The Future of Free Content - tomorrow in Melbourne

Short notice I know, but if you're in Melbourne tomorrow night and have an interest in wikis then check out this Churchhill Club event featuring Angela Beesley. She is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation and will be discussing the future of free content.

Also check out the Wikimedia Australia site that supports the proposed chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation in Australia.

Tags: Angela Beesley, wikis, Wikimedia Foundation

Map mashups are just the start - part 2

The other day I mentioned the importance of considering the the difference between visual (e.g. Google Maps) and non-visual mashups - particulary when thinking about the role for mashups inside the firewall. One of the problems with making that leap is that most Web 2.0 mashups have been focused around map mashups. However, MusicPortl is an excellent example of non-map mashup:

"a place where you can get an overview of information about a music artist. To achieve this goal, it takes advantage of state-of-the-art XML webservice APIs that many websites offer today."

Hats off to Christoph Olszowka for putting MusicPortl together using the services of 8 different data sources.

Tags: non-visual mashups, MusicPortl

Rebooting the Enterprise - 11 October

If you are in Canberra on 11 October come along and hear me talk about "Rebooting the Enterprise with Blogs, Wikis and other Social Software" for the Australian Institute of Management. More details are available on the AIM Canberra Website.

Tags: enterprise 2.0, enterprise social software

Email becoming less effective for the sender

A lot of the same old insights and advice have been floating around for a while about email and how people use (or misuse) it. I've even added my own take on the situation in the past (PDF). However, I was interested to read Darren Barefoot's observation about how wireless email is changing how people in business communicate with email. His theory is that the size of the device actually reduces their ability to respond quickly if an email requires a long and detailed reply:

"When Blackberry users check their email, maybe they’re mostly in a receive-only mode. The Blackberry has, in theory, extended the time lag between reception and response."

Troy Angrignon's replies with his own thoughts, and this comment in particular I thought was interesting:

"I don't even READ much of my inbound email anymore (I can see the first line of it in Gmail, why open it?) Or I flag it and get around to cleaning those up WAY too late. I have had it with letting my email flows dictate how much time I spend at the computer so have pretty much just decided to read/act on only the top 10% of my mail"

So, overall it appears that email is becoming less effective for the sender at least. Something to think about.

Tags: Blackberry, email, technology in the workplace, wireless email

Web 2.0 and Co. get the hype treatment from Gartner

Care of ProgrammableWeb (and many others), Gartner have put emegring technologies such as Web 2.0 through its classic S-shaped hype cycle anlaysis. They highlight Social Network Analysis (SNA), Mashups, collective intelligence and AJAX as well as what they call the "Real World Web" - e.g. things that are location-aware.

Tags: enterprise social software, Gartner, Web 2.0

Evolution of the GUI

To get a taste of the evolution of the GUI see the Room 101 blog, but I found there are real GUI fanatics out there, including:

• GUI Gallery - "screen shots of various desktop computer Graphical User Interfaces and operating systems"; and


• GUIdebook - "a website dedicated to preserving and showcasing Graphical User Interfaces, as well as various materials related to them".

Both site have timelines but GUIdebook looks the most comprehensive and you can follow the evolution of the GUI from Douglas Engelbart to Windows Vista! Of course if you want to go back further, try this CGI Timeline that starts with the Chinese Abacus.

Tags: computers and society, GUI, history of computing

How to mashup a quick Google map

For the non-programmers out there, and spotted via Angus McDonald's commentary on the Australian media's use of mashups in their own online news sites, Quickmaps lets you markup a Google Map with markers, comments, and lines.

Tags: Google Maps, mashups, Quickmaps

Data ghosts in the machine and online

In the US I hear that AOL accidentally leaked the search history of 650,000 users (care of the Datamation IT News Blog), meanwhile a local electrical retailer sold a memory stick that someone had used to take pictures at their own sales conference. More reminders that we are leaving data tracks everywhere about our digital lives...

However, we can't say we weren't warned - we already know that old hard drives and secondhand PDA's can accidentally reveal a lot about their owners.

Tags: information security, online privacy

Google Map mashups are just the start

Care of ProgrammableWeb, a pointer to an insightful InfoWorld blog post that highlights the difference between visual and non-visual mashups:

"Truth-be-told, while visual mashups are cool and useful, I think that non-visual mashups will be more valuable to business as time goes on."

I would perhaps edit this slightly and suggest that non-visual (or even non-map) mashups will be more valuable inside or between businesses over time.

PS I can't help myself... for a bit of fun, have a look at Goggles, a flying game based on Google Maps. I hope someone gives the author a job for this great effort!

Tags: non-visual mashups, mashups

RSS isn't magic - its just XML!

We shouldn't be surprised to learn that, according to CFO magazine in the US, most users of RSS are more likely to be accessing traditional news and weather content than blogs - after all RSS is just XML data and while it provides "glue" that helps bind the social software cloud together in itself it isn't restricted to social applications.

Actually in the article, Forrester Research's Charlene Li correctly points out that "Most people today don't know what SMTP is, but it's the protocol used to deliver E-mail... RSS will be like that."

However, the structured format of RSS means that it will likely become more of a workhorse that email is today. The exciting thing about of RSS is that the end-user can choose how they want to access it - via a browser, in a widget or gadget, email, RSS reader and even XML-to-voice via a phone and perhaps through an IM client. And its pretty good for enabling social software too :-)

Just for the record, this "grey area" is something I've been blogging and talking about in my presentations for a while now...

Tags: enterprise social software, rss, social software

Do you like crisps (chips)?

Something funny on flickr that will appeal to people interested in usability, via Euan Semple.

