October, 2008

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IDEA 2008

ChiefTech

The “IDEA Conference&# :[link] took place in Chicago on October 7-9 at the Harold Washington Library Center. The speakers pushed the boundaries of what it means to design complex information spaces of all kinds. We can all expand our practice by absorbing their experiences and ideas. In cooperation with the “IA Institute&# :[link] we’re happy to bring you recordings of most conference talks.

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Web2 Conversations: Lance Armstrong

John Battelle's Searchblog

Next up in our ongoing tour of conversations at Web 2 next week is Lance Armstrong , the seven time winner of the Tour de France, who recently announced his "de-reitrement" and is going for an eighth win. This appearance, a dinner conversation on day one , is one of Lance's only public appearances since he announced his comeback. He's also an internet entrepreneur, having launched Livestrong.com , a health site, earlier this summer.

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The Future looks very Cloudy

Collaboration 2.0

I’ve just attended the one day, highly-focused executive ‘Cloud Summit‘ conference. The Cloud—used to describe everything from internet-based computing utilities to Software as a Service — was examined and its future impact explored within the highly appropriate venue of the Silicon Valley Computer History Museum. The exhibits on the ground floor of the museum [.

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Some Python bugs

Scary Beasts Security

A little late on this report, but here are some Python runtime bugs I found back in May 2007: [link] Nothing too interesting. It continues to illustrate that modules backed by native code are a great way to break out of a VM. Also, image manipulation code remains a hot spot for integer overflows. The pickle bug is worth talking about. It has been known for trusted applications to unpickle untrusted data.

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Peak Performance: Continuous Testing & Evaluation of LLM-Based Applications

Speaker: Aarushi Kansal, AI Leader & Author and Tony Karrer, Founder & CTO at Aggregage

Software leaders who are building applications based on Large Language Models (LLMs) often find it a challenge to achieve reliability. It’s no surprise given the non-deterministic nature of LLMs. To effectively create reliable LLM-based (often with RAG) applications, extensive testing and evaluation processes are crucial. This often ends up involving meticulous adjustments to prompts.

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CM Conversations: Evan Williams

John Battelle's Searchblog

Next up in the star lineup of conversants at the CM Summit this week is Evan Williams , the co-founder of Blogger, which Google acquired in 2003, and current co-founder of Twitter, which I've written about recently (TweetSense, anyone?). Evan's knack for conversational social media applications is obvious , but as Twitter settles into its place as a Web 2 favorite (and punching bag ), one key question does remain - what's the business model?

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Ah, Yes, Grasshopper: History Repeats Itself

John Battelle's Searchblog

Well, if you're wondering what I've been doing, it's simple - my back is back. Ten years ago, when I was three years into a rocket ship new company, my back blew out in a huge way, and it took me months to get back. I was never the same again (goodbye, contact sports), but I did find yoga as a religion of sorts, and learned all sorts of things about what was important in life.

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OpenID

John Battelle's Searchblog

I'm watching this unfold, OpenID, Facebook Connect, Y!OS, Microsoft support, Google support.it's supposedly a big group hug, but it feels like a war, folks. And it's not pretty. Note this : A couple of hours ago, the Google Security Team posted an article claiming that Google's made the switch to OpenID, joining Yahoo! and Microsoft in the ranks OpenID providers.

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Yes, I am a broken record at times: Is this really revolutionary?

ChiefTech

OK. I'm curious - is using a wiki this way , *really* any different from the virtual teaming and collaboration leading practices we were promoting nearly a decade ago with Lotus Notes ? ( see my case study from 2004 ) At Ernst & Young Australia we even supported account teams with a structured process to deploy project databases (called Engagement Team Databases and Pursuit Team Databases , they could be deployed on demand using an automated process) where users could edit each others pages

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Free Enterprise Search Focus Group on Thursday 23rd October

ChiefTech

Next Thursday, IPP Consulting will be hosting a free Enterprise Search Focus Group to look at the challenges of implementing Web-like search inside organisations. That’s the requirement that comes up all the time – give me a “ Google-like search capability ”… but why is it so hard? This focus group follows the success of our mini KM Bootcamp last month and was inspired by the response to this post the other week.

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How and Why Should You Be Tracking Geopolitical Risk?

Geopolitical risk is now at the top of the agenda for CEOs. But tracking it can be difficult. The world is more interconnected than ever, whether in terms of economics and supply chains or technology and communication. Geopolitically, however, it is becoming increasingly fragmented – threatening the operations, financial well-being, and security of globally connected companies.

