Al Macintyre: Brain to Brain

Sun, 08 Dec 2002 07:24:55 GMT

Open letter from Al Macintyre to Florian and other Weblogger newcomers.

Welcome to an exciting learning curve that can consume you with a desire to learn all sorts of neat things. You shared some questions whose answers inevitably may lead to more questions. Many thousands of other webloggers have been down this path ahead of you, so there is much you can learn by lurking in the sub-communities of webloggers who are a self-help tech support and mutual help society of people sharing tips how best to progress down the path of learning how best to use this relatively new technology.

If you have already selected a particular Blog Software, then you need to join the sub-communities of users familiar with the nuances of that particular Type. Be sure to check out directories of webloggers by category of professional interest ... academia, knowledge management, librarians, journalists, and so forth, because you can get great insights from seeing what is posted to the weblogs of people whose interests are similar to yours. If your interest is in finding weblogs by people who share your hobby interests (one of mine is science fiction books and games), your best route to your peers is via the link services and search engines.

If you know what blogging is all about, but you can't decide what software is best for your needs, check out my do-it-yourself Consumer Reports collection of perspectives comparing what all the different blog software vendors have to offer. If you have no idea what blogging is, or having trouble wrapping your mind around some of the concepts, perhaps you ought to get one of the Blog Books.

Sat, 07 Dec 2002 20:00:36 GMT

[Seb's Open Research] QUOTE

Essential questions about blogging.. Newcomer Florian asks six probing questions, trying to get to the essence of weblogging. Good answers to all of these would go a long way towards building a decent blogging FAQ. UNQUOTE [Seb's Open Research]

[Florian] Weblogging Questions:

1.) why? why do we write? what are the motivations to publish all that is published?
2.) and for whom? who is the audience? who -exactly- are weblogs created for?
3.) are they, can they be an alternative source for news?
4.) how do you find your way around? how do you NOT get lost in the matrix of personal entries and worlds? or is that the point?
5.) what role does weblogging play in your life? how much time do you spend updating your own weblog?
6.) is there a community of webloggers? and what are the "rules"?

Al Macintyre takes a stab at some answers:

1.) why? why do we write? what are the motivations to publish all that is published?

Different strokes for different folks.
In my case, I enjoy writing, speculating, analysing, discussing.
Then some people claim to enjoy my output. This motivates me to try to improve the quality of
- my selection (what I chose to write about) and
- my presentation (clarity of my arguements and beliefs explanations).

2.) and for whom? who is the audience? who -exactly- are weblogs created for?

The communities are evolving. You can perhaps understand better if you can answer the question why we join and participate in this or that Internet Discussion Group but not some other one that has very similar content and people opinions. Or how about friends of friends we trade e-mail with ... people who are not relatives, neighbors, school chums, co-workers, never were in same social group, but we are fast friends with them on the Internet. I took a vacation in Colorado to meet someone I knew only on the Internet, and also to have a vacation in Colorado the week before me at IBM University in the region.

3.) are they, can they be an alternative source for news?

This is a reliability / reputation topic. Some are not reliable sources for news. Some are. The difference is in the character of the writer, our skills at being a word smith, using the software, and other topics I have previously addressed in my Brain to Brain Inter-personal communications Category.
Consider our e-mail contacts who tend to forward a lot of garbage along with the good stuff. It seems to me that some e-friends believe 100% at face value what they hear on the Internet, scams along with it. I have talked with some and learned that they agree with me that 99.999% of the forwarded info about viruses and geopolitics and ete. are fraudulent but they forward all just in case this latest is the 0.001% that is true, and I can't get them to see that the huge volume of false info about scams and urban legends and stuff rooted in racism and so forth is totally drowning out the good stuff in the e-mail. People who cannot distinquish fact from fantasy or why we should make an effort not to pass on the fantasy, they are not reliable sources for news. Well we can have the same people problem in any medium of expression.

4.) how do you find your way around? how do you NOT get lost in the matrix of personal entries and worlds? or is that the point?

This is related to the learning curve of weblogging.
First we learn how to post the stuff to our weblogs.
Then we learn how to work news agregation linking.
Along the way we see the rules of etiquette that apply here to givng proper credit to whoever was the originator of some text, and notifying people that we used their stuff.
Then as we explore referers (who is using OUR stuff) and search engine nuances, we figure out how to find the news sources that we are personally going to be most interested in.
And there is always the Knowledge Management Challenge of how best to organize everything.

5.) what role does weblogging play in your life? how much time do you spend updating your own weblog?

Different people balance all kinds of hobbies and interests, depending on the tools available and the associated learning curves.
Some day we may see family webrings where photos of the kids are posted with dates not being dates when posted, but dates pointing at how old the kids were when these photos were taken, with some kind of scroll feature so we can rapidly flip through pictures of one young boy or girl as they get older, and the whole thing linked in a family tree so we can flip through pictures of relations, and grandparents dig out faded pictures ... here is what auntie this and cousin that looked like.
There is a weblog called Digging Up Dirt, or something like that, which is someone showing the progress of gardening, which in the western culture is one of the biggest family bobbies.
As for me, I am single, somewhat a loner, interested in a variety of intellectual pursuits, which I try to balance, but more computer opportunities mean less time reading novels, more TV channels means less time with ordinary videos, not having a game club around that is into the kind of stuff I like, means I spending less time on game simulation design. We try to fit weblogs into that mixture, and I guess it means less time on the Internet discussion lists for me. Our interests do not evolve, but jump from related area to area.

6.) is there a community of webloggers? and what are the "rules"?

Yes, but it is very disorganized, almost anarchistic, with various webloggers struggling in concert to do Knowledge Management out of the chaos.
There are "rules" but I see them helter skelter, and have copied links to some that I have seen. They are related to concepts of behaving towards our fellow humans in a civilized manner, similar to in e-mail where we are expected to quote in context, not clog up our e-mails with extraneous bandwidth, watch out for the integrity of our fellow computer users systems, help each other out, similar to the open source mentality.

Sat, 07 Dec 2002 19:28:11 GMT

25 Theses of Information Architecture.

From Scott Adams' Handheld Instructional Technology Weblog:

information exists only in communities of meaning

People need information.
More importantly, people need the right information at the right time.
Without human intervention, information devolves into entropy and chaos.
The Internet has changed how we live with information. It has made ubiquitous the once rare entity: the shared information environment.
Shaping information to be relevant and timely requires specialized human work. Doing so for a globally shared environment that is itself made of information is a relatively new kind of specialized human work.
This work is both a science and an art.
This work is an act of architecture: the structuring of raw information into shared information environments with useful, navigable form that resists entropy and reduces confusion.
This is a new kind of architecture that designs structures of information rather than of bricks, wood, plastic and stone.
People live and work in these structures, just as they live and work in their homes, offices, factories and malls. These places are not virtual: they are as real as our own minds.
Many people spend most of their waking hours in these spaces. As the numbers of physical workers decline and knowledge workers increase, more and more people will live, work, share, collaborate, learn and play in these environments for more and more of their lives.
There is already too much information for us to comprehend easily. And each day there will only be more of it, not less. Inexorably, information drowns in its own mass. It needs to breathe, and the air it needs is relevance.
One goal of information architecture is to shape information into an environment that allows users to create, manage and share its very substance in a framework that provides semantic relevance.
Another goal of information architecture is to shape the environment to enable users to better communicate, collaborate and experience one another.
The latter goal is more fundamental than the former: information exists only in communities of meaning. Without other people, information no longer has context, and no longer informs. It becomes mere data, less than dust.
Therefore, information architecture is about people first, and technology second.
All people have a right to know where they are and where they are going and how to get what they need. People naturally seek places that provide these essential needs. Any environment that ignores this natural law will attract and retain fewer people.
The interface is a window to information. Even the best interface is only as good as the shape of the information behind it. (The converse is also true: even the most comprehensively shaped information is only as useful as its interface. For this reason, interface design and information architecture are mutually dependent.)
Just as the Copernican revolution changed the paradigm for more than astronomy, the Internet has changed our paradigm for more than just technology. We now expect all information environments to be as accessible, as immediate, and as total.
Just because information architecture happens mostly on the Internet today, it doesn't mean that will be the case tomorrow.
Information architecture accomplishes its task with whatever tools necessary.
These tools are being fashioned by many people, including information scientists, artists, librarians, designers, anthropologists, architects, writers, engineers, programmers & philosophers. They all bring different perspectives, and they all add flavor to the stew. They are all necessary.
These tools come in many forms and methods, including controlled vocabularies, mental modeling, brainstorming, ethnography, thesauri, human-computer interaction, and others. Some tools are very old, and some are very new. Most are still waiting to be invented.
Information architecture acknowledges that this practice is bigger than any single methodology, tool or perspective.
Information architecture is first an act, then a practice, then a discipline.
Sharing the practice grows the discipline, and makes it stronger.

— Andrew Hinton

[Ross Mayfield's Weblog]

Fri, 06 Dec 2002 19:14:41 GMT

Regarding my recent post on 12 roles of Knowledge Management (KM) workers, [Matthew Eberle Library Techlog] prefers Knowledge Renegade, but I fail to see the definition, while [Patrick O'Beirne] points me to "A knowledge worker is anyone who knows more about their work than their boss.", without volunteering which kind of KM worker this is, from [Monster Learning KM Quiz] so I may as well use Patrick's definition for Matthew's role.

Wed, 27 Nov 2002 22:04:23 GMT

Categorizing Blogs.

A number of great people in the Ryze/Blog tribe have suggested breaking down the blogroll into categories of blogs. Because the list is growing, categorization is necessary to continue to be a useful resource. However, because membership is dynamic so must be the categories and I don't want the categories to be arbitrary.

So I created a little survey. And its here before I spam all the tribe members.

