ACM’s TechCareers site offers “career-related resources, news and job postings for IT and engineering professions”. They recommend that IT professionals and those seeking to become one, should try Branding Yourself With A Blog.
“… Certainly personal branding isn’t a new concept, but the future of personal branding could be in at your fingertips—with a blog. One of the first steps in creating a brand for yourself is to make your blog visible. Post meaningful entries, comment on your industry’s top blogs, or simply gain a regular readership. “Visibility creates opportunities,” says Schawbel, a social media specialist at EMC Corporation. He believes that when you brand yourself, the competition becomes irrelevant. “The goal of personal branding is to be recruited based on your brand, not applying for jobs,” Schawbel says. …”
EPA is on a web 2.0 kick. They sponsored a 2-day monster mashup exercise last Fall, the Puget Sound Information Challenge, and are making plans for further efforts. EPA’s CIO Molly O’neill talks a little about it here.
They’ve also been tracking and flirting with the semantic web, and are wondering how much effort to expend on a more full-on semantic engagement. I presented our semantic eco-blogging work at EPA headquarters in February, and was surprised at the turnout and enthusiasm. In response to a screen shot of a Fieldmarking post describing beach closings, a person from the Water Office related that he learned of the closing of his favorite Lake Erie swim-spot from a blog post. This made an impression on him, since, by rights, the closing should have been reported at the county level, up to the state level, and, ultimately, to his office in DC. It struck him that EPA should be systematically tapping the blogosphere for citizen sentiment and concern.
If they to do this, they will, implicitly, be saying to the citizenry “If you can’t be bothered to fill out the right form in the right office, at least blog about it, and maybe the machinery of the blogosphere will direct your thoughts our way.” I kind of like that. (This particular example - finding information on beach closings in a given area - can probably be done fairly efficiently with Yahoo pipes).
EPA will be hosting this week’s meeting of the multilateral ecoinformatics cooperation, and there will be participation from a wide swathe of EPA - I’m curious to learn of their plans.
Can it be true? Russell Beattie posts that on Twitter there are nearly a million users, and no spam or trolls. Spam does exist on Twitter, of course, but it does seem to be less of a problem than on the Blogosphere, Web or email. Maybe it’s because that search engines don’t treat tweets like Web pages or blog posts.
Last week I noticed that some of our blog posts took a long time to show up in the Google Blog search index. During the past year, Google has been very fast at indexing blog posts, typically taking less than five minutes from the time is made to when it shows up in their blog search index. But this week it seemed that our posts, or at least some of them, took more than twelve hours to be indexed.
Yesterday I tried to watch a post I made on the IT job market which I wrote just before 11:00am (GMT-5). It showed up in Google Feed Reader quickly enough but had not yet appeared in Google Blog Search when I finally went to bed 14 hours later. When I checked at 9:00am today, it was there, so it took sometime between 14 and 22 hours.
It’s not the case that all posts are being delayed — do a Google Blog search for a popular term (e.g., TV) sorted by date and you’ll see posts made in the past few minutes. Nor do I think it’s related to pageRank — their blog search ingest is based on pings rather than crawling. Besides, our blog enjoys a reasonable rank. Finally, it can’t be the case that Google’s systems are being overwhelmed by new blogs — the growth of the Blogosphere has slowed.
So I’m puzzled about what is going on. (goomtitag)
Update 1: Posted at 9:49, in Google Feed Reader at 10:14, indexed by Google Blog Search by ~19:15 and in Google’s main index about the same time. Maybe this is a clue — it used to be the case that a post hit the blog index within a few minutes and showed up in the main index after about twelve hours. This post hit both indexes around the same time — after about ten hours. Maybe there is now just one (logical) index.
Update 2: Hmmm. Another post seems to have made it into Google’s main index before it got into the blog search index. I imagine that Google revisited our blog home page as part of it’s regular crawl and picked up the new post.
The Second International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM 2008) will be held March 30 - April 2, 2008 at the Hilton in Seattle, Washington. The early registration deadline is Monday February 18. The program includes some great invited speakers: Bernardo Huberman (HP Labs), who will speak on “Social Dynamics in the Age of the Web,” David Sifry (Founder, Technorati, Sputnik, and Linuxcare), and Brad Fitzpatrick (Google, LiveJournal Founder). Two tutorials are planned, including “Subjectivity and Sentiment Analysis” by Jan Wiebe (Univ. of Pittsburgh) and “Graph Mining Techniques for Social Media Analysis” by Mary McGlohon and Christos Faloutsos (CMU). See the web site for details.
