Skip to main content

Home/ InsightNG/ Group items tagged Context

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Neil Movold

Context Will Drive The Future Of Web Content Management - 0 views

  • By 2013, Gartner contends, 40% of large companies will have context-aware computing projects on the way. Context is driving content and intelligent customer interactions, delivering Web experiences that will engage site visitors and deliver better business results.
  • Web content management is at the most significant inflection point in its 15-year history. It's now all about the context.
  •  
    Web content management is at the most significant inflection point in its 15-year history. It's now all about the context. By 2013, Gartner contends, 40% of large companies will have context-aware computing projects on the way. Context is driving content and intelligent customer interactions, delivering Web experiences that will engage site visitors and deliver better business results.
Neil Movold

Social Capital - The Key to Success for the 21st Century Organization - 0 views

  • The new advantage is context – how internal and external content is interpreted, combined, made sense of, and converted to new products and services. Creating competitive context requires social capital – the ability to find, utilize and combine the skills, knowledge and experience of others, inside and outside of the organization. Social capital is derived from employees’ professional and business networks. T
  •  
    In the knowledge economy, content is no longer sufficient - everyone has access to a multitude of content. You cannot compete on what everyone knows. As you move up the hierarchy, it becomes more difficult to compete on individual competency - everyone is highly skilled and experienced at the top. It is hard to compete when everyone is so similar. The new advantage is context - how internal and external content is interpreted, combined, made sense of, and converted to new products and services. Creating competitive context requires social capital - the ability to find, utilize and combine the skills, knowledge and experience of others, inside and outside of the organization. Social capital is derived from employees' professional and business networks. The new competitive landscape requires focusing on between-employee factors, the connections that combine to create new processes, products and services. Social capital encompasses communities of practice, knowledge exchanges, information flows, interest groups, social networks and other emergent connections between employees, suppliers, regulators, partners and customers.
Neil Movold

The Pull of Narrative - In Search of Persistent Context - 1 views

  •  
    We live in a world of ever more change and choice, a world where we have far more opportunity than ever to achieve our potential. That kind of world is enormously exciting, and full of options. But it is also highly disorienting, threatening to overwhelm us with sensory and mental overload.  In that kind of world, the ability to provide persistent context becomes paradoxically ever more valuable. Persistent context helps to orient us and connect us in ways that can accelerate our efforts to achieve our potential.
Neil Movold

Personal Web searching in the age of Semantic Capitalism - 1 views

  •  
    Web search engines have become indispensable tools for finding information online effectively. As the range of information, context and users of Internet searches has grown, the relationship between the search query, search interest and user has become more tenuous. Not all users are seeking the same information, even if they use the same query term. Thus, the quality of search results has, at least potentially, been decreasing. Search engines have begun to respond to this problem by trying to personalise search in order to deliver more relevant results to the users. A query is now evaluated in the context of a user's search history and other data compiled into a personal profile and associated with statistical groups. This, at least, is the promise stated by the search engines themselves. This paper tries to assess the current reality of the personalisation of search results. We analyse the mechanisms of personalisation in the case of Google web search by empirically testing three commonly held assumptions about what personalisation does. To do this, we developed new digital methods which are explained here. The findings suggest that Google personal search does not fully provide the much-touted benefits for its search users. More likely, it seems to serve the interest of advertisers in providing more relevant audiences to them.
Neil Movold

Content Curation Tools: 5 Different Approaches - 0 views

  •  
    With the unprecedented levels of published information, it is very difficult for Internet users to stay up to date on what matters to them. This situation is especially dramatic for information professionals that must remain aware of new happenings in order to stay ahead of the curve. Content curation is the process of picking the most relevant and valuable content for a specific audience. There is an important human component to content discovery and curation because only users can fully understand the context of the information they are working with. Technology can support content curation by computing large volumes of information on behalf of the user by helping to discover new pieces of Web information.
Neil Movold

The Future of Context: Mobile Reading from Google to Flipboard to FLUD - 0 views

  •  
    Reading is changing. And arguably, even more than e-readers, tablets, or "readers' tablets," smartphones are changing it.
Neil Movold

