The DOBlog

From Don Carlson, one of my IAIDQ cronies in the US comes this YouTube vid from Informatica (a data quality software tool vendor) that sums up a lot of why Information Quality matters.

Of course, I could get snooty and ask what gave them the idea to juxtapose Information Quality and Trainwrecks…. gosh, I’d swear I’ve seen that somewhere before…

Regular visitors to this blog will know that I always appreciate stuff wot does work. Be it the excellent OnlineMeetingRooms to a humble bluetooth keyboard, I am a ferverent champion of kit that humbly bows its head and goes about doing what it sez on the tin in a competent and reliable manner.

I was faced this week with the god-awful challenge of upgrading the first of my wordpress installations. I f*cking hate wordpress because of the complexity of its upgrade (let’s be honest -it’s a full monty reinstall) process, so I usually hold off for as long as possible. 2.3 passed me by. 2.5 made me sit up and ponder that perhaps I should bite the bullet. The announcement of 2.5.1 made me realise that soon I’d be spurned by the masses for being a lazy barsteward who didn’t bother to update his install.

Also 2.5.x has some nice improvements in structure, layout and design of wordpress that I was hoping to to try out (I am, they are nice).

But the pox-bottle dilemma of the upgrade had me frankly underwhelmed as my WP install was not broke so there was no urgent need to fix it. So I was quite happy when I came across the appropriately titled “Wordpress Automatic Upgrade“. This spiffy little plug-in takes a lot of the heavy lifting out of doing a wordpress upgrade.

It is not perfect but it allowed me to upgrade the DoBlog to 2.5.1 in a matter of moments with relative comfort that all was going well. Being a tad paranoid about these things I’d already taken my own backups of the DB and filesystem, but WAU did it automagically for me as well. All I need to know was an FTP login and FTP path for my host (which as I run the shebang meself I do).

Some minor hiccups with things not quite happening in the order the screen messages said they would but other than that a spiffy simple tool that did what it said on the tin.

I’ll miss Ultimate Tag Warrior (specifically being able to select from existing tags) but look forward to using the improved tagging support promised in Wordpress.

So there I was, in that horrid hypnogogic state between wakefulness and dreams, when I heard John Waters’ voice booming in my ears like the baritone chimes of God himself (or maybe that was Charlton Heston).

“Ahh”, thought I hypnogogically, “this will be one of those pontifical nightmares I get after too much cheese and it will be gone in a moment.”

Then, to my horror, I realised that I was wide awake and the Voice of Waters was coming from my alarm clock radio. He was on Newstalk and he was bitching about bloggers again. So I snapped awake and listened a bit.

The gist of his argument basically boils down to “All bloggers are [insert prejudice here]“. He proudly informed the nation that he doesn’t engage with blogs or read them but he is adamant that they are full of nonsense. Effectively his argument is that “All Bloggers are [insert prejudice here], but I’ve never actually met one”.

And the Internet is full of porn. Let’s not forget that. (but so is the top shelf in my newsagents, let’s not forget that either).

Lovely. Those are firm arguments that one can engage with on so many levels. Oh, hang on, they aren’t.

Let’s play the ‘parse the argument game’ where we take the structure of an argument and swap the context around a bit to see if the underlying premise is either

a) a seriously thought through and evidenced argument based on sound reasoning or,
b) a tenuously cobbled together series of “neo-luddite” prejudices and half-arguments motivated by fear, mistrust, ignorance or the desire to join Kevin Myers in the Independent.

So here we go…

1. “All unmarried mothers are [insert negative comment/prejudice here], but I’ve never actually met one”
2. “All immigrants are [insert negative comment/prejudice here], but I’ve never actually met one”
3. “All [insert ethnic group of choice] are [insert negative comment/prejudice here], but I’ve never actually met one”
4. “Women priests are [insert negative comment/prejudice here], but I’ve never actually met one
5. “People who write songs for Eurovision are [insert negative comment/prejudice here], but I’ve never actually met one”

Hmm…, I’m not 100% sure but I don’t think that the logic John Waters is applying to his position is keeping particularly good company. I could go on with further examples, but that would be labouring the point.

