Friday, December 10, 2010
Karen Johnson Director of Marketing
I am in the information business. Our product allows organizations and businesses to manage the increasing flow of information in their areas of expertise. Therefore, I was surprised when I came upon this article declaring October 20, 2010 as Information Overload Awareness Day. How could I have missed such an important day? Well it turns out that it started in 2009 with 350 people and 30 companies. I think the company that declared the day wanted a bigger splash in 2010. Judging by what I have found on line, I am not sure that happened. Ironically, I think it might just be that everyone is so overloaded that they also missed the day. Here is a link to the sponsor’s site; it appears they have some good ideas. Maybe next year they will be able to cut through the clutter of the web and we will all be aware of Information Overload Day, before it happens and not weeks after!
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Karen Johnson — Director of Marketing
It seems that everyone knows someone who has made a killing with internet marketing. Almost every website has an “advertising” sidebar or section. The idea is that as people visit a website, they see advertisements. If they click on one, the website owner is paid. Should be a win-win huh? Well, I recently visited a website that shows the dark side of advertising.
The website was for a small consulting firm. The site owner had sponsored a fundraiser for a local political candidate and proudly added that information to his blog. That is when the trouble started! Have you seen all the negative advertising on television? Well, it is out there on the web as well. The advertising company crawled the page and found the name of the candidate. It then sold and placed 5 negative ads right above the blog posting! I doubt that was the intent of the web owner when he was looking for a little cash!
This same thing happens when you get those email alerts full of links delivered to your mailbox. There is usually a code embedded in all the links. This code tells advertisers about you, so that the ads you see are targeted to your profile. Not only that — the provider of the alerts gets your detailed information as well. This allows the provider to tell advertisers the sites and subjects that interest you. Yes, we live in a capitalist society, so we expect to be bombarded by advertising, but with the new information age, sometimes I think I am out there a bit more exposed than I care to be!
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Donald Hogan, CEO KnowledgeWatch
In today’s world, change is accelerating beyond the pace knowledge workers can keep up through traditional information channels that are broadcast based. Broadcast based means the information channels send out information – and you receive and consume the information – when you are able to. Yes, we’re talking about newspapers, magazines, radio, television and available consultative information as in written reports.
In that broadcast model, which has worked pretty well for a couple thousand years, knowledge workers act on what they’ve learned from these “broadcasts” and workers strive to innovate due to knowing and acting on new, changed information. Problem now is there’s so much change you need to know about workers simply cannot keep up with the volume and faster arrival speed of changed information.
From mathematics we know that speed squared means acceleration. It is clear change in technology is happening at an accelerating pace. Trying to keep up with your own field using outdated methods will only keep you behind others (your competitors) with their smarter approaches.
KnowledgeWatch believes the Web provides an outstanding environment for a new, much more useful model to receive knowledge. The new model is not dependent on pre-existing, broadcast-based channels, however it’s fully compatible with them. The Web actually provides a foundation for delivery of a richer, easier to consume medium.
KnowledgeWatch is dedicated to study, develop, practice and master providing more useful alternatives of knowledge delivery that are fully compatible with traditional broadcast channels.
Next: Comparing Broadcast to a New Approaches
Wednesday, September 08, 2010
Karen Johnson — Director of Marketing
As a KnowledgeWatch employee, I have the perk of using our software to make my day easier and more productive. Also, as one of the company bloggers, I’ve run into writer’s block more than once. What should I write about? Luckily, I have a profile set up in KnowledgeWatch that can help me out. I call it “Potential Blog Topics” and every day I get a list of new content on the Web suggesting interesting topics to blog about.
As our product is all about controlling and taming the TMI of the Internet, there are a lot of articles and blogs about dealing with information overload being delivered to my KnowledgeWatch screen. I’ve linked to a couple; here and for a different perspective here. They all have great suggestions for dealing with information overload. Each list is different, but everyone agrees on 1) the importance of time management and 2) minimizing the number of sources for information and maximizing the pre-filtering of that information. I truly need their suggestions on time management but I think I’ve got the pre-filtering covered!
