Ayala Alternative Organizational Consulting

from delicious to diigo.com

2009-07-16T17:13:00.006+03:00

After years and years of using del.icio.us - delicious, I read a post from Howard Rheingold mentioning diigo.com and its integration with delicious.com.

I jumped in, had the API of diigo import my bookmarks from delicious and started to use the service.

It was indeed important to me to be able to keep my delicious account alive.

I still need to check what it means if I save a site into delicious: I guess I will have to make some manual imports regularly from delicious to diigo.com

I am still learning about the various functionalities of diigo.com such as the ability to add comments, create groups etc.

Since it is also a social network, there is a need for some critical massis and for me, it means creating links and relationships with existing members and eventually invite new members there.

My account in diigo: http://www.diigo.com/profile/pscheimann

in delicious: http://www.delicious.com/pscheimann

Presentation: how to find information on the Web

2009-07-09T15:49:00.001+03:00

I've just uploaded on slideshare a summary of the course I give on how to find information on the Web:

Finding information on the Web - methodology

View more presentations from Philippe Scheimann.

A post in pep-net about social bookmarking

2009-06-29T16:48:00.001+03:00

I wrote a post on social bookmarking and eParticipation in the framework of our work in POLITECH Institute

Learning about eParticipation through social bookmarking

WAVE Project - Climate Change

2009-03-25T17:04:00.005+02:00

I have started to work on the European WAVE project

updating wikipedia - world map of updaters

2008-07-24T15:14:00.002+03:00

There is this (beta) version of WikipediaVision providing all of the anonymous edits to Wikipedia (almost) in real-time.

I've turned it on and it is like sitting in a movie theatre and looking at the action taking place everywhere in the world:
every couple of minutes or so, there is someone somewhere who is editing a page of Wikipedia or adding an article.

delver - social search engine

2008-07-16T21:51:00.002+03:00

There is an interesting Israeli start-up providing (another) social search engine.

www.delver.com

This time, they start asking you to identify yourself so that they can fit the results according to your profile and all of the social networks you're part of.

It actually makes a good search when you search for instance for professionals who are experts in a specific field. e.g. "infopreneur"

Worth trying

wiki and bisto: similarities

2008-05-03T16:47:00.001+03:00

Check this hub I've just written.
It is part of a presentation I give on 'wiki in the workplace'

Why would an organization need a taxonomy?

2008-02-24T00:27:00.001+02:00

I had to prepare some document introducing taxonomy.

• Where do you store a file that is of interest to you? In which folder?.
• Do you have difficulties deciding upon which folder to store it?
• Do you have difficulties deciding upon the names of the folders and sub-folders ?
• Would you prefer not to have to store manually the file?
• Once you’ve found an interesting website, how do you save its URL?
• How do you retrieve a file you’ve stored several months ago?
• How do you manage your incoming email messages?

The following is a definition of terms used in the field of information :

Taxonomy: Taxonomy is "the science of classification". Usually taxonomy is a top down approach where one person (specialist) defines the categories and everyone else is using this classification.

Folksonomy: A folksonomy is a taxonomy created by people (users). It is used to categorize and retrieve Web pages, photographs, Web links and other web content using open ended labels called tags.

Ontology: An ontology is a shared understanding of some domain of interest. It is a structured information model of a domain capable of supporting reasoning by human users and software agents.

Additional terms
Tag: A tag is a (relevant) keyword or term associated with or assigned to a piece of information (like picture, article, or video clip), thus describing the item and enabling keyword-based classification of information it is applied to.

Tagging: describing the content of a web page in one or more simple words (tags). Often known as key words in academic articles.

Thesaurus: A taxonomy that also includes associated and related terms.

