Worker.digital.info

"Paul Holbrook" points to two outstanding Information Architecture (IA) resources. Paul is a fellow Atlantan and, like me, fairly new to the weblog phenomenon. He has an extensive technology background, having worked on the Xereox Star in the 1980s, and built web server farms for CNN in the 1990s. I only recently began tracking his weblog but already he has pointed me to very informative and helpful resources for KM and klogging. Today he pointed me to two more excellent resources.

This article by Marcia Bates, After the Dot-Bomb: Getting Web Information Retrieval Right This Time explains in plain English seven problems areas with web-based info retrieval. Marcia's background and credentials are impeccable, and her advice invaluable. The added perspective from Louis Rosenfeld is equally valuable. It's stuff like this that makes me long for a copy of Copernic Summarizer.

I would never have discovered either of these subject matter experts on my own. And I've been digging around for days looking for really good material on Information Architecture. If you aren't reading Paul's weblog, you should be.

IR theory and the Net. Lou Rosenfeld builds on an splendid article from First Monday called "After the Dot-Bomb: Getting Web Information Retrieval Right This Time" by Marcia J. Bates. Read through Marcia's article, then read Lou's commentary. Marcia Bates makes reference to several interesting sounding articles that she's written; I'll have to wander over to Georgia Tech's library and see if I can find them. [From Bloug]

[Paul Holbrook's Radio Weblog]

Can K-Logs Improve Corporate Integrity

12:46:13 AM

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Jim McGee on whether or not the process of klogging could expose fundamental problems in business before thay become Enron-like disasters, and whether this quality makes it more or less likely they will take root.

My take -- our litigious society makes it unlikely anyone in a senior position in a major corporation is going to keep a running diary about anything. And given the current direction of the software industry we're moving to self-expiring data of all sorts. These guys are scared to death of data about what they thought or said hanging around.

I doubt klogging will take root at anything other than a departmental level, and then only in non-financial areas. It's hard to imagine it ever getting to an executive level. I hope I'm wrong.

Can knowledge systems lie as well as information systems?.
[...] Suppose for a moment that you had an organization where all the key players kept running diaries of the discussion and debate that accompanied their decisions. Suppose further that these diaries were a matter of record (at least within the organization). In other words, everyone kept a k-log.
How hard would it be for that organization to lie? To fool itself? I pose this not as a moral question, but as a pragmatic one. Along the lines of Mark Twain's observation that "if you tell the truth you don't have to remember anything." [...]

[McGee's Musings]

See also: Blunt Force Trauma | Blunt Force Trauma | Blunt Force Trauma | Curiouser and curiouser! | Blunt Force Trauma | Blunt Force Trauma | Blunt Force Trauma | Ron Lusk's Radio Weblog | Ron Lusk's Radio Weblog | Ron Lusk's Radio Weblog

RSS Feeds for Non-News Sites

12:35:14 AM

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Using "Mark Paschal"'s Stapler Radio Tool (and a little handholding from Mark) I have been able to create two RSS feeds and get them loaded into my News Aggregator. This is a cool thing.
But why is it good?
The two sites are industry-specific portals WhatTheyThink.com and PDFZone.com. Neither of these sites, like most in the print and publishing industries, offer RSS feeds that can be read in an aggregator. PDFZone provides a nice little JavaScript for publishing their headlines on your own webpage, but that isn't useful to me. WTT.com doesn't offer anything as far as I can tell.
I just want a headline scan in my aggregator along with all my other news. And thanks to Paschal's Kit Radio Tool, I can also group all of my industry-specific feeds (custom or otherwise) together. So now I can begin building an industry section in my News Reader and create a group of feeds that pertain specifically to vendors, competitors, industry portals, etc.
Soon I'll be able to quick scan all the key industry news without having to worry about going to each site unless there is something of specific interest. If there is an article of interest, I have the direct link to it in front of me and, better, I can immediately post it for this site. Pretty cool. Thanks Mark. I owe you dinner next time I'm in Chattanooga.

See also: Blunt Force Trauma | Blunt Force Trauma | Blunt Force Trauma | Blunt Force Trauma | Scripting News | Google News Search Beta | Radio UserLand : What is a News Aggregator? | Radio UserLand : What is a News Aggregator? | Radio UserLand : What is a News Aggregator? | Radio UserLand : What is a News Aggregator?

Mower explaining his liveTopics development and its relation to the blogplex
More on liveTopics.

12:18:32 AM

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Mower explaining his liveTopics development and its relation to the blogplex
More on liveTopics.
I gave an initial pitch of some of my ideas today. Not a pitch that I would like to give to an objective audience but, then, this is only my second day off the job!!

I was trying to show how liveTopics and blogPlex fit together.

liveTopics really started life as a bootstrap technology for the blogPlex. blogPlexing depends upon being able to extract meaningful information from what people say on their weblogs. Until such time as technologies like Cyc or Summarizer (see Share in the sidebar) can deliver the goods I needed something else. Hence liveTopics was born to allow you to annotate your posts with descriptive concepts. From a very simple original concept it has taken on a life of its own which is kind of cool.

There are two steps on the way to blogPlex that I think are worth sharing. The first is topicRolling which I have discussed in another recent post. Briefly topicRolling allows you to publish your topics & subscribe to the topics used by others. This allows a group of people to develop a shared conceptual vocabulary or BlogSpeak.

The second is the super-blog. This was really Jack Foster Mancilla's idea. This is an extension of the Blog Topic Table of Contents (TTOC) idea which will be familiar if you click through any of the topic links on my page (or click here). At the moment the TTOC is an individual affair, however pretty soon I am to provide the ability for a group of people to create a super-blog together.

In the same way that the TTOC now lists each of an individuals posts under a topic, the super-blog will list the posts of every member creating a way to see what each member of the group has posted regarding specific concepts. This makes topicRolling very important. We will also need tools to support the merging and grouping of topics into topicThemes.

My view at the moment is rather than embarking on a massive project to create some kind of control language or standardized vocabulary that we allow Darwinian pressures to select topics. As has been written elsewhere people will gravitate towards "good" topics and abandon the bad (and there will be tools to help the losers graciously migrate). The pressure will come from the other users of the plex, in order to be listed you have to use the right topics.

I can imagine situations where two similar topics will grow equal in size. Thats okay. Clever software can work out that they are synonymous by examing their associations with other topics. And the use of topicThemes will help to prevent unnecessary isolation.

And then we reach the blogPlex itself. At the moment I envisage this as a service subscribed to many blogs or klogs. Using the data in each along with the topical metadata to create profiles of bloggers and kloggers.

The value of the profiles is that they will allow the blogPlex service to match up bloggers who are writing about similar concepts - who are not already linking to each other. This is a key point because it is this that enables new communities to form.

[Curiouser and curiouser!]

See also: