infoarch

So I recently met a new colleague who had worked at Merck & Co. and shared his experience with using a expert finding and knowledge sharing platform. He reached out to me to find out if we have a comparable platform, so he could use that to meet his needs. I was curious which platform he had experienced. But he wasn't sure. So I googled a bit during our call - of course I told him I was googling, I don't want to be rude and divide my attention between him and the web... - and there is was. A clear blogpost from 2009 about Merck's experiences with an internal knowledge sharing platform. It also described the underlying technology. What's so special about this? Several things: The power of (Google) search. It still continues to amaze me how easily you can type in a few words in a search engine and find what you're looking for. In this case what I was looking for popped up in the first three results. The power of blogging. I found what I was looking for...

There's been lots of talk in the blogosphere about Marissa Mayers decision to tell Yahoo! employees to stop working from home. Hey, even Yahoo! employees were/are discussing it on the web. James Robertson wrote up a nice post about this decision and also pointed to the fact that Google seems to be like-minded to Yahoo! when it comes to working from home. Also interesting is what he says about the implications of this kind of news for 'the digital workplace'. One of the things I like about the discussion is that we have to rethink why we like/dislike working from home. And that's one of the things I miss in the discussion about tele-work. Of course commenters rightly wonder what this Yahoo! statement means with respect to trusting employees to decide for themselves where they can get their work done. However, isn't it also OK to discuss what the pro's and con's of tele-work are. Is working from home always the best way to go? In my experience with worki...

I find Mary Meeker's reports on internet trends very interesting. They're packed with interesting data and insights. I've been following her work closely. She recently published an updated overview of 2012 and I thought I'd share my highlights with you at the end of this year. sheet 9: stunning slide showing shipment of iPads, iPhones and iPods over 10 years compared. This slides is old(er), but it just underlines the interesting times we live in sheet 10: You thought the ramp up of Apple products is huge, well Android ramp up is 6 times that of iPhone sheet 12: 30% of US adults own a tablet, less than 3 years ago that was 3% sheet 17: mobile advertising is growing rapidly; $0.7 billion in 2008, $19 billion in 2012 sheet 18: 24% of online shopping was done via tablets on Black Saturday, versus 6% 2 years ago sheet 20: we are in the midst of a huge change powered by new devices + connectivity + UI + beauty . Meeker highlights the effects for the pc, photography, ...

Most people know the history of the intranet . And if you’re older you will have experienced its history. Many organization that have had an intranet for years are looking for ways towards a modern and future-ready intranet. But what is the future of the intranet? Many intranet experts and organizations are thinking about this question. Are we eventually going to be apply to wear the intranet? From intranet to social intranet  There’s lots of talk about using social media within organizations. In short this is also called the ‘social intranet’. The intention is to have an intranet that is more than most are used to: news, procedures, who-is-who and the restaurant menu. A ‘social intranet’ should make us forget the old intranet. The old intranet that often hardly supports the way employees do their daily work.  From intranet to digital workplace  For this reason the new intranet is also called the ‘digital workplace’ more and more. A new name to help us forg...

Outdoor maps are great. Google is doing a wonderful job with Maps . But what about indoor maps? I've been tracking posts about this topic for some time. And just recently Google announced it's taking Google Maps indoors . Here's a short video about his initiative: I think this will have huge implications for companies as well. Just think about adding maps to your internal intranet employee directory.

Talking to an old-aged man who had just discovered the internet, he said: "The internet is just so great, what a huge amount of sources we have there!" And I agree with him. The internet is amazing. The huge amount of content shared there about all kinds of topics. The way we can interact with content and people via the internet. The amazing number of different internet services. And we have reached the end of what the internet will bring us. But is the internet all good. There have been many that question if the internet is such a positive force. Shouldn't we question some (or all) of the changes the internet is doing to the world and to. Andrew Keen wrote about the negative aspects of the internet on culture . Nicolas Carr published about book about what the internet is doing to our brain . And more can be mentioned here. Recently I bumped into a review of The Filter Bubble in my Dutch newspaper , went over to watch the related TED Talk with the same title and ...

