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.

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.

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.

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

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.

I guess i am a lucky girl, because the upcoming months are just going to be great (well that is if all goes well and i don't blow it of course!). I have a bunch of speaking engagements coming up that are all going to be at conferences that i am very excited about attending as well. So here is the run down in order of appearance:

Enterprise Search Summit West- September 23th-24th in San Jose, CA. I will be co-presenting with a client about centralized taxonomy management best practices into enterprise information systems (search, CMS/DMS, portals etc.) This is a two day conference that covers how to develop, implement and enhance search capabilities in the Enterprise.

Taxonomy Bootcamp- September 25th-26th in San Jose, CA. I will be introducing a client case study highlighting their use of the Synaptica tool that i am Business Development Manager of at Dow Jones.

Finding a Common Language: Bringing Complex and Disparate Vocabularies Together

2:15 pm – 3:00 pm Paula R McCoy, Manager, Taxonomy Development, ProQuest Daniela Barbosa, Dow Jones & Company This case study addresses the challenges ProQuest faced in managing multilingual controlled vocabularies using multiple Word documents and authority files maintained in an Oracle database. Speakers describe how implementing a thesaurus management tool helped ProQuest simplify and standardize its business semantic management to create a common language and connect disparate information assets as well as handling large and varied vocabularies and authority files, linking new and existing editorial systems and enabling hierarchical views, and automating thesaurus management tasks.

Web2.0 Expo New York- September 16-19th. I will be presenting as part of the Landscape & Strategy track with Chris Saad on Understanding the Basics of Personal Data: Vendors, Users, and You. This track covers the fundamentals of Web 2.0 and explores how they drive strategy, business models, and revenue. The panels will look at how Web 2.0 is affecting finance, advertising, media, fashion, and real estate, and explain how the building blocks of Web 2.0—user-generated content, rich internet applications, collective intelligence, the wisdom of crowds, software as a service, lightweight development models, and mashups—are changing the landscape of media, software, and the economy. I still crack up when i see my picture on the speaker list among some of the big Web2.0 heavy hitters. My mom would be so proud if she knew what Web 2.0 was! {Use Code webny08mc23 to register for Web 2.0 Expo New York and Save $100 or Get a Free Expo Pass}

and last but not least....

Defrag- November 3rd -4th in Denver. This one i am even more excited about because i heard just great feedback about this conference last year. My presentation is titled 'Pulling the threads on user data'. Just like all the other conferences i am super delighted to be on the speakers list with some amazing folks like Stowe Boyd, Esther Dyson, fellow ReadWriteWeb named 'Seven Leading Corporate Social Media Evangelists' Aaron Fulkerson and Sam Lawrence, Paul Kedrosky, Richard Hoeg, Charlene Li, Paul Miller, Clay Shirky and my old friend Lou Paglia among many others. Just the list of speakers would have been enough for me to go, so i am super privileged to also have the opportunity to speak!
NOTE: You should seriously think about going to Defrag and then you should use code 'db1'- that will get you an additional $100 off of current early bird prices. I am also excited to say that Dow Jones Client Solutions is going to be exhibiting at Defrag-more to follow on why we are there and why Defrag attendees should care in another post!

Good stuff- now i have some thinking and presentations to finish!

Over on Techememe the main headline this Sunday morning was a post by Paul Graham on the Y Combinator blog titled Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund. Y Combinator is a venture firm specializing in funding early stage startups. In this post he outlines 30 ideas that Y Combinator is interested in funding. Many are obvious, some are interesting and others perhaps a bit off (or already in motion-perhaps even funded by Y Combinator themselves). But that is not what i found interesting that made me start this post with my cup of coffee in hand.

What got me thinking was that one of the things i usually get asked the most when i tell people i work for Dow Jones (formerly Factiva a Dow Jones & Reuters Joint Venture) is why do i work for such a huge blue chip company (and it is not only the brand blue colors that they are referring to!). When i tell them that i am going on nine years with the company~ scrunched eyebrows tend to come out on the questioners face. I won't lie to you that i sometimes think very comprehensively about leaving and going to some what i think is a promising start-up. Since moving to Silicon Valley three years ago i think about it even more, even going through the process of evaluating very carefully some serious opportunities- but not jumping on any as of yet. Just recently i was asked again and my stock response was 'when the right thing comes that feels right' i will'.

