unstruc chitchatting about information delivery

This Ain't your Mother's Craft Fair

2011-12-18T21:17:00.000-08:00

This weekend i headed over to the Renegade Holiday Craft Fair in San Francisco. In general i love crafty gatherings, from the beloved summer street fairs to special events like the one i went to today, i always get inspired and of course find some scores that i would never fine anywhere else.

One thing that i noticed is that this wasn't your typical holiday craft fair of yesteryear. Here are some of the highlights:

- Many reclaimed items made from recycled materials- these crafters are reusing materials from drum symbols and skateboards (yes i got me one of those) to vintage chair upholstery and creating beautiful items

- Almost every vendor had a Square (or similar) credit card reader- no more 'i don't have enough cash'- a good thing because some things were quite high-end and costly

- and last , more and more i am becoming a fan of etsy- the craft fair was a in person etsy convention- the majority of the vendors i took a close look at had an etsy store.

So aside from some new things i bought, i am also feeling pretty crafty- with a stayaction coming up for the holidays i am looking forward to some creative time- now off to look around the house for items that i can reclaim and get started with.

The Dead of a Pair of Pumps and How Dreamforce has Become an Executive Conference

2011-09-01T09:45:00.000-07:00

I have been going to Salesforce.com's Dreamforce conference for about 7 years in one form or another- from a full conference attendee, to a expo vendor, a virtual attendee and a keynote/expo attendee which i did again this year. Moscone center is nearby the office and I find it extremely valuable to attend conferences- great for networking and for seeing and hearing first hand what the big vendors or technologies are coming up with.

Last night after putting the baby to sleep, I was catching up on my work after spending the majority of the day at dreamforce and was watching the tweet stream from #df11. It was late and the conference attendees where at the Metallica gala concert. Pretty entertaining tweets- from 'they handed out earplugs as we walked in' to the always entertaining @jowyang 's tweet:

But these funny observations was something I had noticed myself- a lot of suits and slick back hair. Now I am not against this (maybe the slick back hair I don't particularly like but whatever it's better then a mullet)- and I myself wear 'proper' business dress to all conferences since I am always running into clients. But I thought the conference looked like more business types then before (I refuse to believe that developers are wearing suits now a days- but they seem to have upgraded to the standard valley dress of khaki's and button downs).

My friend Kevin Marks, who is now at Salesforce and was wearing a snazy jacket, pointed out that Dreamforce11 had all the developer sessions in Moscone West while the business sessions where in Moscone North - we were chatting in the north area and I agreed - and there were a lot of suits there.

With 47,000 attendees, there was a different feeling- Dreamforce seems to me to be a growing must attend for top execs- from the hallway and expo floor conversations I observed . I am sure the developers sessions are still important but the "visionary" stuff that Marc Benioff (CEO) is pushing seems to be working on these guys (yes mostly guy- and yes it was nice to see Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts on stage and loved her talk on the Social Enterprise). All the keynotes are now available on YouTube.

Anyway- on the way from Moscone West to Moscone North through the massive crowds- a street grate got the best of my most beloved shoes- the ones I wear to every conference because they are the most comfortable- I would say that over the years (do I dare admit that these shoes at around 10yrs old?!!)- these shoes have seen hundreds of keynotes and strolled through miles and miles of expo halls- from the small intimate conferences like the beloved defrag to the biggie 'close out Disney World' Gartner conferences.

I will miss you dear shoes.

PS: for those lady friends of mine who we have discussed that the Shoe Mender is a girl's best friend and good shoes are worth fixing and over again. This pair has spent its share of time at the shoe repair shop- this morning as I walked past Jack's shoe repair on market street on the way to the office I suddenly almost had a change of heart- but no their time has come. (Sounds like a trip to DSW is called for!)

Notes from my 5 Minutes of Internal Twitter Fame

2011-08-12T09:25:00.000-07:00

I had five minutes to share some 'best practices' and 'real-life' twittering stories with my fellow co-workers on an internal Twitter 101 Session that our Social Media Marketing Manager put together. The attendees where mostly sales and marketing colleagues. It is a relatively new program we have in place, and i applaud them for taking this step. They went through general how-tos which would be useful for any new user.

My notes outline follows at the request of @tjsweeney to share some context of what i talked about.

I have been tweeting since March 2007, currently have 2,811 followers (since the presentation it has gone up to 2821) and have over 4,000 tweets (so tweeting for 1601 days so an average of 2.5 tweets a day)
I started tweeting during the famous 2007 SXSW Twitter tipping point- where Twitter hit 'mainstream' well the mainstream of Silicon valley that is. During that conference, tweets went from 20,000 tweets per day to 60,000 tweets per day. We all shook our heads and said how will i manage all this? Today there are over 200 million tweets per day. I still find value every day in my tweet stream.
I use Twitter to be smarter, hopefully provide some value to my followers and to help me build my personal 'brand'
How do i let people know i tweet? Beyond engaging with them if they are on Twitter, i link at bottom of my corporate and personal email (currently linking to my aboutme page) and also tie it into my LinkedIn account- when i tweet it gets posted there- provides a somewhat different follower list
I currently use Tweetdeck to manage my streams, Blackberry Twitter or Twitter Ipad when i am on the road. Flipboard i use mostly in the evenings to catch up on my evening 'tweets' and deeper reads
Have various saved searches on Tweetdeck (e.g. Competitive Intelligence, Librarians, Supply Chain, Enterprise Sales, semantic web) and follow companies and people who are prospects/clients or just plain smart peeps.
Lists are very helpful, and there are a lot of wonderfully curated lists or you can create your own and make them private or public
Hashtags- for example to follow a conference like #sla2011 , even if you are not there you can still 'attend' and interact
I use bit.ly to shorten my URLs and find their tracking data very valuable to see how many clicked on my link.
I have many Clients who follow me- i can see that they follow me but they also tell me- often before a meeting starts instead of talking about the weather we might talk about a certain tweet i made earlier in the day- and vice versa- i try not to get on the phone with a client without checking their 'output channel'
I have clients who Direct Message (DM) me and i might do the same to them i find the engagement and response rate to be much higher
To my last point, Twitter has a big vanity aurora around it. regardless of who you are you want to see who retweeted, @ed you, DMd you , favortied your tweet- instantaneously
I spend a lot of time finding (mostly through google search although i recently found the twitter advanced search feature) and listening to what prospects may be saying . One thing i try to do sometimes is wait for someone to tweet something - then i know they are in front of a device (laptop,mobile,table etc.)- per my previous vanity point, they want to see who replied. i might not reply through twitter because what i want to talk to them about is not a conversation to start there - but i might send an email or give them a ring because i can assume they are working on their 'device' and are connected

My last point and probably the most important for people in sales and marketing was to be authentic. For example, i follow our Twitter brand accounts , i retweet things from the Dow Jones twitter accounts that MY followers will find valuable not as an advertising . I have seen others do a dis-service to themselves and the company by blatantly retweeting or promoting product specific things and nothing else. It is ok for the brand twitter account to do that but your personal account needs a good mix of personal and business.

Tweet away my friends.

The Flipboard Experience Will Become a Regular Way to Consume Content

2010-10-25T14:07:00.000-07:00

Here is a prediction: It might not be called Flipboard- but the Flipboard experience will become a format for publishing content, just like today content producers publish content in PDF, Word documents, video embeds, etc.

This weekend here in the Bay area was nothing special thanks to all the rain. We certainly need it so the rain was welcomed and did stay away from most of the Neil Young Bridge School Benefit on Saturday which was nice since that was the only outside plans i had. So Sunday was a perfect day to sit on the couch (when the baby was napping) and spend some quality time with the iPad. Flipboard continues to be my favorite and most used App on my iPad (that is my own usage otherwise it is Angry Birds and Peek-a-boo Barn- you decided which one is addicted to what ;-)

I really enjoy the experience of using Flipboard- if you haven't had the pleasure i have embedded a well done video that will show you the general idea of how Flipboard works. The idea is that Flipboard becomes a living changing social magazine- of things that you are interested in and your network is pushing to you. The content of course is only as good as the 'feeds' you add/follow, and the network you currently follow on twitter and facebook- but the interaction with the content is just beautiful.

Aside from the interaction with the content being visually stimulating, i think it is the alignment with how i enjoy and productively consume content- yes many times i still print out things to read because on a flat screen i have troubles consuming it, the Flipboard experience i think changes that.

Now applications like CoverPad who has a new add-on for Wordpress are coming out with tools to make your content act like Flipboard which i think will lead to other tools that will easily allow content produces to provide a Flipboard like experience for their content consumers.

Imagine a user using a tablet with touch screen visits:

your corporate website, they quickly flip through your product offerings, customer stories etc.
your employees visit your corporate intranet and flip through articles from corporate (video included), HR announcements, sales wins, product brochures, proposals etc. (how cool would a SharePoint add-on be??)
your customers visit your retail store, (e.g. REI, Nordstroms) and flip through your catalogs.
Your daily newsletters (internal and external) are sent out and the content consumers interact with them by flipping through current and past 'issues'
Any many other ways....

Content creation will need to be richer on the production side so producers need to think about that, just like Instapaper and other "read it later" services i believe will change the way online content is written.

Some of you may say, hey Daniela isn't this something the Client Solutions group at Dow Jones can do? Well yes, i sent a note out to corporate a couple weeks back and heard crickets- but we have a lot going on so i need to re-ping. Plus the way we work best (and fast) is to have a client who wants/needs. So i need to find a good use case that we can test this on!

My ebooks now self 'published' on Scribd

2010-10-24T21:03:00.000-07:00

Finally got around to uploading my ebooks to Scribd which is a service that provides social reading and publishing that has a easy to use interface for users and content owners.

The following two ebooks i wrote while working at Dow Jones (where i am still currently). One is about Hybrid Approaches to taxonomies and folksonomies in the enterprise that came out in 2008 and the other one is about how social media is changing the enterprise which i co-wrote with Robert Scoble, Shel Israel and Greg Merkle in 2009.
~enjoy!
The Taxonomy Folksonomy Cookbook: Finding the Right Recipe for Organizing Metadata

You can also view the French Version of the Taxonomy Folksonomy ebook.

Conversational Corporation: How Social Media is Changing the Enterprise

You can also view the French version of the Conversational Corporation ebook.

More Twitterers Following then Getting their Fingers Dirty with Newspaper Print

2010-10-22T08:47:00.000-07:00

Currently the New York Times has fewer print readers than Twitter followers.

"The last set of figures released, on 31st March 2010, put the New York Times’ print circulation at 951,063 and reports this week say revenue from circulation is in decline. However, with 2.6 million followers, the paper’s Twitter account is a roaring success. Particularly when you compare it to its rivals."

Following on Twitter could be something pretty passive especially for people who follow many, while physically picking up a paper (and having to go to the store to buy even more) is definitely not passive. I think a more interesting statistic to compare to print readers would be what the referring traffic is from Twitter to the New York Times site and engagement time- how long does a consumer spend reading the physical paper and how long does a vistior that comes from Twitter spend on NYTimes.com?

Image|Flickr|Jarjan

Creative Interesting Work on the Internet

2010-10-17T22:54:00.000-07:00

The world is full of interesting things that intersect with technology on the internet. Every once in a while if you have good filters (for me it is usually real humans i follow on twitter) you get interesting links that will bring you to a site that will wow- you. This presentation from the Creative Lab at Google has over 100 'interesting' things on the web- from a combination of pure technology to interaction with 'real' life, art, music etc.

Make sure you use full Screen version for best experience since the embed below plays and the full version you can control easier.

It has a lot of content in it- and a bit hard to consume. A couple of things i would have been liked which i believe are just limitations of Google docs:

The ability to link to specific pages , the URL is static for the whole presentation. There is a move to slide feature but you can't link to specific slides.
Someway to record the slide # you like- besides the stickie on my desk
A table of Contents (probably not a technical limitation just a manual process for 120 slides that a google creative person probably would rather not spend time doing!)- but even the top level categories (Audio,Tech, Sports, Politics, Books, History, etc.) could have been valuable to get through the entire presentation

Working Mamas

2010-09-23T15:15:00.000-07:00

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)

2010-09-20T15:15:00.000-07:00

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 Goo d

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

2010-09-02T12:10:00.000-07:00

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

National Breastfeeding Month: Whip 'Em Out!

2010-08-29T09:17:00.000-07:00

A little late on my public service announcement since August is almost over, but August is National Breastfeeding Month. World Breastfeeding Week was August 1st-7th, but i guess here in the states we have extended it to the whole month (good because we need more awareness of the benefits of breastfeeding!) . Hey what the hell, let's celebrate it all year around- knockers that's what they are for!

Yes I Did It and It Feels Great (and Productive)

2010-08-28T13:33:00.000-07:00

Saturday afternoon. Ramona is asleep taking her afternoon nap. Me? I got tons to do but am sitting on the sofa playing with my iPad so I thought I would give Blogger (the platform my blog is hosted on) a try.

I unwrapped my iPad on wednesday taking the day off to enjoy my new toy and spend the day with the kid. I proceeded to do more YouTube watching of Elmo's song then anything else as my 8 month old is already asserting her control of the iPad as a toy that I will have to share with her. So be it, on my list of why I should get one was that she could play baby games on it.

I didn't rush out to buy the iPad - I actually did not buy it, my husband sick of hearing me talk about the pros and cons, if I should wait for the next version (primarily because of the camera) came home with it on Monday - there was no reason to return it once it was in the house. I am a lucky girl. I do like Apple products, our home computer is a Mac, I have an iTouch (which I won but probably would have bought) but work revolves around windows and blackberry and those are big parts of my digital life.

I am going to love my iPad for personal use, consuming content from browsing the web, reading books, playing games, watching videos, etc. But straight away i feel that this is a great tool for work as well. I have only had my iPad for 4 days, but I have already used it at two client meetings and sketched an outline of a solution I am putting together for a client (using sketchbook pro app). One of the meetings i had to be on the 3G network in downtown San Francisco, which was slow as a turtle which was disappointing but expected. The other i displayed a presentation in PDF format that i had emailed myself and it worked fine. Keynote is one of my next Apps that i need to download.

Aside from being a good tool for client meetings it is important for me to know and understand consuming media on a device such as this because it will go beyond the iPad to other devices and this will happen quickly. Our customers are already starting to aggressively ask about iPad solutions (especially for the executive set who tend to be early adopters and important consumers of our content delivery solutions). Lucky for me, because of our alignment with the digital content side of our consumer business (the folks that brought us the WSJ iPad app) we already are a few steps ahead of the game in delivering.

A recent Wall Street Journal article 'Businesses Add iPads to Their Briefcases' on how
"Some Companies, Which Barred the iPhone, Build Apps for Tablet Computer and Give Apple Gadget to Employees" points into the direction this will be going, hopefully i didn't jump the gun too early and miss the handing out of iPads by corporate? (ok ok i would just have two :-)

Note: I had to jump on my computer to do some of the links, Blogger works but it could either be my inexperience with the iPad (e.g. copy and paste), or it is just not not optimized which i reckon will be the case with many sites and services on the web that do not have native Apps. i am ok with that.

A little Friday learning with HTML5

2010-08-27T15:57:00.000-07:00

Although Summer ends closer to the end of September, traditionally the last friday of August is the last day of "summer" as the mind-shift shifts to Fall. Work on friday however is just as important in the summer as any other day of the week according to our leader here at Dow Jones (which i honestly agree with) so today a little Friday learning for all of us.

I used to have a small .txt file that had all the HTML tags that i thought people should know regardless if they ever had a chance to code a web page. Things like how to bold and italic text, add images, links etc. Useful tips for adding rich text to web forms, text inputs etc.

This blog post on HTML5 for journalists reminded me of my well distributed .txt file and perhaps the need to update it once again. If you have heard about HTML5 it is probably because of the HTML5 Video element for playing videos and movies that directly competes with Flash. The Spec being worked on by the W3C goes way beyond video and its a great opportunity to create mark-up that will moves us towards the semantic web by adding valuable semantic meaning to your pages in non-structural ways which is typical of HTML

Martin Belam's post is targeted to journalists (he is an Information Architect at the Guardian) but relevant to everyone that is producing content for online distribution and outlines some key markup that HTML5 is making standard. Here are some of the elements he highlights that are interesting:

aside, is used to mark-up something tangentially related to the main body of text. In a news context, that might represent a factbox, some links to related stories, or a sidebar detailing the key points of a story's timeline.
details is intended to provide a way of including extra content or information that can be optionally expanded or collapsed by the user. That might be something like additional information about an album release, or the opening times of an exhibition.
replicate the print feature of having an image, chart or diagram that sits in the main flow of content, but that is not actually part of the main article. These elements will be marked-up as a figure, with figcaption specifying, as it suggests, a caption to go with the image.
mark tag provides a way to highlight or signify text. Visually you can style it however you want, although a yellow highlighter pen effect seems to be the favourite so far, but the point is to allow you to distinguish portions of text.

At the bottom of his post he also points out some other articles on the subject that are good reads if you want to dig deeper. There are over 100 elements in the HTML5 specs that the W3C that is working on and the HTML5 draft is also a good reference point. Of course RDFa specifications are also being recommended as an add-in to HTML5.

HTML5 is early in its use in the wild but with the W3C making progress (and yes of course there is always some controversy that they have to work through) to finalizing the spec hopefully web developers who understand the value will start making more use of it- so get yourself ready....

Image|Flickr|justinsomnia

What You Need To Know About Data Portability

2010-08-12T17:16:00.000-07:00

As many of you know i have been involved with the DataPortability Project from the start being one of the co-founders and the first chairperson of the board/steering committee. Having Ramona last December pulled me back from a lot of my DataPortability duties and since i have gone back to work my time continues to be limited- but one thing that has not changed is my belief that Data Portability is a topic that both users and service providers should not only be aware of but have standards to implement.

In June of this year we launched the DataPortability Policy after many months of work .The heart of the Portability Policy is a set of plain language questions that should become a common vocabulary between software users and providers. Through these questions, a provider can disclose what they do or do not, to enable data portability and the users can have a clear understanding of what they are about to 'sign-up' for as they select new services to share their data.

Elias Bizannes, the current chairperson just posted an article on Mashable titled "What You Need To Know About Data Portability" that is a good read as it gives an overview of why it should matter for both users and companies. As Elias writes, the technology to enable data portability exists but what we lack, is a cultural acceptance that a company opening up your data to competing services is beneficial. Coverage of the topic on well read sites like Mashable will help this discussion proceed even further!

Don't Read your Daily Newspaper Any More? Then Just Wallpaper Your Room with It.

2010-07-27T08:58:00.000-07:00

Mathew Ingram over at GigaOM posted this morning that Newspapers have hit new low as an information source according to a survey by the The Center for the Digital Future at the USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism.

Is your daily paper collecting dust in the corner? Thinking of canceling your subscription for sure now since none of your 'friends' can discuss the paper with you?

