Knowledge from the Cloud
Searching for relevant information on the Web is both breathtaking and exhausting. With a single phrase you can generate a list of thousands of references that overwhelm the human intellect. To get just the right information, Google, Yahoo!, Bing, Wolfram Alpha, and other search engines devise algorithms to answer each query based on their interpretation of the request. However, as we all know, finding the information isn’t as easy as typing in a search string and hitting the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button.
Finding important and trusted information can be difficult with so many information outlets, opinions, and search options. Moreover, finding information that goes beyond independent facts to provide relevant knowledge can be nearly impossible for complex, overarching questions. To find usable knowledge, it is up to each reader to ferret out supportable information, capture it, and then massage and sequence the information to provide context for his or her unique requirements.
How do you string together disparate pieces of information to generate working knowledge? For now, you need to put it together yourself as part of a document or other type of master repository. Hopefully, this will change in the near future with linked data applications, personalization of content based on semantic interpretation of information, and information aggregators to capture and present usable knowledge.
Not All Information is Created Equally
Most organizations struggle to keep up with the benefits of information portals and Web 2.0 social sites while minimizing the downside consequences that attend random and undirected postings of their product or services from friends and foes alike. After all, once a message is taken into the cloud of the Web then control of that messaging can be confronted, reinterpreted, and lost to a thousand additional voices.
Although corporations today provide a smorgasbord of information scattered across supported forums, wikis, knowledgebases, web sites, formal publications, and even carefully posted YouTube videos, they run a risk of diluting information, posting erroneous information, or incurring a counter-response from competitors. Still, all organizations continue to engage social networks and online publishing to these free information sources and utilize voluntary authoring, all while trying to keep control of their subjective corporate messaging. Many organizations believe that communication can take care of itself once posted to the Web. But others recognize that product knowledge is a large part of the sales and marketing of a product, and the information sources out there supporting the product are not all created with equal quality or authenticity.
For most readers and researchers, objective knowledge about product quality, best practices, and total cost of ownership is created by splicing together disparate pieces of information from these sites or finding a trusted, objective voice outside of the corporate cloud. Readers need objective content to meet their needs using all options and not content slanted towards the sales of a particular company.В Every organization has an answer to a question, but it will always be gauged towards the needs of that company’s bottom line, not the needs of the customer.
To capture knowledge from all the erroneous and disparate information on the Web, someone needs to pull it together as meaningful knowledge. As a reader, this means accessing and organizing disparate information strewn across knowledgebase articles, technical articles, marketing videos, e-book pdfs, printed books and articles, and formal product marketing messaging to give it context. If lucky, a reader may find a trusted author that understands their needs and challenges to comment on and organize all the information scattered across the Web and provide meaningful knowledge for the user.
Pros and Cons of Web Information
To answer a question that requires real knowledge about complex topics, such as “How do I set up an IT management system,” multiple documents and web pages need to be accessed, filtered, and given context. Each information source is imperfect and retains its own advantages and disadvantages:
| Information Portal | Authors/ Audience | Pros | Cons |
|---|---|---|---|
| Web sites | Marketing writer with sales messaging for executives and prospective buyers | Product marketing messages conveying product advantages and sales pitch | One-sided, high-level sales pitch without objective information or detailed instructions |
| Forums | Support personnel and connected peers for customers with immediate problems | Product experts or paid support personnel answer technical questions about issues to specific product problems. | Paid experts only rely on answers within the realm of product or services and provide answers that meet company solutions |
| Social Sites | All stakeholders post all types of content for current and prospective fans of the company | Real-time tweets or postings about special pricing and sales pitches that personalize business interaction on these high traffic sites | Although social sites generate a great deal of traffic, mixing business messages with personal communication can offend many users |
