"If you listen to some you'll hear hype that I control RSS. That's just ridiculous. I don't control RSS. I couldn't change it if I wanted to. It is what it is. RSS controls me. Try to wiggle out from its control and I keep running into it every which way I look. Massive numbers of developers came to the realization that the design period of this network is over, that RSS sneaked out from control of RDF somewhere in the middle of last year when they weren't looking. And it took over the world. I'm proud of RSS for its power. I am in awe of it. I respect it. I am contained by it. I am content."

5:15:39 PM    

"...Until recently, this hasn't been the case. If you wanted to find out what a large group of people were doing, you would have to find a proxy to that information, some general indicator of what the group was doing via book sales or Nielsen ratings or random polls. With a lot of the things happening on the Web, though, this is changing. Enormous amounts of information are being placed online, universally accessible and machine-readable ... the data is interesting: it gives us a glimpse of the patterns and trends that emerge out of the collective activity of the entire group, bypassing the traditional necessity of trusting a few voices to represent the many. It is truly a model for distributed idea generation and interpretation which is only beginning to be tapped. All Consuming is a tiny filter on top of this vast collection of group activity, aimed solely at finding connections between weblogs and books, but I look forward to the day when hundreds of other views of the data are available to consume and build upon." [Erik Benson, at xml.com]

1:26:38 PM    

Wendy Grossman interviews Patrick Ball (deputy director of the Science and Human Rights Program at the AAAS) about statistical analysis of human rights violations.

Can you spot anything in the careers or biographies of military officers that makes them more likely to violate human rights?
What was the big risk for Salvadorean military officers committing huge human rights violations? US training. It's very, very clear. I think US training selects the officers who are the most motivated, and the way that you distinguished yourself in the Salvadorean military in the 1980s was by killing people. So the most motivated officers are also the worst. But what this also says is that US training is useless for restraining human rights abuse.

3:33:15 PM    

"What, if any, are the properties displayed by individuals in a successful collaboration that are absent in an unsuccessful event? We've had years to consider this question, and the result is the fourteen Axioms for releasing group genius...

• The future is rational only in hindsight.
• You can't get there from here, but you can get here from there.
• Discovering you don't know something is the first step to knowing it.
• Everything that someone tells you is true. They are reporting their experience of reality.
• To argue with someone else's experience is a waste of time.
• To add someone's experience to your experience--to create a new experience--is possibly valuable
• The only valid test of an idea, concept or theory is what it enables you to do.
• You understand the instructions only after you have assembled the red wagon.
• If you can't have fun with the problem, you will never solve it.
• Every individual in this room already possesses the answer. The purpose of this intensive interaction is to stimulate one, several, or all ofus to remember and extract what we already know.
• Creativity is the process of eliminating options.
• In every adverse condition, there are hundreds of good solutions.
• You fail until you succeed.
• Nothing fails like success.

[MG Taylor Corporation's Modeling Language for the 21st Century, via s.norrie]

10:25:14 AM    

" Some recent thoughts on KM:

• KM is not an end in itself. It is a set of disciplines and tools to help us meet our business objectives.

  What is the point of doing KM if it does not help us meet our business objectives? KM can only be measured by its ability to help us meet our business objectives.

• KM needs to address the quality of our decision-making.

  What is the point of KM if we still make lousy decisions - if we do the wrong thing - even exceptionally well? We would do better to do the right thing badly and not bother with KM at all!

• KM needs to address the issue of our motivation and our ability to make use of the knowledge we have.

  We can be given all the perfect information and knowledge that we need to do our jobs but if we fail to use it then what is the point?

• KM should help us to improve our awareness and understanding.

  KM should not be just about helping us to know more. It is through increased awareness and understanding that we start to see our organizational world in new ways and identify new business opportunities.

• KM is about helping us to identify new opportunities and leveraging them.

  Measuring the results of KM is important but we should not forget that KM is also about identifying new opportunities. We can measure cost/profit etc but we cannot measure "missed opportunities" by their very nature we do not see missed opportunities until it is too late.

[Gurteen Knowledge-Log, via Matt Mower]

Could one replace KM by MR (Market Research) throughout? worth remembering either way.

12:31:33 PM    

"This distinction of Core versus Ring has helped us understand user requirements a lot better than any previous model we had. Over the years since we first developed the model, we've seen patterns in the behaviors of users of core applications:

• They are comfortable with domain-specific concepts, jargon, and abbreviations. When the application is 'dumbed-down' through the explanation of concepts and jargon, they grow impatient and seem to resent it.
• They come to the application with established processes and procedures that they aren't interested in revising because the software does it differently.
• They are willing to customize the software to fit their specific needs.
• They'll explore the software willingly, trying out features and options, looking for ways to be even more productive.

