Getting paid to visit and use websites?

http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/techbeat/archives/2005/10/should_flickr_p.html#trackback

Cheap Robots (PCs on wheels)

http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/techbeat/archives/2005/05/brainy_pcs_on_w.html

http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000907021772

The Long Tail (Wired Magazine article)

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html

The Power Of Us
Mass collaboration on the Internet is shaking up business

The 35 employees at Meiosys Inc., a software firm in Palo Alto, Calif., didn't know they were joining a gang of telecom-industry marauders. They just wanted to save a few bucks. Last year they began using Skype, a program that lets them make free calls over the Internet, with better sound quality than regular phones, using headsets connected to their PCs. Callers simply click on a name in their Skype contact lists, and if the person is there, they connect and talk just like on a regular phone call. "Better quality at no cost," exults Meiosys Chief Executive Jason Donahue. Poof! Almost 90% of his firm's $2,000 monthly long-distance phone bill has vanished. With 41 million people now using Skype, plus 150,000 more each day, it's no wonder AT&T (T ) and MCI Inc. (MCIP ) are hanging it up.
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How can a tiny European upstart like Skype Technologies S.A. do a number on a trillion-dollar industry? By dialing up a vast, hidden resource: its own users. Skype, the newest creation from the same folks whose popular file-sharing software Kazaa freaked out record execs, also lets people share their resources -- legally. When users fire up Skype, they automatically allow their spare computing power and Net connections to be borrowed by the Skype network, which uses that collective resource to route others' calls. The result: a self-sustaining phone system that requires no central capital investment -- just the willingness of its users to share. Says Skype CEO Niklas Zennström: "It's almost like an organism."

A big, hairy, monstrous organism, that is. The nearly 1 billion people online worldwide -- along with their shared knowledge, social contacts, online reputations, computing power, and more -- are rapidly becoming a collective force of unprecedented power. For the first time in human history, mass cooperation across time and space is suddenly economical. "There's a fundamental shift in power happening," says Pierre M. Omidyar, founder and chairman of the online marketplace eBay Inc. (EBAY ) "Everywhere, people are getting together and, using the Internet, disrupting whatever activities they're involved in."

Collective Clamor
Behold the power of us. It's the force behind the collective clamor of Weblogs that felled CBS (VIA ) anchorman Dan Rather and rocked the media establishment. Global crowds of open-source Linux programmers are giving even mighty Microsoft Corp. (MSFT ) fits. Virtual supercomputers, stitched together from millions of volunteers' PCs, are helping predict global climate change, analyze genetic diseases, and find new planets and stars. One investment-management firm, Marketocracy Inc., even runs a sort of stock market rotisserie league for 70,000 virtual traders. It skims the cream of the best-performing portfolios to buy and sell real stocks for its $60 million mutual fund.

Although tech companies may be leading the way, their efforts are shaking up other industries, including entertainment, publishing, and advertising. Hollywood is under full-scale assault by 100 million people sharing songs and movies online via programs such as Kazaa and BitTorrent. The situation is the same with ad-supported media: Google Inc.'s (GOOG ) ace search engine essentially polls the collective judgments of millions of Web page creators to determine the most relevant search results. In the process, it has created a multibillion-dollar market for supertargeted ads that's drawing money from magazine display ads and newspaper classifieds.

Most telling, traditional companies, from Procter & Gamble Co. (PG ) to Dow Chemical Co., are beginning to flock to the virtual commons, too. The potential benefits are enormous. If companies can open themselves up to contributions from enthusiastic customers and partners, that should help them create products and services faster, with fewer duds -- and at far lower cost, with far less risk. LEGO Group uses the Net to identify and rally its most enthusiastic customers to help it design and market more effectively. Eli Lilly & Co. (LLY ), Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP ), and others are running "prediction markets" that extract collective wisdom from online crowds, which help gauge whether the government will approve a drug or how well a product will sell.

At the same time, peer power presents difficult challenges for anyone invested in the status quo. Corporations, those citadels of command-and-control, may be in for the biggest jolt. Increasingly, they will have to contend with ad hoc groups of customers who have the power to join forces online to get what they want. Indeed, customers are creating what they want themselves -- designing their own software with colleagues, for instance, and declaring their opinions via blogs instead of waiting for newspapers to print their letters. "It's the democratization of industry," says C.K. Prahalad, a University of Michigan Stephen M. Ross School of Business professor and co-author of the 2004 book The Future of Competition: Co-Creating Unique Value with Customers. "We are seeing the emergence of an economy of the people, by the people, for the people."

Peer Production
That suggests even more sweeping changes to come. Howard Rheingold, author of Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, sees a common thread in such disparate innovations as the Internet, mobile devices, and the feedback system on eBay, where buyers and sellers rate each other on each transaction. He thinks they're the underpinnings of a new economic order. "These are like the stock companies and liability insurance that made capitalism possible," suggests Rheingold, who's also helping lead the Cooperation Project, a network of academics and businesses trying to map the new landscape. "They may make some new economic system possible."

Perhaps they already are. Yochai Benkler, a Yale Law School professor who studies the economics of networks, thinks such online cooperation is spurring a new mode of production beyond the two classic pillars of economics, the firm and the market. "Peer production," as he calls work such as open-source software, file-sharing, and Amazon.com Inc.'s (AMZN ) millions of customer product reviews, creates value with neither conventional corporate oversight nor market incentives such as payment. "The economic role of social behavior is increasing," he says. "Things that would normally just dissipate in the air as social gestures become economic products."

Indeed, peer production represents a sea change in the economy -- at least when it comes to the information products, services, and content that increasingly drive economic growth. More than two centuries ago, James Watt's steam engine ushered in the Industrial Revolution, centralizing the means of production in huge, powerful corporations that had the capital to achieve economies of scale. Now cheap computers and new social software and services -- along with the Internet's ubiquitous communications that make it easy to pool those capital investments -- are starting to give production power back to the people. Says Benkler: "This departs radically from everything we've seen since the Industrial Revolution."

Sound pretty threatening to anyone invested in the status quo? You bet. Indeed, as the title of Rheingold's book implies, there could be a dark side to this new cooperative force, especially if it results in mob rule. Quite often, the best solution to a problem comes from the sudden flash of insight from a solitary genius such as Charles Darwin or Albert Einstein. It would be a tragedy if these folks, sometimes unpopular in their times, got lost in the cooperative crowds. Clearly, peer production has its limits. Almost certainly, it will never build railroads, grow wheat, run nuclear power plants, or write great novels.

Yet this cooperative force may spread beyond such easily shared commodities as information, knowledge, and media. People are starting to use the Net to pool tangible goods as well. In a sense, Skype enables people to share computer hardware. Thanks to the Web's ability to serve as a meeting ground and scheduling coordinator, it's becoming economical to share cars, for example. Services such as Zipcar Inc. and Flexcar let members use the Net to reserve one of a fleet of autos in crowded cities, almost on demand, for an hourly fee.

What's driving all this togetherness? More than anything, an emerging generation of Net technologies. They include file-sharing, blogs, group-edited sites called wikis, and social networking services such as MySpace and Meetup Inc., which has helped everyone from Howard Deaniacs to English bulldog owners in New York form local groups. Those technologies are finally teasing out the Net's unique potential in a way that neither e-mail nor traditional Web sites did. The Net can, like no other medium, connect many people with many others at the same time.

What sets these new technologies apart from those of the Internet's first generation is their canny way of turning self-interest into social benefit -- and real economic value. They have what tech-book publisher Tim O'Reilly calls an "architecture of participation," so it's easy for people to do their own thing: create a link on their Web site to another Web site they like; rate a song; or just show off their knowledge with an online product review. Then, those actions can be pooled into something useful to many: the 3 billion song ratings that help people create personalized Net radio stations on Yahoo (YHOO )! Inc. or Amazon's millions of customer-generated product reviews, which help decide hits and duds. Exclaims Amazon CEO Jeffrey P. Bezos: "You invite the community in, and you get all this help."

It's surprisingly good help, too. New research indicates that cooperation, often organized from the bottom up, plays a much greater role than we thought in everything from natural phenomena like ant colonies to human institutions such as markets and cities. It's what New Yorker writer James Surowiecki, in his illuminating 2004 book of the same name, calls "the wisdom of crowds." Crowds can go mad, of course, but by and large, it turns out, they're smarter at solving many problems than even the brightest individuals.

The Internet's supreme group-forming capability suggests the rise of an almost spooky group intelligence. Within minutes of Pope John Paul II's death, hundreds of eBay sellers had posted related products for sale. Whether it is responding to world events or new products such as Sony Corp.'s (SNE ) PSP game machine, eBay's hive mind reacts to shifts in demand much faster than traditional companies with layers of management approval. Although eBay recently has seen some mature markets in the U.S. and Germany slow, the group smarts have helped keep growth more than respectable, with gross merchandise sales this year expected to rise 32%, to $45 billion. As eBay CEO Margaret C. Whitman has noted: "It is far better to have an army of a million than a command-and-control system."

