Drowning in Data: Unplugging to Think Again

Quite the week to rail against the machine and highlight the perils of being über plugged in. The New York Times introduced us to the Campbells, Brian and Brenda, with he so consumed by data that an offer to buy his company sat unopened in his email inbox for a good 12 days, while she, like the football widows of lore, looks for ways to peel him from his gadgets to get him to partake with the family.

While the evolution of technology initially untethered us from our offices, we now drag our office with us. What was once a time saver is now a time consumer. The Twitter, the Facebook, the texting, the email. In her blog, Marci Maddox, Director Global Product Marketing for E2.0 at Open Text shared a line from Forrester's Tim Walters at the Forrester IT Forum when he said: 

Humans have lost the battle of information overload – only the machines can save us now.

Marci and I exchanged some emails on this and I offered that new technology will provide us with more ways to filter, to derive meaning from those burgeoning in boxes. She returned: "How often do we let computers handle the meaningless stuff and it seems that we are marching toward a moment in time where we will truly let the machines run us.  Reminds me of iRobot and a conversation I had with my daughter on what distinguishes a computer from a human."

As I pondered I began examining my own obsession with information. How I created my own taxonomy of folders to help me find things again -- for when I have "more time" -- only to realize that once it is filed it is forgotten. Like Lucy in the candy factory, more is coming so quickly, who has time to "catch up?" There is no more time to go back. And yet I can't stop the futility.

In Tracy Kidder's eponymous book The Soul of the New Machine, engineers breathe life into a next-gen computer -- giving it soul -- as they give pieces of themselves to it. Today, machines and technology seem to foster our individual most compulsive desires, teasing us until we are fully junkified:  Can I get more Twitter followers, he wrote to me so I must write back, I need to update my blog, I need to get through my emails, I need to keep up with my many personas over all these social sites. So integrated are our lives with technology that a mere vacation threatens to create a Tsunami of emails, a void in the Twitter-sphere, a stale blog. If you aren't participating do you continue to exist?

Would Rene Descartes' famous intonation "I think therefore I am" succumb to "I updated therefore I am?" And when we "stop" do we cease to exist? Or by constantly interacting have we ceased living? This theme was loosely explored in Iron Man 2, where the machine initially saves the comic book hero played by Robert Downey, Jr., only eventually to be killing him.

In the Times article, Stanford research is cited that explains the addicting lure of technology. Researchers found that a portion of the brain acts as a control tower, helping a person focus and set priorities. More primitive parts of the brain, like those that process sight and sound, demand that it pay attention to new information, bombarding the control tower when they are stimulated. In past lives, man would rely on this primitive brain function to let him know danger was near. Alerts and chimes have the same effect: drawing our attention.

With multi-taskers, the research finds, we can not distinguish essential alerts and chimes from non-important ones. So as we change our ring tone to let us differentiate between loved ones, work and other, it is virtually impossible for those wired in to ignore any alert. We are training ourselves to react -- but can we still think? There is no doubt that focusing is near impossible with all these distractions pulling at us. And, yet, for a highly connected person, the abrupt removal of technology -- can be just as disorienting. A week's vacation, where I truly unplugged, interrupted my rhythm and flow -- and getting back up to speed was like trying to jump into a turning rope; clumsy, off-balance and daunting.

The downtime was a realization of how exhausted I had become and an awareness of how technology had become the master of my life.

Will we be able to eventually find a balance between machine and life?  Perhaps. The good news is “the bottom line is, the brain is wired to adapt,” said Steven Yantis, a professor of brain sciences at Johns Hopkins University.

Maybe our evolution will include learning to surf. Like water, ride the information wave, don't try and control it. The information will be out there when we need it. And we still exist without it.

What is the Value of Your Information Archives?

So just what is the value of old content? Back in the day, we called content that had an immediate shelf-life perishable, while content that could endure was called evergreen. It's hard to get anyone to agree on the value of content archives, and indeed ROI models essentially don't work because the value is in the eye of both the holder -- and the audience.

