Subscribe
RSS news feed
Add to Technorati FavoritesRecent Posts
- free as in "free spirit"
- Application Distribution in the Cloud
- We don't need social media
- Weekly digest
- Are user stories an alternative to (smart) use cases?
- Twitter: the end of the gossip magazine
- For the sake of being social
- Weekly digest
- Twitter is a competitive sport
- Weekly digest
Navigate
Search the blog
Data Content & Knowledge / Business Intelligence
Tech predictions 2009: Information filtering and behavioral targeting are the new gold
Clay Shirky mentioned it some time ago "It's Not Information Overload. It's Filter Failure". And he is right, currently there is so much information that it is hard to filter it correctly to come to the information you need (Well it is not hard to filter it, it is hard to find a filter that fits your needs). Not only will you have this issue in your RSSreader or your inbox, you'll also experience it when visiting websites.
Not only website visitors will experience this issue, website owners will experience related issues. Due to the fact that the visitors cannot find the information they are looking for they will either stop looking and do nothing or will contact the organization of the site via another channel that is more expensive (a call to a helpdesk costs approximately 7 Euros for the helpdesk owner). The result however is a bad user experience for the visitor. Visitors will either not visit the site again and will try to find another more userfriendly site or they will only use the more expensive channel. Both results are not pleasing for neither the owner of the website (resulting in more costs and perhaps even lower revenue) nor for the visitor (bad user experience and wasting time on another channel than he initially prefered).
Therefore information filtering as well as behavioral targeting is the big thing for 2009. It will enables the visitor to get to the information he needs within the amount of time he wants to spent to look for this information. By customizing the website in run time on the personal needs of the visitor the site owner is able to create a nice you experience and the website owner will save money by having less phone calls and perhaps even earn more money due to the fact the visitor is seduced by some products he really could use that pops up thank to behavioral targeting.
Pick Your Fight: Browser War versus ISP “3 Strikes” Battle
It’s like a tale of two conflicts, where one tale concerns the renewed fight for browser supremacy (brought on by yet another brand new mega-hyped challenger); and the other deals with the never-ending tussle between music labels and illegal file-sharers (with Internet Service Providers, or ISPs, caught smack in the middle). It remains to be seen which battle will eventually come to be perceived as the good fight, but for now, which of the main protagonists would you rather be: the music label, the ISP or the web browser maker?
One key point of note, to my mind, is that both fights are intrinsically linked to the exceptional growth and ubiquity of the Internet, and ever-increasing bandwidth / connectivity for users and electronic devices. Both battles are also centered on the need, by some parties, to control access to certain resources (e.g. online information or media content), but that is where the similarity ends and the outcome / impact on the end-user begin to emerge.
On the one hand, this so called browser wars are ostensibly a good thing for the consumer, due to the beneficial effects of innovative companies trying to out-do each other for increased browser market share. The result is a win-win situation for both consumer and victor/s of the browser wars. On the other hand, when ISPs start monitoring, throttling bandwidth, and perhaps disconnecting, their users on suspicion of illegal content downloads, it becomes less clear as to who the likely winners and losers could be. Is it: the end-users, the ISPs, the record labels, or all / none / some of the above, (and to what degree do they win or lose anyway)?
It also makes one wonder if / how the lessons and outcomes of one battle can be applied to the other? For example, what if browser makers were forced to start targeting their users for possible prosecution, based on browsing habits and consumption of copyright-infringing content (e.g. illegal use of logos, text, images, videos and audio), will they really stand a chance in their particular battlefield? I think not, given the fact that user privacy, via so called private browsing mode, is now being touted as a must have feature by some of the major browsers makers. So what is the likelihood that future ISPs might seek to push privacy as a selling point for their services in order to attract those users who have been, or do not wish to be, stung by legal notices or prosecution? That would be most interesting to see.
