September, 2007 – User experience in a Web 2.0 world...and what it means for your business

Jerome Nadel: Hello, I am Jerome Nadal, Chief Experience Officer at HFI. Welcome to this live broadcast presented by HFI's Usability Broadcast Network. The title of today's webcast is "User Experience in the Web 2.0 World and what it means to your business". It is my pleasure to introduce my friend and colleague, Jeff Horvath, an Executive Director here at HFI. Welcome Jeff.

Jeff Horvath: Thanks Jerome, it's good to be here and it's an exciting topic and I'm looking forward to talking about it.

Jerome Nadel: Excellent, we've got a lot to cover in this session. With that let's begin with a set of progestics. Firstly, many of you have already downloaded the white paper that corresponds to this presentation that is available on our website as well, there's a complete schedule of upcoming webcasts available on this site and then finally we are encouraging because the last portion of the presentation will be question and answers, there is a link to submit your questions in the lower right hand corner of your display. With that Web 2.0, the world of Web 2.0, there is a vocabulary emerging around 2.0. Mass collaboration crowd sourcing, peer production, new revenue business models, social ramifications. In short, we are going to conclude with the framework of Web 2.0 is about quality, about collectivism and about contribution. With that we've divided this presentation into four parts. The first of the four parts is really an introduction and an overview to Web 2.0. Implications not only for business but as well interface design. How to influence and get the desired benefit both externally and internally, and with that we've divided that discussion into two halves. We've got a market-facing half looking at the larger macro eco-systemic view and we will be speaking about the challenge to get voyeurs to move to contributors. How do we get passive viewers to shift to a framework of being an active contributor? Secondly, we look at the inward-facing side, what does it mean from knowledge management perspective? We have got a strong business case that we'll share around a collaboration we did with Ernst & Young here. We'll show new models of collaboration and how Web 2.0 or Enterprise 2.0 can benefit an organization in terms of productivity and collaboration and then finally of course we'll try to pull it off altogether and provide some key axioms for improved design in the Web 2.0 world. So let's begin on this first introduction on overview, the implications of business design - to design. So with that what is all the hype Jeff?

Jeff Horvath: What's all the hype? It's exciting. You can see a fun Web 2.0 image right here that speaks to all the interesting new Web 2.0 companies that are forming out there, the technologies, all these fun little icons and images. I think the key point here is that with all of this new emerging ideas, it's all around empowering users and letting them be the social creatures they are, how do we enable them to do that? How do we enable, how to take advantage of that on a business site or leverage it and turn it into something that's good for them and good for business? So a lot of what we are going to talk today is around that theme of that social level of what does it mean to help with that collaboration?

Jerome Nadel: And how do we provide structure and effective frame work and all that, right?

Jeff Horvath: That's right.

Jerome Nadel: So presented as a tag cloud, if you will, what does it mean around 2.0?

Jeff Horvath: That's right. It's fun there to tag cloud about Web 2.0 so we can see a lot of key ideas here are about business. It's not just about design, it's about business. Web 2.0 is a business idea and so we see some terms in here about business, about economy and things like that. But at the foundation it is still about the user experience. We need to design an experience that is a positive one that users are going to like and that's going to support these new ideas that we are talking about. So you are going to see ideas in here design usability, simplicity, joy, it's all about that. That's the language that's going to enable all of this to happen.

Jerome Nadel: But as well, almost as a paradox, we see terms juxtaposed like conversion and standardization and as we know that's a challenge in interface design as we have this open model of contribution. How do we govern? What are the rules of engagement? How do we ensure consistent predictable patterns that enable users to complete the tasks that they are trying to perform in this new, more open environment?

Jeff Horvath: That's right. So there is a set of themes around Business 2.0 and I know you've extracted some quotes from things out there, I'd like to speak to that.

Jeff Horvath: Right and what that gets to is this is not just about the kids do on MySpace, it's not just about online gaming systems, this is about business as well and we've got some interesting quotes here and we'll to talk about a couple of them. Some of the ones I think that are interesting here is almost 90% of CIOs out there are spending or investing more or already investing in Web 2.0 in their organizations. They are slowly figuring out what works. Three-quarters of the executives out there plan to increase investment in collaboration technologies. They are trying to figure out how do we do this? How can we be successful with this? So it is happening in business right, we're at that storming phase if you will, before we figure out, we are working towards that storming phase.

Jerome Nadel: And our experience is that there is certainly enthusiasm and budget behind this but the challenge is again, what's the value? What's the ROI? Let's get back to the concrete measurable business benefits and through some case studies that we share we hope to clarify that as we move on. I'll take this over here Jeff. This was passed on, this "Did you know?" on YouTube and I encourage you to watch it. In fact several of these artifacts floating around the web and this one was passed on by a client and now friend saying this was something that was to developed around education and takes statistical view looking at this, what they refer to as exponential time, and radical shift that we are seeing. Interesting story over here - I was bringing my oldest child, my daughter up to the university a couple of weeks back and as I am pulling up behind her dragging all her things for her doorman. She comes up next to a young woman in the garden and says "Hey!" They are apparently speaking with each other and the conversation went on for a set of minutes and as we pulled in to the parking lot by her new dormitory, I asked who that was and she shared this young woman's name and I said, "How do you know her?" and she said, "We met on Face book." And I said, "But you seem like you know each other well and how do you know her?" She said, "We hang out on Face book." I think it really speaks to this environment where kids, young adults, adults are collaborating in this third dimension beyond their social life, beyond their business life and in connecting in ways that we have not seen connection before and then you get on to almost into social judgment around this person's profile, they have a lot of pictures, they have a few pictures, they do this, they do that.

Jeff Horvath: They have more friends than I do.

Jerome Nadel: Yeah and it is demonstrating this new model where everybody is connected to everybody and the theme in fact of this nice little educational video being yet is to suggest as we look at emerging parts of the world – China and India, everybody is more connected than they have ever been before. It's a new model for social connectiveness and a new model for social computing.

Jeff Horvath: That's right. That's right. So let's take a look at what does this mean in a bit more detail. Okay, so historically we have designers. We as business people, we have websites and those websites are designed to talk to an individual. You're at the other end of the computer; I'm going to design a great user interface and a great user experience for you to interact with my website. It is an individual experience for the most part. Nowadays though, with all this social collaboration - the sharing, the crowd sourcing, the peering you know, your daughter's story. We are designing for social experiences now. You know, we are designing for us to share experiences online and for those systems that are online to be combined in interesting ways. So it is a collective now and we have got this notion now, of an emergent social entity. So we have a lot of individual experiences but on top of it all is the social experience and it has interesting properties that we need to think about and how do we design for that, and how does that impact our businesses?

