What I do know about is what knowledge is online. Since Sir Tim Berners-Lee (Yes. He was knighted.) created the World Wide Web to link documents together on the then nascent Internet, knowledge became more than monolithic documents or books that were linked loosely via citations and references. Instead of specifying in APA, MLA, Chicago, or Turabian style where the source of a particular knowledge was, one could directly link it using something called “HyperText”, or what some know as “Hyper Text Markup Language”. Today, all websites that you see online are built with a combination of HTML, some JavaScript, and possibly some Flash or Java.

Never mind what the knowledge is built with. Let’s examine very briefly the trend of tagging and keywording content. “Tagging” or “keywording” existing content can help web site users browse through indexes of such tags or keywords similar to how a book may be indexed by the editors and publishers. What was the first representation of such archaic systems on the Internet? Search Engines. Search engines were of two varieties. Directories such as Yahoo or Excite and Search Indexes such as Alta Vista. Both had their place. If you wanted to browse through a human edited directory, you had good reason to. People had taken the time to classify and organize the websites using their God given intellect. If you wanted to search, you also had good reason to.

Since the computer was able to search all of the content in a set of knowledge automatically, search indexes could be created using complex algorithms. One of the reasons Google succeeded in the search indexing industry was because they figured that relevant pages would link to each other and the more relevant websites would have higher density of connections. Similar sites around similar sets of knowledge would coalesce using the network effect to create centers of knowledge. Further more, content that is properly tagged and keyworded can heighten the quality of the search because the search engine has the power to correlate keyword usage and the keywords themselves.

What is OpenCalais?

The Calais Web Service:  The Calais web service automatically attaches rich semantic metadata to the content you submit. Using natural language processing, machine learning and other methods, Calais categorizes and links your document with entities (people, places, organizations, etc.), facts (person “x” works for company “y”), and events (person “z” was appointed chairman of company “y” on date “x”). (OpenCalais 2009)

Now that you have a bird’s eye view of how knowledge is stored and sought online, let’s talk about OpenCalais. OpenCalais is a toolkit that can be used by Content Management systems to automatically find the best set of keywords to represent a particular piece of content. Instead of having to pour your blood, toil, sweat, and tears, you can have a machine do it for you. OpenCalais is not for consumers and must be integrated into an existing piece of online content management software, or be integrated into a custom solution.
If you have a 5-10 page website, you probably don’t need to use OpenCalais. If you have a catalog of any kind, be it books, products, article, or news you should look into integrating this tool so that your website becomes easier to search and navigate on your website as well as through external search engines. OpenCalais looks at your content and finds out if there are references to people, cities, companies, industry terms, and a number of other existing knowledge centers.

A test using the OpenCalais Document Viewer

To demonstrate what OpenCalais can extract from your content, I submitted the content of this article above this sentence to get this screenshot. I’m only showing the highlight of one found term. Similarly, the other terms that were found are connected to vast amounts of knowledge already exist intent on the internet. Those knowledge centers have relevant information and hence if your content is relevant, it is given a high content relevancy rating for each word that it finds. Apparently, my article on “Online Knowledge” only gets a rating of 35%. It’s better than nothing. I’ll try again next time. You can try yourself using their Document Viewer. If you want help in implementing this great tool, let us know by contacting us through our website’s Contact Us page.

Last week, it was brought to my attention that Elgg–an open source Social Networking Platform–was holding a conference on Social Media for Education, and a more specific conference on Elgg. I know and understand the needs of Education that the promise of Social Media can bring. I was very glad someone decided to bring people together to talk about it. Since it was on Friday and I was at work that day, I couldn’t make it. Thankfully, I did make the second conference on Saturday.

At ElggCamp Boston 2009, I was able to see the need for the "Social Networking Platform".Speakers made it very clear that Elgg was not for the person that needed to put up a generic social network to link people together. Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, and Twitter do that just fine.

Jules Verne could see us going to the moon, and John F. Kennedy  actually pushed our country to do it. Star Trek could see us using tri-corders, and Motorola created it as the first cell phone. In my opinion, the iPhone, it’s market of applications, and growing user base is the best way to gain access to and interact with information. It also helps you get in touch with people, but I think face to face is the best way to interface with other humans.

