CyberJournalist.net Jul 9 2003 0:28AM ET [Moreover - XML and metadata news]

New York Times Jul 6 2003 8:15PM ET [Moreover - Top internet stories]

There continues to be great dialog on wikis in the mix of knowledge work in organizations. Ross Mayfield, of socialtext, has an excellent summary post on Group Voice that makes a good point to pick up this thread.

Its not a choice between one or another. The temporal structure of weblogs and logical structure of wikis are a complement for lasting effects. One of the more powerful patterns in an organization is how an opportunity is published in blog, possibilities are swarmed upon in blog conversation and then driven to consensus and outcome in a wikified document. After the outcome, the knowledge and its social context remains.

Both tools together create powerful effects for publishing, communication and collaboration.

Denham Gray calls attention to the key differentiating aspects of wikis in a comment he posted. His key distinctions:

• The power to contribute BOTH to content and structure - other genres require you post within a predetermined structure (blogs, bulletin boards, guestbooks, IM....)

  True equality - blogs have an implicit posting hierarchy - some get main board status, the rest are relegated to buried comments (if allowed)

  Collaborative writing at the most fundamental (text) level - this is very different from annotation, editorial commentary or letters to the editor!

  Open edit - you can change anything at anytime - no attributation, notime/ date stamps in wiki- just pure flow

Stuart Henshall recommends a look at NexistWiki and also offers several interesting reports on the use of wikis in working sessions (see The One Hour Wiki). Doug Holton at Ed Tech Dev offers a pointer to Tiki (and other CMS tools) for Teaching. One curious thing I've noticed is that wikis appear to be very popular in the Smalltalk/Squeak community. Here's one directory, for example, of Smalltalk Wiki Webs.

Next steps for me will be to begin frequenting a few wikis, installing a wiki somewhere I can play with, and looking for appropriate group opportunities where I can apply wikis. As if I had spare time I was desparate to fill :).

(part 1 and part 2 of my original posts on wikis)

[McGee's Musings]

(SOURCE:Blogging Alone)-If your organization doesn't communicate in real time and keeps its knowledge bottled up in people's heads then you will not survive in the long term. Blogs and wikis are one of the best ways to help your organization communicate in real time and can therefore help ensure your organization's long term survival!
<QUOTE>Blogging Alone discovers a vibrant and complex information ecosystem just beneath the formal org chart. We ask people what they are doing when they are doing knowledge work. What most of them told us was they search, acquire, store, retrieve, combine, buy, sell, transfer and share knowledge each day. Management practices for understanding knowledge work have been built using the factory metaphor where you assemble knowledge from raw materials. What we are finding is that a better metaphor would be a knowledge bazaar. These new discovers will lead to answers for these new questions. * What is the difference between the consumer and the producer in the knowledge creation process in the bazaar? * What draws people to be interested in, excited about and motivated to share knowledge and build on their ideas of others? * What are the conditions underwhich people choose to share their knowledge and become a knowledge trader in the bazaar? Companies face an information explosion. In order to survive some are adopting flexibility in a rapidly changing market place while others are going extinct. The company reorg is a signature of the latter where faced with challenges they simply shift the job descriptions of a few individuals and call that management. For survival new strategies are emerging, a fundamental rethinking of how companies process information in order to support good decisions.</QUOTE>
[Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

(SOURCE:Corante: Amateur Hour: democratization of media, digital tools, media-making. Corante)

In a perfect world, every person in an organization would have a public weblog and would use it professionally to communicate within the organization (privately) and outside the organization and everyone could be confident that every person would use the new technology properly and with due respect for the organization. Of course it doesn't work this way, and there's not much difference between weblogs and other communication technology, such as the telephone, email, instant messaging, etc. The employer must maintain a certain level of control over what's said on behalf of the company. Example, an employee encourages potential customers to use a competitive product, even where your product is better, no matter what the medium of communication, has limited career options.

[Scripting News]

Broacast Media Can Be, Too. (SOURCE:O'Reilly Network: Weblogs Are Free, Diverse, and Equal. Broacast Media Can Be, Too [June 07, 2003])-

1. Weblogs are a fundamentally egalitarian form, in which it is not necessary to trade freedom or diversity for equality, or to trade off between freedom and diversity. ...

(SOURCE:"mikelm")-Thanks Mikel! I will try this tomorrow.
<quote>
Ok -- here's a version which uses the builtin website homepage posting form; which will recognize the necessary callbacks for K-collector, or liveTopics. Download this. Install in www/system/pages/radioExpress.txt and configure here.
</quote> [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

Last Thursday's post on wikis generated quite a bit of good feedback. Comments from a number of readers offered pointers to more wiki related materials.

Doug Holton, a graduate student at Vanderbilt, offers these three wiki-specific entries from his blog (which looks to be a useful reference in general):

Here are some more thoughts (and actual research) on wikis: http://edtechdev.org/blog/archives/001181.html http://edtechdev.org/blog/archives/001172.html http://edtechdev.org/blog/archives/001173.html

Bill Seitz is experimenting with a cross between a wiki and a weblog he calls a WikiWeblog. He points to his notes there on self-organizing aspects of wikis at Wikis for Collaboration Ware.

Denham Gray gently reminded me of his KmWiki which was the first wiki I ever posted anything to and is a wonderful resource of KM related materials. Denham is a zealous advocate of the collaborative opportunities found in knowledge work.

Jonathan Smith points to Joi Ito's wiki experiments and an evolving section on Wikis vs. Blogs

Jenny Levine at Shifted Librarian posts a pointer to Blogging, RSS, and Wikis - Presentations, Papers, and a Pathfinder

Elwyn Jenkins at MicroDocBlogger throws his 0.02 in with Blogs, Wikis, and Knowledge Building. He offers the interesting notion that "blogs turn people into webpages" and "wikis turn communities into webpages."

And finally Ross Mayfield reminds me of the work he is doing at socialText.com which is both a source of great info on wikis and social software in general and an ongoing experiment in the same.

Obviously blogs and wikis are not an either/or proposition. I see them both as examples of grassroots, bottoms up approaches to making knowledge work and knowledge workers more effective. If you lower the barriers to participation and make it easier for individuals and teams to narrate their work, then you start to get the possibility of getting knowledge management as a desirable side effect.

Instead of trying to cram a centralized knowledge management system down everyone's throat, you focus on helping individuals and teams do their own work more easily and more effectively. If you give some thought to how you design and shape the environment, the benefits of knowledge management sought by vendors of solutions in search of problems will emerge from the work itself.

[McGee's Musings]

(SOURCE:Social Software)-Slogan der Woche: weblogs turn individuals into webpages while wikis turn communities into webpages
<QUOTE> A weblog enables individual voice. This is important as no other tool has shown the ability to gain the participation of people in a larger, dare I say, system. Perhaps because it give so much back. The simple format of weblogs and ease of use allows wide participation. A post reflects a person's understanding on a given issue at a moment in time. Individual voices exist in a social context that urges continued participation. Post-to-post communication and feedback encourage continued use and sharing that otherwise occurs only in private. A weblog is a great source for what's new and the narrative thread that got us there -- a simply powerful tool for communication and publishing. Wikis let the group voice emerge. Many people participate within a given wiki, each with an equal voice in a shared space that anyone can edit. Its a different act of sharing to contribute your words to a page that others can build upon. Our instinct is to at first believe this would create conflict and distrust, but it actually builds trust. Each wiki page reflects the current consensual understanding of a given concept. A page isn't a complete or perfect understanding, information and conditions change too quickly for it to be possible Instead, a little wabi-sabi and trusting others allows something powerful to emerge and stay current -- a simply powerful tool for collaboration. We aren't the only one to think of the differences between weblogs and wikis as individual and group voices. Elwin Jenkins describes it as weblogs turn individuals into webpages while wikis turn communities into webpages. There are lots of similarities between the two tools. Both are web native, are easy to use, are link-intensive and encourage sharing. Both are being widely adopted, wikis less visibly because of private group use and at different paces in different areas.</QUOTE>
[Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

One unexpected fringe benefit of falling way behind in
responding to all the fascinating posts accumulating in your news aggregator is that you get a chance
to pull multiple items together into an integrated post. I did one recently on weblogs and knowledge management
that a number of people found helpful. The backlog of posts shows no signs of abating, so it's time for a follow up.

Rick Klau sets a nice context by reminding us of Gartner's hype cycle and its application to blogs:

We are almost certainly in the trough of disillusionment when it comes to blogs.
Lots of critical comments, much confusion over their "true" benefits, etc.
Yet hundreds of thousands of people continue to use their weblog as a way of cataloging their thought.
And companies are starting to explore how they might use weblogs for other purposes.

My prediction: we will emerge from this trough into the "slope of enlightenment" during which it will become
obvious that personal weblogs can be tremendous tools for capturing ad hoc knowledge and
archiving it for future use. Furthermore, businesses will figure out that blogs can serve as
both a content management system as well as an internal knowledge sharing platform - a much different
use from the personal application, but a critical one for the business world to adopt weblogs
with enthusiasm.[tins:::Rick Klau's weblog]

Dina Mehta is relatively new to the blogging world. She offers some helpful fresh perspective on the challenges of
introducing weblogs into corporate environments. Thinking about the problems of knowledge management and how weblogs may fit, she says:

I'm not really sure that KM is being adopted in a really useful or effective manner in many organisations here.
More importantly, while its great to have a system in place as a talking point, i'm not really sure what real
value is being created and disseminated. They tend to be led by the HR department and are usually
one-way monologues that not many participate in - (but this is really a topic for another post).

There is a constant generation of content in an organisation - via email, via IM, through documents,
presentations, training workshops and seminars, and sometimes through discussion boards.
KM systems tend to be slow and heavy in capturing and disseminating this content - in the process,
the value may be lost[Conversations with Dina]

Like many of us, she sees that blogs may be the answer, but isn't sure how best to make the case to those in a position to make a decision.

Part of that case will hang on the availability of some concrete examples of weblogs in use in organizations.
Two areas that are generating some early examples of weblogs in organizational settings are project management
and marketing. Both are naturals for the technology, being high-paced and communications intensive.

On the project management side, Jon Udell at Infoworld is a regular source of good insights into weblogs in organizational
settings. Here's a post he ran on the use of weblogs to improve project communications plus the corresponding article at
Infoworld (Publishing a Project Weblog).

The value of a project Weblog has a lot to do with getting everybody onto the same page -- literally.
You want to deliver a manageable flow on the home page, drawing attention to the key events in the daily life
of the project. To do this well, think like a journalist. ...

The newspaper editor's mantra is "heads, decks, and leads" -- in other words, headlines, summaries, and
introductory paragraphs. These devices are, in fact, tools for managing a scarce and precious resource:
the reader's attention. A well-written title (or subject header if you happen to be composing an e-mail message)
is your first, best, and often only chance to get your message across.

