Congratulations to Halley and her team. I guess she won’t be taking a weekend off at a bed and breakfast to celebrate.
Worthwhile Is Born!
Yes, the blog is a now a blog AND a magazine — check it out! I have it right in my hot little hands and it’s really terrific.
You can get it at Barnes & Noble, Borders, Whole Foods and other newsstands in the next two weeks. Enjoy it! [Halley’s Comment]
Thought I would give this a try, although all it may reveal is how few people hit this site. We’ll see what the data looks like tomorrow when it updates. You’ll find more information at the project page for HitMaps.
HitMaps comes out of the closet. KMi’s Jiri Komzak has extended the nifty little blog-gutter-tool that you now see along the upper left side of Get Real, which shows you the locations of everyone who has visited this page (after a once-nightly update, that is)…. [Get Real]
I’ve been following all the energy and excitement around the notion of podcasting with a certain amount of skepticism. This certainly explains why I haven’t yet been a consumer and am not likely to be. I generally don’t spend a lot of extended time in cars and I don’t find listening to be as high-bandwidth a channel as reading. I do travel by air a lot, but I generally use that time to read, not listen.
I’ll grant that there are a lot of busy people who do find themselves behind the wheel and would definitely prefer something intelligent to the usual fare on the radio. It may be that podcasting might be relevant to me as a potential producer of content rather than as a consumer. So, I’m continuing to pay attention, but it’s likely to remain lower on my list than making sure I make more time to post some old-fashioned text to my blog.
If you want to understand podcasting, get an iPod, get the software, subscribe to some feeds. Then go for a drive, ride a subway or an airplane, take a walk, do something away from the computer and take the iPod with you. Listen to one of the new programs. Then let me know if it works. Fact is, you can’t use your eyes when you’re driving, they’re busy. Same with walking. It’s pretty hard to type on a subway. Annotation, if it’s going to happen, will be in voice, and implemented in the iPod. It’s easy to see if you just use it. Use it. Use it. Nike says just do it. The iPod commands: Use it. [Scripting News]
Scoble’s message in a bottle to Bill Gates keys in on an essential truth; that the underlying reality of the wealth of new tools around the web is about creating:
I told him to understand the content-creation trend that’s going on. It’s not just pod-casting. It’s not just blogging. It’s not just people using Garageband to create music. It’s not just people who soon will be using Photostory to create, well, stories with their pictures, voice, and music. It’s not just about ArtRage’ers who are painting beautiful artwork on their Tablet PCs. It’s not just the guys who are building weblog technology for Tablet PCs. Or for cell phones. Or for camera phones.
This is a major trend. Microsoft should get behind it. Bigtime. Humans want to create things. We want to send them to our friends and family. We want to be famous to 15 people. We want to share our lives with our video camcorders and our digital cameras. Get into Flickr, for instance. Ask yourself, why is Sharepoint taking off? (Tim O’Reilly told us that book sales of Sharepoint are growing faster than almost any other product). It’s the urge to create content. To tell our coworkers our ideas. To tell Bill Gates how to run his company! Isn’t this all wild?
Obviously, this all ties into the recent flurry of commentary about the “long tail.” We’ve been indoctrinated for so long into the mythos of mass markets, that we’ve forgotten that human creativity preceeds and predates those markets. After you’ve created a mass marketing/distribution system, the system demands that you find or create hits to feed it. Change the economics of the creation and distribution systems and you open up the entire distribution not just the obvious tail. This is nothing more than Coase’s arguments about how changing transaction costs will play out. Tim Jarrett makes this point and also connects the argument to Clay Shirky’s Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality article.
Both Robert and Tim begin to show how the problem of attention may not be as big a problem as has been argued. Sure, it’s a problem to the mass marketer/distributor who thinks they are entitled to a portion of my and everyone else’s attention. And initially, it’s a problem for me as I learn how to find and connect to that unique mix of sources scattered throughout the entire distribution that warrant my attention. When it settles down, however, my attention ends up better spent with that unique set of trusted advisors than it does filtered through the classic lens of mass market distribution.