Yesterday had been declared by anonymous as a day of protest against the Church of Scientology and a number of street protests were held around the world. People are blogging accounts of some of them, including one from London, where many wore V masks.
“In London, around 200 masked demonstrators gathered outside the Church of Scientology for a peaceful protest near Blackfriars. One unnamed protestor said: “We are here to raise awareness of the blatant exploitation of its members. “They actually scare me.” Onlooker Mark Thompson, 22, added: “You could tell they felt passionate about their cause. “There was a heavy police presence but they were never really used.” (link)
My favorite quote from the blog account was this.
It was the perfect internet anarchist protest. We shouted slogans. People with ghetto blasters played announcements. We shouted at THEM. People with megaphones addressed the crowd. Sometimes we cheered and clapped, sometimes we shouted “TL;DR!” (link)
Late this week Google released the Google social graph API which provides structured access to information Google’s has extracted from public FOAF and XFN data on the Web. Google also says it mines the web for “and other publicly declared connections”. I wonder what that means? Brad Fitzpatrick gives a three minute explanation in this video. This is exciting and likely to give a push to any number of emerging themes, including data portability, linked data, and the Semantic Web in general. There’s lots of comment from the ususalsuspects and also on the SWIG IRC
“…a political resistance strategy in which small, independent groups (covert cells) challenge an established adversary such as a government. Leaderless resistance can encompass anything from non-violent disruption and disobedience to bombings, assassinations and other violent agitation. Leaderless cells lack bidirectional, vertical command links operating without a hierarchical command.” (link)
It’s challenging to combat a leaderless resistance because one can’t use the usual methods to discover participants by exploiting the social networks of known members.
Today’s new communication infrastructures make it easier for such distributed resistance movements to take hold and grow. Information, instructions and loose coordination can be spread via Web pages, Blogs, text messages, IRCs, mailing lists, etc.
A colleague Chris Diehl at JHU APL suggested the Estonian cyberwar might be a good example to study how the Blogosphere was used for this by combining sentiment analysis, geotagging and temporal analysis. This cyber attack was a subject of a recent colloquium at APL. It’s a great idea, but one made more challenging by the fact that the attack is over and would involve dealing with content in Estonian, which, although not exactly a low-density language, is also not one that has been extensively studied by computational linguists.
But maybe there is another example of an Internet-driven leaderless resistance, going on right now, that would be good to study as it unfolds. A group that calls itself Anonymous has announced it intends to launch an online DDOS attack on Scientology as part of a campaign against the organization.
The message is spread in part by YouTube videos starting on 21 January. There is also the Wikipedia page on Project Chanology which was created on 24 January 2008, an Anonymous Scientology Widget that counts down to (I suppose) when participating members should take action, and lost of mentions on forums, blogs and other forms of social media.
Linuxhaxor has instructions for what to do, which are offered only for educational purposes.
“This guide is for information purpose only, I, the site owner, do not encourage people to go about and follow these steps or Chanology in anyway to carry this attack, or any attack to any organization or any person. If you agree to follow these steps and help them carry this attack you are fully responsible for any consequences whatsoever. This act is illegal in many states and countries. ”
Finally, you can track the online interest through this Blogpulse trend graph comparing Blogosphere mentions of (1) “Tom Cruise” (2) Scientology and (3) anonymous+scientology and also the Google Trends graph comparing Google searches for the same three terms. Click on the graphs to see the current results.
Tom Cruise is in there because he’s rumored to be the second most important person in the Church of Scientology and his recent Scientology indoctrination video that surfaced on YouTube may have been the tipping point for some.
Outside.in is another site that shows news, civic information and blogs posts relevant to a location. See the outside.in site for Catonsville MD, the area around UMBC for an example.
A VC blog calls this a hyperlocal site. (They are an investor). It’s similar to everyblock but it covers nearly 12,000 cities instead of three. The coverage, however, does not seem as deep.