Please don't, you can now wallpaper your office or house by recycling read or even unread paper, don't worry your guests won't know that you get all your news online. (according to the same report a growing number of Internet users do not believe that information they find online is reliable.)

All kidding aside, it is pretty cool wallpaper.

Meeting face to face with 8,475 miles/ 13,637 km between us

2010-07-08T21:07:00.000-07:00

I have been doing business with global companies for many years and remember the excitement of the early days of the built-in conference room video systems. I always thought video conferencing was helpful to touch base with clients or internal colleagues at other locations- seeing someone speak was worth the effort of setting those systems up (yeah you know it, they never worked without getting the local IT person involved!). In today's world with Skype or web-enabled screen sharing/video sharing technologies, many meetings have a certain element of 'seeing' the other attendees at a very low cost so many of us settle for using them to get that extra interaction in our meetings.

If you read my profile in this month's 'Faces' column in EContent magazine you know that some of my favorite work days are when i am on-site with clients drilling down on requirements. So tie an on-site with using cool technology and there was no doubt that i would truly enjoy my meeting this afternoon.

Thanks to HPs Halo telepresence system, 8,475 miles / 13,637 km didn't stop me from having a frank and honest discussion- and honestly it felt pretty close to having the other person in the room while sitting in one of the HP Halo conference rooms.

It did take a bit to get 'used to it' (mostly because i was interested in the setup, camera angles etc) but the things i liked the best were:

that there was no image of myself (or the others in the room) on the screens which i always find distracting.
the person was presented 'life-size'
eye contact and verbal cues were easy to read just like if a person was in the room
within a very short time, i forgot about the 'technology' and was just having a conversion

We didn't share any screens or presentations so i would be interested in seeing what that experience is like. The good thing is that we agree to do more meetings using Halo going forward, which is quite alright with me!

The "Face" of EContent for July and August

2010-07-02T13:51:00.000-07:00

I was delighted when Nancy Davis Kho over at EContent Magazine contacted me a couple months back to tell me that she had chosen me for her Faces of EContent column (visit her personal site for an overview of more on her writing including pieces in The San Francisco Chronicle). I have read many of Nancy's articles before and we have also had good conversations at various content related conferences about enterprise content trends and opportunities.

So via Twitter (ah how else!) i was notified by @daviskho and @graubart that my profile has been published in the July/August Faces of EContent. I take responsibility for that oh not so great photo, we wanted an action shot in the office and this is the best i could do - at least i am smiling!

On a Digital Vacation: Be Back Soon

2010-06-05T20:05:00.000-07:00

Image|Flickr|Giorgio Montersino

Sunday Morning Readings : May 16th 2010

2010-05-16T10:56:00.000-07:00

---apophenia: Facebook is a utility; utilities get regulated [good argument about looking at Facebook as a utility, hence it needs to be regulated. i agree that facebook is a 'utility' powered by its users data. without the data they have nothing except the "assembly line" to make that data useful. Fair enough then they provide value but as the Electronic Frontiers Foundation says : “The information you put into social networking sites is yours, and you should be able to access it, export it, and aggregate it as you please,”but alas Facebook claims data portability is criminal. Author danah boyd's "research examines social media, youth practices, tensions between public and private, social network sites, and other intersections between technology and society." and is a must read resource for lucid discussion on these issues. For the time being (and from the start of my facebook usage- i really don't share anything private that is not already public somewhere else on facebook)

---Washington Post: New baby boom fosters culture clash: Parents vs. public spaces. Babies in bars never bothered me but i think a lot of it has to do with my up bringing as i remember being in taverns in Portugal as a very young child- but also like in Portugal, in California we are allowed to drink in most eating establishments and a lot of bars serve food- so bars can be family establishments. When we first moved to California from New Jersey one of the things that i was pretty happy about was being able to drink beer at the pizza joint- although the pizza was crap, the beer was cold and on tap. Brooklyn is having these fights as well based on this article Brooklyn brewhaha: Babies in bars. On the dogs in the park, interfering with kids and vice versa- as a dog owner (of a huge great dane) i agree, both parents and dog owners need to control their broods. On it being a baby boom- hell yeah, San Francisco is producing babies like a bunny farm you can't go anywhere without seeing top end strollers and daddy baby wearers. All good.
---WebNewser: NBC's Today Connects With Foursquare. Another Media company leveraging the location based service Foursquare. [see: Location, location, etc: What does the WSJ’s Foursquare check-in say about the future of location in news?] I am too square to be on foursquare. look at my profile above, 0 0 0 0 check-ins like a zero down car commercial. ok maybe i am not so square but over the last few months i have rarely left the house unless i am going to the store, to see clients or go for a neighborhood walk. i also am one of those people that feels unsure about showing my every location for various reasons (security, privacy, annoyance with strangers). But none the less, i just registered because i have been paying attention and agree that it is a "shift in the platform/content relationship" [Nieman Journalism Lab]

---New York Times: Google Tells Sites for ‘Cougars’ to Go Prowl Elsewhere. Just when i thought that women's sexuality equality was making progress with my support for Cougars (although it comes with giggles often when i see it play out- but to be fair the same reaction goes for those sugar daddy's) 'Go Cougars'- Google shuts it down.

and quick videos (yes i watch videos and read at the same time, while drinking coffee and nursing a baby-multi-tasking at its best):
---Musings of a VC in NYC: Draw Your Ideas. A video of Jack Dorsey (Twitter co-founder)- a bit if how Twitter started and advice: draw out your ideas before you start coding them.

---Mashable: The Semantic Web: What It Is and Why It Matters.
Image|Flickr|Andreas W

From the Young to the Old: Why the iPad is Revolutionary

2010-04-23T10:37:00.000-07:00

A 2.5 Year-Old Uses an iPad for the First Time

iPad has 'changed' 99-year-old woman's life

Sorry To All the Charlies and the Other Followers

2010-04-10T10:07:00.000-07:00

Every Morning /Afternoon/ Evening that i don't tweet, i feel guilty. The other day someone asked me if i had become a weekend tweeter (is that like a weekend warrior i wonder?) and i answered with my stock answer, no i am just too busy- work, new motherhood, sleep, and of course i am still 'listening' (thank goodness for TweetDeck). But not tweeting good content, still makes me feel guilty for not providing more value to my followers because i get so much value from the people i follow.

In addition to all my followers (current count 2,145), I am currently also listed on 109 Twitter lists (unfortunately i can't figure out how to view all 109 but when i do i will update the list below!), some pretty impressive ones that i am proud to be on include:

@techmama/tech-moms curated by @techmama
@techpundits curated by @Scobleizer
@all-the-geeky-ladies curated by @StephanieBamBam
@top-web-devs curated by @carsonified
@techwomen curated by @sarahebourne

So good morning Twitter friends and here is a blanket sorry to all the Charlies and the other followers....i won't feel guilt anymore. It is what it is at this point. hope what i have to offer is good enough for you to stick around. thanks for understanding.

Image|Flickr|Earl- What I Saw 2.0

MediaGazer a New Addiction

2010-03-31T22:23:00.000-07:00

I have been a HUGE fan of Techmeme for a while and now i have a new addiction from the Techmeme team with Mediagazer their aggregated view of coverage about the media business. Well done!

From their about section:

Mediagazer presents the day's must-read media news on a single page.

The media business is in tumult: from the production side to the distribution side, new technologies are upending the industry. Keeping up with these changes is time-consuming, as essential media coverage is scattered across numerous web sites at any given moment.

Mediagazer simplifies this task by organizing the key coverage in one place. We've combined sophisticated automated aggregation technologies with direct editorial input from knowledgeable human editors to present the one indispensible narrative of an industry in transition.

David vs. Goliath Battle for 100 year old Palms

2010-03-26T11:23:00.000-07:00

This fall i moved into a new neighborhood in Pacifica called Vallemar and we absolutely love it- especially the gorgeous large trees that line the neighborhood streets. So it was quite upsetting to hear a couple months back that PG&E was going to cut down up to 11 trees immediately due to issues with the power lines.

Of course the trees were there before the utility poles were put up by PG&E in 1950s, and although there are not as many as there used to be they are still core to the community identity so a good old David vs. Goliath battle to save these 100 year old Canary Palms as begun:

And i hope you can join us in the battle either by:

Giving a Tax deductible donation that will be used to relocate utility poles, avoiding the palm tree removal [would $ have helped David in his battle i wonder??]
Showing up this Palm Sunday [how appropriate!] from 12-2pm at the corner of Reina del Mar and Nataqua in Pacifica, where kids and adults will gather, collecting donations of books and money for the cause

From a Community announcement by Elizabeth Sendil :
---------------------------------
This Sunday, March 28th, in a David vs. Goliath face-off, a group of children and concerned citizens will be gathering in a Pacifica, California neighborhood for a book recycling and fundraising effort to save 11 century old palm trees from being cut down by PG&E. Kids 4 Change, a non-profit children's group which performs charitable services and funding, voted unanimously to make saving the palms their current cause. They will be rallying Sunday with other children and adults to raise awareness about the fate of the trees they love.

The trees, Canary Island Palms, were planted in this urban forest, circa 1906, more than 50 years before the city was incorporated. Stunning in appearance with large fronds that drape majestically from the crown, the trees are threatened not by disease but by poor urban planning. Though they are only one third of the way through their estimated 300 year lifespan, on Tuesday night, Pacifica's Parks, Beaches, and Recreation Commission voted to allow PG&E to kill the first 3 of these trees because the city does not have the money to move the utility poles or underground the wires which are at risk of becoming a safety hazard. The core issue is that the trees have now grown close enough to PG&E's high voltage lines to present a fire and electrocution hazard. Citizens have argued that this was a foreseeable consequence of placing lines directly above these trees, which have, naturally, grown taller. As of now, PG&E is not willing to fund environmentally friendly solutions such as redirecting lines, extending poles, or undergrounding the wires.

In the past 50 years, hundreds of trees have been removed from the rarefied tree-laden neighborhood of Vallemar, many of which were sick, or at the end of their lifespans. Now the remaining healthy palms are at risk only because PG&E placed power lines directly in their line of growth, and the severe trimming required would kill them. Concerned citizens and Kids 4 Change are now joining with a local non-profit, the Vallemar Conservators, which has been working for decades to save and replace the lost grandeur, has been working hard to raise awareness of this situation in hopes of finding a solution other than removal of the trees.

Anyone who is interested in tree conservation is invited to join Kids 4 Change and the Conservators on Palm Sunday, March 28, for the kick-off event, from 12-2pm at the corner of Reina del Mar and Nataqua in Pacifica, where kids and adults will gather, collecting donations of books and money for the cause. The book sale will take place on April 17th, in the same neighborhood, and all proceeds will go towards saving the trees.

To learn more about the palm crisis go to www.vallemarpalms.com. And to donate or learn more about Kids 4 Change please visit their website www.kids4change.org. All monies raised between now and April 17th will go to saving the palm trees.

-----------------------------

Images|Wikipedia|David & Goliath, Caravaggio
Images|Flickr|achesonblog

Ada Lovelace Day Bringing Women in Technology to the Forefront

2010-03-24T13:11:00.000-07:00

One year ago Ada Lovelace day meant a lot to me, but i wasn't even pregnant (by a couple days only to be exact) so i didn't even know that within a year i would have a daughter. This year celebrating one of the world's first woman computer programmers has even more special meaning to me.

I made the pledge to blog about Ada Lovelace today, but won't have the time to do much more then highlight her accomplishments and republish what i wrote last year:

So "Who was Ada Lovelance"?
Ada Lovelace was one of the world's first computer programmers, and one of the first people to see computers as more than just a machine for doing sums. She wrote programmes for Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine, a general-purpose computing machine, despite the fact that it was never built. She also wrote the very first description of a computer and of software.

So why does it matter to me that Ada Lovelace was a woman? If the same work had been done by a man would i be just as interested to celebrate his success?
Probably not- they are hundreds and thousands of men who we celebrate for their historical and modern 'accomplishments'- but not a lot of women. Ada Lovelace, is one of the few whose name has become well known, but there are many others who i respect and admire, many who have had a direct impact on me either throughout the years or more recently through the various organizations i work with.

Ada- i thank you and will tell your story to my daughter today and everyday she needs a reminder of all the brilliant women that came before her and were at the forefront of their industry!

See other post coming in from bloggers who made the pledge. (via google blogs)

Ada Lovelace|Flickr|Nefi
Ada Lovelace|Lego|Flickr|Dunechaser

Read a lot of News Online? Well You Probably are a Early Tech Adopter as Well

2010-03-22T19:28:00.001-07:00

Reflections of a Newsosaur just posted some results from a recent poll that found that newspaper website visitors appear to be early and passionate technology adopters. I am not surprised. Being in the online news business for the last ten years, i can tell you that the users who push us to deliver the most innovations in how they consume content through their enterprise applications are the same ones that favor consumer online news sites.

"In a survey of visitors to the websites of three newspapers in mid-sized communities far from the tech hubs on either coast, Harmon found that 30% of site visitors already have smart phones and that 25% of them are thinking about acquiring one. By contrast, the Nielsen Co. last summer said national smart-phone penetration was barely 17% while Harmon found it to be 25% among news-site visitors.

With about two weeks to go before the iPad ships on April 3, researcher Harmon said a “stunning” 30% of visitors to newspaper sites are considering the purchase of the latest Apple confection in addition to the 6% of respondents who already bought Kindles or another early e-reader."

He ends the post with:

"If newspapers fail to produce appealing cross-media content for the emerging tablet and smart-phone platforms, they will lose what’s left of their readers and advertisers to the competitors who do."

So a couple weeks back i was glad to see that The Wall Street Journal like the New York Times is working on an iPad application and have an " iPad hidden from public view, chained to tables in windowless rooms"so they can test it out (would love to come across that room as i roam the hallways!). But of course Rupert loves the iPad, so maybe we will all get an end of fiscal year "iGift". [wishful thinking ~]

Image|Flickr|Rinkel80

How do I Invest in The Startup Bus Investment Game?

2010-03-10T17:22:00.001-08:00

The Startup Bus is on the way to Austin for South by Southwest, and the teams are ready to start getting investment via the Investment Game.

What's the Investment Game?

From the Site:

Want to help a team succeed? Well earn capital and invest it into a team – and if you invest the highest amount, you will become the chairperson of that startup.

Chair’s are typically tasked with raising financial capital for startup businesses. What we need however, is something just as important: social capital. By participating in this fun game we’ve developed, you actually help us grow our business.

How it works: you get rewarded for activity with http://thestartupbus.com- either your own or from other people. For different types of activity, you earn a bus dollar: the more bus dollars you earn, the more you can invest between the teams. If you invest capital in a team, you will be ranked against other users who have done so. Invest the highest amount of capital and become the chairperson.

As chair, you will get listed as the teams chair on the website. The startup’s – at their discretion – may choose to reward you with stock, if they believe you provide continuing value to their business.

Specific rules:
- when you login, you earn 100 bus dollars
- when you login, you can send a Tweet saying you just made an investment and that will give you another 100 bus dollars
- for every unique user that clicks on the URL in the Tweet message, you will get an additional 10 bus dollars
-for every minute that passes when you are logged in, you will earn 1 bus dollar

Now my question is the teams are great, but how do I invest in 'The Startup Bus Investment Game'? Brilliant.

Tech Mamas: What Have You Done For Your 'Digital' Baby?

2010-02-26T11:11:00.000-08:00

As a Techie Mama, there are a couple of things that i did, either during my pregnancy or right after i gave birth to prepare my little one for her digital life. These included:

Setting up a gmail account with her name [i did this about 3 months before giving birth and started sending her messages, figured if we didn't go with that name i would get a new one and forward the messages] i am pretty sure that gmail will be around when she is old enough to have an email account
A couple of months before giving birth, when we had decided on a name, after many Google searches, i setup an filter on my Twitter Tweetdeck to see how her name was being used
Bought my daughter's name Domain name [after birth because i wanted to make sure that it was a girl and she looked like a Ramona :-) i did check its availablity a couple of months prior and was a bit nervous that it could get picked up but didn't want to spend the 10 bucks!
Setup up a digital babybook [2 weeks prior to giving birth]. I am using a great service called lil'grams that allows me to securely share pictures, videos and stories for friends and family while allowing them to choose how they want to be updated of new things i post. i will be posting up a detailed review about the service shortly on this blog
I checked facebook, there is already someone else with her name (in Italy) but i didn't bother, i am pretty sure that facebook will be the MySpace of her generation due to something bigger and better (perhaps even sooner!) so there will be better places for her online. i didn't bother with twitter either i can't see myself tweeting on her behalf and i think there will be other fads when she is ready to speak her mind.
[Edit: Addition] I setup all the grandparents on Skype! Ramona's grandparents are scattered all around so we had to make sure they got skype working for all those video calls as they watch her grown remotely!
[Edit: Addition]I got a Flip Mino Video Camera, i have a camcorder but it is to bulky to pull out to catch those special moments, the flip is always with me even when i am out of the house

What am i missing that you would add to this list?

Ramona Week by Week: First Three Weeks

2010-01-22T15:35:00.000-08:00

3D photo wall created with Cooliris.

DJ Reorg Combining Enterprise and Consumer Divisions

2010-01-21T09:30:00.000-08:00

A couple of people pinged me last week to see how i was doing and to find out how i felt about the news that Dow Jones had a major reorganization and was combining the Enterprise and Consumer Divisions. As many of you know, i have been with the Enterprise Media Group (formally factiva) for 10 years.

Of course timing is everything and I happen to be on maternity leave and although i have spoken to a couple of my colleagues after the news (yeah i just couldn't help it!), i mostly have gotten the news from internal memos, blog/media coverage and industry analyst insights that have been published.

So what do i think? If you have been reading my blog for a while you know that since 2005 i have been writing about enterprise information delivery and the consumerization of information and information delivery and consumption tools in the enterprise. My main theory being that the tools that employees use outside of the workplace influence and drive the tools that they will ultimately use within the enterprise and at times become one and the same.

So since i have been advocating and working with customers for years trying to assist them in creating the right tool sets for their employees, i believe that the combining of the two divisions could not come at a better time. Four years ago when i first started writing about what our former CEO/EVP Clare Hart eventually called the 'prosumer' - those users were the early adopters. Fast forward to today and most if not all enterprise users are keenly aware of how consumer web applications, portals and tools operate and facilitate their information finding needs. These users now demand that the tools that are given to them to do their jobs offer the same if not superior functionality.

I am hoping that this change will make my job easier and even more rewarding when i return from maternity leave as we continue to leverage the technologies that the consumer media group has developed to deliver innovative tools for enterprise use.

Semantics in Financial Services Presentation

2010-01-18T09:59:00.000-08:00

The Silicon Valley Semantic Technology Group organized by Peter Berger is one of the meetups that i have been going to for a while and have even helped coordinate and host in the past. Last Thursday the 15th they had what seems to be a great session about Semantics in Financial Services with David Newman who is a Senior Architect in the Enterprise Architecture group at Wells Fargo Bank (now part of Wachovia). I missed it due to the bambina, but lucky for me and for the rest of you that were not able to make it, the excellent slidedeck that David Newman used has been posted on Slideshare- see below (thanks Peter!).

