Curiouser and Curiouser! on blogging

For whom the Blog flows

Tue, 25 Jun 2002 12:20:37 +0000

Embedded in most current blogging software is an odd notion. Because the systems are self-referential and the overall audience is in its early growth stages, there is an interesting assumption that one "blogs" for oneself or other bloggers. Conventions, like blogrolling (a cross linking scheme that builds traffic within the blogging community), have a nearly religious fervor associated with them.

Community building, as we've mentioned in other Blog Notes creates the essential social infrastructure on which the long term success of blogging rests. As the community voraciously consumes the product of other community members, a momentum develops. It's good for groundwork and subject to replacement at the beginning of the second phase of growth in the phenomenon.

[5th Constituency]

» I discovered 5th constituency yesterday via Ron Lusks weblog. I'm working back through the stuff there, the blog notes are especially interesting.

I am not sure that I'm down with "making blogging a success" as an end in an of itself. Although I haven't thought about it very hard I guess I see blogging as a part of a wider bootstraping process for online communities as a whole. I guess this may be the second phase that is referred to here.

Categories, topics & audiences

Tue, 25 Jun 2002 12:39:37 +0000

Blog Notes 4: Categories.

No Audience is Interested in Everything You Produce

XML gives Weblogs the capacity to be organized into categories. It's good news and bad. When authoring an article (or one of those littler bloglets), the author is confonted immediately with a series of usability questions like:

If I put this piece in several categories, does that reduce the meaning of each category?
If the piece is on the home page and in a category, why would anyone ever go to both?
If the piece is only in a category and not on the home page, how does anyone know?
If the piece is only on the home page, what are categories for?

[5th Constituency]

» Another interesting piece. I heartilty concur.

My own take on categories is that they are difficult to use. I currently define six categories including the Home Page. They are:

home page

learning

community

personal

technology

tuning

My guess is that only "home page" and "tuning" are separably useful. I do put items in the other categories but I suspect no-one would ever subscribe to them rather than the "home page." (Assuming you wanted to subscribe at all!)

This was really my reason for developing the liveTopics tool. My problem with categories is that they are not granular enough. "tuning" works as a category because I only use that for discussing Radio development work which is, for the most part, orthoganol to what I'm talking about normally.

Using liveTopics I can associate a number of individual topic references to each post (as I have done with this one). This can be used to determine what I'm talking about and by using the topic table of contents what else I've said about a particular topic. Where this will really score though, to my mind, is when you and I can filter each others RSS feed based on the topics we reference.

Categories are dead! Long live topics!

Another point of view

Tue, 25 Jun 2002 22:58:25 +0000

Village shops in BlogSpace

It is my belief that people online, as in daily life, naturally want to form communities and that, where they do not/can not, it is because of a failure of available tools to help them.

Not everyone does want to form a community. A community is nice, when you start and you don't want to (re)discover by yourself all the small things that make the blogging life better, faster, stronger (blogtools, RSS, news aggregators, permalinks, archives, referers, backlinks, valid markup, pinging weblogs...) After a while, being out of a community is good, the same way the small bird is being kicked out of the nest: now do your own thing.

[Jemisa]

» Another viewpoint to my own. I'm not quite sure I fully understand the point being made here, however...

I hadn't thought about it too much but I admit the possibility that there are people who don't want to form communities. However I don't think the bird metaphor works -- birds leaving the nest don't usually go on to live a solitary life they are going on to build a new community. Even more than this though, I believe that humans have an innate instinct for language. Something that is profoundly useless unless one wants to communicate with others.

Unless you are just shouting at random strangers then you are looking for some kind of community with whom you want to communicate.

I'd like to discuss this further.

Fri, 28 Jun 2002 13:56:24 +0000

A Step Beyond Referers!.

TrackBack: P2P Blog-pinging

"Movable Type launches TrackBack, a framework to allow weblogs to ping each other when one blog references another. The idea is that when, say, a Boing Boing entry links to, say, a Scripting News entry, that Scripting News will get a ping that gives it the URL of the referencing Boing Boing post. So in addition to the Discuss link at the end of the story, Scripting could also have a link to page with all the blog entries that have picked up that link. Meta-tools like Daypop can scour these pages and build meme-charts, showing the interconnectedness of all blogs." [Boing Boing Blog]

[The Shifted Librarian]

» I'm not sure I understand the difference between TrackBack and a referrer. I've tried to follow some of the references to see a fuller explanation but I'm still a bit in the dark.

How is the "ping" any different to the web bug that tracks referrer information?

Blogging by email

Sun, 30 Jun 2002 21:45:26 +0000

Radio wishlist > Post to email..

Dale Pike writes:

I want to be able to designate a category and have that post sent as an email message to a pre-determined address. This would allow me to further consolidate my communications and have a more streamlined "write once" approach to my messaging.

[a klog apart]

» I need exactly the same thing to keep legacy people in the loop. I'm trying to knock up something very quickly as a tool in Radio.

Basic features:

preferences per- subscriber email

filter by category & by liveTopic

immediately, hourly or daily feedings

send either complete post or permalink+title

I had originally thought about making it a program that subscribed to an RSS feed and emailed it out. However this seemed like a lot of work and a way of re-inventing my.userland. I'm trying to KISS!

Blogging is the first killer app of Personal Publishing

Tue, 02 Jul 2002 16:04:04 +0000

Blogs as Disruptive Tech - How weblogs are flying under the radar of the Content Management Giants.

Quote: "That was really my eureka moment: my first realization that content management was screwed.

In more technical terms, I realized that Content Management was starting to wrestle with what Clayton Christensen calls The Innovator's Dilemma: the inability of successful companies to adapt to a new, disruptive technology."

Comment: Very much in the vein that the previous post refers to.

[Serious Instructional Technology]

» Some interesting points here especially with regard to Christensen.

Clayton Christensen is all too familiar with that issue as well: "Markets that do not exist cannot be analyzed: Suppliers and customers must discover them together."

Every website has different needs - especially big, complicated websites.

As a result, most CMS software vendors fall into the same business models as the Mainframe vendors selling to corporations: long sales cycles and extensive consulting requirements.

Blogging is the first and truest killer app of Personal Publishing

Chalks away

Wed, 10 Jul 2002 19:33:12 +0000

Google! DayPop! This is my blogchalk: English, United Kingdom, London, Tooting, Matt, Male, 26-30!

Why TrackBack?

Wed, 10 Jul 2002 22:27:07 +0000

More on TrackBack for KM. If Gammel and Mower both think there is something useful in TrackBack who am I to argue? I don't undersand it, but I'm open minded about it. [Blunt Force Trauma]

» I didn't get it at first either, and nor has everyone I've mentioned it to.

What makes TrackBack so important is, I think, the following:

Imagine that I read someone like Jon Udell (which I do) and I find an item of his particularly noteworthy or relevant to me. I post it from my news page and add some editorial content of my own.

But if, like me, you are a relatively new blogger then maybe very few people read my item and nobody bothers to click through to Jon's original. My item never appears in his list of referrers.

This means Jon, likely, will not know that it exists. We could imagine further that Jon would have liked to know what comments I made but he never gets the opportunity.

TrackBack addresses this problem. It allows me as the author of an item to "ping" the original during the act of publishing. This ping does not require someone to read my item and then click through to his. Simply by publishing he is notified that someone has referenced him.

I think this is a very powerful idea and will help to get new bloggers into the space. For those with interesting things to say the time to migrate from the fringe to the centre will be drastically reduced.

Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!

Process logging?

Fri, 12 Jul 2002 18:38:02 +0000

Brett Morgan is talking about KM and blogging integration (k-logging) being the next wave of tools. You bet. Or rather I bet. I'm betting the farm on it.

Here's a thing... How about process-logging.