More companies are starting to understand the logic. If they can get others to help them design and create products, they end up with ready-made customers -- and that means far less risk in the tricky business of creating new goods and markets. So businesses are accessing the cyberswarm to improve everything from research and development to marketing. Says Alpheus Bingham, vice-president for Eli Lilly's e.Lilly research unit: "If I can tap into a million minds simultaneously, I may run into one that's uniquely prepared."

Procter & Gamble's $1.7 billion-a-year R&D operation, for instance, is taking advantage of collective online brain trusts such as Lilly company InnoCentive Inc. in Andover, Mass. It's a network of 80,000 independent, self-selected "solvers" in 173 countries who gang-tackle research problems for the likes of Boeing Co. (BA ), DuPont (DD ), and 30 other large companies. One solver, Drew Buschhorn, is a 21-year-old chemistry grad student at the University of Indiana at Bloomington. He came up with an art-restoration chemical for an unnamed company -- a compound he identified while helping his mother dye cloth when he was a kid. Says InnoCentive CEO Darren J. Carroll: "We're trying for the democratization of science."

And apparently succeeding. More than a third of the two dozen requests P&G has submitted to InnoCentive's network have yielded solutions, for which the company paid upwards of $5,000 apiece. By using InnoCentive and other ways of reaching independent talent, P&G has boosted the number of new products derived from outside to 35%, from 20% three years ago. As a result, sales per R&D person are ahead some 40%.

The online masses aren't just offering up ideas: Sometimes they all but become the entire production staff. In game designer Linden Lab's Second Life, a virtual online world, participants themselves create just about everything, from characters to buildings to games that are played inside the world. The 45-person company, which grossed less than $5 million last year, makes money by charging players for virtual land on which they build their creations. Second Life's 25,000 players collectively spend 6,000 hours a day actively creating things. Even if you assume only 10% of their work is any good, that's still equal to a 100-person team at a traditional game company. "We've built a market-based, far more efficient system for creating digital content," says Linden CEO Philip Rosedale.

Likewise, groups online are starting to turn marketing from megaphone to conversation. LEGO Group, for instance, brought adult LEGO train-set enthusiasts to its New York office to check out new designs. "We pooh-poohed them all," says Steve Barile, an Intel Corp. (INTC ) engineer and LEGO fan in Portland, Ore., who attended. As a result, says Jake McKee, LEGO's global community-development manager, "we literally produced what they told us to produce." The new locomotive, the "Santa Fe Super Chief" set, was shown to 250 enthusiasts in 2002, and their word-of-mouse helped the first 10,000 units sell out in less than two weeks with no other marketing.

Corporate planners are even starting to use the wisdom of online crowds to predict the future, forecasting profits and sales more precisely. Prediction markets let people essentially buy shares in various forecasts, often with real money. Most famously, they've been employed in the University of Iowa's experimental Iowa Electronic Markets to determine, with remarkable accuracy, the most likely winner of the Presidential election. The ease of organizing groups on the Net has caused an explosion in their use, says Emile Servan-Schreiber, CEO of NewsFutures Inc., a consultant that has run 40,000 prediction markets for companies and publications.

Mob Mentality
Hewlett-Packard Co.'s (HPQ ) services division was having trouble a few years ago with forecasts in the first month of a quarter. So Bernardo A. Huberman, director of HP Labs' Information Dynamics Lab, set up a market with 15 finance people not normally involved in such planning. They bought and sold virtual stock that represented a range of forecasts at, above, and below the official company forecast. Their collective bets yielded a 50% improvement in operating-profit predictability over conventional forecasts by individual managers.

For all the benefits, Net-based cooperation holds plenty of peril for the unwary. Obviously, not all crowds are wise. Even The Wisdom of Crowds author Surowiecki wonders if the Net connects like-minded people so well that it can amplify groupthink. "The more we talk to each other, the dumber we can get," he notes. Groups that discourage independent thought potentially could put a damper on out-of-the-box ideas from brilliant individuals. They can also become herds that buy or dump stocks on momentum alone. For that matter, they can devolve into lynch mobs and terrorist groups.

As companies have learned, the online hordes can quickly turn against them. Last September bike-lock manufacturer Kryptonite tried to downplay a blogger video that showed how to open its bike locks with a BIC pen. But the video instantly spread across the Net, forcing the company to spend more than $10 million on lock replacements.

To contend with this rising people power, corporations will have to craft new roles for themselves and learn new ways to operate in order to stay relevant. They'll be unable to keep secrets for long amid the chorus of online voices, as Apple Computer Inc. (AAPL ) learned when fan sites spilled the beans on unreleased products. Managers and employees will have to learn how to take orders from customers more than from bosses. "Networks are becoming the locus for innovation," says Stanford University professor Walter W. Powell. "Firms are becoming much more porous and decentralized."

The challenges, though, go to show that we're not talking about merely a new capitalist tool -- at least not one that's dominated by big capitalists. Upstarts, both ad hoc groups and new companies, are seizing the initiative far more than are established businesses. They're transforming industry after industry faster than individual companies can cope with.

Nowhere has that phenomenon happened faster than in software. Collaborative open-source development is rapidly moving beyond basic utility software like Linux to mainstream applications as well. An especially eye-opening example is SugarCRM Inc., which provides an open-source version of customer-relationship management software now dominated by Siebel Systems (SEBL ) and salesforce.com Inc. (CRM ) The 10-person outfit's software, which CEO John Roberts calls "the collective work of bright CRM engineers around the world," has been downloaded more than 235,000 times for free.

The company makes money from services such as technical support and a $40-a-month Web-based service, as well as more fully featured corporate software for which it charges $239 per user per year. Scarcely a year old, SugarCRM won't reveal its finances, but its business model suggests a big change in how the software industry works. "The fact that everyone can participate [in open-source] is creating a new market ecology," says Kim Polese, CEO of SpikeSource Inc., a startup providing bundles of open-source products. Or, as Roberts adds brightly: "We're turning a $10 billion market space into a $1 billion market space."

The same scary prospect lies ahead for other information-based industries, such as entertainment, media, and publishing, that are rapidly going digital. People are not only sharing songs and movies -- legally or not -- but also creating content themselves and building sizable audiences. The threat comes from more than the 10 million-plus blogs. Overall, 53 million Americans have contributed material to the Net, from product reviews to eBay ratings, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

The most breathtaking example: Wikipedia. Some 5 million people a month visit the free online encyclopedia, whose more than 1.5 million entries in 200 languages by volunteer experts around the globe outnumber Encyclopedia Britannica's 120,000, with surprisingly high quality. "Our work shows how quickly a traditional proprietary product can be overtaken by an open alternative," says co-founder Jimmy Wales. Unlike Britannica, Wales is not aiming to generate much, if any, revenue. But "that doesn't mean that we won't destroy their business," he notes. Britannica spokesman Tom Panelas says sheer volume of articles isn't a measure of quality and may be overload for most readers and researchers.

Then again, the cooperative crowds offer a lifeline to beleaguered media such as newspapers. The five-year-old online paper OhmyNews in South Korea has marshaled 36,000 "citizen journalists" to write up to 200 stories a day on everything from political protests to movies. Its popularity with 1 million daily visitors has made it the sixth-most influential media outlet in Korea, according to a national magazine poll -- topping one of the three television networks. "It's participatory journalism," explains founder Oh Yeon Ho, who says OhmyNews turned a profit last year. The idea is starting to catch fire in the U.S., too, via independent citizen-media efforts such as Backfence Inc. and Bayosphere and budding initiatives by E.W. Scripps Co. (SSP ) and others. The New York Times Co. is also testing the waters: In March, it bought About.com, which has 475 citizen experts on consumer electronics, personal finance, and other topics.

Even industries that traffic in physical goods are being turned upside down by Net-driven sharing. In retail, for instance, "consumers" are becoming active participants in the merchants they buy from, transforming the venerable suggestion box into something more influential. At Amazon.com, thousands of volunteers write buyer's guides and lists of favorite products. Amazon also lets thousands of merchants, from Target Stores (TGT ) to individuals, sell on Amazon pages.

What's more, Amazon is opening up the technology behind product databases, payment services, and more to 65,000 software developers. They're creating new services, such as the ability to compare brick-and-mortar store prices with Amazon's by scanning a bar code into a cell phone. Thanks in part to such moves, the company is solidly profitable on $6.9 billion in sales last year. "We're all building this thing together -- Amazon itself, outside developers, associates, and customers," says Jeff Barr, Amazon's Web services evangelist.