So as i read the Y Combinator's post about Startup Ideas that they are interested in, i started thinking about some of the things that i think that Dow Jones in all its incarnations is doing right that definitely impacts the reason as to why i am still around. So here are some of them:

#3- New News-
Yes traditional newspapers are in trouble and Dow Jones owns a bunch of them including the Wall Street Journal online and print publications, the Ottaway Community newspapers and other publications like Barron's. With their online news publications ventures, they certainly try to innovate from making Facebook applications for WSJ.com around 'what your friends are reading' to supporting and growing the All Things Digital Web site devoted to news, analysis and opinion on technology (and which according to the site runs autonomously as a small online startup), that tends to venture off 'traditional' reporting methods but yet maintains journalist integrity.

But i don't think that is what Paul Graham was referring to or at least that is not how i read it and where i think there is opportunity- the 'New' part of 'New News' is what is interesting to me. 'Traditional' reporting is not going away anytime soon and it shouldn't. Adding blogs to the news output is only one answer but what Dow Jones is delivering in the marketplace and doing is researching and investing in new ways of producing 'New news' by using technology to produce content out of content. Look at its recent acquisition of Generate Inc that brings extraction technology and relationship mapping into the picture and the work that the Algorithmic and Quantitative Trading product group does within its real-time products. Also let's not forget the work that the Factiva business line has done in regards to News visualization and metadata application across over 10,000 aggregated news sources in 22 languages. All with the aim to get more context out of the content that is being produced by the different media outlets. News readers don't want to read the same story over and over again or spends hours per day looking through headlines, they want intuitive ways to digest the massive amount of content that is being produced to give them the information they need.

#7. Something your company needs that doesn't exist.
I am going to bend this one a bit- but the premise is the same because of the downstream affect on the core business. Switch 'company' in this statement to 'client' and you get the basis for the Dow Jones Client Solutions (DJCS) organization which i have been part of for the last 6 years and have had the honor of driving a lot of the innovation of. Sure traditional 'consulting services' where customized solutions are built for clients are probably not to be considered start-up materials that Y Combinator would look at, but the DJCS group tends to be the ones that are called in when something a 'client' needs does not yet exist as a core product offering. The reason i liked my job as a Solutions Architect was that anything my client and i could think of would most likely be possible because of the flexible infrastructure we had built on the Factiva fully enable Web Services platform. What happens however is that some of the custom needs that get designed, developed and delivered eventually end up as part of the core product strategy. Examples are Newsletter creation tools that although continue to have customized components are also now built into the core Factiva.com product with its newsletter features and sales triggering capabilities that are now part of the SalesWorks suite of products.

#14. Tools for measurement.
Once again allow me to bend this a bit (perhaps a bit to much, but i am just trying to make a point here!) The Y Combinator idea request is measurement of productivity in corporations- to answer the question of where people spending their time and who are the most productive. I think that other parts of measurement that are going to be important in Organizations that could essentially tie into productivity gains is the tracking of influence within an organization. For example, take a look a the Community Equity project that Sun Microsystems is pushing forward with SunSpace (note: Dow Jones has no involvement in this project, i am just a fan!).

If you have been following my blog for a while you have read some of my posts on Media Measurement which includes both mainstream and Social Media. Four years ago Factiva acquired a company that had technology specializing in media monitoring and reputation management which turned into our Factiva Insight product suite (now Dow Jones Insight)~ way before people where talking about social media monitoring we were doing some of it. In the last few years that group has innovated quite a bit in the marketplace, and although i personally think that they could do much more i think that there continues to be a big opportunity in measurement tools. As Enterprises continue to use social media internally and externally to collaborate and communicate measurement tools can be used internally as well to measure business impact.

#16. A form of search that depends on design.

The majority of the search options across the Dow Jones properties are premium services that require a subscription of some sort- so the target market is not to beat out 'free search' but i think that a lot of the success of parts of our business has been the ability to provide search tools that have the user in specific vertical markets mind. In January of 2006 Factiva launched Search 2.0 in order to address the change in our core user search market for a simpler but more powerful search. The Search 2.0 interface uses visualization to present relevant search results by utilizing varies technologies to extract metadata and content elements of each article across the premium content, web content and multi-media content that is aggregated. Exciting enhancements to continue leveraging entity extractions for content context are also on the way.

