Friday, December 28, 2007

Reader Centric Publishing

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I am a fan of Scott Karp's Publishing 2.0 a blog about "the (r)evolution of media, driven by the migration of media to the Web and new digital technologies". Catching up on my feeds this evening i came across this post on Reader-Centric Publishing: Aggregating and Repackaging Print Content Online which addresses some of the unique needs that print publications need to address as they move from the print world to the online aggregator world were the reader is king.

Wednesday, December 26, 2007

Short Simple Semantic Web Introduction Video

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You might want to prepare yourself for 2008 by becoming a little bit more aware of Semantic Web technologies because i have a feeling we will all continue to hear more and more about them in various spaces including the Enterprise, Consumer and Government space. Via the Creative Commons weblog, a pointer to a short video explaining the Semantic Web in non technical terms that i think does a good job at giving you an idea of why you should be nodding along when you hear your colleagues and clients talk about Semantic technologies.

The video was put together by Digital Bazaar a company that provides technology platforms that enable digital content to be bought and sold via the Internet. According to thier blog, they have been involved with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) over the past several months working with the RDFa task force, chartered by the Semantic Web Deployment group. (follow this link If you can't see the embedded video)




While cruising through the Creative Commons Weblog i also learned that they recently enhanced the RDF/XML they serve for each license.

Saturday, December 22, 2007

Come join me on my morning walk

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Since i have been in Portugal on holiday, every morning i try to take a walk down to the Marginal which is the road that runs from Cascais to Lisbon on the coast in order to walk off all the food i ate the day before. Our house is in Paço de Arcos a couple miles south of Lisbon, where i was born and raised until we moved to the United States.

Today i grabbed my camera and took a 'shot by shot' starting at our front door. I tried not to use zoom unless it was necessary like for example to see the 25 de Abril Bridge which is a close replicate of the San Francisco Golden Gate Bridge where i currently live.

So come join me (if you can't see the below embed go here and click Slideshow-fast because i am a fast walker!). Enjoy!


Friday, December 21, 2007

Additional support for APML this time from Ma.gnolia

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A nice holiday gift from the folks at Ma.gnolia with their announcement of APML support for their social bookmarking service. From the post by Todd Sieling, Ma.gnolia's product manager, they are using the Engagd service to allow Ma.gnolia members the ability to build an attention profile from their bookmarks.

APML allows users the ability to compress all forms of Attention Data into a portable file format containing a description of their ranked interests- their Attention, based on what they are tagging in a service like Ma.gnolia can then be ported to other services that support APML. This will be a very powerful way to filter information from multiple services a user might use to consume information. As their Attention profile changes in aggregate from the various services they use, consuming services of APML are automatically updated and able to deliver exactly what the user wants based on their ranked interests.

In the annoucement post, Todd goes on to say "these are still early days for APML, and as such there aren’t a lot of service providers supporting it and even fewer applications that can make use of this data. So, the hope in providing it for Ma.gnolia is that it will help stimulate development of APML-powered services that can offer us new ways of looking at what we do as we travel the web".

I have been a member of the APML Workgroup since early 2007, and believe that APML will have a transformative hand in information filtering, so i agree with Todd that we are still in the early days but am excited and thankful about Ma.gnolia's addition to the list of other services that support APML including some big Enterprise players like NewsGator that i have commented before on.

Ma.gnolia is also an early supporter of OAuth, which the open API authentication standard and another of the dataportability.org open stacks specifications.

Right on- and thanks for the lovely gift!

Webinar: Folksonomies & Taxonomies in the Enterprise

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In January i will be leading a Webinar organized by the Dow Jones InfoPro Alliance about Folksonomies & Taxonomies in the Enterprise.

From the e-mail invite:

Enterprises today face a critical challenge: How to manage an abundance of increasingly complex and disparate information assets in an environment of constant change and technological complexity. How do you provide tools that your users are used to using in the commercial world in order for them to stay competitive and enable collaboration?

Results from a recent round table event on Folksonomies & Taxonomies that discussed these challenges will be shared as well other research work that has been focused on the topic.

Other topics to be discussed include:

* What is the business value of a taxonomy/folksonomy and how can you deploy a solution that will grow with the organization?
* What’s the impact of social networking tools on the enterprise?
* Which governance tools can or should be applied?
* How do you merge folksonomies and existing taxonomies – or should you?
* Some best practices and common obstacles

Date: Thursday, 10 January
Time: 11:00 a.m. US Eastern Time/8amPST
to register please follow this link.

If you have items that you would like for me to address or you that would like to share with the audience about your experiences with Folksonomies in the Enterprise space, please drop me a line at daniela{dot}barbosa{@}dowjones.com - thank you in advance!

Thursday, December 13, 2007

Innovation support from within

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i always seem to blog about myself- well first because we all know how much i adore talking about myself... but also because it is easier- but today i want to take the opportunity to highlight one of my coworkers who allows me to be successful- her name is Lisa (the one on the right in this picture) and she is a Global Marketing Manager for our Dow Jones Client Solutions group.

Lisa never says no- although sometimes it comes back as a "no" or a "not now" just because it can't be and i understand that and when i don't (as you can imagine i can be difficult at times) she has the tact to make me understand.

