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.

Hits by Chance

A few years ago I saw Janis Ian perform at Club Passim in Cambridge with my wife. Janis introduced a biopic-inspired tune with the insight that people are not really all that worthy of public spectacle. Celebrities are not the basis for celebration. It's the body of work that inspires and gives life to the individual gifts we contribute to a collective truth called civilization. I've always found ideas more interesting to discuss than people. Some truly redemptive treasures come from some pretty loathsome creatures.

I don't think that makes me a dweeb or misanthrope. But it does bring great joy to the imaginative and experiential side of life -- less so to the material and tangible forms that define "the real world" in a person-centric model. Me? I'd rather float a concept than drop a name any day.

In that spirit I have come to praise the brainy, provocative journalism of Sharon Begley. I've never seen her subjective self in the interview seat, on a conference panel, or an Amazon alert at the bottom of my convolutional shopping cart. I've never sought out a grouping of topics or a collection of resources with her running keyword interference as a vaunted opening into an otherwise flimsy or ill-formed framework for describing our mental conditions, cognitive functions, and neural circuitries. Her smarts are not about shining the brightest but about fusing together the patterns and relationships that occur in the real experiential world -- mapping the machinery of neuroscience to the actions we take and outcomes we seek. It's 10 mg of Ritalin and a glass of warm milk.

A recent piece she ran in Newsweek called Why Everything You Hear About Medicine is Wrong was a splendid profile of a myth-busting gadfly of big pharma fears and conceits named John Ionnidis, Chief of Stanford University's Prevention Research Center. The piece shows how reducing every chemical redirect to pill form provides a blank check for making unsubstantiated medical claims:

Ioannidis’s first targets were shoddy statistics used in early genome studies. Scientists would test one or a few genes at a time for links to virtually every disease they could think of. That just about ensured they would get “hits” by chance alone. When he began marching through the genetics literature, it was like Sherman laying waste to Georgia: most of these candidate genes could not be verified.

Her point (Begley channeling Ionnidis) is that the circle of common sense that surrounds most medical consumers is much smaller than a universal willingness to believe a cause-and-effect relationship every time a a sponsor study/tester pierces the genome dartboard. All it takes is a hypothetical outcome. It doesn't hurt to test approved drugs for other uses. Boing! Again, it's hits by chance. Genome-testing industry? Meet search engine optimization:

By testing an approved drug for other uses, they get hits by chance, “and doctors use that as the basis to prescribe the drug for this new use. I think that’s wrong.” Even when a claim is disproved, it hangs around like a deadbeat renter you can’t evict. Years after the claim that vitamin E prevents heart disease had been overturned, half the scientific papers mentioning it cast it as true, Ioannidis found in 2007.

What ever comes of health care reform, debt ceiling stand-offs, or error-prone medical research, we owe a debt to empirical idealists like Ionnidis for removing our evidentiary blinders and Sharon Begley for her rigor, skepticism, and her regular filing of routine victories over conventional thinking.

Merger in the First Degree (and 2nd and 3rd)

The SIKM Boston group convened last week for a lively workshopping session. There was lots of discussion and very little discussion on what to discuss. The focus? What to do when peering straight into the inscrutable eyes of Chess Piece Face. Yes. we're talking about takeovers of the most alien kind across the hostility spectrum. I especially liked the idea that the discussion gravitated to source conjugation:

* First degree: what can I do unilaterally to keep my job?
* Second degree: what can I do to convince you?
* Third degree: how would the disinterested consultant organization counsel their acquirer-client?

The premise starts not with the pieces but the game board. The game we're playing is capitalism and the rules are by, for, and to the owners of capital. Us custodians, gardeners, farmers, bodyguards, and gatekeepers must take in a deep breath and a full step back from our cubes and Outlook boxes at the dawn of a newly waking work day, knowing that the lights may already be turned off.

To be on board is to be prepared to jump ship once the manifesto has passed from one shipping magnet to the next. The crew, however, is not part of the negotiation or even the inventory. To miss that reality is to be held hostage to our own lethargy and inflated sense of importance. Unlike the good captain, we can't go down with the ship. It's not our board to begin with.

