Portals and KM

When is a Google Bomb a Bomb?

The objective of the Methodology Blog of the Program on Networked Governance at Harvard University is to serve as a forum for discussion regarding theories and methodologies for social network analysis and complexity theory. There was a nice post on Google bombs last week. The post says, “The term "Google bomb" basically describes a misapplication of knowledge on the Google's search algorithms and results.” It adds, “it is indirectly an example of global network building and collective action of website owners and bloggers based on a common idea or opinion.” It then offers a discussion on Google approach to search including some principles:

1. Links are essential to determine the rank/importance of a page
2. The page weight/importance (i.e. a university > personal website)
3. Topicality (How often a website is updated)
4. Other aspects related to web or blog content

…which we all know leads to the prominence of blogs in Google search results and is another example of the power of data mining web participation that I have discussed a bit before eg., More on Web 2.0: Some Poster Children and Why.
The example, of linking George Bush to the search term “failure” raises some interesting questions as the post states: What can the internet community achieve with this form of voice? How will governments react to such movements of altering the search results in an unfavorable way in the future as knowledge becomes more important? How will search engine providers react?

There is a real free speech danger here. The results could also be interpreted not as an “alternation” of search results but as a reflection of free speech by the global population who opposes the policies of the current US president as legitimate US and global polls indicate. If search engines have to modify results that are unfavorable to specific governments doesn’t this destroy the free speech of the internet alluded to in the discussion at the Berkman session, Designing the Future of the Internet, that I posted on yesterday?

The post concludes with comments on the importance of knowledge in this century and knowledge creation and knowledge transfer as key research topics. Kudos to that idea.

Designing the Future of the Internet – David Clark

Last week, David Clark from MIT led a conversation about designing the future of the internet at the Berkman Tuesday lunch series at Harvard Law School. The US National Science Foundation is about to announce a new research initiative which challenges the research community to conceive of what how the global network should appear in 10 or 15 years. David is hoping that this design not be seen as purely a technical discussion and he wants to draw other stakeholders to the table. David Weinberger also did a comprehensive post on this event, David Clark - Should the Internet have a future?

David Clark began working on the internet in 1975 but he does not claim to be founder, only a leader once he got involved. From 1981-1989 David acted as Chief Protocol Architect in this development, and chaired the Internet Activities Board. Recent activities include “extensions to the Internet to support real-time traffic, explicit allocation of service, pricing and related economic issues,” and other policy issues. New activities include the “architecture of the Internet in the post-PC era.”

In the 1990s he was working on bringing quality of service to the Internet and realized that it was not simply a technical issue. He discovered two operating principles. First, economic and political issues have a major play here and second, there was resistance to a vision as that might close out options. As a result, there were many wrong directions. Most of his technical colleagues try to redefine internet issues as technical questions since they are most comfortable dealing at this level. I have seen this happen over and over again in corporate IT environments as well. It always results in a failure to achieve meaningful success.

He also made an interesting observation. Many people see IT as a performance issue, (e.g., making stuff faster or with greater capacity) which he implied was short sighted. There was the same problem in cognitive psychology a few years back as many US researchers simply wanted to get children to perform tasks faster and at a younger age so there was an “arms race” over this issue much to the amusement of many European psychologists who were looking at broader issues.

Now there is this NSF grant to design the future of the internet. It should not be simply making the current reality faster or some other attribute better. David wants non-technical people at the table working on this vision which I certainly agree. He sees security as a major issue. On one extreme controls could be enacted where ISPs are required to police their users and their users PCs, eliminating free access and freedom of speech on the internet as well as any remaining privacy. On the other extreme is prospect of rampant spam, zombies, viruses, etc. The question remains: who gets invited to the table to work on this design and these issues?

Jonathan Zittrain mentioned that the line between PCs and the internet is getting blurred so there needs to be a design for the architecture of PCs, as well. Rebecca McKinnon pointed out that there is already much global concern over US dominance of the internet. David said that NSF was aware of this issue but the only fund US academics. He and others are thinking about how to get non-US involvement through other funding sources. David Weinberger expressed concern over how to keep vendors, such as Microsoft, with vested commercial interests from dominating the discussion. David Clark did point out that vendors are not likely to get NSF funding but that still leaves the issue open.

There were no conclusions except that this is a critical issue and one that requires a lot of discussion. What do you think?

Fortune Magazine's Innovation Weblog

Fortune Magazine has set up a blog, Business Innovation, to support their Fortune Innovation Forum to be held November 30-December 1 in New York City. There are some interesting links, including What can’t real organizations be as collaborative as virtual games? by Dave Pollard and Irving Wladawsky-Berger on Tapping into the Wisdom of Communities, I also like his adjacent post on Social Networks - Knowledge Management Done Right that covered the IBM media event I wrote about in IBM’s Social Software Initiatives: Blogs, Wikis, Tagging, and More. Irving included a link to further coverage of the event by Mike Gotta, IBM: Future Of Social Networks.

The blog roll includes Gautam Ghosh on Management and LipSticking by Yvonne DiVita, two cases in our book, Business Blogs: A Practical Guide. Gautum recently shared this nice piece, Peter Drucker's "Seventh Learning" from the Alternative Perspective blog." Gautum was also honored for an India Blogging award by the Indibloggers site.

Per Diem Blog – Howard Dinin

My friend Howard Dinin writes a blog, Per Diem, where he covers many matters, generally in great depth and in increasing frequency as you can see in his archives. Or in his own words, “I write at length because there are so many things that make up the universe that we experience.” His blog post, Let Us Now Praise Famous Appliances, on buying a blender is a good example.

Howard is also an excellent photographer. He took the photo that is on my blog. There is a link to a series of pictures from France such as Antiques Nice and Autumn in Moissac-Bellevue. Each picture has commentary.

Dante’s Divine Comedy Updated – San Jose Art Museum

Last week I was at the KM World conference to talk about what blogs bring to business. It was a beautiful 70 degree sunny day so I took a walk and went past the San Jose Art Museum complete with free admission. The lead exhibit was Sandow Birk’s update on Dante’s Divine Comedy. Sandow worked with Marcus Sanders to re-translate the three part Divine Comedy as a reflection on modern times. Sandow did the illustration starting with the classic Gustave Dore 19th century engravings.

Sandow did a number of large oils that not only were derivative of Dore but also drew in aspects of other classic works, For example, his reinterpretations of Inferno and Purgatorio were inspired by the large format landscapes of the 19th century American, Fredric Church (1826-1900). In the Inferno, Dante and Virgil are perched under-light beneath the Hollywood sign overlooking Los Angeles at night with the lights of the city below. As the relevant passage now reads, “The eighth circle of Hell was dotted with millions of flames. For where I stood on the rocky ledge, I could see them all shining brightly down below us in the darkness.” Sandow Birk’s Divine Comedy, Inferno, Canto XXVI, 31-33.

Purgatorio is represented by placed an updated version of Peter Bruegel the Elder’s (1525-1569) Tower of Babel on top of one of the hills south of San Francisco. Both pieces work really well. Sandow had Dante and Virgil encountering the Minotaur in plastic perched atop a Greek take out shop in nighttime LA.

There were a few other good works including a nice Louise Nevelson, Cathedral #2, horizontal in muted black. Peter VandenBerge (1935-) did a ceramic, “Couple Watching Saturday Night Movie,” (1969) represented by two bulging intertwined carrots sitting in a single overstuffed chair. I heard The Band’s classic song, The Weight, while walking through one gallery. It came from behind a locked door as part of Michael McMillen’s conceptual installation, “The Third Eye.” It was a creative way to add music to the situation. The song then switched to The Doors. “Light my Fire.” I wonder if the selections were also influenced by Dante.

The San Jose Art Museum makes a pleasant hour or so and admission is free. There is a large café attached. It is located at 110 S. Market, a few blocks from the convention center.

The Third International Workshop on Weblogging Ecosystems - Ediburgh

It is a regular work day in Europe and a good time to mention that the Third International Workshop on Weblogging Ecosystems will take place in May 2006 in Edinburgh, UK. This conference is being held in conjunction with the International World Wide Web Conference (WWW-2006). The call for papers for the workshop is available online at their Weblogging Ecosystems blog. They are calling for papers by March 10 describing research related to textual, visual, graphical and/or sociological analysis of the blogosphere.

Meditation (and napping) builds up the brain

What to do after the big Thanksgiving dinner? Try a nap or even meditation. Here is a story of the benefits of both, Meditation builds up the brain from the New Scientist. Thanks to Peter Flentov for mentioning it. I wrote about a related study on the benefits of napping from the BBC a few months back, Sleeping on the Job - BBC. Hope all those who celebrate have a wonderful Thanks giving.

Investor Relations and Blogging – Ross Dawson

Here is a nice post on an interesting idea, Investor Relations and Blogging. As Ross Dawson says, “Blogging is a fabulous tool to assist transparency and dialogue, which is what investor relations should be about. Let corporate boards blog!” In his long post, points that out that IBM is offering an RSS feed for investor relations and podcasts of investor relations messages. I agree with Ross and think this transparency is great way to make a closer connection with both investors and customers. This is another example of the creativity that IBM is applying to these new tools that I recently wrote about in IBM’s Social Software Initiatives: Blogs, Wikis, Tagging, and More.

"Thinking for a Living" -Thomas Davenport at KM World

Tom Davenport was the opening keynote speaker at the recent KM World. He talked about ways to make knowledge workers more productive using research form his new book, Thinking for a Living. Tom started with some thoughts on Peter Drucker who recently passed away. He recalled an interview he did with Drucker where he asked him what he thought of knowledge management. Peter replied that he was not sure that knowledge could be managed. So Tom said he quickly changed the subject.

Tom found that most companies’ approach to knowledge workers is to spend a lot of energy in the hiring process to get smart people and then they largely leave them alone, trying to stay out of their way. He feels that knowledge work can be measured and improved with some structured interventions. But he also cautioned that there are different types of knowledge workers which require different interventions. For example, a process approach can work well for software engineers, civic engineers, drug clinical trails, and certain health care protocols. It does not work for finding oil and gas, executive management, drug development, and academia.

It is important to have the knowledge workers participate in the design of any processes they will use and to have only part of the work covered by a process approach, leaving them some latitude. This approach was what we used in my first knowledge management effort at Cigna property insurance in the early 90s. There we used star underwriters to design a process where none existed and then linked KM to each step in the process, providing both relevant documents and access to appropriate experts and peers. At the same time we did not script what the underwriters did as there would have been massive resistance. Instead, we simply provided them what they needed to make intelligent decisions, including access to experts in all the niche markets they had to deal with. Here knowledge was embedded in the work. It was my initial introduction to knowledge management and we did it before we learned of the term. I was disappointed to later see a lot of KM efforts end up as simply collecting documents.

Tom also mentioned the British Telcom call center work that I was connected with in London in the early 2000s. It followed a similar approach as what we did at Cigna by embedding KM in the work process. Call centers offer one of the best venues for process oriented KM. It was at a large US telcom that I found one of the best documented ROIs for KM. Here we could easily segment callas hwere the rep used the KM system and those where it was not used. When the KM system was used the cross sell rate was three times that on calls where it was not used. When KM was used, there were fewer escalations to supervisor, and fewer repeat calls, along with positive results on a number of other measures that had large financial implications. This ability to have clear measures is another reason that call centers make great situations to embed KM in the work process.

I look forward to reading the book. I see that Tom is part of a blog now with Larry Prusak and others, Babson Knowledge.

