Friday, October 11, 2002

"20th century business was about mass; 21st century business will be about micros... Some industries like entertainment, publishing, and financial services will be hit first, but eventually nearly every consumer-oriented business will have a clear and unwavering focus on the micros." --Peter Shoemaker 1:31:55 PM    comment  []

Thursday, September 05, 2002

Marc Canter is blogging up a storm. It is amazing what desktop to Web software can do with people that are really leveraging themselves. Something about doing things on servers is passive, weak, and remote.   Given trends in computing and networking it is extremely possible that in less than 10 years a person could run a personal site on their PC that interacts with a million people for not much more than what you pay today. Why be on the wrong side of history (or spend the time learning about stuff that won't matter in a couple of years)? 9:33:05 AM    comment  []

Friday, August 30, 2002

Understanding Weblogs After a couple of weeks, I realized that my weblog was turning into a useful repository of information. What was the URL for that nifty site about cork dolls? There it is in the weblog [6]. What about that news item on how many files are being traded over P2P networks? Right there [7]. 10:47:13 AM  Google It!  comment  []

Thursday, August 29, 2002

Notes is dead NOTES IS DEAD. Kaput, pushing up daisies, canceled, an ex-application (apologies to Monty Python and Hollywood intellectual property gatekeeper Jack Valenti for appropriating material from the classic "Dead Parrot" sketch). According to police reports, Notes was killed by inventor Ray Ozzie, 45. Ozzie entered the Notes space on the Ides of August -- Aug. 15, 2002 -- armed with Version 2.1 of the Groove collaboration platform and its new peer-to- peer e-mail functionality. Notes, already weakened by years of assault by Microsoft and its Exchange/Outlook team, was finished off in recent days by Ozzie's commandeering of another growing collaboration model: Weblogs. 11:48:38 AM  Google It!  comment  []

Wednesday, August 21, 2002

Using Blogs in Business "The natural voice and frequent updates of an engaging personal weblog are the same components found in a successful business blog." 7:49:25 AM  Google It!  comment  []

Saturday, August 10, 2002

For all I know, klogging may address only ten percent of your KM goals. But try it. It is a critical ten percent. This wedge gets people owning their expertise, sharing it willingly, getting credit, getting feedback, being social about knowledge. How does this compare to any other tools you've ever introduced? more... 9:51:14 AM    comment  []

Saturday, July 20, 2002

Weblogs and Firm-wide Knowledge Management . . . a much larger trend: the move towards a simplified, decentralized approach to collecting and distributing information. In other words, a K-log. . . . Weblogs, at their core, are simple tools for the collection of information. Because the architecture behind the scenes is explicitly built to encourage linking, publication of posts and sharing of relevant information, once that information is collected it is easily distributed throughout the organization. . . .  By automating the distribution of the information, it reduces the need for individuals to remember to visit sites of interest to them – and ensures that relevant data will find its way to people who need it. 1:56:36 PM  Google It!  comment  []

Monday, July 15, 2002

Laurence Jarvik reports on last month's gathering of leading bloggers at the National Press Club. His definitition of the blogosphere: "self-referential, self-reflexive, self-analytical, self- correcting, universal, instaneous, decentralized, emotional, rational, and available for continuous updating, response, and review." 12:10:19 PM    comment  []

Saturday, July 13, 2002

klogs vs. mailing lists What advantages do klogs have over lists such as (an ad-free) yahoogroups and the like? 9:46:55 AM  Google It!  comment  []

Monday, July 08, 2002

klog Pilot Notes My own experience returning from a week of vacation really illustrates the benefits it has had within our own team. The first thing I did yesterday was fire up our team klog and read what had been going on while I was out last week. I immediately saw a couple items that needed my attention (which I dealt with in a few minutes each) and got up to speed on what the rest of the team had been focusing. All before I had finished my first cup of coffee and long before I had made it through my backlog of 200 e-mails and a few voice mail messages. 1:30:14 PM  Google It!  comment  []

