I’m mucking about with some of the code and design for this weblog. Mostly trying to move in the direction of better use of css and more leverage out of tools such as “activeRenderer” and “liveTopics” I’m sure I’ll manage to break a few things along the way. Please bear with me. I have added a Change Log to keep track of what I’ve been up to
Bubbling blogs and emergent order
Fleming adds some very useful counterpoint to the evolving debate on blogs and power laws started by Clay Shirky. He picks up on Ross Mayfield’s post on Distribution of Choice that I picked up on yesterday, but takes it in a more interesting direction. He focuses on what can emerge from each of us thinking, writing, and then interacting with one another. The patterns that Shirky sees at the macro level are the end result of all of our activities at the micro level. Some of Fleming’s key observations:
Blogging allows us to work more openly and refer to each other’s work, while also sharing it with a bigger audience. …
Connections form. …float up and into the cloud of the web. Specifically they will end up in an assortment of directories and search engines, most notably in Google.
…the choices of many relatively ordinary folks become more visible than ever before. And they form emergent patterns that become very visible.
…The point is not at all whether I have unfairly more or less readers than some other weblog. The emerging democracy in blogs is in that we together leverage our choices in a way that normally isn’t possible unless you run a big corporation or you’re run by one. We’re a swarm of thought bubbles. [Ming the Mechanic]
What we have in blogging are tools and a process that let us participate in the kinds of messy, distributed, emergent process that will characterize work and life for us tomorrow. It’s the concrete instantiation of what Howard Rheingold is talking about in Smart Mobs and Steven Johnson described in Emergence.
If you only have a nail, every tool looks like a hammer
Like many bloggers I’ve been following the recent debate around Clay Shirky’s Power laws and blogs article with interest. At the same time, Lilia and Denham Gray have been carrying on a blog-conversation about blogs vs. threaded discussions and wikis.
Ross Mayfield adds some excellent observations about the multiple possible purposes for blogs from something resembling journalism to tools to support collaboration among tightly integrated teams.
Blogging software such as “Radio” or “Traction” has that wonderful characteristic of the best kinds of tools that can be warped and twisted to fit so many different needs. Think of Excel being used as a word processor or database manager, for example.
Couple that flexibility with lowering the barriers to entry so that you expand the universe of potential users by an order of magnitude or so and you get the blogging phenomenon. You don’t have to be any sort of technology expert to pick up a blogging tool and get started. Want to talk about your cats? Feel free. Want to become an instapundit? The name is taken, but there’s room for more if you have something worth saying. Want to improve knowledge sharing among a project team? That’s fine too.
The tools don’t put much shape on how you interpret them. That means you interpret and explain them from the perspective of your work. If the problem you have looks like a nail, than this must be a hammer I’ve just picked up. It’s the fundamental beauty of general purpose software running on general purpose computers. The limit is your imagination. No wonder the establishment is worried.
It’s all clear to me now
I’ve got a great idea for an ad….
Sweet Jesus – if you watched the Super Bowl and were mystified by that dumb jeans ad, well, Dooce explains it all for you. Absolutely hysterical.
And if you didn’t see it and want to see Dooce’s brilliant ad brought to life, well, go ahead.
It’s all clear to me now. Thank you Dooce and thank you Rick.
Defenestrating technology
Why I’m not a compugeek. While pondering some hypertext-related ponderings, I found myself thinking about how I approach computers, just because I don’t seem to be typical. You won’t catch me waxing rhapsodic about the latest chip speeds or wireless gizmos, much less the latest software. My laptop at home is a PIII/850, and it… [Caveat Lector]
Dorothea goes on to say:
Where I do seem to part company from other heavy computer users is that my most common response to the things is frankly adversarial—more than that, bullying.
Program crashes? I swear like a stevedore. Bug in something I’m writing? More swearing, coupled with grim determination to make the wretched machine do what I bloody well say it ought to. Something I’m writing runs clean? Ha! One spiteful victory dance, coming up!
I always considered that one of the defining characteristics of my relationship with all technology, especially computer technology. If I haven’t threatened one of my machines with defenestration during the day, I haven’t been working very hard.
For those of you Mac or Linux fans who think my threats are about uninstalling software, don’t be fooled. When I threaten out the window, I mean out the window, preferably an upper story one. I’ve worked with operating systems and technology back to OS/360 and it’s all been out to get me most days. I am in complete agreement with Dorothea here.
Traffic and traffic jams
One driver can vastly improve Traffic.
Traffic Waves [via Marc’s Voice, Smart Mobs, Werblog]
Science hobbyist William Beaty claims: “Sometimes one driver can vastly improve Traffic”
The basic principle is to “bring space into congested traffic” by slowing down and maintaining a large safety gap in front of you. Not only is this much safer for everyone, but it reduces the bunching up that causes the standing waves as shown in the animation above. Slowing down ahead of a traffic jam smooths the slow-then-go pattern. Further, leaving a large gap in front of you allows cars to merge into your lane. While aggressive drivers can’t stand the idea of someone “cutting in” on them, allowing merging can eliminate the traffic jams caused by lane reductions.
Especially entertaining is the FAQ, including, “Are you still alive? Haven’t the road-ragers beaten you up yet? ”
Note the subtle coupling that’s occurring in these traffic situations. Aggressive drivers contribute to traffic jams by causing the bunching up that creates standing wave jams. According to William Beaty, even individual drivers can prevent traffic jams because their slowing slowing down will affect other drivers and slow enough of them down to “bring space” to the congestion.
