Site I can’t do without: StreetEasy

Almost a month since I last wrote?? What have I been doing? Well, I’ll tell you - amidst all the travelling and working and travelling for work, I bought a new apartment earlier this summer, and I’ve spent a lot of time over the past month getting it ready to move in, packing my stuff, and moving.

Usually when you tell people this, one of the first questions they will ask (at least in New York City) is how you found the place that you bought. Now, of course I had a real estate agent, but I had another indispensable tool: a website called StreetEasy.

Twittering a 7-hour client meeting

Today we had a full-day workshop with a client, and I periodically felt the need to twitter about it. There’s nothing in here specific to the client, and it’s probably interesting to no one, but I’m going to post it anyway.

• Bostoners are going to be parading today. Should be passing by the office where we’re meeting sometime in the next hour. about 7 hours ago from web
• Starting a 7 hour client meeting, and yes, I’ve had coffee. about 7 hours ago from web
• Have to remember that outside NY and some places out west, bagels are probably not worth having. about 7 hours ago from web
• Clarification: NY bagels and “out west” bagels are totally different species, but both yummy. about 7 hours ago from web
• Why take a perfectly good blondie and ruin it with raisins? about 4 hours ago from web
• damn it, lunch and caffeine withdrawal are making me crash about 3 hours ago from web
• the morning’s discussion was pretty congenial, but this afternoon, with discussion of personas, the room has suddenly become a bit hostile about 3 hours ago from web
• turns out that the problem isn’t so much with the personas themselves, but with the fact that we’re calling them “personas” about 2 hours ago from web
• one of the skeptics has become a supporter. Awesome about 2 hours ago from web
• turns out that they like the sausage, but they actually DIDN’T want to see the tour of the factory about 25 minutes ago from web

STC 2008 - Day 4

The last day of the Semantic Technology Conference has a few morning panels, a closing keynote, and then some afternoon seminars. But the day is really about saying goodbye to everyone, finally introducing yourself to a few of the people you’ve been crossing paths with for the past week, and making that annual trip to Koo-ki Sushi. Well, that’s what it’s about for me, anyway.

STC 2008 - Day 3

Started out the day with my own presentation - Survey of Taxonomy Tools (follow the link to view the slides). It seemed to be pretty well received, for the most part. I included some time for discussion, and several people contributed interesting comments and questions. I was pretty happy with the turnout considering that this session was first thing in the morning.

After that I was so relieved, I’m surprised I could do anything, but I jumped right back into some interesting presentations, including a panel on Developing Semantic Web Applications, a talk on Calais, and a keynote that included several of the Rising Stars of the Semantic Web. Then I ended the day on the speaking side of the table again.

STC 2008 - Day 2

Started the day out with keynote speeches by Nova Spivack (Radar Networks) & Eric Miller (Zepheira). This was followed by presentations, of which my favorites were on Persistent Identifiers, Blue Organizer, and Bringing Semantics to Mainstream Markets. I closed the day out by going to the vendor exhibits.

Semantic Technology Conference 2008 - Day 1

It occurred to me, towards the end of day one of this conference, that I’ve been making my panel choices based on the speaker more than the on the topic. Now that I know more about who is doing what, this seems to be a better indicator of whether I’ll find the presentation interesting. Of course, I still take the topic into consideration, but my knowledge of the speaker will carry equal weight and will certainly come into play as a tie breaker.

So, today I went to one tutorial by some guys from DERI and one by some guys from Metaweb (makers of Freebase), and then a presentation by Tom Ilube, of Garlik. All three were just as excellant as I’d hoped.

Semantic Technology Conference 2008

Heading out to San Jose tomorrow for STC 2008. In addition to my presentation, Surveying Taxonomy Building Tools (Wednesday, May 21, 8:30-9:30AM), I’ll also be participating in a late addition panel called How to Internally Market Semantic Web Technologies in Large Enterprises (Wednesday, May 21, 5:30-6:30PM). Hope to see you there!

Devastating Success

I ran across the phrase “devastating success” in an old article called The Wal-Mart You Don’t Know. It’s about the impact of Wal-Mart’s pricing policies on the companies that supply them with merchandise. The complete sentence was “For Vlasic, the gallon jar of pickles became what might be called a devastating success.”

I love the way this simple phrase expresses a fairly complex concept - to achieve what you set out to accomplish, but in so doing, ending up worse off than you were before. I’ve seen this happen, and I’ve generally described the phenomenon as “they failed by succeeding”. But I think devastating success is so much more elegant.

(Thanks, Jason, for pointing me to the article.)

Twittering: Broadcasting the Inner Monologue

Last night at about 2am I finally bowed to the pressure to sign up for Twitter. I’m still not sure how I feel about it. I have a tendency towards, shall we say, over-analyzing. I like to deliberate, which is generally not as highly valued an approach as on-demand spontaneous displays of genius, but I’m not sure that uninhibited exposure of my every thought is the solution to that problem. (And yes, I realize that “on-demand” and “spontaneous” are, by nature, in conflict.)

There are a few other reasons that I’ve been resisting Twitter.

Is relevance enough?

I’ve been thinking a lot about semantic search and what makes something relevant. I realized that, in addition to something “having significant and demonstrable bearing on the matter at hand” (M-W), there are at least two other factors that affect how useful an item of content is.

The first is: Quality. Something can be very pertinent to a topic, but if it’s unclear, incomplete, inaccurate, or just plain bad then it probably isn’t going to do you much good. A blurry image of someone doesn’t really let you know what they look like.

The second is Timeliness. This one is tricky - it has to do with the lifecycle of a content item. The most common offenders on the web are usually really old content (often with no date stamp, so you can only guess how old and out-of-date it is). But premature content can be just as worthless. How many times have you seen something of interest, months before you had reason to act on it, then when the appropriate time rolls around you’ve forgotten about it? Or maybe you read something at a time when you really didn’t understand the significance, then later you couldn’t remember where you saw it, or how to get back to it?

So, if semantics are a better way of expressing relevance, and perhaps social media sharing can help us navigate to high quality content, what’s going to help us determine the timeliness of content?