Jonathan Grudin video talk

Emerging Technologies and Knowledge Management
Microsoft Research

- we need to pay attention to the environmental change
- seeing more data doesn't help
- even when aware of non-linear growth (exponential growth), we reason poorly about it
- a great deal of change is right in front of you, the tail is getting longer (from 10, 20, 30, 40 and 50 years of Moore's Law)
- people haven't changed but technology has changed
- he produced code that was compact but difficult to understand and maintain, whole nature of software engineering has changed based on memory advances
- more memory, don't need to create compact code
- he's talking about inertia about these changes
- another thing that has changed is new technologies (IM and text messaging, tagging, blogs), new behaviours (multi-tasking, multimedia authoring, search and browse)
- this parallels the generation that brought email and word processing into organizations
- people are forming social identity from these technologies - this is what Jonathan is now focussing on
- there is a strong parallel between how e-mail was used in 1984 and how IM was used in 2004

- beware the hype cycle (Gartner)
- RSS, blogs, tagging, wikis are already past the peak of inflated expectations from the Gartner hype cycle

Enterprise Knowledge Management
- there are promising emerging technologies: unstructured tagging, weblogs, lightweight enterprise search
- this is what Lilia Efimova is doing in her PhD research

Jonathan Grudin's research
- he's mentioning about Lilia Efimova who was an intern at MSR last summer doing a qualitative study of blogs at Microsoft (meetings, documents, DLs, blogs, 39 interviews of bloggers, infrastructure support, senior legal and PR, VPs, Sharepoint and MSN planners)
- surveying MS attitudes, behaviours (with Gina Venolia)
- analysis of KM and emerging technologies

Employee Blogs at Microsoft
- with Lilia Efimova
- very dynamic area

Managing Knowledge: Challenges and Potential Solutions
- digital documents are difficult to find (adding metadata is work)
- tagging is a lightweight, visible, bottom-up (flickr, delicious) and simple, is ontology overrated?
- documents are difficult to assess (blogs can accommodate this)
- unstructured tagging (flat structure, no hiearchy, so don't need to worry about ontology)
- quesiton: how far can bottom-up approach go?
- problem is that you get so many tags out there, that are not in levels, how are you going to find what you're looking for
- addressing limitations of organization of tags: get most recent photos
- there are lots of personal benefits to tagging
- so people bypass the system
- expertise locator software hasn't succeeded

Further reading: Clay Shirky, "ontology is overrated", Cory Doctorow "Metacrap", David Hawking "Does Topic Metadata Help with Web Search?"

Blogs and the Workplace
- this is related to my PhD research on finding community in blogs
- blogs currently are public personal interactive diaries
- have "A list" bloggers on politics, technology, events, cool stuff
- corporations are beginning to use this
- Jonathan is talking about how blogs differ from e-mail, how provide conversation
- wikis are good for collaboration, for version history

Conclusions
- social technologies are emerging rapidly, will flourish as students enter the workforce
- there are however social practices and technology that remain to be worked out
- unresolved questions, such as limits to bottom-up and collaborative organization

research.frogbusters.com/~jgrudin

Questions
- how extensive are blogs in corporations?
- don't know, Microsoft found lots of people using blogs