Twitter Lists

For the last two days, I have been organizing Tweets I follow into Twitter Lists. I follow US Government Tweets here to understand what do my fellow IT Geek/bureaucrats tweet about. It's been an interesting exercise. Most of it is plain noise which doesn't really make sense in the grand scheme of things. Twitter can be used as an enabling tool for agency branding strategies. Here are some of the tweets I saw:

• RT @FEMA Extreme winter weather tonight/tomorrow? Listen to local officials, prepare at www.ready.gov, & track at www.weather.gov - DHSJournal
  
• Governors declare state of emergency in VA, Maryland and Mass. in advance of approaching storm http://on.cnn.com/evCvN1 /via @cnnbrk - fema
• Want to Resolve Your ADA Complaint? Consider Mediation http://bit.ly/gWuVLV- Disabilitygov
• National Security Agency: Program Manager ( #FortGeorgeG.Meade , MD) http://bit.ly/cMXhyJ #ProjectMgmt #Jobs #Job #TweetMyJOBS - NSACareers
• Happy holidays to you and yours! - EPAgov (tweeted on Dec 25th, 2010)

Anyway as you can see, Twitter is giving me the power to group the tweets I follow into "lists". This is a great idea. Rather than Tweeter creating the lists for me, it lets me create the lists and lets me publish my lists to the Twitter world.

Why is this so great? Twitter is allowing its users to create user centric communities of interest. This is truly social. Usually organizations, standards' bodies or architectures define the communities of interest which to some degree fail because it doesn't appeal to everyone. I have seen this problem in the "search" world. Search engine technologies like Autonomy let organizations or data architects design the taxonomy for a specific topic and then the search engine moves the documents to the appropriate taxonomy node during indexing. If the taxonomy is not done right then bunch of documents don't get put in the taxonomy and they are grouped in the "other" node. The reason why folksonomies work better than taxonomies is because of the "social" aspect. Folks who know the content are organizing it and not some information architect who is following an archaic process. BTW why do relational data architects call themselves data architects. Most of them don't have a clue on how to build an ontology.

Anyway I see alot of potential with the social function. If anyone has an opinion regarding this matter then please chime in. You can also follow me on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/eknock

DITA - That's correct!

Today I was analyzing Java code for a refactoring effort. Before our team could refactor the code, we need to write unit tests to be sure we didn't break any functionality in the software. Unfortunately after looking at the code and asking other team members, I realized that the Java code was poorly designed. What does it mean that the Java code was poorly designed? Does that mean that the code didn't meet the software requirements or pass QA? No, it means that it will take alot of work to introduce new functionality into poorly designed Java code. The code is brittle, tightly coupled, not very reusable. It is always beneficial to design all software before it is developed because during the design process the requirements and the initial design could be analyzed for potential bottlenecks, brittleness, tight coupling, etc., etc. If the software is developed without any design then it is a linear process. The developer will write the code to meet the initial requirements however he or she does not take a step back to assess the developed code's resusablity and flexibility.

This is also true in writing documents. In high school and college, students are taught that they need to create an outline of their paper, then a draft and then the final copy of the paper. The paper meets the instructor's requirement like:

• Write an essay about the Civil War
• Write a technical paper on how to build a Lawn mover
• Write a paper why Roe Vs. Wade is beneficial for the United States.

After the paper is written, the paper is graded on how well the student expresses his or her thoughts about the requirements of the paper. However if the instructor added another requirement that he plans to write a paper which is only comprised content from his students' papers then the paper writing process would be different. There would be discussions between the instructor and his students on what the instructor's paper is about and he plans to write the paper. This would also alter the students' approach to their papers. They would emphasize ideas and support their idea .This might restrict the flow and readability of the students papers To improve the flow of the paper, the students may choose to organize the information differently.

In the information age, every major organization is trying to mine data to give themselves an edge over their competitors. Companies like Google, Autonomy, Fast, Vivisimo, etc, etc offer products which offer search capabilities for unstructured data which is linearly, brittle and tightly coupled (just like this blog entry).

Yesterday I came across an XML standard which identifies the issue of linear writting and describes how to write reusable content. It is quite fascinating. The XML standard is called Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA). It uses ideas of inheritance and specialization. I don't know if DITA is the answer but it asks the right questions and it identifies the issues. Hope you enjoy the white paper (be warned that it is quite technical). If the white paper is too complicated then check out this power point presentation. Enjoy!