Ernie on weblogs as smart filters

Good advice from Ernie that applies to more than law students and explains one of the key values of weblogs as a key element in your personal knowledge management strategy (you do have one don’t you?).

Read the dissenting opinion first. Here’s a tip for law students: read the dissenting opinion first. Assuming you can glean the facts of the case from the dissenting opinion (and, if not, then skim the main opinion until you have the gist of the case),… [Ernie The Attorney]

Here’s Ernie’s key point:

This concept of ‘reading the dissent first’ is applicable to weblogs. In fact, I’d say it is a large reason why reading certain kinds of weblogs makes news gathering more efficient. Reading opinion blogs changes the news gathering process from one where the reader is a ‘passive receptor’ to one where she is an active participant.

Go read the whole thing, it’s worth your time.

Blogging mindfully

The following three items turned up in sequence in my aggregator this morning.

While it’s starting to shape up as another A-List/Power law debate, I think something else more interesting is going on that Dina is highlighting. There are new cultural norms taking shape here influenced, as always, by key characteristics of the technology. At the same time, as Finkelstein points out, these norms are also shaped by predictable aspects of human nature.

It can be a struggle to tune into the nuances of this debate. You can choose to listen to a small set of voices all saying the same thing. You can choose to seek out diversity in sources and perspectives at the expense of having to develop your own synthesis. Most importantly, you can choose to do so mindlessly or mindfully.

1. Revenge Of The A-List(er/ers).

Feel the floor, I mean being flat on the floor, while a very few have the floor. [Seth Finkelstein’s Infothought]

With this key graf.

What I am saying is that bloggerdom is as gatekeeper-constricted as other Big Media. It’s a gatekeeper of audience, not a gatekeeper of production, but this makes no different in the final result. To be charitable, people keep responding to that observation by saying anyone can pitch a story to the editors, I mean the gatekeepers, and that they are unmoved by insularity and clubbiness. Which, by the way, is exactly what Big Media claims too, and I think is about as true (note the implication there – people can think conections count for more than they in truth do, but denying they mean anything at all seems over-idealistic)]

Scoble is responding to Finkelstein’s earlier post. Or more precisely, he’s using his take on Finkelstein’s post to make his own point. But the nice thing about blogs and linking is that we can easily go look for ourselves.

2. Finkelstein notes that he isn’t in the A list.

Seth Finkelstein says that the A-list isn’t linking to him. Or something. Seth, you miss the point. How did I get to the supposed “A list?” By linking to everyone and by reading more than 1000 blogs. Seriously. Why does that matter? The more you link and the more you read, the more likely people are to link to you and talk about you. Here’s a question for you Seth: have you ever linked to an A lister? Here you do and you get linked to by two of us.

Here’s my top blogger tip: if you want people to link to you link to them first! A link is a gift. Everytime I get a link it tickles my soul. Plus, it shows up in my referer log so I notice you did it. How do you think I found out about your blog?

I have a saying. Everyone gets one link for free. But you gotta earn the “n” link. So, the stakes go up next time. Next time you’ll have to be interesting. Sorry, but that’s sorta how it works. (Yeah, my boss ignores me when I go in to ask for a raise too and mubles something about how my coworkers are writing more code and doing more cool stuff to help customers).

Oh, and look at my experimental aggregator blog. What percentage of those posts are from the “A list?” See, you don’t need to be an “A lister” to get noticed.

I’ve only been blogging for about three years. It doesn’t take long to get onto the A list if you wanna be there (here’s a hint, it isn’t as interesting as you might think). Just write something that other bloggers find interesting. Don’t know what that is? Well, then visit Technorati and read some more blogs.

Oh, one rule that an “A lister” taught me very early on: don’t beg for links. There’s nothing more uninteresting than that. [Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger]

And Dina finds an interesting perspective on community that is worth considering.

3. Blogs Grow Community.

Another way of looking at community …. Why the Amish would like Blogs.

