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Thursday, February 21, 2002 |
"The hidden issue, and threat to organizations, is that in a knowledge economy everyone is starting to realize that they bring their brains to work and that they ought to begin using them. This is fundamentally contrary to the underlying and unarticulated assumptions of most industrial organizations. They operate on Henry Ford's old complaint - "why is it that I get a brain when I hire a pair of hands?"
I don't believe that many organizations have really begun to grapple with the implications of telling everyone that they are expected to think. In the near term we're in for a lot of cognitive dissonance as the implicit and explicit messages collide. But John probably has it right that the active brains sitting behind all those personal computers will dominate in the end." [McGee's Musings]
I thought this was so dead on that I just had to post it. Now I just need to know how to make that transformation happen at my organization. Sigh.
11:48:25 PM Permanent link here
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"Disconnected thoughts, I know, but I think Pat D. inadvertantly (perhaps not?) suggested something by linking to Conversant at the end of his piece. One of the really interesting things about Conversant is that it has a two-way link between websites and e-mail. Replies to e-mail appear on the website and vice versa. I think something like that could really help this kind of publishing take off in an educational setting. E-mail might be the connector piece that makes this loose community a little tighter and a little more obviously active." [Serious Instructional Technology]
Lori, I think we should investigate Frontier, PostNuke, and Conversant. In our spare time.
11:44:48 PM Permanent link here
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Social Network Analysis
"How do knowledge workers learn? How do they decide what to learn next? What motivates them to share? These questions are central to the challenges of knowledge management, and yet most corporate portals and online communities are designed in ignorance of their answers.
The concepts of network analysis and socially translucent systems are applicable far beyond the confines of text-based chat. In fact, these concepts are critical to the creation of truly useful knowledge economies and online communities.
The seeds of innovation are lying all around us, from Google's Backward Links to AOL's Buddy Lists to Amazon's Purchase Circles to the incestuous source links of Blogdex. We humans are very social animals. It's about time more of us started recognizing this in the systems we design." [at Semantic Studios, via Tomalak's Realm]
Truly fascinating article, especially for me because I'll be facing these types of issues this year as I design the SLS Portal and figure out exactly which software we'll be using to do it. I definitely want to find out more about Babble now, too.
11:40:15 PM Permanent link here
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RssDistiller
"Here's a new interesting tool for Radio UserLand. With rssDistiller you can extract rss feeds from most regular web pages. All the feeds that you generate can be published on your weblog (so other users can subscribe to them), and you can also share your filters with other users, in order to let them distill pages with their own copy of Radio." [via markpasc.blog Headlines]
Get out! Now I can put any Web site in my aggregator? I might as well just plug myself directly into the Radio Matrix now and get it over with. I know what I'll be doing this weekend....
11:27:59 PM Permanent link here
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Petition to return the Parthenon (Elgin) Marbles to Greece "Nice background on the marbles here. Cliffnotes version here." [MeFi]
What do you think, Dad? When I was four years old, my family lived in Athens for a year while my Dad was on sabbatical teaching there. Unfortunately, I don't remember a whole lot from that time, but I do have some memories that are still very vivid to this day. Actually, they're more like flashes, almost like scenes from a movie I saw years ago. Except that I lived them.
The school room with a border along the top... interlocking blocks and a truck my brother and I got for Christmas... and most vivid of all, my Dad taking me to the Parthenon to watch the men dance on Sunday morning. It's an incredible memory to own, so I have mixed feelings about the Marbles. On the one hand, they belong in Athens. But on the other hand, they need to be protected from the pollution and acid rain. Nothing is ever black and white anymore.
11:13:28 PM Permanent link here
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Reading on the Web
"Once we have enough data on how people actually use the web, we will be able to plan teaching strategies that will help children use the web efficiently and pleasurably.... Currently, there are three strategies for designing websites or webpages: visual, informational, narrative.... When you teach children to use the web, they should have experiences with all three types of webpages and start to understand the strengths and weaknesses of each.
A final step in collection of information is the format for collecting: hardcopy or bookmarking a webpage. Readers need to learn when to read on-line and when to print out a page. If the text is small, no words are highlighted or bulleted, subtitles are missing–if the writing isn't designed for easy scanning–but it looks like information you need, print it. It will be much easier to read as hardcopy." [LucDesk]
Excellent article, well worth your read.
