Gilbane Group Blog

Gilbane Boston conference and workshops posted

2008-09-02T21:18:03Z

The Gilbane Boston 2008 program is now available, and registration is open. As usual we have had a tough time choosing from among all the possible panelists and presenters. Some speakers have not been notified yet, so we will not publish speaker names for another week or so.

The main conference site is http://gilbaneboston.com. Here are the most popular links:

* Conference schedule
* Conference session descriptions
* Workshop descriptions
* Early Sponsors
* Registration

You can also subscribe to our events and announcements blog to make sure you get all the conference updates.

BTW, we will be using gilbaneboston08 for tagging purposes.

Welcome Fred Dalrymple

2008-08-15T12:29:39Z

Fred is our newest contributor, and has already posted his first blog entry. Fred pokes at the challenging tension in search between intent and context, especially over time as context (or intent) changes. Lynda has also posted about intent, and the subject also came up in discussions of search quality around Udi Manber's talk at our conference in this past June.

Fred brings the welcome perspective of a serious software developer, and will be blogging on a few different topics, so he may be posting here on on one of our other blogs. Welcome Fred!

Beyond Intent

2008-08-12T14:58:06Z

Intent, hidden within a search click, lies at the intersection of Search and Business, as in "let's do some business". That search click has extra-ordinary value because of the intent to buy -- that's why we're searching, right?

Perhaps, or maybe we're just browsing, or surfing, and we're not in the mood for advertisements. It could be more militant than that; perhaps we're still trying to research our choices and would see a sales pitch as tainting the honesty of the information. At least that's what the founders of Google originally believed.

Although the model of the web was a set of stateless pages, and a Google search box certainly fits that appearance, people's intent is not stateless. It ebbs and flows, from entertaining looking around, to researching choices and comparing possibilities, through sourcing a chosen product (now we're talking about a qualified buyer), to selecting fulfillment options, and possibly all the way to figuring out how to return a product that we're dissatisfied with. That last one is probably not the best time to present an ad claiming how wonderful that product is.

This is a "long running transaction," a series of steps that fit together and flow towards (and past) a purchasing decision, but with back-currents and eddies. And it really is a transaction in the database sense where a failure during one step can cause the entire sequence to be discarded as if it never happened. Though if you believe Sergey and Larry, it will be worse than never happening, you may lose trust in your guide through that transaction.

Has the intent changed? Depends on what that means. On one hand, what has changed across those steps is the mode of the intent. If the intent was to purchase a product, then the research, comparison, purchase, and fulfillment were clearly pieces of that intent, though they call for different approaches: organic search for the research, product focused responses for the purchase, perhaps service-oriented for the fulfillment, and some combination for the comparison.

But what about that "I need to return this product because I hate it" step? The intent has clearly changed, but it is more necessary than ever to connect this new intent to the previous steps. If not, perhaps the search engine will continue to suggest that product to a disgruntled customer with very counter-productive results.

So, what is the unifying concept? Is it intent, organized by modes? Not if what is being unified is a complete user's story about their purchasing experience.

Inspect 'yer Gadget

2008-08-09T11:45:44Z

As social netwoking sites proliferate, extending the metaphor of organic connections between individuals and communities, one aspect that has so far been under appreciated is the spread of malicious viruses via connections between network members. Just as biological viruses tend to spread faster as individuals are brought closer together by a shrinking world, so too computer viruses are finding a vehicle to spread via Web2.0 social networks.

Most Web2.0 sites, and these include Facebook, MySpace, Orkut, and even Google pages, offer users a potpourri of applets that add cool little functionalities to member's profile pages. Google for instance offers Google "gadgets" like calendars, news feeds, photo display applications, accounting applications, weather, and a whole host of other apps.

Increasingly these are targets for malicious hackers who exploit people's lack of awareness (as well as lack of protection), and their natural tendency to being open to adding new friends and applications without worry, to spread virus attacks. The problem is not necessarily Google's programming, but the open source and shareware nature of applications being developed by programmers around the world, and offered on sites like Google and Facebook.

This was one of the issues discussed at the recent Black Hat USA 2008 conference in Las Vegas where two security experts, Robert Hansen, chief executive of SecTheory, and Tom Stacener, of Cenzic, the security software testing maker, demonstrated how a malicious gadget could break into a user's web browser and read searches in real time and conduct other attacks, including stealing information from other gadgets that store personal information (like accounting applications).

This is particularly a problem with younger users who are seemingly less concerned with privacy and security issues, and see social networks as a vast playground of social interactions and free form play -- putting up personal information, installing unchecked applications, and generally mingling their digital juices with abandon. Interestingly, older users who should know better, also fall prey to these lapses in judgment.