20. Shopping guides.
No we do not have services for shopping, but we are capable of working with clients around this topic and increasing our resources to support customers in this space. As of the end of last year, I became the business development manager for Synaptica and taxonomy services in the DJCS group because i saw these types of markets as being part of our future growth. Our services and Synaptica tool can be used to create and manage taxonomies, thesauri, name catalogs and other authority files that can drive some of the " how do you decide what you want?" features that Y Combinator is looking to invest in. Forward looking investments a couple years back when we acquired the Synaptica product suite and continuous product enhancements ensures our solutions are for example compatible with Semantic technologies by supporting RDF, OWL, SKOS etc. are positioning us very nicely in the space where i thinking online shopping, search and advertising is going.


Like what Paul writes at the end of his post, my own post was an interesting exercise for me as well. I have been away from work for almost two weeks and gave the question of 'what am i doing a Dow Jones' a bit of time as i sat poolside and pondered my next few months. When i started with Factiva, the joint venture was just beginning and we did feel like we were working for a startup. With the News Corp acquisition of Dow Jones last year, one of things that i hoped to see was more strategic investment in some of these 'start-up' ideas. So far i have been pleased with what i have seen from my vantage point. Sure things don't move as fast as i would like them to and many times i get disgusted with the massiveness that the company is (e.g. 7 months to setup a public web page that is only text based and 4 months to get a press release out). I unfortunately do not have the privilege of being able to able to touch all the parts of the business that i think are innovative because i am only focusing on one part of the business; but i think this exercise on a Sunday has been important one for me to be able to look at the company i work for and feel that there are parts that are on the right track and that for the time being i am in a good place with that.

If i am not planning and organizing some event i am not happy- perhaps i missed my calling as an 'events coordinator' or something.

On May 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 the Semantic Technologies Conference in San Jose, i thought it would be a great time to schedule a roundtable discussion on the subject.

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

Wow! I was just named one of the 'Seven Leading Corporate Social Media Evangelists Today' according to Marshall Kirpatrick at ReadWriteWeb! What an honor- especially because of the other Evangelists i was listed among.

This is awesome. First because i am a huge fan of ReadWriteWeb and especially the research that Marshall Kirkpatrik does but more importantly because i truly believe (and have seen it with my own efforts) that Corporate Social Media can have a huge impact on how individuals 'run' their own 'business' in large corporations with benefits all around for clients, the company and themselves.

Early on as i started using Social Media as part of my daily routine, i got some very good advise from someone else on this list- Jeremiah Owyang- who gave me some 'Corporate Membranes' advice that had come from Robert Scoble and although at times i get frustrated with the "Corporate office" because they aren't moving fast enough for me, i keep pushing that membrane... and since i am lucky enough to work for a company that allows me to do it, it has worked out. i have been able to not only build my personal brand but i have had the chance to evangelize the use of Social Media across various groups internally like for example the encouragement of using Social Media tools with my colleagues that result in things like Wikis for roundtables and the Dow Jones Election Pulse blog.

So here is how i think this whole thing went down...another indication of the engagement with the new social media tools we use.

This morning, on Twitter @marshallk twittered a request requesting people to nominate social media evangelists for companies. A bit later i saw cjmconnors twitter a nomination for me (i follow cjmconnors and she is Christine Connors who is the Director of Semantic Technologies and Business Champion for Synaptica at Dow Jones).

Then i get this crypted message from @chrissaad about my ears burning, as i continue to work and twitter along in between client calls and getting work stuff done, including working on a backdrop for a new Synaptica Twitter account that i just put together a couple days ago to use as we announce our new V7 release. Then i get a Twitter Direct Message from @jeffreymcmanus teasing me about being the new Scoble. "The new Scoble?-what the hell is he talking about?", so i head back to Twitter and bam- i remembered the twits and saw this. What a rush!

Over the last year, partially because i have experienced such success, i have really picked up my pace of using social media to Evangelize the work i do; whether it is with personal projects like the Dataportability Group that i am very passionate about or the work i do at Dow Jones- the tools vary but the objective is the same- put myself out there, become part of the community and give back.

Although i have been with Dow Jones going on eight years and blogging about information delivery in the Enterprise for about two years, since November, i have been in new role as Business Development Manager for Synaptica- our taxonomy and metadata management solution. Never heard of it? Don't worry not a lot of people have, the solution is very well received in the marketplace and we have many major global companies using it- but honestly only people in the "know" know about it because it is a niche solution and when Factiva/Dow Jones acquired Synapse- marketing it wasn't done very well and with our recent re-branding to Dow Jones/News Corp it only got worse.