Thursday, June 27, 2002

"It is a mistake to try to look too far ahead. The chain of destiny can only be grasped on link at a time." --Sir Winston Churchill (1874 - 1965) 1:27:33 PM    comment  []

The Eleven Deadly Sins of KM "Not developing a working definition of knowledge Emphasizing knowledge stock to the detriment of knowledge flow Viewing knowledge as existing predominantly outside the heads of individuals Not understanding that a fundamental intermediate purpose of managing knowledge is to create shared context Paying little heed to the role and importance of tacit knowledge Disentangling knowledge from its uses Downplaying thinking and reasoning Focusing on the past and the present and not on the future Failing to recognize the importance of experimentation Substituting technological contact for human interface Seeking to develop direct measures of knowledge ("Drift or Shift", Fahey and Prusak, 1998) How does "Klogging" avoid the quagmire? . . . " 8:41:12 AM  Google It!  comment  []

Wednesday, June 26, 2002

Classroom Experience with Student/Teacher Blogs "Just wanted to throw in a few comments about my class (that I thought I had posted about before but can't seem to find it here). I'm using a blog as an anchor for the class (http://www.bayareawritingproject/15) since we will meet f2f at the most three times. The really cool thing, though, is that I had my students create blogs (see the right hand nav bar on the class blog). In these they are posting their weekly online journals and they will post the work they do in the development of (and the final presentation of) their major project, the Multigenre Research Project. What strikes me is that most of these students have taken to the weekly online journal like fish to water. Their postings are long, insightful, conversational, reflective, and probing. These from the same people who groaned loudly every time I asked them to do a major reflection on their class projects last semester...it's simply amazing to me!" "Feel free to drop in and take a look around. I'll post more as we get some of our genres drafted (the student blogs are perfect for this...put up a draft and then people can add comments quite easily and quickly)." 1:12:44 PM  Google It!  comment  []

Monday, June 24, 2002

Doc Searls "What we call "consumerism" is really just a producerism that enjoyed unusual advantages while the demand sides of market relationships were largely disempowered. The Net changes that. After a two-century hiatus, the Age of Enlightenment picks up where it left off when Industry won the Industrial Revolution. We're in the Information Revolution now, and The People have a shitload more power, especially to inform themselves and each other." 12:45:22 PM  Google It!  comment  []

Response to Wineberger on Collabrative Tools "Email's ubiquity remains its overwhelming virtue, and there is a bright future for systems like QuickTopic which recognize that fact." "There is a chance that blogging will also achieve ubiquity, and I hope that it does because it's a much richer platform for innovation than email will ever be. But we're not there yet." 8:20:56 AM  Google It!  comment  []

Thursday, June 13, 2002

Cluetrain Requires Conversation Cluetrain talks far less about what markets need that about what they are. The first thesis says —   Markets are conversations Not markets need to be conversations. Or people need the right message. In fact, we make the point that there is no market for messages. If you want to see how little people want messages, look at the MUTE button on your TV's remote control. Sum up all marketing sentiment on the receiving end and you'll find negative demand for it. There's nothing conversational about a message. I submit that if a message turns into a conversation, it isn't a message at all. It's a topic. Not many people noticed (including me, until Jakob Nielsen pointed it out) that The Cluetrain Manifesto was written in first and second person plural voices, and was addressed not by marketers to markets, but by markets to marketers. It said —   if you only have time for one clue this year, this is the one to get...   "We are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers. We are human beings -- and our reach exceeds your grasp." 10:52:01 AM  Google It!  comment  []

K-Logs vs. Discussion Groups "I think you hit on the main issue and that is one of 'ownership' - if you have a personal k-log - you own it - it is yours - it is personal - you are probably proud of it and the thinking it represents and you are keen to add to it and see your own thinking evolve ..." "You cannot say the same about a discussion forum :-) and it is why so many fall into disuse ..." 9:45:02 AM  Google It!  comment  []

K-Logs vs. Discussion Groups "I am fairly sure that anyone that been exposed to an advanced K-Log system (with categories, RSS subscriptions, and community functionality) would never opt for discussion groups alone." 9:43:31 AM  Google It!  comment  []

