unstruc chitchatting about information delivery

Human Powered Editorial Processes

2008-07-02T23:44:00.000-07:00

It always brings a smile to my face when i see new services cropping up that have 'human powered' editorial services as part of their value add. Today over at TechCrunch a short review of Blogged.com's news portal peaked my interest so i went to check it out.

From their about page:
The blogs in our database are reviewed, rated, and categorized by editors, so you won't experience the frustration of filtering through blogs that are spam, outdated, or irrelevant. You'll be able to find quality blogs that you would be unlikely to have found through a traditional blog search. We also offer time-based searching, bookmarking, sharing, and feedback functions

I love getting my blog tech news from Techmeme which is auto-generated through a news-picking software system and have relied on it for a while (here is a video of Robert Scoble in Feb 2007 explaining what Techmeme is to Clare Hart my EVP at Dow Jones/Factiva). Techmeme is usually the first thing i check in the morning, and i visit it often during the day. It highlights many of the top blogs i like to read and makes it easy to browse and see the buzz and who is talking about what- i love the interconnections it displays for me.

I also have hundreds of 'trusted bloggers' that i have organized into categories in my GoogleReader, get great tips from the Twitter and FriendFriend folks i follow, subscribe to various daily newsletters, sometimes check digg.com and have a good amount of alerts from various services- so another service is probably not going to make or break me.

I like concept that Blogged.com is surfacing in the Topics that they cover, but currently not all the blogged categories are listed (probably still adding content?). As they expand their editorial selection that should get better. i think it is useful that the topics the posts that are added to, are deemed to be about the post- not the blog's domain coverage category (although much of the content within the existing categories seems to be blog domain specific). So if tomorrow i write a wicked post about gardening on this blog that is about information delivery, the Blogged.com editors might pick it up. If i never write about gardening again that would be ok because the value to the readers who care about gardening would be in that one post.

I also like the fact that on a whim or for a specific project i might be working on i can go find editorially selected posts- say tomorrow i am meeting with a prospect that has a fitness and nutrition service- i can check out the stories in the fitness and nutrition topic- perhaps giving me something interesting to say when i met them!

I am not surprised that they are attempting do this and have such diverse categories that they are covering. One of the things our Client Solutions team has been selling more and more of is the Targeted News Delivery Solutions that we offer where editors who learn the clients specific business requirements crawl our aggregated content sets (10,000+ sources 22 languages), blog and Web content, multimedia and perhaps even the client's own submitted internal content to distribute via email, rss or portal/intranet post. Newsletters are not really a new service, but incorporating different type of media is. The editors become the customer's eyes- to power targeted delivery of content to employees daily who have better things to do then crawl multiple news and blog sites and do not need immediate notification (although we of course have many real-time notification solutions as well).

A quick search on people blogging about blogged.com points to a smart approach to making people aware of their service- editors rate the sites and a note is sent to the blogger notifying them and providing a badge for their blog- and who doesn't like to see themselves in an editorial human powered site?

photo attribution: robotson

E-mail i grew up loving you but our love affair has got to slow down

2008-06-30T09:00:00.000-07:00

Dear e-mail,

i am addicted to you. it has been almost a life-long obsession that has brought me great pleasure and success and sometimes great pain as well as all great loves tend to do eventually. i have been in love since the first day i laid eyes on you on that telnet terminal so many years ago with the first welcome message. Then there was hotmail, yahoo, corporate email, gmail...first on computers that i had to go to the lab or office to read, then home computer and finally my mobile device- we are always connected you and I. There always seems to be someone on the other side unless i get an undeliverable message- but even then we communicated.

But now The New York Times along with IBMs “social computing evangelist” thinks it is time that you and I slow it down and that i free myself from your grip. I have to admit i have been working on it; you probably haven't noticed because i still get a lot of incoming messages that must be replied to and there are things i just can't do currently without you because you are the messenger of choice and yes, of course you do such a good job- no one is doubting that.

Our corporate Instant Messaging (IM) has been a big enabler to me pulling away from you but there are people who i work with that just plainly refuse to use it and our system doesn't do off line group messages so it is limiting for group communications. Then there is the issue with my corporate network that is bipolar on Skype and aggregated IM services so those outside the 'wall' have a hard time getting to me- so it is hard to have it as a communication avenue for clients and partners.

I have this blog, but the messages are public and generic enough not to get me into trouble- but i guess i can use it better to communicate my message- but how do i know that the message is getting to the right person (there is no read receipts that sometimes i send you my dear messenger with and no undeliverable alerts)- sending it to an email address at least let's me off the hook if someone 'claims' they haven't read it. I tried an internal blog, but i wasn't convinced. i guess i can try again but just haven't been feeling it. (yeah yeah keep pushing the membrane, i know)

Twitter- i have been using it communicate with some but very few coworkers- some even signed up but haven't even sent a twitt yet- guess it isn't for everyone but it is a great vehicle for keeping in touch with remote people, and keeping it personal as well as distributing one message to many (when it is up of course and lately it has been unreliable and i need reliability in my life)

I use del.icio.us the most to tag things and a long time ago i tried to get some coworkers to rely on that to see things of interest, they missed some things so i went back to sending them emails with 'check-this-out' messages. In those situations, where i want a response (even a reaction) or perhaps a 'hey why don't you check-this-out well' of course i usually get silence. i am thinking that they all must have 'daniela fatigue' so i have been keeping to myself and engaging with those who are actively participating in the conversation whether internally or externally (thanks folks!)

