Speaker of the week: Chris Sherman, President, Searchwise,

Day 1: Track 2 - Breathing new life into search
Q: Which are the most important topics, for you personally, due to be discussed at the Online Information Conference 2008 and why?
Chris: The sessions discussing the semantic web. After years of hearing that "it's almost here," I've been seeing solid evidence that the semantic web has in fact, arrived, and is set to dramatically change the way information professionals work on the web. This isn't incremental change - it's truly a new paradigm (as much as I hate to use a cliche), and I find the whole area very exciting.
Q: Which tracks would you recommend to delegates attending the conference?
Chris: I'm biased - the Breathing New Life into Search and Order out of
Chaos- Creating Structure in Our Information Universe tracks.
Q: What are you looking forward to most about participating in Online Information 2008?
Chris: Meeting with my UK and European information professional colleagues.
It's always a pleasure to get the perspectives of info pros throughout the world, to compare and contrast their issues and concerns.
Q: If you had to choose only one - which social network would you recommend to colleagues?
Chris: LinkedIn. While I am a member of other social networks, LinkedIn is the only one I find truly valuable, primarily because it has a professional focus, and the people who participate are more interested in sharing useful information than playing games or dithering away on trivial topics (heh - sorry I don't have a stronger opinion about this... :-)
Q: And finally, just out of interest - where are you planning to spend Christmas this year?
Chris: With my wife's family in the Northern Neck area of Virginia. The community they live in is the oldest settled area in the U.S., and the local dialect has more in common with Elizabethean English than contemporary U.S. or U.K. English, so it's always a special treat to be there.
About Chris Sherman
Chris Sherman is President of Searchwise, a web consulting firm based in Boulder, Colorado. He is also Executive Editor of SearchEngineWatch.com, penning a daily newsletter and serving as chair and organiser of Incisive Media's international Search Engine Strategies conferences. Chris writes regularly for Information Today, ONLINE, and other information industry journals.
Email: info@searchwise.net
For more information, or to view the conference programme in full, please visit:
www.online-information.co.uk/conference

Are you integrating properly?

By Phil Muncaster
I will stop harping on about SharePoint one of these days. Promise. But probably not until it ceases to become one of the most popular content management tools among enterprises. So you know what I'm going to say next: despite the hype, SharePoint cannot be all things to all people. It isn't a one stop shop for your ECM needs, and if you think it is, you're going to find pretty quickly that the add-on functionality required to make it so will blow your budget through the roof.
 
In the web content management space too, the shadow of SharePoint looms large again. Most WCM vendors - such as RedDot, FatWire and Immediacy - are trying to promote their own product's easy integration with Microsoft's flagship product, again, mainly because SharePoint isn't very good at web publishing itself. And yet, as Tony Byrne of independent analyst CMS Watch explained, it is still well regarded, and very often used in firms for document collaboration. So in many scenarios, it will be necessary for firms to expose those same documents to the web, hence the need for a decent tool to do that.
 
But while the vendors have caught on to this and are trying to differentiate by offering their own forms of integration, a word of caution from the analyst firm: not all integrated products are born equal, some are more integrated than others. These products' connectors vary greatly, said Byrne - some only working with SharePoint lists, some with its libraries too, some are bi-directional, some aren't, the complexity goes on. Why can't things be easier for enterprise buyers? Well, they're not, so it probably pays to do your research as for any other products, and question all vendor claims. Integration? Exactly what do you mean by integration.
 Interestingly, the larger players in the WCM space, Interwoven and Vignette have remained a little more aloof from SharePoint and such integration issues. Perhaps it's because they want to promote their own document collaboration system, as Byrne suggested. In any case, it would seem a brave move to make, considering the popularity of the Microsoft product among, virtually every firm I've come across.

