60 second Guru Interviews

Roo Reynolds, Metaverse Evangelist, IBM

1. What is your favourite gadget?
Aside from my Moleskine notebook, it's still probably the dusty old Palm III I've had for 8 years now. My first (and, so far, only) touch-sceen device. I still carry it, together with a portable fold-out keyboard and spare triple-A batteries, in my travel bag. It's very useful to have a decent keyboard around when I'm on a train and the laptop just won't fit on those silly fold-out tables. Sure, it's a greyscale screen, there's no camera and it can't play MP3s, but even after all these years, it's still a useful gadget.

2. What is your favourite web site for business use?
Most of the sites I use entirely for business use are all very sensibly behind the IBM firewall. My internal blog lives there, and that's been a useful tool for not just sharing what I'm finding interesting in the world, but getting to know some of my colleagues around the world. Out in the wider world, I use a huge number of different sites for a mix of work and fun. del.icio.us is probably a good example, since I use it to keep track of interesting links, regardless of whether they are for personal use or as part of my job. Since I travel quite a lot, I'm finding Dopplr quite useful for sharing my travel plans with friends.

3. What is your favourite web site for personal interest?
That would probably be Flickr. I fool myself that I'm a photographer (though a very amateur one) and I get a huge amount of pleasure from sharing photos with friends and family. It's more about the social side than the content though; for me, Flickr is a way of staying in touch with people by sharing where we are and what we're doing. It lets me build and maintain those relationships through commenting on each other's lives and interests.

4. If you were marooned on a desert island and were only allowed one item of technology - what would it be and why?
Tough question. Presumably a fully fuelled Harrier Jump Jet would count as technology? Generally, anything that would either get me back to society, or let me keep in touch with it.

5. If you were to time travel 10 years into the future - how will the internet have changed?
Given my role as a metaverse evangelist and enthusiasm for helping people understand virtual worlds, I'd have to say that the way we use the web will have been augmented with even more 3D content, and richer ways of interacting not just with information but with each other.

6. What advice would you give to somone starting out as an information professionnal in 2007?
Get connected. Regardless of your job, find people with similar interests and passions and discover ways of getting to know them better to broaden your network. For example, you might find that blogging is an easy way to share what you know, and meet like-minded (and not-so-like-minded people). You might find Twitter works for you as a way of staying in touch with, and perhaps even building, your social network. Don't rely on one tool for doing this, but use as many as you like.

7. If you had three wishes relating to the development of technology and the internet, what would they be?

• Infinite bandwidth
• Infinite storage
• Infinite time
  
  "Actually, I think 've just pictured geek paradise."
  

About Roo Reynolds:

Roo Reynolds is currently a metaverse evangelist at IBM, helping people understand and facilitating the use of virtual worlds. He is married to an artist, who tries her hardest to keep him balanced.

Contact Information
Roo Reynolds
Blog: http://rooreynolds.com
Blog: http://eightbar.co.uk

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Name: Euan Semple, Social Computing Advisor, Euansemple.com

1. What is your favourite gadget?
My label printer

2. What is your favourite web site for business use?
Google Reader

3. What is your favourite web site for personal interest?
Google Reader

4. If you were marooned on a desert island and were only allowed one item of technology - what would it be and why?
My Macbook - it is part of me.

5. If you were to time travel 10 years into the future - how will the internet have changed?
It is really important that the internet won't have changed, but that what we do with it has.

6. What do you think are the key developments that will shape the search landscape in the next 2 years?
Context deliveredthrough social tools.

7. What advice would you give to someone starting out as an information professional in 2007?
Don't

8. What do you see as the main challenges for information professionals in the future?
Finding other jobs

9. If you had three wishes relating to the development of technology and the internet, what would they be?

• That the focus should be on people and outcomes rather than technology
• That technologies become more open and fluid.
• That IT professionals lighten up and become enablers.

