Category: Enterprise 2.0

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Enterprise 2.0 Film Theory

B3ta dreaming

Almost beyond belief that daydreaming should be pathologised, yet Boing Boing picks up a thread from Consciousness and Cognition of a report about a woman who cannot stop daydreaming. Her doctors can find nothing wrong with her, yet prescribe her 50 mg/day of fluvoxamine but are unable to dream up, define a DSM condition.

50-minsBoing Boing relates her experiences to the chapter in the 50 Minute Hour called “The Jet-Propelled Couch” of a scientist called John Carter who had a similar condition and thought he was the John Carter of Edgar Rice Burrough’s Mars stories:

The physicist told Lindner he was able to teleport himself to Mars and have the same kind of adventures the fictional John Carter had. The physicist kept detailed maps and records of his adventures, accumulating 10,000 pages of notes!

This was the inspiration for Gene Brewer’s novel “K-PAX” and also bears a strong resemblance to P K Dick’s “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale”, filmed of course as Total Recall. It also underpins Billy Liar and Walter Mitty. 

The condition described is not just found in fiction and it’s not an anomally, as Consciousness and Cognition state that:

Recently, the patient discovered a website containing a surprising number of anonymous postings on the topic of excessive or uncontrolled daydreaming. Numerous posters described patterns and tendencies that appeared remarkably consistent with the patient’s experience (including the original pacing behavior) and emphasized the stress of concealing their imaginary lives and the attendant shame, confusion, and difficulty in controlling their divided realities.

It has to be b3ta.com….

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Communications Enterprise 2.0

Scotland joins the Interweb, Obama Tweets

Following on from John Cleese and Twitter, the judge’s decision turned out not to be final and he’s moved the man to the number 2 spot. The reason being the UK is not a country but a combo. As I recall it’s actually the UK of GB and NI, so if they’d started with GB they would be OK.

But as it happen’d the 14 yr old judge didn’t so the Scots Nationalists kicked up and now Mashable is the No. 1 in Scotland. Kid Tech Guru is reported as telling Mashable that he didn’t expect a Spanish Inquisition…  

Over in America everyone is following Obama’s Tweets, in Poland it’s AndyBeard while in Japan, it’s Weird News. Funny old world, the interweb.

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Communications Enterprise 2.0

Calais : I Tagaroo, do you?

tagaroo_logo_fina_2501

Plugin Tagaroo
This Blog is now supported with the WordPress plugin Tagaroo. This plug-in looks very very tasty. It’s not like your ordinary plugin, oh no. Tagaroo is one small plug in something bigger and that bigger is SemanticProxy.

semanticproxy

In the future…
Now if this is all old hat, please leave me a comment on what else I might have missed lately but if not here’s what SemanticProxy aims to make it so:

In the future the entire web will be one giant tightly interconnected information asset. Beyond just publishing information for humans, every site will expose its content in a way that’s readable by machines. Those machines will mix, match, filter and aggregate information to greatly improve things for us humans.

What SemanticProxy aims to do,  is to help achieve this by building and supporting apps and plugins such as Tagaroo and its globalised tag machine. Check out their gallery for a synch up with other tools including Drupal.

Calais on my heart
SemanticProxy itself is all form part of an even more ambitious project sponsored by Thomson Reuters called Calais (or OpenCalais in some quarters) They hope going to transform the web as we know it:

calais_logo1We want to make all the world’s content more accessible, interoperable and valuable. Some call it Web 2.0, Web 3.0, the Semantic Web or the Giant Global Graph – we call our piece of it Calais.

What Calais claims to do is create maps of meaning with the meta data in this or any document. The range of its includes is impressive: calais-02


Linked Data Cloud is so sexy
The next big release of all this will be in January. Calais say it’s going to be a big deal and reading the quote below, even if they half-deliver, they’re going to be right!

The Gist: Release 4 of Calais will be a big deal. In that release we’ll go beyond the ability to extract semantic data from your content. We will link that extracted semantic data to datasets from dozens of other information sources, from Wikipedia to Freebase to the CIA World Fact Book. In short – instead of being limited to the contents of the document you’re processing, you’ll be able to develop solutions that leverage a large and rapidly growing information asset: the Linked Data Cloud.

Hermenuetics
Not for one minute do I profess to understand all of this. What interests me is the flow of information and the creation of meaning – the hermeneutics of data. What attracts me is the fact that I can jump right in and play with the technology. I like this interplay between the now of available technology and its interface with Theory.

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Communications Enterprise 2.0

Dell’s $1M Twitter

Internetnews.com have a nice little piece on Twitter’s potential power What Keeps Twitter Chirping Along that’s attracted the attention of VentureBeat: Twitter has made Dell $1 million in revenue. The peep is this quote:

some businesses have discovered that Twitter is an effective way of communicating with consumers. Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) says Twitter has produced $1 million in revenue over the past year and a half through sale alerts. People who sign up to follow Dell on Twitter receive messages when discounted products are available the company’s Home Outlet Store.  
 

