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Friday, April 05, 2002 |
Knowledge management: can information be counterproductive? [via The Shifted Librarian] "Over time, this knowledge hardens into opinion and attitude." Oh yea, we've seen our share of this. Hardening arteries can slow down the heart's effectiveness and kill a patient; hardening attitudes can slow down a KM implementation and kill an organization's will to participate. See if you can start by finding the right influencers. Ones who are also open-minded. Influencers who are not open-minded can will find enough excuses ('it won't work because...') with which to fill people's minds - and those excuses will become self-fulfilling prophesies. [Steven Vore: KM]
5:14:05 PM 
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Law Is Free
"After following the initial progress of the Radio community, I've come to believe that this type of web publishing will have a widespread and drastic effect on the development of the law. By changing the way court opinions are published, I believe the law itself can be transformed in the same way that web publishing has transformed software and news content....
An increasing number of excellent practicing WV attorneys have told me recently that they are cancelling their subscriptions to commercial electronic legal publishers. Why? Two reasons. First, because all the content is already available, and searchable, directly from the source itself, right on the Web, from the day the decisions are released. What's more, a service I started last year delivers short topical summaries of all opinions filed via e-mail. This simple idea has real power to attorneys, who have repeatedly praised this service.
The point -- law is free. So now that courts have the power to deliver content themselves, why aren't they doing it? Well many are at least posting decision on their respective Web sites. And there are movements afoot to create common markup standards for court decisions. But why not take the next step? My guess is that the right technological answer hasn't been available yet. But with the advent of XML-RPC, SOAP, and DIY Web Services, I think the landscape is changing radically. Here's what I believe would change the law itself radically: Make the points of law in court decisions available as a "feed" on a macro scale -- attorneys and interested members of the public could subscribe to various topical channels of a "legal" aggregator, made up of original source contributors (courts), and open source-webloggian-legal commentators. Nothing like this is really happening now, as far as I know. (Free legal publishing sites like Findlaw simply re-post the static content made available from the various states.) That's the germ of the idea. And what I want to do with it is use Radio to create a legal feed, then see where these ideas go." [Rory Perry]
I have to say... lawyers are really running with this blogging thing. I've learned more about the law during the last couple of months than I have in years. I'm very impressed with Rory's idea - he's shifting legal information. He's even using Radio on the West Virginia's Office of the Clerk site. Ernest and Rory would be quite the dynamic duo.
Hey Bruce - got blog? [The Shifted Librarian]
5:09:42 PM
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Web Database Applications with PHP & MySQL. Web Database Applications with PHP and MySQL offers web developers a mixture of theoretical and practical information on creating web database applications. Using PHP and MySQL, two open source technologies that are often combined to develop web applications, the book offers detailed information on designing relational databases and on web application architecture, both of which will be useful to readers who have never dealt with these issues before. The book also introduces Hugh and Dave's Online Wine Store, a complete (but fictional) online retail site implemented using PHP and MySQL. [O'Reilly Safari]
5:06:53 PM
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Wheels Within Wheels I've been talking to quite a few people about the whole intersection of wikis, blogs and outliners over the last few days. Bill Seitz, who writes his Blog within a wiki talks about viewing wiki pages as OPML. Ken MacLeod has created a Blog macro for MoinMoin. Aaron of Montreal has created OTLML for Outliner Markup to help address some of the perceived shortcomings in OPML. Chris and Earl over at Vanilla have also been doing some interesting work on WikiLogs. But, I have to say, a lot of this disturbs me somewhat. In particular, I'm not convinced by the idea of blogging within a wiki. I think a wiki works best in DocumentMode, where the information is truly collectively owned, and the incremental tweaks of many visitors create a coherent whole. ThreadMode, on the other hand, where each person merely adds their thoughts rather than shaping the collective consensus, makes it much more difficult to follow, with many of the dead-ends, sidetracks, and disagreements that are so prevalent on mailing lists or usenet. In "conversation mode", weblogs, although a stage removed from mailing lists etc, still require an interested party to follow many avenues of investigation and thought. This is not a bad thing. But a wiki can be more than that. It represents a consensus of opinion (even when there is no consensus!) It's the summary of many conversations. Eventually most ThreadMode wiki pages are expected to be refactored into DocumentMode. And, in "history mode", weblogs are a useful record of your thoughts and ideas over time. In many ways they should be sacrosanct. Editing an entry from several months or years ago to reflect your current thinking is bad form. So I'm starting to see almost a progression path - from outline to blog to wiki. It's already happening at one level with some of the people publishing their outlines. Dave Winer promotes thoughts from his instant outline to his Scripting News weblog - presumably ones which he believes deserve a wider readership. The bigger, more widely relevant(?) issues, he writes up into DaveNet pieces, where he can craft more coherent whole articles. Some people's "end of line" publishing is to a page which enables readers to add comments (ThreadMode). However, by replacing that final step with publishing to a Wiki, in Document mode, you can truly release your thoughts, allowing the community to tweak, adapt and extend your ideas in a wholly different way. This is the power of a wiki. But, to twist back to the beginning, I'm starting to see real value in wiki pages, once settled in Document Mode, being expressed as outlines. The ability to see the main points at a glance, and drill down for the information you want, is invaluable. So, in some ways, an outline is both the best start point and the best end point. But to make that progression I believe that the information needs to be freed from the inherent constraints of outlining. I'm sure there are parallels for this elsewhere, but I can't think of any right now ... [Tony Bowden's Radio Weblog]
4:54:16 PM
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I had forgotten all about this resource until this week's Neat New Stuff on the Net by "librarian without walls" Marylaine Block pointed out the fantastic E-book Library for MS Reader and Palm Devices at the University of Virginia's Electronic Text Center. The PDA collection is 1600 strong, all of which are searchable and somewhat browsable by subject. They also list the Top 20 "Bestsellers" and even Staff Picks. Note, too, that Palm users can read these titles using the free Palm Reader or iSilo Free, not just AportisDoc.
