Tuesday, January 30, 2007
Use of Map Mashups in Enterprise Applications
Map mashups are probably the most used if not the most recognized mashups in the consumer world and it is no surprise that they are starting to make an appearance in enterprise applications as well. In the consumer world people create map mashups constantly. The Google Maps Mania blog has an almost daily post on mashups using Google Maps (of specific interest to me would be the fact that the Stabilimento Balneare Bagno Elena has WiFi for example which might come in handy this spring).
Always looking to provide extra value add to our services, late last year Factiva Salesworks provided our users with a global mapping solution using Microsoft's Virtual Earth mapping service which i was very excited to get my hands on.
Using my new video camera (be patient with me this is only my second video with this camera), i recorded this Use Case Scenario of a sales person preparing for a sales trip to Denver. I did this for a client and to show my new colleagues from Dow Jones who were just given access to SalesWorks some of the cool capabilities of an integrated mapping service. (if you are interested in giving this a test drive let me know and i will send you demo access)
Do you know of other cool enterprise map mashup applications? (Salesforce.com has a couple for example) leave them in the comments so i can go take a look.
FASTforward'07 Conference - 2.0 in the Enterprise
The focus of the conference is for the attendees to participate in various types of discussions including panels, interviews and informal discussions around how developments in "Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 and Search 2.0 applications can drive the next wave of value creation within and across their enterprises".
On the Speakers' agenda are folks like Andrew McAfee, John Battelle, Tim O'Reilly and Chris Anderson among others. Have a specific question for these speakers? Well, you can certainly leave it in my comments and i will try to get you an answer or better yet you can ask yourself by clicking on their names and a form will appear that will let you submit a question or possible topic of discussion to the specific presenter.
This is a nice feature that i haven't seen before in pre-conference sites but is a trend that i think conference organizers will be using to include people that can not physically attend the conference but want to participate.
I have an internal meeting tomorrow to discuss conference details so i am not sure of booth duty requirements yet, so here for the world i am claiming 'non-booth' duty for these sessions! The Agenda looks great with topics like The Future of Media, Andrew McAfee's Enterprise 2.0: The Next Disrupter, Business Intelligence: Transformation 2.0, Putting it All Together: The Vision is Reality, Search Technology: The New Frontier, Innovate, Accelerate, Dominate!, Building Stronger Communities, Engaging with Your Multi-Platform Audience, Search Powered Enterprise 2.0, Changing the Game: Using Search to Build New Business Models, of course not missing Chris Anderson's The Long Tail, Mine the Web for Gold, Search Usability and Result Navigators, and Gaining Powerful Insights from Your Data. Ok so i will be at the booth for every break ;-)
I certainly do look forward to speaking to many of the attendees and meeting the other bloggers, podcasters and video bloggers that will be attending the conference. It seems like the conference organizers (FAST Search) don't want the conversation to only be at the conference so they have setup a blog to kick-start the conversation and to hopefully continue the conversation post conference. Conference blogs are tool that is being used more and more for conferences across all disciplines to engage a large audience.
[Edited once i reread]- one thing that is disappointing is the lack of female speakers, an unfortunate but very common occurrence at technology conferences (i see one on the main speakers agenda Jeanette Borzo and four on the rest of the agenda although some names i couldn't tell which way they go).
Monday, January 29, 2007
IBM 'Many Eyes' Project aim to 'democratize' visualization
"Many Eyes allows users to upload large data sets, choose how they are represented visually, and discuss them in an online forum. IBM Research director of collaborative user experiences Irene Greif describes Many Eyes as a way to see if crowd-sourcing principles can be used to analyze visualized data, with the goal of creating data analysis that is both broader and deeper. The inspiration behind the site is to "start a conversation about things like data quality ... The visualization lets you grok at a lot more [data] at once."
Chris Kenton called me today to talk to me about the Media2.0 Workgroup that had just launched and the topic of marketers creating their own applications came up during our conversation. Chris just launched a new blog "MarketingRev: Tech News For Marketers" that is focused on the marketing technology industry. During our conversation, I mentioned my recent post on consumer trends affecting enterprise application development and commented that we see marketers creating 'mash-ups' (perhaps not technical mashups but manual reporting mashups)- using consumer tools like technorati, youtube, google alerts, etc. as they monitor the media 2.0 space. I think this 'Many Eyes' project could be an interesting tool for marketers to have an "active discussion, share ideas, add insight and understand" the visualization of certain metrics they are trying to monitor in a group setting.
