Using ViralHeat

Technology Review: Mining Mood Swings on the Real-Time Web:

Many companies are turning to social-media sites to gauge the success of a new product and service. The latest activity on Facebook, Twitter, and countless other sites can reveal the public's current mood toward a new film, gadget, or celebrity, and analytics services are springing up to help companies keep track. Social-media analytics startup Viralheat, based in San Jose, CA, is now offering free, real-time access to the data it is collecting on attitudes toward particular topics or products...

...Social Trends uses this information to provide a widget that can be embedded on a blog or website showing the sentiment around particular terms. These widgets stay connected to Viralheat's data stores through an application programming interface (API) and are updated as the company collects more information. Viralheat believes the tool will be particularly useful for news sites wanting up-to-date infographics and for bloggers who want to track trends...

http://www.pixelrage.net/:

Is Social Media Tracking for You?
If you’re looking for the most affordable and practical way to measure social media analytics, ViralHeat is your current best  bet in terms of useful metric reporting and price.

In all, it’s not worth your while to bother with social media tracking if you’re throwing out Facebook Pages and videos for the hell of getting backlinks or casual followers, but it’s a must-have if you take it seriously and really integrate these technologies with your brand name, or to maintain relationships with your customers. You’ll WANT to see how it’s doing, otherwise, you’ll be missing out to the point where your campaign will be mediocre at best.

Until Google Analytics supports social media analysis (which I doubt, unless we’re talking about Google-sponsored social media services like Buzz, Wave and the alleged Google Me), ViralHeat is a solid contender that won’t hurt your budget.

Russia. August. 2010. Part 2: Wildfires.

(cont. from Russia. August. 2010. Part 1: Grain. )

The surge of wildfires this summer has shown two important developments in today’s Russia: deteriorating regional/local  government system and growing importance of Russia's blogosphere.

Ever since 2000, when then President Putin started to rebuild centralized federal government system, regional governments were gradually giving up political power. In some respect such reconstruction was aimed at limiting the power of regional political elite, rather than actual power of Russia’s regions, which never were strong. Establishment of the seven (and later the eighth in the Northern Caucasus) super-regional administrations or Federal Districts was meant to bring systematic order and constitutional synchrony to diverse forms of regional entities of new Russia. Political centralization process, coincided with decade long surge in the commodities market, allowed Russia’s Federal Government to gather low-hanging fruits of administrative reforms and economic development. Modernized federal system permitted relatively efficient federal intervention on political, economic and security matters on a case-by-case basis.

This summer, however, the system has encountered its biggest challenge so far. Wildfires in more than 40 different regions (7 with the state of emergency) of Russia have stretched its Federal government and its most effective agency - EMERCOM.

Of course record heat wave and drought throughout Russia were key systemic factors that significantly impacted the scale of the disaster. However, if we measure the apathy and ineffectiveness of the regional/local governments not in "hectares of forest burned", but in “lives lost” or “days it took for some of the regional governor to interrupt their vacation” the picture gets clear. In the system where accountability and resource allocation has only upward dynamics, regional elite is more likely to respond to the criticism from the federal center (i.e. Putin or Medvedev) rather than people on the ground.

In any event, when you watch President Medvedev meeting with Russian oligarchs who pledge money to rebuild villages of Central Russia or Prime Minister Putin responding to remarks of an unknown before blogger, whose comments on government’s handling of fire gone viral, the question you may ask is "what is regional/local governments' response of  to the fire or at least the discussion on the web?"

This brings us to the second point of this post - growing importance of Russia's blogosphere. The backbone of Russia’s civil society is not community services, local churches, PTAs or rotary clubs. The backbone of Russia’s civil society is truth seeking and straight talking “lonely hero”, the one who dares to speak to the authorities.  If previous Russian regimes have sent such loners to Siberia and psychiatric hospitals, the current landscape is significantly different. The internet connects such "lonely hero" to like-minded persons all over the nation. Russia’s blogosphere gives such "lonely heroes" opportunity to express themselves and to be heard by ordinary people.  Twitter makes the dissemination speed supersonic, and mainstream media’s fascination with new means of communication results in media spillovers.

