The Integrity of Football

I, like many millions of viewers, watched the World Cup play-off second leg between France and Ireland, hoping for an exciting and entertaining game.  That it certainly was, with the web providing a medium for football fans world wide to vent their anger about the way the French team qualified for the last 32.

In this game, I was fairly neutral but would be lying if I didn’t say that I clung to the romantic hope of Ireland making it to South Africa.  It all looked against them from the first leg but they dug out a great result in Paris over 90 minutes to force the game into extra time.

I don’t want to discuss the handball itself as I think we need to accept that these occurrences will happen from time to time.  I’m more concerned with how individuals, teams, and countries will be incentivised to reduce this happening.  I’ve been an admirer of Thierry Henry for many years as he has possessed exceptional talent that has been a joy to watch, which sometimes permits me to forgive his sometimes arrogant demeanour.  There have however, been occasions where I felt he has been close to crossing the line almost feigning fair play in retrospect.  This is unfortunately nothing more than an inkling as opposed to something that I can specifically state instances of but as an avid follower of football over the years, you do come to appreciate a perception of some players personalities.  Therefore, I have lost much respect for the man since Wednesday as his actions of running exuberantly to the goal scorer Gallas said a lot about the levels of true remorse.  I’m afraid from my view, the public show of apology by sitting with Richard Dunne at the end of the game came across as nothing more than a public relations exercise as he retrospectively knew he had done wrong.  To say “It was handball but I’m not the referee” is nothing more than a cop out.

So, its happened, these things have happened for years, what are FIFA going to do about it?

Well, although the Irish Football Association have requested a replay, it is unlikely to happen.  If FIFA are to refuse such a replay in a situation where TV footage shows a wrong-doing, the player admits the infringement, and French fans openly are ashamed at the way in which their team has progressed, then I would like to know what positives the world leading body will take from this.  Will they stick their heads in the sands again to the problem?

I am critical of bad referees who simply don’t man-manage players well but I do not class referees who make mistakes as bad referees.  To me, these are referees who need better support.  For instance, would the extra official on the goal line that is being trialled in the Europa league have been able to spot the offence?  Most likely as they stand on that side of the goal only metres away from where Henry handled!

This also will raise questions about the use of video technology in the game, something that has been used very successfully in international rugby.  I recall having the same conversation with my parents and friends of the family as a 9 year old in 1986 after the “Hand of God” incident so why then have we not progressed in 23 years?  Why would FIFA not want to use this?  Wasn’t it rumoured that it was through video technology that Zidane got sent off in the last world cup final?

It is all well and good stating that a replay will cause chaos but not using this high-profile game as a reason to introduce greater support for referees is ignorant and negligent to their responsibility as a governing body.  They are scared that a precedent will be set but I will argue that one needs to be set to avoid a repeat of such unsporting behaviour.  As mentioned before, rugby has introduced improvements to support referees, cricket has also for many years so why hasn’t football.  We cannot simply go on placing more and more unfair responsibility on referees.  I strongly believe that this inactivity will only promote the certain thick-skinned officials like Steve Bennett (see my earlier comment about poor man management as I believe Mr. Bennett is a first class example of this) and less of the communicative and bold referees we see in international rugby who gain belief and faith in their own judgement from the support they receive.

To finish off, what realistic options did the referee have on Wednesday?  Yes, he could have spoken with his assistant but let’s assume he didn’t notice the handball either (as he may have been still thinking whether he failed to signal offside – a skill that sometimes requires chameleon eyes) and it did all happen rather quickly.  What options remain for referees in the modern game? Listen to the players or make an educated blind guess? Referees that have taken players’ body language and reaction into account in the English Premier League in the past and have boldly changed decisions (correctly) have been punished so what could a referee on an international stage do?!

In dead ball situations i.e. like when it is resting in the back of the net, why oh why can we not use a video official to support referees?

We are the filter

Whilst there is a lot of discussion around the ‘noise’ that social media technologies are creating, with talk of “super-contextualisation” or “information filtering”, a revelation has dawned on me.  Whilst technology will have a very big part to play here in helping to focus content to individuals that is more relevant to them, let us not forget that a lot of this we have already: it’s all about the people baby.

