Wikipedia timelines. Whoa. Wikipedia — the free, user-edited, almost-3-years-old, 191466-article-strong, encyclopedia that’s just raised more than 30,000 dollars from surfers like you — features a truckload of hyperlinked timelines, many of them quite detailed. Astronomy, biology, chemistry…
[Seb’s Open Research]
I’ve contributed to Wikipedia’s fund raising; have you?
Good Experience: Five Ideas for 2004. I have five ideas for you to consider this year. They’re not exactly predictions – you can get those almost anywhere, this time of year – but rather thought-starters for you to consider as the new year begins. [Tomalak’s Realm]
This got picked up recently with most bloggers picking up on
IDEA 4. Blogs are just content management systems,
but I am more intrigued by
IDEA 5: Managing one’s bits is an increasingly essential skill.
Last fall I began coaching a friend of mine on his bit literacy – the ability to manage one’s bits: e-mail, pictures, files, contacts, calendar, applications,… everything that laptops and other digital devices might hold.
I’ve learned that bit literacy is a skill that most people don’t have, and almost no one else is talking about. Yet it’s an increasingly essential skill. We deal with more and more incoming bits every day – and not just spam mail. Bit literacy is the ability to manage it all and still be effective
I think Mark Hurst is on to something important here, although I don’t think it is about the bits. It’s about the related notion that the products of knowledge work all pass through a bit stage somewhere in their creation and use. On the plus side, with a common representation, new forms of analysis and management become possible. On the negative side, the uniformity and invisibility of bits makes it harder to take advantage of our other skills for managing knowledge work products (think of the value of piles of paper). What we need to do, and what Mark looks to be thinking about, is what kinds of new skills will we need to develop to take advantage of the opportunity and compensate for the limits of a world of knowledge work that is fundamentally digital. I’ll be watching for certain and contributing where I can.
Blogs As Intra-enterprise Technologies of Cooperation.
George Dafermos at MIT, in Blogging the Market (93 page PDF) , looks at pervasive blogging as potential organizational dynamite, with case histories that include Slashdot, Amazon, Macromedia, Groove Networks, and Gizmodo.
(Thanks, Jim!)
I had real problems with this report. It’s gotten a fair number of pointers from other blogs and the outline looked intriguing. After about an hour skimming through it though I think there’s probably a really good 20-page report lurking in there somewhere, but in its present form it’s hard to justify the time to dig it out. If I were reviewing this paper as a referee I send it back for major revisions. Too bad, because I think it’s asking the right questions.
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:
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.
Brent Schlender writes an article for Fortune in which 'Peter Drucker Sets Us Straight.' The following is a excerpt from that article, the balance is available by 'subscription' to Fortune's online service.
…You can always count on Peter Drucker to provide a new way of looking at things. After all, he is the man who first recognized that management is a discipline worthy of deep and formal study. Long before anyone else – in the early 1950s, no less – he predicted how computer technology would one day thoroughly transform business. In 1961 he presciently called attention to the rise of Japan as an industrial power, and two decades later he warned of its impending economic stagnation. And we can thank him for coining the concepts of “privatization,” “knowledge workers,” and “management by objective.”
At 94, Drucker is still full of insights that seem to elude others, and he is as opinionated as ever. His interests range from economics to psychology to philosophy to opera to Japanese art; his experiences include consulting with literally hundreds of companies, governments, small businesses, churches, universities, hospitals, arts organizations, and charities. To this day, leaders of all stripes make the pilgrimage to California to learn from the master, who continues to lecture at the management school that bears his name at Claremont Graduate University…
Drucker is always worth paying attention to. Here's a piece of the interview I found particularly relevant:
Nobody has really looked at productivity in white-collar work in a scientific way. But whenever we do look at it, it is grotesquely unproductive. As you know, most of my work these days is with universities and hospitals and churches, which are three of the biggest knowledge-worker employers, and their productivity is dismal. In part this is because knowledge work by definition is highly specialized, and that means that the utilization of the knowledge worker tends to be very low.
The inefficiency of knowledge workers is partly the legacy of the 19th-century belief that a modern company tries to do everything for itself. Now, thank God, we've discovered outsourcing, but I would also say we don't yet really know how to do outsourcing well. Most look at outsourcing from the point of view of cutting costs, which I think is a delusion. What outsourcing does is greatly improve the quality of the people who still work for you. I believe you should outsource everything for which there is no career track that could lead into senior management. When you outsource to a total-quality-control specialist, he is busy 48 weeks a year working for you and a number of other clients on something he sees as challenging. Whereas a total-quality-control person employed by the company is busy six weeks a year and the rest of the time is writing memoranda and looking for projects. That's why when you outsource you may actually increase costs, but you also get better effectiveness.
