Ping Tone: Has the Line on RSS Gone Dead?

Twitter, Facebook, Google – none of the big three content aggregators are pledging net neutrality when it comes to sending and receiving news feeds outside their site domains.

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In the past two years they’ve all rejected that tireless and under-appreciated workhorse of boundary-free newsfeeds – RSS. All three have removed the ability to consume their feeds (or anyone else’s) via the open standard of RSS in favor of proprietary formats written to their own APIs.

Logging out of the RSS loop has a lot more to do with shuttling web traffic than shuttering the need for open content standards. In a world of cost-free information, RSS has managed to outlive its market without outlasting the need for it.

In his article Embrace, Extend, Extinguish: How Google Crushed and Abandoned the RSS industry, Ed Bott documents the decade long demise of Google Reader from up and comer to down for the counter:

“In an era of mobile devices, where synchronizing content and settings between multiple locations is a crucial feature, losing Google's sync platform is literally a killer.”

Oh my. Why is it that every trade opinion that passes as critical thought is based on the viability of an existing business model? The writing on that prophetic wall is this: If it’s too small for Google to keep the lights on, why still carry that RSS torch?

Bott concedes the point that RSS is still a viable channel for content delivery but not without the ping tone required in its consumption by mobile devices:

“Of course, Twitter and Facebook made a very large dent in the usage of RSS, but there's still a market there. A big one, in fact, if measured by the standards of a business that's not Google-sized. And now, with Google abandoning that service, any business that uses RSS gets to go back to the glory days of 2006. Ugh.”

As a business model it seems that RSS is a victim of its own success. An open standard co-opted into the activity streams of big social media. Leave smart phones out of it and you still have a surefire standard for delivering pull-based newsfeeds. That’s the stuff we know we’ll want to read in advance. RSS eliminates step one: the need to track it down before the more essential step: catching up to it within a sea of distractions and unfiltered merchandising.

The problem in a post Web 2.0 world there is at best a casual relationship between the utility of a technology and its commercial viability. RSS was invented at a time where content was still a monetizable notion. The investment lights have dimmed now that connection’s been severed by big social and search media.

The rationale in question starts with the assumption that:

• RSS is useful
• It should be upheld as a delivery standard; and thus,
• A bankable asset for any apps outfit that knows how to thread the name-dropping needle so that subscribers can track topics and ideas as easily as they can follow celebrities and human train wrecks.

After all, how could 5.3 million Delicious users go wrong? Easy. The ping tone went dead years ago on Google Chrome itself which never saw an RSS feed it failed to render correctly.

The result is that we early adopters and independent sorts face a new bait and switch dilemma: Take what big search and social media serve up for exploratory grabs but follow the money before you trust your intuitions for there is no free Google lunch. And we might do well to cast a wary eye beyond next gen beta pilots but something as basic as blocking sites in Google search results.

Writing in the Washington Post Ezra Klein writes that such untimely shutdowns…

"…[A]ll have me questioning whether I want to keep investing time and energy in 'free' Google products or whether I need to start looking for paid services that are explicitly making money off the thing I am paying them to do."

In 2013 aggregators still haven’t figured out pull media. Until someone can aim news products at content consumers as well as friend updates on Facebook it appears that RSS will be relegated to hobbyist -journalists like Klein and the Atlantic’s James Fallows. As one of those pariah-researcher types I’d rather entrap my information than line the sights of would-be Ad Words sponsors.

RSS is one of those private label markup languages that's been branded as an activity stream by the social media creature elites. But if your primary goal is to make plausible contacts instead of instant monetization, there's a lot more to be done than hear first about how a friend-imposter's posted their latest bowl of snacks to their daily food updates.

The easiest way to round up to the most active feeds is to browse (not search) major news sites for their RSS sections. That's because there's no standard way that webmasters work this into their architectures. Here are a few examples:

• http://news.yahoo.com/sitemap/
• http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5216556/
• http://online.wsj.com/public/page/rss_news_and_feeds.html

You could parse this out with a splash of Google syntax + semantics:

inurl:rss "(monitor | track | discover | uncover | reference)(startups | companies | sales | leads)" "subscribe to"

Here are a couple of suggestions for embracing RSS even when big search and social are backing away:

1) Know your news flow:

The news volume of newsfeeds are erratic at best. Some channels are spam channels, a fool’s errand of cross-posted press releases that should never rise from the cutting room trading floor. Others may have lofty and expansive labels like WSJ.com: Deals & Deal Makers. But if you sample the stream you'll see a trickle. There's a world of difference between trying to tap a definitive source of transactional details versus a "word on the street" describing one subjective take on yesterday's foot traffic. It's actually more promising to start with the fire-hose (e.g. WSJ.com: US Business) and then reign it in with filtering that reflects your information-seeking priorities.

2) Know your aggregator:

At first blush a dedicated RSS engine like Fresh Patents (http://tgs.freshpatents.com/search-rss.php) looks promising. The content's fact-based, plentiful, and non-commercial, (i.e. uncontaminated by search media spam). However, if your goals are marketing or sales-related, you might as well go back to school for your engineering degree. 'Launch' refers to "a launch and disconnect clutch for the electric motor of a P2 hybrid powertrain." 'Startup' is not about fledgling bootstrap firms hoping to turn the corner on their latest angel round but a literal key turning inside a literal ignition: "During startup of a DC/DC converter." You get the picture.

3. Know that RSS is transactional:

One reason RSS is oversold and underperforming is this notion it's like another communications channel (something you turn on and off). It's not the definitive response to fruitless searches or the final word on being up-to-date. It's a rapid-fire trail of updates crunched together in the form of news articles, database results, or changes to a list, i.e. most emailed stories. At its most passive, setting up an RSS feed is a three-step process: (1) picking your feeds; (2) filtering them down to a manageable size; and (3) trapping results that are in useful enough form to act on directly in the form of a lead or a contact or a list of references.

One answer to the limits of RSS is to forsake it completely in cases where you already know what you're looking to track. For example if you have a finite number of search targets to track, you can set up camp outside specific customer and/or competitor websites and be alerted to specific page changes at WebSite-Watcher (http://www.aignes.com).

If you're still game for proper RSS feeding here's a simple, unchanging success factor: Your reader or the interface you use to review, flag, track, search, and ultimately transform into your own priorities. There will always be a need for a world-class RSS reader, if not a market.

Plumbing Below the Radar

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"Never mistake your presence for the event."

- Roscoe Lee Brown

I'd like to say that the highlight of Tuesday's Open Mic Night was that I got to teach what I love in the manner I love doing it (teach). I'd like to affirm further that there was an airy effortlessness to the presentation. After all this was a captive, active group -- engaged, smart, skeptical -- all the requisite aptitudes. Finally I should clarify that the staging was in a stately conference facility with a robust wifi signal, no dial-in audience to accommodate, and most importantly ... no institutional middle man.