Every workflow process produces an RSS output stream commenting on the state of the process and events that occur. If you're interested in how the process is going you subscribe.

Are any of the open source workflow packages looking at RSS integration?

Blogging books & Trackback

Mon, 15 Jul 2002 09:58:46 +0000

Oh stop already.. I keep reading entries discussing the idea "how silly it is that there are books coming out about blogging."

Look, there's a simple fact that seems to elude most of the Blogerati, if I may coin a term. Most people (something that has no statistically relevant deviation from EVERYONE) have NO idea that blogs exist. The books about blogging need to be there. We're in a pretty self-congradulatory medium here. Hell, I'd even go so far as to say that an inaccurate book is better than no book.

» I think this is a key point. When I step back and think about it I've had a lot of conversations recently where the subject of blogging came up because people asked me about what I was doing. There then followed a conversation where I try to get across what it's all about. In desparation I usually end up with some sort of half-baked: "It's like a web diary" explanation. This misses so much of value but there you go. These are people who know what the Internet, use wordprocessors and email, maybe even write web pages.
So the value of the books, even the bad ones, is as Jenny points out:

"Now I find myself in the same situation with blogs. I plan to implement them for every service area at SLS and on a personal level for staff internally and yet, I'd be surprised if even 10% of our staff understand what they are. I covered blogs at our SLS Tech Summit in March, but it was still too confusing and irrelevant for most of the librarians that attended that session. Next time, I'll be able to hold up these books, and they'll take me more seriously. Sorry, but that's how most of the world still works. They'll purchase them for their libraries, too, which means the concept of blogs will officially be cataloged and indexed in our collective memory (not just the memory of those of us who live online)."

People are going to read these books. Lots of 'em. I hope Blogger.com have a good relationship with their server suppliers!

Blogging is currently a one-way medium. Best you can do is have 2 (ok, "N") people subscribing to each other's monologues. But with TrackBack you close the loop and notify your conversation partner that it's now her/his turn. Now you can TRULY have interchange. Something that's only hackishly possible at the moment. (Check the userland discussions for the number of times people ask for "comment notifications".)

» I agree. I think TrackBack is a very important technology. I'm reaching for a metaphor but can't find a good one.
But effectively it's the difference between a broadcast system and a network. Blogs alone are too much like public broadcasting. You send and if you're lucky you get back letters and phone calls. With TrackBack people can be wired in, feedback loops will be established, communities will grow, it'll all come alive.

Why Radio?

Mon, 15 Jul 2002 22:47:25 +0000

Why have I choosen Radio over MovableType? It's a question I've asked myself recently.

I think MT looks like an excellent blogging system. In a few years time I think that MT (or son-of-MT) is likely to be the choice for bloggers who need a little more than Blogger (or son-of-Blogger) will provide. I don't believe, as much as I love it, that Radio will be that choice.

However I do believe that Radio could be the klogger tool of choice. Why?

Because Radio has such potential in both a networked (social) and standalone (personal) context. Because Radio is a general computing platform that has been specialized to handle blogging but could also be specialized for a thousand other applications.

I, along with others, are looking to take it to the next stage with k-log ready tools. Userland are doing their part with things like Instant Outlining and RCS.

So, that's why Radio.

Why Radio?

Tue, 16 Jul 2002 22:13:04 +0000

Hmm... Ya think?. See I think that all the cute little features that are being added to Radio are going to "in a few years time" bog it down terribly. However MT is a wad of perl code, which means it can be a point of departure for whatever anyone wants to do with it, without having to learn a proprietary "less than impeccably documented" scripting language (grumble grumble.)

However, initial ramp-up with radio can't be beat (to say nothing of the 40m of cloud space), so here I am.

I like radio alot, but I have to say the more compelling reason to use it over other blogging software is ease of setup & the year of service that comes with using radio.

As a developer, I've given up on trying to do really neat things with radio. It's just too hard to track down the documentation. [The Universal Church Of Cosmic Uncertainty]

» I think there are two different issues at play here: language and platform.
Is MT a better blogging system than Radio because it is a wad of Perl code rather than a wad of Usertalk code? I'm not sure but I guess so if only because of Perls popularity. Neither would be my first choice for writing a complex application but both are adequate to the task.
But the important issue for me is the platform. I would class MT as an application and Radio (along with Frontier) as a platform. In particular an ideal platform for delivering groupware applications.
Here's an example from my experience: About 5 years ago att UNL we were looking for a learning mangament system for lecturers to use to construct & deliver on-line courses. A question which stymied most vendors we spoke to was:

"How do you handle a lecturer who wants to update his module whilst on a cycling holiday in the south of france?"

For the most part they had no answer to the disconnected scenario and had to bluff or fall back to legacy software "Oh they can edit stuff in Word and then C&P when they get back." Right...
I can imagine constructing some very novel solutions to this kind of scenario with a combination of Radio & Frontier. I can imagine some novel applications for k-logging too.
It's the flexibility and power of the platform that I'm betting on.

Blogs as external brain packs

Tue, 16 Jul 2002 22:40:51 +0000

Wired: "Seniors in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease, with mild to moderate memory loss, are writing weblogs to help them make sense of their daily lives. And the activity, they say, is slowing the onset of their symptoms." [Scripting News]

» This is such a fantastic idea.

It does, however, raise some serious security issues. At the moment there is no real trust issue with what goes in a weblog. But if someone is really going to treat a weblog as their external brain pack then their going to have to be sure that no-one can tamper with it, thereby altering their perceived reality.

It puts me in mind of the Christopher Nolan film Memento (with Guy Pierce).

Faster damnit! Faster!

Wed, 17 Jul 2002 00:52:58 +0000

I've had complaints about how long my weblog takes to load.

Looking at it there are a lot of extraneous bits that seemed like a good idea at the time but I don't want any more. They're gone now. Also I've cut down how many days posts live on the home page from 7 to 3.

It seems faster now, although most of my posting is done using a 56K modem. Nothing seems fast with that bandwidth!

BlogRings on the cheap

Fri, 02 Aug 2002 21:19:14 +0000

Check out Blogger's random site tool. Basically you just drag the link into the link toolbar on IE 5 and it lets you randomly surf blogger blogs. That really isn't too interesting to me. What really would be cool if someone built a tool for Radio that let me put the sites I visit most often into a webring. That would let me surf my favorite sites by merely clicking on a link in the link toolbar. It also would be great if I could publish my webring link. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]

» I think you could do this using BackFlip. Add each of the blogs to your daily routine, then add the daily routine link to your IE toolbar.

I emailed them a while back about allowing you to have more than one tour, and to allow people to share tours (you can share link folders). They never acknowledged me.

More on TrackBack

Fri, 09 Aug 2002 17:01:45 +0000

What about TrackBack?.

While I was in the hospital in June, the Movable Type folks implemented a feature called TrackBack.

I'm not exactly sure all that it can do, but here's at least part of the story. (I'm posting this so I can get corrected if I don't understand the feature. It occurs to me that this post could use the feature, heh.)

Anyone, anywhere can send a message to any Movable Type server to associate a URL with a weblog post. That URL will be shown in the list of TrackBack links for the post.

Further, based on an email from Matt Mower, for some reason that I don't understand, this can only work with Movable Type servers. I doubt this, because from all outward appearances it is using HTTP, which could be emulated by any program capable of doing HTTP. Matt thinks this feature should be implemented with XML-RPC. I'm not sure it'll take off no matter what it's implemented in.

Here's the problem. By design it seems to assume that everyone plays fair. But eventually we all attract a relatively small number of people who would mark up every post with trash talk, if given the chance to. It's a predictable process. That's why I don't have a discussion group here (I used to), or a comments feature. It's why MSNBC is moving to weblogs over discussion software. It's basically why weblogs have a future for thoughtful discourse where mail-list-like collaboration tools are dead-ends. When I think about evolving weblogs, I try to avoid features that turn them into discussion groups.