Since i took this new role i have seen the gap in the marketplace as i speak to prospects (who for example tell me how they think i am very interesting from reading my blog but can't find any information on the tool!) and therefore i struggle that there isn't even landing page to point people to-duh! So over the last few weeks i have also been working internally with the help of some very supportive people from marketing and product and we have a great plan to continue on the social media work i have been doing for two years- so watch this space ;-) and see how i prove that i belong on the list of the 7 leading Corporate Social Media Evangelists!

***Thanks to everyone who has left such kind words on the comments section of the RWW post and thank you for the nominations including Chris Saad's great quote!

I love it when i find things like this that i had wish i had attended and someone managed to get on video and upload on the web. Dave Clarke Director of Global Taxonomy at Dow Jones was in Singapore this summer at a iKMS conference as a presenter and i just found these videos that Patrick Lambe at the Green Chameleon Blog posted back in September.

The best part is that i have seen Dave give this talk multiple times, but never managed myself to get it on video so I am glad these are out there because now i can always reference them. Thanks!

Patrick Lambe who posted these also just published a book on taxonomy development titled: Organising Knowledge: Taxonomies, Knowledge and Organisation Effectiveness that has been receiving positive reviews in the community.

To watch, i threw this up on my big monitor and watched the video while following the slide deck which was a good way to see all the slides.

Part One: Dave introduces Synaptica from Dow Jones and other Taxonomy management tools and how to use these tools to collaborate around taxonomies


Part Two: Dave take the audience through using Synaptica to create taxonomies


Part Three: Dave discusses integrating taxonomies into a business infrastructure, talks about the different systems that are typically integrated with a taxonomy management tool and the importance of using open standards (RDF, SKOS, OWL)


If you find these video's interested Patrick Lambe has other videos on his Blip.tv channel that might interest you.

i got to be a potty mouth at work again this week, well at least i got to read and speak a lot of 'bad' words because i have been having various conversations with prospects and one with a partner about 'Inappropriate Language' taxonomies (uh but lot's of words are in my own daily vocabulary so does that make me inappropriate?- WT#@!?;-) .

So as you can imagine i am already loving my new focus as Business Development Manager for Synaptica which includes among other things the Taxonomy Warehouse site (yes site needs some work) that has such fascinating topics as 700,000 Acronyms, Initialisms and Abbreviations, Fashion and Apparel and of course my personal favorite Inappropriate Language that are partners provide.

So over the last few years custom taxonomies and pre-built taxonomies have been a major part of the work that my teams have delivered to customers. With my background in information science and years of experience in observing our taxonomy experts custom build taxonomies i know the hundreds of 'people hours' that it takes to build a solid taxonomy/thesaurus. However, it is a hard conversation to have with a lot of customers when license costs are discussed- because if you haven't built one you simply can't imagine the effort in not only building but implementing and governing to ensure that it remains fresh.

So, i have been stressing out a bit because of a meeting a signed myself up for and i don't think it was for a valid reason at all-just because i license taxonomies and thesauri for a fee it doesn't mean i don't support open standards like those that are supported by the DataPortability group - the DP group is not about 'free' it is about open standards that allow portability of data regardless if it is 'paid' for or not. So for example, many of our available taxonomies are delivered to customers via RDF format one of the DP supported formats.

So i was stressing specifically because I signed up for the Freebase meetup next week ( Freebase is a collaboratively-edited database of cross-linked data) and had to answer the following question as part of a survey:

Do you fit into any of these groups?

• I'm an open data person. Information wants to be free!
• >>So i am an open data person- but i don't think that all information wants or can afford to be free.
  
• I have this specific topic I'm really into, and want Freebase to hold the data about it.
• >>>ok sure i can come up with something and when i submitted the survey i had no use that i could devote time to but now I thinking of potentially looking at freebase to manage the DP Definitions.
  
• I develop apps or mashups, and want to use Freebase data
• >>>my dream, to have time and real skills to do this well
  
• I refuse to be labeled, but will describe myself here:

So i submitted that i refuse to be labeled because...my answer "it's a long story". So i am looking forward to dropping by and meeting some of the Freebasers (i attended a Freebase session at BarCamp but didn't really participate and honestly since it has been on my radar but i have not delved as deep as i wanted to).

