Paul Kulchenko: klogs

eRoom spruces up hosted collaboration offering. "NEXT WEEK COLLABORATION software provider eRoom plans to roll out an updated version of its hosted digital workplace offering, featuring integrated real-time communication tools and new business process capabilities."

Dody Gunawinata has set up a Manila/Radio community for his organization: AIESEC. Nice. [John Robb's Radio Weblog] I like it too. Is it possible to do something like this (I mean the home page) for Radio Community Server?

You cannot make people smarter. Curiouser and curiouser! quotes Mathemagenic:

[from my PhD proposal] Learning is best described by the metaphor “you can lead horse to the water, but you cannot make it drinking”, or as Joseph Kessels says “you cannot make people smarter”. Even in the case of formal learning an organisation does not have control over employee’s brain and heart, so in order to benefit from employee learning, companies have to find the way to support and encourage it without full control. The author believes that the answer lies in supporting interplay between individual and organisational needs by relating and integrating employee-driven informal learning and organisation-driven formal learning.

And continues with his concerns: "My fear is that klogging will only thrive in organisations that are healthy, and that there may not be enough of them. Or, worse, that klogging will thrive as a control mechanism imposed by insecure and fearful management. I don't want to be a part of that." [Curiouser and curiouser!] Very good point. I don't that the former is something to be afraid of. It may work as a nice indicator of the health of the company ;).

Ray Ozzie: Architecture matters: The Rebirth of Public Discussion. "In traditional discussion, topics and their responses are contained and organized within a centralized database. The relationship between topics and responses is generally maintained in a manner specific to the nature of the database - that is, in newsgroups the messages might be related by Message-ID hyperlinks or crudely by title, in Notes they are related by the $REF hyperlink, and so on. Summary-level "views" are generated through database queries. And that has been the general architectural design pattern of public discussions for quite some time.

But blogs accomplish public discussion through a far different architectural design pattern. In the Well's terminology, taken to its extreme, you own your own words. If someone on a blog "posts a topic", others can respond, but generally do so in their own blogs, hyperlinked back to the topic's permalink. This goes on and on, back and forth. In essence, it's the same hyperlinking mechanism as the traditional discussion design pattern, except that the topics and responses are spread out all over the Web. And the reason that it "solves" the signal:noise problem is that nobody bothers to link to the "flamers" or "spammers", and thus they remain out of the loop, or form their own loops away from the mainstream discussion. A pure architectural solution to a nagging social issue that crops up online."

Blunt Force Trauma: Managing Local and Remote URLs in Radio. "I don't know anything about writing macros for Frontier so how would I create an ifLocal macro? For my reference mainly, as I don't fully understand the fix but I most definitely understand the problem -- it's bitten me a couple of times already." Shouldn't be difficult. Code of the macros was posted already:

on ifLocal (url1="/", url2=radio.macros.weblogUrl()) {
 if radioResponder.flSameMachine {return (url1)} else {return (url2)}
}

Create file ifLocal.txt in Macros folder of Radio, copy this code there and you're done. Now you can use iflocal() in your templates.

Technography: Meeting Checklist. Intelligence of your meeting system. 23 smart and not-so-smart things people do.

Jon Udell on Radio deployment descriptors. "I was reminded of: (1) how much non-default configuration I depend on, (2) how little I remembered having done that configuration, and (3) how hard it was to articulate, then transfer, that configuration." I'm glad I'm not the only one who struggles with custom configuration. I'm doing installations for my co-workers and would like to be able to set up proper configuration with minimal effort. The easiest way that I found is probably to use radioStartupCommands.txt file, which is executed at every startup. The problem is that weblogData.root (which is where the most preferences are stored) is not opened when radioStartupCommands.txt is executed, so I need to open the database myself in radioStartupCommands.txt. Any ideas on how to do that? Ideally I would like to have "Save configuration as" button that will create that file with ALL setting I currently have, so I can enable/disable some of them and update Radio configuration. One more Radio question: How to update templates without republishing the whole site?

Jon Udell is moving his weblog to new home using Radio and external FTP site. One of the gotchas he found:

"- If you hardcode your site address anywhere, you'll get burned. I did this in a few places. For example, I had:

http://radio.weblogs.com/0100887/stories/2002/03/16/storylist.html

instead of:

<%radio.weblog.getUrl()%>stories/2002/03/16/storylist.html"

Right. In fact, I use my own macro to do just that and little bit more. <%ifLocal()%> macro, which looks like this:

on ifLocal (url1="/", url2=radio.macros.weblogUrl()) {
if radioResponder.flSameMachine {return (url1)} else {return (url2)}
}

One of the problems with Radio that I noticed is that it's not easy to produce link that works properly off- and on-line. Local links look like this: http://127.0.0.1:5335/gems/toolbox.css, and external links look like this: http://radio.weblogs.com/0106541/gems/toolbox.css. I use external stylesheets and often work offline, so it's real problem for me. ifLocal macros always generates proper link and works for images, files and pretty much everything else. Just put this as a value for href or src attribute: <%ifLocal()%>gems/toolbox.css and you're done.

