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Saturday, August 10, 2002

Integrated Blogging Functions and KM

Integrating klogs with Big-KM.

In order for klogging to be successfully I think it is going to have to come to an understanding with Big-KM.

Example: BigCo has invested half a million dollars in a big knowledge management system for their world-wide operations. This kind of investment can become a lode-stone around any other systems neck. For klogging to thrive here it is going to have to integrate.

Here's one idea I have for how this could work.

1. Extend Big-KM System-X so that it can aggregate RSS feeds like Radio, MT and others do now.
2. Extend your klogging software to allow per-post meta data. (liveTopics does this for Radio)
3. For each project in System-X define a set of topics that will act as trigger phrases for that project
4. Get the kloggers to use those topics when they want to involve a post in a particular project
5. Now subscribe System-X to every klog in the organization and watch as it indexes and archives all that information. Each project grabbing only those postings that are appropriate (by use of the trigger phrases)
6. This means that the klogs add value to the big-KM system. Suddenly it doesn't just have the dry dusty project documention, but all the live vibrant stuff that people are really doing!
7. Now extend System-X to generate a per-project RSS feed.
8. If I am on the project I can subscribe to this feed. Now instead of receiving email from System-X or having to go to an arbitrary web page, I get all the "official" project stuff (new documents, forms etc...) delivered in my RSS stream.

Closing the loop between the big-KM and the klog so that they both add value to each other.

Just an idea... [Curiouser and curiouser!]

Posted by:  Terry Frazier at 6:37 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 
Categories: Collaboration, Strategy, Technology

The First Remote Post

I have to say that over a dsl line at both ends this works about as well as locally. I could get to like this. It's still not quite as nifty as having Radio deployed on my laptop (where I could work regardless of connectivity) but it's pretty darn good. Now, next step is to figure out how to make a VPN.

Posted by:  Terry Frazier at 2:36 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

Failing Badly

There's an interesting article in the current Atlantic Monthly about the likelihood that stricter security systems will make Americans less safe than they'd be otherwise. In it, one of the foremost experts in the world on cryptography talks about how certain systems fail badly -- by which he means that when they fail, as they inevitably do, the consequences of the failed system are worse than the consequences of never having had such a system in the first place. The full shutdowns and total rescreenings of passengers following airport security breaches are one of his examples -- when these systems fail, they do so in a way that is extremely costly and painful. Interesting in its own right, and unquestionably true. It got me to thinking about the broader implications of failing badly -- that a really well-designed system fails well, and that that might be a source of compelling competitive advantage in business -- that one's systems are designed such that the inevitable failures in any given component are isolated and prevented from causing more widespread and costly failures. While I haven't even finished the article yet, it seems that systems that fail well are designed so that components are modular, with responsibility for only one small area of functionality, and that surrounding systems are designed to catch and isolate the consequences of any failure.

Now, neither Scott nor I have really thougth this through, but it seems likely that failing to adequately consider the consequences of failure is at the heart of all sorts of major screw-ups -- ranging from California wildfires started by the Forest Service to the Worldcom debacle.

I wonder how often a failure point is observed but not noted by someone in a company, and I wonder if the open use of klogs within a company could broaden exposure to those failure points, thereby hardening the system and improving competitive advantage?

Posted by:  Terry Frazier at 12:44 AM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

Factory Tours -- BN.com

This week I went into the Barnes & Noble distribution center in Memphis, TN. I've been there before but it still amazes me -- 300,000 sq. ft. of space housing a $12 million automated book handling system that guides human pickers with RF-based scanners and then transports, sorts, matches, packages, weighs, stamps, and ships 10s of thousands of packages a day -- error free. It's one of the most incredible things I've ever seen.

The level of software integration they have achieved is incredible. Sometimes orders are processed in the warehouse within an hour or so of being placed on the web. This really is the future of book sales.

Posted by:  Terry Frazier at 12:23 AM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

Untethered -- Going Wireless and Seeking Remote Access

The 614+ has a much nicer router with built-in web page for admin, plus 802.11b and enhanced 22Mbps wireless. It was only $119 with a $20 mail-in, and a PCMCIA card was just $59 with a $10 mail-in.

I haven't tested the remote access yet, but it sure was easier to configure. And the wireless is way cool. I haven't really played with WiFi before, but it was a cinch to configure and get access. Now I need to find some of those war chalking places and log in, tune in, and turn on.