There's a particularly useful diagram Jon reproduces in another Infoworld post on blogs, scopes, and human routers
and drawn from his his equally useful book, Practical Internet Groupware. It captures a notion of the multiple
overlapping groups that we belong to in the pursuite of knowledge work.

Jon has also talked about the notion of what he calls the conversational enterprise and how weblogs will serve
as a key source of the raw materials for knowledge management in organizations (Technical trends bode well for KM);

What k-loggers do, fundamentally, is narrate the work they do. In an ideal world, everyone does this all the time.
The narrative is as useful to the author, who gains clarity through the effort of articulation, as it is to the reader.
But in the real-world enterprise, most people don't tend to write these narratives naturally, and
the audience is not large enough to inspire them to do it.

There is, however, a certain kind of person who has a special incentive to tell the story of a project:
the project managers, who are among the best power users of Traction Software's enterprise Weblogging software,
according to Traction co-founders Greg Lloyd and Chris Nuzum (see “Getting Traction”).

Traction certainly is powerful software, although the power does come at the expense of a somewhat steeper learning curve
than systems like Radio or Moveable Type whose origins were in personal weblogs rather than enterprise.
Actually, it might be better to think in terms of a steeper implementation curve, rather than learning curve.
Setting up Traction in terms of project structures and tags takes some thought to get full advantage of the tools.
Using them on a day-to-day basis is pretty straightforward.

The use of weblogs in marketing settings is also drawing attention. Some of that is in the form of early, and
rightfully ridiculed, examples such as the faux-blog Raging Cow, which tried to force its traditional marketing
strategy through a blog format.

Others have made more sensible progress (I suppose that makes me terminally boring). Inc. Magazine ran a
recent piece on Blogging for Dollars (link found via Blogging News), for example, that highlights some examples
of the real use of blogs as a marketing tool.

Gary Murphy at TeledyN offers up a couple of interesting examples of KM in organizational settings in a recent
post on Walmart's KM rocks.

Both searches were initially pointless because, for very good reasons, both the sought after data
items did not exist in the superficially logical locations. This is probably the number one flaw with
most dead-robot KM systems: They fail to accommodate how Reality is inherently messy!

The only possible method to locate either the ribs or the cards was to do what humans have done
since the dawn of archives, ask someone who knows. In both instances, we needed someone who knew
where the target was, and who could refer us to someone who knew how to extract it.

Murphy provides the critical link here between weblogs and organizational need. It is the realization that
KM in organizational settings is primarily a social phenomenon and not a technology one.
Most prior efforts to apply technology to KM problems in organizations have been solutions in search of a problem.
They have been driven by a technology vendor's need to sell product, not an organization's need to solve problems.

Weblogs are interesting in organizational KM settings because weblogs are technologically simple and socially complex,
which makes them a much better match to the KM problems that matter. One thing that we need to do next is to work
backwards from the answer - weblogs - to the problem - what do organizations need to do effective knowledge management.
We need to avoid the mistakes of other KM software vendors and not assume that the connection is self-evident.

[McGee's Musings]

(SOURCE:"oliverw")-Blogs are the real thing because they have a real voice!
Ain't nothing like the real thing baby! Everybody who wants a blog will have a blog 10 years from now just like everybody who wants
email has email. We may not call it a blog. Whatever we call it, it will be a website with cool, sophisticated technology behind it that allows
you to easily organize, annoyate and record anything using any media (voice, photos, movies, text, etc.) anywhere, anytime to
whoever you choose (friends, family, colleagues, the entire web,etc.). And the rewards are greater to those who jump in sooner rather than later!
<quote>
Every January, trade publications put out lists of predictions for the coming year. They discuss products, services, and
trends that they think will change the way business is done, labeling some of these "disruptive technologies."
The idea of disruptive technologies comes from Clayton Christensen's 1997 book, "The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies
Cause Great Firms to Fail." A disruptive technology is a method, procedure, skill, device, or material that redefines competitive standards,
and it often forces us to re-examine the way we work. Also note that the technology doesn't have to be a physical item.
InfoWorld’s list of disruptive technologies for 2003 included open source, self-service CRM, digital identity, and my personal favorite, weblogs.
How can a simple web-based journal be “disruptive?” For starters, it’s worth describing what a weblog is.
Basically, a weblog, or “blog,” is an online, time-stamped web page that includes the thoughts, ideas, and comments of the “blogger.”
The musings are usually brief, but they are published frequently and consistently.
People can subscribe to receive the blog updates via e-mail. Often, the blogger is an expert on the subject he or she is discussing.
At first glance, it doesn’t appear that blogs would be at all disruptive. So why all the hype? If we look closely at the structure and
intent of blogs as a communications tool, we can see some powerful ideas at work. Blogs are a direct, one-to-many means of communicating ideas.
They expand an individual’s ability to communicate. They are fresh and timely. The blogger, to maintain interest, must communicate often.
Blogs enable a single person to share ideas, insights, and useful knowledge with an audience.
Thanks to the web, the audience can be a global one. Whenever a new tool or process—such as e-mail—expands communications,
the effects are far-reaching and dramatic. Even though blogs have been around for 3-4 years, they could be “the next big thing.”
Blogs Are the “Real Voice” Two important characteristics of blogs are that they are written by a person who is knowledgeable and
passionate about the topic, and they are written in a “real voice.” This is a cosmic shift from the marketing and public relations
materials that are the staple of business communications.
</quote> [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

(SOURCE:"corante_social")-Nice explanation! Need to try out a Wiki Weblog some day!
<quote>
I just found my WebLog wiki page from Sept'99. It says... "WebLog-s are basically running chronologies of annotated links that the logger finds interesting, and perhaps other random thought-blips. Usually structured as a multi-day document, most recent stuff at top. I could see a Wiki node representing some chunk of time (a week?), and using it as a springboard to other nodes of commentary. The problem is that this doesn't create a web of links among the individual little chunks. Another approach would be to make a separate Wiki node for each nugget, and the WebLog would really be the Recent Changes page..." How funny is that? It only took 26 months to get around to doing it... What kind of person might like to run a Wiki Weblog instead of a straight WebLog? An individual who wants to write about ideas, relate them to each other, and refine them. Someone who's been intrigued by the idea of Hyper Text might be interested. I could see Vladimir Nabokov using a wiki instead of hundreds of index cards to develop a story. :) Someone who's thought, "This weblogging stuff looks interesting, but you're always just throwing away your notes as they slide out of view" might be interested.
</quote> [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

(SOURCE:Scripting News)-Yet another intro article to blogs. The more the better!
<quote>
Weblogs are becoming increasingly difficult to ignore for those of us who spend much time reading the Web. Also known by the inscrutable nickname "blogs", weblogs are something of a hard nut to crack. Compounding the difficulty is the fact that a great deal of weblog content today is about weblogs and weblog technology. What are weblogs? What's the big deal? Why should we pay attention? We attempt to answer these questions in the essay that follows.
</quote> [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

Wikis are now on the radar screens of many of us grappling with using technology effectively in knowledge work. Ward Cunningham's book,The Wiki Way:Quick Collaboration on the Web, has been on my bookshelf for some time now and I've visited a handful of public wikis. Lately there's been a spate of posts in the blog world about wikis. I've gathered up and made a first pass at organizing the ones I've encountered into what might be a reasonable order (based on my current level of ignorance).

One thing that did help me get a better grasp on wikis was listening to David Weinberger's talk at Seabury Western two weeks ago. David was drawing attention to the collaborative effort to produce the Wikipedia, which is essentially an open source model effort at creating an online encyclopedia. I had always been puzzled by the free-for-all editing capability inherent in the wiki technology. The analogy that finally made it clear for me was to a whiteboard in a conference room. Those frequently become shared design spaces as markers change hands. Wikis are the same idea moved to the web, which suggests to me that they are likely to be more useful inside organizations than elsewhere.

• Why Wiki Works - [link courtesy of Corante: Social Software, which has been following the Wiki discussion in depth]
• Why Wike Works/Not
• Why I Don't Like Wikis Email - [Also from Corante: Social Software] - Some interesting observations about visual presentation in wikis and email vs. better laid out web pages and how this interferes with the usefulness of wikis (at least on the public web).
• Email Doesn't Self-Organize - [from Ross Mayfield] - quoting Ward Cunningham

  Cunningham also points out that you can go away from a wiki and come back at any time to pick up a conversation without much inconvenience, which isn't the case with e-mail-centric group discussions. "E-mail doesn't self-organize," he emphasizes.

• The Cunningham quote comes from What's a Wiki? an overview article by Sebastian Rupley at Extreme Tech.
• Wiki as a PIM and Collaborative Content Tool [via Sebastian Fiedler] - which appears to be a good overview with lots of links.
• From the other Seb in my aggregator (Sebastien Paquet at Seb's Open Research) comes Why Meatball Matters.

  Meatball Wiki is a little-known gem in the jungle of online community-related material on the Web. What is it about? A whole lot of fascinating stuff - in founder Sunir Shah's words:

  It philosophizes about the nature of hypertext, government, and identity. It talks about user interfaces, community building, and conflict resolution. But it also contains technical analyses of indexing schemes, wiki architecture, and inter-wiki protocol design.

  Sunir has recently been busy writing up a nice summary of what's significant about Meatball, as part of a work portfolio he's preparing to get into the Knowledge Media Design Institute at the University of Toronto.

  I believe Sunir understands Wiki philosophy better than anyone else I know. His contributions to framing the concept and patterns of soft security that underlie the social architecture of Wikis are what made me an early convert to Meatball. If only Sunir had kept a blog instead of a home-brewed diary page, he'd surely be well-known in social software circles today.

  Hopefully, as the Wiki way slowly seeps into the mainstream Internet mentality, its perceived weirdness will subside and collaborative hypermedia communities like this one will get the recognition (and linkage) they deserve.

[McGee's Musings]

(SOURCE:"blts")-Yup the paradox of blogging. CEOs, CFOs, CTOs and all officers of public companies walk the fine line between private and public all the time. This is nothing new for them but this is new to the "Leaf Nodes" I think it's going to become increasingly normal for leaf nodes to have to do this finely balanced dance because transparent (both internally and externally) corporations will eventually rule the earth.
<quote>
As long as your company views your blogging as "you chatting with your neighbors on your personal time", you pose little risk. But the more that co-workers, CEOs, and so on are on-record as being cool with blogs, the more that blogs take on the timbre of being "official". The more "official" that blogs are, the more perceived risk the company takes on by allowing you to blog. And neither you nor your CEO is really keen to make things more complicated than they need to be. And this is why, IMO, you see most companies and employees today still dancing around the issue of employee blogs and seemingly settling on a "don't ask, don't tell, and please for the love of God don't do anything stupid" policy.
</quote> [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

Another stream of recent posts has focused on weblogs as a tool for knowledge management both to capture and share knowledge. They include a mix of posts focusing on individual knowledge workers and on knowledge workers within organizations.

