Congratulations to Halley and her team. I guess she won’t be taking a weekend off at a bed and breakfast to celebrate.
Worthwhile Is Born!
Yes, the blog is a now a blog AND a magazine — check it out! I have it right in my hot little hands and it’s really terrific.
You can get it at Barnes & Noble, Borders, Whole Foods and other newsstands in the next two weeks. Enjoy it! [Halley’s Comment]
I first used a timesharing computer in 1973 in a summer job with the old McDonnell Douglas. It was a Xerox SDS machine. My terminal was an old Teletype 33. This is a fascinating account from one of the early inventors in the field.
“I still don’t understand where all the computer time goes in time-sharing installations, and neither does anyone else.” — John McCarthy, 1983 (Of course, the state of the art has advanced considerably since then; now we don’t even know where the compute time goes in single-user workstations.) [Hack the Planet]
Thank you Judith for the reminder and pointer to an excellent resource. If we’re going to be serious about doing knowledge management in whatever flavor we happen to believe in (personal, corporate, or otherwise), then we need to stay grounded in the work that has come before us.
I’m reminded of an old software engineering quote that I can’t track down this minute since I’m blogging this on the train. I do remember that it was in the Proceedings of the 1968 NATO conference on software engineering, which shows you the kind of useless stuff that clutters up my head. Anyway, the quote was something along the following lines:
“Unlike Einstein, who observed that if he had seen farther than others it was because he had stood on the shoulders of giants, in the field of software engineering, we have mostly been standing on each other’s feet.”
Something to keep in mind if we hope to make some progress in a world far more complicated than the one that existed in Einstein’s day, or even in 1968.
Old news to many but quite possibly new news to some–here is a link for your KM Library.
Karl Erik Sveiby–the principal of a global network of consultants, and a professor in Knowledge Management at the Swedish Business School Hanken in Helsinki–very generously supplies an online library of his earlier works, many of which are out of print.
This library also contains some of his favorite articles by other authors.
Check out the 90+ well-organized links available in his Sveiby Knowledge Management library.
Tom Peters wisely turned his webpage into a blog a while back. Finally, they’ve decided to offer an RSS feed. Not as fast as I would have liked, but its now there. Of course, it’s got tiny little excerpts instead of full feeds, but it’s a start. Even the most enlightened clign to obsolete notions of driving traffic to their sites.
Nor can I. We need all the strong voices we can find today.
Keep the bird burning. Shelley needs some coins in her tips jar. I can’t imagine the blogosphere without her strong voice…… [Joho the Blog]
I don’t care whether you print them out or not, but you will want to read them. Thank you Robin and Peter.
Best Research Articles On Information Architecture. Peter Morville, author of one of the key reference books on Information Architecture, has published a rich and well-curated list of information architecture resources online. Given his experience, know-how and vision, you can count on this being a must print-out… [Robin Good’s Latest News]
A nice workflow diagram if you are a fan of David Allen’s Getting Things Done(and you should be).
By way of 43 Folders, which I suspect I will also become a fan of. Some of the material there is a bit Mac centric, but the rest of it more than offsets that minor issue if you don’t happen to be a Mac user.
Getting Things Done fans, definitely don t miss this. A PDF illustrating a cool, annotated version of the basic GTD workflow. [43 Folders]
Both Hugh Macleod and Evelyn Rodriguez belong in your pay attention to list if you are remotely interested in the topic of knowledge work and how it is changing the nature of the organizations we inhabit and create.
the creative age. A blogger I’m enjoying a lot these days is Evelyn Rodriguez. She’s in sync with a lot of my current thinking, namely, that we’re entering into what is known as “The Creative Age”. Good-bye white collar, hello black collar…. [gapingvoid]
Aren’t you just a little bit curious about what is hiding on the back of those credit cards in your wallet? I see some soldering iron time in my future.
Stripe Snoop is a suite of research tools that captures, modifies, validates, generates, analyzes, and shares data from magstripe cards. The data is captured through different hardware interfaces (or stdin), the contents decoded into the correct character set, and then a CDDB-like database attempts to figure out what the contents mean.
Originally a proof of concept for an interfacing project, and then a spin off from a research project, Stripe Snoop has matured in the definitive software for accessing and understanding magstripes.
Just the ticket to refocus on a warm afternoon in Boston. Go check it out.
Friday Fun: A One-Minute Vacation — In case you can’t manage 2 1/2 weeks, the quiet american: one-minute vacation might help…
Surely you can spare a minute to clean your ears? Take a one-minute vacation from the life you are living. One-minute vacations are unedited recordings of somewhere, somewhen. Sixty seconds of something else. Sixty seconds to be someone else.
Stick your earbuds into the audio out on your internet reading machine and try out this mp3…
may 24, 2004 – 800 KB — The recording was made in the back garden of my house in Manchester, UK, on the first of June, 2003, at around 9:30 p.m., when it was still light. This is one of those rare, fortuitous moments which will probably never happen again, at least to me. I had just switched on the MD and gone out of the back door to record the birdsong, when just at that very moment it started to rain. So I stood underneath our oaktree and kept recording. You can hear, amongst other things, blackbird, swifts, starlings, blue tits, and of course the rain on the leaves, gradually getting heavier. The equipment used: a Sony MD Walkman MZ-R700 and a Sony ECM-MS907 stereo mic. You must believe in spring indeed.
Chill out in these dog days of summer. [Frank Patrick’s Focused Performance]