10:59:16 PM Permanent link here
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Webarian Q&A with Brewster Kahle
"The idea is to try and build a library in the digital age. People are trying to figure out the role of libraries at a time when physical books are no longer as dominant as they were. Peter Lyman wrote a report to Congress on why we should archive the web and he said: 'The internet is now the information resource of first resort for millions of readers.'
If that's true then it's a huge change _ and we have some work to do! Even before the Internet Archive and Alexa I was involved with WAIS - Wide Area Information Servers, which was the first internet publishing system. I subscribe to Raj Reddy's idea that we have the 'opportunity to build universal access to human knowledge'. " [at The Guardian, via Tomalak's Realm & Meryl]
Here's my favorite quote, though, that I'm going to steal:
"The net's graduated from being exciting to being an appendage to my brain."
10:53:24 PM Permanent link here
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More IM fun: When Bots Collide, an Inverted Turing Test [at Fimoculous, via Boing Boing]
"My Valentine's Day present to all of you is love tale between two robots. Today, I built a little program that allows two IM robots to talk to each other. Incessantly, without human interaction. They chit-chatted all day, holding marvelous conversations between their IM windows. I only peaked in occasionally, and I can tell you that they're still verbally feeling each other out. Admitedly, there's still some tension, but I have hopes for this couple -- I expect baby bots in a few months. It's truly beautiful: an intimate exchange of language, privately held by two responsible, nearly-sentient beings. I chose SmarterChild (IM) and RingMessenger (IM) for the tête-à-tête. They're still flirting away, but here's how it started:"
RingMessenger: *sigh* This is no good. Please say you are sorry, and we can continue on our paths.
SmarterChild: Okay, sorry..
RingMessenger: Thank you! I accept..
SmarterChild: You're most welcome..
RingMessenger: Very well!.
SmarterChild: Well well well..
RingMessenger: Well well well, you say?.
SmarterChild: Well well well you say, you say?.
RingMessenger: Well well well you say you say, you say?.
SmarterChild: Well well well you say you say you say, you say?.
RingMessenger: Well well well you say you say you say you say, you say?.
SmarterChild: Enough..
RingMessenger: What about enough?.
SmarterChild: "Enough" can mean different things to me..
RingMessenger: I reckon I will have to think about that for awhile.
10:46:15 PM Permanent link here
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"Chris has a great weblog about Interactive TV." [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
Ditto the link to this blog. I love PVRs, so I'll be adding yet another RSS feed to my news aggregator. He's got a link to Time's article The Pirates of Prime Time.
"The reason Sonicblue got sued is that the new Replay 4000, which hit the market in late November and sold out before Christmas, automatically fast-forwards shows past commercials and lets broadband users send them to friends over the Internet. (TiVos do not offer these features.) An independent site called Planet Replay even helps match up people who want to trade shows.
For now, though, Replay-to-Replay show swapping is painfully slow. Software engineer Thomas Wagner, 32, who has three Replay boxes at home, says it took him eight hours to get a half-hour episode of the now defunct show The Tick from another user, even though he has a high-speed cable modem. But he figures all that will change as the technology improves.
And if the industry tries to go after individuals like Chaplin, it will probably be an uphill battle. According to Forrester Research, personal video recorders will be in 40% of all U.S. households by 2006. Until better encryption or industry-ordained alternatives give consumers legitimate ways to watch any show, anytime--without bothering to set the VCR--pirating and trading are bound to flourish. Even then, concedes TiVo president Morgan Gunther, "nothing is unhackable." While soap operas and sitcoms may not be getting any smarter, our ways of watching them almost certainly will."
10:38:15 PM Permanent link here
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Dazzle 6-in-1 USB Card Reader for $21 after rebate (updated)
"Mac Zone renewed its stock of the Dazzle 6-in-1 USB Card Reader, which reads CompactFlash, SmartMedia, IBM Microdrive, Secure Digital, Memory Stick, and MultiMedia Card formats, for $40.99. A $20 mail-in rebate, good through February 28, trims the net price to $20.99. It's still the least expensive multi-reader we've seen. Shipping starts at $5. Update: a reader reports compatibility with Mac OS X and iPhoto." [via Boing Boing]
I made sure I ordered mine before posting this! Actually, with the shipping cost and tax it's more like $29.99, but I'm not quibbling. Don't be put off by the Mac shop selling this... it also runs on Windows 98/ME/2000. This will come in mighty handy.