Over the course of my trip to New York City this weekend, I realized exactly how valuable my iPhone is. When I got off my bus at 31st Street and 7th Avenue, I wanted to use my gym membership at the sports club. I went online on my iPhone, looked up the nearest 24 hour gym in their network, and copied and pasted the address into the Google Maps application. In about 2 minutes, I was on my way. After I arrived and couldn’t get into the side of the building which was advertised, I looked up the phone number online, gave them a call and got in. That’s convenience.

The sports club’s web site is not optimized for the iPhone, but since the built-in Safari Browser is a full-fledged browser, I was able to navigate with some effort and get what I needed. If the web site was actually created for the iPhone, it would have saved me some time from zooming in and out, panning left and right to get around. If they had an "app" for that, I might have been able to log into it with my account and it would have been geo-location aware of where I was and tell me the nearest branches of the club. Why don’t they create an "app for that"?

This is all possible and contradictory to popular belief, the functionality that I just described doesn’t have to be developed as an iPhone Application. Much of the functionality can be created in HTML as a web application and placed on the Internet. Google has done a great job by making all of their applications as iPhone friendly "webapps" which behave like iPhone applications.

Recently, some plugins have been released to make your WordPress blog iPhone friendly. Available at Brave New Code, the WPTouch Mobile Theme and Plugin for WordPress takes your standard WordPress blog and makes it look, feel, and behave as an iPhone application with nice transitions.

Static Content Sites

Many organizations have also released informational web sites in a handy, iPhone friendly format. Their sole purpose is to disseminate information. Web Apps such as the Athens Tourist Guide :  and Pocket Cambridge : are basically lists and tables of static HTML that look nice on an iPhone or an iTouch. Do you have information that can be useful to iPhone users? There are some really easy ways to get it out there.

1. iWebKit – “Iwebkit is the revolutionnairy kit used to create high quality iPhone and iPod  touch websites in a few minutes and is based on an LGPL license. In the first 4 months of it’s existance the pack has greatly evolved from a basic idea to a project that has reached worldwide fame!”

2. iUI – It has the following

1. Create Navigational Menus and iPhone interfaces from standard HTML
2. Use or knowledge of JavaScript is not required to create basic iPhone pages
3. Ability to handle phone orientation changes
4. Provide a more "iPhone-like" experience to Web apps (on or off the iPhone)

Dynamic Content Sites

Do you have programming ability or resources which you can utilize to push out your content from your organizational and institutional databases? You can probably use the aforementioned tools in conjunction with dynamic server side languages, but you might want to look into the following options to make your life easy.

1. ComponentOne iPhone Studio – ComponentOne’s studio is a rich set of ASP.NET Server Controls which is beyond compare when it comes to giving you a competitive advantage in creating dynamic applications fast. Some of the included server controls are : Calendar, ViewPort, CoverFlow ( Like the iTunes record browser ), and MultiView ( like the Photo explorer in the iPhone Camera application ).

2. iWebKit for Grails – This plugin provides integration with iWebkit, a powerful User Interface Library for Safari development on iPhone. By using this plugin, the grail developer will have an iphone web app skeleton (CSS and javascript) but also a extended tag library helping in creating iphone web pages in an easy,clean and fast way. If you are a Java developer or your company has them, and have gotten the hang of Groovy, this might be the path for you.

3. iUI with Asp.NET – iUI is very simple and some people have taken some steps to create their own integration for ASP.NET and iUI. This page points you to some third party resources which may be helpful for you in creating dynamic iUI applications.

Possible Scenarios and Tips

How can you capitalize on the iPhone and iTouch user? Here are some ideas which may work out for you.

1. If you have a Calendar of events, you can add iCalendar format links which can let users download the event data and add it to their iPhone Calendar.

2. If you have a location or event search which requires an address or a zip code, you can use W3C’s Geolocation API which is supported by the built-in Safari browser on iPhones.

3. If you have a member’s only directory, you can create an interface which can list people’s information as well as publish their contact info in the vCard format so that they can add it to their contact lists.

a form of protection provided by the laws of the United States (title 17, U. S. Code) to the authors of “original works of authorship,” including literary, dramatic, musical, artistic, and certain other intellectual works. This protection is available to both published and unpublished works. Section 106 of the 1976 Copyright Act generally gives the owner of copyright the exclusive right to do and to authorize others to do the following:

• To reproduce the work in copies or phonorecords;
• To prepare derivative works based upon the work;
• To distribute copies or phonorecords of the work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending;
• To perform the work publicly, in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and motion pictures and other audiovisual works;
• To display the work publicly, in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and pictorial, graphic, or sculptural works, including the individual images of a motion picture or other audiovisual work; and

And it is automatically secured as soon as the work is created in a “fixed form,” whether or not the author formally registers.

