November 30, 2003
knight ridder on tribe.net and blogging...
Editor & Publisher :: Knight Ridder's Web Focus: Local, Local, Local
By Carl Sullivan
Interview with Hilary A. Schneider, president and CEO of San Jose, Calif.-based Knight Ridder Digital (KRD)
...As we move into 2004, what are the biggest challenges facing KRD?
HS: The challenge is to keep growing, both share and revenue in existing businesses -- and expand into new businesses -- in ways that are smart for Knight Ridder. We have aggressive plans for next year. On the classified front, we want to grow volume of recruiter listings and leverage our increased job seeker traffic from MSN and AOL. We also plan to continue to grow automotive listings share. And while we focused a lot of attention on our largest sites in 2003, next year we will bring that expertise to all of our sites to drive audience and revenue in our community markets. We successfully rolled out several site redesigns this year, and will continue those efforts in 2004.
In addition, we're exploring how social networking can power listings -- especially private party -- through our investment in Tribe.net. We think there's a tremendous opportunity here to build a business around the intersection of communities of interest, self-publishing, and person-to-person listings.
What news sources do you consult regularly -- online and offline? And what do you think of blogs -- hype or industry-changing?
HS: Living in the Bay Area, I read the San Jose Mercury News, and regularly jump onto the site to check out breaking news throughout the day. I also read The Wall Street Journal.
As for blogging. I think it's a fascinating development. We have two blogs on SiliconValley.com: Dan Gillmor's eJournal and Good Morning Silicon Valley. As newspaper companies, we have to ask ourselves: what does it mean to allow a reporter to publish under the media brand directly to the Web -- without any editing? This is different than traditional editorial workflow, which has multiple levels of editorial checks and balances. To provide transparency to users, blogs should be clearly labeled: what is edited by us, what is written by us but published in real-time, and what is self-published by other users. The business model to sustain this kind of publishing is still to be determined, but to reference Tribe.net, we think user-generated content, powered by social networking, has potential to drive traffic, revenue, and listings in our local markets...
digital karma: innovations in ethics...
Vive le Canada : Online communities : distributed creativty
by Flick Harrison
...I'm currently taking part in an online conference, Eyebeam, which discusses distributed creativity, digital communities and networks. With reference to the arts specifically, but it's about the political implications of non-owned info / art and avoiding systems of control or disruptions. My section is 'Digital Karma: Innovations in Ethics'. Sound interesting? Check out:
An Online Forum
Presented by Eyebeam and Still Water @ UMaine Nov 12-Dec 19, 2003
Artists are organizing impromptu street actions by mobile phone, musicians are repurposing peer-to-peer applications for artistic ends, and programmers are distributing electronic toolkits to help artists leap from code to creation.
Distributed Creativity, Eyebeam's sixth annual online forum, investigates new paradigms for artmaking that take advantage of mobile and distributed technologies such as WiFi, Weblogs, Wikis rich Internet applications, voice over IP and social software.
Forum co-hosts, panelists and public participants from around the world, including Creative Commons, DATA, Fibreculture and Rhizome will discuss the artistic, legal, technical and social dynamics of creative networks small and large.
[Apparently, the results will be published in a book eventually]...
social intelligence design 2004...
Social Intelligence Design 2004
...SID 2004 is the third workshop on the subject of social intelligence design focused on the significance of information technology in our lives, work, home, and on the move. In this workshop we consider Social Intelligence (SI) as the ability for people to relate to, understand and interact effectively with others. Our particular concern is how SI is mediated through the use of new technologies.
Main Themes of SID-2004:
* Natural Interactions - covering theory, modelling and analytical frameworks that have been developed with Social Intelligence Design in mind, including situated computation, embodied conversational agents, sociable artifacts, socially intelligent robots.
* Communities - covering community media, communication patterns in online communities, knowledge-creating, network and anonymous communities.
* Collaboration Technologies and tools - covering innovations to support interactions within communities, covering a range from knowledge sharing systems, multi-agent systems and interactive systems.
* Application Domains - including design, workspaces, education, e-commerce, entertainment, digital democracy, digital cities, policy and business.
Intended Participants:
This workshop is intended for all who are concerned with the impact of advanced information and communication technologies on social intelligence, in particular, researchers, developers and designers of new ways of communicating enabled and supported by such technologies. The contributions will be published in the workshop proceedings...
November 29, 2003
social intelligence pentagon style...
Boston.com :: Pentagon seeing new keys to victory
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent
...WASHINGTON -- America's traditional approach to winning wars could become another casualty in Iraq as leading military strategists conclude that superior firepower is no longer the key to securing a durable peace.
A Pentagon paper, which is making the rounds to senior officials and was provided to the Globe, says that in the age of US military supremacy, "security = all else defense" -- a recognition that military power is only one item in a list of social, political, and economic tasks that are as important to victory, or even more so, than bombs, missiles, and guns. "War is more than combat, and combat is more than shooting," said retired Navy Admiral Arthur K. Cebrowski, director of force transformation for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. Cebrowski's office produced the paper.
While overwhelming military power will remain the pillar of national defense, officials are reaching the conclusion that the United States needs to place significantly more emphasis on ways to consolidate its victories, which now seem almost assured given the unmatched superiority of American land, air, and sea forces.
But achieving the kind of political victory that has proved elusive in Iraq and Afghanistan -- where popular and guerrilla opposition has raised concerns that the US invasions ultimately could end in defeat -- will depend on a much more holistic approach to war, strategists say.
The Pentagon report says a major element of success is the mastery of "social intelligence" by soldiers, diplomats, and aid workers schooled in the process of stabilizing chaotic societies, and possessing a working knowledge of local culture and customs.
"We must be able to look and operate deeply within societies," the paper says. Also described as critical are close relationships between the United States and international civilian and military authorities who will ultimately be responsible for securing the peace...
November 28, 2003
social intelligence...
Primates have social intelligence, and some say autonomous agents have social intelligence (see: Getting to Know Each Other - Artificial Social Intelligence for Autonomous Robots.)
Cantor and Kihlstrom (1987) redefined social intelligence to refer to "the individual's fund of knowledge about the social world."
And, at that intersection of social software, social networking, and knowledge management, one of the topic areas at The 2004 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology will be:
Social Networks and Social Intelligence
* Entertainment
* Knowledge Community Formation and Support
* Link Topology and Site Hierarchy
* Intelligent Wireless Web
* Social Networks Mining
* Theories of Small-World Web
* Ubiquitous Computing
* Ubiquitous Learning Systems
* Virtual and Web Communities
* Web-Based Cooperative Work
* Web Site Clustering
In the phenomenological dimension of social understanding - you could be me, but then again, I could be you. (^:
November 27, 2003
more MT spam vulnerabilities...
If you utilize Movable Type for your weblog this is mandatory reading:
Musings: More MT Spam Vulnerabilities
km and fons trompenaars...
VNUnet :: Reap the long-term rewards of knowledge management
by Michael Gubbins
...Knowledge management has previously been a big disappointment for many companies. What's changed now? The big problem with knowledge management (KM) has been lack of focus - lots of grand vision, little practicality. KM strategies now need to built on more secure foundations, says leading expert Fons Trompenaars, of Trompenaars Hampden-Turner.
He believes that at the heart of knowledge management is a misleadingly simple question: 'How do you extract meaning from all the data around you?'
That's not just a technical task; it also takes in issues like company attitudes and multiculturalism. To create practical business policies is difficult unless you have clear objectives. Trompenaars suggests companies look at tasks as business dilemmas to be reconciled: eg transnational solutions versus localised centres of excellence, or rewarding individual endeavours or collaborative teamwork.
'Companies need to ask what they can learn from mistakes and understand that erring and correcting are both part of the reconciliation process.'
Knowledge management is enshrining the process in business practice...
November 26, 2003
danah decoding @ nyt.com...
Danah Boyd speaks out on Friendster, social behaviors, online environments, and social architectures.
Mentioned in this article, in order of appearance:
danah boyd, Friendster, connected selves, Joi Ito, Sixdegrees, Jonathan Abrams, Burning Man, Pretendsters, Fakesters, Sarah Tuttle, Intel Research Anthropologist, Genevieve Bell, Tribe.net, Mark Pincus, Peter Lyman, and SIMS: School of Information Management and Systems, UC Berkeley.
The New York Times :: Decoding the New Cues in Online Society
By MICHAEL ERARD
...quote...
A SOCIOLOGIST among geeks and a geek among sociologists, Danah Boyd has 278 friends who link her to 1.1 million others.
So says Friendster.com, whose millions of members have transformed it from a dating site into a free-for-all of connectedness where new social rules are born of necessity. A 25-year-old graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley, Ms. Boyd studies Friendster, hovering above the fray with a Web log called Connected Selves (www .zephoria.org/snt) and interviewing Friendster users. Her irrepressible observations have made her a social-network guru for the programmers and venture capitalists who swarm around Friendster and its competitors.
"She's definitely a Pied Piper for a bunch of different people," said Joichi Ito, a high-tech venture capitalist who lives in Tokyo. "At the same time she, as an academic, is able to articulate what is going on in a way that the people building the tools rarely understand or can articulate."
Ms. Boyd explained Friendster this way: "It allows you to purposely say who the people in your world are and to allow them to see each other, through a connection of you." An individual registered at Friendster has a home page with photos, a brief profile and photos of people to whom they have agreed to link. That person can then browse his or her network or search it for dates or activity partners.
Ms. Boyd says that the real world has a set of properties, which she calls architectures. With its deceptively simple set of features, her thinking goes, Friendster bends or replaces all of the real-world architectures.
For instance, when two people speak to each other, they assume their conversation is fleeting, but e-mail and instant messaging, by making that conversation persistent, offer a new architecture. When two people greet each other on the street, neither can see (nor hope to grasp) the range of the other's social network. For that matter, no individual can see information about his or her own social network: who knows whom, and how...
...end quote...
notable judiths - judith bishop...
...Professor Judith Bishop joined the Department of Computer Science at the University of Pretoria in 1991 from University of Southampton after twelve years at the University of the Witwatersrand. She received a PhD on Code Generation and Structured Architectures from University of Southampton (1977). Dr. Bishop had sabbaticals at University of Cambridge (1980), University of Southampton(1986), the Software Engineering Institute in Pittsburgh (1994/5) and the University of Victoria (1999).
Judith Bishop's research interests are programming languages and distributed systems. Since the 1970s, she has worked on computer architecture, languages and operating systems, going through the days of Pascal, occam, Ada, Stack Machines, RISC machines, UNIX and specialised configurations systems such as Darwin. For the past seven years she has worked with Java, and now have a Microsoft Rotor Project based on C#.
Professor Bishop is a Mac fan and has used Apples since the early 1980s. She currently has three - a Powerbook, and two iMacs and is drooling for a new flat screen iMac. She also has two Wintels round and about ...
Dr. Bishop has published over 50 journal articles and international conference papers as well as thirteen books translated into six languages, including the best selling series of books, Java Gently. She guided many students and colleagues to present good papers and degrees.
Judith is the principal grant holder for the Polelo Project which is funded by the National Research Foundation and the SA-German cooperation agreement, a DTI THRIP grantholder with local company, Jay van Zyl, and Microsoft.
Dr. Bishop is the SA Representative on IFIP TC-2 and convenor of the awards committee. Immediate past Chairman of IFIP Working Group 2.4 (Software Implementation Technology), and a past chairman of the SA Computer Lecturers Association (SACLA).
She is the editor of IEE Software and on the editorial board of the South African Computer Journal, and has organised many successful conferences, workshops and courses...
text mining promises...
Intelligent Enterprise :: The Word on Text Mining
By Seth Grimes
Mentioned in this article, in order of appearance:
Barak Pridor, ClearForest, Autonomy Systems, Bayesian Statistics, Claude Shannon's Information Theory, Dr. Claude Vogel, CONVERA, RetrievalWare, Inxight Software, Star Tree, SAS, Text Miner, and Enterprise Miner.
...Although still in its infancy, text mining promises rapid advances in the scope of applications and in the effectiveness, comprehensiveness, interoperability, and usability of software implementations. The field won't be mature until commercial tools offer closed-loop analytics, that is, actionable results rather than just visualizations, analytics that are well integrated with data mining, and statistical analysis systems that use all an organization's information assets. Although techniques seem fairly well established, maturity will also bring standardized interfaces and input and output formats, extension to a spectrum of rich media in addition to plain text, the scalability to world-size applications, and predictive capabilities. The implementations available show that researchers and vendors are on the right track...
KM + or - IT...
VNUnet :: Dump the blame game and look to the future
by Michael Gubbins
...Few areas promised quite as much 'efficiency' as Knowledge Management. If only we could learn to see information as our main asset and share a bit more, the KM revolutionaries would say, we could become kings and queens of a new Knowledge Economy.
Where did it all go wrong? The IT professional, of course. Delegates and exhibitors at last week's KM Europe 2003 conference in Amsterdam were falling over themselves to talk about past geeky misdemeanours.
"We don't deal with the IT people any more," said one vendor, who shall remain nameless. "You'll never get them to understand the business."
There's a lot of this kind of talk around. IT companies are often convinced that, if only they could talk to the chief executive, sales would rocket. The small-minded obsessives in the IT department are holding back the future, they say.
OK. So all of us know IT professionals from the Planet Zorg, who simply cannot mix with Earthlings. We have all seen data centres that are the eclectic product of years of bodging, where shelves bulge with redundant kit that was once the Next Big Thing.
But let's also recognise that few businesses historically really understood the role of IT in the value chain.
What we need is to dump the blame game and look at future opportunities. IT-led business projects may often be a recipe for disaster, but it's difficult to envisage a business-led project that does not have IT at its core.
Sam Marshall, knowledge management specialist at Unilever, says that a successful project ought to be 20 per cent IT, 30 per cent processes and 50 per cent people.
But those making a success of projects, like his company, understand that only a harmonious relationship between the three can really work. Jaw-jaw is better than war-war...
anti-spam...
The New York Times :: Antispam Bill Passes Senate by Voice Vote
By JENNIFER 8. LEE
..."I don't think you will see really a cutback in spam until someone is caught and prosecuted and they know for sure that we are serious about the enforcement of the law," said Senator Conrad Burns, Republican of Montana and a sponsor of the bill, known as the "Can-Spam" Act.
The bill allows the federal government, state attorneys general and Internet service providers to bring lawsuits against bulk e-mailers who use deceptive practices like false e-mail addresses and subject lines. Enforcement officials estimate that over 90 percent of junk bulk e-mail comes from slightly more than 200 spammers.
Individuals would not have the right to take action against people who violate the law, despite a last-minute attempt by Senator Jon Corzine, Democrat of New Jersey, to add a provision that would provide for bounty hunters.
The bill outlaws several common spamming techniques, like using e-mail addresses gathered from the Internet or generated by computers. Under the legislation, bulk e-mailers could face up to $250 in penalties for each deceptive e-mail, up to a $6 million maximum fine. Violators could also face up to five years in jail...
November 25, 2003
sociable particles...
sociable bosons
anti-social fermions
BEC Friendsters
haitech haiku™
©2003 judith meskill
inspired by an article in The New York Times today on: Big Step in Conductivity: More Sociable Particles
November 24, 2003
bill gates on 'knowledge workers'...
eWeek interviews Bill Gates in an article called: Blazing the Longhorn Trail and, among many other questions, asks:
eWeek: Where should companies spend the dollars freed up from lowering costs? And where should they spend new technology funds?
Bill Gates: Web services is the new architecture for new applications. Web services are being used to connect information that is inside the company in different systems. They're connecting people and systems in new ways and connecting across different companies as well. You think of investments for making your knowledge workers more productive. That is the biggest investment companies in almost any industry make.
There are things that are essentially new ways of doing business, such as creating workflows to connect buyers and sellers together. We are seeing lots of interest in taking BizTalk and connecting it up with our XML forms capability called InfoPath. People still want projects that are about five to six months in duration. They don't want a one-year shot in the dark. And they want projects where, if they really look at all the costs, then for a million dollars or less they can be really far along and start to get the payback.
visuos - access to 'knowledge' spaces...
While perusing my 'webstats' I found this reciprocal link from HyDeSign. And directly below the link to my 'knowledge notes' I found this link to an ACM article on visuos: A Visuo-spatial Operating Software for Knowledge Work.
More fodder for my 'Personal Knowledge Mapping' research: (visuos - by clemens lango.)
frequency...
Frequency is a desktop weblog client. If you have a weblog you manage with Blogger, Radio, Movable Type, or other Blogger API or metaWeblog API system, you can use Frequency to add new posts instead of logging into the web site every time. (comes in three versions, Mac OS X, Windows2000/XP, and Mac OS 9.)
blogging backtalk...
In Howard Kurtz's Media Backtalk (washingtonpost.com) today:
...begin quote...
College Park, Md.: In your column today, you quoted Bill Keller mentioning how he checks out blogs critical of the Times and that sometimes it provides him with a journalistic gut check: "Sometimes I read something on a blog that makes me feel we screwed up..."