The blogger named “top_lap” with his “Put my f___n village bell back” is yet another example of Russian blogosphere’s growing influence and its interesting manner of communicating with the authorities (in Russian http://top-lap.livejournal.com/2010/08/01/, YouTube - "Рында как символ русской демократии" - Эхо Москвы 1/5).

Here is English language summary of the discussion:

In a scathing attack posted on LiveJournal, a blogger writing under the name top_lap vented his frustration at the authorities’ chaotic efforts to contain the fires. He said the ponds his village had previously used as reservoirs for fighting fires had been filled in and sold to developers, the local fire engine had vanished and the fire bell had been removed.

Such is the sensitivity surrounding public anger over the government’s response that Vladimir Putin himself was forced to go online and answer top_lap’s claims. This in itself is noteworthy as the prime minister claimed in 2007 that he had never even written an email.

***

Top_lap, who says he has a holiday home in a village in Tver province, 153km (95 miles) from Moscow, asked why there were no more forest wardens, who in Soviet times would have raised fire alerts. The fire bell had been replaced by a telephone which did not work, he said in his blog entry, which is punctuated by obscene swear-words. "Where is our [tax] money being spent?" he asked. "Why with every passing year are we hurtling towards a primitive social order?"

***

Top_lap questioned the need for Medvedev’s pet project of building a Russian “Silicon Valley” when the country doesn’t have enough fire engines. “We have no hope in you,” he wrote, addressing Russian officialdom. “We all understand that your one principle in life is that everybody owes you. But you’re mistaken, you owe us and you owe us a lot.”

Putin penned his answer after a Moscow radio station forwarded him a blog that railed against the decline of rural fire protection and self-serving bureaucrats. Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesman, confirmed the authenticity of the response posted on the website of broadcaster Ekho Moskvy.

“On the whole I agree with your observations,” Putin wrote in a letter mixing flattery with irony... Putin, 57, told Time magazine in 2007 that he’d never sent an e-mail... Putin, who began his letter with the words “dear user,” said he read the blog “with great interest and pleasure.” While conceding the government’s responsibility to fight natural disasters, he explained that Russia was facing its worst heat wave in 140 years and that western countries also suffered frequent wildfires. “You’re definitely a gifted writer,” Putin wrote. “If you made a living by writing, you could live in Capri, just like Vladimir Lenin’s favorite writer, Maxim Gorky.” “If we had your address, you’d immediately get a ship’s bell from the governor,” he wrote.

Michael Davies teaches Systems, Leadership and Management (SLaM) Praxis and Lab for SDM MIT Fellows

ESD.945 SL&M Praxis – Systems, Leadership and Management Praxis course overview:

"This course is about praxis1; it gives SDM Fellows a systematic approach and the practical skills needed for the application of their rich and deep learning and frameworks about systems, architecture, technology and strategy to real-world leadership and management challenges. It runs during the Summer session as a complement to and preparation for the SL&M Lab course in the Fall session, in which project teams work with the top management team of a high-tech business on a relevant real-world systems, leadership and management challenge.


This course provides a systematic approach and a a set of powerful analytical tools for the effective strategic management of high-tech and systems business. The objective of the program is to enable would-be managers in high-tech or systems businesses to better:
• anticipate the future and navigate its implications
• innovate and differentiate their offers, creating new value
• build competences and capabilities, and thereby capture value
• make smart decisions, fast and accelerate execution


Most sessions will involve a mix of case studies, class discussion and in particular guest speakers who have directly relevant experience; one of the later sessions is a computer-based simulation exercise in which participants play the role of the top management team of a high-tech business.

A central element of the course is a project carried out in teams of three to five people that involves an analysis of the strategic challenges currently facing the top management team of a major high-tech or systems business, and recommendations for the strategy that the business should pursue."

The final project of the summer SLaM Praxis
(August 9, 2010):

"The Great Game's scope is the complete digital ecosystem, although the primary focus will be where all of the major players meet, in smartphones, consumer electronics, digital media and the connected home.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Game

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2010/07/30/Mobile-Market-Share

The scope explicitly includes:
-    mobile OS platform battles
-    connected home: Apple TV, Google TV and so on
-    gaming
-    media
-    cloud services

'The Great Game' will have four rounds:
-    2010
-    2011
-    2012
-    2013-2015

Each round begins with each team announcing its intended strategic moves for the round, covering issues such as product portfolio, scope of activities, intended partnerships and so on. This can include real options, that are triggered by other players or by market developments."