Anyway....if you are interested in licensing an inappropriate language taxonomy please contact me so i can continue to be a potty mouth and if you are lucky enough (i promise i won't charge you any more ;-) you can hear me articulate some of the terms that essentially are inappropriate for corporate communications- just because we can.

Image attributed to

My friend and one of my favorite Silicon Valley rock stars Jeremiah Owyang a Senior Analyst at Forrester Research will be presenting a Webinar on the Topic of Social Media this Thursday (9:30PST/12:30EST) with Glenn Fannick, Product Development Manager for Factiva Insight at Dow Jones.

Jeremiah and I worked very closely in late 2006 to put together a social media roundtable event in Palo Alto, CA with influential early social media Evangelists including many social media enthusiasts, corporate practitioners and PR/Corporate Communication attendees. In the tradition of Social Media the event was well documented and the community continued to discuss the topics addressed after the roundtable. After the event Jeremiah also worked with us to co-author a white paper based on some of the findings and outstanding questions.

I have seen both Jeremiah and Glenn speak quite often and they are always dynamic speakers so they promise not to disappoint. I look forward to listening in this week to see how the conversation has matured over the last year and i have no doubt that I will learn quite a bit.

There are over 800 registered attendees already and if you are interested you can still registered.

As i had announced on this blog back in December i was asked by the Dow Jones Info Pro Alliance group to conduct a Webcast on Folksonomies and Taxonomies in the Enterprise. One of the group's outreach programs is the Info Pro Alliance portal which provides various resources for information professionals in the Enterprise space. I used this opportunity to share some of the information discussed at the recent round table event we coordinated here in Silicon Valley and to share some of the things i have come across in the last year in this space. It was OK- i wouldn't say it was my best 'performance'!

As part of the follow up i have created a Wiki for the community to participate and share with each other on the rather new topic of using both Folksonomies and Taxonomies in the Enterprise. From the Wiki you can also link to the recorded Webcast or the Slide deck that i have posted on Slideshare. I still have a lot to do on the Wiki (e.g. finishing the Q&A from the session)- but i hope that others will also assist in making the Wiki a useful place for those who are interested in the topic. If you know someone in the Enterprise that is looking into Folksonomies please send them a link to the Wiki (thanks!).

If this is a subject of interest, please be sure to check out the wiki and share additional resources or thoughts on the issue.

Many thanks to Lorraine Bell for all her assistance in coordinating this WebCast!

Have you ever gotten a call from a recruiter at a certain massive company in Mountainview, CA and wondered out loud who does their own department recruiting because obviously the person on the other line had done no homework whatsoever in reviewing what you or the company you currently work at do? They probably didn't even 'google' your name. I have been on the other side and it is painful and honestly we have all been on the phone with recruiters so they aren't the only ones.

Especially in the technology world recruiting can be cut throat when bidding for the right candidate and the recruiter better be prepared to not only have done their homework on the candidate but also on the company they work at, and their competitors who may also be bidding for that worker especially for fancy college graduates.

eWeek's Joe Wilcox who covers Microsoft recorded this podcast with Ruth Van Dyke, Microsoft's Staffing Research & Competitive Intelligence manager, and Arthur Rassias, vice president of Dow Jones Enterprise Media Group Client Solutions, in which they discuss how the Microsoft implemented a rich content driven recruiting system using Dow Jones services. I happen to be the person that worked very closely with Ruth to gather the groups requirements and make recommendations for a multiple phases so I am particularly pleased with the outcome and happy that Microsoft is seeing benefits from the solution.

The full case study with additional details is available here.

April 2008-If you have found this post it was posted out of date sequence in order for me to quickly link to a written description of Synaptica a Taxonomy and Metadata Management tool that i am the Business Development Manager for at Dow Jones. At this point they are redesigning the Synaptica web presence which means that this data is not easily available for me to link to (aside from putting it on my on web server)- problem resolved temporarily and please note i might make changes here.