Publishing aggregated RSS feeds and decentralized directories "With this tool I can publish a selection of my feeds to a category specific K-Log. Readers can either read it as a weblog, or subscribe to it via RSS (a newsfeed of selected newsfeeds). I could publish dozens of these aggregrated feeds if I wanted to." 9:40:50 AM  Google It!  comment  []

Wednesday, June 12, 2002

Radio behind firewalls This is exactly what I meant. While corporate portals tend to centralize information and to create the need for some kind of editorial process, using tools like Radio lets users not only produce but also decide how to aggregate contents on their own desktops. This make the whole system highly scalable and lets users have a very high degree of customization in terms of how and when the access their information. I'm not saying that corporate portals are dead, I believe that there's a need for a set of centralized resources and contents. Applications like scheduling, document distribution, manuals, instructions, and similar still belong to a central server. Everything that does not need to be distributed to every single users of an Intranet can be decentralized. At the end of the last century we all believed that portals needed personalized GUIs and we were developing them on servers instead of where they belong: clients. Radio and applications like Radio are the ultimate GUI customization tool. I can decide how I access my contents because the interface is actually sitting on my own desktop, I don't need to change anything on the server, I can build the tools (or use others' tools) to decide how I want to interact with all these contents. Of course, given this approach, news aggregators as we know them today will need to evolve, but a journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step, and this is definetly the first very important step. 12:49:22 PM  Google It!  comment  []

A Great Vision for News Aggregators "Paolo: 'It's important to consider that 'set of news sources' could also mean reports generated by your accounting software, status of your servers, posts in a discussion group, orders from your e- commerce site, updates from your co-workers workflow management software..' Thanks Paolo, that's absolutely true." [via Scripting News] 8:34:32 AM  Google It!  comment  []

Tuesday, June 11, 2002

"The revolution will be decentralized." [via Adam Curry] 8:27:11 AM    comment  []

Monday, June 10, 2002

Blogging talk at Inappropriate Tech. "Next up, the Blogging panel. Not the usual suspects: Neil McIntosh, the Deputy Editor of Guardian Online, Ben Hammersely, journo and RSS wonk, and Tom Coates, the blogger behind PlasticBag. Dave of NTK is moderating. Ben: I have four blogs, one for each personality. One of the blogs that I write is about syndication with RSS, which subject I'm writing about for O'Reilly. Regular blogs can be just wanking, but these collaborative blogs are very useful; like email lists with a URL. Using the power of RSS, I read about 20-30 blogs a day. But I don't nead to read more, because blogs like Boing Boing reads all the individual blogs and extract the good stuff. (I've just revealed that I read ~100 blogs and RSS feeds every day, to Dave's astonishment) Dave: The repitition is painful. People all link to the Daypop Top 40. Tom: Some people blog for fun, for self-promotion to pursue a special interest or to stay in touch with a bunch of friends. Dave: Aren't blogs desined to cut down repitition? Tom: No, my tool is designed to connect with with other bloggers with similar interests. You can get 200, 500 opinions on a given subject. (Aside: Ben is blogging live from the stage) Neil: The Guardian blog is only slightly collaborative -- there are only two of us. Ben: Dan Gillmor was talking about cameras built into 3G phones in Japan and said there would come an event where 4,000 people would take pictures with their phones and post them to the Web before the new media noticed. (Aside: the accoustics here suck and it's really hard to tell what the people on stage are saying, sorry for the spottiness of this entry) Dave: How is this different from the DTP revolution, when the Mac made it possible for every idiot to publish bad zines and allowed newspapers to fire all their people in favor of self-taught amateurs? Dave: What about aggregation? Ben: Aggregation is the future. RSS is the future. It's not all sites about kittens. Good blogs are addictive: Boing Boing, Kuro5hin, Metafilter. Tom: There's a need for an editor -- Slwhether it's Slashdot like automation or a human being. My fave: kottke.org. Neil: I like scripting.com because it winds me up every time I visit it." [via BoingBoing] 1:20:47 PM  Google It!  comment  []