Lou Rosenfeld, author of the excellent Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, has a good post on blogging k-logging.

Dave Pollard has generated a great set of posts on weblogs as knowledge management tools. His weblog in general has become a must read for me.:

Blogs in Business: The Weblog as Filing Cabinet

Weblogs could be a mechanism to coherently codify and 'publish' in a completely voluntary and personal manner the individual worker's entire filing cabinet, complete with annotations, marginalia, post-its and personal indexing system.

A Weblog-Based Content Architecture for Business (this post also has some excellent diagrams of how weblogs fit within the entreprise)

The fundamental difference between this and traditional enterprise-wide content architectures, is that knowledge under this model resides with and is controlled by the individual. The knowledge of the community is simply the sum of the knowledge residing in the weblogs of the community members (within any shared categorizations the community members decide to establish, and pushed to other community members by the weblog's 'subscription' functionality. The knowledge of the enterprise is simply the sum of the knowledge residing in the weblogs of all employees, made accessible through the weblog's publishing and subscription functionality, using the tools present in the weblog itself. Theoretically, depending on the robustness of the company's networks, the Intranet could be slimmed down to nothing more than a set of organized links, with no actual 'content' whatsoever.

Blogs in Business: Finding the Right Niche

Weblogs can be effectively pitched to senior management of major organizations by explaining how they help solve the six problems:

They make contributing knowledge simpler, easier, and more automatic

They make it easier to update knowledge on a timely basis

They make knowledge more context rich

They allow the authors of key business knowledge to build and retain 'pride of ownership'

They make contributing knowledge more fun, since it becomes more like 'publishing'

They make contributing knowledge more fun, since it becomes more like 'publishing'

Each individual's 'collection' of shared knowledge is easy to define and assess at performance evaluation time

They make knowledge easier to route, to 'subscribe' to, to canvass and to 'mine'

Dave Sifry, creator of Technorati, and Doc Searls did a piece for Linux Journal on Building with Blogs. One key excerpt:

As weblogs account for more and more of the traffic in knowledge about a given subject, they become powerful instruments for hacking common wisdom. In many categories, they are moving ahead of mainstream journals and portals and building useful community services where over-funded dot-com efforts failed spectacularly.

Sébastien Paquet adds a piece on "towards structured blogging" where he starts to think about how to begin adding a next layer of metadata to collections of weblogs.

Right now what we have, globally speaking, is pretty much a huge pool of blog posts, each implicitly tied to a particular weblog author and with a date slapped on.

Donald Luskin makes the following observation in his weblog (pointers courtesy of Scripting News and Roland Tanglao)

At the dinner table I explained what a blog is. There was the usual polite, partially feigned fascination with anything having to do with the Internet. But when I said that blogs have completely transformed my utilization of media and the way I acquire information about the world -- that I basically get everything from blogs now -- everyone stopped being polite. One fellow at the table was utterly shocked that I would trust any information I acquired online. I asked him if he trusted information he got from politically biased mainstream newspapers like the New York Times, or for that matter, from any commercial media biased toward at least some degree of sensationalism, if not some particular political view. I asked him if he had ever, once, read a newspaper account of some event of which he personally had expert or eye-witness knowledge, and found it to be accurate. I asked him he had ever once been interviewed by a reporter who quoted him accurately or in context, or who didn't already have the story written before the conversation even began? Well, no, he had to admit... but still... "...not the Internet! You can't be serious!"

Roland is always a source of good observations and links about blogging in knowledge sharing and knowledge management contexts. Some recent commentary via his blog include

Blogging is too difficult but it will get better. Like I always say we are at the VisiCalc stage of blogging. Compare and contrast Excel and VisiCalc; lightyears better and people in 2003 understand spreadsheets. Same thing will happen with blogging; we need years of experience and iteration to get from the VisiCalc of blogging to the Excel of blogging.

and this pointer to Value Creation by Communities of Practice

Blogs encourage cross-functional disruptive thinking.
I read a great quote that, like a magnet of meanings, pulled together layers of my thinking into a surprising pattern of possibility. Here it is: "Here is the paradox: You need a great team of people with diverse skills to perform a symphony well, but no team has ever written a great symphony! ... While cross-functional teams are key players in defining and implementing incremental innovation projects, cross-functional disruptive individuals tend to be key players in defining radical innovation projects."

That should cover it for tonight, although there are still a bunch of good posts on this topic filling up my aggregator.

[McGee's Musings]

"I can't say that I agree with Don Park on this one.  In every organization in which I've been a manager, hierarchy becomes unavoidable because of course it's essential to utilize organizational network forms to cope with complexity.  But hierarchy by its very nature causes filtering and interpretation, and in order to truly keep a continuous "feel" for what's going on in the organization and in the market, I strive for more sophisticated network forms that inject more than a bit of the "edge" into my thinking.

Don says that "the CEO is not likely to know about, let alone subscribe to, a lowly QA engineer's blog."  Perhaps.  But I seek out and truly relish interaction with people at the edge of my organization.  When I find a hairy bug (e.g. a deadlock, or a comms or memory issue in the product), I love having the developer come in and debug it face-to-face.  It gives me a chance not only to understand more about the product's internals, but also you have NO idea what I learn while chit-chatting while waiting for debug files to copy, etc.  Design & implementation issues, stuff that people have been building off to the side, things about the organization, rumors, etc.  And of course they also milk me for what's going on in my travels, in my official role as Overhead at the organization.

I love listening to an individual sales rep or SE when we're on a sales call, because I get a better feel for what's actually going on with customers or prospects.  I try to pattern-match across reps so that I can see what might be improved in the sales process, rather than just listening to my VP of Sales.  I love interacting with designers and developers when doing my Thursday detailed feature design reviews.  I suppose this is just classic "walking the halls", etc., but I feel as though without this kind of direct nonhierarchical contact I would lose touch with my organization, and people throughout would know I was disconnected and would lose respect for me.

With regard to blogs, I do agree that we need to figure out some kind of structure, but I don't think it should be strictly hierarchical.  I've got nearly 150 feeds that I monitor in one way or another - some employee, some not - and of course it's way too much to consume everything.  I've asked myself "if you could only read 10, which would you read?"  But I've found that this is the wrong question.  Reading those 10 would be like only having meetings with my direct reports.  I look to blogs for serendipity, and I won't truly understand what's going on "out there" unless I mix it up a bit.

So rather than hierarchical blogs, maybe the answer is a mix of some close (recurring) and some far (random)?  Maybe I should constantly read my 10 favorite feeds, and have the reader spit a bunch of randomness at me from the remaining 140?  All I know is that I need to mix some "practice" with the "process", to force some chaos into the system rather than just treating it as merely complex and manageable - which it most certainly is not. [Ray Ozzie's Weblog]"

(SOURCE:"curious")-I guess this makes Live Topics obsolete. Can't wait to try it.
<quote>
Paolo and I are now subscribed to a single shared cloud (called WWWW) of topics using the k-collector server and client for Radio. This means that our posts will be aggregated together by k-collector on the basis of the topics we use. The demo interface shows a simple hierarchical view but we have lots of other things planned. Another poweful feature of this setup is the shared topic roll. Because we are both subscribed to the WWWW topic roll we use the same topics and any topics we create are automatically made available to other subscribers.
</quote> [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

Excellent! Blogs = Instant publishing!
<quote>
Blogs are instant publishing. You write, you cut-and-paste images, you cut-and-paste links, you customize everything through a WYSIWIG interface, and with one click you publish. There is no Webmaster. There is no gatekeeper (necessarily). There's just you, your PC, your Internet connection, and a form. Think of HTML as a language for creating Web pages. Blogging is simply a Graphical User Interface that makes creating "content" as easy as -- writing. (And with audioblogging or videoblogging or blogs that just consist of pictures, photos, or other images -- it doesn't even have to be writing.) The implications of this are as profound as the implications of the Web itself. They are not limited to journalism. That is its public face, because blogging software is such a great tool for journalists. A lot more publications -- not just National Review and The Nation, are going to switch to a blogging format over the next year, because it saves a ton of money. But that is the tip of the iceberg. Blogging is going to be a great education tool. Blogging is the perfect groupware tool. Blogging really is Personal Publishing, the promise of HTML fulfilled.
</quote> [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

(SOURCE:"curious")-A picture is worth a thousand words.
<quote>
K-collector. Matt has already written about k-collector today here and here. What can I add? Maybe a little drawing?
</quote> [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

(SOURCE:Corante Social Software) - Nice counterpoint to WhyWikiWorksNot! [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

(SOURCE:Corante Social Software) [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

(SOURCE:"emm")-Nice!
<quote>
I thought that it would be cool to have a page that showed all the pictures that I have used in my blog postings. The myPictures tool that comes with Radio Userland puts the pictures in a year/month/day directory structure so I wanted to work with that in a recursive nature. Here is what mine looks like. I ended up doing two different macros: one for main main blog and one for categories. For the main blog macro, I decided to move my myPictures directory to wwwphotos because I don't want all the different template graphics showing up in my blog. For the category macro, I used the images directory because it doesn't seem to suffer from that problem. You can adjust as necessary.
</quote> [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

(SOURCE:"mcgee")-Wow! A wondefully pragmatic proposal that not only sells blogs to business but also clearly explains how to train new bloggers and work around obstacles! Bravo!
<quote>
Implementation and Training Each person selected to have a weblog then needs to be trained how to set up and use the tool. This entails: * Setting up the weblog's personal taxonomy (categories) corresponding to their filing cabinet tabs or 'My Documents' folders * Setting up the weblog's 'permanent files': documents that are regularly and repeatedly used such as contact lists and policy documents * Setting up the weblog's links, directories, and subscriptions * Helping the weblog owner decide on appropriate publishing decision rules : what knowledge (reports, analyses etc,) he/she will be expected to create, what knowledge from other sources he/she will be expected to propagate, and who will be permitted or required to access or subscribe to which weblog categories * Helping the weblog owner decide explicitly what doesn't get published, to avoid confidentiality risks, intellectual property law violations, and information overload * Training the weblog owner to pause each time he/she saves or sends a document, link, or message, and decide whether to publish it to the weblog at the same time, using the agreed-upon decision rules * Possibly teaching the weblog owner how to create document abstracts, how to properly categorize posts, and how to notify potentially interested users of a post who aren't already subscribed The Five Obstacles I forsee five major obstacles to the successful introduction of weblogs into large organizations: * HTML / Microsoft format conversion. Most large companies use MS Office as their principal document standard, and the conversion of Office documents to HTML remains a bloated and untidy process. * Authoring rights: Decisions need to be made about who can post to each weblog, and about the potential use of 'group' weblogs, which in many organizations will be political. * Proprietary macros: Existing commercial weblog software is too complex and techy for the average business user, so customization will be needed to keep weblog maintenance as simple as possible for neophyte users. * Intermediation: Many business executives will want to delegate responsibility for their weblog to an administrative assistant or knowledge steward, which may complicate the process and dilute the benefit of using weblogs. * New knowledge behaviours: Weblog owners will need to learn to develop and use appropriate publishing decision criteria and how to abstract and categorize the knowledge they produce. It's no longer just their filing cabinet. The key to success is to pick the spots in your organization where weblogs can solve pressing business problems, make a compelling case for their use, ensure the weblog owners are properly trained, and anticipate and deal with obstacles in advance. Given the enormous potential of weblogs to realize some of the long-awaited benefits of knowledge management, this should be well worth the effort.
</quote> [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