Part of the ship-jumping drill is conducted in the self-renewal of our daily vows (including refresher swimming lessons). From the first degree perspective Kate Pugh recommends declaring "a major" to resist being tagged as cargo (overhead). In the consolidations to come it helps to eclipse counterpart "majors" by playing the "best practices" hand in trying to stave off commodity status and marginalization. I concede that the part about personal branding and sucking up to the brigadier smacks of a Fast Company survival guide written by that same doomed captain after the life boats have left for good. Animal magnetism is what seals deals and wins business. There are limits, however, to personal charisma outside the school of self-preservation.

The options seem more leveragable in the second degree where self-declared majors can double as brokers for the teams they've assisted and the projects they've led. One of the more thoughtful second degree contributions to our meeting came from Dave Wallace who spoke in terms of what farmers provide hunters in acquisition terms that is also certain not to show up on a balance sheet:

"How do you reward firefighters for the fires that never happen? he asks. "How can you document that demonstrated ability to diffuse the crises?"

Here it helps to take a page out of Kate's playbook for connecting personal outputs to winning outcomes by elevating those contributions to revenue-generating status. Dave was also quick to address the match-ups and shake-outs around the re-ordering of org charts: who is your equivalent in the new organization? Do they have a higher title, a lower salary band? What expectations do they answer to and what problems do they resolve?"

The third degree is about the ultimate out-of-body merger drama. The active disinterest that speaks to the dispassionate observance for how outsiders advise their conquering clients to carve out the crown jewels of the predatory spoils. Beyond the aggressive cost-cutting that finds a home in bull and bear markets alike there is the need to safeguard the knowledge flows that drive the sales cycles -- not just the profit centers they flow to. I've always carried this implicit understanding with the type A bosses I've supported in their sales efforts. KMA's Mike Gilronan was incredulous how under the radar this realization lands on the operational side: "Some non-revenue-bearing folks don't get it -- How do we justify ourselves?" This is not a rhetorical question to Mike: "Have you ever been held to a quota?"

That unwritten contract trades knowledge flows in the form of competitive intelligence, task-based search results, and accelerated proposal generation for job security. Pure and simple. The easiest way to demonstrate this systemically to an outsider.

That's where the appeal of an enterprisewide tool like SharePoint can play to a farmer's advantage. There's nothing a hunter-gatherer likes better than the map to the treasure -- especially if it spares them any unnecessary turf battles or homegrown improvised explosives designed to blow-up in their faces. That's the beauty of what Chris Rivinus described in my KMWorld Reality Series as the Rorschach test-like properties of SharePoint.

It's a system designed to unify and synchronize all the moving pieces -- prized assets and headcounts alike. Flush the red dye of a bloodless acquisition coup through the SharePoint plumbing and you'll see where the information travels through the anatomical heart of the enterprise. Conversely you'll see the blockages too -- where gangrene is setting into the outer corporate limbs because of information-hoarding, silo-keepers, and other forms of fear, loathing, and clog-hardening lethargy.

Here's a conversation that an acquisition leader and a SharePoint manager can have. It's not "take me to your leader." It's more like the building inspector flushing the pipes to show the rust in the plumbing. That's the kind of knowledge that transcends where the bones are buried and speaks to where the integration needs to happen -- hint: it lies below the financial reporting radar.

Sadie Van Buren referenced the ultimate third degree solution based on a New York City-based copy editor who joined Google Adsense and gamed the vanity results. Every time the agency googled itself it got the gamer's resume. He got his choice of offers.

Merger in the First Degree (and 2nd and 3rd)

The SIKM Boston group convened last week for a lively workshopping session. There was lots of discussion and very little discussion on what to discuss. The focus? What to do when peering straight into the inscrutable eyes of Chess Piece Face. Yes. we're talking about takeovers of the most alien kind across the hostility spectrum. I especially liked the idea that the discussion gravitated to source conjugation:

* First degree: what can I do unilaterally to keep my job?
* Second degree: what can I do to convince you?
* Third degree: how would the disinterested consultant organization counsel their acquirer-client?