Announcing the Media 2.0 Workgroup
"The Media 2.0 Workgroup is a group of industry commentators, agitators and innovators who believe that the phenomena of democratic participation will change the face of media creation, distribution and consumption. Join the conversation..."
We already have a great group of industry leaders and this morning my e-mail was a buzzing with additional requests to participate. Since we offer an aggregated feed as well as OPML, you will be able to subscribe to posts that the Workgroup participants submit with the 'Media 2.0' tag.
From the Techmeme front page this morning- launch thoughts from some of the fellow members of the group:
Jeremiah Owyang / Web Strategy: Hashing out ideas with the Media 2.0 Workgroup
Jeneane Sessum / ALLIED: Media 2.0 Workgroup and Young Dr. Kildare
Frank Gruber / Somewhat Frank: MEDIA 2.0 WORKGROUP FORMED
Suw Charman / Strange Attractor: Joining the Media 2.0 Workgroup
Scott Karp / Publishing 2.0: Media 2.0 Workgroup Launches
Marianne Richmond / Resonance Partnership Blog: Announcing the Media 2.0 Workgroup
I am very pleased to be part of the Media 2.0 Workgroup and as part of my ongoing fascination with "tools and trends for Media 2.0 consumption in the information savvy enterprise" i will be participating with my thoughts on the tools and business needs of the enterprise user- here are some highlights from the last month:
Sunday, January 28, 2007
You know you are going to do it- test out this Javascript
Want to impress your friends, family and coworkers?
GO to any web page, clear the address bar, and paste this:
"javascript:document.body.contentEditable='true'; document.designMode='on'; void 0"
(without the quotes) and hit enter and then edit the page as you see fit.
Enterprise Blogging - looking for use cases
- Send them a copy of Naked Conversations by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel- They hadn't read it yet and since i read the book last spring i have sent it to a handful of clients and prospects because it provides an awesome foundation as to the importance of blogs.
- Send them information about internal corporate blogging, specifically case studies and information to build a business case. A bit harder to find. So below are some items i will be sending (actually i will just send this post!).
Early last year i started talking about internal blogging and since then have also seen some great uses of blogging tools within my customer base, including promotion of library information services, executive 'voice' blogs, and group work blogs- but aside from generalizations it is hard for me to discuss specific case studies due to confidentiality agreements. So here are some items:
- Just this week, Rod Boothly from Innovation Creators posted a detailed post on 'How to use Blogs in the Workplace'. He has had other posts in the past that would be of interest to companies that are evaluating internal blogs including, Enterprise blogs cost $50K - so why aren't there more? and Enterprise Blogging.
- Suw Charman over at Corante has a category on 'dark' or internal blogs which includes this case study from an European pharmaceutical company (hopefully more are fore coming on this topic)
- Gilbane's Report from March 2005 on Blogs and Wikis: Technologies for Enterprise Applications?
- A glance at IBM internal Blogging
- Charlene Li's Forrester's Report on Blogging platforms.
- In Optimize: EMS: Adventures In X-treme Web 2.0 Specialty retailer EMS uses blogs, wikis, and BI tools to expand collaboration internally and externally with business partners.
- A couple of articles i found in the factiva archive that are not available on the web so i won't link to.
If you have additional resources you can share about internal blogging in the enterprise please add to the comments! thanks-
Saturday, January 27, 2007
Consumer Trends Influencing Enterprise Application Development
My answer? Consumers who use Web 2.0 applications tend to have a 'day' job as users of enterprise applications. As someone that spends a lot of time working with clients designing, developing and implementing information delivery solutions behind the enterprise firewall- i am a believer that content distribution tools are being shaped by the consumer web and by watching what is happening in the 'Web 2.0' world i can only hope to stay one step ahead of the users with the solutions we deliver.
We have been talking about users creating their own content for a while time (blogs, wikis, podcasts, etc.) and i love how the conversation is now shaping around 'user-generated' applications. Back in August i asked the question 'who will be creating the enterprise applications of the future'.
Dion Hinchcliff has a recent post about Enterprise Mashups Being Ready for the Enterprise in which he goes into the topic of user generated applications in detail. The power of allowing subject matter experts who know little to nothing about programing to create applications to meet a business need is certainly very interesting to me and some forward looking enterprises that i work with are delivering content frameworks based on web service architectures that are flexible enough to quickly take advantage of these new technologies.
