Improved search engine technology is moot?

There is no comparison of results for Google vs. Microsoft search here, but the authors actual point is worth a note. I think the author is saying that improved search engine technology only searches part of the internet and THAT is not a very significant amount of the actual information available. Most valuable information is obtained in a social context and search engines don't do that............

Microsoft's Google-killer arrives with a 'whuh?'

The Register,

 "Google's executives might be sleeping a little easier this weekend after Microsoft unveiled its much-hyped new search engine. It's fast, slick, and comes with a raft of interesting new features: confounding some expectations as surely as it confirms others. In short, Microsoft has produced a search engine that's better in almost every way than Google, except for one: its search results are terrible..........

Precious little of the "world's information" is even written down. Much of is it encoded in enduring transmission mechanisms such as music, the visual arts, religion and myths, for example. And almost all of the stuff that is written down isn't ever going to be accessible through the public internet for very practical reasons. You can get some of this piped into your computer if you're lucky enough to belong to a local library, but that's because a consensual social mechanism has been invoked to bypass such restrictions. What the internet's public search engines are left to work with is a toxic wasteland largely characterized by the generation of real time noise - both private and commercial - and what the machines churn out in answer to our hopeful "queries" isn't of much use to the rest of us."

8:12:01 PM    

Mopsos

From Peter Drucker:

Ninety percent of what we call 'management' consists of making it difficult for people to get things done

 

4:48:46 PM    

FireFox 1.0 "Thrilla from Mozilla"?
A more secure browser than IE?? Who'da thunk it?
Quite a bit of buzz about Firefox........I'm cautious, a late adopter of early adopters,
I'll wait a few weeks.
The release of Firefox can be downloaded from http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/ .

12:26:53 PM    

Webinar notes: "Convincing Your Boss That It's Not All Free on the Web". Today I attended a webinar, "Convincing Your Boss That It's Not All Free on the Web" presented by Mary Ellen Bates (the Goddess of the Web Search) and sponsored by Factiva. According to the announcement at the end of the... [LibraryTechtonics]

This presentation will be on the Factiva site after Monday, the 15th. It is worth refreshing your memory so one can refute the misconception!!

10:51:14 PM    

Great!  A must to bookmark or include in RSS search.......

A Search Engine for Code. An article at Newsforge pointed me to Koders ( http://www.koders.com ) a search engine for finding programming code. Nifty. The front page allows you to specify keywords, sixteen languages (from... [ResearchBuzz]

10:08:56 PM    

Blogs and Wikis. Lots of people, both here at Sun and out there in rest of the world, like to talk about Ã¢Â€Âśblogs-and-wikisÃ¢Â€Âť like it’s one word or they’re one thing; I was reviewing the text of an upcoming book about the space today, and it asserted that Ã¢Â€ÂśObviously, the two are converging.Ã¢Â€Âť Huh? Granted that they’re both about people placing content on the Web for other people, but in their essential nature, it seems like they couldn’t be more different. A wiki is a collaborative construction engine, with refactoring and edit-in-place being the dominant forms of activity, and many equal voices singing ... [Planet XML]

Clearly different; WIKIs are collaborative and blogs are individual voices.

9:55:11 PM    

Elmine Wijnia has published her BlogTalk paper "Understanding Weblogs, a Communicative Perspective" (pdf). Although I have been a eye-witness of how her work took shape in the past months, with her master thesis and this article as outcome, now that there is something like a finished product it speaks more clearly to me.

In my view Elmines work does something very important, which is to firmly place weblogs in communications, and not put the fact that it's technology-based first. This is a notion that I and others attempted to do in the past in anecdotal form, but she does this academically.

That is why her definition of weblogs resonates with me:
The weblog, or blog, is a webpage on which the author publishes pieces with the intention to
start conversation. Or in more detail, a weblog disseminates ideas, to generate conversation.

It catches the part of blogs where publishing/broadcasting has a role, and when the more intense forms of 1 on 1 communication kick in. It describes what we actually do, in stead of which tools we use to do it.

12:17:20 AM    

Language of Networks

Lightweight mention of network analysis, specifically social network analysis.WIRED

...At a symposium titled "Language of Networks," a panel of
mathematicians and graphics geeks dazzled a standing-room-only crowd
 with elaborate diagrams of social networks. Social network analysis has been around since the 1930s, but only recently has it become automated. It's still more art than  science, but it's fast becoming indispensible for nailing opinion leaders, locating hubs
of influence, and tracing flows of ideas.

10:29:06 PM    

Piers blogs about how it bugs him that people either talk about Personal KM with an emergent/systems approach or about Organisational KM with a top-down approach. If you accept the systems approach he says then you also have to accept that this translates to the organisational level as well.

[PersonalSomethingManagement]

Mine: The systems approach should work for both organizational and personal KM

6:07:01 PM    

French Caldwell and Alexander Linden of Gartner have collected a number of articles under the banner of PKN and Social Networks Change Knowledge Management

Personal knowledge networking and social networks give individual knowledge workers direct control over the enterprise's intellectual capital and enable a new "grass-roots" approach to knowledge management.

This article is a summary of seven items that require Gartner membership / paid downloads. But the topics all sound familiar: Grass-roots KM, Social network analysis, blogging, RSS, and wiki.

I found this sentence intgeresting in the overview paragraphs: "Interest [in these topics] is also being driven by the realization that KM can happen without a lot of explicit governance."

- jackvinson (jackvinson@jackvinson.com) [Knowledge Jolt with Jack]

WIKIs and blogs empower employees but does not preclude explicit knowledge governance (knowledge organization)

If a corporate entity hasn’t tried explicit KM governance (knowledge organization) in the past and wants to avoid it in the future, chances are slim for long-term success of networking tools..

9:43:56 PM