[Scripting News]

» I think there has been a misunderstanding between Dave and I. Maybe I misphrased something or it was misinterpreted. Either way:

I'm not suggesting that TrackBack can only be implemented in MT. Just that, as it is implemented in MT it can only be served by MT and is most useful to MT users. It doesn't suit me very much. I also don't like the way you have to TrackBack enable things, use special URL's, have bookmarklets etc.. all that gets in the way to me.

I envisage an open XML-RPC based system. The TrackBack data should be available to & from any system and can track arbitrary URLs (no requirement to TrackBack enable anything).

Also with the prototype Radio client all the work of pinging is done for you automatically. As part of the publishing action Radio will figure out all the posts being referenced and ping them automatically. That's how I want it to work, you might want it different which is why I say it's a prototype.

As to the inherent design problem in trackback, well, I agree with the comments made. From a certain viewpoint.

However I see TrackBack not so much as a weblogging tool but as a k-logging tool. It gives you the ability to know what someone else is contributing to projects you are working on and that could be vital. As are discussion forums and all the other collaborative tools that help people do useful work.

Will TrackBack be absused? Sure. But so can any technology. If the abuse becomes a problem we can evolve strategies for addressing it. For me this is a time for experimentation, it's too early to abandon a potentially useful idea like TrackBack because it has a potential for abuse.

Example (and shooting from the hip) : Problem: "nusiance pings appearing on my TrackBack report." This seems a lot like the problem of spam email to me. Collaborative spam filtering looks set to deliver good results here, maybe it could do the same for TrackBack?

[Disclaimer: TrackBack - I am a believer!]

Redesign in progress.

Sat, 10 Aug 2002 21:38:59 +0000

Apologies for the interruption in service. This weblog is being redesigned.

I don't think anyone would argue that it didn't need it!

It's all in the title

Tue, 20 Aug 2002 19:43:13 +0000

Personal Knowledge Publishing = Blogging. (SOURCE:Curiouser and curiouser)-I like it!You know, I don't like the term klogging very much. It has meaning to us "in the know" but I think it's rather an opaque term. I would prefer a term like Personal Knowledge Publishing which actually says a little bit about what it means, and, harkens back to the DTP revolution. I think PKP will hail the same revolution for Knowledge Management by emphasizing that it is people that matter. Process should follow people. [Roland Tanglao's Weblog]

» I think Roland got it right with his title

Personal Knowledge Publishing = Blogging

and to put it in an organizational context

?? Knowledge Publishing = Klogging

I'm still working on the ??

Something worth talking about.

Tue, 20 Aug 2002 21:15:08 +0000

Something Unexpected: Scotts Radio.

Something Unexpected: Scott's Radio

As the author of the O'Reilly Essential Blogging chapters on Radio, I clearly have a commercial interest in Radio. You'd think that I'd want people to just buy the Essential Blogging book and NOT give content about Radio for free. You'd think that but you'd be wrong. I really want to see Radio do well along with great people like Jake and Lawrence. And more documentation is pretty much always a frothy good thing for products.

So... Inspiration struck me yesterday when I was digging through the 240 gigabytes of digital bile that I call a hard drive(s):

O'Reilly cut a lot of my text on the Essential Blogging book. (these are all labeled as "Missing") Why not aggregate that content along with my previous writings on Radio and release it as a free book under the GNU Free Documentation License? This content still gets tons of hits from Google so it's clearly useful.

A quick demand (ok gentle request) to my partner, Gretchen, for "A really cool cover" and within about an hour, she IM'd me the graphic at left. And I've been in hard core content massage since 3:37 am on this oh so soggy Boston day. I won't tell you that this content is perfect -- there are clearly some broken links and other editing style things that need to get done. But there is a lot of content and it's useful. It'll get improved more over time but following the Open Source mantra of "Release Early and Release Often", I give you:

Scott's Radio

==> Read Stories <==

[The FuzzyBlog!]

» Thanks Scott for publishing this.

Will Blog for Food

Wed, 21 Aug 2002 08:32:02 +0000

More on licensing for liveTopics. (SOURCE:Curiouser and curiouser)-Good luck! I am trying to do the same thing. Making a living through blogging. This also reminds me that I need to installl LiveTopics as well as add the blogrolling macro, ...So I think it's real values to me are: * reputation * a lead-in to other services * the vision The other services could be support, as well as more general KM/klogging consultancy or integration work. Am I making sense? I guess we'll know if I end up starving and homeless in 6 months time! [Roland Tanglao's Weblog]

» It feels good to know that I'm not alone. Roland Tanglao is also walking around wearing a sign reading "Will Blog for Food." In a sense I guess he's lucky, he has partners. At least he won't starve alone!

Blogger representation : uncovering the implicit

Thu, 22 Aug 2002 13:05:41 +0000

Uncovering the implicit. From Sébastien Paquet and Lilia Efimova ... some interesting insights as to why people blog and why some professions are better represented than others e.g. educators, journalists, software developers, librarians, lawyers and knowledge professionals. As Sébastien says in his [original posting] on the subject :

I think the commonality has to do with uncovering the implicit.

And as Lilia [adds] :

For me, blog is something for articulating ideas. They get some shape once they get out of my brain, and it becomes easier easy to deal with them. Blog is something for catching those difficult to catch things...

I think they are on to something here - some people because of their mindset "can't help but blog" while others will "never get it" or never find the time or the motivation to do it. And that's not a judgement - it simply reflects the diversity of human nature and that can only be good [] [Gurteen Knowledge-Log]

» An interesting observation, seems about right. Let's just hope the blogger mindset is in the majority!

Klogs can improve the value of what you write

Wed, 28 Aug 2002 15:27:46 +0000

Curiouser and curiouser! in There's a hole in my bucket....

As a klogger, over the past 3 months or so, I have recorded & published tens if not hundreds of thoughts. I doubt if I shared one quarter of output during the last 6 years I worked at various companies. Oh I would probably have emailed here and there, spoken up during meetings. But I wonder just how much knowledge is being lost, second by second, in most companies by each employee. Then multiply up...

But even if they would catch those thoughts, it's going to be very difficult to find something relevant and to understand it our of the context. More or less like forum discussion: you have to follow for some time to make sense of it.

Going through blog archives is not easy... So far I benefit more from the distributed dialog and from the collective filtering. So, blogs is more for sharing, rather than capturing...

[Mathemagenic]

» I don't think this problem is necessarily inherent in blogging/klogging as practiced, more a problem in the simple calendar based access method most weblogs provide by default.

But there are other options, for example a Radio weblog with liveTopics adds another dimension for relating posts together to create a train of thought. You can follow a topic from a post into a table of contents where you can see other posts referencing that topic. You can also see, for each post, other topics that were associated with it allowing you to hop from one subject of conversation to another.

The next level is based upon XML topic maps (in XTM format) which I am experimenting with generating right now. This will allow you to reconstruct the weblog to serve different purposes and, by merging topic maps from different weblogs together, to analyse a larger conversational "space."

All in all I think klogs will, ultimately, vastly improve the ability for people to find things that are relevant and meaningful among the discourse of themselves and others.

Republished everything

Sun, 08 Sep 2002 22:26:45 +0000

266 files and 24 minutes later my entire weblog is republished. Now to do a random sampling and see if everything is okay. I guess one side benefit is that my archives will all have the spiffy new(ish) Bryan Bell theme instead of the rather gnarled older Bryan Bell theme!

Sing me a blog

Tue, 10 Sep 2002 08:18:16 +0000

Radio Wishlist - Hearing blogspace..

From NewScientist: Musical approach helps programmers catch bugs. Professors developed a system that automatically converts Pascal source code into simple "music".

Can we mine RCS community servers, blogs and posts for metadata to compose a live music track?

