Data Availabity, Data Connections, Data Data Everywhere

In the last week, MySpace announced its Data Availability project a way for members to share profile data with other social and community sites across the Web and that in addition it had also officially joined the DataPortability Project. Then Facebook launched Facebook Connect which will allow users to “connect” their Facebook identity, friends and privacy to any website. On Monday according to according to TechCrunch (i will be at the announcement event and received an invite almost 10 days ago which i am assuming is related) Google is due to announce “Friend Connect”. Those are the big names you all know, and then there are others that you might also be familiar with like Digg and Plaxo and hundreds of other smaller players that are addressing Data Portability and are 'talking' and 'doing'.

Of course there has been a lot of discussion on the internet, in chat rooms and in discussion lists about what this all means- too much to read as usual which is overwhelming and i am trying really hard to find new voices to me that are discussing these issues.

Are all or any of these vendors with their 'big' announcements perfectly addressing DataPortability project goals? No- there is a lot of work that still needs to be done to ensure that there are standards and this is not about one vendor- but these are needed steps.

Do i think that the big 'vendors' are feeling the pressure by users, technologists and advocates to evolve their user data models sooner then later because of the Data Portability Project and the visibility we have managed to gain over the last six months- Yes.

If these vendors had wanted to 'perfectly' address it would they be able to go to the DataPortability Project Wiki and pull a check list? No- not yet since those technical specifications are still being developed but we certainly are happy to have the vendors continue to participate in those discussions so we can finalize and publish the DataPortability Best Practices (open to all).

The DataPortability Project - six months strong- that i have been involved in since the beginning has done what i think is an amazing job at moving the conversation from the tech zone here in the Bay area which has been going on for years- to the global 'mainstream' (although many of the existing communities have a large global presence of course). Call it timing, call it good marketing, call it luck- call it what you wish- i like to say it has to do with a need...a need by users, vendors and technologists to have one forum to discuss and act on the various issues and opportunities around user data and the usage of that data (the 'Graph').

So how do all the different announcements by the MySpace, Facebook and Google differ or are the same- not all of the details have been published so it will be interesting to see them all. i am looking forward to the outcome of the exercises that Kaliya the 'Identity Woman' is proposing for this weeks upcoming Internet Identity Workshop in which they will be comparing the 'openness' of these announcements. I unfortunately won't be at the Workshop but will be attending Thursday's Data Sharing Summit.

I am just so happy to be in the middle of this sprint to action by vendors, this public cry for control from the users and with all the community leaders that have been working for a long time in this space as well as the large amount of new voices that come with the DataPortability Project- including my own.

Michael Pick who made the original DataPortability Project viral video did another video this week that highlights those vendors that are involved in the conversation.


DataPortability - Join The Conversation from Smashcut Media on Vimeo.

i (heart) RSS. You Should As Well

I like the idea of evangelizing something for a whole day and today May 1st- beyond being May Day (which celebrates the social and economic achievements of the labor movement) seems to be also RSS Awareness Day via rssday.org. As a celebration and re-engagement with my RSS feeds i promised to do a little RSS feed gardening on my Goggle

Reader.

Here are some of my previous thoughts on RSS which stands for Really Simple Syndication- a really simple and powerful way to consume and publish content.

Do you have people on your team that you still need to convince (or educate) on RSS- here is a quick video to start the conversation.

Semantic Technologies in the Enterprise Roundtable Event- May 22th in Palo Alto

If i am not planning and organizing some event i am not happy- perhaps i missed my calling as an 'events coordinator' or something.

On May 22nd from 2-6pm in Palo Alto, CA - Christine Connors the Director of Semantic Technology Solutions for Dow Jones and the Business Champion for Synaptica, will be leading a roundtable discussion on the subject of Semantic Technologies in the Enterprise.

Many of our Enterprise Customers have been asking us about semantic technologies and since Christine will be in town to present at the Semantic Technologies Conference in San Jose, i thought it would be a great time to schedule a roundtable discussion on the subject.

Some of our previous roundtable events that i have coordinated have been very successful and have covered subjects such as Social Media Measurement and Folksonomies and Taxonomies in the Enterprise. This event will be at our Palo Alto office that also houses the local printing plant for The Wall Street Journal. This means that afterwards we get to do a special guided tour of the printing plant which is always a highlight for the attendees (and no matter how many times i do it - for me as well!).

