Scott Johnson – The people I read are my intelligent agents

Intelligent agency.

Buzz is on the phone, quoting something Feedster‘s Scott Johnson said over dinner in Boston last night, about the RSS+aggregator-enabled blog world. What Scott said (Buzz says) was,

The people I read are my intelligent agents.

Context… Remember the “intelligent agents” scare from a few years back? (Wonder how much VC money got wasted on that one?) Never happened. (Not in a big way, anyhow. Are you using one now? I mean, in addition to the ones you read in your aggregator? See what I mean?)

Now, thanks to RSS, it’s happening.

Makes me think back to Doug Engelbart’s thinking about augmenting human intelligence, and how the best augmentation in fact comes from other connected human beings.

[The Doc Searls Weblog]

Buzz and I had the same conversation earlier this morning. Scott has a wonderfully succinct way of describing the power of these new technologies combined in interesting ways. I’m no Scoble, but I do manage to track almost 300 weblogs and newsites using RSS (including Scoble of course). The power of RSS is that the news comes to me filtered by all of those bright minds, who are themselves feeding off of other bright minds. Add tools like Feedster on top of that and you start to have the first tools that promise to help fight the problems of attention.

Trying to eliminate the people from the mix was clearly the wrong approach. Forging a better partnership between people and machines is the trick.

Google gaffe on blogging tools – old style marketing collides with web reality?

Seth Dillingham posted. When I first posted that I thought it was just a repurposing-DMOZ-problem, so it was a question of how Google looked, not anything they had actually done. But then Seth Dillingham posted a pointer showing that Radio UserLand is actually on the DMOZ list for weblog tools, so Google modified the list to take Radio out. This is surprising, and imho, requires an explanation. Did they modify it? If so why? And do they modify search results to favor their products and services? This is scary stuff. [Scripting News]

I’m inclined here to view this as a case in point of “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity” (Hanlon’s Razor). Now the stupidity in question may likely be that of some techno-challenged marketing type who still insists on viewing the universe through a lens of “customer as couch potato,” where this sort of tweak could and would work because anybody who might catch the “error” would have no effective way to communicate to the masses of other couch potatos out there. Ironic that the error is about the very tools that are continuing the shift in power from organizations to people.

It will be interesting to see how quickly this mistake gets corrected and whether the explanation will be rooted in a classic couch potato marketing mindset or something else.

Lowering the power of context

Comment on post 3734 on 10/18/03 by Dare Obasanjo. *chuckle* It’s amusing to see my words critiqued out of context. It’s almost like being a celebrity or a famous politician being crucified over misconstrued sound bites. Almost. [chaosplayer News]

Dare chides me on taking his remarks out of context in yesterday’s post. On reflection he’s probably right in the sense that we are both making more or less the same point and are not in any disagreement.

His comment, however, triggers several other thoughts. One, that the tools here make it simple for anyone here to go look at what he said and draw their own conclusions. Two, that the particular quote I pulled by way of Scoble did trigger a reaction and let me start a train of thought that served my purposes. For that I am grateful, even if I may have been less than accurate in representing Dare’s point.

This suggests to me one of the advantages of blogging as a form over newsgroups and threaded discussion. In a threaded discussion I am more bound by context than I am here. Lowering the power of context without removing it entirely, makes blogs more conducive to working out your own ideas. I wonder what Denham would have to say about this? He’s generally been an advocate of the collaborative powers of tools such as threaded discusisons and wikis. Blogging adds another flavor to the mix. The challenge now becomes working out for yourself and your organization how to manage the mix.

LazyWeb request: RSS readership tracking.

LazyWeb request: RSS readership tracking. Can someone please build what Brian Peddle describes here: a tool for generating stats of RSS syndication feed readership?

I have no idea how many people read this Weblog, because much of the audience seems to come via the RSS feed. I have no doubt this will become more common in the future. I hardly read any blogs that don’t offer syndication feeds, because they are so much more efficient for skimming lots of different sites. Dave, Scott, Dave, or BenMenAnil, you listening?
[Werblog]

Yes, please. I want this yesterday. What he says. Thank you.

A formula for blogging in organizations

I just learned about another SQL Server weblog community: SQL Team weblogs. Running on Scott Watermasysk’s .TEXT. By the way, the SQL Team website has tons of info on SQL Server.

[The Scobleizer Weblog]

I was going to point to this as a good example of the benefits you obtain when you lower the barriers to expression. And it is. But it also contains some interesting material on knowledge work from a slightly different point of view than I’ve taken before. So I’ve also subscribed to their RSS feed (SQL Team Weblog RSS feed).

One of the benefits you get when you lower the barriers to expression and lower the barriers to attention by providing RSS feeds is that the abstract notions of self-organizing networks get a set of operational tools. This is what is getting us excited about the potential for these new tools inside and across organizations.

Blogging in organizations = lowering the barriers to expression + lowering the barriers to attention. That’s a formula that warrants some thought. Moreover, it’s a formula that would likely never have occurred to me without living inside the phenomenon.

Lowering the barriers to expression

Dare Obasanjo: “The blogerati need to accept the fact that their medium of communication is also the favored way for teenage girls to carry on in the grand tradition of “Dear Diary.”

[The Scobleizer Weblog]

This is yet another one of those silly observations. It’s on the order of noting that four-color presses print both Hustler and National Geographic. The most important criteria to me about these new tools is how quickly and to what extent do they get out of your way. The power of blogging tools has been to lower the barriers to expression by at least an order of magnitude.

New Radio theme

a weblog of post-its.

Now, I'm not a Radio user but this theme for Radio that Cristian has just released makes me wish for a moment that I was just to try it. Looks really cool. I probably wouldn't use it directly, but there are many elements in it that I find intriguing. Ahh if only I had some time to do a full set of CSS options for d2r…

[d2r]

I've been thinking of shifting to a new theme. Certainly, Cristian's is well worth looking at.

Chief knowledge officer key to survival?

Chief knowledge officer key to survival. A recent press release for a book launch promotes the value of having a chief knowledge officer (CKO): Companies such as Kmart Holdings Corp. could have dodged bankruptcy during the 2001 recession if they had had a chief knowledge officer… [Column Two]

A pointer to an interview with Lester Thurow flogging his new book. Let’s just say that Thurow has a very generous definition of what constitutes a CKO. I’d say he’s more than a bit out of sync with current usage. One the other hand, this may represent an interesting data point in the argument that what we’ve been calling knowledge management will morph into simply “management.”

Alan Kay and Six Sigma

One of my favorite observations, which I first heard from Alan Kay, was that “point of view is worth 80 IQ points.” Now, Alan is a very clever fellow, and it’s only just occurred to me now, but Alan never specifies a sign for those IQ points. It’s just as likely that a wrong frame of reference acts as an 80 point penalty as that a right frame provides an 80 point bonus.

This places Alan firmly in the Six Sigma camp long before the movement existed (Alan always has been a leading edge kind of guy).