Mohamed Nanabhay's Blog

Mashable has a story about Israel-based Blue Security's new product Collactive.

Blue Security are best known for their aggressive anti-spam service which they had to shutdown after the spammers hit back at them and took out Six Apart's Typepad blogging platform as collateral damage.

They have now created a new web app called Collactive that allows users to easily "game" social news features by enabling you to co-ordinate large groups of friends/supports to skew online results. It does this by letting you send out "All Points Bulletins" to supporters urging them to take some sort of action on social sites like Digg, YouTube, Reddit, BBC News, etc. The action the end-user needs to take ranges from just viewing a story to voting on a story (or "burying it") or to e-mail it in order to promote it to the most e-mailed stories list.

Of course, this sort of thing has been going on for a while - people have been e-mailing lists saying "Hey! BBC has a poll so please go and vote for side X" but a tool like Collactive makes it so much more "organised".

Interestingly, they offer an "enterprise version" as well...I can see lobby groups and net activists making heavy use of this sort of tool in order to promote their cause or to give "their side of the story" more prominence. This has serious trust implications - we somewhat trusted social media systems because our peers recommended what they thought was interesting or honest. This sort of organised gaming used to be the domain of SEO's out to make a buck. Now that politics is involved the stakes are so much higher than just a few clicks or back links.

So out goes the "wisdom of the crowd" and in comes "information warfare" Web 2.0 style...

I woke up this morning to an invitation to join the Facebook group "Bullardgate". It seems that David Bullard, the pompous Sunday Times coloumnist has kicked up a storm with a scathing piece on blogging and bloggers. Vincent Maher didn't take kindly to Bullard's piece - not only did he rip it to shreds pargraph by paragraph but also kicked off a campaign to get Bullard to apologise.

I'm all for kicking up a storm and fighting The Man yet I can't help but wonder if David Bullard has just successfully link-baited us all. Maybe next week he'll announce how many links his article got. :)

Of course, this isn't the first time someone has gotten blogs so wrong. At least Bullard admits to having read a few blogs. At the 3rd AlJazeera Forum, straight after Lawerence Lessig's keynote I heard a senior executive from a big news corporation ask the person next to him "what's a blog?".

It seems everyone is talking about the new Barack Obama campaign site. It's full of Web 2.0 goodness - from "on-site" social networking tools (user profiles, blogs and location based event planning and volunteer co-ordination) to "off-site" viral media tools (Flickr, YouTube and Facebook) to a shiny Brightcove powered video channel.

More interesting than the fact that a US Candidate is riding the Web 2.0 wave are two issues that Michael Arrington almost pointed to in the two TechCrunch posts about http://www.barackobama.com - the history of social networking tools in US Presidential Campaigns and the difficulty that everyone faces when hosting open communities online:

1. While TechCrunch pointed out that the site "launched basically feature - complete and bug free", not much was written about the forerunner to this sort of lobbying - the Howard Dean campaign. Guys like Zack Rosen put together DeanSpace (which later became Civicspace) to essentially take the choas that was the grassroot support for Howard Dean and provided a framework for activists to use to manage volunteers, events and even whole campaigns. I'm certain that the DeanSpace (which was built on everyones favourite CMS, Drupal) experience provided valuable insight and lessons to whoever envisioned the Barack site.

   While the technology is important, the vision to fully exploit it is something different all together.

2. TechCrunch then went all crazy about a derogatory group that someone formed on the site (alluding to all sorts of mysterious explanations like hackers or pissed off developers). Gosh! Someone abusing an online community? Who would have thought...

   Now one would have thought that Michael, the "gatekeeper" of Web 2.0 companies would have at least pointed out that the formation of this derogatory group on the Barack site is one of the main issues that user-generated communities have to deal with on a daily basis. The question of what is acceptable and what isn't; of what is allowed and what isn't; of whether to censor or whether to allow complete uncensored and unmonitored free speech; the issue of the limits of that free speech are all issues that anyone who has a blog that allows comments or a discussion forum has to deal with on a regular basis. Dealing with these issues isn't always easy - moderate too much and you lose your community. Moderate too little and you lose your community.

What I would really like to see is how effectively this fancy shiny website translates into on the ground action. I guess it's time to find a few new RSS feeds to watch.

This is a great social engineering story with a twist. The aim wasn't to get information out of the BBC, rather to get info into it!

Link: BBC Issues An Apology After Hoax (washingtonpost.com).

I usually warn about ideas getting "bigerised" at the organisations I'm involved in. It's a sure way to derail a great idea. Of course, the concept is not my own - so I present another cool story from from Michael Hiltzik’s “Dealers of Lightening – Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age", where I first read about "biggerism" a few years ago:

The Berkley Computer Corporation (BCC) pioneers were about to become victims of the “second-system effect”. The theory of the second systems was formulated by an IBM executive named Frederick Brooks, whose career supervising large-scale software teams taught him that designers of computer systems tend to build into their second projects all the pet features that tight finances or short deadlines forced them to leave out of their first. The result is an overgrown, inefficient monstrosity that rarely works as expected. As he put it in his pithy masterpiece, The Mythical Man-Month: “The second is the most dangerous system a man ever designs.” The BCC machine could have sprung full-blown from the pages of Brook’s text. As Lampson recalled, the designers of the economical and practical SDS 940 regarded their next machine as an opportunity to “look at all the things you could make much more wonderful, and plan to make them all more wonderful by creating a system that could handle a lot more users and much larger programs and was much faster and used computing resources much more efficiently and was better and more wonderful in every possible way. “It was not a very realistic enterprise,” he acknowledged. “But at the time is seemed great, the proper next step, as second systems often do.”… Some of the workers, including Thacker, could tell early on that the project was getting out of hand. The engineer’s engineer possessed the unique trait of aiming for less, not more, in his systems. “This was so unusual for an engineer,” recalled Charles Simonyi, a young immigrant from communist Hungary who assisted Thacker, watching as he chain-smoked through the night designing the machine’s logic, “He had this word for what was happening. He called it ‘biggerism’. I heard this word from him and my English was not that good and I always thought it sounded slightly obscene, because he’d say, you know, ‘This project has been biggered.’”

This lesson goes beyond systems - it applies to any activity which requires a bit of planning.