technology

Could Kynetx Connect JPS?

Becca Stern — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 02:59:56 -0700

When I first heard of the company Kynetx a few days ago, the initial image that popped into my head was that of KNEX, my brother’s favorite childhood toy. As I delved into the Kynetx website and learned more about the project, however, I began to understand the function of this program and how it can help JPS advertise its less well-known products.

Before I explain the functional advantages, some background on Kynetx. Created in 2007 by Phil Windley and Stephen Fulling, this private company went public in July 2009 with the launch of the AppBuilder, a program that allows quick and easy creation of Kynetx apps. You’re probably wondering what a Kynetx app is, and how it differs from other apps. Kynetx produces apps whose purpose is to enhance user experience. This means that the app might function as a way to make website navigation easier for a user and also as a marketing technique for a sales company.

Anyone can use Kynetx. All you (the user) have to do is download the app and it automatically integrates products to the context of your environment by performing item search and look up functions from any website. For example, you might be looking at Britney Spears’ webpage and the Kynetx app would allow you to purchase her CDs through Amazon, but from her website. This takes advantage of the impulse shopper because s/he might not necessarily want the …Baby One More Time CD, but because it was made available while the interest was prominent, the user is more likely to purchase it.

Needless to say, this would be a great tool for [JPS]{jewishpub.org) to use. If someone was visiting the Song of Songs Wikipedia page, the Kynetx app might pop up Debra Band’s The Song of Songs. Thus, by giving the user the opportunity to purchase [The Song of Songs] (http://www.jewishpub.org/product.php?id=222), the Kynetx app directs traffic to the JPS website, at which point the user might continue to explore the website and find a less popular, albeit interesting book to purchase.

In addition to impulse shopping, Kynetx can be used as a tool to connect people. For example, if you were to download the Kynetx Tagged Tanakh (TT) app, you would be able to see other users who contribute to or look at the TT. So, if you went to The Jewish Exponent website, you might learn that your favorite journalist is a contributor to the TT. You would know this because, as a user of the Kynetx TT app, a little blurb would come up next to the journalist’s name. If the journalist was not a TT contributor, the app would allow you to invite said journalist to join TT and to start contributing.

While I think that Kynetx is an original and useful program, I’m hesitant to use it because it seems a little too Big Brother to me. I don’t particularly enjoy being targeted with advertisements and, as an impulse shopper myself; I fear that my spending would increase drastically with an app like Kynetx. On that note, I recommend Kynetx to those trying to publicize a product, but caution users with similar spending weaknesses to my own.

The Long Tail: A Long Stretch?

Becca Stern — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 08:12:09 -0700

I recently finished reading Chris Anderson’s “The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More”.

The Long Tail is a statistical property which says that the majority of the population rests in the tail of probability distribution. The reason the Long Tail works is because today, with the accessibility of information, society demands variety. This demand stimulates the need to have a large number of unique items in relatively small quantities, in addition to a small number of popular items available in large quantities. Throughout The Long Tail, Anderson uses music as his prime example. The example works like this: Music is the general category. Within “Music” there are various genres that range from highly popular (Rock/Pop) to more unique (African Folk). Anderson explains that because there is a higher demand for Rock/Pop, it is at the front of the tail, while African Folk, which sells fewer albums, falls somewhere on the falling part of the tail.

The Long Tail doesn’t just apply to music. It can find a place in any aspect of the world because everything has a Long Tail. In Torah, the Long Tail is anything that doesn’t make it into a Dvar Torah (Sermon) or one of the greatest hits stories like Noah and the Ark or Moses and the Ten Commandments. For example, Eve eating the apple might be at the front of the tail, the Tower of Babel might be toward the middle, and Lot’s daughters seducing him might be toward the end of the tail.

The Tagged Tanakh (TT) helps make the Long Tail of Torah more accessible by incorporating tools to help users find what they want. It has moderation points that allow users to help sort and filter the most relevant content. User profiles enable people to share information about themselves so that they can find other people with similar interests. The mere act of adding tags makes info in the Torah more findable. Thus, the Long Tail of Torah can go on forever as long as people continue contributing remarks and tags to the Tagged Tanakh.

Tags, Janet Murray, and the Tanakh

Becca Stern — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 12:00:38 -0700

Though the Tagged Tanakh (TT) was conceived by JPS, the idea behind it was inspired by important people in academic, technological, and Jewish fields of study. Over the next few weeks I’m going to write a series of blog posts, each focusing on one of these individuals and how their work impacts the TT. My first subject is Dr. Janet Murray, a woman whose work has deep implications for the Tagged Tanakh.

