KMWorld & Intranets 2003/Streaming Media Conferences: Quick Takes
The KMWorld & Intranets 2003 Conference this year is co-located with the Streaming Media CA conference, which made for some interesting juxtaposition at times. Attendance was slightly off from last year's, and exhibitors were way down. Here are a few quick takes on the highs and lows:

- The opening keynote offered Peter Rinearson of Microsoft offering their version of "eating your own dog food", which featured video clips of happy near-future office workers sewing up a big deal by dragging and dropping digital objects across huge panel screens, tablet PCs, PDAs and such. The less romantic current reality of Microsoft trying to get everyone to go paperless and to use tablet PCs was presented quite honestly by Peter, to his credit: one photo shows what looks like at first a Microsoft employee scribbling away happily on a tablet PC, only to reveal in the next photo that he's actually using a paper pad resting on top of the PC. So much for capturing "tacit knowledge". Technology can change content culture, but technology cannot create content culture until the individuals accept the value of the content created by it.
- While Knowledge Management is still a real concept, it seems as if this year marks a watershed point as to its focus. Last year's gathering was the "yes, we're ready to do this" conference, as legislative mandates for corporate compliance and public sector initiatives compelled many institutions to adopt more stringent content capture, storage, management and retrieval capabilities. This year is more the "yes, we're already doing this" conference, which ironically seems to have taken a lot of the wind of of KM's sails. With IT willingly supplying much of the infrastructure to enable the technical components of KM, much of its emphasis has shifted to changing content culture via communities of practice, alarming, storytelling and other initiatives oriented towards implementing new models of management.
- Discussions of digital rights were frisky and intriguing in the Streaming Media conference, and virtually absent from the KM and Intranets tracks of its sister conference. Microsoft, with its pending Longhorn initiatives, is most aware of this on the institutional side, but the intersection of rights-driven issues is sure to make a major impact in the next year on the KM/institutional side of the fence. The partial connection between the two exhibit halls for these two conferences this year is perhaps symbolic of the as-yet unconscious pending marriage of the focus of media companies and behind-the-firewall institutional perspectives on content value management.
- The taxonomy battles rage on, like Delacroix and Ingres battling over whether the essence of painting is color or line. A panel including David Seuss of the reconstituted Northern Light and Claude Vogel of Convera locked horns over the importance of context-oriented categorization and hierarchical taxonomies. Claude argues more towards the camp of defining an item's essence in a strict hierarchical taxonomy, whereas David fell more on the side of multi-nodal ways of placing an item in a more dimensional taxonomy. There is still no one right answer to this discussion; the real answer seems to be to have content organization methods that meet both the immediate and ongoing needs of an institution's assets. If one defines the essence of something that never gets used, then the benefits of that essence are limited.
- Anacubis was the "big booth" at this year's conference, which says as much about the lack of major players making a big push as much as anacubis' ambitions. Content visualization tools were a big part of the exhibition, as even players such as Taxonomy tool-oriented Stratify was showing desktop visualization capabilities. While anacubis looks sexy as all get-go and plays very well with structured data to spot company-oriented relationships that are useful in some key CRM and competitive intelligence settings, the power of the tool gets on much thinner ice when you begin to look at more complex data relationships and falls apart in most ways when it comes to examining unstructured data relationships.
- Doing it right at the desktop level is a major emerging theme for content organization. 80/20's long-standing approach along these lines seems to be mimicked by a number of players, now, some of which may be trying to revive stagnant institutional sales by appealing to users as much as anything else. Its the content, Inc., an all-new company representative of this user-level trend, provides simple, well-integrated tools that allow users to classify content easily on the fly for themselves and workgroups, so that it's more immediately usable for the individual and increasing the probability that the organization will benefit from this "me first" approach to content usefulness. At the end of the day, all content politics are local...
- There is Knowing, but Is There Knowledging...? Hubert St. Onge of konvergeandknow provided an excellent C-Level presentation making the case for Knowledge Management on a business basis, emphasizing the importance of developing an organization's capability to respond rapidly to market opportunities in a competitive marketplace as a key factor. Hubert's outlook sells very well, and it should, given the experience that's gone into it. However, while there are objectives in his model, it lacks concrete activities to which people relate on a daily basis. "Knowing" is not something that can fit on a time sheet; it's an asset, not an activity. This is why concepts such as publishing are so important in the framework of KM: knowing and learning are important, but publishing in highly social contexts, teaching and sharing are the things that people do on a daily basis to create value through content.
- Weblogs making grass-roots KM happen. Billions of dollars of infrastructure and countless academic studies later, what's the one thing that's really enabling the essence of Knowledge Management within professional organizations and communities? The cheap/free capabilities of weblogging are enabling individuals and institutions to realize many of the goals of KM with simple tools to develop expert networks and Communities of Practice inside and across institutional firewalls. Kudos to Darlene Fichter of the University of Saskatchewan/Northern Lights Solutions and Arik Johnson of Aurora WDC for laying out just how much power is available to professionals through weblogging for creating highly valuable content that can support an organization's key goals.