The Click Heard Round the World. Fifteen years before the Mac, Doug Engelbart demo'd videoconferencing, hyperlinks, text editing and something called a 'mouse.' He tells Wired magazine writer Ken Jordan about his part in the point-and-click revolution. [Wired News]
Great overview of Doug Engelbart's work from Wired. Alan Kay once told me that you could explain most of the history of personal computing as people trying to work out the implications of what Engelbart demoed in 1968. Here's Engelbart on how they framed their approach:
Our approach was very different from what they called “office automation,” which was about automating the paperwork of secretaries. That became the focus of Xerox PARC in the '70s. They were quite amazed that they could actually get text on the screen to appear the way it would when printed by a laser printer. Sure, that was an enormous accomplishment, and understandably it swayed their thinking. They called it “what you see is what you get” editing, or WYSIWYG. I say, yeah, but that's all you get. Once people have experienced the more flexible manipulation of text that NLS allows, they find the paper model restrictive.
We weren't interested in “automation” but in “augmentation.” We were not just building a tool, we were designing an entire system for working with knowledge. Automation means if you're milking a cow, you get a tool that will milk it for you. But to augment the milking of a cow, you invent the telephone. The telephone not only changes how you milk, but the rest of the way you work as well. It touches the entire process. It was a paradigm shift.
One key notion of Engelbart's that I don't think has been sufficiently investigated or thought about is the time investment in learning to use new and powerful tools for working. The industry, by and large, has gone down the path of initial experience and ease of use out of the box. Very often this is at the expense of long term ease of use.
Take something as seemingly simple as outlining software, a category “Dave Winer” contributed to greatly. The earliest outliners like ThinkTank and More devoted considerable thought to using the power of technology to let you do things with outlines that weren't possible on paper. But the marketing forces driving software led mostly to the vestigial capabilities for outlining left in Word or Powerpoint. There are some promising developments such as MindManager for the PC and OmniOutliner for the Mac, but they are niche applications. Few seem prepared to invest the time to learn how to make effective use of these tools to think. Engelbart assumes that you will invest considerable time to learn to use the tools. For those with well defined work worlds (think AutoCad or Excel or programming), there is an expectation that it takes time to become effective using new tools. Not so in the world of general purpose knowledge work. There's opportunity there still to be exploited.
CIO. CIO RSS Feeds available. CIO content is now available in an easy-to-use XML format. Stream our feeds to your website or desktop aggregator for an instant and automatically updated list of our latest stories. The feeds are refreshed daily and the content within them is updated as new resources become available on our site…. [Lockergnome’s RSS Resource]
A great collection of categorized RSS feeds from one of the authoritative voices in the IT management world.
As I’ve come to expect for “conventional” publishers easing into RSS waters, CIO’s feeds are essentially teasers designed to get you to go read the full story on their site. Fortunately, the writers at CIO know how to write good teasers. If you’re going to use RSS in this fashion, then you need to do it professionally; give me a good teaser, not the first 50 words of the story.
Paul Graham: What You Can't Say. “The most important thing is to be able to think what you want, not to say what you want. … Draw a sharp line between your thoughts and your speech. Inside your head, anything is allowed. … But, as in a secret society, nothing that happens within the building should be told to outsiders.” [Hack the Planet]
More provocative thinking from Paul Graham. Some bits and pieces that particularly caught my eye, although it's all worth reading and thinking about:
A good scientist, in other words, does not merely ignore conventional wisdom, but makes a special effort to break it. Scientists go looking for trouble. This should be the m.o. of any scholar, but scientists seem much more willing to look under rocks. [10]
Why? It could be that the scientists are simply smarter; most physicists could, if necessary, make it through a PhD program in French literature, but few professors of French literature could make it through a PhD program in physics. Or it could be because it's clearer in the sciences whether theories are true or false, and this makes scientists bolder. (Or it could be that, because it's clearer in the sciences whether theories are true or false, you have to be smart to get jobs as a scientist, rather than just a good politician.)
Or this:
Argue with idiots, and you become an idiot.
Power to the Edge:[A 9MB pdf] A new book by Dave Alberts and Richard Hayes – open sourced in its entirety by CCRP.
This book is truly a must-read for anyone interested in decentralization and the social and organizational relevance of shifting power to the edge, whether in a commercial or a defense context. As you read about the technology enablers of the edge, it’ll become clear why products such as Groove – as COTS enablers of the fully-networked collaborative environment – have such immediate relevance to the defense community.
A debt of gratitude goes to John Stenbit and Lin Wells for catalyzing the creation of this tremendously timely, useful and relevant piece of work. [Ray Ozzie’s Weblog]
Once again, it appears that the U.S. military is moving ahead on figuring out new ways to organize and manage work, while commercial organizations create pale imitations of concepts long since discarded as unworkable.
Scott Watermaysk has uploaded a new version of .TEXT, which is the blogging engine that drives Longhornblogs.
Oh, what’s this? Open Source free software? Huh? On Microsoft platforms? What’s the world coming to? Scott, how do you do it?