Weblogs as filtering tools

Why blogging isn’t a fad. Arnold Kling offers one of the best explanations I’ve seen of the value of blogging as a distributed information filtering mechanism.

“This filtering process makes all of us more efficient. Information with low value does not travel far. Information with high general value tends to travel the farthest. Information with low general value but high local value tends to reach interested people but then die out because as it gets passed along its value decays below the threshold. Everyone tends to receive information with a high value to them, and they avoid having to read information that has low value to them.”

[Werblog]

Gradually working off the backlog of items lurking in my news aggregator. This is, indeed, an excellent explanation of the value of weblogs in organizational settings and in communities of practice. I might have gotten to it earlier, but it’s from another of those Corante blogs that continue to refuse to offer RSS feeds. I have yet to hear the argument about why RSS feeds are a bad thing from Corante’s point of view. But until I have time to scrape these blogs into my aggregator I just don’t have time to track them, no matter how excellent the content may be.

Interview with Robert Kahn on ARPAnet history

Putting It All Together With Robert Kahn. Robert Kahn is one of the original architects of the internet, along with Vinton Cerf. This wide ranging interview traces the history of the original ARPANet and NSFNet as they became the internet we know today. Some interesting tidbits near the end of the article about his original plans for The Digital Library Project, digital objects and identifiers for digital objects. By Unknown, Ubiquity, March 11, 2003 [Refer][Research][Reflect] [OLDaily]

Mindstorms resources

Learning by doing and sharing… at age nine.

I have reflected a couple times on building communities of inventive kids. This post by Mark Szpakowski describes the kind of thing I believe could get kids hooked on learning and sharing:

I've been watching how my 9-year-old son is making use of the Lego Mindstorms community and associated sites: he's self-educating himself, making use of both books and online resources. The lego robotics forums let him see what builders all over the world are constructing, complete with digital photos of construction details. He refers to these in his own building projects, always with variations due to different parts, etc.

In the Mindstorms forums you can find dozens of kids exchanging tips and undertaking all kinds of cool projects. Makes me wish I'd had something like that when I was their age.

[Seb's Open Research]

Morons in the news

Morons in the News: Zero-Tolerance: The 'Tolerance' Stands for 'Intelligence'. If there's one thing I love as much as I hate zero-tolerance policies, it's clever use of a system… [Morons Dot Org]

Oh. What a wonderful Catch-22. A 6 year old is facing expulsion for having a plastic butter spoon in his backback. A spoon he got in the cafeteria and wanted to take home. So if they press for expulsion, the parents will sue the school for provding a dabgerous weapon to their 6 year old. Zero-tolerance is for morons. I hope the parents get a ton of money. [A Man with a Ph.D. – Richard Gayle's Weblog]

Something to brighten your day

Email and revealing communities of practice

Hewlett-Packard discovers communities of practice by analysing intenal e-mail exchange.

E-mail reveals real leaders [via Column Two]: how Hewlett-Packard discovers communities of practice by analysing intenal e-mail exchange. Contains reference to the paper, which describes the algorithm in more details:

Tyler, J. R., Wilkinson, D. M. & Huberman, B. A. Email as spectroscopy: automated discovery of community structure within organizations. Preprint http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/cond-mat/0303264, (2003).

[Mathemagenic]

Looks like an interesting idea. Something to get back to and read in detail

Blogs as an ugly term

There seems to be a consensus that ‘weblog’ and ‘blog’ are ugly terms. Many worry that this ugliness adds an element of additional challenge to realizing the value of weblogs within organizations. Recently there’s been some effort to coin more appealing terms.

One of the central features of knowledge based organizations is that individual knowledge workers are the people in the best position to evaluate and design their work. This is a radical departure from industrial-logic organizations where the coordinated design and definition of tasks and jobs is the norm.

Part of the generally disappointing results from centralized efforts at knowledge management follow from this disconnect between organizational logics. Shoshanna Zuboff and her husband James Maxmin have recently published a new book that may shed light on this. It’s titled The Support Economy: Why Corporations are Failing Individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism. I say may because I am only about a third of the way through it. What Zuboff and Maxmin argue is that the logic of managerial capitalism has run its course and needs to be replaced. Managerial capitalism represents the organizational and economic logic and norms that worked to create mass markets to match up with the production capacity of mass production.It essentially drove much of the economic growth of the 20th century.

From a variety of perspectives, the logic of the emerging knowledge economy is more distributed and decentralized. The work itself requires local perspective and initiative.

What I find interesting is the emerging alignment between several distinct threads. One is this decentralized logic of knowledge based organizaions. The second is the strength of intellectual capital arguments such as the end-to end argument, Dan Isenberg’s notion of stupid networks, and Doc Searls and Dave Weinberger’s most recent piece on the a world of ends. Finally, in this context, we have the application of weblogs inside organizations as a tool to promote knowledge sharing. Here, this alignment of weblogs with these parallel trends suggests that weblogs are a technology well matched to the problem.

Given the match between weblogs and this broader trend toward decentralized and distributed solutions, the lameness of ‘blog’ as a term might actually be one of its primary strengths. It reflects that weblogs are tools coming into organizations from the grassroots, not something imposed from a central source. That may be more important than usual for organizational innovations when we’re talking about an innovation that is in sync with the demands of knowledge economy organizations.

Multitasking might make you stupid, but that doesn't mean you have a choice

Sue Shellenbarger: Multitasking makes you stupid, studies say.

Sue Shellenbarger: People who multitask are less efficient than those who focus on one project at a time, says a study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology. The time lost switching among tasks increases with the complexity of the tasks, according to the research by [David Meyer, psychology professor at the University of Michigan] and others. (Via Frank Patrick.)

[Tesugen.com]

Sure it does, but does that mean you really have a choice? The research is intriguing. What I’d like to see next is some advice about making good choices about what and when to multitask and when and how to go after flow. The research only seems to go after the first part of the problem, which is to establish how much and what kind of degradation you might expect. The interesting part of the problem is how to get better at including multitasking appropriately in your repetoire of work strategies. Cause I sure don’t expect to get back to a world where I have the unfettered freedom to always single thread.