Understandably, many people find this a little…confining.

It’s always been possible to quote written works and to use them as inspiration for one’s own writing, with appropriate citation.  If it weren’t, no college student would ever be able to write a research paper, as the very concept requires supporting evidence.

Things get a little murkier in other media, though.  Hip-hop and rap music are founded on sampling beats.  Visual images are used to illustrate points online and in public presentations all the time.  Jazz “standards” are called standards for a reason – every working jazz musician knows and can perform those tunes at the drop of a hat, or of a spontaneous jam session.  Whole communities write fan fiction around existing imaginary universes.

Most of those things don’t meet the official definition of “fair use”:

Section 107 [of the US Code] contains a list of the various purposes for which the reproduction of a particular work may be considered “fair,” such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research.  Section 107 also sets out four factors to be considered in determining whether or not a particular use is fair:

1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
3. amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

Which definition, you will note, is very vague (even the US Copyright Office admits this).  Fair use was famously invoked for a reprint of 300 words from President Gerald Ford’s 30,000 word speech pardoning Richard Nixon – and it was not successful.

The whole idea of copyright, fair use, and intellectual property rights exploded into popular consciousness with the release of DJ Danger Mouse’s Grey Album, which was a mashup of the music from the Beatles’ White Album and vocals from Jay Z’s Black Album.  Mashups have been a regular practice of live performances by club DJs for years, but this was actually released as an album.  EMI, holder of copyright to the White Album, went ballistic.

Enter into this morass Creative Commons.  Founded in 2001, the purpose of Creative Commons is to:

[make] it easier for people to share and build upon the work of others, consistent with the rules of copyright.
[Creative Commons provides] free licenses and other legal tools to mark creative work with the freedom the creator wants it to carry, so others can share, remix, use commercially, or any combination thereof.

In other words, creators of original works can now reserve SOME rights to their works.

These options can be combined in a variety of ways to allow the author to decide whether and how other people can re-use her original work.

Simple idea – big impact, with over 130 million works currently estimated to be covered by Creative Commons licensing.

So you have no excuse not to get out there and collaborate!

Resources:

• Copyright Basics, US Copyright Office – http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ1.pdf
• Fair Use, US Copyright Office – http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html
• 10 Big Myths about Copyright Explained, Brad Templeton, http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html
• Fair Use Interpretations and Guidelines, Lloyd L. Rich, The Publishing Law Center, http://www.publaw.com/fairuse.html

Feeding America is the nation’s largest charitable hunger-relief organization. They are a network of more than 200 member food banks and food-rescue organizations, serving all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico.

The new Intranet, named HungerNet, launched at their annual network conference in May to rave reviews.

Feeding America engaged Beaconfire to help them develop a knowledge management strategy and redesign their Intranet.  The existing Intranet, used by the network members and the national staff, was not well organized, not intuitive, hard to update and difficult to use. Feeding America needed a new site and system that would allow them to promote 2-way communications and knowledge sharing between national staff and network members.

We started the project by first helping Feeding America define how the Intranet fit into their overall knowledge management strategy, gather input from the network members on content and feature priorities, and establish clear objectives for the Intranet redesign.

A cross-organizational team, with participants from the network members and the national office, worked with us to further identify features and requirements for the new Intranet and select new technology. After considering several options for the content management and intranet features, the team felt that Microsoft SharePoint (MOSS 2007) was the best fit. Making the technology decision before design was critical because it allowed us to design the information architecture, wireframes and business logic around SharePoint’s framework. This saved Feeding America time and money by limiting the scope of customization needed during development. While the main point of the redesign was usability, Feeding America also wanted a new creative design that was engaging, welcoming, and highlighted those features that were priorities for the network members.

For the implementation, Beaconfire worked with Feeding America’s SharePoint vendor, PointBridge, by providing overall project management and quality assurance testing.

And, if you’re a non-profit: how does this affect you ability to reach your supporters? 