Mastermind

I was pleased to hear recently that Bart Smith a reference librarian at the British Library (BL) and part-time quiz supremo is to once again step under the spot lights. This time on tonight's Mastermind.
The legendary quiz show will see Smith pit his wits against fellow contestants using his knowledge of the Spanish Civil War as his specialist subject.
I had the pleasure of interviewing Bart late last year to talk of his career as an information specialist at the BL over three decades. However his second passion for memorizing dates has undoubtedly helped him with appearances on Test the Nation and University Challenge: The Professionals in which he captained the BL team to win in the final.
With that kind of record of success it should make for good viewing. Good luck from all of us here at IWR.
Mastermind will be screened tonight at 8pm, BBC 2

Speaker of the week: Kate Stanfield

Kate Stanfield, Head of Knowledge Management, CMS Cameron McKenna LLP is this week's speaker. Kate is speaking on day two of the conference.
Day 2: Track 3 - Information professionals surviving and thriving in the new age
Kate comments here on her session
Hybrid professionals mean a thriving library; the experience of a European Law Firm
"All too often some members of the information profession feel that they are not given credit or are fully valued for their expertise, although this is a generalisation - this can result in a defensive attitude and at it's worst, a perception of that professional as a "cannot do" rather than "can do" person. They may do their job well, but will not "stretch" or step outside their comfort zone, and gradually the more interesting work is not brought to the information function. This vicious circle can sometimes be broken if new and complementary roles can be taken on, to demonstrate the skills and value of an information professional.
"I have been lucky in my career, in that I have been able to stretch the boundaries of my scope - I have had to include some boring tasks as part of that, but it has usually improved my credibility and increased my understanding of organisational needs, strategy and goals. The result has been a more fulfilling job, and a role valued by my organisation."
Q: Which are the most important topics, for you personally, due to be discussed at the Online Information Conference 2008 and why?
Kate: Collaborative working - we are finding web 2.0 technology can be applied to such good effect within so many communities of practice, but this is fraught with issues - policies, protocols, longevity and archive storage of knowledge. I hope to find out more about how other people are tackling this - and what to avoid!
Q: Besides your own, which tracks would you recommend to delegates attending the conference?
Kate: Track 2: Order out of chaos - creating structure in our information universe - so much in all of the tracks, but the semantic search is such a key thing for me going forwards - this could make such a difference to information retrieval.
Q: What are you looking forward to most about participating in Online Information 2008?
Kate: The discussions! Knowledge is all about the people, so to hear what such a great range of experts are doing will be most interesting.
Q: If you had to choose only one - which social network would you recommend to colleagues?
Kate: LinkedIn probably, it is becoming really well populated now.
Q: Finally, out of interest - where are you planning to spend Christmas this year?
Kate: At home - we are renovating an old house and with eight coming to Christmas dinner, I aspire to have a cooker by then, a whole kitchen would be nice too but....
About Kate Stanfield
Kate Stanfield is the Head of Knowledge Management at CMS Cameron McKenna LLP. Her background is that of an Information Manager, she joined the firm in 1990 having spent 7 years in public and business libraries. A Chartered Librarian with over 20 years experience she has implemented several knowledge systems, including electronic systems for sharing information. Kate received the Lexis Nexis Butterworths award for excellence in 2005.
Kate has helped several clients with knowledge and information services, ranging from carrying out knowledge sharing audits, helping to create a knowledge strategy, through to developing taxonomy for the business.
For more information, or to view the conference programme in full, please visit:
www.online-information.co.uk/conference

Credit crunching IT

Well, it didn't take long did it? Green IT has already been toppled as the topic on everyone's lips in the technology industry, just as compliance before it. Now every vendor, every services organisation, every analyst is talking about what CIOs should be doing, buying and saying in the "current economic climate". Some of it is of course, spurious rubbish, but other advice makes a little more sense.
Former European head of security at IBM, Nick Coleman, for example, predicted a massive restructuring in the security industry as capacity is reached on staff numbers and firms look to cut back. And then everyone's favourite analyst behemoth, Gartner, came out with all guns blazing. IT leaders must not be shy, it said, they must grasp the nettle by the horns, or some such metaphor, and embrace transformational change projects.
Now, if we're talking about near mission critical applications which could make or break your reputation as CIO, enterprise search is probably somewhere up there. So it was no surprise last week that Jean Ferre, chief executive of French-based search firm Sinequa, was waxing lyrical about his firm's products and their ability to help you out in the current economic climate. When you think about it, he's kind of right when he says that one of the few assets your organisation has that won't depreciate is your talent, your human resources. The only problem is that the knowledge locked away in their brain holes can't easily be tapped.
Which is where knowledge management tools of old were meant to help. Trouble is they were universally panned as unwieldy, hard to use, and thus largely failed. Newer firms like Trampoline Systems are making a good stab of reinventing the area, allowing firms to manage projects by mapping out the relationships their staff have with each other, and with the information they deal with on a daily basis.
Coming at it from a slightly different angle, Sinequa's 'thing' is that it allows users to search for corporate documents according to who is mentioned in them, or who has authored them. It can be tremendously helpful to be able to pull out this kind of information, especially dealing in an enterprise context, because reading a document is often not enough - you'll also need to ask someone who can offer insight about that document, talk through what you need to talk through, and then make your informed decision.
That's the idea anyway. I haven't used it yet, but the demo seemed pretty smooth and, in these oh so trying times, you could do worse than looking for ways to maximise staff productivity, break down silos, increase efficiency and so on.

