if you are wondering where it’s moved to, it is here.  http://www.loupaglia.com/correlate.   Be sure to check it out, RSS has moved there as well.  Thanks.

Apologies to those who have been waiting for a new post, I haven’t had a chance to post over the past couple of weeks.  There is a lot going on at work and I have been moving correlate to a new domain, loupaglia.com. I don’t want to lose you as readers so please update your bookmarks and feeds. The new location for correlate is http://www.loupaglia.com/correlate.

I hope to be able to post more often now that the move to self-hosted WordPress is complete.

I will post one more time in about a week to catch anyone who misses this post. I hope to see you at the new location!

I will admit, I am a fast-forwarder. I condense three hours of prime time viewing into a much more condensed time frame, usually starting at 10 p.m. The ability to fast-forward on a DVR has been a much debated issue in the advertising community. Now, NBC comes out with a study that I first saw mentioned this morning in Techdirt that states that people still pay attention and that the ads have value even in fast forward most.

Now, of course, media outlets have every reason to want to say people still pay attention to the ads, it is in their interests. And many are not buying it. The challenge for advertisers is to find that positive correlation in the advertising run with brand equity increase and/or product sales increase.  The same goes for ad campaigns on the internet.  Even with the technology in place to avoid ads, I for one do still pay attention. (At a minimum, I need to watch for when to stop fast forwarding!)

One thing on the DVR front that jumps out at me is ‘fast-forward ads’.  What is that?  Well, why not design an ad that gets the message across without sound and in fast forward mode.  Remember, those cartoons people draw that shows animation when you flip the pages, same thing, frame-by-frame story telling.  One of the commentors on Techdirt said they’ve seen it in action.  I know I’ve seen it on the side of the tunnel going between Hoboken and NYC, Target ran a whole campaign in that tunnel a couple of years ago.  I still remember all those Target logos bouncing around.

No, I’m probably not starting this as a monthly thing but I do have to give credit where credit is due. Marc Andreessen, <sarcasm>known to be an extremely unsuccessful entrepreneur as the co-founder of Netscape, LoudCloud and now Ning, </sarcasm> is now author of the correlate “Blog of the Month” award: blog.pmarca.com.

And as world renown as ‘correlate’ is, this is quite the accomplishment since the blog was only launched at the beginning of June. It is one of the more thorough blogs with some of the most comprehensive posts I’ve read in quite some time. Not sure how he finds the time between Ning and writing it. He has some fantastic coverage on Facebook. Some very good insight in the nature of working with venture capitalists. And the latest is his Guide to Start-ups.

I highly recommend it. And if there was any doubt, the tag line “Often wrong, never in doubt” wins the correlate “Blog Tag line of the Month” award.

How can you tell? When over 90% of your first 100 items in your reader are discussing nothing but the iPhone. I’m been reviewing my RSS collection as of late simply because I noticed that there is a lot of discussions taking place around the same topics. Much of that, I believe, is that we travel in the circles we know and I developed my list from the blogrolls of some of the top technology and VC blogs out there. I’ve been extending into various niches now as well.

Anyway, to all those who waited in line and got your iPhone, congratulations. I’m going with Fred Wilson’s choice this time around and taking up the Blackberry Curve. I’m sure I will be switching to an iPhone in the future (perhaps second gen.) but for now, I need something with 100% reliability for corporate email and enterprise reliability.

A couple of days ago, I read a post by Jeff Pulver entitled Facebook: Evolving beyond being “Just a Social Network”. His comparison of Facebook and AOL, calling Facebook potentially the “new” AOL, immediately struck a contemplative cord with me. What strikes me
as so fascinating how similar the two stories are.

In the late 90’s, AOL was still a darling of the web. But its strategic issues really were showing themselves with their “walled garden” approach while the “open” web was growing, thriving and becoming a true disruption to their destination business. One could say that having everyone come to AOL was a large factor in the difficulties they ran into.