The problem of information overload can be thought of as a signal-to-noise issue.  The signal, like a radio signal, consists of all the content you actually want and need from the internet: travel plans from a visiting friend, an urgent question from your boss, or a blog post from a key thinker in your field.  The noise is everything that gets in the way, all the irrelevant or unimportant (to you) content that you need to dig through to find the signal.  That includes chain emails from friends and coupons from Amazon.com, but also a lot of content that might be interesting if only there weren’t so much of it.

Sorting out the signal from the noise takes up time.  For some people, slogging through the noise in their email becomes such a hopeless task that they declare email bankruptcy: they give up and start fresh with a new email address.  Other people find tools to stay organized: group their blogs in a feed reader, tag their emails, and generally use more technology to solve their problems with technology.  Some question whether information overload is as much of a problem as the media (and studies funded by software companies) tell us.  But whether or not we’re drowning in our email, managing the flow of information in our lives seems to be an increasing challenge.

If you’re a non-profit, there are simple things you can do to help your supporters avoid information overload – be part of the solution rather than part of the problem.  Your subscribers care about your cause, and they’ll support you when they think of your messages as important.  By making sure your messages come through as signal (and not as noise) in the minds of your supporters, you increase the chance they will pay attention, and you also help reduce their inbox clutter.  Everyone wins!

Some easy things you can do:

• Watch the frequency of your messages. If you send emails too often, they may start to feel like spam, even if spam filters don’t catch them.
• Have something to say. If your messages are pointed, relevant, and interesting, your supporters will look forward to reading them.  Tie your message to a specific action, or tell your supporters about an important new effort.  Make your point in the first paragraph of the email.  Ask yourself if this message is worth the time they’ll take to read it.  If it’s not, give it a bit more thought.
• Know your value to your subscribers. Chances are, they signed up for your list because they want something from it, be that information, involvement in your cause, or entertainment.  (I promise they didn’t sign up because they thought “hey, I don’t get enough email”…)  Know what your subscribers want, and give it to them.

If these tips sound suspiciously like email best practices, well, there’s a reason they call them “best practices.”  But unlike using a clever subject line or checking your spam score before sending, these tips help you strengthen your relationship with your list over time, not just boost your response to one email.  By respecting you subscribers’ inbox, you’re building a relationship of trust with them, one where they go out of their way to read your email because they know it’ll be worthwhile.

Microsoft has announced that the Service Pack 2 update to Microsoft Office 2007 will include support for the ODF document format used natively by OpenOffice (free) and StarOffice (very affordable). Equally exciting is the news that users of Office 2007 will also be able to author PDF 1.5 and PDF/A documents without the need for an additional plugin such as Acrobat.

As a user of OpenOffice at home, I am already able to work easily with MS Word and Excel files while retaining all (or nearly all) of the form and function of the originals and preserve their native .doc and .xls formats. I’m just hoping that MS Office’s support for the open format will increase confidence to the point where more companies and organizations will feel secure enough to move to one of the free office solutions entirely.  You sure can save a lot of money with free software, and OpenOffice is looking better all the time.

While this is likely good news, the announcement was also met with a healthy dose of skeptecism.

But lately, I’ve been wondering.

A couple months ago, at South by Southwest, an interview with Mark Zuckerberg famously went awry when the Twitter-feuled audience first started heckling the interviewer, then eventually took over the microphones. (If you are interested, check out this particularly thoughtful account of the event, which includes an amazing video of the interview with a twitter overlay).

A couple of weeks ago, I was at a different conference (the IA Summit) where Twitter was again used by the crowd, but this time in a far more sanguine way, to share information amongst the audience and make insightful comments about the presentations. It probably helped that the audience and the speakers actually knew each other, even if only passingly in some cases.

I got enough value from following the Summit’s twitter feed that I left thinking, could this actually be of value in a corporate setting?

After all, I’ve been to plenty of all-staff meetings, or large team meetings, where people are already bringing their laptops. The larger and longer the meeting, the more likely people are trying to at least keep an eye on their email. So, the technology is already in place in many offices to try adopting a twitter feed. And what is the value of twitter here?

A second, quiet, channel of information.

The bigger the room, the less anyone wants to interrupt the presenter’s flow to ask a question. The more likely the group is to simply go with the flow. If information they need isn’t provided, they might (if they are lucky) get a chance to ask a question afterwards, or they have to spend extra time cornering the presenter. Having a quiet alternate channel of communication is incredibly helpful. In particular, here are a few of the things that you might use twitter for:

1. Request a resource: “Can someone tell me where to find the .pdf that Michael is talking about?”
2. Expand on the content: “In addition to the companies listed, Arlene and I have started talking to Widget Co about this”
3. Gauge interest: “I was hoping to hear more about the bonus program. Anyone else?”
4. Brief side conversations: “Alan, should we be using this tool for Project Z? Looks like it might be helpful.”

