CRM Assist Apr 9 2003 2:16PM ET [Moreover - Knowledge management news]

(SOURCE:"jonu")-Two points:

1. The ability to route the proper info between overlapping private and public scopes will (and is for the early adopters) a competitive advantage
2. The people at Microsoft "get" blogs even though they don't yet fully understand them or offer blogging products. If I was a Microsoft competitor and my company wasn't blogging, I'd start blogging now or risk losing a competitve advantage to the Borg.

<QUOTE> Today, you can see a great example of this principle of overlapping scopes. Chris Anderson copies some material from his private "work blog" at Microsoft over to his public blog, SimpleGeek, in order to attract outside perspectives into the organization. This is precisely the maneuver that I have found to be powerful, yet elusive to explain. Chris's entry takes a confessional tone. "I don't understand blogging," he writes, and he worries that software will get written before the subtleties sink in. That's a valid concern, and a great issue to raise now that blogware has begun to issue from Redmond. As a matter of fact, though, Chris's take on blogs is spot on: One reason I believe that blogs are great for corporation internal communication is the question of distribution lists. Inside of Microsoft we live and die by email. However the constant spam of email to large distribution lists ends up drowning out the important information. For many types of communication (but not all) blogs provide a better way of communicating. There are many cases where you as the publisher of a piece of information don't know who would be interested. Blogs are a way to "publish and forget" - you fire the information out there, and interested people will find it. Once I add our internal blog server to the corporate search service, suddenly I could find people that worked on products that I wanted to communicate with. Amazing. [SimpleGeek] Even more interesting, at least to me, is Chris's instinctive use of overlapping scopes, and his positioning of himself as a router among them. "This is quoted from my internal blog at work..," he writes, "I know that there are much better experts out there to answer this question...I hope some of them can respond." Bing! <QUOTE> [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

(SOURCE:"mcgee")-Summary: weblogs are better and more compelling for the general public because they foster thinking in public; wikis and other media require thinking together and thinking together is harder than thinking in public.
<quote>
My problem is this. Most of the technology tools for supporting thinking together (e.g. discussion forums, threaded discussion, wikis) depend on skills and norms that I've found to be rare in practice and challenging to promote. My intuitions tell me that there are important differences with weblogs that address at least some of these issues. ... One of the primary reasons that thinking together is hard is that it requires both that we think in public and that we think collaboratively. I suspect that thinking together fails at least as often because we don't know how to think in public as it does because we don't know how to do it collaboratively. Further I think that order matters. You need to learn how to think in public first. Then you can work on developing skills to think collaboratively. Thinking in public is a precursor skill to thinking collaboratively that's been ignored. We want to get to the fun stuff (ooh, brainstorming!) and skip over the hard part. Weblogs make the hard part easier. They make it possible and permissible to go public with an idea while you're still working it out. Their structure of time-ordered, generally short, posts feels less intimidating than having to produce a finished, completely worked out, properly structured report. Their organized, permanent, structure of archived posts give you something to go back to and to build on. Pulling it all together under the umbrella of an individually identified place makes it visible and sharable with others without forcing it on anyone. Finally, syndicating the results via RSS makes it available to those who are interested in a way that enables dialog without demanding dialog.
</quote> [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

(SOURCE:"mathemagenic")-Once we can explain these things to non-bloggers, then we will have come a long way to making blogging mainstream. <quote> For example, I find it very difficult to explain to non-blogger why
* blogging somehow builds trust to other people faster and better than other ways
* blogging somehow gives me a feeling of "belonging" to my "blogging neighborhood" and loyalty to this group
* I feel that blogging gives me better identity than any of my on-line profiles, my CV, list of my publications
* I feel that my blogging conversations are deep and engaging
* I feel that these conversations are dialogues with me and not "everyone on-line" even if they are public and distributed over several blogs I mean, I can explain it to others, but it's hard to believe. In many cases you have to get you feet wet before you convinced :) </quote> [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

Amen! Preach it!
<quote>
First of all, how cool is that? Second of all, the subtitle really nails it: "What Happens to Journalism and Society When Every Reader Can Be a Writer." I'll say it again, the connection of Web logs and journalism is just too important to miss. It's valid to argue what form of journalism Web logs take, but there is no denying any longer that it's a form we're all going to have to start taking seriously as a source of information. And that means teaching our students the good and bad about the genre as well. I have a number of new "sources" that I trust, and I've left behind many of the traditional media sources that I used to rely on. The more I read Web logs and the more I find intelligent, articulate filters and thinkers, the less I believe the stream of pre-packaged pablum that Big Media want me to consume. And that's significant as I have been immersed in the study of media almost all of my professional life. If you would have told me just a couple of years ago that I would stop buying newspapers and not watch the evening news I would have laughed in your face. Seriously. But here I am.
</quote> [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