“The Amish way of life is actually a means to prevent interaction with outsiders. Oddly this is precisely why they are such supporters of community……………………..

The problem with the Amish method of community or the beauty of it depending on how you see it, is that there is not really any growth. The only way you get more Amish to have kids. That limits the growth to a pretty slow number. The same is true of Separatist or Elitist communities. If you aren’t trying to actively convert users, or working on ways to have communities interact you aren’t likely to grow your communities.” [Brandon Wirtz’s Digital Mix]
[Conversations with Dina]

After Action Review Toolkit

This is a nice process for running AARs together with a case study of AARs in action. AARs are a simple and powerful technique for discovering and communicating lessons learned. They work especially well in project-based environments. If they aren’t already in your bag of tricks, they should be

After Action Review Toolkit. Allison Hewlitt has posted a draft After Action Review Toolkit, which provides a practical step-by-step process for running these reviews. To quote: The AAR is a simple process used by a team to capture the lessons learned from past successes… [Column Two]

’social intelligence’ quote

You can still get sent to the metaphorical principal’s office for it I suspect.

‘social intelligence’ quote….

Thanks for nothing — by Susan Maushart in The Australian is totally off-topic for what I normally post in this category, but I loved the following quote:

“When I was a kid, “social intelligence” was what you got sent to the principal for. Today, it’s the stuff of merit certificates and hand stamps.”

[judith meskill’s knowledge notes…]

Playfair forced offline by Apple, reappears on Indian site.

It must be frustrating to be a corporate lawyer with a technological clue. You know that sending a cease and desist letter will immediately trigger the proliferation of copies across the net and around the world, as well as generating all sorts of unwanted publicity. On the other hand, if you don’t you violate your responsibilities to your shareholders. I think “bullied” is a bit inflamatory. IANAL, but this strikes me as yet one more piece of evidence that the DMCA is bad law.

Playfair bullied offline by Apple, reappears on Indian site. PlayFair, the free software project that allowed you to strip the copy-restriction wrapper off of your iTunes Music Store tracks, has been removed from SourceForge in response to a threatening letter, apparently from Apple. It has been relocated to a server in India, and development continues apace. Link (Thanks, Jonathan!) [Boing Boing]

You are your references

If you’ve been paying attention, this is in the “well, duh?” category, but it’s worth having handy for those who haven’t. You might also want to take a look at David Brin’s The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy & Freedom? for a longer take on the same question.

First Impression. You are your references.”

Seth Godin , Author, “Purple Cow“

[Fast Company]

Key paragraph:

One thing is becoming crystal clear: You are your references. If a friend tells me a play is no good, I don’t go. A friend’s recommendation will also determine my choice of lawn-care service or an island to vacation on. My publisher just sent me an email asking about a potential author–and if I don’t back up the author’s version of our relationship, he won’t get the contract.

No person or company can escape their past. You can no longer change your prices with impunity, because the old price lists may be cached at The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine (www.archive.org ), which regularly takes snapshots of Web sites and stores them forever. With a little care, you won’t hire a manager with a history of abusing his employees, because the lawsuits are all in the public record.

Social Network Systems from Bob Frankston

Now these are Social Network Systems I can endorse!

Is it SATN?. No, just Bob Frankston and his three newly proposed YASNS — EomE [Enemy of my Enemies,] Blind Trust Network, and the Mindless Philatelist Network:

You’re invited to join the EomE network

Unlike David Weinberger who seems to dislike the social networking phenomenon, I embrace and extend the concept.

Enemy of my Enemies is a new social network. Unlike the old ones it focuses on the real need to protect ourselves from “them”.

Warning: you must click the button an even number of times otherwise you will be considered an enemy.

You will be asked to make sure that you are indeed the enemy of at least one of my enemies. Don’t be surprised if you are on enemy list yourself. You can be in both categories though in order to join you will have to agree to attack yourself to protect me.