That raises a key point: All of us will have to take on more responsibility. And to get the most out of the new cooperative tools and services, we'll have to contribute our time and talent in new ways -- such as rating a seller on eBay or penning a short essay in Wikipedia. But the rewards will be more personalized products and services that we don't merely consume, but help create.

Ultimately, all this could point the way to a fundamental change in the way people work together. In 1968, ecologist Garrett Hardin popularized the notion of the tragedy of the commons. He noted that public resources, from pastures and national parks to air and water, inevitably get overused as people act in their own self-interest. It's a different story in the Information Age, contends Dan Bricklin, co-creator of the pioneering PC software VisiCalc and president of consultant Software Garden Inc. in Newton Highlands, Mass.

Instead, he says, there's a cornucopia of the commons. That rich reward may be worth all the disruption we've seen and all the more still to come.

(Source: http://www.businessweek.com/@@D1zKxYYQFbYvyQMA/magazine/content/05_25/b3938601.htm)

Information Visualisation

http://www.k-praxis.com/archives/information_visualization/000062.html

Map Hacks on Crack

The internet's two largest search engines are begging to get hacked.

On Wednesday, Google opened a set of programming interfaces for its popular service, in the hope hackers will overlay the maps with data from outside sources -- such as wireless cafes.

Just one day later, Yahoo announced its own set of programming tools for its map service, Yahoo Maps.

Both companies are hoping the new mapping APIs, or application programming interfaces, will excite developers, help the companies find new employees and, perhaps most importantly, result in free product prototyping.

But the search giants were also reacting in no small part to web hackers who had already started to reverse-engineer the two mapping services in ways neither had expected.
"We are doing this because they were already doing it," said Google Maps product manager Bret Taylor, half jokingly, at Where 2.0, a new conference focusing on innovations in mapping and location-based services.

Outlining Google's new offerings, Taylor stressed that Google is a company of engineers that wants to foster a network of developers and provide a formal way to work with outside programmers.

"Frankly we like new and innovative solutions," Taylor said. "We expect new and creative ideas to come out of this that we haven't thought of yet."

Before Google opened the Maps API, several "mashups" had been created, including Paul Rademacher's housing map, which layers craigslist housing ads onto Google maps, and an anti-gridlock site that marries Yahoo traffic data with Google maps. There's also Adrian Holovaty's ingenious Chicago crime map, which lets users create custom views of crimes from auto theft to bribery on maps as tiny as individual police beats.

Other hacks include a small-town walking tour with annotations, a map with clickable London traffic cameras and a map for finding cheap gasoline that's no longer online.

Rademacher's Google-craigslist hack earned him a star role at Where 2.0. Tim O'Reilly, the web-trend predictor at the helm of the O'Reilly publishing company, sees the future of the internet in these innovative, unpaid hacks.

"Google Maps with craigslist is the first Web 2.0 application," O'Reilly said, referring to his belief that the future of the internet will be created from interlocking connections of open data services that will be constantly improved and tweaked.

The API announcements illustrate that both companies are serious about devoting resources to outside projects that the companies have little control over.

The APIs, which specify the rules for what kinds of data can be passed to the mapping server and how the maps can be used, require user documentation, updates and support forums.

Not surprisingly, the two companies have different rules.

Yahoo is a bit more flexible in the kinds of data that can be passed and uses several open data standards, including RSS. The company also hosts the resultant map on its own servers, which could save hackers from having to pay for expensive bandwidth if their application becomes popular. It also allows Yahoo to serve advertising, if it chooses. However, the hosting offer is not negotiable, even for geeks with deep pockets who want the map featured on their own website.
Google, on the other hand, expects developers to host their own hacks by running Google's innovative JavaScript to power the map's smooth rendering, but reserves the right to place ads next to the mashup map in the future.

Yahoo sees the legitimized hacking as another extension of its effort to turn its customers into participants. Its local service, Yahoo Local, for example, attempts to merge blogging, restaurant reviews, social software and portable electronic devices.

Hackers, who had to constantly keep an eye on Google Maps for code changes to keep their jury-rigged applications running, welcomed the news. But they also had detailed questions about data specifications and gripes about the licenses.

"With this level of excitement around (Google Maps), it really makes sense for them to really foster development, instead of having people worry about their sites being taken down," Rademacher said.

They also started to build some Yahoo mapping hacks in less than 24 hours.
One such hacker married Yahoo's San Francisco Bay Area traffic data with live feeds from government traffic cameras to a map of the Bay Area. Another created a map-based tribute to the wine-tasting buddy film Sideways.

What's new in search: Prospective Search?

February 28, 2005

The ‘search’ functionality forms the base of most internet operations today.K-praxis has, in previous posts, speculated on the future of search. With the advent of ‘prospective search’ this functionality is now branching off in a different direction. What is the scope and potential of prospective search? How is it different from traditional search methods? What kind of a future does prospective search have? In this article k-praxis examines the definition and uses of prospective search as opposed to retrospective search.

Defining Prospective and Retrospective Search

Most of the search based on the Internet has been reference based. Google, the forerunner of all searches tends to give out results that are relevance oriented. Thats is, you type in a keyword and Google performs the search based on these keywords alone. Instead of using HTML, the delivery protocol for web pages is a desire for a new, feed-centric protocol, that is RSS. To search chronologically-ordered content, a relevance-based search like Google destroys the chronology and is inappropriate. More innovative in the search technology are sites such as PubSub, Technorati and Newsgator.

There are two ways in which a user can search the Internet for information:

Retrospective Search: This is the traditional form of search as performed by search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and other search engines. This method is called ‘searching the past’ where information is gathered by spiders, net crawlers and other forms of data entry. This information is sorted into a historical searchable selection. In such a system of search, queries are constantly changing and can be considered to be static. The results of these queries may change over a period of time but they are considered to be static because the results can be gathered only against the background of informationthat is already available on the web.

Prospective Search: This new method of search was introduced by PubSub. It is termed as ‘searching the future’. Information is gathered by a variety of methods against newly updated documents. Every time a prospective search is performed the queries are stored in the database while the results are discarded. When a new document matching the query is made available, the user receives an update. In this system of search, it is the queries that are static while the results are dynamic.

With information on the Internet constantly expanding, searching for information can become a cumbersome, tiring and confusing process which takes up a lot of time as the users sift though pages and pages of information. One could argue that retrospective search is more comprehensive and heterogeneous. While this may be true, prospective search is useful in that it reduces the time taken by users to search or repeat search for a particular bit of information.

Exploring Keyword Search

Merely using keywords to locate data isn't comprehensive enough. More often than not, you receive results that you do not care for. It is advisable therefore, to use key phrases instead of keywords alone. Phrases are less generic and more descriptive. This is the kind of language that a search engine understands.

Prospective Vs Retrospective

Prospective search is not meant to be viewed as a replacement for traditional methods of search. It is useful only when it is used to complement retrospective search. While retrospective search allows users to source information that is already known and documented, prospective search allows the user to be updated whenever a new piece of information pertaining to the query is added to the wealth of the Internet database.

Prospective search throws many doors open for those in the business of content creation and management. It means that newly generated content is immediately forwarded to those who have expressed an interest in the subject matter.

Prospective search is also changing the way the Internet works by making the web more personalized. Users can receive only the information they are interested in rather than having to go through large amounts of data that they may or maynot be interested in at all. Using prospective search their query is stored and the user receives a feed or an update every time something new (pertaining to the query of course) pops up on the Internet.

Instead of going through a lot of irrelevant 'junk' information it is simpler to use prospective search offered by PubSub, Technorati, Feedster, Blogpulse and Bloglines. These services are currently offered free. In order to make this kind of search more innovative, prospective search engines could team up with library databases such as Proquest whereby a user will receive a feed once any new information is available.

Conclusion

Prospective search will make the job of information hunting and gathering less time consuming and more accurate and updated. In fact the idea that users will be able to access the latest and updated information is its greatest strength. Prospective searches will be most useful for business purposes where the availability of new information is key to the progress of an enterprise.

However, it is still important to access information that is already known and this is where retrospective search holds sway. Prospective and retrospective search are complementary to one another. One cannot be used in place of the other. The future of prospective search is largely merged with the continued usage of retrospective search. The user will most probably use a combination of retrospective and prospective search to capture data.

Google Gets Earthy

By Daniel Terdiman
Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,68042,00.html
02:00 AM Jun. 30, 2005 PT

Google mappers can now tag and share their favorite locations with other users, who can then spot those choice Yosemite camp sites or find the most intriguing Polish medieval buildings.
On Tuesday, Google launched Google Earth, a free software package that gives detailed, 3-D views of cities across the globe replete with thousands of restaurants, schools, hotels and other establishments. It also provides amusing motion graphics of the route between locations or 3D cities.

But as useful as that kind of information can be, Google Earth's true special sauce is the way it allows users to create markers for just about any venue or location, write a note describing it and then share it with the application's entire user base.

