Enterprise 2.0 started Monday with a day 0 of tutorials. That was a travel day for me, so not much to say there

Day 1 was filled with keynotes and talks, followed by a cocktail reception in the demo pavilion.

The morning kicked off with David Weinberger (author Everything is Miscellaneous) who gave a great talk about data, meta data, and how not imposing physical world limitations on organizing data is a key to making it as accessible as it can be. There is a great synopsis of the book (or at least the talk) in one of the reviews at amazon.com – a snippet:

David Weinberger, internet visionary, has again synthesized an intellectual romp through another important topic – Information. We, humans, are obsessed with defining, categorizing and organizing information as our way of bringing some order to the chaotic world we live in.
Weinberger explores our obsession with information from Plato and Aristotle to our modern-day digital explosion of information.
He frames this exploration by defining 3 orders of organizing information:

1) 1st Order organization is of the physical world, manipulating physical objects and organizing them,
2) 2nd Order of organization is the use of metadata to organize and categorize physical objects i.e. library card catalogs. This is still limited by physical constraints.
3) 3rd Order of organization is the world we live in today, as we move from the physical to the digital, organizing information becomes freed from physical constraints allows us to simultaneously define, categorize and organize information into a million different taxonomies.

The next talk was from Andrew McAfee of Havard Business School. He gave a "report card on the state of the enterprise 2.0 meme." One of my big take away’s from his talk was the lack of (real) evidence supporting the value of web 2.0 technologies for business. At least beyond the few examples he said that he uses over and over again. This is also a point that I’ve been making in presentation I’ve been giving inside of IBM. He called for a repository to be build that we could all use to store (and borrow) success stories.

Then came the corporate talks. The room took a bit of turn. These talks were really more product pitches than anything else. Clearly there was some sponsorship precedence here, and companies have to get their messages out. The chunking seemed really discongruous and really seemed to "harsh the buzz" of the room. We heard from IBM, Microsoft, SAP and Cisco.

Between two of the talks Jessica Lipack and Jeffrey Stamps of NetAge gave a talk about their long history in social networking and online communications network. One memorable story about how they used snail mail years before the Internet to reach out to their immediate network (and higher order degrees) find people interested in creating an international communications network. I believe their initial request went out to 9 people and they ended up with 50,000 people at one point.

Unfortunately I missed a couple of great sessions after lunch due to customer / partner commitments. Hopefully I’ll get to some today…

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The Future of Communities Blog » Blog Archive » Building the…

“ At South by Southwest, Twitter just went bonkers. It was the ideal environment for it–lots of influential geeks in a small area, all wanting to tell each other what they were doing, and all talking about how Twitter was going bonkers, and blogging about it. I wonder: Was that an anomaly? Can small companies ever count on seeing their product explode onto the scene all at once like that?

[Caterina] Fake: You can’t count on that kind of thing, ever. We very carefully built the community on Flickr, person by person. The team and I greeted every single person who arrived, introduced them around, hung out in the chatrooms.  It was a very hands-on process, building the community…

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Social Degree » Facebook Platform – The Challenges Ahead For…

“There is no question that the new Facebook platform is going to have a massive impact on the market. A FB app and integration is going to become an essential part to any social site and startup, just like the rage of widgets was middle of last year. With only days under its belt, we’ve already seen one massive success with iLike’s music service. Despite all of this I do think that there will be challenges for developers and entrepreneurs ahead:”

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Over here at RIM’s Wireless Enterprise Symposium showing off some work that I’ve been doing with RIM around Lotus Connections. Today’s keynote speaker is Malcolm Gladwell…

High stakes decisions under conditions of informational uncertainty.

"I want to tell you a story about a statue…" A ‘Kouros’ – a type of Greek statue, typically of young men, that are exceedingly rare. A dealer came upon one and brought it to the Getty museum to see if they wanted it. The Museum spent 14 months doing all manner of verification testing, including comparing marble samples to pieces of the same time.

After the 14 months the museum spent $10M on the statue (1981). Evelyn Harrison, one of the worlds great experts on Greek art visited the museum and got a preview. She said, right away, that it was a fake. They asked another expert from NYC who also said that it was a fake.