Additional information and readings on technology strategy can be found at MIT Open Courseware:

2nd INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON CRISIS MAPPING (BOSTON, OCTOBER 1-3, 2010)

The International Network of Crisis Mappers (CM*Net) was launched by 100 Crisis Mappers at the first International Conference on Crisis Mapping (ICCM 2009) in October 2009. As the world's premier crisis mapping hub, CM*Net catalyzes communication and collaboration between and among crisis mappers with the purpose of advancing the study and application of crisis mapping worldwide. Register Now for ICCM 2010: Haiti and Beyond.

Feel free to join our dedicated CrisisMappers Google Group here.

While my MacBook was on repair for the last two weeks...

"The Influence Project concludes this Sunday August 15 at midnight EST. The surge of interest continues and there’s that last minute at an eBay auction feeling pulsing through this network of networks that is the modern Internet."

MIT SDM Students on Blue Hill Reservation Hiking Trip

Russia. August. 2010. Part 1: Grain.

(cont. in Russia. August. 2010. Part 2: Wildfires. )

It seems that August continues to be most intense month in Russia's political life. The heat wave followed by massive wildfires in the central Russia and Siberia add to the long list of events that took place in Russia's most contemporary history: August Putsch (August 19-21, 1991), Financial crisis (August 17, 1998), Kursk Submarine Accident (August 12, 2000), Russian-Gerogian Conflict (August 8, 2008), Sayano-Shushenskaya hydro accident (August 17, 2009).

This summer the heat wave in Russia reached absolute record temperatures. There were 21st temperature record registered in Moscow this summer. Two records were broken in June, ten in July and ten in the first half of August.

Low rainfall and hot temperatures damaged 32 percent of the country’s grain crops, said Russian Agriculture Minister, Yelena Skrynnik on July 23. This satellite vegetation index image, made from data collected by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite, shows the damage done to plants throughout southern Russia.

Hot and dry summer resulted in massive drought, which led the government ban its grain export. Agricultural analysts are estimating that grain output will suffer a 40% loss this year, cutting previous forecasts of 70-75 million tons to 59.5-63.5 million.

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin suggested the ban could remain in place until well into 2011. Mr Putin said that this year's crop could be as low as 60 million tonnes, well below last year's 97 million, and Russia needs almost 80 million tonnes to cover domestic consumption, so even with this ban, there might be a shortfall of nearly 20 million tonnes for the Russian consumer.

President Medvedev's verified Twitter account (KremlinRussia) posted a link to presidential memo, which assigned responsibilities to different cabinet members.   The two biggest concerns so far are (1) monitoring internal dynamics of food prices (and if necessary intervention) and (2) mitigating the possibility of grain reserve imbalance between different regions of Russia.

It is too early to say if Russia's neighbors may follow suit. A senior Ukrainian Farm Ministry official said this year's wheat harvest could fall to about 17 million tons, below the consensus in a Reuters poll last week of 18.1 million and down from 20.9 million in 2009. However, the decision to ban Ukraine's export has not been made.

Analysts already expect the London-listed Russia's deep-water Novorossiysk commercial sea port on the Black Sea may lose up to $40 million over a ban on grain exports imposed by the Russian government.  Novorossiysk port also serves as a transportation hub for Russia's landlock neighbors.

Now let us zoom out from Russia's map and look at big picture.  The total drop of Russia grain production (plus its closest neighbors) is going to be 20-25 million tons lower that previous forecasts. Fortunately such amount will not significant impact world's grain output.  Take a look at data provided by UN's Food and Agriculture Organization. World grain production fluctuates between 670-685 million tons per year, in which  25 million ton or even 30 million tons shortage makes less than half of a percent of global food production.

Moreover, the reaction of other food commodities suggest us that there is no upward reaction to the expected drop of grain output in Eurasia.



Then the question is What's All The Fuss About? And here I can give you two different explanations.  First, the ban is Russia's internally driven policy directed toward domestic audience. Unfortunately, its domestic media machine works so efficiently that it spins its internal message into global media.

