Portals and KM

TVissimo Relaunches Today with New Interface

Today, we have re-launched TVissimo™ with an improved interface. I am pleased to be part of this effort and continue to be the main author on our TVissimio - TV Schedule and Online Video Blog. Visit our blog for tips and techniques on using TVissimo. We also cover the television and movie industry and industry bloggers.

TVissimo.com is a free television schedule and online video search engine to help you find TV programs and movies you want to watch, quickly, easily and free. Whether you’re at home or away, you can instantly find the precise TV show schedules and your exact channel numbers. With hundreds of channels delivering thousands of programs daily, printed TV schedules have become pretty useless, while on-screen cable or satellite schedules are slow, difficult to use, and offer only limited details and functionality. Finding online (streaming or download) content requires searching many websites in different formats. TVissimo provides a single entry point for finding content everywhere.

TVissimo.com is doing for TV what Google™ has done for the web. Rather than focus on channels, TVissimo is designed around the concept that people have TV-Show-Type favorites, regardless of what channel the show is on. To see differences between various TV show search providers, go to TV-Show-Schedule.com. If the show you’re looking for exists, you’ll find it, unlike other top-ranked services that often come up empty.

Search any way you prefer, using Google-type keywords or phrases, for Categories such as adventures, football, children’s cartoons — or by any criteria, such as description or actor/star/show-type. You can even specify prime or rerun, length, or time slot, and display the schedule sorted by program name or start time. For example, you can browse through a list of comedy movies that are on tonight between 8:00 and 11:00 p.m., or check if a Nicholas Cage movie is on. And you can print out your own customized TV schedule, sequenced by start-time or program name.

TV show listings are available for the next 14 days, refreshed nightly, all year round. Online video availabilities are refreshed daily for the currently indexed sites (TidalTV), with more added in the near future.

Go to TVissimo.com, enter your zip code, and pick your TV service provider (cable, satellite or fiber). You can also save multiple locations (e.g. grandmother’s house or hotel during a business trip).

TVissimo.com’s innovation is based on searching the available TV show details using a patent pending database search technology developed over a decade and applied to meet the challenges faced today by people trying to find their favorite television shows quickly and easily.

You can readily send TV program alerts to yourself or to friends by email or Twitter message. TVissimo friends’ lists are created by entering your contacts’ email addresses or Twitter IDs and specifying which of your favorite programs to send to any person or group. You can send business related shows to co-workers, entertainment programs to friends, religious programs to religious group members, etc.

Once your Favorites are stored, future searches will bring up only the shows matching your preferences, which can easily be modified later. For the first time in the new TV world of hundreds of channels and dozens of online video sites, finding your favorite TV programs can be easy by putting an end to channel surfing, never again missing your favorite shows or starting half way through them.

Catch the Introductory video on TVissimo and watch “The Life of Remo”, the abused remote control through YouTube.

Fast Forward 09 Goes to Vegas

I had a great time at Fast Forward 08 - see Blogging Fast Forward 08 for the details. The only down side was the location - Orlando. Now they have greatly improved this factor as the show goes to Vegas. FastForward 09 will be there Feb 9 -11. I have not been there since I stopped by in 1967 on a cross country trip back to Boston from LA. 

The conference also has a great lineup of speakers and sessions. Speakers include Clay Shirky, Don Tapscott, Charelene Li, John Lervik, Bjorn Olstad, and others. The site says that FastForward 09 provides a much-needed forum for the discussion of best practices for developing and implementing search solutions as the evolution of the approach to user-centricity continues – both outside and inside the firewall. 

Here is how they elaborated on these themes. Outside the firewall, as users push to create, collaborate, and consume information and products in new ways, businesses are driven to find innovative ways to connect with this user-centric audience. On public- and customer-facing Web sites, search drives revenue by increasing customer loyalty and conversion, and monetizing existing assets. 

Inside the enterprise, as corporate data stores grow and as workforces become more mobile and geographically dispersed, businesses need to find effective ways to help their employees connect and collaborate. Search increases productivity inside the firewall by helping workers find relevant information and expertise faster. Search also improves business decisions by helping people make better use of what an organization already knows – connecting them to the latent and relevant information they need to make informed choices. 

There is an early registration discount at the FastForward 09 site. I hope to see you there. I will be blogging the event.

Alternatives to Tag Clouds?

Jeffrey Zeldman is a well known lecturer and author on web design according to his entry in the wikipedia. He has maintained a blog, Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report, on the topic since 1995. In April he ran a post, Tag clouds are the new mullets, semi-trashing tag clouds as being over done. So I wondered what his thoughts were on alternatives. I went to put in a comment to this post asking the question and noticed that he apparently does not take comments, at least on older posts. I did see that there are lots of comments on his most recent posts but the tag cloud one does not list comments or have a way to add them.

Anyway, I remain very interested in the concept of tag clouds. Typepad provides this option for category listing and I used it for a while. I then dropped the on my blog as I found the regular listing easier to read and it seemed redundant to have two categories archives, especially since I experiment with so much other stuff in my side bars. However, I many of my blog clients like tag clouds and I think it works for them. I may add mine back.

So I am interested in starting a conversation and will keep this comment field open to all legitimate comments. What do you think about tag clouds? Equally important, what do you see as alternatives to tag clouds?

Search Optimizing Google

Here is a fun slide series on search optimizing Google. It starts with the question - What if Google had to design their user interface for Google? It covers what Google would have to do to show up high in its own rankings. It certainly clutters up the simple interface.

iQuest joins Google Enterprise Professional program

I have written about iQuest on this blog on several occasions, see Adding Social Network Analysis to Search – iQuest. I think it provides a currently unique offering by combining comprehensive search capabilities with social network analysis. I am also serving as an advisor to the firm. iQuest Analytics has now joined the Google Enterprise Professional program, which “extends the power of Google search and helps customers get more value out of their Google enterprise search deployments.” The Google Enterprise Professional program includes developers, consultants and independent software vendors that provide value-added services for Google enterprise products.

Josh Rosenthal, CEO of iQuest said in a recent press release,"the Google Enterprise Professional Program will help us provide Google search to users of the iQuest Discovery Platform. Google's enterprise search products offer the same quality search experience as people get with Google.com."

Kevin Smith, program manager for Google Enterprise Professional also said in the same release,"Google is excited to have iQuest Analytics as a partner in the Google Enterprise Professional program. We're looking forward to bringing the power of Google search to Data-mining, entity extraction and analysis of large corpuses of unstructured data."

I am very pleased to see this connection established and look forward to seeing what happens as a result.

Google Loses Copyright Ruling or We Can’t Search? It Must be Belgium.

Here is a counter point to the post below on Google Adsense. I actually really like Belgium and have been there on holidays on a number o occasions. The food is wonderful, and the beer is some of the best in the world. Cities like Brugge and Antwerp have wonderful architecture. But be careful if you want to use the internet and be especially careful if you are a blogger or a search engine. As Ron Miller wrote, Belgian Newspaper Wins Suit Against Google for Posting Headlines and Links. Most people try to get high on the Google page ranking. The papers in Belgium do not want to appear and sued Google for copyright violations when their articles showed up in Google News. I was very pleased when I was in Google News thanks to the Fast Forwardblog. I also really like its customization features and look for stories in niche areas of interest. Unlike Google search the service only looks at about 4500 sources and most have to apply to be included.

