Tag: information


  • First Metricocracy measured hits. Pictures and other junk on pages inflated the results so Metricocracy decided on either unique visitors or page views. Now, the Metricocracy wants us to measure attention. Attention is engagement, how much time users spend on a page. What do we really want to know? Really it is the potential value…

  • There is a slight difference between FriendFeed and an RSS aggregator? According to the site, “FriendFeed enables you to keep up-to-date on the web pages, photos, videos and music that your friends and family are sharing.” It is using the RSS feeds of the various sites. So, like an RSS aggregator, FF pulls information from…

  • When I present my ideas, my intent is just to provide what I know or think without bias. The information just… is. The good, the bad, and the ugly all need to be in front of the decision maker(s) to have a chance at a quality decision. From my perspective, the information I provide belongs…

  • Blackboard acquired patent ‘138 and brought a lawsuit against Desire2Learn. I would say 80-90% of the commentary about this case has been from anti-Blackboard crowd with about 90% of the rest from the let’s-wait-and-see crowd. Blackboard very much has been mum on the subject. I do not recall a blog of a single Blackboard supporter…

  • Clusters can making finding where a user was working a clusterf***. Users end up on a node, but they don’t know which node. Heck, we are ahead of the curve to get user name, date, and time. Usually checking all the nodes in the past few days can net you the sessions. Capturing the session…

  • Blackboard Vista tracks student activity. This tracking data is viewed as a critical feature of Vista. Our instructors depended on the information until we revoked their ability to run reports themselves due to performance issues. Campus administrators can still generate reports (though some still fail). We doubt the solution to this is Blackboard improving the…

  • Dumbfounded By The Numbers

    Chancellor Eroll B. Davis Jr told the Georgia Board of Regents, “We grew essentially by a large university.” The USG gained 10,077 students (my alma mater has ~11,000) in a year. They calculate these fall term to fall term. In the same fall term to fall term time period, in the same same university system,…

  • I just finished How Doctors Think yesterday. First impression was doctors don’t spend very much time thinking and gathering information to make a diagnosis. That impress struck a very negative chord with me as it sounds like in my profession of database and computer administration we spend hours picking apart the data we have to…

  • Doesn’t it always look like this? User runs script against service. Script operates so quickly and sucks so much traffic its obvious its a script. Service’s automates systems detects the abuse. User gets automated notice about violation of Terms of Use and prevention from accessing the site. User pitches a fit because he is “famous”.…