Blogging activities

Well, I haven't been posting much here but I have been working on other blogging activities around the web:

Tri Blog: My side project is coming along quite nicely and I hope to "launch" it over the next month or so. Nothing too crazy here, just a triathlon blog site. I'll post more about this soon.

Work Blog: I'm trying to revive our internal blog at work and it's not going so well. I've added tons of content to the site and I'm encouraging others to blog but I haven't seen much activity. I even created a blog contest for the month of November which is NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month) and offered a $25 gift certificate for the best blog entry, but I still can't get the team to actively engage with the blog. It's a topic I hope to bring up during our year end retro meeting on December 10th.

School Blog: A couple friends from school started up a blog called Six to Nine Scholar and they've invited me to write with them on the site! I'm a little nervous about publishing my first article to the site since they have pretty high quality material over there, but hopefully my article is up to par. Here's a sneak preview of the article (which I'm still revising a bit):

WTC Brand Crisis

In the triathlon community, any controversy that arises is eventually discussed heatedly on the forums at Slowtwitch.com, the leading forum for endurance athletes. On the last weekend of October, the forums at Slowtwitch were active with a new scandal revolving around the World Triathlon Corporation (WTC), the owners of the Ironman Triathlon brand. The negative outburst from the community, and the subsequent handling of the event by the WTC reminded me of a framework for managing scandals we learned about in our Marketing courses. I’m not certain if the WTC management used the exact steps we covered at school but the way they responded to the situation certainly fit into the framework provided.

Quick updates 7/5

Alright, since I haven't posted in a while, here are some quick updates:

Evernote count: I've cleared the 1,000 note mark on Evernote! That's a lot of notes if you ask me... which means I may have to do a little bit of spring cleaning soon. I have 77 different tags in use right now, so I may have to consolidate that into a more manageable list.

Twitter organizer: Progress on my Twitter organizer has stalled a bit. I thought I was close to creating a nice view of useful tweets from my feed but I can't seem to filter out the "junk" tweets. If only I could have someone curate my Twitter feed for me ... Oooh, new idea, post a job listing on Amazon's Mechanical Turk and pay someone pennies a day to filter my Twitter feed for me.

Tri Toys Wish List: I finally picked up the Garmin Forerunner 310XT! I've been running with it for the past few weeks and I've slowly begun accumulating workout data on it. The 310XT should be the perfect companion to my PowerTap in collecting raw data from my training sessions. I must confess though, I don't think I'm getting the best usage out of this data since I don't analyze it as much as I should to learn stuff from it. Like I've said before, I love collecting data but I don't like analyzing it. I'll scan it for obvious trends and patterns, but I won't necessarily run comparisons between various sessions looking for key drop off points or other problem areas. I should probably start doing that though to get the most 'bang for my buck', both in terms of money spent on these fun toys and in time spent while training.

Data Analytics

I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with data analytics. On the one hand, I think there's a lot of value to be drawn out of analyzing data and looking for trends and patterns to assist in decision making. On the other hand, I think the process of analyzing the data is tedious and time consuming. I don't like crunching and poring over all the data. I'm all for collecting as many data points as possible but ideally I would have someone that analyzes the data for me and finds all the useful nuggets of knowledge.

I bring all this up because lately I've been doing a lot of data analysis in and out of work, and unfortunately right now I'm not in a position to have others do the analysis for me. So that means I've been crunching a lot of data lately. This actually hasn't been too bad because I've been focused on the results and the payoff that might come out of the data.

At work I have two data analytics tasks on my plate. Now normally I would not be too happy if my boss put me to work crunching data, but both of these tasks have come from my own initiatives and are part of the 'innovations' task force that I'm leading. Unfortunately the innovations budget only covers me right now so I have to provide the hard data to support my initiatives on my own and that means crunching rows of data. One of the tasks is to prepare quoting sales data that our system has been collecting for years and use this to improve our consumer profiling process. The other task is to analyze data from a project tracking system we've been using for the past year and look for opportunities to improve our project portfolio management process. I've found some solid actionable areas of improvement here and I'm now preparing a write-up to present my recommendations to management. (I'm actually using a lot of the ideas and concepts from my Technology Management class for this initiative. This whole MBA thing is paying off already!)

Outside of work I've been playing around with Twitter data and digging into the area of content curation. I've tested a lot of the Twitter clients out there and I haven't really found anything I like that presents my Twitter feed to me in a way that is manageable and still enables discovery of timely and relevant content. So I've been making my own Twitter curator that tries to organize my Twitter feed and shows me exactly what I want to see based on several different data points. Some of the points include friend quality, follower quality, post frequency, list memberships and link quality. It's not production ready by a long shot (and it may never be), but I'll try to post screens of my Twitter curator sometime in the near future.