The survey takes about 1 minute: Click here to take survey
Additional feedback would be appreciated:

Here are the initial categories:

Business blogs
KM blogs (Klogs)
Marketing Blogs
Information Technology Blogs
Web Design Blogs
Biotechnology Blogs
International Blogs
Writing Blogs
Political Blogs
Personal Blogs
Collaborative Blogs
Other

[Ross Mayfield's Weblog]

You might want to link yourself to the Ryze Blogger Tribe, identify friends there, say hello to some guest books, perhaps mention what aspect of our weblogs you most like, then use message discussion board of blogger tribe to discuss how we might best use this other medium.

Mon, 25 Nov 2002 21:29:24 GMT

Picture of Al Macintyre posted to Ryze, for those of you who are interested in what I look like. This was taken in 1998, me at my PC hutch before the PC upgrade, and before my recent furniture alterations, but it is a fiar representation. I use the milk cartons to store papers because you can stack them, and see through the sides what in there, much better than the cartons that computer paper comes in.

Sun, 24 Nov 2002 21:07:13 GMT

Question: Is there a directory out there of where people are doing good writing about Knowledge Management?

Partial Answer: Several people have attempted this, resulting in Fragmented Indexes, which collectively get us to a lot of interesting stuff on KM.

Logically and ultimately we might expect to find a comprehensive directory at the Blogs and Bloggers Tribe organized by Ross Mayfield. (A Tribe is a business networking community hosted by www.Ryze.com) Thanks to Andrea Janssen of http://fliegenvonferne.blogspot.com for introducing me to this place.

But while we are waiting, see:
http://www.rklau.com/tins/ left column other blogs of note by category, with one list for KM
Phil Wolff http://dijest.editthispage.com/klogs/ left side ... his stuff can be read in your choice of seven languages
http://www.mcgeesmusings.net/index.html right column blogrolls have a knowledge category
David Gurteen has what he calls KM News Aggregation page http://www.gurteen.com/gurteen/gurteen.nsf/0/D202075EFE9D8E1B80256BF40034ECE8/
Seb surely has one http://www2.iro.umontreal.ca/~paquetse/cgi-bin/om.cgi?Weblogs_By_Profession but http://www2.iro.umontreal.ca/~paquetse/cgi-bin/om.cgi?KMPings is almost empty when I looked there
KLOGS discussion group http://groups.yahoo.com/group/klogs/

When I come across cool KM ideas I often put them in my Brain to Brain Category, but it is scattered throughout, not in any directory format, while I try to post FAQ discoveries to dws via my e Radio Ideas. I also have a lot of links to weblog directories, some of which are KM releated, in my Blog Software Perspectives and Search Engine Tips.

Sun, 24 Nov 2002 06:52:57 GMT

[Dane Carlson] QUOTE Common Errors in English: "abject, about, absorbtion, accede/exceed, accent marks, access, accessory, accept/except, accidently, acronyms and apostrophes, actual fact/actually, adapt/adopt, adultry, advance/advanced, adverse/averse, advice/advise, adviser/advisor, affect/effect, agreeance/agreement, ahold/hold, ain't, altogether/ all together, all, all goes well/augurs well, alliterate/illiterate, alls, allude/elude, allude/refer, allusion/illusion, alot, almost, alright, altar/alter, alterior, alternate/alternative, alumnus/alumni, amature, ambiguous/ambivalent, ambivalent/indifferent, American, amoral/immoral, amount/number, an historic..." UNQUOTE [Dane Carlson]

Obviously when I upgrade my browser, I need grammar checking for keying here, not just a spell checker, although this focuses more on errors in usage than errors in grammar.

Thankyou Professor Brians for sharing (this is not a complete list of his resources, but I doubt I will find time to explore them all):

Common Errors in English

FAQ on what IS an Error in English

Electronic Research Publications

Links to website rating services (bottom of home page)

Literal Answers to Rhetorical Questions

Nuke Pop Nuclear War Imagery in Popular Culture

Science Fiction-Related Materials

Searchable Bibliographies and Discographies

Web Resources for the Study of English

World Civilizations Resources for Teachers

Sat, 23 Nov 2002 22:17:27 GMT

There's lots of stuff I mean to do to improve my weblog some day, and I often introspective reviewing cool ideas. From my home site upper left corner link to Organica which has found some sites that link to me, and how recently. This is a somewhat different perspective than Referers, and obviously Organica does not have the whole picture. I was checking those links whose last seen column was recent, and curious what they interested in, linking about (not always obvious) and I came across this gem (original source in German).

David Skyrme authored this great piece, identifying 12 kinds of Knowledge Workers QUOTE

"The expert - you have expertise in a domain of knowledge or a particular skill. You enjoy honing your knowledge and exercising your core skills. You are the recognized "expert" and stay with your choosen knowledge domain over many years.

Knowledge analyst - you love assimilating knowledge from many sources. You have many of the attributes of the expert (but are perhaps not as self-opinionated or self-promotionalist) and also of the packager. Others respect your views and like your 'rational' knowledge to support their arguments.

Knowledge leader - you have a broad area of knowledge and build bridges between knowledge (and people) in different domains. You are a generalist, not a specialist. You see the big picture and how knowledge supports organizational objective. You're the future CKO or CEO.

Knowledge networker - you are a knowledge broker and connector. You connect people to people and people to knowledge. A hybrid of expertise and leadership - you're scope is not too broad and you have a large address book. You don't know all the answers yourself, but you know a person who does.

Knowledge custodian - you like everything to be in its proper place. You love classifying knowledge and organizing content into taxonomies. You get upset if knowledge renegades upset the system. You're probably the knowledge centre manager.

Knowledge creator - you're an ideas person. Always thinking of new things to do, you never seem to have time to see them through to implementation. Your thinking goes off in several directions but you do come up with breakthrough ideas and innovative approaches.

Knowledge entrepreneur - you may not have the best ideas yourself, but you do recognize those that have potential. You are the bridge between the creator and the packager. You have a good story to tell and are committed to making a difference.

Knowledge packager - if you didn't do knowledge work you would probably be an engineer or mechanic. You assemble all the knowledge components to make something worthwhile. You help knowledge creators realize their dreams.

Knowledge visualizer - you like pictures, so you get away from those boring bulleted Powerpoint slide shows. You make your points in images, diagrams and perhaps even cartoons and music.

Knowledge activist - you are committed to a cause and will marshal the knowledge you need to support your case. You can also be a knowledge maverick, questioning the status quo and raising doubts in others about the efficacy of their hard-won knowledge. Although an irritant to the powers that be, it is often you who initiates change.

Knowledge seeker - ever curious, you are always asking "why" and seeking new knowledge. Even after you retire, you will go on knowledge delivery cruises to new exotic locations. The pursuit of knowledge for your personal fulfilment is your key driver. You couldn't care less if it's useful to others or not, but are always willing to share it enthusiastically.

Storyteller - you cut into the bullshit and encapsulate knowledge into highly memorable stories. You have a strong imagination and look for analogies and metaphors. The fact that storytelling is now a tool for corporate knowledge management means that you should have a bright career ahead - even if you did get turned down for the Edinburgh Festival fringe!"

UNQUOTE

I heard from Andrea Janssen who writes http://fliegenvonferne.blogspot.com and educated me as to the original source that was in German so it was non-obvious to me. QUOTE

The name of the writer in the German preceding text. This is a quote from David Skyrme's latest I3-Update which I am subscribed to. It ought to appear here soon: http://www.skyrme.com/updates/latest.htm but hasn't been put up yet. I was quite intrigued with the text and had to post it, but would feel better if you credited David in your text. UNQUOTE

Andrea goes on to inform me that "Martin Roell and I will be starting an English languaguage collaborative blog in a couple of weeks."

Here's a link on who Andrea Janssen is and what she's into - a whole lot more than Knowledge Management Consultant. I need to do a page like this about myself some time.

Sat, 23 Nov 2002 20:55:05 GMT

Earthweb on weblog software for IT managers. [Scripting News]

This article reviews what we webloggers already know, and shares some ideas worth further exploration. It also introduces me to the wicki, group editing of a shared document. I am a bit nervous about this concept ... I am accustomed to shared programs in which it is clearly tracked which programmer made which changes for which reasons, where we have good consistent programming discipline standards.

Currently I send e-mail to selected co-worker users every few days. I select recipients based on nature of content situation. Perhaps some of this sort of thing belongs on a weblog, with comments, and IT department subscribing to the comments, which might say YES this is a high priority to resolve, or NO there is some nuance you were not aware of. However, rather than comments, I am more comfortable with the Manila group discussion format, that makes it easy for people to comment on other people comments, aside from the original author of a thread.

I have identified a problem with some garbage in one of our files. It is not doing dirt to the integrity of our corporate data base, but could contribute to invalid results for people doing queries over the data in that file. Here is specificity of the problem, as I interpret it. I seek permission to delete these records.
We did have some costs that were negative and I fixed them. I believe it is valid to have a negative quantity transaction, or temporarily negative on-hand due to transactions posted out of sequence. I do not believe it is valid for the value of something to be negatively priced.
The ERP has provisions to delete items, customers, vendors, etc. when we no longer need them. I have discovered that unfortunately, history on those deletions do not go away, so that when we re-issue an item, customer, vendor, etc. for a new entity, it comes attached to history on the unrelated prior usage. I am now inventorying contents of history files using control numbers that are no longer in our system, for the purpose of working towards purging these orphans. (Orphans are child records with no parents, where widows are parent records with no children.) I trust my co-workers concur with my efforts.
Some Help Desk Challenge we were working on has come to the point that some new or revised software is ready for testing. Here is how to conduct such a test. Here is how to evaluate and report the results of the tests.
Common questions to Help Desk => FAQ on how to accomplish standard activities that newcomers may need to know, especially if they come to us from a different Computer Operating System environment which probably did things other than what we are accustomed to.

Sat, 23 Nov 2002 20:30:10 GMT

[Seb's Open Research] QUOTE

BlogChannels for loosely joining webloggers?.

Here's a little something I wrote in reply to High Context editor David Gammel's introduction to the group-forming community.