| Wikis | Customers, R&D, and support personnel post topics edited by corporate gnomes and gardeners as reference information for customers and engineers. | Corporate wikis provide features to write directly to the web and perform peer editing on topics. Postings can allow readers to argue facts behind the scenes before formally adding to or updating content. | Authoring to a wiki requires users committed to writing and sharing information. And without editors, the information posted can be unreliable and self-serving |
| Knowledgebases | Support personnel and R&D personnel share ticket resolutions for technical users and field personnel. | A knowledgebase acts as the reference of technical issues for active customer issues or problems resolved by product support teams. | Knowledgebases can become stale with old content and erroneous information. Answers are highly focused on specific customer problems. |
| Blogs | Independent authors provide knowledge and feedback for their autonomous readers. | Successful bloggers are independent authors who deliver content based on their personal expertise and knowledge. Providing germane information for their readership is the blogger's goal. Objective content is the product. | Everybody and anybody can blog, which means care needs to be taken about the blogger's credentials, knowledge, and personal prejudices. |
| Formal Documentation | Corporate writers publish product collateral from the engineering perspective | Formal documentation provides information about a products features and basic "how-to's." Companies are liable for this mostly reference information and ensure that it is accurate, edited, and translated. | Writers usually report to R&D teams, rendering their deliveries as feature-based content only. They write from the inside out of a product's features, rather than offering best practices from a customer's perspective. |
| Independent publications | Third-party subject experts write printed publications directed at paying customers interested in a specified product or service. | Many companies like Microsoft and Adobe rely on third-party writers to provide in-depth best practices for their products and services. | Third-party writers need to ensure that they get paid. Consequently, only products, services, and technologies meeting public demand for printed and online books are published. |
| Videos | Marketing, sales, support, and customers provide content for new users and free online training needs. | Sometimes only a video will work to impart information. Professional marketing videos or video screen captures are published to video sites. | Professional videos provide marketing messages. Videos usually fall into separate categories of |
| Streaming | Streaming refers to the manner of delivery rather than the content. All types of video and character data is pushed to customers for up-to-date information access. | Streaming information provides real-time information and can be accessed and captured using embedded or independent personal streaming aggregators. | Until search engines begin filtering content from streaming information providers, their distribution remains outside of normal queries. They also take large amounts of bandwidth and are focused on narrow ranges of information sources. |
Capturing Real Knowledge from the Web
With all the benefits of real-time information and online data, putting it all together to make sense of a particular subject remains elusive. Answering a multi-step and expansive question such as “How do I set up my IT Management System” requires access to multiple sites and information portals to get a comprehensive outline of all requirements. Videos using Adobe Captivate or MadCap Mimic can show a beginner how to use a software product’s user interface and provide basic training, but cannot impart strategies to design or deploy a system. Help files can give micro information on basic tasks and field definitions, but little else. Social sites, forums, and wikis can help existing customers with specific problems, but then require the user to purchase books or attend costly training sessions that address larger architecture and overall process issues.
To translate discrete pieces of information into real knowledge requires more interaction and cohesion in presenting full topics about real world problems. But today’s Web provides only piecemeal information without the ability to meet the needs of most customers. But in their eagerness to engage customers and utilize social network information sources, many companies are too eager to embrace all Web 2.0 communication strategies and take a shotgun approach to authoring and presenting information. Many believe that customers can write their own information and post it for their own needs. Real knowledge management from the Web requires another step to consolidate and form real knowledge.
In my next blog I will show an example of how a company uses Web 2.0 with traditional information sources to present product and service information. It’s not a pretty site…er, sight.
November 3, 2009
В· 
Michael Hiatt В· 
3 Comments
Tags: cloud, Knowledge, Linked data, Web knowledge В· Posted in: Contextual Data, Information, Information management, Knowledge, Semantic Web
3 Responses
Shotgun Communication | Mashstream - November 14, 2009
[...] Knowledge from the cloud [...]
About Mashups and Linked Data | Mashstream - November 16, 2009
[...] Knowledge from the Cloud: The pros and cons of online information that questions information sources and their veracity. Not all information is created or maintained equally. [...]
uberVU - social comments - February 1, 2010
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