05/30/06: Advice to New Grads – Get Involved
I've been enjoying all the history and character of Scotland (minus the Haggis). A friend of mine needed help putting the final touches on a castle / bed and breakfast that he is renovating. While I'm not sure why he asked me after my last incident trying to use his planer to slice some fresh mozzarella, I am always available to help a dear old friend.
As a result of this commitment, I was unable to accept any requests to deliver any commencement speeches to this year's graduating classes. In past years, I have enjoyed using those precious few minutes of undivided attention (as undivided as can be expected on such an important day) to give our nation's newest graduates some wisdom before entering the working world. Luckily, this castle has wireless, and I have a blog, so wisdom can be dispensed regardless.
Today more than ever, the world is much more interesting if you interact with it rather than simply passing through it. Today's graduates have access to unbelievable amounts of information, most of it at their fingertips in a raw, un-sanitized format. Previously, it was this information that separated the haves from the have-nots. Today's graduates are separated by what they do with this information. My advice – Get Involved.
Get involved in everything around you, your local community, your government, your place of worship, and your work. The world is full of people who are passengers; they listen and go home. Your success will be defined by how involved you are with the world around you and how you drive change into that world. Don't let a minute pass without trying to create positive change in the world around you. People around you will thank you for your efforts and reward you with the greatest compensation possible: Respect.
Getting involved isn't simply putting in your time at the office, paying your taxes and voting once every four years. Getting involved means gathering as much information as you can from the world around you and using that information to guide your actions. While everyone graduating today will retain something different, I hope everyone learned how much he or she doesn't know. There is no sea floor when talking about depths of knowledge. While you may get a piece of paper saying you have graduated, you should never stop learning. Use that continual learning to make things happen.
So as you step into tomorrow, be ready to raise your hand and get involved. Life is much more enjoyable as a driver rather than a passenger. You will find that in life, as in VW commercials: Drivers wanted.
Today more than ever, the world is much more interesting if you interact with it rather than simply passing through it. Today's graduates have access to unbelievable amounts of information, most of it at their fingertips in a raw, un-sanitized format. Previously, it was this information that separated the haves from the have-nots. Today's graduates are separated by what they do with this information. My advice – Get Involved.
Get involved in everything around you, your local community, your government, your place of worship, and your work. The world is full of people who are passengers; they listen and go home. Your success will be defined by how involved you are with the world around you and how you drive change into that world. Don't let a minute pass without trying to create positive change in the world around you. People around you will thank you for your efforts and reward you with the greatest compensation possible: Respect.
Getting involved isn't simply putting in your time at the office, paying your taxes and voting once every four years. Getting involved means gathering as much information as you can from the world around you and using that information to guide your actions. While everyone graduating today will retain something different, I hope everyone learned how much he or she doesn't know. There is no sea floor when talking about depths of knowledge. While you may get a piece of paper saying you have graduated, you should never stop learning. Use that continual learning to make things happen.
So as you step into tomorrow, be ready to raise your hand and get involved. Life is much more enjoyable as a driver rather than a passenger. You will find that in life, as in VW commercials: Drivers wanted.
How many times have you searched for something, only to have the results overrun with ‘results’ that really don’t answer your question. While spider-based search engines such as Google allow you to search the billion plus pages on the web, the results sometimes fail the human test of legitimacy. Human-based indexes, such as About.com, can offer quality over quantity, but are subject to the contributions of the editors on board. I’ve mentioned before about the collective power of the web, and once again, new concepts based upon old world ideas are emerging to take advantage. This time, the concept is called ‘Folksonomy’.
I was looking around in New York for reviews on one of New York’s top restaurants and client of ours, Mas Farmhouse. The head chef, co-owner and dear friend, Galen Zamarra has created a wonderful dining experience that reminds of being in a French Farmhouse outside Normandy. The team is completing a great site that will capture the atmosphere of this Big Apple Gem. During my web search for reviews, I was dismayed to discover that there are ten times as many pages in the search results for ‘New York Restaurant Reviews’ as there are restaurants. Some simply have the words, but may have very little to actually do with restaurant reviews. Imagine if my results could benefit from those who have searched before me, just as we all benefited from Lewis and Clark’s mapping of the west.