Truth is, the most gratification came from assembling two Boston-based information communities -- my PI/detectives and fellow SIKM colleagues -- then watching the collaboration fly across the conference table. The joy of discovery is one thing. But sharing that joy is pure rapture.

Kirstie Fiora filled in for my woeful event-planning deficits -- ushering in attendees past locked front doors and assorted roadblocks that escaped my logistical skills for bringing people together. I've been living off her Angie's Kettle Corn snack offering since the session ended. Pathetic.

In addition to Kirstie and brother Gordon, my improbable roundtable for round one included:

• Ann O'Connor (PI) -- Researcher, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers ("IBEW")


• Carrie LaRose (PI) -- Comptroller, H&H Delivery


• Dave Wallace (KM) -- Managing Partner, GameChange LLC


• Joe Cadillic (PI) -- Private Investigator, Murphy & Associates


• John Dalli (PI) -- Owner, Worcester Record Search


• Kate Pugh (KM) -- President, Align Consulting


• Paula Cohen (KM) -- Knowledge Manager, Information Enterprises

The premise of the News Radar theme was that we're fussing over stuff that should not rise to our radar levels. I demonstrated tools for flushing information waste products back down below the sewer line where they belong. On the attention scale we rake our mental bearings into three piles:

1. PURPOSE: What makes our lives worth living


2. OBJECTIVE: What do I do to make #1 happen


3. DISTRACTION: What gets int the way of #2

Way too much of the web is sheltered under the growth of pile #3. That's where I introduced the pruning shears of semantics, syntax, and search operators for pruning away the rubbish. I also tried to give them some bearings on when a scarcity of information actually calls for expanding the boundaries through keyword cultivation or the simpler queries that create more productive outcomes in ponds (specialty databases) in lieu of oceans (commercial search engines).

These examples were modeled on the saving graces of an XML-centric approach for having useful information find us -- assuming that web searches don't fall in the #1 pile camp. We used syntax to forge for RSS feeds. We used semantics to develop some word algebraics for trapping some common corporate event triggers (marketing, finance, regulatory, musical management chairs, etc.) We even set up watch lists to ensnare specific people we might call on that we can insinuate by the job titles in the announcements of their promotions.

We tested the relationship of push and pull sourcing by using Site Explorer to compare self-referring links to external ones as an even-handed basis to gauge the credibility of information providers by their web domains and pages. Finally we went shopping for higher level concepts like citizenship in Google Keywords and came away with the humbling conclusion that "Citizen Watches" were likelier to tell us Google time better than the Bill of Rights. Another discrepancy worth noting is the number of searches generated for terms versus the ad dollars they fetch, e.g. "SAS Document Management" yielded 73 searches last month despite its "competitive" appeal to Google advertisers.

The one underwhelming demo I thought was the section on rolling your own custom search engines. We grouped media sources back into their traditional pre-web categories. Remember the term "paid media" to describe the success of 20th century PR campaigns?" Didn't think so. The disappointment was in the lack of evidence that the keyword refinements did much to skew the results or tell the underlying story of the custom search theme. I also flew over the information pond completely. That means I didn't focus much on using Google as the search engine of record in order to qualify and build contact lists from social media sites.

I'm looking forward to the next several sessions in Western Mass and will try to localize them. Candidate projects on the agenda? Building alumni lists from LinkedIn of Five College graduates.

News Radars: Target Practice for Web Curators

What you don't know may hurt you.

What you don't need to know WILL distract you.

Content is no longer king. At least that's what I read in the news paupers.

There is no longer a premium on being the first to know. The future lies in being the first to understand in a way that draws others to that same understanding and their own conclusions. That's the manifesto for curators.

Content is a stammering, mucus-laden umm among the miscellany of unfiltered search results and anonymously authored web posts. In a world where pocket devices are publishing platforms, scarcity isn't measured in speed, access, or being connected but in making connections. Enter the sense-making territory of the web curator.

Imagine you're on the exhibition floor of the social media event of the century: information surplus? Meet knowledge deficit! That introduction is being brokered by a knowledge planner -- someone who can reconcile information supply with knowledge demand by anticipating:

• how news travels


• in what circles, and


• where that impacts most

The cultivations of web curators are based on the three pillars of interpretation: context, context, and context. Tell me who said it, who heard it, and where and what they said becomes immaterial. Tell me the way in which an appeal was made and the call to action falls by the wayside. Show me the eye-witness who lived through the event she's recounting and I get her authenticity implicitly as well as the emotional investments that would lead me to question her disinterested bystander status. An accomplished curator is not simply a message interceptor or retransmitter but a temperature gauger who positions the bursts and slowdowns of message traffic within the frame of reference of the personal radar.

We operate on a need-to-know-basis. If it lands off radar, our attentions don't shift.

In this tree-falls-in-the-forest scenario a Web curator is the best defense against the maladies of information fog such as A.D.D., insomnia, the blurring of professional and personal affairs, and absent presence -- the anxiety of device-enabled availability. That doesn't mean you farm your calendar out to a personal attention manager. That happens in a decade or two. But it does mean answering to the contextual value of our personal mental space: WIIFM (What's in it for me)?

The Market for Curators

So how does the curator find their niche? Being all things to all content consumers is about as relevant as trying to bury a subjective point of view. The new transparency isn't about leveling the playing fields of opinion. It's about linking to sources.  Unlike the ad-supported models of SEO campaigns a curator is not a human lynchpin for converting click-happy consumers. Idea people are not buying merchandise so much as arguments -- the kind that support the rationales for the advice they sell. Perhaps the killer app here is rediscovering the art of disengagement: finding no surprises when we reconnect because the curator has your back at all times:

She tries to communicate a need for balance to employees who report to her, too. “I worry about the speed at which they are going,” she says, adding that she wants them to “shut down” when needed, for the sake of their families and their health.

- Mickey Meese, Who's the Boss, You or Your Gadget? New York Times, February 5, 2011

Assuming we know what keeps our clients up at night, what kind of radar-building equipment serves the needs of curators?

That's where a grounding in advanced search commands and even some grasp of tired, ol' traditional media segments can come in handy. If you use a custom search tool like Google Coop Search to bundle sources you can see highly differentiated takes on your pet peeves, hot stock tips, and celebrated rumors on the news horizon.

Run those queries in the form of event-based trip wires and the daily counts form the aggregated patterns of what blows hot and cold in terms of news coverage. Google Trends runs the media pick-up patterns in tandem with the same terms in Google searches -- in effect we have that same handshake from the trade expo: media supply meets (or misses) user demand.

These radar constructs are good for high visibility issues that soar and plummet from year-to-year. But many of our search targets would go undetected on such a public radar. For that we need to scale down to a more street level view through localities, community members, and more niche or locally based organizations. That's where an RSS reader like Feed Demon shines as a personalized approach to event tracking and the aggregated coverage patterns -- the IPhone of Google Trends, if you will.

