Paul Holbrook: Noted

Boxes and Arrows Favorite books

Wed, 22 Jan 2003 01:00:44 GMT

I adore book lists, especially ones that are more like annotated bibliographies. The web design journal Boxes and Arrows published a wonderfully eclectic list of their favorite books for 2002.

Knowledge hording

Tue, 10 Sep 2002 04:25:35 GMT

Digging deeper into knowledge hoarding.

Something tells my intuition that we're not framing things correctly when we get wrapped up in discussions of the appropriate reward systems/incentives needed to encourage knowledge sharing. It's encouraging to see the beginnings of some research data, but I remain suspicious. I suspect that we still need to get a more nuanced understanding of knowledge work and knowledge sharing before we can draw any good conclusions. Right now, I think the reports we're getting are the same low quality data we'd get out of focus groups. I'd like to see some data on what people do about knowledge sharing as opposed to what they say.

Are Rewards the Answer?. Ernie and Rick correctly identify the problem within US law firms—the lack of motivation among lawyers to share their knowledge. There are many reasons, monetary and non-monetary, why lawyers are unwilling or reluctant to share their intellectual capital. To understand why this is, I believe you have to look at the intrinsic disincentives within US law firms, before you can even think about ways to incentivize lawyers.

Hazel Hall, Senior Lecturer in the School of Computing in Edinburgh, Scotland, has conducted some of the best knowledge sharing studies I've read to date. In Devising Intranet Incentives: Rewards and Conditions for Knowledge Exchange, Hall lists several oft-heard excuses for hoarding knowledge within organizations. Remarkably, they all sound similar to what lawyers say:

My time is better spent generating revenue for the firm
I'm too busy to learn how to use the technology
It's not my job
I'm not rewarded for it
I'm not measured on it
The work is confidential
Why should I willingly hand over my work product
I don't have anything of value to share
I share my knowledge in other ways
I like to work alone
What's in it for me?

In Sharing Capability: the Development of a Framework to Investigate Knowledge Sharing in Distributed Organizations, Hall discusses motivational incentives in the form of rewards (Note: the parenthetical references are mine).

Hard rewards (i.e., money):

financial rewards (salary, bonus, extra vacation days, laptops, Blackberries, etc.)
access to information and knowledge (sharing clients contacts)
career advancement (more interesting work, promotion to partner)

Soft rewards (i.e., ego)

enhanced reputation (being considered an expert in a practice group)
personal satisfaction (altruism, praise, flattery, etc.)

In order to encourage knowledge transfer within a law firm, the disincentives must be eliminated, or at the very least, substituted with some other motivational factor. That motivational factor just may be in the form of rewards.
[excited utterances]

Blog and other resources from Michalski.

Tech Bargains

Tue, 27 Aug 2002 03:46:04 GMT

TechBargains.com has - um - bargains on tech stuff. Looks useful; I'll try it the next time I have money to spend on tech stuff.

This page says that the folks who run this do this mostly as a labor of love. They do accept ads, and they do accept products for review, but they claim they aren't biased. In any case, the main feature of the site is factual information - who's selling what cheap for how long.

Blogging in education

Tue, 13 Aug 2002 15:32:25 GMT

Useful introduction to weblogs in education. I hate the name they gave to it: Edublogs. (On first glance, I thought they said Edublobs.)

Standards levels from Utah

Thu, 08 Aug 2002 01:31:01 GMT

Dreamweaver Standard.

The State of Utah is currently putting together a standards document that will help develop more coordination and interoperability between its departments. Guidance levels are defined as follows:

Approved: An Approved standard is critical to the Enterprise and will be enforced. The numbers of standards in this category will be minimal.

Best Practices: A Best Practices standard produces superior results for the enterprise.

Agencies are accountable to justify a departure from best practice standards.

De Facto: A De Facto standard identifies choices that are widely accepted because of widespread use within the enterprise whether or not they qualify for an actual Best Practices designation.

Sustained: A Sustained standard indicates a standard or practice that no longer shows

promise but is still used or even expanded because of a prior standards solution.

Migrate From: A Migrate From designation refers to a standard or practice that has been abandoned for a better solution. It is not a favored standard yet continues to be in use around the enterprise. Organizations should plan to migrate away from solutions assigned with this designation

Emerging: Emerging standards may have future value within the enterprise but have

proven no specific benefit at the time. The enterprise may be conducting a pilot project to establish the potential benefits and risks of selecting this standard.

A standard for web design and development has now been defined. Dreamweaver is listed as the defacto standard, although some agencies still use things like FrontPage. Standard web development kit items can be found on the State's Enterprise Development Group site. Matt Brown has put together an excellent Dreamweaver Blog.

