It turns out that we have lessons to learn from Uganda – more specifically, from web coverage of events in Uganda this week.

I’m constantly trying to improve my own ability to follow real-time world events, whether through social media, advanced search technologies, or aggregation of multiple old/new information technologies. About this time last year, as the Georgian-Russian skirmishes were just kicking off, I wrote about keeping up with information on international events (“Using Web 2.0 to Track a Political Crisis“).

In the intervening year, development of real-time tools and techniques has really blossomed. This past week, the onset of violent political unrest in Uganda has served as yet another crucible in which new techniques and web-based technologies can be tested and tweaked.

We’re still well inside a week since the onset of this round of violence in Uganda, so there’s not an enormous amount of reporting in traditional “1.0″ western sources. If you’re interested in the actual political background, context, and parties involved in the Ugandan unrest, one quick read is from the Uganda Independent’s blog, “For the International Audience: The Kampala Riots Explained.” Make sure you read through the many comments, however, as the post has now sparked a blizzard of competing explanations, an angry diversity of opinion likely representing the fissures behind the uprising itself.

But as for keeping up with the latest events in Uganda, now just four days since the unrest flared, I have been having an experience much like the first few hours of the Iranian elections crisis earlier this year. It’s been frustratingly difficult to get up-to-the-minute information on events in Uganda, as it was initially from Iran. In the latter case, though, the size and strategic importance of Iran combined with the large numbers in the Iranian diaspora, ultimately led to an explosion in eyeballs trained on events being tweeted and Facebooked out of Iran, a more developed and urbanized country than Uganda, with much greater cellphone penetration and internet access for citizen reporting. In Uganda, not so much.

I’ve just read a thoughtfully analytical look at how web-based social media can help audiences inside and outside Uganda keep up with, and make sense of, the events of the past four days, and with really helpful insights for tracking this crisis and others going forward. The piece is “Aynchronous Info, Disjointed Data and Crisis Reporting,” on the Appfrica.net blog. It’s written by Kampala-resident Jonathan Gosier (Follow him on Twitter, @jongos), a software developer and entrepreneur with Appfrica Labs.

Jon happens to be a 2009 TEDGlobal Fellow. and really knows his social-technologies. His review of crisis-reporting capabilities mentions the use of such apps or sites as Twitter, Ushahidi, Plurk, Swiftriver, FriendFeed, and Facebook, among othes. A major focus in his article is the role of citizen reporting – and the incumbent guidelines on the citizen consumer of that kind of reporting.

On day three of the Kampala riots we saw evidence of this. People on the ground wrote about the situation as it unfolded through out the day until things began to finally settle down. Then 8 hours later we began to see people in the US retweeting things that happened hours ago (in the morning for us) as ‘news’. To them it was indeed news as they were just waking up to it. This in turn created confusion for us back here. (”Have the riots started again or is that just an old re-tweet?”). This is not a problem of user behavior, rather it’s a problem of the UI itself. Retweeting messages from friends and followers is something users of Twitter have always done. However, what’s missing is some way to group these updates together, so as to build a more accurate timeline of activity.”  - Jonathan Gosier

Jon’s article is not entirely comprehensive; for example he cites the shortage online of photos of this week’s unrest, yet I quickly found this small collection on Flickr and others, and they’re certainly worth a look to convey a powerful visual image of events. But overall his insights into the nature of the audience for socially-reported news are a very helpful addition to an emerging issue we need to think about: how the Crowd reads the Crowd, including perceptions, warping biases, and technological constraints.

By the way, about an hour before I published this post, Jeff Benson (Twitter’s @jefferysan) tweeted this optimistic update: “Well, the horrendous traffic this morning suggests that everything is back to normal. I hate when “good signs” aren’t that good…#Kampala.”  And sure enough, within ten minutes, Uganda-watchers outside the country were re-tweeting the news….

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For the past year, whenever my group has had government visitors to Microsoft labs in Redmond to see advanced technologies, we’ve considered whether or not to show them a demo of a particular “secret project” being developed, now called Microsoft Vine.