Are these blogs by and large critical of the Times from the Left or from the Right? Do you think he gives equal weight to blog critiques from both sides of the spectrum? And lastly, can you name some of the blogs Keller may have mentioned by name so that we the news consumer can check out their critiques for ourselves to help us more critically understand the beefs that both sides of the spectrum, but particularly the Right, has with the Times?
(Above reference is to Bill Keller's Changing Times (washingtonpost.com) - Post, Nov. 24)
Howard Kurtz: I asked Keller that very question -- which blogs was he talking about? He declined to get specific, joking that he didn't want to provide a "blurb" by singling one out. But I thought it was refreshing that he checks this stuff out and doesn't dismiss it out of hand. Obviously the Times, like the rest of the mainstream press, gets criticized by the left as well as the right, though most of the critiques tend to be from conservatives.
...end quote...
'highly tech-savvy' americans...
According to the Globe and Mail "A study released Sunday found that 31 per cent of Americans are "highly tech-savvy" people for whom the Internet, cellphones and handheld organizers are more indispensable than TVs and old-fashioned wired phones."
In an aggregate of past studies performed by the Pew Internet & American Life Project and reported on a Daily and Overall Internet Population table: "About 59% of Americans (113 million) have gone online." Of that 113M who have gone online 93% send email and only 3% create a web log or "blog" that others can read online.
November 23, 2003
social networking notes...
While perusing Luigi Lugmayr's realkm weblog this evening I came across another social networking sites to add to my growing list: Affinity Engines.
Luigi makes mention of Valdis Krebs in his weblog which inspired me to perform a Google search on sites 'related to' Valdis' InFlow software and I found: Fractal Genomics - another site that I have to look into further, and an organization to which Valdis belongs: INSNA (International Network for Social Network Analysis) that has a long list of software programs for social network analysis.
November 22, 2003
knowledge worker news...
InformationWeek : IT Employment : The Programmer's Future
By Eric Chabrow, Chris Murphy
...Not long ago programmers were the essence of IT. They were critical knowledge workers before the term gained popularity, and programming was the starter job of many business-technology leaders. Contrast that with today: Companies treat programming as a capability that's best bought on an as-needed basis. In some circles, that's given the profession a bad rap. "Many IT professionals wouldn't call themselves programmer," says senior VP and CIO David Guzman at the medical-supplies distributor Owens & Minor Inc. "It's an anachronistic term with a pejorative context to modern IT professionals."...
November 21, 2003
social software notes...
This 1997 paper - that I cite below - was 'news' to me, and I am including it here for my 'social software notes'. The author, Robert Rockwell, died suddenly in 1998. Rob was an anthropologist, 'social software' advocate, and co-founder and chief scientist for blaxxun technologies.
An Infrastructure for Social Software
by Robert Rockwell, Blaxxun - 1997.
...In the physical world, complex social interactions are usually made manageable by facilities, rules, and service providers that guide and support the participants. Consider what goes on at trade fairs, legislative hearings, conferences, and in shopping malls. People must get from one place to another, meeting rooms must be allocated, agendas prepared and results published, and the general logistics must be managed concerning who deals with whom--and where, when, and how those interactions take place. In situations where the facilities are inadequate or the rules are not codified, the services of tour guides and administrative assistants, brokers and agents, couriers, and consultants may supply the missing social structures.
In a virtual world (as the DVE applications themselves are often called), this kind of logistical support must be supplied by software. As the range of DVE applications expands, they will need software support of a kind rarely envisioned by previous generations of programmers. A new breed of programs is required: social software.
The overriding point of social software is not simulation but conversation. Its applications are not substitutes for real-world interaction, but extensions of it. Its "worlds" are not virtual in the customary sense; they are real media for meeting others on-line. Designers of social software are less concerned with how well their on-screen objects mimic real-world objects than with how well they connect their users to each other.
Simulation environments can be thought of as being like the "preview" mode of a word-processor, designed to match the look of a printed document. Social environments, by comparison, are like hypertext, opening up avenues of communication that were unforeseen in the media that preceded them...
November 20, 2003
social networking ala red herring...
Red Herring's assessment of the current 'social networking' playing field, in:
Social nets: goldmine or rat hole?, is:
"Friendster and San Francisco-based Tribe Networks appeal to the consumer market. Friendster helps people looking for dates and new friends, while Tribe is creating a community-based classified ads service. Meanwhile, LinkedIn and British Virgin Islands-based Ryze are aimed at professionals. Others, such as Spoke, New York-based Visible Path and Santa Monica-based ZeroDegrees target the enterprise." This article goes on to state: "The various flavors of social networking are based on a simple premise: that a friend or a friend of a friend will help you find your next sale, job, or date." And concludes with "All told, the fuss over social networking shows that VCs and entrepreneurs are once again willing to place bets on companies with unproven business models."
Mentioned in this article, in order of appearance,
(a veritable 'Who's Who List' of the current 'Social Networking' Players, Analysts, and Funders):
LinkedIn, Sequoia Capital, Friendster, Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers, Benchmark Capital, Spoke Software, Doll Capital Management, David Hornik, August Capital, Tickle by Emode, Alison Murdock, IBD NETWORK, Reid Hoffman, Charlene Li, Forrester Research, Sixdegrees, YouthStream Media Networks, Tribe.net, Ryze, visiblepath, Zerodegrees, Mark Granovetter, Mark Kvamme, Mark Pincus, craigslist, Ben T. Smith, IV, Tim Sullivan, Match.com, Barry Diller, IAC/InterActiveCorp, Evite, John Foley, Monster, Microsoft Wallop, MSN, AOL, Yahoo!, Cary Fulbright, and Salesforce.com.
social networking service search...
Sand Hill Road is sifting through the contenders to find the 'perfect social networking' investment. Matt Marshall - in Mercury News :: VCs on the hunt for next hot 'social networking' service - says "The gold mine, as VCs see it, rests in using the Internet to give a personalized, user-friendly twist to mainstream industries like dating services, job listings and classified advertising."
Below I have included links to those mentioned in this article:
Mayfield, Tribe.net, AOL, Evite, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Mark Pincus, Friendster, Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers, Benchmark Capital, Esther Dyson, Esther Dyson's tech newsletter, The Washington Post, Knight Ridder, Larry Page, Tickle by Emode, Ringo, and Love.com.
November 19, 2003
anti-social software?...
OfficialSpin :: Former IEQ investment, BiblioTech, copies its way into history
...London, England -- (OfficialSpin.com) -- 18/11/03 -- According to a website operated by Bibliotech Limited, OfficeMaster is their property - reference is made on the website to "TM" and BiblioTech say: "OFFICEMASTER" is owned and operated by Bibliotech Ltd." They say that "Officemaster is a leading, web-based, mobile office solution that combines a full suite of social software applications. With a focus on communication and collaboration, OFFICEMASTER allows each company to work effectively, both internally and with its customers and partners in an online business environment."
One problem though... OFFICEMaster is a UK registered word only (WO) trademark No. 2161786, owned by LSC Group Limited of Tamworth Staffordshire. LSC Group applied for their WO trademark on 21 March 1998. However on 6 July 1998 BiblioTech registered the domain name - officemaster.co.uk - then on 8 July 1998 BiblioTech registered another domain name - officemaster.net. LSC Group was granted a registered trademark on 30 April 1999, but that hasn't stopped BiblioTech from pursuing their own use or claiming that they own the trademark.
LSC Group's trademark is in Class 9, described as follows: computer programmes for the recordal, storage, indexing, retrieval, viewing, amending and printing of documents..."And so it seems that BiblioTech's use is a clear infringement of LSC Group's Mark...
social networking news...
[there are three news stories in this post, don't miss the two 'below the fold'.]
United Press International: The Web: Real-time networking
By Gene J. Koprowski
..."The idea is to take advantage of the Internet's ability to mimic normal human behavior," Alex Chang, founder of Friendzy, a Web-based social networking organization, headquartered in Dallas, told UPI. "The most useful contacts you make are through someone you already know. There is no better targeted marketing than going through people you already know."
Friendzy was launched last month on the same kind of premise, said Chang. Those looking to make new contacts, whether they are for business or social reasons, log onto the site. It takes about one minute to register. "Visitors enter profile information and then can search for people by interests," said Chang. "Or, they invite their friends onto the network."
By putting the social network into a visualized format via the Web, users can seek out new friends with common interests more easily.
Privacy is protected, initially, by providing new members only limited information about another person, the online version of meeting someone in a bar and telling them your name and where you are from, said Chang...
...Microsoft Corp., in Redmond, Wash., is offering software called Microsoft Office Live Meeting for use by businesses for "real-time events (such as) marketing and public relations tours, briefing journalists, and even e-learning," Kent Kappen, a manager in the real-time collaboration business unit at Microsoft, told UPI.
Kappen said real-time technologies are replacing tedious "media tours" for company executives, who in the past had to travel to New York, Chicago, Washington, and Los Angeles to introduce a new product to the business press.
The software also is being used for more structured events, such as business meetings. Users log onto the system and communicate, with applications -- such as spreadsheets or word processing files -- in real-time, with colleagues around the globe, said Kappen.
"You can hash out things and get business done," Kappan explained. "This replaces sending a draft of a memo or a press release back and forth five times. You can just virtually look over someone's shoulder and collaborate and get it done on the spot. The key technology is not really just broadband. People with 56k line connections can collaborate too, just as well as those with a T1 line. The technology is bandwidth adaptive."
Another software firm is offering real-time collaboration tools that allow customers like Sony Corp., to connect all of their distributors at one time for a "live event from the desktop" and train them how to sell a new product, Marni Hoyle, vice president of corporate marketing at Centra Software Inc., of Lexington, Mass., told UPI.
"This is all really a reflection of the changing of social dynamics and of how business is conducted these days," Jeff Wong, global director of product management at Genesys Corp., an integrator of virtual conferencing technologies in Los Altos, Calif., told UPI.
"The driving thrust of companies is doing more with less," Wong said. "So companies need to communicate a lot more in a global economy. The technologies are bringing distributed work parties together, and enabling productivity through better communications. It's as if they're all part of a real social community, not separated by continents."
The real-time tools are likely to grow even more sophisticated within the next 10 to 15 years, said Peter Plantec, the psychologist and author, whose book features a forward by Ray Kurzweil, the computing guru.
"We're going to see programs that behave like viruses -- virtual characters -- talking in chat rooms, and MUDs (multi-user-domains) with people, and self-replicating and evolving. It will be totally wild," Plantec said.
"Corporations will use 'Synthespians' -- synthetic actors to communicate with customers. By replacing people, they will increase the profitability of corporations. There will be a lot more leisure time, because these synthespians will do a lot of the routine work we do today. And that will be interesting. If people have too much leisure time, they can get into trouble."
Plantec also predicted the very nature of social relationships would change for humans as these virtual characters evolve. "People will have relationships with computers," he said...
...With the renewed popularity in social-networking sites, Gratitude.net builds upon the trend of people looking to the web to help them make personal connections and experience a sense of community. With instant access to a large network of others who may have faced similar life challenges, Gratitude.net allows members to easily poll one another to quickly tap into knowledge and insights on how to best approach specific problems. The Gratitude community allows for a supportive environment to ask for advice, seek affirmation and discover solutions to real problems.
A completely free site, members receive and distribute gratitude tokens to other Gratitude community members who have helped them through a tough situation. Every member receives 1,000 tokens of gratitude each week to freely share with those who have shown support and offered them guidance. Taking time to send expressions of thanks and tokens of gratitude allows members to build a thankful disposition and a happier approach to life.
Built on the beliefs of Harvard professor, Howard Gardner -- that the most accomplished people in history cultivated three key habits: reflection time, leveraging their strengths and framing their experiences for growth -- Gratitude.net allows members to nurture these habits through sharing challenges and offering advice and wisdom to others.
"Gratitude.net was developed to help cultivate that person we all wish we could become," said Gattis...
Mercury News :: Marimba chairman to step down
By Therese Poletti
...Kim Polese, one of Silicon Valley's few high-profile female executives, said Tuesday she is stepping down as chairman of Marimba, the software company she co-founded in 1996...
...Tech insider Dave Winer, an inveterate blogger and fellow at Harvard Law School, said he was surprised that Polese stayed at Marimba as long as she did.
"She is more creative and Marimba has become a successful company, but kind of mundane," Winer said.
He speculated that Polese may be interested in a new kind of software growing in popularity. "She has been showing up at parties about social networking software and blogging parties," Winer said. "It's a whole new generation of software, and some of it is being created in the valley."...
social networking trends...
In the following article Bambi Francisco outlines nine trends and warnings to keep in mind when considering a jump into the Internet sector. Her seventh point addresses the current interest in the 'social networking' arena and I am including it here.
Coming in 2004 :: Internet market-share wars
By Bambi Francisco
...7. Venture capitalists fortunate enough to have some money invested in public stocks have had some fresh cash to invest in upcoming competitors to the consumer Internet incumbents. Social-networked sites like Friendster, Tickle, Tribe.net, etc. are getting funded in hopes that they will be the next-generation of sites where people will flock and advertisers will follow. These sites just have to organize their database of people in a way that make it compelling to advertisers. At the very least, the sites do provide an alternative to subscription services like IAC's Match.com. To the extent that Tribe.net can get established as a place to advertise services or goods locally, sort of a combination of craigslist and eBay, it may see some traction next year. If you think the start-ups aren't ones to watch, think again. If the Internet years (1995-2000) are similar to the 1980-1984 PC revolution, it's more likely that companies going public after the 2000 crash will be big winners by the end of 2010. Of the 50 largest market capitalized tech IPOs in the last 22 years, 20 went public between 1985 and 1989. Only 9 went public in the early part of that decade...
knowledge worker news...
Peter Cappelli, from the Wharton School, and Megan Santosus, Senior Editor for CIO Magazine, warn of the consequences of preparing for a post boomer 'labor shortage' rather than 'knowledge shortage' in the article cited below.
CIO Magazine :: When (or if) the Boomers Say Bye-Bye
BY MEGAN SANTOSUS
Not a Labor Shortage, a Knowledge Shortage
...Peter Cappelli, a management professor and the director of the Center for Human Resources at The Wharton School, conducted research that questioned ... assumptions about the potential economic impact of an aging employee population. Cappelli found that any projected labor shortage caused by retiring boomers is, in fact, a complete fiction.
...So if there's not going to be a labor shortage based on demographic shifts, what's the problem? As Cappelli sees it, many companies are fixated on the idea of a manpower shortage and thus will spend precious time, energy and resources solving the wrong problem. The real challenge - retaining the workers you already have - will likely go unaddressed. According to Cappelli, the employment boom that occurred in the late '90s was in actuality a retention issue in disguise. "A couple of years ago, all sorts of companies were hiring like crazy and weren't able to meet their business demands," he says. "The thought was that the problem was an inability to find enough people, but companies were losing people out the backdoor as quickly as they were hiring in the front door."
In effect, companies were paying a tax on two fronts: They paid to hire and train new employees; and they paid for the loss of experience and knowledge.
Ironically, IT is one of the professions that historically has been most at the mercy of demographics because employers have focused on hiring people right out of college. So if Cappelli's theory is right, is there any hope for a rebound in IT employment? Unfortunately, the answer isn't clear-cut. In light of the trend toward the global outsourcing of IT work, companies may not believe they need to fret about retaining skilled workers because the pool of available labor is now a worldwide one.
"The ability to outsource work outside the U.S. gives employers a safety valve," notes Cappelli. "They don't have to find or retain the workers here; they can just move the work to where the workers are." Cappelli prefers to keep his own counsel on whether the millions of IT jobs sent abroad will ever return or whether millions more are destined to go the same way. What that question comes down to is flexibility versus control. If companies want the former, they'll continue to ship work and jobs offshore; if they want the latter, IT jobs will stay put and, perhaps, even return.
The notion of a worker shortage based on aging boomers and flagging birth rates is a seductive one because it's quantifiable and lifts the responsibility for the future from our already overburdened shoulders. After all, you can't fight demographic trends. Que sera, sera, as it were. But as Cappelli reminds us, assuming that the future is out of our control just about guarantees that it will be...
November 18, 2003
rss, weblogs and knowledge managment...
I am constantly searching for traditional news feeds that talk about weblogs, blogging, knowledge management, social software, and social networking. News items that cover the intersection of two or more of these areas are infrequent, but here is one today that speaks of weblogs, RSS, and Knowledge Management.
MarketingProfs :: RSS for the Real World
by Dana VanDen Heuvel
...RSS is a "techie" acronym for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary, depending on whom you talk to, the time of day and the day of the week. Also referred to as an RSS feed or XML feed, this protocol is an application of XML that provides an open method of syndicating (or distributing) and aggregating Web content.
RSS is the hottest thing in Web communication, and the beauty of it is that it really is simple. Just like that first cell phone.
RSS is basically a stream of data in its most pure form: content separated from presentation. For instance, RSS feeds syndicate news headlines on some of the largest news sites. It also powers knowledge management networks and Weblogs. Using RSS files, you can supply a data feed of headlines, links and article summaries from your Web site.
RSS feeds are read by a Web-based tool called a news aggregator (such as News Gator) - typically a free download that allows you to view RSS site subscriptions. An RSS feed is produced whenever content is added to the site to which you've subscribed...