"The goal with Google Earth is to create a kind of browser for the planet," said John Hanke, general manager of the Google Keyhole group, which developed the application. "(Our mission) was to take it in the most extreme direction in terms of making this a virtual model of the planet."

Clearly, Google believes that the best way to achieve that goal is to let users populate its databases with countless markers for places and things its own programmers would never think of.

For months, users have been gaga over Google Maps, which quickly and easily conjures up maps of nearly anywhere in the United States. Particularly popular is the service's satellite views, which show detailed images of neighborhoods or particular streets. And because of its open architecture, others can create imaginative hacks that combine Google Maps with third-party services like craigslist.

Google Earth is Google Maps on steroids -- and the company has incorporated the hacking element into the product by allowing anyone to add their own details.
The system already includes dozens of hacks and thousands of tags acquired by Google when the company bought Keyhole, a satellite imagery provider, last year. Keyhole has encouraged its community of users to post their own data about places and things throughout the world.
One is a hack that mixes mapping information with data from the bus system in Boulder, Colorado, showing in real-time the location of the city's buses on the 3-D map.

There are plenty of others: a lighthouse tour of the United States, good hikes in Marin County, California, the best camping spots in Yosemite National Park and lists of medieval buildings in Gdansk, Poland.

"I'm reminded of all the railroad nuts and how they could create an annotated map of the (United States), showing all the best bridges, tunnels and places to watch trains go by," said Matt Haughey, creator of the popular MetaFilter group blog and an evangelist of user-created content.

To Haughey, the open service means users can develop and share far more information than any one company could produce alone.

Indeed, according to Hanke, Keyhole users -- and now those of Google Earth – have been doing just that, and the service's bulletin board system is full of countless such examples, many of which can be found under discrete, searchable categories -- like Beijing, U.S. warships, theme parks and many more -- on the Keyhole BBS.

But Haughey cautioned that Google Earth could be open to exploitation.

"Looking at Portland (Oregon), I see someone made an entry for some storage place," he said. "Probably someone that works there or owns it. Kind of like map spam."

Still, Hanke feels the upside of an open-ended database outweighs the problems. He noted that the service could be expanded by users in almost infinite ways -- an open-endedness that mirrors the infinite extensibility of the web.

"You see the promise of a view that lets you understand the web and graphical information on the web," Hanke said, "with the map as kind of the underpinning of that."

The Dawn of the E-Lance Economy

In this eye-opening article, Thomas W. Malone and Robert J. Laubacher of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology look at how a new kind of organization could form the basis of a new kind of economy--an e-lance economy--where all the old rules of business are overturned and big companies are rendered obsolete.

Drawing on their research at MIT's Initiative on Inventing the Organizations of the 21st Century, the authors postulate a world in which business is not controlled through a stable chain of management in a large, permanent company. Rather, it is carried out autonomously by independent contractors connected through personal computers and electronic networks. These electronically connected freelancers--e-lancers--would join together into fluid and temporary networks to produce and sell goods and services. When the job is done--after a day, a month, a year--the network would dissolve and its members would again become independent agents.

Far from being a wild hypothesis, the e-lance economy is, in many ways, already upon us. We see it in the rise of outsourcing and telecommuting, in the increasing importance within corporations of ad-hoc project teams, and in the evolution of the Internet. Most of the necessary building blocks of this type of business organization--efficient networks, data interchange standards, groupware, electronic currency, venture capital micromarkets--are either in place or under development. What is lagging behind is our imagination.

But, the authors contend, it is important to consider sooner rather than later the profound implications of how such an e-lance economy might work. They examine the opportunities, and the problems, that may arise and anticipate how the role of managers may change fundamentally--or possibly even disappear altogether.

A good paper on e-lancing

http://www.janus-eu.org/Documents/EBEW/eLancing.pdf

The Future of Knowledge Management

by Ross Dawson

August 2004

In the much vaunted "hype cycle" of business trends and fads, knowledge management has already plumbed the depths of disillusionment. However as it edges towards maturity as a business discipline, it is spawning successors that are more relevant to our times, and that offer more direct business traction. The original premise of knowledge management was that if the most valuable resource of organisations is knowledge, then it should be leveraged and made more productive. This absolutely still holds. However the hype around knowledge management over the years has made what was always an amorphous and slippery concept even harder to grapple with and convert to business results. Today, managers need more focused frames, first to think about these issues, and then to take pointed action.

The rapid evolution of our intensely connected global economy means developing knowledge capabilities is a business imperative. The pioneers of knowledge management developed valuable tools and approaches. What they learned is now being applied in a range of emerging business disciplines. In the course of my travels and speaking and consulting engagements around the world, I have found that there are five key frames for leveraging knowledge in organisations that are emerging as the successors to knowledge management, and that executives find relevant, compelling, and actionable.

Social networks. Traditional organisational charts and business process maps tell you very little about how work is actually performed in an organisation. The reality is that work and knowledge flow in often highly informal patterns, based on who people actually communicate with in doing their work. Social network analysis is being applied by many leading companies around the world to gain insights into this "invisible organisation," and to design interventions that enhance the productivity and effectiveness of knowledge work.

Collaboration. In an economy based on highly specialised knowledge, collaboration is essential. Many of the approaches pioneered in knowledge management, such as communities of practice, are extremely relevant and useful. However what is critical now is a focus on fostering collaboration between individuals, teams, divisions, and organisations. Collaboration tools such as video conferencing and web conferencing are becoming standard. Now companies are working as a top priority on developing the skills and culture that enable high-value collaboration. However implementing a whole new set of businesses processes is also required to unlock the full potential of collaboration.

Relevance. In a world of massive information overload, we want to see only information that is highly relevant to our work and interests. Among the many evolving technologies that support this, there are two key practices that will be central to enhancing information relevance. Implicit profiling learns from what we search for and look at, when, and for how long, to improve over time at understanding what we find useful. Collaborative filtering allows us to draw on the insights and discoveries of people who have similar profiles and interests to us. Amazon.com uses similar approaches in a basic form to point us to books and CDs we might like. The future lies in finding relevance for individuals from vast oceans of information.

Workflow. Knowledge work literally flows through an organisation. The next decade will see companies shifting their business processes to platforms that enable smooth and efficient workflow. Once this shift is made, you can reconfigure at will how work is done, and even allow clients and suppliers to participate in your processes, creating powerful lock-in. The emerging discipline of "workflow learning" integrates access to every type of learning-whether it is information, elearning modules, or human experts-into the everyday flow of work, so these are available as and when they are needed.

Knowledge-based relationships. In our global hyper-connected economy, the drive to commoditisation is relentless. What this means is that an increasing proportion of business value resides in trusting, knowledge-based relationships, that allow companies to create value with clients, suppliers, and alliance partners in ways they could not do otherwise. Organisations are realising that outsourcing and offshoring only work if there are effective flows of knowledge between companies. Professional firms are finding not only that clients are increasingly demanding knowledge transfer, but also that engaging in knowledge-based relationships increases customer loyalty and profitability. Relationships are the future of society and business, and rich knowledge exchange will be at their heart.

Workplace Predictions

What's Next? Work Auctions? Resume Implants?

by James E. Challenger

Imagine one day employers bidding for workers in online auctions, work schedules set by the year vs. the week, and colleges offering a degree program in generational mediation.
These are just some of the scenarios that could result from a society where the number of retirement-age Americans - 65 and older - will grow at a much faster rate than the age groups that will be needed to replace them.

A Future Filled with Retirees

Between 2005 and 2015, the number of people 65 and older is expected to increase 26 percent. Meanwhile, the population of 40- to 54-year-olds will shrink by five percent. Furthermore, there is not much relief behind them - the number of Americans 25 to 39 will grow by only six percent between 2005 and 2015.

The retirement surge could result in a human capital crisis for employers across the country. For some, the crisis is a matter of months away. The federal government alone will see 31 percent of its workforce - nearly 500,000 employees - reach retirement eligibility by 2006.
This will present challenges for employers, workers and society in general. However, it could also present some intriguing opportunities for enterprising individuals and companies. The response to these challenges and opportunities will drive workplace trends, many of which are already beginning to take shape.

It may be difficult to envision amid downsizing and the highest unemployment rate in a decade, but within ten years jobseekers will again be in extremely high demand. This could lead to bidding wars over the most talented workers, just as it did in the late 1990s.

In addition to the aging population, the trends shaping the workplace of the future will be heavily influenced by rapidly advancing technology, such as nanotechnology; record downsizing and the push toward a just-in-time workforce; and women's ascent up the education and corporate ladders.

Here are my predictions of the top trends:

Mediators will be used to create generational harmony. With baby boomers vowing to stay in the workforce and a growing number of seniors over 65 coming back to work, it will not be long before companies see the age range of their workers span four generations. To help companies manage the delicate balance between these diverse generations, a new breed of consultant will be created: the corporate age advisor. He or she will mediate conflicts between age groups, ensure that each department has the right mix of generations to achieve its goals, and develop programs to increase the harmony between groups.

