Darwin Discovery Engine Blog

Cesar Brea Writes About Darwin Ecosystem

We were pleased to see the post, Filtering The Collective Preconscious: Darwin Ecosystem, by Cesar Brea.  Cesar’s firm, Force Five Partners “designs, implements, and optimizes multi-channel marketing programs to exploit today’s increasingly fragmented and digitally-dominated channel landscape. Beyond driving for bottom line improvements, we also build our clients’ analytics capabilities to sustain these gains. This has become mission-critical as the expanded use of digital channels forces marketers to sink or swim in oceans of data.”

Cesar has said that the next area of focus on the Web is analytics and we were pleased to show him how the Darwin Awareness Engine works and very pleased to see his response in this post.  Cesar begins with a useful framework for look at content on the Web (in his words)

Professional filters: we follow people whose jobs are to cover an area.  Tom Friedman covers international issues, Walt Mossberg covers personal technology.

Technical filters: we use services like Google Alerts to tell us when there's something new on a topic we're interested in

Social filters: we use services like Digg, Reddit, and Stumbleupon to point us to popular things

Tribal filters: we use Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and (Google hopes) Buzz to get pointed to things folks we know and trust think are important

I follow all of these but an especially heavy user of the tribal filter. When I first started a blogs six years ago people used to send me stuff through email. Now my Twitter provide my favorite tribal filters. Cesar is one of these.

Cesar goes on to write that in addition to what gets through, there's how it's presented. He then describes Darwin’s content filtering and visualization.  Cesar concludes, “if you are responsible for syndicating and helping users usefully navigate a highly dynamic information set collected through a multitude of sources -- say, a news organization, a university, a large consumer products or services firm -- and are evaluating monitoring technologies, Darwin is worth a look.” We agree and greatly appreciate his commentary. 

Predicting the Strength of Ties Through Social Media

Eric Gilbert and Karrie Karahalios at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign recently published an interesting paper on Predicting Tie Strength With Social Media. Building on the theoretical work on strong and weak ties started by the classic Mark Granovetter 1973 paper “The Strength of Weak Ties,” they looked at whether social media behavior could be used as a predictor of tie strength. In this paper the researchers present a predictive model that maps social media data to tie strength. The model builds on a dataset of over 2,000 Facebook relationships and distinguishes between strong and weak ties with over 85% accuracy.  

They asked 35 people to rate a number of their Facebook friends that were randomly selected.  Then they looked at the Facebook behavior of these people to see if could accurate predict the strength of their ties as reported by the participants. Dimensions such as the use of words associated with intimacy and intensity, duration of communication, social distance, and other factors were looked at for their predictive power. The complete set of variables was combined to form the predictive model that worked in 85% of the instances. 

I am sure that the researchers would be the first to agree that more work needs to be done. As a former researcher I can see many potential confounding variable but, at the same time, the work looks promising.  They offer some practical applications. For example, a “system that prioritizes via tie strength, or allows users to tune parameters that incorporate tie strength, might provide more useful, timely and enjoyable activity streams.”

This is especially true as many people are building friends or followers that number in the hundreds, if not thousands. This would also apply within the enterprise as the use of social media within the firewall continues to grow.

 

Enterprise Search Summit 2010 Comes to NYC and KM World 2010 Moves to Washington DC

This year’s Enterprise Search Summit 2010 will be at the New York Hilton on May 11-12. The KM World Conference & Exhibition 2010 has moved to Washington, D.C. It will be November 16 - 18, 2010 at Marriott Renaissance,  It is nice to see these two conferences on the East Coast. I went last year in the November to the combined conference in San Jose.

Thierry Hubert and I will be presenting at the Enterprise Search Summit 2010. We are presenting on Deriving Order From Chaos Through Discovery and Awareness. Our session is on Wednesday May 12 at 1PM. The Enterprise Search Summit says that the “emphasis for Enterprise Search Summit is on how enterprise search enables Information Access. Search can no longer be viewed as a stand-alone application. It is increasingly part of everything we do and has become the de facto gateway to information in the enterprise.” I would certainly agree and we hope to see you there.

The KM World announcement said that this year's theme is KnowHow: the Knowledge-Driven Enterprise. “The knowledge of how to do something smoothly and efficiently with technical skill and expertise -- also known as "knowhow" -- drives every enterprise, agency, and organization. Creating knowledge bases, sharing them effectively, using them for decision-making and innovation.”

This sounds familiar but it is great that it is still very relevant. The session shave a 2.0 flavor like last year. I hope to be able to attend. Deadline for speaker submissions is March 1. Here are my notes from the combined event last year.

KM World and Enterprise Search Summit: Is Semantic Technology Real?

KM World and Enterprise Search Summit: Evolve From a Tactical E-Discovery Approach to Search and E-Discovery

KM World and Enterprise Search Summit: The Role of Social Techniques in Search & How It Impacts Your Organization

KM World and Enterprise Search Summit Sessions: From Birth to Billions: The Life Story of Google Enterprise Search

KM World and Enterprise Search Summit Sessions: Fundamentals of Enterprise Search

KM World and Enterprise Search Summit Sessions: Enterprise Search Technologies

Pivot is a New Way to Look at Data - TED Demo

Gary Flake recently demoed Pivot at TED.  It is a new way to browse and arrange massive amounts of images and data online. Built on Seadragon technology, it enables spectacular zooms in and out of web databases, and the discovery of patterns and links invisible in standard web browsing. Gary is a Technical Fellow at Microsoft, and the founder and director of Live Lab. He shows how you can take control over data to see trends that might be undiscovered otherwise.  For example, being able to see all Wikipedia pages related to a topic at once, allow you to see trends that are not contained in any single entry.

He said that with Pivot you can navigate the Web as if it is a Web and see relationships.  He talks about taking the curse of data overload and turning it on its head to take advantage of quantity to see the patterns within it. Here is Gary’s Pivot talk on TED.

Although we take a different approach this is exactly the goal of the Darwin Awareness Engine. Instead of bringing you long lists of content on topic that are order by popularity, we show the top 100 themes within the content that relates to your topic of interest.  We attempt to let you discover unexpected patterns, content, and relationships in this manner. 

Tracking the Buzz as TV Becomes More Social

Social Media is moving into television on an increasing basis and this will have a number of implications. This is the theme of a post by Tim Dillard on TheNextWeb: Will 2010 be the Year of Social TV?  For example, fans of certain TV shows from different time zones are saving the latest episodes of their favorite shows and then arranging common viewing times with their friends to watch the shows whilst discussing the action together on Skype,

The shows themselves are also launching efforts, sometimes with mixed results. In the UK, high profile post-apocalypse drama, BBC's 'Survivors', launched with stream of tweets from 'survivors'. They were supposedly trying to get messages out to a world in which most of the population had been wiped out by a mystery virus. However, the effort did not last. In another failed case, Fox tired integrating Twitter during reruns of sci-fi series 'Fringe' in the US. It got criticism almost immediately from the show's fans by swamping the screen with tweets from the cast and crew of the show, thus obscuring much of the action. Sounds like those tweets do blast you with multiple tweets in a row, except even worse.

It seems the most successful efforts so far are user generated. For example, with Twitter, real-time conversations about TV shows at the shows are broadcast live are linked together through the use of hashtags.  This is the same with online communities. The television shows will need to move better in this direction by listening to their viewers and being creative. 

One of the issues that comes up with this move is the ability to track the buzz around shows. The Darwin Awareness Engine™ provides one solution to this tracking issue. With its real time reach and the display of rising stars as buzz climbs, the Awareness Engine can help shows keep up with their buzz. 

 

Demand is Rising for TV Web Convergence

Rob Paterson recently did a post, TV and Radio and the web, where he reported some interesting survey data. The desire to hook up their TV to the Web is rising in US Internet users. In 2009, the percentage of US interest users that would like to hook up their TV to the Web:  ages 14-26 – 74%,, ages 27-43 – 71%, ages, 44-62 – 59%, and ages 63-75 – 46%. In talking with a number of people in their 20s and 30s, they say that they only watch TV in the OnDemand mode. I have tried this and it was a great way to watch and tape the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Concert.

Rob wrote that he has cancelled his cable access and has been connecting directly to the web for 2 months now. He writes that the reasons for doing this are: greater control, , no ads, no paying for unwanted content, and plenty of good Web TV content. Also the the pathways there – iTunes, Veoh, YouTube are good enough and getting better. He uses a simple mini connector on his MacBook to link to his TV set and uses the screen management feature to synch the screens. I can do the same on one of my TV sets, the one I purchased in 2009. Rob adds that in 2010 even these simple technical hurdles will go away.

Rob predicts that in 2011 the Web will be the channel for TV. Others have said it will happen in 2010. For example, eMarketer CEO Geoff Ramsey writes in his 2010 Predictions Round-Up, “The Consumer Electronics Show in early 2010 will usher in TVs with direct Internet connectivity, or with on-screen access to content portals such as YouTube, Blockbuster and Netflix. As online video becomes intertwined with the living-room TV experience, download and streaming services will take on a prominent role in the home entertainment ecosystem.”

I am looking forward to this as I watch Van Morrison’s live performance of Astral Weeks on my TV through DVD. It should only get better.  This convergence will only increase the amount of content generated through social media and develop new audiences for this content. At Darwin Ecosystems we eagerly await this trend as it will only increase the value that the Darwineco Awareness Engine™ can provide. 

Using Darwin’s Awareness Engine™ to Uncover Community Web Activity: Lou Dobbs Case

The Darwin Awareness Engine™ uses the concept of rising stars to bring forward terms that are receiving increasing attention in the target content areas. In this case we were looking at both informal media such as blogs and more traditional mainstream media.  

We noticed that Lou Dobbs started getting a lot of attention in the informal media.  Looking closer we could see that is was coming form the Latin-American community.  At the same time there was little mention of him in the mainstream media until a week later

The Latino community was organizing to demand Lou Dobbs resignation or firing from CNN for some very inappropriate comments. This discovery created a baseline to observe how the news spread and eventually grew to be covered in the mainstream media a full week later. In this case the Awareness Engine™ served both an early detection and provided the ability to monitor the story as it evolved. 

As many know Lou Dobbs did resign but the story does not stop here. What is the aftermath? What happens to the community that was organized to demand Lou Dobb’s resignation? Does it consolidate and grow its influence on the Web? These are questions that be monitored and tracked by the Awareness Engine.™ The coverage and conversations in both social media and mainstream media can be observed and compared. 

Monitoring and Measuring the Impact of Public Service Media Part Two: Addressing the Issues

In the last post we raised some of the ways that Public Service Media can support community through the Web. In this post we look at how Darwin’s Awareness Engine™ can help. First, we will look at data mining and awareness. The Awareness Engine™ collects Web events from both formal and informal sources, and correlates them with multi-dimensions to show occurring emerging patterns.  The basic interface provides the user with the benefits in the “Awareness and Discovery in Action” section.  The accumulation of this information provides a rich corpus for advanced trend analysis over time.  Special reports and alerts can be customized and developed as needed to meet different levels of monitoring and analysis.  Public Service Media programs can benefit from the measuring and monitoring of the evolution of a theme over time or dimension:

1.     tracking and measuring the impact of the Public Service Media programs’  actions in the community and/or the broader Web

2.     creating alerts based on significant variations within the designated  themes of interest and/or controversial spikes

3.     advancing analytics for pattern recognition and prediction

With these benefits, the Public Service Media programs have better awareness of critical themes to improve and mitigate their interaction within the community and the Web.  Furthermore it provides them with better planning for subsequent and follow-up programs, which become more target-specific and identifiable.

The Awareness Engine™ can also help empower community leaders.  Similarly to the Public Service Media team, the community leader/s can gain greater awareness from the technology.  This access can generate more relevant content, but also engage more community leaders to participate as a valuable resource towards their community thanks to the Public Service Media.   A key benefit is that the elevation of awareness will generate more content from the community, thus leaving the PSM neutral in the emergence of community issues.   Our next post will cover an example of how Darwin’s Awareness Engine™ can uncover community Web activity before it hits the mainstream press. 

Monitoring and Measuring the Impact of Public Service Media Part One: Defining the Issues

A new breed of dialogue amongst communities is possible with the Internet and Public Service Media can play an important role documenting and supporting this effort.  This dialogue can be intentionally coordinated for a known purpose or it can emerge out of a shared event or awareness.   These new conversations range from known issues, to emerging and ephemeral bursts that can reach a tipping point capable of having a positive or negative effect for the concerned community in question, but also into other supporting or antagonistic actors or communities. The recent effort by the Latino community organized through a Web site to sanction Lou Dobbs is a good example that I will explore in more depth in a later post.

Considering that the information used by a community for support or dialogue can be found in different sources, it is important to understand the core issues and needs of this community when using Web technologies.  Given that some of its members might be active information and support providers, one must be aware that the relevant content for this community can emerge from anywhere.  As such, it is important, before interfering with the community’s use of their Social Web, to take a baseline measurement of the current pulse within the known sources and those that are far reaching but correlated

Darwin Ecosystem provides a Web Discovery and Awareness Engine™ that collects information from formal and informal sources, and displays the emergence of themes within the targeted content that relates to the topics of interest.  This approach does not depend on the search engines’ popularly page ranking, thus, importantly, it can display in near-real-time the emergence of a Web movement from fresh information across multiple sources on one screen without scrolling through pages of results.  It is also not subject to manipulation by search engine optimization (SEO) experts.  Furthermore, trends can be analyzed from the collected information to observe the progress of a theme and its associated topics (monitoring the pulse through time and the impact of an event on a community’s topic of interest).

Darwin’s Discovery and Awareness Engine™ provides valuable real-time information about the technology savvy level of the community, and other sources addressing them directly, or even related topics unbeknownst to them.  These sources display, with Darwin, the themes of interest where the program team can target its attention and discover opportunities for actions and/or further inquiries.

