Bot becomes trusted member of social network

So some guys in Italy were doing research in social networks and found surprising behavior when their bot's regular visits to people were noticed. Turns out people could see that and responded by trusting the bot, so they started making random recommendations, which people who trusted the bot responded to quite well.

Social aping online can be incredibly simple (on the Internet, nobody knows you're Eliza) and as always I want to extrapolate to a bot that can operate a simple small business.

Writing a planner

Here's an article about a STRIPS-like planner that chains together different calls to utilities according to the starting situation - I'd like to do this in the general case.

PFMEA

Given any process, there is a method for identifying and prioritizing risks. This is the kind of systems thinking that go into the procl folder in my notes.

Why aren't there standards for invoices and things?

Answer: there is, kind of - EDI.

Business process simulator

I'm not 100% I'd call this a business process simulator - it's really a queuing theory simulator, maybe. But whatever it is, it's damn cool.

Intentional Software

Here's a consultancy here in Budapest that use some in-house advanced modeling tools for business processes and then generate software from them.  They seem to like formal logic (going on their logo for that).  Very ELTE.

Referenced from the blog of one of their employees.

Business process diagramming/definition languages

Just some leads:

• BPMN is an open notation format.
• Some flowchart examples.
• Gliffy does BPMN, apparently, as a Web service - probably easier to use it than rolling my own.

OpenERP

Whoa.  Open-source SAP replacement - and we all know what a profitable ecosystem SAP is!  This is open-source!

So ... gotta look at this in much more detail.

Update: And here is its slightly more scammy-seeming cousin VIENNA Advantage.  Apparently this one is built by a single company with what sure looks like a remote-control office (I am not free of this guilt myself, of course) who has reportedly opened their source.  If it's open access source, color me unimpressed, natch - and there are some textual weirdnesses on their cluttered front page as well that make me kind of wonder how serious they are.

But they exist.  And as such, they're data.

Update #2: dear Lord, their user interface is in Silverlight.

Website elements

Yessss, yessss, boilerplate.  Processessssssss.

Target application: Desant landing pages

Desant is a highly refined landing page app.  You drop it in and get statistics on visitors - and it's that snippet of a business process network that I want to think about.

Cancellation flow

I'm intrigued by this kind of business process/strategy/workflow/programming stuff.  Here's a thoughtful article about how to build a service cancellation system.  I love it!

Managing scanned input

Freecode.com and SourceForge and GitHub all agree: there's no such thing as an open-source scanner manager.  And that seems like such a no-brainer - the utilities that come with scanners uniformly suck for any practical purpose.

What I'd like would be something that would just sit there and assemble my scanned input into either (1) a multipage TIFF document or Word document or ... you know, something, or (2) put each file, dated, into a directory, or yeah, (3) open it up in an editor, but still dated in a directory by default instead of calling it "Lastscan.jpg".

And apparently nobody has done that.  There are some APIs, and the "SANE project" (which says a Windows port is underway, with a link to oblivion), but no simple little GUI tool.  Also, a link to the TWAIN group itself.  (TWAIN = Technology Without An Interesting Name, ha.) And Github finds me something called an Aljex client.

Google stats on Blogger are essentially useless

The new Blogger UI presents basic stats integrated right into the blogging interface, so I see them.  And they are utterly useless.  Yesterday's post about shell command apps has garnered 48 hits.  From where?  Why?  No idea.  I do see 43 hits (to somewhere on the blog) from a porn site in Russia - which is, yes, a way of spamming my stats reports, thank you very much.

I can only see the top 10 search phrases that brought people here.  That's, yes, useless - on a blog with a topic as sprawling as the intersection between programming and semantics, of all things, the phrases indicating people's interests must number in the hundreds or thousands.  But I can't see them, so I don't actually know what people are interested in reading about.

It's enough to make me write my own analytics platform.  Just for Blogger, and just to track what I actually want to track.

Update 2012-12-12: and I'm not the only one - see my post today on Better analytics!  I need to set up a feed for search terms.

Target application: Woopra

Woopra is the analytics platform that Google tracking isn't.  Its feature list is droolworthy.  I'd like to do something like it as one component in an overall business process workflow system or something.

Rory Sutherland talks about economics and marketing

Here's an interesting talk by Rory Sutherland which mercifully has a transcript (seriously, I'm just not video-oriented).  A pretty bad transcript, mind you, but intelligible.

Upshot: people aren't reasonable, and there are patterns in this irrationality that we can both understand and exploit in our marketing.

Business processes

Searching HNN for a meaningful phrase is just asking to be sent down the rabbit hole of thought. I look for business processes and find this - (TODO: think about that one for a while).

Here's what I want to do: I want to come up with an open-source set of best practices for startup business processes. Where to start?