This morning, I received an e-mail asking if we’d opened up an office in Zambia.  Given my fawning over my trip last year to Botswana and South Africa, it was only natural that someone on the team be curious if I’d actually made the leap and left.  After all, he found someone on LinkedIn who claims to be a member of OpenSource Connections.  A new employee in the Zambia office?

Not quite.  As it turns out, the person who makes the claim to be a “co-ordinator” at OSC may simply be a mugu who goes by the name of “Simon Mugala.”  The more likely probability is that Mr. “Mugala” is a member of a 419 scammer who is trying to prove to the poor people who respond to his spam e-mails that he’s a legitimate member of a legitimate company that has millions, if not billions, in oil fortunes that need to be repatriated to the U.S. and only needs a bank account number to get that money over there.

The unknowing respondent (and, really, aren’t most people who respond to a 419 scam unknowing?) will probably look at Mr. “Mugala’s” profile on LinkedIn and assume that he’s from OSC.  However, even the most cursory examination will reveal the flimsiness of this claim:

• He has 0 connections.  This should be the big a-ha.  Unless he’s brand new to social networking and hasn’t had a chance to connect, then he should have some friends.  It’s possible that Zambia hasn’t discovered LinkedIn, but…
• He doesn’t link to the home page.  There isn’t a website link in the page for his (our) company.
• A Google search of Simon Mugala + OpenSource Connections yields no results.  You’d think he’d be in an employee directory somewhere.

What LinkedIn lacks is the way for me to tell them that he’s not a part of our organization.  Furthermore, what it lacks is the reputation engine to state that based on existing evidence, he’s probably not a member of our organization. 

As for “Simon,” I hope he exists, and I hope he’s a Zambian who loves open source and just accidentally filched our company’s name.  I’d love to see Zambia one day, as my friends Carla Rountree and Amanda Hilligas can testify to, and maybe I can meet “Simon” and we can talk about all things FOSS!

The founder of the World Wide Web fears it has become a web of lies.

At the initial test run of the Large Hadron Collider, Sir Tim Berners-Lee cited the spread fears of the world about the impact of the LHC on Earth via the Internet as an example of the Web gone wrong.   While his World Wide Web Foundation looked at labeling websites, similar to a simple IQ rating, they decided that multiple ways were needed by multiple users to brand the usefulness and viability of websites.

This leads to the need for a reputation engine for the Internet.  Just as Stephen Colbert’s assertion on Wikipedia that rabbits are carnivorous, should have been flagged as questionable because of Colbert’s lack of previous contributions and lack of previous information acceptance.  All it takes is a few people to believe what they see, tell their friends, and the wildfire of an urban legend is born.  It’s how Nigerian scamsters work.

Andy Gregorowicz and Mark Kramer at MITRE have come up with an initial pass at how to validate the information presented by multiple contributors.  Their paper points out the difficulty of determining provenance of information and the many to many relationship of contributors and information.  Still, it is good start towards separating truth from fiction on the Internet.

ABC News posted a story today positing the imminent decline of the small airport.  While the article only specifically cites the reduction of flights at the San Luis Obispo airport, it does draw more general conclusions about the impact of reduced airline traffic on regional and municipal airports.  A similar report in June prematurely predicted the demise of many airports. prompting at least one airport director to respond directly to the allegations.  While reports of the death of the regional and municipal airport may be greatly exaggerated, there is no doubt that airports cannot simply sit back and rely on airlines to do their marketing for them.  The presence of planes does not ensure the presence of passengers, and, as my Army buddies are wont to say, it’s time for airport marketers and directors to lean forward in the foxhole and take charge of their own destinies.

What can airports do?  Here are a few suggestions:

1. Talk to your constituents.  This isn’t just the flying public, but everyone who’s affected.  Airports mean jobs and commerce, so there are more people than just airport/airline employees and fliers who are affected.  Tell them what is going on more often, and don’t expect them to read the minutes of your board meetings.
2. Tell the good stories.  There are reasons that people like to fly out of municipal airports, and that message needs reinforcement.  As one passenger said, “When you want to make connections…it’s really important to have a local community airport.” 
3. Tell the WHOLE story.  It’s easy to go to an airfare aggregator such as Kayak and look at fares from regional and large airports.  Does your airport have shorter security lines?  Does it have more convenient parking?  Cool art exhibits?  Tell the world!

If regional and municipal airports don’t do their part to market to the flying public, then they will most certainly lose flights as the cost of oil and consolidation within the airline industry put the squeeze on the smaller players.

Is your airport’s website telling your story?  Does your website, the most commonly seen branding statement of your airport, tell the story you want it to?  If not, check out our AeroWeb solution and see if we can help.  Contact us to see how we can help you fight back.

On August 6, 2008, Jason Hull will be presenting at the AAAE NextGen Airport Conference and Expo. He will cover how airports can use their websites as marketing tools to passengers, airlines, and general aviation. He will discuss the case study of the Charlottesville Albemarle Airport website and the AeroWeb product and cover best practices of websites throughout the industry.