In the NYTs article they recommend the use of the phone- i like the phone but when i call i get voice mail mostly- unless of course i ping them on IM or email! telling them i am going to call which works beautifully. Just the other day i had lunch with someone that is younger then me (10yrs) and they said 'oh well i hate the phone as a means to communicate' as they typed a text message into their iPhone.

Just last night you and i worked off line (honestly my favorite moments you and i spend together because there are no interruptions) and then this morning i sent a boatload of emails out when i synced- of course 20 messages came back immediately- although i admit some are the 'thank you' immediate delete short lined emails which i have mixed feelings about as it is.

So i don't know- i have been thinking about our relationship since i read that NYTs article yesterday and agree something has got to give- just not sure what it is.

Have to go now- i have over 500 emails in my corporate in-box and many in my personal in-box and many to reply to so i hope you had your fortified energy drink this morning because i am planning on giving you a workout my friend.

lovingly your e-mail slave,

-daniela

Image Attribution: Simon Davison

TechCrunch Enterprise

2008-06-23T22:49:00.000-07:00

Back in September 2006 i excitedly blogged about news that TechCrunch was going to have an Enterprise version. I am a big TechCrunch fan because it allows me to keep myself up on the latest and greatest in consumer technology which i truly believe eventually bleeds in one form or another into the Enterprise- if it provides values to the user.

So for the last year and a half i have been blogging about the enterprise and how companies can and should leverage technologies and trends in the consumer space-many of these i find out about on Techcrunch. I have often thought about the news i had read back in 2006- but figured since i was doing such a wonderful job covering the space- Arrington didn't feel he could compete with me (this is when you fall over laughing hysterically of course!).

Well the time is now I guess and TechCrunchIT just launched with Steve Gillmor, Editor and Nik Cubrilovic as Co-Editor. From their about page:

TechCrunching the Enterprise

TechCrunchIT (TCIT) is the newest blog in the TechCrunch network. TCIT is dedicated to obsessively profiling products and companies in the Enterprise Technology space. TCIT aims to promote an understanding of emerging and existing Enterprise technologies and to analyze their commercial, social, and consumer impacts.

This new blog features a range of Enterprise-related news and analysis including applications, open standards, platforms, cloud computing, microenterprises, customer experience, legacy enterprise, social media, information management and software among other subjects. TCIT coverage includes profiles and first-person guest blogs from the people leading Enterprise Technology innovation – to further personalize the Enterprise space for the trade and consumers.

The target audience is not necessarily for early adopters or geeks but for technology and business leaders—decision makers, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and influencers.

I am looking forward to the coverage (although the first few posts are a bit bla).

Folksonomies and Taxonomies in the Enterprise- My eBook Advocating a Hybrid Approach

2008-06-17T23:45:00.000-07:00

So to date- my favorite feedback on my ebook on Folksonomies and Taxonomies in the Enterprise that was launched on Sunday for the start of the Special Library Association (SLA) conference in Seattle was from a fellow co-worker. In her email she congratulated me on a job well done, that the ebook looked great and that "Maybe you can get someone to animate your character and you can get her to do some of your work for you?" Oh boy...only if i could!

I have been on the road for what seems like ages- conference season is at hand, Semantic Technologies conference, Internet Retailer and now Special Library Association- awesome stuff but boy am i behind- if only i could get my ebook avatar to indeed give me a hand.

This ebook is nothing like i have seen been produced by Factiva/Dow Jones in the 8+ years i have been here. My marketing project manager for this ebook, Kelly Minervini did a spectacular job with putting it together and i am extremely grateful to her as well as the rest of the folks that worked on the team to get this out- it is beautifully designed and laid out, fun to read and provides a great description of my thoughts around the hybrid options around Enterprises leveraging hybrid approaches to Folksonomies and Taxonomies as part of their information strategy.

This ebook is laid out as a “Cookbook” in an effort to help readers find the best “recipe” for their enterprise metadata needs. It is divided into chapters and subheads, each titled with a play on words about the art of cooking. We wanted to make it a fun piece for the audience to read, so it contains cooking/food illustrations as they relate to the taxonomy/folksonomy theory described.

If you have been reading my blog for a while, you know that social tagging is a topic i am very interested in as it relates to information delivery and organization.

The ebook discusses:

The business value of a taxonomy/folksonomy and how you can deploy a solution that will grow with an organization
The impact of social networking tools on the enterprise
The governance tools that can be or should be applied
How to (and if you really should) merge folksonomies with existing taxonomies
Best practices
Common challenges and obstacles

Some of the key messages and take-aways i was trying to illustrate:

The taxonomy versus folksonomy issue is not an “either/or” debate, but an opportunity for mutual progress. By combining the virtues of each approach into a working hybrid model, the enterprise can achieve its goal: a user-friendly system that encourages collaboration and makes information easier to find.
Good content management tools are not necessarily those with the most features or the greatest power, but those that encourage participation by being easy to use.
There is no one right way to incorporate a folksonomy into an enterprise. Instead, there are levels of engagement ranging from free and loose social tagging with little supervision to closely monitored tagging built around a tightly controlled core taxonomy. By precisely identifying your goals, you can more effectively determine the balance between community freedom and centralized control that is right for your enterprise.
Today, the state of enterprise folksonomies is comparable to the state of corporate intranets and portals a decade ago – a learn-as-you-go period of trial-and-error experimentation.
There is no end to the possibilities of a hybrid approach to enterprise taxonomies and folksonomies. In fact, the important conclusions are not the ones the ebook draw, but the ones that the reader reaches after careful consideration of their enterprise needs and ambitions.

