As a way to further let our users to get the most relevant news & content from the web, apart from our algorithm for finding the best content in each network, giving the option to the users to further personalize their news & content would be a priority for us.

The personalized news service of ours works in a form similar to a personalized feed reader but with a substantial difference; the difference is in the way of presenting feeds; the user could provide the service with some of her selected feeds which she would like to follow; the service will then rank the news items & sort them based on our news importance ranking algorithm; our importance ranking algorithm in here will have more personalized taste by taking note of the taste of the user in reading the news presented to her in our network sections or anywhere else.

We believe this approach will further optimize the pattern of reading feeds for those who would like to always stay tuned of specific news sources (or blogs) by ranking them most important of them. The users could still see the latest updates of each specific source by searching for the source name even if the ranking of the news items of the given source is not high.

This personalized news reading model will be also applied in a different way to personalizing our Q&A service as well (there is no source feeding there, but the is  following other users there), so the users could enjoy the more relevancy of the contents in every part of our system.

This feature is going to work beside our core network based content following & we think these features could well complement each other.

Al Nikpay, 

There is a big controversy over the meaning of each of the terms used in the phrase “Knowledge Management“, & the combination makes it more controversial. (Considering Wikipedia as a public fair quality reference, our definition of the term is almost the same as them). 

www.library.uthscsa.edu/images/Phrenology10.jpg

iKnowlej tries to take the first real steps toward addressing the Knowledge Management on the web for individuals & any social groups including any types of organizations in a wide scale.

We, human beings, consume information in lots of different ways in the everyday life, but there is no real direction in doing this & therefore, there is a very low level of efficiency on doing this. In iKnowlej, our goal is to provide every possible tool, whether it is already built by someone else or if we need to build it ourselves; to  tie those tools together all toward oriented goals.

Providing people the right tools to share their knowledge with each other through Social Q&As, or communicating their thoughts with each other through notes in the form of blogs or micro-blogs (Texts) & any forms of media are just the starting tools we are going to provide the people for their personal & cumulative Knowledge Growth. There is going to be huge focus over the automation of the processes while there are going to be lots of new ways for the people to share their information & to store their information.

There are going to be different tools helping people in their decision-makings as we believe the real usage of the Knowledge is when it appears in the form of Decision Making & that is where the Execution is. There are going to be both Social tools which will be used helping people in all of the collaborative decisions, which people should make with each other at the scale of Elections as one of the most important examples to any group decision making in the smallest forms. The Individual Decision Making tools matters more because this is the basis of the Social Decision Making as well.

We think individuals’ goals are something which are the main driving force for us in our everyday life (when it comes to adjusting them with feelings). Getting any information in that regard is going to be valuable to us & will probably remain longer in our mind. We put more emphasis on this while we let you also store & manage any other unrelated information you get to stay well-managed. Using networks in iKnowlej for classification of the information could make this happen.

We like to consider the real goal of iKnowlej as the Ultimate Knowledge Management Tool. Knowledge is the fundamental need & tool for growth & to survive in the existing world & this is what makes human unique. Our goal is to help it grow faster than ever.

Letting the people to consume the information in different formats could improve the impression of the information on the individual`s mind. We try to make this happen on all of the important information which are available in our service.

We are going to connect people not based on how they look or what their style is, but based on how they think. There is a huge value & inspiration in creating the right connections between the right people since they could truly motivate (we linked general because we did not find a specific good article at the time of this writing) each other for further growth in whatever field.

We are going to tie all of the conversations happening in the world (or at least on the web) connected. That means we are not going to loose anyone’s opinions & we could track all of the conversations in the same place. People’s comments which could appear in the form of voting, feedback, opinion, analysis, review & so-on is huge contributing factor to the conversations & having it all in one place is going to be huge. The hassle on how to manage all these conversations is something which is our duty to address & there is not a real concern there. Our comment widget has already started addressing this.

Simple tools such as bookmarking the information & or flagging them or highlighting them & so forth are some of the simple tools for helping individuals to use the computer storage instead of their memory for storing the vast information we are concerned about, & they are a way for getting access to those potentially valuable information later.

Knowledge has truly became the most important competitive advantage tool for every major industry in which people work & as a driver of the best strategies, innovative solutions, & every other things which are considered as a competitive advantage. The underlying need for achieving any of those is Knowledge & the companies must try to educate their people in order to win. This applied to every individual who is willing to grow.

