Victus pro Scientia Opus -- Food for the Knowledge Worker

How Does the Internet See You?

The title of this post is the key question posed by the "Metropath(ologies)" exhibit at the MIT Museum, one of Boston's best-kept secrets.  I had the chance to try out an on-line component of this exhibit called "Personas," an installation that comments beautifully on both the power and fallibility of data-mining.

When you enter your name into Personas, a computational process kicks off that assembles a "seemingly authoritative personal profile," beautifully presented as follows:

It's not meant to be useful or accurate, but to spur thoughts about reliability of algorithms being created inside "black boxes" that can have significant impact on our lives:  showing up on the first page of search engine results, having misinformation about us "out there" for credit reviewers or hiring managers because of past indiscretions, sharing a name with someone else, or something as simple as a misapplied tag to a photo on a social networking site, etc.

Although it took me a while to discern what is meant by "illegal" in my results (it's not as bad as I had thought, but it did indeed make me think!), I enjoyed not only the visualization of my "on-line identity", but also the thought that the artist  put into the project.

Serendipity and Weak Search -- For When The Stakes Are Low

I've been playing a lot lately with a music service called blip.fm (@mikegil), where one can "virtually DJ" songs stored by others to create a playlist.  When trying to find songs based on a keyword or theme, I'll often search based on that word (for example, "Saturday").

Blip.fm doesn't have anything like faceted search, and very little metadata associated with the songs, so the search results may return anything from songs with "Saturday" in the title to bands with the word "Saturday" in their name.  Pretty sloppy, right?  Lousy user experience, right?

As it turns out, no.

Perhaps it's the unique nature of music, but the imprecision of blip.fm's search actually makes my searches fun -- I often find some little pearls that I didn't expect and frankly wasn't looking for, but am happy to encounter.  I've discovered songs and artists I never would have found otherwise.

Commentators often lament the "niche culture" and "death of serendipity," those precious moments where you find the unexpectedly fascinating article on page 2 of the Metro section instead of the one article you googled and found on Boston.com, so this imprecise search has been a breath of fresh air.

However (and this underscores points we make all the time about the difference between enterprise data and consumer data), I'm not seeking serendipity when I'm searching for my firm's institutional knowledge.  I need one authoritative data point, not ten decent ones.  This requirement frequently means insertion of a human into the process to broker the flow of knowledge. 

Am I going about it wrong?  Is there a place for serendipity, for Amazon-esque "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought..." suggestion, or is precision the most important?  Is the distinction a work/fun one?  An enterprise/consumer one? 

There's some great reading on this point -- I especially recommend the work that Dan Keldsen and Carl Frappaolo have done on behalf of AIIM in the area of findability.

Behold the Power of Social Media: Old School Meets Web 2.0

This weekend, I joined some friends for a couple of beverages at a venerable bar in Philadelphia.  McGillin's Olde Ale House is the oldest continually operating tavern in Philadelphia, established in 1860.

We ran into some minor, annoying issues with the service, surly attitudes from the bartender and waitstaff.  Nothing acute, a lot of what you'd expect at a crowded bar in an urban setting (especially in Philadelphia, where pugnacity is an art form), but it aggravated me enough to Tweet about it:

 

I was positively dumbstruck when I received an e-mail today, not 24 hours later (on a Sunday, no less!) from McGillin's decidedly non-surly publicist offering to buy me a beer by way of apology.  It appears that McGillin's created a Twitter account last week, has 47 followers already who've signed up for information about McGillin's news, events, giveaways, etc. , and most importantly, actively monitors their "channel" for feedback from their customers.

The cycle between a customer's experience with a business, feedback, and corrective action being taken or not has gotten amazingly short and direct.  Kudos to a decidedly "old school" business for investing in and effectively using this "new school," social media tool to improve a customer's experience.

Inaugural Word Clouds: Bush vs Obama

Mike Volpe from HubSpot (thanks, Drew Smith [twitter:  @smith_drew] for the tip!), has a terrific blog if you're a marketer, or just interested in how people use language in marketing and interact with and consume social media.  He just posted a great blog article about comparing word clouds of the Bush 2000 inauguration speech and the Obama 2008 inauguration speech.  For those readers not familiar with the concept (i.e., if you missed this previous post, a word cloud or tag cloud is defined as:

"...a visualization of word frequencies. [A] tag cloud enables you to see how frequently words appear in a given text, or see the relationship between a column of words and a column of numbers.  The size of the word corresponds to the quantity associated with that word."
[source:  ManyEyes blog from IBM,  http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/page/Tag_Cloud.html]

The comparison of speeches like these is a use case I've heard for a qualitative, visual analysis tool, and I'm pleased to see it actually used in a timely and topical way.  I have no desire for a political discussion here, so take a look for yourself, and see how the speeches compare when held up against one another. 