Murray is an accomplished scholar in more than one field. She is internationally recognized for her work in game theory and interactive design. As the Director of the MA and PhD programs in Digital Media at Georgia Tech, Murray is also a member of their Experimental Game Lab (EGL). A prolific writer, Murray’s work is published in multiple languages, and in spring 2000, she was named to the Board of Trustees at the American Film Institute.

So, how does the work of Janet Murray impact the Tagged Tanakh? I read one of Murray’s articles, “Cyber-infrastructure as Cognitive Scaffolding: The Role of Genre Creation in Knowledge Making” in an attempt to understand the context of the Tagged Tanakh beyond Judaism and technology. Though confusing at times, Murray’s main point is that information is applicable to individuals based on how they categorize information. In other words, how we organize information conveys meaning. Tags are like post-its or labels that provide information about information (AKA metadata).

With tags, people can organize and group photos, videos, or any other form of data. By using ‘tags’ to define and organize the Tanakh, unconventional associations surface and anyone and everyone can find a way to connect to Judaism. As more people begin to populate the Tagged Tanakh, the network effect comes into play and the Tagged Tanakh’s value increases because more users create more tags, which creates more opportunities to interact with Torah. In this way, individuals eventually connect to each other via their tags and remarks.

Since the launch of the Tagged Tanakh in early 2010 some interesting tags have emerged. Some of my favorites include: JTW, environmentalism, and food.

I think that ‘tagging’ is an excellent process that creates an infinite number of access points to the Bible. Stay tuned as I continue to research and share with you the people who inspired the Tagged Tanakh!

The Delicious Connection Between Judaism and Technology

Becca Stern — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 08:56:15 -0700

Hello! My name is Becca Stern and I’m the newest addition to the JPS Interactive team. As the JPSI Summer Intern, I’ll be writing and contributing to the JPS Interactive blog and the Tagged Tanakh all summer, and I could not be more excited!

A little about myself: I’m a rising junior at the University of Pittsburgh where I’m studying English Literature and Children’s Literature. I’m a native of Philadelphia (go Phils!) and I love to eat and travel—especially at the same time.

One of my first assignments at JPS was to sort through JPS Interactive’s bookmarks. Using a web tool called Delicious, JPS staff have tagged and gathered interesting tidbits of information found online that relate to Judaism and technology. After hours of exploring three years’ worth of links (which I guess are kind of like digital bread crumbs), I started to conceptualize the path JPS Interactive and the Tagged Tanakh are forging.

If you would like to explore the links that JPSI has gathered you can jump to them quickly on the right hand side of this blog thanks to the Delicious widget we’re using. The links range from silly to serious, but they all share one common idea: Judaism and technology are not an oxymoron.

Personally, my favorite link not only connects Judaism to technology, but it adds humor to the mix. I like it because it shows how elements of Judaism can be appropriated and applied to modern society. Try not to laugh too hard…

Another interesting link lets you literally jump into the Bible—without moving away from your iPhone and Gchat. This virtual map tracks all of your favorite characters and their journeys, as told by the Tanakh. This could be a great way to enhance your understanding of the weekly Torah portion.

To sum it up, all of these Jewish-related websites are important because they make Judaism an accessible and relevant part of society.

Stay tuned throughout the summer as I continue to connect Judaism and technology!

Pulling The Torah Rather Than Pushing

JT — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 11:50:38 -0700

David Siegel would have us believe that the era of pushy salesmen and invasive marketing is coming to a close. With the dawn of the Semantic Web, pulling will become the more active verb (and business strategy) of the 21st century.

Siegel is an entrepreneur, typographer, and technologist and is one of the biggest proponents of the semantic web (aka Web 3.0). If you’re looking for a simple explanation of how the semantic web and its business applications work–check out this post Siegel recently composed for American Express or this post that discusses his work.

What does this have to do with Jewish educational technology? How does the idea of pull affect Jewish publishers, educators, and other community leaders?

Anyone who suffered through Hebrew School as a child knows, that if you don’t have a gifted teacher, interacting with Torah is generally a less than pleasant experience. As we grow older, we become more removed from the Bible, unless we decide to become a “professional Jew” or “adult learner.” For most American Jews, contact with the Bible is limited to uncomfortable encounters with Bible-thumpers, talking vegetables, or alienating conversations with supposedly more learned Jews. The Bible is repeatedly “pushed” onto people without clear and apparent justification beyond, “Did you know that the Bible says X about Y?”

I am often asked how the Tagged Tanakh will attract new readers to the Bible or at least engage audiences in new and innovative ways.

The Tagged Tanakh offers structured data associated with the Jewish Bible, blending vetted content with user-generated-content.

