Category: Practices

Dolly Levi as the patron saint of the knowledge economy

Apropos of the gift economy of weblogs, here’s a great little story courtesy of David Gurteen on courtesy among scholars.

The scholar’s courtesy. A few weeks back I met with a very interesting woman called [Shane Godbolt] who works for the National Heatth Service (NHS) in the UK.

As she valued my website and newsletter – she brought me several ‘knowledge gifts’ in return as a ‘thank you’. This is just what I love about Knowledge Sharing – you get back as mcuh as you give – if not more [Smile!]

Amongst these gifts was a beautiful little story about the importance of acknowledging the sources of your ideas – regardless of whether they are in ‘print’ or not.

I received an early lesson about acknowledging others from my mentor George Spindler. The Spindlers were houseguests visiting me after I took a full-time academic appointment upon completion of doctoral studies. I eagerly shared an early draft of a chapter I had been invited to write, tentatively entitled “Concomitant Learning”.

Spindler was up early the next morning, but to my disappointment I found him looking through materials he had written (my library contained many of them) rather than reading my new draft. He had already read and enjoyed my article, he explained, but he expressed disappointment at my failure to credit him as a source of inspiration for the concept that provided my title and rationale. He had been searching for the citation I should have made. “But you’ve never written about it ,” I explained, reaffirming what I already knew and he was beginning to suspect. “I got the idea from you, but you only suggested it in a seminar. There was no publication to cite.”

Technically (and luckily ) I was correct, as his search revealed. That wasn’t the entire lesson however. “No matter where or how you encounter them,” he counseled, “always give credit for the sources of your ideas. It’s so easy to do so : so appropriate to good scholarship … and so appreciated.”

Never again have I limited my acknowledgements only to people whose ideas are in print. And I, too, have “so appreciated” that courtesy when extended to me!

Harry F. Wolcott, Writing up qualitative research, 1990, pp.72-73). Quoted in Blaise Cronin, The scholars courtesy, the role of acknowledgement in the primary communication process. Taylor Graham 1995, p122. [Gurteen Knowledge-Log]

Na ve though it may be, I continue to believe that knowledge hoarding and information hoarding are fundamentally pathological behaviors that have little chance of surviving in the face of healthy organizations. People who really know stuff are always willing and eager to share their interests and knowledge with others. Those who feel compelled to hoard their knowledge do so because of the meagerness of their holdings not because of their riches. Dolly Levi is the patron saint of the knowledge economy not Ebenezer Scrooge.

My secret hope for blogs

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.

A look at recent user level activity in the RSS world

I’ve been an advocate of RSS and the less recognized value of the aggregator side of the blogging world for some time. There have been a whole series of recent examples of RSS applications worth noting. I thought I’d pull together a niumber of the items gracing my aggregator on the topic.

For example, we have technology analyst firms beginning to make their content available through RSS. Perhaps what’s notable here is the shift in focus to actually thinking about increasing the value to customers.

Forrester gets RSS. [via Chad Dickerson of Infoworld]

In my post about Mr. Safe, RSS, and IT analysts, I criticized the analysts for not “getting it” on RSS. I’m glad to report that I didn’t have the full story on at least one of the analyst firms. Ezra Ball, a senior web developer at Forrester, wrote to me and pointed out that while Forrester has not covered RSS heavily, they do produce RSS feeds themselves. To me, actually doing RSS is a greater demonstration of “getting it” than only writing about it. According to Ezra:

Forrester does provide a couple of RSS feeds: one for all research ( http://www.forrester.com/rss ), and one for “free” (requires guest registration) research ( http://www.forrester.com/rss/free ). We’ve actually had these for about three years, but people are still only starting to wake up to how to consume RSS.

Jupiter Research gets RSS and weblogs. [via Chad Dickerson of Infoworld]

When posting about Mr. Safe, analyst firms, and RSS a couple of weeks ago, I criticized Gartner and Forrester/Giga for not covering RSS effectively. Ezra Ball at Forrester let me know that they have RSS feeds, despite a lack of significant coverage of RSS in the research they offer.

