Digital Asset Management

5 Tips for Advanced Metadata Management.

Metadata Management is the process of ensuring that all metadata associated with a digital asset is captured, organized, stored and made available for use by and within other applications. Metadata Management begins at the moment the digital asset is created by an application or captured by digital imaging.

Okay, so that’s my “in a nutshell” definition of Metadata Management. But let’s take a step back to the beginning,
and solve some of these mysteries of metadata. First of all, what is metadata? Well, according to Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary; meta·da·ta a noun plural but singular or plural in construction : data that provides information about
other data.…in other words, data about data as it refers to an electronic or digital file. Metadata is critical in ensuring that your digital assets will be accessible far into the future.Now, I suppose you may be wondering how

Continues @ http://www.extensis.com/damcenter/articles.jsp;?id=300004

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Curatorr: A Twitter Tool for Media Companies.

ROI calculations are a joke.

Our colleagues over at Forrester recently undertook some interesting research regarding content management investment attitudes in 2010 (DM, RM and WCM).  The overall finding was along the lines one might expect, “72% of respondents intend to expand their use of ECM technologies“… but there was an intriguing second key conclusion in the report: “49% could not estimate the ROI for any of their ECM systems.”

Let me state my take on ROI calculations as clearly as I can. ROI calculations for information technology are junk calculations, a fraud, a nonsense, and a complete waste of time. Clear enough for you? Oh and by the way, ROI calculations from software vendors are even worse…

ROI assessments are based on the simplistic formula of benefits minus costs to calculate the return on your investment. But simple is not always smart, and most if not all the of the benefits in such calculations are by nature predictive. In other words they are guesses, and in my experience, almost always overly optimistic — and fatuous guesses at that.

Continues @ http://www.cmswatch.com/Trends/1798-ROI-Joke

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Needed: Infrastructure to Make the Web Personal – GigaOM.

The web is becoming more dynamic, context-aware and personalized by the day, and the amount of information consumed by each person is increasing exponentially. But while hardware performance is improving, except when it comes to the simplest of parallel programming tasks, software infrastructure is not keeping pace. We need to develop new data processing architectures — ones that go beyond technologies like memcached, MapReduce, NoSQL, etc.

Think of this as a search problem. Traditionally, there was an index of every document in which every word occurred. When a query was received the search engine could just look up the precomputed answer to which documents had which word. For a personalized search, an exponentially larger index is needed that includes not only factual data (words in a document, brand of cameras, etc.) but also taste and preference data (people who like this camera tend to live in cities, be under 40, love “Napoleon Dynamite,” etc.).

Unfortunately, personalizing along 100 taste dimensions leads to nearly as many permutations of recommendation rankings as there are atoms in the universe! Obviously there isn’t enough space to precompute what recommendations to show every possible type of person that queries a site.

Continues @ http://gigaom.com

Extractiv: Content Provisioning : Beyond Search.

A happy quack to the reader who alerted me to Extractiv. The company is in the “content provisioning business”, and I did not know what this phrase meant. I know about “telecommunications provisioning”, but the “content” part threw me. I followed the links my reader sent me and located an interview (“Quick Q&A on Extractiv”) on the AndyHIckl.com blog. It took me about a half hour to figure out that the interviewer and the interview subject seemed to be the same person.

The key points that pierced the addled goose’s skull were:

• The service “helps consumers ‘make sense’ of large amounts of unstructured text. The method is natural language processing
• Unstructured text is transformed into structured text for sentiment tracking and semantic search
• The technology is “unique distributed computing platform makes it possible for us to crawl — and extract content from — zillions of pages at the same time. (Our performance is pretty unbeatable, too: we’re currently able to download and extract content from 1 million pages in just under an hour.)”
• “Extractiv’s a joint venture between two companies: 80Legs and Language Computer. It’s really a great match. 80Legs offers the world’s first truly scalable web crawling platform, while Language Computer provides some of the world’s best — and most scalable — natural language processing tools.

Continues @http://arnoldit.com

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How Falling Prices Have Created Video Ubiquity – GigaOM.

Transformational Impact

The impact of more video devices in more places is the consumption of more bandwidth than ever before, which will transform networking. And more processing and storage will be required than ever before, which will transform IT, including cloud computing.

Today’s HDTV streams need somewhere between 4 and 7 megabits per second. 4K or, in a few years, Ultra-HDTV video streams will need tens of megabits per second, just for one channel. Increase that further for 60 frames per second, finer gradations of color, 3-D, and multiple screens, and network capacity will need to increase ten- or twenty-fold, or more.

Consumer networks are already mostly carrying rapidly growing amounts of user-generated video content, IPTV and peer-to-peer traffic, and Cisco forecasts that video will account for 90 percent of network traffic by 2013. Sure, there’s text and images and spreadsheets and slideshows traversing networks too, but it takes a lot of 140-character tweets to equal one full-length motion picture. Enterprises are increasingly adopting mobile, desktop, and immersive telepresence solutions. Meeting all this demand will require increased investment in wireless and wired networks.