Yes, there are some appallingly poor bloggers out there. There are people who think that their opinion is worth listening to, no matter how bizarre, poorly founded or just plain crazy. But then there are people like that in the Op-Ed and letters pages of national papers every day. Yes there are bloggers who can’t write legible, comprehensible or intelligible English and whose posts I wouldn’t print out to hang on a nail in the outside loo in case the toilet paper runs out. But then there are a good number of journalists that I have the same opinion about.

But just like there are good journalists whose writing and research is good, there are good bloggers who through passion, special expertise or insight, or just plain hard work produce interesting and thought provoking pieces, or give us things that make us laugh and lighten our days a bit. I don’t shout out that all journalists are idiots just because there are journalists who I can’t stand to read.

However, all bloggers look alike to John Waters (who doesn’t read blogs apparently).

Waters challenged the Newstalk Breakfast show to find him “a blogger who can string three sentences together”. This abruptly, superficially and prejudicially dismisses some excellent people who blog intelligently about subjects that they are passionate about or have a particular specialist expertise in. Some of these people (dare I say it) are also print journalists.

Immediately I think of Edward McGarr in McGarr Solicitors, Simon and the punters over on Tuppenceworth, the unstoppable Damien Mulley, Steve Tuck’s Data Quality blog, the Freaknomics blog on the Wall Street Journal, or some of Mr Water’s colleagues in the Irish Times, the investigative insights of Maman Poulet (why can’t mainstream press get scoops like this?). And let’s not forget the irrepressible Twenty Major.

Using the same prejudiced thinking (in a different context) Waters might equally have challenged Newstalk to find him a black man or a woman who would have the ability to be credible candidates for the Presidency of the US. Oh… what’s that Internet?

I do hope that Newstalk consider rising to John Waters’ challenge. Get Mulley, either (or both) of the McGarrs, and a few of the Irish Times bloggers into a room.

Of course it is fundamentally unfair for those of us who blog to take task with the arguments put forward by John Waters. As he claims not to read blogs or to engage with blogs he has opted out of his right to reply in this medium. So I’d ask anyone commenting to:

1. Refrain from playing the man… play the ball. Address the logic, comment on the fear or philosophy that might be motivating it, but do not play the man. I’ll red card anyone who plays the man and they’ll be put in the sin bin (ie I’ll won’t approve your comment and the world will never see your wit and erudition.)
2. Each commenter should say one nice thing about John Waters in their comments. The nice thing should be really nice, not sarcastic. I’ll suggest a template for the nice thing… “John Waters is [insert nice thing about John Waters here], but I’ve never met him“. If you have met him, please share the most pleasant thing you can recall about the experience (did he tell a funny joke, pull a funny face, rescue a small child from a burning building, that kind of thing.)

   [Update: As some people seem to find this challenging, I'll extend it to allow for surreal or illogical compliments to JW. However they should still be nice things and not outrageously sarcastic. Think Satire not Sarcasm.]

3. If you want, please include in your comment a link to a particularly well written, informative and reliable blog (ie one that is not prone to publishing lies and that quickly corrects errors in their posts - that kind of thing).

My starter - John Waters looks like he takes good care of his hair, but I’ve never met him.

Of course the blogging community could just decide to ignore the issue all together.

But I have a dream. I dream that one day the children of bloggers and ‘traditional media’ journalists will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. I have a dream that the children of bloggers will not be judged by the medium they choose write in but by the quality of their content. I have a dream that one day, John Waters might actually go on-line and read some good blogs (he could start with some of the Irish times ones, particularly Shane Hegarty’s) and realise that sweeping arguments built on sand have been overturned many times in the past.

[Update: The podcast of this morning's John Waters' bit on Newstalk this morning is up on the Newstalk site, a little over 8 minutes 50 seconds in.. My views here are based on his comments this AM and on his previous comments, which I'd like to link to but the link to the podcast seems broken.]

