At this very moment I am watching a podcast from Greg Merkle of DowJones Enterprise Media Group Reading the Technology Tea Leaves: Trends in Media and Information Technologies , which was listed on Freepint; 'Reading the Technology Tea Leaves: Trends in Media and Information Technologies'. The talk is basically your standard talk on web 2.0., touching on the semantic web too, but he talks about some specific applications with which it is good to become more familiar.
- He talks about 'interruptive technologies' for example how a company can go from being very resistant to RSS to using it exclusively to move around all their company's internal information in a space of three years, a huge culture change. Wikis are also widely used.
- He mentions how applications like iGoogle help users to assemble their own resources, cutting out the need for an administrator (web master?)
- Swivel is an application that allows you to put statistical data online and integrate it (mash it up) with information from different sources. Freebase is similar. These involve sharing data with the public. Dapper is a resource that allows you to create RSS feeds from sites that do not provide RSS feeds or widget, and the owner of the website might not even know you are doing it! {I guess an example would be a section of a web page with statistics that change daily. ]This raises copyright isssues. I couldn't quite get the hang of what Yahoo pipes was at all. Many companies are starting to use Twitter which can send an instant message. Mostly this is used to chat to people about what you are doing at that moment, the equivalent of social chatting.
- Putting information into the public domain for public comment and correction involves trusting the public but it is important to be able to see what the public think by seeing what tags and comments they add, and who links to the site etc.
- 66% of his audience had a metadata or taxonomy strategy for their company. For instance Factiva organises its company information by company, topics, industries and regions. a taxonomy could just involve the use of an authority file.
- Resources such as Factiva 2.0 can analyse search results and represent them in visual form, such as graphs of the number of posts ard arranged by date, (this shows peaks where something important happened relating to this term,) associated keywords etc.
I concluded that social software tools are used in business a lot more prevalently than I thought.
Comments