Jerome Nadel: Fundamental. Our theme at HFI for years now is content is king. Good usability, good interface design is important but content is king and we see in the model of old. It was really a publish-and-push and then you get the passive viewer. Now the viewer can't just sit and observe, they need to be a contributor because you are only as good as your collective content and that really I think, embodies the spirit and financial business framework of Web 2.0. We move on and in this slide this is the theme we shared through time talking about self-serve usability and let's not forget that even as we move to this new exciting world of Web 2.0, these core frameworks still apply. Things to be effective and have business value need to be both usable and useful. Fundamentally, we need things that work. So we get excited about new technology capabilities and we've been working with some startups that are very excited about the capabilities of Web 2.0. Looking at it more at a technology future set, we need to remember that what we are ultimately trying to do from a user experience perspective, from an emotional design, from utilitarian perspective is create things that work. Things that work better than they did before and we are going to demonstrate it through some examples of good and perhaps less good design, how that manifests. With that this next section will really focus on as we distill interface and visual design down into a set of core themes, from navigation to page design. What are some of the trends that we see that are shifted from the world of Web 1.0 to Web 2.0? So Jeff let's begin with navigation.

Jeff Horvath: Sure and we should start with a notion that a lot of things are the same. We still need to care about the navigation. People still need to find information and we need to understand how to help them do that. Okay, but one of the key differences here is if we got in this Web 2.0 world, people are collaborating, we're creating our own content, we're sharing it etc. and so the designer can no longer spend their time upfront doing all the data gathering and their card scoring and all that fun stuff to figure out what's the navigation structure that I'm going to provide to the users or rather the users are ones that are going to provide the navigation structure. They are the ones if you look at You Tube here; we are going to be sharing information with each other. We are going to be recommending things to each other and that provides that they in fact, own navigation for the site. If you look at something like Flicker with these tag clouds those emerge from the metadata that users provide about their own content and so that becomes the navigation for the site so that is a user generated navigation if you will. So the challenge now is, what's different is no longer am I the designer in my design navigation framework for the users to provide navigation. So it's my job now to provide a framework that will work and do that in a way that is extensible, that makes sense and as usable to everybody else.

Jerome Nadel: So navigation is no longer static...

Jeff Horvath: That's right.

Jerome Nadel: But it is a framework that enables perhaps a secondary navigation through voting, rating, folksonomical tagging, to enable me to find things in other exploratory ways that I hadn't done before but it's still incumbent on the designer to think about good framework and effectiveness of it.

Jeff Horvath: That's right.

Jerome Nadel: Very good.

Jeff Horvath: So the next one here is about search. Now historically, search results come from algorithms. Our job as designers is to figure out how to design the content, what kind of metadata do we need, how do we do that in a way that will beat in search engines you know, make sure that our content that shows on people's search results.

Jerome Nadel: SCO?

Jeff Horvath: SCO that's it. Nowadays, we are moving towards a model where it is not the algorithms that are coming up with the results, it is other people. So I am going to provide a search query and well there are still algorithms out there it's based on what do other people think? How do they organize? How are they going to answer this question? So that may mean that as a designer, I am not trying to beat search engine if you will, my job is to figure out a way to make sure that I am using, interesting other people that are similar to me, the user you know, to help find the results that are relevant to me. So I want to find people who are like me and have answers to similar questions and that's going to drive my search results. So that's a shift, a pretty important shift in how we do search results.

Jerome Nadel: And the key theme of course, over here is to enable and encourage me to contribute although I might be able to do better than the taxonomist - the person who is creating this search catalogue. You need to create a framework through influential interface design that makes it easy for me to contribute and we will be talking about it especially in the realm of knowledge management within intranets, within internal portal design.

Jeff Horvath: Here's another topic-Content. We talked about content is king. In the past, very much a publishing model we'd be the website organizers. We'd come up with the content, we'd publish it was very much about managing that content, we will wrestle with the content management systems and how does that work with the interface and all that wonderful stuff. Well now in the Web 2.0 world, the users are providing the content. So it's less about we creating that content, publishing it etc., it's about they provide the content now what do we do? How do we get the content out there and in a way that is useful and usable? And that has one pretty big, well, a number of implications. The biggest one I think is the notion of moderating that content.

Jerome Nadel: Absolutely.

Jeff Horvath: Every time we talked about this with the company they ask us, "Gosh how do I control that?" The users, they can just put anything out there and so that makes a lot of people very nervous to give up that kind of control and so it's about what is the right level of moderating that content? If you look on the left here you see a website, it's a web-censor, a community for musicians. Musicians don't like to be censored at all. They don't like to be moderated so the decision there is don't do any. Let them say whatever they want, that's what is right for them and for their business. On the right you see a Lego kids, you should better moderate that content and make sure it is appropriate to them. There is no one right answer for how do I moderate this content? It's going to be what's right for you and your users, but that issue is important.

Jerome Nadel: We will be sharing that challenge through some case study where in fact, this notion of how do I score? How do I rate? Can anybody contribute? How do I ensure that what is ultimately out there is representing and reflecting our brand is it something we want to affiliated with us? So opening up blogs to say, "Tell us whatever you want" can be harmful and that needs to be managed depending on the environment of the site.

Jeff Horvath: That's right. That's right. The last one here is page design. We still have to design pages; pages still have content on them. Well, in the past whereas we could mostly be pretty confident about roughly how users would get to that content. They probably would go to our website and search and navigate through it to get to that content. We are less confident about that nowadays. We get syndicated content. We get content that can be mashed up and can be reused and re-purposed in all sorts of different ways. So right here if I am interested in some science that Apple is doing, I might go to Apple's website, navigate around and experience the Apple experience to get to. But I might also have subscribed to that on My Yahoo page and I might get to that content through My Yahoo and never go to that site. I'll still get to that end, that destination but I would never have experienced the Apple experience on my way. That's different; there are different implications so it shifts the focus more towards let's design content that can stand out or relate in other ways within the context of that content.

Jerome Nadel: So in this period of a mash up I assume that your design becomes much more elemental and the page is no longer the element, it is really the element within the page because that could be repurposed on another site completely out of context which is a different paradigm for design and user experience as well. So this provides a framework of some of the themes to be thinking through when understanding the world of Web 2.0 and how to design optimally for it. Again the feeling here was to really make this concrete. Let's look at it from two axes. One, being the market facing, the big network and much of I think when we speak to Web 2.0 we think of it more in the open end user collective framework. We are going to follow that with the inward and share that although there are similar themes that were encouraging contribution in collaboration, the way they manifest the strategy, the influential design that we encourage is going to be different between the two. We are going to try to provide some case studies between each of these as well, clients and projects that we've engaged on where we've seen this manifest in different ways and we give our take about what we think is working and what's not. So let's begin at the highest level. You know when we look at this massively multiplayer online gaming as kind of the onset of this global community interacting and that was a big smash on the market and again, in the figure on the left hand side you are seeing, you know what's taking the lion's share of that entire massive multi-player environment. But as well on the bottom we see which of course everybody, I presume it is you know of the Second Life and it is an interesting model because we see whole economies and business models and academic theses that are being modeled around Second Life. You know it almost comes back to you as "wag the dog", are we looking at reality to identify virtual reality, or are we out there in a virtual world and then mimicking that in reality? I think it speaks to a different time; you have a comment on that?

