DeFrag 2008 has come and gone. Investing some of my own resources and vacation to travel west to Denver was a great idea … better yet … because of the US presidential election, there was no one in the airports or on the planes!

While I was flattered on how many people were impressed with my own efforts for my corporation, as to be expected … I met two individuals who "wowed" me even more. Here are their stories:

• Sun Computer – Neeraj Mathur ( blog | LinkedIn ): Sun Computer has taken the idea of the "virtual water cooler" to the next level. Their entire employee performance recognition system is being reworked to reward those people who participate in internal forums. Sun uses many of the normal tools such as blogs, wikis, discussion boards, social search, etc. However, their systems tracks participation and allows other employees to give a "thumbs up" rating to collaborative content. In other words, just like on the external web sites like Trip Advisor or Amazon, one may rate fellow employeee's collaboratitve content found upon the internal web. Your participation ratio affects your performance appraisal and raise.

• CISCO – Yatman Lai: Yatman had the idea to create a common tag database. While most of you understand the concept of tagging content to enhance the value of social search, imagine if the tools and systems you used interfaced with a central tag respository / database? This idea requires a common systems protocol, but the ability to moves tags from one system to another, and pull all of those tags up via keyword search is a great idea.

I guess it's time to put my own thinking cap on and try to further evolve the virtual water cooler!

The first day of DeFrag 2008 has come and gone. While it has been an excellent event, my only wish was that there might have been a bit more representation from the corporate world. Most attendees seem to be start-ups or independent consultants. However, the value of learning where this community feels social computing is headed can not be discounted. Here are a few of my favorite takeaways from yesterday:

• Atlassian has plans in the works to allow users to add Google Gadgets to their Confluence wiki personal dashboards. This feature should appear sometime towards Summer of next year. Very cool!

• Taligent seems to have a webpart which allows one to better understand how one's community is utilizing SharePoint 2007. I definitely need to learn more about this web part.

• Almost by chance I learned of a new Google tool which could help better focus one's presentations.  One of the leaders for a different panel discussion (Deborah Schultz) Twittered that she would be using Google Moderator. Although in fact she did not get much use out of this tool, I was intrigued and spent time on the Google web site. Google Moderator was created by Google to enhance and better focus questions received for Google TechTalks. The blog Google Operation System has a great post outlining its features. Based upon my own quick research, Google Moderator if used in advance of a presentation would be very easy for your audience to use, and allows one to better understand what folks would like to learn. Here are a few screen shots. Either click upon any thumbnail image to view full sized or download this pdf file:

Corporations have gone social. I should know; I'm partially to blame! Today my company has a large Web 2.0 environment which includes blogs,
wikis, discussion boards and social search … which will be the focus
of my presentation named social search in the corporate environment (day 1 – 2:30 pm).

Our environment includes Microsoft SharePoint, Confluence and Connectbeam. Each tool has its advantages and disadvantages.

• SharePoint 2007 has great power, but the new team room owner's eyes glaze over when they seen the myriad of complex menus
• Confluence, and all wikis are great in how they allow for creative collaboration, however a blank starting page is daunting for any online community
• Social Tagging (Connectbeam) enhances any organization's wealth of knowledge, but getting your users to tag can be difficult.

Stop by my presentation to learn more, but for the online community, here are a few resources:

• SharePoint 2007: Manual | Tutorials | Quick Reference Guides
• Connectbeam: Box Opening Video!
  (may take a moment to load)

In fact, the Box Opening Video was created by yours truly while visiting Connectbeam earlier this year. I will buy a round of drinks for anyone who can give me the exact location of the nerd featured in the video (i.e. me … the Northstar Nerd). This award may won by anyone, not just DeFrag 2008 attendees! For those of you who don't have a couple minutes to watch the box opening video about nerds and project knowledge silos …

Tomorrow I head for DeFrag 2008. I'm using my personal funds and some of my remaining vacation to attend this conference. While you might find the fact that a corporate kind of guy is using personal time and money to attend this kind of conference … consider this fact. Where do social media / networking tools start and stop? My wife and I often comment to each other that the boundary between work and leisure for someone like myself gets very fuzzy. I do not consider the uncertain boundary a negative situation; I like the intersection of the two worlds (work and leisure).

Even before the conference starts I will meet with Microsoft on collaboration tools for Outlook. It's hard to believe that my own efforts in this arena started only 30 months ago with MediaWiki and Moveable Type … a clandestine skunk works on some old Dell desktops running mySQL. Today my company has a large Web 2.0 environment which includes blogs, wikis, discussion boards and social search … which will be the focus of my presentation named social search in the corporate environment (day 1 – 2:30 pm). Stay tuned … I'll blog my DeFrag impressions.

Last night I hit the jackpot in terms of discovering new resources. The key was understanding how to follow up on useful information … to expand it to become even more new valuable knowledge for me. Here is how the process went … and what I discovered.

Really Simple Sidi posted on Microsoft's new data visualization tool, DataDepot. Many of you may remember I already have an interest in data visualization, and I was even featured in an interview by the NY Times on the same subject. I subscribe to Sidi's blog via RSS (learn more).

As I was convinced that Microsoft's DataDepot was a somewhat new service, I immediately decided to Google the service, but not in the manner you might expect. In this instance, I wanted to learn whom might be the netizens who already had posted about DataDepot.  In other words, this was my chance to learn about people who are both smart, linked and well informed. Thus, I did a Google linked search. See the screenshots at the bottom of this post, but the concept is easy. I browse over to Advanced Google Search, and paste the DataDepot web address into bottom window … "find pages that link to a page". If you are truly exploring something rather new, the web sites which come up in your results should represent services / blogs / etc. which represent sites "in the know".

I now spend time researching my Google results, but not just from the vantage point of my original query (DataDepot), but in terms of whether the resulting sites have expanded value. In my case, I only turned up 32 sites that linked to DataDepot. This confirmed my original hypothesis that Microsoft's DataDepot was either rather knew, or still at least unknown. Time to take a look at the resulting sites.

Those results ultimately led me to this content (some via a link):

• eScience at Microsoft– a blog of research and science out on the edge.
  .
• Seed Magazine – defines itself as "science is culture" … fascinating stuff
  • Cribsheet - great downloadable pdf's of science concepts / areas.
  • Mind2008 - video presentations by revolutionary science thought leaders

I could go on, but the end result if I have a huge new amount of data to explore … some for work (data visualization and DataDepot) … and some for just the sake of science (Seed). 

click to expand either image to full sized