I am happy to announce that Fal Sarkar has joined us as a Contributing Analyst. Some of you may have met Fal when he was the Market Segment Manager for ECM at Sun as we did, or when he was at Xinet before that. Fal is currently based in India with his family where he has been involved in some very interesting work. See Fal’s post from yesterday, and his bio for more details. Fal will be writing and helping us with research on content management (both ECM & WCM) and social media, as well as what is happening in India.
Fal can be reached at: fal@gilbane.com, or at extension 219, which transparently rings through to Fal in Chennai, India or to his voicemail, but please remember the time difference.
Welcome Fal!
Author: Frank Gilbane (Page 49 of 71)
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 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
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.
We’ve been so busy getting ready for next week’s conference in San Francisco that it was a bit of a surprise to be deluged with submissions for our Boston conference yesterday. Of course that is because the deadline for submitting proposals for the Gilbane Boston conference, December 2 – 4, 2008 was June 15. It’s great to see the interest!
Anyway, since we will all be very busy next week, we realized we might as well extend the deadline, so the new deadline in June 24.
See: https://gilbane.com/speaker_guidelines.html for instructions.
Questions can be sent to speaking@gilbane.com.
Relevance has always been the main goal of search for most of us searchers, although sometimes completeness can be even more important, e.g., when we want to determine relevance ourselves and volume is not an issue. Relevance is relative, and there is no way to write code that can anticipate relevance in a general way. (Of course quality is relative too!) Fortunately, search can be extremely useful even without the mind reading option – in fact, mind-reading wouldn’t be enough to anticipate relevance enough anyway.
Much of the discussion about search quality these days revolves around the front-end of relevance, i.e., determining, as much as possible, searchers’ intent. And we do have increasing amounts of information (such as surfing behavior) that allows us to make better guesses about intentions.
We can also make information richer so that search engines can make more accurate determinations about relevance. For example XML site maps provide context in the form of structural information; providing additional metadata to search engines provides even more context.
Despite the imprecise, and constantly changing meaning and use of language, we have been able to asymptotically improve our ability to determine both intent and relevance, and incrementally improve search quality.
I say “we”, but I am neither a developer nor an expert on search technology. We are fortunate to have someone who is arguably the most influential expert and developer today speaking about search quality in two weeks at our San Francisco conference. Udi Manber, VP Engineering, Search Quality, Google is going to open the conference with a presentation on Search Quality and Continuous Innovation. While Udi won’t be giving away any secrets, his presentation will provide valuable and fascinating insight into the way Google thinks about improving search quality. For a taste of Udi’s clear and straightforward style, and what he’ll be talking about read his recent blog post: Introduction to Google Search Quality
We have a lot of search coverage at our San Francisco conference in a couple of weeks, including a conference keynote, a track keynote, multiple panel sessions, and an in-depth workshop. To complement all of this we are offering a 20% discount to registered attendees who order Beyond Search: What to do When Your Enterprise Search System Doesn’t Work, by Stephen Arnold.
Steve is being interviewed by Lynda Moulton in the Enterprise Search track keynote, so you can pepper him with questions after you read the report. All registered attendees will automatically get an email with the coupon code to use for the discount. If you can’t make it to San Francisco you can still get the report at .
Find out more about what we’ll be covering in our search track on Lynda’s search blog. Though there is some overlap, also see the Search and Semantic Technology category.
This year we have 5 half-day workshops following our conference with 5 excellent expert instructors. These are a great complement to the conference for those of you really need to dig-in to a topic.
A: Web Content Management Systems: Architectures & Products
Tony Byrne, Founder, CMS Watch, Publisher, The CMS Report
B: Enterprise Search: How to Successfully Adopt and Deploy Search
Lynda Moulton, Lead Analyst for Enterprise Search, the Gilbane Group
C: The Hive: A New Model for Extracting the Best from ECM Initiatives
Cairo Walker, Consultant, Enterprise Content Management Graduate Program, University of Technology, Sydney
D: Buying and Implementing Content Management and Global Translation Management Systems
Andrew Draheim, Globalization Consultant, Dig-IT!
E: Social Media 101: Building a Social Media Roadmap
Rachel Happe, Research Manager, Digital Business Economy, IDC
Registration information
