Social Mashup

“Privacy is an onion” (patent pending maxim); it is situational, temporal and multi-dimensional. Perhaps said axiom should be recast as a ‘genetically modified onion’.

Perusing articles on Facebook privacy control changes from a well-known security company, there is the revelation that “no private information should be on the Internet”. A wise statement for an information security purist, but what constitutes ‘private information’, to what degree is it fluid and are the controls within Social Networks sufficient to allow us to restrict access in the ways we demand / require? What are the ’sociological norms’, and what of ’super-social’ libertines (such as I) that have exceeded Dunbar’s Number by a magnitude of 700%?…

Read the full article on the Atos Origin CIO / CTO Blog

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Star gazing with a Social Nostradamus

I was thinking this week about Social Networks and how I saw their potential development over the next few years. As wonderful as they are, we must remember that sites such as Facebook are only really 5 years old, and they have had to spend time defining a business model, growing awareness and user bases and of course dealing with horrible scalability issues (when a site has 200 million users the industrialisation and volumetric management becomes a ‘tad tricky’).

So let’s assume the last 5 years have been all about understanding the market, users and fundamental sizing problems. What will (or should) the next 5 years deliver?

I see this question in the context of some interesting statistics:

1. The amount of time people are spending on Social Networks has trebled

2. Revenue from online advertising now outstrips offline

3. The rise of the smartphone, advances in mobile networks, and importantly price reduction in handsets and mobile Internet usage opens up some really exciting new potential

So let’s get to some predictions… ..Continue reading..

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A bear with a sore head!

I’ve been using and very much enjoying LastFM for just over a year. Recently I noticed play back cutting out after an hour or so, and this silly graphic appearing to punctuate the irritating silence.

I thought the designers had gone insane, radio is generally a passively consumed media so the idea of wandering off, and LastFM demanding some kind of ongoing attention seemed incredibly poorly though out (dare I say vacuous).

Now take a look at that “Subscribe” link. Well, I thought I was a subscriber, perhaps not a paying subscriber, but certainly a loyal site member and consumer none the less.

Follow that link, we arrive at the page below and the “real intention is revealed”. Uninterrupted radio now costs three quid (vernacular for Pounds Sterling) a month. So, look again at the picture above. Are people concerned that I’ve been eaten by said famed bear, am listening to Internet radio whilst dusting the cat, or in reality are the site providers using “nuisance tactics” to drive fee paying subscriptions?

It makes me think seriously about purchasing one of the many dedicated Internet radio appliances (from about 40 manufactures last time I counted). Some even integrate playback with Pandora, so I could easily retain the ‘played track history’ elsewhere, all with no interruption and no recurring fees (beyond the initial outlay on the physical device itself).

I think it’s really interesting that LastFM are broadcasting over CBS networks in New York, San Francisco, LA and Chicago (as announced earlier in the week). That’s great, a fascinating ‘cross over’ story from Internet radio to traditional broadcasting (of course CBS own LastFM). However, I’m ‘dismayed’ at the decision to implement interruptive ‘tactics’ that make no sense in such a delivery model on the Web. And seriously guys, when did a certain type of icon become prestigious (bullet 4 below)?

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Centre for Secure Information Technologies

I was having a peruse of the latest (1oth – 23rd October) edition of Engineering and Technology magazine from the IET this morning. Contained therein is an interesting announcement from Queen’s University in Belfast of the opening of a new research centre for IT Security. The investment in the £30m establishment is part-funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, the Technology Strategy Board and a collection of industry ’sponsors’ such as BAE, Thales et al.

Interestingly the centre is researching intelligent CCTV systems that seek to filter and prioritise video, highlighting what it detects to be ‘incidents of note’ to human operators.

Other technologies being explored seek to improve router security, making them more resilient to Denial of Service (DoS) attacks and seeking to prevent the propagation of DoS attacks through “IP networks”.

The diagram below illustrates the areas of application and technology focus for CSIT. Their view is that “one of the key differentiators for CSIT is the multi-disciplinary and system integration aspect of the centre. It is only by integrating some of the different technology ‘pillars’ outlined below, that creative and appropriate solutions to complex real world problems can be delivered.”

You can read more at the CSIT Website. CSIT is part of the campus of the Northern Ireland Science Park.

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Rules, guidelines, laws and judgement

A few weeks back I attended an interesting debate and presentation about Business Process Management (BPM) in the Public Sector. In fact this was a Government Panel discussion led by a consultant who was ‘much singing’ the praises of BPM backed by enterprise rule systems (ERMS). If you’re not familiar with such patterns, the basic premise is the process is separated from the business logic which is crafted and maintained in a separate, dedicated system and ‘consulted’ as necessary in key decision steps in the business process. ..Continue reading..

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What’s important, and where are your spending time?

I’ve written in the past about the dangers of outposts in terms of wasting effort and creating endless repetitive noise. I recently watched this nice little video from Darren Rowse over at Problogger and I want to highlight a very key observation “people sometimes give up on their Home Base and spend all of their time on outposts”. Don’t let that apply to you! ..Continue reading..

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Another cool way to enrich and contribute

Conceptually brilliant, an interesting way to expand and enrich page content on behalf of ‘other users’. I can immediately see parallel enterprise side implementations to enrich corporate Intranet and Knowledge Management tools.

Watch the video, install the necessary and give it a try…You can share entries through Blogger, Facebook, Twitter and Google profiles.

Very smart!

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Tech Journalism and PR Signposting

I wanted to post up some links and a short video about UKTJPRs Twitter project. If you’re interested in Technology Journalism and PR in the UK tech market, I would suggest having a look at the following:

1. The link above and this overview

2. On Twitter @spode and @andylim (there’s a couple of suggestions for FollowFriday!)

3. On Facebook the UK Technology Journalists and PR Group

4. The UK Technology Journalists and PR group on LinkedIn

5. The video below, which will give an overview of some of the features the Twitter project is looking at

6. In the ‘wider sense’ also have a look at JournoTwit

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Many permutations lead to Rome

In the reconstitution of this blog and indeed the exercise of porting out from Drupal to Word Press I gave some thought to the (age old) issue of content duplication and what we have come to know and love as ‘canonical URLs’. To give a really simple explanation, search engines can resolve multiple URLs to the same actual content page e.g. stevenimmons.org, www.stevenimmons.org, stevenimmons.org/index.php (and so on)… ..Continue reading..

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I want to enrich my content at work and at play

Zemanta’s tag line is “Improve the way you blog & write e-mails” and having used firstly Drupal add-ons and subsequently ‘out of the box’ Word Press functionality I would certainly endorse its usefulness. If you’ve not tried Zemanta it essentially presents useful pictures, snippets etc. relevant to the context of the article being composed. It also does some of the hard work in terms of highlighting what might be ‘fair use’, an example being pictures on Flickr under Creative Commons. In other words it does real time searching, suggesting content for inclusion in articles and a degree of filtering as to what might be appropriate to utilise.

Now step inside the firewall to Enterprise 2.0 land and consider the following: ..Continue reading..

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