DISQUS

Just started using Lijit on a TypePad hosted blog - I like exposing the search terms coming along, but wondering what the delay between new content being posted, and Lijit consuming the new information is. Do you pull the RSS feed? Can one proactively ping the Lijit engine to poll sooner?

And Bill - if you find your way to the Boston area, we can try some pair club juggling. Nothing like the adrenaline rush of a flying club to get you going! :)

Incidentally, I thought I was one of the only strange ones in Boston to be using Twitter, until I went to a Knowledge Management session at Bentley College a few weeks ago, and 30-50% of the KM people (most of them older than me, and I'm an Apple ][+ kinda guy) had heard of and were using Twitter.

I was flabbergasted to be honest. As a result of twittering, found out one fellow works not 2 blocks from me. This isn't just a Silly-Con Valley phenomenon. ;)

Twitter is no more or less of a time waster than e-mail, IM, blogging, reading, 'riting, 'rithmetic.

Once you start to get a following, like on any 'social network' then you can do awfully useful things like quickly poll the crowd on simple things like "is website x.com down for anyone else? (typepad for example)" to feedback on new web designs, what cell phone to buy out of a handful of choices, etc..

The virtual watercooler effect is pretty handy, and doesn't require firing up a "room" in any sort of IM/IRQ/ICQ-style parlance. You step in and out of the flow as you like.

But Twitter certainly does bad things for you if you lean at all towards ADD! :)

Robert: Yes, even personal computers are still fairly early in the adoption lifecycle. Too complicated (for many), too expensive (for most), and still too damn geeky for "normal people" (I hear an average man is kept in a vacuum sealed vault in Switzerland).

That said, it simply takes time and effort before anything gets real momentum. I can still recall a good 5 years ago when a co-worker said to me, well, I guess I'll create a blog now - seems like EVERYONE is doing it. Not even close then, or now.

As someone covering enterprise adoption of tech around content, collaboration, information, knowledge, etc. - it's very scary to see how far behind some companies are, although there are the lovely rare creatures who are the early adopters that help to bring the rest of their industry behind them (legal being a prime candidate - they just love seeing 'precedent' in all shapes).

Even the most successful technology, meme, etc. is still unknown by the vast majority of people on the planet, let alone used/understood.

We did our Enterprise 2.0 research last quarter, and I was a bit surprised (although not entirely) at how badly RSS (Happy RSS Day), Blogs, and RSS did when we were looking at where people put themselves and their organizations on the Chasm scale.

See:
http://www.biztechtalk.com/2008/04/feedback-wan...

So is the wide format blog the "HD" of blogging templates? :)

Nice FriendFeed widget - didn't realize it was available. Learn something new every day!

BTW - for those of you with a more enterprise than personal slant, our quarterly research topic for Q1 was Enterprise 2.0 - go get a free copy at www.aiim.org/enterprise20 - pushing 1000 downloads as of now.

Cheers,
Dan

Synchronicity is a wonderful thing, eh?

Between FriendFeed, OpenID, OpenSocial and some other "meta layer" concepts, we're finally reeling back in some of the chaos that was unleashed via so many disparate sources.

We'll see what happens, but the expansion/contraction of running wild and then pulling it back a bit seems to be getting us going in the right direction.

Ken - thanks again for popping over and commenting, and then this great commentary here!

Definitely worth keeping an eye out for the Big Brother-ish and Minority Report-ish bits (presumably the predicting your future issues rather than the portal/dashboard-like view?).

The privacy aspects are certainly concerning, although as any sufficiently paranoid person will tell you, your private information is already quite public - if not overtly, then in barely hidden silos.

Still, yes, human oversight is needed, and it is tricky stuff, whether automated, done by a 3rd party, or managed by the individual/owner of their social/relationship information. Who is right? Who is wrong? If I say I went to Harvard on every social profile I can find, yet I didn't, does that tilt these systems towards pollution or purity?

Early days, although we're motoring along - and stumbling in the right direction, getting some things right and some thing wrong.

And the answer is, yes we're too connected. Except that the vast majority of the world isn't - so there is still hope! ;)

Ooph, CIOs reporting to the COO is bad enough, but MAYBE good. To the CFO? Been there, really mixed bag...

Having sales and marketing skills are awfully handy for any technical role. Completely changed my role, when I took that to hear. Out of the weeds, and into executing on the business vision.

Bridges don't build themselves - at least not until we get nanotechnology working! :)

Cheers,
Dan

Hi Ken - well, it's about time ECM/DMS/etc. gets a bit more attention, eh? The fastest growing source of "digital stuff" is the unstructured world of documents, content, information and knowledge, and yet the ratio of database and operations people to the unstructured world is entirely flipped around...

Great to see a conversation about solution selling, and honing in on the combined needs of both business and IT. Of course, are those teams aligned? Perhaps, perhaps not - so always wise to uncover how the parties involved in this decision interact, and how to affect useful change by being a bridge builder between those parties, and into a solution that will fit their needs.

Hard work to be sure, but well worth it, all around.

Cheers,
Dan

Speaking of bugs - your LinkedIn profile badge here (http://www.linkedin.com/pub/1/418/495) leads to a 404 not found on LinkedIn. Hmm?

Chris - saw the change bright this morning, and it's definitely cleaner, but being such a heavy user, it's going to take a bit to get used to things.

As I comment over on my blog though - why are they adding their own status area (ala Facebook and Twitter's "what are you doing now?")? And why can't we pipe in status from elsewhere (Twitter->Facebook)?

Lots of little usability issues like that to this new released, although I notice they took the site offline for upgrading tonight, so maybe they're already jumping on this.

Between the facelift and mobile access recently though, it's great to see LinkedIn getting modernized. There's hope yet!

Mathew - found you via (mistyped) twitter lead from Steve Rubel... there's a joke in there somewhere.

Interesting points all around - and finding the signal in the noise is a major issue. Which is why search (and find - the end product) is still nowhere near a done deal. We've got content creation tools aplenty, and tagging/sharing tools out the wazoo, yet much content gets buried (whether maliciously - as is rumored in the DIGG world, or just due to volume).

Plenty of work to be done!

Cheers,
Dan

PS - The pogo strip can't be THAT ancient, if I know about it. Wait, how'd I age that quick? ;)

How about exposing the Facebook Beacon? (while this world is still murky)

Amazing how long it has taken for them to morph their previous "lifestream" ability into something like this. And 3 years to add just ONE photo to a profile? Ooph. And yet, I still prefer LinkedIn (in general) to Facebook. Go figure! ;)

Have not (yet) bought an iPhone, still weighing my options while remaining blissfully mobile mail free at the moment.

However, I'm going to Denmark in a few months - anyone who has unlocked an iPhone and traveled abroad, I would love to hear about the experience, as it would be awfully handy (no pun intended) to have mobile mail/web available for this trip, and others brewing that will have me untethered for a good amount of time.

Robert - always interesting to hear a deep enterprise search guy discuss marketing.

Makes complete sense - to engineer a search solution, you need to get into the headspace, and linguistic and computational space to pull forth the nuggets of information that people are searching for.

And what's a guaranteed way to determine whether what you think people searching for, and what they actually get match up? Doing marketing and measuring the end results of sales versus your marketing efforts.

Ah, if only all marketers understood this, and everyone looking at enterprise search understood this as well.

If enterprise content was created to be found (and understood) in the first place (instead of being yet another TPS Report [for Office Space fans]), life would be a lot easier "behind the firewall." Long road to haul though!