(a) the party is not calling me that, (b) it's Bristol East, (c) look at % of replies not just tweets - that's what counts.

Obviously I have now corrected the fact I had said she was MP for Bristol West, rather than Bristol East. Mea culpa.

As for her point (b) -- "the party is not calling me that" -- I concur. I understand they are calling McCarthy their 'New Media Campaigns Spokesperson'. However I think my use of 'Twitter tsar' can be forgiven, since her own office is calling her that. This from her own Parliamentary web page:

Kerry becomes Labour’s New Media Campaign Spokesperson - 17 Aug 2009 - The Labour Party have announced that Kerry will be the "Twitter tsar" with the responsibility of encouraging MPs to use new media.

Finally we come to McCarthy's point (c) - isn't it uncanny how politicians always seem to make three points about anything? OK, so McCarthy says the @replies (people replying to your tweets with tweets of their own) are a more important measure than followers.

McCarthy may be right -- @replies can be a sign that people aren't only reading your tweets, they're often a sign that they are responding to them too. But she may be wrong, because @replies aren't necessarily replies at all, but simply people trying to get the attention of that Twitter user.

So there's an awful lot of @reply 'noise' out there, as people make their various points or simply try and send a message to a user. You can guess how many @replies certain celebrities are sent, not because they have written a tweet that people are responding to, but just because they are trying to get that person's attention. Let's not even begin to talk about @reply spammers.

In the case of an MP using Twitter, there is also the fact that constituents use Twitter to complain about all sorts of things going on in their constituency, or try and garner some publicity for a local event. Does receiving lots of @reply complaints or advertisements make one an influential Twitter user?

Kerry McCarthy MP: Labour's New Media Campaigns Spokesperson, a.k.a. 'Twitter tsar'.

Suffice to say @replies are not a scientific measure of the extent of a user's Twitter influence any more than the number of followers as a percent of total tweets. As 'Twitter tsar', or at least New Media Campaigns Spokesperson, McCarthy is surely aware of this.

Besides I'm not sure (I could be mistaken) if it's possible for anyone other than the Twitter user themself to count up their total @replies very easily. If you are not that user, you can do a search for their Twitter account name, such as @KerryMP, and start counting. But since it displays only 20 per page, you're in for a long session of clicking 'more' to count the next 20, and so on.

McCarthy didn't seem to realise that I was being flippant when I asked whether Paul Daniels would make a better 'Twitter tsar' than she. But let's stick with the Paul Daniels comparison for the time being. McCarthy has had 20 @replies in the last 20 hours. Daniels had 20 @replies in the last 13 hours, which suggests that Paul Daniels is replied to more often than Kerry McCarthy (caveat: I didn't say it was that scientific, did I?)

So I'm very sorry Kerry, but:

(a) my original blog was what's known as 'satire', (b) your own office calls you "Twitter tsar", and (c) Paul Daniels gets more @replies than you as a percentage of tweets. So there.

In my view one of the prerequisites of a true 'Twitter tsar' is the art of the witty riposte. So come on Kerry, I know you can do better than simply a, b, c.

UPDATE:

Kerry McCarthy gamely got back in touch to tell me, "Next time - make it funnier!" A fair cop. She also tweeted that, "At the risk of being accused of another sense of humour failure, u missed my point - I meant my replies not ppl replying to me."

Another fair point, though replies by a user count as normal tweets, taking us perhaps back to the metric between the number of followers as a percentage of total tweets. And as I've mentioned, Paul Daniels still has the lead there.

I guess one could split out replies from other tweets, and then come up with another metric based on replies as a percentage of total tweets. I've not got time today (a job for a rainy day methinks) but that will give you an idea of how responsive the Twitter user is, rather than be a metric of Twitter influence in its own right. So I'm still not ruling Paul Daniels out of the running for 'Twitter tsar' just yet!

I also notice that McCarthy has got her team to revise the document I quoted from above, in which her own team called her a "twitter tsar". The line,

"The Labour Party have announced that Kerry will be the "Twitter tsar" with the responsibility of encouraging MPs to use new media."

now reads:

"The Labour Party have announced that Kerry will be their New Media Campaigns Spokesperson with the responsibility of encouraging MPs and others to use new media as a form of direct engagement with voters."

Near the bottom of the release, this paragraph has now been added too:

"The appointment, which has led to Kerry being dubbed 'the "Twitter tsar", comes following the recent study conducted by the Independent newspaper which declared Kerry the most influential politician on Twitter."

So that's cleared that up.

Follow me on Twitter: www.twitter.com/jasonstamper

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With just 2,424 followers on Twitter despite 4,555 tweets, one wonders how much she really knows about micro-blogging.