Blunt Force Trauma: Traction vs. Radio -- A Personal View. "The e-mail interface is something Radio badly needs. The more ways you can get data into, and out of, a KM system the more likely everyone is to use it. The ability to easily e-mail log summaries, as well as accept and route incoming e-mail posts, is a very nice feature." Agree. I'm running community server behind the firewall and for some business users it's very important to be connected via email. Although, there are some tools like news2email and the ability to mail to category that allow you to do that.

"There is one other broad philosophical issue: Traction seems built for a top-down, hierarchal, controlled access system -- precisely what you would expect from a CIA software project. Radio is much more a bottom-up package -- a grass roots, revolutionary, damn-the-IT department sort of thing that people can get excited about, have fun with, proselytize. Can you imagine anyone but a CIO or IT-geek proselytizing the densely woven fabric of Traction?" Right to the point. I'm all in favor of bottom-up approach, but it seems like the most practical approach is somewhere inbetween: company will benefit from using both, top-down and bottom-up systems, they just have to be well-connected.

John Robb: Knowledge Sharing -- a new buzzword that makes a lot more sense that Knowledge Management.

Mikel Maron: myRadio release. "myRadio is a digital dashboard styled tool, much like My Yahoo, but based on Radio Userland and desktop aggregation." I think I'll give it a try.

Bruce Tognazzini: How Call Centers can Make or Brake Companies. "Call center personel should see their primary job as giving engineering enough information to put the call center out of a job. Certainly in the computer field, this bears no actual risk, as engineering sees their jobs as manufacturing enough new bugs to keep the call center fully employed." [Column Two] Once again, CRM and KM. Interesting.

Marcia J. Bates: After the Dot-Bomb: Getting Web Information Retrieval Right This Time. "Long-term solutions to the problems of indexing the Web will probably involve multiple overlapping methods of classifying and indexing knowledge, so that people coming from every possible angle can find their way to resources that work best for them. Instead of calling it an "ontology," label the system of description what it really is - a classification, thesaurus, set of concept clusters, or whatever." [boingboing] How about calling it taxonomy instead of ontology?

Steve Pepper: The TAO of Topic Maps. "The generality and expressive power of the topic map model bring with it other advantages that go far beyond those traditionally associated with indexes. The close similarity to semantic nets gives an idea of how topic maps, even without any occurrences connecting them to an information pool, can become valuable resources in their own right. This in turn opens up new business opportunities for creating and selling “portable topic maps” that can be overlaid on multiple information pools. For traditional commercial publishers, producing well-crafted topic maps could be a new way of leveraging their existing knowledge and experience and combating the threat to their existence posed by the vast amounts of information now available for free." [Curiouser and curiouser!]

Richard Florida
The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life

From his recent interview: Be Creative Or Die. "My theory uses the three T's: technology, talent and tolerance. You need to have a strong technology base, such as a research university and investment in technology. That alone is a necessary but not in itself sufficient condition. Second, you need to be a place that attracts and retains talent, that has the lifestyle options, the excitement, the energy, the stimulation, that talented, creative people need. And thirdly, you need to be tolerant of diversity so you can attract all sorts of people -- foreign-born people, immigrants, woman as well as men, gays as well as straights, people who look different and have different appearances." [Gurteen Knowledge-Log]

Paul Holbrook: Klogging: it's a risk. "A klog is by definition not politically correct; you say what you think, not what you believe others might want to hear."

Larry Prusak: Storytelling: Organizational Perspective. "We’re constantly telling people, learn more. Be smarter. Reflect. Share. But they’re not given the time and space to do it."

brentashley: Get up to speed on K-Logging. "Knowledge Logging (K-Logging) is a bottom-up approach to sharing the soft knowledge that is built during the course of a project. Knowledge is both logged and shared continuously at the source, using content management tools which allow easy updating of a shared website. Style is informal, freeform and conversational and the focus is on collaboration and discussion."

Jake Savin: "To make staff weblogs really fly, there has to be a quicker turnaround than would be possible if the editors have to approve every word. It just won't fly. The publication has to trust their writers to exercise their own better judgement." Perhaps companies should do the same for their employees. Just yesterday I had an argument about it. Is it practical/feasible/honest to filter all content employees produce? Can't our bosses simply trust our judgement?