Have you tried it yet? News here. My first search here. I guess there were technical difficulties yesterday.
Oh, it’s pronounced “cool,” but, old geezer that I am, I would have never guessed that on my own.
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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!
Join the Gilbane Group and Vignette on July 30, 2008, at 2:00 p.m. (Eastern) for a webinar entitled “The Keys to a Targeted Online Experience.” The primary topic will be the synergies derived from the tight integration of Web Content Management-Portal-Collaboration suites versus stand-alone applications.
Click here to register.
Time magazines’s Josh Quittner offers some insight into Kindle sales:
According to a source at Amazon, “on a title-by-title basis, of the 130,000 titles available on Kindle and in physical form, Kindle sales now make up over 12% of sales for those titles.”
Amazon’s quarterly results didn’t spell things out more, though the inventory of eBook titles continues to grow:
The number of titles available for the Kindle are now up to 140,000 compared to 90,000 at launch, and the company did not break out any other Kindle figures except to say sales of e-books represent a low double digit percentage of the 140,000 titles available in both e-books and print formats.
As I was developing concepts put forth in the report Enterprise Search Markets and Applications – Capitalizing on Emerging Demand I bounced around the Internet a lot to verify information I had previously noted about products listed in the vendor directory. As I did so, evidence began to emerge about the ease with which I could resurrect an earlier retrieved bit of content. It mystified me that vendors of products to aid retrieval of content would make it so difficult to find information on their own web site. One assumption of mine has been completely debunked, that vendors would use their own search product to help site visitors discover more about their products and services. It made me wonder why they would not be showcasing the full flavor of their offerings.
The report was not written to evaluate specific products but rather to give a more holistic view of how the markets for products break down and how products themselves can be categorized. In order to do the latter, it required reading about many products with which I had no hands on experience. I wanted to understand how vendors were positioning their products, what markets they felt their products are most suited to satisfy, and what search problems were best solved with their technologies. Coming up with generalizations, trends, and differentiators was one purpose for my research. When I realized how difficult it was to dig out specifics from many vendor Web sites, I moved on, probably leaving stones unturned but time was not on my side.
Now I am going back to learn more about the problem with researching search, something complained about by a number of buyers I interviewed. Vendors are not making it easy for buyers to narrow their search for search, and shame on them. This should be a “no brainer.” If you are a vendor pushing a product that is easy to install, implement and deploy, there is no better way than to put it to work on your own site. On the other hand, if you have products that are more sophisticated in terms of offering complex retrieval by leveraging refined ontologies or rules, you had better take the time to make it work well for finding nuggets on a few hundred pages of your Web site.
I am going to be writing more about this because the deeper I dig, the more interesting the results. For starters, of the first 28 vendor on my list, twelve have no site search. Of those that do, several use a third-party search engine, not their own. One major vendor’s search result count displayed nearly a hundred records that matched the search while also displaying the breakdown of records by category. The trouble was the category numbers totaled less than 20. Hmmm!
Perhaps the trouble in “searchland” is that no one wants to take the time to implement, deploy and maintain search to satisfy the user. I keep saying, “it’s not the technology; it’s the thought and skill that goes into the back room implementation.” Or is it? Stay tuned.
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.
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