MSNBC via Scripting News via Roland Tanglao:

490, 000 blogs and a new blog every 40 seconds! Wow! But the bigger story is what[base ']s happening on the 490,000-plus Weblogs that few people see.

Two thousand new blogs every day is a a grave responsibility and public trust. We are at a tricky stage in a product category's life cycle. The average user's skill level falls as the accellerating newbie influx makes the population grow younger. Now is the:

• Time for blog usability.
• Time for localization.
• Time to work out every big and noticeable bug.
• Time for measurement and watching the unintended ways people use your tools.
• Time to wrap dangerous code in GUI so tinkering is only on purpose and  out of accidental reach.

This is for all the vendors in this space. The folks who make Radio, Blogger, and the other great tools. And the bold tweakers who make those products better. We have the juice, let's put it in a clean glass with a little parasol.

[aka Blue Sky Radio]

10:15:31 PM  #  

I spoke of four klogging roles last week: catalyst, coach, armorer, practice leader. Matt Mower advocates the the role of "Intranet Editor:"

Much as the users of a Wiki should occasionally re-factor pages that are becoming "busy" I think that a good intranet editor should be grooming the klogs in their organization and drawing together useful strangs to form part (or all) of the static intranet.

Roland Tanglao builds on this:

I think a natural progression for knowledge is:

1. blog breaking news
2. harvest it periodically (say weekly) into an FAQ and/or other knowledge base type of documents
3. Put the link into a a directory that supports transclusion like Manila style directories.

K-Log => (FAQ or other knowlegebase article) => directory.  

K-Logs need to be periodically (at least once a month) harvested for content that should go into an FAQ or other knowledgebase document and links that that should go into a directory. This is the job of a K-Log editor :-)! I have been trying to do this with VanEats but after a klog gets to a certain size, it really needs to have some time set aside for it.

Practice Leader is probably the closest to a dedicated multi-author editor. Summarizing work in a field, showing the aggregate progress and useful threads. Structuring knowledge into FAQs or other KM systems may be a natural progression, especially as klogging tools and KM tools build bridges.

Entropy, bad.

Fighting entropy, expensive, slow. 

Self-review is a powerful tool for learning. Going over my own posts for the past week, month, and quarter has shown patterns I missed, ideas I was skirting but never wrote outright. It reinforced brief social connections, blogs to which I linked to and people with whom I briefly corresponded. It takes concentrated time and effort. It helps me to print out all the pages on my blog for that period; something about shuffling through paper.

Folks are trying hard to automate this work. Summarizers. Cluster analysis. Text to Structure converters. Taxonomy systems.

But the expert author of the original content is often the best judge of relevance.

10:14:16 PM  #  

Everyone in the group writes with their own copy of Radio and publishes their weblog in both HTML and RSS. One of the editors takes responsibility for running the Multi-Author Weblog Tool, which joins all the individual feeds into a single weblog. This person is the webmaster of the multi-authored weblog.

Each hour when the news aggregator scans for new posts, any new items appearing in your author's feeds are automatically posted to the webmaster's weblog.

If you're the webmaster, it's important that you leave Radio running with the news aggregator enabled, at least during the hours when your authors will be writing new posts, since Radio can only update the weblog when the news aggregator scans for new items.