stargeek
Content Targetting for Personal AdsContent Targetting for Personal AdsContent Targetting for Personal Ads 04/09/2004 04:09 PM Sure, personal ads are one of the biggest money-makers on the web, with everyone from InterActiveCorp to Friendster being involved... This is a GrokNews Entry: (what is grok?)Content Targetting for Personal AdsGrok Headline matches for Content Targetting for Personal AdsAdsense Content TargettingAdsense Content Targetting 06/30/2004 08:07 AM There is a bit of a debate going on in the AdSense community on just what Google uses to target advertisments. Is it strickly on-the-page criteria, or are their off-the-page influences such as link text. If it is off-the-page, does site context and structure (theme) matter? Google Targetting Dark FiberGoogle Targetting Dark Fiber 02/01/2005 09:16 PM "Dark fiber refers to fiber optic cable that's already been laid, but is not yet in use. Thousands of miles of dark fiber is available in the United States, ... "Google is looking for Strategic Negotiator candidates with experience in...(i)dentification, selection, and negotiation of dark fiber contracts both in metropolitan areas and over long distances..." GlooLabs and Samsung SDS Partner to
|
 In a recent
post
I advocated almost a complete replacement of existing knowledge
management systems and intranets with a three-tiered set of simple,
intuitive tools consisting of:
On giving it further thought, however, I wondered whether PPI was the solution to the wrong problem. If the tools and information on people's PCs and intranets are unduly complex, counter-intuitive, and inappropriate for the key business problems that front-line people need to solve, so that people use other processes (walking down the hall to speak to colleagues), other tools (the public Internet) and other sources of information (the people in their rolodex) instead of the ones supplied by their employer -- doesn't this suggest it's the tools that need 'improving', not the users and the processes they use? I believe personal content management tools are the place to start, because since the earliest days of business, the principal way of sharing information has been peer-to-peer, the most valued 'repositories' of business information have been personal filing cabinets, and the principal schema for organizing work has been the personal desktop. It makes sense, therefore, that tools that facilitate and reflect these well-established 'knowledge processes', information sources and networks should be much more successful than the complex, centralized, hierarchical knowledge management tools and repositories that have been foisted on users for the past decade. I wrote the other day about attempts to replace paper, and about Gladwell's study of why paper and documents have proven so durable and successful even in this electronic age (spatial flexibility, tailorability, browsability). And I believe any schema for personal content management needs to reflect and honour our most established 'information behaviour' -- the shuffling of paper. The founders of a company called Alias Research (now part of Silicon Graphics, but in the process of being spun off again) were powerful advocates of making technology adapt to human behaviour rather than the other way around, and I agree with them 100%. Lowest common denominator, across all job descriptions, levels and industries, are these fundamental 'knowledge worker' behaviours and needs:
I'd start by creating a machine-readable analogue of the physical workspace. We need a Workspace Tool that allows us to shuffle virtual documents the same three-dimensional way we shuffle physical ones. That tool should replace the 'arrow' cursor with a 'hand' cursor, like the Acrobat pdf cursor but a lot more flexible. The 'hand' needs to be able to pick up and move a document, and to pick up and read and browse a document, and to be able to clip a document or a piece of a document to another, either temporarily (so the documents could be separated again) or permanently (so they would become a new document), and to be able to place any document anywhere in a stack of documents. The 'hand' needs to be able to put two documents side by side and browse them simultaneously. The tool needs to allow the user to do this on multiple three-dimensional virtual workspaces, that the user can label as they see fit. It must allow the user to make multiple copies of the document, and move or change each copy in different ways. And it must allow the user to send any copy of the document to any number of other people (without opening another 'application') and to 'permission' the document to identify who else can 'subscribe' to it -- the set of people who they will allow entry to this virtual workspace to access it. Such a tool would allow us to capitalize on the economy of 'virtual' space by doing away with the 'filing cabinet' -- that horrible black hole invented by Dewey the librarian into which documents disappear never to be found again, which Windows has tragically copied. Instead, we would 'save' the entire workspace, with its three-dimensional array of documents intact. It would be neatly put away but, if we needed something in that workspace again, we would simply open the entire workspace again, arranged in the way that made sense to us, and instantly find what we were looking for by where it was in the space, not by having to remember what awkward name we gave it. And then on to the next project with a 'clean' new workspace. This tool would need to be indifferent to the document's format -- whether the suffix was .doc or .xls or .ppt or .html or .pdf would be irrelevant. More importantly, e-mail messages and other 'recorded conversations' would need to be seamlessly accommodated just like any other document. There are some tools today that do limited parts of the above, but in awkward and unintuitive ways. This needs to be as simple as child's-play, and will probably require software designers to start from scratch and throw away all their familiar technological architecture constructs in favour of the human information constructs we have used at least since Gutenburg. The Workspace Tool could eliminate the need for Windows Explorer and similar 'file management' tools on most computers. OK, that's a start on the spatial flexibility and paper-shuffling spec for the tool. Let's go on to annotation. I've seen some limited annotation functionality in a program called FolioViews, that 'labels' each user's notes and/or changes in a publicly-accessible and centrally-controlled document. MS Word has some such functionality in its 'edit mode'. E-mail uses blacklining or indenting to create 'threads' of consecutive commentary. And wikis take it to the next step -- collaboration -- but at the cost of not distinguishing which individuals contributed and changed what, which requires enormous trust. All of these are forms of annotation. But you have to admit they're pretty clumsy. Again, let's look at how it happens in the physical world, and emulate that. For short additions we use the carat and write above the line. We cross out, without eliminating legibility, to indicate deletion. We use the margins, and, if that isn't enough, a