Month: September 2003

Space-age illustrations gallery

Magnificent space-age illustration gallery. Dreams of Space is an enthusiastic and wonderful gallery of vintage space-related illustration from the 1890s to the 1970s, divided by era. Link (Thanks, Charles)
[Boing Boing Blog]

I grew up poring over these illustrations in the 60s figuring that I'd be living in one of these drawings by now. On the other hand, I never figured I'd be writing this on a computer I carry in my backpack.

Presentation on weblogs in the organization from Michael Angeles of Lucent

Blogging in an organisation.

This sounds like a must-read. No time now – keeping it for later.

Excellent presentation on supporting K-logging within a large organisation. Lucent Technologies’ Information Specialist, Michael Angeles, believes blogging has evolved beyond “cool” and is moving quickly into the corporate world. In this presentation, Angeles will discuss who blogs, how and why. He will also discuss how Lucent is supporting bloggers and at the same time keeping close watch over the resulting growth of information on the Intranet.

Lucent’s Michael Angeles has posted the slides from his presentation to the (US) Usability Professional Association’s “Blogging in Corporate America” event in New York. His talk was called Making intranet weblog data usable.

This is worth a read for anybody interested in:

* how to support quick, easy knowledge sharing
* how to use simple publishing tools to bind together diverse data and knowledge bases
* how to promote expert voices within an organisation or a community
* how to deal with (and enoucrage) a diverse knowledge ecology within an organisation

A truly excellent and well-prepared presentation.

[headshift moments]

[Conversations with Dina]

Definitely worthwhile. Let me add my recommendation to the several other recommendations arriving in my aggregator. Helpful in building the arguments for using weblogs inside the firewall, although it doesn’t really do justify to the importance of RSS/aggregation in the overall knowledge sharing mix.

Jon Udell touts Syncato

Kimbro’s science experiment.

Kimbro Staken’s new science experiment, Syncato, is bubbling right along. I just used the new comments feature to post a comment to an item. In the comment, which is well-formed, I “transcluded” the result of an XPath query of Syncato’s XML database. I also quoted Kimbro in the comment, and used my own blog’s convention — <blockquote cite="..."> — to do so. Now watch:

Comments I’ve posted.

All blockquote elements.

All quotations of Kimbro.

Comments, written by me, that quote Kimbro.

XPath code fragments contained within comments where I quote Kimbro.

Awesomely cool. Kimbro writes:

In reality Syncato is much more then just a weblog system, it’s an XML fragment management system. [Syncato]

Great description. And what a powerful concept!

[Jon’s Radio]

Of course, knowing how and when to turn from learning to action is no easy task when these sorts of goodies keep flowing into your field of vision.

Learning to action

Do Yourself a Favor and Stop Learning.

Do Yourself a Favor and Stop Learning: ” I’m about to admit something odd, and perhaps career-threatening: I’m sick of learning.”

[elearnspace blog]

Right next to Dave’s pointer to Andrew Grumet in my aggregator. About the tantalizing trap of finding the perfect technology solution in the next new thing. Try this bit of advice from Deane at Gadgetopia; it applies to more than just technology:

Don’t look out on the horizon and worry that a new language will render your app irrelevant. Just write something. Solve a problem. Make an existing application better. Re-work an interface to remove issues users have been complaining about. Deliver some value to someone, somewhere.

Go with the weblog flow

Andrew Grumet. Andrew Grumet: “Free your mind, and your weblog will follow.”  [Scripting News]

All the evidence I'm familiar with says peak performance depends on “flow.” So why is so much of the practice of management day to day about control? Some more from Andrew:

To really get into weblogs as a writer, try to keep moving to stay with the flow. The old advice to a budding jazz musicians applies: “If you make a mistake and hit a bad note, don't stop! Hit it again and keep going”. Too much worrying will make a burden of posting, making work of what should be fun.

The promise of weblogs in the organization is that they help us get more accustomed to flow. The threat the pose is the same thing; they work against those who are more comfortable with control than with performance.

Another new content management blog

New content management blog.

Ideas in Technology and Publishing is a great new blog covering content management, XML and other publishing related technologies. It's less than a month old so it's still possible to read through the archives in full, which I've just done and recommend to anyone with an interest in content management.

[Simon Willison's Weblog]

Another new blog looking at content management. Here is the RSS Feed.