"I'd like to mention one of David's initiatives that he hasn't mentioned in his intro but is in my opinion highly relevant as a practical illustration of blog-based group-forming. David has set up the KMPings service.

What KMPings does is enable webloggers with an interest in knowledge management to combine teasers for selected blog posts from their personal blog. The result is another, collective blog that points to various posts by participants. (If this sounds abstract, just click the link and you'll understand right away.) KMPings has enabled the formation of a loosely coupled community of KM bloggers. I'm subscribed to this blog and it has helped me discover a few new webloggers who share my interest in knowledge management.

One way to describe what KMPings does is to say that it provides a shared channel for a particular area of interest. It was a direct inspiration for my proposal of ridiculously easy (blog-enabled) group forming. My idea is to automate what David has done and extend it to any topic anyone can dream up.

Given such a system, if I felt like it, I could almost instantly set up a "MontrealPings" blog channel, or a "OrigamicArchitecturePings" blog channel, or what have you, and start putting relevant posts at those channels. Other interested webloggers could subscribe (via RSS) to such channels and could ping them whenever they write something that relates to the topic at hand that they wish to share with the community of subscribers.

Perhaps a better name for that idea would be just that, BlogChannels - what do you think?"

There's a dual way to look at blog channels. They provide a sociality-driven incentive for bloggers to apply metadata tags to their posts. By tagging X on a post you're in effect hanging out a bit with the X crowd. "Metadata has never been more fun!"

Well, that's perhaps an exaggeration, but I'm personally much more interested in metadata that means something for people other than me. This is what I find most interesting in this scheme: metadata is shared - that's built into the design. The meaning of the shared term takes shape through the efforts of several people. Contrast this to what currently happens with individual blog categories, where we often have a hard time making sense of each other's categories.

UNQUOTE [Seb's Open Research]

Sat, 23 Nov 2002 07:22:30 GMT

Topic Maps: CMS is only the beginning.

Topic maps in content management. Lars Marius Garshol pointed me to his very interesting article on topic maps and content management. This talks about using an Integrated Topic Management System (ITMS) to provide a much more powerful management interface to the normal... [Column Two via Curiouser and curiouser!]

Also read Matt's further thoughts on topic maps.

[Seb's Open Research]

Well Al likes the World Map of where the Blogs are from MSN, except I want the zoom to be able to take me to individual USA states, and perhaps use a system like the TV Weather Channel with color layouts coded for type of content, which we can filter in and out for what we want to see.

Sat, 23 Nov 2002 07:15:36 GMT

[Seb's Open Research] QUOTING [group-forming: user blogs]

Where's the fertile soil for group-forming?. Presumably, different communities that already exist in society differ in their potential to spawn new groups. What are the already existing communities where a group-forming system would be likely to get a good amount of traction?

It seems fairly clear from our previous discussions that some sort of label or description is needed for a group to come together. In the case of meetup.com, for instance, labels are pretty simple, having two facets: geographic location and a label referring to an interest (which can be pretty much anything - examples: "Radiohead", "homeschooling", "philosophy" ...)

UNQUOTE [group-forming: user blogs] via [Seb's Open Research]

This ties into my recent Blog Census posts seeking a Preferences Page where people can create a list of topics they interested in being indexed on, by the Blog Directories. See my e-Radio Ideas Category for Mon Nov 18, Fri Nov 22, and Home page this weekend.

While this focus is on group forming from the group end, my interest is more on group finding from the perspective of someone having certain interests & wondering what members of theoretical group are out there, and doing a better job of seeing what traffic there is to various sites, including our own, and being able to prioritize what I most want to read out of the wealth of possibilities out there.

Sat, 23 Nov 2002 07:10:01 GMT

[Seb's Open Research] QUOTING [a klog apart]

28183 blogs in the BlogStreet directory. I wonder how fast it is growing.

Spidering for blogrolls and rss, BlogStreet generates my Blog Back Report (blogs linking to mine) and a Blog Neighbourhood Analysis (blogs with similar blogrolls). RSS Discovery shows my rss feed in clean html. The blogspace search feature may replace DayPop a little bit. UNQUOTE [a klog apart]

Blogstreet has now indexed more than twice as many blogs as the blogging ecosystem.

UNQUOTE [Seb's Open Research]

I saw similar stuff in more than one place and wondered who was quoting who.

Check the comments on the original post at [a klog apart]: Blogstreet has 60,000 blogs in their data base (we consumers would like to see this number some place on their site as it grows), but their automated service filters out junk acording to a criteria test.

Another post laments that most bloggers are unaware of what directories are out there, so they do not register there. Then a directory gets popular, people find out about it, they register there.

The moral of this tale is that the directories, like search engines, need to be proactive in seeking out what blogs exist that might be worth adding to their link collections.

Sat, 23 Nov 2002 07:04:32 GMT

Several folks seem to be looking at similar data recently:

How many bloggers are really out there? How can we find out?
Can we correlate true population with what's in the directories?
How do we do a better job of connecting to people who are linking to us, and writing similar content topics?

[a klog apart] QUOTE

Why do weblog directories have so few entries?.

28,183 blogs in the BlogStreet directory. I wonder how fast it is growing

Spidering for blogrolls and RSS, BlogStreet generates my Blog Back Report (blogs linking to mine) and a Blog Neighbourhood Analysis (blogs with similar blogrolls). RSS Discovery shows my rss feed in clean html. The blogspace search feature may replace DayPop a little bit.

The Radio universe has at least 50K users, and there are probably more than 500K bloggers. How many are in Blogdex or the other community sites?

UNQUOTE [a klog apart]

Thu, 21 Nov 2002 20:19:22 GMT

Rick Klau posted an article Nov 11 on Weblogs and Leaky Pipes, an idea Nov 8 from Ross Mayfield. We all know how much spam is in e-mail, which I have written about in past posts on my weblog, but Jon Udell has done the best explanation that I have seen so far, about how blogging is superior to e-mail for group discussions, and Ross has a post Oct 16 that shows that spam may drive e-mail out of business. Incidentally, l like how Ross has created titles to his posts that we can access via a chart down the side.

Consider the potential productivity of knowledge management, contextual links, bringing in new people to an on-going discussion, low overhead of unwanted socially hostile people, computer viruses.

Suppose you get questions by e-mail related to your business. Consider placing your answers in FAQ format in a weblog, then when replying by e-mail, include url link to the FAQ. You will find that new questions are very similar to old questions, so tinker with the text in the old question so that you can use the same url for the next person. Over time, the people who are asking questions will use the FAQ to not need to ask so much, might subscribe to new posts to your FAQ category, co-workers might also share the same answers to recurring questions. Think multi-author with search engine support.

Mon, 18 Nov 2002 07:10:49 GMT

Thanks to me checking my referers from time to time, I am finding many more links I want to check out than are humanly possible to do so.

Lots of links to Weblogs in Education from Edublogs by Sarah, and her thoughts on using weblogs as a writing / content / synthesis / collaboration Tool by Teachers. McGee has lots of great essays on Knowledge Management that includes Blogs in Education. Also check out my links from Blog Books and Blog Software stories.

Sébastien Paquet's weblog is Seb's Open Research & his great article, with an immense volume of heavy duty links for us to explore, should be occasionally reviewed on weblogs role in rise of personal knowledge publishing. Seb's Weblogs by Profession is a directory of professions active in weblogging, in which for many, but not all, he has links to directories for each of the professions that he lists.

Educators and (old) Teachnology
Journalists - I have found that Journalists sometimes do a great job of explaining technical stuff, when they themselves are also using that technology.
Knowledge Management people
Lots more

Sun, 17 Nov 2002 21:10:47 GMT

[McGee's Musings] from [Boing Boing Blog] QUOTE

Gar's Tips on Sucks-Less Writing. My pal Gareth Branwyn was and is a great mentor to me. When I started bOING bOING (the print zine) in the late 1980s, he helped me with my writing immensely. Now he has posted a wonderful tip sheet at Street Tech, called "Gar's Tips on Sucks-Less Writing." Thanks for sharing your secrets, Gar! Link Discuss [Boing Boing Blog]

A great collection of tips for writing for any medium. This particular tip hits way too close to home. When I was writing my first book, I had an editor who typically started reading my chapter drafts at the top of page three. That's where I would finally get going. Today I'm getting closer to the first few grafs. UNQUOTE [McGee's Musings]

This advice is a bit opposite to what I recently been getting about my own efforts from some other people. What people want from me, that I had not been doing in the past, is an abstract introductory paragraph summary of what the following stuff is all about, then at the very end a bottom line summary of conclusions. I suspect that people who are real good writers can take people to the meat of their material without needing the kind of abstract round up that I need.

Sun, 17 Nov 2002 21:00:50 GMT

McGee has created a dynamite essay on categorizing knowledge that is just too large for my Radio editor to handle me taking out what I did not want to repeat. I suggest you go read the whole thing, then perhaps we will all link to it with our comments.

Wed, 06 Nov 2002 19:16:39 GMT

[kuro5hin.org] has started a discussion in which the comments are worth studying because of lots of great links.

Common Errors in English. When writing the most cut and dry articles everyday, one must express that the more importantly exact same phrases as to not encounter dilemmas. Ain't it a shame that you can't find a guide while surfing the internet to help with the problem of grammatical errors? UNQUOTE by Frank Crist at [kuro5hin.org]

The usage guide link above is to something compiled by Paul Brians, Professor of English at Washington State University in Pullman, WA.
Apostrophe Guide
bartleby.com
Economist Style Guide.
Greenrd's Law: Every post disparaging someone else's spelling or grammar, or lauding one's own spelling or grammar, will inevitably contain a spelling or grammatical error.
Jack Lynch's Guide to Grammar and Style
Merriam-Webster Dictionary of Usage and Style
Plurals Guide
Strunk and White's The Elements of Style

Tue, 05 Nov 2002 22:32:08 GMT

[Tomalak's Realm]: Scott Berkun's uiweb.com: QUOTE Top Reasons why ease of use doesn't happen on engineering projects. In reviewing all the email I've received at this website, and the experiences I've had teaching and consulting, I've tried to catalog the different reasons why projects didn't result in easy to use designs. UNQUOTE [Tomalak's Realm]

This is great. The reasons each come with discussion of how to fix the problem.