You can download the ebook here - all download forms come directly to me, so i am not going to spam you. You will get an automatic thank you note from me. If you want to contact me directly please email me at daniela.barbosa{@}dowjones.com

Thanks again to all the great folks that helped me in finalizing this ebook and for Dow Jones for the opportunity to publish this it!

Semantic Technologies Conference Coverage Wrap up

2008-05-29T18:42:00.000-07:00

The fourth annual Semantic Technology Conference took place in San Jose, California from May 18th-22nd. It was the first SemTech conference that i have attended but i have been watching SemTech output for about the last three years so i certainly was primed for it. With all the Semantic Web buzz lately i was fairly certain that the conference was going to definitely be worth my time. I wasn't disappointed.

I had the privilege of attending both the full conference and workshops as well as working the exhibit booth for Synaptica the taxonomy and metadata management tool that i am the Business Development Manager for at Dow Jones. Many of our existing customers use Synaptica to build and maintain business taxonomies, thesauri, name catalogs, authority files etc. that become cornerstones of their semantic activities.

In this post, i will outline some of the tools that i and others used to 'socialize' the physical conference as well as outline some of coverage i have been collecting over the last week to provide my readers and many customers who could not make it to the conference a good overview of what happened. According to conference organizers there was an increase of 30% from the previous year and in my next post i will write a bit more about the attendees and why I am particularly interested in semantic technologies and believe my clients should be as well.

Being in the 'cloud' while at the conference>>>

I attend a lot of local bay area conferences where technology on the stage is highlighted and the technology in our hands is used to connect, discuss, share and socialize. I also however attend a lot of 'corporate' conferences where the conference rooms have no WIFI, they hand out 30lbs of paper as conference collateral (with presentations that NEVER match up with the ones the speaker is doing!) and the only connections we make are either by being scanned at the booth or doing the ritual business card trading ceremony. As to be expected the SemTech crowd was in the know and the conference coordinators did their best to accommodate.

During SemTech many attendees took advantage of tools like

Twitter (here is a view using Summize.com and the tags we loosely agreed on #semtech08 or #semtech2008 (and by default were always alerted as to where the post session drinking was happening or which rooms had power strips!)
del.icio.us tags like semtech08 or semtech2008 to tag web content during and post session presentations
Of course the darling of the semantic web, Twine with a collaborative Semantic Technology Conference Twine (unfortunately at this time you need to be a member- drop me a line if you need an invite daniela.barbosa [at] dowjones.com).
Flickr to tag and post photos
One of my favorite ways that thoughts were shared in 'real tine' was Nico Adam's Seesmic session reviews- it was like i was almost there at the sessions i missed!

All and all the social interacting in the 'cloud' was not only useful but also great for furthering engaging with like minded people, many who i hope i will remain connected to.

So the 'conversation' back channels and the hallway conversations were great but what about the Conference sessions themselves?>>>

The sessions were a combination of keynotes, tutorials, industry sidebars (Finance, Health, Govt), and 'use/case study' presentations. They ranged from introductory business sessions to Technology advanced sessions so there was plenty for everyone- and some slots turned into a dilemma for me to decide which way to turn.

Although all the presentation slide decks are being made available to conference attendees (and many presenters are also publishing their own)- there really was no recording on the sessions (although the conference coordinators did tell me that some sessions were recorded via audio and they are checking the files to see which ones are publishable to attendees) [my personal opinion is to make everything open to the public- but i am a natural born sharer ;-)

I did manage to convince the kind Eric Franzen one of the main conference coordinators to allow me to video tape two sessions that Christine Connors from Dow Jones did- one titled Semantic Coding at 120mph that focused on some of the semantic work Dow Jones is doing as part of the products and services we offer (she is our Director of Semantic Technology Solutions) and the second one the Final KeyNote Panel about bringing Semantic Technologies Back to Business which i have embedded below:

Here is some other coverage from the conference that you might find interesting:

Alex Iskold Founder, CEO of AdaptiveBlue and a regular contributor to ReadWriteWeb on Semantic Web topics and was on the The Rising Stars of the Semantic Web: A Status Report and Future Survey panel that David Scott Lewis moderated has two great write-ups as part of his coverage.

An overview of the "Semantic Venture Panel: Investor Opportunities and Pitfalls" session. The panel featured Stephen Hall from Vulcan Capital, Eghosa Omoigui from Intel Capital and Amanda Reed from Palomar Ventures.
An overview of the "Taking Semantic Technology to the Masses" session. The panel was moderated by Carla Thomson from Guidewire Group and featured Josh Dilworth from Porter Novelli, Tom Tague, who heads the Calais initiative at Reuters, and Mark Johnson, who is a product manager at Powerset.

Ivan Herman the Semantic Web Activity Lead for the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) who was on the Final KeyNote Panel, posted on his personal blog a wrap up post of the sessions that highlights some of the sessions that he attended and some of his own thoughts on what attendees should bring back from the conference - the bottom line is that it is not about just talk anymore the buzz is real and companies are in the marketplace with semantic technologies solutions.