More information can be found here.

Slides of my presentation are available here.

Eric’s R&D project is HighTechCville, a website aimed at helping people identify technology communities of interest in the Charlottesville area. The engine behind the website pulls in information about people and companies from disparate sources such as the Neon Guild, the Virginia Biotechnology Association, LinkedIn, and personal and business web pages. It then performs cluster analysis on the people and organizations to determine communities of interest.

Naturally, I was curious about what our website (and appurtenant profiles) said about us through the eyes of HighTechCville. Our tags are Ruby and Rails, which is not surprising given the provenance is from our entry on the Working With Rails website. I decided to dig a little deeper to see the story that our website told to the search engines. The ten most common search terms leading to our site for the past three months are as follows:

apple itouch
itouch calendar
new pda
textmate clone
dedupe itunes
textmate windows
itouch
new apple itouch
open source connections
itunes dedupe

Of the top 10 terms, only 3 really relate to what we do. As an aside, I’m sure that simply posting these terms in this blog entry will only solidify the results. Naturally, this concerns me, as the people who need what we provide obviously aren’t coming to us via the website.

How should we tag our business? I think that our work falls into the following 5 broad categories:

Open Source for the Government: The government, as a steward of taxpayer money, has a responsibility to provide the highest value products and services for the lowest price possible. Paying license fees for commercial applications that can be performed equally well (and often better) by open source applications does not fall into the category of good stewardship. Furthermore, the government could and should own as much source code as possible to encourage broader and higher quality competition for subsequent work. This work takes two vectors–leveraging existing open source products and applications (and hopefully contributing back where possible) for government work, and helping government agencies learn the lessons of development in open source communities to improve their development methodologies. (Note: opensource.gov, if it was up to us, would encompass much more than just translations and analysis of open source media for government policy and implications) We feel that these lessons also segue well into our second business tag…

Build Better Software: Our developers are fascinated by the craft of software development. While not pedantic to the point of being obsessed about process for the sake of process, we do believe that software development is an art that follows the rules of Pareto optimality. In terms that undersell the definition, 80% of the work in software development is plumbing, and 20% is “secret sauce.” We leverage and create tools which minimize the amount of human time necessary to get to the point where developer skill has the maximum impact. This covers the range of the software development life cycle, from ensuring that the right questions are being asked to determine a pain point we are to actually solve (often rather than the one that is first described to us) through to code coverage metrics and unit testing to automated test scripts before deployment. We also are avid proponents of Agile Development methodologies during development to ensure that our skills are applied to the right problems at the right times to maximize customer value. Agile Development involves rapid prototyping, which helps us help customers to move…

From 0.1 to 1.0: We assist companies who have a great concept to get through prototyping phases and to develop a working application that is an embodiment of their ideas. Often, this occurs when companies successfully raise an initial round of venture capital financing and now need to bring a product or service to market to generate beginning sales or beta customers. They must demonstrate working features for customers to get orders for the full product, and often do not have the team put together to meet the aggressive deadlines of their investors. We quickly embed ourselves with the business and deliver on the highest priority features to facilitate rapid sales cycles. Of course, we don’t just focus on version 1.0, as we specialize in…

Web 3.0 for the government: The government owes it to citizens to be as transparent as possible, and it has started to achieve this in limited areas, such as the TSA blog and the Charlottesville Albemarle Airport Authority blog. However, this is only a small step in the right direction. Not only does the government need to reach out more to its citizens in a proactive manner and engage them (note: the TSA is experiencing the problem of engagement, discussed here. They could use a few hours with the Rimm-Kaufman Group.) Making the plethora of information available more user-friendly and accessible for self-help is a good start. The government also has another, more somber need for Web 3.0. No matter how one defines it, the United States is locked in a war on terror against unconventional enemies who are very smart, very adaptive, and very technology savvy. We need to maximize our usage of Web 3.0 technologies to get in front of enemy decision cycles and interdict their actions. Our intelligence agencies collect far more signal and human intelligence than our analysts can sift through, and throwing more analysts at the problem is not the answer; technology is the only way we can identify what analysts should take a deeper look at.

Location aware applications: One specific area of focus of leveraging Web 3.0 capabilities is in location aware applications. These applications provide context based on geographic location and temporal activity to isolate information specific to a given area of geographical interest. Identifying not only where information is tied to, but also who is interested in the same location helps quickly automate creation of communities of interest based on the specifically identified locus. Through the use of geographical information systems, users can overlay and share appropriate information in a visually intuitive manner that helps others quickly grasp the salient points to be shared. This can also be used to plot information over time (time is, after all, another point on a geographic grid) for users to see quick patterns emerging.

Clearly we have a long way to go to get our website to tell the story of our business. Maybe a pleading letter to Matt Cutts is in order.

How do you perceive us? Are you surprised at the tags we have self-identified? What tags would you use to describe us? What tags would you use to describe your business?