Over at O’Reilly Radar Tim has a post about a new company that just launched at the Web 2.0 expo called Spock…
You can search for a specific person — but you can do that on Google. More importantly, you can search for a class of person, say politicians, or people associated with a topic — say Ruby on Rails. The spock robot automatically creates tags for any person it finds (and it gathers information on people from Wikipedia, social networking sites like LinkedIn and Facebook), but it also lets users add tags of their own, and vote existing tags up or down to strengthen the associations between people and topics. Users can also identify relationships between people (friend, co-worker, etc.), upload pictures, and provide other types of information. This is definitely a site that will get better as more people use it — one of my key tests for Web 2.0. It also illustrates the heart of a new development paradigm: using programs to populate a database, and people to improve it.
Go to the article for more detail, but here is a quick screen shot to peek your interest:
Fascinating. IBM offers some products for entity analytics, but none that I know of that are aiming at web scale analytics, or combining it with social software.
A thought provoking talk by Charles Leadbeater on the notion of "Collaborative Creativity".
From the site:
In this deceptively casual talk, Charles Leadbeater weaves a tight argument that innovation isn’t just for professionals anymore. Passionate amateurs, using new tools, are creating products and paradigms that companies cant. He describes the rising role of serious amateurs ("Pro-Ams," as he calls them) through the story of the mountain bike.
Also on the site, a version of the player that is really neat:
When you roll over the timeline its displays a chapter visualization that allows you to page through sections of the talk.
From a peer of mine who has been doing quite a bit of work in Second Life…
Greetings all! There will be a celebration of the launch of Notes 8 Beta in Second Life at 9:00 AM EST and 9:00 PM EST on May 2nd, 2007. If you do not already have an avatar in Second Life, you can create one today at http://www.secondlife.com and join our virtual event. The event will be held in the Lotusphere region of the IBM 9 sim. (slurl://IBM 9/54/63)
The Notes 8 Beta reception gives you a live virtual forum to meet birds-of-a-feather, Lotus Business Partners, and customers. Come tell us about what you think of Notes 8 and what you plan to do with it.
If you are new to Second Life there will be an introductory session at 9:00 AM EST and 9:00 PM EST on May 1st also in the Lotusphere region. Experienced people will be on hand to help you with the tutorial.
If you have any questions please contact me by e-mail at jo_grant@us.ibm.com, or via my avatar in Second Life: Jaymin Carthage. Please forward to other Second Life members.
A couple of professors from Harvard and Duke business schools got together and examined the relationship between affability and competency at work. They generated a magic quadrant diagram like this:
Our research showed (not surprisingly) that, no matter what kind of organization we studied, everybody wanted to work with the lovable star, and nobody wanted to work with the incompetent jerk. Things got a lot more interesting, though, when people faced the choice between competent jerks and lovable fools.
Ask managers about this choiceand we’ve asked many of them, both as part of our research and in executive education programs we teachand you’ll often hear them say that when it comes to getting a job done, of course competence trumps likability. "I can defuse my antipathy toward the jerk if he’s competent, but I can’t train someone who’s incompetent," says the CIO at a large engineering company. Or, in the words of a knowledge management executive in the IT department of a professional services firm: "I really care about the skills and expertise you bring to the table. If you’re a nice person on top of that, that’s simply a bonus."
But despite what such people might say about their preferences, the reverse turned out to be true in practice in the organizations we analyzed. Personal feelings played a more important role in forming work relationshipsnot friendships at work but job-oriented relationshipsthan is commonly acknowledged. They were even more important than evaluations of competence. In fact, feelings worked as a gating factor: We found that if someone is strongly disliked, it’s almost irrelevant whether or not she is competent; people won’t want to work with her anyway. By contrast, if someone is liked, his colleagues will seek out every little bit of competence he has to offer. And this tendency didn’t exist only in extreme cases; it was true across the board. Generally speaking, a little extra likability goes a longer way than a little extra competence in making someone desirable to work with.
I’m sure that we can all reference experiences where we had colleagues that were less than affable (or even down right nasty). One particular person comes to mind for me - he shall remain anonymous, but he is extremely bright and reviled by almost everyone who has to work with him.
There is a lot of stuff in his head, none of which could be found in "How to Win Friends and Influence People", but for the technical details in a few areas there aren’t many people that know more than him.
I wonder what the implications are here for social software… There is a is a level of abstraction that social software provides that might act as a sort of "smoothing function". Perhaps smoothing the rough edges on the "competent jerk’s" personality, or allowing the relatively few areas of competency of the "loveable fool" to be highlighted, along with their natural proclivity relate to other people.
