10
Apr
A couple of (unrelated) items for today.
1. I’ve been invited to lead a panel at the Enterprise Search Summit West conference in San Jose in November. I’m pretty excited since I’ve not been to conferences in a couple of years. Leading this panel will be interesting because the topic will be related to federated search in the enterprise and I know that not everyone agrees on what enterprise search is, on whether federated search fits in the enterprise, and on how necessary federated search is in the enterprise or anywhere else for that matter.
I’ve put a call out on the LinkedIn Federated Search and Enterprise Search groups looking for panelists who know both worlds. I’ve gotten a few replies and I’d like to receive some more. The exact topic has yet to be determined; ideally there will be sufficient diversity among those responding to put together a panel to share differing viewpoints and to also help shape the topic before we “go live.” This is not going to be a “federated search will save the world” panel by any means.
If you’re interested in being considered for the panel or know of someone I should be considering, please drop me a line (or have them drop me a line) in the next week via my email address in the About page.
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4
Sep
LinkedIn now has discussion groups. This is great because a number of representatives from the major federated search companies are members of the LinkedIn federated search group I’ve recently created and can share in conversations. In particular, these major vendors are currently represented:
- Deep Web Technologies
- Ex Libris North America
- MuseGlobal
- Vivisimo
I’ve got requests out to other vendors to join. Additionally, we have people in the group who don’t work for vendors who have tremendous relevant experience.
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1
Sep
Jill Hurst-Wahl, in a post yesterday on her Digitization 101 Blog, wrote about five blogs she found interesting. Jill was doing her part to participate in and spread the word about Blog Day. Well, Blog Day was yesterday, but I’m going to bend the rules and share five blogs with you today.
[Note: In part 3 of the luminary interview with Todd Miller I wrote that I'd publish part 4 today. I'll be publishing it tomorrow instead.]
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5
Aug
Community has always been important in my personal and professional life. This blog is an expression of community but it is, to a large extent, a “read-only” forum (with the exception of comments, reader reviews and occasional guest posts.) I’d like to grow participation in the community, and to that end, I’ve launched three “initiatives.”
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8
Jul
Next Friday I will publish a list of what I think are the best federated search slide presentations of the last 12 months. I’ve got some ideas and would like your suggestions. Vendor presentations are welcome if they inform or educate readers about the industry.
I also plan to write other “best of” articles. What are your favorite federated search blog articles from the blogosphere? Nominate posts from your own blog or from another one you frequent. For a different article I’d like to know what web articles best articulate challenges of the industry.
Send in those ideas (by email or comment) and give kudos to a worthy vendor, organization, or blog owner.
5
Jul
I launched this blog seven months and two days ago with this post. I’m delighted with the readership, the comments, and the participation and there are some great things in store for the rest of 2008 and beyond.
The article base is strong and growing. It currently includes:
- 21 basics articles
- 42 viewpoint articles
- a number of reviews, technology and industry news articles
- a few fun articles
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24
Mar
This blog started last December 3rd with a welcome post. The blog will soon be four months old. I thought it would be fun to see what posts have been the most popular, in terms of views, so I looked at the WordPress stats for the blog. Here’s what I found:
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8
Feb
I’ve made a couple of changes to the resource information in this blog:
1. Most notably, I created a vendor information page. That page contains information about commercial and non-commercial offerings in the federated search market. If your organization sells or provides open source federated search software or services you are welcome to submit your listing at no charge. Please follow the submission guidelines at the top of the search page. In particular, I’d like to have the current contact information for each vendor as I’m interested in engaging vendors in the effort to make demos publicly available.
Along the lines of publicly available demos, if you’re a potential customer of federated search and your vendor doesn’t have a public demo, whether or not it’s referenced from this blog, ask the vendor why and post a comment on the blog to let us all know the reason.
2. I’ve cleaned up the formatting of the resources page a little and have moved the short list of blogs to that page.
If you know of good freely available resources of interest to the federated search community please let me know about them and I’ll add them to the resources page. These would include papers, presentations, web-sites, and blogs.
Also, as there are some conferences coming up that have some relationship with federated search, I’ll be announcing those very soon on this blog and I will also start to list them in the resources page. Please let me know of relevant conferences.
29
Jan
As this blog gains traction I’ve been thinking about how to make sure that there are mechanisms for all vendors and providers of federated search products and services to participate in discussions and to gain visibility in the community. At the same time, I don’t want this blog to become filled with advertisements and marketing pieces for vendors.
A couple of steps I took a few days ago was to announce that I will be creating a vendor resources page and to kick off a campaign to encourage vendors to provide publicly available demo applications to facilitate comparison of federated search products. See One-stop access to multiple federated search applications for more information about those two items.
A third step is the creation of a new blog, The Federated Search Press Releases blog. This new blog is available to all providers of federated search products and services to make public announcements in the form of press releases. The new blog is referenced in this blog’s About page, it will be referenced periodically in blog posts here, and it will be promoted just as this blog is promoted. In other words, I expect there to be a healthy number of readers of the new announcement blog.
I encourage everyone to visit the new blog, to subscribe to it via RSS or email, to use it to create visibility for your press releases, and to tell your customers and colleagues about the new service. And, I invite you to leave a comment here with suggestions and feedback.
3
Dec
Welcome to FederatedSearchBlog. This blog aims to keep you abreast of happenings in the federated search industry and to serve as a forum for discussion of issues, questions, and concerns among vendors, customers, and potential customers.
While this blog is sponsored by Deep Web Technologies, its intent is to serve many diverse interests.
Have a look around. Information is clustered in these areas of the blog.
- About page
- Resources page
- Links section - lists blogs related to federated search or with substantial relevant content
Please recommend relevant resources for inclusion.