November 17, 2003
notable judiths - judith shakespeare company...
"...what would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith..." --Virginia Woolf
While this is not one of my traditional honorable mentions of a notable 'individual' Judith, I felt that I would honor the individuality of the 'Judith Shakespeare Company' as 'Shakespeare's wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith'...
...Judith Shakespeare Company, founded in 1995, is committed to bringing Shakespeare's language to life with clarity and vitality, while expanding the presence of women in classical theatre. JSC's 2003-04 Season will also feature the long-awaited full production of Richard 3, which crowns the company's recent three-season presentation of Shakespeare's History Cycle. In this series of eight plays, which follow the struggles for the English crown for over 100 years, all monarchs and contenders to the throne have been played by women. 2001's production of The Tempest featured Jane Titus in the role of Prospero. The full production followed The Tempest Project: an experiment in non-traditional casting, which gave five directors the opportunity to explore the play through the dynamics of non-traditional casting, and gave audiences the opportunity to respond. In 2000 JSC sponsored two panels, Expanding the Presence of Women in Shakespeare Performance and Expanding the Presence of Women Directors, both featuring prominent women theatre artists in conversation about women's current status and possibilities in the business and the artform...
triarchic intelligence...
The Yale Herald :: Ace it with PACE: Making testing actually matter
BY DANIEL LEVIN BECKER
...THE GUIDING PRINCIPLE OF The Yale University PACE Center is what Dr. Robert Sternberg calls the triarchic theory of successful intelligence, which suggests that there are three kinds of intelligence - analytical, practical, and creative - and that each is a crucial element of success in and beyond education. (Mental flexibility, as it turns out, is essentially determined by one's ability to selectively switch between the three modes of thinking in order to best deal with unfamiliar situations.) PACE stands for the Psychology of Abilities, Competencies, and Expertise, and it is the traditional perception of these three things as distinct and innate constructs which the center is committed to defeating; it aims instead to ease transition between them. "You need to be creative to have ideas, analytical to judge them, and practical to get them to work," Sternberg explains. "The logic applies to any field. Let's say you're a writer: It takes creative intelligence to develop ideas for novels and poems, analytical intelligence for the plotting and internal coherence of what you're writing; and practical intelligence to write something people are going to want to read."
The center's directorate body consists of Sternberg, IBM professor of psychology and education at Yale and current president of the American Psychological Association, his wife and deputy director Elena Grigorenko, and associate directors Linda Jarvin and Steve Stemler. While Sternberg and Grigorenko oversee nearly all of the center's projects, a small but growing handful of multinational consultants and research assistants take more involved roles at the helm of each.
The members of the center are busily directing the idea of triarchic intelligence toward research in a variety of academic areas; with the exception of the leadership projects, which are sponsored by the U.S. Army and explore ideas like the development of effective military leaders through explicit and tacit knowledge, PACE's projects are devoted to educational advancements. Its research is focused on creating successful teachers, developing better ways to nurture the talents of gifted students, and improving the overall structures of schools themselves...
November 16, 2003
knowledge management news...
[there are two news stories in this post.]
Navy Newstand :: FORCEnet: Delivering Tomorrow, Today
By Journalist First Class Jd Walter,
Naval Network Wafare Command Public Affairs
...NORFOLK, Va. (NNS) -- To be successful in information exchange and ensure both operational readiness and mission success, participants must learn to leverage technology in the most efficient and effective means possible. To this end, the naval services have engaged in a joint solution, an initiative known as FORCEnet.
FORCEnet was created to develop both the architecture by which Navy, joint and coalition force systems communicate, and the logistics to support such a network. By looking across warfare mission areas to identify and maximize current capabilities, while adapting network-enabled delivery of tactical data in a secure environment, the Navy expects to effectively deliver multiple sources of collected information in a collaborative, at sea environment. In layman's terms, this translates to a communications system employed and delivered to each participating platform within a combat scenario whether joint (U.S. forces), NATO or coalition.
"This is about integrating communications capabilities across warfare networks for streamlined operations," said Head, FORCEnet Innovation and Experimentation Branch Cmdr. Rick Simon. "It's more than just technology; it's being able to use knowledge to better engage the enemy."
This knowledge exists in three distinct forms: raw, unprocessed data; processed data, or information; and archival data, or actual knowledge. Similar to the intelligence process, where information does not become intelligence until it is analyzed, knowledge also requires scrutiny beyond the processing phase. However, whereas only legitimate intelligence or knowledge was once available to combatants, an integrated, network-centric architecture such as FORCEnet makes actual, real-time battlespace knowledge available to the individual combatants concerned. This allows for on the spot updates to battle plans to compensate for unforeseen circumstances or changing battle conditions.
"The first goal of this initiative is a unified Intranet that transfers data seamlessly with the appropriate security," said Capt. Robert Whitkop, FORCEnet deputy director. "Think of it not so much as a funnel through which all information flows, but a mesh, with standards that allows data, information and knowledge to be immediately available and transferred."...
ITBusiness.ca :: Don't talk to me, I only work here
by Shane Schick
...It isn't easy breaking down the barriers in the enterprise. Believe me, we tried.
The set of cubicles we occupy here are set up so that you can't always see the person sitting next to you. After putting up with this problem since the day we moved in here, we decided this morning to get rid of one of the walls. At least, we wanted to get rid of it, but there are a lot of screws and we don't quite know what we're doing, so we had to call the guys who work in our mailroom. This is always slightly embarrassing, and sometimes mildly irritating, in part because we couldn't do it ourselves and in part because it means we have to wait for them. You know, kind of like calling the IT help desk.
In 1964, a French philosopher named Gaston Bachelard published a book, "The Poetics of Space," which attempted to show how our perceptions of houses and other shelters shape our thoughts, memories, and dreams. He took readers on a journey from the attic to the cellar, concluding that the sense of intimacy we feel about our homes is almost completely self-created. In other words, the objective space of a house -- like its walls, doors, roof or individual rooms -- is far less important than the values or emotions we assign to it. This is why some men call their home their castle, or why some teenagers consider their parents' house a prison from which they desperately want to escape. This process of psychological projection is the "poetics" to which Bachelard's title refers.
The poetics of an enterprise can be somewhat similar, and surprisingly strong. Just today a co-worker commented about how another woman in this building has a habit of resting her coffee mug on top of her cubicle and leaving it there while she goes down to another floor. These are the kind of things that get under people's skin, and build up into what often seem like inexplicably complex relationships between people who happen to work in the same general vicinity.
We all acknowledge that technology has changed the way we do business, but we are only slowly realizing how it has changed the poetics of space. In some ways, IT allows everyday workers more control over certain business processes. But the distribution of those resources is often decided for them by someone else, and there can be highly varying degrees of freedom over how the resources they enjoy are used. Unlike a home, which in many cases will be owned by the person who dwells inside it, office space and the technology that goes with it is always on loan to the user.
This may help us understand the challenges around user behaviour and IT/client relations. Imagine owning a home where, if there's a problem with the plumbing, you had no control over who comes to fix it or when. The illusion of control is magnified by the move towards Web-based portlets that seem to give users more input on knowledge management or business-to-employee services, but which are really under the aegis of senior management.
The real test will come as mobile computing takes root among sales, marketing and other executive staff. Today a great deal of the hardware and applications are owned or managed by individual users. As remote access technologies wrest autonomy from workers, expect another clash of hierarchies.
Aristotle once called politics the ability to control your environment, so perhaps it shouldn't be any wonder that technology has a way of turning the poetics of space into office politics. Be it ever so contentious, there's no place like enterprise...
November 15, 2003
meatrix space...
Both Robert Paterson and Dave Pollard have created posts regarding
THE MEATRIX - a must see animation on factory farming.
(and so i wrote an ode to meatrix space
and posted it on 'how to save the world'
the errors of that ode i here erase
and in 'fixed' form you'll find it now unfurled. (^:)
an ode to meatrix space...
and if you meet live meat in meatrix space
and see and feel and hear just how they're raised
you might decide to seek a better place
to forage for your food than cement-grazed.
and if it's true that we are what we eat
disease and drugs and damage do descry
that if we eat this badly handled meat
we could fall ill and should not wonder why.
and so for me it's tofu, greens and rice
that's how i gather ration for my day
but others will decide to roll the dice
and hope for health whilst eating meatrix way.
it's garbage in and out from warehouse farms
so far from pastures, fields and country charms.
©2003 judith meskill
knowledge worker news...
ZDNet UK :: 'Dodgy-dossier syndrome' rife in the workplace
by Matt Loney
...Two-thirds of knowledge workers are unaware of the dangers that meta-data contained within their documents can pose to themselves and their businesses, according to new research.
Ninety percent of business documents are adapted from other documents, but 68 percent of people do not know that their work often contains information about the source of the document, the researchers found.
UK software company Workshare, which commissioned the research, refers to the problem as 'dodgy-dossier syndrome' after the infamous UK government report on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction, a significant portion of which was found to have been copied from a 12-year-old PhD thesis written by student Ibrahim al-Marashi.
More pertinent examples, perhaps, include the European Commission's draft directive on software patents, which was found to contain as its author the name of Francisco Mingorance, who is European director of public policy for the Business Software Alliance -- a prominent lobbying organisation that has pushed for more rights for copyright holders. Mingorance later said he did not know how his name came to be associated with the document, but by then the damage was done.
Workshare's research found that only 6 percent of people think of metadata as data that tracks and identifies changes, while 39 percent think of it as hidden document content. Just over half of respondents -- 52 percent -- think of metadata as being data that describes the document. "There are inherent dangers due to document metadata, which identifies historical changes within a document, author histories and document origins," said the company. "Awareness of the term 'metadata' is low and fewer still know of its dangers."
Furthermore, there is no standard practice when contributing to a document, with 'document anarchy' making management difficult, and only 14 percent of companies feeling that they can control how contributors give feedback to critical documents on time and in the correct format.
More business users are contributing to shared documents than ever before," said Workshare European vice president Andrew Pearson, "and companies are losing control of what happens inside the process. Changes in the way organisations work has made this problem more acute in recent year with restructuring and flattening of the organisation, so brought these problems to the fore."...
GN Online: On Agenda: Powering Dubai's knowledge community with human resources
By K. Raveendran
...Silicon Valley in the US was built around Stanford University. But to say that its Dubai adaptation, the Dubai Internet City-Media City cluster, is founded on the strength of Knowledge Village would be stretching things a little too far.
And yet to the extent that the DIC-DMC community relates to the US innovation facility, Knowledge Village (KV) is aiming to provide what Stanford did for Silicon Valley; not by way of innovation, but in terms of human resources.
Threesomes and foursomes of young men and women, regretfully with cigarettes in hand, sitting around coffeehouse tables and chatting have become a common sight at the eating joints within the cluster and added a new ambience to the community. They are the students of institutions like the American University of Dubai, Dubai College etc., and would soon be joined by those from the Knowledge Village.
And these men and women will be the key resource for the new Knowledge Economy to develop. Already, many of them are undertaking short-term assignments with companies in Dubai Internet City and Media City in a partnership in which both sides benefit. For the companies, it helps cut costs significantly, while for the students it provides both experience and some extra money.
"The Knowledge Economy will be one where human capital is the chief source of economic value and education and training become lifelong endeavours. And this is where Knowledge Village will make a contribution," Dr Abdullah Al Karam, Director of KV, said in a recent interview.
Learning community
The success of the knowledge community has created the need for manpower that matches its requirements and Knowledge Village hopes to serve this need at optimum costs. A majority of institutions joining the Village are from the professional training and e-learning sectors, offering courses in IT, media, finance and are offering a brick-and-click combination of both classroom and web-based courses.
The burgeoning ICT cluster is also providing high-quality business interaction and networking opportunities for the students as well as among the entities, which helps increased knowledge sharing within the community.
The Village includes a Media Academy, an Innovation Centre, research and development organisations, science and technology institutes, and certification and testing organisations as well as incubators. All these are constituents that help in the development of knowledge capital.
The learning community is thus expected to facilitate a rich environment of ideas, creativity and expertise that will stimulate strategic growth for companies located in the cluster. Similarly, placement programmes will enable students to gain access and experience with leading IT and media companies. Industry-academic linkages are expected to be a major driver of talent in the knowledge economy.
Branches of leading international universities and educational institutions offering Masters and PhD programmes in IT, management and media disciplines are among the launch business partners of Knowledge Village. These include the British University and BITS Pilani, one of India's top engineering institutes.
The clusters and sub-clusters within the knowledge community offer vast scope for the talent that is created through these programmes. The dynamic international ICT community of DIC includes around 560 companies, big and small, and some of them represent the top names in the global industry and encompassing a community of over 5,000 knowledge workers.
Similarly, the Media City has nearly 800 companies, engaged in broadcasting, publishing, new media, music, entertainment and event management. Over 10 TV and radio channels are broadcasting out of Media City. With its own teleport providing a one-stop shop for all broadcasting requirements, including up-linking, down-linking and content creation, DMC is a value proposition that global broadcasters can hardly resist.
The author is a UAE-based journalist...
November 14, 2003
social networking and baboons...
Anthropologist Joan Silk, a UCLA professor, is in the news this week for her research with female baboon moms who have formed tight social networking groups.
[There were about 30 hits for this story this morning on Google Search: silk social networking]
Professor Silk offers a number of publications - on the evolution of cooperation in primate groups - (in pdf format) on her website.
photo credit - Joan Silk's website
aneurysmal annulment...
stowe boyd's survival
september birth month memoirs
timing is crucial...
haitech haiku™
©2003 judith meskill
inspired by stowe's surgical success - stowe is a strong presence in real-time, collaborative and social technology spaces
knowledge management news...
[there are three news stories in this post.]
destinationCRM :: IT Spending Recovery Seen in 2004
by Lisa Picarille
...The planets are finally in alignment and market researchers are now predicting a recovery in IT spending.
A combination of technology advances, architectural changes, market forces, and best practices will make for a good recovery for IT in the near future, culminating in very strong growth in the longer term, according to Al Lill, group vice president for market researcher Gartner.
"Overall IT spending has bottomed out, and 2004 and 2005 will see a minimum of strong single-digit growth over 2003 levels," Lill says.
Although overall IT spending will increase, the growth rates of specific technology sectors are expected to vary widely.
The crest of the new wave of growth is expected to impact four key areas: secure wireless broadband, very low-power-consumption mobile devices [and screens], easy access to real-time infrastructure, and the widespread pervasion of service-oriented architectures.
Gartner says more companies are planning to replace aging equipment, to install new technologies to improve efficiency, and to boost spending on devices that use open-source software and wireless communications. "Companies are beginning to make the turn from protecting profitability to driving growth," Michael Fleisher, chairman and CEO of Gartner, said at an industry symposium late last month. "Cost cutting will remain important, but it will no longer be your CEO's number one priority."
Gartner also predicts that the recovery will come with a variety of shifts. The firm claims that there will be "a tremendous skills shift within the IT workforce, impacting hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of workers."
Workers with skills in the areas of broadband, wireless, Linux, content management, real-time analytics, data-mining, security, middleware, certification skills, business intelligence, and knowledge management are expected to be the most highly valued.
Gartner analysts also expect massive vendor consolidation through 2005. At that time more than half of the current technology suppliers will be eliminated from the competitive landscape. As a result the remaining vendors will regain pricing power in several technology sectors.
For example, Lill says the combination of secure broadband wireless, low-power-consumption mobile devices, and new display technologies will dramatically change a handful of industries, including publishing, media, and advertising...
Business Wire :: Vivisimo Clustering Gains Market Momentum
...PITTSBURGH--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 13, 2003--Vivisimo, Inc., a leading provider of clustering and meta-search software, today announced that a growing number of search sites, enterprises and government institutions have deployed Vivisimo Clustering to organize their search results, leading to almost tripling of revenues, substantial business progress, and the first year of profitability for Vivisimo.
Vivisimo has been selected by leading web search, pharmaceutical, technology, and scholarly-publishing organizations to significantly improve end-user ability to find information. Some of Vivisimo's notable customers during the last year include Cisco Systems, NASA, InfoSpace, Stanford's HighWire Press, Journal of American Medical Association, British Medical Journal, New England Journal of Medicine, ARC Advisory Group, and Institute of Physics Publishing. License fees from these customers and a dramatic increase in revenue from the Vivisimo website, which optimizes paid listings with clustered web search results, led to the profitable operations achieved over the past twelve months.
"Our vision is that users everywhere will see organized search results by clustering them rather than by merely listing them out. This vision has been partly realized, since millions of people are already benefiting at our customers' websites and our own. And we are doing this profitably in a down economy," said Raul Valdes-Perez, president and co-founder of Vivisimo.
Building on this momentum, Vivisimo's advisory board has recently been strengthened by the addition of Thomas Detre M.D., Distinguished Service Professor of the Health Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh and formerly President of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. Dr. Detre, who was instrumental in the growth and development of the university as one of the nation's foremost leaders in academic medicine and research, will aid Vivisimo in capitalizing on its success in scientific and biomedical markets and the development of pharmaceutical information retrieval solutions.
