Year: 2004

Adding Feedster search

Just got around to adding Feedster search over in the right hand column here.

THANK YOU, THANK YOU: SEARCH BAR NOW WORKING.

feedsterThanks to some help from my brilliant friend in Scotland, Aalia Wayfare at The LeftHander (who previously fixed the gap in the middle column of my permalink pages), the “SEARCH SITE” bar in the upper right corner of my blog is now working. Instead of using Google, this bar now uses Feedster’s search engine. From the testing I have done, not only does it pick up all references to keywords anywhere in my archives, it also updates every day, so you can even use it to find references on my seven-day home page and category pages. BTW, Aalia has just ponied up for a Salon Blog.I’m still hoping that Google will get around to re-crawling all my pages, which should up my hit count by about 400 hits per day, and help people who rely on that search engine to find my site. I’d like to thank these wonderful people for helping me revamp my blog to make it easier for Google to crawl, and for readers with slow connection speeds to use: In addition to Aalia (who has also fixed my metatags): fellow Slogger Philip Vassar at Just Playing, Arve Bersvendsen at Virtuelvis , the blogless Ken Hirsch at No Pundit Intended, and Seth Finkelstein at Infothought, as well as Radio’s intrepid Lawrence Lee at Tomalak’s Realm. These guys are wonderful, selflessly helpful, and persistent and knowledgeable about all things technical. Thanks, guys!

In the meantime, if you’re one of those unhappy with Google’s unpredictable behaviour, you can add a Feedster search bar to your own site by going here.

[How to Save the World]

Active Listening (and Reading)

Some good advice about how to be more intentional and mindful in your information gathering and analysis. Apropos of that, let me point, once again, to Ellen Langer’s excellent work on Mindfulness and The Power of Mindful Learning. You might also want to take a look at the late Don Schon’s The Reflective Practitioner.

Active Listening (and Reading). Piers Young wrote a post called Listening and Anecdotes. Something he said made me realize that getting great advice is one thing, actively thinking about it and doing something with it is something else! He quotes one of the pieces… [John Porcaro: mktg@msft]

Busy People or Productive Organization

Here’s an interesting distinction to meditate on. The biggest challenge lies in the slipperiness of defining what it is we want “out of” either people or organizations. When that is as hard as it frequently is in the realm of knowledge worker, it takes an immense amount of trust to let the knowledge workers in your organization figure it out for themselves.

Busy People or Productive Organization. Busy People or Productive Organization — What is the distinction between…

“We need to get the most out of our people?”

and

“We need to get the most out of our organization?”

…other than the fact that the former leads one to the idea of keeping everyone busy and the latter, if taken seriously, leads one to making sure that they aren’t. Just something to think about. [Frank Patrick’s Focused Performance Blog]

Corporate Blogging Resources

Nice collection of recent resources focused on Corporate blogging.

More Corporate Blogging Resources. The theme of most advice to corporations considering an excursion into blogging – if you believe, say, Microsoft’s Robert Scoble or Six Apart’s Mena Trott, is “be honest” – in other words, a complete break from the usual practices in corporate communications. That said, as the other articles in this nice summary on corporate blogging note, this new media is an excellent communications and marketing tool, allowing you to connect directly with your employees and customers. Also worth reading from the same author: Strong words free your mind. By Amy Gahran, Contentious, March 30, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect] [OLDaily]

An April Fools Day Scrooge

Bah! Humbug!

What’s the April Fools Day equivalent of Ebenezer Scrooge?

About the only good thing I have to say about the day is how quickly I was able to delete crap from my aggregator. I can’t say whether any of it was funny or clever because I deleted stuff as quickly as I recognized it.

More evidence that I’m a boring old fart.

A People, Once Liberated…

What he said. There are some things worth staying idealistic about.

A People, Once Liberated….

A People, Once Liberated…: “And in my mind, technological change often enables, and is accompanied by, social change. In my view, the provision of an accessible and affordable education to the majority of the world’s population is a form of enfranchisement, of emancipation. And though this new form of universal suffrage is not a technological revolution, but rather a social movement, it is also not possible without technology.”
Comment: This paragraph sums up much of my interest in elearning/knowledge sharing/technology, etc. The higher goal is the provision of education for people so that they have the opportunity to make better lives for themselves. Technology makes this financially possible (an ebook can be read by millions with the only additional expense being bandwidth costs…a regular textbook has additional expenses associated with each copy). Still, as Stephen indicates, the greater challenge will be social…education seen as an event, dispensed by an institution, needs to give way to education as a process, largely controlled by the learner, drawing from various sources (formal and informal), the elimination of high cost as a barrier. Previously, education was expensive due to physical limitations…the Internet has shown that it no longer needs to be.

