Carlos Domingo - Un poco de todo

Alex Barnett (the only other European at Mindcamp besides me as far as I know) organized with two other guys (sorry but I did not catch their names but I think they were students doing a project on this) a session to discuss why corporations are not tagging their internal content (hence the del.icio.us inside title of the session meaning inside the firewall) as an alternative to the traditional hierarchically organized Intranets for finding corporate content. I argued that this is already done to some extent since the addition of keywording as metadata is something that all enterprise content management systems lets you do and is basically tagging. I got the impression that my suggestion that tagging was not that revolutionary as Web2.0 people tend to think was not very popular. One guy that happened to be standing next to me supported the idea in the context of tagging images in a photo library which I brought up as an example of a corporate application of tagging that is currently widely used (he worked for a stock photography company and he seemed to be very well aware of the issues as I am since one of our company products is a very broadly used digital asset management system).
I think that what makes del.cio.us revolutionary is the consumer aspect and how by having so many people tagging the same content (basically, the same web sites), the most commonly used tags emerge as the best way to describe that content and become their defacto metadata. The main difference is that in corporations, only few people are typically allowed to tag content and add metadata to it so that "wisdom of the crowds" effect never appears. Could ECM companies change that? Yes, very easily, just make the metadata editable so that every time you are finding a document or posting a document into the corporate repository you can add as many keywords to it (or tags as it is now prefered) and that effectively becomes del.icio.us. Would corporations want that? Most likely no, it is not clear that enough people will actually do that for the tags to become more useful than the officially sanctioned ones. Someone suggested that companies should have some sort of reward or micropayments system to incentive employees to do so. That guy obviously does not run a company, I highly question the extra benefit of finding things more efficiently against the extra cost. You want to reward employees to do their job and, for the majority of employees, that is not improving the metadata of corporate documents so you do not want them to spend time doing that. For corporations that finding content across the organization is very critical (like a consulting company), there are already solutions there like Autonomy’s software that basically tries to automatically extract concepts from documents across an enterprise so that you do not have to rely on user created metadata to find relevant content in a corporation.

Some people argued that del.cio.us was not going to be used in corporations because people do not understand it. Again, I highly question that, metadata has been around for tons of years and it is a pretty selfexplanatory concept (metadata, data about the data, get it?), I will agree that people do not understand del.icio.us the first time simply because their Web UI sucks.

Dave Winer was there with a "you kids do not understand anything, I blogged for 9 years and RSS already solves this problem" attitude that did not really contribute much to the discussion. I do not see how RSS helps adding the proper metadata into corporate content.

One funny remark came up from an Amazon employee that said the real problem that Amazon had categorizing their content was that "Amazon has a lot of books". No wonder, weren’t they called "the worlds largest bookstore" at some point?

CD

Technorati Tags: mindcamp2.0

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The first presentation I attended at MindCamp was some sort of commercial pitch for a product called MindManager that claims to have 750,000 users, a pretty decent install user base. At first, it looks like some sort of digital white boarding tool so I was not too excited about it but the more the guy got into how to use it and what it does, the more interesting it looked. I particularly like the integration with the Research feature in Microsoft product that he demoed and also how he positioned the product as a tool to help to get things done (something I am very interested in, there were two sessions on this at Mindcamp but both Sunday morning so I missed them, too bad, I will have to read online about the discussion) and even more interesting, as a way to reach consensus on a meeting and track the discussion and the decisions, actions, etc. After some research on the web I found that there is an open source version called FreeMind that also looks interesting  (and free even, this in not cheap stuff, the basic version is more than $200 an the professional one is $350) so I will keep this on my list of things-to-do-when-I-have-time-that-almost-never-get-done and perhaps check it in more detail in the future. The idea of trying to map the mind while you are brainstorming and use that as a way to capture the resulting discussion and agreement and then use it to track progress against it certainly seems very appealing to me.

