Group items tagged

Monday, October 29, 2007 The Semantic Web Goes Mainstream Continued from page 1 By Kate Greene Print E-mail Audio » New! Listen - Flash Listen - MP3 Subscribe to podcast What is this? Powered by Share » Digg this Add to del.icio.us Add to Reddit Add to Facebook

Sharepoint, Among Other Upgrades October 17, 2007 — 08:18 PM PDT — by Kristen Nicole — Share This NewsGator, the RSS company, has announced at the Web 2.0 Conference that NewsGator Social Sites are now available for users to incorporate for business use. Social Sites is an add-on for the NewsGator Enterprise Server (NGES), which is a tool that businesses can use as a way to interact, share news, search for items and generally keep up with what’s going on in the company. Included in this launch is the support of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and 3.0. So now you can let your employees use NewsGator Social Sites for communicating in a circular manner around important information. Incorporate RSS feeds, profiles, self-published articles, tags and more into the network to be searched be employees. The syndication of content from SharePoint Server lets users keep up with updates from their desktop, email service or mobile device. Some other enhancements come in the way of actual social networking options. Profiles have been improved so that more relevant information is more readily available, making it easier to find people with the necessary area of expertise, for the necessary information. NewsGator has also recently launched its Facebook application.

Avvo's new competitor It has been a few weeks since I mentioned Avvo, the controversial Seattle online attorney rating service that was promptly sued after its debut in June. Now, it turns out that Avvo will be facing some competition from an Arlington, Va.-based startup called HireTrade that has created a "legal marketplace" in which attorneys can post online profiles and clients can attempt to find attorneys to work on their cases. For now, the company is focusing on the legal markets in Washington, D.C., New York and Philadelphia, but it plans to expand to other geographic areas in the future. HireTrade says its HourlyValue Ratings System taps the knowledge of clients to rate attorneys, a method that it believes is more effective than a 1 to 10 rating scale like what Avvo employs. (HireTrade says it will not post a rating of an attorney until it accumulates three projects/reviews of the attorney.) At the present time, HireTrade's database does not appear to be as robust as Avvo's. I searched for three different attorney names and did not get a result or an attorney rating. (Similar searches on Avvo returned hundreds of attorneys.) Still, I asked HireTrade Chief Executive Neil Sandhu how his company is different from Avvo. Here's what he said: We think that existing professional ratings systems, including most numerical ratings systems, result in arbitrary values as it is impossible for a numerical algorithm to really capture every single nuance of a professional's background or decide what is the correct weight to place on different items of information such as experience, education, etc. (not to mention the fact that it appears that some of these systems merely assign higher scores to those professionals who take the time to fill out their profiles in more detail). Thus, meaningful comparisons are difficult to draw from the numerical values that result. Furthermore, there is very little actual intrinsic value in any number generated by such a system. And he continued: But what does a 5.0, 7.5, or 10 really signify when it comes to the seller of a service and, even if a numerical system was somehow perfect at capturing and interpreting data, can you really effectively compare someone who has a 8.8 to someone who has a 9.5--what if the person with an 8.8 has worked on more difficult matters and the person with the 9.5 has worked a long time and done very well with less difficult work? When the service is at the heart of what is being sold, we think an entirely different system must be used. Those are also some of the arguments made in the lawsuit against Avvo. Posted by document.writeln(showE2("johncook","seattlepi.com","John Cook"))John Cook John Cook at August 27, 2007 11:35 a.m.Category: Avvo Comments #48664Posted by unregistered user at 8/27/07 8:33 p.m.hey. i told those guys to turn their site into a myspace for lawyers but nooooo. what do i know Report violation #48671Posted by unregistered user at 8/27/07 9:31 p.m.Avvo's primary competition is certainly their own misguided idea and the shark who pounced on their inane offering. Report violation

Microsoft invests $240M in Facebook, as Facebook develops ad product By Doug Sherrets 10.24.07 Updated Microsoft has snagged a deal to invest $240 million into popular social network Facebook, valuing the company at $15 billion — a 1.6 percent stake. Microsoft has also agreed to advertise on Facebook in international markets. We listened in on a well-staged official press conference call that the two companies did this afternoon — you can read most of the same information in the press release. Here are some highlights: Microsoft needs the international ad agreement because Facebook says nearly 60 percent of its 50 million active users are based outside of the US. Facebook also claims to be gaining 200,000 new users per day, worldwide.

Facebook’s emergence into a major Internet player has been compared to Google’s rocketship rise a few years ago.