Another new content management blog

New content management blog.

Ideas in Technology and Publishing is a great new blog covering content management, XML and other publishing related technologies. It's less than a month old so it's still possible to read through the archives in full, which I've just done and recommend to anyone with an interest in content management.

[Simon Willison's Weblog]

Another new blog looking at content management. Here is the RSS Feed.

Copyright cops in the NYTimes

“You Coulld Be Next”. A Cartoon in the NYTimes?

“On copyright – the Copyright Cops – outlining many of the favorite examples of just how pervasive copyright (and copyright infringement) has become in modern life.” [Furdlog]

And make sure you’re reading Furdlog daily because Frank is doing a fantastic job covering filesharing and copyright issues.

[The Shifted Librarian]

Ridicule may be the most effective tool available to address copyright in its current incarnation. And listen to Jenny; Furdlog should be in your aggregator.

MP3s Are Not the Devil – Orson Scott Card on copyright

Orson Scott Card weighs in on copyright from the perspective of record companies vs. those who actually create something:

So it’s pretty hilarious to hear record company executives and movie studio executives get all righteous about copyright. They’ve been manipulating copyright laws for years, and all the manipulations were designed to steal everything they could from the actual creators of the work.

Thanks to Slashdot for the pointer.

Knowledge at Work – Denham Gray's new blog

Where are the KM discussions?. There seems to have been a dramatic drop in the level of on-line KM discussion across all the key forums since the end of the first quarter '03. Let's take a tour: The EU Knowledge board has closed its forms… [Knowledge-at-work]

Denham Gray starts a blog, Knowledge at Work, in addition to his KMWiki and his frequent thoughtful comments on existing blogs.  I've certainly benefitted from his generous contributions to my thinking. I've subscribed to his feed and am looking forward to being able to follow his contributions more easily.

Denham is focused on the interactions between knowledge workers level of knowledge management, so it's intriguing that he's picked up on a drop in activity in discussion forums and email channels devoted to KM. Certainly, in my own case, I've found a blog to be a better forum for striking a balance between developing my ideas about knowledge management and knowledge work and sharing those ideas with the broader community of interest/practice around the topic. I find the signal to noise ratio of blogs much higher and much more susceptible to management than in threaded discussions or mailing lists.

Making the Case for the Case Method

For those of you who are interested in the case method as a tool for teaching and learning, David Garvin of the Harvard Business School has an excellent article in the September-October issue of Harvard Magazine. Better yet, it is available online:

All professional schools face the same difficult challenge: how to prepare students for the world of practice. Time in the classroom must somehow translate directly into real-world activity: how to diagnose, decide, and act. A surprisingly wide range of professional schools, including Harvard’s law, business, and medical schools, have concluded that the best way to teach these skills is by the case method. [Making the Case: Professional education for the world of practice]

Garvin’s research and writing have focused on organizational learning long before it was a popular buzzword. This article offers extensive background on the origins and history of case method teaching as well as insights into how it is evolving.

Recommended reading from Ray Ozzie – Power to the Edge

Power to the Edge:  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]

Something to add to my high-priority reading list (as opposed to my much longer “get to it someday” readling list). There's certainly major new possibilities in organizational design that make it feasible to distribute decision making more widely and the competitive environment makes that distribution much more strategically relevant.

Rolling Stone's classic coverage on Spacewar and computing

Classic Video Games And Computers. While looking up music lyrics i found myself clicking on one 1980s site's link to classic video games. They turned out to be implemented in Flash — yuck, but in the usual Net way it lead to me reading up on early VideoGameHistory. The real gem on that front is Stewart Brand's 1972 article from Rolling Stone, on Spacewar and computing in general:

I asked Alan Kay if Spacewar had been played over the Net.

Since I was looking for emulators anyway, I also dug up the most recent version of VICE, which among other things emulates the CommodorePet, my first computer. [AbbeNormal – Abbe Normal]

Another example of all the good stuff you can find on the web. Brand's Rolling Stone article is one of those classics that I've been wanting to lay my hands on for a while.

Of course, this is available as a labor of love. While you're at the site, check out the rest of the coverage about the original Spacewar.