The Gilbane Advisor

Curated for content, computing, data, information, and digital experience professionals

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Could the iPhone be a Kindle Killer?

Charlie Sorrel has some thoughts over at Wired’s blogs.

Here’s a project I would love to do if I had the time–a face-off between Kindle, the iPhone, the Sony Reader, an eBook Technologies ETI-1, and a few other devices. Take a few book types–novel, textbook, graphical book, business document to begin with–and create a feature matrix and evaluation criteria. Also evaluate the e-commerce experience, the experience with public domain and other free content, and the experience of adding your own content. Write it all up, and keep it up to date.

Inspect ‘yer Gadget

As social netwoking sites proliferate, extending the metaphor of organic connections between individuals and communities, one aspect that has so far been under appreciated is the spread of malicious viruses via connections between network members. Just as biological viruses tend to spread faster as individuals are brought closer together by a shrinking world, so too computer viruses are finding a vehicle to spread via Web2.0 social networks.

Most Web2.0 sites, and these include Facebook, MySpace, Orkut, and even Google pages, offer users a potpourri of applets that add cool little functionalities to member’s profile pages. Google for instance offers Google “gadgets” like calendars, news feeds, photo display applications, accounting applications, weather, and a whole host of other apps.

Increasingly these are targets for malicious hackers who exploit people’s lack of awareness (as well as lack of protection), and their natural tendency to being open to adding new friends and applications without worry, to spread virus attacks. The problem is not necessarily Google’s programming, but the open source and shareware nature of applications being developed by programmers around the world, and offered on sites like Google and Facebook.

This was one of the issues discussed at the recent Black Hat USA 2008 conference in Las Vegas where two security experts, Robert Hansen, chief executive of SecTheory, and Tom Stacener, of Cenzic, the security software testing maker, demonstrated how a malicious gadget could break into a user’s web browser and read searches in real time and conduct other attacks, including stealing information from other gadgets that store personal information (like accounting applications).

This is particularly a problem with younger users who are seemingly less concerned with privacy and security issues, and see social networks as a vast playground of social interactions and free form play — putting up personal information, installing unchecked applications, and generally mingling their digital juices with abandon. Interestingly, older users who should know better, also fall prey to these lapses in judgment.

A word to the wise for people, especially companies, who are exploring how to deploy Web2.0 and Enterprise2.0 applications in their corporate networks. A word of caution too the next time you decide to poke someone after seeing their cute (and perhaps fallacious) profile picture.

Until protection tools get better, remember to Inspect ‘Yer Gadgets!
Virus update: Social networking sites targeted by worms

Research Sneak Peak: The Role of the Operational Champion

As Mary noted previously, globetrotting has been just one reason for our blogging hiatus. The more interesting interrupter has been the development of “the report,” aka our research and analysis for Multilingual Communications as a Business Imperative: Why Organizations Need to Optimize the Global Content Value Chain.

It has been an intense period to say the least, as the result comprises the stories of 40 content and localization/translation management professionals as told to myself and colleague Karl Kadie over 60+ hours. We are indebted to this community of experts for their knowledge sharing and deeply impressed by their dedication to improving processes in their areas of expertise.

It feels right then, to dedicate this first blog on our research results to these passionate and meticulous professionals, trained to understand the power of the word and its effect on content consumers. Way back in 2005, I coined an informal term for folks such as these: the glue people — a rare breed who manage to bridge gaps between various organizational units through education, facilitation, and coordination focused on “the bigger picture.”

In this case, painting that picture requires color mixing that supports corporate global expansion goals without compromising the needs and expectations of multinational customers for multilingual content. Thus the demise of the informal term in favor of one that more aptly describes the efforts of today’s content and localization/translation management professional — enter the operational champion.

Focused squarely on the inherent relationship between successful globalization and multilingual communications, our study’s operational champions are savvy customer advocates and marketeers. They have designed internal educational campaigns with titles such as “Content Matters,” “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle: Not Just for Energy,” and “Do You Know Who’s Not Reading Your Content?” They have titles such as “Content Management Practice Leader,” “Director, Global Language Services,” and “International Marketing Manager.” They have produced inspiring results:

    • “We’ve raised the level of awareness of content value in our organization.”
    • “We can build one web template and replicate it 25 times for various regions within in six months.”
    • “We can show savings of over $900 per document and reduction of translation time by five days.”
    • “We have achieved a 68% reuse rate for our content.”

Impressive indeed — and just a sample of what’s inside the report to help speed results for those working toward similar goals. More to come!

What do you know about content technologies?