Ease of use was not stated as an explicit project goal.

Any development project must have clearly defined goals that team leaders agree to, one of which ought to be ease of use for end-users of the product, combined with a set of trade-offs. If we cannot do everything desired (schedule slips), how important is this goal?

Ease of use was not defined in actionable terms.

Designers tend to focus on that which is clearly defined, such as features, performance metrics, defect rates, time schedule, which means that user friendliness can get ignored if it does not also have spelled out what is needed to satisfy the end users. It is critical to spell out what it is that is being lost if someone decides to cut it out.
Before the project specifications are finalized, the team leader needs to make sure customer needs have been properly researched.

Decision makers don't see the trade-offs.

An element of quality is the productivity of the end users of the product.
The needs of end users, to efficiently perform the product functions, must be researched, before the product specifications are completed.
For many end users, they prefer something that is easy and efficient to use, than something that is robust and never crashes. Most of us want both, but as time and budget run out, typically some goals are sacrificed, so it is important up front to have a set of priorities which goal to cut first / last.

Unseen impact on ease of use on system / code architecture.

Think prototyping and error messages.
Think User Interface mapping out very early in the overall design.

Confusion over how to use customer data.

Data does not solve problems, people do.
Thus it is critical that the data not be misinterpreted or misused.

Confusion over who the customer is (user vs. customer vs. client).

The person who will be using the product is often not the same as the person who pays the development bills.
Document the needs of both, and how conflicts in expectations to be resolved.
You don't want to be communicating to users in geeky jargon, but in terms of business goals.

Technical focus dominates the view of the project.

Team leader needs to balance the various perspectives.

Diffusion of design authority (too many cooks).

Best way to manage this is to have one person, or a small number, define vision for the project.
Then other people design their aspects of the big picture, within the shared vision.

Feature based design vs. scenario / task based design.

The primary value of software is not in its repetoire of features and capabilities, but rather in the ability of its users to complete the tasks for which they aquired this computer product.
It is not good enough to have features somewhere within the package that can get the job done.
End Users need easy navigation to getting the job done, whatever the job might be.
Having a usability engineer in the quality assurance testing staff is essential.

No connection made between business goals and ease of use.

If the project specifications and team leadership fail to make clear how important ease of use is to overall sucess of the project, then this aspect is one of the first things to be cut, and one of the main reasons why projects fail at many corporations, after they have invested millions of dollars into some conversion.

General Incompetence.

Teams need to be led by good examples, to avoid getting dysfunctional teams.
The worst kind of bad decision making is where something is not communicated until it is too late to fix.

The wrong people are involved.

The right people are those who are able to effectively balance several key attributes.

Compassion for other people.
Abstract Problem Solving Skills.
Ability to effectively communicate design ideas.
Experience crafting designs and observing other people using them.

Lack of familiarity with the creative process.

It is essential to understand a variety of disiplines and how to cross their boundaries and balance them.
Adequate time needs to be allotted to various different development phases.

Fri, 01 Nov 2002 17:19:12 GMT

Risk Management tips in Oct 2002 Praxis includes ways to hide your e-mail address from spammers, yet still make the obvious to real people (see in my Search Engine Tips the many ways to get at people's e-identity), also what viruses trojans worms etc. threats and Microsoft Vulnerabilities are going around and what you can do to protect yourself.

Thu, 24 Oct 2002 21:53:54 GMT

I took the multiple intelligences test and was told that of the six kinds, I scored highest on Personal Intelligence. The six kinds are:

Linguistic
- I am definitely NOT a word smith able to get my point across with either precision or flair. So what should I do about that?
Logical / Mathematical
- At one time this was my best subject, but it has deteriorated thanks to disuse. Math was no sweat for me in school. Some of the sciences were tough, some easy. Where I fell down was in memorization. When I had the leisure to figure things out, I did Ok. I could visualize multiple dimensions, but they tended to slow down my thinking geometrically.
Visual / Spacial
- A phobia associated with heights and crowds probably impeded my exploration of this part of our world. I can function, but I just try to avoid certain combinations. I have met a few people with photographic memory and am glad I do not have it. What they all had in common was a lack of sympathy for people with impaired memories, an arrogant disdain for normal frailties.
Physical
- I had never before considered athletic prowess as a form of intelligence, but you know, our world values that, and reading this section tells me that this includes craftsmen and artists, who are gifted in non-verbal expression.
Social
- I figure I am probably lowest here, perhaps tied with physical. Both low compared to other people, and low compared to how well I do in the other intelligence areas.
Personal
- Personal intelligence is all about the ability and willingness to reflect on life's big questions:
  - I know that there is such a thing as stable secure powerful computers at affordable prices, so why does the crud drive them out of business?
  - Why did 9/11 happen?
  - Can the sniper get a fair trial and why does that matter?
  - Why does our current enemy hate us so much, and is there a long term solution for the continuing recruitment of new enemies?
  - What should I be doing differently, planning for my future?

When we are communicating with people we need to be sensitive to the fact that different people understand things best different ways, learn things best different ways. Good writing helps. Examples and Analogies help. Illustrations help. Numbers help.

Now one might argue that tests like these need to be similarly crafted with great wisdom. I saw some questions there that I had never before seen anything like it, and some familiar forms. It was a mixture of spacial, math, literary, and common sense questions.

Write your name using the hand you don't typically write with and look at the results. Which is true? I checked that the results looked like they were written by a four year old. Fortunately I was not asked about what my name looks like normally.

Chris is now 2/3 of Ted's age. In six years, Chris will be 4/5 of Ted's age. In 15 years, Chris will be 7/8 as old as Ted. If they are both under the age of ten, how old are they now?

I started with ((Ted now) x 2/3 = Chris now) + 6 years = (Ted then) x 4/5 therefore T x 10 = (T+6) x 12 solving for T now, with result of a negative number. I majored in math in college, but I really have not had this kind of arithmetic since grade school - I suspect I am misinterpreting 4/5 of Ted's age now or then?

Tue, 22 Oct 2002 18:37:19 GMT

Thanks to Jim McGee on his planned use of Radio Weblogging in a class for MBA candidates, for linking us to AKMA on phases of blogging:

Writing as though no one would ever read what we post.
Writing as though only the people whom you know might possibly read your blog will actually do so.
Think about one and two, realizing other people have surely thought about this before.
Begin to grasp the fact that everything you ever posted is out there on the Internet, in search engine caches, other people quoting you, including people who have not yet learned how to properly link, so any mistakes you spoke will come back to haunt you.
Writing based on your interests. You know all the above, but don't care, you are now blogging.

Tue, 22 Oct 2002 16:32:37 GMT

Observations on Al's writing skills development.

I got feedback from more than one person on Friday's essay, about mismatches between our use of technology, our needs, how we learn how to use it effectively, and dreams of effective Knowledge Management. Basically my writing skills are at issue, and how I should focus practice to improve on my flaws.

While the indented bullets help me organize my thoughts, they do not always communicate well to other people. When I have a collection of related ideas, to communicate through my current level of understanding how I can utilize Radio, I should try to package each sub-thought as a separate page, using Radio Stories, then tie together a smaller piece on Home page or relevant category.

The article started as an outline in my head that was never put on paper. The end user needs that outline, or structure, spelled out using more obvious sub-titles.

On the content of my last essay.

With respect to the notion that lots of software comes with tons of features that no logical human can possibly use, and thus there will always be waste in what we get, I believe that so long as the excess capabilities do not impair performance of product usage, this is an economical way to deliver versatility using a standard package. I would hope that the Word Processing Software of The Future, come with features that do not occupy computer memory when they are not being used, so that current bloat demanding more hardware purchases just to keep same efficiency when upgrade to next software version, will become a design approach of The Past.

Blogging is not the only software where the computer gets out of the way, and the end user just does our thing to communicate ideas or transactions or whatever. Some other software is more helpful when it comes to access to integrated help, when we get stuck. Some other software is more helpful when we need to diagnose when something goes wrong.

I agree that with blogging, we can communicate effectively, without the software or other users reality constantly tripping us up, like in e-mail how we have to cope with the risk of viruses, con games, spam, flames, as an overhead baggage that comes with that territory. However, the fact that we CAN, does not mean that all users DO. In the article link that inspired my original writings, it is evident that a gigantic volume of potential users are blocked by the learning curve and common misconceptions.

However, my thinking in that essay, was aligned to the efficiency and comfort level of end user humans taking full advantage of the promise of Knowledge Management, and broad spectrum of users seeing the changing reality. This has marketing and training implications such as potential audiences not seeing the implications of how easy it is to implement new technologies.

My failure to communicate this more effectively is a testiment to both my writing skill inadequacies, and where I am in learning how to use Weblogging.

Fri, 18 Oct 2002 19:58:51 GMT

[Jim McGee] shares much insight on the mental challenges for end users learning Knowledge Management. QUOTE For most people, computers have more possibility, than they have real practical utility. UNQUOTE This then begs the question WHY and what can be done to fix this.

Our mental models evolve thanks to input such as the above links.

