I need to break form my passive del.icio.us link-blogging activities to quote a section from 43 Folder on “Writing sensible email messages”

“You can make it even easier for your recipient to immediately understand why you’ve sent them an email and to quickly determine what kind of response or action it requires. Compose a great “Subject:” line that hits the high points or summarizes the thrust of the message. Avoid “Hi,” “One more thing…,” or “FYI,” in favor of typing a short summary of the most important points in the message”

Shiv Sing posted an article on Line56.com regarding the Intranet Trends to Watch. Many of the trends Shiv lists are not surprising. Like for example, the corporate telephone directory is not the killer app on the intranet.

However, sadly with all the emphasis over the years on knowledge management, the recent hype around personal search tools and of course the web search power houses, Information Retrieval is still an unsolved problem on the intranet.

The other day I watched Brewster Kahle’s inspiring presentation at last month’s NotCon session titled, “Universal Access to Human Knowledge” (Page with 54 Minute MPEG @ 120 MB — worth every bite ;-)

For those that don’t know Brewster Kahle, he was an early member of the parallel supercomputing company Thinking Machines. From there he went on to develop, found and sell to AOL WAIS, Inc. which was probably the internet’s first global search engine (years before the web took off). Later Kahle started Alexa Internet (the “related links” service in IE), which he sold to Amazon.com.

As expected, Adobe has come back at MSFT’s InfoPath with the preview release of Adobe Designer 6.0

Jon Udell of course is spot on with a review in his blog of Designer, which can also be found in this weeks print edition of Info World:

From Jon: “Despite evident weaknesses, the Designer/Reader duo offers two key strengths: digital-paper fidelity, and a ubiquitous runtime. Using the free Reader, I was able to fill out a Designer-built form, print a high-fidelity copy for my records, and post its XML data to a Web server. No matter how the future of e-forms unfolds, that’s going to be a popular scenario.”

Ironically, the week my InfoWorld subscription seems to have lapsed in the renewal process, Jon Udell, in his latest column, makes some of the very same points I mentioned yesterday regarding the bastardization of email for file sharing.

Jon writes:

“It drives me nuts when people send me multi-megabyte files as e-mail attachments. Don’t they know a better way?”
…
“E-mail is a poor file-transfer solution in many ways, but it makes perfect sense to users. An e-mail with an attachment compresses notification and delivery into a single step.”

It is increasingly vexing to me the way email is the defacto standard for sharing files. The reality is that email was never designed for sharing files.

It is an all too common occurrence in a corporate setting where multi-megabyte PowerPoint and Excel files get slammed around to numerous recipients on a distribution list with disparate versions shooting back at the sender and no easy way to consolidate the flow.

After reading a bit about, Paper Airplane, my first impression is that it sounds a bit like Groove, but differs in that it’s integrated into the browser (Mozilla/FireFox currently) and built on-top of the Java JXTA and P2P Sockets framework. I haven’t tried it yet, but it seems worth a look even in its early beta state.

“Paper Airplane is a Mozilla plugin that empowers people to easily create collaborative communities, known as Paper Airplane Groups, without setting up servers or spending money. It does this by integrating a web server into the browser itself, including tools to create collaborative online communities that are stored on the machine. Paper Airplane Groups are stored locally on a user’s machine. A peer-to-peer network is created between all of the Paper Airplane nodes that are running in order to resolve group names, reach normally unreachable peers due to firewalls or NAT devices, and to replicate content.”

I was (and still am) fond of what the OpenCola guys created back in the P2P buzz days, but this recent spin-off, “Dude, check this out!” [DCTO?], started by a few of the OC founders and development managers, has me scratching my head — albeit OC did as well. So perhaps I’ll simply reserve dismissal and keep an eye on the progress.

For the most part DCTO seems to be a hybrid of Metafilter, Technorati, Feedster and the Delicious social bookmarks manager.

As others have predicted, we will see more an more of these…

“MUTE File Sharing is a new peer-to-peer network that provides easy search-and-download functionality while also protecting your privacy.”

