Shhh! Microsoft’s Listening

The Fight: Though at this point I am somehow able to take anything as a compliment with just the right sprinkle of delusion, I’ll take that strongly as a compliment and keep doing my thing. Sorry about the cats but this story was just so big (I thought I might have been blowing lids off things — at the time at least) I couldn’t wait to lay down either cat pictures or “cat” pictures. I’ll make up for it.

lame: “A responsible journalist would issue a retraction immediately.” Okay let me field this one seriously. Look back at the stupid thing, it’s me saying Woah I’m seeing some strange shit which at the least means things you do are going through Microsoft’s servers, possibly because of this or that based on the timing but I wasn’t sure and that it wasn’t my department. After that, after I hit the button on this, within no time explanations were offered, this Weave thing. And then you come in and not only do you read my article, you post in it, adding to the counterbalancing of my FUD and lies after having read, like other people who read this, the comments which because of how I write read with a greater air of authority and truth than comments anywhere else. Scrolling up I see some good shit right here. The last thing I’ve purported to be is a responsible journalist however I spent a good chunk of time going through empirical data to put together the parts of this that were not speculation and between that and the comments, you know what that makes this? Good OC and I stand by it.

Your exception is noted, but summarily to be written off, to me, as having been produced by a bigger putz than myself. That said, keep it coming and I’ll do the same.

Starting with, now that I know what to look for, a thorough crunch of the numbers to confirm that this Weave program isn’t, for example, leaving the Microsoft browser stuck in this mobilizer mode. Because it’s been mobilized, that means there’s no javascript in the code which means these hits don’t get caught by Google Analytics. Now most journalists at this point would have a lack of data to offer you anything further having been offered things by the reader. But not me, I’m a borderline computer genius and in addition to Google Analytics I’ve set this place to sort of ping my own server, if you will, every time a human, not a bot, draws out either a regular web page from our server, a single article I wrote from the RSS feeds or both. Because I have that data in this case I can now figure out more answers including isolating all WP traffic and then all Weave traffic within that WP traffic and see if there’s an additive or a displacement effect on the Weave traffic against the non-Weave WP traffic and then report back. I’ll just shut up and go do that right now.

PS: You use postscripts in a comment? What is this, a Civil War soldier’s letter to his wife That’s worse than my signing my drivel. And I did research that. Even included it in the article if I recall (it’s tl;dr, not going to reread it, a vague recollection suffices). And here’s where you also wrong about what I did or did not research, the dumbshit conclusion you drew, if you don’t mind my correcting you with more FUD drivel: If it’s hosted by Microsoft, this data is in Microsoft’s hands. Whether or not they’re aware of it (actually at least a handful of them are having read this from microsoft.com hosts (meaning from the campus) since I posted it, two of whom were using Google Reader I should add, the data is relaxing on their servers and will be there forever, free for them to use in whatever way they want. When they cooked up this cloud engine thing that the Weave man used with his software, do you actually think datamining was not on the list of reasons on their blackboard to go forward with this along with plans of how to parse it up to work to their favor? If you think of that, you think less of Microsoft than I do.

In addition to sites like this, I monitor the hell out of my own sites I serve myself (this is hosted by Doug Smith’s ISP) including my own sites and those of my friends and clients. In fact I made my first phone website, blownfuze.org, chiefly because I wanted to create such logs to analyze. I made a site, put a lot of hours into it, just to amass logs to dig apart. That’s how valuable logs are to me and other people and in my case, other than indirect knowledge from learning some nerd social psych to apply later, since I chose not to attempt to monetize that site (or batteryboss.org) I had no financial incentive.

You can bet your cute little ass that Microsoft is interested in such data, and they should be. That’s Google’s bread and butter right there, this data and how it’s helped them learn how to target, for example, ads they broker. Did you know that for Facebook to attract a visitor’s click on an ad they have to show it to ten times as many people as Google does? Pretty weak right? Well, this is one of the things a company, which by the way is vested in Facebook I believe, gets better at that. So you can run and retract that homeboy.

The Fight: Thanks again, that made me feel good, waking up to that. I have a fragile self esteem you know, so every little quasi compliment goes a long way and may even save me shrink money.