Working Mamas

Whenever i think about being a full-time working mother (mind you all mothers are 'working' mothers), I feel really lucky that the company i work for supports working mothers regardless of their roles. I think a big reason is that we are a global company, and our side of the business (formally Factiva) was from the start a Dow Jones/ Reuters company with a large European staff. Now that we are NewsCorp, and even bigger global company, i feel there is still good support for working mothers that perhaps is better then other American companies based on my experience of having a kid 9 months ago. My colleagues around the world however do have better benefits and longer paid maternity leave then we do here in the states, but obviously that is because our government does not support mothers (and fathers) like other countries.

Yesterday morning, on my Mamas Circle mailing list i received a note about Lucia Ronzulli. Ronzulli is an Italian politician representing her country at the European Commission, i don't know what her day to day politics are and for this post it doesn't matter. On September 22nd she attended a Commission meeting carrying her 1-month old baby in a wrap as you see in this picture. According to the note i got, she got applause by all her politician colleagues, and then requested better rights for working mothers in Europe.

This picture made my day, probably my week.

CAPTCHAs are not just Crummy or Lame they do good (and already make revenue)

Just saw this on Techmeme about CAPTACHAs turning into yet another advertising banner. CAPTACHAs are the text strings that Web sites often force you to read and retype for security reasons. Peter Kafka calls them 'Crummy' others, 'lame' - that could possibly be improved with what Solve Media is trying to bring to the market as ad units that are easier to read.

But CAPTACHAs have another purpose and are already making revenue as i blogged about in August 2008:

The Effort is to help digitalize print and is quite interesting use of the technology that many people just find annoying (i tend to enjoy the challenge!):

"Efforts to digitize (really) old books and newspapers were being hampered by faded ink that confounded OCR software. The solution Luis von Ahn came up with was to use the words that the software couldn’t recognize and insert them into these so-called reCAPTCHAs and use the power of human brains to decipher them. CAPTCHAs serve up two words, one is the security word, the other goes toward the book digitization effort."

The New York Times is using this service to digitalize their archive that goes back to the 1800s (and paying for it). This ReCAPTCHA service as been a project at Carnegie Mellon where the CAPTCHA technology was born (but is being spun out as its own company) . The project is also doing work for free for the Internet Archive’s project to digitize every book published before 1980 which is pretty cool.

[Edited] - adding another CAPTCHA for good, a prototype from a reply to my post by @kentbrewster : Missing Kids CAPTCHA -- a Hack for Good

Aside from not wanting to see more advertising on websites i visit, i would also miss the inappropriate CAPTCHAs that pop-up every once in a while but perhaps they can be replaced with inappropriate advertising....

Enterprise Social Bookmarking Neglected Stepchild

Luis Suarez is the Knowledge Manager, Community Builder & Social Computing Evangelist in the IBM Software Group division and has a great blog and Twitter feed that always has great tidbits on enterprise adoption of 2.0 tools, especially within the realm of knowledge management. IBM has always been an early and successful adopter of enterprise 2.0 tools.

Via the ReadWriteWeb Twitter Feed i saw this post from Suarez on the The Business Case for Enterprise Social Bookmarking: $4.6 Million a Year in Cost Savings! . Nothing like throwing those kind of numbers to get someone interested in reading more. The numbers he references are from 2008, but i agree with the point that he makes that enterprise social tagging/ bookmarking keeps gets ignored but is still an important and rather critical part of a successful Enterprise 2.0 adoption strategy.

If you have been reading my blog for a while you know that i have always been an advocate of social tagging and in 2008 published an ebook on Hybrid Approaches of using Folksonomy (social tagging) and Taxonomy in the Enterprise.


Image|Flickr| AMagill