Based on the Slidedeck, the presentation covered:

The Case for Semantic Technology- Important Key Drivers, Limitations and Benefits
Overview of Semantic Technology - Basic Overview that hits all the most know items for business and technology folks
Semantic Technology Providers and Adopters -a high level list. He makes mention of Dow Jones as an adopter but forgets to mention Synaptica as a technology provider of ontology editor
Semantic Applications for Financial Services- I am always a sucker for 'use-cases' of semantic technologies in the enterprise and Newman provides two slides that outline various semantic applications for financial services which i have highlighted below
Recommended Semantic Technology Books and Articles

Many of the Semantic Applications that Newman points out for financial services can also be extended to other non-financial services companies but his breakdown highlights specific opportunities for financial services. Wish i had been there in person to learn more about which of these applications Newman and his team are tackling using semantic technologies:

Semantics in Financial Services -David Newman

View more presentations from Peter Berger.

From Peter Berger's introduction:
David Newman serves as a Senior Architect in the Enterprise Architecture group at Wells Fargo Bank. He has been following semantic technology for the last 3 years; and has developed several business ontologies. He has been instrumental in thought leadership at Wells Fargo on the application of Semantic Technology and is a representative of the Financial Services Technology Consortium (FSTC)on the W3C SPARQL Working Group

Welcoming Ramona into Our Lives

2009-12-30T17:01:00.000-08:00

Seven days ago on December 23rd we welcomed into our lives a baby girl- Ramona. The last 9 months have been an amazing experience thanks to my husband, family, friends and all the powerful women i have met through my pregnancy and birth.

Makes sense as to why no blogging, tweeting or anything else out of me lately- uh? :-)

Hope everyone is having a wonderful holiday season~ i certainly am!!

Enterprise 2.0 - A Conference, Conversations and a lot of Common Sense

2009-11-06T16:19:00.000-08:00

This week the Enterprise 2.0 Conference made it's debut in San Francisco (it has been an annual event in Boston). I was only able to attend one of the days but got my fill of colleagues who work in the space that i have not seen for a while, vendors (expo hall had many new and 'old-timers') and got to attend some interesting sessions.

One of the things i love about Twitter is the value that it brings at conferences- both when you are physically there as well as when you are 'listening' in remotely. Commonly called the 'Back-Channel' attendees tweet their thoughts, location, what speakers are saying etc. The Enterprise 2.0 site has a handy 'Back Channel' page or a quick Twitter search on the #e2conf hashtag will let you read through some of the conversations occurring in the back-channel as well the 'reporting' that was done during sessions and post event. The days i was not there, i was tracking the conversation that way. Today i also spent some time reviewing various 'wrap-up' posts including:

Oliver Marks - The Enterprise 2.0 Value Propositions Agenda -
Andrew McAfee's Top Enterprise 2.0 No-No's - CMS Wire
Tony Bryne- Enterprise 2.0 Conference wrap up
Nenshad Bardoliwalla - Is Enterprise 2.0 a Savior or a Charlatan? How Strategy-Driven Execution can pave the path to proving legitimate business value (great post need to digest a bit more myself)

My own thoughts align with some of the criticism and frustration that can be heard about E2.0 that it is early, how do you define, what are the business values, etc. Do you have to give it a special name- or it is just for marketing purposes. Spending some time with the vendors in the expo hall- the business proposition is primarily productivity benefits, increasing sales, capturing knowledge- nothing new in the Enterprise software space but the key is that the user (enterprise user in the role of the consumer) is driving. Adoption is still a huge issue and although the 'wikification' method of enterprise penetration (Mary puts a wiki server under her desk, at 10 dollars for 10 users that grows to enterprise) has proven to be successful for some of these smaller vendors and it is still early on but the big platform vendors are quickly catching up.

From the start, the labeling of Enterprise 2.0 has been debated and for instance the panel titled "Is Enterprise 2.0 A Crock?" that featured internal evangelists from EMC, Eli Lilly, CSC Booz Allen, MetLife and Alcatel-Lucent was supposed to prove that it isn't- although it was good to hear these big name companies on a stage advocating and proving some benefits- i didn't manage to hear anything new and specific. That is why i enjoyed sessions like the one that Susan Bouchard from Cisco did on Enterprise Mashups Deliver Business Value: Cisco's Story (disclaimer Cisco has been a client of mine for a while).

Susan recently co-authored a book titled Enterprise Web 2.0 Fundamentals and the years that i have know her as been an advocate of adopting new technologies for Cisco- primarily sales teams. Susan's presentation had specific use cases on leveraging mashups (a technology that is included in the E2.0 'stack'). She also mentioned some of the work that my team has been doing around executive dashboards to deliver contextual data that incorporates mashup principles (Cisco is currently not a client of that solution).

Susan also made note of a recent publication by Cisco titled the Economics of the Cisco Collaboration Story: Case Studies of Web 2.0 Collaboration Initiatives where over $650 million in savings is sited based on their use of Web2.0 collaboration capabilities (this number includes things like reducing travel and the use of some of their own product lines (e.g. Webex)). Susan posted her slide deck on Slideshare (E2.0 presentations are locked down for attendees only-boooo) so here it is :

Enterprise Mashups Deliver Business Value

View more presentations from SusanBouchard.

Always good to be surrounded by like minded individuals and although i am sure i missed meeting many many many more because i was only on site for a day- i certainly enjoyed it and all the while making the brain juices flow which sometimes is hard to do when you are in front of a computer and talking to Enterprise clients about existing solutions (cause that is what they are ready for)- when the mind wants to explore and build the next thing!

Image|Flickr| Alex Dunne

November Equals Pumpkin, Taxonomy Bootcamp and Enterprise Search Summit

2009-11-05T09:01:00.000-08:00

I looked at the calendar yesterday and the realization that November is upon us hit me pretty hard. With November comes a lot of pumpkin (here is my new pumpkin addiction recipe for this year) and a few speaking spots before i go out on maternity leave (yeah yeah i can't believe it's already time either!).

Just like last year and the year before i will be attending and presenting at Enterprise Search Summit and Taxonomy Bootcamp which i am really looking forward to.

At Enterprise Search Summit West i have been asked to participate on a panel titled "Is Semantic Technology Real?" moderated by Rob Gonzalez from Endeca.

Is Semantic Technology Real?

10:45 am – 11:45 am

Moderator: Rob Gonzalez, Platform Product Manager, Endeca Technologies
Michael J. Cataldo, CEO, Cambridge Semantics
Daniela Barbosa, Business Development Manager, Dow Jones Client Solutions, Dow Jones & Company
Lorenzo Thione, Founder / Principal Program Manager, Powerset / Bing Microsoft, Inc.

Semantic technology is all the rage, sometimes even dubbed “Web 3.0.” However, many people—especially those making technology decisions for enterprises—wonder whether semantic technology has meaningful applications in the enterprise. Based on hands-on experience working with semantic tools, this panel of experts will establish the boundaries between reality and hype and help you understand what enterprises can gain from semantic technology in the here and now.

At Taxonomy Bootcamp, i have been asked to be part of a panel that Wendi Pohs is running titled "From the Lighthouse: Visioneering Taxonomies’ Future which promises to be an engaging panel on the future of taxonomies. I have been in forward looking mode for the last few months so i have been thinking about this subject quite a bit.

From the Lighthouse: Visioneering Taxonomies’ Future

4:00 pm – 5:00 pm
Moderator: Wendi Pohs, Chief Technology Officer, InfoClear Consulting
Daniela Barbosa, Business Development Manager, Dow Jones Client Solutions, Dow Jones & Company
Jenny Benevento, Information Architect/Taxonomist, Sears Holding Company
Gia Lyons, Social Business Software Consultant, Strategic Consulting, Jive Software
Steve Ardire, VP Strategy & Business Development, Early Stage Semantic Technology Startups

Join Wendi Pohs and this panel of experts as they peer into the future of taxonomies. Each panelist concentrates on a specific area, including semantic management tools, consumer-driven taxonomies, social networking software, and emerging semantic technologies. We’ve asked these speakers to both enlighten and challenge you, so bring your thinking caps and questions.

It is not too late to register and you can use these codes for some discounts- Enterprise Search Registration with SPK5 code and Taxonomy Bootcamp registration with SPK5 code.

My sessions last year featured a Synaptica Case Study at Taxonomy Bootcamp titled "Proquest: Finding a Common Language: Bringing Complex and Disparate Vocabularies" (video available here) and at Enterprise Search Summit a presentation on Centralized Taxonomy Management for Enterprise Information Systems (video available here)

Looking forward to seeing everyone there including the Dow Jones Taxonomy Team (Dow Jones is a KMWorld sponsor- note: my speaking spots are not sponsored spots but by invitation of the moderators) and the Synaptica team who are exhibiting and sponsoring Taxonomy Bootcamp!

Image|Flickr| minipixel

Note this post is cross-posted on the SynapticaCentral Blog.

The ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit Thursday October 15th

2009-10-13T09:42:00.000-07:00

The list of attendees at The ReadWrite-Real-Time-Web Summit is certainly looking impressive and the event wiki already has a good list of topics that people want to discuss. The purpose of the event is to bring together some industry leaders to discuss the following:

The state of the art, science and business of the Real-Time Web;
Efforts to create standards and interoperability;
Challenges in user experience, technology and monetization.

I am really looking forward to attending and participating on Thursday. In my attempt to get smarter quickly :-), i have no doubt this event will meet my expectations- the combination of the RWW team, the participants listed and Kaliya Hamlin who is known for coordinating un-conference events it is sure to be worthwhile.

It is not too late to register and there is a discount code"RWWDiscount" that is good until end of day today, Tuesday Oct 13th.

If you are not located in the Bay Area you can also check out selected sessions throughout the day via a live video broadcast on ReadWriteWeb.

Twitter Cleanse. Back Refreshed but Dumber

2009-10-12T11:38:00.000-07:00

I kinda did it on purpose but definitely did it for longer then i originally anticipated- mainly because life got in the way- but i quit Twitter for a while (my last tweet was on August 23rd- WOW i can't believe it has been that long!!)

So every weekend for the last 3-4 weeks i have told myself, "Monday i get back on the bird"- but it has just not happened. I have also been less inclined to blog- all in the same cycle i guess. So what have i learned over the last two months with no Twitter participation? (every once in a while i would look at my stream to try to get myself back in the swing of things but with no avail):

I feel dumber. no honestly i do. much much dumber.
I went back to relying on Techmeme to keep up with what is happening in the industry- not 'real-time' because i don't visit the site 24/7 but definitely still a wonderful source to use (i also follow the stream on Twitter so i will go back to that)
Although i probably have spent more time reading longer, in-depth articles etc. without applying what i am reading with the community and listening/conversing about them it has less impact- so i felt dumber per my first point!
I crawled back to my Google Reader and noticed that many bloggers that i used to follow religiously aren't blogging as much- are they are on Twitter more? or like me on a cleanse with life in getting in the way? (yes there are many a blog post out there about the decline of formal blogging being replaced by Twitter)
I had a customer the other day dropped me a note- they were worried about me because i had been so 'quiet' - they missed my input because they followed me and subscribed to my blog and i had not been producing much. That was a nice reminder that i needed to motivate myself!
I have missed some major announcements- from people moving from one company to the next, new product enhancements, releases etc. eventually i find out but i was no longer one of the 'first' in the know
I miss it- i do. the conversations i have been having with myself are not as entertaining and provocative :-)

So...I am back on the bird. tweet. tweet.

Patrick Lambe's Survey on the Future of Taxonomy Work

2009-09-11T10:54:00.000-07:00

This post was originally posted on the SynapticaCentral Blog.

Patrick Lambe has been analyzing the knowledge, skills and experience needs of the taxonomy profession for a while and as part of this his work he is conducting a survey on the present and future of taxonomy work and the needs of taxonomy professionals. Patrick is the author of a great taxonomy development book titled "Organising Knowledge: Taxonomies, Knowledge and Organizational Effectiveness" and an active writer on the topic of taxonomists and taxonomy development on his Green Chameleon blog.

Patrick, like some members of our own Dow Jones taxonomy team will also be Taxonomy Bootcamp in San Jose this November. Acording to his orginal request for survey responses, participants in the survey will also get a report of the results (which will include additional research beyond the survey). Patrick writes: "For those of you who believe that taxonomies still have a future, this might make interesting reading, and for those of you who believe a la Theresa Regli that “taxonomies are dead”, we’d like to hear from you on why!"

You can take the survey at http://tinyurl.com/taxonomywork

Image|Flickr|Jima

How companies are benefiting from Web 2.0: McKinsey Global Survey Results

2009-09-03T14:17:00.000-07:00

Enterprise Web 2.0 is in the air lately which has lead me to two back to back posts on the topic. Yesterday McKinsey's report on 'How Companies are Benefiting from Web2.0' hit my inbox and today a bunch of bloggers, like Oliver Marks over on his excellent ZDNet Collaboration 2.0 blog and Stephen E. Arnold on Beyond Search have already picked it up for summary, comment and discussion.

The third in production this McKinsey report is focused on deriving measurable business benefits companies are getting from their Web 2.0 investments. The results are based on around 1,700 executive survey respondents and focused on deployment of these technologies in three ares:

Within their organizations
Externally, in their relations with customers
In their dealings with suppliers, partners, and outside experts

From the main summary:

"Their responses suggest why Web 2.0 remains of high interest: 69 percent of respondents report that their companies have gained measurable business benefits, including more innovative products and services, more effective marketing, better access to knowledge, lower cost of doing business, and higher revenues. Companies that made greater use of the technologies, the results show, report even greater benefits. We also looked closely at the factors driving these improvements—for example, the types of technologies companies are using, management practices that produce benefits, and any organizational and cultural characteristics that may contribute to the gains. We found that successful companies not only tightly integrate Web 2.0 technologies with the work flows of their employees but also create a “networked company,” linking themselves with customers and suppliers through the use of Web 2.0 tools. Despite the current recession, respondents overwhelmingly say that they will continue to invest in Web 2.0."

The results point to blogs, RSS, and social networks as important means of exchanging knowledge in the enterprise (i guess RSS is not Dead after all...at least not in the enterprise.) Below is a graph that outlines the technologies in play, with video taking the lead in use and things like tagging and Mash-Ups unfortunately trailing (could it be that the respondents where heavily business versus developer/technology types?). [click on image below for larger image]According to the report, adoption also continues to be an issue- which honestly is not that different then most enterprise initiatives around 'knowledge management'- just because you build it does not mean the people will use it.

Another focus on use of Web 2.0 technology that this report highlights is the use of technology to improve communications with suppliers and outside partners. I think this is an important aspect of the benefits of Web 2.0 for various reasons including ease and cost of setting up, familiarity of the technology by the users on both sides, and the ever growing need for companies to collaborate and build processes around suppliers and partners that are essential to their business continuity. Video, Social Networking, Blogs, RSS and Wikis take the expected lead in use for these business purposes: [click on image below for larger image]Some might be thinking- hey isn't Web 2.0 dead? Well remember it is only a marketing label and it definitely is not dead in the Enterprise as i have written before in various posts. Like Oliver Marks comments in his post on the report, the ‘Business and Web 2.0′ consulting landscape' continues to grow when you see the continuous attention of the big firms and the shoring up of smaller consulting outfits with super talent there is an obvious interest and need to use these technologies to enhance business operations.

Andrew McAfee New Book: Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization’s Toughest Challenges

2009-08-05T13:55:00.000-07:00

A couple weeks ago i downloaded the first chapter of Andrew McAfee's new book Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization’s Toughest Challenges that is scheduled to be published this fall (and i also joined the facebook group to move up the publication date because in today's world every week can make something like this less and less relevant!!). Since then i have talked with three different clients in which i make reference to the book because i think it would be a valuable resource for them.

I am and have been for a while a big fan of McAfee's work. Like him, i truly believe in the infiltration of consumer web tools into the enterprise. He however is a researcher and thought leader out of Harvard, i just get to implement information delivery, consumption and collaboration solutions within enterprises- and at times some companies that are quiet HUGE and slow moving. So having a resource like this new book with case studies is great value to me as i share and work with customers.

Reading through the first chapter and some of the reviews that he just posted from people that read the full book, i am really excited about the content and use cases that will be available that he promises will:

"show how leaders are applying new tools, new approaches, and new philosophies to challenges such as accurately predicting the future (in domains where traditional forecasting methods have a poor track record); creating, gathering, and sharing knowledge; increasing rates of innovation; locating answers and expertise; and identifying and solving problems more quickly."

Chapter 4 is going to be focused on how to succeed - because like with most projects in enterprises just because you build it doesn't mean the users will come, adopt it and receive value- planned rollout and adoption strategies post truly understanding user needs is required.

I am also very interested in learning more about McAfee's take on the industry that is bringing these tools to the market- a young industry that is becoming more and more embedded in the traditional application platforms (Microsoft, IBM, etc.).

If you are interested in reading more of McAfee's writing in addition to reading the introduction chapter you should subscribe to his Blog "The Business Impact of IT" i highly recommend it.

Flickr Slideshow Cures a Bit of Back Home Blues

2009-08-02T21:01:00.000-07:00

Although i am lucky enough to live on the coast of California and am privileged enough to be able to walk down to the Pacifica beach and for example watch whales pretty frequently this summer, i still get a bit 'home' sick when i think about being back in Portugal especially because the coast line reminds me so much of where i grew up in Portugal (a bit south of Lisboa in a town called Paço d'Arcos). But a flickr slideshow cured it all this evening. (an early morning walk in 88 photos from our house to the beach pathway from Dec 2007).
Enjoy~

History of Business Intelligence

2009-07-08T17:29:00.000-07:00

This afternoon, I was looking for some good business intelligence use cases as i worked on a client presentation on integrating external news, financial data, social media and internal business data to create what i am calling a 'one-page' executive leadership view and I came across this video presentation on the 'History of Business Intelligence' by Nic Smith.

Nic is a senior marketing manager for business intelligence solutions at Microsoft and obviously has some killer presentation skills. Definitely worth the 10 minutes- including a couple of chuckles.

View more documents from Nic Smith.

Where did i start my search? Slideshare of course. A great resource of smart people, with excellent presentation skills that feel that sharing with the community is more beneficial then hording their knowledge. thanks folks.

Bit.ly on This

2009-07-07T08:30:00.000-07:00

I have been using the URL shortener service bit.ly for a couple of months now and love it. bit.ly allows users to shorten, share, and track links (URLs). Reducing the URL length makes sharing easier when you are using Twitter or even sending links via email.

Aside from the convenience and usability issues it resolves, my favorite thing is being able to track the shortened links i publish. Great for seeing how many clicks i get from a Tweet post with a shortened URL but also for tracking who has clicked on the link i sent them. Recently i sent a shorten URL to a coworker, a couple days later in conversation i asked what they thought of the link i sent them, they answered that it was great. yes. i believe it that is, that is why i sent it to you. but not that you actually read it. nope according to my bit.ly tracker you never clicked on it. oops.

