In August i 'quietly' launched another blog with my colleagues - - this one an 'official' one for our Dow Jones Client Solutions Taxonomy Services and Synaptica solutions that i am responsible for as Business Development Manager in the Americas. It is called Synaptica Central and it has been pretty successful to date. It took Christine Connors and myself a while to get this blog going and many conversations internally as to who, what and why- sometimes i admit a bit frustrating but that was to be expected and all turned out well!

The thing that i however am the most proudest of is not the traffic or the response but the fact that my Dow Jones colleagues are starting to get into it (and i hope it isn't just because i ask them to!). Last week the Dow Jones Taxonomy Team was at the Enterprise Search and Taxonomy Bootcamp and we got most of the team to blog from there (and we have some that still need to be edited and published).

Here are some of the current contributors from around the world:
Christine Connors- Director of Semantic Technologies and Dow Jones and Business Champion for Synaptica- Princeton, NJ
Wendy Lim- Taxonomy Consultant Singapore -
K Biju- Taxonomy Services Manager Singapore
Julian Brierley - Global Taxonomy Specialist- London
Dan Segal- Manager Taxonomy Delivery - Princeton, NJ
Maggie Hammond- Taxonomy Consultant - Chicago, IL
Jim Sweeney- Synaptica Product Manager, Denver, CO
And of course my posts (although i spend more time doing admin stuff at this time)
And many more folks to come !

Personal blogging is one thing- but blogging as a corporate team is another game all together and i have certainly been learning how to manage across the board from a technology perspective (we are using Drupal) to a delegation perspective so all can participate with their unique voices. As I learn more about the process i will make sure to share my thoughts here as well since it has been and will continue to be a good learning experience for me on the use of Social Media within a corporate team.

Last week at the Web 2.0 Expo New York, Chris Saad and i presented a session titled "Understanding the Basics of Personal Data: Vendors, Users, and You". It was a great honor to be able to speak in a session at Web 2.0 expo in New York and it was a good experience as i had expected.

Although mostly a technical crowd we started off my asking who in the crowd was a developer, a UI person or a business person and the room was evenly distributed. After introductions and a quick look at the original Data Portability Project video we took the audience through an overview of how we got to what we called 'a personal web' and then some tech inflection points as to how the 'stack' has been building up and what the digital user experience is today (see slides below).

Chris then jumped into an important discussion in framing the data portability conversation around what he has called the "The mythical value of data lockin". Like he says in his post on the subject, as project members we constantly get asked:

Why would a vendor allow users to leave their service?

Why make it easy for users to take the preacious data you have about them and use it on other sites?

or…

What is the business justification for letting data walk out the door?

One of the key messages we wanted to portray to the Web 2.0 Expo crowd as they were thinking about business issues that Chris outlines in his post on his personal blog was that Data Portability is "about enabling, empowering and encouraging your users to bring all their data with them, to connect your data to the rest of their data ecosystem and to continue to refresh and maintain the data on an ongoing basis". The benefits should be twofold and bi-directional.

Before the Q&A session, we took the audience through the actual project objects and some of the project results we expect to deliver and how to get involved regardless of how much 'free' time you have!

Some session attendees also took some detailed notes (thanks!), including:

• Farhan "Frank" Mashraq session notes Data Portability Project: Understanding the Basics of Personal Data: Vendors, Users and You
• Kris Jordan's post Chris Saad, Daniela Barbosa - Understanding the Basics of Personal Data and DataPortability
  

Note: Although i am Chairperson of the DataPortability Project Steering Committee and a co-founder of the project, this blog is my personal blog.

This past week i was at Web 2.0 NYC and on return home my brain as usual is overloaded with the people i met, the ideas we discussed and they presented, the business opportunities and ideas and the general feeling that there is still a lot of room and opportunities for innovation around information creation and consumption.

A lot of what i saw (especially on the exhibit hall floor) targeted to the Enterprise space was a lot of packaging around what is already out there (wiki, blogging, social networking)-wrapped in shiny colorful enterprise bubble wrap (the kind that goes pop), that is supposed to make your employees happy to be sharing their most intimate knowledge with their also ecstatically sharing colleagues- creating an ecosystem of content creation and consumption that will take enterprise users into this digital century that today's web 'consumers' live in.