Today, I got an e-mail from Michael Gartenberg, VP and Research Director at Jupiter Research (the inline links are mine):

Hi, just a quick note that Jupiter was the first research firm to have analyst weblogs (including RSS feeds). Our Microsoft Monitor research service also has a companion weblog with RSS as well. In addition, Jupiter ran the first business weblog conference this past spring and we will be doing a follow up to it on the West Coast this fall. We have covered the RSS issues extensively in our written research as well coverage of Weblog adoption both in terms of who is writing them and who is reading them. Other firms often do not cover trends like RSS until they become mainstream, Jupiter has a slightly different approach.

Jupiter certainly deserved a mention in my original post. Their weblog conference was well-attended by folks in the community and they have a substantial weblog presence. Unlike Gartner’s weblogs, all of Jupiter’s weblogs have RSS feeds — a weblog without an RSS feed is like a cheeseburger with only the bread.

We’re also beginning to see other examples of RSS in use beyond the primary example of RSS to support weblogs. Of course, as you might expect, there’s a certain amount of noise in the system as Vizard reflects in his remarks below. He invests a lot of energy in trying to convince himself that RSS can simply be grafted onto CRN’s existing model of trying to drive traffic to their websites. This is whistling past the cemetary in my view, but I don’t mind as long as the experiments are being run. The market will twist the technology to its own purposes as always.

RSS for Publishers. [via EMERGIC.org]

CRN’s Michael Vizard on RSS and its growing importance:

Web logs are interesting, but what’s even more interesting is the RSS technology. Now, I’ve got a mechanism by which I can let people customize how they want to have information come to them. One of the things you’ve seen happening on CRN.com is that we’re creating an RSS feed around storage. That’s my first experiment with getting people to sign up for it. People can have a storage feed and get all the related headlines coming to them.

Once they get the headlines, they click on them and it takes them back to our site. It becomes a mechanism for driving traffic to the site that is phenomenal. It also is a beautiful thing for readers, because it allows them to customize content in accord with what they’re looking for.

Right now, we’re not shipping out whole stories via RSS. People want tight, limited summaries in an RSS feed, but will come to the site to read the stories. They use it as a digest and index to what’s going on, but at the end of the day it will actually drive more traffic to the sites.

I think RSS means that people will move from the days of active Web surfing to passive Web surfing. By that I mean that people will no longer go on the site because it’s fun, they’ll only go when they have some specific thing that they care about. The RSS feed is a way to bring people back to sites for stuff that they care about it.

At the same time, people will find Web sites richer because they’ll find them easier to navigate. I don’t care whose site it is — aggregating any site’s content these days is a difficult chore because there’s so much of it. RSS gives people a point of entry into the site for things they care about. I think that it will actually rejuvenate content on the Web. We could also have a much longer conversation about how RSS and e-mail will leverage and extend and improve each other.

Not surprisingly, Inforworld is beginning to use RSS feeds in several new ways and is providing more content in the feed instead of trying to force readers back to their site. They are also experimenting with embedding advertising in the stream.

New InfoWorld RSS feeds and changes. [via Chad Dickerson of Infoworld]

We just added a bunch of new RSS feeds here at InfoWorld. You can see the entire list on our homepageEach of our top-level Tech Index categories now has an RSS feed, and we also threw in a Test Center Reviews RSS feed so those of you with RSS readers can more easily keep up with the product reviews we are doing every week.

Responding to the suggestions of folks like Dwight Shih as I promised, we’ve also made our feeds less “parsimonious“(as Dwight put it). Instead of just using the “deck” (journalism jargon for what you might call the sub-headline) as the description, we’re using the first paragraph of the story, which certainly makes the items a bit fuller.

On the advertising front (see pointers to earlier discussion here about ads for NewsGator), we are trying out a new way of advertising using an auction-based system (similar to Google) called Industry Brains. We’re already using Industry Brains on our site (see “InfoWorld Marketplace” at the bottom of our homepage, for example), but it will work in our RSS feeds like this: Advertisers currently bid on links in our News section. The top bidder will receive ad placement in our Top News RSS feed for the first feed of the day (i.e. not every time the feed is updated). The ad link and copy will appear in the description of an entry after the editorial content and indicated by “ADVERTISEMENT” text. As I said in our early trials of RSS-based advertising, we’re experimenting and look forward to your feedback, either via e-mail or in your own weblog. Matt McAlister, our director of online product development, is driving this effort, so feel free to e-mail him if you have questions or comments.