Image|Flickr|Janrito Karamazov

Speaking at eComXpo Free Virtual Show This Week

2009-07-06T07:49:00.000-07:00

This Thursday at 11:20EST, i will be conducting a session with Jonathan Kranz on day two of eComXpo which is virtual show for "e-commerce and affiliate marketers that addresses the latest trends and issues in marketing for retailers, affiliates and networks". [registration is free so join us!]

The title of our session is "Now You’re Cooking: How A Dow Jones eBook Boosted Brand And Tripled Lead-Gen Expectations" which is a case study of the ebook i published last June with Dow Jones titled "The Taxonomy Folksonomy Cookbook: Finding the Right Recipe for Organizing Enterprise Metadata".

Jonathan was instrumental in the copy writing and concept design of that ebook as well as the most recent one "The Conversational Corporation: How Social Media is Changing the Enterprise" that i cowrote with Robert Scoble, Shel Israel and Greg Merkle. Jonathan is spectacular to work with and in this session he will share with the audience some of the tips that he shared with us as we were putting together and publishing our own successful ebooks.

The session summary from the conference agenda reads as follows:

If content is king on the Web, then what’s the royal road to online success? For Dow Jones, the secret was an ebook strategy that positioned them for leadership--and resulted in three times the number of downloads and leads than they had expected. Co-hosts Jonathan Kranz, author of Writing Copy for Dummies, and Daniela Barbosa, Business Development Manager for Dow Jones’ Synaptica, share their insights on:
How a traditional company is reinventing its content/copy through ebooks
Uncovering opportunities for competitive distinction through thought-leadership
How to leverage expertise to build brand, generate leads and lubricate the sales process pipeline
The crucial power of killer graphics — why ebooks are more than mere whitepapers
Promotional power — leveraging Web ads, social media, webinars, personal appearances and more to accelerate success

I am really looking forward to conducting this session with Jonathan, he certainly has a lot to share with everyone based on what he has learned over the years in producing projects for various types of clients and we will be sharing some real stories that came out of the two ebooks i have written over the last year. 'See' you there!

Siri, a Virtual Personal Assistant

2009-07-05T17:01:00.000-07:00

Ever so often i see an iPhone application that makes me want to go off and buy one (i am still on Blackberry because it is the work standard). I have an iTouch in which i test and play with applications, etc. but since it requires wifi it is limited as to the universal use for applications.

I got to see the 2nd public demo of Siri, a Virtual Personal Assistance at the Semantic Technologies conference a couple weeks back that i have been mentioning to a lot of folks. I just found the slide deck that Tom Gruber used as well as the keynote video which is worth a view if you want to see what the future holds for us in regards to connected information retrieval and delivery.

During the presentation Tom Gruber outlines what it takes to put an application like the Siri Virtual Personal Assistant together and why the time is right for Siri and others. The enabling conditions that he outlines include: [@minute 6:49]

Location Awareness
Time Awareness
Task Awareness
Conversational Interface
Speech to Text
Text to Intent (natural language processing)
Dialog Flow
Semantic Data
Services APIS
Task & Domain Models
Access to Personal Information (data portability)

Video demo starts at about 8 minutes:

Interested in learning more? See additional coverage of Siri.

Making Money on Twitter US$1,441.62 per tweet

2009-06-12T15:44:00.000-07:00

This morning i read that Dell Sold $3 Million in sales through Twitter an accomplishment that should be acknowledged and is import for other B2C businesses to admire and try to replicate. $3 million is a small amount to Dell but still relevant (about .5% of their annual revenue of $61M )- since they are just getting started with the medium . {CORRECTION-thanks to Sandro: revenues 61B not $61M, and thus this is only 0.005% (one part in 20,000) of their revenue.] They use other social media channels as well so based on the viral nature of Twitter into other channels (Facebook, blogs, Youtube etc.) it probably is a combination of the originating points of the promotion codes on Twitter spreading out.

But let's say that the average PC purchase is $800 bucks. Using that average (i made that up) through Twitter they acquired ~ 3,750 customers. Depending on their retention and loyalty rates, long term these consumer acquisitions can be even worth more.

So i checked out their Dell Twitter accounts, and there are multiple Twitter channels- 34 of them on the Dell on Twitter page and that is not counting other Dell 'employees', 'fans' and 'followers' that are not listed that retweet. Just looking at the 'Dell Offers on Twitter' category, there are 10 separate accounts. Between theses 10 twitter accounts as of this morning about a total of 2,081 tweets had been published across those 10 accounts- so if my math is correct, Dell netted about $1,441.62 per tweet. Not bad for 140 characters.

Image|Flickr|striatic

Rutgers Drops “Library” from Name of School

2009-06-11T13:20:00.000-07:00

The Rutgers University Board of Governors approved a resolution April 2 removing the words “library studies” from the name of the School of Communication, Information, and Library Studies. Effective July 1, its name will be the School of Communication and Information. The school’s faculty had voted 30–10 in favor of the name change at a February 4 faculty meeting. - posted on ALA site

As a graduate of the MLIS (Master of Library and Information Science) program at the Rutgers School of Communication, Information and Library Studies(SCILS) i am disappointed by this change. The article states that one of the reasons was that people thought that it was solely a library school- that is not a problem of the library studies program but a product of the school not being to define why Library Studies is just as important as the Communications and Information part of the program and that Library studies requires specific skills sets that the marketplace needs.

Image|Flickr|ksscils598s08

Semantic Technologies Conference in San Jose, CA June 14-18th

2009-06-10T00:01:00.000-07:00

Just like last year, I am very excited about the upcoming Semantic Technology Conference in San Jose on June 14th-18th. The program looks great and aside from attending many sessions and i am also going to be very busy!

Starting on Sunday, June 14, 2009 from 02:00 PM - 04:00 PM we kick-off with the Semantic Code Camp, an event that is free for non-conference attendees as well (register here).

On Monday, June 15th from 6:00-8:00pm, The DataPortability Project is hosting a DataPortability get-together. As an added bonus, when you register to attend this meetup, you will get access to Chris Saad’s conference session "It's Time for Social Media to Become Personal Media" which takes place prior to the meet-up (5:00pm-6:00pm). You will have access to the full conference and you will be able to also network with all the other attendees. You need to register to get access into the conference center for the session and get-together. (contact me with questions)

On Tuesday, June 16, 2009 from 11:45 AM - 12:45 PM , i am super excited about being on a panel moderated by Paul Miller titled "Semantifying Social Networks" with Nova Spivack, Stephen A. Leicht and Amit Sheth. (for this session you need to be a conference attendee, please see below)

Interested in attending the full conference? Use the DataPortability Discount code: ST9DP . It will give the user $200 off a “full event” or “conference only” registration fee and $100 off a “tutorial day only” fee.

For example: If you are also interested in attending a full Semantic Search Day on Wednesday. Use the code to get you $100 off the day price of $195- costing only $95!

Here is what i look like, come find me if you want to chat~ See you in San Jose!

Conversational Corporation Roundtable Wrap-Up

2009-05-28T10:19:00.001-07:00

Yesterday afternoon i had the privilege to moderate a panel discussion with David Meerman Scott, Marketing Strategist, Keynote Speaker, and Author of World Wide Rave; Shel Israel, Best selling author of Naked Conversations and the upcoming book Twitterville and David Spark, Tech Journalist and Founder of Spark Media Solutions as well as about 15 attendees from different verticals, job roles and levels of participation in the use of social media.

David Libby, one of the attendees has a detailed posted based on the notes he took that provides an excellent overview of the discussions that took place. We also recorded the session via Ustream.tv, which i have embedded below.

The Roundtable discussion was a chance to learn from the attendees and the panelists what companies need to think about and how they need to approach being a 'Coversational Corporation'. The title comes from a recent ebook that i published with Shel Israel (one of the panelists), Robert Scoble and Greg Merkle called the The Conversational Corporation: How Social Media is Changing the Enterprise'.

I started off the discussion with introductions, asking the participants to tell us what they would like to get out of the discussion, the list was diverse and included:

How invested do we want to be from the start?
How do we work with our legal departments? (we had a good conversation about legal being very good at focusing on 'risk' and that we still have issues going to trial)
What are some of the non-traditional ways to do business using social networking
How do you bring it all together? (tools, messages, initiatives)
How do you stay ahead of your clients? (especially important for professional services providers)
Transcending Time-zones with social media for global companies and clients
Non-profit use of social media
Social Media-> how different is it from PR?
Using Social Media to coordinate and promote events
How to get your Salesforce into the conversation?
Things to keep in mind when thinking about using social media in a regulated industry
Focusing on the Story.....instead of the Tools!

I think we covered most of the questions that initially were put on the board and was pleased with both the pace and the participation of all the attendees.

To watch the video of the roundtable discussion, make sure you turn up the volume both on your PC as well as on the player below because some of the people in the back are sometimes hard to hear.

After the roundtable discussion and some drinks and appetizers out on the lovely sunny patio we got to take the participants on a tour of the Palo Alto Wall Street Journal printing plant which is always a treat!

A big thank you to all the attendees, panelists and internal Dow Jones people that made this event happen!
More photos from the event can be found here.

VRM and Request for Taking Control of My Purchasing Power

2009-05-17T09:43:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I attended the VRM (Vendor Relationship Management) Workshop in Palo Alto. The workshop sessions were great and i left even more excited and invigorated about the possibility and opportunities with the concept of VRM for consumers and the marketplace in general.

One of the session topics was the Personal 'RFP' (Request For Proposal). I have been keeping an eye on the VRM conversation for a while and Personal RFPs is a topic that comes up often as a concept, so i was excited that Doc Searls was leading a session on the topic.

An early post from 2007 on the subject from an active participant in the VRM project Keith Hopper defines the Personal RFP as follows which i think it a good summary of our discussion yesterday:

The idea is simple: have the individual consumer dictate what they want and at what price. Let the vendors who can match this need come to them rather than the other way around. Product marketers currently have an annoying habit of telling us what we need and then inundating us with a sea of unsolicited communications around products we may not want. Removing this vendor behavior would reduce an unwanted advertising burden on the consumer (annoyance) as well as on the marketer (cost). This should decrease total unit costs, and by extension the cost to the consumer.

The idea of the 'Personal RFP' is to have an outbound channel (and we spent time in other sessions at the workshop defining some of those possible channels) that would allow the consumer to explicitly announce to Vendors what they are looking to buy. A simple statement such as:

I want ____ in ___(city,Lat/Long) between___&___(day&time) for $___.

During the session we discussed the different purchasing needs of a consumer- for example when buying a car, you may have a long list of specifics (i want a car that gets more then x miles per gallon, have X cylinders, leather interior, 3 yr warranty, etc.) or something more more simple which might not be as affected but product details (i want Linseed oil).

A consumer may also be at a different point in their purchasing decision- they can be looking for a camera and have done no research on what they need and therefore would put a very generalized statement ' I want a digital Camera in San Francisco by the end of the month for no more then US$250.00' or they have a specific camera model in mind 'I want a Canon EOS 5D Mark II with a Car Battery Charger CBC-E6 in San Francisco by Friday May 22th for US$2,550'.

So during the discussion we spent some time talking about the different types of 'requests' that a consumer could possibly want to make of their vendors. Much like in a corporate enterprise 'RFP' process (which over the years btw i have answered hundreds of!!) there could be different types of requests based on where the 'buyer' is such as:

Request for Information- e.g. i would define this as a high level request for information from a vendor to understand what they offer, this could lead to a customized landing page for the consumer for example with the vendor's products
Request for Quotation - e.g. i would define this as providing price points for a specific product that the consumer knows they want- this could lead to a custom page that present a customized 'coupon' for that specific product for that consumer for a limited time
Request for Proposal- e.g. i would define this as the consumer defining their needs in detail based on their intended use of the product and having the vendor identify solutions that would meet those needs and help guide the consumer to buying the product that fits their needs.

One of the things that popped into my head that i certainly would want to make sure this process would avoid would be a 'Request for Spam' (although i realize that some consumers may actually enjoy shopping that way- all about choices!)

There of course would probably be other types of 'Requests' as VRM services are made available in the marketplace to consumers and during the day we discussed some of those models that are being worked on by project members. Workshop Notes will be posted on the wiki.

If you are interested in the topic as it continues to mature and become a reality (and trust me based on the workshop we will be seeing some real life example of VRM in action soon) please poke around on the Project VRM wiki and/or subscribe to the ProjectVRM Blog.

Image|Flickr|CarySkelton's photos|Why? Well the obvious message of the Kinks song titled 'You Really Got Me' but also that Bruce has been taking audience song requests that create this type of view in the front of the stage- personal requests for songs!

Real Life Twitter

2009-05-14T18:00:00.001-07:00

Lately my husband, in an attempt to obviously connect with me more over my Twittering habit has taken to yelling things out loud in a monotone voice like 'starting to make dinner by myself. lol' from the other room to get my attention away from the computer or 'OMG i just found the best shoes. and on sale!' when i pickup a new pair.

So of course, I just laughed hysterically as i watched this clip- on what would happen if the way we communicate on Twitter was the way we communicated in real life.

Hey at least we would talk to one another more- even if it was uni-directional!

Copyright Through the Ages

2009-05-08T16:17:00.000-07:00

This week at the CODIE awards dinner for SIIA (Software & Information Industry Association) we got a preview of their newest anti-piracy campaign video- an updated version of their 1992 'Don't Copy that Floppy' classic video that certainly had everyone in the room laughing (either because we remember seeing it, we all really miss floppies or because the rapping 'Digital Protector' is just too much!).

Copyright laws are not new, it is just that as media evolves it different characteristics and capabilities that would have been unimaginable (even in 1992 when the floppy copy was an issue!). So it was with great interest that i came across this site about Copyright History which is a digital archive of primary sources on copyright from the invention of the printing press (c. 1450) onwards.

From the Scout Report Summary where i found the reference:

This website, initially funded by the United Kingdom Arts and Humanities Council, uses primary source material from Italy, France, Germany, the UK, and the United States to trace the beginnings of copyright. For each of these geographical zones/jurisdictions, a national editor was responsible for "selecting, sourcing, transcribing, translating and commenting documents." Documents found here include "privileges, statutes, judicial decisions, contracts and materials relating to legislative history, but also contemporary letters, essays, treatises and artefacts." To get visitors oriented to the immense topic at hand, a compact interactive timeline has been provided. At the bottom of the page visitors should click on "The Timeline Interface" to view the full timeline. Moving the gray vertical bar over each 50 year time segment will show all the copyrights for that 50 year period. A high arc in the time period indicates a lot of activity for that time segment. There are colored dots to indicate the country the material is from, and rolling the mouse over each dot will reveal the full record. The site is loaded with information, and various ways to search for material. Searching by "date" and "place" is one way to search. See the menu on the left side of the page to see the available search and browse options, such as "country", "original language", "person", and "place".

The Conversational Corporation How Social Media is Changing the Enterprise

2009-05-05T10:42:00.000-07:00

If you are a longtime reader of my blog, you know that i have been writing about the intersection of consumer information tools and the enterprise since early 2006 and that the topic is one that is very dear to my heart- so i am very pleased to annouce this new ebook today.

Although it seems like only yesterday, it was in early winter of 2007 that the title of our new ebook 'The Conversational Corporation' came to mind based on an on-site visit to Sun Microsystems with Robert Scoble, Greg Merkle and myself, three of the four authors of our newest ebook 'The Conversational Corporation: How Social Media is Changing the Enterprise'. The fourth author Shel Israel was brought in later on when Robert suggested that we use this ebook as a follow-up to their Naked Conversations book published in 2006 that was focused on Social Media, especially blogging for mostly a corporate audience (and what a difference it made in corporate blogging- i know i personally gave over 20 customers copies!!). In addition to the previous collaborations with Robert, Shel had also been doing a lot of work with Enterprise companies and had interviewed more than 300 people in 38 countries on social media’s impact on culture and business that we were lucky enough to leverage for this ebook.

In the ebook which is available for free download, we look at ways that corporate employees are communicating and collaborating, and we discuss their impact on the 'Corporation'—particularly on the changing expectations of customers and employees. I am a believer that there is a very true intersection between business and social media in today's enterprise employee toolkit that is needed for their day to day work and i think that the ebook does a good job of outlining some of these opportunities.

Out of that session (the image is from the whiteboard that day), Robert's “Starfish Approach” is covered and it is a concept that i have been sharing with customers that certainly resonates with them as they begin to put together an information strategy that uses multiple tools : “...like a starfish, your organization should be able to grow, adapt and even abandon new tools (“legs”) without threatening the health of the larger organism”.

The ebook took a while to publish due to various issues (mostly time constraints on 4 plus people's schedules!) and even this weekend as I reviewed the final version there are many things that i would have liked to add which i will cover here on this blog in the upcoming weeks. The original idea was to do a themed design like my 'Folksonomies and Taxonomies in the Enterprise' ebook, the layout for this ebook however is simple- but hopefully you find the content and the ideas we explore useful and valuable enough to 'start' the conversation about how you can create a "Conversational Corporation' within your own companies.

We look forward to your thoughts and ideas on how to enable and drive a 'Conversational Corporation'- Enjoy!

Additional photos from the session (thanks to Carolyn Flynn) can be seen here.

Everything is Broken...Still

2009-04-23T09:58:00.000-07:00

I was on holiday in Europe for the last two weeks (with some work days with the local offices in some countries that i visited) and feel like i need a vacation from my holiday....anyway...i have tons to go through in my RSS reader but this one this morning was worth 20 minutes. funny real stuff. i agree with Seth Godin- not much has changed since he recorded this in 2006. enjoy.

Seth Godin at Gel 2006 from Gel Conference on Vimeo.

Ada Lovelace Day Bringing Women in Technology to the Forefront

2009-03-24T00:01:00.000-07:00

Last night on my way home i was thinking about Ada Lovelace. Ada Lovelace Day is today March 24th and the purpose is to have an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology. A couple months ago i signed the pledge, to honor Ada Lovelace and promote women in technology.

So "Who was Ada Lovelance"?
Ada Lovelace was one of the world's first computer programmers, and one of the first people to see computers as more than just a machine for doing sums. She wrote programmes for Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine, a general-purpose computing machine, despite the fact that it was never built. She also wrote the very first description of a computer and of software.

So why does it matter to me that Ada Lovelace was a woman? If the same work had been done by a man would i be just as interested to celebrate his success?

Probably not- they are hundreds and thousands of men who we celebrate for their historical and modern 'accomplishments'- but not a lot of women. Ada Lovelace, is one of the few whose name has become well known, but there are many others who i respect and admire, many who have had a direct impact on me either throughout the years or more recently through the various organizations i work with. Women like Clare Hart and Christine Connors at Dow Jones who affect myself and the company i work for day in and day out in how they help push our company forward by utilizing technology. And then there are all the great women i have met at events like She's Geeky like the woman who runs that conference Kaliya Hamlin who is involved and a leader in so many technology organizations- unselfishly pushing and advocating for what she believes in. There are so many other women that i follow, admire, and am inspired by....hopefully they know who they are.

