Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Use of Map Mashups in Enterprise Applications

1 comment :
I like maps-they are a graphical representations that users typically understand and know what they should do if interactivity is built into them. I have delivered various solutions over the years to my enterprise clients that provide simple interfaces for users to interact with, for example regional newsstand views and am starting to discuss the use of map mashups with our content for specific business needs.

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

No comments :
Lucky me- next week i am going to San Diego for the FASTforward'07 conference. Dow Jones/Factiva is one of the gold sponsors of the conference- so if you are going to be there please stop by our booth and come have a chat about some of the thing we are doing with our customers. If you would like to schedule a specific time to meet or have plans to meet with others to talk about Enterprise 2.0 outside of the scheduled agenda that you think i would like to participate in, please do drop me a line at daniela{dot}barbosa{at}dowjones.com.

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

No comments :
Via my ACM TechNewsletter an announcement about IBM's new Many Eyes project by their Collaborative User Experience research group. Their goal is 'to "democratize" visualization and to enable a new social kind of data analysis'. I haven't had a chance to throw a data set at it but it sure sounds interesting (see tour on the site)- still in research phase but IBM can probably make it into a powerful user tool.

"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

3 comments :
Today is the official launch of the Media 2.0 Workgroup. The idea for creating this Workgroup that covers Media 2.0 topics is the brain child of Chris Saad and over the last few weeks a core group has been discussing the format, purpose and value that the Workgroup will hopefully bring to the industry.


"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

1 comment :
Via Ian Kennedy's del.icio.us feed one of the coolest javascripts i have seen in while. Of course it is Sunday evening and the cool factor is on high alert as i try to avoid real work. But look click on the below graphic, i made the front page of The New York Times...well not really ;-)



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

No comments :
Last week i was visiting with a client and the topic turned to the use of Blogs by companies to communicate both externally and internally. As we continued to talk we targeted in on the use of Blogs for internal communication and creating synergy within work groups. So on my list of follow-up items for this customer was to:
  • 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:

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

No comments :
Thursday night i stopped by at the Minna Gallery for the SF Beta mixer and a visiting Australian Web 2.0 entrepreneur (yet another who is weeks away from launch and in town to get things moving) asked me why i attended events like this. SF Beta is one of many monthly events in the San Francisco Bay area for founders, developers, designers, bloggers, investors, journalists, and everyone else interested in the Web 2.0 community- and the participants to these events are ever growing.

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

2 comments :
Via Techcrunch an interesting new service at dotherightthing.com that is focused on corporate responsibility issues. Generated mostly by user submitted content, companies are ranked for doing the right or wrong thing. From their tutorial page, ratings of companies are determined by two factors: the ratings of the activities the user and the rest of the community find important and the number of people who found each of these activities important. Both companies and consumers are encouraged to participate.

There are many 'watchdog' bloggers out there and if this service if sustainable (it is still too early to evaluate), it could be one central point for monitoring consumer sentiment on corporate social responsibility. I would however like to see a couple of enhancements including the ability to subscribe to company specific RSS feeds and potentially an aggregated company ranking going across all the existing rankings on that company.

Another thing for PR and Corporate relations to keep an eye on.

Moving Music Media around tedious but i probably wouldn't pay for it

2 comments :
Starting around 11:30am today (it is now 6pm and i will admit that i have broken away several times) i have been loading CDs to my iTunes Music Library so i can update my iPods' (60GB Video and 2GB nano) music library. I have not added music content to them in months because i have been mostly listening to podcasts that i am automatically subscribed to and just haven't had the time to do it. I am however completely tired of listening to the same albums that have been there for months. Transferring music to my iPod always seems like a very time consuming process and today because i am just bulk loading, it has been tedious and has completely slowed down my laptop as i tried to do other tasks (eventually i just added another machine to the mix).

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.
So what did i rip anyway? A total of 325 songs- 23.8hrs, 1.3GB. Mostly close eyes and pick from the self of a huge library we have gathered over the years:

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

2 comments :
With the completion of the Dow Jones acquisition of Factiva on December 15, 2006, we now have a new structure that integrates the former Factiva business with Dow Jones Newswires and Dow Jones Licensing Services as part of the Enterprise Media Group. With this integration i have a whole bunch of new people to work with and i am privileged to be working with some great folks from the former DJ Licensing Services group. As a new group we are having our first team meeting starting tomorrow at 8amEST. Due to client commitments, i was unable to travel east to meet my new colleagues and at that early hour PST never do look my best. So daniela style i hereby introduce myself to them:

Davos Conversations in a Web 2.0 world

No comments :
Arianna Huffington posts about "My First “Davos Moment”"in which she arrives at the hotel in Davos to find a Davos sponsored blogger meeting and Klaus Schwab -- the Swiss professor who created the World Economic Forum 36 years ago. The Davos Conversation page has video, blogs (with comments), is linking to other blogs of interest that are covering davos and are taking questions submitted via YouTube and Google Video including Klaus Schwab talking about the use of social media and a Web 2.0 world and how we have to 'reset' ourselves and become aware of all the tools that are available to address the issue. Jeff Jarvis also posted a video on YouTube asking people to respond to his Davos announcement. Reuters is conducting interviews on SecondLife.

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

1 comment :
Robert Berkman from the Intelligent Agent Blog, loves tag clouds. I agree with him that tagclouds can be used effectively to tell a story for business researchers among others in the enteprise who are responsible for redistributing or presenting information . His post points us to a site called TagCrowd . According to the site, TagCrowd is a web application for visualizing word frequencies in any user-supplied text by creating what is popularly known as a tag cloud. It is very easy to use and configurable even by creating a stop word list. I have a couple of uses for it already including some upcoming client presentations.