They recognize the location of a blog posts as follows. A blogger registers he feed with outside.in and they monitor the posts. She geotags blog posts with the a location using one of four methods: (1) a link to a Google map with the location, (2) a blog category or tag that looks like a Zip code, (3) an inline text tag like or [where 1000 Hilltop Cir, Baltimore, MD 21250], or (4) geoRSS
Everyblock launched yesterday as a site that shows you news and other item that are about or relevant to your neighborhood. You enter your address, postal code or neighborhood name and see news articles, civic documents like crime reports and building permits, blog posts, craigslist entries, Yelp reviews, and Flickr photos associated with the area around it.
Currently only three cities are covered by everyblock — New York, Chicago and San Francisco. For an example, see the everyblock page for NYC’s Chelsea neighborhood or around the University of Chicago.
I suspect that much of the work that goes into a system like everyblock is selecting the right sources. For example, how you access online local government documents for each state or city will differ. You would want to mine the local newspapers for news items and focusing on them would make disambiguating geonames and addresses easy, since your first order approximation would be that every geo-reference is local. There is also work in adapting to the APIs for other services, like Yelp and craigslist, that each has its own way to sorting items into geographic regions.
There are good data sources for the GIS information and services, free or paid, that will do the geocoding and reverse geocoding of names and addresses. The Earth is a finite place and we have a lot of data about what is where, at least in the more developed parts of it.
Although everyblock claims to include relevant blog posts, I’ve not seen any yet. This is a harder problem, unless you get bloggers to add explicit geographic metadata or register their blogs with a location, like feedmap.org does.
The popular XKCD had another Web related comic yesterday, but it trned out to be self-negating. As was noted on Slashdot:
“As I noted yesterday (and was joined by many others)… in an offhand observation xkcd has singlehandedly changed a small section of the Internet. Changing the results from a Google search for “Died in a Blogging Accident” from 2 to (at this writing) over 7,170 in a little more than 24 hours.”
The number of results are now up to 13.3K. I guess something like the Heisenberg uncertainty principle applies to the Internet, too.
Update 1/15: Here’s a trend graph from blogpulse for occurrences of “died in a blogging accident” in blogs as of 09:00 gmt+5 on 15 January 2008. Click graph to see current data.
Update 1/16: Google trends shows a sudden interest in the dangers of blogging las week. Here’s a graph from 16 January 2008. Click on the graph to see the current trend graph.
Technorati founder David Sifry launched a new service last week, when everyone was recovering from one holiday and preparing for another. Hoosgot (Who’s got …) let’s you ask the collective Blogosphere by posting a question on your blog or on the Twitter microblogging system. You need to include the term hoosgot in your blog post and @hoosgot in your twitter update to have it noticed.
Sifry explanation of how Hoosgot happened reinforces my belief that the greatest skill a practical computer scientist can have is being able to quickly test a new idea by turning it into running code.
“You gotta love Holiday Weekends. Friday night (the 28th) The lazyweb popped back into my mind. I missed it. I started asking myself the question, “Why hasn’t anyone reconstituted the lazyweb?, What if we could rebuild the lazyweb for the 2008 web? What if we could take advantage of all the cool tools that have arrived in the last 5 years? Would it work?” Rather than wait around, I realized I could just build it, and maybe folks like me would use it. At about 5am on Saturday morning, the first prototype was up. I made some major changes, including twitter support Saturday night. And launch is today, on Sunday morning! Ain’t working on the web fun?:-)” (link)
Of course it helped that he could tweak Technorati to collect blog posts and tweets.
Will it work? Hooknows. One problem is spam, and Sifry is well positioned to deal with this. The other is that the wisdom of crowds is not uniform. Since your Hoosgot query is going out to a very broad group, a narrow question on an obscure aspect of Java programming will be a head scratcher to most. If you ask the blogmob for a movie recommendation, they will tell you to go see Norbit, which was 2007’s 29th highest grossing movie but also so unredeamably horrible that it almost killed Eddie Murphy’s career.
There are some possible things that could address these problems. Learning to spot Hoosgot spam and automatically adjust the model as it evolves is one. Another is to classify the Hoosgot queries by intent, topic and geography. Both of these are made more difficult if the queries are short, as they will be for Twitter-based queries. We’ve dealt with some of this in Akshay Java’s recent work on analyzing Twitter updates (
Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities).
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