In conclusion, it appears that one fight could help open up the field for competitive innovation, with great opportunities for both winners and end-users, while the other fight now seems more and more like a defensive rearguard action that could end-up stifling the more innovative go-to-market models necessary for survival in a changing environment. I leave it up to you to guess which is which.
Hypertext Markup Love 5
I think it was at least 10 years ago that I bought a book concerning HTML. The thing I remember most of this little book was that is contained a warning concerning the use frames in websites. Not a warning that you are probably completely clueless and you should not have a keyboard when you are planning implement frames in a site, but a warning for the fact that not all the browsers were supporting frames at that very moment of writing.
It was indeed a rather old book, however I fell in love with markup. Markup is the solid base of websites, all the other things (CSS, Flash, Silverlight, other plug ins etc) are just some fancy paint on the solid building. Off course the paint is important, however without a building there is not much to paint. Building buildings is more interesting to me than doing some paint jobs with fancy shiny paint.
Currently my markup loves is reviving since HTML5 is being specified. HTML5 does contain so much good elements, functionalities and other technologies that were missing since the introduction of HTML4 (almost 10 years ago in December 1999). I will give you five good reasons why you too should be in love with HTML5 and why you should use it:
- Clearer structure
HTML5 will offer you a clearer structure to create a page with. Instead of ending op in a severe case diveritus (use the div element for nearly everything with caring about semantics) you could use elements like Section, Article, Aside, Nav, Figure, Header and Footer. Your page will become far more semantic using the elements. - Video, Audio
Video is on great demand (every hour 13 hours of video is uploaded on Youtube). HTML didn't had native support for playing video and audio in sites. There was the object tag, however it still required a plug in to get things to work. Another great thing is that you can easily offer alternative formats for e.g. video's and that can you style the video tag as you can with any other element. - Offline web applications
With a native implementation you are no longer dependent on one vendor based plug ins (Google Gears), which is great, since more vendors result quite often in more innovation. And innovation is good for HTML as long as it is using open standards and is not proprietary. It really opens a new way of working (Gears is currently paving the path), you can now work when you want, where you want independent of connection. - User interaction
Isn't it a great idea that you can edit browser pages without the need of rich text editors like tinyMCE of FCK editor? Isn't it even greater that you have some elements that will enable a track changes functionality in webpages? Off course it is nice that you can drag and drop items in web pages, however the nicest option is the native Undo functionality (for someone with my typing skills it is really great). Again a standarized functionality that currently implemented via many plug ins (that have a hard time to manage cross browser functioning). - Communication
One of the limitation of e.g. AJAX is that it is by default single domain (with some tweaks in a browser you could make it multiple domain). However HTML5 offers by default cross-document messaging, which is great and offers again a great set of opportunities. Besides that also server-sent events, Web sockets, and channel messaging are great new features.
I bet you are also in love now with HTML5, it is only a pity we have to wait another 14 years before it is a real recommendation. However in the meanwhile we can flirt with it in several browsers.
Rent-a-ranter
My favorite podcast just finished their final, what they refer to as ordinary episode: LUG Radio . The podcast is hosted by four British blokes (Jono Bacon, Stuart Langridge, Chris Procter, and Adam Sweet) who admittedly swear and joke a lot but also discuss Linux and other open source related topics with very refreshing insights. That's all over now of course. They bailed out. Don't they say that only all good things come to an end? (wink,wink,smile)
In that final episode they were discussing whether - in their own words - "Pundits should fuck off". Their definition of a pundit is someone who writes or talks authoritatively about subjects without actually being an authority on that subject. In short: someone who pontificates. Listen to the episode yourself if you want to know what they concluded. One interesting question that came out of this discussion was whether good bloggers are just good at articulating things and not necessarily knowledgable about the subjects they write about.
Now I might be venturing on very thin ice here, but I actually like to write about subjects that fascinate me. And I am always fascinated by the things I don't fully understand yet, but am trying to understand. So my blogs are often thoughts that I am saying out loud, hoping I can spark some thoughts in other people's heads too. Does that make me a pundit? I'll leave that up to you (be gentle...).
