Another Indication of Blog Doom?
January 30, 2012
“Blogging Declines Across the Inc. 500” seems to be another indication that blogging equals doom. The story points out that a University of Massachusetts study “as found a huge drop in the number of companies maintaining corporate blogs over the past year.”
If you are following this alleged trend, you will enjoy the data which suggests that some companies have decided that blogging is a waste of money. Now the academic researchers don’t use phrases like “waste of money”, but the message seems to be blogs don’t deliver.
What do companies expect from Web logs? That question is not part of the study, but I think that like search engine optimization, Web logs (blogs) are expected to make revenues soar, create a flood of in-bound calls from prospects, and generally fill in the void left when direct mail lost efficacy for many organizations.
What are companies doing to make sales and build their brand? Social media is the new “silver bullet.” What companies will discover is that social media is not the answer to generating leads and closing sales. Neither blogs nor social media work the way the good old fashioned go-go days of the pre-crash era tools functioned.
Knee jerk reactions are typical in many businesses. Social media is as or more expensive than creating content for blogging. Even more interesting are issues of ownership of social media identities. A misstep in a blog can create a problem. A misstep in a social media channel can be a problem as well.
Companies looking for a way to make sales will have to do more than chase the next big thing. In our work, we think that high value information, consistent communication across multiple channels, and a findability strategy create points of engagement.
Doing one thing, like running a query on one free Web search engine, seems to work. The reality is you need to work to get value.
Stephen E Arnold, January 30, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Infor Software Introduction Signals PLM Demand Rising
January 30, 2012
There has been a lot of talk recently about the increased need for PLM among all industries but specifically for the consumer packaged good (CPG) industries due to increased and unpredictable materials costs and stricter regulatory compliance standards. A recent article, Infor Accelerates Product Development for Process Manufacturers, on Industry Today, explores how one provider of PLM solutions is making it easier than ever for companies to adopt PLM.
Infor, a leader in the PLM industry, has introduced Infor10 with the hope that the more user-friendly software application will be easier to use and more effective. As the article highlights,
“Infor10 PLM Process offers users the unifying capabilities of Infor10 ION and the consumer-grade user experience of Infor10 Workspace to connect applications in a single, easy-to-use system that simplifies and streamlines business processes providing users direct access to all relevant, real-time data for faster, more intelligent decision making.”
The increased demand and interest for PLM is not surprising as more and more companies are realizing how much money and time will be saved by moving to the cloud. There is, however, more to PLM than just moving data to a cloud and streamlining business processes. At the heart of any great PLM is a great search engine. Data management is worthless if that data cannot be retrieved easily by any employee needing it. New data management solutions not only streamline business processes but make data easier to manage, search, and access.
With the demand for mobile technology PLM software designers are now making strides, and in some cases accomplishing, mobile applications allowing users to access company data from their Smartphones. As PLM continues to explore new ways to connect employees with information and proving to be cost effective, it will be no surprise to see more industries adopting PLM solutions in the near future.
Catherine Lamsfuss, January 30, 2012
Inteltrax: Top Stories, January 23 to January 27
January 30, 2012
Inteltrax, the data fusion and business intelligence information service, captured three key stories germane to search this week, specifically, how certain industries are gaining a foothold via big data analytics.
One story, “Marketing Analytics Makes for a Wide Open Field,” showcases how smart marketers are getting a better understanding of potential customers with BI.
“Human Resources is Not Helpless With Big Data” acts as a rebuttal of sorts to a spate of news saying HR offices aren’t properly utilizing big data. We think they are and can do even more with a little help.
However, not all the news is positive. “Avoiding Obsolete Analytics” deals with SPOTS, an acronym for obsolete analytics, of which some say are more prevalent than we think. We, though, disagree, and showcase some finely evolving tools.
Big data is storming the castle of industry, changing the way nearly everyone does business. From the cutting edge HR work to stepping around potentially obsolete tools, there is an entire world of news waiting for you. We’re going to give you all you need to stay current in the big data world.
Follow the Inteltrax news stream by visiting www.inteltrax.com
Patrick Roland, Editor, Inteltrax.
January 30, 2012
Protected: SharePoint Professionals Will Have a Developing Time in San Francisco
January 30, 2012
Building a SharePoint Web Site: Three Important Planning Points to Remember
January 30, 2012
In “3 Things to Know Before Using SharePoint to Build Your Website,” Will Saville of BrightStarr makes a few key points to consider before diving in head first. With a SharePoint deployment, planning is imperative.
What does Saville suggest for success? For starters, talk about business requirements and value 80 percent of the time and SharePoint technology capabilities 20 percent of the time. This helps you keep on track with your business goals. Second, know that out-of-the-box SharePoint capabilities may not meet all your needs, so plan to customize with Web parts. And last but certainly not least, consider your content:
If content is king, then Content Managers must be pretty important. But, it’s incredible how easily they can be side-lined. A poor editing and content management experience will lead to low user adoption, which will ultimately result in content not being published as quickly (if at all). Because SharePoint isn’t a point WCM solution, it’s really important to consider their needs and make sure it works from a content management perspective as early on as possible.