Dickerson also has a nice post on a variety of business uses of RSS and some emerging cases studies in that area:

RSS and business — what really matters.

As I’ve noted before, I had been swimming in the seas of RSS for a while as a producer of RSS content at media companies, but it wasn’t until recently that I had my awakening as a consumer of RSS. In a classic case of (possibly) bad timing, my personal RSS awakening converged with the recent Echo discussions. Whether or not anything will change is to be determined, but my discussions with non-developers who use RSS indicate that they are pretty bored by the whole discussion and just don’t want the rug pulled out from under them — Technology Marketing writer Jonathan Angel represents this contingent well when he writes “Stop wanking and drive.” In any case, I’m reminded of an excerpt from Ellen Ullman’s book Close to the Machine, a book which offers the best glimpse into the mindset of programming that I’ve ever read:

When the humans come back to talk changes, I can just run the program. Show them: Here. Look at this. See? This is not just talk. This runs. Whatever you might say, whatever the consequences, all you have are words and what I have is this, this thing I’ve built, this operational system. Talk all you want, but this thing here: it works.
(this quote is actually on page 2 of the Salon excerpt)

…[snip]….

The developer discussions aside, e-mail from my last column about RSS elicited some interested feedback from the business side of things, which is what really matters if RSS or RSS-like technologies are going to be ultimately successful. Greg Reinacker pointed me to an RSS case study for his NewsGator product (full disclosure: Greg advertises his product in InfoWorld’s RSS feeds as I’ve discussed here). While the case study obviously focuses on how Greg’s product was leveraged in a business setting, the real story is how RSS met a defined business need, and met it well. Yes, I know case studies are marketing tools, but I include NewsGator’s marketing material here because it illustrates a coming-of-age of the RSS concept, i.e. material you can show non-technical people to help them “get it.” Also, everything in this case study rings true based on my experience with RSS. (a Google search for RSS and “case study” actually gives you the NewsGator case study as the first useful link — if you know of any more RSS case studies, let me know):

Triple Point started with a simple goal: “The idea is to free some of our content, expose it via easily searchable XML and HTML via HTTP, and reduce the amount of information hunt and peck that currently goes on, thus increasing productivity and improving the quality of our work,” says Allie [Rogers, CIO of Triple Point Technology].

I also heard from Phil Gomes, the co-founder of PR agency G2B Group, which has a blog of its own and a whitepaper on RSS and corporate communications. Jon Udell has already covered Phil’s whitepaper well, but suffice it to say that it’s refreshing to see that some people in the PR world are thinking about this and getting it. I subscribed to the G2B RSS feed so I can stay up-to-speed with where they are headed in their thinking. The great thing about weblogs/RSS is that I can afford time-wise to peek into the thinking of this world on a regular basis — I’m subscribed to 31 different sources currently and have yet to feel overburdened by the amount of incoming information.

As a final note on business and RSS, Paul Beard references my previous post about RSS awareness at Gartner, Forrester, and Giga, pointing out that if I search for RDF on those sites, I would do a little better. Thanks, Paul. I’ll let Mr. Safe know, but I have a feeling he’s getting pretty tired of talking about this and is thinking about other things.

Dave Winer reports on a new RSS service from Wired News that lets you subscribe to a feed with the outputs of a search. “Happiness is a new RSS application from Wired News.” Meanwhile, Scoble reports on another Microsoft RSS feed:

More RSS shows up at Microsoft. This time the Knowledge Base alerts are published as an RSS feed, says Kevin Dente.

As all this activity takes place, you start to see lots of smart people beginning to think about where RSS might be taking us. Among the examples worth taking a look at:

Hmmm. [via Steve Gillmor]

Rather than just inserting RSS into an email client paradigm as in Newsgator, it might be amusing to invert the solution and explore the usability issues of rethinking email as being just another form of feed served up to a reader, with plug-ins for creating & replying, etc. Hmm..