Exploring The "Labs" Trend in Consumer Startups - 0 views

  •  
    In the world of technology companies, the "labs" concept and nomenclature found a friendly home. Microsoft Research has FUSE Labs, there's HP Labs, and Mozilla Labs, and let's not forget the once-mighty Google Labs (R.I.P.), among many others. Digging into the history of big tech "labs" would be the subject worthy of a book, of course, but in the context of this narrow post, it's worth briefly noting that for those that make things and are builders, every big company needed to have something like this for branding, recruiting, and to keep the innovation engine humming as their corporate parents grew larger and more bureaucratic.  Perhaps each one wasn't referred to as a "lab" explicitly in name, as Amazon has A9 and Google now has Google X. No matter the name, there's something powerful in the word that reminds us of the old chem lab and that spirit of experimentation.
Neil Movold

Gamification: Measuring and influencing user behavior - 0 views

  •  
    Games are fun-well, unless you're playing with your super-competitive friend. And we all have one, don't we? Still, for the most part, games are entertaining-and that's why gamification has taken off as a technique to entice people to adopt various applications and processes. Gamification is defined as the use of game design techniques, game thinking, and game mechanics to enhance non-game contexts. In other words, gamification gets people interested in something they otherwise wouldn't notice while also encouraging them to compete in game-like activities.
Neil Movold

The News Challenge-winning PANDA Project aims to make research easier in the newsroom - 1 views

  •  
    The PANDA Project, a winner of this year's Knight News Challenge, is what developer Brian Boyer calls a "newsroom data application," a tool that helps find context and relationships on the fly. Boyer, the news applications editor at the Chicago Tribune, will lead the project, which plans to create a set of web-based open source tools that will allow any newsroom to set up their own PANDA to analyze data whenever the need arises.
Neil Movold

Adding Gamification to Your Community - 0 views

  • According to a definition in the Gamification Wiki,"Game Mechanics are constructs of rules and feedback loops intended to produce enjoyable gameplay."
  • To break the definition into simpler terms, game mechanics let you build features that are fun and addictive. In my earlier gamification post, I provided a table that compared game mechanics to human desires.  This is just a subset of possible types of game mechanics that could be incorporated into a community or website.
  •  
    I wrote a post about Gamification last week and this week, I want to dive into more detail about how to apply gamification and game mechanics to a community site.  It is interesting to see gamification now being applied in a marketing/website/community context, because many marketers and community managers have already been using these techniques to build engagement for several years.  But I am more than willing to jump on the gamification bandwagon if it helps push the boundaries for other marketers and community managers.
Neil Movold

#5 The Four Most Powerful Types of Creative Thinking - 0 views

  • The word insight has several different meanings, but in the context of creative thinking it means an idea that appears in the mind as if from nowhere, with no immediately preceding conscious thought or effort. It’s the proverbial ‘Aha!’ or ‘Eureka!’ moment, when an idea pops into your mind out of the blue. There are many accounts of creative breakthroughs made through insight, from Archimedes in the bath tub onwards. All of them follow the same basic pattern: Working hard to solve a problem. Getting stuck and/or taking a break. A flash of insight bringing the solution to the problem.
  •  
    "Considering I'm a creative coach, some people are surprised to learn I'm a little sceptical about creative thinking techniques. For one thing, there's a lot more to creativity than thinking. It's possible to sit around having lots of creative thoughts, but without actually making anything of them. But if you start making something, creative ideas seem to emerge naturally out of the process. So if I had to choose, I'd say creative doing beats creative thinking. And for another thing, a lot of 'creative thinking techniques' leave me cold. Brainstorming, lateral thinking and (shudder) thinking outside the box have always felt a bit corporate and contrived to me. I've never really used them myself, and after working with hundreds of artists and creatives over the last 14 years, I've come across plenty of other creative professionals who don't use them. I don't think you can reduce creative thinking to a set of techniques. And I don't think the process is as conscious and deliberate as these approaches imply."
Neil Movold