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Karen Johnson — Director of Marketing
I recently read an article in Newsweek called “The Creativity Crisis”. In summary, it states that for the first time creativity in the United States is declining. The author goes into some detail about how to measure and improve a person’s creativity and reasons for why there is less creativity today. One thing they blame is the focus schools have on teaching to standards allowing less time for creative activities. I’m sure that’s true, but they also point out that: “Creativity requires constant shifting, “blender like” pulses of both divergent thinking and convergent thinking, to combine new information with old and forgotten ideas.”
Is there perhaps another reason for the decline? I spend my day jumping from information source to information source and am distracted by all the interesting but not very useful stuff that I run across. I’m beginning to wonder if information overload should take part of the blame. In a way I’ve become a type of popcorn popper, with only divergent thinking popping around in my head. I don’t have the time for the blender pulses of convergent thinking that the author of the article talks about. There are probably a lot of popcorn poppers out there. I think we all need to make a pledge, take less time finding information and more time pulsing information into knowledge. The result of this change would be to perhaps create for your business the ultimate “better mousetrap”. What do you think?
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
Donald Hogan, CEO KnowledgeWatch
Picking up from our last post on simple TMI, (too much information) we’re all now experiencing on the Web a new period toward a phase of what KnowledgeWatch thinks of, (or calls) Web Addressable Knowledge. Fundamentals have occurred that enable this Addressable Knowledge Period. One fundamental is the proliferation of RSS or Really Simple Syndication content publishing. Another fundamental is people understanding and desiring to address content from many, many content sources – this is found with popular use of RSS readers to receive content for personal research use. On the Web today, each of these fundamentals drives each other to occur as in a natural phenomenon.
RSS publishing is the Web’s new ad-hoc standard for publishing content. While HTML page growth still occurs on new Web sites, individual RSS content articles are being published at an enormous rate and that rate of growth is accelerating. I’ve seen one statistic mentioning existence of now over 200,000,000 blog sites on the Web and still growing.
The advent and explosion of Web RSS content – whether news articles or blog content causes this new deeper than HTML layer of “Too Much Information”. Each RSS feed represents from one to often several score of “articles” or comments containing content. Now, if you follow one or a mere hand-full of blogs or news sources, you can manage to organize and make use of the content from your chosen content sources (bloggers) or your news sources.
Let’s say you’re part of an organization with needs to focus attention on particular subject knowledge that’s occurring and growing in the world. These organizations are any Professional Association or subject-focused membership group. Examples are: Medical Specialty Colleges, Industry Trade Associations, or maybe company Competitive Intelligence Departments.
The aggregate of Web published content about a particular subject domain represents a knowledge-base about that subject domain. In particular, the newly published portion represents the changes being experienced in that subject world.
If you had a way to telescope into your particular subject knowledge-base available on the Web to organize it, see it just as it changes each day and consume it that would be a way toward managing TMI into Addressable Knowledge.
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Donald Hogan, CEO KnowledgeWatch
The World Wide Web has become a powerhouse of information, knowledge and data. Much of it can be very valuable; however, too much of it remains not-useful. It’s hard to argue with the concept the Web has “too much information” or what text users refer to as TMI.
The phenomenon of the Web is not fully understood and appreciated by many people because our experiences in the early phases of the Web caused us to use and rely on public search engines like Google, Yahoo and Ask, to name three.
Public search engines provide us with information retrieval that could not have been imagined in previous time. But, they also inundate us with so much non-relevant information we often consider them useless except for some fundamental research tasks. People easily then extend their feeling of search engine uselessness to the entire Web in general, which I think is an unfortunate outcome.
I believe growth in the use of the World Wide Web for publishing content is similar to the growth of use of automobiles in the early part of the twentieth century. Automobiles could have become considered useful from the very start. However, their use did not spread and become easy for a majority of users until a volume of road systems and services sprang-up. Until that happened the automobile was just for some hobbyists and adventurers.
The really useful days of the Web are ahead of us.
