Friday, July 19, 2002

John Robb is also beginning to think about using different terminology: Knowledge Sharing. A new buzzword that makes a lot more sense that Knowledge Management. 9:51:22 PM

I spent some time over lunch experimenting with my new "ultra-portable" (my Palm m500 with a portable keyboard). I'd started typing up an idea for a story. Probably fifteen minutes into it I was ready to save. Looked in the menu and couldn't find anything. Double-checked the familiar "Ctrl+S" keyboard shortcut. Nothing. Started to get worried: what if I couldn't save my prose? And then it dawned on me: on a handheld, you don't have to "save" your work. It's always saved, all the time. What a refreshing reminder of how accustomed we've become to the process of saving our work on computers, of the fear that we might accidentally lose hours if we're not constantly clicking on "save." What an artificial construct. When you put pen to paper, you don't need to periodically save your work. Get out an old typewriter and bang on the keys. Slap some paint on canvas. Carve wood. None of these activities require you to "save" your work. I'm looking forward to returning to that world. 6:38:20 PM

Excellent essay by Malcom Gladwell (author of The Tipping Point) on The Talent Myth. Thanks to Mark for the link. The broader failing of McKinsey and its acolytes at Enron is their assumption that an organization's intelligence is simply a function of the intelligence of its employees. They believe in stars, because they don't believe in systems. In a way, that's understandable, because our lives are so obviously enriched by individual brilliance. Groups don't write great novels, and a committee didn't come up with the theory of relativity. But companies work by different rules. They don't just create; they execute and compete and coordinate the efforts of many different people, and the organizations that are most successful at that task are the ones where the system is the star. 11:14:38 AM

Mark brings a close to thirty days of usability improvements. 7:40:49 AM

Tested out some of the links in the right-hand bar. Many lead away, but I've tried working around a Radio shortcoming by providing direct links to my "stories." Turned out that, for some reason, my blogroll.opml file (which I use to maintain said list of links) had lopped the ".html" from the end of several links. In other words, most of them were broken. I'll have to check on this later, to see if they break again. 12:00:24 AM