Pattern Cognition

This is old skool data mining.

In the UK, the Guardian Newspaper put 700,000 documents of MPs’ expenses online for review. Rather than employing text analysis software, the Guardian is relying on humans to read, decipher, and flag suspicious spending for further review.  As of 5 am (MT) 80% of the documents were reviewed.

Nothing like the possibility of salacious or euphemistic mis-classification of dubious expenses to fire up the inquisitive nature of the common man.

I can’t help but wonder what this type of forensic illumination this may bring to the democratic process.  How would MPs or members of Congress spend and behave if they knew the public might scrutinize line by line every reported expense?  Would there be more accountability or would this lead to more creative methods by lobbying firms to buy influence?

Perhaps both.

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Mashable is reporting the sudden flatline of Twitter’s phenomenal growth.

Image from Mashable.com

Even though I use Twitter, I do so reluctantly.  My life and thoughts are not, quite honestly, so exciting nor profound that I need to broadcast every action and thought to my followers.  I find Twitter beneficial for following some thought leaders or a general monitoring of the Twitter stream for information.

This Harvard study reports on what I’ve suspected yet lacked the background data: 10% of Twitter users create the vast majority of the content.  And when you look at the content created by these uber Tweeters, there is so much crap and self-aggrandizement, many followers drop off out of frustration.  In essence, Twitter has become a communication/broadcast medium for a community of followers rather than a conversational medium.

Maybe I’m being too harsh.  Part of Twitter’s huge growth may be attributed to a voyeuristic satisfaction of peering into a person’s daily activities via Tweets.  Perhaps the majority of followers have realized that in the end,  their own lives are more interesting than those they follow.

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Just finished an article on the Kellogg Insight web site discussing research findings on mavens, community, and influence.

Using key work semantic analysis on the community postings, the Kellogg researchers determined those knighted as “influencers” are able to disproportionately sway opinion vs. the average community member.  And more often than not, influencers took positions on a product’s performance and whether or not to buy the product.

This could be a great tool for those in the financial services industry.  More specifically for analyst who follow and analyze earnings of product based companies.  By using an online community and deploying a systematic research focus, it may be theoretically possible to determine how well a new product might perform in the market place.  And, if it is a highly visible product (from a company’s revenue generation perspective) the community’s response could be a leading indicator on the impact the company’s bottom line.

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For the record, I’m one of them.

The news reporting the average age of a kindle user is a bit dated at this point (ancient, 2 week old), for those that missed it, on a forum site, 70% of Kindle owners reported their age and it turns out the average age reported is 40.

That doesn’t surprise me.  The Kindle  is dedicated to delivering long form content like books, magazines, and newspapers.  Amazon is smart to keep the Kindle targeted and develop future features with this core application and usage in mind.

On a vaguely related note, earlier last week Steve Gilmore proclaimed RSS to be dead and hence blogs and longer form content not nearly as relevant than before (my words, not his); Twitter acting as the grim reaper that made the use, or rather the need, to use RSS, obsolete.  Hence Twitter is a better mechanism to disseminate and propagate information than RSS.

He may be right about short format information.  However, I believe Steve’s broader application to all RSS content based dissemination may miss the mark. While Twitter has proven itself as hugely valuable for updates, announcements, and offers, Twitter’s feeds an ADHD torrent of info porn.  Kindle, as a proxy for longer format content on the other hand is designed for attention centric activities like reading a book or newspaper.

Twitter = jump into the info torrent.

Kindle = jump into a single info stream.

So am I right about the content attention centricity being tightly bound to platform primary usage and demographic profiles are the trailing edge?  Let’s watch text book sales as a crossover usage to the Twitter generation.

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I love this picture, quite the juxtaposition of organic and inorganic designs and material.

The photo was taken in Hong Kong.  The scaffolding is made out of bamboo which is tied together to build the superstructure used outside of the building under construction.

The Bamboo Borg

In some ways this makes me think of the interactions that online and social community software companies try to capture.

Some companies like Jive, Mzinga, and of course HiveLive (where I work), take the organic predisposition of humans to interconnect and bind.  In turn, the software provides the structure and meta-framework that allows for the maximization of discovery and interactions, both human and information centric.

Of course I’m greatly biased as to which company does it the best, cough, HiveLive.

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Despite a crazy valuation based on eyeballs, Facebook has always struggled to monetize their user base on the growing social platform.

So how does the poster child for online communities decide to make a buck?  Sell your profile data.

To their credit, Fb did try advertising, but too many of its users focused on friending rather than paying attention to Fb version of lame ass banner ads.

We’ll see how much intrusion the FB audience will handle.  A decent amount of information is already available for Fb users.  A key point will be to what degree market researchers methods intrude and ratchet up the creep factor.  Then again, Facebook users aren’t exactly known for being, er, discrete.

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