Human Factors

Such works quite well in and of itself, however human factors must also enter in. Such is why the TSA actions are not justifiable based upon probability and consequences alone.. and also why cargo containers, trains, and mass transit are not subject to the same criteria airport gate areas are.

1. Unfamiliar risks are perceived as worse than familiar ones. Case in point, folks are often afraid to fly, but rarely afraid to drive in heavy traffic. The same applies to terroristic threats, and nuclear energy in contrast with the risks of coal or petro.
2. Controllability this is a major issue with nuclear power. People feel it is so outside their individual control. Its also why folks often feel more at risk when someone other than themselves drives a car.
3. Voluntary vs involuntary. Alcohol kills more people than nuclear power, but it is more acceptable as the drunk takes it on themselves. On the other hand, such needs to be balanced with the danger to others that the drunk creates should they get in a car and drive.
4. Ick Factor How gruesome is the death or injury? Is it an acute event, or chronic and slow.

The above concepts from a class given by Dr. Vicki Bier UW-Madison based upon tweets from Risk Analysis Engineer @arclight.

Consequences

As far as the consequences aspect goes, it can range from annoyed / ticked off customers with no safety impact, all the way up to catastrophic where in a large area can be impacted with multiple casualties. Back in my day, I remember the tedium of running MIL-STD-882 (Standard practice for system safety) analysis on gas valve controllers. Case in point, if the gas valve shuts down, and no fire can be maintained, such generally results in an annoyed customer. By the same token, should a large gas valve go to a fully locked on state, a catastrophic failure, ie substantial property damage, massive deaths, and severe injuries is likely.

In a large forum, repetitive postings, and or nearly repetitive postings were easy to detect. Namely as soon as an entity started to astroturf, within an hour, there would be dozens of reports of something fishy going on. Within two hours, 5-10 staffers would be on it, and such campaigns were killed off before the majority of users were even aware of it. The thing is, astroturf detection relies not only on a moderation team (we had around 130 or so staffers such that all time zones were covered), but also the membership to take issue with the problem. Back in 2006, with over 100,000 registered screen names, and a minimum of 3000 real live humans online 24/7, such detection was nearly automatic.

On the other hand its not 2006 anymore. In the future nefarious individuals, companies, and orgs will distribute their efforts not only on a few large forums as they did years back, ie the top 20 on bigboards, (and yes, we talked amongst each other over coordinated trolls and astroturfers) but a coordinated campaign could reach small forums, newspaper comment sites, and individual blogs who dont have wide ranging linkage.

In the future, its also likely such content will not be identical, or nearly identical. When I left the forum world, such was just starting to occur… I remember testing out some different types of linguistic analysis on my desktop to look for parallels when we’d see spikes in subject content, and more often than not, even rudimentary linguistics tools would pick it up.

Large Scale Detection and Mitigation

The thing is, such has to happen on a large scale to be effective. Case in point, most savvy folks know not to click on links from ezinearticles, fizya, or associated content as the quality sucks… but they still rank high in search results. On the other hand, google to appears finally get fed up enough to start to put the kabosh on such, and hopefully it will correct over time… (on the other hand, why ehow didnt get whacked is beyond me).

It is possible that as search engine algo’s evolve that just as they capture and downrate the get rich quick world, likewise they will also capture the astroturfers. Persona management tools are still a function of a limited number of individuals, and such will lend itself to shallow content, and thereby low rankings and visibility, yes even to the main article if a blogger doesnt keep tabs of comments. Kos is a bit more eloquent, “bullshit only goes so far, no matter how many personas are spreading it.” I’m thinking something on the order of an aksimet with linguistic analysis might be the way to go. Granted, such will also capture coordinated campaigns of like minded sound bite individuals who dont put in the time to really think about an issue, but then again, we dont need anymore sound bites.

Bribery

A second issue, is the bribing of individuals for purposes of one sided collective campaigns, case in point this rather interesting fiasco with mommy bloggers, Toyota, and apparently a very inept third party, the last text of which is located here.

This bribery issue is a tough one considering it is regulated, but many are likely ignorant of such, case in point the individual who started the whole Toyota mess, as well as those who took her up on it… Granted, I am giving the benefit of a doubt here.

Ultimately such is a serious concern, and its something all of us, even the sporadic lone blogger need to consider. Just as we need to keep out sites free of the get rich quick folks, we also need to be aware of the need to keep astroturfers away.

Spam marketing to the wrong market sector. Dont market real estate based SEO to a manufacturer, or food based SEO to an aviation concern.