Getting your content managers on-board early will keep them engaged and encouraging of user adoption. The project success comes down to the people you have working on the project and their drive for innovation.
To customize your SharePoint site with Web parts and to make a user-friendly site that makes for easy adoption, look to a comprehensive solution like Fabasoft Mindbreeze. Having Fabasoft Mindbreeze in your SharePoint system combines on-premise information with Cloud information, connecting your users to what they need. For an enriched user experience, the Mindbreeze InSite capability. . .
recognizes correlations and links through semantic and dynamic search processes. This delivers pinpoint accurate and precise ‘finding experiences.’ And this with no installation, configuration or maintenance required. Fabasoft Mindbreeze InSite is the website search that your company needs.
Check out Fabasoft Mindbreeze’s full suite of solutions.
Philip West, January 30, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
MediaFunnel: Social on Steroids
January 30, 2012
Formerly known as TweetFunnel, MediaFunnel was founded by serial entrepreneur Andreas Wilkins, and Steve Chipman, president of Lexnet Consulting. The namesake technology, originally developed by Cloud10Apps, is a social media management systems geared towards fostering team collaboration to effectively interact with customers and prospects over social channels. The organization is self-funded but is in the process of looking for additional funding.
MediaFunnel tackles the problem of coordinating the efforts of multiple (each with multiple social profiles), allowing a team of users to synchronize communications with customers and prospects over Facebook and Twitter. On the back end, the technology integrates with applications like Salesforce.com (which turns tweets into sales leads), Zendesk (which creates customer service tickets), Twilio (which allows users to post via SMS for alerts and both internal and external user postings), and YouTube (which lets users concurrently upload videos to YouTube while posting content to Facebook) to extend social interactions into traditional processes. The brand monitoring functionality for Twitter can track conversations based on keywords, mentions, and direct messages and includes search and pre-set alerts for social mentions and brand monitoring.
Adding workflow to managing a corporate social networking presence, MediaFunnel allows anyone across an enterprise to contribute content that can be reviewed, edited and then disseminated to a community via Twitter or Facebook, moving content creation beyond the social media team to everyone within an organization and outside with a guest posting feature. Contributors, who can submit material via e-mail or text, are assigned varying degrees of editorial control. The technology’s editorial review process helps companies control brand imaging and compliance.
MediaFunnel’s current architecture is based on Ruby on Rails, MySql and Amazon EC2 cloud services. Competitors include HootSuite, CoTweet, and Threadsy. Segments that may find the technology particularly advantageous include PR firms, consumer brands, mass media, and retailing.
Rita Safranek, Janaury 30, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Wordmap Introduces Taxonomy Connectors
January 30, 2012
According to the Wordmap.com article “Wordmap Taxonomy Connectors for SharePoint and Endeca” , users will be able to use its new Taxonomy Connectors directly with Endeca. Endeca Taxonomy Connector users will have the ability to use Wordmap to handle “all of their daily management tasks.”
A few notable benefits of the Taxonomy connector are,
No configuration needed for consuming systems. It can manage the taxonomy centrally and push out only relevant sections for indexing, navigation and search and taxonomy is seamlessly integrated into the content lifecycle.
The Wordmap Taxonomy platform definitely seems to be a viable tool when it comes to managing Endeca systems and seems like a no brainer for those using the platform. However, a few questions do come to mind. If Open Source connectors enter the scene will there still be a market for Wordmap connectors or what if Oracle decides to become a little stingier with its system access policies?
Users could still find that the Wordmap Taxonomy Connectors hit the spot or they could find the platform too cumbersome and go elsewhere. Guess it depends on “Which way the wind blows.”
We have heard of a push to make open source connectors available. With some firms charging as much as $20,000 for a connector, lower cost options or open source connectors could have a significant impact on the content processing sector.
April Holmes, Janaury 30, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Search Only Goes So Far
January 30, 2012
Infocentric Research surveyor Stephan Schillerwein, who presented his findings at the Online Information Conference, released some alarming statistics about enterprise search in his report “The Digital Workplace.” Among the points which jumped out at me were 40 percent of employees use the wrong information when conducting enterprise searches and 63 percent “make critical decisions without being informed,” which results in a 25 percent work information productivity loss.
According to the Pandia Search Engine News Article “Huge Problems for Search In the Enterprise” Schillerwein believes there are a few reasons why enterprise search is problematic. Users don’t account for the fact that enterprise search is different from Web Search, they have unrealistic expectations and there is a clear problem of lack of content. The Pandia article asserted: Schillerwein suggests a solution based on several elements, such as consistent coverage of information flows for processes, bringing together the worlds of structured and unstructured information, and adding context. I would agree as this ability to combine structured and unstructured data while maintaining context is key in our approach. However, when you combine the crowded jumble of tweets, social media and other data that crowd employees’ smart devices the problems with enterprise search could continue to take a downward spiral and “finding a needle in a haystack” could be easier than doing an enterprise search.