Speaker of the week - Richard Wallis

Richard Wallis, Technology Evangelist, Talis, UK is this weeks speaker. Richard is a track keynote speaker on day two of the conference.
Day 2: Track 2 - Catch the semantic wave - or drown in a sea of content
Q: Which are the most important topics, due to be discussed at the Online Information Conference 2008 and why?
Richard: Having spoken with several key speakers, whilst recording the Online Information 2008 podcast series, it is clear that many sessions that I am looking forward to are building on the experience of Web 2.0 and new social patterns to predict an exciting and challenging future.
Q: Besides your own, which tracks would you recommend to delegates attending the conference?
Richard: The Web 2.0 after the Buzz track - because we need to take the lessons of Web 2.0 and project them forward.
Q: What are you looking forward to most about participating in Online Information 2008?
Richard: Meeting both speakers and attendees to join in the physical social networking
Q: If you had to choose only one - which social network would you recommend to colleagues?
Richard: It would totally depend on their area of interest - dependant on the conversation I use Linked-in, Facebook, Twitter and Doppler.
Q: Where are you planning to spend Christmas this year?
Richard: A few old fashioned web-less (with the exception of iPlayer) days at home with the family and lots of food.
About Richard Wallis
Richard's thirty year plus career in the computer information industry, the last eighteen of which has been with the UK's leading Library Systems and Semantic Web technology company, Talis, coupled with his passion for and involvement with new and emerging technology trends, gives him a unique perspective of the issues challenging Libraries, and Information professionals today. Richard has been at the birth of several major System Developments, as architect, research and technical lead. As Technology Evangelist he is at the forefront in promoting, explaining, and applying new and emerging Web and Semantic Web technologies in the library and wider information domain. Richard is an active blogger on Panlibus, a regular podcaster in the Talking with Talis series, and host and chair of the Library 2.0 Gang.
For more information, or to view the conference programme in full, please visit:
www.online-information.co.uk/conference

ECM - a risky business?

Forgive me if this is a bit grandmother-sucking-eggs stuff, but have you thought about the risk profile of your ECM investments recently? I would normally have thought, and I think a good many IT buyers think similarly, that the safest options lie with the big boys - the IBMs, Oracles and EMCs of this world. Well, in the world of content management, that's not necessarily the case.
A new report by analyst CMS Watch - yes, sorry to harp on about them again but as independents they don't really have many peers in the business - suggested that actually you may be better off opting for a smaller, mid-tier player. Why? Well, according to Alan Pelz-Sharpe, the report author, many of the large vendors in this space are still undergoing costly, timely eye-off-the-ball type integrations of recent acquisitions - think IBM and FileNet for example. Another reason is that some, like Oracle, are still finding their way in the area, having only relatively recently entered the ECM market. What that means for IT buyers is change, and that is never a particularly reassuring trend among your suppliers, least of all in the current climate.
Another advantage of the mid market vendors is that they generally tend to do one thing and do it well, rather than try the all things to all people approach. This means that you may accrue a whole load of point products of course, but that's kind of how people buy ECM technologies anyway, according to Pelz-Sharpe, and it's easy to see why. Pressure on IT is usually such that it's pretty difficult to sit back and look at the long-term, big strategic picture. That would be the ideal of course, but if your finance department is screaming because they need a quick fix to a workflow forms-related issue, you kind of have to suck it up and just support the business.
So I guess the advice of the week is take a look at the smaller players, because in the long run it may be in your best interests; in this economic climate you have to be as risk averse as possible, and that could mean putting your eggs in a smaller vendor's basket.