I haven’t tried it yet, but it seems to be similar to Waste

Ephraim Schwartz writes in InfoWorld about how Social Networking Software is targeting the corporate enterprise, with startups such as
ZeroDegrees,
Interface Software,
ContactNetwork, and
Spoke targeting CRM…

“Leveraging advances in communication and integration, a new kind of application — corporate social networking — is being folded into the CRM feature set.”

“Companies like Siebel and Salesforce.com are watching this space. These social networking companies will be gobbled up real quick,”

In addition, I believe that Microsoft and IBM are watching this space as well, because in my opinion Social Networking Software is a natural extension to enterprise messaging software such as Exchange and Domino.

Ross Mayfield links to a fascinating article on
Boxes and Arrows by Alex Wright about Paul Otlet: The forgotten forefather of information architecture.

“In 1934, years before Vannevar Bush dreamed of the memex, decades before Ted Nelson coined the term “hypertext,” Paul Otlet envisioned a new kind of scholar’s workstation: a moving desk shaped like a wheel, powered by a network of hinged spokes beneath a series of moving surfaces. The machine would let users search, read and write their way through a vast mechanical database stored on millions of 3×5 index cards.”

CNET News.com has an article on a new Wharton Team that appears to be using k-log-like techniques to rediscover serendipitous data connections.

“Although an unprecedented amount of information about technology is now available online, Ranieri notes that “everything is set up to look for exactly what you are looking for,” rather than to assist in the process of finding crossover, innovative applications. In addition, information is “stored in silos” that are hard for non-specialists to penetrate. Until now, there has been no way to search for attributes like “lighter, faster or quicker” with technology categories, he says.
…
The Wharton team’s new process aims to meet this challenge by using a methodology that “combines computer research techniques with human research techniques,” MacMillan says. Kimbrough likens the new process to the methodology Google uses. Although Google’s search engine is automated, it exploits information that thousands of individuals (at no cost to Google) painstakingly collected and loaded onto their Web sites. Kimbrough explains that Google’s page-ranking algorithm “exploits tons of work (done by) people who put Java links on their Web sites; it exploits their manual labor.”
…
the Wharton team’s new process searches through documents and makes connections between highly technical descriptions of properties–often familiar only to narrow “silos” of technologies–and broader terms that could suggest market applications to those who work in other areas. As Ranieri describes it, “We found a clever way to make a link between attributes and markets.”
…
Although it’s too early for developers to discuss technical details, Kimbrough acknowledges that this new process requires a significant amount of human input. “In part, we use human beings to create databases of attributes that can be matched up.”

Scopeware is a personal desktop search tool similar to X1, but with a different take on the user experience.

I haven’t tested it yet, but it seems to be worth a look.

Scopeware also offers a server-based solution.

Via Due Diligence

“Enterprise collaboration and groupware company Intraspect Software has been sold to public company Vignette for $20m in cash and stock.”

Tim Oren has a nice quote about the space Introspect served too…

“This one’s a cautionary tale not only on the late-90’s investing boom/bust (Intraspect’s history covers nearly the whole saga), but on the long selling cycles and difficulty of extracting revenue from businesses for software of this type. Social Software advocates and investors take note.”

Joe Wilcox of Jupiter’s Microsoft Monitor Research Service talks about MSFT’s collaboration culture within business groups and relates it to what former Apple executive Michael Mace wrote in his rant about Who Killed Apple Computer?:

From Collaboration: The Microsoft Way:
“Microsoft’s collaborative culture makes the company very responsive to competitive threats. The character also means Microsoft can quickly focus resources from multiple product divisions when executives see there is a need. These could be seen during the so-called browser wars with Netscape, when Microsoft rapidly churned out new Internet Explorer features and caught up with Netscape in about 18 months and three product versions…”

The Internet Archive has release a new tool that allows you to search for relevant pages from 1996 until today.

“You can search and find things the way they used to be.”

I guess the web almost never forgets…

Don Park paints a picture of blog and wiki convergence in the following quote:

“Imagine posts and comments flowing from blogs to wikis like the way streams feed into lakes. Got the picture yet? Now think of a blog category as a wiki page. The picture changes so that the blog becomes a mountain and categories become the streams running down the side of the mountain in all directions toward wikis into which streams from other mountains also feed into.”

