six months ago twas when i first began
to leave my 'knowledge' scrawl upon this page
the flames of 'knowledge work' i often fan
my appetite for 'more news' here assuage.
i've met and conversed often with 'like minds'
and cherish those 'loose ties' which here i've found
and find my path of searching often winds
towards those with whom i share a 'common ground.'
the names of those i honor appear here
within my 'blogroll' to the right they stay
and some have carved impressions oh so clear
of true 'collaboration' on the way.
now to my 'action' cohorts i give cheer
may time and focus bring our visions near.
©2003 judith meskill
i originally started a 'blogger' weblog - mainly poetry - in september of 2001... but this weblog - in its current 'knowledge notes' format - had its debut on july 1, 2003
Today I google searched - judith series,
And found there in my early morning haste,
Judith Tarr - in answer to my queries,
And Judith Merril gone, but not erased.
Both Tarr and Merril have a SciFi bend,
And then I found my searching brought me to,
Judith Raskin whose voice did certain lend,
a brave note to the 'opera,' tis true.
Now Judith Powell will help improve your life,
While Judith Frediani reads for you,
And Judith Blankman helps allay the strife,
That's caused by hunger, with her art so true.
So dance with Judith Marcuse near the 'fire',
While Judith Turner 'snaps' Times Square's desire.
©2003 judith meskill
this sonnet was inspired by a google search for the words 'judith series' sans quotation marks.
in weaving the first eight judiths from this search into this year end collage to mark the end of 2003 - it was 'kismet' (and google rank) that had me end with 'judith turner,' a photographer, and recorder of 'times square' events.
i wish a safe and happy new year to you all, my gentle readers!
Remember my August 23rd post - 'PowerPoint corrupts absolutely'? Well according to Ex-Talking Head dAviD ByRNe, PowerPoint has other uses. Rachel Konrad writes for the Associated Press on David Byrne's utilization of PowerPoint in - 'Ex-Talking Head Makes PowerPoint Art.'
David Byrne produced a book/DVD titled 'E.E.E.I. (Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information)' in which he originally intended to spoof PowerPoint but ultimately wound up morphing the 'malevolent marketing' tool we all 'love to hate' into an 'artistic medium.'
Byrne, a fan of Tufte's, and Edward Tufte seem to be on different sides of the PowerPoint argument, but are they really?
Today in eWeek, Matt Hicks questions: Are Enterprises Ready for Social Networking?
Stowe Boyd says: "There's no place more evident than in sales that who you know is more important than what you know."
"Sales and business-development groups are heavy users of sales force automation systems, which already track ROI and deal flow metrics. Companies who first use social networking in a coordinated way should have little trouble tracking the impact that the technology has on the number of deals or time it takes to make a deal," Boyd said.
Social Networking software mentioned in this article:
Paul Gillin, TechTarget 'Editor in Chief,' gives his 2004 outlook: VoIP to rise, Sun to set.
In his 'Stuff to Avoid' category Paul Gillin warns that:
"...Blogging's wave has already crested now that millions of online diarists are realizing that not that many people actually read this stuff .... Social networking sites like Friendster. Puh-leeze. Don't we have better things to do? ..."
Stacey Snow-Clarke reporting for 'The Business Journal of Tampa Bay' - 'Local couple to launch dating site' - writes:
"Jesse James, a consultant and motivational speaker, won't be seen leaping from speeding Amtrak trains with sacks of stolen goods. But James, 57, does want to help people get their lives on track. In February, James and his wife, Ashlee, plan to launch MyEMatch, an online dating service.
...What differentiates MyEMatch from thousands of other dating sites is its "Love Quotient," a test that assesses the user's relationship-building skills, James said. The idea is to make people aware of possible challenges in developing relationships."
Bruce Bartlett, in Blogs galore!, gives his list of those who are, in his opinion, the most notable 'economic' bloggers - regardless of their 'political views' and affiliations:
Brad DeLong, Max B. Sawicky, Donald L. Luskin, Steve Antler, Ray Fair, Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok, Stephen Bainbridge, Glenn Reynolds, and Eugene Volokh.
In the Washington Post today, Leslie Walker shares her 'short list' of some of the hottest Internet services of 2003 in 'A Year For New Paths To Friends, Music, More.'
Leslie Walker's 'Web Watch' short list of 'hottest services' includes:
Apple - iTunes, Friendster, Vonage, Skype, Amazon, Google (and their acquisition of BLOGGER), Kazaa, and There.
Web User News :: Website names top words of 2003
...The word "blog" has been picked as one of the top words of 2003 by a US website specialising in language.
Website yourDictionary.com, which offers more than 2,500 dictionaries for more than 300 languages, has compiled a list of what it claims is the top word, phrase and name of the year.
According to the site, weblogs have come of age in 2003 and "regrettably, this lexical mutation [blog] with them". The word "blog" was ranked as the second top word of the year.
The top word of the year was "embedded" - the word used to describe news correspondents embedded in military units in Iraq. The word "SARS" ranked third. The top phrase of 2003 was "shock-and-awe" - the US strategy in US - and the top personal name of 2003 went to Saddam Hussein.
"This year the Iraqi War has dominated the English language as it has dominated the news," said Robert Beard, chief executive at yourDictionary.
However, Paris Hilton, the hotel-chain heiress, also featured in the list of top personal names following the "internet distribution of her extracurricular activities".
yourDictionary.com has also published a list of president George W Bush's top-five mispronunciations, including "new-cue-ler" (for nuclear) and "a-merr-ca" (for America), and top product names, which includes Apple's download service "iTunes"...
and so i wish for you this holiday
a heightened sense of all that lights your fire
for passion is the thing that, come what may,
will help to manifest your deep desire.
so thank you for your praise of my tech prose
and in your heart please know that all you share
comes back to you and often overflows
with that for which your heart has steadfast care.
and as we find that 'sense in action' counts
with blogs and wikis in a 'socialtext'
we'll see that interest in our action mounts
as we with knowledge fill our 'social decks.'
twas lilia inspired here this prose
to 'actionable cohorts' - this 'sense' flows...
©2003 judith meskill
Once upon a time, eons ago by weblogging measure, Dina Mehta traveled from India and visited the USA and Europe - meeting face to face with many of those who populate her 'blogroll.' When I met Dina, she told me of conversations with Stuart Henshall who wanted to form a 'troupe' of individuals from all over the world who have a passion for making true collaboration happen. This was an idea on which I had also been ruminating and had planned to discuss with Dina at our lunch meeting in Philadelphia.
And then, as often happens in weblogging land, a meaningful conversation began to emerge - among thought leaders and like-minded individuals - around creating an 'actionable sense.'
A partial list of cohorts who have been blogging about our 'actionable sense' collaboration follows - to their descriptions and 'conversations' I do defer:
Lilia Efimova - 'actionable sense'
Ton Zijlstra - 'Making Actionable Sense,' parts I, II, and III.
Dina Mehta - 'actionable sense'.
Stuart Henshall - 'Actionable Sense Troupe.'
destinationCRM.com: What's in Store for '04?
by Martin Schneider
...As the New Year approaches, some wonder what 2004 has in store for the CRM industry. Industry pundit Barton Goldenberg, president and founder of CRM consultancy firm ISM, Inc., predicts a lot of positive momentum on the horizon for the industry.
...This past year was one full of major mergers: PeopleSoft acquired J.D. Edwards, Siebel Systems acquired UpShot, Pivotal Corporation merged with chinadotcom, Best Software announced plans to acquire ACCPAC. Goldenberg says the consolidation trend will continue into 2004.
Another hot spot in the coming year will be continued explosion of Web-services. "CRM Web services applications will blossom in 2004, and Microsoft will substantially increase its promotional budget for both Web services and .NET initiatives," Goldenberg says.