(SOURCE:RenaissanceWeb Yahoo mail list)-Excellent. Another great community.
<quote>
A number of things, actually. In the broadest terms, it's what we call a CCMS; a Community Content Management System. But that doesn't tell you much, does it? Maybe some bullet point details will help: * JournURL is a community platform. The primary mission of our software and the service it powers is communication through interaction. People talking to people. Thoughts exchanged, customers reached, and lives touched. We operate under the basic assumption that the only thing as important as expression is feedback. * JournURL is a personal publishing tool. Within minutes of signing on, you can have a working weblog, journal, or diary. If you know how to post to a message board, you know how to manage your own content-rich site. And fortunately, it isn't just for beginners; demanding users can access powerful scripting and template tools that will turn your humble weblog into a complex, dynamic resource. * JournURL is a forum environment. Robust threaded and linear discussion that encourages extended conversations and debate. No simplistic comment system here, folks. No anonymous spam. * JournURL is a little like a Wiki. Linking between the various entries and articles in your blog (or posts in the forum) is as simple as typing the title of the desired document. And if there's no match available, JournURL will serve up a page of search results to get your reader back on the right track. * JournURL is a supporter of syndication and interoperation. All blogs publish RSS 2.0 syndication feeds. All blogs support Trackback. And soon, all blogs will be able to integrate OPML blogrolls. * JournURL is an experiment. We call it "sharewhere". Create an account, create a site, and have fun... it's free for non-commercial use. But we ask that you please commit to a monthly or annual donation to help support management costs and continued software development. As a bonus, with your donation, you'll gain access to advanced features like WYSIWYG editing, file storage space, and email. Does that make it any clearer? If not, hey, just create an account and give it a whirl. It should become self-evident pretty quickly
</quote> [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

(SOURCE:Scripting News)-Wow! Bryan, please make these themes available to the public!
<quote>
Pat Delaney and I have come up with what I think is a novel way of designing a template for large groups with many "individualistic" departments. It's kind of a site on a site, or stacked webpages. On the first (background) layer, two thin bars, left vertical and top horizontal, are joined in the top left corner of the page, drawing the eye to a central school image (in this case, Martin Luther King) and permalink to the school home site. On the second (foreground) layer, managing editors can carefully insert banner images representative of different functions or departments. The theme also includes a directory of the school's most important sites, a seach engine link, and a drop down window for navigating teacher and class blog pages.
</quote> [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

(SOURCE:"arch")-Excellent! Subscribed!
<quote>
Hi Jim and Rogers, As part of the work we're doing for Frontier 9.1, this discussion group is now available in RSS: http://radio.userland.com/discuss/rss.xml
</quote> [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

Blogs increase the surface area of organizations

I'm often criticized for using biological metaphors for organizations, but I think they're very effective sometimes.

Seb's Open Research

Blogs increase the surface area of organizations

Jon Udell has got a keen eye for biological metaphors for information systems, and here comes up with a nice one for how weblogs change the shape of organizations:

Think of an organization as a single-celled animal. Blogs increase the surface area of the cell, help nutrients flow across its membrane, and promote multicellular cooperation.

I'm on the road with low bandwidth and was spending too much time commenting on my blog to think of something original to blog today. Instead I have quoted one interesting person quoting another interesting person. Sorry if you already saw this today, but it was the most interesting thing I could find through my quick zip through my RSS feeds today.

[via Joi Ito's Web]

And I'll just daisy-chain this post on through - like Joi, I've been consumed with non-publishable stuff (in this case, working on

the conversion from Radio to Movable Type). This is a great metaphor for how blogs can improve knowledge sharing in an organization.

[tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog]

(SOURCE:weblogg-ed news: Using Weblogs in Education)-Yet another excellent intro. This one from the very cool Stephen Downes.
<quote>
Through the interlocked network of weblogs, information can spread like wildfire. Very few blogs have a large audience - the largest, Instapundit, attracts only some tens of thousands of readers. But the network of weblogs forms a set of interlocking communities, so that on the whole, a new idea or a link to a new article can move very quickly. What's even more significant is that these ideas and links will only propogate to those parts of the network where the information is of the most interest. The weblog community is therefore a highly efficient filtering community, a capacity that has been recognized by the establishment of such services as Metafilter, Blogdex and Daypop, and which prompted Google to purchase Blogger a few months ago. (http://weblog.siliconvalley.com/column/ dangillmor/archives/000802.shtml#000802)
</quote> [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

This is why everybody should have a blog. On your blog, you make your own rules and nobody can flame you (because you can turn off or ignore comments). Mailing lists still have their place but I think blogs are more generally useful because of the flamers.
<quote>
Interesting idea, though I am not sure that codifing the rules would help. Many email lists have similar rules. This set is a little less fuzzy, which may be useful for an end user. The problem with this approach is that it really only works if you have one person making the decisions. A committee can't separate wheat from chaff. Even with one person deciding, the rules must be very specific. But as soon as the rules are specific, people will push the boundaries. If you try to control the boundaries, you get slammed on Free Speech (even though the list is private and controled) Any form of moderation on an email list is a nightmare. You can only hope to control attacks by pointing out that if the attacker continues then the list will be destroyed. It is like convincing a parasite that what they are doing is wrong. Moderating unmoderated email lists is a special kind of hell.
</quote> [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

Cool name for a new kind of journalism!
<quote>
The Internet is unprecedented in its role as a networking engine, a gathering place where those with highly particular tastes can find one another and develop communities devoted to their interests. Imagine a bank of experienced reporters who tapped into these online aggregations of users. A cabal of freelance journalists could make a killing if they went looking online for readers to pony up and pay for content only their own specialized reporter could provide. Writers could map out their own topics for coverage based upon their interest, expertise, and experience. Once they'd hit upon their subject of choice, they could solicit suggestions from readers who had flocked to support them out of interest in their subject area. The first-hand accounts of a reporter who'd signed on to go where the funding readers sent him could crack wide open the stories that might not otherwise see the light of day. Via technology like wireless messaging and picture-snapping cell phones, a reading public could contribute questions and story suggestions to the journalist at the start of each workday, even as the reporter transmitted images and text during the course of his day. Sound far-fetched? Tell that to the 316 donors who contributed a total of $13,834 to freelance reporter Christopher Allbritton. His weblog, Back-to-Iraq 2.0 was the vehicle for a recent monthlong trip to Iraq (Allbritton's second), during which he tapped into his own network of sources in the region to report from various points within Turkey and Iraq about the military conflict and its effects upon the citizens of the region. Readers swarmed to the site (more than 462,00 unique visitors logged on since January 16, 2003), and contributed a mélange of opinions in addition to their funds, transmitted to Allbritton via PayPal (also Ebay's most popular and trusted method of payment).
</quote> [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

(SOURCE:bloggers unlimited email list)-This looks great! Congrats Marc, Paolo, Matt et al. Can't wait to try out the real thing. WebOutliner appears to be a Radio tool in its first incarnation which allows you to do all the things you can do in Radio with ActiveRender using your web browser. [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

(SOURCE:Scripting News)-Excellent. Decentralized backup. Weblog providers should backup your blog, but I know I would feel safer if I can also have a backup of my very own. Will backup "VanEats" using this method tonight. [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

(SOURCE:Scripting News)-Yet another reason why weblogs are different. You can do whatever you want on your blog but you are accountable ultimately (unlike email lists) because your blog space belongs to you.
<quote>
This second form contrasts markedly with traditional web-based bulletin boards. First and foremost, it is entirely distributed. There is no centralized database-backed web server to maintain, because each post resides on the weblog author's system. Second, there is no requirement that participating systems run on the same software. An author can participate in the discussion as long as their software supports a standard data format. This means that they are free to choose their software that best fits their usability preferences, licensing preferences, operating system and budget. Third, there is a built-in authentication mechanism. A weblog author's posts appear at a specific url, which can be tracked through the Domain Name System to the maintainer of the machine and ultimately to the author.
</quote> [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

Yet another RSS reader but this is something to track because some cool people who I trust love TopStyle and HomeSite.
<quote>
FeedDemon is a Windows desktop RSS reader/organizer, which is a bit of a departure from my previous efforts (TopStyle and HomeSite). The screenshots at the right are of FeedDemon in its infancy. The UI may change between now and the first beta release, but the general concepts are in place.
</quote> [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

(SOURCE:"rayo")-So what about Groove makes this project better? The only differentiator that I can see is Groove's built in high quality security. Does this team really need that level of security? Other than the military and the government, who really needs the security of Groove? And also why couldn't this team have used internal blogs? Someday I am going to really have to try Groove and figure this out.
<quote>
An interesting cross-border use of Groove I just found out about: The International Crane Foundation - headquartered in Wisconsin - uses Groove to help a multi-national team address threats to key wetlands used by Siberian Cranes during breeding, wintering and migration. During the past three years, the ICF has worked intensively with the United Nations Environment Program and colleagues in Russia, China, Kazakhstan and Iran on this project, which addresses threats to key wetlands used by this crane species (the third rarest) during breeding and migration through these parts of the world.
</quote> [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

Groove is more than a blog.  Groove allows a team to collaborate at a finer level - sharing files, sharing a calendar, sharing notes, participating in a discussion forum or a chat, editing a document, sharing websites, managing project tasks - in a secure and project-specific setting.  Only the team members share the Groove Workspace.  With the GrooveInterOp Radio Tool, you can have both - the secure team environment of Groove and a weblog.