Synaptica is the result of over a decade of continuous research and development driven by power-users in the information management and library communities. An unparalleled set of features has evolved to meet the uncompromising demands of taxonomy and authority file experts:

• Manage glossaries, dictionaries, lexicons, taxonomies, thesauri, ontologies and name authority files
• Supports ANSI/NISO Z39.19; ISO 2788 & ISO 5964
• Simple search or power search modes
• Standard hierarchical, associative and equivalency relationships
• Customizable semantic relationship types and behavior rules
• Meta vocabulary clusters and crosswalk mapping
• Multiple categories for a single term
• Expandable hierarchies and relationships
• Approval & candidate term statuses
• Customizable data entry templates and rules
• Dynamically enforced rules-based logic
• Collaborative and compartmentalized portals
• Role-based granular permissions
• Robust scalable enterprise-class architecture
• Web Services remote data access and write control
• DBMS deployment on Oracle and SQL Server
• COM and Database APIs for systems integration
• Logical delete and restore of terms
• User ID and date-time stamping
• Online reports using report wizards
• Bulk import and validation functions
• Various export formats including, MS Word and Excel, CSV, XML; ZTHES, RDF SKOS and OWL
• Unicode UTF-8 support for non-western character sets


Web-based User Interface

The entire Synaptica application has a web-based user interface enabling access by location independent knowledge workers. A “portal” system allows project teams to access subsets of the vocabularies with user functional privileges controlled by 12 permissions levels from read-only through super-administrator. A suite of online report wizards allows users to create alphabetical and hierarchical reports as well as various export formats including CSV, XML; ZTHES, RDF SKOS and OWL


On-the-fly Customization
Another of Synaptica’s strengths is the ability to customize the system in minutes. An extensive menu of administrator’s tools, all fully accessible via the web-UI, allows users to: create new vocabulary files; define the metadata elements; create new kinds of semantic relationship types; configure rules-bases to govern semantic and taxonomic house-rules; customize display formats and perform data import functions.

Enterprise Scalability
Synaptica provides an enterprise-class solution for authority file and controlled vocabulary management. The system uses a library of COM business objects, which can be accessed through the web-application or via an API. The system supports SQL Server and Oracle databases scalable for multiple users and millions of terms and relationships. A library of stored procedures supports native database API integration.

Onsite or Remote-Hosting
Synaptica is a client-server web application that can be installed locally on a client’s intranet or extranet server. Alternatively, Dow Jones can host client systems on our secure servers, which means the client needs no special equipment. In either case, systems use password-protected accounts, so users can access all of Synaptica's features from anywhere in the world using standard personal computers and web-browsers.



Dow Jones Client Solutions Taxonomy Consulting

Dow Jones Taxonomy Services consultants help organizations to build, deploy and maintain working taxonomies tailored to their individual needs. We provide:

• proven experience at gaining senior management and inter-departmental commitment on quality benchmarks and ways of measuring return on investment,
• cost-saving approaches and tools, and advice on the benefits and disadvantages of the different approaches;
• knowledge of resource allocation and elapsed time for taxonomy projects,
• And practical assistance with taxonomy design, development and implementation best-practice advice, practical tips and "war stories" to help you avoid project pitfalls and speed up project completion

Consultants work with clients on a modular basis in the key project phases of assessment, design, delivery, adoption and maintenance. The level of service is matched to your needs and resources.

Dow Jones Taxonomy Development Services: Helping you build or customize taxonomies

Dow Jones Client Solutions (DJCS) manages one of the largest dedicated global taxonomy resource teams, providing editorial expertise across multiple industry sectors. From the creation of precisely tuned authority files to the development of large-scale taxonomies across multiple domains, including ongoing maintenance, DJCS can be your service partner for outsourced taxonomy and controlled vocabulary development.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The other day i posted some jobs that are open in the Dow Jones San Francisco office in my Facebook Marketplace profile- while i was posting them the option to buy a Facebook Flyer was presented and i wondered if it would be worth it. The costs didn't seem too high but i passed- well today via a twitter message from Jeremiah Owyang i saw this post on Charlene Li's blog about a test she is running with Facebook Flyers so i thought i would give it a try since i had a new posting to put up. Hey for 4 bucks it is definitely worth it- perhaps even better then a virtual Facebook beer for a buck that i will send to anyone that gets the job. Shel Israel also got into the action via the same Twitter message.A couple of things Facebook can do to make the service better would be to guide the flyer creator (i did it through the marketplace prompts)- for example providing a preview prior to publishing, suggesting a length for the title etc. Unless you go through the main page to create a flyer it doesn't tell you that you can't make any changes to the flyer once you purchase (BOO they should have at least had a warning!).

In the FAQ section (after i purchased) i found good information including the following : There is a 200 character limit for the body of the Flyer (including spaces and returns) and a 25 character limit for the title. In addition, there is a 15 character limit for words in the body of the Flyer.

