What if we have succeeded in creating intelligent content? Content that has semantic metadata, content that is tagged so we know where we can use it. How do we then present it to the people who have to base decisions on that content, to do their job? How do you design an interface that leverages the value of all those content assets? This was the question Ann Rockley put to me after my presentation at Intelligent Content 2010.

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Organizing the sharing of information

The ‘I’ for IT in this particular title refers to me, myself and I, meaning: where is the user in Information Technology? The accepted way of designing large IT systems has been to focus on information, its creation and management. We grew up with Create-Read-Update-Delete. Users that were not allowed to change information were granted rights to view. And thus we created application after application for our users. And then came the internet.

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The freedom to drown in information?

I would have never thought this, but the current president of the USA had some really interesting things to say about information. Barack Obama at his White House ceremony told the world that from today on we are to share information, and not to withhold it. Sharing information is the way to a transparent organization that can be held accountable for its actions.

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@Intelligent Content 2009, Palm Springs

Scott Abel freaked the hell out of me in Palm Springs yesterday. Not with his story of bad customer experience, but with his story of good customer experience! He sketched a world of companies providing me with more information than I ever asked for. And the flow just kept coming and coming and coming…

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Tim Berners Lee on the semantic web

Next week I will be speaking at Intelligent Content 2009. The Rockley Group states that intelligent content is not limited to one purpose, technology or output. It’s structurally rich and semantically aware and is therefore automatically discoverable, reusable, reconfigurable and adaptable. And intelligent content isn’t just a future, it’s possible now, as Tim Berners Lee states in an interview on YouTube. But for content to be intelligent you need a design.

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Living in the cloud

A colleague of mine has as MSN tagline: “All people see is location independent capabilities and information. Everything else lives in the cloud”. Maybe we are there for people, for individuals, but for enterprises? Last week I personally encountered an example of typical Enterprise 1.0 behavior.

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Emergent patterns on the internet

One of the blogs (Dutch) I follow pointed me to a speech by Dr. Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google on the future of technology. Schmidt points out that within a few years we will carry around more video material on our iPOD’s than we will be able to view in a lifetime. We are entering the Information Age, where information is ubiquitous, omni-present. And besides the rather obvious referrals to Moore’s law (processor speed doubles every 18 months) and Kryder’s law (hard disk capacity doubles every year), he touched on a subject that is close to my heart: the power of information.

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Prayer of an information gal

Communication theory tells me that people cannot hear the word ‘no’. So when I say ‘I don’t want to be rich’, what I am actually saying is: I want to be rich. Then why is it that feels so beside the truth? Where does my resistance come from? Could it be simply frustration because I don’t make enough money or is there something else?

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