The Value of Curatorship

Finally curators should sell their quantifiable benefits to a confused and distracted market. That sales pitch starts with single examples:

Abstractions like what the best-known are best known for might be a starting point for idea people. For more grounded folks it boils down to this -- one purposeful, unitary artifact that reveals the telling quote, table, framework or footnote -- diamonds in the ... umm ... content rough.

The bigger picture benefits will emerge once these evidentiary building blocks become ingrained in our web-based discovery process. That might be sweet music to sleep-deprived crisis managers. It may be a threat as well to the scientists of external risk assessment who traffic in the language of hysteria; the paranoid leading the parablind down an alley of would-be prowlers and invaders. No one likes to depart from the script. No one makes time for interruptions. They arrive unannounced. Their departure comes in its own time.

The impulse to panic is an age-old temptation not restricted to unsuspecting widows or defenseless victims. Is the concentration level thick with anticipation or diffused through false alarms and unmet expectations? Is it a wave of consensus or a squeaky wheel? A whistle in the dark or a charging stampede? What are the measured responses that address tangible perceptions -- not last night’s nightmares but tomorrow’s business realities.

A curator can discern the strength of association and tell you where you are in your crisis – floating near the bottom of a deep-sea or being washed into shore escorted by the storm surge itself.

Sound like answers you're not getting from today's Google? If you want a crowd, start a fight. And when you do, hire a curator who can point out who's in the audience.

Investigation Entry

The cognitive psyches have weighed in and it's nearly unanimous -- a brain on wireless is one that's rewired. Our circuits are abuzz with new spongy cells burning neural pulses into the trendy new places brains like yours and mine are looking for action. We're as easy to find as the answers to our searches. That's because we're conversing freely and openly, punching our surfing sessions into Google-enabled keypads -- the MRI scoring each mental discharge.

Critics like Nicholas Carr argue that more neurons firing (or even faster processing) doesn't necessarily mean a brain capable of lucid thinking for sense-making or problem-solving in support of sound, evidence-based decisions:

"Dozens of studies by psychologists, neurobiologists, and educators point to the same conclusion: When we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning. Even as the Internet grants us easy access to vast amounts of information, it is turning us into shallower thinkers, literally changing the structure of our brain."

The more interesting question to me is not about brain shape or mental depth but the enfeebled analytical muscles of an unquestioning generation of digital natives. That's not to say Carr's cautionary polemic is an indictment of GenY. I'm sure for every would-be hedge fund trader there's a budding journalist willing to hold a day job too. But we've barely begun to assess the damage of coming of age in a world where:

* Capital (not English) is the universal language of the species

* First Amendment rights are surrendered with the wave of a coupon, and

* The healthy skepticism of an informed electorate is confused for the faltering missteps of a business model (that being the demise of newspapers and the cleansing power of public investigations)

Rather than lamenting the golden age of impeachable offenses it might be more productive to consider some of these recoverable assets if we taught investigation skills to home bound couch-surfers sniffing for cheese in their own white Google lab coats. Here are a few initial thoughts:

1) Paying for information doesn't necessarily mean a vendor or an identity thief owns your credit card. Another form of payment is attention. Short of subpoenaing a suspect's surfing sessions how does one capture that?

2) The web 2.0 world is a giant echo chamber when you're trying to be heard. But if you can tune your research ear you can better understand the motivations of your search targets and the social circles that they travel in.

3) With the advent of suggested search Google is now in the business of completing your thoughts for you -- or at least sketch them out early enough to reward their Ad Word buyers for their advertising dollars. Other than to follow the herd there is no useful purpose to keywording one's way through a Google-based investigation.

4) A stealth researcher doesn't file FOIA requests or hack into the hard drive of a person of interest. They can use frameworks like Oceans, Lakes, and Ponds to determine where to search and source conjugation in order to determine what to believe.

5) It's not just about the right approach. The right tool-set is essential for knowing what evidence passes the smell test and comes with the pattern-matching potential the researcher needs to press their case. Here's what Carr has to say about the random and undisciplined way that critical mental thought rolls out to sea in most search sessions:

The depth of our intelligence hinges on our ability to transfer information from working memory, the scratch pad of consciousness, to long-term memory, the mind’s filing system. When facts and experiences enter our long-term memory, we are able to weave them into the complex ideas that give richness to our thought. But the passage from working memory to long-term memory also forms a bottleneck in our brain. Whereas long-term memory has an almost unlimited capacity, working memory can hold only a relatively small amount of information at a time. And that short-term storage is fragile: A break in our attention can sweep its contents from our mind.

That buffer that Carr finds lacking in working memory is a reservoir of resilient research exhibits called an RSS reader. Consider the sound operation of one to be the price of investigation entry.

So that's the start of teaching Gen-Yers how to teach themselves at the Academy of Higher Skepticism. When those questions become the properties of digital natives, the immigrants will feel a whole lot better about turning over the messes of our creation. We'll also stop waxing nostalgically for the big three networks, the Sunday papers, and paid subscription media.

Investigation Entry

The cognitive psyches have weighed in and it's nearly unanimous -- a brain on wireless is one that's rewired. Our circuits are abuzz with new spongy cells burning neural pulses into the trendy new places brains like yours and mine are looking for action. We're as easy to find as the answers to our searches. That's because we're conversing freely and openly, punching our surfing sessions into Google-enabled keypads -- the MRI scoring each mental discharge.

Critics like Nicholas Carr argue that more neurons firing (or even faster processing) doesn't necessarily mean a brain capable of lucid thinking for sense-making or problem-solving in support of sound, evidence-based decisions:

"Dozens of studies by psychologists, neurobiologists, and educators point to the same conclusion: When we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning. Even as the Internet grants us easy access to vast amounts of information, it is turning us into shallower thinkers, literally changing the structure of our brain."

The more interesting question to me is not about brain shape or mental depth but the enfeebled analytical muscles of an unquestioning generation of digital natives. That's not to say Carr's cautionary polemic is an indictment of GenY. I'm sure for every would-be hedge fund trader there's a budding journalist willing to hold a day job too. But we've barely begun to assess the damage of coming of age in a world where:

* Capital (not English) is the universal language of the species

* First Amendment rights are surrendered with the wave of a coupon, and

* The healthy skepticism of an informed electorate is confused for the faltering missteps of a business model (that being the demise of newspapers and the cleansing power of public investigations)

Rather than lamenting the golden age of impeachable offenses it might be more productive to consider some of these recoverable assets if we taught investigation skills to home bound couch-surfers sniffing for cheese in their own white Google lab coats. Here are a few initial thoughts:

1) Paying for information doesn't necessarily mean a vendor or an identity thief owns your credit card. Another form of payment is attention. Short of subpoenaing a suspect's surfing sessions how does one capture that?

2) The web 2.0 world is a giant echo chamber when you're trying to be heard. But if you can tune your research ear you can better understand the motivations of your search targets and the social circles that they travel in.