In this way, having a second, quiet channel of information might increase the usefulness of a large meeting, or even help positively shape the direction of conversation without grinding things to a halt.

What do you think?

Editor’s  note: Each week, we do a survey of Beaconfire staff to get impressions on a variety of non-profit technology issues. All opinions expressed here are solely those of their authors. RSS is becoming ubiquitous, and with the sheer volume of content on the internet, more users are finding that they need a way to manage their content. This week, we asked the Beaconfire staff: How do you consume RSS content?

Eric, Senior Consultant: I aspire to have a complete set of Yahoo! pipes to perform elaborate analyses of of the blogosphere and social media about the the people and issues of importance to me, translates snobby foreign news sources into English to make me seem smart at parties, and otherwise leap tall buildings.

But in fact, I use the built in reader in IE7 to keep track of about 2 dozen environmental and tech/marketing blogs.

Ali, Marketing Consultant: I’m a fan of Google reader. It’s one of the easiest readers to set up, I can access it from any computer and I can track all the marketing and technology blogs I follow.

Amy, Functional Consultant: RSS is everywhere but I pro-actively consume RSS in two ways.  One is iGoogle – I use Google as my browser home and have set up a HOME tab with news (CNN, Top Stories), Weather, Moon Phases, HowTo Wiki and, of course, the BeaconfireWire feed.  My iGoogle also has an IA/UX tab with my favorite industry feeds (Boxes & Arrows, A List Apart, UX Matters, etc).  

I also use Bloglines to manage RSS feeds.  Bloglines has more advanced functionality than iGoogle in terms of managing feeds and I like how it lets me save articles in the feed queue for later so I can go back and re-read them when I have time.

Paul, Software Engineer: This may brand me as a neo-Luddite, but I don’t use RSS.  I’ve always preferred to actively seek information on a website rather than subscribing to a feed and having it delivered to me.  The moral of the story?  Make sure content that’s available in RSS feeds is conveniently indexed in HTML format on your website as well.

Marissa, Functional Consultant: RSS (like Web 2.0) is one of those technologies that isn’t really new, and has really always been around in some form. And everyone who uses the Internet probably consumes an RSS feed in one shape or another, even if they don’t know it. If you see a list of “latest news” on a web site in the past few years, you’ve likely consumed RSS content.

For my personal RSS use, I love Netvibes. The tabbing and rearranging let’s me keep my most important RSS Feeds up in the forefront, while allowing me to easily organize secondary feeds that I like to read from time to time.

Kate, Administrative Assistant: I’m obsessed with tracking the weather, both on my home laptop and on my iPhone. Especially since I’m new to this whole “East Coast Weather” thing, and I don’t have any windows at my desk, I use my iPhone to see what the weather’s like downstairs at least 5 times a day. I also check the weather in my hometown, as well as in Paris, London, New York, and Portland. I just like to see how we stack up. I also track stocks on my iPhone that I’ve not invested in, but I think I get some sick pleasure in watching other people lose their shirt. I guess a touch of schadenfreude’s good for the soul.

Kristin, Project Manager: Honestly, I don’t consume any RSS. I can’t even keep up with email (which is my primary "dashboard") so why add another "feed" to my list of things to try and keep up with.

John Brian, Marketing Consultant: I use a single Netvibes page as my portal at both work and home – it’s the only way I can avoid getting buried in content. I triage my content into pages – must-read items like my email, a couple political blogs, weather, and, most importantly, Beaconfire Wire live on the first tab, fun and goofy stuff, including Digg and my comic alert feed on the second (when you get the rest of your newspaper online a la carte, it’s important to get Dilbert and Doonesbury that way too), clients and other non-profits on the third, work-related tools, like Central Desktop and Basecamp on the fourth, and occasionally interesting, but non-required reading on subsequent tabs.

The key is making use of preview tooltips and titles to quickly and ruthlessly mark items as read – I’m not someone who deals well with unread items, either in my inbox or my feeds. But in the net, using RSS keeps me from having to check more than 100 sites several times a day, so it’s a real time-saver.