Is the future of search being transformed using visualization technologies?

Greg Merkle Factiva's VP of Product Design is going to be conducting a Webinar this week on 'Uncovering Hidden Value within Information using Visualization Technologies". Greg is a top notch presenter and visionary in the industry and is not to be missed- he thinks the future of search is being transformed- join us to see why.

Here is some information on the Webinar:

The future of search is being transformed using visualization technologies. Learn how visualization technologies can help you easily:

• spot a trend
• look for patterns and relationships
• quickly & efficiently synthesize data

Visualization of ideas is not new, but the incorporation of new technologies gives this trend startling new dimensions. Take a tour of the hottest of these new capabilities from across the web lead by Greg Merkle, Vice President of Product Design.

Join us Wednesday, 27 September, 11:00 US Eastern time/8amPST via LiveMeeting technology. [west coast folks- this stuff goes great with morning coffee!]

Register today or drop me a line if you can't make it and i will get a recorded version out to you.

This week i was in a virtual meeting with one of my product folks back in corporate. He commented on my recent Web 2.0 job title post validating my point on that post that at factiva many of us consider ourselves 'Web 2.0' driven although our titles might not be searchable with those terms- he even signed his latest e-mail to me with 'web 2.0 enthusiast' tagline under his name-which i thought was quite clever.
During our meeting, i found something out- which prompted me to whine how i miss being in the middle of the action back in corporate when it comes to discussing new technologies and user needs in today's enterprise.

Later on in the evening as i was going out with some friends- the conversation in the car turned to corporate cafeterias- someone said that they love lunch time because they get to spend time talking to people that work in other departments/projects that they probably would never learn from. I made this little 'uhmm' sound- which prompted my every knowing husband to say- oh looks like this conversation is going to be a blog post-

There is always a lot of talk about the great corporate cafeterias in the Valley with a lot of focus on the food and the physical space, but it is the conversations that occur in those cafeterias that i am most jealous of. I have been invited to lunch at some of the cafeterias out here-some are damn nice- but they have either been clients or acquitances that work there. At the office, i tend to eat my lunch at my desk- i browse my rss feeds, listen to podcasts or watch videoblog posts-many of which i ping my colleagues with via IM. In our SF office we have a nice office space with a eat-in-kitchen (image above left is from the main conference room)- but it just isn't the same as the corporate cafeteria back at the NJ Factiva office where product, customer service, finance, HR, content,taxonomy,sales etc. meetup on a daily basis. Now that i look back at it- even the 6 yrs i worked there i didn't use the cafeteria like i should have- i ate a lot at my desk just trying to do more work when important conversations could have been happening.

So i can't do anything about the physical cafeteria so what can replace a corporate cafeteria in a virtual world? Things which we are using internally to combat my lunchless interaction could include any of the following that we already have access to:
- Internal Blogs
- Internal Wikis
- Shared RSS feeds
- Social Bookmarking
- Collaboration portals
- Virtual presentations
- Live Web Meetings

This post is not about enterprise information delivery but about another kind of delivery- awareness. If you have ever seen me in person you might have noticed that i don't really wear makeup-never really have. i do however - hopefully like most of you regardless if you are male or female- use things like deodorant, toothpaste, shampoos and all the other grooming products men, women and children use.

Yesterday i went to the Sweetwater to see Brittany Shane (good local SF band). It happened to be Breast Cancer Fund Benefit and the organizers did a good job of distributing some very disturbing information.

I am doing my part to spread the word. Please check out The Compaign for Safe Cosmetics at www.safecosmetics.org and click on the image above to download a very informative brochure about the 12 Ugly Truths Behind the Myth of Cosmetic Safety. For the dudes out there- don't be turned off by the lip stick on their logo- it applies to you as well.

Here in the Bay area people have told me before that titles don't really matter. Mine currently is a Solutions Architect, and sometimes i feel like "Art Vandelay" when i say it out loud- although i do architect information delivery solutions for clients- the Architect piece sometimes irks me especially when i try to explain to someone outside of the tech industry- no i can not help you build that patio addition to your house!