Recently took the time to watch some Dreamforce 2011 talks. There's lots to learn from them. I particularly enjoyed Marc Benioff's interview/talk with Eric Schmidt . I liked the way they stepped back and looked at the history and future of the technology industry in general, and the internet especially. Just to list some of the questions they talked about: what the future of the manufacturing industry (in the US and Europe) will be? Why is it hard for existing players to move to new technology standards? What should an existing company do when technology shifts? Where is 'cloud' and 'social' going? What is the potential of the internet for business and government? Is this only for large companies or more so for small companies? In short the future according to Schmidt is: mobile, local and social. And here's the whole talk for you. Hope you enjoy it!  

Oops, missed the 1st minutes of Neil Morgan , Head of Global Intranet at WWF International (5000 employees). How did they get to their new collaboration platform? Surveyed users by asking questions and watching the way they worked. Based on the survey’s they came up with personas. They found that lots of work was very labor intensive. To address their ‘problems’ they turned to Google. People were already using Gmail, Google Docs, etc. They went for Google Apps: Calendars Docs (e.g. Forms), Spreadsheets Presentations Google Sites (best practices, wiki space, etc.) Neil stresses how really simple it was to set up Google Apps and how simple it is too use. He also shows how well the parts of Google Apps integrate. Search Docs or Search All from one box. Create a document, share it easily and chat about it in the sidebar. Etc. How do they link all these sites back into the intranet portal. They implemented a newsroom approach on the central intranet. They want the sites to think more in a n...

It wasn't too long ago I wondered if there would be another DARPA Grand Challenge. I wondered because the Challenges I'd followed and watched were so inspirational. Remember the 2006 Grand Challenge when the Stanford team passed the finish line first ? Man, I almost jumped up and down with the team... And if the DARPA Challenges weren't continued, would the research team go forth with their work or would it be commercialized? Then, just recently, we heard Google is working on a secret project, the Google Car. An autonomous vehicle driving around in the SF area. Wow! Techcrunch , Robert Scoble , the NY Times and ReadWriteWeb have the story. Oh, and Google of course. So, the work done for the DARPA Grand Challenges is continued by Google. And who's responsible for this project? Right, the team leader of the winning team in 2006, Dr. Sebastian Thrun. In 2006 he was lead researcher at the Stanford AI lab. So, now we have the Google algorithm and the Google Car com...

Some time ago I pointed to an interesting company , Micello , who's focusing on mapping the inside of building. They start where Google Maps and Street View stops. It looks like they weren't the only one's that thought this was a good idea... Google seems to be working on this too. "According to a new rumor, Google could soon take Street View indoors and allow its users to walk into virtual stores." - Is Google Planning to Take Street View into Stores? (Updated) ( view on Google Sidewiki ) UPDATE March 26, 2010: Also refer to this post . UPDATE 15-10-2011: Why is indoor navigation so hard?

My previous post was posted with Google Sidekick. I tried it before, but didn't push those 'sidenotes' to my blog. Now I've done it a first time, I'm planning on doing it more often. Google Sidekick reminds me of Trailfire. I used to use that tool. The problem was it wasn't used by many of my friends. But it worked nicely. In the meantime Trailfire was discontinued. Google Sidekick will take it over from there. Tags van Technorati: google , trailfire , notes , blogging

Not too long ago I shared an idea I had. Wouldn't it be neat if you could follow a news topic? I wrote: Wouldn't it be interesting if you could just point to the article or video about the topic and say: subscribe to all articles about this topic. A topic-RSS feed. Of course you can do this for big topics, using hashtags in Twitter for instance. And you can also define a query and subscribe to that feed, using Google Alerts for instance. But for smaller topics it's not that easy. Or am I missing something? Or do you know of apps that already solve this problem? Well, it looks like some people at Google had the same thoughts. Recently Google launched 'Living stories' . The NY Times and the Google System blog ran articles about this new app. Currently it only works with news from two large newspapers: The New York Times and The Washington Post. But it relates well to my idea. Think about what this could mean. We could be able to point to an article ...

