White Paper Introductions
I am not joking about this. The following is the first line of an introduction of a white paper I downloaded.
“This paper describes a new collaboration technology that is based on the support of lightweight, informally structured, opportunistic activities featuring heterogeneous threads of shared items with dynamic membership.”
If I had a nickel for every time I heard that.
So I thought I’d explore some more to see how even more confused I could get.
There was this…
“We explore the concept of social landmarks in complex, shared information and coordination environments.”
Ok, not too bad. I get that. Sort of.
Then there is this buzzword gem…“Contextual collaboration is a promising approach to embedding new collaborative features into existing applications.” Right with you, buddy.
When referring to someone named Picard and colleagues, another author had this to say
“I question two aspects of the work: the Computers Are Social Actors (CASA) approach, and the use of psychophysiological measurements of emotion without a stated theory of emotion.”
Of course, I questioned the same thing last week.
Then there was this…
“The principle of information hiding has been very influential in software engineering since its inception in 1972.”
And this whole time I thought it was 1971.
“Chat Spaces are rich persistent chats that provide light-weight shared workspaces for small to medium-scale group activities.”
Are they talking about AOL Instant Messenger? Or not. Not sure.
And finally…
“We present contextual collaboration, an approach to building collaborative systems that embeds collaborative capabilities into core applications, and discuss its advantages.” …collaboratively.
I am getting a smurf has been smurfing smurf lately, that smurfy smurf.
Now I’ll go back to ESPN Page 2 and The Onion.