Denver – Twitter as a News Service – TweetDeck a major help?

August 25, 2008 at 7:13 am · Filed under Democratic Convention, Denver, Fast, TweetDeck, Twitter

Many of the conventional news services will be going all out in Denver this week at the Democratic Convention. Many Bloggers are there too. But I think that this may be the Twitter Convention too.

Here are just a few from the PBS system:

Laura Hertzfeld, Vote 2008 producer: http://twitter.com/Laura_PBS
PBS Vote 2008: http://twitter.com/pbsvote2008
NewsHour: http://twitter.com/NewsHour
Tavis Smiley: http://twitter.com/tavissmiley

My Twitter feed has many more and all the breaking news services. But what I want is for those Twittering to give me a feel. To be like a composite eye whose many perspectives ad up up to a collective.

The “headlines” will be covered by the regular news channels. The feel of the floor and the deep background can be offered by a Twitter “Collective”. In time a station need not send its own staff at their own cost. It can use local volunteers to Twitter for them – creating a new kind of “Wire Service”.

But how to make sense of all these Twitter inputs? I already have nearly 400 feeds – how can I see the patterns from the noise? How could a station with say hundreds of volunteers Twittering the worlds news or simply using search to find the coverage separate the news from the noise?

I think that an answer may be TweetDeck

I have been using TweetDeck for a few days now and I am really impressed. I can easily create groups of meaning – beats for news – and I can easily use the search capability to extract content that has a focus. As Twitter users breach the 150 Dunbar number of followers and chaos and noise build, they can use TweetDeck to recreate meaning again.

I restrict my “Friends” group to my real friends. I have set up a Beat to cover media – all my pub TV and radio and Media folks go in here. I have set up a news channel.  To learn more bout Joe Biden, I did a serach for Biden and have a column there. It could have been any topic of course.

Is not the real value of social media in Convening or Meaning Making?

Assuming Twitter can solve its stability issues, the risk will always be noise. Success for twitter will bring too much noise for most people to handle.

A tool like TweetDeck starts to address this noise issue and starts to help us use Twitter to find more meaning and hence value.

Update: Jon Husband asked me to look at monitter – a tool that enables you to set 3 search variables and have access to everything that is happening in the Twitterverse. I have set it to Denver, NPR and Obama – I am really there!

Is there room for a “retail” Fast Search Tool that will enable me to “Parse the Web” for other content that fits my profile? A tool that would have a Dashboard that would feed back by my self selected groups things that I would like based on my prior actions and the actions of say a group of selected friends?

What would my web world be like then? What would be the value of such a tool?

Disclaimer – I have no connection to TweetDeck other than I have just donated some money to them!

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Managing Data in the Clouds

August 22, 2008 at 11:48 am · Filed under Cloud Computing, Enterprise 2.0

Will integration issues dampen the enthusiasm around cloud computing? What are the role of data environments in these new scenarios?

The folks that manage data integration have some interesting observations to make on this topic. I recently had the opportunity to speak with Chris Boorman, chief marketing officer with Informatica, and Ron Papas, senior vice president and general manager for Informatica On Demand, about the enterprise data management implications of this growing trend.  (The interviews are posted here and here in this two-part series.)

As cloud computing engagements increase in sophistication and edge ever closer to the mission-critical core of the enterprise, recognition is growing that there are enterprise data management issues that still need to be worked out. “Our belief is that cloud computing or on-demand computing is simply a way of further fragmenting data, because customers are absolving themselves from responsibility for the management, storage, security, and backup and recovery of the availability of that data,” Chris pointed out. However, he emphasized, “you must never, ever, absolve responsibility for the quality and the ownership of the data, and having such quality and ownership as part of your core business processes. And that requires integration.”

Cloud computing hands off many of the aches and pains associated with systems and application development and management to someone else. But this does not relieve enterprises of the requirements and responsibilities around effectively managing enterprise data. Many observers, in fact, are concerned about the implications of cloud computing on enterprise data management and integration, since much of the processing and storage of information shifts to outside providers.

As Informatica’s Ron Papas put it, technically, there isn’t a lot of difference between on-site systems and data stores and cloud-managed systems and data stores.  However, there’s a big difference in the ownership of these applications:

“What’s that’s doing is it’s bypassing the traditional process of having IT design the whole integration processes into the solution. So, before you know it, you could be up and running with Salesforce.com without having put much thought into integration, because it’s really being led by the line of business side. You could have someone in the sales and marketing unit that somehow bypassed IT and went up and implemented Salesforce. All of a sudden, they realize they need access to that data. they need it synchronized.”

More companies are emphasizing their ability to compete on analytics, and the ability to integrate and leverage enterprise data is key. Whether on-site or in the cloud, effective data integration is a must.

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If We Ever Get Tired of the Term ‘Enterprise 2.0,’ Here are Some Ideas

August 18, 2008 at 6:01 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0

Monikers and buzzwords are rampant across our industries. There has been plenty of teeth-gnashing and guffawing over the ‘Web 2.0′ term, right down to lawsuits over its use with conference venues. The term itself has gotten plenty of eye-rolls, and eyes really start to roll if someone mentions ‘Web 3.0′

Enterprise 2.0 has had fewer eye-rolls, but is very much the close sibling of Web 2.0.

