Sunday, November 26, 2006

LibWorm - Search for Library News

Yesterday, while I was working on my final projects, news of LibWorm spread throughout the biblioblogosphere. LibWorm is a "Librarianship RSS and Current Awareness Search" by MedWorm’s Frankie Dolan and David Rothman.

LibWorm let's you search for library news across over 1000 RSS feed (including blogs, journal tables of contents and more). I need to poke more before I give my official opinion - but the one thing missing is a way to see what feeds are included. If I find a journal RSS I want to share with others, I want to have an easy way to find out if it's included and I did a few searches and browsed a bit, it was easy to find news (which is the point) but not the sources for the news (not the point - but a handy addition so that I don't waste people's time with suggestions - like adding the DUSLA blog).

Read more from David himself or from LibWorm's About page.

Wednesday, November 15, 2006

25 Technologies

I just attended the SirsiDynix Institute on 25 Technologies in 50 Minutes and I have to say that Stephen Abram is a man after my own heart. Learning Learning Learning - make time for learning - that was the theme of this event!

Stephen suggests:
  • going crazy with images and adding them to our library sites to give us personality (Flickr, Picassa)
  • using social bookmarking sites to keep track of reference bookmarks (del.icio.us)
  • recording story hours or events in the library and sharing them with the world (YouTube)
  • bridging the digital divide by introducing our users to Google Office
  • searching with a guide (ChaCha)
  • communicating with our users where they are (Meebo,Trillian,MySpace,Facebook)
Most importantly spend 15 minutes a day playing and learning these new technologies. Stephen suggests setting up a blog - not sharing it with others - but using it as your learning tool. Through your blog you can learn how to use Flickr, tags, Technorati, and so much more. Thinking your too busy? Think about your work day - how much time to you spend checking personal email? Participating is chit chat with colleagues? Talking to family on the phone? Bet it adds up to more than 15 minutes - so why not spend 15 minutes - which is practically nothing - learning something new today? You don't have to become perfect at it - you just have to get a feel for it.

He also mentioned the Learning 2.0 program at PLMC (Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenburg County) which was inspired by an article Stephen wrote in Information Outlook titled 43 Things I (or you) might want to do this year. In this program the staff was encouraged to learn 23 things in 9 weeks - and it was successful! Putting the staff at this library ahead of the curve when it comes to web technologies.

Stephen ended by saying (I'm paraphrasing) We need to share, be supportive, and we need to learn! If you are too busy maybe you and a colleague can support each other and learn for 15 minutes every other day - taking turns. The thing I love about working in a library is that it's like a family - and families support each other - so why not carry that mentality over to learning?

See all of the links discussed by Stephen on his blog and get learning!

Sunday, November 05, 2006

Delaware Book Festival

I went to the first Delaware Book Festival in Dover yesterday.

I had been looking forward to this since I received the first email from the Delaware Library Association back in the spring. The weather was wonderful and I enjoyed the foliage on the drive down to Dover.

My favorite presentation was the one done by Michael Dixon, who is based in Cecil County, Maryland and also teaches at the University of Delaware. He spoke on "Uncovering the Past" and had a great story about one of his team finding a letter from Thomas Jefferson!

As a future librarian, it was appreciative to hear Mr. Dixon recommend that those who do research should consult reference librarians as they will have the subject matter expertise of what is in a particular collection. In a world where some think that Google will resolve all research issues, this was refreshing.

I also got to introduce myself to someone who spoke in one of my history classes a few years previously. I even saw a co-worker of mine visiting the nearby Johnson Victrola Museum!

It was a great day and I'm looking forward to next year's event.

KMW2006 - Enterprise Blogs for Knowledge Exchange

This was the session I presented in, but first I listened to Ted Graham talk about blogs at Hill & Knowlton. My favorite thing about Ted's talk was that his blog is titled "Collective Conversation" - what a great name.

Before Hill & Knowlton has blogs, they noticed that a few of their staff was blogging on their own - anonymously. H&K wanted to bring that blogging in house and let the staff blog under the H&K banner without any restrictions on what they can write about (with the exception of the obvious - nothing confidential). This allowed the staff to talk in their own voice and in turn give the company a human feel - and since it was a group blog, no one person had to keep it up and running. In addition to the external benefits, the blogs lead to new groups and collaboration among the past.

