Standards initiative for blog aggregation and applications

One of the problems with blogs is that posts can have any, or no, structure. So, for example, my blog post about a DVD review might include the running time and the certificate. Your DVD reviews might instead offer a star rating and a genre classification. This inconsistency makes the work of automatic aggregation into a DVD review site very difficult. Likewise its very challenging to do intelligent filtering (e.g notify me of all reviews of Jim Carey's films in the non-comedy genre) .

Decoding the DNA of the Web

To date the web has been a bit of a black box where we search for needles of usefulness embedded in haystacks of junk. This could be changing as Alexa, the Amazon-owned search company have just announced (Dec 12) that they plan to open up their index of 5 billion documents to users and developers. This index is absolutely huge containing some 100 billion bytes of data which compares well with the complete Human Genome at a mere 3.2 billion base pairs. The release of this index will allow these mountains of data to be mined for all sorts of valuable associations plus the development of specialised applications and vertical search engines. Read the ‘heads up’ on this by John Battelle .

Bees recognise human faces

The pattern recognition skills of bees are well-known, thought to have evolved to enable them to discriminate between different types of flowers. As social insects, they can also recognise and differentiate between their hivemates. Now a new study shows that these capabilities are so powerful that bees can recognize human faces better than some humans and with one-ten thousandth of the brain cells. The results may help lead to better face-recognition software. To read boingboing synopsis.

Cheer up if you cannot understand their web-site, you are not stupid: its designed that way

Simon Caulkin, writing for The Observer, Sunday December 11, 2005, Customers are not just for Christmas , notes that, regretably, it almost seems to be common practice, this time of year to misuse the power of the web by bamboozling customers with the objective of maximising profits, not through good value but at their expense.

Pheromone-based messaging is the oldest and most evolved form of biological signalling. It uses chemicals to effect communications between animals and insects through smell and taste. There is an excellent opportunity for today’s virtual teams and mobile groups to re-organise the way they use their internet, email, messaging and presence-aware technologies to gain huge benefits from it.

Good collaboration needs accountability

Buzzle.com reports (7 Dec 2005) that wikipedia has been forced to change its policies to ensure that contributions can only be made by logged in users. Recently there have been possible libel cases around "false and malicious" wikipedia entries, 'vanity editing', and the question of how any of its entries can be trusted without author identification. To read the article.

Microsoft Research tool sorts your email inbox by importance

Sometimes the simplest ideas are the best – in this case automatically ‘triaging’ inbound email by user defined importance. SNARF allows the user to design their own personal email importance criteria such as the "number of emails sent to me in the last month". Such metrics can, in turn, be combined to create overall importance criteria for sorting your inbox.

Collaboration2.0 - a new generation of virtual collaboration products or just slicker marketing?

A hot topic at present on the web is the suggestion that we have now reached a new level of products, services and suppliers. Some are calling it Web2.0 and others such as BusinessWeek are calling it WebSmart.

Always on mobile devices need supporting etiquette

The Economist (Jan 2003) in a short article “Think before you talk” reports on how Ideo (the designers behind the Palm Pilot and Microsoft Mouse) have developed 5 prototype “social mobiles” known as SoMo's which modify their user’s behavior to make them less disruptive. Click here to view an excellent web presentation on the 5 SoMos. Other technologies like VoIP and IM can be equally disruptive and intrusive - its prompted me to develop a draft POLite Intrusive Technology Etiquette (PoLITE for short) a discussion starter of which you can find here.

Lateral leadership skills are how to get the job done when you are not the boss.Roger Fisher, the world's leading expert on win-win negotiation, partners with Alan Sharp in Lateral Leadership (1998, 2004) to identify three fundamental problems with collaboration in organisations and what you can do to fix them.