Clay Shirky writes the following in his piece about, “Wikis, Grafitti, and Process:”

“A wiki in the hands of a healthy community works. A wiki in the hands of an indifferent community fails. The software makes no attempt to add ‘process’ in order to keep people from doing stupid things. Instead, it provides more flexibility, a crazy amount of flexibility, and intoxicating amount of flexibility, allowing massive amounts of stupidity and intentional damage to be done, at will, by roving and anonymous posters. And it provides rollback.”

Beau Lebens’ Dented Reality has some interesting projects, like this one…

“HTFS is a complete, database-driven “file-system” on the concept of hyper-text … The basic idea of this system is …[that]… files, emails, notes and links can be stored as unique items – ONCE, managed by a database.” [more]

Hmm, sounds a bit like Ted Nelson’s Xanadu.

I’d love to see some demos of it, maybe sample code too.

I tested the Coppermine Photo Gallery Script last night and it was very easy to install and best of all (IMO), it comes with a Windows XP Publishing Wizard plug-in that allows you to select a group or folder of images and “Publish” them to your Gallery. It will even create thumbnails and preview images.

Nice!

I alluded to this the other day, but the following from Jupiter Research sums up MSFTÂ’s marketing positioning strategy for the new Office System, which will also include Longhorn and I suspect enterprise search.

Basically, they are not selling features or services, but “solutions” to very specific business processes.

“Microsoft is putting less emphasis on individual applications and product features and more emphasis on what people can do with Office System. The strategy also synchs with other products, such as development of Windows Longhorn. Earlier, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates discussed “scenarios” the company is using to develop Longhorn. One scenario might be a teenager interested in listening to music. Microsoft has taken a similar approach to Office System, looking at information scenarios Office users confront daily.”

Building on the ubiquity of Office in the enterprise, I think Microsoft
is promoting a very compelling trend and something to seriously consider in
regard to delivering an enterprise user experience that feels
seamless or natural.

Essentially, it’s
an obvious goal: Give users an interface that they already know and use daily.

Specifically the key to
providing this enterprise utopia is with Microsoft’s soon-to-be released “Office
2003 System”. IMHO and if all goes well, Microsoft will finally deliver a
malleable front-end framework that lets developers tap into the specific work-flow
processes that people accomplish everyday in each of the main Office
applications (Word, Excel, Outlook and perhaps PowerPoint and Access)

MSNBC has a decent post about
What is a Wiki? (scroll down the page a bit, because their perma-links don’t seem to be working properly)

Tim Bray quotes Sam Ruby’s observation of the tenaciousness of collaboration via a Wiki

“[Sam Ruby] speculated that this was like rugby, if we get enough people pushing in the same direction we’ll eventually move the ball in that direction.”

Indeed!

Today must be research Wednesday for me, because here’s another great article on search. This one, from the latest issue of DM Review,
is specifically talking about “Discovery Systems” in relation to BI:

“Leading enterprise search and classification vendors, including IBM, Verity, Inxight and Stratify, have recently introduced “discovery systems” designed to automatically identify important relationships and trends within documents and document collections.”

This sounds like a barebones version of Groove:

“WASTE is a software product and protocol that enables secure distributed communication for small (on the order of 10-50 nodes) trusted groups of users.”

However, it looks like perhaps AOL made Nullsoft dump WASTE from their site because the link went 404 yesterday afternoon.

Of course there’s already a mirror, which I found @ blueyonder.co.uk via the Slashdot Thread:

• Windows Installer
• Source

As a fan of Groove, I’ll need to set aside some time to check this out.

Audioscrobbler Browser — “[is] a visualisation tool for finding new music by exploring links between related artists”

Wow! I found relationships between artists that I never realized existed.

For example, Nina Simone and Portishead are releated via Radiohead.

