news aggregator

This year’s Gilbane SF started with a day of pre-conference workshops. In one of them — Managing the Web: The Fundamentals of Web Operations Management — Lisa Welchman, founding partner of WelchmanPierpoint, discussed the challenges faced by today’s web teams.

"Web managers tend to have the world wide web on their shoulders," said Welchman, emphasizing the enormity of complexities that go into web operations management. If web operations management is not done right, one of the outcomes is poor web experience, resulting in lost revenue. But there are ways to make your web operations efficient and successful.

Wij hebben 2 katten ter adoptie: 1 witte en 1 zwarte. Ze zijn 4 jaar oud, we hebben ze meegebracht uit New York 2 jaar geleden. Over 1 maand vertrekken we naar Colombia en we kunnen ze (spijtig genoeg!!) onmogelijk meenemen, dus we zoeken iemand om 1 van de poezen (of beiden) te adopteren.

Het zijn 2 vrouwtjes. Ze woonden de eerste 2 jaar in het appartement in New York, maar zijn nu gewoon buiten te wonen, dus ze kunnen binnen of buiten. Ze zijn beiden gesteriliseerd en gevaccineerd en hebben een chip ingeplant. Ze zijn ook zindelijk (binnenshuis). Het zijn heel lieve katten, vriendelijk in de omgang.

We kunnen ze spijtig genoeg dus onmogelijk meenemen, bel ons op 03 / 325 88 70 or email petervandijck @ gmail dot com als je meer informatie wil.

Stuur deze webpagina ook door naar je vrienden, alvast bedankt!

Foto van toen ze nog klein waren:

Foto’s van nu:

Bel ons op 03 / 325 88 70 or email petervandijck @ gmail dot com

We talked about the big changes coming for MODx (news, site) earlier this year and now we are seeing those changes come to fruition. Beta 1 of the new MODx Revolution 2.0 is ready to download and test and there are some major changes in this open source web content management system.

Lokman Tsui is giving a Berkman talk called “Beyond Objectivity: Global Voices and the future of Journalism.” This is based on research he’s been doing for his doctoral dissertation.

NOTE: Live-blogging. Getting things wrong. Missing points. Omitting key information. Introducing artificial choppiness. Over-emphasizing small matters. Paraphrasing badly. Not running a spellpchecker. Mangling other people’s ideas and words. You are warned, people.

Lokman has been long interested in the Chinese Internet. He was born and raised in Amsterdam, and says that the Dutch often don’t like difference and diversity; they’re struggling with the idea of cultural complexity. After wrestling with what to study, he talked with Andrew Lih and came away wanting to study something that works but that we don’t understand well. Lokman chose Global Voices.

He’s interested in “how the world comes to know itself.” Lokman thinks journalism is crucial to this. James Carrey [sp?]: The public is what forms when people get together to talk about the news. Now, with the Internet, we have strangers everywhere. “What does that mean for the kind of journalism we want?” Lokman cites Habermas. We need to re-think journalism. “My purpose here is not to celebrate the Internet” or to dismiss the dangers, but to see it as an historic opportunity. By thinking about the global nature of communication, we can design better institutions.

His research begins with a study of GV as a a “newsroom.” What are the journalists’ routines? How do they socialize? How do they get news? E.g., it used to be easy and convenient to get info from gov’t sources, leading to a bias towards those sources. But the GV newsroom is different. Multicultural, global. And the newsroom is online, which leads to different interactions and shapes the news. We need a new conceptual toolkit to understand it.

Is GV journalism at all? GV is the trickster of journalism, in Lewis Hyde’s sense: it provokes us to respond and develop. GV and journalism are both ways of seeing. There are three ideals of journalism, intertwined with ideals of democracy. (1) Professional J, with liberal democracy, aimed at providing information. (2) Alternative media, with participatory democracy, aimed at representation. (3) Public journalism along with deliberative democracy, aimed at conversation.For a long time, we’ve taken objectivity as the “gold standard” of journalism. But this doesn’t make sense for public journalism; it makes no sense to ask whether a conversation is objectivity. How do we judge conversations? GV gives some hints. GV supports “communicative” democracy (a la Iris Young) , aiming at conversation, and replacing objectivity with hospitality. Habermas was thinking of coffee houses where people have to bracket differences to enable conversation. Hospitality enables conversations even when there’s a disparity of power. Differences can be very useful in having a good conversation. E.g., the powerful host serves the guest, subverting the power relationship. That’s hospitality. It’s a way of judging journalism as well, seeking to include difference and diversity.