Vivisimo's innovative technology has been recognized by several leading industry organizations. In the past year, Vivisimo was selected again as the "Best MetaSearch Engine" by industry experts at Search Engine Watch and was named to the "Top 100 Companies that Matter in Knowledge Management" by KM World Magazine.
Vivisimo Clustering solutions dramatically increase the efficiency of knowledge workers who need to quickly handle large numbers of search results - from the web or document databases. With Vivisimo, users no longer have to scroll through endless pages of results to find what they are looking for. Vivisimo's Clustering organizes search results into folders on the fly, without requiring any pre-processing of source documents. This new way of handling search results which leads to a vastly superior end-user experience, is seeing rapid adoption and is changing the way people search...
allAfrica.com: South Africa [opinion]: Fez And White Gloves' Elite Still Rules SA Business
by Kevin Wakeford
...THE recent euphoria over the official launch of Chambers of Commerce and Industry of SA (Chamsa) and Business Unity SA (Busa) at Sun City may be as short-lived as the expectations of the Springboks at the Rugby World Cup in Australia.
The business unity process has been a tough one but is probably just as important as the multiparty talks at Kempton Park a decade ago.
Political democracy without economic wellbeing and meaningful participation by the majority of our people is an accident waiting to happen in our society. The recent boycott of voter registration stations is a telling reminder of how meaningless the vote becomes when poverty engulfs a community. The institutional and service platforms of organised business are fundamental to the transformation of our economy.
If we assume the success of transformation hinges on the fundamental change of local and regional chambers or different chapters of sectoral bodies, then one requires equal access to services for business people of all races and persuasions, despite their prior membership affiliations and the fees they can afford.
Enterprise development is vital to boosting economic growth, to broaden access to the wealth creation process. The rubber hits the road at local chamber level, where crucial services such as trade and investment facilitation are provided.
This level also provides vital knowledge management activities that assist businesses in navigating through the morass of the regulatory environment. More importantly, business representatives can relationship and strike deals on a nonracial basis...
November 13, 2003
social networking and blogging...
[there are two news stories in this post.]
Silicon Valley Biz Ink :: Tickle Inc. Consolidates Social Networking Market With Acquisition
...SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 13 /PRNewswire/ -- Tickle Inc., formerly Emode, Inc., today announced the acquisition of Ringo, Inc., the third largest social networking company in the market. The acquisition integrates Ringo's robust feature set and more than 350,000 members with Tickle's newly-launched social networking services. The combined membership of more than one million consumers further solidifies Tickle's ten week-old social networking service as the number two player in the market. In a separate release, the company also announced today the appointment of industry veteran Samir Arora as chairman of the board and its name change to Tickle Inc.
"We are thrilled to be joining forces with one of the only other social networking sites that has viral growth and a rare team of people who are both technically excellent and understand the human side of the technology," said James Currier, founder and CEO of Tickle Inc. "Ringo's unparalleled feature set and groundbreaking technology will add more social networking power to our overall business and help us extend the incredible growth we've experienced so far. This move is the first step in a focused expansion strategy for Tickle."
Since its founding four years ago, Tickle has provided viral content such as self-discovery, matchmaking and social networking services to build a critical mass of over 16 million members. According to comScore Media Metrix, Tickle recently broke into the Top 50 most trafficked Web sites and was shown to be the number two Internet destination in the women's category -- currently, more than 65 percent of the company's members are women. Tickle has a solid revenue model with a majority of revenues coming from consumer subscriptions and a smaller portion from top-tier advertisers -- resulting in six consecutive quarters of profitable growth.
"We were approached by many companies, but ultimately we decided that Tickle had the most compelling vision for how social networking interacts with the rest of the Internet," said Michael Birch, co-founder and president of Ringo. "Tickle remains one of the most viral companies I've seen after many years in this industry, and I was excited to join the team and see where the power of our combined forces would take us."
Launched in early 2003, Ringo has built a significant offering that has grown virally and attracted a strong, diverse community of active users. Based in Walnut Creek, Calif., the company and its founders -- Michael Birch, Paul Birch and Morgan Sowden -- have been developing viral online applications for over four years and were most recently named by Spin magazine as "the next Friendster." The technology behind the service, Ringo's rapid application development environment, was specifically designed to develop and launch community applications quickly and seamlessly. Through the acquisition, Tickle further strengthens its reach into women, religious groups and music fans and will have access to Ringo's industry-leading, robust features set, including popular services such as blogs, events, forums, polls, calendaring and classified listings.
The acquisition of Ringo is a cash and stock deal, effective immediately. Key members of the Ringo team will join Tickle's product and engineering groups in San Francisco to accelerate the development of the Tickle social networking service.
Keywords: IAC, Yahoo!, AOL, Google, Match.com, Personals, Classmates, Friendster, HotJobs, CareerBuilder, Monster...
Silicon Valley Biz Ink :: FaceTime's Instant Messaging Customer Leadership Tapped by COMDEX
...FOSTER CITY, Calif., Nov. 12 /PRNewswire/ -- Furthering its leadership as the premier provider of security, management and control solutions for instant messaging (IM) and other forms of real-time communications in the enterprise, FaceTime Communications today announced its CEO, Glen D. Vondrick, will lead a discussion at COMDEX entitled, "Instantaneous Online Communications: Instant Messaging, Presence and Blogging." The session will be held Thursday, November 20 at 11:30 a.m. as part of COMDEX's Digital Enterprise Conference. FaceTime is widely recognized as an industry pioneer whose multi-network IM business applications enable enterprises to safely embrace the real-time presence capabilities of AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo!, IBM, Jabber, Reuters and other networks in a myriad of critical business functions. At COMDEX, Mr. Vondrick will present several FaceTime customer case studies that demonstrate how IM security and management solutions can be used by fast-paced organizations to enhance such critical business functions as customer service, community collaborative workflow, regulatory compliance reporting, and IT management and security...
weblogs in the news...
[there are six news stories in this post, make sure to read 'below the fold' as there are some interesting reads.]
Wisconsin Technology Network :: The Blog Nation
by Chris Shipley
...Blogging may be the first truly disintermediated, widely distributed and democratic publishing medium. Because blog media is low- or no-cost, there is no barrier to becoming a blog publisher. Indeed, anyone can create a blog. Whether anyone else reads it is another matter, but it is at this point where the reader, rather than writer/publisher, is truly empowered. In print or even online publishing, publishers assume their access to the printing press (physical or digital) washes them in journalistic integrity such that they can say to the reader, "Trust me," without necessarily earning that trust. As readers, we are trained that the media establishment is legit, that they more or less print truths. That trust relationship is turned on its ear in blog media. The reader who returns again and again to the source says to the publisher, "I trust you." Breech that trust, and the feedback loop of comments and referring links and the like will relegate your blog to the long, long list of the unread. Credibility, point of view, integrity are the lifeblood of the blogger.
For this reason, exactly, it is more than probable that bloggers will become the most influential commentators on all aspects of business and society. They can publish quickly to loyal and trusting readers. The blogger's perspective will carry tremendous weight, just as the venerable New York Times or - in our industry - PC Magazine do with their readership. And just as savvy product marketers learned to court the favor of journalists in other media, they must learn to reach out to bloggers who will become the king makers of the future...
ONLamp.com :: Markov blogging
by Andy Lester
...Three times a week, MarkovBlogger posts an entry at use.perl.org. It always has something interesting to say, like:
as we all fear about cloning is reproductive cloning - replacing your failing organs with fresh, healthy ones (by creating a new IO system on my knee for about an hour with wireless (source)
if we decide to install ZoneAlarm on the schedule because there are no O'Reilly books for us, the Old Executive Office Building was in Monterey, I think. Perhaps "furniture" is a pro-choice/anti-microsoft one. (source)
I'm glad I got another email message to fill a bottle with a laser printer for a database with lots of useless constant globals. :-) (source)
I went to lunch with most object inheriting from the heat. The crocodile feeding was the response to a different icon) (source)
The MarkovBlogger was created by Joe Johnston. It's a simple Perl Program adapted from a program in The Practice Of Programming that performs its analysis on use Perl journal entries, and posts a journal entry of its own twisted creation.
I first ran into autogenerated text back in 1984 from an article in Byte with a program listing for Travesty generator. I believe it was in BASIC, and I had to translate it into Turbo Pascal. I was hooked, and threw every scrap of text at it that I could find.
My thanks to Joe for providing this valuable public service...
The Advertiser :: Logging protest 65m up a tree
By Tim Martain
...ENVIRONMENTAL activists took their fight 65m above the forest floor yesterday, setting up camp in one of the Styx Valley's tallest trees.
And they plan to stay there until Gunns Ltd's bulldozers roll in.
The Wilderness Society has joined forces with Greenpeace in what is being touted as Australia's highest and most sophisticated anti-logging tree-sit protest.
The State Government and the forestry industry yesterday labelled it a cheap political stunt.
"The Government has very clearly indicated it's working towards the goal of phasing out clearfelling in old-growth forests - working with the community and key interest groups and preserving jobs," Deputy Premier Paul Lennon said.
"The Greens are obviously unable to move past the old-style politics of protest and division."
Mr Lennon called the protest "juvenile and meaningless".
The Global Rescue Station has been erected 65m up an 84m eucalyptus regnans nicknamed Gandalf's Staff in logging coupe Styx13C, south of Maydena.
The coupe has been earmarked by Forestry Tasmania for logging by Gunns Ltd some time next year.
The protesters say they will make the tree their home until the area is exempt from logging operations, and will share their experience with the world via the Internet.
"We're going to take a stand here until the Government intervenes and does the right thing," said Greenpeace Australia/Pacific campaigns manager Danny Kennedy.
"We have satellite communications that enable web broadcasts, and weblogs will be uploaded daily on to the Wilderness Society's site for people around Australia and the world to look at." ...
Silicon Valley Biz Ink :: C I Host Enhances e-Memories Program to Empower Digital Camera Buffs
...BEDFORD, Texas, Nov. 13 /PRNewswire/ -- C I Host, a global leader in Web hosting, Internet infrastructure and software development, has completely retooled and re-launched its e-Memories software to capitalize on the holiday surge in digital photography.
Christopher Faulkner, CEO of C I Host, said, "e-Memories now can transform a photographer into a `virtual media mogul.' This is more than an on-line scrapbook. Version two is an on-line media center with streaming video, blogging, family TV, digital family trees, e-mail, slide shows, postcards, chatrooms, birthday reminders and more."
Experts estimate the digital camera market is a $4.5 billion industry. However less than 15 percent of camera owners have experimented with on-line slide shows and similar products, researchers say.
"Any one of these features alone could be priced higher than where we have positioned the entire e-Memories `bundle,'" Faulkner said. "The value of the product and the ease of use should attract many holiday shoppers hoping to complement their new digital cameras."
In addition, a person armed with a digital photo-equipped cell phone with Internet service literally can up load shots to their Web site on the go.
"With digital photography, people don't buy or process film, so they are shooting more frames," Faulkner said. "e-Memories is a great way to display their talents."...
Newswise :: How Blogs and the Internet Are Impacting the 2004 Presidential Campaign
...Newswise - Web logs or "blogs" and the Internet have already sparked much discussion in the presidential campaign, as candidates such as Howard Dean have used them to generate popular support and to raise money. But how much will they impact the presidential race between now and Election Day?
This topic will be explored in a symposium entitled "The Internet and Political Campaigns -- What Impact Will it Have in 2004?," which is being held on Wednesday, Nov. 19, 2003 at the Johns Hopkins University's Bernstein-Offit Building, located at 1717 Massachusetts Ave. NW.
The event, which is free and open to the public, begins at 7:30 p.m. It is sponsored by the Communications and Government Programs of Johns Hopkins University Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences Advanced Academic Programs.
Panelists include Michael B. Cornfield, research director of the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet at The George Washington University; R. Rebecca Donatelli, president of Campaign Solutions and who was lead Internet consultant to the McCain for President campaign in 2000; Laura Quinn, managing partner at QRS Newmedia Inc. and former deputy chief of staff to Al Gore; and Harrison "Lee" Rainie, director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project and an expert at the use of the Internet in American society and culture.
The discussion will be moderated by Alexis Rice, a fellow in the Center for the Study of American Government at the Johns Hopkins Washington Center. Rice is the creator of www.campaignsonline.org and the author of a recent report on web blogs, entitled, "The Use of Blogs in the 2004 Presidential Election."...
dot Journalism :: Blunt: a cut above the rest
By: Jemima Kiss
Email: jemima@journalism.co.uk
...Blunt, the web magazine run by journalism students at Cardiff University, was the surprise winner of the best web site award at this year's Guardian Student Media Awards.
Gareth Brown, online editor of Blunt, told dotJournalism that he had been unable to hear the judges' commendation when he accepted the award because runners up had been jeering so loudly.
"We were completely surprised to win. The other sites had proper funding, and some of them were built by external companies," he said.
"Ours was all our own work."
Judges commended the site for its quirky, irreverent style - despite fierce competition from the University of Durham, University of Bath and University of Southampton.
The site was built in 2002 by Gareth Brown and fellow student Fred Dutton as part of their Magazine Journalism course at Cardiff University.
For their efforts, the students won 500 cash, return flights on Easyjet and work experience at Guardian Unlimited. Awards were presented by Radio One presenter Colin Murray at a ceremony at Millbank in central London.
Mr Brown is now working on a new publication for backpackers, which will involve a web resource of news, information and community features for 18-25s.
"We want to include blogs, so that people can write about their travel while they are away," he said.
"I'm excited by the idea of creating an online community."
The Guardian Student Media Awards are now in their 25th year and award prizes in 13 categories including best newspaper, best budget publication and best reporter. This year's judging panel included Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, Jon Snow of Channel 4 News, Vogue editor Alexandra Shulman and Rebekah Wade, editor of The Sun...
November 12, 2003
social software report...
Sequoia Capital ''Links In'' with $4.7 Million Investment
...MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 12, 2003--LinkedIn, the premier provider of professional networking tools for hiring managers, job seekers and professional service providers, today announced that it has secured Series A financing of $4.7 million. The investment was led by Sequoia Capital, the venture investors behind well-known Internet brands such as Yahoo!, Google and PayPal. Sequoia Capital is also an investor in Plaxo, the leading contact updating tool.
Through the real-world business successes of its users, LinkedIn has demonstrated that even established executives increase their business effectiveness and career success by using a referral-based professional networking tool. LinkedIn not only enables professionals to discover inside connections they never knew they had, but also allows them to receive referrals to deal makers, hiring mangers and other highly sought-after executives through the people they already know and trust.
Sequoia Capital's investment underscores the significant business opportunity involved in re-engineering several large and existing markets. For example, employers and employees will spend nearly $8 billion this year to find each other through the Internet, classifieds and recruiting firms. While online job boards have become popular, they rarely work for job seekers, and hiring managers are overwhelmed with resumes and "cold" emails from strangers. LinkedIn is the only tool that mirrors the most successful process for finding a job and hiring employees and contractors: it allows both job seekers and hiring managers to find each other through referrals from their real-world connections.
"The business potential for social software is quite limited. In contrast, LinkedIn is squarely focused on trusted business referrals, which is how business gets done and for which real money gets spent every day and all over the world," said Mark Kvamme, partner at Sequoia Capital. "LinkedIn provides both patented and effective technology that has the power to transform hiring--very much in the way PayPal re-engineered the transfer of money and Google dramatically increased the utility of the Internet for individual consumers and professionals." Kvamme is joining LinkedIn's board of directors.
LinkedIn's management team is led by CEO Reid Hoffman, who co-founded SocialNet in 1997 and was most recently the executive vice president of PayPal. "We are very pleased with the rapid adoption of LinkedIn among hiring managers, venture capitalists and executives from public companies in a broad set of industries," said Hoffman. "It is particularly gratifying to see that it took less than two months for LinkedIn to help hiring managers not only reach top talent through referrals, but also interview and hire them." ...
TheFeature :: Mobile, Social, and Trustworthy?
By Howard Rheingold
...What if you could say to your mobile media, some time in the near future: "I'm in this airport for the next hour and a half. Is there another engineer from my company, member of my sorority, hometown neighbor, relative, or colleague in the vicinity who wants to have a cup of coffee and kill some time?" or "I'm driving to the office in five minutes. Who along my route is going exactly where I'm going right now, and is guaranteed by someone I trust to be trustworthy?" or "Which of the strangers on this train shares more than three friends in our address books?" The problem is not computing power or wireless capability, but a software and social challenge. The social challenge has to do with what you have to disclose to strangers about yourself in order to find like-minded strangers and win their trust without compromising your privacy, and conversely, what you need to know about nearby strangers in order to trust them. The software challenge is to use computing and communication capabilities to negotiate possible compatibilities on an ad-hoc, peer-to-peer basis, without bothering the users too much -- if your people-finder beeps at you every fifteen seconds, you aren't going to use it for long. The social challenge is trying to quantify such ineffable notions as affinity and reputation in a manner computing devices can use.
