Bruce MacVarish Notes

Enterprise Semantic Web

Currently working at Yahoo!, Dave Beckett has been very active in the emergence and development of the Semantic Web for a number of years.   As I've been thinking about how the semantic web intersects the enterprise and specifically multimedia communication content , I found his simple, direct approach to describing and implementing semantics and metadata to be very helpful. Check out some of his presentations and publications.  As the buzz meter on Semantic Web continues to climb, and terms like AI, Ontologies, Syntaxes and Web 3.0 start to cloud the thinking, look for simple, direct insight from someone actually writing code and using the technologies.

From Dave's blog:

"I often been puzzled why people write “The Semantic Web is AI” and “The Semantic Web is a top-down design” and “The Semantic Web is Ontologies”. As far as I’m concerned, all of those are bogus. I think I’ve worked out why they write this - they aren’t talking to anyone actually working directly on the technologies.

The semantic web is: a webby way to link data. That is all.

Everything beyond that is entirely optional fluff: data vs metadata, syntaxes, ontologies, query languages, rules, logic, …

This is my “lowercase” semantic web and the basis of what I have in running production code right now.

I’ll probably use that as my theme when I speak about A Little Semantics Can Go a Long Way on the panel at the Semantic Technology Conference in San Jose in May. ( I’ll also be at WWW2007 in Banff, Canada and XTech 2007 in Paris. )"

Sensing Relevance in the "Flow"

Phil Wolff wants a solution now.   He's ready for someone to introduce contextual intelligence and relevance filtering to the FLOW of communications media and various social channels bombarding him --- and all of us.   

I agree with Phil.  I like to call this "sensing relevance in the flow". Our ability to take advantage of social presence and near real-time communication applications mixed in the Flow of information we create and receive every day will directly depend on our ability to filter and adjust that Flow based on tools that sense social and contextual relevance.  There are significant opportunities within the Enterprise ( think Enterprise 2.0 + communications ) to create user value from intelligently managing communications flow.   

Here's Phil's view:

" I need tools that filter the spew.

Sort it.

Rank it.

Based on my behavior.

The way other tools infer from community behavior.

Google News, Techmeme

Buzz Index, Zeitgeist

More than social filtering,
personal, behavioral, tacit filtering.

Datamine Me! 

Infer the heck out of me.

Expect to see these social filtering, behavioral and implied relevance tools emerge from today's enterprise communications leaders including Avaya, Cisco and others.   The key will be to apply the social software lessons learned from leading Web 2.0 players and adapt them to the communication flows running within the enterprise.   

YouMob - Live Mobs on the Web

From Gerrit Visser at Smart Mobs

YouMob founder Steve Falcon points to YouMob a site that lets people on the web gather around any page.

"We've created a site that directly implements a kind of "swarming' on the web that you discuss. It's called YouMob"

As live mob participants, mobbers can share their reactions and comments, and be counted among those who consider a page interesting, entertaining, important, or even unacceptable. Simply put, YouMob creates LIVE mobs on the web.

The YouMob message marquee lets you send a comment to all mobbers present. Since a mob can be attended by literally thousands of people, the message marquee displays comments in the order they were submitted. Each comment is displayed for a few seconds before the next one is shown.

Turnaround Plan

Marc Andreesen recently outlined his recommended 9 Step plan to turn around a public company in the high-tech/media space with over 5,000 employees.   So which Media company was Marc thinking about as he pulled togethre his thoughts?

Here's his turnaround plan in 9 easy steps.

Step 1: Go dark and execute.

Step 2: But first, throw your predecessor completely under the bus.

Step 3: Identify the 3-5 things that are working surprisingly well in your business, and double down on those.

Step 4: Identify the 3-5 things that are consuming a lot of money and time and yet going nowhere, and kill those.

Step 5: Lay off a third of the workforce.

Step 6: Reduce layers, then promote up and comers and put them clearly in charge.

Step 7: Figure out the single most important thing your company has to win at, and put your single best person in charge of winning at it.

Step 8: Look at the market, figure out 3-5 new areas in which your company is not currently playing or winning, but are clearly going to grow a lot -- and acquire the best company in each of those areas.

Step 9: In six months, relaunch the company with a single, crisp, coherent message and strategy.

Appendix for media companies only:

Step 10: For God's sake, stop suing your customers.

Enterprise 2.0 Keynotes - Day 1

Charlie Wood cuts to the chase in his summary of the day 1 Enterprise 2.0 keynotes.  Thanks Charlie!

Notes from Enterprise 2.0 Day One Morning Keynotes

David Weinberger

• Says "messiness is good", but I think he's mistaking complexity for messiness.