Awareness and discovery are cognitive and intimate processes that are best experienced by a user facing recognizable information that might validate his/her perception, or capture the attention when unexpected information is observed in a familiar context.

Public Service Media program can benefit from:

1.   identifying key sources and Web-active community members

2.   targeting investigative reporting

3.   engaging communities in constructive interaction

4.    observing the dynamics of leading theme over time

5.    observing the impact of Public Service Media actions of the communities

With these benefits, the Public Service Media programs become a catalyst for community empowerment, thus accelerating a successful social integration whilst monitoring and mitigating the risk of extreme movements and stereotypes. In my next post I will look at some of the ways that the Darwin Awareness Engine™ can address these issues.

The Future of Publishing/Media and Web Analytics

Last week I attended the the Webtrends Engage event in New Orleans. I sat in on the Future of Publishing/Media Panel. As this is topic we often cover on this blog I want to share my notes. The local newspaper, the Tines Picayune, was running front page stories on the upcoming Supper Bowl everyday this week. On Monday the paper had a letter to the city of Miami to help them better prepare for Saints fans. The first point was to order more beer. Today they provided a very useful section on Mardi Gras. I wish I could stay.

This panel on newspapers and other traditional media covers a topic that I have been writing about a good bit on this blog. Here is an excerpt from the panel description: “The 100 year plus industry has hemorrhaged profitability and good, talented people, and been forced to re-evaluate its entire business model. The Internet as a whole has started to progress beyond the two-way Web and into a real-time Web, and content producers no matter how big or small, must be ready to deploy measurement models to help make relevant content publishing decisions and in turn drive ad revenue.“

The speakers include: Sam Whitmore (moderator), Alan Citron (Buzzmetrics), Lewis Vorkin (True Slant), and Paul Berry (Huffington Post).

Sam is the founder and editor of Sam Wittmore’s Media Survey.  He pointed out how the Web has made us all potential publishers.  The panel discussed the role of analytics in the publishing world.

Alan said that one of the things you have to master as a startup is analytics, You have to pick carefully with the budget of a startup. They primarily look at macrotrends. They have 40 sites and need to look over all of them. They cluster their sites where commonalities might apply.  They are now experimenting to make their middle pages like mini-home pages to keep people there and to attract ads placed there.  Mobile is important but determining how to monetize mobile is still an issue.

The Huffington Post recently passed the Washington Post, the LA Times and the Wall Street Journal in number of readers. When Pual started three years ago they only had Sitemetter – a free primitive tool I used to use for this blog They were underfunded at the time for their goals so they had to be careful. They built some tools themselves. Now they can see how they are doing on an hourly basis and everyone is addicted to these stats.  He said that tools need to be intuitive so everyone can use them and not just a few experts. 

Paul said they look at the stories and what people care about to support optimization.  They also constantly test features to see what headlines work better by putting up different combinations and making adjustments.  These efforts are improving their bounce rate.  This constant attention and adjustments of place and titles by editors stands in stark contrast to the print newspaper editors who decide once and day and throw stuff on your step with few ways to see what you do with the paper.

Paul said they are looking for brave brands for ads. They have applied sentiment analysis of their comments to give themselves and brands a better picture of what is happening and how engagement is working. To keep people on the site they have business in the front and party stuff in the back. The back pages get a lot of traffic. I know this myself as I have been tempted to go back for the party stuff after going to the front page for a more serious news story.

Paul said that people love thumbnails and good headlines. They try to use these to get people exploring their site. He also said that they believe in the scroll. You do not need to be above the fold on a Web page but rather in the story. Paul said they support mobile devices and the analytics with mobile is similar. They are spending a lot of time looking at how their stories look on mobile. This places a strain on the organization to be constantly checking this.

Lewis has over 300 member journalists on True Slant. He went from traditional media to AOL several years ago. At AOL data was important but they did not have the right data. Then he moved on to found Trueslant to support traditional journalists to move into digital publishing. These journalists did not know about the data possibilities in digital. You need to take advantage of the data that is now available They cannot build these analytics tools themselves although they did some of this at first. Lewis said that page views are not useful. The real metrics are more like time spent, comments, repeat commentors, Coming up with right metrics and seeing then constantly is the key,

Forbes Media is one of the investors in his firm and they can bring in CMOs for discussion sessions. At a recent event all the CMOs wanted to talk about was social media. Measuring social media is an important next step. Research into a viewer’s path is key but hard to do.  Mobile is the future of news but they have not gone there yet. Lewis agreed with Alan that there remain monetization issues with digital.

This was useful session. The Huffington Post example certainly shows the power of making good use of the data available with digital media. We have written here how traditional media needs to get more creative as they respond to social media. Analytics is a necessity in this effort. 

The Power of Visualization and Real Time Data

 Last week I attended the the Webtrends Engage event in New Orleans. I want to share with you one session that relates to one of our concerns at Darwin. Ben Cerveny of Stamen Design spoke on Real Time Data and the Power of Visualization.  before I go there I want to share an image that I felt was a greta visualization. The city is very proud of their New Orleans Saints football team that is going to the Super Bowl for the first time in the 43 years of playing here. On the left is an American flag Saints style that I saw here in the Uptown area. While the colors are not exactly the same as this blog, they do go with it. 

Ben labeled his talk, Shapes in the Cloud. His company is a boutique design firm in San Franciso. He talked about how data visualization affects both the front and back end of data. Webtrends also actively supports innovation on both ends.

Ben went through a series of their projects, beginning with a virtual town hall for Moveon.org. in 2004.  Moveon.org wanted to invite guests to talk about the political issues in the 2004 US election. They wanted some visualization to support the audio on the web site. You logged into the site with your zip code. You would then see a map and see the participants by location. This gave you a sense of the audience. It was dynamic so you could bee to progression of attendees and see the growth.

Next, you could see results from polls related to the speakers. The data would change as the results rolled in, again in the map format so you continued to get a sense of community. This showed the dynamic aspects of data as a medium. Ben said that data can be a mirror and people and communities can use to see more about themselves.

Next, Ben talked about their work with Digg In 2006.  Digg is one of the top news aggregation sites. Ben’s firm formed a partner ship with Digg, to create a site called Digg Labs to show visualizations and the dynamics of interactions.  He showed a display where stories and their supporters are displayed. You can see the evolution of voting patterns. If people vote for more than one story you can see the connections. This visualization is still playing at digglabs.com. These and other visualization show the dynamics of the Digg community and the evolution of stories. You see the explosion of votes as popular stories break. Stack is another digglabs visualization that shows the pattern of story votes over time.

Ben’s firm also did a visual hurricane tracker for MSNBC. The visualization simultaneously shows the effects over time, as well as the present status.  You can drill down from the high level view to get details. There is the live version and the historic version. Both are still live at MSNBC.com./hurricanetracker  You can parse the data to see only level 5 hurricanes, for example. You can patterns of movement.

Trulia Hindsight shows historic views of home construction. Trulia has access to data from tax assessments in the US. You can se the patterns of development as a city emerges. He showed parts of San Francisco from 1848 to 2003 so you can see how the city grew. The process of creating the visualization helped the Trulia data people to better understand what was within their data.

Ben next talked about Crimespotting in Oakland. This project shows where crimes occur in Oakland. They took data form the city web site and then rebuild how it is visualized to make it more understandable. They did this as test case. You can see when crimes happen, as well as where. You can parse the data by different dimensions such as time of day.

The last project is SFMOMA ArtScope to provide immersive art browsing. For the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, they put the entire catalog from the museum into a site. They made it into a slippery map format (like Google Maps) that allows you to move over images. You can see paintings as they were acquired over time. You can the patterns of collection. I wish the Boston MFA had this application.

Ben and his firm do some very creative work that does demonstrate the power of good visualizations. 

YouTube Video on Social Media Revolution

Here is great video full of data on the impact of social media. Facebook would be the fourth largest country in the world, the top Twitter people have more followers than many countries and 24 of the top 25 newspaper have had significant decreases in circulation.  The video itself has had well over a million viewers so far and will likely gain many more soon. 

Initial Thoughts on Apple's iPad

Where to begin about the iPad? The name? the iPhone OS? ATT? No camera? Lack of interconnectivity? Storage? USB? Lack of ingenuity perhaps?... and the list goes on. I will not repeat what every one has said on the Web and the press. It is now very obvious that Apple disappointed its fan-base with a lack of vision and absence of revolutionary thinking. It seems they lost their magic on that one, and the hype that they created is now hurting them.

I am sure that they will recover. Now all the competitors are going to try to move quickly... and of course this is good for users and innovation. This time I am sure that innovators were overrun by business people who had their fingers in iTunes’ store, ATT and new imaginative ways to perform consumer cashectomies. To add insult to injury, Apple saw the writing on the wall as every day we saw emerge what the users, experts and developers expected to make this a great breakthrough. The iPad is an ideal case study of the failure to leverage Web communities to create a product that meets and exceeds expectations; this should go in the business book of what not to do in the age of information sharing. Apple lost over 4% when the market closed today.

Now let’s innovate Apollo13-style. What can, after all, I use this iPad for? It’s a screen, it can be programmed, it can access data, it responds to my touch, it’s feels good to hold, and it is an oversized iPod. Now what? It’s all about the apps. Regardless of the eBooks, movies, pictures, email, games.... this iPad opens a new world of applications for very specific and unexpected use. I think we will see more business applications come out of the iPad than the iPhone simply because business applications are process-driven and need to show more screen real-estate than a phone.

But it will not be so easy for organizations to think outside the box considering that today’s applications need to be ubiquitous to the enterprise standards. So who will use them? In my opinion it will be defined according to roles and functions instead of an homogeneous platform requirement (after all the data access is/should be supported by server services and not applications themselves; review your IT director’s compensation if that is not the case ;-). I can imagine CEOs and executives changing their reports and dashboards for iPad applications that provide them with more mobile and instinctive interactions, medical personnel using the iPad for charting instead of nurse-station or bedside computers, and many other specific uses that the iPhone was too small to do efficiently.

I also see new opportunities for information consumption models that involve visual representation of shared and/or large amount of information that require more tactile interactions than retyping a search query or browsing pages and pages of results before discovering what matters to the user. . But, maybe I am being optimistic.

Yes I am disappointed by Apple’s iPad limitations, but I am interested in the potential it offers for developers and innovators alike. Apple has proven time and again what it can do. That’s what it needs to remember today as the critics speak

Changes in Media Consumption: TV Rises in Popularity, Unlike NewsPapers, While Mobile Devices Also Move Up

Television does not appear to be suffering the same way as its older mainstream media cousin, the newspaper. Deloitte’s 2009 “State of the Media Democracy” survey reports a 26 percent increase in the Americans choosing TV as their favorite type of media compared to the previous year. This is likely influenced by the recession. More than 70 percent of those surveyed rank watching TV in their top three favorite media activities. When ranked alongside activities such as surfing the Web, listening to music or reading, 34 percent of consumers place it at the top. This is a substantial increase from last year and more than double those selecting the number two choice, the Web, which came in at 14 percent. 

When watching their favorite TV shows, 86 percent of respondents prefer watching on their television set, either live, via their DVR/TiVo, or using an “On Demand” feature.  While less than 10 percent of Americans say they prefer watching the same content online, a growing number of consumers are using online platforms to watch their favorite TV shows. 

Consumers are watching close to 18 hours of television programming on their home TV in a typical seven day week — up notably from less than 16 hours last year. Looking at the interest in TV – Web convergence, 65 percent of respondents would like to be able to easily connect their home TV to the Internet so that they can view videos or downloaded content. This is a significant trend that has gained strength over the last three years. Of course, the reverse could occur with more TV on computers.  A move in this direction would allow for more search and data mining capabilities.

The study also looked at mobile device use. One-third of surveyed consumers use their mobile phone as an entertainment device and 47 percent of smart phone owners identify the device as one of their three most valuable media and entertainment products — a significant increase from 20 percent last year. I certainly use my iPhone as an entertainment device as much as a mobile phone.

The Deloitte survey also indicates that mobile phone use is rapidly separating the Internet experience from the desktop for almost half of the population.  Forty-eight percent of those surveyed have data plans for their mobile phones and 42 percent are using their phones to access the Internet. The report suggests that this decoupling is expected to facilitate new consumer behavior including mobile search, social networking and purchasing.

The most popular mobile activities, according to the survey include: text messaging (72 percent), accessing the Internet (42 percent), online search (30 percent), downloading applications (27 percent) and using GPS (26 percent).

The report also looked at advertising. TV still holds strong here with 83 percent of consumers identifying TV advertising as one of the top three media with the most impact on their buying decisions.  In the online world, over half of all U.S. consumers believe that online customer reviews and ratings influence their buying decisions more than any other type of online advertising, and 51 percent have purchased products based on an online recommendation. In addition, 24 percent of U.S. consumers would like to have an online service that recommends a product based on other consumers’ preferences.

Social networking continues to rise. According to the survey, one-quarter of U.S. consumers are socializing online almost every day and nearly 60 percent currently maintain a social networking site, up from 48 percent last year. The connections maintained over social networks provide powerful sources for trusted recommendations.  The content generated through social networking provides a rich source for understanding the collective mindset of consumers. A tool such as Darwin’s Awareness Engine (TM) can help understand the themes emerging from these conversations and discover the unexpected. 

Bob Stepno's Other Journalism Blog

I have written about 50 top journalism blogs and here is another list of 91 Journalism Blogs and Websites You Will Love that I found from Bob Stepno through Twitter.  In this post I want to bring your attention to Bob’s own  Other Journalism Blog where he discusses online journalism. It is an excellent resource. I have known Bob since the early days of the Berkman blog group. Bob now teaches journalism, media studies, digital culture, and Web production at Radford University in Virginia. 

Bob provides useful coverage of the recent of Editor & Publisher. This publication was a trade journal for the newspaper industry,” which, Bob writes, “in recent years has made it a chronicle of the industry’s decline, while juggling its own print and online editions.” Bob writes about the need to preserve E&P’s archive for journalism historians and offers links to other coverage.

There is a nice post on the online, ‘cross-generational’ features of the new PBS NewsHour.  This is another creative combination of old and new media.  PBS merged broadcast and digital staffs in an expanded newsroom, with part of the goal to provide reporting, “that is cross-generational, diverse and dynamic.” They have also created a partnership with GlobalPost, a Boston-based network of international correspondents already online as http://globalpost.com. Bob mentions that, Hari Sreenivasan, a major part of the broadcast/Web crossover, will write a news commentary blog that will share links to primary source documents so that viewers can make up their own minds about stories. This is a nice old-new media combination feature. There is more about out how the online and broadcast operations are being reorganized by Anna Shoup, local/national editor of the program at her PBS MediaShift blog.

 

 

Social Media is Breaking Down the Google-Gutenberg Dam on Content

Here is an interesting post by Aaron Kahlow. He writes about the information curation potential of social media in his post, 2010: Social Media Removes the Dam of Gutenberg-Google. We certainly agree with his message.

Aaron begins with the effect of the printing press. It certainly opened up content distribution way beyond what the monks doing hand written work could accomplish. However, it established new controls over what content got out. You still needed to have the resources to set up a printing press, print and distribute works.

Now we have the Web and you might think the dam is broken. In one sense it has, as there are very few barriers to getting content out on the Web. In 2008 there was more content created than in the entire prior history.  The trick is finding this content, especially the quality stuff. This is where Google has both helped and created a new bottleneck. As Aaron writes, “With only 10+ organic results and a similar number of paid results, consumers will only find content they seek in those 20 places -- with less than 20 percent being relevant as it relates to information they seek.” For example a search on “green card” will get you a lot of services that want to charge you money for what the US government does for free.

Aaron goes on to comment that social media can help break this new dam. Now we can “get good information through tweets of those we follow, Facebook Sharing, and from others within our networks who are usually connected online. We have a new discovery outlet and a new way to find stories, whether mainstream or from an unknown blogger. We find things based on recommendations of trusted colleagues, friends, etc.”  This is how I found Aaron’s post.

Peter Cashmore raises a similar point in his predictions for 2010 than we commented on earlier (see Reflecting on Peter Cashmore's Web Trends to Watch in 2010). Peter wrote that, “The Web's biggest challenge of recent years is that content creation is outpacing our ability to consume it: "Information overload" has become an increasingly common complaint… In 2008, the answer revealed itself: Your friends are your filter… Increasingly, your friends are becoming the curators of your consumption.”  I certainly agree here and Twitter has served this role for me.  Much of what I write about on my blogs comes from my Twitter friends, including the link to Peter Cashmore’s predictions.

Aaron offers some good points to make effective use fo social media to get your content out. Instead of having to contact a prominent journalist to write a story about your company, you can use your own channels such as blogs to consistently write good content worth tweeting and sharing.
 You can also leverage your own social networks to start sharing content. 
These are all reasons that we write this blog and participate in Twitter and other social media.

Darwin Ecosystem Awareness Engine™ is designed to address this issue of finding relevant quality content without having to go through the filter of Google or other search engines. Unlike Google, it does not decide what content is most relevant but rather lays out the content related to your topic of interest in clusters of themes and lets you explore what themes interest you. (see: A Comparison of Google Web Search and the Darwin Awareness Engine™). 

Darwin allows you to become your own curator for topics of your interest. You can also go beyond this to act as a curator for friends or colleagues You can set attractors on your topics of interest: people, places, concepts, and more. Then you can see what emerges. This can be especially valuable for niche areas. You can create your own online magazine. It can cover a much greater array of source than Google News and it will show the relationships between news items that emerge rather than simply displaying them. You can adjust your filters to further focus you’re your curation efforts. We see content curation as one of the major applications for the Darwin Awareness Engine™.

I like Aaron's conclusion about the effect of social media, "In the end, the winner is content. Good content, sharable content, and consumer-driven content will allow us all to have a broader spectrum of information and, for the marketer, an easier way to connect with their base." We hope to contribute to this outcome. 

The Top 10 Trends for the 2010s from Ross Dawson

Here in another interesting list on what to expect in 2010 but it extends to the decade.  Ross Dawson posted his top 10 trends for the 2010s and called it the most exciting decade in human history. We will focus on the first two in this post as they relate to the Darwin Awareness Engine’s (TM) mission.

The first trend is Information Intensity. Ross wrote that, “we will soon consume more media than there are waking hours, by virtue of multi-channeling at most times. Billions of people and places will be media producers, including video streaming from most points of view on the world. We are just at the dawn of an incomprehensible daily onslaught of news and information – some valuable, much useless.’

The topic of information overload has been around for some time, probably since the first enhances to communication technology thousands of years ago. But now with all the user generated content it takes on new meaning. More content was created through social media in 2008 than in all of prior history.  The Awareness Engine helps you find what is relevant to your topics of interest and then lets you decide where to focus within these topics. You do not have to know what you are looking for as in traditional search.

The second trend, Intelligence, is a partial remedy to the first. Ross wrote that while we are swamped by information, “we are now creating a collective intelligence that will filter and respond to what is worthwhile. Reputation measures will drive who we meet, do business with, and date. Machine translation will enable the people of the planet to communicate…”

Darwin offers another way to harness the collective intelligence. Instead of using reputation measures, it looks at relevance and correlation.  Reputation, pioneered by Google, is useful but it can be spammed and it tends to promote the already popular, rather than the unexpected, but useful.  Instead of waiting for linking to occur, the Awareness Engine looks at what is emerging in real time that is relevant to your topics of interest. It does not replace reputation measures but offers an alternative.

Peter Cashmore offered a similar prediction about how your friends will serve as filters for content. Instead of indirectly through reputation, he noted the more direct methods available through channels such as Twitter and Facebook. Darwin allows you to also become your own curator or producer of filters. You can set attractors on your topics of interest: people, places, concepts, and more. Then you can see what emerges. This can be especially valuable for niche areas. You can create your own online magazine.

Ross also offered 10 TENsions That Will Define 2010. One was on a topic we have frequently covered here, Death of Media – Birth of Media. Ross wrote,
”Literally hundreds of newspapers around the world have shut their doors in 2009. Broadcast TV is struggling. Advertising has slumped. Yet as traditional media staggers, a new world of mobile media, social media, video everywhere, and new business models are opening a new era in which media is at the center of the economy.” We would add that traditional media can survive if it learns to make creative use of the new media and not simply try to port old methods to the new media.  Examples include, Radio’s Air America, New York Times, and Los Angeles Times.

Information Awareness and Discovery for Life Sciences and Pharmaceutical Companies

Success for lIfe sciences and pharmaceutical companies is often associated with their ability to manage knowledge transition and information sharing. This is especially true as as they deal with the challenges of many recent mergers in the industry.  The segregated systems where the departments’ collaborative efforts are stored represent a significant barrier to business continuation and leveraging knowledge.  As system integration analysis and process streamlining efforts struggle to unify these systems, the companies are losing precious time to better manage their R&D, clinical trials, and manufacturing, all the while  ensuring efficient CRO and CMO monitoring relationships.

Considering that these companies are knowledge intensive, it is critical for them to improve R&D productivity.  However, the increasing complexity of information systems and the increasing amount of semi-structured collaborative technologies increases the level of information overload, growing work flow complexity, and knowledge isolation through diverse communication and storage tools.

These companies’ organizational models are in the perpetual struggle of managing rigorous processes and needing to be flexible and organic in their structure. 

Mastering knowledge in a timely manner is key to their evolution and discovery processes.  This is why Darwin Ecosystem takes a different approach to accelerating information consumption by breaking the silos of knowledge to allow for meaningful discovery.  Our technology aggregates the information made accessible through simple syndication channels (RSS) and correlates it to deliver an awareness experience according to the user’s context of interest.  This  presentation, known as a Scan Cloud, immediately  displays what is happening across the organization’s departments by outlining correlated clusters and dimension classes that make it easy to grasp what is happening and direct attention  to the information of interest.

Darwin’s Awareness Engine is designed to evolve with the company and its users, and it can process new sources on demand, thus adding to your corpus of correlated information.  There  is no need for complex dashboards, strenuous process analysis and complex system integration.  All that is required is to make the content available to the service as an RSS feed.   Darwin’s Awareness Engine will correlate the content as it comes.  The experience can also be enhanced by customizing the taxonomy according to the company’s cultures and context. Darwin provides an awareness of what is d going both inside and outside the organization so that emerging themes do not get lost in silos.

Illustrations:

The following illustrates a correlation from mainstream media and blogs the morning of December 14, 2009.  The Scan Cloud™ show the connections between the emerging events associated with the Monsanto company.  A selection of on the Monsanto key word further filtered the sources and allowed for social media content to emerge as seen in the second screen capture.  The selected blog entry reveals a criticism of Monsanto. 

 

Best iPhone Apps from O’ Reilly

 We are all iPhone users at Darwin Ecosystems. O’Reiilly sent me their book,Best iPhone Apps for review and I think it is a great resource. I reviewed it with an experienced iPhone user, my Darwin colleague, Thierry Hubert, who agreed with their picks while he was helping me set up my iPhone. Since there are over 50,000 iPhone apps to choose from, a little help is appreciated. Thierry really liked their picks and said he was going to get a copy of the book.

I really liked the format and the picks seem to make sense. There are quite a few useful categories and easy to follow format. I marked Air Mouse Control as a remote for presentations. Thierry said he uses it as well as Yelp for local dining recommendations. The book recommends Twitterrific for our favorite micro-messaging tool and Thierry agrees. Shazam allows your to let the phone listen to a tune and name it. Thierry says it works and George Dearing also tweeted to me that he got it to work. The there is Flight Track Pro for tracking flights. This will be useful to know when to pick up my wife at the airport.

I highly recommend the book. What iPhone apps do you use and recommend?

The Rise of Social Media Directors at Mainstream News

Dirk Smillie wrote in Journalism's Hottest Job at Forbes.com that there are now about 200 social media directors at newspapers, book publishers, magazines and television news stations. Most started in the last two years. He writes that, “Rarely offline, their job is to tweet, ping, blog and friend-find throughout the day, building and interacting with new audiences, promoting media brands and sometimes breaking news.”  We have been covering the relationship of social media and mainstream news for a bit (see The Misplaced Fear of the Mainstream Media and Here is a Creative Blend of Mainstream Media and Social Media).

Dirk goes on to question whether simply tweeting the news is a money maker. He points out that most newspaper RSS feeds don't carry ads; neither do blog posts or tweets that break news and adds that Lynn D. Johnson, senior vice president for social media at the Advertising Research Foundation, says news organizations aren't earning "anything significant" from social media. This is where the mainstream news needs to get creative. They should not simply reproduce the old media content in the new media. For example, social media can be a useful means to drive traffic to your regular, ad laden channel. A Seattle TV station took over the top TV news ratings spot when its news staff tweeted to establish a better connection to their audience.

Dirk concludes his post with a quote from Woody Lewis: "Whether news organizations believe in its potential to make money or not, they see the train leaving the station and don't want to get left behind. They know that social media is where users want to be." Woody writes the blog, "Save the Papers," which debates how mainstream media can use social media to survive. They certainly need to be more creative in how they broadcast their content with all the new options open. They need to lead readers and viewers to revenue producing channels as well as add revenue to the new channels.

There is another way that mainstream media can use social media. They can better mine it for breaking news and trends. Using the Darwin Awareness Engine ™ we observed a few weeks ago that social media was all over the Lou Dobbs story at least a week before the mainstream media.  Social media creates a vast amount of interesting content. For example, as early as 2005 news people were turning to bloggers for story ideas.  The Awareness Engine can provide greater control and flexibility over how you mine this data. 

Webcom 09: La Peur Mal Placée des Médias Traditionnels

Ceci est une translation en français d’un blog Webcom 09: The Misplaced Fear of the Mainstream Media publié récemment afin d’atteindre les communautés de langue française et anglaise qui s'intéressent aux moteurs de découverte et de veille sur internet.

Un sujet central au récent événement Webcom 2009 fut celui de la crainte de voir les médias traditionnels perdre leur position de leader au profit des media sociaux.

La seule réalité que la consommation de l’information se déplace vers un dialogue sur l’internet oblige les médias traditionnels à entrer en concurrence avec ce qu’ils qualifient de contenus non vérifiés et par conséquent pas digne de confiance. En d’autres termes, on assiste à une nouvelle démonstration de leur difficulté à distinguer entre les contenus non vérifiés et la sagesse collective. J’ai souvent entendu de la part de ces médias traditionnels les commentaires suivants: “ Comment les gens peuvent-ils lire des commentaires aussi pauvres et invérifiables?” “ Notre mission est de fournir des contenus de qualité qui sont de loin plus solides.”

Les fournisseurs de contenus formels restent convaincus que sans leur production contrôlée, les gens auraient une vision déformée et s’appuieraient plus sur des opinions que sur des faits avérés. On peut comprendre leur point de vue. Si les gens acceptent l’information issue du media social comme une vérité validée, ils auraient raison….

Et pourtant, n’est-ce pas ce que nous faisions déjà? Le simple fait que les opinions et les discussions soient transposées de l’oral vers l’écrit ne change rien par rapport au risque de désinformation. Face à l’information, indépendamment de sa source, les gens modifient, fabriquent et adoptent leur propre point de vue en fonction de leur réseau social, qu’il soit physique ou via l’internet. La bataille n’est donc pas du formel contre l’informel, mais plutôt du comment les fournisseurs de contenu formel écoutent et participent au dialogue.

