Joe Peichel's Radio Weblog

Mon, 13 Jan 2003 06:05:44 GMT

First, Jon Udell of Infoworld writes about The disruptive web: "Thus a new service, potentially useful to millions of people, was deployed by blogging a Web page containing 900 links. The meme spread quickly in the petri dish that is the interconnected blog network. My published RSS feed spread the news to my subscribers, who passed it along to their subscribers, and soon the blog indexes picked it up and spread it even more widely. By the end of the day, the technique was verified to work with many libraries in the United States." [InfoWorld] Then, I run across Clay Shirky's (O'Reilly) LazyWeb and RSS: Given Enough Eyeballs, Are Features Shallow Too?: "There is evidence that this two-step process applies to features as well, in a pattern Matt Jones has dubbed the LazyWeb. The original formulation was 'If you wait long enough, someone will write/build/design what you were thinking about.' But it is coming to mean 'I describe a feature I think should exist in hopes that someone else will code it.'" [O'Reilly's OpenP2P] Both of these stories exemplify how weblogging (and its technical underpinnings) have become the poor man's "knowledge management" system. If one agrees with Thomas Edision that "The value of an idea lies in the using of it," then Jon's story is a personal testimonial of experiencing a revelation and turning it into reality through the vehicle of the loosely-coupled weblog pub-sub network. So too, Clay Shirky cites two examples of situations where one mind delivered the "idea," and another mind delivered the "using of it," again through the magic of weblogs, RSS, and web-based pub-sub. Certainly, ideas are often highly valued in today's society; however, as recent economic events seem to bear out, not every idea, even when used, can produce economic value. I think I'd revise Edison's quote to read "The value of an idea lies in the effective using of it," drawing on Merriam-Webster's first definition of effective: "1 a : producing a decided, decisive, or desired effect." The "desired effect," of course, is sustained economic growth (not the short-term gains of the late '90s that vaporized so quickly). One of the opportunities of the web as demonstrated in the Udell and Shirky articles is the low cost of R & D for a certain domain of ideas (we'll call them "web services"). Experiments can yield success or failure in hours, and learning from those experiences occurs at a similarly frenzied pace. The time-to-market for Jon Udell's idea was simply his development time. His time-to-volume (Internet-scale usage) was less than 24 hours. Granted, he's not generating revenue or profit from this usage, but substantial numbers of users derive value, resulting in additional growth in eyeballs to Jon's writing, making him a more-marketable writer, and ultimately delivering added compensation to his bank account.

Fri, 10 Jan 2003 08:39:27 GMT

New Architect: - A Question of Identity - Passport, Liberty, and the single sign-on race "The Liberty Alliance argues that the problem with using Kerberos for interoperability is that it requires a middleman?a Kerberos Distribution Center server?to hand out "ticket-generating tickets." Kerberos also doesn't allow for the distinction between authentication tickets and authorization tickets?in other words, the difference between verifying your identity and verifying what actions your identity can perform. Rather than Kerberos, Liberty relies on the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), an OASIS specification for exchanging authentication and authorization data using XML." [new architect] Clearly, unless an application can determine what permissions to grant any user agent (web browser or other), the potential for security breaches and fraudulent transactions is unacceptable for all but the most low-value activities. Another point made in the article is the fact that the WS Security spec moves the responsibility for web services security into the application layer instead of the transmission layer, putting more power and flexibility into the hands of application developers (but, as Spidey's uncle Ben says in Spiderman, "With great power comes great responsibility.").

Thu, 19 Dec 2002 13:00:02 GMT

non-GNU Savannah - RSS Channel to Mail - The goal of the project is to provide a way of "mirroring" a RSS news feed as daily mail batch. [non-GNU Savannah] One more piece of the RSS->knowledge management puzzle. Mailing a daily summary of an RSS channel provides an additional (and more common) way to subscribe to knowledge developing in RSS. Not every user will want an RSS aggregator on his/her desktop.

Sun, 15 Dec 2002 04:58:08 GMT

Mac OS X Hints: Use the myodbc driver with Excel v.X via MS Query [Brian Jepson's Radio Weblog] And Mac OS X takes yet another step closer to the business mainstream...

Fri, 13 Dec 2002 15:48:24 GMT

Ease-of-use principle:If there's only one "right" way to do something, make that way unmistakably intuitive. If you're unable to create a single, unmistakably intuitive "right" way, make every possible way a "right" way.

Fri, 13 Dec 2002 12:41:19 GMT

Novell URLs I dug up:

Getting aquainted with Novell's various identity management infrastructure and how to manipulate it programmatically. So much to learn, so little time...

Thu, 12 Dec 2002 14:19:12 GMT

Getting into practice.

KM as Both Practice and Theory. Ton Zijlstra uses his weblog to share self-directed learning experiences and think out loud about how to address issues in his company. [b.cognosco]

Terry points to a good article about the perils of being a thinker and also the problems of getting your message across. This:

This prospect viewed us a software company as the only product information he saw from us was one having to do with some software we happen to sell as a tool. This tool is part of a larger product that is in the area of consulting. So I talked with this prospect about what it is we actually do. Now how is it that this prospect got the wrong impression? Is our productinformation not clear enough? These are the sort of things my colleague and I want to talk about when meeting the other accountmanageing researchers.

struck a chord with me.

[Curiouser and curiouser!]

Thu, 12 Dec 2002 14:18:15 GMT

Locus for action.

Who Needs an Intranet?. Martin White has an interesting answer for managers of small companies wondering about intranets -- you probably don't need one! I concur, companies under about 50 employees, with everyone located in the same facility, can likely forego the expense and ha [b.cognosco]

I think this is where I begin to diverge from mainstream thinking on Intranets. My thinking here is along the same lines as my previous post on whether an Intranet is a factory or a gallery. I agree with Martin that a 50-man organisation doesn't need a gallery intranet to reflect upon work done or to showcase the HR policy set. But who does? More often than not I think these sites are built with an eye on senior management approval. Hence: glossy, bright colours, simple headlines and little substance.

However if an intranet is living work, an embodyment of the spinning flywheels and turning cogs of the organisation, then why is it any less relevant to a 50-man, or even 5-man organisation? To me it's just as relevant. In a small organsiation there are less people doing the work, everyone needs to be that bit more focused on it (and I don't I know that). In a large organisation there are more cracks for things to fall through, but the idea is the same.

An intranet should help to collect things together and provide a locus for action. The intranet should be part of the process, embedded in the work not separate to it. As Terry says in response to the gallery post:

In "The 21st-Century Intranet" Jennifer Gonzalez describes four types of intranets ranging from the asynchronous broadcast model to the symmetrical interactive model. Almost none of the later exist and I belive it is becasue of the point you make -- there is almost no room for people. Even the idea of adding people to the intranet draws gap-mouthed stares from executives in many companies.

I don't think a change in workflow alone will do it. As numerous k-log threads have discussed, the cultural and personal barriers are greater than a simple change in workflow can address. But a comprehensive approach, will solid management support, could drastically change the nature of intra-company communication.

The basic point is this: If the Intranet is about the people, and their work, then why does the number of people matter?

[Curiouser and curiouser!]