Not sure about this, but what the heck…
http://twitter.com/fgilbane
Category: Collaboration and workplace (Page 44 of 94)
This category is focused on enterprise / workplace collaboration tools and strategies, including office suites, intranets, knowledge management, and enterprise adoption of social networking tools and approaches.
I always took footnotes for granted. You need them as you’re writing, you insert an indicator at the right place and it points the reader to an amplification, a citation, an off-hand comment, or something — but it’s out of the way, a distraction to the point you’re trying to make.
Some documents don’t need them, but some require them (e.g., scholarly documents, legal documents). In those documents, the footnotes contain such important information that, as Barry Bealer suggests in When footnotes are the content, “the meat [is] in the footnotes.”
The web doesn’t make it easy to represent footnotes. Footnotes on the Web argues that HTML is barely up to the task of presenting footnotes in any effective form.
But if you were to recreate the whole thing from scratch, without static paper as a model, how would you model footnotes?
In a document, a footnote is composed of two pieces of related information. One is the point that you’re trying to make, typically a new point. The other is some pre-existing reference material that presumably supports your point. If it is always the new material that points at the existing, supporting material, then we’re building an information taxonomy bottom up — with the unfortunate property that entering at higher levels will prevent us from seeing lower levels through explicitly-stated links.
To be fair, there are good reasons for connections to be bidirectional. Unidirectional links are forgivable for the paper model, with its inherently temporal life. But the WWW is more malleable, and bidirectional links don’t have to be published at the same time as the first end of the link. In this sense, HTML’s linking mechanism, the ‘<a href=”over_there”>’ construct is fundamentally broken. Google’s founders exploited just this characteristic of the web to build their company on a solution to a problem that needn’t have been.
And people who have lived through the markup revolution from the days of SGML and HyTime know that it shouldn’t have been.
But footnotes still only point bottom up. Fifteen to twenty years on, many of the deeper concepts of the markup revolution are still waiting to flower.
There sure are lots of surveys on social media and networking tools these days. I just noticed one Dynamic Markets did for AT&T. Here are some of the highlights from their website.
A pan-European survey of more than 2,500 people in five countries shows that the use of social networking tools as part of everyday working life has led to an increase in efficiency. The study shows that 65% of employees surveyed in Great Britain, France, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands say their company has adopted social networking as part of their working culture. The research also reveals that the rate of adoption is most popular in Germany, leading the way at 72% while Great Britain lags behind with 59%. The study also reveals:
- 65% of employees surveyed say that social networking sites have made them and/or their colleagues more efficient
- 63% say they have enabled them and their colleagues to achieve things that would not otherwise have been possible
- 46% say they have sparked ideas and creativity for them personally
The Top 5 social networking tools being used as part of everyday working life are:
- Companies’ own collaboration sites on intranets (39%)
- Internal forums within the company (20%)
- Company-produced video material shared on intranets (16%)
- Online social networks, such as LinkedIn and Facebook (15%)
- External collaboration sites on the web and internal blogging sites (both 11%)
I don’t remember when I joined LinkedIn, but I still have items in my inbox from 2004 so it has been awhile. Up until last year sometime I never actually used it except to accept invitations from people I knew (and a handful I didn’t because it was easier than thinking about it). At some point last year I thought to use LinkedIn to find a colleague’s updated contact information, and for the first time thought of LinkedIn as really useful. Recently I’ve reached a new level of appreciation for its use when I saw that the LinkedIn CM Pros group had over 7000 members, and that application support was added, for example Blog Link.
While there is no doubt that social networking technologies will be widely deployed specifically for enterprise use. It is too early to know what the tool landscape will look like. The basic technology is clever but not rocket science, and is available from many sources. It is also too early to know how, or if, internally and externally-focused tools will be integrated into a cohesive user experience. In any case, LinkedIn is not to be ignored.
But I digress. The real reason for this post was to point to some interesting market research by Anderson Analytics (who I had not heard of before), where they use text mining of LinkedIn to come up with four user profiles. This is interesting as market research, for market research, and in its use of text mining. From their announcement:
- “Savvy Networkers” (9 million) are likely to have started using social networking earlier than others, are more tech savvy, and more likely to be active on other SNS sites like Facebook. Savvy Networkers have the most connections (61 on average) and are more likely to use LinkedIn for almost every purpose other than job searching. Savvy Networkers have the second highest personal income ($93,500) and usually have “Consultant” in their job description.
- “Senior Executives” (8.4 million) are somewhat less tech savvy and are using LinkedIn to connect to their existing corporate networks. They have power jobs which they are quite content with, and are likely to have been invited by a colleague, then realized how many key contacts were on the site and started building connections (32 on average). Senior Executives have the highest average personal income ($104,000) and have titles such as Owner, Partner, Executive or Associate.
- “Late Adopters” (6.6 million) are likely to have received numerous requests from friends and co-workers before deciding to join. They are somewhat less tech savvy and are careful in how they use LinkedIn, tending to connect only to close friends and colleagues and have the fewest number of connections (23 on average). Late Adopters have the lowest average personal income ($88,000) and have titles such as Teacher, Medical Professional, Lawyer, or the word “Account” or “Assistant” in their job description.
- “Exploring Options” (6.1 million) may be working, but are open and looking for other job options often on Careerbuilder.com, perhaps in part because they have the lowest personal income ($87,500). They are fairly tech savvy, and use SNS for both corporate and personal interests.
… To find out which type you are most like, you may use the predictive tool available at Anderson Analytics: http://www.andersonanalytics.com/litype
I have to say the tool didn’t get my profile right!
