Organic KM: Enterprise 2.0 Would Signal The End Of The Corporate KM Function

Organic KM: Enterprise 2.0 Would Signal The End Of The Corporate KM Function

Having read it I was trying to imagine what The Pope would think of going back to paganism...

It's a Moody World

I subscribe to a news service called Future Brief which provides a daily email...

...to the busy professional who wants to remain aware of trends in a rapidly changing world, yet not be buried under a mountain of information

Normally 3 stories with just a paragraph on each, it is easily digested and some of their snippets are quite interesting. Today's included a link to an article in New Scientist (here) which describes a site launched in June 2005 that tracks mood swings across the 'blogosphere'.

Moodviews captures and provides analysis of posts on the US LiveJournal blog hosting service - a total of about 10 million blogs with about 250,000 new posts a day. About 60% of these posts use the 'mood tag' feature, where the poster can choose from 132 different moods. To the original Moodgrapher, which plots aggregate levels of use of each of the tags over time, they have added Moodteller, which does an analysis of the text of blog postings to determine mood.

Now they are adding Moodsignals, which detects words and phrases which are associated with a given mood in a given time interval, using statistical frequency comparisons and burstiness models. It looks at unusual peaks in the levels of mood annotations, and then tries to explain the peaks found by analyzing the language used by bloggers. In looking for explanations, Moodsignals searches news archives.

And, finally, they also provide a Moodsticker giving the latest information on the most popular mood, updated every 10 minutes.


Fascinating, but I'm finding it difficult to see applications of this outside market research and PR. I wonder if there are any mashup applications of this in retail?

Mashups created by Unconferencing

It all started with an "IT Business Hot Story" that appeared in my email pointing to a Blog entry from Vinnie Mirchandani entitled SOA = SOS that aroused my interest. This item is full of links to quotes from the great and good about SOA, but finishes by contrasting Enterprise SOA approaches with an alternative....

In the meantime, in the Valley, young (and old) kids, oblivious to all these weighty questions are writing their own SOA in very small letters - in mashup camps

What the heck is that all about then? Now I really was interested.

Over the course of two days, more than 300 people turned up for Mashup Camp at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California (right in the heart of Silicon Valley). At last count, more than 980 photos were loaded into Flickr. Not only do the pictures document some of the content that was generated during the event, they also show the attendees having a great time. Close to 40 distinctly separate discussions were proposed and held during the 2-day unconference.

So what is a mashup? And what is Unconferencing?
Let's take them one at a time...

A mashup is a website or web application that seamlessly combines content from more than one source into a new combination. Mashups take advantage of emerging simple and lightweight public APIs and Web feeds, which make it relatively easy to design and build on sources such as eBay, Amazon, Google, Yahoomaps and Salesforce.com. Coupled with technologies like AJAX which allow the development of powerful clients, you can build quite rich applications combining data from inside and outside an enterprise.

It has been getting quite a bit of press recently because of interest generated by Mashup camp. Here's what one of the organisers, David Birlind said on ZDNet - Mashup ecosystem poised to explode. I think that remains to be seen, but The Programmeable Web currently references 192 APIs and 569 mashups.

As for Unconferencing, well I'm not sure I like the name, but it does convey the idea that it takes an opposite approach in some ways to a conventional conference.

One element is the escape from the "No space" phenomenon described so well by Naomi Klein in No Logo - the pervasive influence of sponsorship, where so many conferences have become merely marketing pitches from vendor representatives, rather than genuine discussion about the nitty-gritty of getting technology to work.

The second element, is that at an unconference there are no spectators, only participants. As Dave Winer puts it, the fundamental law of conventional conferences is...

The sum of the expertise of the people in the audience is greater than the sum of expertise of the people on stage.

So, instead of a bunch of prepared powerpoint presentations (Who hasn't experienced Death by Powerpoint? In the extreme, some people believe Powerpoint is Evil, but I digress...) followed by Q&A sessions, there are facilitated discussions where everyone is involved. Each session has a leader and covers an important topic and people go to whatever session they want to participate in. See
**here**, for example, the way mashup camp 2 is being organised, which embraces the practices of Open Space Technology

One of the best known is O'Reilly's FOO camp (FOO = Friends of O'Reilly)which has been running since 2003. Somewhat inevitably (as any LISP programmer would tell you)a spin-off/imitation of this called BarCamp was created. BarCamps are now being scheduled all over the world. Mashup Camp is another.

David Gammel's blog has a useful comparison of Conference v Unconference which summarises the main contrasts.

So, just think. What could you achieve with an Unconference of architects? What might the themes be? Maybe we should organise one. But first we need a Wiki....