Google at first did not take the suite by the Belgium newspaper group Copiepresse seriously and did not even send anyone to the first court hearing that they lost. Now they lost the appeal but they will appeal it further and feel confident of eventually winning. Business Week has the details in, Google told to remove content from site. It seems that European copyright law is a little tougher than in the US or UK and “fair use” does not apply in the same way.

Here is a post script from Ron that appeared today, Another Day, Another Publisher Sues Google. In this case there may be some wrong doing by someone. Although who is at fault is still unclear.

Knowledge Energies – Capturing Knowledge from Emails

I recently met with Thierry Hubert and Frederic Deriot of Knowledge Energies. They are coming up with some interesting ways to look into emails to abstract the knowledge exchanges that are normally lost through this channel. The use tags for this and these tags can be applied dynamically.

They write that most collaboration technologies like email ignore the importance of linking context and process when communication occurs so valuable knowledge is lost. This is one reason to switch to blogs as many have written about. In their approach, which requires some upfront discipline by the participant, context and process is captured so the knowledge gained can be obtained.

In the paper, Ephermel Collaboration, Theirry gives a classic example of an employee using basic email technology to build her own chaotic and undocumented process to measure progress and set a worldwide action plan. Then she cannot find anything. I have been there and I am sure everyone reading this has been there. Also. This is one reason I write my blog to find stuff such as my thought son their work. There can be other complementary solutiuons and making more structured use of email could certainly be one. As Theirry writes “Working on integrating them (collaboration tools) into core business processes and applications is the desired answer.”

We had a brief meeting and I need to learn more but I think they are on to something that could be very useful. I think there is a lot of promise here

My Web 2.0 Reading Lists

Yesterday I wrote about Harvard’s H20 Playlist, a social bookmarking tool that the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School has developed. I have started using the H20 Playlist myself. Since I have been writing a good bit on Web 2.0 recently I needed a way to keep track of my research and the links. I found it very intuitive to use and was able to get started without assistance which is unusual for me and tech tools.

Here are my current Playlists. I will keep adding to them. One of the commitments you make when you publish a playlist is open access through the Creative Commons licence. Please feel to use them and let me know if you have any suggested additions.

Web 2.0 & Business

Social Bookmarking

Business Blogs

Business Wikis

Community Sites

More on H20 Playlist as a Social Bookmarking Tool for Business

I have written about the H20 Playlist, a social bookmarking tool that the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School has developed, see The Berkman Center’s H20 Project – Creating Innovative Learning Environments. I think it is a tool that fits well into the business environment. Here are some more thoughts. First, social bookmarking can provide a number of benefits to the organization:

• Enabling topical resource lists than can be personalized and shared – creating personal “knowledge management” systems through lists of winning sales proposals, best practice deliverables, etc. around specific topics or work efforts

• Offering support to online workgroup activity through integration or connection with team work spaces

• Enhancing individual or team profiles to let others know what content the individual or team considers important

• Facilitating discovery of employees or teams with similar interests or facing similar issues

• Measuring popularity of intranet documents and their authors through numbers of tags

H20 Playlists have more structure than del.icio.us and this makes the service a good candidate or model for business use. Each Playlist has a title with its own URL separate from its tags, which makes it a unique entity that can be shared as a whole, a key feature for business applications. You can also rearrange your Playlist to reflect changing priorities instead of being limited to the reverse chronological order in delicio.us. There can be headings and subheadings. Like iTunes, a person sets up a library of all their links, and then creates Playlists on different topics that draw on these links, adding to the flexibility. You can search to see all the Playlists that contain an item, as well all the comments that others have made about the item.

How could Playlists work within a business? Individual project teams can collectively create Playlists to support their work. These can be attached to their wiki or blog. They can be shared and discussed at virtual meetings. At the enterprise or division level, a knowledge manager can create an ongoing library of links to critical documents with annotations on their importance. These could be drawn from the best of team Playlists. Then official enterprise Playlists can be developed that represent the best thinking on specific issues that are important to the company.

Employees or teams can download Playlists to fit their work needs. Then, they can make these Playlists once again personal as they engage in work activities by modifying them with both new annotations on the usefulness of existing links, as well as new links. Anyone in the firm, including the original knowledge manager, can access these new derived Playlists to enhance their own or add back into the official enterprise Playlist on the topic for continuous improvement.

The ability to stay current is facilitated by the Playlist feature that allows you to see what Playlists are being derived from existing ones, as well as what Playlists are influenced by others. With tagging behind the firewall, the best thinking in the firm can become more transparent and constantly updated to the benefit of all. Knowledge is easily shard and communities can consolidate their key documents and resources.

I have been talking several clients about social bookmarking through tools like Playlist and there seems to be good interest. Tomorrow I am going to share my own experiences with H20 Playlists and my Playlists on Web 2.0 topics. enterprise tagging

Making Sense of the Social Side of Web 2.0

There was an interesting article recently in the Boston Globe on marketing and the new media, Hidden messages: Is new technology empowering consumers -- or marketers? By Joseph Turow. It talked about a number of ways that marketing in making use of the new internet. There were a couple of interesting quotes at the beginning.

“Where the old-media system was one-way, today's new media technologies allow consumers to talk back -- and tune out. On Internet message boards and blogs, people can slam products they don't like, celebrate certain brands over others, and help shoppers find the cheapest prices….James Stengel, Procter & Gamble's influential marketing chief, proclaimed in a much-discussed 2004 speech that ``consumers are less responsive to traditional media" and ``are embracing new technologies that empower them with more control over how and when they are marketed to."

How do you make sense of this participant discussion? How do you find out what is being said about you and your products in the new web? How do you find the most influential discussants? The available data is only beginning to be tapped. Currently, a number of Web 2.0 search tools such as Google consider participant behavior to enhance their search results. There are other approaches emerging that also feature social network analysis in their search results but look more deeply into the social side of web content.

For example, iQuest measures the “betweenness centrality” - are you between important web sites and how important are the connections that passed through your site versus others on the whole web. iQuest correlates well with Google but it is harder to spam because of the indirect social network measures. Both tools return the appropriate sites for the search term with links to those sites. However, a big difference between the two occurs in the results displayed as iQuest also shows you the social network analysis.

iQuest is also different from other social network analysis services because it also contains a content analysis tool and looks inside the content of electronic communication. Most social network analysis tools simply look at the relationships between participants in this communication. This allows a hybrid tool like iQuest to show you who is talking to whom, what they talk about, when they talk, and where those conversations take place on the Web. You get to see the social side of the search results and look directly into the participant behavior behind internet content creation. For example, this can create a visual display of what the Web is saying about your products and services and the role they play in marketplace conversations. It can let you know who are the major players in important conversations and how they are connected. You can see the gatekeepers, leaders, influencers, coordinators and innovators in each topic. You can better understand the evolving community.

