Category: Technology

My flight from Amsterdam to Valencia was one of the first to make it on-time, on-schedule this Tuesday — but of course, before that, I spent several days anxiously keeping track of the latest updates on the cloud hanging over Europe. And while I consider myself very lucky (a friend of mine will be stuck in Hong Kong until the 6th of May!), it gave me plenty of time to ponder just how important on-line communications play a role in this nowadays. Continue reading “How a volcano in Iceland disrupts online”

You may have heard of the 90/9/1 rule of social engagement: in essence, the rule posits that in a community, 90% of the people are passive readers; 9% are active participants; and 1% account for creating the majority of content. It’s key to understanding how the growth of an online community works. Continue reading “Measuring the 90-9-1 Rule in Social Media”

Microblogging is the quintessential “keep it simple” service.  So when a vendor adds a seemingly minor new feature, that’s relatively big news. (Remember when Twitter added “retweets” last year?) Naturally, when Yammer announced its “community” functionality last week, it was immediately followed by a few gushy reports on what a game-changer this was. Rather than go by the demos, I waited until the service actually became available yesterday to have a look. Continue reading “Yammer not ready for the enterprise”

Quick question. If a conference runs simultaneous tracks on “Enterprise Search,” “Document Management,” and “Company XYZ’s project to replace the intranet with microwikiblogging,” which will have the largest audience?

I’d venture a guess that most people are drawn to the the experimental and innovative, rather than to the mundane reality of complicated enterprise tools. That’s only natural, certainly at a conference. You go there to be inspired, not to be reminded of that system designed to do essential, but relatively boring stuff; a system which, on top of that, is still exhaustingly difficult to get right. Call it content technology escapism, if you will. Continue reading “The dangers of social software”

It’s one of those elusive dreams of web content management: a completely metadata-driven publishing model. Especially when there’s lots of content, and a variety of sites or channels targeting different audiences. Wouldn’t it be great if content more or less automatically found its way to the right places? The same items appearing in all the right spots, without laboriously having to copy it or even attach it to a specific point in your website tree? Continue reading “Tagging your web content”

Over the years, I’ve seen a large number of web site functional designs, technical designs, requirements, wireframes and mock-ups. But usually, the one thing missing from the planning of a WCM-driven web site is what’s most likely to shoot the implementation in the foot: the functional design of the CMS back-end. The form & function of how the CMS will work, look and feel for the end-user of the system, not the visitor to the web site, is too often overlooked. Continue reading “Why you’ll throw away your CMS in 3 years”

A lot of my time is spent evaluating technology, and I have a confession to make: the licensing is one of the least spectacular bits to review. It’s certainly relevant, and always one of the things we discuss, but it rarely makes the top-10 issues in a review. Continue reading “Open source: it’s just a license”

In a clip on YouTube, an interviewer asks passersby in Times Square what a browser is. The surprising result: many think it’s a search engine. Continue reading “Users don’t know what a browser is (or anything else)”

Somewhat stealing the thunder of Microsoft‘s almost-released Bing search, Google presented a preview of Wave yesterday at the I/O Developer conference. So what kind of wave is this?

Well, the short version of Google’s explanation is that Wave intends to provide a modern alternative to the aging paradigm of email (the long version is on YouTube). If you’ve been following the Social Software & Collaboration space, you could recognize it as a collision of Twitter, IM, and blog comment threads. Continue reading “Google Wave: Tsunami or Wipe Out?”

Spring is here, and, as in Autumn, this means new products released and new version numbers. But how major or minor will the releases really be? Can you tell from the versioning alone? Continue reading “Software versions – how strange the change from major to minor”