b.cognosco
Where leaping to conclusions is my primary form of forward motion.
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Digital Asset Management -- A Disappearing Act
Visible KM
Windley on Blogs for Sprawling Organizations
Klogs Get Official Support in Utah
Knowledge Networks for the Cost Conscious
LinkBack to List Referrers Locally -- More Ways to Weave the Blog
Gaining Parity with e-Mail
Readerware -- Fan-freaking-tastic!
Recycling Does Not Improve Government
User-centered Software Design
Triangulating on Shared Knowledge
Migrating Weblog to Different Server, Fixing Links
Making Companies Human
Building Business Relationships via the Blog
Military Intelligence and Photoshop
Printcafe Scheduler
Radio vs. Traction -- A Personal View
How Does This Differ From Just Posting a Link to an Article
Is FBI Behind BN.com Security Hole
Multi-Author Weblog Tool Description and Discussion
Author Names in Multi-Weblog Author Tool
Radio and Ampersand in RSS Readers
Display Preformatted Text With Radio
Sunday, July 21, 2002
Sen. Earnest Hollings Should Be Removed from Office
In a sad case of a politician who has lost all contact and credibility with his constituents, Sen. Earnest Hollings of South Carolina has written a letter to the FCC demanding they implement a broadcast flag requirement whether or not Hollings can get his despicable legislation passed. I wonder just how many millions Hollings has pocketed in campaign funds from Hollywood? "Hollings: Broadcast flag now, by FCC mandate" [Daypop Top 40]
Digital Asset Management -- A Disappearing Act
Is Digital Asset Management (DAM) losing its value? According to this article in CIO:Digital asset management (DAM) products may be a hot topic now, but a January report by Stamford, Conn.-based Meta Group predicts that by 2004 or 2005, such tools will likely evolve into nothing more than a set of features inside more complete enterprise content management tools." [CIO]
In 1999, while working for print industry consulting firm CAP Ventures, I wrote a fairly extensive research paper on Digital Asset Management for the print industry. (While a bit dated, you can still read the executive summary from that paper.)
Even back then I concluded that any discussion of DAM was incomplete without considering a much broader media context. But there is still a need for properly handling files for print, and many in the print industry can still use smaller systems than those sold by Artesia or Bulldog/Documentum.
This brief article is a good summary of the current state of DAM, covering several applications and giving a brief overview of the wide variety in price and features that today's products offer
Visible KM
Hugh Madison at American Invisible provides a thought provoking post on what it takes for KM to really succeed. Hugh has clearly been there before.KMSome personal thoughts on Knowledge Management. [American Invisible, Inc.]
Hugh's RSS feed didn't include some key points from his story, so I've listed a few below:
A successful KM initiative needs:There's a pattern here. See it?
- A compelling reason why each employee should buy in - rewards are called for
- training so that everyone appreciates the value of context. [...]
- training so that people learn to write for an audience outside their own group of contacts. [...]
- training so that people understand that most knowledge is specialized. [...]
- Someone VERY senior to champion the KM cause.
As Robert Buckman said in the interview John Robb posted yesterday, 90 percent of the effort put into the Knowledge Sharing system at Buckman Labs was spent encouraging people to share. And as I wrote in The Power of Knowledge Sharing, while some people will refuse to do this, most people simply don't know how.
The fact that the cost barriers for KM tools have plummeted means that those of us who already want to share can do so with less effort and less dollars. Now, how do we get those don't already want to, to join the group and be effective?
Windley on Blogs for Sprawling Organizations
Enterprise Development in Utah.On Wednesday, I spoke to the enterprise development group on my principles for enabling web services. The enterprise development group, or eDG as they call themselves is a group of specialists from across our IT organizations that meet regularly to share expertise and develop some de facto standards for multi-tiered applications in Utah.
I'm very supportive of these kinds of groups since I think they represent our best hope at building community in an IT organization that is best described as "sprawling." We have talented experts buried deep within the organization and, often, the biggest problem we face is being able to get the right people on the job. When an issue comes up, we likely have someone who knows just want to do, but no way to get that expertise to the job. Building overlapping communities of specialists and communities of interests seems the best way to attack this problem. My open offer on blogs is an attempt to jump start some of those communities.
[Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog]Klogs Get Official Support in Utah
K-logging at the statewide level. Top down endorsement for klogging..The Utah State CIO made this Offer to Utah State IT Employees.