So here we are in 2007, Facebook is all the rage and creating for themselves a “new” garden. Are we heading into a scenario where much of social web experiences are found in the Facebook environment. I find it very interesting that at a high level, Facebook is in fact doing exactly what
AOL did in the past.  Now, granted, an open API architecture where developers are consciously tying their solutions and services onto the Facebook platform is quite different. In fact, I am not criticizing their solution in any way, I think their strategic move to “open up” could be a brilliant one and really changes the playing field particularly for vertically-oriented social networks.

But the premise remains the same, you can go to the web (or in this case the “social” web) but you need to come to Facebook first. Perhaps Jeff was on to something with his question, “Is Facebook the “new” AOL?”, indeed.

There has been a lot of pre-coverage of Powerset, starting with the TechCrunch post back in February. Many claim that they have something in development, to be released for public view in September that can change the tide of the search marketplace. And they will do it with natural language search.

I have to say that I will believe it when I see it, that is my stance right now. Not that I don’t believe a company can develop a category leading application or service even when the market “seems” closed out. I made that mistake once before in 1998 when someone first introduced me to a company called G-O-O-G-L-E, and Yahoo! seemed like that had the search market monopolized.

My curiosity around Powerset is more around the paradigm of natural language search than the company itself. Any time you ask people to switch their behaviors and usage habits, you are setting up another barrier for yourself. People are used to typing a few words or even advance queries into the “little white box”. Will they shift to typing in “Who won an academy award in 2001?” like discussed in VentureBeat earlier today. Time will tell but right now most would type “academy award 2001″. It will be critical in how they overcome that challenge.

I, for one, am very interested to get a peak into what they have developing and signed up for Powerlabs today. Bringing the early adopters and users into the process of testing out various elements in a fantastic way to get early feedback, hone the engine on obvious user tasks, gain early market momentum and build word-of-mouth. Smart move (if the engine provides a satisfactory experience and doesn’t not turn users away), users rarely come back if the first experience is a bad one. And in the case of Powerset, the experience is going to have to be better than Google on the first pass, otherwise users will go with what they know.

To close, let me use an example.  On the Powerset blog,  they use the example query “Who proved Fermat’s last theorem? in a post.  Their results set are impressive providing the instant answer.  Just for validation, I searched “Fermat’s last theorem” at Google and a Wikipedia page came up as the first hit.  The answer “Andrew Wiles” was found in the sixth sentence.  Great example of two things.  First, showing Powerset as an answer finder, and second, raises the question if search engine switching costs are low enough that a little less legwork to find the answer is going to win the hearts of users.

Over the past couple of days, I’ve been spending some time using Movable Type (3.2 version) to set up an internal blog for our business unit.  It’s been an interesting experience working with the templates from scratch, much different than using a hosted solution, at least I know what I will be in for if I go self-hosted with this one.

Anyway, I wanted to note a really good article I read about Steve Jobs yesterday.  It is entitled Steve Jobs in a Box, written by John Heilemann.  Really gives you some perspective on not only Jobs himself but how far Apple has come since his taking the CEO helm back in 1997.   Quick thanks to Fred Wilson over at A VC for pointing out the article in his post.

This morning I read the piece, Opinion/Analysis: Books? What Books?, by Zach Simms at Rev2.org, regarding the impending demise of books. While I don’t disagree that the web and our always connected paradigm has changed the book business forever, I’m not calling for the “end of the book” quite yet. The web has changed how people consume information. People are going to web more than ever and as Zach points out, new innovative offerings are even moving book content to digital devices like the Sony Reader.

And, here’s the thing, people still love to read. If the demise of books was so upon us, would we still not see a thriving bricks-n-morter book industry? Okay, thriving may be a strong word, but there are still a ton of book stores. As an example, according to Answers.com, Borders has about 1,200 stores, Waldenbooks has 560 stores, Barnes & Noble has 700 and B. Dalton has 100. That is a lot of outlets pushing a product that is on its way out of style. And that is in the wake of continued pressure from online bookstores like Amazon (whose success also sheds light on the demand for books).

In addition, even in a world of connectivity and digital solutions, many still love the opportunity to stick their nose in a book. As much as I am online, I also enjoy to sit down and read a book. Unfortunately, I only find time to get 20 or 30 pages in at a time; I’m currently reading The Ten Faces of Innovation which I reference in a recent post. Come to think of it, this post reminds me that I need to spend more time online to update my Shelfari bookshelf to ensure it has all the books on my shelf or that I’m currently reading. Happy reading.

