Online Information Conference 2009 Podcasts

Online Information, in conjunction with Talis, are producing a series of 'Talking with Talis' podcasts, interviewing various information industry leaders due to speak at the Online Information 2009 conference in December.

Helen Clegg and Susan Montgomery - From Knowledge Management to Knowledge Enablement: Changing the Content Management Paradigm with Sharepoint - Session Preview

Microsoft SharePoint is a disruptive technology in the world of content management and it has changed the rules of the game. In a SharePoint environment, it's no longer about a few people organizing and overseeing the collection and dissemination of static pieces of information maintained in a central database or document repository; but about dynamic, constantly changing content that anyone with the relevant SharePoint access permissions can contribute to and organize.  

In this podcast Helen and Susan preview their conference session taking place at 9.30 on Wednesday 2 December at the Online Information conference.  They discuss how they got started with SharePoint, what pitfalls they encountered, the lessons learned, what they would do differently next time and what they have accomplished to date. 

Helen Clegg and Susan Montgomery [00:11m]:Download

Dame Wendy Hall - The Semantic Web Revolution

For this final podcast in the Online Information Conference 2009 series, I caught up with Dame Wendy Hall in a very echoey room at the Royal Society in London.

Wendy is sharing the opening keynote session on the first day of the conference with Nigel Shadbolt.  Their session has the title The Semantic Web Revolution - Unleashing the world's most valuable information.  This promises to be a great session to catch with a combination of slide-backed presentation, conversation, and Q&A.

In this conversation with Wendy, we explore the approaching step-change evolution that Semantic Web technologies, specifically Linked Data, will bring to the online world over the next few years.  An evolution to the web that is already in place, not the totally disruptive revolution that the web itself was.  Wendy makes it clear that, as with the document web of the mid nineties prior to the emergence of Google for instance, it is difficult to predict how the data web will turn out and what tools, services, and business models will emerge.  Nevertheless, the opportunities for innovation, building on the unleashing of distributed yet interlinked data, will be massive.

An interesting insight in to the thinking that will underpin what promises to be a great opening session to an equally good conference.

Dame Wendy Hall Talks with Talis [00:42m]:Download

Microsoft Bing's Antonio Gulli

Talks with Talis

Antonio has been working in the area of Web search for eleven years.  He has recently joined Microsoft as principle developer manager based in London.

Presenting in the The realtime web: Discovery vs. Search  session on the 1st day of the Online Information 2009 conference, Antonio brings an insight in to the challenges of realtime search.  Traditional search systems utilise pointers between pages to ascertain relevance and importance.  In a realtime environment, those references will have not been created.  News items from the BBC are obviously of high reputation, but are they as important as the local paper when you are in Iowa?

How do you calculate the relevance images, or videos, or a stream of information from an event such as an earthquake?  How do you calculate the importance of various social services such as FaceBook and Twitter?  Without giving away the secret recipe behind the way Bing approaches this, his explanations set the scene for these very real challenges.

Antonio Gulli Talks with Talis [00:43m]: Download

Adrian Dale looks forward to
Online Information 2009

The twelve months that have elapsed since the previous Online Information Conference has seen an explosion in technologies that influence the information world and life in general.  What was being talked about as up coming trends last year, are now core to the agenda of this years conference.

Conference Chair, Adrian Dale, joins me in conversation to discuss these trends an to explore his hopes for the highlights of this years conference.

Adrian Dale Talks with Talis [00:32m]:Download

Charlene Li - The Impact of Social Media in your organisation

The Opening Keynote slot on day three of Online Information 2009 will be filled by Charlene Li, formerly of Forrester Research and now founder of Altimer Group.  Named "One of the Most Influential Women in Technology" by Fast Company magazine, Charlene, co-author of Groundswell is well know for her opinions on how social technologies are influencing all business.

In this Talking with Talis conversation we explore her thoughts on how many commercial organisations are having to wake up to the new way that there customers and employees are interacting. Realising that they can not control or buy their way in to this space, is an important step.  We move on to explore how things will evolve further, how and for what the massive amounts of data amassed by social services. With a history in newspapers, Charlene has some thoughts on what the future may look like for that industry if the do, or do not, adapt.

An interesting heads up for day three of the conference.

Charlene Li Talks with Talis [00:42m]:Download

Stephen Abram - The Open Movement in Libraries Technology & Education

Stephen Abram is Vice President, Innovation for library system vendor SirsiDynix.  He is track keynote speaker for the  The Open Movement in Libraries, Technology & Education  track, on the third day of the conference.

In this first podcast in our Online Information 2009 series, Stephen first explores the meaning of the, often over used, openness concept.  Are we talking about openness of systems, software APIs, open source, approach, minds, libraries, or a combination of several. of these.

With such a broad topic, it was inevitable that we addressed many many aspects of the influences of technology and attitudes on the way libraries are evolving.  Touching on the library system industry, and how it has and is changing, postulating on the future of libraries, and external influences from our rapidly changing world, this is a great introduction to his presentation and the track it kicks off.