Hospitality goes back to Kant’s “Perpetual Peace.” His third law suggests that hospitality is a right based on the fact that we share a world. Kant says we cannot refuse a visitor if it will lead to his/her destruction. Hospitality is about access, recognition, and appropriate response. Arendt wrote about intersubjectivity as a way toward truth. We now have an abundance of stories on line. The constraints have changed, so the way we judge journalism should change. The challenge is that, while the cost of speech as gone down, our attention is still scarce.At RottenTomatoes.com, the objectivity is in the dry summary. But the subjective reviews are more interesting and useful. The professionals should aggregate and amplify all these voices. You need to put them all together. What would an aggregation site look like for the news? It’d look a bit like GV. You get curated news and posts and tweets, and then comments and conversation.

Q: [me] Why has the term “hospitality” become less used precisely when we are most in contact with different cultures?
A: It may be partially due to the paradox of choice, and a fear of the unknown that’s come about in recent years. We’re very happy to send our products, our TV programs, and our money everywhere. But the flow of people is restricted. And it’s a matter of being able to listen, which some places are better at than others. I’m playing with the hospitality ratio: how much you listen vs. how much you speak. E.g., how many films you import vs. expert. A few years ago I looked at how many links link back to you and how many links to others. I compared a-list blogs and newspapers. Newspapers didn’t link out much at all.

Q: How do we train people for journalism?
A: J is a craft as well as a profession. The Internet is making us think about J as a craft: pursuing excellence for its own sake in something you care about. Most GV people think of themselves as craftspeople. Q: Where’s the hook in what you’re saying? And, btw, journalist didn’t come out of people seeking the truth but hard-drinking people who were getting paid to present a point of view. Also, you might look at Erik Erikson.

Q: Hospitality is reciprocal. How might the concept of respect apply to journalism?
A: Reciprocity is a huge part of hospitality. It means journalist need to include more views.Q: There are many public spheres, even within GV.
A: Yes.

Q: Does GV connect to other kinds of civic spaces, other than journalism?
A: GV isn’t just a bunch of people trying to do journalism. It’s an infrastructure for other sorts of projects, such as translation, herdict.org… There are tons of other civic practices there. Q: [ethanz] I want to temper some of your optimism. I think it’s great that you’re offering a new criterion — hospitality — for evaluating journalism. I think these ideas get stronger in combination. My main criticism of your work is that you’re not critical enough of GV [which Ethan co-founded]. GV is at best partially successful.

[I missed the last few questions. Sorry.] [Tags: journalism diversity objectivity hospitality global_voices everything_is_miscellaneous ]

Memopal is an Italian company with a smart way for you to share files, images and video stored on your desktop rapidly using your smartphone.

The start of summer seems an odd choice to start doling out awards (isn’t that usually January/February?) but it hasn’t stopped asp.netPRO from counting the votes in its 2009 Readers’ Choice awards. It was the winner of the Best CMS that made us stop and pay attention.

One of the most striking trends underway in the DAM space right now (indications of which were abundantly present in the exhibitor booths at this year's Henry Stewart DAM Symposium in New York) is the rush toward Adobe Flex-based client interfaces. The obligatory charcoal-and-pewter look and feel is everywhere, it seems.

Of course, the significance of Adobe Flex isn't the color scheme but the underlying technology. We've written about some of the technical issues with Flex before. The significance to buyers right now (as my colleague Theresa Regli made clear in her Monday morning presentation at the Henry Stewart show) is merely that the rush to a new technology -- however sound (or problematic) that technology might be -- entails risk, and early adopters of the new Flex-based DAM systems will need to have the patience and willingness to deal with the unexpected quirks and annoyances that inevitably surface whenever Version 1.0 of something goes into production. And like it or not, the first-generation Flex UIs are tantamount to Version 1.0 software. There will be kinks to work out.

