Worker.digital.info

In this post "Jon Udell" takes an example of a quality weblog post and, in his typically cogent fashion, points out some of the most useful products of this activity.

I don't always agree with Jon -- sometimes he's so far out in front of the technology that I can't connect -- but I believe his points on the value of effective weblog usage are sound. William Zinsser's Writing to Learn is a classic text on how putting ideas to paper -- in an appropraite fashion -- clarifies thinking. (Sadly, I can't tell that such skills are any longer taught in public schools.) What Dave Winer calls narrating the work is a prime example of this. Jon's other points about the impact of a weblog are equally valid.

For any company to succeed at knowledge management -- or have an effective virtual company since they are artifacts of the same process -- there must be an emphasis on getting people to think out loud effectively. Virtual collaboration and knowledge management are not about application training, or technologies, or protocols.

They are about getting people to expose their thoughts to one another, and to do so in a way that is both useful and inviting. This does not come naturally to most people. It takes work. It takes guidance. And it takes some encouragement and support -- along with the right technology. But in the end the technology matters little, be it a weblog, a discussion group, or even e-mail. It is the human factors that are most important in trying to build dialogue.

Jeffrey P Shell thinking out loud about Zope. Here's Jeffrey P Shell thinking out loud about a Zope optimization puzzle: [...]
Although Jeffrey reaches no conclusions in this posting, I find his thinking-out-loud process incredibly valuable. Writing is a way to clarify thinking. Doing such writing on a weblog is the primal act of knowledge management. Here are some of the useful outcomes:
- Jeffrey thinks a little harder about this bit of analysis, because he's making it public.
- The fact that Jeffrey is wondering about these issues creates the possibility that, by manufactured serendipity, answers will come to him from people made aware of his interest.
- Now that I know Jeffrey's on the case, I'll remember to check his weblog (or contact him personally) when I next encounter a similar problem.
Thinking out loud isn't always useful, of course. You have to think about interesting things, and articulate them in useful ways, as Jeffrey always does. Dave Winer calls this "narrating the work." Knowledge management is really just about cultivating that habit and that skill. [...]

[Jon's Radio]

See also: " Think out Loud !" 2002 Meeting of the Minds | Symposium-Undergraduate Research Inititive | THINK OUT LOUD / PETER BECKETT | Think Out Loud | Think Out Loud | I think out loud , when there's no-one around | MTM MUSIC | Think out Loud - Shelf Life | | Think Out Loud | A Fingerprints Fanlisting | | | Think Out Loud | Fingerprints Fanlisting | think out loud

Success and the Private RSS Feed

5:10:35 PM

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Great heaping gobs of success! I love it when a plan comes together. After many niggling errors and fubars -- caused by a loose nut connected to the keyboard -- I have finally succeeded at How to publish a category to a different FTP server, published that Category into a separate password-protected directory, and managed to get my News Aggregator to suscribe to Private RSS with User Authentication in Radio.
Woo Hoo! Big day at the races.
This is cool, as it has all sorts of implications for KM apps, client relations, etc. Very nice. Thanks to everyone on the Radio discussion group who helped me over the steep end of the learning curve.

See also: Web Services Articles from The Stencil Group | The Stencil Group: Web Services Article Index | Blunt Force Trauma | Blunt Force Trauma | Flash Blog | Blunt Force Trauma | The Daily Blog | The Nautilus-list 2001-May Archive by Date | The Nautilus-list 2001-May Archive by Thread | nautilus-list 2001-May Archive by Date

Weblogs Are Disruptive Technology

10:28:45 AM

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Another take on Clayton Christensen's disruptive technology spectrum

Weblogs are to CMSes as pcs are to mainframes. I came across a slightly-too-long but ultimately interesting article called Blogs as Disruptive Tech. The thesis: weblogs are to big, expensive content management systems (CMSes) as the PC was to the IBM mainframe. Very interesting read.
[Paul Holbrook's Radio Weblog]

See also: Blogs as Disruptive Tech - How weblogs are flying under the radar | Welcome to Disruptive Technology | Disruptive Technology Resources | Weblogs offer a disruptive technology ! :: WritersWord :: Wirter's | WritersWord :: Wirter's Word & Sword: tools for the modern writer | WritersWord :: Wirter's Word & Sword: tools for the modern writer | WritersWord :: Wirter's Word & Sword: tools for the modern writer | WritersWord :: Wirter's Word & Sword: tools for the modern writer | O'Reilly Network Weblogs : Disruptive technology , or disruptive | O'Reilly Network: Weblogs (by date) [September 24, 2002]

Inter-link for Multi-User Weblogs and Intranets

10:25:03 AM

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Not sure where this fits. It isn't specific to Radio -- I don't think the Moveable Type TrackBack even works in Radio -- but I wanted to capture the thought about automatically linking certain entries to different logs, i.e. a project team working on customer service systems might want to link to the log kept by the CSRs for problem resolution, etc.

Using MT TrackBack for Cross-functional Team Blogs.
Just yesterday Glen and I were talking about what balance to strike between multi-author weblogs and individual weblogs on our intranet. I think that eventually we would evolve our blogs on the intranet to single-author but enable some way to port or otherwise indicate certain of their posts for diffferent teams the writer might be on. We use MovableType and had not yet come up with an elegant way to do this that still met our needs (it is partially a taxonomy challenge, of course!).
The new MT TrackBack might fit the bill:

Multiple "authors" without author accounts
Say you want to have your readers contribute to your blog, but do not want to add them as an author; either because you want to limit the number of authors or you don't want the work of having to add new people each time someone wants to post something interesting. Or, you may not want their posts to "weigh" as much as your official set of multiple authors.
With TrackBack, you can set up a section of your site to receive pings.
Kristine, one of our beta-testers, used her site, The Red Kitchen, as an example:
"If I had a category named 'Red Kitchen Guests' and allowed pings to it... then anyone with an MT blog could post a recipe on their page and ping my guest category. Then it could automatically list a ping link and excerpt on the Guest category page."

With this we could set up team weblogs that just gather TalkBack pings from team members who are writing klog entries. Ideally I would like for individual writers to set one or more of their categories to auto-ping relevant team klogs when a new entry of that category is posted. I'm not sure that TalkBack supports category auto-pinging right now but maybe we could do it somehow via category templates.
I'm looking forward to experimenting with this.
[High Context]

See also: Blunt Force Trauma | Blunt Force Trauma | Blunt Force Trauma | Blunt Force Trauma | Blunt Force Trauma | Blunt Force Trauma | Blunt Force Trauma | Blunt Force Trauma