The premise starts not with the pieces but the game board. The game we're playing is capitalism and the rules are by, for, and to the owners of capital. Us custodians, gardeners, farmers, bodyguards, and gatekeepers must take in a deep breath and a full step back from our cubes and Outlook boxes at the dawn of a newly waking work day, knowing that the lights may already be turned off.

To be on board is to be prepared to jump ship once the manifesto has passed from one shipping magnet to the next. The crew, however, is not part of the negotiation or even the inventory. To miss that reality is to be held hostage to our own lethargy and inflated sense of importance. Unlike the good captain, we can't go down with the ship. It's not our board to begin with.

Part of the ship-jumping drill is conducted in the self-renewal of our daily vows (including refresher swimming lessons). From the first degree perspective Kate Pugh recommends declaring "a major" to resist being tagged as cargo (overhead). In the consolidations to come it helps to eclipse counterpart "majors" by playing the "best practices" hand in trying to stave off commodity status and marginalization. I concede that the part about personal branding and sucking up to the brigadier smacks of a Fast Company survival guide written by that same doomed captain after the life boats have left for good. Animal magnetism is what seals deals and wins business. There are limits, however, to personal charisma outside the school of self-preservation.

The options seem more leveragable in the second degree where self-declared majors can double as brokers for the teams they've assisted and the projects they've led. One of the more thoughtful second degree contributions to our meeting came from Dave Wallace who spoke in terms of what farmers provide hunters in acquisition terms that is also certain not to show up on a balance sheet:

"How do you reward firefighters for the fires that never happen? he asks. "How can you document that demonstrated ability to diffuse the crises?"

Here it helps to take a page out of Kate's playbook for connecting personal outputs to winning outcomes by elevating those contributions to revenue-generating status. Dave was also quick to address the match-ups and shake-outs around the re-ordering of org charts: who is your equivalent in the new organization? Do they have a higher title, a lower salary band? What expectations do they answer to and what problems do they resolve?"

The third degree is about the ultimate out-of-body merger drama. The active disinterest that speaks to the dispassionate observance for how outsiders advise their conquering clients to carve out the crown jewels of the predatory spoils. Beyond the aggressive cost-cutting that finds a home in bull and bear markets alike there is the need to safeguard the knowledge flows that drive the sales cycles -- not just the profit centers they flow to. I've always carried this implicit understanding with the type A bosses I've supported in their sales efforts. KMA's Mike Gilronan was incredulous how under the radar this realization lands on the operational side: "Some non-revenue-bearing folks don't get it -- How do we justify ourselves?" This is not a rhetorical question to Mike: "Have you ever been held to a quota?"

That unwritten contract trades knowledge flows in the form of competitive intelligence, task-based search results, and accelerated proposal generation for job security. Pure and simple. The easiest way to demonstrate this systemically to an outsider.

That's where the appeal of an enterprisewide tool like SharePoint can play to a farmer's advantage. There's nothing a hunter-gatherer likes better than the map to the treasure -- especially if it spares them any unnecessary turf battles or homegrown improvised explosives designed to blow-up in their faces. That's the beauty of what Chris Rivinus described in my KMWorld Reality Series as the Rorschach test-like properties of SharePoint.

It's a system designed to unify and synchronize all the moving pieces -- prized assets and headcounts alike. Flush the red dye of a bloodless acquisition coup through the SharePoint plumbing and you'll see where the information travels through the anatomical heart of the enterprise. Conversely you'll see the blockages too -- where gangrene is setting into the outer corporate limbs because of information-hoarding, silo-keepers, and other forms of fear, loathing, and clog-hardening lethargy.

Here's a conversation that an acquisition leader and a SharePoint manager can have. It's not "take me to your leader." It's more like the building inspector flushing the pipes to show the rust in the plumbing. That's the kind of knowledge that transcends where the bones are buried and speaks to where the integration needs to happen -- hint: it lies below the financial reporting radar.