While the Do-Not-Call list may have sparked fear in the hearts of telemarketers, Goldenberg says that the legislation will prove a boon for permission-based direct marketing solutions providers in 2004. "This in turn will generate new and impressive enhancements in the marketing automation component of CRM software," Goldenberg says.
Other hot trends in 2004 include the emergence of CRM in the social networking space, especially in the sales field; further acceptance of the hosted CRM model as a viable CRM strategy; and 30 to 40 percent growth in the number of companies operating as true real-time enterprises, according to Goldenberg...
David Lidsky, a senior editor at Fortune Small Business, reports his Fearless Forecast for 2004 in hopes of duplicating the success of his "outlandish predictions" for 2003.
One of the questions David Lidsky asks & answers is:
"Will social networking stay cool?"
...quote...
Friendster, the leader of the social networking phenomenon, becomes withdrawn, angry, defensive, moody, and erratic, leading sites one degree away from Friendster - Tribe.net, LinkedIn, CraigsList - to stage an intervention. Friendster couldn't deal with its surging fame and became addicted to prescription painkillers it got from Rush Limbaugh when he signed up. And he had said that he was "just here to help." That enabling behavior meant Friendster never had to confront that it was never really interested in making new friends as it says on its profile. Its true desire had been to find "activity partners," if by activity you mean finding gullible young hipster wannabes to sign up for a thinly disguised dating service in the hopes of making money off of them later. The pressure to maintain the friendly illusion led it to spiral into decidedly non-friendly activities, making the gossip-page exploits of Britney Spears, Tara Reid, and Paris Hilton look like the ladies were attending ice cream socials. Friendster checks itself into the same retreat where Limbaugh sought help and returns to the Net five weeks later, blaming the media for wanting it to succeed too badly because it's different from the other dating sites.
...end quote...
Rajesh Jain blogged the The 2003 OSDir.com Editor's Choice Awards in Open Source - I added the 'links' and the 'Best of Platform' category.
Summary:
Best Application in...
Java: Eclipse
Perl: MovableType
Python: BitTorrent
PHP: PHP
XML: Jabber
Best Applications:
Instant Messaging: Gaim
Email: SpamAssassin (Double Winner)
Overall Desktop App: OpenOffice
Database: MySQL
Web: Tiki
Best of Platform:
Linux: openMosix and EtherBoot
Mac & Windows: OpenOffice
Back on 19 September 2003, Jim McGee referenced a post by Jon Udell on Kimbro Staken's new science experiment, Syncato. And now - actually twelve days ago - Silicon Valley Biz Ink published a press release - Sleepycat Software Honors XML Innovators.
Sleepycat Software, makers of Berkeley DB announced results for the 2003 Berkeley DB XML Innovation Awards. XML technology consultant Kimbro Staken took the second place award for developing Syncato, a weblog or "blogging" application that combines an easy-to-use online personal idea log with advanced knowledge management and publishing capabilities. Staken's system stores each personal log as XML that can then be searched via XPath.
"Syncato maximizes the value of people's ideas and information in blogs by making them easily searchable," said Staken. "Under the hood, the Syncato weblog system is a XML fragment management system that relies on the flexibility of Berkeley DB XML to store XML natively alongside non-XML and semi-structured data."
DecisionCast announces IDG's InfoWorld as Media Sponsor for RSS WinterFest 2004, a free, two day Webcast, wiki, and Weblog event on January 21-22, 2004, that will explore the uses, applications, and future of RSS and Internet content syndication. "More and more companies and organizations are using RSS to alleviate e-mail overload as well as to manage projects, deliver important information, create effective knowledge management and content management systems, and push information to their customers."
Featured speakers include:
-- Anil Dash Vice President, Business Development, Six Apart
-- Jon Udell, Lead Analyst, InfoWorld Test Center
-- Chad Dickerson, CTO, InfoWorld Media Group, Inc.
-- Bill French, Co-Founder, MyST Technology Partners
-- Robert Scoble, Technical Evangelist, US-.NET Platform Strategy, Microsoft
-- Scott Johnson, Founder, Feedster
-- Greg Reinacker, Founder, NewsGator
-- Chris Pirillo, Founder, Lockergnome
-- Ross Mayfield, CEO, Socialtext
-- Greg Lloyd, President & Co-Founder, Traction
-- Cynthia Carlson, Founder, KnowLogix Consulting
-- Graham Rasmussen, Consultant, KnowLogix Consulting
-- Matt McAlister, Vice President, General Manager, InfoWorld Media Group, Inc.
-- Derek Scruggs, Founder, Escalan
Huh, you say? Well, blosxom is a lightweight weblog implementation, created by Rael Dornfest, that describes itself as "the zen of blogging." Simon Cosens' Bryar is a modular, extensible weblog tool - more complex than 'blosxom' - primarily in its extensibility. A Bliki, according to the 'Wikipedia' is quite simply, a weblog with wiki support. If you are still saying 'Huh', then skip Simon's article and just read his conclusion excerpted below. Otherwise, in O'Reilly's Perl.com, Simon Cozens writes about 'Blosxoms, Bryars and Blikis.' - a worthy read for the 'Perl' and 'CGI' savvy.
Simon concludes with: "I consider the emergence of interest in social software to be one of the most fascinating trends in software engineering this year. Two of the most powerful and popular aspects of this, wikis and blogs, are particularly well-suited for extension and embedding, and Perl is a particularly well-suited language for achieving this.
Although part of the point of this article was to demonstrate Bryar, there were several other important points. First, that there are plenty of Perl implementations of both wikis and blogs that you can choose from; second, that Perl makes it really easy to create your own blog or wiki and customize to your own purposes, including embedding them in an existing application.
But finally, the point was to encourage you to think about good design and the power of extensible applications; if you can create a tool that is both powerful and generalizable -- just like Perl itself -- it may end up doing wildly different things to what you initially intended!"
In an OJR article: A Look Back at 2003, and What's on the Horizon for the Online News Universe, Mark Glaser reflects on his predictions for 2003 regarding, among other things, weblogs and blogging, and then offers up some predictions for 2004.
One of Mark's 2003 predictions was that "smart bloggers get their due, become famous, and can get paid for what they do. Media companies get it, and start assigning blogs as real jobs and not just extracurricular activities." Mark reflects that "Now a month doesn't go by without another media company announcing new Weblogs -- Fast Company, MSNBC.com, Variety.com, Wired Magazine, New York Magazine."
Read the article, it has an interesting Q&A section with a diverse array of opinions on - "the proliferation of people with camera phones breaking spot news stories; the rise of Google and Google News; the soap opera at (AOL) Time Warner; the continued inroads of paid content; RSS feeds; massive online coverage of the war in Iraq; viruses, worms and spam overwhelming newsrooms; the struggle for independent news in Zimbabwe, China, Iran and Iraq; and political rhetoric and election coverage." - among other things.
Dedicated to Jerry Ash,
AOK Star Series Leaders 2001-03,
and the Indomitable AOK Community of Participants
by Judith Meskill
'Twas the night before 'Star' time, and all through the halls
Jerry Ash was now pacing and bouncing off walls;
His notes were all tucked on his website with care,
In hopes that AOKers would be there to share;
'Exemplars' were nestled all snug in Lelic's head,
While visions of 'Good Practices' eased Simon's dread;
Crafting 'Stories' and 'Cases' did fill up his cap,
While 'Informal Ontologies' caused him to nap.
In Denham Grey's K-log there was such a clatter,
Of ' Patterns', 'Peer assists', and 'Questions That Matter.'
His thoughts on 'KM Strategy' flew like a flash,
Tore open his computer and typed with panache.
Jack Ring was still pondering on what he did know
To shed some more light on our topical flow,
When, what to our wondering eyes should appear,
But Bob Buckman, and Melissie to help us steer,
Victor Newman was 'Building' our knowledge so quick,
I knew in a moment he'd give us a kick.
Patti Anklam was 'Sharing' much more than her fame,
And she listened so closely and called them by name;
"Now, ASH! now, McELROY! now, ALLEE and DIXON!