Usability of Intranet Portals - A Report from the Trenches

It was interesting to see that a recent Nielsen Norman Group Report, Usability of Intranet Portals - A Report from the Trenches, found that the main issues in intranet portals remained from their previous report on the subject three years ago. Specifically: (in their words - shortened from their report summary)

“Portal solutions still don't offer satisfactory usability out of the box. This is more of a disgrace now than it was in the past, because we now know so much more about intranet usability.

Single sign-on is still more a dream than a reality. It's one of the most desired portal features and creates huge savings in help-desk calls, but most companies are not yet there.

Personalization for individual users is still rare. Organizations continue to find role-based personalization more useful and to use it more frequently.

Governance has always been more important to portal success than technical issues, and this finding was even stronger in the new study.

ROI is woefully under-documented. Too few portal projects collect good productivity metrics.”

I would certainly agree that these were key issues three years ago. It is too bad, but not surprising, to see them still around, especially the governance and ROI issues. It may be that the new social software tools might just disrupt the enterprise portal play. They certainly have the ability to change it.

Thanks to Mat Schwartz, a writer who worked on the project, for pointing to this report. He mentioned that one of the really interesting findings from the report was that some companies have backed off of personalization (one of the big buzzwords in the portal space) because users didn't always know what it was, how to use it, or care. Multiple sites mentioned having personalization features, but many report they are not being used much, the same with portlets. They found that less is more. At the same time, Mat said that they found that there is still a big need for the continued integration of business applications (via Web interfaces) into the portal, for everyone from customer service reps (customer-support tools) to executives (dashboards). There are remain many opportunities for organizations to study the way their employees work and build better portal tools to support those processes.

Van Gogh’s Drawing – The Metropolitan Museum of Art – New York

The Met offers a rarely seen exhibit of Van Gogh’s drawings that I recommend to anyone near New York. It was the one must do activity on our $25 Jet Blue trip to New York and met and exceeded expectat5ions. Like many exhibits, the chronological order allows you to see Van Gogh’s evolution as a drawer. He started first with inexpensive drawing instruments to learn art and master the black and white before moving to color. His entire creative period for all media was only nine years.

The drawings convey his distinct vision and make a strong compliment to his use of color in oils. They frequently used distinctive patterns to convey different aspects of a scene, like the cloth coat vs. the face of the figure, vs. the background. These patterns work in the same way that Vincent used strong colors to convey different aspects of a scene.

Later, Vincent used drawings done after a painting on the same subject to send copies of his recent painting to his brother and artists who be hoped to impress. A digital camera would have allowed him to simply take and email copies but it would not offer the chance for interpretation and reworking that his drawings gave Van Gogh. He offered tried different arrangement or approaches in the drawings. The paintings are often simpler in composition and detail as he “cleaned” the scene to focus on color.

The exhibit takes a while to go through with 113 works, mostly drawings, a few watercolors, and some of the painting that served as subjects for drawings. The catalog is one of the best I have seen. It has many more works that shown in the exhibit, including all of the paintings represented in the drawings and many additional drawings on related themes to those shown. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is located at Fifth Avenue and 82nd street in New York. There are no special tickets or additional admission charges for the Van Gogh exhibit which runs until December 31. It is worth a special trip to the city.

Two Excellent New York Restaurants: I Coppi and Savoy

Last weekend I took the $25 Jet Blue special from Boston to New York with a friend. Highlights included a trip to the Met for art (Van Gogh’s Drawings) and the Met for opera (Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro). The Van Gogh exhibit deserves a separate post for tomorrow. While there we also went to an excellent place for dinner in the East Village, I Coppi, and for lunch in Soho, The Savoy.

I Coppi is a mid-priced Italian with a wonderful strong wine list with excellent super Tuscans. We had a 1996 Ornellaia that was very dark, spicy, and intense while being very smooth at the same time. There is a garden in the back with heat lamps that allow for outdoor dining in early mid-November and we were lucky to get seats there. For starters we had the mussels and clams in garlic and white wine broth over grilled Tuscan bread, a nice variation over traditional steam mussels. A wonderful chestnut and butternut squash filled ravioli in a sage butter sauce followed. The sauce made for good dipping with the Tuscan bread provided up front. The shared entrée was a rare butter-flied beef tenderloin with rosemary and roasted potatoes and chard on the side. The owner served this course. There was only room for coffee to fuel a walk through the East Village. I Coppi is located at 432 E. 9th St. (East Village) between First Ave. and Ave. A (212)-254-2263.

Savoy offers a nice lunch in Soho where we met a friend. She works in the area and had been given this pick form her colleagues. There were fireplaces on both floors. It was tough to make choices but I had the garlic roasted leg of lamb sandwich with arugula and my friend had the duck confit with braised pears. Both were perfectly done and there was plenty of meat in the sandwich which has a carrot and pistachio salad on the side. They celebrated their 15th anniversary in October. On December 2, a curator from the American Museum of Natural History will lead a dinner based on Darwin’s cooking at the Galapogos. The Savoy is located at 70 Prince Street, NYC 10012. (212) 219-8570.

While we were in NYC, we also saw The Marriage of Figaro at the Metropolitan Opera at Lincoln Center. It is the middle of a three part series of plays on Figaro of Sevilla that Mozart converted to opera. This was a great production that fully conveyed the comic aspects of the work. The scenery was striking, with its use of soft browns and greys. There were large windows typical of European places with effective back lighting casting shadows across the stage outlining the many small pane windows. Pre-opera dinner came in the form of take out from Dean and DeLucca’s large Soho store at Prince and Broadway. We took a long time making our selections as I like to just walk around the store as if it is a gallery.

Corporate Wiki Users - Win an iPod

If you are an active user/contributor to a company wiki, consider taking this survey from Professor Ann Majchrzak, Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California by November 27th and have your name entered into a raffle for an iPod Nano. I got this from several people, including John Maloney and Adriann Jooste of Deloitte, so thought I would pass it on.