Help me tell posts/sources apart. Help wade through hundreds of feeds and thousands of posts in a newsreader.

Use popularity, link density, post length, freshness, Flesch and other readability statistics, comment thread length

Help me find gems.

Connections with my blog, the relevance of this source's last 50 posts to my last 50 posts.

This is not audio blogging so much as blog visualization. Cool. Something to do after DayPop and blog SNA become blasé.

I sing the blogspace electric.

[a klog apart]

» It's a lovely idea.

How do you turn ideas into music?

It's your weblog

Tue, 10 Sep 2002 09:59:50 +0000

On the difference between blogs and discsussion forums. Some people do not seem to be able to get their heads around the difference between blogs and discussion forums. To my mind, although at a surface level they have some similarities - at a deeper level they are fundamentally different.

There are two dimensions to their differences - the first the psychological dimension and the second the technology dimension. One of the major psychological differences is that you own your weblog - it is YOURS - and it represents a history of YOUR thinking - so you take pride in its ownership - something that does not make a lot of sense in a discussion forum. On the hand on the technology front - [Ray Ozzie] sums up one of the major differences:

From [Architecture Matters: The Rebirth of Public Discussion by] by [Ray Ozzie] [Gurteen Knowledge-Log]

» Excellent point.

Comments are cool again!

Tue, 24 Sep 2002 17:04:58 +0000

New comment on post 413. New comments on post 413 (1 comments, previously 0) found [Comments for usernum 0107808 on server http://radiocomments.userland.com/comments]

» I'm very happy to be getting an RSS feed of comments to my weblog via CommentMonitor.

Weaving an Intranet

Thu, 26 Sep 2002 09:56:48 +0000

I see a blog-aware Intranet as being like a moving tapestry woven out of the best threads of each blog in the organisation.

For a well baked blog, add topics

Sat, 28 Sep 2002 12:59:52 +0000

Michael DeMaria over at Network Computing wants weblogs to have topical lists of posts. He points out that the time-based format isn't the easiest thing to use when looking for specific posts on selected topics. There are obviously two ways find posts contain a specific topic:

1) Use a search engine. This is the best approach to use when people are resistant to entering metadata.

2) Use a metadata tool like LiveTopics by Matt Mower. Matt has built a tool for Radio that makes it easy for authors to enter in metadata with each post. This makes it easy to provide directories that list post by topic (through use of the outliner). Basically, Livetopics can create a simple list of topical links to posts, or a complex hierarchy of topical links. Matt has a complex hierarchy on his site.

[John Robb's Radio Weblog]

» With thanks to John for the link.

Clearly I think Mike makes a very valid point. Weblogs make great diaries, but the by-date navigation structure sucks for locating topical information. More information about liveTopics can be had by either clicking the liveTopics see-also reference under this post, or going to the liveTopics page on the Novissio website.

Would you like a test drive?

Sun, 06 Oct 2002 08:44:47 +0000

Before you get in the car, you need a driver and a map.. Matt Mower comments on my altruism as a cultivated resource comments: ... I listened to a Geoffrey Moore webcast recently... [brentashley]

» Brent makes a good point. Much of the difficulty with business blogging is not technical in nature:

It's a problem of an entrenched culture of insecurity that results in hoarding of knowledge and attempts to steer personal and corporate destinies by controlling knowledge flow.

And he goes on to say:

Our problem is that we're trying to sell sets of fancy wheels to people who don't know how or why to drive, let alone have a map of where they're going. They get in, crash into the first obstacle they find, get out and slam the door, muttering about how this damn car can't drive straight.

However I think this is a best case scenario right now. It seems to me that only organisations with a Phil at the helm that even go for the test drive.

A taste of randomosity

Tue, 15 Oct 2002 23:21:10 +0000

I've decided to start surfing a few sites using the randomizer every day - just to see what else is out there. Just three or four different random blogs each day before I sign off. Tonights batch turned up a fantastic quote from Mischiefgurl:

Where are we going and why am I in a handbasket?

Microsoft Blogger

Fri, 01 Nov 2002 15:26:17 +0000

Anil Dash: Microsoft's Weblog Software. [Scripting News]

» The only thing wrong with this is that Microsoft won't use the words 'weblog', 'blog', 'weblogger', etc... They wouldn't use such old tired terminology when they could invent new and improved (and trademarked) terminology of their own!

liveTopics 1.1 close to release

Fri, 15 Nov 2002 00:18:21 +0000

It looks like I might finally have squashed the remaining bugs in liveTopics 1.1, what started as your run of the mill complex update spiralled into an endless cycle of fiddly little bugs. But it's starting to look good now. I'm hoping to roll out to testers very soon.

Between this and trying to come up with a decent pitch for business blogging I haven't been posting much. I've been reading a lot though and making lots of new friends via Ryze.

Seeds & notes

Wed, 27 Nov 2002 11:38:04 +0000

Improved Weblogging: Seeds and Notes.

Summary: In this entry I argue that a different position in a process of research/inquiry (thought development?) probably requires a different treatment in the weblogging, klogging process. I discuss a simple model of the thinking process and how each piece of the model might be treated differently by the weblogger. Bottom line is that Radio can be used to support such differentiation. See below for details. [Connectivity: Spike Hall's RU Weblog]

» An enjoyable piece from Spike about the development and communication of ideas and how it relates to weblogs. I like the concept of seeds & notes and how they relate to socialized and unsocialized thoughts.
This is of particular interest to me now because I am trying to think of places where weblogging fits naturally into a business. It's been suggested that research (companies or departments) is a natural fit since people are already conditioned to write (seemingly a barrier to adoption so far). It also helps that people working with ideas are likely to abound with undeveloped micro-content. Weblogs are a great way to record, develop and ultimately communicate that.
Anyone working in research want to try help design and run a pilot knowledge-logging program?

BlogStreet

Thu, 28 Nov 2002 16:46:44 +0000

Pretty Damn Cool: BlogStreet

I just checked out BlogStreet and I have to say that it's pretty damn cool. I know Veer one of the authors via IM from India and periodically he pops onto my radar with a new BlogStreet feature and says "Is it ready yet?". Using my mighty "bermuda triangle of software bugs" power I give it a whirl and he very nicely takes the feedback. He and I just spoke again and there are several new Blogstreet features, BlogStreet icons and more. More on this next week when people are reading again. Until then it's worth a definite look.

[The FuzzyBlog!]

I am always as fascinated by these things as I am disappointed by not being in the top #10. Oh well, now you know I'm an egomaniac so the cats out of the bag :P

BlogBrowsers

Fri, 29 Nov 2002 09:24:14 +0000

Okay I admit it, I'm hearing lots of people hopping up and down about BlogBrowsers and I can't help but ask; What is all the fuss about? Indeed more than that I can't help but ask the questions; Why? Where does this get us?

So a blog-browser reads & renders RSS, big deal. Wheres the value?

I hear Dave and others talking about "routing around Microsoft" but I don't see it. I'm a fan of blogs but I fail to see how a niche blogging application is going to route around MS. There's a whole lot of HTML web out there, are you planning to just leave it behind? And haven't we bought something pretty valuable in having a single platform (the browser) for delivering web applications? Isn't this what DHTML is working towards? If you want to innovate around MS then it makes more sense to me to start contributing to Mozilla's success.

Could someone give me the obviously missing pieces that will make this fit together for me...?

Tracking the link cosmos

Sat, 30 Nov 2002 08:21:29 +0000

Technorati. technorati.com is the best site I've seen sofar for showing who links to who's weblogs. Well, mainly I'm interested in who links to what on MY log, mostly to see which stories worked well, and to discover new friends who are exploring similar topics. The other sites that attempt to show connections between weblogs have sofar not shown me much more than I already knew, but in my technorati listing I right away get to know some new people. And it is great that in this world, plagiarism is flattery. And a way of voting. I copy somebody else's story, and somebody else copies my copy, and that shows that all of us found it important and interesting. [Ming's Metalogue]

I too have become interested in Technorati. It's like TrackBack in reverse and let's me find where the idea flow that I am participating in has reached in a more concrete fashion than Organica & EcoSystem.