On, WIIG! on, SANTOSUS! on, LELIC and NEWMAN!
To the top of the 'Series'! Our knowledge will flow!
Now dash away! Flash away! And reap as you sow!"
As lurkers were listening our ideas did fly,
When met with an obstacle, we'd merely ask why,
From theory to practice our strategies flew,
With the help of dear Jerry, and 'Star' leaders too.
And then, in a twinkling, David Hawthorne did say
"Let me tell you a 'Story' and start it this way."
We drew in our hands, and we all turned around,
Down the chimney Stephen Denning came with a bound.
Next came David Snowden, and Hubert Saint-Onge,
'Organic,' 'Evolutions,' their thinking is strong;
Thomas Stewart in 'Real Time' did pop in to stay,
Charles Savage doing 'Knowledge Turns' followed his way.
Richard Cross on 'Ethnography,' oh so merry!
While Carol Kinsey Goman's 'Ghosts' were so scary!
Frappaolo and Murty and Tucker and Kelly,
Filled a panel with Schoeps and Vinson for 'ELKE';
Sveiby did the 'Tango' and spoke of 'Un-learning,'
While Skyrme shared his 'Insights' and kept our lights burning;
David Weinberger listened and gave us a 'Clue,'
'Manifestos' and 'Pieces' on what we could do.
'Intellectual Capital' we heard him shout,
Nick Bontis that is, I can say without doubt;
Carl Frappaolo was 'Auditing Knowledge Returns,'
While Leif Edvinsson's 'Brainpower' candle still burns;
Debra Amidon, 'Architect,' we were in awe,
Ash Sooknanan turned 'Kafkaesque' into awards,
Dede Bonner talked 'Leadership' and 'CKOs,'
Jerry giving a nod, up the chimney he rose;
Ash sprang to his sleigh, to his team gave a whistle,
And away they all flew like the down of a thistle.
But I heard him exclaim, ere he drove out of sight,
"HAPPY CHRISTMAS 'AOKers', TO ALL GOOD-NIGHT! "
© judith meskill, for all parts that are mine... (^:
The New York Times :: Bush Signs Law Placing Curbs on Bulk Commercial E-Mail
by Jennifer 8. Lee
...President Bush signed a highly awaited law on Tuesday to restrict junk commercial e-mail, or spam, which now accounts for more than half of all e-mail traffic.
The law, which takes effect on Jan. 1, will ban the sending of bulk commercial e-mail using false identities and misleading subject lines. It will also require all commercial e-mail messages to include a valid postal address and give recipients the opportunity to opt out of receiving more messages.
E-mail messages with adult or pornographic content will have to be labeled in a manner determined by the Federal Trade Commission, which is also authorized to study the feasibility of a "do not spam" list that would be similar to the "do not call" list for telemarketers.
"In a country with an ever-increasing reliance on the Internet, I am glad to know that today marks a day where Americans will begin to have some muscle against the spammers out there who flood their inboxes each day," said Senator Conrad Burns, the Republican from Montana who sponsored what is being called the Can Spam Act.
Critics say the law, a result of compromise after years of Congressional stalemate, places the interests of businesses above those of consumers. They say it is flawed because it establishes a set of legal loopholes and pre-empts stricter state laws like the one passed by California this fall, which requires marketers to get consumers' permission before sending e-mail. The European Union has directed its member countries to adopt permission-based e-mail policies. Britain approved such a law last week.
With the federal legal framework established by the new law, the attention now shifts to enforcement efforts. The Federal Trade Commission and other federal agencies, state attorneys general and Internet service providers will be allowed to take spammers to court, but individuals do not have the right to sue spammers...
TMCNet :: FrontRange Solutions Delivers Knowledge and Asset Management Solutions
...HEAT Plus Knowledge has a new and more intuitive interface that allows service and support center technicians to extract information and navigate content faster and more efficiently, thereby reducing call times and improving response consistency. Additionally, HEAT Plus Knowledge features improved relevancy rankings, allowing service and support centers to weight and rank documents with more accurate relevancy.
"Knowledge management and asset management are essential components to FrontRange's complete service management solution, further enabling organizations to consolidate the management of support, service, knowledge and assets," said Kevin J. Smith, vice president of Products for FrontRange Solutions. "For organizations to thrive, they need one solution that provides a complete service level view of their business and helps them increase their level of support and customer satisfaction while reducing costs. HEAT Plus Knowledge and HEAT Asset Tracker further establish our leadership position in the service management marketplace."...
Silicon Valley Biz Ink has a fun press release on Tickle by Emode's shopping related quizzes: Corduroy in Your Stocking This Year? - that reveals America's 'Holiday Shopping Styles and Quirks.'
Today in Silicon Valley Biz Ink, CMP Media's Intelligent Enterprise Magazine announced today that its editors have selected the 12 most influential IT solution providers in the development of emerging "intelligent" enterprises. The 2004 Dozen excel at delivering solutions that bring higher value to customer relationships, enable greater visibility into enterprise business performance, and set the stage for affordable intelligent computing. Here is the complete list:
1. Cognos, Inc.
2. BEA Systems
3. Informatica
4. Business Objects
5. Hyperion
6. IBM
7. Microsoft
8. SAS
9. Information Builders
10. MicroStrategy
11. NCR Teradata Division
12. SAP
Also in Silicon Valley Biz Ink, Hummingbird announces availability of Hummingbird BI(TM) 8.5 which includes a broad range of customer-driven functionality, flexibility, and scalability enhancements to simplify user experience and increase productivity.
Christopher Saunders writes for InstantMessaging Planet on 'Spicing Up Collaboration' with Pepper Computer's flagship collaborative application.
Pepper Computer's founders Len Kawell and Mary Ellen Heinen, have strong backgrounds in collaboration systems. Kawell, with Lotus Notes, and he and Heinen with e-book player Glassbook (later acquired by Adobe.)
Pepper Keeper uses the "page" metaphor. Like sheets of paper in a notebook or journal, once you use the "pages" you need to buy more - pages are "non-renewable" - that is, they're usable once. Christopher Saunders writes: "Pepper Keeper introduces collaboration into the picture by enabling users to share their creations with others. The system relies on AOL Instant Messenger (specifically, the TOC protocol) to link users with friends, via a built-in Buddy List. The applications can be sent to other users as either read-only, or fully editable."
Pepper is available in Windows and Mac versions - and right now it is free.
In the 15 December 2003 issue of Computerworld Singapore, in 'Squeezing value from KM,' Melanie Liew writes that, according to Clare Hart, president and CEO of Factiva, "Knowledge Management (KM) is an all encompassing approach to harnessing the knowledge within an organisation, from capturing it to sharing it. It is predicated on existing organisational intelligence, the organisational culture and the platform that is in place."
...quote...
Said Factiva's Hart, "The decision-making process toward the adoption of what is called a knowledge and information management system increasingly takes place in four phases.
Phase one comprises an enterprise information audit. What information does a company have? What does it need? This applies to both internal and external information. Archived internal white papers and sales documents are as important as wider external news."
Phase two is where the taxonomy is applied. A common language is required to enable the integration of internal and external data – structured and unstructured. This must reflect a company's culture and fit with the existing organisational vocabulary.
Phase three is where the technology is finally deployed, built to fit the company that it is designed for.
Phase four sees this technology 'cut to fit' the organisation's culture and built to evolve with the direction this company wants to head.
In fact, KM technology is expected to get smarter and easier to use. Based on information supplied about the user and the technology's own intelligence, KM technology is increasingly basing its results on who the user is, what information users have volunteered about themselves, with built-in collaborative filtering to delivering the information that the worker needs efficiently and effectively.
...quote...
The following are some 'knowledge' sound bytes published in the Earth Negotiations Bulletin on the Summary of the Pan-African Implementation and Partnership Conference on Water that was held 8-12 December 2003.
