Curiouser and Curiouser!

Curiouser and Curiouser! on content-management http://matt.blogs.it/ RSS feed for topic content-management Copyright 2006 Matt Mower Squib/0.1 self@mattmower.com self@mattmower.com en-gb Blogging is the first killer app of Personal Publishing Tue, 02 Jul 2002 16:04:04 +0100 <A href="http://www.webcrimson.com/ourstories/blogsdisruptivetech.htm">Blogs as Disruptive Tech - How weblogs are flying under the radar of the Content Management Giants</A>. Quote: "That was really my eureka moment: my first realization that content management was screwed. In more technical terms, I realized that Content Management was starting to wrestle with what Clayton Christensen calls The Innovator's Dilemma: the inability of successful companies to adapt to a new, disruptive technology." Comment: Very much in the vein that the previous post refers to. [<A href="http://instructionalTechnology.editthispage.com/">Serious Instructional Technology</A>] <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> » Some interesting points here especially with regard to Christensen. <UL> <LI>Clayton Christensen is all too familiar with that issue as well: "Markets that do not exist cannot be analyzed: Suppliers and customers must discover them together."</LI> <LI>Every website has different needs - especially big, complicated websites.</LI> <LI>As a result, most CMS software vendors fall into the same business models as the Mainframe vendors selling to corporations: long sales cycles and extensive consulting requirements.</LI> <LI>Blogging is the first and truest killer app of Personal Publishing</LI></UL>  </BLOCKQUOTE> http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000082.html Fixing intranets with klogs Sun, 18 Aug 2002 22:31:55 +0100 <A href="http://www.steptwo.com.au/columntwo/archives/000166.html">Fixing intranets</A>. It's interesting how the same issues seem to come up in bunches. Over the last month, I have now talked... [<A href="http://www.steptwo.com.au/columntwo/">Column Two</A>] <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> » James has written an interesting post about some of the common problems with intranets that he encounters with his clients.  As someone interested in how klogging (I'll use the term for now!) could affect the role of intranets and content management his issues seem particularly relevant to me.  In preface to my remarks I should point out that I am choosing to address static content rather than the possible dynamic web applications you might find on a typical intranet. The issues, re-ordered slightly to suit my responses, are: <OL> <LI>The intranet has grown over time. <LI>Manual processes (using Frontpage or Dreamweaver) are used to publish pages. <LI>A lot of information has been published, but the site isn't being used. <LI>There is little high-level structure, and users are not able to find information. </LI></OL> 1. If you want a logical hierarchical structure then organic growth is a problem.  It's like running water, it flows down along the path of least resistance and doesn't care about the direction.  Same with people, they'll squirrel stuff anywhere that makes sense today (have you taken a good look at your my "My Documents" directory lately?).   Of course if you're klogging then this organic growth is part of the package.  Whether that bothers you is probably a factor of points (2), (3), and (4).  2. This is most obviously solved by klogging software.  It's one of the fundamentals. 3. Hard to say but I guess much of the information published may be of low quality.  In my experience no matter how hard publishing to an intranet can be, creating information is harder still.  This leads to variable quality in that information.  Variable quality leads to low usage.  Low usage provides little incentive for new information to be created and so on. Klogging address this in two ways I think: <UL> <LI>When you have something to publish it's dead easy: click, type, click. <LI>You can publish in bite-size chunks.  This means that if you have a small but useful piece of information you can just klog it.  You don't have to pad it into a long document to make it worthwhile.  You also don't have to find "just the right place" for it to go, it just gets klogged.  That chunk can exist in it's own right, waiting for the day someone needs it.</LI></UL> Which brings us rather neatly to (4) 4. As it stands klogging is a decentralizing technology that doesn't encourage a formal hierarchical structure.  You klog and, if all goes according to plan, people will subscribe to you and they will link to you.  Will they be the right people?  Does it make information any easier to locate?  Not automatically no.  But then hierarchical structures don't necessarily make life any easier.  Once a hierarchy is more than about 2 levels deep it can cause it's own navigation issues. Some people might argue that a healthy klogging culture coupled with a Google search appliance (or any search engine that has a pageranking algorithm I guess) could well make it easier to find what you're looking for.  I think theres something to be said for that. My own approach is to allow for easy metadata-enabling of klogs.  My hope is that combining klogs with topic maps will allow new structures to be grown from them automagically.  This can complement the pagerank based search and provide new ways of finding and traversing group knowledge. So should you scrap the intranet and replace it with klogs? I don't think so.  But perhaps you should think carefully about what you want your intranet to achieve and whether some of your goals for information publishing and dissemination couldn't be better achieved with a klogging strategy.</BLOCKQUOTE> http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000343.html e-mail and virtual learning environments (why its a bad idea) Mon, 09 Sep 2002 18:35:34 +0100 <A href="http://www.dmreview.com/master.cfm?NavID=193&EdID=5677">DM Review: The Intelligence in E-Mail: Are You Ready to Listen?</A>. Quote: "It is becoming more clear that when one tries to make a CRM system do everything (ERP, data warehousing, e-mail management, billing, telephony, chat, etc.), one gets something that does nothing well. This realization is leading to unification of data, but specialization of channel." Comment: We're about to embark on a fairly significant e-mail project - giving all classes a listserv - and managing the knowledge generated will be a trick.  