VentureBeat speculates on Twitter’s business model and possible premium accounts in the future. Over at Mashable they’re less convinced: Twitter May Have Made Dell a Million, it Doesn’t Mean it Can Be (Easily) Monetized. For Mashable’s Stan Schroeder the problem is keeping the shabang tweeting while delivering potential high value ads. I think there’s a bigger problem and that’s that to be effective it’s bloody annoying.

Go back to the Internetnews piece and there’s plenty of quotes from people saying how much it annoys them. Their journo David Miller even recommends Googling “I hate Twitter” which is worth the sport. He also quotes Discovery.com’s Trisha Creekmore as saying “I find Twitter incredibly annoying, both as a user and bystander…” which I must admit I can sympathise with, especially in twhirl form.

twhirl makes me jump. It pops up and surprises me. Which is all sad justice as I used to torment an entire theatre of sales guys with an even more annoying rich media pop-up device a few years back. But at least we didn’t send them John Cleese, but maybe we should have done.

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Enterprise 2.0

Social Media Managers in demand, well in the USA…

Readwriteweb stats - click to view

The readwriteweb has stats showing web 2.0 managers in hot demand, despite the downturn. They reckon that both marketing and social media firms are hiring and personal recommendations are key to the process.

Top of this they say is that “community managers are hot”. But who are these chods? Here’s the rww definition:

A community manager is someone who communicates with a company’s users/customers, development team and executives and other stake holders in order to clarify and amplify the work of all parties. They probably provide customer service, highlight best use-cases of a product, make first contact in some potential business partnerships and increase the public visibility of the company they work for. (source)
 

That sounds almost like an internal comms manager / business development manager hybrid. But I wonder how it correlates in the UK. Must confess what data I have is slight and what I’ve seen, not encouraging. However a PR Week article sent to me via LinkedIn looks promising:

There is mounting evidence that internal comms is proving resilient to the economic turmoil that is beginning to hit other parts of the PR industry.

Be interested to hear of any more substantial data for the UK.

Categories
Enterprise 2.0

John Cleese gets Mashed

Over at Mashable they’re exultant to be causing consternation for Sir John Cleese (have they knighted him yet?) Apparently he’s the Number 3 Twitterer in the UK with Stephen Fry in the lead. Mashable take the number 2 spot.

What bemused me most, was one of the commentators quickly claiming that Cleese had ‘pulled a Kanye West’ by paraphrasing a Tweet made by a fake Kanye West of one Stephen Colbert. 

Confused, I most certainly am…who needs simulacra when this is cracking off?

Update: what’s even more disturbing is Cleese’s web site – Headcast. He’s charging $1 a pop for video downloads. There must be some mileage in making notes on Celeb websites, there really must…

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Enterprise 2.0

Cloudy thinking & clever data

Souce: Dion Hinchcliffe

I find the following worthy of a scribble so I don’t forget,

Amazon’s use of APIs is making its network traffic rocket 

Microsoft has lost a top data center nerd to Amazon

Amazon has launched an elastic cloud

Amazon is building a giant new datacenter near a big dam

Google already has one

Microsoft’s Azure is a service living in their data centers and on the net

There’s no standard OS for clouds

The code needs to live somewhere and that where has laws

It’s all hype

The Q for me though is this – what happens to clouds if the network itself gets a bit smarter?

Categories
Communications Enterprise 2.0

Litmus tested

Following on from yesterday’s post about Litmus, The Register gives the launch a right drubbing and observes that Web 2.0 has only just arrived in Slough. Comparing the launch to an aging dad who just so most has to be a hip daddio, the cyberrag august journal opines that the developers want an even wider audience than that provided by the iPhone so they’re:

…prepared to pretend that the aging dad trying to look 20 years younger really is a cutting-edge Web 2.0 company, if it will get them in front of the O2 customer base.

Miaow, pass the vinegar…

Categories
Communications Enterprise 2.0

Litmus test

A friend asked me yesterday what I thought about Android phones. I explained that as far as I understood it there wasn’t actually an Android phone but it was an operating system for them made by Google. But in any event I hadn’t seen one. I’d seen Nokia SmartPhones, Blackberries and raspberries and even iPhones complete with beer mugs, but I’ve yet to see, hear or touch an Android in any shape or form. T-Mobile have them, but who has one??

Tomorrow sees O2 launching their Litmus site for mobile App developers. I can understand the need to ensure that any apps integrate securely into the o2 network, but the big Q for me is just how interoperable their APIs are. Could for example an app made for Litmus work on an iPhone or on me Nokia on Vodafone? That’s what I want and it doesn’t take a litmus test for that. Grumpiness aside, the Litmus site is fun and I like their ethos, at least on screen:

If you participate in O2 Litmus with an open mind and sense of community it will be a richly rewarding experience to see an app grow and improve through this process.

More guff on the project can be found on Venture Beat.

Categories
Enterprise 2.0 Theory

Žižek on form, on love/

I just love the web. Thanks to A General Theory of Rubbish (often NSFW – not I bet that they do) for finding this one.