...Presenting on the vulnerability of water resources to environmental change, Hans Beekman, United Nations Environment Programme - UNEP, said that vulnerability assessments should include water quality, climate variability, pollution, urbanization, competition for water, data availability and knowledge gaps...
...On Tuesday, 9 December, Eberhard Braune presented recommendations for ministerial consideration, which include the need to: develop capacity at all levels; strengthen partnerships with international training institutes; improve monitoring and assessment programmes; find new ways to disseminate information and share knowledge; and reinforce the link between the scientific community and decision-makers and civil society...
...Abby Mgugu, Southern African Development Community (SADC ) Regional Coordinator for Women’s Land and Water Rights, chaired a session on water and gender. Mildred Mkandla, EarthCare, presented on a rainwater harvesting pilot project in Kenya, which seeks to empower women to own, control and manage their water resources. Delegates underlined the critical role women in developing countries play in the management of water resources, particularly at the household level, while often lacking access to land and financial resources to participate in the decision-making process. The session concluded that gender concerns need to be taken into account in terms of policy formulation, resource allocation, development of technology and training programmes, and management of facilities. They also stressed the need to recognize and promote indigenous knowledge systems and to develop information systems that are gender disaggregated and easily accessible at all levels...
Douglas Merrey, International Water Management Institute (IWMI), presented the final report "WaterDome" on water-related World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) outcomes. Efua Dzameshie, Young Volunteers for the Environment, said sustainable water management needs to be community-driven and focused on the poor, and stressed the need to: involve women and youth; improve knowledge management, including traditional knowledge; and build capacity for Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM).
WALTHAM, Mass., Dec. 15 /PRNewswire/ -- 3rd Millennium announced today the release of its knowledge management system to the open source community. The software is a foundation technology for knowledge management solutions in biopharmaceutical research and development. It is the first of a number of open source releases planned by the company. 3rd Millennium, a leading life science informatics consultancy and systems integrator, has developed these systems in the course of dozens of custom software development projects completed during its seven years serving the life science R&D market.
The New York Times :: Social Networks
By Jon Gertner
...quote...
Some of the fledgling social-network companies may indeed mature into powerful business hubs like eBay or Amazon. Yet the more intriguing prospect, from a sociological standpoint, anyway, is whether these applications will actually transform our lives. Ever since the publication of "Bowling Alone," we've been flooded with even more data about the end of community and lamentations for its return. At least in theory, a readily accessible social network would enable more of us to bond with people we regard as far less anonymous than strangers. The larger possibility, that plugging into our social networks might somehow remedy a profound national loneliness, is even more enticing.
What seems just as likely, however, is that social-network applications will further fracture life into disparate spheres -- the online and the offline. Jonathan Abrams (the C.E.O. of Friendster) and Mark Pincus (the C.E.O. of Tribe Networks) see their creations ultimately as a means to enrich offline experiences. But this fact is incontrovertible: technology has outpaced our physical ability to manage the social network. Duncan Watts, author of this year's book ''Six Degrees,'' has wondered whether our primitive ancestry gives us a hard-wired tendency to attend to only our immediate associates, like family and friends. Our online persona may be rich with friends and contacts; it may make us feel popular and deeply valued as we trade tips about the best Australian Shiraz or converse about the best way to get to Burning Man. But our offline persona still gets stuck in traffic on the way to the liquor store. Our online persona may manage a Web-based cocktail party of three degrees -- a party that would include our friends, the friends of our friends and the friends of our friends' friends. But our offline persona, juggling the demands of family and work, can barely return the telephone calls from the first degree.
...end quote...
European and Pacific Stars & Stripes :: EUCOM sailors win Copernicus award
By Jason Chudy
...A sailor based in Bahrain and two based in Europe were recently selected as 2003 Copernicus Award winners. The award recognizes Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard military and civilian personnel who significantly contributed to naval warfare in the areas of command, control, communications, computers and intelligence; information systems or information warfare. It is co-sponsored by the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association and U.S. Naval Institute.
...Petty Officer 1st Class Aaron Martin of the Naples, Italy-based Submarine Group Eight earned the award for co-authoring a Web-based knowledge management software program with contractor David Weeks. Martin and Weeks' software allows members of the command to organize and share information on submarines in their area of operations...
[UPDATE: I have subsequently made a number of posts regarding Plaxo at The Social Software Weblog that you might want to reference as I have 'softened' my opinion on Plaxo, and so has David Coursey, quoted below, for that matter.]
Yes, says David Coursey, Executive Editor of ZDNet AnchorDesk in 'Why my address book is spamming you.' David has been testing add-ons for Outlook and 'spamming' his address book acquaintances with requests for infomation. The add-ons he has been testing are: AccuCard, GoodContacts, Plaxo, and he is looking for feedback on AddresSender, which he did not get an opportunity to test. David has decided to stay with the service he started out with: GoodContacts.
The following is an excerpt from David's article above - his opinion on Plaxo:
...I'LL START my comparison of these services with Plaxo, because Plaxo gives me the creeps. There are several reasons for this.
First, every time I get a Plaxo request from someone seeking my information, the message tells me how many Plaxo requests I've received previously; I'm up to 50 Plaxo requests. This means Plaxo is meticulously keeping track of who it's sent mail to. Which makes me feel like Plaxo is stalking me.
Second, how does Plaxo intend to make money? Plaxo is a free service and their Web site says the company, which has raised something north of $10 million in venture capital, plans to sell premium services to business users. Before I give Plaxo my information to store on its computers, I'd like to know what the company's specific plans are to earn a profit, and how my information fits into those plans. So far, there are no answers to those questions on the company's Web site.
Third, Plaxo is founded by a Napster co-founder, Sean Parker. Based on Napster's interesting concept of "fair use" and property ownership, I will never trust an ex-Napster exec with anything, especially not my personal data. Plus, as far as I'm concerned, any money made from Napster is tainted. Yes, I do think businesses should pay attention to ethics, and there should be penalties for those that don't.
Fourth, Plaxo seems to rely on creating a network of Plaxo users, information about which resides on Plaxo's own computers. This is used to update information automatically in the background on the member's machines. This is an interesting feature, but requires a lot more trust than Plaxo has earned from me.
Finally, Plaxo makes a big deal about telling you how trustworthy they are. This reminds me of a used car dealer where I grew up who called himself "Honest Joe" or something. I forget what the guy was indicted for. But I digress.
I don't respond to Plaxo requests, won't join Plaxo, and recommend you don't, either. On the other hand, Plaxo is free, promises to stay free for individuals, and if you don't share my concerns to heck with you. Seriously, Plaxo seems to work fine, it will just never work for me...
Jordan Times :: Jordan to develop Arabic version of knowledge-sharing software
...AMMAN (JT) - A knowledge-sharing software, whose Arabic version is to be developed by Jordan, was released during the World Summit for the Information Society (WSIS) under way in Geneva.
The portable Knowledge Asset Development System (pKADS), a tool used to collect, distill and synthesise lessons learned in a way that would improve results and inform policy and development strategy, was developed by UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund, Business Information Systems, and University College Cork, Ireland, with full funding from the government of Ireland. The CD-ROM will be distributed free of charge.
According to a statement released by the Ministry of Information and Communications Technology (MoICT), pKADS is a CD-ROM version of UNFPA's Intranet-based Knowledge Asset Development System.
"We are excited at the opportunity of building bridges of cooperation between global and local learning institutions for the development of pKADS in the Arabic language," said MoICT Minister and Minister of Administrative Development Fawwaz Zu'bi.
He said the application of such knowledge management software both within and outside of government presents a prospect for knowledge sharing between development projects in Jordan and across the region...