10:29:28 PM Permanent link here
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The Project and the Expedition
"Lately I've been reading Stephen Ambrose's book about the Lewis and Clark expedition. The project began with an enormous amount of training and planning. The sponsor (Thomas Jefferson) and the project manager (Lewis) worked together preparing the requirements. They knew they would have to rely on a lot of exploratory testing. Lewis pieced together the right people to make up the team. They were experts in eXtreme programming. After each iteration, the manager and comanager (Clark) constantly revised the development plans. Many of the initial requirements proved naive and unworkable.
They struggled through the lifecycle like a keel boat pushing upstream through uncharted territory. Ultimately, good project management proved flexible enough to adapt to every development, while keeping the interests of the sponsor as the central priority. The final product didn't have precisely the same set of features initially envisioned, the deadline was pushed back about a year, but all concerned were well pleased with the outcome. The retrospective conducted by the sponsor (they didn't have facilitators in this role yet) revealed that, given all the unexpected developments (scope creep), it would be hard to improve on any aspect of the project." [via meryl's notes]
Don't you just wonder how it all would have turned out if they'd used Microsoft Project for this? If you're quiet enough, you can hear my colleagues at SLS laughing, laughing, laughing....
10:04:43 PM Permanent link here
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Hossein, Mr. YACCS himself, was kind enough to note to me that the Javascript code I was using to provide the "Open links in new window" option was making YACCS pop up two windows instead of one. Even better, he pointed me to a workaround that uses Javascript code from RandomWalks instead. I've switched over to using that script, so please let me know if you experience any problems with it, especially you Mac users that visit with IE 5.1 Thanks!
Also, I have a lot of posts I want to blog tonight, and I'm actually very tired, so no new documentation tonight. I'll try to get back to it on Saturday and make up the difference. However, I will add a note to the YACCS tutorial regarding the above problem and fix.
9:40:42 PM Permanent link here
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Radio Bump pointed me to AmphetaDesk, which is a news aggregator similar to Radio's. I'm going to have to start exploring this soon because at the ILA RTSF meeting and the tech summit next week, I want to have documentation ready for the best product to emulate Radio's aggregator. I want everyone to have it is as easy as I do, in part so that I can get them to understand how we could implement RSS feeds across libraries, especially within Illinois. Plus, I think my Dad would really like this stuff.
So I know Eric thinks the NewsIsFree aggregator is the cat's meow. I'm also going to look at Meerkat and NewzCrawler, What other programs should I consider?
9:24:14 PM Permanent link here
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FBI to Issue 5-Day Terror Forecasts
"Abandoning the last-minute, panic-inducing warning system it has used until now, the FBI today said it will begin issuing regular, five-day terror forecasts. Today's outlook: light, scattered terrorism early, tapering off by noon. Tomorrow: Clear, and seasonably dangerous.
According to U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, the forecasts will serve as a more consistent, and less frightening, reminder that Americans should stay vigilant, while the familiar, five-day format should make it much easier to plan ahead." [at SatireWire, via Doc Searls]
8:36:33 PM Permanent link here
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You just haven't lived until you've heard a 7-year old girl and a 4-year old girl singing Britney Spears' "Oops I did it again" in the back seat. Trust me.
8:23:39 PM Permanent link here
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Windows Media aware of DVDs watched
"In a Web advisory, computer privacy and security consultant Richard Smith detailed what he termed 'a number of serious privacy problems' with the Windows Media Player for the Windows XP operating system.
The posting flagged a feature that allows Microsoft to log what DVDs play on a particular PC through the use of an electronic tracking file known as a 'cookie.' Smith went on to criticize the Windows Media privacy policy, which as of Tuesday did not disclose the DVD reporting feature. In response, Microsoft said that it had changed its privacy policy Wednesday morning." [News.com]
Big Brother Bill is watching you....
