Saturday, November 23, 2002

There's lots of stuff I mean to do to improve my weblog some day, and I often introspective reviewing cool ideas.  From my home site upper left corner link to Organica which has found some sites that link to me, and how recently.  This is a somewhat different perspective than Referers, and obviously Organica does not have the whole picture.  I was checking those links whose last seen column was recent, and curious what they interested in, linking about (not always obvious) and I came across this gem (original source in German). David Skyrme authored this great piece, identifying 12 kinds of Knowledge Workers QUOTE "The expert - you have expertise in a domain of knowledge or a particular skill. You enjoy honing your knowledge and exercising your core skills. You are the recognized "expert" and stay with your choosen knowledge domain over many years. Knowledge analyst - you love assimilating knowledge from many sources. You have many of the attributes of the expert (but are perhaps not as self-opinionated or self-promotionalist) and also of the packager. Others respect your views and like your 'rational' knowledge to support their arguments. Knowledge leader - you have a broad area of knowledge and build bridges between knowledge (and people) in different domains. You are a generalist, not a specialist. You see the big picture and how knowledge supports organizational objective. You're the future CKO or CEO. Knowledge networker - you are a knowledge broker and connector. You connect people to people and people to knowledge. A hybrid of expertise and leadership - you're scope is not too broad and you have a large address book. You don't know all the answers yourself, but you know a person who does. Knowledge custodian - you like everything to be in its proper place. You love classifying knowledge and organizing content into taxonomies. You get upset if knowledge renegades upset the system. You're probably the knowledge centre manager. Knowledge creator - you're an ideas person. Always thinking of new things to do, you never seem to have time to see them through to implementation. Your thinking goes off in several directions but you do come up with breakthrough ideas and innovative approaches. Knowledge entrepreneur - you may not have the best ideas yourself, but you do recognize those that have potential. You are the bridge between the creator and the packager. You have a good story to tell and are committed to making a difference. Knowledge packager - if you didn't do knowledge work you would probably be an engineer or mechanic. You assemble all the knowledge components to make something worthwhile. You help knowledge creators realize their dreams. Knowledge visualizer - you like pictures, so you get away from those boring bulleted Powerpoint slide shows. You make your points in images, diagrams and perhaps even cartoons and music. Knowledge activist - you are committed to a cause and will marshal the knowledge you need to support your case. You can also be a knowledge maverick, questioning the status quo and raising doubts in others about the efficacy of their hard-won knowledge. Although an irritant to the powers that be, it is often you who initiates change. Knowledge seeker - ever curious, you are always asking "why" and seeking new knowledge. Even after you retire, you will go on knowledge delivery cruises to new exotic locations. The pursuit of knowledge for your personal fulfilment is your key driver. You couldn't care less if it's useful to others or not, but are always willing to share it enthusiastically. Storyteller - you cut into the bullshit and encapsulate knowledge into highly memorable stories. You have a strong imagination and look for analogies and metaphors. The fact that storytelling is now a tool for corporate knowledge management means that you should have a bright career ahead - even if you did get turned down for the Edinburgh Festival fringe!" UNQUOTE I heard from Andrea Janssen who writes http://fliegenvonferne.blogspot.com and educated me as to the original source that was in German so it was non-obvious to me.  QUOTE The name of the writer in the German preceding text.  This is a quote from David Skyrme's latest I3-Update which I am subscribed to. It ought to appear here soon: http://www.skyrme.com/updates/latest.htm but hasn't been put up yet.  I was quite intrigued with the text and had to post it, but would feel better if you credited David in your text. UNQUOTE Andrea goes on to inform me that "Martin Roell and I will be starting an English languaguage collaborative blog in a couple of weeks." Here's a link on who Andrea Janssen is and what she's into - a whole lot more than Knowledge Management Consultant.  I need to do a page like this about myself some time. 4:17:27 PM

Earthweb on weblog software for IT managers. [Scripting News] This article reviews what we webloggers already know, and shares some ideas worth further exploration.  It also introduces me to the wicki, group editing of a shared document.  I am a bit nervous about this concept ... I am accustomed to shared programs in which it is clearly tracked which programmer made which changes for which reasons, where we have good consistent programming discipline standards. Currently I send e-mail to selected co-worker users every few days.  I select recipients based on nature of content situation.  Perhaps some of this sort of thing belongs on a weblog, with comments, and IT department subscribing to the comments, which might say YES this is a high priority to resolve, or NO there is some nuance you were not aware of.  However, rather than comments, I am more comfortable with the Manila group discussion format, that makes it easy for people to comment on other people comments, aside from the original author of a thread. I have identified a problem with some garbage in one of our files.  It is not doing dirt to the integrity of our corporate data base, but could contribute to invalid results for people doing queries over the data in that file.  Here is specificity of the problem, as I interpret it.  I seek permission to delete these records. We did have some costs that were negative and I fixed them.  I believe it is valid to have a negative quantity transaction, or temporarily negative on-hand due to transactions posted out of sequence.  I do not believe it is valid for the value of something to be negatively priced. The ERP has provisions to delete items, customers, vendors, etc. when we no longer need them.  I have discovered that unfortunately, history on those deletions do not go away, so that when we re-issue an item, customer, vendor, etc. for a new entity, it comes attached to history on the unrelated prior usage.  I am now inventorying contents of history files using control numbers that are no longer in our system, for the purpose of working towards purging these orphans.  (Orphans are child records with no parents, where widows are parent records with no children.)  I trust my co-workers concur with my efforts. Some Help Desk Challenge we were working on has come to the point that some new or revised software is ready for testing.  Here is how to conduct such a test.  Here is how to evaluate and report the results of the tests. Common questions to Help Desk => FAQ on how to accomplish standard activities that newcomers may need to know, especially if they come to us from a different Computer Operating System environment which probably did things other than what we are accustomed to.   2:55:05 PM