Yahoo PR Newswire :: New Technology Platform Will Deliver LexisNexis Services Globally
..."Today we've taken a substantial leap forward in our global strategy to deliver superior online legal and business information and decision-making tools to LexisNexis customers, no matter where they are in the world," said Andrew Prozes, CEO, LexisNexis Group, and member of the Reed Elsevier board of directors. "A single technology platform brings countless advantages to our business, especially the ability to develop and share advances in information services applications quickly and tailor those innovations to deliver the best online features and functionality for each market."
The new platform allows LexisNexis' local businesses to benefit from innovative and standard-setting Web technology and a consistent user interface, while customizing products to the specific information needs and language of a country, a jurisdiction or a market. As the platform is applied in each market, customers will realize the benefits of LexisNexis local and global products with enhanced functionality, advanced taxonomy and more seamless searching and linking.
Also, the system enables LexisNexis to develop further advanced information services product concepts for more rapid worldwide adoption. These include products that are designed for electronically filing and retrieving court documents and other public records and electronic discovery, as well as those that integrate information and tools into customer portals, business intelligence processes and Knowledge Management systems...
In The New York Times this morning, S. Lee Jamison writes about 'An Online Search for Fun, Without a Look for Love.'
As my burgeoning list of 'social networking' links - creators, channels, funders, and analysts - grows by leaps and bounds, so does the number of reasons that people seek these 'channels' of connections.
Do you dial into any of these 'channels' for connections?
The New York Times article that I cite above is a 'fun' read about the value of finding friends while utilising the connection power of CraigsList, Friendster, The Lunch Club NYC, and Social Circles.
MarketWire :: ZeroDegrees Debuts Premiere Privacy-Driven Social Networking System for Business
...quote...
Online Service Exponentially Increases a User's Network of Relationships While Maintaining "Gold Standard of Privacy"
SANTA MONICA, CA -- (MARKET WIRE) -- 12/10/2003 -- ZeroDegrees Inc. (ZDI), the "People Network Company," has announced its company launch with the final beta of its ZeroDegrees social networking technology that enables people to connect in a way that closely emulates natural social behavior. Its final beta is now available for free download at www.zerodegrees.com. In the 16 weeks since its soft launch and original beta, the network has grown to 140,000 searchable contacts.
ZDI simplifies and accelerates the real-life process of connecting people with the contacts of their friends and colleagues using modern technology and old-fashioned discretion. Recognizing that the lion's share of new business development in industries such as law, automotive, accounting, software, medical and marketing services are done by personal referral rather than cold call -- in some cases by a factor of ten to one -- ZDI's "People Search Engine" enables business professionals to find a path to new clients through trusted intermediaries who know both the client and the business professional. In addition, sales and business development professionals can search for a path and request introductions to known executive decision makers in the Global 2000 using the same process of leveraging trusted relationships.
The ZeroDegrees system is available as an online service for individual subscribers as well as enterprise customers on a per-seat basis. The service is 100 percent opt-in at every level and lets each subscriber decide what is published about them, who can see their information, whom they are linked to, who can search across their network, and who can contact them for an introduction...
...end quote...
In MarketWire today there is an announcement for Six Degrees of Separation for Your Pets.
Backwash a Boston, Massachusetts based company that grew out of a personal project of founder David Ring, today announced - Backwash for Pets - "the first social networking site for pets and their owners."
David Ring comments: "The whole pets concept grew organically. A few of our Backwash.com visitors registered under their pets' names, uploaded their pet photos, wrote profiles for their pets and then engaged in message board discussions posing as their pets. The idea quickly caught on like wildfire and the spin-off site Backwashpets.com is the end result."
Backwash was founded in August, 1997 and is headquartered in Boston, MA. (Sounds like an 'only in California' concept to me, but hey... (^:)
In an article today in Network Computing Asia, Chan Chi-Loong writes about Collaboration Trends and Managing Its Dynamics.
I am including additional references for Collaboration Taxonomy, following this (long) citation from Chan Chi-Loong's article:
...quote...
According to Dr Prabhakar Raghvan, Verity's CTO, the two most important resources a company has can be distilled to just two things: people and knowledge. Creating a knowledge management platform with efficient search functions and a well-defined document management plan can save companies millions - at a fraction of the cost of setting up the system, according to Prabhakar.
...Brian Prentice, senior analyst of Technology Research Services at META Group, strongly believes that collaboration technologies need to be managed more than ever as a profusion of collaboration tools invades the market.
Collaboration technologies are everywhere. A typical organisation might use IBM Domino for e-mail, Microsoft Sharepoint Server for directory services, Plumtree for portals, SAP for resource planning, Siebel for CRM, Oracle for databases, and so on. One of the biggest problems is that these technologies overlap. A shared workspace can be created with the Domino mail server, MS Sharepoint Server, Plumtree portal, and SAP. Besides the redundancy of resources, sometimes these different technologies do not mix that well and end users are inundated with having to learn how to use (or worse, forced to used) all these different applications for different groups. Far from simplifying matters, collaboration technologies actually complicate matters for end users if not properly managed.
Collaboration Taxonomy
One solution to help resolve this from the end user perspective is to establish a collaboration taxonomy. This is a set of guiding principles that correlate business activity and IT solutions with a collaboration focus. By having such a structure, organisations can better identify collaboration needs. This is a starting point for crafting a full-fledged management policy.
Through looking at some of the different aspects of collaboration - individual users, business processes, knowledge communities, intra-enterprises and lifestyle centric processes, a collaboration taxonomy can guide organisations in focusing on the intended returns of each IT investment. From this starting point, it can be extended to see how much work is necessary to integrate each piece into your organisation.
A Collaboration Strategy
META Group believes that a few big vendors like Microsoft and IBM will eventually dominate the market a few years down the road. These vendors were picked because they have strong existing products (e.g. Lotus Notes, Exchange) and a unified strategy for collaboration, rather than singular point products.
"Simplifying things is one of the best ways to empower people to use collaboration technology," says Balaprakash Kasiviswanathan, regional product manager for Asia-Pacific, Microsoft, "and seamless, painless integration from the front-end to the back-end will do this."
Whether META Group's predictions will play out remains to be seen, but there is no doubt that collaboration - e-mail, for example - is one of reasons we frequently employ IT in the first place. Comprising information and people, collaboration is too important to the future of an organisation to be left unmanaged...
...end quote...
Additional Collaboration Taxonomy References:
A Taxonomy for CSCW (Computer Support for Collaborative Work) Systems,
Blog of Collective Intelligence: Collaborative Taxonomy Archives,
Clemson University, C.R.E.D.O. Lab, Automation in Design Group,
CSCW-98 Workshop,
Mark Klein's Selected Publications on Collaborative Design,
Underlying principles of an online community: The CSCW framework,
Wherewithal: Collaborative Taxonomy Engine.
Washington Post :: U.N. Sets Aside Debate Over Control of Internet
By David McGuire
...United Nations member states this weekend headed off a showdown over who should control the Internet, agreeing to study the issue and reopen it in 2005.
...Leaders had planned to wade into a debate over the way Web site and e-mail addresses are doled out, standards are set for Internet security and the thorny question of how Internet-based transactions are taxed, among other things.
Some developing nations have complained that the world's most visible Internet governance body -- the U.S.-based Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) -- hasn't adequately represented non-U.S. interests, and should be replaced with a governmental group overseen by the United Nations.
ICANN President Paul Twomey said this weekend's compromise shows that most countries don't want to scrap ICANN. "When you look at the actual outcome, it reflected that a lot of delegations weren't willing to go down that path at all. I think that was a minority opinion," Twomey said. "We're happy also to have two years where we listen to the concerns of governments."
ICANN -- a Marina del Rey, Calif.-based nonprofit -- has managed the Internet's global addressing system since 1998 under an agreement with the U.S. government.
Many U.S. companies -- who actually run much of the Internet's infrastructure -- strongly opposed efforts to move Internet management into government hands, arguing that private-sector groups like ICANN are better suited to respond to the quickly evolving Internet...