I believe that the 900 or so IT employees of the State of Utah would benefit from speaking and listening to each other more. I think we need groups of specialists inside various departments to communicate with others in their specialty and without. Consequently, I'd like to see more people writing blogs and communicating their ideas through an open forum like the one blogs engender. To that end, I'm willing to pay the licensing fee to Userland for the first 100 employees who start a blog. Here are the conditions:
- Download the software and begin using on the 30-day free trial. I'd like to see you get a start before I pay the fee. Let me know when you're up and running.
- I'm biased toward IT employees, but other are welcome too, particularly if they're interested in eGovernment.
- You're responsible for what you post. If you're going to talk about things that shouldn't be public on Userland and need to be kept behind the state firewall, let me know and we'll set up a place inside the state network for that. We could even set up an authenticated area, if needed.
"It is good to be king." Royal suggestions cut through all kinds of trust issues and formal decision making. I've been asking for prerequisites to success on various knowledge management lists. Uniformly the top answer is "senior management endorsement, buy-in, enthusiasm."
UserLand's hit a sweet spot too.
- Low price point cuts risks of trying and eventual rollout
- Newbie-friendliness gives immediate satisfaction (egoboost, social affirmation)
- Syndication/etc. amplifies social networking effects, reinforcing current participation and bringing in new users
One other thing: you can see from Windley's post there is something real about the sense of ownership and control you feel when the tool and your writings are on your desktop. Radio gives you this. The tradeoffs of remote access and managed desktop are also real, but have much less emotional investment. These feelings of control worth of attention as the klogging meme spreads.
I'll have to encourage my buddy Bill Kendall, who's in the Salt Lake City D.A.'s office, to look into this. (Granted, that's city and not state government, but wouldn't it be interesting to see that combination as well?)
[tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog]Knowledge Networks for the Cost Conscious
Creating affordable Knowledge Sharing networks seems to be a theme these days, given the unmitigated failure of big-buck alternatives. David Gammel of High Context goes the final mile and provides a nice overview of creating an almost no-cost KS network.
Low-cost Klog NetworkThe level of investment required for really excellent km tools, such as weblogs, has gotten so low that it is much easier for a relatively low level employee to start a grass-roots movement within the staff if they are motivated. Given the failure of enterprise level KM initiatives and the burst .com bubble, this could be the perfect time to stealth in some web-based knowledge sharing tools.
In this article I will discuss how you can create a low-cost knowledge weblog (klog) network using free and/or donor supported software. This method is well suited to the stealthy introduction of weblogging as a knowledge management tool. All you need is one server to host the klogs and you can be off and running before senior management has a chance to quash your initiative. Or take credit for it. :) Read more... [High Context]
There are very important ideas in this:
- With no investment chances are you can sneak this into your Dilbertian department without raising suspicion. You still need a bit of a geek to set it up and run it, but you can do it for almost free.
- Even small enterprises can now afford this stuff. In fact they can no longer afford not to have it.
Young, entrepreneurial companies eat away from the bottom of the big Dilbert-company markets, but to do so they have to move fast and spread themselves thin. Most struggle to reach across geographic boundaries for anything more than marketing or a little customer support. True knowledge sharing across the country is just about impossible for the small- to mid-sized enterprise. ASPs, Salesforce.com, and MSOutlook's Public Folders haven't really helped. Most still get by on sheer luck and determination.
What David describes can be done by almost anyone with access to a geek. And not an uber-geek. Probably any 17-year-old with a knack for Python or pearl will do. That's still too techie for me, but even if you have to shell out $40 for Radio it's still an affordable way to get started.
This is great stuff, David. Thanks for bringing it to us.
Saturday, July 20, 2002
LinkBack to List Referrers Locally -- More Ways to Weave the Blog
Looks similar in concept to TrackBack and kmPings (you guys will correct me if I'm wrong), but based on specific referral pages. I'd sure like to see someone do a write up on just what all these things do, and how they relate/interact with each other.
Linkback Referrers.I spotted Stephen Downes Referral System via www.davidwatson.org.
Very cool little script. I have added it to my templates here on high context. It will display the referrers to each individual page. So if you link to anything on this site your page will be listed on the sidebar as people follow the link.
