IBM E-Business Patterns

IBM e-business SOA pattern redbook.
It's surprisingly good; a small, well-defined set of interacting patterns that are easy to learn and useful in real-life work.

I90 - Bellevue to Seattle

I walked the I90 bridges, from Bellevue Square to downtown Seattle, about 12 miles total.

I did go to the Cirque Du Noc ball on Saturday, but seeing as I'm a total stranger,
taking pictures didn't seem entirely appropriate. The crowd was about half the size
of what I expected; apparently their livejournals' bark is worse than their bite.

Overdriving - Breitbart Revisited

An electronic transistor normally outputs a sine wave signal. But a transistor can be overloaded by too much input, resulting in a "clipped" sine wave and signal distortion.

Look at the Breitbart memegraph again.
The initial spike is almost vertical.

I've run hundreds of these graphs.
This is an unusual rate of change.

Memes have a velocity restriction on how fast they'll travel through the ideosphere, determined by a myriad of factors. And I know from personal experience that the curve of an overdriven meme differs from the standard s-curve of a "natural meme". It's possible to temporarily hype a meme by spamming email, newsgroups and blogs with inappropriate links, but then the meme quickly fades out.

I think it's likely that this is the result of a deliberate and unusual marketing strategy, and that the breitbart meme will look like an overdriven meme by summer of 2006.

Statistics for the Idle & Curious

30,000 people have viewed a memegraph (since March, 2005).
15,000 site logins.
3,000 of those have read at least 25% of the site.

Current rate of 500 new logins per month and 150 repeat logins,
although I haven't spent much time on hyping the site lately.

The most memorable area (by far) is the diagram of Schramm's model,
judging from search engine feedback. I might update it with new material soon.

All in all, it's been more successful than I expected.

Disrupting Saleslogix

Decimate: from the Latin decimare, meaning 'take the tenth man', and means 'kill or remove one in ten of'.

In the days of hand-to-hand combat, "decimate" was a rule of thumb. If an army incapacitated 1/10th of the opposing force, the "operational effectiveness" of that force would likely collapse. At 10% losses, soldiers fear for their lives, lose confidence, and stop functioning as a cohesive team.

I worked for Saleslogix from 1998 to 2000, and I left at the height of the Dot Com bubble. For a few months, we had a cohesive and productive team; one of the few groups that shipped an ROI-positive product in that last year.

But in 2000, our team was a victim of internal politics, hijacked by another set of managers.

I left the company, but I had helped build a good team and I resented the myopic priority of personal politics over the long-term health of the company. In a sudden epiphany, an information strategy flashed into my head. Poor management had already damaged the spirit of the team. Firing the manager and architect for purely political reasons had taken a toll, and I suspect my resignation also caused some loss of faith.

"Decimating" my old team would reset it back to its original state and deprive the new leaders of victory.

My goal was to cripple their effectiveness by knocking out an additional 20% of the team, using a cruder version of some of the meme strategies on this website, through the legal use of existing information channels. And I must admit, I was curious if information channels could even accomplish such an ambitious mission.

But the actual results were beyond surprising, far beyond what I had intended.

The team was essentially obliterated within one quarter. The extent of my responsibility for these results is certainly questionable, there's no direct proof; the team may have imploded anyway, but I did earn a reputation among the employees (and others) that was larger than life, I think.

Abstract Factory & Service Oriented Architecture

Abstract factory is my favorite design pattern. So the first thing I noticed about Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is that it's a variation of abstract factory. I sketched out two designs of the same system, one as abstract factory, the other as an SOA -

Similarities include:

• central point of control


• implementations determined at run-time


• maximum class granularity with minimum complexity

But I suppose their differences are more interesting. One of the touted features of SOA is "local implementation" combined with centralized interface control. How does that differ from AbstractFactory? In SOA, the "creation" ability of the abstract factory is shifted to the service. Another difference is that a requester needs knowledge of both the abstract factory and the created factory ("Chevy factory") but in SOA, the requester is isolated from knowledge of the service.