In his post, Hinchcliff points to the fact that enterprise users have had development tools they could use and understand, particularly the "ubiquitous corporate spreadsheet" for a long time. Now if "If we could only provide mashup tools as easy to use as the spreadsheet with automatic enterprise development best practices, along with access to all the services and content in the enterprise and on the Web, users might indeed use them to solve their business problems and not have to ask IT departments to deliver these solutions using older, (much) more expensive methods."
Updated: Sunday January 28th - The New York Times Technology section today covers this topic with "Awaiting the Day When Everyone Writes Software" called intential programming, discussion with Charles Simonyi former chief architect at Microsoft responsible for Word and Excel.
Corporate Social Responsibility- dotherightthing.com
Moving Music Media around tedious but i probably wouldn't pay for it
Would i go to ReadytoPlay to rip my entire collection- probably not- it seems like a great service for someone that is ok with just having MP3 versions of their music and then sells off their CD collection which is not really legal. I am sure that people chose to go down the one time route if they are going to go completely digital with their future purchases. I could plug in my iPods into the stereo but am not convinced that the sound would be the same and my husband who has dog ears for music quality wouldn't allow it anyway.
Jerry Garcia-
-Reflections
Dave Alvin and the Guilty Men
- The Great American Music Galaxy
Grateful Dead
- Dead Set
Bob Dylan
-Saved
-Shot of Love
-LoveSick
-Desire
Dire Straits-
-Communique
-Dire Straits
Jimmy Cliff
-The Harder they Come
Jackson Browne
-Running on Empty
Johnny Cash
-The Sun Years
Ryan Adams
-Gold
The Band-
-Moondog Matinee
-Rock of Ages
-Music From the Big Pink
Los Lobos
- Colossal Head
Ronnie Wood
-I've Got my Own Album to Do
The Rolling Stones
- Beggars Banquet
Staple Singers- Best of the Staple Singers
Lucinda Williams-
-Car Wheels on a Gravel Road
-Lucinda Williams
Warren Zevon
- Excitable Boy
Tuesday, January 23, 2007
Introduction to my new Colleagues
Davos Conversations in a Web 2.0 world
Wow what a social media frenzy! All this to engage the public on the topics that are being discussed at the World Economic Forum at Davos- i think this is an excellent use of social media in the public arena, whose aim to engage people across different generations is sure to get more people involved in the conversation.
Sunday, January 21, 2007
Web Application for creating tag clouds
These tagclouds that TagCrowd produces are looking at word frequencies and not neccissarily what the text has been tagged with (unless you include the metadata in the text box). There are some other tagcloud makers that look at what tags have been applied.
I recently re-read this white paper on Getting Started with Controlled Vocabularies, Taxonomies and Thesauri so for fun, i through the text into TagCrowd to produce the following:
Saturday, January 20, 2007
Marvin Minsky's new book on Artificial Intelligence
From my ACM Technews newsletter comes an announcement of Minsky's new book the Emotion Machine and a pointer to a recent interview. According to the interview article, the book provides a blueprint for a thinking machine that Minsky would like to build—an artificial intelligence that can reflect on itself. Here is an excerpt from the interview:
The theme of the book is that humans are uniquely resourceful because they have several ways to do everything. If you think about something, you might think about it in terms of language, or in logical terms, or in terms of diagrams, pictures, or structures. If one method doesn't work, you can quickly switch to another. That's why we're so good at dealing with so many situations."
Defining Terminology for News Aggregators a paper from Microsoft
The paper is written by four authors and is a short read that they hope will lead to further discussion on the topic of user interfaces for RSS news aggregators. i would label the aggregators that are being addressed- a self subscription RSS feed model (user find feeds and subscribes)- which is different from the traditional news aggregators that bring a universe of news content to the user that is already indexed and rich with metadata and then the user filters within that aggregator's content domain. The findings however are useful to both.
