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Armonk, NY — Dec 18, `07 — IBM today announced the availability of IBM Atlas for Lotus Connections, a corporate social networking visualization and analysis tool.

IBM Atlas for Lotus Connections is designed to help organizations maximize their investment in social software by answering questions such as who the key experts are on a given topic, how they are connected, and whom a user’s contacts know that they do not.

Developed by IBM Research, Atlas has four Web 2.0-based components — My Net, Find, Reach and Net. These components help users spot the important connections and the relationships between various groups and navigate their personal and corporate networks.

The Net component of Atlas provides a visual indication of the important hubs among topic experts and informal groups that have developed while working on similar projects.

My Net offers similar capabilities for a user’s personal network. For example, a salesperson can better manage and understand their social networks making sure they have connections across the right topic areas.

Reach, the social software dashboard feature in Atlas, helps users navigate the up to six degrees of separation that divide them from a colleague. The dashboard shows users the shortest path to reach an expert and ranks the expert based on the level of interaction across the network.

The Find component of Atlas builds upon core Lotus Connections expertise capabilities by taking searches beyond the corporate directory to include results based on social data such as reporting structures, blogs and communities.

Atlas is designed to work with IBM Lotus Connections, the industry’s first integrated enterprise social software platform. The latest version of Lotus Connections, version 1.02, is now available and features:

* Expanded support for operating systems such as SUSE Linux, browsers such as Mozilla Firefox 2.0 and directories such as Microsoft Active Directory, enabling businesses to deploy and integrate social software across their IT environment.
* Plug-ins for IBM Lotus Notes, IBM Lotus Sametime, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Explorer and IBM WebSphere Portal, enabling people to interact with their professional networks using their everyday productivity tools.
* A rich API based on the REST and Atom standards allow other applications to utilize the profiles, community, bookmarking, blogging and activity services of Lotus Connections.

More on IBM Atlas at IBM.

SAN FRANCISCO –BUSINESS WIRE– Dec 03, ‘07 — Russia-based SUP, today announced that it has acquired LiveJournal from Six Apart, Ltd. LiveJournal is one of the world’s leading global online communities, with a monthly audience of more than 18m unique visitors in nearly every country in the world.

Additionally, SUP today launched a new U.S. company, LiveJournal, Inc., based in San Francisco, which will manage and operate LiveJournal. More information on the acquisition is available at Livejournal.com/LJ_2008.

This deal is the second agreement between SUP and Six Apart. In October 2006, SUP concluded a licensing agreement with Six Apart to support and develop the large Russian segment of LiveJournal, which now represents 28% of its monthly audience. In the past twelve months, SUP and Six Apart have worked in close collaboration to improve LiveJournal for Russian users during which time the community has almost doubled.

New LJ community to highlight plans launched

The new management team outlined their plans for the service in a new LiveJournal community – LJ_2008 – dedicated to addressing questions and concerns from users, and serving as a forum to discuss anything related to the acquisition. Also at LJ_2008, users will find details about LiveJournal, Inc.’s goals over the next 100 days. These goals include planned upgrades as well as new features and services for the LiveJournal community. The team will focus on such items as service performance, usability, socialization and discovery features. LiveJournal, Inc. is encouraging users to post on the community new ideas for improving the service.

The LiveJournal community was informed of the news yesterday afternoon. SUP promised significant new investment in LiveJournal in the coming months and years. SUP also reassured the community that while subscribing to a minimalist approach in managing the site, it will establish clear and concrete policies with regard to communication and consultation on issues vital to the community.

Nov 16, ‘07 — Too long have we suffered in silence under the tyranny of idiocy. In the beginning, the internet was a place where one could communicate intelligently with similarly erudite people.

Then, Eternal September hit and we were lost in the noise. The advent of user-driven web content has compounded the matter yet further, straining our tolerance to the breaking point. It’s time to fight back. Says StupidFilter Project.

What is StupidFilter Project

The solution we’re creating is simple: an open-source filter software that can detect rampant stupidity in written English. This will be accomplished with weighted Bayesian or similar analysis and some rules-based processing, similar to spam detection engines. The primary challenge inherent in our task is that stupidity is not a binary distinction, but rather a matter of degree. To this end, we’re collecting a ranked corpus of stupid text, gleaned from user comments on public websites and ranked on a five-point scale.

Eventually, once the research is completed, we plan to release core engine source code for incorporation into content management systems, blogs, wikis and the like. Additionally, we plan to develop a fully implemented Firefox plugin and a Wordpress plugin.

Project Status

This project is currently in the design and analysis phase. We’ve gathered a fairly large (225K+ comments) database of comments, primarily from Youtube, that ever-inspiring font of stupidity. We’ve implemented a web-based comment ranking system to seed our stupidity corpus and that’s proceeding nicely.

Moderator applications are now open and we’re going through them as quickly as possible. We’re testing CRM114 as a classification platform, initial tests with the bit entropy and correlative classifiers are pretty promising. Additionally, we’ve moved to a new dedicated server better suited to the heavy database work we’re doing. We’re still on track for a late December alpha code release date. StupidFilter.

WASHINGTON (AP) — October 21, ‘07 – It was late on Aug. 22 when Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt wrapped up 1,250 words on his experiences in Mozambique. There was more he wanted to write about online, but he had to be up early. “I think I’ll post and go to bed,” he wrote on his Web log.

Leavitt and Michael Chertoff at Homeland Security are the first two members of President Bush’s Cabinet who are blogging. The State Department has begun a blog, too, although Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is not a contributor so far.

Two of Chertoff’s 11 entries challenge New York Times editorials. Most recently, he said the newspaper’s editorial staff “hyperventilates” about the department’s effort to arrest gangs and get illegal aliens off the street.

Leavitt has written about the children’s health care program and defend Bush’s veto of a spending increase that the Democratic-controlled Congress passed. Last week, the House failed to override the veto. “The drama around vetoes and overrides are just the way Washington conducts a conversation and debate,” he wrote.

More at AP, Michael Chertoff, Secretary-DHS Blog-Leadership Journal, Mike Leavitt, Secretary HHS Blog