November 23, 2004

Company Identity

Over the weekend, my SEC filings harvester completed the second pass at downloading ownership-related filings. My hard-working script took nearly two weeks to complete the pull.

This project is turning out to be a good lesson in aggregation and identification. After examining the data extracted from these filings, I found gaps in the filings for certain companies due to the re-assignment of CIK codes. For example, Berkshire Hathaway Inc (CIK:1067983) has a an earlier thread of filings under Berkshire Hathaway Inc /DE/ (CIK:109694).

Thankfully, data about changes in company identity can be gathered from termination filings and "formerly known as" information in SEC Edgar search results.

My third pass at downloading will now take into account changes in company identification from my data sources, including changing names, ticker symbols, and SEC CIKs.

I am now thinking about how to additionally publish data about those points where separate threads of identity are joined.

November 19, 2004

Re: Conversation Category

James Tauber, Don Park, and Dave Winer are discussing how to tag blog-to-blog conversations. The idea is that blog entries for a particular conversation are assigned an agreed-upon category and that a conversation aggregator is used to moderate the conversation.

To add my own two cents to this thread, conversation aggregators (as well as the participating blogs) should make use of "reply on my blog" links.

Also, on naming the conversation: When replying to blog entries which are not yet designated as being part of a thread, an identifier is generated, perhaps inviting responses from a list of fellow travellers. This identifier could be based on the entry, or selected through a dialog which would assist the blogger in forming a Google-unique word combination.

It warms my heart that ideas for blog-to-blog conversations can be improved upon in the context of a raging RSS vs. Atom debate :)