Don’t you just hate waking up in the morning dreaming about a blog post you read? And because, as we all learned from that Batman episode, you can’t read in your dreams, you can’t remember where you read it so you’re faced with the choice of spending hours reading RSS archives to find the original source, if one actually exists, or writing about it and hoping it’s fairly original before you kill the memory with whisky?
I know I do. Anyway, apologies if someone wrote exactly this in the past few days. I did check the two blogs I know I was reading in my dream and didn’t see it there, but in any event I hope I add enough value along the way in the retelling, though the more I write the weirder the idea seems, so I suspect it’s a symptom of a bad falafel. And yes, I just admitted to dreaming about reading blog posts. Hence the reference to killing memories with whiskey.
So.
I think Xobni and other contact management enhancement tools, or possibly the enterprise itself, could possibly benefit by tallying the amount of bandwidth devoted to individual contacts. Words of email, characters of Twitter/IM, minutes of audio or video chats, etc. Ideally we’d tap into the lower levels of the network layer and figure things out from there. Oh, and if it’s not too much to ask, please surrender your phone logs as well, mmmK?
Obviously (obviously!) certain forms of communication would be adjusted to a certain factor to normalize the inputs, so a series of emails would end up ranking similarly to a phone call. The value of each connection would vary from person to person, and possibly from day to day, but this ought to be something that can be extrapolated over a historical data set, right?
I’m aware of studies done with email chains within companies to establish defacto social networks and identify key influencers, but what about on a larger scale?
When you get down to it, if enough people visit a given blog, that site is effectively a member of the company. Let’s take Bob as an example, and suppose he was a key factor in the success of project DiaperBag (don’t ask; the person in charge of naming projects was going through a thing.) Now let’s apply a Google PageRank-style algorithm to spread Bob’s value across the people he spends his bandwidth on. What are the odds that Stack Overflow gets more credit for the win than Alice down the hall did for supplying some tips on the semi-documented API?
Now let’s break the work/life balance. What does it mean when someone downloads a torrent? What’s the value of that connection? Is there a bias that would apply to time of day, so that, say, YouTube videos from a particular channel after dinner would signal a different level of meaning than if they were viewed at 2 in the afternoon?
I don’t know what it means, but we clearly live in a world where everything is becoming measurable; just take a look at Nicholas Feltron’s annual reports for an example. I’m just wondering what would happen if we were to quantify relationships a bit more, is all.