It sounds like a great project! One audience member (well at least the one who spoke up) was concerned about legal action taken against the company due to something that was blogged about - and Ted told us that there hadn't been any problems like that. Also, the staff have all been really great about what they've written - nothing petty or rude about each other, the company, or the clients. I think that (provided your employees are happy) you'll find this is the case in most places - the staff just want to be provided with a voice and will use it only for good :)

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Saturday, November 04, 2006

KMW2006 - The New Shape of Knowledge

David Weinberger gave an amazing opening keynote on day 3 of KMWorld & Intranets - I think this was my favorite. See the few pictures I took.

David started with what he called the most hideous slide ever (it was very animated - bouncing words everywhere). The point was that knowledge is changing in all ways but one - the who of knowledge is going from experts to all of us (taxonomy v. folksonomy), the where of knowledge is going from people in cubicles to people in public places, the how is going from people sitting in a room to people engaging in conversation, the when is changing from this ribbon we've had of working in private to making it public and not being able to change it anymore - the ribbon is being broken, and the shape is what the whole keynote is about. The one thing that is not changing is the what (the content) of knowledge – and the what is boring.

So what has knowledge been? David starts with Plato who said 2 very important things "Justified true belief" (content) and "The wise man knows how to carve nature at its joints" (order) - the idea is that there are natural dividing places in nature. To explain this (and this was funny if you were there) David pointed out that we all know there are 9 planets. However, now we know how made up and arbitrary these joints (our knowledge) are because the International Astronomical Union came to us and told us that Pluto wasn't a planet anymore – there aren’t 9 planets – there are only 8.

In the other example, David showed us an image of how to cut a pig (something like this only cuter). The idea is that there is a right way to carve a pig - but in truth there are infinite ways to carve up that pig. The problem is that we assume that nature (the joints) is orderly and we try to make it so.

The truth is that there are so many ways to carve up our world - not just one orderly way - which is why we need tagging (great transition - don't you think?). The way we're carving up our world is dependent on our interests, our individual needs, and so on. So, deciding ahead of time that here is the taxonomy - and having only one taxonomy is the same as saying there is only one way to carve up the pig and limits our ability to do what we need and want to do.

David then took us through 7 properties of traditional knowledge. The first of these is that knowledge is in our heads - which is what psychotics believe - it is the definition of schizophrenia – and obviously untrue. The next is that there is only 1 (no plural) knowledge. Third is that therefore it is the same for everyone - there is only one truth and everything else is wrong. It's simple - the world looks really complex, but once we figure it out it's simple. Next, because there is so much to know, most of the opinions we hear are false and which means that we need experts (librarians) to help us weed through it all. Sixth, is that we've assumed that knowledge is not just a collection of facts, it's order, and we prefer to organize things in trees (bird is a vertebrate is an animal..). Lastly, we assume that knowledge is as big as we are - it expands over years.

The reason a lot of these principles match the rules of reality is because the means by which we have preserved and presented knowledge is physical. It's books, it's blackboards, it's white boards. It means that the topics of knowledge have to be divided up because books have to be divided up. It's as if libraries were invented to keep ideas apart. Where do you put a book about the history of military cooking? You can't put it in all 3 places because of the rules of matter, books can only be in one place at one time.

David then introduced us to the 3 orders of order:
  1. Organize the books (put them on shelves). This is a binary decision and forces us to think in trees
  2. Separate the meta data about the books and organize it.
  3. Everything is digital. The information, the content and the meta data.


We are no longer limited by the physical. An example is an online camera store - in the physical store you can only put the camera on one shelf. In the online world you're going to list that camera everywhere you can think of so that it's easier to sell. The thing is that this kind of disorder in the real world is messy - online messiness is a virtue - it enables ideas to come together. Finally, online everything is meta data. In the physical world there are objects and labels for the objects. Online you can go onto Google Books and type in an author and you'll get back not just the titles the author wrote, but the content of the books. This works the other way too - you can search for a line from the book and get that same book. There is no distinction between the content and the meta data. Meta data is now what you know that you're going to use to find what you don't know.

If everything is meta data, the multiplier of knowledge goes up a lot - suddenly everything is a label to help us find something else.

Online we can also re-order data in a way that makes sense to us (if you did this in a real store you'd be thrown out). One of the ways to do this is faceted search. David showed us the NCSU Endeca catalog as an example of this. Any branch on your search results page can act as a root for your search - creating the tree for you. You can limit your search by female authors and then 19th century if you choose or you can choose to limit first by the 20th century and then fiction authors - you're in control. The system is organized around your needs and way of thinking, not the thinking of a catalog librarian.

