links for 2008-10-01
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CC-aware Flickr search tool
links for 2008-09-29
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"Most Americans feel that companies should have a presence on social media sites, and many feel that they should actively interact with customers through those sites. Those are just some of the findings of the 2008 Cone Business in Social Media Study, which said that 93 percent of Americans expect to see companies online where the users are—on social networking and other media sites."
links for 2008-09-28
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Somewhat pointless in that there's no such thing as a definitive list of the "Greatest" films - "greatest" is far too subjective. But useful for populating a Lovefilm list nonetheless.
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"A stunning new twist in the story of Capa's iconic war image shows that authenticity is more than just an artistic criterion"
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"Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] is a free, easy-to-use Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources. It lives right where you do your work — in the web browser itself."
Browser-based Endnote-like citation manager - worth downloading if only because Thomson Reuters are bullying the author with a C&D action.
links for 2008-09-25
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Setting up VMWare image to run 3 browsers
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Another online identity aggregation service. Unless I'm missing something fundemental, how is this different to any of the others - and WHY would I want put all my identity eggs in the one basket?
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"Judged by the amount of money directly dependent on it, the British Bankers’ Association’s London Interbank Offered Rate matters more than any other set of numbers in the world…
…The calculation of Libor is co-ordinated by just two people, who work in an unremarkable open-plan office in London’s Docklands."Utterly fascinating explanation of how LIBOR is calculated, and why it's so important. Fascinating in a scary kind of way, because it's one of those artificial - and basically fictional - constructs that our civilisation is based on…
Quantity or Quality? Measuring Enterprise 2.0
[Crossposted from the Headshift blog]
One of the most common barriers to adoption of social software in enterprise settings is the perception that using social media isn’t “real work”. Instead the term “social” in “social media” is seen as a synonym for frivolous and time-wasting.
To an extent, there are aspects of social media that reinforce this stereotype - Facebook is often cited as the poster-child for this problem. Give your staff access to Facebook, runs the argument, and they’ll spend all their time poking and throwing sheep at each other.
This is actually a debate that’s as old as management itself - I’ve been around long enough to remember the same debates around rolling out email, and I’ve no doubt that phones were seen as a terrible distraction and waste of employee productivity.
At the heart of the issue, it’s a generic management problem and comes down to whether you subscribe to the Theory X or Theory Y view of your staff.
But when applied to Enterprise 2.0, this issue is accentuated by the intangible nature of a lot of social media. How do you apply a value to contributing to a wiki or a forum?
A recent post by the Harvard Business School’s Andrew McAfee looks at this problem, and he’s come up with an intriguing take. His point is that this kind of activity is too broad to reduce to a single metric - and that attempting to do so can cause unexpected side-effects. Measure contributions by volume, and it becomes easy to game the system with quantity overriding quality.
And there are other factors in play, too. Analysis that I’ve seen done of the commenting patterns on a large UK network of blogs show a pronounced long-tail effect in action - active commenters are VERY active, leading to a pronounced power law curve when comparing activity across the population as a whole.
Professor McAfee proposes a multi-dimensional rating, that combines a number of activities. Authoring blog posts, editing wiki pages and contributing to discussions in forums would all build towards an overall rating - and measuring a number of activities allows some rather neat visualisation techniques.
Although this is still fundamentally a volumetric approach, it should also be possible to add in a rating factor - rather like eBay feedback, there are a number of techniques for rating contributions for quality.
I’m sure this model would work to an extent, although it would also likely suffer from eBay’s flaws - negative feedback is disproportionately weighted compared to positive. That’s particularly the case if you’re the proud owner of a flawless feedback record - a single negative rating hurts that in a very visual way. And eBay have in fact moved away from a straight-forward “buyer-rates-seller-rates-buyer” model to something which is slanted more in the buyer’s favour.
And there’s also the issue about how likely you are to negatively rate the contributions of people that you work closely with - frank and honest feedback is a hallmark of some cultures, but I do wonder if there would be a lot of “pulled blows”?
Perhaps the question is whether measuring the effectiveness of Enterprise 2.0 tools at the individual level is actually the right place at all? On the one hand, social tools are predicated on the idea that the total is greater than the sum of the parts, as network effects come into play. So perhaps a truer measure of effectiveness would actually be found by looking at a more aggregated level?
Filed under Blogs, Technical stuff, Them, Working smarter | Comment (0)links for 2008-09-24
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"PhoneGap is a free open source development tool and framework that allows web developers to take advantage of the powerful features in the iPhone SDK from HTML and JavaScript. We're trying to make iPhone app development easy and open. For many applications a web application is the way to but in Safari you don't get access to the native iPhone APIs, and the that's the problem we're trying to solve."
links for 2008-09-22
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More press-release-regurgitated-as-journalism:"A new out-of-hours service that allows pupils to receive homework tips from "virtual teachers" is being piloted in Clackmannanshire.
Pupils at Alva Academy will trial a "vodcasting" system in the first project of its kind in Scotland."
So nothing like a virtual teacher then, a better description might actually be "pupils to get access to videos of lessions". Just because it's on an iPod doesn't make it revolutionary…
links for 2008-09-21
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"With Drop.io Location, you can now assign a physical world address or location to any drop.io drop. Once your drop is assigned an address, you can then access the content of
your drop from that particular location via a GPS enabled BlackBerry® device, a Loki enabled browser or our iPhone application (currently in private beta)."Like the sound of this; could be useful for ARG-ish type stuff
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Text-only archive of Wired UK from April 1995 through to Feb 1997
links for 2008-09-20
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Found via Infovore's delicious - this is the new Corpus Clock at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Beautiful.
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"The proposal to create a government-financed agency to take the most toxic assets (such as subprime and Alt-A RMBS) off the balance sheets of the US banking system is not unexpected. The US Treasury is in fact already running a pilot scheme for this twenty-first century version of the RTC; it has been stepping up direct purchases of Fannie and Freddie mortgage bonds in the last couple of days. "
What's almost as interesting as the article are the comments - this being the FT, it's akin to the anti-YouTube in terms of grammar and coherence.
links for 2008-09-19
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"Are you tempted by the idea of Twitter inside the firewall? For true Twitter junkies, it may be nearly irresistible. And, now, we're hearing about some new Twitter-clones that are designed to operate within enterprises. However, before you start pushing this as the next big thing for law firm knowledge management, consider the following: What existing workflow or tool will Twitter replace or enhance within your law firm?"