How Everyday Things Are Made

How Everyday Things Are Made.

How Everyday Things are Made: Spent the morning with my kids on this site. They loved it. Good example of learning with video/audio and limited interaction (“apply it” section). I'm reminded of how we are still in the early stages of elearning…and offerings will continue to be more sophisticated. My first exposure to the Web was a text only experience. Now, in a very short period of time, the browsing experience has become interactive, media-rich, and user-friendly (in many cases). We have the background of Web progression to direct our efforts in elearning…so it's safe to say that over the next five years, we'll see an exponential improvement in the quality of elearning materials.

[elearnspace blog]

For those times when you really want to do a factory tour and you don't have one handy.

Can Gator pass the Mom Test?

Gator Threatening Those Who Call Their Application Spyware. Many people have pretty strong negative opinions about Gator’s adware application (it watches what you surf and pops up its own ads). Gator, like most companies that have strong critics, has decided that they need something of a PR campaign to improve their image – specifically trying to overcome the impression that they’re placing spyware on people’s computers. So, what do they do? They decide to sue anyone who calls their application spyware. It seems like a debate on semantics, but Gator insists their product is not spyware at all. They claim that spyware is installed surreptiously, whereas their software requires someone to agree to install it. Others disagree with that definition, saying spyware includes any software that is constantly “phoning home” with your information, or which does things (such as pop up ads) without the user understanding why – in which case, Gator would qualify as spyware. However, so far, Gator’s “PR” campaign has been winning, and sites are changing how they refer to Gator. This is, most likely, a short term strategy – because of articles like the one linked here, that make Gator look even worse by using threatening lawsuits to quiet anyone critical of their software. Instead of pulling out the big legal stick, wouldn’t it have made more sense to make the program less problematic? [Techdirt]

What you call it isn’t the issue. Trying to build businesses that appear to depend on keeping users uninformed of what software applications are doing to their systems is.

Here’s a gedanken experiment for you. How many of the staff at Gator would be comfortable running the software on their machines (or their mother’s)? Alternatively, how many people would install and run the software if all of its activities were fully disclosed in something other than an EULA that almost nobody reads?

This is fundamentally a cluetrain argument. Do youhave a business model that is potentially transparent to all parties. Or does the model depend on the laziness or ignorance of one of the parties. Classic mass media strategies (TV, Radio, Magazines) are built around sponsors who will foot the bill in exchange for the chance to present ads to viewers. An acceptable tradeoff and one that is generally transparent. Product placement starts to move into a grayer world. The more I think about it, the more the Mom test seems pertinent.

Second blogiversary

I've now been writing this weblog for two years. My very first post was a pointer to a Technology Review article on the challenges of preserving digital information. A little later that day I posted a entry on John Robb's notion of k-logs. Since then I've tried to stay reasonably focused on the topic of knowledge management and knowledge work.

According to “Radio” this is my 3,740th post since that first day. You haven't seen all of them because I use this same tool to maintain a personal k-log of material, but most of them have found there way here.

Last night I was on the phone with Buzz talking about ActiveWords, knowledge management, the Dean campaign, and Feedster among other things. Without a blog, I would never have discovered ActiveWords nor met Buzz. In my recent email archives I've been chatting with Ross Mayfield, Rick Klau, AKMA, Dave Pollard, Roland Tanglao, Terry Frazier, Denham Gray, Jack Vinson, Judith Meskill, Lilia Efimova, Jon Husband, Greg Reinacker, Matt Mower, Jenny Levine, and others I'm sure I'm forgetting. I've also had the pleasure of meeting and interacting with the likes of Dave Winer, David Weinberger, Robert Scoble, Ben and Mena Trott and other luminaries.

Pretty good payoff from taking the risk of putting my thoughts out in public before I was sure they were fully polished.

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.