Ada- i thank you.

See other post coming in from bloggers who made the pledge. (via google blogs)

Ada Lovelace|Flickr|Nefi
Ada Lovelace|Lego|Flickr|Dunechaser

They Don't Own It. You Don't Own It. But Perhaps We Need to Redefine and Standardize It.

2009-02-16T19:45:00.000-08:00

I just finished posting my first post over on the DataPortability Project Blog titled Redefining and Standardizing ‘Ownership’. The DPP Blog has been live since December and the guys have been doing a great job covering things that are important to the Project. Honestly, i haven't had the time in addition to all the other things i have been doing on behalf of the Project to blog, but this afternoon i went ahead (with some encouragement from the chat room) and posted my thoughts on the recent changes that Facebook made to their Terms.

The latest Facebook step (misstep?) occurred last week when they made some changes to their Terms of Service and one of the items of contention by many is the following statement:

“You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content. “

The Consumerist Blog posted on the subject yesterday and today many have been commenting. and facebook themselves have made public comments and started a discussion board to address questions from users.

It is obvious that as a community we need to redefine and standardize the way we define and award rights to ownership of data and this is one of the reasons that i am involved in the DataPortabilty Project [and currently serve as the Chairperson of the Steering Committee]. I realize that it has been common in the world of the internet to let 'Vendors' own what goes into their EULAs and TOCs- but we shouldn't continue to let that be. More thoughts over there.

With the Web 2.0 Label At Least I Knew What to Look For

2009-02-14T15:32:00.000-08:00

Recently i had lunch with a customer that we had just finished delivering a taxonomy advisory project that focused on their 'retail employee' portal. I have known this customer for a while and the folks that work there are pretty tech savvy so of course during lunch a bunch of things came up in regards to the gadgets and tools we use in our day to day life and at work.

During lunch, one of them asked me a question that i had not been asked in a while- what was the "coolest and newest" application that i had been using and would recommend? After a couple seconds of awkward silence, I said that i really didn't really have an answer for something 'new'. In regards to services that i have been using more and more and find extremely valuable i mentioned things LinkedIn that have used for years (highlighting the new features which i love), SlideShare and Twitter (and Twitter apps) of course....but what else? We talked a little about the iPhone of course and even Facebook- but there wasn't anything i could point to that provided a great new service- especially for use by the enterprise user.

Today's post on the "Death of Web 2.0" on TechCrunch reminded me of that conversation. In that post, the author points out that more and more companies are not using the term as part of their pitch to get covered and and according to the Google trends analysis the author did it shows that less people are searching on the term. I have always used "Web 2.0" as a marketing label- not as a description of technology per say- so i wonder what are companies indeed labeling themselves? "Social Media" and "Social Networking" are probably used more and more, but what else?

So i still feel 'out-of-the-loop' so perhaps it is:

there is no new label like 'Web 2.0' to latch on to?
or maybe there just isn't a lot of services that are coming out that excite me?
i have my head in my arse?
the 'channels' that i am still dialed into are not doing their jobs and online coverage of new products and services are lacking
i don't know where to look [perhaps you can help me with this one?]

Lately, I don't find TechCrunch to be doing the same job it used to do in covering new services (there is too much drama lately maybe because i get suckered into reading stupid comments!). TechCrunch Enterprise which i had been waiting for since 2006 just hasn't gotten me excited as i wanted it to. i read other sites like ReadWriteWeb (a daily must read) and Mashable and the people i follow on Twitter are also invaluable to me to find new products services. But why am i just not that excited about most of products and services that they are covering?

Image|Flickr|An Era passed (record labels) by Olivander [i recommend visiting Flickr page]

Check With Your Local Library First With This Updated Bookmarklet

2009-02-09T19:52:00.000-08:00

Thanks to a connection i made at the She's Geeky Conference last month Judith Bush sent me a message on twitter this afternoon about the new xISBN bookmarklet that OCLC has updated and that now supports thousands of libraries. According to the announcement it will be updated on a monthly basis so if a library maintains up-to-date information in the Registry, its data will be automatically reflected in xISBN bookmarklet that has been installed by the user.

Is was only 12 months ago that i found this handy tool, and i can say that i have already probably saved hundreds of dollars by getting books from my local library that typically i would buy from the likes of Amazon. If i could find a combination of this and buying chapters and 'sections' of books that i would like to keep digitally for my digital devices like my laptop, itouch and 'dreaming of getting a kindle' - i would be in heaven!

So what does this Bookmarklet tool do? Here is an excerpt from my post on February17th 2008 on the subject:

So let's imagine that i am on Amazon.com and i am looking at David Weinberger's book 'Everything is Miscellaneous'. I don't have a Kindle so no easy download for me- and perhaps i am not sure i want to commit to having a copy in my book collection before i read it (well this book i actually do-and well marked it is!).

So before purchasing of Amazon.com, I decide to see if my local library system- in my case the Peninsula Library System (PLS)- has the book available. Clicking on the Peninsula Library Bookmarklet i installed- extracts the ISBN from the URL on the bookseller's page (Amazon in this example) and then goes to a library catalog and searches by ISBN.:
A search against the PLS Catalog shows me libraries in my Library System that i can borrow from that have the book in their collections. I can then cruise down to that location to pick it up, place a hold on the book if it is checked out, or put a request for interlibrary loan right from my browser. There are also many ebooks available from my PLS library system so i can get immediate access to those.

Facebook Opening Up : More Steps Towards Data Portability

2009-02-07T14:43:00.000-08:00

There are many things i love about the world we live in- one is the power of the 'user' (i have always been one for group protests and group advocacy!) and i personally think that it fair to say that Facebook's new announcement last night on Opening Up Facebook Status, Notes, Links, and Video to Facebook Platform is about the users and developers who represent the 'facebookers' demanding that their user data is 'open'- if no one was asking and threatening to go elsewhere as they find other great services they probably wouldn't be listening.

Looking back at the last year - Scoblegate was only 13 months ago!- there have certainly been a lot of steps towards the vision and mission that the DataPortability Project has been working towards and personally it is fulfilling to see these large vendors taking heed and listening to their 'users'.

These steps by the big vendors are quite important but also need to be reviewed as to what their end game is. Over on the DataPortability Blog, Steve Repetti one of the Dat aPortability Project steering committee members and a huge advocate of dataportability in his own products writes:

"On the one hand there is very little about this that is open. Facebook controls the data, its access, and its availability. Facebook defines the integration, they determine the protocols, and the APIs, and even who can and cannot use any of this. This “openness” is all under the oversight, control, direction, and whim of the giant."

I agree with Steve's sentiment that, "Facebook has made huge strides in extending its world beyond the looming walls of their garden" and i certainly look forward to hearing more feedback from the developers who will be working with the APIs over the next few days as to what is truly possible based on the APIs that have been made available.

Reading through some of the other commentary this afternooon, i love Dare Obasanjo's comment ' Facebook is now acknowledging that their users use other websites and integration with those sites doesn't require these sites to become sharecroppers on the digital farmland that is the Facebook canvas page. '-yep. the main difference is that the value of the experience will perhaps no longer need to be within facebook- and that is just one of the reasons that supporting data portability is valuable to the user and the ecosystem as a whole.

and two additional comments have to make...

1. i find it interesting that facebook chose to make this announcement at 4:54pm PST- when most of the world has called it quits for the day and many for the weekend as they go about their lives

2. i realize that this is a 'developer' announcement and that the general user doesn't care much for API related information- but shouldn't the facebook blog post an overview for what this means to the facebook "user"? You know that person that 'friended' you last month that is not involved in the tech scene- currently spends little to no time on other social networks sites being that they only recently got 'on board social networking' and because facebook was the first one they joined they have no idea what this all means about moving around their user data?

Our Data on the Web- What if We Woke Up to Empty Shelves

2009-02-02T22:11:00.000-08:00

As i finished up my coffee Saturday morning before heading to the BART station to pick a fellow 'she geek' up to head down to day two of She's Geeky, a quick look at Techmeme reminded me of some of the important issues we had discussed the day before at the session about 'Making Information Accessible'.

That morning's two stories that caught my attention, was one on Google going 'bonkers' earlier that morning with malware messages on all the results and Ma.gnolia a social bookmarking site suffering major data loss and basically forcing them to shut down access to the site. [it is now Monday at 9:30PST and the site is still down with no message when you land on their pages which is disturbing. the last message is on their twitter account @magnolia]

In that session on friday we discussed structuring data for findability and reuse but we also went on a tangent about where the data is stored, who has access, who owns it, who can move the data etc.

This is one of the reasons that i got involved with the DataPortability Project early on and currently server on the Steering Committee as chairperson along with other roles. The project is addressing the issue of user data with the vision that "data portability enables a borderless experience, where people can move easily between network services, reusing data they provide while controlling their privacy and respecting the privacy of others". Issues of ownership, security and access to your user data are an important part of ensuring data portability for users.

So over the last few days, i have been thinking, would i pay for a service that took all my data from these various site i am adding value to and kept it secure, aggregrated and always accessible with 'one' click? (content created on services like Twitter, Facebook, Blogger, Flickr, Delicious, and on and on etc.) Yes i would. Stowe Boyd describes such as service at the end of his post on the subject.

and i just did a backup of my delicious tags- you never know...and fingers crossed for the mag.nolia team and users (i am one of their users but have over the last year mostly used delicious).

Image|Flickr|svenwerk

She's Geeky Day 1 : Oh Ada, Wish You Could Have Been Here

2009-01-30T22:37:00.000-08:00

Day 1 of the She's Geeky (un)conference wrapped up with some wine to wind down the she geeks and a real treat- an Ada Lovelace biographical film which was a history lesson on Ada, who many call the "first programmer". Some of my notes/thoughts follow but overall all a great day and i am certainly looking forward to tomorrow!

On this first day, there were more then 50 sessions scheduled on a wide range of topics. I like many other, wanted to attended multiple sessions that might have been running at the same time so i tried to pick from a diverse 'track' in each time slot.

The first session i attended was titled "How to Build Credibility in a techy world when you are not techy" and a small group of us had a targeted and helpful discussion sharing our experiences. "techy' was mostly defined as hard core programming- because all of us around the table were techy to some level. Here are some notes from that session that i submitted as note taker (all session notes will be published on the she's geeky site):

---first show what your strenghts & values are- (e.g. understanding the user while they understand the code)
-----define how you will be working together
----volunteer to help them with specific aspects of their role that they might not be 'good at' or like. for example helping them with business/admin things
----share recognition with the team early on, praise

-Build Alliances and Allies
-----become an advocate outside of the the core group for them - interdepartemental/executive
----focus on your soft skills value-- what are the people issues to understanding
---give them ownership----you need them for specific things identify and give them ownership
--***Find one person on the team that can be your 'internal' contact and ally, someone you can go to to help you understand things that you might not understand and be able to ask 'offline'

--Somtimes it is 'not' personal to you but 'personal' to them as to the attitude they have towards you- try to understand what is going on- stress in their life?personal family issues? scared that they can't do something ? ask
---Help them ***Sleep Better at Night*** ;-)
--Remain the Calm Pillar when stress situations arise.

--we tend to put out there right away what we "lack"- how do you go about being honest but confident of what you can bring to the table?
---Executive sponsership- find it and cherish it- use it to your advantage

---** Make sure you understand "What is in it for Them?"

The second session, which i helped lead was on "Making Information Accessible" - the leader of that session is a technical writer and had one of the best lines i have heard about technical manuals: "manuals have no plots or surprise endings"- as we discussed some of the challenges of different types of content. We spent some time talking about the value of meta data, unstructured and structured data, chunking, journalism and publishing, citizen journalism and the production of content through social networking tools like Twitter (a question gets asked, gets answered but it is findable again? where is all this content going and how can we access ?)[I was introduced to Tweetake]

A tasty lunch of Indian cuisine allow some of us to catch up and for me to type of my session notes as a dutifiul note taker!

The third session i attended lead by IdaRose Sylvester and Susan Mernit on "Transparency & Identity Online and Offline" in a packed room- with many personal stories and questions for those who have (or have had at one point) a more transparent online indentity lead to interesting observations about transparency Offline in our Online world (yes i wrote that backwards on purpose because that is what i found to be the most interesting was the discussion on how we live our offline different because of our online "transparency" or lack of). Here are some notes i took from that session:

Session Introduction by IdaRose and Susan
-What does it Mean?
-- How much do you tell/share on line?
--What moral issues?
--What about your employers?
-- What are your privacy, safety concerns
--How much is too much to share?
--What kind of rules do you make for yourself?
--How you manage your own transparency?

Using different personalities/personas on line- discussion around 'handles' and branding- separating from real name

-- Prefessional - (word combination of personal/professional) - combined worlds of professional and personal online identity-
----who wants to know who you are when they find you? discussed that it could be your customer,your employer, coworkers, your friends/family, strangers
---long term concerns---what you say now can affect you later- how do you think about those events? e.g. sharing medical stories that might affect the way a future employee thinks of you.
---the "ugly side" of putting identity access stuff out there e.g. "spam" created by adding yourself to services, etc.

--Having your identity being out there-->>>someone talked about how since the 70s they have been using the same 'handle'- hundreds of username/password= having to change and create a new identity would lose a lot and is not manageable

---discussion around what happens when you are forced to change your identity - someone shared a story about how they went about trying to erase things associated with their real name . from contacting google to remove things (they have a form you can submit requests) from their indexes to contacting web content owners. but the bottom line? things that are out there will never never disappear!!

--Biometrics- the idea of your digtial identity life pulse
--various people talked about their experiences when they got stalked , or harassed- sometimes to the point that they had to completely remove their online identity and start again

---Discussion on how you create a synonymous identities- not using your legal name for everything you do online as well as offline
--discussed how to do that offline, eg, conferences where you might not want to be identified by your real name- but you need to pay by credit cards etc. using paypal,

--Advice to everyone- buy your name as a domain name if you haven't already!
--remember when you buy something whois directory will display your personal info- how transparent will you be?
--Someone mentioned a new service called Nombray that allows you to buy your name as a domain and automatically creating an online identity http://www.nombray.com/ --Discussed grabbing your name when any new service is create. pros- someone else doesn't get your username/ cons- too many services to remember
--Discussion around the importance of picking secure passwords as you create multiple identities

--Make sure you put a disclaimer about what you write on your blog so it is clear to you employer, readers and anyone that might come across it- but other services (twitter,facebook etc) don't make that as easy.

--We are human so sometimes we talk trash-but today we need to be extra careful- are you saying and doing anything that you can't take the hit for online OR offline?

--Think of it in a simple way- what if everything you ever wrote ended up on the front page of the New York Times- you need to make that a standard- don't make public what you would not want appearing there.

--A certain amount of transparency is good because people are becoming more and more transparent both on and offline today it is easier/safer/better established boundaries- but think long term

--discussion around kids creating indenties online-
---how do you help your kids brand themselves online? the identity they are creating now may be with them for the rest of their lives
---teenagers are not aware of the fact that all the do online will be online basically forever and they can't hide from it.
--parents who are familiar with these issues should make an effort to educate the other parents in the neighborhood because typically not every parent is connected

The forth session i attended was titled Democratizing Data - and we learned about an upcoming book titled (perhaps?) "Democratizing Data". With the new government administration, comes an advocacy for a more transparent government, but what does that mean in the real world and can it be applied to the corporate enterprise data as well? The theory is that by democratizing data—-allowing you to access and use any (and all) data--government and enterprises can leverage lessons learned from the Web 2.0 world to build networks and communities based on trust, openness, and empowerment. Creating mashup applications out of automated structured data feeds will improve worker efficiency, transparency, and stimulate mass collaboration. The discussion focused on the theme of the book, making government data accessible and participatory and we discussed other types of data (e.g. medical records). We also briefly touched on resources for getting access to specific types of data (Infochimp, Freebase).

After i tweeted that i was in that session, kind words via a retweet from one of the co-authors of the book, David Stephenson poped up "RT @danielabarbosa: we are discussing Democratizing Data here at #ShesGeeky 1,000 blessings be upon you and your sisterhood"...

By the last session of the day i was feeling the need to geek out- a "for real" geek out and earlier in the day i had talked to Marilyn Davis after she had introduced herself in the morning as being someone that wanted to help women who wanted to learn how to program (yeah i am never going to give my dream up of learning in depth programming!). Marilyn put on the board a session on Python a programming language that i have been wanting to learn more about so i figured this would be a great opportunity. After some projector issues, we finally got to see some of the basic principles of programming in Python- a quick download on my computer and now i am setup to do the basic tutorial when i get a chance (i saw some Ruby sessions on tomorrow's agenda that i think i am going to attend as well - so then i suspect i should be able to decided which one i want to dedicate more time to goof around with).

goodnight ladies..and geek on my friends!

Photo|Flickr|Liz Henry (She's Geeky Attendee and blogging sessions as well)

Enterprise Finding with the Semantic Web

2009-01-26T19:04:00.000-08:00

Very similar to the possible benefits of the Semantic Web in what i like to call the research 'finding' environment in corporate enterprises and perhaps one of the most illustrative examples of the value of the Semantic Web i have seen in a while, this post titled Semantic Web in Education by Jason Ohler a professor of Educational Technology and Distance Learning at the University of Alaska paints a illustrative picture of some of the values end-users/consumers can derive from the Semantic Web. Flip it from an education research environment that Olhler is addressing to an enterprise finding environment and you have an interesting use case for why enterprises should look closely at the promise of the semantic web.

"One vision of a well-developed semantic web includes a search feature that would return a multimedia report rather than a list of hits. The report would draw from many sources, including websites, articles from scientific repositories, chapters in textbooks, blog dialogue, speeches posted on YouTube, information stored on cell phones, gaming scenarios played out in virtual realities-anything appropriate that is accessible by the rules of Web 3.0. The report would consist of short sections that coalesce around knowledge areas that emerged naturally from your research, with keywords identified and listed conveniently off to one side as links.

The information in the report would be compared, contrasted, and collated in a basic way, presenting points of agreement and disagreement, and perhaps associating these with political positions or contrasting research. Because the web knows something about you, it also alerts you to local lectures on related topics, books you might want to read, TV programs available through your cable service, blog discussions you might find relevant, and even local groups you can contact that are also focused on this issue. Unlike a standard report, what you receive changes as the available information changes, and you might have wiki-like access to add to or edit it. And because you told your agent that this topic is a high priority, your cell phone will beep when a significant development occurs. After all, the semantic web will be highly inclusive, providing a common language for many kinds of media and technologies, including cell phones. The net result, ideally, is that you spend less time searching and sifting and more time absorbing, thinking, and participating."

Starting in February, Christine Connors and I will be conducting a three part Webinar titled 'Discover the Semantic Web' that will address some of these enterprise specific opportunities to leverage the Semantic Web.

