Category: Personal

My subscriptions network

I rave about the value of my aggregator all the time. It's way past time I make that list of sources available. I've added a link over to the right of all the subscriptions I follow in “Radio”. It's a much more dynamic list than my blogroll, which I'm coming to think of as a passing and obsolete concept. I've set it up so that changes to the subscription list will flow here once a day.

These are the bright minds that contribute to my evolving view of this world we live and work in.

happy belated blogiversary…a haiku gift from Judith Meskill

jim mcgee's musings
fine fodder for fomenting
knowledge work wisdom…

haitech haiku™
©2003 judith meskill

in celebration of jim's two year blogiversary and his generous 'virtual' accessibility…

What a lovely gift. First time I've ever been the subject of a haiku. Thank you Judith.

BTW, if you aren't following Judith's weblog (RSS feed) you're missing important insights into the world of knowledge work.

Second blogiversary

I've now been writing this weblog for two years. My very first post was a pointer to a Technology Review article on the challenges of preserving digital information. A little later that day I posted a entry on John Robb's notion of k-logs. Since then I've tried to stay reasonably focused on the topic of knowledge management and knowledge work.

According to “Radio” this is my 3,740th post since that first day. You haven't seen all of them because I use this same tool to maintain a personal k-log of material, but most of them have found there way here.

Last night I was on the phone with Buzz talking about ActiveWords, knowledge management, the Dean campaign, and Feedster among other things. Without a blog, I would never have discovered ActiveWords nor met Buzz. In my recent email archives I've been chatting with Ross Mayfield, Rick Klau, AKMA, Dave Pollard, Roland Tanglao, Terry Frazier, Denham Gray, Jack Vinson, Judith Meskill, Lilia Efimova, Jon Husband, Greg Reinacker, Matt Mower, Jenny Levine, and others I'm sure I'm forgetting. I've also had the pleasure of meeting and interacting with the likes of Dave Winer, David Weinberger, Robert Scoble, Ben and Mena Trott and other luminaries.

Pretty good payoff from taking the risk of putting my thoughts out in public before I was sure they were fully polished.

Scott Johnson – The people I read are my intelligent agents

Intelligent agency.

Buzz is on the phone, quoting something Feedster‘s Scott Johnson said over dinner in Boston last night, about the RSS+aggregator-enabled blog world. What Scott said (Buzz says) was,

The people I read are my intelligent agents.

Context… Remember the “intelligent agents” scare from a few years back? (Wonder how much VC money got wasted on that one?) Never happened. (Not in a big way, anyhow. Are you using one now? I mean, in addition to the ones you read in your aggregator? See what I mean?)

Now, thanks to RSS, it’s happening.

Makes me think back to Doug Engelbart’s thinking about augmenting human intelligence, and how the best augmentation in fact comes from other connected human beings.

[The Doc Searls Weblog]

Buzz and I had the same conversation earlier this morning. Scott has a wonderfully succinct way of describing the power of these new technologies combined in interesting ways. I’m no Scoble, but I do manage to track almost 300 weblogs and newsites using RSS (including Scoble of course). The power of RSS is that the news comes to me filtered by all of those bright minds, who are themselves feeding off of other bright minds. Add tools like Feedster on top of that and you start to have the first tools that promise to help fight the problems of attention.

Trying to eliminate the people from the mix was clearly the wrong approach. Forging a better partnership between people and machines is the trick.

New Radio theme

a weblog of post-its.

Now, I'm not a Radio user but this theme for Radio that Cristian has just released makes me wish for a moment that I was just to try it. Looks really cool. I probably wouldn't use it directly, but there are many elements in it that I find intriguing. Ahh if only I had some time to do a full set of CSS options for d2r…

[d2r]

I've been thinking of shifting to a new theme. Certainly, Cristian's is well worth looking at.

Alan Kay and Six Sigma

One of my favorite observations, which I first heard from Alan Kay, was that “point of view is worth 80 IQ points.” Now, Alan is a very clever fellow, and it’s only just occurred to me now, but Alan never specifies a sign for those IQ points. It’s just as likely that a wrong frame of reference acts as an 80 point penalty as that a right frame provides an 80 point bonus.

This places Alan firmly in the Six Sigma camp long before the movement existed (Alan always has been a leading edge kind of guy).

Comments Feed for McGee's Musings

I've been hosting comments here for the past few months, largely at the urging and encouragement of Denham Gray. While I don't get tons of comments, the ones that I do get are generally very high quality.

As you might suspect, given my enthusiastic support for RSS as a tool to make my life as a knowledge worker easier, there is an RSS feed for my comments. I host it at a “Manila” site, provided by the great folks at Weblogger, which is a site I'm holding for a future development project. Anyway, please feel free to subscribe to that comments feed in addition to my regular RSS feed.

Gifts in my aggregator

One of the fundamental pleasures of blogging and of having an eclectic subscriptions list is that someone out there is going to point you toward something you would never find on your own that you enjoy immensely. The following comes from Richard Gayle’s weblog and fits that aspect of blogging perfectly.

My mother sent me a link to some interesting essays by author Jane Haddam. One has a great title Why I Don’t Vote Republican which is actually a more mild and well thought-out essay than the title would suggest. Be sure and check out the sidebars: The God Thing, The Money Thing and The Stupid Thing. Her other recent essay, Jane’s Rules of the Road, offers some very good points about online discussions. I enjoyed reading all of them. [A Man with a Ph.D. – Richard Gayle’s Weblog]

We live in a world that denigrates thinking. With blogs you can surround yourself with those who revel in it. It’s a gift economy where the gifts are thoughts, ideas, and perspectives that can widen your horizons if you’re willing to accept the gifts as they appear on the threshold of your aggregator.