Thursday, February 26, 2004

Ethnography applied to new product development Elizabeth Sanders has written an article on applying ethnography to product development. To quote: Applied ethnography is gaining widespread acceptance as a research technique. But many companies are still puzzled by it, or do not know how to use it effectively - especially in the new product development (NPD) process. This article will explain the fundamentals of this technique, and give some examples of how it has been used effectively in the NPD process by companies in recent years - and perhaps help you decide if applied ethnography is right for your latest project. [Thanks to elearningpost.] [Column Two] 3:05:20 PM    Trackback []

New project : topic maps Wiki Alexander Johannesen has started a project to develop a topic maps-based Wiki, which looks to be very interesting. To quote: I've been planning a new project for some time, and this is the initial Release of Ideas. The project has been brewing for some time, but needs have arisen for me to actually get it up an running in a somewhat fast pace. I need a system for updating project areas with documentation, people involved, business cases, history and so forth (the usual suspects), more as a collaborative system more than specialised editors of content. Very much like a Wiki, but fixing the (for me) apparent flaws of current Wiki's. [Thanks to Peter Van Dijck.] [Column Two] 3:00:10 PM    Trackback []

Blogs for Professional Advantage   http://ross.typepad.com/blog/2004/02/blogs_for_profe.html John Battelle's collumn at Business2.0 suggests that blogs will become a staple of business (reg. req.): So here's my prediction: Blogs will soon become a staple in the information diet of every serious businessperson, not because it's cool to read them, but because those who don't read them will fail. In short, blogs offer an accelerated and efficient approach to acquiring and understanding the kind of information all of us need to make business decisions... Until recently, blogs have proven to be an incredibly lousy source of information for most businesspeople. Finding and keeping up with the relevant ones is far too time-consuming. But I've recently started using a newsreader, and after spending hours setting the damn thing up, my business life has changed forever. He is right for two reasons: first exposure to blogs is as a reader and like all great disruptive technologies they provide competitive advantage to individual early adopters. Same dynamics drive team leaders to bring blogs and wikis inside to create advantage for workgroups. Some team members initially participate as readers, but gradually shift to being contributors and collaborators. [via Stowe] Related... 11:34:10 AM    Trackback []

Wizards and Guides: Principles of Task Flow for Web Applications Part 2 In part one of this article the discussion was one of views, forms, and the manner in which they could be combined into a task structure known as a hub. This installment expands on those themes by exploring two other types of task structures commonly employed in web applications--wizards and guides. 11:21:05 AM    Trackback []

NewsGator RSS Aggregator I pulled the trigger and bought a copy of NewsGator today. I live, breathe, and dream in Outlook and it is by far the best solution I have found to date for reading news via RSS. I have been a long-time Radio user and will most likely continue to maintain my weblog there, but the aggregator has been giving me fits lately. Once I installed NewsGator I discovered that I was missing a lot of content by relying on the aggregator in Radio alone. I think NewsGator also lowers the "friction" for deploying weblogs and other RSS based tools in the enterprise for project management and information sharing. I have demonstrated Radio in the past and most folks seem to have a hard time getting past the fact that they will have to install another application to read RSS feeds. When I show them the content in Outlook they get it - I think it is going to lower the acceptance barrier in many organizations. It was pretty trivial to setup and get running. I downloaded the plug-in that allowed me to post to Radio and had to configure the proxy settings to get the subscriptions up and running. I was able to easily add all of my subscriptions by importing my subscriptions opml file from Radio. More comments later. 11:18:54 AM    Trackback []

Test post from Newsgator This is a test post from Newsgator via Outlook. 10:18:55 AM    Trackback []

Wicked (Good) Wikis. Blogalyst Stowe Boyd has a seriously great article on wikis in Darwin. Its a good intro to wiki, compares them with weblogs, highlights their emergent properties and role as social tools. ...Wikis are built upon an inherently open model of... [Ross Mayfield's Weblog] 7:07:58 AM    Trackback []