One small bug I've discovered with Mozilla is that a local referral within the same site creates an unexpected value for document.location in the javascript code. No problems in IE so it must just be Mozilla. [High Context]
Gaining Parity with e-Mail
This posting from Jon Udell on collaboration technologies that have caught the eye of Esther Dyson. I note among them is Parity -- a venture I believe is being headed by graphic arts visionary Paul Trevithick. Seems Paul is, as usual, on the leading edge and drawing attention from some big names.
What if being non-communicative weren't an option?This Fortune article on Esther Dyson was cited on a private mailing list. It's interesting to see where she is placing bets:
A big challenge for managers will be encouraging employees to share information instead of hoarding it. Dyson has made investments in several companies that help employees communicate with one another continuously and effectively, especially by e-mail. One, called Tacit Knowledge Systems, has software that (with user permission) reads and categorizes e-mail sent within an organization. Anyone needing information about a topic can turn to Tacit to find an expert and forward a request to get in touch. Another company, Parity, has a so-called "commitment-management tool" that lets the sender specify the action an e-mail requires. The software helps the recipient meet deadlines--like responding to a customer by tomorrow afternoon.I think I can see the handwriting on the wall. Groupware has failed forever because people by and large don't want to communicate continuously and effectively. Opting out of that flow may cease to be an option. If so, jumping on the weblog bandwagon for internal corporate communication looks like the offense that is the best defense. If your flow is a corporate asset that's going to be managed anyway, wouldn't you rather control it yourself? [Jon's Radio]
Readerware -- Fan-freaking-tastic!
How could I have missed this? If I die tomorrow the blogosphere will have made my life complete with this response from Jim McGee. Well, ok. Maybe that's a little dramatic. But I have wanted something like this a long time.Now excuse me, I have to go scrounge on e-Bay for CueCat.
Readerware - personal library app.[McGee's Musings]How About a Personal Library App. Maybe it's just me, but I never saw any way Amazon was going to be profitable until they took over the e-Commerce and web operations for Borders. [Blunt Force Trauma]Terry is looking for a program that will let him build and maintain a database of his personal library using the data available from Amazon and elsewhere on the web. It already exists and it's called Readerware. I now have over 3,000 books catalogued using it. It also supports CD and video libraries. Recommended. Less than $100.
Recycling Does Not Improve Government
I was terribly unhappy about the bumper crop of experience-free children the Clinton Administration ushered into the White House in 1992. Now I'm equally unhappy about the seemingly endless stream of political retreads being rounded up by the Bush Administration.Sometimes I just want to opt out...
Thanks (I think) to Dan Rosenbaum for this one.
Fool Me Once, Shame on Me. Fool Me Twice.....Semi's gonna have a ball with this one.
There's a new director of the Pentagon's new Information Awareness Office, part of the DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. (It was DARPA's organizational predecessor that gave the world the Internet. But I digress...) This new director is one John M. Poindexter.
Yes, that John Poindexter. Ronald Reagan's National Security Advisor. The one who was convicted in the Iran-Contra affair. Remember? He sold weapons (illegally) to Iran, and used the cash to (also illegally) fund the Contra insurgency in Nicaragua. Ollie North's buddy. It was in all the papers.
Poindexter was convicted of conspiracy, lying to Congress, defrauding the government, and destroying documents. The convictions were overturned; Poindexter had been given immunity before Congress (after invoking his Fifth Amendment rights). His testimony, though public and nationally broadcast, was inadmissible, courts said.
So here he comes sliming his way back into public service, this time running an office that is supposed to:
"create a new intelligence infrastructure to allow ... agencies to share information and collaborate effectively, and new information technology aimed at exposing terrorists and their activities and support systems.... The key to fighting terrorism is information. Elements of the solution include gathering a much broader array of data than we do currently, discovering information from elements of the data, creating models of hypotheses, and analyzing these models in a collaborative environment to determine the most probable current or future scenario."To me, this sounds a lot like what the NSA is supposed to be doing. If you read the IOS's page closely -- and there's no way to read it casually -- it looks like IOS is developing ways to massage and pass around raw data that the NSA and the National Reconnaissance Office and all that crew develops.Which is not a bad thing. And it's surely a comedown for a past National Security Advisor to have an office that's probably deep in the bowels of the Pentagon, far from corridors of power. And it speaks well of the man that he still wants to be in public service.