I’ve noticed a big change in my online habits over the last 6 months in that in my quest for relevant information, I’ve moved away from my traditional feed reading tools and concentrated on my Twitter community.  My connections to various people represent different interests of mine.  Some of whom cover one subject, some more than one but all relevant to me in some way.  What I have found through this transitional 6 months is that the stories that I would have historically paid more attention to, tend to permeate through into my Twitter stream though the various hooks into FriendFeed and other Twitter related sharing services.

Someone recently debated with me that this type of behaviour will only funnel things of interest to you and not allow for those tangential subjects to creep in, that will ultimately become more of a standard core interest.  I disagreed as it is my relationship with individuals in the real world that exposes me to new things of interest, from the extremes of taking up flying power kites to gaining greater insight to the enterprise 2.0 culture shift.

I admit, that in my online world, there is an abundance of such initially peripheral subjects that I choose to follow but it is down to my own discipline and focus in choosing what to read further into or not.  Consider it a filtered stream off the roaring river that is Social media.

What do you think?

Open Text Web Solutions – Collaboration between RedDot and Vignette

Fun and Games with IIS7 and Tomcat Connector (Jakarta)

I needed to run Tomcat behind IIS and delegate html page requests as well as xml page requests from IIS 7 through to Tomcat.

As I had done this a number of times with IIS6 and Helicon’s rewrite tool, I thought this would be easy… Oh no.  I was wrong.

Therefore, here are a few things to be aware of:

• Make sure you have installed the Tomcat Connector OK.  I found this site to be useful here for the Tomcat Connector install on IIS 7: http://www.iisadmin.co.uk/?p=72
• Install the ‘URL Rewrite’ module within IIS 7.  I didn’t do this myself, not because it was difficult… I just simply didn’t do it and would guess there is enough info on how to do this.
• Configure all rewrite rules at the server level and not at the individual site level.  This is because there is some issue around chaining an HTTP request through an ISAPI filter like the Tomcat Connector and then the URL rewrite module or vice versa.  I even tried another ISAPI based rewriter like the one from Helicon (http://www.helicontech.com) resulting in the same challenge that the rewrites and redirect (delegation – not to be confused with a 301 type redirect) worked independentlybut not together.
• The syntax for the rewrite rules is different from Apaches mod_rewrite – e.g:

1. ^/?.*/(.+\.html?)$ would normally handle input urls like /index.htm or /level1/level2/index.htm but this was not liked by the URL Rewrite module in IIS 7.  What worked instead was ([^/]+\.html?).
2. Remember to use {R:1} syntax for getting the back references instead of $1 etc.
3. Remember to use conditions if you have multiple sites in the same instance utilising the {HTTP_HOST} and {SERVER_PORT} strings.

Let me know if you found this useful or if there are other useful references to add into this.  I personally found it difficult to dig up something similar.

It’s just nice when someone engages…

Recently, during a holiday in Australia, my girlfriend and I were walking down the main street of Bellingen, a sleepy and beautful town in New South Wales, when a burly bearded man in an apron approached us to ask if we were looking to eat on that particular evening.  We weren’t as we had planned to eat back at our rather cosy campervan and were more in the mood for a coffee if anything.  However, I asked what was on the menu and he was excited and passionate to tell us about the menu.  He additionally latched onto our desire to have a coffee and claimed to have the ‘best coffee in town’ but also backed up his words in action by offering the coffees on the house if we didn’t agree that they were great.

He got us with this offer and so he guided us past the competing cafes to his clearly very new business and sat us down.  The lattes came shortly after and they were as good as he suggested but rather than pay up when he came to get the bill, we decided to stay and have a 2 course meal.  His eyes visibly lit up and willingly told us about a couple of the dishes that he had forgot to tell us about beforehand.

The meal was great, made with very fresh ingredients and the whole experience got me thinking about how a simple bit of effort to engage, listen, and action with potential customers led this guy to have two satisfied customers and a reasonable tip on top of the bill.