Many Web 2.0 services such as Google and Amazon open up their data for others to add value. This becomes a fertile source for search combined with social network analysis. For example, you can see the relationship between the top sites on Google searches such as Cambridge Real Estate or to see the relationships between top players in the community. You can also look at the interactions of team members on a project workspace, the nature of collaboration on a wiki, who links to your blog and who links to them, the evolution of a social bookmarking term, or the patterns of communication in a community site such as Live Journal or MySpace. One of the cornerstones of most Web 2.0 applications is open architecture and this offers access to understanding the social patterns within participation.

Social Tagging and Folksonomies - Web Session

I am participating in an virtual session on Social Tagging and Folksonomies on July 26. Information about the session is below. I am looking forward to hearing what the others have to say. You can find the details at the Taxonomy Community of practice site. Others include:

Seth Earley is the founder of Earley & Associates Inc., a consulting firm specializing in knowledge, content and document management systems with a focus on taxonomy development and workflow design.

Rashmi Sinha is the founding principal of Uzanto (www.uzanto.com). At Uzanto, Rashmi focuses on Customer Research and Social Technologies such as Recommender Systems & Tagging.

Jim Smallwood is Lead Information Systems Engineer at MITRE Corp (www.mitre.org) in Bedford, MA. where he's responsible for managing corporate intranet content.

The session will cover:
- Issues in social tagging and folksonomies
- The benefits of social tagging in an enterprise setting
- Advanced uses of social tagging
- The Onomi social bookmarking project at Mitre enterprise tagging

Commercializing Social Networks: Social Networking 3.0

Some of the original social networking tools seemed a bit lame and people responded to them that way. But I recently saw an article, Social Networking 3.0, by Wade Roush. It was from November 2005 but it still corrected some misimpressions I had. He concludes that the latest generation of social-networking technology on the Web offers far more than friends lists -- and is finally making money.

Take Linked In, Wade writes: “… LinkedIn's membership has grown from 1 million to 4.2 million; users are conducting 5 million searches a month for potential contacts within their own networks, and the company has launched several revenue-producing features, such as paid subscription options that allow members to search profiles outside their immediate circle of friends and friends-of-friends.”

These sites are now realizing that they are part of the trend of user generated content and providing more ways for users to generate more content about their favorite topic, themselves. I have noticed that I am still getting Linked In requests to be connected. I am also getting some requests for making a connection or introduction.”

Konstantion Guericke of Linked In is quoted, “First, we are a search engine. But second, we are a publishing platform -- about yourself and what other people say about you," Guericke says. "It just creates a more powerful business."

They finally get it. Kudos to them and for this shift in positioning.

Fringe Contacts: People Tagging – from Library Clips

Watch out you may get tagged. Library Clips recently wrote about People tagging. “People tagging is becoming the next logical step in the tagosphere…at the moment most “enterprise people directories” list a fielded profile and a photo, one of the fields will be called interests or specialty, etc… What if you could tag yourself with your interests or areas of expertise, and what if others could also tag you, and likewise you can tag others.”

People tagging could help you find people of similar interests or someone to fill a job or task requirement. The post mentioned that IBM has a working model for a people tagging module that is also incorporated into the people directory, it’s called Fringe Contacts.

Stephen Farrell and Tessa Lau provide a paper on the IBM effort, Fringe Contacts: People-Tagging for the Enterprise. Such as tagging documents can help you keep track of them and their links, tagging people will help you keep track of them. Seems logical to me. I am always forgetting names but if I could search of qualities or attributes, I could more likely find the person whose name I forgot. This should work well for large enterprises like IBM but also for individuals operating in the web.

I heard about this from several sources including Tomoaki Sawada enterprise tagging

Adding Social Network Analysis to Search – iQuest

A few weeks ago I announced that I have become part of the iQuest Global team. I want to share some thoughts about the iQuest tool set in this post. The web today is about participation, among other things, and web search tools that are most effective take into consideration this participation, through some type of social network analysis, in delivering their results.

Google uses a form of social network analysis to enhance their search results. It measures your degree of “centrality” - how connected are you through its page rank approach. It looks at many things and keeps the algorithm secret to slow down those who want to cheat. One of the central factors in the reputation of the site measured through who links to you (and who links to them) and who do you link to, and how relevant is your content. However, it is relatively easy to cheat on this measure because of its very direct social network analysis. Google is always trying to monitor for cheaters as a result.

iQuest also uses a form of social network to enhance its search results. It measures the “betweenness centrality” - are you between important web sites - how important are the connections that passed through your site versus the whole web – and the key word in the search does not have to be on your site - it can be on the other sites that connect to and through yours. iQuest correlates well with Google but harder to spam because of the indirect social network measures.

Both tools return the appropriate sites for the search term with links to those sites. However, A big difference between the two occurs in the results displayed as iQuest also shows you the social network analysis. Google keeps theirs secret, likely to protect their measures from the cheaters.

iQuest is also different form most social network analysis because it looks inside the content of electronic communication and does simply look at the relationships between participants in this communication. This allows it to show you who are talking to whom, what they talk about, when they talk and where those conversations take place.

It also looks at relationship over time and provides “movies of the communication patterns over time. This allows you to see how relationships evolve the impact of temporal events on these relationships. This allows it to paint a graphic picture in real time of the relationships of people, ideas and organizations. In summary, iQuest marries termless search and social network mapping technologies to analyze structured, semi-structured and unstructured data.

You can find more about iQuest and see demos of its analysis at the iQuest Global site.

Where Tagging Works and Where Tagging Doesn’t Work – Search Engine Lowdown

Here are two posts on tagging, one Where Tagging Works and another where the author feels it doesn’t do well, Tagging Not Likely The Killer Solution For Search. Thanks to Amanda Watlington for pointing them out. Let’s start with the negative one. Danny Sullivan says the all the hype about tagging is, “ignoring the fact that we've had tagging on the web for going on 10 years, and the experience on the search side is that it can't be trusted.” He points out that Google has not picked it up, likley because of the past misuse.

Now to be fair, I heard from the foudner of del.icio.us at a Berkman meeting that it was not designed to develop folksonomies, “bottom up” key words. It was a social bookmarking tool, a way tha people can store and share links to stuff they feel is important. It was not designed to augment search by providing new key words.

The key word “web 2.0” gets 75,900,000 hits on Google but who goes beyond the first few pages. The list leads with the famous O’Reilly article. Del.icio.us said there were 0 results for the same term which seems weird, must be some error. So I tried “knowledge management” in del.icio.us and got 2272 tagged items and a list of related terms. In Google I got 73,800,000 hits. Only one item was in the top ten on both results, The Knowledge Management Resource Center. But to comapre the two tools is not really relevant as they have very different functions.

I guess I tend to agree with Danny Sulliivan about the tagging and search but that is not the original intention of tagging. If I want to search on a key word, I will still go to Google as the most efficient way. If I have the time to go exploring through multiple links and see the interrelations between key words, I might go to del.icio.us. However, if I want to set up a way to store and share links on a particular topic, I will use del.icio.us which I have done already in co-authoring an article.