J’ai aussi été amusé en entendant les médias traditionnels et les grandes sociétés du media remettre en question la valeur du media social et de son contenu. Ces sociétés dépensent des fortunes en études marketing pour étudier les tendances, avec des analyses de type voo-doo, et qui regardent dans le rétroviseur l’impact des campagnes précédentes afin d’influencer la suivante. La chose amusante est qu’ils ont religieusement appliqué cette méthode pour mesurer les opinions et les appréciations des consommateurs pour mieux les attirer, et pourtant ils s’inquiètent du volume de contenu créé par ces mêmes personnes qu’ils essaient de comprendre et d’anticiper par croisement d’analyses. Quelqu’un peut il me pincer?

La perception qui doit changer n’est pas celle des gens, mais celle des sociétés des médias qui ont un comportement bien plus féodal car elles craignent de perdre leur pouvoir. Je pense que la réflexion de Thomas W. Malone en 2004 The Future of Work sur la transformation du modèle d’affaires est encore plus vraie aujourd’hui à la lumière du challenge auquel font face les médias traditionnels. Mais les médias traditionnels sont-ils capables de conduire de façon distribuée les délibérations et la création de contenu avec l’émergence d’une sagesse écrite des foules.

La possibilité d’avoir accès à des communications écrites en temps réel a changé les concepts de lecteurs et d’audience. C’est devenu un dialogue! Et de ce point de vue, l’industrie des médias est transformée à jamais. Les médias traditionnels doivent repenser leur relation avec leur clients (oui, clients puisqu’ils ne sont plus passifs lecteurs). Ils ont besoin de se recentrer sur leur coeur de métier et valeurs d’une information vérifiée ou validée, et d’atteindre un nouveau niveau qui préservera leur intégrité alors que leurs hypothèses sur les cycles de vie d’une information sont en train de changer. Certains comprendront que leur processus de gestion du business est leur ennemi et qu’ils doivent en créer de nouveaux.

Les sociétés des médias se perdent dans leur tentative de devenir elles aussi une destination du media social, plutôt que de se concentrer sur leurs forces et atouts. Elles prennent le risque de devenir des suiveurs de la révolution des médias au lieu d’essayer d’en être les leaders ou les champions des sources validées et digne de confiance. Il me semble qu’ils font une grave erreur en essayant de rattraper une tendance plutôt que de songer à innover et devenir les propres acteurs de leur transformation.

Je vous invite à lire le post de mon collègue Bill Ives qui a été publié récemment à propos de  What killed the Rocky Mountain News comme un exemple de média traditionnel qui n’a pas été capable de résister à la montée du média social. Dans cette session, l'ancien journaliste John Temple a dit que les journaux ont besoin de passer plus de temps à innover, et pas seulement essayer d’accroitre leur Chiffre d’Affaires avec des versions en ligne de ce qu’ils ont déjà fait ou publié.

Reflecting on Peter Cashmore’s Web Trends to Watch in 2010

Peter Cashmore, CEO at Mashable recently provided 10 Web trends to watch in 2010 to CNN. They all seem likely but I want to focus on four that relate to Darwin Ecosystems Awareness Engine™: real-time ramps up, content 'curation,' cloud computing, and fame abundance, privacy scarcity.

Peter commented that, “sparked by Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed, the real-time trend has been to the latter part of 2009 what "Web 2.0" was to 2007. The term represents the growing demand for immediacy in our interactions. Immediacy is compelling, engaging, highly addictive ... it's a sense of living in the now.”  Darwin’s Awareness Engine™ allows you to set the time frame you sample for relevant content. It operates in the immediacy of real time and can go back to the last few hours, days or weeks.  You can see what is emerging and where it is emerging. For example, the talk about Lou Dobbs’ actions a few weeks ago first emerged on the informal media of blogs before it appeared on the mainstream media.  By looking separately at informal and formal media we could see the hot topics on each.  Often the topics on informal media are predictors of what soon will hit the mainstream.

Peter wrote that, “The Web's biggest challenge of recent years is that content creation is outpacing our ability to consume it: "Information overload" has become an increasingly common complaint… In 2008, the answer revealed itself: Your friends are your filter… Increasingly, your friends are becoming the curators of your consumption.”  I certainly agree here and Twitter has served this role for me.  Much of what I write about on my blogs comes from my Twitter friends, including the link to Peter Cashmore’s predictions. Darwin allows you to also become your own curator. You can set attractors on your topics of interest: people, places, concepts, and more. Then you can see what emerges. This can be especially valuable for niche areas. You can create your own online magazine. It can cover a much greater array of source than Google News and it will show the relationships between news items that emerge rather than simply displaying them. You can adjust your filters to further focus you’re your curation efforts. We see content curation as one of the major applications for the Darwin Awareness Engine™.

Peter added that, “Cloud computing was very much a buzzword of 2009, but there's no doubt this transition will continue.” We are a cloud application.

Finally, Peter wrote that, “Warhol was right: Fame is now abundant. Social media has birthed a galaxy of stars in thousands of niches: We're all reality stars now, on Facebook, Twitter and all the myriad online outlets where we hone our personal brands.” With Darwin we have the feature of rising stars and fading stars. You can see what topics are merging on the general Web or within you niche. You can also see the topics that are fading in importance.  These results are not based on popularity and are hard to push in spammy ways. The importance is based on the substance of the content itself and how it relates to other content within the target area, the whole Web or your subset.

We are excited about Peter’s predictions for 2010 and look forward to the potential of playing a role within them. 

Google and Yahoo Turning to Specialized Search

I have discussed specialized search a bit (for example, see: Will Yahoo's Changing Search Strategy Cause it to Pick Up Niche Services?) Yahoo is not the only mover in this direction. As reported by Venture Beat, Google is planning to launch a music search service with music sites Lala and MySpace-owned iLike, according to multiple reports.

The article states that with this new service, you╒ll be able to search for a musician, then play songs streamed from partner sites like Lala and iLike. CNET describes the goal as providing ╥everything a music fan may need when searching online for a favorite artist,╙ while TechCrunch says the pages will be modeled on Google╒s results for public company searches.

It goes on to add that this sounds like a smart move for both Google and the music companies, giving Google a cool new service without requiring the search giant to host the music or strike deals with the record labels on its own, while bringing more exposure to Lala and iLike.

We certainly agree and feel that specialized search services are one of the next major directions with search. The Google page rank approach has been around for some time. It keeps getting refined but you can take it only so far.  It was a huge improvement over what was available. But you still get many false positives and lots of stuff to shift through. Specialized search can get you there faster. 

Darwin offers both an alternative to the Page Rank approach but it also allows you to set your own level of specialization. You can search on a general basis like Google or set a very focused attractor and specify the area within the Web that you want to focus. It can be formal or informal. 

Paul Sagan Predicts TV Survival Means Hyper-Local Coverage Online

The MediaPost recently reported that Akamai Technologies CEO Paul Sagan warns that television is about to experience the equivalent of the Big Bang, Akamai Technologies facilitates more than one-fifth of the world's Web traffic so they have a good view on the subject. What will cause this transformation? The article states that, “the ability to match high-def TV picture quality with Internet interactivity is creating a sea change for online video that will begin rippling through the television industry in 2010. Only TV station owners that leap to the new arena, playing the strength of their hyper-local connections, will survive.” Otherwise they will feel the same big impact form the Web that music and print have felt.

I am reminded of a past transformation in news coverage when the telegraph first appeared, the news outlets of the day came together to form the Associated Press to capitalize on the new technology and share its promise.  It does not seem that a similar event will happen here. Now it is everyone for themselves.

Traditional television content producers and distributors that are among Akamai's deep client base are in peril according to Sagan. The audiences for this content are rapidly moving to the Web. The article goes on to report that, “too many broadcasters are obsessing about cannibalizing their content instead of using the efficiency and convenience of interactivity to expand their local power base. While increasing numbers of TV stations are going online with real-time and on-demand local news, sports and other live events, they do not have the interactive online advertising in place to fully monetize their content.”

This sounds like what happen to the Rocky Mountain News.  There is a way out. Television content producers can take advantage of the ability of the Web to address the long tail of specialized content.  The large players are global and generic. Sagan says that “the window is still open for broadcasters to create long- and short-form programming that -- when expertly presented and searchable -- can be monetized and generate a new audience and new revenues.”

However making effective use of interactive advertising is essential for hyper-local online broadcasting to become a viable business.  They are not there yet but must make the transformation to realize this opportunity.

Another success component is effectively harvesting breaking news about local events to generate this hyper-local content. Often local stories first break through “non-professional” reporters on little known sites. This is where Darwin Ecosystems’ Awareness Engine™ can help.  Through it you can mine the long tail and discover interesting relationships between stories that enable you to provide added value to breaking news. 

Top 50 Journalism Blogs from Journalism Journeyman

As Journalism Journeyman reports with online venues and mobile phones, many amateur and professional journalists are asking, “What is a journalist, and where is this field headed?” We have asked the same question here (see The Misplaced Fear of the Mainstream Media and Here is a Creative Blend of Mainstream Media and Social Media) and some earlier observations from 2005 (Notes on Blogging, Journalism and Credibility)

Journalism Journeyman adds that one way to gain perspective on this question is to read what other journalists are saying about this field and blogs are a good resource.  The blog goes on to provide a very useful list of Top 50 Journalism Blogs. The list includes blogs that focus on citizen journalism, personal blogs from professional reporters, journalism school-supported blogs, blogs on a new media focus, organizational blogs and resource blogs that provide primary resources for investigative writing.  We will not reproduce their list as you should go to their site but we will offer an example from each category.

Citizen Journalism

Global Voices: Over 200 bloggers around the world work together to provide translations and reports that normally are not heard from traditional media. As the site says, “Global Voices aggregates, curates, and amplifies the global conversation online – shining light on places and people other media often ignore.” I got to know Rebecca McKinnon and some of the other founders of this blog while I spent some informal time at the Berkman Center in 2004 -2005. This is a great resource to find out what is happening in countries where traditional reporting is difficult to access and is useful for any country.

Personal Blog

BuzzMachine: Jeff Jarvis, author of What would Google Do? and Associate Professor and Director of the City University (NY) interactive journalism program, blogs about media and news at this blog. Jeff was part of the conversation I reported about in 2005 in Blogging, Journalism and Credibility.

School-Supported Journalism Blogs

Nieman Journalism Lab: This blog is “a collaborative attempt to figure out how quality journalism can survive and thrive in the Internet age.” The blog is based out of Harvard, and collaborators include the Harvard Business School, the Berkman Center for Internet and Society and the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations. The first two of these groups sponsored the 2005 meeting I mentioned above.

Organizations

Society of Professional Journalists: This organization, founded in 1909, is a broad-based organization dedicated to encouraging free journalistic practice based upon high ethical standards. They include a list of blogs through their site as well as news.

New Media Focus

Hypercrit: Michael Becker writes about journalism, but with a broader lens on new media and digital culture.

The Web Overtakes TV to Become Biggest Ad Sector in UK

The UK has become the first major economy where advertisers spend more on internet advertising than on television advertising, with a record £1.75bn online spend in the first six months of the year according to the Guardian.  The paper notes that this change marks a watershed for the embattled TV industry, the leading ad medium in the UK for almost half a century (or perhaps a waterloo). It has taken the internet little more than a decade to become the biggest advertising sector in the UK.

It is somewhat ironic to read this in another embattled media that is being challenged by the Web (see for example, Who killed the Rocky Mountain News? John Temple at WebCom 2009). The Guardian reports that the Web now accounts for 23.5% of all advertising money spent in the UK, while TV ad spend accounts for 21.9% of marketing budgets. I wonder what percentage traditional print newspapers account for.  Also, it would be interesting to see what portion of the Web advertising comes from online versions of newspapers and what percentage of newspaper ads revenue is from print versus online.

The survival of traditional media was a topic at the recent Webcom in Montreal.  Darwin provides a way for news organization to use the Web to their advantage by discovering stories beyond the expected.  My colleague Thierry presented a number of examples of this in his presentation, Case Study H1N1: Collective wisdom is emerging from Web chaos.  We will be providing a summary of this session soon. 

More Twitter Lists Ideas: Great Web Awareness Channel

We recently posted on some ways news organizations are using twitter Lists (see: Here is a Creative Blend of Mainstream Media and Social Media) and also posted on our own Twitter Lists.  Here are some more thoughts.

First, Rob Paterson posted, Twitter Lists – 1st Insight? Among other things he wrote, “What I have immediately seen from the new lists that are emerging around …(my) related areas of my interest is that I have some real gaps. Those that created the lists whom I like care for and admire have people that I don’t know and who don’t know me.” This has also been our experience both in our own personal Twitter feeds and the Darwineco one.  We have been listed by some people that we were not aware of and on all of the lists that mention us we have found new people with common interests.  As a result we are now following new people either through our lists and/or directly.

Twitip offered ways to create an extremely useful list.  It wrote to create a very specific list name. This has been our practice. You should also promote the twitter list elsewhere. This is a general good practice for social media. They suggested that you link to twitter lists from your blog, especially a company one. We are doing this at the Darwin Discovery Engine Blog.

They also go on to write about 8 things to consider using Twitter Lists. You can use it as an extension of the TweetDeck groups function. This has been our case as it was easier to create new topic specific lists than creating new TweetDeck groups and wading though all the people we are following.

One easy way to do this is to look at lists on the topic that others created and they with a single click you can pick people you like and add them to your list on the topic. We found new people, as well as easy access to the twitter feed of people we know and want to follow.

You can easily identify what types of people users follow and you can easily get the tone of a group. The ability to scan over a list makes this possible, You can see what lists you appear on. This enables you to discover people with similar interests as noted above and reciprocate with the list creator.