Prediction Markets Summit - San Francisco

Colabria, Newsfutures, and Commercenet are sponsoring the Prediction Markets Summit on Friday, December, 2, 2005 from 8 to 5 at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco. As the KM Cluster site says, ‘Prediction markets are also known as information markets, decision markets, idea futures, and virtual markets, prediction markets are speculative markets created for the purpose of making predictions. Assets are created whose final cash value is tied to a particular event, outcome or parameter (e.g., total sales next quarter). The current market prices can then be interpreted as predictions of the probability of the event or the expected value of the parameter.” Naturally James (Wisdom of Crowds) Surowiecki is a big fan and he has written, "Market predictions often outperform those of even the best-informed expert."

Business Week named prediction markets as a top technology trend for 2005 and they fit within the Web 2.0 approach of drawing on participant knowledge. Here is a list of readings about prediction markets. You can register at the KM Cluster site.

IBM’s Social Software Initiatives: Blogs, Wikis, Tagging, and More – Part Three- Internal Applications

This post is the third on an interesting press session on social software at IBM in Cambridge on November 7, titled: “The Future of Enterprise Social Networks.” Today, I cover the demos of stuff going on inside the enterprise. These were some of the most exciting efforts.

Martin Wattenberg, IBM Research presented a demo of Jam Analytics, a tool that allows you to look at discussions with internal collaborative experiences designed to obtain greater employee participation and dialog on key issues. The initial World Jam was designed to capture input on ten important issues. It lasted 72 hours and had 52,000 IBM employee participants globally. The paper, World Jam: Talk Among 50,000+ descriobes the event. The Jam Analyzer helps visualize what is happening and lets you drill down on specific participants and conversations. You can seen posts by the same person or about the same topic or product or from the same location. This way you can go through a huge amount of data and cut it many ways. A good tool for the Beercaster (Greg Narian records conversations in bars and sorts by person, place, and topic)

David Millen next gave one of the most interesting demos with immediate application within many large firms. He showed the IBM internal social book marking (or tagging) application, Dogear. It gives you tagging capability combined with authentication of the tagger. Your corporate directory presence can also have your tags (as well as your blogs). You can see others within your firm with the same book marks. You can see the book marks of individuals and you can subscribe to them. They now have about 17,000 tags in a few months with limited promotion. I think this has great potential and IBM did a great job on this version of enterprise tagging. It was built by Jonathan Feinberg of IBM Research. David also showed Fringe which crawls around and looks for associations between people how they are connected. It has integrated Dogear, the tagging tool.

Dan Gruen next presented Unified Activity Management. As the IBM web site states, “The goal of the Unified Activity Management (UAM) project is to recast collaboration technologies in terms of the meaningful business activities in which people are engaged, both to support the work of each individual person and team and -- more significantly -- the enterprise. This includes both formal elements such as workflows and structured documents, as well as informal collaboration such as chats and emails that is so critical to getting the work done.” It looks at work from an activity perspective and lets you chart business process (e.g. responding to an RFP) and associated best practices. You drag in documented sub-steps from other processes to improve your process. You can find work process related documents and people.

I wish we had this application in 1993 when we created the insurance underwriting KM system that was very process-centric. A key concept Unified Activity Management is that you do not have document processes as a separate activity. The application records the process in the context of supporting it. Then you can access this recorded process and mix and match past processes to create new ones. This was the illusive goal of some of our early KM efforts. Just do it and the system will document the useful stuff without you having to do the extra work that often interfered with documentation. Kudos to Dan.

Our panel followed with Dave Weinberger, Stephen Sparkes, and myself. Dave blogged it so I defer for the most part to his notes at the end of: IBM shows del.icio.us for the enterprise, and more. Matt Hines of eWeek wrote a story, IBM Sets Its Sights on Social Networking Tools, which trigger my memory of some of the discussion. I did comment that by gathering evidence of workers' specific contributions through the transparency of blogs , businesses will be better able to give credit to people who come up with truly innovative ideas, rather than hand down praise through levels of corporate hierarchy where senior people are more likely to take credit for what their staff actually does. When asked if the transparency will inhibit people, I said that blogs can have the opposite effect and may even inspire people to try harder at their jobs based on the (increased visibility) of their work.

The Irving Wladawsky-Berger briefly summarized things with a point that all the transparency that comes with these new tools might have a positive impact within a democratic society. Whether this occurs I think it can help break down silos and encourage dialog. It might even break down hierarchies in organizations. All of these would be good things. enterprise 2.0 enterprise tagging

IBM’s Social Software Initiatives: Blogs, Wikis, Tagging, and More – Part Two- External Applications

As mentioned yesterday, I attended an interesting press session on social software at IBM in Cambridge on November 7, titled: “The Future of Enterprise Social Networks.” I was there as an outside commentator on a panel with Dave Weinberger and Stephen Sparkes. The opening positioning panel of IBMers was covered yesterday. Today, I talk about the demos of external applications. Tomorrow, I cover the demos of stuff going on inside the enterprise. Dave blogged the whole event with his post: IBM shows del.icio.us for the enterprise, and more.

Irene Greif, IBM Fellow and Director, Collaborative User Experience moderated the panel and positioned them within the Web 2.0 frame. Marc Andrews gave the first demo on Social Nets Analytics: WebSphere Information Integrator OmniFind. The IBM web site states, “WebSphere Information Integrator OmniFind Edition features high-quality, scalable, secure, free-form text search that finds the most relevant corporate information from the plethora of enterprise information stored in file systems, content repositories, databases, collaboration systems, intranets, extranets, and public-facing corporate Web sites.” The demo showed how it can be used for public image monitoring. Marc said it will be a product announced soon. He showed how you can categorize this information, identify hot topics and critical issues, and understand the tone and sentiment of comments. The tool was pointed at public response to the Honda Civic in the demo. You could drill down to specific issues like fuel efficiency and see the tone and sentiment about public comments. I could see how this contextualized information could be more actionable, as Marc stated.

David Sink and Joel Farrell from the IBM Software Group next gave a demo of Appliki – a wiki like tool for quickly generating new applications. In the demo they showed how a chain of hardware stores could quickly set up an application to monitor weather, map stores, and link to inventory suppliers using available web services. In this case the wiki served as an aggregator and displayer of various web services. The services included Google Maps but it was unclear if they had the same integration of the other mashups around Google Maps. They seem to be able to monitor the sales of weather related inventory at the various stores and swap out inventory where needed.

The key feature was the ability to quickly assemble custom applications by drawing on available web services and integrating them. The first demo was based on existing products and is becoming a product itself soon. The demos tomorrow are currently only experiments inside IBM but they certainly have product possibilities.

IBM’s Social Software Initiatives: Blogs, Wikis, Tagging, and More – Part One

I attended an interesting press session on social software at IBM in Cambridge on November 7, titled: “The Future of Enterprise Social Networks.” IBM asked me to serve as an outside (unpaid) commentator on a panel with Dave Weinberger and Stephen Sparkes. Stephen is the Managing Director and CIO of the Investment Banking Division at Morgan Stanley and they have been doing in this area. I will break the event into three parts as there is only so much I can read and write in one day.

Dave Weinberger blogged the event live and then added a bit more the next day. His post, IBM shows del.icio.us for the enterprise and more , also generated some good commentary. He also felt the day was interesting and found it was "exciting to hear IBM promoting the virtues of decentralized software." But then not to take his comments out of context (as I just did), look at the whole post.

There were lots of press there: AP, Business 2.0, CNET, CRN, e Week, Information Week, IDG and others along with a bunch of analysts including Gartner and Amy Wohl. Amy asked many of the questions and some of the best ones. Amy also writes some blogs for IBM, including a blog on software as services, a topic very relevant to this session. Matt Hines of eWeek wrote a story, IBM Sets Its Sights on Social Networking Tools, on the event.

The event began with a panel of IBMers, followed by some demos, and then a Q&A with our panel. The first panel was lead by Irving Wladawsky-Berger who positioned the IBM efforts in social software as part of Web 2.0 and the increased collaboration and participation it brings. I know there is controversy around this term but it was nice to see that the need for increased collaboration and transparency was seen as a key issue for companies that want to survive in today’s and tomorrow’s marketplace. Irving said that most information in the early days of the Web came from institutions and now 60% comes from individuals. Whether he is totally right about the early days, there does seem to be increased involvement by individuals through blogs and other means. Irving also said that the failed promise of knowledge management is more possible now as with the rise of collaborative knowledge. I would agree with the current rise of collaboration within KM as many people have come to see that KM is more than document management.

Mike Rhodin, General Manager, Workplace, Portal & Collaboration, followed. He commented that the increased transparency through blogs can accelerate messages throughout an organization. He added that wikis can be dynamic publishing vehicles that allow for constant updating of content. He proposed the idea of establishing a wiki-based best practice forum for a company’s products that was out outside the firewall for customers to provide input.

Irene Greif, IBM Fellow and Director, Collaborative User Experience, was next. She also commented on the effects of Web 2.0 on collaboration and wondered what drove some tools to take off and others fail. Irene pointed to a recent HBR article, Collaboration Rules. She later used the Web 2.0 concept to position the demos.

Marc Andrews, Strategy & Business Development for Information Integration talked about some effects of collaboration on business. Blogs accelerate the impact of conversations and public opinion. Companies need to monitor these conversations closely to remain in touch with the market. IBM wants to make these conversations more accessible and deliver “information as a service.” It also wants to put this information in context so it is actionable. All of these are worthy goals and the subsequent demos included a public image monitoring tool.

I agreed with the general direction that IBM was conveying and found it nice to see a large firm making these statements. Part of this must come from the Lotus heritage. Tomorrow I go into the demos.

Learning 2.0 Podcasts – The Otter Group

The Otter Group has launched a new podcast series by Kathleen Gilroy on the subject of Learning 2.0. The series discusses advances in learning enabled by the onset of the broader changes within Web 2.0. You can find the audio and video podcasts at their new Learning 2.0 Tip of the Week Weblog. Last week they posted a 5 minute overview of how we are defining the world of Learning 2.0. This week, they will post a podcast about aggregators.

Update on New Orleans Restaurants

The New York Times ran a story recently, Pralines, Seasoned With Tears, on the impact of New Orleans on southern cooking. It included an update on a number of well known New Orleans restaurants, many of them have been my picks in several posts, Goin’ to New Orleans Part 1: My Restaurant Picks, and Part 2: Restaurant Picks from Harmony St. Charles. It is nice to see the restart of New Orleans cooking.

Reopened

Herbstaint referred to itself as “modern New Orleans,” with dishes like Shrimp and Green Chile Grits Cakes with Tasso Cream Sauce and Herbsaint, Tomato and Shrimp Bisque or Gumbo of the day. I have been there several times and always found it great. It is located at 701 St. Charles in the warehouse district. (504-524-4114).

Upperline was written up in the New York Times, not that Yankees know much about New Orleans cooking, and I am interested in trying it. Like Herbstaint, it is newer Creole. One of the signature dishes is fried green tomatoes. They must do it a new way.

Casamentos’ will reopen Nov. 15. It is near Tipitina’s and has great po-boys. It is located at 4300 Magazine St. (504) 895-9761

Also, Curvee and Lilette have opened. I have not been to them.