Questions & Answers on the web has been always a very important form of contents. It has been always an important form of oriented conversations over at the Forums or even in the Chatrooms & elsewhere. There has been various efforts like Google Answers or Yahoo Answers or some niche targeted service such as LinkedIn Answers or many others out there. However, all of this services have missed some fundamental features which will be highlighted below.

In iKnowlej, we think user-generated Q&A service could perfectly fit into our goal for offering Knowledge Management solutions for the individuals as Questions are one of the most fundamental forms of knowledge gaining initiators to human beings that leads to small or big discoveries.

The form of our service will start as a Web 2.0 Model which is centric around the users participation on doing everything (asking questions, voting each other questions, responding to the questions, voting the responses, & so forth). However, we are trying to further focus on empowering the users & enriching the service by going beyond the so-called enabling features. We believe that most of the times, questions are more important than answers (or at least as important). Providing a process for voting the questions by the users in order to express which questions matter to most of them is a one of the major differences of our service with others. This way the more important questions get more attention & the users do not face cheap questions frequently. Below are our other distinctions:

- The questions are being classified through our standard networks & they will be only presented in those networks or in their parent networks. This approach will make the questions being seen or asked by the individuals who are subscribed in those networks making the questions completely relevant to them & the individuals will not get lost in the ocean of irrelevant questions. (This is probably the most important & differentiating factor of our service)

- We try to add some visualizations to the questions & even answers by automatically adding related media to them. We also try to empower the users to upload their questions in the media formats while we try to be conservative in this section. We believe this approach could highly increase the richness of the service for the users.

- We try to cluster the related questions in each network to each other in order to further enrich each of the questions. The process of discovering the related questions will include various steps to make sure we are not attaching the cheap questions as the related ones.

- We are trying to offer some experimental models for automatically suggesting some responses for any given questions while expecting the users reactions to our suggestions which could train our algorithm for giving better responses.

- We are trying to offer our Q&A service beside our comments on our news stories so the users could further discuss the news in a Q&A formats to discover all of the hidden aspects of the news stories better.

We believe this is going to be a big feature for iKnowlej & we will constantly work on this to further discover & address wide aspects of growth for the service.

In iKnowlej, mastering the news aggregation is being considered as one of our most important focus; one of our major take in this regard is to add value to the news stories or any sorts of articles available on the web which we have aggregated. This is one of the core value propositions we are trying to offer in iKnowlej. News or articles are being presented in iKnowlej in 3 different places. The first place is our main pages where we offer various stories in one page starting by our front page or network pages where we try to sort different news articles there through our news importance ranking algorithm. In this section we try to show the following info about the story:

A_ The importance of the story based on our algorithm which ranks the news items based on which sources on the web have reported the story & how many times the news story is being reported; these are indicators on how much the story gets attention by the media & blogs (which signals how much it would get attention by people).
B_ The number of comments the story has received in total from each of the sources reported it inside & outside of the iKnowlej (our effort to gather all of the comments from outside of the iKnowlej is a work in progress which we have completed a good percentage of it)
C_ We show the link of the most important sources (based on the sources ranks in our algorithm) reported the story (this is not illustrated on the above image)
D_ The Images & Video which we have discovered on the web as the related ones to the story, which could hugely help in further visualizing the event for the people.
E_ Showing the # of votes the story has received by our users indicating their personal interest on the story & how important they think the story is for them.
F_ We show the personal tags suggested by the users to the given story (Users could tag the stories there for their personal use there)
G_ We offer the users the ability to favorite the story or to flag it for later review
H_ Upcoming Feature: In addition to the comments, we are trying to add the Q&A feature around the news stories where people could clarify all of the questions they might have about the story & to get the audiences to leave responses or comments about the given story

Then we have our “More” section for the news stories where we offer more information about them: (which looks something like the picture below; the image below is not complete yet & it is just a draft)

A_ We show all of the stuff which was presented in the previous section listed above
B_ We show the complete list of all sources reported the story
C_ We show the related stories or articles
D_ We show the name of all people who voted for the story, tagged it, or commented on it
E_ We show the recent visitors of the story’s “More Page” in iKnowlej plus those in the sources (just the sources which have installed our comment widget)
F_ We show a cached version of the page where the users could get a quick glimpse of the page where they are going to

The last section where our users might go in order to get the full texts of the story is their selected source of news, where we intend to offer iKnowlej Bar on the top of the news stories so users could get lots of valuable info about the story. This feature is not completed yet & it is under development, & we try to make it as exciting as possible (& it is optional certainly).

iKnowlej prospective of the identities on the web is that just like the real world, we should have the real identity on the virtual world (i.e. web); this is important simply to prevent lots of abuses some people make through using the anonymous identity or misusing others names on the web for various unlimited purposes.