If the group was with local or state government, or related to homeland security, or emergency responders and the like, the answer was easier, because that’s the sweet spot it’s designed for.

But I was always tempted to show it even to my federal government friends – and anyone else – just because it’s so impressive!

No more dilemma: Vine is being unveiled this week to the world, being rolled out live in a controlled Seattle beta initially. It is a very cool, highly visual, local/social networking service that adds to your Twitter-like updates access to 20,000 local media sources, along with incorporated local-government and emergency-management notification feeds from government sources like police, fire, and federal agencies like NOAA.

One of our most impressive executives, Tammy Savage, had the original idea after Hurricane Katrina and has led this important public-saftey initiative ever since.  Implementation has required an alignment of expertise in social software, new media, cloud computing and cloud services, and advanced mobile functionality. This morning the early reviews have been impressive:

Seattle Times: Microsoft Debuts Vine: Twitter + Facebook on Steroids

TechCrunch: Microsoft Vine to connect family, friends when crisis hits (good screenshots).

Mashable: Microsoft Vine is Twitter for Emergencies

Econsultancy: Could Vine be Microsoft’s first real social media hit?

Vine was initially designed and prototyped within the Windows Live team, and about a year ago was transferred into the Start Up Business Accelerator group (which sits like my group under Craig Mundie) for robust incubation - the precursor for scaling and transitioning into an existing business division for full global support. That should be happening with Vine over the next months.

A tough technical challenge – though no surprise to anyone who’s worked in the semantic-analysis space – has been getting the localization to work reliably. Vine’s access to hyper-local information from mobile devices has to mesh with local news and alerts from the thousands of feeds and notification services.  We’re continuing lab work on improving the recognition and extrapolation of precise place names in unstructured text, a classic problem in geospatial analysis and software.  A review in SearchEngineLand (“Microsoft Goes Social & Local with Vine“) points out just how important the localization is, and the promise of having precision hyperlocal targeting in Vine’s social soctware:

An application that can connect with other social services, allow both sending and receiving of data to and from those services, pull in local news from media outlets and other feeds (like local blogs, say), and add local context to all of that data in the form of mapping … now that could become a very compelling tool.”

And yes, we’ve been working on the business model – a common criticism of Twitter and the like. As ZDnet reports (“Microsoft to begin public test of Twitter-like notification service“), Microsoft says ““The baseline offering of Microsoft Vine will available at no charge. Over time, you can expect to see premium services added on to the baseline offering, for a fee.”

Sign up for the beta yourself.  One thing I notice: there’s no technological substitute for some old-fashioned realities of public safety.  Vine offers a handy wallet-sized card, to print out and clip – yes kids, it’s an actual physical artifact!  And I spy with my little eye a reassuring caveat in the fine print on every page of the Vine demo, down there with the legal notice: “In case of an emergency dial 911.”

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Political junkies are drumming their fingers mid-day this Tuesday.  They’ve likely already voted, but have no access to exit-poll results until early evening.  Mashup maps of results from sites like Twitter, essentially self-selected and self-reported exit polls like this one at SetFive, or this one mapping general Twitter election buzz, are fun but wildly inaccurate as election tracks.

You can try to get your regular work done, as I’m sporadically attempting, but it’s tempting to waste your time surfing from site to site, as the London Times Online helpfully points to “the Top 25 sites for U.S. election obsessives.”  Huffington Post also has an election-freak’s treasure trove of links and feeds.

But the rubber meets the road in rolling fashion tonight, and if you’d like to get the actual numbers tonight as quickly as the talking heads are getting them, here are links to several battleground-state official sites for results in real time, along with poll-closing times. All times are Eastern Standard Time.

6:00 / 7:00 pm: Indiana
7:00 pm: Virginia
7:00 pm: Georgia
7:00 / 8:00 pm: Florida
7:30 pm: North Carolina
7:30 pm: Ohio
8:00 pm: Michigan
8:00 pm: Missouri
8:00 pm: Pennsylvania
9:00 pm: Colorado
9:00 pm: Minnesota
9:00 pm: New Mexico
10:00 pm: Iowa
10:00 pm: Nevada
11:00 pm: California (check those ballot propositions)
11:00 pm: Washington (many at Microsoft watching the big gubernatorial race)
1:00 am: Alaska (c’mon, you’ll still be up)

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Fact: This morning’s press release from CERN: “Geneva, 10 September 2008. The first beam in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN was successfully steered around the full 27 kilometres of the world’s most powerful particle accelerator at 10h28 this morning. This historic event marks a key moment in the transition from over two decades of preparation to a new era of scientific discovery.” (LHC background here.)

Analysis: Early this morning, Twitter alerted me that the Earth was still spinning. Below I explain how.

Remember the old DEW Line?  The Distant Early Warning system stretched across Canada, and to Iceland in the east and Sarah Palin-country in the west, during the Cold War to trigger an alert if Soviet bombers tiptoed over the Pole heading for the U.S. border.  If you grew up in the grand old days of the Cold War you kept wondering what was going on up at the DEW Line, or at least I did as a kid with an inquiring (if jittery) mind.

When Google first made available its “Google Alerts” feature, allowing search results off news and web queries to be delivered in near-real-time by email, I went a little hog-wild and set up several hundred. The ones which a lot of people set up, I did as well – alerts on the names of professional colleagues who get quoted frequently, old girlfriends who are sometimes in the news on the West Coast, stealthy startups that friends are establishing, international topics and crisis-points which may periodically flare up. Having a little background in Boolean logic and query structure helps, to filter out crap and duplicative hits.

One of the odder alerts I set up, late one night while goofing off, is a slightly complex one about the Rapture, yes from Christian eschatology, designed to let me know ASAP that someone has posted somewhere on the Internet that they believe it has just occurred. If and when it happens, I’ll either be zooming skywards myself (doubtful but nice to contemplate) or sitting in a diner wondering why I can’t find my pleasant waitress. It would be nice to know why, at that point, and finding out via my mobile device buzzing is as likely and efficient a way as any.

Last year I began experimenting with Microsoft’s Live News Search, which appears to have more contributing news sources than Google News, and I can RSS feed those for endless delivery options of breaking news into other pages and services.

Lately I’ve added email and SMS alerts for Twitter searches, and several other alert-generating services using Twitter’s open API, as a helpful means of generating real-time alerts of breaking news and important events.  The lifeblood of information coursing through the web’s veins on Twitter, in real time from the crowd, seems destined to outperform CNN or Fox News, and certainly traditional wire services when it comes to delivering news first.  “Wire services” – how musty and quaint a term that’s becoming.

Early this morning I had a great opportunity with LHC (or, in News Search RSS parlance, LHC).

Waiting for News of the Black Hole 

While waiting for the End Times myself, I’ve noted other periodic threats to The Earth and All We Hold Dear, like the LHC firing up.  As Wikipedia puts it, quite neutrally but with links to outrageous scare-mongering, “Although some individuals, including some scientists, have questioned the safety of the planned experiments in the media and through the courts, the consensus in the scientific community is that there is no basis for any conceivable threat from the LHC particle collisions.” 

Yet as one news story noted yesterday in the frenzied run-up to the first experiment, “the collider has been the subject of intense fear among the public. Public-relations staffers at the LHC are receiving a flood of worried and angry phone calls and e-mails, reported James Gillies, head of PR for the collider. Nobel prize winner Frank Wilczek of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has even received death threats, according to the BBC.”

“They phone me and say: “I am seriously worried. Please tell me that my children are safe,” Gillies told the BBC. “There are a number who say: ‘You are evil and dangerous and you are going to destroy the world.”  – James Gillies, LHC Director of Public Relations

So here’s how I used Twitter to keep track, just in case, starting with the official CERN Twitter feed at http://twitter.com/cern; they posted rarely but authoritatively.  I also follow several news organizations on Twitter, like CNN, AP, the New York Times, and a few local news sites, but those were unhelpful with LHC. A Twitter-specific breaking-news service, “BreakingNewsOn,” is a great one to follow, though lately they’ve injected several appeals for donations into their excellent newsfeed.  They provide a kind of serious DrudgeReport newsfeed (which I also have – love their use of the siren-light as their Twitter icon) but without the Paris Hilton or dingo-ate-my-baby stories, and they actually set up a subset of LHC news, at http://twitter.com/LHCLatest.

