Organic Data

I work in a corner of the software industry where business management applications have evolved from their rudimentary 1980's origins and where at the same time, the principles of how people should use those applications, particularly in the area of data disciplines, have also evolved.

For example, we learned quite early on that the pre-school data principle of preceeding zeroes was important because a record coding sequence of 1, 2, 3, 4 - 99999 doesn't sort well compared with a sequence like 0000001, 00000002, 00000003 and so on. And also early on, we devised methods for combining different coding analyses into single codes, like AS012003UK is really AS-01-2003-UK.

Things have moved on considerably since then, of course, but increasingly data appears to be playing a more important and prominent role in our everyday non-working lives. Like our mobile phone address books, do you use forename/ forename, surname / surname, forename or just non-intelligible anarchy? (fyi I'm 100% surname,forename apart from family members.)

What about our MP3 collections or the thousands of digital photgraphs that occupy our hard disks? - again fyi I use a 2003-10-20 format for photo subfolder names.

Being vaguely of a data persuasion, I've studiously codified my most of my personal digital stuff - but not all of it - to be accessible in as sensible a way as possible to me, to aid searching or just better organised archiving.

This is something that's not inherently easy to do in Windows as there's no inbuilt data management or indexing at an operating or filesystem level, so you have to devise your own coding structures if you want them, relying mostly upon sorting by filename and date to get you by. A future version of Windows is supposed to have a proper indexing filing system built in and that may help a little, but it's 3-4 years away it'll be a chargeable upgrade so this won't do anything to help us organise our digital stuff in the short term.

Is random, badly structured data actually a good thing in an organic, gritty sort of way or is the inexorable slide into immaculate uniformity an inevitable and necessary consequence of achieving a truly connected and digital life?

But in one sense, perfect and structured uniformity seems to be somewhat at odds with the organic like forms that can appear when you graphically represent things like interconnected FOAF profiles, for example but having said that, I suppose that the uniformity found in phenomena like the Fibonacci Sequence and the Mandelbrot Set can take on a lifelike form too.

Social Network Testing & The Semantic We

This place is getting more like Gattaca every day. I was doing some thinking in the car this week - I've been in the car a lot this week - about

FOAF profiles and the whole Six Degrees of Separation thing, and I wondered if in the not too distant future, we might be supplementing our resumes and c.v.'s with social profiles giving details of the layers and the strengths of our social and professional network connections, affording would-be employers the chance to overlay and match our network profiles against their model candidate network profile like a relationship or social form of psychometric testing. (I wonder what having RageBoy in your social network would throw up in such a test?...)

Social Networking, a discreet pastime in itself for some, surely must be more complex than simply being about collecting basic vanilla connections and relationships. From casually flitting about networking sites the other day, I found comments from professional social networkers such as "My mission is to meet 1,500 people this year, last year I only met 1,200" and this seems like a very clinical approach where the only important measure is the number of people you add to your network and not what you add to it. For some it's evidently just a numbers game, but surely it must be less linear than this?

Google uses their PageRank method to sort and order links so that the more hyperlinks that point to a specific site, the higher the rank value of that site and the closer to the top it floats in Google's search indexes.

Put this into the context of social networking and FOAF, and I suspect that before long we'll be ranking individuals and their connections in this way too, by calculating their social value in terms of the number of people they 'know' and weighting their links accordingly or, more interestingly, by attibuting a value to the life contribution they make in other ways, e.g. applying a value multiplier if you've written a book or a software program or some other kind of social contribution or identifier like race, linguistic skills, parenting skills or information that may be put to more sinister uses; your biological make-up or your genetic profile.

On that last point, I suppose that if we're completely serious about our social networking - pure social networking - then there's no point in having someone in your social network who's going to die young from heart disease through lack of exercise or smoking habit, after all what use would they be to us in the long run?

Increasingly I get a sense that the early murmurs and machinations of the Semantic Web are creeping progressively over our world and infesting it like some form of nano-technology-esque meta sludge, gradually and imperceptibly pushing us to revaluate and logically re-organise every aspect of our lives in preparation for the day when we are entirely depicted and rendered in a database somewhere or indeed, everywhere on the Web.

"Power Corrupts. PowerPoint Corrupts Absolutely"

"PowerPoint is a competent slide manager and projector. But rather than supplementing a presentation, it has become a substitute for it. Such misuse ignores the most important rule of speaking: Respect your audience."

I've given hundreds of presentations, talks and briefings over the last few years. In my experience there are two basic types of presenter, those that absolutely need a script (mostimes that script is actually their PowerPoint slides), and those that don't.

I also think that once you've set-off down either route in your presenting 'career', it's very difficult to switch styles at a later time. Whichever of these two camps you naturally fall into the first time you stand up in front of a group of people to present, then the die is cast and you'll present that way for good.

I'm a winger and just love standing up in front of people, I form a rough picture in my mind of what I need / want to say, like milestones, make some simple notes (that I invariably forget I have in my pocket) and then throw myself in at the deep-end without a script and endeavour to join the dots between each milestone in as interesting and as conversational a way I can manage.

Once, giving a keynote to a large audience, I worried myself into writing a script, stood up, falteringly read the first sentence in a very obvious 'Hey, I'm reading this' manner, quickly abandonded the script and reverted back to my natural method and delivered a great talk. I can't do it, the script thing, probably as much as people who deliver great scripted talks cannot deliver 'off the cuff'.

Then there's PowerPoint. I've gone full circle with PowerPoint and, having one day realised that all I was doing was leading a group-reading session, decided that less was more and I now resist temptation to use it as much as I can, and when I do I make sure there are fewer than 5 slides, if possible, and as few words on each slide as possible.

PowerPoint is a great tool as a visual aid, something that pops up to underline a point or to depict graphically something too complex to explain verbally. Beyond that, it should be banned. They should put a limit on the number of slides, 5 or 10, and restrict word-counts per slide. Actually, someone should write a PowerPoint virus that infects presentations and arbitrarily deletes slides containing more than 5 words or reduces the overall number of slides down to 4 or 5.

Just think of the good that would do, imagine the productivity savings across the western world, both in saved preparation and presentation time. You might even think that PowerPoint is the reason Microsoft has gotten so big, their evil sabotage tool is sapping the productivity levels of every bleedin' company on the planet, sucking them dry leaving MS to do all the real business whilst we're all locked away wondering how long before the last slide.

Forget Microsoft's anti-competitive practices, that's all just a front for the real deal. PowerPoint.