New Technorati Infrastructure beta test!.
Folks,
After 2 months of painstaking effort, I’m proud to announce the new Technorati infrastructure is up and ready for use.
Please have a look, and tell us what you think:
We focused 100% of our time on completely refurbishing our underlying event engine – essentially taking a volkswagen engine out and putting a Ferrari engine in. This new engine sports:
[…snip…]
Please go and use the site – and send us feedback.
Definitely faster and more responsive.
“Tell one, tell all, the invaluable Snopes.com has finally gotten an RSS feed!
Snopes is required reading for people on the Internet. If it sounds too good to be true, if it’s a little too conveniently in favor (or against) your favorite ideological position, or if it’s a little too horrifying to be true, check it on Snopes before you get upset, or worse, spread the claims further. Because you’ll meet someone who has nearly the entire site indexed in their head, and there’s little that’s more damaging to your point then to have it conclusive rebutted on Snopes.
I’d just like to take this opportunity to thank Barbara and David Mikkelson (FAQ link substantiating the names) for providing such a fine resource to the Internet.
And it’s darn fun stuff, too.
Pass it along.” [iRi]
Another great RSS resource. Subscribed
UPDATE: the actual RSS feed was at
http://www.snopes.com/info/whatsnew.rss
although all of snopes appears to be unresponsive at this precise moment. I have gotten material from the url and it was RSS
Once again, Judith finds an excellent resource.
social (software) entrepreneurs?….
While performing a ‘social software’ search last evening, I found a paper that was written five years ago on ‘business’ and ‘social’ entrepreneurship.
J. Gregory Dees published this paper, on Social Entrepreneurship, for The Stanford Business School’s Center for Social Innovation. At that time he was the Entrepreneur in Residence, Kauffman Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership, Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and Miriam and Peter Haas Centennial Professor in Public Service, Graduate School of Business Stanford University. Currently Professor Dees is with Duke’s Fuqua School of Business.
In this paper Professor Dees gives a brief history of the evolving definition of ‘entrepreneur’:
[…snip…]
Peter Drucker: “the entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity.” Dees goes on to interpret Drucker’s definition as: “Entrepreneurs have a mind-set that sees the possibilities rather than the problems created by change.”
Howard H. Stevenson, a leading theorist of entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School, defines the heart of entrepreneurial management as “the pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled.”
[…snip…]
In conclusion Dees states:
“Social entrepreneurship describes a set of behaviors that are exceptional. These behaviors should be encouraged and rewarded in those who have the capabilities and temperament for this kind of work. We could use many more of them. Should everyone aspire to be a social entrepreneur? No. Not every social sector leader is well suited to being entrepreneurial. The same is true in business. Not every business leader is an entrepreneur in the sense that Say, Schumpeter, Drucker, and Stevenson had in mind. While we might wish for more entrepreneurial behavior in both sectors, society has a need for different leadership types and styles. Social entrepreneurs are one special breed of leader, and they should be recognized as such. This definition preserves their distinctive status and assures that social entrepreneurship is not treated lightly. We need social entrepreneurs to help us find new avenues toward social improvement as we enter the next century.”
Based on Professor Dees definitions, both borrowed and advanced, of ‘Social Entrepreneurship’ – Who do you think are the ‘Social Entrepreneurs’ of the ‘Social Software’ movement?
As a side comment, I continue to be amazed at the quality and the quantity of great material that Judith Meskill continues to find and share.
Wikipedia timelines. Whoa. Wikipedia — the free, user-edited, almost-3-years-old, 191466-article-strong, encyclopedia that’s just raised more than 30,000 dollars from surfers like you — features a truckload of hyperlinked timelines, many of them quite detailed. Astronomy, biology, chemistry…
[Seb’s Open Research]
I’ve contributed to Wikipedia’s fund raising; have you?
Good Experience: Five Ideas for 2004. I have five ideas for you to consider this year. They’re not exactly predictions – you can get those almost anywhere, this time of year – but rather thought-starters for you to consider as the new year begins. [Tomalak’s Realm]
This got picked up recently with most bloggers picking up on
IDEA 4. Blogs are just content management systems,
but I am more intrigued by
IDEA 5: Managing one’s bits is an increasingly essential skill.