Village shops in BlogSpace "They realised that beyond being a convenient facility the shop provided a focal point for the community. A convenient meeting place where villagers could catch up with each other and share gossip. They realised that without this focal point their community would be damaged in ways that were unacceptable to them." "On the web bulletin boards often serve this purpose although the very thing that makes them powerful (removing geography as a barrier to membership) is also, too often, their downfall as they become overcrowded and diluted. However in a democratised publishing environment it is inevitable that there is not going to be a single source on any topic. People are going to disagree, or just want to say it there way. That's as it should be." 8:29:37 AM  Google It!  comment  []

Community Discussion Newcomers to the blogging world are often very, very surprised—it's not just a world, it's a community in the truest sense of the word. It's warm, inviting and friendly, just like an old-fashioned real world community. Community is a word that is tossed around so often that I thought it had lost all meaning -- and my career includes a stint running portal technology for a set of 60+ internet sites with over 300,000 users in total. In my blogging experience, what I have found online is a level of community that hasn’t been seen since the late 1980s before the Internet became a piece of everyday life. A good analogy for the blogging community is the following: Blogging feels like a small rural town. The roads may not always be paved, sometimes the electricity goes on and off but the people are friendly and everyone is happy to help you. When you start blogging, you won't find the fit and finish of a commercial product like Microsoft Word (the road isn't paved), the technical support is, well, interesting (the electricity goes on and off) but what you will find is worth the journey. If you need help with your blog or something that you are writing, post it to your blog and you’ll probably be surprised at the level of help you are offered.  Detailed examples are here: http://www.fuzzygroup.com/go/?blogCommunityExamples 8:25:20 AM  Google It!  comment  []

Saturday, June 08, 2002

The Tipping Blog: How Weblogs Can Turn an Idea into an Epidemic "Somehow I had lucked into the mythical 'Tipping Point' described by author Malcolm Gladwell: 'that moment in an epidemic when a virus reaches critical mass'. If the link to my article was the virus, then the method of transmission was the humble weblog" 10:22:28 AM  Google It!  comment  []

Tuesday, June 04, 2002

"librarians have to "move from physical access to intellectual access" 10:18:41 AM    comment  []

"I much prefer getting email as having to login to webct to check and see if anyone has posted anything..." 10:03:22 AM    comment  []

Thursday, May 30, 2002

Weblogs and Blogging - Part 2 "Weblogs have emerged as a powerful knowledge management tool for corporations and education. Radio UserLand is a weblog tool that makes it easy for employees to quickly publish knowledge to an intranet where it is archived and is accessible to other employees using search engines." 1:46:54 PM  Google It!  comment  []

Personal RSS Aggregators " . . . a deep principle at work here. . . . the emerging RSS network is . . . decentralized and ultimately social in nature. . . . the raw output of the online news collective is filtered for me by people doing what they do best: spotting patterns, alerting the tribe." " . . . RSS is the protocol of a knowledge network, and that people are the routers." "This arrangement delivers all the usual benefits of cloud-based software: zero footprint, anywhere/anytime access." "The publish/subscribe model . . . principles of loosely coupled messaging to the realm of human communication. Lots of people get the idea of publishing blogs to the web. . . . publishing an RSS channel, and subscribing to channels, closes the communication loop and creates a new interactive medium." 1:18:32 PM  Google It!  comment  []

Wednesday, May 22, 2002

Why CEOs still don't get the Net C-Net Interview with Professor Raphael Amit, Wharton School "Q: You've quoted (former General Electric CEO) Jack Welch talking about how e- commerce will change the DNA of his company. Now, you're a professor. Give GE a grade. How well have they done in carrying out that changeover?" "A: I don't need to give GE a grade. I will ask you back and say, you be the judge! As a result of this change in DNA, what percent of the sales are Web-enabled (at GE)? The answer is a very small percent. I always say that I don't want to pass judgment, but let's just look at the results. That was the objective; let's see what was accomplished." "Q: And that drives home the point I wanted to make--that you need to integrate first. All these external activities that are on the edge of the firm and externally will be that much more profitable if, internally, you are first all squared away." "A: I'm sure that if you made that pitch to Jack Welch when he was still running GE, he would have bought into that--saying, 'Yeah, I'm 100 percent behind it.'" "A: Yes, but the lesson there is that you put the cart before the horse. He should have focused first on what his successor is facing, that the internal integration of data and streamlining, and with that accomplished, go outside--as opposed to going outside first and then worrying about the inside. Thinking about connectivity and collaboration before thinking about integration and optimization may be something that (CEOs) will have to think about." 12:15:25 PM  Google It!  comment  []

