This morning I signaled a status update [think twitter] "Generating a list of 2000 fake name, titles, phone numbers, and office locations for our new demo sandboxes."  … one of my colleagues Graham, read what I wrote and replied with "Once you’ve got that list, could you send me a copy?"

… Alan’s entire post is here.

I’ve been in this exact situation myself – building a demo and feeling the need to generate a bunch of sample data. I would be grateful to discover someone else was already ahead of me and just as grateful to see my work get reused. Odds are good there are lots of work items that are small enough that you "just do it" your self but are probably already out there or being done by others.

Deploying a microblogging capability inside your firewall – whether it be Lotus Connections, Socialtext, Jive, or a stand-alone open source option – provides the value of sharing work information while not exposing it to the internet at large. If you prefer the outsourced experience of status updates but still want the privacy of your information, then a cloud service may be your preferred channel.

But microblogging is not the only mechanism for sharing information and reducing duplicate work. A "Shared Files" capability has a similar value. Consider the example above. The producer of the sample dataset may be separated from the consumer by days or weeks. If the dataset is published to an internal file sharing service, it can be found by others, tagged, rated, and more. If the status updates and shared files are linked to the author’s profile, then adhoc expertise evolves and it becomes increasingly easy to find the people you need to work on any given activity.

What social networking software capabilities are you considering ?

From a simple perspective, "analytics" for the end user means three things: Data + Processing + Display. While purists may say analytics is just the processing, the old adage of "garbage in / garbage out" is apt. So too is the recognition  that great data with great processing can still leave you scratching your head if you can see what is important.

All of this is to say I found it interesting to read that NBC has added a live twitter "pulse" analysis for the Olympics. At the moment I would guess it is must another gimmick to generate buzz. However, there could be real value in what it does.

The purpose of Twitter Pulse is to show the relative volume of tweets and the topics they represent.

Data: The data is Twitter but its not clear how they select tweets about the Olympics vs. all other tweets. For now, we will assume its a good data set.

Processing: Next, there is some type of analysis – presumable to pull out key words such as the sport, the interest, some data keys ("video", "medal", etc.) locations, athletes, and so on. All of this data is processed for one metric, "volume of traffic".

Display: the "volume of traffic" metric controls a box size. The other data keys are used to generate some text overlay and to choose a suitable background image. All of this is then rendered "tree map".

What does it mean ? OR more important to a company, what use is it ?

The resulting data could indicate what people are interested in seeing and thus influence what what content is broadcast as well as what types of advertising will have the highest impact. If this were trusted, then it could impact the cost of advertising as well as the size and demographic of the audience.

However, we need to remember the data set – Twitter. So perhaps this is not a sufficiently accurate sampling to make changes to broadcast content. But, what about using the data to change web content ? It could be a good predictor of web site traffic and thus advertisement selection and placement as well as to focus content.

As an aside, I found it interesting that over the 30 minutes or so of watching the Twitter Pulse, the sport of Curling rarely dropped out of the top 1/3rd of the graph’s boxes.

My observation of "analytics" is that success requires all three disciplines working in concert and more often than not, there are three distinct skill sets – data management, processing, and visualization. If you are interesting in the display component, you might be interesting is looking at "Many Eyes" which not only provides visualization of data set but also lets users share their discoveries – a kind of "social data processing" capability.

When I was in college, companies often donated hardware and some software to universities. This was a mixed blessing. The donation was great but it also meant that the college had to use their limited IT staff to manage the systems and the new equipment was always vying for limited raised floor lab space.

Here is where a cloud service could be a huge win for both the corporate sponsor and the university.

IBM announced it will make portions of its software portfolio available in a cloud computing environment to more easily allow professors to incorporate technology into their curricula and students to focus on development vs management of the systems they require. The initiative is called the Academic Skills Cloud and provides the software and system capabilities at no charge and without the need for students or faculty having to install and maintain it themselves.

Here are some additional resources:

• full article -> Academic Cloud to Speed Delivery of Technology Skills to College Students
• more about  IBM Cloud University Initiatives 
• recording of the live webcast

By 2050, 70 percent of the Earth’s population will be living in cities – growing from 3.3 billion people today to a breathtaking 6.4 billion. This wave of urbanization presents enormous challenges and opportunities to all of us.

The Smarter Cities Leadership Forum on Tuesday, February 23, 2010 will begin at: 10:30 AM EST/9:30 AM CST/7:30 AM PST.