Google Labs recently launched a cool tool: Google News Timeline . Google Search has a comparable feature too if you know what to type in . You can use Google News Timeline to search what has been said about a certain topic, person or brand over time. This is great for companies for instance, but also for research. It helps you get a feeling for the time period the topic was hot, how much was written about the topic at a certain time, etc. But what I was wondering is, isn't this also very interesting for inside companies as well? We all experienced old ideas coming back to life in companies over time. For some reason that great idea you had didn't really take-off. But now all of a sudden it does. The strange thing I've seen many times is that this new interest for a topic or idea, doesn't always relate to or build on the research that was done in the past. It looks like a new idea, fresh from the start. But in reality it isn't (-- and hardly ever is). A Google Ne...

Sorry I'm in Google mode today! Just read a nice article in The McKinsey Quarterly, 'Google like a pro' (not free). I Google a lot and mostly just use the simple term or string search. Occasionally I use more powerful queries. However, in this article I learned some new ones. I thought I'd share them with you (- and by typing them in I'm learning as well!). intitle: "plane crash" > finds the string in the title of a webpage site:nl or site:us for Dutch or US sites only. inurl:news or inurl:forum for news sites and forum discussions respectively. inurl:2008 to limit your search to a time period. view:timeline, gives search results in clickable timeline ~airplane, searches for airplane, plane, air, flight, aircraft, etc. Samuel is a *, gives search results telling you who Samuel is (according to Google...) I've been using these more often lately. I was thinking: why not put a little cheat sheet on the Google homepage to help u...

Ran into this interesting post and picture of the "new business card" . I think it really neat. It relates to what is happening now. What do you do if you have an appointment with somebody new? You Google them. At least I do. The same goes for when someone's applying for a job and I have to interview him/her. I Google them. This relates well to what Dell's Bob Pearson said some time ago : 'Google is our homepage'. I think doesn't only account for companies, but for people as well. If this business card is not for you, try this one ! Thanks Geekdad , Jeremiah Owyang and Gizmodo for the posts. Tags van Technorati: google

As you know I'm a happy Google Alerts user . However, I've been looking for a way to read the alerts in my feedreader. Not too long ago I told you Google is working on it. And now... it's there and it works . And I love it! [Thanks for the pointer, Google Operating System ]

A couple of days ago I mentioned 'Feedmysearch' with which you can RSS-ify a Google query. Very neat, but the 'automatic subscribe button' on their site didn't work for me. However it does work in this way: - type in the Google query you want to RSS-ify, - click 'Feed my search!', - copy the URL (instead of hitting the 'subscribe' button), - paste it into your feedreader (in my case Google Reader ) ... and you're all set!

I've been waiting for this for some time: to be able to turn Google searches into an RSS feed. I've been using Google Alerts , but I don't like getting the results in my Inbox. Feedmysearch solves the problem nicely! It turns your Google query nicely into an RSS feeds. Thanks Lifehacker for the pointer.

Nicolas Carr has written another fascinating article you can chew on. It's titled "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" . It relates well to posts about changes in reading behavior that I've been pointing to recently . The central thought of the article is: "Media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought." This is an interesting statement. However after reading this article I don't understand how this works, although I see it in practice. Does anyone no where I can find more info on this topic? The conclusion of the article seems to be: get used to less-deep-reading and more skimming. But is this really inevitable trend or we will people revolt every now and then? Just like with philosophical trends move between subjectivism and objectivism. --- Here are some key citations from the article: "It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional ...

Google Translate Becomes the Best Free Online Translator . Cool and very useful! Man, we did lots of research on automatic translation in the past. Also using parallel texts/web pages. But we never had enough to get it good. Google does, of course. I also like the social part of Translate: you may suggest a better translation if you like.