Curiouser and Curiouser!

Event Sharing, publishing, syndicating, etc. When we introduced the "when" part in the w4 concept, almost one year ago, what we had in mind was a space where events would be topics which could be aggregated in calendars and allowed users to navigate information using a timeline.
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Using the same approach we are using with topics, new events will be automatically distributed among members of a cloud allowing users to pick an event if it already exist instead of creating it.

There will also be relations between events and other topics on the server, which we believe will create a sigificant added value to the process (allowing, for example, to quickly move to all information related to an event to all information related to one of the participants).

[Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog]

The When classification was always a key part of the overall vision of K-Collector. Being able to navigate sensibly based upon time & date is a very powerful concept.

One of the last things I did within liveTopics before moving on to K-Collector was to implement time as an XFML facet. This created a hierarchy of topics representing dates. For example there was a topic "2003". This in turn contained 12 sub-topics "Jan 2003" through "Dec 2003". Each of these topics contained a further division by date. Posts were linked to these topics based upon publication date. The upshot was that you could browse based on an increasingly specific date filter.

We will be looking to implement When topics in K-Collector in conjunction with ESF events. The idea will be to link the event (perhaps defined as a What topic), with a particular point in time (a When topic), a place (Where) and possibly people attending (Who). Hence an event will form a glue which binds together a number of different topics in a context.

Example:

What

blogtalk 2.0

Where

Vienna

Who

Thomas Burg

When

5-Jul-2004

There are still issues to work out like: What about events which span multiple days? Do we represent time on the calendar? What about recurring events? And so on. But I think even a simple model which dodges many of these questions would be amply useful at this point.

Introducing the enhancedAggregator.

I've recently spent some time investigating Radio's aggregator code, looking for an easy way to support additional RSS modules in general, and ENT 1.0 topics in particular.

The enhancedAggregator tool is the -provisional- result of this investigation. It comes with full ENT 1.0 topics support for Radio's aggregator, and skeletons for aggregating Atom 0.3 feeds and ESF 1.0 events for RSS 2.0.

I'd like the enhancedAggregator to become a community driven project, allowing Frontier/Radio developers to easily test aggregation of new syndication formats and extensions, without mobilizing Userland scarse resources.

So I've added some intal/uninstal/update/prefs ancillary functions to the tool, and provided guidelines for updating the current drivers and adding new ones, with pointers to the available online documentation.

I hope Matt will copy the ENT module driver and paste it into the k-collector client for Radio, and Paolo's eVector crew will build upon the ESF module driver skeleton, copying the result to their new tool when it's stable enough.

[s l a m]

Marc's doing sterling work.

In response to "Terminology: The management in KM", Richard McManus agrees and suggests Information Flow (a term he has been musing about) as an alternative.

Whilst I do like the way information flow sounds I don't think it replaces knowledge management because it describes the goal and not the activity.

Hence:

• information flow is to X, as
• managed knowledge would be to knowledge management

The question remains: What is X?

Perhaps the problem with the American economy is that it is a house divided against itself.  We think of ourselves as an innovation driven country, fully in support of Pareto's entrepreneurs.  In fact, we are largely supporting Pareto's renters (rentiers) in:  IP law, health care, taxes, spectrum allocation, and more.  The problem is that we are an open economy in a globally competitive system.  By protecting renters at the expense of entrepreneurs we make it almost impossible to compete.

[John Robb's Weblog]

I don't understand John's post but I've been interested to read a little about Pareto and will probably read more.

I've been pondering the term Knowledge Management a little. In particular the use of the word manage.

A dictionary search for 'manage' brings up, among others, the following meanings:

• to direct or control the use of
• to exert control over
• to make submissive to ones authority, discipline, or persuation
• to direct the affairs or interests of
• to make subservient by artful conduct
• to bring around cunningly to ones plans
• to exercise in graceful or artful action

with the following synonyms:

• to direct
• govern
• control
• wield
• order
• contrive
• concert
• conduct
• transact

From the latin manus meaning hand.

To me this terminology sounds all wrong. It is the language of control, of dominance. It is the lanuage of the scarcity mentality which says "I Win, You Lose" or "You Win, I Lose". That's not how I want to think/talk about knowledge.

Unlike, say, Plutonium, knowledge is only as scarce as we make it. As I impart my knowledge to you I don't lose it, instead we both have it. And maybe more, between us we may synthesize something that I could not have created alone. Giving my knowledge to you has, at the very least, increased the total amount of knowledge, not reduced it. (Fortunately Plutonium doesn't work this way!)

So I think the terminology doesn't fit. In the context of a healthy organization knowledge isn't something that we should want to manage. Rather I'd say it's something we want to plant and watch grow.

What is required, I think, is to recast the principles of knowledge management in a language which emphasizes abundance without unduly frightening those people who may tend toward a scarcity mentality. I'm still thinking about how that goes...

A few days ago I wrote a bookmarklet for toggling checkboxes on the page. It's intended to make it a bit easier to use the Radio News Aggregator page. This often has hundreds of checkboxes which you may need to toggle on and off. After a while it gets to be a pain. The bookmarklet went through the page toggling every checkbox. Unfortunately I found it didn't really do what I needed as, quite often, I want to keep about half the posts in the page for later.

I just wrote a variation which can be used alongside it. What this bookmarklet does is to selectively toggle checkboxes on the page. Like the previous one it looks at each checkbox in turn. When it finds a checkbox which is checked it begins to toggle each subsequent checkbox until it reaches another one that is already on.

What this means is that you can toggle on the first and last checkboxes of a group (or several groups) that you want selected. Then use this bookmarklet to check every checkbox in between. Easy! It can then be combined with the toggle-all bookmarklet to invert the selection.

New topic map tools. Peter Van Dijck has pointed out a few new topic map tools and approaches: tinyTIM: a very small easy to use (50kb jarsize) in memory Topic Map engine. It implements the TMAPI interfaces, so one can work with TopicMaps via... [Column Two]

Two interesting tidbits.