Blogger Discount on Bug Tracking Software
Don't know if I'll take them up on the discount, but the package looks interesting. Just what I need, another software product to test. Sigh...

Axsoft is offering a free 3-user license for their bug-tracker.

Axosoft: Free 3-User Offer

Axosoft is offering bloggers a free 3-user version of their .NET & SQL based OnTime defect tracking software (bug tracking software). For more information, visit

http://www.axosoft.com/Free3UserOffer.htm.

An interesting way to market software and build buzz.

[Marc's Outlook on Productivity]

 

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More Web Toys

brain eaters. Whenever I’m overwhelmed with work tasks, I become far more susceptible to the siren call of brain-eating games. I lost more hours than I care to admit to WEBoggle this week. Now I find myself confronted with the ingenious InfocomBots—AIM bots that allow you to play the best of InfoComs classic text adventure games using nothing more than an AIM client. Ack! My susceptibility to the appeal of these games was probably fueled by my recent sleeplessness and drug-induced fogginess, which in turn resulted from the annoyingly persistent cough I’ve not been able to shake for the past 2+ weeks.... [mamamusings]

 

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Find File Extensions

GNEWBIE GNOOK: Decoding Obscure File Extensions.

By Brandon Watts

Q: I'm really confused about all of the different file extensions that are sitting on my computer. How do I know what type of files they are, and what programs they go with?

A: If you have ever (as a beginner) perused the system folders on your computer, you know how frightening it can be. You'll be presented with all of these strange filenames and indecipherable file extensions. Or, maybe you have installed a new program and would like to know what some of the installed file types do. If you've ever been in this position, surf on over to FILExt.

Upon arriving at the site you can search for a specific file extension that you may have in mind, or you can browse through the extensive database. Even though this site contains just a portion of extensions, it really shows you how many different types exist that you've never heard of and probably will never see. Still not able to find what you're looking for? If this is the case, you can post your question on the forums where people reside to discuss file formats and all their glory. That's gotta be some exciting discussion...

Have a question or subject that you would like to see covered? Drop Brandon a line and maybe he can include it in a future edition of the Gnewbie Gnook! Also, don't forget our forums (or, if you're a Latin freak, "fora") where Gnomies from all around the world congregate to help, be helped, and discuss issues that may or may not have anything to do with technology!

[Lockergnome's Windows Fanatics]

 

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Locate IP Addresses

NET: Atelier Web IP Locator v1.0.

• 833K
• Win98/2k/XP
• FREE

http://www.atelierweb.com/iploc/index.htm

{IP locator} Enter IP addresses to retrieve information including country, city, ISP, and start / end IP addresses. You can enter up to 100 IP addresses and search for them. The resulting information is useful for locating Internet visitors or sites that send spyware (I have a list of sites to block and a couple of them only list the IP address). It's also for producing localized content, redirecting visitors, analyzing raw Web logs, and producing spam-filtering software. Even use it to learn about IP addresses and the information they provide. [Meryl]

[Lockergnome Windows Fanatics]

 

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Weekend Blogger
weekend mode.... [jenett.radio] 

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The Ten Keys To Effective Networking

THE TEN KEYS TO EFFECTIVE NETWORKING
There is a lot of nonsensical 'conventional wisdom' out there about networking. About the need to be aggressive. About the importance of exchanging business cards. About only networking with 'key decision makers'. About the art of small talk. About exaggerated politeness. About being everything but yourself. In my experience, none of this advice works. Here are ten things that do:

1. Do your research. Learn who specifically you need/want to meet (whether your networking objective is business or personal). Find out as much as you can about them, and where you are likely to meet them, or where you are likely to meet someone who can introduce you to them. And don't limit yourself to 'secondary' (Internet and library) research. Talk to existing contacts to unearth information about your target contacts that no one else has (but be careful to verify it). Most networking 'events' that are organized for you are a waste of time -- you'll meet mostly other people looking to meet people who aren't there. Usually, the best networking events are those you have deliberately got yourself invited to.
2. Develop 'elevator speeches'. First impressions are important, and a brief, clear, compelling, rehearsed (but natural-sounding) 20-30 second statement, prepared for and delivered to a specific target contact when you first meet, can be powerful. They shouldn't be the first thing you say, of course, but you shouldn't wait too long. They should be unique (something only you could/would say), personal and engaging but not fawning, all about the other person not about you, and should suggest how you might be able to help the other person. Hard work, but worth it.
3. Don't underestimate the 'strength of weak ties'. This is the theory (which is well-supported) that most of the critical successes in your personal and professional life will come through someone who knows the person who will ultimately be responsible for that success (future customer, employer, best friend or spouse), not through a direct, planned or serendipitous contact with that person him/herself. Those 'friend of a friend', two and three degrees-of-separation contacts need to be nurtured and real -- if you're just using someone to get to someone else, they'll know, and the outcome won't be pretty. But there can be an implicit 'exchange of favours' among weak ties -- if you introduce me to X I'll introduce you to Y. Reciprocity is OK.
4. Listen and help. Women are often better networkers than men because they listen better, and they know that asking another person questions is a great way to engage them and draw them out. The objective of asking questions is to learn how you can help the other person, not to set them up for your sales pitch. Networking is not about selling (your product or yourself), and if you try to sell too early, not only will you fail, you won't get a second chance. If you understand the other person's needs, and can gently suggest that you might be able to help him/her meet those needs, you've succeeded.
5. Never lie, and don't tolerate bullshit from others. Even being associated with dishonest people can seriously hurt your networking efforts, and if you yourself get a reputation for dishonesty or exaggeration, you're toast. Always be genuine -- people have great bullshit detectors. A classic example of this kind of well-intentioned but disastrous deceit is the guy that calls you up and asks to 'interview' you, when his real motivation is to land a job with your company, using you as his research tool. Ask yourself how you would feel as the unsuspecting 'interviewee'. Ugh.
6. Understand that every conversation is an implicit contract. The person who you're talking to has an objective in talking to you (which might be as simple as extracting him/herself from the conversation ASAP). You have an objective in talking to that person. Those objectives may not be clear at the moment of first conversation, but one way or another they'll crystallize quickly. Like a dance, one person needs to lead (both people trying to lead is not uncommon, but pretty ungraceful). The lead may switch back and forth, and that's all part of the implicit contract that guides and steers the conversation. That's why listening is so important, reading the body language, establishing trust and rapport. Until you both understand the implicit contract, there can be no real conversation, and without real conversation there can be no real relationship. This is very subtle, but very important stuff. The only way to be good at it is lots of practice.
   
7. Follow through and follow up. If you say you're going to do something in a conversation, that's a commitment. Do it, quickly. Otherwise, you'll have a reputation for breaking promises you'll never live down. And if you do establish a good relationship, don't just walk away -- ask for a follow-up meeting, or, if you've really impressed and you know it's now or never, ask for the work, the job, the date.
   
8. Learn to tell stories. Nothing is more engaging, or more subversively effective, and nothing cuts through the ice better than a well-told story. That's why the best speeches always start with them.
   
9. Prune your networks. Although there's no hard-and-fast rule, many experts believe that it's impossible to maintain meaningful relationships with more than about 150 people at a time. It's like juggling -- too many balls in the air spells disaster. Do triage: Some relationships will grow just fine with no attention. Others aren't going anywhere no matter how hard you work at them. Focus on the third group -- those which will blossom with investment, but not without.
10. Manage your networks. Occasionally sit down and go through your network list and evaluate each relationship, what its value is to you, what needs to be done, and which ones are most important and most urgent. Don't let the urgent relationships consume all your time so there is no time left for the important ones. Networks are an investment -- like a garden they need to be tended, weeded, watered, and at the right time, harvested.

[How to Save the World]

 

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Fun Web Button Maker

Fun Web button maker.

Here's a neat site to make fun buttons like these. Link (via horkulated)

[Boing Boing]

 

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CutePDF Writer

DOWNLOAD: CutePDF Writer v2.1 [1075K] Win98/2k/XP FREE.

http://www.mywebattack.com/gnomeapp.php?id=107763

{Convert documents to PDF} CutePDF Writer allows you to convert any printable document to PDF format. It installs as a virtual printer and is available from any application that offers a `Print` option. The program is easy to use; just select the CutePDF printer and click the print button. Some advanced options are also available (scaling, multi-page layouts, print quality, and more). Unlike most other free PDF creators, this one does not insert any watermarks at all - however, it depends on the install of a free converter - which can be easily downloaded and installed. If you are looking for easy, no hassle conversion to PDF format, you should give this one a try! [SnapFiles]

[Lockergnome IT Professionals]

 

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How Can I Stalk My Friends?

GNEWBIE GNOOK: How Can I Stalk My Friends?.

By Brandon Watts

Q: I've been trying to find out information about lost friends, family, and classmates. But when I go looking for a people search engine on the Web, I keep getting these sites that want to tell you the bare minimum and then charge for additional information or a background check. Where can I get a good and free search engine for people of my past? All I want is an address or a phone number.

