Thursday, July 31, 2008

Good Thing i LOVE to Talk Because I Have a lot of Talking Coming Up

4 comments :
I guess i am a lucky girl, because the upcoming months are just going to be great (well that is if all goes well and i don't blow it of course!). I have a bunch of speaking engagements coming up that are all going to be at conferences that i am very excited about attending as well. So here is the run down in order of appearance:

Enterprise Search Summit West- September 23th-24th in San Jose, CA. I will be co-presenting with a client about centralized taxonomy management best practices into enterprise information systems (search, CMS/DMS, portals etc.) This is a two day conference that covers how to develop, implement and enhance search capabilities in the Enterprise.

Taxonomy Bootcamp- September 25th-26th in San Jose, CA. I will be introducing a client case study highlighting their use of the Synaptica tool that i am Business Development Manager of at Dow Jones.
Finding a Common Language: Bringing Complex and Disparate Vocabularies Together
2:15 pm – 3:00 pm
Paula R McCoy, Manager, Taxonomy Development, ProQuest
Daniela Barbosa, Dow Jones & Company

This case study addresses the challenges ProQuest faced in managing multilingual controlled vocabularies using multiple Word documents and authority files maintained in an Oracle database. Speakers describe how implementing a thesaurus management tool helped ProQuest simplify and standardize its business semantic management to create a common language and connect disparate information assets as well as handling large and varied vocabularies and authority files, linking new and existing editorial systems and enabling hierarchical views, and automating thesaurus management tasks.



Web2.0 Expo New York- September 16-19th. I will be presenting as part of the Landscape & Strategy track with Chris Saad on Understanding the Basics of Personal Data: Vendors, Users, and You. This track covers the fundamentals of Web 2.0 and explores how they drive strategy, business models, and revenue. The panels will look at how Web 2.0 is affecting finance, advertising, media, fashion, and real estate, and explain how the building blocks of Web 2.0—user-generated content, rich internet applications, collective intelligence, the wisdom of crowds, software as a service, lightweight development models, and mashups—are changing the landscape of media, software, and the economy. I still crack up when i see my picture on the speaker list among some of the big Web2.0 heavy hitters. My mom would be so proud if she knew what Web 2.0 was! {Use Code webny08mc23 to register for Web 2.0 Expo New York and Save $100 or Get a Free Expo Pass}

and last but not least....

Defrag- November 3rd -4th in Denver. This one i am even more excited about because i heard just great feedback about this conference last year. My presentation is titled 'Pulling the threads on user data'. Just like all the other conferences i am super delighted to be on the speakers list with some amazing folks like Stowe Boyd, Esther Dyson, fellow ReadWriteWeb named 'Seven Leading Corporate Social Media Evangelists' Aaron Fulkerson and Sam Lawrence, Paul Kedrosky, Richard Hoeg, Charlene Li, Paul Miller, Clay Shirky and my old friend Lou Paglia among many others. Just the list of speakers would have been enough for me to go, so i am super privileged to also have the opportunity to speak!
NOTE: You should seriously think about going to Defrag and then you should use code 'db1'- that will get you an additional $100 off of current early bird prices. I am also excited to say that Dow Jones Client Solutions is going to be exhibiting at Defrag-more to follow on why we are there and why Defrag attendees should care in another post!

Good stuff- now i have some thinking and presentations to finish!

Saturday, July 26, 2008

I Got Mistaken for an Italian but the Issues that the DataPortability Group is Trying to Address Came Through Loud and Clear

No comments :
This week i had the pleasure of participating on a panel discussion titled"The Future of the Web is the Future of our Data: Introducing Data Portability" that was hosted by the BAIA Business Association Italy America.

The Panel included:
*Moderator (AND Organizer): Mary Trigiani, Spada Inc. - www.spadainc.com
*Steve Greenberg, founder Ciabe - www.ciabe.com and a Steering Committee Member of the DataPortability Project
*Lorenzo Thione, founder Powerset - www.powerset.com
*and myself.

The evening kicked off with some initial networking where i had a chance to have some interesting conversations with other attendees on topics like government legislation around user data as well as have some deliciously catered snacks, drinks and excellent coffee courtesy of Caffè del Doge.

We kicked off the panel discussion by showing what I think is the best introduction to what
Data Portability is when we talk about it from a social media perspective via this video introduction that Michael Pick created: DataPortability - Connect, Control, Share, Remix



Mary Trigiani, always super prepared and organized had the three panelists submit our thoughts prior to the panel and has shared the panel discussion talking points on SlideShare so you can also read through some of our thoughts .


The BEST part of the evening aside from the fact that two people actually started conversations with me in Italian- assuming i was also Italian (and i was so proud i passed for one-although i responded in Portuguese) was that the majority of the attendees where not technical and those that were technical where not part of the valley 'tech' scene , and definitely not the 'regular' crowd that i have been having conversations with.

So the interest and the questions were very much from an user perspective. Questions of; usability- in which i used OpenID as an example of a good solution with what currently amounts to a not great user experience for non-technical users; Synchronization of data- why users have to update the same information various times; contact lists, how portable can they be and which pieces of data should a user be able to move; User privacy issues and how terms of use EULAs are rarely and mostly impossible to read and understand; as well as other items.

We also had an engaging and at time entertaining conversation thanks to Steve Greenberg who was playing a bit of devil's advocate about why vendors (for this discussion defined as those that provide social network services) would want to allow their users to take data away. The discussion ranged from the business models of the pros and cons of doing this, to whether it would actually push the vendors to be even more creative and push them to provide more value to the user so they would remain active users.

I tried to make it clear to the room that the reason i am an active member and leader of the DataPortability project is that all the concerns and issues that we discussed are part of the DataPortability Project agenda. While many have been working on the standards and technologies that make data portable (and new organizations and technology standards continue to pop up to do the good work), there has, until the DataPortability Project, not really been a complete, cohesive and simple story for vendors, consumers and developers to follow.

The attendees where very engaged, and i always enjoy participating in discussions with people outside the active community because it really gives you a different perspective on the issues that the DataPortability Project can works towards addressing. As usual, i got a bunch of business cards and follow-up emails (that i need to follow-up with this weekend!) from people who wanted to get involved in the project, but i figured i would first practice what i wrote on my personal letter to my email inboxes, and give everyone the general summary of 'How to Get Involved in the DataPortability Project' and then touch base individually on their specific topics if interest ranging from 'how can i help you evangelize' to 'how can we bring this discussion around policy into the legal circles'- all items that the project group needs volunteers for!

The DataPortability Project is a very young organization and critics have at times given us slack for not doing enough, but you can read about our accomplishments in the first six months to judge for yourselves and with the finalization of the steering committee and the governance model which one of our most active members Elias Bizannes has outlined in this excellent post, we are positioned to make even bigger strides on behalf of users, developers and vendors.

So how can you get involved in the DataPortability Project?:




And if any of this feels overwhelming, please go ahead and drop me a line- it might take me a couple days to get back to you but i will!

ONCE AGAIN- a big thank you to my friend Mary Trigiani for organizing this wonderful event flawlessly...you are not only a great advocate for users and vendors in the marketplace but also a great friend. Thank you.

Additional photos from the panel available here.

Please note: this is my personal blog, the opinions expressed on this site are my own and do not necessarily represent those of my past, future or present employer or any organizations i might belong to unless explicitly stated that is the case.

Thursday, July 24, 2008

Music to Technology: We Can Do Better

No comments :
Robert Scoble over on his Scobleizer blog posted that he thought the best Fortune Brainstorm Tech Talk this week was Neil Young challenging the tech industry on music quality.

I just saw Neil when i was in Portugal (and we always catch him when he plays around here) and he blew me away.

I am not surprised that Neil is on the front line challenging the industry to make the quality of music better. He has spent a lifetime tinkering with musical equipment to make it sound better on stage, when recording etc.

My understanding is that he loves to tinker and has invented some pretty cool things not only for music, but also for his kids especially with his fascination for Lionel Trains. He is also building a better greener car.

In regards to Robert's question on whether i would like better quality music or MP3 is good enough?

I think we can do better and therefore we should- for the sake of the music and future listeners who might not get the chance to see someone like Neil play live music.

The man plays like he is possessed sometimes (and i was happy to see i caught this in action with this picture) and he tackles his projects in the same way so i am glad he is taking this one on.

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Still Relevant, and Fresh Every Time I Read It

1 comment :
Looking for something through scraps of paper in my notes drawer and found the following list- which i thought this is great where did i get it?
  1. Relax
  2. Have a sense of humor
  3. Find your voice and use it
  4. Tell the truth
  5. Don’t panic
  6. Enjoy yourself
  7. Be brave
  8. Be curious
  9. Play more
  10. Dream always
  11. Listen up
  12. Rap on

Oh yeah it's the:
The Cluetrain Hit-One-Outta-the-Park Twelve-Step Program for Internet Business Success

still relevant, and fresh every time i read it.

Sunday, July 20, 2008

A VC Calls for Startup Ideas and I Ponder What I am Doing at Dow Jones

2 comments :
Over on Techememe the main headline this Sunday morning was a post by Paul Graham on the Y Combinator blog titled Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund. Y Combinator is a venture firm specializing in funding early stage startups. In this post he outlines 30 ideas that Y Combinator is interested in funding. Many are obvious, some are interesting and others perhaps a bit off (or already in motion-perhaps even funded by Y Combinator themselves). But that is not what i found interesting that made me start this post with my cup of coffee in hand.

What got me thinking was that one of the things i usually get asked the most when i tell people i work for Dow Jones (formerly Factiva a Dow Jones & Reuters Joint Venture) is why do i work for such a huge blue chip company (and it is not only the brand blue colors that they are referring to!). When i tell them that i am going on nine years with the company~ scrunched eyebrows tend to come out on the questioners face. I won't lie to you that i sometimes think very comprehensively about leaving and going to some what i think is a promising start-up. Since moving to Silicon Valley three years ago i think about it even more, even going through the process of evaluating very carefully some serious opportunities- but not jumping on any as of yet. Just recently i was asked again and my stock response was 'when the right thing comes that feels right' i will'.

So as i read the Y Combinator's post about Startup Ideas that they are interested in, i started thinking about some of the things that i think that Dow Jones in all its incarnations is doing right that definitely impacts the reason as to why i am still around. So here are some of them:

#3- New News-
Yes traditional newspapers are in trouble and Dow Jones owns a bunch of them including the Wall Street Journal online and print publications, the Ottaway Community newspapers and other publications like Barron's. With their online news publications ventures, they certainly try to innovate from making Facebook applications for WSJ.com around 'what your friends are reading' to supporting and growing the All Things Digital Web site devoted to news, analysis and opinion on technology (and which according to the site runs autonomously as a small online startup), that tends to venture off 'traditional' reporting methods but yet maintains journalist integrity.

But i don't think that is what Paul Graham was referring to or at least that is not how i read it and where i think there is opportunity- the 'New' part of 'New News' is what is interesting to me. 'Traditional' reporting is not going away anytime soon and it shouldn't. Adding blogs to the news output is only one answer but what Dow Jones is delivering in the marketplace and doing is researching and investing in new ways of producing 'New news' by using technology to produce content out of content. Look at its recent acquisition of Generate Inc that brings extraction technology and relationship mapping into the picture and the work that the Algorithmic and Quantitative Trading product group does within its real-time products. Also let's not forget the work that the Factiva business line has done in regards to News visualization and metadata application across over 10,000 aggregated news sources in 22 languages. All with the aim to get more context out of the content that is being produced by the different media outlets. News readers don't want to read the same story over and over again or spends hours per day looking through headlines, they want intuitive ways to digest the massive amount of content that is being produced to give them the information they need.

#7. Something your company needs that doesn't exist.
I am going to bend this one a bit- but the premise is the same because of the downstream affect on the core business. Switch 'company' in this statement to 'client' and you get the basis for the Dow Jones Client Solutions (DJCS) organization which i have been part of for the last 6 years and have had the honor of driving a lot of the innovation of. Sure traditional 'consulting services' where customized solutions are built for clients are probably not to be considered start-up materials that Y Combinator would look at, but the DJCS group tends to be the ones that are called in when something a 'client' needs does not yet exist as a core product offering. The reason i liked my job as a Solutions Architect was that anything my client and i could think of would most likely be possible because of the flexible infrastructure we had built on the Factiva fully enable Web Services platform. What happens however is that some of the custom needs that get designed, developed and delivered eventually end up as part of the core product strategy. Examples are Newsletter creation tools that although continue to have customized components are also now built into the core Factiva.com product with its newsletter features and sales triggering capabilities that are now part of the SalesWorks suite of products.

#14. Tools for measurement.
Once again allow me to bend this a bit (perhaps a bit to much, but i am just trying to make a point here!) The Y Combinator idea request is measurement of productivity in corporations- to answer the question of where people spending their time and who are the most productive. I think that other parts of measurement that are going to be important in Organizations that could essentially tie into productivity gains is the tracking of influence within an organization. For example, take a look a the Community Equity project that Sun Microsystems is pushing forward with SunSpace (note: Dow Jones has no involvement in this project, i am just a fan!).

If you have been following my blog for a while you have read some of my posts on Media Measurement which includes both mainstream and Social Media. Four years ago Factiva acquired a company that had technology specializing in media monitoring and reputation management which turned into our Factiva Insight product suite (now Dow Jones Insight)~ way before people where talking about social media monitoring we were doing some of it. In the last few years that group has innovated quite a bit in the marketplace, and although i personally think that they could do much more i think that there continues to be a big opportunity in measurement tools. As Enterprises continue to use social media internally and externally to collaborate and communicate measurement tools can be used internally as well to measure business impact.

#16. A form of search that depends on design.

The majority of the search options across the Dow Jones properties are premium services that require a subscription of some sort- so the target market is not to beat out 'free search' but i think that a lot of the success of parts of our business has been the ability to provide search tools that have the user in specific vertical markets mind. In January of 2006 Factiva launched Search 2.0 in order to address the change in our core user search market for a simpler but more powerful search. The Search 2.0 interface uses visualization to present relevant search results by utilizing varies technologies to extract metadata and content elements of each article across the premium content, web content and multi-media content that is aggregated. Exciting enhancements to continue leveraging entity extractions for content context are also on the way.

20. Shopping guides.
No we do not have services for shopping, but we are capable of working with clients around this topic and increasing our resources to support customers in this space. As of the end of last year, I became the business development manager for Synaptica and taxonomy services in the DJCS group because i saw these types of markets as being part of our future growth. Our services and Synaptica tool can be used to create and manage taxonomies, thesauri, name catalogs and other authority files that can drive some of the " how do you decide what you want?" features that Y Combinator is looking to invest in. Forward looking investments a couple years back when we acquired the Synaptica product suite and continuous product enhancements ensures our solutions are for example compatible with Semantic technologies by supporting RDF, OWL, SKOS etc. are positioning us very nicely in the space where i thinking online shopping, search and advertising is going.


Like what Paul writes at the end of his post, my own post was an interesting exercise for me as well. I have been away from work for almost two weeks and gave the question of 'what am i doing a Dow Jones' a bit of time as i sat poolside and pondered my next few months. When i started with Factiva, the joint venture was just beginning and we did feel like we were working for a startup. With the News Corp acquisition of Dow Jones last year, one of things that i hoped to see was more strategic investment in some of these 'start-up' ideas. So far i have been pleased with what i have seen from my vantage point. Sure things don't move as fast as i would like them to and many times i get disgusted with the massiveness that the company is (e.g. 7 months to setup a public web page that is only text based and 4 months to get a press release out). I unfortunately do not have the privilege of being able to able to touch all the parts of the business that i think are innovative because i am only focusing on one part of the business; but i think this exercise on a Sunday has been important one for me to be able to look at the company i work for and feel that there are parts that are on the right track and that for the time being i am in a good place with that.

Saturday, July 05, 2008

Can i Survive Without my Laptop?

No comments :
I bit the bullet and bought myself an iTouch, my BlackBerry has an International plan and i therefore i have made the decision to leave my laptop at home. Will the iTouch in combination with my Blackberry be an enabler to me having a connected vacation? I am heading to Spain and Portugal to visit family and catch some Bob Dylan shows. I am having a little anxiety as i always do-but especially because i usually take my laptop when i travel. First, because i always like having web access- at night at hotels to check out travel sites for the next days, or things like train schedules but also because i like to keep connected to my work inbox.

With my Blackberry i will have access to my work email, i can also VPN into the network with my iTouch via WIFI (yes i tried it using our external connect service- and it worked!), and obviously i have web browser both on the BlackBerry and the iTouch when i have access to WIFI- so there really is no need for the laptop. Any document that i might 'need' i have sent to my gmail account. So hopefully i will be able to survive without lugging around a heavy laptop~ i will keep you updated as to how well that goes- i have high hopes and am very much looking forward to my vacation!

Wednesday, July 02, 2008

Human Powered Editorial Processes

No comments :
It always brings a smile to my face when i see new services cropping up that have 'human powered' editorial services as part of their value add. Today over at TechCrunch a short review of Blogged.com's news portal peaked my interest so i went to check it out.

From their about page:
The blogs in our database are reviewed, rated, and categorized by editors, so you won't experience the frustration of filtering through blogs that are spam, outdated, or irrelevant. You'll be able to find quality blogs that you would be unlikely to have found through a traditional blog search. We also offer time-based searching, bookmarking, sharing, and feedback functions

I love getting my blog tech news from Techmeme which is auto-generated through a news-picking software system and have relied on it for a while (here is a video of Robert Scoble in Feb 2007 explaining what Techmeme is to Clare Hart my EVP at Dow Jones/Factiva). Techmeme is usually the first thing i check in the morning, and i visit it often during the day. It highlights many of the top blogs i like to read and makes it easy to browse and see the buzz and who is talking about what- i love the interconnections it displays for me.

I also have hundreds of 'trusted bloggers' that i have organized into categories in my GoogleReader, get great tips from the Twitter and FriendFriend folks i follow, subscribe to various daily newsletters, sometimes check digg.com and have a good amount of alerts from various services- so another service is probably not going to make or break me.

I like concept that Blogged.com is surfacing in the Topics that they cover, but currently not all the blogged categories are listed (probably still adding content?). As they expand their editorial selection that should get better. i think it is useful that the topics the posts that are added to, are deemed to be about the post- not the blog's domain coverage category (although much of the content within the existing categories seems to be blog domain specific). So if tomorrow i write a wicked post about gardening on this blog that is about information delivery, the Blogged.com editors might pick it up. If i never write about gardening again that would be ok because the value to the readers who care about gardening would be in that one post.

I also like the fact that on a whim or for a specific project i might be working on i can go find editorially selected posts- say tomorrow i am meeting with a prospect that has a fitness and nutrition service- i can check out the stories in the fitness and nutrition topic- perhaps giving me something interesting to say when i met them!

I am not surprised that they are attempting do this and have such diverse categories that they are covering. One of the things our Client Solutions team has been selling more and more of is the Targeted News Delivery Solutions that we offer where editors who learn the clients specific business requirements crawl our aggregated content sets (10,000+ sources 22 languages), blog and Web content, multimedia and perhaps even the client's own submitted internal content to distribute via email, rss or portal/intranet post. Newsletters are not really a new service, but incorporating different type of media is. The editors become the customer's eyes- to power targeted delivery of content to employees daily who have better things to do then crawl multiple news and blog sites and do not need immediate notification (although we of course have many real-time notification solutions as well).

A quick search on people blogging about blogged.com points to a smart approach to making people aware of their service- editors rate the sites and a note is sent to the blogger notifying them and providing a badge for their blog- and who doesn't like to see themselves in an editorial human powered site?

photo attribution: robotson