We need ambient findability. We need smart ways of guiding people towards the content they’d like to see — with categorization and search playing complementary goals.Getting people to the content they want to see, using the search functionality your average newspaper website has on offer, is not exactly what I’d describe as fast or effortless. Full-text search can be a daunting experience. We need some sort of a sitemap that acts as a gateway to our content and is broader than our primary navigation.We need deep links to the topics that are currently on people’s mind and that are being talked about.How neat would it be if we could also browse by mood or by genre?We need quick links to topic pages about related persons, organizations, events and locations.We need links to terms on Wikipedia (e.g. using Apture) or the ability to look things up in a dictionary (like the one they have over at the New York Times)Related content should be referred to either using tags or if you’re really hip, using relationships. Search behavior doesn’t always revolve around a big input box and a submit button.Faceted search needs facets: ways of splitting up search results into meaningful categories. Rich metadata and a well thought-out categorization scheme is a prequisite.Online search should work similarly to asking a question to a flesh-and-blood reporter
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Seeker Friendly - the Future of Search [29Apr10] - 0 views
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Can't find what you're looking for? Here is how web developers could make your search a lot less difficult.
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Internet security: cookie monster unleashed following EU ruling [28May11] - 0 views
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Warning notices at the top of websites, annoying pop-up windows, forms asking for your consent ... fears have been voiced that browsing the web could become more complicated and time-consuming as a result of "challenging" new EU rules on internet cookies.They are small text files put on to our computers by websites so they can remember things about us, and almost every site uses them.But at one minute past midnight on Thursday 26 May, the law surrounding the way they are used changed.
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From that date, all UK businesses and organisations running websites in this country were required to obtain people's consent before they install cookies on their machines.Some experts have said that where the new rules could have a big impact is if people are looking at lots of different sites they have no relationship with. For example, you might be browsing a dozen online retailers looking for the best price on an item. The worst-case scenario is that every time you visit a new site, you face a pop-up window, a "splash page" (which comes up before the home page) or a bar at the top, informing you about how cookies are used on the site, and asking for your consent.
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The Singularity Just Got A Lot Closer - 0 views
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The Topic-Mapper software development kit (SDK) by ai-one inc. reads and understands unstructured data without any human intervention. It allows developers to build artificial intelligence into almost any software program.
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Unlike other machine learning approaches, ai-one’s technology extracts the inherent meaning of data without the need for any external references. A team of researchers spent more than eight years and $6.5 million building what they call “biologically inspired intelligence“ that works like a brain.
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First, it automatically creates what ai-one describes as a “lightweight ontology” (LWO), The system determines the relationships between data elements as they are fed into the system. The primary benefit of LWO is that it is completely objective -- it makes associations without editorial (human) bias. LWOs are also very adaptive, automatically recalculating when ingesting new data. Unlike traditional ontologies, LWOs require no maintenance.
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It works like a brain... the more it reads, the more it learns, the better it gets at recognizing patterns and answering questions. http://diigo.com/0hqgr
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Windows 8 ARM Will Not Support Legacy Software [19May11] - 0 views
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"Intel, speaking out of turn and damaging its intimate relationship with Microsoft, has revealed that legacy x86-compiled software will not work on the ARM version of Windows 8. Microsoft has promised that the Office suite will be available on Windows 8 ARM, but beyond that, nothing. While this means there won't be many compatible apps at launch, it also means this will be the first full-bodied version of Windows that won't (initially) be susceptible to viruses and malware..."
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Social friending - William Deresiewicz on the meaning of friendship [18Jun10] - 0 views
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Having been relegated to our screens, are our friendships now anything more than a form of distraction?
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Facebook isn’t the whole of contemporary friendship, but it sure looks a lot like its future. Yet Facebook—and MySpace, and Twitter, and whatever we’re stampeding for next—are just the latest stages of a long attenuation. They’ve accelerated the fragmentation of consciousness, but they didn’t initiate it.
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We’re busy people; we want our friendships fun and friction-free.
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Far from being ordinary and universal, friendship, for the ancients, was rare, precious, and hard-won. In a world ordered by relations of kin and kingdom, its elective affinities were exceptional, even subversive, cutting across established lines of allegiance.
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Friendship was a high calling, demanding extraordinary qualities of character—rooted in virtue,
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Christian thought discouraged intense personal bonds, for the heart should be turned to God.