This morning when i checked my e-mail, i reviewed my LinkedIn updates- one of them was an update from Emanuele Quintarelli, who has moved from Accenture to Reed Business Information a Reed Elsevier company. I can't quite remember how Emanuele got on my LinkedIn connections but i do peak in on his blog Infospaces every once in a while for some good reading on items of interest to me like social bookmarking in the Enterprise.

Emanuele's new title at Reed Business Information is, Web 2.0 Research & Development Director. From his LinkedIn profile:
Lead Researcher, Strategist and Project Manager for web 2.0 business models and applications (User generated content, Partecipative Architectures, Collaborative Tagging and Annotation, Rich Internet Applications, Web and Service oriented architectures).

Sounds like a great position that will help Reed a publisher of information for business professionals take a lead in delivering content to today's new work force that demands more from the information that is made available to them. I applaud Reed and/or Emanuele whomever came up with that focused position first!

I did a quick job search for web 2.0 within job titles that have been recently posted on job boards and i couldn't find many that actually looked like they had web 2.0 in the title but did in the description.

SimplyHire- 86 hits
Monster - couldn't find a search by title option?
Yahoo Hotjobs: - 8 hits
Indeed- (67 hits on sept 24th when updated with corrected link)
i also noticed the left side refinement features by Title,Company,Location,Job Type and Employer or Recruiter posted.
Updated- Thanks to Rony Kahan of Indeed.com who posted a comment with a link to Indeed.com's trending tool -pretty cool - but you know what would be great? (and remember this is coming from an archivist who works for a company with a 30yr+ archive) if you could click on points to get those job postings from months ago (i however think that a lot of job sites remove their posts). That would be a great tool for management that is looking to 'name' new positions or see what competitors are doing? Or is there a tool that does that already?
Poking around also found a "Where are the jobs" real time map with click through. very nice.

Quick glance- pointed to many developer and UI positions.

Do you know of other positions that have Web 2.0 within the title in the publishing industry? Perhaps we might be calling it something else like 'new media'? Or maybe existing job titles/roles are just looking at information delivery in a Web 2.0 world? I know that at Factiva we are.

Well best of luck Emanuele Quintarelli! Looking forward to 'hearing' more-

This morning as i was going to work on mass transit i looked over the shoulder of the person in front of me to see an article about Google-i just read the headline- the rest of the print was too small-the bold headline was valuable.


The article was about a ruling in Belgian courts around Copiepresse and Google displaying their headlines and snippets from their web publication. Last week i posted about screen scraping and legal ramifications and this ruling is back to that subject.

From Webpronews some details;

Order the defendant to withdraw the articles, photographs and graphic representations of Belgian publishers of the French - and German-speaking daily press, represented by the plaintiff, from all their sites (Google News and "cache" Google or any other name within 10 days of the notification of the intervening order, under penalty of a daily fine of 1,000,000.- € (1.27 million USD) per day of delay;

Also order the defendant to publish, in a visible and clear manner and without any commentary from her part the entire intervening judgment on the home pages of 'google.be' and of 'news.google.be' for a continuous period of 5 days within 10 days of the notification of the intervening order, under penalty of a daily fine of 500,000,- € ($635,000 USD) per day of delay.

This ruling comes after Google announceded its recent AP deal and the News Archive search service. With both of those moves, Google is once again pointing to the value of pay for premium content. We all however know that there is also value in headlines-if they are returned to the user in context. I have made that argument to clients for years when they start looking at usage- a user can browse hundreds of headlines quickly giving them a lot of good information without clicking through too many-if any articles. Remember i didn't start this post by telling you that i ripped the paper out of the readers hand- the headline was enough to prompt my further research (yes i used factiva.com to find out more once i got online in case you are wondering)

What i focus on in solving information delivery issues is seamless access to content on demand when and how the user needs it. Seeing an article headline that you need to quickly make a business decision and getting prompted for a username or a credit card is frustrating. Productivity and compliance issues drive many enterprises to work with premium content aggregators whose primarly pbusiness is in gathering validated trusted content, normalizing, categorizing and then delivering that content however a client wants it.