Pledges to reopen

Commander’s Place is in the Garden District and this is where we took out-of-towners for upscale in the 1950s. It is classic New Orleans Creole and the flagship of some of the Brennan family. They have pledged to reopen all their places. They have already reopened some but Commander’s need some repair. When they do open, it is better to go for lunch, its cheaper and you can see the neighborhood better. It is located at 1403 Washington St. (504) 899-8221.

Brigsten’s – I went here the last time I was in New Orleans (March 05) and it was reasonably good but I was not blown away. But kudos to them for pledging to reopen.

Galatorie’s is old style Creole and has been around forever (1905). It used to be my favorite old style place but I was disappointed alst time. Standards include: broiled pompano, trout amandine and French bread so light you have to keep it from floating off the basket. It is located at 209 Bourbon Street (504) 525-2021 – Jackets are required for dinner and all day Sunday. They are opening a Branch in Baton Rouge first, much to the distain of my NOLA chefs but it they have fallen a bit, perhaps Baton Rouge is a better place for them. They are also not keeping up their web site at the moment.

Michelin Stars Shine on New York Restaurants

The New York Times reported in Is New York Worth a Trip? Oui, that Michelin has released star rating for New York restaurants. Four places received the three star raking - Alain Ducasse at the Essex House, Jean Georges, Le Bernardin and Per Se. It is interesting that the links in the New York Times article do not link to the restaurants site but the NYT reviews, not wanting you to leave them. I, however, provide real links, so please go away and come back soon. I am sure these three stars are all beyond my budget.

They did list a place for one star that I went to for brunch last spring, The Spotted Pig, and wrote on in Sunday in New York. Too bad Michelin, I saw them first. I had an excellent Frittata with Sweet Potato & Roasted Garlic and Prosciutto on the side. The Spotted Pig is located at 314 W. 11th Street @ Greenwich Street (2120 - 620-0393).

Hurricane Addicts- Great Short Term Situational Blog on Katrina

Blogs are often thoughts of as a long term activities. Questions such as how often should I post, etc. arise in this context. But some people have made great use of the low cost (or no cost) aspects of blogs to create a web presence for specific events. Andy Carvin did a nice job with his Gates@Central park blog on the Christo event. He acquired many comments on the event and then locked it up as a record once the event was only. These blogs are ofthen done in Blogger and other free tools as extensive functionalit is less an issue.

Hurricane Addicts is another great example. In this case, a physician with expertise in psychiatry and addiction medicine, was “called upon to serve evacuees in Louisiana whose heretofore fragile and distressed existences have been further destabilized by Hurricane Katrina.” He agreed to work 14 consecutive twelve-hour days, beginning on Thursday, September 22. In the blog, Hurricane Addicts he recounted his “journey to the heart of diluvial darkness.” When he was done, he consolidated the entries into one long post to facilitate reading.

Thanks to Dan Gruen at IBM for sharing the Hurricane Addicts blog, Dan is doing some very interesting activities with blogs and other tools inside IBM.

These situational blogs are another example of how blogs have openned up participation in the web. I heard this week that over half the content in the web now comes from individuals rather than institutions.

More on Web 2.0: Marketplace Mashups

Cesar Brea, leader of Marketspace Advisor, did an interesting recent post on marketplace mashups, another instance of participant driven activity in Web 2.0, or whatever you want to call it. Marketspace Advisor is part of the Monitor Group. As Cesar writes:

“..,Google is moving as fast as possible to raise those entry barriers, even as it continues to work on improving its search technology. One of the ways to raise those barriers is to distribute itself widely and deeply into many other people's websites and desktops. One way it has done this is to make freely available certain tools and API's that people can use to build useful solutions of their own, whether on their own personal computers or on their servers. An increasingly well-known example is the free distribution of the Google Maps API.”

Google uses the same data at Map Quest, MSN and Yahoo but they are letting others do creative things with this data by making their APIs available and simplifying the software. Cesar mentions a service, Ning, that has appeared to make the Google Maps mashup process even easier. Cesar and his colleagues used it to produce a restaurant review beta, commenting on a few places near their office in Cambridge. Cool stuff. Cesar has encouraged me to put my restaurant picks into this format. Perhaps…

The Ning site says it is a Ning is a “free online service - or Playground - for you to build and run your own social applications. Social apps let anyone match, transact, and communicate with other people.” Here are the sample uses they list:

For any City - Create your own Classified Listings
For any Interest - Create your own Online Reviews
For any Event - Create your own Photo Sharing App
For any School - Create your own Social Network
For any Topic - Create your own Online Bookmarks
For any Mammal - Create your own Hot or Not®

Blogging for Product Developers: Valuable Tool or Passing Fad? – December 7

I will be hosting a live audio session on “Blogging for Product Developers: Valuable Tool or Passing Fad?” for the Management Roundtable on Wednesday, December 7 from 1:00 to :2:30 pm. I interviewed a number of product developers, product managers, and senior marketing bloggers for our book, Business Blogs: A Practical Guide, and the lessons learned from these interviews will form the core of this session. Their companies included both large and small firms: IBM, Microsoft, and SAP, as well as PubSub, ActiveWords, NewsGator, BlogBridge, Feedster, FeedBurner, MyST Technology Partners, and others.

These product developers all found that the transparency and high search visibility of blogs offered a great way to explore product development with their clients and receive valuable feedback. As studies have shown, products developed through customer feedback are more likely to generate greater profits and be more on target with market needs. Blogs also gave the products of small firms greater visibility and the larger firms found that blogs enable closer connections with their customers, putting a more human face on their efforts.

The Management Roundtable, founded in 1980, is a knowledge and networking resource for product developers. It publishes newsletters, hosts a variety of specialized conferences, workshops, and audio-sessions and conducts onsite training. They also offer the web-based service, Knowledge Roundtable, launched in 2004 to advance product development, innovation and collaboration. This service offers “continuous, unlimited access to competitive insights and facilitates introductions among industry practitioners for benchmarking and partnering.”