Jeff Horvath: Yeah if I am a marketer and I want to market in Second Life, am I going to market it to Jerome or am I going to market it to Jerome's avatar in Second Life? That's an interesting conundrum there...

Jerome Nadel: And who is Jerome? Is Jerome the avatar or is Jerome...?

Jeff Horvath: Yes, exactly. Do I want to sell to the avatar or do I sell to you? It's interesting, lots of interesting applications there.

Jerome Nadel: And I think it is really reflective of this notion of you are out there, it's a large community; it is a different model and a social collective and we bring this to you know back to more concrete so here Web 2.0 market facing again it's kind of the, about putting the user in control and the realm of if that we already share is how much control? How open, how much governance and editing is happening over the interactions online? So more than the company blogs of "tell me what you think?" these are really new evolving business models.

Jeff Horvath: That's right if we look at up here at Dell. Dell is very popular you know, they design your own computer. That is Dell's thing. Well now, they have taken that one step further they've developed an online community for customers to come in and talk about the design of the computers, the design of Dell computers. Give then some more ownership - let them collaborate in that product generation process. IBM- we talked about Second Life, IBM spends time in Second Life doing training in customer support to people in Second Life, okay so how does that work? We talked about MySpace, these big social communities, it's not just you know teenagers and young adults down there, defining their persona. Taking IT global is an online community with over a hundred thousand people around the world. In IT space, they come together not to talk about you know how many friends do you have but I work in this technology and I want to work with my peers, it's an IT organization, one of the largest in the world doesn't get a lot of press, because it's not fancy and fun like MySpace. We talked about blogs. GM had one of the earliest blogs and they were one of the pioneers in...

Jerome Nadel: Opening up.

Jeff Horvath: Opening up and there are risks you know, you have to be brave to do that. I'm going to open up and am going to let my users talk to me, that can be a little scary but there are benefits to that.

Jerome Nadel: But remember again, I think we picked a nice mosaic of different digital properties that correspond to organizations and their business and paradigm and from an interaction design perspective, we often say that the interface is the medium to influence the end user. And this is a critical point to be made within this webcast is that it's not just having the property and the frameworks of people can contribute – it's getting, creating the desired behavior. How do you influence through design? So let's move on and look at this example. This in fact, came from collaboration with a start up in the space of a social media network very much around collecting, sharing and creating content that will be pushed up by others. And you see this progression over here. The slide is titled shift from voyeurs to creators and this speaks to a business imperative and we encourage that designers think in this way. What am I trying to have happen - to see this progression from viewer to collector, to connector to creator? Let's remember if we don't have content as "content is king", we don't have Web 2.0. So this notion of where are we now? If I as a viewer am going to go to You Tube and watch a video, I'm not contributing that. I'm not giving back to the social network. What is being encouraged by good design is to provide a framework that enables me in context to easily give back and we see this progression over here and I suggest one difference between the inside and the outside is you'll find as the common theme on the outside the big network is there will be something analogous to this progression that we see here. Static viewers that are on the couches, layers are going to be inadequate. You get pages but that's not the metric any longer but you need the people giving back, fuming the engine of content and design needs to do that and we are going to share a case study with a young star at Eluma, an organization that many of you might not know and we have a perspective of the CEO, Richard Buck. Here's an engagement that we worked on and without saying "Hey, we've got a great concept we feel there is some clever technology that enables the frame work of a desktop client connected to the world of 2.0." In the white paper you will see more of his details, quote in his perspective, a very articulate and bright guy but again in this period of the tag clouds although it is very appropriate we can distill down all of the words that he uses in his clever statement over here, things like closer relationships, dialogues, consumers, prospects and let's not forget brand because brand is going to be important as he looks at brand as to generate the revenue for him to advertising in other vehicles. Other themes that we have spoken, relinquishing control and having trust in the collective social network and back in this given organization, this utility and the collective opinion will emerge and ultimately, there will be profit and I think this really embodies the spirit of 2.0. To say put it out there through kind of statistical central limit theorem things will come back to a happy need and you got to open it up so for the business viewers in the audience over here if your intent is to make good from the business perspective in 2.0, I think many of this key terms you see here relinquish control, trust, collective opinion, emerged profitability is really - underlines successful business models in this space.

Jeff Horvath: That's right, it takes a little bit of bravery to do this at times too because that relinquishing control aspect is an important one. You are going to the users more than instead of trying to hold them into your little world and that's scary to a lot of businesses and that's, I think that's one of the biggest barriers if you will, of getting people to understand why that is a good thing, how it works in getting over that fear.

Jerome Nadel: And with that the model of conversion has changed you know historically, we look from a content perspective though converging is looking at the number of page flicks. So I have flicked through and gone deep in to this site and then we move to e-commerce and it's a focus of did they buy, did they convert to put something in the cart and then check out and ultimately buy? Conversion here, once again, is really about giving content back not just passively dealing but actively contributing. We see some of that reflected as we go in to a little bit of the case study about Eluma, again Eluma.com if you are interested in seeing a little bit more about what they are dealing and you know again, I think it speaks to this its ultimate kind of egalitarian democracy which is referred to as the ethnic in democracy as well. So in this framework, you see at what they were looking at with a desktop client the one with download is really mashing up the best of the Web 2.0 world. You got your personal start pages, which you are very familiar with, then the notion of content sharing and in rating and loading, social bookmarking, what did I think and let others see it and of course an almost an RSS aggregator on steroids.

Jeff Horvath: That's right.

Jerome Nadel: And the idea was to aggregate all of this into a unified container but again, not just to receive but to contribute back out and that's reflected in this next slide over here where we look at the Eluma Community Ecosystem and again, the reason that we are highlighting this is not just about this design we are sharing a couple of screen shots to follow. But about this ecosystem about the fact that it's no longer Eluma is a content provider and they are pushing that to passive recipients. The work is now in part on the end user and you see that reflected a little bit in this diagram so we see if you will from right to left, within the slide, the idea that you've got branders and they are going to create content, once again content is king. You've got on Eluma content creators but you got others that are pulling back into the network and this model is only effective if they get the viewers of content, the collectors of that content to comment, to organize to publish back.