Last week, Eiso Kant posted an entry on his blog with the inviting title: "Is blogging dead?". His point is that "blogs are often no longer about the integrity of the content but the number of backlinks it receives, the number of page views and how high it ranks in Google". I admit, these things matter much to me too, but you actually need to write about someting that is valued by others to achieve all that. That's the beauty of Web 2.0!
The thing that triggered me most was a response by Eiso on a comment to this blog entry, where he wrote:
"I have been at the head of a project where we hired article writers to populate blogs. When we paid them we didn’t ask for great articles, neither were we looking for the best writers, we were looking for cheap keyword rich content."
So if I am understanding correctly, you can rent a ranter for populating blogs. These people actually get paid to provide mediocre content. I have tried www.rent-a-ranter.com but it doesn't exist yet. So here's your chance!
Wall Street Journal: Most Corporate Blogs Are Unimaginative Failures
Gosh, I sure hope we are making a good attempt at not being a boring a corporate blog here! According to the Wall Street Journal most corporate blogs will bore you to death. Fortunately, the author of the article provides some good hints and examples of good corporate blogs. Let's copy their style and we should be safe. ;-)
I would really value your opinion of our blog now, dear reader. Did I just see you suppress a yawn?
Milking the web
The web has become a very lively place. Around the globe, people are happily sharing all sorts of experiences with any subject you can think of. There now is an enormous collection of thoughts, opinions, stories and conversations that you can draw from when you are selecting a car, finding a suitable mortgage, finding the best hospital for treating your mother's heart condition, purchasing top quality roasted Guatemalan coffee beans or finding out personal information about someone you are thinking about hiring.
I use different web resource types (blogs, search engines, feeds, ...) for finding out about different subjects. Moreover, the resource type that I use for finding out more about a subject depends on my connection with the subject. This is visualized in the picture below. I call it my web usage spectrum.
The horizontal axis marks the favourableness of subjects. On the left are the subjects that I don't care much about and on the far right are my favorite subjects. The vertical axis marks the frequency at which I use certain web resources for finding information about subjects. At the bottom are my least used resources and on top are the ones that I use all the time. The length of the boxes inside the graph says something about the universal usefulness of a resource. It is by no means exact nor did I collect any statistics.
I wish to stay abreast with subjects that I am strongly connected with. For that I am relying on resources that I value and trust. As you can see in the graph, I follow these resources using syndication and collaborative tools. For less favourable subjects I take a more traditional, pre-Web2.0-approach.
My web usage spectrum is highly subjective and reflects how I prefer to milk the web. I adapt it every now and then when I learn new tricks. Usually an adaption leads to an improvement in the quality of the information I find, the time I need to find the information or the amount of fun that I am having.
My guess is that my web usage spectrum is not unique and probably sub-optimal. I know that it is tweakable but I am relatively slow at adopting new tools (I am skeptical and allergic to change...). For example, I was only very recently convinced of the use of twitter (you can follow me here).
This all poses an interesting question: How do you know if your spectrum is optimal in the sense that you use the right resources the right way? One approach to answer this is to compare your spectrum with other spectrums. So please share with me: how do you milk your web?. What does your web usage spectrum look like?
Internal blogs matter
Like many other companies these days, Capgemini has an internal blogging community. I used to write frequent posts on my own internal blog, but I have been passive for over 6 months. The reason is that I do most of my blogging out in the open these days, which is already taking up much of my time.
I must also admit that I had another reason, besides being too busy blogging elsewhere, for pushing aside the internal blog-o-sphere: the fact that it is only visible from within Capgemini. But I have changed my mind after reading this post on the "Go Big Always" (GBA) blog by Sam Lawrence. I am very much inspired by this post. Thanks for waking me up, Sam!