To put McCarthy’s following in context, it’s worth noting that magician Paul Daniels has built up a following of 22,421 through almost exactly the same number of Tweets as McCarthy: 4,614. That's magic!

Paul Daniels' profile picture on Flickr.*

Not fair, you cry: Daniels is a celebrity while MPs rarely are (though a fake LordMandelson Twitter profile quickly racked up 2,793 followers despite only 23 Tweets to its ‘name’.)

You have a point. But fair or unfair, McCarthy has only added 0.53 followers for each of her tweets. Paul Daniels’ ratio is 4.6 followers per tweet. So who would you back to raise MP’s influence on Twitter?

To be fair, The Independent newspaper named McCarthy the most influential MP on Twitter, based on a combination of followers, mentions and outgoing links to stories. So that explains it.

It’s clear why Labour would want to hire a ‘Twitter tsar’. I’ve written in the past about the huge positive impact that social networking had on Barack Obama’s election campaign. Labour must replicate that success the best they can.

Twitter and other social networking sites are thought to be a conduit to an audience that might pay little or no attention to more traditional media. Their potential to encourage dialogue, and the informal nature of what one publishes on such sites, gives them a quality that is hard to copy in other formats.

Little wonder then that Tory MP Alan Duncan, who was forced to apologise “unreservedly” after he was secretly filmed complaining about MPs' pay and expenses in early August, set up a Twitter profile and uttered his first Tweet last week. If rebuilding your reputation is required, ‘look no further than Twitter’ seems to be the mantra.

After a single Tweet, Duncan has 30 followers at the time of writing. That gives him an outstanding ratio of 30 followers per tweet. So what was his first Tweet? ‘Sorry’? ‘Mea culpa’? Of course not. “My first tweet ever,” he wrote, “So be gentle. Weather here fabulous”.

To follow Paul Daniels: Twitter.com/ThePaulDaniels*
Kerry McCarthy: Twitter.com/KerryMP
Alan Duncan: Twitter.com/AlanDuncanMP*
Me: Twitter.com/jasonstamper

* While I believe these are the genuine Twitter profiles of Paul Daniels and Alan Duncan, it's not always easy to tell, because it's easy to set up a fake. But that's another story.

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We go on to discuss the difference between cloud computing and SaaS, internal versus external clouds and why Albright argues that SuccessFactors would not have been possible were it not for social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Finally, I ask him whether the company has ambitions to broaden its cloud platform to third party applications providers, as salesforce.com has done with its Force.com platform. As you'll hear, Albright claims his firm will take a rather different approach to openness than salesforce.com has.

If you're wondering why I ask the question, you might recall that salesforce.com has faced criticism in the past for failing to make Force.com a completely level playing field.

Online apps provider Zoho even claimed that salesforce.com's CEO Marc Benioff used strong-arm tactics such as trying to buy the firm in a bid to prevent it competing with salesforce.com's own applications; Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu wouldn't sell the company, and Benioff wouldn't let Zoho put its apps on Force.com even though it had spent time on integration work before Benioff pulled the plug.

It was perhaps a little ironic then -- or perhaps just a sign of Benioff's cheek -- that he left the stage after his keynote at his firm’s Cloudforce event recently to the sound of the Rolling Stones’ hit Get off of my Cloud.

Stream my podcast with SuccessFactors' Paul Albright in Windows Media format by clicking here (right-click to download) or if you prefer it's in MP3 format here.

Some clouds.

I was keen to know what McClelland thinks about Atos Origin UK MD's recent comments to CBR that his clients do not want to act, as he put it, as "guinea pigs" by becoming cloud computing early adopters. Does that view resonate with what she's seeing in the market?

I also asked whether she believes cloud computing differs from managed services as we know and understand them today; and why Colt's Managed Services Division saw growth in its most recent quarter of almost 30%, despite Colt as a whole seeing fairly flat revenues.

Is the economy puhsing people to look to such services, or could it be internal pressures such as compliance, budget constraints and increasing infrastructure complexity (or all of the above)?

Maggy McClelland, managing director of Colt's Managed Services division.

Later in the recording, you'll hear Steve Hughes' views on the role of emerging standards in cloud computing, and we discuss the current fears over cloud computing amongst many CIOs, such as governance and compliance, security, quality of service and even IT department territorialism.

Here's the podcast then, in Windows Media format: Listen now. Click the link to stream it to your PC, or right-click it if you would like to download it to your PC and listen to it later.

Steve Hughes, cloud and virtualisation specialist, Colt Managed Services.

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What's perhaps more interesting though than the fact a multi-million dollar computer can draw a pretty picture, is that it's all now being drawn on the supercomputer itself, rather than the numbers crunched and then visualised using different software on graphics processing units.

