Letting Your Content Self-organize And Build Correlations

Social Media Benefits for Search
As the interest in social media continues to grow, it's fascinating to see how it intersects with search. WebProNews recently spoke with Stephan Spencer of Covario...

Recent Articles

Honestly Assessing Your Organization For...
This is the second in a series of my notes on the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston, June 14- 17. This post covers the first half of afternoon portion...

How Will Enterpise 3.0 Affect Your Knowledge...
I recently attended the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium for the second time. It is an annual one-day conference, held on the MIT campus. The site describes it as an event "where CIOs and other senior business executives...

Process-Alignment Remains The Key To Effectiveness
Before there was enterprise 2.0 I used to think that, except for utilities like email, most business information-based software such as knowledge...

Adopting Enterpise 2.0 Using Best Practices
I recently read a post, Why Best Practices Don't Work for Knowledge Work, by my friend, Luis Suarez. It nicely articulated some ideas I have been thinking about...

Knowledge Management Is The Gatekeeper...
Last Friday, my good friend, the always enlightening Euan Semple, posted one of those very thought provoking blog posts that one cannot ignore, just like that.

07.01.10

Letting Your Content Self-organize And Build Correlations

By Bill Ives

This is the ninth in a series of my notes on the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston, June 14- 17. This one is different as it covers the session led by myself and by my Darwin colleague, Thierry Hubert, Using Chaos Theory Principals to Overcome Information Overload within the Enterprise and on the Web. Here is our description and then summary of my opening comments follows. The next post will cover Thierry's comments.

"With the addition of social media to the already increasing amount of Web content companies are spending more resources trying to make sense of what is happening. In addition, the connections between formal, informal, structured and unstructured information are becoming more difficult to establish. It may only get worse with the advent of auto-generated content and other content "farms."
In this session we will explore and discuss how the application of chaos theory to this issue can help break the silos of information and allow the emergence of meaningful awareness for better decision making.

This new paradigm moves beyond Page Rank to reduce the impact of traditional SEO techniques that elevate low quality content. We will look at how the visualization of connections between content related to a particular theme can reveal new relationships and help with the discovery and awareness of trends, both anticipated and unanticipated."

I started by saying that we do not see Chaos Theory as put in practice through our Darwin Awareness Engine™ as a replacement for Google. We see it as a complement. It is an awareness or discovery engine not a search engine.

For example, when I want to find the TV schedule for the NBA playoffs or the Web Site of the Boston Celtics or even the Los Angeles Lakers, or an article I heard about at this conference, I turn to Google. I use Google when I know what I am looking for.

If I want to find the stories I did not know to look for about a topic of interest, if I want to discover new things, if I want to see the breaking news in real time, the stories generating the most buzz, I turn to Darwin. Chaos theory does not offer a precise answer, but it reveals a movement or trend as it occurs. I use Darwin when I want to explore any area of interest in more depth.

Now if I go to Google I get a linear list of results rank ordered by its external framework. Google decides what is important for you. Darwin provides an overview of the 100 top themes related to your topic of interest visualized in a tag cloud type structure and allows you to explore the ones that appeal to you. You become the decider and we will show some real time examples.

Rather than taking a linear, deterministic approach to finding content through seeking repeatable patterns on the Web with an external framework like page rank as done by Google, we use Chaos Theory to find non-repeatable patterns in Web content that come and go in real time. Rather than using an external framework, we look for self-organizing patterns within the content itself.

Continue reading this article.

About the Author:
Dr. Bill Ives is an independent consultant and writer who has worked with Fortune 100 companies in business uses of emerging technologies for over 20 years. For several years he led the Knowledge Management Practice for a large consulting firm.. Now he primarily helps companies with their business blogs. He is also the VP of Social Media and blogger for TVissimo, a new TV schedule search engine. Prior to consulting, Dr. Ives was a Research Associate at Harvard University exploring the effects of media on cognition. He obtained his Ph. D. in Educational Psychology from the University of Toronto. Bill can be reached at his blog: Portals and KM. He also writes for the FastForward blog and the AppGap blog.

About KnowledgeManagementNews
Strategies for maximizing return on information resources

KnowledgeManagementNews is brought to you by:

WebProNews.com	Jayde.com
MarketingNewz.com	SalesNewz.com
CareerNewz.com	InvestNewz.com
networknewz.com	WebsiteNotes.com
AdvertisingDay.com	ManagerNewz.com
SearchNewz.com	CRMNewz.com