Now where does it work according to Search Engine Lowdown. It works at a site, Millions of Games, because “it's narrowly focused on a specific topic and has a large degree of agreement among its user community.” Well this was exactly the situation when my co-author and I used del.icio.us to store secondary research for an article. I think that there will be some very focused uses of tagging emerging as people explore its possibility. The H20 Playlist created by Harvard’s Berkman Center is one example. enterprise tagging

More Tagging Articles

I am writing an article on enterprise social bookmarking or tagging behind the firewall. As part of my research I have looked at a few other works on the topic, including the CIO article I commented on in yesterday’s post. Here are some more that I want to share. If you have any other sugegstions please leave me a comment to this post. Thanks in advance.

Perhaps the best is Social Bookmarking in the Enterprise, by the Dogear creators, David Millen, Jonathan Feinberg, and Bernard Kerr. I did a post on this before.

The Buzzmachine wrote about a conversation on web 2.0 tagging last year. There is some useful comment including the following: “Someone says that a key benefit of tagging vs. metakeywords on web pages is that they are visible and you can see whether they are credible and not spam and manipulation. Similarly, Google chose not to use metakeyworks but instead gave weight to the words inside a hyperlink and that’s better because it’s visible, not invisible. So we find out what the world thinks content is about instead of what the author thinks it is about.” This was not the first time this point was made but it is useful to consider.

I also liked the link to Consumating.com, where people tag themselves, which is of course counter to most uses of tagging where others tag your work. It would be better to have others tag you in this case. Although in the case of consumating it is a way to meet people with common interests as you can see others with tags similar to yours.

There is also a Business Week article, Picking Up Where Search Leaves Off that gives some of the aerly history. I also looked in the wikipedia. I found the wikipedia article on social bookmarking much more useful that the article on tagging. Both of them had long lists of servcies besdies del.icio.us.

Let me know if you have any other favorite articles on tagging, especially behind the firewall. enterprise tagging

The Name Game – CIO Magazine on Enterprise Tagging

CIO Magazine provided a brief, but useful, summary on enterprise tagging in the article The Name Game by Michael Fitzgerald. It covers IBM’s Dogear that I have written about before but there was also an interesting reference to another tagging effort at IBM at Thinkplace. An excerpt from the article is below:

“ThinkPlace originally classified ideas using terms from IBM's official taxonomies for content such as industry and products. But "we observed the users and saw that the terms they used didn't always match" the formal taxonomy, she says. So IBM created a way for users to enter keywords, or tags, that would be appended to the suggested terms from the formal taxonomy and thereby improve their ability to find relevant ideas. The results have been promising, says Arbusto. "You can see what your colleagues are interested in," she says. "From a collaboration and knowledge-sharing perspective, that's what's neat about folksonomies."

There is more in the article. I think that tagging will be a great enterprise application. IBM is considering making Dogear a product and has indicated that customer response is quite positive. The CIO article said that Chris Fralic, vice president of business development at Del.icio.us, told the author that a number of companies had contacted del.icio.us before Yahoo purchased it, looking for a corporate version of its tagging tools. It will be interesting to see who gets first to market here and who becomes the dominant player, just as del.icio.us did on the interenet.

Thanks to Tomoaki Sawada for sending me a link to this article.

A New Role – VP of Internet Channel Strategy for iQuest

I am pleased to take on a new responsibility with iQuest Analytics as the Vice President for Internet Channel Strategy. Their iQuest tool is a software suite that combines social network analysis, auto-categorization and text mining technologies to analyze unstructured data. This allows you to look at the patterns of communication between any form of electronic communication, (e.g., email, blogs, tagging links, etc.). Unlike other social networking analysis tools, it can display the evolving nature of social relations over time though “movies” of the changing patterns. iQuest also goes beyond standard social networking tools to allow you to look inside this communications so you see what people are writing and communicating about. It can analyze anything with words or symbols (e.g., articles, web pages, reports, memos, e-mails, telephone call logs, transcripts, message boards, blogs, survey responses, RSS feeds) to show who is talking to whom, what they talk about, when they talk and where those conversations are taking place.

In this generation of the web with increased participation and increased connectivity, I think that a tool like iQuest offers great potential. For example, it looks at networks of blog links, the inter-connections between web sites within a market, or the patterns of email communication. It can see what people are talking about and how they are connecting, or not connecting around these issues. It can look at media reports, blogs, message boards and enthusiast Web sites to track trends from their birth to their tipping point to forecast future trends.

I have known Josh Rosenthal and Peter Gloor, the principals at iQuest Analytics, for some time and I have great respect for them and their vision for the directions this tool can take. iQuest can function as enterprise business intelligence tool and as a web application. My focus is on the latter to help them envision and plan new capabilities to add value within the evolving internet, new web-based uses for iQuest, and new ways to position iQuest as a web application, as well as look for other web-based tools and services that can benefit from integration with iQuest’s capabilities. I am excited about the path forward and I will write about iQuest from time to time on this blog.

This role is not exclusive and I will continue with my other alliances and work. This includes my partnership with Kathleen Gilroy and The Otter Group in offering the Learning Boot Camp 2.0 and related consulting work, my alliance with Cindy Gordon and Helix Commerce for their blog and wiki workshops and consulting and other services, and my own consulting, speaking, and writing in the use of emerging technologies in business.

To Tag or Not to Tag! Notes from the Session

I posted earlier on a meeting of KM Forum, “To Tag or Not to Tag! Should We be Structuring our Knowledge Assets or is Free-text Search Enough?” Here are my notes from the session. There were a number of experts in taxonomy development in the audience and I learned a great deal. The term “tagging” was used for categorization for this session and not for social book marking as in del.icio.us. Of course, the multiple meanings of the word tagging points out some of the problems with tagging. We hope to have tagging as social book marking to be the topic of a future session.

This session was organized around several questions and these were the main one:

1. Can you fully exploit Knowledge Assets in the form of documents without categorizing them? – The answer is that categorization is usually needed. If the contents of a category get too large or if the content is very small, they are less useful. Inside the firewall a controlled vocabulary helps with this categorization but it needs to be continuously refined.

2. How best to give context to content? We said that this is best done by aligning the context with the goals and processes of the organization so it supports work flows. This is something we did in the first knowledge management system I was involved with in the early 90s. In this case we aligned the content with the insurance underwriting and claims processes we were supporting.

3. Is automatic categorizing working for some (or all) of your content? Several people experienced with these tools said they are getting better but still not ready for prime time in many areas. They do get you started but they people still have to do a lot of refinement. They work best in certain well defined fields with a specialized vocabulary. They also work best with hard facts like “age” and less well with inferences.

4. Does taxonomy or navigated search have a place in your organization? Is it available and used? The answer is again yes. Navigated search usually refers to guided search where you are offered alternatives to select from. Siderean Software is one vendor with Seamark Navigator.