Saturday, May 18, 2002

I presented my BLOG this morning at a technology conference here at Keene State College. Academics can use a Blog to "open source" their ideas (rather than endure the painfully long traditional journal process). Track and receive feedback about your ideas Simply use the Blog as a professional diary, which encourages you to think about your research areas on a daily basis. Create non-invasive "conversations" about your research. 9:56:31 AM  Google It!  comment  []

Tuesday, May 14, 2002

Much ado about blogging [functions of blogs--historic] "Some weblogs were personal diaries; others were free- form catalogs of personal obsessions; others were focused on one or another arm of the technology industry or Internet culture." " . . . Blogs express opinion. They're one-person pundit shows . . . " "Then there are those . . . [that] compile news and links on some specific subject -- and that, yes, sometimes break stories of interest to devotees of that subject. . . . There are those . . . that provide links with no opinion at all." 3:03:55 PM  Google It!  comment  []

Use the blog, Luke " . . . becoming a force that can make sense of the Web's infinity of links." " . . . weblogging has finally hit the mainstream. . . . more need for experienced guides." "The true revolution promised by the rise of bloggerdom is . . . about information management. . . . help organize the Web in ways tailored to your minute-by-minute needs." " . . . helping Google transform the Web from a disorganized mess into a more coherent universe of useful data." " . . . a conceptual limitation with most individual blogs, a limitation that is hard-wired into the software used by the great majority of webloggers: They are organized around time. . . . The beautiful thing about most information captured by the bloggers is that it has an extensive shelf life. The problem is that it's being featured on a rotating shelf. If there's a time element that I do care about, it's not the just-off-the-wires time of today's news. It's my time. It's what I'm doing right now." "If we had standardized tags for just five or six additional elements . . . you'd need keywords . . . a way to distinguish between positive and negative links . . . " " . . . [subscribe] by checking a box when you visit their site . . . watch the activity on sites . . . a connection machine . . . your blog analyzer . . . [would] do away with the dependence on front doors, and let your favorite bloggers come to you."   2:57:10 PM  Google It!  comment  []

Steven Johnson on "Emergence" . . . emergent theory and its relationship with the Web. "Emergence is what happens when the whole is smarter than the sum of its parts. It's what happens when you have a system of relatively simple- minded component parts -- often there are thousands or millions of them -- and they interact in relatively simple ways. And yet somehow out of all this interaction some higher level structure or intelligence appears, usually without any master planner calling the shots. These kinds of systems tend to evolve from the ground up." "leader is probably the wrong word for people who start trends, early adopters. . . . They just are somewhere at a key point in the overall system of fashion, wherever that is, where they're connected to the right people, and what that core group decides ripples out very quickly through the whole system. So they're leaders in the sense that their ideas emanate from them, but they emanate in a much more distributed-network kind of way." " . . . four stages of emergence: first stage was people working on the problem without realizing they were working on the problem . . . second stage is when it becomes a field in itself . . . third stage is where people actually go out understanding the laws that run through these systems and start building things in a conscious awareness of those laws . . . fourth stage [is] when computer networks get to actually start having kind of a mind of their own . . . " "What has emerged in the weblog community is that I don't have to become an average Slashdot reader, I can say, I'm kind of like Cory, and I'm kind of like Steven, and I'm kind of like Dave Winer in a certain sort of way. I'll read their things, and they'll point me to the appropriate things, including Slash articles." "A blog tribe." " . . . can you see a point where all these little things add up to a system that wasn't planned, but fixes the problems by grouping together." " . . . there needs to be some other thing that comes along that holds all of that information and turns it into some higher level structure that can actually make sense of it all." 2:23:38 PM  Google It!  comment  []

