Seb's Open Research
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Saturday, June 26, 2004
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Friday, June 25, 2004
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Pithy explanations for the success of blogs
Tom Smith comes up with a totally rockin' list of formulas that explain the success of weblogs in learning / knowledge management. Via the social software channel.
- Bad Is the New Good ( It Really Is )
- Some Things Just Don't Work (And Never Did, Let's Get Over It)
- People need to PeripherizeTM, Not Focus ( There is Too Much Information )
- Thinking Out Loud ( The Best Place to Do It )
- Informality Fucking Rocks ( Everybody Hates the Suits Really )
- You Don't Know What You Know ( Really )
- You Probably Know Too Much To Even Begin Writing It Down ( Really Really )
- A Little And Often is Best ( Your Mum Was Right )
- The Link is God ( Which makes Google the Devil )
- Person Centric not Place Centric (You can only be in one place at a time)
- Personal Taxonomies (Let Dublin Core catch up rather than dictate)
- You Own Your Blog ( You Are Your Blog )
- Information Exists in the Context of People (And Always Has)
- If It's Not Documented, It Really Doesn't Exist
- Democracy is the Least Worst of the Alternatives (Let's Get Over It)
- Reflection is the New Black (Who'd have thought?)
- Lets Plan To Start Now, Plan Later (That's The Plan Anyway)
- Passwords Blow Goats
- Distributed AND Centralized (not OR)
- Nobody Owns the Blog Concept
- If Blogs are the Songs, RSS is the Home-made Compilation CD (RSS is cool)
- People Can Cope With Simple ( Just about, but not always )
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Don't Try And Make The Computer Do Things It Can't And We Can ( i.e
Manage Knowledge, Make Sense, Inspire, See Connections, Make Jokes,
Cock Up)
- Google for "Small Pieces Loosely Joined"
 10:35:42 AM
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Wednesday, June 23, 2004
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In-flight jokes
At the end of my Westjet flight back the attendant grabbed the mic and
told us a joke. Humor injects a very welcome human element in otherwise
quite stiff and boring air travel. Maybe this should become policy? (It would need
to be a different joke each time though. And a good one at that.)
8:21:57 PM
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Tuesday, June 22, 2004
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Gatineau seminar on weblogs
I'm in Ottawa right now. Spoke yesterday morning on a panel on weblogs for
an audience of communication specialists who work in the Canadian government.
John Stevenson, who works at the International Development Research Centre and is a long-time blogger, kicked it off beautifully, giving an excellent
general history and overview of weblogs and why people love them. He
then explained different ways in which they can enhance communication in organizations.
I spoke right after him and provided some more detail on the mechanics
of how blogging and aggregation works, and explained how the emergence
of the two-way web is moving us to increasingly networked ways of
diffusing information. (My slides are here. By the way, if you were
there and would like to start an email conversation with others who were there too, just send me email at Sebastien -dot- Paquet -at- nrc -dot- ca.)
 Did you know the US army had embraced collaborative weblogs on a
private network? Greg Searle,
who's co-founder and chief scientist at Tomoye, explained
how that came about. It's a very interesting story: two company
commanders - Nate Allen and Tony Burgess - who lived next to one
another
in Hawaii and discovered the incredible value of informal conversation
among peers for learning. They then started digging into the literature
on communities of practice to better connect their insights with what
is known in this area.
They ended up wroting a book titled "Taking the Guidon" which became
wildly popular within the army and led to a guerilla knowledge
management effort among people in that position. A community of
practice of company commanders initially built on PHP-Nuke sprang up below the radar and interest
bubbled up over about two years. Despite obvious resistance among
people in the upper ranks, it was eventually recognized that you need a
network to fight networks, and this internal blogging activity
is now officially
endorsed, which is quite an about-face for the military culture. Greg
said the passion of the participants was a key factor in the success of
the CoP. Also, when the survival of your men depends on learning,
it provides a powerful incentive to find more effective ways to learn.
You can get a glimpse of what's discussed in the community in this Washington Post article.