I just noticed Ray Ozzie’s update to his Email/RSS musings, not through NetNewsWire, but via a Technorati cross-link to Collet’s Weblog. Perhaps I reset the unread flag without noticing it (I am using an alpha version of NNW) but I can’t be sure unless Ray does another silent update.

and this from Dave Sifry,

RSS as Infrastructure. [via Dave Sifry]

With the announcement yesterday of the assignment of the RSS 2.0 specification to Harvard University, along with a Creative Commons license and a new 3 person steering committee, RSS 2.0 has become more firmly cemented as an infrastructural element in the web publishing world. This is a good thing. It will help wary organizations to feel more comfortable using a syndication standard with the assurances that it is not going to be changed on a whim or hijacked by someone with a hidden agenda. RSS 2.0 isn’t perfect, and that’s one of its best qualities. It was designed with a “worse is better” mentality, what I like to call POGE – the Principle of Good Enough. That means it is simple, easy to understand and to code. It means that it doesn’t have a lot of bells and whistles, and it isn’t a format for all things or all purposes. It has a history, which means it has some bumps and warts, but IMHO, it does a pretty good job of doing what it sets out to do: Be a format for the syndication of published content. This is not a knock on other efforts that attempt to achieve other goals. My perspective is to use the best tool for the job at hand, and it is OK for different people to have different opinions on what that is. Kudos to Dave Winer, the folks at Berkman, and the Advisory Board for taking this positive step….

and from EMERGIC.org

Something New and Big is Brewing.

I tried an experiment over the past 10 days or so to get an idea of the utility of blogs. I get about 500-odd items from my 90+ feeds daily. I decided to delete the ones which I found not very useful, and see how many items would be left over a 10-day period. The answer: about 300. This means, that I getting about 30 good ideas / comments from bloggers daily. I cannot think of any other source which provides such a rich set of new inputs. Bloggers cook food for the brain, and RSS feeds are the delivery people.

With my Info Aggregator, I am now as excited as I’ve been about a new technology. RSS is undboutedly the HTML of today. The Info Aggregator (or more broadly, an RSS aggregator), is creating within me the same excitement that I felt using Mosaic in the fall of 1994.

Something big is underway. The pieces are slowly coming together. Blogs, Publish-Subscribe, RSS, Information Refinery, Dashboard, Web Services – its all very exciting. We all have an opportunity to be part of this new emerging world.

From Steve Gillmor again, who also notes the value of RSS in keeping tabs on whether someone you want to hear from has posted anything new lately, without your having to surf in their direction.

The Sound of Silence. [via Steve Gillmor]

Nothing sways me from the notion that RSS is a transcendent technology. As it continues to gain momentum, nothing seems to effectively slow it down. Name changes, name-calling, namespaces–they’re more fodder for the Channel. RSS is a superset; it’s inclusive of email, collaboration technology, sales force automation, iTunes, Hailstorm, IT, standards, portals, and especially weblogs.

Going beyond that, Gillmor argues in a later post that despite current experiments integrating RSS into email (e.g., Greg Reinacker‘s NewsGator), email will ultimately get folded into RSS feeds instead. Phil Wolff of a klog apart elaborates on Gillmor’s hypothesis:

Steve Gilmore says email is a subset of RSS. You betcha..

Microcontent. It’s a big big idea. Steve Gilmore, at last night’s Jing Jing Blogger Dinner, had two comments on my email as syndication client post.

First, he thinks I have it backwards. RSS (and its decendents) won’t fold into email. Email will fold into newsreader tools. This may be semantics, but I don’t think so. Echo is extensible. You will see a wide variety of microcontent formats. Box scores. Supply chain orders. Cat pedigrees (it’s a blogging world, after all). Each type with its own editing, display, and storage. So email is just an instance, a special case of microcontent syndication and management.

Second, he sees Microsoft too entrenched in Outlook. So dug in, they can’t reimagine it as a general microconent client, let alone completely re-engineer the plumbing. I’ll trust him on this; Steve knows many more people at Microsoft than I do. He says that clicking on a link in an Outlook message shouldn’t launch an external browser; it should stay in the reader context. If they got it, they’d be working with all forms of content internally.

Meanwhile, all the independent software developers are getting creative. Mail service providers jump at RSS to differentiate themselves. NewsReaders gain features people use to manage overflowing email. Portal makers flow RSS feeds in and out. Blog hosters bake RSS into default templates. Social network and digital ID elements are touching syndication, promising new value for getting messages via syndication server vs. email server.

But aren’t InfoPath and the deep XMLization of Microsoft Office evidence of microcontent thinking? RSS/Echo is hot buzz at Microsoft developer conferences. Will Redmond politics amid the product silos fuel the reinvigoration of Outlook as a microcontent client before the third party world completely redefines microcontent messaging?