But still. John Poindexter should be in jail, not in the Pentagon. He waged a private war that was contrary to the policy of the government he swore to serve. He should not be pulling a government paycheck -- much less with a high security clearance. Here's a ton of links about Poindexter and Iran-Contra. Thanks to bOing-bOing for the original link. [Over the Edge]
Friday, July 19, 2002
User-centered Software Design
I've been looking for an Information Architect/Information Retrieval specialist to help me better understand the basics of good information systems design. I'm amazed at the wealth of knowledge available to us all via the weblog community and how some of the people in it make complex things so comprehensible.James Robertson at Column Two posted this helpful example created by Donna Maurer, showing how user stories clarify and enhance requirements documents.
It is an interesting approach and one that I, being neither an engineer nor designer, like quite a lot. It gives the software designer a human goal to achieve.
I thought the accessibility series over at dive into mark used this pretty well, too.
Personas and scenarios. Donna Maurer has written a very practical blog entry on using personas and scenarios. To quote Donna: These were so powerful! It is amazing how much extra information stories can give.[Column Two]
Triangulating on Shared Knowledge
Today John Robb made a thought-provoking post on Yahoo! Groups: K-Log and it should be passed along. The essay he refers to really hit home given some of the research and study I'm currently doing, and it is well worth reading. There is much good thought taking place right now on how to bring people within a business together on both emotional and intellectual levels. I think the scandals rocking corporate America have a lot to do with that. [...more]Migrating Weblog to Different Server, Fixing Links
This thread in the discussion group covers setting up a Meta redirect tag in pages on the Radio Communty Server so that calls to that server will be sent to the new one.
Also see this thread:
http://radio.userland.com/discuss/msgReader$16813?mode=topic&y=2002&m=7&d=19
Making Companies Human
A nice complement to today's thoughts on klogging and business strategy.
Weblog as the interface to a person.Time for people. Paolo Valdemarin: Time for people. "Time for anonymous companies is over, we have all had enough, it really looks like it's time for people, time for weblogs." [Jake's Radio 'Blog]Also this comment by Paolo:I have had a company web site for about the last 7 years, but I have never received much feedback from it. Since I have opened my blog I'm receiving lots of messages from people all over the world. This is happening because they perceive the weblog as the interface to a person, while the company site belongs to a faceless entity, even if for some of those 7 years, behind that company web site there was only one person: me. [emphasis added]If you start connecting the dots between the weblogs and k-logs space with the recent books such as Free Agent Nation , Bobos in Paradise, and The Rise of the Creative Class you can see the acceleration of a fundamental shift in the relation between employer and employed.
Pay attention; it will affect you. [McGee's Musings]
Building Business Relationships via the Blog
If you read only one post today, make it this one. This post from Rick came across my aggregator and triggered my thinking. When I put it with the post from Jim and the essay from John I wound up triangulating on The Power of Shared Knowledge.
Put Your Business Where Your Blog Is.Just put together a few thoughts on how blogs serve as business relationship-builders. I now have a couple examples of this blog leading directly to business relationships that are playing a significant role in sales opportunities. Those relationships would not have existed but for the blog.
While leads me to a new mantra: put your business where your blog is.
[tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog]
Military Intelligence and Photoshop
Military mathematicians have uncovered new pixel manipulation techniques with potential to automate complex photo-retouching tasks.
Is this the next killer Photoshop plug-in?.Oh, this is TOO easy. If this becomes a commercial product, retouchers are either gonna love this or, if they charge by the hour, go broke overnight.
from the news article...
[...] While working on ways to improve surveillance images, the U.S. Navy discovered an innovative technique to restore damaged photographs and works of art, according to a press release issued last week by the Office of Naval Research.The new method promises to eliminate much of the hand labor and guesswork currently involved in art restoration, since a computer now can handle much of the process. [...]
Printcafe Scheduler
I believe this refers to the latest release of what used to be Kerens, a print scheduling system based on Eli Goldratt's Theory of Constraints.
Printcafe Shows New PrintFlow, PrinterSite Internal & Logic Upgrade at Conference
"PrintFlow is an amazing new technology," said Doug Ehmann, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of The Sheridan Group, a large publication printer. "It?s fast and can consider many more constraints and options than is humanly possible. We investigated other technologies to help us with scheduling, but none could manage in real-time our complex and critical processes." [WhatTheyThink]
While this product is not particularly suited to digital or demand-driven print operations, it is encouraging to see Theory of Constraints being applied in printing. TOC principles, along with such ideas as single-unit-flow and cellular manufacturing, are critical to efficient demand-driven operations.