The roundtable portion of the event will cover topics such as:

• What can Semantic technologies do for your organization?
• How can the Semantic Web help you in your job role?
• Where do you start and what are best practices?
• How do you “sell” Semantic web investment concepts internally?

I still have a couple of seats left at the table- so if you an individual at a company that is looking at using or are already using semantic technologies in your enterprise and are interested in coming to meet some of your fellow Bay area colleagues that are working on similar projects- please e-mail at daniela.barbosa@dowjones.com. If you know of someone that might be interested in the topic please feel free forward this post to them.

Photo Categorization Different Needs for Different Users

Over the last few days i have come across two separate conversation about taxonomies on Flickr that i thought were interesting. Flickr is a photo (and now video) site that has become increasingly popular yet i still run into people frequently who don't know about flickr (yes, shocks me as well). When i ask what they use to share pictures they mention sites like Snapfish or Kodak Easyshare were the model is still more share and buy then organize. Flickr allows users, especially Pro users who pay $24.95 per year to use a variety of ways to 'organize' their photos by using collections, sets and tags.

John Suler has an interesting project going on using Flickr about The CyberPsychology of Flickr and his recent addition was about Categorizing Images which came with the photo i include in this post. The project is to encourage discussion on how "people in flickr use photographs and images to express themselves, converse with each other, and form relationships as well as groups" and this addition was focused on how flickr users categorize their pictures.

In talking about personal 'taxonomies' he writes: "The categories you start off with may not work well later on. And the way you organize images for your own personal archive may be different than the collections you create for showing your images to others, as in flickr." In my world of taxonomies, we call this audience centric views- different audiences either by user type, location (e.g. US/UK), or usage purpose, etc.. Well built taxonomies allow this and robust taxonomy management tools enable this. Here is a paper on how the National Library Board of Singapore uses Audience-Centric Taxonomy: Using Taxonomies to Support Heterogeneous User Communities'

The other topic was Keywording for biology/taxonomy/nature photographers using Aperture which i have not used but seems to have a more robust keyword management tool allowing a hierarchy to be built. In the thread Stewart Macdonald highlights one of the things that for example content editors benefit from when a hierarchal taxonomy is presented that allows selection when tagging and that can also automatically expand the user-selected terms using related terms from their taxonomy system (and it does not have to exclusive of free text tags either!).

Stewart writes in response to someone who suggests that he just add keywords and then use search to find photos: "The hierarchy is important to me. If I didn't have nested keywords, I'd have to assign the following keywords individually to any pics of crocodiles:
animal
vertebrate
reptile
crocodile
Crocodylus
Crocodylus porosus

Being able to just assign 'Crocodylus porosus' and have all the 'upstream' keywords included too is a bit quicker.

I am always trying to find 'consumer' examples to illustrate concepts- that although might be different in a corporate environment still help the user understand some of the benefits- so these things and flickr- delight me.

Photo credit : jsuler

So Your Company Profile is in the Top Ten on LinkedIn What Does it Mean?

Through a Twitter message from @Infosourcer a new twitter follower of mine who is the Manager of Internet Research at Deloitte (who also have @DeloitteLLP)- a pointer to a post on the LinkedIn Blog about Top 10 Company Profiles on LinkedIn (April 2008).

So what does it mean to be one of the Top 10 Company Profiles views on LinkedIn?

• do they have the biggest ego maniacs?
• are their employees being recruited the most?
• do they have the most interesting people working for them?
• do they have the most social media enabled employees that are pushing their online profiles?
• are they companies that most people want to sell into?
• are they the most socially connected companies?
• are they just purging from one another?
  
• are they just bigger then everyone ?