Jeff Horvath: That' right and it gets back to what we talked about earlier. Eluma here is not just providing the navigation and the content, they are providing a framework. It's a framework for others, the consumers, the users to engage and provide and become contributors to it and that then will have value to the brands around that they want to use this as a tool for their own company.

Jerome Nadel: Absolutely and again this notion of create a viable container that facilitates contribution in collaboration. So you see here, I share a couple of views of evolving design and this is not final, we are coming up with another release that I understand will be out in fact, next month. But you see the framework here and your displays of the notion of "How I can identify things that are of interest to me" and then how immediately contextually, I have the ability to act on those things. So the idea of "let me grab this, let me go ahead and publish it out, let me play in place", it's really about the verbs or the nouns and I think again one aspect of 2.0 is very much around taking action. Don't view passively but take action.

Jeff Horvath: Right. I think a good quote that I had wanted to point is Web 2.0 is not about the nouns anymore it is about the verbs. It's about what you can do and enabling that.

Jerome Nadel: Enabling and promoting and with that the space is getting bigger and bigger and again you see some initial concept design some ipsum lorem as it is evolving but the idea of how do I encourage exploration and discovery? There's so much out there and again back to that "Did you know?" You Tube video that I spoke to before, more and more, there is more and more. How do I filter? And even in this period of folksonomical tagging, let me find what I am looking for against not only taxonomical structures but what others say as well. So designs in the 2.0 world need to encourage simple exploration to recommendation engines by experts and by others to simple frameworks that enable me to find what I would like and to organize in a meaningful way that I can pass on to others. So again, what you are really doing in the 2.0 world is creating a game where you enable rules and the players actually will be playing.

Jeff Horvath: Excellent. I think the number one most effective way of helping somebody make a decision about whether to buy or covert is a recommendation. A recommendation by somebody they trust if back to that, a recommendation by somebody else. So getting those other people to help you to make your decisions whatever that is, is a fundamentally important part of what it means to do business in a Web 2.0 world.

Jerome Nadel: Absolutely and then we come to some key themes so you know very bold over here – move me from voyeur to contributor and I think if we distill down and in fact the slide that follows will talk about some core principles of market facing Web 2.0 but this probably summarizes it best. Get me from being a passive viewer of content you created and I receive to someone who becomes a contributor back. Let me fuel the engine, get me active, make me participate and for the interaction designers in the audience this is the goal, successful in interaction or not, influence me, persuade me to act in a way that is meeting your business subject. So in this case again it is giving back. So we talk about a set of core principles.

Jeff Horvath: Yes Core Principles. We need to have the network, we need to have the people there to do that, how do you build that network? So you need to start this process of getting people, getting a social community to be able to contribute to your business in the end. You need to build that network. There are different ways to do that. You know, what the real difference by the situation is we need to have that network right there. There is this notion of crowd sourcing if you are not familiar with it the idea is to get the collective to work together in an egalitarian way, in a very peering way to collectively create content, create value for you . Let's leverage that, it is a natural outsource of that social dynamic that we as people have.

Jerome Nadel: And this has been implemented in that way that there are contests to create, opening it up and so the world of remix and the like. Let me just put it out there and come up with something better and give that back and that applies here as well. Sorry...

Jeff Horvath: Yeah, no, no problem. I think the important concept is no matter how smart your organization is, the collective intelligence and skills out there outside the organization is always going to be more than the collective intelligence and skills inside. So the more you can leverage out there whatever that might mean, the better off you are going to be as an organization. So that is an important principle. We need to move them along to continue. We talked about getting them from voyeur to contributor. That's the channels of the designer in the business. How do we transition them, how do we enable them, and what language do we give them to make that transition along that continuum?

Jerome Nadel: And we go back to the beginning of graphical interface design, objects and actions. You know like Jeff used to point out that in the 2.0 there are more verbs than nouns. The actions associated with objects need to be co-positioned so you make it very easy and inviting for me to take action. Get me off this seat. Don't just encourage but enable me to contribute back and we have spoken to this back and again, you are giving up some control. I think Richard Buck in his very articulate quote really shared that you've got to give it up, you got to let them give in and in the end they don't get right, then we concluded this theme of establish trust, participating in their world. And when we see these very successful Web 2.0 initiatives, they have really followed these core principles that we are speaking to here. So that's the outside. Let's look at what this means on the inside and one of the interesting things is, as we begin here is, I first started experiencing and reading on Web 2.0, one interpretation of that especially around the notion of folksonomical tagging, it was - something is created, historically it is well defined, so let's take this specially from the knowledge management perspective. We had a given artifact in an organization and the taxonomist who is going to set up Meta tags is going to catalogue that artifact. So when I query for it against some four pre-defined filters I confined it against that structure with a notion of folksonomical tagging that sells in a very open egalitarian framework. "Let people call it what they think" which might not fit at all with the structure of the taxonomy that already existed. So when thinking about this I said, well within an organization if something brand new is only identified by the collective touches by the number of people who have identified it to be this. By definition when something is new, it's not going to be well-tagged and it requires the social network to be very large and all actively telling me what the thing is, to be accurately identified. Inside organizations you might not have those types of numbers so the key theme here is going to be how do we complement current taxonomical structure with the benefit of folksonomical contribution? And this is very much a theme of the section that follows that something that is different on the inside and the outside. The outside is big and limitless. The inside is as much as you have, it's the number of employees you serve and it is a different environment size matters in the beginning and we are going to be speaking to that.

Jeff Horvath: Yes that's right.

Jerome Nadel: Okay, there's a lot on this slide, we apologize for that. We spoke about this a bit in the white paper but it tries to delineate a difference between the present day intranet and the world of Enterprise 2.0 and it speaks of some key differences over here between collecting information, communicating, creating and distributing content and clearly as we know the in world of Web 2.0, big differences underlie the way we create and get to distribute that content. More than open framework everybody can be a publisher creating an enabled environment that allows for sharing and collaboration. In fact a set of months back, I co-presented in a webcast with Ed Sanders of SAP talking about the corporate portal and what makes for a good portal design and how you in fact, encourage and enable collaboration and improved productivity. The theme carries on here. How does 2.0 make a portal better and especially from a KEM perspective, how do you improve knowledge sharing, knowledge distribution, collaboration of that knowledge?

Jeff Horvath: I think one important aspect of the slide is that overlap that we see on the right-hand side. On the left we see that knowledge is discreet, it is separate with different channels different ways of organizing it. Now when we are leveraging that folksonomical information we are leveraging the social, we are leveraging the community, that information starts to cross boundaries and that has power and that has efficiencies and so that is a good thing and I think that is the bill that we are going to talk about tomorrow.