Online auctions will replace recruiting. Online auction sites have been used to sell everything from used record albums to multi-million-dollar homes, so why not temporary workers? Temps will become increasingly important as companies try to maintain a just-in-time workforce. However, labor shortages could drive up salaries as well as the fees paid to firms that provide temporary workers. To eliminate the middleman, companies will go directly to the workers through online sites. A precursor to this can already be found at reEmploy.com, which places retired workers with their former employers on a temporary basis.

Consultants will be hired to teach retirement. Where there is a dilemma, a consulting business cannot be far behind. As the nation's baby boomers begin reaching early retirement age in less than five years, a new business opportunity will arise: couples retirement consulting. Such a service will be in high demand, especially in dual-income households where both husband and wife retire around the same time. The adjustment of going from a situation where both are working to one where both are retired will almost certainly be a difficult one to manage.
Flextime will be measured by the calendar, not the clock. The typical 40- to 50-hour workweek will one day be a footnote in the history books, as households with two full-time earners push for more flexible scheduling alternatives in order to balance work and personal lives. One plan that may eventually take hold is setting an annual work requirement. In this option, workers would be required to dedicate 2000 to 2500 hours to work-related activities. This would be particularly well suited for industries and businesses that experience seasonal slowdowns which might otherwise compel companies to initiate layoffs.

Women's gains will help shrink wage gap. The gap between men's and women's wages will continue to shrink as women flock to labor-short industries for jobs. Women are branching quickly into sectors of the economy that are currently suffering or are expected to suffer from shortages of skilled labor. They also represent a growing portion of graduates in the high-paying fields of dentistry, medicine and law. More companies will launch programs designed to clear the obstacles hindering women's ascent to the upper ranks of the corporate ladder, such as mentoring programs, audits of compensation issues, and continuing education in countering harassment and discrimination.

Dot.coms will make a comeback. A rebirth of the high-tech industry, which has announced more than 1.3 million job cuts in the last three years, may occur just as rapidly as its downfall. Some of the growth will be driven by the Internet. Security is one area well-suited for the Internet and already there is a growing number of companies offering online background checks and identity confirmation. Another area of technology that will take off and require more workers in the years to come is nanotechnology, digital processing on a microscopic scale.

Corporate recruiters will follow the NBA in recruiting from high schools. Since the NBA has had success hiring raw basketball talent right out of high school, why not corporate America? The share of workers with post-high-school education will grow just four percent between now and 2020. As a result, corporations will be compelled to take over the education of their future workers. High school graduates will go directly to employer universities, where they will be educated in math, science and technology, the areas where skills seem to be weakest. Corporate educators will continue the tradition of teaching literature, philosophy, psychology, etc, to develop the reasoning and problem-solving skills which are also essential in today's workplace.

Entrepreneurs will get younger and employers will suffer. Undaunted by the downfall of the dot.coms, the generation in college during the recession that began in March 2001 may initiate a new wave of entrepreneurial ventures as the idea of working for someone else loses appeal. The number of colleges and universities offering programs and degrees in entrepreneurship has grown to more than 550, up from just a handful in the 1980s. Making room for entrepreneurs in the corporate structure is one challenge employers will have to consider, lest they lose some of the best and the brightest to self-employment. Companies that can offer positions allowing candidates to utilize their entrepreneurial skills will have an edge over their competitors.

Resumes will go high tech. Nanotechnology that will soon beused for tracking consumer products may one day be used in humans to store a tamper-proof record of one's personal, professional and educational background. A microchip about the size of a grain of sand could be imbedded in workers who, simply by passing through a radio frequency field (the doorway into the human resources department?), would send the information to the hiring manager's computer. Such technology will not only eliminate the need for traditional paper resumes, but it will save employers from hiring firms to conduct expensive background checks.

There will be civil war between the public and private sectors for workers. The federal government will battle with the private sector for the best workers, as retirements sweep away the most knowledgeable employees in both sectors over the next seven years. Labor shortages threaten to impact agencies critical in the fight against terrorism, including the departments of defense, transportation, and state. The Federal Emergency Management Agency could lose up to 45 percent of its employees. The deciding factor in the war for workers may come down to healthcare. While all federal employees are eligible for health insurance, the number receiving such coverage in the private sector is shrinking. Private-sector employees who do have coverage are being asked to pay a larger share of rising health-insurance premiums. If these trends continue, the hiring advantage will most assuredly go to the government.

e-Lancing

Temp freelancers mine the web for work

by Robert Celaschi
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

After Bruce Bockie got caught in his third layoff in 1994, he knew he needed to take a different approach to his career. He didn't change his line of work - he's still a data process engineer - but he did change the way he offered his services.

Back then he was director of information and strategic planning at a large corporation in Sacramento. Now he works as an independent contractor, getting his clients from Internet job boards such as guru.com, dice.com and monster.com.

"I just signed up with Guru. I've used Dice for over five years [and] Monster for about three," he notes. Bockie browses the postings to find companies that need his expertise, then contacts prospects and offers his services. Once he finishes a project, he starts looking for the next one. It usually doesn't take long to find a new gig. "The longest break I've had is about three weeks."

No More Middleman
Bockie is an example of how the World Wide Web has blurred the old lines of employment. To get the same kind of short-term jobs a decade ago, he would have had to sign up with a technology-savvy temp agency or spend a lot of time knocking on doors. Today he's letting the Internet serve as middleman.

"I do something called business process re-engineering," he explains. "I go into companies and have them tell me how they would like to improve, and I facilitate that improvement through automation." Bockie has helped Nike Corp. streamline order processing so shoes can be shipped a few days after they are ordered, instead of the 30 days which had been the norm previously. He also helped the State of Nevada improve its welfare system.

Internet job-hunting is not limited to only the technically inclined. It works for freelancers in a wide variety of fields, as well as people looking for traditional permanent work. Even the old-line employment agencies have integrated the Internet into the way they do business.

Carol Larsen says it has completely changed the way she does her job as district recruitment coordinator for Kelly Services in Sacramento. The nationwide company posts jobs at www.kellyservices.com and participates in other job boards such as Monster.

"For us, the last two years have seen a huge use of the web," she confides. "I use the web on a daily basis. It has helped to speed up finding people."

In the old days, if a client company wanted Larsen to find new talent, she would first place a classified ad in the newspaper. Typically, the deadline was Friday afternoon for the Sunday edition. It would be Monday morning before the first applicants called, a gap of several days from the time the client company had asked for help. That lag time is gone now. "I can put an ad on the web today and get responses today," Larsen explains. "And in today's tight employment market, that's critical."

In some ways, temp agencies like Kelly end up competing with the same companies they are trying to serve, since those employers also post openings on Internet job sites. "But it's who does the better job of recruiting that counts, according to Larsen. For her, it's a full-time job.

For someone at a client company, recruiting new talent may be one of many jobs, and might not always have top priority. Employment agencies with well-known names like Kelly, Accountemps or Snelling also have the advantage of a lot of walk-in clients in addition to Internet "hits."

Another aspect is expense. Most job boards and agency sites are free to jobseekers. But the sites are there to make money, and they do that by charging the companies to post their job openings. Kelly spends $1600 a year to be on one Sacramento-area job board. Unless a company is large, it may not have the budget to post jobs on a lot of websites, she notes.

Jobs posted on the Internet run the full range from warehouse workers to executives. Even people with no Internet access or experience with the web can tap into its job-finding potential, thanks to statewide taxpayer- supported resources.

California Connection
The State of California has its own job service on the Internet at www.caljobs.ca.gov. Part of the Employment Development Department, CalJOBS has been on the web for about four years. "The majority of people who access CalJOBS come into the EDD office. We have staff who help walk people through it," says Michael Bernick, director of EDD. "We have about 200 offices and over 1000 people statewide involved in our job placement efforts. There's no substitute for the person-to-person connection."

Being state sponsored gives CalJOBS a couple of advantages. "First of all, CalJOBS is accessible at no cost: It doesn't cost employers and it doesn't cost jobseekers," Bernick points out. It's also connected to America's Job Bank, a nationwide employment database operated by the Department of Labor.

New Sites Every Second
It's hard to keep track of all the new sites popping up. Guru.com, based in San Francisco, has been around only eight months, and has signed up 100,000 freelance professionals, or "gurus." It also registered more than 9000 companies wanting to hire.

While Guru, Monster and others are generalist sites, there are also sites catering more to specific types of work. Dice, for example, concentrates on high-tech jobs, while staffwriters.com deals solely with writers, editors, researchers and graphic artists.