(SOURCE:"jonu")-That's right. I want to have a conversation with you; not hear your "pitch" or "message". <QUOTE> In short, I don't want you to pitch things to me. And I don't want your clients to pitch things to me either, at least not directly. I do, very much, want them to speak in their own authentic voices, about the technologies and products and services that inspire their passion, to everyone who might have a reason to care. I want your clients to explain what they do, how they think, and why their efforts matter. And so, of course -- and more importantly -- do current and prospective customers. What's missing from Phil's chart, I think, is an appreciation of how awareness flows through blogspace. Communication, in this view, is a tactical missile launched by a PR agent and aimed at a journalist. News flash: I'm the wrong target. In fact, and counter-intuitively, blogging doesn't aim at any target! Chris Anderson put it nicely the other day: Blogs are a way to "publish and forget" -- you fire the information out there, and interested people will find it. [SimpleGeek] If this seems like too much of a leap of faith, consider how hard executives and engineers already work explaining to one another the nature and value of what they do. Some of this is necessarily confidential. A lot isn't, and when it isn't, the message could (and should) reach a much wider audience. Some of those readers will be journalists who write for print and online. Most won't be journalists -- but a growing number of those folks will write online too. What is known and thought about your clients will emerge from this melting pot of perspectives. If you're selling a product or service, you have to be able to tell a good story. If you're advising sellers of products or services, you have to help them tell those stories. If you're a journalist, you have to evaluate all the stories and weave them into a coherent narrative. This has always been true. But we never expected all the storytellers to wear real faces and speak with real voices. Now we do. </QUOTE> [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

(SOURCE:"mcgee")-Of course, I would choose the company with the weblog culture if I had a choice!
<quote>
For most companies the focus will remain on doing business and doing whatever best contributes to getting the job done. I remember a conversation a few years back with an attorney who had done some work with Cisco. Cisco managers basically said "we're using email to run our business, we're making commitments and binding agreements with it, and it's your job to figure out how to make that work, so deal with it." While there may be some initial hemming and hawing, the concerns Jack raises won't be show stoppers. I think there are two reasons to believe that internal weblogs will actually prove to be a better solution than email and newsgroups for this category of concerns. First, weblogs directly address the out of context problem created by email and newsgroup and exploited in discovery proceedings. Weblogs keep the context visible both in terms of the chronological and archive structures of the weblog format and in terms of the practice of linking across weblogs. Second, is the point that Jack raises at the end. The public nature of weblogs does encourage more attention to "writing smart" than email and newsgroup formats. It helps keep you focused on the notion that you are writing for the record. I sometimes wonder what would have happened at Enron if they had done more of their thinking "in public." If an extensive weblog culture had been in place, could they have done wha they did? I don't know what the answer to that thought experiment might be. But if you had a choice between joining an organization with an active weblog environment or one that discouraged them, which would you choose?
</quote> [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

-McGee is everywhere and saying the right things! How does he do it?
<quote>
Also, McGee added, reading a blog is less like reading a story and more like reading a reporter's notebook; thoughts are stream-of-consciousness and disorganized. "The signal-to-noise ratio in a blog is much different," McGee said. "It's information and ideas they may not necessarily turn into a story. I think of a blog as a backup brain, a place to remember stuff and a place to work out ideas." Although chat rooms and messaging software allow instant idea exchange, McGee said blogging may make for better conversation because it allows time to compose thoughts. Also, because blogs present ideas straightforwardly, they may beat e-mail for data sharing. "When stuff is buried in an e-mail or conversation, it's hard to manage," McGee said. "When you move to e-mail to PowerPoint to Word documents, unless you get them printed, you may not know what's going on."
</quote> [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

Works fine for me except the dates are all messed up. The dates show the date of the scan; not the time of the news item. Other than that (and its insistence on using IE), it seems very nice.
<quote>
SharpReader is a .NET 3-pane RSS Aggregator. Some of its main features are:
* handles all RSS versions, modules like dublin core, content:encoding, xhtml:body, etc.
* allows you to group your subscribed feeds in categories
* easily reorder your subscribed feeds through drag-and-drop
* feed-refresh settings per feed or per category
* reduces bandwidth by using HTTP Conditional GETs
* RSS Auto-discovery
* minimizes to the system-tray
* easy keyboard navigator to go the next or previous unread item
* dialog-less way of subscribing to new feeds - just drag a link from your browser into sharpreader, or enter the url into the address-bar at the top
* error-correction of some common rss-feed errors (unescaped ampersands, illegal characters, unknown entities)
* support for proxy-servers and proxy authentication
* mark items read and unread
* import and export opml
* filter items and last but not least, for items that include the full html description, sharpreader lets you expand a headline to view links and responses to/from other posts in other feeds. This allows you to read posts in context, and will show related posts together.
</quote> [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

(SOURCE:Scripting News)-Go Matt and Paolo go! Looking forward to the next release of Live Topics with Easy News Topics.
<quote>
This specification defines the Easy News Topics (ENT) Module for the RSS2.0 syndication format. ENT is intended to be a very simple standard for describing how topic information can be introduced into an RSS2.0 news feed.
</quote> [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]