The Roadmap to 'Hadoop in the Cloud'

The Twitter ball started rolling again just now. Matt Asay posed an interesting question about Forrester suggesting Hadoop isn't a great fit for the cloud. (Even) without context Vijay Vijayasankar and I started firing off questions and answers which inevitable led to my promise of writing down the transition plan for it

Here it is

Speeding up hyperlinks: topics

In a conversation with Jon Husband earlier today, we discussed hyperlinks - and how they've changed this world. In my view, hyperlinks form zero-threshold access to any and all information just a single click away. Whenever I scavenge the Web for info, I open up links in new tabs until there are 20 or so of them, and then scan the results, greatly helped by search, maybe jumping back and forth or drilling down deeper and deeper.
Compare that with the old fashioned way I had to gather information, which at best resulted in a day or so in one or more libraries where some or most books would be out on loan and I'd only have the full result set after a week or two, sometimes more - leaving me with a metre of paper books I had to plow through

Scanning them was simple yet elaborate: read the index, pick the most appetising chapters, and from each of those carefully read the first and last paragraph. Mark in mind or on paper if worthwhile, and continue search - I used to write 10-page papers in a single night doing so

Now, we have hyperlinks - and I still miss something. I call it topics, and here is how I envision them to work

54% of blog posts contain pure facts

A post by Dion Hinchcliffe on "social business maturity" made me laugh and cry at the same time. It's one of those misleading semi-analytical semi-research posts that will be joyfully accepted by most people as solid truth.
However, it ain't. If it's anything solid, it's solid suggestimation. Why?

The post smacks the reader in the face with impressive percentages that most, if not all, are in the 50's, 70's or even 80's, seemingly showing that vast majorities of companies are "socially mature".
I'm not even going to dig around in the studies / research cited in every statement (truly chapeau for Dion for not only citing them, but also providing a link by the way - even if I got a 404 on 1 out of 9), I'm just going to show how the attempt to state

Social media is now being used in en masse for marketing, sales, operations, customer care, supply chain, and amongst our workforces

is doomed to fail as the post combines two opposites: on the one hand perfect percentages are presented, on the other hand those are related to vague absolute truths, such as "using social technology for marketing and related functions" and "use social media to engage with customers". Any percentage of nothing is nothing

The thin line between transparency and vanity

I had an interesting discussion with Joseph Jude on the share buttons on my blog. In short, his opinion was:

@martijnlinssen I don't c transparency in tat number. Just a ego push for author. Btw, u shd hv a share btn. Just not the numbers. No value
— Joseph Jude (@jjude) November 24, 2012

which doesn't leave much room for interpretation, fortunately. I agree, and don't agree, as the bandwidth for numbers is so very, very wide: most numbers are meaningless as mere numbers

Read before you share - otherwise it's gossip

A rubbish post by business insider titled "This Survey Is Devastating For Microsoft: 42% Of Windows Users Plan To Switch To Apple" and a very dubious post by the New York Times titled "The Tablet Market Grows Cluttered" drew my attention today - the latter claimed that

About 98 percent of Web traffic from tablets comes from iPads, according to Onswipe, a digital publishing company

The answer to the first riddle lies in the post itself, the other answer is just a few clicks away. The verdict: bogus anal-ysis. Which doesn't matter to the authors, because the shares came in by the hundreds of course. Amazing facts!

Big Brother? Sits right on your mobile

[The image above has nothing to do with this post, but it seemed to be fitting, given the latest developments. This post is all about trust]

In this age of free(mium), it's common knowledge that you pay with your privacy. Facebook is the best (or should I say worst) example of the dance around your data, yet there are many more tools that you use, which have access to everything that you carry with you: all the data on your phone. Not only can they read that, they can also change it - and even "impersonate" you

Some applications do need this very deep trust level, e.g. virus scanners and applications such as Androidlost. Others absolutely do not do so, like Skype, Google Plus, LinkedIn and Facebook. Interested to see what they can do to the contents of your phone? You'll be in for a surprise, or should I say, shock

Institutionalisation or mob rule - how minorities control the majority

[Image by Mick Stevens, courtesy of the Newyorker]

The topic has been on my agenda for very, very long now. I've touched upon it in my Social Business (R)evolution book, and most other "social posts" underlying that.
I've touched upon it in my "enterprise posts", and in my "religion posts". I haven't written any (or maybe I have some?) "political posts", but I have most certainly done so in my "spiritual posts".
Institutionalisation - it ruins everything. It obliterates common sense, magically forces people to hand over any and all kind of responsibility, and transforms reluctance into acquiesence