In contrast, users of ring applications display different patterns:

• They need concepts and jargon explained in plain language or eliminated entirely.
• They look to the application to suggest procedures. (For example, Chip wanted the financial software to walk him through the end-of-year closing process.)
• They'll usually accept all of the application's defaults and standard configuration settings. For many preferences, they'll defer to the application for its expertise.
• They rarely explore options in the software. If the package doesn't directly guide them to functionality, they're unlikely to discover it. Fear of 'breaking something' constrains their behavior.

...A given application could have two separate interfaces to serve these different types of personalities." [Jared Spool, User Interface Engineering]

ABC has two interfaces: the desktop interface for specwriters, and the web interface (at surveyanalysis.com or on the user's desktop via Radio's personal webserver) for Market Research agency and client users.

1:28:55 PM    

"I try very hard not to build up reliance on particular tools or techniques. I hear experienced developers describe themselves as Oracle programmers, or as J2EE programmers, and I cringe: the more experience you have the broader your base should be. So the first trick is to know as many tools and techniques as possible. You don't have to be an expert in them all, but you really should know of their existence, and have an idea of the circumstances in which they could be applied." [Dave Thomas interview, Code Generation Network]

Interesting example of domain-specific syntax in Ruby using 'compile-time' methods (I used a similar technique in Forth for the BT CATI system).

1:00:18 PM    

A few miles from the bridge to the south lie the ruins of the ancient city of Ur, founded 8,000 years ago...

Sgt Sprague, from White Sulphur Springs in West Virginia, passed it on his way north, but he never knew it was there.

"I've been all the way through this desert from Basra to here and I ain't seen one shopping mall or fast food restaurant," he said. "These people got nothing. Even in a little town like ours of twenty five hundred people you got a McDonald's at one end and a Hardee's at the other."

A few hundred yards downstream, a group of Iraqis, some of them hiding out in the country from the fighting in Nassiriya, invited journalists to strong sweet tea in a farmhouse of whitewashed mud. They spread carpets and cushions on the floor and generously allowed the guests not to take their muddy boots off. [James Meek, The Guardian]

5:51:21 PM    

"So, what is Xpertweb? In simple terms, it is a way for people to offer their services and products, for a suggested fee, or even for free if they choose, and for others to know with a high level of confidence what they can expect to get.
...It might be huge." [Ming the Mechanic]

10:51:54 AM    

"A very few large corporations have discovered something very useful about the weblog: It is the most economical focus group ever invented . Why base the risk assessment on a new product line on some marginally applicable statistical sample when you can simply ask the customer what they think ? Like the art of business, the art of blogging is an art of conversation." [teledynamics communiqué]

10:17:24 AM    

"If I were an executive in a large organization, I would encourage the organization to experiment with using blogs instead of other forms of communication. My guess is that blog filtering could enhance productivity by improving the relevance for workers of the information that they have to process." [Arnold Kling]

10:10:26 AM    

"Marketers need solid market research to guide their decisions about product positioning, revenue potential, and target markets. Likewise, designers need solid design research to guide their decisions about the product's interaction framework, feature set, and overall appropriateness for its users." [Steve Calde at Cooper, via Teledynamics Communiqué]

12:17:05 PM    

"...[humans] alone have been provoked by that epistemic itch to seek a remedy: better truth-seeking methods. Wanting to keep better track of our food supplies, our territories, our families, our enemies, we discovered the benefits of talking it over with others, asking questions, passing on lore. We invented culture. Then we invented measuring, and arithmetic, and maps, and writing." [Daniel Dennett]

...and then we invented computing, and the web, and blogs?

2:31:38 PM    

"...in the real world, if you have the job of building something that actually works, as a computer programmer or as an engineer, or you need to do something very precise and important, like surgery, you can't get away with anything much less than 100% right. You might get away with 99.99% right, and the last 0.01% will still haunt you." [Flemming Funch]

8:27:38 PM    

"The web is my medium of choice, not a medium of last resort.

• ...
• I ignore the advice of pundits and gurus who are not practitioners.
• ...
• I do not apologize for taking my work seriously.
• ... "

[Ftrain.com]

Paul Ford's personal set of 20 principles for his writing on the web.

3:33:47 PM    

"Is there any urge more basic than for your life to be of consequence?

...we are helping in the birth of a ubiquitous global network, for it's not the "frozen" Internet Infrastructure that matters, it's the connecting of most humans who wish to be, using words and gestures that seem natural to them ... it's good to pause and wonder at our good luck to be at this place at this time.

