Darrell Gunter, EVP/Chief Marketing Officer, Collexis Holdings Inc. referred to an interesting study, Semantic Wave Report 2008: Industry Roadmap to Web 3.0, and you can order the executive summary for free.  Darrell’s discussion of the knowledge plane where you extract knowledge and concpets, “searching to knowing” was very interesting.   He also talked about exploring rather than searching and explained the Collexis fingerprint engine.  From their website: “Collexis High Definition Search enables extraordinary knowledge retrieval and discovery quickly and accurately by utilizing fingerprinting technology. The CollexisFingerprint empowers users to immediately identify and search for documents, experts, trends, and new discoveries more quickly, accurately – and deeply – than conventional search engines.”  They are using this engine with a community of biomed experts.  

Interesting interactive site to visit – Interactive Vietnam Veterans Memorial.  Just heard from one of the creators, Chris Willis, VP Social Media, Footenote.com, who worked with a team to take pictures of the wall (6500) and then opened the site where people can share memories, memorabilia (including super 8 film), etc.  You can search the wall, browse names by category, enlistment types, service, and home town.   This new site ended up on the front page of CNN on Apr 2.  Very interesting. Footenote.com also has a partnership with the US National Archives.  Check it out.

At Information Today’s Buying & Selling eContent 2008 event, Y.S. Chi, Vice-Chair, Elsevier gave a great analogy about the different levels of content available to users.  He compared content to baseball.  You can watch a ball game from the bleachers, from box seats, from a private suite with pop-up screens and access to stats, video clips, etc., or from your TV at home.  It’s the same content, the ball game, but the user experience is different.  I love this example.  Chi also listed 8 ways information can retain value:  personalization (content tailored to you), immediacy (early content is better), interpretation, authenticity, accessibility, embodiment (tangibility), patronage and findability. 

Keen, who came out of O’Reilly’s 2004 Foo Camp as a Web 2.0 skeptic, was interviewed by Information Today VP of Content, Dick Kaser at the Buying & Selling eContent event.  Some interesting comments, quotes: 

We have to get beyond the cult of the innocent/child; how can they be wiser than expert?

Best book on Web 2.0 — The Long Tail.

Google chapter in Keen’s book,The Cult of the Amateur, is called 1984 2.0.  Keen believes Google is more successful than Microsoft and an ad monopoly.  It learns about us and our intelligence and wants to know us intimiately so it can sell us personalized ads.

 Keen believes that 3.0 (the next big thing) will bring the return of expertise, professionalism  and the curator.  He used the example of Mahalo.com a curated search engine.

Interesting messages in his talk for information professionals: stay away from the cult of the amateur, don’t be humble –”humility is the kiss of death”, open source software doesn’t translate into open source culture — a crowd can’t author books or write songs, revel in the role of authorative curator and use experts to build communities, like Kids