A: This is actually a fun project! You might be curious how your old friend from high school is doing, or maybe you would just get pleasure out of calling them up and telling them that you turned out to be more successful than they did? Ah, well ... to each his own! As you can imagine, old faithful (the Internet) contains the tools to carry out this task. It sounds like you have already seen services such as Classmates. There are also quite a few free Web sites that will help you out in regards to this. Below are three worthy ones that I found. Just so you know, the first site mentioned will open a veritable cascade of new browser windows depending on how many sites you have it search.

http://www.free-people-search-engine.com
http://people.yahoo.com
http://www.whowhere.com

To be honest, the information that you are able to obtain through these sites is a little unnerving. By providing minimal details, I was able to successfully find the addresses and phone numbers of several of my friends. If you really want to get serious, you could even type the address into a site like TerraServer or Terra Fly to see a satellite photo of the location. However, if you're looking at satellite photos of their house, you are walking the fine line between normality and insanity. Can you say stalker?

[Lockergnome Windows Fanatics]

 

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Pollard's Principles of KM, and an Invitation To Join AOK

I Have A Dream...

POLLARD'S PRINCIPLES OF KM, AND AN INVITATION TO JOIN AOK

I am delighted to have been asked to be this month's moderator of the online forum Association of KnowledgeWork (AOK) featuring some of the founders of, and some of the brightest and most creative thinkers in, the discipline of Knowledge Management (KM). My subject for the discussion, which runs from March 15 to 26, is officially "Weblogs and other Personal Content Management and Social Networking Tools in KM", but the discourse is always wide-ranging, so just about anything about KM may be discussed.

If you are interested in this subject, I welcome you to join AOK (sign up here -- it's free), read the introduction to this month's discussion here, and contribute your two cents' worth by replying to any of the discussion threads, or starting your own, either by e-mail reply (if you sign up to receive the discussion by e-mail) or by responding on the archive pages. All comments are reviewed and edited by Jerry Ash, AOK's extremely friendly and competent manager.

Some of the members of AOK are a bit impatient with "technology-obsessed" KM practitioners, so to keep them interested in the discussion, I'm going to broaden the issue to encompass dialogue on the principles underlying my belief that Personal Content Management (PCM) and Social Networking applications are critical to the survival of KM in large organizations. Here are those principles:

Pollard's Principles of Knowledge Management

1. KM should be about Front Line Worker Effectiveness: The key 'value proposition' for KM must be improving the effectiveness (not the efficiency) of knowledge workers (defined by Drucker as 'anyone who knows how to do their specialized job better than anyone else in the organization including their boss' -- i.e. almost everyone on the front lines of the organization). In other words, don't worry about what 'knowledge' or 'knowledge work' is -- as long as what you're doing improves front line knowledge worker effectiveness, it's KM and you're on the right track.
   
2. There is an Urgent Need to Improve Front Line KM & IT: If you talk to knowledge workers, they will almost unanimously tell you that they desperately need help in improving their work effectiveness, and that little of what KM & IT have provided thus far has been useful to that end.
3. Knowledge Workers Don't Know How to do Knowledge Work: Knowledge workers perceive a crisis of information overload, and feel they do not have the time nor the skills to manage information effectively.
4. Knowledge is Best Transferred by Conversations: The principal and most effective means of knowledge transfer in organizations is conversations, the best of which are oral and face-to-face, iterative and context-rich.
   
5. Everyone Learns, Organizes and Processes Information Differently: Taxonomies, tools and processes that force people to use a different model for doing these things than the one they use naturally, will be resisted.
   
6. Most KM & IT Tools are Unintuitive and Over-Engineered: Simpler is better. If you have to teach people to use tools they're probably too complicated. Best are tools and processes that emulate the natural 'information behaviour' and artefacts of workers i.e. mimicking their physical workspace (desk), the physical media (paper), and the processes (conversing, subscribing, stacking, shuffling, filing documents, highlighting, annotating, writing in and crossing out with a pencil) they intuitively use to acquire, process and disseminate information.
7. Conversations Rarely Include the Best Possible Experts: The risk and cost of misuse (theft, hacking, inappropriate use) of knowledge pales in comparison with the risk and cost of not using the best available knowledge. That includes not knowing who the best experts are (inside & outside the organization), and relying on lesser expertise.
   
