Me, myself and I

A look at what I’ve been up to over the last 9-12 months through the lens of my friends …

IAs, Language and Lego at IA Summit 2008

My first presentation to my first IA Summit is now over — a presentation on semantic analysis.

In linguistics, semantics is the subfield that is devoted to the study of meaning, as inherent at the levels of words, phrases, and sentences. In the presentation, I suggest that by analysing content from its semantic perspective, you can gain a much richer understanding of your content and the business logic that goes into creating it.

If you want to create a taxonomy, a comprehensive index of ‘things’ for help files and FAQs, understand, map and infer the user-behaviour that creates content, then semantic analysis is the tool for you.

If you were at IA Summit, and had any questions arising from the presentation, please feel free to post a comment below. The entire speaker’s notes for the presentation can be found on my slideshare site.

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Presenting at Web Directions Government

After receiving some encouragement from John Allsopp, I’m presenting at Web Directions this year on the topic of knowledge management and social computing.

For many people, knowledge management is an IT system that sits somewhere and gobbles up documents. Some vendors claim that their Records Management System or their Document Management System will do all your knowledge management, and for us KM practitioners this focus away from people and to systems has led to nothing but trouble for a decade.

Knowledge management is, first and foremost, about people. It’s not about software. It’s about storytelling, having a coffee and sharing war stories, about getting together after a difficult project and doing “lessons learned”, and even about watching a video to learn techniques from other sporting teams. If you can get your people together to share the important bits inside their heads then you can ensure you’ve got ways to equip people with the information they need do successfully do their jobs in an information-demanding world.

The people-centric part is why the boom in social computing tools out of the Web 2.0-sphere is so exciting. In the modern world, people just don’t have lots of time to get together and chat, so a system that supports the way people tend to share information, that is, in a social-way, is vital.

Want to learn more? Come see me at Web Directions Government on 19-20 May at Old Parliament House, Canberra Australia.
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