Traditional education in computer literacy may be flawed.
- Users in the work place learn from other users, who may be good at what they do, but not good as instructors.
  - This invariably leads to holes in what gets communicated.
  - The new person learns how to do things under normal circumstances, with how to cope when things go wrong is often set aside for later, allowing time for them to get comfortable with the overall work flow. But invariably the new person is faced with something going wrong, long before the structure of their education addresses how we have learned to cope with some problems that do reoccur.
- Structure of Documentation, originally designed for Experts, in need of redesign for different audiences. Part of this is figuring out how best to utilize new tools for organizing information.
- Structure of Learning Environments failure to acknowledge and effectively deal with the notion that different people learn best different ways, and how do we identify what those ways are for potential students?
The biggest mental bottleneck that I have seen when I have been trying to explain Weblogging to other people, is that most people tend to forget that computer technology is a moving target. We learn that as we move away from academia, the value of what we learned is eroded, but most of us forget that anything we have learned about computer know-how is eroded extremely rapidly, such that anything and everything we learn which was perfectly valid when we learned it, can become plain wrong a few years later.
- A few short years ago the World Wide Web did not exist. It is a relative newcomer on the Internet scene, but most everyone I know, who uses the Internet, takes it for granted. The PC was invented after the Internet had been around for a while, and the original inventors computer ingredients were almost 200 years ago (Babbage, Lovelace, Hollerith), but their equipment and tools would be unrecognizable to a computer user of today. It is quite possible that what we call computers today will be unrecognizable to the computer users of 50 years from now, unlike in transportation and most other technologies, where the basic form does not change much over time.
- An old friend, whom I have not seen for several years, was a teacher of nurses and medical students at a hospital. She would tell me that newcomers to medicine had no sense of history. They would learn about the latest medicines and treatments, then be studying a case from a couple of years ago, and ask why the treatment they learned yesterday was not used in that case. Well it had not been invented yet. A lot of this wonderful stuff that you are learning is also new to the old medical staff.
- Well there is the same kind of thing in computer technology. There is all this new stuff that did not exist as a possibility a few years ago, and many people who learned what could be done with computers are in need of regular refresher classes in what new stuff has come along most recently.
  - The easiest way I know to pick up appreciation for computer possibilities is to go to the traveling shows organized by the major computer vendors, such as IBM, that shows business people here is what can be done RIGHT NOW with their hardware and software. These shows hit all the major cities, and come back around 3-6 months later, because that is how fast their reality changes, and there is whole new stuff to communicate.
- As more and more people want or need some computer feature, be it application integration, simple computer communications, your own web site, the larger customer base means more vendors offering products that make it extremely easy for someone with no technical background to do what used to require a high priced specialist. But when, in recent memory, something is very expensive, or needs heavy duty training to accomplish, many people are not ready to accept that we are crossing a thresh hold to a new reality, and that this is a continuing fact of life.
- The last time I had a major upgrade to my home PC, I was telling my supplier that I wanted to keep my old monitor because I liked it so much, and I need not buy a replacement keyboard ... further discussion led me to the discovery that between the previous time I had to buy a keyboard, and the latest aquisition, the price had dropped from like $250.00 to $10.00. All the more reason why I question a management decision to save a few bucks on each user's equipment by not giving them all the features available for rapid keyboarding. I believe the big cost in the work place is anything that impairs the people productivity, and trying to save $10.00 a person on the equipment on their desk top means a much larger loss per person in productivity in even one day of this, let alone years and years.
  - However, as shown later in this essay, there is also an issue of teaching the people how to effectively use the keyboarding resources that are available and have been purchased.
  - Of late there has been an interest in reviewing what software has been aquired, and how to use it more effectively. I think there is an even more basic thing that should be reviewed, and that is work flow at the interface of human and computer.
- Today anyone can afford a UPS, but I remember a couple decades ago trying to persuade my management to consider getting one, at a time when the cost was ONE HUNDRED TIMES more expensive than they are today. What made the difference was primarily growth in customer base, leading to economies of scale. I can say the same for many peripherals people take for granted today.
- But people remember how expensive this or that used to be the last time they considered getting something, without absorbing how dramatically the costs have shifted, and that memory is a bar today to even considering it.
- Where I now work, there are over 1 million blue prints in file cabinets. These are the huge things that if you lay them on a conference table, the table is not big enough for the whole thing. Yet big as they are, somehow people occasionally manage to misfile them. Several years ago I suggested that we move the whole library to a CD Rom Juke Box
  - (that's where you have a rack of CD Roms, and the software knows which Disk to insert into slot so as to access the data) to be attached to the network, so that any worker could access any blueprint at any time, and misfilings would be a thing of the past.
- Well when I first suggested this, it was too expensive, and there were issues of scanner unreliability when dealing with those large documents. The price has come crashing down, and the reliability skyrocketing up. However, disk space to access the software to access the various tools, is still a price bottleneck.
  - I think there is room for rethinking client server resource allocation in a world where every desk top has unused resources and the whole enterprise is hurting for some resources.
- Some day my company will be ready to accept the merits of my proposal, but there are always the people who remember the reasons why we could not do this a few years ago, who are at risk of being blind to what has changed in the interim, just like I was blind to the drop in keyboard prices.
We need to be able to analyse common error patterns, without the blame game distraction, then figure out corporate solutions.
- I am in a multi-user network with queues for user consumption of shared resources, whose access is optimized to maximize productivity by people currently connected to the system, such that there are delays for resources provided to work queues where processing does not need human interaction. For new users whose past experience was standalone systems, they have a significant learning curve to appreciate the fact that all these different kinds of queues exist (program execution, printer sequencing) both in system and in users (someone walks off with THEIR reports, but in between some pages is someone else's reports).

There may be value in evaluating how people around us have stumbled in learning how best to utilize technology. The following are examples from my own career, some from current employer, and many from earlier work experiences.

We have talked before, earlier in my Brain to Brain category about the fear of work place blame game. I have seen people who seem to prefer to do nothing, than risk being a target of the perceived blame game. I have seen people do serious analysis of things that go wrong, in which they personally are blameless, and when you combine the input from several such analyses, we have meaningful data to act upon, but some managers focus on the commonality of each analysis being that the analyst is blameless, without dealing with the specific problems that they found.
Multi-user creation and use of shared queries, spread sheets, and so forth in the networked business world, where one person creates a tool for a specialized need, then other people, who are less cognizant of tool creation, end up using those tools for other purposes, with potentially flawed output.
- I find it disturbing that there is an almost total lack of estimating skills or support for the notion that everything should be tested - existing tools that we use in our daily work, and new tools that get added - to validate that the output we are getting from them is in fact correct output.
- I have found it extremely disturbing to find this mind set among software designers at major computer vendors, leading to systemic bug blindness.
I think it is a well known fact within the Computer Science Profession that the biggest bottleneck to getting accurate information into corporate data bases is the end user interface, and user interaction with warning messages that the software delivers with respect to data inconsistencies.
- I have talked about this with many managers, and it seems to me that there is a conceptual problem, where I am being accused of calling people idiots, or some topics are taboo because of perceived blame game. Very few co-workers have got it, with respect to what I was trying to communicate.
- For example, we have redesigned some input screens so that the same amount of work can flow into the system with 1/3 as many keystrokes, and we have redesigned reports to review the veracity of input so that it can be checked in 1/10 the human time. It took me YEARS to get permission to develop these improvements, because of this conceptual misconception as to what I was seeking to accomplish by discussing the bottlenecks and what I thought could be done about them.
Some people have a mental barrier with respect to AND OR Boolean Logic. In practical business terms, you want to put a translator between them and the computer, because otherwise we are just about guaranteed bad results.
- I have run into several managers, over several decades, in which I was unable to get across to them that they use AND OR logic one way, and this system they using use it a DIFFERENT WAY and the way to get the computer to tell you what you want, is to couch your requests within the structure of this computer software, which really is very simple to define. But they seem locked into continuing to ask what are flawed commands of the computer, in terms of how the software is designed to function.
- The scary thing about this is that I only found out about these problems because these individuals asked me to figure out what was wrong with their output, and my conclusion was that is was flawed input by them. How many people are in this boat and not asking for help?
Occasionally I have taken the time to just watch what the users of software that I have tinkered with are doing, to get some insight into how it can be further improved.
- In the process I have been horrified to witness some people with poor keyboarding skills. How long have they been doing this? Years perhaps. Who taught them this, and how many other people have been taught the same way? There are key combinations that can get the cursor to a specific location on an input screen, with at most 2-3 keystrokes, but here I see someone moving the cursor one position at a time, effectively doing 100 times as many keystrokes than are neccessary to get the job done.

There may also be value in evaluating what has led to us learning computers effectively. Can any of this insight be extended to other potential students?

I watched other people perform some tasks, in which they explained stuff as they went along. I became eager to want to do that myself. The people, who were doing the showing, they had some teaching skills.
Net Change documents are developed and distributed. These itemize what is different between our current system and something else that many users may have been familiar with in past work experiences.
I have a document at work in which I can look up by subject, things that can go wrong, and how we have figured out is the best way to resolve that scenario. My challenge has been how to make that document available to my co-workers, while keeping the content structured so it is efficient for my use. Ultimately I believe this sort of thing belongs in a system that a search engine can hit.
The first computer club that I was a member of - it developed a skills bank, a directory of members who had specific know how and experience in various nuances of various hardware and software. If any of us got into difficulty, we could look up the skills bank index to find fellow members with relevant know-how, then call them up and get rapid assistance.
2-3 years ago we were suffering thousands of misposted transactions a week, in which it took a few minutes to generate a thousand errors, but half a day to post the corrections. Now we are down to months between incidents of misposting. This is because of dual solutions. One technical, one management.
- The technical solution was to have the software intercept error conditions and apply generic actions instead of surprising users with geeky choices.
- The management solution was a combination of imposing some rules about how the queues were to be used, and recognizing that when people are faced with disruptions to their daily routine, we can have an epidemic of other people who get disturbed, as the initial victims seek to disassociate themselves with any risk of being targeted by the blame game, when the real game should be how to get the job done with zero tolerance for errors. Making a fuss about occasional errors can lead to a higher incidence of errors.
Many companies have had the computer resources to support a test environment, that can be used for teaching end users. Ideally the test environment can be replicated regularly so that it is a sampling of say 5% of the production environment transactions replicating all combinations possible, so that users can be educated in everything, without replicating the same consumption of computer resources. While it is Ok for them to delete stuff in the test environment and make all sorts of mistakes, with no harm, there are dual problems of people knowing whether they in test or production (we have had people screw up in production when they thought they in test) and the notion that we not want to encourage behaviors in general through the education environment that are inappropriate in the real work place.
- I have suggested (not really implemented yet that I have seen, except in a few cases where it was helpful to me for testing new software modifications), that for every real criteria in a company (item, warehouse, facility, department, etc.) we create a TEST criteria, in which the General Ledger would be told to ignore any quantity or dollar value associated with transactions in those criteria. Then if someone wants to figure out how to do something, they can use the TEST item in the TEST department to see if their idea has merit.

