A fascinating bit of the early history of personal computing. Bob Frankston's recollections on how he and Dan Bricklin implemented the original Apple ][ version of Visicalc. I still wish that Bricklin had been more than one year ahead of me at business school. I had to do Finance by hand just like he did. While I was simply suffering, they were implementing a solution to the pain they experienced and launching the first killer app of the PC generation. I did buy my first PC, an Apple ][ shortly after graduating from business school, but sure wished I had been able to have it while I was there. My other regret from that era was selling the Osborne I “portable” computer I bought after the Apple ][. I sold it to a colleague who went back to business school after I did. I think that old Apple ][ is still in my parents basement somewhere, but the Osborne is gone.
Author: Jim
RSS feed for Virgina Postrel's dynamist weblog
I'VE MOVED. This blog is at a new URL. Please change your bookmarks and blogrolls to http://www.dynamist.com/weblog/. Thanks…. [Dynamist Blog]
Virginia Postrel's blog has moved and is now running with Moveable Type. Better yet, it now has a lovely RSS feed, although it took a little bit of digging to find it. The RSS auto-discovery isn't quite configured correctly. But it's there and now I can follow it in my aggregator.
Weblogs in my tool mix
Yet another “what are blogs?” article in the general press (the Las Vegas Review-Journal of all places) including the obligatory do they threaten journalism question. Normally I probably wouldn't bother to link to the article, except that I do get quoted. The reporter, Matt Crowley, and I had a good conversation several weeks back that helped me pull together some of my thoughts on the topic.
I would have preferred a little more attention to the business and organizational implications, but I really can't complain. They spelled my name right and they quoted me accurately:
Nevertheless, Blood and Jim McGee, an adjunct professor of technology at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, say traditional news channels are safe.
…
Also, McGee added, reading a blog is less like reading a story and more like reading a reporter's notebook; thoughts are stream-of-consciousness and disorganized.
“The signal-to-noise ratio in a blog is much different,” McGee said. “It's information and ideas they may not necessarily turn into a story. I think of a blog as a backup brain, a place to remember stuff and a place to work out ideas.”
Although chat rooms and messaging software allow instant idea exchange, McGee said blogging may make for better conversation because it allows time to compose thoughts. Also, because blogs present ideas straightforwardly, they may beat e-mail for data sharing.
“When stuff is buried in an e-mail or conversation, it's hard to manage,” McGee said. “When you move to e-mail to PowerPoint to Word documents, unless you get them printed, you may not know what's going on.”
We all try to make sense out of the new in terms of what we already understand–the “horseless carriage” phenomenon. It's a necessary step in working our way to understanding the new on its own terms.
There were a couple of things we talked about that didn't make it into the final copy that have to do with organizational uses.
One was the value of using a news aggregator, such as “Radio”'s. Coupled with blogs, aggregators let me track an order of magnitude more sources than I could using conventional surfing. Right now, for example, I'm subscribed to almost 200 sources with my aggregator. What that has created is an early warning system of sources (mostly other weblogs) that I've learned to trust over time. Moreover, these weblog sources of experts in topics I'm interested in generally have a one to two week lead time over conventional news sources that I follow.
The second was a prediction that weblogs in organizations would become as indispensable as email and would take on some functions that now get done in email for lack of a better place.
Here's what I expect will occur. Email will remain the place where I manage shared activity (instant messaging may take some of that over – something I'll talk about another time). Weblogs will be where I start and share my thinking. The tools that now comprise office suites will support specialized tasks (e.g. spreadsheets for quantitative analysis) and will be where I sometimes package materials for broader consumption or distribution to audiences who can't or won't visit my weblog. I'm finding, for example, that I now do 80-90% of my writing inside “Radio”. Granted I use its outliner rather than the desktop website for most of that, but it does represent an interesting shift in my work habits.
Knowledge work, weblogs, and fair process
I’ve just been rereading an article from the Harvard Business Review called “Fair Process: Managing in the Knowledge Economy.” Written by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne, two professors at Insead, it helps me understand one of the reasons why I think that weblogs have an important role in making knowledge work in organizations more effective.
Kim and Mauborgne’s fundamental insight is that “employees will commit to a manager’s decision–even one they disagree with–if they believe that the process the manager used to make the decision was fair.” Doesn’t sound especially profound until you think about how often it is ignored on the premise that all the matters is the final outcome.
They define three principles of what constitutes fair process: engagement, explanation, and expectation clarity. Many managers ignore all three. Those who do attend to process tend to get stuck at the first principle of engagement and ignore the other two. They make some effort to involve everyone in the process, but too often short circuit the rest of the process in the rush to get to the “right answer.” Managers feel the pressures of time and assume that as long as the final outcome is fair and logical, they will be forgiven for rushing ahead. More likely, they will be punished in terms of sullen compliance or outright sabotage.
Now apply this in the realm of knowledge work. Kim and Mauborgne quote Friederich Hayek
“Practically every individual…possesses unique information” that can be put to use only with “his active cooperation”
You don’t get voluntary cooperation without paying attention to what they term “procedural justice.”
As I’ve argued before one of the principal benefits of weblogs is the way that they can make knowledge work more visible. In this context, weblogs serve as a tool that makes fair process a natural byproduct of the work itself. They are a place where explanation can be developed and shared as it is worked out in real time. Moreover, if you can get an institutional environment in which everyone can potentially contribute their perspectives by way of their own weblogs and these perspectives can flow through the system by way of RSS, then you also increase the degree of engagement.
The flip side of this is that without a belief in and commitment to the notion of fair process, weblogs by themselves aren’t likely to last very long inside organizations. While they can be a tool to promote those values, I don’t think they can create those values if they are otherwise absent.
More on agenda setting and weblogs
Kevin Marks. Kevin Marks rebuts Andrew Orlowski's rant, yesterday. [Scripting News]
Good response to the piece on Google and second superpower that I picked up on yesterday. Lots of people are responding to Orlowski's piece, which does qualify it as thought provoking, although most seem to be more upset than it warrants. Flame wars are moderately entertaining, as long as you're not in the direct line of fire, but they're not terribly productive. It's one of the reasons I prefer blogging to threaded discussion. It helps keep the discussion more civil and more focused on the content instead of the rhetoric. If you want to have intelligent conversation, you need to dial the volume down, not up.
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?