John Breslin a researcher and adjunct lecturer at DERI, NUI Galway, Ireland in the areas of the Semantic Web and social software who i was very please to meet in person and spend some time with speaking about DataPortability covered some of of the sessions including:

Overview of Nova Spivacks Keynote presentation on "Experience from the Cutting Edge of the Semantic Market" where Nova provided an overview of Twine (many people raised their hands in the crowd as existing users which was excepted). I was please to see Nova also speak about some enterprise market opportunities for Twine- for companies to do knowledge sharing etc. (who doubts that is a Twine play?)
Overview of Eric Miller from Zepheira talk on "The Next Generation of Semantic Development Tools" outlining Zepheira's new service REMIX.
John Breslin, Stefan Decker and Uldis Bojars also presented a tutorial on The Future of Social Networks on the Internet: The Need for Semantics and have posted their slides on slideshare. I am really bummed i missed this session because i had signed up for the Ontology tutorial because i thought all sessions were going to be video archived.

Carla Thomson's summary of the panel she participated on Taking Semantic Technology to the Masses in this post Geekery Fiefdoms at SemTech in which she quotes Tom Tague from Reuters "Thomas coined a term I’m stealing that sums up the semantics space perfectly: geekery fiefdom. It’s a great description of a sector that is striving to achieve traction in the consumer space, but continues to pepper its messaging with semantic buzzwords and discussions of the plumbing behind it all. As Thomas quoted one of his customers in the financial sector, “If you have to explain it, I don’t want it.”

Beyond all the buzz, the instructive tutorials and the cool demos however there was little mainstream press or even 'mainstream' bloggers, or analysts covering the conference as David Scott Lewis says in a comment he left on Ivan Herman's post....perhaps next year but until then i have lots of presentations that i need to download of sessions that i missed that either sound interesting or that i heard were very good.

Data Availabity, Data Connections, Data Data Everywhere

2008-05-11T10:10:00.000-07:00

In the last week, MySpace announced its Data Availability project a way for members to share profile data with other social and community sites across the Web and that in addition it had also officially joined the DataPortability Project. Then Facebook launched Facebook Connect which will allow users to “connect” their Facebook identity, friends and privacy to any website. On Monday according to according to TechCrunch (i will be at the announcement event and received an invite almost 10 days ago which i am assuming is related) Google is due to announce “Friend Connect”. Those are the big names you all know, and then there are others that you might also be familiar with like Digg and Plaxo and hundreds of other smaller players that are addressing Data Portability and are 'talking' and 'doing'.

Of course there has been a lot of discussion on the internet, in chat rooms and in discussion lists about what this all means- too much to read as usual which is overwhelming and i am trying really hard to find new voices to me that are discussing these issues.

Are all or any of these vendors with their 'big' announcements perfectly addressing DataPortability project goals? No- there is a lot of work that still needs to be done to ensure that there are standards and this is not about one vendor- but these are needed steps.

Do i think that the big 'vendors' are feeling the pressure by users, technologists and advocates to evolve their user data models sooner then later because of the Data Portability Project and the visibility we have managed to gain over the last six months- Yes.

If these vendors had wanted to 'perfectly' address it would they be able to go to the DataPortability Project Wiki and pull a check list? No- not yet since those technical specifications are still being developed but we certainly are happy to have the vendors continue to participate in those discussions so we can finalize and publish the DataPortability Best Practices (open to all).

The DataPortability Project - six months strong- that i have been involved in since the beginning has done what i think is an amazing job at moving the conversation from the tech zone here in the Bay area which has been going on for years- to the global 'mainstream' (although many of the existing communities have a large global presence of course). Call it timing, call it good marketing, call it luck- call it what you wish- i like to say it has to do with a need...a need by users, vendors and technologists to have one forum to discuss and act on the various issues and opportunities around user data and the usage of that data (the 'Graph').

So how do all the different announcements by the MySpace, Facebook and Google differ or are the same- not all of the details have been published so it will be interesting to see them all. i am looking forward to the outcome of the exercises that Kaliya the 'Identity Woman' is proposing for this weeks upcoming Internet Identity Workshop in which they will be comparing the 'openness' of these announcements. I unfortunately won't be at the Workshop but will be attending Thursday's Data Sharing Summit.

I am just so happy to be in the middle of this sprint to action by vendors, this public cry for control from the users and with all the community leaders that have been working for a long time in this space as well as the large amount of new voices that come with the DataPortability Project- including my own.

Michael Pick who made the original DataPortability Project viral video did another video this week that highlights those vendors that are involved in the conversation.

DataPortability - Join The Conversation from Smashcut Media on Vimeo.

i (heart) RSS. You Should As Well

2008-05-01T10:16:00.000-07:00

I like the idea of evangelizing something for a whole day and today May 1st- beyond being May Day (which celebrates the social and economic achievements of the labor movement) seems to be also RSS Awareness Day via rssday.org. As a celebration and re-engagement with my RSS feeds i promised to do a little RSS feed gardening on my Goggle

Reader.

Here are some of my previous thoughts on RSS which stands for Really Simple Syndication- a really simple and powerful way to consume and publish content.

Do you have people on your team that you still need to convince (or educate) on RSS- here is a quick video to start the conversation.

Semantic Technologies in the Enterprise Roundtable Event- May 22th in Palo Alto

2008-04-30T15:28:00.000-07:00

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.

Photo Categorization Different Needs for Different Users

2008-04-30T09:17:00.000-07:00

Over the last few days i have come across two separate conversation about taxonomies on Flickr that i thought were interesting. Flickr is a photo (and now video) site that has become increasingly popular yet i still run into people frequently who don't know about flickr (yes, shocks me as well). When i ask what they use to share pictures they mention sites like Snapfish or Kodak Easyshare were the model is still more share and buy then organize. Flickr allows users, especially Pro users who pay $24.95 per year to use a variety of ways to 'organize' their photos by using collections, sets and tags.

