Category: Personal

Just managing some administrivia for bloglines. Please ignore

Today is my seventh blogiversary.

Over time, we’ve seen a proliferation of tools and services that give us ways to connect and interact. Today we have Twitter, Friendfeed, LinkedIn, Facebook, and more. All are ways to improve our chances of connecting. As you can see in the sidebar, I  maintain some presence on most of them.

This space is the place where I try to get my thinking straight and immerse myself in the ongoing conversation of others trying to get their thinking straight. Some of them think in like-minded ways, others in very different ways, and all are important to the journey.

Social technologies must be lived in to be understood. You can’t understand from the sidelines. I think this is one of the impediments that larger organizations face in managing adoption. They are comfortable with the illusion of carefully crafted plans. They need to become reacquainted with the less well-marked paths of real learning.

What I said in 2005 is still true:

I remain interested in the challenges of making organizations better places for real people to work in and still believe that the effective use of technology makes a difference. I suspect that large organizations are nearing the end of their useful life and that the evolution toward new forms will continue to be painful and noisy. I worry about leaders and executives who choose to ignore facts and who can t or won t distinguish between the theory of evolution and the theory of who shot JFK. [McGee s Musings]

In years past, I’ve tried to acknowledge the interesting people I’ve managed to cross paths with as one of the primary benefits of choosing to participate in the read/write web. As those numbers continue to grow, that’s becoming unwieldy. I’m also reluctant to single out only those people who happen to blog themselves. Today’s environment is too rich for me to be that restrictive. Regardless of whether you’re another blogger on a similar journey, a friend by way of one of today’s social networks, a microblogger, or commenter here, thanks for participating and thanks for sharing. I will give one shout out to a new friend, Liz Strauss, to momentarily borrow her tagline…”you’re only a stranger once.” Tell me more about you and your experience.

I’ll be heading to San Francisco at the end of the month to participate in the upcoming “Social Media Strategies” conference being held there on October 29th and 30th. If you’re interested in joining me, here’s a sign-up link that will get you a discount on the registration fee:

I’m planning on talking more about the notion of “Technology for Us” that I’ve been developing over the last several months. If you do plan on attending, let me know here so we can plan on connecting face-to-face.

Paul Myers and I were colleagues back in Boston back in the early 1990s. Thanks to the wonders of Twitter, LinkedIn, and RSS we reconnected and I came across his excellent blog and found this little gem this afternoon. I suspect that your politics might influence exactly how funny you find this, but I think everyone ought to be able to appreciate it at some level.

A teaser on the front page of this week’s Simmons Voice, the college newspaper, declares "Student questions Palin’s qualifictions [sic]." That last word was a typo – obviously the intended word was "qualification" – but when you think about it, "qualifiction" is a dandy word for false or misleading credentials. On resumes, people commonly stretch the truth of their experience by taking more credit for some accomplishment than they probably deserve. But lies presented as truths are, in a sense, fictions. Thus a new word for the week – "qualifiction: the outright misrepresentations of job titles, degrees, or achievements that are presented to bolster one’s suitability for a job." Pass it on!

Neologism of the Day: Qualifiction
professormyers@professormyers.com
Thu, 18 Sep 2008 21:58:41 GMT

Hat tip to Pharyngula

Welcome to those of you visiting courtesy of Liz Strauss. This place started as an experiment while I was teaching courses in IT and Knowledge Management at Northwestern

One of the unexpected rewards of blogging is watching those that you’ve influenced in some way going off and succeeding in their own unique way. If for some odd reason you are not already following Jack’s work, you should correct that mistake immediately.

Blogging for five years

I have been blogging for five years now.  Amazing.  My focus has always been around knowledge management, but the specifics and surrounding topics have wandered over the years. 

Thanks to all my commenters and readers.  And a special thanks (again) to Jim McGee who told me, “You should really start your own blog” because I was leaving so many comments on his.  (So many, in fact, that I still get spam that thinks I have something to do with the ownership of his website.)

Statistics:

• 1860 entries (this is number 1861)
• ~1900 readers via FeedBurner
• 1415 comments (many from myself)
• 419 trackbacks (many from myself)
• 28 categories with anywhere from 6 to 616 entries
• 1753 tags (and not all entries are tagged)

Blogging for five years
Jack Vinson
Sun, 18 May 2008 20:06:58 GMT

Espen, my concern with Dr. Carlin as a potential consultant is that he has a reputation for calling it as he sees it, despite what the following might suggest. Would any large consulting firm be willing to take that risk with its clients?

Dr. GC floors’em

One of my academic colleagues suggested we hire Dr. G. Carlin as a faculty member in strategy based on the following test lecture – but in my view he would fit equally well in a consulting company. Perhaps a shared appointment?

Geek/nerd humor. I’ve seen this before somewhere and I’m glad to see it again. I’ve certainly sat through my share of presentations like this. You wonder how many takes it took to get it right.

Funny: Rockwells Retro Encabulator

The yin to Common Craft’s yang:

I wish I knew more about this, the YouTube pages offer little info.
Thanks to Paul Ingram and Ryan Turner for the pointers.

Updated:  Here it says “This is a hoax video produced by Rockwell
for a sales meeting. See also:
Turboencabulator” Thanks Bill! 

Yes We Can

Beautiful.

This is showing up in all of my news feeds. I thought I would pass it along as well. Thanks to Rick Klau and David Weinberger among others.