AbstractFactory is an application pattern, SOA is enterprise.
SOA has an explicit bus, AbstractFactory doesn't.
But in general, most differences are implied, based on their context of usage, not on the patterns themselves.

Blu-Ray Versus HD-DVD

Still no clear winner.

One team needs to take drastic action to break the deadlock.

Breitbart Meme

Interesting spike characteristics.
You have to wonder if it's a deliberate meme injection.

Meme Hacking - Subverting The Ideosphere

Outline for possible Defcon 14 presentation (let's cross our fingers!)

Humorous introductory anecdote

Quick rehash of Meme Miner presentation & highlights

(Outrageous) Premise to establish audience identification & interest

Strategic outline to support premise

Establish terminology - 'decimate': to destroy 1/10th

Empirical example - Memetic disruption of Saleslogix

Active versus passive devices

An active device?

Semantic map - empirical example, expanded theory

Injection Maps - Slashdot & CNews as empirical examples

Injection Maps - expanded definition using 'affinity'

Memetic fingerprinting by culture & sex

Synthesis of semantic maps, injection maps and fingerprinting

Google and Homeland security

RSS meme still pre-inflection point

Yahoo catching the RSS wave, it's still a pre-inflection graph. But judging from the gradient and blog meme, it's quite likely that RSS growth will peak and flatten in 2006. Blog growth is tightly coupled to RSS growth.

Google versus Meme Miner

It's official!

Google says I'm a hacker, so I should be a shoo-in for a follow-up Defcon 14 presentation.

Google has defined Meme Miner as a "virus or spyware product".

KeyRing Meme Pattern

This pattern is based on Meme Theory and the Schramm Communication Model. Today's Meme was deliberately designed as a keyring pattern as a real-life test of the strategy.

The keyring pattern is the meme equivalent of differentiated (or segmented) marketing strategy. The keyring page contains graphs which span a wide range of contexts; technology, sports, music, business, investment.

Step 1) The user, interested in medicine, logs into the page and finds something of interest.

Step 2) The original user forwards a link to a co-worker with similar interests and the second user looks at keyring.

Step 3) But people span multiple knowledge domains. The second user also has an interest in sports, and finds the sports references on the keyring page.

Step 4) The second user now forwards that link to acquaintances within the sports context.

Step 5) Over time, the meme propagates across several knowledge domains.

The strategy works, and it has a substantially different propagation rate than the other two strategies (Flea, Venturi).

A Meme Equivalent to Capacitance

We might be able to empirically deduce the existence of stored value for memes.

1) Take the set of all memes and measure the average of their peak rate of change.

2) Take the set of pre-maturely aborted memes (like Service Oriented Architecture) and measure the average of their peak rate of change.

If a premature meme left behind "stored value" from its initial release, this subset of memes should have a higher peak rate of change that's statistically significant. Impedance should be less for memes that have previously passed through the Ideosphere (for the set of memes that eventually found a foothold, that is). I'd expect the graph to look like this -

Ohm's Law

The modern electronics industry is founded on a single notion - Ohm's law, a quantitative, time-based measurement of electrons passing through a wire.

The graphs on this website are based on a single notion - the quantitative, time-based measurement of unique keywords passing through the Internet (using Dejanews as a proxy for now).

Maggianos versus IT Departments

So I'm sitting in a bar and in walk four Maggianos employees, fresh from the grand opening of their Bellevue store.

And these guys are hyped.
They're genuinely excited about working for Maggianos.
And I wondered why.
So we get talking and these waiter kids taught me something about the software business.

Maggianos avoids the IT scourge of the "primadonna pattern" through short and immediate feedback paths of cash tips and customer comments. One bad waiter impacts everyone else's future income and everyone knows it.

True, these are not equivalent situations, but the comparison points out deficiencies in today's strategic IT structure.