John Suler has an interesting project going on using Flickr about The CyberPsychology of Flickr and his recent addition was about Categorizing Images which came with the photo i include in this post. The project is to encourage discussion on how "people in flickr use photographs and images to express themselves, converse with each other, and form relationships as well as groups" and this addition was focused on how flickr users categorize their pictures.

In talking about personal 'taxonomies' he writes: "The categories you start off with may not work well later on. And the way you organize images for your own personal archive may be different than the collections you create for showing your images to others, as in flickr." In my world of taxonomies, we call this audience centric views- different audiences either by user type, location (e.g. US/UK), or usage purpose, etc.. Well built taxonomies allow this and robust taxonomy management tools enable this. Here is a paper on how the National Library Board of Singapore uses Audience-Centric Taxonomy: Using Taxonomies to Support Heterogeneous User Communities'

The other topic was Keywording for biology/taxonomy/nature photographers using Aperture which i have not used but seems to have a more robust keyword management tool allowing a hierarchy to be built. In the thread Stewart Macdonald highlights one of the things that for example content editors benefit from when a hierarchal taxonomy is presented that allows selection when tagging and that can also automatically expand the user-selected terms using related terms from their taxonomy system (and it does not have to exclusive of free text tags either!).

Stewart writes in response to someone who suggests that he just add keywords and then use search to find photos: "The hierarchy is important to me. If I didn't have nested keywords, I'd have to assign the following keywords individually to any pics of crocodiles:
animal
vertebrate
reptile
crocodile
Crocodylus
Crocodylus porosus

Being able to just assign 'Crocodylus porosus' and have all the 'upstream' keywords included too is a bit quicker.

I am always trying to find 'consumer' examples to illustrate concepts- that although might be different in a corporate environment still help the user understand some of the benefits- so these things and flickr- delight me.

Photo credit : jsuler

So Your Company Profile is in the Top Ten on LinkedIn What Does it Mean?

2008-04-21T23:05:00.000-07:00

Through a Twitter message from @Infosourcer a new twitter follower of mine who is the Manager of Internet Research at Deloitte (who also have @DeloitteLLP)- a pointer to a post on the LinkedIn Blog about Top 10 Company Profiles on LinkedIn (April 2008).

So what does it mean to be one of the Top 10 Company Profiles views on LinkedIn?

do they have the biggest ego maniacs?
are their employees being recruited the most?
do they have the most interesting people working for them?
do they have the most social media enabled employees that are pushing their online profiles?
are they companies that most people want to sell into?
are they the most socially connected companies?
are they just purging from one another?
are they just bigger then everyone ?

I certainly wasn't surprise to see any of these companies and i am sure size attributes to it but i would love to see a comparison graph of how successfull the top 10 profiled viewed companies compare in using LinkedIn to recruit new employees as well. I did a quick search in the job board and found the following numbers of job posted by the top 10:

GE (and General Electric)- 4
Deloitte- 3
Cisco- 236
HP- 22
Oracle- 337
Google- 154
Microsoft - 113
Accenture- 31
IBM- 3

I Knew There was a Reason I Never Started Smoking, I Was Waiting for Something Better

2008-04-16T22:03:00.000-07:00

This article over at paidcontent.org Blog Reading: Kind Of Like Getting A Nicotine Fix caught my eye this morning because as you probably guessed it, i am obsessive about reading my blogs with the various tools i use and particularly checking blog aggregating services like Techmeme . Of course, there is nothing like a story about bloggers and blog readers to get a blogger excited (how many times can i say blog and get away with it?)

As the post on paidcontent.org states the study was conducted with only a few people (15) and 11 of them are bloggers to boot - but some interesting findings.

I see the use of blogs continuously growing behind corporate firewalls as a new way to communicate with employees and across groups, online newspapers like The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal among most of the other biggies, are also pushing out blogs. And it seems that they are having some success (just based on simple comment engagement that i see) so it is important to understand the behavior that drives people to read blogs if you want to make them successful. Some items from the report:

study participants who labeled their blog-reading time as “chilling out” and “doing nothing,”>>yeah i am chilling right now so there has to be some 'pleasure' involved don't make your post read like a dissertation
one describing his impulse to read blogs as similar to his cigarette habit. >> sure i get a bit jumpy when i can't check my favs, some people have America Idol- i got my blogs so put that in your pipe and smoke it
the blog readers typically professed little stress about information overload in trying to keep up with their favorite blogs. When they got behind on reading posts, they just skipped the old ones. >>yep love that 'read all' feature on Google reader- free me please and please recycle that big pile of newspapers in the corner of my kitchen as well!
Habitual reading can become potentially detrimental when people disengage mentally and don’t think very critically about what they’re reading. >>not any different from print media where people believe what they read because it is 'published'

Most importantly i think is this comment by one of the study authors Eric Baumer:

I think this finding helps to open up the design space in terms of tools to support blog reading. Rather than focusing on helping readers wade through a deluge of information content, one could envision tools that focus on the reader’s relationship with the blogger or allowing more fluid, nuanced interactions between bloggers and readers.