Folksonomy is a concept where content is labeled by site visitors in such a way that future site visitors can use this classification during searching. Sites such as del.icio.us connect with other content sites, mostly blogs, to allow visitors to easily label (tag) content with key words. For example, someone reading a new york blogger’s review of a restaurant might tag the review with keywords like ‘New York’ or ‘Restaurant Review’. Future searchers would benefit from this tagging when searching in a search engine that leverages Folksonomy. Google is beta testing a version of this called ‘Google Co-Op’ which is receiving good reviews.
An old pal of mine, John Dvorak, highlights a big problem with Folksonomy. It works as long as everyone plays by the rules. Just as unscrupulous firms attempted to attract traffic to a page by loading a web page with repeating keywords, tagging will likely get abused if it becomes an important consideration for search engines. Some level of accountability will have to be introduced, just as was done with Wikipedia to reduce malicious changes, I agree with JD, that Folksonomy’s public adoption will always be hampered by the dreaded ‘Tragedy of the Commons.’
But how about folksonomy in a less anonymous environment, such as the corporate world? As publishing and portal technologies continue to distribute intranet content publishing further out into the corporation, classifying this content becomes more of an issue. Corporations suffer from the same search and indexing issues found on the internet. The difference is that corporations can place a business cost on the associated lack of productivity and therefore put value on solving it.
I believe there is real value in folksonomy in the corporate world. This content tagging approach will allow employees, including the content creators, a simple means to define content as easily as it is created. While traditional search engines would only index the content on the page, or the file structure the page exists in, folksonomy would allow tagging of content beyond this. Tagging also distributes the time consuming process of creating and classifying content beyond the content creator.
Corporate Folksonomy will need a few guidelines to work successfully. Here are a few of my thoughts:
- Tagging must be seamlessly integrated into corporate intranets and portals to make tagging content and searching on the tags simple.
- A tagging ‘meta-dictionary’ should be considered to encourage similar tagging strategies. Consider a wiki approach to this tagging dictionary to allow it to continue to evolve as well.
- Tagging shouldn’t be anonymous.
While I don’t have a prediction on the future of Folksonomy in the public, I do think it offers enormous potential solving the content dilemma facing corporate intranets. Folksonomy did help me find another review of Mas. From the looks of it, The person enjoyed the restuanratn as much as I did!
I was looking around in New York for reviews on one of New York’s top restaurants and client of ours, Mas Farmhouse. The head chef, co-owner and dear friend, Galen Zamarra has created a wonderful dining experience that reminds of being in a French Farmhouse outside Normandy. The team is completing a great site that will capture the atmosphere of this Big Apple Gem. During my web search for reviews, I was dismayed to discover that there are ten times as many pages in the search results for ‘New York Restaurant Reviews’ as there are restaurants. Some simply have the words, but may have very little to actually do with restaurant reviews. Imagine if my results could benefit from those who have searched before me, just as we all benefited from Lewis and Clark’s mapping of the west.
Folksonomy is a concept where content is labeled by site visitors in such a way that future site visitors can use this classification during searching. Sites such as del.icio.us connect with other content sites, mostly blogs, to allow visitors to easily label (tag) content with key words. For example, someone reading a new york blogger’s review of a restaurant might tag the review with keywords like ‘New York’ or ‘Restaurant Review’. Future searchers would benefit from this tagging when searching in a search engine that leverages Folksonomy. Google is beta testing a version of this called ‘Google Co-Op’ which is receiving good reviews.
An old pal of mine, John Dvorak, highlights a big problem with Folksonomy. It works as long as everyone plays by the rules. Just as unscrupulous firms attempted to attract traffic to a page by loading a web page with repeating keywords, tagging will likely get abused if it becomes an important consideration for search engines. Some level of accountability will have to be introduced, just as was done with Wikipedia to reduce malicious changes, I agree with JD, that Folksonomy’s public adoption will always be hampered by the dreaded ‘Tragedy of the Commons.’
But how about folksonomy in a less anonymous environment, such as the corporate world? As publishing and portal technologies continue to distribute intranet content publishing further out into the corporation, classifying this content becomes more of an issue. Corporations suffer from the same search and indexing issues found on the internet. The difference is that corporations can place a business cost on the associated lack of productivity and therefore put value on solving it.