A group of researchers at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories' Information Dynamics Lab, Bernardo Huberman, Stephen Sorkin, and Josh Tyler, have produced a working model of a Nokia 3650 phone that runs a Symbian C program that does not attempt to solve the reputation problem, but does allow people within bluetooth range of each other to discover if they have the same preferences without revealing them to each other. "Just what you need for the phenomenon of discovering in real space if you have a community," Huberman noted when he told me about their recent work. This video narrated by Sorkin, demonstrates how nearby phones negotiate possible affinities in the geographic vicinity by testing for similar attributes such as common address book entries or any other specified attributes...
layer 3 vpn...
Boardwatch: Syndesis Struts at OSS Event
...DALLAS - Syndesis, the company that brings networks to life globally, is proud to showcase its proven success in delivering bottom-line value for Telecom Italia and other lean operators at the upcoming TeleManagement World conference.
TM Forum Operational Excellence Award
TeleManagement Forum (TM Forum) will present its first ever Operational Excellence Award to Telecom Italia during the opening ceremony of TeleManagement World on November 11. This Award, which highlights Syndesis' integral role in Telecom Italia's recently-deployed company-wide DSL flow-through provisioning system, recognizes the significant business benefits achieved by Telecom Italia through the implementation of an OSS/BSS solution using the TM Forum's Next Generation Operations System and Software (NGOSS) approach. Syndesis, Granite, Micromuse and TIBCO provided solutions to Telecom Italia, with Syndesis providing a NetProvision-based solution for inter-domain service activation of new convergent services.
Business Benefits of NGOSS
NGOSS are hailed as the future for service providers to enable the rapid and efficient delivery of new services. Mark Nicholson, CTO and Vice President of Product Management for Syndesis, joins Saverio Orlando of Telecom Italia, the chief technology officers of Granite and Micromuse, and the GM of TIBCO to talk about how an integrated approach to NGOSS design has been achieved in a real-life environment. The discussion, "NGOSS Compliance: A Step-By-Step Approach to Business Benefits", takes place on Wednesday, November 12, 2003 from 10:30am - 12:00pm.
Showcasing Operational Excellence
Syndesis will be available in Booth #75 to demonstrate why Telecom Italia - and numerous other Tier 1 service providers - have chosen carrier-class solutions from Syndesis...
November 11, 2003
social software am i...
...Someone just worked out how to get a lot of hits! Or was this really the lazyweb in action. Thanks to Chris Heathcote inspired by Tom Smith " I invoke the LazyWeb to make me a "Am I Social Software or Not" site... ." When I read Peter Merholz comments on Epinions last week this was not the result I expected. Now someone just needs to post the Epinions review to close the loop...
Stuart is 'the blogosphere' according to the "Am I Social Software or Not" site, and I am:
social networking & knowledge work research...
A large portion of my research is at the intersection of social networking and social software solutions, and their capacity to help improve knowledge work. The following three papers may be of interest to others who are working in this space. An abstract for the first paper appears 'above the fold' on my weblog, please continue reading 'below the fold' for the remaining two papers.
Enabling Collective Knowledge Work Through the Design of Mediating Spaces: A Framework for Systemic Socio-Informatic Change (ResearchIndex)
By: David Ing and Ian Simmonds
ABSTRACT: We propose a framework for designers of business organizations and designers of information systems that portrays three forms of “space” that mediate social interactions: physical space, social space and informatic space. The framework aids organizational designers and information technology designers to understand some of the complexities of enabling knowledge work, by contrasting the properties of the spaces and their interactions:
* Social interaction enabled by physical spaces is the focus of architects of buildings and urban planners, managers locating individuals and team who work together, and conference organizers who plan events to encourage networking.
* Social interaction enabled by social spaces is the focus of organizational designers who develop supporting social structures such as centers of excellence or practitioner support networks.
* Social interaction enabled by informatic spaces is the focus of knowledge architects and process analysts, who administer and moderate groupware and workflow applications.
In addition,
* Informatic spaces hosted in physical spaces are the focus of Information Technology architects, who ensure appropriate geographical coverage, performance, availability and security through appropriate computer hardware and software (e.g. servers, access points and networks).
Since the ways in which knowledge work can be carried out vary from person to person across a community, and innovations are naturally introduced over time, an enabling infrastructure should be capable of adaptation to those changed needs. We draw on research in general systems theory, architectural theory, and social theory to inform our practices in advising on business design, and methods and tools for information modeling.
Information Retrieval Algorithms For Knowledge Management – The Challenge Continues (ResearchIndex)
By: Elaine Ferneley - E.Ferneley@salford.ac.uk, Brendan Berney - B.T.Berney@salford.ac.uk, and Yacine Rezgui - Y.Rezgui@salford.ac.uk
This paper considers Information Communication Technology (ICT) support for the knowledge creation process that takes place by the interaction of both tacit and explicit knowledge with the knowledge creating entities of the individual, group and organisation (or organisations). Attempts to provide ICT support for this process have tended to focus on two stages in the knowledge evolution cycle, firstly extraction and representation and secondly dissemination. In order to extract and represent knowledge a number of approaches have been used, these include: the use of knowledge bases and ontologies, the use of filtering and categorisation mechanisms to extract key terms and the development of various weighting mechanisms in an attempt to prioritise or cluster related entities. To support dissemination various approaches to user profiling have been used which usually incorporate some form of adaptive information filtering mechanism. This paper presents a critical evaluation of a number of the more well know extraction and representation techniques. It then presents a set of user profiling techniques appropriate for use in intra-organisation knowledge management portal applications.
SMILE Maker: Concept-Orientation in Agent-Based Architectures for Personal Assistance and Collaborative Problem Solving (ResearchIndex)
By: Svetoslav Stoyanov, Neli Stoyanova, Piet Kommers and Ivan Kurtev
The paper presents some experimentally validated design solutions on the groupware module ‘Partner’ of SMILE Maker for mobile and personal support facilities. Three types of scenarios for collaborative problem solving have been tested. Pin-cards, Delphi and BrainMapping modes proved to have a differential effect on learning and collaborative problem solving suggesting concrete design solutions.
SMILE Maker is a web-based knowledge support system promoting with just in time, just enough and just at point of need intelligent support in dealing with ill-structured problem situations. Conceptually SMILE Maker lies in a cross-section area of four recently strongly recognized paradigms: problem solving, concept mapping, collaborative learning and instructional design.
The module ‘Partner’ of SMILE Maker enables a shared group environment for distributing learning resources. It supports externalis ation and sharing the individual potential in terms of formal expertise and tacit knowledge, organised by the personalised meaningful perception of the problem space.
layer 3 vpn...
Light Reading :: Japan's HOTnet Picks Juniper
...SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- Juniper Networks, Inc. today announced that Japanese service provider, Hokkaido Telecommunications Network Co. (HOTnet), is transforming its regional wide area network to a 10-Gigabit Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) architecture based on routing platforms from Juniper Networks. HOTnet will launch a range of sophisticated revenue-generating services, including QoS-controlled Layer 2 and Layer 3 VPN services, and is developing an MPLS-based Internet Exchange (IX) using Juniper Networks M-, T- and E-series platforms.
"Our vision is for a network infrastructure that seamlessly connects from the core to the edge and delivers reliable and highly scalable services," said Satoshi Baba, manager IT Expert and Technical Planning for HOTnet. "Juniper Networks routing platforms are enabling this evolution. For example, the M-series platform's hardware-based MPLS functionality and robust QoS facilities provide for a wide range of network services and an easy transition from our legacy dedicated services to new L2 and L3 services."
A member of the PowerNets Japan group of 10 power companies, HOTnet was an early leader in its market with its Gigabit Ethernet LAN to LAN (L2L) service. The new MPLS network will meet growing demand for highly reliable services, especially from users relying on mission-critical business networks.
HOTnet is also using the M-series as a high-performance IX routing platform. It has also replaced its legacy broadband aggregation equipment with Juniper Networks E-series platform, planning to leverage its capabilities to provide voice over IP (VoIP), content distribution and other highly customized services. In addition, Juniper Networks T-series high-density routing platform has been selected to provide the high reliability and scalability essential to HOTnet's MPLS backbone and to serve as the basis of a possible network enhancement to GMPLS.
"HOTnet is recognized across Japan as a market leader in the deployment of advanced network services," said Masanori Osuga, vice president, Japan, Juniper Networks. "We are excited about the potential of the new HOTnet MPLS network using best-in-class Juniper Networks solutions to provide the next generation of advanced commercial IP services to business and residential users of Hokkaido."...
personal knowledge mapping...
If you read my weblog, then you most likely read Dave Pollard. But for those who do not, Dave has posted a 'Business Case for Personal Productivity Improvement' on his 'How to Save the World' weblog. Check it out. It's a great business case and complements my research on 'Personal Knowledge Mapping'. (paper coming soon.)
November 10, 2003
knowledge management news...
[there are nine news stories in this post.]
CIO :: Analyst Corner - IT Does Matter
By Margaret Tanaszi - Program Manager, IDC
...An interesting debate has been engaging the attention of many in the business community and IT industry, sparked by an article by Nicholas Carr in the May 2003 Harvard Business Review, IT Doesn't Matter. On his website, Carr further explained his argument in the article that IT has become a commodity, and although essential to competitiveness at the regional and industry level, "it is no longer a source of advantage at the firm level - it doesn't enable individual companies to distinguish themselves in a meaningful way from their competitors." (Nicholas G Carr.) The article said,
The rapidly increasing affordability of IT functionality has not only democratized the computer revolution, it has destroyed one of the most important potential barriers to competitors... The opportunities for gaining IT-based advantages are already dwindling. Best practices are now quickly built into software or otherwise replicated... Their very power and presence have begun to transform them from potentially strategic resources into commodity factors of production. They are becoming costs of doing business that must be paid by all but provide distinction to none."
Carr's thesis is built on the notion of scarcity. He says that what makes a resource truly strategic-the basis for sustained competitive advantage-"is not ubiquity but scarcity," and notes that the core functions of IT have now become available and affordable to all."
However, the same notion about the value of information (the "information is power" principle) was firmly disproved by the now common diffusion of information by networks and the Internet. One of the key tenets of knowledge management, for example, has been that the value of information increases by its use, distribution and transfer to create new forms and configurations of knowledge, which go on to create new kinds of value, and as history shows, value that can be translated into currency.
Few would argue with Carr's point that "most companies can...reap significant savings from cutting out waste." That is a perennial problem for most organizations, and they are trying to address it as best they can. Many companies can also count themselves in Carr's assertion that "companies have been sloppy in their use of IT," citing inessential volumes of information on corporate storage networks. That too is an ongoing challenge for most organizations.
It is when Carr claims that corporate IT spending studies "consistently show that greater expenditures rarely translate into superior financial results" that he exposes the space in which IT can truly matter. The disassociation between spending and results sheds no light on what was done with the IT investments to lead to those disappointing outcomes. Similarly, Carr cites a 2002 Alinean study, comparing those same parameters for 7,500 large U.S. companies, which found that "the top performers tended to be among the most tightfisted." Again, what is missing is how those top performers used the IT investments to their advantage...
KM Europe 2003 - creating, exploiting and retaining Knowledge
Now in its 4th year and already enjoyed by more than 10,000 visitors, KM Europe is the largest Knowledge Management (KM) conference and exhibition in the world. Growing every year, this event is a driving force behind KM development in Europe. KM Europe 2003 takes place from the 10-12 November at Amsterdam RAI and will be the biggest and best event yet.
TenLinks :: iManage Releases CADLink for iManage WorkSite
...FOSTER CITY, California, November 10, 2003 - iManage, Inc. (Nasdaq: IMAN), a leading provider of collaborative content management software for global enterprises, today announced the release of CADLink for iManage WorkSite MP, a solution that integrates leading computer-aided design (CAD) applications into the iManage platform. Designed to help engineers leverage content management functionality from within their native CAD environment, CADLink for iManage WorkSite MP is being introduced under an OEM agreement between iManage and McLaren Software, the leading developer of content-based enterprise applications for companies in the process manufacturing, utilities and engineering, design and construction sectors.
The introduction of CADLink for iManage WorkSite MP will combine the power of iManage's collaboration content management solution with the CAD capabilities of industry-leading products like Autodesk AutoCAD and Bentley MicroStation. CAD drawings and the intricate network of references between the CAD files typical of complex designs, are all stored, accessed and controlled through iManage Worksite MP, enabling engineers to work concurrently and improve design cycle time. Engineers using the solution can access drawings directly from the iManage repository through the familiar menus of their CAD applications, speeding the adoption of content management practices. Combined with the powerful extranet capabilities and tight security model of iManage WorkSite MP, CADlink enables businesses to collaborate across their value chains on design and construction projects at significantly reduced time and cost...
...The Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions (OSFI), the regulator of federally registered financial institutions operating in Canada, will implement a new system to streamline, standardize and re-design internal processes and improve the management of information across the organization. OSFI will work with Cap Gemini Ernst & Young (CGE&Y) as its systems integrator for the initiative, and will utilize software solutions from Formark and Open Text(TM) Corporation (Nasdaq: OTEX)(TSX: OTC). The solution will be based on Open Text's Livelink(R) software suite.
Called the Business Systems Integration Initiative (BSII), the project will allow OSFI to enhance its effectiveness in an increasingly complex and rapidly changing financial services industry. The BSII project will provide a new level of automation, so that OSFI employees can quickly and more efficiently manage regulatory processes, improve risk management supervision and speed responses to key stakeholders...
Endeca Announces Formation of Government Advisory Board
...CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 10, 2003--Endeca, the leading provider of advanced search and Guided Navigation(SM) solutions, today announced the formation of a government advisory board. The founding members of the Endeca Government Advisory Board bring long experience and expert knowledge of public sector and government technology applications to the company. Founding members include: Roger Baker, former CIO for the Department of Commerce, Alan Balutis, former executive director for the Federal Government Information Processing Council (FGIPC), and Charles Battaglia, former staff director for the Senate Select Intelligence Committee.
"We are very pleased and honored to have such an experienced and successful trio of individuals form the nucleus of our advisory board," said Steve Papa, CEO and founder of Endeca. "These board members exemplify integrity and public service and have been entrusted to provide leadership across the wide spectrum of government including national intelligence, military, and civilian agencies. Their association with Endeca is further validation of Endeca's potential to revolutionize the way the public sector finds, discovers, and analyzes information, and we plan to augment the board with equally distinguished members in the coming months." ...
Business Standard :: Managing know-how
...Winners of the IMA-American Express "India CFO Awards" write exclusive case studies on how they helped their companies overcome crucial strategic problems. In the last of this series, V Balakrishnan, CFO, Owens Corning India, winner, India CFO Award 2002 for Excellence in Information & Knowledge Management, writes about how he made information management more seamless and aligned it to the company strategies.
...The various initiatives that we have undertaken in the field of knowledge management have been recognised by Owens Corning. We had been engaged by the parent to develop a Six Sigma Tracking Tool that is used across some 60 sites worldwide. It is a prestigious project that has enhanced the image of the organisation.
One question that is asked is: what is a CFO's role in knowledge management? Knowledge Management is all about process and aligning strategy to what your company knows.
It is a process requiring appropriate corporate culture, good technology, metrics and an organic quality of growth, right information to right people and understanding of what needs to be retained. One would end up linking knowledge, business strategy and IT.
Given all this, a CFO is at an advantage of capturing the organisational knowledge which is into processes that are aligned well to the business strategy that he or she is aware of, and use IT as a tool for capturing this knowledge through a well-designed process.
This knowledge is mostly converted into business data and as the central repository, the CFO is able to leverage the knowledge availability across the organisation and channelise it through processes to drive superior business results.
In my role as the CFO of the company, I along with my highly-charged IS team, have been able to make information management more seamless than experienced earlier. Some of the initiatives or strategies might look small but these have contributed immensely to the productivity of the organisation...
...NEW YORK, Nov. 10 /PRNewswire/ -- Executives and high level decision makers from the largest pharmaceutical and healthcare companies along with economists, strategists, and consultants will convene in Chicago, IL to address critical impediments to industry growth and profit, reports Strategic Research Institute.
R&D productivity, generic competition, pricing strategies, regulatory and policy concerns, as well as lack of innovation in global product marketing will be among the obstacles covered over the course of the two-day executive forum to be held in March.
The speaking faculty is diverse and comprehensive, consisting of industry executives from strategic planning, market analysis, licensing, federal relations, new products, business development, knowledge management, drug commercialization, medical affairs, health economics among others.
Key industry companies participating to date include: Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Eli Lilly, Novartis, ISO Healthcare, Medical Solutions PLC, and Aventis Pharma US.
Audience interaction will be facilitated via panel and roundtable discussions, specifically in the integration of R&D and performance strategies...
Computerworld Singapore :: Search gets serious
By Cathleen Moore and Tan Ee Sze
...The content management challenges that enterprises face in Singapore are no different from those reported in other parts of the world: the electronic content that enterprises accumulate is growing rapidly and these would require good search solutions.
Moreover, in the Singapore context, enterprises may also have to grapple with a host of other issues. James Lin, chief operating officer of Mustard Technology, pointed out that there may be good technology but what is often lacking is local support in terms of cost-effective consulting and implementation skills. "For the global vendors, it is a challenge to support remote customers," he said.