Bingo- remember years ago we were having conversations about whether a blog was a blog if it didn't allow comments? Comments now are an essential part of building relationships with users. And the evolution of blogging will continue- there are going to be many new tools to engage readers with the content and each other, things like:

using alternative ways to push content like using Twitter to 'publish' posts
Matching the readers 'Attention' to specific blog posts (see search example on RAM and Whiskey blog)- so the first posts the visitor sees when visiting a blog are the most relevant to them based on their current attention profile
allowing readers to comment beyond text for example with video replies
allowing 'real-time' chat on blogs- once you post (i just had this experience today with Tangler with a DataPortability logo chat at the bottom of this page not a blog but the concept is an interesting one especially for heavily trafficked and commented site)

What other ways have you seen out there or can imagine that will change how 'blogs' engage their readers?

Picture of the Portuguese 'SG' cigarette by lanier67.

Bring it on- the Data that is

2008-04-15T23:03:00.000-07:00

Infectious Greed by Paul Kedrosky is one of my daily reads and i also follow him on twitter which i always recommend to people especially my Dow Jones Colleagues who are interested in the markets and want to get value from Twitter besides how many cups of coffee someone had (although he like all us regular twitter folk also twitts personal messages often).

Today he has some good food for thought with his 'Bring on the Data Blogs' post. He writes:

I am, however, increasingly fascinated with capturing and incorporating useful, alternative data sources from the edge. You see some of that beginning to happen via Twitter (and I'm advising an interesting company doing work here), but there are all sorts of opportunities at the confluence of unstructured data, companies like QL9 and Kirix, webcams and video analytics, and, yes, blogs. While I've long incorporated meta-data from blogs in my thinking, I want to make it more explicit. I want blogs about data, sites that reshape and repurpose data as their central purpose.

I just had this conversation the other day that we should be doing more with our web presence beyond blog posts and contextual links and 'widgets'- the topic of the conversation was putting together an unique Synaptica web presence for our community- something i have been advocating since day one in my role as Business Development Manager earlier this year. The word 'blog' was being used during the call (and there will be a blog element) so of course i turned into my usual snotty self and commented- 'well a blog would have been cool two years ago-we need to do more and while we are at it eat our own dog food'. woof woof growl growl- i say.

DataPortability Logo selection open for public voting

2008-04-15T20:28:00.000-07:00

In early March the DataPortability Group received a cease and desist letter from Red Hat that the DataPortability Logo was too similar (identical, in their words) to their Fedora Logo. Instead of fighting it, after discussing with the community we decided to run a contest to select a new DataPortability Logo.

In addition to having the honor to be the designer of the new DataPortability logo and to help the community create an important Trust Mark for the emerging Data Portability conversation, there are also many prizes from companies who support the DataPortability initiative and have donated prizes to be awarded to the winner including an iPhone, Ad space on Techcrunch, cash and more. We had over 400 submissions, which have been narrowed down to 15 finalists over the course of the last month.

The idea is that the DataPortability Logo will be the center piece of the DataPortability Brand and will be used on blog sidebars, websites and projects to show support for the DataPortability Project.

So Vote Now! The public voting begins on April 15, at 12pm (PST), and ends on Friday, April 18, at 11:59pm (PST).

Some people are critiquing that the DataPortability Group has been too busy dealing with the logo contest instead of doing 'real' work towards data portability. Well some people really have been busy since this process has been very time consuming and Elias one of the leaders of the "logo gang" writes about some of the project processes in this post- at times a challenging technical and organizational project that i am super impressed these folks pulled off within the time lines set! Congrats and Job Well Done!

From the outside i can see how someone might say that the group is not doing much beyond a contest for a new logo-we are a young group (established in late Nov 07)-but i have had the pleasure to see from the 'inside' (which is really public and open to participation!)- there is other work going on and very passionate people who are indeed working towards making data portable while continuing in the establishment of governance and process for the group. Setting up processes is something that just needs to be done as well and this logo contest project in addition to delivering a project that we wanted to do with the community, provided us with some real use cases for getting projects started and completed as DataPortability deliverables-let's hope that some of the lessons learned will hyper-power the next few projects.

What are you waiting for? Vote Now!

Conferences, Events, Travel and Maximizing My Time

2008-04-12T11:29:00.000-07:00

So i have been up since 7am on a beautiful Saturday morning trying to organize my calendar for the next three months and i am totally frustrated. Trying to organize my calendar for events and four conferences that have four online activity calendars/schedulers with four separate logins, plus i need to make hotel and flight reservations as well as appointments so i can maximize my time at these events. Urgh---Who is going to fix this???

Things are certainly getting better and below i highlight one way i am maximizing some of interoperability of web based calendaring using features like iCalendar but i am still having to do a lot of manual work that requires multiple logins and at minimum first time setup on all these services. So of course this activity i am doing this morning is silly because i am reviewing/updating my Outlook calendar (where my work colleagues go to when they need to book appointments so by default my base) , my Google Calendar, my Upcoming.org , my Dopplr plus the calendar on the fridge for the hubby (not for a long while will that one be fixed!). DataPortability anyone?

I invest time and money in all the conferences and events i go to, so i certainly want to maximize the ones i am attending so i can network and meet with as many people as possible. So after spending some time this morning trying to figure out the best way to not only manage my own life but make myself available, as a first step i have created a Google public calendar and using the Calendar embeddable feature i added it to my blog (see on the right side menu).

On my Google public calendar i put the following description:

I am the Business Development Manager for Synaptica and Taxonomy Services at Dow Jones. Part of the Dow Jones Client Solutions team, i am responsible for business development for Synaptica our taxonomy and metadata management tool and work very closely with our Taxonomy Services team.