... What's interesting is how few people set the direction for the American Experiment. Only the 56 white guys in Carpenter's Hall understood what a leap they were taking with the Declaration of Independence ... Eleven years later, the 39 signers of the Constitution acted just as independently in setting down the rules of engagement for the people and their rulers. ... The fight over the document was fierce and the debate thoughtful, but they didn't revise what the standards body had hammered out. So the twig was bent and that was the direction our nation inclined.

That was serious standard-setting. Today, under Doc's Anybody can Change it doctrine,

[NEA: Nobody owns it, Everybody can use it, Anybody can improve it. (Doc Searls) ]

we're sitting around lobbing ideas and code around, seldom realizing that we're the delegates setting the standards for the world that will follow us. Relatively speaking, we're even fewer than the four score or so men who did the real work of putting symbols on parchment. Some of the symbols we're using are pretty arcane, but they set standards anyway, which will mold society as surely as did the Federalist papers.

So a few will debate nuances no one else comprehends. Even fewer will lay down the words that free our progeny. What works will grow and the rest will wither, as it always has. Someday we'll see that the Toms Jefferson and Robbins were right in seeing that as long as there are willing followers there will be exploitive leaders.

So instead we'll follow our collective gut, add what we can, use what works and leave something better behind. Maybe this isn't an apocalypse but a parenthesis and the age of hierarchy is an interruption in organic evolution as it's always gone on.

Doing sensible things is what makes us consequential."

[Escapable Logic]
10:54:25 AM    

"But we did find a bulletproof topology for assigning metadata to business content strings. MindShare was based on the idea that, if something is worth keeping at all, it should be available fortuitously when we're looking for things like it but may not even remember this item specifically. The universal topology for everything we need to keep track of is the IPIA coordinate system. IPIA says that the meaningful text strings in any file, correspondence, meeting, call, etc. can be classified unequivocally as an Issue, Promise, Idea or Appointment. You'll never mistake an issue string from a promise received string.

And obviously our world is defined by promises payable and promises receivable. Making them explicit is a Good Thing."

[Escapable Logic]

8:52:52 PM    

Loyd's Curiosity

This is totally cool that I could receive and vote for this from within my aggregator. It gives me all sorts of ideas for our blogging + news aggregation grant project! Thanks to jenett.radio for highlighting this!

[The Shifted Librarian]

Hmmm... indeed: as the developer of SurveyAnalysis.com I had to try this, but when I voted my aggregator page was replaced by the poll form, which was somewhat disconcerting (I'm used to aggregator page links opening a new window).

[Update: this appears to have been a Safari bug -- Safari behaves as if a <form> in an <iframe> has target="_top" -- not the case with Explorer or Chimera.]

12:15:22 PM    

"It seems to me that the multiplier effect that occurs in weblogging is at the center of what learning and scholarship are really about. Being able to share thoughts, share readings, share online resources, and then get the boost that comes from one person multiplying what is shared into a network of unpredictable connections and responses is just what every teacher wants students to learn about learning, i.e., that it's exciting to learn and exciting to share what is learned. This boost of interconnectivity is also exactly what every scholar wants to achieve when searching for new ideas, new observations, and new connections." [Joseph Hart: EduResources]

10:35:25 PM    

"Kids don't have a clue about how things work. Sure, kids can whiz through a lot of menus and commands, etc. But I understand what is happening underneath -- they are clueless. This bothers me... We don't understand that true knowledge is more than learning how to push the buttons..."

10:25:34 AM    

"...our core expectation is that we will be served rather than just sold to. Here are some universal hopes that any of us has when engaging another... Naturally, they're unreasonable:

• Understand my purposes and serve them...Listen past my words.
• Leave your business plan at the door...
• Take the time to educate me...
• Details matter...
• But don't drown me in the details...
• Bring your expertise but leave your biases behind...
• No matter how important this project is, I have a real life...
• Give the project credit for its passion, significance and potential...
• Keep the loop alive because communication is your real product...
• Respect the goddam deadline...
• ...remind me, gently, that you can get my job done three ways:
  • Fast
  • Good
  • Cheap
  Pick Two

[Escapable Logic (much abbreviated)]

These are written from the client's viewpoint, but seem pretty much bidirectional: for people as for programs, client and server are fleeting rôles, not lifetime assignments.
Read the whole thing (including a story of economic romanticism).

5:36:44 PM    

"Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heart-ache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. There is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, to discover what is already there."

3:59:10 PM    

Hal Clement (Harry C. Stubbs)

A quiet and underrated master of "hard science" fiction who, among other things, foresaw integrated circuits back in the 1940s.