As enterprise workers continue to feel more comfortable using search as their primary tool and the influence of the Google model of simplicity- i see how tools like Google search with Enterprise controls (allowing companies to point to specific premium content) are going to be a core to news content delivery in the enterprise. I already see some clients doing it (and they have been doing it for years with some other enterprise search engines as well)- but honestly i am not convinced that the search interface is going to be the only place for delivery of highly relevant news. So as services like Google start opening up access to APIs that get to that content is when the conversation starts getting both interesting and exciting. But first we need to figure out the model of publishing premium content in today's web world.

every once in a while i like to remind my readers that....The posts on this blog are provided 'as is'’ with no warranties and confer no rights. The opinions expressed on this site are my own and do not necessarily represent those of my past,future or present employer.

Great news comes through Rob Boothly's Innovation Creators blog today that Michael Arrington's TechCrunch will soon expand to a new blog which will cover enterprise products.
Hurray!
Don't get me wrong- i love the consumer stuff and certainly much of it applies to the enterprise as well -especially when our enterprise audiences are becoming more and more innovation creators and whose work and personal life from a technology perspective is no longer separate- but a weblog "dedicated to obsessively profiling and reviewing" new enterprise products and companies managed by the folks at TechCrunch is just grand- i can't wait!

Read or listen to any conversation about sales successes and the topic of 'knowing your customer' eventually comes up as a key skill that top performers display. Last Week on Russ Lombardo's SalesTalk radio show on Business Voice America Radio, the topic was "Drive Revenue and Retention Through Effective Response to Customer and Prospect News" with Simon Bradstock-Director of Product for Factiva SalesWorks.

It is a good overview of how Factiva is delivering some very valuable services to sales groups across various industry sectors. The conversation revolved around using services like Factiva SalesWorks to keep an eye on events occurring in the news that may create business opportunities and/or a threats- but it goes beyond that to address some core information delivery issues that sales, like other parts of the organization are dealing with.

A couple of items that i am working with clients on right now:

- Some of the recent focus groups factiva conducted pointed to the fact that high performing sales folks- are avid readers- like the self directed innovator- the right tools to make sure they capture all they need is essential. Tools that allow them to digest large amounts of information, can be delivered to them via existing systems like CRMs, portals, search, etc. or through their native information tools like for example a RSS reader. They must have options- mixing content from here and content from there- regardless of format or subscription model and today's Web 2.0 technologies allow companies to provide various options without a lot of added cost.

- They discussed Dynamic Account Planning tools which i think are a great productivity tool to provide sales teams- making the account planning process a living breathing process- i blogged about Account Planning in a Web 2.0 world back in July- and i am currently working on some very cool things with some my customers that i will try to share with you soon.

Over the last few months i have been getting myself out there to network- or at minimum to meet new folks in the local area that have similar interests. I have been going to a lot of local gatherings mostly surrounding new technologies and a lot of events that allow startups to demo and/or give a short presentation on what they are trying to do.

At these events, most of the demos are consumer or enterprise application entrepreneurs- all of which i find interesting of course but during the last two i got to find out more about the action in the non-profit space.

Last week i saw a demo of CivicEvolution which provides online tools and resources to help groups achieve their goals through deliberation and collaboration. Check out their site- this seems to be a great tool for organizing locally and beyond.

Tonight at the STIRR event i met Dave Shefferman, Executive Director of One Brick- they have been at it since 2001 and the concept is a great one. It was the first site i visited when i got home- Dave wasn't demoing at the event but he was quick to give me just enough of an elevator pitch to have me go check it out. They are all about creating a flexible volunteer environment. Good stuff and they might have a local chapter you can keep your eye on.

