Category: Personal

The issue is user created context

Jeff Jarvis discovers North America user created content

OK, his post-9/11 postings were the direct inspiration for my blogging, and I find his old journo crossover views on this medium fascinating. But occasionally Jeff Jarvis fluffs one, so I’m going to have to diss my blog-daddy. In this case, he happens upon the revelation that about 2/3 of AOL users’ time is spent with other users’ contributions, and riffs from there. Fine to speculate on the implications, but I’m here to tell you this is old news. Similar distributions of user time date well back into the proprietary days of AOL, CompuServe and Prodigy. Remember, I used to read usage time and income reports from the entrails of the CompuServe accounting system. This isn’t anything novel, nor does it have to do with the advent of blogs, social software, or anything else trendy. Same thing happened with crappy old ASCII forums, CB, and proprietary e-mail. It’s related to human nature, not the specific technology – so long as it’s two-way – and that in many ways is very good news.

We now return you to your previously scheduled new media speculation. [Due Diligence]

Glad to see someone out there who has been paying attention all along. You have to be very careful not to get caught up in the news business’s need to pretend there’s something new every day. Couple that with most people’s aversion to anything resembling a sense of history and you get breathless commentary on old news.

I once had the chance to hear the late Herb Simon give a speech on what constituted news. He walked the audience through a funny sketch of his gradual abandonment of the daily newspaper, the nightly news broadcast, the weekly newsmagazine, and monthly magazines as devoid of anything that resembled news. He finally settled on reading the annual update volume to the Encyclopedia Brittanica as being about the right frequency and perspective for his getting updated on what had happened that mattered during the year.

Staying in this context, I’m quite certain that Simon’s primary sources of information about stuff that mattered to him was his network of colleagues and friends, not “content providers” offering to keep him up to date.

What I think may be relevant today is that new tools (weblogs, wikis, etc) are pushing forward along the dimension of context management instead of content. Perhaps what we are building with weblogs, RSS, and the rest is the infrastructure for personalizing and managing context on a new scale.

Political Compass

Just took the political compass test.  I am right between the Dalai Lama and Nelson Mandela.  Nice company. [John Robb's Weblog]

Looks like John and I are in the same general vicinity, as is Dave Winer. Certainly a more interesting way to think about things than a one-dimensional left-right analysis which always feels overly limiting.  For another look at a richer way of thinking about political orientations you might want to look at Jerry Pournelle's “All Ends fo the Spectrum.”

Lunch with Rick Klau

Lunch with Jim McGee.

Just returned to the office from a thoroughly engagaing lunch with Jim McGee. Jim is every bit as smart and engaging as his weblog would have you think he is.

As has become the norm in first-time meetings with fellow bloggers, all of the ordinary “getting to know you” stuff is gone. We already know each other, we already have an idea of what interests each other, and we jump right into a completely thought-provoking discussion. It was true when I met Chris & Joy, Ernie, Buzz, Matt, Denise, Jonas, Ross and many others.

John Robb wrote about this last year too. With “social software” getting so much attention lately, I think we would be wise to recognize that weblogs have become one of the best ways to get to know people you should know. You decide which people to associate with in part based on what they know — and blogs help establish that.

I’ve been fortunate enough to meet several of my friends face to face, but the most surprising thing is that after meeting them face to face it only reaffirmed what I already knew: they’re interesting, thoughtful people who I’m lucky to know.

By Rick Klau. [tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog]

Rick skips over the importance of two to an excellent conversation. After almost two years of reading each other's blogs, several phone conversations, and multiple last-minute lunch cancellations, Rick and I finally managed to break bread together.

We did indeed dive right into several conversations that were both challenging and entertaining. Something that would not be possible, by the way, simply as a side effect of several of the various networking websites such as Ryze or LinkedIn. While these sites may have a role to play, the picture you can build of someone on the basis of following their blog on a sustained basis (preferably in your aggregator) is not something that can be replaced by the dry recitation of resume tidbits and interests that make up the relatively static content of these networking sites.

Looking forward to future lunches with Rick.

Congratulations Full Professor AKMA

Rest of the Day.

After mass, I went to lunch with the adult education coordinator of the parish (St. Elizabeth’s, Glencoe — which always makes me think of Scotland’s infamous massacre) that’s invited me out to talk about The DaVinci Code. She and I traded ideas about the panel discussion, which includes Prof. Barbara Newman of Northwestern University and Brian Hastings of Church of Our Savior, over an Indian buffet. She’s rather more sympathetic to Gnosticism than I am, but we held a lively and wide-ranging converstion. It sounds as though the church will be packed; she’s estimating three to four hundred people will attend, overflowing the sanctuary and spilling into an adjacent parish room. If you’re coming, come early, I guess.

When I got back to my office, the Dean rang me up; the Board of Trustees had voted to promote me to full Professor. It sounded as though he said “effective immediately,” but I got lost in a jumble of subsequent topics. To be on the safe side, you may kneel and call me “Full Professor Adam” when you address me. [emphasis added]

Then, alas! I had to drop Margaret off on the train. Pip did her Halloween bit, Si is off at a (church) all-night lock-in, and I’m exhausted. I didn’t sleep well last night; tonight, I’m about to crumple altogether.

[AKMA’s Random Thoughts]

So typical of AKMA to try to bury the news about himself in this post. Even Boards of Trustees do eventually get things right sometimes.  Congratulations on your promotion!

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.