12:23:04 PM    

"This hasn't been said often or emphatically enough, so I'll boldface it: Blogs are outlines, and blogging is a form of outlining. This occurred to me during the panel on weblogs at Supernova on Tuesday.

I was writing in an outliner, and I was doing it fast [~] about as fast as it can be done. And I'm not saying that because I'm vain about my typing. I'm saying it because I was using a tool that greatly speeds the process: an outliner. Radio Userland's, to be precise.

In the Weblog session, Dave said "Weblogs are the word processors of the Web" ...

One of the cool things about an outliner like Radio's is the way it lets you organize what you say by processes like promote/demote, collpase/expand and hoist/dehoist. I won't explain them here, but I will tell you they are very handy once you get to know them. They even help me organize what I'm thinking and writing about, which is saying a lot.

In fact, I just used outlining features to quickly reorganize my blog/outline after moving (actually copying) all of my Day 1 reporting over to its own "story page", where it should have been in the first place. [Later... I just added Day 2]" [The Doc Searls Weblog]

...and of course it took only a few hours for Doc's great conference blogging to appear in my Radio News Aggregator.

(Note: St. Luke's seems like a fascinating creative company, but their current corporate site, and their BT broadband campaign, are clueless.)

11:26:04 AM    

"...a review of Timothy Ferris' celebration of amateur astronomers. Dyson generalizes the discussion to the wonderfully productive role to be played by amateurs in a number of fields. The closing paragraph gives a feel for what the article is about:

When we look at the wider society outside the domain of science, we see amateurs playing essential roles in almost every field of human activity. Amateur musicians create the culture in which professional musicians can flourish. Amateur athletes, amateur actors, and amateur environmentalists improve the quality of life for themselves and others. Amateur writers such as Jane Austen and Samuel Pepys do as much as the professionals Charles Dickens and Fyodor Dostoevsky to plumb the heights and depths of human experience. In the most important of all human responsibilities, the raising of children and grandchildren, amateurs do the lion's share of the work. In almost all the varied walks of life, amateurs have more freedom to experiment and innovate. The fraction of the population who are amateurs is a good measure of the freedom of a society. Ferris shows us how amateurs are giving a new flavor to modern astronomy. We may hope that amateurs in the coming century, using the new tools that modern technology is placing in their hands, will invade and rejuvenate all of science.

8:09:06 PM    

"Becoming proficient, really proficient, in just one programming world takes years. Sure, lots of bright teenagers learn Delphi one week and Python the next week and Perl the next week and think they are proficient. Yet they don't have the foggiest clue how much they're missing. ... So for now, my advice is this: don't start a new project without at least one architect with several years of solid experience in the language, classes, APIs, and platforms you're building on. ... And when you're designing abstractions or programming tools, go the extra mile to make them leak proof." [Joel on Software]

4:21:04 PM    

"What if my mentor sucks? What if I mentor someone who turns out to be a bozo, and for whatever reason I can't turn it around? What about people who are fantastic engineers but have terrible management skills? And are you, Britt Blaser, the alpha-mentor who will reap the 1% rewards of all of xpertwebs workers?" [Jonathan Blocksom Brain Food]

"The Xpertweb peer-to-peer system automates reputation-building.
Here's a graphic depiction of a typical Xpertweb transaction.
Here's a list of Xpertweb-related blogs." [Escapable Logic]

5:01:59 PM    

"Amazon wins because they embed more intelligence and more knowledge in their system than anyone else. The tools that Amazon makes available and easy to use make me effectively smarter about book purchasing ... Amazon augments my intelligence. Since I'm "smarter," I tend to make better decisions about the books I buy, buying fewer that I don't like..."

"The combination of Amazon, e-books, and a personal content management system like Tinderbox is allowing me to create what I call my "Library of the Future." ... By using Tinderbox as an application to "glue" different, knowledge-rich information sources together, I've created a system that allows me to easily discover, purchase, track, annotate, relate, and search my important books in a "just-in-time" fashion." [Erehwon Notebook]

12:55:06 PM    

"Home access to xreferplus by Gateshead library members is now live. Anyone with a card can now visit www.xreferplus.com, click "Library card login" and then enter their library card number for access.

xreferplus is a digital reference library that is the ideal starting point for research on any subject..." [via etcetera]

Go Gateshead!

3:29:04 PM    

"I think it's a very demeaning thing to the human mind to believe in a falsehood, especially as the truth about the universe is so immensely exciting," Dawkins says. Indeed. And it's not only demeaning, it's disabling. If one has been trained to believe one falsehood, what is to prevent one from believing in more? From believing any falsehood that happens to appeal? And if that is one's mental habit, how can one think clearly about anything at all?