Give Me a Sign: What Do Things Mean on the Semantic Web? - 0 views

  • From this discussion, we can assert with respect to the use of URIs as “names” that: In all cases, URIs are pointers to a particular referent In some cases, URIs do act to “name” some things Yet, even when used as “names,” there can be ambiguity as to what exactly the referent is that is denoted by the name Resolving what such “names” mean is a matter of context and reference to further information or links, and Because URIs may act as “names”, it is appropriate to consider social conventions and contracts (e.g., trademarks, brands, legal status) in adjudicating who can own the URI. In summary, I think we can say that URIs may act as names, but not in all or most cases, and when used as such are often ambiguous. Absolutely associating URIs as names is way too heavy a burden, and incorrect in most cases.
  •  
    The crowning achievement of the semantc Web is the simple use of URIs to identify data. Further, if the URI identifier can resolve to a representation of that data, it now becomes an integral part of the HTTP access protocol of the Web while providing a unique identifier for the data. These innovations provide the basis for distributed data at global scale, all accessible via Web devices such as browsers and smartphones that are now a ubiquitous part of our daily lives. Yet, despite these profound and simple innovations, the semantic Web's designers and early practitioners and advocates have been mired in a muddled, metaphysical argument of at least a decade over what these URIs mean, what they reference, and what their actual true identity is. These muddles about naming and identity, it might be argued, are due to computer scientists and programmers trying to grapple with issues more properly the domain of philosophers and linguists. But that would be unfair. For philosophers and linguists themselves have for centuries also grappled with these same conundrums [1]. As I argue in this piece, part of the muddle results from attempting to do too much with URIs while another part results from not doing enough. I am also not trying to directly enter the fray of current standards deliberations. (Despite a decade of controversy, I optimistically believe that the messy process of argument and consensus building will work itself out [2].) What I am trying to do in this piece, however, is to look to one of America's pre-eminent philosophers and logicians, Charles Sanders Peirce (pronounced "purse"), to inform how these controversies of naming, identity and meaning may be dissected and resolved.
Neil Movold

Conversations That Share Tacit Knowledge - 0 views

  • Now when I’m asked, “What's the most effective way for people to share their tacit knowledge?” I always think of Hans and the answer I give is: “Tacit knowledge needs to be shared through conversation.” My reasoning is as follows. Our tacit knowledge is drawn from our experience as well as our years of study and is stored in bits and pieces in our brain, that is, it is not stored as answers or explanations but as fragments. What we call “tacit knowledge” is the human ability to draw on those fragments to construct a response to a new problem or question. Tacit knowledge is particularly useful when we are faced with a complex problem. By complex I mean a problem that does not have a factual, right or wrong answer, for example, "What architectural design would best fit this physical space and meet the needs of the client?" or “How would you stop an oil leak 5000 feet under water?” When an expert like Joachim faces a complex problem he brings together those bits and pieces of his experience and study that are relevant to that specific problem situation and puts those together to form a solution. Because he is embedded in the situation he knows the context and the end goal. In bringing together those bits and pieces that are in his head, he conducts, what Don Schon would call, a “reflective conversation with the situation.”
  • Tacit knowledge, then, is constructed in response to a question or to a problem at a specific moment in time. It is a magnificent human capability we have to be able to continually reconstruct what we know into new forms to face new situations.
  •  
    Now when I'm asked, "What's the most effective way for people to share their tacit knowledge?" I always think of Hans and the answer I give is: "Tacit knowledge needs to be shared through conversation." My reasoning is as follows. Our tacit knowledge is drawn from our experience as well as our years of study and is stored in bits and pieces in our brain, that is, it is not stored as answers or explanations but as fragments. What we call "tacit knowledge" is the human ability to draw on those fragments to construct a response to a new problem or question.
Neil Movold

Search Today and Beyond: Optimizing for the Semantic Web | Innovation Insights | Wired.com - 0 views

  • The search engine strives to understand not just the words, but their context, hence the term semantic search.
  • Google’s new “Hummingbird” algorithm allows the user to conduct what Google calls “conversational searches”. By this they mean that the search engine will take an entire sentence into account, not just the words in the sentence.
  •  
    "Search has changed dramatically over the past year and semantic technology has been at the center of it all. Consumers increasingly expect search engines to understand natural language and perceive the intent behind the words they type in, and search engine algorithms are rising to this challenge. This evolution in search has dramatic implications for marketers, consumers, technology developers and content creators - and it's still the early days for this rapidly changing environment. Here is an overview of how search technology is changing, how these changes may affect you and what you can do to market your business more effectively in the new era of search."
Neil Movold

Accidental Architectures and the Future of Intelligent Networks - 0 views

  •  
    "Not everything happens for a reason in the world of information management. Not every table or field in a database got where it wound up via some master plan. More often than not, a company's information architecture has grown and evolved organically, like a sort of digital mycelium, spreading underground for years, ultimately providing the infrastructure for all manner of analytical insights to blossom somewhere down the line. The obvious casualties of these "accidental architectures" (as companies like EMC and Talend are calling them) are the elusive goals of clarity and certainty. That's why residential construction engineers take a vastly more disciplined approach when working with their architect counterparts. You wouldn't want an accidental architecture for your three-story home, would you? No one in their right mind would want any such thing."
Neil Movold