I certainly wasn't surprise to see any of these companies and i am sure size attributes to it but i would love to see a comparison graph of how successfull the top 10 profiled viewed companies compare in using LinkedIn to recruit new employees as well. I did a quick search in the job board and found the following numbers of job posted by the top 10:

GE (and General Electric)- 4
Deloitte- 3
Cisco- 236
HP- 22
Oracle- 337
Google- 154
Microsoft - 113
Accenture- 31
IBM- 3

I Knew There was a Reason I Never Started Smoking, I Was Waiting for Something Better

This article over at paidcontent.org Blog Reading: Kind Of Like Getting A Nicotine Fix caught my eye this morning because as you probably guessed it, i am obsessive about reading my blogs with the various tools i use and particularly checking blog aggregating services like Techmeme . Of course, there is nothing like a story about bloggers and blog readers to get a blogger excited (how many times can i say blog and get away with it?)

As the post on paidcontent.org states the study was conducted with only a few people (15) and 11 of them are bloggers to boot - but some interesting findings.

I see the use of blogs continuously growing behind corporate firewalls as a new way to communicate with employees and across groups, online newspapers like The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal among most of the other biggies, are also pushing out blogs. And it seems that they are having some success (just based on simple comment engagement that i see) so it is important to understand the behavior that drives people to read blogs if you want to make them successful. Some items from the report:

• study participants who labeled their blog-reading time as “chilling out” and “doing nothing,”>>yeah i am chilling right now so there has to be some 'pleasure' involved don't make your post read like a dissertation
  
• one describing his impulse to read blogs as similar to his cigarette habit. >> sure i get a bit jumpy when i can't check my favs, some people have America Idol- i got my blogs so put that in your pipe and smoke it
  
• the blog readers typically professed little stress about information overload in trying to keep up with their favorite blogs. When they got behind on reading posts, they just skipped the old ones. >>yep love that 'read all' feature on Google reader- free me please and please recycle that big pile of newspapers in the corner of my kitchen as well!
  
• Habitual reading can become potentially detrimental when people disengage mentally and don’t think very critically about what they’re reading. >>not any different from print media where people believe what they read because it is 'published'

Most importantly i think is this comment by one of the study authors Eric Baumer:

I think this finding helps to open up the design space in terms of tools to support blog reading. Rather than focusing on helping readers wade through a deluge of information content, one could envision tools that focus on the reader’s relationship with the blogger or allowing more fluid, nuanced interactions between bloggers and readers.

Bingo- remember years ago we were having conversations about whether a blog was a blog if it didn't allow comments? Comments now are an essential part of building relationships with users. And the evolution of blogging will continue- there are going to be many new tools to engage readers with the content and each other, things like:

• using alternative ways to push content like using Twitter to 'publish' posts
• Matching the readers 'Attention' to specific blog posts (see search example on RAM and Whiskey blog)- so the first posts the visitor sees when visiting a blog are the most relevant to them based on their current attention profile
  
• allowing readers to comment beyond text for example with video replies
  
• allowing 'real-time' chat on blogs- once you post (i just had this experience today with Tangler with a DataPortability logo chat at the bottom of this page not a blog but the concept is an interesting one especially for heavily trafficked and commented site)

What other ways have you seen out there or can imagine that will change how 'blogs' engage their readers?

Picture of the Portuguese 'SG' cigarette by lanier67.

Bring it on- the Data that is

Infectious Greed by Paul Kedrosky is one of my daily reads and i also follow him on twitter which i always recommend to people especially my Dow Jones Colleagues who are interested in the markets and want to get value from Twitter besides how many cups of coffee someone had (although he like all us regular twitter folk also twitts personal messages often).

Today he has some good food for thought with his 'Bring on the Data Blogs' post. He writes:

I am, however, increasingly fascinated with capturing and incorporating useful, alternative data sources from the edge. You see some of that beginning to happen via Twitter (and I'm advising an interesting company doing work here), but there are all sorts of opportunities at the confluence of unstructured data, companies like QL9 and Kirix, webcams and video analytics, and, yes, blogs. While I've long incorporated meta-data from blogs in my thinking, I want to make it more explicit. I want blogs about data, sites that reshape and repurpose data as their central purpose.

I just had this conversation the other day that we should be doing more with our web presence beyond blog posts and contextual links and 'widgets'- the topic of the conversation was putting together an unique Synaptica web presence for our community- something i have been advocating since day one in my role as Business Development Manager earlier this year. The word 'blog' was being used during the call (and there will be a blog element) so of course i turned into my usual snotty self and commented- 'well a blog would have been cool two years ago-we need to do more and while we are at it eat our own dog food'. woof woof growl growl- i say.