 

Cool. A blogging system based on an RDF database instead of a conventional relational database or object oriented database. Now that's thinking differently. Can't wait to see this and try it out!
<quote>
Essentially making a blogging tool like all the others, but having the data stored in an RDF store rather than flat files/relational DB. There'll be simple methods to create items etc. etc. Initially the aim is to have something that behaves just like the other tools (without a lot of the nice bits to start with). The first advantage is that metadata from other vocabularies can be directly added to the items, so if one item was in response to another item this could be recorded. This should also allow the system to be used in application domains other than blogging - e.g. bugtracking. Within blogging, categories could be used in a much more sophisticated way than they are at present. The other big advantage is that other (non-blog/RSS) RDF data can also be stored/retrieved in the system, so for example if people are referred in blog items, the foaf profile of those people can be stored and retrieved as required (this could be displayed like http://xml.mfd-consult.dk/foaf/explorer/ ). It would also Data from multiple sources such as other blogs could be aggregated. It would also be possible to use inference over the data using the RDF model, so it would be easier to e.g. select all items referring to a particular site.
</quote> [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

Nice summary of social software prior art! [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

WikiLogs. »WikiLog: an attempt to synthesize the best aspects of WikiWikis and WebLogs.
Yes, weblogs can be done by hand on any wiki. The difference is that automating it makes it more powerful, and conceptually easier for people to work with.«

[SOURCE:owrede_log] [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

(SOURCE:"rossm")-'Email doesn't self organize' - Slogan der Woche. Because Email doesn't do links and doesn't do RSS natively (you can graft these things on afterwards like people have done but the perils of HTML email shows the impedance mismatch). <quote> Cunningham also draws many distinctions between wikis and another popular means of Web communication: blogs, or Weblogs. "Blogs and wikis are polar opposites in many ways, though they're seen as similar" he says. "A blog tends to reflect the biases and opinions of an author, while a wiki is more like an open cocktail party. In a wiki you try to speak without a strong voice, seeking consensus to create something permanent, while on a blog you're developing your own voice and it's very much about your voice." Cunningham also points out that you can go away from a wiki and come back at any time to pick up a conversation without much inconvenience, which isn't the case with e-mail-centric group discussions. "E-mail doesn't self-organize," he emphasizes. In terms of future trends for wikis, Cunningham says "there's a lot of interest in combining the timelessness of wikis—the fact that you can go away from them and come back—with the attention-grabbing aspect of blogs. Integrating blogs and wikis is a hot item right now." </quote> [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

(SOURCE:Scripting News)-Looking forward to reading this book!
<quote>
Now that the book has been announced by the publisher, I can finally start talking about what I've been working on lately: Radio UserLand Kick Start will be published this summer by Sams Publishing. The book is for Radio users who want to move into the advanced Web authoring and programming features of the software. A draft of the first chapter, Publishing a Weblog, is online
</quote> [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

(SOURCE:"mcgee")-McGee nails it! People don't want to narrate their personal and business lives using blogs and other tools because they are afraid that their narration will be ignored and considered uncompelling. Call me an optimist but I think everyone has a compelling story to tell in both their personal and business lives. And this story can and should be shared!
<quote>
Conventional wisdow says it's because people are worried that someone will steal their ideas. I think that's a rationalization. I think the real fear is the fear of being ignored. The fear that the knowledge I share is so obvious or trivial that no one will care. What's the old maxim from Mark Twain? "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt." The issue may still be fear, but it's a fear that we need to address in a very different way.
</quote> [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

(SOURCE:"emm")-Essential reading!
<quote>
Seth have posted a page that regroup its articles and essays on UserTalk. If you are serious about programming Frontier or Radio UserLand, you need to bookmark this page. Seth Dillingham is certainly one of the best UserTalk knowledgeable person in the universe (he is funny too). UserTalk: Articles and Essays by Seth Dillingham http://www.truerwords.net/articles/ut/
* Patching Frontier's Support for External Editors
* Optimize Your UserTalk Code: Remove Extra Variables
* Thread-based Global Variables in UserTalk
* Optimal String Concatenation in UserTalk
* Simple Cross-Network Scripting
* Activating URL's with Regex
</quote> [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

(SOURCE:"emm")
<quote>
This is a tool for Radio Userland. Using it will allow your Radio8 install to produce RSS-1.0 XML feeds.
</quote> [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

<quote>
XFML.root --------- Exports from your Radio posts to an XFML file.
</quote> [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

I met Todd, a banker, tonight at our friend Paula's party. His job is to fund knowledge based industries. I was stunned to find out that he doesn't know what a blog is! I figured that bankers would know based on especially after Google's recent acquisition of Blogger and Neoteny's (who are VCs) funding of TypePad. Don't all bankers and VCs know each other :-) ?

Just goes to show you that blogs are far from mainstream. I need to continue to cultivate my pitch.

Because bottom line: a) we don't have a business model that I can pitch to bankers and VCs although I think we are getting closer b) blogging is new!

But I do know that blogs are a big part of the future of the web and if we don't make lots of money off of it somebody else will. And to me, it's not all about money (but of course that's a big part of it); it's about making the world a better place by enabling better communication through blogging.

Todd: I suggest you come to one of our DisruptiveThinking Meetings and we can discuss blogs, demo blogs and start one up for you.

In the meantime here are some links for Todd to investigate about blogging:

• What is blogging?
• Why blog?
• VanEats our blog about cooking and eating in Vancouver
• Status Blogging 101 - we think that private status blogs are an excellent tool to eliminate meetings and make organizations better by improving communication

[Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

But I want to come back to it soon and do a way to store a sequence of pictures in a single story and have them display on one page, perhaps in a variety of ways. Now I might be missing something, is there already a Manila plug-in that does this? If so please send a pointer. [Scripting News]

Getting the right user interface for RSS aggregators is both intriqing and important. RSS is encompassing more and more of our common data stream and we need ways to customize its display to suit individual needs. In particular, I'm still interested in something that was discussed quite a bit last September, the digital dashboard concept, with RSS assumed a central element. There was some debate about whether the dashboard concept was good or bad, but little was settled. Now we have a series of arguments around the proper UI for RSS aggregators:

Interfaces for aggregators.

Dave Winer thinks Radio Userland has a better interface for reading RSS feeds:

RSS readers that work like Usenet readers are a waste of time, imho. Aggregators should not organize news by where items came from, just present the news in reverse chronologic order.

Of course I disagree. I was turned off by Radio Userlands HTML-based interface long ago and I switched to NetNewsWire because it offers exactly what Dave considers to be a waste of time. Radio Userland keeps me away from organizing myself. [...] [Oliver Wrede]

I can only second Oliver's assessment of Radio Userland's aggregator interface. Only Mikel Maron's myRadio tool comes to rescue the user who wants to organize and cluster her RSS feeds in Radio. MyRadio is a big improvement but has serious interface problems, too. [...][Sebastian Fiedler]

[Seblogging News]

I continue to believe the RSS will play a critical role in the dashboard concept and can't imagine there is any rational basis for asserting the only way feeds should be presented is in reverse chronological order. That makes some sense within a specific feed, but it is hardly helpful if you have hundreds of posts from different sources. It is perfectly valid to sort feeds based on origin, topic, or theme depending on your use. Most likely some combination of all three. Moreover, the user should be able to decide what portion of the post is displayed -- e.g. pick the headline, an excerpt, or the entire feed. In short, an RSS aggregator should allow a user to organize data along whatever axis, and in whatever fashion, desired. Just as in structuring collaborative systems, the idea of imposing a single way of thinking, or working, on the user is the surest way to ensure a system won't be used. I haven't used Radio's default aggregator for months. Despite Dave Winer's comment above, it's terrible. The default Radio aggregator is a barrier to getting new Radio users heavily into RSS management. But Radio combined with Mark Paschal's Kit, which provides time-based filtering and full-text search, plus Mikel Maron's myRadio, which provides categorization and grouping, create about as good an aggregator experience as I've been able to find. (Yes, myRadio does have some significant UI issues of it's own, but it's far better than Radio.) For reference, I've used both AmphetaDesk and FeedReader on Windoze. As for the dashboard concept, it continues to grow in both its breadth and its use. [b.cognosco]

-Blogging is too difficult but it will get better. Like I always say we are at the VisiCalc stage of blogging. Compare and contrast Excel and VisiCalc; lightyears better and people in 2003 understand spreadsheets. Same thing will happen with blogging; we need years of experience and iteration to get from the VisiCalc of blogging to the Excel of blogging.
<quote>
've come to the conclusion that blogging is too difficult. And, unless something drastically changes, its never going to be more than a content management system for nerds and technophiles (like me) that want to use overly complicated software to keep track of their online diary.
</quote> [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

looks like business 2.0 sees blogs in our future [EraBlog.NET]

(SOURCE:"escapablel")-Wow another Britt must read! Here are some juicy excerpts (bold mine!) Go Britt and Ming go!: <QUOTE> Like blogs, kindword/frustration/evaluation comments can be helpful but they share a failing we've discovered about blogs, which is why people are trying to leverage them into knowledge management systems: non-explicit, anecdotal text is quotable but otherwise unusable. Here's a report just in from Jason Calacanis on how his company's venture capital database overtook the previous market leader, which was a blog about venture capital: That is the big lesson I think.. blog + database + research reports = big business, blog plus nothing = a hobby. (author's emphasis) Reputation is too important to be a hobby. ... The operative word is require. A reputation system is worthless if it captures ratings only at the whim of the buyer, or worse, at the whim of participants in a forum, as in this example, where the comments do not necessarily relate to a particular task. They can be too vague to benefit the next customer. Therefore it's imperative to require that a grade and comment be recorded within a specified period after presentation of a completion report or invoice. ... Have you ever had one of those projects which seemed simple, but once you got into it, you discover non intuitive requirements embedded in your initial enthusiasm? Such a discovery is like pulling a string out of a sweater. Actualizing the Xpertweb meme is a little like that. ... Here's what happens when you think seriously about a useful reputation system: ... Fair enough, those forms could be designed in an afternoon. But there are other considerations. Once completed, where should their data be stored? Today, such information is kept by the seller. Naturally, the seller will yield to the temptation to excise the unflattering remarks. The data could be kept on a central server, but then what happens to reputations built through blood, sweat and tears if the central servers go out of business? It's not like the W3C is gonna store this info for us. Just as bad, any centralized system may not scale as needed or worse, is corruptible, as described in the HumanTech Parable. The only answer left standing is that both the buyer and the seller must keep the information, which must be identical to be valid. That means that both parties must have a web site with space and programming for the reputation system. Ratings so mirrored are demonstrably valid. If there's any divergence, the ratings cannot be presumed to be valid. The ratings are only useful if subsequent users can access the reputation data. Conventional wisdom says the data should be a mySQL data base with a CGI. Then, of course, each user would need an XML-RPC or SOAP routine to access reputation data from all the other sites. That's a load which is sure to overload the requirement for user-maintained data. (Visionary doesn't have to mean stupid?there are some experts who think Xpertweb is silly enough already!) The obvious but counter-intuitive answer is to post all data as pure XML in plain sight on each user's Xpertweb site with known paths to the data. As Doc reported on Thursday, these requirements seem implicit if you're serious about a useful reputation system, sort of like seeing the horse in a block of marble and removing all the marble that doesn't look like a horse. In fact, as Doc also related, a useful reputation system seems to me to be implicit in the XML spec. Though enterprises seem to be using XML primarily as a serialization routine (like SOAP) to connect legacy data systems, XML is fine as a data format, if you're willing to live with its verbosity. As a data format hosted on a web server, XML is readable by search engines, a skillion parsers and certainly by a thin-client purpose-built script like the one we're building for Xpertweb. We're even on the cusp of a promise dormant since the spec became a recommendation in February, 1998: An XHTML page can contain explicit links to bits of XML data and, without any programming display linked data when the page is opened. XML is truly data for the rest of us, because it frees us from CGI programming and the hidden data that only CGIs can talk to. ... I see a reputation engine as a kind of internal combustion engine. Even if it's a two-banger, you still need quite a few moving parts to get it to turn over. I think we have a pretty good design and built-in means to re-engineer it while it's running. That's why I welcome dogma slayers, but note that there's more to a reputation engine than it seems at first. [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

News Goes RSS!.