Finally, we learned through Twitter (via @VMaryAbraham) about 10 Twitter List widgets from ReadWriteWeb that you can grab and embed. They pointed out that addition to allowing users to create their own curations, Twitter has also added a basic widget-maker for adding tweets from any user's list to any given website. As a service they used this feature to allow access ten great lists Including one from Robert Scoble and one that is the entire ReadWriteWeb Team.

Twitter Lists continue to be an interesting way to bring more awareness to what is happening on the Web. We will be returning to this topic again.  

Complete Listing of Our KM World 2009 Session Notes

We have been blogging some of the excellent KM World sessions. Here are links to the seven sessions we posted on last week. There is an emphasis on search and discovery as this most relates to Darwin Ecosystem. This was a great conference from our perspective. 

We hope these notes are useful and welcome your thoughts on the sessions.

KM World Sessions: Is Semantic Technology Real?

KM World Sessions: Evolve From a Tactical E-Discovery Approach to Search and E-Discovery

KM World Sessions: The Role of Social Techniques in Search & How It Impacts Your Organization

KM World Sessions: From Birth to Billions: The Life Story of Google Enterprise Search

KM World Sessions: Fundamentals of Enterprise Search

KM World Sessions: Enterprise Search Technologies

KM World Sessions: Resetting the Enterprise With 2.0 Collaborative Tools

KM World Sessions: Is Semantic Technology Real?

This is another in a series of notes from the 2009 KM World. It is titled: Is Semantic Technology Real? It is moderated by Rob Gonzalez, Platform Product Manager, Endeca Technologies and include: Michael J. Cataldo, CEO, Cambridge Semantics, Daniela Barbosa, Business Development Manager, Dow Jones Client Solutions, Dow Jones & Company, Lorenzo Thione, Founder / Principal Program Manager, Powerset / Bing Microsoft, Inc.  Here is the session description.

“Semantic technology is all the rage, sometimes even dubbed “Web 3.0.” However, many people—especially those making technology decisions for enterprises—wonder whether semantic technology has meaningful applications in the enterprise. Based on hands-on experience working with semantic tools, this panel of experts will establish the boundaries between reality and hype and help you understand what enterprises can gain from semantic technology in the here and now.”

Cambridge Semantics provides semantic development tools.  Dow Jones Client Solutions helps clients with taxonomy solutions, as well as other information needs. Powerset was acquired by Microsoft. It is Web semantic search tool.  Rob said, in answer to the panel title question, that semantic search has been applied successfully inside the enterprise and on the Web.

Rob asked the panel if there any examples of financially successful Web applications of semantic technologies. Lorenzo said yes. This happens more when you use semantic technologyto improve an existing site or product on such applications as consumer search. It seems harder for new sites such as Wolfram Alpha.

Daniela said in publishing there have been successful examples such as the Huffington Post and some Web advertising that use semantic web but do not promote it. The sites that promote that they are semantic Web are less successful.  Best Buy is using semantic web with their whole catalog but it is not promoted as a semantic web site. Google bought a semantic search company and it formed the foundation for Adsense and Adwords.

Semantic web appls let you combine different data sets like comparing the odds that you will be killed by sharks vs. vending machines.  It turns out that Vending machines are more deadly.  Semantic search helps people better define what they want in search.  The definition of semantic technology has been fluid.  Rob said it is everything from natural language document processing, and sentiment analysis to geotagging so it is metadata on top of data.  It is finding new meaning in data. Michael said semantic technologies are based on emerging standards on ontologies, distributed query, and other related things.  Semantics helps you find concepts even when there are not exact word matches. For example, you can find out how many sub-prime mortgages are in your loan portfolio even if they not are labeled that way. You define the characteristics and then find them. Here is a paper on semantic technologies and ontologies. 

The panel moved to semantics in the enterprise. There have been a number of successful examples where you can use a computer to connect data in two different places. How do you know that different things are similar? This is the answer that semantic technologies can address. It is about understanding concepts. FAST was given as an example. Consulting companies are starting practices around implementing semantic technologies.  At Dow Jones they are seeing companies interested in making better use of existing data through semantic technologies..

Daniela Is hoping that semantic technologies will get implemented like wikis, start small and spread.  This will be better than starting big.  Michael said that ontologies can grow over time. 

Some one asked what is new about semantic technologies? Daniela said the open vs. closed concept.  You can find better connections now. Companies do not know they are already part way there so some stuff is not new.  Now you can get your siloed data connecting and get better access to data outside the enterprise. Semantic technologies are trying to find structure in data where it does not explicitly exist in the same way a person might.

Merck is using semantic technologies to automate the integration of research results from three different relational databases and several spread sheets so they can be uploaded into a common database. Prior to this people had to cut and paste content by hand into a template for the upload.

Semantic technologies support discovery in contrast to simple search when you know what you are looking for. There remains a lot to do to improve the interfaces of semantic technology tools. 

KM World Sessions: Evolve From a Tactical E-Discovery Approach to Search and E-Discovery

This is another in a series of notes from the 2009 KM World. This is part of the Enterprise Search Summit.   It is titled: Evolve From a Tactical E-Discovery Approach to Search and E-Discovery by Brian W. Hill, Senior Analyst, Forrester Research, Here is the session description.

During the next 18 months, initiatives to cut costs and rising regulatory demands will drive enterprise e-discovery investments. Although search is a critical component of e-discovery, enterprises Forrester surveyed use a grab bag of search tools and techniques for litigation or regulatory inquiries. Lacking an end-to-end approach to gather and filter information, few enterprises report having a holistic approach to e-discovery. A full two-thirds of Forrester respondents consider their e-discovery strategy reactive rather than proactive. This indicates overall enterprise readiness for e-discovery is dismal. In this session, Hill will demonstrate the need for information and knowledge management (I&KM) professionals to collaborate with IT, legal, and business teams to understand how search technology can help cut e-discovery costs and mitigate risk. Formalized, cross-functional e-discovery programs that facilitate internal communication, encourage standardized methodologies, and provide a “big picture” view will help drive results. These programs can help support initiatives to synchronize e-discovery,
records management, and archiving.

Brian started by saying that eDiscovery solutions are not cheap but not using them can be much more expensive. Companies are grappling with regulatory issues and getting ready for possible litigation. Organizations have responded to this by rolling out a series of archives. The result is content and technology chaos that is difficult to search across and does not manage to mitigate legal risk. 

There is massive fragmentation within many enterprises. Security and metadata can be very different and not connected.

eDiscovery is a large market but it is also immature. May organizations are having challenges here. There are different stakeholders including legal and regulatory and large set of technology options. eDiscovery now invites fear uncertainty and doubt. At the same time organizations are trying to take out cost.  (see my posts: Equivio Releases Relevance™ to Enhance eDiscovery and Darwin Ecosystem Brings Awareness Engine™ to the Web and within the Enterprise)

There are different content types: email, collaboration systems, desktop files, etc. Email is the fastest growing content type.  However, the law says that all types of electronic content is subject to eDiscovery, including things like voice mail.  Only 20% of organizations surveyed felt their records were accessible and searchable.

There is a change point at the 5,000 employee level. There is more pain above 5,000 employees. Companies at this level feel more vulnerable and have much more complexity to deal with.  There is more to it than search. There needs to be proper legal hold capability within records management.   Brian looked at the records management vendors. Many people are using Sharepoint but it is not designed for this task. (see Forrester ECM wave report)

Less than half of stakeholders are satisfied with their records management.   Technology is not the answer. You need a well defined process that has proper stakeholder alignment. The market is fragmented and there are about 500 venders that address this need in some way.  But again the right process is the main need and it is perceived as the top challenge.  Defining defensible, repeatable process is key.

Records managers report all over the place in organizations. This is another example of fragmentation. There is gradual trend toward reporting form IT and legal.  IT and legal are key players here and Brian said he often finds that IT and legal have not met before.

There is a wide variety of maturity of this function within large organizations for those just starting to those very well developed. The company’s legal risk profile is a main driver of maturity, as well as how many times they have been sued.

One search approach is key words but you only find what you are looking for. You might not know the right key words.  I will add that this is a place where Darwin Ecosystem can help as it allows for discovery of relationships that you were not necessarily looking for. There are tools that use fuzzy logic, clustering, and other means to uncover key words that you did not think about.

The most commonly used technology to support search is operating system and desktop search. There are a number of shortcomings with this approach.  A very low percentage are using enterprise search.

In summary, it is much more than technology.  You need to define objectives, build queries, measure success, automate, review and analyze. You need a team of experts: legal, search, statistics, etc.   Make sure you have the right exec support. Get the right stakeholders. Develop a records retention strategy and policies. Create a consistent process.  Need to have integration between records management and search.  Should stay on top evolving case law.

Brian's slides are available at  http://www.forrester.com/esswest09 

KM World Sessions: The Role of Social Techniques in Search & How It Impacts Your Organization

This is another in a series of notes from the 2009 KM World. These notes are done real time so please excuse typos.  It is titled: The Role of Social Techniques in Search & How It Impacts Your Organization by Charlene Li,  Partner, Altimeter Group.  Here is the session description.

“Social technologies are transforming the way that people use the web and, with it, the way that companies engage with their customers and employees. Search is certainly being affected by the increasingly social nature of online activities. Impacting the socialization of search are the factoring in of the social graph and social activities into search results. Also, online people increasingly turn to their social networks when seeking information, recognizing that these people are likely to lead them to results. Li, a former Forrester analyst, provides insights into how social technologies are transforming the way people search for and discover information and how you can prepare your organization for—and create business advantage with—this shift.”

Charlene is now writing a book on how social technologies are impacting organizations and making them more open.  She started her talk with search.  Googlesearch results now provide a lot of personal context.  Then she showed Twitter results on Bing. It shows the most popular links about a topic. She said search will change to provide more social content both inside the enterprise and on the Web.

There are three ways search will improve. First, semantic search will better understand the meaning behind your search query.  For example, people will use the words Saints differently. Some people will think of a football team. I would. It will also be more personalized and more social.

Your social content will be integrated everywhere. You will not have to go to a site like Facebook but it will be found in many contexts.  Now there is a greater culture of sharing.  The engagement pyramid starts with watchers, then sharers, then commentors, then producers, and finally at the top are curators.  The curators mange the content produced by the pyramid.  She said most organizations support the top of the pyramid but the focus should be at the bottom so the watchers are well served.  These people are the foundation.

Facebook Connect puts Facebook content on other sites. For example, you can comment on Huffington Post and it will appear on my Facebook and my friends can see it.  So you can bring your friends into Huffington Post and bring Huffington Post into Facebook. This openness is the future.

Then she showed Tech Crunch with Google Sidewiki. You can see the side conversations around this site. Tech Crunch cannot control this conversation but now you can see it easily.

Next, she showed Amazon with GetGlue that allows you to see comments on a book from multiple sites.  You can see what people are saying and where they are saying it.  The comments are being separated from the site and pivot around the topic or the person.

With these tools you can target marketing much more. You can use social graphics: who is like you who might have the same interests. Media6 identifies who is closest to you. Then they can target those people with ads based on what you do and like.  You can also map relationships within organizations to target business communication.

Be careful not to get too wrapped up in the technologies. Start with what types of relationships you want with your employees and your customers.  Loyal and constant relationships are more valuable.

Obama redefined political campaigns.  The relationship with the candidate was more personal and got more engagement with supporters. This type of connection will be very powerful for businesses.

You also need to create learning organizations. There are many tools for seeing what is happening on the Web. Good to get these tools in the hands of everyone so they can see what is happening inside and outside the organization. This is a role that Darwin Ecosystem serves as you can see the relationships between topics on a near real time basis.

There also needs to be a culture of sharing. Internal micro-blogging tools such as Yammer can promote this sharing.  You need to create new information workflows to support this sharing. Everyone is getting the information that used to be department focused and siloed like marketing.  Comcast is using Twitter to respond to customer issues very quickly and the whole organization has become more customer focused. I have conversed with Comcast through Twitter and they are very responsive.

Kohl’s has a very interactive Facebook page and responds quickly to comments put on the wall. Saleforce.com is integrating a Twitter-like comment feature so you can talk about sales issues.

Openness requires accountability. The Red Cross gave guidelines for its employees on how to use social media and avoid risks. Finally you need to be open to fail and but you need to learn from these failures – Google says fail fast and fail smart.  Walmart failed many times at first with soclal media through fake blogs and other stuff. Finally they started a blog for their buyers that worked. 

In summary, Charlene said you cannot ignore social networks as they will be everywhere and integrated into many things. You need to be prepared to give up control to succeed.

 

KM World Sessions: From Birth to Billions: The Life Story of Google Enterprise Search

This is another in a series of notes from the 2009 KM World. This session is titled, “From Birth to Billions: The Life Story of Google Enterprise Search” by Cyrus Mistry, Enterprise Product Manager – Google. Here is the session description.

“This talk examines the state of Google’s Enterprise Search business, highlighting the origins of the iconic yellow box and the way the product and business search market has evolved over the past decade. Mistry highlights the challenges facing enterprises and providers of business search technology, as well as possible solutions and case studies of companies and organizations leading the way in search innovation.”

Cyrus began by describing the common problem of having too much information at work. The average worker creates over a gigabyte of information at work and much of this is in email. So Google were asked if they could bring Google into the enterprise.  At first they resisted but there was too much demand so they started Google enterprise search.

They found people wanted three things. First, people want simplicity.  The average number of words put into a Google search field is shrinking but people have the same expectations for good results.  They also want speed of response.  They did studies and found that the faster the results the more relevant people felt the results were. The third thing people want is relevance.

