Year: 2003

Thinking in public – knowledge management with a small k

Reminder. Paul McCann asked me to remind him (and other Chicago-area bloggers) when the upcoming presentations by Jim McGee and David Weinberger were scheduled, and this morning I got a message from Eric Sinclair renewing the plea for that reminder. So here we go: Jim will come to Seabury on Thursday, April 10, to talk about sharing knowledge via blogs (the title of his presentation will be, “Thinking in public — Can you do that? Is it safe? Is it wise? Weblogs in organizations.” He’ll be in the Seabury Lounge, I think, and the presentation will start at 7:30. David Weinberger… [AKMA’s Random Thoughts]

I'm flattered that AKMA was kind enough to sandwich me between David Weinberger and Ben and Mena Trott who presented last month. Hanging out in such company has to be a good thing.

I'll be sharing some thoughts, observations, and questions about how weblogs are beginning to be used as one more tool to help make knowledge work more effective inside organizations. The perspective I've been poking at for some time now is what happens when you begin to revisit the idea of knowledge management from the point of view of making individual knowledge workers more effective.

Think of it as knowledge management with a small k. The wave of solutions offered under the rubric of knowledge management prior to weblogs was largely driven by vendors with a centralized, top-down, organization centric view of the problem. At best they were attempting to solve the problem of knowledge management (whatever that might be) from the perspective of the organization, not the perspective of the knowledge workers doing the knowledge work. A good portion of the resistance to these knowledge management efforts is sensible resistance to extra work that has no demonstrable payoff for me as a knowledge worker.

I started experimenting with weblogs and precursors to weblogs several years ago and began to publish a public weblog about 18 months ago. I've found the notion of weblog as backup brain to be a powerful metaphor for finding the value of weblogs to the work of an individual knowledge worker within an organization. 

One of the central things that occurs with this strategy is that you have to start learning how to think in public. That certainly can feel like a risky thing to do. In some organizational settings it might well be risky. But I'm increasingly convinced that developing that skill will be an important aspect of what organizations must learn to do to survive and thrive in today's world. If you're going to be near Evanston next Thursday night, do drop in. If you're lucky AKMA's wife will provide molasses cookies again. Then it won't matter whether I have anything useful to say or not.

Googlewash or Agenda Setting?

Googlewash. Andrew Orlowski: Anti-war slogan coined, repurposed and Googlewashed… in 42 days. Orlowski discusses how a small group of A-list bloggers can quickly redefine terms in the eyes of Google…. [Google Weblog]

Very thought provoking commentary on the interaction between A-list bloggers and Google around the phrase “the second superpower” which Jim Moore introduced in his new blog and which lines up with some of Joi Ito’s recent thinking about emergent democracy.

Granted that technologists have a predisposition for liking rational utopian forecasts, it’s still interesting to see how these early adopters can have a disproportionate impact by leveraging these new tools. “Googlewash” is a clever term but I find it too pejorative. We are in an economy of ideas after all. Figuring out how to take advantage of this new environment to devleop and spread those ideas is a good thing. I do worry a bit about connecting this new found power to more traditional forms of influencing and shaping agendas. I hope, and suspect, that that is part of Dave Winer’s agenda in his new role at Harvard.

Reed on the Myth of Interference

My article on David Reed is in Salon. Salon today is running “The Myth of Interference,” an article I wrote about David Reed’s idea that the federal policies intended to prevent radio signals from interfering are based on bad science…. [Joho the Blog]

With this concluding quote from Reed

“The best science is often counterintuitive,” says Reed. “And bad science always leads to bad policy.”

Definitely worth reading, both for its specific message about a different way to think about regulating radio and the deeper issues of how to think about the interaction between policy making and technology development and evolution. I would tweak Reed’s final comment to read “a bad understanding of science always leads to bad policy.”

I sometimes wonder whether we wouldn’t have better policy if policy makers took the same care to not over-design their solutions that Reed and his colleagues took when they formulated their end-to-end argument.

Breaking the law in Illinois?

Super-DMCA Already Law in Several States. Louis Trager at the Washington Internet Daily reports that Super-DMCA bills have already passed in several states: The low-profile lobbying effort was under way about 2 years before it burst into the open in recent days. Legislation supported by MPAA… [Freedom to Tinker]

Apparently Illinois is among the states that have passed some form of this legislation. Which means that I may be breaking the law as I write this since I sit behind a firewall, use NAT on my home network, and use VPN to reach the office network. I'm going to see what I can learn about the Illinois legislation. Meanwhile, I'll continue my civil disobedience. Maybe this is actually a clever strategy to jumpstart the ailing technology industry by forcing all of us to redesign our net access? Somehow I doubt it.

Use your computer, break the law

Ignorant Legislators in Michigan. When lawmakers create stupid laws, they reduce respect for the what they do and injure civil society. With hardly any… [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]

Ed Felten picked up on this the other day. If you use a VPN to connect to your office and you're in Michigan, then it would appear that you are breaking the law. There are other, equally stupid aspects of this new legislation. Why is it so hard to learn the most fundamental things about technology before acting?

Weblogs as filtering tools

Why blogging isn’t a fad. Arnold Kling offers one of the best explanations I’ve seen of the value of blogging as a distributed information filtering mechanism.

“This filtering process makes all of us more efficient. Information with low value does not travel far. Information with high general value tends to travel the farthest. Information with low general value but high local value tends to reach interested people but then die out because as it gets passed along its value decays below the threshold. Everyone tends to receive information with a high value to them, and they avoid having to read information that has low value to them.”

[Werblog]

Gradually working off the backlog of items lurking in my news aggregator. This is, indeed, an excellent explanation of the value of weblogs in organizational settings and in communities of practice. I might have gotten to it earlier, but it’s from another of those Corante blogs that continue to refuse to offer RSS feeds. I have yet to hear the argument about why RSS feeds are a bad thing from Corante’s point of view. But until I have time to scrape these blogs into my aggregator I just don’t have time to track them, no matter how excellent the content may be.

Interview with Robert Kahn on ARPAnet history

Putting It All Together With Robert Kahn. Robert Kahn is one of the original architects of the internet, along with Vinton Cerf. This wide ranging interview traces the history of the original ARPANet and NSFNet as they became the internet we know today. Some interesting tidbits near the end of the article about his original plans for The Digital Library Project, digital objects and identifiers for digital objects. By Unknown, Ubiquity, March 11, 2003 [Refer][Research][Reflect] [OLDaily]