b.cognosco
A quest to examine, inquire, and learn.
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Wednesday, July 10, 2002
Why TrackBack -- Mower Responds
Why TrackBack?.[Curiouser and curiouser!]» I didn't get it at first either, and nor has everyone I've mentioned it to.What makes TrackBack so important is, I think, the following:
Imagine that I read someone like Jon Udell (which I do) and I find an item of his particularly noteworthy or relevant to me. I post it from my news page and add some editorial content of my own.But if, like me, you are a relatively new blogger then maybe very few people read my item and nobody bothers to click through to Jon's original. My item never appears in his list of referrers.
This means Jon, likely, will not know that it exists. We could imagine further that Jon would have liked to know what comments I made but he never gets the opportunity.
TrackBack addresses this problem. It allows me as the author of an item to "ping" the original during the act of publishing. This ping does not require someone to read my item and then click through to his. Simply by publishing he is notified that someone has referenced him.
I think this is a very powerful idea and will help to get new bloggers into the space. For those with interesting things to say the time to migrate from the fringe to the centre will be drastically reduced.
Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!
My take (a first pass at understanding an amorphous structure and subject to change) -- This is potentially both useful and a major distraction. Someone like Udell, who has a near cult-like following and is doubtless linked by thousands of readers, will be swamped by public TrackBack pings -- rendering them almost useless. OTOH, people like me -- and Matt, and hundreds of others with small, faint voices -- can quickly discover who (if anyone) is listening. This is a useful service, one that could significantly shorten the time it takes to find one's audience.
But what I think is more important is the KM/klog aspect -- where employees who are well below the radar screen but critically important to actually getting a solution -- never get heard or informed. It seems to me the TBping has potential for real improvement here. I want to digest this more and respond further in a day or so.
Indexing the Universe
I've long been a curious tester of non-linear thinking tools -- mindmapping, concept maps, etc, and have an off-again/on-again relationship with tools such as MindManager and Personal Brain. I've had only a little exposure to XML Topic Maps -- first seeing them at a Seybold show a year or so ago -- and don't really know where they fit in the great KM schema. But if they manage to create a sharable visualization of how topics relate to each other I'm interested in seeing how they work.Interestingly, I've found the UK and western Europe to be far more accepting of these alternative thinking methods than the US. This post originated with Ron Lusk but I found it via Matt Mower who, as luck would have it, is from the UK. I'll be following this train of thought closely...
The Tao of Topic Maps.[Curiouser and curiouser!]The TAO of Topic Maps. The TAO of Topic Maps introduces topic maps, “a new ISO standard for describing knowledge structures and associating them with information resources.” [Ron Lusk: Ron's K-Logs]
» Wow cool. More reading for tomorrow!
Check Out activeRenderer's FAQ.
Check Out activeRenderer's FAQ. I've added a number of topics to aR's Frequently Asked Questions. Among other things, I included an explanation of how to have liveTopics work with aR's outlined weblog style. [read more] [Marc Barrot: activeRenderer]KM Needs Technology and People in Balance
KM as a technology issue. What if knowledge management actually is a technology problem? Current thinking holds that knowledge management's problems come from too much focus on technology when the key problems are about organizational processes and practices. I've said as much myself on many occasions. But this formulation risks perpetuating the myth that problems are either organizaitonal or technological. We know the real world isn't that simple, of course. We shouldn't contribute to the confusion by oversimplifying our discussion Technology drives knowledge management issues on two dimensions. The first is the dimension of organizational scale and complexity. Knowledge management is a non-issue below a certain scale. Leveraging and sharing knowledge within co-located, reasonably small groups can be done without resort to technology. Geographic dispersion and numerical scale create knowledge management problems that require the intelligent application of technology. This doesn't mean there are silver bullets to be found with technology, simply that technology is a necessary component of any solution. This perspective suggests that technology's primary organizational contribution to knowledge management is in establishing a uniform infrastructure and contributing to a consistent language and terminology environment. The second dimension of technology is as the primary personal tool for the creation of knowledge work outputs and intermediate results. I've touched on this before in knowledge work as craft work. Despite all its troubles and limitations, the PC is an essential tool in the creation and management of knowledge work. Remarkably, organizations and most individual knowledge workers provide little insight or guidance in how to use this tool in a way that creates knowledge work products effectively. Sure. Bill Gates keeps making promises about how great things are going to be (think Information at Your Fingertips or the Digital Dashboard). All of these visions skip over the niggling details of what you as knowledge worker need to be doing to organize and manage all this lovely data/information/knowledge. The unstated assumption in most of these visions is that someone else will take care of them (either the software vendors or the magicians in the IT department). Some researchers are working on radical technology visions for how to do this. David Gelertner, for example, would have us replace our existing file systems with his scopeware. Great concept and Gelertner is a brilliant thinker. But I'm not holding my breath. To me K-Logs represent the most interesting recent effort to address this need with a simple solution available right now. They offer a starting point that a knowledge worker can understand and build from. [McGee's Musings]Is Economy Really Picking Up
Are more trademark applications really a sign things are picking up, or just a sign more people are unemployed and sitting around trying to capture some intellectual property they can exploit when things actually do pick up?
