HB E-NEWSLETTER
produced biweekly by the e-Content Institute

April 25, 2005

Hot Bytes is a benefit of professional membership in the e-Content Institute. It's your source for news on Canada's knowledge and content management, e-business software and information products industries.

IN THIS ISSUE

- Thank you for responding to the conference survey
- Information Architecture for Content Management - 2 DAY WORKSHOP
- Conference presentations online
- Where the jobs are: librarians break into strategic roles
- The challenge of supporting print and electronic resources
- Google launches personal history feature
- Employees driving Wi-Fi adoption
- HighBeam Research announces suite of tools to help bloggers
- Canadian businesses embracing mobile technology to stay competitive
- Foreign Affairs rolls out InfoBank to deal with e-mail glut
- The future of blogging
- Content management trends
- Do you still need meta tags?
- Combat over collaboration
- Get notification of RSS feed updates with Feedbeep

Cast your vote in our e-poll!
Tell us what you think in our newest e-Content Institute poll:

Do you read more blogs than you did a year ago?

Cast your e-vote at www.econtentinstitute.org

Latest poll results:

Does your organization have a strategic plan to manage email archiving?

Yes - 41 %

No - 59 %

Thank you to everyone who voted in our poll. We'll have a new poll question for you every other week, and let you know the results in the next issue of the Hot Bytes e-newsletter.

Thank you for responding to the conference survey
We had a very good response rate and overall your feedback was very positive. Many of you took the time to add extra comments and we appreciate those. Overall, delegates rated the keynote speakers and the workshops very highly. As for the conference programs here are a few key results:
- 80% agreed that conference sessions were informative, interesting and well produced
- 83% said that topics and content were reflective to industry trends and needs
- 86% agreed that the 2005 Information Highways conference was valuable and worthwhile

Information Architecture for Content Management - 2 DAY WORKSHOP
Learn how to design your information architecture to support the user experience with in depth sessions on content modeling, metadata, establishing business rules, repository structures and workflow. Co-produced by the e-Content Institute and The Rockley Group and sponsored by Arbortext; June 7-8, Toronto. Register here

Conference presentations online
Just a reminder that more than 85 percent of the 2005 Information Highways conference presentations are now available on line at www.econtentinstitute.org/conference/presentations.asp

ii3, Canada's only full service Knowledge Management firm recently participated in the 2005 Information Highways Conference in Toronto. ii3 has offered to make their post-conference CD package available to not only those that signed up for this at the conference, but also to all Information Highways members and subscribers. This package includes:

· Knowledge Management: Making the Case for Business Utility - Presentation and Video Interviews
· Knowledge and Knowledge Management - ii3 White Paper
· Finding relevant knowledge: Classifying content in the enterprise - Presentation by ii3 and Stikeman Elliott LLP

If you are interested, please contact Jamie MacKay at jmackay@ii3.com

SIIA's Content Forum is focused on hands-on tactical information for operational managers and executives involved in creating, publishing and distributing digital content. May 24-25, 2005. Universal City, CA. More info: http://www.siia.net/cf/2005/

Where the jobs are: librarians break into strategic roles
Hiring demand for librarians is on the rise, writes Laura Stevens of CareerJournal.com, even as corporate-library staffs see their numbers fall. To advance their careers, corporate librarians are leaving the stacks far behind. The hottest jobs are in competitive-intelligence research, says Janice R. Lachance, executive director of the Special Libraries Association (SLA) in Washington, D.C. Many library positions no longer have "the L-word" in their job titles, she says. Instead, they may be called an information scientist, knowledge manager, taxonomist (someone who classifies information), information broker or market-research manager, says Sarah Johnson, Webmaster of LibraryJobPostings.org, a career site for professionals. Mari Vaydik is an example of a librarian whose career path is taking a new twist. The 28-year-old earned a master's degree in library science last year. Through networking with friends, she was invited to interview with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra and started as its manager of development research five months ago. The job, which pays $40,000 a year, she says, requires research expertise, as well as people skills. Ms. Vaydik spends time "chatting it up" in the donors' lounge before and after concerts, she says. She still considers herself a librarian.
Source: WSJ CareerJournal.com

The challenge of supporting print and electronic resources
C&RL News contributor Joan Gotwals writes that “Funding college and research libraries has never been easy, but today it is especially challenging. Supporting the hybrid environment of the print and the electronic worlds and the multiple needs this creates, as well as keeping up with rapidly changing technology, requires increasing library resources. At the same time, our institutions of higher learning are struggling to meet overall costs of higher education. After years of significant tuition increases, there are growing concerns about the affordability of higher education in the United States. In a recent study cited in the New York Times, only one state, California, was highlighted for affordable higher education opportunities.1 Colleges and universities without question are under substantial pressure to slow the pace of rising costs and, in many cases, restrict or cut budgets. As responsible citizens of an institution that asks all units to exercise restraint in expenditures, librarians must ask serious questions about what and how they do things and seek to find the most efficient ways of supporting institutional priorities.”
Source: American Library Association