Radio vs. Traction -- A Personal View
Jim McGee asked, so I thought I'd try to find an answer.Jim McGee asks:
Traction? How about Radio?. What more do you get than buying individual licenses for Radio which you can get for about 1/10 the cost of Traction? [ McGee's Musings]
Jim is referring to the review (quoted below) of Traction Server by Jon Udell in InfoWorld, and since I'm trying to get a little traction of my own -- developing a strategy for small to mid-size business information/KM infrastructure -- I decided to investigate it from a business perspective.
Here are the areas I thought important to consider in comparing Traction to Radio: [more...]
How Does This Differ From Just Posting a Link to an Article
How does this differ from just posting a link to an article? If you post a link to a web-published article doesn't it get a new version of itself everytime you open it up (barring cacheing, of course)? Some of these PDF breakthroughs just leave me wondering "Why..."
Company releases software that syncs PDFs to update them as new releases come available, calling the documents SmartPDFs.
Is FBI Behind BN.com Security Hole
With federal agents now surfing the web, monitoring your TV habits via the cable guy, and issuing warrants to bookstores for your purchase records, could this be just another hidden attempt by DOJ and America's favorite jack-booted teddy bear to let agents spy on the average American citizen and see what we're reading?Nah, of course not. That's silly. Only an unpatriotic, paranoid, conspiracy theorist could think such a thing.
This is a breach, but a fairly minor one since credit card numbers are not exposed. It's a little eerie to have your purchase records available, but no reason for real concern. After all, if you're not guilty of anything why should you worry about people knowing what books you buy. We're all just one big, happy family. (Oh, Mom -- that book on lesbian women's studies I bought last year was a gift. I certainly don't read such things...)
BN.com: The Hole Story. It's a minor flaw compared to others in the e-commerce privacy-breach annals, but a hole found in BarnesandNoble.com's site again raises the question: Why do they take so long to fix? By Danit Lidor.[Wired News]
Multi-Author Weblog Tool Description and Discussion
Radio discussion thread describing install and use, and discussing initial reactions to the Multi-Weblog Author tool. This looks like a very cool thing. AFIK, it takes a group of RSS feeds from individual weblogs and aggregates them into posts on a single page or category.I can see this being very useful for group journaling as described in "In the Same Room Does Not Mean on the Same Page", for tracking software development projects (when combined with threaded discussion, doc mgmt, RCS, etc.), and for lending a sense of coherence to a group of company weblogs across departments or even the entire enterprise.
A scenario: (I need to draw a picture of this) I can see a sort of pyramid structure -- each individual has a weblog where they narrate their work and record important insights, experiences, or problems. Each has a category for Team, Department, Division, Company, etc. where they post items relevant to a specific audience. The Team Leader runs a Multi-Weblog Author Tool, aggregating the "Team" feeds from each employee. Someone at Department, Division, and Company levels do the same.
These aggregate weblogs generate their own RSS feeds and could, again, be subscribed by any individual in the company -- leading back to each employee and providing the opportunity to comment and contribute at all levels of the organization.
This is real transparency. Combined with a culture that doesn't penalize people for saying what they think, this could be a powerful way to keep employees informed and to let employees inform the company.
Author Names in Multi-Weblog Author Tool
Thomas Burg is using Radio as a multi-author k-log and an internal reporting tool. He is looking to automatically add the author's name to each post. This thread in the discussion group cover a source macro and customizing the RSS file.Radio and Ampersand in RSS Readers
Broken news feed, AmphetaDesk error, ampersands, white space, and XML. I didn't realize it, but Radio does something improper with ampersand characters -- some non-conformaing XML thing. By using & in my post I create an RSS feed that some XML-compliant readers can't read.The problem isn't permanent -- it happens only as long as the &-item remains in the feed. As son as Radio has aged the item enough (I guess) it falls out. So the problem isn't permanent and Radio feeds appear to break randomly. As Morbus Iff says:
- for XML to be considered valid, all &'s need to be turned into /&. Radio doesn't currently do this, and Radio feeds break all the time.
I'll have to be more careful in the future.
Display Preformatted Text With Radio
This thread in the Radio discussion group covers forcing Radio to include external text files, code segments, and other preformatted text without modifying each occurence. Addresses path issues, the file.readWholeFile verb, and Macintosh path idiosyncracies.
Syndication
Contact
Presence
This Page was last updated: Wed, 02 Jul 2008 22:06:57 GMT