Join IBM for the Smarter Cities Virtual Leadership Forum, where forward-thinking public and private sector leaders converge to explore how our cities are getting smarter, driving greater innovation and transformation for competitive advantage while meeting the pressing needs of engaged constituents.

From the comfort of your office, discover how leaders from across North America are transforming their communities and businesses.

Full article and registration >>

In my morning “digital mail bag” was a pointer to The Register’s article on Oracle, Sun, and the departure of their CTO for cloud. In the article, they describe Lew Tucker as “former vice president of Salesforce.com’s AppExchange applications market place; had been with Sun for less than two years and was handed the role of building out Sun’s hosted cloud.” You can read the whole article here.

A few weeks ago, I sat down with representatives from a number of government agencies and much of the conversation surrounded cloud computing. What was evident were a few things:

• nearly everyone is investigating cloud options
• “cloud” is an over used term and means everything from raw CPU and storage to hosted custom applications to hosted commodity services
• most of the use cases were for cloud versions of traditional solutions – aka the cloud was just a different deployment option
• traditional thinking means traditional requirements and hosted clouds do not always meet those requirements
• exploiting cloud computing to its fullest will occur as new programs are designed and fulfilled but there are starting points today

The common thread was that having flexibility was critical. Some commodity capability could go into a public cloud. Low risk capability could go into a hosted cloud. By far, the private cloud has the lower threshold of adoption (independent of cost or complexity) as it is easier to trust.

While “cloud” may be an over used term, it is clear there are both current use cases and new thinking for solution design to take better advantage of flexible options. The silver bullet of a “cloud” is it’s ability to smooth out load. The larger the cloud the more balancing that can take place. This starts the balancing act. A private cloud will be smaller than a public cloud. If the private cloud is only servicing one type of solution, then it is likely to surge and idle all at once. However, a service cloud is quicker to leverage than an infrastructure cloud.

• Software as a Service clouds benefit from large diverse user populations
• Platform as a Service clouds benefit from lots of diverse applications
• Infrastructure as a service clouds benefit from lots of diverse compute requirements

So, what do you need your cloud to do ?

… the attacks are distinctive in the kinds of data the attackers target, and they are rarely detected by antivirus and intrusion programs … the intrusions grab a foothold into a company’s network, sometimes for years, even after a company has discovered them and taken corrective measures

… The attackers were in the firm’s network for a year before the [law] firm learned from law enforcement that it been hacked. By then, the intruders harvested thousands of e-mails and attachments from mail servers.

… Mandiant has seen malware and backdoors that were programmed to lay dormant for months — more than a year in one case — before awakening and sending a beacon to an external command center signaling that it was alive — long after the company thought it had eradicated the intruders.

The article outlines the process of attack …

• the attackers conduct reconnaissance to identify workers to target in spear-phishing attacks … then send malicious e-mails or instant messages that appear to come from a trusted colleague or friend

• the e-mails have an attachment or link to a ZIP file containing zero-day malware that exploits Microsoft Office or Adobe Reader vulnerabilities. they focus on obtaining elevated access privileges to burrow further into the network

• stolen e-mail messages and documents are collected and stored on a staging server inside the company’s network before being encrypted with custom algorithms and compressed into an .rar file.

• the files are then siphoned out in small random bursts generally via normal protocols

Read the full article @ "Report Details Hacks Targeting Google, Others", Wired.com

Let me preface the rest of this as being a shorter post that planned because I wrote the longer one and my editor crashed (ARGH).

The prompt for this post was the closing credit on the NBC Nightly News podcast. (For the curious, I get most of my news through various internet channels but I still like the capsulated format of the National Evening News. I just don’t like having to drop everything to watch the broadcast at a fixed time.) recently, NBC added a graphic to the end of the news to indicate they are on Twitter, Facebook, and support SMS.

News agencies have adopted the various social media as alternative channels to reach their audience (micro blogging breaking news, streaming video of extended features, etc.). More and more, they are also monitoring these channels for the next big story. The risk to "sourcing" from public social media is "verification". Ideally, all sources are vetted and corroborated, but it’s easy to cut corners in an attempt to scoop the story. It’s risky to get a story wrong. It’s far riskier to make business or security decisions.