Sat, 12 Oct 2002 17:52:53 GMT

[BlogFish] QUOTE

Repeat As Necessary.

From the very funny How to Fail at Writing...

6. There are thousands of writing books. Better read them all before you start. One of them has got to have the secret. (Be sure to skip all the exercises.)

11. Whatever you do, don't finish anything. Just keep starting new fragments. Or endlessly torture your existing manuscripts until you drain them of any vitality they might once have had.

13. Be sure you never actually submit your work for publication. Take the decision out of the editors' hands: reject it for them.

UNQUOTE [BlogFish]

11 is me.

Wed, 09 Oct 2002 19:45:18 GMT

Thanks to links on Oct 9's Search Day review of a Search Engine executives conference in San Francisco, I found this article in which [Australia's F2 Network] in the Sydney Morning Herald, heavily quoting the head of the development team for www.panopticsearch.com (which I will be looking into further for my evolving essay on Search Engine Tips), writes

Web site structure is key to both search engines properly navigating the important stuff on our sites, such as
- Page Names
- Descriptive Anchor Text
- short meaningful urls
Search Engines themselves need to do a better job of deep linking to permalinks

This implies that we periodically need to compare the standards of our weblog software and plug in tools to what are the evolving search standards.

Wed, 09 Oct 2002 03:01:53 GMT

[Sean Carton] QUOTE

Information architecture (IA) is more important to the success of a site than design or programming. The two are (obviously!) vital. But if your customers can't find your products and information or can't access your services, you're better off not having a site in the first place.

UNQUOTE

Mon, 07 Oct 2002 08:31:28 GMT

While adding some more updates to my Blog Software directory, it occurred to me that I might later have a mangement challenge keeping track of stuff that does not belong here, which reminds me of a funny story from yesteryear. In the 1970's I was active in the Cincinnati Computer Club, at a time when a lot of home computer users identified interesting Internet sites such as BBSs based on the phone number that went into your modem.

We'd circulate directories of phone numbers by category, published in newsletters, passed around on diskette, and some of those sites had directories of other sites that people tried to mine. Now at that point in time, the ability of end users to do cut and paste correctly was in its infancy, because the software just was not that good. So we would get strings of digits that were supposedly a phone number that someone had typed in wrong, or they dropped a leading or ending digit in a string, with a zero inserted by mistake that made the right number of digits.

Our club had a directory of several thousand numbers passed out to the officers and volunteers to check them out before we published them to the general membership. Quite a few were identified as wrong numbers (this number is for a real human being, not a computer connection), so we omitted them from our official directory. Then we would get people sending us in additions to our directory, that they got from other directories, that included those #s we had determined were wrong #s, so we started listing them immediately followed by Do Not Call - this is a Real Person, not a BBS. We also had a statement about the problem in our introductory text about how to use the overall directory.

Many members did not read the instructions, and were curious about the Do Not Call numbers, and called them out of curiosity, thinking perhaps we were saying not to call because something extremely naughty going on at those BBSs. So then we started getting some members calling us to say that they tried a Do Not Call number and think the officers ought to update the club directory because this is a Real Person, not a BBS, so we ended up having a separate Do Not Call list, which was used to clean suggested additions to the list, before we checked them out.

This was before ma bell had caller id. Unwanted phone calls was an epidemic compared to today, and the poor person whose number made it into these hundreds of directories of BBSs of which a large percentage were actually wrong #s (for calling BBSs) became afflicted with phone calls all day long from all over the country, in which the caller did not say anything, something like today's marketing which dials a cluster of phone #s, connects the phone vendor to the first person who answers, and records others that answer to try them again a little later.

Sun, 06 Oct 2002 18:15:25 GMT

The following are some long notes after cracking yet another book on a topic I want to know more about in general terms, and hopefully be more likely to remember some of these principles when I am in a position that it would be good to be applying them, when I do my web things. Hopefully, the kinds of conclusions and insight that you see in my notes will help tell you whether you want to go out and get this or a similar book for yourself. This is what I got out of just one chapter of a book. I may be doing this sort of thing with other chapters later.

I mention several people's web sites in this article, in which I note some thing they have been doing that I do not want to emulate. These web sites have great collections of information. I would not be mentioning them if I did not think they were worth while places to suggest that other people go. So when I mention something I not like, that is an eye speck blemish from the perspective of what I seek in making my site better, when learning from them. If you go to their site and not find the evidence of which I speak, then that will tell us that they saw my observations (or someone brought it to their attention), and applied these lessons of usability that I am struggling to learn.

Website Usability, according to the introduction in the book Usability for the Web by Tom Brinck, Darren Gergel and Scott Wood, is a collection of goals that can conflict with each other, so we have to prioritize which are applicable in any given circumstance. This concept also applies to any documentation we have that teaches someone something, and our design of software outside of the web.

Functionally Correct
- The software is user-friendly, and performs flawlessly.
Efficent to Use
- Get the job done fast and hassle free.
Easy to Learn
- Minimal steps for the end user.
Easy to Remember
- Ideally, the end user not need any cheat sheets.
Error Tolerant
- How are errors discovered and dealt with?
Subjectively Pleasing
- Think graphics, color combinations, content arrangements. Is the color contrast one that works for people of all ages?
- My personal preference is maximum visual contrast (light background, dark text) without assaulting the eyeballs (avoid bright stuff except to make an occasional emphasis).

Common Problems of Usability with many web sites today include

Human Perceptual Issues
- We should give serious thought to how best to arrange data to serve the needs of the people who will be accessing it. Data organized efficiently according to ruies of underlying data base structure is not good enough when end users not familiar with that structure, like people on highways without maps or road signs.
- Think menu structures such that it is obvious for a user where to look first, using subheads on lists. I have barely begun doing links on my web page, and I have seen tons of examples how not to do them, where people have columns of links that scroll off the page before we get to another topic of linkage.
  - Ernie the Attorney, has sub-headings for Personal, then Law stuff, but I not see any link from his home page to his stories
    - or categories (which have some software redirecting anyone who tries to explore them, so from that I conclude that he has applied software to successfully get privacy in some categories - for more info on that concept see in my Radio Doc Sources - look up Rick Klau),
  - of which he has many interesting to explore, and once there, there is no obvious link back to his home page. Thus, to successfully navigate Ernie's site, you have to Understand the Radio url number system, and also recognize that Ernie violates hyperlinking standards (more on that below). I want to do my site so that users do not need to know any secret system to get around.
  - Alison Fish, for example, has sub-headings for Radio Docs, Development, Web etc. but I can see that any one of those can begin to get like the long winded lists of older sites. She also has no lonk back to her home page from a story. This could be deliberate.
    - My friend Julian Goh (whose site is not yet open to the public) saw some navigation tools that he saw no need for, and he deleted them. This was a Manila site in which we discovered that once you delete some things, undeleting them is not always available, especially after the learning process got to the point of realizing that we did have a need for what he deleted.
    - I eventually want to have an easy site navigation structure, in which from any page a user can get to my home, then from there to any of my content - categories, stories, archives. At some point perhaps I should move all the home stuff to some new category name, and leave the home page for site navigation aids.
Navigation
- Is there a logical architecture to the information on a web site, that is obvious to any casual visitor?
- Links should have a clear indication of where they are going, without being urls that run across the page. Think about phone menus when we call some business and there are a string of vague categories that drill down to more specific except most of the time it is guess work which is best and we often end up not where we want to go, so let's avoid that sort of thing in what we design.
- There are standards. Use them.
  - Blue text with underline is a hyper link - do not use that for something else. Purple means my browser remembers me being there once before. Some folks whose weblogs I subscribe to via News Aggregation (see Understand Radio News Aggregation for explanation of that topic) who habitually violate this standard, such as Ernie the Attorney. Do not emulate them, in that respect.
  - Cory Doctorow's Boing Boing uses bold black headings for items, which are rendered to my Radio News Aggregation like Ernie's abuse of purple underlining. This is a potential glitch to bring to the attention of Radio Userland. However those links do work to get to the permalinks involved, where Ernie's purple words are just that, with no linkage.
  - I want the same standard that we get with Radio Free Blogistan. Incidentally, look at the arrows at the top of the page. No ambiguity. That is a standard to emulate with arrows.
  - If clicking on something goes some place and it is inappropriate to use the blue text underline, then make the fact of the hyperlink obvious, such as a raised 3D image that looks like a button. HOW to accomplish that is something I will need to learn in future lessons.
Human Memory
- Too much to remember means something will be forgotten.
- Too long to remember means something will be forgotten.
- Too many similarities in what is to be remembered means confusion invited.
- Don't require users to have to remember stuff between web pages. They will stop to look at something interesting and forget what they needed to remember. The book gives some examples of financial sites that make it far too easy for a human being to enter what is a valid financial transaction, and not in fact know that one did a transaction, but is in fact a human keying error, made all the more likely by the design of the site.
Database Integration
- Many businesses use their live data as output to a web site where the end users interact with the data. There is a great risk that the data changes rapidly while the user is trying to do the transaction, so there needs to be some way to let the user know that this is happening and can affect them.
- It should be well known to developers how web design is different from traditional software. In pre-web programs, the data dictates the flow. Different kinds of data need to be processed in different but similar ways, and the bulk of the data can be organized to process similar transactions together for overall efficiency. In web-processing, the end user could do any random thing, and each input needs to be resolved rapidly, so as not to keep the user waiting.
- If a user returns to a page we recently we were on, are we seeing the latest information, or something from our Browser Cache?