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:



created at TagCrowd.com

Saturday, January 20, 2007

Marvin Minsky's new book on Artificial Intelligence

No comments :
I have been a fan of Marvin Minsky's writing since a professor in library school introduced me to some of his work through coursework which lead me to read Minsky's Society of the Mind. Minsky is the co-founder of MIT's Artificial Intelligence Lab and is considered one of the leaders in the Artificial Intelligence (AI) world. The Society of the Mind paints a high level picture of what Minsky considers the basis of how the mind works- a collection of specialized agents that working together allow for complex thoughts and actions. The premise of course at a very high level, is that if computers can replicated the way those agents are produced and work together- artificial intelligence is created.

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:

"What are your latest ideas about the mind, as set out in The Emotion Machine?
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."

and on commonsense thinking:

"This is important because the way people solve problems is first by having an enormous amount of commonsense knowledge, like maybe 50 million little anecdotes or entries, and then having some unknown system for finding among those 50 million old stories the 5 or 10 that seem most relevant to the situation."

The book has mixed reviews on Amazon.com- but i am sure that since i am not a neuroscientist, i will find something interesting and thought provoking as i continue to work on information overload issues in the enterprise-because consumption of content is tied to our knowledge, understanding and current 'on demand' needs- so it is already in the mail.

Defining Terminology for News Aggregators a paper from Microsoft

No comments :
Via the Touchstone Blog a good find on a Microsoft authored paper on feed reader behavior that attempts to define terminology for news aggregator applications. It looks like it was published for the upcoming Computer/Human Interaction 2007 Conference in San Jose, CA according to the small print on the front page.

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

No comments :
When i stopped in at MacWorld this month i had a chance to check out the new iPhone. One of the coolest features i saw on the iPhone was the pinch screen technology that Steve Jobs' demos in this video (i oohed as well). Via Scoble and John Nack from Adobe comes this awesome video of multi touch interfaces- wow. On Scoble's comments, someone also posted this speech by Jeff Han at TED Talks were he demos the pinch screens as well as a keyboard. His site is here. cool stuff.

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

No comments :
I would never give up IM in the workplace and for the last 5 years or so i have had access to a corporate IM client (Reuters Instant Messenger) that we all use as well as commercial IM clients, GoogleTalk (on mobile as well), Skype and Yahoo!. I use IM commonly to not only collaborate with my coworkers but also to chat with clients. The commercial version that i use most with clients is still Yahoo!

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

No comments :
Being that i spend most of my time working with clients to deliver content to enterprise users, i am always excited when Jakob Nielsen's 10 Best Intranet report is published. Like many others who deal with information delivery behind the firewall- i follow Nielsen and sometimes do not agree with him, but i know that many of my clients do follow the lead of both Nielsen and the intranets that have been reviewed and recognized. I haven't read the entire report- but i will and will post additional thoughts once i do- i however recommend reading the summary of the report that was published in the useit.com Alertbox.

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

1 comment :
Tag clouds are an interesting way to see trends across large collections of user tagged content like flickr and i am starting to see them being used in the enterprise as a tool to find interesting content, subject matter experts and 'brewing' topics. Enterprises that are using tools like blogs and wikis can easily leverage those technologies to drive tag cloud views. Most tag clouds are generated by the tags that users apply to the content element- be it a picture, video, blog post or any other type of document internal or external to the enterprise. There however are other ways to create 'tag clouds' such as using text mining technologies to extract the most frequently used terms and phrases of specific data sets, or looking at search terms that people are using like what The New York Times Search Tag Cloud does.

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

2 comments :
Yesterday i walked another one of my co-workers through getting a RSS reader and subscribing to RSS feeds from blogs, wikis , web sites and some of the subscription services we have available to track our customers and industry. i recommended Google Reader- because it is easy to use for a first time user and its recent enhancements have impressed me enough to make it my primary RSS reading tool.

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

No comments :
As an add on to an e-mail message to a client yesterday that included some whitepapers and conference slide decks on the topic of Social Bookmarking in the Enterprise, i sent a link to two of my posts on the subject. This is something i do often- linking to both my blog as well as many others that blog about information delivery in the enteprise.

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?

No comments :
Can you believe it? Officially it has now been two years since i moved to California from the east coast. I have to say that it has been a blast and i have certainly assimilated into the California lifestyle fully! But one of the things i still miss most about being in New Jersey (aside from the pizza and bagels of course) is spending time with my product group back at our corporate headquarters. Every once in a while they come out to visit with clients- but certainly not enough for me to get my fix. So i need to fill my curiosity by reading what is put out there in general internal and external communications, scanning the internal teamsites, playing in the integration sites and asking a lot of questions. That helps with the short and long term product stuff- but what i really like is hearing them talk about content industry trends and what we see in the marketplace.

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

No comments :
I am not at CES this week, but like past years i am keeping an eye on what is happening there. I am not a gadget or hardware girl- just know that what consumers use/want to ingest content will eventually come into the enterprise and i better be ready. This year however i feel more connected then ever-could be that i am listening better since i have been involved in what is happening in Silicon Valley - but it is also because of the coverage the blogger community and content providers like Podtech, and Engadget are already delivering from the conference. (Nicolas Carr has started an interesting conversation on this topic).

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

No comments :
On Thursday Jeremiah was kind enough to invite me to come by and visit the new Podtech offices in Palo Alto so i could check out the new digs and we could catch up on a couple of things including some follow up items from the recent Social Media roundtable event. They have a great office space right next to the Wall Street Journal printing plant in Palo Alto that sometimes i work out of. Old content meet new content- right next door.

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

1 comment :
I have been back for a couple of days and have to say that it is hard to get the brain going after forcefully disengaging myself from work-partially because i just have so much i want to do and can't figure out where to start.

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?