See updated post at the new location

Are we in the beginning of a shift from holding so strongly to the words ‘knowledge management’? And if not, should it begin immediately? My sense is that ‘knowledge enablement’ is a potentially a much stronger word for what organizations are aiming to achieve.

The opening sentence of the Wikipedia entry for Knowledge Management is:

Knowledge Management comprises a range of practices used by organisations to identify, create, represent, and distribute knowledge for reuse, awareness and learning.

Reading a couple of posts from the Fast Forward blog, there is some interesting debate regarding knowledge management, its relevancy and whether it is an impediment to fostering enterprise 2.0 value in the workplace.  Paula Thornton wrote Knowledge Doesn’t Want to be Managed, ending with the statement that ‘KM is dead’, later following up with KM Nerves are Raw.

However, my sense is that perhaps we are keying too strongly on the word ‘management’ in the entire equation.  Sure, in the past, organizations tried to manage (aka control) knowledge and information.  Some still do, but many are leveraging the power of their organizations, the new thinking of digital natives and very often the power of 2.0 technologies to strengthen their knowledge strategies.

Knowledge Management doesn’t mean ‘knowledge control’.  In that I do agree with Paula’s early point “The promise of 2.0 is to ‘free’ the knowledge.”  Knowledge does want to be free, free to be disseminated by experts and leveraged by all, particularly the ones that need it.

So perhaps KE should be the term of the new era.  It is about Knowledge Enablement, Knowledge Empowerment, Knowledge Evangelism and Knowledge Everywhere. 

Yes, you heard it here. Apple is taking their next step in the mobile arena and they are calling it the Apple iPhone. Seriously the amount of coverage on this device is amazing. My colleague, Glenn Fannick, has a good post covering the coverage. There really isn’t a whole lot new I can say on the topic and the mobile space isn’t something I write about. I will leave that to the mobile and device bloggers.

Nonetheless, I think the iPhone is going to be a tremendous success and deserves all the hype. If there is ever something that is entering the market that looks like a game-changer, this looks like it could be it.

Do I want one? Absolutely. Will I get one right now? Absolutely not. This is a product that I plan on waiting to see the early reactions from the first 21 million people who are going to run out and buy it. The biggest question in my mind (and this is not a secret or new) is how it is to interact with the phone without a keyboard. I currently use the Treo 650 and I use the keyboard all the time for email. I’m not sure a screen-based solution will be an adequate substitute, but if any company is going to figure it out it is going to Apple.

Here are some links to some posts that I’ve read recently on the iPhone:

• 5 Ways iPhone will change the wireless biz - GigaOm
• The Less Obvious Impact the iPhone Will Have - Jeff Nolan
• I Don’t Want An iPhone, I’ve Got a Curve - Fred Wilson
• The iPhone’s potential downfall: Lack of mechanical keyboard - VentureBeat

I read a post earlier today by Jeremiah Owyang entitled LinkedIn’s Web Strategy. I recently wrote a post about the value of LinkedIn and that was not what Jeremiah was questioning. His inquiry was more with regard to its strategic approach as related to other social networks, particularly Facebook.

LinkedIn sees itself as a social networking tool for business. Facebook is a social network for life, which may include business.

Does or should LinkedIn deploy an API to integrate into Facebook as Facebook positions itself as THE social networking platform? It is definitely an interesting strategy if LinkedIn feels there is a risk that it can be dis intermediated by Facebook if it deployed its own more business-centric offering. As it stands, I think there is still a tremendous amount of differentiation between the two sites, aside from the baseline (and annoyance) of having to manage networks and relationships in two places.

This begs a further point. We are sure to see a lot of convergence in the social networking space. There are simply too many players where maintaining your own personal information and your network of relationships. In order to survive, a social networking site is going to have a key differentiating value proposition to me as a user or a critical competitive advantage. Right now, I think Facebook and LinkedIn both have one, critical mass versus targeted business solution respectively. But there are a number of players out there as well such as the obvious MySpace, Friendster, even Plaxo and now Xing to name a few.