You can register for the Blogging for Product Developers session at the Management Roundtable site. I hope you can attend.

When is a Blog, A Blog?

Ethan Zuckerman, of wonderful program Global Voices Online, made an interesting observation at a recent Berkman lunch series which I will get to in a minute but first the context. Christopher Lydon and his team from Open Source radio were leading a discussion about their program. Open Source has a blog, Open Source: A public radio program with Christopher Lydon. There is very long and well written “about” section, Why a Blog. It says:

“Open Source will not be a show about blogs. It will use blogs to be a show about the world. For this, however, to pull in the people who read and write blogs, to help them tell their stories — and the stories of the people they know — on the radio, we need to give a little, too.”

The blog is used to present topics that will be covered in the show, receive comments, and continue the dialog beyond the 30 minutes of radio air time. The about section concludes with the following:

“More generally, however, a blog is a way of thinking. It’s a way of recording the argument you are having with yourself, admitting that you may be about to be wrong, and ensuring that, when you are wrong, you make your wrongness available as a public record. A blog is Socratic that way; it knows that it does not know. So we begin a blog, as we begin a show, as an act of good faith, a sign that we are working hard to get this right.”

Ethan said they were not doing a blog, but rather an RSS enabled content management system. In other words, they were using blog software to present ideas and collect comments. Ethan explained that most blogs are connected to an ecosystem of other bloggers who engage in online dialog. In the case of the Open Source blog, they announce events, get comments, and provide response. If it was to be really a blog it would need more of Christopher Lydon’s personal perspective and lees neutral journalism.

This raises and very interesting question: What is a blogs? Is a blog a style more than a tool? I have been defining blogs to audiences that are not familiar with them as possessing the following characteristics:

- Simple Web pages designed for frequent updates
- Require little or no coding, require little or no cost – eliminating entry barriers
- Each entry, or post, has its own unique Internet address
- Posts can contain links to other posts or sites
- Blogs can accommodate comments
- Posts are arranged in reverse chronological order
- Posts are placed in searchable archive that can have categories for browsing
- You can subscribe to updates through RSS
- Usually written from personal or individual perspective
- Accessible nature promotes transparency
- It is only the beginning – new features constantly emerging (e.g. audio, video)

These characteristics do include reference to the individual or personal perspective but I would include as a blog The Open Source blog and many other uses than take advantages of the combination of transparency with a searchable archive that blogs offer. I think that we should be inclusive and look for many other innovative uses of the qualities that blogs offer. We may then decide not to call them blogs but I think the labels are less important than opening up the conversations.

What do you think makes a blog, a blog?

Academic Bloggers – Blog and Perish?

The New York Sun recently had an article, Blogging Prof Fails To Heed His Own Advice, that looks at some academic bloggers. It starts with the quote "I shouldn't be doing this. I'll be going up for tenure soon."by Daniel Drezner , an assistant professor of political science at the University of Chicago. Later, he did not get tenure but says his blogging was not the reason. Many academics consider blogging to not be a serious activity and view time spend by academic bloggers as time away from more serious research. One the other hand, some academic bloggers, such as Drenzer, have developed large following and, as a result, have made their work more accessible.

Often academics only speak to a very small group of colleagues. I think that anything that can spread their work to a larger following is a good thing. Naturally, they still need to do their research but time spend sharing it with the larger world is a good thing.

I heard from a friend at a large Boston area school that one of her colleagues is very into blogging about policy issues related to his research. He plans to continue after his upcoming retirement as he finds it very meaningful. Good for him. More academics should have this view.

As Henry Farrell, who contributes to the blog Crooked Timber is quoted in the Sun article, "To dismiss blogging as a bad idea altogether is to make an enormous mistake," he wrote. "For these academics, blogging isn't a hobby; it's an integral part of their scholarly identity. They may very well be the wave of the future."

Cambridge Harvest Soup

It is fall and time for harvest stuff. This week my neighbor, Bob Harrington, served an amazing harvest soup that he adopted from a New York Times recipe that they state was adopted from Mary Ann Yevuta. I am going to record Bob’s version.

2 pounds lean pork, cut into 1 inch cubes
2 1/2 TB olive oil
1 large onion
8 cloves garlic, finely chopped
2 Granny Smith apples, peeled, cored, and chopped. Bob left the skin on one
1 medium butternut squash cut into bite size chunks
1 15 oz can of white beans
4 TB of rosemary, finely chopped
2 qts chicken stock

First, season pork with salt and pepper to taste and set aside. Heat olive oil in a large casserole or pot. Add onion, saute until soft and then add the garlic and saute it and set aside the onion and garlic.

Next, sauté and brown the pork on all sides. Return the onions and garlic to the pot, add apples squash, beans and herbs. Add the chicken stock to cover. Bring to a boil and then lower to simmer. Cook covered until pork is tender, about 2 hours. The squash can be micro-waved a bit to make sure it is soft if you do not have time to cook for the full two hours.

Serve with some hearty red wine, Spanish or Italian might work well, or a Burgundy. Finish with a salad and cheese course and you will have a great fall meal, as we did. Any Miles Davis from the 50s such as Kind of Blue, Someday My Prince Will Come or Miles Ahead will work well with this but we just talked.

Portuguese Cape Cod Cooking with Fado

My friend Don Lesser has written in his blog on Portuguese cooking as done on Cape Cod. Don includes recipes for clam stuffing, potatoes and chorizo, and Portuguese seafood stew. Go to his blog for the details. I was recently in Provincetown and took back stuff from the Provincetown Bakery which Don recommends. The various Portuguese pastries made for a great breakfast the next day. Tony the owner is quoted, "Desserts first, life is short." We took his advice and started the day with desert.