DataPortability Logo selection open for public voting

In early March the DataPortability Group received a cease and desist letter from Red Hat that the DataPortability Logo was too similar (identical, in their words) to their Fedora Logo. Instead of fighting it, after discussing with the community we decided to run a contest to select a new DataPortability Logo.

In addition to having the honor to be the designer of the new DataPortability logo and to help the community create an important Trust Mark for the emerging Data Portability conversation, there are also many prizes from companies who support the DataPortability initiative and have donated prizes to be awarded to the winner including an iPhone, Ad space on Techcrunch, cash and more. We had over 400 submissions, which have been narrowed down to 15 finalists over the course of the last month.

The idea is that the DataPortability Logo will be the center piece of the DataPortability Brand and will be used on blog sidebars, websites and projects to show support for the DataPortability Project.

So Vote Now! The public voting begins on April 15, at 12pm (PST), and ends on Friday, April 18, at 11:59pm (PST).

Some people are critiquing that the DataPortability Group has been too busy dealing with the logo contest instead of doing 'real' work towards data portability. Well some people really have been busy since this process has been very time consuming and Elias one of the leaders of the "logo gang" writes about some of the project processes in this post- at times a challenging technical and organizational project that i am super impressed these folks pulled off within the time lines set! Congrats and Job Well Done!

From the outside i can see how someone might say that the group is not doing much beyond a contest for a new logo-we are a young group (established in late Nov 07)-but i have had the pleasure to see from the 'inside' (which is really public and open to participation!)- there is other work going on and very passionate people who are indeed working towards making data portable while continuing in the establishment of governance and process for the group. Setting up processes is something that just needs to be done as well and this logo contest project in addition to delivering a project that we wanted to do with the community, provided us with some real use cases for getting projects started and completed as DataPortability deliverables-let's hope that some of the lessons learned will hyper-power the next few projects.

What are you waiting for? Vote Now!

Conferences, Events, Travel and Maximizing My Time

So i have been up since 7am on a beautiful Saturday morning trying to organize my calendar for the next three months and i am totally frustrated. Trying to organize my calendar for events and four conferences that have four online activity calendars/schedulers with four separate logins, plus i need to make hotel and flight reservations as well as appointments so i can maximize my time at these events. Urgh---Who is going to fix this???

Things are certainly getting better and below i highlight one way i am maximizing some of interoperability of web based calendaring using features like iCalendar but i am still having to do a lot of manual work that requires multiple logins and at minimum first time setup on all these services. So of course this activity i am doing this morning is silly because i am reviewing/updating my Outlook calendar (where my work colleagues go to when they need to book appointments so by default my base) , my Google Calendar, my Upcoming.org , my Dopplr plus the calendar on the fridge for the hubby (not for a long while will that one be fixed!). DataPortability anyone?

I invest time and money in all the conferences and events i go to, so i certainly want to maximize the ones i am attending so i can network and meet with as many people as possible. So after spending some time this morning trying to figure out the best way to not only manage my own life but make myself available, as a first step i have created a Google public calendar and using the Calendar embeddable feature i added it to my blog (see on the right side menu).

On my Google public calendar i put the following description:

I am the Business Development Manager for Synaptica and Taxonomy Services at Dow Jones. Part of the Dow Jones Client Solutions team, i am responsible for business development for Synaptica our taxonomy and metadata management tool and work very closely with our Taxonomy Services team.

I am as one of the original co-founders of the DataPortability Project : www.dataportability.org

Please contact me directly at daniela.barbosa@dowjones.com if you would like to schedule a meeting with me at anytime or come find me at the event- this is what i look like in case you are looking for me!

Then i added all my events. Because most of them are on upcoming.org a service i already use often, it was very easy to do because i clicked on "I'm Attending" then clicked to add to my Google Calendar. Then I added personal notes as needed about my attendance at that event so hopefully i can schedule some meetings etc.

It would be awesome if ALL the conference program calendars that i need to fill out for each conference session i want to attend could be portable and then easily included in the details of each calendar entry for people to see which sessions i am attending to get a better idea of my interests. The Semantic Technology Conference Scheduler (what else would you expect from this conference) gets me one step closer.

Hope to see you at one of these events and conferences!