Info Tech Start-ups Featured at SLA Toronto Event

A few weeks ago I attended SLA Toronto's event Start It Up!  The event was hosted by Helen Kula at the MaRS Discovery District where she works as a Senior Information Specialist in the Market Intelligence group. Four local vendors presented their technologies, all in the area of information aggregation.

I was excited to attend because as someone who works and plays in the areas of social media, information management and knowledge management, I am always looking for useful new tools to use in my work. We live in exciting times when someone in his or her basement can quickly become the founder of the next Amazon, Twitter or Facebook. But it's not an easy road to getting there, and those startups that truly have valuable ideas need our support if they are going to be viable.

The notes below are based on notes I sent out via Twitter during the event. No doubt there are inaccuracies and omissions as a result; I welcome corrections and additions.

Trendspottr - http://trendspottr.com/ - @trendspottr

First up was Mark from Trendspottr.   Trendspottr is a free web-based service that identifies and predicts trends from real-time data. Some of the largest media companies in the world are using it, for example: the BBC, The Guardian, BBC Today, Yahoo News and Canada's Post Media. Also some of the biggest PR agencies in the world are using it to identify trends. Klout is using also using it internally, sees the value of it.

Mark explained to use that the "half-life" of content is now about 3 hours. It will soon be down to minutes. Value dissipates quickly. The focus of Trendspotter is to find data very early on, hours before general awareness. They are now trying to predict trends and outcomes, getting ahead of the info curve.

Trendspotter has a bookmarklet that allows you to start a search to see what is trending on any topic.

In December it will be integrated with social media "dashboard" tool Hootsuite. They will soon also be releasing Trendspottr Newsroom and Trendspottr Pro (with notifications and analysis). Trendspottr is also working on time-based influencer analysis.

BuzzData - buzzdata.com -  @BuzzData 

Next up was Nick Edouard of BuzzData, a tool for data sharing and collaboration. Data sets loaded onto BuzzData are given their own URL and tools for sharing or working with privately.

Some of the features making BuzzData unique:

• You can choose your license for making data sets available publicly, for example making them available under Creative Commons.
• BuzzData helps to encourage community around the data, encouraging the community to work with, manipulate, and link to the data.
• You can add context to data including visuals, graphs, images.
• Versioning of data. Excel doesn't allow for this kind of data trail. 
• Site has ability to flag content as being inappropriate.

BuzzData is a platform.  Edouard says "let's build an ecosystem of apps around it," which goes along with the general philosphy of BuzzData: "Good stuff happens when data is shared." It seems to me this is a lot of what we hear reporter/author Jeff Jarvis saying as well. 

Still in public beta, BuzzData is being used by newspapers, news agencies, governments, cities, not-for-profits, NGOs and more.

Edouard explained that most people's experience with open data was version 1.0. We now need to take it a step further,  curating the data and building engagement around it. 

ConnectedN - http://www.connectedn.com/ - @getconnectedn

How do you get experts to comment on something relevant and turn it into content for clients? That is the goal of ConnectedN. 

How does it work? ConnectedN delivers targeted information to the experts inside an organization (also for knowledge management and marketing teams). It allows them to easily add comments and then publish this out to blogs, a newsletter, Twitter, LinkedIn and other sources on the Internet. 

This allows you to easily designate one person inside your organization to spend an hour a week or five minutes a day participating in content creation. 

If you have a strong KM or marketing team trying to drive customer engagement, this makes it a lot easier. 

Currently ConnectedN is available as a paid, customized service, but will soon be launching a self-serve, lower price point service.

Sciencescape - coming soon to: http://www.sciencescape.net 

Next up: Sam from Sciencescape with a new product launched that same day.

Sciencescape maps out scientific publications/articles from PubMed, and includes news feeds, filters, timelines and article-level metrics.

To date Sciencescape has been mapping out current publications. They will be relying on users to map out historic articles.  According to Sam, Sciencescape gets better the more it is used: as comments are added in, researchers around "bleeding edge" areas can be identified. 

Once available to the public (soon!), there will be flagging methods in Sciencescape to help police contributions. 

It is not yet ready, but in a few days we should be able to go to http://www.sciencescape.net/ and sign up for beta passwords.

Eqentia - http://www.eqentia.com/ -  @eqentia 

Next up at SLA Toronto start-up night: William Mougayar of Eqentia - a news/social media content curation platform.  I was already familiar with Eqentia, having worked with Mougayar previously to put a sample site together (more on that below). 

Eqentia allows organizations or internal departments to put content out to internal or external clients/customers. Content can be automated, curated, or manually gathered.

Eqentia looks for relevancy rather than popularity; it index 120,000 articles per day using semantic search. It looks for relevancy first, then popularity.

It essentially allows you to become the publisher - content comes in, is filtered according to rules you set, and the good content comes out. Your content can be branded, integrated with any site, even delivered via email.