As reported in an article in The New York Times, 'Nations Chafe at U.S. Influence Over the Internet,' ICANN president, Paul Twomey, was excluded from a prepatory meeting for the United Nations' World Summit on the Information Society.
Jennifer L. Schenker, of the International Herald Tribune, states "Icann and the United States government are expected to come under heavy fire at the conference, which begins Wednesday in Geneva and will be one of the largest gatherings of high-level government officials, business leaders and nonprofit organizations to discuss the Internet's future. An important point of debate will be whether the Internet should be overseen by the United Nations instead of American groups like Icann."
According to this article, the role of governmental agencies in the future of the Internet will be the core discussion at this conference. Although Icann and the US Government will be conspicuous by their absence at this meeting, Nicholas Negroponte, Esther Dyson and Tim Berners-Lee, are expected to attend. As are representatives from a number of US based companies, including AOL, Microsoft, The Boeing Company, Siemens AG, Alcatel and Vodafone.
Boston.com :: Six Degrees Co.
By Chris Gaither
More buzz on social networking attracting users and investors. Many of the same faces and places I have documented in the past - but a few new individuals mentioned in this article which asks: "But will anybody make money?" and questions the wisdom of calling 'social networking' 'Internet 2.0.'
Mentioned in this article:
James P. Currier, Tickle by Emode, Friendster, Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers, Benchmark Capital, Sequoia Capital, Battery Ventures, Mayfield, Knight Ridder, The Washington Post, Tribe.net, Andrew L. Anker, August Capital, Ringo, Evite, Barry Diller, IAC/InterActiveCorp, John Foley, Monster, Stanley Milgram, The Oracle of Bacon, Sixdegrees, Stan Fung - Zero Stage Capital, Elizabeth Lane Lawley, Spoke, Ryze, visiblepath, LinkedIn, Contact Network, David Flaschen - Flagship Ventures, Google, Mark Kvamme, and Samir Arora.
ScienceDaily :: Faster, Better, Cheaper: Open-source Practices May Help Improve Software Engineering
ARLINGTON, Va. -- Walt Scacchi of the University of California, Irvine, and his colleagues are conducting formal studies of the informal world of open-source software development, in which a distributed community of developers produces software source code that is freely available to share, study, modify and redistribute. They're finding that, in many ways, open-source development can be faster, better and cheaper than the "textbook" software engineering often used in corporate settings.
In a series of reports posted online, Scacchi is documenting how open-source development breaks many of the software engineering rules formulated during 30 years of academic research. Far from finding that open-source development is just software engineering poorly done, Scacchi and colleagues show that it represents a new approach based on community building and other socio-technical mechanisms that might benefit traditional software engineering.
...Three projects--one by Les Gasser at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and Scacchi, one by Scacchi and John Noll of Santa Clara University and one led by UC Irvine's Richard Taylor--are applying the lessons learned from open-source practices to create new design, process-management and knowledge-management tools for large-scale, multi-organization development projects.
"In many ways, open-source development projects are treasure troves of information for how large software systems get developed in the wild, if you will," Scacchi said.
Yahoo :: COPLINK(R) Crime Fighting Solutions
TUCSON, Ariz., and WIGAN, GREATER MANCHESTER, UK, Dec. 4 /PRNewswire/ -- Every day in the United Kingdom, burglaries, car thefts, assaults, and other more serious crimes like armed robberies, drug trafficking and gang related offences often go unsolved despite the best efforts of law enforcement. But all that could now change with COPLINK -- Knowledge Computing Corporation's critically acclaimed crime-fighting tool that as of today, is available to law enforcement agencies throughout the United Kingdom. Orbitron Technologies, a respected leader in software development and systems integration, will serve as the company's first international distribution partner. The agreement represents Knowledge Computing Corporation's first entry into international markets.
...COPLINK, in use since 1998, is based on knowledge management technology first prototyped by top-ranked researchers in the Artificial Intelligence Lab at the University of Arizona in Tucson through a grant by the National Institute of Justice. The technologies developed at Knowledge Computing Corporation have been tested and proven by law enforcement agencies around the country.
Managing Information News :: DSTL Knowledge Services Wins Major Industry Award
...Knowledge Agents at the Defence Science Technology Laboratory (Dstl), part of the Knowledge Services Department, and an Aslib Corporate Member, has been awarded the title of Best Information/Knowledge Team in a Public Sector Environment yesterday evening at the International Information Industry Awards ceremony held at the Royal Lancaster Hotel...
EWORLDWIRE :: C I Host, Friendzy Partner To Launch Social Networking Site
DALLAS/EWORLDWIRE/Dec. 5, 2003 --- FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
C I Host, Friendzy Partner To Launch Social Networking Site
BEDFORD, TX (December 3, 2003) - Those purported "six degrees of separation" may narrow a bit as C I Host, a global leader in Web hosting and Internet infrastructure, partners with One Technologies, Ltd., to launch social networking site Friendzy.
Friendzy, hosted by C I Host, provides one of the most comprehensive sites for social networking - perhaps the fastest growing and most symbiotic example of the Internet's communications potential. Intimate social networks, called Friendzys, form around common threads - experiences, hobbies, interests, needs, professions, consumerism, informative sources, etc.
Alex Chang, Friendzy founder and CEO of One Technologies, said, "Friendzy membership will multiply rapidly, so we need the highest assurance of security and the greatest flexibility for community growth. The site is based on Microsoft .NET technology, so C I Host satisfies and actually surpasses all of our requirements."
Christopher Faulkner, CEO of C I Host, said, "Friendzy realizes the Internet is bringing the world together in ways never imagined, one hundred eighty notches opposite from critics who said computers create isolation."
Friendzy brings together members based on experience and real life interaction, to create quality relationships not just quantity. The network invites new members to enjoy self-expression and self-discovery by meeting new people and trying new things.
For me, my 'knowledge notes' provide a way to record the 'global buzz' on a number of topics that I follow. However, I have received some feedback from those who read my newsfeed, or my contributions to various 'topic exchange channels,' to include only one item, or news story, per post. I have been doing this for the past couple of weeks and find that it has been difficult for me to 'contain' certain areas to this format. And so, I will attempt, at least for this 'knowledge economy' news channel, a more conversational inclusion of multiple stories, on this single topic, in a single post, and see how well it is 'digested' by my fine readership.
Today, on INQ7.net, Irene R. Sino Cruz talks about the Philippine government's desire to ensure a continuous stream of local technical workers and prepare future knowledge workers for the "Knowledge Economy" through the Philippine's 'PCs for Public School Project (PCPS 2).'
The Star Telegram, in Fort Worth, Texas has an 'Opinion' piece on the "City of Arlington 2025 Visioning Report" and Arlington's need to draw and keep college graduates to support an evolving "knowledge economy."
In 'Pakistan Link Headlines,' talking about the World Summit on Information Society (WSIS) being held in Geneva from December 10 to 12, Dr. Attaur Rehman of Pakistan said the representatives from governments, private sectors, civil society, international organisations and mass media would attend the Summit. He said the World Summit on Information Society (WSIS) "was not about Information Technology but was about the transition taking place during the last two decades where the world had moved from a natural resource based economy to the knowledge economy."
'The News Review' from Douglas County, Oregon, reporter,Chris Casey, writes about the Roseburg Area Chamber of Commerce's 2004 Business Outlook Forum where David Frohnmayer, president of the University of Oregon, advocates greater investment in higher education, a critical player in the emerging "knowledge economy." He noted that the University of Oregon in 2002 received $70 million in state tax money and spent $700 million in the local and regional economy. "That's a 10-to-1 return on investment," he said. "If we were all on the stock market, we'd want to buy that stock on the basis of its equity value. And that's a year-in and year-out return."
In 'The Guardian' Dr. Ray Greek, medical director of 'Europeans for Medical Advancement' speaks out on how the government policy to promote an internationally competitive knowledge economy in Britain is influencing the direction of British science for economic motives, even though they conflict with public health interests and he concludes that "A knowledge economy based on erroneous knowledge is doomed to fail."