Sun, 06 Oct 2002 02:20:42 GMT

I'm exploring some of About.com's pages that define the basics of doing a personal web page, and I got to their section on what books to buy to help you, which I think is very personal depending on what an individual person thinks they need, from overall perspective on something, to a good manual.

http://personalweb.about.com/library/weekly/reviews/aabybbooks.htm

I am fortunate in having several large book stores near where I live. Books a Million (I estimate closer to 1/3 of a million there), Barnes and Noble, Borders, and others, so I can go browse the sections of these stores looking for something of particular interest, but unfortunately some of these book stores need to learn from the librarian profession when it comes to putting books on the shelves so people can find what is there that we are interested in getting.

Worth looking over, because towards the bottom of the list is the topic of books to help us do a better job of writing well.

Most of the books listed here seem to assume that we are using the generation of web creation software that came before weblogging, but webloggers still can learn from generic books such as those that talk about improving usability and accessibility. I myself not quite ready for an HTML book, but am headed in that direction.

Sat, 05 Oct 2002 08:01:54 GMT

Thanks to [Alison (Blog) Fish] for these great links to doing a better job of blog writing:

Daniel Will-Harris's Five Keys to Building a Better Site
- Will feels that we need to know what we want to accomplish before we start our website.
  - Well I think this might make some sense for a business, but not neccessarily an on-line journal, or someone like me who is using the software to learn how to work the software.
- Look at the competition and learn from them how to do a better job with a site that does not look just like them.
- Provide navigation to help visitors easily move around your site.
- Study your logs to find out which pages are being visited and which are not.
  - I have no idea how to find such logs.
Cameron Barrett's thoughts on what makes a good weblog.
- I am not so laid back about giving credit, as you probably have seen. I want to carefully identify where I got something from if at all possible, but I recognize that it can clutter the text when there are a string of weblog equivalents of an e-mail many time forwarded.
- With respect to the notion that a shared site can overwhelm the editor if the pool of contributors gets too large, I think the answer to that is to have Radio post to Manila where there are several editors.
- Good advice here about things that need to be done.

Wed, 02 Oct 2002 22:09:30 GMT

This problem that dws describes below, is sometimes I have contributed to with my blogging, that people who do not heavily participate in News Aggregation might not see. It is also something that a lot of newbies, which Doc obviously is not, might get in a habit of doing without realizing how it can aggravate many of their site visitors. The main reason it happens a lot with me is the whole business of a flaky OS connected to a flaky internet connection ... at any moment our browser connection might crash, so we want to key a little, save it, key a little more, save it.

The first suggestion is to have the 3 buttons activated so that if you think you might want to tinker with a post some more, you do not use one of the publish options until you no longer think that way. However Radio Wish, we also need some additional buttons to save something longer while posting the stuff around us, and also being able to clearly see what has not yet been posted, and what has been updated since that last publish.

My second thought is if Radio Outlining can be done in stories (I do not know if it can), then as we get into something that calls for some further re-write, such as in my mini-essay on the plight of a Nigerian woman that my Google referers tell me a flood of people think is a hoax, then perhaps it is time to move that stuff to a story, and leave a pointer at the old permalink redirecting visitors to where it went, with a variation on John Patrick's technique.

But a Radio Wish that would further enhance this mutual Knowledge Management would be to have a public url that has our stories alphabetized by title, that is to our shortcuts what the public stories page is to our stories directory. Your radio application has to be running to access the our links. To the extent that we can make it more user-friendly for people to navigate our stories, and also incorporate outlining and everything else, the more we will put in stories that which some of us are now putting in the date navigation area.

[dws.] QUOTE

Doc, I love ya man for all you've done and said so well for years. But I hate the way you blog here; Doc Searls Weblog. Am I the only one? Maybe it's something at my end but I don't think so. What I get through my aggregator looks like Doc keeps changing the same item all day long (maybe in an outliner of something), reposting it time after time as it grows throughout the day. This produces two problems at my end:

I see the same stuff over and over in my aggregator, each time with something added at the top.
If I want to post a reference to a item from Doc I have to dig through the whole days mega-post to find and edit out the one item I want to reference.

If you know Doc personally, please gently tell him that a blog should be one item, one post, next item, another post. Thanks, dws. UNQUOTE [dws.]

Mon, 30 Sep 2002 22:46:43 GMT

Radio Tip ... we can learn how to improve our own art of weblog information presentation by reviewing the best of the best, then emulating their achievements. Remember last week there was an award for the best British weblog?

Thanks Alison Fish for checking out the Five Fish Award system, after I located what seemed like an interesting link in Genius Blogging Strategies from www.blogging.biz - other Awards to check out some time, and of course the sites that win, and get honorable mention, include:

Third Annual Medley Medals by Biz Stone from whose book I am getting this info and there are links to the earlier years' awards.
Scripting News Awards for great blogs by category
- Technology Insightful
- Manila Anchors
- Great Eye Candy
- Technical Mental Giants
- Blog Tools
- Blogger Contributions to Excellence
The Bloggies 30 award categories, of which I am only sharing a few samplings here
- Rebecca's Pocket wins award for best article or essay about Weblogs.
The Anti-Bloggies seem to me to be awards to people who have demonstrated great talent for doing hostile website things that would make us all pleased to see them leave Planet Earth, reminincent of the Darwin Awards.

Blogs, that win great awards, are worth trying to emulate.

Thu, 26 Sep 2002 21:16:35 GMT

The Guardian's list of top British weblogs. [Scripting News]

Tue, 24 Sep 2002 08:31:34 GMT

Integrity

Tue, 24 Sep 2002 08:08:43 GMT

Toastmasters teach improved communication skills.

Tue, 24 Sep 2002 07:00:10 GMT

[James Robertson} has some interesting insight on how non-programmers view documentation. It was a surprise to me that some people have actually been observed reading some of the documentation, other than me of course, and a surprise that other people figured out how the documentation was being utilized incorrectly.

Sun, 22 Sep 2002 20:06:04 GMT

Continuous improvement of our Radio communication efforts, in Al's opinion, requires mixtures of:

Writing Skills in general ... which we can learn by practicing good examples set by others, such as Novelists, Journalists, and successful Technical Writers.
Learning broad range of capabilities of Radio, and the relevant vocabulary, then using them effectively, such as links to context, to more detailed stories, and include objects across spectrum of what's possible.

Alison Fish has been teaching Al Macintyre how to do Images and Permalinks, but not enough has clicked in Al brain yet.
The learning curve at getting better and better at these tools for me has been:

Past: Get comfortable with Stories, Shortcuts, and simple links.
Now: Delve into more advanced links and objects we can connect to our web site.
Next: Become a student of Radio Outlining.

Know laws and etiquette.
- Be very careful in quoting not to permit any confusion regarding who said what.
  - I have a Radio Wish that a future version of the Radio editing box can have something for us to click on that we could use a particular style for quoting a particular person ... person A B C in a body of text.
  - For the moment, just break new paragraph QUOTEs around whoever source.
  - But I want to learn how to mix it up ... Person A said this, but on the other hand Person B makes a good point, and it is crystal clear what was said by ME, A B etc.
  - I think part of the problem is that we are accustomed to using double quotes when quoting someone, but double quotes have a special meaning in Radio, so we need something else when making it clear we are quoting someone and who.
- Be sensitive to the needs of a broad spectrum of people visiting our web site.
Understanding how to best use the medium.
Knowing the subject that we are sharing our opinions on, and being careful to distinguish which of our words are backed by experience and when this is just our uninformed opinion.
Other topics on Phil Wolff's great lists.

Sun, 22 Sep 2002 10:38:59 GMT

Topics this last week on Al Mac's Weblog (a review to help see what Categories are needed):

This last week I increased my Categories to:

400 on Radio Dial: IBM 400 Interests ... connections to user group activity and lists.
Brain Exercise: Space for future reviews of favorite books.
Brain Food: Where I trying to learn new stuff (for me) from other people tips.
- Perma Links and Images, with help from Alison Fish and Rick Klau.
- Outline to help general beginners to Radio.
Brain to Brain: Techniques for more effective human communications.

Etiquette of all this.
I need to review this whole area of doing a better job with writing; accessibility; credibility; etc.

e Law: Changes in the legal landscape within which we all dwell.

Useful links to commentary grappling with hot topics.

e Radio Ideas: my input to dws.Radio.FAQ to add to the body of How To.
- Continued misc. thoughts shared.
- "Radio Doc Sources" = Index to the people who have documented Radio.
- Tools for enhancing Radio.
- Al's Radio Wishes.
- "Understand Radio Categories" with occasional additions.
- "Understand Radio News Aggregation" ditto.
HisTech: Comprehending History of General Technology Evolution.

Latest: reversal of autos and pollution; real antimatter; computer history; anthrax spread by photocopy machines; and more.

Laugh Track: Miscelaneous Humor.
- Sad but True Banking Stories.
- I basically created this for future posting of humor that used to go on the Home page, and started it out with copies of all humor that previously went there.
My Friends and Family: Stuff of interest to people I know more off Internet than on.

Plight of a Nigerian Woman.
"Blind of NH" Real World Challenges.
I need to fix my pictures.
Personal stuff.

Security: Computer Security; Homeland Security; Other Security.
- Report on a user meeting whose topic was on Security Testing.
- Links tips opinions and news, on hot topics from a spectrum of sources.
SF: Science Fiction interests.

Technological advances into reality with concepts that until recently were Science Fiction, and where various nations space programs are headed.
Web sites for SF fans.

Home Page and Stories.
- New Story on some Chess Variants.
- My essay on the Y2K of copying (Mon Sep 16).

Sat, 21 Sep 2002 22:33:25 GMT

[Blogfish] QUOTE Phil Wolff of a klog apart asks "What is 'Good Blogging'?" UNQUOTE [Blogfish]

This is a great thoughtful outline by Phil on literacy skills and blogging, and the technical stuff that makes it work.

