Careless Web site content can place your company at risk

Debra Young wrote in CNET-Asia/IT.Manager on 26th February 2004, Careless Web site content can place your company at :

"Sandy Sherizen, President of Natick, MA-based Data Security Systems, advised that anyone responsible for corporate Web content should ?learn to think like a thief, like someone who might want to steal information or get involved with competitive business intelligence gathering.? "

He cited case law where an individual went fishing on Corporation A’s Web site and, because of insufficient firewalls, found a way to use that Web site to break into Corporation B’s information system and wreak havoc. Corporate B was able to successfully sue Corporation A for damages, even though a third-party hacker (a teenager with minimal assets) actually executed the intrusion.

Nick Brigman, VP of Product Strategy for Pittsburgh, PA-based RedSiren, suggested applying the "rule of least-privilege" to what you put on your Web site. “Only put out there what’s absolutely needed for a given function,” cautioned the IT security management executive. He said it starts by first determining the goals and uses for your corporate site. “If your goal is to attract prospects and transition them to a sales team, then you don’t need to put a lot of detailed information about the company up there on the Web site,” he explained. Too much information can give away the company store.

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How keywords impact search engine

In CNETAsia/Builder, Michael Meadhra wrote How keywords impact search engine :

Most search engines give a keyword more or less weight based on its location. The weighting algorithms vary at different search engines, and the details of those algorithms are closely guarded secrets. The following list puts the possible keyword locations in approximate order from highest to lowest priority.

• Domain


• Page title


• Headings (enclosed within h1, h2, h3 tags)


• Body text - The first 2 to 3 KB usually counts more than the rest of the text (if the search engine scans more than that).


• Meta tags - Keywords appearing in the description meta tag still seem to count, as do keywords in some of the Dublin Core meta tags. Some search engines don't ignore the keyword meta tag completely but, rather, discount it heavily?especially if the keyword doesn't appear elsewhere on the page.


• Links - Even keywords buried in the URL, name, or id attributes of a link count in page ranking


• Alt text - Keywords in alt text attributes count toward page ranking. This is yet another reason to take the time to create meaningful alt text for all images

Tracking user navigation methods by logging where users click on web pages

Michael Angeles has written Tracking user navigation methods by logging where users click on web pages:

I need some way of exploring alternatives, but I don?t want to change the site too drastically without having some justification for doing so, so about a month ago I asked our systems administrator to come up with ways to track where links are being clicked on the page. The first month of data has arrived and I have some stats to show where people are clicking to get around the site.

1. Child list links (in body) - 65%


2. No navigation used - 18%


3. Side-bar navigation - 13%


4. See Also links (in body) - 4%


5. Bread-crumbs - <1%

The findings aren’t very dissimilar to what you may have read in Michael Bernard’s articles, Where Should You Put the Links” (Usability News 3.2) and Examining User Expectations of the Location of Web Objects” (Internetworking 3.3).

Living with Topic Maps and RDF

Lars Marius Garshol of Ontopia has written a paper, Living with Topic Taps and RDF
(Topic maps, RDF, DAML, OIL, OWL, TMCL):

This paper is about the relationship between the topic map and RDF standards families. It compares the two technologies and looks at ways to make it easier for users to live in a world were both technologies are used. This is done by looking at how to convert information back and forth between the two technologies, how to convert schema information, and how to do queries across both information representations. Ways to achieve all of these goals are presented.

An excellent comparative paper of some 30 pages.

The Ideal CMS -- Circa 2004

Tony Byrne, Founder, Principal, CMSWatch, 12th Dec. 2003, wrote
The Ideal CMS -- Circa 2004 -- Featured Product:

This remains something of a quixotic venture, because choosing a web content management product forces buyers to face real trade-offs. This is almost inevitable in an environment where enterprises have extremely divergent -- and sometimes conflicting -- business reasons for implementing a content management system. Achieving greater automation will almost always reduce content re-use opportunities, and vice-versa. The more flexible technical platforms usually take the longest to implement and have fewer editorial features 'out of the box.'

Naturally, then, vendors make choices about where to focus their products, often driven by the requirements of their major clients (or industry focus). A vendor may market its product (or 'suite') as a universal tool, but most CMS packages are beginning to fall into identifiable niches.

So herewith is the 2nd Annual ?Ideal CMS,? based on package versions in production as of November, 2003.

Value-Driven Intranet Design

Shiv Singh wrote in "Boxes and Arrows" on 9th Feb.2004, "Value-Driven Intranet Design:

Fundamentally, your intranet must be tied to value creation like other business services within your organization. If it does not result in value creation for your business, the intranet is a failed service.

...breaking up your intranet into discrete, tightly defined services is the first step in measuring its value. These discrete services should provide tangible benefits to narrowly defined target audiences.

ask yourself and the specific target audience questions such as:

• Is this service being delivered in the offline space?


• If so, how effectively is it being delivered and is it reaching all of its target audience?


• Can the service be delivered more effectively and efficiently via the intranet?


• Will it reach a larger percentage of the target audience?


• Will the offline service need to continue once the intranet service is launched?


• How does the target audience benefit from access to the service?


• Under what circumstances will they use this service?


• Does it make a meaningful difference to their jobs?


• Does it enable them to create measurable value for the company?


• Do they have the right tools, usage patterns, and motivations to use the service?

The questions above are designed to help you truly understand the need for the service, the context in which the service will be used, the tie to the business value through the service, and the personal event triggers that will motivate use of the service.