Jerome Nadel: Absolutely and a case study over here, Giovanni Piazza runs the center for Business Knowledge at Ernst & Young. Ernst & Young the largest of the major accounting firms in the world and towards a 140,000 employees and very distributed partnership. The challenge is, how do they create a knowledge infrastructure that becomes routine where people can get what they need to do their work and again in the same spirit as Richard Buck's set of quotes, once again we encourage you to download the white paper, there is more content and detail in there about some of the great thinking of these gentlemen. We see here historically it has been people with content, now it's about people with people and in a business oriented way he said, this Web 2.0 thing is only effective if it's going to enable or meet business imperatives, share competencies around the enterprise. So as a global distributed environment, Ernst & Young challenged us in the set of displays that I'm going to share coming up, to say what would be the future of a knowledge sharing environment be if we embraced and adopted the best of 2.0, in an implementable framework? What would it look like and how would it act? And we wanted to share some of these tenets over here because I think that they speak to what makes for a good knowledge management in general and how to leverage some of the best attributes of 2.0. So we are going to share more details on these displays but one of the things you see in this slide titled "Fostering Collaboration and Knowledge Sharing" is that the user is in the center, not the taxonomist necessarily, but the user. And you see a set of pages over here, an Ajax space homepage that has some layered clever technological capability, you see search results, personal page but on the bottom-right you see this notion of a document viewer. And as we talked before about, carry the verbs with the nouns. People in general don't want to go to a room to collaborate, they want to collaborate in context, so when I find something that is meaningful to me, enable me with the tools co-positioned next to the thing that I have found of interest, to be able to interact and interface with it. So let's tell that story visually and that's the way we like to tell stories, here at HFI.

Jeff Horvath: (Laughs).

Jerome Nadel: So we begin with a homepage and you see on the top-right, the idea of a query was initiated. I didn't enter the detailed attributes of the homepage. It's a homepage with things like RSS feeds and some Ajax, built-in application layers and the like, but we begin with a query from the top. You've now come to a search results page and on that search result you see that it is divided in two halves. You have the classical taxonomical filters but you also have the folksonomical tags and what is to be done is a tag list or a tag cloud. So how does this work? In this world, I queried for something European Telecom, it's come out and I can filter it to say well I can start filters; I'd like to look at everything in Asia. I'd like to look at everything in this time period or I'd like to look at if I, for this set of results, what do other people describe these things as? Let me re-filter this list against that so already we see the benefit of these folksonomical contributions over here. We move on and here we see now and down at the document level, I mean what we refer to as the document container where there is a kind of Meta content around these given documents describing what they are. But look at the right-hand rail over here. In this framework, we are immediately enabling me to see how did other people tag this? Let me contribute my own tags to these documents. Let me in fact, moving in telling this visual story; initiate a discussion thread through this. So I'm walking through in a sequence where I begin by finding an artifactive knowledge and the tools that enable me to share, contribute, post to my blog, give back to the collective community or immediately co-position and this is something that we think is very important around internal portal design. We talked about how it manifests as you saw the Eluma example where we publish "let me see something that I have already collected. But in this framework, if somebody is on the other side of the world and if they put something out that is of interest for me, let me speak directly with them. Let me share with others as an expert, what I think this is really about." So the key theme over here when we move on and we talk about the notion of a structured social classification is, don't throw away your taxonomist.

Jeff Horvath: (Laughs).

Jerome Nadel: But leverage - enhance the taxonomical structure with folksonomical contribution. What does that mean? So in this diagram, we are looking at a world from the center out to say as I create something, I'm going to publish it and there might be some structure where by I've already identified a set of Meta tags. That document, that artifact ultimately published and accessible. When somebody else views that document and encourage them to contribute back, you call that A, B, and C, I think it is more or like F with a little bit of B.

Jeff Horvath: That's right.

Jerome Nadel: So the intent over here is that these folksonomical contributions are a layer that go on top of that core taxonomical foundation and that could be done through automation, through technology or that could be done by a taxonomist saying "what is everybody saying? Let me make sure I am listening to them. And adding that to the value of how I've catalogued the content that we have."

Jeff Horvath: So it starts and the whole story is it starts at that core, the taxonomist driven core if you will, this is our knowledge, this is our organization, these are our documents and these are our intellectual capital. But we are not going to, we don't want to lose all of the implicit knowledge that we've got in our organization, we want to enable the entire of the organization to expand and elaborate that, take it to a new level, organizing it in better and different ways and we benefit by capturing that and everybody else benefits as well.

Jerome Nadel: It gets better through times so as we said the challenge on the inside, because the numbers by definition are smaller within an organization than the world at large. Make sure that there is some structure and rigor about how we identify things such that when they are published they are immediately findable by whatever structure exists. But let that get better through time whereas in contrast, on the outside what we are suggesting is the network is large, it is the big social network. So you can start more embryonic, more pure and let this build the infrastructure and let people contribute.

Jeff Horvath: That's right.

Jerome Nadel: So these themes in and out are somewhat similar but they are very different in the fact that content that comes out in the internal environment is to immediately be findable and good and well-defined while on the outside we are really lying at some level on this social network to make it good.

Jeff Horvath: That's right. That's right.

Jerome Nadel: Finally in sharing in this vision of Ernst & Young's, something that we think is very pioneering as well, is this concept moving to one digital platform, a notion of an integrated e-channel and in this world as many large service organizations have an intranet, an internal portal, an extranet, a secured area for their clients and a public facing dot com. Imagine a unified platform where based on who I am, that's the view of the site that I see. So as an employee, I can be in. I am on the inside and I see very much the Enterprise 2.0 environment that we saw before. As an anonymous visitor, I come on the outside and the more I tell you about myself, the more I am able to interact through these tools of the Web 2.0 world. Note on the top as well it's not a free-for-all, so an organization like Ernst & Young can't just have content published by anybody. There needs to be some structure, so this scoring process suggests that there is encouragement to contribute out, share our expertise at a grassroots level but let's make sure we have some governance and control about that. And Jeff and I think to articulate this control continuum from where it used to be very controlled, "I publish, you read" to a very open world where everybody contributes with really no order. Order as defined democratically and naturally, to something in between and that's the key theme of this webcast when you are looking at 2.0 technologies, ask yourself where are you along this continuum and clearly the world of 1.0 is gone. So hopefully you are not going to be anchored at one end of that continuum and maybe not all the way at the other but find the place and what we've tried to share through some of these design tenets what are the things to be thinking about on the in on the out, to encourage that contribution as well.

Jeff Horvath: That's right.

Jerome Nadel: And Jeff why don't you share some of the core principles on the inside?