This title by Mike Altendorf, in CIO Magazine, October 31, 2008, mystifies me, Search Will Outshine KM. I did a little poking around to discover who he is and found a similar statement by him back in September, Search is being implemented in enterprises as the new knowledge management and what’s coming down the line is the ability to mine the huge amount of untapped structured and unstructured data in the organisation.
Because I follow enterprise search for the Gilbane Group while maintaining a separate consulting practice in knowledge management, I am struggling with his conflation of the two terms or even the migration of one to the other. The search we talk about is a set of software technologies that retrieve content. I’m tired of the debate about the terminology “enterprise search” vs. “behind the firewall search.” I tell vendors and buyers that my focus is on software products supporting search executed within (or from outside looking in) the enterprise on content that originates from within the enterprise or that is collected by the enterprise. I don’t judge whether the product is for an exclusive domain, content type or audience, or whether it is deployed with the “intent” of finding and retrieving every last scrap of content lying around the enterprise. It never does nor will do the latter but if that is what an enterprise aspires to, theirs is a judgment call I might help them re-evaluate in consultation.
It is pretty clear that Mr. Altendorf is impressed with the potential for Fast and Microsoft so he knows they are firmly entrenched in the software business. But knowledge management (KM) is not now, nor has it ever been, a software product or even a suite of products. I will acknowledge that KM is a messy thing to talk about and the label means many things even to those of us who focus on it as a practice area. It clearly got derailed as a useful “discipline” of focus in the 90s when tool vendors decided to place their products into a new category called “knowledge management.”
It sounded so promising and useful, this idea of KM software that could just suck the brains out of experts and the business know-how of enterprises out of hidden and lurking content. We know better, we who try to refine the art of leveraging knowledge by assisting our clients with blending people and technology to establish workable business practices around knowledge assets. We bring together IT, business managers, librarians, content managers, taxonomists, archivists, and records managers to facilitate good communication among many types of stakeholders. We work to define how to apply behavioral business practices and tools to business problems. Understanding how a software product is helpful in processes, its potential applications, or to encourage usability standards are part of the knowledge manager’s toolkit. It is quite an art, the KM process of bringing tools together with knowledge assets (people and content) into a productive balance.
Search is one of the tools that can facilitate leveraging knowledge assets and help us find the experts who might share some “how-to” knowledge, but it is not, nor will it ever be a substitute for KM. You can check out these links to see how others line up on the definitions of KM: CIO introduction to KM and Wikipedia. Let’s not have the “KM is dead” discussion again!
Socialtext released Socialtext 3.0, a trio of applications including Socialtext People and Socialtext Dashboard, as well as a major upgrade to its Socialtext Workspace enterprise wiki offering. These products are built on a modular and integrated platform that delivers connected collaboration with context to individuals, workgroups, organizations and extranet communities. People are able to discover, create, and utilize social networks, collaborate in shared workspaces, and work productively, with personalized widget-based dashboards. The company also announced Socialtext Signals, a Twitter-style microblogging interface that goes beyond simple “tweets” by integrating both automated and manual updates with social networking context, expanding the company’s business communications offerings for the enterprise. As with its proven Workspace wiki and weblog product, Socialtext will make all of its offerings available on a hosted ASP as well as an on-premise appliance basis. The entire Socialtext 3.0 trio of products is available immediately on the hosted service, and will be made available to appliance customers starting in October 2008. Socialtext 3.0 profile integration with LDAP or Microsoft Active Directory systems enable rapid population. REST APIs for workspace and profile content are now complemented with a Widget architecture and user interface for the creation of enterprise mashups. Productized Connectors are available with Microsoft Sharepoint and IBM Lotus Connections. You can immediately experience this new release in a free trial at http://socialtext.com/
MicroLink announced the release of MicroLink Autonomy Integration Suite (AIS) for SharePoint 2003/2007, which consists of six web parts that integrate Autonomy’s Data Operating Layer (IDOL) server with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS). This integration allows SharePoint users to leverage Autonomy’s information discovery capability and automated features in a unified platform. MicroLink’s Autonomy Integration Suite for SharePoint consists of custom web parts that create more efficient access to the search capabilities of Autonomy’s IDOL server from within SharePoint. With interfaces familiar to SharePoint users, AIS helps organizations to process digital content automatically, share data and synchronize with other data webparts. AIS comprises Search and Retrieval, Agents, Profiling, Web Channels, Clustering, and Community Collaboration. AIS also improves expertise search and incorporates full document level security. Key Features of AIS: Federated search capabilities for SharePoint, enabling customers to index and search all content across the entire enterprise and repositories inside and outside the SharePoint environment; Custom Web Parts that enable access to the capabilities of Autonomy’s IDOL platform from within Microsoft’s SharePoint Portal Server; Data connections for each web part that allows data sharing and synchronization between parts; For the end user, a singular interface that is consistent with the SharePoint user experience. http://www.MicroLinkllc.com
Social media has crept into all sorts of enterprise applications, and is certainly an important component of all of the areas we cover, including content management, enterprise search, multilingual applications, and authoring and publishing. So rather than discussing social media in isolation, we’re going to focus more on covering social media in context, which means in whichever of our blogs (or conference sessions) it makes sense. You can use our site search to find discussion about social media from Geoff and our other analysts and contributors.
Check out Fred’s entry posted on our main blog earlier today on “Integrating Traditional Documentation with Social Media”
Subscribe to the Gilbane Advisor
