infoarch

I recently posted my notes on the 1st masterclass of the SharePoint conference we organize. The 2nd masterclass of the SharePoint conference is by Andrew Wright . His talk is about ‘contextual intranet’. I'm sharing my summary of the masterclass below. I think I'll also post one or two more posts on the conference itself. But first Andrew Wright's masterclass about 'contextual intranets'. What is a contextual intranet? Wright’s definition is: An intranet that facilitates the development of content – both qualified (signal) and unqualified (noise) – that supports continuous improvement, efficient operations and employee engagement and delivers this content in a meaningful context to the employee. Characteristics of the contextual intranet The contextual intranet exists of the following elements: Content development Business imperatives (continuous improvement, operations (tasks), employee engagement) Content delivery (context provided by meta dat...

Many companies are looking into social tools for their internal organization. Lots of others just select what related companies have chosen. Hoping this is the right choice. As with selecting content management systems, many struggle to select a social platform. There are so many tools out there and they all say they can help you support internal networks. How to choose the right one? Is there a right one? Does the success of a tool elsewhere mean it will also be successful in the company you work for? The Social Now conference in Porto (June 26-27), organized by Knowman , addressed these questions. And it did so in a unique way. Basically the idea was to have social tool vendors present based on a concrete company case that wanted to move forward in knowledge sharing, idea management and collaborative project work. The vendors were asked to share their approach in 20 minutes and then an expert panel helped the company ask the right questions to the vendors. Many brave vendo...

The New York Times has an interesting 'experimental projects' group, beta620. ReadWriteWeb recently pointed to an interesting experiment, called Longitude. Wouldn't it be neat if news items could be browsed through by a map? So you can see what news has been published about the city or country you live in or are interested in? Longitude does just this. One thing I was wondering is: Is this concept also interesting for the intranet? Could it be valuable to international companies to link the news items and intranet pages to a location? Clearly there are good cases for the combination of location and intranet . Curious to hear your thoughts about this. Go ahead and play with Longitude. Great stuff for in the weekend if you ask me!

I've promised Bill Ives that I'd write a blogpost about Darwin Awareness Engine a long time ago. Finally, here's my post about this new and interesting service. Sorry it took so long... How do you keep up with the news, tweets, updates and feeds? We live in the wonderful world of information abundance. But many feel overwhelmed by the amount and speed of information. Some even talk about information overload. I described how I keep up with what's going on  in the world and in my area's of interest. But can't it be better? Yes, it can. This is where all kinds of new(er) solutions pop up. Like Techmeme and Postrank . There's even talk of Web Squared, Web 3.0 or the Semantic Web , which should help us filter through loads of information coming at us. Not just by highlighting 'the best tweets and feeds', but my semantically analyzing and summarizing the information. The Darwin Awareness Engine fits in this movement. And I think they're do...

This talk by Lee Bryant is about data and how it can lead to and improve social business intelligence. The industrial age model is getting less and less productive. It's still being masked by financials. We also see the limits of the carrot and stick management methods and extrinsic motivation as a way of orchestrating work. Process is an embedded responsive to prior stupidity (Shirky). It's the opposite of human endeavor which is about pattern matching, sense making, etc. Social Business is becoming the new mainstream. You can see this happening on the streets (shops saying "follow us on Twitter"). Data should/can drive evolutionary improvement. Social business data and intelligence can create the conditions for businesses to evolve. API's are the sex organs of business evolution then data is the DNA. Companies are sitting on loads of data. Of which just a small bit should remain confidential. This is the starting point for social CRM. Eventually it will be just...

Nova Spivack of Twine has an interesting post (on Twine) introducing us to Stephan Wolfram's 'Wolfram Alpha' . This is really exciting news and I'm looking forward to get my hands on this new "answer engine" . I still have to think Spivak's post through to really understand what this means for the internet, for search and natural language processing. But, I have a question (for you) without having many answers to this question myself: Can this be used for the enterprise too? If answers to questions can truly be computed , can enterprise-specific questions also be answered using enterprise data (if needed, combined with external world knowledge/data)? Can questions as: why does this part have these specifications, why were they chosen?, be answered? If so, this could be very interesting for companies having loads of unstructured and structured information hanging out all over the place. Providing smart insights over this information using this engine cou...

