This
great post is about the International Standards Organisation's plans to
require licensing fees from those who use their language, country, and
currency codes, which would break the Web big time, and the laughable
Dewey Decimal System vs. Library Hotel lawsuit.
When good institutions go bad. The
last few weeks have seen a dismaying upturn in the number of
semi-public institutions which seem to out to make a buck rather than a
contribution, risking the contributions they've already made. [Simon St. Laurent]
The last paragraph is especially insightful:
The larger problem this illustrates isn't the greedy nature of
everyone, but rather the difficulties of trust in a world where
organizations are underfunded and expected to scramble for dollars.
Building organizations which are intended to promote the sharing of
resources requires an independent source of funds. Otherwise,
organizations will end up placing tolls on their results, impeding the
very sharing they were set up to create.
Ideas
come to me when I知 doing the laundry or the dishes; when I知
drowsy容ither just before going to sleep, or when waking up after
dozing off on the couch; when I知 reading; when I知 walking.
How come software
teams seldom have arranged places specifically for stimulating ideas?
It痴 obvious that you need to detach from what you池e usually doing.
Got to go. [Tesugen.com: Peter Lindbergs Weblog]
In the time I spent in university settings I saw a huge difference
in collaborative behavior and creative friction between those labs that
featured a couch and those that didn't. Furniture attracts ideas.
We do have a couch where I work now, but it hardly gets used; I think
it's because it isn't located in a strategic location - it's in a place
that doesn't feel intimate enough.
(My title referred to the notion of third places, beyond home and work, that act as social condensers.)
I'm late with the news, but the insightful Denham Grey - who is to be credited with building much of the impressive Knowledge Management wiki - has started a Typepad blog.
This is great news. I feel Denham is among the very few who possess an
understanding of the KM landscape that is at once broad and deep. I
know I have a lot to learn from him.
Greg: "Subscribe" is a term that is much more accessible than RSS or "XML."
Or "syndicate this site (XML)" (found on half a million pages according to Google), might I add. The comments shed more light on the topic. As Greg writes:
the flaw is in the interaction design, moreso thant the naming
convention. When a user clicks on the orange XML box, they are
presented with a mishmash of XML and no context for what should be done
with that XML unless they have already been initiated into the
community of RSS users.
The XML buttons are many people's first contact with RSS. It's indeed a
pity that they are not more self-explanatory. Perhaps just having a button besides them, linking to an accessible article about news aggregation would help?