[Butterflies and Wheels -- no permalink: 05-11-2002 entry]

12:50:22 PM    

"Here's a nice short case study on a local advertiser that used traditional survey research to gauge the success of an online campaign. The results were encouraging too."

When a longtime Washington D.C.-area diamond retailer (we'll call it Rocks Are Us) that normally relied heavily on radio spots decided to venture online, Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive showed the hesitant advertiser that change can be a good thing.

4:39:51 PM    

"system.verbs.builtins.xml.rss.compileService changed on Sat, 16 Nov 2002 19:28:09 GMT: Fixed problem where permalink wouldn't be used if the attribute was specified; and supported change detection for guids that aren't permalinks. Thanks to Roger Turner for the excellent bug report." [via Radio.root Updates]

8:58:05 PM    

Xpertweb users will live in two economic operating systems, the large one we love to hate and their P2P forms-based shareware model. For the Xpertweb portion of their lives, they'll deal with people ranked as experts by their previous customers. They'll find their expert by looking in an RSS index for people who've done similar projects before and who know more about their problem than they do. This is the embodiment of Bill Joy's axiom that there are always more smart people outside your company than within." [Escapable Logic]
1:08:29 PM    

"FDS International has reinforced its interpretative and reporting skills with the appointment of two senior research associates in its London office. Nanda Marchant re-joins the company, having left for Barclaycard, where she reshaped the customer satisfaction research department and held other senior marketing positions. At FDS she will strengthen the company[base ']s qualitative offering, adding end user and agency perspective to her experience as a client. Keith Page also joins the company to working with director Michele Silber on large ongoing quantitative programmes and other consumer research projects."

(I developed the CATI [Computer Assisted Telephone Interviewing] system which FDS used for BT's Customer Satisfaction Measures project -- probably the largest Market Research survey in the UK. An early version of ABC was used for some analysis, including interviewing statistics on up to 100,000 records/month.)

7:13:38 PM    

"a street on a human scale with a grand vision"

Over the past few weeks hundreds of Today (BBC Radio) listeners have been nominating streets they believe are worthy of the title 'Best' and 'Worst' in Britain. The Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE) has been processing and assessing the submissions and come up with the definitive list of the nation's model and horror roads.

check the article out" [via etcetera]

(I went to school in Newcastle, and expect to be moving back to North East England next year.)

12:10:13 PM    

"During our research for "Don't Cross the Memes" we encountered several potent memetic viruses. Six months later we have perfected a simple yet effective human virus detector..." [via wood s lot]

Viruses [I] suffer from [and cure, if known]:

Macintosh

Use a mouse with more than one button.

Linux

Install the latest version of Microsoft Windows. Learn to love it.

Junkfood

Eat some real food. Something which you can identify the source of every ingredient, not the point of manufacture.

Politics

Stop caring!

Environmentalism

Consume more stuff! It's easier to buy new stuff than to recycle.

Viruses [I] might suffer from:

Religion (80%)

Read "God's Debris" by Scott Adams (yes, the Dilbert guy)

British (80%)

No need for cure. Benign virus.

Conspiracy Theory (60%)

Face it, the elected government is in control. Actually that's quite scary.

Hippyism (68%)

Free love is passe and potentially dangerous, and patchouli smells like cat piss.

(seems fair, except that apparently 100% atheists aren't supposed to recognize religous symbols! :-)

3:38:59 PM    

• The University of Texas at Austin CS Department obituary
• The manuscripts of Edsger W. Dijkstra
• A symposium in his honor was held on Dijkstra's birthday in May 2000. Its program contains many quotes and some photographs.
• The Humble Programmer, Dijkstra's Turing Award lecture, gives a personal view of the progress of computer science.

[Lambda the Ultimate]

10:42:44 AM    

Possible implementation: enhance Tabulate command (which shows values of selection in new window) to report additional info (eg duplications) and create comma-separated list of the values on the clipboard. Option to supply template for clipboard output.
5:22:02 PM    

Project-level implementations of KM hold promise for one simple reason: They address real day-to-day problems that can only be solved with collaboration. Notice I didn't say collaboration tools. That's a very important distinction because this is where KM has traditionally gotten into trouble. The tools are enablers; collaboration is an interaction of people. If you use the tools right, you make the interaction easier; people see the value and buy into the concept. Once people buy into the concept, any initiative will grow and nurture itself.

This approach is exactly why we're having success with project-level KM. The ability to focus on core collaboration tasks and really get to the heart of what workers need is key to any KM initiative.

4:40:57 PM    

Fingers crossed.
12:25:37 PM