Social Media: Capturing Knowledge in a Self-Organized Way

It's the early 80s and you sit at your terminal with a stack of papers, a document holder and a keyboard. Your mission: Enter as many of the paper forms into the terminal as possible. Exciting work, isn't it?

The problem is that this is not an inaccurate way to view data entry today. Granted, a lot of the brute force work has been done and legacy systems exist from which to pull data. Further, the forms are now entered directly into the system as opposed to copied from paper, but as regards entering novel data the situation has changed little.

The other major problem is that this type of raw entry, which is generally entering data into a form, only captures defined phenomena. The data that is being entered, especially into a form, is often classified and defined in advance. There is no elasticity to what can be captured.

This is problematic in that you must have a clear picture of what you are capturing in advance. For hard problems and complex situations you very rarely know much, if anything, in advance. If your only valid form of capturing data is via traditional predefined methods, such as forms, then your ability to capture data, and eventually knowledge, is vastly compromised.

This revelation is nothing new, of course. People have been trying to innovate data entry and knowledge capture for several decades. But, what other types of data can be captured and how?

The Army is asking this exact question, if indirectly. In reading several SBIRs the concept of capturing the knowledge inherent in soldiers heads is coming to the forefront. It is being recognized that not only do experts have valid perspectives and answers, the boots on the ground do, as well (keep in mind, this is probably not a new perspective in the military, but is one that I have seen in several SBIRs recently). Beyond that, though, they are starting to explore how to bring that knowledge into existing systems.

The how of this is a serious question. Computer systems today are clearly defined and generally purposeful to a single end. Human thought, on the other hand, is often multi-purposed and the field of understanding human thinking (philosophy) has been around for as long as humans and has yet to reach one shared conclusion on how we think. Even if we could get some Matrix-like data jack implanted into soldiers heads could we really transfer the knowledge as it is represented inside their brains into a computer system?

Perhaps we need another way of gathering data since it would seem that direct access to the human mind would avail us little. There is a new(-ish) movement which is providing an answer: social media.

Probably one of the most useful aspects of social media is how important and interesting knowledge percolates to the top. This is done in various ways. For instance, if I see an interesting tweet on Twitter, I will retweet it. If I read something worthwhile on Facebook, I may comment on it or repost it. It's this interaction with the content that causes the interesting bits to rise to the top.

The exciting thing, at least from a systems perspective, is that this is self-organizing behavior. It is through the interaction of the components of the system (here, the components are the people) that the interesting bits are being obtained. While it may be difficult to capture human thought and knowledge in its native form, it's not as difficult to capture the important pieces as they are being defined by the social system already.

Further, the nature of social media, in that it tends to interact in bite-sized, discrete pieces, means that the computer system needs not have much understanding of what it is capturing at all. The knowledge is already distilled into its core component, often with attribution, and the computer system merely need remember it. It can be stored without pre-defined labels and fields.

The thing which the computer system must crucially provide is a robust search capability. Whether this search capability is enacted after the fact, or whether there is a component of the system which searches as knowledge comes in is immaterial. As long as the system can search through the knowledge is what's important.

Eventually, this captured knowledge can be used and reused as more people interact with it. Each interaction would in essence refine the knowledge, making it more useful to the computer system and the people in general.

The Dark Side of Twitter

I've seen a very interesting phenomenon going on in the Twitter-verse recently. It has brought to my attention that Twitter (and micro-blogging in general) can be used for reasons that are not above-board. What, pray-tell, is this dark and nefarious phenomenon?

I keep getting followed by prostitutes.

The first time it happened I just thought it was some random individual with a sick sense of self. However, the next day, another woman of the same ilk followed me, and the next day another. That's when I started getting curious (not about what the women offered, but about what was really going on).

Invariably, they all posted a provocative picture of a woman with at least one post which was anywhere from lewd to slightly suggestive. That post would have a link attached. The link takes you to some triple-X "dating" service. Within a couple of days the account is shut down (you get the "Nothing to see here, move along" message when you try to visit the account).