I am as one of the original co-founders of the DataPortability Project : www.dataportability.org

Please contact me directly at daniela.barbosa@dowjones.com if you would like to schedule a meeting with me at anytime or come find me at the event- this is what i look like in case you are looking for me!

Then i added all my events. Because most of them are on upcoming.org a service i already use often, it was very easy to do because i clicked on "I'm Attending" then clicked to add to my Google Calendar. Then I added personal notes as needed about my attendance at that event so hopefully i can schedule some meetings etc.

It would be awesome if ALL the conference program calendars that i need to fill out for each conference session i want to attend could be portable and then easily included in the details of each calendar entry for people to see which sessions i am attending to get a better idea of my interests. The Semantic Technology Conference Scheduler (what else would you expect from this conference) gets me one step closer.

Hope to see you at one of these events and conferences!

Today On ReadWriteWeb I have the honor of being named one of the Seven Leading Corporate Social Media Evangelists

2008-04-11T18:15:00.000-07:00

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!

A Podcast listen on Libraries and the Semantic Web

2008-04-07T23:39:00.000-07:00

Back in February i stumbled across a blog that i thought had a good purpose and blogged about the Practical Advice being offered on that Blog focused on Library staff on How to Learn About the Semantic Web. The blog is titled Semantic Library Blog and it is authored by Fiona Bradley an Australian Librarian working for IFLA in the Netherlands.

It seems like i wasn't the only one that found it. Yesterday on my walk to the beach i tuned in to what Fiona had to say during her interview with Richard Wallis at Talis. I enjoyed their conversation and thought the point Fiona made that the cataloging community will be the first in the Library to have to deal with Semantic Web is probably on the ball.

She also posted an expanded post on why she got interested in Semantic Web as a follow-up to the podcast in which she writes:
Beyond these issues, I’m interested in what’s next. I think libraries are a natural fit for the Semantic Web because of its emphasis on RDF, and data and metadata. In some ways it’s a return to what we do best - organising information, provenance, databases.

I am a big fan of what Talis has been doing in the Semantic Web community including their talking with Talis Podcasts and their Nodalities blog with Danny Ayers' This Weeks Semantic Web Posts and always enjoy their often focus on the Library world. (and ok i am very big fan of Danny Ayers (Talis Community manager and his DataPortability and Me Video submission to our project!).

Bonus: From This Weeks Semantic Web Lesson, Teaching a Six Year Old About Triples (not to be confused with Triplets- and why every parent should buy their kids a whiteboard)

Semantic Web Experimental Mashup

2008-04-03T21:30:00.000-07:00

Via Peter Reiser's blog a pointer to this very cool experimental mashup using Wikipedia, Open Calais, Goggle and Amazon that demonstrates how to use semantic based term extraction and the Amazon API to search for relevant books for a specific topic like for example i used Dow Jones which brought back books on the Wall Street Journal which is one of the Dow Jones properties.

From Peter's Blog: How it works

1. The search input is sent to wikipedia.org
2. The respective wikipedia page is sent to the Open Calais service to extract the terms
3. The extracted terms are sent to google, and get enriched by related terms using the google labs service "google suggest".
4. the terms are sent to the Amazon API and the relevant books from Amazon are displayed

A simple use case for this could be a blog widget that would semantically extracted information from posts, like for example on this post an Amazon widget would present books on the Semantic Web, Google and APIs with my affiliate ID embedded so if a reader wanted to purchase books related to the subject of the specific post they could.

OpenID Status Check: Are There Premium Services Using OpenID?

2008-04-03T18:22:00.000-07:00

OpenID is a key emerging open standard for online identity. A couple weeks ago i posted about how the Political Market Prediction Section of CNN Supports OpenID which i thought was the first implementation of OpenID in a main stream media site and since no one refuted maybe i was right?

Today over at ReadWriteWeb a great writeup and resource titled OpenID Status Check: A Guide to Getting and Using Your OpenID gives you all you need to get up to speed on what is going on in the OpenID space. It is awesome to see such great adoption across the space and usability issues being addressed.

So are there any premium content providers that are using OpenID? By premium i mean having a monthly, yearly subscription fee to access content and services online. I took a look OpenID Site Directory and saw that some services like for example Flickr that provide premium accounts allow users to utilize OpenID - so will we see more services that have a freemium and premium models using OpenID? And will we see it with the online content providers who still want to maintain a user registration model with different levels of access?

Never experienced an UnConference? Now is the time Data Sharing Workshop and Summit

2008-03-31T22:48:00.000-07:00

One of the first bay area tech events i remember attending when i moved to San Francisco three year ago was an unconference event. An unconference is a conference where the content of the sessions is created and managed by the participants (generally day-by-day during the course of the event) rather than by organizers in advance of the event. Honestly i was skeptical of the whole idea because i come from a corporate conference culture of "we must wear black slacks and white shirts so we can look uniformed at the booth" (thank goodness that was recently dropped!) and sit in the audience and listen carefully. What i have learned however after attending a few of them is that unconference events are a great way to build communities and get things done!

One of the people who has been extremely valuable to have as part of the DataPortability Project that i am involved in is Kaliya Hamlin who is an old pro at building communities in the tech world. Since 2005, Kaliya has been facilitating the Internet Identity Workshop and has received considerable praise for helping achieve real results, including the incredible progress of OpenID and other user-centric identity projects. She along with others in the Identity Community have an open invitation to all for the upcoming Data Sharing Workshop on April 18th and19th and the Data Sharing Summit on May 15th.