According to researchers at the University of Washington which was referenced in this NY Times article

“…companies would benefit from encouraging richer social connections,”

The Times article also mentions …

“Google may be great, but people are greater. Paraphrased roughly, that is what researchers at the University of Washington found in a study released last week. People are more likely to seek information from other people than to search the Internet or an intranet, and they are three times more likely to go to people they know than to outside experts…”

Some good reads about the current state of web-based interfaces, keyboarding and where they all started…

• Future: Is there life after the browser?
• Who Needs a Mouse?
• Bruce Damer’s Personal Histories of the Desktop User Interface

(via Doc and Don)

Well said from McGee’s Musings about blogs and KM:

“Knowledge work, on the other hand, depends on extracting maximum advantage out of the unique characteristics and experiences of each knowledge worker. Knowledge management, from this perspective, has to be a decentralized, grassroots, activity. If you accept that premise, the promise of weblogs in knowledge management becomes clearer. Weblogs operate on grassroots assumptions by design.”

From Microdoc News:

“Google, a Knowledge Operating System (KOS) manages your knowledge activity on the Internet. Google, as a KOS, manages your requests for information, indexes your web pages, responds to applications you may be running on your computer that interface to it via the Google APIs, and integrates knowledge and information from millions of computers into a single large managed database.”

This seems to be a little excessive in that I don’t know if I’d want to give one company that much information about me, but the high-level idea is interesting.

More on KM and Blogs …

Jim McGee writes: “One reason that so many of us find weblogs exciting in the realm of knowledge management is that weblogs reveal that the most important knowledge needs to be created before it can be collected and organized.”(via Sebastian Fiedler)

I think I agree, if Jim is implying that blogs enable the full KM process cycle of creating, collecting and organizing information.

Bryan over at SourceID posts about the Jabber + PingID single sign-on solution:

“Single sign-on, from corporate portal website, to 401k provider website, to Jabber window.” (via Doc)

Promit Chakrabarti: “Resistance to share knowledge stems from the fact that people are concerned about job security. This leads towards knowledge not shared or used. To enter oneÂ’s knowledge into a system and to seek out knowledge from others is not only threatening, but also involves lot of effort that hunts for motivation.”

Well said.

Hewlett-Packard scientists found a company’s power and communication structure may be as simple as examining patterns of e-mail exchanges.

“Because [Email] can be captured and stored, many scientists are eyeing e-mail as a tool to quantify exchanges that in the past have taken place in hallways or meetings. The researchers in this study said e-mail flow could provide a window into the communications structure of an organization.”

From Jon Udell’s latests InfoWorld column:

“Making knowledge more available gets easier with Weblogs, improved information sorting, better user connections”

“Bottom-up vs. top-down taxonomy is an old, ongoing KM struggle. But the emerging architecture of business process automation may help us cut that Gordian knot. XML documents, produced and consumed by Web services but also by people running a new generation of XML-savvy applications, will be the currency of the information economy. Richly structured, easily captured, and embedded in well-defined business contexts, they’ll be a godsend for tools that mine knowledge from documents.”

Quotes from Jon Udell’s interview with Ward Cunningham:

“Most of business programming is about getting a wrong program to do the right thing by being even smarter. People resent these systems because that’s what they have to do. The program is a boat anchor dragging down the pace of business, and it’s almost set up so that it can’t be anything but.”

Jon Udell has some encouraging words to say in regards to Chad Dickerson’s experience “winning ugly” with XML and content:

“As a longtime content wrangler, I’m guilty of assuming that any structure is mappable to any other structure. And that’s true. But it’s never as trivial as we like to imagine. Transformation is work. We’ll always need to do some of it programmatically.”

Well said.

Jon Udell just ties everything together in this sentence, “When teams form and work together, the “markup” that enables and documents team formation, and that represents shared work product, needs to arise naturally and invisibly as a consequence of tool use.” … great post!