Image|Flickr|AlexBarros

For Your Consideration: Planning for Enterprise 2.0 in 2009

2009-01-19T13:30:00.000-08:00

Mike Gotta, an analyst at Burton Group published a good post on the Social Computing Magazine site that i recommend enterprises who want to take advantage of '2.0' check out. Gathered from his own client interactions on the topic, the article titled 'Planning Considerations for Enterprise 2.0 in 2009' outlines a couple key topics and areas that business and IT decision makers should be aware of.

Specific items that caught my interest:

Communities & Social Networks: Think "Adoption", Not "Deployment" - Since early 2007 i have used the term 'Change Management 2.0' when addressing this subject. Buying/building a 'Web 2.0' tool and installing it within your existing infrastructure does not guarantee success-there are a lot of adoption items like for example social and generational issues in your Enterprise that one needs to be prepared in advance to address in order to be successful.

Social Platforms: Managing The Gap - Gotta's point is that organizations that have selected specific "tools to fill gaps in existing collaboration and content platforms" and are now faced with products that have "grown into mini-suites". This brings up issues of not only multiple technology implementations but of course issues around putting together a successful long term strategy around information management and findability.

Enterprise RSS": It's A Middleware Decision - The recent piece on ReadWriteWeb titled 'R.I.P. Enterprise RSS' specifically including all 70+ comments and all of Marshall Kirkpatrick's updates after the initial post (ah the beauty of the Blog platform!) is certainly a recent must read on the topic of Enterprise RSS. Gotta's points are relevant including his statement that although we use the term "RSS" we should be focusing on Atom because RSS is a dead-end and architecturally deficient. Regardless, one thing that also must be addressed is how to incorporate the features and use cases of using feed syndication into the common non-technical users mindframes in the Enterprise space.

Social Analytics: Redefining Business Intelligence- I think there are two sides (if not more!) of the analytics discussion. One is the value an organization can gain from actually doing it and the second how employees in the future will be 'rated' in some sort or other by their interactions and contributions to the company, their partners and their clients. Mostly everything in the Enterprise needs to be measured, especially if it is eating up operational capital- so Enterprise 2.0 tools are no different, it is just that we do not know what to measure or how. Peter Reiser's work at Sun Microsystems around 'Community Equity' is an interesting early look at how a large company is implementing and adopting analytics as part of their collaboration platforms.

Other highlights that i am always interested in that Gota includes; digital life and digital work convergence specifically around identity, standards for integration and interoperability (he highlights specifically Microformats) and record management specifically as a long term issue that might sound boring compared to all the other things he highlights but as we all know creating data in the enterprise has very different compliance issues then the consumer space.

Gotta also highlights some vendors to keep an eye on as well as open source alternatives that Enterprises should look into.

Image|Flickr|spike55151

Blogging in the Global Library Community

2009-01-13T22:26:00.000-08:00

Librarians are no strangers to the blogging world and some of the earliest blogs i followed where indeed written by Librarians. The Librarian in Black blog by Sarah Houghton-Jan a Digital Futures Manager for the San José Public Library is definitely one that i have been keeping an eye on in a Library topic folder in my RSS reader over the years and always find interesting and valuable information.

Recently Sarah wrote a post on her blog that caught my attention about a new book published by LibWorld titled "Library Blogs Worldwide" in which she has written a chapter covering the United States Library blogging community (page 187).

The book was published via the Infobib LibWorld project and is available as a free download or a paperback from Lulu online publishers.

It offers thirty commentaries by local librarians on the state of library-related blogs in 29 countries! The forward by Walt Crawford provides a good summary of the volume and diversity that global library blogs offer.

In Sarah's chapter she asks the question "which came first, the librarian blog or the library blog?" She writes that the librarian did because they "began sharing information with each other and as more of us saw the power of the blogging medium, we began adopting the same techniques at work.". I agree with that answer and it probably mimics a lot of other industries and professions who have adopted blogging as part of their work 'duties' in the same manner.

Another good resource for comprehensive lists of blogs is the Blogging Libraries Wiki and an output of the LibWorld report is available from the LibWorld delicious account where they have tagged all the blogs mentioned in the book by country.

Dicking Around Obliviously

2009-01-11T11:42:00.001-08:00

Maybe our parents' generation spent hours upon hours cruising around in their cars around the neighborhood oblivious to the unnecessary carbon emissions they were producing in order to be part of the 'gang' or driving door to door as salesman as part of their job that required the car as a 'vehicle' to get their work done, but today's Sunday's Times article Revealed: the environmental impact of Google searches raises some interesting data- that although we should of course question - is something that our digital generation should be paying attention to as we continue to live both our personal and work lives more and more online.

The premise:

Performing two Google searches from a desktop computer can generate about the same amount of carbon dioxide as boiling a kettle for a cup of tea...While millions of people tap into Google without considering the environment, a typical search generates about 7g of CO2 Boiling a kettle generates about 15g.

Nick Carr on his Rough Type blog writes so eloquently as usual:

"But this isn't really about Google, which is only supplying us with services that we want. It's about us. We may be obsessive about turning off the lights when we leave a room, but at the same time we may happily spend hours dicking around online, oblivious of the electricity lighting up our screen, heating our chip, and powering and cooling the data centers we're connected to. (It's true that in some cases Internet use may substitute for other activities, such as travel, that would consume more energy, but let's not kid ourselves: the vast majority of computer and Internet use represents additional energy consumption.) How many Twitterheads think about their electricity use before they tweet? Not many. How many bloggers think about it before they blog? Not this one."

i pronounce myself guilty as well - and picking up a book for the rest of the afternoon.

Image| Cruisin’ the Original: Woodward Avenue

Library of Congress Reports on Flickr Pilot

2009-01-07T21:05:00.000-08:00

[This post is cross-posted on the Synaptica Central Blog]

Last month the Library of Congress released their report on their ongoing Flickr project that i have been very interested in and have written about as the project progressed. From their blog post on the report:

"Only nine months into the Library of Congress’ pilot project placing Library photos on the Web site Flickr, the photos have drawn more than 10 million views, 7,166 comments and more than 67,000 tags, according to a new report from the project team overseeing the lively project."
“The popularity and impact of the pilot have been remarkable,” said Michelle Springer, project manager for digital initiatives in the Office of Strategic Initiatives, who said total views reached 10 million in October. The site is averaging 500,000 views a month, she said, adding that Flickr members have marked 79 percent of the photos as “favorites.”

A summary of some of the outcomes:

Increasing awareness of the digital photograph collection the Library of Congress (LC) has which has been available for years on the Library's website turning to not only an engaged audience but a lot of referral traffic to the Library's Website. "Feedback of this nature suggests that as a result of this project the Library is reaching new audiences—people who did not or could not find this material on our own site, and people who never thought to look here. "
Gain a Better Understanding of Social Tagging and Community Input (see below for more details)
Pilot helped the LC staff gain experience with Web 2.0 online interactions with 'patrons'

Since the beginning of the project i have been very interested in learning about some of the outcomes that the project would provide in regards to user tagging versus applied controlled vocabulary through traditional bibliographic cataloging. In the report the share that they used the Flickr API to do deeper analysis of the tagging that was done by the community (see pages 19-24 of the full report) based on nine categories that provided some interesting insight focused on issues commonly cited in comparisons of social tagging vs. assignement of controlled vocabulary terms(page 28). The categories analyzed were:

I. LC description-based (words copied from the Library-provided record): e.g., titles,
names, subjects, etc.

II. New descriptive words (words not present in the Library-provided description):

Place: e.g., cities, counties, countries, natural feature names
Format (physical characteristics of the original photos). Sample tags: LF, large format, black and white, bw, transparencies, glass plate
Photographic technique. Sample tags: shallow depth of field
Time period. Sample tags: wartime, WWII, 1912
Creator name: e.g., photographer’s name

III. New subject words (words not present in the Library-provided description):

Image (items seen in the image itself). Sample tags: cables, trees, apples, windows, hat, yellow
Associations/symbolism (phrases and slogans evoked by the image). Sample tags: Rosie the riveter, Norman Rockwell, We can do it!
Commentary (revealing the tagger’s value judgments). Sample tags: Sunday best,
proud, dapper, vintage.
Transcription (transcribing words found in items such as signs, posters, etc., within the photo)
Topic (terms that convey the topic of the photo). Sample tags: architecture, navy, baseball, story
Humor (tags intended to be humorous rather than descriptive) Sample tags: UFO, flying saucer

IV. Emotional/aesthetic responses: (personal reactions of the tagger). Sample tags: wow,
pretty, ugly, controversial

V. Personal knowledge/research (tags that could only have been added based on knowledge or research by the tagger, and that could not have been gleaned solely from the description provided or examination of the photo): For example, the tag murder used on a portrait of someone who was later murdered or tags added for the specific county when that information was not part of the description.

VI. Machine tags (added by the community not Library-supplied): e.g., geotags and Iconclass tags

VII. Variant forms (representing terms already tagged but in a different form, such as synonyms (e.g., WW2, WWII, World War II, worldwarii) or plural/singular differences (e.g., transparency/transparencies)

VIII. Foreign language (tags in foreign languages/scripts, whether they are translations of English-language tags, or new tags)

IX. Miscellaneous (tags that are not readily understood, that provide corrections to LC descriptions or to other taggers (e.g., not peaches), or tags later removed

Some of the Future Tag Analysis Interests (page 29) are also quite interesting such as actually incorporating popular concepts or variants into the LC's own controlled vocabularies (yeah something i advocate in the hybrid approach!), bringing the tags into the LC's search environment, populate bibliographic records with tags (although that have already added the Flickr URL to the "additional version available" field (MARC field 530) in some catalog records which leads users to the appropriate Flickr page that might provide historical information etc. on the image that is vaulable- see sample on page 36).

In the report they also share some of the experiences the staff learned from using Web2.0 tools in interacting with patrons that might be different from the traditional reference desk exchanges (page 37).

The good news? Skip to page 38 of the full report to see the recommendations and conculsions including details of headcount that is necessary for the program to continue and expand. But the report ends with the following good news:

"It should come as no surprise, then, that the Flickr team recommends that this experiment in Web 2.0 cease to be characterized as a pilot and evolve to an expanded involvement in this growing community (and other appropriate social networking opportunities that may arise) as resources permit. The benefits appear to far outweigh the costs and risks. "

The entire set of tags that have been applied can be seen alphabetically or as a tag cloud of the 150 most popular tags.

Many thanks to the Library of Congress staff for taking on this project and continuous sharing their progress through their blog and other resources (see Appendix C) and to the authors of the project report: Michelle Springer, Beth Dulabahn, Phil Michel, Barbara Natanson, David Reser, David Woodward, and Helena Zinkham!

I Needed 150 Million to Confirm My Thoughts

2009-01-07T17:43:00.000-08:00

Early this week prior to pressing 'publish' on my "Who gives a F? Florida, Facebook and 'Friends'" post i thought "am i going to sound ignorant that i didn't 'realize' how big and embedded Facebook is getting?". Well i got some positive feedback and agreement on flickr that others had only recently been noticing the same thing outside of their 'tech network' and today I felt even more vindicated when i saw the swoon of news on Techmeme triggered by Mark Zukerburg's annoucement that they have hit the 150million user mark.

I especially like J ohn Furrier's take of why Facebook is being quickly adopted by all types of web users:
"Simply put: they broker transactions from finding lost friends, staying in touch with existing friends, making new friends, to finding and buying products and services."

And of course the last part of that statement is the money maker on the table.

Image|Flickr|Mathew Field

Where All the She Geeks Will Gather Together on January 30-31: She's Geeky (un)conference

2009-01-06T08:12:00.000-08:00

Last year i was not able to attend the first She's Geeky conference event but remember reading and hearing about how great the sessions and the event was so when Kaliya Hamlin reached out to me this year and asked me if i would be interested in helping with organize the event i jumped at the chance.

A couple months ago a couple of us who wanted to help organize the event got together to start working on logistics (Kaliya and Laurie Ray are doing all the heavy lifting) and as we were introducing ourselves i explained my interest in the She's Geeky event as follows:

When i first moved to the bay area i wanted to be involved in the tech scene - but was certainly intimidated not only is it very male dominated they are also programmers and hard core geeks - something that i got over by just diving in using the will power and skills i have learned in being in male dominated corporate environments over the last 15 years. But while i think i have managed to make the best of the fact that i am not a programmer and not male by establishing myself in various communities it might not be as easy for other women- so an environment like the She's Geeky event is needed plus i have no doubt that there are hundred's of cool she geeks that i might never get a chance to meet otherwise!

So here are the basics for the event:

The event takes place January 30-31 (Friday-Saturday) at the the awesome Computer History Museum in Mountain View. There is also a pre-event social hour on the evening of the 29th in Mountain View and on Friday night we will show the Ada Lovelace movie the Museum has before heading out to dinner.

On Friday the 30th the doors will open at 8am with breakfast and espresso. and then the Agenda making will begin. If you have never been to an unconference event here is how it works:

At the beginning of the day, we create the agenda. (you can however add suggested topics in advance here as well)
Everyone meets in one room and posts topics they would like to present, see or discuss. This creates a rich assortment of agenda items and makes for an exciting day of learning. There is a PDF called 'unconferencing' that explains how to prepare for an unconference.
From there, we go to separate areas or rooms assigned to each topic.
The session can be a presentation, inquiry about a question or discussion about an issue or technical field.
One participant volunteers to record the proceedings.
The notes from each session are collected in the newsroom, then a book is compiled with all the notes from the conference and distributed to everyone who attended.

So what is the main purpose of the She's Geeky event?:

Exchange skills and learn from women in different fields of technology.
Provide a forum for discussion of issues affecting women in technical fields.
Connect the generations of women working in or interested in technology, from those in middle school to the pioneers of the industry who may be elders in their 70’s.
Connect women in technology, computing, entrepreneurship, funding, hardware, open source, nonprofit and any other technical or “geeky” field.

What should you plan on getting out of the event if you come out and participate:

Build relationships and even partnerships across disciplines.
Learn something new from other geeky women.
Find answers to the questions that matter to you.
Consider business issues related to the technology industry.
Be exposed to new ideas for making and keeping technology relevant.

Ok - interested but have questions? feel free to contact me or send a note to info@shesgeeky.org otherwise you can register here http://shesgeeky.org/sg/register/

If you are plan on going and want to advertise the fact on your site or blog, please use these images:

Here is the official invitation that you can download and send to others that might be interested:
Shes Geeky Poster

She you there Geek Girls!!

You can also find us here:
Facebook Group
Event Page on Facebook
Join the LinkedIn Group
Follow us on Twitter @shesgeeky

Demand That the Services You Use On the Web Give You Data Portability in a Secure Way

2009-01-05T19:29:00.000-08:00

Lots of chatter today about Twitter's Monday Morning Madness via Techmeme because over the last 78 hours multiple Twitter users were compromised multiple times, first with a Phishing scam and then an actual compromise of some high profile accounts (including Obama's twitter account).

Elias Bizannes a fellow colleague in the DataPortability Project has written a very well thought out and detailed post over on the official DataPortability Blog titled "Time To Criminalize The Password Anti-pattern" that i recommend you read to understand the issue and the recommended solutions that Twitter among many other sites you are probably using should follow.

Once you give a site your password to make your data portable from one site to another, that site now has your password forever and it's valid until you change it- even if the site claims they don't keep the password once they pull the data that you have 'authorized'- somewhere in some log file the password associated with our username is recorded and if someone wanted to get to it that probably could.

So before you use a service that is asking for your actual password to pull data, think about it and then demand that the service gives you data portability in a Secure Way by using open protocols like OAuth to secure authorization of data between services. (something that Twitter has come out and said they will be releasing in Beta this month)

This picture on Flickr by Richard Parmiter says it all: giving sites your password in order to pull data from one site to another is like loaning your underpants to strangers. Don't do it.

Historical Note: 40th Anniversary of "Mother of all demos"

2009-01-04T13:57:00.000-08:00

Going through my thousands of unread items in my Google Reader lead me to this gem via a post in early December on CNET's Matter/Anti-Matter Blog titled the 40th Anniversary of "Mother of all demos" which points to Doug Engelbart's presentation to the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco on December 9, 1968 that i had not seen before. Called the 'Mother of all Demos' because in the 100 minute presentation Engelbart and his team show, in working form, for the very first time all of the following technologies:

* This was the public debut of the computer mouse
* Graphical user interface with point and click and menus
* Intermingling of text and graphics within a document, styling of text in a document
* Hypertext and linking between documents
* Remote collaboration plus videoconferencing

Hosted by the Science and Technology in the Making (STIM), project supported by a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation you can see the original video on this site in two versions, one that has been edited into 35 segments and reformatted as Flash streaming video clips with a brief abstract of the subject matter treated in each segment or the full 100 minute video (scroll to bottom of that page).

The Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute's project was focused on pursuing primarily these goals (that eventually became what we know as a personal computer:

1. Improve the Effectiveness with which individuals and organizations work at intellectual tasks.
2. Develop a system oriented discipline for designing the means by which greater effectiveness is achieved.

Here are some of the highlights that i found interesting:

They send the video transmission to the Menlo Park labs and show the audience the 'mouse' for the first time in a public forum
Just like any live demo (and yes we have all experienced it!) there are some hiccups, mistyped words and 'oops' moments
Review of user documentation online versus printing manuals
How they used direct messages (yes instant DMs!) to coordinate and plan the presentation itself
Collaboration features with a live audio-video window insert on the same screen!
Keyword weighting and power of keyword searching
Herman Miller Design was working with the lab on designing and building the control consoles,display consoles and chairs! Designing the modern office!
Love the way the filming is done with the live images projected and faded on the screens. The the filming of the presentation is better then some of the lecture series you see today online that struggle to get the screen online with the presenter!

Overall a good 100 minutes spent this morning.

Who gives a F? Florida, Facebook and 'Friends'

2009-01-03T15:11:00.000-08:00

This holiday season we headed down to Florida to spend some time with the families both on the west and east coast of Florida. So we managed a couple of days on each coast which is usually just enough for me (i admit i am not a big fan of Florida often citing this great Bugs Bunny clip to compliment my feelings).

But none the less i know a lot of good people who live in Florida so i will let it be because that is not the point of my post~ The reason i am writing this post is that through the week we were there one of the things that i observed (as i remained mostly offline by choice) was the incessant mentioning of Facebook- and this was not in my Silicon Valley echo chamber so of course i took notice.

Now i have been on Facebook for a while, and have found it quite useful mostly around events but i have really never become a 'fan' of Facebook itself or its 'walled garden' strategies. Most recently i have been 'friended' by people who i went to high school/college/previous lives- and mostly i am kinda indifferent about it to tell you the truth. This afternoon i cleaned up my FB 'inbox' (so much noise!) and thought who would i like to connect with that i have not been in touch with over the years and i really could not think of anyone. call me indifferent and heartless if you care to...