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The classical notion of friendship was revived, along with other ancient modes of feeling, by the Renaissance. Truth and virtue, again,
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The modern temper runs toward unrestricted fluidity and flexibility, the endless play of possibility, and so is perfectly suited to the informal, improvisational nature of friendship. We can be friends with whomever we want, however we want, for as long as we want.
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in ancient times
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The culture of group friendship reached its apogee in the 1960s. Two of the counterculture’s most salient and ideologically charged social forms were the commune—a community of friends in self-imagined retreat from a heartlessly corporatized society—and the rock’n’roll “band” (not “group” or “combo”), its name evoking Shakespeare’s “band of brothers” and Robin Hood’s band of Merry Men, its great exemplar the Beatles.
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Friendship is devolving, in other words, from a relationship to a feeling—from something people share to something each of us hugs privately to ourselves in the loneliness of our electronic caves, rearranging the tokens of connection like a lonely child playing with dolls.
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And now friendship, which arose to its present importance as a replacement for community, is going the same way. We have “friends,” just as we belong to “communities.” Scanning my Facebook page gives me, precisely, a “sense” of connection. Not an actual connection, just a sense.
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The more people we know, the lonelier we get.
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But when I think about my friends, what makes them who they are, and why I love them, it is not the names of their siblings that come to mind, or their fear of spiders. It is their qualities of character. This one’s emotional generosity, that one’s moral seriousness, the dark humor of a third.
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So information replaces experience, as it has throughout our culture.
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Character, revealed through action: the two eternal elements of narrative. In order to know people, you have to listen to their stories. (…)
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No solitude, no friendship, no space for refusal—the exact contemporary paradigm.
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The Agile Model comes to Management, Learning, and Human Resources [17Sep11] - 0 views
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This agile model (which is now well known in Silicon Valley and in the software engineering world) has transformed software. It has many benefits: it reduces the long cycle times that create risk; it enables engineers to take advantage of the fact that requirements change quickly; and it honors the fact that people perform best when they work on small projects they can finish quickly.
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Agile is also built on the understanding that people learn in small chunks - so while it may in fact take a year or two to build a highly complex website, no person needs to try to understand the entire engineering program in advance. And as the image on the right shows, daily work becomes a part of a bigger project in a continuous, dynamic process.
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Look at where Agile fits in Management and HR:
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Traditional annual performance appraisals use an older "waterfall" method - continuous feedback and recognition is an "agile" approach.
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Traditional formal training and certification is a "waterfall" model - rapid e-learning and informal learning is an "agile" approach.
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Top down cascading goals are a "waterfall" approach - rapidly updated "objectives and key results" (sometimes called OKR - widely used at Google) is an "agile" model.
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Traditional annual rewards and bonuses are a "waterfall" model - continuous recognition and social recognition systems are an "agile" model.
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The annual employee engagement survey is a "waterfall" model - continuous online idea factories and open blogs are an "agile" model for employee engagement.
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The annual development planning process is a "waterfall" model - an ongoing coaching relationship is an "agile" model for leadership.
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The traditional recruiting process is a "waterfall" model - this is being replaced by a continuous process of social recruiting and referral-based recruiting which can be rolled out in a few hours.
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Consider what has happened to the corporate training industry. While formal education and training has not disappeared, today people want to learn "on the job" through informal and social networks on a real-time basis. This is a form of "agile learning"
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Smashing The Clock [11Dec06] - 0 views
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At most companies, going AWOL during daylight hours would be grounds for a pink slip. Not at Best Buy. The nation's leading electronics retailer has embarked on a radical--if risky--experiment to transform a culture once known for killer hours and herd-riding bosses. The endeavor, called ROWE, for "results-only work environment," seeks to demolish decades-old business dogma that equates physical presence with productivity. The goal at Best Buy is to judge performance on output instead of hours.
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Best Buy did not invent the post-geographic office. Tech companies have been going bedouin for several years. At IBM (IBM ), 40% of the workforce has no official office; at AT&T, a third of managers are untethered. Sun Microsystems Inc. (SUNW ) calculates that it's saved $400 million over six years in real estate costs by allowing nearly half of all employees to work anywhere they want. And this trend seems to have legs.
