Curated for content, computing, and digital experience professionals

Month: July 2008 (Page 2 of 3)

Google Released Knol Yesterday

Well, we can now let the cat out of the bag. Google released Knol yesterday. Knol is guaranteed to generate lots of discussion in the blogosphere and press, especially among fans and detractors of Wikipedia. It is not really the same kind of animal as Wikipedia however, and we’ll talk more about this in another post, but it is something you will want to check out.

Udi Manber, was planning to announce Knol’s release in his keynote at Gilbane San Francisco last month, but unfortunately, it wasn’t quite ready. Fortunately, we had a back-up plan and Udi instead gave an excellent and audience-pleasing presentation on search quality.

Google Releases Knol

Google announced that Knol is now open to everyone. They announced Knol back in December. Knols are authoritative articles about specific topics, written by people who know about those subjects. From their blog post:

The key principle behind Knol is authorship. Every knol will have an author (or group of authors) who put their name behind their content. It’s their knol, their voice, their opinion. We expect that there will be multiple knols on the same subject, and we think that is good. With Knol, we are introducing a new method for authors to work together that we call “moderated collaboration.”

With this feature, any reader can make suggested edits to a knol which the author may then choose to accept, reject, or modify before these contributions become visible to the public. This allows authors to accept suggestions from everyone in the world while remaining in control of their content. After all, their name is associated with it! Knols include strong community tools which allow for many modes of interaction between readers and authors. People can submit comments, rate, or write a review of a knol.

At the discretion of the author, a knol may include ads from our AdSense program. If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the author with a revenue share from the proceeds of those ad placements. We are happy to announce an agreement with the New Yorker magazine which allows any author to add one cartoon per knol from the New Yorker’s extensive cartoon repository. Cartoons are an effective (and fun) way to make your point, even on the most serious topics. http://knol.google.com

Gilbane Group Updates

Obviously I’ve taken a little blogging break. The combination of our San Francisco conference taking place just before summer hit, a short vacation, a flurry of activity here including new reports, partnerships, people, and the need to ramp up for Gilbane Boston in the Fall, have consumed me (especially the vacation, part 1). It is time to catch up. There is too much to cover in one post, so I’ll spread things out over the next week.

I’ll cover our new reports later, but you can learn more, and download some of them at https://gilbane.com/Research-Reports.html. The reports that aren’t free are available at .

It’s been a month since Gilbane San Francisco, so I will just say that we had a great event, and it was good to see many of you there. This was our largest San Francisco event so far. Interestingly, Gilbane Boston remains our largest conference, and, after 4 years in SF and our 5th this year in Boston, it’s time to recognize that is likely to continue as they are both continuing to grow at the same rate.

If you didn’t make it to San Francisco, the site and program will remain live so you can see what you missed. If you were there, remember that the link to the presentations was listed in your program guide. If you can’t find it send an email to customerservice@gilbane.com. Our conferences are mostly made up of interactive panels, so there are fewer formal presentations than there used to be.

We are not an “unconference” since an important part of our value proposition is to carefully structure the kinds of topics we think our audience needs to hear about, and to ensure diversity of opinion by assigning a variety of experts to debate the issues. But interaction is critical, and what our audience prefers, so we’ll continue to balance serendipity and structure.

OutStart and Eedo Knowledgeware Merge

OutStart Inc. and Eedo Knowledgeware Corp. have combined their operations, making the new company a provider of software for creating and sharing organizational knowledge through learning and social collaboration. The company will work to serve the LCMS and learning market, while supporting the emerging need for a business social software platform to enable effective informal knowledge sharing. The combined company has more than 300 customers, including commercial, government and defense organizations; a global base with close to 40 percent of its business coming from international clients; and, solid finances with 50 percent of its revenue coming from recurring business. The company will make its headquarters in Boston and maintain offices in the United States, Canada, England, Germany, Ireland and the Netherlands. http://www.outstart.com

Webinar: Creating and Selling Global Content Strategies

Updated August 5
Thursday, July 31, 1:00 pm ET/10:00 am PT
New Gilbane research confirms that when it comes to delivering multilingual content for global websites, marketing, business, and IT professionals use whatever resources they have at their disposal to just get it done. It’s clear, though, that performing tactically is no longer enough to attract international audiences, maintain competitive positioning, and scale to meet demand. How are companies large and small are making the shift from performing tactically to thinking strategically? More importantly, what can you learn from their experiences?
Darren Guarnaccia, VP product marketing for Sitecore, and the Gilbane globalization team share insights in a lively online panel discussion that will help you sell your executives on investing in strategies as well as tactics for multilingual web content.
Register today.
Hosted by the American Marketing Association. Sponsored by Sitecore.
Update: If you missed the live event, the recording is now available. Please contact us for a copy of the Gilbane presentation delivered during the webinar.

Search is Not Taking a Summer Break & Call for Papers

Amidst post Gilbane San Francisco business. I have been reading what everyone else has been writing about search the past couple of months. While there continues to be much speculation and gossip about the Microsoft acquisition of FAST, and which companies may soon be absorbed into larger entities, there also continues to be interesting activity among the mid-tier and start-up search vendors. Meanwhile, I advise those who aspire to acquire a search solution for “behind the firewall,” don’t wait for the “big players” to come up with the definitive solution to all your search needs because it will never happen. I’m in good company with other analysts who advise moving on with point search solutions for specific business needs. You will save money, and time because most of the new products are optimized for rapid deployment, in weeks or months, not years.

If you check out my new research report, Enterprise Search Markets and Applications; Capitalizing on Emerging Demand, June, 2008, you will find a directory to companies offering search solutions with choices for what Steve Arnold refers to as “beyond search.” Deep test drives of many of these products can be found in his report, as well. Meanwhile, new releases of products listed, and new products both continue to be announced. ISYS, Coveo and Expert System (Cogito) have brought new offerings to market in the last month and Collexis, a relative newcomer, is drawing attention to itself by demonstrating its products at numerous meetings this year.

So, keeping reading and checking out the possibilities. While you are at it, be sure to put the Gilbane Boston Conference on your calendar for December 3 – 4. We are all busy rounding out the program right now.

I am particularly interested in hearing from those of you who have participated in the selection of a search product in the past two years, implementing or deploying a system anywhere within your own enterprise. Please consider sending me a brief proposal for a presentation at the conference. For your effort, you will get to attend all the conference sessions, as well as help the audience with the needed reality checks on what it takes to conduct a selection process and follow through with implementation. I particularly want you to share your learning experiences: the good, the frustrating, and the lessons you have accrued. Professional speaking experience is not required – we want stories. [You’ll find my email on the “Contacts” page of the Gilbane site and you should also look at the speakers guidelines for additional information.]

Day Software Updates Content Repository Extreme CRX

Day Software announced the general availability of Day Content Repository Extreme (CRX) v1.4. The latest version of Day’s product enables the storage, management and exchange of content across large-scale enterprises. Day CRX v1.4 was designed for large-scale enterprise production environments. The product is a packaged, commercial version of Apache Jackrabbit. Day CRX 1.4 manages both structured and unstructured content, enabling content-centric business applications to take advantage of the repository’s content services, and flexible and extensible content storage. Day’s technologies allow companies to access information about their specific businesses, processes, products, customers and documents, which were previously ‘locked’ in proprietary repositories. http://www.day.com

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