Maybe.

I think Steve just wants RSS feeds delivered to his Blackberry. For now.

And from Chad Dickerson at Infoworld one more time:

RSS killed the Infoglut Star.

It’s “all RSS, all the time” this week in my weblog, and my weekly column for InfoWorld is no different. In this week’s installment, I write about how RSS has really changed the way I consume information for the better:

It’s fairly common knowledge in pop-culture trivia circles that the first video to air on MTV was the Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star,” a song with a title that proved prophetic in its bold announcement of a shift in the way music was consumed and marketed. Something similar but perhaps just as profound is happening with the delivery of information online with tools that leverage RSS [read the rest here]

It’s truly amazing how something so simple — almost dumb — can make such a difference, but trust me, it does.

Extreme mobility and knowledge work effectiveness

Extreme Mobility: a rant that I had to write after reading Tim, Dave, and this all in one day. [Ray Ozzie’s Weblog]

Just getting around to reading this post of Ozzie’s from last week (one of the advantages of news aggregators). Full of lots of Ozzie’s usual excellent insights.

I believe we’re currently in a transition period for personal computing: from a tethered, desk-bound, personal productivity view, to one of highly mobile interpersonal productivity and collaboration, communications, coordination. We’re focused right now on devices and networks because we’re coming at the problem bottom-up: preoccupied by gizmos and technologies’ capabilities rather than focusing on how our lives and businesses and economies and societies will be fundamentally altered.

I’ve been living in this mobile world arguably since the early 90s. My primary computer since 1993 has been a laptop of one variety or another. I’ve lived the the scenarios Ozzie describes including the joys and aggravations of Lotus Notes when it was the only environment to deal with keeping a mobile workforce in sync.

Most organizations still operate on the notion that the corporate network is a fortress to be protected. This makes my life difficult from two perspectives. First, getting into my own network is more difficult than I would like from my selfish, time-pressed, user perspective. Second, when I am with clients, my effectiveness is compromised by the hurdles I have to negotiate to get access to material on their networks. Email becomes the lowest common denominator for coordinating work and the impacts on knowledge work effectiveness are invisible to the organization. Extra hours that I work to cope with these limits don’t show up anywhere in the reporting systems.

One aspect of this transition to extreme mobility is that I control the tools of my craft. I do have to reach an understanding with the folks in IT support so that they trust I won’t do anything stupid and will keep them in the loop. But I can experiment with new tools and practices. The challenge is to bring the useful lessons back into the organization. Ozzie sums it up well:

Regardless, one thing seems certain: with the notable exception of a small number of truly visionary CIO’s such as the one mentioned above – exceptional individuals who are willing to move their enterprises forward by taking risks – discovery and innovation in mobility and interpersonal productivity & communications – in “relationship superconductivity” – is being driven primarily from “the edge”: from small businesses, organizations and individuals who are experimenting with new communications technologies and software. Innovation now works its way into the enterprise; it no longer migrates outward. The technology leaders of the past – enterprise IT – are now focused (for very good economic reason!!) on cost reduction and efficiency, on “fast solutions”, and on a very tough regulatory environment, through strict controls. Liability, and the sheer mass and difficulty of managing broad ICT deployments encourages conservatism, and this won’t be changing anytime soon.

 

Productivity tips on how to handle E-mail – thinking about how to use our tools

Taming the E-mail tiger – how to manage your E-mail to be more productive. Dennis Kennedy has some great productivity tips on how to handle E-mail.  I like his idea of a folder that is labelled something like “action items.”  That is, a place that you can move emails relating to things that need to be done, but not right away.  I recently started aggresively managing E-mail in my inbox, and it has made a world of difference.  I wish I had read Dennis’s article a couple of years ago.

The key is to keep as few emails in your inbox as possible.  If you can do that then you are in good shape.

[Ernie the Attorney]

A nice pointer from Ernie to some useful tips.

It’s also a good example of how important it’s becoming for knowledge workers to start thinking explicitly and systematically about how they use the tools they have at hand. The marketing behind most technology tools gets in the way here, because it emphasizes such fuzzy notions as “intuitive interfaces.”