8. Management Doesn't Want or Need KM Decision Support: Executives are hired and paid top salaries because they supposedly have the skills, experience, judgement and instincts to make near-optimal decisions quickly. They pride themselves on their ability to make decisions with imperfect information. They use their selected inner circle of advisors as a sounding board. They (mostly) don't use KM systems. KM is not for them, it's for the Front Line Knowledge Worker. A major KM challenge is that management is paying for it, but they don't use it themselves -- a hard sell.
9. Stories are Critical to Knowledge Transfer: More than just examples, stories are a language for translating knowledge between our personal, unique, unfathomable mental models. A good narrative is almost inherently more effective, clearer and more persuasive than a good exposition or a good analysis. If we can teach knowledge workers to tell, and write, good stories, we can massively increase the value of stored knowledge.
10. Humans are Inherently Poor Collaborators: You can't just blame poor tools for the lack of progress in virtual and asynchronous collaboration in business, and the failure of team and community knowledge tools and 'spaces' to get much traction -- at least beyond the short life and limited purpose of specific projects. Business by nature is undemocratic and uncollaborative: The hierarchy exists to reinforce that instructions flow down, work is done by individuals according to those instructions, and the results are reported back up. There is little room (and often little perceived need) for consensus building or any of those warm fuzzy things we are taught to do in Teamwork 101. In fact, most teams exist principally to dole out tasks to their members and aggregate the status and results of that individual work. Even inherently collaborative tasks like editing are usually done sequentially by individuals. If it's really important to improve collaboration and teamwork in organizations (i.e. if it's not just a smokescreen by management to make the organization appear more democratic), we're going to have to fundamentally change the way businesses are organized and operated. You might even have to change our human culture (or at least fire all the males).
    
11. Much of What We Do at Home is Also Knowledge Work: The commercial applicability of tools developed to improve knowledge worker effectiveness could also be leveraged for home use. Example: If you want to move videoconferencing out of the stone age, figure out how little Janey in Seattle can use it to chat and play with Grandma in Florida (and remember principle 6).

My argument for focusing KM first and foremost on improving (and simplifying) the Personal Content Management and Social Networking tools available to knowledge workers follows directly from these principles. Without good tools we cannot support effective processes and bring about productive behaviour change.

Inherent, too, in all these principles is the need to stress quality over quantity -- we need fewer, simpler-to-use tools with fewer, intuitive functions, and less, better-quality, more useful content.

I am hopeful that much of the AOK discussion will be about principles 4, 7 and 9, because even with best tools in the world, there will remain cultural and learning obstacles to effective knowledge work and effective knowledge transfer. I look forward to seeing you on AOK
[How to Save the World]

 

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Search Engine Watch 2003 Award Winners, Part 4

Best Search Toolbar
Best Search Feature
Best Specialty Search Engine
[ClickZ]

 

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How Piracy Repeatedly Saved The Entertainment Industry

How piracy repeatedly saved the entertainment industry. This month's Wired has a very good excerpt from Lessig's new book, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity, detailing the way that pirate media has always been the prerequisite of next-generation legit media.

As the history of film, music, radio, and cable TV suggest, even if some piracy is plainly wrong, not all piracy is. Or at least, not in the sense that the term is increasingly being used today. Many kinds of piracy are useful and productive, either to create new content or foster new ways of doing business. Neither our tradition, nor any tradition, has ever banned all piracy.

This doesn't mean that there are no questions raised by the latest piracy concern - peer-to-peer file-sharing. But it does mean that we need to understand the harm in P2P sharing a bit more before we condemn it to the gallows.

Like the original Hollywood, P2P sharing seeks to escape an overly controlling industry. And like the original recording and radio industries, it is simply exploiting a new way of distributing content. But unlike cable TV, no one is selling the content that gets shared on P2P services. This difference distinguishes P2P sharing. We should find a way to protect artists while permitting this sharing to survive.

Link [Boing Boing Blog]

 

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Bloggers Praise Search Tool For Outlook

Bloggers praise search tool for Outlook.

Several people have commented on Marc Orchant's recommendation for the Outlook search enhancement tool called Lookout (which I Scobleized with a link a week ago or so). It is getting great praise. For instance, check out what Jeff Maurone says about it: "I just, tonight, got around to actually installing it and completing the first indexing and oh man it's awesome."

By the way, I found Jeff by looking at Technorati's "link cosmos" for me.

[Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger]

 

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Search Engine Watch 2003 Award Winners, Part 3

Best Shopping Search Engine
Best Design
Most Webmaster-Friendly Search Provider
Best Paid-Placement Service
[ClickZ]

 

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No Silver Bullet

I'm working on my weekly InfoWorld column (this one will run in print and online on March 8) and I'm referencing an essay from Frederick Brooks (of "Mythical Man-Month" fame) entitled "No Silver Bullet: Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering."

You just have to read this. I've read it many times before and referenced it in a column on web services two years ago, but the essay continues to amaze me. Although it was written eighteen years ago, the content still rings true. Just a sample:

The essence of a software entity is a construct of interlocking concepts: data sets, relationships among data items, algorithms, and invocations of functions. This essence is abstract in that such a conceptual construct is the same under many different representations. It is nonetheless highly precise and richly detailed.

I believe the hard part of building software to be the specification, design, and testing of this conceptual construct, not the labor of representing it and testing the fidelity of the representation. We still make syntax errors, to be sure; but they are fuzz compared with the conceptual errors in most systems.

If this is true, building software will always be hard. There is inherently no silver bullet.

Amen. Be sure to read the rest.

[Chad Dickerson]

 

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