Category: Practices

Dinah raises an interesting question about how we read weblogs and why some of us are biased toward reading inside aggregators and why some of us prefer to read weblogs in situ. I’ve long preferred reading in an aggregator and, more specifically I find myself returning again and again to the simple, chronological, single-page design offered out of the box by Radio.

As to why I prefer reading in an aggregator over visiting weblogs directly, I see four reasons:

1. An aggregator substitutes one discipline for many. It brings information to me when there is information to be had. I don’t need to remember to cycle through a blogroll.
2. An aggregator makes more efficient use of my time by taking over the task of polling and collecting information for me.
3. Ideas come to me in pure form and on an equal footing. Moreover they show up in a consistently readable format. My aging eyes don’t tolerate small fonts or oddly-colored backgrounds well. While there may be design asthetics I am missing, it’s a price I am willing to pay.
4. I find the juxtaposition of ideas arriving in my aggregator stimulating. It promotes serendipitous connections I would not otherwise make. This is why I continue to prefer Radio’s design to three-paned aggregators and other designs that are biased toward segregating feeds.

My typical practice is to scan through my aggregator in several passes. In the first pass, I quickly look for items to delete. I use a pair of bookmarklets to toggle checkboxes on or off depending on my mood and how many items are backlogged in the aggregator. If there are lots of items (> 200 say) I toggle the check boxes all on which presumes I will be deleting most items. As I scan, I click off the checkbox for items I want to come back to. Bad titles and boring leads mean an item is likely to get axed. If I miss something good, there’s usually a high probability of someone in my subscriptions list bringing it back to my attention.

In the second pass, I still tend to focus on material to eliminate based on scanning the first few sentences or paragraphs. More stuff gets deleted.

When I get down to a few dozen or so posts, I start to read more carefully. Some items I post away to categories I maintain locally strictly for my own purposes. Backup brain kinds of things.

Finally, I’m down to items I want to think about and likely comment on or use as a launching pad for my own ideas. Those might well sit in my aggregator for several days to a week, sometimes longer depending on what else I’m up to.

Developing the Master Skill of the Leader

I prepared this top ten list of listening skills with an eye towards developing mastery. Not that I have mastered the skill of listening, but because it is a skill worth mastering. I am sharing it here due to the enthusiasm readers have shown for the topic.

…

[Reforming Project Management]

Hal Macomber has a long, but excellent, post on listening as a core leadership skill. Full of good advice and pointers to more.

Good listening starts with genuine curiosity. But in a leader it also requires the strength to set aside any assumptions that you might already know the answer and be willing to be surprised.

On Planning…. On Planning…

Planning is an unnatural process; it is much more fun to do something. The nicest thing about not planning is that failure comes as a complete surprise, rather than being preceded by a period of worry and depression.
– Sir John Harvey-Jones

(heh, heh) [Frank Patrick’s Focused Performance Blog]

Yes, indeed.

Weblogs as status reports – It can work but the barrier is cultural not technological. (SOURCE:Rands In Repose: Status Reports 2.0 via McGee's Musings)- We've tried over the last 2 years to replace status reports with blogs at a e-commerce company I do consulting for. Success has been mixed. Even though most of the people are engineering staff (i.e. technical people who should have no problem with the 'geekiness' of today's blogging tools), getting them to document in real time what they do has been more difficult than I anticipated. Transparency, even internal status transparency, is a new and hard thing for today's business culture. I think this will shift in time as people become more used to the idea of making themselves more transparent. Not only will the tools get easier to use, but the idea of being transparent (internally at least) will become more and more common just as the idea and culture of email took a while to take hold. Remember the executives who got their email printed out by their secretaries? Just as this is perceived as being quaint today, so too will today's resistance to internal transperancy be perceived as quaint in the future.

QUOTE

There needs to be some creative incentive for individuals to write stuff down. For the Wiki, there is the promise that if you write it down, maybe you can avoid future lame redundant questions. For the weblog, the timely conversational style of the medium keeps the content focused on news of the moment and that's really the question; is news of the moment interesting to an engineering organization?

What I'm curious about is if anyone has had any success using web-based collaboration tools as a means of augmenting or replacing status reports. I know Wikis have successfully emerged as semi-structured information repositories… have they evolved into anything? How in the world can I get out of writing Status Reports?

UNQUOTE

[Roland Tanglao's Weblog]

Roland, of course, is spot on about the problems being cultural. And with the notion that the transition is becoming more comfortable with transparency. Time to move David Brin's The Transparent Society to the head of the reading queue.

My current hypothesis is that you have to start with the individual knowledge worker and work from the bottom up. What I haven't cracked to my own satisfaction yet is what the organizational support requirements need to be.

Current status reporting requirements are still rooted in industrial assumptions about projects and processes. Key to those assumptions is the notion that variation is bad. Things are supposed to go as planned. In a knowledge economy those assumptions are inverted. You still need to plan. But now the plans are to help you recognize which variations are important, which are trivial, which are bad, and which are good. Status reporting should become more about discovering and understaning the implications in those variations.

Dilbert for 21 Nov 2003. [Dilbert]

Looks like status reports are in the air

Status Reports 2.0. At a start-up, there are two organizational inflection points which drastically change communication within the organization. The first change occurs around fifty or so people — this is the moment when, if you're an early employee, that you first see… [Rands In Repose]

Some nice reflections on the potential for wikis and weblogs to address that perennial necessary evil in organizations–status reports. Comes down slightly in favor of weblogs for most organizations given the open-ended, unstructured, nature of wikis.

Overall, I'm inclined to agree, although the hybrid strategy that Ross Mayfield is pursuing at SocialText is intriguing as well. Another take to factor in is that taken by the folks at Traction Software. The start up curve appears a bit steeper, but they seem to have thought more about how to operate at the structured team level.

What I'm continuing to struggle with is how best to introduce these concepts into organizations that are just beginning to grasp the limitation of email as a management tool.

Comment on post 3836 on 11/17/03 by Liz Lawley. I think for many of us the goal is to get our thoughts *written*–the being read is a secondary bonus. 🙂 The real problem with full-text feeds, I think, is that they make it more likely that comments–which I think are a critical part of many weblog entries–will be missed. 🙁 [chaosplayer News]

As expected, Liz raises several cogent points about my bias for full-text feeds. First, like Liz, my initial goal in blogging was to make it easier to get my thoughts written down in the first place. Discovering that there were people out there who wanted to read them was a secondary and welcome bonus.

As for missing comments, I'm less clear. It was a while before I enable comments at all. I do get comments and those that I get are always valuable. My solution to not missing comments on  my own weblog is to provide an RSS feed from my comments so they flow into my aggregator. The only drawback to that approach I can see is that comments do get separated from the original post as they come into the aggregator, but I can always go back to the weblog itself to track the comments in place. I also find that the bulk of the discussions I track tend to be cross-blog rather than comment-centric. The question, of course, is whether that observation in an artifact of my being aggregator-biased. How many good discussions am I missing by not tracking comments on other blogs more closely?

For that matter, why, or perhaps when, would you choose to post a comment instead of making an entry in your own blog? The technologies are opening up more choices; are there any emerging guidelines or practices to direct my choices.

A number of the people who's blogs I read regularly have not set up their systems to provide a full text feed of each post. 40 words is not enough for me to accurately decide if I want to read something or not. More often than not the post gets deleted.

Please consider offering an alternative feed for those of us who want full text. That said, I don't offer 40 word excerpts on my feed so if you want one ask and I'll set it up.

[thought?horizon]