Curated for content, computing, and digital experience professionals

Author: Frank Gilbane (Page 71 of 71)

Gilbane San Francisco Conference Program Available

We have just posted the program for our Spring conference in San Francisco. Thanks to all who submitted a record number of great proposals – we wish we could accomodate them all. We are working on the Amsterdam conference now and there is still time to submit speaking proposals. We are co-locating this conference with XTech 2005 (formerly XML Europe), so proposals the complement XTech topics would be great.

Blogs for enterprises and groups?

Tim Bray is skeptical of enterprise and/or group blogging. I have also been skeptical, but now think there is something there, though just what remains to be seen. One barrier to enterprise, and group, blogging is the perception that blogging is only for personal journals or a new tool for both professional and amateur journalists. This is understandable given the state of today’s blogosphere, but it is a mistake to conflate the use of a technology with the technology itself. Obviously we think a group blog on business and technology issues is a good idea since we started one, but we also suspect our effort will evolve in unexpected (and some planned) ways.

Taxonomies, Folksonomies & Controlled Vocabularies

There is an enlightening discussion going on between Lou Rosenfeld, Clay Shirky and others on the utility of folksonomies as used by Flickr and del.icio.us, vs. subject-matter-expert developed taxonomies. As one of the commenters has pointed out, this is not an “either/or” issue. Certain applications where the scope of the content and users is bounded will benefit from the discipline of a carefully architected vocabulary. Other applications where the scope of either the content or the user community is less well-defined will either suffer or, more likely, the users will ignore the prescriptions (this is why the “semantic web”, if I understand it at all, is hopeless). The key issues are related: cost and adoption (cost is usually a function of adoption, not development), and I think they both would agree on this point. How these approaches might work together is trickier and well worth exploring. In any case, this debate provides a condensed lesson in many issues that most enterprise content managers have probably not thought through, but even those that have should check out this thread.

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