These observations triggered several questions and observations.
First, there are a number of companies offering enterprise information solutions. Many are focused on the older approach of key word queries. There are business intelligence systems which provide “find-ability” tools along with a range of useful analytic features. Although search is not the focal point of these solutions, they do provide useful visualizations and statistics on content. The problem is that most organizations are confused about what is needed and what must be done to maximize the value of systems which go beyond key word retrieval. This confusion is likely to play a far larger role in enterprise search challenges than many market analysts want to acknowledge. Instead, many solutions today seem to be making information access more confusing and problematic, not clearer and more trouble free.
Second, the challenge may be more directly related to figuring out what specific business process needs which information. Without a clear understanding of the user’s requirements, it may be difficult to deploy a system that delivers higher user satisfaction. If this hypothesis is correct, perhaps more vendors should adopt the approach we have taken at Digital Reasoning. We make an extra effort to understand what the user requires and then invest time and resources in hooking appropriate information and data into the system. No solution can deliver the right fact-based answers if the required information is not within the data store and available to the algorithms which make sense of what is otherwise noise? We think that many problems with user acceptance originate with a misunderstanding or sidestepping of user requirements and the fundamental task of getting the necessary information for the system.
Third, the terminology used to describe information retrieval and access is becoming devalued. At Digital Reasoning, we work to explain succinctly and without jargon how our next-generation system can facilitate better decision making for financial, health, intelligence, and other professional markets. We have complex numerical recipes and sophisticated systems and methods. Our focus, however, is on what the system does for a user. We have been fortunate to receive support from a range of clients from government and industry as well as the investment community for our next-generation approach. We think our strength is our focus on the customer’s need and not only our unique predictive algorithms and cloud-based solution.
To learn more about Digital Reasoning and our products, navigate to www.digitalreasoning.com .
Dave Danielson, Digital Reasoning, January 30, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Deep Web Technologies: Cracking Multilingual Search
January 30, 2012
The rapid development of Web-based technologies over the last decade has created a unique opportunity to bring together the world’s scientists by making it easy for them to share research information. With the shift from US-centric, English language information to information published in other languages, researchers find that facility in one or two other languages is inadequate.
The Multilingual Challenge
Multilingual search increases the value of research output by making it available to a wider audience. Seamless federation and automated translation makes available research from China, Japan, Russia, and other countries prolific in science publication to researchers who may lack facility in certain languages. In the area of patent research, multilingual search greatly broadens the scope of patent research. For English speakers, the availability of multilingual federated search exposes English speakers to diverse perspectives from researchers in foreign countries.
For example, China’s research output is now far outpacing the rest of the world. In 2006 China’s research and development output surpassed that of Japan, the UK and Germany. At this pace, China will overtake the USA in a few years. But non US innovation is not confined to Asia and Europe. Brazil’s share of research output is growing rapidly.
Sample system output from WorldWideScience.org, powered by Deep Web Technologies’ multilingual federating system.
Deep Web Technologies (DWT) is one of the leaders in federated search. Federation requires taking a user’s query and using it to obtain search results from other indexes and search-and-retrieval systems. For example, Deep Web Technologies’ Explorit product handles this process, returning to the user a blended set of results. For the user, federation eliminates the need to frame a query for Google, Medline, USA.gov, and the NASA website. The user frames a query, sends it to Explorit and a single, relevance-ranked results list is displayed to the user.
DWT has moved beyond single language federation and grown to become the leader in federated search of the deep web. This has resulted in the launch of their ground-breaking, patent pending multilingual federated search capability in June of 2011.
“We now live in a much more interconnected world where information is available in a variety of languages,” noted Abe Lederman, President and CTO of Deep Web Technologies. “Major advances in machine translation have made it possible for DWT to develop a revolutionary new Explorit product that breaks down language barriers and advances scientific collaboration and business productivity.”
Elsevier Snapped by Price Elasticity
January 29, 2012
Interesting page about smart folks boycotting Elsevier. You don’t know Elsevier? Well, check out the company’s subscription prices to scientific, technical and medical journals. Now navigate to The Cost of Knowledge and see what an online push back looks like. The idea is that some smart folks will no longer do editorial work, review articles, and other tasks routinely expected of knowledge farmers who want to sell information nuggets to the Elsevier combine. Publishers have a number of challenges, including prayers for Barnes & Noble assault on Amazon. Good luck with that, publishers.
I don’t have a dog in this fight. I learned after publishing a number of books that it is better to output information in this free Web log than server as a knowledge farmer on subsistence income. I suppose Elsevier could try the Web censorship thing, but smart folks may be able to work around the technical efforts of print publishers trying to figure out the digital world. That price elasticity hurts when it snaps back in one’s face, doesn’t it?
Stephen E Arnold, January 29, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com, my current and friendly publisher in Oslo, Norway, where the water is generally safe to drink and the publishers quite civil.
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