Loving the language of spam

I've always been fascinated by the evolution of spam. I think this is because of an interest in language and communication through text. Spam represents an attempt to inveigle, to persuade using the written word. To do this it not only has to con-vince, it also has to get past the filters that are designed to sift it out before it gets to unsuspecting recipients.

This leads to a kind of sophisticated tightrope walking, between getting the message through (the filters), and getting the message across (to the readers).

A lot of this is to do with the gulf between what the human brain can recognise/make sense of, and what the human brain can program computers to recognise/make sense of. This gulf in embodied sense making ability, and codifiable sense making ability is where the spammers live. As that gulf slowly narrows it'll be interesting to see what happens.

The technique I find most interesting at the moment is the use of images to deliver the message (e.g. an ad for viagra), and some pseudo intelligible text to fool the filters. I have no idea how they generate this text, but it is intriguing to read:

"Men lived in families, tribes, and races, at feud super with one another, command frowning yawn plundering, outraging, and killing. All the evil seems to exist through farm some cause independent of school sweep the funny conscience of men. Those men brain scary who accept a slip new truth when it enjoy has gained a certain degree of acceptance, always pass over

The antagonism between amuse life and the bring conscience may be removed cushion in two ways: by do a change of life or by It cannot be. uptight orange What is the mow use of the clergy, who don't believe picture in what they preach? love Those who do evil through ignorance of the stretch truth quit provoke sympathy with their crash victims and repugnance"

Did you know you are on a biofuel bus?

I've been getting the bus the last couple of weeks as I'm waiting for new glasses so I can drive again. One of the things I noticed was that some of the buses in Christchurch have small biofuel notices on them, and there's one with a full paint job promoting biofuels.

I had a look on the Environment Canterbury web site, and sure enough, they're running a trial. It's only a 5% blend, but it may increase to 20%, and it's only on a few buses, but it's a start.

Getting on the bus last night, there was a woman with a clipboard asking each passenger "do you know you're on a biofuel bus?". It made me wonder about the purpose of asking the question. Was it to see how many people were aware of the pilot? Was it to inform people of the fact that biofuels were being used? It's one of those problems in social research. You can't ask the question without changing the knowledge of those you are asking. I could almost see the more astute of the passengers thinking "well, yes, because you're asking me that question, and the question implies that I am about to get on a biofuel bus".

But, whatever the rationale behind their questioning methods, I think it's a fantastic initiative and I'm going to get the bus more often, even when I do get my glasses.

Environment 2.0 ... The World is Us/ing Us

A lot of the work I've done recently is in the Environment sector, on whole of sector data, information and knowledge issues. One of the fascinating things that's starting to happen is national and international federation of biodiversity data. I really like the intro video on http://www.eol.org/home.html and the promise this sort of thing has for better managing the world we live in.

It's stylistically quite reminiscent of the original Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us video reated by Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University. So it's also interesting to see these kinds of communication methods being quickly adopted and repurposed into different contexts.

For me these are all examples of the emergence of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's Noosphere. The thinking mind of the living breathing earth.

Museum 2.0

A 2 day conference with 200 librarians, museum staff, and archivists. It could have been musty, and death by droning powerpoint, but it wasn't. I've just been at the National Digital Forum, and it was fantastic to see Web 2.0, folksonomies, podcasts and mashups being embraced by this community. One of the speakers had already made a del.icio.us account with bookmarks for the sites he referred to, common enough among digerati, but fairly radical for Museum people.

There were some magnificent speakers including Toby Travis from the Victoria and Albert Museum, and Susan Chun from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. These and other institutions are enabling users to tag art works and gallery objects (online) to improve discoverability, and blogs and podcasts to reach out to a wider audience. Some were using Flickr mashups to let the public contribute images to exhibitions, setting up famous dead photographers as Flickr users, creating gallery profiles in MySpace, and even a gallery in Second Life.

One of my favorite examples was a 'Design your own Arts&Crafts Tile' flash application. People could create tiles, and rate each others. They had a very limited number of patterns and colours to work with, and only a title and brief description field for metadata. Given this very limited palette (in fact probably because of it) it was amazing to see what people did, and the kind of dialogue by picture and metadata that occurred as a result.

Another interesting aspect was the thought going in to the interaction between folksonomies and rigorous academic taxonomies as used by archivists and curators. Folksonomies were being used to inform enhancement to taxonomies and the more formal descriptive content around art works. Discussions were starting about faceted folksonomies, the notion of hierarchies and clusters of tags. I'm wondering whether this will get us closer to the emergence of the semantic web. Certainly having the 'memory institutions' involved in this process is going to add something, whether it's needed academic rigour and inspiration, or restrictive pedanticism remains to be seen. Their increasingly excited and engaged though, and that's a great start.

Human Traffic

A number of European cities are trialling a traffic management approach involving a massive reduction in the number of signs and traffic signals.

The mantra is "Unsafe is safe" and the rationale is that the more you try to control people, the less personal responsibility they take. Where there are less rules people take more care, and negotiate via gestures, nods and eye contact. It's been tried in some towns in Germany, and accidents reduced dramatically.

This thinking seems to me to resonate well with reactions against rules based approaches to managing organisational performance. The more you trust people (within an appropriate minimal set of boundaries) the more you get emergence of functional, adaptive behaviour.

OnlineGroups.Net

It's a big day, OnlineGroups.Net have released their 'start a site' and 'start a group' service using a paid subscription model.

I've been using the technology for three years now, right from a very early alpha stage. This was mostly because I shared an office with the creators of the software. I've seen it evolve from being pretty rough and ready to being extremely functional. There are still a few things I don't like, but overall it's fantastic.

I'm a member of ten active groups, and am the administrator for a site that comprises six groups, and is likely to have many more. The things I like the best about the system are:

• the user management - where users can manage their account details in one place, while being members of many groups
  
• the centralised file storage (this makes a huge difference for committees and groups that aren't on the same IT infrastructure)
  
• the focus on good online group facilitation processes
  

Enterprisey

I recently spoke at the Brightstar 6th Annual Strategic Intranets and Portals conference
I was going to blog some notes at the conference, but I stopped as soon as I saw that Michael was doing a much more thorough job than I could have done.

One thing that Michael's presentation raised for me was the relationship between web 2.0 and enterprise collaboration/km technologies. Which is driving which? I've said for a couple of years now that corporate users expectations have been raised by Google. How is it that you can normally find what you're after on the Web, where there's 8 billion pages, and you can't find anything on your corporate document repositories where there's only a few hunderd thousand documents?

Michael asked whether perhaps Web 2.0 was just the bringing of 'enterprisey' collaboration functionality to the public web. To a certain extent I think that's true, especially for those who have been using Lotus Notes for years. I also think that Web 2.0 is driving some innovations from the public web into enterprises though. Blogs, wikis, and faceted classification (tags) are to me, clear examples of this. Lightweight, 'paper thin' portals like Netvibes are also examples of the kinds of customisation that corporate users may start to expect.

Google page rank style search power is another thing that should come into enterprises. The challenge with this is that there just aren't that many links between corporate documents. The reason Google works is that a lot of relevance ranking can be drawn from the number and type of links between web pages. I think this offers a lot more promise than automated context extraction technologies like Autonomy (as fantastic as they are). It was therefore interesting to hear BEA talking about incorporating contextual links between people, documents, and groups to improve search within the enterprise portal space.

I await these developments with interest.