Metalogue

Sat, 30 Nov 2002 10:26:21 +0000

Metalogue. What's a metalogue? I don't think it is in the dictionary. But a prologue is something one says in the beginning, to introduce something. An epilogue is something one says after the main action, as a sort of conclusion. A monologue is a prolonged presentation of some kind, spoken by one person. A dialogue is an exchange of ideas between two or more people. I suppose a metalogue would be talking ABOUT things that are happening, from a somewhat elevated perspective. Actually I think most weblogs I read are metalogues. They try to connect up some dots, try to discover clues in information and events, and try to connect that up with something bigger or deeper. Where are we going? What does it mean? [Ming's Metalogue]

Talking about what is happening... I love the idea of the Metalogue, trying to join the dots and connect what we see with a wider world and understanding.

Making ends meet

Sun, 01 Dec 2002 19:52:55 +0000

This is a difficult post to write.

The last 5 months have been some of the most interesting and exciting of my life. When I started blogging I couldn't have imagined what a dramatic impact it would have on me. I've been thinking more during this time than at any other time in my life and, having found a voice, sharing more. It's been very liberating. It also seems to me that the path I am on now may define my course for years to come.

Starting a business was something I really wanted to do. But I wasn't ready for the challenge, economy or no economy. I've learned so many things, like the supreme importance of your network and, by extension, your brand relative to things like products and services. But it's hard to run a business when every little thing is a lesson. Despite good advice I've made mistake and after mistake and they keep coming. On one hand I'm constantly learning and that's fun, but on the other hand it doesn't necessarily make for good business.

I want to continue, I hope to continue. I believe (dangerous as that is) that k-logging has an important future, my inability to come up with the right message or pilot site not withstanding, and is going to be a good business to be in. I also want to continue because I'm talking to and sharing ideas with some great people and that's always cool. But the hard reality is that I haven't made it work yet and I'm almost at the end of my rope.

I've started looking for a job, posting my resume to various recruitment sites. So heres where we come to the difficult bit:

Please, if you or someone you know could use my skills (CV will be up when Word agrees with me about what HTML is):

Java application development
Technical consultancy
Web development (Servlets/JSP, Perl, Cold Fusion)
Knowledge Management (+quite a lot of experience with Livelink) implementation or consultancy
Systems Management (Quite a bit of Solaris & WinNT/2K + a smattering of linux)
Tech support / Client support

please do get in touch, I could really use some help at the moment.

BlogTalk: We finally get our chance!

Tue, 17 Dec 2002 16:46:02 +0000

BlogTalk is a European weblog conference set for May 2003, in Vienna, Austria. Hey, a weblog conference I can drive to! I simply cannot miss. [Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog]

Guess I know who I'm carpooling with ;-)

It's being organised by Thomas Burg.

klog as sounding board

Mon, 30 Dec 2002 19:46:14 +0000

Multiplier effects in klognets.

The Weblogging Multiplier Effect. Some thoughts about the significance of weblogging for instruction and scholarship. [EduResources]

[...] The booster or multiplier that occurs when a person writes about what she or he thinks, observes, and reads, and then receives comments from others within a few hours or days makes an incalculable difference--the difference between private and public writing. This difference multiplies what can be learned and also multiplies the responsibility for thinking through what is said. If a writer's greatest tool is a large wastebasket (as, I believe, Hemingway remarked); the next greatest tool is a real audience.

Again, very good stuff from Joseph Hart. A must-read. In a similar vein, see the article by Verna Allee containing the famous quote Knowledge = power, so share and it multiplies.

[Seb's Open Research]

I've always been happiest when I have a sounding board for my ideas which are often half-formed or just plain out of phase. The power of the weblog as sounding board is that those ideas can kick around some, be rediscovered when the time is right or just act as big flags to warn you "danger Will Robinson!"

Seb's open Surveys

Mon, 30 Dec 2002 20:02:42 +0000

BlogStreet: How Useful Are Blogs and Wikis for Sharing Knowledge.

BlogStreet: How Useful Are Blogs and Wikis for Sharing Knowledge

BlogStreet has just announced a survey that they are hosting to look into this:

BlogStreet is hosting Sébastien Paquet's survey on the usefulness of weblogs and wikis for sharing knowledge. Please go here to fill in the short multiple-choice questionnaires.

- Weblog Survey
- Wiki Survey

Definitely worth filling out.

[The FuzzyBlog!]

I concur!

Hit-and-run weblogging

Fri, 31 Jan 2003 10:52:32 +0000

This item on hit-and-run weblogging coupled with this other item on discerning weblog usage gave me an idea:

Is there a way, in Radio, to specify which posts are forwarded to your aggregator feed? Often I do a quick post (some smug webloggers might call these hit-and-run posts) for my own reference. Other posts have an audience in mind. I'd like to post both to my weblog, while forwarding only the latter to the aggregator feed. Has this been done?

[Blogfish]

For this kind of stuff I use a trick I picked up from Spike Hall. I have a category Seeds which represents those things. Any post I don't want to appear goes into Seeds and not the Home Page.

Then I copied the #upstream.xml file from /www/system into /www/categories/seeds/ to prevent anything getting upstreamed to the cloud.

p-logs

Fri, 14 Feb 2003 17:43:09 +0000

P-Logs for Project Teams. Here's my Proposal for a P-Log (Project Weblog) Specification.

Why the Interest in Weblogs?
I've been curious about the role blogging could play on projects. In October I did a posting Project Klogs: Changing Paradigms on John Udell's view of weblogs for projects. Udell claimed our tools and practices don't attend to the story of the project.

Projects fail. This is the usual case. We all know this. Attempts by the PMI to address this have not succeeded. It's time for something completely different.

Why A Specification?
We've been designing and redesigning the same collaboration tools for years. Ten years ago I used an early Lotus Notes database for project management. Back then and today the collaboration environments do the same things: provide status, track issues, and discussion. We can do those things with a p-log. But there are three critical issues that need attention that haven't got attention:

Uncertainty - the future unfolds influenced by actions of the team and the world that is unfolding around the team. Planning is the conversation for participating in the infolding.
Learning - the vast majority of knowledge is tacit. Projects are one-of-a-kind opportunities to share, deepen, innovate, ...
Mood of the team - enthusiasm beats complacency, cooperation beats (internal) competition, determination beats resignation, and wonder beats arrogance. Yet, when mood is left unaddressed we get what we get.
P-logs are about the story of the project and the team. P-logs are for the team to take charge of the conversation of the project.

What's Next?
Perhaps this is too ambitious. Perhaps nothing short of audacious ambition will get at the underlying sources of project failure. I propose we do this together. How about a project conducted with a weblog for developing the p-log? (Thanks Joe for the proposal.) In the next few days I'll write about aspects of the p-log specification. Please join in with your comments and questions, suggestions and criticisms, and offers to build and use a prototype p-log.
[Reforming Project Management]

Semantic blogging

Mon, 24 Feb 2003 14:03:46 +0000

Semantic blogging tool?. Danny Ayers is working on a 'semantic weblog server'. It'll be interesting to see how this turns out. The semantic web needs working apps, so the rest of us can get a clue re what it's all about. [Second p0st]

This looks interesting.

Corporate bloggers manifesto

Thu, 27 Feb 2003 13:38:55 +0000

The Corporate Weblog Manifesto.

Thinking of doing a weblog about your product or your company? Here's my ideas of things to consider before you start.

Tell the truth.

Post fast on good news or bad.