Nothing instills a lack of confidence like showing your best efforts on your own broken website. Sure, its a pain to keep up with browsers, and even screen sizes. Otoh if you want to impress potential clients, a page with CSS splattering your content randomly on the screen, no matter how cool the art is, if its not readable is not cool.  Its the same with broken website navigation, or errors so bad, that a users browser throws up and is unable to render. Such does not inspire confidence.

Retro can be cool, and 1994 style websites can create authenticity in some markets. However, years old SEO techniques are not. While a cool sales pitch may impress the uninformed, is not going to fly worth a hoot unless there is little to no competition. (albeit, flying not worth a hoot, is better than not flying at all, but its still not cool)

A coder does not a website builder make. Ive built hundreds of sites over the years, and while technically they work and get the job done, I am no graphic artist. I know this, and as such outsource the presentation arena to people who are for other than my own sites. Sadly, far too many recently unemployed coders think they can do websites, and just as with my work, the underlying code is solid, but they dont spend the money for a graphics person. It shows, and it is not impressive.

SEO is only part of the game, and realistically, its a tiny part. Traffic without conversion is just burning up server dollars. It doesnt pay, and often times ends up being a negative ROI. Just as one would not go to the expense of prime billboard space or tv ads unless they had the ability to fullfill orders, it makes no sense to spend money on SEO without the rest of the game plan in place. Certainly there are situations where traffic can be more important than conversion, but they are a rarity, and often times more of a specialized internal thing, than an external deal subject to outsourcing.

In a nutshell, we have 2 folks coming from quite different backgrounds. One fellow is very careful, deliberate, and seems to put a lot of work into his communications, albeit the content is on the lighter side. The other fellow is gung ho, lets go get things done, and focuses on content depth, but not so much on the content presentation. Its a setup for a interesting situation when the two worlds meet.

One of the guys then took matters into his own hands, and wrote a post entitled Quality writing matters To some extent he is correct, details matter, albeit I would take issue with the part that writing does in all situations. Certainly if one is writing a legal brief, policy statement, or even addressing some type of literacy organization, writing quality most definitely matters. On the other hand, in the tech domain, I am not so sure, especially when one is communicating with world wide audience, where many are not all that skilled in a specific language, but may be exceedingly gifted in any number of technical areas.

This had been on my mind a bit, as anyone who has read IG for a while knows my blog writing quality sucks; I’m more concerned with quickly deciminating ideas, than being accurate from a prose pov, and secondly, I dont have an editor at hand. And yes, an editor makes a world of difference, whether one is shooting for prose or speed, it really can help, to say nothing of the ability to bounce ideas back and forth to ensure ones writing matches what one intends. I’ve written everything from mag articles to tech standards to product manuals, to political and policy… but in each case where writing quality mattered, I not only had an assistant/editor/reviewer at my side, but also had a panel of reviewers to double check, or even triple check. There is nothing more fun than doing a new policy dump to many thousands of people, and having it come across wrong… and then spending weeks dealing with the collateral damage. NOT! And yes, that can happen even with an editor and review panel on board, but the probability of trouble is reduced significantly.

This is not to say that blog writing quality doesnt matter, or that the audience is unimportant, but that it is a more informal, off the cuff type of communications, than say a editorial, a tech manual, or trade publication. And by the same token, the expectations are different as well. I do not expect a blog entry to fall into the domain where the socratic method can be applied, although it may happen. Perhaps a few folks will read it, some will comment, most wont and thats fine. Perhaps some will read it, and say, whoa I dont want to hire this guy, and thats cool, as others will say, this is what I want, and thats fine too.

Some time back in 2005, I talked about customer filtering using blogs. Ie, its key to avoid the wrong customer, perhaps even more so than getting a ton of the right customers plus 1 bad one, as that solitary bad one can suck up so many resources, the others suffer. The key is early screening to get the right ones, and filter out the bad ones. A blog, and ones writing style and branding is one of many ways to do said early screening. Its not that one group of customers is good and another is bad, its just that not all are suited to all types and styles of businesses.

Getting back on topic, just last week, a young fellow was asking questions in text speak. While not the exact question, it was similiar to Wht opamp wld wrk bst 4 msring thrmocuplz. Its completely understandable, but not very conventional, and some of the guys took issue with it… “Egads, the kid is probably using a keyboard, why does he have to write in textspeak?” I said, its some youngster, lets not dampen his enthusiasm, its how many of them communicate… if he is young and is interested in thermocouples, lets just help him out. Well it still agravated the older guys, so we said “hey, could yall wait until you get to an ASCII keyboard, the text speak is a challenge for us.” Sure enough, an answer came back in perfect prose where he apologized. He just ran into confusing mess of op amp selection, wanted an answer, and whipped out a quick question using his everyday communications style. As much as such would aggravate others, I think such is completely reasonable.. not for a thesis or whitepaper of course, but even for a conversational blog, it might be just fine. Bearing in mind ones audience…. ie the older guys in my group would be unlikely to read it, and that may be just fine. I’ve struggled through poor translations of German papers for years… the struggle is well worth the headache, as the content is often times right on the mark. Of course, I could always pay for a good translator, or learn German, but instead I make the call to dig, the poor translation is enough to get me rolling.