No doubt, for some reason I am not aware of my twitter user name has been picked up by this "dating" service and they keep following me with fake accounts, all in vain hopes of promoting their "service". It's all at least partly automated, it has to be, and there's probably one person sitting behind a desk creating profiles then running those profiles through some tool they had custom made to follow a few thousand people.

The practice, though, really brings questions to my mind about what twitter can't be used for. If it can be used for prostitute marketing, why not black-market marketing or subversive political marketing? Why even marketing at all? I once had the privilege of speaking with an individual that detailed how an anarchist group used Twitter to attempt to disrupt the RNC in Colorado.

Of course, far from being upset by all of this I tend to think of this as rather ingenious. What uses can Twitter serve? What's the most creative use any of you have seen?

JavaScript: Callbacks in Loops

I just finished a mashup that had to be blogged about. I suffered to find this solution, and I wanted to share what I learned with the world.

In the mashup I took a twitter feed and plotted the tweets onto a map based on the location of the tweeter. Let me set the stage.

The Google Map has already been set up and the list of tweets has been obtained. It is now time to plot the tweets onto the map. This will be done within a function called addMarkers. The HTTP Geocoder that Google provides will be doing our geocoding. For more information on this service, see this.

Keep in mind that I'm doing all of this in a Presto Mashlet, and will be calling out to the HTTP Geocoder via a URLProxy call that is undocumented but available for use.

At first blush, the following approach seems appropriate. Here is an excerpt from the addMarkers function:



However, this suffers from a very serious drawback, and that drawback revolves around the scope of the function as it exists on the stack. Remember that you are calling out and receiving an asynchronous response via the callback. There's no telling where this loop will be when a callback returns, but the scope of the function is maintained on the stack until all of the callbacks have been completed.

When a callback returns, the current value of i will be used to index into tweets! Since all of these calls take time, the most common result is that i will actually be out of bounds of tweets. Recall that updating the loop variable is the last operation done in any JavaScript for loop. Once you have looped through all of your indexes you, of necessity, must set i to be out of bounds of tweets. Therefor, i will be equal with tweets.length.

The result is that you pass an undefined object into placeMarker in place of what should have been the tweet.

The next logical step is that you should create a variable to hold the value of i, like this:

var myTweet = i;
...
this.placeMarker(point, tweets[myTweet]);

However, this will fail as well!

The problem here is that myTweet is still within the scope of our addMarkers function. addMarkers will therefor have only one copy of myTweet. Once again, you end up in a situation where the loop will probably finish before any of the callbacks return. The net result this time, however, is slightly different. You will pass in a valid tweet to placeMarkers, but it will be the last tweet in every instance. You'll have the same tweet attached to all of your markers on the map, the last tweet in the list.

So, how do you remove the timing issues? This is where I suffered. I hunted and pecked out half-solutions for quite a while. Finally, I had to start thinking outside of the normal box to come up with a solution.

The whole problem revolves around all of the callbacks returning to a shared scope in the stack, that being the scope of addMarkers. Once you consider it that way, it becomes obvious that providing each callback with its own scope on the stack is what is needed. The way to do that is to have a function fire off the HTTP Geocoder request. The function will get its own spot on the stack and will have its own scope. Let addMarkers maintain the loop and call this function whenever it wants to fire off a request. Pass in the tweets and the desired value of i to be remembered.

Consider the following:

This approach will result in the correct tweet being displayed with the correct marker on the map.

Como Se Llama?

Originally, I created my twitter account with the handle @jitlife. Obviously, jitlife is my blog, so I thought it made sense. After all, I want people reading my blog, right? Twitter seemed like a good pointer to my blog.

However, I started rethinking this mindset and eventually asked myself this question: Am I marketing my blog, or am I marketing me? By being @jitlife, I was marketing my blog. Therefor, I determined to change my twitter handle.