Our view on the potential of the web is that, the individuals’ responsibility & accountability could be measured in a much higher level on the web & that is unlike the real world mainly due to the web’s potential to track the activities of the individuals, subject to the privacy issues & net neutrality.

Open-ID still has a long way to go, but there are some basic steps right now which are Good to be used by various services not considering the strategic decision-making the businesses might have on competing with the similar services.

Taking advantage of the public profiles of the people available in various services such as LinkedIn, or other social networks or any other services where people share their identities publicly could help other services on the web to further be able to identify their users & let their users to identify each other better.

There could be lots of problems associated with this model, but we believe only going this way could make the people more concerned about the importance of using their real identity online & preventing others from misusing it.

We obviously also support the Open-ID initiative as it is deployed in our website while we support the authentication services provided by other major service providers such as Google, Yahoo, or facebook.

We are hoping to either become an innovator in this field which needs real innovation & execution from the companies or the any of the web foundations, or to just to become a major supporter of any other leader in this field.

Some Discussions on the web in this topic:

BBC,  Techcrunch UK, Scobelizer, ReadWriteWeb -A, ReadWritWeb -B, ReadWriteWeb -C

That is right. iKnowlej is going to have all those enabling tools & more (in different & innovative forms). The reason is that they are all great products for enabling the users to participate in the ecosystem of creating contents & we think there is nothing wrong in using the good ideas & trying to make them to work much better. However, each of those models have various shortcomings (obviously nothing is perfect & everything is capable of improvement). iKnowlej as a service which is trying to be Knowledge Centric, tries to provide its users with the information that are highly relevant to them. The first thing we do is to address the relevancy of the contents created by those tools to the people. We are going to have a complete different approach for further discovery of good contents & we will rank everything because ranking matters alot. We are also going to make the information much richer than it is available at anywhere else.

Right now, through the availability of the services such as FriendFeed, all of the above services are tied perfectly together in a very social way (although not mainstream but growing fast). That model seems very interesting.

We are going to have much deeper integration. After all, it is all about the contents consumption which we prefer having it in such a way to add more values for the users, & not to distract them from what they should really pay attention to.

In the upcoming posts, I am going to explain what the existing shortcomings of each tools are & how we are going to address them & what the integration of all those means.

We are not going to have those tools in our first Beta Release, but a little bit afterward.

There is no question that Twitter has become a great way to spread your words to the world & most importantly to those who would like to know the answer to the question of “What are we doing?”. There are number of companies which have already signed up on Twitter, & they are benefiting from the exposure & user engagement which this great utility is giving them. So, we think it is a right move for us to start using Twitter to further know the audiences which we are going to serve through in iKnowlej.

Our Twitter account which will be soon updated by “What we are doing” in iKnowlej is: twitter.com/iknowlej

Update: We are also on Friendfeed

One of the core issues on the web for many people who try to keep themselves up to date is the increasing noise of information; it means that there are load of information on the web which are irrelevant to the people and we have to look in all those irrelevant information in order to get the chance of seeing the relevant one. We are also constantly seeing new content enabling tools getting into the market through various approaches (blogs, photo/video/audio sharing sites, micro-blogging, link sharing, and so forth). This is the issue which takes a lot of time of the people while the frustration arising from this might result in discontinuing of browsing and some other possible inconveniences.

The following are some of the reasons we see for the described issue:
A) There are so many sources of information which people would like to follow

B) People do not know what they should follow exactly (This is controversial, but really an issue for almost anyone)

C) In various sources of information, there is no ranking of the contents to show exactly what are the best thing (That means, even if we know what sources to follow, the source content should be ranked based on our needs)

Content Hubs have been one of the solutions discussed lately in various places as one of the approaches which could solve some of the problems mentioned. We describe content hub as a place for connecting all of the sources of information together, categorizing them in a standard format (chosen through a democrat way by the users) and letting those sources and others to consume its contents. The contents will be ranked in various ways (including personalized ranking to address all sorts of needs). This will let the consumers to discover what is relevant to them much easier by subscribing only the right content hubs that are relevant to them and not every individual source they are looking for. They will also get the chance to meet and share thoughts with all other people interested in the same hub and will get the best content ranked through various ways.