Are the Wall Street Journal's archives important? The Journal makes its money selling immediate news to an audience that demands instantaneous. That doesn't denigrate the value of the archive -- but the primary value to readers is immediate, up-to-the-minute, highly specialized financial information. Conversely, general news sites have it a bit tougher since general news is seen more as a commodity; available for free from multiple sources. For these sites, the archive actually gains more value over time, particularly if it becomes a means of driving traffic to the site, as Dorian Benkoil writes (and concurred by virtually every SEO specialist) for the Poynter Institute's E-Media Tidbits column.

Benkoil's Poynter compatriot Michelle Minkoff finds another use for "old" content: providing historical, primary source content to commemorate anniversaries. In the ongoing saga of historical revisionism, Minkoff sees a value in being able to dust off the annals and touts The Spokesman-Review of Spokan, Wash., for how it handled the 30-year anniversary of the eruption of St. Helens. Coverage included an interview of photojournalist Christopher Anderson as he described the picture that landed on virtually every newspaper. Additionally, Anderson took his lenses back to the same vantage point -- showing us what it looks three decades later.

Historical retrospectives work for virtually any industry on any topic. People want to know what "was'' the day/year they were born. For my father's 75th birthday I gave a bound keepsake edition of The New York Times. We all got a kick out of the cost of men's suits (two pairs of pants, one jacket!), Singer sewing machines and farm equipment. A business that assembles a slide show of then and now may find that it becomes a viral success -- driving traffic and stickiness.

For fee, for free, for traffic, for loyalty, the best way to determine the value of your archives -- is by getting it out there -- and see if your audience responds.

Newsweek (Finally) Wants to Embrace the Web -- But is it Too Late?

I can't sum up my feelings when I heard Jon Meacham tell Jon Stewart on the Daily Show, that Newsweek needs to "fully embrace the Internet." However I can describe my reactions: rolled my eyes, shook my head, and muttered, "about (effing) time." Really, I don't have anything against Jon Meacham, (and he is really smart) but I do have an issue with really smart people having had their head in the sand for the past 15 years, and not having "fully embraced" the Internet.

Stewart and Meacham hailed the importance of Journalism -- and lamented the subsequent lack of business model that supports the gathering of general news. Meacham "speculated" that Newsweek had it backwards -- where you are solely focused on the digital -- and then spin up a magazine! Yes!! Yes!! By gotcha he got it. Why this wasn't obvious 10 years ago, or even 3, when WaPo's management wrote this memo, outlining The 10 Web Principles, is beyond me.

Well, it isn't a mystery really. Writers have been skeptical of the Web for all the wrong reasons, putting more value in having something in print than in pixels. The reality is, and trust me, I have tested this on a whole bunch of journos and it is like light dawn's on marble head, news on the Web (and the corresponding byline) will be consumed by more people than in print. And for some reason that matters to journos - which is the reason you find Meacham on broadcast, writing books or even Twittering. They want their names out there; they want to know they are an influencer.

So while wanting to embrace the Web is a good thing albeit a bit overdue, sadly Meacham and Co will  find  that the work flow has been honed and hewn over the past 77 years to be a print-first paradigm -- and to shift Web-first is going to be ghastly difficult because the entire infrastructure needs to be ripped out. This is not an intractable situation -- but it is a problem, because it will require a capital budget expense -- which is hard to justify when the company is on the block.

I hope for the sake of investigative journalism, for balanced journalism, for war coverage and domestic issues coverage, Newsweek can sort it out. It's not too late yet, but it the clock is chiming.

The Perversity of PowerPoint

Fresh from a holiday to Barcelona and Italy, I have been busy attacking my "to read" pile, when I came across this story, which illustrates the perversity of PowerPoint. And while it has nothing to do with digital publishing per se -- it has everything to do with effective communication.

This image was shown to General Stanley A. McChrystal, leader of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, to convey the complexity of the war.

