Year: 2004

MBA Student Suvey Project: The Blog as a Meaningful Business Tool

More efforts to dig into the connections between blogs and organizations.

MBA Student Suvey Project: The Blog as a Meaningful Business Tool.

Matthew Lin wrote me and asked to help publicize his survey. If you leave your email addy at the end, he’ll share his report. Here is his email:

Dear Nancy,

My name is Matthew Lin, an MBA candidate at University of New Brunswick at Saint John, Canada. I am currently conducting a research on how weblogs are being used as business tools, and their particular implication for small and medium enterprises. I have designed a questionnaire in order to survey individuals who publish weblogs or can describe the reasoning behind their company’s weblog. The survey will be posted online for one month, starting next week. I am seeking your assistance to promote this survey to your readers, in hope of gathering a good cross-section of business weblogs. Please spread the word!

The survey is available at: http://business.unbsj.ca/bblog/

Additional information about this project (e.g., objectives, hypotheses) are available upon request.

Thank you for your consideration. If you are aware of others who might also be
interested in posting this questionnaire URL, please feel free to forward this email to them.

Sincerely,

Matthew Lin

[Full Circle Associates Online Interaction & Community Blog]

Want Lookout? Get it today

Several people I trust have been recommending LookOut and its availability after Microsoft purchased the company may become an issue. I’ve grabbed a copy.

Want Lookout? Get it today..

Lookout 1.2 (the current version with the new license agreement) is available today until 12:00 PM PST at this link. After that time, you ll need to either find a friend who has the installer or wait until Microsoft decides what it s stratgey for the Outlook add-in will be.

There s been a lot of speculation that the fact that purchase was made through the MSN group (where founder and developer Mike Belshe is joining the Advanced Search Technology group) may mean that we won t see Lookout re-released as an add-in for the Outlook application.

Others are predicting that Lookout search capability will be incorporated into the next version of Outlook (but who knows when that will be?).

As the old song goes get it while you can .

[The Office Weblog]

Martin Roell on Improving Knowledge Workers’ Productivity

Martin has put together a nice synthesis of thinking about weblogs and knowledge worker productivity.

Improving Knowledge Workers’ Productivity and Organisational Knowledge Sharing with Weblog-based Personal Publishing.

In case you wonder what to read this weekend: Martin Roell published 0.9 version of the paper for his BlogTalk presentation – Distributed KM – Improving Knowledge Workers’ Productivity and Organisational Knowledge Sharing with Weblog-based Personal Publishing.

This paper briefly explores the failure of traditional knowledge management to adress the problem of knowledge worker productivity and argues that a deeper understanding of knowledge work is necessary to improve it. It then explores knowledge work and how it is supported with information technology tools today, focussing specially on the email client as a knowledge work tool.

The paper introduces weblogs as personal publishing tools for knowledge workers and shows how personal publishing supports knowledg work processes, is personally beneficial to the knowledge worker and helps the dissemination of knowledge through an organisation.

Martin intergrates lots of thinking on “blogs in KM”, so, next to an interesting read by itself, this paper is a good starting point to discover follow-up reading.

[Mathemagenic]

“Yes, And” and Uplift Improvs

Knowledge work is increasingly about learning to think and act on your feet. The notion of scripted responses is an outmoded response appropriate to industrial settings that no longer exist. Improv teaches that you can prepare for the unexpected in more useful ways that standing around with your mouth agape. “Yes, and” is one of those fundamental tricks of the improv trade. Scripts may be obsolete but rehearsal still can help. Tom provides a nice summary of improv and pointers to some useful improv resources.

“Yes, And” and Uplift Improvs. I was at a retreat last week at which the leader spoke of a “Yes, And” dialog model. A group… [Tom Munnecke]

List of wiki engines

Seems writing a wiki tool is another rite of passage for programmers. Quite a remarkable list.

Holy Wiki. (via Tim Wilson) Think wikis are just a passing fad? This is an amazing list of wiki engines that makes me want to play even more. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been showing and talking about Wikipedia lately. The more I think about it, the more I wonder if collaborative construction of content won’t be the rule instead of the exception in the future. [Weblogg-ed News]

Favorite PowerPoint Resources from Michael Hyatt

Although I’ve been trying to wean myself from PowerPoint, this is still an excellent set of resources from Michael Hyatt.

My Favorite PowerPoint Resources. I don’t know about you, but our business runs on PowerPoint. Last Friday, I led a seminar in Atlanta on publishing strategy with a group of 55 foreign publishers. Today, I made a presentation in Boston to some investors attending… [Working Smart]

David Gelerntner on Beauty in Computing

Here’s a great thought to start off my day. I think it applies beyond the obvious complexity of computing.

David Gelerntner on Beauty in Computing.

David Gelerntner, a computer scientist at Yale, perhaps put it best when he said, “Beauty is more important in computing than anywhere else in technology because software is so complicated. Beauty is the ultimate defence against complexity.”

Quoted in the Economist article “Unix’s founding fathers” (via Dan Hill)

[Tesugen.com: Peter Lindbergs Weblog]