At the end of last year, I worked very hard alongside some colleagues at Factiva (Dow Jones) to coordinate a roundtable event to discuss Social Media with thought leaders in the Bay Area. The thought to have the roundtable came to me after speaking with Jeremiah Owyang and sharing my frustrations with the fact that every time i met up with people who were talking about Social Media, I always wanted my Factiva Insight product folks in the room- to listen and participate in those conversations. So what i managed to do was bring them West using a combination of social media itself (i blogged, reached out to other bloggers via comments etc) and good old fashion networking (i went from pub to pub in San Francisco- seriously i am not kidding) to engage members of the community that i knew would make great participants. We also reached out to a handful of local clients that we knew where dealing with these issues internally.

The location was a wonderful place called Zibibbo's in Palo Alto, CA where the food was incredible and the wine nicely poured...and what a great crowd we managed to get.


What were some of the questions we were/are trying to answer during this roundtable ?

- Do you believe Consumer Generated Media is important and should be measured?
- Who is creating Social Media? What are they creating? And is the who more important then the what?
- If you are producing Social Media as part of your PR/Marketing plan, how will you measure ROI?
- Do you think that Social Media needs a structured, mutually agreed upon measurement techniques and metrics (e.g. MSM's ad value equivalence and article impressions) to make monitoring a more serious practice?
- So what should be measured, and how do you want it delivered?


One of the agreed outcomes of the roundtable was that we would produce a white paper of the information that we gathered along with our co-author Jeremiah Owyang. Well for months and months i have been bugging (read harassing) Marketing about this white paper and when it would be finalized. Well as you know, Factiva has gone through a lot of corporate changes- we officially became Dow Jones in January and then five months later the news about the News Corp acquisition- well i guess they have all been busy. I am sure i have made more then one enemy being a pestering little bug- oh well i hope we can make up soon.

So the final outcome is this report authored by Matt Toll of our Marketing group and Jeremiah Owyang. You can Download the Report here: “Tracking the Influence” (PDF).

Since the event- many of the participants have continued to talk and address issues of social media measurement- some of the companies that participated have implemented strategies that they continue to refine. The white paper has some good thoughts and ideas by the participants and we hope that their voices are heard. As Jeremiah describes it, the white paper serves as a good primer for those that are new to the concept, or for those who need to start deploying a program but also provides a good insight into what was going through on minds on that day in December of 2006.

Additional information about the roundtable is available on the Factiva Roundtable wiki that was used to coordinate the event and provide a place for reflection afterwards. More pictures from the event here and shortly if i ever get to re-re-encode my video files i will post video clips of the participants.

and some final words?

I have been blogging since i made made my trek across the country when i moved to the Bay Area in February 2005- it started out as a way to keep in touch with family and friends and then i found myself blogging to keep in touch with my former East coast clients to share with them the things i was seeing on the West coast. Quickly my blog turned into a good way to communicate with my new clients on the West coast, the tech community, my company co-workers around the world and a way to completely bore the hell out of my friends and family who were expecting pictures of me surfing and living the San Francisco lifestyle but instead have to read about Web 2.0, social media and general grumblings about information delivery in the enterprise.

There are certainly other work colleagues of mine that are 'business' bloggers but none of us are currently under a Dow Jones domain- they are personal blogs that address business issues and trends that we are all interested in. When i started blogging, i was part of Factiva which at the time was a Dow Jones & Reuters company and had a blogging policy and even a CEO blogger.

At the end of last year, we became fully owned by Dow Jones and one of the first things i asked our PR department was about the DJ blogging policy. I am still waiting for an official Dow Jones blogging policy but was told to follow the employee code of conduct as a rule (honestly i think that all companies should have an official blogging policy and have been ancy about not having one over the last 8 months). If you are a regular reader of my blog, then you know that i try not to talk much about the Dow Jones corporate business or try to be overtly pushing products that we sell- for example i have hardly touched this News Corp situation on this blog (i have however Twittered about it but that is a closed network of those i consider my trusted friends some which are also clients).

The other day i was talking to my friend Jeremiah Owyang as we were coming out of a Social Media club event in which he had just been on a panel on business blogging in the enterprise. I told Jeremiah that our Client Solutions marketing group was producing a new quarterly newsletter and they had informed me that they wanted to highlight my blog. It has also been featured on the InfoPro Alliance newsletter that Factiva produces mostly for their information professional audience. Jeremiah thought it was great that Dow Jones trusted me enough to publish my site to their customers, but since he has been following my blog he can understand why the content i produce is valuable to the organization- i think it is pretty cool as well that they trust me.