The internal blogging community of Capgemini is fairly large. People from all over the globe are active in this community. There are blogs that focus on development methodologies, on specific technologies and products, on right shoring experiences, et cetera. However, I am not sure how actively other employees read these blogs and benefit from their contents.
Most people at Capgemini (at least as far as I can see) use good old e-mail for finding and sharing information. They simply direct a question or item of interest at an e-mail group. This usually results in quick answers too. On the other hand, people also complain about receiving too much generally directed e-mail that pollutes their e-mail boxes. Maybe we should use e-mail for specifically directed information only, and use the blogs for generally directed information. That would take a rather large collaborative effort in our case.
But would that really solve anything? Moving information from e-mail boxes to RSS feeds doesn't make much difference to me. I still have to read them, and I still won't have time enough to do that (the number of feed subscriptions I have in my RSS Software exceeds 80...). For me personally, podcasts form part of the solution. I listen to them while I am commuting or mowing the lawn (if I had one). The podcasts that aggregate news and information are usually the best ones.
So, I can only conclude boldly with this: All Capgemini personnel should get iPods. Depending on your role, your skills, your position and your ambitions, your iPod will be automatically synchronized with what you need to hear. We'll probably need to be a little bit further in the development of the third version of the Web to really make this work...
Wikimania
Warning: this blog post has an extremely high link density. When I wrote this, there was no article on "Link density" on Wikipedia yet. Feel free to create that article yourself. As of version 2.0 of the Web, everyone is allowed and entitled to do just that. In 1995 (long before the term Web 2.0 was coined), Ward Cunningham made this possible with his simplest online database that could possibly work. He was recently interviewed on the FLOSS Weekly Podcast and his original WikiWikiWeb is still online.
Probably because of its inherent simplicity, the wiki has become immensely popular. To give you an idea of this popularity, here are some crude statistics:
- Google yields almost 300,000,000 for "wiki",
- WikiEngines lists 147 implementations of the simplest online database,
- The most popular wiki engine MediaWiki has been downloaded 16,456 times in the last 2 months (also see the figure below),
- Wikipedia (based on MediaWiki) currently has 2,301,479 articles in the English language,
- Wet Paint, one of the most popular wiki hosting sites, has registered over 810.000 wiki sites.
Now you might think: "So, wikis are hot. Thanks for the stats, but what's in a wiki for me?" A wiki has proven to be a simple and effective tool for building a database of collective knowledge of a group of people. Fruits of a wiki range from solutions to problems to ideas for new products. The added value of a wiki lies in the possibilities that it creates for harvesting collective intelligence (crowd wisdom) and for collaborative innovation. Tim Hyer excellently explains this. I have much trust in the wiki model too. Some time ago, I even played with the idea of applying that model to a country's civil code. Thinking of adopting a wiki yourself, but not entirely convinced yet? Then watch this 21 episode movie series about wiki adoption (Blip TV).
The wiki certainly seems the easiest way to add collaboration functionality to your website. All you need to do is choose a wiki engine, style it to your company's style guide and your done, right?. Well...not exactly. You will first need to choose a wiki engine. There are quite a lot of wiki engines that we can choose from, but fortunately, there is the Wiki Engines wiki that provides us with a nice top 10 of wiki engines. You could start by picking a wiki that you can deploy in your back office. There are, of course, more selection criteria. Selecting a wiki engine is just like selecting any other software package. The Wiki Choice tree might ease the selection process.
Once you have launched your wiki, how do you make it work? We all expect to see a flourishing community, but how are you going to convince people that they should submit their knowledge and ideas? In order to grow a wiki needs fertilization (generating interest) and cultivation (monitoring and moderation), so point out a Champion. A wiki, like any other social site, requires substantial investment before you can reap its fruits. Will there be any return on your investment? What does a wiki cost? Maybe you will find answers to these questions at the International Symposium on Wikis (WikiSym) (the WikiSym website is, of course, a wiki).