The content Hubs also will have much richer information since we apply various technologies into their contents for finding the similar content (through content clustering), & enriching them by adding all sorts of media to them and more.

We are going to offer such a service in iKnowlej which we will call it “Networks”. For finding the relevant sources & contents for the networks, we are going to apply “Semantic Technology” & we are constantly working on to make it better day by day. We think networks are going to be the start for a very important phenomenon.

Here are some of notable blogs which are also highlighted the problem:

Scobelizer, Readwriteweb, Google Blogoscoped, TechCrunch (Also is linked above), LifeHacker, Micro Persuasion, & others.

Al Nikpay,

Hi Everyone,

Comment tools are one of the core features of the media on the Internet enabling them to interact with the audiences in getting their opinions, & whatever people put in their comments. However, as the Internet grows up, it needs to get better managed.

From audiences perspective, they would like to be able to track all the things they have done for their knowledge management & growth monitoring plus for their reputation purposes.

On the publishers side, they want richer contents, they want kinds of comments which help them understand their own works better for improvement, want to get to know who are commenting & so on.
Comment system also needs to be provided in such a way to further empower the audiences to have more oriented comments, more optimized communications, & more.
iKnowlej Corp. is now offering a comment system which somehow address all of the above with the below unique feature which could highly enrich the comments of the publishers. As we have a good news system which discovers what are the news which are written on the very same topic, we let those publishers who have written about the same topic to have their comments synchronized with each other (including the iKnowlej itself). Any comment shows where is its origin (it comes from which blog or website), therefore those who usually get more comments will get more links to their website for each of the comments origined from their website.
This is almost a way to show the related sites for getting more of the conversations about the topic.
We believe that the above mentioned feature is a good approach toward enrichment of the content of the blogs, letting the publishers to enjoy link building with other sites while enriching their contents plus letting the audiences to be able to get the big picture of all the conversations about any given topic from any given website. There is only one issue which is, we have to get the comment system to be installed on as much as possible blog or website to get its full functionality.
This is going to be the start of iKnowlej Comment Widget & we will constantly work toward its optimization & enrichment in features.

This issue is discussed on the blog0sphere:

Readwriteweb, Blog Herald, Scobleizer, Louis Gray, & many others.

Enjoy it,
Al Nikpay

Hello World!,

This is the official blog of the iKnowlej Corp. (& we are clearly using the Wordpress great OPEN SOURCE cms for blogging). Thanks to Wordpress community.

This blog is going to be used as our connection point to the world telling about what’s going on about iKnowlej (mainly internally, as you could easily Google things about us happening externally).

We decided to start our first post on iKnowlej with our VISION which is the very purpose of us to run this company.

To say a little about iKnowlej’s Vision, it has the vision to become the utility for accelerating the Knowledge Growth Rate of the human beings. We try to assure you that this is perfectly possible through the power of Internet & other companies like Google have somehow proved that “making the information to be accessible everywhere with a great ranking model addressing what we need” could be one of a good approach reaching that goal.

We will try to approach the iKnowlej’s Vision very slowly as this is a huge dream while there is no limit for.

iKnowlej will starts by providing a Global News Service first. This news service will be somehow different than the existing models. I am going to point out the differences of this News Service in a dedicated different post. We have lots of reasons on why we have considered the news aggregation as the starting point for going toward our vision.

iKnowlej is also going to have a Q&A service which is also tried to be different (of course, in a better way) than the existing services.

There are some reasons on why we have started such approach to our vision with these services. Knowledge starts by having the appropriate & relevant information (based on what we need & what we should need). The starting point of the iKnowlej would be getting to know what the users need.

We have also big plans for developing our Knowledge Management platform. As we would like to have various tools fully customizable for all types of needs, & since the concept of KM itself is not that much well-established, it has become somehow challenging.

At the end, this vision matters because we believe most of the existing world challenges is due to the lack of knowledge of the human beings.

Best Regards,

Al Nikpay