3) With the advent of suggested search Google is now in the business of completing your thoughts for you -- or at least sketch them out early enough to reward their Ad Word buyers for their advertising dollars. Other than to follow the herd there is no useful purpose to keywording one's way through a Google-based investigation.

4) A stealth researcher doesn't file FOIA requests or hack into the hard drive of a person of interest. They can use frameworks like Oceans, Lakes, and Ponds to determine where to search and source conjugation in order to determine what to believe.

5) It's not just about the right approach. The right tool-set is essential for knowing what evidence passes the smell test and comes with the pattern-matching potential the researcher needs to press their case. Here's what Carr has to say about the random and undisciplined way that critical mental thought rolls out to sea in most search sessions:

The depth of our intelligence hinges on our ability to transfer information from working memory, the scratch pad of consciousness, to long-term memory, the mind’s filing system. When facts and experiences enter our long-term memory, we are able to weave them into the complex ideas that give richness to our thought. But the passage from working memory to long-term memory also forms a bottleneck in our brain. Whereas long-term memory has an almost unlimited capacity, working memory can hold only a relatively small amount of information at a time. And that short-term storage is fragile: A break in our attention can sweep its contents from our mind.

That buffer that Carr finds lacking in working memory is a reservoir of resilient research exhibits called an RSS reader. Consider the sound operation of one to be the price of investigation entry.

So that's the start of teaching Gen-Yers how to teach themselves at the Academy of Higher Skepticism. When those questions become the properties of digital natives, the immigrants will feel a whole lot better about turning over the messes of our creation. We'll also stop waxing nostalgically for the big three networks, the Sunday papers, and paid subscription media.

The Blogging Bridge and Tunnel Authority

Since I started the online version of Internet Research I've been assigning blog creation as the final class project. It's meant to demonstrate back to as large a world as possible these three learnings:

1) The query formation techniques we develop while talking to search engines in the mechanical ways that search engines understand

2) The ability to integrate supporting design elements that reinforce a core topic or innate passion that will not extinguish after the grading period

3) That aspirational voice which withstood every doubting impulse that the student was too overextended, broke, or scared of technology to toss their hat in the reinvention ring.

As you can probably guess I'm partial to demo #3 when it comes to favorite blogs. It's always flattering when a student is able to create a parallel blogging universe that includes a custom search engine, RSS feeds tailored to topic, tag clouds, and blog rolls. I get a little emotional when I see a post explaining the finer points of using a tilde to expand a nested set of word algebraics. But I really choke up when I hear a professional transitioning from the boundaries that trapped them into a bad career move or an unpromotable position -- aren't they all these days?

The best blogs are where the student can clarify those aspects of their experience that they want to plant as a foundation for bridging what they do well into what they strive to be recognized for. That's the bridge they're building and watching them cross over is a beautiful view to be riding. The tunnelling chute refers to the immersive delight of mucking about in sandboxes of our own design. That quality of focus cannot happen in a more self-conscious social medium: you can tell a Face book page by its cover.

Blogs instead are a staging area for the thought that lies behind our work. Sure there's always wiggle room for the surface details and the name-dropping. But the underlying factors that motivate our best efforts will find a nurturing harbor in the introspective virtues of blogging.

Here then are links to the newest cadre of bloggers for your horizon-gazing and tunnel-drilling pleasure:

Teen Case Manager (Robyn Allen)
PI Student (Barbara Pulse)
Professional Investigation (Luis Carrasco)
TFX Consulting (Deirdre Lin)
Getaway Car (Joel Armstrong)
Law and Psychology (Jiyoung Koh -- pictured above)
Little Voices (Sharon Floyd)
One for the Dads (Tracy Jenkins)
PABIGGE (Chris Mordi)

The Blogging Bridge and Tunnel Authority

Since I started the online version of Internet Research I've been assigning blog creation as the final class project. It's meant to demonstrate back to as large a world as possible these three learnings:

1) The query formation techniques we develop while talking to search engines in the mechanical ways that search engines understand

2) The ability to integrate supporting design elements that reinforce a core topic or innate passion that will not extinguish after the grading period

3) That aspirational voice which withstood every doubting impulse that the student was too overextended, broke, or scared of technology to toss their hat in the reinvention ring.

As you can probably guess I'm partial to demo #3 when it comes to favorite blogs. It's always flattering when a student is able to create a parallel blogging universe that includes a custom search engine, RSS feeds tailored to topic, tag clouds, and blog rolls. I get a little emotional when I see a post explaining the finer points of using a tilde to expand a nested set of word algebraics. But I really choke up when I hear a professional transitioning from the boundaries that trapped them into a bad career move or an unpromotable position -- aren't they all these days?

The best blogs are where the student can clarify those aspects of their experience that they want to plant as a foundation for bridging what they do well into what they strive to be recognized for. That's the bridge they're building and watching them cross over is a beautiful view to be riding. The tunnelling chute refers to the immersive delight of mucking about in sandboxes of our own design. That quality of focus cannot happen in a more self-conscious social medium: you can tell a Face book page by its cover.

Blogs instead are a staging area for the thought that lies behind our work. Sure there's always wiggle room for the surface details and the name-dropping. But the underlying factors that motivate our best efforts will find a nurturing harbor in the introspective virtues of blogging.

Here then are links to the newest cadre of bloggers for your horizon-gazing and tunnel-drilling pleasure:

Teen Case Manager (Robyn Allen)
PI Student (Barbara Pulse)
Professional Investigation (Luis Carrasco)
TFX Consulting (Deirdre Lin)
Getaway Car (Joel Armstrong)
Law and Psychology (Jiyoung Koh -- pictured above)
Little Voices (Sharon Floyd)
One for the Dads (Tracy Jenkins)
PABIGGE (Chris Mordi)

Wordle Play in Pictures

One option for visual knowledge representation is an oft-tagged utility we've been using in a cloud-enabled intranet that we're now piloting called Wordle.

Wordle is not a substitute for plot-pointing social neurons like the one referenced by Valdis Krebs on a recent SIKM discussion. But it does create visual maps that could be applied to a community of practice wiki, job postings, or any other transactional undertaking worthy of tracking. The tool will generate a tag cloud for any RSS feed you throw at it. You can then re-stage the representation as a widget in your social media of choice.

For example our business pipeline contains a list of prospects. Each company's recent maneuvers generates a newsfeed which is then captured as a word picture.

Here's a work-in-progress posted today called "Budget Trouble."

This sequence is not automated. The cloud does not update -- lest fees, terms, conditions and enterprise edition headaches would surely ensue.

Bravo to the developer, Jonathan Feinberg.

Wordle Play in Pictures

One option for visual knowledge representation is an oft-tagged utility we've been using in a cloud-enabled intranet that we're now piloting called Wordle.