As we head into the new year Lisa had a great idea to have an internal video contest highlighting our core capabilities and how our business has changed over the year. I (note: this is when i get back to talking about myself btw) came up with a good idea and gathered the local team to join the production staff- and guess what?

.....Yes. We won!- over 15 internal submissions (so proud we got that many!!) and we came in first place with a spoof on the PC Mac commercials. And honestly since we produced it, i haven't been able to stop watching it cause it cracks me up. Unfortunately the rules are that we can not distribute externally but here are some highlights:

- Old Services (played by Tyson) thinks Folksonomies are music
- Old Services only knows intranets and can't spell Wiki
- Old Services believes that every clients (played by Soo) wants an "out of the box" solution that works exactly like those the client's competitors has on their own sites
- Old Services doesn't ensure adoption of solutions that leads to unhappy clients
- New Services (played by Brent) of course is hip- understands the client needs and our core capabilities and is dedicated to innovating with the client

Very happy with:
1. having a marketing resource like Lisa - thank you,!!
2. feeling that for a big corporate company DJ (as of today News Corp let's see how that changes things...) is brave enough which is cool
3. winning ;-)

Sunday, December 02, 2007

I'm happy we are Friends but do i really care?

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For years i tried to correct my friends when they said things like 'my friend at work said' or 'my friend on the team said' with questions like 'are they really friends or co-workers, teammates, acquaintances or someone you know?'. They probably thought i was annoying when i asked, well actually i know they do sometimes find me annoying but that is a story for another blog.

Fast forward a couple of years after most of them were well 'trained' to use the term as i deemed appropriate and now a days everyone seems to be every one's friend. Today's New York Times has an article 'Myspacebook. past. Friending, Ancient or Otherwise' (found via Techmeme) which is about how some Academic researchers are starting to explore the parallels between online social networks and tribal societies and how they are seeing a resurgence of ancient patterns of oral communication. Aside from picking up another new word to use safely in describing social media, 'orality' - the article does make some interesting points on the emergence of oral culture online. “Orality is participatory, interactive, communal and focused on the present. The Web is all of these things.”

So i just grabbed our beautiful 1982 edition of America Heritage Dictionary (you know the one with the small pictures on the margin), that was given to my husband for his 8th grade graduation - spent a good simple 15 minutes of pleasure looking at words like exacerbate- and got to the definition of friend:

friend n. 1. A person whom one knows, likes, and trusts. 2. An acquaintance. 3. A person with whom one is allied in a struggle or cause; comrade 4.One who supports, sympathizes with, or patronizes a group, cause, or movement.

So maybe my friends where right- if i kinda like my coworker i may be able to use the phrase 'my friend at work' when describing them in a casual conversation. So folks, yes the word 'friend' can be used to describe different levels of friendship but going forward i insist that we only reserve BFF for the truest of friends of course...

So this morning, i logged into Facebook to see what my 'friends' are up to today and noticed that my friend Mario Sundar who is the Community Evangelist at LinkedIn just posted a link to a 2006 article from the Columbia Business School How Well Do Your Friends Know You? . With all the controversy around the recent Facebook Ad Beacon advertising program it is an interesting read because it questions how much we really know about the people we call our 'friends' and that most people want specific, personalized suggestions from friends whom they believe, correctly or not, know them well.

The key however is that i want to be able to call on the different levels of 'friendships' i have both online and off across multiple networks when i look for recommendations. You might be my friend because we like the same type of music so i might be interested in what new albums you are buying, but i might really have no desire whatsoever to trust your purchasing decision around cars or tech gadgets. But most importantly i want to control and own that data about who and why people are my friends and be able to use it where and when i want to. At this point, although there are some initiatives on their way to solve this starting with the ability to port my data, that knowledge of who i trust when is only in my brain.

Want to be my friend? Well then just 'friend me' already! (but please don't make it a random request- if you tell me where you found me and how we are connected (even owing up to being a random find) it might increase the chances of me wanting to be your friend.

yes i use the root word 'friend' over 25 times in this post- so get over it my friends.

Saturday, December 01, 2007

Who would have thunkit?

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i only have electronic access to the full text of The Wall Street Journal from 1979 forward (it has been in print since 1889 and i am way too lazy to go to the microfiche) but the phrase 'bob dylan' appears 413 times, (and only 76 of those in the headline or lead paragraph)- with the earliest reference being in 1984 when he was referenced in a travel review of country hotels of Britain as staying at the Tulchan Lodge on the Scottish hills.

In 1965 Bob Dylan was in san francisco doing a news conference and he was asked if he thought there would ever be a time when he would paint or sculpt and he responded with a 'oh yes'...'oh sure' - and giggles (see embedded video at 5:15). At that point neither he nor the audience would have thought that he would be featured in The Wall Street Journal article covering an art show of his original works.

And let's think about it- Wall Street Journal readers who read the paper in 1965 would have never thunkit themselves that a two article color print feature in the Leisure & Arts section with a corresponding online slide show would exist about Bob Dylan in 2007. yeah so i will cliché it up and say it- the times -well the journal it keeps a-changin'.




PS> Bob fan? run don't walk to see I'm Not There