Don also mentions that, “if you can find a copy of Howard Mitchum's Provincetown Seafood Cookbook, you'll have the mother lode of Portuguese Cape Cod cookery,” and adds that, “the Provincetown restaurant Clem and Ursie's serves pretty much the entire Provincetown Seafood Cookbook.”

While eating his food, listen to Fado. The sad, but beautiful, music originated in the 1820s in Portugal and is marked by mournful tunes and lyrics. I find it has the same power as the blues, to help you feel sad and, at the same time, to feel good about it. Here is my take on Three Fado Queens - Amália Rodrigues, Mariza, Cristina Branco.

I saw that Mitchum also has a New Orleans seafood cook book, Creole Gumbo and All That Jazz: A New Orleans Seafood Cookbook.

More on Web 2.0: Some Poster Children and Why

I continue to try to get my hands around Web 2.0 or where the Web is going. A number of people do not like the term but there were 16,600,000 Google hits on “web 2.0” on November 2 with the O’Reilly Conference by that name on top. I do not really care what they call it but I think a term is needed and it seems that many of the “people” have voted. I recently wrote about an article by O’Reilly himself, What is Web 2.0, and had a chance to look at it again on a plane ride last week. Thanks again to Kathleen Gilroy for frist pointing out this article. So here is some more

It seems that the main issues are web services (2.0) vs. products (1.0) and the rise of participant driven services in particular. eBay is the poster child here, as is del.icio.us. I use the term participant for several reasons. First, people are able to participate more. Second, users sounds either too techy or people as addicts. Third, I was taught as a research psychologist that people in experiments are participants and not subjects and the training has held.

Microsoft has even become converted with its annoucement that it is moving into free ad supported web servcies. Here is a link to the NY Times story, Microsoft Introduces Web Services, Competing With Google and Yahoo.

I wanted to record in this post some of the poster children of this movement in different categories. I will be pulling some material from the same O’Reilly article here, just shorten and paraphrased a bit to make it shorter.

Yahoo! was born as a catalog of links, an aggregation of the best work of millions of web users. This role as a portal to the collective work of web participants remains the core of its value.

Google's breakthrough in search, which quickly made it undisputed market leader, was PageRank, a method of using the link structure of the web rather than just the characteristics of documents to provide better search results.

eBay's product is the collective activity of all its participants; like the web itself, eBay grows organically in response to user activity. eBay's competitive advantage comes almost entirely from the critical mass of buyers and sellers, which raises the barrier for any new entrant offering similar services.

Amazon sells the same products as competitors and receives the same product descriptions, cover images, and editorial content from vendors. But Amazon leverages participant engagement more than others. They have more user reviews and invitations to participate in varied ways on virtually every page--and most importantly, they use participant activity to produce better search results. While a Barnesandnoble.com search is likely to lead with the company's own products, or sponsored results, Amazon always leads with "most popular", a real-time computation based not only on sales but other factors that Amazon insiders call the "flow" around products.

del.icio.us and Flickr have pioneered the rise of "folksonomy" (in contrast to taxonomy), a style of collaborative categorization of sites using freely chosen keywords, often referred to as tags. The participants created the tags and build the categories, hence folksomy. Interestingly, Joshua Schachter, the founder of del.icio.us said at a recent Berkman session that he does not like the term folksonomy as sees his program as a memory aid and not a participant driven category building system.

Cloudmark is a collaborative spam filtering product that aggregates the individual decisions of email users about what is and is not spam. This allows it to outperform systems that rely on analysis of the messages themselves.

This list goes on but here are some of the poster children and the reasons for their inclusion. Do you have any other nominations?

Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes

According to Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox article, Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes, “Weblogs are often too internally focused and ignore key usability issues, making it hard for new readers to understand the site and trust the author.” He then gives the top ten design mistakes that many bloggers commit. The list is actually quite good. I am always frustrated when I go to a blog and find the author’s bio and photo are missing. You want to know who you are connecting with if there is a connection. Other common mistakes are posts with non-descript titles and links that do not say where they go (click here?). Google also does not like to find these last two instances and you are less likely to be found with Google if they are missing from your blog. If also does not help if your calendar is your only navigation and you publish on an irregular basis. There is more in the article.

Connectedness – The Newsletter

Bruce Hoppe of Connective Associates writes the blog, Connectedness. He also publishes a newsletter by the same name. Bruce runs classes on Social Network Analysis (SNA). As Bruce writes, “Connectedness is a monthly newsletter about improving business with a network perspective. It covers ways to increase productivity, improve leadership, accelerate innovation, create value with key customers, and connect HR to corporate strategy. If you already read the blog Connectedness, think of this newsletter as an executive summary.”

Bruce is very knowledgeable on SNA and both the blog and newsletter make for good reading on the topic. The October issue of the newsletter looks “how the network perspective can tap our visual sense to create a powerful story about how each individual contributes to the success of an organization.” You can subscribe by going to his Connective Associates site.

What do Blogs Bring to Knowledge Management and Communication within the Enterprise? – KM Forum

I will be speaking on “What do Blogs Bring to Knowledge Management and Communication within the Enterprise?” at the November meeting of Boston KM Forum. The meeting will be held at Jarg, located at 330 Bear Hill Road in Waltham, MA on Thursday, November 17, 2005 from 4 to 6 pm. This session summarizes the insights gained from the 70 interviews I conducted with successful bloggers for our book, Business Blogs: A Practical Guide, and addresses the use of blogs for knowledge management, as well as internal communication and collaboration. Details and reservations are available at the Boston KM Forum site.

The Boston KM Forum is a Community of Practice for people working in the field of Knowledge Management. It supports the exchange of ideas, best practices, business opportunities, learning communication, and networking in the areas of: Best Practices Collaboration, Communities of Practice, Innovation, Content Management, Learning, and Change Management. I have attended a number of their sessions and always found them very useful. I was at the October speaker where Dorothy Leonard from the Harvard Business School discussed ideas from her latest book, Deep Smarts.