Here’s a short piece about the practice of adding “best bets” to enterprise search (”best bets” are essentially ponters introduced at the top of search results that direct users to documents that should have the highest ranking).

This article is based mainly on Dennis Deacon’s comment about setting up “best bets” in enterprise search on his own blog, where he points out that instituting “best bets” is often a workaround that’s undertaken after paying thousands (if not tens or hundreds of thousands) of dollars to implement enterprise search.

The first article also points out that adding “best bets” into any search application is a always going to be a manual hack, that is essentially a workaround for fixing what’s wrong with your enterprise search installation.

But what exactly is the real reason for having to institute these “best bets” in the first place? The answer is actually quite simple: poor metadata.

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I was a little disappointed when I first read the title of Patrick Lambe’s commentary at Inside Knowledge, “Should be it be wisom — not knowledge — management?“.

However, as I got into Patrick’s arguments, my disappointment gave way to a sense of relief — Patrick, by the end of the article, dismisses “wisdom management” as the red herring that it is.

Discussions about whether knowledge management should be called “wisdom management” (or anything else, for that matter), usually stem from epistemological arguments about the nature of knowledge and wisdom, and whether it’s truly proper to call what we do “knowledge management”.

Well of course it’s not. A name is, after all, just a name. And it’s unfortunate that “knowledge management” is what has stuck, but that’s the nature of naming things — sometimes the name you end up with is not really the best for something.

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The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) has just decided that the web is going to get a whole host of new domain names — which could be as varied as .bank, .sport, .shopping or pretty much anything else you can dream up.

The article I’ve linked to cites fears of cybersquatting (sitting on a domain name that you shouldn’t really have, like if I bought and amazon.biz and tried to basically blackmail Amazon into buying it from me), as well as general disorganization on the web brought about by these changes.

Sound scary? Well, there’s no reason to be afraid — many have tried and failed to organize the web, and it hasn’t ground to a halt yet. Funny enough, if we look at a bit of history, we can see that things weren’t really supposed to be this way in the first place.

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The way I figure it, on June 27th, this blog will officially be 20 months old. I understand that 20 months is when children often enter the “terrible twos” (I don’t have any children myself, so I have to rely on what I read on the web).

While browsing around to find out about what happens at 20 months old (yes, I know a blog is not a child, but hey, I thought it might be worth a laugh), I was stunned to come across this statement:

Look for new signs of assertiveness from your toddler. Hallmark behaviors to watch for: He may insist on doing exactly what you’ve told him not to do or throw himself down on the floor in a fit of temper if he doesn’t get his way. His demands may alternately frustrate and amuse you. At times, for example, he’ll likely ask for something that he doesn’t even want, just to see if he has enough power to get it.

Unfortunately, this pretty much describes my nearly 2 year old WordPress install just as well. Last week’s denial-of-service attack on my host’s server didn’t help matters any either.

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Anecdote has an interesting post from a few days ago about the power of storytelling in organizations. The particular example used in this post is the story of a particular manager:

One of the stories often selected as significant is a seemingly simple account of a woman whose manager stops whatever he was doing whenever she visited his office, moves to a table in the middle of the room and invites her to sit down and then totally focusses on her. She felt that she was being listened to and her ideas were important. It was remarkable for this woman because other managers didn’t do that.

When presented along with about 150 other stories, leaders often selected this story as something they would like to get their managers to start doing. They believed that getting their managers to effect this change in their own behaviour would lead to an overall organizational change.

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Well, the server where I host my sites was attacked over the past few days, and it was quite a nasty attack. All my sites got absolutely flooded with comment spam (this site alone was receiving around 1000 spam comments a day), and a few spam comments even managed to make it through the filter.

Things seemed to have calmed down somewhat now, and I’m really hoping they’re going to stay that way. It was very frustrating not having access to any sites — and most of the time I wasn’t even able to get in to delete comment spam.

So if you noticed some odd behaviour here over the past few days, it was most likely because of the attack on the server. If you notice anything else going wrong (I’ve taken some measures to hopefully prevent this from happening again), just drop me a line and let me know. Thanks for sticking it out with me through this attack.

Just a quick post to let you know of a fun new feature I’ve added on my photo blog. It’s basically a little box in the sidebar that lets you view random images from my posts, and a click will take you to that particular post.

While the photos are currently showing up a little weird, due to the fact that they’re two different sizes, I’m hoping to fix that so that they all show up properly in the sidebar thumbnail preview. Also, if you refresh the page, you’ll see a new batch of photos every time.

Also, if you’re looking for more cool images to look at (or interesting stuff to read), check out my friend Greg MacGregor’s site at rewinder.ca — where you can also spend some time admiring his simple, lots-of-whitespace design.

UPDATE: The weird sizing that was happening with the image previews should now be fixed. I have yet to do any testing in Internet Explorer, but things are looking better in Firefox anyway.

As regular readers of this blog probably already know, I’ve never exactly been happy with the Canadian telecommunications industry. They’ve been bilking Canadians out of money unfairly for years now, with little or no government intervention to keep them on the straight and narrow.

It appeared that no one in government was willing to take on the big Canadian telecom companies and stand up for Canadians right to not get screwed on telecommunications service provision. It would appear David McGuinty’s Get Connected Fairly Act may change all that.

According to the Canadian Press:

Liberal MP David McGuinty says Canada’s cellphone industry has collected billions of dollars in “misleading” charges over the last 25 years, and he’s proposing legislation to stop it.

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