Category: Personal

Weblogs and passion

I had an opportunity to listen to Mena and Ben Trott talk about Moveable Type last night courtesy of AKMA at Seabury Western. They sparked a good discussion around the role of weblogs in creating and sustaining community (two good live blogged accounts from AKMA and Gabe Bridger by way of Mike Marusin).

At least some of the power and energy behind the weblog phenomenon has to come from passion of the creators of weblog tools. All of the products supporting weblogs are labors of love; all grew out of individual efforts to scratch personal itches–Blogger, Moveable Type, Radio.

This is why weblogs will become important to knowledge management and knowledge sharing in organizations and why the big software players haven’t been a significant factor yet.

Organizations have recognized that knowledge is an essential part of the value that they create. Knowledge management efforts on the other hand have largely been a disappointment because they have tried to force knowledge into a product metaphor; trying to force what is fundamentally a product of craft into an industrial model of reusable parts (see knowledge work as craft work).

Discussions about knowledge management in organizations always raise the issue of sharing with the argument that people will be reluctant to share out of fear that their efforts will be appropriated by others. This is rooted in a industrial product metaphor of knowledge. See knowledge work as craft, however, and the sharing issue dissolves. Craft workers exist to share the fruits of their creating. A true knowledge craft product embodies something of the soul and personality of its creator. You share it with others not so they can copy it but so that they can find inspiration in using it in their own craft.

Weblogs hold so much promise in the organizational realm precisely because they amplify this connection between craft and creator. Your record is there to be seen and to be shared.

This is also why weblogs are so confusing in the organizational realm. You have to move beyond the notion of reusable and reproducible product as the putative goal.

I had a conversation with Alan Kay a while back about Smalltalk and object-oriented programming that I now finally think I understand (conversations with Alan can be that way for those of us who are mere mortals). He was disappointed that the early commercialization efforts around Smalltalk and OO emphasized the idea of reuse. His goal had always been (and still is, take a look at Squeak and SqueakLand) to make it possible for developers to express what they were trying to do faster and more effectively. He was trying to make computers a medium for expressing certain kinds of thinking.

Weblogs accomplish something similar for knowledge workers. They lower the barriers to sharing ideas far enough that it becomes possible for nearly all of us to do so. Bring that inside organizations and you have a powerful tool for being effective as opposed to merely productive. Scary to the established order? Sure. But if value does truly depend on how well and how fast organizations can create and share new knowledge, then the winners will emerge from those who commit to making it work.

Model rockets as terrorist threat

Educational Flying Model Rockets Ruled Terrorist Threat. Model rocketry is educational, it’s cool, it’s safe, and it’s fun. It’s launched everything from science fair projects to the careers of NASA engineers and astronauts as well as that of at least one SFT writer. Too bad the already-passed and signed Homeland Security Bill is going to kill this great constructive hobby for kids and adults. On May 24, every employee of any shipping entity who could possibly touch a package of in-transit model rocket engines on their way to a kid’s mailbox or store has to be explosives-handling certified, fingerprinted and pass a criminal background check. UPS, some trucking and railroad firms have stopped shipping the motors; Fed Ex employees have indicated to some model rocket flyers they likely will follow suit in the coming weeks. “It is the heart of the problem we face. Because if manufacturers like Estes can’t get rocket motors delivered to stores, the hobby is completely dead,” according to Tim Van Milligan, president of Apogee Rockets in Colorado Springs, Colo. Jay Apt saw his first model rocket catalog at age 13 in 1962. and went on to fly four shuttle missions that included two spacewalks and a mission to the International Space Station. “If we are to keep challenging our technology-inclined young people, we need to keep the benefits of model rocketry in mind when we pursue a tendency, natural in troubled times, to restrict anything which might be abused,” Apt said. “It makes no more sense to restrict aerospace modeling than it would have to ban rental trucks after they were misused in Oklahoma and New York.” U.S. Senator Michael Enzi, R-Wyo., intends to introduce legislation as early as this week to make what’s being called a “technical correction” to the 1970 Safe Explosives Act so that the material used inside the small motors is removed from the “explosives list.” Perhaps you might like to send a copy of this SFT story to your Representative or Senator along with your thoughts? [Sci-Fi Today]

Why is it that reason and thought are such unpopular activities? It seems to be some deparate desire to “do something” that disconnects reason from action. I guess I’m showing my age, but “think before you act” still seems like better advice than “ready. fire, aim.”

In business settings, we rightly fear “analysis paralysis” and celebrate action. But the record shows that the problem is about paralysis not analysis.

North, HarvardMan, North

Come South Young BlogMan.

Dave Winer is debating which route to take on his trek East: “I talked about the northern route, below, now let’s talk about the southern route. Stop in Phoenix where I have a dinner invite, catch some baseball, then cross New Mexico and Texas, swing into New Orleans for some gumbo with Ernie the Attorney….” [Scripting News]

Yes, Dave come South.  The weather’s great, the food is outstanding (the crawfish are really great this year), and you can come stay at my house and let your new laptop soak up the Wi-Fi cloud that permeates my humble abode.

[Ernie the Attorney]

The southern route may sound appealing, but your destination is Cambridge and Harvard Yard. That means cold, gray, serious. New Orleans would only delay the inevitable.

North through Chicago, however, acclimates you to your new climate. After a stop in Chicago, Boston and Cambridge will feel springlike and appealing. You need time to thicken that Southen California blood after all those years.

Mucking about with this site

I’m mucking about with some of the code and design for this weblog. Mostly trying to move in the direction of better use of css and more leverage out of tools such as “activeRenderer” and “liveTopics” I’m sure I’ll manage to break a few things along the way. Please bear with me. I have added a Change Log to keep track of what I’ve been up to

Defenestrating technology

Why I’m not a compugeek. While pondering some hypertext-related ponderings, I found myself thinking about how I approach computers, just because I don’t seem to be typical. You won’t catch me waxing rhapsodic about the latest chip speeds or wireless gizmos, much less the latest software. My laptop at home is a PIII/850, and it… [Caveat Lector]

Dorothea goes on to say:

Where I do seem to part company from other heavy computer users is that my most common response to the things is frankly adversarial—more than that, bullying.

Program crashes? I swear like a stevedore. Bug in something I’m writing? More swearing, coupled with grim determination to make the wretched machine do what I bloody well say it ought to. Something I’m writing runs clean? Ha! One spiteful victory dance, coming up!

I always considered that one of the defining characteristics of my relationship with all technology, especially computer technology. If I haven’t threatened one of my machines with defenestration during the day, I haven’t been working very hard.

For those of you Mac or Linux fans who think my threats are about uninstalling software, don’t be fooled. When I threaten out the window, I mean out the window, preferably an upper story one. I’ve worked with operating systems and technology back to OS/360 and it’s all been out to get me most days. I am in complete agreement with Dorothea here.