MIT Entrepreneurship Review | How the Interest Graph will shape the future of the web - 0 views

  • The Interest Graph has been described as the “middle ground between Google and Facebook – between search, advertising, and the social graph”. Simply put, Google creates their version of the Interest Graph by mining my search queries and other data collected online, for example through Gmail or Google Maps.  It then offers advertisers a way to personalize their messages. One of the problems is the often high noise level in the data due to the lack of context (e.g. I might be looking up something for a friend rather than myself), which decreases relevancy. Recently, there has been a lot of buzz around social search as studies have shown that friend recommendations are much more powerful than traditional advertising in influencing consumer behavior and purchasing decisions.
  •  
    What do Color, Quora, Hunch, Blippy, and StockTwits have in common? They are examples of companies that generate value for their users by leveraging the concept of the Interest Graph. The list also features some of the most promising startups right now, having raised close to $100 million in venture funding. Pure coincidence?
Neil Hambleton

The dangers of the internet: Invisible sieve | The Economist - 0 views

  •  
    Call a friend in another city or a foreign country, and ask them to Google something at the same time as you. The results will be different... "The result is a "filter bubble", which he defines as "a unique universe of information for each of us", meaning that we are less likely to encounter information online that challenges our existing views or sparks serendipitous connections. "
Neil Movold

The Future Of Technology Isn't Mobile, It's Contextual - 0 views

  • It’s called situational awareness.
  • Our senses pull in a multitude of information, contrast it to past experience and personality traits, and present us with a set of options for how to act or react.
  • it selects and acts upon the preferred path. This process—our fundamental ability to interpret and act on the situations in which we find ourselves—has barely evolved since we were sublingual primates living on the Veldt.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • Our senses aren’t attuned to modern life. A lot of the data needed to make good decisions are unreliable or nonexistent. And that’s a problem.
  • contextual computing
  • Always-present computers, able to sense the objective and subjective aspects of a given situation, will augment our ability to perceive and act in the moment based on where we are, who we’re with, and our past experiences. These are our sixth, seventh, and eighth senses.
  • These merely scratch the surface. The adoption of contextual computing—combinations of hardware, software, networks, and services that use deep understanding of the user to create tailored, relevant actions that the user can take—is contingent on the spread of new platforms.
  • It’s interesting because it’s always with the user and because it’s equipped with sensors.
  • It’s a cultural moment that’s not dissimilar to the way in which graphical, and then networked computing, were introduced in conceptual and technical forms 10 years before reaching commercial success.
  • identified four data graphs essential to the rise of contextual computing: social, interest, behavior, and personal.
  • There are legitimate ethical concerns about each of these graphs. They throw into relief the larger questions of privacy policy we’re currently wrestling with as a culture: Too much disclosure of the social graph can lead to friends feeling that you’re tattling on them to a corporation.
  • In an ideal contextual computing state, this graph would be complete—so gentle nudges by software and services can bring together two people who are strangers but who could get along brilliantly and are in the same place at the same time.
  • Given that psychology still struggles to explain exactly how our personal identities function, it’s not surprising that documenting such information in a computable form is slow to emerge.
  • A more successful example is Evernote, which has built a large business based on making it incredibly easy and secure to document both recently consumed information and your innermost thoughts.
  • It cannot yet tackle the way your curiosity might lead you to new directions. And it could never effectively recommend a restaurant or a vacation spot based on what it knows you read.
  • As Bill Gates astutely pointed out, "There’s a tendency to overestimate how much things will change in two years and underestimate how much change will occur over 10 years."
  • By combining a task with broad and relevant sets of data about us and the context in which we live, contextual computing will generate relevant options for us, just as our brains do when we hear footsteps on a lonely street today.
  •  
    "NEXT UP: MACHINES THAT UNDERSTAND YOU AND EVERYTHING YOU CARE ABOUT, ANTICIPATE YOUR BEHAVIOR AND EMOTIONS, ABSORB YOUR SOCIAL GRAPH, INTERPRET YOUR INTENTIONS, AND MAKE LIFE, UM, "EASIER.""
1 - 19 of 19
Showing 20 items per page