Certainly Google's announcement regarding its forthcoming Knol article writing service has caused quite a stir in and beyond Silicon Valley as The New York Times, Search Engine Land, Google Blogoscoped, GigaOM and many others try to have a go at scoping out Knol's significance.

In short, Knol will enable people to create encyclopedia-like articles on various topics which can be rated by their readers and have both in-article links to other sources on the Web and automatically generated links to related Knol content. Unlike Wikipedia, there's one author per article, but multiple authors can create articles on the same topic, creating a free-market effect as to who is the leading expert on the topic. Articles will be equipped with Google ads, revenues from which will be shared with the author.

This is quite different in many important aspects from Jimmy Wales' Wikipedia, which in addition to attributing authors only in the history trail on collaboratively edited articles also maintains an ad-free environment for their content. While there are more than passing similarities to Wikipedia in Knol's overall design, the system doesn't seem likely to yield similar results. Knol's emphasis on single authorship without editing means that any particular subject is going to gain popularity based on a particular person's outlook, which may be good one day and quite out of date the next.

So while Knol may help people to get a leg up on what leading experts think about a particular subject - and mind you, that might be great for consultants like us folks at Shore - it's at the mercy of the editing priorities of whomever is maintaining their articles. For fast-changing topics this means that it may take a little bit more work for a reader to figure out who's really at the top of their game on a particular topic - and who's off on holiday for a while. Wikipedia needs constant monitoring to keep powerful people and organizations from trying to add spin to their articles, but at least there's highly active editing of one reasonably definitive version of the facts on a given topic.

While the comparison to Wikipedia is inevitable I see this in many ways as much a play for a wider variety of reference portals. Certainly About.com's docent system has resulted in topic experts who have financial motivations to maintain reference topics well on a wide variety of subjects, and in many ways Knol seems to be aimed at providing more efficient ways for subject matter experts to compete with one another in ways that generate revenues more efficiently than About.com. Knol puts more of an onus on an individual author to keep their information up to date, as others could come up with fresher content first, providing a framework that will help them to focus on content while leaving usability, design and monetization concerns to other. As Google's OpenSocial initiative gains steam one can imagine a person's Knol pages as reference content that can travel with them throughout related social media sites.

This free-market approach to knowledge is intriguing but it highlights a major problem that Google faces. As more and more high-quality user-generated content comes online, many people are finding answers to their questions from leading experts in social media venues that are precluding the need to reference a search engine for answers. As it is, so many topic-oriented searches display Wikipedia articles as the definitive source that in some ways Google has become the default front end for Wikipedia lookups as much as an index of the Web in general, reducing overall ad engagement on Google search results pages - and, in time, fewer searches generated on Google. Fewer searches means less available inventory for Google ads - so keeping more people engaged in Google inventory of some kind becomes an increasingly important goal for Google. So as much as this is a very interesting and useful approach to knowledge development it's overshadowed by commercial considerations that may or may not result in knowledge that people really trust. Collaborative editing has its limits for generating quality reference content, but at some point one's own version of a topic needs to stand up to the challenge of other knowledgeable people.

There are many different ways that Knol could evolve out before it launches, but the key factor would seem to be to provide people with a way to aggregate knowledge effectively. As much as one individual's view of a topic can be useful collaborative editing offers the most certain way to gain insights that are going to provide people with the deepest insight into a given topic. There's still room in such a system to reward individuals - one can imagine a system like Wikinvest in which a collaborative neutral article could be supplemented by opinionated personal articles - but first and foremost one hopes that Google will see that the best system will be one that serves the truth before it serves the bottom line. Knol holds out great promise as a platform that can help individuals to create useful reference content, but it may wind up having to serve too many competing interests to gain much of an impact on the marketplace.