5. When is key-word, free-text or Google style searching good enough? Of course, the answer it depends. If you find what you need the answer is yes. Google does have a lot of advanced features that allow you to narrow your search. They are generally not used by most people, including me.

6. How generally pays for categorization and taxonomy development within an organization. This effort is generally seen as “soft” and it is often difficult to get it funded and difficult to determine who should pay for it.

Denham Grey also provided some useful comments on classification and the issues in we discussed that go beyond what I mention above. He said that tagging (in the social book marking sense) “often fits best where the content is user owned and generated (blogs, images), a bottom up emergent categorization works when the group and domain is small (<150 people), strongly bounded and the participants can annotate, edit and refactor the content directly (without a strong editorial process).” There is more in his post, Classification - does it work? enterprise tagging

A social and cognitive analysis of tagging - Rashmi Shinha (Part Two)

Yesterday I wrote about Rashmi Shinha’s cognitive analysis of tagging. Today I will discuss her social analysis or why people tag. As she says, “even if you tag mostly to remember your own stuff, it is difficult to remain untouched by the presence of others.” This is why I blog. Tags provide some of the social connections that blogs offer with a lot less work. They are like mini link blogs and except all you do it use the delicious pull down from your browser and a few clicks. You can see who else is tagging what you like. You can hope that your tag might lead others to the stuff.

She evokes James Surowiecki and provides a useful summary of his four conditions that can lead to "wisdom of crowds.” Here is what she said about the four conditions in her words:
(1) diversity of opinion - each individual brings their idiosyncratic perspective to bear on the issue. (this is definitely true for tagging. There is a long tail of tags).
(2) independence of members from one another (that people make independent decisions. This is why mass copying of others' tags is not a good idea.)
(3) decentralization (with tagging power does not reside in a central location, but it does seem to very influenced by the first few taggers..)
(4) a good method for aggregating opinions (Tag clouds and simple lists seem to work well for this, though better methods are needed.)

So the wisdom of the crowds sorts out stuff. I can do a delicious search on web 2.0 and find that 2987 people tagged Tim O’Reilly’s article on web 2.0 (on 3/13/06). There are a number of other things that were tagged by more people. I can read what each wrote about O’Reilly’s piece. I can do a Google search on the same term on the same day and find 67,000,000 hits and Tim O’Reilly’s article is listed as number three, a slightly higher ranking than in delicious. There is a lot larger crowd involved here but I cannot see Google’s algorithm that ranked it that way.

I looked at what people wrote in their delicious notes on the O’Reilly article I find mostly trivial stuff that was written as a self note to the tagger, A few of them seem to be written to a larger audience. It is all fairly raw stuff with no vetting. However, you can quickly skim the notes to get a cumulative impression of what people said, like the travel and restaurant review sites. It also does not mean that you agree with the majority of them.

Rashmi also looks at the tag web 2.0 and she reports 230,000 tags by October 2005. Well on March 2006 there were 4017 tags on “web 2.0” and 48,449 tags on “web2.0.” Do things get untagged or tags get thrown out or run out of the viewed pace like Technorati? This does not seem right. She adds that there is no consensus regarding the term. Tagging allows you label stuff without really knowing what the label means. Categorization would require this to be effective (see yesterday’s post). Tagging does not need this knowledge as much.

Tagging can be a handy tool to keep book marks of links to stuff. This was its original intention. The designers did not have folksonomy development in mind as I learned at a Berkman session with the founder. The value of the social side is less clear to me except to web junkies, even though it can be interesting. The value of the social side seems clearer behind the firewall where tools like IBM’s Dogear make use of authentication so you know who the tagger is and thus can better evaluate their tags and use their tags to learn more about them.

Read Rashmi’s piece and decide for yourself. It is worth it.

BTW James Surowiecki gets 347,000 hits in Google and 123 in delicious. Rashmi misspelled his name as Suroweicki. Her spelling got 2 tags in delicious and 553 hits in Google. The link to his book site is number one in Google and has the third most tags in delicious. The link with most delicious tags is a New Yorker piece by Surowiecki that is not on the front page of Google, although another New Yorker piece is number 8 in Google. I am not completely sure what to make of this comparison between Google and delicious as they have difficult goals. However, some people may use them with similar intensions. I think I will still go first to Google to find stuff but if it is really important I might also check delicious as an alternate source. On the other hand, if I want to tag stuff myself or work with a colleague on something that requires tagging I will naturally use delicious. enterprise tagging

A social and cognitive analysis of tagging - Rashmi Shinha (Part One)

Rashmi Shinha writes two essays on tagging that Tomoaki Sawada pointed out to me. In the cognitive analysis of tagging she writes how the lower cognitive cost of tagging (versus categorization) makes it popular. In the social analysis of tagging she writes how tagging transforms the solitary browsing experience into a social one. Rashmi Sinha is the Founding Principal of Uzanto - a Mountain View California based consulting company that focuses on web product strategy. She is also very smart.

In the cognitive analysis she compares it to categorization. Tagging is a simple two step process. We associate stuff to the objects to be tagged and then we tag it. Done. However, with categorization the process is just begun at that point. After associating some stuff to the objects to be categorized then you have to decide which one to use and if there is a hierarchy, what is the order. You also want the category system to enable you and others to find it later. This remains a problem for me with my email folders and document folders. This categorization involves some difficult and often arbitrary decisions. It is also hard to undo categories so you are even more hesitant about committing to them.

Dave Weinberger makes some of these points (but not the one about the cognitive ease of tagging) in Tagging and Why it Matters. Dave concludes that social tagging better represents our networked and cluttered world than any attempt at creating a universal framework that reflects a rational order to the universe. While I do not want to attempt to bring rational order to the universe, I do want to try bring some rational order to my email folders so I can find stuff later.

I really like Rashimi’s conclusion. “the beauty of tagging is that it taps into an existing cognitive process without adding add much cognitive cost.” We tend to free associate about stuff (tagging) but we resist being forced into a corner that is hard back out of (categorization).

With tools like delicious the mechanics are also easy. However, the lack of required standards also makes discovery of the stuff that people tag an exploratory process. A colleague, Kathleen Gilroy, and I used a slightly different version of common topic to start a “clean” tag about this common topic. To start with a somewhat unique tag we joined two words with an & and no spaces. Kathleen gets all the credit for this idea We were the only ones using this particular combination of letters and so we could store the stuff we were reading to write a report and each of us could find each other’s stuff easily without having to sift through lots of others. If we wanted many other people to find these tags we could probably re-tag it with two tags, each using one of the words. If we wanted to see what other people were tagging on the topic we could also look at the more common way to tag the words.

I did an experiment to test this. There were 41 tags with our combination of words in delicious. I think they are all ours but I know for sure that almost all are. I then searched on the first term (intranet) and got 4780 tags and searched on the second term (web 2.0) and got 4016 tags. If took out the space between web and 2.0, I got 48,449 tags. When I combined the two words with an & but put in space I got 110 tags, I tried replacing the & with the word “and” and got the same tags. So you have to play around a bit to find all the stuff but this exploration process can also allow you to discover new things.