But things are different in the enterprise, Page rank is not relevant as there is not the same linking as on the Web.  In 2001 they launched Google for the enterprise in a small yellow pizza size box at a small price point that opened it up to more businesses. Cyrus said it also help lower the price of many other search tools. In 2004 they added more security. 

People felt Google was not connected so they did Open Source and established the connector framework.  Next after the basics were done they looked at the search experience.  They wanted to bring all types of results (text, images, etc.)  into a single screen.  This provided intelligent simplicity.  Next they looked at scalability so you can reach all documents. With Google you can add more boxes to get scale even up to a billion documents.

Now they are looking at social signals. Cyrus said this is where the innovation will be found.  The feature of user added results has been the most popular capability. People get really excited about this.  Another popular social feature is query suggestions to see related things that others are searching for.  They found a big jump is usage after this feature was adopted. They also look at where people click to see if a result should be elevated.  They use a complex algorithm to overcome any bias of current rank of this elevation.

 

 

KM World Sessions: Resetting the Enterprise With 2.0 Collaborative Tools

This is another in a series of notes from the 2009 KM World. These are near real time notes so please excuse typos and spacing issues. This is the Opening Keynote: Resetting the Enterprise With 2.0 Collaborative Tools by Andrew McAfee. Here is part of the session description.

“Andrew McAfee focuses on how emergent social software platforms are benefiting enterprises, and how smart organizations and their leaders are making effective use of them to share knowledge, inspire innovation, and enable decision making. He shares strategies, stories, and real-world examples of successful enterprise collaboration using 2.0 tools.”

Andy began with his definition of enterprise 2.0, It is “the use of emergent social software platforms by organizations in pursuit of their goals.”  Here is what I wrote recently. (see What is Your Definition of Enterprise 2.0? Here is Mine.) I think they are very similar. Andy said that now technology is not being used to tell people what to do but instead it is being implemented to let people decide what to do about it. I really like this. He then asked those who find their intranet easier to find stuff than the Web. Five people raised their hands. This is the first time that I have seen anyone raise their hand as I have been asking audiences the same question with attribution after I first heard Andy ask it several years ago.

Andy told a story about the recent time when he was in a rental car that did not work. So he tweeted and asked for help and got 16 responses in a few minutes, most from people he did not know. People do want to help each other. I found this out last weekend when I had a Twitter spam attack and got lots of help to fix it. So he said let’s stop worrying about the risk of social media within the enterprise. People are usually helpful. He finds very few horror stories inside the enterprise.

One difference from the Web is that your identity is traceable within the enterprise so bad behavior will be found out. I would add that you are also working with colleagues who hopefully share a common goal. In fact, I think that enterprise 2.0 can help people be more aligned around common goals. Andy said that enterprise 2.0 has improved his view of humanity.

He then said to avoid the idea that there is one way to do things. Innovation is more the issue now than strategy. There are now chief innovation officers. Crowdsourcing is becoming more common. Companies are now sending problems out on the Web for others outside the enterprise to help them solve the issue. Merck is one example.  The diversity of people looking at an issue increases the rate of solving a problem.

The key is building communities than people want to join and participate.  Verizon has opened up a portion of their web site and let others help them solve customer issues.  Some people are spending a lot of their time for free helping Verizon with customer service.  These people do get status and recognition.  

Andy said he used to be against the wisdom of crowds. He thought crowds would get dumber when they got together. Now he has completely changed his mind.  He gave an example where a group prediction market beat an expert and a synthesis of the polls on the electoral college vote spread in the 2008 US presidential election.  The lesson: crowds can be very wise. You should enable peer review and experiment with collective intelligence.

The great benefit of using Enterprise 2.0 is not sharing documents for collaborating. This is helpful but it is not the biggest benefit. Instead it is connecting the dots on issues. He gave the example of the wiki set up by the US intelligence community: Intellipedia. Because of this wiki people now know better who is doing relevant work on topics of interest.  They are discovering useful people on their topics of interest.  There is less parallel play and re-inventing the wheel.

He gave some major benefits from a recent McKinsey study that found increased customer satisfaction, increased innovation, access to knowledge, access to internal experts, and employee satisfaction.  While these results are likely from true believers, the magnitude is impressive.  Adopting enterprise 2.0 seems to be a necessary move.  Now the internal processes of the organization can be supported through technology.

He concluded with some pointers for success.  He twisted this by talking about how to fail.  Declare war on traditional management and technology, Bad idea for two reasons. It is bad marketing and it is wrong.  Allow walled gardens to flourish. Do not have disconnected content and teams. Accentuate the negative.  Do not worry too much about the risks.

Another thing to avoid: Try to replace email.  It will be hard and email does have its uses, especially as a single source.  We tend to overweight the advantages of the technology we are using.  A replacement technology needs to be ten times better than what you are using.  Email is the current technology and is not that bad.  Over night success occurs when there is no existing technology on the issue, examples are Facebook and Twitter.

Another thing to avoid: put into many features. Keep it simple like an iPod, Google, etc.  Technologists love features but users respond to simplicity even it then think they want more features.

Another thing to avoid: Overuse the word “social.” This is not top of mind for senior execs. While I would agree with this I would also not go with enterprise 2.0 with execs. It seems that technology labels are difficult in general. Just promote what it does.

 

 

 

 

 

Darwin Ecosystem’s computing architecture is mindful of reducing the carbon footprint.

Since the conception and first iteration of our Awareness Engine, we have considered the importance of leveraging Cloud Computing for our scalability and cost management.  One of the by-products of this decision is a direct benefit to our planet; reducing our computing carbon footprint. 

The global IT industry generates about 2 percent of all global carbon dioxide emissions, or about as much greenhouse gases as the world's airlines, according to a recent Gartner study.   As technology advances, and demand increases globally, we are all faced with the challenge of how to reduce the carbon imprint our industry contributes to global warming and climate change.

This Saturday, we had the honor of  being invited to the Maple Leaf Ball in Boston where Quebec’s Prime Minister, Jean Charest, made a compelling speech about clean energy and Quebec’s concrete initiatives to leverage their hydro-electricity and other clean tech to service Canadian provinces and the United States.  His speech, and recent actions in New Brunswick,  Prince Edward Island, and Vermont not only demonstrate that Quebec is committed to this mission, but it also reinforced our strategic decision to open our research and development in Montreal.  To be located in such a progressive and action-driven location regarding clean-tech will only enhance our ability to see that our technology becomes environmentally friendly as our research will clearly be supported with the will of government initiatives and technical talent.

According to recent research our decision to adopt Cloud Computing makes Darwin Ecosystem an environment-conscious company.  Nonetheless Thierry Hubert, co-founder and driving force behind our technology’s direction, is convinced that Cloud Computing alone is not enough to answer the growing need for near-real-time data processing power.  In fact he believes that computing energy is being wasted on idled computers and that the future of computing does not reside in data-centers (whether they be in Mountain View or on the Cloud - wouldn’t this be  going backwards to the era of mainframes?).  As such, Darwin Ecosystem explores new ways to leverage distributed/grid computing models to further reduce the carbon footprint as it delivers timely and interest-drive information to its users and communities.

Tweet Your Weight. Has Social Media Gone Too Far?

Here is a sure sign that something may be happening. As reported in the Los Angeles Times, a French company, Withings, has equipped a bathroom scale with wifi so you can send you weight and body fat ratio to Facebook and your web site. Withings provides weight graphs and body composition analysis that are instantly available on your iPhone and on the web.

Now they added a Twitter feature so you can tweet your weight.  Which Twitter List should this one be placed on?  Maybe they should add an image capability. 

Radio’s Air America: Another Example of Traditional News Media Making Good Use of Social Media

We have been talking about how mainstream media can take advantage of social media rather being overwhelmed by it. Here is another example. Jen Nedeau, Director of Digital Strategy at the radio show Air America Media writes about how they are using social media to support the radio show. 

She starts with the observations, “Radio is a unique platform. As long as people drive their cars or tune in at work, radio will continue to exist. And while the Internet age has brought about innovations in audio such as podcasting, iTunes, Pandora and Last.fm -– it is my observation that talk radio has been slower to engage in the social media space comparatively speaking.” 

I certainly agree with the first point. I often listen to NPR (or music) while driving my car while records and tapes collect dust and even my iPhone’s iTunes has even replaced CDs. It all has to do with the fact you can process audio and visual information at the same time. While you cannot text (a visual task) and drive you can still listen and drive. 

So radio may not be facing the same threat as newspaper and TV, it still needs to take advantage of social media if just to better compete in the radio space. I have read about a number fo things that TV is doing with social media so I was very interested to learn about possibilities with radio. Jen offers a number of things they are doing to expand their reach. They have hired a team of digital media editors to produce content and are investing in the Web as a platform. 

More specifically they are extending the two-way conversation beyond calls into the radio show or e-mails to the show hosts. Each show host will have their own Twitter account and Facebook Page. The goal is help recruit listeners to participate with the show and distribute blog posts afterward. Having a goal is key here. 

They are also looking to invite guests who have an online presence and as well as listen and react to what is going on in the Web. Here is where Darwineco’s Awareness Engine™ can help as you can see what topics are associated with your brand as well the topics you are interested in and covering on your show. 

In addition, they are looking for ways to leverage the larger company brand on social networks to direct links, drive traffic, coordinate customer service and act as a mouthpiece for the different brands underneath it. They will measure these efforts closely as this is an advantage that social media can bring with its real time aspects. Here is another area where Darwineco’s Awareness Engine™ can help. You can see what is being said about you, as well as what topics correlate with your brand.

We Have Started Twitter Lists with @darwineco

Twitter Lists open up a number of interesting possibilities. We wrote about some excellent uses by new media in the recent post, Here is a Creative Blend of Mainstream Media and Social Media.  The National Hockey League is using Twitter Lists to build social networks for fans. Each team has a list and tweets have proved to be more successful in mobilizing fans than originally anticipated. Here is a useful post by Mashable on how to create Twitter lists.

We have also started a number of Twitter Lists at our Twitter feed @darwineco. We are experimenting and they are all in the beginning phase. They will grow.

Here are our lists. You can check them out at @darwineco or just click on the links below. We welcome suggested additions. 

http://twitter.com/darwineco/enterprise-2-0

http://twitter.com/darwineco/web-2-0

http://twitter.com/darwineco/french-speaking-community

http://twitter.com/darwineco/mathematics

http://twitter.com/darwineco/km

http://twitter.com/darwineco/media

http://twitter.com/darwineco/vip

http://twitter.com/darwineco/sme

http://twitter.com/darwineco/partners

http://twitter.com/darwineco/darwin-team

Here is a Creative Blend of Mainstream Media and Social Media

The subtitle of this post is Four Ways News Organizations are Using Twitter Lists. It is largely based on a Mashable post by the same title.  As we have been talking about the need for traditional mainstream media to use innovation to take advantage of social media rather than being crippled by it, this post caught my eye. For prior discussion see Webcom 09 - The Misplaced Fear of the Mainstream Media and Mainstream Media versus Social Media? Not Really the Right Question.

The Mashable post points out that Twitter lists are giving news sites increased ability to curate news as well as tap into Twitter users who can help them collect more news. In the process, “news organizations are beginning to learn the fundamental characteristic of social media: it’s social.” Prior to this news organizations were primarily using twitter for one-way self-promotion with a few exceptions. 

The New York Times, which has done as good a job as any new outlet in bringing in blogs, provides the examples. First, they now have staff directories through a twitter list. You can follow a list of Times’ staffers, which includes a stream of tweets from more than 100 people.  Other newspaper sites will likely follow this example.

They are also swerving as a Twitter filter, always needed, creating lists on subject areas that even includes Twitters outside of the Times staff who tweet on specific subjects. The Times even has a list for world news, which includes some of its competitors. This is a big move from a site that used to only link to other Times articles.  They are starting to understand and this can be a useful service by vetting the sources.

The examples are not limited to the NY Times as the Los Angeles Times is creating twitter lists on West Coast topics. Huffington Post is gone beyond both Times by embedding the lists on their website using the Lists API. This creates pages of streaming tweets from their lists.

News organizations are also creating lists for events, giving their readers with a resource of Twitterers associated with a specific event. This is a way to feature only vetted users as anyone, including spammers, can tap into an event hash tag.  As an example, CNN created a list for the November 3 elections that featured politicians that are running for election.

This is a good move and will help organizations who follow this path not only reach and engage more readers, but they should learn more about social media and be able to apply it to other efforts.

 

Tactical Transparency: The Value of Access to Information from Shel Holtz

This is another of my session notes from Webcom 09 where Darwin also presented three times. We will be covering our sessions soon.  I am cross-posting from my Portals and KM blog because I really liked what Shel had to say. Here is the session description for Tactical Transparency: The Value of Access to Information.

. “The degree to which people trust organizations directly affects their willingness to do business with those organizations. Transparency is a foundation of trust, yet most organizations continue to operate by designating all information confidential, then deciding what information it must disclose. In today's world, with organizations under a microsocope to an extent they have never before experienced, that approach needs to be reversed: Company information is sharable, except for those items that must remain confidential. Using new media can provide organizations with a simple yet effective way to be transparent and reap the benefits.”

Shel started with the US open government effort. It started with a lot of flash but has not really taken off.  Transparency is counter culture to government agencies, at least in the US.  One agency director told Shel his employees will not use social media. He speaks for the agency alone.  He just wanted Shel to let his employees understand the impact of social media so they can react to it.

He then conveyed an example of TSA countering a bogus claim with the actual videos of the event.  He moved on to Eron’s operations in secrecy that led to the SOX legislation to force more transparency on financial activity. Next he covered AT&T request to ask employees to write against net neutrality and pretend they were not employees. As you can imagine this blew up in the blogs and even mainstream media.  Almost nothing is hidden. I have seen this myself when I just wanted to find my cousin’s phone number. For 95 cents I could find out much more.