For all the power built into the tools we have, we take far too little time to think about how to make most effective use of those tools in our day-to-day work. When we do, more often than not, we get stuck in inapplicable notions of productivity and throughput drawn from industrial models of mass production..

Ignoring the media for real insights into change.

Bashing WiFi and the Broadcast Mentality [SATN]

More insights from Dan Bricklin at SATN. Here he offers some thought about the typically lazy thinking underlying most mainstream coverage of wi-fi. Twitting a recent article in the Boston Globe about the wi-fi bubble bursting he argues:

Sounds like the old “broadcast” mentality: Something isn’t interesting or valuable unless it provides a service that a big company can charge for. It seems the fact that millions of people are buying and installing (at their own expense) WiFi for their own purposes and not just to charge others is completely uninteresting to these pundits. This is like the thinking that P2P could only be used for sharing things that would otherwise be sold mass-market.

and he repeats an observation from David Reed:

As David Reed likes to point out, automobiles were user financed purchases. We didn’t turn the US into an automobile-centric society with taxis owned by the railroad companies. People bought their own cars for their own purposes, be it to visit friends, go “to the country” (an important, fun reason in the early days), tend to the sick (doctors were early adopters), shopping, commuting, etc.

Two things are going on here. One, the media is trying to atone for its breathless coverage during the dotcom bubble replacing the herd stampeding in one direction with a change in direction not a change in approach. Which reflects the second issue operating here. We’ve been enmeshed in a mass production/mass market economy for so long, that we’ve forgotten that it was an invention itself in response to particular technological changes.

Fortunately, I don’t rely on media coverage any more, I go to the sources such as SATN and other blogs.

If information foraging is the metaphor, are weblogs the ur-farms of the knowledge economy?

Information Foraging.

Information Foraging: “Information foraging is the most important concept to emerge from Human-Computer Interaction research since 1993. Developed at Xerox PARC by Stuart Card, Peter Pirolli, and colleagues, information foraging uses the analogy of wild animals gathering food to analyze how humans collect information online.”

[elearnspace blog]

I think you could make a pretty easy argument linking the upsurge in weblog popularity to how well tuned they are to supporting effective information foraging. Add in good aggregators and perhaps we have the first hints of the knowledge economy equivalent of the transition from hunter-gatherer cultures to agriculture.

If the only tool you have is a hammer…

A Day In My Life, By Bill Gates. (SOURCE:Scobleizer Radio Weblog)-PREDICTION: Within 10 years, the centre of most knowledge workers (including Bill Gates) will be a blog type application. NOT email. <quote> I’d say that of my time sitting in my office, that is, time outside of meetings, which is a couple of hours, two-thirds of that is sitting in E-mail. E-mail is really my primary application, because that’s where I’m getting notifications of new things, that’s where I’m stirring up trouble by sending mail out to lots of different groups. So it’s a fundamental application. And I think that’s probably true for most knowledge workers, that the E-mail is the one they sit in the most. Inside those E-mails they get spreadsheets, they get Word documents, they get PowerPoints, so they navigate out to those things, but the center is E-mail. </quote> [Roland Tanglao’s Weblog]

Roland catches the real point of this interview with Gates. The interview provides some interesting raw data on the day-to-day work practices of our economy’s quintessential knowledge worker. Email is the tool he has for communications so it is the tool that he uses. It is worth seeing how Gates thinks through how to get leverage from the tools that he has available. We all need to exercise that kind of thought about how to use our knowledge tools — blogs and aggregators included.

Diving into the middle

Mark Bernstein: The core challenge of the weblog is simply that we’re always coming into the middle of the story. This is what I meant with my post Orientation. I’ll steal the David Mamet quote, from his book On Directing Film:

In film or on the street, people who describe themselves to you are lying. Here is the difference: In the bad film, the fellow says, hello, Jack, I’m coming over to your home this evening because I need to get the money you borrowed from me. In the good film, he says, where the hell were you yesterday?

[Tesugen.com]

I wish I had seen this quote 18 months ago when I first started blogging. I did manage to figure it out, but it would have been nice to have this little piece of advice.

It reminds me of the editor who worked with me on my first book, Managing Information Strategically. Jon used to start reading my draft chapters at the top of page three. When I asked him why, he said that was where he always found my real lead. I still struggle with diving into the point I want to make and resisting the urge to offer all the backstory.