So course i have read the articles about the growth of Facebook over the last year- and certainly did not doubt them- but rather chose to ignore the fact that Facebook has become a very mainstream social networking application- a social hub for many regardless of what age and demographic they are. So i think it is time for me to start paying more attention once again to Facebook again because you know my theory on consumers- the apps they use at home is what they want at work.

.....perhaps next time i go to Florida, people at the bar, supermarket, restaurant, and simply waiting in line will be talking about Twittering each other (i have no doubt that in many circles they already are!).

Happy Holidays! How About Some Chocolate Pistachio Cookies ?

2008-12-21T22:00:00.000-08:00

A small gift from me to you- Still looking for a last minute present for your family, friends or holiday guests? These Chocolate Pistachio Cookies are a favorite of mine to make and give as gifts in unique boxes. I found the recipe originally in the 2006 Martha Stewart Holiday cookie magazine and make them often when a delicious 'rich' dessert is needed to close out a good meal.

Just like a good truffle- 3 to 5 per box does the trick. Fairly easy to make these are very rich and certainly my favorite!

Happy Holidays~~~

Oh Why Haven't I blogged So Much?

2008-12-17T20:52:00.000-08:00

Recently one of my co-workers bugged me yet again about why i haven't been blogging (thanks Brent~)- my response was that i have been chatting over here @danielabarbosa and contributing and managing Synaptica Central (never as easy as writing you own thing!) and investing a lot of my 'free' time on the DataPortablity Project - all things that i love and feel passionate about---and of course the old end-of-year getting contracts in the door excuses...but those are all excuses and i just need to prioritize and be more effective. At last count there are at least 8 great draft ideas on my blogger dashboard- shame on me...

Someone wrote a letter to Daniel Tunkelang recently that i had been thinking that i would write myself to him and he responded with "How Do I Blog So Much? Great responses and The Noisy Channel is certainly one of my favorite new blogs that i recently started reading religiously as i ponder myself -"how does he blog so much?"- thanks for the tips Daniel!

Image|Mike Willis

She's Geeky - New York City Starts Dec 5th!

2008-11-28T10:29:00.000-08:00

Hi my name is Daniela and i am a Geek....

A 'She Geek' that is and that is why i am helping the She's Geeky organizers with the upcoming She's Geeky - Women's Tech (Un)Conferences:

She’s Geeky events are neutral, face-to-face gathering spaces for women who like to geek out. Attendees include women involved in all aspects of technology, including those who like to use geeky tools, not just coders, programmers and engineers. You don’t even have to be from the computer industry. You just have to be a woman who identifies as a geek.

If you’re any of these things, you’re invited to come to She’s Geeky to:

Exchange skills and learn from women in different fields of technology.
Discuss issues that affect women in the technology industry.
Connect with other women in technology, computing, entrepreneurship, funding, hardware, open source, nonprofit and any other technical geeky field.

If you want to learn more about these events, check out the faqs

HURRY the NYC event starts on Dec 5th. To register for the NYC event visit the registration page. (there is a She's Geeky bailout offer for folks who have just been laid-off or on the verge of being 'downsized'). Here is a PDF invite to send to all your east coast She Geekers!

Here is a great video montage from last years She's Geeky event in MountainView, CA- where all the She Geeks proudly proclaim their geekiness!

If you are interested in how it went down in 2007- Additional coverage from the 2007 She's Geeky event follows:

Wired- Oct 23th 2007 She's Geeky Unconference: Cupcakes, Kids, and Whip-Smart Girl Geeks
Beth Canter - She's Geeky: Feeling Energized, Connected, and Learning
A Stitch in Time... - She's Geeky: Women Are Cool
BookBlog- She's Geeky
Contagious Curiosity- She's Geeky Monday
Heather Vescent- She's Geeky Session: On Do-ocracy
This is where I try out: she's geeky (part 1 )(part 2)-
liz henry- Liveblogging for She's Geeky -
Hana's Mom- She's Geeky unconference -
Mary Trigiani - She's geeky, not angry
She's Geeky, Future of Technology, Visual notes
San Jose Mercury News - Insight for Women Geeks (archive subscription required)

The San Francisco Bay Area event is Jan 29th-31st and i will be posting more on that event when registration opens- but if you are going to be on the West coast go ahead and put it in your calendar now!

How the Semantic Web Will Change Information Management: Three Predictions from fumsi

2008-11-24T21:34:00.000-08:00

[This post was originally posted on the Synaptica Central team blog]
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fumsi is a digital and print publication that provides resources and tools for people who "find, use, manage & share information" . They are part of the FreePint family of resources for professionals in the Information Management field. If you watch or subscribe to the Synaptica Central RSS feeds (right menu) you probably saw the recent pointer to the rich write-ups by James Kelway also published on fumsi on Creating User Centred Taxonomies. Jame's personal Blog User Pathways is also another must read blog if you want to learn about information management from a information architecture, interaction design, and user experience perspective which i believe is extremely important to do in today's user driven information experiences.

This Sunday morning's reading lead me to catching up on my multiple feeds and one that caught my attention was this article in fumsi by Silver Oliver who has a background in Library Science and is currently an Information Architect at the BBC titled How the Semantic Web Will Change Information Management: Three Predictions

Prediction number 1: a move from the pull to the push search paradigm, or more ‘context-aware’ applications

Today's information consumption, still starts mostly with information seeking and retrieval- processes that in today's fast moving, overloaded information companies and cost saving conscience enterprises are simply not sustainable in order to be competitive. If you happened to be a defrag this year and listened to my presentation on Pulling the Threads on User Data you heard me speaking about the need for context aware applications and standards to make data portable- ultimately leading to one of Silver's first predications that "The Semantic Web could assist in this area, by publishing data in a way that smart applications can take advantage of and so improve smart context aware recommendations. The right thing, at the right place and at the right time".

Prediction number 2: the battle of the identifiers or the age of pointing at things

Recently here on Synaptica Central, Christine Connors- Director of Semantic Technologies at Dow Jones, published a post that touched on this subject titled "Taxonomies are a Commodity " in which she ended her post with the following:
"I actually like the fact that taxonomies have become commoditized. Why? Competition drives improvement - in quality, in focus, in security and in usability. These are areas that the semantic web community needs to focus on - in my experience, security and usability need attention NOW. Good fences make good neighbors, and when we've got good fences, we can make more links and learn to trust. Icing on the cake!"

Prediction number 3: the changing role of the information professional

Silver ends this prediction with the following statement: "The skills of information professionals will be essential in populating and managing the Web of data and, to make this happen, we must make the shift from thinking repository-scale to thinking Web-scale."
Back in January 2008, i wrote a post over on my personal blog titled " Sexy Hot Trends for 2008 and Beyond- Librarians" where i highlighted some of the opportunities I saw for people with library science degrees (and no you don't need to be female and wear purple tights!- i just love that Super Librarian image!). So i obviously agree with Silver's prediction- the skill sets and experiences that information professionals can bring to the Semantic Web can be huge and I certainly hope that the Semantic Web community continues to cross-populate even more with the InfoPro communities- here at Dow Jones we are committed to doing our part to make sure that happens. Working with our InfoPro Alliance Group (headed by Anne Caputo the new SLA president ) we are looking to provide some Webinars in the new year to address Semantic Web issues that need to be addressed in Enterprise- by Information Professionals as well as other parts of the organization- so watch this space for more info as we finalize those sessions!

Image|Flickr|Leo Reynolds

Super Librarian Image above is from from the NJ State Library which includes the great Super Librarian Comic Book . You can also buy Super Librarian gear if you are so inclined.

Synaptica Has Got Its Head in the Clouds

2008-11-01T17:01:00.001-07:00

This is a re-post from a post i just published on the Dow Jones Synaptica and Taxonomy Services Team Blog- Synaptica Central. It is based on real conversations i have been having with clients that they can have access to our taxonomy and metadata management tool as a service instead of a client hosted application (something i find not may are aware although it specifically states it on the bottom of our features list).

--------------------
The way companies are using software has been shifting- and if your head hasn't been in the clouds over the last few years i am sure you have noticed the shift to SaaS (Software as a Service) offerings and more services moving to the "cloud'. From The Economist's recent 14-Page Special Report on Corporate IT titled 'Let it Rise' focused on cloud computing, Microsoft's recent Azure announcement indicating an even bigger investment to moving services to the 'cloud', the recent discussions around Tim O'Reilly's post Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing , and of course discussions about the economics of cloud computing in today's world it is evident that these models- which are not really 'new'- are here to stay.

It is a little known fact- one that i am trying hard to ensure the marketplace knows, but Synaptica is available as a hosted application with complete access to most of all the features that are available (this includes access to robust Web Services). And just like the recent buzz in the marketplace, having access to Synaptica as a 'service' is something that recently we have been getting more and more requests about.

Who has interest in a Taxonomy and Metadata Management tool as a hosted model? Well it is not for everyone who has a need for a tool like ours, but for those who are interested it really varies. For example:

Small to Medium, Corporate libraries or Product Manager/Marketing groups who are managing various taxonomies and do not have a lot of IT resources for bringing a tool in-house but can really benefit from a centralized taxonomy management tool that can be accessed via the internet securely by their global colleagues that work on the vocabularies collaboratively

Companies that have an urgent need for a tool but don't have the resources to bring it in-house quickly at that specific point and chose a hosted model as a first phase to get their taxonomy development and deployment done

Companies that perhaps have an technology architecture that is based on the LAMP Stack that Synaptica at this point can not fit nicely into

Start-ups who are building a consumer service that requires a tool to manage their controlled vocabularies (e.g. product categories, navigation taxonomy etc.) but who do not have the IT infrastructure to host an application like Synaptica (e.g. most of their stuff is already in the 'cloud')

So with our hosted model, we can provide at whatever tier a company is at- an affordable and secure way to manage an important part of their business.

And the best part? Well coming in at the low-end, with access to a Synaptica hosted annual license (with full access to all editorial and administrative features including Web Services), you can basically choose to either use one of the premier taxonomy management tools in the marketplace or if you are so inclined- you can instead choose to spruce up your office by buying a Hyacinth Macaw Parrot, or perhaps you can buy one of your employees a nice baby shower gift like this blinged out Baby Pram or even update your office outside picnic patio area with the Kalamazoo Bread Breaker Two Dual-Fuel grill - yes, it really is your choice.

DataPortability Community Manager Volunteer Role

2008-10-23T07:22:00.000-07:00

There are a lot of good people working day in an day out within the DataPortability Project and it seems that we are picking up steam again (more on that to follow). I am a big fan of having defined roles and responsibilities so i recently suggested to the Steering Committee that we try to recruit an official Community Manager as well as some additional roles that i will be posting soon.

I personally believe that a Community Manager role is an essential part of any web facing company or organization. It is not that active members are not doing some of the items that the role has been defined with- and that they will continue to do some of them- but that it will be great to have an individual to run with things. I also feel that the role is a great way for someone to pick up experience in a global public web organization with a lot of public exposure.

In the spirit of the DataPortability Project, this position was posted and then will be finalized when the appropriate candidate accepts the role. There are a lot of valuable things that a Community Manager can bring to an organization- and i just tried to outline them all based on other role descriptions i reference in the post. Since this is a volunteer position at this point- we want to make sure we get the right person and then finalize how they are going to contribute with their input in order to make THEM and DataPortability successful.

If you are interested you can read the Community Manager role description here and if you want to read additional thoughts from group members check out our discussion list.

Who Owns Social Media?

2008-10-21T23:14:00.000-07:00

This evening i attended the Social Media Club San Francisco meeting on the subject of "Who Owns Social Media?". Andrew Mager over at ZDNet was live blogging from the room and also has posted some photos (darn somehow i missed the skittles!).

It was a lively conversation in the room but unfortunately the panel discussion was a bit too short- but i already hear rumblings on the internets that this conversation is continuing.

The main question that the panel tried to address was 'who is responsible for social media in the enterprise?'. As Chris Heuer posted on his introduction post to the event "Most social media ‘insiders’ would naturally say, everyone is responsible, but this is just not the reality for most businesses. Someone needs to allocate budget, someone needs decision making authority over infrastructure and major programs, someone needs to rewrite job descriptions upon which employees are measured and many more people need to understand why, where and how to engage."

I have been involved in the Social Media conversation for a while and it feels good to have these conversations- the practice of using social medial across the enterprise (internally and externally) is maturing and these issues are coming to a head with many companies and the good folks that belong to the Social Media Club around the world are the right people to be guiding these conversations.

One of the questions that i wanted to ask but did not get a chance to address with the panel but did chat with @MeHeatherD and @jacobm afterwards- is who owns the 'brand' of the Social Media leaders in your company. When they leave- how much of the Social Media they have created do they get to take and own (defining 'own' as Intellectual Property (IP)) and even if they don't take the 'content' what is the brand value that they can essentially never truly transfer and that there is no way you can write into their job description or company rules? Or can you?

Image|Seattle City Light Brochures, Seattle Municipal Archives. |via Flickr

Blog Action Day 2008 Poverty and we Prep by Hanging at the Ritz in Half Moon Bay

2008-10-15T22:32:00.000-07:00

I have had this post opened all day (thank goodness for auto-save on blogger!) and it is getting close to the end of the day so i am forcing this out but it is an important one.
Over the last two weeks we have all been so busy and so obsessed about talking about the pain we personally feel, our employers feel, or our clients and even our neighbors in the economic spiral we are experiencing that we might forget about the folks that are already suffering because they have to think every day about how they are getting food on the table. For many this is not something new that happened over the last few weeks, they have been struggling in and out of poverty for years.

Using Twitter hashtag @bad08 i just spent some time looking at some of the other Bloggers who have been participating in the Blog Action Day: Poverty 2008 and they certainly are inspiring.

Last night a bunch of us showed up at the Ritz in Half Moon Bay for a Meetup with a focus to have conversations about how we can share best practices around the need for an 'economic turn around". I thought it was ironic that we were going to meet at the Ritz to drink wine and cheese and discuss the doom of the economic marks so i twittered "Going to: Economic Turnaround Meetup @ the Ritz where we will drink wine and cheese- rule #1 for turnaround- attitude, act like you're rich "

The meetup was organized by Robert Scoble based on his post The customers are gone, now what? Tent sale!. The night was lovely with a full moon and with great conversations as Bill Sanders's blogged about this morning- from real issues that are affecting ourselves and our families (like Robert's brother's bar for example) to the spectacular stories of Paul Allen's Octopus yatch and Space X odysseys.

And as i drove home from the event last night, i thought about the long day at work i had ahead of me today with back to back calls and thought about all the people out there in the world that unfortunately are not tossing and turning like me at night because of the big presentation they are doing, the pitch they need to nail, or they contract they need to get their client to sign- but tossing and turning about how they are going to get food on their table for their family the next day. I hope events and communities like the Blog Action Day continue to make people aware of these issues and help us understand how we can help.

Image| Bill Sanders

Bringing Pictures Alive: A Storyteller at the Library Of Congress

2008-10-10T23:52:00.000-07:00

Watching this video this evening was the most enjoyable thing i did all week. (even if it had been just a regular week when i didn't need something to distract me i think this would have won out!)

I just finished watching Robert Scoble's Getting USA's Treasured Images Onto Flickr video on Scobleizer.tv with Helena Zinkham, who runs the prints and photography division of the Library of Congress. In the video, she talks about how they get images from the library onto Flickr and what that’s done for the library itself.

Since the Library of Congress went live with this project i have been a great fan- and i have been waiting for an update on the status of the project so this video was extremely interesting to me.

Helena is a great story teller- watching the video i felt like i have known her all my life.

She starts off by pointing out that the Library of Congress's (LOC) objective is to preserve knowledge so people can use it and take it beyond the LOC walls- lucky for us.

Part of the conversation is about the actual work to do the digital images (although i thought at one point she mentioned that she was going to show Robert the room but that never comes up in the video. see technical FAQs here if you want to learn more about the how). The LOC's aim is to take the original image and provide a neutral representation- the digital image should look like the actual original photo. They get comments from people who want the LOC to do the colors nicer/brighter/darker- but the LOC is not in the optimization business because that is "very judgmental" Helena says- so they keep the artifact as close to the orginal as possible letting others ("outside the wall") optimize for what they need the photo for such as prints, posters etc.

At one point in the video Helena shows the earliest known photographic portrait of a person which is absolutely beautiful it is of Robert Cornelius ~stunning. (however it is not on Flickr through LOC).

So how did the LOC get to Flickr?

They knew that allowing people to tag content might be useful to get through the over 40,000 pictures that had not been fully cataloged. So they thought about building a web 2.0 application internally for use with the public- but what Flickr brought to the table, was an existing photo friendly, photo loving community. Working with George Oates at Flickr, starting in May 2007 they worked together that summer to put together a process to get the pictures into Flickr.

Flickr had to create a special type of account for the LOC that is now being used by eight public photography archives through their 'The Commons' program - something i did not know existed but looks to have some gems.

The LOC are the stewards of these collections and Flickr had to provide a special Copyright status that means that the Library is unaware of any restrictions on the use of the image.

So what does it mean that they are Bringing Pictures Alive?

Helena talks about the fact that what this has done is bring the collection 'alive' by allowing people to not only add tags- but comments on the pictures that tell personal stories or point out facts about the photo that due to resources catalogers would probably never get a chance to research.

Here is a perfect example from today's new uploads- this picture of Evelyn Nesbit was posted and within hours a colorful story of her life and times developed in the comments.

During the video, Helena tells a story about this picture of Weavers at Work at the The New York Blind Association and this House in Houston where people went beyond identifying the place that shows how indeed this process is bringing value for the LOC as well as the public.

The one thing that Robert doesn't dig into is how they are going to take the tags and comments specifically to enhance the existing catalog. I would have liked to hear a bit more about some of the results of this additional metadata on the collections outside of Flickr- how are they specifically being incorporated back into the original 'artifacts', what work effort is required? How valuable are the current tags? does it really save catalogers time? or does the metadata noise actually cause more work in the long run?

Helena briefly mentions that the LOC have very gifted catalogers (they do!) - but the volume is just too large to be able to catalog down to the level that the flickr users are doing. It does seem that the LOC is 'manually' enhancing their catalogs, for example this comment where the LOC is corrected and states that they would "update the source data and reload the descriptio n".

I have no doubt that the LOC will be sharing more of what they have learned about user tagging collections- but to date there seems to be some real value for both the LOC as well as the public!

And one last note, there was some sound issues late in the video with the volume turning up really loud that gave me a startle so beware!

What? You Need another Twitt in Your Enterprise?

2008-10-08T21:53:00.000-07:00

I am guilty of sending internal group emails with questions like- "has anyone worked on something like this", "can you point me to a proposal that addresses this need that we have delivered on", "what are your thoughts on this article, "who would like to blog a post responding to this", "why do you all always ignore me" (ok they don't ignore me all the time but enough of the time that makes me paranoid...). I have tried to setup up groups on our internal Instant Messanger but the group features are weak, the team is globally dispersed so not on line at the same time, and some people just never log on and messages are not delivered when people are offline and come back on. I am sure my experiences are not unique.