Labels: advertising, collaboration, Google, knol, reference, Social Media, Wikipedia

I took the suggestion of my colleague Jeff Cutler and sat down to lunch recently with Collexis EVP and CMO Darrell Gunter to get a briefing on their progress in launching product platforms leveraging their core content technologies. I must admit that I approached the lunch with some skepticism. The knowledge management landscape is littered with startups that had great technology ideas but which never quite made it as independent companies. With this troubled environment in mind, what was it that Collexis could offer that would distinguish it quickly enough to be a successful David amongst content Goliaths?

Collexis' core competency is being able to apply its "secret sauce" of semantic processing and faceted navigation to more valuable forms of content than others and to develop unique ways to apply those semantic tools to real-life business problems. Where companies like Inxight had semantic engines trained to parse already commoditized forms of content such as news articles Collexis focuses its semantic processing capabilities on unstructured content generated by professionals such as medical researchers. The story could have ended right there like so many other companies in the KM "dead pool", but instead of settling for marketing a nifty content categorization tool Collexis has worked with its recently acquired platform partner Syynx to develop some very serious solutions for scientific, technical and medical clients that are strong indicators of how semantics and professional networks can combine to create powerful publishing solutions in high-value enterprise markets.

The most interesting of these emerging platforms is biomed experts.com, a portal being readied for launch by Collexis that combines Collexis' semantic capabilites with public research articles from PubMed to develop an extremely powerful expert network tool. Put in any relevant set of terms from the world of STM publishing and biomedexperts.com will return a cite-ranked list of relevant categories that can be navigated to find experts who publish research in that topic specialty. Choose any one of these experts (click on screen grab to right for more detail) and get an excellent analysis of their publishing patterns in this topic arena, including a publishing timeline and categoried publication cites organized by more than a dozen related topic areas, including disorders, anatomy, procedures, physiology and so on. If this person's work is of interest to you it's easy in biomedexperts.com to track this person's publications and to invite them into your personal network. Biomedexperts.com enables one to view patterns in research and relationships amongst researchers with other powerful analysis tools, including a nifty map representation of which locations are collaborating heavily with other worldwide locations on a topic as well as a startree-like representation of the strength of publishing ties between different authors.

While we've seen some navigation tools like this deployed on platforms such as Factiva's Search 2.0 research portal Collexis has taken sophisticated analysis of texts to a whole new level in placing the exploration of authors and their network of relationships at the core of biomedexperts.com's capabilities. Not only can one identify rapidly the strengths of an author's research with biomedexperts.com but one can also move rapidly to understand the social contexts in which that research is developed. When your next step in your own research is understanding not only who wrote what but who's in thick with whom in their research it can accelerate rapidly your own next steps.

While it's uncertain that biomedexperts.com will succeed in developing community around its platform any more effectively than other efforts such as Elsevier's 2Collab its focus on organizing both content and authors into meaningful patterns is a key advantage that could help Collexis accelerate its product development efforts in a number of very interesting directions - including other market verticals where professional expertise is expressed effectively through publishing. Collexis understands as well as any other content company out there today that content is as much about the people who create it as it is about documents and data and has developed tools that exploit that understanding very effectively.

This interesting marriage of social insight and insight into topic expertise is a valuable combination that we can expect to see in many major content platforms over the next few years. Collexis has a window of opportunity in which it can sling its very potent capabilities at Goliaths focusing on similar opportunities - or decide to collaborate with a wide range of Davids and Goliaths to help them succeed in keeping their value propositions from frittering away as social networking tools begin to replace document repositories as primary content discovery tools. Lock and load, Collexis, you're in the right place at the right time. Thanks for the sandwich!

Labels: biomed experts, collaboration, collexis, knowledge management, Social Media, tools

Rafael Sidi is pumped up about Elsevier's new 2collab social bookmarking service, which he describes as the product of "the young turks in Amsterdam," presumably product developers trying to encourage this major scientific publisher to engage the online world of collaborative content. As what sounds to be a countercultural "intrapreneur" initiative 2collab has a lot going for it. 2collab has all of the features that one would expect to find in a modern social bookmarking service - public and private groups, tagging, commenting, voting, easy bookmarking and a very attractive and highly usable design - combined with editable citation information stored with each bookmark (click on the screen grab above to get a flavor of the metadata). However, the citation data cannot be referenced via the 2collab search engine yet, a minor inconvenience in the short run but something that should be addressed once a significant body of content is aggregated via the service.