People seem to expect the Tagged Tanakh to push the values and ideas of the Torah onto unsuspecting noobs just like Hebrew School and other old-school institutions were supposed to. In fact, they couldn’t be more mistaken. The Tagged Tanakh will instead pull together students of all ages who seek out the wisdom of Torah. Passions, questions, and communities of practice will PULL people to the Tagged Tanakh because it caters to a wide range of needs and interests.

The Tagged Tanakh is a reflection of the Power of Pull in tandem with Torah study. On ReadWriteWeb.com, Jeff Stein sums it up perfectly:

“At the technical level, the Semantic Web has a lot of complexities. But the whole point of the Semantic Web is that with open data standards non-technical people can easily publish, link, mesh and look up data. Just like it doesn’t take a Computer Science degree anymore to build a good website.”

An Empty Middle School Dance Floor

JT — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 03:05:53 -0800

The Tagged Tanakh soft launch coincided with Tu B’Shvat at the end of January 2010. It was a quiet affair with not much pomp and circumstance. We released the site a tad prematurely, but we were so excited to get people tagging. We wanted to release early and release often.

In one year’s time, the Tagged Tanakh (TT) went from prototype to its first full release. Sure we couldn’t include all the cool features we originally wanted to, but we had made something unique – an online relational database of the English translation of the Jewish Bible.

The TT allows users to contribute remarks and tags to words and verses in the Bible. Vetted content provided by scholars and JPS staff is available alongside ideas and questions contributed by general users. People can create feeds that follow specific topics of interests or follow feeds made by other people. Feel free to take a tour!

We hope that it’s more than just hype, we want the Tagged Tanakh to be useful.
We want to conserve and stimulate conversations around Torah.

However, in order for the Tagged Tanakh to be of value it must take advantage of the network effect. Right now the Tagged Tanakh is like a middle school dance just after the doors opened. We need some brave souls to cut a rug and inspire more folks to join the dance floor so we can get this party started.

Access to the Tagged Tanakh is free, but you do need a registration code.
If you’re interested in getting in on the action simply send an email to me at:

jwaldman@jewishpub.org
Subject: Tagged Tanakh Registration Code Request

Happy Tagging!

Digital Diplomacy and Our Not So Distant Future

JT — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 03:19:08 -0800

In recent news, Google and the U.S. State Department unveiled their plans to work with Iraq’s National Museum to digitize their collection and offer a “virtual tour” of Ancient Mesopotamia with Google tools. Comcast officially announced that they are acquiring 51% of NBC Universal. Stevie Wonder was appointed a position at the UN as a Messenger of Peace. And poor Tiger Woods is being skewered by the media.

So what do all these things have in common? Each one of these headlines forecast major developments in technology that will profoundly affect our future. Although I don’t have a crystal ball, I do have a healthy imagination and read lots of Warren Ellis comic books. So here are four things that I think will change the way we conduct our lives in the coming years.

Warning, this blog post contains “forward-looking statements.”

1. 21st Century Statecraft
Corporate and national allegiances have always shaped diplomacy. Think of it this way, the East India Company is to Britain as Google is to the U.S. Both companies chartered into unknown territories on behalf of their nations and in return each received special treatment. The Google/U.S./Iraqi National Museum project points to how Google will become the nanny of all of Iraq’s orphaned, or in this case, looted, information or artifacts. Google will be the all-seeing eye of the United States government across all borders.

2. End-to-End Economics
“We believe distribution and content can work together, but it doesn’t happen by accident—you have to manage it,” said Comcast Chief Operating Officer Stephen Burke, who will be overseeing the takeover of NBC Universal. “We could look for new, innovative ways to bring content to market by just doing deals with media companies, but the truth is that it’s much easier to take risks and try new things when you’re in the same company.” And there you have it. Content and distribution are back together. Comcast CEO, Brian Roberts has already blogged about the deal and the antitrust hoards are gathering. The End to End Principle receives economic validation with this monumental deal.

3. Identity Management
Because those text messages and emails we all crank out only “occupy space” on a server somewhere, they are never really deleted. Media theorist Douglas Ruskoff does not paint a very pretty picture for Tiger Woods or for any of us churning out digital matter. Managing our digital lives through emails, Facebook updates, or SMS will become a critical facet of inter-personal communication. Every digital communication we have is archived somewhere, so if you don’t want private matters broadcast to eternity, it’s probably best to use two cans and a string or go for the good ol’ face-to-face meeting.

