randomosity

Every­one knows that the value is in the net­work. SNA is a won­der­ful tool for aca­demic and I am using it to map my local webs of com­merce. The folks at Spoke how­ever are doing this one step bet­ter. They have the typ­ic­ally enorm­ous and touted list of key decision makers and influ­en­cers at com­pan­ies around the world. Noth­ing short of a big Spam list there. How­ever, on join­ing the net­work, you con­trib­ute your own con­tact list. Again noth­ing revolu­tion­ary in that…but here’s where it gets inter­est­ing. The little cli­ent that har­vests your con­tacts for Spoke also meas­ures how con­nec­ted (inbetwee­ness in SNA-speak) you are based on fre­quency and nature of con­tact based on your email his­tory. Sure its not flaw­less, but when you over­lay this with all the other par­ti­cipants they are build­ing one mega web and are cre­at­ing a poten­tially rich map of influ­ence flows. It raises some ser­i­ous pri­vacy and trust issues, but it is clearly push­ing the envel­ope one step bey­ond. Many CRM apps are out there try­ing to build sim­ilar webs in an auto­mated fash­ion, but gen­er­ally require huge rejig­ging and manual cre­ation of hier­arch­ical rela­tion­ship by thew user. Few actu­ally auto­mate the pro­cess, let alone start to weight the res­ults through con­tac­ted­ness (not con­nec­ted­ness) min­ing. Intriguing.

I don’t nor­mally click thru for adverts and the like, but after wtch­ing an epis­ode of zeFrank today the pro­du­cer sof the movie The Last Kiss had clev­erly bought some space. Why did I click? Well, lately zeFrank’s been pretty enter­tain­ing and I figured why not sup­port the site. I am glad I did. The site for the movie is quite a nice piece of flash. Nicely open page, lots of white space and a very smooth and, in my mind, thought­ful nav­ig­a­tion wid­get. Small popup from the bot­tom tied to the movie’s theme, but very user-centric. Works for me. Try it your­self. The incent­ive was to hear the soundtrack and it hap­pens to strike me as appeal­ing and is run­ning as a loop in the back­ground as I write this. All in all I was struck by the value of this click thru and sim­il­arly by the path from a pod­Cast I sub­scribe to to this movie which pre­sum­ably has some thought given to demo­graphic tastes in just such a clickthru.