A word to the wise for people, especially companies, who are exploring how to deploy Web2.0 and Enterprise2.0 applications in their corporate networks. A word of caution too the next time you decide to poke someone after seeing their cute (and perhaps fallacious) profile picture.

Until protection tools get better, remember to Inspect 'Yer Gadgets!

Virus update: Social networking sites targeted by worms

What do you know about content technologies?

2008-08-07T14:40:47Z

We're growing. Like many of our colleagues in the industry we have found that problems in the housing and financial markets have had no noticeable effect on demand for our services. Of course things could change, but enterprise content technologies are so core to businesses of all kinds that, while watchful, we are not concerned.

Our main concern, as always, is to keep the conversation and flow of trusted content moving between all the stakeholders (investors, vendors, practitioners, IT, consultants, etc.) in the content technology market. If you are involved in content technology or applications in any of these capacities and have expertise or experience you would like to share with our large, growing community, let us know. We have potential opportunities for bloggers, consultants, analysts, educators, or someone who has a particular expertise and simply wants to express an occasional opinion. If you are interest or have questions let Sarah know at sarah@gilbane.com.

Where Content Management Meets Social Media

2008-08-05T12:04:49Z

"Where Content Management Meets Social Media" is the tagline for this year's Gilbane Boston conference. We've been covering social media tools for enterprise use at our events since 2005, just after we published Blogs & Wikis: Technologies for Enterprise Applications? - still one of our most popular downloads. But the number of speaking proposals we received on social media for enterprise applications for the Boston conference was striking. It seems nobody wants to talk about anything else! While we'll still have a dedicated track to cover social media, you will see the topic being addressed in every track.

The conference program will be published soon, and as Sarah posted a couple of days ago, speaker notifications will start going out.

New Report: Open Source Web Content Management in Java

2008-07-29T14:07:09Z

Well, actually the report was published by the author, Seth Gottlieb, a few months ago, but it is now available at the Gilbane store. Seth has worked with open source content management systems for years and for this report personally installed all the products he evaluated. Seth has written a really excellent report that is a must-read for anyone considering investing in and open source web content management system, or for anyone inclined to dismiss them out of hand.

Report Description
Open Source Web Content Management in Java provides an in depth analysis of seven of the leading open source Java web content management platforms. Written for technical decision makers, the report breaks down the open source marketplace and describes various categories of open source software and where they are most effectively used. The report also provides a framework for understanding the cost and risk implications of selecting an open source platform over commercial software.

Each 15+ page product evaluation explains the technical architecture and functional capabilities of the platform and provides insight into how the project is organized and the community behind it. There is enough technical detail to provide a foundation for ruling out incompatible technologies and prototyping the likely candidates. There is also useful information for content contributors and site managers to help them understand how the tool would support their responsibilities of today and their vision for tomorrow.

Products Evaluated:

Alfresco Enterprise
Apache Lenya
Daisy CMS
Hippo CMS
Jahia Enterprise
Magnolia Enterprise
OpenCms

Buy Open Source Web Content Management in Java, by Seth Gottlieb.
NOTE: This is a downloadable PDF file. Acrobat version 6 or higher required.

New Contributing Analyst - Fal Sarkar

2008-07-28T15:13:49Z

I am happy to announce that Fal Sarkar has joined us as a Contributing Analyst. Some of you may have met Fal when he was the Market Segment Manager for ECM at Sun as we did, or when he was at Xinet before that. Fal is currently based in India with his family where he has been involved in some very interesting work. See Fal's post from yesterday, and his bio for more details. Fal will be writing and helping us with research on content management (both ECM & WCM) and social media, as well as what is happening in India.

Fal can be reached at: fal@gilbane.com, or at extension 219, which transparently rings through to Fal in Chennai, India or to his voicemail, but please remember the time difference.

Welcome Fal!

Hello World

2008-07-27T16:20:42Z

I'm really excited to join the first class team at the Gilbane Group as a contributing analyst. I hope to contribute to Gilbane's industry leading analysis of trends in content and collaboration technologies by bringing my content management experience, views and commentary to our readers and clients.

Two years ago, after spending my entire life in California, I moved to India with my family following a foreign posting by my wife. I currently live in the south Indian city of Chennai, and am Gilbane's man out in the world (well, at least in the world outside of the US). I hope to present an international perspective on industry trends, my views on the world of media and culture, and wondering aloud, why in this time of globalization, if the world is really flat, how come there are so many bumps in the road?

A lot of interesting things going on in the world of content and beyond.