Of further interest is predict what the social networking landscape looks like and how we interact with it if these networks begin to converge either through consolidation or web service tie-in. Where does one stop and the other begin? How do we merge our networks as some of our network members only live in one or the other? And what capabilities do the networks give us as we try to segment out family from friends, friends from colleagues and colleagues from acquaintances.

Other good related reads:

• LinkedIn vs. FaceBook - It’s all About the “Free” by Jim Kukral
• LinkedIn says it will own business networking - The Kudos Factor
• Facebook the new Linkedin - BizTips

There are interesting conversations brewing on the topic “continuous partial attention” and “flow”. I picked it up in Eric Norlin’s Paying attention to flow post over at Defrag. It seems the term “flow” is being used in several different ways and it can really turn your perspective upside-down if you aren’t in the “flow” which has caused me to entitle this post completely the opposite.

But as I listen and read more on the topic, it strikes me that “flow” is not something that is new. We may be experiencing flow at a different rate and in the web medium with all of the interactive, social network tools that are emerging around us. But it is fundamentally no different. Look at a trader who uses a Bloomberg terminal while simultaneously processing orders, talking on the phone and listening to CNBC in the background. If that isn’t managing flow at a high clock speed, I don’t know what is. That has been happening for decades.

Stowe Boyd, posted a video and pdf of his presentation in a recent post; it is worth it if you have 30 minutes to listen to it and not pay total attention while you are doing nine other things.

His premise of connectivity being more important than productivity is an interesting one, the fact that the productivity of your collective network is more critical than one’s individual productivity. That is a fundamental shift. My personal belief is the most successful individuals are those that can be a huge catalyst for network propulsion but also attain personal goals and meet individual objectives. I would posit that Stowe himself is that latter, personally successful but a powerful network contributor.

We live in a society where you are judged and viewed on what you personally accomplish (even as a member of a team). Without being able to separate yourself individually, it is impossible to differentiate your contributions to the network than any other member of the network. That is something that we must not lose sight of.

“Flow” and managing one’s attention are clearly topic du jour; they are right up there with “information overload”. The technologies are enabling us to process an inordinate amount of information fractionally and in short chunks of time. And it does give us a lot to think about regarding our own productivity and focus, and the productivity and focus of our networks.

So does the new emerging world of “flow” cause many to be hyper-productive and gain an individual competitive advantage? Or are we so into the bits and bytes of communication, connections and interaction that we’ve become so fragmented that we are completely not paying attention to anything? I do and will continue to the former but will certainly keep an eye of on the latter.

I will be attending the SLA Conference in Denver this week.  It should be a good event and I am looking forward to the opportunity to speak personally with other leaders in the industry, customers and colleagues.  Dow Jones will have a big presence at the event so be sure to come and see us; we’ll be located right inside the main entrance area (Booth 367).

My colleague, Dave Clarke, will be speaking at the event on .  His topic:  How to Implement Audience-centric Taxonomies for the Semantic Web.  If you are interested further in the topic, we are doing a lot of work, including Taxonomy Warehouse, in the space and we’d be happy to speak with you.

See you at SLA!

I did not intend to have two Google-related posts two days in a row but yesterday I didn’t know that today Google was going to launch Google Gears. Google Gears is a new offering that allows developers to build off-line web applications. What better way to demonstrate that than by improving arguably the best RSS reader on the market, Google Reader, by adding off-line access to it. Scoble has good early coverage of Gears on his blog.

There seems to be some strong synergies between Google Gears and other platforms getting a lot of press of late such as Adobe Apollo or Microsoft Silverlight. I need to complete some additional reading before understanding the friend vs. foe line each of these development environments. For some additional background, I wrote an earlier post on Adobe Apollo after seeing it demonstrated at Web 2.0 Expo.

My colleague, Greg Merkle, and I have had a number of conversations about the merits of various readers. I’ve used Google Reader for some time and consume all of my RSS using it. Greg refused to fully convert from his heavy Shrook usage because of his need for off-line access to his feeds. Looks like Google just won over another user.

