The Social Networker

by Chris Miller at 09:00:00 PM on Thursday, January 17th, 2008


What the? How the? Where the?

Those were all the first words I used when I first saw the homepage and got into the site. After I logged in, the landing page looked exactly like before. Many colors, many boxes and no order or flow to do things. So let's get this straight from the beginning. The interface that welcomes you needs a serious overhaul, but the product behind the scenes does not get the bright star it should if users will not stay and use the site.
Knowgee homepage

So here I sit, befuddled like any beginning user would be. But fear not, I trudge on. Determined to find the reason for this site and it's promise to help me sort or control what is in my brain. So I jump to the little green button for the tutorial.
Knogee is a web 3.0 site that helps individuals, organizations and communities assemble and interact with deep knowledge on a range of specialized subjects.  The heart of Knogee is a new type of intelligent agent that questions, guides and collaborates with users and then uses what it learns to repeatedly canvass the web to find fresh, highly relevant information.

A Web 3.0 site! Whew knew we made it out of 2.0! Ok let us get serious. It is supposed to learn and help you make widgets. The Personal Edition is free and there is a paid edition.

A ha! I told you I would find it. I started my own knowledge map of sorts. I created a topic, created some basic questions and some sample answers underneath. The product then goes out to the Internet to help you start building this knowledge collection. Wow, it came back blank, but I knew one key thing I wanted focus on. DataPortability. I put that into the Google tab instead of the new Knogee tab and bam!!, it lit up like a Knogee tree. This thing called the Knogee Harvester goes out and picks the fruits of knowledge from the Internet it seems. Impressive listing on my topic with a voting ability to help your knowledge quest grow. From there I hit a darn wall once again.

Anyone want to get in there , or from Knogee, and explain what the heck is going on?

  • 1) Thanks!
    Created by Pharos at 01/18/2008 4:22:40 PM email | website

    Chris,

    I'm a developer at Knogee. Thank you for the review and for taking the time to dig down and find out what we're all about. I hear your concerns about confusion, we defiantly have some work to do in that department! It's not easy to get everything right but we are passionate and working hard to get it there!

    I'll go over a few of your points to clarify a bit about what is going on.

    When you create a topic, you are taking what you know about a subject and building what you called a "knowledge map". This is kind of like an outline of the topic that will both guide people who visit and also allow knogee to

    'understand' the topic so the harvester can do what a simple search engine could not.

    When a new topic is created it takes about 15 minutes for the harvester to start adding relevant content. (tiny company, not many servers...yet) It will then continue to improve the topic continuously.

    Why would you want to do this? --> Well lets take your social networking topic. Imagine that you fill out the 'knowledge map' to represent how YOU see the world of social networking. You then add some of your own content and vote up/down what knogee finds. This would be and excellent staring place for someone who visits your blog.

    You can now embed the topic directly into your blog so that someone new to your site could easily browse and benefit from your expertise. Your regular visitors can also help keep the topic up-to-date and even expand it.

    --Now about those darn walls you were running into--

    Once you have built the inital structure of your topic, you can add to it in several ways. First if you answer questions on the hunt page you can click the "extend topic" button. This will present you with the same wizard you used at the beginning. Anything you add here will be added to the 'knowledge map' at the point you reached by answering questions.

    For example you answer "YES" to "Is there buisness value in enterprise social networking". Then you click 'extend topic' to add deeper questions down that branch.

    You can also use our wizbang advanced tool called KBEE. { Link }

    I hope this helps a bit. We'll be working hard to improve how easy the site is to use and I hope you'll stop by every now and then to see what we've been up to.

    Pharos

  • 2) re: Thanks!
    Created by Chris Miller at 01/24/2008 3:34:41 PM email | website

    Pharos - I am glad you found the review so quickly. I will definitely check out the advanced tool. I think I was confused on that fact that I build the questions and then answer them and expand more. A knowledge map to me lays out the different paths as a part of brainstoring, but it seemed yours had to be in a question with answers. Not all sections would have that. I suppose it could be statements that then have choices to dig further.

    I think of it like CoMapping (I did a site review on them previously) with your added bonus of the harvesting. Let me go back and dig into it more and see what we discover.



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Yes this is a blatant theft of the outline that Jess uses on her page, but I asked permission. Why?? Because I am a hardcore admin and can make ugly tables to make you developers frustrated, but this was too nice to pass up.

Also Known As: Chris Miller (when awake)

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