The Trust Network is the new effort to solve the problem of trust on the Internet. You can simple check a box to say you trust me. We at the Trust Network understand that there are people who you trust with your life but not your money but such fine distinctions are not compatible with the need for naive trust. All who are trusted agree to encode all their information into the semantic web ontology that eschews ambiguity in favor of simplicity. Esperanto is the only language allowed within the Web of Trust (WoT).

For those reluctant to be enmeshed we are willing to assist with the “Home Lobotomy Kit”. It provides all the instructions you need (spoons not included). After the operation you will find no ambiguities in the concept of trust.

After all, the whole purpose of these networks is to collect people like we collect stamps. So why bother with the people part and go straight to the Mindless Philatelist Network. This is the network for people who don’t really care what they collect as long as they have the most. Stamps are simpler than people but either way only quantity matters.

[The Social Software Weblog]

Active Listening (and Reading)

Some good advice about how to be more intentional and mindful in your information gathering and analysis. Apropos of that, let me point, once again, to Ellen Langer’s excellent work on Mindfulness and The Power of Mindful Learning. You might also want to take a look at the late Don Schon’s The Reflective Practitioner.

Active Listening (and Reading). Piers Young wrote a post called Listening and Anecdotes. Something he said made me realize that getting great advice is one thing, actively thinking about it and doing something with it is something else! He quotes one of the pieces… [John Porcaro: mktg@msft]

Blogging, calendaring, and timelines

Here’s an interesting experiment that I plan to follow up on for my own timeline data. I’m one of those who think at least one important aspect of weblogging is its ability to serve as a back-up brain. As I get older, I want to have better ways of thinking about lots of data for my own purposes. Timeline and event data is one important category that I still need to crack.

Blogging and Calendaring.

Michael Sippey has an interesting experiment with his Timeline (example):

A couple of years ago I started keeping simple timelines — “major” personal events over the course of a year, to make it easier to scan a period of time without being bogged down in the dozens of weekly appointments that clog the day-to-day calendar.

I’m in the messaging business. Focused — today — on email. But lately I’ve been interested in how messages (of all stripes) could more effectively be integrated into where we best process specific types of information. Your average inbox is not great at organizing time-oriented material, especially reminders about events that will take place in the future — calendars are obviously better at that. And with iCal (the format, not the app), it becomes reasonably brainless to publish individual events and/or a stream of events out to users. Case in point: it was probably less than one day of effort for the engineers at Expedia to add a downloadable calendar event to your online travel itinerary. But the fact that I can automagically pop my flight info into Outlook is at the top of my list of reasons why I’m loyal to Expedia.

So, anyway. Sippey.com/timeline is the result of some noodling on those two issues. A single page view of a year. Which is also rendered in calendar form, and made available for layering on top of your calendar. It’s hindsight publishing, of course (this did happen on this day, instead of this is going to happen on this day). But calendars are not only planning tools, they’re rememberance agents. And layering information like major news stories, weather (a la Jerry’s story about his old DayPlanner habits), sports scores and even personal bloggish notations could be an interesting use of the iCal format.

This is a small part of an idea Ramesh Jain has talked about – the EventWeb.

[E M E R G I C . o r g]

Making Your Blog Posts Spiffy

Some good ideas for making your posts more useful to readers. Something I should pay more attention to. I focus so much on the RSS side of the equation, that I sometimes forget that there are those who prefer getting their weblog content in their browsers.

Making Your Blog Posts Spiffy. Kaye offers up some tips on making the most of blog posts:

  • Use a pull quote
  • Adam Polselli’s unique blockquote style for showing code labels it as such (scroll down to see)
  • Adrian Holovaty’s blockquote style for showing code highlights it & changes the font
  • Put quote marks around your blockquote content
  • Use a different font in your blockquote
  • Jay McCarthy puts a dotted line around his blockquotes
  • According to these suggestions, I’m doing a fairly good job. But the pull quote thing is very cool, something I’m going to have to experiment with.

    UPDATE: Well, that was pretty easy… [Weblogg-ed News]