Other Mentions:

• Google Gears Lets Developers Take Apps Offline — TechCrunch
• Google releases open source toolkit for offline apps — O’Reilly Radar
• Dojo Offline on Google Gears — Ajaxian
• Google Gears - Jeff Nolan

Other Good Follow-ups:

• Google Reader Offline - thanks about time someone did it — Daniela Barbosa (because I link to colleagues’ blogs
• Additional coverage of the Google news @ Tailrank

Over the weekend, I read a provocative article, The Final Days of Google: It is going to be an inside job by Robert X. Cringely which I found via a Valleywag post. It is a very good article that I recommend reading if you have the time but the quick summary is that Cringely’s hypothesis is that the company that gives Google a run for its money will be started by the talent and ideas being incubated at Google today.

While I think any company runs the inherent risk that employees will leave to start their own profitable venture, that goes with the territory and also applies to almost any type of firm in any type of industry. But my sense is that Google employees, while incredibly intelligent and talented, pose no greater risk towards building a competitive innovation than anyone else. Check out the article’s comments which tend to agree with that premise. Here are a couple of reasons why, starting with the weakest argument:

History

Historical track record is a great predictor of future outcomes. If you look at the recent technology leaders and innovations that have taken place, they have not occurred from founders flight of established technology leaders. Google itself came out of the academic arena as did Yahoo! I’ll admit, I have not done the proper diligence on this point, just going off memory. Happy to be challenged or verified.

Copyright

Copyright is a strong deterrent to the scenario. Google implemented the 20% time program a key competitive advantage to develop future products and business. As such, they clearly have policies in place to protect that advantage. Any work product that is developed at Google is the property of Google. My sense is that would apply to both the engineers and the researchers completely their work with Google funds. So, it would really take an astute individual to hold an idea back and strike it out on their own, but it most certainly couldn’t be in the search space.

Power of Google Platform

We must not lose sight of the value of creating and developing new ideas on top of the Google platform. Many of the ideas fostered by the 20% program are built upon the framework of the Google search architecture. It is not going to be a seamless transition to simply take that new idea into a new self-standing company even if copyright (discussed above) was not a problem. It is going to take a strong disruption to unseat Google, especially if it is going to be in the area of search. Time will tell if it will be something we already know about like semantic search written about today at Read/WriteWeb.

Final Thoughts: Googlers will leave to start their own ventures. It would be naive to think that they wouldn’t. Google has a keen ability to find and foster both technological and entrepreneurial talent. That will not stop in the people they hire at Google, it stays with people forever. However, it doesn’t mean that the new ideas that former Googlers develop will come from the Google idea bank nor be in direction competition with Google’s business.

Related Reading:

• Googlers going to do themselves in? by Scoble
• Google Entrepreneurs by MacKayNet
• 20% Free Time - The Biggest Threat to Google by Digital Inspiration
• Google’s biggest fear: Googlers by MediaVidea

Recently, Michael Arrington posted Silicon Valley Could Use A Downturn Right About Now causing some interesting and probably healthy conversation. This includes the Valleywag criticism within their coverage The Genie is Out of the Bottle and The Bubble isn’t all bad. Goes with the territory when you are a member of the Technology/Media Triumvirate (TechCrunch, GigaOm, PaidContent). A couple of views jump out at me on the topic overall.

Arrington’s Comments

First, I find it interesting that Arrington, someone who stands to profit most from a healthy technology economy, is the one calling for a downturn. Downturns and bubble bursts have typically not been kind to those whose readership depends heavily on the industry remaining in full throttle mode. Looking back at the first bubble, publications like Red Herring, Industry Standard, Business 2.0 and Wired were the rage and when 2000 hit, the burst hit them as hard as it hit the start-ups they wrote about. As much as I love reading new media outlets covering today’s upswing, I am not confident that there is enough business for them if the bubble bursts and we see a similar downturn.

A Bubble?

Secondly, the bubble itself. I don’t live in the valley so I can’t reflect on Arrington’s view on how “hostile” or different the valley has gotten, how far we are from the purity of entrepreneurism during quieter times. I can reflect, however, on the first bubble from my time at About.com and living through the hype and the burst. The parties were thriving, start-ups were coming out of no where and features were launching as full-fledged companies that had no shot of surviving on their own. In that, I do see some similarities to the late 90’s. But for some reason, I don’t see it as a bubble like before.

