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).

Technology Review weblog

Technology Review launches weblog.

The folks at MIT Technology Review (to which I subscribe) have started a weblog, including posts from folks like Simson Garfinkel, who I've been reading for a long time (if you've never owned Simson's PGP book from O'Reilly, where have you been?)   In one of the first posts, Simson notes my recent switch to Mac OS X, writing: “The Mac is offering a really interesting niche to the technological elite.”  I actually just installed X11 on my Mac this weekend.  For fun.

My only polite request to the Technology Review folks would be to add an RSS feed and permalinks to the individual posts, but having tangled with content management systems too many times, I'm not going to get too preachy on how easy that might be, because maybe it isn't.

[Chad Dickerson]

Technology Review is one of the few print sources I both subscribe to and read regularly. A weblog from them should be well worth following. Let's hope the RSS feed follows soon.

One more example of Sturgeon's Law – Perseus study on weblogs

Everyone seems to be getting their shorts in a knot over the recent Perseus study on weblogs. Among comments I’ve seen in my aggregator are those from:

MarketingWonk
Many to Many
Mathemagenic
The Register (Andrew Orlowski in one of his usual blogs are stupid rants; what is his problem?)
Scripting News

So, where’s the news here?

This is a perfect application of Sturgeon’s Law – “90% of everything is crud.” I suppose it sells papers and marketing studies to focus on failure, but the important message is that the failure has to occur if you want to see the successes. The more experiments you can run and the easier it is to run an experiment, the more likely you are to see successful results.

Blogrolls as obsolete concept

Roll away.

Great party tonight here in Boston on the eve of BloggerCon. Met Betsy, Werner (whose birthday is today) and Glenn for the first times. Did the same earlier at lunch with Ed and Adam.

One conversation, repeated several times with different combinations of bloggers, comes down to this: old blogrolls have become a pain in the ass. All of us who have been blogging for awhile have lots of dead links in our ‘rolls, and frankly don’t even look at the things very much. Did once, maybe, but not any more.

So our ‘rolls are legacies. We maintain them for readers more than ourselves. Interesting, no?

[The Doc Searls Weblog]

Seems to me that blogrolls made sense in a time before RSS aggregators. If you use other blogs and sites as triggers for your own writing, then a blogroll serves as a useful way to organize your surfing. When you shift to an aggregator driven strategy, your subscriptions file becomes the equivalent of your blogroll. Of course, your subscriptions file is invisible while your blogroll was public.

Windley on Event Driven Business

Event Driven Business. In an event driven business, products are built to order, not built to stock, reducing inventory carrying costs and allowing greater customer satisfaction as a result of customization. This article from ebizQ has a great analogy: [Windley’s Enterprise Computing Weblog]

If you want the train to move over one foot, you have to do an immense amount of work tearing up and re-laying tracks. On the other hand, all you need to do to turn the more agile truck is move the steering wheel.

This is a useful analogy. I also agree with Phil that the following observation provides a very useful classification of data in organizational information systems:

[E]vent-driven, service-oriented architectures integrate three kinds of data: reference data, such as the number of trucks in a fleet; state data, such as the number of trucks under repair; and event data, such as a delivery being completed.

Worth checking out the full article.