Enterprise Content Management vendors, such as EMC, are rolling out their next wave of ECM applications incorporating social networking technologies for businesses. This trend will most likely increase as customers struggle to figure out what role Web2.0 and Enterprise2.0 technologies can play in their business, or more likely, if they should play any role at all? Companies like Ning, co-founded by Marc Andreessen of Netscape and Loudcloud fame, enable people to build their own social networks and virtual communities of interest at a much lower cost. How will they fare? Will everyone one day have a virtual social network to complement their real-world social network? And will we be able to tell the difference? Will we one day tell our kids to go out and play with their friends, just to see them lock themselves in their bedrooms and log on? Are we there already? Does going out on a date mean pointing and clicking?

Trendy social networks like Facebook and MySpace are trying to cut the clutter with a new facelift, while they struggle to find ways of monetizing their millions of users and hold onto an often fickle membership. Do you like Facebook's new look? Facebook claims 90 million users, two-thirds of whom live outside of the United States. They say they will hit 100 million members by year's end, and claim to have 200,000 programmers developing on the network. What will they do if all their developers get sued like those two brothers in India who dared to scra(m)bble Hasbro's Facebook strategy? Does Facebook see themselves as a social movement, more than a business? Yet, its the business that has to justify a $15 billion dollar valuation!

And then there is the ever exploding world wide web. Google this last week announced that its search engine index crossed the 1 trillion (that's 1,000,000,000,000) mark of unique URLs on the web. "The first Google index in 1998 already had 26 million pages, and by 2000 the Google index reached the one billion mark." While there is some uncertainty as to the exact number, we all know that the number is big -- really big, and growing really fast. But with all this burst of information, are we just wasting time? How is it that we are so over-informed, yet so under-educated? Does all this knowledge lead to any more wisdom?

Around the world, Barack Obama concluded his most excellent Middle Eastern and European adventure to roaring crowds, all asking, "Say Brother, can you spare some change?" Are you a fan of Barack's on your Facebook page? Is he a connection for you on LinkedIn? Do you follow him on Twitter? School kids in India debate and make presentations on Obama, McCain and the US Presidential elections, even in the elementary schools!

Meanwhile the wars we wage continue unabated, and all is being caught on YouTube and brought to our desktops and handhelds. Or is it? Who are the new media gatekeepers, and are they the same as the old gatekeepers, but with fancier titles?

In India, the world's largest democracy, they faced two straight days of terror with serial bombings in her high-tech capital Bangalore, and the Hindu heartland city of Ahmedabad (the site of deadly communal riots just six years ago). India is struggling to keep internal peace amidst possible communal riots and violence, and rising tensions with its neighbor Pakistan. India is viewed as a phenomenal high-tech success story, yet controversy about outsourcing and its impact on the US continue as both countries face crashing stock markets, high inflation, and economic uncertainty. How will this uncertainty, increasing risk and social unease affect India's rise as a global economic, cultural, and nuclear power? How will a nation of a billion people, with 70% living in rural villages, emerge as a global leader?

Finally, the world is coming together not for war, but for sport as the Beijing Olympics soon get underway. China prepares for its international coming out party in what will most likely be the first real-time, blogged-Olympic games. Billions of people around the world will be following the information, ironically from one of the most state-controlled information societies in the world. More interestingly, restrictions on blogging are not just coming from the government, but the International Olympic Committee (IOC) itself as they "put the brakes on Olympic blogs" and web diaries by athletes and coaches. Their "rationale for the restrictions is that athletes and their coaches should not serve as journalists - and that the interests of broadcast rights-holders and accredited media come first." Meet the new gatekeepers. Making the world safe for commerce!

And speaking about gaming? What about gaming? Will the next Olympic games (or the one after that) be held in a virtual world? Will there be an Olympic Games hosted not by a country, but by Second Life? If so, will I watch the games on my network connected and web enabled Playstation or Xbox through YouTube? Will the athletes be competing on the Nintendo Wii? How weird is that?

Although controversy of some kind will surely follow, perhaps, if only for a little awhile, the world will focus on games rather than violence.

We can only hope.

Google Released Knol Yesterday

2008-07-24T12:41:05Z

Well, we can now let the cat out of the bag. Google released Knol yesterday. Knol is guaranteed to generate lots of discussion in the blogosphere and press, especially among fans and detractors of Wikipedia. It is not really the same kind of animal as Wikipedia however, and we'll talk more about in another post, but it is something you will want to check out.

Udi Manber, was planning to announce Knol's release in his keynote at Gilbane San Francisco last month, but unfortunately, it wasn't quite ready. Fortunately, we had a back-up plan and Udi instead gave an excellent and audience-pleasing presentation on search quality.

http://knol.google.com/

RSS and Atom feeds

2008-07-24T12:21:25Z

As punishment for not blogging for awhile we discovered last night that the (Feedburner) feeds for many of our blogs had been out of commission since late May or early June. The problem has been fixed, which is why you may have a few more items than usual in your feed this morning.