CD

Technorati Tags: mindcamp2.0

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So this year again there were few people teaching lock picking and I actually got to try one. The particular technique that a guy called Pablo told me is the following (check the picture to understand a bit better how it works although it is a bit fuzzy). You have a key that fits on a particular kind of lock but with all the pins very low so obviously, won’t open the lock as keys have pins of different highs but it will fit on the lock well. With one hand, you put some pressure on the key inside the lock and then with something like a small hammer, start hitting the key on the lock horizontally till the energy of hitting the key will lift the internal pins of the lock and you will feel how suddenly you can turn the key and open the lock. Not sure I explain it well but it was pretty cool, it took me a couple of attempts but it was a really cool feeling when the key turned around and open the lock.
In case you are interested in the topic, check out this web site.

CD

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The guy wearing this t-shirt at Mindcamp2.0 was the guy that actually had the implants on his hands, you can clearly see them in the x-ray image. I have actually read about a club in Barcelona (Baja Beach, not a place I will go though) that they do RIFD implants for VIP customers so they can be identified and they can use it as a debit account to pay for drinks.  (check an article about it here). Will this eventually become popular so we will all have RFID implants in our bodies?

CD

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So this morning Mindcamp 2.0 finished, I was not there as I only attend half of the day yesterday, I had things to do plus I am not really into sleeping there surrounded by geeks. The hours that I spent there, I had a lot of fun. Lots of cool and creative people. It look a lot more crowded (the space was narrower so it could just be my impression) and certainly more organized with people helping with Mindcamp2.0 t-shirts, etc.

It was already fun from the beginning when everyone introduced each other (last year I actually got there late since Jim and I got lost using Google Maps, no problem getting to the new place this year) showing a lot of creativity and humor. Here is a summary of some of the most amusing ones, specially from the Microsoft crowd (Andru joked about how unfortunate was that there were not enough
Microsoft people, probably 20~30% of the people there were from Microsoft with lots of Amazon people as well):

• One guy that introduced himself as "working on open source projects at Microsoft" (as you can imagine, there were quote a few laughs when he said that but Scoble mentioned that the product they were working on was pretty cool and that he uses it but I did not get what was the product about),
• Another guy said he worked on "Windows reliability" that also trigger some laughing
• A guy worked on Windows clustering to "help programs stay running through blue screens"
• One guy introduced himself as someone working for a company that just lost $40BB this week, many people did not get the joke, including me, perhaps because it was misleading, Microsoft has not lost that money, they are actually an extremely profitable company, Microsoft shareholders have lost the money though as their market cap dropped
• A Boeing guy (not Microsoft but worth to mention) introduced himself as someone interested in mass transportation (so certainly working at the right company)

I attended only three sessions as I was not there for too long and I wondered around and talked to people but in any case, it was worth spending some time there. I got some pictures in Flickr here.

Keep the good job Andru and look forward to Mindcamp 3.0!!
CD

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Since this week was Microsoft’s earnings announcement, that was obviously the topic of conversation with everyone in this industry. In a conversation with a former Microsoftie that certainly knows the company well (or used to at least), we discussed the following theory. Since Microsoft is still losing money on the Xbox and they are gearing up to compete with Sony they could either acquire Nintendo or spin out the Xbox division as a separate company and merge it with Nintendo. Why would they do that? Nintendo competes more with Sony than with Xbox, they have the DS that clearly competes with the PSP and Microsoft is not a player on that space. Nintendo is really focus on gaming while Microsoft is pushing the console as one step into an all-entertainment device for the living room (the same Sony is doing with the PS2 and soon with the PS3), Nintendo is successfull in Japan and understand the games that appeal to the Japanese (recently proven with the wild success they are having with the brain training games and the new DS) while Microsoft, coming from a PC background, does not understand console gamers as well. Microsoft goes after an older customer base of gamers while Nintendo tends to target a younger crowd. Sony has a broader scope in gaming that Microsoft could easily reach acquiring Nintendo. And hey, Nintendo is profitable while the Xbox is not and they are already based in Redmond so they would not even have to relocate them to Microsoft territory.