My View

I may be wrong, but aside from the incredible acquisitions taking place, I don’t see the same behavior in the venture capital community where unsound ideas are being funded. Yes, there is the set of companies that are simply being built for exit, and they are numerous. But do we see 12 different online bookstores trying to be the next Amazon.com? I don’t believe we do.

The thing that concerns me most is the fact we live in a new web, much of which is based on platform capabilities and web services. So it isn’t as easy to see the duplicity of effort as we should have seen in the late 90’s when it was so obvious. I do not see as many copycats and large number of companies trying to do the same thing (except for perhaps the social networking space). What I see more is each company has their own lense on problem(s) they are trying to solve. The issue is that no economy is going to support so many players in the platform, web services, mash-up space and there will be losers as the environment shakes out. That is healthy.

But is it a bubble? Not if healthy economics and survival of the fittest kicks in. And not if there are winners in each of the key verticals of the new web. In the last 90’s there were a lot of start-ups simply launching with no real problem to solve or customer base to address. That I see as a fundamental difference to today.

The infamous “Echo Chamber”. If you have a blog that concentrates on any topic regarding the web, you are pretty much right in the center of it. It is a term you hear a lot out of the valley. For example, Fred Wilson has 19 different blog posts where he uses the term. My personal favorite is from his post, Outside the Echo Chamber, where he describes his encounter with a typical American:

Our driver said, “why is it that Google is so much better than Yahoo when they are both owned by the same company”.

That type of comment really makes one think. It is challenging to keep perspective about the views of the web outside the “echo chamber” when we are so involved in the web, the innovation taking place around us and the great solutions. As Geoffrey Moore would classify us, we are the innovators and we are the early adopters; there are whole other classes of people AFTER the chasm.

And on that point, does the average person actually care about Twitter? Well, I can’t say that I do either, I haven’t been able to relate to the hype (Renee Blodgett is with on this) so I would welcome some enlightenment about it. But overall, we should understand how the reverb affects us, our immersion in OUR own immersion.

But then again, for every comment like the one above, I get pleasantly surprised by others. Like when my uncle who is trying to price his house said “well, I guess I’ll check out the other houses in my neighborhood on Zillow“.

Other coverage and resource on the Echo Chamber:

• Trapped in the Echo Chamber by Salon.com
• Please Don’t Confuse Blogging with the Echo Chamber
• Web 2.0 Echo Chamber: Another Reality
• sometimes we forget where we are on the curve

Very often it seems to that firms make a fundamental mistake by following the age old adage “the customer is always right” and by extending it to the “customer always knows”. And in the world, and especially in the world of web-based products, that is simply not the case. In case anyone stops reading right here, I am NOT saying that customer input is not important and should not be valued.

I’m currently reading The Ten Faces of Innovation by Tom Kelley at IDEO. It is a fantastic book that I highly recommend to anyone who does product development whether it be web, packaged or even service. Tom makes important points about where good ideas come from and that breakthrough ideas rarely come from the customer directly. He even states that “Most customers are pretty good at comparing your current offerings with their current needs…”

Tom goes on to make his point even more clearly by re-stating a quote from Henry Ford when he said:

“If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse.”

I cannot begin to tell you the number of times in my prior and current roles where the sentence is said “we should ask customers what they want”. That simply misses the mark. Or sometimes your were on the money but by the time you do it, the target moves. Steve Jobs once said, “You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.“

So the solution is to always aim for the pain point. The questions to customers should always be towards the pain points and to what solves a particular problem or objective that they have. Asking customers what they want in your future product is often the equivalent to asking someone what they want for dinner on November 8th, 2011; they simply do not know.

Customer input has its place and it is an invaluable input to understand there here and now. Is your product solving their needs? What should it do right now leading you directly towards incremental improvement ideas. But be careful when looking for customers to spell out where your next innovation is going to come from. They probably do not know and they may not even initially jump for joy the first time you explain or show them it.

