Bingme

"Don't ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who are alive."

create your own visited countries map or vertaling Duits Nederlands

What if you could see all your company activities in realtime? This has been the goal of many technology companies over the years. No single solution stands out as being great but, new approaches based on metadata mashups might make this a reality soon.

The first generation of mashups have focused on maps to highlight the relationships between location based metadata. The new mashup dashboards can show your companies sales based on location, buyer profile, total sale across time. Your marketing team can know who just experienced their key product message along with the effectiveness of the delivery channel over time. Collecting the stream of attention metadata as your target customers listen to your product message on their iPod and presenting it in a dashboard puts the CMO back in the driver seat.

This is great overview of participant segmentation and the data flows that are driving the new web. Media metadata is the key element of many of the new viral participation sites and can be applied to old problems. Segmenting the participants and tuning the metadata using the model below will enable the addition of web2.0 elements into the enterprise. Any enterprise is made up of a collection of roles and technology adoption profiles. Yes these are people but from the enterprise point of view their employees are personas performing processes. Executive can now imprint and influence the performance of their company at less cost and higher fidelity then ever before.

The diagram below illustrates how we see media and metadata flowing to and from different activities around media on the web. The corners of the matrix are meant to represent activities, not kinds of people. So, for example, a Flickr user might fluidly switch between creating and uploading her original photos, to enthusiastically tagging and commenting on others’ photos, to passively watching syndicated photos appear on her desktop or phone, to Photoshopping a Creative Commons-licensed photo that catches her eye and re-uploading it… The point of the diagram is simply to emhasize that each of these activities generates different kinds of metadata that potentially can be used to support the other activities. MSMDX (Media Streams Metadata Exchange) project’s

A creative mashup presented as a game. A bit like Risk with the randomness of Google search results.

a cool online strategy game that exploits Google's search engine in an original way. the search results are localized using the Netgeo database (www.caida.org) & "captured" on a world map by virtual pins. by choosing well chosen search queries, players can occupy specific places on the world map. the 2nd player (or the computer) then tries to "hit" those exact places, or to explore alternative cities or countries to occupy, until all pins are used. Information Aesthetics

The new web properties have certainly started to get mainstream attention. Businessweek and other magazines are dissecting the main components of Web2.0. Now even the guardian of the mainstream is including (and defining?) the elements of the new web.
2006 Emerging Technologies Hype Cycle

Web 2.0 represents a broad collection of recent trends in Internet technologies and business models. Particular focus has been given to user-created content, lightweight technology, service-based access and shared revenue models. Technologies rated by Gartner as having transformational, high or moderate impact include: Social Network Analysis (SNA) is rated as high impact (definition: enables new ways of performing vertical applications that will result in significantly increased revenue or cost savings for an enterprise) and capable of reaching maturity in less than two years. SNA is the use of information and knowledge from many people and their personal networks. It involves collecting massive amounts of data from multiple sources, analyzing the data to identify relationships and mining it for new information. Gartner said that SNA can successfully impact a business by being used to identify target markets, create successful project teams and serendipitously identify unvoiced conclusions. Ajax is also rated as high impact and capable of reaching maturity in less than two years. Ajax is a collection of techniques that Web developers use to deliver an enhanced, more-responsive user experience in the confines of a modern browser (for example, recent version of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Mozilla, Safari or Opera). A narrow-scope use of Ajax can have a limited impact in terms of making a difficult-to-use Web application somewhat less difficult. However, Gartner said, even this limited impact is worth it, and users will appreciate incremental improvements in the usability of applications. High levels of impact and business value can only be achieved when the development process encompasses innovations in usability and reliance on complementary server-side processing (as is done in Google Maps). Collective intelligence, rated as transformational (definition: enables new ways of doing business across industries that will result in major shifts in industry dynamics) is expected to reach mainstream adoption in five to ten years. Collective intelligence is an approach to producing intellectual content (such as code, documents, indexing and decisions) that results from individuals working together with no centralized authority. This is seen as a more cost-efficient way of producing content, metadata, software and certain services. Mashup is rated as moderate on the Hype Cycle (definition: provides incremental improvements to established processes that will result in increased revenue or cost savings for an enterprise), but is expected to hit mainstream adoption in less than two years. A "mashup" is a lightweight tactical integration of multi-sourced applications or content into a single offering. Because mashups leverage data and services from public Web sites and Web applications, they’re lightweight in implementation and built with a minimal amount of code. Their primary business benefit is that they can quickly meet tactical needs with reduced development costs and improved user satisfaction. Gartner warns that because they combine data and logic from multiple sources, they’re vulnerable to failures in any one of those sources.

GeoRuby A few days ago, IvyGIS was released by Robert Thau. It is a Rails engine which connects to MapServer and PostGIS databases and can display Google Maps-style views. Here is a demo and it is quite impressive. It uses the SVG display feature of Firefox (since version 1.5) to overlay geometries obtained from the PostGIS server on top of MapServer image tiles. This is the first time I have seen this functionality actually put to use and it looks absolutely great. It also works on IE6 using VML (but I haven’t tested yet). There is some functionality overlap with my own project, GeoRuby and the PostGIS Spatial Adapter, regarding PostGIS data access. A difference is that, in the case of IvyGIS, the use of geometric columns must be declared in the model whereas for GeoRuby, it is transparent, but that is a functionality not difficult at all to add.

Now that we are collaborating on documents and ideas using services like Writley, how do we find the documents we are working? This a a many to many problem that needs a live tagging or clustering solution. Ajax spreadsheets are not a real solution but some of the attributes built into a spreadsheet like solution do help this problem.

The concept of individuals owning documents is broken. The network of documents, clustered by type and usage, are owned by the group. Permissions may create an ownership hierarchy but, input is allowed by all. Wikis are certainly one solution to this problem but not a complete solution. Ajax editors and document viewers are needed to provide a richer interaction with these new documents. You need awareness of who is editing a section of a document as it happens. Certain section get locked dynamically as users need to post an edit. All edits are version controlled and different version clusters can be shared as almost new documents. The idea of what is a document is based on the set of editors over stream of time. The classic version control problems come to the forefront. Branching, merging, conflicts need to be supported in these new ajax document editors.

Who owns your identity? The ideal world would be where you owned your identity. The reality is that any number of competing web entities own pieces of you. Yahoo has their identity network, Google has theirs, Microsoft, AOL, and other have identity networks that barely connect. Segmentation of what is you is needed. Talk seemed to move around the services that are provided by People aggregator.

Using SaaS and Web 2.0 for business automation This area is of importance because good, effective Business Process Management has been one of the holy grails of enterprise software for years now. Traditional software development has repeatedly yielded BPM results that are too heavyweight, brittle, hard-to-change, and not responsive to the business. And like with so many aspects of Web 2.0, looking at the successful models in the highly Darwinian Petri dish of the Web gives us many suggestions on how to do it better: Dynamic languages that make mashing together functionality both inexpensive and easy, low-impedence and highly scalable integration models such as JSON and REST instead of SOAP or WS-*, peer production techniques that harness the users as the users operate the system, self-service IT and the list goes on.

Harnessing Web 2.0 techniques for business process integration, automation, and management, particularly around highly-repetitive, transactionalprocesses will allow more time for tacit interactions, the high value knowledge work that many workers can't spend time doing because of the overhead of tedious, low-value transactional work. Tacit interactions are perceived as one of the biggest remaining avenuesfor achieving higher worker productivity.