Well in the last couple of days I have been working hard on the liveTopics 1.0 release. It's so close I can almost feel it. We're testing and hopefully will have the kinks worked out in the next couple of days then I can finally get this sucka out the door.
Also I'm really besotted with TrackBack but haven't seen it work the way I would like yet. So I've rolled a TrackBack server in Frontier that comes with a Radio client. The two communicate with a simple XML-RPC interface that would allow any klogging system to join in.
At the moment the Radio client automatically harvests each posting for links (when you submit it) and automagically pings each one. The ping contains the permalink for the post, the Url of your weblog, the title of the post, your name & email address. But you can drop most of this information you don't want to pass it. I guess some people will also want fine-grained control over what they ping. That shouldn't be too hard.
Along with this are some macros to show your TrackBack information against each item.
At the moment the server is hosted on my laptop which isn't ideal but is good enough for testing. The next job is to find a better host and then look at adding a simple federation mechanism. That would allow lots of different people to provide TrackBack servers and share the results.
More on this later.
OWL Web Ontology Language Working Drafts Published. From W3C news releases: The Web Ontology Working Group has released three first Working Drafts. The Feature Synopsis, Abstract Syntax and Language Reference describe the OWL Web Ontology Language 1.0 and its subset OWL Lite. Automated tools can use common sets of terms called ontologies to power services such as more accurate Web search, intelligent software agents, and knowledge management. OWL is used to publish and share ontologies on the Web. Read about the W3C Semantic Web Activity. [ia/ - news for information architects]
» Interesting stuff. I shall have to see how this relates to Topic Mapping and XTM. My guess is that OWL is a layer above XTM and is used for providing the contours of the topic map.
Envisioning projects a la klog?
How can weblogs contribute to project visualization?
Annotation.
- Associate each project post with one or more tasks, issues, milestones, and deliverables on a given project.
- Enable a few extra attributes for a post: Red/Yellow/Green Priority (U.S. cultural bias).
- Create a view into a team's weblog posts organized by the work breakdown structure, another by priority
PM is about the conversation more than formal modeling. It is how we come to appreciate project dreams and know project reality. We discover our colleagues' capabilities and limits. We negotiate commitments. We make the thousand mid-course corrections to the project plan. My project communication templates help you script some of those conversations.
But conversation is narrative and auditory. How do we get the best characteristics of project conversation into visual media? Into electronic visual media?
Thanks to experience designer Diego Lafuento for the Tufte pointer.
[aka design]
[a klog apart] [Ron Lusk: Ron's K-Logs]
» This is an interesting idea which I need to think about some more.
The idea of klogs integrating with other systems already has me interested and this adds a new dimension.
This inspires another post.
In order for klogging to be successfully I think it is going to have to come to an understanding with Big-KM.
Example: BigCo has invested half a million dollars in a big knowledge management system for their world-wide operations. This kind of investment can become a lode-stone around any other systems neck. For klogging to thrive here it is going to have to integrate.
Here's one idea I have for how this could work.
- Extend Big-KM System-X so that it can aggregate RSS feeds like Radio, MT and others do now.
- Extend your klogging software to allow per-post meta data. (liveTopics does this for Radio)
- For each project in System-X define a set of topics that will act as trigger phrases for that project
- Get the kloggers to use those topics when they want to involve a post in a particular project
- Now subscribe System-X to every klog in the organization and watch as it indexes and archives all that information. Each project grabbing only those postings that are appropriate (by use of the trigger phrases)
- This means that the klogs add value to the big-KM system. Suddenly it doesn't just have the dry dusty project documention, but all the live vibrant stuff that people are really doing!
- Now extend System-X to generate a per-project RSS feed.
- If I am on the project I can subscribe to this feed. Now instead of receiving email from System-X or having to go to an arbitrary web page, I get all the "official" project stuff (new documents, forms etc...) delivered in my RSS stream.
Closing the loop between the big-KM and the klog so that they both add value to each other.
Just an idea....