Finally, here's a list of 12 wiki's that actually work. How is your wiki doing? Are you reaping fruits or are you still investing?
BI and Financial Risk Management
I'm sure we're all acutely aware of the current financial market problems as a result of sub-prime lending and the the down turn in the economies in many countries resulting in bad debt.
We could look to better intelligence to predict the market down turns, to look for the early triggers in the economy to help spot the warning signs and to help manage the situation. Complex mathematical models that give varying levels of probablistic outcome would have shown the shifting nature of the risk. We've also had increasing levels of legislation and regulation to identify individual risk and fraud and general improvements in risk determination at the Business to Consumer level. And yet after all these things we've seen a financial service market in near melt down.
What has surprised me most in this current period of crisis is the seeming lack of understanding of corporate exposure to risk through institution to institution trading. It appears that financial institutions may have been deeply concerned with the individual risk of a customer transaction, they've not had a suitable handle on the bigger and as events have transpired, potentially organisation crippling decisions they've been taking.
How many companies are looking back at their balanced scorecards and their array of metrics and rethinking which ones are really important to survival? I hope most of them.
iPodification obsolete?
Ron Tolido wrote that iPodification leads to nothing (quite literally) eventually. Until then, we will unfortunately have to carry around all our cumbersome gadgets. Sure thing, they are indeed getting smaller and smarter, usually right after you bought one, rendering your new precious obsolete (no matter how long you wait).
In the impressive 6 volume epic "Reality Dysfunction" Peter F. Hamilton writes about a far and dazzling future where people have the ability to have themselves genetically customized. They have genetically enhanced senses and can even digitally (for lack of a better term, I use digitally, because surely, digital computing will become extinct) record experienced senses for later replay. These senses are shared on a universe wide web. This same medium is used for telecommunication. Messages are e-thoughts with attached e-experiences. A nice example of a compelling nothing that iPodification could lead to.
In the mean time, iPodification is taking some very interesting shapes. Take the iPodified baby for example, or Levis' iPodified jeans. But mostly, iPodification means making "digital stuff" portable. I don't know how to put that better. The digital stuff can be anything: books (have a look at Podiobooks), maps, movies, language courses, schedules, music, e-mail, news, directories... Some of that stuff is expected to be there when you need it, even if you don't know you are going to (context bound stuff, like local maps and directories, and ads too because without them there is no business case).
In short: Based on your current situation, your iPod should intelligently synchronize itself with a personalized repository of digital stuff. Wait a minute, were we talking about a PDA or an iPod? The boundaries between gadget categories become blurred. PDA's entertain you while helping you navigate and iPods are organizing your life while you are dancing. How applicable does that make the term "iPodification"? Has iPodification become obsolete already? Help me find a better word!
“You can’t manage what you can’t measure”
A quote often used and with various theories on its origin, some attributing it to Dr. Deming although others claim him to be misquoted. Irrespective, the simple reality is that a lot of executive management is done “to make the numbers”; which is fine so long as the numbers you’re trying to make are still relevant.
Industry measures like churn and average basket size all grew out of historical models and operating principles, but today we’re in a rapidly changing environment where some of these historical principles are being overturned. For instance we have the long tail that challenges the traditional view of the market, and the importance of customers is changing from a simple basket size or repeat purchase model with the advent of cross selling within an ecosystem.
While companies who wish to be agile and change the rules of the game might be suitably led from the top, execution can be hampered by the slowness of change in the way businesses measure themselves, coupled with Market analysts still wanting to see traditional measures to gauge underlying performance which can rapidly translate to impact on the share price. Maybe we’ve seen the consequence of not having these measures to fall back on. Was the dotcom boom and subsequent bust based on not really understanding the underlying measures that these businesses needed to conform to? Having one hand on the fundamentals of a business, even when trying to change, seems to be a pretty sound foundation, but an organisation should not let these dominate, they should be scrutinised and reassessed, and they should reflect how the business needs to be, not how it once was.