They decided to debut this statue in Greece where the preview audience also spotted it as a fake.

Represented here are two different ways at making a decision. One way is exhaustive, with a great deal of research, the other is based off a gut instinct by people who just blurt out their opinions.

Typically we make decisions the way the Getty did and we can even be chastised for making decisions too quickly.

"I think this is very relevant to all of the people in this audience…" No matter what we do day to day, judgment is at the core of what we do every day. Its why we’re hired, promoted, etc. This kind of decision making skill is central to what it means to be an expert. There are plenty of scenarios where the precise exhaustive analytical style is the right way to go. There are, however, scenarios where flash judgment is the only way to make the decision – judging the authenticity of art is one of those.

In authenticating a piece of art you need to pull from years of experience in study of the field of art and experience in working with art. It becomes and instantaneous pattern matching exercise.

There is the notion of ‘cudoil’ (French for ‘at-a-glance’) that separates great generals from those who are not. This also exists in experts in any field.

There is a hard realty about his type of skill in that it is very difficult (or impossible) for someone to give a precise reason for why they’re able to make the decisions they do. Unfortunately we’re often challenged to defend our decisions by backing up the reasons. This is counter to the nature of how these experts make these flash decisions.

Example of tennis players. One of the worlds greatest tennis coaches can predict with almost 100% accuracy if a player will double fault. He’s seen near 500,000 serves and built up patterns that he can call on to make the judgment, but has no idea "how" he does it.

He interviewed a bunch of famous tennis players asking how to hit a topspin forehand. They all agreed on their answer. When taped, however, they did not actually do it as they said. They spend all day doing this, but don’t know how they do it in a way that they can describe it.

(ASIDE) How useful is it to gather people for a focus group if experts can’t determine how to describe how they do something that they do thousands of times.

Respect the mystery of this kind of wisdom – it can’t be explained to most’s satisfaction.

This kind of wisdom is fragile and easily disrupted. For example, the person responsible for getting this art at the Getty was tainted since the Getty endowment prohibits purchases of art from before 1900. She wanted it to be true.

Cops are all about making high stakes decisions in the face of limited information / uncertainty. Police error is highly correlated with the presence of a second officer. Many precincts have instituted single officer squad cars to combat this. (Young men tend to act rashly when in the presence of others).

High speed chases are also illustrative. Officers tend to make really bad decisions after being involved in a situation as tense as a high speed chase.

Judgment is frugal – it thrives under conditions of informational gap. We greatly over value the importance of a piece of marginal information.

A study suggested that taking away information from doctors and just leaving them with 4 (specific) pieces of information they will diagnose chest pain with a much higher accuracy than if they has much much more information.

In the military the problem is often that we "knew too much". Not that we did not have enough information. Pearl Harbor is an example. We had piles and piles of mail that analysts poured though, but in the end it was journalists that had the best judgment and wisdom – they were deprived of enough information and able to make the best judgment.

"The great decision makers have the courage to walk away from the marginal piece of information."

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I’m not sure I get exactly where he is going (sounds a bit like delicious and root.net had a baby) and what he has concretely, but here is some propaganda from his othersonline site:

It’s this easy …

1. Create a profile. Include a picture, links to your Web site(s) and keywords/tags (interests, memes, hobbies, etc.)
2. We promote you to others, when you’re relevant to their Web browsing and interests. You get more traffic.
3. Use our toolbar to manage your profile, increase your rank/visibility, and see people relevant to YOUR Web browsing.
4. Publish our widget to your blog, using whatever tags you wish. It helps.
5. Smile and spread the love!

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At Ignite Seattle Shelly Farnham talks about placing a "semantic layer over your social network"

"There has been a lot of work in the realm of social networks on line… but its extremely overwhelming, especially to the average user, and how it integrates into face-to-face is a big problem. What you need is more abstraction – how do you take this giant crowd and abstract it to what’s meaningful to me…"

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Looks like things are pretty busy in the Notes reception in Second Life

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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.

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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 can’t. 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.

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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.

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