This leads us to the second and more important point: Russia's domestic policy is unintentionally helping international food commodity traders.  I am concluding this post with SPIEGEL magazine article  Speculators Rediscover Agricultural Commodities. The article was published on July 29, 2010 before the Russian ban on grain, nevertheless it captures the trend:

Driving the price explosion was the growing use of agricultural commodities to produce biofuel. But 2008 was also the year in which, for the first time, the public realized that grain merchants were no longer the only ones trading on the exchanges (in their case, by buying grain futures to hedge against poor harvests), but that the major players in the financial markets had discovered the lucrative trade in agricultural commodities.

Last year, Goldman Sachs earned $5 billion in profits with commodities alone. Other major players include the Bank of America, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley and J.P. Morgan.

They are no longer merely offering classic funds, but are now trading in financial instruments that function similarly to the subprime mortgage loans on the now-collapsed US real estate market. With these instruments, known as collateralized commodities obligations, or CCOs, profits are based on market prices. The higher the trading prices of wheat, rice and soybeans, the bigger the profits. The market's behavior reminds one of the Internet bubble at the beginning of last decade and the fluctuations just prior to the financial crisis, then-Merrill Lynch President Gregory Fleming said in May 2008.

RIP Google Wave

Official Google Blog: Update on Google Wave.

RIP Google Wave...

"Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects. The central parts of the code, as well as the protocols that have driven many of Wave’s innovations, like drag-and-drop and character-by-character live typing, are already available as open source, so customers and partners can continue the innovation we began. In addition, we will work on tools so that users can easily “liberate” their content from Wave." (Official Google Blog, http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/update-on-google-wave.html)

Obituaries:

"Google Wave, Poorly Understood and Underused, Dies In Infancy" (Fastcompany.com)

"Maybe it was just ahead of its time. Or maybe there were just too many features to ever allow it to be defined properly, but Google is saying today that they are going to stop any further development of Google Wave." (Techcrunch.com)

"Goodby Google Wave, We Hardly Knew You." (DailyFinance)


"Google's attempt to reinvent e-mail has fizzled." (CNN.com)

"The move isn’t much of a surprise; adoption never seemed to materialize for Google Wave — even after it dropped its invite-only status — as users struggled to find meaningful use cases for the service (though we found a few)." (Mashable.com)


"It's dead, Jim. Google Wave, the much-hyped collaboration tool that Google released in beta form just about a year ago at its developer conference, is dead." (Examiner.com)

"Google is known for daring to invest in new products, services and features and being willing to walk away from those not living up to its hopes." (AFP)

"After opening to the public in May, Wave failed to attract the user base Google anticipated. Instead, when faced with a drastically different paradigm for interaction, the public decided to stick with the familiar: e-mail, IM and Facebook." (Switched.com)

"MIT OpenCourseWare recognized by the AAAS"

MIT OpenCourseWare: Unlocking Knowledge, Empowering Minds -- d'Oliveira et al. 329 (5991): 525 -- Science.

"The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has announced that MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) has been named a recipient of the Science Prize for Online Resources in Education. OCW is the Institute's groundbreaking effort to share the core academic content — including syllabi, lecture notes, assignments and exams — from the entire MIT undergraduate and graduate curriculum. The site currently includes materials from more than 2,000 MIT courses and has received more than 68 million visits since the site's launch in 2002." (http://web.mit.edu/press/2010/ocw-award.html)

System Design and Management Program and Social Media, need some crowdsourcing advice...

Trying to organize SDM seminar on social media and recruiting, what topics and new trends do you think could be interesting for SDM MIT Fellows? I need some crowdsourcing assistance here...

BBC News - Global cluster bomb ban comes into force

BBC News - Global cluster bomb ban comes into force.

BBC: "A new global treaty banning cluster munitions has come into force. The Convention on Cluster Munitions bans the stockpiling, use and transfer of virtually all existing cluster bombs, and also provides for the clearing up of unexploded munitions. It has been adopted by 108 states, of which 38 have ratified it. The charity Handicap International estimates that 98% of cluster bomb victims are civilians and nearly one-third are children."