CD

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I am sure that if you read news, blogs and tech.memeorandum, you are coming across more and more articles about what I think is one of the biggest sociological phenomenon in the Web this days, the video Web site YouTube.com
It has even been featured twice in El Pais, the Spanish news paper since two clips posted there are on its way of becoming the biggest hits in Spain this coming summer, one is a song by a group called El Koala (here the video, this guy has even made it to Spanish national TV after becoming popular in YouTube, pretty amazing considering is a US site that does not even have a localized UI) and the other one is a spoof of the recent Madonna hit Hang Up by a group called Las Terremoto de Alcorcon (video here). Even if you do not understand Spanish, you might still enjoy them (specially the Madonna spoof) so try them out.
So today I just came across this article, The neglected art of lip-syncing. By Sam Anderson while I was doing my morning review of tech.memeorandum (on a different note, I nearly stop using my RSS reader lately and just browsing tech.memeorandum one a day and that seems to be working better at managing my time and information overflow than subscribing to my own feeds) and I just realized that I spent half and hour checking some of the videos that are linked there (do so, this one and this one are extremely funny if you only want to waste 10 minutes of your time). Admittedly, it made me laugh and I had a good time but I just realized that lately, I am spending more and more time looking at YouTube videos that I either came across reading an article or that someone sends me via email. So, since I assume that I am pretty stereotypical Web surfer (well, perhaps I do surf a lot more than other people but I am sure that there is ton of people like me), I can declare in this post that YouTube is becoming the biggest time sucker on the Web. I was going to blog about MindCamp2.0 but because of YouTube it will happen later in the day.

CD

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The unconference started a couple of hours ago, I will be posting later tonight or tomorrow, so far looks similar to last year with the usual suspects from the Seattle tech scene around.

CD

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I know that I am way too late posting about this but after Apple’s release of Boot Camp a couple of weeks ago, I now certainly do not need two computers, I can just live with my brand new MacBook Pro. This is a smart move for Apple and I definitely though that this was going to happen either way (check my previous post on the topic here) except that I thought that it won’t be done officially by Apple and it was not going to happen till Vista ships. This can seriously boost MacOS X market share but keep in mind that Windows losing a couple of percentage points in market share will do nothing to Microsoft business (which will be selling copies of Windows anyway and not the low margin OEM versions but the full priced, retail ones) but might double Apple’s business (specially if that also increases sales of related software, .Mac accounts, more iPods, etc.).

CD

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Friday morning I had a minor accident (twisted my ankle) so this weekend I was stuck at home (not that the weather was any inviting in Seattle, yesterday it was miserable, what a place this is, I will never get used to this weather) and decided to see Lost. So I got myself the complete first season on DVD and saw few episodes and the verdict is that I am now a Lost fan. I like the cast very much, the story is pretty interesting and intriguing (in spit of few holes in the script, or perhaps those are things that will be clarified later) and I love how the present time in the island is evolving as we learn more from their pasts lives (it is pretty amazing how there was no one with a normal life in that plane, what a coincidence). So if you have not seen it, give it a try.
And get the DVDs, why pay Apple the same money to see it in a tiny iPod Video when for the same price you can get the DVDs or if you really do not want to spend any money, just wait till ABC has them for free on their Web site as it was announced recently. Which brings me to some recent debate about whether we need IPTV or not. Well, for once, I do not want to see TV on my computer, I want to do it on my TV. In this particular case, imagine if I had a set top box with IPTV that support video on demand and high quality streaming, in that case, I would had purchased the episodes directly there rather than taking a trip to a store to get the DVDs (remember my injured ankle…). Also, the debate about whether we need IPTV or not is really American centric since in many European countries or in Japan cable is not well developed and therefore IPTV is a cheaper way to serve TV channels to the masses that obviously, has a lot of advantages over cable since it is mainly served by telcos over already existing ADSL lines and it helps them to justify providing broadband and developing ADSL. And the consumer does not need to care about whether is getting the TV over Internet or not, he will just care about getting more services and channels at a cheaper price. In fact, my father in Spain has IPTV and he did not even know that he was getting the TV signal over the Internet but he got that since he get a cheaper bundle with high speed ADSL than getting his Internet connection from one provider and his cable or satellite from another.

CD

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