Month: November 2003

ER-6 headphones

Buzz is nothing if not a persuasive salesman. He's been on my case for months to try Etymotics's ER-6 earphones. He finally succeeded a few weeks back and I've now been using them for a while.

I should have given in to Buzz earlier. Understand, I was already using an upgraded pair of UM In-Ear Monitors as recommended by Kevin Kelly at Recomendo. And I used Bose's noise-cancelling headsets when I travelled. The ER-6's replace both of those and give me noticeably better sound over both of those choices.

Don’t return those MP3s

A picture named fargo.jpgThis idea is going to backfire. Better to send music CDs to record company execs, cut them in half so they can’t re-sell them, and send an unmistakable message that the gravy train is drying up. Sending email with huge enclosures is a horrible abuse of the Net. [Scripting News]

I’d have to agree with Dave here.

Besides being an abuse of the net likely to cause more harm to the average user than it will send any useful message to record company execs, it has another problem. I’m willing to bet that many if not most of these execs don’t read their own email. You’re more likely to make life difficult from some poor Executive Assistant than you are to deliver any useful message to the executives themselves.

If the relevant executives were making any extensive use of email and the web, I think we’d see a lot less clueless behavior on their part.

Full-text feeds and weblog comments

Comment on post 3836 on 11/17/03 by Liz Lawley. I think for many of us the goal is to get our thoughts *written*–the being read is a secondary bonus. 🙂 The real problem with full-text feeds, I think, is that they make it more likely that comments–which I think are a critical part of many weblog entries–will be missed. 🙁 [chaosplayer News]

As expected, Liz raises several cogent points about my bias for full-text feeds. First, like Liz, my initial goal in blogging was to make it easier to get my thoughts written down in the first place. Discovering that there were people out there who wanted to read them was a secondary and welcome bonus.

As for missing comments, I'm less clear. It was a while before I enable comments at all. I do get comments and those that I get are always valuable. My solution to not missing comments on  my own weblog is to provide an RSS feed from my comments so they flow into my aggregator. The only drawback to that approach I can see is that comments do get separated from the original post as they come into the aggregator, but I can always go back to the weblog itself to track the comments in place. I also find that the bulk of the discussions I track tend to be cross-blog rather than comment-centric. The question, of course, is whether that observation in an artifact of my being aggregator-biased. How many good discussions am I missing by not tracking comments on other blogs more closely?

For that matter, why, or perhaps when, would you choose to post a comment instead of making an entry in your own blog? The technologies are opening up more choices; are there any emerging guidelines or practices to direct my choices.

Full text please

 

A number of the people who's blogs I read regularly have not set up their systems to provide a full text feed of each post. 40 words is not enough for me to accurately decide if I want to read something or not. More often than not the post gets deleted.

Please consider offering an alternative feed for those of us who want full text. That said, I don't offer 40 word excerpts on my feed so if you want one ask and I'll set it up.

 
Let me add my vote to this request as well. I find that it takes an absolutely compelling headline and a lead graf and available time for me to go check out a full post that isn't already in my aggregator. Do I risk missing something compelling? Possibly. But if you're primary goal is to get your content read, then a full feed is your best bet from my selfish perspective.
 
I know that there are those, like Liz Lawley,  who still prefer to read blog posts in situ. I'm an informavore, however, and I don't find enough incremental information content in the typical blog site to warrant regular visits to the site over consuming the posts by way of a full feed. To me the default behavior of some blogging tools to offer abbreviated feeds is a holdover from such discredited notions as stickiness and aggregating eyeballs.
 
On the other side, choice is good. If there is any interest in seeing an abbreviated posts feed or titles only feed here, let me know in the comments and I'll add it.

Electronic Portfolio White Paper

Electronic Portfolio White Paper. Everybody is talking about e-portfolios these days, and this paper talks about them a lot, 68 PDF pages worth. With contributors from Blackboard, eCollege, EDUCAUSE and a bunch of universities, among others, this paper also carries some clout. The paper aims to provide “a comprehensive review of electronic portfolios, from a conceptual understanding of applications to identifying technical and interoperability requirements (and) to provide a conceptual overview exploring potential opportunities and challenges to electronic portfolio adopters and developers.” This it does, with a series of use cases and a good conceptual overview. Several architectures are proposed, but in the end, only the ‘peer-to-peer’ model is worth considering, since the others are tied to enterprise systems. Comprehensive references and resources. If you are interested in ePortfolios, I can’t think of a better place to start than with this discussion. By Gary Greenberg, ed., ePort Consortium, November 3, 2003 [Refer][Research][Reflect] [OLDaily]

The notion of portfolios is relevant and applicable well beyond the campus. I routinely ask to see samples of people’s work when interviewing. We all produce portfolios of our work. The question is how well organized is your portfolio.

A step forward or backward?

Another Step Along the Way.

David Brett of Knexa, a friend of mine, just sent me this link, to consultants who look like they’ve put language to Drucker’s notion that knowledge workers own the means of production in an increasingly knowledge-based economy (see his article titled Beyond the Information Revolution, a central article to the creation of the concept of wirearchy for me).

I have spoken and written about this sea-change in the nature of work in terms of the “Mass Customization of Work“, which I think is the logical and very likely result of individuals’ knowledge and working styles (necessarily) interweaving with the structure and flow of large integrated systems for the distribution and manipulation of information.

I’ll have to check out in more detail the site of Volitional Partners, who say they are launching a revolution in the nature of work, wherein individual employees “own” their knowledge. It looks interesting, and also looks like they want to stake out some mindspace with their language and wordings.

