Monday, July 23, 2007

BEA Aqualogic addressing Enterprise Mashup Space with New Products

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I have been following the Enterprise mashup space for a bit and have a lot interest in tools that enable users to create Enterprise mashup applications much like they are able to do in the consumer space. Via the programmableweb blog i read a post about BEA's newest AquaLogic tools that are incorporating social computing tools that include Pages, a tool for lightweight web page creation, Ensemble, infrastructure software for mashup applications, and Pathways, an information discovery tool that combines social bookmarking and tagging with search and activity analytics.

They are branding the new services as Enterprise Social Computing and ask questions that i ask all the time which are - ...doesn't it seem like things are easier outside the firewall? Why isn't booking corporate travel as easy as reserving a table at your favorite local restaurant? Why isn't sharing all the information related to a project as simple as organizing your life on a MySpace (ok i might use Facebook) page? And why are email and Microsoft Office used for just about everything?

The Scobleshow also did a video back in June that i embed below with Jay Simons, Senior Director Product Marketing at BEA Systems that provides a good overview of the Pages tool and in which Simons talks about giving enterprise users in the lines of business tools that they are used to in the consumer space in order for them to create business applications with both internal and external data.

BEA has been in the web services creation business for a while with their products that enable developers to create web services that can be consumed by applications and therefore they understand some of the data issues of enterprise content, security and compliance which is extremely important when dealing with enterprise content distribution models. According to Simons these issues are part of the core of the product suite using existing standards which may address concerns that enterprises may have.

The Pages application seems to be a bit more 'end-user' friendly then some of the other enterprise mashup products that i have seen which tend to be more 'developer/techie' focused. and i love some of the examples that are provided in the video of enterprise applications that can basically be built on the fly by users (as long as the data sources are available of course).

I see a lot of uses for products like Pages and i would love to be able to get my hands on these tools to try it out- unfortunately it looks like it is only available for clients that already have BEA solutions in house. If you are a client of mine that has access to these new solutions, please drop me a line- i would love to talk to you about them!

Sunday, July 22, 2007

Facebook's News Feed Preference Tool- Manual Attention Dashboard

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For some reason i had missed the Facebook Newsfeed preferences dashboard until today. It looks like it has been around since November 06. If you check out the announcement post it highlights some of the features of the Dashboard.

First i love the design- and agree with Larry Rubin's statement that whomever designed this feature could have been inspired by music mixing stations- very cool and easy to use.

Second, i only have 66 friends right now-but realistically see that number rising. Some are 'real' friends people i hang with all the time, others are people i like to follow in the industry or coworkers, and even people i meet at events that i might want to keep in touch. As my Facebook feeds start getting noisy- i am going to love the ability to not only indicate the types of stories i would like to see more or less of but also identify which 'friends' i want to see more and less of. love it- i can tweak my feeds based on what my attention needs are.

The reason that Facebook is able to easily do this is because of the metadata that is applied to each data element. Story types (Events, Groups, Statuses etc.) and who posted (friends). So they are taking well structured content and applying a good UI design that is easy to use for most users. Can't vouch for the results yet however.

This will also be extremely useful once (and if ever) Facebook allows you to publish your News feeds as RSS- instead of taking the whole universe of feeds you can already add some relevance post syndication and then other tools take it from there.

Thursday, July 19, 2007

California the new Italy: Renaissance 2.0

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Dave McClure Master of 500 Hats- is going hot and heavy on his blog about Facebook. A couple days back he had a good post on how the Facebook news feeds feature is the new SEO a topic that was briefly addresses by some of the Facebook developers at the Community Next Viral Marketing event i attended last week.

At the end of that post McClure makes what i think is a great analogy to what is happening:

"We're not in the middle of Bubble 2.0 -- rather, we're in the middle of Renaissance 2.0. Northern California is Italy. Palo Alto is Florence. San Francisco is Venice. Sequoia Capital (or Peter Thiel & Reid Hoffman) are the Medicis. Ev, Biz, Ben, Mena, Matt & Toni are the Gutenbergs. And Mark Zuckerburg is Da Vinci. Bene, molto bene :)"


The image i managed to butcher as part of this post is of Lorenzo de' Medici, one of the great patrons of Renaissance Artists. The Renaissance was about great art, creativity and cultural and ideological development (i admit it is my favorite period and i can go sit at a good collection for hours and reflect on what it must have been like to be there), it was however not a period of great social or economic change. Does what is happening- qualify for a period of social and economic change? Can we point to the consumer as producer and owner of content as a potential change in the economics of content (text, music,video etc) creation and distribution? Do services like Facebook create economies of users that could drive social agendas? I think they might.

Monday, July 16, 2007

29 ways to reduce your fuel usage

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My second car that i use for all personal travel is a hybrid- a Ford Escape SUV . we needed a big car for big dog, the old lady and the music gear and wanted something practical with good CLEAN gas mileage. very happy with it.

Lifehacker is a site that i visit often and makes my RSS feed list and today i saw this post on 29 ways to reduce you fuel usage that i think we should all be aware of.

It isn't rocket science- just conscience.

i do admit to having problems following #10 however.

Sunday, July 15, 2007

WSJ.com Partners with Loomia to Provide Article Recommendation Engine

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While many are arguing that The Wall Street Journal didn't get the Blogging history article correct, i have been busy playing around with the new article recommendations feature that is now available on WSJ.com.

WSJ has partnered with Loomia a recommendations engine whose hope for media companies is to guide users to content on their site that they might never have seen otherwise. I think it is a very useful feature and have always been a fan of content produced by other readers actions- what i call User Generated Data- such as most e-mailed, most read, most traded (stocks), most blogged etc.. WSJ also recently released features using Sphere to present related articles and blogs.

It is great to see WSJ.com implement these types of tools because as with most consumer focused new media tools, my clients in the enterprise space are also starting to talk about providing similar functionality in regards to creating a 'wisdom of crowds' type of sharing around news content.

Read the What's This description in the screen shot i provide to understand a bit about how the recommendation's engine works.

Loomia also comes with clickstream monitoring which is obviously of use above and beyond proactively serving up content- for example it can continue to provide metrics and user behaviors around the type of content readers like and authors should be writing.

What are we going to see on WSJ.com next- a MyBlogLog widget?

Monday's edition will also have a Twitter article. I am not sure if this WSJ twitter channel belongs to WSJ.com but is doesn't seem to be updating, Marketwatch another Dow Jones property has a twitter channel but it doesn't have that many followers (i know that one is 'owned' by Marketwatch). I took a look at other twitter URLs like twitter.com/bbc, twitter.com/reuters, twitter.com/nyt (which belongs to Dave Weiner) etc. and they all have very few followers as well. I personally like my Marketwatch twitter alerts.

Community Next- Viral Marketing

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Yesterday i attended the Community Next- Viral Marketing event in Sunnyvale. Jeremiah thought the folks there were hard core because it was a beautiful day out- since i live in Pacifica even being indoors most of the day but having the luxury of walking outdoors for lunch and snacks made it a good reason to go.

Overall a good day and you will have to read through the end to get the tutu picture reference.

Some tips from the panels on viral marketing:
  • target Hollywood media (music, movies etc.)- they have a built in audience and will drive users
  • target politicians, especially during election races- another built in audience- allow your social media tools to help them spread their message. their constitutes will use the same tools to 'promote' themselves and their causes
  • One of the top reason that viral services take off is the users like tools that let them do self-expression- accessorization of their user created content is hot
  • When thinking about developing for Facebook Apps- consider how the user experience will be viewed within the Facebook news feeds which is where a lot of growth comes from
  • Use tools like web-conferencing to test your target market- watch them click through on your beta site, see what they miss, what they click on etc. be agile enough to make changes based on real time usage
  • if your service is a way for users to interact with others, or if your growth is going to be from them 'inviting' their friends- build in things like automatic upload of their contact list for sharing and building the community
  • if you find people 'teaching' others how to use your tools (PBWiki talked about how educational users were doing seminars on using their wikis)- reward them by fueling the fire- they will be your spokespeople around the world- create presentation material they can use, send them t-shirts, premium access accounts, etc. 'Employee' your users.
So...? i work for Dow Jones mostly in the B2B enterprise market- what did i learn? Basically that creating buzz around products and services can extend beyond product brochures and Ads in industry magazines. We are already do some things but can definitely do more like:
  • We already do a good job of this with our Factiva Insight products which do media monitoring and measurement by providing access to the tool to journalists, commenters and others. My colleague Melanie Surplice in PR usually highlights some of those on her blog.
  • I constantly see blog posts (i have a couple searches on the term 'factiva') by librarians that write about finding something awesome in the database or even how they teach people how to use the factiva service- make them factiva 'divas'- send them a t-shirt, have them work with you to create training materials etc.

A couple of additional things i would like to comment on from yesterday:

1. boys- learn how to do presentations- presentation skills are important- engage, flow and message and if you have to use a PowerPoint slide deck use it well....
2. i call them boys in #1 above because I was also a bit disappointed (ok maybe more then a bit) that there was only one female on all the panels. Interestedly enough some of them spoke about the target market audience of viral application being young women- making some comments about how they sit around in a Tutu reading Cosmo magazine trying to figure out how to market to them.

Great Tutu photo credited to ambrosialove

Thursday, July 12, 2007

Blog Silos in the Enteprise

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Just got back from the Social Media Club event in San Jose- the theme was Blogging 101 and Mike McGrath did a great job at moderating the panel. Although i admit i was a bit late (but soooo happy there was still pizza when i go there!) some of the topics discussed where indeed on the 101 level but as usual i managed to get the brain going- but that left me with some questions.

One things that one of the panel members Tony Bove talked about at the end of the panel was blog software in the enterprise- giving the audience an example of a team using a blog to work on a group document. i believe he was advocating stand-alone blog platforms separate from other enterprise systems which lead me to think about Blog content and the silos that that blog content may sit in....all the way home up the 101.

Creating and managing enterprise content through enterprise content management (ECM) tools typically includes structuring, organizing, searching on, filtering, and easily modifying that content. But are enterprise content management and search tools capable of managing participatory content like blogs effectively?

But does it really make sense to have a blogging platform that is detached from the ECM system that already manages things like workflow, compliance, security, and integration into other systems?

Is it the content or the software that is the issue?

Is blog content stuck in one format- blob text post, comments and tags?

- what other structure is there in a blog post that is explicit in the blogging software data store?

Look at these two examples- is there a standalone blogging software that can achieve the level of structure that the text on the right hypothetically has?

Enterprise 2.0 Comic Strips and presentations

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Last month i posted an Office 2.0 comic strip about adoption of Web 2.0 technologies in the Enterprise that i had put together using a very cool Rich Internet Application (RIA) called Scrapblog. I am still working on episode two- so meanwhile i found another 'comic' strips on the same topic that i would like to share.

On Slideshare- Sowing the Seeds of Change- by Simon Revell, an IT consultant and public speaker tells the story of how he spread the work about enterprise2.0 in his organization:


there was a second Enterprise 2.0 comic strip that i recently saw that i think was created with Plasq's ComicLife- that i just spent some time looking for and couldn't find. if you know what i am talking about please leave it in the comments

Tuesday, July 10, 2007

Case Study: How Online Video Boosts eNewsletter Performance

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There has been a lot of writing and discussions about video over the last few days- from media production, aggregation and search to advertisement revenue models within videos etc.. So i went looking for some case studies from a corporate perspective and came across this post that presents a case study on how online video increased the click through rate in a specific eNewsletter campaign for a company in Miami.

The Loop Consulting group according to their blog, specializes in helping their customers in using electronic Newsletters effectively as part of their marketing and communications campaigns. This newsletter is for the Latin Builders Association. Here are some results they share in the post:

Click-Through: The total amount of recipients that viewed the video was a whopping 64%. This is the highest request for any link within an eNewsletter that we at Loop have ever seen. It moved the overall links requested from a 9% to a 41%, wow! This shows that video is a very attractive channel for recipients.

New Channel: Through LBATV, the Latin Builders Association has created a new medium to communicate their message, as well as a new product for sponsorship revenue. Video augments the sponsor's message outside the venue walls.

Old Media coming alive in color and some advice on social networking and your boss

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The Wall Street Journal's 'Cubicle Culture' author Jared Sandberg had a piece today on social networking sites and what to do if your boss wants to join your network and become your 'friend' a topic that i have been discussing with some colleagues as well. The online article comes with a video in which Sandberg gives some advice on how to set up privacy settings in Facebook a fast growing social networking site in the corporate space.


I have been watching WSJ.com videos for a while and the quality has certainly improved- and it isn't because it is produced like an old media tv show with the right anchor in the right location- i think the video is improved because it is more like the new media video that we are getting accustomed to on services like Podtech which has multiple video channels and WallStrip (recently acquired by CBS). The personable camera shot - just like the viewer is sitting in the same room getting a demo or running down the street with the person. Take a look at the Wall Street Journal's All Thing Digital lead by Walt Mossberg and Karen Swisher where you can "Check out our videos where old media people come alive in living color". Now, All Thing's Digital according to their disclaimer is run autonomously as a small online startup while "adhering to the journalistic standards of the best of the mainstream media" so you would expect it to be a little edgy- but when you are accustomed to reading an author like Swisher and then watch her walking up and down the street in Palo Alto for the launch of the iPhone- you have to smile and then tune in for more.

EDIT- i feel like i need to point out New York Times's Dave Pogue's recent iPhone video as another example of old media playing the new media game.

There is a meme on Techmeme about how some Old media folks are jumping ship to new media providers but i don't think it is super different from what has been happening for a while, like i posted yesterday video is hot- good video producers that engage their audience are going to be sought by both old media and new media companies.

By the way some shameless promotion- i have my own Blip.tv channel offers welcomed ;-)

Monday, July 09, 2007

Video Aggregation and Search for the Enterprise Information Worker

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Every Monday our team in San Francisco gets together to review opportunities, discuss enhancements, new products etc. essentially a typical sales team meeting to gear up for the week. In today's conversation our product 'Ambassador' Brent Kraus started a discussion on our upcoming integration of audio and video content into Dow Jones's Factiva products. Video is hot and not only in the consumer space- enterprise business content consumers have been asking for it for a while.

Yesterday Jeremiah posted some interesting predictions on Google and online video that is worth a read, especially if you are interested in the consumer space and video advertising- i however would like to expand on one of his points which is the video search space- with a focus on the enterprise information worker.

Last week i blogged about how Context and Aggregation are King- in the new business media world, and touched upon the importance of being able to get to video business content which may include relevant video and audio information from business news sources, CEO interviews, executive speeches, shareholders meetings, and product reviews to name a few that would be of interest to corporate users. There is obviously an explosion in high value video content- produced by both new and old media outfits- that enterprise users need easy access to in order to do their information work.

There is also a visable maturation of multimedia search engines like Blinkx, Nexidia and EveryZing/Podzinger that go beyond what most of the major search engines do to search video, which is still mostly text-based searching relying on titles, descriptions and tags and not searching inside the multimedia content.

During our meeting this morning, one of the benefits that i brought up that Factiva is doing with our new multimedia enhancements, that is different from the consumer video search space is that we are serving up video content that is relevant to business users along with other types of content- much like our core business to distribute only the best business news content and the best blog business content (although we do have solutions that actually throw a very large net- i am only talking about end-user research tools). In addition to the aggregation we are also adding additional metadata about that content and using visualization to provide additional information to the user on what the search results are (click image to see sample screen).

The new features will leverage EveryZing's (PodZinger) speech-to-text and natural language processing technologies that enables users to surface short, targeted clips around specific search terms where they can subsequently view only relevant sections or the entire episode. It includes both video and audio. It also uses the Factiva Intelligent Indexing ™ and displays results in charts and graphs so that users can immediately extract value and understanding from their search. This is based on our Search 2.0 technologies that Lou take us through in this video from the FAST forward conference. Going against the results set the discovery pane presents metadata elements like what company, news subject and industry the videos are about- clicking on each item drills down to other results that were tagged the same.

I remember not so long ago when i was very vocal with the product folks that we needed to look at video and audio content and provide the same aggregation value to that content that we do with the text based content- i am pleasantly surprised and very pleased as to how quickly they managed to put this into the product enhancement cycle- congrats folks.

Oh yeah- and Jeremiah- we now got some Podtech content as well- ;-)

The enhancements are due in August- if you are not a Factiva subscriber but would like to preview it when it goes live- drop me a note at daniela.barbosa [at] dowjones.com



Sunday, July 08, 2007

More Practical Advice from Web Strategist Jeremiah Owyang

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Last Spring Jeremiah gave me some good practical advice in section 321 and this morning i just got caught up on his blog (and as always there is plenty to consume)- Web Strategy by Jeremiah and yet again some right on practical advice...and just the reminder that i needed right now. Thanks buddy.