Pocket PC Thoughts: Microsoft's
In-House Sociologist
"Ever get the feeling your Usenet newsgroup list
is being watched? By Microsoft? If so, consider yourself right. Thanks to the
expertise of sociologist Marc Smith, Microsoft is keeping a close eye on
newsgroups and other public e-mail lists, which it has identified as the
Internet's undervalued "knowledge management application." In Microsoft's
research and development labs, Smith has spent the past several years slicing
and dicing data about messages and message authors in an ambitious effort to
help people make sense of the newsgroup manifold--the hordes of know-it-alls,
flame warriors, spammers and neophytes who, by Smith's estimate, last year
numbered more than 100 million in the Usenet network of e-mail threads, or
newsgroups. Smith's idea is that you can tell a lot about the quality of data by
tracking its newsgroup contributors' social habits--a notion that holds promise
for sorting through millions of messages, and peril for a online world
increasingly skittish about invasions of privacy. Following the launch of
Microsoft's NetScan application for analyzing newsgroups and the people who post
to them, Smith spoke to CNET News.com about NetScan, about Microsoft's interest
in e-mail lists and about an application under development that would link
objects in the real world to an array of online information."
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