Last fall I began coaching a friend of mine on his bit literacy – the ability to manage one’s bits: e-mail, pictures, files, contacts, calendar, applications,… everything that laptops and other digital devices might hold.
I’ve learned that bit literacy is a skill that most people don’t have, and almost no one else is talking about. Yet it’s an increasingly essential skill. We deal with more and more incoming bits every day – and not just spam mail. Bit literacy is the ability to manage it all and still be effective
I think Mark Hurst is on to something important here, although I don’t think it is about the bits. It’s about the related notion that the products of knowledge work all pass through a bit stage somewhere in their creation and use. On the plus side, with a common representation, new forms of analysis and management become possible. On the negative side, the uniformity and invisibility of bits makes it harder to take advantage of our other skills for managing knowledge work products (think of the value of piles of paper). What we need to do, and what Mark looks to be thinking about, is what kinds of new skills will we need to develop to take advantage of the opportunity and compensate for the limits of a world of knowledge work that is fundamentally digital. I’ll be watching for certain and contributing where I can.
Blogs As Intra-enterprise Technologies of Cooperation.
George Dafermos at MIT, in Blogging the Market (93 page PDF) , looks at pervasive blogging as potential organizational dynamite, with case histories that include Slashdot, Amazon, Macromedia, Groove Networks, and Gizmodo.
(Thanks, Jim!)
I had real problems with this report. It’s gotten a fair number of pointers from other blogs and the outline looked intriguing. After about an hour skimming through it though I think there’s probably a really good 20-page report lurking in there somewhere, but in its present form it’s hard to justify the time to dig it out. If I were reviewing this paper as a referee I send it back for major revisions. Too bad, because I think it’s asking the right questions.
Dinah raises an interesting question about how we read weblogs and why some of us are biased toward reading inside aggregators and why some of us prefer to read weblogs in situ. I’ve long preferred reading in an aggregator and, more specifically I find myself returning again and again to the simple, chronological, single-page design offered out of the box by Radio.
As to why I prefer reading in an aggregator over visiting weblogs directly, I see four reasons:
My typical practice is to scan through my aggregator in several passes. In the first pass, I quickly look for items to delete. I use a pair of bookmarklets to toggle checkboxes on or off depending on my mood and how many items are backlogged in the aggregator. If there are lots of items (> 200 say) I toggle the check boxes all on which presumes I will be deleting most items. As I scan, I click off the checkbox for items I want to come back to. Bad titles and boring leads mean an item is likely to get axed. If I miss something good, there’s usually a high probability of someone in my subscriptions list bringing it back to my attention.
In the second pass, I still tend to focus on material to eliminate based on scanning the first few sentences or paragraphs. More stuff gets deleted.
When I get down to a few dozen or so posts, I start to read more carefully. Some items I post away to categories I maintain locally strictly for my own purposes. Backup brain kinds of things.
Finally, I’m down to items I want to think about and likely comment on or use as a launching pad for my own ideas. Those might well sit in my aggregator for several days to a week, sometimes longer depending on what else I’m up to.
Brent Schlender writes an article for Fortune in which 'Peter Drucker Sets Us Straight.' The following is a excerpt from that article, the balance is available by 'subscription' to Fortune's online service.
…You can always count on Peter Drucker to provide a new way of looking at things. After all, he is the man who first recognized that management is a discipline worthy of deep and formal study. Long before anyone else – in the early 1950s, no less – he predicted how computer technology would one day thoroughly transform business. In 1961 he presciently called attention to the rise of Japan as an industrial power, and two decades later he warned of its impending economic stagnation. And we can thank him for coining the concepts of “privatization,” “knowledge workers,” and “management by objective.”