Economic Hard Times and Web 2.0

This morning (via a newly-subscribed-to Twitter feed linking me to Harvard Business Publishing), I found and read a great short blurb of an article by Tom Davenport, with whose work at CIMS I am familiar.

Tom raises the timely question of the impact of the economic crisis on the explosion of social media, and it's a good point.  The people who scratch their heads hardest and ask most frequently "Why would you want to do THAT?" when told what Facebook or Twitter do are the Greatest Generation, people who came of age during honest-to-goodness hard times and who were inculcated with values that include hard work and fiscal prudence.

An absolutely priceless line from Davenport that sums it up best is this:   "Will we have time for Second Life when we have to take a second job?"

Social Media Meets Marketing

Today, I attended a roundtable discussion sponsored by the Mass Technology Leadership Council (MTLC), and facilitated by Paul Gillin, a luminary and authority on the topic of social networking.

The event was titled: "Using Social Media to Catapult Your Company to Thought Leadership" and the presenters included:

• John McArthur of Walden Tech Partners, whose extensive work in IT operations, management, and finance gave him great perspective.
• David Vellante of Wikibon.org, whose experience at IDC and several technology start-ups helped him start up an IT wiki that presents information from the buyer point of view
• Jeremy Selwyn of Taquitos.net, whose experiences bootstrapping a site as a lark/hobby have evolved into an avocation that gets nearly 600,000 page views per month.  There's also something endearing about a guy whose stated mission is "to try every potato chip in the world."

Each had unique viewpoints and stories to share, and all had valuable nuggets to take away, although it's always challenging to find a parallel with our firm's needs as a professional services/consulting firm.

A couple of highlights/nuggets, interspersed with my thoughts/reactions to them:

• Over 60 people in the room, and NO ONE who doesn'tuse Plaxo and/or LinkedIn.
• Interesting perspective on how companies get people to know about them.  Many of the presenters and attendees professed to not read newspapers at all, but merely subscribe to Google Alerts to stay current on topics of particular interest to them.
• Bloggers' heuristics:  if you spend 1-2 hours a week writing your blog, spend 4-5 hours a week reading other people's blogs.
• A lot of talk about "link love" and how Google results are so critical, AdWords, etc.  For example, only 2 out of the top 100 results for the term "PC" are computer makers (and one of them makes Macs).  Use URLs that look like the content, as they are much more easily surfaced by Google search results.  This is often at odds with Enterprise Content Management systems, which create more complex URLs for purposes of managing the content.
• Paul Gillin:  "Search is the new syndication."
• Don't lose track of objectives:  1. Help people find you (search/links).  2. Get your message out there (newsletters, website).  3. Create and sustain dialog with your customers (blogs).
• Metrics about website usage are ALL contextual.  What metrics matter to you?  What is baseline state?  Unique visitors? Repeat visitors? Pages per visit? From what domains?

The roundtable included lots of small tips/tricks throughout, but the main themes were timeless:  consistency and rhythm are key to events and all other marketing activities. This definitely ties back to David Maister's themes in "Strategy and the Fat Smoker."  Everyone knows the right behaviors, but few have the willpower to consistently execute them.

In keeping with the social media aspects of the day, I "live-tweeted" the proceedings http://twitter.com/mikegil), trying to capture nuggets of wisdom in real time.  Of course, I learned only after the fact of the proper way to tag my Tweets with a hash (#MTLC) so that they are easily referenced/found based on search for that string.  So now I know...

OK, I'll Admit It, I Had a Mullet

Or maybe it was a "mulldina," or pseudo-mullet.  In any case, it was a bad, 1980s-style, hockey-player kind of haircut.  Hard to remember -- it was fairly long ago, and (thankfully/hopefully?) there's not a lot of photographic evidence out there.  At the time, it was popular and of course I thought I looked OK.

I was thinking about mullets ("business in the front, party in the back") because a blog post I read today from IBM about tag clouds referred to Jeffrey Zeldman's original blog post making the tag cloud/mullet comparison.  Two interesting points:

1.  IBM has released a tool for creating tag clouds, a commonly-used web tool for visually representing word frequencies in selected text by sizing words according to their frequency.  It's called Many Eyes, and some of its capabilities (such as the ability to quickly draw up comparison tag clouds for two pieces of text) are bound to be highly useful, while some are just plain cool.  Thanks to Bill Ives' blog for the reference to this tool.