There are two common methods of confirming data – authenticated sources (having security credentials and requiring a login to post content) or authoritative sources (building trust over time). Both mechanism have merit. However, controlling the credentials of all users, limits the scope of the user population. This is fine for a private solution but excludes the large data pools generated by public social media services. An alternative is to use analytics on the social media data to create a level of trust …

• how many different sources are reporting the same event
• what medium is used (micro blogging vs video vs SMS)
• what past traffic have the sources reported
• who "follows" the source
• what else is known about the sources
• etc

Monitoring the social media streams and analyzing the content goes far in established a level of credibility in the information. While there is risk in gathering information from unauthenticated sources, there is also great value assuming it is not trusted without verification.

.

To those whom I did not have the chance to connect, I and many from the team are available both here thru our blog as well as in person so don’t hesitate to “connect with us”!

So, how was Lotusphere 2010?

In a word, “extreme”! Even knowing much of what was announced at the conference, I still had a full time job getting the ins and outs from jump starts to deep dives.

What were the big take-aways?

I’d say that there were multiple big messages. On the environments side it was Cloud, first class mobile device support, and a biggy (pun warning) was Lotus Connections on Z-Linux is coming!

Back to the “cloud”, I’d say the message was blending on premise capabilities with capabilities in the cloud so you can balance the best of both. For many Federal customers, “private clouds” provide the higher security and governance needs.

Before I forget, mobile was everywhere I both is sessions and the hands of attendees. I saw more Blackberries, iPhones, and Androids than I did laptops. IBM gets it – “mobile is a primary interface now.” On a personal note, I wouldn’t say the iPhone out numbered Blackberries but they were definitely prevalent. I’ll following this closely.
Unified Communications was integrated into many sessions. It was all about controlling presence everywhere and to best suit the user, seamlessly integrating the office, VoIP, soft phone, cellphone and flowing between them without interruption – both at the user discretion and through user configurable routing rules. I’ve been using these capabilities for about 6 months and they make a big difference in both my flexibility and transparency.

Any other themes?

Another big message was modular components, capabilities and services. While a lot of sessions were in the scope of products, the content was about “capabilities” and how they are surfaced as portlets, widgets, an modular components. Further, those same user facing capabilities can be accessed with web 2.0 interfaces – REST, ATOM, XML, etc.

A great example of this emphasis on capabilities and modularity was a challenge a customer gave me – “we use Lotus Connections Activities for lots of small projects, can I get a view across all of them? Preferably as a timeline?”

We hit the “Ask the Developer Lab” and in about 15 minutes we had a Lotus Connections engineer, a Notes client developer and a Mac user bouncing ideas. They had two choices. The Activities to-dos can be accessed as an iCal feed and the Notes 8.5.1 client can display multiple calendars together. Alternately, the Activities assignments are available as a feed and IBM Mashup Center 2.0 was a new Timeline widget.

BTW, the three engineers were not together. The Lotus Connections engineer had Sametime Broadcasts to fire off the question.

Any surprises?

“Project Vulcan” was announced as was “LotusLive Lab”. When I get back to my laptop, I’ll write more about these.

What!?

Oh, I should explain. I came to Lotusphere and only carried my Blackberry (where I am writing this post) and occasionally had an iPod Touch. My goal was to test just how far these mobile devices could go.

I had access to email, calendar, Lotus Connections, my shared files, blogs, micro blogging (Twitter and my IBM Connections status), an a nice conference app built by business partners. I also could get to LotusLive where people were sharing emo materials, updated slides and more so could just Dogear (bookmarking) for later.

There is no way I could cover everything at Lotusphere, especially in one post but I hope this gives you a taste and feel free to comment on any points you’d like more info on!

Web applications have the advantage of delivering both the user experience and the data from a server every time. If a bug fix needs to go out to everyone or an new feature, it happens the next time a user visits the application web address. No fuss. No foul. But, if the application has a rich user experience with drop downs, and graphics, and drag-n-drop, and worse, if the application was developed in a pristine modern lab, then that application makes assumptions about the quality of the network – it’s speed, it’s latency, and it’s resilience. While this describes the original lab environment and it may even describe what you will find in close proximity to the mega-cities, this does not describe most of real world.

Once again, in the third quarter of 2009, 19% of the Internet connections around the world were at speeds greater than 5 Mbps. This level was fairly consistent with the prior quarter, as well as compared to the same period a year ago. The United States, however, saw high broadband adoption rates decline slightly in the third quarter, losing 0.7%, while shedding a more concerning 8.8% year-over-year. The global level of high broadband penetration, shown in Figure 10, remained consistent quarter-over-quarter, remaining at 0.01 – that is, one high broadband IP per 100 people.

source: Akamai

When just looking at the United States, 91% of the people do *not* have the "high speed" internet.

