Guess-able URLs are URLs in which a novice user can guess the format. These are often an overlooked but important aspect of social software. If you know about del.icio.us and have a basic understanding of the URLs for del.icio.us, you can make guesses about the format of a suite of URLs.
Category Archives: Work
IT Architecture – Realms of Work
Keith and I, the two IT Architects at UW-Madison, are getting ready for a planning session for our work. We are also getting ready to hire a third IT Architect. This has started me thinking about the big picture of “what we do”. I came up with the following chart last night while thinking about this work.
As I see it, IT Architecture has 6 broad realms of work (here at UW-Madison): Identity Management, Content Management, Communication and Collaboration, Service Oriented Architecture, Enterprise Data Architecture and Enterprise Application Ecosystem. There are three aspects to each realm: The Issues that are related to the realm, the Technology portion of the solution and the Human portion of the solution.
Clay Shirky – Ontology is Overrated Presentation Notes
IT Conversations: Clay Shirky – Ontology is Overrated
Clay Shirky gave a presentation at ETech titled Ontology is Overrated. You can listen to the presentation at the link above (ITConversations).
Highlights [with my expansions in square brackets]:
(1) Ontologies are left over from times when we had to file objects on shelves. This is no longer true with data on the web [or in an enterprise].
(2) The ontological goal of finding the perfect categorization scheme for the “essence” of the objects you are categorizing is a false goal in this era.
(3) Library of Congress categorization scheme (hierarchical buckets without overlap between buckets) is optimized for numbers of books on the shelves not conceptual ideas or intellectual aspects. Books need to be in one place but ideas can be all over the place. We have confused the container for the things within the container.
(4) There is no shelf. There is no physical constraint that we have to enforce upon the web.
Event & Venue Database (EVDB) – Social Sofware Event Calendar
EVDB – The Event & Venue Database
EVDB is an event calendar system based on open contributions and smart searches. Any logged in member can enter an event. Calendars and Event are tagged like in del.icio.us. The software suggests a list of popular tags (this would help with stemming of tags – Mac, MacIntosh, Apple, etc.)
When creating an event you can tag the event and mark whether the event is free or for charge. There is a Venue Search function (you can see charge-back forming now). You add the traditional information (Time, Date).
Smart Calendars are calendars based on search terms (here comes the folksonomy and social part). You can build a Smart Calendar then share the calendar with others. You can also subscribe to Smart Calendars via RSS or ICAL. Very cool.
This system does not displace the enterprise calendar application which has a strong requirement for group scheduling where all must attend. EVDB looks like a great system for one-to-many, make-it-if-you-can events and as a tool for discovering events of interest in my area.
{JJP}
The Long Tail
In The Long Tail weblog, Chris Anderson (editor in chief for Wired Magazine) explores the long tail of markets and social networking. The Long Tail hypothesis states (basically) that the economics of sum of all of the small markets and niche products are greater than the sum of all of the “hit” products. In other words, the latest belly-button pop star may sell millions of CDs but all of the funky 1 and 2 sale CDs will sell even more.
Amazon has more sales from all of the titles that Barnes and Nobel DOESN’T carry (the top 30,000 titles) that the total for the top 30,000. I believe that the same “long tail” effect applies to enterprise collaboration and communication.
Tagging in WordPress
I have two plugins installed in WordPress for this blog that help connect other pieces of social software. (1) Technotag allows me to insert tags for Technorati in the end of the entry. (2) del.icio.us tagging plugin crawls the post and puts up the little square graphic next to terms that match tags in delicious.
This is pretty cool stuff that begins to knit together various pieces of social software. What would I like to see next in a blog app:
Jim Phelps 