Yesterday on the way home i listened to the Dave Girouard session at the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium. Girouard is VP and General Manager of Google Enterprise and on the MIT site it quotes Eric Schmidt saying that "In his group, we have the wildest meetings"- sign me up.

I saw one of the other Enterprise Google folks in April at a conference and he had also talked about the evolution of the 'office worker' to the 'knowledge workers' to the 'self directed innovator' in the workplace. Right away i associated with the definition of a self directed innovator- i had been thinking about that user for a while as i design solutions for enterprise customers- mainly because i am one, but more importantly because i believe those folks are on the bipolar edge of an enterprise user and a consumer and successful enterprise applications need to feel 'comfortable' and usable for these users and then others who will follow the early adopters.

I highlight the items below that i thought were important to keep in mind as we try to deliver enterprise solutions that solve business issues and have high levels of adoption. Here are a few items that are important to keep in mind that Girouard mentioned that i would keep in mind with information delivery solutions in the enterprise:

• The target employees for the greatest adoption probably has no directs reports however are big influencers at their company and/or within their groups- if they use it others will follow
  
• the raw material = talent- without it nothing happens- tools need to leverage that talent and enable sharing
  
• need information everywhere- at their desktop, on the road, in a meeting, on the fly when and how they want and need it
  
• put the companies' knowledge behind that person
  
• they like to collaborate inside and outside the company- enable this
  
• their personal life and work lives are not entirely separate- they live an intermingled life- support it
  
• they do not spend the majority of a time in one single application- let the information follow were they go
  

In Girouard's case he is talking about search- but we all know that Google Enterprise is thinking way beyond search and other other enterprise applications already out there. As savy users, if enterprise applications don't meet our needs we find other ways to do what we need to do, we stop being productive or even worse leave to go somewhere were the tools meet our 'style'. With the new 'MySpace' generation coming into the workforce, enterprise applications need to be designed to meet the needs of those new users.

Jeremiah proves himself as not only being a great connector in the web world but also a fine event coordinator!

Down to the signs in the parking lots to the HDS Executive Briefing Center- so none of the attendees would get lost- to the excellent 'play on words' on the back of the swag give away t-shirts (see image on the left)- the event was a lot of fun and i also got to spend time with some very interesting folks.

I had a great conversation with both Hu Yoshida, VP and CTO and Claus Mikkelsen, Chief Scientist and Industry Expert- both Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) executive bloggers- these folks get it. Let's face it they had a room full of people who are either interested in web technologies, social media or b2b or b2c web businesses, all in need of storage. What a great way to reach out to a whole new buying segment for HDS. We talked a bit about the use of blogs in what i like to call the 'listening' part of sales which i have blogged about before.

On his blog post about the event Jeremiah says "IÂ’ve got a few things to brag about, the entire event was spread via blogs and emails, and we didnÂ’t spend any money on getting the word out." Yep-you do.

More information about the event including those that had demo desks can be found here on the Lunch 2.0 Site. Here is a pic of me talking to Shel Israel.

Just watched The McVlog Robert Scoble interview, great stuff. Robert blogged about it as well but i saw it on the McVlog first. I started visiting Daniel McVicar's McVlog recently because of his box set from Blogher which included a video interview with Arianna Huffington that i saw them record at the conference- funny stuff.

This short video will allow you to have a 'relationship' with Robert- hey that is what he calls it- and i have to agree. He talks about the difference in reading 100 blogs and seeing a video- especially when trying to show someone how to do something. I tried it here a couple weeks ago when i felt a video response was appropriate to describe how RSS alerts were going to be incorporated into one of our products based on a query i received.

Anyway...one of the highlights of the video, had to be when McVicar points to the obvious resemblance between Robert Scoble and Philip Seymour Hoffman- who is obviously destined to play Robert in the 2007 version of Pirates of Silicon Valley movie. I have seen Robert in person at some events and i certainly agree-

Want to see if you can tell the difference? Try this Simple Game i put together of 'Is it Valley or Hollywood?