[David Fletcher's Government and Technology Weblog]

Is a P133 is faster than a Cray 1?

Wed, 07 Aug 2002 19:12:09 GMT

http://www.apple.com/scitech/physicalscience/VE102501.pdf http://www.megafoundation.org/UltraHIQ/HIQNews/1996_Forecast.htm

Jon Udell on moving off radio userland

Wed, 07 Aug 2002 04:44:54 GMT

Jon Udell has written a note about moving his site from weblogs.com to Infoworld. [Jon's Radio]

Open content networks

Sat, 03 Aug 2002 02:54:48 GMT

This makes me recall blog posts to the Open Content Network I'd seen awhile back. Sounds like a little bit of the HTTP Extensions for a Content-Addressable Web and Content Mirror Advertisement Specification voodoo magic would hit the spot here.[0xDECAFBAD]

Generating RSS feeds from ordinary stuff

Sat, 13 Jul 2002 01:02:48 GMT

If Mark Baker's Tech Curmudgeon blog surrounded his items with

<span class="rss:item">mumble-mumble</span>

tags, he could use the RSSifying script at http://www.voidstar.com/ to create an RSS feed with the link

http://www.voidstar.com/rssify.php?url=http://markbaker.blogspot.com/

Mark Baker, Tech Curmudgeon. Hey Mark, you got an rss.xml feed ?? [snellspace]

categories: Ron's Web Usability Pages

SICP online

Thu, 11 Jul 2002 21:31:28 GMT

SICP Online.

Kenneth Hunt informs me that SICP is available online. Thanks!

[Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog]

Myth of 5 nines

Wed, 10 Jul 2002 19:49:49 GMT

The myth of 5 nines. exploring the realities of internet uptime | c o d e s t a The standard for uptime percentage is [Nicest of the Damned]

Weblog Compendium

Mon, 08 Jul 2002 00:45:11 GMT

Here's an interesting list of tools and weblog-related stuff: the Weblog Compendium. All kinds of stuff, and you can add your own resources.

Cygwin XFree86: free X server on MS Windows

Sun, 07 Jul 2002 14:17:13 GMT

I've used Exceed's X server for years, and I like it, but it costs hundreds of dollars. Slashdot has a thread about a free X server: Cygwin's XFree86 4.2.0 on Windows XP . Slashdot notes that this runs on Win2k, not just XP. There appear to be two primary problems: first, you can't run a Windows application window next to an X window, as you can with X servers like Exceed or Hummingbird. Second, you can't cut and paste between X and MS Windows. (The latter one is a bigger hassle, I think.) [Slashdot]

CMSes in summary

Sat, 06 Jul 2002 15:12:17 GMT

Column Two: CMSs in summary is a pointer to a few sites that summarize the features of various CMSes out there.

Tue, 02 Jul 2002 14:34:52 GMT

Day 17: defining acronyms.

I used 50 acronyms and abbreviations on this weblog last month: ADA, ALT, CGI, CMS, CSS, CTRL, DMV, DNS, DTD, EFF, FAQ, FSF, GFDL, GIA, GPL, HTML, IE, IIRC, IIS, IO, KB, KDE, LONGDESC, MB, MSDN, MSN, MT, Mac, NC, OPML, P2P, PGDN, PGUP, PBS, PDF, PONUR, RSS, RU, SOAP, SSN, TDD, US, VNC, W3C, WCAG, WYSIWYG, Win, XHTML, and XML.

If you know what all 50 of them mean, congratulations; you have a long and prosperous future as a technical editor. If not, you'll appreciate the fact that I defined each of them with the tag. Hover your cursor over each acronym to see what it stands for. This works in all modern browsers, and is harmless in Netscape 4.

You should define an acronym whenever you use it, or at least>Michael benefits. When Michael hovers his cursor over an acronym, Opera displays the acronym title as a tooltip.

Bill benefits. Mozilla goes even further, automatically rendering acronyms with a dotted underline. When Bill hovers his cursor over the acronym, Mozilla changes the cursor to a cursor + question mark, and then displays the acronym title as a tooltip. (You can override this default behavior with cascading style sheets, or use CSS to get a similar effect in other browsers.)

Google benefits. Google indexes the acronym title as well as the acronym itself, so people can find your site whether they search for the acronym or the spelled-out description.

I wish I could say that Jackie benefits, but she doesn't. Neither JAWS nor any of the other screen readers on the market currently support reading the titles of acronyms. I hope some day they will, and then you'll be ahead of the game.