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Another thing about this experiment: It wasn't imposed from the top down. It began as a covert guerrilla action that spread virally and eventually became a revolution. So secret was the operation that Chief Executive Brad Anderson only learned the details two years after it began transforming his company. Such bottom-up, stealth innovation is exactly the kind of thing Anderson encourages.
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But arguably no big business has smashed the clock quite so resolutely as Best Buy. The official policy for this post-face-time, location-agnostic way of working is that people are free to work wherever they want, whenever they want, as long as they get their work done.
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So bullish are Anderson and his team on the idea that they have formed a subsidiary called CultureRx, set up to help other companies go clockless. CultureRx expects to sign up at least one large client in the coming months.
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It seems to be working. Since the program's implementation, average voluntary turnover has fallen drastically, CultureRx says. Meanwhile, Best Buy notes that productivity is up an average 35% in departments that have switched to ROWE.
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"It wasn't hugs and smiles," she says of Ressler's and Thompson's campaign. "Managers in the old mental model were totally irritated." In the e-learning division, many of Wells's older co-workers (read 40-year-olds; the average age at Best Buy is 36) expressed resentment over the change, insisting that work relationships are better face-to-face, not screen-to-screen. "We have people in our group who are like, `I'm not going to do it,'" says Wells, who likes to sleep in and doesn't own an alarm clock. "I'm like, `that's fine, but I'm outta here.'" In enemy circles, Ressler and Thompson are known to this day as "those two" and "the subversives."
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`How are you going to measure this so you know you're getting the same productivity out of people?'"
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Achen could see that not only was his team's productivity up, but engagement scores, or measuring job satisfaction and retention, were the highest in the dot-com division's history.
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"For years I had been focused on the wrong currency," says Thompson. "I was always looking to see if people were here. I should have been looking at what they were getting done."
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Achen says he would never go back. Orders processed by people who are not working in the office are up 13% to 18% over those who are. ROWE'ers are posting higher metrics for quality, too. Achen says he believes that's due to the new office paradox: Given the constant distractions, it sometimes feels impossible to get any work done at work.
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But it's worth remembering that most big companies fail to grow at the rate of inflation. That's true in part because the bigger the company gets, the harder it is to get the best out of each and every employee. ROWE is one of Best Buy's answers to avoiding that fate. "The old way of managing and looking at work isn't going to work anymore," says Ressler. "We want to revolutionize the way work gets done." Admit it, you're rooting for them, too.
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Connect the nation (2) [20Sep11] - 0 views
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Linking the data together is proving to be one of the sticking points for the Internet of things, according to Maurizio Pilu, lead technologist at the UK government’s Technology Strategy Board (TSB). The TSB recently held an over-subscribed workshop to discuss the possibilities and challenges facing the ‘Internet of things’. “The feeling was that applications and services that could make money, and that could change our lives, are not emerging fast enough,” explains Pilu. “And one of the main reasons is that data produced by ‘things’ is not interoperable, due to the fragmentation of the industry.”
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Maurizio Pilu believes the UK has three strong advantages when it comes to the Internet of things. “We have world-class communications technology research base; we are strong at data analytics; and we are an early adopter of technologies like this,” he says.
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“But there is one big disadvantage,” he says. “This stuff costs money, and like other countries, the UK is going through a period of cautious investment decisions.”
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However, Pilu also remarks that China’s approach to the technology is different. “They see this as a big IT system which they install in a given city, with a huge control room where you can see everything,” he says. “That’s a very expensive approach, and it’s also very rigid.” “In the UK however, these big ticket investments are out of the question, so we have to be agile, work together, form relationships, prototype projects and fail quickly.”
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Current Analysis Ranks AT&T a Top Provider of Machine-to-Machine Services [21June11] - 0 views
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According to the Current Analysis report, AT&T's strengths include: Providing "custom solutions" for companies, including expanded professional services, targeted to specific business needs Offering cost-effective services to global customers, with expanding global M2M footprint Developing key relationships with platform providers to provide enhanced services for M2M customers Excellent traction with 12 million Connected Devices in Q1-11 "AT&T continues to add value to its M2M solutions," wrote Kathryn Weldon, Principal Analyst, Current Analysis. "AT&T has made a number of recent alliance announcements with application platform providers, which adds to its arsenal of solutions."
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