Speaker of the Week: Jeremy Gould

Jeremy Gould, Head of Internet Communication, Ministry of Justice, UK is this week's speaker. Jeremy is a track keynote speaker on day one of the conference.
Day 1: Track 1 Web 2.0 After the buzz
Q Which are the most important topics, for you personally, due to be discussed at the Online Information Conference 2008 and why?
Jeremy: I'm really keen to learn more about how business can better adopt semantic web technologies
Q Besides your own, which tracks would you recommend to delegates attending the conference?
Jeremy: search and SEO aren't the 'sexiest'; of subjects but they're vital for business, and easily overlooked in the web 2 media hype. I think there's plenty to learn there still.
Q What are you looking forward to most about participating in Online Information 2008?
Jeremy: Meeting new people!
Q If you had to choose only one - which social network would you recommend to colleagues?
Jeremy: I get more business intros through LinkedIn right now - it's become my online CV
Q And finally, just out of interest - where are you planning to spend Christmas this year?
Jeremy: West coast of Ireland.
About Jeremy Gould
I am a civil servant at the UK Ministry of Justice with responsibility for digital media strategy. I lead a team of web professionals managing a portfolio of websites, developing customer-centric online communication propositions, and using social media tools to encourage online engagement.
Prior to joining the civil service, I worked on web 'stuff' in wider public sector, corporate, and agency environments.
Jeremy Gould's Specialties:
Proposition development with a technology agnostic approach
Defining user experience - strong ability to act as an 'informed customer'
Using social media for online engagement and delivering lean, functional web presences
Delivering with limited resources
Building and motivating teams - physically and virtually
Qualified and experienced OGC gateway reviewer
Learn more about Jeremy by checking out http://whitehallwebby.com, http://twitter.com/jeremygould, http://linkedin.com/in/jeremygould/
For more information, or to view the conference programme in full, please visit:
www.online-information.co.uk/conference

Information Professionals guiding you to the best bits of the blogosphere

Still baffled by the popularity of his blog, Stephen Arnold, who will give the closing keynote speech at the Online Information 2008 show, has little enthusiasm for blogosphere backslapping and puts his efforts into content critique instead.
Q: Where is your blog?
A: arnoldit.com/wordpress
Q: Describe your blog and the categories you have on it
A: I'm an adult goose who comments on search and content processing.
Q How long have you been blogging?
A: Since January 2008.
Q: What started you off blogging?
A: To protect my term "beyond search". My attorney told me that to protect those two words I would have to do something with the term. It's an intellectual property matter. Now I'm stuck with it.
Q: Do you comment on other blogs and what is the value of commenting?
A: I comment on anything that interests me that is related to content processing: traditional media, upstart companies and anything in between. I'm highly critical; I make no attempt to be fair.
Q: Which bloggers do you watch, link to and why?
A: Not many. The list is on the site. I'm not interested in links; I provide opinion.
Q: How does your organisation benefit from your presence in the blogosphere?
A: Again, I was told that I needed to blog if I wanted to own the "beyond search" term.
Q: What are the blogs in your sector that you trust?
A: No clue; I pay no attention. I do primary research for organisations. Most weblogs are written by people who aren't experts. Most of the ones I've seen are baloney.
Q: What do you personally get out of it for your career?
A: I'm at the end of my career; I get nothing. I own the term "beyond search" on the strength of the content on my weblog. I put no new stuff on my weblog and I make that clear. I'm the antithesis of the 25-year-old who works in search.
Q: What good things have happened to you that could only have happened because of blogging?
A: Nothing good, other than owning the term. I had no idea that the weblog would become popular. Its baloney compared with the studies I have done. I'm baffled by the fascination with my weblog. I have no interest in being popular. I have a readership in the tens of thousands and I'm baffled. I'm the opposite to IWR. My weblog is about what's important. When someone criticises me, I think that's good, and say "keep thinking". That's what it's about.
Q: Setting work aside, which blogs do you read just for fun?
A: None, I work.
Selection box: Beyond Search's blogroll
What search sounds like: altsearchengines.com
Content management big boys' scrap: bmoc.wordpress.com
Advice from Down Under: steptwo.com.au/columntwo/archives/cat_search_tools.html

