Saturday Randomness

Spent a good hour this morning reading Mini-Microsoft, a recent phenom that’s actually been around a while. The comments are the interesting stuff. I don’t really care about the innards of Microsoft, but it’s making me think about how Yahoo works, including SDS and my own group.

Sheesh, blog spam is way up this past week. I moderate comments from all new commentators, so they aren’t posted until I approve them, but they do hit my mailbox. The increase is at least 10x what it used to be, although, fortunately I’m not seeing volumes like Ryan. There must be some new WordPress comment spam software in production. Like Ryan I’m not ready to introduce CAPTCHA.

Speaking of trends, I’m suddenly seeing the Three Letter Acronym “LMK” pop up in email and IM. This started about a few weeks ago. It’s not like I recently moved to a new team with their own lingo — this is from folks within my existing group, in other areas of the company, friends, and business contacts outside the company. It seems to be spreading like crazy. Wikipedia has had an entry for it since the spring. LMK if you’re only recently seeing it too, or perhaps I just haven’t been paying attention?

Finally, this Web 2.0 observation from Matt McAlister:

One [Yahoo] is facilitating community development. The other [Google] is facilitating data retrieval.

Saturday Randomness

The Matrix

Today’s the day for talking about things in two dimensions, it seems.

A co-worker and I were discussing a work situation (not here, fortunately) where things are getting heated and personal. I made the statement “this is what happens when really smart people jump in” and he corrected me: “this is what happens when really political people jump in.” We agreed there are two dimensions to organizational trouble. For illustrative purposes, I threw together a matrix, and put some rather arbitrary labels on the quadrants:

Trouble Matrix

Later, I was in a discussion about how many of the people who provide huge amounts of value to the company go relatively unnoticed. They key is that perceived value to the company is a product of both your contribution and your visibility. So a work value matrix might look like:

Work Value Matrix

So I figured that was that, but then had a third discussion about how SDS can best provide value (we’re doing some planning at the moment). We have lots of systems in place that crunch data and provide a quantitative view, and we have business-savvy analysts to provide a qualitative view, but there’s always room for improvement both ways – and one view holds that combining the two allows you to add qualitative business rules to your analytics to build a self-running, decision-making optimization engine. That’s either web analytics nirvana or shades of a self-aware “HAL 9000”-like infrastructure, depending on how you look at it:

Analytic Value Matrix

Suddenly I’m thinking we need a matrix-building web site to crank these out. 🙂

The Matrix