Sadie Van Buren referenced the ultimate third degree solution based on a New York City-based copy editor who joined Google Adsense and gamed the vanity results. Every time the agency googled itself it got the gamer's resume. He got his choice of offers.

To the Victor Go the Hit Counts

A dear friend and astute social observer just registered a topical hit count smackdown. The two sparring factions within a Google search are:

"liberal historian": 10,500
"conservative historian": 17,200

He concludes:

"[t]he modifier is used to signify exceptionalism. So, my counterintuitive deduction is that historians lean to the left, thus the need to attach "conservative" more often than "liberal" since perhaps to many "liberal historian" is tautological.

He then substitutes a personifying actor for an actual advocate:

"Just something to consider when one sizes up the importance of the phrase "history will judge..."

Here's my take.

Google ignores most punctuation. This means that a phrase entered as "liberal, historian" counts word ordering alone -- not context. For example:

... important news that is flying under the radar. Posted by Contrarian at 6:42 PM. Labels: Conservative, historian, Liberal, Politics, Reagan, Welcome ...

Another distortion is the numerous duplicate entries attracted by both phrases in a Google web search -- it improves for specialty collections like Google News, Images, Scholar, etc.

Finally Google has its engineering fingerprints all over this thing -- not just in terms of its Ad Sense program (READ: Advertising for Mad Millennials) but even for the interpretation of what our search intentions happen to be. Don't believe me?

I then invite him to sample the useful information folly and direct him to reference the results starting with the 4th hit.

What is Google telling us? That we're really so sold on one specific search engine to assume that Google is a definitive final word on our inquisitive behaviors -- as in everything ever written about [blank] can be found thru ...?"

On the other hand if the mission is to use Google as an unofficial sampling of the world's fleeting, cumulative curiosities then yes: I would agree that reading hit counts on Google is akin to sampling an unscientific but plausible set of survey results.

One way to accentuate the actual usefulness of Google is to use syntax to aim your query in a way that squares your intentions with its indexer. For instance, if you limit your request to primary information providers, say bloggers, you get a much smaller, controlled, and arguably credible response:

"conservative historian" (inurl:blog OR inurl:blogs) = 316
"liberal historian" (inurl:blog OR inurl:blogs) = 229

One should also see a dramatic reduction in dupes and landing pages for books on Amazon. Hopefully we'll also see slight drops in the number of searchers duped by Google as well.

To the Victor Go the Hit Counts

A dear friend and astute social observer just registered a topical hit count smackdown. The two sparring factions within a Google search are:

"liberal historian": 10,500
"conservative historian": 17,200

He concludes:

"[t]he modifier is used to signify exceptionalism. So, my counterintuitive deduction is that historians lean to the left, thus the need to attach "conservative" more often than "liberal" since perhaps to many "liberal historian" is tautological.

He then substitutes a personifying actor for an actual advocate:

"Just something to consider when one sizes up the importance of the phrase "history will judge..."

Here's my take.

Google ignores most punctuation. This means that a phrase entered as "liberal, historian" counts word ordering alone -- not context. For example:

... important news that is flying under the radar. Posted by Contrarian at 6:42 PM. Labels: Conservative, historian, Liberal, Politics, Reagan, Welcome ...

Another distortion is the numerous duplicate entries attracted by both phrases in a Google web search -- it improves for specialty collections like Google News, Images, Scholar, etc.

Finally Google has its engineering fingerprints all over this thing -- not just in terms of its Ad Sense program (READ: Advertising for Mad Millennials) but even for the interpretation of what our search intentions happen to be. Don't believe me?

I then invite him to sample the useful information folly and direct him to reference the results starting with the 4th hit.

What is Google telling us? That we're really so sold on one specific search engine to assume that Google is a definitive final word on our inquisitive behaviors -- as in everything ever written about [blank] can be found thru ...?"

On the other hand if the mission is to use Google as an unofficial sampling of the world's fleeting, cumulative curiosities then yes: I would agree that reading hit counts on Google is akin to sampling an unscientific but plausible set of survey results.

