infoarch

It's been way to long ago. But I was invited to try SemanticProxy . ReadWriteWeb recently had a nice overview post on Semantic web applications and Calais was one of them. Calais is: ...a toolkit of products that enable users to incorporate semantic functionality within their blog, content management system, website or application. Since launching the Open Calais API early this year, over 6,000 developers have registered with it and the service is doing more than 1 million transactions a day. We wrote about the launch of Calais' easiest-to-use service yet , called SemanticProxy , at the end of September. Version 3.0 was released earlier this month and version 4 is expected by January 09. RWW verdict one year later: Calais has really blossomed over the past year and it is one of the most promising Semantic services around today. We can't wait to see what's next! I finally had time to play around with SemanticProxy. I first tried the demo using the ...

Lots of interesting stuff has been written and is being written on why we should use microblogging (or microsharing) inside and outside the enterprise. I've been collecting some of the posts I find most interesting and will share them with you here, with some personal comments relating to why I use microblogging inside and outside the company. On external microblogging: How to Use Twitter as a Twool by Guy Kawasaki. Great example of personal experiences with Twitter, but also how it can be/should be used by companies. Learned about search.twitter.com ,which is great. Already use Twitterfeed , which is handy to auto-publish bookmarks, etc. Why I love Twitter by Tim O'Reilly. It's unbelievable how many tweats he cranks out every day. How do you do that? I don't have a smart phone and use the web and TweetDeck to tweet. After reading this post I decided do regularly check my Twitter Grade . Just to see how I'm doing compared to others. 10 reasons why Twitter...

Happy Holidays everyone! Hope you have some nice, relaxing days with friends and family. Wish you all a Happy New Year. I won't be blogging much the coming weeks. I'm definitely looking forward to 2009: in January I'm celebrating my 2 year blogging anniversary. Tags van Technorati: holiday , new year , life

Just signed the petition of 'Better Place' and inserted a badge on the right-hand side of my blog. The venture to change the way we see mobility and use natural resources has gripped me over the last couple of years. I must admit this is largely due to some innovative colleagues I carpool with. Dutch TV has been broadcasting interesting documentaries on this topic and we've been discussing them and the implications of their statements. Then, recently, I ran into an article in Wired about 'Better Place' and the guy behind the company, Shai Agassi . 'Better Place' has this 'big hairy audacious goal' to change the way we approach mobility. And while 'Detroit' was sleeping and may go bankrupt, these guys are working hard to actually do what should have been done years ago: find alternatives for the way we make cars and make them run. I support this venture to make this world a better place and hope you will too.

My Dutch newspaper ( NRC , Dec. 18, 2008) had a nice short article with very interesting content (- no link available, so I'll provide source link). The Journal RNA Biology is now requiring papers to be peer-reviewed twice. Once on Wikipedia . And once by the journal's own review panel. A summary of the paper must be submitted to Wikipedia first, before the paper is published in the journal. I think this is good for the scientists wanting to publish an article. Who knows what kind of interesting corrections and extensions will be made to the central thought of their paper. And it's also good news for general public as well. Expert information (on RNA in this case) is published publicly and shared with us all. It would be nice to see other journals open up as well! I was also thinking this could or should be applied inside companies as well. In most companies employees write reports and they're submitted to an archive or document management system, after being fo...

Not bad, eh?! 14% This quiz was provided by - Search & Social - Media Experts

Strategy + Business has an interesting interview with prof. Ikujiro Nonaka, "The Practical Wisdom of Ikujiro Nonaka" . Some nice quotes: In the act of creating, people argue. They have heated dialogue. They get upset! Without real exchange, you can't create knowledge. Knowledge creation is a human activity. (...) ... Nonaka's perspective ... runs counter to conventional corporate practice. Most companies assign knowledge management to their information technology departments, which focus on codifying best practices that can be captured, stored, indexed, and retrieved as efficiently as possible. Nonaka views all this data management as minor, almost incidental aspect of the capability development that enables business success. (...) Nonaka's concept of a knowledge-creating company resembles the kind of community in which generosity is prevalent, people feel recognized as distinct individuals, and informal, honest communication is commonplace. When d...

[Note from infoarch : Peter Verhoeven is a smart colleague of mine. One of the things he’s working on is selecting and implementing an Enterprise RSS solution for the company we work for. Peter did deep research on this topic and found some gaps in what current Enterprise RSS vendors are offering. I asked Peter to summarize his thoughts in the guest blog post you find below. Enjoy! And we would love to hear what you think. Peter's LinkedIn profile can be found here and he initiated and maintains a popular website, Magnifiers.org .] Introduction Last months we evaluated two Enterprise RSS solutions: Attensa Feed Server (AFS) from Attensa and NewsGator Enterprise Server (NGES) from NewsGator , to replace our self-made Enterprise RSS solution. Both products are missing an essential feature for us, namely good support of “secured feeds” and options to share “secured feeds” with employees with the same permissions. What are “secured feeds”?...

Recently I posted my thoughts on 'IBM and Numerati' . I got several interesting comments on that post . And I was pointed to posts by Luis Suarez (mind you, an IBM-er) and Dave Snowden (an ex-IBM-er). I had already read them before posting my ideas on this topic, but didn't respond to their posts. But too be clear. I was just as surprised to read about this topic as Snowden. And funnily, an IBM-er like Luis says this is not common practice at IBM either... However, as I said, I do find the idea intriguing... and scary. True, like Luis and Ton Zijlstra commented , this is different from web 2.0. For me too, I like the web 2.0 approach more than the Numerati approach. But I do find this approach closer to web 2.0 than my commenters. Luis says: IBM is not routinely analyzing employees e-mail, calendars and chats without employees' permission or knowledge But how does this relate to IBM Whisper and the opt-in 'Social Network tool' IBM runs internal...