A pair of Google goggles: blog.adheresolutions.com and blogoscoped.com
Natural language processing: lingpipe-blog.com
Search engine marketing/optimisation: pandia.com/index.html

A web of information relationships

This week I wanted to highlight a few examples I have recently come across that display and contextualising complex data in innovative ways.
The first up is a basic but clever little Java applet that displays the structure of any given website. You pop in the URL of your choice and the applet gets busy making a conceptual diagram of your site.
Links (blue), tables (red), images (violet), forms (yellow) and HTML tags (amongst others) are allocated a particular colour and placed accordingly in a spider chart. That is then laid out on the basis of how the various elements of the site relate to each other and on their frequency.
Although simple it's interesting to compare the structure one site to the next. Have a look how the IWR blog compares to the IWR home page.
IWR Blog

IWR Website

The outcome is a unique and pretty graphic, but the question is how useful is it?
In its current form maybe not so much for the average information pro, but what if rather than search through the amount of DIV tags and HTML links on a site, it could search a number of key words and how they relate? Fortunately the source code has been made available so if anyone is interested have a look.
As a start it illustrates how people are being inspired to show the things they find fascinating in unique and innovative ways.
Next up is Breathing Earth a 'real-time' map of the world that shows very clearly the co2 emissions of any given country while a series of either sun or shadow icons flash up whenever someone is either born or died in the world.

The simulation takes its data from sources ranging from the United Nations to the World Factbook (published by the CIA) and works out the averages. Apart from the world map itself, a table in the corner of the page shows the amount of co2 generated and how many births and deaths their have been since you opened up the page.


It's a clever way of hammering home the momentum of civilisation from the energy it takes to maintain the lifestyles of richer nations to poignant flickering of a multitude of sun and shadow icons in the developing regions on the planet. By making the point so well it rather impressed me.
Finally, I also came across a rather handy vendor generated tool while conducting a review of their recently revamped website.
Credo Reference (or Xrefer as you may remember them) has recently relaunched their web services platform, and tucked away in there is a reworked Concept Map. This self animated spider diagram is another excellent way of showing the researcher what the relationships are to different but related search results. Results can be manipulated so easily, even the ability to display the depth of your results is available. You can probably tell that I rather liked it. But more of that in the review to come.

In the meantime any of the more technical minded of you out there think you could apply these to your work, do let us know what results you had.

Innovations in search or just vendor hype?

By Phil Muncaster
So another week another enterprise search announcement. This time Exalead, one of the mid-tier vendors sharing the space with Vivissimo, Sinequa and others, has launched a new product line - CloudView. The problem I'm discovering digging deeper and deeper into this area, is that every single vendor is claiming to have a differentiator, a unique selling point and the best search engine in the world ... ever. Unfortunately, speak to the analyst community and they'll probably tell you that the enterprise search market is seriously crowded, and that most of the options you'll have out there pretty much boil down to not that much differentiation at all.
CloudView promises an OEM edition, a Search Edition and a 360 Edition all built on a service oriented architecture platform. Part of the message UK managing director Raymond Bentinck is trying to push out is of Exalead technology giving improved usability and relevancy. The other is being able to search structured and unstructured information in the enterprise and beyond, and complete the loop if you like, by going further than BI tools can by telling you not just the what but the why.
According to Ovum's Mike Davis, the only way to really differentiate in this space is by concentrating on a specific sector, and serving the needs of those customers. Which is very much what Recommind does, with the legal market pretty much in its back pocket. If search is being commoditised to this extent, it's probably not a bad thing for the IT buyer, or the information professionals who have to use the products - competition usually benefits the customer eventually. Search is fast becoming, as Davis says, the new portal - the place where you want to go to find all your information in a single view, and the vendors that can provide this in a most comprehensive and user friendly way as possible will triumph.