Many of the twitterers I follow regularly were also interested in LHC, and so late last night and early this morning I noticed others tweeting their observations, like Robert Scoble pointing to a nice online tour of CERN here.

Finally, if you like your news crowd-sourced, you could follow the Twitterverse’s observations and contributions at http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23LHC, which takes advantage of the popular “hash-tag” feature and aggregates all tweets with the tag #LHC.  That helped a lot, although there was quite a bit of frivolous (okay, funny) stuff going on there

So, the sun is now rising on the East Coast, signaling LHC’s failure to destroy our planet.  I’m already monitoring several new candidates as the next one-fell-swoop threat to human life. Let me know if you have better or more interesting ways of accomplishing this – I’d like to be the first to know….

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Just a quick note between conflicting conference sessions in different locations around the DC Beltway, to note that WIRED’s premier national-security blogger Noah Schactman may have just cracked the code – or at least “a” code – on where the ongoing dispute over “control of cyber” is heading in national security circles, in his latest DangerRoom post (“Air Force Cyber Command Could Return, with Nukes“).

The dispute has been reported lightly, in places like the NextGov blog (“The Cyber Command Power Play?”), and usually boils down to a perceived battle between the U.S. Air Force and the nation’s Intelligence Community, over control of the increasingly central issue of cyber offense and cyber defense.

I’d been alerted to the debate earlier by Jason Bacheler, one of the up-and-coming new generation of technologically adept Air Force officers.  Jason (LinkedIn profile here) has been serving as DIA’s deputy CTO for the past couple of years, and his Twitter feed and other observations are typically spot-on with political acumen and policy depth. 

By the way, a central figure in this is Gen. James Cartwright, the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs (bio here). When I briefed “Hoss” Cartwright a couple of times (once during his tenure running Strategic Command when he was interested in launching Web 2.0 tools there, more recently when he was new at JCS and was interested in the Alien program), he had enormous interest in the outer edges of technological capabilities and cyber issues, and a real appetite for the opinionated discourse of his people – good sign, I thought.  He’s also a demonstrably gifted political actor in his realm, so his role in the cyber debate could be decisive… Oh, and he isn’t USAF, by the way – he’s a Marine.

Leads me to believe that Noah at WIRED should request a one-on-one interview with Cartwright; I bet it’d be granted and I bet it’d be fascinating…

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Channel 10 podcast

I’m a big fan of the cool site Channel 10 and its podcasts and blogs (“a place for enthusiasts with a passion for technology. Through a world-wide network of contributors, Channel 10 covers the latest news in music, mobility, photography, videography, gaming, and new PC hardware and software”).

So I was chuffed when the ubiquitous Jon Udell interviewed me a week ago for Channel 10 (“Lewis Shepherd discusses the Institute for Advanced Technology in Governments“).

Jon asked some really thoughtful, insightful questions – we wound up getting much deeper than planned into topics like Government 2.0 relationships between citizens and public data, and successful routes to innovation in government bureaucracies. 

Channel 10 has posted the whole darn 46-minute conversation we had; my, I do prattle on. But they also have the full text at the link, so you can just skim for particular items of interest.  Pretty wide-ranging topics touched on, including a couple from my government years (Intellipedia, touch-tables) and some more recent Microsoft technologies (Surface, PhotoSynth, PopFly, WorldWideTelescope, Live Translator and others).

Just a few snippets:

JU: Microsoft’s Institute for Advanced Technology in Government is a mysterious new organization that hasn’t been heard from much. Readers of magazines like Government Computer News may have seen some notices about it, and may have noted that former CIA Assistant Director Jim Simon is the founder…  But not much else is known. So, what’s this all about?

LS: Well, I’d say a better word than mysterious would be quiet. And that’s because we’re new and small. The Institute was set up by Bill Gates and Craig Mundie in 2004. They decided that Microsoft should play a more strategic role in the eyes of government….