As to when that significant body will appear is anyone's guess at this point. In spite of a decent launch and prominent billing for the service on Elsevier's corporate portal there appear to be relatively few takers for the service so far. I was challenged to find any publicly posted articles with comments other than my own in five days' worth of posts and thus far today there have been nine public posts in all. To the product's credit the timestamping makes it very easy to figure this out, but in the meantime it's a reminder that the community is still in the process of forming around this product. Group participation doesn't fare much better, with public groups still very small and formed around topics mostly centered on online technology topics.

2collab has an excellent design and the development team is to be commended for a first-rate job in launching a highly credible platform right out of the box, but it's going to take more than features similar to established social media outlets to attract people already using those other platforms. Just as a simple example of the challenge that faces Elsevier, a topic like "congestive heart failure" returns 141 results on del.icio.us, accumulated over a long period of time, to be sure, but in the meantime indicating a ways to go for 2collab to attract active participation. As important as it is to get the technology right in social media it's equally important to get some core communities invested in the platform so that their examples of successful interactions can get other participants jazzed. Consider 2collab to be in serious need of jazzing at this point.

Can Elsevier manage to get some more mojo behind 2collab and develop it into a thriving social media community? In truth Elsevier and other scientific publishers are so far behind in embracing social media that it's going to be an uphill struggle for any of them to make significant progress in developing social media capabilities that are, admittedly, rather long-term investments for as-yet-uncertain future revenues. But one thing seems to be certain: whichever scientific publisher is able to finally crack the social media marketplace and develop a tool that becomes the "go-to" place for sharing and discussing scientific literature is going to win a big, big prize at the end of the day - regardless of how that prize scales to current revenue streams. Consider 2collab a modest bet by Elsevier on the future of social media as a publishing platform that is in need of doubling-down sooner rather than later to ensure a place at the emerging world of user-driven publishing markets.

Labels: 2collab, collaboration, elsevier, Social Media, STM

With much ballyhoo Microsoft unveiled its new HealthVault beta portal recently, a big push by the Microsoft to get a leg up on Google's position as a source for health information. The HealthVault portal itself could hardly be called a portal: it's a landing page that invites you to use a special version of Microsoft's Live Search, set up a portfolio of private health information that can be shared with trusted sources and a link to software that can enable one to download information from health monitoring devices into your HealthVault data. Once you've selected any of these options there's no navigating back to the main portal page. So what you get right now is more of a showcase for potential partners than an online presence that's going to attract an audience.

The Live Search tuned up for HealthVault has a number of useful features, many of which have been used for a long time already in Google's health-oriented searches and in Amazon's A9 search portal. The latter similarities are no coincidence, given Amazon's decision a while back to dump Google as a search partner in favor of Microsoft and the highlighting of Amazon's content in the HealthVault portal. Search results are pretty good in HealthVault, with some being downright rich in content and others being merely comparable to Google search results. Put in a broad terms such as "Autism" and HealthVault Live Search returns a column labeled "Articles" with Wikipedia content - kind of a mini-Answers.com - a column of Web search results and a column of sponsored content from Amazon with contextual ads beneath it. Atop this is a category-based navigation similar to Google's Co-Op feature.

Something a bit more off the beaten track like "pancreatic cancer ductal tumors"
ditches the Wikipedia articles and draws in more scholarly content in search results than one would find in Google, which tends to segregate scholarly resources off in its Google Scholar search. That may or may not be a good thing depending on who is using this feature, but if you're trying to dig deeper into a health issue you definitely have some contrasts between Google and Microsoft to consider. There are also some interesting differences when you try a term that may not be thought of immediately as a health resource, such as "cinnamon," which is now being used as a resource for blood sugar and cholesterol management. In Google there is no health-oriented Co-Op category information available for this search whereas HealthVault provides a very useful taxonomy. However, again HealthVault comes out a little heavy on the hardcore health information and a little light on more consumer-accessible informaiton.