API fun

Fun times playing around with the Twitter and Foursquare APIs. I've been brushing up on my javascript skills and putting my home server back into action in order to cook up 'proof of concepts' on a couple areas I'm exploring. I'm not one to start from scratch so I always look for samples first before I start.

On the Foursquare front, someone cooked up this nice little site (Checkin Mania) that I've dug into for sample javascript & 4SQ API code. The site is a really slick mashup of Google Maps and Foursquare/Gowalla data. You can see popular checkin venues on the map and view how many people checked into each venue and other basic information. I think if you want more detailed information you need to use OAuth data to log in, but that's not incorporated into the site just yet. Still, I have to tip my hat to Rakshith and Init Labs, they've put together a pretty robust site with limited resources here. The site was "written using notepad :), hosted on Google App Engine". Nice!

There's no shortage of Twitter API samples on the web so I'm up and running on this platform already. Here I'm digging into the issues of content curation and social discovery. How do I keep up with all the tweets of the people I'm following? Better yet, how do I keep up with all the 'good' tweets of the people I'm following, and let the noise fall by the wayside. Also, how do I find new people to follow? Based on my interests and the data that I've made publicly available, is there a way to find people who share my same interests and can add their 'good' tweets to my Twitter feed?

Content Curation

One of the areas I'm digging into right now is content curation, specifically on the Twitter platform. With the millions of tweets every day on Twitter I can't imagine how anyone can keep up with it all, or if they would even want to keep up with it all. Right now I have around 80+ people I follow on Twitter and I stopped trying to keep up with them months ago. I can't even imagine how people who "follow" hundreds of people derive any value from these folks.

For several weeks I tried to keep up with the tweets of the people I follow using lists and everything else Twitter (and Twitter clients) have to offer, but ultimately it was just too much. The things is, I do want to read the more interesting tweets and stay up to date with the people I'm following. I don't just follow anyone on my Twitter account, I try to hand pick most of the people I follow so that my Twitter stream is useful. But it's just too much... I'm down to a small list of a dozen people who I check regularly and everyone else just gets lost in the stream.

Anyways, not sure how much I can figure out, but I'm just toying around with the Twitter API and my personal feed to see what sort of information I can bubble to the top. I'm not trying to make a Twitter client or a Twitter service here, but I just want to get a handle for all the information out there and see what I can do with it.

APIs

I'm playing around with several different APIs during my spare time lately. I have a couple of concepts and ideas I want to explore and I just want to see what's available to me if I want to prototype and experiment. Some of the API's I'm playing with are: Twitter, Foursquare, Evernote, TweetMeme, Bitly and Facebook. The general areas I'm exploring revolve around content curation and social discovery.

Creating solutions, finding problems

"Instead of looking at a solution first and trying to find a problem for it, look for
a problem first and try to find a solution for it."

These simple words of wisdom were imparted to me by my computer science professors back in college. At the time I was working on an independent study course with some CS friends that involved the iPaq PDA's. We had picked the iPaq for our independent study project, mostly because it meant we would be given the device to play around with for most of the quarter. When asked what we were going to do with the iPaq's, we didn't really have an answer. We knew we just wanted to play around with these cool toys. We had no real idea what we were going to do but we knew we could find a problem that could be solved by this new portable solution. (We ended up cobbling together some "PDA in the classroom environment" type project that was eventually picked up by other students and converted into Pocket Classmate.)

Sadly enough I still fall into this trap sometimes. For example, I really want to do something with crowdsourcing and crowdfunding. I have a 'solution' in mind, the power of the crowd, but I don't have a real problem to address. I also like the idea of tying virtual goods to real world goods, but I can't really figure where this 'solution' would fix a real problem. Oh, did I mention there's a $750 3D printer that I really want to buy, for no reason other than wanting to play around with a cool new toy? Luckily I know enough these days not to move forward with these random ideas, but instead I file them away in my head as options to consider when I find real problems to attack.

Ideation

The creative process of generating, developing, and communicating new ideas, where an idea is understood as a basic element of thought that can be either visual, concrete, or abstract.
-B. Jonson

I've been doing a bit of brainstorming lately on some new ideas and initiatives I want to explore. Some of them are really random and out there (heads-up glasses display for sports electronics) and some are a bit more common and practical (Twitter widgets, Facebook apps). Some of these ideas have been floating around in my head for a while and some have just sprung up recently. Regardless, I'm trying to actually write down some of the details from my head onto paper and flesh them out a bit. A lot of them won't go anywhere, but some of them might actually find a spark of life in the real world.