The majority of the paper addresses things that people in the information delivery business already know, but i think it is good to define a common vocabulary. Some interesting items from the paper:
- A vocabulary for the characteristics of the application's environment in which the software is executed, 'Desktop', 'Web-based', 'Widget' and 'Mobile' aggregators
- A vocabulary that describes the user interface of the aggregator, as well as the actions the interface affords
- Although a very small user behavior study (34 users interviews), several user patterns emerged around 'Folder/Feed Selection', External Navigation Techniques and 'Session Termination and unread items'
When doing user interface design work for tools that deliver content to enterprise users, it is always important to understand the user behavior within the content set that they have access to. I constantly think about my own RSS reading habits and talk to enterprise workers about their consumption habits and needs as well. After looking at the user patterns that emerged around which folder or feed to read first, i would put myself in the 'Routine' strategy- which is defined as having a specific routine that i always read, frequently in a specific order, depending on the place of mind i am in (work vs. home). That is find and dandy today but as my attention is further thinned out as feed content becomes a big part of my enterprise content consumption- this routine strategy will probably become inadequate, hence why i think that aggregators that will provide attention strategies will in the long run become the choice of enterprise users.
And here is an interesting aside, the word 'aggregator' is not recognized by my Blogger spell check. I remember that it used to be in my custom dictionary in Office suite (just checked and it is no longer so perhaps it was added by Microsoft recently?) and the Merriam webster dictionary doesn't have the word 'aggregator' listed as well although other online dictionaries that cover computing do.
Thursday, January 18, 2007
Multi Touch Interfaces
Updated Jan 19th: This month, Jeff Han's new company Perceptive Pixel, will ship its first wall-sized touch screen this month, which allows several people to gather around the screen and "become collaborators.
For those of us that still love to read the newspaper, a flip through online paper that we could use our hands would probably be very interesting to use. I am sure we will see something like that soon enough and hopefully some of the newspaper readers (everyone is alway telling me how their kids don't read the paper) will still be around to enjoy it.
I am still begging for a tablet PC but if someone wants to volunteer me straight to these multi touch interfaces- sign me up i am ready.Instant Messenger (IM) frenzy
IM can be a great tool but it can also be distracting and a time waster if not managed properly. I however tend to find that in the business world people are respectful of your time and keep the chatter to a minimum.
Well, i certainly wasn't looking to add anymore to that list, but last week i finally had to cave in and added yet another I service, AOL because some new colleagues are using that IM client.
It was the last straw. i just couldn't take opening up multiple IM clients and even worse, putting them all on 'away' or 'on the phone' during my work day. A productivity tool gone bad. There are various applications that attempt to solved this problem and i have looked at them before but now was the time to try something out.
Today Meebo popped into my attention zone twice, first in my inbox with an invitation to an upcoming lunch 2.0 event and then on TechCrunch announcing new funding so i decided to give them a try. So now all my IM clients (minus Skype) are all in one IM browser based client that i can use from any computer. Hope it works out like i want it to.
I am also testing out the embedded site feature- on the right side of my blog site labeled 'Ping Me'- go ahead try it- if Meebo is as easy as it seems and i am online i might just reply!
Monday, January 15, 2007
Jakob Nielsen's Report of the 10 Best Intranets of 2007
On the list this year, there are a couple of customers that i have worked with over the last few years at Factiva Dow Jones (as there was on the 2006 and 2005 lists) but it makes me particularly pleased because this year's winners emphasized an editorial approach to news on the homepage. From the summary:
"Many intranets have long offered news feeds, but this year's winners have taken extra steps to make their news offerings more relevant to employees, both for internal news and for industry-related external news. Labeling and categorization are more extensive than before, and several intranets let users rate and comment on stories."
Editorial workbench solutions for corporate clients have been a very popular solution over the last few years and for companies that do not have resources to hand pick articles, our editorial services have also offered customized news summaries that can be posted to intranets with multiple delivery options like wireless delivery. With information overflow and with the need to provide content specific to the business needs- human 'editors' who have knowledge of the business will always provide the best summarization of news of interest and it is evident based on the usability and added values these intranets provide.
Nielsen goes on to write under the heading "Web Trends Without the Hype" about using Web 2.0 in the enterprise. Richard MacManus over at Read/WriteWeb thinks Nielsen takes "takes an unnecessary potshot" against user rated content. Of course we know that Nielsen is just being Nielsen but i tend to agree with Nielsen- in that:
Employees of the same company have shared goals and interests, they have passed the quality filter of getting hired, and they have their reputations to protect. For all these reasons, ratings and comments from colleagues are likely to be much more useful than those of random blog readers.