IT will also be transformed. After all, how effective will databases that were designed for alphanumeric data be when a majority of future IT expenditures will be for acquiring, managing and maintaining enormous repositories of unstructured video for security/surveillance, merchandising optimization, field service, collaboration, depositions, entertainment, or applications we haven’t imagined yet?

Continues @http://gigaom.com

Review: Digital Anarchy’s Beauty Box.

Digital Anarchy has produced some truly fine plug-ins over the years. I still think their Psunami plug in for After Effects rocks and rolls and have used it often over the years. Not too long ago they sold most of their video software to Red Giant and focused on the marketing of their Adobe Photoshop filters and other products. Looking to get back into the video genre, Jim Tierney and Digital Anarchy have produced ‘Beauty Box’ for both Final Cut Pro and Adobe After Effects. One serial number is all I needed for both the Final Cut Pro and Adobe After Effects installations and both went smoothly.Beauty Box is a skin retouching software, which uses Face Detection to identify skin tones at the same time as it preserves important facial features. It is, by design, easy to use and intuitive even though the downloadable manual provides a considerable amount of additional and useful information, which helps to clarify many of the manually adjusted parameters that Beauty Box incorporates.

Digital Anarchy’s Beauty Box is really not about creating fancy effects and appearances that stand out from the crowd, though I suppose one could create them to some degree. It is about doing the final retouching to facial characteristics and skin tones once you have created your sequence. Its effects are subtle, as they should be, which only makes it that much more valuable a tool to have. Using it was really quite simple and automatic.
Continues @ http://www.lafcpug.org

Posted by Henrik de Gyor on February 5, 2010

With Digital Asset Management (DAM) system, or any system containing intellectual property within an organization, unique logins (username and password) for every individual user with access is common. Unique logins should not be limited to people with a specific level of access, a particular role nor a certain level of permissions, but everyone with access to the DAM.

Why? A few reasons…unless you enjoy seeing your IP sold on an online auction

Security

When some one leaves an organization (for any reason), they should not walk away with any access to any intellectual property (IP), applications nor digital assets which are owned and/or licensed by the organization. This can reduce the potential risk of having your competitors having direct access to your DAM. This also limits the risk of IP spreading wildly out of control. This goes hand in hand with the use of a permission and role structure.

Accountability

Unique logins allow a certain level of accountability for every user. Everyone should be kept accountable for what they do (or don’t do), regardless of their role, title and/or seniority. True accountability does not play favorites. It should be clear as black on white.

Reporting

Once you establish individual logins, it should be easy to report who has:

• Uploaded an asset
• Downloaded an asset
• Metatagged an asset
• And many other measurable results on an individual basis, group basis and even throughout organization

Reporting capabilities are common in many DAM systems. Reporting also allows you measure the performance of system, user adoption as well as user results from the DAM. Unique logins per individual allow at least administrators to pin point exactly who did what with which assets and when this occurred.

As a best practice, passwords should be changed on regular intervals (such as every few months) for additional integrity. There are some regulations which mandate passwords to change often. Can your DAM users change their own passwords?

What does a strong password look like?

• 8 or more characters
• Includes letter(s), at least one upper and one lower case letter and number(s)
• At least one special character
• Avoid using words found in the dictionary

If possible, explore the option of having a single sign-on (SSO) feature for time savings so users only need to remember one unique username and password for all the systems they access instead of different logins for different systems.

Do you have unique logins for each DAM user?

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Google Enlists NSA To Defend Its Data — InformationWeek.

By Thomas Claburn
InformationWeek
February 4, 2010 02:26 PM

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The Forrester Blog For Technology Product Management & Marketing Professionals.

“Cloud computing” is a very hot topic, and like social media, subject to much debate about “what is cloud computing?” and “what does it mean for business?” Simply stated, cloud computing lets your customers and potential buyers take advantage of services and resources delivered as an online utility. Buyers get the benefits of using your technology without worrying about the technical details as much as they would if they implemented software inside their data centers. The benefits can include: lower capital investment, faster implementation, reduced risk, proven security and improved scalability to handle the increased amounts of data. Purists believe that true cloud computing requires large scale sharing by infrastructure/application providers and their consumers alike. While my colleagues at Forrester try to sort out the market and make it easier for IT buyers to decide where to invest, I’d like to explore the idea of marketing to customers in the cloud.

B2B marketing needs to embrace the cloud. Most executives see marketing as a large discretionary line item in the corporate budget. During tought economic times, that “discretion” gets cut more often than not.  Marketers perpetuate this short-sighted perspective when they focus more on program and campaign spending and fail to invest in the capital or IT support needed to make marketing execution more efficient and the results more visible to the organization.

Continues @ http://blogs.forrester.com/