So now we've gone from the organized tree to a pile of leaves. But it's not just a pile of leaves, it's a pile that's full of links and meta data. This changes the role of the traditional knowledge manager - who's job it was to filter out the crap for us. Now, it takes more effort to delete than to include. Storage is basically free so why take the time to go through the data and delete items? This also means that 3 years from now you'll be able to go back and pull up and article that at the time was insignificant and now is very important. So there is no reason to exclude and every reason to include now that we have tools that let us sort and filter on the way out.

Rather than the experts deciding how things are going to be structured, give the users those tools so that they can decide how they want it organized and structured - postpone the taxonomy until the last step. Taxonomy is not the only way to see data - it's one way - another way is it to let users have a bit of control (tagging).

Next, David gave us 4 things this talk was not about and one that it was.

This does not make things simple

That's okay! The example he gave us what a speech that President Bush gave that was 2400 words - and you know that the speechwriters said, we have to make it simple for the American people. Well, a few hours later David checked Technorati and found that there were over 2400 blog posts about this talk (1 per word). Each post would find something interesting in the speech and expand on it. Bloggers are taking the simple and making it complex - which is exactly what we do in conversation - why? Because we're sick of being treated like idiots (expletives removed) who can only handle little simple ideas, we want the complexity.

It's not about you

You're making a new you online. Our blogs are a new self, we're writing ourselves into existence on the web with each post and populating the online world. Your blog is your new public self in the new public space of the web.

It's not about experts [Wikipedia critics, skip to the next point - heed this warning]

David believes that Wikipedia is a credible source. He knows that the fact that it's in the Wikipedia does not make it fact, but he does feel that the Wikipedia provides resources which can be trusted. Why? Because it's highly edited, because there are discussions going on about the facts that people are including in these articles (and we're going to be able to go back and look at this for years to come), because it provides warning notices that make it more credible (ex. Neutrality is disputed) - this is not something you'll ever see on a newspaper.

It's not about knowledge

David explained this by using the example of businesses. Businesses own their goods they also had all of this information and content - knowledge. They had assumed that it was theirs and that they owned it - building a wall around their businesses. In today's world this model doesn't work anymore, so what's happening is the knowledge (content) is being sucked out, leaving only the businesses as husks to hold the products. For example - Amazon. The content is being moved out of the business and aggregated on the web and having more content added to them (tagging, reviews, images, etc).

It is about externalizing meaning

We get meaning by having the huge pile of leaves (the web) to sort through and putting it together - and we get to do it ourselves - and we want to do it ourselves! This enables understanding.

This does not mean that David feels that the growth of the web is the death of knowledge - we're way too good at being knowers.

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Friday, November 03, 2006

KMW2006 - Making Choices in Enterprise Search

Steven Arnold is a kick :) He came into the room and was just exuding friendliness. He asked people their names and where they were from.

Steve started by offering $1 to each person who asked a question after his talk - much better than the tiny candies I got at IL for asking a question :)

I guess you want to know what I learned from Steve - well here we go.

First off, he is no fan of the word findability - he feels that data should be pervasive. He said that people don't want to search for information - they just want it to be at their finger tips - which I guess is why when people search they only use one or two words in their query. The other problem is that each year search becomes more complex and precision isn't going anywhere. The challenge to raise precision.

Steve showed us some examples of search engines. He started with Exalead with I wrote about earlier. While Exalead is impressive and offers amazing filtering options - Steve feels it's too overwhelming for the average searcher - it's too complicated and too much is going on on the screen. I guess I'm just optimistic in thinking that people would learn to use and when they had they wouldn't want to use anything without filtering options.

Next, he went over Live.com (Microsoft). He said that if you do a search on Live.com you'll get you results faster than you will on Google - but the reason is because the content is all cached on the servers - so you're not searching live up to date info. He mentioned (and I have no experience with this) that if you use the same search technology in SharePoint it will take forever.

Lastly, Google. Apparently Google is working on way to refine their search results. They did some studies and came up with a much simpler interface - one that I don't like at all - for filtering results. They will be providing 2 pull down menus above the search results list - so if you search for recipe you'll get a box with cuisine and one with course - this way you can narrow it down to the type of recipe you're looking for. This contradicts what I heard last week about web design - which is that users don't like pull downs. So, where is the data in the pull downs coming from? It's generated based on search patterns found in the Google databases.