U.S.News & World Report

"Articles from the last 14 days are free. Archived articles may be purchased for as little as $1.99." [Recently approved feeds from Syndic8.com]

Check it out - U.S. News hops the RSS gravy train! They even have the white-on-orange XML button on the page (bottom right-hand side) with a what is this link!

"This button () links to our weekly RSS feed. RSS stands for 'Really Simple Syndication,' an XML-based format for distributing links to our latest stories. Usnews.com updates the RSS feed on Saturday afternoons (EST) with links and descriptions for each of the stories from our most recent issue. We also offer exclusive web-only content, which we add to the feed as soon as it becomes available online. We encourage you to use this feed for your own use, but we do not allow re-posting of our full-text stories."

One note, though - you can probably get older articles for free from your local library. Great to see another major publisher coming on board!

[The Shifted Librarian]

(SOURCE:"mathemagenic")-Awesome! Everybody should have a "Why I blog story" on their blog!
<quote>
One of the great challenges in knowledge sharing, and in asynchronous communication, is to provide your audience with enough context to understand where your message 'comes from' -- what mental models, preconceptions, hidden agendas, historical baggage and motivations filter and taint what you say. Conveying this context makes it easier for the recipient of your message to internalize what you're saying more accurately and fully. It can also prevent misconceptions that lead to argument or disparagement of your point of view. For that reason, I thought it might be helpful to let you know not only who I am (in the sidebar About the Author ), but also why I blog -- what motivates me, on top of a heavy business workload, to spend at least 25 hours a week reading blogs and other resources, and writing my own blog posts. So here goes: I do this for three equally important (to me) reasons:
</quote> [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

(SOURCE:"curious")-Not sure what to make of this. But I think it will lead to some good. Will be watching, waiting and trying to figure out where I can help.
<quote>
We are proud to announce the launch of the Social Software Alliance The brainchild of the pioneers at SocialText the alliance is intended to be a place where the developers & users of social software can come together to create open standards, and, contribute industry best practices. Our initial aims are:
* aid discovery of developers working on synergistic projects and standards
* assist in shaping open standards that mesh well with other alliance and Internet standards
* help promote each standard to gain wider adoption
</quote> [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

Nice flavour sampling!
<quote>
What is a blog? What role do blogs play on this ever-changing, ever-expanding stage we call the Web? Will blogs forever alter the way we communicate or merely fade into oblivion? Many have speculated, pondered, commented and opined about these very questions but the definitive answers remain as elusive as ever. The purpose of this project is to step back from the rhetoric and simply let blogs speak for themselves and allow those who will listen to develop their own conclusions. 31 Flavors of Blog examines thirty-one distinctly different blogs and displays the diverse and innovative ways blogs are being used to communicate, educate and entertain. Each "flavor" provides a sampling of the incredible variety of blogs on the Web. A new blog will be featured each day during the month of March. Think of this project as a trip to the ice cream parlor where you sample new and exciting (and sometimes disappointing) flavors all loaded onto that tiny pink plastic spoon. And after you're done sampling you can sit back and reflect on how blogs are shaping the Web or simply wipe that bit of fudge from the corner of your mouth and sample some more flavors.
</quote> [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

I've long dreamed of using RSS to produce and consume XML content. We're so close. RSS content is HTML, which is almost XHTML, a gap that HTML Tidy can close. In current practice, the meat of an RSS item appears in the <description> tag, either as an HTML-escaped (aka entity-encoded) string or as a CDATA element. As has been often observed, it'd be really cool to have the option to use XHTML as well. Then I could write blog items in which the <pre> tag, or perhaps a class="codeFragment" attribute, marks regions for precise search. You or I could aggregate those items into personal XPath-aware databases in order to do those searches locally (perhaps even offline), and public aggregators could offer the same capability over the Web. [O'Reilly Network] ... [Jon's Radio]

CRM Assist Apr 9 2003 2:16PM ET [Moreover - Knowledge management news]

(SOURCE:"jonu")-Two points:

1. The ability to route the proper info between overlapping private and public scopes will (and is for the early adopters) a competitive advantage
2. The people at Microsoft "get" blogs even though they don't yet fully understand them or offer blogging products. If I was a Microsoft competitor and my company wasn't blogging, I'd start blogging now or risk losing a competitve advantage to the Borg.

<QUOTE> Today, you can see a great example of this principle of overlapping scopes. Chris Anderson copies some material from his private "work blog" at Microsoft over to his public blog, SimpleGeek, in order to attract outside perspectives into the organization. This is precisely the maneuver that I have found to be powerful, yet elusive to explain. Chris's entry takes a confessional tone. "I don't understand blogging," he writes, and he worries that software will get written before the subtleties sink in. That's a valid concern, and a great issue to raise now that blogware has begun to issue from Redmond. As a matter of fact, though, Chris's take on blogs is spot on: One reason I believe that blogs are great for corporation internal communication is the question of distribution lists. Inside of Microsoft we live and die by email. However the constant spam of email to large distribution lists ends up drowning out the important information. For many types of communication (but not all) blogs provide a better way of communicating. There are many cases where you as the publisher of a piece of information don't know who would be interested. Blogs are a way to "publish and forget" - you fire the information out there, and interested people will find it. Once I add our internal blog server to the corporate search service, suddenly I could find people that worked on products that I wanted to communicate with. Amazing. [SimpleGeek] Even more interesting, at least to me, is Chris's instinctive use of overlapping scopes, and his positioning of himself as a router among them. "This is quoted from my internal blog at work..," he writes, "I know that there are much better experts out there to answer this question...I hope some of them can respond." Bing! <QUOTE> [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

(SOURCE:"mcgee")-Summary: weblogs are better and more compelling for the general public because they foster thinking in public; wikis and other media require thinking together and thinking together is harder than thinking in public.
<quote>
My problem is this. Most of the technology tools for supporting thinking together (e.g. discussion forums, threaded discussion, wikis) depend on skills and norms that I've found to be rare in practice and challenging to promote. My intuitions tell me that there are important differences with weblogs that address at least some of these issues. ... One of the primary reasons that thinking together is hard is that it requires both that we think in public and that we think collaboratively. I suspect that thinking together fails at least as often because we don't know how to think in public as it does because we don't know how to do it collaboratively. Further I think that order matters. You need to learn how to think in public first. Then you can work on developing skills to think collaboratively. Thinking in public is a precursor skill to thinking collaboratively that's been ignored. We want to get to the fun stuff (ooh, brainstorming!) and skip over the hard part. Weblogs make the hard part easier. They make it possible and permissible to go public with an idea while you're still working it out. Their structure of time-ordered, generally short, posts feels less intimidating than having to produce a finished, completely worked out, properly structured report. Their organized, permanent, structure of archived posts give you something to go back to and to build on. Pulling it all together under the umbrella of an individually identified place makes it visible and sharable with others without forcing it on anyone. Finally, syndicating the results via RSS makes it available to those who are interested in a way that enables dialog without demanding dialog.
</quote> [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

(SOURCE:"mathemagenic")-Once we can explain these things to non-bloggers, then we will have come a long way to making blogging mainstream. <quote> For example, I find it very difficult to explain to non-blogger why
* blogging somehow builds trust to other people faster and better than other ways
* blogging somehow gives me a feeling of "belonging" to my "blogging neighborhood" and loyalty to this group
* I feel that blogging gives me better identity than any of my on-line profiles, my CV, list of my publications
* I feel that my blogging conversations are deep and engaging
* I feel that these conversations are dialogues with me and not "everyone on-line" even if they are public and distributed over several blogs I mean, I can explain it to others, but it's hard to believe. In many cases you have to get you feet wet before you convinced :) </quote> [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

Amen! Preach it!
<quote>
First of all, how cool is that? Second of all, the subtitle really nails it: "What Happens to Journalism and Society When Every Reader Can Be a Writer." I'll say it again, the connection of Web logs and journalism is just too important to miss. It's valid to argue what form of journalism Web logs take, but there is no denying any longer that it's a form we're all going to have to start taking seriously as a source of information. And that means teaching our students the good and bad about the genre as well. I have a number of new "sources" that I trust, and I've left behind many of the traditional media sources that I used to rely on. The more I read Web logs and the more I find intelligent, articulate filters and thinkers, the less I believe the stream of pre-packaged pablum that Big Media want me to consume. And that's significant as I have been immersed in the study of media almost all of my professional life. If you would have told me just a couple of years ago that I would stop buying newspapers and not watch the evening news I would have laughed in your face. Seriously. But here I am.
</quote> [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

(SOURCE:"jonu")-That's right. I want to have a conversation with you; not hear your "pitch" or "message". <QUOTE> In short, I don't want you to pitch things to me. And I don't want your clients to pitch things to me either, at least not directly. I do, very much, want them to speak in their own authentic voices, about the technologies and products and services that inspire their passion, to everyone who might have a reason to care. I want your clients to explain what they do, how they think, and why their efforts matter. And so, of course -- and more importantly -- do current and prospective customers. What's missing from Phil's chart, I think, is an appreciation of how awareness flows through blogspace. Communication, in this view, is a tactical missile launched by a PR agent and aimed at a journalist. News flash: I'm the wrong target. In fact, and counter-intuitively, blogging doesn't aim at any target! Chris Anderson put it nicely the other day: Blogs are a way to "publish and forget" -- you fire the information out there, and interested people will find it. [SimpleGeek] If this seems like too much of a leap of faith, consider how hard executives and engineers already work explaining to one another the nature and value of what they do. Some of this is necessarily confidential. A lot isn't, and when it isn't, the message could (and should) reach a much wider audience. Some of those readers will be journalists who write for print and online. Most won't be journalists -- but a growing number of those folks will write online too. What is known and thought about your clients will emerge from this melting pot of perspectives. If you're selling a product or service, you have to be able to tell a good story. If you're advising sellers of products or services, you have to help them tell those stories. If you're a journalist, you have to evaluate all the stories and weave them into a coherent narrative. This has always been true. But we never expected all the storytellers to wear real faces and speak with real voices. Now we do. </QUOTE> [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