We’re growing. Like many of our colleagues in the industry we have found that problems in the housing and financial markets have had no noticeable effect on demand for our services. Of course things could change, but enterprise content technologies are so core to businesses of all kinds that, while watchful, we are not concerned.

Our main concern, as always, is to keep the conversation and flow of trusted content moving between all the stakeholders (investors, vendors, practitioners, IT, consultants, etc.) in the content technology market. If you are involved in content technology or applications in any of these capacities and have expertise or experience you would like to share with our large, growing community, let us know. We have potential opportunities for bloggers, consultants, analysts, educators, or someone who has a particular expertise and simply wants to express an occasional opinion. If you are interest or have questions let Sarah know at sarah@gilbane.com.

Communities, Engagement, and Web Experience Management

We came across a study entitled “The 2008 Tribalization of Business” while preparing to publish a new Gilbane white paper on web experience management. The “Tribalization” research looks at communities and online marketing: how they deliver value, obstacles to making them work, what contributes to success, and how marketers measure effectiveness. Highlights of the research (co-sponsored by Beeline Labs, Deloitte, and the Society for New Communications Research) are reported on marketingcharts.com.

This datapoint caught our eye:

“The greatest obstacles to making a community work are not related to technology or funding, the study found; rather, getting people [to engage] in the community (51%).”

Community is one of four components of engagement strategy discussed in the new Gilbane white paper (the others are personalization, user-generated content, and collaboration). In the paper, we provide some guidance about making communities work not just at start-up but throughout their lifecycle.

Engage Me! Web Experience Management as the New Business Imperative is the companion white paper to a webinar in which we participated with Linksys and the Colorado Department of Transportion. The webinar and paper are sponsored by FatWire. An archive of the webinar is available for viewing, and the paper is now available for download on the FatWire site. It will be posted on the Gilbane site later this month.

Where Content Management Meets Social Media

“Where Content Management Meets Social Media” is the tagline for this year’s Gilbane Boston conference. We’ve been covering social media tools for enterprise use at our events since 2005, just after we published Blogs & Wikis: Technologies for Enterprise Applications? – still one of our most popular downloads. But the number of speaking proposals we received on social media for enterprise applications for the Boston conference was striking. It seems nobody wants to talk about anything else! While we’ll still have a dedicated track to cover social media, you will see the topic being addressed in every track.
The conference program will be published soon, and as Sarah posted a couple of days ago, speaker notifications will start going out.

Before You Start a List of Vendors: Map Your Course

There is a pattern in how many small to mid-sized enterprises go about researching technology applications, one that does not serve them well. As I interact with colleagues, business affiliates and professional peers, I play into this behavior unwittingly. For example, how many times have you been on the asking or answering side of this question: “My organization is planning to procure a search system this year, what systems should we be looking at?” Too often, I make a quick judgment based on what little I know about the asker and toss out a few potential candidate vendor names.

This scenario plays out frequently and now I am uncomfortable because, as a consultant and search analyst, I know that there is a lot more I need to know before offering off-handed advice to that question. Here are some ideas for questions that you should be asking first so that, when someone like me wants more context, you have ready answers.

Your first step is to survey your internal landscape and clearly document the following:

  • What are the business outcomes you expect to derive from the search product, who will be using it, under what circumstances and for what purpose?
  • What is the scope of the content that will be indexed for retrieval? Create a content map that explicitly illustrates: What, Where, Who, When. This means capturing what the content is in terms of document types and formats, numbers and size, and topic, and where it is being created, stored and managed. You need to know who created it, owns it, and will have access to it. Finally, it helps to document when it was created and information about retention.
  • Who will be involved in product selection and evaluation, who needs to sign off at every stage of selection and procurement, who will be involved in installation and deployment, and who will maintain the system on an ongoing basis?
  • What is your IT infrastructure and who controls it? If a schematic is not in place that depicts at least the portion of the computing infrastructure that will be integral to your search support, it is time to make sure one is prepared. You cannot make an informed decision about appropriate and workable search solutions without this information.

You will also be wasting the time of vendors when you seek product and licensing information if you do not have all of these issues sorted out. Much of the packaging of search products is dependent on numbers of documents or size of the corpus to be indexed, how the software will be installed, and who and how many will be accessing it. Pricing information will be vague until you have concrete content “demographics” to share with prospective vendors. You can’t even establish a budget without answering the questions above, and you need a ballpark budget figure to help narrow your choices.

So, I am resolving to be more thoughtful in my responses when queried by friends and colleagues. Before answering I will be asking you for some meaningful data in advance of reeling off a list of products. It is time for you to do some preliminary research in-house before establishing the lineup of suitors. More on the next steps, next time up.

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