...Mustard Technology's niche is in the area of fuzzy search that crosses language barriers – the fast and fuzzy transliterated search. Mustard uses patented fuzzy logic matching algorithms and natural language parsing capabilities that mimic the human approach to problem-solving. This enables the software to index high volume databases and suggest appropriate matches according to user-configured business rules and scoring thresholds. The software operates across multiple Asian languages and is tailored for Chinese (simplified and traditional), Malay, Japanese and Korean languages as well as English.
The company also has a patent for its version of the taxonomy search, and works closely with local research groups to incorporate other technologies such as concept search, text summary and text categorisation into its search solutions.
...One of the growing ways to put search to use is through search-derivative applications, in which core search functionality is pressed into service for specific processes such as knowledge management, marketing, sales force automation, help desk, and training.
Looking towards the future, enterprise search technology will continue to expand beyond its seek-and-find roots, blurring the lines between efforts such as business intelligence and knowledge management in an effort to present a full view of information assets within a company...
Yahoo PR NewsWire :: Virage(R) Announces VS Archive(TM)
...SAN MATEO, Calif., Nov. 10 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Virage, Inc., a wholly owned division of Autonomy Corp. (Nasdaq: AUTN; LSE: AU.; Europe Nasdaq: AUTN) and a leading provider of rich media communication and content management software, today introduced VS Archive, its next-generation software solution to store, categorize, manage, retrieve and distribute video, audio and other rich media content.
Building upon the highly successful VS Production(TM)and VS Publishing(TM), this release expands the range of rich media business applications including those for marketing, sales, human resources, production and training. With this solution organizations can digitize, index, share and repurpose content departmentally or enterprise-wide thereby enabling multiple users distributed across locations to quickly find and review content and collaborate online. In addition, the solution automates the analysis and categorization of the original footage removing this once highly manual and time-consuming process. Companies making this investment benefit through improved communication, better advertising and promotion, increased productivity, accelerated learning and the security of knowing valuable corporate assets will be preserved for the future.
VS Archive manages all forms of unstructured content from the point of ingestion through archive creation and content access. Powered by Autonomy's Intelligent Data Operating Layer (IDOL), video and rich media are now integrated at the center of other enterprise content and compatible with existing systems. IDOL Server(TM) capabilities include automated retrieval, hyperlinking, categorization, alerting, profiling, clustering and personalization. Other Autonomy technologies integrated into this release include Dremedia(TM) and SoftSound(TM) for scene change detection, transcript alignment and advanced audio and speech analysis.
In addition, Virage core products and technologies power the solution. The SmartEncode(TM) product line includes the award-winning and market-leading product VideoLogger® for automated indexing, analysis and encoding, and ControlCenter(TM) for monitoring, managing and scheduling multiple source feeds. Virage Solution Server(TM) provides the framework and underlying capabilities for rich media content management using Java(TM) 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE). The capabilities include security, user and group management, asset management, database and storage management, XSL template rendering, SOAP data import and high availability...
November 09, 2003
knowledge economy news...
[there are six news stories in this post.]
Washington Post :: Brain-Gain Cities Attract Educated Young
By Blaine Harden
..."A pack of cities is racing away from everybody else in terms of their ability to attract and retain an educated workforce," said Bruce Katz, director of the Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy at the Brookings Institution. "It is a sobering trend for cities left behind."
The long economic downturn has stalled growth and increased unemployment in almost every U.S. city, and has brought a sense of near-desperation to the intercity fight for young talent. Mayors, business leaders and university presidents are scrambling to secure new technology companies and entice young people to live downtown.
"In our business, you have to cannibalize," said Ron Sims, the county executive of King County, which surrounds Seattle, and a Democratic candidate for governor of Washington state. "Many cities don't fight back very well."
In addition to Seattle, the largest brain-gain cities include Austin, Atlanta, Boston, Denver, Minneapolis, San Diego, San Francisco, Washington, and Raleigh and Durham, N.C.
The rising tide of well-schooled talent has created a self-reinforcing cycle. Newcomers ... have made a handful of cities richer, more densely populated and more capable of squeezing wealth out of the next big thing that a knowledge-based economy might serve up.
Some of these cities are blessed with relatively young, homegrown billionaires. They understand technology and are making huge bets to lure more talent. Seattle, with Microsoft Corp. co-founders Paul G. Allen and Bill Gates fronting much of the money, is probably making the most expensive such bet in the country -- on biotechnology...
The Arizona Republic :: Fox is correct to view U.S. as partner
by O. Ricardo Pimentel
...Mexico is already our second-largest trading partner and we are its first, representing about 85 percent of all of it trade, Fox (President of Mexico) said. Arizona gets an estimated $6.8 billion of that.
This trade is accompanied in flourishes by the rhetoric of hemispheric cooperation - except when we talk about immigration.
Simply, Mexico views itself as in a partnership. We don't.
Fox made a good case for Mexico simply holding up its end of the bargain, providing labor and, by the way, being rich in something else we crave. That would be oil.
The United States has a knowledge-based economy, technology and investment wherewithal. Canada has much natural and human resources to contribute.
Fox speaks of a North American bloc that must vie economically with other regional blocs that are becoming increasingly efficient and competitive.
Meanwhile - my words, not Fox's - we are increasingly becoming a nation of unilateralists. We don't think in terms of blocs. We think the U.S. spells us, even when that shortchanges us.
Fox said it is shortsighted not to view the migration patterns evident in this hemisphere in a more global context. When the story of the 21st century is told, he said, global migration will be a major theme. He advocates bringing order, legality and fluidity to this flow with immigration reform that recognizes this central "fact of life."...
STUFF : INFOTECH : New Zealand :: ICT needs identified
By TOM PULLAR-STRECKER
...The Labour Department's Community Employment Group hosted the "Connecting Communities" conference, which was attended by more than 400 representatives from community groups, non-profit organisations and government agencies.
Labour Department chief executive James Buwalda says the conference showed the need for "asset-mapping tools" which could be used by community groups to maintain information on ICT resources, skills and services in their areas. Also highlighted was the role of "e-riders" - people with ICT expertise who are willing to help train and help educate community groups and non-IT literate people in their communities.
Mr Buwalda says the calls for "broadband for all" are a "no-brainer". "The internet is designing itself around broadband." He says the priorities will help shape future funding from government for community-based ICT projects for the next five years.
Social Development Minister Steve Maharey said the Government is committed to building "a knowledge-based society for New Zealanders". He says New Zealand is doing "pretty well in this area".
Progress will necessitate creating more places where people can access the net, "if not at home, in local libraries or whatever".
A lot of the drive will have to come from local government, he says...
STLtoday :: Midwestern governors ask how to halt job loss
...The Midwest has a lot going for it: affordable housing, top universities and a quality work force. With those assets, why can't the region attract high-tech, good-paying jobs?
Governors from four Midwestern states sought an answer to that question Thursday from panels of experts from businesses, academia and government.
Gov. Bob Holden had called the specialists together for a brainstorming session sponsored by the Midwestern Governors' Association. The group is supposed to come up with recommendations for the governors of all 13 member states to consider early next year.
Holden was joined by Govs. Jim Doyle of Wisconsin, Thomas Vilsack of Iowa and Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas. All are Democrats. Staff members and representatives from other states also attended the session at the Renaissance Grand Hotel.
Over the past three years, Midwestern states have been rocked by an economic downturn fueled partly by an exodus of manufacturing jobs to foreign countries, where it's cheaper to produce goods. The governors were looking for advice on how to keep what manufacturing jobs their states still had while replacing those that had been lost with a new, "knowledge-based economy."...
The Times & The Sunday Times, Malta :: Reflections on the FOI Conference
...The Malta Federation of Industry held a successful conference on the theme "Europe - most competitive economy by 2010? How will Malta benefit from this process?" on October 31 at the Corinthia San Gorg Hotel, St Julian's.
FOI president Anton Borg delivered a detailed presentation comparing Malta's current performance under the numerous Lisbon statistical indicators in relation to those of the EU 15 and the other nine EU accession countries together with Malta. Several eminent speakers, economists and politicians also discussed the various issues that proved to be more than a mouthful for a half-day conference.
The FOI was honoured with the presence of Dr Philippe de Buck, secretary general of the Union of Industrial and Employers' Confederations of Europe (UNICE), who discussed UNICE's stand and contribution to the Lisbon Agenda; Jussi Mustonen, director and chief economist of the Confederation of Finnish Industry and Employers (TT), who questioned how achievable the Lisbon Agenda indicators are; Dr Lawrence Gonzi, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Social Policy, who presented the social aspect of the Lisbon Agenda and the developments in Malta as an accession country; John Dalli, Minister of Finance and Economic Affairs, who focused on the possible ways of developing a competitive knowledge-based economy in Malta; and Gordon Cordina, from the Economics Department, University of Malta, who discussed how the Lisbon Agenda targets could be met...
Viet Nam News Agency :: Knowledge Based Economy Workshop
Ha Noi, Nov. 9 (VNA) - Domestic News
- Nov. 10: The Viet Nam Union of Scientific and Technological Associations to hold a workshop on knowledge-based economy.
November 08, 2003
social networking and blogging...
Wired News :: Will Microsoft Wallop Friendster?
By Kari L. Dean
The two articles that I cite and quote today - from Wired and eWEEK - offer a little more on Wallop - Microsoft's 'invitation only' entry into social networking and blogging - and an extension of their IM product that is currently being tested by approximately 100 Microsoft employees.
Wallop is receiving mixed reviews as a entrant into the social networking / blogging sphere of services. Recently there has been a surge in mainstream news articles reporting on this cross-over area between social networking, social software, and weblogging.
...Rumors about Microsoft's Wallop have been greatly exaggerated, mostly due to the blogging community's inability to penetrate the site's invitation-only front door.
...Wallop is Microsoft's venture into the red-hot social-networking arena, using the common Microsoft tack of piecing together existing technologies and packaging them for the novice user. Those technologies include Friendster-style social-networking capabilities, super-simplistic blogging tools, moblogging, wikis and RSS feeds, all based on Microsoft's Instant Messenger functionality.
"IM is more of a model for what we are doing than social networking," said Lili Cheng, research manager for Microsoft's social-computing group. "You can add Wallop to your Instant Messenger and add new pictures and content that way."
...Cheng said Wallop enables users to build online social networks in a more realistic manner than Friendster, the popular social-networking website. Friendster membership works by invitation only. Once new users establish Friendster profiles -- complete with pictures and lists of interests -- they can search an ever-growing network of friends, and friends of friends, for people they might want to contact. That network can get so large that it becomes hard to manage. It's not unusual for a new user's network to grow to 175,000 "friendsters" in the first week.
...Some social-networking software experts are skeptical about Wallop, saying that it seems merely to bundle existing tools rather than offering new functionality. Some even dismiss it as vaporware.
Mark Pincus, founder of Tribe, said he wouldn't be surprised if the work on Wallop never gets off the ground as a viable service for consumers.
"Microsoft had the last seven years to create something that makes (building networked) groups easy, but they still have nothing today," Pincus said, citing threedegrees.com as an example of Microsoft's unsuccessful foray into social networking.
Ross Mayfield, CEO of Socialtext, a social-networking software company, noted that while all of Wallop's features are available elsewhere, "this stitches together lots of things that others have innovated on, and the integration looks appealing as a service."
Mayfield sees the integration of IM as particularly significant, as most blogging tools -- except AOL -- don't have that feature. However, he would prefer that such a tool be developed as an open-source project rather than a proprietary service.
"You have to commend AOL and Google (for their blogging tools)," Mayfield said. "They are big companies not just providing blogging, but providing it with open standards, participating in Atom, the next-generation syndication standards after RSS.
"We anticipate (Wallop) as being very closed and proprietary, which is antithetical to the way that blogs, as technology and a culture, have developed."...
Also reported by: Packing a Wallopby Mary Jo Foley, Microsoft's Wallop : Gadgetopia by Deane, The Blog Herald: Wallop being beta tested: Microsoft looking at 2nd Qtr 2004 release Archives, WinXPcentral - Microsoft Research Packs 'Wallop', and TechNewsFirst.com :: Microsoft Research Packs 'Wallop'.
Microsoft Research Packs 'Wallop'
By Darryl K. Taft
...LOS ANGELES - Microsoft Corp. themed this week's Professional Developers Conference along the lines of the company's advancements in presentation, storage and communications, and Wednesday Microsoft showed how its research arm is enhancing these areas and more.
In a keynote address here, Rick Rashid, senior vice president of Microsoft Research, spoke on the issue, as well as touching on the question, "Are we done yet?" Rashid gave examples of several areas in which Microsoft's research dollars are going to further the company's products.
In the area of communications, Rashid called upon Lili Cheng, a senior researcher at Microsoft, to demonstrate how the software giant is working on social computing, social interaction and how communication can work in the future.
Cheng demonstrated a research project called Wallop that includes Web logging capabilities, document and image sharing, and other interactive features. Cheng said parts of Wallop will find its way into the Longhorn operating system. The software will automatically associate people, groups and data in Longhorn...
November 07, 2003
social networking and blogging...
MediaDaily:: All The News That's Fit To Blog? Not Yet, But Maybe Soon
By Larry Dobrow, Contributing Writer
...Blogging and social networking may or may not change the face of traditional media as we know it. But Web wonks at a freewheeling panel discussion in New York Thursday morning said the impact of both is already being felt up and down the media food chain. And with one of the panelists estimating that somewhere in the neighborhood of three million blogs currently exist - three million people decrying the Bush Administration's economic policies, overcrowding at the local zoo or the propriety of continuing "8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter" without John Ritter - it probably behooves those few who aren't paying attention to get with the program.
The blogging crowd was on enemy turf. The breakfast roundtable, dubbed "The People vs. The Media: Will Blogging & Social Networking Turn the Media World Upside Down?," was held at publishing power-lunch mecca Michael's (in the back room, dubbed "Siberia" by one attendee). Nonetheless, the session was the blogging and social networking equivalent of an all-star game, featuring A-list bloggers, venture capitalists and suppliers of blogging and social networking technology.
The most interesting take on the rise of social networking (and the potential for monetizing it) was given by Tribe Networks chief executive officer Mark Pincus. Pincus, whose Tribe.Net seeks to be to professional networking and advice what Friendster is to dating, suggested that social networks - especially ones that serve as de facto referral networks - could ultimately serve as an alternative to classified ads. The potential implications for advertisers are enormous, as local classified activity is generally considered a better indicator of purchasing intent than a search on the Web.
"Twenty-five percent of the U.S. population participated in a person-to-person transaction [not involving the Internet] last year," he added, saying that there's a huge opportunity for any company that can capture a piece of this business online. At least a few media behemoths must agree: Tribe Networks counts The Washington Post Company and Knight Ridder among its investors.
That point was echoed by Ben Smith, chairman and chief executive officer of Spoke, who said advertisers would soon covet (if they don't already) information obtained via social networks. "I can point a better ad at you based on who your friends are," he said. "Who you know defines you more than the magazines you read."
Other panelists explored whether social networks can help media companies build loyalty with existing readers. Tony Perkins, creator and editor-in-chief of AlwaysOn and the event's host, questioned whether newly emboldened readers will continue to be engaged by Web sites that don't allow them to comment on stories, editorials or columns. What the blogging and social networking era has done for these readers, he said, was reveal "the power of participating in media... the average citizen out there has something to say." As a result, he believes every Web site will eventually have to open itself up to readers' comments, or risk losing their trust...
MacNN News :: Rainjul launches Polywogg blog services
...Rainjul has released a first public beta version of Polywogg, a journaling/blogging service for Mac OS X Jaguar and Panther. "This first release of Polywogg is packed with innovative features, many never before seen on any journal service, such as video blogging with Apple's iSight camera and comprehensive desktop web client application support. The blogging and journaling phenomena are ultimately about the appeal of social networking." It is available as fully functional and non-expiring software with both a Polywogg Reader and Polywogg Publisher. For a limited time, a one-year subscription for five journals is free for Apple .Mac members and $15 for others...
November 06, 2003
knowledge management news...
[there are three news stories in this post.]
Intelligent Enterprise Magazine :: 2003 Readers' Choice Awards
QUOTE...
The Readers Have Chosen: IBM, Microsoft, and SAS take the most laurels
We thank the subscribers who cast their ballots to determine this year's winners. Here are some highlights:
IBM swept the Integration categories, and SAS won more awards than ever.
Ralph Kimball holds firmly onto his reign as favorite columnist.
Informatica edged out Data Junction from its long-running lead in Data Movement & Transformation.
The editors had to make the difficult decision this year to throw out the Supply Chain Management Systems category, for lack of a significant number of votes. We also had an unusual number of categories in which three or more products tied; we called these results a draw.
