The Gilbane Advisor

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Category: Collaboration and workplace (Page 54 of 103)

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.

On Crowdsourcing and Social Media: An Interview with Plaxo’s Regina Bustamante

August 12, 2008 / / 0 Comments

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Regina Bustamante, Director of Globalization with Plaxo, to discuss the company’s content globalization strategy and how Plaxo users are integral to its success. Plaxo offers a suite of online solutions for social networking. Top services are the address book and calendar applications in addition to Pulse, a sharing and networking tool.

KK: How has the growth of global web access affected the adoption and development of your social networking solutions?
RB: Plaxo’s user base continues to grow steadily since we reached the 15 million user mark back in October 2006. As a result, our product release cycles have accelerated from two or three months to just one week. At the same time, Plaxo’s non-English base of users and users with international connections is growing rapidly. Shorter product cycles coupled with user demand for multilingual products made it necessary for us to explore new ways to release products to major markets in local languages.

KK: What model did Plaxo use for its initial localization/translation efforts?
RB: We localized our address book and calendar tools into French, German, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish and Simplified Chinese over a year ago, using LSPs for the initial translations. We then provided early release versions to specific “power users” in each international market who reviewed everything, including the UI and suitability to local cultures.

KK: So Plaxo users provided quality assurance in this effort?
RB: Yes, users were even willing to test and report on features such as sorting, name and address formatting, etc. When Pulse was released with localizations into the same languages, non-English users continued to send suggestions, comments, and to act as informal quality control agents. The involvement of the user community improved the quality of local versions of our software.

KK: The Dutch version, released in July, increased the role of longtime power users, correct?
RB: Absolutely. The Netherlands has quickly become one of the largest markets for Pulse and we expanded the involvement of the user community, relying on a group of long-time Plaxo members for the development of the Dutch glossary.

KK: What’s in store for the future of Plaxo’s localization/translation efforts?
RB: For future product releases, we will move to a crowdsourcing model based on a translation portal we are developing that will enable any Plaxo community user to submit and comment on translations. To ensure high levels of quality, this portal includes separate roles for a language moderator and project manager.

KK: What will be the key to success for this model?
RB: Plaxo’s position as a provider of no-charge consumer software helps us to engage users for localization/translation assistance. The key is to only ask users to help with things that directly benefit them. Our crowdsourcing model is not intended to entirely replace LSPs. For example, we have no plans to use crowdsourcing to translate the corporate website or documents such as the Terms of Service or Privacy Policy.

Inspect ‘yer Gadget

August 9, 2008 / / 0 Comments

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

Google Released Knol Yesterday

July 24, 2008 / / 0 Comments

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 Releases Knol

July 23, 2008 /

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

OutStart and Eedo Knowledgeware Merge

July 22, 2008 /

OutStart Inc. and Eedo Knowledgeware Corp. have combined their operations, making the new company a provider of software for creating and sharing organizational knowledge through learning and social collaboration. The company will work to serve the LCMS and learning market, while supporting the emerging need for a business social software platform to enable effective informal knowledge sharing. The combined company has more than 300 customers, including commercial, government and defense organizations; a global base with close to 40 percent of its business coming from international clients; and, solid finances with 50 percent of its revenue coming from recurring business. The company will make its headquarters in Boston and maintain offices in the United States, Canada, England, Germany, Ireland and the Netherlands. http://www.outstart.com

Acrobat.com…

June 3, 2008 / / 0 Comments

… was announced yesterday, and is available now as a public beta. By all means, check it out. I have been playing with Buzzword, and like it. I did manage to break it trying an Export to Word 2003 XML, but it is a Beta after all.
I do wonder about the export choices, which, apart from Acrobat, zipped XML, and plain text, are all Microsoft–Word 2003, Word 2007, and Word 2003 XML. This makes perfect sense if Adobe sees Buzzword as the Web interface in a Microsoft-centric document workflow. But I can see other use cases, especially ones where the content is destined for a Web CMS (or is already in a Web CMS and is being updated. In these cases, the Web CMS would likely not want the overhead of the complex Microsoft file structures.
I think we are getting a briefing on Acrobat.com shortly. I will see what Adobe has in mind.

Vignette Enhances Web Experience Platform

April 28, 2008 /

Vignette (NASDAQ: VIGN) announced significant enhancements to its Web Experience Platform foundation. Vignette’s integrated Web Experience Platform foundation is meant to help organizations quickly manage and deliver targeted content and facilitate user interaction and collaboration with the high performance and scalability required to support large-scale deployments. Vignette Content Management lets users streamline the creation and management of Web content and reduce bottlenecks associated with the delivery and publishing of that information. Enhanced features include friendly URLs to increase search engine site rankings, skip level upgrades to reduce the steps necessary to upgrade from older environments and integration with Vignette High-Performance Delivery (HPD). Vignette Portal allows business users to elevate their brand identity and engage in more personalized Web interactions with key audiences. New capabilities include integration with HPD and Vignette’s recently announced Community product line. Vignette Collaboration helps organizations drive productivity, improve knowledge management and more efficiently direct business processes that require interaction across disparate geographic and organizational boundaries. The latest release features new social computing capabilities including ratings, reviews, tagging and usage analysis. Additional enhancements include improved usability and performance and enhanced support for blogs, wikis and discussion forums. Collaboration also supports auditing and retention policies which enable organizations to more actively manage knowledge relative to compliance.

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