About Euan Semple:

Euan Semple is an independent advisor on social computing for business. He is a well known writer, thinker and public speaker on the subject and in recognition of his many accomplishments he was voted Information Professional Of The Year (2005) by Information World Review.

Euan pioneered the use of weblogs, wikis and online forums while at the BBC and his work there continues to enable staff to work more effectively and more collaboratively across the entire organisation. While at the BBC Euan also worked on their award winning leadership programme and gained unparalleled experience in how to engage and inspire people with the possibilities of social computing as a business tool.

Contact Information
Euan Semple
E-mail: euan@euansemple.com
Blog: http://theobvious.typepad.com/blog/
UK mobile: +44 (0)7711058611
Business info: http://www.euansemple.com
AIM: Hydeend

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Paul Blake, Knowledge & Content Manager, 3, UK

1. What is your favourite gadget?
My iPod has radically changed the way I source music – CDs now feel too big and clunky - however I would have to choose my Nokia N73 mobile phone. It is the first smartphone I’ve used that does both ‘smart’ and ‘phone’ equally well. The battery life is superb, the web browser quick and full-screen, and the phone elegantly handles everything a fast 3G network can throw at it – including live TV streaming. I’m very interested in seeing what the Apple iPhone will do, but in the meantime I’m really enjoying using the Nokia.

2. What is your favourite web site for business use?
I tend to cast my net quite widely, so don’t have one favourite site. The Register (http://www.theregister.co.uk) and Slashdot (http://slashdot.org/) are always good value for general technology news, and Digg (http://digg.com) can throw up some surprises - even if the commentary is rarely that incisive. For my particular industry, Mobilecrunch (http://www.mobilecrunch.com/) and InfoSync (http://www.infosyncworld.com) offer good solid coverage.

3. What is your favourite web site for personal interest?
The one I’m enjoying most at the moment is Rock’s Backpages (http://www.rocksbackpages.com). My uncle, Miten (http://www.devapremalmiten.com/), is a musician and he gave me a subscription to it to encourage my music writing. It is great resource and features some of the best freelance music journalists out there, including Barney Hoskyns, who is the site’s editor. It put me onto to Terry Reid, who I wrote about for another one of my favourite sites – Music for Grown-Ups (http://www.musicforgrownups.co.uk), which is run by Gerry Smith, who more mature members of the information industry may remember as the founder of Headland Press.

4. If you were marooned on a desert island and were only allowed one item of technology - what would it be and why?
No question – my Macbook. I'm a relatively new convert to Apple and it is simply the best, most versatile computer I've ever owned. It pains me to use a Windows PC at work now or troubleshoot my wife’s PC dilemmas at home (she is getting a Macbook for her birthday!). Mac OS-X is now so far ahead of Windows it is almost comical. Of course, I'm assuming that this particular desert island has mains electricity and a decent Wifi connection! (Don't all desert islands have Wifi these days?)

5. What do you think are the key developments that will shape the search landscape in the next 2 years?
I think it will be interesting to see how Web 2.0 will play out in the corporate space. In that arena I don’t think it represents the revolution that some people believe it is, although, like most new technology, it will find its place and niche. Of course, it introduces all sorts of headaches for search; not least that user generated content tends to be unfocussed and verbose. At the end of the day I think it all comes down to good content, good search, and good navigation. That is my mantra anyway.

6. What advice would you give to someone starting out as an information professional in 2007?
Follow your heart and be flexible. I’ve done all sorts of jobs during my information career, many of them not even recognised as information jobs, including a decade as a writer and editor. I’ve only taken jobs I feel passionate about and have never worried about job titles or money. If you are good at what you do they take care of themselves anyway. I do think the modern information professional needs to acquire a broader range of skills than perhaps in the past – and you have to be fearless in stepping outside your comfort zone to do that. My editorial experience has really served me well, as has my understanding of web publishing technologies.