In this post last year on what i saw as growing trends in information delivery in the enterprise- "News Summary Applications- 'Socialize and Network with External News" i wrote that there was a need for enterprises to enable ‘participatory consumption’ to socialize and network with targeted external news more within the enterprise. It is good to see that those companies that are taking the lead are being recognized.
Sunday, January 14, 2007
Use of tag clouds and words to tell a story
Via Richard MacManus's Read/WriteWeb blog comes this interesting use of Tag Clouds over at Seattle Post-Intelligencer's online site seattlepi.com as part of the media coverage they provide online. As newspaper audience continues to shift to online mediums, it is tools like this that brings value add to readers and potentially drives readership. Todd Bishop's blog covers Microsoft and he has posted some interesting views of Bill Gates CES speech. To learn more about this project, read Todd's accompanying story and related blog post as well as some of the comments on his post. There is also a timeline of Microsoft's evolution in words that Bishop and his team produced that is another unique use of tags by adding a slider view feature. The tagline generator is available for use under a Creative Commons license over at chir.ag/tech.
UPDATE (Jan 15th)- Bishop delivers on a reader's suggestion and does a Bill Gates and Steve Jobs: Keynote text analysis and provide an analysis on Michael Dell as well.
It is always interesting to see journalists like Todd Bishop using words to analyze and understand what is being said about a company, industry etc. especially in such an interactive way for the reader. Factiva iWorks/Search 2.0 has visualization capabilities that utilize text mining technologies to identify top trends, relationships and patterns within your search results and it has become a very popular feature for various types of users from journalists to PR folks because it not only saves time, it discovers topics that might have been missed if the user had to read through all the results. Journalists have also used our text mining platform to do word analysis on specific topics-for example on the clichés that are most used by the media.
Thursday, January 11, 2007
RSS Feed Readers can save you time and give you a competitive edge....and attribute revenue to your bottom line
I use multiple tools to consume my RSS feeds (i have over 150 feeds i monitor regulary and i use OPML to move my subscriptions around different services) including:
-Google Reader - browser based - allows me to check my feeds from my multiple computers - since everything is stored at google i can see which feeds i have read, i can subscribe to feeds from multiple places etc. I typically 'know' which feeds i am going to look at- they are doing some neat things with usage trends and i can view my feed within the folders i have or all items.
-Bloglines- i have used this reader for a while and haven't dropped it completely with my use of Google Reader- it is also browser based and i still use the mobile version on my Blackberry
-Internet Explorer IE7 RSS reader- of course i couldn't resist when i upgraded to IE7 but it honestly has not kept my interest. (and i find it super annoying when i click on an RSS feed and IE automatically tried to subscribe to it in the IE7 reader)
-Attensa in Outlook (commercial version) (i have a customer who is in pilot phase (enterprise version) and i have been testing along although i recently uninstalled it as it was slowing down my outlook). Aside from being in outlook which is a natural place for the enterprise user they are also providing some valuable display options for feeds that you use most often.
-Touchtone - Attention Management desktop engine in Alpha- i have a few 'important' feeds and it has presented positive results in getting my attention. It will hopefully be great once the next version comes out because unlike the readers i mention above- i don't need to know what feed i should read- it will tell me what i should be looking at [if you are interested in testing this service let me know i have a couple alpha invites available]
-Sharepoint RSS WebParts - i maintain multiple team sites and have specific feeds into those sites that i share with co-workers.Today in my Techsoup.org feed i saw this article by Robin Good from Master New Media, on "Why RSS Newsfeed Aggregation Can Save You Time and Money". In this piece he provides some simple tips including creating searches across multiple blog sites or using aggregation sites.
One of the questions he answers is:
Can you share your total time savings and earnings generated by having adopted RSS?
This is a difficult question to answer, as making reliable and publishable calculations is always a source of debate. But, since there is no gain or understanding unless we share a bit more of what we know, here are the numbers and unpretending calculations I gave Kathleen:
Time Savings: Two hours per day at $50 an hour for at least two consecutive years = 50 x 2 x 6 (workdays a week) = $600 x 52 (weeks in a year) = $ 31,200 x 2 (years) = $62,400, or 1,152 saved hours (144 days!) of my time.
Earnings: Since I only utilize RSS in a very limited way for direct revenue, it is much more difficult to calculate this one.