Eqentia acts as an all-in-one comprehensive platform allowing for content harvesting, filtering, aggregation, curation, branding, newsletter managemeent, semantic searching, publishing and more. The content integrates well with social media; it has "on ramps" and "off ramps" bringing content in, pushing content out.

They already have a range of customers. Mougayar said he is talking to a few law firms currently because of mix of internal and external content. 

Mougayar showed a sample Eqentia site at http://www.librariesfuture.com/ that was created with my help. (It needs work and, yes, it is heavy with posts from my friend Stephen Abram). 

ITWorld Canada also has an Eqentia site http://www.itworldcanadacurated.com/. 


Wrapping it all up

I personally find the subject of tech startups to be fascinating, and love to see us give support to these local companies, especially in terms of being beta testers, providing feedback, and giving them potential new business.

During the Eqentia presentation, I was asked how I got involved with the project. Long story short: I had attended a few Toronto Semantic Web Meetup Group meetings organized by William Mougayar in an attempt to get my head around the semantic web. He is extremely humble, not talking about his own semantic tool at the meetings. As I started to get to know him, I started to ask about his company. Finally one day he invited me to see it in action. I was hooked!

He then asked if I would like to curate a site. Of course! Unfortunately it has been a busy year and I haven't spent the time on it that I would like (which is why I've never written it up here previously). But I hope you will take a look. If you would like an introduction to the folks at Eqentia, let me know. I have no financial arrangements with them--I am just an enthusiastic fan-girl who likes to be the first to try things out.

Everyone seemed to quite enjoy the tech start-up evening. I hope SLA Toronto makes this an annual event! Toronto is a real hot-bed for tech start-up companies, many of them working in areas that should be of interest to special librarians, information managers, and knowledge management directors. 

Why Occupy Toronto?

I have been trying to get my head around the "Occupy" movement, particularly in Canada. It seems to me there are a lot of points of contention and pain in other countries, but wonder what we have to complain about in Canada that would move people to these extreme measures. I'm also not sure I completely "get" this movement since there are not specific demands or direction. On the other hand, I defend their right to peaceful assembly and protest.

I was in New York last week and walked past the Occupy Wall Street encampment. I was surprised at how small a geographic space it takes up (no bigger than Toronto's, albeit a lot more densely populated). I was also surprised at how organized they appeared to be, obviously quite self-contained in the space they are occupying.

Last night my fellow Slaw law blogger Omar Ha-Redeye appeared on TV Ontario's current affairs talk show The Agenda with Steve Paikin supporting the Occupy Toronto movement. It is a thought-provoking exchange and helped clarify things for me. Here's that discussion--





As I have been writing this, word comes via Twitter that the people at Occupy Toronto have been served eviction notices by the city. Everything is peaceful so far, but the city (and the world) will be watching.

My Top 5 Tips for Businesses Using Social Media

On Friday Phil Ridout put out the following question to some people in his Google Plus network:

Social media in business setting - top tips please!
I've been asked to make a presentation in 10 days time about using Social Media in a Business Setting. I've a bunch of ideas and stuff of my own but what better way to demonstrate the power of social networking than by asking people in my network for their top tips. So, what are your top 5 tips for businesses using Social Media please.

I quite like the list I came up with, so decided to share with you here. This has been derived from a lot of reading, course work learning and hard-won real world experience. I believe all these points apply whether your project is inward facing or outward facing.

My top 5:

1. Start small with a "quick win" project, especially with a small group (e.g. pilot project, proof of concept) and then slowly work into larger, strategic projects from there.

2. Don't build an "empty disco" - seed any new tool with content and invite a few people in to share specific contributions to get the ball rolling. If the dance floor is empty, no one is going to want to be the first to dance.

3. Solicit early adopter(s) to be champion(s) of the project. Give them support, including special training in the project's technology. Keep them in the loop so they can accurately sell/evangelize to others inside the organization.

4. To sell it to the executives, the initiative needs to tie back to the organization's or department's business goals. Don't just start using a tool because everyone else is doing it. (Hint: "It will improve collaboration" rarely ties back to business goals and is usually not a selling point.)

5. If the small project doesn't work, kill it quickly and move on to another "quick win."

What do you think of these tips? What are your top 5 tips for businesses using social media?

Are You Using Plaxo? How to Delete Your Account

A discussion on one of my listservs about Plaxo got me thinking about why I had signed up for it, and why I still had an account. It was many years ago that I signed on (probably when it was first launched). I signed on to see what it is about, but rarely went back. Few of my contacts were there, and those were mostly contacts I have connection with on other sites. So, I decided to delete my account and document the process for everyone.

Do you use Plaxo? I am curious to know what value you are getting from it. Why do you use it?

How to delete your Plaxo account


1. Go to the Plaxo site http://www.plaxo.com and click on the "sign in" button.

2. Sign in. If you don't remember your password, ask for a password reminder. Hopefully you remember the email address you used to sign up!

