b.cognosco
Where leaping to conclusions is my primary form of forward motion.
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Book Reviews
Recently
Self-publishing Firm Provides More Marketing Support
Broadcast Brouhaha
Flawless Consulting: How to Get Your Expertise Used
Permalnk Revisions Needed
Interesting BookBiz TidBits from M.J. Rose
K-log Implementation Challenges
Weblogs die too..
Update: Talk About Roundabout
My New Scanners Are In! My New Scanners Are In!
Holy Sh#t! Guess Who's Tracking Your Downloads
Sen. Earnest Hollings Should Be Removed from Office
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
Tuesday, July 23, 2002
Business Use for Instant Messaging
Ernie the Attorney provides a short, succinct scenario for the business use of IM. It will become common in the enterprise.Business Use for Instant Messaging? - Yep, apparently Lands End uses it to answer customer questions as they browse the catalogue company's website. The cheery representatives will even use IM to redirect the customer to a particular page on the website if necessary.I see IM working its way into law firms too. The other day was illustrative. I was on the phone with an important client in one of those situations where I couldn't get off the phone no matter what happened. A call came in on my other line, and I ignored it. Thirty seconds later I was paged by the receptionist. I had to E-mail her to let her know I was on the phone, and we traded E-mails so that I could (1) find out who was looking for me (2) tell her to tell the person to call back in 10 minutes. All of this took more time than it should have. Instant Messaging would have been much faster. Of course, now I suspect most law firms will view IM as some sort of frilly toy. [Ernie the Attorney]
Self-publishing Firm Provides More Marketing Support
Following the M.J. Rose column today, which covered big-name publishers picking up self-published work and taking advantage of authors' self-promotional initiative, iUniverse has annouced a marketing kit to help their authors get more attention. Every little bit helps.
iUniverse Introduces Marketing Toolkit07/23/2002
Answering a need voiced by thousands of authors worldwide, iUniverse, Inc., announced today the launch of its Author Marketing Toolkit, a complete, customized marketing guide that helps authors publicize their work, create demand and sell books. [iUniverse]
Broadcast Brouhaha
Thanks to Ernie the Attorney for this one. This business with the Fritz bill, and the FCC broadcast flag brouhaha is asinine. Some argument may be made (I dont necessarily buy it) that government intervention is called for to protect certain industries and American jobs from foreign competition. But since when does the government of the US of A intervene to protect specific industries from their own customers?! How idiotic is that?From the New York Times:
Hollywood studios have maintained that they will not send digital copies of movies and other programming over the airwaves unless safeguards are in place to prevent perfect copies from being redistributed online. That, in turn, is seen as holding back the market for digital televisions and the on-demand services that might come with them.I can assure you this is not the case, and if it is the market will respond with a solution far better for consumers than what the television networks purport to do. There is no way that legislation written by a bunch of sold-out, technology-ignorant legislators for the sole purpose of protecting an entrenched media aristocracy can do anything but harm for consumers and the market in general.
Legislators should be debating the extent of copyright protection, the applicable penalties for violation, and what -- if any -- changes should be made in the balance between spurring innovation and rewarding creators. Nothing more. As Ernie said in Ignorance is Bliss
Sometimes too many people working together on one thing do not create a bold new thing. Instead, they create a patchwork of compromise, where the whole is vastly less than the sum of the parts.First, every legislator should be forced to read The Broadband Difference: How online Americans' behavior changes with high-speed Internet connections at home from the Pew Internet Project. If they cant read it themselves then they should be tied in a room and have it forcibly read to them. Then they should be required to go to the blackboard and write 100 times each, The Internet is not cable TV. The Internet is not cable TV. The Internet is not cable TV This happens in lawmaking too, but mostly because of the influence of lobbyists representing special interest groups. It's not just a problem of too many people, but rather it's a problem of people having too much information.
This whole episode shows how woefully ignorant most of our legislators are regarding basic economics, market theory, and basic technology. And my, how thinly they disguise their motives.
Flawless Consulting: How to Get Your Expertise Used
Flawless Consulting by Peter Block is one of the better, and most practical, how-to books on consulting I've read. [More...]Permalnk Revisions Needed
Radio Wishlist - Permalinks in Categories.Permalinks in categories point to those posts on the home page and home page archives, not to their instances on the category home page or in the category archive. Permalinks just don't understand their page's category. I explain further and with examples on the Radio UserLand discussion list.
[aka Blue Sky Radio]
[a klog apart]Interesting BookBiz TidBits from M.J. Rose
There are some good ideas in today's Wired News column by M.J. Rose, and some validation for authors like Hugh Madison at American Invisible.Before 1998, it was rare for established publishing companies to bid on self-published fiction. But in the last 18 months, thanks in great part to authors' ability to use the Internet to market themselves, more than three dozen self-published novels have been picked up by major houses. [...]Also, a very entrepreneurial idea from Florida-based Chapter-a-Day: sending out excerpts from popular business books via daily e-mail:
The business of book clubs: From Good Morning America to the White House, book clubs are flourishing. And now businesses want them too.Wells Fargo already has one. So do sales and marketing executives in Minneapolis-St. Paul.
