Subject Matters

John Robb writes about Joe Reger’s new venture:

The concept is simple. Data is usually locked up in monolithic applications (CRM, ERP, etc.). Application seats are expensive. Training is expensive. Etc. People that need the data often can’t get to it.

What if human readable data flows (via RSS) could be generated by these applications? It would allow the development of easy to read weblogs (that republished these RSS flows) that almost everyone in the company would find valuable. The combinations are almost limitless and the flow is completely automated.

The flip side is also extremely valuable. Using a weblog model of data entry, it would become much easier to train people to enter data in a timely fashion. Further, they get immediate feedback on their efforts since the data they post is transformed into an entry on the blog.

To be honest that seems a little bit eccentric for me as ERP consultant. In ERP applications users typicaly get regular output in the form of report. Alerts are another form of output for irregular information. Then there is one more way of getting information called query. I can hardly imagine these to be replaced by RSS. What I am thinking about is typical scenario where some user is processing each transaction on a one by one basis. Then RSS-like presentation could be very interesting to think about. The examples could be order approval, cost account/element assignment,  order shipment, etc.

But as for CRM it’s quite another matter. As Reger explains:

Let’s take the example of a sales force working at a Fortune 100 company. This sales force works on long-cycle consultative sales that generally take 60-90 days to complete.

Traditional Blogging:

Members of the sales force make blog entries each time they talk to or visit a potential client. This practice is valuable because it creates a repository of sales tactics and results.

dataBlogging:

Just like in traditional blogging, members of the sales force make entries each time they visit a potential client. However, and this is the key, because their blog entries have additional data fields on them they track quantifiable information like Chance of Close, Effectiveness of Pitch, Hours Invested, etc.

Graphs are generated from the extended data attached to each blog. For example, an Effectiveness of Pitch vs. Hours Invested graph will determine whether spending more time selling is worthwhile.

The Advanced Data Search feature is used to find entries based on quantifiable data searches… in much the same way that somebody might query a database. However, it is done simply through a web interface by anybody.

The extended data for each sales call is published in RSS feeds, meaning that other enterprise systems can consume it… a simple integration between the dataBlogging system and more complex and possibly more difficult-to-use legacy systems.

Open Source Social Bookmarking Service comforteagle writes “This past week I launched an open source social bookmarking competitor to delicio.us - de.lirio.us. After running it for a while open to the public it appears to be running relatively bug free so this is the invitation to the Slashdot crowd. The code is entirely open and the content is cc licensed, so I’m sure it won’t take too long for folks to cook up some additional tools aside from the blogging feature. For those not familiar the meme is social bookmarking, which is basically a service to share bookmarks publicly instead (or in addition to) only within your browser. There are lots of other additional benefits, but that’s the gist of it. More details here and here.”

David Weinberger writes:

We’ve organized knowledge into trees, from Aristotle to Linnaeus to Dewey. You get a tree by doing the basic thing of lumping and splitting, and then splitting the lumps until you get to a lump that is too unitary or miscellaneous to bear any more splitting. But lumping and splitting has been constrained by physical limitations. For example:

1. A thing has to go in one pile or another. For Aristotle, this was expressed as the Law of Identity (A is A and A is not not-A), a pretty basic rule.

2. The way we lump and split is the same for everyone: If you own a clothing store and separate it into men’s and women’s departments, it’s separated that way for everyone who enters.

3. The lumping and splitting is done by experts.

4. The person who owns the stuff also owns the organization of the stuff. You can’t come into the clothing store and rearrange it the way that suits you.

5. Lumping and splitting results in a neat and clean order. It’s clean-edged.

But now we’re digitizing information, resulting in a third order of order in which we break the rules of real-world order:

1. Things can go in more than one pile - You put your e-store’s hiking boots under shoes, men’s and women’s apparel, outdoor wear, popular items, items on sale, etc.

2. The arrangement can be different for each person.

3. You or your social group are the experts.

4. Users get to control the organization of the stuff.

5. Messiness is a virtue on the Web.

You can see much of this in the rise of tagging: Users create the metadata and anyone can figure out how to sort through it and organize it. It’s out of the hands of the owners of the stuff being classified.