Jeff Horvath: Sure. Some of the core ideas, the important ideas that we think encapsulate all of this is it is about people. It's about connecting people with people. We talked early on about this emergent social nature of it all. It's no longer the individual, it's about the people collaborating and doing crowd sourcing and peering and all that. So we need to think philosophically if you will, about the people aspects of this. We need to collaborate in context, is another of our four principles here. We don't, it's not the design to force me to go somewhere else to collaborate, I'm probably not going to do that. Let me, enable me collaborate in the context of whatever it is that I am doing, that's important. Don't throw away your taxonomist, we talked about that. The job of the taxonomist may shift a little bit but is still an important job. We still need to start on our internal applications with a solid foundation that is organized around the business that makes sense and gets you started so we can elaborate on that and grow. So the taxonomist's job involves that organization, well so, how do we organically grow with that but don't throw away your taxonomist.

Jerome Nadel: Which we think will be a growing industry in how folksonomy meets taxonomy. How do we leverage the collective good and put it as a layer on top of the structured taxonomical catalogue?

Jeff Horvath: Yes that's right. It's probably more important tomorrow than it is today. All this knowledge that we have now internally, externally, hybrids, how do we manage that? That taxonomist will be very, very important. This fourth point, a very important point here and this is the one that scares a lot of organizations that you need to manage the cultural change here. It's going to be, it's doing business this way, is different, and it takes some bravery. You need to trust the users, you need to put some control in their hands whether it is the employees, whether it's the public your customers, whomever, you need to let go some of that. You need to go to them and establish some trust. That's the cultural change of how we do business and beyond changing just how we do the e-channel, this change will change how we do business, and how we interact.

Jerome Nadel: In and out.

Jeff Horvath: In and out.

Jerome Nadel: Again, it is the notion of a digital e-channel as we start breaking down the walls and thinking of you know role-based design, based on what you know about me being able to serve me better, which is another key theme that we have really, there is so much to talk about here.

Jeff Horvath: That's right.

Jerome Nadel: And as we were preparing for the discussions in this webcast, we spoke about that the more you know, so in the 1.0 world moving to 1.2 the idea of dynamic personalization. As I navigate through a site I volunteer information, you are learning more about me. Think of 2.0 and when you get me to be passive viewer to a contributor you are learning more and more and more about me. So let's talk about business value. Business value is having a subscriber base that you have decomposed the demographics and psychographics that you know a lot about, so let's leverage what we know about these consistent end users and drive value out of that end. That's why we see still close to 2000 dot com boom, there's almost frenzy value of over "build the network and tells us a lot about them" and what we find, I heard an interesting presentation by Lee Rainey of the Pew Research institute project talking about the fact that today, people are less and less concerned about volunteering information because everybody is doing it. So we are moving into a world where we are volunteering more and more about ourselves, enabling if you will, marketers or those who could serve us in a more personalized way to give us more of what we are looking for - offers that makes sense.

Jeff Horvath: That's right. There is collective value in providing that information. I don't have to guard it quite as closely. I still want to guard some of it but in providing that information about me and you getting that information about me enables the collective. Everybody benefits from that it's a sea level change.

Jerome Nadel: Show me the value, I'm not going to fill a profile necessarily, through my behaviors you can determine what I do, make it happen easily so I'm not doing the work upfront.

Jeff Horvath: That's right.

Jerome Nadel: Questions are coming in and let me encourage, so we wanted to leave time because we assume that this will be somewhat provocative and we will be getting a set of questions in the end and they are on the way in. You'll see the magic hands giving questions as we go.

Jeff Horvath: (Laughs).

Jerome Nadel: And some good ones are already coming in. So let us quickly close and then we are going to move to questions and answers. Really you know, there is one slide over here and I am putting it all together and the white paper tried to articulate this as well as what does it mean? And we started with this upfront; I'll take that first line because that's one I hold near and dear. In 2.0 and there are a lot of definitions of 2.0, but one that works for me is 2.0 is about equality, collectivism and contribution. You could almost look at that as contribution is the bigger piece over here you know the tag cloud perspective you have got to get them to give back and then we climb down and talk about some other action.

Jeff Horvath: Absolutely. We need to enable that. It's the job of the designer we talked early on about it, it is still about designing a user experience to enable us. What we mean by this is different now, it's a little broader and more complicated but it's that user experience that drives it, if we don't enable it, we don't enable them to contribute which is the goal then it is not going to happen. Just because we build it, doesn't mean that they are going to come. So we – it is the job of that designer and as a business to figure how to transition them along that continuum from voyeur to contributor.

Jerome Nadel: And that's the responsibility of good design.

Jeff Horvath: Sure, that's right.

Jerome Nadel: The reason we were excited to include those case studies that you saw and the case of Eluma is the notion of publishing context. In the framework of Ernst & Young's, an internal portal enable to put this on my blog and enable me to initiate discussions right and enable me to pass this on to somebody else.

Jeff Horvath: Right and then this last thing about influence, the influence that the end users can have now - the customers, the employees whether it is internally or externally, they have more influence now individually and collectively because we as an organization need to participate. We need to enable them to build our product, our brand, our community here and so we need to go to them and they have influence over us. They have more immediate and direct control and influence over what we do and how we do our business. That's different, it takes some getting used to but it is a very powerful idea.

Jerome Nadel: And good interface design can actuate the desired effect so really experiential design means that you are going to get the behavior you want. Create the framework for them to contribute, be active participants in the social network, that's the spirit, equality collectivism and contribution. With that let's take some more questions from you, so we begin and it's a great way to start out a question by the way.

QUESTIONS & ANSWERS:-

Jerome Nadel: Jerome and Jeff really enjoying your webcast it's probably been read. What is great is that there is a connection between KM/design to work with content whether created by the creator or helping to facilitate the collector. What are the metrics that you are most interested in?

Jeff Horvath: I would say on that front the metrics that are interesting to me are how successful are those elaborations? How successful is that elaboration of the content because that's going to drive how that evolves, how that changes how that impacts other areas of the organization? So we need to be able to figure out whether it is the taxonomist doing it or some technology or whatever. What's the impact of that content that's being created and what do we do about it?

Jerome Nadel: Yeah the measure, there's a call for action. I mean again, I suggested previously we used to look at PayJets and say we've done really well off on that. From the commerce perspective we looked at conversion and conversion could be around content too I wanted you to look here, you did and these were the web measures we worked at.

Jeff Horvath: That's right.

Jerome Nadel: Now it's about giving back, it's about publishing and providing, contributing back and that becomes more and more the metric of success in the 2.0 world again.

Jeff Horvath: That's right.

Jerome Nadel: If you are the voyeur who goes and watches a video on You Tube you really are not part of that network.

Jeff Horvath: That's right. Well there are organizations now that are and it's becoming a part of the job description and the compensation package to contribute internally and that was like this. The more you contribute to the overall intellectual capital of the organization, the better off you are going to be.