Wordle is not a substitute for plot-pointing social neurons like the one referenced by Valdis Krebs on a recent SIKM discussion. But it does create visual maps that could be applied to a community of practice wiki, job postings, or any other transactional undertaking worthy of tracking. The tool will generate a tag cloud for any RSS feed you throw at it. You can then re-stage the representation as a widget in your social media of choice.

For example our business pipeline contains a list of prospects. Each company's recent maneuvers generates a newsfeed which is then captured as a word picture.

Here's a work-in-progress posted today called "Budget Trouble."

This sequence is not automated. The cloud does not update -- lest fees, terms, conditions and enterprise edition headaches would surely ensue.

Bravo to the developer, Jonathan Feinberg.

Site in the clouds

The last couple of weeks I've been nibbling away at a new approach to staging knowledge portals by staging a pilot through Google Sites. It's the anti-intranet. It's the thousand tiny SharePoints of light. It's not proprietary although it is password protected. It's a portal into something larger -- not smaller than the sum of its hyperlinks. No one needs an encryptocard or a secret handshake other than the invite to join.

The one frustration is that the so-called scripts that pass for gadgets are as erratic as a unexpected and unwelcome one-two patch on a Windows update. I must have toyed with a half-dozen customizable RSS interfaces. They all fell apart the minute I went into tweak them. That's my kneejerk response to the false positives pouring from references to Obama that include neither 'government' nor 'politics.' (Talk about departing from false positives as usual).

The ticker display widgets, especially from one source called SaneBull are a hearty lot. The driving directions from MapQuest won't drain the batteries on your GPS compass. I am in awe of the Google spreadsheets that sing and dance or cry and mope depending on the market gyration du jour. It's also a guilty pleasure to be searching on filetype and trolling for all these "kickass PowerPoints." That's not my emotional connection but those of the consultants who respirate, perspire and dream in slideware. The punch line is that it's public domain presentations so the getting something for nothing buzz lasts a lot longer than the going rate on RSS feeds.

The nicest part about cloud computing for builders and users alike is that you've replaced Little IT with Big Google. And there are no bruised egos, server crashes, or even pink slips -- how beneficent can Google be?

The other knot that I still haven't untangled is that the Custom Google Search closes for business whenever I log off the web. This is never an issue on the blog where the Javascript holds the custom search in place regardless of whether hot PowerPoints can keep me burning through spent fuel rods well after the intranet shuts its doors.

Site in the clouds

The last couple of weeks I've been nibbling away at a new approach to staging knowledge portals by staging a pilot through Google Sites. It's the anti-intranet. It's the thousand tiny SharePoints of light. It's not proprietary although it is password protected. It's a portal into something larger -- not smaller than the sum of its hyperlinks. No one needs an encryptocard or a secret handshake other than the invite to join.

The one frustration is that the so-called scripts that pass for gadgets are as erratic as a unexpected and unwelcome one-two patch on a Windows update. I must have toyed with a half-dozen customizable RSS interfaces. They all fell apart the minute I went into tweak them. That's my kneejerk response to the false positives pouring from references to Obama that include neither 'government' nor 'politics.' (Talk about departing from false positives as usual).

The ticker display widgets, especially from one source called SaneBull are a hearty lot. The driving directions from MapQuest won't drain the batteries on your GPS compass. I am in awe of the Google spreadsheets that sing and dance or cry and mope depending on the market gyration du jour. It's also a guilty pleasure to be searching on filetype and trolling for all these "kickass PowerPoints." That's not my emotional connection but those of the consultants who respirate, perspire and dream in slideware. The punch line is that it's public domain presentations so the getting something for nothing buzz lasts a lot longer than the going rate on RSS feeds.

The nicest part about cloud computing for builders and users alike is that you've replaced Little IT with Big Google. And there are no bruised egos, server crashes, or even pink slips -- how beneficent can Google be?

The other knot that I still haven't untangled is that the Custom Google Search closes for business whenever I log off the web. This is never an issue on the blog where the Javascript holds the custom search in place regardless of whether hot PowerPoints can keep me burning through spent fuel rods well after the intranet shuts its doors.

Take the librarian within and tell it to stop collecting

I was talking on email recently with an information professional who has their MLS + MBA, an eagerness to learn and a charismatic demeanor. None of this makes it any easier to set priorities around attacking the post meltdown job market.

The exchange prompted a few issues to bubble up from below the bubble implosion that's to ring inside our collective ears long after the banks start loaning again to one another.

1) Do I get licensed as a techie?

Unless you're working with a tool everyday and testing it in context the training is hard to retain. If you've got a database worth building then getting DBA skills makes a lot more sense. I did stumble on this SharePoint resource that looks intriguing because it's actually being marketed to end-users (what an overdue concept!)

2) Do I reinvent myself as the social media butterfly?

Web 2.0 gets tired quickly if it's all about taking up a collection of interminable, never-ending web 2.0 resources. Take the librarian within and tell it to stop collecting! The real challenge and value is making the important pieces fit:

* tags,
* feeds
* posts
* networks
* customized search
* add-ons for email
* versioning of in-process materials (a.k.a. document collaboration)

That's where it not only becomes interesting but critical to would-be clients and employers.

3) Do I future-proof my career and just concede that we're all going to work in health care one day?

Here's an idea: why not build a project workspace through Google that pieces some of these elements together? Use it to prototype a go-to-market team that's much more aware of its own offerings than the market it's trying to infiltrate. There's nothing a hiring manager likes more than the budget covers 'cuz you know what?

You don't need one.

Take the librarian within and tell it to stop collecting

I was talking on email recently with an information professional who has their MLS + MBA, an eagerness to learn and a charismatic demeanor. None of this makes it any easier to set priorities around attacking the post meltdown job market.

The exchange prompted a few issues to bubble up from below the bubble implosion that's to ring inside our collective ears long after the banks start loaning again to one another.

1) Do I get licensed as a techie?

Unless you're working with a tool everyday and testing it in context the training is hard to retain. If you've got a database worth building then getting DBA skills makes a lot more sense. I did stumble on this SharePoint resource that looks intriguing because it's actually being marketed to end-users (what an overdue concept!)

2) Do I reinvent myself as the social media butterfly?

Web 2.0 gets tired quickly if it's all about taking up a collection of interminable, never-ending web 2.0 resources. Take the librarian within and tell it to stop collecting! The real challenge and value is making the important pieces fit:

* tags,
* feeds
* posts
* networks
* customized search
* add-ons for email
* versioning of in-process materials (a.k.a. document collaboration)

That's where it not only becomes interesting but critical to would-be clients and employers.

3) Do I future-proof my career and just concede that we're all going to work in health care one day?

Here's an idea: why not build a project workspace through Google that pieces some of these elements together? Use it to prototype a go-to-market team that's much more aware of its own offerings than the market it's trying to infiltrate. There's nothing a hiring manager likes more than the budget covers 'cuz you know what?

You don't need one.

