We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.

Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]

Buzz

Instapundit supplies two interesting (at first I thought that was about bloggers deep under the earth) recent links (among the usual zillion other interesting links), which in their different ways both illustrate how difficult it is being a Big Business person these days.

The first is to this Wall Street Journal piece, about how big business is now using the buzz on the Internet, blogs, etc., to find out what people really thing of their latest products.

People who rave online about their favorite new gadget – or gripe about the products they hate – are turning heads in the business world.

The growing popularity of blogs and other online forums has prompted companies to pay more attention to what is being said about them on the Internet, and has given rise to a new kind of market research aimed at finding useful information in the sea of online chatter.

For more than a year, car-maker Volkswagen AG has used a service by Techdirt, Foster City, Calif., to find out which new technologies are generating the most buzz online, with the aim of integrating some of them in new automobiles. “I think [Web sites] are very important as a source of unfiltered information, but there’s too much information out there already. Frankly, we don’t have time to keep track of all these things,” says Daniel Rosario, a senior engineer in Volkswagen’s electronics research lab in Silicon Valley.

There is no link to Techdirt in the piece, but presumably they mean these guys. As I understand it, what Techdirt supplies to each of their customers is a kind of bespoke e-newspaper (to replace the daily pile of off the peg newspapers and magazines that you had to make do with before). And as I further understand the situation, there is only so much that you can do along these lines automatically. To really get the full flavour – the buzz – of what the Internet is saying, about you, and about things relevant to you, you need human beings to pull it all together. To edit it, in other words. Interesting.

Also interesting is the other piece Instapundit links to, which is an example of just such a little buzz of comment, and not very polite comment, about a new corporate product, namely Microsoft’s new blogging software, MSN Spaces.

I have always understood that version 1.0 of anything produced by Microsoft should be avoided like the Black Death, but that version 3.4 might end up being really rather good, not to say market sweeping, and the fact that Microsoft reckons that there is a market out there to be swept (eventually) is the important fact here is the other important fact embedded in every big launch they indulge in.

So, does that prejudice still hold good? Part one certainly seems to apply still, according to Xeni Jardin of Boing Boing. Alerted by a reader to the effect that …

Microsoft’s new blogging tool … censors certain words you might try to include in a blog title or url.

… Xeni Jardin of Boing Boing continued:

… If you can’t speak freely on a blog, what’s the point of having one? This demanded a full investigation.

So Xeni Jardin investigated, and basically, she found that it was true. My favourite idiocy that she turned up is that if you entitle a blog posting “Pornography and the law” (not unlike this posting title here), you are told to stop being profane. Also, literary people need to be careful of any mention of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita. On the other hand, other even more profane (so profane, one assumes, that Microsoft did not even conceive of them – a bit like Queen Victoria and lesbianism) titles like the one Instapundit links with “Butt Sex is Awesom”, is allowed.

I assume that there must be some way to switch off this absurd nannyism, but maybe that assumption is wrong.

ZDNet UK has this to say:

Getting an amusingly named blog past the MSN Spaces controls may be fun, but it also illustrates the tensions between the traditionally free and open world of blogging, and the more corporate approach of a software giant like Microsoft.

These tensions are also apparent in Microsoft’s approach to blog content. Unlike rival services such as Blogger, MSN Spaces forces new users to grant Microsoft permission to “use, copy, distribute, transmit, publicly display, publicly perform, reproduce, edit, modify, translate and reformat” their blog postings.

Bloody hell. In fact: buzz, buzz, buzz. Will version 3.4 actually be any better than version 1.0?

Finally, I find this conclusion to the WSJ piece very poignant. It seems that the Ford Motor Co. was stung by the buzz:

Some companies, though, have been less successful in their attempts to find useful information in online chatter. Ford Motor Co.’s European unit last year hired a firm to help it watch the Web, but the trial soon ran into trouble: It was receiving information more rapidly than ever, but found that it couldn’t act on the new data fast enough.

“To make full use of real-time information, you need to develop an internal structure that can react at the same speed,” says Tim Holmes, executive director of public affairs for Ford in the United Kingdom. Three months after it began, Ford discontinued the project.

Ouch. It is not enough to know what is being said. You have to be able to do something about it.

NOTE: In the first edition of this I put that Xeni Jardin was, in the words of a commenter (to whom thanks), a “dude”. My apologies to Ms. Jardin.

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