Use a human voice.

Make sure you support the latest software/web/human standards.

Have a thick skin

Don't ignore Slashdot.

Talk to the grassroots first

If you screw up, acknowledge it.

Underpromise and over deliver.

If Doc Searls says it or writes it, believe it.

Know the information gatekeepers.

Never change the URL of your weblog.

If your life is in turmoil and/or you're unhappy, don't write.

If you don't have the answers, say so.

Never lie.

Never hide information.

If you have information that might get you in a lawsuit, see a lawyer before posting, but do it fast.

Link to your competitors and say nice things about them.

BOGU.

Be the authority on your product/company.

Know who is talking about you.

[The Scobleizer Weblog]

A good set of principles for someone who is blogging to the outside world (and please visit the original post for a full definition of each point, especially the lovely BOGU!).

What's in a name?

Fri, 28 Feb 2003 19:46:45 +0000

So far we have:

business journalling
knowledge-logging
k-logging
corporate knowledge recording (from Christian)
professional knowledge publishing
enterprise weblogging

any more for any more?

Will we catch this wave?

Tue, 18 Mar 2003 14:36:39 +0000

Participants Share.

Sharing knowledge with yourself. Jim McGee nails the role of weblogs in KM, counter to Stephen Downes misguided claim that "Weblogs get data into the system, but that's never been the problem with knowledge management: no, the problem is in using the data in any meaningful way."[OLDaily]

In the organizations where I've struggled to make knowledge management work, one of the fatal flaws has been the notion that knowledge management is somebody else's problem. ...a huge amount of the knowledge important to me remains explicit and never ends up making the cut to tacit. ... Weblogs put the emphasis where I believe it belongs; on the individual knowledge worker. It encourages them to begin thinking about their own knowledge work more explicitly and systematically. It helps them realize that they are the problem and the solution. You have to learn how to share knowledge with yourself over time before you can begin to share it effectively with others. [McGee's Musings]

What weblogs do, contrary to traditional enterprise software, is enage people as participants.

[Ross Mayfield's Weblog]

More good thinking out loud from Jim & Ross. I'm not convinced by the use of do in the last sentence though.

I don't think that weblogs do anything and I'm increasingly of the opinion that the benefits that we are seeing at the moment are simply those of tapping into a particular type of personality, i.e. the enthusiastic early adopters who will do something with anything you throw at them.

So far I'm not seeing the kind of evidence that weblogging (in whatever form you name it) offers a particularly unique solution to the KM problem generally. Those solutions are going to have to come from us, in how we apply what is, after all, just another technology. Otherwise I predict in 12-18 months time, articles about "how weblogging has failed us."

In my opinion, we do have an opportunity to use the current wave of popularity for weblogging to get people to experiment with this new medium, try to change some working assumptions and the practices that go with them and move things on a little.

Ready for the next wave.

What do weblogs do?

Wed, 19 Mar 2003 10:42:58 +0000

What do weblogs do?.

from Curiouser and curiouser!:

I don't think that weblogs do anything and I'm increasingly of the opinion that the benefits that we are seeing at the moment are simply those of tapping into a particular type of personality, i.e. the enthusiastic early adopters who will do something with anything you throw at them.

I agree, but with a twist... what weblogs have done is help the group of enthusiastic early adopters become self aware, to recognize themselves as a group, and to help make strong social connections between people of like minds. This is very valuable and I hope we can find other ways to partition the blogsphere so that, as other social networks come online (lawyers, doctors, teachers) they too can find themselves and be stronger for having done so.

[Micah's Weblog]

I guess I was a bit too quick there... I agree with Micah that weblogs have offered an improved medium for people who want to communicate with each other to do so. So yes, I was wrong, they do do something.

But what I'm trying to say is that enabling early adopters to communicate better isn't really doing what I'm interested in. My take on the history of KM and it's technologies is that the early adopters are not a good predictor for how the rest of the wave will use a technology and I'm not sure that the early or late majorities, within organisations, will take to this medium as the early adopters do.

What weblogs have done is provide an easy lowering of the technological barrier. But this is just allowing what I consider the real, social, problems to rise to the surface. Of course this still does something good. Exposing these problems is the first step towards solving them. In my own journey I think I started with a view that the problems were mostly technological -- get the technology right and the problem is solved. I don't think like that at all any more.

Happy birthday to you

Wed, 26 Mar 2003 08:47:05 +0000

Only one year. One year ago today I opened this weblog. Yesterday I went trough the last 12 months of posts. I didn't read them all, but... well, I saw my life passing before my eyes. There are some posts that I wrote about one year ago that look like they could have been written yesterday while others belong to a very distant past, when my company and my life were different, we had other projects, other dreams. A lot of stuff has happened since them, good and bad. Among the good thing, I must say that weblogging in the last year has been a great experience, more than 61,000 "unique visitors" came on these pages, more than 1,5 millions hits. I have met a lot of incredibly smart people in the blogosphere and some have become friends. A warm thank you to everybody for this wonderful year. [Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog]

Paolo is among the nicest people I have had the privilege of meeting and getting to know. I don't think that would have happened but for his blog, so:

Happy birthday to you,
Happy birthday to you,
Happy birthday Paolo's blog,
Happy birthday to you!

Just one question: Are the English and Italian blogs twins?

Cast off your discreteness

Thu, 01 May 2003 18:58:39 +0000

A note about blogs. I just posted this in a private space, but thought it was worth reposting here:

Some of us are seeing weblogs as an early step in the evolution of the web (or, some say, a revolution in the way the web is used), and the general label for the stuff we're talking about is "social software." Social software supports group forming, an activity that wasn't necessarily in the heads of the folks who created the first blog systems as simple content management, emphasizing individual publication. Blogs are evolving, though, as nodes in social networks, and bloggers are drawn to group-forming activities and software developments that emphasize the connections as well as the nodes. It's possible to see blogs as a bunch of discrete publications that order random posts in reverse chronological order, but you get away from that pretty quickly when you get into the space and se what people are actually doing with their weblogs.
Discuss A note about blogs [weblogsky]

Interesting. The work that Paolo and I are doing is about elevating blogs from their discreteness and into a world of connections made through topics!

You mean I'm not an enigma?

Fri, 02 May 2003 22:21:15 +0000

I was reading something today about how bloggers quite often don't offer the reader any information about themselves at all. I guess it's true, although I don't hide my biases it's probably hard to judge what sort of person I am. So i've added a little bit of biography via the "About Me" button in my right hand link panel. It's a work in progress but hopefully gives more of the flavour (I won't ask which one).

Shared transcripts for the masses

Mon, 07 Jul 2003 07:16:33 +0000

Blogs in the Workplace.

An NY Times article on weblogs in business that somehow missed Socialtext ;-(

..."People are starting to use Web logs to archive data that would have otherwise been lost," Mr. Tang said. He noted that much of the company's internal communications had been via instant messaging — and was lost as soon as the correspondents closed their chat windows. Now, though, employees are starting to post transcripts of relevant discussions on the Web logs, he said.

"It's not just making life more convenient," Mr. Tang said, "but actually giving us something new we didn't have before."

[via Scripting News]

[Ross Mayfield's Weblog]

This would seem to support the argument for IM-to-blog as a useful publishing metaphor. Although I wonder how well it can be made to work in practice: I can think of few IM conversations that I would want to appear on a blog unedited. Perhaps there is a middle-step.

An interesting approach to this, for me, would be the idea of a shared transcript editor. Roughly what I have in mind is a 3rd participant in the conversation (a bot of some kind) which records what is said. When the conversation is over it sends (via IM) both participants a link to a shared transcript editing page. Once the participants have agreed the final transcript it then blogs it to both their weblogs.

Of course all of this sounds like it would work much more seamlessly as a Groove application.