Chapter-a-Day, a Sarasota, Florida, company that builds and maintains online book clubs -- sending out daily book excerpts for libraries and book stores -- is getting as many as a dozen inquiries a week from corporations. [...]
I love this idea. It's a variant of the book summary/abstracting services offered by several companies. I think the bite-sized nature of this makes it very appealing. One of my favorite services comes from Audio-Tech Executive Summaries and is called Business Briefings.
It's on CD rather than e-mail, but every month they review some 300+ publications and send out a very interesting bite-sized summary of ideas, concepts, research, and publications that are or will affect business. It's one of the most interesting services I get, and I think it's because of the bite-sized nature of things.
Self-Publish Stigma Is Perishing. Major houses gobble up rights after authors create a buzz for their work. Also: Book clubs that work for business ... and more in M.J. Rose's notebook. [Wired News]
K-log Implementation Challenges
More on Klog Implementation Challenges.www.davidwatson.org wrote a piece back in June about the difficulties a klog implementation could face. Training and organizational culture again. This is worth checking out as another addition to a balanced view on klogging.
[High Context]
Weblogs die too..
Weblogs die too..FuckedWeblog catalogs distressed, absent or departed weblogs. See recent ones or submit an blog site's suicide note or obituary.
This might be useful in an intranet. Part of pruning the tree, finding successors, acknowledging the need for archival.
[a klog apart]Monday, July 22, 2002
Update: Talk About Roundabout
More Synchronicity -- go read Atlanta blogger Daniel Taylor at Dreaded Purple Master.I know this is old hat to you long-time bloggers, so forgive a newcomer's enthusiasm. Phil Wolff over at a klog apart made a post on job searching -- which I should be doing, but I'm not. If you are smarter than me (and less convinced of your own infallabillity) read the whole thing.
What I want you to read is here:
Jay Manifold, Project Manager, Kansas City, Missouri..I like Jay's blogging voice. His blog, A Voyage To Arcturus, is a delightful blend of philosophy, astronomy and space, and life.
Will Project-Manage for Food[a klog apart]
I got laid off. OK, it ain't up there withwhat happened to this guy, but it shut me down for a few days. Not moping -- updating a résumé and networking like mad. [...] [aka bloggers for hire]
Buried unceremoniously in this post from Phil, which he got from someplace I never heard of, quoting someone else I never heard of, who puts in the line what happened to this guy, is a link to fellow Atlanta blogger Daniel Taylor, aka Dreaded Purple Master.
Taylor is <strike>funny as a crutch</strike> laugh-out-loud funny. Why I followed that particular link I'll never know. He has apparently been writing forever, reads stuff I read, watches the one TV show I watch, and lives just a couple of miles from one of my favorite parts of the city.
I don't know him, and would likely never meet him. I just find it insanely cool that this blogging business leads to this sort of thing.
And I was a gen-yoo-whine blogging skeptic. Someone pass the crow. Maybe I'll even make it to one of them Blogger Meet-Ups real soon now, ya hear.
Update: I've been brought up short and had it pointed out to me that had I spent more time watching the 70s TV show Happy Days I would have known the phrase "funny as a crutch" was not a compliment. Well, what do I know. I'm from Texas.
So here's to Daniel Taylor -- funny as whoopie cushion; funny as a 24-hour Jonathon Winters TV marathon; funny as a Gallager Sledge-O-Matic skit; funny as a ... well, you get the point.
My New Scanners Are In! My New Scanners Are In!
Is the Internet cool or what? On Wednesday I made a post about a personal library app. On Friday Jim McGee responded. On Saturday I picked up Jim's post in my News Aggregator and immediately went to ReaderWare to check out the software.By 10:3O AM EDT I had decided I needed this software and a barcode scanner. Readerware suggests a CueCat and suggests eBay as the place to get them. By 11:00 AM I had scrounged eBay, found a likely source, and did a Buy It Now! for 2 CueCat USB scanners for a total of $8. I paid via PayPal
By 4:00PM I had an e-mail from the seller saying he had the money and would ship that afternoon if he could find a Post Office open. At 10:30AM this morning my new CueCat barcode scanners arrived!
This is as close to instant gratification as I can stand to get. I'll be a book scanning son-of-a-gun by tomorrow afternoon.
Thanks again to Jim McGee of McGee's Musings.
Holy Sh#t! Guess Who's Tracking Your Downloads
Gimme a C! Gimme an I! Gimme an ...Ugh. I wish this was a surprise. But there's no conspiracy here. Really.
One thing I don't get about the EFF. Why don't they blow the trumpet on comScore? This company has tricked millions of people into "download accelerators" and other trojan horse software that tracks their traffic, credit card usage (it actually captures numbers), and more -- all in the name of so-called research. Most of the download accelerator software providers they use are front companies.Hey, this is one of the worst violations of privacy I have ever seen and nobody knows about them. You know why they don't? Here is the address of the company:
Reston Office (headquarters):
11465 Sunset Hills Road, Suite 200
Reston, VA 20190
Telephone: 703-438-2000
Fax: 703-438-2051
Yahoo Driving DirectionsIf you don't get the implications of this, ask someone what government agency is based in Reston VA. BTW, comScore just bought Media Metrix and now own the online consumer data market.
[John Robb's Radio Weblog] [Ye Olde Phart]
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.
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