Where I do have a huge beef, is technical accuracy…. ie, the science behind any type of communication better be rock solid, or if leading edge, at least presented as such. About 3 weeks ago, I was reading a paper on capacitor reliability. Likely it was written in China, based upon the authors info, but was translated into Englsh by an individual that had neither a command of the specific Chinese dialog used, nor English. What an absolute mess of rabbit trails and conflicting science. The grammatical and spelling errors I could deal with… violations of the basic laws of thermodynamics combined with translation rabbit trails were another matter indeed. The same also occurs in non translated material… there is the cartoon about the guy who told his wife to wait, as he just found an error on the internet. I’d like it if just once, for an entire week I could read a technical articles without coming across glaring tech errors and omissions, or worse, more formal papers with errant bibliography. How long can it take to make sure the journal you cite really exists? How long can it take to make sure you are not violating Ohm’s law? This is a matter of content depth… blow the depth, the meat of what you are trying to communicate, and the whole thing is now suspicious.

I guess in fairness, the same could be said for written prose of the lack there of. When glaring grammatical errors,and or spelling errors occur it does detract and make for an issue of credibility… and how long does it take to check? Not long really, at least on new PC’s which have spelling and grammatical check capability within the editor, or even older ones where one could use a wordprocessor’s toolset for a quick check. (I write almost everything on a vintage thinkpad, it has a nice keyboard, but has no power for much anything else… thus I do spell and grammer checks on a periodic basis, but obviously that doesnt catch them all, and certainly doesnt go justice to the newest entries.

Indeed, and I think many see the positives of building a community as a way to boost revenue, and are rather happy go lucky on the potential downsides. Its not for the faint of heart, and it does take full blown commitment, as stuff will hit the fan at one point or another. Without a game plan in place, or at a minimum, a loose framework, things can spiral down pretty fast.

The worst case response scenario is the all too common typical happy happy face we can do nothing wrong pr speak. That almost always tends to inflame a situation and make what might have been managable albeit uncomfortable deal end up as a major crash and burn. Yet, the happy happy speak is so ingrained in the corporate culture, to upend it and get real in the face of adversity is anathema. Granted, there are many mitigating factors, by getting too real, one can run into anti-trust, SarOx, or other legal headaches, to say nothing of liability issues. In those situations it can end up being a loose loose deal all around, with the exception of council who smiles all the way to the bank irrespective of the outcome.

As a ex-community manager, and having to deal with thousands of really ticked off folks, it can be a real frustrating, and evening frightening deal at times. Heather, a CM over at flickr describes the role quite well, “its like being a pinata, people beat you with sticks and expect you to give them candy.” I think she really hit it on the mark with the following advice.

When things to go wrong, own it. Admit it. Don’t try to whitewash it. 

Granted, there were days when I spun things, sometimes, its an inevitable situation for the previously mentioned reasons. Yet, even when working the spin, if one is upfront that yes indeed it is spin, and you cant go further into it, but even that amount of transparency does lead to at least some good will. Doing so, may lead to only a small number of folks entering supervillain mode if any. Yep, been there done that too, the FBI is still on my cells speed dial. Things can get out of hand, and if need be, there are times and places to call in the feds, just make sure your privacy policy gives an out for law enforcement, or one can really hose up trust in a hurry. 

I do find it so very interesting how twitter is abuzz with all of this community stuff, and yet so few seem willing to talk about the potential hazards. Sure, some of it is proprietary for good reason. No one really likes to fess up that with user generated content, occasionally a terrorist will pop up, or that a contributor had things go so far south they are suicidal. Yet, these things can and do happen. The key is having the ducks in a row upfront, such that when bad things happen, there is a game plan in place ahead of time. And yes, that game plan also includes ones staff… a suicidal community member whether successful or not can inflict pretty severe trauma on the part of staffers if they are not prepared ahead of time. Even with preparation, its not so simple.