Yes, I know this one is a bit off topic. However, I find it to be such a good idea. I admit, I stopped watching The Apprentice a few years ago as the quality dropped. And from a business perspective, it makes complete sense to cancel. The show would have held my interest if the producers would have provided the contestants with more fundamental business tasks (I fully realize this would have been a challenge and run the risk to be fundamentally boring outside of a core audience). But, alas, there may be reason to keep the show on for another season and it comes from Mark Cuban.

In his post, Donald - Need a Job?, in addition to some witty top-10 style commentary, Mark comes up with quite an interesting idea:

…you can go back to NBC and ask for one more season of The Apprentice. Me against You. We let the audience pick the tasks and our teams and we let Rosie O’Donnell and Melania be in the boardroom and decide who wins or loses.

Now for those who like reality television shows, that would be good television. And there has to be something valuable you can do on the web with it. Only way to top it would be Donald Trump vs. Mark Cuban in Survivor.

I was at FAST’s Future of Media meeting in NYC today.  It was a very interesting panel discussion and un-conference which included the following speakers:

Perry Solomon, VP within FAST’s Media practice (and fellow Sloanie)
Tom Smith, Director of Applications Development at Hearst (and fellow Primedia colleague)
Benjamin Rudolph who manages search for Comcast
Benjamin Ropke, enterprise architect for digital asset management at NBC Universal

All of the discussions that took place were interesting including but certainly not limited to meta data, user generated content, search-based product development and multimedia search.  Each of the topics may make for interesting future posts but the one topic that jumped out as a great post topic was something Benjamin Rudolph brought to the fore called “the context of search”.

The basic premise is that search is not just the technology that finds the correct result set based on what the user types in.  There is an “art” to search and that “art” of search is bringing to the user’s attention the results that are most contextual to the site itself.  This means the result sets should have context to the type of information you would think the user is coming to your particular site for.  Yes, a fairly obvious point but one that is lost in the noise often.  And it sounds quite inline with what was discussed in a prior post regarding role-based search applications.

To bring the point home, let’s use an an example or two that were discussed at the event this afternoon:

A user searches for “Tiger”.  Are they looking for Tiger Woods, Tiger (the version of OS X) or Tiger, the animal.  Well, with a large enough archive, all types of results from the same search index would be correct.  When you search for the term “Tiger” at Google, it provides you with results that match each of these.  In fact, all three types of “tiger” comes to you in the first eight links. But the art of the context of search is to align it with the context of the site.  If you are at a sports site, then Tiger Woods is probably the most appropriate.  And if you are at the National Geographic site, the user is probably looking for the big cat.

Another example that was closer to the Comcast business was searching for “24″.  Here context becomes even more interesting.  If you are a user that searches for “24″ at Amazon, the context governs that the user is probably looking for the season-by-season DVD box set.  At Comcast, however, the user is probably looking for the on-air schedule and even the online video collection for the show.  All related to the show “24″ but each site provides information to the user with a lot more contextual sensitivity.

Again, seems fairly obvious but I found it made an interesting enough point to bring it up here for discussion.

This is the question I asked myself after reading Andrew Keen’s post entitled “The message is the master” at The Great Seduction.  And if you ask my wife or some family members, you would get an answer of an emphatic ‘yes’.  It is more the norm lately where I hear some variant of “wow, you are always online” or “is that computer attached to your hands?”  So maybe there is something to be said for being too connected.

It used to be that you had to be conscious of maintaining a good work/life balance.  Now, more often it seems like there is a shift to online/life balance.  And this becomes exceedingly difficult as more aspects of life and managing one’s life move to the online medium.  Not necessarily Second Life online life but other variants like email, FreeCycle, craigslist, eBay, networking sites, news, video, the list goes on and on.

And it becomes even more pervasive with the continuing emergence of mobility.  Take a look at Fred Wilson’s post, Life Without My Laptop where he feels he can do everything now including blogging directly from his blackberry.  And after all, it is a point within itself for the simple fact that I’m writing this post on the train as I head into NYC for FAST’s Future of Media meeting and as my Treo buzzes incessantly as new email hits my inbox.

Andrew links to a fantastic Forbes article wittily entitled Can You Hear Me Now? which discusses quite well how connected we all are now and the effects such devices and non-stop connectivity has on us.  Perhaps we should think twice about the emergence of offline/online applications as I discussed in a previous post about Adobe Apollo.  Should we create yet another new place to be “almost online” or “almost connected”?