   …

LS: We have visibility into the entirety of strategic and future-oriented work that Microsoft is doing. Not just strictly MSR, but also incubation, Live Labs, Office Labs, forward-thinking people in various product groups.

   …

LS: What I see is a changing mindset about Microsoft, and the role it can play in government. It’s not just about are we on a Windows platform. It’s about what can I use, on my computer or mobile device, that’ll enable me to do things I couldn’t do before. If those are Microsoft things with a Windows label, that’s great. If they’re not, if they’re cool, funky, web-centric things like Popfly, that’s great too.

   …

JU: Tell me if this fits into your charter. A big aspect of what I think of as Government 2.0 is the emerging availability of various sources of government data. There’s a growing consensus that data will be made available, and that’s happening, but in a way that reminds me of how things were, and mostly still are, on the scientific web. Yeah, there’s the data, go grab the gzipped tarball and have fun with it. As opposed to offering a service layer interposed between both applications and human being. I see an interesting possible role for Microsoft, and I see it as extension of something that’s happening in the relationship between MSR and the scientific community…  One of the things I’m seeing Microsoft consistently doing in its partnerships with scientists is to provide both infrastructure and consulting expertise, to help people wrap their arms around large datasets and make them useful in ways they wouldn’t otherwise be.

I’m wondering if there isn’t scope for something analogous in the government space, as these datasets begin to be made available, but not necessarily in ways that enable citizens to ask and answer meaningful questions, or relate the raw information to policy.

LS: You’ve hit on something that’s really important, and yes, it’s an interest of ours. It’s very hard to do, but if you do it, the value is tremendous… When you think about large volumes of data being transmitted in both directions — from citizens to governments, and from governments to citizens — it really opens up the world. We haven’t figured out all the ways, but it’s fascinating to think about the diverse set of enterprise challenges that governments face, and about the technologies we have in the nooks and crannies of Microsoft that might be able to help.

JU: It sounds like you’re having fun snooping around finding them.

LS: I’m having a blast!

With any luck, an Obama or McCain administration will put some momentum into areas like Government 2.0 and extending a social-networking paradigm out to polity relationships.  They’re each making the right noises right now.

These excerpts don’t do John’s great questions and the exchange which followed justice – get the full interview and podcast here).

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Fact: Gartner now says that “Web 2.0 software” is falling from its “Peak of Inflated Expectations” and is on its way to a “Trough of Disillusionment.”  However, Gartner finds that wiki software has traversed that path already and is now well on its way up again to mature enterprise acceptance as a valuable productivity tool.

Analysis: Gartner’s just released their 2008 “Hype Cycle” report on Social Software - you know, stuff like public virtual worlds and Web 2.0 tools.

(I don’t know the legality of republishing the actual chart itself, so I’m not including it; I use the Microsoft enteprise license to access Gartner research.  I do note that a Web 2.0 enthusiast from the Netherlands has already posted the new Hype Cycle chart another new and related Hype Cycle chart, on “emerging technologies,” as a Flickr image here. There’s great overlap between the two reports.)

I’ve written before about the usefulness of Gartner analyses; I have to admit that Hype Cycles are my favorites. There’s something about internally debating their judgment calls as your eye travels the path, from pre-adoption “Technology Triggers,” through the bubble-esque “Peak of Inflated Expectations,” and right down into the depths of the “Trough of Disillusionment.” 

If you’re an enterprise IT guy, in a CIO or CTO role or investigating/recommending/approving new technology investments, you really wind up focusing most time on the slow ascending climb to the right of the chart, what Gartner calls the “Slope of Enlightenment.”  Just as in the old days when corporate “data-processing” chiefs lived by the mantra “No one ever got fired for buying IBM,” today’s CIO’s rely on technology that has essentially graduated to Gartner’s “Plateau of Productivity.”

