October
An article originally posted on googleblog.blogspot.com
“Until now, alerts have been delivered via email only, but those days are over. Now your News, Web, Blog, Video, and Groups alerts are more easily accessible than ever.
Once you sign in to Google Alerts and create an alert, you can opt for feed delivery by clicking ‘Edit’ next to your alert on the ‘Manage Your Alerts’ page and changing your ‘Deliver to’ selection from ‘Email’ to ‘Feed’ (click on the image to see larger).”
Read the full article at googleblog.blogspot.com
If you’ve been wanting to monitor all websites, news, blogs, videos and groups indexed by Google, now is the time to get your Google alerts configured – RSS is up and running!
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October
An article originally posted on Broadband Evolved
“KP is definitely new and innovative and if you get a moment, I would recommend that you take a look. I especially love the concept of using people that you know and trust as a proxy for contextualizing traditional searches…”
Read the full article at www.broadbandevolved.com
Thanks for this post, Matt. We call it the “EaSE” concept: Experts as Search Engines. Knowledge Plaza lets you perform Google searches inside the collection of Web sites or pages related to a user, and even to a whole group of users.
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October
An article originally posted on blog.hbs.edu
“I received a wealth of insightful comments in response to my earlier post on Enterprise 2.0 ratings for knowledge workers. I thought I’d use some of them to continue discussing the topic, starting with the very basic question of whether measuring E2.0 participation is a good idea at all. A few commenters felt that it was not, and that the very act of measurement would pollute or drain enthusiasm from exactly the activities E2.0 enthusiasts are trying to encourage.”
Read the full article at blog.hbs.edu
Almost one month after launching the discussion whether knowledge workers should have E2.0 ratings Andrew McAfee posted part 2 of this topic.
Most people who reacted on the blogpost tend to think that rating people would actually discourage contribution though no evidence for that is provided.
According to Andrew McAfee who tends not to believe this rating may have a twofold result: it may encourage friendly competition and make people strive to improve their scores.
I personally believe that one number of a couple of numbers aren’t enough to rate people’s participation. After all, some people (a minority) may be excellent at adding information whereas others are really good at tagging, commenting and rating (after all: isn’t that just what transforms information into knowledge?). Therefore only a complex rating scheme may correctly display the actual value of what people are contributing (in whatever form).
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October
An article originally posted on scottgavin.info
“In my biased opinion, we’ve delivered the most exciting Enterprise 2.0 social productivity platform on the market. And with new development coming to fruition in the next month it’s just going to get better.
Knowledge Plaza has been developed as a Web-based platform for enterprise search, social bookmarking, knowledge management, information brokerage and expert identification.
The platform allows you to add websites, emails, documents, contacts, references and discussions. Multimedia is on the way. You can tag, annotate and share anything you add. Using workspaces, your network and company facets sharing and finding information is at the core of Knowledge Plaza.”
Read the full article at scottgavin.info
Scott Gavin’s claims about Knowledge Plaza are indeed very broad, however we stand by them as his post and many others’ reveal e.g. Bill Ives’s recent post.
An authentic knowledge hero’s piece of work! 
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October
An article originally posted on Enterprise Social Search
Google is back with a social search experiment. This time they call it SearchWiki. A collective feature “ala” Digg to promote search results, add public comments to them, remove them, and suggest what you would like to see the next time you perform your search. The new feature lets you see others’ comments for your particular SearchWiki as well as your previous notes.
It’s not the first time Google tries this kind of approach for sorting search results. They had previous experiments where you were able to vote and suggest better results. While SearchWiki has been translated in different languages and has a polished look, Google states that it is still an experimental feature that is served only to a random selection of participants and that it may only be available for a few weeks.
In regards of every search result, 2 new boxes let you promote the result to the top of your SearchWiki or remove the website which will then appear at the bottom of the page. If you have promoted more than one page you can then organize them in your preferred order.
Any promoted page will stay at the top each time you redo this search or any other search that brings one of your promoted pages in the top results. It is not clear how Google will user this collective rating in their algorithm or if they will use it at all.
Another feature that appears near search results is the public commenting of a search result or moreover of a url. Those comments are made public meaning that Google has a special page that brings you all the commented pages for a particular search with their ratings.
Google will include in your search results comments that you might have added previously. It is not clear if they will bring others’ comments in your result list. That would be a nice feature to see comments from a trusted list of friends who might have an opinion on the Web page.
At the very bottom of your SearchWiki page there is a link to add a result that you would like to see the next time you do your search.
The new result will then appear at the top of the results page.
While Digg is useful for promoting news information it is hard to imagine how the collective rating of search results could impact the quality of Google. With many users only using a couple of keywords in their search query it is hard to bring the necessary context needed for an appropriate rating of the search results.
On a less social aspect, being able to organize and see previous notes on search results when you redo a search query can be personally useful. How many times do you do the same search again and again because you forgot the websites you were looking for, but not the path to get there. Having the possibility to leave some marks along this path can be handy.
A tricky usability problem in SearchWiki is that you generally build confidence or have comments only after you’ve opened a search result. So going back to your result page when you had the result you were looking for is not so obvious.
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October
An article originally posted on
We’ve been delighted to welcome Thomas Vander Wal from Infocloud solutions for a few days with us in Belgium. Thomas is a senior consultant in social software and personal knowledge tools, also known for coining the term “folksonomy“. It offered a great opportunity to share perspectives and visions of the future with the whole team including our visionary friend Scott.
Thanks Thomas for your visit and for your eye-opening presentation! It was also a pleasure to put a face and voice on a blogger previously played by our Feed jockey.
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October
An article originally posted on Gartner
“Emerging software solutions will transform the software industry and the way software is used over time, according to Gartner, Inc. Software solutions are changing to be user-centric, Web-centric, service-oriented and utilized through new delivery models (such as cloud and software as a service). While this massive amount of change will not be delivered at once, it will cause significant disruptions to the industry.”
Read the full article at www.gartner.com
Interesting analysis of Gartner concerning the evolution in the Software industry especially the disruptior #2 about the evolution to user-specific needs software and disruptior #3 about the intensification of Web platforms, SaaS and other utility services.
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October
An article originally posted on Slideshare
Presentation from Karen Blakeman at the ‘Internet Librarian International 2008′ covering advanced search features from search engines and other tools, along with tips and tricks.
Definitely a reference. Thanks Karen for the tips!
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October
An article originally posted on Search Engine Land
Katherine Boehret wrote, “In about a month, Google will begin delivering these alerts to users via feeds, as well as emails.”
Read the full article at searchengineland.com
This is a major enhancement from Google. Allowing people to subscribe to RSS feeds to monitor results is extremely useful.
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October
An article originally posted on www.readwriteweb.com
“The New New Thing Is Social SaaS
If SaaS was simply doing traditional enterprise IT but with a Net Native design at a fraction of the cost it would be big. But that is only the start. What really differentiates the SaaS winners is that they have a social media/networking twist at the core of their value proposition.”
Read the full article at www.readwriteweb.com
SaaS can prove to be useful and meaningful in various scenarios. The most evident one is interaction with clients where you can provide them with an exchange platform for projects and knowledge sharing.
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