Sunday, May 05, 2002

Managing the Connected Organization "If knowledge is power, what is connected knowledge?" "All individuals, communities, systems, and other business assets are massively interconnected in an evolving economic web. . . . We must manage connected assets, not unconnected individuals." " . . . some basic principles at work in the complex adaptive systems we call our organizations. 'There is a central difference between the old and new economies: the old industrial economy was driven by economies of scale; the new information economy is driven by the economics of networks...'" " . . . how to provide the 'missing links' that change a poor economic network into a better conduit for information, influence, and knowledge." Improving Individual Effectiveness " . . . effective general managers spend more than 80% of their time interacting with others. . . . the importance of conversations and relationships in managerial work." "Project managers with better personal networks were more productive -- they were better able to coordinate tasks and find the knowledge necessary to accomplish the goals of the project." Improving Team Effectiveness "Those teams that  could easily reach other teams and access the knowledge they needed were more successful than teams with poor network connections. Both [researchers] found that the ability to reach a diverse set of others in the network through very few links was the key to success." "A sparse radial network in which your direct ties are connected to others that you are not connected to, has been shown . . . to provide many benefits and opportunities." "Complex tacit knowledge knowledge requires direct interaction and sharing of experiences between two or more individuals. . . . tacit knowledge is shared and learned via trusted social networks." Improving Information Flow "Clusters of concentrated connections . . . In such a network it is easy to access those in your cluster but not those in other clusters. This often results in distant clusters not knowing what information and knowledge is available elsewhere in the organization." "Why not use the power of the network itself to create a solution? Improve the organizational network and then use technology to help people communicate across wide spans of the human network." "Common wisdom in networks is "the more connections, the better." This is not always true. What is always true is "the better connections, the better." Better connections are those that provide you access to nodes that you currently do not have access to. . . . connected to others who are well connected." "In human networks, the fewer the steps in the path the quicker the information arrives and the less distorted it is." Leading Edge Management "Vancho has summarized these concepts of managing connected organizations using Einstein's famous formula:     E = MC2 M is the Mastery of each individual (human capital) C are the Connections that join the individuals into a community (social capital) C is the Communication that flows through those Connections E is the resulting Effectiveness of the team or organization The effectiveness of a team or organization is based on personal know-how (mastery), enhanced by communications(feedback and new knowledge) from both direct and indirect connections (diverse networked resources). . . . connected knowledge is pure energy!" "How can managers improve the connectivity within their organization? Here are a few places to get started: Design computer systems that facilitate conversations and sharing of knowledge -- think communication, not storage/retrieval. It is no longer sufficient to just hire the best. You must hire and wire! Start new networks, help employees and teams connect --connect the unconnected!" "We can adapt the old campaign slogan to reflect a new network economy reality -- "It's the connections, stupid!"   12:47:26 PM  Google It!  comment  []

Tuesday, April 30, 2002

Who the Hell is John Hiler? "Hiler warns that blogs and corporations probably won't be a good mix. But blogs should be a natural fit for small businesses. 'They put up a website that you can’t tell is run by a couple of passionate people . . . It looks very professional, and they pay designers to make the website seem as though it’s run by a huge company. I think that’s a huge mistake. A small company’s only advantage, often, is that it truly cares…. [But] that doesn’t come through in the web site.'" "Blogging then, or at least some version of personal publishing, may help create a true connection between small companies and their customers. Business with a well- established sales cycle who want to 'increase deal flow' or attract 'better educated' customers should consider blogs, Hiler said. (Yes, I know, this isn't new, we're in Cluetrain territory. But most companies still don’t get it.)" " . . . small businesses need to get involved in the personal publishing sector. I think that’s going to happen with weblogs becoming a more integral part of marketing. Weblogs are all about two people making a connection. Corporations, by their very nature, are an abstraction going away from the individual. Once weblogs start becoming a core tool in a small business marketing toolkit, then personal publishing becomes a real industry . . . " 11:09:44 AM  Google It!  comment  []

