Jonathan Grudin talk

Jonathan Grudin Talk
Emerging Technologies and Knowledge Management

The wireless does not appear to be working here in BA 1180, so I’m going to blog locally on Microsoft Word and then transfer to Blogger. There will be a meeting with grad students and faculty later this afternoon. I’ve just also noticed that this talk is being recorded by ePresence. Jonathan just mentioned that he’s glad to be back in Toronto. Anyways, I've just realized that this talk is very similar to the video talk that I attended and blogged while at PARC. He’s now talking about irresistible forces in technology, there is an imperceptible change of exponential growth of technology. From psychological studies and effects, even when aware of non-linear growth, we reason poorly about it. Even though we have more data, it doesn’t help. He’s now showing the visualizations of exponential growth, in particular Moore’s Law. The basic curve of Moore’s Law doesn’t change, but you have a long tail which becomes longer and longer in time as you increase in time. There have been professions that have been affected by this change in hardware, like hardware R&D, software R&D, user interface R&D.

OK, the wireless is back on, so I'm going to continue blogging in Blogger beta.

We now see effects in consumer behaviour and in organizational and institutional behaviour. There's a new generation of technologies and students are picking up these skills and behaviours (note: he mentioned that weblogs are a waste of time for students, hehe, well I'm blogging right now but I think it depends what the blogs are talking about, I think blogging can be constructive to find community, hence my research). Jonathan is doing research into these new collaborative technologies. Ah yes, the ever popular emerging technologies hype cycle from Gartner, this is what he is showing. Gartner is optimistic about these technologies like wikis and blogging. The research that he is doing in MS Research include a qualitative study of blogs at MS with Lilia Efimova (who's a PhD research doing similar work to finding communities in blogs like I am). They've found rapid evolution of product blogs, Microsoft employees are heavily into blogging. They found that blogs are good for communicating with businesses and customers if the employees had lots of experience in blogging.

The second part of his research is talking about Managing Knowledge: Challenges and Potential Solutions. Digital documents are difficult to find, adding metadata is work. One type of adding metadata is unstructured tagging like Flickr. Almost everyone in the room put up their hand to say they've visited the Flickr site, in contrast to not many people from our survey that we did in the Business of Blogging workshop from CASCON 2005. It's so easy to search for photos in Flickr based on tags, Jonathan mentioned how he had to write a trip report for table top displays, and so just did a search on that in Flickr and found all these photos from the recent CSCW conference in Banff that ended couple of weeks ago. Flickr has an innovative approach, bu the question is how far can bottom-up go? Flickr also has automatic clustering of photos and create structure based on number of visits, the most recent time. You can quickly navigate through the photos space of Flickr. There's also been a recent study of Flickr from Cameron Marlow and his colleagues from Yahoo Research from the Hypertext 2006 conference.

Jonathan is now talking about how blogs are affecting the workplace, we explored this in the Business of Blogging workshop at CASCON 2005. Employees can get up to date information from events, for monitoring comments on products, to put a human face on your enterprise and connect to customers (including Microsoft), and internally-facing to communicate about project visibility and knowledge management. Blogs can then be used to link to document repositories to provide context. In other words blogs can provide documentation to projects. How do blogs provide context? Blog entries briefly describe documents and it's easier to blog a comment than to email it. It doesn't add work.

One of the questions that Jonathan gets is the blog a limited structured format? He thinks that there will be a merger between blogs and document repositories because blogs can add that missing context to document repositories. This also includes wikis which is good for deadline-driven collaborations. Building expertise locators hasn't succeeded so people bypass the system. Why they don't work? It's because it's difficult because the processes are highly social and complex.

In conclusion, he encourages us to look ahead of the curve and how rapidly things can change. There's now a paradigm shift in HCI and its social computing and it's great to know that I'm in the right area for research!

On Technorati: jonathan grudin, knowledge management, emerging technologies, social computing