2.  In the Many Eyes blog, a reference is made to "one wag" calling tag clouds "the mullets of Web 2.0."  I thought that was hilarious, and a bit of quick research shows that wag is likely Jeffrey Zeldman.  The interesting part, to me, is that he did so in April, 2005.  For someone to be anticipating three years ago that web designers would be as sick of tag clouds today as we were of mullets, mood rings or the Macarena is pretty prescient. So, props to the cool kid. 

However, I'm not a designer, just a business user, so for me utility begets ubiquity.  Tag clouds are a super-useful device for efficiently navigating through tagged or indexed data using an easy-to-use visual tool.  For better or for worse, tag clouds are not going away until a new, easier convention replaces them, no matter what the cool kids say.  As the baseball player Yogi Berra famously stated about a Minneapolis restaurant, "Nobody goes there any more.  It's too crowded." 

Maybe IBM can give even the cool kids something to like about tag clouds again with Many Eyes.

Web 2.0 Tools Update

I love the part of the show House Hunters on HGTV where, after the buyers have decided on one of the three properties, the show's producers come back and revisit the new homeowners to see how they've settled into their new home.  In this post, I'll attempt a similar "re-visit" of some of the Web 2.0 tools I've blogged about over the past few months:

Tool	Date of Original Post	Rating 1 – 5, (5 = best)	Comments	UserID
Del.icio.us	11 March 2008	5	Immensely useful for storing and sharing bookmarks and tags.	mikegil
Taglocity	10 April 2008	3	Useful, pretty to look at, but hard to keep up with volume	n/a
Twitter	10 April 2008	4	Wickedly addictive, but still not clear on usefulness	mikegil
Swaptree	26 April 2008	2	Jury still out, have not yet transacted, too soon to tell.	mikegil

If you want to join the fray, please look me up on any of these services, but don't blame me if all of your discourse turns out to be under 140 characters (or, if you're one of the cool geeky kids, exactly 140.)

New Skills Needed for "Work 2.0"

There's an old saying about the weather:  "Everyone talks about it , but no one is doing anything about it."  The same thing seems to be happening with Web 2.0 (63,100,000 results for this term on Google, a very small percentage of which actually prescribe skills you'll need to thrive in it).  At a recent KM Forum meeting with this theme, however, I got some very specific prescriptive guidance for survival in the Web 2.0 world in a presentation from Ray Sims.

One slide in particular from Ray's presentation really stuck with me.  The slide (slide 34 of 51) enumerates some skills we're going to need in this new world, such as:

• efficient network creation and vetting (knowing who is worthy of your time and your trust),
• being OK with sharing ideas before they are fully thought out, and
• attention discipline (rather than scatter-brained multi-tasking).

There is plenty of worthwhile content all throughout this presentation, but I found this slide, in particular, to be worthy of immediate action and long-term resolve.  Ray's blog post on the definition of knowledge management is worthy of a separate post (or series of posts).

One last thing about the KM Forum. It illustrated something I've felt for nine years via opportunities like the KM Forum or last week's Sloan Sales Conference, or even the random guy sitting next to me at last week's Sox game quoting Hamlet's soliloquy to me as we chatted about David Ortiz's slump:  I'm blessed to live in an area where there is just an insane concentration of brainpower.

Earth Day Meets the Long Tail

A very simple, yet appealing idea came to me this week, compliments of Very Short List, a favorite website for surfacing strange and wonderful ephemera on the web:  Swaptree.

Swaptree works on a very simple premise:  we all have books, DVDs, music CDs and video games we no longer want.  There are other people who want them, and they have books, DVDs, music CDs and video games that we want.  Swaptree creates an exchange where people can connect and trade their cast-offs in these categories.  Users need only pay shipping costs, which Swaptree will calculate and show.  In fact, users can print the required postage directly from Swaptree, turning a tedious computer --> post office trip into a slightly less tedious computer --> mailbox trip.

Of course, since it's a "web 2.0" community, you can find and maintain a network of friends within Swaptree.  Find me (username:  mikegil) if you've got any good stuff to trade -- I'll be working on my "items i want" and "items i need" lists.

Simple, useful, leveraging the web and the wisdom of crowds, and eco-friendly.  Happy Earth Day.