Use Case: RSS Readers as News Radars

Here's a current use case to track "events on the ground" through Feed Demon. There have been reported instances in the media recently of attempts to confuse or intimidate potential voters, particularly new or youth voters. College age voters are traditionally the most under-represented part of the electorate.

Whether it's due to cynicism or naivete a third more concrete factor (inexperience) makes this group prone to believing falsehoods and misleading statements aimed at creating doubt about their residential status. Ahem. So participation in their democracy will jeopardize their financial aid or even come back to haunt their parents during next year's tax season. What could be more American than not voting?

One way to monitor attempts at voter suppression around college campuses is to use a broadly descriptive search statement on Google News:

location:nh college students registration election

You'll find a piece of syntax snuck in here. It helps us focus exclusively on content sources on Google News originating from the Granite State. New Hampshire is my location of choice as the nearest swing state to me with area colleges signifying the swingiest of voting blocs.

You'll also note that the semantics of this search statement are not in anyway prejudicial or skewed towards a certain outcome. Any attempt to tune this search at the outset would overly constrain the result set (n=109) as of yesterday's test run. In other words a more effective content analysis occurs by introducing results-based logic once the feed appears in Feed Demon.

That's where you can construct "Watches" to pull instances of terms like:

* suppression
* fraud
* misleading
* confusion, etc.

...from the New Hampshire tracking folder where these hits reside.

Don't forget to sample several of the more questionable hits. They will acquaint you with terms you hadn't considered or steer you away from outcomes that are clearly off-the-mark from your search objectives.

The second stage of tweaking your RSS reader as news radar is to harvest the feeds sprouting from the sources included in your search results. Gathering up the list is easier than confirming each source's deployment or policy regarding RSS. The range is huge! Some papers package their outputs by sections of the paper. Some don't. Some dispense with RSS altogether, figuring that it will only cannibalize their beleaguered media empires.

There are a couple of alternatives to site hopping in search of the bright, orange RSS icon. One work-around is to include the inurl: syntax in the regular Google web search:

inurl:rss OR inurl:xml [insert semantics from Google News search] intitle:new intitle:hampshire

This workaround should get you a pre-confirmed list of feeds although it doesn't guarantee that they originate from ground zero live-free-or-eat-granite country.

Another way is to work from the colleges themselves as news sources. The very first hit I pulled yesterday yielded this list of Students for McCain backers by their academic institutions:

State Co-Chairs

Greg Boguslavsky -- Dartmouth College
Shaun Doherty -- Rivier College

University Chairs

Lianna French -- New England College
Joe Doiron -- New England College
Brendan Bickford -- New Hampshire Technical Institute
Trevor Chandler -- Plymouth State University
Brittany Puleo -- Rivier College

Julie Kraus -- Southern New Hampshire University
Regina Federico -- St. Anselm College
Allison Krause -- University of New Hampshire
Brandon Mancuso -- Franklin Pierce College
Dasha Bushmakin -- Keene State College
Ryan Dorris -- Daniel Webster College

In closing the follow-up would be to Google each college with the inurl syntax, filtering the pages that can be used to build your tracking folder in Feed Demon.

Use Case: RSS Readers as News Radars

Here's a current use case to track "events on the ground" through Feed Demon. There have been reported instances in the media recently of attempts to confuse or intimidate potential voters, particularly new or youth voters. College age voters are traditionally the most under-represented part of the electorate.

Whether it's due to cynicism or naivete a third more concrete factor (inexperience) makes this group prone to believing falsehoods and misleading statements aimed at creating doubt about their residential status. Ahem. So participation in their democracy will jeopardize their financial aid or even come back to haunt their parents during next year's tax season. What could be more American than not voting?

One way to monitor attempts at voter suppression around college campuses is to use a broadly descriptive search statement on Google News:

location:nh college students registration election

You'll find a piece of syntax snuck in here. It helps us focus exclusively on content sources on Google News originating from the Granite State. New Hampshire is my location of choice as the nearest swing state to me with area colleges signifying the swingiest of voting blocs.

You'll also note that the semantics of this search statement are not in anyway prejudicial or skewed towards a certain outcome. Any attempt to tune this search at the outset would overly constrain the result set (n=109) as of yesterday's test run. In other words a more effective content analysis occurs by introducing results-based logic once the feed appears in Feed Demon.

That's where you can construct "Watches" to pull instances of terms like:

* suppression
* fraud
* misleading
* confusion, etc.

...from the New Hampshire tracking folder where these hits reside.

Don't forget to sample several of the more questionable hits. They will acquaint you with terms you hadn't considered or steer you away from outcomes that are clearly off-the-mark from your search objectives.

The second stage of tweaking your RSS reader as news radar is to harvest the feeds sprouting from the sources included in your search results. Gathering up the list is easier than confirming each source's deployment or policy regarding RSS. The range is huge! Some papers package their outputs by sections of the paper. Some don't. Some dispense with RSS altogether, figuring that it will only cannibalize their beleaguered media empires.

There are a couple of alternatives to site hopping in search of the bright, orange RSS icon. One work-around is to include the inurl: syntax in the regular Google web search:

inurl:rss OR inurl:xml [insert semantics from Google News search] intitle:new intitle:hampshire

This workaround should get you a pre-confirmed list of feeds although it doesn't guarantee that they originate from ground zero live-free-or-eat-granite country.

Another way is to work from the colleges themselves as news sources. The very first hit I pulled yesterday yielded this list of Students for McCain backers by their academic institutions:

State Co-Chairs

Greg Boguslavsky -- Dartmouth College
Shaun Doherty -- Rivier College

University Chairs

Lianna French -- New England College
Joe Doiron -- New England College
Brendan Bickford -- New Hampshire Technical Institute
Trevor Chandler -- Plymouth State University
Brittany Puleo -- Rivier College

Julie Kraus -- Southern New Hampshire University
Regina Federico -- St. Anselm College
Allison Krause -- University of New Hampshire
Brandon Mancuso -- Franklin Pierce College
Dasha Bushmakin -- Keene State College
Ryan Dorris -- Daniel Webster College

In closing the follow-up would be to Google each college with the inurl syntax, filtering the pages that can be used to build your tracking folder in Feed Demon.

In Praise of Feed Demon

Feed Demon is an unfortunate name for an outstanding Information Management Tool. It's being sold (free download) as a personal organizer for RSS feeds. What it does really is create a pond of edible fish from an oceanful of loosely connected firehoses.

The key is to expand your comfort zone around what's RSS-enabled on the web and what's plain .html. It's easy enough to skim the Google ocean floor for appearances of RSS in URLs or the news sections of .com sites. Certainly acquainting your news queries with feeds and steering away from email alerts is a step in this direction.

What's there to prevent a warm fuzzy around RSS feeds? Lots of feeds (including blogs) have pre-defined defaults that push users toward one reader or another. The trick is to isolate the plain vanilla XML without the wrapper so you can feed your local copy of Feed Demon without hiccups, pop-ups, or passwords.