The question is, will this help? My answer is "No" - for the reasons I just stated - If I have to scroll through a pull down menu of filtering options - I ain't gonna do it - and if I'm not going to do it - who's to say someone who's unfamiliar with search technologies is going to use it?

Steve did make one last point that I think you'll all appreciate - he said not to forget about librarians, they go to school to learn how to find info - use them.

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Thursday, November 02, 2006

KMW2006 - Folksonomies, Social Tagging, & Complexity Theory

Usually people who are fans of taxonomies do not get along with folksonomy fans. Our speaker, Tom Reamy, made sure that we knew going in that he was on the taxonomist's side of things before he started talking. The funny thing was the next thing he said was that Library Scientists and Folksonomists (or believers in folksonomies) get along even worse that taxonomists and folksonomists - coming straight from Internet Librarian where everything was about social software and social tagging - I found this funny (I do know that the people at Internet Librarian were from one subset of the library science group - and that they're more likely to like new tagging options than those who weren't there).

So are you wondering what a folksonomy is? A folksonomy is a classification done by the user or some amateur - not a professional cataloger. Tom mentions that in addition to being data added by the user it's also a social experience - you can see what's popular by visiting del.icio.us and viewing the tag cloud.

Tom moved on to give us some advantages & disadvantages (all of which I think were from Wikipedia - but I'm not 100% sure).

Advantages
  • Simple - no learning of formal classifications or heirarchy needed
  • Lower cost of categorization (using the users)
  • Open-ended - can respond quickly to changes
  • Relevance - users are closer to the data and so they can tag things better than an expert
  • Multiple Dimensions - put together by "communities" of like-minded taggers
  • Easy to tag any object
Disadvantages
  • They don't work very well. They're great for personal indexing, but they aren't great when someone else wants to find something.
  • Don't compare favorably with controlled vocabulary
  • No structure - "onomy" should not be part of the name - "onomy" = structure
  • Get caught up in jargon
  • Subject matter experts are not professionals (I ask you to read what Dave Snowden said in his keynote - and then David Weinberger [not written by me yet])
  • No quality control - all based on popularity
  • and many more...
Tom's argument is that the 2 don't compare - they are radically different - I can probably think of a few people who would disagree - but they'd probably be folksonomy fans.

So what does Complexity Theory have to do with this all? While complexity theory does relate to maths & sciences, the key concept is that it is self-organizing.

An example of a complex system is ant tunnels. The ant doesn't know what a tunnel is, it doesn't know why it needs to make tunnels, it just knows that there is something in the way and it needs to be moved. In this case evolution has lead to organization. Other features of complexity theory are feedback, local interactions and large number elements.

Tom goes on to bring this all back to our intranets by making the point that our intranets will not evolve into a structure - we need to put that structure there (something I did by writing my own wiki application instead of using one that depends on links for structure). Intranets are also a great place to use tagging because it's a controlled environment and everyone is tagging within the same context (this is especially true for a library intranet where all of the librarians are also familiar with taxonomies).

So, in order to make tagging more effective Tom feels we need some changes. We need (most importantly) feedback - a way to rank tags and some rules that say if this tag is ranked poorly it's removed from the list of tags - so this is feedback with consequences. We need to allow only certain people to tag - once again get feedback - all for ranking of taggers to see who's using helpful terms in their tagging. Lastly, we need to use a combo of explicit (people) and implicit (software) ranking methods to get better tags and more useful search results.

Overall, a very interesting talk - and it's even more interesting after you hear about some of the speakers who followed (which I better get to writing about).

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KMW2006 - Innovative Enterprises: Leaders' Visions & Stories

WOW! What a great Keynote we had today. Dave Snowden of Cognitive Edge & Cindy Gordon of Helix Commerce International gave a great show this morning.

I have to say that I'm a little worried about the way Info Today conference Keynotes are headed - last week we had our keynote speaker serenade us and this morning we got a musical slideshow - do we see a pattern here? :)

Anyway, I never feel that I can do justice to great speakers when I sum up what they said, but I'll give it a whirl here.

The question is "What makes a great story?", the answers - Endurance, Relevance, Memorable. The examples that Cindy gave us of memorable characters were Shrek (a movie that almost everyone in the room had seen) and Golumn from Lord of the Rings.