And, in 'The Financial Express' today Pradip Kumar Dey, FE Research Group, agrees with Pythagoras that "Numbers rule the universe." He notes that "While petroleum sector majors remain on top of FE 500 (numbers generated by The Financial Express Research Bureau analysing the performance of India's top 500,) companies from the knowledge economy, steel, automobiles and pharmaceuticals have also moved to the top of the pile."
CIO-Asia :: The Evolution of IT
By Teo Chin Seng
...The trend to enable knowledge workers to access information pervasively is also influencing a trend in the IT industry: the evolution of the extended organisation through mobility. Information and workflow get pushed out from the enterprise to its employees on the move. Inputs from employees on the move get pushed into the enterprise to enable timely responses. This will enable companies to operate in a real time manner in understanding and reacting to the pulse of the organisation, its marketplace and its customers. We are looking forward to more efficient and affordable products in mobile telecommunications and mobile data terminals convergence....
Slashdot :: Economic Analysis of the Nanotech Future
...nweaver writes "Economic Historian and Berkeley Professor Brad DeLong has created an analysis on his Web Log on the economic implications of Nanotechnology. His observations are based on what previously happened with the Industrial Revolution (and other economic shifts in general) and using this to speculate what Nanotech will do to the economy: who wins (technical/knowledge workers), who loses (manufacturing), and what changes (costs of products)."...
...ePeople is a provider of Customer Interaction Management software for companies that sell, service and support enterprise products and services. ePeople's flagship product, ePeople Teamwork enables managers and knowledge workers in customer support, team selling, strategic account management and professional services to optimize, capture and reuse expert knowledge and the collective skills of an extended team. ePeople Teamwork works with Outlook, CRM, email, IM and the web. ePeople customers, including companies such as Cisco Systems, InstallShield and Openwave Systems, have deployed ePeople Teamwork to realize significant gains in customer resolutions, service quality and productivity. Headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., ePeople is privately held...
CNN :: Net-working: Can cyberspace help?
By Nick Easen for CNN
...Web sites are springing up to help managers meet the right contacts. And in many cases colleagues can help make the connection.
"Chatting people up at networking events is of limited value, but obtaining introductions is the key to getting the ear of the people they want to reach," Konstantin Guericke, co-founder of LinkedIn, told CNN. "People join because they believe the most valuable new business contacts come through referrals from people they already know and trust."
LinkedIn and others like Ryze and ItsNotWhatYouKnow are the business equivalents of the popular Web site Friendster. Most are free to join, profiles have no photos and your list of contacts is called your "tribe."
LinkedIn, active in 80 countries with 48,000 regular users, does not allow people to cold-call each other. Instead mutual contacts can vet whether they want to refer you. "We facilitate over 1,000 successful referrals per month. Our users accept three-quarters of all requests because they never hear from strangers," says Guericke. "Users only request a referral for a specific business or career purpose. It's not something 'extra' they work on, but a more efficient way of doing what they already do."
These sites say they make finding business leads quicker and more reliable, including hiring employees, signing up distributors and locating industry experts. A downside is that for a successful new contact, both parties must feel the other side has something to offer. If you do not have a valuable network to start with it is unlikely that others will refer you or ask you to be part of their network. And there is already a debate on how these Web sites will make money.
Venture capitalists have ploughed millions of dollars into Friendster and similar community sites. But it remains to be seen whether they will reap big returns. "I have no doubt that 90 percent of people will be happy to pay a fee for a referral that they can't get any other way," says Guericke...
EContentMag :: IMN, Inc. Releases Integrated RSS Service
...Emarketing firm IMN Inc. (formerly iMakeNews) has launched an RSS service that is integrated into its enewsletter and DirectBlog platforms. IMN customers can now publish their enewsletters or blogs so that they are automatically picked up through RSS content aggregators. The service is designed to offer marketers multiple ways to distribute their content, including email, the Web, or RSS feeds, increasing the number of alternatives for breaking through and engaging qualified recipients.
Through IMN's new service, marketers set their enewsletters or blogs to be published as RSS feeds at the same time that they post them to the Web. The process is designed to be transparent to IMN clients, who then use the same procedure to publish their content simultaneously as an email, Web site, and RSS feed. They use the same Web-based templates that they depend on to develop, publish, and distribute their content, and to measure customer behaviors in response. Phase two of IMN's RSS service will be available later in December and provide IMN's behavioral tracking capabilities, the same as those currently available through the company's newsletter and DirectBlog services...
Entrepreneur magazine :: Powering Up By Mike Hogan
...Gartner gives a thumbs up to Linux desktops for "structured task workers," but not knowledge workers.
The former are employees who use a few applications and perform a limited number of computing tasks repeatedly. The latter are managers, designers, analysts and such, who run diverse combinations of applications. The more homegrown applications, macro-bedecked spreadsheets and highly formatted document templates your company uses, the more it will cost to port those tools-probably created in Windows-to Linux. You'll have to rewrite them and retrain users. Ka-ching!
But smaller enterprises or anyone sticking to standard, off-the-shelf software can avoid those costs. Linux suites such as Sun Microsystem's StarOffice and OpenOffice.org are very compatible with popular Windows applications, notes Silver. Also noteworthy: About three-quarters of employees fit Gartner's structured task worker definition.
You'll want to run the numbers for your own workplace, but Gartner's findings don't rule out Linux desktops like BusinessStation.
...Like Gartner, I found that document, desktop publishing, photo and graphics files-even multidimensional Excel spreadsheets-transferred back and forth between Windows and Lindows applications with only the most trivial of tweaks. Worst case: You'll lose some favorite font, math function or right-click mouse convention. But I don't see why switching to Linux would cause any more help desk calls than a new version of anything else.
The Wintergreen desktop worked OK, but slowly. It's not the processor or the memory; it's the idea of running OS and apps off a CD. Yes, you can, but the time wasted will quickly add up to the price of a new Dell.
The chassis is a standard minitower in every way except that it lacks a hard drive. That helps achieve a "locked" client, secure from unauthorized changes. But then, there's the speed thing-and you'd be amazed at how difficult it is to get Ethernet and USB peripherals configured without a hard drive.
Yeah, what do I expect for $169? Here's what I got - a noisy, re-purposed consumer PC that's not powerful enough for a knowledge worker and without the features usually found on thin clients. Is tech support any help? I don't know, because I've never gotten past Wintergreen's answering machine.
Lindows.com touts the systems as though it has something to do with them, when in fact, it's a couple of levels removed. It asks for $59 per year for software support, which seems eminently fair. But it's not exactly like buying from Dell or IBM, is it?
Bottom line: Linux is ready for some desktops. Just make sure the desktops you buy are ready for Linux...
Web Services Journal :: Enabling the High Performance Corporation
by Jonathan Sapir, president of InfoPower, developers of SnapXT
...To quote Peter Drucker: "The most important, and indeed the truly unique, contribution of management in the 20th century was the 50-fold increase in productivity of the manual worker in manufacturing. The most important contribution management needs to make in the 21st century is similarly to increase the productivity of knowledge work and the knowledge worker."
Unfortunately, to date, our efforts to improve the productivity of this increasingly important segment of the organization have been less than spectacular. As is pointed out in a recent study by the Center for High Performance and its parent company Hudson Highland Group ("Unlock Corporate Performance: America's Knowledge Workers Provide The Key" download pdf) a "performance crisis" has hit Corporate America, hindering its ability to shake off the effects of the sluggish economy and return to sustainable growth.
...In his book The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell searches for catalysts that precipitate a "tipping point" - that moment in time when the boiling point is reached. This concept holds that small changes will have little or no effect on a system until a critical mass is reached. Then one final small change "tips" the system and a large effect is observed.