Several other initial observations on the chart:the two Hype Cycle charts:

• Newest disruptive technology trigger charted: “Erasable Paper Printing Systems,” something being researched by numerous large companies like HP and Microsoft as well as already in startup mode, but pegged by Gartner as still 10 years or more from mainstream adoption
• Microsoft’s Surface has achieved brand dominance, as Gartner puts “Surface Computers” on the rise in visibility
• Other key investments of Microsoft Research are validated with positive momentum ascribed to “Mobile Robots,” “Augmented Reality,” and “Green IT,” though only the last one is within 5 years of mature adoption
• “Cloud Computing” is still on the rise, not having peaked in hype yet, though many would find that hard to believe – with its Time Magazine cover last year, it’s practically reached the point of being satired on The Daily Show
• “Public Virtual Worlds” are right alongside “Web 2.0″ in still heading down toward their disappointment trough
• Furthest to the right – meaning most mature and enterprise-worthy – is the seemingly venerable “Basic Web Services.”

I really like these reports for a number of reasons – among other things, it looking at them together makes clear the social aspect of a number of more mature technologies (Tablet PC, Electronic Paper) which I favor, and which too often are recognized only for their technical aspects, not the socially enabling and disruptive benefits within and across organizations. 

The Gartner report also allows the blogosphere and twitterverse to step back from the moment-to-moment faddishness of the social software sector, and reflect upon the larger context of the individual technologies.  One measure of health: not a single technology earned the dubious distinction of “Obsolete Before Plateau,” a mark of shame which Gartner regularly applies to technologies that are getting hype but show no longterm promise.

Taken together, the social software space appears robust and very, very interesting.  Get a hold of the full report, it’s worth it.

Note: post updated 8/12/2008 to add references to a second Hype Cycle report on “Emerging Technologies”

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Fact: According to the latest McKinsey Global Survey report, “Building the Web 2.0 Enterprise,” many companies find themselves actually changing organizationally, both internally and externally, as a result of adopting Web 2.0 tools and practices. 

Analysis:  While you need to register to read the complete article, Dion Hinchcliffe’s Social Computing Magazine has a helpful review, “McKinsey Releases 2nd Survey on Web 2.0 in Business,” which notes that as companies mature from experimentation to broader integrated deployment, their enterprise character sometimes morphs.  As Social Computing’s Raj Sheelvant recounts:

26 percent of the executives surveyed report that Web 2.0 tools have changed interactions with customers and suppliers, while 33 percent say these technologies have created new roles or functions inside the organization. A third of the satisfied respondents even feel that Web tools are changing its structure. Companies are using Web 2.0 tools more extensively for interactions with their customers, suppliers, and outside experts… In addition, they are forming networks outside their corporate walls.”

The centrifugal force of collaboration is potentially very powerful – and very disruptive to formerly closed and hardwired organizations.  The national security community (DoD, intelligence agencies, FBI, DHS, etc.) is of course famous for being closed and hardwired. Enterprise security inside their firewalls takes on a whole new meaning, as I learned and practiced while there for a few years.  So the prospect of disruptive openings to the outside has of course been controversial – but enticing nevertheless, for agency directors and uniformed general officers as much as for the regular knowledge workers who’ve suffered inside stovepipes for decades.

Risk management can protect classified data appropriately and still allow these new disruptive practices to flourish in the community.  “Forming networks outside the walls” of an intelligence agency sounds terrible if you’re thinking incoming espionage or trojans, but great if you’re talking about CIA analysts reading NSA databases, FBI agents chatting in realtime with DHS watch officers, or Coast Guard vessels being tipped off by automated alerts to relevant new NGA imagery. 

The controversy lessens with each progressive step.  To help matters along, Bob Gourley, formerly of DIA fame and now running CTO Vision, has just published a solid article in Social Computing Magazine entitled “Social Media and the National Security Professional.”  Great basic advice for those in-the-community who may not be aware of how to take full advantage of new tools and approaches like blogging, Facebook, and LinkedIn.  Crazy guy that he is, Bob uses me for comic instruction fodder for your visit to his Twitter account:

“If you desire to “follow” me on Twitter all you have to do is sign up for a Twitter account and click the “follow” button. Then you can read those micro posts whenever they are made. You can also find other national security professionals to follow on Twitter, and they will be able to find you as well.”

