User Friendly. Meryl does the dance of joy! User Friendly now has an RSS feed among a few others. Just waiting for Joy of Tech to join the RSS revolution!… [meryl's notes]
One more item switched from my having to browse to appearing in my aggregator.
Here’s something highly cool – a new site (new enough to still be in beta) called 10,000 eBooks has collected together the Project Gutenberg text files of public domain books and converted them to Palm, HTML, PDF, Rocket eBook, iSilo, Doc, Plucker and zTXT formats. iSilo is my format of choice for everything I buy from Fictionwise, so being able to download PG that way is a big plus for me. Since King Lear is on my list of books to read anyway, I’ll download it from here in iSilo format, rather than suffering through the typical ASCII formatted Gutenberg file. I had been considering an ongoing project to read Edward Gibbons’ Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire volumes, and I can get all them formatted nicely and read them comfortably on my Handspring in my favorite format. Very nice.
Link found via TeleRead.
For those of you who, like me, are ever fearful of being caught with time on your hands and bereft of reading material.
Pssss… Have You Heard About RSS?.
A very well done and thorough introduction to RSS. Here’s one quote that nicely captures the payoff from using RSS as a core component of your personal knowledge management strategy:
Since I started monitoring RSS feeds from about 80 instructional technology weblogs in January 2003, I can without a doubt say I have learned of more innovations and information relevant to my field than I would have gotten from checking web sites and reading listservs.
There’s been some recent noise about the bandwidth demands imposed by RSS readers that poll sites too frequently or not intelligently enough. I’m sure there are technical issues to be dealt with, but let’s not forget my bandwidth as an individual. RSS increases my bandwidth for monitoring things that matter to me by an order of magnitude.
Gadgetopia links to this tremendous resource: Just Say No to Microsoft
Just nice to be reminded that there are alternatives.
An implicit message that I want to highlight is the issue of taking control of your own work environment. It is a personal computer after all. Even if you choose or have to stay with Microsoft products, that shouldn’t preclude your taking the time to make them work the way that best suits your needs.
BTW, that’s the logic behind why I shelled out my own money to add ActiveWords to my computing mix. I don’t use it anywhere near to its full potential, but even the little productivity gains and friction eliminators mean that I pay for ActiveWords in about half a day.
Whither eLearning?. The MASIE Center has just released: Making Sense of Learning Specifications & Standards: A Decision Maker’s Guide to their Adoption (2nd edition) (pdf file)Eighty-two pages of cogent explanations, history, processes, and reference sources. This is one of those reference works, like a good dictionary, that you… [Internet Time Blog]
Worth having on hand
David Brett of Knexa, a friend of mine, just sent me this link, to consultants who look like they’ve put language to Drucker’s notion that knowledge workers own the means of production in an increasingly knowledge-based economy (see his article titled Beyond the Information Revolution, a central article to the creation of the concept of wirearchy for me).
I have spoken and written about this sea-change in the nature of work in terms of the “Mass Customization of Work“, which I think is the logical and very likely result of individuals’ knowledge and working styles (necessarily) interweaving with the structure and flow of large integrated systems for the distribution and manipulation of information.
I’ll have to check out in more detail the site of Volitional Partners, who say they are launching a revolution in the nature of work, wherein individual employees “own” their knowledge. It looks interesting, and also looks like they want to stake out some mindspace with their language and wordings.
There are many people, processes and applications purporting to do some or all of this, in terms of human capital, intellectual capital, social capital, relationship capital and so on. I think it’s all part of a very big and very permanent shift, in which conversations and dialogue between human minds, imagination, voice and purpose play a central role.
Nothing is more human than the capability to engage in conversation and dialogue, point and argue, push back and pull forward ideas into newer, more interesting, more stimulating, more coherent shapes. This will be central to work, to culture and to democracy as we believe it should be, in the next few years to come.
My first reactions to the site of Volitional Partners are more cynical than Jon’s. We have lots of perfectly serviceable language already. Anyone whose homepage is littered with neologisms, trademark symbols, and talk of “Proprietary Platforms” has dug themselves a hole that I am reluctant to explore.
It comes across as a hybrid cross between New Age Mysticism and MBA MarketingSpeak. I can only hope it’s a sterile hybrid. If there is something real and useful there, wouldn’t it come across without the noise?
Jon calls this another step along the way. I wonder in what direction?
Here is a golden quote from Howard Rheingold:
When Cooperation Breaks Out, Civilizations Advance
As a mobile technology professional (ok an on the road every day of the working week consultant) cooperation with my peers is extremely difficult and yet when it happens the rewards are great. I believe that the impact that community or collaborative tools can have on mobile professionals is even greater than on people who have opportunities to interact face to face on a regular basis. This is kind of like an un-tapped market for collaboration …
Really just wanted to point to Ed Taekema’s relatively new blog, Road Warrior Collaboration (RSS Feed), about his experiences trying to do effective knowledge work as a road warrior. I spend way too much time on the road myself and I’ve found that most software tools don’t really deal well with the problems of mobile professionals, no matter what the marketing claims of vendors may be. Ed’s blog provides some helpful perspective.
Feedster – Don't Blog Without it!.
For those of us that can't afford John Peterson's LISA solution then implement this! For your own name, for the name of your blog, for all the things you search for each day.
If you have some topic you follow–if you want your newsreader to keep “pumping” it right to your desk–just do one search for it at Feedster.com. Then, get the rss url of the search itself to transfer into your own newsreader. Awesome. Feedster search rss urls are indicated with these icons:
— Gives you the full post
— Gives you the summary and headlines
You don't have to run that search ever again–because your aggregator will do it for you, automatically, and for free.
Clearly time to start thinking about how to take more systematic advantage of Feedster.
Hell is Microsoft Outlook Express users.. Thanks to Simon for linking to the “Internet Help Desk” video on Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie. It was just what I needed this morning. [Sean Gallagher: the dot.communist]
Something to brighten a Sunday morning
mamamusings: Internet Librarian: 30 Search Tips in 40 Minutes. (SOURCE:mamamusings: Internet Librarian: 30 Search Tips in 40 Minutes)- Lots of great tips. Read the full article for all 30.
QUOTE
Mary Ellen Bates on tips for searching effectively. These are her tips, not mine. My comments, when I have them, are parenthetical.
I almost hate to share these, because these are the kind of tips that let people like me come across as an “angel of information mercy” to the people who ask me for help in finding things!
BTW, Mary Ellen is a great presenter. Funny, interesting, clear. She’s got a free “tip of the month” email update, which you can also read on her web site.
- Always use more than one search engine. (You’ll often get very different results; useful to triangulate.) See a test at www.batesinfo.com
UNQUOTE
If you fancy yourself a knowledge worker, search skills had better be in your repetoire and you had better be looking to improve those skills routinely.