Gilbane Group Updates

2008-07-23T12:27:39Z

Obviously I've taken a little blogging break. The combination of our San Francisco conference taking place just before summer hit, a short vacation, a flurry of activity here including new reports, partnerships, people, and the need to ramp up for Gilbane Boston in the Fall, have consumed me (especially the vacation, part 1). It is time to catch up. There is too much to cover in one post, so I'll spread things out over the next week.

I'll cover our new reports later, but you can learn more, and download some of them at http://gilbane.com/Research-Reports.html. The reports that aren't free are available at http://gilbane-store.com/.

It's been a month since Gilbane San Francisco, so I will just say that we had a great event, and it was good to see many of you there. This was our largest San Francisco event so far. Interestingly, Gilbane Boston remains our largest conference, and, after 4 years in SF and our 5th this year in Boston, it's time to recognize that is likely to continue as they are both continuing to grow at the same rate.

If you didn't make it to San Francisco, the site and program will remain live so you can see what you missed. If you were there, remember that the link to the presentations was listed in your program guide. If you can't find it send an email to customerservice@gilbane.com. Our conferences are mostly made up of interactive panels, so there are fewer formal presentations than there used to be. We are not an "unconference" since an important part of our value proposition is to carefully structure the kinds of topics we think our audience needs to hear about, and to ensure diversity of opinion by assigning a variety of experts to debate the issues. But interaction is critical, and what our audience prefers, so we'll continue to balance serendipity and structure.

Gilbane Boston call for papers deadline extended 1 week

2008-06-14T11:46:38Z

We've been so busy getting ready for next week's conference in San Francisco that it was a bit of a surprise to be deluged with submissions for our Boston conference yesterday. Of course that is because the deadline for submitting proposals for the Gilbane Boston conference, December 2 - 4, 2008 was June 15. It's great to see the interest!

Anyway, since we will all be very busy next week, we realized we might as well extend the deadline, so the new deadline in June 24.

See: http://gilbane.com/speaker_guidelines.html for instructions.

Questions can be sent to speaking@gilbane.com.

What does 'search quality' mean?

2008-06-05T20:55:59Z

Relevance has always been the main goal of search for most of us searchers, although sometimes completeness can be even more important, e.g., when we want to determine relevance ourselves and volume is not an issue. Relevance is relative, and there is no way to write code that can anticipate relevance in a general way. (Of course quality is relative too!) Fortunately, search can be extremely useful even without the mind reading option - in fact, mind-reading wouldn't be enough to anticipate relevance enough anyway.

Much of the discussion about search quality these days revolves around the front-end of relevance, i.e., determining, as much as possible, searchers' intent. And we do have increasing amounts of information (such as surfing behavior) that allows us to make better guesses about intentions.

We can also make information richer so that search engines can make more accurate determinations about relevance. For example XML site maps provide context in the form of structural information; providing additional metadata to search engines provides even more context.

Despite the imprecise, and constantly changing meaning and use of language, we have been able to asymptotically improve our ability to determine both intent and relevance, and incrementally improve search quality.

I say "we", but I am neither a developer nor an expert on search technology. We are fortunate to have someone who is arguably the most influential expert and developer today speaking about search quality in two weeks at our San Francisco conference. Udi Manber, VP Engineering, Search Quality, Google is going to open the conference with a presentation on Search Quality and Continuous Innovation. While Udi won't be giving away any secrets, his presentation will provide valuable and fascinating insight into the way Google thinks about improving search quality. For a taste of Udi's clear and straightforward style, and what he'll be talking about read his recent blog post: Introduction to Google Search Quality

Don't Forget Today's Webinar

2008-06-05T13:58:08Z

Mary Laplante will be moderating a webinar at noon eastern time today, Web Experience Management: Essentials for Engaging Customers and Winning Loyalty. The sponsor is Fatwire, and the speakers will be Yogesh Gupta, President and CEO of FatWire; Sovan Shatpathy, Manager of Web Infrastructure at Linksys; and Erik Kulvinskas, Web Coordinator for the Colorado Department of Transportation. We are seeing a lot of activity in Web Experience Management, and Mary offers the following definition:

Web experience management is a business practice that formalizes an organization's approach to relating to its audiences through web-based channels. WEM is based on the premise that engagement that delivers high value to all participants does not happen by accident, but rather, by design. Only when experience is deliberately managed does it become repeatable, predictable, and capable of being improved and optimized. WEM, as a business practice, is enabled by a range of technologies, including web content management, personalization, dynamic content delivery, analytics and optimization, and emerging tools for social computing. As such, WEM calls for integrated marketing and IT processes.

Registration for the webinar is still open.