Andrew McAfee

• Traditional software is "anti-social". Funny. Says remarkable progress has been made in spreading the idea of "Enterprise 2.0" and credits high school and college kids for doing so: "My son uses Facebook. How can we use systems like that in our business?" I don't have any experience that validates that.
• Expertise is widely distributed and hard to locate. I totally agree. Your position in the org chart doesn't tell me what you know.
• The users themselves should be generating the metadata, as a by-product of their normal work. Tagging, linking, etc.
• "I used to think that the opposite of an imposed structure was going to be chaos. But that's just not true."
• "Cambrian explosion of tools and technologies"
• products that grab me have "Zen-like simplicity" "They do one or two things for me that I need done"
• gives his lowest grade to "communicating results": success stories, war stories, examples of how the vision is playing out in the real world
• want the industry to avoid the ROI trap. if ROI = 200%, why is the company doing anything other than buying and using software? instead, companies want ways to triangulate the quality of their investment in software
• proposes an e2.0 repository for e2.0 efforts, suggests some ground rules, vounteers to participate
• "the blogosphere is my single most valuable source of information"

Great presentation--content-rich, well-delivered, exactly on-time, perfectly targeted at the audience

Ambuj Goyal, IBM

• "Enterprise 2.0" is just "eBusiness 2.0"
• Share with suppliers (extranet), commerce with their customers (internet), share with employees (intranet)

Unfortunately, this presentation seems to be mostly a sales pitch for WebSphere Portal, WebSphere Commerce

David Weinberger

• Says "messiness is good", but I think he's mistaking complexity for messiness.

Andrew McAfee

• Traditional software is "anti-social". Funny. Says remarkable progress has been made in spreading the idea of "Enterprise 2.0" and credits high school and college kids for doing so: "My son uses Facebook. How can we use systems like that in our business?" I don't have any experience that validates that.
• Expertise is widely distributed and hard to locate. I totally agree. Your position in the org chart doesn't tell me what you know.
• The users themselves should be generating the metadata, as a by-product of their normal work. Tagging, linking, etc.
• "I used to think that the opposite of an imposed structure was going to be chaos. But that's just not true."
• "Cambrian explosion of tools and technologies"
• products that grab me have "Zen-like simplicity" "They do one or two things for me that I need done"
• gives his lowest grade to "communicating results": success stories, war stories, examples of how the vision is playing out in the real world
• want the industry to avoid the ROI trap. if ROI = 200%, why is the company doing anything other than buying and using software? instead, companies want ways to triangulate the quality of their investment in software
• proposes an e2.0 repository for e2.0 efforts, suggests some ground rules, vounteers to participate
• "the blogosphere is my single most valuable source of information"

Great presentation--content-rich, well-delivered, exactly on-time, perfectly targeted at the audience

Ambuj Goyal, IBM

• "Enterprise 2.0" is just "eBusiness 2.0"
• Share with suppliers (extranet), commerce with their customers (internet), share with employees (intranet)

Unfortunately, this presentation seems to be mostly a sales pitch for WebSphere Portal, WebSphere Commerce

Evoca's Skype Call Recorder

From the Evoca Blog:

"This week we launched the anticipated Skype Call Recorder. We’ve officially partnered with Skype to be their call recording tool of choice, and as such, we’ve made it oh-so-easy for you to record, share and host your Skype calls.

We spent the week at the Skype Developer’s Conference in Boston, and have been speaking with technology bloggers, developers and the great people at Skype.

See our early coverage that has been published by Mashable!, Genbeta and SplashCast."

The Implicit Web

Alex Iskold at Read/Write Web describes and analyzes the Implicit Web:

 

"What if there was a way to capture our choices automatically? What would that mean? Firstly, as Fred Wilson put it, we would be able to spy on ourselves. That is actually not as strange as it sounds. Just as we often refer to our respective browsing history, it would be great to automatically refer to the things we liked. Secondly, if our web-wide preferences were accessible to different web sites and web services, then they would be able to do a better job of personalizing our online experience. From recommendations to look n' feel, a Web where our implicit preferences are automatically considered, would feel a lot more personal.

The Implicit Web is powered by clicks. When we click on things, we vote. When we spend time on a page, we vote. And when we copy and paste, we vote some more. Our gestures and actions reveal our intent and reactions. While it is impossible for an algorithm to always capture our intent with 100% certainty, a lot of software has gotten pretty good at doing it.

Typically, software that powers recommendation engines or search engines takes clicks, time and actions as inputs and feeds them into a sophisticated optimization algorithm. Usually, the algorithm assigns weights to different input parameters and then outputs a verdict - e.g. how much the user liked or disliked something."

While significant opportunities exist for the consumer version of the Implicit Web, it will also be an important part of the how emerging enterprise web applications evolve to improve personal and collaboration productivity and customer service.