If you're considering a DAM system from a vendor that has recently gone (or will be going soon) to a Flex-based client (i.e., Widen, The FeedRoom, EMC Documentum, MediaBeacon, Ancept), you should understand that it's more important now than ever before that you do your own hands-on usability testing before assuming that everything is going to magically work out fine. If customization of the client app is something you need to do, get the vendor to show your developers what's involved in doing customization work. Chances are, your developers will have a serious Flex learning curve to climb before becoming productive. And that's if the vendor even makes it possible to customize the client software at all. (Some vendors don't have SDKs yet.)  It's one thing to customize a DHTML interface; something else again to do surgery on a Flash UI.

If you're shopping for a DAM product, be ready for some very pretty-looking new interfaces. But also remember, you can't live on eye-candy alone. Slick does not mean more business-useful.

On the “Future of Publishing” panel this morning at Media Bistro Circus in New York, Dan Costa asked the panel what advice they’d give to young graduates looking to come to New York and enter the field of journalism.

Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate

It reminded me of the scene in The Graduate where Dustin Hoffman’s uncle corners him and tells him “I got one word for you: plastics.” Except that now the new word would be something more like “audience” or maybe “brand.”

(Eileen Gittins of Blurb got the biggest laugh of the day with her answer - “marry well.” Ouch. I thought the days of “pre-wed” degrees were over - though to be fair she said that applied equally to male and female grads).

Anil Dash provided a bit of insight that “only the old folks are worried about this - young grads will get crappy jobs that pay poorly as young grads have always done.” True enough , but I’d argue the whole question is wrong.

It’s based on a premise that no longer holds - that you wait until after graduation to start “real life,” and that your employer (or set of employers) has a substantial and significant role in defining your career path. It assumes that your career is about what job you get, and how you manage it, rather than what kind of audiences you build and how you create opportunity based on those audiences.

It’s also based on the idea that college grads are 22-year-olds with no experience. I don’t have statistics at hand, but it seems to me that even when I was teaching college writing courses 10 years ago, college students were incredibly diverse in age and experience: I learned as much from many of my students as they (I hope) learned from me. Why assume the ‘graduate’ is looking to us, rather than ‘we’ (large media company folks with decades experience) looking to ‘them’ for guidance?

The digital natives are going to create the future of publishing, not necessarily the digital immigrants who currently run media companies.

Why, for that matter, assume that the college degree is the primary path to career at all? I’m a big proponent of formal degrees (and have a student loan bill which rivals my mortgage from gathering my own) but there’s no reason to assume that this is the only (or even primary) way to make a career in 2009.

For those who are the proverbial 22-year-old impending college grad looking to ‘get started,’ why wait for graduation?

Blog! You’ve got greater information technology producing and publishing power at your fingertips, at nominal cost, than most major media companies had just 2 decades ago. Build a consistent brand for yourself as a producer of quality content - that brand (represented in something like a blog, or a site which tracks your work over time) will be stronger than any resume or set of job titles.

Build your network of influencers - connect with people working on what you’re passionate about, and the “career” stuff will work itself out.

Check out the folks at CoPress and what they’re doing in bringing open source platforms and thinking to college publications. Get involved in an open source, open culture, open content, or other organization that is focused on creating community value first and company value second.

Earlier this year in an interview, George Grippo, VP Media Asset Management at North Plains, indicated that many Digital Asset Management (DAM) vendors are struggling to cope with the special requirements of video asset management.

While he didn’t explicitly say in the interview that North Plains (news, site), a rich media and DAM solution vendor, was working on a solution to do just this, this week’s release of their latest version of Telescope Video Manager shows that they were.

Available as an on-site or SaaS solution, the Telescope Video Manager provides a relatively inexpensive solution that even novices can use in the creation, editing and distribution of short and long form video across multiple platforms like YouTube and other social networks.

Not all products are built with loads of venture capital in the coffers. Many are grown slowly and painstakingly over a number of years. A labor of love? Maybe. Some unseen driving force pushing them? Most likely.

During the work for our recent Umbraco CMS Review we stumbled upon the story of how this product came to be. It struck us as notable and inspirational, so we thought we’d share it more broadly.