The "e-lance" route isn't for everyone. Being independent usually means having to track your own Social Security and employment tax payments, since there is no automatic withholding from paychecks. Health benefits, 401k plans and vacation days don't automatically drop in your lap. It can also mean extra hours tracking down late payments. And, of course, nobody pays you for the time you spend looking for the clients, discussing potential projects and figuring out how much to charge.

But even that extra work has its compensations. Bruce Bockie recalls one client that offered a job involving a lot of travel. The work was appealing, but the travel wasn't. "So I added on $20 an hour because I didn't really want to do it," he recalls.

The client still wanted him at that price. Suddenly the travel didn't seem so bad.

(Source: https://hestia.ntsecure.net/jobjournal/article_full_text.asp?artid=9)

How Marvellous Minds Make Money

This article was originally published in Vol 16 No 12 December 1999 of Executive Excellence - Australia Edition

The application of technology is rapidly and dramatically changing the face and form of business. We've read it, we've seen it, we know it. The business models of Internet companies—and increasingly all companies—are constantly changing in response to unpredictable shifts in the way business is done. Currently few seers in business attempt to look beyond a few years out, and even then they risk being proved wrong within a far shorter timeframe.

What this amounts to is an eternal game of catch-up, with extremely ephemeral phases of leadership for a few. The ubiquity of technological developments, as well as the shortening of the product development and marketing cycle, means that leadership in the implementation of technology can differentiate you from your competitors only fleetingly. The investment in technology which is necessary to gain leadership can be immense, yet provide advantage only briefly. Substantial investment and carefully considered implementation of technology will be fundamental to the survival and success of all businesses from now on, but this alone will by no means ensure competitiveness or success.

So what will make the difference into the 21st century? The answer lies in the distinction between information and knowledge. Information is what is or can be digitised, and thus easily stored, copied, communicated and accessed through databases and systems. Knowledge is the capacity to act effectively in complex situations, which for a long time hence will be only a capability of humans. In the realm of information, by its very nature, it is almost impossible to gain lasting advantage. Knowledge, however, whether it be held by individuals or in the capabilities of effective teams, is extremely difficult to replicate, and is itself the source of innovation in technology, marketing, product development and strategy that creates superior value for the organisation and its clients.

So while technology will provide the backdrop for business into the next millenium, the only lasting source of differentiation will be in the knowledge of the people in the organisation, and how effectively those people can work together to create results. The so-called field of knowledge management is beginning to address the issues of providing the technological links and storage which allows information to be shared between people. This is an important but limited part of how to develop knowledge capabilities. Real improvement of individual's and teams' knowledge capabilities is based on understanding how people acquire, use and create knowledge. In this, business has an immense amount to learn from the field of cognitive psychology, which has very practical application in presenting information and ideas more effectively, assisting effective high-level thinking, and making better decisions as individuals and groups.

The productivity and effectiveness of knowledge workers—whatever the field or industry in which they work—are almost by definition based on their skills at dealing with information and knowledge. When adding value to information, generating knowledge, and applying knowledge to business processes are the primary source of value creation, then people's capabilities at information and knowledge processes such as filtering information, analysis, decision-making and conceptual communication will determine success. Human skills are increasingly become the primary source of differentiation, and while many knowledge workers are already excellent at knowledge tasks, their skills can and must be developed further on an ongoing basis in order to to maintain and develop competitive advantage.

In many ways the most valuable knowledge skill in the next millenium will be facilitation, in the sense of assisting groups to pool their expertise and knowledge constructively in making effective decisions and creating new knowledge. Most organisations hold immense knowledge in their staff and executives, however in many teams and committees the diversity of views and opinions represented can result in decisions and actions which reflect power and politics rather than what will be best for the organisation. Good facilitation uses frameworks that allow a wide variety of perspectives to be synthesised and integrated into a richer view of the whole to result in better decisions, rather than resulting in destructive arguments and conflict.

The complexity of the business environment in the 21st century will undoubtedly continue increasing ever further; in this world effective strategic thinking and action will require richer ways of thinking. While computers will take more and more low-level work functions from people, the domain of high-level strategic decision-making will remain the work of humans. Thinking, creating knowledge and making decisions more effectively as individuals and groups will emerge as the only true source of sustainable differentiation and competitiveness, despite the popular focus on the ever-changing context of technology, which will remain a tool and not an end in itself.

While arguably the primary field of business competition is already in attracting and retaining the best talent and knowledge, it is exciting to envisage a world in which developing the dynamic knowledge capabilities of individuals and organisations is recognised as the key source of advantage. We stand on the threshold of that world, and those that leap into it before others will have a great headstart in what will be an incredibly challenging and exciting race.

Information farms in developing countries
© Copyright 1994-2002, Rishab Aiyer Ghosh. All rights reserved.
Electric Dreams #3424/October/1994

The greatest effect of the information revolution will be felt in developing countries. While in much of the world, the growth of connectivity means a choice of 500 channels on television instead of 50, this is hardly revolutionary. Allowing people to do more of what they do already is an incremental change over the past. Change is revolutionary when it enables large sections of society to do what they could never have done before - what they could never have even dreamed of, and what could totally change their way of life.

Rural communities throughout the developing world remain largely agricultural. They have remained poor through the industrial revolution. Although their standard of living has improved, their position in society has not. They have remained a source of cheap labour, while wealth, capital and power accumulate in urban population centres.

It is the nature of industry to centralize. Industrial societies prosper when the sources of wealth are collected together in physical proximity, which is why cities are formed. Agriculture, on the other hand, is decentralized - the more sprawling the countryside, the better. Rural communities are intrinsically suited to such a decentralized economy, dispersed as they are, away from any single concentration of power. But there are alternatives to farming wheat and sugarcane.

The information revolution threatens to reverse the industrial economy's magnetic pull to the cities. In the information age knowledge, not the diesel turbine, is power. Luckily knowledge does not have to be carted around from place to place in expensive trucks and cargo trains. Knowledge floats rapidly through far cheaper modes of transport, from radio waves between satellites to flashes of light reflected within strands of fibre optic cable. Knowledge does not need to be geographically concentrated. In fact, an economy based upon knowledge grows especially when it is possible to take advantage of the fluidity of data, selecting at an instant from the vast array of choices available only because they originate from the whole world. If access to information were limited to the physically near, it would lose much of its value.

The creation of wealth in an information economy is not dependent on the fertility of the soil, nor on huge investment in monsters of cogs and wheels in conventional industry's monuments to centralization, but only on the human brain - and the means to get brains together, over geographical distances.

Electronic mail is already available in most countries of the world, even in many poor regions of Asia and Africa. Building an information infrastructure is not as expensive as building an industrial one, and its enormous catalytic benefits for overall growth and prosperity are being recognized in many developing nations. If they act, then people still stuck in Toffler's First Wave of agriculture might leap finally into the Third Wave.

The information revolution could do for rural and poor communities what the industrial revolution could not - distribute control and capital among those who currently rely on their exploitable labour for survival, not possessing large banks of land or money. Capital and knowledge are increasingly becoming equivalent, and nothing necessarily prevents knowledge being created in villages.

Knowledge brokers and the decline of corporations

© Copyright 1994-2002, Rishab Aiyer Ghosh. All rights reserved.
Electric Dreams #367/November/1994

An information economy will have little use for traditional corporations with their hierarchy of managers and employees. Decentralization will be taken to its extreme limit, with the individual as the smallest economic unit of production. Greater and freer networking between individuals will lead to more efficient channels of communication, to flexible organizations of information capital and expertise.

Corporations are formed for a number of reasons. Their primary function is to collect - to bring together in a legal and often geographical entity a group of people, capital and expertise; and to present a unified interface to the rest of the world. Improvements in technology and resulting changes in society will make much of this unnecessary. The spread of anonymous digital commerce and multiple privacy-protecting identities may, in fact, make rigid corporate structures impossible to sustain. As more of the present advantages of a corporation become available to individuals, companies will have to yield greater control to them through flexible structures in order to exist at all. Of course all this is primarily applicable to information age industries - oil refineries will be less affected.

Many knowledge workers already telecommute. Working from home (or laptop) offices, telecommuters don't need a corporation as a physical place of work. The corporation needs knowledge workers because of their information capital. Knowledge workers themselves usually require little capital other than information, their own or that of other workers. What the traditional corporation offers are sophisticated ways of getting all that knowledge together and presenting it to end users, the customers.

However, it is becoming easier and cheaper for those who want services to communicate directly with those who provide them, and for knowledge workers to share information without intermediaries. By limiting individuals' resources to others within an organization, rather than the pick of the world's best, intermediaries may even have a negative effect on productivity. In the past, such hoarding of trade secrets provided an edge over the competition. In the future it will be very difficult to keep information secret - a fallout of advances in cryptographic technology has been the appearance of spontaneous anonymous markets for knowledge, allowing individuals to bypass their employers to benefit from their expertise.

