ITI Bloggers November 29th, 2006

Many (maybe most) of us in the information industry know what RSS is—a way to have a summary of new content from selected web sites automatically delivered to you. It is one of the features of Web 2.0, and so this session was appropriate for “Web 2.0 Day”. It was kicked off by Peter Griffiths and Karen George, representing the UK Home Office, the department of the government concerned with immigration, customs, prisons, and related issues. The information services unit has developed RSS services to help keep Home Office staff up to date on developments. They are now delivering 400 current awareness “bulletins” every two weeks (“fortnight” here in the UK) plus over 40 alerts a day. Is there any doubt that RSS has progressed from something used only by “geeks” into the mainstream?

Griffiths noted that political blogging has grown dramatically in the last year, and some prominent political bloggers have a high profile. One blogger got more hits on his blog than either major party in a recent UK election! (This blog hasn’t achieved that status yet, but we’re working on it! )

George said that even in a government department, it is important to monitor new technology (bloggers do!), and the Home Office information center would never go back to its old way of doing things—a progressive department indeed!

But RSS is not without its problems. In fact, because of the tremendous amount of information available, it suffers from the very problem it was created to solve: information overload! There are too many feeds, too little consistency among them, and too many posts. So what’s next? Nicholas Ampazis, Associate Professor at the University of the Aegean, has one suggestion: give RSS readers intelligence to sort and rank information according to criteria more convenient to users, such as by author or by subject instead of today’s typical date sort. He has created a prototype, Feeds2.0, to address some of these problems and invites us to try it.

Where is Web 2.0 going? What will be its future and how will it affect the industry? That’s the topic for another posting on the last session of the day.

Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today

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ITI Bloggers November 29th, 2006

A conference-goer today found a secluded place to do his work on the balcony of the Olympia Convention Center, which dates to Victorian times.

The sunlight pouring through the glass dome pierced the intricate metal work of the supporting rafters and painted, for a time, the lacey image of an earlier era on the wall beside him.

Though there is much talk of the future sweeping away the past, some things are as persistent as iron.

Dick Kaser
ITI V.P., Content

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ITI Bloggers November 29th, 2006

Today was “Web 2.0 Day”, with an entire track devoted to Web 2.0 and its applications like social network software.

Each person on the opening panel was asked to define Web 2.0, and it was very interesting to hear the variety in the definitions. Nic Newman from the BBC Search Futures said it was people interacting with information in different ways. Other panelists defined it in terms of features, capabilities, or even a business model.

An often cited comment by Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the Web, who thinks that Web 2.0 is nothing new, is often mentioned when you ask people to define it. One thing is certain: There are many revolutionary changes afoot! The old “Find” model has been superseded and is broken because of the enormous amount of content now available. New technologies are being applied to help people find the information they need and to unlock the value of media archives. Newman thinks that metadata will be a major key to success in the Web 2.0 world.

In contrast, Stuart Kauder, CEO of a new search engine company, Accona, thinks that acquisition of companies and platforms is the new business model for Web 2.0. He points to the recent acquisition of YouTube by Google for $1.65 billion as a good example because Google has the traffic to support the acquisition. According to Kauder, one of the sadder truths of the internet is that the better the content, the less the revenue per user, and to be successful a content producer cannot afford to share advertising revenue with a broker. His advice for providers:
• Relevancy will be extremely important.
• Hybrid business models have great promise.
• You must establish relations with advertisers.
• Don’t be afraid to consider new revenue models.

This was a highly interesting introduction to Web 2.0 and its technologies. We have a lot to learn!

Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today

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ITI Bloggers November 29th, 2006

Jonathan Wax, General Manager, EMEA, Nexidia, Ltd., talked with me today about how the difficulties of converting spoken words to searchable text can be solved by using phonemes.

To illustrate his point he did a search on BBC videos for “Saddam Hussein.”

“It doesn’t matter how you spell it,” he said. (Lucky for the spelling-challenged like me.)

Once translated to phonemes, the phoneme string can be searched against audio tracks translated by the same method.

The demo did indeed rapidly retrieve some BBC clips tagged to the point where the reference to “Sad am Hu zane” occurred. In fact, we zipped directly to a BBC clip on Hussain’s recent sentencing.

The technology behind the method emerged from research at Georgia Tech.

Besides obvious applications for indexing and searching audio files, Wax said the technology is also being used in intelligence applications.

Dick Kaser
ITI, V.P. Content
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ITI Bloggers November 29th, 2006

Don Hawkins posed three trivia questions this morning. The answers were given in the first few minutes of a panel session on the value of social networking to 21st century organizations. If you had any doubts about the take-up of Web 2.0 technologies in today’s corporate world, ponder on the answers:

• Over 3,000 individual employees blog at Microsoft.

• IBM has 15,000 bloggers.

• 70,000 IBM workers contribute to wikis.

Do you need any more evidence that social networking software is being taken seriously by the largest of international companies?

