This is part of an ongoing series about government 2.0 written by Dr. Mark Drapeau. To view previous posts in the series click here.

Future planning is a big part of what the national security apparatus of the United States does, and it is incredibly difficult to do well. As the national security writer William Arkin relates in his 2005 book Code Names: “Our Intelligence Community is constantly being surprised by events in the world and misreads what is happening.” Along the same lines, Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his must-read book The Black Swan explains why and how we are often surprised by rare, extraordinary events of huge consequence.

Such events elude the analysis of even the smartest person. Most have heard the term “Renaissance Man” – a person of many diverse talents like athletic prowess, intellectual power, musical ability, street smarts, and a way with the ladies. But we may not need them anymore, with access to “Renaissance Networks,” a term recently coined by a new media analyst at CIA’s Open Source Center. Why have a genius in a cubicle when a person who’s merely “smart” can utilize global crowd wisdom?

Recently, I attended a small conference about using social tools for information sharing hosted at Johns Hopkins University and sponsored by the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC). Our hosts for three days were the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) World Intelligence Review (WIRe) and the Director of National Intelligence’s (DNI) Intelligence Community Enterprise Services (ICES). They were able to bring together the people who build social tools, those who evangelize about them, and influential end users to have candid and open discussions about them.

In the intelligence community, as in the defense community where I primarily work, there are what people call “cylinders of excellence” – different agencies and units that internally may perform their functions very well, but they do not necessarily have a culture of community leadership and partnership in something larger than themselves. Some in the IC have been promoting information sharing as opposed to keeping secrets. (What’s the joke about secrets? Only two people know, and one of them is dead.) Lately, a big part of information sharing has been the INTELINK system, which is closed to outsiders and includes terrific “clones” of Wikipedia, YouTube, Digg, Flickr, AIM, Wordpress, and more – “These tools have no respect for the formal org chart,” Harvard Professor Andrew McAfee put it to the audience.

And the toolkit is expanding. The big development in IC social networking tools hitting the news recently is A-Space, essentially a mashup of Facebook, LinkedIn, and GoogleDocs designed to be an addictive work environment for analysts with access to sensitive human intelligence (HUMINT). A-Space will have status updates a la Twitter, subscriptions to updates, feeds and friends, activity streams, content management a la Sharepoint, a community grid tag cloud, RSS feeds from outside, drag and drop capability, discussion/question threads, a ’scrapbook,’ and widgets. This system – frankly better than anything I know about in the private sector at the moment – should increase collaboration and analytical thinking.

All the talk about collaboration inspired an interesting formal debate among two IC thought leaders, Geoff Fowler of the WIRe, and Chris Rasmussen, an IC 2.0 evangelist based at NGA. In a fun twist, the debate was moderated using a public Twitter feed by Carmen Medina, a former CIA Associate Deputy Director (Intelligence). The debaters were influenced by Medina’s comments and also by the audience’s, and by the end, participants from outside the conference were asking questions – which for the very private IC is quite profound. Debate largely centered around the question, “Who is an expert?” with the general acknowledgement being that despite the need for subject matter experts, “Buford T. Justice is now involved in the national security process.”

More futuristically, analysts will be able to use A-Space feeds for more than news and personality information. One the government connects the huge number of sensors and other devices reading all sorts of information (temperature, heat, satellite imagery, sonar, radar, robotic sensors, RFID tags, biometric scanners, law enforcement raid cams, views from pilots’ cockpits…) to these feeds (for example, a Navy analyst could subscribe to a feed from underwater sensors looking for suspicious activity happening near underwater cables), the possibilities are endless.

In the private sector, there is discussion about barriers to adopting social tools. These include concerns about computer and information security, side-effects due to using unproven technologies, and concerns about negative impacts on productivity. But, a recent Gartner study suggests that if IT departments do not implement social technology tool use, worker bees will find workarounds. Therefore, a fair amount of time at the WIRe/ICES conference was spent discussing how to change the culture of organizations to take best advantage of the inevitable use of these social tools.

At the end of the film The Good Shepherd, the new CIA director says to Matt Damon’s character, “A Senator once asked me, ‘Why don’t you say ‘the’ before CIA? And I asked him, Do you say ‘the’ before God?” With regard to integrating social technology tools into everyday intelligence operations and analysis the IC is not quite godlike yet… but they’re getting awfully close.

Dr. Mark Drapeau is an Associate Research Fellow at the Center for Technology and National Security Policy of the National Defense University in Washington, DC. These views are his own and not the official policy or position of any part of the U.S. Government. If you think this commentary is weak sauce, find him on Twitter and tell him about it!