There seems to be a growing trend toward the 125×125 pixel ads, and I thought cool, I have a 125X125 logo graphic, and could always use more traffic. The thing is… its a 125X125 graphic, its not an ad, there is no call to action. Inventorsgarage does not need image branding such as Nike, McDonalds or much of the F100. What it needs is targeted traffic, ie folks with ideas who want to run with them. Even better, folks with ideas, who are willing to buy services to bring their invention to market . A 125X125 logo graphic wont do diddly to bring the folks within that demographic over here. It likely will bring folks who are curious, and perhaps within that group their will be some… but why spend $ in order to get a mix of folks, when a redo of a logo graphic into a true ad might get a much more targeted demographic. So… gotta ad that to the todo list.

Along that line of thinking, if I step back and look at IG, and also look at my business page… I’m a plumber with leaking pipes at home. Neither were designed with commercial intent. IG is not really commercial, its more a personal/hobby site, albeit it does serve as a marketing funnel for business clients while maintaining the personal/hobby aspect. And my business site… well, it was created as offline folks kept asking for it. And while my focus is 80% hardware, the webside of things does get interwoven, and I’ve ended up doing a fair amount of website/commnuity consulting… thus it doesnt work out too well to tell folks they should have a website, when one doesnt have one of their own. (I hate to admit it, but i actually have a vbulletin license mostly just for client test and debug on my server at the office) LOL

The end result… the business site needs an overhaul. If a client said hey check this out, I’d go whoa… that has about a zero chance of converting. Too much of the content is more applicable to white papers, than actual calls to action. It also needs some serious work in the graphics and gui part (talk about zero whitespace, and really no clear calls to action, or clear whats in it for me to type of material). Ultimately it goes back to the beginning, it was put up in a weekend, as folks kept asking for it, and i needed to get it done. I should have put a plan together first as I always tell folks to do upfront… dont even think about coding or software selection, first figure out the overall vision, then from there make the more detailed decisions. Otherwise, its very likely that the tail ends up wagging the dog, ie the tools drive the websites function, rather than a vision for what the website should be. And yes, being a wiki driven site… it does lead to a lot of verbose subject matter. Of course the only time I’m not verbose is when we try to put a a whole website and a server on a 8 bit microprocessor with only 64K or 128K of ram.

Thus, more stuff on the web todo list… it will be interesting.

Well, I read something tonight, and now it makes sense….

Last week I suggested you create wordpress themes and release them for free with your link in the footer, the majority response was that not a lot of us can design and code wordpress themes, nor have the time to learn. A good alternative is to sponsor themes other people have created, another plus of this is that they will be promoting their theme, which essentially equals free promotion for you.

Apparently a lot of folks who are in a bit over there head are releasing wordpress themes! The thing is… graphics wise, many of those themes are top notch. Some incredibly beautiful layouts… just the underlying code is terrible. Considering how many times I’ve run across this in the past few months, I’m almost thinking I should add a wordpress theme fixer service to the web dev side of my business. Of course the problem is… just like the plumber with leaking pipes, I need to do a bunch of web cleanup of my own before I start trying to market said services to others. Might be time to put an edge on my own saw again.

The solution… either A, set up a clone subdirectory on my webhost for test purposes, or go local. I will say that since I’ve gone local, its a ton faster, and a whole lot easier. Ie, rather than test, download via ftp, edit the file, upload the changes via ftp, test, and repeat, is pretty onerous after a bit, as contrasted with using file save in notebook, followed by a browser refresh.

The key of course is getting everything to work, without a lot of messing around, and their are a number of ways to get tripped up, and its not exactly well documented.

So, here we go

FIrst, you need a webserver which runs on your desktop. Like many folks, I run wintel… and putting apache on a wintel box is a bit screwey. But alas, the folks over at CH software made it pretty easy with webserver on a stick… I must admit, I just use a directory on my hard drive, but the stick thing sure sounds like a great idea as well. Its not blazingly fast, especially when doing major mysql updates, but its a nice solid tool.

Next, you need to get some configuration information and files from your webhost… the idea is to have as close to as possible an exact mirror of what is online running on your desktop. For the most part, short of 2 modifications in a copy of ones online database, everything is identical.

1. make a new subdirectory on your desktop webserver. In my case, its g:\wos\www\inventorsgarage\blog4\  (ie, dont use the domain extension of com, or the www… when setting up the directory. You could if you wanted to, as long as you left out the periods, but why add extra redundant characters, especially since its local.

2. Use your ftp program to download a complete copy of your wordpress directory into that subdirectory…. in my case public_html/inventorsgarage/blog4/ will be copied to g:\wos\www\inventorsgarage\blog4

3. Next fire up phpmyadmin on your webhost… You need to look at the database used by wordpress, and write down the collation settings,  and any other customizations, so you can duplicate it on your desktop.

