unstruc chitchatting about information delivery

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!