3. Once you successfully sign in, click on the drop down menu under your name. Then click on "Settings".

4. On the first screen under "Account info" find the line that says "If you no longer want to use Plaxo, you can delete your account." Click on the words "delete your account" (in blue).

5.  Plaxo will ask you to confirm the deletion. Note that this deletion (and the deletion of all your contacts) will be permanent. It asks you to review what will be deleted. If you prefer, there is a way to download your content from the very first screen (under "Sync and Back Up" in the menu at the top). I didn't bother with that since I did not have much content or many contacts.

Plaxo also asks for your reasons for leaving, and what they could have done better to keep you to stay.

6. Click on the blue "Delete account" button (above) and voila! your account has been permanently deleted.

Blogger Monday: When should you back up your blog content?

Last week I wrote my "Blogger Monday" blog post Sunday night and used the option to schedule it to post on the Monday. I went to sleep, content in having a new blog post under my belt. I have been on Blogger, Google's blogging platform, before it was even owned by Google. Yes, more than seven years. I have always composed my messages directly into the blog, hit "publish" and never had a problem. Until last week.

The next day I went about my day, and it wasn't until late morning that I thought to check in to the blog. Much to my surprise, the new blog post was not there! I went into the dashboard on the back end. Perhaps I had done something wrong? With the WordPress blogging platform, for example, if you leave the category "uncategorized" checked off, the post does not appear publicly.  No, nothing there. I checked draft posts, I checked scheduled posts, and I checked all posts. Nothing. I tried searching the posts from the back end, again nothing. I spent a couple of stressed hours. I remembered largely what I had written, but who wants to spend another hour rewriting a blog post?

I checked Google's help forum and discovered a few others had experienced the same problem recently, but no one was offering answers as to why and how to recover. I vented a bit on Twitter, and got a bit of sympathy but again no real answers.

And then I got a message from educator extraordinaire, Diane Bédard:

Backup? Ummm...hrm. I had never thought to back up an individual blog post. I always thought once it was accepted as post I would be safe. Apparently not!  My first reaction was to say "I could never write off-line and then post to a blog! Blogging directly into the blog platform is part of my creative process!". I have to admit to being a bit huffy about it. And then I realized that (as is always the case) Di was right.

Backing up individual blog posts

So, my compromise is to write directly in the blog platform, but then to copy down the content at least until the post goes up publicly. That way I always have my last post at least in draft "just in case."  I am getting used to this new addition to the workflow, but here is what I do:

• Go to the HTML editor for the blog post and copy all content (using "select all" in the browser).  This way I capture all the HTML coding. 
• I then copy it into a text editor rather than Word so that extra Word code is not added to the document. And...save.  
• If I need to reinstate the blog post later, I would copy from the text editor document, and paste into the HTML editor screen.

So how did I get the post back last Monday? After putting it aside for a couple of hours, I came up with an idea: what about my browser history, was there a link there? I went in, and was very fortunate to somehow (mysteriously) be able to pull open the blog post. It appeared to somehow still be in Blogger, albeit lost. I copied from the HTML editor and then went to the blog in a fresh screen, started a new blog post, and pasted the copied text back into the HTML editor.  I was extremely lucky all of this actually worked.

Backing up all archived blog content (i.e. exporting)

In addition to backing up individual posts, what else should you do to back up your blog content? It is a good idea to periodically back up your content in case the site goes down or disappears.

WordPress, for example, has an "Export" feature currently under "Tools":

Blogger has an "Export content" feature under "Settings" and "Basic":

Other considerations in backing up blog content

Other things to think about when determining how you are going to back up blog content:

• Think about the format you are exporting the content into. 
• What about the blog template, especially if you have customized it? On Blogger it doesn't hurt to grab the template HTML (copy from the Template > Edit Template page). In WordPress, keep track of the plugins you have added.
• What about blogger profiles? And other pages added such as with WordPress?
• Will the content you capture allow you to sufficiently replicate the blog later? Move to another platform?
• Where will you store the backup versions of the site? Think about the measures you typically take to back up important content. You may wish to do the same with your blog content.
• How often will you back up content?  It is a good idea to stick to a regular schedule. Will you back it up daily, weekly or monthly?
• Who will be in charge of backing up the site? Who will fill in if that person is away?

I have to admit being a bit cavalier with my own blog, but after last week's incident am starting to realize how much personal equity I have built up in this blog and how I should be making a more concerted effort to back it up. And of course if you are administrating a blog for work or business purposes, you may have even more important reasons to back it up consistently.

When updating blog templates or layouts

Finally, it is a very good idea to have a separate development or test site for making changes to the blog template or plug-ins. Set up a copy of your blog at a separate URL to test out changes. That way if you mess something up, you haven't destroyed your good work on the main site. This is something I see others doing. In the past I would have just tweaked the template of this blog on the fly; however, especially with something like WordPress, code and plug-ins can interact in unexpected ways. As I start to think about changing the template to this blog, I am giving thought to setting up a separate test site so I can play around with options and not risk losing my hard work.