Why do stories matter? Well, Dave wanted us to take a little test before he answered that question for us. I'm going to give you a link to a video - while watching it please count the number of times that someone in a white ball catches the ball - and Dave points out that a bounce and a catch counts. Have you see this video before? If not - watch it now (don't read any further).

*

*

*


Okay - so what's your answer? 8? 16? 24? 30? Did you see the gorilla? (are you going HUH?) Watch it again - this time just watch - don't count. If you saw the gorilla the first time then you weren't paying attention to the task at hand.

Dave says that the problem is either you can count the ball or look for the gorilla - you can't do both. It's not possible the way the human brain is structured, you see the world as a series of dots and you fill in the gaps with memories from previous experience. If you come from a western-based language and you really concentrate, at most you will take in 5% of the data - if you come from a pictorial language group it goes up to 10%.

A radiologist for example looks at an x-ray, scans 5% if they're really concentrating, scans through 40,000+ patterns in their long-term memory, which are roughly sequenced in frequency of use, and having done that makes a first pick pattern match that fits with their previous experience - a first pick - not a best pick. Then they rationalize it - whatever they picked is a rational decision.

Human beings are pattern processing intelligences not information processing intelligences - the only human being that process information in a rational structured way is autistic - which is why they find it difficult to cope with the amount of sensory stimulation within the world.

He then recommends reading The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (a great book). He said he sent several copies to an IT department at a major American company and when they asked why he made them read it is was because they assume their users are autistic - they assume that they can look at everything you present on the screen and make rational decisions.

I find this fascinating!!

I won't go on to quote everything that Dave said, the point is that Content Management assumes you have context - when you don't. This explains why search engines can't find what you're looking for - you're asking based on your stories - your memories. The way that we can explain things that we know is to tell stories. He showed us a diagram where between abstract content and embodied context you find narrative stories. Dave says:
I can always say more than I can write down. I always know more than I can write down. I will always say more than I can write down.
So, narrative stories are the missing link in knowledge management.

He then gave us a quote from Terry Pratchett's Witches Abroad:
Stories don't care who takes part in them. All that matters is that the story gets told, that the story repeats. Or, if you prefer to think of it like this: stories are a parasitical life form, warping lives in the service only of the story itself.
In conclusion, he calls for a combination of stories and content - a way to let the author add keywords to their content (tagging) since they know the context in combination with keywords added by professionals who lack context (taxonomy) will lead to better knowledge management.

I hope I did Dave's talk justice, since it was amazing. I will add a link to the presentation once it becomes available - because the graphics and quotes where too much for me to get down ;)

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KMW2006 - Exalead

Just a quick post on Exalead - who provided us with breakfast this morning. Exalead is Europe based search engine (and enterprise search vendor) that is making it's way over here to the U.S. They pride themselves on having one focus - search. Unlike the other popular search products out there that have spread themselves over many different areas.

As librarians we know the answer to this question - but we were asked "Why does search matter?" The answers: The explosive growth of data has made it impossible to find anything without search capabilities and this need to find information is critial to doing business - and doing business efficiently. Exalead wants to make search easier (sounds like Intellext's Watson - are we sensing a theme here?) - not just for the user, but for the content manager and the IT staff.

The demo we saw of Exalead (the enterprise solution) in action seems to match the way a lot of search tools seem to be headed. In addition to the list of search results you have a left column full of filtering options like language, file size, file type, author, and source. It also offers a desktop search functionality that lets you choose to search the web and your PC at the same time - or any other combination of available options.

The thing I liked the most was they way the combined results appears (see my pictures) next to each result it would read "My PC" or "Web" to make it clear where the result was coming from. Pretty nifty little search - and like I said something we're seeing more and more of - especially in our library catalogs (like the one I mentioned the other day).

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KMW2006 - How Do I Get People to Use the Content?

Jay Budzik from Intellext gave a great presentation about bringing the right content to the user - making it more likely that they will use what they find. Jay tells us that the burden of search is on the user. They have to decide where to search (which site, database, directory) and they have to know the system they're searching - how often do they know the right place and the right methods?

For this reason, we need to make it easier on the user to find what he/she is looking for - and we need to make it easy! Jay mentioned that Motorola has a 5 terabyte intranet CMS and only 1% of the content is used in a year! That's a lot of content to find that it's not being used.

So what do we do? We can get the info to the user by providing RSS and search alert emails - but that can lead to information overload. Jay asked us how many of us actually read everything in our RSS reader every day - no one raised their hands - it's just impossible to read everything - you learn to skim for relevant content - while that's okay for us, we want to provide a better experience for our users.