The difference between querying a search tool and a feed reader is the difference between rolling the dice and staying on top of what you need to know. Anyone with a pile-on of automated emails knows how tedious and time-consuming it is to dig out from under a pile of alerts.

There's no way to overlay your own need-to-know priorities around screaming urgencies or passing fancies. Every alert looks like a priority -- until you open it. Yes, you can create multiple email accounts but then you've opened up another receptacle without reducing the garbage piling up in your in-box.

One of the other unsold factors about RSS Readers is that the very term presumes you actually have the time to plow through the thousands of hits that will find their way into your reader. You don't. The information is waiting for you but it won't burn a hole in your pocket if you fight off the temptation to be on top of everything at once. First take a deep breath. Now replenish your feeds without acknowledging every update that lands within your reach.

Okay. So now I'm going to gush about the pond factor as it relates to catchable fish in Feed Demon:

First of all when you're about to freak out because your pond is threatening to become the size of a toxic, unswimmable lake you can press the anxiety button and any article over the prescribed limit will be marked as "read" -- that doesn't mean it goes away. You can still search it. You can even create automated filters that channel keywords into specific feeds and folders. It simply won't be considered fresh or new.

The search component works two ways: (1) you can search ad hoc among the thousands of feeds -- imminently preferable to doing the same among 8 billion pages indexed on Google. (2) you can set up filters in anticipation of hot topics you need to pulse (usually exact matches for a person or small entity within a larger group).

The folder concept is nothing unique. But folder designations are important for organizing the types of content that spans the feed streams. For instance it's one thing to use a To-Do list schema: gotta get a job, gotta push out a blog post based on what's latest, great. It's quite another to organize according to how the feed finds its way in: is it a series of job postings? Latest slew of news articles? Twitterings from top-of-mind text strings?

To pretend that these vastly different forms are all part of the same content soup is to conceed an important advantage of Feed Demon. Knowing who generates content and who it's intended for is the single most important attribute for understanding the context of any feed, regardless of the facts, views expressed, and the form for doing so. That understanding is what we're losing with the disappearance of traditional media. One way to reclaim this is to set up your folders according to media types be they newspapers, jobsites, blogs, social nets, etc.

I guess one aspect of Feed Demon that is more a solid feature than a best practice is the Dinosaur report that lists subscriptions which haven't been updated in the past 30 days. It's helpful to combine this feature with the "Find New Feeds" option that indexes a collective grouping of feeds among Feed Demon users. Sometimes this is helpful for determining correct terms and tags surrounding topics of interest. Other times it's more a distraction -- particulary when the feed remains turned on but the lights are out -- the feed's dried up.

In Praise of Feed Demon

Feed Demon is an unfortunate name for an outstanding Information Management Tool. It's being sold (free download) as a personal organizer for RSS feeds. What it does really is create a pond of edible fish from an oceanful of loosely connected firehoses.

The key is to expand your comfort zone around what's RSS-enabled on the web and what's plain .html. It's easy enough to skim the Google ocean floor for appearances of RSS in URLs or the news sections of .com sites. Certainly acquainting your news queries with feeds and steering away from email alerts is a step in this direction.

What's there to prevent a warm fuzzy around RSS feeds? Lots of feeds (including blogs) have pre-defined defaults that push users toward one reader or another. The trick is to isolate the plain vanilla XML without the wrapper so you can feed your local copy of Feed Demon without hiccups, pop-ups, or passwords.

The difference between querying a search tool and a feed reader is the difference between rolling the dice and staying on top of what you need to know. Anyone with a pile-on of automated emails knows how tedious and time-consuming it is to dig out from under a pile of alerts.

There's no way to overlay your own need-to-know priorities around screaming urgencies or passing fancies. Every alert looks like a priority -- until you open it. Yes, you can create multiple email accounts but then you've opened up another receptacle without reducing the garbage piling up in your in-box.

One of the other unsold factors about RSS Readers is that the very term presumes you actually have the time to plow through the thousands of hits that will find their way into your reader. You don't. The information is waiting for you but it won't burn a hole in your pocket if you fight off the temptation to be on top of everything at once. First take a deep breath. Now replenish your feeds without acknowledging every update that lands within your reach.

Okay. So now I'm going to gush about the pond factor as it relates to catchable fish in Feed Demon:

First of all when you're about to freak out because your pond is threatening to become the size of a toxic, unswimmable lake you can press the anxiety button and any article over the prescribed limit will be marked as "read" -- that doesn't mean it goes away. You can still search it. You can even create automated filters that channel keywords into specific feeds and folders. It simply won't be considered fresh or new.

The search component works two ways: (1) you can search ad hoc among the thousands of feeds -- imminently preferable to doing the same among 8 billion pages indexed on Google. (2) you can set up filters in anticipation of hot topics you need to pulse (usually exact matches for a person or small entity within a larger group).

The folder concept is nothing unique. But folder designations are important for organizing the types of content that spans the feed streams. For instance it's one thing to use a To-Do list schema: gotta get a job, gotta push out a blog post based on what's latest, great. It's quite another to organize according to how the feed finds its way in: is it a series of job postings? Latest slew of news articles? Twitterings from top-of-mind text strings?

To pretend that these vastly different forms are all part of the same content soup is to conceed an important advantage of Feed Demon. Knowing who generates content and who it's intended for is the single most important attribute for understanding the context of any feed, regardless of the facts, views expressed, and the form for doing so. That understanding is what we're losing with the disappearance of traditional media. One way to reclaim this is to set up your folders according to media types be they newspapers, jobsites, blogs, social nets, etc.

I guess one aspect of Feed Demon that is more a solid feature than a best practice is the Dinosaur report that lists subscriptions which haven't been updated in the past 30 days. It's helpful to combine this feature with the "Find New Feeds" option that indexes a collective grouping of feeds among Feed Demon users. Sometimes this is helpful for determining correct terms and tags surrounding topics of interest. Other times it's more a distraction -- particulary when the feed remains turned on but the lights are out -- the feed's dried up.

Tag, We're It

Yesterday I attended Laurie Damianos's discussion at the Boston KM Forum ("Tag Me -- Social Bookmarking in the Enterprise"). I had the good fortune of meeting Laurie first at last spring's Enterprise Search Summit.

I found that my number of questions for Laurie has increased since our last interview for the Provider Base piece set to go in the Nov/Dec Searcher. That increase is not because Laurie dodges good questions. It is inspired by the topic -- the richness of the subject itself.

To her credit as a speaker Laurie led an attentive and engaging group whose inputs were both numerous and broadly distributed. Here are some of the more engrossing threads of our dynamic session:

Life in Email --

The immediate remedy at Mitre began as the antidote to a ton of email sitting on some restricted fileserver archive. Increasing access points to content was the business case. A persuasive case was made that there was an over-reliance on 1:1 communication (email) whose knowledge might prove useful to others. Interestingly the Mitre approach includes bookmarking email message based on embedded links in the message.