Your feedback is welcome. Please write to the editors at iemagazine@cmp.com. The winners are as follows:
INTELLIGENCE
ALERTING TOOLS
MicroStrategy
Narrowcast Server
ANALYTIC SERVERS
Microsoft
SQL Server Analysis Services
BI APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT PLATFORMS & TOOLS
Business Objects
Developer Suite
BUSINESS PERFORMANCE MONITORING & MANAGEMENT ENVIRONMENTS
Pilot Software
Pilot BusinessMonitor
CLICKSTREAM-ANALYSIS TOOLS
SAS
IntelliVisor
DATA MINING TOOLS
SAS
Enterprise Miner
DATA MOVEMENT & TRANSFORMATION
Informatica
PowerCenter
DATA VISUALIZATION TOOLS
Visual Mining
NetCharts Server
ENTERPRISE BI SUITES OR PLATFORMS
Crystal Decisions
Crystal Enterprise
FINANCIAL PLANNING, FORECASTING, & BUDGETING TOOLS
Hyperion
Planning or Pillar
GEOSPATIAL ANALYSIS PLATFORMS
MapInfo
various products
MANAGED REPORTING SYSTEMS
Crystal Decisions
Crystal Reports
MULTIDIMENSIONAL ANALYSIS TOOLS
Cognos
PowerPlay
PREDICTIVE MODELING TOOLS
SAS
STAT
SEARCH & RETRIEVAL TOOLS
Google
Search Appliance
UNSTRUCTURED BI APPLICATIONS
SAS
Text Miner
COLLABORATIVE COMMERCE
E-BUSINESS INTEGRATION MIDDLEWARE
IBM
WebSphere Commerce
PROVIDERS OF CUSTOMER INTELLIGENCE, INTERACTION, & RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE
Siebel
INTEGRATION
APPLICATION SERVERS
IBM
WebSphere Application Server
ENTERPRISE INFORMATION INTEGRATION PLATFORMS & PORTALS
IBM
WebSphere Portal
ENTERPRISE INTEGRATION MIDDLEWARE
IBM
WebSphere MQ
MOBILE APPLICATION SERVERS
IBM
WebSphere MQ Everyplace
INFRASTRUCTURE
APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT TOOLS & PLATFORMS
Microsoft
Visual Studio.Net
DATABASE SERVERS
Oracle
Oracle Database Server
ENTERPRISE MODELING & DESIGN TOOLS
Microsoft
Visio
ENTERPRISE STORAGE MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS
EMC
Enterprise Storage Networks
ERP APPLICATION SUITES
SAP
mySAP ERP
OPERATING SYSTEMS
Microsoft
Windows 2000
SYSTEMS INTEGRATION/CONSULTING PROVIDERS
Accenture
BONUS
INTELLIGENT ENTERPRISE COLUMNIST
Ralph Kimball for Data Warehouse
MOST IMPORTANT REASON TO BUY STRATEGIC SOFTWARE RIGHT NOW
Capturing Efficiency to Drive Down Costs
...ENDQUOTE
New Zealand News - - Know-how sure to rise
By ESTELLE SARNEY
...Remember how Grandma baked the best scones you've ever eaten? Maybe you got her recipe, but no matter how many times you tried, your scones never turned out as good.
Believe it or not, this little story encapsulates the essence of a new trend in business: knowledge management. The name sounds dull, and experts agree it is a passive misnomer for active sharing of knowledge to make a company more efficient, effective and innovative.
So what's with the scones? Knowledge management consultant Carl Davidson says it shows how knowledge can be categorised as explicit and tacit.
Grandma gave you only explicit knowledge by writing down instructions. What you also needed was her tacit knowledge of how she worked in the butter and milk, how she kneaded the dough. You would get this only by talking to her face to face, watching her, or making a batch alongside her. ...
Snip... Long article on the 'basics' of KM. Opens with scones and ends with some signs to watch for in you organization that might indicate that you need to have a 'knowledge strategy'. ...Snip
...Signs you need better knowledge management
* Effort is duplicated
* The same mistakes are made in different parts of the company
* The company repeats past mistakes
* People feel overwhelmed by information
* People don't talk face to face
* People don't know what or who to consult if they strike a problem
* Decisions aren't made on the best information available...
Byte and Switch :: The Global Site For Storage Networking
...StorageTek supports its Email Xcelerator solutions through its Global Services organization. StorageTek's professional services experts have experience in designing and implementing a cost effective infrastructure to support an e-mail environment, and are adept at helping customers identify best-in-class solutions.
This new suite of solutions -- the StorageTek Email ArchiveMaster(TM), Email ArchiveMaster with search and retrieve capability, and Email AuditMaster(TM) -- will address the three primary management issues related to e-mail:
Archive Management: This software/hardware/service-based solution enables companies to better manage e-mail data through its lifecycle. It automatically migrates older e-mail and attachments to inexpensive and, if necessary, compliant media.
Knowledge Management: In addition to the archive functionality, this solution allows both IT and end users to better exploit the knowledge contained in the e-mail archive through advanced search and retrieval capabilities.
Compliance Management: This workflow based solution enables regulated organizations to comply with rules pertaining to review, retention and classification of e-mail messages and attachments.
weblogs in the news...
[there are five news stories in this post.]
U.S. Newswire :: AFGE Launches UnionBlog.com; Web Log Believed First for Labor Movement
...WASHINGTON, Nov. 5 /U.S. Newswire/ -- The nation's largest union for federal and DC government workers, AFGE, today announced the launch of its official blog web site believed to be the first of its kind: UnionBlog. Web logs, or blogs for short, are a sort of cross between an online diary and links to current news reports. Blogs have become a popular means of communication.
"We felt the need to launch a web log that would not only cater to our members, but government workers in general and the public as well," said AFGE National President John Gage.
UnionBlog will include typical features such as links to important media and information web sites and a personal column by National President John Gage, but the site will eventually integrate interactive activist features such as surveys and petitions. "We plan to give the people new vehicles to make their voices heard," said Gage.
AFGE represents 600,000 federal and DC government employees nationwide and overseas, including DoD, Department of Homeland Security, TSA, Social Security Administration, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, and the Department of Veterans Affairs. For more information on AFGE visit UnionBlog or the official AFGE web site...
Washington Post :: Movie Meltdown
By Howard Kurtz
As a footnote to his coverage of the debacle of the cancelled CBS miniseries - "The Reagans" - Howard Kurtz makes the following comments:
...the Web site Blogads has this scoop:
"John Kerry: first presidential candidate targeting advertising to blogs.
"Ads for John Kerry's presidential campaign are running on four sites this AM.
"For you news junkies, this is groundbreaking. Blogs are extraordinarily cheap AND influential, and it is great that a national campaign has caught on to advertising on the blogging medium.
"There are also some important philosophical ground to plow. Josh Marshall sketches a policy for accepting ads from campaigns he covers.
"The bottom line: bloggers have the lowest overheads in media and the most passionate audiences. Buying 5 million page impressions on blogs costs less than $3000. The same ads on WashingtonPost.com or NYTimes.com would cost $125,000 ... which would you buy?"
But could candidates lose votes over annoying pop-ups?...
City Journal :: Another Victory for the New Conservative Media
by Brian C. Anderson
...Conservatives have long lamented the Left's near monopoly over the institutions of opinion and information, which has enabled liberal opinion makers, including television producers, to present their own views as Gospel truth and to sweep aside ideas and beliefs they don't like as if they were beneath contempt, unworthy of argument. But as CBS has discovered to its dismay, conservatives suddenly have a sizable - and growing - media presence of their own, and not just on talk radio.
Consider the Internet, where conservative-friendly news and opinion websites like the Drudge Report, Dow Jones's OpinionJournal, National Review Online, and FrontPage, along with current-event "blogs" like AndrewSullivan and InstaPundit - all of them launched in the last several years - are having a seismic impact on politics and culture. Consulted daily by millions, including just about everybody who works in media, these sites (usually running on shoe-string budgets) serve as 24/7 B.S. detectors, relentlessly exposing liberal bias and lies wherever they rear up...
...IMlogic Inc., a leading provider of infrastructure solutions for the rapidly growing enterprise Instant Messaging (IM) market, today announced that its president and CEO, Francis deSouza, will be leading a discussion on "Instantaneous Online Communications: Instant Messaging, Presence and Blogging," at the Comdex Las Vegas 2003 event on Thurs., Nov. 20, 2003, from 11:30 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. PST. In addition, deSouza will be presenting a featured discussion entitled, "Instant Messaging Infrastructure Solutions - Is IM 4 Real?" at the Comdex Digital Enterprise Innovation Center on Wed., Nov. 19, at 2:30 p.m. and 3:30 p.m. PST. IMlogic will also be exhibiting its market-leading technology at Booth # 5058J...
Yahoo PR NewsWire :: What Your Company's Web Consultant Doesn't Want You to Know
...SANTA BARBARA, Calif., Nov. 5 /PRNewswire/ -- For many small- to medium- sized business owners, maintaining and updating a Web site has been a costly and time consuming process. Expensive maintenance contracts or knowledge of HTML are required. Dynamic database-driven Web sites are priced out of reach for many business owners. Now, however, a powerful, yet relatively misunderstood Web publishing tool is available that business owners can utilize to quickly update their sites without waiting for busy and expensive Web consultants to perform simple tasks like adding new pictures, changing text or adding a new email address. And the best news - it's free! Welcome to the world of "blogging."
A blog or weblog, is a Web page made up of short, frequently updated posts that are arranged chronologically, like a "news" page. The content and purposes of blogs vary greatly, from commentary to news about a company, person or idea. Recently blogs have been appearing on political campaign Web sites.
Tom Mattson of Santa Barbara, CA-based Industrial Strength Design says most business owners are unaware of the potential of this new, free web publishing option: "I was reading the blogs of technical Web writers when I realized that blogs are really just Web pages. My clients could utilize a free tool like BLOGGER and update their own Web sites, the pages didn't have to be called `blogs.'"
Mattson spent considerable time testing the available blogging tools and found BLOGGER to be easy to use and free. BLOGGER was recently purchased by Google. The buyout is considered a huge boost to an enormously diverse genre of online publishing that has begun to change the equations of online news and information. Now Google is positioned to surge to the forefront of what David Krane, the company's director of corporate communications, calls "a global self-publishing phenomenon that connects Internet users with dynamic, diverse points of view while also enabling comment and participation."
Allen DeForrest of Wild Ideas, a local backpacking equipment company and one of Industrial Strength Design's clients, says BLOGGER is an extremely useful tool that increases the efficiency of maintaining a Web site: "We have been able to easily add new content during the backpacking season to our site. With the seasonal nature of our business, updating our site quickly is critical."
Mattson explains that if a person knows how to send an e-mail, they can update their Web site: "BLOGGER Web pages are easy to update with only a Web browser, from any computer, anywhere. BLOGGER driven pages can be integrated into existing sites or used to build new Web sites. Our team is eager to help our clients learn how to capitalize on this powerful, free Web publishing tool." ...
November 05, 2003
social network news - upcoming.org...
The New York Times :: Online Diary: A Collaborative Event Calendar
By PAMELA LiCALZI O'CONNELL
...Event listings in newspapers and city magazines can be frighteningly comprehensive (there's far too much going on). But there's one thing they cannot tell you about a concert or lecture: who is planning to go.
A new site, Upcoming.org, calls itself a collaborative event calendar because its listings are created by users rather than by newspapers or venues. Once you register - a brief, free process - you can enter the events you plan to attend. The site then sorts the events by metropolitan area and shows which users have expressed an interest in them.
One appealing aspect is the ability to track the events listed on your friends' calendars. "Now I can see what concerts my friends are going to and who else is going to the concerts I'm going to," said Andy Baio, a Web programmer in Santa Monica, Calif., who created the site in his free time.
Because Upcoming.org lets users post their photos and create "friends" lists, it has been compared to sites like Friendster. But Mr. Baio sees a crucial difference. "Friendster shows who's connected to who, but it doesn't let you do anything with that information," he said.
Like most social networking applications, Upcoming.org becomes more useful as more people join. The site grew to 2,000 users its first month by word of mouth and now lists more than 1,500 events in 42 states and 44 countries.
Eventually Mr. Baio may have to recruit "super users" to help enforce rules against self-promotion (venues can't enter their own listings, for example) and to weed out fake listings. A recommendation engine will be added, he said, "to suggest events to you that otherwise you may never have heard about."...
November 04, 2003
knowledge management news...
[there are eight news stories in this post.]
MarketingProfs.com :: Between the Pages of Angel Customers and Demon Customers
by Nick Wreden
...How many companies call themselves "customer-centric" while failing to see issues through customers' eyes?
Larry Selden, professor emeritus of finance and economics at Columbia University, and Geoffrey Colvin, senior editor at large at Fortune magazine, argue in their book, Angel Customers & Demon Customers, that any company that claims it's customer-centric is "an outright fraud" unless it can pass a three-part test:
* Is there a specific person who "owns" the customer and can develop specific value propositions?
* Who is accountable for the profitability of a customer or segment?
* And how significantly does the company differentiate interactions with customers?
The subtitle of the book is Discover Which is Which and Turbo-Charge Your Stock, which summarizes the book's premise well. The only way to achieve a P/E superior to the market - not your industry - is to understand that a company is no more than a portfolio of customers.
Companies that want a superior stock price must understand the relative profitability of customers, develop different value propositions for customers of varying profitability and organize around customers.
Here's what the authors say:
You can build gross margin by making capital investments that reduce labor costs; it works because the capital costs aren't included in gross margin. You can buy market share with price cuts. You can increase customer satisfaction and retention through all sorts of giveaways to the customer that will cost the company dearly.
Only by looking at customer economic profit and a contribution to a premium P/E can one make a sound judgment about the success of an initiative...
Selden and Colvin offer a new way to calculate customer equity - although, curiously, the term is never used. A "Customer Segment Value Creation Scorecard" divides each demographic or other segment into current, new and lost customers.
Sales to each group are broken out by products, services or intellectual capital, and reflect cross-sells and up-sells. Costs include COGS (costs of goods sold), account management, acquisition costs and, interestingly, Customer Knowledge Management (CKM), which represents the costs of acquiring, maintaining and using customer information. Subtracting these costs (and taxes) from revenues gives the familiar figure of net operating profit after tax, reached in a new way.
Then the approach grows complex. Using these figures, companies can calculate return on invested capital (ROIC) for each category of customer. The ROIC for each customer segment is used to calculate current and future P/E...
destinationCRM :: Phone Tag: A Costly Game
by David Myron
...Siemens Communications released the results of an online survey outlining how much money British businesses are losing due to phone tag.
Of thirty thousand British information workers surveyed, 70 percent of respondents claim up to one third or more of their calls do not get through to the right people the first time. They are either forced to hang up or to leave a message when an associate is not available to take the call. In fact, more than one quarter of respondents believe that 50 percent or more of their calls fail the first time because people are not available on the other end of the call.
ased on the survey and its own research, Siemens estimates each office worker wastes at least 30 minutes a day playing phone tag or making unsuccessful phone calls. After considering average employee hourly pay rates, based on figures from Britain's National Statistics Office, unsuccessful phone connections costs British businesses nearly L83 million ($139.1 million) a day, or L22 billion ($36.87 billion) in a working year. These figures do not include toll costs.
Connecting employees to associates quickly is a familiar concept inside call centers, especially when agents need to call an associate or a supervisor for help with a customer. A related study this summer by Collaborative Strategies, commissioned by ePeople, revealed that more than one-third of the workweek is spent answering intrusive questions, which often necessitates another call to a colleague for help.
Collaborative Strategies surveyed 157 respondents from companies with at least $50 million in revenue.
"Where we see this most often is in what we call exception management, which is when you have an irate customer.... Eighty percent of the time you can use a low-cost automated solution [to answer customer queries]," says David Coleman, managing director at Collaborative Strategies.
Yet, it's the other 20 percent of calls that causes the most difficulty. These need to be answered by a live agent, and quickly. One way to solve the problem, the Collaborative Strategies report claims, is effective expertise management that includes knowledge-sharing and other more efficient ways to answer questions, find expertise, or obtain necessary information in a timely fashion. Companies like ePeople and Kanisa compete in this space. "Enterprises have been slow to adopt knowledge management technologies, but based on the survey results they could clearly benefit," Coleman said in a statement. "There exists a tremendous opportunity for knowledge and expertise management vendors to deliver tangible value to the enterprise."...
TMCnet :: eGain Announces New Release of Data Adapter to Support eService Trade-in Program
...SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- November 4, 2003 -- eGain Communications Corp. (Nasdaq: EGAN), a leading provider of customer service and contact center software to the Global 2000, today announced a new version of eGain Data Adapter to support the eGain SafeSwitch Program. Announced earlier this year, eGain SafeSwitch allows companies that have already invested in non-scalable or obsolete eService systems to safely switch to eGain's proven, best-of-breed e-Service software, trusted by world-class companies to achieve and sustain customer service excellence, while trading in the un-depreciated value of their prior investment*.
The new version of the eGain Data Adapter allows customers to easily access data from any business system including legacy eService systems, ensuring a seamless switch to eGain with no business disruption. Furthermore, the solution enables fast and easy access to complete customer views and associated service history, based on data from eGain and non-eGain systems.
"Staying with obsolete e-Service systems could be a fatal mistake in today's tough business environment," said Ashu Roy, CEO of eGain. "The eGain SafeSwitch Program and the eGain Data Adapter, along with the guarantee of investment protection and no business downtime, make it a no-brainer for companies with such systems to make the switch to eGain."