4. Russell’s Paradox
Bertrand Russell is considered to be one of the 20th century’s premier logicians. He is most renowned for his contribution to the foundation of mathematics and what is called Russell’s Paradox, which shows that a logically impossible scenario is apparently plausible. This reminds me of one of my favorite Stevie Wonder tunes, “Love’s In Need of Love Today”. As a UN Messenger of Peace, Stevie has already promised to compose a hit song to raise awareness of the challenges faced by people with disabilities. The blind prophet is a well-known archetype, but with economic, technological and social instability being the norm, it seems like counter-intuitive logic will be a governing force in days to come.

What is a dataset? Part 2

JT — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 03:00:16 -0800

In an earlier post I introduced the concept of datasets and how they are becoming more valuable via crowd sourcing tools. Tech guru Tim O’Reilly has suggested that, “Data is the next Intel Inside,” meaning that the next major commodity in our economy will be specific bodies of information or data. Here’s the money quote from the O’Reilly post:

“The race is on to own certain classes of core data: location, identity, calendaring of public events, product identifiers and namespaces. In many cases, where there is significant cost to create the data, there may be an opportunity for an Intel Inside style play, with a single source for the data. In others, the winner will be the company that first reaches critical mass via user aggregation, and turns that aggregated data into a system service.”

The goal of the Tagged Tanakh is to create such a dataset of information around the Jewish Bible and then produce services that enhance the experience of text study. JPS wants to shepherd this discrete body of data and serve as a hub for the multitude of digital Jewish resources that connect to the Bible and related texts (~ahem~ On1foot, MediaMidrash, OpenSiddurProject).

What would happen if JPS sponsored a contest to use data visualization tools to help generate new biblical commentaries? Or imagine when the mitzvah projects for all of the Bar/Bat Mitzvahs in 2012 contribute to a crowd-sourced music video of 7th graders rapping the Bible. New methods for engaging Jewish text are at our fingertips with a dataset of the Tanakh.

As Bill Moyers put it: “The more each of us knows and understands (the Bible), the better our chances for living purposeful lives, creating strong families, building solid communities, and forging a more tolerant and vibrant democracy … together.”

So to answer the question, what is a dataset? The answer for some is money, for others it is power, and for us it is a conversation.

Tools and Resources for the Network Age

JT — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 02:58:11 -0800

Is the Information Age at an end? With a new decade nearly upon us, some have been saying that we are now entering the Network Age– a time when men will mine for data, not oil. Ranking and figuring out how people share their sentiments will become the driving force of community management and business growth.

In the book Authenticity, the authors describe “rendering experiences” for customers as the foundation of this new emerging economy. Digital Anthropology jobs and community management tools will drive the 21st-century economy. Eventually, we’ll all climb aboard the Cluetrain and ride off into brighter, more lucrative future.

And yet, most people still scratch their heads when social networks are mentioned. They seem to think that social networks equal Facebook, which is akin to saying all vacuums are Hoovers. The founding executive editor of Wired Magazine, Kevin Kelly, describes participation in social networks as organic behavior in a technological matrix.

In case that pithy statement didn’t shed some light on this matter, here’s a great presentation made by my buddy Gagan over at DesignStamp in Vancouver. Connecting with customers and rendering positive user experiences helps transform brands from products to lifestyles. This is the core of social networks, in my opinion. Businesses and organizations that understand this will thrive in the new millennium, those that disregard it are in for a bumpy ride.

Social media 101: Connecting with your customer

View more documents from DesignStamp.

The Future of the Tagged Tanakh

JT — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 02:56:10 -0700

It seems like everyone these days is talking about the future. Will people still read books? Can global catastrophe be averted by not eating meat?

According to the CEO of Google, in five years we’ll be surfing through mostly Chinese content online. According to a former muckity-muck at Facebook, the future is not information, but networks. While architectural students in London envision a future made up of, “car-crash spaces that occasionally come into focus as giant mechanised spindly crustacea.”

If the future is not our own, then how can we shape it? If entire conferences dedicated to the future of the web can’t predict how Google Wave will change our lives then how can us regular folk develop content and technology strategies that don’t become redundant thanks to the actions of Amazon or Twitter?

Originally we had imagined building the Tagged Tanakh in private development. We wanted to design and then release to the public a fully populated and rendered experience of accessible, relevant, and dynamic Jewish content. Our plan was to curate and refine the Tagged Tanakh and include all the bells and whistles: bi-directional Hebrew/English display, integration of third party datasets like The Harper Collins Bible Dictionary, or cool APIs.

But now we see the error of our ways. It’s actually better to share our work with the public sooner. This will help populate the Tagged Tanakh, identify usability issues, and clarify which features are the most beneficial. As founder of Meebo, Seth Sternberg recommends, “Launch fast and light, and listen to your users for feedback.”

So when will the fast, light, and PUBLIC version of the Tagged Tanakh be available?
Stay tuned to this blog for more information.