In this article we bring you the history of the Umbraco Web CMS, from a .NET toolkit used as part of founder Niels Hartvig’s consulting business to being one of the most popular .NET open source web content management systems in the market.

When you are doing well in the market, it’s possible that you could just sit back and enjoy the fruits of your labor. But while you are sitting there drinking your strawberry daiquiri, the market is likely to be shifting and changes may be required.

Sitecore (news, site) understands this well. According to their VP of Product Marketing, Darren Guarnaccia, web content management has become a commodity, plateauing on functionality and UI. For customers, it has become frustrating trying to decide which Web CMS is the right one, when they all seem the same. So what do you do?

Sitecore’s answer is to provide a solution to solve a specific problem. In this case, it’s an Online Marketing Suite (OMS).

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E Ink has sold itself to Prime View International, a large Taiwanese display manufacturer, and I don’t understand why.

Now, it’s not surprising I don’t understand why. I have no info about E Ink’s financial state other than this article by Robert Weisman in the Boston Globe, and in any case I’m not a great financial guy (and I have the bank statements to prove it). So, my surprise may well be due to nothing but ignorance. Nevertheless, here’s why I was taken aback by the announcement.
E Ink is on a roll in a market that is about to explode (in the good sense). After ten years of work developing a low-power, highly legible display, it’s got something that works. Thanks to Kindle, it’s proven itself in the mass market and it’s in lots of people’s hands. And the market is about to take off now that we have digital delivery systems, a new generation of hardware, and a huge disruption in the traditional publishing market. So, why would E Ink sell itself?

The price — $215M — seems relatively low for such a hot product. If they need the money to fund R&D or to build manufacturing facilities, surely (= it’s not at all sure) there were other possibilities. Apparently the market crisis made an IPO implausible, although, to tell the truth, I — with my weak financial grasp — am not convinced. Investors are looking for places to invest, and E Ink looks like it’s exactly the sort of company they’d love to back: a proven leader in a market that’s obviously on the verge of explosive growth. It’d be like getting in on the early stage of iPods, only potentially bigger, since everyone who reads eventually will have an e-reader. But, if an IPO was out, why wouldn’t E Ink have preferred other forms of investment, including giving a partnership and equity stake to Prime View?

The most likely explanation by far is that I don’t understand what I’m talking about. Another explanation is that the company and its investors simply wanted to cash in by cashing out; the Globe article suggests this. But, that again raises the question of why they’d want to exit a company with a product in a market that’s about to take off. Perhaps they have reason to think the market is not going to take off , but that seems wrong; note that Google yesterday announced it’s going to enter the online book sales business. Or maybe they have doubts about E Ink technology. Maybe they worry the cost won’t drop fast enough for a commoditized market. Maybe color isn’t on its way fast enough. Maybe they’re worried about the inability (or so I’m presuming) of their tech ever to handle video, since the winning e-reader will eventually be multimedia. Maybe they know about ebooks on the way — Apple iPad or whatever the presumed product will be called — that will make static, black-on-gray pages seem obsolete.

So, I don’t know. But it smells fishy to me…although, as I may have mentioned, my financial sniffer has never been very reliable, and I’ll be happy to be set straight about this.

[Tags: e_ink kindle displays ebooks e-books everything_is_miscellaneous ]

Anyone out there who can tell me how to a ToC in my PDF output?

I have a map that incudes some preface stuff and then I'd like a ToC before the actual content.

 I assume I will need to include an element of some sort, but I can't figure out which one.

 Regards,

Søren Weimann

One of my areas of focus is around social tools in the workplace (enterprise 2.0) is social bookmarking. Sadly, is does not have the reach it should as it and wiki (most enterprise focused wikis have collective voice pages (blogs) included now & enterprise blog tools have collaborative document pages (wikis). I focus a lot of my attention these days on what happens inside the organization�s firewall, as that is where their is incredible untapped potential for these tools to make a huge difference.

One of the things I see on a regular basis is tagging interfaces on a wide variety of social tools, not just in social bookmarking. This is good, but also problematic as it leads to a need for a central tagging repository (more on this in a later piece). It is good as emergent and connective tag terms can be used to link items across tools and services, but that requires consistency and identity (identity is a must for tagging on any platform and it is left out of many tagging instances. This greatly decreases the value of tagging - this is also for another piece). There are differences across tools and services, which leads to problems of use and adoption within tools is tagging user interface (UI).