Yes- calculating how much revenue a employee can attribute to their use of blogs (both consuming and publishing) would be a very interesting thing to look at. I have posted before about my use of blogs in my sales cycles and can certainly attribute finding opportunities to reading specific blog posts.
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
2006 Post i made about Information Delivery and consumption in the Enterprise
While looking for those posts, i found myself reading some of the posts i published in 2006 on Information Delivery and Consumption in the Enterprise. I use Blogger for this Blog and they recently added tagging capabilities, so in 2007 it will be easier for me to find posts. Since last year that function was not available, here is a summary that i created for my own reference with high level subjects, hopefully the titles that follow the date of the post are descriptive enough and i apologize for the long URLS:
- RSS in the Enterprise
http://danielabarbosa.blogspot.com/2006/04/rss-in-enterprise.html
http://danielabarbosa.blogspot.com/2006/05/times-they-are-changing.html
http://danielabarbosa.blogspot.com/2006/11/rss-cleaning-leads-to-finding-new-hp.html
- Social Bookmarking/Tagging in the Enterprise
http://danielabarbosa.blogspot.com/2006/11/social-tagging-in-enterprise-podtech.html
http://danielabarbosa.blogspot.com/2006/10/social-bookmarking-in-enterprise.html
- Use of Blogs to understand your clients- http://danielabarbosa.blogspot.com/2006/07/openly-known-user-of-blogs-to.html
http://danielabarbosa.blogspot.com/2006/11/rss-cleaning-leads-to-finding-new-hp.html
- Enterprise use of Social Media tools (my definition at this point includes: blogs, video, podcasts,wikis etc.)
http://danielabarbosa.blogspot.com/2006/07/marketing-goes-web-20-why-dont-i-just.html
http://danielabarbosa.blogspot.com/2006/11/private-letters-turn-into-public.html
http://danielabarbosa.blogspot.com/2006/12/participatation-in-buying-cycle-instead.html
http://danielabarbosa.blogspot.com/2006/12/social-media-roundtable-round-up.html
http://danielabarbosa.blogspot.com/2006/11/power-of-communication-tools-at-our.html
- Sales in a Web 2.0 world
http://danielabarbosa.blogspot.com/2006/11/wikis-case-studies-in-enterprise.html
http://danielabarbosa.blogspot.com/2006/09/keeping-eye-on-your-customers-and.html
http://danielabarbosa.blogspot.com/2006/07/account-planning-in-web-20-world.html
http://danielabarbosa.blogspot.com/2006/08/web-20-strategies-understanding-your.html
http://danielabarbosa.blogspot.com/2006/02/death-of-cold-call-or-customers-you.html
And last but not least- last year's 'what i see in 2006' post which is right on target for what i did get to work on in 2006:
http://danielabarbosa.blogspot.com/2006/01/what-is-hot-on-my-list-for-2006.html
Monday, January 08, 2007
Got Content? Will a successful Metadata Strategy help you unlock your content's business value?
Tomorrow morning, 8am PST/11am EST i will be getting a little fix by attending a webinar on the business value of a successful metadata strategy and listening to Greg Merkle impart some of his wisdom. Greg is the Associate Vice President of Product Design at Dow Jones and will be leading this webinar. For the past 13 years Greg has been responsible for driving Human Factors and User Interface Design and currently runs the Product Design Group at Factiva Dow Jones.
i am a HUGE FAN of Greg's and have learned a lot from him over the years around building information solutions that address enterprise users' needs.
If you can join us, register here- if you can't or you are reading this after the fact and are still interested we will be providing a recorded version afterwards so drop me a line [daniela[dot]barbosa@dowjones.com] and i will send you the information.
Sunday, January 07, 2007
Connect Experiences coming to you soon- hey i might have just had one reporting on CES from my kitchen
Typical of my media consumption habits, this afternoon i started reading some blog posts from CES attendees, waited for Robert Scoble to post the lunch interview will Bill Gates on Podtech (a great interview session) and then setup up my laptop on my kitchen counter to watch the Bill Gates CES keynote as i made Rissóis de Camarão for dinner. I just got a new video camera so i figured i would play around with it. One of the main topics that Microsoft is talking about is the "Connected Experience" and most of the keynote was dedicated to this topic. I feel like i kinda had a connected experience with Bill this evening, here is why:
Gates spent some time talking about the connected home with some cool examples as usual. Since i was in the middle of making dough for my Rissóis , when he showed the kitchen counter with the recipes projected on the counter i got super excited and exclaimed out loud 'i want one'. In the beginning of this video you see me ALT/Tab to check something in the recipe, if the recipe was projected on my counter, with an interactive size graphic for my dough ball (how cool is that!!) it would be a truly connected experience and for someone like me who constantly uses web recipes to try new things a very cool gadget indeed!