7. What do you see as the main challenges for information professionals in the future?
The biggest one is staying relevant. Everyone is an expert in information these days – or at least they think they are. In fact I’m not convinced there is a defined entity called the information professional anymore. We are all information professionals, it is just that some people understand what that means more than others - and that isn’t automatically the people with the information science degrees. However, on the plus side there are many more opportunities for people from an information professional background than ever before, as long as they are open and creative.

8. If you had three wishes relating to the development of technology and the internet, what would they be?

• Bandwidth everywhere.
• A more sensible and pragmatic approach to copyright and licensing.
• An ultra light and portable Mac I can sling into my bag, if anyone in Apple R&D is listening!
  
  

About Paul Blake:

Paul Blake is the Knowledge & Content Manager at mobile telecoms company 3, where he heads up a team authoring content for Ask 3, the knowledgebase supporting 3's contact centres in Glasgow and Mumbai, customers, retail stores and dealers. He has a 20 year association with the online information industry, including spells as Editorial Director of vnunet.com, Group Editor of Learned Information, and Editor of Information World Review. He began his information career at the British Library where he specialised in business and patent information

Contact Information
Paul Blake

Email: paul.blake@three.co.uk
Website: www.three.co.uk

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Name: Adrian Dale, Managing Partner, Creatifica Associates, UK

1. What is your favourite gadget?
I never go anywhere without my laptop – and mobile phone – without them I feel “digitally disadvantaged” disconnected from the world in which I now live and work 24x7.

2. What is your favourite web site for business use?
My Yahoo is my business portal, my rss reader and my news site.

3. If you were marooned on a desert island and were only allowed one item of technology - what would it be and why?
Clearly a satellite briefcase, my connection to the net and to the folks who could rescue me.

4. If you were to time travel 10 years into the future - how will the internet have changed?
Sadly we’ll have two tier net – the paid for and the free with different speeds of access and information delivery. Fortunately, the semantic web will be a reality and the important information collections will be “discoverable” and will respond to intelligent queries in a intelligent way.

5. What do you think are the key developments that will shape the search landscape in the next 2 years?
Google will finally admit publicly that they can use metadata in all their search facilities (not just Google scholar) and will raise the ranking of metadata enabled collections.

6. What advice would you give to someone starting out as an information professional in 2007?
You must learn to speak the twin languages of IT and Information – can you explain how a “metadata model” and an “entity model” are related?

7. What do you see as the main challenges for information professionals in the future?
Our IT colleagues are waking up to (or reinventing) the sophistication of the semantic infrastructure that the information profession has created but are likely to present it from a technology perspective to our business partners.

10. If you had three wishes relating to the development of technology and the internet, what would they be?

• That all new digital collections conform to a standard (or well documented non-standard) metadata model.
• That all search engines and indexes become interoperable
• That html is replaced by XML and style sheets as the primary language of the web.

About Adrian Dale:

Adrian Dale is renowned as a radical thinker in the information and knowledge management fields - on a mission to integrate the divided camps of the information management world. He has managed the information, records and knowledge functions of several UK organisations in the public and private sector - handling the shift from the paper to electronic worlds.

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Adriana Lukas, Big Blog Company

1. What is your favourite gadget?
My laptop (Sony Vaio), followed by my Blackberry 8100

2. What is your favourite web site for business use?
I like Doc Searls, Confused of Calcutta,

3. What is your favourite web site for personal interest?
Flickr, Boing Boing, Chasemeladies, Jack & Hill,

4. If you were marooned on a desert island and were only allowed one item of technology - what would it be and why?
Provided internet connection and power supply is available, my laptop - it's my workspace, reading, writing, music, video, communications.