The multi-term tag is one of the more helpful elements in tagging as it provides the capability to use related terms. These multi-term tags provide depth to understanding when keeping the related tag terms together. But the interfaces for doing this are more complex and confusing than they should be for human, as well as machine consumption.

In the instance illustrated to the tag is comprised or two related terms: social and network. When the tool references the tag, it is looking at both parts as a tag set, which has a distinct meaning. The individual terms can be easily used for searches seeking either of those terms, but knowing the composition of the set, it is relatively easy for the service to offer up "social network" when a person seeks just social or network in a search query.

One common hindrance with social bookmarking adoption is those familiar with it and fans of it for enterprise use point to Delicious, which has a couple huge drawbacks. The compound multi-term tag or disconnected multi-term tags is a deep drawback for most regular potential users (the second is lack of privacy for shared group items). Delicious breaks a basic construct in user focussed design: Tools should embrace human methods of interaction and not humans embracing tech constraints. Delicious is quite popular with those of us malleable in our approach to adopt a technology where we adapt our approach, but that percentage of potential people using the tools is quite thin as a percentage of the population.. Testing this concept takes very little time to prove.

So, what are the options? Glad you asked. But, first a quick additional excursion into why this matters.

One common hinderance for social tool adoption is most people intended to use the tools are missing the conceptual model for what these tools do, the value they offer, and how to personally benefit from these values. There are even change costs involved in moving from a tool that may not work for someone to something that has potential for drastically improved value. The "what it does", "what value it has", and "what situations" are high enough hurdles to cross, but they can be done with some ease by people who have deep knowledge of how to bridge these conceptual model gaps.

What the tools must not do is increase hurdles for adoption by introducing foreign conceptual models into the understanding process. The Delicious model of multi-term tagging adds a very large conceptual barrier for many & it become problematic for even considering adoption. Optimally, Delicious should not be used alone as a means to introduce social bookmarking or tagging.

We must remove the barriers to entry to these powerful offerings as much as we can as designers and developers. We know the value, we know the future, but we need to extend this. It must be done now, as later is too late and these tools will be written off as just as complex and cumbersome as their predecessors.

If you are a buyer of these tools and services, this is you guideline for the minimum of what you should accept. There is much you should not accept. On this front, you need to push back. It is your money you are spending on the products, implementation, and people helping encourage adoption. Not pushing back on what is not acceptable will greatly hinder adoption and increase the costs for more people to ease the change and adoption processes. Both of these costs should not be acceptable to you.

I am starting with what we know to be problematic for broad adoption for input. But, compound terms also create problems for search as well as click retrieval. There are two UI interaction patterns that happen with compound multi-term tags. The first is the terms are mashed together as a compound single word, as shown in this example from Delicious.

The problem here is the mashing the string of terms "architecture is politics" into one compound term "architectureispolitics". Outside of Germanic languages this is problematic and the compound term makes a quick scan of the terms by a person far more difficult. But it also complicates search as the terms need to be broken down to even have LIKE SQL search options work optimally. The biggest problem is for humans, as this is not natural in most language contexts. A look at misunderstood URLs makes the point easier to understand (Top Ten Worst URLs)

The second is an emergent model for compound multi-term tags is using a term delimiter. These delimiters are often underlines ( _ ), dots ( . ), or hyphens ( - ). A multi-term tag such as "enterprise search" becomes "enterprise.search", "enterprise_search" and "enterprise-search".

While these help visually they are less than optimal for reading. But, algorithmically this initially looks to be a simple solution, but it becomes more problematic. Some tools and services try to normalize the terms to identify similar and relevant items, which requires a little bit of work. The terms can be separated at their delimiters and used as properly separated terms, but since the systems are compound term centric more often than not the terms are compressed and have similar problems to the other approach.

Another reason this is problematic is term delimiters can often have semantic relevance for tribal differentiation. This first surface terms when talking to social computing researchers using Delicious a few years ago. They pointed out that social.network, social_network, and social-network had quite different communities using the tags and often did not agree on underlying foundations for what the term meant. The people in the various communities self identified and stuck to their tribes use of the term differentiated by delimiter.