To close, as more of life (and life management) moves online, we should always remain conscious of the simple fact that for all the great things emerging on the web, just as much great life and experiences remain just as they did before the coming of the web.  Baseball, reading, simply sitting outside in the sun and relaxing are just a few.  Perhaps that is why I recently purchased the Belkin N1 Wireless router with such fantastic range that I can use the computer in the backyard!

Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2 are getting lots of coverage as of late. The former allows you to store/retrieve data out of the Amazon cloud “paying by the drink” while the latter allows you to computer in the Amazon “cloud”.

At Web 2.0 Expo, Jeff Bezos made an interesting statement about a recent and early-stage offering, Amazon Mechanical Turk. This new venture will leverage “human intelligence” and their cloud via Amazon Web Services. The specific example Jeff mentioned was leveraging humans to process product pages to eliminate duplicates, as task often difficult where products that are identical but represented differently exist on an e-commerce site.  Another Amazon Web Services example was allowing customers to notify Amazon that a shipment is coming and Amazon would allocate the appropriate amount of warehouse space for the inventory. And then, almost obviously, customers can use the Amazon web services to process e-commerce transactions which would subsequently be managed through top-notch Amazon’s supply chain processes.

Aside from the impressive nature of all three web service initiatives, I am most impressed by Amazon’s approach to extend their business in non-obvious ways. Companies so often move from core competencies to drive future revenue which causes a lack of focus organizationally. I thought this initially about Amazon as well (what? Amazon sells books and goods…they sell books.) until reading further into it.

Here is some additional articles and coverage about Amazon Web Services:

• Amazon Web Services blog
• Artificial Intelligence, With Help From the Humans by the New York Times
• Opening Up to Collaboration by BusinessWeek
• Mechanical Turk explanation by WhatIs.com
• Sold on eBay, Shipped by Amazon.com by the New York Times
• Amazon S3 Reaches 5 Billion Stored Objects by TechCrunch

Amazon moved swiftly beyond selling only books to being synonymous with e-commerce. Very similarly, Amazon is leveraging its strengths such as scalable architecture, e-commerce leadership and supply chain/warehouse capabilities to expand its business once again.

Amazon needs to build architectural transaction capacity to support high transaction volume; why not lease it out to the “cloud” in EC2 to offset expense and make money. Amazon needs to build large database systems to support its business and e-commerce product catalogs; why not lease it out to the “cloud” in S3 to offset expenses and make money. Finally, and arguably the most interesting scenario, is Amazon’s bridging of its off-line and online worlds. Amazon needs to build world-class warehouse capacity and supply chain system support; why not lease it out to the “cloud” (so to speak) and (you guessed it) offset these expenses and make money.

Many may say this is a strategic gamble. However, even if this becomes a break-even proposition to support their core business, it may be enough of a win. And in the long term, Amazon will be controlling a large cloud of information and transactions many other businesses. That is not a bad place to be as the web services model continues to expand and establish itself.

Dion Hinchcliffe of ZDNet posted a very compelling read called Enterprise 2.0 as a corporate culture catalyst. It touches on all of the emerging technologies that are being adopted (to the chagrin or championing of CIOs) and also provided a great image visualizing all of the social elements of the Enterprise 2.0 movement. (See below)

A key point in Dion’s post is that these enterprise 2.0 tools are currently being set-up and utilized whether organizations want them to or not. Often, they are being endorsed by innovative leaders in the largest of organizations. In other cases, they are taking place via grassroots movements (aka corporate renegades with corporate credit cards).

It does really shed light on a couple of key concepts. First, the centralized roll-out of tools and technology isn’t the only way people get tools that help them get their jobs done. Organizations are going to have to decide what their strategies will be to deal with this, enable 2.0 capabilities by providing them to the workforce or try to stop them. I’m not sure the latter is possible. Second, users will use the tools that are the easiest to use and assist them the most with their individual and collective productivity. And ultimately, that should be what organizations find important because that is where the corporate ROI will be.

Reverse mentoring is truly upon us…