And while the image certainly succeeded it also lead Gen. McChrystal to quip: “When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war” -- which was followed by uproarious laughter -- probably not the creator's intention.

Finally. It may have taken a four-star general to opine what many of us have felt for years: that PowerPoint is not the medium for all things -- and certainly not for something as complex as war strategy. But think about something else: How many wo/man-hours went into creating this? You don't just slap this together (despite the fact that it looks like it was). Hours and hours were spent trying to pull something together that fell flat with its audience. And how many hours of productivity were lost by the members of the audience who had to sit through a mind-numbing presentation.

Effective communicators hate slide decks. They know that to connect with their audience -- they need to "read" the non-verbal cues and have listened to the conversations going on just before -- and tack accordingly. An effective communicator interacts with his or her audience -- hard to do when one is supposed to follow a scripted slide show. Personally I find decks to be cumbersome and counter-productive, and would prefer to go low tech -- or at most to use slides that illustrate a point.

A deck is a crutch -- usually, and I am on a limb here, for people who don't know what is going on -- or, more charitably, for those who do but who are nervous in front of crowds, or finally, for those who have a message to get out -- and don't care about the audience. PowerPoint is an anthama to the Hallmark slogan "When You Care to Send the Very Best." Stick a Don't in there.

While we talk about cost of time to produce these beasts of boredom -- how about what it costs to actually sit through them?? Dave Paridi, co-author of "Guide to PowerPoint," calculates the losses  from poor PowerPoints -- looking merely at the work to it takes to clarify a poor presentation. Frankly I think he way understates the losses.  Nowhere does he address the amount of lost productivity from the people who had to sit through the poor presentation to begin with -- and could they have received that information in some other format that would have been faster and more effective.

The reality is, we don't create a video for every instance of communication, and PowerPoint should not be the de facto messenger either. Think of slides as exclamation points -- and use sparingly.

Getting Man & Machine to Communicate

"Semantics is hot," declares Seth Grimes, "but only in a geeky sort of way." And then Grimes offers 11 different ways semantics is impacting -- search. In fact Semantic Search takes two geeky subjects and, when conjoined, attempts to become a precision tool for finding what the user really wants.

But what does the user really want? And here is the crux of the problem. The machine needs to discern the true question the user is asking when searching -- but the challenge is the machine and man do not share the same language. Man wants to ask a question -- well, naturally -- meaning highly unstructure. And machines need people to be structured. NLP, Natural Language Processing, is where the machine finally understands human-speak. (We're a long way off still -- but heading in the right direction.)

It helps if we know Boolean -- but few do. Really smart people I know may know that putting a + sign between words means AND, but few know that the - (minus) sign means NOT. Nor do they think to put phrases in "". Really smart people I know forget that really smart people don't know Boolean -- which leaves many really smart -- and not so smart people --having a dismal time when they are searching for things. (To prove my point -- this article on 10 Google Search Tricks has been in the top 10 in popularity for the last 10 days.)

Which circles back to why semantics is hot. Generating semantic metadata means machines can locate content about this -- when a person asks for that. It presents content to us by clustering content under categories -- so we may browse through and find what are looking for. Semantic Metadata is a great first step to getting man and machine to communicate.

Having Fun With Semantic Metadata

Last week, I hosted a webinar on Semantic Metadata for the company previously known as Nstein (now Open Text) -- along with two of my colleagues, Sheila Woo and Matt Mullen. Despite putting it together in just under 10 days we still had over 250 registrants, which proves my point that interest in Semantic Metadata has created a "hockey stick" graph; slight incline for 10 years -- and soaring upward now.

Matt and Sheila are uniquely well-versed in how semantic metadata can assist the largest of information providers, so it was an engaging webcast. We looked at how Semantic Metadata can boost Audience Engagement, how it can increase traffic and stickiness, how we could improve productivity and contain costs -- and how it can provide a unique search tool on both the back end and the front. When we polled the audience, more than 40% said they could imagine using Semantic Metadata to improve audience engagement. This tracks with Gilbane's analysis that Audience Engagement is the number one focus of enterprise Marketers.