Managing the Complexity of Content Management

Victor Lombardi wrote in "Boxes and Arrows" on Feb.9th, 2004, "Managing the Complexity of Content Management":

...the issues are many, spanning strategy, design, content, technology, training and several others. One conclusion we can make is that content management has become a very large category?attempting to include content authoring, metadata authoring, database-backed websites, workflow management, and even thesaurus management?and instead of making CMS a goal you might start by focusing on which of these functions you need. Otherwise, the general complexity becomes the central problem facing any content management project.

Here are ten lessons in managing complexity:-

1. Keep the team small
   
2. Don't try to fix everything at once
   
3. Only build what you need
   
4. Create an efficient information architecture
   
5. Show your content some love (creation, editing, and migration of content are often underestimated)
   
6. Hire bouncers as project managers
   
7. Tightly integrate design and technology
   
8. Buy the right size
   
9. Design faster than business can change
   
10. Get a second opinion
    

Information Architecture: Creating Order out of Chaos

Tracy Reith has written a "Quick and Dirty" presentation on Information Architecture: Creating Order out of Chaos.

Includes a "Process", checklist, survey, design principles, etc.

Ideas in Technology and Publishing: Who Should Manage your CMS?

On 9th Feb 2004, Bill Trippe wrote Who Should Manage your CMS?:

The question came up recently--where in your organization should a CMS be managed?

1. The CMS software, repository, interfaces, and customized tools should be managed by a centralized technical organization...

2. The content of the CMS content and how it displays to its various audiences should then be controlled by those people who own the different communication products and different audiences..... Some organizations are very focused on branding (e.g., use of the corporate logo and name, colors, etc)....they can be easily controlled and administered by a central group.

IBM sets out to make sense of the Web

In 'CNet Asia - News & Technology', Stefanie Olsen wrote on
February 6 2004 9:25 AM IBM sets out to make sense of the Web:

The Internet can be a treasure trove of business intelligence--but only if you can make sense of the data.

Enter IBM, which would like to see its WebFountain supercomputing project become the next big thing in Web search. Along with competitors such as ClearForest, Fast Search and Transfer, and Mindfabric, Big Blue hopes to foster demand for new data-mining services that ferret out meaning and context, not just lists of more-or-less relevant links.

WebFountain traces its roots back to Stanford University and another groundbreaking research tool, Google. Its origins lie in a scholarly paper about text mining--authored jointly by researchers at IBM's Almaden site and at Stanford--that discusses an idea known as hubs and authorities.

That theory suggests that the best way to find information on the Web is to look at the biggest and most popular sites and Web pages. Hubs, for example, are usually defined as Web portals and expert communities. Similarly, the concept of authorities rests on identifying the most important Web pages, including looking at the number and influence of other pages that link to them. The latter concept is mirrored in Google's main algorithm, called PageRank.

IBM applied the same concepts in an early Web data-mining project called Clever, but shortcomings eventually led researchers to turn the theory of hubs and authorities on its head. In short, IBM found that it could excavate more interesting data from pages that the theory of hubs and authorities normally pushed to the bottom of the heap--unstructured pages like discussion boards, Web logs, newsgroups and other pages. With that insight, WebFountain was born.

Cogitative Topic maps Websites (CTW) Framework. Information and tutorial

At Cogito Ergo XML:

As a website grows and turns into a Web portal with deeply interconnected website architecture that provides access to rich content, content with lots of links, images, and other types of objects, its developers are faced with the growing challenges of enforcing link integrity and maintaining the enterprise look-and-feel standards and navigational order. Tasks that once were simple can turn into laborious and convoluted processes as the information resource base of the site expands.

However, information maintenance can be robust and straightforward. This tutorial shows that using topic maps as the source code or site map of a website offers convenience, power, reliability, and rapid reconfigurability to the maintainers of large, complex websites.

Includes fulling working example with source XTM, XSLT transformation the generates the set of XHTML web pages, and the working web-site.

Views of knowledge are human views

G. Dueck writes in the IBM Systems Journal "Views of knowledge are human views"
Different people see knowledge management from different perspectives. Some people emphasize intellectual capital, some people always think about technology, whereas others put community building first. In this essay, I associate the different views of knowledge with personality types. In other words, a person's temperament determines that person's view of knowledge?a remarkable coincidence. Therefore, a person's answer to the question ?What is knowledge?? is strongly related to the answer to ?Who am I?? Hence, an enterprise should be careful when defining knowledge management for its use, lest its definition imply ?who the employee should be.? "

"The ancient Greeks differentiated between four kinds of knowledge:

pisteme

abstract generalizations, basis and essence of sciences; scientific laws and principles

Techne

technical know-how, being able to get things done, manuals, communities of practice

Phronesis

practical wisdom, drawn from social practice

Metis

“It is what the flair, the knack and the bent of the successful politician is made of: a form of knowledge which is at the opposite end of metaphysics, with no quest of ideal, but a search for a practical end; an embodied, incarnate, substantial form of knowledge.”

We observe in today's KM communities that we are still struggling to integrate such different dimensions of knowledge into a unified approach to KM."

Information architecture: carrying out a classification situation analysis

Gerry McGovern writes in "New Thinking" Sep.9th 2002, Information architecture: carrying out a classification situation analysis

Before you create a classification for your content, it's essential to carry out a comprehensive classification situation analysis. Classification design should follow the 'geniuses steal, beggars borrow' rule. Your job is not to come up with some innovative way to classify your content. It is to find a classification that works.

He presents a simple method and 8 areas that should be examined in the situational analysis.