Posted by:  Terry Frazier at 12:15 AM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

Browser Wars

I got started on this browser kick because some of my favorite blogs starting using activeRenderer for archive pages, blogrolls, and such. I can't read them in Opera -- it doesn't support some DOM and Javascript functions that Barrot uses to create the collapsable menus.

Mozilla supports them, but it just does not run on my system -- not v1.0, or any of the v1.1 Betas I've tried. Besides, it's full of other bugs and anomolies (at least on my Win2k system.)

So I'm stuck. I can't read a number of the very nice blogs I've been reading until Opera gets with the program and supports DOM. I hope that is soon -- it's the only real weakness it has.

Posted by:  Terry Frazier at 12:06 AM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

Thursday, August 8, 2002

liveTopics, TrackBack, and Other Radio Enhancements

Let's see what's on the slab....

Well in the last couple of days I have been working hard on the liveTopics 1.0 release.  It's so close I can almost feel it.  We're testing and hopefully will have the kinks worked out in the next couple of days then I can finally get this sucka out the door.

Also I'm really besotted with TrackBack but haven't seen it work the way I would like yet.  So I've rolled a TrackBack server in Frontier that comes with a Radio client.  The two communicate with a simple XML-RPC interface that would allow any klogging system to join in.

At the moment the Radio client automatically harvests each posting for links (when you submit it) and automagically pings each one.  The ping contains the permalink for the post, the Url of your weblog, the title of the post, your name & email address.  But you can drop most of this information you don't want to pass it.  I guess some people will also want fine-grained control over what they ping.  That shouldn't be too hard.

Along with this are some macros to show your TrackBack information against each item.

At the moment the server is hosted on my laptop which isn't ideal but is good enough for testing.  The next job is to find a better host and then look at adding a simple federation mechanism.  That would allow lots of different people to provide TrackBack servers and share the results.

More on this later. [Curiouser and curiouser!]

Posted by:  Terry Frazier at 9:23 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

Social Capital, Intellectual Capital, and Klogs

K-logs, knowledge sharing, and social capital.

Blogging Alone.

Stephen Dulaney applies Indicators of Social Capital to Web Logs.

1. Levels of giving (blog ecossystem) reflects people's propensity to give to others when they themselves may not directly benefit. The economy of giving links.
2. Participation and engagement (What we do when we blog Meg Hourihan) gauge of people's involvement in a range of groups and associations, both formal and informal. Ray Ozzie adds a nice contribution to "Why we Blog"
3. Reciprocity within the community (everybodyblogit) is the measure to which people can rely on their community to help in times of need. How to Start a Weblog (For Professinal Journalists)
4. Generalized trust that people have in other individuals and groups, and how safe they feel in their daily interactions with others.
5. Trust towards public officials and institutions or the measure of people's confidence in the institutions of society.
6. Social Norms (Lessig) the rules, belief, morals and habits that regulate behaviour.
7. Attitudinal variables (blogtree) important to social capital or individuals' belief about themselves, their place, and their tolerance of others, levels of acceptance, motivations and sense of connectedness.
8. Confidence in the continuation of social and political relationships for the future.

This list is from the work titled Framework for the measurment of Social Capital in New Zealand which was prepared by Anne Spellerberg and assisted by the social capital programme team. page 16 of the (link to pdf found here)

Do these apply to an Intranet klogging cluster?

I'm sure they do, with a few differences.

1. More klogger than blogger. Kloggers are also members of the large, amorphous population of blogspace. As people are socialized first into a local klogspace, this outside affiliation may be lessened.
    
2. Colleagues first. Second, you define your focus of attention by your work more than your passions and curiousity. Your formal affilliations (your chain of command, your team, your stakeholders) and informal ones (your office network, ad hoc teams) fill your days, and your klogs.  
    
3. Work cultures. Social capital within an enterprise is strongly flavored by personality, policy, institutional memory (institutional rumor?), regional culture, and occupational culture.
    
4. Personal fences. Do you keep your social circles apart? Many people take care about mixing work, family, friends, politics, and faith. Do you want your bondage master, your bowling team, and your quality circle to know about each other through you? when people at work see your personal blogs, how does that affect your working relationships? This visibility biases what people write.  
    
5. Intellectual property. Work is more a Free Agent Nation than ever. Portability of knowledge and experience is a career asset. Most employers claim that everything employees write using company IT gear is the employer's property. This creates a conflict of interest.  

