March 6, 2007

An idea pinched from Tuppenceworth

Tuppenceworth have started doing ‘Tag Clouds’ to visualise the frequency of words etc in political manifestos and speeches in the run up to the Irish General Election.

Ho-hum I thought… wouldn’t it be interesting to do the same on the emerging commercial Information Quality Blogs (and perhaps other commentary in the area - it works on any text) to see what sort of themes emerge in the tags (ie commonly occuring words). The bigger the font the more frequent the occurence. I’m making no inferences based on the ‘cloud’ - I’ll leave that up to you. This one is based on a post by Garry Moroney of Informatica on their blog site.

created at TagCrowd.com

Side effects of the Blog Awards?

It would seem that the IT thought police in my employer were paying attention to the Blog awards. For a long time our web filters only blocked tools like blogger.com and typepad. Sites like Tuppenceworth who operated their blog on their own domain (like the DoBlog too) flew beneath the radar.

Not any longer.

As of today I’ve noticed that the venerable Tuppenceworth has been blocked, as have all incarnations of Twenty Major. It is possible that it is just a co-incidence that this has happened a week after the Irish Blog Awards, but I’m far to cynical to think that. I’m donning the TinFoil Hat of Conspiracy as I suspect that the media profile given to some of the former ’stealth blogs’ in the run up to the Blog Awards may have alerted some policy makers to the fact that there’s more than one way to blog.

Hopefully I’ll be able to keep updating the DoBlog and the IQNetwork site after hours from the office. Failing that I’ll just have to trawl for some wireless broadband connectivity.

In the mean time…

###Updated###
Tupp’worth isn’t blocked anymore… looks like a random burp from the web filters. Twenty is still barred though, more’s the pity.

March 5, 2007

Count down to an Information Quality clash?

Daylight Savings time starts in the US on the 11th of March - that’s next week. DST doesn’t start in Ireland or the UK until the 25th of March. The US change comes about under an Energy Protection Act passed last year.

Microsoft are warning people in the US that their PCs won’t automatically update (not that mine ever did) and are assuring people that VISTA already handles it.

So what will happen if your PC has the incorrect locale settings (data)? Will that have triggered it to download the various patches for Windows and Outlook? Have European firms checked that they have no dependencies on US daylight savings time in other software or calculations?

I’m probably fretting over nothing but seemingly innocuous base data can, if not managed correctly, have a big impact on business processes and on people’s lives.

My advice - check your locale settings even if you’re using a Mac.

Back again… and with a new face too.

Site Aesthetics | Comments (0) Daragh @ 8:03 pm

The DoBlog is back again, and in the style of Bond villains it has another new face. The old one was functional-ish and quite search engine friendly but it was a tad bland and ugly and didn’t wrap text very well. Frankly I put my failure to be nominated for any of the Irish Blog Awards down to the poor design ;-) . Next year I am hoping to wrestle TwentyMajor for a 2 litre bottle of Um-Bongo - well done to Twenty for winning again.

I’ve been busy with the IQNETWORK website (www.iqnetwork.org) getting it bang up to date and also running the 4th Information Quality Forum in DCU. I’m also lecturing in DCU as well, so I have very little time for this blog which is still more of a hobby than a way of life.

Must also try and find time to get back into training with the Aikido club…. (sorry Sensei).

So much to do… must set up a category for ‘time management’….