(SOURCE:"mcgee")-Of course, I would choose the company with the weblog culture if I had a choice!
<quote>
For most companies the focus will remain on doing business and doing whatever best contributes to getting the job done. I remember a conversation a few years back with an attorney who had done some work with Cisco. Cisco managers basically said "we're using email to run our business, we're making commitments and binding agreements with it, and it's your job to figure out how to make that work, so deal with it." While there may be some initial hemming and hawing, the concerns Jack raises won't be show stoppers. I think there are two reasons to believe that internal weblogs will actually prove to be a better solution than email and newsgroups for this category of concerns. First, weblogs directly address the out of context problem created by email and newsgroup and exploited in discovery proceedings. Weblogs keep the context visible both in terms of the chronological and archive structures of the weblog format and in terms of the practice of linking across weblogs. Second, is the point that Jack raises at the end. The public nature of weblogs does encourage more attention to "writing smart" than email and newsgroup formats. It helps keep you focused on the notion that you are writing for the record. I sometimes wonder what would have happened at Enron if they had done more of their thinking "in public." If an extensive weblog culture had been in place, could they have done wha they did? I don't know what the answer to that thought experiment might be. But if you had a choice between joining an organization with an active weblog environment or one that discouraged them, which would you choose?
</quote> [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

-McGee is everywhere and saying the right things! How does he do it?
<quote>
Also, McGee added, reading a blog is less like reading a story and more like reading a reporter's notebook; thoughts are stream-of-consciousness and disorganized. "The signal-to-noise ratio in a blog is much different," McGee said. "It's information and ideas they may not necessarily turn into a story. I think of a blog as a backup brain, a place to remember stuff and a place to work out ideas." Although chat rooms and messaging software allow instant idea exchange, McGee said blogging may make for better conversation because it allows time to compose thoughts. Also, because blogs present ideas straightforwardly, they may beat e-mail for data sharing. "When stuff is buried in an e-mail or conversation, it's hard to manage," McGee said. "When you move to e-mail to PowerPoint to Word documents, unless you get them printed, you may not know what's going on."
</quote> [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

Works fine for me except the dates are all messed up. The dates show the date of the scan; not the time of the news item. Other than that (and its insistence on using IE), it seems very nice.
<quote>
SharpReader is a .NET 3-pane RSS Aggregator. Some of its main features are:
* handles all RSS versions, modules like dublin core, content:encoding, xhtml:body, etc.
* allows you to group your subscribed feeds in categories
* easily reorder your subscribed feeds through drag-and-drop
* feed-refresh settings per feed or per category
* reduces bandwidth by using HTTP Conditional GETs
* RSS Auto-discovery
* minimizes to the system-tray
* easy keyboard navigator to go the next or previous unread item
* dialog-less way of subscribing to new feeds - just drag a link from your browser into sharpreader, or enter the url into the address-bar at the top
* error-correction of some common rss-feed errors (unescaped ampersands, illegal characters, unknown entities)
* support for proxy-servers and proxy authentication
* mark items read and unread
* import and export opml
* filter items and last but not least, for items that include the full html description, sharpreader lets you expand a headline to view links and responses to/from other posts in other feeds. This allows you to read posts in context, and will show related posts together.
</quote> [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

(SOURCE:Scripting News)-Go Matt and Paolo go! Looking forward to the next release of Live Topics with Easy News Topics.
<quote>
This specification defines the Easy News Topics (ENT) Module for the RSS2.0 syndication format. ENT is intended to be a very simple standard for describing how topic information can be introduced into an RSS2.0 news feed.
</quote> [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

(SOURCE:"42")-I'm all over this! Next Radio thing to try on my list. Sounds a little like LiveTopics with an RSS file attached!
<quote>
I was inspired a decade ago by reading Vannevar Bush's 'As We May Think', written in 1945. Ever since reading that piece I've been fascinated by the idea of sharing 'trails' of information or as Bush put it "There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record.". So anyway, I've been thinking about RSS and thinking about trails. RSS feeds are certainly not the trails that Bush described but I like the analogy, particularly the emphasis on sharing. I want to be able to create a trail through the web that I can share with you, that you can read in any number of ways, using RSS aggregators or using directly in your weblog, that you can repurpose and share with others. For those who are brave enough to humour me in my wild ramblings I've created a new tool for Radio UserLand that allows you to make and publish your own RSS trails. I call it my trailBlazer tool! It's in alpha right now but you're welcome to give it a whirl. Comments are particularly welcome
</quote> [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

(SOURCE:Scripting News)-'nuff said! Preach it! <QUOTE> Blogs are organized with items appearing in reverse chronological order (the most recent postings appear first). Typically they include links to other Web pages on the Internet. As an application, they look something like a combination of e-mail, Lotus Notes and a free-form discussion group. Sometimes blogs form rings, which connect sites with like topics together, so a reader can see different sides of an issue. Some important technology visionaries are already using blogs. Pioneering veterans such as Dan Bricklan, Mitch Kapor and Ray Ozzie have active sites. Given that these are the inventors of spreadsheets and groupware, that's an impressive list. For certain types of communications, especially those overloaded with e-mail and voice mail, blogs could be heaven-sent. Rather than attaching comments about a topic and 15 documents to one e-mail and then sending it to 35 people who might care, the information could be posted to a blog and appropriate parties could add relevant comments. With a blog collecting all the comments and information about a topic, it could be easier to focus on one topic at a time. It also could be helpful to projects, especially development projects. A developer could attract customers and put in feature changes before an application enters the beta stage. </QUOTE> [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

Library Stuff found "three new articles from Search Engine Watch about RSS and weblogs:

1. RSS: Your Gateway To News & Blog Content
2. Making An RSS Feed
3. Loving Each Other More: Search Engines & Blogs"
4. Plus, Steven reports that OCLC Research news now has an RSS Feed.

Scripting News overflowed with news of new RSS feeds today:

1. "Cisco Systems has 12 new RSS feeds. Latest News Releases, Content Networking, Partner, Routing, Security, Software, Standards, Storage Networking, Switching, Voice, Wireless, Features.
2. Apple has four new RSS feeds.
3. Fast Company has an RSS feed too."
4. Even Microsoft has hopped on the bandwagon!

Methinks I see a tipping point approaching....

[The Shifted Librarian]

I'm pretty happy with SlimBrowser so far.  It's got a nice tabbed interface and a zoom feature that is cool for pulling up documents on the projection screen in a meeting.  I was surprised at the number of web browser shells that have been built for IE.  All of the nabobs talking about how "closed" IE is had me fooled; in actuality it looks like there are far more innovative extensions available for IE than for Mozilla (or Phoenix or whatever).

~

Joe Bork has some great information on SxS assemblies, and points to Brad Abrams new public blog.  When I look at the list of "bloggers who happen to work at MSFT" I still am amazed that all of these people have blogs.  Within the past year, the number of bloggers who happen to work at MSFT has multiplied dramatically, and the representative quality of these bloggers is fantastic.  These people are forces of nature within MSFT, and collectively span most pieces of the business.  I have ready access to most of these people at work, but I still monitor them all with my news aggregator (RSS Bandit), because I'm finding at least one useful thing per day on their blogs that I never would have found otherwise.  Scanning co-workers public blogs to find information that helps me at work -- how ironic is that?

[Better Living Through Software]

Configuring Movable Type

A couple of years ago I predicted that Weblogs would emerge within the enterprise as a great way to manage project communication. I'm even more bullish on the concept today. If you're managing an IT project, you are by definition a communication hub. Running a project Weblog is a great way to collect, organize, and publish the documents and discussions that are the lifeblood of the project and to shape these raw materials into a coherent narrative. [Full story at InfoWorld.com] ... [Jon's Radio]

(SOURCE:"curious")-Good list of steps when trying to boostrap a blogging culture in a corporation.
<quote>
Change Management is all about getting people to do different things, or things differently. In business, the guru of the moment on this subject is John Kotter. In his book Leading Change he describes the eight steps to getting people to do different things or things differently, and they are irrefutable: 1. Establish a sense of urgency 2. Form a powerful guiding coalition 3. Create a vision 4. Communicate the vision 5. Empower others to act on the vision 6. Plan for and create short-term wins 7. Consolidate improvements 8. Institutionalize the change The underlying principle here is that, in business as in real life, you don't bring about sustained, meaningful change by edict. You need to persuade, enthuse, and engage people in sufficient numbers to change behaviours, laws or processes. If you want to do this in your business, buy Kotter's book, since that's what it's focused on.
</quote> [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

Tipped

"In the past week:

• Weblogs cover the war without mainstream restraints
• Reporting Reflects Anxiety
• Public's Appetite for Instant War News Fuels Spread of Web Logs
• On-the-spot blogs from war
• It's instant, but how much can we trust?
• A Medium Meets Its War
• Improved Tools Turn Journalists Into a Quick Strike Force
• War a Boon for News Sites, Blogs
• War reporting goes hi-tech
• Fascinating Web logs provide an unfiltered view of the war
• War coverage with personal touch emerges
• Blogs bring personal view of war
• Net news: live from the war zone
• War brings a surge of traffic on the Net
• Blah, blah, blogs
• US soldier "bloggers" report from war zone
• Straight or Slanted, 'Blogs' Add Spice to War Reports
• Web surfing for war junkies
• He's glad to admit he's a 'warblogger'
• Bloggers click on pulse of war news
• For war newshounds, nothing beats blogging

Etc.

Um...I think we're outta the closet." [weblogged News]

[The Shifted Librarian]

Steven Levy: Blogger's Delight. Will the war become the breakthrough Weblogers have been waiting for?

[The Doc Searls Weblog]

Very helpful discussions lately on weblogs in knowledge management contexts. Matt Mowers starts by taking me to task with the observation that:

I don't think that weblogs do anything and I'm increasingly of the opinion that the benefits that we are seeing at the moment are simply those of tapping into a particular type of personality, i.e. the enthusiastic early adopters who will do something with anything you throw at them.

So far I'm not seeing the kind of evidence that weblogging (in whatever form you name it) offers a particularly unique solution to the KM problem generally. Those solutions are going to have to come from us, in how we apply what is, after all, just another technology. Otherwise I predict in 12-18 months time, articles about "how weblogging has failed us."