There are many people, processes and applications purporting to do some or all of this, in terms of human capital, intellectual capital, social capital, relationship capital and so on. I think it’s all part of a very big and very permanent shift, in which conversations and dialogue between human minds, imagination, voice and purpose play a central role.

Nothing is more human than the capability to engage in conversation and dialogue, point and argue, push back and pull forward ideas into newer, more interesting, more stimulating, more coherent shapes. This will be central to work, to culture and to democracy as we believe it should be, in the next few years to come.

[wirearchy News]

My first reactions to the site of Volitional Partners are more cynical than Jon’s. We have lots of perfectly serviceable language already. Anyone whose homepage is littered with neologisms, trademark symbols, and talk of “Proprietary Platforms” has dug themselves a hole that I am reluctant to explore.

It comes across as a hybrid cross between New Age Mysticism and MBA MarketingSpeak. I can only hope it’s a sterile hybrid. If there is something real and useful there, wouldn’t it come across without the noise?

Jon calls this another step along the way. I wonder in what direction?

Pollard on Personal Productivity Improvement

THE BUSINESS CASE FOR PERSONAL PRODUCTIVITY IMPROVEMENT.

In a recent post I argued that IT and Knowledge Management (KM) should merge into a combined TechKnowledgy department that would, in addition to the traditional responsibilities for managing the financial, HR and sales systems and technical hardware of the organization, take on these two important new responsibilities focused on the individual ‘knowledge worker’:1. Social Software Applications: Development of new social software applications for front-line employees, including:

  • Expertise locators – to help people find other people inside and outside the organization they need to talk with to do their job more effectively.
  • Personal content management tools – simple, weblog-type tools that organize, access and selectively publish each individual’s ‘filing cabinet‘, as a replacement for failed centralized content management systems.
  • Personal collaboration tools – wireless, portable videoconferencing and networking tools that save travel costs and allow people to participate virtually in events where they cannot afford to participate in person.
  • Personal researching and reporting tools – technologies and templates that enable effective do-it-yourself business research and analysis and facilitate the preparation of professional reports and presentations.

PPI2. Personal Productivity Improvement: Hands-on assistance to front-line employees — helping them make effective use of technology and knowledge, including the above tools, one-on-one, in the context of their individual roles. Not training, not wait-for-the-phone-to-ring help desk service — face to face, scheduled sessions where individuals can show what they do and what they know, and experts can show them how to do it better, faster, and take the intelligence of what else is needed back to HO so developers can improve effectiveness even more.
I’ve written before about social software applications, and noted that Business 2.0 has named these applications the Best New Technology of 2003.

Now I’ve put together, in Word format, a downloadable Business Case for Personal Productivity Improvement. I’ve written this so that it can be used by both:

  1. IT/KM professions inside the organization, to get executive buy-in and resources for it, and
  2. external IT/KM consultants who want to sell this service to organizations that prefer to outsource it.

I hope you find it useful and I would welcome comments on it. I am looking to organize a virtual collaborative enterprise of IT/KM professionals interested in providing this service, so I may also post it on Ryze/LinkedIn.

What do you think — could people make a living doing this?

[How to Save the World]

More spot on insight from Dave Pollard. This ties in nicely with several lines of thought I’ve been exploring. Take a look at Is Knowledge Work Improvable? for example.

The key challenge here is that success depends more on leadership than on management.

Personal Wiki PIM – Update I

Personal Wiki PIM – Update I.

I’ve been using MoinMoin as my personal information management platform for the last several weeks. This had several goals. First, I needed to get my growing collection of documents under control. Secondly, I really wanted to dive into wikis a lot deeper and this gives me a great chance to do just that.

So here is a brief update about what I have found so far.

  1. I am amazed at how useful the auto linking and document templating is for PIM type functions. It is really a snap to put some rudimentary organization on the material and then let it develop from there.

    I was initially worried that what I needed was more structured database style storage for contact information and such, but doing it freeform doesn’t seem to have anty real disadvantages that I have found yet.

  1. MoinMoin has a pretty cool regex based query tool that lets you collect links to other pages. I have made good use of this to create a very low maintenance set of navigation pages so my info is only one to two clicks away. Very Handy.

  1. Wikis really help me write … all the fuss about how it really is designed for writers not readers is apparently true, at least in my case. I find it easier to write in my wiki than in MS Word. Perhaps less clutter? More focus on the words?

I have also made use of editmoin which allows me to use vim to edit my documents which may contribute to the ease of writing somewhat. Here is an Infoworld article noting that writers tend to work in minimal writing tools. Maybe that is partly what I’ve experienced.

  1. I have had to spend sometime on buffing up the css stylesheets. This is mainly because a lot of my formal documents need to get emailed out to customers and I have been converting them to PDF and sending them that way. This required some adjustment to the styles.

[Note to MoinMoin developers: It would be cool if the print preview used a different stylesheet… Then I could highlight uncreated WikiWords in the regular view but not the print view …]

  1. Finally, I am using JPluck to sync the content of my Wiki to my Palm Pilot. That way all the info I need is always at my fingertips. It took some adjustments to the spidering controls to get it to focus only on what I wanted, but it has worked out very well.

So far this has been extremely successful. More reports as events warrent 😉

[Ed Taekema – Road Warrior Collaboration]

Here’s a perfect example of why Ed’s blog is in my subscription list. This is excellent perspective on similar experiments I’ve been trying to get some traction on.