8:22:56 PM Permanent link here
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Sorry, I should have been clearer about the Acrobat eForms thing. We're still a heavily paper-based organization, especially for communication with our members. Since we're already producing so many forms in Word, I'd like to just serve them up online without having to do any coding or editing. I want one-click publishing of PDFs that can be filled out online and submitted. So if you have any ideas for how to do this other than Acrobat or if you have experience with Acrobat's eForms, I'd love to hear about it!
6:01:42 PM Permanent link here
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Here's the great thing about the Web and blogging. I followed a link from Dave Winer to Daniel Berlinger's Archipelago blog for a review of Six Degrees. SD sounds very interesting, and I'd like to try it out, except I don't have a Mac or Windows 2000 or XP. But reading Archipelago got me this most excellent quote from Zimran:
"If music was available at marginal cost, total good to society would be $25,740M, all of it going to consumers. As things stand, society only gets $22,890, split evenly between producers and consumers. There's a dead weight loss (i.e. money that's burnt to collect this "tax") of $2,857M. This means that market for music is $2,857M smaller than it would be in an efficient market. This is equivalent to a copyright tax rate of about 12% (income tax efficiency is about 20% I think). So, for CDs, you can claim each additional year of copyright costs society $2,857M in dead weight loss.
But this is just for a single year. Copyright currently lasts for authors life plus 70 years (and counting). So, let's treat this as a 140 year annuity of $2,857M at a 5% discount rate. Calculating the present value gives you: 19.978 * $2,857M = $57,078M. This is the present value of the cost to society of a 140 year copyright tax. Coming back to Valenti, if this was increased to 1000 years, it would cost society approximately the same amount, since costs that far in the future are so deeply discounted they fall to zero (i.e. present value multiplier at 1000 years = present value multiplier at infinite years = 20).
So from a financial standpoint, the length of copyright currently might as well be infinite, as it costs society approximately that much. This clearly goes against the "for limited duration" section in the constitution. So when someone asks you "who does extending copyright hurt?" you can answer "everyone, to a tune of about $3B a year just for music."
Complete with graph and all, makes a great printout for presentations. Being a good netizen, I backed up to zimran's main page at winterspeak.com and found way too much stuff to list here, so I'll just encourage you to check out the site for yourself.
I also scrolled down further on Archipelago and found a link to Mark Pilgrim's Accessibility Statement, which should be a model for all of us, especially public entity sites.
Then I added Archipelago to my news aggregator. :-)
3:47:11 PM Permanent link here
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AvantGo weeds out custom channel 'abuse'
"Avantgo, the PDA content provider, is to start charging for custom channels with more than eight subscribers, in a move to stamp out business use. The change in Ts&Cs takes place tomorrow, February 20, and is expected to affect thousands of businesses. [...] Custom channel charges for eight users and below remain free. From nine to 100 users, annual charges are set at $1,000 a year; 101-500 users $4,000; 501-1000 -$6,000." [The End of Free]
So the AvantGo change makes The End of Free, and now it's official. I understand wanting to stop abuses by "big businesses," but obviously they can monitor this so why can't they weed out the bad guys. Maybe they shouldn't have to, I hear you asking... but what about all of the non-profits and amateur sites that were using this service. How many thousands of users did we send AvantGo's way, and now they want to charge us a minimum of $1,000 if you have a fielded baseball team subscribe to your channel (that's less than nine people, for our international friends). Here's something for us to investigate though:
"Pocket PC Thoughts, a forum site which estimates that it has 8,000 subscribers to its Avantgo channel, says it will no longer offer Avantgo, as the fees are too high. It recommends instead Mazingo. 'Despite it's quirks and rough edges, Mazingo is the best solution for getting this site onto your device,' it says. ® "
It may be a while before I get to play with Mazingo (hey, I do have to work some times), so if you get to it first, give me a holler. I'd love to hear your evaluation of it.