4. Make a backup of your wordpress database, and download it to your hard drive. In my case, the file is called invent21.mysql.gz.

5. Now, open up wordpress file called config.php in your favorite text editor, to get the database details. Here are mine for example… although they have been changed… such data does not belong in the public domain, as it would be a huge security risk.

define(‘DB_NAME’, ‘invent21′);    // The name of the database
define(‘DB_USER’, ‘inVentor997′);     // Your MySQL username
define(‘DB_PASSWORD’, ’123BoTylkFG’); // …and password
define(‘DB_HOST’, ‘localhost’);    // 99% chance you won’t need to change this value
define(‘DB_CHARSET’, ‘utf8′);
define(‘DB_COLLATE’, ”);

Ok, so now its time to have some fun on the desktop.

6. First you need to create a database using phpmyadmin on the desktop. The WOS startup screen has a convenient link right to phpmyadmin. Make sure you use the same database name as called out in wordpress’s config.php, and the collation info as found in step 3 above.

7. Next use phpmyadmin to create the user as called out in step 5, ie in my case inVentor997, and then grant that user all privileges, being you will be running on your desktop, security is no where near the concern it would be if you were live.

8. Then use phpmyadmin to import the database backup into the database you created in step 6. In my case, I would import invent21.mysql.gz. Bear in mind, that if your blog is massive, phpmyadmin does have size limitations, and you might need to use something like bigdump if you hit a wall with phpmyadmin.

9. Next, you need to modify two database records on your desktop. WordPress has a home url location, and a site url location. If you do not modify those, when you fire up wordpress locally, it will come up for a flash, and then send you to the online version, rather than the desktop. They are location in the wp_options section of the desktop database )step 6… (you may have a custom prefix, and thats ok… they are in wp_options with or without a prefix). Change those records from something like http://www.inventorsgarage.com/blog to wherever your local website is. in my case http://localhost/inventorsgarage/blog4/

10. Lastly point your browser to http://localhost/inventorsgarage/blog4/ and you should be good to go with a local copy of wordpress running on your desktop.

11. Periodically, you may want to copy your online database to your desktop version, and what I do, is delete the current desktop database, and reload from scratch, although if one is handy with phpmyadmin you may be able to just add the new records. Just make sure the site and home url records are updated.

Its great to run wordpress locally, being its so easy to try things, and revert back using windows explorer if something goes wrong… all the while the online version just continues to run happily along. And then once you are happy with the desktop version, its a simple matter to ftp the changes to the online verion. Do keep in mind that the databases will likely not be in sync, and thus you need to do some configuring in the online version, as far as turning on widjets, or other plug ins… but this way, you know what you are up against, rather than dealing with unknowns on a live site.

I’ve used blogcms for years, but upgrades and such were always sort of a pain, especially since its such a rare occurrence. I’ve also come to really like wordpress, having used it on a number of sites. Thus, a conversion seemed to be in order.

Thus, some googling showed a few options for a nucleus conversion, one of which was importing an RSS feed. However, being I’ve got ~3 years worth of blog entries, that didn’t seem to be a whole lot of fun. A little more googling, and I found this nifty program.

However, nothing is ever simple. This program has not been updated for quite some time, and wordpress has undergone significant changes in how they handle categories. Thus, this convertor would not work properly…. so I looked into rewriting it. That turned into a major headache, due to the whole category database schema. Thus, what I did was the following.

Downloaded an old version of wordpress, this convertor would work with.

Ran the conversion

Updated wordpress to the current version.

It works!!!!

Almost…. the images and such are missing, which is pretty minor.  The cool part, is the converter kept my categories, comments, and even found some old trackback spam which I had missed.  Amazing, what a nifty tool!

I’ve been spitting and fussing about the practices of so called engineering portals for a long time. It seems they are getting to be higher and higher in search engine ranks, and as such displacing useful sites, sometimes even to the point where one has to go to page 3 or 4 to find something worthwhile.

Google coop changes that, in that one can specifically exclude sites, as well as direct ones search towards more useful ones like manufacturers data sheets and technical articles.

Thus, I’ve taken matters into my own hands, and am building my own electronics design and development coop search. I really think this is the way of the future, if not on a wide scale level, at least on a more localized, or even personal level. There are sites such as the datasheet aggregators which I’d rather never see again. They don’t have archive information, nor do they always have the latest revisions either, and as such, there are not of much value. With coop search, I liked it to DMOZ on steriods, and I think its going to be huge.