Wednesday, May 7, 2008

Borrow a Person from the Library

Living_Library

A Scandinavian event called the Living Library which lets patrons borrow human “books” is making its way around the UK according to the Times Online. During these special events, library readers are able to check out a person for up to 30 minutes for a one-on-one chat which will offer them the opportunity to learn about a different lifestyle, culture, ethnicity, etc. The books cataloged for the events include a wide variety of stereotypes including Gay Man, Police Officer, Person with Mental Health Difficulties, Muslim, Vegan, and Ex Gang Member.

The Big Bang: Creating the new library universe
Encouraging flexibility, rapid response and innovation within the library sector National & State Libraries Australasia 2007–09

"New technologies are impacting on every aspect of libraries. We have responded by implementing an extraordinary range of continuous improvement and innovative projects, building
on the foundation of decades of collaborative technology and standards. We have created new services and made key parts of our collections available globally.

We are now in a position to explode and reshape our core services, resourcing and infrastructure; to explore radical new approaches across all parts of our work; and to fundamentally shift our libraries to the digital world. Our response to the environment is maturing and we must re-examine our collections; the services we provide to library users; our preservation and digitisation responsibilities; operational priorities; and workforce planning.
The rate of change will accelerate in our organisations during 2007–09.

The Big Bang is for everyone working in National & State Libraries Australasia libraries. It sets out the challenges for our libraries, a set of key operating principles endorsed by all
the members, and NSLA strategies and actions for 2007–09."

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Tagging and Taggers

A recent research paper, "Can Social Bookmarking Improve Web Search?" by Paul Heymann, Georgia Koutrika, and Hector Garcia-Molina, draws numerous interesting conclusions about the effect of taggers and tagging on findability. The authors used del.icio.us as the source for tags. Several of the results they found:
  • "Tags are present in the page text of 50% of the pages they annotate and in the titles of 16% of the pages they annotate" (p. 8). It seems that taggers are not particularly original in their tagging.
  • "Pages posted to del.icio.us are often recently modified" (p. 4) and "approximately 25% of URLs posted by users [of del.icio.us] are new, unindexed pages" (p. 5). By monitoring tags of interest to you, you can find out what's new more effectively than you can by setting up standard search queries.
Their closing section, in which they discuss how tagging could be improved in the long run, bears quoting at length:
In terms of tags, we believe that user interface features could have a large impact on improving the quality of tags for search. For instance, interfaces that recommended tags not in the page, or not common for the given domain, might help alleviate those two problems. Another approach might be to have domain-specific sites (e.g., photography) which might have higher quality tags due to the shared context of the users.

EUFeeds -- 300 European Newspapers by RSS

EUFeeds is a special-purpose RSS aggregator for European newspapers that provides access to more than 300 papers from the European Union. Provided by the European Journalism Centre in the Netherlands, this site lets you quickly browse the print media from each EU member nation. The site defaults to UK newspapers; there is no apparent way to set a different country as your default entry page. It also does not provide an RSS feed for the aggregated content -- so you cannot subscribe to the aggregated Czech Republic news, only visit it on a web page.

Goodbye, Enterprise - Hello, Socialprise

Here's another word to add to your lexicon: "Socialprise." It's meaning is somewhat obvious: social tools + enterprise = "socialprise." It's a new term, but one we hope sticks around, since it's currently representative of one of the biggest shifts in business today. We covered some socialprise tools before, in discussing Worklight, Google Sites, and HiveLive, but here's a new avenue for social tools in the workplace: Social CRM. A company called InsideView is bringing the social web to CRM, and they're not the only one to do so.

InsideView isn't a new company, but what they're announcing today is certainly new: it's called "SalesView," and it brings social media to Enterprise CRM. This on-demand business application scours the web, then presents relevant customer data, discovered through that web harvesting, as well as through specialized research providers and social networks.

Out of the some 20,000 sources utilized, some are traditional, but many are "web 2.0" like Facebook, LinkedIn, Jigsaw, ZoomInfo, as well as web-based news sources, blogs, and job postings.

LinkedIn Integration

The data which is found is then presented within the context of enterprise CRM applications in use today. Currently, SalesView is available as a mashup for Salesforce.com and SugarCRM, but will soon be offering mashups for Microsoft CRM and Landslide Technologies, and, by the second quarter of 2008, a standalone application will be available.

Salesview/Salesforce Mashup

The product will be offered based on the "freemium model - their words, by the way, meaning they're at least tapped in enough to subscribe to Wired - starting with a free version for light research. Pro and Team versions round-out the offerings, including more features, like unlimited watch lists, specialized providers, and the sharing of customized agents among members of the sales team.

InsideView's customers already include some big names like Ariba, Centive, Cisco/WebEx, Jobscience, LucidEra, Rearden Commerce, ServiceSource, StarCite Inc., SuccessFactors and Symantec.Cisco/WebEx, Jobscience, LucidEra, Rearden Commerce, ServiceSource, StarCite Inc., SuccessFactors and Symantec, among others.

In addition to InsideView, there are more companies that are also blurring the line between enterprise business and the social web. Another CRM offering, this time from Tactile CRM, started using the Google Contacts API to import Gmail contacts into their web-based CRM tool.

And then there is Oracle's CRM on Demand service that was announced in November 2007, which includes social networking features like those found in MySpace or Facebook, such as the ability to create and join groups, ala Facebook.

Another is Kintera, whose software-as-a-service has been calling itself "social CRM" for awhile, since their product captures online activity, like email and web form donations, and merges it with offline activity, entered via standard data entry techniques.

However, InsideView claims to be one of the first true examples of a Socialprise CRM application, and, in comparison with others, it seems like a valid claim.

"We are experiencing an inevitable convergence of social media, user generated content and enterprise applications. SalesView is born of this trend, and delivers on its promise with a smart, fresh and complete approach to business search and intelligence," said Rand Schulman, chief marketing officer of InsideView.

The connected social web in business? Bring it on. And while you're at it, maybe it's time to consider unblocking Facebook on the firewall, too.

Ten Sites for Finding Wonderful Things

Read/Write Web aggregates the four most recent posts from ten websites you may never have come across and presents them in an annotated guide to finding fantastic things. Here are their ten sites, click through to the original article to view the posts from each:

  1. BoingBoing
  2. Waxy Links
  3. Neatorama
  4. Laughing Squid
  5. JoshSpear.com
  6. Fresh Creation
  7. PicoCool
  8. Swiss Miss
  9. NotCot
  10. We Make Money Not Art

As an aside, it’s interesting to note their use of the AideRSS tool to link to the most recent popular posts for each blog.

Revenge of the Experts

Revenge of the Experts

Newsweek discusses the return of the pro in their article Revenge of the Experts which postulates that the time of the amateur on the Web is coming to a close.

“In short, the expert is back. The revival comes amid mounting demand for a more reliable, bankable Web. “People are beginning to recognize that the world is too dangerous a place for faulty information,” says Charlotte Beal, a consumer strategist for the Minneapolis-based research firm Iconoculture. Beal adds that choice fatigue and fear of bad advice are creating a “perfect storm of demand for expert information.”"

via Social Media