Krissy Danielsson over at ebizQ has an interesting post: She suggests that maybe it’s time to call Web 2.0 something else, like ‘Live Web.’ It describes the real-time, real access, immediate nature of the technology and methodology. By extension, we could call Enterprise 2.0 ‘Live Enterprise’ and Software as a Service (which creates the ugly acronym SaaS) ‘Live Software.’ (This would also segway nicely into the Microsoft ‘Live’ sets of offerings.)

Krissy reminds us one of caveat: someone may have already copyrighted these terms. But it is a catchy idea.

Another term that describes what Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 is all about and getting a lot of play is ‘Web Oriented Architecture,’ or WOA, which links things, at least semantically, with the more internal enterprise track of SOA.

Let’s face it, as these technologies and methodologies advance, it doesn’t make sense to keep referring them as release ‘2.0.’  We’ve been calling Web 2.0 ‘Web 2.0′ for almost four years now. And calling everything ‘3.0′ will invite lots of ridicule.  We need a new moniker to describe what we’re doing here — time is running short.

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The Human Voice – Leroy Sievers

August 18, 2008 at 6:00 am · Filed under Blogging, Cancer, Community, Death and Dying, Leroy Sievers, NPR, Public Media, Public Radio, Relationships, Web 2.0

Leroy Sievers died this weekend. This picture is one of him blogging for NPR on his cancer. His column on the NP Blog is called “My Cancer“.

I post about Leroy today not just to honor a great journalist and a courageous man but to make a point about voice. The human voice that is central to the relationship world that is struggling to emerge from the transactional world that we mainly inhabit today.

Leroy’s column at NPR was unusual in two ways. First of all it was based on a journalist telling a story about himself – what it was like to to live with and die from a disease that had condemned him. Death in our society is itself one of the great taboos. We can talk of almost anything but this. Secondly Leroy did not allow any distance between his public voice and himself. So he could and did talk of his fears and uncertainties, of the days when he despaired and felt too weak to go on, of the joys of little things and the vital importance of friends and lovers.

For those of us in the “club”, his column was an immense comfort. For we too feel all these things. By bringing his voice to the ’sphere, he gave us ours.

And that my friends is the point. Here is the announcement of his death on the blog. Please have a look at the comments – there are hundreds and hundreds already – to see what I mean by him giving us a voice.

For when it all is stripped away, the great power of the 2.0 world is not to sell us more stuff but to help us regain our humanity.

If you would like to know more about Leroy Sievers and what he meant to many people - NPR have a wonderful tribute page here

I find this photo album especially moving as Leroy unlocks the unpspoken words in others and they alo offer a glimpse of themselves – the face tells so much

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Some 2008 Enterprise 2.0 Success Stories – Tell Me More

August 17, 2008 at 10:28 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0

A while back I posted a number of Enterprise 2.0 success stories for 2007 on the AppGap blog. They came from this blog and my Portals and KM blog. Now, I am starting to collect stories from 2008. Recently, after an exchange of emails I got this list from Justin Kistner of Voce Communications, a communications consultancy that creates marketing programs for their clients. His firm also writes the blog, Voce Nation that looks at social media, among other things.

Justin was clear that the first two of the stories were about his client, Social Text, but the rest are from other firms. I really appreciate this research on his part and his sharing of the list.

Here is the list. With one exception, these are all links to stories in the press. It is great to see more and more enterprise 2.0 successes. If you know of any enterprise 2.0 success stories please feel free to add them in the comments, just provide the facts and don’t engage in your own marketing or spin.

How a Marketing Firm Implemented an Enterprise Wiki - Using a wiki from Socialtext, a social software vendor, CoActive, a New York-based marketing firm, has been able to take critical work out of e-mail boxes and put it into one transparent, searchable portal.

Web 2.0 Tools Transform Osborne’s Management Strategies – electrical equipment manufacturer Osborne Transformer implemented a wiki for a variety of tasks such as company’s ISO certification process.

Forrester Report: CIOs See Value in Web 2.0 – Analyst study finds rogue usage of consumer-grade technologies still on the rise.

Wikis Get Users Talking at MIT, Johns Hopkins

Canada embarks on major Web 2.0 initiative – The Federal government’s decision to create a comprehensive system for future online collaboration and social networking projects is growing proof that Canada acknowledges the explosive potential of Web 2.0, industry experts say.

Podcast with Clark Kokich, CEO of Avenue A | Razorfish on CEO blogging – He regularly blogs internally to employees.

Improved Collaboration a primary driver for Web 2.0 technologies, says Ziff Davis survey with more than 71 percent of respondents indicating this.

Things the CIA learned about implementing an enterprise wiki – When it comes to social software implementation, they stressed the importance of administering access, starting small and moving information out of narrow channels like e-mail and into broader platforms like wikis.

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