2:03:06 PM Permanent link here
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One of the things I've been proposing for my Library System, probably via grant money, is to get us set up to support our members filling out Adobe Acrobat Electronic Forms in the browser and submitting them to us directly online. As with so much in my life, I know this can be done but I have only a vague idea of how. I'm sure it involved lots of money, though. I figure once we have this set up, we can in turn offer it as a hosted service for our members so that they could let their patrons fill in program registration forms, ILL requests, meeting room requests, etc., online. We'd have the all of the software and hardware on our end, so they wouldn't have to worry about maintaining their own little technical nightmares.
So as I said, I know this can be done, but I can't find a live, working example of it. If you know of one that I could actually demo at next week's Tech Summit, or if you have any experience doing this, please let me know!
12:12:50 PM Permanent link here
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Library: the Most Powerful Tool on the Planet
"I used to live a 15 minute walk from a University Library. It had 2 million volumes and took several dozen newspapers, journals, and magazines from around the world. It had copies of the New York Times dating back into the 1800s. It had databases full of millions of articles from reputable peer reviewed magazines and journals, and 'summaries' of even more articles. Moving away from this library has drastically changed my ability to think about and reason about issues, for the worse." [kuro5hin.org]
While this is a great diatribe about missing university library services, it doesn't mention the librarians themselves once. turmeric looks up all this stuff himself, which is good because we've taught him to feed himself, rather than giving him a fish. But let's not forget that none of those services would be there without the librarians. So maybe we should say that librarians truly are the most powerful people on the planet!
"This town I am in has a public library, in fact it has about 15 or 20 of them spread out in different branches. They have lots of books about home electrical repair, second rate novels, time, and national geographic. But they are nowhere close to a real university library, where the true and important ideas of the 'people who run the world' are layed out for the public to see.
Out here, I have no way to analyze the ownership relationships between companies, to dig up 10 year old articles on the beginning of an organization or the history of an individual, out here I have no access to the books that make revolutions, I merely have access to oodles of 'second hand material' off of the internet."
Well, his public library has failed to give him a fish or teach him to feed himself because most likely it does have access to FirstSearch or something similar. In Illinois, the State Library has been wise enough to provide free access to FS for every resident. That's right... every resident, and other state libraries do this, too. We just don't do such a good job letting those residents know about this (another reason for LibraryU). Providing remote access is another issue we have to deal with. My home library did it by using an authentication script to provide the login and password. Now they just have to do a better job of advertising it.
And I doubt there's anything turmeric's old university library could ILL that a public library can't. If there's a small fee, well... he was paying those fees mixed in with his tuition, right? In SLS, we charge three-measly-freaking dollars for a book from anywhere outside of Illinois. I hope his home library sees this commentary and let's him know he still has a great library in his backyard.
11:27:11 AM Permanent link here
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Amazon Easter Egg
"Amazon Easter Egg --Click on "Directory of All Stores" near the bottom, then scroll down to the copyright notice at the bottom. Under the "1996" is an invisible link which will take you to the farewell page for one of their employees." [MeFi]
10:13:54 AM Permanent link here
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Not sure how I missed this one before now, but here you go. FBI in Libraries and Bookstores: Eyeing What You Read by Nat Hentoff [via Dave Farber's IP list]
"Chris Finan's letter to the country's booksellers continues: 'The judge makes his decision 'ex parte,' meaning there is no opportunity for you or your lawyer to object in court. You cannot object publicly, either. The new law includes a gag order that prevents you from disclosing 'to any other person' the fact that you have received an order to produce documents.' (Emphasis added.)
Here's a prelude to next week's library warnings. The Capital Times quotes Barbara Dimick, director of the Madison Public Library. She says: 'We want to be able to tell people who use the library that records are confidential, and they can use materials without fear of intimidation. That's being usurped now by federal agents. . . . We're all real jittery about it.' "
There should be another article containing advice for librarians soon so if you see it before I do, please let me know! Note the last sentence of this article:
"Where are the newspaper editorials and reports on television and radio about this beheading of the First Amendment right to read?"
See previous post listed below.
9:59:19 AM Permanent link here
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20-somethings Fleeing Papers for the Web
"Among internet users in their twenties, the ritual of sitting down with the morning paper is gradually being displaced by a new routine: logging on for news. People in the 20 to 29 age bracket are bypassing print newspapers for their online editions, according to a recent study from Forrester Research.