The model for future information corporations already exists. Stock exchanges (and investment banks to some extent) are very loosely held organizations. There is some amount of common infrastructure and interface to customers, but there are relatively few restrictions on flows of information and capital. The more participants depend on their own capital or expertise, the more they directly gain. A choice of the best alternatives is always available.

A knowledge exchange can be even more open. Customers will always have access to the best resources; and providers of services themselves will be able to source additional expertise from anywhere in a global information market.

The information economy will work when the fluidity of knowledge is at its peak. This will be achieved by removing restrictions on the distribution of capital and expertise, by decentralizing the economy to the maximum where individuals join forces depending on their changing needs and abilities, by letting knowledge workers become knowledge brokers.

Knowledge, revolution, and cotton-mill capitalism

© Copyright 1994-2002, Rishab Aiyer Ghosh. All rights reserved.
Electric Dreams #8027/November/1995

Knowledge revolution is a catchy term, that's why it's been overused into being almost an epithet. Actually, what is happening in the world today is hardly a revolution at all. Although the shape of the world may be changing, it will not happen all at once, but over time. In the near future, there may be confusion and excitement, and even a few big changes, but anything remotely revolutionary will come much later. We should not, however, be misled by the similarities between the present and the apparent future, into examining the knowledge economy through the lens of today's industrial one.

This is especially true in our understanding to the relationship between the knowledge economy and industry, and of the impact of social, legal and political structures favouring knowledge upon society in general.

Knowledge is often treated as an extension of industry. It doesn't have any identity of its own - yes, there is all that stuff about bits rather than atoms, but then there are also industry's more familiar distinctions: between the services provided at a check-out counter and the goods being bought. Knowledge will be just another ingredient in the industrial soup, of corporations, cities, fixed jurisdiction, hierarchical government, the nation-state and, of course, money.

If all this were to change, well, then it would really be revolutionary - but not a revolution.

The period of the industrial "revolution" in England stretched over some fifty years, well into the 19th century. For an enormous length of time for a revolution, the new industrial economy was based, eventually, upon agriculture. This meant not just food, the pre-agricultural commodity that all societies must eventually depend upon. No: the huge factories and mills that were the emblem of progress and the new age, before, during, and after the introduction of mechanisation, were all dependent on the cotton crop. Without cotton, flax, wool, silk and other such raw, agricultural, materials, all the automated looms in the world would do no good.
Arguments for the continuation of industrial socio-economic organisation in a knowledge economy invariably rest upon the supposition that knowledge is useful only when applied - to industry. So an oil company networks its offices, organises its expertise, and becomes a "knowledge company". A software firm is wealthy, according to this line of reasoning, only because its products support drilling rigs. In fact, knowledge will be traded for knowledge and grow as apart from industry as the latter has grown, today, from the cotton crop.

By the time industry had become anything like what it is at present, built several layers over agriculture and apparently quite separate the social infrastructure of capitalism was already in place. Labour and capital swarmed to the cities; informal liberties were replaced by formalised rights and new forms of punishment; the distributed power of local councils or parishes was subverted by the strengthened central authority of the nation-state. It was only then that the railway, not the mill, became was the emblem of the times. It took even longer for the arrival of the car, symbol of purely industrial production where the train was one of transport.

The impact of this social infrastructure was much wider than the domain of industry itself, extending into everyone's lives and even to whatever agricultural economy remained. The impact of the knowledge "revolution" could be just as universal.

The social infrastructure brought by knowledge, of decentralised power and informal systems of justice and trade, cannot be expected to materialise immediately. But that change is slow cannot be taken to mean it is not happening. Knowledge is at least as revolutionary a socio- economic force as was industry. And it will result in great changes equally gradual.

Information Overload - Problem or Opportunity?

This article was originally published in Company Director, October 1997

"We have for the first time an economy based on a key resource [information] that is not only renewable, but self-generating. Running out of it is not a problem, but drowning in it is." John Naisbitt, author of Megatrends.

Information overload is a fact of life for company directors, senior managers, and all professionals. Information is coming in from all sides in the form of reports, memos, newspapers, journals, and letters, and now the advent of e-mail and Internet has turned the torrent into a flood.

How can directors cope with the onslaught? Or rather, since we are businesspeople, it seems the question should be how can we turn the reality of the new business environment into an opportunity and a competitive advantage?

"The competitiveness of firms will reflect the way their businesses receive and process information to create intelligence." John Prescott, Chief Executive, BHP.

Sustainable competitive advantage is ultimately about making better strategic and management decisions than your competitors. And those decisions need to be based on having a better insight than your competitors into how your business environment is developing.

The increasing globalisation and diversification of business means that you can no longer look only at your own industry in your own town. Developments in other countries and industries and in technology could all suddenly and dramatically change the dynamics of the business your companies operate in.

And this is one of the main reasons information overload is a vital issue - not only has there been a dramatic increase in the availability of information, but you now need to be informed on far broader range of issues in order to guide your companies forward in an increasingly rapidly changing environment.

"In the period ahead of us, more important than advances in computer design will be the advances we can make in our understanding of human information processing - of thinking, problem solving, and decision making..." Herbert Simon, Economics Nobel-prize winner

Technology is perhaps at the root of the advent of information overload, though it will also be part of the solution, by providing increasingly refined ways of filtering data to present the most valuable information to the right people.

In the end, however, people are the ultimate processors of information, and - until computers replace company directors - people are the only ones who can effectively integrate and synthesise what they know to make effective management decisions in the light of their business environment.

So, what can we as managers and directors do to improve the way we deal with a world of massive information input, and in fact turn our ability to do so into one of our core competences, and a source of competitive advantage?

There is no quick fix; enhancing our skills requires effort and is an ongoing process. Implementing the following principles can make a real difference to your effectiveness in dealing with the new reality of information overload, and in your role as a company director.

1. Set information objectives. You can't begin to sort through the 'infoglut' unless you know what is most important to you. To set effective information objectives you need to start from your own objectives and those of the company boards you sit on. In order to achieve these, what do you need to know about what is happening in your company, your industry, technology, the economy, and around the world? What are the forces at play which might impact your business and industry? Putting thought into identifying the key areas you need to be informed on, and prioritising these by importance and timeliness will let you know what you should be focusing on.

2. Select your information sources. Once you have a clear idea of your information objectives, you can make a deliberate decision about what sources you will use. Which reports, newspapers, magazines, journals, news services and television programmes do you need to look at regularly? Once you know your priorities you can often rationalise the sources you need, rather than being swamped by a mountain of paper you can never get through. Can you use media summaries or industry updates? Getting the information you need more efficiently is well worth the cost of a subscription. Aim to read things your competitors aren't likely to see - get a broad perspective.

3. Set time aside for reading. Because reading is not urgent, it often doesn't get done. Reading and learning are what Stephen Covey refers to as Quadrant II activities - important but not urgent. You will make better decisions and be more effective for the rest of your working career if you keep abreast of developments in your industry, the business environment and technology. How long you should spend reading each day will vary tremendously for each individual, though most directors would benefit enormously from spending at least two hours each day learning more about developments in their industry and the broad social, economic and business environment. Block out periods for reading each day at times which work for you - whether it's in the early morning, after lunch, the evening, or while commuting.

4. Filter aggressively. You have to be ruthless in getting rid of surplus information. Get yourself off mailing lists, use assistants to filter your messages, and use e-mail filtering software. From there, filtering is in its essence a process of scanning everything to judge according to your information objectives whether it's worth reading or dealing with in more detail. Those things that pass are read or put aside for your reading time, the rest go in the bin. If you're still getting too much to read, you need to go back to your objectives and refine them until you only get all the most important information that you have time for. As knowledge management guru Karl Erik Sveiby points out, most information has negative value: if you read something and it's not useful, you've wasted your valuable time.

5. Be open to useful information. This seems to contradict the last dictum, but both must coexist. Nicholas Negroponte, director of MIT's Media Lab and author of "Being Digital", talks of the 'serendipity factor' in information. If you're too blinkered in what you look at, you may never stumble on the most valuable information and insights. Companies and industries don't exist in isolation, they are all part of a broader system. Some executives skim through a trade journal from a different industry each month, for insights into their own situation. Much may be irrelevant, but you can also find valuable information and insights, and you can be sure your competition aren't seeing it!

6. People are your best resource. In all the hype over Internet, intranets, groupware and push technology, many seem to have forgotten that often the most effective and efficient way of finding information is through people. How well-informed you are depends largely on the quality of your personal network, and how effectively you can gather and trade information through the people you know. If you need to learn about recent developments in a field or find out something - ask the right person!