As promised I would let you know what my experiences are with Twine . Basically not much. I really took a good look at it in the beginning, but could find out how it would fit in my work. I couldn't just drop my work documents there. I stuff I do outside work doesn't fit there at all. So, in the end I didn't up using it much. I'm still listening to the Twine users and hoping to hear from them how I can integrate it in my work life. I do find that Twine could mean a lot in the enterprise. I would be wonderful to drop all my stuff in their, have Twine find interesting related documents, bookmarks and people, connect to people that work on related stuff, etc. Maybe we can try this in the near future? Two interesting posts on Twine can be found here and here .

Alright! Just received my invite to the Twine beta. As I wrote a couple of days ago , there's a way to cut the line! And it works. I'll let you know what I think of Twine soon.

Wow! I've written some posts about the new Semantic Web wave and here's another surfer: eeggi ! ReadWriteWeb has a nice summary on this new search engine . Eeggi is not live yet. There are demo's on the site. It looks a lot like Powerset , but (from the demo) it seems to be a little smarter. For one it also supports multi-lingual search. Looking forward to the 'live' version of eeggi! By the way: did you also see the demo video's of Searchme ?

As I wrote before I'm really curious to start using Twine . I'm still waiting for an invite to the beta. Nova Spivak just posted that people like me can get ahead in line by posting about Twine on their blog! Well, here's my post! Hope to get my invite soon and let you know what my experience with Twine is. And if you want an invite too, just follow the link !

Interesting short discussion about the future of the Web on Media Conversations. It mainly focuses on "web 3.0" and the "web being all around you". I listened to the podcast, but you can watch it too. I embedded the video for you. UPDATE: There was something wrong with the video embedding code, so I'll put in the link to the video instead.

Alex Iskold has another great post on Semantic Web on ReadWriteWeb . He's looking for the killer app to launch the Semantic Web. That doesn't seem to be too easy, refering to his list of options. What my killer app would be? It would be something like this. A tool that helps me when I write emails and documents. It reminds me of related (truly related, not just based on key word comparison) emails, documents (I wrote before), Internet pages (I visited before), etc. in a non-intrusive way. But for now, the "Shortcuts" are indeed, a good step in the right direction. What "Shortcuts" are? Go ahead and read Iskold's post !

I'll continue and round up my posts on "The New Semantic Web wave" . In this post I'll comment on Alex Iskold's posts about the Semantic Web on Read/WriteWeb . The first post is titled "Semantic Web: Difficulties with the Classic Approach" and the second "Top-Down: A New Approach to the Semantic Web" . First of all: Alex, thanks for the insightful posts and the historical overview of the development of the semantic web. Secondly, to my readers, please read Alex's full posts. Summarizing them for you would withhold you of a good overview. They're long posts, but well worth the read. Now to my comments. I really liked the pragmatic approach ("simple semantics") to the long quest for the Semantic Web (refer to figure). I agree with your "new approach" too. Along with the examples you give, I find that Twine and Powerset are applying this new approach, right? They're doing "simple semantics", not waiting ...

Some time ago I was invited to use Powerset , a new natural language search tool! I'll share my experiences with you. The user-interface is wonderful! It’s clear, not clogged, lets you type in comments without moving away from the pa ge, etc. Here are two screenshots to give you an idea. When you start using Powerset you get to watch a couple of short video’s on how Powerset works, how you can use it, what the limitations of this version are, etc. Insightful, good expectation management. (By the way, why not let all be able to see those video's, while they're waiting for invites?) To give you a taste of how Powerset’s natural language search works they’ve created a set of queries to illustrate the power of their semantic index. The reference applications are limited to ‘speech’ (quotes), ‘business’ and ‘arts’. There's an application called Powermouse, which gives us a glimpse into Powerset’s natural language index and lets us see how it extracts struc...

Scobelizer shared this first-time demo of Twine . While waiting for an invite I'll chew on this! UPDATE Dec. 18, 2007: Just watched the video. I'm really looking forward to getting my invite. This technology would be very interesting to use in companies. I think the limited scope would make Twine even more useful. Is Radar Networks thinking about offering an enterprise-version of Twine?

Interesting interview with Nova Spivack , founder of Radar Networks , on Twine , by the Downloadsquad . Twine is about sharing, finding and organizing personal information in one place in a new way. This app addresses information overload most knowledge workers experience. ( Yes, there's money to be made here! , as Phil Windley says.) Spivack says Twine is the next step in knowledge management and communities of practice. All your personal information is tied together in one place. It's something in between Google and Facebook . Using natural language processing they can find places, people and things in your information. You can search in your Twine network for relatedness. The search is based on a user-driven crawler. Later on they will support importing all your information. Money will (possibly) be made using ads. They are slowly letting people use Twine (I'm still waiting…). Twine is about "knowledge networking" as opposed to "social networkin...