The eGain SafeSwitch Program is available to replace email management, knowledge management, live web collaboration and web self-service systems from existing and acquired vendors such as Kana, ServiceSoft, Firepond, Brightware, eAssist, Delano, Divine, Melita, Webline, Cisco and others. Several enterprises, including leaders in industry sectors such as outsourcing, manufacturing, retail and government, have already made the switch eGain's trusted solutions...
MCADCafe :: NGRAIN Software Brings 3D Capabilities to Product Knowledge Management
...Enhancements to NGRAIN Knowledge Module and Mobilizer deliver improvements in the way companies capture, manage and communicate product knowledge for training, maintenance and service applications.
Responding to a growing need for more effective ways to support product knowledge management within organizations, NGRAIN(TM) Corporation, a leading interactive 3D visualization and simulation software developer, today announced significant advances in its innovative products, Knowledge Module 2.1 and Mobilizer 2.1.
NGRAIN revolutionizes the way organizations maintain and communicate complex product and equipment knowledge. This allows employees to easily embed knowledge within 3D models, resulting in Knowledge Objects that are deployable to users with desktops, laptops or Tablet PCs. NGRAIN Knowledge Objects provide a powerful visual index to reference materials and knowledge, through an on-demand virtual product experience available to anyone, anywhere.
"NGRAIN has extended its knowledge-capture capabilities and - for the first time - allows users to integrate NGRAIN 3D graphics content directly into familiar applications like Microsoft(R) Word and PowerPoint(R). With these capabilities, users can easily access and understand product knowledge, wherever and whenever they need it - in the classroom, on the factory floor or out in the field," said Gabe Batstone, General Manager, NGRAIN Product Knowledge Management...
...VIENNA, Va.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 4, 2003--Convera (Nasdaq:CNVR), a leading provider of search and categorization software for enterprises and government agencies, today announced RetrievalWare has been selected as the search technology for the Customs and Border Protection Harmonized Tariff Schedule (HTS) handbook. The new contract for Convera is worth approximately $2 million.
Within the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the Automated Commercial Environment (ACE) developed for Customs and Border Protection will be used to increase critical information sharing among the 22 Department of Homeland Security agencies. An important component of ACE, the electronic handbook helps create a new high-tech trade system to streamline import operations and offer greater efficiency for Customs and Border Protection staff and the international trade community...
Silicon Valley Biz Ink :: Verity Named a 'Top 100' Company by DM Review for Second Consecutive Year
...SUNNYVALE, Calif., Nov. 4 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Verity Inc. (Nasdaq: VRTY), a leading provider of enterprise software that helps organizations maximize the return on their intellectual capital investment, has been cited as a 'Top 100' company for the second consecutive year by DM Review, a foremost publication for business intelligence and analytics, in the most recent issue of the magazine...
PAHO :: Scientists Review Advances in Scientific Research in the Americas
...Washington, DC, November 3, 2003 (PAHO) - Scientists from throughout the Americas opened a meeting here Monday to review the current status of scientific research in the region.
The three-day meeting being is being held at the headquarters of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO).
The 15-member Advisory Committee on Health Research (ACHR) - which includes eminent scientists from several hemispheric nations - will review the initiatives and strategies of technical cooperation by PAHO agencies for the promotion and development of health research.
The task this year has mainly to do with the management of information and knowledge.
The meeting was officially opened by PAHO Director Dr. Mirta Roses, who said that faced with "inequity, urban growth and poverty the likes of which this continent had never witnessed before - poverty has tripled since the 1970s - we see knowledge not as something static, but as a tool to change the situation."
Roses said that development and access to knowledge are essential to meet the new challenges and to sustain the progress made in the area of health. "In this regard," she said, "the trail-blazing work of ACHR helps show the way by pointing out the best ways to reach those objectives."
Dr. Richard Van West Charles, PAHO's area manager for Information and Knowledge Management, noted that one of the elements for gaining knowledge is research.
"Research is often perceived as a tool of exploitation by the powerful, or as just a way to publish it in a scientific magazine. However, it is a vital component of development and, as such, must be accessible to all levels of society." For this to be possible, he said, every PAHO initiative must have a communications component that aims to reach wide and diverse audience.
Van West Charles also said that PAHO is working strongly to transform the traditional way in which knowledge is regarded. "We have to learn to share knowledge, using existing technologies and understanding it as a tool for action. We're also working to better organize the collection and analysis of data, attain knowledge, and evaluate the impact of scientific research in the region," he noted...
...MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., Nov 3 /PRNewswire/ -- Ingenuity is pleased to announce today that the Stanford Genome Technology Center at Stanford University has licensed Ingenuity Pathways Analysis, a new web-delivered application that enables biologists to discover, visualize, and explore therapeutically relevant networks significant to their experimental results.
Dr. Ronald Davis, Professor of Biochemistry and Genetics at Stanford University and Director of the Stanford Genome Technology Center, first used the application during its beta release. Dr. Davis, who is pleased with the application's novel analysis of gene expression data said, "Ingenuity Pathways Analysis is the first successful application to bring a systems biology approach to large datasets, enabling functional analysis on a genome scale. Its delivery, incredible ease-of-use, and most importantly, its biological insights, make this a necessary solution for anyone doing gene or protein based research."
In addition to licensing the Ingenuity Pathways Analysis application, Ingenuity and the Stanford Genome Technology Center are collaborating on the development of new functionality to further extend the application's capabilities and the state of the art of systems biology...
November 03, 2003
social networking - the link is the thing...
DM Review - The Link is the Thing, Part 3
By Richard Hackathorn
A partial list of references mentioned in this three part series:
Valdis Krebs :: Post-Merger Integration, Scale-Free Networks, The Oracle of Bacon at Virginia, Small World Project - Columbia University, Norah Jones, Citations: Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications - Wasserman, Faust (ResearchIndex), DM Review - Farming Web Resources for the Data Warehouse , The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web - Page, Brin, Motwani, Winograd (ResearchIndex), Pagerank Explained Correctly with Examples, Pagerank Explained. Google's PageRank and how to make the most of it., SIENA, Associative Link Analysis resource site.
...Part 1 of this article (August 2003 issue of DM Review) reviews the work in network analysis of complex systems, particularly the recent research into the small-world (SW) property, aristocratic-egalitarian (A-E) distinction and tipping points. Part 2 (September 2003 issue of DM Review) applies these concepts to the business intelligence (BI) and data warehousing (DW) fields with a new methodology called Associative Link Analysis (ALA) by discussing the translation of typical warehouse schema into an associative graph form. This article, Part 3, the final in the series, describes several metrics for analyzing graphs, strategies and tactics based on the SW property, and implementation issues...
Additional reading on a few of the concepts introduced in this three part series:
"Small World Property": Locality, Hierarchy, and Bidirectionality in the Web (ResearchIndex),
"Small World Architectures": Multiple Scales in Small-World Networks (ResearchIndex),
"Tipping Points": Tipping Points,
"ER Schema": A Formal Framework for ER Schema Transformation - McBrien, Poulovassilis (ResearchIndex).
notable judiths - judith tsouvalis...
...Dr. Judith Tsouvalis is a graduate of the London School of Economics and Political Science (B.Sc. (Hons.) Geography) and the University of Oxford (D.Phil). She worked for a number of years in the Department of Geography at the University of Nottingham, before returning to Oxford as a lecturer in 1999.
Dr. Tsouvalis is a fellow of the Royal Geographic Society with the Institute of British Geographers, and at the School of Geography & the Environment is involved in the Social Stability and Exclusion research group and the Historical Geography research group.
Research Interests
Summary - Philosophy, social theory, processes of reality and identity construction, issues of social integration and exclusion, relationship between cognitive and experiential understanding, knowledge-construction, forestry, farming.
Dr. Judith Tsouvalis is broadly interested in philosophy and social theory, and the ways in which conceptual and experiential knowledge and understandings of the 'world' interrelate. She is particularly interested in processes of reality and identity construction, and issues of social integration and exclusion, both of which she has explored in the context of forestry and farming in Britain...
knowledge worker news...
[there are four news stories in this post.]
The New York Times :: Hold That Thought. Change That Look.
By CLAUDIA H. DEUTSCH
...TWENTY-ONE years ago, Thomas J. Peters was a little-known consultant at McKinsey & Company with some unconventional ideas about how corporate management should operate. Make what customers want to buy, not what you manufacture best? Heresy. Fraternize with your company's hoi polloi? Unthinkable. Recognize that corporate loyalty is an archaic concept? Nonsense.
But then he turned those radical ideas into a zippily written business book, "In Search of Excellence" (HarperCollins, 1982). It flew off bookstore shelves and catapulted Tom Peters (he quickly dropped the formal Thomas J.) from consultant to management guru. Never mind that a still-quoted 1984 article in BusinessWeek - the one with the single word "Oops!" on the cover - chronicled the subsequent hard times of many of the companies that Mr. Peters and his co-author, Robert H. Waterman Jr., had cited as excellent. Mr. Peters, who stopped consulting 15 years ago, has churned out nine other successful books, and has a full plate of speaking engagements, at upward of $75,000 a pop.
His 11th and newest book, "Re-imagine!" (Dorling Kindersley), which just arrived in bookstores, is almost a print version of a blog, those ubiquitous online compendiums of personal anecdotes, thoughts and data. Visually, it is a kaleidoscope of images that assault the senses along with the intellect. It is filled with exclamation points, quotations, bright colors, photographs - all offering different nuggets of information at once. Some (younger) readers may find it exciting; many may find it unfathomable, or even migraine-inducing. ...
Q. A lot of the ideas in "Re-imagine!" - women buy lots of things, the "company man" is a species near extinction - are old. Is this really reimagining, or simply repackaging?
A. Don't denigrate packaging; packaging is substance. Steve Jobs understood that at Apple, the folks running Bloomberg's television programs understand that, Braun understands it so well that it put its chief designer on its board. I'm saying that board chairmen should regularly lunch with designers, that companies should put designers on boards. Those are actually pretty new ideas.
And if presented energetically, with passion and caring, old ideas can be news. After all, Peter Drucker was writing about "knowledge workers" 50 years ago, but it still feels like a fresh concept. Marketers may know that women spend lots of money, but the old white guys in management - and don't kid yourself, old white guys still rule the world - must be reminded to put women on boards and in management so that their attempts to sell more to women aren't seen as exploitative. Middle managers may realize that they probably won't stay with the same company forever, but they need to be reminded to undertake some visibly innovative projects to put on their resumes...
CNEWS Canada - Workforce improved between '71 and '01: StatsCan
...OTTAWA (CP) - University graduates invaded not only high-tech industries, but also a variety of high-knowledge jobs in the 30 years between 1971 and 2001, a Statistics Canada study indicates.
Even in the mining, oil and gas sector for example, the percentage of workers with high-knowledge occupations almost doubled, to 26 per cent from 14 per cent.
In general, 34 per cent of knowledge workers had university degrees in 1971, compared with slightly less than three per cent of other workers, the agency reported Thursday.
"By 2001, 52 per cent of all workers in knowledge-intensive occupations had a university degree, compared with less than 10 per cent of those in other occupations."
The study found that the shift toward a knowledge-based economy was not a new phenomenon that emerged only in the 1990s when the information and communications technology sector experienced explosive growth.
"In fact, the proportion of knowledge workers increased steadily over the last three decades, reflecting a growth trend that began long before the high-tech boom of the 1990s," the agency said.
In 1971 about 14 per cent of the workforce had high-knowledge occupations. By 2001 that proportion had almost doubled to 25 per cent.
The study also found that:
-While knowledge-based occupations pay significantly higher wages, the wage advantage enjoyed by knowledge workers relative to other occupations did not increase significantly from 1971 to 2001.
-In 2001, some of the largest concentrations of knowledge workers were in business services at 66 per cent and finance and insurance at 42 per cent.
-In the 1990s, the proportion of workers who were knowledge-based grew faster in service industries than in goods industries.
-University degrees were most common in professional occupations. In 1971, slightly less than 45 per cent of professionals had university degrees. Thirty years later, this proportion was 66 per cent.
-Growth in knowledge-based occupations has occurred in all regions of the country...
...Zone Labs(R), Inc., the most trusted provider of endpoint security solutions, today announced Zone Labs Integrity(R) 4.5, a new version of the company's best-in-class, centrally-managed endpoint security solution. Available later this month, Integrity 4.5 offers the broadest standards-based support for enterprise-wide policy enforcement for today's borderless enterprise. In addition to more complete integration with network access devices, increased scalability and further security hardening, Integrity 4.5 allows enterprises to secure employees' use of public instant messaging services to reap the productivity benefits of instant messaging (IM) without having to invest in proprietary solutions.
"The weakest link in an enterprise risk management program is unsecured end-points which expose vulnerabilities to the corporate network and drain IT productivity," said Eric Ogren, senior analyst at the Yankee Group. "Zone Labs Integrity implements standard 802.1x technology in enforcing a centrally managed policy for end-points that extends risk management well beyond the scope of antivirus solutions. Enterprises are deploying Zone Labs to reduce end-point security incidents and significantly reducing the risks of business disruption."
Integrity 4.5 drastically reduces enterprise exposure to security vulnerabilities, malicious code and targeted attacks by using a "proactive security" approach rather than the traditional, reactive methods dependent on anti-virus updates and software patches. Integrity's combination of robust, multi-layered client protective mechanisms and centrally-managed security policy prevents threats from penetrating the network, thus halting propagation and further damage. This "Zero Day" proactive protection becomes even more important with shrinking timelines between the discovery of a vulnerability and the rapid spread of specific exploits such as seen this past summer with the MS-Blast worm. ...
Integrity 4.5 also introduces new features to protect the growing number of enterprises in which employees use public IM services to communicate. Meta Group predicts that by 2007 over 90% of Global 2000 knowledge workers will be running an IM service. Based upon the technology that Zone Labs acquired this past summer to secure instant messaging at the protocol level, Integrity 4.5 includes an optional module to secure PCs from vulnerabilities introduced via any client that accesses AOL, MSN and Yahoo! public IM services.
Unlike traditional approaches to IM security which require proxy servers or use firewall-like rules to block IM traffic, Zone Labs takes a client-centric approach to protecting PCs using IM. As a result, enterprises can easily add IM protection to their existing security infrastructure, retaining the benefits and flexibility that public IM services provide while eliminating the need for costly retraining or installation of proprietary IM solutions. Integrity 4.5 enables central management of encryption for instant messages, content filtering, usage controls, unsolicited communication blocking, as well as usage and event reporting...
Bangkok Post :: Advocates see no progress on reforms
by Ampa Santimatanedol
...Education reform is heading nowhere because authorities are concerned only with keeping power and fail to chart new education courses and set new goals, reform advocates said yesterday.
Ratchanee Dhongchai, a coordinator of the Network for Education Reform, said the education system had not improved since reform began two years ago mainly because there were no new "innovations" and because authorities refused to change.
The National Education Act supports alternative education but so far no mechanisms had been set up to give learners choices outside the mainstream education system, Mrs Ratchanee said.
Schools were still focusing on producing students who competed academically. Teachers, meanwhile, still did not know if they were under the jurisdiction of the education, tourism or sports and culture ministries. Because teachers themselves were confused, they could not give students guidance under the learners-centred education system, part of the reforms.
"Children are left on their own because teachers cannot give them advice. Now both students and teachers seem to know nothing," Mrs Ratchanee said.
Anuj Arbhabirama, a Thailand Research Fund researcher, said education reform failed because there were no goals. Western countries or Japan were turning out knowledge workers to invent high technological products but Thailand could not produce and sell technology like them, Mr Anuj said.
"We need to have goals. We need to think what we we want our rural children to be," he said.
Mr Anuj said Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra tried to make teachers know what teaching reform was about by teaching students at Samsen Vidhayalai school himself, but changing teachers would never be easy.
"The prime minister does not understand teachers. To change them, he must empathise with them. He must know what is going on in the heads of those teachers. He may understand the police but he does not understand teachers," Mr Anuj said.
Mrs Ratchanee said some local communities were fed up with waiting for the Education Ministry and had started alternative education programmes themselves...
November 02, 2003
ode to a weblogger...
and if you find yourself without a clue
of how to lure good readers to your page
just hearken back to that which you find true
and worthy of a writer's modest wage.
your navel gathers dust and at times bores
so switch your gaze to higher honest tales
of how you'd rather swim to distant shores
than find your weblog your good reader fails.
the knowledge that you share will surely shine
a glowing ember in the thoughts of those
who read your prose with hunger line by line
and find your wisdom to them freely flows.
and if you find this sonnet serves you well
i pray that your dear readers think you're swell.
an english sonnet in iambic pentameter
©2003 judith meskill
November 01, 2003
social networking and social software...
Curious about what Microsoft Research is tinkering with in the Social Networking Analysis and Social Software arenas? Check out the Microsoft Social Computing Group. Many interesting projects listed here.
I found this site when I was doing research on a paper I am writing on "Personal Knowledge Mapping" and came across a reference to their Personal Map project.
Wonder why there's no mention of Wallop on this Social Computing projects page? [last seen at Faculty Summit 2003, (scroll down to "Booth 25")]
ps: Regarding Social Software, you might also want to visit Denham Grey's SocialSoftware section of his KmWiki for some great links.