I have however created a 'backchannel' with key folks that i work with on Twitter- the noise there is different i guess and using Direct Messaging bypasses the hundreds of other emails that person may get (especially if they use a Twitter client to alert them of DMs). As i get more followers and i follow more people however i have a hard time listening on on that backchannel (i keep hearing that Groups are coming to Twitter- when??)

Twitter like services- which allows users to broadcast short messages (usually 140 characters) have been coming up during client conversations- from using it internally or externally to communicate; to obviously monitoring what is being said about them- and how they should respond. I don't think Enterprises can hide much longer behind the ignorance curtain- it is becoming a new way to deliver information- one that is inherently powerful in the Enterprise space because it's main purpose is response and discussion- not only push.

Today this article on ReadWriteWeb about Best Buy buying an Enteprise Twitter application from Headmix caught my attention (although i don't read a "license to try pilots" as an full sale in the Enterprise but certainly understand that is a great foot in the door for them). Lucky for the Best Buy team- their project does not seem to be tied to regular metrics and goals since he comments "People have stopped asking us about metrics, measurement and goals. They see that it’s a cost of doing business. Nobody questions whether you need to have phones anymore, its assumed."

Just last month Jeremiah Owyang, who is always ahead of the game, posted an overview of Enterprise Microblogging Tools or what he called "Twitter for the Intranet"- (i get the 'intranet' label but i would argue that the power of a microblogging tool is that it is device independent- it should not matter if i am using a browser, a phone (regardless of what type/platform), or another web enabled device). If you are looking for potential tools to use 'behind your firewall' you should take a look.

Of the Videos that have on the HeadMix site- this ones addresses specifically why Best Buy is interested in this distributed messaging microblogging platform:

Making The Sale from Arik Jones on Vimeo.

A new Blog Synaptica Central Makes Me Sooooo Proud

2008-09-29T22:41:00.000-07:00

In August i 'quietly' launched another blog with my colleagues - - this one an 'official' one for our Dow Jones Client Solutions Taxonomy Services and Synaptica solutions that i am responsible for as Business Development Manager in the Americas. It is called Synaptica Central and it has been pretty successful to date. It took Christine Connors and myself a while to get this blog going and many conversations internally as to who, what and why- sometimes i admit a bit frustrating but that was to be expected and all turned out well!

The thing that i however am the most proudest of is not the traffic or the response but the fact that my Dow Jones colleagues are starting to get into it (and i hope it isn't just because i ask them to!). Last week the Dow Jones Taxonomy Team was at the Enterprise Search and Taxonomy Bootcamp and we got most of the team to blog from there (and we have some that still need to be edited and published).

Here are some of the current contributors from around the world:
Christine Connors- Director of Semantic Technologies and Dow Jones and Business Champion for Synaptica- Princeton, NJ
Wendy Lim- Taxonomy Consultant Singapore -
K Biju- Taxonomy Services Manager Singapore
Julian Brierley - Global Taxonomy Specialist- London
Dan Segal- Manager Taxonomy Delivery - Princeton, NJ
Maggie Hammond- Taxonomy Consultant - Chicago, IL
Jim Sweeney- Synaptica Product Manager, Denver, CO
And of course my posts (although i spend more time doing admin stuff at this time)
And many more folks to come !

Personal blogging is one thing- but blogging as a corporate team is another game all together and i have certainly been learning how to manage across the board from a technology perspective (we are using Drupal) to a delegation perspective so all can participate with their unique voices. As I learn more about the process i will make sure to share my thoughts here as well since it has been and will continue to be a good learning experience for me on the use of Social Media within a corporate team.

Web 2.0 NYC presentation Understanding the Basics of Personal Data: Vendors, Users, and You

2008-09-22T21:25:00.000-07:00

Last week at the Web 2.0 Expo New York, Chris Saad and i presented a session titled "Understanding the Basics of Personal Data: Vendors, Users, and You". It was a great honor to be able to speak in a session at Web 2.0 expo in New York and it was a good experience as i had expected.

Although mostly a technical crowd we started off my asking who in the crowd was a developer, a UI person or a business person and the room was evenly distributed. After introductions and a quick look at the original Data Portability Project vide o we took the audience through an overview of how we got to what we called 'a personal web' and then some tech inflection points as to how the 'stack' has been building up and what the digital user experience is today (see slides below).

Chris then jumped into an important discussion in framing the data portability conversation around what he has called the "The mythical value of data locki n". Like he says in his post on the subject, as project members we constantly get asked:

Why would a vendor allow users to leave their service?

Why make it easy for users to take the preacious data you have about them and use it on other sites?

or…

What is the business justification for letting data walk out the door?

One of the key messages we wanted to portray to the Web 2.0 Expo crowd as they were thinking about business issues that Chris outlines in his post on his personal blog was that Data Portability is "about enabling, empowering and encouraging your users to bring all their data with them, to connect your data to the rest of their data ecosystem and to continue to refresh and maintain the data on an ongoing basis". The benefits should be twofold and bi-directional.

Understanding the Basics of Personal Data: Vendors, Users, and You (Web 2.0 NYC)

Before the Q&A session, we took the audience through the actual project objects and some of the project results we expect to deliver and how to get involved regardless of how much 'free' time you have!

Some session attendees also took some detailed notes (thanks!), including:

Farhan "Frank" Mashraq session notes Data Portability Project: Understanding the Basics of Personal Data: Vendors, Users and You
Kris Jordan's post Chris Saad, Daniela Barbosa - Understanding the Basics of Personal Data and DataPortability

Note: Although i am Chairperson of the DataPortability Project Steering Committee and a co-founder of the project, this blog is my personal blog.

Shirky on: It's Not Information Overload. It's Filter Failure

2008-09-21T10:55:00.000-07:00

This past week i was at Web 2.0 NYC and on return home my brain as usual is overloaded with the people i met, the ideas we discussed and they presented, the business opportunities and ideas and the general feeling that there is still a lot of room and opportunities for innovation around information creation and consumption.

A lot of what i saw (especially on the exhibit hall floor) targeted to the Enterprise space was a lot of packaging around what is already out there (wiki, blogging, social networking)-wrapped in shiny colorful enterprise bubble wrap (the kind that goes pop), that is supposed to make your employees happy to be sharing their most intimate knowledge with their also ecstatically sharing colleagues- creating an ecosystem of content creation and consumption that will take enterprise users into this digital century that today's web 'consumers' live in.

You sense some snarky in me i am guessing. You might be right-i have been talking and asking for these tools for enterprise users for years and now i am complaining that there are too many choices- do i not believe in the open market? yeah i do of course- i just hate seeing too much of the same that might not address the real problems. I think that Clay Shirky in his keynote addressed the problem i see about the need to approach 'filtering' (aka information delivery) in his talk:

It's Not Information Overload. It's Filter Failure.
Take the 23minutes to watch this video and let me know what you think.

And while you are at it- watch this hilarious, but also inspiring keynote by Gary Vaynerchuk from Wine Library TV. Patience and Passion- please stop doing what you hate.(language as expected if you know Gary might not be appropriate for office so go with headphones!)

Portable Contacts- My Contacts, My Data

2008-09-11T21:55:00.000-07:00

I had put the Portable Contacts Summit on my calendar weeks ago when i first heard of it, then this morning i let the failed technology of my laptop (it officially hates me) and hosting service (my SynapticaCentral blog won't publish!) and the day to day grind get to me- so i looked at the invitation again and thought-Urgh can and should i really go?

The first i heard of Portable Contacts project was back in May at the Data Sharing Summit and Joseph Smarr already had a very compelling story to tell about the open standards he was proposing that provide users a secure way to access their address books and friends lists.

I posted on Twitter this morning "wishing i was at the Portable Contacts session today but it was clearly marked for programmers(my one fault in life ;-) and time is valuabl e"not because i didn't think that the day would be valuable if i went but because it was focused on developers, and i thought 1#what value would i bring 2#shouldn't i get these 55things i need to do for work done today?. Kevin Marks replied that "@danielabarbosa Shame, we'd love to have you here - it's not just programmers but data discussions too"but i had committed to my to do list by then and then thought all afternoon on how i would have rather been there. It is still a shame however- guess you can't call it right all the time!

To get an idea of what Portable Contacts is trying to achieve visit their website and read through the - About, Why Now?, Goals and Approach and current spec.

So-Why now you ask? from the site:

The momentum began building for 'data portability' last year, and we are now at a point where there is strong support for the principle that users should be in control of their data and have the freedom to access it from across the web. And the major players have all recognized that they and their users are better off with secure contacts APIs (rather than having third-party services ask for users' credentials in order to scrape their data). As a result, we're seeing major Internet companies making contacts APIs available, such as Google's GData Contacts API, Yahoo's Address Book API, and Microsoft's Live Contacts API (with more to come). Not surprisingly though, each of these APIs is unique and proprietary. We believe this creates the ideal conditions for developing a common, open spec that everyone can benefit from.

A couple write-ups are already available including John McCrea's Live blogging notes. At around 1pm John writes "
1:00 About to resume. Saw amazing discussions over lunch. I won’t name names, but some would be shocked by the various pairings of competitors breaking bread together"-
i always have that same feeling when i go to these sessions- and agree that is one of the reasons things get done. I look forward to learning more and looking at the recent specs from a user and vendor prescriptive.

This is of course interesting in regards to the work i do over at the DataPortablity Project- so i am sure that beyond me others in the project are interested in learning more and will be digging deeper on not only the technical but the user usability perspective. Because the bottom line is that the technology and the standards make it work- the user makes it part of their digital life.

Image|Flickr|roughdrft

It's Not the Content Silly, but the Metadata You Should be Listening to

2008-09-09T19:35:00.000-07:00

I have been biting my bottom lip all day- at first because i really did not feel like commenting on it and specifically because i didn't know the 'facts'. But after noticing a swollen lip, i decided to go ahead.

Since i happen to work for a media provider (Dow Jones) whose model is certainly currently focused on providing 'authoritative' premium content- something that many clients are willing to pay a lot of money for access to (so things like today are not a common occurrence)- i knew that most likely any post would be blatantly pro-premium subscriptions- because trust me if someone had done a check on a Dow Jones news feed product they would have seen that the story was 'bogus' with little effort. So a story like this perhaps makes us drool because it provides a perfect case story on why 'free' is not better- certainly not when millions of dollars are at stake.

From a Wired Blog a good explanation of what happened:
the article in the Sun Sentinel's archive had no date on it. But when Google's spider grabbed it, it assigned a current date to the piece, which then resulted in the article being placed in the top results of Google News. When the employee from Income Securities Advisors ran a Google search on "2008 bankruptcies," the old United Airlines story appeared as the top link in the results, with a September 6, 2008 date on it. (Google has now released a screenshot that shows the UAL story as it appeared on the Sun Sentinel web site. The only date in the screenshot is September 7, 2008, the date Google accessed the page. There is no date under the story's headline to indicate when it was published.) At 11 am Monday, the employee added the story to a feed that is included in a Bloomberg subscription service and within minutes, 15 million shares of United Airlines stock had been sold before trading on the stock was halted.

But although this of course is a compelling story to only trust authoritative sources and premium content aggregators, this story is not only about 'free' content because the traders (human or machines i may ask?) acted on a news story from a reputable and costly service- Bloomberg.

So who is to blame? Well of course many are talking about it in both main stream media and blogs and sure things like this have happened before but I think that the simplest answer is to ask why the person who pressed the send button to Bloomberg didn't vet out the story. Perhaps it was early in the morning (ok 11am is not that early but let's go with that excuse....) and he got in late the night before thanks to a delayed United flight and all the recent news about the airline industry losing money and charging $15 for a pillow was enough to believe the story and pass it along as a true story without any vetting.

But the interesting part to me is the metadata associated with the news story- because essentially that was the technical culprit- the article did not have metadata (in this case publication date) to tell Google that it was an article from 2002 that had been republished on their website. The problem is that there really is no standard to provide that information that online news providers adhere to and as more of their archives that were traditionally only available through premium aggregators that normalize the content, come on-line for 'free' more unknowns start to be thrown at online news services like Google News.

One of the core benefits of aggregator premium services (e.g. Factiva from Dow Jones, LexisNexis) is the normalization of the content from 'trusted' sources. This ensures that publication data- sometimes down to the millisecond is provided and the consuming application whether it is a trading system, a news portal or an alerting sms message sent to the banker on the run- gets it right.

Image|Flickr|arimoore

ReadWriteTalk Interviews Me About My Recent eBook

2008-09-07T10:13:00.000-07:00

My typical Sunday afternoon usually consists of an afternoon walk down to the Beach with my iPod stacked with podcasts from the week - this Sunday morning as i was downloading the new episodes i couldn't wait for my walk and had to listen to one immediately with a cup of coffee in hand.

Why? Well, I was recently interviewed by Sean Ammirati for ReadWriteTalk about my recent eBook on the Hybrid approach to Folksonomies and Taxonomies in the Enterprise. ReadWriteTalk is part of the ReadWriteWeb blog network. ReadWriteWeb is one of my favorite resources out there on the web because it provides coverage of many of the web technology trends that i am interested in, providing great coverage of companies and emerging technologies and trends that play in the space.

During the podcast i try to explain why i wrote the ebook, highlight some of the practical recommendations i make in the ebook when approaching user tagging in the Enterprise and even provide some behind the 'scenes' stories about the creation of the actual ebook. The transcript of the interview is also available.

What are some of the other podcasts i listen to semi-religiously?

- I have been a regular listener of ReadWriteTalk since it started up including the new RWWLive sessions.
- SemanticWebGang (also syndicated by ReadWriteWeb and Talis)
- BusinessWeeks Behind the Cover podcast - for example last week's podcast on "IBM Has your Number" had me run out to buy Stephen Bakers' new book Numerati which i recommend and will blog about soon .
- Talking with Talis podcas t- focused mostly on Libraries and emerging semantic technologies
- NewYorkTimes podcasts - mostly the Science Times podcast but sometimes others
- Nodalities podcast (another Talis podcast guess they have cornered the podcast market that interests me!!)
- An old favorite of mine is the SalesRoundup Podcast
- and of course the DataPortablity in Motion podcast (i think the guys have gone on a summer vacation and will hopefully be returning soon)

Have recommendations for other podcasts i should be tuned into? Please leave them in the comments!

So remember if you see me walking on the beach, or even on the BART on my way to work in the morning with my earplugs on nodding and smiling- i am probably listening to one of the many podcasts i listen to regularly.

Smart Women Thirst for Knowledge and to See What Other Smart Women are Doing

2008-08-25T23:42:00.000-07:00

It is a little known fact, that for my undergraduate degree, i earned a major in Women studies and minor in Labor studies- not women in labor but two unique majors- one in Women's Studies and one in Labor Studies. It is not known because it hardly has anything to do with what i "do" which is what people are mostly interested in versus the "how" and "why" i do and approach things in a specific way. I think a lot of who i am is because i grew up with very strong women around me- my mother and grandmothers specifically- but the choices i have made for myself have also helped shape who i am today and how i continue to develop as a woman in the business world.

I have been meaning to post a reference on my blog to a recent article in Business Week Online titled Don't Cry For Us Silicon Valley by Sarah Lacy about women advancing in technology because it is articles like this that remind me that there is progress being made (although many of us think that it is not going fast enough!) . The articles provides some good highlights on some of the established corporate women as well as the positive news from women in the start-up sector.

One of my favorite resources online to stay aware of what other women are doing in the business world is the blog 'News on Women' which provides almost daily updates on women who have been promoted and/or move to new companies. You can also browse by industry, C-level positions like CEO and CFO and Board Appointments and sometimes aggregated reports are published which are interesting.

Every once in a while i get a comment about the image of the glass on the right menu of my blog- you can also get your own "Smart Women Thirst for Knowledge ' glassware if you are so inclined. cheers!

Semantic Technologies in the Enterprise Roundtable September 22th Palo Alto

2008-08-22T10:52:00.000-07:00

Like i have said before, if i am not planning and organizing some sort of event (personal or work related) i am not happy- perhaps i missed my calling as an 'events coordinator' or something.

On September 22nd from 2-6pm in Palo Alto, CA - Christine Connors the Director of Semantic Technology Solutions for Dow Jones and the Business Champion for Synaptica, will be leading a roundtable discussion on the subject of Semantic Technologies in the Enterprise.

Many of our Enterprise Customers have been asking us about semantic technologies and since Christine will be in town to present at Taxonomy Bootcamp in San Jose, we thought it would be a great time to schedule a roundtable discussion on the subject since our May scheduled one had to be canceled due to last minute scheduling conflicts.

Some of our previous roundtable events that i have coordinated have been very successful and have covered subjects such as Social Media Measurement and Folksonomies and Taxonomies in the Enterprise. This event will be at our Palo Alto office that also houses the local printing plant for The Wall Street Journal. This means that afterwards we get to do a special guided tour of the printing plant which is always a highlight for the attendees (and no matter how many times i do it - for me as well!).

The roundtable portion of the event will cover topics such as:

• What can Semantic technologies do for your organization?
• How can the Semantic Web help you in your job role?
• Where do you start and what are best practices?
• How do you “sell” Semantic web investment concepts internally?

I still have a couple of seats left at the table- so if you an individual at a company that is looking at using or are already using semantic technologies in your enterprise and are interested in coming to meet some of your fellow Bay area colleagues that are working on similar projects- please e-mail at daniela.barbosa@dowjones.com or visit our registration page. {please no vendors or consultants at this time, the aim is to make this a BoF (Birds of a Feather) type of roundtable}

If you know of someone that might be interested in the topic please feel free forward this post to them.

Also- if you are interested in just the tour part of the printing plant i might be able to squeeze in a couple of additional people- please drop me a line.

Why my dog is like a search engine without a taxonomy

2008-08-21T10:21:00.000-07:00

This morning i asked my Townes if he wanted a biscuit- i forgot that he isn't the smartest dog in the world and that he can not make the automatic association that a biscuit is a cookie. (read: it really isn't that he is dumb just that he wasn't trained).

So i told him he was like a search engine without a taxonomy and then he looked even more confused. Then we made this video. he is a bit bored because it is the second take so the intial reaction is not 100% but hopefully you get the idea!

As humans we easily make associations between words- machine and dogs can't unless they are "trained".

He is a 4 year old Great Dane in case you are wondering

Digitialization Efforts Through Challenge-Response Tests

2008-08-17T22:07:00.000-07:00

Another technology does good story, this time from Chris Albrecht a GIGAOM in a post titled CAPTCHA’s Can Be Useful, Don’tcha Know that describes the use of the CAPTCHA technology. A CAPTCHA is a type of challenge-response test used in many sites when users are doing things like making a reservation or a purchase or leaving comments to ensure that the response is not generated by a computer.

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. If you are using sites like Craigslist and TicketMaster among some other 45,000 sites that use the technology you are also helping the effort.