How to do it

The first time you use an acronym, mark it up with an tag, like this:

CSS

Radio users can automate this markup by using shortcuts. From your Radio home page, click "Shortcuts" in the main navigation menu, then define the acronyms you use frequently. (Be sure to change the input type from "WYSIWYG" to "Source" so you can type the HTML directly.) For example:

Name: CSS

Value: CSS

Then, in your post, simply type "CSS" (with the quotes), and Radio will render it with the acronym tag and the title, just as you defined it.

[dive into mark]

Mon, 01 Jul 2002 18:18:18 GMT

The Motley fool has a useful set of budgeting worksheets.

Article: A solid intranet in eight steps

Mon, 01 Jul 2002 01:17:38 GMT

I've never built a built a full-corporate intranet site, though I've been in a few efforts to build group sites. Even those efforts could have used the information in the article Theo Mandel has written: A solid intranet in eight steps"

He outlines eight steps to getting it right:

Forget about your Internet site.
Eliminate frames from your design
Create intranet guidelines and stand by them
Put usability before consistency
Start small and grow iteratively
Use standard link characteristics
Evaluate against measurable objectives and criteria
Make your intranet accessible

From [Column Two] and [Intranet Focus Blog]

book search tool

Tue, 18 Jun 2002 16:31:27 GMT

agmweb.ca allows you to search 7 online book stores for books and prices. All information is available in XML-RPC and RSS feeds for you to syndicate on your site."

Mon, 17 Jun 2002 16:46:38 GMT

Some new knowledge management resources.

Three Knowledge Management Primers for the Millennium : Primers include:
- What is Knowledge Management, by Hubert Saint-Onge
- The Sveiby Toolkit, by Karl Erik Sveiby
- Putting the Engine of Innovation to Work, by Jef Staes
* Go to the Primers
* While you are there, checkout the Knowledge Innovation Timeline graphic

An excellent set of resources courtesy of SynapShots, an excellent resources in its own right

[McGee's Musings]

Popping water ballons in 0g

Mon, 17 Jun 2002 16:27:39 GMT

POP!. "Did you ever wonder what it would be like to see a water balloon pop in space?" NASA researchers popped some water balloons on the "vomit comet," the modified 747 used to simulate microgravity. These downloadable movies show what it looked like. Popping a water balloon on Earth is not very interesting - it goes like this: (1) Pop! (2) Big mess - but in microgravity it's a fascinating and complex process. Neat stuff.
From Making Light | Discuss

[24-hour drive-thru]

more on SpamAssassin, mostly on OS x

Thu, 13 Jun 2002 17:25:48 GMT

Running SpamAssassin under OS X. I've been using SpamAssassin for a week or so, ever since the WELL switched it on on their mail-servers. It is fantastic. I get in excess of 1,000 emails every day, and more than half are spam, and SpamAssassin just nails 'em. I get one or two false-positives a day, tops, and only two or three false negs. It's made my life livable again.

But what do you do if you don't run your own mailserver? Well, if you're running OS X, you can install SpamAssassin locally and have it prune your mail on your own computer. Ben "Movable Type" Trott has written an excellent tutorial on running SpamAssassin under OS X. Link Discuss (Thanks, Merlin!) [Boing Boing Blog]

Cocoa-based XSLT tool

Thu, 13 Jun 2002 01:38:44 GMT

Interactive shells uber alles!. Taking a stab at learning XSLT. TestXSLT from Marc Liyanage is making me happy and helping, for many of the same reasons I enjoy learning Python, and have been somewhat enjoying learning Common LISP again.... [0xDECAFBAD]

Appears to be Mac/Cocoa only.

SpamAssassin

Thu, 13 Jun 2002 01:33:28 GMT

SpamAssassin sounds like great way to kill spam. Simson Garfinkel writes glowingly about it, and notes that Dave Farber is a convert. SpamAssassin only runs on UNIX for right now, but that works for me.

How to create directories with radio

Wed, 12 Jun 2002 20:42:10 GMT

The neatest thing seems to be that when you get to a website, it gets transcluded into the directory listing itself. And the Back button seems to work right.

ramseeker - Mac ram price quotes

Wed, 12 Jun 2002 20:31:44 GMT

After looking at warehouse.com, I was under the impression that memory for a G3 400mhz iMac (the kind we have in the house) was running around $80 for 256mb, and $200 for 512mb. I just found a site called ramseeker; they provide price comparisons from a variety of vendors. According to them, 256mb can be had for between $35 and $50, and 512mb for around $90. That's more like it.

ramseeker doesn't sell memory; they claim to be a free service comparing prices for Mac memory. Very useful.

I still don't want to pay for it. The Mac belongs to my wife's work, so I'd like them to pay for it. I don't think that's real likely right now.