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I Support Barack Obama

John Battelle's Searchblog

which should not be a surprise to regular readers of this site. I am on a list of "CEOs for Obama" and have been donating to Obama's campaign. Why am I posting this now? To a media/tech site? Well, I was inspired by Tim. Faced with these problems, we need a president who can harness the best and brightest our country has to offer, a president who is conversant with, and comfortable with, the power of technology to assist in solving these problems, a president who is good at listening, studying,

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WePc.Com Launches

John Battelle's Searchblog

For the better part of a year, we at FM have been working on an innovative new project with Asus and Intel. Today it launched. WePC.com is an experiment in crowdsourcing an entirely new piece of hardware, and I'm very proud of the work we've done together. Check out my first submission - the LowJackPC. The idea here is to gather the collective intelligence of PC users to help build a smarter, better machine.

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A Reminder of What Web 2 Is

John Battelle's Searchblog

From the man (yes, my partner on Web 2 Summit, so I am biased) who helped start the meme: value is migrating to a new kind of layer, which we now call Web 2.0, which consists of applications driven not just by software but by network-effects databases driven by explicit or implicit user contribution.

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Web2 Conversations: Larry Brilliant

John Battelle's Searchblog

Larry Brilliant, the Executive Director of Google.org, is the face and mind behind Google's philanthropic entity. Here's a snip from his bio: Larry is an M.D. and M.P.H., board-certified in preventive medicine and public health. He is a founder and director of The Seva Foundation, which works in dozens of countries around the world, primarily to eliminate preventable and curable blindness.

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7 Pitfalls for Apache Cassandra in Production

Apache Cassandra is an open-source distributed database that boasts an architecture that delivers high scalability, near 100% availability, and powerful read-and-write performance required for many data-heavy use cases. However, many developers and administrators who are new to this NoSQL database often encounter several challenges that can impact its performance.

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On Speech Based Interfaces to Search - and Beyond

John Battelle's Searchblog

This stuff is going to get real, soon. From Google's latest Technology Roundtable Series : [This] video, "Applications of Human Language Technology," is a discussion of our enormous progress in large-scale automated translation of languages and speech recognition. Both of these technology domains are coming of age with capabilities that will truly impact what we expect of computers on a day-to-day basis.

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The Video Effect

ChiefTech

Some new research suggests that videoconferencing is less effective because it distorts decision making but I'm not really sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing. Perhaps this is really the effect of using videoconferencing with people who are only used to a one-way interaction with television? You know, the type of people who actually believe what television news tells them about the world.

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McKinsey & Company, MISAustralia & Ross Dawson on balancing the reality of Web 2.0

ChiefTech

Not sure how I missed this from McKinsey & Company research report on Web 2.0 in business from back in July , however none the less it makes interesting reading. They report: “ that after an initial period of promise and trial, companies are coming to understand the difficulty of realizing some of Web 2.0's benefits. Only 21 percent of the respondents say they are satisfied overall with Web 2.0 tools, while 22 percent voice clear dissatisfaction.

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LOL. Wikis are *old* technology

ChiefTech

I had just posted this and then a funny thought came to me: LOL. Wikis are *old* technology. Lotus Notes first appeared in 1989, but has much old roots of course. Meanwhile the WWW was invented in 1990, although it also origin backs in the 1980s. And of course the first wiki, WikiWikiWeb , was developed in 1994 and released into the wild in 1995. So really, Wikis are an old technology, just as much as the old man of groupware, Lotus Notes.

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Entity Resolution Checklist: What to Consider When Evaluating Options

Are you trying to decide which entity resolution capabilities you need? It can be confusing to determine which features are most important for your project. And sometimes key features are overlooked. Get the Entity Resolution Evaluation Checklist to make sure you’ve thought of everything to make your project a success! The list was created by Senzing’s team of leading entity resolution experts, based on their real-world experience.

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Xenos – a different kind of Enterprise RSS tool

ChiefTech

Thanks to a little bit of serendipity while researching Enterprise RSS for my next Image & Data Manager (IDM) magazine article , I had the opportunity to talk to Scott Lewis from Metanews about his Enterprise RSS software, Xenos. Xenos is a different class of Enterprise RSS tool from systems such as Attensa and Newsgator. It is designed for information professionals and other communicators who want to create tailored newsletters and feeds from existing feeds.