 Ray
Valdes, research director in Gartner Research, then gave a presentation
on the future of blogging, syndication, and related technologies. I
especially liked his discussion of how Really Simple Syndication (RSS)
thrived while the much more sophisticated Information & Content
Echange (ICE) standard pretty much floundered. Simplicity rules. His slide on the Gartner Hype Cycle
as it applies to XML technologies was pretty neat too, though I don't
recall exactly where RSS was (I think it was pinned in several distinct
stages, depending on the kind of payload - news headlines, personal
publishing, or data.) (You can get the report for just $495 :)
Afterwards we fielded a number of good questions. One of the things we
discussed was the issue of reaching out to the young. A lady from
Health Canada said they have loads of excellent, relevant, reliable
information for them, e.g. on AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases,
but the issue is getting the kids to rely on it rather than on dubious
word-of-mouth from peers. It is pretty clear that an official Health
Canada blog won't be subscribed to by kids. Spamming blogs with links is out of
the question. Someone suggested sponsoring young bloggers, which is
touchy but could perhaps be done.
In the afternoon, Ian Darragh and Venk Chandran discussed best and
worst practices in e-newsletters. Robert Oates, who's been responsible
for the Government of Canada
newsroom since April 2002 spoke last. The newsroom is Open Source
software-powered, the backend is XML, the rendering is XHTML and 35
webfeeds are offered.
We got a behind-the-curtains look at the
newsroom's administration system, which is basically a pretty well-designed
structured blogging
interface. The news submission form lets you fill
in basic Dublin Core metadata for author, audience, subject, etc. The
people filling this out are professionals so you can kind of expect
them to expend the effort required to fill the form. Interestingly, the
newsroom opted not to offer email subscription because
people are buried under spam and because RSS lets them do away with the
burden of registration and email address collection and management.
Not every government department is using it, but I can see this newsroom becoming a
nicely unified, comprehensive, and metadata-rich one-stop shop for
government information and webfeeds. Kudos to Robert for pulling it off
with a very small team.
All in all a good day. Hopefully the gospel will spread a bit
around the capital and seed new initiatives around blogging and
webfeeds.
3:34:29 PM
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Monday, June 21, 2004
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A special request
With thanks to my colleague Stephen Downes for writing most of the following, and licensing it in such a way that I may repurpose it:
As you may know, the work I do is funded by the Government
of Canada through its support for the National Research
Council's Atlantic E-Business Initiative in the Institute
for Information Technology. The National Research Council
has given me a great deal of freedom to offer a wide range
of offerings for the Web community, including
Seb's Open Research, the Seb's OpenMind wiki, weblog deployments at educational institutions, the Internet Topic Exchange (in collaboration with Phil Pearson), various publications,
presentations, outreach and involvement in various innovation and knowledge sharing networks and more.
From time to time, funding for such initiatives is
reviewed, and our office is no exception. Quite reasonably,
the auditors would like to be able to show that some value
was received for the money spent, that the work performed
here had a positive impact on the wider community.
The impact of my work, and the work of our group as a
whole, is hard to measure. Sure, there are the usual things
- number of publications, number of talks, agreements
signed, and so on, but that doesn't tell the whole story.
Not even close. My weblog does not really
show up on the tally sheet, for example. TopicExchange.com flies below the radar for most established metrics.
So they have asked me, "Do you have recorded bits where
people say 'how great you are', 'you have had a great
impact ...', 'we couldn't have done this without you...',
either of a personal or NRC nature?" Such stories "have a
tendency to really impact write-ups for funding cases."
Well, I suppose I do, but I don't know what they are. So I
need your help.
If you could, please take a couple of minutes and send me
an email documenting the impact I've had and that the NRC
E-learning Group has had on your work and your projects.
You don't need to go into detail (though you can if you
want); just let us know what we did that helped you with
what you're doing. We want stories from across Canada and
from around the world.
Send it to me by email at Sebastien -dot- Paquet -at- nrc -dot- ca.
Your help here would really be appreciated. Even a couple
of sentences would give us information we did not have. So,
please take a couple of minutes, and let us know how we've
helped. This will allow us to continue providing our
research and services for free for a long time to come.
Many thanks.
Sébastien Paquet
 This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons License.
10:59:24 AM
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Copyleft
2006
Sebastien Paquet.
Last update:
4/22/2006; 12:18:20 PM.
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