John Robb. How to boost employee productivity by using a news aggregator. [klogs]

A small change in the way we work could shave 45 minutes off of the average workday.  That small change is to use a news aggregator to get news instead of gathering it by hand.  Applied across a company, that 45 minutes of savings could be worth $1,650,000 a year.  The wild part is that the cost to implement this is only $8,000 and requires little if any support from the IT department. 

• Accurate K-Logging of current activities:  status, thinking, plans, projects, etc.
• Online presentations, to-do lists, project plans via outlines. 
• K-Log personal portals that integrate all connection info (e-mail, IM, phone, address, bio, resume, picture).

Very simple stuff can yield big results. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]

» John Robb's right on the money again.  I'm really starting to love reading John's blogging (via my aggregator of course)

I'm looking at everything I do now in terms of whether it can be output as OPML for instant outlining, or as RSS for aggregation, or both.

Start-up wants your help to fight spam. Wow - this is a really neat idea. It's basically a P2P spam filter. A free Outlook plugin (hopefully other mail clients will be added soon) that any user can click "This is spam" on a message. Then based on trust metrics, and how many users deem it spam - the message is marked as spam for all users of the system. P2P at it's best!

[rebelutionary]

» An interesting example of a company trying to get a community to come together to contribute on a project of greath worth!  I wish them well.

I feel very happy to have gotten involved in the fight against the extension of RIPA.  Not so much because we won but because it is the first time that I cut through my inherent apathy and fight it tomorrow mentality and took direct political action when it mattered.

In fact, as those who've been reading about it recently will know, we haven't won at all.

RIPA was not being extended as a means to extend the authority of a whole group of people (such as local councils and the FSA), but to regulate and legitimize the processes by which they are already getting this information. As a home minister let slip on the Radio, many officials are already getting this kind of information via informal channels - the extension to RIPA really was the governments attempt to regulate it.

Of course the fact that the government is attempting to legitimize this is just another sign of their inherently anti-democratic leanings.  I wouldn't feel so agrieved if this legislation was going hand in hand with an effective Freedom of Information bill.  This government seems to have very similar tendencies to the secretive and power grabbing administration of the Shrub.

We should be looking closely at the powers we have already granted the police and secret services.  We should be reigning in access to information by officials, not licensing it.  I could stomach the requirement for police and the security services to do domestic snooping if and only if they were regulated by (and forced to justify their actions to) an oversight committee made up of judges, MP's, privacy advocates and lay people.

The secret services are supposedly there to protect us - or at least British interests.  I for one would sleep much happier knowing that there were people capable of checking on that, and in whom I had at least a small amount of faith.

I think the recent leaks by the Stephens enquiry about collusion between the security services and paramilitaries in the killing of Irish catholics should tell us everything we need to know about allowing unchecked and unsupervised powers to be granted to anyone in authority.

Bah!

JRo essay: Telecommunications Implosion [John Robb's Radio Weblog]

» John has some interesting & depressing things to say about the state of broad-band and how vested interests are strangling any chance for things to change.

I don't know if the situation is better here in the UK.  I guess it probably is, for now, with strong competition between DSL and cable vendors.  But nobody is talking about fibre to the home here either.