What can be done ? There are two options:

1. deploy high speed internet everywhere
2. build applications that use the available internet connectivity better

The first will happen slowly and you as an application producer or consumer don’t have much control of it. What you do control is the applications. As a consumer – whether it be an individual or an organization can choose which web applications you use and standardize. You have two options "better applications".

Data centric applications can do a better job of getting the application "out of the way". A good example is this blog. It recently added a new format targeted at mobile devices which reduces load and display time by about 60%. This same interface could be used for any browser. The result is that all of the information of the blog is conveyed with some reduction in functionality but it may be those features were not needed in the first place. Personally, I think we can learn a lot by paying attention to the mobile device environment. It forces applications to leverage the network for what it provides – connectivity – but not assume it is ubiquitous, fast, or consistent.

User Interface (UI) intensive applications require a different solution. If the experience is important, then perhaps the UI should be persistent on the desktop / device and the internet is only used to transfer data as needed. These have an additional advantage in that different devices / user / conditions drive the application requirements. Many web applications have taken this direction. How you implement the desktop application is highly variable. It could be native code – rich experience with less training given it follows standards. It could be Java – common experience across multiple platforms; And soon, it could be persistent HTML5 with it’s localStorage. This last option has the advantage of being a web application so it can be updated quickly and has the advantage of local storage so it does not need to pass the entire user experience back and forth with the server each time.

The reason it has taken me so long is I WILL NOT TWEET MY EVERY MOVE / THOUGHT / DIATRIBE / etc. Further, I really don’t what to listen to others’ every move / thought / diatribe / etc.  And on the surface, *that* is exactly what Twitter seems to be.

So what is Twitter ? It’s nothing more and nothing less than a short messaging service.

What makes Twitter interesting is *how* people use Twitter. Yes, there are those that tweet (the act of sending a short message through Twitter) verbal diarrhea. There are also those who use Twitter as self promotion (where ’self’ is either the individual or the company). There are also those who use it an an intelligent pub/sub infrastructure. The unique bit is that Twitter itself has almost none of the intelligence – it is how people use Twitter and how they have developed clients and tools that leverage Twitter that is interesting. One of the most powerful of this is the ‘hashtag" …

Once you’ve started using Twitter, it won’t take long before you come across what’s known as a hash tag. That’s when you see something in a tweet that has a # prefix. (The # is a hash symbol, hence the term hash tag or hashtag.)

For example, if you’ve seen tweets related to the recent U.S. government stimulus bill, you may have noticed some of them had #stimulus in them.

It took me a while to wrap my head around what the purpose of this thing was but, once I “got it,” I realized it’s not as complicated as it seems.

A hash tag is simply a way for people to search for tweets that have a common topic. For example, if you search on #LOST (or #Lost or #lost, because it’s not case-sensitive), you’ll get a list of tweets related to the TV show. What you won’t get are tweets that say “I lost my wallet yesterday” because “lost” isn’t preceded by the hash tag.

It is the "search" aspect of hashtags that is so powerful. You do not need to "follow" every user and you do not need to read every tweet. You find (or create) a hashtag that relates to a topic of interest and you "subscribe" to it. Most Twitter clients let you create persistent searches. In this way, you do not need to know all of the user who are discussing a topic, you just need to know the hashtag for that topic.

… hash tags are NOT any kind of official Twitter function. The company has not created a list of topics that we can browse through to see if there’s one that interests us … any user can create one simply by adding it to their own tweet.

For example, when the plane went down in the Hudson River some Twitter user wrote a post and added #flight1549 to it … somebody else read it and when he posted something about the incident, added #flight1549 to *HIS* tweet. it didn’t take long for this hash tag to go viral … it’s a very organic process.

[Before creating a new hashtag] The first thing I would do is a basic Twitter search on the term itself so I can see if someone’s already created a related hash tag. Before you create your own tag, you might want to search on a few variations to make sure they don’t already exist.

Source: The Twitter Hash Tag: What Is It and How Do You Use It?

I only follow a small number of people but I have hashtag searches on a number of topics and it is the tweets on those specific topics that provide the value. Not only can I learn about the topic, I can also ask questions to "the community" (regardless of who that may be). In my first few examples of asking questions I had multiple good answers in a matter of seconds! The power of a huge network of people, connected by a simple messaging service.