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Information security: Throwing stones in the Web 2.0 greenhouse

ChiefTech

I completely understand the bias here as Symantec Australia are trying to engage in a bit of marketing about their information security products in this article from the Australian IT section: “ ALMOST 80 per cent of local organisations have experienced a data breach in the past five years, with a further 40 per cent reporting between six and 20 known breaches during the period, according to Symantec's first Australian data loss survey… …The main cause of data breaches was lost laptops (45

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The personal value of blogging

ChiefTech

Considering past discussions about blogging , here is another take on the value of blogging by Dirk Singer and why it isn't dead just yet or being replaced by Twitter. He lists some reasons why he finds it valuable, which I’ll summarise as follows: To create a dialogue with like minded people; To gather and collect information; To practice and fine tune writing skills; and Build personal brand.

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The Comments Have It

ChiefTech

You might recall there was a brief flurry of discussion about the value of commenting in blogs. I noticed that ProBlogger, Darren Rowse, kicked off a discussion on the same topic. Rowse himself doesn’t add a lot of value to the discussion, but the comments on this topic make interesting reading. For the most part, the people reading Rowse ’ blog maintain that comments are important, although no one likes comment spam.

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Strategic CX: A Deep Dive into Voice of the Customer Insights for Clarity

Speaker: Nicholas Zeisler, CX Strategist & Fractional CXO

The first step in a successful Customer Experience endeavor (or for that matter, any business proposition) is to find out what’s wrong. If you can’t identify it, you can’t fix it! 💡 That’s where the Voice of the Customer (VoC) comes in. Today, far too many brands do VoC simply because that’s what they think they’re supposed to do; that’s what all their competitors do.

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This week – David Gurteen, 3eep and talking Web 2.0 with accountants

ChiefTech

Aside from seeing my new Intranet 2.0 article in print , this week has been interesting for a couple of reasons. I’ve spent most of today with David Gurteen , who started the day by presenting and then running one of his famous Knowledge Cafe sessions for the NSW KM Forum. I had the chance, along with a couple of others from the KM Forum, to talk more informally with him over lunch and then we finished the day with a one-on-one chat I managed to arrange between David and someone with a particu

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A Transparency Engine for the World Wide Web

Collaboration 2.0

Every so often you come across a web application that is a game changer: the utility of browser plugin reframeit is a hugely powerful adjunct to your use of the entire web. The video above demonstrates marking up the transcript of a political speech with associated facts and links using reframeit that will be associated [.

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It’s primetime for collaboration mashups

Collaboration 2.0

As winter draws in throughout the northern hemisphere, the silver lining of the recession we are descending into for the collaboration tools industry is the huge use case justifications for strapped companies of all sizes to take advantage of their products. In an era which is going to see some enterprises in suffering industry sectors fighting [.

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The Secrets of CEOs

Collaboration 2.0

I just finished reading an advance US manuscript of ‘The Secrets of CEOs - 150 Global Chief Executives lift the lid on business, life and leadership’ by Steve Tappin, who is a managing partner in the global CEO & board practice of Heidrick & Struggles, and Andrew Cave, a leading English financial journalist. The book [.

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The Big Payoff of Application Analytics

Outdated or absent analytics won’t cut it in today’s data-driven applications – not for your end users, your development team, or your business. That’s what drove the five companies in this e-book to change their approach to analytics. Download this e-book to learn about the unique problems each company faced and how they achieved huge returns beyond expectation by embedding analytics into applications.

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The LowJack Self-Perpetuating Road Warrior

John Battelle's Searchblog

I am really, really busy. So why did I just spend 20 minutes making a dream PC? Because I really want this machine. From my description: This is the continuation of my "Lowjack PC" idea, but now with bells and whistles. One of the things I am most worried about is someone stealing my laptop. It's got ALL my key info on it. I want my PC to know that I'm using it - ie, that it's ME, and not anyone else.

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Yahoo and Google Falling Out of Tree?

John Battelle's Searchblog

Just in time for my interview with Jerry Yang next week at Web2, this report from the Journal ( via Reuters ): Google Inc (GOOG.O) and Yahoo Inc (YHOO.O) could announce a decision to walk away from their search deal by the middle of next week, The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter. The two Internet companies have so far failed to reach an agreement with the U.S.

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Web2 Comments Winners!

John Battelle's Searchblog

I couldn't pick three, so I went with four winners. I learned a lot from the hundred or so comments that came in, and I am busy preparing for the show next week. It was hard to narrow them down, but I had to. If you won, congrats! I'll be reaching out to the winners via email for their free We2 passes, but here are the comments! * Dominic Son says: * # October 22, 2008 11:57 PM.

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