Saturday, November 22, 2003

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Distinguishing Internet Legends The #1 distinguishing characteristic of internet legends seems to be the lack of a link. This is immediately cause for great suspicion, since the web makes it SO easy to provide a link. The interesting thing to me is that it would be very easy to make up a link. And they often do have detailed contact information (Sgt. Brian Murphy, Chief Detective, New Orleans Police Dept., 111-222-4444, ext. 9999). At a bare minimum, a completely fabricated (non-existent) link would improve the credibility by its mere apparent presence. Lots of people wouldn't bother to check it (think about all the dial-up users still out there). An easy improvement would be a link to the home page of some credible news source (a city newspaper, for instance). So then it would appear, to the casual reader who did click the link, that the author of the message had simply failed to make a correct, permalink. Taking it to a new level, a hoax site could be put in place to link to. Doing this well would be orders of magnitude more effort than the minimum approach. But still not that hard for someone with motivation and skills. A somewhat easier approach would be to create a fake weblog/personal site for this purpose, and have the personal site include the fake kind of link posited as the minimum approach. Many more readers would be satisfied by drilling one level down, would consider the weblog entry to be sufficienct validation, without clicking on the link contained in it. 5:32:30 PM    comment []

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This article in Software Development magazine almost perfectly describes the Requirements Analyst (aka, Systems Analyst, Business Analyst, Business Systems Analyst) role as I see it. 5:30:20 PM    comment []