A new blogging tool

Mon, 21 Jul 2003 11:36:38 +0000

Zoq 1.0 features. These are Zoq's 1.0 planned features. I hope I didn't forget of any important one. writing/editing/deleting posts (who would expect) comments on your posts pings weblogs.com sending and receiving trackback drafts archives by month and category one click posting ent enabled rss feeds full text search creating new weblogs clean and nice urls inviting writers to colaborate on your blog changing your design different levels of editing permissions chosing from different design templates creating your own template sending images to use on your posts thumbnail generation [Daily Bytes]

Will this be a next generation blogging tool? I wonder what it's written in.

Blogging steady state

Tue, 29 Jul 2003 17:22:45 +0000

To post or not to post. I don't feel much like posting in these days. I was about to try writing why... but I don't feel much like posting in these days. [Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog]

I went through a very similar experience a couple of months ago. I just found myself unable to work up the enthusiasm to write. Then I found myself starting to comment on posts where I had nothing to say, simply to be posting something (I invariably cancelled those posts).

I think my output has dropped since then in both quantity and (measured by the power of hand waving) quality. I guess this will either fix itself, or it won't. Maybe this is the new steady state for 1-yr old bloggers?

The weblog method

Wed, 06 Aug 2003 09:16:20 +0000

Edu-blog experiment.

While being offline, I had more time to think about my own research ideas.
A part of describing a little bit quantitatively and more qualitatively the Polish blogosphere, from the psychological and sociological point of view, I had an idea of an experiment.

How to proove that a blog can be a useful edu-tool when searching news, structuralizing them and acquiring them?

Let's choose three groups of students.
The course, the teacher, the time, the age, etc, is as similar as possible.
In the first group there is no permanent homework required.
An essay, a report and a final exam.
The students are asked to read some texts each week and make some searches, but there are no output to deliver, only a soft discussion at the beginning of the lesson.

The second group is asked to run a weblog, where the students should put the same essay and report, but they are also asked to write down their ideas about the texts they have read during the week and the results of the searches they were asked to do. Their weblogs are discussed at the beginning of each lesson. The students would pass the same final exam at the end of the course.

In the third group I would apply a classical edu-method, e.g. a test at the beginning of each lesson, plus the essay, the report and the final exam. The test would be related to the texts and searches to do at home. It is necessary to have this third group because I would like to differentiate the impact of blogs from the impact af any educational method applied to students.

I suppose that the final exam should be composed of several parts - some knowledge, some skills, some creativness related to the knowledge and skills, some logical thinking on the base of the acquired knowledge...

My hypothesis is that the results of the final exam should be different in each group. Probably different also depending of the several parts of the exam. I would love to see that the knowledge is worse in the first group than in the second and third group, and that the skills and creativity are better in the blogs group.
The first group is not motivated to learn during the whole year (or semester), the second group is externally motivated to get the internal self-learning process. The third group is externally motivated (forced?) to learn because of the tests.

What do you think about it? What should I change to make the experiment better in methodology and more interessant for research? Is there anybody who did it already?

Sebastian Fiedler" height="20" width="20" border="0" /> Marysia proposes a classic quasi-experimental setting to "proove that a blog can be a useful edu-tool." For various reasons I don't think this type of research desing is necessarily appropriate. What are your thoughts on this? [Sebastian Fiedler]

[Seblogging News]

»I would be interested in the results of this experiment. One interesting point for me would be about the requirements on the instructor in each case and, in particular, for case#2 how comfortable the instructor is about (a) writing a weblog and (b) helping others to do so. Does the instructor even need to be writing one themselves? (After all, most of the time instructors do not take tests with their students).

Engage with the mission

Wed, 27 Aug 2003 21:08:28 +0000

A Blogger in Their Midst.

Harvard Business Review, Sept 2003, leads with a case study on blogger behavior at work. The case is kinda fun. A woman writing a blog calling herself "Glove Girl" is responsible for a big increase in the sale of the company's products, but she blogs without permission, and without following the company line. (Imagine that.) What is the CEO to do? [smirk]

As usual, HBR invites four 'experts' to offer their views on what to do. The advice is not bad. It ranges from figure out how to take this blog-marketing thing mainstream to what's wrong with the way you communicate internally that you didn't know Glove Girl was blogging.

Here are my comments:
(I used to be a Chief Operating Officer for a design-build commercial builder.)

Create mechanisms for employees to engage fully in the mission of the company. Some people are just dying to make bigger contributions. Blogging is just one way to share ones voice.
Blog with company bloggers. Ray Ozzie founder of Groove took up blogging and discovered his own voice along the way. (If you can't beat 'em, join 'em?) Learn first-hand how the blogging medium (genre) can support the company mission.
Encourage group blogging. As companies become more and more virtual (physically separate) we risk becoming detached from our peers. A group blog, where each of us can post, read, and comment as it serves us and the group, nurtures relationships. Group blogging may be the safety net for distributed project teams.
Bring the marketing department together with the company bloggers. Prepare yourself to mediate the conversation! My experience of bloggers is they are VERY well-intended. Help people find ways to create something new from an intentionality between the groups.
Look for other 'marginal practices' that may be contributing to the success of the company. Instant messaging for supporting clients immediately comes to mind. Wikis for supporting the folks who are supporting the customers? How about unsanctioned websites?

Creating a blogging presence was too easy. It took me all of 3 hours on a weekend. Just imagine what is happening at work with all the 'friendly support' available! Don't wait...harness it.
[Reforming Project Management]

I really like #1:

Create mechanisms for employees to engage fully in the mission of the company. Some people are just dying to make bigger contributions. Blogging is just one way to share ones voice.

Companies clueful enough to want to listen to their participants will find blogs to be a great way to tease them out and get them interacting.

A journey with Phil

Tue, 23 Sep 2003 20:33:41 +0000

So, I don't have the patience to do a complete re-write but here is a recap of some of the highlights of my conversation with Phil.

Obviously, since we were using it, we talked about Skype (i'm pronouncing it 'sky'-'p'). I guess I'm both impressed and frustrated in equal measure. Most of the time (we were talking for hours, god knows what state Phil was in the next day) the quality was good, but it did crap out on us quite a bit. It definitely needs a cell-phone style signal meter. We even mused that, since Skype knows your address it could tap into the Internet Weather Report to tell you what sort of call to expect!

We talked about the possible applications for a good, free, VOIP client and there are many. One in particular appeals to me and that is seeing Skype support bundled with the software I buy. What I want is that when I need to contact a vendor I can press a Skype me button. This lets them know that a CSA or Techie should get in touch with me. It's convenient for me because it means that I will be at the computer when they call. The win for the vendor is that they only need to call when they see me online and the cost is significantly cheaper than how they do this today. (As an example, doing webcallback via Netcall means the vendor has to pay for 2 PSTN calls. One from the Netcall server to the CSA and one from the Netcall server to the customer. Then they have to pay Netcall to manage it all as well. Gets expensive).

Phil and I are both lefties so we rapped about the war, Bush and the Dean campaign. It's incredibly for a guy that seemed such an outside 12 months ago that if you search for Howard on Google, Dean for America is no. #2. What is particularly impressive is the way the Dean campaign have leveraged their digital savvy into on the ground support. Would that any UK politician had the same nouse. I can't imagine being so impressed with any MP I have come across that i'd actually go talk about them. I would love to feel differently though!

I gave Phil a quick head's up on the work we are doing with K-Collector/W4, he hadn't seen it since BlogTalk (it seems so long ago now...) and we've put a lot of effort in since then. We also talked about what's needed to get corporates into blogging.

Oh he put me onto Ruled Brittania (by Harry Turtledove) which is an alternate reality novel set in an England conquered by Spain. I'm a complete sucker for this stuff so that went straight onto my wishlist. In return I suggested Fatherland (by Robert Harris) a detective thriller set in a victorious post WW II Germany and The Man in the High Castle (by Philip K. Dick and personal favourite of mine) set in an America split down the middle by Germany and Japan.