Sunday, April 28, 2002

Can you afford not to klog? Frank, Steve - You need a commercial hook. Look seriously at the "businessizing" movement. Tom Peters is a big evangelist for turning each team into a professional service business, and each individual into someone who works like a professional consultant. His "Brand You" books and seminars call for personal CRM, personal marketing, etc. Right after email, klogging is the tool of choice for those with a businessized attitude. It makes you more effective with internal customers. Along the way, you share knowledge painlessly, and develop your reputation among the folks who can advance or retard your career. It is not about investing in some ethereal, academic, corporate exercise in mental masturbation, evaporating in a few quarters. Klogging is selfish. Fun. Practical. Distinctive. A force multiplier. A time saver. Career insurance. If you're not klogging now, you're putting your job at risk. Do you remember people who were the last to get fax and email? Staying disconnected puts you and your department at a professional disadvantage. Klogging is like this. Can you afford not to klog? 1:39:53 PM  Google It!  comment  []

Wednesday, April 24, 2002

"Our idea is that there is strength through cooperation, collaboration, and resource-sharing . . . " 3:26:13 PM    comment  []

Tuesday, April 23, 2002

How to deploy KLOGS at MIT But Tim couldn't leave well enough alone. He came up with three ways to get Radio into MIT: Centralized push. Have Sloan’s IT services folks set up a Radio Community Server and put Radio on every first year MBA’s laptop. In the classroom. Have a few professors start using Radio as a knowledge sharing mechanism and put part of the class participation grade for their students in how well they use their weblogs. From the grassroots. Have a few bleeding edge folks get their sleeves up and evangelize it. How can we generalize this? Tim's three stages are natural levels of escalation. A. User referrals. "How did you do that?" "Oh, yeah. My Radio. Wanna see?" Grassroots, subversive, and memetically savvy. Seed early adopters with the tool. Listen carefully for their hot buttons. Probe for their serious problems and experiment with how the tool makes things better. Then plan your pilots. B. Pilot projects. Prove your solution works, Learn the best ways to use it in this environment. Discover which features and practices: Generate the most perceived value, Provoked the strongest positive emotional response Stack the deck in favor of an early win. For example, Tim's picks for fertile pilot soil: There are some classes, including the introduction to IT class, a few of the marketing classes, and a class being taught on virtual communities, with which Radio is a natural fit. You might get the professors on board pretty quickly, with the students doing exercises in Radio for a semester. I'd also look for classes, and workplaces, where: people work together in project teams, freshness of external information (competitor and customer behavior) is important, klogs can help overcome team member churning. C. Standard deployment. Software rollouts are well understood. Bullet proof deployment and use for newbies. Stimulate learning curve behavior, minimize life cycle costs. I'm adding this to my Radio Klogging Kit for Managers. [klogs] 8:46:02 AM  Google It!  comment  []

Thursday, April 18, 2002

" . . . your readers [employees (jrr)] know more collectively than you do. If we can capture that, we all come out ahead." "But the main thing is, we develop a web of trust. That's sort of how this community works." 11:46:33 AM    comment  []

Business pros flock to Weblogs " . . . plans to expand it until virtually everyone at his 60-person company, Mobilocity, has a Weblog. Javaid’s brief experience has convinced him that far from an exercise in self-indulgence, Weblogs actually can be used to increase worker efficiency." " . . . he sees a growing market in what he calls knowledge logs — searchable databases that can be used within a corporate environment to exchange ideas, revise documents, trade snippets of computer code and even manage projects. 'Most people’s in-boxes are pretty overwhelmed . . . This is a tool that allows people to provide information that is quickly disseminated and is a big improvement over current ways of spreading information. . . . I think we’ll see more and more acceptance that the Weblog format is just a Web site and anyone can use it — it makes sense for any type of content' . . . " "The aspect of community building is one mentioned frequently by blogging enthusiasts . . . " 11:41:23 AM  Google It!  comment  []