It seems the ease in creating tags makes up, at least some what, for the relative difficulty in finding stuff. However, this is good if you are doing research and exploring things on the web and have the time and patience for it. A call center rep accessing an enterprise knowledge management system to answer a customer’s question who is waiting on the phone will want to the quick hit to the righ tthing and that is the goal of a categorization system, especially if the reps pay is adjusted by how fast they get the customer off the line satisfied enough to not call back. This is why people spend time on categorization systems.

In summary, tags are fast done but it takes a bit of effort to find stuff with them. That effort can illuminating in itself if you have the time and interest. Categorization takes more time but that is in part because you want to make it easy to find the right stuff the first time.

All of this rambling leads to the second benefit of tagging, the social side but this is long post, enough for one day. You should also read Rashimi's complete posts as I they go into much more depth that my summary. I will cover the social side tomorrow. enterprise tagging

To Tag or Not to Tag! Should We be Structuring our Knowledge Assets or is Free-text Search Enough?

Here is an interesting event that I plan to attend in the Boston area. The KM Forum discusses To Tag or Not to Tag! Should We be Structuring our Knowledge Assets or is Free-text Search Enough? Questions to be discussed include the following as they are listed on their event site:

- Can you fully exploit Knowledge Assets in the form of documents without categorizing them?
- How is contextual content best understood and presented?
- Is automatic categorizing working for some (or all) of your content?
- Does taxonomy or navigated search have a place in your organization? Is it available and used?
- When is key-word, free-text or Google style searching good enough?
- Are you clear about which approach is needed and for what circumstances?

I hope to see you there and I am sure I will be writing something based on this discussion. It will be held on March 16 at 4 PM. at Jarg, (MetraTech Building), 330 Bear Hill Road, Suite 230, Waltham. As they write, “This debate has endured for years but the technological ground keeps shifting. Business managers and audiences are becoming more sophisticated about search, where and how they need to use it.” At the same tagging tools are completing changing the paradigm with social book marks that can be shared through such tools as del.icio.us and IBM’s Dogear that works behind the firewall. enterprise tagging

More on Google and Privacy from the Electronic Freedom Foundation

Here is a story on the Electronic Freedom Foundation’s blog, Google Copies Your Hard Drive - Government Smiles in Anticipation. They raise some very important thoughts. Before I get into some of these, I do not want to be bashing Google for this. It is my understanding that Google is resisting efforts to make their data available for the wrong reasons. I also want to state that I used Google to find the online version (and thus the link for this post) of this article when I was sent the content without a link from a friend, Allan Denchfield of Carrier & Ives Move & Relocation Management..

There were many other mentions of this title in the Google search as a lot of others have written on it or taken the title from what I believe is the original one to use this title. While Google is certainly not to use the data it gets to make money, it is my understanding that they use it to target their ads and offer it in an anonymous and aggregated way to others to for marketing research. But all this increased transparency can be used for not so nice purposes. I asked before in Google’s Expansion into Wifi: The Empire Reaches Out. Of course, I used my Google site search on my blog to find this post from the over 1,000 ones that exist. Thanks to you readers, I am even making a some money on my Google Adsense.

In this latest case, the Electronic Freedom Foundation writes, “If a consumer chooses to use it, the new "Search Across Computers" feature will store copies of the user's Word documents, PDFs, spreadsheets and other text-based documents on Google's own servers, to enable searching from any one of the user's computers. EFF urges consumers not to use this feature, because it will make their personal data more vulnerable to subpoenas from the government and possibly private litigants, while providing a convenient one-stop-shop for hackers who've obtained a user's Google password.”

This is enough to convince me not to use it but then I am not a tools guy anyway. On the other hand, Google stores a lot of other things on its servers simply to do the services it provides to us. The web is very powerful but I also assume that anything that is exposed to it is discoverable whether in a personal email, a Google search, or a blog. I do not have any deep dark secrets but I consider my hard drive as more protected. The current laws seem to feel the same way as the EFF article says that you have more privacy rights to what is on your hard drive than to what you send through an email. The article concludes that the privacy laws need to be updated to reflect the growing transparency of web 2.0 (they do not use these exact words not I am interpreting what they say). I agree.

Google’s Expansion into Wifi: The Empire Reaches Out

Here is more on Google. As many of you may have heard, they are expanding into offering wifi using their free, ad based business model. Paul Callahan provides an excellent summary of Google's wifi efforts to date in big blog, paul callahan...mostly common sense re: networks. He also links to an Info World article, Google eyes how mobile devices will use city Wi-Fi , that covers how they are starting in San Francisco. It includes the provision of location based ads.

Paul offers a useful example of how this might work and make even more money for Google, “…combining the physical world with the Internet will yield rich new data about the behavior of the masses. If the vast majority of Google Wi-Fi users search for doughnuts when passing through Union Square in San Francisco, … the value of the advertising space in that rough location goes up and up (for doughnuts). If Krispy Kreme wants an ad in that wireless zone, it will have to pay more.”

This picks up on what Micheal Fedor wrote about in his post on the possibilities of mobile mashups (see my Monday post. The options seem endless, just add in Google maps coupled with location based services. Michael said you could locate all your buddies as they go clubbing on Saturday night and arrange to meet up. Google can know here you are and where you are discussing going (via email, blogs, even cell phones?) so they can target the right pizza ad or taxi service. Paul also talks about location based advertising through wi-fi in his post, Got my free Wi-Fi -- but now I want location.

Google already reads the content in our Google email to target it s ads. But then do we really want everyone to be able to know where we are and what we are doing and saying all the time? Do we really want one company having all the playing field and data? I can see the synergy for better services and I like the targeted ads so far on my blog. I can also see anti-trust possibilities but I am sure the Google guys have been thinking about this for a long time. I can also see unwanted monitoring in the wrong hands but I also see this as evitable anyway so we might as well attempt to keep it open and regulate it somehow. I do not pretend to have the answers here but the issues are huge.

Paul Callahan has been involved with networks and wifi for many years and his blog is full of good stuff on the subject.

Tagging and Why it Matters – Dave Weinberger

Dave Weinberger wrote this brief piece, Tagging and Why it Matters, in May but it still is useful, especially for anyone new to tagging. Tagging is the “offspring” of key words but with some new twists as Dave explains. For those really new here is a piece I wrote on Intro to Tagging.

First, the readers, not just the writers get to tag. For this reason tagging becomes social, his second point. It also allows taxonomies to be built from the ground up by “the people” rather than be dictated by “the experts.” He argues that the inability to create common taxonomies was one obstacle to the success of enterprise knowledge management. I have seen this myself. Now tagging might help this and allow it to sweep through the corporation as socially accepted tags that reflect the thinking of individuals are now enabled. IBM has started to use tagging internally through its Dogear application. It will be interesting to see the effects.

Dave concludes that social tagging better represents our networked and cluttered world than any attempt at creating a universal framework that reflects a rational order to the universe. One look at my office and you would agree. enterprise tagging

Google Wi-Fi – Good or Bad Idea?