[Update - I've decided to close comments on this as I'm bored of it now - I can't quite rouse Damien's passion about JW. Pings are still allowed however. Thanks to everyone who contributed.]

[Update: Wikipedia have picked up on this whole bruhaha and John Water's profile includes reference to the 'Blogging Controversy'. Twenty Major and this site are cited as references.]

Hmmm… perhaps I should have wished for that time machine after all. I keep missing deadlines for the Science Week thing.

Today’s question is “What invention has helpd you most with your working life”

As my job centres on computing and computery things many people would expect me to say “the computer” or “d’Internet”. But Babbage’s calculating engine and its descendants are just fripperies when compared to other inventions that I might mention.

Booze is another possiblity, given its ability to unlock creative thought processes so that complex problems fall away in a “moment of clarity”. But I suspect that , overall, it may have hindered me more than helped given the fuzzy headed hangovers and general making a tit of myself at Christmas Parties when I was a younger man (ie up to last Christmas).

However, when I think about the nature of my job and my working life since mid-way through college, I realise that the majority (if not all) of my career has dealt with clearly defining and structuring problems in a way that results in clearly defined and structured solutions becoming possible. Take away my computer and I can still do that. Take away my booze and I can still do that, but I’ll have a much more muted celebration afterwards (”yippee, mine’s a tea please”). Ultimately my career has been about structure and communication.

To that end I’d like to nominate a combination invention… the dry-wipe whiteboard and the non-permanent marker. With these I can

• do complex analysis of problems
• define project structures
• prioritise work plans for my team
• diagram for my Masters students the complex set of transactions that resulted in the collapse of enron
• Map root causes of process failures
• Draw funny faces
• Write project acronyms or codenames that will never see the light of day, but which everyone in the meeting finds hilarious
• and so many more…

And then when I’m done or when I find we’ve gone down a dead end I can just wipe the whole lot off. When I have a notes worth doing something with they can then be transcribed to Word, MSProject or PowerPoint and a fully formed idea can then be communicated to others.

Also, I must not forget the smell of the markers.

A close second place would be flipcharts and post-it notes, for similar but less ecologically friendly reasons.

Yes, there are lovely technologies out there that I could nominate. However most of them simply technologise the type of creative process that can be had with a humble whiteboard and marker.

Just for the LOVE of GOD and ALL THAT IS FRICKIN’ HOLY please don’t use permanent markers on the whiteboard. People who do should be shot, treated with the best medical care until they are able to stand up again and then be shot a second time.

Curses. I missed the deadline for yesterday’s competition over on Mulley.net to win a Wii in National Science week.

I will not make the same mistake twice. Today’s question is “What invention would you like to see most in the future?“.

Given I missed yesterday’s deadline I was tempted to go for a TARDIS or similar time travel machine (not a De Lorean as Simon would probably try to open the gull wing doors to make it fly, thus not breaking the “rules of the game”). However I dismissed this as that would open up the whole time travellers paradox… If I’d posted and been in with a chance to win the Wii would I have wished for a time machine to bring me back in time to post and win the Wii and if I hadn’t would I have won or would the original timeline have continued on.. (ohhh my brain hurts after that).

I then thought about Giant Killer Robots (ideally made of gold). However Roosta beat me to it. Curses. Perhaps I should ask for my time machine?

However a more mature pondering of the question made me consider my commuting and the implications for future family life (I live in Wexford, work in Dublin) and my carbon foot print (I tend to travel to the UK and US a few times a year to speak at conferences) and the fact that it took a colleague 2.5 hours to get from Swords to the city centre yesterday due to the buses - or specifically the lack thereof.

So the invention I’d most like to see in the future is a transporter like wot they have on Star Trek. My commute to the office would be a lot shorter (speed of light vs speed of bus eireann), I could zip back to wexford for lunch with the family, work late for my wage-masters and be back home for tea and tucking in etc. And my colleague would be able to get from Swords to Dublin before he has to turn around again and retire.

And I’d never have to deal with Ryanair’s baggage allowance or Baggage manglers handlers ever again.