Jonathan Peterson writes in his Amateur Hour column, “Web content can always go lower and be more “real”. More positively; without advertisersÂ’ demands for “reach”, individuals can aspire to the most intimate, emotional artistic visions. Andy WarholÂ’s 15 minutes of fame is closer at hand than ever before…”

“Instant messaging, ubiquitous connectivity (SMS, two-way paging, etc), project blogging, k-logs, XML and other technologies are going to allow us to turn the computer from a replacement for the secretarial pool into a tool for collaborative knowledge working.” (link via Kevin Werbach)

Mike Sugarbaker: “It’s very simple: there are some friends you’d trust with your seat at Starbucks, but far fewer you’d trust with your car keys, and even fewer with, say, your sister in a tube top.”

dive into mark: “Why canÂ’t I just click an “auto-content” button and have my software automatically generate a list of, say, a dozen interesting links and quotes culled from my aggregator subscriptions, “neighboring” sites, sites discussing the hot topics of the day, and mainstream articles reporting on a small hard-coded list of additional topics?”

Seem like it would be easy enough to create a service like this given the Blogish services available today.

Shelley Powers over at Burningbird is doing some interesting things with trackbacks. I’d like to test out the PHP code when it’s available.

Neat trick: Wrapping XML-RPC in SOAP (via Sam Ruby)

Jeremy Zawodny writes, “It’s a rare engineer who can see both sides of the coin: the technology and its application toward achieving a company’s business goals.”

“However, there’s a stranger breed … the engineer who … has little trouble explaining how his work supports the company’s broader goals…”

I think as we put the .com era behind us and as engineers from that time mature, you will see more and more of this “odd creature” — at least I hope so (sans the part about the “difficultly communicating with the more common engineers” :)

I found this via Doc who got it from Buzz, but anyway, it’s a Java Applet that moves (virtually) through space and the subatomic universe of
electrons and protons: Molecular Expressions: Science, Optics and You – Powers Of 10: Interactive Java Tutorial (very cool!)

I’m really enjoying the use of Mark Pilgrim‘s
Recommended Reading tool. It’s a great demonistration of the Six Degrees of Separation in the Blogosphere. Thanks Mark!

Kevin Werbach on CNet: “Businesses that can capitalize on decentralization–as both creators and users of technology–will be best-positioned for the future.”

Well, this is my first post using Michel Tidakada’s b2 blogging tool and I must say, I like it. Nice work!

I’d also like to thank my buddy John Federico for the server space … man, this server rocks!

An interesting sidebar by Jon Udell to an article in InfoWorld on the Google search appliance…

Quotes: “Webloggers are becoming the guerrilla warriors of a KM revolution. And on both sides of the firewall, they and Google are natural allies.”

“The presence of Google motivates in ways that go beyond the trendy appeal of Weblogs. Of course, posted items can be found later on. But more subtly, they participate in a status hierarchy. Google’s PageRank algorithm is all about finding the best document — that is, the most relevant, most authoritative — for each query-defined domain.”

Meg from megnut.com wrote an interesting review of Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams in the latest issue of New Architect

found a link to this on ScriptingNews: “Many, if not all companies have knowledge workers. Some, are composed entirely of knowledge workers. These people are domain experts. They keep up to-date (or should) with the evolution of knowledge within their chosen domain. They have thinking skills that have been developed to process data within that domain. Everything they think about within the envelope of that domain has value. Unfortunately, most companies don’t capture, package, and distribute that insight. "

from a Business 2.0 article on KM: “Companies waste billions on knowledge management because they fail to figure out what knowledge they need, or how to manage it. In his latest book, Thomas A. Stewart explains how to answer both questions.”

interesting … there’s a fairly new mailing list called k-log that’s “dedicated to the discussion of Weblogs for Knowledge Management and collaborative groupware within corporations and non-profit organizations.”

Procter & Gamble “… recently began linking 18,000 research and development employees through a global intranet called InnovationNet.”

the project developed by AskMe allowed workers to collaborate on new product development with company experts from around the world.

good quotes:
“A recent study by …Gartner Group suggests companies that proactively manage intellectual assets stand to make more profit than those that don’t.”

“Technologies that mediate that are going to be the next generation of the information revolution. They’re the answer to our most complex set of questions.”

this article tries to breakdown and define the various portal offerings … it’s worth a read even if it’s a bit obvious is some cases.