The awkward Art of Selfpromotion

Yesterday I saw a post on Cloudave, written by Michael Krigsman. It was about a list of people worth following, according to Michael, if you are interested in Enterprise Software.
I scanned the list to see who was on there that I'm not already following, and was surprised to find Michael Krigsman himself on it.
As he himself titled the post "Trusted enterprise software experts: The #EnSW Twitter list" I couldn't refrain from tweeting my feelings about that:

RT @CloudAve: Trusted enterprise software experts: The #EnSW Twitter list http://goo.gl/fb/VENrl < sad how @mkrigsman put his own name on it

However, I was too quick. @Cloudave himself pointed me to the fact that this was not Michael's list, but Dennis Moore's one - and that was correct.
So I correct my tweet by RT-ing it with a comment, and apologise:

Correction, it's @dbmoore's list. Sorry > The #EnSW Twitter list http://goo.gl/fb/VENrl < sad how @mkrigsman put his own name on it

The post is a summation of someone else's "list" without reference to source, and it's got the author of the post on it, as well as the creator of the "list": Dennis Moore.

So I thank Cloudave, and tweet with some sarcasm that I'm pleased to see that Dennis thinks of himself a s a smart news commentator

@CloudAve thanks, read too quickly. Odd blog post then, though. However, pleased that @dbmoore thinks of himself as a smart news commentator

A while after, while myself sound asleep, Dennis responds with a tweet and an email

How Dachis failed the Social Business test

[Image by Pablo X]

My post the other day on Dachis deleting blog posts of employees who left has led to quite a bit of Twitter conversations - not all of them equally pleasant nor a true example of Social (Business). I feel that this extra post is needed to bring some closure, and achieve some lessons learned. I'll show how the story has unfolded, and also

I wrote Is Dachis rewriting its own history because at that point I had found that certain blog posts were no longer present, and Dachis (Dave Gray, informed by Peter Kim) ensured me that no blog posts had been removed.
In the light of those contradicting facts, writing the post was inevitable

Big Data? No. Big Information as a Service

I've been going through the Gartner hypecycle these last few weeks, regarding Big Data. I've been through the Trough of Disillusionment and back, and rocked back and forth a bit even, and I now figured out what's been bugging me so much about it.
It reminds me a bit of #E20...

How Klout could make Twitter a better place

I've written my fair share of posts on Klout. 1.5 years ago I started off with a mild post called "Why I have doubt about @Klout"

At the beginning of that I stated

First of all, I highly appreciate the service

- and I ended with

11 extra Klout points in 12 days on the one hand comforts me, and on the other makes me think about the stability and value of it all...

Since then, I've become increasingly weary of the product, especially because of the consistently incosnsistent quality of the product, its lack of service, and its continuous drumming on the marketing machine nonetheless - no wonder 2.5 million people instantly killed their Klout profile as soon as they finally got the chance to do so

Today, I present a way for Klout to actually create some goodwill on Twitter

tibbr 3.5 turns the world into interactive post-its

Tibbr released version 3.5 to the public today in Palo Alto California, 9 AM Pacific time. I got a solo preview yesterday and I was impressed by it - as usual I'd say.
"In twelve months since launch, tibbr has been deployed to hundreds of thousands of employees across global enterprises, who can now use tibbr to unify people, data and businesses processes to get work done"

A clear message: ...to get work done. In my opinion, tibbr dramatically reduces unnecessary human intervention in the workplace, thereby making work less unpleasant while freeing up resources for the really interesting work.
Not the greatest nor shortest sales pitch - but then I'm not selling anything here

Ticking the TOS box means you Agree

There has been some fuss about Google+ deleting someone's profile picture as it showed him giving the middle finger, aka flipping the bird.
Google deleted the profile picture, without notice.
Apparently Mr. Siegler doesn't like G+ doing so, as he can have the same profile picture on Twitter "and other services", as he claims. What does that have to with the price of tea in China?
Mr. Siegler then continues to whine about Google's real naming policy, as if that has anything to do with it either

An Occupy miscarriage conspiracy theory? Please, don't

Jennifer Fox is the name of the Seattle Occupy protester whose video and words have gone viral in the last 2 days, claiming police pepper spray and physical abuse led her to miscarry her 3 months old foetus

When I read about it, the images shocked me: a deeply hurt Fox seems to be fighting a dozen emotions at the same time: pepper spray, pain, worries about her baby, shock, you name it.
However, the dozen or so blog posts and news paper articles I read left me with questions. The major one of those was about how they possibly could lose verification out of sight in their hurry to be sucked along into the publish stream of yet another SEO hype. Bloggers, journalists: the majority of you should be very, very ashamed for spinelessly republishing a major news story without asking any questions or performing any checks

The initial KloutoCalypse: how big is it?