The discovery that these variations were not fungible was an eye opener and quickly had me looking at other similar situations. I found this was not a one-off situation, but one with a fair amount of occurrence. When removing the delimiters between the terms the technologies removed the capability of understanding human variance and tribes. This method also breaks recommendation systems badly as well as hindering the capability of augmenting serendipity.

So how do these tribes identify without these markers? Often they use additional tags to identity. The social computing researchers add "social computing", marketing types add "marketing", etc. The tools then use their filtering by co-occurrence of tags to surface relevant information (yes, the ability to use co-occurrence is another tool essential). This additional tag addition help improve the service on the whole with disambiguation.

The use of distinct and disconnected term tags is often the intent for space delimited sites like Delicious, but the emergent approach of mashing terms together out of need surfaced. Delicious did not intend to create mashed terms or delimited terms, Joshua Schachter created a great tool and the community adapted it to their needs. Tagging services are not new, as they have been around for more than two decades already, but how they are built, used, and platforms are quite different now. The common web interface for tagging has been single terms as tags with many tags applied to an object. What made folksonomy different from previous tagging was the inclusion of identity and a collective (not collaborative) voice that intelligent semantics can be applied to.

The downside of disconnected terms in tagging is certainty of relevance between the terms, which leads to ambiguity. This discussion has been going on for more than a decade and builds upon semantic understanding in natural language processing. Did the tagger intend for a relationship between social & network or not. Tags out of the context of natural language constructs provide difficulties without some other construct for sense making around them. Additionally, the computational power needed to parse and pair potential relevant pairings is somethings that becomes prohibitive at scale.

One of the methods that surfaced early in tagging interfaces was the quoted multi-term tags. This takes becomes #&039;research "social network" blog' so that the terms social network are bound together in the tool as one tag. The biggest problem is still on the human input side of things as this is yet again not a natural language construct. Systematically the downside is these break along single terms with quotes in many of the systems that have employed this method.

What begins with a simple helpful prompt...:

Still often can end up breaking as follows (from SlideShare):

Non-space delimiters between tags allows for multi-term tags to exist and with relative ease. Well, that is relative ease for those writing Western European languages that commonly use commas as a string separator. This method allows the system to grasp there are multi-term tags and the humans can input the information in a format that may be natural for them. Using natural language constructs helps provide the ability ease of adoption. It also helps provide a solid base for building a synonym repository in and/or around the tagging tools.

While this is not optimal for all people because of variance in language constructs globally, it is a method that works well for a quasi-homogeneous population of people tagging. This also takes out much of the ambiguity computationally for information retrieval, which lowers computational resources needed for discernment.

Lastly, the option for input is the text box per tag. This allows for multi-term tags in one text box. Using the tab button on the keyboard after entering a tag the person using this interface will jump down to the next empty text box and have the ability to input a term. I first started seeing this a few years ago in tagging interfaces tools developed in Central Europe and Asia. The Yahoo! Bookmarks 2 UI adopted this in a slightly different implementation than I had seen before, but works much the same (it is shown here).

There are many variations of this type of interface surfacing and are having rather good adoption rates with people unfamiliar to tagging. This approach tied to facets has been deployed in Knowledge Plaza by Whatever s/a and works wonderfully.

All of the benefits of comma delimited multi-term tag interfaces apply, but with the added benefit of having this interface work internationally. International usage not only helps build synonym resources but eases language translation as well, which is particularly helpful for capturing international variance on business or emergent terms.

This content has come from more than four years of research and discussions with people using tools, both inside enterprise and using consumer web tools. As enterprise moves more quickly toward more cost effective tools for capturing and connecting information, they are aware of not only the value of social tools, but tools that get out the way and allow humans to capture, share, and interact in a manner that is as natural as possible with the tools getting smart, not humans having to adopt technology patterns.

This is a syndicated version of the same post at Optimizing Tagging UI for People & Search :: Personal InfoCloud that has moderated comments available.

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Scott Rosenberg’s short video, The First Blogger, is an excellent example of how to engage and audience and build buzz for a book (in this case, his forthcoming Say Everything. It uses a topic that many potential readers would be interested in, and draws those folks into a little mystery.