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:National Intelligence Launches MySpace for SpiesWhat Happens When the Government Goes Web 2.0Google: Helping America’s Intelligence Agencies Find StuffIn Finland, Government Disconnects ItselfFacebook Banned For Ontario Government EmployeesFacebook Still Banned in SyriaOMG!! The Feds Launch Their Own MySpace Clone

Source:Mashable!

In the quest for URL shortener dominance in this era of the microblog and limited message space, BudURL comes out swinging. Going toe to toe with other URL shrinkers, BudURL combines metrics with URL shortening.

I am always wary of tools that try to combine metrics with social media, like Twitter Grader and Twitter Follower Friend Ratio. The main reason for this is the risk that people who don’t understand the nature of social media (engagement, conversation and a way to make being genuine a real part of business and personal online interaction) will use the metrics they attain to spam or abuse those in the social media space. Also, turning it into a competition defeats the whole concept of microsharing.

BudURL seems to have found the right mix of metric and social by keeping it simple. Unlike Bit.ly with its custom keywords or TinyUrl with its custom URL feature, BudURL gives you a way to track where your link was clicked. Keywords take time to track and rely on third party software for adequate information, and custom URLs are handy for sharing a link but offer no tracking. To see your referrers without any keywords involved is useful.

The lack of a keyword metric also helps prevent certain kinds of spamming. There is a huge subset of people and businesses out there who watch keywords like a hawk, looking for any opportunity to “game” a system with keyword metrics. By concentrating on where your link was seen and not the keywords around it, you are getting useful information and not contributing directly to a potential spam issue.

My favorite part of BudURL is the real time aspect of the referrer list - it auto refreshes every few seconds as people stop by your page. It was fascinating to me to see the test link I tossed up on Twitter get sent around the Internet. I got a fair share from Twitter, but I also got to see when someone else picked up the link and put it on other sites.

For people concerned with privacy, they may take issue with BudURL’s tracking of visiting IPs. In addition to referring URLs showing on the list, the visitor’s IP is tracked as well. I love this feature - I have a burning desire to see where my readers live and work. I find it interesting. However, if you are nervous when people know too much about you, it may help to keep in mind that clicking on a BudURL will give the person who made the URL your IP.

BudURL also gives you a way to track your BudURLs and create notes to help you remember what they were for. It also offers a toolbar button you can use to easily create BudURLs. Just add it to your toolbar with a simple drag and drop and click it when you are on a page you want to make into a BudURL. It took less than a minute to sign up for the service and install the button for me, and I didn’t even have to wait for a confirmation email. My account was active right away. Additionally, my URL tracking was active from the moment I first sent the URL out into the Twitterverse. Instant gratification is always a winner for me with a new application.

Overall, I think BudURL is going to hold its own against existing Bit.ly and TinyUrl. It isn’t as short as is.gd, so if you are looking for super-short, stick with what you know. I love the metrics feature even more than I love TinyUrl’s custom URLs (I never found a need for Bit.ly’s keywords). I think I’ll be using BudURL from now on to help keep a better eye on my links in microblogging and microsharing services.

There’s been a few exciting things I remember as a kid growing up including: when Hogan slammed Andre, getting my first GameBoy and working at the transit museum. But those totally pale in comparison to the announcment made this morning that TinyURL now supports custom URLs.

It’s all the talk this morning! Louis Gray was able to take a 2-line announcement and turn it into a full product review. Louis points to a post by Steve Gillmor - unfortunately my GilmorDecoder hasn’t arrived yet so I can’t comment on that post.

Gray is clearly mislead, it’s probably because he ate too many brats last night. He notes, "You typically had to trust the person or service sending the TinyURL, or preview it to be sure you weren’t being sent to a Rick Astley music video or a malware site."

And now, ladies and gents, here’s an example of why what he just wrote makes no sense http://tinyurl.com/seagate (don’t worry it’s not malware or Rick Astley). Now do you see why this isn’t going to protect you any better than before? In fact, it might be worse because now the evil people can use URLs that look like legit companies only to send you somewhere bad. I imagine the email scammers will love this new feature.

If TinyURL wanted to offer some new features that would be seriously beneficial, they could add account functionality to save created URLs into lists. They could also offer statistics which could lead to even more goodness as they could show hot and top links and create real content discovery. Perhaps TinyURL could offer a stumbleupon-style feature as well.

In all seriousness, this is a feature that everyone’s asked TinyURL to create but I don’t know if it’s really that important. It will make it easier for the linker but the same for the linkee. I certainly hope that TinyURL users don’t stop linking directly to Web sites and instead link to TinyURLs. 

Most times, the TinyURL is behind the scenes and never heard from. Do you think you are really more likely to click a URL on Twitter if it says http://www.tinyurl.com/microsoft than http://www.tinyurl.com/425c35s? Doubt it. Trust the source, not the URL.

I use MooURL because it’s cuter and looks better.

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