To produce the image on Argonne’s Blue Gene/P supercomputer, 160,000 computing cores all work together in parallel. Today’s typical laptop, by comparison, has two cores. In fact if you wanted to try and do this kind of picture on a typical home PC, it would take you three years just to download the data.

The latest volume rendering techniques being used by Argonne can be used to make sense of the billions of tiny points of data collected from an X-ray, MRI, or a researcher’s simulation.

Usually, the supercomputer’s work stops once the data ha­s been gathered, and the data is sent to a set of graphics processors (GPUs), which create the final visualizations.

But the driving commercial force behind developing GPUs has been the video game industry, so GPUs aren’t always well suited for scientific tasks. In addition, the sheer amount of data that has to be transferred from location to location eats up valuable time and disk space.

“It’s so much data that we can’t easily ask all of the questions that we want to ask: each new answer creates new questions and it just takes too much time to move the data from one calculation to the next,” said Mark Hereld, who leads the visualization and analysis efforts at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility. “That drives us to look for better and more efficient ways to organize our computational work.”

Argonne researchers wanted to know if they could improve performance by skipping the transfer to the GPUs and instead performing the visualizations right there on the supercomputer. They tested the technique on a set of astrophysics data and found that they could indeed increase the efficiency of the operation.

“We were able to scale up to large problem sizes of over 80 billion voxels per time step and generated images up to 16 megapixels,” said Tom Peterka, a postdoctoral appointee in Argonne’s Mathematics and Computer Science Division.

So it really is more than just a pretty picture: it's something of a breakthrough in supercomputer visualisations.

Read more about it here.

IBM's Nick Drabble.

Nick Drabble is Dynamic Infrastructure Leader in IBM's Software Group in the UK & Ireland. In Part 1 of the vodcast, I started by asking him what IBM means when it talks about Dynamic Infrastructure. We then discuss the role of virtualisation within this Dynamic Infrastructure, and how companies can best overcome the challenges that analysts say still hamper virtualisation projects.

In Part 2, we move on to discuss the emergent paradigm of cloud computing, and where Drabble believes it will have greatest impact in the enterprise. I also find out a little more about the similarities between cloud computing and what IBM has for some time called On Demand computing.

You can stream them in Windows Media format by clicking on the links below, or right-click to save them to your desktop.

Part 1: Beyond Virtualisation

Part 2: Cloud Computing

For those who prefer to download the files in MP4 format to play on their iPod or whatever, you can download those by right-clicking on these links:

Part 1: Beyond Virtualisation (MP4, Zip file)

Part 2: Cloud Computing (MP4, zip file)

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I met and profiled Carol Bartz a couple of years back, when she was CEO of CAD vendor Autodesk. Of all the CEOs I have interviewed, I found her among the most impressive: business acumen, technology expertise and a very human touch are three qualities you don't often find in one leader.

Carol Bartz: from computer science at the University of Wisconsin to Yahoo CEO (via DEC, Sun and Autodesk).

But all of Bartz's qualities will surely be called on now, as Yahoo reported quarterly results down 13% to $1.57bn, and profits down 25% to $76m.

But Bartz feels the company is improving: "I'm pleased with our results this past quarter," she said. "We established a clear, simple vision to be the centre of people's lives online, and we're backing that vision with important initiatives to create 'wow' experiences for our users."

With rival Google seeing flat revenues in its latest quarter but profits up 18%, the pressure is definitely on Bartz to either get the numbers heading in the right direction within the next two quarters, or to reconsider some kind of deal with Microsoft, which tried to buy the firm last year.

Co-founder Jerry Yang stepped aside as CEO at Yahoo in January to be replaced by Bartz, who was CEO at Autodesk for 14 years. Yang faced criticism from some shareholders for not accepting the $45bn Microsoft deal. The latest rumour is that Microsoft could take control of Yahoo's search engine for $3bn.

Either way, one thing Bartz doesn't have right now is time: shareholders have lost patience. Its stock is down 1.5% on the results announcement, taking another $350m off its market cap.

My profile of Carol Bartz is here.

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It doesn't come as a huge surprise, as in January this year Nortel filed for bankruptcy protection in both the US and Canada, and shortly after put its UK business into administration to boot.

Based in Toronto and still ranked as the biggest maker of telephone equipment in North America, Nortel said the moves were designed to give it breathing space to deal with the deteriorated environment in which it finds itself.

In a statement on Friday, the London 2012 Organising Committee (Locog) said it had ended its contract with the infrastructure supplier "on good terms".

