2007 February 20

The Possibilities of iReader by Syntactica (and its underlying engine)

Was delighted to spend time today at the Minnesota headquarters of Syntactica talking about today’s release of iReader. Henry Neils CEO, Ward Johnson VP Sales and Fred Sweeny CEO of Assessment.com (a sister company) met with me to talk about the launch.

Instead of doing a review (since there’s already a great one done by ReadWriteWeb), I’d instead like to do what I love to do best: toss out ideas and tell you why this company and their offering needs to be looked at very, very closely if you’re a Web 2.0 developer or care about knowledge, innovation and ideas — and why the timing couldn’t be better for them to have leapt into the Web 2.0 game.

First off, World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners Lee has been the top evangelist for his concept of the Semantic Web. Having data-wrapped-around-the-data you need to obtain — so machines can help us decide what’s relevant and contextual to what we’re seeking and deliver it to us and be somewhat self-aware — hasn’t worked since no one seems to be participating.

The Semantic Web is a lofty and worthwhile goal, but just like a bunch of smart people trying to determine what the taxonomies need to be within which information should reside, the Web, blogosphere and sites like Flickr and TagWorld have instead embraced the much messier tagging concept and allowed people to create folksonomies instead…and it’s exploded in use.

Guess what? People don’t organize. We throw stuff in closets and kick stuff under the bed when company comes. We search for filing systems and buy millions of organizers that often go unused.

In today’s tsunami of content that is accelerating because it can (storage costs falling, bandwidth increasing, computing horsepower growing more robust by the year) and coupled with (OH MY GOD!) even MORE coming with all the user generated content…there is no human way to gather, track or even hope to match data to data and stay abreast of some concept or create, innovate or invent new things.

Today I track hundreds of blogs and dozens of traditional news sites. I emptied my news aggregator this morning before breakfast by skimming articles and collecting the ones I choose to delve into later on…but there are now 596 articles there for me to ~~read~~ skim. But what if there are jewels in the areas I care about posted by a brand new blogger that I don’t track? What if that blogger is a Professor at University of Oxford and is the world authority on a subject I care deeply about?

iReader is a web browser plug-in that can quickly abstract a hyperlink on a page and tell you what the concepts are on the linked-to page so you don’t have to go there…or choose to leap out to it. Sounds simple and it’s cool for certain, but what I learned about today was more about what’s going on under-the-covers which, most interestingly, is available to developers via their API…

…and this is where it gets interesting.

Two buddies of mine, serial entrepreneur George Johnson and business change agent, Jeff Staggs, started Entrevis and their “A Better Way to Live and Work” program. It’s a very solid process to walk through with any of the 17-21%+ of workers dissatisfied with where they are and helping them walk down a path (e.g., see “20 Percent of Workers Plan on Changing Jobs in 2007” and “One in Five Government Workers to Leave Jobs in 2007“. That path starts with a persons own vision, their values, what they think their purpose is, and the other dozen or so lessons coach them to partnering, negotiation, their business plan, execution, etc.

I’ve gone through the program with amazing results. Still…I’ve been kicking around ideas with both of them as they strategize over increasingly better ways to align with the macro trends in the world…namely that the lifetime corporate models of work, typical staffing models, opportunities to mass collaborate on the Internet all point the way to the changing nature of work AND that each of us need to find containers within which to put our personal value propositions. Let me go a little deeper on this…

Think about the modern corporate organization and its just over 100 years of existence. From this Wikipedia article on the corporation comes this quote from Adam Smith’s the “Wealth of Nations” which criticized the corporate form because of the separation of ownership and management.

The directors of such [joint-stock] companies, however, being the managers rather of other peopleâ€™s money than of their own, it cannot well be expected, that they should watch over it with the same anxious vigilance with which the partners in a private copartnery frequently watch over their own…. Negligence and profusion, therefore, must always prevail, more or less, in the management of the affairs of such a company.

The modern corporate entity is, as Smith points out, an abstract one by its very nature. Remarkably complex and with numerous layers of specialized functionality, making it work as a whole is an ongoing challenge. With little true ownership by those that work within the corporate structure and loyalty (by both sides) fleeting, its no wonder that people are searching for meaning and aligned jobs while corporations are seeking human resources that provide a competitive advantage. Now throw in the explosion in instant and cheap communications, idea generation, knowledge transfer and social connections that the Internet has enabled and the corporation itself is undergoing massive shifts.

Now throw in the disruption of outsourcing, specializations that perish and retraining that takes years — coupled with the masses that are working in jobs that pay the rent but are misaligned with what each view their mission, values and purpose to be, and you have a climate ripe for disruption and change.

So what does this have to do with you and what can you do about it?

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