One of my particular interests lies in what all of this means for doing knowledge work inside organizations. The mentality of mass market distribution manifests inside organizations as a concern for control. In a mass market world or organization there is room for only one message and, frequently, only one messenger. From this industrial perspective, attention management looms as a grave threat. If I insist on routing all decisions about attention through a central node, then, of course, that node suffers from attention overload. But it does so at the expense of wasting potential attention capacity distributed throughout the organization. The only hope of tapping the available attention capacity of the organization is to give up the attachment to conventional notions of control. Put another way, the biggest obstacle to success remains the emotional needs of senior leadership to stay in control.
I’m finding Martin’s 43 folders immensely helpful in getting a better handle on David Allen’s Getting Things Done. This post is one good example of understanding what Allen is talking about.
Next actions: Both physical and visible. If your next action is not both physical and visible, it’s probably really a _project_. [43 Folders]
I first used a timesharing computer in 1973 in a summer job with the old McDonnell Douglas. It was a Xerox SDS machine. My terminal was an old Teletype 33. This is a fascinating account from one of the early inventors in the field.
“I still don’t understand where all the computer time goes in time-sharing installations, and neither does anyone else.” — John McCarthy, 1983 (Of course, the state of the art has advanced considerably since then; now we don’t even know where the compute time goes in single-user workstations.) [Hack the Planet]
I’ve got an old IBM Thinkpad available. With a little rearranging in the study, this could be a worthwhile investment.
Multiple Monitors – put that extra laptop to use.
MaxiVista is out with their new 1.5 version. This new version has a few bug fixes, but also supports up to THREE secondary displays via three other PCs. If you’ve got other laptops or Tablets around, you’ve GOT to try MaxiVista. Don’t confuse it with ShareKMC or VNC.
This is a SOFTWARE DISPLAY ADAPTER that shows up in your Display Properties. Treat it like any other monitor. Here’s my setup. It’s pure sex.
Another convert to full text feeds. Perfect timing from my perspective as I’ve just started following Wil’s site. I’ve also just started reading Just a Geek, which looks like it will be fun
After several conversations at Gnomedex with geeks who are better at being geeks than I am, I’ve decided to put the full text of all my posts into my XML feed from now on.
I guess I hadn’t done this in the past because I wanted people to actually visit my site, but I don’t care about traffic any more. Now I just want people to enjoy what I write, in whatever format they prefer, including offline newsreaders.
In a related story, thanks for all the advice about newsreaders. I’ve been fooling around with Sage for the last few hours . . . the “discover feeds” thing is a killer app, man.
Thank you Judith for the reminder and pointer to an excellent resource. If we’re going to be serious about doing knowledge management in whatever flavor we happen to believe in (personal, corporate, or otherwise), then we need to stay grounded in the work that has come before us.
I’m reminded of an old software engineering quote that I can’t track down this minute since I’m blogging this on the train. I do remember that it was in the Proceedings of the 1968 NATO conference on software engineering, which shows you the kind of useless stuff that clutters up my head. Anyway, the quote was something along the following lines:
“Unlike Einstein, who observed that if he had seen farther than others it was because he had stood on the shoulders of giants, in the field of software engineering, we have mostly been standing on each other’s feet.”
Something to keep in mind if we hope to make some progress in a world far more complicated than the one that existed in Einstein’s day, or even in 1968.
Old news to many but quite possibly new news to some–here is a link for your KM Library.
Karl Erik Sveiby–the principal of a global network of consultants, and a professor in Knowledge Management at the Swedish Business School Hanken in Helsinki–very generously supplies an online library of his earlier works, many of which are out of print.
This library also contains some of his favorite articles by other authors.
Check out the 90+ well-organized links available in his Sveiby Knowledge Management library.
If we manage to survive the next few years, this may prove to be the most important news of 2004.
Historic Space Exploration Event.
CNN: SpaceShipOne captures X Prize. SpaceShipOne climbed into space for the second time in a week to claim the $10 million Ansari X Prize. X Prize officials said the privately funded craft reached 368,000 feet — well into space — Monday to win the $10 million prize. A wonderful day for space buffs, and humanity. People will soon leave this planet, to live permanently in space and on other worlds, and this achievement is one huge step along that path. (Image thumbnail by Dexter and Southfield Schools, via CNN) [Dan Gillmor’s eJournal]