“For example, from my page, look for the graphic that shows Lewis Shepherd and click on his head. You will see his Twitter site. Or if you don’t remember what Lewis looks like can click on the list of people I follow and find him there. Following feeds like this will keep you informed of key meetings, conferences and events and of course blog posts.”

My headache aside, Bob’s summary point is right on: “a key benefit of Social Media for national security planners is to accelerate good ideas, whether they be good ideas for policy or good ideas for technology.” He outlines several actual scenarios of the combinatorial power of matricing “crowds, random individuals, fields of experts or trusted friends” together as sources of real-time information. 

At some point, we’ll also begin to see internal evidence within IC agencies and DoD bureaucracies of the kinds of organizational reform and change which are becoming apparent in the Enterprise 2.0 private sector.  What will those changes look like, and how will they mesh with the continuing constraints of collecting and managing top secret, compartmentalized information?  

One safe prediction: it won’t look like the bureaucratically-focused upheavals creakily designed in the original post-9/11 reforms. Changes will likely develop organically from grassroots collaboratively-adopted business practices.  They’ll almost certainly be more subtle, but more significant, than diktats from above.

Stay tuned…

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My gut tells me that the latest round in the Georgian-Russian crisis is going to get ugly.

CNN’s “Russian Tanks Rolling into Georgian Breakaway” shows one thing: our old friend Vladimir Putin feels free to call the shots.

Twitter alerts can only get you so far, in following a crisis.  Check out these first attempts: this Twitter search or this one, or this Live News feed.  You can RSS any of these by the way.

I’m working on several Popfly-designed orchestrations of alerts and newsfeeds to keep me updated on the latest news from South Ossetia, incorporating crowd-sourced information as much as I can. 

Interfax Screenshot

I’m also using my bilingual browser to surf some Russian sites.  I won’t neglect the Georgian ones as well, as soon as I find them; many have been reported to be the victims of curiously timed distributed denial of service (see the precursor to this action from two weeks ago, “Georgian President’s Website Falls Under DDOS Attack“).  Click the images to the right to see some bilingual-surfing examples. One is the official Interfax Russian news agency’s reporting, showing the Russian side of the story (English machine translation on the bottom of the horizontally split screen).  The other is the view from Pravda, still the voice of the Russian Communist Party, and shows that in this incident they’re supporting the Medvedev-Putin policy. In the Pravda case, I changed the setting of the IE machine translation plug-in to view the two versions side-by-side, with English on the right-hand side.

Pravda Screenshot

I’ve also been inspired by some of the thoughts Helen Thompson raises in her AFCEA Signal blog this week on info overload (“Incoming: The Patterns of Data Management“).

Thank goodness I kept my clearances when I left government last December.  I’m going to get to a computer with JWICS access and check out one of CIA’s newest services, “Samizdat,” as described in the recent CIO magazine profile of CIA’s new IT:

The CIA also boasts of grassroots Web-driven efforts that are sprouting up inside the intel community. One such effort is called Samizdat (which is a Russian word for self-publishing) and is a collaboration among the intelligence community analysts who follow Russian affairs that the CIA funded and provides the networking capabilities. The website incorporates Web 2.0 technologies, like blogs and wikis, breaking news intel and video.”

“[Ken] Westbrook notes that the idea bubbled up from the analysts themselves and was funded from a special CIA budget for just such a thing, and the project moved quickly by using agile development methods. ‘We put the analysts in a room with the developers to work this out,’ he says.”

My first post-Cold-War visit inside an intelligence agency was in late September 2001 at the Office of Naval Intelligence (I’d had a couple of earlier episodes in the 1980s).  One of the senior old-hand ONI analysts I met then, let’s call him “Chris,” had spent decades specializing in following the Soviet Navy before the old USSR dissolved, just as I had once been a Soviet foreign-policy analyst for OSD. Chris explained to me the tremendous decline in the numbers of analysts following Soviet/Russian affairs since the fall of the Berlin Wall.  They’d either retired, been RIF’d, or been “retrained” to do something completely different.

I suspect we may have to retrain the retrained…

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