Just today at the New Tech Meetup in San Francisco- where the topic was Women in Tech- Lorna Li asked me what i blog about- my standard response is that i blog about information delivery in the enterprise and it is a way for me to be part of the community that discusses issues important to that market segment while connecting with customers.

i don't get paid extra to blog about things that might bring revenue to the company or induce engagement with communities of importance to us, i do it because i truly enjoy it and it brings me immense pleasure when a customer or colleagues say to me- yeah i want to talk to you about that post about bla bla bla or i have been looking forward to meeting you- your blog is very interesting especially that post about bla bla bla.

I like think of myself as a corporate blogger that is trying to fit the Community/Evangelist Role that Jeremiah commonly speaks about- but i certainly feel that i could be doing much more. Part of it is time constraints and being overworked- i can't tell you how many times i come home with a great idea post that i start to write and then get wrapped up with some work project or simply run out of steam to continue thinking about work- so i try to pay myself and tell myself that i am blogging here for daniela not for Dow Jones- they are just one of the beneficiaries.

But the bottom line is that i am proud that my blog gets highlighted in a corporate newsletters from Dow Jones- it is through Social Media (my blog) that as an employee that is not at the executive levels that typically gets the public ear through mainstream media- I am able to communicate with the marketplace- i just wish i had more time to do it because it seems that almost everyday i say to myself 'if only i had the time to blog about this...'.

Oh yeah and something else to worry about-let's see if News Corp has a corporate blogging policy....if not maybe i will just convert this blog to focus on delivering information to enterprising cats.

Yesterday i attended the Community Next- Viral Marketing event in Sunnyvale. Jeremiah thought the folks there were hard core because it was a beautiful day out- since i live in Pacifica even being indoors most of the day but having the luxury of walking outdoors for lunch and snacks made it a good reason to go.

Overall a good day and you will have to read through the end to get the tutu picture reference.

Some tips from the panels on viral marketing:

• target Hollywood media (music, movies etc.)- they have a built in audience and will drive users
  
• target politicians, especially during election races- another built in audience- allow your social media tools to help them spread their message. their constitutes will use the same tools to 'promote' themselves and their causes
  
• One of the top reason that viral services take off is the users like tools that let them do self-expression- accessorization of their user created content is hot
• When thinking about developing for Facebook Apps- consider how the user experience will be viewed within the Facebook news feeds which is where a lot of growth comes from
• Use tools like web-conferencing to test your target market- watch them click through on your beta site, see what they miss, what they click on etc. be agile enough to make changes based on real time usage
• if your service is a way for users to interact with others, or if your growth is going to be from them 'inviting' their friends- build in things like automatic upload of their contact list for sharing and building the community
• if you find people 'teaching' others how to use your tools (PBWiki talked about how educational users were doing seminars on using their wikis)- reward them by fueling the fire- they will be your spokespeople around the world- create presentation material they can use, send them t-shirts, premium access accounts, etc. 'Employee' your users.
  

So...? i work for Dow Jones mostly in the B2B enterprise market- what did i learn? Basically that creating buzz around products and services can extend beyond product brochures and Ads in industry magazines. We are already do some things but can definitely do more like:

• We already do a good job of this with our Factiva Insight products which do media monitoring and measurement by providing access to the tool to journalists, commenters and others. My colleague Melanie Surplice in PR usually highlights some of those on her blog.
• I constantly see blog posts (i have a couple searches on the term 'factiva') by librarians that write about finding something awesome in the database or even how they teach people how to use the factiva service- make them factiva 'divas'- send them a t-shirt, have them work with you to create training materials etc.

A couple of additional things i would like to comment on from yesterday:

1. boys- learn how to do presentations- presentation skills are important- engage, flow and message and if you have to use a PowerPoint slide deck use it well....
2. i call them boys in #1 above because I was also a bit disappointed (ok maybe more then a bit) that there was only one female on all the panels. Interestedly enough some of them spoke about the target market audience of viral application being young women- making some comments about how they sit around in a Tutu reading Cosmo magazine trying to figure out how to market to them.

Great Tutu photo credited to ambrosialove