On Saturday 10 May 2008 14:19:30 Francis Fish wrote:
> Wasting my time ...
Why waste it further by whinging then?
> "Funded by Enterprise Ventures, the Viking Fund and South Yorkshire
> Investment Fund,"
> Ok, so that's where you're based - not for me then, after spending a long
> time trying to find out.
Um....
"""Location
Ensembli is based in Sheffield, amongst thriving digital and creative
technology industries."""
Near the bottom of the page linked to by Imran...
> The site is almost content-free and doesn't have an address I could see.
> Linking to the dictionary.com definition of *ensemble* makes you look like
> you don't know what you're doing.
Clicking on "Contacting ensembli" gives:
*
http://ensembli.com/index.php/contact/ Which has a registered office & admin office, phone number, etc.
> Is "psychic" also in the list of desirable qualities?
> Which P in LAMP? Python or PHP? Python people command much greater
> salaries.
I'm guessing PHP givem the website is php based, but it does rather say that
they're not locked into a particular tech, so I guess when it means
comfortable with it means one or more.
"In short you were born to engineer software applications with Web
technologies and are confident that you can pick up anything in this
sphere that you don’t currently know."
Not only that, it also mentions Java, Ruby etc. I suspect that they may
actually just be in the process of deciding what sort of technologies they
want to use for whatever they're doing. (looks like a form of personalised
news aggregation based on (maybe) exploitation of people's social graph.
Random aside:
If that's the case, being based in sheffield makes sense since these people
are based there:
http://gate.ac.uk/
... which is java based. Applying text mining to news, and then clustering
based on user behaviour and those of your friends seems to make sense,
to an extent, but only if your news interests are similar to those of your
friends.
(no idea if that's the case. If they've not made that link they probably
should.)
Struck me as a fairly clear set of requirements, though I personally hate
the whole phrase "alpha-geek". I understand where it comes from and
why [the people who came up with it] use it, but it's also an *incredibly*
divisive phrase (since it assumes that only the loudest shouters are the
ones worth listening to). (Ok, it's not quite that bad, but IMO it's close)
Aside from anything else, it works on some really bad assumptions and
appears to just lead to technological inbreeding...
> This is a good example of why people mock the whole "web 2.0 thing".
I don't see that as necessary (there's also far better reasons to mock the
"web 2.0" meme - largely the fact its a terrible name) . As far as I can see
you missed the word "contact", the fact they had "location" specified, and
indicate they're after people who are comfortable with multiple technologies.
Must be one of those days - I have them all the time :)
Michael.
--
(disclaimer: I know Imran from offlist and I know he's genuine - he's also
organised things like Open Coffee in Leeds, and I'm sure he means well.
I didn't know about this - I've only extropolated from their blog and what I
already know about text mining[1], nor do I have an interest in jumping ship
at present :-)
[1] We ran an trial project with NacTEM to put BBC News content through
their text mining tools, and they produced some very cool and interesting
results, so I can see those links.