One way to accentuate the actual usefulness of Google is to use syntax to aim your query in a way that squares your intentions with its indexer. For instance, if you limit your request to primary information providers, say bloggers, you get a much smaller, controlled, and arguably credible response:

"conservative historian" (inurl:blog OR inurl:blogs) = 316
"liberal historian" (inurl:blog OR inurl:blogs) = 229

One should also see a dramatic reduction in dupes and landing pages for books on Amazon. Hopefully we'll also see slight drops in the number of searchers duped by Google as well.

Content Supply? Meet Knowledge Demand!

This post tries to shed some light on the often bewildering exchange between your users and the information they use (or uses them as the case may be).

Our discussion adheres to a simple, familiar concept that governs these interactions. Think of the marketplace. Think economic cycles. Think fundamental rules. Now apply the laws of supply and demand to your internal databases and networks:

Supply – The content we’ve already got posted and indexed.

Demand – Why our users are spending time in the systems we build them.

Again it’s that demand side where all the mystery unfolds. What attracts demand to supply on intranets? In retail this is a question answered with every new trip to the checkout counter. But we knowledge intermediaries don’t have the benefit of measuring demand by dollars spent. The only expenditure on our information assets is the attentions paid by our users – a payment rarely shared with us!

Still, for information architects the response might bear some resemblance to the common shopping experience in the form of...

* Freshness – continuous updates of volatile, time-sensitive information – especially where responses to pending changes are required

* Uniqueness – documents with exceptional properties and lacking the redundancy of more generic materials

* Transferability – The ease of getting document text, graphics, and formatting from one project to another

But are these qualities best measured in the algorithms of code or the minds our users? We all know who won that battle in the race to define relevancy on the web and it was Page Rank by a mile. But what about inside the firewall? What could be more organic than a formula based on most popular downloads? What could be more democratic than tracing click-throughs to the ultimate purchase -- not a catalog page, or a banner ad but the buying of an argument, the best-selling item in the shopping cart of any analyst.

Not so fast. What about voting qualifications? Are some elections to the hall of top docs more democratic than others? We all know the only impediment to gaming the world's most popular ranking formula. And it has far more to do with Google's hush-hush policies than the brilliance of its programmers.

Content Supply? Meet Knowledge Demand!

This post tries to shed some light on the often bewildering exchange between your users and the information they use (or uses them as the case may be).

Our discussion adheres to a simple, familiar concept that governs these interactions. Think of the marketplace. Think economic cycles. Think fundamental rules. Now apply the laws of supply and demand to your internal databases and networks:

Supply – The content we’ve already got posted and indexed.

Demand – Why our users are spending time in the systems we build them.

Again it’s that demand side where all the mystery unfolds. What attracts demand to supply on intranets? In retail this is a question answered with every new trip to the checkout counter. But we knowledge intermediaries don’t have the benefit of measuring demand by dollars spent. The only expenditure on our information assets is the attentions paid by our users – a payment rarely shared with us!

Still, for information architects the response might bear some resemblance to the common shopping experience in the form of...

* Freshness – continuous updates of volatile, time-sensitive information – especially where responses to pending changes are required

* Uniqueness – documents with exceptional properties and lacking the redundancy of more generic materials

* Transferability – The ease of getting document text, graphics, and formatting from one project to another

But are these qualities best measured in the algorithms of code or the minds our users? We all know who won that battle in the race to define relevancy on the web and it was Page Rank by a mile. But what about inside the firewall? What could be more organic than a formula based on most popular downloads? What could be more democratic than tracing click-throughs to the ultimate purchase -- not a catalog page, or a banner ad but the buying of an argument, the best-selling item in the shopping cart of any analyst.

Not so fast. What about voting qualifications? Are some elections to the hall of top docs more democratic than others? We all know the only impediment to gaming the world's most popular ranking formula. And it has far more to do with Google's hush-hush policies than the brilliance of its programmers.

