It is so nice to know that the folks over at Google are reading my blog (well actually i don't know that i just think everyone one of their releases is about me). With today's announcement of Google Gears that will enable developers to create offline web applications using JavaScript APIs. With the Google Reader offline mode is the first release they have managed to solve yet another one of my problems.

Surface a 30 inch table top display is a new Microsoft product that provides interaction with digital content through natural gestures, touch and physical objects (for example you place your camera on the display and it wirelessly downloads your pictures!). I have posted before on multi-touch surfaces and many folks have been working on this technology for a while. More from Microsoft on their Surface site take a look at the Orgins section. Below is a video from WSJ.com of Bill Gates doing a demonstration of the features:



Back in January i was making dinner and watching Bill Gates CES keynote speech in which he demoed a kitchen environment that had touch features-basically a countertop that you can stream recipes and other type of information, like the size of the dough ball you should roll. I really wanted one then and i really really want one now:

Memorial Day here in the States is NOT one of those holiday's that Hallmark has manipulated into a card giving holiday, so that means no gifts either but today the good folks over at Particls have managed to go into public Beta giving you a special gift.

Click To Play

Via the always entertaining J-Walk blog a fabulous morphing video collage of female portraits in Western Art.



The director eggman913 also has some other morphing videos on his channel.

It all started out when i found a track back to Piers' Feed Need Blog that had linked out to my last post. There i found a Robert Scoble video on how he uses Google Reader, good stuff for those of you that ask how can anyone keep up with the volume. The video had been uploaded to Viddler so this then lead me to the Viddler video site which i have been seeing more and more of on blogs. I especially like the ability that Viddler has to add both time and comment tags which can be extremely useful as you create and share videos. I already have two video channels one on YouTube and one on Blip.tv so i would be cautious of adding another but i do like what i have seen so far.

The highlight of my travels however on Viddler was today's feature video of the day which was a short but concise explanation of what Pinko Marketing is by Tara Hunt.




After viewing the video i went over to my Google Reader and looked at Tara's recent posts including her Ma.gnolia tags, which lead me to LibriVox a great fine. LibriVox volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain and release the audio files back onto the net. I just downloaded Henry James' Washington Square onto my ipod and it was very easy and fast. I haven't heard an audio book in a long time, saving my ipod time mostly for podcasts but i am looking forward to engaging with some literature.

The New York Times today had an article titled 'Why Work Is Looking More Like a Video Game' that caught my eye. Just last week i was discussing with some colleagues the learning and collaboration benefits of 'games' but creating a 'brokering' game around attention and collaboration within e-mail conversations is a great idea and i am anxious to find out more about how enterprises may actually be able leverage this.

In this article two services are reviewed, one is a CRM solution Entellium that provides some 'gaming' like functionality and the other is a very interesting concept out of a Palo Alto company Seriosity. The idea is to create a virtual economic community within the Enterprise around corporate e-mail communications. From the Seriosity website "It tackles the problem of information overload in corporate email using psychological and economic principles from successful games". E-mail information overload is indeed a huge problem in the enterprise- things like Subject line 'rules' (e.g. Proposal Approval) and Outlook flags do attempt to provide some sort of priority but how powerful would attaching monetary value be?

The service includes an e-mail add-on called Attent and is described in the article as "Employees assign one another “Serios,” the currency in Attent, for ideas, completing tasks and so on, and use them to help distinguish their e-mail from normal corporate spam. Over time, Attent users can gain not only Serios but also badges of excellence for, say, linking engineering and marketing, much as public skills rankings are widely used in online multiplayer games. Others in the company can see the badges, and presumably tap those people for help when they need it."

I always try to maintain a high level of personal 'currency' within the corporate groups i work with- the question would be would i be savvy enough to use my Serios to my advantage?

If you are interested in Web 2.0 in the Enterprise and don't subscribe to Dion Hinchcliffe's blog on Enterprise 2.0 you really should since he is talking about the shift that information delivery Web2.0 technologies are going to enable. His latest post Mashups: The next major new software development model? is definitely on target with some conversations i have been having around 'mashup' technologies and their use in the Enterprise space.

Hincliffe's post clearly defines some benefits as well as the challenges and opportunities of Mashups. If you're responsible for an information delivery strategy in your enterprise you might have someone in your IT department who has brought up mashups, but most likely it is one of your 'geekier' knowledge workers that have sent you a link with a 'masterpiece' they have created- all by themselves. And don't worry, if they haven't yet- they will soon.

A couple days back one of my Dow Jones colleagues Lou Paglia posted on his blog about mashup services focusing on his recent experience with Teqlo. (which has also been on my list of services to try out for a long time). I was going to leave a comment on his post last week but my computer had a meltdown and i never did get a chance. Lou's comments are important ones, it seems that Teqlo, like others i have tried like Dapper and even Yahoo! Pipes are not yet tools for the 'common' end-user-i am convinced they will get there but honestly i really don't think that the 'common' end user is who those tools should be targeting in the Enterprise space. Enterprise mashup tools need to enable power knowledge workers who have the inclination to think about how content should be distributed to their coworkers- they will have some sort of programing inclination (like for example i have been know to hack a javascript but don't consider myself a programmer), will understand data structure and end-user consumption requirements.

I have posted my thoughts before on how i think mashup tools are going to be adopted by enterprise users- if i get to create my own content consumption model as a consumer- why wouldn't i be able to leverage those same technologies to create and share with my coworkers in the enterprise. Over the last few months however i have also been paying attention to some of the enterprise grade mashups such as Kapow (read through some of their 'success' stories to see how big companies are using) and IBMs QEDWiki. However, these tools are not really built for an 'end-user' in mind and as Hinchcliffe points out still need to address items such as "single sign-on (SSO), LDAP, JSR168 (portals/portlets), legacy integration, management, monitoring, RSS strategy, etc.".

Another important issue that Hinchcliff writes about is that most Enterprises are not ready because not a lot of Web services are available within the Enterprise to supply the data and back-end functionality to create mashups- and the value of course is in mashing up internal and external data. For years i have worked with clients to create information delivery strategyies built on SOA principles and those customers that have implemented such a strategy are ready to rock-n-roll in this brand new world as these mashup tools are enabled in their Enterprises.

A good morning coffee video- Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) Theater — David Weinberger in Conversation with Bradley Horowitz. Interview is about 34 minutes and then about 20 minutes of good Q&A with the attendees. David Weinberger is one of the authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto and has a new book Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder.

On his book blog Weinberger has a review of the session at Yahoo! as well. A couple of things i jotted down as i listened:

• those that accumulate ideas accumulate power
• in content distribution traditionally 'experts' on the way in do the categorization- in today's world you must include everything and filter on the way out
• changes in data storage changes the way we 'organize' data- it is more expensive (time to do it) to delete then to keep - eg. reviewing your digital pictures
• brain seems to be clusters- not set up to think categorically although we have learned to
• social filtering- making use of people you know or respect to do the filtering (how different is that for example like a librarian who categorizes a book a 'romance'? well the 'masses' can do it and it might be more relevant because the ones you listen to are like you
  
• personalized newspapers 'the daily me'- usually sent via e-mail or blogs or even personal widget pages (netvibes, igoogle)- the new front page 'filtered news' - aggregate the aggregation of the aggregation- by those that we respect
  

I just ordered the book Everything Is Miscellaneous along with Seth Godin's new book The Dip.

Last year Amazon.com without much fanfare that i recall rolled out tagging features. Each Amazon product can be tagged by users and a set of tags is then shown on the product pages so users can see the words that fellow consumers have used to describe that specific item. Honestly i am not a big Amazon shopper and i noticed but really didn't 'notice'. I also do not know how many items have been tagged by how many users but just cruising around tonight i found most things with tags although i couldn't find the RSS subscription icons.

I have written about social tagging quite a few times and i am interested in the use within both consumer online applications like Amazon and within the Enterprise (plus one affects the other more and more as these tools are introduced into the marketplace). Back in January on Read/WriteWeb Alex Iskold wrote about the competitve advantage that Amazon could have if they leverage the power of the 'consumer tag' along with some of highlights of Web 2.0 functionality that Amazon is presenting to its users. In his post Iskold writes:

Amazon's infrastructure analyses and categorizes huge volumes of text on a daily basis. The output of these algorithms is a list of key phrases that uniquely identify any item (e.g. a book). In my recent post about recommendation engines, I suggested that these key phrases can be substituted by people's tags. It looks like Amazon will soon be in position to do just that. What this means is that Amazon is going to be able to do item-based recommendations for all its products, without having to analyze music, movies and houseware in the same way. This will be another big win for Amazon and a big competitive edge, since no other retailers have this.

With the launch of the Amazon's RSS Tag Feeds Amazon presents its users with new ways of consuming recommendation and crowd 'wisdom'.

From the Amazon help files here are some ways they are recommending for uses of tag RSS feeds:

• Subscribe to feeds such as quilting or murder mystery, to learn of new products related to your interests, hobbies, or favorite authors as soon as other customers suggest them

>>> cool so per my picture, if i wanted to see what product people tagged 'bob dylan' i will eventually be able to just subscribe through my RSS reader (not all tags are enabled currently). Sure i can subscribe to similar feeds through other social tagging systems- but none are very targeted to products that are for sale

• Embed a widget on your own website to automatically show the most popular products for a tag, such as wii games, and earn referral credit through the Associates program

>>> cool so i can embedd a crap widget on my site and make a crapload of money ;-)

• Create a special tag for your book or movie club and provide a feed of recommendations to your members

>>> ok this is getting more interesting and can be extended across many uses. For example conference speakers can use a specific tag to tag books for a specific conference. teachers can tag recommended books for class reading, etc.

• Export all your products and tags into another application or create your own web 2.0 mashup

>>>>Yes the beauty of RSS makes it easy to consume within other applications and with the growth of mashup tools you can probably make some interesting tools to monitor products both from the consumer and the vendor perspective. If you are monitoring your products for example you can create views for each product, displaying the words people are tagging it with, you can setup alert words (like 'crap' for example), see what competitive products people are also tagging with the same words, and you can even use it to discover new market opportunities.

I am not a lawyer so obviously i can't be the one to validate this information but via webworkerdaily.com a pointer to 12 Important U.S. Laws Every Blogger Needs to Know posted at the Aviva Directory. It is good read and certainly a good link to keep around if you are a blogger- so i figured i would do a quick post to record it for myself. In addition to the 12 main points, additional resource links are also included at the end of the post.

Items such as deep linking, image and content reuse etc. are addressed as well as 'user-generated' content on your site- mostly comments. Section 7 and 8 of the post address issues that need to be addressed if you allow people to leave comments on your site.

7. Who Owns User-Developed Content and Can You Delete It
8. The Duty to Monitor Your Blog Comments, and Liability

Just last week, Mario Sunder, community manager at LinkedIn posted a question on LinkedIn Answers asking people what their thoughts on a comments policy for a corporate blog are(question now closed) . The consensus is that you have to think it out and make it apparent on your site (i have to work on that i guess!).