Google launches personal history feature
AP Business Writer Michael Liedtke reports on the recent launch of a personal history feature by Google. "Google Inc. is experimenting with a new feature that enables the users of its online search engine to see all of their past search requests and results, creating a computer peephole that could prove as embarrassing as it is helpful. Activating Google's "My Search History" service, unveiled Wednesday afternoon at http://labs.google.com, requires users to create a personal login with a password. Users of Google's e-mail, discussion groups and answer services can simply use their existing log-ins. The service allows users to decide if they want Google to automatically recognize them without having to log in each time they use the same computer. Those who prefer to log in on each visit can use a link that will appear in the right-hand corner of Google's home page. Whenever a user is logged in, Google will provide a detailed look at all their past search activity. The service also includes a "pause" feature that prevents it from being displayed in the index. Users will be able to pinpoint a search conducted on a particular day, using a calendar that's displayed on the history page. The service sometimes will point out a past search result related to a new search request."
Source: Yahoo! News

Employees driving Wi-Fi adoption
Iain Thomson from VNUnet.com notes that enterprises are being urged to wake up to the growing security risks associated with employees installing Wi-Fi in the workplace without the permission or knowledge of IT departments. "Deploy Wi-Fi or your employees will do it for you," warned Chris Clark, chief executive for wireless broadband at BT. "The reality is that the benefits of Wi-Fi are very nice. As soon as individuals find this out they will install it themselves, if the IT department won't, and that's a huge security problem." This has happened already at a large Boston financial institution, according to Anurag Lal, vice president of business development at wireless networking firm iPass. Lal explained that the organisation had been in contact with iPass about introducing Wi-Fi in its offices. It decided not to install the network but called back six months later after discovering that employees had taken matters into their own hands.
Source: VNUnet

HighBeam Research announces suite of tools to help bloggers
Not Your Ordinary Press Release......instead, welcome to a new form of communications our CMO has nicknamed a "Blog Release." What better way to announce the new suite of blog tools by HighBeam Research than to blog this press release? Getting official stuff out of the way – the dateline is Chicago, IL, and here's the top of the ol' inverted pyramid for you purists: Resource or rumor mill? The burgeoning blogosphere, designed to share opinions and information, can be both – often containing links to sources readers don't know. But with the first-ever suite of blogging tools launched by an online publisher, HighBeam Research is giving millions of bloggers a more trustworthy voice and blog readers a more credible resource. BTW, go here for a definition of blog (otherwise know as "web log"). And, if you want to read the more traditional press release we posted on Business Wire, it's here.
Source: HighBeam Research

Canadian businesses embracing mobile technology to stay competitive
CATAAlliance's online poll conducted by ePenso.com shows that 69 per cent of Canadian businesses surveyed believe mobile technology is helping them better compete, and 55 per cent are using mobile technology either in key departments like sales, or across the entire company. Adoption of mobile technology has a strong foothold in the Canadian market and is gaining acceptance - 38 per cent of respondents said they were either evaluating mobile technology or in the process of deploying it in certain departments or across their organization. Canadian businesses are optimistic about the adoption of mobile technology with 82 per cent believing that the portable office - the ability to work from anywhere, anytime will be a reality in the next five years. In addition, 53 per cent of respondents think their companies will adopt converged voice and data networks to provide workers with access to voicemail and e-mail through the device of their choice within the next three years.
Source: CATA Alliance

Foreign Affairs rolls out InfoBank to deal with e-mail glut
IT Business.ca writer Kathleen Sibley reports that the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada (DFAIT) is in the middle of rolling out a system that aims to combine the best of both the electronic and the paper-based worlds. InfoBank, which comprises information policies, practices and tools as well as support, is designed to help employees cope with the ever-increasing amount of information they’re flooded with, including some 60 million e-mails a year passing over the department’s network. It’s also designed to help employees share information more easily and securely. “Back in the paper world there existed manuals that explained to our correspondence officers and to our foreign affairs and trade officers whom to carbon copy, whom to include in correspondence and how to write memos,” said DFAIT senior policy strategist Joel Denis. “When you placed a computer on everybody’s desktop and we gave them the new world of the Internet and e-mail and told them how easy it was to send the policy to someone in Abu Dabi, for example, we forgot to address some of those key practices.” As a result, he said, employees who were carbon copied on an e-mail for information purposes only suddenly began taking action on everything they found in their inbox. “That would seem simple and basic, but in our department it was a nightmare.”
Source: ITBusiness.ca
For more on this story see Joel Denis’ presentation IM Revitalization in Foreign Affairs Canada. Orginally presented at the 2005 Information Highways Conference