Anatomy of a Tag --

Do the users make up their own terms? Apparently they have the choice between a pre-formed set of suggested tags or their own. The form includes the original bookmarker and others who've bookmarked their entries. Laurie refers to the comment feature as "a reverse blog."

Links to Nowhere --

Pointers need owners or the link goes stale. The broken link icon shows benefits of a link scan process that tests for 404 errors. Each owner is notified of the bookmarks they develop which they can choose to ignore, fix, or delete. Hovering over a padlock tells the user how to pick the lock (i.e. what password to use or group to contact). Users can mouse over faces and get lots of detail at a glance. When they leave the company the residual bookmarks are placed in separate account -- they can be copied for 90 days or let expire.

Social Tags (Supply) and Search Terms (Demand) --

The terms that bubble to the top of the results pages are not repesented in Mitre's subject taxonomy. According to Laurie the taxonomy is growing ... slowly. The search term is creating equivalencies between search terms and tags. Governance rules are in place to maintain the folksonomy so it is not altered by an intermediary. Laurie's team allows the differences to remain, not trying to normalize different forms of the same expression.

Expert Finders --

Administrators and gatekeepers had all the topic-related documents so they've been falsely deemed as experts. The same fiction occurs when a top-tagger is confused with being an expert in the subject they're tagging. There's no gaming of the system because there's no built-in incentive to compete head-on or outrank the next prolific tagger.

Social Bookmark Reporting --

There's a seven day window of the most recent popular tags. This breaks the dominance of librarian taggers as most prolific contributors. Tagging activity shows how users are related by interest area. Users can view bookmarks by department. Different sorting options including tags, bookmarks, bookmarks by department. Laurie noted some surprisingly bad taggers even as the firm's KM enablers or "knowledge stewards." Lynda Moulton noted that it takes mindset to do it consistently and effectively. People are getting it.

Tagging by the Numbers --

The system holds...

* 21,000 bookmarks
* 99,000 tags with 12.5K unique to the system (-- doesn't account for spelling and punctuation discrepancies)
* Average number of tags have doubled from 2.7 to 5.4
* The past three years the average is that bookmarks are 83% external

Performance Benchmarks --

According to Caterina Fake of Flickr 9-15% of population are contributors in social communities. This equates to 85-90% of users as lurkers. Fourteen percent of user population contributes at Mitre among those with access. Half of employees use the system.

Next Steps for Tagging --

Laurie mentioned an organization called LCC ("Language Computer Corporation") that examines semantic construction of document to relate tags to each other by generating "did-you-mean-this prompts" to the content provider. It also make recommendations to other users: "you need to talk to this person." It's based on common interests they're sharing beyond the recognition that their interests are shared.

Other Tagging Resources --

FURL caches the bookmarked resources. Users request feature but can't provide it internally because of copyright restrictions. Scuttle is easy to deploy and extend. Twine is another solution with an interesting social component. ConnectBeam and DogEar were also mentioned as self-contained tagging platforms.

Tag, We're It

Yesterday I attended Laurie Damianos's discussion at the Boston KM Forum ("Tag Me -- Social Bookmarking in the Enterprise"). I had the good fortune of meeting Laurie first at last spring's Enterprise Search Summit.

I found that my number of questions for Laurie has increased since our last interview for the Provider Base piece set to go in the Nov/Dec Searcher. That increase is not because Laurie dodges good questions. It is inspired by the topic -- the richness of the subject itself.

To her credit as a speaker Laurie led an attentive and engaging group whose inputs were both numerous and broadly distributed. Here are some of the more engrossing threads of our dynamic session:

Life in Email --

The immediate remedy at Mitre began as the antidote to a ton of email sitting on some restricted fileserver archive. Increasing access points to content was the business case. A persuasive case was made that there was an over-reliance on 1:1 communication (email) whose knowledge might prove useful to others. Interestingly the Mitre approach includes bookmarking email message based on embedded links in the message.

Anatomy of a Tag --

Do the users make up their own terms? Apparently they have the choice between a pre-formed set of suggested tags or their own. The form includes the original bookmarker and others who've bookmarked their entries. Laurie refers to the comment feature as "a reverse blog."

Links to Nowhere --

Pointers need owners or the link goes stale. The broken link icon shows benefits of a link scan process that tests for 404 errors. Each owner is notified of the bookmarks they develop which they can choose to ignore, fix, or delete. Hovering over a padlock tells the user how to pick the lock (i.e. what password to use or group to contact). Users can mouse over faces and get lots of detail at a glance. When they leave the company the residual bookmarks are placed in separate account -- they can be copied for 90 days or let expire.

Social Tags (Supply) and Search Terms (Demand) --

The terms that bubble to the top of the results pages are not repesented in Mitre's subject taxonomy. According to Laurie the taxonomy is growing ... slowly. The search term is creating equivalencies between search terms and tags. Governance rules are in place to maintain the folksonomy so it is not altered by an intermediary. Laurie's team allows the differences to remain, not trying to normalize different forms of the same expression.

Expert Finders --

Administrators and gatekeepers had all the topic-related documents so they've been falsely deemed as experts. The same fiction occurs when a top-tagger is confused with being an expert in the subject they're tagging. There's no gaming of the system because there's no built-in incentive to compete head-on or outrank the next prolific tagger.

Social Bookmark Reporting --

There's a seven day window of the most recent popular tags. This breaks the dominance of librarian taggers as most prolific contributors. Tagging activity shows how users are related by interest area. Users can view bookmarks by department. Different sorting options including tags, bookmarks, bookmarks by department. Laurie noted some surprisingly bad taggers even as the firm's KM enablers or "knowledge stewards." Lynda Moulton noted that it takes mindset to do it consistently and effectively. People are getting it.

Tagging by the Numbers --

The system holds...

* 21,000 bookmarks
* 99,000 tags with 12.5K unique to the system (-- doesn't account for spelling and punctuation discrepancies)
* Average number of tags have doubled from 2.7 to 5.4
* The past three years the average is that bookmarks are 83% external

Performance Benchmarks --

According to Caterina Fake of Flickr 9-15% of population are contributors in social communities. This equates to 85-90% of users as lurkers. Fourteen percent of user population contributes at Mitre among those with access. Half of employees use the system.

Next Steps for Tagging --

Laurie mentioned an organization called LCC ("Language Computer Corporation") that examines semantic construction of document to relate tags to each other by generating "did-you-mean-this prompts" to the content provider. It also make recommendations to other users: "you need to talk to this person." It's based on common interests they're sharing beyond the recognition that their interests are shared.

Other Tagging Resources --

FURL caches the bookmarked resources. Users request feature but can't provide it internally because of copyright restrictions. Scuttle is easy to deploy and extend. Twine is another solution with an interesting social component. ConnectBeam and DogEar were also mentioned as self-contained tagging platforms.