Intelligence for dummies

In our quest for more time-efficient ways of charting the blogosphere we have set ourselves up to be presented to by a number of firms with 'innovative proprietary methodologies' and afternoon-killing PowerPoint decks to prove it. The formula touted by the one we met today was depressingly familiar.

Entrepreneurial numbercruncher + complex content-crawling algorithms + a load of processing power + a load of storage space + a load of bandwidth = "intelligence".

I wouldn't mind it if they were generally a bit more honest and admitted that what "intelligence" means in this case is some sort of partial, statistically-devised opinion, the awareness of which may or may not be commercially relevant for the client that paid to run the algorithms that build all those colourful little graphs.

In the specific case here I even came to doubt whether they really have all the stuff on the left of the = sign nailed. But its the "intelligence" thing that usually has me running to man my side of the battle lines.

"We can measure sentiment to 90% accuracy using algorithms," we were told without a hint of any of the body language normally associated with the telling of porkies. The face of a former MOTD presenter with an unusually protruding chin immediately formed in my mind.

If one let these over-confident bits of code loose on long-form content like Crime and Punishment I wonder what its sentiment would turn out to be? Pissed off most probably, which was what I was feeling several slides into the presentation.

The essence of the pitch was this: we can help you measure the influence of comment in the blogosphere. Such a tool would indeed be handy, but unlike this one it would need to go beyond scoring individual bloggers as detached nodes of influence. I'd want to know more about the impact of networked relationships and resonance. I'd want to find a way to visually represent what Tristram Shandy calls "that circle of importance, of which kind every soul living, whether he has a shirt to his back or no, ----has one surrounding him."

Trust the monkey-minded mathematicians to want to pull things apart in order to understand them better. The moment they spot anything ineluctably complex and three dimensional they immediately want to attack it with formulae until it is as flat as a hedgehog at Hockenheim. In most cases the end result is digital snake-oil, commonly sold to PR punters with a left-brain inferiority complex.

What we really need is a browsing interface that would allow us to define our entry point (blog, blogger, permalink, topic, blogroll etc), fine tune our assumptions (a DIY proprietary methodology no less) and then explore along multiple dimensions the relationships that emerge.

We could quickly visualise the strength and frequency of comment and citation between bloggers and we might also be able to track paths into and out of the mainstream media. This would not only be a better way of monitoring the blogosphere (for us communications professionals) it would possibly also be a better way of interacting with it altogether (at least in certain contexts).

Oh dear, I'm beginning to sound like Ted.