There are now broad hints that Google might move into WI-FI access, going way beyond its search roots to do battle with the telcos in this area. As Adam Pasick writes in Google Prepares to Launch WiFi Service, “The company has already launched a sponsored WiFi "hotspot" in San Francisco's Union Square district in April with a start-up called Feeva. Speculation about a forthcoming Google WiFi service has been rife since August following an article in Business 2.0 magazine, but the company has refused to discussed its plans.”

Opinion seems unclear on whether this would be a good thing for Google or be an over reach. But perhaps the service could be very good for users if it is free like most Google offerings or very low cost. Chris Nolan seems to feel that the wi-fi foray is a good thing. There have been efforts for cities to provide free or low cost wi-fi that the telcos have blocked to preserve their profits at the expense of the public. I wonder how they will respond here. I can feel the legal staffs getting ready from here. It might give Google unparalleled leverage over the Web that could be used for good or bad purposes. As I wrote in It’s becoming a Google World, Google is now covering all the big apps on the Web. Now they might dominate the means for you to access those apps.

I do not pretend to have all the answers here or even enough to offer a firm opinion but it certainly is something to consider and watch. Google has joined Microsoft as perhaps the only two firms with enough coverage to dominate and dictate to the IT industry. It remains to be seen how this power will be used and how it will be challenged in the marketplace and in the courts. They even now plan to go into phone search. What is next?

Thanks to my friend Allan Denchfield for pointing this out. As recently reported in the Boston Globe business section, the success of Google has also inspired more venture capital money to flow back into Web-based start-ups. I guess this is a good thing if it encourages innovation.

Google has also hired a Washington lobbist to help their many business causes.

Google Print – A Good Thing

If is well known that Google has partnered with the University of Michigan, Harvard, Stanford, the New York Public Library and Oxford University to scan and index their library collections and make them available on the Web. Only small snippets of the entire text are available if the book is copyrighted. Tim O”Reilly writes in the New York Times Op Ed, Search and Rescue, that the Author’s Guild is trying to stop this effort as a violation of copyright law.

Tim supports Google on this and I agree, as far as I know the facts. If the book found is copyrighted, the user is notified and has the opportunity to purchase it. As Tim writies. “Google allows click-through to the entire book only if the book is in the public domain or if publishers have opted in to the program. If it's unclear who owns the rights to a book, only the snippets are displayed.”

This will make books more accessible. Authors write to be read and to make money. Those books that have passed into public domain status will now be better able to continue to meet the first objective. Those still under copyright are more likely to be found and meet both objectives. The really great writers focus on the first objective, that is the lasting one. At the same time, the writer's ability to make a living needs to be honored and protected and this system seems to do that.

It’s becoming a Google World - Eszter Hargittai

Google is covering all the big apps on the Web. They had search, last year added free email, and now has free chat and voice-over-internet [VoIP] and they keep track of all activity with those services. They even have blogs with Blogger. Thanks to Valdis Krebs for pointing to this post by Eszter Hargittai on Crooked Timber. As Eszter writes:

“As long as you stay logged on (to Gmail – their email), Google can track all of your online activities connected to its services, which include searches run on its search engine. Not only do they have information about all of your emails, they also know what searches you run and what results you choose…

Being able to scan your email (as they do for the purposes of displaying Google Ads)” … (they know who you talk to and what about) and can “develop very nice maps of people’s networks. Now that they have launched Google Talk they will also know which of your email contacts are strong enough that you also tend to contact them through chat (assuming you are using Google Talk for IMing). They will have more data on which to draw for a network map of your connections. And since the use of Google Talk requires a Google Account from both users, they can construct network maps of those people as well. So your network map is not just about your direct connections.”

There is more in his post. He concludes that he uses a variety of services from various companies, in part, so his profile at any one vendor doesn’t become too detailed. Good idea. At some point there may be some regulation on this but be careful for now. Now there could be some very useful information from this but we would want to control it and now we don’t. This is part of a continuing trend with iPods combining with cell phones. The opportunities for good and bad from all these combinations abound.

Good Article on Tagging – HP Labs

Pito Salas of BlogBridge sent me a link to a great article on the concepts behind and within tagging, The Structure of Collaborative Tagging Systems by Scott Golder and Bernardo A. Huberman, Information Dynamics Laboratory, HP Labs. They describe collaborative tagging as the “process by which many users add metadata in the form of keywords to shared content.” This is what is commonly referred to as tagging at the moment and what was popularized by sites such as del.icio.us and Flickr. In the abstract write that they “discovered regularities in user activity, tag frequencies, kinds of tags used, bursts of popularity in bookmarking and a remarkable stability in the relative proportions of tags within a given url. We also present a dynamical model of collaborative tagging that predicts these stable patterns and relates them to imitation and shared knowledge.”

The entire article is worth going through. They compare the usefulness of conventional hierarchical taxonomies to more free-from tagging which is neither hierarchical or exclusive in its categorization. This allows tagging to identify an article to being about many things simultaneously, which is both a good and bad thing. On one hand it makes it more likely to be found through various search terms. On the other hand it can lead to chaos. All of this is a byproduct of the imperfect relationship of language and thought which complicates attempts at categorization.

The authors looked at tagging patterns within del.icio.us. They found a number of uses for tags: what it is about, what it is, who owns it, refining categories, identifying characteristics, self reference, and task organizing. Users have a strong bias toward using the more general tags first, such as the first four uses. Naturally, there are also more commonalities between users on these first four, rather than the more personal uses in the last three. They also found some stable patterns in tagging within and between individuals. The stable across individuals is explained by the features of del.icio.us which show prior tags for commonly tagged urls and by the common background of many users.

Earlier, I did a brief general introduction to tagging.

Nooked: Corporate and Organizational RSS Feed Directory

Looking for places that offer RSS feeds? Here is a site, Nooked.com, where you can search for corporate and organizational RSS feeds by keyword or browse categories. If you publish corporate RSS feeds, you can submit them to their directory. I looked at the Social and Cultural category and then under that, food and beverage. I found the Cafe Geek site listed. It is “building a community of coffee lovers who can review and rate their favourite cafes from around the world. Users can comment on reviews and even update the ratings.” The most recent review was Cafe Calabria in Vancouver, BC. I wonder it VanEats has found it.

Thanks to John Maloney for pointing this out. He found it through his business blogs syndication.

Yahoo Search and Creative Commons

From the press release in WebProNews today :

"Yahoo Inc., a leading global Internet company, today announced the launch of Yahoo! Search for Creative Commons beta, a service that provides Internet users with access to the largest collection of Creative Commons content on the Web. Creative Commons content is identified with special license information by its owners, indicating that their copyrighted works are available for free through required attribution or non-commercial use."

I assume Google will somehow get involved. I see this better access to Creative Commons as a good thing.