Tags: humour, usability

The Secret Life of Bloggers

Two interesting reports/articles on the web with a similar theme about content creation and social software on the Internet:

• Picked up by Anecdote (and many others), the Guardian talks about the 1% rule - "It's an emerging rule of thumb that suggests that if you get a group of 100 people online then one will create content, 10 will 'interact' with it (commenting or offering improvements) and the other 89 will just view it"; and


• The Pew Internet & American Life Project have released a new report on the motivations and habits of bloggers - one of their findings is that most bloggers don't view their efforts as a "public endeavour" and spend on average only 1-2 hours a week blogging.

To be honest, there is nothing surprising here but it does counteract some of the hype in this space. Its also worth (again) referencing back to Figallo's practical guidence on hosting web communities, which again is still looking pretty solid even after a few years... so even if time alone is the only barrier to blogging its unlikely we will ever see everyone writing a blog because there are clearly other factors at play.

Tags: blogging, Cliff+Figallo, Pew+Internet+&+American+Life+Project, social software

Pre-paid credit cards arrive in Australia

Nice to see a bit of disruption in the Australian banking sector with the recent launch of what is claimed to be Australia's first pre-paid credit card - the Bopo pre-paid Visa card from Bill Express can be ordered online and then topped up at 3,500 newsagents.

But I find it strange that there doesn't appear to be any other way topping up the card other than going physically into a newsagent. Considering two of the proposed benefits are "To keep your bank account separate when you buy online" and "Convenient Internet-only statements" the reality is it looks more like a product for non-online consumers. For example, Visa's pre-paid Buxx card (available in the US) appears to offer more top up options.

Reviews of the new pre-paid credit card early in the year by consumer credit advocates (as reported in the Sydney Morning Herald) also suggested that when you look at the fees and features, a traditional bank debit card might offer better value and more flexability.

Still, its a good example of how technology can help to disrupt existing markets.

Tags: bopo, e-commerce, pre-paid credit card

Hands on SNA for organisations

Many people have asked about learning the practical side of social network analysis (SNA), as its much more fun if you can get your hands on the tools and work with them. Optimice have put together a 2 day hands-on course on ONA (...SNA for organizations) which will be held in Sydney in October. As a bonus they are giving participants a copy of Rob Cross and Andrew Parker's book on the "Hidden Power of Social Networks", one of the most practical books on SNA that you will find. There is an early bird offer as well!

Tags: knowledge management, social network analysis

Change of gear at ChiefTech

Just a quick note to let you know that I've decided to put Chief Technology Solutions on hold in order to take up a full-time position with CSC in Australia as an information and knowledge management consultant. While I've enjoyed working with a range of businesses over the last few years, this is an exciting oppourtunity for me to focus on consulting in projects for CSC's blue chip and government clients. Its also a chance to work with some interesting people in the information and knowledge management space like Laurie Lock Lee and Cai Kjaer.

As for the ChiefTech blog, hopefully you won't notice any real changes to what I'm posting, but I will point out that moving forward this will very much be a personal blog about technology, information and knowledge management - don't expect to find me talking (directly) about my work at CSC :-)

I'm also going to continue with being involved as a board member of Workplace Learning Illawarra, a member of the NSW KM Forum committee and a supporter of the Illawarra ICT cluster.

Tags: Computer Sciences Corporation, James Dellow

Customise me, Jessica!

In an innovative move by Yahoo's music channel, they have released a DRM-free personalised MP3 by Jessica Simpson. The personalisation is quite simple, you can pick a person's name to incorporate into the song, but provides a proof of concept. The Yahoo! Music blog provides a bit of background and feedback putting forward a point we haven't heard much about before, the cost of implementing DRM:

"Our position is simple: DRM doesn’t add any value for the artist, label (who are selling DRM-free music every day — the Compact Disc), or consumer, the only people it adds value to are the technology companies who are interested in locking consumers to a particular technology platform... It’s very expensive for companies like Yahoo! to implement. We’d much rather have our engineers building better personalization, recommendations, playlisting applications, community apps, etc, instead of complex provisioning systems which at the end of the day allow you to burn a CD and take the DRM back off, anyway!"

Great to see ideas emerging for alternative business models that use the mass customisation potiential of technology to open up rather lock down music and other downloadable media.

Tags: drm, music, personalized music, Yahoo! music

Descartes to Berners-Lee

JP blogged about Jonathan Riehl’s Digitising More Than Organisational DNA article in FirstMonday, but I just skipped to the references... from René Descartes to a 1948 paper on A Mathematical Theory of Communication (PDF) to Berners-Lee and Connolly on Hypertext Markup Language.

Tags: FirstMonday, History of the Internet, Jonathan Riehl

Meet Dandelife and Wufoo

No time for a decent blog post at the moment, but here are a couple of interesting new tools I've seen recently:

• dandelife.com, care of Many-to-Many who describe it as a social software tools for "building biographies of people, places and things";
  
• wufoo.com, care of Read/Write Web, lets you create your own online forms.

Tags: Dandelife, web+2.0, Wufoo

The best of the best in KM

Care of Knowledge Jolt with Jack, the 2006 World's Most Admired Knowledge Enterprises (MAKE) winners have been recently released. Like business awards in the general, the value of the MAKE awards has often been debated in KM circles, but I think its good to at least have list of companies to compare and benchmark your own performance against. Also, with my background in KM at Ernst & Young its always good to see them still making the list!

Tags: Ernst & Young, knowledge management, MAKE awards

DKW Wiki Case Study Updated

The case study for enterprise wiki poster child, Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, has apparently been updated and it now available as a PDF (the perfect format for spreading the word around your own business)...

Tags: Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, enterprise social software, wiki