Why should you consider attending?

The primary goal is to provide a gathering space for everyone to work together to build consensus around and get adoption of emerging dataportability standards. Both events are part of an ongoing collaboration with DataPortability.org, which we all hope to evolve into a larger-scale Data Portability conference in the near future.

Here are the details from their event listing:

The Data Sharing Workshop (April 18th and 19th)
As a first step, the Workshop will provide a gathering space for different groups to have in-depth discussions about emerging data sharing standards and initiatives, and continue ongoing work by establishing Action Items to be carried out at subsequent events.

The Workshop will be held at the SFSU downtown campus in cooperation with the SFSU Institute for the Next Generation Internet add it to your Upcoming if you plan on attending.

The Data Sharing Summit (May 15th )
The Summit will take place a month later, providing enough time to further develop the ideas discussed at the Workshop while still being able to track progress. With the larger venue, participants from the Workshop will be able to share their ideas with a broader audience.

The Summit will be at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Ca, immediately following the Internet Identity Workshop, allowing those in the user-centric identity community to participate in the Summit. Add it to your upcoming.

Additional information is available on the Data Sharing Summit Wiki.

If you have any questions about any of these events, or would like to get involved as a volunteer or sponsor, please contact Laurie Rae at laurierae@datasharingsummit.com

See you there!

Blog post Image by jdlasica

Semantic Web in Niche Markets Not about Content but the Connections

2008-03-31T21:43:00.000-07:00

In a recent must read post on ReadWriteWeb on Semantic Web Patterns: A Guide to Semantic Technologies Alex Iskold writes "People simply do not care that a product is built on the Semantic Web, all they are looking for is utility and usefulness." Are they also willing to pay for access if the utility and usefulness meets their needs- i would venture to say yes.

Found via a new favorite blog of mine, John Breslin's Cloudlands a new website for Art fans that goes beyond traditional museum, journals and events calendars by providing a platform that users can use to create a personal lens into the Art worlds that interest them . I have not tried it myself but MutualArt.com sounds like a prefect application of "the promise" for the semantic web and perhaps? it is the first 'semantic app' that is collecting a membership fee (paying members at $300 per year).

They have a good short overview video on their web page but they don't allow you to embed or even link to it directly (or at least i couldn't figure it out so it is on the right side of the page). For Art lovers this seems like a great service because it seems to provide a very targeted service to learn and live Art.

The target audience is probably a well engaged one that would gladly pay for a premium service that helps them organize their commitments in the art world. What makes it semantic? According to their press release: The MutualArt.com site is powered by proprietary state-of-the-art semantic Web technology, uniquely filtering vast quantities of diverse art information, so that only information relevant to users' tastes and interests is delivered to them. They claim to have done two years of research and development so it isn't a simple website and probably will indeed provide a valuable resource to aggregate and make sense of the art news and events. They are claiming to have the largest collection of art related articles on the web, social features and events calendars to deliver information that is important to the specific user.

A good case study for media providers that have niche markets and increase commoditization of the content they provide? Crain's New York called it "A new Web Service promises to do for art what the Bloomberg terminal did for finance" perhaps one day in the future they will review financial niche services and say "a new service that promised to do for for finance what MutualArt.com did for Art".

Staged Debates on Taxonomies

2008-03-13T21:34:00.000-07:00

I am always looking for good resources to use as quick introduction to topics that i can share and videos tend to be one of my favorite things to reference if i can find them so i keep a handy list of topics that i can send off to people like Taxonomy Management Tools, DataPortability introduction, RDFa introduction, a Case study titled From Taxonomy to Ontology and a Simple Semantic Web Intro among others i can quickly reference.

This evening i found these videos from the 2005 Content Management Pros Summit where Theresa Regli and Seth Earley debate the pros and cons of various taxonomy issues by flipping a coin to see which side they will take debating each issue. Both of them can obviously argue both sides of the coin because they have heard it all from their customers and i think the format works well and is instructive on the topic:

Loren Feldman interviewing Chris Saad from DataPortability Group

2008-03-11T22:34:00.000-07:00

Loren Feldman of 1938 Media is quite a character and a bit controversial at times some of his classics include Stop Crying, Anti-Social Media, and the oh so classic Gabe goes Geek Hollywood.

Here Feldman talks to Chris Saad founding member and chair of the DataPortability Group. I admit i was waiting for a what's "a little guy like you running a big movement like this" comment (sorry Chris ;-) but this is a straight up great conversation on what the DataPortability Group is about.

Of course only in a Loren Feldman video does the 'user' become 'Joe Blow'- which of course lead me on a chase of where the phrase 'Joe Blow' originates. i found some simple definitions and that it occurs mostly in the States and Australia (hence why Chris was so comfortable with it!) but not too much on its origins which seems to go back to the 1940s to describe the average guy. I grew up in north Jersey so it was a common phrase i heard often.

The WI-FI analogy that Chris uses at the beginning and towards the end of the video to describe what regulars 'users'- sorry the regular "joe blows'- should actually think of when they eventually see the DataPortability logo on a site is a very effective analogy. When we see a WI-FI sign on cafe window, we don't think of all the complicated protocols that enables WI-FI to happen- we know that it works, what our security options are (well we should) and that there are standard access protocols for all WI-FI networks. DataPortability aims to do the same for your data on the web.