Archive for the ‘Social Computing’ Category

MarkLogic? A “NoSQL” Database? YES!

Wednesday, April 14th, 2010

The NoSQL movement had been garnering a lot of attention recently. It’s a trend largely facilitated by the changing demands of the transactional web. Today, the web is bidirectional and much more content oriented than it was in years past. The amount of user generated content has increased exponentially and relational databases are not tailored to handle massive amounts of semi-structured content.

One NoSQL option that we at Avalon are very excited about is Marklogic. Some will argue that it does not fit into their definition of “NoSQL,” but Mark Logic CEO Dave Kellogg did a good job of positioning Marklogic as a relational database alternative (aka NoSQL) in a post last week.

Recently I’ve been spending a lot of time exploring how Marklogic, as a powerful document (yes, key [aka URI] – value) and XML database, can be used to support social media and user generated content use cases. For example, threaded comments are much more naturally represented in a hierarchical, ordered format like XML. Marklogic and xQuery make it easier to store, manipulate, and search these data structures.

To demonstrate, I built a simple element reordering example using Marklogic and jQuery. Even this simple example would be non-trivial in a traditional relational model where lists and order with respect to other elements are unnatural at best.



So this is obviously a super simplified example, but hopefully it gives you a small glimpse into one of the capabilities greatly simplified by Marklogic through XML and xQuery.

I will be at the MarkLogic User conference in San Francisco May 4-6th. I hope to see you there!

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Posted in ECM & Portals, Generic, Search, Social Computing | 1 Comment »

Social Media is a means not a strategy!

Wednesday, January 20th, 2010

Clients regularly ask me what they should be doing with relation to public social networks like Twitter and Facebook. This is usually a frantic behind the eight ball type discussion generated by social media hype evoking a sense of urgency and haste. I generally respond with a question- what is your marketing and brand strategy as it relates to X (website, application, service, etc.)?  And many times they respond that their social media “strategy” is to create some sort of viral behavior through Twitter, Facebook and/or Youtube to generate traffic back to their web property.

Social media is not a strategy but a means! And when thought of as a strategy itself, may drive some traffic and awareness but typically does nothing to generate sustainable affinity to your brand or service. Focus should be on a the strategy that leverages social media outlets and behavior to create social, functional and contextual relevance with your users/customers.

Jan-Willem van Beek wrote an excellent article entitled “Social Media is No Holy Grail” on TheNextWeb that effectively elaborates on these ideas. Put the strategy first and you might be surprised at how your social media perspective changes!

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Posted in Social Computing | No Comments »

Defrag 2009 Conference Retrospective

Friday, November 13th, 2009

I spent the last two days at the Defrag Conference in Denver, Colorado. Defrag is, in its own words “focused on the tools and technologies that accelerate the ‘aha’ moment, and is a gathering place for the growing community of implementers, users, and thinkers that are building the next wave of software innovation.” It was a fantasic event with a sort of who’s who attendee list. Monitoring the realtime twitter back-stream was dizzying at times but very insightful.

I boiled down the event into four themes based on the sessions I attended. If you were there you may have seen it differently:

  • shift from search to discovery – online social graph(s) becoming more important and driving the information that finds you. Like Khris Loux said, if the information is important to you, it will find you. Keyword searches in Google will be largely replaced by the “flow”.
  • flow and filtering – the flow is a massive expanding river of realtime information/noise. The ability to filter information that is most relevant and important to the individual from the flow is the next big challenge/opportunity.
  • identity – fundamental to enabling discovery and filtering the flow is identity which is currently in a very fragmented state. There are also big privacy and segmentation concerns that need to be addressed by selective sharing of identity attributes.
  • the “cloud” – more of an undertone enabler but mentioned in almost every presentation I attended.

Through all of the insightful discussion and visionary commentary, I was surprised there was little mention of or acknowledgement of the “digital divide“, especially as it relates to social collaboration. The masses are barely catching on as we’re accelerating further away. If your online social graph only represents 15% of your real relationships, it will be inherently flawed in providing the basis for what information will “find” you.

I was also surprised that the importance of the mobile shift and mobile device explosion was absent from most conversation, possibly because the group has moved passed it already. But I think there will be drastic paradigm shift in how the masses interact “online” enabled by ubiquitous mobile connectivity that’s incomprehensible.

This was a great event and certainly by far the best I’ve attended in terms of power availability (strip at every table) and wifi (access point every other row!). The format, flow, atmosphere and attendee passion made for a wonderful experience. Denver’s a fantastic place for a conference, the Hyatt was a great venue and I am lucky to be local. And thanks to my employer for making the investment for me to attend this event!

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Posted in Social Computing | No Comments »

Professional Social Computing… what in the world does that mean?

Wednesday, February 4th, 2009

Greetings, all. As I am the Practice Manager for Avalon’s newest practice area (Social Computing), I thought it is only appropriate to share what I am going to focus our efforts on and how I view our evolving world of social computing. Like any evolving technology, social computing means many different to many different people.

As I write this blog in the beginning of 2009 I have to assume that the current perception of social computing is Facebook. My assumption is obviously not an act of genius (quite the contrary) but a simple observation of everyone I know (spanning many generations) coming to the realization that this site is simply a life-changing platform. I will assume if you are reading this you are already somewhat familiar with Facebook and will not bore you with its capabilities. I am much more interested in how to extend similar capabilities (and more importantly, the “intent”) into the professional space.

I could easily turn this first entry into a War and Peace epic (ok… I am probably dating myself with this comment) but I will stop with the following outline of how I view the current Social Computing space and how I will attempt to break it down in future posts. My proposed tiers are not necessarily mutually exclusive but hopefully provide a framework for options to approach this new space. So this is my “stake in the ground” to make sense around the current state of Professional Social Computing technology.

  • Tier 1 – Social Networking components
    • Wikis, IM, Forums, etc.
  • Tier 2 – Social Networking platforms
  • Tier 3 – Targeted Social Applications (e.g. Social Search, Social CRM)
  • Tier 4 – Semantic Analysis platforms (i.e. tools to analyze/report on unstructured text

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