When we turned it loose for questions we must have piqued the imaginations of many -- because over 25 questions flew in. The range was from how long does it take to implement (the obvious answer is the ever-annoying "it depends) to how do I create a taxonomy (this is Sheila's forté - so she riffed on that) you can go generic with an IPTC taxonomy or do an analysis of all your assets to create a custom taxonomy.

People were particularly intrigued with the idea of putting a "linguistic fingerprint" on assets --using a combination of linguistic and computational analysis -- so you can find content that highly similar to another. Or, as we say, "relevant content."

We had someone ask how you could use Semantic Metadata to improve information security, that was my baby: consider adding it into an email process to determine if sensitive information is being sent out through the firewall.

The truth is, Semantic Metadata, which is the data that describes in rich detail the "aboutness" of something, can be incorporated into virtually any application that incorporates "unstructured" data. If you are a content freak like I am -- it's time to consider becoming a semantic metadata geek.

History of Indexing & what exactly is 'semantic metadata?'

The Internet is the biggest library in the world -- with all the books on the floor.

-- unknown

I'm sure most of us have never spent even a minute or so pondering about the classification system that keeps libraries sane. But they weren't always pristine. According to editors at TheStraightDope.com, when Melville Dewey spent his junior year (1872-73) working in Amherst College's library, he was frustrated by the disarray of Amherst's collection. A real self-starter (apparently) Dewey examined how other libraries were organizing books. One method, which dated back to the Han Dynasty (206 BC - 9) was to assign books a given a spot on a shelf and log in a journal the location and book title. Another mode was to alphabetize the entire collection -- which created a fair amount of juggling when new books came in! Other libraries (harkening back to the Hellenic era) chose to organize by subject. But what constituted a subject? Sir Francis Bacon in the 1600s, said there were three branches of knowledge: history (deriving from memory), poetry (from imagination), and philosophy (from reason.) The Vatican said there were a pithy two: sacred and profane.

Dewey channeled his frustrations and within four years took the best of all the methods and developed a standard of classification and indexing that still exists today. The system consisted of combining "the analytical simplicity of decimal numbers to an intuitive scheme of knowledge, one that would fluidly accommodate all the books ever written, and all the books that could be written as well," said Mathew Battles, Library Historian. Further, Dewey's systems worked for any asset -- not just books.

Alas, Dewey's system for libraries has not been the way the Web sites are indexed -- although that is starting to change. Like Dewey, companies are starting to create federated classification systems for all of their content, creating Taxonomies and Authority Files for centralized knowledge management. Another term for this type of information is semantic tags -- or more accurately, semantic metadata. Most of the efforts to create semantic metadata have been largely manual, which, as Chris Hill says "is a losing proposition" with the deluge of content now being acquired and developed. The typical approach is tag "after the fact" is problematic as well - as it tends not to be comprehensive nor complying with classification standards that have been created.

As Nstein Technologies spokeswoman for the last 3 years, I've spoken on the subject of semantic metadata quite a bit, usually as the lone voice in the room uttering those words! So I was amazed last month when at two different DAM conferences semantic metadata was uttered by virtually every speaker! Yet, it was apparent that few in the audience understood the scope of what metadata could be.
It seems we are at a point in history when every knows they need metadata -- but really don't know the "aboutness" of the subject!!


So a trio of us are hosting a webinar next week on "Semantic Metadata 101: Your Assets are Bare Without It." Linguistics expert Sheila Woo (and Director of Product Development) and Nstein's Sales Engineer will be joining me on Wednesday, March 31, 10am EDT/ 3pm GMT.

If you are involved with managing large repositories of content, you head up knowledge management, you are a CMO looking to leverage content to drive readers, engage and cross promote products and services, then join us. They'll be plenty of time for questions -- just bring your own cookies and coffee.