One example of this phenomenon is the establishment of e-mail as a primary means of doing business. Although personal computers in business had been around in various forms since the early 1980s, they were not seen as primary means of communication. In order for that to change, several factors had to occur: PC prices had to come down low enough to place them on every desktop; users had to become more comfortable with their use to incorporate them into their daily routines; network technology had to improve to the point where internal connections extended throughout the organization; a public network (the Internet) had to be established to allow external point-to-point communication; and easy-to-use e-mail software had to be created. The tipping point came when e-mail software was on enough desktops to drive further adoption. Suddenly, if you didn't have e-mail you were out of touch, and unable to conduct business the way the rest of the world was conducting it.
Today, technology has become so ingrained in the daily life of business users that their requests for automated solutions far outstrip IT's ability to deliver them all. One of the consequences of this is that many users have resorted to creating their own solutions using desktop tools (for example, creating macros in spreadsheets to perform repetitive calculations). The problem with this is that these systems are isolated from the rest of the organization, and the tools used to build them are often ill-suited to the task at hand. But we are moving toward a tipping point, and the change will be swift and sudden. Key drivers toward this point are Web services and service-oriented architectures (SOAs). These new concepts will enable solutions developed by and for a single business user to be easily extended to others in the organization. All that is needed to reach the tipping point is the right tool built on these concepts - a personal service builder (PSB).
...So what exactly is a PSB? One way to think of it is as a development environment that lets business users create simple applications with techniques such as mind mapping instead of writing code - or depending on IT to write the code. Those business users know their jobs very well. They know what they need to do it better. But unless they've taken programming courses, they've lacked the knowledge of how to translate their ideas into something practical. Now, business users simply need to understand the logic - A follows B follows C - and then map it out with the PSB. The rest happens behind the scenes...
The New York Times :: Patents: Idea for Online Networking Brings Two Entrepreneurs Together
...Reid Hoffman, chief executive of LinkedIn, and Mark Pincus, chief executive of Tribe.net, considered the six degrees patent so valuable that they bid on it and won when YouthStream decided to auction it, saying it was not using it in its current business operations. They learned about it from Andrew Weinreich, a lawyer, who founded Sixdegrees.com in 1997 with a friend, Adam Seifer. YouthStream bought the company in 1998 for stock then worth $125 million.
Sixdegrees.com was a social networking company. Its name played on an idea by Stanley Milgram, a Harvard psychologist. More than 35 years ago, he suggested that all people on earth were connected by no more than six degrees of separation - that is, two people who did not know each other would find a link through no more than six people. His idea is not the subject of the patent; rather, it covers the software code for making it work in computer systems.
Mr. Weinreich said in a telephone interview that the six degrees business concept was ahead of its time, coming as it did a few years before digital cameras became ubiquitous. Thus, it could not offer what has become an integral part of the online dating game: photographs.
In addition to having started their respective social networking sites last summer, Mr. Hoffman and Mr. Pincus each own about 2.5 percent of Friendster, which they bought separately. Mr. Hoffman purchased his shares in September 2002; Mr. Pincus bought his in February. Discussing the patent, Mr. Pincus said he and Mr. Hoffman were "talking to Friendster about partnering, where they would pay to be a co-owner." No one from Friendster responded to several e-mail messages and telephone calls inquiring whether Friendster was interested in the matter.
Mr. Pincus said that he and Mr. Hoffman did not want to be perceived as "two investors gone astray trying to hold up Friendster for ransom." But they also did not want to get into a bidding war with Friendster's other investors, he said.
Even though Mr. Hoffman and Mr. Pincus bought the patent primarily as a defensive measure - to prevent another company from acquiring it and demanding royalties from them or putting them out of business - Mr. Hoffman said a number of their competitors were going to be surprised when they learned of the patent.
"The general attitude among entrepreneurial people is that they think that they were first and that there is no history to what they are doing," he said. "Both Mark and I had tracked six degrees as an intellectual precursor to our own businesses."
The six degrees patent is not the only one to have been issued covering aspects of social networking.
Tacit Knowledge Systems, of Palo Alto, Calif., has been issued at least nine patents for "knowledge systems" technology, which, patent disclosures suggest, touch on social networking. Tacit and In-Q-Tel, of Arlington, Va., a private venture backed by tax dollars to keep the Central Intelligence Agency abreast of the latest technology, signed a broad licensing deal in June to deliver Tacit's technology to selected customers in the United States intelligence community.
Nonetheless, other entrepreneurs like Mr. Brydon are skeptical that patents will play a significant role in shaping the social networking landscape, even though Mr. Weinreich, the co-founder of Six Degrees, is an adviser to visiblepath. "This industry is going to go in a thousand different directions," Mr. Brydon said. "I think we're going to find that many of the things being protected today are completely irrelevant a year from now." ...
New York Post :: Social Networks Get New Friend$
By Ben Silverman
...DID you hear the news? Social networking is the next big thing.
Many in the technology media have latched onto the idea that social networking will be an economic force in the future. Never mind that social networking has been around since the dawn of time and that the mob has really been the only organization to take it to its proper heights. Social networking is hot and there's plenty of money out there to prove it.
Friendster, which if you listen to the hype will revolutionize the way we interact in the same way the Segway will make the automobile obsolete, recently scored $13 million in financing. Friendster has also, according to published reports, spurned a $30 million takeover offer from Google and somehow managed to secure a $56 million valuation.
Friendster is, in effect, a combination of reunion Web sites like Classmates.com, dating Web sites like uDate.com and online classified and community properties such as Craigslist. If you want to decrease the number of bookmarks you have, Friendster is the way to go. But where Friendster really comes in handy is if you want to network your way into someone's pants.
Like the plethora of dating Web sites out there, Friendster is little more than an excuse to check out guys and girls. The one thing that Friendster offers that dating sites don't is a feeling of intimacy.
Unless someone is your verified friend, you can't connect with him or her. But once you do connect with someone, his or her network of friends opens up to you. There's apparently safety in knowing that the random person you hook up with is a friend of your friend, or your friend's friend.
But networking organizations and Web sites have been around forever. They fail or succeed based on the level of activity by the participants. Many people who join networking organizations stop participating once their needs are met, or once the organization fails to meet their needs.
Craigslist has undoubtedly been the most successful experiment in online networking. On any given day there are plenty of people willing to sell, buy, trade or simply give away everything from cars and pets to sex and Mets tickets. But Craigslist's mostly noncommercial spirit has been largely responsible for its success. People like the fact that you don't have to pay to use the service or give up any privacy.
Friendster is currently free, devoid of annoying ads (it has some ads, but no pop-ups) and pretty private. But venture capital firms don't throw down $13 million to make people happy - they do it to make themselves money. And like the most successful social networks, it's all about money...
The following article is really about getting spammed on a continual basis, finally flipping your proverbial 'bit' and sending an email to the offending spammer threatening them with bodily harm and getting arrested yourself. However, it had a great closing pertinent to 'knowledge management' that I am citing below:
ITBusiness.ca :: You writin' to me?
by Dave Webb
...According to intellectual capital expert Nick Bontis of McMaster University, there are two major barriers in North America to a successful knowledge management environment. One is the input bottleneck -- though we can speak at 150 words a minute, most of us can't tickle a keyboard faster than 50 words per minute. This causes us to be selective about what we share, though frequent readers of this space might disagree. The second is cultural -- unlike, say, Japanese companies, North American firms tend to disseminate business information from the top down. Japanese workers are more accustomed to a collaborative environment -- horizontal sharing of information. North American workers lean more toward the knowledge-is-power ethic -- hoarded knowledge is leverage.
Recent vast improvements in speech recognition technology mean that the first barrier could soon be overcome. And there will be pressure, as companies recognize the value of knowledge sharing and try to enforce a culture that encourages it, for employees to be more forthcoming with their knowledge. In an environment designed for rapid and wide distribution of knowledge, we'll again run up against the immediacy issue. And we might share some things we'll wish we hadn't...