Yup. Transporters it is. And interestingly we are getting closer to this technology… extend the range and move from simple matter to slightly overweight bloggers.

I’ve been playing around with e-Touch meeting room from Onlinemeetingrooms.com for the past while. To put it bluntly… this product does exactly what it says on the tin.

• It is a meeting room
• It is online
• It just works

Recently an event I was involved in as a speaker had a problem. A speaker had a last minute problem travelling to the event. In conference land this is usually a crisis situation. The conference organiser called on me to see if I could do a second presentation at the conference, but was concerned as the speaker who was to travel had been ‘ticked’ as one they wanted to see by a lot of delegates. I would very much be a ’surrogate band’ and people might not welcome the change in running order (particularly if they’d paid mainly to see that presentation).

Being a cheeky bugger I dropped a quick email to Joe Garde in Onlinemeetingrooms.com to see if he might be able to help. A few additional facts are important here. I emailed him around 18:30 on the Friday of a Bank Holiday weekend. The conference started on Monday in the UK. Monday was a Bank Holiday in Ireland (where Joe is based) and the speaker was due to present on Tuesday afternoon.

This left a window of Monday to sort something out that we could be confident would work.

Joe phoned me on Saturday morning and we discussed options (while I furiously texted the conference organiser in the UK to let him know what was happening). With Joe’s help a clear plan formed… we’d use the OnlineMeetingRoom system to video link the speaker into London from Dublin. Ideally we’d need a wired broadband connection, but Joe and I were confident we could make it work.

Over to London with me… Monday afternoon we did a test (24hrs before the presentation). Over the hotel’s wifi network. No wired broadband available…

Worked perfectly. No fuss or hassle, no installing equipment (I had a webcam in my bag and the roadies… sorry AV professionals took care of figuring out the hook-up to the PA). The roadies liked it so much they wanted to get in contact with Joe as they do a lot of conferences and seminars that it could add value to… I do hope they buy it.

Fast forward to the day of the presentation… room full of people, nervous conference organiser and conference chairperson… me very calm and confident because I knew we were using good kit that just works.

…Presenter comes on from Dublin, audio good, video good, presentation content good. Slide timings a little off because I was running the powerpoint in London to keep as much bandwidth for video and audio as possible and got distracted by how well things were going.

…everyone happy. Kudos for everyone all round.

Looking back, I could have done one or two presentational things better but the kit worked. That was the main thing.

I work in Telco and I’ve seen a fair share of ‘cutting edge’ tools that just don’t cut the mustard when the shit is hitting the fan. My experience with the e-touch Online Meeting room has always been excellent. When the chips were down the tool just worked. And Joe helped out co-ordinating on the Dublin end to make sure that the presentation went as smoothly as possible, which on a Bank Holiday was support above and beyond the call of duty.

It is so straightforward even my pointy-haired boss could use it…

Now that’s good kit that just works.

A while back I reviewed Trademark2.0 by R.Todd Stephens. The book is now available from Amazon.co.uk…

My review of the book can be found here…

A few things peeve me on the web. One of them is website form validators that do not recognise tlds other than .com, .org or a country tld. These validators seem oblivious to the fact that since 2000 ICANN has been rolling out ‘new’ tlds to take the ‘pressure’ off the .com and .org domains and .info has been active as a tld since 2001.

I chose .info for my domain name partly because my old obriend.com domain was hijacked and partly because that problem manifested an opportunity for me to rebrand myself on-line with a domain name that related to me and my interests. Obriend.info is a website dedicated to information about OBrienD (me) and where OBrienD can discuss topics relating to Information Quality and Information Management (Info).

However I find myself having to fall back on other email addresses such as my gmail or IAIDQ email address when filling out web forms as many validators (often on very reputable and high-profile sites) reject .info as part of an email address, in blissful ignorance of the fact that up to March 2007 there were 4 million .info domains registered with 1.6 million .info websites active (this being one of them).