Sat, 21 Sep 2002 05:47:18 GMT

I started some new categories today, and went through my archives assigning some stuff to also be in the relevant new categories ... check out what I have via http://radio.weblogs.com/0107846/Categories/

Tue, 10 Sep 2002 10:26:31 GMT

In apparently first professionally published article by [Morgan Wilson] good essay explaining

Weblog terminology
Weblog history links
Weblog applicability to Law Librarianship

Good things about blogging: QUOTE [Morgan Wilson]

Blogging software makes it very easy to maintain a blog.
Blogging blurs the distinctions between reader, author, and commentator.
Informality – most blogs have no pretensions about being polished work and there is a general understanding that blog information is not to be taken at face value.
News feeds offered by some blogs can help with the information overload problem.
Blogs can be very current and are a good way of keeping one’s finger on the pulse of developments affecting the profession.
Blogging can be fun and opens a door into the blog community.

Bad things about blogging:

Blogging is too easy – anybody can maintain a blog.

The informal nature of blogs makes it possible for the blogger to add inane or inaccurate comments, or even do more sinister actions like alter /distort another person’s words.

There is a lot of redundancy in blogs – many point to and feed off each other – although this is not always a bad thing.

Combined with listservs, group emails, automated searches, clipping services, print and electronic journals, and everything else, blogs simply add to the information overload that all law librarians (also known as human filters) must deal with daily.

The power of blogging can be abused. Blogs have been to create Google Bombs, a deliberate way of associating one item (usually unfavorably) with another unlike item

UNQUOTE [Morgan Wilson]

I disagree about how easy. I think this is a user beholder issue, in that there is a big learning curve to get into it, and not well defined where the threshholds are.

In PC hardware world there are standards of stuff to have to be able to accomplish certain tasks.

In Blogging documentation world it is not at all clear what the prerequisites are to learning how to do things.

Anything can be abused. e-mail viruses, spam, flames, crackers, denial of service attacks

some aspects of computing can be abused far worse than blogging.

YOU decide what you want to subscribe to, turn off a subscription if too much duplication, or it diverges from your interests.

TOOLS available to manage the information overload

Something else about RSS ... I am getting a list serve archives in headline form, like how we get USA Today headlines.

Tue, 10 Sep 2002 05:36:54 GMT

Radio Tip

Remember Mark Pilgrim's 30 days of lessons in making your site more accessible and usable? Well here is another resource in that department.

Thanks to [Morgan Wilson's Exploded Library] post about Usability (incidentally check my "Blind of NH" story for a chilling collection of Usability Challenges), I see that [Library Techlog] has link and review to Usability Toolkit from a Special Interest Group that is trying to help everyone improve Usability.

QUOTING [Library Techlog]

The Usability Toolkit is a collection of forms, checklists and other useful documents for conducting usability tests and user interviews.

UNQUOTE [Library Techlog]

[Morgan Wilson's Exploded Library] was particularly interested in QUOTE

the Topics in Usability section, including usability basics, FAQ and ethics section

UNQUOTE [Morgan Wilson's Exploded Library]

Mon, 09 Sep 2002 19:18:39 GMT

Radio Free Blogistan] QUOTE

Weblogged Conversation: Slow Academic Adoption of Weblogs. Seb closes the loop on an interesting multi-weblog conversation about why weblogs have not (yet?) been widely adoped by academics as a research tool:

Stephen over at Blogging Alone mentions Sébastien Paquet's reasons why blogging has failed to become a widely accepted research tool among academia. I disagree with nearly all of these reasons. Below is the list of reasons and my thoughts based on my own experiences:

Follow the link to Seb's summary to get the whole flow of the dialogue. UNQUOTE [Radio Free Blogistan] I inserted into quoting the link to Stephen context.

The flow of the dialogue is not yet clear to me, but I get the drift of it.

I will agree that a lot of people have valid concerns about Privacy on the Internet, and the risk that someone will steal their ideas, if they prematurely share them through the Weblogging medium.

I believe that Weblogging Technology documentation is mainly aimed at people who are not only Computer Literate, but somewhat experienced in tinkering with how things work on their screens. In other professions than computing developers, there are many people who lack this attribute. They just want to use the software. You do not have to know how to change a tire or tune an engine to drive a car - when it needs service you take it to the experts. When TV set or Telephone is broke, either call repairman or buy a new one. There are computer users who want that from their computer experience. Thus it is perfectly legitimate for such people to complain about the learning curve.

I agree that it is easier to publish through some time honored template, even when some new template might be be better suited for the work, especially when there are other players, like employers, who need to approve the new template.

I think that scientists seek to figure out how things work, then engineers apply the results in the real world. Scientists propose a theory to explain the evidence, then come up with experiments to test the theory. Developers have similar approach, by coming up with ways to test new software and changes to software. In that sense, computer people are a mixture of scientist and engineer, but computer science in the real world is still like an artist crafting something. I doubt that I understand social scientists well enought to comment on how they fit into that picture.

Mon, 09 Sep 2002 19:15:31 GMT

[Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog] QUOTE

I found out via an email exchange that one of the founders of the [newly relaunched] electronic intifada website is Dutch. Arjan El Fassed also posted several comments to yesterday's posting. Of course there are counter posts now as well that is forming a lively conversation.

My advice to Arjan is to re-re-launch electronicintifada as a weblog. Perhaps a multi-user weblog for multiple authors. Currently the site appears to emulate a BigPub and imho detracts from their mission.

As with all aspects of war, be careful not to become what you are fighting against. UNQUOTE [Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog]

This is also like the appearance of impropriety. The enemies are not clearly understood by government intelligence, let alone anyone else. When any group of people discuss something, the odds are that several are police spies, journalists trying to ferret out a story, pure innocents trying to figure out what is going on, and it may be that none of the participants are any of the bad guys, but in a war, the rules of innocent until proven guilty are sometimes altered into round up suspects before someone pulls another 9/11.

Mon, 09 Sep 2002 18:58:37 GMT

Reference Directories to Blogs by Profession, organized by

Sebastien Paquet

His home page.
His weblog is Seb's Open Research
Weblogs by Profession is a directory of professions active in weblogging, in which for many, but not all, he has links to directories for each of the professions that he lists.
- Consultants
- Educators and (old) Teachnology
- Journalists
- Knowledge Management people
- Lawyers and Academic Law
- Librarians
- Researchers
- Software developers
- Web designers and information architects

Thu, 05 Sep 2002 21:23:31 GMT

Comment on Al's Radio Doc Sources using Quick Topics. Eventually, Al wants to look into pros & cons of several different commenting systems for Radio, but we have to start some place.

Tue, 03 Sep 2002 21:06:00 GMT

I'm available for hire to analyze K-Log requirements, design solutions, facilitate deployment and ongoing evolution. ~ dws.

Radio Dreams: From Seb's Open Research to Alison Fish's Blogfish to Al Macintyre to Phil Wolff's a klog apart to [Don W Strickland: RadioFAQ] (Al may have mixed up the precise path, by accident):

Alison Fish of Blogfish:

I suspect that beginning bloggers and kloggers are often inhibited..

If we set up a k-logging community for our company intranet, I suspect there will be an initial _hump_ of hesitation among the employees. Maybe having a few designated posters at the beginning would ease the transition. Must think on this.

Seb's Open Research:

Lessons learned from a large scale K-logging implementation.

Most people don't like to write. We've had a difficult time designing interfaces that encourage adding information instead of just reading.
There's no substitute for good, accessible writing. We have several people who write consistently for the system. The logs show that postings from one writer get far more attention and prompt far more linking than those from the other writers.

Al Macintyre's suggestions for preparing for a company intranet were posted Aug 26, and I can see that someone downstream has enhanced my ideas with links to additional aids.

Why don't people write?

Fear.

Fear of failure.

Fear of criticism.

Fear of reprisal.

Fear of looking stupid.

Fear of being stupid.

Fear of permanence.

Fear of strangers.

Fear of invaded privacy.

Fear of falling behind.

Fear of the blank page.

Motive.

I'm thinking a lot about folks who haven't written a paragraph since high school. Folks who never got more than a C in English. Paralyzed by a blank sheet of paper. By permanence.

UNQUOTE [a klog apart] [Don W Strickland: RadioFAQ]

To the list of fears I would add uncertainty about job security. The style of my writing might antagonize management sufficiently that they will start looking around for someone to replace me. We can be in a company in which with turnover a lot of relevant education and training in how to make the enterprise a success, just walked out the door in the head of the departing co-worker. However, if that knowledge could be captured in a k-log, the employee, doing the transplant from their brain to the k-log, might feel that the company has less need of having their brain around, so it might impair raises, and they not feel so bad about the person leaving.

In other forums I have suggested that we would all be much better off in the future if more youngsters were encouraged to have pen pals in other cultures. Start with the New Democracies that came about because of the end of the Cold War. The connection has to be through whatever mediums work over there, where they not have good infrastructure like we do, the phone connections are intermittent. I think News Aggregation is better than e-mail.

What this does for the next generation is that they will write more coherently, and better understand the problems around the world, and why some solutions fail. Awareness of how much worse off other people are, but for the Grace of God where we were born could be us there, means that we may be less materialistic, less subject to temptation, more appreciative of what we have.

What this does for the next generation in other lands that our kids are pen palling with, they have a better understanding of our values, how capitalism can work.

Now can this concept also be promoted at the adult level to fill out the Sister Cities concept? Our city wants to encourage more trade, and educational exchanges with the people of the cities we have partnered with. I think Radio Categories, for people in enterprises that support the Sister Cities movement, is an ideal way to develop relationships that will be to the benefit of that e-trade growth. Have the school systems host weblogs by the students, in which they can interconnect with the youngsters at the schools of the Sister Cities.

Helping get something like this operational will also educate Radio developers as to what is needed in the area of Radio documentation so that this software can be used by any person, regardless of past computer experience, thus opening up Radio to the mass market.