Jerome Nadel: Or the content for entertainment site?

Jeff Horvath: Absolutely.

Jerome Nadel: The more that's out there. Another great question here, it doesn't begin with the compliment but well we'll go through it anyway.

Jeff Horvath: (Laughs).

Jerome Nadel: I certainly see how this impacts website design. Is there also a connection to Web based application design? Let me begin on that Jeff because we see this often that we create this artificial dichotomy between the app and the KM area of the supporting referential sites around the application. They should be better integrated; people should not go to a room, to a collaboration site to collaborate. The application model of 2.0 is incorporating collaboration in the application.

Jeff Horvath: That's right.

Jerome Nadel: So we need to get out of the mind set of "I have an application and I could Alt+Tab or switch over to something that enables me to collaborate, to an instance whereby the application itself is a collaboration in itself.

Jeff Horvath: That's right. That's the design challenge and that's what we talked about a little bit earlier is that e-channel innovation. We don't want to have a site into this and that, it's - this is now, this is our intellectual capital, let's break down the barriers.

Jerome Nadel: And again with application designs, we are seeing that even the publishing model of content says that the application now needs to maybe extract and you get into even XML layer there that this is what I am looking for here, let me get straight to it so I could use it in context. So that model of application design is different it's now one that entails "give me everything I need to do this piece of work" which is really good interaction design to begin with. How do you see companies using social networking and Web 2.0 for their intranets? So obviously we were speaking about that a little, I presume this came in a little earlier within the webcast. Do you want to speak on that?

Jeff Horvath: Sure, sure. Companies are doing a couple of things and it's starting organically. But the CIOs of organizations are figuring out that this needs – that they need to pay attention to and there are a couple ways. Organizations are using tools like Wiki's and blogs and other collaborative tools like that to enable their project work. Project teams or peer groups are using these technologies on their own without even the knowledge of the CIO sometimes to enable their work. To help them collaborate, communicate, peer, doing that kind of intellectual and professional peering at work. So they are using this technology and they are starting to become standard and use some off-the-shelf, if you will, tools to enable this kind of activity.

Jerome Nadel: And again I think some of the examples almost related questions that are coming in over here so you will see me kind of scanning across. Does the Ernst & Young example also include a social networking component, connecting people to people? So one of the things and perhaps this was coming in advance of that sharing factor, the page view is the idea that I am on this piece of content, let me see the author, let me immediately come to a discussion thread, let me connect with the other people we are connected about this. So what we looked at, almost form infinity perspective is, what are the actions I would take around this artifact? If I would want to put it on or post it on my blog? If I would want to chat about that? If I would want to pass it off to a colleague? All of these enablers are really part of social networking saying "you can use this; you can contribute back, with folksonomical tags or encourage me to publish out."

Jeff Horvath: That's right.

Jerome Nadel: Another excellent question over here. How do you handle content aging (old, stale content) when users are the contributors?

Jeff Horvath: I think that can happen organically. I think in this rule where users are generating content, they are generating the navigation and the Meta tools around the content. We talked about how we as designers need to create the framework to enable that but part of that framework means how do we deal with an issue like this? So whether it is tagging or recommendations or other tools those things should and will have a natural sort of time sensitive nature to them. Recommendations will fade overtime as we stop using them. Tag cloud will evolve over time as we start changing and people are using them, so I think that's a natural consequence of some other ways that we do this.

Jerome Nadel: Yeah almost to that data mining model you know where what's zoomed is what's current and a lot of people have been around this. It's at the top; it's in high focus with high visual acuity. Things that are stale are going to be at the bottom. Of course, there needs to be some algorithm or some decision that says, "this is so stale that it is out" and some mechanism around content management will be looking at aging and relevancy. But really the social network organically determines what's up close and what's further alike and that manifests clearly through things like recommendation engines or even videos at the top of You Tube.

Jeff Horvath: That's right.

Jerome Nadel: What ideas do you have about how you integrate folksonomy and other user input into a structured taxonomy? So again, this was a – I'll being if I may?

Jeff Horvath: Sure, sure.

Jerome Nadel: This was a bit of a theme and we shared and you know that was kind of an inventive here that that notion of a structured or social classification suggesting that they are connected where folksonomy is not its own orthogonal set way to navigate or filter this. It should be better connected to a taxonomical structure which means that and I know again in that case of Ernst & Young; they spent a lot of time and energy around refining their taxonomical catalogue. So even if it is more of the batch process say around these artifacts, we were able to capture other terms that are used as descriptors, make sure you at least cognizant to that information coming in. Again, I think we are going to see more tools evolving in doing that in a more automated manner.

Jeff Horvath: That's right, that's right.

Jerome Nadel: Another good question here, How do you incent users (internally or externally) to contribute content?

Jeff Horvath: Sure. A couple of ways that we talked about the internal one, literally you can incent them that is part of the job description, they can be and there are organizations that do that. But I think at a broader level the incentive is organic. People who are going to want to contribute because they are interested in it and they think they can add value. It's a natural consequence of being part of a social entity. We can call it meritocracy at times where you want to provide value because you think you can; you think you have something somebody else doesn't. It happens somewhat organically. Certainly you can do all the old design tricks you know, providing you, we'll give you some if you give us something, we want that to happen in the context of what you're doing and let you drive that process.

Jerome Nadel: How do you address concerns about privacy or company-sensitive information? A good question and there are many ways to look at this. The privacy of the individual contributor to knowing who the individual is. I'm a big fan of re-authentication, you know the more you know about me the better you can serve me and even in that e-channel continuum that we spoke about before the idea is of course, you begin with an anonymous user maybe already by IP domain and the - through click screen, you are already cookie-ing, I know what you are and what you have already done. Get them to register, and then they are going to be able to see more perhaps plans from the inside. So the encouragement in the 2.0 environment to tell me who you are really is an enabler that says I can share more with you because you volunteered who you are.

Jeff Horvath: That's right. I think this also gets at that figure - that big issue of trust that we talked about. Companies need to trust the users more and the need to just sort of let go if you will and it's awkward and difficult for organizations to do but there is value in letting be and letting the information get out there, if you will, at least some of it and getting the feedback. So you get timely and relevant information and so there's value there and that's a change in mindset in some organizations do. Give up something to get something.

Jerome Nadel: These questions are fantastic, thank you and I think very relevant for the viewership at large. Very interesting about participation, but doesn't the data show that in actuality, very few people are participating? The layer of activists is thin (and influential), but if they don't represent the masses is it effective for a large organization to put too much stock in their views? So set – and it's very insightful observation over there. So what happens when you get the noisy respondent to the surveys, you put all your stock in that, it's a way to simplify that statement and again I think we come back to is it on the outside or the inside? And I remember you know Paula Abdul an American idol...