Bump in trademark applications may signal economic rebound, some say. Nando Times Jul 10 2002 7:06AM ET[Moreover - IP and patents news]
Jon Udell Explains the Real, and Simple, Solution to Trusted Computing
Jon Udell takes a look at Palladium and explains, succinctly, how we create a real Trusted Computing environment -- using technologies that are mostly available today plus a little personal accountability. Jon's scenario is where we should all be headed, and quickly, lest this whole digi-Nazi/Palladium thing gets out of hand.
O'Reilly Network: by Jon Udell - Control Your Identity or Microsoft and Intel Will.[Privacy Digest]I've been mulling over the list of features touted for the Microsoft/Intel/AMD security scheme called Palladium.
[ ... ] We can choose accountability, or we can let the unholy alliance of Hollywood, Microsoft, Intel, and the government choose for us. The alliance, cleverly, pretends to solve problems that really annoy us, like spam and email worms. But these violations of trust won't yield simply to trusted motherboards and operating systems. People have to assert (and prove) their claims of trustworthiness, and other people have to make judgments about those assertions. [...]
Barr on Right Side of Privacy Issue
Georgia Congressman Bob Barr can be infuriating -- he often comes out on the opposite side of issues from where I stand. Even so, he is one of the few people in Congress who ever (and I mean ever) calls the federal bureacracy to task for infringing the basic civil liberties of American citizens.This is not the first time Barr has come down on the side of privacy advocates. Having served with both the US Attorney's office and the CIA, Barr knows something of the damage that such government entities can cause. And when he speaks about privacy issues, politicos have no choice but to take him seriously.
I disagree with Barr on many issues, but on this issue he deserves our full support. Those who oppose Barr across-the-board because of particular personal agenda items are doing themselves a disservice in the battle to maintain some level of privacy against our War-On-Terror-crazed government.
New York Times - free registration required Privacy Officer Is Possibility at Security Department.[Privacy Digest]Under Congressional pressure, the Bush administration said today that it was open to the idea of installing a chief privacy officer in a new Department of Homeland Security to make sure it weighed issues of confidentiality and the secure handling of personal information.
"If you bring us a proposal, I think we'd look at it very carefully," Mark W. Everson, controller of the Office of Management and Budget told Representative Bob Barr, Republican of Georgia, who heads the House Judiciary subcommittee on commercial and administrative law. "Privacy is a very important function."
Mr. Barr opened a subcommittee hearing by asking Mr. Everson what steps would be taken "to ensure the privacy of personally identifiable information as the new agency establishes necessary databases that coordinate with other agencies of the government."
A Publisher's Spin on Palladium
In the current Seybold Bulletin (e-mail subscription so no link) Bill Rosenblatt uses his editorial to take the publisher's view on how Palladium is good for all of us. Many of his points are reasonable and, to be fair, he also notes the risks to users and to Microsoft in the Palladium strategy.Where Rosenblatt errs is in his underlying assumption that what publisher's want is what the rest of us need. We have ample proof that, left to their own devices, most publishers (regardless of media and like most entrenched businesses) view customers as little more than tokens from which revenue can be extracted and would choose all manner of user-hostile control and revenue generation schemes -- while doing little to improve their business models or increase the value they provide.
A robust, ubiquitous control mechanism that enables this sort of dreary, burdensome business practice hardly deserves support. There is no question the protection of copyright and intellectual property must be preserved, but Palladium-like architectures shift the balance of power totally to entrenched businesses, and do so in a way that is far more invasive and damaging to creators, innovators, and users than is called for.
[...] In the end, Palladium seems like publishers' best hope for DRM functionality that is as transparent, robust and ubiquitous as they would like it to be. Microsoft seems to have realized that it's very difficult to make money from DRM functionality per se, yet such functionality is necessary to support the various software and services from which Microsoft (and other vendors) could make money; therefore, it's necessary to build DRM technology and give it away as a way of moving things along. If publishers want DRM, they should take an open-minded attitude toward Palladium and find ways of working with Microsoft to ensure that it meets their needs.[Seybold Bulletin]Bill Rosenblatt is lead consultant at GiantSteps Media Technology Strategies.
Error: Can't Find (categoryName)
What happens when you delete a Category before you take all the messages out of it? Why, you get an ERROR message, of course. But only under certain circumstances.I was working on my Category structure. I decided I didn't like some of the things I had done so I went through and deleted (I thought) all the posts from it. Then I deleted the category.
I have Radio set to use the 3-button option (Post, Publish, Post & Publish) and I have upstreaming set for "Only on Publish". (Both these settings are in the Prefs and are explained in the Help.
With these settings I have more control over when Radio spews my ramblings out into the blogosphere (i.e. I get a second chance to correct my errors, but I digress...)
It turns out I had not actually gotten all the messages out of the deleted Category, and if you click the "Publish" button under those circumstances, you get this:
[Macro error: Can't find a sub-table named "categoryName".]
It was very confusing and this thread on the Radio discussion group will point you to the solution. But hopefully, you'll never need it. After all, I do lots of stupid things so you won't have to.
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