Its my data and I’ll share if I want to

One day I’ll figure out how Dan Farber manages to keep his finger on the pulse of EVERYTHING. Certainly over twenty years of ‘editor in chief’ roles has given the man some insight. A few months back he made a very apt observation about corporations, social networks and controlling data, where’s the money?

There is value in the knowledge, or wisdom if you prefer, derived from data (facts and figures). scientia potentia est. Consequently, there is intrinsic value in data. That’s why our parents forked out hard earned cash for World Book Encylopedias in the 1980’s and still have them on the bookshelf in the hall for all to see! Well, perhaps that just an Irish thing.

I think the social networks phenomenon is driving home the value of tools that produce knowledge from data, particularly when there is so much data and old models for interpreting data no longer work. Staying with Google, when they bought YouTube, did they pay $1.65 Billion USD for the video content, or the tag cloud, data relationships, and viewing history about the content? I propose that as a video portal, YouTube’s value (although I wouldn’t have paid that much for it) was in it’s meta data and how it used it, not it’s content. Although content is not king, having it was critical in building up the meta data (or ‘connectivity’ using Odlyzko terminology).

We are used to getting things for free on the internet. In the social internet we are producers as well as consumers of information. So there is a real challenge in encouraging people to share data, particularly when it is possible, but not always probable, that someone is going to try use that data for their own ends. Yet people, including myself, do it.

Why do people share the things they know, such as code to validate an IBAN or scrumptious zucchini recipes for nothing? It’s because we still hold on to our own experience and knowledge in applying this ‘data’, and the ‘connectivity’ gained when someone discovers it. So, while I could learn to make a Bailey’s Cheesecake I much prefer buy one (well two or three actually, they don’t sell retail) and share.

Let’s wrap up with a classic anecdote/joke from the Toastmasters handbook…

There was an engineer who had an exceptional gift for fixing all things mechanical. After serving his company loyally for over 30 years, he happily retired. Several years later the company contacted him regarding a seemingly impossible problem they were having with one of their multimillion-dollar machines. It shook and vibrated violently every time they started the machine. They had tried everything and everyone else to get the machine to work but to no avail. In desperation, they called on the retired engineer who had solved so many of their problems in the past. The engineer reluctantly took the challenge. He spent a day studying the huge machine. At the end of the day, he marked a small “x” in chalk on a particular spot on the side component of the machine, took a sledge hammer and hit the spot a smashing blow. Instantly, the machine quit vibrating and ran smooth as silk.

The company received a bill for $50,000 from the engineer for his service.

They wrote him a letter saying that $50,000 for hitting the machine was outrageous as any fool could have done that. They demanded an explanation.

The engineer responded with a new bill stating:
One sledge hammer blow to machinery – $1.00
Knowing where to hit machinery – $49,999.00

It was paid in full and the engineer retired again in peace, but in a much bigger house.

Search Engine Optimisation

As mentioned in the first birthday article, 1 Year Old Today! I use Google Analytics to get an idea of visitor trends, and what articles people are reading the most. Another piece if insight is how people are finding the articles through search engines. It’s interesting to see what people are looking for, and how that changes over time. Here are the top search keywords used each month for people finding SOA Station.

July – ‘mind the gap oracle’
June – ‘trailing block elements must have an id attribute’
May – ‘trailing block elements must have an id attribute’
April – ‘iban check’
March – ‘oracle bpel custom functions’
February – ‘extension functions for xsl in bpel’
January – ‘soa diagram’

Of course, this is only showing you what people that found SOA Station had been searching for. What such information gives is a picture of how search engines represent your website and the content on it. This is often quite different from how you, the publisher, sees it. The styling, context and structure of the site gets lost in search engine algorithms. Many people use the search engines as their portal to the internet so Search Engine Optimisation becomes very important when trying to make your web site stand out from all the others.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via search results for targeted keywords. Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results or the higher it “ranks”, the more searchers will visit that site. SEO is not advertising, but to get it done well often involves specialists with in-depth knowledge of search engine algorithms.