[a klog apart]

Posted by:  Terry Frazier at 9:19 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

The Failure of Transcopyright

[...]Ted Nelson's concepts of transclusion and transcopyright belong to a similar paradigm where content is value and links are mere mechanics, an outside vehicle for the transmittal of content rather than the item of value itself. In its fully implemented state, transcopyright sees a link from A to B as A using something owned by B, which readers should pay for in the form of a micropayment. This makes perfect sense in a traditional, product oriented economy where content is king. B manufactured a product which As readers consumed and should therefore pay for. After Google, it makes no sense at all. The economy of links is not product oriented. It is service oriented, and the service is the link. The link is an action rather than an item; an event, rather than a metaphor [...]

This puts things in a perspective I never considered. I suspect the treatise will fall on a lot of deaf ears (the Danish Newspaper Association?) but with the rise of more google-like entities it is only a matter of time before online resources that refuse links become isolated and rarely-traveled bypasses on the web.

The value of linking.

Links and Power: The Political Economy of Linking on the Web. (SOURCE:a klog apart)-Where does Phil get this articles? Thanks!<QUOTE>Search engines like Google interpret links to a web page as objective, peer-endorsed and machine-readable signs of value. Links have become the currency of the Web. With this economic value they also have power, affecting accessibility and knowledge on the Web.</QUOTE> [Roland Tanglao's Weblog]

Looks as though I missed this the first time round. Thank you Roland for catching it this time. [McGee's Musings]

Posted by:  Terry Frazier at 9:07 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

More Flexible News Scanning Needed

Radio Wishlist - Tune news aggregation intervals up and down..

Bryce Yehl tossed a coin in the fountain:

Radio Wish: Finer configuration of aggregation frequency.

One thing that sucks about falling behind in Radio's news aggregator: new items will continue to flow in while you're still dealing with the old ones. The "sticky" checkboxes in myRadio help to cope with this problem, but that only goes so far (especially when you have a serious backlog).

I'd like to configure Radio so that it automatically runs the news scan less frequently, perhaps once per day. Coupled with that, I want buttons in the browser to scan immediately and temporarily disable automatic scans.

Why make news collection a quiet background activity? Resources, for one: you don't want syndication confused with denial of service.

klogging calls for more frequent updating of select partner/colleague feeds. Sometimes polling every three minutes is the right thing to do.

Posted by:  Terry Frazier at 8:54 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

Friday, August 2, 2002

August Print Industry Roundup

I've been traveling quite a bit this week and haven't had time to post but I have been keeping up with the news. Several interesting things have happened while I was on the road.

National Association for Printing Leadership (NAPL) reported business in the commercial print sector has hit a five-month low at 45.5. This is the second consecutive decline and the second consecutive sub-50 month. NAPL cautions this is not an indication the industry is going back into recession. NAPL tracks a lot of industry statistics, and I need to check into this because I don't know what they saw that indicated the industry was ever coming out of recession.

ImageX licensed three of their patents to printChannel. This is an interesting move in the overall landscape of printing process patents. I have written about this before and have serious doubts about the viability and enforceability of many of the recently-issued process patents for online printing companies. At best these patents are a stretch. At worst they're outright fraud.

I have reviewed the printChannel offering and met previously with the management team there. It's difficult to believe they would gain anything useful from this license, so the motive is likely defensive -- to avoid wasting vital capital in useless legal wrangling. Virtually all the print e-procurement companies are struggling, and wasteful patent litigation is the last thing any of them they need.

But printChannel's signing with Imagex could establish precedent that there is market value to the patent and allow the company to take its lawsuit business model to larger players. This is something to watch. (Editor's note: Soon after this piece was written printChannel announced they would cease operations and in November 2002 was acquired by Printcafe. In May 2003 ImageX, teetering on its own bankruptcy, was acquired by Kinko's for $15 million -- Ed.)

Kinko's is rebuilding in Dallas. The company continues to rebuild itself in the DFW area after installing a new CEO and shuttering its SoCal HQ. Gary Kusin, the new CEO, came from the office furniture industry. Sue Parks, recently named exec-VP of Ops, came from Gateway Computers and USWest. I'm told there are lots of ads in the DFW papers for programmers, engineers, etc at Kinko's. Should be interesting to see what happens there over the next year. It is not easy to rebuild an entire company in a new city.

Posted by:  Terry Frazier at 2:25 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 
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