In my opinion, we do have an opportunity to use the current wave of popularity for weblogging to get people to experiment with this new medium, try to change some working assumptions and the practices that go with them and move things on a little. [Curiouser and curiouser]

Stephen Downes, whose initial post started this round of discussion, continues by observing that:

I've been weblogging for the last five years. I've long since solved the input problem, the one Jim McGee talks about. But using this information is still a pain, despite a fair bit of thought and work around the problem of information retrieval from weblogs (what do you think my [Research] button is? Most weblog software hasn't even addressed the problem, much less solved it). [OL Daily]

So Downes has already discovered what I've only started to suspect after a little over 18 months of weblogging. We're still in the early, early stages of understanding how to help knowledge workers be more effective at doing knowledge work.

This is the essential perspective that I believe has been largely missing before the advent of the current round of tools, despite their limitations.

I've had a continuing conflicted opinion about the role of technology in making knowledge work more effective. I'm not as anti-technology as my friend and former colleague and co-author, Larry Prusak. There are times when he can sound like a total luddite and he's certainly a proponent of the social dimensions of knowledge management.

Many of the challenges of knowledge management are either created or aggravated by the information and technology that comprise so much of our organizational context. As technologies like email let us operate organizations of much greater scale and scope, they also create a demand for knowledge sharing across timezones and oceans that we haven't had to address before. And, as I've argued before, these technologies have also complicated our information and knowledge lives by making our work less visible. To the extent that technology has helped create our knowledge management problems, it also needs to be enlisted in solving those problems.

Weblogs by themselves don't do anything more than any other tool. Someone has to pick up the tool and put it to use. What is it about this particular category of tool that has persuaded someone like Stephen Downes to maintain and evolve a weblog over the past five years? All innovations have early adopters. Successful innovations build on the lessons learned from those early adopters and evolve the innovation in ways to make it more suited to the needs of those who follow on the adoption curve.

I heard a story the other day about a computer science class that assumed that mainframe computer systems were developed by scaling up from the "first" computers, which were the PCs developed in the late 70s and early 80s. I'm old enough to know that it worked the other way and to remember the rhetoric around PCs as the "great equalizer" that was going to shift power from faceless corporate data centers into the hands of the individual. Apple's marketing is still built around that myth.

Organizations took that general purpose, universal tool and shaped it toward their own specific needs. It's my contention that those needs were rooted in industrial models of organization and information processing and largely ignored those aspects that make knowledge work different.

Weblogs are one technology component of an important shift in perspective from the organization to the individual knowledge worker. For production work and for much routine information work this shift is irrelevant. It is the increasing percentage of of knowledge work relative to the total work of the organization that is changing the discussion.

Paolo Valdemarin has an excellent post today on the potential contribution of weblogs to building social capital inside (and across) organizations.

...Besides using "social capital" to measure countries' economic power, I believe that the same concept can be applied to any community. Applied to the weblogs community, this concept help explain the huge power that has been unleashed by blogging.

Reading other people's weblogs creates trust and efficiency, and it's an excellent base to build businesses and relationships.

This is interesting also for k-logging (or "business journalling"): if a country with a better community is richer, then also a company with a better developed trust and efficiency amoung its workers is going to be better off than others.

So, no, we are not wasting time writing on our weblogs, we're investing. [Paolo's Weblog]

Right now, a relative handful of early adopters are playing with and experimenting with this new tool of weblogs. It's a tool whose strengths are well matched to a changing shift in emphasis toward a greater role for knowledge workers in organizations.

There are always new tools and innovations promising to solve problems. I've been disapppointed by many and helped by a few. My intuitions and my experience tell me that weblogs fall in this second category. Those early adopters and leaders such as Stephen are already figuring out how to solve the next round of problems. But those are good problems to have. They are the problems that surface after you've decided to take personal responsibility for managing your own knowledge and learning. That may be an unnatural act for many inside organizations who would prefer that the world not change. I'm convinced it is changing and that most of us will have to start learning what Stephen has. It's not something that you can wait until everything is already figured out. You'll be better off the sooner you can get started.

[McGee's Musings]

(SOURCE:"marcc")-Right on Paolo! Investing the time in blogging results in better business in the near future due to increased networking and trust.
<quote>
Besides using "social capital" to measure countries' economic power, I belive that the same concept can be applied to any community. Applied to the weblogs community, this concept helps to explain the huge power that has been unleashed by blogging. Reading other people's weblogs creates trust and efficiency, and it's an excellent base to build businesses and relationships. This is interesting also for k-logging (or "business journalling"): if a country with a better community is richer, then it's also true that a company with better developed trust and efficiency amongst its workers is going to be better off than others. So, no, we are not wasting time writing on our weblogs, we're investing. [Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog]
</quote> [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

I got the de-duper working, so now blogToaster is being feed from both blo.gs and weblogs.com. As blo.gs is event driven rather then polling like I'm doing for weblogs.com, you should notice that you get toasted much quicker if the blog pings blo.gs [Simon Fell]

MSNBC Mar 22 2003 7:26PM ET [Moreover - XML and metadata news]

Jim nails it again. It's worth adopting weblogs sooner rather than later in order to get the benefits NOW (or sooner than your competition)!
<QUOTE>

Right now, a relative handful of early adopters are playing with and experimenting with this new tool of weblogs. It's a tool whose strengths are well matched to a changing shift in emphasis toward a greater role for knowledge workers in organizations.

There are always new tools and innovations promising to solve problems. I've been disapppointed by many and helped by a few. My intuitions and my experience tell me that weblogs fall in this second category. Those early adopters and leaders such as Stephen are already figuring out how to solve the next round of problems. But those are good problems to have. They are the problems that surface after you've decided to take personal responsibility for managing your own knowledge and learning. That may be an unnatural act for many inside organizations who would prefer that the world not change. I'm convinced it is changing and that most of us will have to start learning what Stephen has. It's not something that you can wait until everything is already figured out. You'll be better off the sooner you can get started.
</QUOTE>

[SOURCE:McGee's Musings] [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

ninemsn Mar 18 2003 7:30PM ET [Moreover - XML and metadata news]

(SOURCE:)-Yes! This is what we do! And convincing people that the effort of articulation is worth it will greatly accelerate blog adoption in organizations. <QUOTE> What k-loggers do, fundamentally, is narrate the work they do. In an ideal world, everyone does this all the time. The narrative is as useful to the author, who gains clarity through the effort of articulation, as it is to the reader. But in the real-world enterprise, most people don't tend to write these narratives naturally, and the audience is not large enough to inspire them to do it. There is, however, a certain kind of person who has a special incentive to tell the story of a project: the project managers </QUOTE> [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

Blogging. Thoughts on protocols, part 1 [Pushing the Envelope]

(SOURCE:"sjoerd")-This is great: now you can have a real time vanity search of your name available as an RSS feed.
e.g. http://www.feedster.com/rss.php?q=%22roland%20tanglao%22 is an RSS feed showing all posts with links to Roland Tanglao (I assume that putting a phrase in quotes causes the whole phrase to be searched for like Google. Couldn't find any docs confirming this so this is only a guess for now).
<quote>
Scott Johnson (maker of Feedster) mailed me to say that the search results already are available in RSS. It's the XML icon at the bottom of the result page. That's just great!
</quote> [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

There has got to be a catch! Ads, perhaps?
<quote>
Comprehensive site statistics for your web log...free.
</quote> [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

Bottom-up vs. top-down taxonomy is an old, ongoing KM struggle. But the emerging architecture of business process automation may help us cut that Gordian knot. XML documents, produced and consumed by Web services but also by people running a new generation of XML-savvy applications, will be the currency of the information economy. Richly structured, easily captured, and embedded in well-defined business contexts, they'll be a godsend for tools that mine knowledge from documents. Full story at InfoWorld.com

Here's Edwin Khodabakchian's take on InfoPath, an example of the kind of "XML-savvy application" I had in mind:

Infopath is a kind of Blog++: the manipulated data is rich and structured (expense report, travel request, hotel reservation, employee review), meaning that when the data is published back to the server can be processed by an array of services, processes, agents. [Collaxa's Take]

Exactly. Collaboration tools have to move heaven and earth to mine knowledge and infer social networks from email traffic. While it is notionally private, many email exchanges -- "here's the revised version with the changes we discussed" -- are really semi-public in scope. The same holds true for many voice interactions. ... [Jon's Radio]

I had an opportunity to listen to Mena and Ben Trott talk about Moveable Type last night courtesy of AKMA at Seabury Western. They sparked a good discussion around the role of weblogs in creating and sustaining community (two good live blogged accounts from AKMA and Gabe Bridger by way of Mike Marusin).

At least some of the power and energy behind the weblog phenomenon has to come from passion of the creators of weblog tools. All of the products supporting weblogs are labors of love; all grew out of individual efforts to scratch personal itches--Blogger, Moveable Type, Radio.

This is why weblogs will become important to knowledge management and knowledge sharing in organizations and why the big software players haven't been a significant factor yet.

Organizations have recognized that knowledge is an essential part of the value that they create. Knowledge management efforts on the other hand have largely been a disappointment because they have tried to force knowledge into a product metaphor; trying to force what is fundamentally a product of craft into an industrial model of reusable parts (see knowledge work as craft work).

Discussions about knowledge management in organizations always raise the issue of sharing with the argument that people will be reluctant to share out of fear that their efforts will be appropriated by others. This is rooted in a industrial product metaphor of knowledge. See knowledge work as craft, however, and the sharing issue dissolves. Craft workers exist to share the fruits of their creating. A true knowledge craft product embodies something of the soul and personality of its creator. You share it with others not so they can copy it but so that they can find inspiration in using it in their own craft.

Weblogs hold so much promise in the organizational realm precisely because they amplify this connection between craft and creator. Your record is there to be seen and to be shared.

This is also why weblogs are so confusing in the organizational realm. You have to move beyond the notion of reusable and reproducible product as the putative goal.

I had a conversation with Alan Kay a while back about Smalltalk and object-oriented programming that I now finally think I understand (conversations with Alan can be that way for those of us who are mere mortals). He was disappointed that the early commercialization efforts around Smalltalk and OO emphasized the idea of reuse. His goal had always been (and still is, take a look at Squeak and SqueakLand) to make it possible for developers to express what they were trying to do faster and more effectively. He was trying to make computers a medium for expressing certain kinds of thinking.

Weblogs accomplish something similar for knowledge workers. They lower the barriers to sharing ideas far enough that it becomes possible for nearly all of us to do so. Bring that inside organizations and you have a powerful tool for being effective as opposed to merely productive. Scary to the established order? Sure. But if value does truly depend on how well and how fast organizations can create and share new knowledge, then the winners will emerge from those who commit to making it work.

[McGee's Musings]