A fascinating example of how people and systems interact in unexpected ways. If this kind of result interests you beyond its own merits you might want to look into Jay Forrester’s work on systems dynamics, starting with Counterintuitive Behavior of Social Systems (pdf). You might also want to take a look at Mitch Resnick’s Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams: Explorations in Massively Parallel Microworlds
Doc Searls stolen laptop
What’s Up, Doc?. Like many of you, I was shocked when I learned that my buddy Doc had his laptop stolen. What a crock! Well, it’s time to give back to the man who’s given so much to this community. I’ve set up a PayPal donation link. Let’s get that man a new friggin’ PowerBook! The 15″ SuperDrive model is only $2,799.00. If every regular Doc follower donates a few bucks to the fund, he’ll have a new machine in no time at all. I’m using paypal@lockergnome.com for this particular campaign, and I swear (on my chest) that all monies will be given to him. If you’re going to pass the link around, please keep an eye on this particular blog post, as I’ll kill the PayPal item as soon as enough has been generated…. [C:\PIRILLO.EXE ~ Chris Pirillo]
These things happen, but at least we can do something useful about it.
IBM research papers on knowledge management
Some excellent resources found by Lilia in her research.
IBM research papers on communities, learning and more.
Trying to find a paper on-line gives you a lot of other interesting things. So, I came accross public papers of IBM Watson Research Center. These are some I’d like to check out:
- 02-07 Understanding the Individual, Community and Organizational Benefits of Work-Based Communities
- 02-01 Understanding the Benefits and Costs of Communities of Practice
- 01-06 The Dynamics of Social Interaction in a Geography-based Online Community
- 01-03 Social Construction of Knowledge and Authority in Business Communities and Organizations
- 00-07 Coming to the Crossroads of Knowledge, Learning, and Technology: Integrating Knowledge Management and Workplace Learning
- 00-06 New Workplace Learning Technologies: Activities and Exemplars
- 00-05 Designing Learning: Cognitive Science Principles for the Innovative Organization
Change as a team sport
“The only way to have a successful revolution in any field of human activity”.
In a recent post on Interconnected, Matt Webb quotes Kurt Vonnegut:
Slazinger claims to have learned from history that most people cannot open their minds to new ideas unless a mind-opening team with a peculiar membership goes to work on them. Otherwise, life will go on exactly as before, no matter how painful, unrealistic, unjust, ludicrous, or downright dumb that life may be.
The team must consist of three sorts of specialists, he says. Otherwise, the revolution, whether in politics or the arts of the sciences or whatever, is sure to fail.
I’ll let you read the rest on Matt’s site. Tom subsequently writes on how Malcolm Gladwell rediscovered pretty much the same idea.
I think the connection to Gladwell is a bit forced, although The Tipping Point is still a great piece of work and worth reading in its own right.
I would label these specialists Thinker, Citizen, and Teacher, and there’s little doubt that all are essential to successful change, even when change is short of revolution. One implication is that you’d better understand which you are and line up the missing roles if you want successful change to happen.
Sharing vs. hoarding knowledge
Several items over the past few weeks all suggesting that sharing knowledge pays off far better than hoarding does. Handy to have around if you’re fighting arguments that investing in knowledge management has to overcome hoarding.
Napsterize Your Knowledge: Give To Receive. The primary lesson: “The more that a company shares its knowledge, the more valuable it becomes.” It’s astonishing how many people still don’t believe this. But when I look back at the success my website and OLDaily have brought me – despite my lack of any obvious qualifications in the field – it is self evidently true. When you share your knowledge, you share your ability, and this is what makes you or your company more valuable. People prefer to hire or contract for services based on proven ability nearly every time. Moreoever, the more you share, the more people share in return (many of the items in OLDaily are the result of submissions from readers), which increases your personal or corporate knowledge base. Anyhow, this article discusses some of the benefits of sharing knowledge and then offers some advice on how to do it. (This and the next two items via elearningpost.) By Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba, MarketingProfs, January 21, 2003 [Refer][Research][Reflect] [OLDaily]
Communities of Practice – The real thing!. Here is an excellent example of a medical team building their own Community of Practice using Radio so that they can serve their own Community better. [Robert Paterson’s Radio Weblog]
This looks like it kicks serious ass. From their “What we’re doing” document:
It seems very likely that the needed essential innovation in healthcare is sociological, more than technological innovation, more than economic innovation. We have more advanced medical technology than we can currently deliver to patients. We spend abut twice as much per person on healthcare delivery in the US as is spent in Great Britain and there is little to indicate our patients have better health or higher satisfaction as a result. The sociological innovation will be discovering how to cooperate. Some community will discover how they can cooperate among providers and with patients. That is the highly leveraged innovation. That community will change everything for the rest. The sciences of complex adaptive systems and social networks need to come together. To these we need to add the art of community conversations. [Seb’s Open Research ]
Hoarding is for the weak. Xerox has apparently proven what all knowledge workers intrinsically knew anyway; that knowledge hoarding is detrimental. Via Column Two
A recent Xerox research report has found that high-performing employees don’t tend to hoard information. According to the news summary: The idea that knowledge is power has been knocked on the head by researchers who claim that high-performing employees are more likely to be ones who proactively share information with their colleagues.
My own experience agrees 100%. I am personally more powerful in what I do when I collaborate and openly share with others. They provide essential critique, support and grounding for my thoughts. [thought?horizon]