Using Search to Run Your Metadata Through the Wash Cycle

When we are getting our houses of information architecture in order it doesn't hurt to include the search tool in your walking tour. While not an afterthought search engine tuning is sometimes forsaken to the crash test of an overly formal BETA assessment. Your BETA testers can smell wet paint but they can't sense the color scheme. They step around loose nails. But any student of Google's Innovation Machine [see "Reading Google's Mind in HBR's April issue by Bala Iyer and Tom Davenport] knows that the line between testing and marketing has disappeared. When your users hit your new homepage they might not have a shopping list in hand. They might not know exactly what they're looking for. But even if...

1. Your KM store does not stock coffee mugs and t-shirts
2. You are a service provider with intangible assets
3. The text in your documents is not up to building code (READ: metadata structure)

... they might expect KM to help them decide (or at least spark their curiosity!)

What if they want all the white papers detached from the rest of the marketing archive? What if it would be easier to search according to subject experts than actual subjects? How much play do you have in your design choices when the walls and fixtures are already in?

Has this happened to you?

* The site map is a missing item on the search menu
* The site structure is incidental to the results page
* You need to browse one database at a time to get your bearings

The best laid KM plans can't hide the disconnects when we don't hook search up to our metadata schemas, taxonomic mappings, and navigational paths. Reading metadata is not something search tools do in their spare time. They must be customized to render all the pre-BETA code you can cram into the interface. Only then can you flush out the ROT that will ooze to the top of your results pages.

Remember search tools can help you find what you need. But they can be easily trained to help you prevent what your users need least: noise instead of signal.

Using Search to Run Your Metadata Through the Wash Cycle

When we are getting our houses of information architecture in order it doesn't hurt to include the search tool in your walking tour. While not an afterthought search engine tuning is sometimes forsaken to the crash test of an overly formal BETA assessment. Your BETA testers can smell wet paint but they can't sense the color scheme. They step around loose nails. But any student of Google's Innovation Machine [see "Reading Google's Mind in HBR's April issue by Bala Iyer and Tom Davenport] knows that the line between testing and marketing has disappeared. When your users hit your new homepage they might not have a shopping list in hand. They might not know exactly what they're looking for. But even if...

1. Your KM store does not stock coffee mugs and t-shirts
2. You are a service provider with intangible assets
3. The text in your documents is not up to building code (READ: metadata structure)

... they might expect KM to help them decide (or at least spark their curiosity!)

What if they want all the white papers detached from the rest of the marketing archive? What if it would be easier to search according to subject experts than actual subjects? How much play do you have in your design choices when the walls and fixtures are already in?

Has this happened to you?

* The site map is a missing item on the search menu
* The site structure is incidental to the results page
* You need to browse one database at a time to get your bearings

The best laid KM plans can't hide the disconnects when we don't hook search up to our metadata schemas, taxonomic mappings, and navigational paths. Reading metadata is not something search tools do in their spare time. They must be customized to render all the pre-BETA code you can cram into the interface. Only then can you flush out the ROT that will ooze to the top of your results pages.

Remember search tools can help you find what you need. But they can be easily trained to help you prevent what your users need least: noise instead of signal.

The 80:20 Rule of Knowledge Management

The concrete and yet elusive goal to waging a successful KM campaign is the quest to determine two things really:

(1) Who created the content you're identifying; and,
(2) Who was it intended for

If your KM system can solve these two mysteries you are well on your way to getting KM right. Because if your colleagues know this they can reconstruct not only topics, formats, and date ranges but the actual motives of the person or teams that created the work and thus how in-step it is with their own tasks, priorities, and personal investment in the material itself.

The other 20 percent? That falls outside the domain of KM central. That's up to the domain leaders. Ultimately though the remaining 20% answers to the role of knowledge contributor. Most of us are members of the content producing and consuming camps. It's a goal no more abstract than garbage-in, garbage-out. Your keynoter is also part of the clean-up crew. This reciprocal arrangement bodes well for tackling the 80/20 rule.