We’ve all attended sessions where the ‘early adopters’ of some new technology or other have preached corporate salvation, if only we’d all get on the right bandwagon. But this panel gave some real insights on how important social networking software is, right now, in the cold, hard world of corporate reality. And for good measure, some great examples from the worlds of high school education and small business as well.

A few examples:

Any Microsoft employee can blog a bright idea that can be seen by all employees, including Bill Gates. Assessment, feedback and adoption of good ideas are all now much faster.

Microsoft internal reports are more easily shared – company wide.

IBM has a personnel directory that is tagged by the employees themselves. Individual expertise is readily identified and validated by the community.

IBM uses podcasts to distribute information to its 340,000 employees around the world, in all time zones. By using podcasts to replace expensive international conference calls IBM calculates that significant telecommunication costs have been saved and bureaucratic internal IT procedures have been circumvented.

Ewan McIntosh works for a publicly-funded educational research body in Scotland. While fully appreciating the cost savings of creating new educational resources using low cost or even free open source software, he noted that public funding bodies can be suspicious when budgets are not fully spent. Nonetheless, Ewan is fully committed.

Ewan has worked with schools to get children blogging when travelling on school trips and visits. He’s had them publishing blogs, videos and games as well as learning about the technology itself. It may be difficult to quantify the benefits, he said, but at least it’s not so hard to get the kids to attend school now. And they enjoy attending too!

Alex Bellinger, Audacious Communications sees social software as something that enables all workers in a company to adopt new communication and working methods, not just the few techies who were happy to create websites in the 90s. As an early champion of podcasting in the UK he’s a firm believer that social software liberates users.

For these panellists, there’s no going back. The key is to convince users that a blog or wiki is designed to save them time and aid collaboration, not to add to their information overload.

Jim Ashling
International Columnist
Information Today

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ITI Bloggers November 29th, 2006

I had a fascinating conversation at lunch with Anthony Watkinson (center), a publishing consultant and part-time lecturer at University College London. Just back from The Charleston Conference where he spoke on "The Future of Publishing in an Age of Uncertainty," he engaged me in a discussion about Open Access publishing.

I was not taking notes, but the bottom line seemed to be that Open Access is a publishing model still in search of a business model . . . or at least a sustainable funding base.

Though many institutions have pledged support of the idea, Watkinson observed, few have come forward with the money to pay for publishing papers in such a way that they can be offered free-of-charge to users.

Dick Kaser
ITI V.P. Content

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ITI Bloggers November 29th, 2006

Barb Brynko, Editor-in-Chief, Information Today, (left) was spotted at a private luncheon today conversing with Linda Stoddart, Head of the Dag Hammarshjöld Library at the United Nations in New York and Chair of the UN Task Force on Knowledge Sharing.

Stoddart has already appeared on two keynote panels at this meetings’ main program, including one on libraries and publishing developments and another on national libraries. She talks again tomorrow on the subject of "The Value of Communities."

Dick Kaser
ITI V.P., Content

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ITI Bloggers November 29th, 2006

Discussing the process of the companies’ merger after four months, Kate Worlock, director of EPS/Outsell, Inc., said: "We’re working on the back end of the business, taking a look at sales and advertising functions, and we’ll be restructuring the organization’s product architecture, developing new products … we’ll keep the best and weed out the rest."

Barbara Brynko
Editor in Chief
Information Today

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ITI Bloggers November 29th, 2006

Barbara and I did a couple of joint meetings today. Lucky vendors: two editors for the price of one. Sitting with Jack Abuhoff, the company CEO, Barbara asked an insightful question: “What does the name mean?” It is, it turns out, hyphenate of two merged companies. More significantly, however, it mirrors the combination of the company’s parallel “processes.” Okay, this is one of those companies that everyone feels does good work but remains a bit of a mystery. Barbara and I did a bit of interrogation and it turns out that Isogen were content technology experts and Innodata were experts in project management. Abuhoff says that this seemingly disparate union yields the ability to help publishing companies of all kinds streamline content process. Wisely, the company has recognized that this is a difficult “solution” to pin down. Thus, it has opted to, and I quote, “product-ize” its offerings in to more comprehensible a la carte menu of vertical publishing solutions that will, according to Abuhoff, help publishers “develop a product quickly, at a lower cost, to delivery timely information.”

–Michelle Manafy, Editor of EContent & Barbara Brynko, Editor of Information Today
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ITI Bloggers November 29th, 2006

Fascinating talk with Jean-Paul Chauve, VP of Nstein’s e-publishing division. I’m guessing his title will give it away, but the company is no longer seeking to provide indexing and categorization solutions to multiple industries. The company will focus on its core strength: the publishing industry. Nstein announced a partnership with Eurocortext, a European content management company with deep roots in publishing over here and the rumor is this will be more than a partnership. While Jean-Paul was mum on any details, he did allude to some interesting news coming later this week about an acquisition that will allow them to provide a unified end to end solution to the publishing industry that will leverage Nstein’s core competencies, as he said, “help publishers make the publishing process faster and leverage multiple business models—with content created by the publishers and their readers.”

–Michelle Manafy
Editor, EContent, Intranets, the Enterprise Search Sourcebook

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