The concept of Social Media of course is not at all that different…

The owner was engaging with potential customers by conversing on the street corner away from his shop front as that is where the people were passing and presented the greatest opportunity – remember, we weren’t even looking to have a coffee initially.  Not too dissimilar from the way that social media has allowed businesses to engage in conversation away from the corporate website.  Taking active part in conversational hot spots around the web could equally present greater opportunity than simply focusing on the dated strategy of getting visitors to the corporate site.

The conversation with the owner allowed him to listen to what we wanted and make a proposal that was appropriate and personalised to our desire for coffee.  Again, social media presents a tremendous opportunity for companies to listen.  This is very much understated and misunderstood as many see the new set of social tools as a new channel to promote within.  A certain amount of self promotion is ok but it is important to have context and be able to back things up (i.e.  ”We have the best coffee in town. If  you don’t agree, you don’t pay”) but to listen is where the value truly is.

In the end, we were so satisfied with the service and the product that it led to a greater income than two coffees (which he put on the house in the end anyhow).  Had we popped by and decided to try a coffee without the effort of the owner’s engagement, would we have stayed for our 2 courses?  Who’s to say, but it is clear that passionate engagenment in this way, comparible to what a social media strategy should be formed of, definitely contributed to us having a pleasant evening that was much better than either of us had expected.

New Wave of Thinking

As Google unleash Wave to the development community, it knows that the secret to its success is crowd sourcing.

It was great to see the presentation of Wave at Google IO and in particular how inclusive those behind the project made developers.  By opening the doors early to those who can extend and enhance the vanilla offering in ways that Google themselves will not have thought of, ready for a proposed launch later this year is simply fantastic.  Unlike players such as Facebook who have retrospectively added to their API, Google have set about this project in a truly open way, which I think wil reap great rewards as Wave will soon become a central way to manage social content.

The presentation in itself is impressive for the way that it neatly sews the various offerings that have made Google so strong in the past few years together – whether that be the on the fly translation capability when chatting in real-time or impressive realtime search result updates of previous conversations.  However, this is only an impressive starting point as Google themselves have built these features on top of the foundation not through bespoke APIs but rather the public and open APIs that they have released details on.

Someone once mentioned something that was very poignant for me and it was “Never think you know more than your audience”.  This has stuck with me and it rings true in many different contexts.  With the openess of the Wave platform, Google have nailed this.  Pro-actively understanding that adoption levels will rely on the innovation locked away within the development community.  Many companies lack the knowledge to know how to unlock this potential within their respective communities, some are simply ignorant but I believe Google will show how this consideration will lead to an explosion of success around the platform.  Enterprise software vendors should pay attention, in the least for the example that will be played out before them – utilise your communities!  Vendors should also look to investigate innovative ways in which they can benefit from the Wave foundation as the potential will differ greatly from organisation to organisation.

I for one will be keen to explore the Sandbox that Google have running already and can think of a number of collaborative scenarios that will help organisations centralise social conversations.

The Importance of Architecture

I get the feeling every now and then, that software products or solutions sometimes fluctuate too much towards one end or the other in the technology-business scale (or bottom up – top down).

Now, although I’m a technologist, I favour a bias toward the business end as any technology should surely serve a purpose and should not be built because it can be built.  I have seen this challenge play out several times in my career as I have witnessed technologically motivated people build ‘cool’ apps or tools with weak consideration of how it fits the business need.  Therefore, I normally strongly argue that any software development process must be top down.

I should clarify this – When I say must, I actually mean: should predominantly be.  This is because, good foresight from someone who understands the technology and appreciates enough of the business domain knowledge often facilitates the better and more successful solutions/products/tools.  How many times have you heard people talk about getting software developers exposed to the everyday business challenges?  A lot, right?  Whilst I agree in the sentiment of this, I do not agree as passionately as some as I believe it is not an individual developer’s responsibility to ensure a solution fits a need.  Instead I believe that it is the responsibility of the process to ensure that a requirement is created by those with the business domain knowledge and translated successfully along the software development journey between those who handle it, each understanding the part that means something to them.

