Earl Mardle nails it. But so long as there is demand from insecure executives for rules they're supposed to follow, there will be gurus to provide them with exactly that.
"My kvetch about management gurus is that they observe patterns of behaviour in successful people,
enterprises etc and then convert them into rules which other, less
successful people or organisations are supposed to follow in order to
be successful.
[...] Instead of trying to get people to shoehorn themselves into some
executive straightjacket, we should be looking through our businesses
for people in the ranks who display the characteristics he talks about.
We should be encouraging and challenging and testing those people, just
as we do with athletes, pushing them to push their envelopes to see if
they can break through to become one of the "effective executives" and
making sure that when they do, we have given them plenty of reason to
be loyal, or at least grateful as they move on.
[...] Effective Executives are not a product that we can make, but an emergent property of correctly functioning organisations."
Right now submitting a post to a channel requires people to either fill in a form
on the channel page of their choice or send a TrackBack ping to the
channel. Both are simple, but still harder than they should. How about
adding a third option: simply link to the channel in your post. To make it easier, the top of each channel page could even provide some standard boilerplate chunk of the requisite HTML.
In order for this to work the ITE needs to watch the participating weblogs. It already watches for weblog updates,
so just let people register their blog or feed once and let the ITE
pick out the posts that link to it as they appear thereafter.
Note that this new option automagically generates visibility for the channels on participating blogs with
every post submitted; this is one of the key elements
that were missing for effective word-of-mouth propagation of awareness
of the Exchange. I'm kicking myself for having taken so long to find a simpler way.
Of course, along with ease of use comes more spam. I've been thinking about this too - more later.
I recently packaged up a version of the Webjay.org database for a
researcher interested in collaborative filtering of music. I'm
posting here to offer a copy to any interested researcher or
programmer. [...]
What could you do with this information? You can track the spread of
songs from one playlist to another, since successive additions will be
ordered by date; I imagine there are characteristic patterns. You
might develop methods to infer how appealing a song is, because a
more-appealing song should not only be more widespread, it should
spread faster. You could study what proportion of songs are hits. You
could study which users have the most influence in creating hits, and
ask what characteristics influencers have. You could take advantage of
the fact that the data is commonly available to compare algorithms from
different researchers, in a way similar to the NIST face image dataset.
The data is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike
License. More data may be available on request. It may also be
possible to gain direct access to the un-anonymized live data for the
purpose of developing real world services.
Drag it to your bookmarks and click it when you get the New York Times
"Sign up! It's free!" page instead of the article you wanted to read.
You will get a link to that same article that doesn't require
registration.
For instance, it will turn this
page into this
link, which you can click and/or blog.
It's an oldie but a goodie - I use it all the time.
It has just dawned upon me that part of my email might
as well be shared with the wider world, so I'm publishing some of it
(with the permission of correspondents, of course) on a new blog called
Seb's mailbox. (I
use Blogger's email-to-blog feature and slight editing.) Here's the
feed.
Latest additions (click
here if you don't see 'em below) :
To send me a message, use email or deposit it in my
public inbox.