Shel said that organizations need to be proactively transparent to avoid these disasters.  I remember that my former employer required me to have a PR person present whenever I talked with the press. Now everyone is the press. Microsoft allows over 3,000 employees blog without company editing. The rules have changed. We need to be accurate but we need to talk like people and not institutions.  I interviewed some Microsoft bloggers in 2004. One said that they were trying to put a human face on Microsoft.

However, transparency is not full disclosure. You cannot provide medical information about patients or employees. Much financial information cannot be shared for publically traded companies. However, you should start with the full disclosure premise and then pull out want should not be shared.

Shel referred to Paul Levy as the most transparent CEO.  He explained his salary and how it is determined on his blog. Then he asked if he is paid too much and responded to comments on the blog.  He also said that if things did not change he would have to lay off hundreds of employees. He held town hall with employees to get ideas on how to save jobs and invited the Boston Globe for transparency. He got standing ovations for this move.

Webcom 09 - The Misplaced Fear of the Mainstream Media

Permeating the recent Webcom 2009 event was the discomfort and fear of mainstream media losing ground to the rise of social media.

The simple reality that information consumption is migrating into a Web dialogue leaves the mainstream media having to compete with what they label as unverified content, and thus accordingly, untrustworthy information. Again, a major perception shift from an industry that has a difficult time distinguishing between unverified written expressions and the wisdom of crowd. I often heard from many traditional media people attending such comments as: “How can people consume such rubbish and unverifiable comments?” “We are dedicated to verifying and delivering quality content that is far more reliable!”.

Formal content providers truly believe that without their controlled content people will have a distorted view of what matters and believe opinions over facts. From their perspective they are absolutely right! If people accept social media information as validated truth, we would have... well, isn’t this what we already have? The simple fact that opinions and discussions are transposed from the oral to the written form does not mean that it changes much regarding the risk of people being misinformed. People distort, fabricate and adopt their own points of view according to their social networks, whether it be physical or the Web. The battle is not one of formal versus informal, but one where formal content providers need to listen and engage in the dialogue.

I was also amused when I heard that mainstream media and large companies were questioning the value of social media and its content. These companies and traditional media spend fortunes on market trend analysis with voodoo-like rearview mirror reporting that only serves to give them an impact appreciation for what they did in order to improve the next campaign. The amusing part is that they have traditionally done this to measure opinions and perceptions to best attract customers, yet today they are worried about the volume of content created by the same people they have been trying to mind-probe through inference investigation. Can someone pinch me here?

The perception that has to change is not the one of the people (it is only a transposition for them), it is the one of the media companies who are far more feudal than the people, as they fear a loss of power. I believe that Thomas W. Malone’s 2004 The Future of Work a great tome on the transformation of business, is more meaningful today in the light of the traditional media companies’ challenge. But are traditional media companies capable of distributed deliberation and content creation with the emerging wisdom of crowds?

The ability to have a real-time written communication has changed the concept of readers and audiences. It is now a dialogue! And from that basis the media industry is transformed forever. Traditional media needs to rethink its relationship with its customers (yes customers as they are no longer passive). They need to focus on their core value of reliable information and take it to a new level that will preserve their integrity as their assumptions regarding the information life-cycles and distribution are changing. Some will understand that their business operating processes are the enemy and that they must create new ones. 

Many media companies are becoming consumed by finding ways to become social destinations themselves than thinking about their core business value proposition and processes. These companies are taking the risk of becoming followers in the media revolution instead of becoming the leaders and champions of valued and verified information. In my opinion they are making a mistake as they are driven by following to catch-up instead of innovating and managing their own transformation.  

See the post by my colleague Bill Ives that appeared here this Monday on What killed the Rocky Mountain News for an example of a mainstream news company that did not successfully handle the rise of social media. In this session the former Editor, John Temple, said that newspapers now need to spend more time on innovation and not simply work on trying to get more revenue for online versions of what they have always done. 

Post script: The Seattle Times recently took the innovative step of inviting editors from some neighborhood blogs to question mayoral candidates for a town hall-style debate organized by the newspaper and its news partner, KING-TV. Here is a good example of creative use of soical media with traditional media. 

Who killed the Rocky Mountain News? from John Temple

This is the second of a series of session notes from Webcom 09 where I am also presenting. Here is the session description for Case Study: Who killed the Rocky Mountain News? John was the former editor of the Rocky Mountain News that closed. He now writes the blog, Temple Talk. “Colorado's oldest newspaper died just days short of its 150th anniversary. The economic collapse may have been all that was needed to sink the Rocky Mountain News. But it already was struggling because of the societal shift to the Internet. Craigslist and other Web sites sapped its classified revenues. 

 Cell phones and computer screens were more of a draw for a rapidly growing percentage of the population than any printed page the paper's clever designers could conjure. Its journalists were slow to accept that their world had changed. Its advertising department was used to taking orders, not to helping businesses grow using the latest tools. Executives were torn - even frozen - over the prospect of potentially "cannibalizing" their print business online. The tension between trying to maintain the paper's once-lucrative print franchise and building a new online business was unbearable. In the end, the Rocky did neither. And now it's a memory in the Wayback Machine. It won't be the last metro daily to make that claim. But there are lessons in its demise that could help others survive and thrive in the Internet era.” 

John began with the story about they produced a documentary on the paper’s demise. The video was started when the outcome was not sure. He said that the Web was a factor but also the economic collapse and the fact that Denver could not support two general interest papers. 

He then offered business lessons going forward for the Web era. He was the editor of the paper for 11 years and publisher for seven. He said that when all your revenue comes form print, it is difficult to turn to other sources. The paper was founded in 1859 and was Colorado’s oldest paper. It had great loyalty in the local area. The company that owned the paper also started the Food Network and is now worth billions so they were smart people. It also had the largest circulation in the area. Lesson One: You have to know business you were in. They thought they were in the newspaper business. In the newspaper business you think about tomorrow. On the Web you have to think about now and forever. I find that this is also the case with blogs but with Twitter it is only now. 

The paper also thought they were in control but really consumers were in control. John felt if they had built online tools to establish greater connection with the community the paper would have survived. They thought their competition was another paper but really it was for attention though various media. It is hard for a general interest communication vehicle in an era of increasing fragmentation. The long tail helped sweep them away. Craig’s List was one factor along with Yelp, Wikipedia, YouTube, and many others. 

During the 2004 US election YouTube did not exist. In the 2008 YouTube was involved with the best presidential debate. Rocky Mountain News went online in 1995. They thought the goal was to strengthen the paper when actually it was a new medium to develop on its own. It re-launched in 1996. They still described the web site as a complement to the paper. This is not a web strategy. 

Another lesson: “keep the new venture free from the rules of the old.” Next lesson, “people running the new business need to be free regardless of impact on the old business.” John gave the example of Yelp that has 25 million users. He said that editors would not have liked giving prominence to user generated content with typos. In 2000, the two Denver papers combined business operations. The agreement did not mention the Web. However, the print classified ad revenue alone went down 100 million a year for several years. They also upgraded their print facilities and won national awards. 

Another lesson, “if you want to compete in a medium, you have to understand it.” They built a great web site with no SEO considerations and no one could find it. Next lesson: measure, measure, measure. The Web allows you to measure, take advantage of this. You also need to do R&D to find innovative new offerings and not just try to get more money for current offerings. 

 I have watched our own local paper, the Boston Globe, struggle and almost fold. It is still going and I hope it learns the lessons John conveyed to continue. You can find the text of John’a talk on his blog. I later did a talk on Blogging in the Age of Twitter. I said that John’s talk was a good precursor and could be called newspapers in the age of social media.

Post Script - Here is John's talk on his blog: Temple Talk. 

Peut-on tirer du sens des micro-blogs?

Ceci est une translation en français d’un blog “Making sense of micro-blog Streaming and Awareness” publié récemment afin d’atteindre les communautés de langue française et anglaise qui s'intéressent aux moteurs de découverte et de veille sur internet.

Les micro-blogs (Twitter), network sociaux (Facebook) et autres publications issus des nouveaux médias (Flickr ou YouTube) nous permettent de recevoir un flux d’information continu associé aux événements au fur et à mesure qu’ils se déroulent, en réponse à notre curiosité et envie d’être au courant de ce qu’il se passe autour ou au sein de nos communautés d’intérêt.  Des événements tels que la montée du mouvement Obama durant les dernières élections présidentielles américaines, comme plus récemment les mouvements de protestation contre les élections Iraniennes ont été alimentés par et ont profité de cette vague internet.  Ce qui fut remarqué comme un trait de génie dans la campagne d’Obama pour faire passer le message, est maintenant perçu comme un instrument essentiel à la libre expression et antitrust des medias en Iran.

Quand un événement est aussi important et observé par tant de gens, on peut être certain que les medias traditionnels s’en feront l’écho et filtreront les différentes sources d’information pour nous les servir. La réalité est que il ne nous viendrait pas à l’esprit, à moins d’être un passionné par un sujet, d’aller dans les espaces de micro-blogging pour être informé sur ce qui se passe sur un thème donné. Et la raison en est simple: Pourquoi irions nous perdre notre temps à lire des centaines d’entrées insignifiantes et chronologiques dans des micro-blogs émis par des personnes que l’on ne connait même pas?

Même Connan O’Brian, le nouveau présentateur vedette du Tonight Show a maintenant une plaisanterie satirique à propos de l’absence de fond des Twitts des célébrités en contraste avec la popularité fulgurante de Twitter. Qui peut bien être intéressé par savoir si Angelina Jolie envoie un message sur Twitter “J’ai bu un très mauvais café à Malibu”? Alors pourquoi tant d’engouement et que faut-il en penser?
Cet engouement grossit parce que les médias ont depuis appris à utiliser Twitter pour toucher une audience plus grande, et ce sans coûts supplémentaires. Cela leur permet aussi de faire ce qu’ils ne savaient pas faire avec les texte-messages sur téléphone... ainsi, ils font la promotion de Twitter à chaque occasion qui se présente!

Et pourquoi le micro-blogging a son importance? Et bien tout simplement parce qu’ils représentent la voix du peuple (rapidement effacée par ces méga media qui inondent l’espace par leur messages). Il est important de faire une distinction à ce stade; la voix du peuple n’est pas la même chose que le thème commun discuté par tous. C’est pourquoi celui ou celle, pour qui le temps est important, ne prendra pas le temps de lire une suite chronologique de publications de 140 caractères provenants de personnes qui commentent leur attente dans la queue devant le magasin pour acheter le dernier iPhone ou ceux qui se plaignent du Directeur de leur Lycée.

Les micro-blog sont chaotiques par nature et participent à notre surcharge d’information, à moins biensur d’avoir un sujet d’intérêt commun avec quelqu’un qui fasse un travail de surveillance, de recherche, de filtrage, de sélection et de livraison de pièces d’information les plus pertinentes et intéressantes sur ce le sujet. A ce jour, le phénomène du micro-blogging est utilisé pour faire la promotion se soi, ou de sa communauté.

Maintenant, comment extraire du sens et de la valeur de cette surcharge d’information que nous aimons tant créer et partager. En contraste avec la succession des micro-blogs, l’engin de veille et de découverte Darwin, un produit de Darwin Ecosystem LLC, prend une approche différente en reconnaissant la nature chaotique de l’information, et en appuyant son modèle sur l’émergence des thèmes corrélés et ce à travers de multiples sources.

A New Age of Communication-Centric Collaboration

Twenty years ago Lotus Development Corporation released Lotus Notes.  As one of the fortunate alpha tester and early adopters, Notes changed the way I relate to collective information and inspired my career in collaboration and social computing.  Since then  the platforms have changed but collaboration computing remains rooted in Ray Ozzie’s Lotus Notes vision.  As an extension to Ray’s view of collaboration, I created in 1996 the first social network (InterCommunity) on the Lotus Domino platform (Web server) and delivered the first Web-based community social network upon which partners could build community applications (similar to FaceBook).  The solutions we see on the Web today were understood and often existed in large enterprises as well as being available to a handful of early business Web communities throughout the ‘90s.   

For the last 20 years I have also observed companies going through the painful transition of archaic email and file sharing to Wikis and collaboration solutions.  The simple fact that collaboration is stuck in application silos is deeply rooted in the segregation of process and communication tools.  When you think about it,communication and deliberation precede the formality of process, yet most information systems have it backwards and do not connect the two effectively (even if they have all the latest Web 2.0 tools).  Frankly, other than Web protocols, the core usage challenges have not changed since 1989 despite the Web’s richer applications and social computing innovations; connectivity and open source is what made the difference thus far, not the applications themselves.  As we are naturally motivated in transposing what we know over understanding the opportunities that a new environment offers, we often continue to make the same mistakes and build technologies to over-think what is natural; our innate ability to communicate and  evolve.

But now Google shows us Google Wave.  Not since my introduction to Lotus Notes twenty years ago have I been wowed with innovation in that space.  Google Wave truly rethinks communication streams and collaboration as it should be with today’s connected world.  Google did not reinvent the wheel, they just proved that it a sphere.  It is perhaps too server-centric for  my taste, but it  is just a matter of time before the model can be truly internet-based instead of mainframe-like.  Nonetheless, Google Wave’s API does open new ways to incorporate content, applications and structure in the stream of human communication in real-time.  Lotus Notes first version had some very basic features that made it possible to build solutions that promoted collaboration and content distribution, as well as  access control, replication, forms, views, scripting language, mail and later Web standards.  With these integrated basics developers created applications that exceeded Lotus‘ expectations.  Google Wave’s core architecture has the building blocks, openness and a framework based on today’s Web computing reality that will allow the user and developer community to marvel us with their clever use of Google Wave.  The communication-centric framework of Google Wave is simply brilliant and users will gradually embrace its many features as well as enrich their use through third-party plug-ins. 

