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Michelle Manafy is the Editorial Director, Enterprise Group, for Information Today, Inc. In this role, Michelle serves as Editor-in-chief for EContent magazine, the Intranets newsletter, and the Enterprise Search Sourcebook. She is also the programming chair of Information Today's Enterprise Search Summits and the Buying & Selling eContent Conference. Prior to joining EContent as Editor, she served as Associate Editor of EMedia magazine where she specialized in author acquisitions and editorial development. Michelle has written on a variety of technology topics including digital publishing, content development and distribution, streaming media, and audio, video, and storage technologies. Michelle co-edited and contributed to the book Dancing with Digital Natives: Staying in Step With the Generation That's Transforming the Way Business Is Done (December, 2010, CyberAge Books). She was the editor of the book Cashing in With Content: How Innovative Marketers Use Digital Information to Turn Browsers into Buyers, by David Meerman Scott. Michelle speaks at a variety of industry events and serves as a judge for various content and technology competitions. She has worked in book and magazine publishing for more than 20 years in areas ranging from pop culture to academic nonfiction, and holds a B.A. in Journalism from San Francisco State University. Follow Michelle on Twitter @michellemanafy
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I just got busted for referencing a '60s Charlton Heston movie. OK, I get nostalgic. So when I heard an interview in which someone referred to "slugs" in the context of journalism, I felt like I was taking another joyride in the Wayback Machine: Could slugs be alive and well in contemporary journalism?
My audiobook ended while I was driving into the office. With 30 more minutes of back roads to navigate, I opted to listen to the radio. I have a few different stations programmed into my radio, as my epic commute takes me in and out of the range of several. Clicking until I hit a live station, I was immediately intrigued by an accented voice discussing the history of the Nobel Prize. I glanced up to where, on another day, my satellite radio receiver would sit, to find out who was speaking. Alas, it was analog. So I had to wait until the end of the Democracy Now! program to learn that it was Peter Zander, curator of the Nobel Museum in Stockholm, Sweden.
I can sing the alphabet backward. I learned it as a child and it sticks with me, just like its more popular cousin, the alphabet song. In his keynote at Enterprise Search Summit West, held Sept. 23-24 in San Jose, Calif., Gene Smith said that social discovery isn't new. It's been around a lot longer than I've known any alphabet songs—not to mention the web, much less its 2.0 iteration.
Many of us know that bookstores employ "cooperative advertising," which is little more than a pay-for-placement arrangement. So who can we trust? I get my best recommendations from friends, colleagues, and the library staff-picks shelf. In some ways, I am old-fashioned. However, I have also become quite addicted to user reviews...
Agile thinking is something we do everyday. Perhaps we miss a word or two on a bad phone connection, or we don't express our thoughts clearly in an email, yet the person on the other end of the communication detects myriad clues from context or experience to interpret meaning, or asks follow-up questions for clarification. Michelle Manafy, editor of EContent magazine, waxes eloquently on the topic . . .
In his most recent book, Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, Weinberger humanizes the nearly inconceivable scope of the digital content universe.
Despite his lighthearted take on the power of the Google brand, senior product and marketing manager for Google Enterprise Kevin Gough had some serious insights into how the consumer market dictates expectations inside the enterprise. Without doubt, IT departments hear users say they want enterprise search to “work like Google,” while serious searchers bemoan the sheer quantity of results the engine generates.
EContent magazine editor Michelle Manafy discusses strategies and tactics for organizations searching for an Enterprise Search Solution with Martin White, managing director of Intranet Focus Ltd. and author of Making Search Work: Implementing Web, Intranet and Enterprise Search.
The other day I was trying to track down someone I haven’t seen in about 20 years. I tried Google and, shockingly, received too many results. The two links on the first page of results that I clicked and skimmed through were old and not terribly useful. Next, I tried ZoomInfo. I actually find this service to be a bit spooky.
In a recent edition of John Lienhard's The Engines of Our Ingenuity, which I heard in the car on National Public Radio, Lienhard discussed the demotion of Pluto from planet to dwarf planet—brilliantly tying in the naming of the Disney dog. When I went to the University of Houston's site to check the name of the episode ("Poor Old Pluto"), I found that in addition to offering online transcripts of his commentaries on NPR, Lienhard now also provides them as podcasts. I will admit that I got what I needed from the transcript, but I clicked to listen anyhow, to reignite the flame of inspiration.
I have never lived in a development or suburb, but those I’ve visited seem to suffer from a confusion of quaint street-naming conventions in which Honeysuckle Lane intersects Honeysuckle Court. The fact that the houses look nearly identical is painfully exacerbated by the streets all bearing cloying and similar names, which has left me winding through speed bump-safe streets only to be frustrated by a surplus of cul-de-sacs. It leaves me with the impression that suburbs are insiders’ clubs, where only those who can detect the subtle distinctions between mass-market designs can navigate with confidence.
Really Simple Syndication (RSS) may be really simple for publishers in terms of providing a quick alternate content delivery stream and it may be a relatively simple way to help avoid inbox info-glut, but it isn’t always so simple to integrate into an information-gathering routine. For the most part, RSS readers provide only the most basic functionality to do just that: read feeds. However, a few RSS readers out there are trying to do more—like help info-seekers find appropriate feeds, manage the incoming information for future use, and access it in different ways that suit a variety of needs. Pluck is one such feisty RSS reader.
"More, More, More, How Do You Like it?" Who knew that Andrea True’s disco lyrics would presage today’s digital information dichotomy? When you really need to know, quantity without quality just won’t do. Anybody using a search engine realizes that, unless you get a perfect hit on page one, too many results are a very bad thing. And if you are a researcher, the seemingly endless resources of the Web seem swell until you actually have to pull a needle of data out of a haystack of results.
Ozmosys acts as an intermediary between content aggregators and the inboxes of information seekers, delivering a sort of daily digest
compilation of information via an email or into a portal.
Some still read for pleasure, but as a society, we are expected to ingest ever more information and, as such, seek the most expedient means to slurp up what we need to know. And, without a doubt, the browser/search engine combination has caused a tectonic shift in the way we expect to locate and consume the information we seek.
Anyone in the content business who's lately heard a humming that sounds something like WebFountain but couldn't quite make out a distinct message, listen up. According to Robert Carlson, vice president of IBM's WebFountain project, they are "coming out."
For some industries, access to real-time information provides calculable advantages. Take the investment sector, for one. Successful traders require an almost extra-sensory ability to intuit the ways in which major mergers and minor management changes will affect a stock's worth. These shifts can occur minute-by-minute and translate into to hard-earned or hard-lost money measured in seconds.