I believe there is real value in folksonomy in the corporate world. This content tagging approach will allow employees, including the content creators, a simple means to define content as easily as it is created. While traditional search engines would only index the content on the page, or the file structure the page exists in, folksonomy would allow tagging of content beyond this. Tagging also distributes the time consuming process of creating and classifying content beyond the content creator.
Corporate Folksonomy will need a few guidelines to work successfully. Here are a few of my thoughts:
- Tagging must be seamlessly integrated into corporate intranets and portals to make tagging content and searching on the tags simple.
- A tagging ‘meta-dictionary’ should be considered to encourage similar tagging strategies. Consider a wiki approach to this tagging dictionary to allow it to continue to evolve as well.
- Tagging shouldn’t be anonymous.
While I don’t have a prediction on the future of Folksonomy in the public, I do think it offers enormous potential solving the content dilemma facing corporate intranets. Folksonomy did help me find another review of Mas. From the looks of it, The person enjoyed the restuanratn as much as I did!
05/11/06: Fun really does sell.
In my downtime during these EU conferences, I do like most others and read my email. I received this interesting link to a game from a company in Denmark selling time keeping software. As everyone in The Archer Group knows, time is money. Entering time into our time tracking system is critical to our success and something I do religiously.
What I like about this game is how it connects to the pain that their product solves. All to often, companies create games that are nothing more than time wasters with product placement. Sure people spend hours trying to beat the clock on some driving/tetris/bat the penguin game, but do they come away with a greater appreciation of the product? Maconomy demonstrated that they too know the importance of capturing time and created a game that taps into the pain felt by managers.
I’m off to my eco-tour this weekend. I hope everyone have fun back in the States. I think I’m in the mood for some Italian…
I’m off to my eco-tour this weekend. I hope everyone have fun back in the States. I think I’m in the mood for some Italian…
When I fly a commercial flight, I do as everyone else and book the flight online. eTickets replaced fed-ex's from our travel agent; the lengthy calls to travel agents have been replaced by fare searches on Expedia.com. But how do travel agents survive if we don't need to call them?
Back PW (Pre-Web), travel agents earned their keep because they had access to information we didn’t have. The web changed all of that. The old axiom that information wants to be free was proven true again, and the PW travel agent was looking at the same information we could view. Airlines, always looking for ways to cut costs, saw that with a little investment on the web, we were intelligent enough to book our own ticket.
Fast forward to today. I am in the middle of planning some sight-seeing around my trip this month to the 4th EU-Latin America/Caribbean Summit in Vienna. I looked online at tourism sites, blogs from previous travelers, and reviews from online travel guides. Despite loving the web, all of this information got me reaching for a tall glass of the Johnny Blue. After the blue calmed my nerves, I reached out to a travel agent that specialized in eco-tourism in Europe. For a fee, she was able to organize every last detail of my trip, most of it based on her first hand experience or from experiences of previous travelers. She used her travel agent skills and her expertise in a specific niche to define her value.
Sure the Internet can cause a PW middle man some trouble. If you fear you are a PW middle-man or woman, fear not. Look at how you can use that broad expertise in the process and couple that with some specific value-added knowledge or creativity (something we will never be able to ship offshore btw) to create a new service that people need!
Back PW (Pre-Web), travel agents earned their keep because they had access to information we didn’t have. The web changed all of that. The old axiom that information wants to be free was proven true again, and the PW travel agent was looking at the same information we could view. Airlines, always looking for ways to cut costs, saw that with a little investment on the web, we were intelligent enough to book our own ticket.
Fast forward to today. I am in the middle of planning some sight-seeing around my trip this month to the 4th EU-Latin America/Caribbean Summit in Vienna. I looked online at tourism sites, blogs from previous travelers, and reviews from online travel guides. Despite loving the web, all of this information got me reaching for a tall glass of the Johnny Blue. After the blue calmed my nerves, I reached out to a travel agent that specialized in eco-tourism in Europe. For a fee, she was able to organize every last detail of my trip, most of it based on her first hand experience or from experiences of previous travelers. She used her travel agent skills and her expertise in a specific niche to define her value.
Sure the Internet can cause a PW middle man some trouble. If you fear you are a PW middle-man or woman, fear not. Look at how you can use that broad expertise in the process and couple that with some specific value-added knowledge or creativity (something we will never be able to ship offshore btw) to create a new service that people need!
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