Big Bill is watching your posts
Published: 19 Aug 2003 15:25 BST
Ever get the feeling your Usenet email 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 email 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 few years slicing and dicing data about messages and message authors in an ambitious effort to help people make sense of the newsgroup phenomenon -- 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 email threads, or newsgroups.
Smith's idea is that you can tell a lot about the quality of data by tracking its authors' social habits -- a notion that holds both 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 analysing newsgroups and the people who post to them, Smith spoke to CNET News.com about NetScan, about Microsoft's interest in email lists, and about an application under development that would link objects in the real world to an array of online information.
How did a guy like you get to work for a company like Microsoft?
I'm a sociologist. I've now been at Microsoft Research about four-and-a-half years. Microsoft has a few social and cognitive psychologists, but I'm the only sociologist.
Which means what, exactly, in the context of technology employment?
A sociologist studies the attributes of relationships and the group of relationships that add up to a collective or a community. As a technology group, our mandate is to both explore and to build tools to study the phenomenon that we could call online community. We sociologists don't like to use the term "community," particularly -- we like to refer to them as social cyberspaces.
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