[Seb's Open Research] QUOTE BlogChannels for loosely joining webloggers?. Here's a little something I wrote in reply to High Context editor David Gammel's introduction to the group-forming community. "I'd like to mention one of David's initiatives that he hasn't mentioned in his intro but is in my opinion highly relevant as a practical illustration of blog-based group-forming. David has set up the KMPings service. What KMPings does is enable webloggers with an interest in knowledge management to combine teasers for selected blog posts from their personal blog. The result is another, collective blog that points to various posts by participants. (If this sounds abstract, just click the link and you'll understand right away.) KMPings has enabled the formation of a loosely coupled community of KM bloggers. I'm subscribed to this blog and it has helped me discover a few new webloggers who share my interest in knowledge management. One way to describe what KMPings does is to say that it provides a shared channel for a particular area of interest. It was a direct inspiration for my proposal of ridiculously easy (blog-enabled) group forming. My idea is to automate what David has done and extend it to any topic anyone can dream up. Given such a system, if I felt like it, I could almost instantly set up a "MontrealPings" blog channel, or a "OrigamicArchitecturePings" blog channel, or what have you, and start putting relevant posts at those channels. Other interested webloggers could subscribe (via RSS) to such channels and could ping them whenever they write something that relates to the topic at hand that they wish to share with the community of subscribers. Perhaps a better name for that idea would be just that, BlogChannels - what do you think?" There's a dual way to look at blog channels. They provide a sociality-driven incentive for bloggers to apply metadata tags to their posts. By tagging X on a post you're in effect hanging out a bit with the X crowd.  "Metadata has never been more fun!" Well, that's perhaps an exaggeration, but I'm personally much more interested in metadata that means something for people other than me. This is what I find most interesting in this scheme: metadata is shared - that's built into the design. The meaning of the shared term takes shape through the efforts of several people. Contrast this to what currently happens with individual blog categories, where we often have a hard time making sense of each other's categories. UNQUOTE [Seb's Open Research] 2:30:10 PM

Topic Maps: CMS is only the beginning. Topic maps in content management. Lars Marius Garshol pointed me to his very interesting article on topic maps and content management. This talks about using an Integrated Topic Management System (ITMS) to provide a much more powerful management interface to the normal... [Column Two via Curiouser and curiouser!] Also read Matt's further thoughts on topic maps. [Seb's Open Research] Well Al likes the World Map of where the Blogs are from MSN, except I want the zoom to be able to take me to individual USA states, and perhaps use a system like the TV Weather Channel with color layouts coded for type of content, which we can filter in and out for what we want to see. 1:22:30 AM

[Seb's Open Research] QUOTING [group-forming: user blogs] Where's the fertile soil for group-forming?.   Presumably, different communities that already exist in society differ in their potential to spawn new groups. What are the already existing communities where a group-forming system would be likely to get a good amount of traction? It seems fairly clear from our previous discussions that some sort of label or description is needed for a group to come together. In the case of meetup.com, for instance, labels are pretty simple, having two facets: geographic location and a label referring to an interest (which can be pretty much anything - examples: "Radiohead", "homeschooling", "philosophy" ...)  UNQUOTE [group-forming: user blogs] via [Seb's Open Research] This ties into my recent Blog Census posts seeking a Preferences Page where people can create a list of topics they interested in being indexed on, by the Blog Directories.  See my e-Radio Ideas Category for Mon Nov 18, Fri Nov 22, and Home page this weekend. While this focus is on group forming from the group end, my interest is more on group finding from the perspective of someone having certain interests & wondering what members of theoretical group are out there, and doing a better job of seeing what traffic there is to various sites, including our own, and being able to prioritize what I most want to read out of the wealth of possibilities out there. 1:15:36 AM

[Seb's Open Research] QUOTING [a klog apart] 28183  blogs in the BlogStreet directory. I wonder how fast it is growing. Spidering for blogrolls and rss, BlogStreet generates my Blog Back Report (blogs linking to mine) and a Blog Neighbourhood Analysis (blogs with similar blogrolls). RSS Discovery shows my rss feed in clean html. The blogspace search feature may replace DayPop a little bit. UNQUOTE [a klog apart] Blogstreet has now indexed more than twice as many blogs as the blogging ecosystem. UNQUOTE [Seb's Open Research] I saw similar stuff in more than one place and wondered who was quoting who.  Check the comments on the original post at [a klog apart]: Blogstreet has 60,000 blogs in their data base (we consumers would like to see this number some place on their site as it grows), but their automated service filters out junk acording to a criteria test. Another post laments that most bloggers are unaware of what directories are out there, so they do not register there.  Then a directory gets popular, people find out about it, they register there. The moral of this tale is that the directories, like search engines, need to be proactive in seeking out what blogs exist that might be worth adding to their link collections. 1:10:01 AM

Several folks seem to be looking at similar data recently: How many bloggers are really out there?  How can we find out? Can we correlate true population with what's in the directories? How do we do a better job of connecting to people who are linking to us, and writing similar content topics? [a klog apart] QUOTE Why do weblog directories have so few entries?. 28,183  blogs in the BlogStreet directory. I wonder how fast it is growing Spidering for blogrolls and RSS, BlogStreet generates my Blog Back Report (blogs linking to mine) and a Blog Neighbourhood Analysis (blogs with similar blogrolls). RSS Discovery shows my rss feed in clean html. The blogspace search feature may replace DayPop a little bit. The Radio universe has at least 50K users, and there are probably more than 500K bloggers. How many are in Blogdex or the other community sites? UNQUOTE [a klog apart] 1:04:32 AM

© Copyright 2002 Al Macintyre.