[elearnspace]

The 'Perfect' Corporate Weblogging 'Elevator Pitch' Competition

Judith Meskill is up to her usual tricks again. She gently persuaded me to be one of the judges.

The ‘Perfect’ Corporate Weblogging ‘Elevator Pitch’ Competition….

Scenario:

A business executive, with whom you have been trying to arrange a meeting, is available for a condensed pitch from you on a one minute elevator ride.

It is your goal to convince this attentive business leader — who has heard about weblogs — to sponsor and resource a critical mass of weblogs in his/her organization so that their benefits can be demonstrated in a meaningful way.

It’s a long elevator ride to the top floor of the Sears Tower in Chicago — [1,354 feet at 1600 feet/minute!] — visual aids are not available and your entry will be judged on your ability to present your pitch “on the fly” — just text.

Rules, Preparation Requirements:

Submission: text entry between 50 to 160 words.
One entry per person.
Please make sure that you include, with your submission:
your full name,
your website and/or weblog url(s), and
a valid email address.
All entries must be received by midnight (EST) April 15, 2004. Entry scoring will be completed by judges by midnight April 22, 2004.

Winning entry will be announced shortly thereafter —
date to be announced in the near future.

Prizes:
No ‘monetary compensation’ — but excellent ‘sur-prize’ To Be Announced!

Competition Submission Format:

For now, please email completed submissions to:

pitch at weblogsinc dot com

Once an alternate form of submission is created — it will be prominently displayed on this weblog!

If you have any questions or comments please post below in the comments field.

Please DO NOT post competition submissions in the comments field!

Submissions will be kept ‘anonymous’ so as not to sway the esteemed panel of judges… (-:=

I am including a few excellent links regarding ‘corporate blogging’ in the Related Links. Feel free to recommend additional links in the comments field and I will add them to the Related Links field. Thanks and Good Luck! [The Social Software Weblog]

Axsoft is offering a free 3-user license for their bug-tracker

Something to follow up on. Interesting both from a marketing point of view and as a potential tool for knowledge work.

Axsoft is offering a free 3-user license for their bug-tracker.

Axosoft: Free 3-User Offer

Axosoft is offering bloggers a free 3-user version of their .NET & SQL based OnTime defect tracking software (bug tracking software). For more information, visit

http://www.axosoft.com/Free3UserOffer.htm.

An interesting way to market software and build buzz.

[Marc’s Outlook on Productivity]

Blogging, calendaring, and timelines

Here’s an interesting experiment that I plan to follow up on for my own timeline data. I’m one of those who think at least one important aspect of weblogging is its ability to serve as a back-up brain. As I get older, I want to have better ways of thinking about lots of data for my own purposes. Timeline and event data is one important category that I still need to crack.

Blogging and Calendaring.

Michael Sippey has an interesting experiment with his Timeline (example):

A couple of years ago I started keeping simple timelines — “major” personal events over the course of a year, to make it easier to scan a period of time without being bogged down in the dozens of weekly appointments that clog the day-to-day calendar.

I’m in the messaging business. Focused — today — on email. But lately I’ve been interested in how messages (of all stripes) could more effectively be integrated into where we best process specific types of information. Your average inbox is not great at organizing time-oriented material, especially reminders about events that will take place in the future — calendars are obviously better at that. And with iCal (the format, not the app), it becomes reasonably brainless to publish individual events and/or a stream of events out to users. Case in point: it was probably less than one day of effort for the engineers at Expedia to add a downloadable calendar event to your online travel itinerary. But the fact that I can automagically pop my flight info into Outlook is at the top of my list of reasons why I’m loyal to Expedia.

So, anyway. Sippey.com/timeline is the result of some noodling on those two issues. A single page view of a year. Which is also rendered in calendar form, and made available for layering on top of your calendar. It’s hindsight publishing, of course (this did happen on this day, instead of this is going to happen on this day). But calendars are not only planning tools, they’re rememberance agents. And layering information like major news stories, weather (a la Jerry’s story about his old DayPlanner habits), sports scores and even personal bloggish notations could be an interesting use of the iCal format.

This is a small part of an idea Ramesh Jain has talked about – the EventWeb.

[E M E R G I C . o r g]