"Technology for the Games is a huge undertaking with a fixed deadline, relying on finalising the design and building of systems now," Locog's statement read. "In order to deliver 'the most connected Games possible', Locog felt it was vital to work with a single business to cover the entire network infrastructure. As a result, Locog and Nortel amicably decided to bring the current agreement to an end."

Phil Smith, CEO, Cisco UK and Ireland said: “We are delighted to be working with LOCOG to provide the network infrastructure for London 2012. In the UK, Cisco enables businesses, public services and ultimately communities to enhance the way they operate. We will work hard to deliver the infrastructure for London 2012, which promises to be the most connected Games ever.”

With the transition coming only around six months after Progress acquired fellow middleware firm Iona for $162m, there were conspiracy theorists who wondered whether Alsop and the board had not seen eye to eye on the deal, leading to them parting company.

In this two-part podcast, I start by asking Reidy about the timing of that leadership transition. In Part 2, I ask about Reidy's initiatives at Progress, what he means by 'One Progress', and how he hopes to get the firm to over $1bn in the next five or so years.

I close the podcast by asking Reidy how he sees Progress playing in the new cloud computing ecosystem. The background hustle and bustle comes courtesy of the rather fine lounge in The Lanesborough Hotel, Hyde Park Corner.

Listen to Part 1 here.

Part 2 is here.

Both are in the Windows Media (.wma) format.

Rick Reidy, Progress Software's president and CEO.

Some examples from that STC article:

+ "Cloud Computing or software as a service (SaaS) is being touted as the pay-as-you-grow solution to the current economic problems."

+ "Good quality broadband internet provision has made it possible to offer software as a service - or what is now known as the Cloud Computing model."

+ "The Cloud Computing market is in its infancy. Suddenly organisations that would never normally be at the forefront of technology adoption are rushing headlong into SaaS."

In my view, this is a big mistake, and only adds to the confusion surrounding cloud computing. I tried to cut through the hype and come to some proper definitions in this recent special report. William Fellows, analyst at The 451, sums it up about as succinctly as anyone when he describes it not as software as a service, but 'IT as a service'.

Anyone still in any doubt after reading my articles in this special report may perhaps also be interested in a virtual conference all about cloud computing coming up in October – I’m giving the opening address.

www.cloudadoptionarena.com
VIBevents are delighted to be launching the industry’s first international virtual cloud adoption event which will bring together the leading CIOs, IT Directors and Cloud Experts to share insights on overcoming the risks and reaping the rewards of migrating to the cloud.

Our panel of speakers providing end user case studies include, Tesco, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, CBR, Californian Public Utilities Commission, Imperial College London and Telegraph Media Group, see the full line up at www.cloudadoptionarena.com

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But if Apple made no discernible improvements to an iPhone or iPod, it would still have its army of loyal fans singing their praises from the rooftops, such is the blind loyalty that they feel for the Apple brand.

To call them, as many do, ‘Apple fanboys’ might be something of a generalisation (and rather sexist) but there is no doubt that when it comes to Apple, buyers of its products are often more than mere customers. They are usually brand ambassadors too: talking passionately about their latest gadget or gizmo to anyone who will listen, or flooding the Internet with positive blogs and comments about Apple and its products. Such is the success of Apple’s marketing.

In the below podcast, I asked him about that deal, about the potential overlaps between the content management portfolios of Open Text and Vignette, and also why he believes Vignette was having a tough time finding consistent financial performance.

I also asked him whether Autonomy's acquisition of Interwoven earlier this year presents a greater threat to Open Text and its Vignette business.

Here's Part 1, and here's Part 2. They're both MP3s.

John Shackleton, Open Text CEO.

Please follow me on Twitter: www.twitter.com/jasonstamper

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We also touch on the role of social networking -- Twitter, LinkedIn and so forth -- in the enteprise today, and whether it is right for some companies to be banning the use of such tools.

You can listen to it here. It's in Windows Media format.

IBM's UK and Ireland CEO Brendon Riley: head of one of IBM's largest business units.

Previously, based in Vienna, Riley served as Managing Director of IBM in Central and Eastern Europe, Russia/CIS, Middle East, Africa, Austria and Switzerland, where he was responsible for one of the corporation’s fastest-growing portfolios worldwide.

Prior to this position, Brendon was based in Sydney, in his native Australia, where he was the Managing Director & Chief Executive of IBM Global Services Australia (GSA), an IBM, Telstra and Lend Lease joint venture company.

Please follow me on Twitter: www.twitter.com/jasonstamper

Thanks to Rodrigo Galindez on Flickr for the pic (CC licence).

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Rackable bought SGI for $25m in cash in April this year. A month later as it completed the acquisition, Rackable announced that it is changing its own name to Silicon Graphics International Corp, or SGI.

[click continue reading for more]