I know the impulse will be not to keep archives and to lock them away if created.  Also to make the lists instructor-distribution only. [<A href="http://instructionalTechnology.editthispage.com/">Serious Instructional Technology</A>] <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> » A few years ago I was involved in a virtual school project.  Although I would not call it a success per se, it had many successes and we learned a lot. My reason for dredging this up is that one of our bedrock principles was that email was part of the problem.  At the time there were growing voices suggesting email as the solution to all our woes.  A good example was student submission of coursework.  This struck us as particularly crazy given the problems people were already having managing their email (especially lecturers) and the lack of any solution for managing email. Here is an example of where this can easily go wrong: <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> "You failed because you didn't do the coursework" "But I submitted my coursework in the e-mail" "No you didn't" "I did it was attached to the e-mail I sent you" "There was an attachment but it was empty." "But the file was in there"</BLOCKQUOTE> Who is in the right here?  Is this an honest student, victim of a mistake, or someone trying to pull a fast one. The solution we ended up recommending was based upon <A href="http://www.opentext.com/">Livelink</A> a web-based knowledge (content) management system.  In particular we were interested in whether we could implement workflow to manage a number of the complex problems in this space (the answer was no we could not for reasons more complicated than I want to go into here). However the approach was right.  It gave us: <UL> <LI>Web based <LI>Secure <LI>Workspace based metaphor [in particular the personal workspace which we hoped would address the need to build a student profile] <LI>Discussion forums with e-mail integration <LI>News channels <LI>Full-text searching of everything <LI>Document management <LI>Integrated workflow <LI>Scalable to tens of thousands of users <LI>Scriptable at the back end (if you were a very patient person)</LI></UL> These kinds of features were what we were looking for to address the concerns of building a virtual learning environment for real.  Okay long pointless ramble over...</BLOCKQUOTE> http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000513.html Topic Maps: CMS is only the beginning Thu, 21 Nov 2002 09:59:41 +0000 <A href="http://www.steptwo.com.au/columntwo/archives/000381.html">Topic maps in content management</A>. Lars Marius Garshol recently e-mailed me, and pointed me his very interesting article on topic maps and content management. This talks about using an Integrated Topic Management System (ITMS) to provide a much more powerful management interface to the normal... [<A href="http://www.steptwo.com.au/columntwo/">Column Two</A>] <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> » I'm fundamentally a believer in topic maps even though I haven't really seen them in concrete action yet.  I just believe that they are too simple and elegant an idea to not work.  The nice thing is that with XTM and XFML beginning to take off we are sure to see more and more applications that do support topic maps. One thing in particular that interests me is that Alex Shapiro (of TouchGraph fame) has created a Personal Brain viewer.  This uses the new brain exporter to create a map that is browsable in a TouchGraph viewer.  It's very cool to be able to take the plex-style view of Personal Brain and switch to a TG style view.  If only they could be integrated somehow... For my own part liveTopics adds to the capability of Radio as a CMS by overlaying a topic based structure onto the content.  This will become more powerful when topics can themselves be structured, and when the postings from multiple weblogs can be related by content. Something that worries me though is a recent comment (I cannot remember the source) that weblogs+topics are just recreating threaded discussions.  I can't quite articulate yet what it is I don't like about this comment, but there is something here that bothers me.  (Note: I see nothing wrong with threaded discussion per-se, I think I am more bothered by the possible perception that blogs = another usenet somehow)</BLOCKQUOTE> http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000842.html Printers, get out of ink Sat, 21 Dec 2002 22:47:34 +0000 <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> <A href="http://www.terryfrazier.com/weblog/2002/12/20.html#a1070">Content Management Not Good Business for Printers</A>. Several years ago I completed a comprehensive study on Digital Asset Management for Print Providers. [<A href="http://www.terryfrazier.com/weblog/">b.cognosco</A>]</BLOCKQUOTE> I think there is an opportunity for clever print delivery firms with some spare cash and an eye for where print does add value. If they can adapt their processes to be simple and hook into things like web-services (e.g. deliver from application, not on floppy disk or via e-mail) they can be relevant. I guess the key to this will be digital print technology.  That likely spells doom for lots of established companies who operate on tight margins with ultra-expensive equipment to pay off. Example Scenario of what I have in mind (I'm not suggestion any printing company could make a living off this): I have a DeskJet 940c at home on which I print endless numbers of papers and articles.  For anything up to about 50 pages it's great.  Lovely little printer.  But beyond that I try and avoid it.  500 page e-book?  Forget it. If I could click Print in IE, Word, Acrobat, whatever...  And then get a marketplace of local printing companies who could accept the job.  Let me pick the one with the right combination of quality, paper, speed and price.  Select it, enter my PayPal authorization.  Hit print.  And then either go pick it up next time I pick up the newspaper or have them mail to me. That's a service I could come to like. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001010.html Permission based posting Sun, 08 Feb 2004 00:13:18 +0000 Just a couple of follow-on thoughts... <ol><li>If a feed is copyright, does that mean an aggregator should not collect it? Is this reproducing the work? (How is it different, for example, from downloading pirated software?)</li> <li>What does it say when an author asserts copyright of material, but publishes it in an RSS feed? The Creative Commons licenses grant rights to the recipient. Copyright (AFAIK) does not.</li> <li>Does it matter what type of aggregator it is? For example <a href="http://www.evectors.com/itkcollector/">K-Collector</a> aggregates in a different way (and for a different purpose) to, for example, <a href="http://radio.userland.com/">Radio Userland</a> or <a href="http://ranchero.com/netnewswire/">NetNewsWire</a>.</li> <li>If it aggregates a feed, should it prevent you from re-posting aggregated content? In Radio this is very easy, I can click a button on a post in the aggregator to use it as the basis for a post to my own weblog. If an item is copyright should it stop me doing that?</li> </ol> I think this draws us awfully close to the kinds of things Ted Nelson was thinking about when he outlined his vision for transclusion based publishing. I can almost envisage a system where, when I press the post button on a copyright item, my aggregator goes off to check with the original authors system for permission to publish. You could imagine using the data from a social network to decide who can republish your content with your permission. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001858.html DelphiGroup: Making the case for taxonomy Mon, 16 Aug 2004 11:56:57 +0100 I'm reading an excellent report from <a href="http://www.delphigroup.com/">Delphi Group</a> called Information Intelligence: Content Classification and the Enterprise Taxonomy Practice (see <a href="http://www.delphigroup.com/coverage/taxonomy.htm">here</a> for a download link). The gist of the report is that, for enterprises, search is not enough. The report makes the case that whilst search technology has improved a lot in recent years, and continues to improve, the majority of professionals still find it an unsatisfactory way to work and often spend in the region of 20% of their time searching for information. Often cited problems were constantly changing information and a lack of precision about what they were looking for. The report then makes a case that introducing taxonomy based services can significantly improve performance and save money by eating into that 20%. Whilst the report is funded by a number of companies with a vested interest in taxonomy (for example Autonomy or Verity) the case seems to be well made off the back of a credible piece of research (which is a follow-up to similar research done last year). My summary: <ul> <li>82% of users do not have access to a centralized point of search & information across information systems</li> <li>The provision of a singular navigational front end (e.g. taxonomy) and omnipresent search tool that collectively aggregate disparate content resources, can, from an end-user perspective, deliver the simple single point of access that many users strive for.</li> <li>Lack of organisation of information is the number one problem in information management & retrieval.</li> <li>If professionals are spending 20% of their time (or more) looking for information then this results in an opportunity cost & represents a runaway expense item in many organisations.</li> <li>Keyword search assumes you know what you are looking for & that it an often erroneous assumption.</li> <li>75% of people surveyed during a Yahoo market research project preferred browsing to searching.</li> <li>In some instances it is easier to discover information about a particular subject if you see it in the context of related thought. Browsing encourages associative thought.</li> <li>The availablity of taxonomy eliminates the need for the researcher to completely understand the subject before issuing a query.</li> <li>Browsing via a taxonomy in essence provides an education on the subject and lends insight into the issues or facets of the subject.</li> <li>The number one source of frustration with search of on-line content is the fact that the content they search for is constantly changing, which both frustrates the user and reduces the effectiveness of simple search.</li> <li>Use of a taxonomy can provide a dynamic bookmark so to speak, a one-stop-shopping guide to all relevant content on a subject. Return to a subject node exposes the latest and complete collection of content about that subject area. This addresses the number one cause of frustration, the dynamic, volatile nature of information sources.</li> <li>Navigation of a well-designed interface to information on a web site/portal automatically directs the researcher to other relevant topics.</li> <li>The tagging effort represents another process that a business must undertake in order to obtain the benefits of a taxonomy. In some cases this could be done manually. But this approach is not easily scalable.</li> <li>Will authors be willing or available to perform this classification manually?</li><li>68% concur that the process of locating & retrieving the information needed to effectively execute their jobs is difficult and time consuming.  Not a single respondent strongly disagreed with this statement.</li> <li>Whilst users see some improvement in information retrieval over the last 2 years, their attitude towards its level of difficulty remained virtually the same.</li> <li>Respondents overwhelmingly pointed to the fact that business content is constantly changing and has to be continually relocated.</li> <li>Findings pointed more towards the speed and ease of use of retrieval environments and less to effectiveness, as the primary point of pain amongst todays business people. </li> </ul> I think this report is very well worth reading to anyone interested in search, taxonomy, or knowledge organisation. Of course I too am baised because I think <a href="http://www.evectors.com/itkcollector/">K-Collector's</a> integrated approach addresses a number of the concerns raised by this report. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00002443.html