NLP search engine

2008-02-21T11:38:00.001+02:00

Grab this swicki from eurekster.com

Did you say "open source"

2008-02-18T23:21:00.003+02:00

I spent some time checking the various platforms on the Net providing open source programs and letting people upload their code.
I came up to the conclusion that there are some 'pure' platforms and some 'not so pure':
“Pure”
Apache Foundation and its “Sponsorship Program” 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization
Savane
Gforge.org
Rubyforge 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization
Not so “pure”…
Google Code
Launchpad : “Launchpad” is a registered trademark of Canonical Ltd.
Sourceforge.net

What do you think?

drip irrigation - another swiki search engine

2008-01-06T13:56:00.000+02:00

Grab this swicki from eurekster.com

Organic Agriculture drip irrigation - search engine

2008-01-05T10:34:00.000+02:00

just made the following :

Grab this swicki from eurekster.com

End of the Year ?

2007-12-29T14:04:00.000+02:00

While most of the Western World is away on vacation, here in Israel things keep being hectic.
Working as usual.

Jewish Holidays were in Sept/October and now everyday is a working day.
Even the New Year's Eve was celebrated on Friday night (28th) so that people can go to work as usual.

Searching for CoP - Communities of Practice

2007-12-09T18:30:00.000+02:00

Here is an example I provide when giving a presentation on ways to find information:

For some consulting project we've been involved lately, I needed to find some information concerning Communities of Practice (CoP).

When starting with a topic such as CoP, it is a good idea to use sites such as answers.com or ask.com that give you a first insight as well as a query in Google : "define:community of practice"
I also googled and started saving some relevant sites using my del.icio.us: my social bookmarking service.
In parallel, I was able to check the popularity of these sites in the community of del.icio.us users: it is possible to see the number of people who saved a specific site.

I was able to see all the sites (hundreds) of the community that were saved with the same tag:
Communityofpractice (in one word) as well as the most popular ones

A good thing is that it is possible to look at the comments/notes that people have made on this site.
When seeing an interesting comment, I was then able to see the list of sites saved by this person.
Actually, if this person has saved it and made some interesting comments, this makes it an interesting person to know, maybe an expert?

Today, I used for the first time lijit.com as you can see with the example of CoP.
It looks promising.

The Web: finding and $haring effectively

2007-12-08T14:40:00.000+02:00

We've given a 60-90 min presentation to Hi-Tech companies such as NDS and Comverse
as an introduction to our 1-3 day course on the following:

R.D. Roger, a librarian from Yale University, wrote in the 80s: "We are drowning in information and starving for knowledge". Indeed, there are more than 50 Billion web pages on the Internet and 500 times more in the 'Deep Web'.

While the use of search tools such as Google is simple, people are generally using less than 20% of its features and basically search the ocean of information based mostly upon their intuition and not systematically.

Knowledge workers spend up to to 30 percent of their work days looking for information and at least 50 percent of online searches are not successful.

There are more than 1 Billion Internet users and the daily volume of email has reached more than 100 Billion messages with about 70% of this being SPAM.

Organizations generate a large volume of valuable information that is increasingly hard to locate and use meaningfully. Information sources are growing constantly in volume and in complexity, which results in people storing more data in more places.

Web 2.0 has become a buzzword and it may not be clear how these technologies can fit in the business, save time and money, while increasing profits.

Successfully Working and collaborating in such an environment is a real challenge.

This 90 minute presentation will provide the following:

A systematic approach for finding information efficiently:

from “Google smart”: Google provides a large range of applications and features way beyond the usual search
to the “Deep Web”: most Search Engines can not access the deep web that is 500 times larger than the Web
via “Social Search Engines”: this new generation of search engine is taking into account the power of the community when searching

Ways to manage information internally, to collaborate and manage knowledge
Effective use of Web 2.0 tools such as RSS, blogs, bookmark sharing, wikis and more
and lots of tips

Welcome

2007-12-08T14:37:00.000+02:00

This is the official blog of Philippe Scheimann CEO of Ayala Alternative Organizational Consulting.

I'll use this space to post what we're up to, thoughts, news, stories etc.

Basically, we're into finding solutions to problems.
Problems and solutions usually involve organizational, technological and "human" aspects.