I downloaded Stories to Tell to Children: Fifty-One Stories With Some Suggestions for Telling, written in 1907 by Sara Cone Bryant for the next time we're at the doctor's office.
Librarians could easily incorporate links to specific titles into class reading lists, homework help sites, and webliographies. If you're a school librarian, work with your teachers to get their reading lists and then post the links to these on your site. If you're a public librarian, work with the school librarians to point to, mirror, or create these lists on your site. Don't duplicate effort, but do collaborate to make the access as easy as possible for your patrons. If you run out of copies for a class assignment, point the kids to this site (and Project Gutenberg) because they have web-based versions, too. [The Shifted Librarian]
4:48:31 PM
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Exactly 
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I'm sick and tired of these discussion board pukes hiding behind the veil of community as they trash someone with enough balls to be a public figure. |
What's the value of a relationship? Or vice versa?
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In the front-loaded economy, there is a case for consumers to expect goods and services for free. Consumers--who think that they should be able to swap songs for free, use pirated software, or obtain medicines at a competitive price without paying a markup to patent holders--are not entirely wrong. The most efficient allocation of goods and services is obtained when the price is equal to marginal cost--and if the marginal cost is zero, so be it. |
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This addresses threats to the existing intellectual property distribution system by suggesting some constructive new solutions. Which is fine. But it's also econo-jive (to me, at least). And I think the answer can't come just from the supply side, or from government. It has to come from respect for the powers of real customers in real market relationships. So forgive me for going into a perhaps unrelated rant: |
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I am not a fucking consumer. I am a paying customer. I have bought thousands of dollars worth of music and other recorded goods over many years, and would gladly continue to do that, if there were a real marketplace that allowed it. The Net creates a necessary but insufficient founding condition for that marketplace. And the entertainment industry wants to fuck that up because they see real market relationships as a threat to the old unbalanced producer/consumer power advantage (which isn't a relationship at all) that they've enjoyed since the Harding Administration. |
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I mean "real marketplace" literally: a bazaar. Not a category, a demographic, a region any of the other nouns for which "market" provides a handy but misleading synonym. |
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In a real bazaar, the supply side doesn't set all the conditions by which demand may behave. That's what we've had for roughly the entire history of the entertainment industry. That industry's incumbent supply side wants those conditions to persist, even though their advantages have been diminished by the bazaar-supporting commons that the Internet creates. So, instead of welcoming these new conditions in an opportunistic way, this ossified old industry wants their departed power advantages restored by force of law. Well, excuse me: fuck that. |
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Let's look at what the demand side of this market would want if the means were there for creating and sustaining the customer-vendor relationships that make markets what they are. |
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Let's imagine being able to engage the first sources of music and other forms of entertainment on a direct, a la carte basis. Imagine paying for everything you listen to on the radio on the same basis, knowing that most of what you were paying for went back to the originators of those musical selections and those programs, with a fair handling fee for the intermediaries. Imagine what happens when the means are in place for passive consumers to become active customers. |
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That's what we need to create. The Net is just the beginning. Now we have to build out the rest of it. If the entertainment hegemonizers can't take the lead in this thing, they need to follow or get out of the fucking way. |
Ground zero for a you-heard-it-here-first
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I listened tonight to a demo CD of Venice Cameron, a singer from Toronto who happens to be the daughter of my hosts here in Seattle. This wasn't one of those "listen to my kid" moments (though technically, I suppose it was). Venice's parents are brilliant folks and serious artists in their own rights, among other things. Anyway, I had no idea. She's almost unbelievably good. I was completely blown away. Her songs are terrific, and her singing is by turns soulful, playful, acrobatic and wise — with an operatic vocal range . And she's just twenty-one or something. |
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I just looked her up on Google and found this page that the producer John Jones put up (as a blog, I guess) a couple months ago. He's done Duran Duran, Celine Dion, Fleetwood Mac... No wonder it's so beautifully done. |
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So keep your ears piqued. |
Just in time to miss the Olympics by like, two months or something
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Jerry Kindall, another local up here in Seattle, notes that the new OmniWeb for OS X is out. I've been using the last version for several days now and on the whole I've been liking it. Looking forward to trying the new version on a couple of the sites the old one wouldn't parse. Like Xo's for example. Will he popdown menus work on the page? The Customer Care heading on the index page, for example, has a popdown menu that shows in other browsers but not in OmniWeb. Still: a quibble. |
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Today I head for Salt Lake City for a weekend of skiing with the family (first time in 6 years). Then work again. | [Doc Searls Weblog]
4:43:29 PM
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© Copyright 2002 Mark Oeltjenbruns.
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