Under any practical arrangement the reach of the KM team does not extend beyond the 80 percent. Designing an experience is one thing. Endorsing and classifying content is quite another. But how does the designer impress upon their content producers the need for direct engagement in the mechanics of sound KM execution.

I put this question to a panel of intranet managers, information architects, and leading practitioners in a 2005 roundtable in Searcher Magazine entitled: Under Budget, on Time, and in Sync: How to Stage Successful Rollouts. One of the participants, Christie Confetti-Higgins of the internal portal team for SunLibrary within Sun Microsystems focused on the breadth versus depth issue that lies at the core of content production (and producer participation in it). Christie focused on the need to shape an enterprise taxonomy around the routines and priorities of her users -- not around the completeness of a subject or discipline it addresses:

There was a fine balance between how many levels of the taxonomy hierarchy to go down before it was no longer valuable to the user. Do you drill down to 10 levels in a competitive taxonomy or will 5 levels do? Some of the questions we asked ourselves were based on the content. Was there a lot of content around a particular area of [industry] competition that would benefit from further categorization? If so, we then investigated that option. We continually looked at how users would find the information. At some point, it is too detailed and then the return diminishes for us in terms of time to develop and the end user in terms of time to now find that information. There is a thing as too much detail :).

Three years since its publication the excessive detail Christie refers to here could be buried in the long tail of your search log results or the tags too specific to be reused in future business efforts. In an SLA conference last fall she positioned it as embedding a client-centric perspective in your KM system. This is an approach that values timely sharing over exhaustive collecting and shows a direct pay-off to producers -- even when their participation falls outside the scope of their performance reviews.


var addthis_pub = 'attspin';

The 80:20 Rule of Knowledge Management

The concrete and yet elusive goal to waging a successful KM campaign is the quest to determine two things really:

(1) Who created the content you're identifying; and,
(2) Who was it intended for

If your KM system can solve these two mysteries you are well on your way to getting KM right. Because if your colleagues know this they can reconstruct not only topics, formats, and date ranges but the actual motives of the person or teams that created the work and thus how in-step it is with their own tasks, priorities, and personal investment in the material itself.

The other 20 percent? That falls outside the domain of KM central. That's up to the domain leaders. Ultimately though the remaining 20% answers to the role of knowledge contributor. Most of us are members of the content producing and consuming camps. It's a goal no more abstract than garbage-in, garbage-out. Your keynoter is also part of the clean-up crew. This reciprocal arrangement bodes well for tackling the 80/20 rule.

Under any practical arrangement the reach of the KM team does not extend beyond the 80 percent. Designing an experience is one thing. Endorsing and classifying content is quite another. But how does the designer impress upon their content producers the need for direct engagement in the mechanics of sound KM execution.

I put this question to a panel of intranet managers, information architects, and leading practitioners in a 2005 roundtable in Searcher Magazine entitled: Under Budget, on Time, and in Sync: How to Stage Successful Rollouts. One of the participants, Christie Confetti-Higgins of the internal portal team for SunLibrary within Sun Microsystems focused on the breadth versus depth issue that lies at the core of content production (and producer participation in it). Christie focused on the need to shape an enterprise taxonomy around the routines and priorities of her users -- not around the completeness of a subject or discipline it addresses:

There was a fine balance between how many levels of the taxonomy hierarchy to go down before it was no longer valuable to the user. Do you drill down to 10 levels in a competitive taxonomy or will 5 levels do? Some of the questions we asked ourselves were based on the content. Was there a lot of content around a particular area of [industry] competition that would benefit from further categorization? If so, we then investigated that option. We continually looked at how users would find the information. At some point, it is too detailed and then the return diminishes for us in terms of time to develop and the end user in terms of time to now find that information. There is a thing as too much detail :).

Three years since its publication the excessive detail Christie refers to here could be buried in the long tail of your search log results or the tags too specific to be reused in future business efforts. In an SLA conference last fall she positioned it as embedding a client-centric perspective in your KM system. This is an approach that values timely sharing over exhaustive collecting and shows a direct pay-off to producers -- even when their participation falls outside the scope of their performance reviews.