At 94, Drucker is still full of insights that seem to elude others, and he is as opinionated as ever. His interests range from economics to psychology to philosophy to opera to Japanese art; his experiences include consulting with literally hundreds of companies, governments, small businesses, churches, universities, hospitals, arts organizations, and charities. To this day, leaders of all stripes make the pilgrimage to California to learn from the master, who continues to lecture at the management school that bears his name at Claremont Graduate University…
Drucker is always worth paying attention to. Here's a piece of the interview I found particularly relevant:
Nobody has really looked at productivity in white-collar work in a scientific way. But whenever we do look at it, it is grotesquely unproductive. As you know, most of my work these days is with universities and hospitals and churches, which are three of the biggest knowledge-worker employers, and their productivity is dismal. In part this is because knowledge work by definition is highly specialized, and that means that the utilization of the knowledge worker tends to be very low.
The inefficiency of knowledge workers is partly the legacy of the 19th-century belief that a modern company tries to do everything for itself. Now, thank God, we've discovered outsourcing, but I would also say we don't yet really know how to do outsourcing well. Most look at outsourcing from the point of view of cutting costs, which I think is a delusion. What outsourcing does is greatly improve the quality of the people who still work for you. I believe you should outsource everything for which there is no career track that could lead into senior management. When you outsource to a total-quality-control specialist, he is busy 48 weeks a year working for you and a number of other clients on something he sees as challenging. Whereas a total-quality-control person employed by the company is busy six weeks a year and the rest of the time is writing memoranda and looking for projects. That's why when you outsource you may actually increase costs, but you also get better effectiveness.
The Click Heard Round the World. Fifteen years before the Mac, Doug Engelbart demo'd videoconferencing, hyperlinks, text editing and something called a 'mouse.' He tells Wired magazine writer Ken Jordan about his part in the point-and-click revolution. [Wired News]
Great overview of Doug Engelbart's work from Wired. Alan Kay once told me that you could explain most of the history of personal computing as people trying to work out the implications of what Engelbart demoed in 1968. Here's Engelbart on how they framed their approach:
Our approach was very different from what they called “office automation,” which was about automating the paperwork of secretaries. That became the focus of Xerox PARC in the '70s. They were quite amazed that they could actually get text on the screen to appear the way it would when printed by a laser printer. Sure, that was an enormous accomplishment, and understandably it swayed their thinking. They called it “what you see is what you get” editing, or WYSIWYG. I say, yeah, but that's all you get. Once people have experienced the more flexible manipulation of text that NLS allows, they find the paper model restrictive.
We weren't interested in “automation” but in “augmentation.” We were not just building a tool, we were designing an entire system for working with knowledge. Automation means if you're milking a cow, you get a tool that will milk it for you. But to augment the milking of a cow, you invent the telephone. The telephone not only changes how you milk, but the rest of the way you work as well. It touches the entire process. It was a paradigm shift.
One key notion of Engelbart's that I don't think has been sufficiently investigated or thought about is the time investment in learning to use new and powerful tools for working. The industry, by and large, has gone down the path of initial experience and ease of use out of the box. Very often this is at the expense of long term ease of use.
Take something as seemingly simple as outlining software, a category “Dave Winer” contributed to greatly. The earliest outliners like ThinkTank and More devoted considerable thought to using the power of technology to let you do things with outlines that weren't possible on paper. But the marketing forces driving software led mostly to the vestigial capabilities for outlining left in Word or Powerpoint. There are some promising developments such as MindManager for the PC and OmniOutliner for the Mac, but they are niche applications. Few seem prepared to invest the time to learn how to make effective use of these tools to think. Engelbart assumes that you will invest considerable time to learn to use the tools. For those with well defined work worlds (think AutoCad or Excel or programming), there is an expectation that it takes time to become effective using new tools. Not so in the world of general purpose knowledge work. There's opportunity there still to be exploited.
CIO. CIO RSS Feeds available. CIO content is now available in an easy-to-use XML format. Stream our feeds to your website or desktop aggregator for an instant and automatically updated list of our latest stories. The feeds are refreshed daily and the content within them is updated as new resources become available on our site…. [Lockergnome’s RSS Resource]
A great collection of categorized RSS feeds from one of the authoritative voices in the IT management world.
As I’ve come to expect for “conventional” publishers easing into RSS waters, CIO’s feeds are essentially teasers designed to get you to go read the full story on their site. Fortunately, the writers at CIO know how to write good teasers. If you’re going to use RSS in this fashion, then you need to do it professionally; give me a good teaser, not the first 50 words of the story.