jim mcgee's musings
fine fodder for fomenting
knowledge work wisdom…haitech haiku™
©2003 judith meskillin 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.
happy blogiversary to me. One year. Four hundred and thirty-nine entries. One thousand, five hundred and forty-six comments. (Thanks for being the first, Joi!) Over fourteen thousand page views per month. An entire world of new friends and colleagues. A changed life…. [mamamusings]
Nice to share a blogiversary with such distinguished company. Happy blogiversary indeed!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
| One of the reasons posting has been light this week is that I’ve been catching up from last weekend’s adventure. My younger son and I spent the weekend at Space Camp in Huntsville, AL. As you can see, we managed to enjoy ourselves. I’ll leave it to you to imagine a similar picture with Dad in it. |  |
The last few days in my aggregator have been discouraging. Today’s nonsense was this from Gizmodo:
Airlines on the look out for gadgets. In light of the recent discovery a whole panoply of gadgets in al Qaeda hideouts that had been converted into weapons or bombs (like camera flashes that turned into stun guns), the Department of Homeland Security is issuing a warning to airports to be pay extra close attention to passengers with computer equipment and consumer electronics. So maybe bringing two laptops, a digital camera, a Pocket PC, and a WiFi detector with us on our current trip to California wasn’t such a good idea after all. [Gizmodo]
Boing Boing is full of similar distressing items ranging from:
TSA adds “sarcasm” to list of aviation risks
A kid who put a note telling TSA snoops to stay out of his luggage was busted on trumped-up “bomb-threat” charges for penning the following and putting it in his bag:
”[Expletive] you. Stay the [expletive] out of my bag you [expletive] sucker. Have you found a [expletive] bomb yet? No, just clothes. Am I right? Yea, so [expletive] you.”
Boy, good thing the eagle-eyed, sticky-fingered underwear fetishists on search-detail were on their toes, otherwise, this kid might have been able to board an airplane with a deadly sarcastic note in his checked luggage.
to John Gilmore’s recent experiences as a “suspected terrorist.”
As I read these and other tidbits offered up through my aggregator and through news channels, I fear we are a civilization that has abandoned the capacity for rational thought.
Fortunately, my aggregator also brings me gems such as Seb’s recent post on the late Edsger Dijkstra’s efforts at what I’ve described before as thinking in public (plus parts 2, 3, and 4). The whole post is well worth the effort, but let me focus on the last section of it.
The end of the article offers a great quote from Dijkstra on the struggle to accurately observe and steer one’s own thinking:
“The need to get some sort of verbal grip on your own pondering will by sheer necessity present your ponderings as something in which, as time progresses, patterns will become distinguishable. Once you have established a language in which to do your own pondering, in which to plan and to supervise your reasoning, you have presented a tool that your students could use as well, for the planning and supervision of their reasoning.”
I completely agree with Chalmers who writes about that quote:
Geek that I am, I find this passage incredibly touching. It’s the combination of Dijkstra’s searing integrity and his humility and willingness to make a complete ass of himself, by actually standing up and pondering aloud in front of his students, for their sake, that gets me every time. I wonder if the success of the scientific method does not depend on exactly this combination of integrity and humility? Dijkstra doesn’t just advocate it. He models it.
Here, for me, is the secret promise of blogs. They lower the barriers and make the practice of writing widely accessible. Which increases the chances we will begin to start thinking again.
Writing is the fundamental tool of reasoned argument and what we need as individuals, organizations, and civilization is as much reasoned argument as we can get. In the blogosphere you get to watch good writers at work as they develop ideas. Thanks to aggregators those ideas appear in a form that makes them natural raw material to kindle your own thinking. The combination of blog technical features (public distribution, short posts, chronological ordering, permalinks) with social practices (personal identification, generous linking, blogrolls) highlight the development of ideas as a social phenomenon over time.
Here’s a Gedanken experiment. How would activities at the TSA change if they published a daily weblog with real stories of the best and worst of what they had encountered that day? Not likely to happen, but worth thinking about.