Archive for March, 2003
March 30, 2003
Google Goes SETI
The Google Compute Project is an extension of the Google Search Bar that will add your computer to a network of others that are working on collaborative processing projects, ala the wildly successful SETA@home project. (No ETs found yet, though.) Google will use your computer to do computations during periods of time that it has extra processing power avaiable (such as when you are reading weblogs). Looks like they are donating the processing time to charities and/or academic research projects. (Via Google Weblog.)
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March 25, 2003
The Dark Side of Spam Filtering
I discovered today that several important e-mails addressed to me over the past couple of weeks had been blocked by our spam filter at work. The person writing them had the word ‘free’ in a line of her signature, advertising a free seminar her company is offering. That plus html formatting was enough to trigger the filter threshold. I had to scramble quite a bit today to make up for the delay in getting the information.
There are a couple issues here. One, I need to talk to our admins about raising that threshold a bit. I’d rather get some spam and all of my genuine mail rather than no spam and not all the valid stuff. I may also start sending domains to the network admin that I want added to the whitelist so I don’t lose stuff like this in the future.
I wonder what else I may not have been receiving? There is no easy way in our current system at work for me to review what messages have been blocked. My spam blocking at home works great since I can see exactly what has been filtered out at will.
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March 25, 2003
Federal Knowledge Drain
Many Federal Employees Consider Leaving Jobs, Survey Says (washingtonpost.com)
More than one-third of federal employees who took part in a government-wide survey released today said they were considering leaving their jobs.
Ouch. Hard to imagine how much expertise and knowledge will be walking out the federal door. Of course, that assumes they can find other jobs first (those who aren’t retiring).
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March 25, 2003
Meeting Industry Blog
Doug Fox — The Future of Meetings is a blog about the meeting industry. Doug’s is the third blog I have come across by someone in the association world.
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March 24, 2003
XML for Contact Info
For future reference:
Cover Pages: Markup Languages for Names and Addresses
Address Data Interchange Specification (ADIS) 01-1
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March 21, 2003
Thunderstone Search Appliance
Thunderstone has launched their own Search Appliance product.
(Thanks to the most excellent Search Tools News for the pointer.)
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March 10, 2003
My Top 3 Content Conversion Tips
On the ASAE Technology List, someone asked for the top three tips you would give for someone who is about to embark on a content conversion project (defined as moving content from an old site to a new site). Great question!
Here are my top three based on one completed mirgration and another that is in the planning stages:
1. Inventory current content and delete as much of it as possible. Remove anything that is out of date, incorrect, etc. If you are migrating to a new site structure, the inventory can be used to map existing content to its home in the new structure. This page has some good tips and a spreadsheet tool for conducting a content inventory.
2. Budget for html temps to assist in migration and clean-up. This is essential if you do not have tools to automate portions of the conversion. The temps can focus on brute force cut-and-paste (if necessary) and content clean-up to use new style sheets, etc. Staff can then focus on overall content organization, template design, etc., which is a better use of their time. BTW, you need to do the content inventory/mapping for temps to effectively do the brute-force work. No budget for temps? Then you need to allow for extra time (lots of it) for staff to do this themselves.
3. Force yourself to assign metadata during the conversion. If you don’t do it now chances are you will never have time to go back and do it later.
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March 5, 2003
RSS in Government Blog
A new blog: RSS in Government. News about how RSS is being used in federal, state, and local government.
Utah seems to be very willing to experiment with new technology. Check out Phil Windley, the blogging former CIO of Utah.
(Thanks to Shifted Librarian for the pointer.)
(Update: updated this to add the former in front of CIO. Somehow I missed that Phil had resigned as Utah CIO at the end of last year.)
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March 4, 2003
A Pain in the Metadata
Seb points to an interesting presentation on metadata written by Stefano Mazzocchi.
The presentation dances around an issue we ran into like a brick wall: quality metadata is needed to provide quality search and retrieval on large collections of material, however, the amount of human effort needed to create the metadata is directly proportional to the size of the collection.
This does not scale well and has to be done in a distributed way unless you can afford a room of librarians on staff. The problem with distributed metadata creation is one of training. Expecting our usual web content contributors to be experts in applying our full thesaurus is not realistic. Hell, I’m not an expert in applying it either.
So what to do? I’m open to suggestions!
We are experimenting with targeting specific, high knowledge-value, subcollections for in-depth metadata tagging by a central expert. A ’shallow’ representation of the full thesaurus would be used for indexing normal content on the web site by distributed content contributors.
The idea is that the high-value resources, typically used in academic research, allow for the most finely tuned searching while less valuable content is tagged in much less detail. All of it in combination should be supportable by existing staff resources.
I also want to explore allowing our users to rate the value of individual pages/items and see if that provides better rankings than we can do internally.
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March 3, 2003
CMS Vendor Web Site Quality Survey
Column Two is conducting a survey that will assess CMS vendor websites on how well they serve their potential and existing customers. Take a couple minutes to fill it out. I’m looking forward to the results. My prediction: CMS vendor web sites fail miserably in areas deemed important to their customers.
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