Just was rethinking the way I organize my work while reading the 'Productive Magazine' . (Great magazine, by the way!) As a knowledge worker I do lots of work because I think it's good for me and/or the company I work for. After finishing a memo, report, etc I go off and distribute it. Of course I hope others will read it, use it and make good decisions based on it's content. I organize my work using the 'Getting things done' methodology . And it works great for me. In the Productivity magazine other methods tell us what GTD is lacking. I wasn't too convinced by their lists... But all of a sudden I did realize that I don't ask myself explicitly enough for every task: Who I am doing it for? Is someone really waiting for me to give them new insights and/or am I answering questions they have? This relates to what GTD calls 'desired result' of a task. I think I should focus on this more to hopefully become more productive than I already am (- at le...

Good news! Wikipedia is going to work on its user-friendliness. (Refer to Marie Jose Klaver's post (in Dutch), Wikimedia's post .) My first reaction was: great. Then I read some critiques on this move and thought: that's an interesting perspective. Making Wikipedia easier to use, could lead to lots of clutter and more edit-wars... Why I'm happy is because I'm thinking from a corporate perspective first. We are using the Mediawiki platform (on which Wikipedia is built) for our enterprise wiki's. Although they are much-used in R&D, we see that less-tech-savvy employees would rather have a more user-friendly (mostly relating to a WYSIWYG editor) interface. So, from a company perspective I'm really happy with this and hope this will encourage our employees (and other companies) to use wiki's more often. Tags van Technorati: wiki , wikipedia , mediawiki , enterprise 2.0

I forgot to post an idea on how Taglocity could become even more useful (for me). It would be nice to be able to tag/label files too (straight from Outlook and in Explorer). I know Vista supports tagging of files (I use Vista at home and XP at work), but I don't find the tagging very easy and user-friendly. Is Taglocity thinking of moving in this direction? Tags van Technorati: email , productivity , social networking

Recently I decided to stop publishing my bookmarks to my blog . I wondered if my readers agreed with this idea. Some responded and urged me to continue to publish my bookmarks. So, I almost proceeded to do that and then I thought: why not tweat them? I proposed that option and it seems to do the trick. I'll be trying this and see if this is the way to go. You can follow my tweats (with bookmarks) here . And of course you can follow my bookmarks directly in Diigo en Delicious . Tags van Technorati: social bookmarking , twitter , microblogging

Wow, this is a great presentation on the evolution of the 'information architect' role (- found via @dtunkelang. Thanks again! ). As you know I'm an information architect for Océ. I posted on my definition of 'information architecture' before . My definition seems to fit more with the 'old' definition than the new. Although this does depend on where you live. In The Netherlands, e.g., information architecture is more related to 'information management program development' than to 'web architecture/design'. Tags van Technorati: information architecture , information management

Alright! Not too long ago I said I would start using Taglocity . And, of course, I promised to tell you more about my experiences using it. Well, here goes! The strange thing is not too many people seem to be using Taglocity. At least not the people in my network. Lots of them use Xobni , as I did too. I tweated my network , searched Twitter , Googled a bit and found their isn't a whole lot of buzz on Taglocity yet. Well I guess I'll have to create some and lead the way... ;-) Ok, now about Taglocity. As I said I really enjoy Gmail functionality. Taglocity brings this to Outlook. And it works for me. I really enjoy adding labels to my email. I still put mail in one of the 6 folders I have (of which the biggest one is 'Deleted items'). But I now also label them. This makes finding my email back much faster. And I don't have to be to anxious to put the email in the right folder. The search speed of Taglocity is good enough. In practice I switch between Outlook ...

Not too long ago I read Dan Brown's Angels and Demons' . This book introduced me to some people I've vaguely heard of, but didn't really know: the Illuminati. Actually I'm not really sure I know them after reading Brown's book. Are they real? Have they actually done the stuff Brown describes? And are they still active? The same kind of questions popped up when I recently ran into a new book by Stephen Baker, "The Numerati ". Actually I first read some of the buzz on this book and read an excerpt in Business Week . I plan to buy the book and read it soon. Based on the excerpt and other posts I read on this book, my first impression is: very interesting, thought-provoking stuff. As I understand, the basic question is: how far can you go with data, numbers, digital objects? If you have lots of them, what can you do, has been and is being done with them? What I like about this question, is the fact that it doesn't relate to the postmodern world w...

As you know and can see: I have my new bookmarks published to my blog every now and then. I started doing this because I see others doing this too. I found it quite useful. For me, it feels like others are reading and recommending posts that I am not following and reading. Hopefully I could do the same for them. It's some form of social search. And I do see that friends following my blog copy posts from my 'recommended bookmarks' and share them with their readers. However, I'm stopping anyway. I find the amount of 'recommended bookmark' posts is cluttering my own (non-automated) posts. And you can follow my favorite bookmarks (with or without comments) on Diigo and delicious anyway. If you think this is wrong, please let me know. If you happy with this move, let me know too! Tags van Technorati: social bookmarking , search , social search

Technology Review: 10 Emerging Technologies 2008 tags : trends Posted from Diigo . The rest of my favorite links are here .