Compared to older web users, wired twenty-somethings are 43 percent more likely to consider the internet to be the best place to get up-to-date information. They’re also 24 percent more likely to consider the internet the best source of the most in-depth information. Also, web-savvy people in their twenties are 75 percent more likely than older web users to prefer the internet as a source of information such as news and classified ads...." [at Media Life, via SLS What's GNU]
What do they mean just focusing on twenty-somethings? Hello, we thirty-somethings have been experiencing this even longer. I know I don't read print newspapers anymore, mainly due to issues of timeliness (think how long it took to read about September 11 in print), a focus on content that is too narrow (lots of stories about cars, but little about books, Web sites, etc.), fluff (a story about my neighbor's dog, but no in-depth reporting on the Middle East), a decision to appeal to the lowest common denominator, and single-viewpoint journalism (why international papers are so much better than American ones). So this isn't a new phenomenon.
"The study's findings, coupled with the enduringly dismal online ad-sales climate, also suggest that it’s inevitable that more web sites will begin charging for content."
I read blogs now, not print magazines or newspapers. I get better commentary, better perspectives, and links to material for further reading. I notice some newspapers are starting to incorporate blogs, and that's one way to get me coming to your site. Of course, hosing all of your archives (like the SJ Mercury News did to Dan Gillmor) alienates me, but newspapers used to be king because they were objective and had experts. Now, they're not so objective anymore (witness the dearth of criticism of Bush, Ashcroft, and Cheney in print versus online), and I can find better experts online. If the newspapers can remember their role in our society, translate their missions to the Web, and start using those experts to blog, then they'll get me back as a reader.
Wouldn't it be cool if newspapers and libraries teamed up to provide bib- and Web-liographies for important subjects to complement blogs by newspaper columnists? For example, I recently completed a very tardy, but I think handy for the future, tutorial about Researching September 11 Events and Terrorism. If a local newspaper had worked with me on this, we could have integrated their relevant articles into the tutorial. We would have publicized the collaborative effort to our patrons and to libraries, thereby driving traffic to their site, and they would have had a valuable link on their Web site for further information. Same thing with a meningitis scare in my local community last fall. See, we librarians are more valuable than you think we are.
See that wall around you, Mr. Print Media. That's called a box. Think outside of it.
9:39:36 AM Permanent link here
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Huygens' Clock Puzzle Solved
"PhotoGuy writes 'Okay, I haven't heard of this puzzle either until now, but it sounds like a fascinating phenomenon. According to this article: Huygens had two clocks side by side and he found that even when they began out of sync, they soon got into a rhythm where the pendulum on one moved as if it were a mirror image of the other. The article is pretty light on the explanation, noting only the conditions required (small relative mass of the pendulums [pendula?], relatively close speed of the clocks), and not really addressing the physics behind it.' There's a great site at Georgia Tech that explains the puzzle in more detail."[Slashdot]
More reading for tonight.
7:56:05 AM Permanent link here
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In regards to last night's How to Add the YACCS Commenting Service doc I wrote, Hossein notes: "By the way, you might have noticed that your "open links in a new window" script causes YACCS to launch an extra blank window when you click on the comment link. There is a message board post here that explains how to fix this problem. It might be helpful when writing your "how to add the 'open links in a new window' script."
Actually, <red-faced> I hadn't noticed, so thank you Hossein! I'll add it to the doc tonight. </red-faced>
7:52:16 AM Permanent link here
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Resources for doing layout with CSS.
"I've been slowly building a list of resources for doing layout with CSS, which may be of interest to site developers. Many of these links are culled from glish and the css-discuss list." [via ia/]
There's been lots of flaming and name-calling in the recent CSS vs. tables debate, but this is exactly why it's important to ask questions, be open to new ideas, and try new things. In addition to starting the debate, Dave has done all of these things, so kudos to him. Out of all the good and bad reactions he's gotten come wonderful resources like this one from Michael Angeles. Not that there weren't already hundreds of other resources out there, but this is why the Web (and blogging in particular) is so great - the breadth of discussion that can take place is amazing... it raises everyone's consciousness, brings in experts and newbies, and can provide a method for resolution, something we find all too infrequently in the real world.
7:48:27 AM Permanent link here
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© Copyright 2004 Jenny Levine.
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