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April 17, 2007
Patent Granted 7,206,785
Impact Analysis of MetadataMethods and systems for estimating impact between metadata descriptors are provided. A software program compares a first metadata descriptor with a second metadata descriptor and determines an impact rating between the metadata descriptors. The impact rating may be used to map metadata descriptors or as an indication of how a change in one database will effect other interrelated databases.
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Posted by Todd at 11:03 PM
April 15, 2007
DMReview: Data Quality: The Price of Entry
What exactly is data quality? The most obvious answer is that data quality represents the validity of the information. But that doesn’t really tell the whole story of data quality, take a look at the following dimensions as describes by the United States Accountability Office: Accuracy, Validity, Completeness, Consistency, Timeliness, and Ease of Use.
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Posted by Todd at 7:32 PM
April 12, 2007
Mass Adoption of Social Software
While Web 2.0 applications like Flickr, SlideShare, MySpace, and Second Life provide great examples of large scale deployments, we seem to have a shortage of Enterprise mass adoptions. Mass adoption would be where a large percentage of employees, contractors and business partners access the social application in their day to day work. To put this in perspective, Wikipedia is updated by only 1% of the user base actually updates information. In January 2007, the site registered 42.8 million unique visitors while only 75,000 registered contributors. Another way of looking at it is that the Wikipedia server infrastructure handles 200 million queries while handling around a million updates. Do not misunderstand, this is very impressive but with those numbers within a corporation, what happens? To keep the math simple, let us assume that we have 100,000 employees. Based on the Wikipedia numbers, we might expect to have 1,000 people updating content. Of course, that would only be in a perfect world. The actual number may only be around 100. Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia says that instead of the hundreds of thousands of people we might imagine contributing information to the site, it’s actually written by just a few hundred people, known as "super-contributors. Jacob Nielson remarked User participation often more or less follows a 90-9-1 rule: 90% of users are lurkers (i.e., read or observe, but don’t contribute); 9% of users contribute from time to time, but other priorities dominate their time; 1% of users participate a lot and account for most contributions: it can seem as if they don’t have lives because they often post just minutes after whatever event they’re commenting on occurs.
So what constitutes mass adoption? Can we say that 100 contributing users defines an environment of mass adoption? Perhaps we can separate the content from the usage and only attach the mass adoption class to the usage side. That seems to be limiting to me but I have been wrong before.
Posted by Todd at 2:13 PM
April 7, 2007
Patent Granted 7,200,820
A system and method for viewing search results is disclosed. A method of communicating a search result according to various views is disclosed. A method of displaying metadata associated with content of websites is disclosed. A method of displaying metadata associated with relationships of websites is disclosed. A method of displaying metadata associated with images of websites is disclosed. A method of displaying metadata associated with seals of websites is disclosed. A method of displaying metadata associated with one or more websites in a view, receiving a request to change the view, and displaying metadata associated with the one or more websites in a second view is disclosed.
Posted by Todd at 1:46 PM
April 4, 2007
What is Social Tagging
Social tagging describes the collaborative activity of marking shared online content with keywords or tags as a way to organize content for future navigation, filtering, or search (Gibson, Teasley, & Yew, 2006). Traditional information architecture utilized a central taxonomy or classification scheme in order to place information into specific pre-defined buckets or categories. The assumption was that trained librarians understood more about information content and context than the average user. While this might have been true for the local library with the utilization of the Dewey Decimal system, the enormous amount of content on the Internet makes this type of system un-manageable. Tagging offers a number of benefits to the end user community. Perhaps the most important feature to the individual is the ability to bookmark the information in a way that is easier for them to recall at a later date. The benefit of this ability on a personal basis is obvious but what about the impact to the community at large. The idea of social tagging is allowing multiple users to tag content in a way that makes sense to them, by combining these tags, users create an environment where the opinions of the majority define the appropriateness of the tags themselves. The act of creating a collection of popular tags is referred to as a folksonomy which is defined as a folk taxonomy of important and emerging content within the user community (Ahn, Davis, Fake, Fox, Furnas, Golder, Marlow, Naaman, & Schachter, 2006). The vocabulary problem is defined by the fact that different users define content in different ways. The disagreement can lead to missed information or inefficient user interactions (Boyd, Davis, Marlow, & Naaman, 2006). One of the best examples of social tagging is Flickr which allows users to upload images and “tag” them with appropriate metadata keywords. Other users, who view your images, can also tag them with their concept of appropriate keywords. After a critical mass has been reached, the resulting tag collection will identify images correctly and without bias.
Posted by Todd at 12:02 PM
Introducing Enterprise 2.0
By now you have probably heard of Web 2.0 and all of the hype surrounding the next evolution of web technology. The impact on our culture is unmistakable with the advent of Weblogs, Wikis, and many other social applications. While Web 2.0 has been debated by researchers as to who and when the concepts emerged, little argument exists that the technology has arrived. Unlike Web 1.0, this new technology encourages user participation and derives its greatest value when large communities contribute the content. User generated metadata, community based information, and innovative designs enable a much richer environment for value creation.
Imagine a world where delivering the most advanced product with the greatest number of features actually losses the war for customer’s attention. This is exactly what happened to the feature rich Diamond Rio MP3 player. The Rio hit the world with a simple design, advanced features and a collection of technology advancements that forced the recording industry to file suit to protect their interest. Yet, today 75% of the market is owned by Apple’s IPod which has far fewer features, cost more, and operates on top of a proprietary music format which cannot be accessed by other devices. On the surface, this seems to fly into the face of Web 2.0 openness. What happened to the traditional framework where value dictated the winners and losers? Describing the competitive market where the Apple IPod competed head to head with the RIO is leaving out a few details. Specifically, the emergence of ITunes and the ITunes Music store altered the entire music ecosystem. The advanced functionally was transformed to the computer application which eliminated the need for that kind of feature set to be housed within the device. Add the ability to buy any song for $0.99 and you have a complete transformation worth billions. What Apple delivered is the “music experience” for the end user. This transformation from the traditional buying CD’s and loading the songs on the computer then trying to manage the music was Apple’s greatest accomplishment.
The IPod story is an Enterprise 2.0 success story based on collaborative designs, viral marketing, and the implementation of the experience over technology and features. Businesses, organizations, and individuals are all changing the way in which value is delivered. Enterprise 2.0 is about you, your collaborative ability to contribute to the vast amount of knowledge in the world today. We are starting to see power shift from the few that controlled the flow of information to you; Times Person of the Year for 2006. The business implications of this new media are unclear. No one is really sure where the rich user interfaces, self-service, the long tail, agility, transparency, and the emergent components of trust are going to take us. The one thing we can count on is that change is inevitable. Organizations have a plethora of knowledge stores ranging from repositories to registries; from corporate Wiki’s to Enterprise Collaborative applications like SharePoint. While we have plenty of tools to choose from, technology is only part of the solution. Social or behavioral changes must also occur in order to make inroads into the business culture of the organization. For example, when sending out an attachment do you email the document or send a link to a shared workspace? With collaborative type solutions, we have a much richer set of tools to deliver value to the business. Additionally, the organization must also change and adopt the technologies as a viable method of doing business. The essence of Enterprise 2.0 is the facilitation of value creation not the management of it. We are moving away from the traditional command and control model of value creation to one that is self-organizing, innovative, distributed, and collaborative. By utilizing these tools, altering the social behavior, and implementing change in the organization, we can evolve to a single entity all driving toward the same goals.
Posted by Todd at 12:00 PM