5. If you were to time travel 10 years into the future - how will the internet have changed?
I think it will be cheaper, more available (wifi or other echnology to make it ubiquitous) and that's just the infrastructure. If you mean the world wide web, that's trickier to predict. There will be a lot more tools for filtering and navigating around the information. Search is a very crude way of doing that. The shift to a new nature of authority will be more complete and there will be deeper understanding of credibility, reputation and trust. People will perceive the internet more as a social space or system (persistent, evolving, unintended consequences, complex) than information or data pool and technology will enable us to 'translate' more of human aspects and personality into the online world. The distinctions between individual, personal and intimate (and perhaps more nuances) will deepen. In short, the internet will be more human centered despite greater numbers of people being dependent on and present in it.

7. What do you think are the key developments that will shape the search landscape in the next 2 years?
Tagging, folksonomies are the obvious to mention but I do foresee more focus on filtering, possibly in conjunction with tagging. Just like tagging is a sort of human metadata bot, filtering by humans would be the other side of the coin.. There will be a lot more human/machine combinations, with technology being finally relegated to its proper place - helping individuals to do what they intend, not the other way around. Distinguishing between what's a machine's job and what's better done by a human - understanding of a sort of comparative advantage of the two.

8. What advice would you give to someone starting out as an information professional in 2007?
Stop treating information as a pool - you can't damn it, make it stop for you to analyse and file for retrieval. It's a torrent, which can be navigated but not contained or captured in its entirety. Therefore, your perspective and individual skills and inclinations matter more than ever - they will give you a clue and motivation as to where to start. Once you do, be curious, go out there, follow the links and seemingly random connections. The information environment is non-linear and the best guide for it is the human mind, not technology, a platform, a tool or process. Learn to do what millions of individual people are doing online and then see how it can be used to your particular needs.

9. What do you see as the main challenges for information professionals in the future?
Ability to understand what's changed and the tremendous potential of the kind of technology the internet has spawned over the last 5 years. Also, having done that, convincing those who use information as input of that shift.

10. If you had three wishes relating to the development of technology and the internet, what would they be?

• Make people more curious and more self-confident in their own abilities to grasp the changes,
• Implode process based systems and formal structures - no more dependence on processes
• Internet connection everywhere
  
  

About Adriana Cronin-Lukas:

Since founding the Big Blog Company, probably the first specialist blogging consultancy (but who's counting these days), in early 2003, Adriana Lukas has advised companies in Europe and the US on how to integrate social media such as blogs, RSS, wikis and tags into their communications both external such as media relations and online marketing activities and internal such as organisational and employee communications.

Adriana's focus is on use of the social web dynamics in a commercial and organisational environment and on the use of emergent technologies to stimulate collaboration, creativity and ultimately innovation. It means looking at external and internal communications challenges that most companies face these days. She prefers strategic focus first, as implementing social tools should be the final stage of a change within an organisation often needed to maximise the benefits of the new tools. Adriana's approach to implementation is flexible, individual-focused, incremental. The results are sustainable as the social media and tools become part of the fabric of the business. As you can see from the list of speaking engagements she will speak about it to anyone who'd listen. You can contact her at adriana dot at bigblog dot net.

Adriana is a veteran blogger and still keeps on top of the developments in her sphere of interest: Media Influencer, The Big Blog Company and Samizdata.net.

Her clients include a large healthcare, pharmaceutical and FMCG companies, the Adam Smith Institute, National Opinion Poll, Social Affairs Unit, Kable and many others that have benefited from her expertise and advice.

In July 2005, Adriana orchestrated the first ever motion picture release via blog for Hollywood producer Kamal Aboukhater's film Blowing Smoke. She also advises PR firms on strategy for their clients in the Web 2.0 environment.

That said, the claim to fame Adriana is most proud of is coming up with the definition of a barking moonbat, which earned her an entry in Wiki pedia.

Contact Information
Adriana Lukas
E-mail: adriana@bigblog.net
Blog: http://www.mediainfluencer.net
Skype name: adriana872
UK mobile: +44 (0)787 6757129
UK phone: +44 (0)20 7870 8862
US phone: +1 (310) 601-8183

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