“Almost every major software vendor offers a portal solution. It’s no wonder: With organizations striving to provide internal and external users with an intuitive way to access relevant content, browser-based portals are a strategic part of any e-business initiative. In a recent Meta Group survey, 78 percent of organizations indicated future portal efforts would include employees as targets. That figure is far greater than the 53 percent that plan to target customers and 32 percent aiming at suppliers.”

From: Interactive Week: “one area that seems to be bucking the [downward] trend is the field of business-to-employee applications. Companies servicing this sector are reporting healthy revenue and, in fact, a number of firms are making new investments in B2E ventures.”

“B2E’s favored status comes from the simple fact that companies, big and small, have reported significant gains – both in cost reductions and productivity improvements – from implementing B2E applications. They cover the gamut from self-service access to … portals aimed at improving collaboration and communications among staff. What they have in common is a relatively low cost of implementation and a high return on investment (ROI).”

this is a bit old, but i thought it to be a great quote by Stefano Mazzocchi about his decision to leave the Apache Cocoon development he created:

“…delegation scales the community and a bigger community means more value, more fun, more positive energy. But delegation happens only if you trust, if you consider your fellow community mate equal to you.

When this doesn’t happen, friction develops, bottlenecks arise, positive energy turns into negative one.

“American Express and software partners Tibco and Infosys launched a new company on Tuesday aimed at giving customers an easier way to access business-management software, services and content via the Web.”

“The new venture, dubbed Workadia, will provide companies a corporate portal where employees can log on to access certain business applications, e-mail, calendars, expense reports, corporate travel, human resources and a list of other products and services.”

From: New company targets corporate portals – Tech News – CNET.com

From: IBM Research: Knowledge Socialization: White paper

“The use of corporate portals continues to pick up steam among large companies. The key seems to be the desire for organized information and a place to direct internal marketing.”

From: Corporate Portals Ready For The Big Time – Report

“The onslaught OF dispersed work forces along with increased competition and shorter product cycles means collaboration between employees and business partners is at a critical juncture. Collaboration tools are an important means for turning the travel time and expense of old into work time and increased profits.”

From: Create working offices on the Web

one of the local new jersey papers just did a story about us and boy do i love miss-quotes, “Peloso says his product is better than Excel” (where did that come from?)

Nick Denton the CEO of Moreover, writes about “How rumors, leaks, and news online have transformed the Internet’s impact on business”

an interesting paper on collaboration by jon udel: “The goal of Internet groupware should be to reclaim the original vision of the Web as a medium of collaboration. It’s no accident that vision arose in a scientific milieu since the enterprise of science is so deeply rooted in collaboration.”

From: Internet Groupware for Scientific Collaboration / Draft #3

“Collaboration is a fundamental process in any enterprise, as well as between enterprises.” a quote from The Gartner Group’s report on Building a Collaborative Environment: Who Needs What?

“…a recent IDC survey of prospective ASP users showed that collaborative software is the most popular “current or preferred use of ASPs,” with more than 60 percent expressing a taste for hosted groupware.”

From: Groupware Grows Up

this sounds like a job for consentcache …

White paper: “How Knowledge Management Makes Customer Satisfaction a Strategic Asset”

Read the summary or dowload the PDF

wow! i wish i could have been this subversive when i was in highschool.

Aaron Swartz writes, “School harms kids! You may not believe it at first, but it’s true. In America, we have a mandatory public school system that destroys children’s minds and molds them into slaves of the establishment.” in his schoolyard subversion blog and he’s only in 9th grade!

i have to agree with aaron. i hated the left-brained method of teaching i experienced in school. subjects seems disconnected, collaboration was contrived and testing didn’t show how well a student understood a subject, it only demonstrated how well they memorized facts. IMHO, education is a holistic experience.

“Without high-quality and easy-to-use tools, filtering and managing the overwhelming quantity of information has been a nearly impossible task.” [more here]

some good quotes:

“Knowledge management is merely a shift from physical effort to mental effort, with the limits being time rather than physical strength.”

“superior use of knowledge is essential to survival”

“The key component (in a knowledge management system) is connecting people”

“what financial rewards and competitive advantage may be derived from knowledge?” … “One distinction could be between knowledge designed to reduce costs and knowledge designed to create revenue.”