Month: September 2008

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News

A Demonstration of the Virtue of Persistence

The War Within by Bob Woodward

Bob Woodward recently wrote a book, The War Within, that chronicles what was going on in the White House in the past couple years. I haven’t read it, but I read excerpts on in Robert Tracinski’s TIA Daily newsletter which made me feel proud and inspired. This will be shocking to my friends in the Bay Area, but the subject of my admiration is President Bush.

To be clear, our president has weaknesses, as do we all. His crowd of detractors is legion, and it is unnecessary for me to call them out. But he does have one great virtue: persistence. He doesn’t give up when he knows he’s right. When I read the account of how much opposition he faced to the surge and how he reacted to it, it inspired me provide that kind of leadership and it set an image in my mind of the kind of leadership I want.

Here’s an account of how Retired Army Gen. Jack Keane delivered a message from President Bush to Gen. David H. Petraeus.

Keane took out the piece of paper and read the president’s message, verbatim, aloud to Petraeus:

“I respect the chain of command. I know that the Joint Chiefs and the Pentagon have some concerns. One is about the Army and Marine Corps and the impact of the war on them. And the second is about other contingencies and the lack of strategic response to those contingencies.

“I want Dave to know that I want him to win. That’s the mission. He will have as much force as he needs for as long as he needs it.

“When he feels he wants to make further reductions, he should only make those reductions based on the conditions in Iraq that he believes justify those reductions. These two concerns that we are discussing back here in Washington—about contingency operations and the needs of the Army and the Marine Corps—they are not your concerns. They are my concerns.

“I do not want to change the strategy until the strategy has succeeded. I waited over three years for a successful strategy. And I’m not giving up on it prematurely. I am not reducing further unless you are convinced that we should reduce further.”

I am convinced the essence of leadership is to set the destination, to congratulate the team when they cross the finish line and in all other times provide humble service to the people who are getting the job done. We didn’t read about it in the papers at the time, but Bush was providing exactly that type of leadership.

I run the technology department at a small business that provides leadership in digital marketing strategy. I’ve managed larger teams than I am now–we’re in a period where we have a solid strategy and things are looking much better than they did six months ago. Every day, I strive to keep the team supplied with billable work and the tools they need to produce excellent work. Likewise, my bosses allow me to be successful by pointing to where they want the company to go and then getting out of my way.

So often we are dissatisfied with government and politicians. It’s amazing to find shining moments of leadership in places where the stakes are so much higher.

Categories
News

On Clear Night Sky: The market for Internet skills

I just posted to Clear Ink’s company blog: The market for Internet skills. The post is about the market for skills on Elance, the ratio of developers to open projects and how it might affect your choice of technology–whether you’re a provider or a consumer.

Categories
News

Microblogging needs tags on people, not content search

There’s an ongoing conversation on the Gillmor Gang around Twitter’s disabled track functionality. This functionality allowed you to set a search term that would be applied to all messages (tweets) sent in Twitter. Matching tweets would be sent to you via the Google Talk interface. The user experience was that you could open up your IM client, tell Twitter that you want to get all messages that contain “core php” and they would appear in a chat window in real time.

Unfortunately, this functionality apparently wasn’t coded to scale with the popularity it attracted. Twitter took the feature away months ago and it hasn’t returned. You can get a similar experience by subscribing to a search in Summize, a search engine for tweets. In this model, you enter a search term and then subscribe to the results via RSS. Your RSS client can poll the feed regularly. But the experience is much slower. I understand that while track was working, Steve Gillmor would watch tweets flow in and carry on realtime conversations. This isn’t practical with saved searches. You can check your feed once a day or so. It’s a half solution.

The real weakness of both track and Summize is that they take an old school way of finding information. Remember when Web page search engines just indexed the content? It worked for a little while, then people optimized content to get undue attention. That is, they put a bunch of keywords on pages and pushed their results to the top. This wasn’t helpful to people looking for information.

A better search for tweets would involve gestures by listeners. Perhaps an impartial observer could contribute as well. Additionally, search is always behind. It’s a report in retrospect. The delay was short with track, but what we really want is a system that suggests information we might be interested in. That will allows us to learn things we don’t yet know we want to learn.

Here’s my vision. When I follow someone on twitter, I should also answer the question of why. I would do this with tags. When I subscribe to a feed in Google Reader, I put the feed into a folder that answers why I subscribed. Egg City Radio is in my “music” folder. Techcrunch is in my “vendor-sports” folder. With some minimal set of people, the gestures would add up to an aggregated rating of content topics.

I would expect that the system would also benefit from an analysis of the content. Someone who talks frequently on a topic should be tagged by an automatic process. This would fill in gaps before people discovered the speaker. Gestures by people would override any tags generated by content.

The user experience I’m looking for is to ask Twitter for people who talk about a topic I’m interested in, liberated bootlegs for example. Twitter would suggest 10 people I should follow. Google does this with Reader. My universe of topics I pay attention to in Reader probably would not match completely with the universe of topics I want in Twitter. I imagine I’d want more local news and politics in Twitter and less about big chunks of entertainment.

I don’t see what would prevent this system I describe except Twitter continuing to control the attention of microbloggers and refusing to implement it. Identi.ca certainly can implement this feature, but they better match Twitter’s features first. I suppose Google could ramp up Jaiku to include it, and it might be easy given it exists in Reader.