I have read the more skeptical and critical press on Google Wave.  In my opinion they have short memory and grossly under estimate what Google is doing to the Web with this truly new paradigm.  Facebook and other messaging technologies need to think about ways to connect and leverage Google Wave or they will be left in the dust by its user community.  As to the critics who claim that the UI is too complex for every day users... I would like to add that if you survived and supported FaceBook’s user experience, Google Wave will not be a problem.  This is not your father’s Web so get with the program and compute with passion and intelligence.  We are about to discover new ways to have a return of investment for all the time we wasted promoting ourselves on the Web 2.0.  Isn’t it time for something new? 

I see Google Wave as new platform capable of creating a much needed movement to revive business opportunities and bring new players to the Web.  I also feel fortunate that the Darwin Awareness Engine brings a solution to the information overload that Google Wave generates.  If history repeats itself, Google Wave’s composition is destined to succeed. 

The Evolving Google Rankings Algorithm

Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz's CEO, recently posted his personal opinion of how some of the key factors in Google's ranking system have changed through the years he has been in SEO. I learned about this from @o0x on Twitter. Now I do not claim to be a technical SEO expert but I have figured out how to get blog posts on the front page of Google. I did this first just for fun and now (warning commercial coming) to help others. So I was very interested in his opinions. He covered the four big factors. I provide a brief summary of what he said for each. Go to this blog for the details. These factors were the ones I knew so I was very interested in the graphic on his blog that shows their relative rise and decline.

Domain Trust/Authority – He said came this into consciousness in 2003 and over the last couple of years, has become the dominant factor in the success of rankings at Google. Anchor Text in External Links – He said while this is still a very powerful ranking tactic, it's not as it was before 2004. I really felt that it didn't carry the same power it did for those years afterwards. “Today, my belief is that anchor text has come to be regarded much as PageRank was after its dominance in the algorithm - as a technique that SEOs have focused on gaming to such an extent that much of it has become noise, and it's only really valuable when found in conjunction with other positive signals.”

On-Page Keyword Usage – He said that it not lost all of its ranking power, but it “still sits in the middle as an essential element, but one where "more" won't help you. This is in direct contrast to the other elements I've included in this diagram (where more does equal better rankings).”
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Raw PageRank / Link Juice - PageRank used to be everything and it built industries of link sellers and buyers. PageRank has been on decline as a ranking factor so some time. Remember Google keeps its methods secret and is always changing them to stay ahead of the gamers. So this is just his opinion. However, it is consistent with my intuition and experience.

My advice is to not game but do what best communicates to your readers. I use the second and third factors above more but with the goal of providing better information to readers. My understanding is that the first goal is more something you achieve than technique. I stay away from gaming methods on both blogs and Twitter and just try to have meaningful conversations. Also, remember that you have to speak to two audiences, Google and your readers. If you only speak to Google you might get readers but they will not stay or come back.

In contrast to Google, Darwin uses correlation metrics based on Chaos Theory Darwin looks for the emergence of correlated themes within chaotic content. This moves Darwin away from the voting and popularity rankings used by many information aggregators and search engines like Google to rank information. By using correlation metrics, it does not require a known process or taxonomy to discover useful and related information. It also does require shifts in algorithms to stay ahead of cheaters as it is impossible to cheat on Darwin. 

Improving communication during work-awareness.

Recent surveys and research show that executives finally value social media favorably to improve relationships with customers and build their brand (“Social Media: Embracing the Opportunities, Averting the Risks” paper from Russell Herder). Paradoxically, these same executives fail to embrace these technologies within their organizations to improve productivity through better collaboration, idea sharing, faster initiative adoption and, of course, knowledge capitalization. The reason for this can be attributed to the many past failures of Knowledge Management (KM) and collaborative technologies that were assaulted by armies of consultants and system integrators over-thinking communication empowerment. Today we know that most KM initiatives have failed due to exaggerated efforts to harness tacit knowledge into explicit processes. Having spent most of my carrier in the space of KM, collaboration and social technologies since 1988, I can testify to how many times the Web 2.0 in the enterprise was adopted under different names; Groupware, Shareware, Communication Intranets and others...the bottom line is that they all aimed at improving communication during work-awareness.

Let me expend on work-awareness. Work-awareness in state of mind where the individual is focused on his/her activity and driven by accomplishing the task at hand. If a company is able to empower the individual with communication and information discovery tools, then the information being captured is likely to be rich in relevance and valued as a sharable asset for others. Many power-blogger and micro-bloggers (Twitter) practice this concept to make their knowledge valuable for personal gain and knowledge acquisition. This is an observable phenomenon that companies can use to improve capturing knowledge from their workforce as well as empowering them to share this knowledge to solve problems and improve productivity.

Now back to the bad rep of KM and earlier versions of the Web 2.0. KM, like the early efforts of artificial intelligence, is a noble cause rooted in predictability and measurements that can rival the best structure data analysis. The reality is that the data source is messy and very human. As such, emerging movements and personal interpretations are more meaningful than a well defined empirical dashboard. Basically it requires a human being to extract value from this corpus of unstructured data.

Most of my readers know I have been developing a Web 2.0 awareness technology (Darwin Ecosystem) for the last two years that can can extract relevance out of the chaos of unstructured communication. I was a keynote speaker at the Enterprise 2.O conference in Montreal, Canada last week. Since the conference, I have been exposed to many Canadian companies who are struggling with making sense of their communication platform as they are exploring the implementation of Web 2.0 solutions. After every demonstration of Darwin’s Awareness Engine these companies were amazed at the technology’s ability to aggregate and correlate meaningful information on one screen; one called it “The dashboard of our voices” and an other said “I can finally make sense of what is going on without endless meetings.” Needless to say, we are now discussing the best way to implement Darwin’s Awareness Engine in environments that have only emails, Lotus Notes/Domino, Sharepoint and others with proven Web 2.0 solutions. I look forward to harvesting what they have in their legacy communication tools to show them that the value of collaboration is not about the platform you choose (the standard now), but instead it is about the knowledge hidden and captured during work (the future).

Goollery Provides a Nice Collection of Google-related Projects

Goollery offers a nice collection of Google-related projects from around the world. There are a number of categories: Google Brand, Search, Maps, Earth, Image Search Chrome, SketchUp, Translate, Android, and YouTube.  Within each category there is a variety of projects. For example, under search I found, a painting project that had the Google search page done in the styles of Miro and van Gogh, as well as several original themes by Valéry Grancher, France. The Search Engine Rap Battle was a video context between MSN and Google.

Under maps, there is Ohio Piano. There are 88 counties in Ohio and 88 keys on a keyboard. With Ohio Piano, the state map is turned into a piano that you can play with two pre-programmed melodies. It is by Andy Woodruff, Cambridge, Massachusetts. There is also British Art From the Tate that allows you to explore locations of paintings within the Tate with Street View depicted in a special selection of Tate artworks. You can discover how urban and rural environments have changed, and the views painted by artists such as Turner and Constable are now lost. It is by www.svmapplets.com.

In another Google maps project. Artist Bill Guffey from Kentucky painted scenes from around the world that he saw with Google Street View. Word Magazine UK created a project where iconic album cover photographs are mapped via Google Maps. I could go on but you get the idea. It contains some very creative work. 

Economist Intelligent Unit Finds Strong Belief in Business Value of Social Software

The Economist Intelligence Unit reported that Web 2.0 has moved from buzzword to reality in many of the world’s largest corporations. They conducted a survey of 406 senior executives worldwide and found that 79% of respondents see the collaborative web as a way to boost revenues and cut costs. They said that, “perhaps the most interesting finding is that a full 85% of C-suite executives see the sharing and collaboration aspects of Web 2.0 as an opportunity to increase revenue and/or margins, versus 75% of middle management.” Nothing like having top down sponsorship delivered to a largely already convinced group of middle managers. This top down effect also extend to the view that Web 2.0 is transformative, affecting all parts of the business (35% versus 28%) and is making a significant impact on the company’s business model (41% versus 22%). They asked good questions.

The top perceived potential for Web 2.0 was to transform the way that companies interact with their customers. Many of these study participants were part of large companies already using Web 2.0 tools and methods. The most cited use was the creation of online communities to help with product marketing or product development. Next was the use of blogs or wikis to initiate conversations and share knowledge inside or outside the company.

It seems that so far executives are more convinced of external uses of Web 2.0 than internal enterprise 2.0 efforts. The study found that 68% of executives expect Web 2.0 methods and tools to be the single biggest factor changing the ways their company interacts with customers. While 49% said these tools will change how employees interact with each other and the company. This is not surprising given the current usage patterns within the sample reported above and the broader awareness of Web 2.0 marketing efforts than enterprise 2.0 collaboration efforts.

Building on this nearly 60% of those surveyed said that their companies are asking customers to contribute their product development and/or enhancement, or that they plan to do so within the coming two years. In addition, “about half of companies say they are, or are planning to, treat customers as co-developers of products that are in a constant state of improvement.” The wisdom of crowds has caught on.

Making Sense of Micro-blog Streaming and Awareness

Microblogs (Twitter), social networks (Facebook) and rich media posts (Flckr and YouTube) give us the ability to receive streams of events as they occur in near real-time about unfolding events or just  answer our curiosity needs to know what’s happening in our communities of interests. Events such as Obama’s rise to the presidency, and more recently the protest against the election in Iran, have been fueled and benefit from this Web movement. What was seen as an ingenious way for the Obama campaign to spread its message, is now seen as the instrument of free speech and media control disruption in Iran. 

When an event is that important, and being watched by so many, we can count on the news to leverage and filter these sources for most of us. The reality is that unless your are passionate about a given topic or your social network, you would not think of going to microblogs to be informed about what is going on. And the reason is simple... Why would you waste your time reading through hundreds of insignificant and chronologically sorted posts from people you don’t know?

Even Connan O’Brian, as the new host of the Tonight Show, now has a satirical skit about how meaningless celebrity Twitts are in contrast to the hype made about Twitter. Who really cares if Angelina Jolie Twits “I am having a terrible coffee in Malibou”? So why the hype and when does it matter?

The hype is there because many media have learned to use Twitter to reach a larger audience at no cost... that is why every media talks about Twitter. This basically gave all the media a way to do what they could not do with phone text messages... so they promote Twitter every time they can!

Now why does microblogging matters? It matters because it is the voice of the people (although fading quickly thanks to those mega-media spammers). This is where an important distinction must be made; the voice of the people is not the same as the words of every one. This is why no one who values his/her free time will read the chronological stream of 140 characters statements from people waiting in line to buy the new iPhone or complain about Junior High’s principal.

Microblogs are chaotic in nature and increase our information overload, unless someone who cares about a given topic, observes, searches, filters, selects and delivers the valuable nuggets for us to pay attention. To this day the microblogging phenomena has been focusing on self-promotion, community awareness, and used for people-reporting.

Now how do we make sense of the information overload we all love to create and share? In contrast from today’s iteration with micro-blogs, Darwin Ecosystem LLC awareness and discovery engine, takes a different approach by acknowledging the chaotic nature of this information, and focusing its model on the emergence of correlated themes coming from all even-driven sources.

Twitter, Blogs, LinkedIn, Facebook Lead Social Media Marketing

There continues to be a lot of research in social media marketing as budgets and media attention shifts form old school to new school media. Here is another study on the growing use of social media in marketing. In a survey, Social Media Marketing Industry Report, by Michael Stelzner with almost 700 responses an overwhelming majority (88%) of marketers say they are using some form of social media to market their business, though 72% of those using it say they have only been at it a few months or less. The Media Buyer Planner reported that the study found that Twitter, blogs, LinkedIn and Facebook - in that order - are the top four social media tools used by marketers. See below for links to other studies.

I would imagine that many of the Twitter uses fall into the recent category. I wonder what the relative ranking was a year ago and what it will be within a year. It is nice to see blogs up there. As I written many times, I think Twitter and blogs complement each other. Twitter gets attention and blogs can provide substance. I am now advising my blog clients on Twitter use, although some have used it longer than me and I learned new stuff from them.

Here is perhaps the most interesting statistic. The survey ‘found that there is a direct relationship between how long marketers have been using social media and their weekly time commitment. For people just beginning, the median weekly time commitment is two hours per week. For those who have been at it for months, the median jumps to 10 hours per week. For those who report social media marketing use for years, the median is 20+ hours each week.”

This would seem to indicate that the value of social media becomes more evident the longer you use it. Then you invest more time for this benefit. Of course, we have to be careful that correlation does not equal causation. It could be that it is the really committed to who stick around to be included in the longer time social media groups. I would want to see the total numbers in each time of use category.

Darwin can be used to provide focus to social media so users get more targeted content through their personal "magnets," especially when they are pointed to long tail topics on the Web. This then provides a vehicle for marketers to provide more targeted and useful messages. Magnets can draw on a range of sources but also be limited to channels such as Twitter. 

Web 2.0: A Collective Conscientiousness Platform?

I have been exploring the role that the WEB 2.0 can have as platform for the representation of Collective Conscientiousness. With blogs, wikipedia, wikinews, social networking, MySpace, LinkedIn, YouTube and other highly interactive and social network-enabled features, we are starting to see popular themes and sub-culture groups emerge to the mainstream. With the interaction between people’s interests and the need to express themselves (their lives) with these systems, we are providing our society with near-real-time awareness of what matters to people. 

I believe that we will be able to harness the commonality of the expressions found across these systems and be capable of viewing the expressions of the Collective Conscientiousness. I think that this awareness can influence actions towards the evolving Collective Conscientiousness that can be of use to market analysis, political campaigns and governance.

Please comment and let me know if this is a topic of interest and if you would like to join a focus group to further discuss and explore the possibilities of a visible collective conscientiousness.