In my last post I showed how to remove your Klout profile from the public eye, without waiting for Klout to take 24-48 hours to do so. As I get impatient every now and then, I decided to take the first 500 tweets containing Klout and delete after I published it. I ignored all the tweets that said something like "Gee I wish I could delete my Klout profile" and only kept those that showed knowledge of being able to delete their Klout account with a few simple clicks.

Out of the 500 tweets, 337 remained. I filtered those for unique users, and stuck to 293 (sorry, said 296 before) unique Twitter users who knew how to delete their Klout profile.
For every single one of those, I checked their Klout profile to see if it still existed.

Completely drop your Klout account in 30 seconds

Well, the day has finally come. Since today, Klout allows you to delete the profile they (or you) created on you.
In my case, that means I'll first have to sign up for klout, as they created my account all by themselves - but I'm happy to go through that little PITA

Here's how to delete your account:

Open Source and Cloud, Mobile, Data: what goes where?

After an interesting question from Matt Asay I gave a few answers, then decided that Twitter's not always suited for long conversations (ahem)

I'm working on the theme for OSBC2012. I want to highlight the connection btwn cloud/mobile/data. Can someone help me express that?

My first reaction was that these words are big, and could mean a lot of different things to different people. I don't like to talk about Cloud as it's a blanket term for three different main streams in general: IaaS, PaaS and SaaS (infra, operating system and software).
Mobile? Pretty much the same thing. Mobile has operating systems and software, and is useless without that special infrastructure called Connectivity: a connection to the Web

B2B and Social - selling ice-cream in the desert?

Lately I see a lot of "news" on B2B from a place I wouldn't expect: Social.
In my opinion Social and B2B have absolutely no business with each other (see my freeBook on Social Business)

Joshua Paul is my superhero of the day here, with an utter nonsense post titled 10 Secrets of the B2B Social Business Superhero

Intrinsic motivation - I doubt the research 1/2

Deb Louison Lavoy shared a TED talk with me, Dan Pink on the surprising science of motivation

Briefly summarising that, Dan shows proof of extrinsic motivation (pure money in this case) actually having little to none and sometimes even a negative effect on people's performance. In short, when the reward for a task was at its highest, people did actually perform worse than when it was a medium reward: in the experiment conducted there were three kinds of rewards: low, medium and high

I want to write two posts on this. This one is about me hairsplitting the very research in question that underlies Dan's passionate and entertaining TED talk. The second one will be about my opinion on intrinsic (and of course, extrinsic as well) motivation

Update 19th September 15:05 CET: I exchanged some tweets yesterday with some people about this post, and the outcome baffled me: people attacked me about intrinsic motivation in general, pointing me to research even (how ironic), and I even got called jerk and idiot.
Please read the above carefully before you react. I also changed this post and added one line below in which I clearly state that good performance in this test would entitle a participant to the equivalent of one month's worth of salary - for half a day's work. Performing very well would "only" double that. Would any performance below good be rewarded? No, not at all. So only good or very good performance would be rewarded. Well, I think it suffices to say that merely performing good - according to the research team - would be considered to be outrageously well rewarded by any participant. I'd sure as hell make sure that I perform just good, so there's hardly any incentive to perform very well
Hence why I consider this very research to be fraudulent and urge it to be completely ignored from a scientific point of view; and that's the only focal point of this post

The research paper can be found here - I'm referring to Experiment I only

The second coming of 9/11

Over the past weeks I've watched the growing attention for the 10-year anniversary of 9/11 in every media possible, including so-called conspiracy theories. What strikes me most is that a majority of the attention is on the events itself, and very little on what to learn from them.
Since 9/11, the US government (agencies) have gotten an increased grip on privacy - not only in the US, but all over the world. Taking a flight has become a silly drag, where I for one sometimes don't have to take off my shoes while going through Customs, and sometimes I do.
Just one example, yet I could go on and on...

It doesn't matter whether I think (or rather, believe) 9/11 was an inside job or not, or whether measures taken since are proportionate or outrageous or anything in between. What does matter is the fact that the "War on Terror" has an eery resemblance to the Crusades