If you haven’t yet, be sure to read through this past Sunday’s cover story from the NY Times Magazine, called “Open Source Spying: could wikis and blogs prevent a terrorist attack?” It’s a very thoughtful, well written, and clear report on the attempt to introduce social networking technologies like these to the intelligence community as a way to identify meaningful patterns and keep up with rapidly emerging threats. It’s interesting too to be reading interviews with top NSA and CIA officials along with familiar names like Clay Shirky and David Weinberger.

The article has implications for business research and knowledge management as well: if you’re already well versed in social software and wisdom of crowd approaches to identifying useful knowledge, you won’t necessarily learn anything new technically here. However, the article does raise some very intriguing challenges regarding organizational issues:

1. how to bridge the inherent tension between the desire for open information and sharing and the desire of an institution (here the intelligence communities) to keep information private;
2. how to build a critical mass so that people contribute to blogs and wikis so they prosper; and
3. how to make sure that employees are rewarded and given proper recognition for contributing to blogs and wikis.

Any business considering introducing internal blogs and wikis as a form of knowledge management and information collection/analysis mechanism will need to address these same concerns, pointed out so well here in this piece by Times’ writer Clive Thompson.

Technorati Tags: Web 2.0

Technorati Tags: Cyberintelligence

Technorati Tags: The New York Times

As if we don’t have enough on our hands to try to figure out how to get the most out of doing research on what’s being written, spoken, and shared on blogs, wikis, and other consumer generated media like YouTube, we now have the decidedly mixed blessing of figuring out if, how, and–why–to tap into the online 3D virtual world, Second Life as a source of business information.

And indeed, some companies are setting up virtual storefronts, there are some virtual conferences, and there are even some second life libraries too, like InfoIsland, which says that it is “a virtual library providing real services to Second Life residents.”

So, this is all certainly fascinating for researchers, and some initial questions that I think about when pondering doing actual research in Second Life are:

• What new types of substantive business information is being collected and generated in Second Life, that is not being generated or available in the physical world?
• What kind of business information is ideally suited to be created and generated in Second Life?
• How is searching for data and information in Second Life a different experience or process?
• In studying the Second Life residents as a market, how much of what they say or do can be applied to the larger population, or even just to the population online
• How might a company’s Second Life presence impact its physical operation?
• What technology trends that emerge in Second Life could seep back out to the physical world?
• Are questions like these even important?

I plan to look into some of these issues for an article on business research and second life in an upcoming issue of The Information Advisor.

Technorati Tags: Second Life

Technorati Tags: Business Research

In a recent round up of techniques and tools for doing more precise blog research on Technorati to be published in the December Information Advisor, I had a chance to ask CEO David Sifrey several questions about the latest enhancements on his site, as well as a few broader questions about Technorati.

There wasn’t room in the article for everything that Sifrey told me, so I thought Intelligent Agent readers might appreciate some of his comments that could not make it in to the piece, so here they are below:

Sifrey Talks About Technorati and Trends in CGM Monitoring

In addition to clarifying some of the new Technorati features, we spoke with David Sifrey about larger trends in blog searching, and some of Technorati’s future plans. Here is an edited transcript of our talk:

Q. Some people have told me that they don’t rely on Technorati because it misses a lot of bloggers’ postings—that they simply don’t show up. Can you comment on that?
A. Let me address this concern by making several points:

1. We’re still pretty young and we’re not bug free. Sometimes we screw up, but we try to fix it.
2. We are growing as a company, and we’re not a subscription service. We’re also getting more support queries—questions like why is my blog not being indexed and so forth—and it can be hard to deal with this success. So I extend my apologies for not being as responsive as we should be. We are working on coming up with tools to let people fix their own problems.
3. Now and then, the blog post providers themselves, like Feedburner, Typepad, and Blogger, may have their own issues. It’s not always our fault.
4. Finally, we recognized early on when we developed Technorati that the ability to eliminate spam would be a tremendous differentiator from other services. We want to be the most comprehensive index and provide relevant, spam-free results. But this presented us with an internal conflict. We had to make a choice—we could be a little more lenient on spam detection to make sure we did not reject legitimate postings, but this would mean more spam; or we could be really stringent in blocking spam, but that means we may get “false positives”. In other words, a legitimate blog can trigger our spam filter.

Q. There was a recent posting from one of Technorati’s editors that bloggers are more likely to have their posts indexed if they use the Atom standard vs. RSS. Is this right?
A. Yes, there is a small difference. RSS is fine, but for technical reasons we do recommend that you have an Atom feed as well, to help us distinguish if you are sending an excerpt or the full content of your blog post.

Q. Where are we in terms of indexing non-English blogs?
A. Look at my latest state of the blogosphere report: English now represents just over 1/3 of blogs—it’s no longer the majority. Japanese and Chinese have become really big. Now we are trying to improve our localization of search and discovery for other languages. We have a relationship with a team in Japan for technorati.jp; and we’re working on Romance language localization too. Searchers can now even type Japanese or Chinese right into the box.

This was all pretty easy with Romance languages and when there is a space between words. But for Japanese and Chinese, the word-boundaries problem is a not a trivial issue.

Q. Where are we in terms of indexing words on podcasts and video?
A. We’re all about understanding the live web. Blogs were first big symptom of what occurs when people have enough bandwidth to be on the web all the time and when they have access to good tools so they can be creators as well as consumers. All these other media are part of the live Web too. Voice-to-text technologies are immature, though, so for this kind of more opaque content, we need to rely on our tags page. As the technologies mature to make audio and video posts transparent, we will aggressively pursue this, but it is not yet effective or reliable.

Technorati Tags: Technorati

Technorati Tags: David Sifrey

Well, these Google custom search engines are coming quickly now, and so what do we need? Yes, a directory of these so we can all find the right niche custom search engine for whatever research we’re engaged in.

There are several of these collections popping up now, but it looks like the most complete and comprehensive is CustomSearchGuide.com. And there’s even a “Business and Finance” tab to locate advertising/marketing; economics custom search engines and several more.

And feel free to submit suggestions for my Business Research Engine too. I’d like to get it to 100 of the best sites and blogs for conducting business research.

Technorati Tags: Business Research

Technorati Tags: Search Engines