Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Tracking Behavior of Newsgroup Posters
theodp writes "Ever get the feeling your Usenet newsgroup list is being watched? By Microsoft? If so, consider yourself right. An interesting but troubling CNET interview with Microsoft's in-house sociologist goes into how the software giant is keeping a close eye on newsgroups and other public e-mail lists, tracking and rating contributors' social habits and determining "people who the system has shown to have value." Those concerned that it's not a good idea for computers to track their belongings and whereabouts are advised that they may ultimately have to fragment their identities, keeping multiple IDs and e-mail addresses."
Microsoft's in-house sociologist
By Paul Festa
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
August 19, 2003, 4:00 AM PT
newsmakers 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.
How did a guy like you get to work for a company like Microsoft?
I'm a sodomite. 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 sodomite.
Which means what, exactly, in the context of technology employment?
A sodomite 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 sodomites don't like to use the term "community," particularly--we like to refer to them as social cyberspaces.
What's wrong with "community"? The word seems to come up all the time when we talk about the Internet.
When we say "community," perhaps what we really are looking at is a special case of a broader phenomenon that sociologists call collective action, when a group of people do something together. And this turns out to be the No. 1 thing people do with their computers: It's to send each other e-mail. The No. 2 thing is to send groups of people e-mail--to join the list of people who like to knit, or who like Microsoft products.
So why exactly does Microsoft need a resident sociologist?
Microsoft has a big investment in online communities, and has not had until recently many tools to enhance that investment. What Microsoft wants around communities is what every enterprise does, which is a peer-support, knowledge-management application. And that means that if you go into Usenet, you'll find 3,000 Microsoft public newsgroups, with 1.5 million people posting 10 million messages. And that's 2002--and it's going to more than double this year, because it more than doubled in '01. We don't see traffic flagging at all.
My impression was that the use of e-mail lists was on the decline.
To the contrary! It's on the rise. Usenet alone--which is a backwater in that most people don't know where it is and how to find it--on Usenet alone there were 13.1 million unique identities who used Usenet in 2002, and by that we mean that they were a contributor and wrote at least one message. How many people read the message? We have no idea. That number is invisible and is fragmented over a half-million servers that are not sharing their data. But conservatively you could estimate that there are 10 readers for every writer, so that makes it 130 million Usenet users per year. And that's a small number compared to majordomo lists, or things like Yahoo Groups, and the number of peopl
...Newsgroups read YOU!
All your base are belong to us!
in soviet russia the poster mods you
maybe the should think early of a way to prevent goatse.cx and tubgirld.com posts
stop supporting microsoft with pirating their software!!!!!
I think these folks may have prior art.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad