Inside the Information Tokamak, Part 1: The Blue Spheres of Messaging
April 2, 2008
I’ve also enjoyed the tokamak, a machine that produces a toroidal magnetic field for confining a plasma. (A plasma is, for those who cut physics class to enjoy a spring day, an ionized gas containing an approximately equal number of positive ions and electrons. Zap this puppy, you get interesting phenomena. Here’s one example on a slightly larger scale than your local university’s physics lab.
Source: http://ocw.mit.edu/NR/rdonlyres/Global/7/
77E722FA-4A00-476D-9D4A-3F86C9BDA2B3/0/chp_sun_plasma.jpg
So what does nuclear physics have to do with behind-the-firewall search? Actually, quite a log if you have a poetic side to your curious self.
I am living in a digital tokamak. Instead of ions and electrons, I am bombarded by the information particles shown in the diagram below:
This is a diagram prepared in 2003. I am using it “as is” despite its flaws. If you want to recycle the diagram, please coordinate with me.
If you read my earlier post about the “gray bar”, you know that the “yellow spheres” and the “purple spheres” exert pressure on an organization’s information environment. The three new sets of spheres in blue, red, and green are what’s inside the “gray bar” in this diagram.
In this essay, I am looking at the specific technologies and functions that define behind-the-firewall search at this time. Please, keep in mind that key word search and retrieval is one component of other enabling technologies. In effect, key word search is a commodity, and it is of little interest to me. If you want reliable key word search, use Lucene, Flax, or one of the other open source systems.
Let’s take a brief look at these 12 digital ions and electrons. In order to break up this argument into manageable chunks, I will discuss the “blue spheres” in this Web log installment and then tackle the “red spheres” and the “green spheres”. In the “green sphere” segment I will offer some observations. You are, of course, welcome to push back, grouse, or post Nigerian email scam letters. (I’m getting almost a 1,000 blog spams every 24 hours. This must be a record for a Web log that contains Greek, Latin, and references to William Cullen Bryant.)
A Little More Physics
The notion of tokamaks and plasma is that when forces that are used to push certain things–ions, electrons, and employees–together, energy is released. In the case of our friendly tokamak, we get physical phenomena. In an organization, instead of sparks, we have grousing employees. Our colleagues emit “I can’t locate the document” or “This search system sucks”.
As pressure rises in an organization, the demand for a system to go beyond search increases. Ignore the problem long enough, and the situation goes critical. In the lab, the tokamak can explode. In an organization, the unlucky search system administrator gets fired.
Inside the “gray boundary”, then, are the digital ions and electrons that have made search into a pivotal function.
The Blue Spheres
You will have to click on the dots in the graphic above to read the labels on these spheres. Let look at each of the “blue spheres”.
- Email. In this “blue sphere” is my life. I receive a significant amount of email. I routinely archive the email, make copies of the archive, and then I spend hours rooting through these archives trying to find an attachment. The more employees you have in an organization the greater the email problem. There are versions of email; there are attachments; there are emails that miss bits and pieces. Accessing email from a mobile device is problematic even with a “crackberry” or other smartphone. Key word search for email is almost useless. There is no one-size-fits-all solution.
- Instant messages. Talk about a nightmare in a regulated business. Your legal counsel’s fear is that a raft of IMs or instant messages turn up with information that is potentially damaging. A comment about a new product or a remark about a particular company’s quarterly earning–these can get you face time with the clever MBA, Jeffrey Skillings. You might even share the same cell. He gets fish sandwiches sometimes.
- Text and chat. There’s a whole new world of information rising. Twitter is less of an instant message and more of a short Web log posting. The conversational features built into Gmail and Facebook are particularly interesting. If these are used behind an organization’s firewall, should these be captured, indexed, and archived?
- Audio / video chat. Writing is bad but the Skype or other Voice over Internet Protocol systems raise an interesting question when used behind a firewall; namely, “Should a pharmaceutical company or stock brokerage capture, make searchable, and archive these conversations?”
The messaging ions and electrons can be particularly energetic. As the Internet shifts from novelty to an extension of communication, the role of search shifts from finding to a far more significant function. Think of search like an actor in Joe Sears’ s, Jaston Williams’, and Ed Howard’s Greater Tuna, a comedy about small town life. Each actor plays many roles.
Search, like the thespians, rush madly from costume to costume in order to play the different parts. Asking key word search to deal with the four “blue clusters” is a notion, as Augustus Caesar, said, “A thought from a person with a mind like a beetroot.” In other words, it’s a really dumb idea.
In the next installment, we’ll look at the “red spheres”. One of these is labeled “search”, and we will probe what “search” means in an organization today.
Stephen Arnold, April 2, 2008
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