Data analysis and business intelligence analyst Merv Adrian announced on his blog today that he’s going to giant analyst firm Gartner and his discussion of the decision is really interesting. He just spent the last two years independent, is very active in social media and will now join a much more traditional organization.  He’s on Twitter at @merv.

It was just two months ago that Michael Krigsman welcomed Adrian into the Enterprise Irregulars working group.  Other members of the group work in big firms as well.

Adrian credits boutique analyst firm RedMonk with inspiring many of his strategic beliefs about how analysts can participate in social media and offered a good critique of standard practices in response to a James Governor blog post discussing Gartner’s social media last Spring.

As for participation by the old guard, they have a way to go. Just today I heard of an analyst being called out for putting “too much good stuff” in his/her blog. The notion that it might be a way to draw eyeballs to the for-pay content is still beyond all of them. And with rare (though exemplary) exceptions, twitter is for broadcast, not for dialogue; even if they tolerate some limited interaction with those outside the paywall, it’s probably that they aren’t noticing it. They are most definitely not encouraging or motivating it.

That should give you a little taste of what Merv Adrian will try to bring to the biggest analyst firm in technology, and a firm that is widely considered behind the times when it comes to social media.  (Though neither Governor nor Adrian agree with that sentiment.) I haven’t listened to the Sage Circle podcast linked-to at the end of his announcement post yet, but I’m sure that will be good too.

Adrian describes himself as: Technology analyst and consultant, 30 years of industry experience, covering software mostly, hardware sometimes. Former Forrester SVP.

I don’t know Adrian, though I have been following him since putting up this post on ReadWriteWeb about how to follow hundreds of analysts on Twitter with a single click.  Anyone who gets props from James Governor, Carter Lusher and says the kinds of things it looks like Adrian does has got my interest piqued, though.  Good luck in the new gig Merv, and keep blogging.

via Going to Gartner « Merv Adrian’s IT Market Strategy.

This post is the beginning of an experiment wherein I put up quick bits about found links that are too long for Twitter but not quite the right fit to post on ReadWriteWeb.

I wrote a blog post on ReadWriteWeb this afternoon about AOL’s acquisition of TechCrunch. As the first hired writer at TC years ago, I’ve got some very personal thoughts and feelings about it. I thought you, readers of MarshallK.com, might want to read them.

I wrote about a really cool new feature on Foursquare today, called it “must-have,” and now am seeing a fair amount of cynical backlash. People get upset when you get excited about Foursquare – they think it’s overhyped, they want to see less coverage of it, less effusive coverage of it, more critical coverage, more discretion over what we tech bloggers get breathlessly excited about so that they the readers needn’t be bothered by anything but the rare, guaranteed win that they must pay attention to.

Well that’s not how it works, folks. We get excited, I get excited, about potential. About early startups that are opening our eyes to new possibilities for utility and value creation. I don’t know which ones will work out long-term and I don’t really care. When I write about technologies, I write about what they do for me and what I like about them.

Note that one commenter below makes a good counter-argument.
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Government data as a platform for innovation is something I find exciting. Unfortunately, every time we write about it at ReadWriteWeb, very few people read our articles. Consumer data from private companies, be it Facebook, Twitter or Foursquare, for example, finds far more interested readers.

Both have a few things in common: they are stories about data that you and I produce being leveraged by independent developers to build new services and ways to make use of that data. I love EveryBlock and the way it shows me the 911 calls, restaurant reviews and news stories about the area I live in. It uses mostly government data. I really liked the story I wrote about it (“The Day Everyblock Came to Town“) but it got far fewer pageviews than the equally local story Boom! Tweets & Maps Swarm to Pinpoint a Mysterious Explosion.

Maybe that’s because it was about an explosion, and maybe because it indicated some fulfillment of the promise of data exploited. But I think it’s in part because it’s about Twitter data instead of about public data in the traditional sense of the word. Readers just don’t find government data very interesting. It’s a part of a larger problem I think: people don’t care about nonprofit or social good stories either. Far, far fewer people read stories about human rights, watchdog organizations, etc. than they do the big corporate market leaders online. We cover social good stuff anyway, because it’s important, but we always recognize that those stories are going to perform poorly in terms of readership.

Thoughts?

Nate Silver, author of the political stats blog FiveThirtyEight, is now writing for the New York Times. That’s very cool. It’s an inspiration to try and write better blog posts and fewer mediocre ones. ReadWriteWeb is syndicated by the NYT, but that’s different. You’ve got to be pretty consistently awesome, I’m guessing, for the Times to say “hey, come put your blog on our site.” That level of consistent awesomeness is an inspiration, for any blogger, anywhere. I feel a long, long way from so consistently awesome right now. I’d sure love to grow as an author to feel like I wrote fewer mediocre blog posts than I do today.

One step I’d like to take is to learn to stop before publishing and ask myself: how could this post be better in a big way? What fundamental insight can my noggin’ churn up with just five more minutes of slowing down from the perpetual mad dash of blogging? Publishing immediately is hard wired in my brain now, though, and it’s going to be easier said than done to change that habit.

I got my list of 100+ applicants for this evening news writing position at ReadWriteWeb whittled down to a list of top 10 applicants tonight. (Related story about how to get a job as a professional blogger here.) I mentioned on Twitter that in summarizing the pros and cons of leading applicants for the rest of my team to evaluate I’ve included an evaluation of their Twitter accounts. A good Twitter account isn’t a requirement at all but… it helps. A number of people asked me just exactly what that meant. And so I wrote a song about it, and it goes a little something like this…

It’s not really a song, sorry! It’s just me talking. It got cut off at the very end by an incoming phone call, but I suspect you may find it interesting none the less. Speaking of Twitter, here’s my account there. Let’s be buds if we’re not already, huh?

Direct MP3 download here, iTunes subscription link here and podcast subscription feed here.

I’ve long been impressed with the rich-media popup tool Apture. If you’re actually on my site and not reading this in a feed reader, you can see the little book icon in the previous sentence. Hover over it and you’ll see a Wikipedia entry I selected to appear here. It was really easy to do using the Apture plug-in for WordPress.

Last week semantic web company Zemanta released a very similar but open source program called Balloons. I’m going to try to install that next here and compare the two services. Alex Iskold got me thinking about it. (Oh wow, look at that double LinkedIn and Twitter pop-up – that is awesome! I hate reading peoples’ names online and not being able to see where they work. This is great.)

So far Apture is pretty impressive. I did the wrong thing with it a couple of times, but I think I’ve got it down now. This post will evolve as I find the time to try out Zemanta.

Here's how a link I added to an RWW post about Zemanta looks....in Apture!

Ok, Zemanta plug-in now installed. The company says the Balloons feature is automatically included. Let’s see.

Update: You can’t really use both at the same time on the same blog – Apture hijacks all of Zemanta’s balloon links. You probably won’t be able to see Zemanta links now, but I’ll be posting a full comparative review of the two services tonight or tomorrow on ReadWriteWeb.

Test: Pablo Picasso

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