You sense some snarky in me i am guessing. You might be right-i have been talking and asking for these tools for enterprise users for years and now i am complaining that there are too many choices- do i not believe in the open market? yeah i do of course- i just hate seeing too much of the same that might not address the real problems. I think that Clay Shirky in his keynote addressed the problem i see about the need to approach 'filtering' (aka information delivery) in his talk:

It's Not Information Overload. It's Filter Failure.
Take the 23minutes to watch this video and let me know what you think.


And while you are at it- watch this hilarious, but also inspiring keynote by Gary Vaynerchuk from Wine Library TV. Patience and Passion- please stop doing what you hate.(language as expected if you know Gary might not be appropriate for office so go with headphones!)

I had put the Portable Contacts Summit on my calendar weeks ago when i first heard of it, then this morning i let the failed technology of my laptop (it officially hates me) and hosting service (my SynapticaCentral blog won't publish!) and the day to day grind get to me- so i looked at the invitation again and thought-Urgh can and should i really go?

The first i heard of Portable Contacts project was back in May at the Data Sharing Summit and Joseph Smarr already had a very compelling story to tell about the open standards he was proposing that provide users a secure way to access their address books and friends lists.

I posted on Twitter this morning "wishing i was at the Portable Contacts session today but it was clearly marked for programmers(my one fault in life ;-) and time is valuable"not because i didn't think that the day would be valuable if i went but because it was focused on developers, and i thought 1#what value would i bring 2#shouldn't i get these 55things i need to do for work done today?. Kevin Marks replied that "@danielabarbosa Shame, we'd love to have you here - it's not just programmers but data discussions too"but i had committed to my to do list by then and then thought all afternoon on how i would have rather been there. It is still a shame however- guess you can't call it right all the time!

To get an idea of what Portable Contacts is trying to achieve visit their website and read through the - About, Why Now?, Goals and Approach and current spec.

So-Why now you ask? from the site:

The momentum began building for 'data portability' last year, and we are now at a point where there is strong support for the principle that users should be in control of their data and have the freedom to access it from across the web. And the major players have all recognized that they and their users are better off with secure contacts APIs (rather than having third-party services ask for users' credentials in order to scrape their data). As a result, we're seeing major Internet companies making contacts APIs available, such as Google's GData Contacts API, Yahoo's Address Book API, and Microsoft's Live Contacts API (with more to come). Not surprisingly though, each of these APIs is unique and proprietary. We believe this creates the ideal conditions for developing a common, open spec that everyone can benefit from.

A couple write-ups are already available including John McCrea's Live blogging notes. At around 1pm John writes "
1:00 About to resume. Saw amazing discussions over lunch. I won’t name names, but some would be shocked by the various pairings of competitors breaking bread together"-
i always have that same feeling when i go to these sessions- and agree that is one of the reasons things get done. I look forward to learning more and looking at the recent specs from a user and vendor prescriptive.

This is of course interesting in regards to the work i do over at the DataPortablity Project- so i am sure that beyond me others in the project are interested in learning more and will be digging deeper on not only the technical but the user usability perspective. Because the bottom line is that the technology and the standards make it work- the user makes it part of their digital life.

Image|Flickr|roughdrft

I have been biting my bottom lip all day- at first because i really did not feel like commenting on it and specifically because i didn't know the 'facts'. But after noticing a swollen lip, i decided to go ahead.

Since i happen to work for a media provider (Dow Jones) whose model is certainly currently focused on providing 'authoritative' premium content- something that many clients are willing to pay a lot of money for access to (so things like today are not a common occurrence)- i knew that most likely any post would be blatantly pro-premium subscriptions- because trust me if someone had done a check on a Dow Jones news feed product they would have seen that the story was 'bogus' with little effort. So a story like this perhaps makes us drool because it provides a perfect case story on why 'free' is not better- certainly not when millions of dollars are at stake.

From a Wired Blog a good explanation of what happened:
the article in the Sun Sentinel's archive had no date on it. But when Google's spider grabbed it, it assigned a current date to the piece, which then resulted in the article being placed in the top results of Google News. When the employee from Income Securities Advisors ran a Google search on "2008 bankruptcies," the old United Airlines story appeared as the top link in the results, with a September 6, 2008 date on it. (Google has now released a screenshot that shows the UAL story as it appeared on the Sun Sentinel web site. The only date in the screenshot is September 7, 2008, the date Google accessed the page. There is no date under the story's headline to indicate when it was published.) At 11 am Monday, the employee added the story to a feed that is included in a Bloomberg subscription service and within minutes, 15 million shares of United Airlines stock had been sold before trading on the stock was halted.

But although this of course is a compelling story to only trust authoritative sources and premium content aggregators, this story is not only about 'free' content because the traders (human or machines i may ask?) acted on a news story from a reputable and costly service- Bloomberg.

So who is to blame? Well of course many are talking about it in both main stream media and blogs and sure things like this have happened before but I think that the simplest answer is to ask why the person who pressed the send button to Bloomberg didn't vet out the story. Perhaps it was early in the morning (ok 11am is not that early but let's go with that excuse....) and he got in late the night before thanks to a delayed United flight and all the recent news about the airline industry losing money and charging $15 for a pillow was enough to believe the story and pass it along as a true story without any vetting.

But the interesting part to me is the metadata associated with the news story- because essentially that was the technical culprit- the article did not have metadata (in this case publication date) to tell Google that it was an article from 2002 that had been republished on their website. The problem is that there really is no standard to provide that information that online news providers adhere to and as more of their archives that were traditionally only available through premium aggregators that normalize the content, come on-line for 'free' more unknowns start to be thrown at online news services like Google News.

One of the core benefits of aggregator premium services (e.g. Factiva from Dow Jones, LexisNexis) is the normalization of the content from 'trusted' sources. This ensures that publication data- sometimes down to the millisecond is provided and the consuming application whether it is a trading system, a news portal or an alerting sms message sent to the banker on the run- gets it right.


Image|Flickr|arimoore

My typical Sunday afternoon usually consists of an afternoon walk down to the Beach with my iPod stacked with podcasts from the week - this Sunday morning as i was downloading the new episodes i couldn't wait for my walk and had to listen to one immediately with a cup of coffee in hand.

Why? Well, I was recently interviewed by Sean Ammirati for ReadWriteTalk about my recent eBook on the Hybrid approach to Folksonomies and Taxonomies in the Enterprise. ReadWriteTalk is part of the ReadWriteWeb blog network. ReadWriteWeb is one of my favorite resources out there on the web because it provides coverage of many of the web technology trends that i am interested in, providing great coverage of companies and emerging technologies and trends that play in the space.

During the podcast i try to explain why i wrote the ebook, highlight some of the practical recommendations i make in the ebook when approaching user tagging in the Enterprise and even provide some behind the 'scenes' stories about the creation of the actual ebook. The transcript of the interview is also available.

What are some of the other podcasts i listen to semi-religiously?

- I have been a regular listener of ReadWriteTalk since it started up including the new RWWLive sessions.
- SemanticWebGang (also syndicated by ReadWriteWeb and Talis)
- BusinessWeeks Behind the Cover podcast - for example last week's podcast on "IBM Has your Number" had me run out to buy Stephen Bakers' new book Numerati which i recommend and will blog about soon .
- Talking with Talis podcast- focused mostly on Libraries and emerging semantic technologies
- NewYorkTimes podcasts - mostly the Science Times podcast but sometimes others
- Nodalities podcast (another Talis podcast guess they have cornered the podcast market that interests me!!)
- An old favorite of mine is the SalesRoundup Podcast
- and of course the DataPortablity in Motion podcast (i think the guys have gone on a summer vacation and will hopefully be returning soon)

Have recommendations for other podcasts i should be tuned into? Please leave them in the comments!

So remember if you see me walking on the beach, or even on the BART on my way to work in the morning with my earplugs on nodding and smiling- i am probably listening to one of the many podcasts i listen to regularly.