Jeff Horvath: (Laughs).

Jerome Nadel: You know when she you know was a little bit bizarre on TV that was the no.1video on You Tube. A day later it was at the bottom and that's really the open egalitarian democracy, if it's no longer of interest; it's pushed to the bottom. We have big numbers to help but within an organization you might have a few local activists who can perhaps distort reality in terms of their contribution and that's why once again we're suggesting internally this categorical difference in the firewall, don't get rid of your taxonomist, maintain structure but listen to your internal experts. On the outside especially if it doesn't matter if Paula Abdul is at the top or at the bottom.

Jeff Horvath: Right.

Jerome Nadel: Let them be. It's more of entertainment quality.

Jeff Horvath: That's right.

Jerome Nadel: You want to comment on that?

Jeff Horvath: To come back there's a lot to this question and I think one of the other aspects I used the word "meritocracy" a little bit ago and I think that that has some play here. If you've got loud voices or a few voices, the community is going to let everyone else know if there is value in that voice, whether they are just responding to it or reacting to it, extending to it or listening to it. Okay, if there is value in that, there's merit there and that creates value and influence for that voice whether it's external or internal and that can influence things.

Jerome Nadel: But you know, the challenge of course is turning the key as initiating the Web 2.0 paradigm in what happens on Day 1 and then also, again I think we're encouraging repeatedly in different ways, don't throw away everything you have on the inside, but start listening to better and better and better and create influential designs that enable people to collaborate in context. I guess this will be the last round of questions over here as we are coming to an end. As people contributing to forums or chats will not necessarily produce valuable or unique content, how do you keep quality high? So clearly we see recurring themes about this but this is a bit of a different axis, do you want to begin and I will comment on it?

Jeff Horvath: Sure, sure. It gets to that moderation question to some extent that we talked about earlier on. The right answer is going to depend on the organization the user organized. We talked about that musicians' community we just want to let them go that's the value to them, so that's the value to us. Other places where you know, if it's CNN's website we want to allow feedback on the news stories, we probably want to have some level of moderation to make sure that it is not just you know, garbage, so to speak. So the right answer that gets to that role of moderation and what is the role of its internal taxonomist or any sort of moderation around that? Externally how do we and how much do we want to moderate content, sometimes it means you know what we're going to seed the conversations, sort of externally equivalent to that internal taxonomist seeding the taxonomy there we may seed conversations with relevant information and try and use that as a tool.

Jerome Nadel: This question is specific to health care but I think a very relevant cross industry and I'd like to respond to that. What are your thoughts about how Web 2.0 can work in health care systems? So that's an interesting question, is it like one will rate this doctor and like the collective through a rating engine and intrusive voting to who should determine, who I should got to or not, or to a hospital or not . Or is it the outside to the inside? How do I collaborate better on the inside? Let me step away from the world of HR and come back to health care. We've been doing some kind of ethnographic day-in-the-life thinking around recruitment processes. So I am a potential recruit, I go to a digital property to say, "I think I like to apply here." What happens once I have submitted my CV or resume or application? What happens internally? How do you need re-pass around especially across a global organization, this given artifact to say, "this individual doesn't really fit here but how do they work for you?" and that is the spirit of 2.0. More than ever, we now have a collaboration infrastructure that says look at this and determine what you want to do with it and I think organizations more and more across various business lines, be it in the ERP, OSS you know, more on the accounting and operational side, be it more on the hiring side, be it more in the health management space we'll say, "let's connect the outside to the inside and embrace the best of 2.0...

Jeff Horvath: That's right.

Jerome Nadel: ...to enable us through peering to be more effective in how we make decisions and how we improve work flow associated with processes in the current world."

Jeff Horvath: That's right.

Jerome Nadel: So we see great implications and ramifications in health care, both outside to enable me to find the right practitioner and inside to improve productivity and collaboration. So I guess we should move towards the killer closing question over here. Okay we'll take this one and I see another one being passed by the magic hand.

Jeff Horvath: The second killer.

(Laughter)

Jerome Nadel: The word 'collectivism' has political connotations. I'm glad somebody observed that because it certainly does. Do you use this word with those connotations in mind? So you know, it's interesting because we look at collectivism, is it really the negative side of collectivism? That there is some governing role you know, a kind of a communist infrastructure...

Jeff Horvath: (Laughs).

Jerome Nadel: ...or is it taking the best of what everybody has to offer? And that was somewhat moderated by the notion of egalitarian collectivist.

Jeff Horvath: Sure.

Jerome Nadel: This idea of everybody gets to contribute back and we encourage that contribution in a very collective way.

Jeff Horvath: That's right I think ideally we want to use that term in its best sense but there needs to be tools and mechanism surrounding it to control it.

Jerome Nadel: So I guess this is a great question for conclusion of 2.0. So we've talked about the migration and progression from 1.0 to 2.0. We have this final question and I'll come back to some of the closing comments over here. What do you know about (and I add) the semantic world of Web 3.0? I'll let you begin and I'll jump in later.

Jeff Horvath: Sure. The notion of Web 3.0 is semantic web where the web, the network out there starts to take on knowledge about what's out there, how it should be connected and how to move around and so there is some imbued knowledge and intelligence almost in the network itself and in the collection and connections between the content. And so the notion of Web 3.0 is how do we leverage that? How do we leverage intelligence in the network, if you will, to better support us?

Jerome Nadel: So we better know what's out there. How do we use technology and automation to help us find the things that are connected?

Jeff Horvath: That's right.

Jerome Nadel: Which if we go all the way back to Web 1.0, a lot of these philosophical principles were the intent to web.

Jeff Horvath: That's right.

Jerome Nadel: To improve research and collaboration and sharing and they manifested you know, at a staircase type framework and again there's a lot to do around 2.0 and as we move to more some of a semantic framework, now it is going to be easier to get everything that we want. It is going to come to us more than us having to go to it.

Jeff Horvath: So I think we have a topic for the webcast next year.

Jerome Nadel: I think we do have a follow-up topic and I know that we have, you can go to our website as I'm dutifully looking at the next webcast coming up, thank you Jeff. There will be on October 11th, a web cast by two esteemed colleagues, Apala Chavan and Susan Weinschenk. "How to create products and services through contextual innovation?" So this ideative approach of contextual innovation is going to apply to some really clever product concept designs that are being done worldwide. Apala is a global expert on that and she will be sharing her views as moderated by Susan Weinschenk. I definitely encourage you to join in for that and with that Jeff, thank you very much.

Jeff Horvath: Thank you.

Jerome Nadel: We thank you all and look forward to spending time with you on our next webcast.

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