Process itself, is something that I could discuss in a series of posts on its own so I will end that particular point here.  However, the relevance of mentioning process is that it shares that same slot of being an unsung hero of importance alongside architecture.

Getting the right architecture in place facilitates the evolution of a software offering in the right direction.  Architecture is just the broader blueprint for complex systems as what idioms can be for a specific coding problem.

Having a good understanding of architecture and how the various pieces can fit into it can allow an organisation to best structure their teams for success.  Comparing similar offerings with perceived overlap on an architectural basis allows for rational judgement of where best to combine efforts.  Such comparisons can be easily made through applying the age-old Model View Controller (MVC) pattern across systems to further disect the roles of many product teams or systems.  Such architectural understanding, which can be focused or abstracted to the right level coupled with business knowledge provides that critical bottom up part, enabling and preparing organisations for the road ahead.

Twitter and the Butterfly Effect

I was having a great chat with some guys yesterday about the value of Twitter.  Topical question I know but the conversation helped me to justify what I truly thought.

In summary, Twitter exposes you to conversation that you would otherwise not be part of.  People may follow you because of a random spontaneous Tweet you created and that may lead to a connection of some kind.  This in itself may not lead to significant value for you but it may lead to other opportunities.

This view rather reminded me of one of my favourite books – ‘Yes Man’ by Danny Wallace.  Now a film, the book describes how opening up to new opportunities through not saying no when faced with a yes or no question gave him great fulfilment, opportunities providing financial gain, fun and actually led him through a series of events that ended in him meeting his now wife.

I’ve taken a small amount of inspiration from this as I now do not block people who try and follow me who I don’t know.  I originally felt techno-stalked but it has occurred to me that this is not the case and such random followings could lead to greater things that I just don’t know of at the moment.

Website Marketing Campaigns

Websites are marketing campaigns, right?  They should be giving (potential) customers the information they need to entice them through the door, right?

Well I read an interesting article on CMS Watch today, which quite fairly talks about the challenges as seen from a consumer perspective when trying to access information, which websites use as a ‘dangling carrot’ to gain that all important Lead information.

Should certain documentation and materials be locked away behind a registration form or equivalent?  Doesn’t this only serve to frustrate the consumer regardless how minimalist the form is?

For those who run websites, conversions are everything, whether that be a sale or the capture of Lead information.  However, should this view point change? Should a website be seen more as a brand awareness tool?

The same debate has been ongoing around banner advertising and paid search for some time.  Whilst click through rates on banner ads are low, the gain is in the exposure of the brand, which indirectly influences.

Therefore, a strategy around open information with well placed calls to action may be a better approach although the bean counters will need to have their expectancy levels set!

Personal Brands

I’m quickly learning that I should follow my gut instincts.  A personal brand i.e. a relationship with an individual generally tends to promote greater trust and credibility than a corporate brand, especially where blogging is concerned.

Of course, some may say that this is old news but it appears that this is not the thinking in many corporations.

A corporate blog has been seen to be the ‘must have’ to be percieved as ‘with it’ and ‘I get it’ during the web 2.0 buzz.  However, as the term web 2.0 begins to fade in favour of more s0cial terminology, I think people will begin to really ‘get it’.

A blog has value only if it develops trust, which commonly only occurs at a personal level.  That’s what being social is about right? What is a corporate blog anyhow?  Is it not just corporate news tailored differently.

What I believe corporations will start to learn and believe is that by providing the platform for their employees to develop their own personal brand (through blogging for example), they will in turn gain trust in the corporate brand, which is essentially the end goal.

There is always going to be a question of how to police these personal brands.  My view would be that in most cases, only a very mild form of policy is needed here in much the same way as most employment contracts talks about who owns the IPR of anything you create whilst you are in a given employment contract.  To mitigate the risk of people bad-mouthing the corporation and therefore damaging the brand at this level, the answer is simple – treat them well, provide the freedoms to further their personal brand and they will repay you in loyalty.

What are your views?