In deciding on my new twitter handle, I came up with a few criteria:

1. It has to be short
2. It has to reference me as an individual

I was going to add as 3 that it had to be clever, but the more that I thought about this, the more I realized that the first 2 are the most important, and in that order.

It has to be short as twitter only allows 140 characters. If someone is @replying to me and they have to type in a 15 character handle, well, they'll be less inclined to do so (at least from a mobile device) and they'll also have less space to say what they want to say.

That it must reference me is quite obvious once you realize that I'm marketing myself. The problem here is that all of the obvious references to me were taken! @rollins, @mrollins, @mikerollins, etc. All, gone. Most were taken and had only one or two posts, which is frustrating, but so is life.

Barring the obvious, I decided to get clever. I chose @rollinsio. Briefly, it's a silly name I call myself when I'm talking in a fake Spanish accent but it's also clever in that it could stand for Rollins I/O: perfect for twitter! It's short and it references me (rollins is prominent).

Building Your Professional Brand: Drink the Kool-aid

Is what you have to say compelling, insightful, interesting or useful? Would you like to get this message out to others? Would you like to receive the acknowledgment of your peers for what you have to say?

If you answer yes to all of the above then you need a professional brand. A professional brand is something that marks you as uniquely you, something that points directly at you in such a way that others recognize you. It's not quite a kind of fame, but it is a way of differentiating yourself from the masses.

I've recently become interested in establishing my own professional brand and I've started looking around at ways to do that. Here are a few of the observations I've made.

You need a soapbox

You have to have some place where you can expound on your ideas to the fullest extent possible. Follow out every thought, every nuance of an argument and feel comfortable doing it. Speak your mind!

This is where your blog comes in. It is your soapbox. You can discuss whatever you like there, but the more erudite and insightful your blogs are, the more folks will come back after the first dose.

However, how do you bring people to your soapbox to partake of the Kool-aid you're doling out?

You need a megaphone

You need some forum wherein you can succinctly give out information that will draw others back to your soapbox. You need something that is light-weight and is easily consumable with a minimum of effort.

You need twitter.

140 characters is not (generally) painful to consume. You can read a tweet and in a split second decide if it's something that your interested in. Thus, if you can craft your tweets to be compelling enough for folks to be interested, then you can use twitter to announce your new blogs.

Of course, this necessitates having a following on twitter, but this is a recursive process. Your first few followers will likely be your friends or those you capture by chance. Consider, though, the phenomenon of the re-tweet. If what you have to say is compelling enough then there is a good chance those that follow you will RT your tweet to those that follow them, and on and on.

Shameless self-promotion is of value here. If you think what you have to say has value, then there's no harm in promoting it. Someone else may find it of value, too. Remember, if it's profound enough for you to blog about, then it's probably profound enough for someone else to read.

But, don't just limit your tweets to self-promotion! Tweet about things that fall in line with your brand or RT information that is compelling in and of its own right. If others begin to see you as a fount of useful information they're likely to buy into your Kool-aid.

Mark Drapeau (@cheeky_geeky) has a great blog about "Expanding Your Twitter Base". His rule of thumb is provide valuable information to others on a regular basis.

Shepherd your following

Once you have others interested in your Kool-aid, you have to take care of them. Shepherd your following by interacting with them and acknowledging them. You can do this by responding to comments on your blog or by RT'ing interesting things that your followers aim at you. The main point is that you have to be involved in as personal a way as possible. If you're involved personally then others will be more inclined to recommend you to those that they know.

Also, don't just fall off the face of the Earth for any lengthy amount of time. You have to keep the Kool-aid flowing! The more often you present new ideas and information, the more likely folks are to come back and see what the latest is. If you only post a blog once every 2 months, well, you're not going to have an easy time building a following. If, however, you are prolific poster and always provide value, you're likely to garner a larger following faster.