Interesting to see that CMS Watch is using different modes to convey their 12 predictions about the content management landscape — an article and a YouTube production — which notes significant changes for 2009 according to their research:

Nora Ganim Barnes, Chancellor Professor of Marketing & Director, Center for Marketing Research, University of Massachusetts talked at the Gilbane conference about a recent social media study of Inc. 500 companies.  Interesting stats based on familiarity and use of six forms of social media — blogging, message/bulletin boards, online video, social networking, podcasting, wikis.  In 2007 56% were using at least one type of social media and in 2008 77% were — a big jump.  Much bigger than Socialtext’s study of corporate blogging in Fortune 500 companies — 8% in 2007 and 12% in 2008.  With Inc. 500 study, blogging was 19% in 2007 and 38% in 2008.  The Inc. companies current measures of social media success: hits/page views, awareness, customer satisfaction, feedback/comments, lead generation, revenue, sales, word of mouth.  Reasons for getting into social media: communication, add value, product/brand awareness, keep up with trends/competitors, product demos, more cost effective and productive form of marketing.

Opening keynote speaker at Gilbane’s conference (Where Content Management Meets Social Media), Prabhakar Raghavan, Head of Research for Yahoo! was the former CTO of Verity (now part of Autonomy), and a scientist at IBM’s Almaden Labs. He now runs the labs for Yahoo! with 300 scientists around the world, and also heads the search strategy (web search) for the organization. He describes Yahoo!’s industry as search and advertising online.  I loved how he started with his conclusions –

Web search is no longer about document retrieval but a means for web-mediated goals. Search is a means to a goal, translated into 2.3 keyword searches.

And this leads to

A new breed of search experiences  which demands a search ecosystem combining content with intent.

He illustrated short cuts, deep links and enhanced result summaries of Yahoo! searches and since we’re in Boston used Legal Seafoods as an example.

Search: content vs. intent

Premise – people don’t want to search, people want to get tasks done.  His premise certainly fits with the information industry premise of librarians (who by the way love to search) that people want answers.

Raghavan talked about how the Net is moving from a web of pages to a web of objects – people, places, businesses, restaurants (and relationships with each other) – objects that have attributes. Intents are satisfied by juxtaposing objects and attributes. Search is no longer links, but objects with attributes.

Where do we get structured objects/attributes?

• Machine learning techniques – classification/extraction(mechanically); scalable, but unreliable (80-90% reliable)
• Building an open ecosystem – less scalable but reliable; provided publishers have incentives to contribute; demands opening up of search

What does open search mean? Rich abstracts with pictures and reviews.  Yahoo! uses a SearchMonkey Ecosystem where publishers provide rich structure and show in search that way; algorithms still rank results.  These enhanced results, for site owners, increases the quality of users, who are engaged, and fosters loyalty. The best intelligence is human intelligence, so people are the best contributors of rich structure.

Lee Rainie, Director, Pew Internet & American Life Project, was kind enough to send me a copy of a new book that he and Associate Director Susannah Fox put together with Janna Quitney Anderson, Associate Professor, Elon University’s School of Communications & Director of the Imagining the Internet Center.  The book is called Up for Grabs: The Future of the Internet, Volume I. It covers a range of topics including: social networks, digital products, civit engagement, formal education, families, extreme communities, politics, health system change, personal entertainment, creativity, and lots more.  The authors surveyed many technology experts and found much agreement about where digital hardware and software are heading and that technologies will become even more important in users’ everyday lives.  Lots of interesting disagreement and discussion around: the likelihood of an attack on the Internet, the “internet of things”, the changing of the formal education processes, the flourishing of individual creativity, social groups of all kinds, and other topics.  There is no question, however, that Pew’s premise holds true: the Internet, as a tool, influences human endeavors and there is a need to produce research testing the power and degree of those influences.

Also note, Lee Rainie is the opening keynote speaker at Computer in Libraries 2009, March 30th, Hyatt Regency Crystal City.  His talk — Friending Libraries: The Nodes in People’s Social Networks.

Just read an advance copy of Information Advisor’s KM supplement, Dec 2008 written by Robert Berkman and published by Information Today.  I got really excited reading the discussions around using knowledge in the enterprise and how the new Web 2.0 tools are enabling better participation.  Loved the interview with consultant, author & professor Tom Davenport (occassional keynote speaker at KMWorld & Intranets, and blogger) where he talked about the knowledge still being very important but “management” not so much.  I’ve always thought that that KM was more about knowledge sharing than knowledge management.  Great info from Cognizant CKO Sukumar Rajagopal, and loved his quote: “Web 2.0 technologies, due to the participatory nature both on the contribution and consumption sides, can dramatcially improve the effectiveness of knowledge management.”  He also talks about Cognizant’s knowlege champions and their “router model of KM” — “Knowledge Creation is essentially a distributed function; the router model avoids the need to accumulate all the knowledge in one place and thereby obviates the need for “keeping-the-central-repository-current” problem….we strongly believed in the wisdom of crowds and enabled community contribution through multiple media—blogs, forums, wikis, social bookmarking, etc. We have a small team of moderators who act as catalysts in building and sustaining the community by connecting the seekers to experts as required, and moderating the content.”

But one of the best parts of the Berkman’s newsletter is the one page Recommended Sources of Inforamtion on Enterprise 2.0 — very nice!  Includes books, blogs, websites, reseearch resports, user generated videos, associations and more.  Thanks Robert.

Isn’t this exciting?  Our own SLA stamp celebrating  100 years of the leading international association of information professionals!   I was priviledged to be it’s president in 1995/6 and have been an active member since I was library science student (just a couple of years ago).  Many of my closest friends are part of the SLA family.  I love this stamp and you can purchase them here.

I really look forward to our 100th annual conference being held in Washington DC, June 14-17.  Hope to see you there.

Great workshops on the weekend here in Monterey CA — I can tell by all the enthusiasm and buzz and the ideas that are flying around.  The first two keynote speakers have sparked some great discussions already.

Howard Rheingold (who did a talk for me in Toronto in the early 90’son virtual communities) talked about the “Social media classroom“, now under development, that will allow students to switch from blogs to forms to wikis to chat to microblogs fluidly.  For more coverage of Howard’s talk see Don Hawkins piece and Jaap van de Geer’s conducted a brief interview with Rheingold.

It great to see an article on environmental scanning in SLA’s Information Outlook 09/08, Environmental Scanning:  A Different Kind of Competency. Environmental scanning is such necessary skill in a fast changing world and there isn’t a great deal of practical information about the process so it’s great to see this article  Also check out our earlier post.

Darlene Fichter pointed us to this new book by Rohit Bhargava, who writes the popular Influential Marketing Blog, something to which we should all be paying attention.  The book webstie is rich with ideas and information, including a 5 minute video clip, podcasts, and lots more.  I look forward to more ideas when I actually read the book!

Dave Snowden, Cognitive Edge, started with, “System design is not a linear process” and today requires a co-evolutionary approach.

Key concepts:  everything is fragmented, pattern based decisions (associated with the concept of mess), complexity & constraint, distributed cognition (from fail safe to safe fail experimentaiton), natural numbers (5, 15, 150) (some of which Dave covered in last year’s keynote, it’s podcast is available.)

Existing methods: narrative based requirements, cross silo self-forming teams, managing emergence

Emergent methods: crews, coherence mapping

Project design — Cynefin, see Harvard Business Review article Nov 07 (which won an Academy of Management’s Award for the best article by practitioners — and article which Dave wrote with Mary Boone)

Dave recorded his talk today and will post a podcast on his site.