The Between the Lines podcast is one of the regular podcasts i listen to and last week on the way to work i tuned in to listen to Dan Farber and Denise Howell on Google Apps, Lawgarithms, YouTube futures and more… . Denise is appellate, intellectual property and technology lawyer and the author of ZDNet's new Lawgarithms blog. i added it to my reading list.

They had an interesting conversation that is being discussed by others about copyright in the Blogsphere (e.g. RSS syndication via scraping) and the new Bizdev 2.0 which she referenced as basically as simple as flickr posting open APIs and developers kits- with term of services that imply an automatic partnership with potential creators of mashups with absolutely no business development on either side - and the terms of service agreement that the user has agreed to is the only legal requirement.

I have had this post on the legal ramifications of screen scraping on my edit board since last week after i read this piece in Plagiarism Today about Dapper. I ran into his blog as I was reading the conversation about RSS scraping on Robert Scobles Blog. In his post about Dapper -Jonathan Bailey writes:

While being easy to use or free is not necessarily a problem in and of itself, in the rush to enable users to make an API for any site, they forget that many sites don't have one or restrict access to their APIs for very good reasons. RSS scraping is perhaps the biggest copyright issue bloggers face. It enables a plagiarist or spammer to not only steal all of the content on the blog right then, but also all of the content that will be posted in the future. This is a huge concern for many bloggers, especially those concerned about performing well in the search engines.

i had seen Dapper on TechCrunch and i got excited, i dapped and the UI was hard, but by last week the UI experience was a bit better- labeling and functional changes. I thought about it often following the day of my post but I was having a hard time creating a Dapper- mostly because i didn't feel comfortable screen scraping news sites- since i work for a news content aggregator and know copyright issues quite well. Since the Plagiarism Today piece, Dapper has made some changes including a Opt-Out option for publishers and others. I think Dapper is pretty cool and is one of many companies that will continue to allow consumers to define how we -as end-users with limited programming skills-interact with information technology in the consumer and enterprise space- they will just have to figure out how to go about it without allowing their users to break the law.

the hush hush when the channel marketing folks visited i guess is out of the bag with the following that got forwarded to me this evening: It's official Google News adds Newspaper archives. Factiva is one of the content aggregators that is participating as one of the subscription services retrieved as part of your archive results.

We have been doing it with Yahoo! since June 2005 so it isn't a big deal except that i am pretty certain that more enterprise information workers use Google instead of Yahoo during their work hours -as they conduct research with web searching and even with Google desktop search. Look at what our EX-CEO (she recently went to Dow Jones our parent company) had to say about Google back in July 2004.

Users can either access through the News Page (i couldn't find it i went straight to it) or directly here: http://news.google.com/archivesearch

When results are presented they are presented with a timeline and you will see "Pay-Per-View - Source Name - Factiva, a Dow Jones & Reuters Company" for those articles you can use your existing Factiva subscription (you can also buy subscription access) . Many of my customers have subscriptions to Factiva Search so a simple cookie will send them on the way to the full text of the article. I have no idea at this point how the algorithms (our's not Google's) are being executed by the way- i haven't been privy to the conversation- so more on that as i find out.

After trying a couple of searches-I cheated and searched for 'factiva' to be certain i would get a Factiva sourced article. When you select the headline from the results page you are brought to the following page:

You click on 'View full article' to get to the article seamlessly if you are cookied (or you get prompted for a userid). The page also displays a short list of related Articles using iWorks technology (iWorks is the older sister of our new Search 2.0 functionality-i am not sure why it isn't Search 2.0 although there must be a good reason).

Anyway as clearly marked it is in BETA and i will promptly submit my feedback as usual (more and more we go straight to customer BETA- because as some may say, if it ain't in BETA it ain't cool- i however think it is a great way to develop products for our customers, with our customers- so submit your own feedback. [note: i couldn't find the regular feedback button that is the first piece of feedback!]