This is a small but significant information quality problem. The ‘master data’ that is being used to support the validation processes on these sites is incomplete, out of date and inaccurate. Web developers should take the time to verify if the snippets of code they are using to validate email addresses contain all valid TLDs and if not they should update their code. Not doing so results in lost traffic to your site, and in the case of registration forms for e-commerce sites it costs you a sale (or three).

Another thing that peeves me is the use of (or not) of apostrophes in email addresses. Names like O’Donnell and the usual spelling of O’Brien have apostrophes. Some organisations allow them as part of their email addresses (joe.o’connor@thisisnotarealdomain.lie). For some reason however, many CMS platforms, website validators etc. don’t handle this construct particularly well. Indeed I’ve seen some chat forums where ‘experts’ advise people to leave out the apostrophe to avoid problems, even though the apostrophe is perfectly permissable under the relevant RFC standards.

I’ve experienced the problem with Joomla and Community Builder on the IQ Network website which required me to manually work around the issue as I am not a good enough php developer to hack either application to fix the problem in a way that doesn’t cause other problems (such as the apostrophe being displayed back with an escaping backslash - ” \’ “.

On the web you are in a global community. Just because your country/culture doesn’t use apostrophes or accenting characters doesn’t mean that they are not valid. Your code should be built to handle these occurences and to avoid corrupting data. Joe O’Connor’s name (to return to our fictional example) is not Joe O\’Connor. He should not see his name displayed as such on a form. Furthermore it should not be exported as such from a database into other processes.

Likewise, if Joe.O’Connor@fictionaldomain.info decides he wants to register at your site you should make sure you can correctly identify his tld as valid and get his name right.

R.Todd Stephens is a very interesting man. I’ve met him and have sat through an incredibly interesting tutorial he gave back in 2006 in London on Enterprise Metadata. What interested me most about his presentation was how he was referring to tools and technologies that I was tinkering with to try and improve communication of key concepts and improve efficiencies in information management in my day job. Indeed, some of the tools were things I was playing with outside of work as a hobbyist blogger. It’s a pity I haven’t had a chance to implement too much of the vision that he triggered in my mind at that time for improvements in the day job … but who knows what might happen by the end of the year.

His website - www.rtodd.com - has been a regular touch point for me ever since.

He has recently published a book that sets out a recipe for establishing your personal brand (he uses the term trademark for a variety of reasons). Part of his thesis is that the collaborative tools of Web2.0 (the Read/Write Web as it is often called) have altered the rules for creating your personal brand and provide you with opportunities to raise your profile and, importantly, to measure how your profile is doing.

What sets this book apart in my eyes is that Todd adds value in interesting ways. Apart from just presenting bland statements about how ‘blogs are good’ and conferences are great ways to see new places and meet new people, he presents a set of tools to measure and score how well your ‘trademark’ is doing. He also sets out a reasoned argument as to why establishing a personal trademark for yourself may well be the career survival tool for the Read/Write Information Age.

He brings together a variety of references and marries them together in support of his argument - and above all he provides examples of how you can ’speak with data’ to track how well you are meeting or exceeding your own expectations of what your ‘brand’ might be. From checking the site stats for your blog to your technorati rankings to having a ’scorecard’ of the things you’ve done to promote your brand, Todd give some keen insights.

The fact that he is a world-class recognised authority on the management of meta-data is evidence of the success of his formula. The book at times reads somewhat autobiographically and it is clear that this is not a book based on a theoretical view of things or an attempt to leap on the airport business bookshelf bandwagon but rather an attempt to share a recipe that has worked.

I’ll certainly be taking stock of how I’m doing. This blog is a key part of my personal trademark but after reading Todd’s book I think that I might need to balance the scorecard a little bit more. The framework he presents gives me a road map to do this.

Trademark2.0 can be purchased from LULU.com. Just click on this link to be taken to the book’s page on Lulu. If you don’t want to buy from Lulu, the ISBN for the book is 978-0-6151-5688-0 and your local bookstore should be able to order it for you. Better yet you can buy Trademark 2.0: Defining Your Value in the Web 2.0 World from Amazon by clicking on this link.