The following quote from Barry Schwartz, the author of "The Paradox of Choice" was right on point:
As the number of choices grows, choice no longer liberates but debilitates
So how do we limit the number of choices? The answer that Intellext came up with was Watson. Watson shows relevant search results based on what you're working on. So if you're doing a PowerPoint on Knowledge Management, Watson will search the sites you choose (including local CMSs, Intranets, desktop search apps etc) for relevant content related to your topic. I need to tell you all that my notes now read in very big letters - VERY COOL!

This is basically an application you install on your computer that will search while you work without your input - very easy on the user. So my next thought (which is probably what you're thinking - if you didn't click the link yet) was - "How Much??" Watson is free if you don't mind ads and can be purchased to remove the ads.

So, does it work? Remember the people at Motorola? Use of content went up significantly after installing Watson because the content was right there on their screen for them - no search necessary.

I'm certainly going to be installing Watson to give it a whirl - probably on my work computer.

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KMW2006 - User Experience: Lessons Learned

Carmine Porco from Prescient Digital Media (whose company hosts the Intranet Blog) shared some case studies of Intranet redesigns with us. I want to preface this for the librarian readers that a lot of his suggestions apply more to big companies than little libraries - and I also think a lot of his suggestions apply more to our public sites than our Intranets, so think of his suggestions in that context.

Carmine started with a bad practice from August of this year. Radio Shack used email to fire 400 employees!! This was an example of bad use of technology within your organization.

Now into the meat!

#1 it's not enough to be cool when designing your intranet (or website) - it needs to deliver value and if you can't prove that to your higher-ups than the intranet is going fail. Keep in mind that success & value is more than money! Value is employee satisfaction, awareness and retention.

Carmine gave us an interesting example of a survey given to IBM regarding where they go first to find office information. In 1997 the number one answer was Co-Worker with 57% of the vote followed by 54% Manager and 28% Intranet. In 2003 that same survey got a much different result - Intranet was #1 with 71% followed by Co-Worker with 37% and Manager with 31%.

Next Carmine calls for a business plan before re-redesigning and intranet - this is where I think things get a bit too in-depth for a library intranet. But it does make sense that you have some sort of plan or report before designing any webpage. In my case I took the library's strategic plan into consideration when making design and structure changes to our intranet. He also mentioned ROI (Return on Investment) - not something librarians worry about when it comes to an intranet. He gave us some interesting numbers - like the fact that an email box costs $20 a person in storage - so why not put the document you want to share on the intranet (in one place) and stop sending emails?! I'm all for that!

Like I said before, without executive support things will fall apart - so make sure your managers/directors/board (whoever) is behind you and is out there making the employees aware of the changes that are to come. This tip applies to all organizations - large and small - and really fits more with the intranet re-design project more than a public site re-design.

Carmine calls for governance - a hierarchy of people in charge of the intranet - this is probably not possible in small organizations - but if your intranet is also small it might be a good idea to think about this. In the model that Carmine showed us he had an Execututive at the top (director/manager), next a Council of people who will make decisions on behalf of the staff, then an Editor - Carmine notes (and I agree) that your webmaster should not be your editor - IT people are not trained to write content and they should not be writing the content for your organization.

Once you have a governance structure in place it's time to do a content audit. This means going through the data on the old intranet and weeding out the junk. I can tell you from experience that this takes time and needs more than one person involved. In my case I needed to contact each department head and ask them to go through their documents - how am I supposed to know what's important?

Now that your content is ready create a wire design - this is a design without the bells and whistles that shows the users where the content will lie on the page - this way they can move things where they think make sense and all of your hard work isn't down the drain. The design is the final step - as Carmine says it's the lipstick! When it does come time to provide designs - only due 2 designs and make the users pick from the 2 - otherwise you'll end up with way more work than is necessary. Carmine said "Design by committee will kill a project!" - can you disagree? I can't.

Lastly, think about personalization before you go all out with detailed sessions and databases to store settings. Will users really use it? Do the staff in your office change their default Windows settings? If not they're probably not going to customize the intranet. Carmine shows some examples of customization that don't involve the user. When the user logs in they see a weather box specific to their location (this works for big organizations spread out across many areas).

Overall, a very interesting session (and my first here at KMWorld & Intranets) - I'm going to poach some of these ideas for our website redesign and a couple sound pretty handy for our intranet as well!

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