If you see an article that interests you in search results you can bookmark it into your HealthVault secure account information via the "Add to Scrapbook" feature, but in doing so you'll have to pass through a login screen and some other screens that were just plain frightening - I had no idea what would happen if I said "yes" to the questions asked, but went along anyway - just to get a bookmark into my HealthVault account. I'll allow that this is a Beta product and that such oddities are likely to be worked out in time, but it's one of those typical instances of Microsoft features that sound great on paper and wind up never working the way that you hoped that they would.

The HealthVault Account feature allows a member to use their HealthVault information in association with a number of health screening services and online medical records services, presumably to make it easier for people to give you proper medical care and advice. This is obviously the big corporate hook for HealthVault, with doubtless the hope that major HealthCare providers would default to HealthVault as a common provider of this type of service and enable them in time to deliver streamlined services and benefits based on HealthVault as a common interface. That may very well be, but right out of the box don't expect too many consumers to be jumping head over heels for this service. The non-friendly home page for HealthVault says in essence to the consumer "Hi, we're Microsoft, give us all of your health history details and we'll make it easy for corporations to look at them." Thanks, but I think that we've been there already with Microsoft Wallet, an earlier stab by Microsoft to become the universal online payment service for ecommerce. You'd think that they'd learn from that experience that it helps to look at things from the consumer's perspective first.

One of the more promising features of the beta HealthVault is the HealthVault Connection Center, which highlights software that makes it easy for people using health monitoring equipment to collect data from these devices in HealthVault and to make it available to physicians who can scan that information as needed. This plays into Microsoft's strengths as a provider of gizmo interfaces and offers some potential long-term benefits for wellness monitoring services. But even here it's early days for the beta product: the HealthVault Connection Center at this point is just a set of links to Microsoft's device driver and software download pages on the main Microsoft Site. There's no integration to speak of.

Microsoft has carved out an ambitious vision for HealthVault, tying in personal, Web and device-driven content into a framework that may make it easier for health care professionals to provide services to patients and wellness enthusiasts. In the still-sketchy outlines of this product you can see how Microsoft sees a huge opportunity to become a master repository for health information that could make it a power player in the health care industry as a result. With the far more competitive and commoditized media marketplace looking less and less like a winner for Microsoft this leveraging of its strengths in both the consumer marketplace and the corporate marketplace may be a great way for Microsoft to firm up its established but threatened footholds in both markets.

But clearly this ambitious vision has a long way to go. The Live Seach results are very well designed and promising, but they are not so clearly superior to Google's existing health care offerings that it is likely to create an immediate stampede to Live's view of health information. The corporate feel of the site and the utter lack of deftness in making people feel that there's something in it for them to provide highly sensitive personal information puts a damper on the potentially strong value-add features that could be built off of it. The device integration is a nice concept, but there's a long way to go before we see dashboards built off of this information that will be useful to both consumers and health professionals. There was enough goodness in all of this to get at least one news cycle of positive spin, but there's a long road ahead to make this a viable hit for Microsoft.

Still, it's more than its major competitors have done lately to offer a vision of how personal, Web, scholarly and device-driven medical content can come together to improve health care for both consumers and professionals. Microsoft would claim that the've stolen the march from Google with this initiative, and from a vision standpoint they may have a reason to crow a bit. But from an execution standpoint it's a clumsy enough start with typical Microsoft over-hyping of fairly modest features and partner relationships that potential heavyweight content partners are not going to get bowled over immediately as they have been in days past. This may buy Google and others time to come up with their own approaches that may have a more consumer-friendly appeal that will be essential for the long-term success of any such initiative. In the meantime HealthVault's visionary offering gives both content producers and medical professionals a lot to think about in how they plan to make better use of the Web to improve their services to consumers.

Labels: collaboration, consumers, enterprise, HealthVault, Microsoft, STM