One such specialist is Sean O’Brien ( no relation ) founder of SEO Expert, a search engine optimisation company that provides consultation, but also tailored optimisation services such as getting inbound links, listed in directories and making optimisation changes to your site. This means that these SEO Experts can be engaged on a once off or on going basis depending on your on budget and capabilities. Their site has further information on this, but only a little information on their clients or techniques. This is understandable, to a certain degree, however, having some figures on page rank improvements achieved, and a high level description of actions taken would give better justification for using SEO.

Bringing in an external, specialist, company to boost your sites ranking in search engines does make a good deal of sense. While it is not the same as advertising, you are looking for the same results. That is, increased brand awareness, and sales.

Of course, once you’ve spent your advertising budget, it’s gone. Applying SEO and using SEO techniques on your site does have longer lasting effects.

Lost in translation – Globalisation Gotchas

When we think of Globalisation, we often think of the manufacture and trade of goods. With the advent of the European Union came the more formalised notion of ‘the four freedoms’ (people, goods, services, capital) of the internal market. People, goods and capital is fairly tangible, but what is interesting from an IT point of view is globalisation (or free movement) of services. It’s not just fashionable to outsource your call centre department, but also development effort.

High speed internet aspect takes care of one of the challenges of communication, but what about the language itself? When outsourcing, how does one ensure the requirements are communicated correctly. Using online translation tools can go horribly wrong. In this case journalists from Isreal managed to insult a prominent Dutch politician and his mother!

The top destination for outsourcing is India. India has the world’s second largest labour force with 516.4 million (2007 est.), 27% of them involved services (2003 est.). Global consultancy firm PricewaterhouseCoopers has more details. This is a highly skilled, well educated workforce and though not always needed, Hindi translation, Punjabi translation and Urdu translation services are available. While Hindi is the official language, English enjoys the status of ‘subsidiary official language’. Certainly within the services sector there is a English language revolution going on. Add to that the fact that most of the development languages, and IT infrastructure product documentation, are in English and there are obvious advantages here.

Outsourcing is no longer just for Fortune 500 companies. Small and mid-sized firms, as well as busy professionals, can outsource their work to increase their productivity and free time for more important commitments. It’s time for the world to take advantage of this revolution.

Vivek Kulkarni (CEO Brickwork India and former IT Secretary, Bangalore)

Of course this level of outsourcing still requires commitment and a lot of upfront preparation and documentation. A lot of industries are moving away from the heavy weight processes of the 20th century. It will be interesting to see how Agile development methodologies, which put a greater emphasis on communication over documentation, work with distributed development teams, in different timezones. Feel free to share your experiences.

Starting up in a Credit Crunch

It is hard enough to come up with a unique business idea, let alone see it through to implementation. One of the big challenges is the cost of getting going, as well as meeting existing financial commitments. Oh, and there’s the time commitment too. Statistically, most self employed people work well over 60 hours a week.

With open source, and development licences, the technology costs in getting started are not significant. The OTN licence permits free use of Oracle products while developing an application. Oracle also provides Free and Open Source software products too. Even the Oracle 10g Database can be packaged and distributed in your application for free.

The BIG cost for a start up is expertise. So, even if the technology stack is free, someone needs to be paid to put a scalable, robust and reliable solution in place. Someone needs to be paid to market and sell the product too. Finding such resources is tough, finding the money to pay them is tougher. The author of Go BIG or Go HOME, a book about startup strategies, offers a social network dedicated to startups that seeks to make finding resources, and investment, easier.

As an obvious marketing tie-in, the network is called Go BIG where Angel Investors and people looking for funding to grow their business can meet. The member profiles are quite detailed, allowing an Angel Investor to specify exactly what sort of industries, business types, and geographies, they are interested in providing venture capital for. At this point it is worth mentioning the international aspect of Go BIG. The network is tailored for 11 countries so far. It’s not all about the money though, the network also allows people to get help on business plans, and to promote their own skill sets. So, finding a Flash Developer or an Accounting Assistant is a bit easier. Just a bit though 🙂