The future of blogging
Recently, blogs have been credited with everything from CBS News anchorman Dan Rather's departure, to unauthorized previews of the latest Apple Computer products, to new transparency in presidential campaigns. The big question is whether blogs, short for Web logs, have the staying power to become more than just online diaries. Wharton legal studies professor Dan Hunter puts blogging right up there with the printing press when it comes to sharing ideas and disseminating information. "This is not a fad," Hunter says. "It's the rise of amateur content, which is replacing the centralized, controlled content done by professionals." The growth rate of blogs is impressive. Technorati, a search engine that monitors blogs, tracked more than 8 million online diaries as of March 21, up from 100,000 just two years ago. A new blog is created every 7.4 seconds. That adds up to 12,000 new blogs a day, 275,000 posts a day and 10,800 updates an hour. "At its most basic level, it's a technology that is lowering the cost of publishing" and turning out to be "the next extension of the Web," says Wharton legal studies professor Kevin Werbach. "Blogging is still in its early days. It's analogous to where the Web was in 1995 and 1996. It's not clear how it will turn out."
Source: CNET News

Content management trends
Consultant Catherine Elder writes that it is no wonder that content management (CM) growth remains strong with a booming market for applications that promise great cost savings and productivity for companies that invest in them. According to a Deloitte report on Enterprise Content Management, CM cuts labor costs associated with authoring and design by 50% in both online and print endeavors. Not surprisingly, the need for managing and understanding information in order to effectively impact job performance will continue to grow. Content management systems (CMS) will continue to enjoy sales growth as companies deploy new systems or revise current ones. The CMS industry will follow its trend of consolidation by acquisition, merger and partnerships to provide deeper services in managing content. And more workers can be classified as “knowledge workers” whose performance requires efficient access and use of information. We’re dealing with more information than ever before and most of it is in digital format. “Only one third of one percent of content today makes it to the printed page. Thus, although digital content takes less space, it will require focused effort to devise appropriate management systems,” says Peter Lyman & Hal Varian of UC, Berkley, School of Information Management Systems, authors of “How Much Information”.
Source: Prescient Digital Media

Do you still need meta tags?
Paul J. Bruemmerof Pandia writes that years ago, meta tags were the magic bullet for achieving high search engine rankings with organic search engine optimization. Today, most meta tags are not as powerful as they once were - except for the Title and Description Tags. Used in SEO and web site development, a meta tag is the hidden HTML code containing text describing web page content information for search engine spiders. Meta tags exist behind the scenes and are not ordinarily seen by site visitors unless they click on View Source. The Title Tag is particularly important today because it becomes the hyperlink shown on the search engine result pages (SERPs) of most major search engines. The Description Tag is used as an expanded description of the web site, following the Title hyperlink in many search engine SERPs.
Source: Pandia

Combat over collaboration
In an article for BusinessWeek online, Jay Greene in Redmond, Washington writes about the combat over collaboration. "Starkey Laboratories Inc. is known for its high-end hearing aids, but until recently the process that engineers at the Eden Prairie (Minn.) company used to design them was decidedly low-end. They would cook up a design concept and then e-mail it to colleagues so they could make changes. But because multiple copies of each design were circulating, there was a lot of confusion about which version was the most up-to-date. Rather than wait for Starkey's tech department to deliver a solution, a group of frustrated engineers took matters into their own hands. They used Microsoft Corp. (MSFT ) software to covertly set up an internal Web site for collaboration. They were able to go online to set common goals and deadlines, and to maintain one version of a design for their project that anyone could modify. "It immediately increased productivity," says Timothy D. Trine, vice-president for hearing research and technology. Starkey now has 450 collaboration Web sites for various projects."
Source: BusinessWeek online

Get notification of RSS feed updates with Feedbeep
You may be quite content just letting most of your RSS feeds sit in your feed reader until you get around to 'em. On the other hand, there may be feeds whose content updates you want to know immediately. In that case you may want FeedBeep, at http://feedbeep.com/ (hat tip to Library Stuff. This service does cost money, but if you want to be alerted to changes in RSS feeds and have an SMS mobile-phone, this could be very useful. First you'll have to register. This requires a user name, desired password, and of course the phone number. Once you've registered FeedBeep will send a message to your phone with additional information. (Note that this service is offered worldwide, but you may want to check the list of supported providers at http://my.feedbeep.com.)
Source: ResearchBuzz

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