separate page with a numbered reference for commentary and longer additions. We may use post-its for the same purpose, or for personal notes pertinent to the document. There are three reasons this is much easier with a pencil and paper than on a laptop. The first is flexibility -- by writing smaller or at an angle we can squeeze a lot of changes into a small area, and we can use graphics as well as text. And we can move stuff around within the document easily. The second is recognizability -- we can tell by the handwriting whose changes are whose. The third is comparability -- we can put two pieces of text side-by-side to compare them or see if they're compatible as we decide what edits or annotations to make. How could we do this in a simple, intuitive way on a laptop? This is much more challenging because of the different native formats of all the documents we annotate. I suspect any intuitive Annotation Tool would need to quietly convert each document to a bitmap in the background. It would also need to pre-set the user's annotation 'voice' -- using some distinctive font, typestyle, textstyle and/or font/background colour to set off the annotations from the rest of the document. It would use the pencil, rather than the hand or arrow, as the cursor symbol. It would need a simple 'insert or comment' functionality that would automatically expand the available space -- exactly at the point of insert -- to contain all that the user wanted to add. That functionality would include a simple freeform drawing tool for graphics. The tool would need a 'mark to delete' functionality that didn't obliterate what was proposed for deletion. It would need a 'replace' functionality that combined the 'insert' and 'mark to delete' functions. It would need a 'highlight' function. It would need a 'move' function. It would ideally need a 'cross-reference' function that would allow the annotator's inserts and comments to dynamically link to another place in the document, or a section of another document. The key again is simplicity and intuitiveness. When the user places the 'pencil' cursor in a space and starts drawing or typing, the tool would automatically interpret this as an 'insert or comment'. Click and drag would first 'highlight', and then if the user started drawing or typing it would be treated as a 'replace', whereas if the user hit the 'delete' key it would 'mark to delete' and if the user then moved the pencil cursor elsewhere in the document and hit the 'insert' key it would leave a numbered flag at the original point and move the highlighted content to the new location. The key sequence 'cf.' could activate the 'cross-reference' function. No menus, no special function keys to remember. In fact, this simple analogue to the pencil could even replace the word processor and html composing tool for all but the most sophisticated document preparation. For what is composition beyond starting with a blank page, and successively inserting, replacing, deleting, moving, annotating and cross-referencing?  Even
if this Annotation Tool isn't able to interpret and spruce up the
hand-drawn graphics into more professional form, as long as it is able
to compress the annotated document to a reasonable file size for
storage and transmitting to others, its product could become the
ubiquitous standard format in which virtually all documents are
maintained on our computers. And most important, the
Workspace Tool and the Annotation Tool together could obviate the need
for most of us to ever print out anything in hard copy. So not
only would we save a lot of paper, we'd no longer have to worry about
page size, page cutoff or printer compatibility.As I've mentioned before, I think UXGA technology is also essential to getting us to this state, since it allows the user to review, without eyestrain or scrolling, two complete pages side-by-side on the screen. I also think significant productivity improvement will only come when the third 'layer' in the chart above -- social networking applications that allow us to identify relevant contacts, connect to them powerfully, simply and virtually, and share our permissioned content with them -- have been built on top of these newly-improved personal content management applications. Only the three 'layers' of tools working together can enable powerful, context-rich virtual conversations, so that Dr. Nonaka's famous 'virtuous cycle' of knowledge creation (pictured just above right) can finally become a reality. And then, decision-makers will no longer be able to blame awkward and inappropriate technology for being uninformed. |
ptech.wsj.com/ptech.html
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ptech.wsj.com/archive/ptech-20040916.html
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zeelish.com
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Well the last two months have been fun. Todd, the Head Geek asked me to handle the daily news while he finished his super secret project. His project is about done and I have other commitments, so today will be the last day of me handling the daily news. I will still be doing some Apple articles, so you’re not totally rid of me. :-)
So I wanted to say thank you for putting up with my presentation of
the news, I appreciated your patience. I also wanted to publicly thank
Todd for allowing me to post on his website. You can visit me at
my Mac Switcher Website, www.surf-bits.com.
Take care, Tim
I've been trolling through all the social networks, blogging tools, forums, mail lists, personal information managers and portals I've signed up to over the years letting folks that the micro-content roadshow is getting ready to leave the station.
First trial run - Vancouver, B.C.
Then NYC - Amsterdam - Paris - Trieste and London.
My time in Galway - will certainly be part of the micro-content revolution - but ONLY focused on a digital identity standard we call FOAF. Many have complained that the term FOAF (which stands for Friend Of A Friend) is the wrong term - as it's much more than a list of friends, and they're right.
But the FOAF train is leaving the station and we're all about being pragmatic and getting things to work - now.
We can always start an OpenPeople effort - later.
Meanwhile I'd love to meet people and talk about micro-content. Come on by one of the dinners and let's schmooze open standards and what's possible.
gid.cimne.upc.es
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I've long been a fan of Audioscrobbler and a user there, but I've been waiting for them to do cool stuff with the data.
I don't know exactly what the relationship is with audioscrobbler, but Last.FM appears to be everyone's audioscrobbler data (like mine), but with mp3 streaming of the music. I just tried it out and heard my own collection streaming back at me, as a virtual radio station. It will even let me hear all my friends' music in streaming form.
Something makes me think this can't possibly be legal or last for any length of time, but it is a cool use of Audioscrobbler's data.
nytimes.com/2004/06/03/international/middleeast/02CND-TENE.htm
l?hp
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personalfirewallday.org
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