December 8, 2008 by knowledgenavigator
CIO Insight has announced their top 10 disruptive IT trends for the coming year.
New Media
Augmented Reality
Social Networks
Information Transparency
Web Waves
3D Printing
Molecular Computing
Cloud Computing
Semantics
Web as Reasoning Engine
Gartner has also announced their top 10 strategic technologies for 2009:
Virtualization
Cloud Computing
Servers — Beyond Blades
Web-Oriented Architectures
Enterprise Mashups
Specialized Systems
Social Software and Social Networking
Unified Communications
Business Intelligence
Green IT
There’s some overlap between the Gartner and CIO Insight lists (when you figure “Web Waves” on the CIO Insight list equates with “Business Intelligence” on the Gartner list). We can bet that no list of predictions will be dead on. The Gartner technologies have better explanations and straightforward categories …let’s hope clarity provides more direction (better understanding and informed leadership) and becomes a better predictor than something that’s much more ambiguous and uses some odd rather odd labels for these trends.
Posted in News, Trends | Tagged 2009, information technology, IT trends, predictions | Leave a Comment »
November 11, 2008 by knowledgenavigator
From Episode 104 of The Project Management Podcast…
Seven phases of a project:
- Phase 1 – Wild Enthusiasm
- Phase 2 – Disillusionment
- Phase 3 – Confusion
- Phase 4 – Panic
- Phase 5 – Search for the Guilty
- Phase 6 – Punishment of the Innocent
- Phase 7 – Promotion of the Non-Participants
Posted in Project Management | Tagged humour, projects | Comments Off
October 26, 2008 by knowledgenavigator
I’m very fond of the Common Craft videos. They take complex ideas on a variety of Web2.0 concepts and applications (RSS, Wikis, Social Networking, Social Bookmarking, Blogs, Online Photo Sharing, Twitter, Podcasting) and make them easy for anyone to understand.
As we gain expertise in a particular area of knowledge, it becomes difficult to provide a basic explanation of these technologies, especially to newbies. These videos are just a few minutes long (usually between two and five minutes) and have a distinctive style that is quite entertaining.
Lee and Sachi LeFever are Common Craft, a husband-and-wife company. Lee LeFever was interviewed by Jon Udell (Interviews with Innovators as part of the IT Converstaions Network). The 26 minute interview is almost longer than the dozen Common Craft videos that have been produced so far, but there are many insights that make this interview worth a listen.
As Albert Einstein stated: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler.” The efforts in paring these videos down to just what is needed really shows, however, LeFever says that with the success of the videos, he has been overwhelmed with requests for videos for various topics and applications. Many assume these short videos only take a short time to produce, but LeFever notes that several of the videos took forty and sometimes even more than eighty hours to complete.
Going by the statistics on these Common Craft videos that have been uploaded to YouTube, they are proving to be quite successful. Whether a newbie to these Web2.0 or an expert teaching newbies, the Common Craft site is a terrific resources for all – Twitter it, Blog it, and Social Bookmark it now!
Posted in Productivity | Tagged teaching video resource Web2.0 technology education | Leave a Comment »
October 10, 2008 by knowledgenavigator
Thanks to Roy Tennant for compiling a list of Library-related API’s. From a variety of services that can validate and be used to leverage additional information to a number of tools and specifications, this is a handy list of a number of essential API’s that can be used by many Libraries.
For those not familiar with them, an application programming interface (or API) is a set of functions, procedures, methods or classes that an operating system, library or service provides to support requests made by computer programs. Submit a chunk of data like an ISBN and an API can return a title and perhaps other related data. This is an oversimplication as many services like Amazon Web Services (AWS) API can handle many different types of data and respond handily with standardized output. Submission interfaces are often avoided with API’s and data is returned in a format like XML that can be more easily repurposed than an HTML results page. API’s have become quite fasionable with major Internet players like Google and Amazon and Facebook making their API’s widely available to developers. As indicated by part of the list compiled by Roy, there are many Library-oriented API’s based on standards like Z39.50 or OAI that have been developed by Libraries and are often forgotten with all the big Internet players.
Posted in Library Systems, Productivity | Tagged API, library IT, Library Systems, resource list | Leave a Comment »
September 5, 2008 by knowledgenavigator
So Google has introduced a new Browser of their own making called Chrome as a beta. Quite out of the blue it appears on the main Google search/home page:
“New! Download Chrome (BETA) – the new browser from Google”
Many are wondering what evil things Google up to and reviewing Chrome’s terms of service and it’s function:
Be sure to read Chrome’s fine print
Google pulls a Microsoft on user privacy
Does Google Have Rights to Everything You Send Through Chrome?
Review: Google’s Chrome needs more polish
Personally, I don’t think Firefox has anything to be too worried about, but it’s funny that Mozilla CEO, John Lilly, was just interviewed by Wired Magazine and discussing Mozilla’s relationship with Google:
Wired: Roughly 85 percent of your revenue comes from Google. What happens if Google decides to build its own browser?
Lilly: It’s kind of a sucker’s game to speculate about what Google’s going to do. That said, it was the Google guys who approached us — not the other way around — because Firefox was a good browser. Our relationship will be just fine, as long as we build something that people give a damn about.
Though I don’t think it’ll replace Firefox, I’m enjoying trying out Flock right now. Flock is Mozilla’s newest browser and its moniker is “the social web browser.” It says it’s for Social Animals, for Shutterbugs, for Bloggers, for Media Junkies, and for News Hounds. It brings in your news feeds, just like a good RSS reader should. It also brings in new and popular media feeds from popular destinations like Flickr and YouTube, but presents results in a very dynamic display. Where Flock really excels is with the Friend Activity Widget. Once you activate (or configure) a service such as Digg, Facebook, Flickr, Pownce, Twitter, or YouTube, you’ll receive feeds and updates from your friends using those services right in your browser. It also makes it easy to post or share your content with your friends or the world via these social network services that are integrated into the browser. There are add-ons or plug-ins for Flock as there are with Firefox, but I wasn’t able to locate one for Del.icio.us at this time (though there was one available for Zotero). Nevertheless, I think it’s definitely worth a try, especially if you’re very social ;)
Posted in Firefox | Tagged browsers, Chrome, competition, Firefox, Flock, Google, Mozilla | 1 Comment »
