Friday, June 20, 2003

Source: Curiouser and curiouser!; 6/20/2003; 9:02:03 AM Jon Thorne: Resourcing your knowledge intiative. Jon's session was very hands-on, group activity based so I don't really have notes.  This will be from memory. Jon's thesis is that it is much easier to get a KM initiative funded if you focus on the benefits of your work rather than the approaches used or the specifics of the technology or situation.  He recommends to focus on the pain and outline the golden future without that pain.  This resonated for me with the Geoffrey Moore 'Leaky Pipes' stuff I was thinking about a little while ago. What he then did was to outline a situation in a major corporation with an aproximately $9bn turnover.  They had moved from a situation of being very country focused with 30 brands in each country to a single set of brands across all countries.  Bringing everything together like this created a somewhat chaotic situation in their IT systems.  One example might be HR people inputting data on a tuesday which would be required for a payroll run on a monday. Jon's challenge to us was to come up with a 5 minute or less pitch to the CEO of this company to persude him to fund an initiative addressing this problem.  He further came up with a list of banned phrases including all the usual suspects like knowledge, collaboration, communities of practice, solution, forums, etc... We split into 3 groups with about 20 minutes to discuss our proposals.  I must admit that, at this point, I was highly skeptical of the exercise.  It just seemed a ridiculous thing to expect us to do this in 20 minutes.  However we discussed it and came up with something we hoped was short, punchy and to the point. I think we were close, we delivered a 44 second pitch, but we did spend some time restating the problem.  Another group were closer than us and got within a hairs breadth of the real solution (since this was a real case study) which was: We'll deliver the right information, first time, every time. Now that's a real elevator pitch! I guess somewhere around here I was having an "ah ha!" moment that made this a very worthwhile experience for me.  If a business is going to be investing in KM it has to be on the basis of meaningful results.  I realised that over the last year I have drifted away from that too far.  When the inner workings are fascinating to you it can be hard to realise that others don't share your opinion. It's been quite a thought provoking experience. [Curiouser and curiouser!] 11:38:16 AM    trackback []     Articulate []

Source: Wizbang; 6/20/2003; 8:46:51 AM Kevin Aylward has some great ideas here: Principles I Blog By These are the principles I blog by. I'm not trying to preach or convert, just offing some food for thought. There are as many different ways to blog as there are bloggers. These principles work for me, your mileage may vary... Blogrolling I decided early on that I would not overtly request another blog add me to their blogroll. I blogroll the blogs I read frequently and hope that some percentage, upon reading my work, would return the favor. So far this approach works for me, as it does not place the other blogger in the awkward situation of having to decline making a reciprocal link. I would love to be on the blogroll of some more of the top blogs, but I've found that not asking works for me. Eventually I win them over the old fashion way : hard work, good posts, and gratuitous linkage. Return Favors When Possible As I previously mentioned, I blogroll what I read, but I also blogroll sites that blogroll me. With a ranking around 200 on the Ecosphere I am now in the position to help other bloggers out by linking to them. Since I enjoyed Bill Quick's Daily Pundit free for all, I put the comments section at Wizbang inline with the posts. This creates, in my mind, the potential for a running discussion and adds to the site's interactivity. Like OTB I want to recognize sites that add Wizbang to their blogroll or refer a lot of traffic my way. I do link to stories on other sites as well, but I know that if someone blogrolls me, they will be recognized here. Evolve Your Choice Of Topics By that I mean that I am not immediately inclined to create a post about every major news story that crosses the wire. There are other sites that specialize in that. A couple of items a day catch my fancy or cause me to consider things long since forgotten. Knowing your own strengths and weaknesses as a writer is very helpful. Establish Boundaries That You Won't Cross My posts have gotten more personal, but that is because there are things I have wanted to say, but I needed the right time and context to say them. It helps when thinking of topics to have a base of what is and is not off limits. Return Early Favors Done For You When I first started out a few big name bloggers responded to my promotion attempts. Some linked my posts and others engaged me in conversation. I voraciously read posts on other sites covering the do's and don'ts or blogging. I wanted to know what others thought was (or was not) proper behavior in this community. One conclusion I reached was that it is good form to promote that which you find worthy of promotion. If I ever become a big name blogger I'm not going to let it go to my head, I will engage as many beginning bloggers as my time will allow. Do What You Can To Improve The Blogosphere I found some areas of the blogosphere had been underserved or not addressed at all. I set about using my extremely limited programming skills and imagination to create the Running List of BlogSpot Defectors and the Stand Alone Trackback Pinger. Both of these projects attempt to address a deficiency in portions of the blogosphere. If you are not technically inclined, do help publicize efforts you find useful. Be Interesting This is more of a personal item. I try to maintain an interesting stream of posts. What is of interest to me may not be of interest to you - but at least you will know that upcomming posts will have been found interesting by one person: Me. More than once I've written and discarded a post because what started as a good idea turned into an uninteresting post. Well there you go... [Wizbang] 9:05:10 AM    trackback []     Articulate []

Source: Wizbang; 6/20/2003; 8:46:52 AM One Last Trackback Gift I've updated the Wizbang Stand Alone Trackback Pinger to accept input from a bookmarklet. The original post describing the need for this kind of tool is here. Wizbang Trackback Bookmarklet Installation: 1) Drag the link below to your toolbar. Wizbang Trackback 2) Say yes to any security warnings. 3) You're done. Usage Directions: 1) View the item you on your site that you want to send a trackback to another blog about. If you want your the target blog readers to be able to jump right to your post, make sure you are viewing the permalink version of the post. 2) Select the text you want to send in the trackback ping. 3) Click on the Wizbang Trackback bookmarklet link in your toolbar 4) The trackback form should be populated with your permalink URL, blog name, and the selected text in the excerpt box. 5) You will need to cut and paste the trackback URL and your post title into the form - sorry I can't do everything for you :-) 6) Submit Cool, huh? Enjoy! Let me know if you have any problems with this... [Wizbang] 8:58:21 AM    trackback []     Articulate []

Source: Second p0st; 6/20/2003; 7:34:10 AM Radio post indices. Rogers Cadenhead has written some UserTalk code to display an index of posts on your Radio weblog. I did something like this a while back (ported from the bzero version on request from Kevin Altis) but never tidied it up for release. But here it is from Rogers, with the useful feature that you can get it to just index one category! Nice. Comment [Second p0st] 8:12:00 AM    trackback []     Articulate []