I just got this new camera (love it already) so I don't have video editing software and i am hopefully moving on to a iMac soon so i used Window Movie Maker to make this video which i had never used before- not bad. I still have a lot to learn about video outputs so i hope this looks ok, although i see a huge improvement from my other videos.
Update: check out the Podtech BlogHaus front page for ongoing coverage
Visit to Podtech's new offices - they create content with some pretty cool content creators on board
So far i love most of the stuff that Podtech has out there. I admit that i started paying attention like most others did in the summer when Robert Scoble went over there from Microsoft and i faithfully watch the ScobleShow, listen to Jennifer Jones's Marketing Voices, their news channel and had some chuckles this weekend over some of the Lunch Meet interviews.
I definitely think that the content they are producing is valuable for enterprise users who need to keep up with the topics they cover. Since i work for an enterprise content aggregator, just like the services i deliver to the enterprise have television and radio transcripts, i could see podtech transcripts (with links to audio/video), that are indexed with meta data being in our archive just like any other content provider.
While there- i got to see some of the very nice folks who work there including Robert Scoble- he was busy so we really didn't get to talk- although i did ask him a question i have been wanting to ask- how come Maryam does all the chick interviews?- i think he thought i was giving him crap about the fact there there are almost no female bloggers on his link blog- but i wasn't- i was just wondering if he would just giggle too much through an interview- although i am sure it is still hard to find a C-level female executive at high tech companies, let's see who he decides to tackle first.
I look forward to seeing what else Podtech has up their sleeve in the upcoming months.
Thursday, January 04, 2007
Standing for Attention in the Enterprise
But have no fear something ALWAYS gets my brain going just when i thought it was giving out on me- what is that something? spending time with clients and remembering that information delivery in the enterprise-even with all the nifty little web 2.0 tools out there still has a long way to go.
One of today's interesting conversations that got my attention was when RSS delivery was brought up as an option to deliver company and industry specific content (news, financial reports etc.) to teams that might be working on specific client engagements and using wikis as a collaboration point. The interesting thing is not that we were talking about RSS to do this but that fact that it seems that in a little less then two years, I have gone from having conversations about 'what is RSS' to 'wow, there just is too much of it, the tools to use it are cumbersome and we just can't deal with it'.
i have certainly seen the increased adoption of RSS as a delivery mechanism of content in the enterprise (especially news content)- but i still haven't seen an enterprise tool that is blowing every one's socks off. Many talk about the new Office platform and IE7 as a potential - but from what i have seen so far it might just be a stop-gap as it stands- a tool for new users of RSS that will quickly be outgrown because of the volume of content being produced and the need for the consumers of that content to be able to manage it efficiently.
So something that i know i will be talking about in 2007 is... Attention
And i won't be the only one paying attention to 'Attention'
i had already started this post on Attention and i remembered that in my inbox was a note from Greg Narian with the subject title 'Continuous Partial Postponement?' that i had seen coming in this morning but had not clicked through before i left for my appointments. It is an interesting look at two sides of the attention theme. The first one Continuous Partial Attention - constantly needing to be connected so we don't miss anything, the second is what we lose when as we constantly postpone one thing to get to the next. Kathy Sierra also has a good post on the problem of continuous partial attention from early December that links to multiple posts she has made about user behavior due to attention issues.
We are starting to see some of the main players in the RSS reader market address the need to manage a users 'attention'- the big news this week is Google Reader's trends which provides some reading trends for the user which is one step towards what their 'attention' is. Some have been talking about it for a while like the folks over at Touchstone who have an Attention Engine that i have been using (gem: found this good overview of their current Alpha here). and are taking the lead on APML (attention profiling mark-up language) which is an open standard for encapsulating a summary of a users interests based on their access across various tools, devices, tools etc. All things that i think are going to be needed in one way or another to help get the right information to enterprise users when they need it as well as assist in the knowledge sharing we are constantly looking for -so what is Joe the expert at XYZ paying attention to?