So, what I’m saying is that we’re moving from thinking that the right way to arrange — and understand — things is to figure out the taxonomic tree ahead of time. Instead, make a big pile of leaves, each with lots of metadata, and allow users to add more metadata and to sort and categorize it as they need.

But there are problems with this, especially with regard to tags:

- One word can have many meanings, and one meaning can have many words. As tagging gets more popular, that’ll be a bigger issue.

- If we form social groups based around how we use words, we run the risk of fragmenting ourselves further, this time around semantics.

- Folksonomies can reinforce homogeneity.

John Robb has a wish: “Here’s a product I would like to use. When I was at UserLand we used a group instant outliner to coordinate our efforts. It was very, very helpful. The only problem was the desktop to desktop synchronization. One way to fix that would be to offer a group outliner as a subscription-based Web service. A group instant outliner that works like Google Maps (as an example of the real-time, responsive, visually intensive Web service) would be amazing. Let me say it again: it would amazing.

WSJ writes:

Four years ago, Jimmy Wales launched a free online encyclopedia that anyone could edit. Now, Wikipedia is one of the most popular sites on the Web, and Mr. Wales is building on its success with a new venture. This time, he intends to make a buck.

Mr. Wales’s closely held company Wikia Inc. has begun promoting its first for-profit endeavor, an ad-supported site called Wikicities.com that is based on the concept behind Wikipedia. Through Wikicities, groups of Web users can create their own free Web sites and fill them with, well, nearly anything. Among the topics being discussed on the nascent site: Macintosh computers, college hockey and real-world cities like Los Angeles, Beijing and Calgary.

Jon Udell writes @ InfoWorld:

…The current craze for tagging things — Flickr photos, del.icio.us, and Furl URLs — shows that people are more likely than you’d guess to add structure to content. Under what conditions will they make the effort? First, tagging must be easy — a two-second no-brainer. Second, it must deliver both instant gratification and longer-term value to the person doing the tagging. Third and most important, it must occur in a shared context so that network effects can kick in.

Of course, some tags are implicitly woven into the fabric of our content. Consider, for example, the recent Demo conference in Scottsdale, Ariz. As information about the event flowed into the blogosphere, a likely tag to hang on conference-related items would have been the distinctive name Demo@15. And sure enough, that tag was used on both Flickr and del.icio.us, although by only one person. (Hint to conference planners: If you want the blogosphere to synchronize its coverage of your event, pick a tag and promote it.)

But there are also implicit tags — namely links — that identify items about the conference, and a new service I built this week is helping me find them. After Jason Hunter showed me Mark Logic’s XQuery-based XML database, Content Interaction Server, in a screencast, I set up an instance of it and began pumping in the RSS feeds of all the blogs I read. Then I wrote a query that combines free-text search for items containing the strings “Demo” or “Demo@15″ with structured search for items that contain links to demo.com. It yielded a nice list of Demo-related items that I couldn’t have built any other way.

Russell Beattie makes some interesting points about tags:

The core of the idea which Anthony implemented and expanded upon was this: Del.icio.us introduced (or at least popularized) the concept of tagging as a way of organizing links. Tags in my mind are flat-namespace meta data that can help identify a piece of content in an almost democratic fashion. Flickr took the concept and applied it to photos, so that people could organize photos based on this simple meta data. I didn’t grok this at first, until I had created a new flickr user called MobileMonday and blogged that people should send me their photos of the event and I would post them under that name. That’s when Mike Rowehl responded and said, more or less “hey moron, everyone can post under their *own* name and just tag them ‘mobilemonday’ instead.” And that’s when a little light went on over my head about tags.

So I thought, what happens if you apply tags to messages as well? “Messages” being things like comments and blog posts, but in a forum-like structure, where you could follow threads in x dimensions. Add in Alerts (IM, email, etc.) and RSS and it becomes really useful as a discussion tool. Once we started working on that idea we expanded on it, and added URLs and user names to the tag namespace, now I can include URLs, but not just as way of sharing that link but of *commenting* on it. Then as a publisher, I can watch different tags, URLs and if someone responds my posts or puts my name in the tag, I get notified of those messages.

What captured my attention is this “threads in x dimensions” paradigm. I imagined this visual abstraction of x dimensions. It brings another interesting point: such a “dimensionism” will require totally new user interface approach. And alpha version of Tagsurt definitely lacks it. Still this “dimensionism” could be a great idea.