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Donald Hogan, CEO KnowledgeWatch
I was thinking about key insight today when I remembered a conference call I was in several weeks ago with the design and Website construction company that was creating our new corporate branding and logo. Certain insight sometimes is key to making proper decisions of all kinds. If you’re doubtful about things and don’t have access to the right insight, decisions take longer and they often are not proper directions.
I had instructed the designer during one of our several conference calls, (he was a talented fellow working in New York City), to think about our “leading edge technology” and “our selling a high value, modern service”. I also told him that he could create a new logo and corporate identity for KnowledgeWatch without having to use our past identity – which was a nautical thematic look that employed a prominent lighthouse in our graphics. You know, nautical = navigation and lighthouse is a beacon for people seeking direction – that was our old thematic for KnowledgeWatch. (Ok, maybe a little trite, but I kind of liked it when we originally adopted it.)
Fast forward about three weeks later and it was time for the big day when the new concepts rendered for our logo would be revealed. Our management team particularly migrated to liking the one design prototype that now graces our company collateral. After we thanked the designer for his valuable work, he added as an afterthought at the very last moment, ”you know I tried to incorporate the lighthouse but I kept thinking “high technology and cutting edge” and lighthouses are really not used anymore and they’re sort of relics today.” “That relic image kind of “fights” with the idea of modern and advanced.”
I thought to myself, what an insight he had, that none of us so close to the company had. I closed the conversation with: “That’s ok ! I get it. If our business ever gets involved with building row boats, we’ll maybe bring the lighthouse back!”. And with that exchange our new logo was born! We hope you like it, and don’t hesitate to tell us what you think.
Monday, May 17, 2010
Donald Hogan, CEO KnowledgeWatch
So, today as I set about considering what to write for our blog I came across a news release that really caught my eye, stopped me dead in my tracks and yanked me in its direction:
Job Study – Top Ten Hot Career Trends for College Graduates (PRNewswire)
#3 on the list was Data Mining. The article from the University of California San Diego Extension described this new, hot job as… “Looking for a needle in a haystack is a good analogy for data mining jobs. “Data mining is the technique of extracting specific types of information or patterns from large databases, such as data warehouses. “Advanced statistical methods sift through large volumes of data, providing answers to questions that were once too time-consuming. “
A lot of people I know make reference from time to time of our work at KnowledgeWatch as data mining. Actually we like to think of it more as knowledge mining. That’s sort of why we, uh, named our company KnowledgeWatch – as in watching for knowledge. Who’s knowledge? Well, our customer’s knowledge. You could call it data mining but that’s technically not accurate because we’re mining a database that’s the really, really big cyber database called the World Wide Web. We’re mining it not to necessarily answers questions or conclude our own results, we’re finding, aggregating and refining the volume down so that customer knowledge workers can make use of textual articles, or knowledge, in whatever ways they need to – to do their jobs better. Our marketing folks extend this idea more with our marketing slogan: Powering Innovation.
What we’re mining could be data in a database, but it’s predominately textual (or word) based data that our customers have pointed out as pertinent to their desired subject domains. So we obtain really relevant and custom knowledge for each customer because we look at places they think will likely hold the most relevant current knowledge for them. A second step, after we know where to look for that customer, is we help our customer define very, very precisely the kind of articles of knowledge they get “watched for” by our system. The third step is to do this each and every day, in order to harvest brand new knowledge being published into the world, to quickly gather it and direct it to our customer.
Our typical customer is likely a content manager at a large professional or trade association who’s looking for subject domain knowledge to pass along to hundreds or thousands of member subscribers. It could also be someone like a sales support competitive intelligence analyst at a corporate enterprise trying to keep up on competitive product knowledge.
So, each day our customer has the opportunity to have their needles in the haystack automatically float up to them so they can enrich the knowledge and the work product of many knowledge workers.
That’s what our knowledge mining does !
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KnowledgeWatch provides complete and cost effective solutions for professional organizations and enterprises to easily identify and harvest relevant news and content from the Internet.
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