Back in May after going to hear Chris Anderson speak i posted about the huge value in archives that the 'long tail is producing. Factiva and other content aggregators have been telling the what we call the 'Good Enough Search' engines that their Enterprise audience wants premium content and companies are willing to pay for their employees to ensure solid business decisions - Google News Archive is just another way for them to get to that content. Google perhaps didn't originally look at this as another way to service the Enterprise Market?- but i think they might have just again-

Update: Found this on paidcontent.org -

This morning I got pinged by Joanne Wan of STIRR who i have been recently running into at a couple of events and she pointed me to her flickr photostream from the BlogHer conference where i got to pose with her just like Arianna Huffington did.

Arianna is certainly a more powerful blogger then i am, however she did not have a cool "Web 2.OH YEAAHH!!" T-shirt like mine- and what a coincidence- Joanne just recently got crowned the Web 2.Ooh ValleyWag Queen!
Oh what fun we have in the Valley...

Catching up on blog reading this weekend has not been so time consuming thanks to Bloggers taking time off for the end of summer holiday in the United States- Labor Day to celebrate America workers- i guess we don't feel like working much hence the low volume- i know i didn't. The Wall Street Journal even ran a piece on August 31st (subscription required) about the multiple 'gone fishing' posts on Blogs:

In the height of summer-holiday season, bloggers face the inevitable question: to blog on break or put the blog on a break? Fearing a decline in readership, some writers opt not to take vacations. Others keep posting while on location, to the chagrin of their families. Those brave enough to detach themselves from their keyboards for a few days must choose between leaving the site dormant or having someone blog-sit.

Interesting posts found during my catch up:

• Maybe all the bloggers are at Burning Man. CNN's Business 2.0 seems to think that the running joke is that in Silicon Valley you can't get any software code written or raise venture capital funding the week before Labor Day because all the techies head to Burning Man. I recently was told by someone that a recruiter recently encouraged someone to show off her tattoos during her interview- i have always wanted dreads, maybe now is the time?
  
• From Ross Mayfield's Blog- do you want to contribute to an article in Wired News? A Wiki allows the author to experiment in collaborative journalism
• Via Steve Rubel- The LA Times NewsPoint RSS Service the key here is that it is just not for LA Times content but it enables users to aggregate news headlines and editor-recommended content from latimes.com, as well as RSS feeds from other websites and blogs- this will lead people to their reader as the primary aggregator- i have mentioned this to our product folks and some custom apps we are working on allow for this personalization but behind the firewall- i think our destination products should allow self aggregation for non-factiva content sources
  
• Also via Steve Rubel- "Test your Web 2.0 Awareness" - i bit weird to remind oneself that all we do it being tracked- i got 21%
• Rob Boothly at Innovation Creators on A Better Way to Do Things- With 40% of business being ad hoc according to a McKinsey report- Rob posts about how if companies want to build more secure, more structured and more efficient ad hoc information analysis and distribution processes they should consider using blogs, wikis and Office 2.0 tools as a replacement for today's emails, IMs and shared drives. Rob is speaking at the Office 2.0 conference in October
  
• Guy Kawaski gives you 'Everything You Wanted to Know About Getting a Job in Silicon Valley But Didn't Know Who to Ask'
  
• From Creating Passionate Users - Why Marketing should make the user Manual!- bingo and yet another reason why certain companies are even going to the users to create user manuals via media files
• Howard Rheingold is teaching a class on Participatory Media/Collective Action this fall at the UC Berkeley School of Information and a course syllabus is available as a wiki
• Caught up with my Bare Naked App blog to see how they are doing
  

I bought and downloaded QuickTime Pro today and spent more then half the day playing around with the software. It was easy enough. I downloaded it on my Windows XP machine and although the basics i accomplished i probably want to get a Mac if i want to do video editing seriously any time soon.