Blog Search Success Stories – Bob Wyman Pub Sub

It is always great to discover new stories where new tools such as blogs, aggregators, and related search capabilities provide business value that would have been difficult to obtain otherwise. On Monday I spoke with Bob Wyman, CTO and co-founder of Pub Sub who writes the blog, As I May Think. PubSub is a future looking search service that notifies you when new content is created that matches your subscription parameters. Bob pointed me to two recent success stories that are described in his blog. Here is an excerpt from Bob’s post, Real-time Public Relations Management: EMC and Dantz, which concisely summaries the events in the first example.

“As the details of EMC's purchase of Dantz were being finalized, the PR teams for both companies were hoping to keep the secret until the moment they had decided to make public announcements. Unfortunately, their plans were leaked in an untimely slashdot article. This premature disclosure could have made a real mess of their PR plan if it weren't for the fact that Guillaume du Gardier, a member of the public relations team in France, was a blogger and had a PubSub subscription to mentions of EMC and Dantz. Because of his subscription, Guillaume -- not a regular reader of slashdot -- was the first on the EMC/Dantz team to discover the leak when he got the alert from PubSub... Once notified of the leak, the team was able to move quickly to regain control of the situation. Guillaume concludes on his blog that "PR Pro can't ignore blogging"

In the second example, the release of Snap.com, a search engine, the monitoring of the blog world around the release picked up a negative Boing Boing blog post about certain aspects of the terms of use. The Snap.com were able to make adjustments and get the word out before it became a PR nightmare for the new tool. This example points a great use for proactive search to monitor the blog world for responses to new product releases. The speed of the blog world can then be used to make corrections and avoid disasters.

The Problem of Finding the Right Stuff in Internal Blogs

Fredrik Wackå in CorporateBloggingBlog links to the Made Out of People blog that asks if there is a better way to find stuff in blogs. Fredrik writes that “the question might seem ordinary and not that exciting. But the discussion goes to the heart of business blogging, especially internal blogging with KM purposes. The author suggests that while external blogging is successful and growing in companies like Microsoft, Sun and Yahoo, their internal blogs tends to fall apart. The problem is the difficulty of finding important information in old blog posts. Intranet search engines often don't perform very well - and there aren't that many alternatives to searching.”

This is a critical matter if blogs are going to move beyond a “flash-in-the-pan” status inside organizations. Made Out of People points out that while there are many ways to get content into the mass of internal content there are fewer ways to get it out. Google and other search engines work well with blogs in the outside world. It will be interesting to see how the internal search engines can take on the challenge of blogs.

I know that as blogs grow in content it becomes harder to find stuff. I am turning more and more to Google (against just my site) just to find the stuff in my own blog. Here are some thoughts I posted earlier on the entry of Google into the enterprise search field where it will have to compete with the high end search tools like EasyAsk.

Does Google Write the Next Dictionary?

The Bramblestory blog states that correct word usage and spelling must at some point bend before common usage, and for these relics of the 90s, that time has come. The blog listed Google hits for some variant terms:

e-mail – 13.9M hits vs. email - 267M hits

web site – 9.6M hits vs. website – 117M hits

on-line – 9.8M hits vs. online - 330M hits

The blog adds that Google even asks "Do you mean..."

I tired this on 5/31 and “email” got 295M hits and “e-mail” got 24M hits. Google also asked me “do you mean email?” when I put in e-mail but not the reverse.

Webster’s Third International Dictionary came out in 1962 to a controversy over this same issue. The guiding principle of the new dictionary was that correctness rests upon usage. This was met with some critical reviews. My father, Sumner Ives, a linguist, was hired by the publisher, Merriam Company, to craft an explanation for this approach in anticipation of the critics.

In an interview published in the NY Times on March 3, 1962, he said that we must get away from the notion that there is only one English language and the idea that the role of the dictionary is to monitor for correctness. Instead, language is a living thing and different varieties are appropriate for different occasions. The dictionary should be a recorder of language and this history will evolve over time.

Google hits may be the latest statistical validation of language usage and a guide for the next generation of dictionary scholars.

I wonder what other uses can be found for Google hits?

Search Engine Optimization: Intelligence from The New Yorker

Disclaimer: This is another in the series of “I may be the last know” postings so if you are an expert in search engine optimization skip to the next one.

I was skimming through that high tech news source, The New Yorker, on Saturday and came across an article that articulated a topic I have been discussing a bit. I had been curious to see my modest blog appear at the top of the pile of 153,000 Google hits on – portals and km. Several people explained that this was because a number of kind readers of this blog had put in links to it in their sites and the presence of these links is one of the most important criteria Google uses to rank its search results. I am glad it is not hits.

According to the New Yorker, “Some American companies have armies of programmers toiling away in Bangalore solely to boost their Google rankings.” The writer goes on to add, “Much of what the “optimizers” do is reasonable, helping companies do a better job of presenting content, using keywords, and building pages to which others will want to link. (These are termed “white hat” tactics.)”

This was reassuring since my daughter, Sarah Ives, revealed to me over lunch on Friday that she has done work related to search optimization and my friend, Amanda Watlington, has developed such strategies for the web sites of a number of large firms. I would certainly put both of these people in the “white hat” category.

On the other hand, there are many unnamed companies that wear the black hat in this space. The New Yorker article states that some companies even set up “link farms” - interconnected Web sites that simply link to each other. A company can buy thousands of domain names, set up Web sites, and create thousands of links out of nothing. I am glad they are not going after the portals and km search string.

Google tries to outsmart these companies to keep their rankings honest and there is a constant battle between Google and the black hat optimizers. The Google moves have even gotten names, like hurricanes, and they result in counter moves and counter-counter moves.

As Cesar Brea showed me recently, you can even go to Technorati, put your url in the search field and see who is linking to you.

Clash of the Titans in Search: Google vs. Microsoft

Cesar Brea sent me the link to this article, “Google Moves Toward Clash With Microsoft,” that appeared yesterday in the NY Times. I also get this NY Times service in my e-mail box but I rarely get beyond the headlines. I will have to see if I can feed it in through Newsgator.

It appears that the battle over search may move into the battle over the desktop. There was saying as portals were introduced, that “who controls the desktop, has a major advantage in the battle over IT.” Portals were expected to play a key role here and they have to some extent. But then there are few pure play portal players left, as most have been bought by others (e.g. Top Tier, Epicentric).

Who thought that search, perhaps instead of, or in addition to, portals, may be a key factor in this struggle for IT control. IBM has made many initiatives into search with both internal and external efforts. It will be interesting to see how they weight in here.

In perhaps a related move, Google has released a significantly improved version of Blooger that now includes RSS and the ability to make comments as Amanda Watlington, a Blogger user and search expert, pointed out to me. This is a good move as prior to these upgrades, Blogger had the lowest rating in the PC Week evaluations of web log tools. It will be interesting to see if PC Week upgrades its ratings of Blogger.

I have also been amused at the way Google has directed some hits to my blog. For example, my posting on Groove on Location in Albania, got a hit from a Groove search “on location in Albania.” The other hits were mostly singles in Albania wishing to meet other people. For some reason the searcher went to my site and was picked up in my tracking tool. Not sure if they went to all the singles sites first as the tracking tool is not that robust.