7. Develop your reading and note-taking skills. There are many courses and books available on developing reading speed and comprehension. If you're going to spend a couple of hours a day reading, then it's well worth investing time and money if it can bring even a small improvement in your effectiveness. And everyone, however fast and effective they already are, can improve their reading skills. Taking effective notes can be one of the best ways of assimilating new ideas and perspectives into a framework which can help you make better decisions. Mind-mapping, which allows you to represent the relationships between concepts, can be a very valuable tool for managers and directors.

8. Sleep on it! The human mind learns by connecting new ideas and information with your existing memories and experience. The most useful insights and perspectives often come after your unconscious mind has had the opportunity to sort through and link ideas together. Some of the ways you can assist this process and tap your intuition are by finding ways to represent your ideas visually, regularly putting yourself in relaxed, meditative states, and playing games which require spontaneity.

Meeting Government's Need for Enterprise Search

Sameer Kalbag of Convera

The government market for enterprise search products has witnessed substantial growth over the past several years, a trend that is projected to continue well into 2005 and beyond. This increased demand for search solutions can be attributed to several major factors:
Information overload: The ubiquity of digital communications, personal computers, cheap storage and Web publishing has created an ever-growing glut of digital information. To deal with the huge influx of this digital content, government agencies are looking for innovative solutions that help filter, find, organize and route information to those persons who need it, when they need it.

Legislation: The E-Government Act of 2002 is fundamentally reshaping the way government does business. Subsection (207.f.1), for instance, requires all federal agencies by the end of 2004 to have committed a strategy and timetable for making pertinent public information available in electronic form. Effective search can improve the accessibility of published information by reducing the time spent by users to find relevant information.

Evolving threats: The events of 9/11 and subsequent war on terror has forced the intelligence, law enforcement and defense departments to rethink the ways they gather, re-use and share information both within and across organizations. Effective search technologies play a critical role in helping analysts connect the dots.

Technology-savvy users: A Web-savvy population, coupled with the popularity of Web search engines, has turned “search” from a skill used primarily by librarians and researchers to an everyday household activity. Both government employees and the general public have come to rely on search as a reliable tool to find the information they need quickly.

For government organizations starting to deal with these issues, choosing the right search solution can be challenging. From search appliances to question-answer systems, the choices seem endless. To complicate matters, many vendors claim to support similar features but differ greatly in their approach and level of coverage. To ensure successful deployment, organizations need to move past the product literature and high-level feature checklists to gain understanding of the fundamentals of enterprise search and how it applies to their environment.

Enterprise Search vs. Web Search

For many people, the term “search” has become synonymous with services such as Google, Yahoo and MSN. A user can enter a few keywords into a search box, press a button, and usually find some relevant Web pages within a few clicks. The buzz generated around these businesses has led some IT decision-makers to assume that the same approaches and technologies for Web search can be directly applied within an enterprise. Closer examination shows that the spaces are quite distinct. To see why, let’s look at few of the underlying assumptions of Web-search.
One significant difference between enterprise and Web search involves the nature of the content being searched over. Web search companies have invested heavily in technologies to address filtering of spam, promotion of paid sponsored links and development of algorithms that depend primarily on the social popularity of Web sites. While effective over the entire World Wide Web, these techniques provide little or no advantage when applied to enterprise assets such as office documents, database tables, XML records or internal Web sites. Second, simple keyword searching works well in most Web search engines because chances are extremely high that someone on the WWW has already constructed a Web page that uses the exact keywords specified by the user. The scale of the Web and social network effect contributes to the impression that the highly relevant results are always returned. A more accurate description of what is going on is that users usually get an acceptable answer, not necessarily the best or complete answer. Users rarely realize this is because of the scale and patchy nature of the Web. For enterprise search, different approaches beyond keyword search and popularity-based ranking are required to get the best documents back and to ensure higher recall of all the relevant information to a query.

Data Aggregation

In most organizations, critical business information is spread across file-servers, Web-servers, databases, desktops, content management systems, e-mail, collaboration servers and other business applications. Most of these systems limit searching to content managed locally on the server and provide very basic search capabilities. An effective enterprise search solution can often solve this problem by providing a single access point that spans across multiple heterogeneous repositories. The decision of which content repositories/data to index is highly dependent on the business problem being solved. For example, let’s say a regulatory agency wants to reduce the time it takes their agents to research a complaint. By indexing the e-mail server mailbox where complaints are received, an e-mail archive of historical complaints and a database where investigative evidence is stored, agents would be able to quickly piece together all relevant information about a case. When evaluating vendor’s capabilities in this area, data-integration, issues to consider are:

Does the vendor support the content repositories you plan to index?
Does the solution deal well with indexing databases?
Does the solution use native APIs to connect to the repository?
How quickly are changes in the underlying repository reflected in index?
Does the vendor provide a robust, scalable spider to crawl internal Web sites?
Does the solution allow you to configure which custom metadata is retrieved from each repository?
Does the solution provide a flexible API to allow integration into legacy IT applications?
Does the solution support hierarchical objects: embedded files, zips or multi-page scanned documents?

Note that indexing solutions that rely primarily on Web crawling instead of native APIs will be limited to finding assets accessible through a Web page and have very limited flexibility in dealing with metadata.

Security

While the power of search stems from its ability to aggregate data, along with its benefits come some risks. The highly publicized incidents of personal data theft from companies such as Seisint and Choicepoint illustrate the problems that occur if appropriate policies, procedures and technologies are not in place to protect access to information. Clearly, strong security capabilities must be a cornerstone of every enterprise search solution. Issues to consider are:

Does the solution use industry standard authentication and access control protocols?
Does the solution protect server-to-server communication?
Does the solution provide flexible policies for choosing what is indexed, what is not indexed and where indexes are stored?
Can the system overlay additional access control policies for logical groups of aggregated data?
Does the solution provide access control down to the user and document level?
Does the solution integrate with IT directory infrastructures used for managing users and group membership (e.g. LDAP, Active Directory, Custom)?
Can the solution use document access control attributes stored in the repository?
Can the solution deal with multiple authentication and access control systems available for each repository?
Can the security system be extended to support custom access control schemes?
Does the system provide sufficient audit and logging capabilities?

Carefully evaluate solutions to determine if vendors have added security as an after-thought. These add-on approaches can leave security holes or result in significant performance impacts when security is turned on.

Metadata Search

While keyword searching represents a base capability available in all search engines, more sophisticated search strategies are often called for. In many circumstances, end-users can more quickly locate relevant information assets by using attributes of the content rather than simple keywords applied directly to the document contents. To enable powerful metadata search, solutions should be evaluated on their ability to support:

Indexing of multiple metadata schema in the same repository;
Mapping of metadata schema across repositories
Powerful parser scripting language to easily extract metadata from unstructured documents;
Indexing, extraction and search of metadata stored in XML records;
Natural language, integer, floating point and date searching over metadata fields;
Exact match as well as range searches for numbers and dates;
The ability to aggregate metadata stored in separate repositories at runtime (e.g., a system should be able to index documents in a file system while using metadata attributes stored in separate RDBMSs);
Query operators such as AND, NOT, OR and field weighting across the document body and across fields; and
Incremental indexing for a document whose useful lifetime is short or metadata changes often.

Text Mining and Advanced Discovery

Aside from the modes of searching described so far, many civilian regulatory, law enforcement and intelligence organizations need sophisticated discovery capabilities around the area of text mining. Let’s say, for example, an intelligence analyst is given the task to scour large amounts of raw intelligence data to determine the most likely location of a wanted terrorist. Obviously, using a simple keyword query such as “Where is terrorist XYZ?” will be fruitless. The clues to the answer may be spread across multiple nuggets of information that only a human analyst can reasonably piece together. The purpose of the search application, then, is to provide a set of tools to enable analysts to efficiently explore the information space, filter out noise, connect the dots and see a pattern. Many different questions will be asked, which over time will help the analyst piece together the puzzle. For these types of applications, the analysts require a wide range of capabilities including:

High-performance and scalable system that supports complex queries (thousands of terms and operators);
Ability to work with extremely large sets of results;
Storing of results and queries for reuse and refinement;
Filtering huge amounts of information, signal detection and notifying users of new relevant information;
A powerful query language with, for instance, Boolean, proximity and adjacency, wildcard and pattern-matching operators;
Support for multiple languages, diverse document formats and noisy data;
Easy integration with other analysis tools and repositories;
Ability to slice and dice data to see the big picture and quickly drill down to relevant information;
Support for searching over time-based multimedia assets;
Support for multiple languages and cross-lingual search;
Customizable domain-specific knowledge resources;
Entity extraction; and
Co-occurrence detection.

The Change to E-government

The push to e-government and the ubiquity of digital information is forcing agencies all across the government to re-evaluate the way they get business done on a daily basis. Enterprise search solutions can introduce significant efficiencies and cost savings by helping agencies filter, find, organize and route critical information to those persons who need it, when they need it. When selecting search solutions, it is important to understand that different business problems require fundamentally different approaches to search.