There was lots more but I'm running out of steam...

Feedster top-100

Fri, 16 Jan 2004 18:38:01 +0000

Feedster's top 100 list.
Feedster is keeping a separate list of "top 100 feeds." Weird, I'm #4 on that one too. I'm very honored that so many people subscribe to me.
[The Scobleizer -- Geek Aggregator]

I'm somewhat shocked at how few subscribers any of these blogs have. I'm assuming this must be from a limited subset of data.

Licensed to aggregate (pt #3)

Tue, 10 Feb 2004 11:10:14 +0000

Just musing out loud...

The HTTP protocol specifies headers which clients can supply in a request to control what a server can return to them. One in particular is the accept header. Which looks something like:

accept:text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,image/jpeg,image/gif;q=0.2,*/*;q=0.1

so there is already a simple model available for delineating content types. I am thinking of something along the lines of:

I'm not sure whether this is something that should be embedded in an RSS feed or referenced from another location (since it is potentially applicable to the blog as well). Other questions are:

Should it be extended to handle specific identifiable resources?
To whom are these rights granted?
Do we have the right set of rights to be granted? (cf my use of read above.)
Is the creative commons URL per scheme approach the right one?
Can we come up with a similar scheme for copyright & public domain?

It occurs to me that it might be possible to link a scheme like this to FOAF and use a service like PeopleAggregator to create the publishing/sharing relationships. This moves much closer to Ted Nelsons Transclusion publishing concept.

Lurkers within

Fri, 13 Feb 2004 08:44:44 +0000

Lurking - Ton on Lurking and Weak Ties and their value in networks. Ton has a superb article on the value of lurkers and their weak ties and their power to help networks... [Robert Paterson's Weblog]

Interesting notes about lurkers and their significance. Inside companies I think there are, typically, less forums to lurk in. Developing a weblogging culture will help to promote the lurking within. Ton has also prompted me to wonder about whether there should be tools for lurkers. If we see lurking as a useful complement to participation, what can we do to facilitate it?

Blogging summary

Sun, 15 Feb 2004 17:34:44 +0000

I just took a look at my All Posts page for this blog and was a little taken aback at just how much content I have amassed since I started. 1,300 posts doesn't sound very much until you start reading the titles. I got interested in my posting habits and got some data out of Radio to make these graphs:

<%softShadow( "images/posting-history.jpg", width:664, height:419 )%>There is quite a lot of daily fluctuation. I guess that's only to be expected.

<%softShadow( "images/summary-posting-history.jpg", width:664, height:419 )%>Somewhat less on a monthly basis although you can see that the trend is downwards as I have gotten busier with work.

DIY blogging stats

Sun, 15 Feb 2004 17:46:31 +0000

In case any other Radio users would like to do what I've just done I've uploaded the script necessary. Import this into Radio and run it. It will create two files in your gems folder called posting-history.csv, and, summary-posting-history.csv, respectively. These can be imported into Excel, sorted and used however you fancy.

Blogging archetypes

Mon, 16 Feb 2004 12:57:46 +0000

I'm reading Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm and something just struck me.

Moore describes buyers in the following categories:

innovators
visionaries
pragmatists
conservatives
skeptics

with his celebrated chasm being the gap between the visionaries and the pragmatists.

Moore defines some of the characteristics of visionaries and pragmatists in relation to markets. It's a sweeping generalization but he notes how visionaries often have very strong horizontal links between them whilst pragmatists tend to be much more focused on vertical relationships with those around them.

What struck me was how this mirrors with a take up of blogging. Blogging has been very much about the horizontal. We are throwing out ideas and commentary and, quite often, making broad horizontal links to our comrades in spirit. My supposition is that this prospect likely does not appeal to the pragmatists out there who are more focused on the people around them, their "verticals."

I think what we may be seeing, with the emergence of k-logging, is a move to a more blended and holistic form of blogging where the verticals relationships take their rightful significance.

Making projects a little bit easier

Wed, 18 Feb 2004 07:34:32 +0000

Why Projects are Hard.
This sidebar to Frank Patrick's series on Promises and Prescriptions attempts to show why it is we find projects hard. I found it hard to understand the sidebar! (Just kidding Frank.)

Projects are hard due to the interaction of uncertainty and variability. Our efforts to minimize uncertainty, for instance by deciding early, serve to limit the actions available to performers as the future unfolds. At the same time, we introduce variability by being unreliable with our project commitments. "Hard" is an understatement.

For those of you subscribing to Reforming Project Management via Bloglet, you can add a subscription to Frank's Focussed Performance Business Blog and have our postings delivered together automagically in the same email message. (You'll find Frank's subscription box at the top of the right-hand column.) Try it out for awhile.
[Reforming Project Management]

I think that this is one of the first areas in which business weblogs will make a big impact. Widespread use of weblogs offer a low-cost boost in information visibility & processing which has a two key knock-on effects for project work:

earlier identification of risks
better tracking of those risks

In concert these effects mean that more overall risk can be endured because it can be evaluated early & addressed (rather than only being seen after it is upon you).

In turn this ability to manage risk better holds out the possibility of a more flexible approach to project work. One such idea borrowed (most recently) from eXtreme Programming is the architectural spike.

In XP an architectural spike is a short, controlled, foray into unknown territory. When confronted with a difficult problem several of these spikes may be made to evaluate different approaches before selecting the best option.

Used as part of a lightweight, high-visibility, methodology this is an improved way of working. Because you can trust that your risks are containable you can safely defer decisions until they need to be made increasing options & flexibility for the project team.

Yikes

Mon, 22 Mar 2004 20:13:54 +0000

I clearly talk about Bush/WarOnTerror far too much. This blog is meant to be about new approaches to Knowledge Management through weblogs, topic maps and good conversation. AdSense tells a different story! (Although I wonder if it is weighing my archives, I'm sure I've talked about KM than Bush over the last 1374 posts.)

Strip Mining for Whimsy

Mon, 12 Apr 2004 15:38:42 +0000

Forgotten gems. Sometimes, you come across a blog that makes you stop and think for a while. A blog that takes your breath away. A blog written in such a way that you sit, dumbstruck, whilst you read.

Quite a long while ago I came across Strip Mining for Whimsy. I donÂ’t know why I stopped reading Joshua Norton II, Emperor of The United States and Protector of Mexico, but whatever reason I had at the time, it canÂ’t possibly have been good enough, for there simply is no reason good enough to not read this blog.

Go. Pause. Read. Feel. [Chocolate and Vodka]

Spot on Suw. I really like his writing and his point of view. And I thought I had my subscription list under control again...

She canna take it anymore

Tue, 20 Apr 2004 21:27:22 +0000

The unblogged blog is a blog not worth blogging. You know one of the worst things about going away for a few days? You get back to a whole backlog of blog posts that you want to write but which feel like they'll take forever so you put off starting them because you have work and emails and stuff to do first. Then you discover that everyone else has been astonishingly productive whilst you were away and the already huge list of blogs that you try to peruse on a daily basis have stacked up the unread entries in Bloglines and suddenly your criteria for which blog to read next is not 'which author do I like the best?' but 'who's been lazy this week?'. How I smile when I see a blog with unread entries still in single figures.

And I have a cold. Ok, so it's not quite the unfettered snotfest I suffered a few months ago, but it makes me feel slow and stupid. (Anyone who comments that I actually am slow and stupid will feel the full force of my sneeze, I promise you.)

So, early night tonight and blog first thing in the morning. Honest, guv. [Chocolate and Vodka]

Yep. My aggregator is full, I have a bunch of blogs to read, documents, presentations,

My Lord is a filthy pig!

Wed, 21 Apr 2004 19:28:16 +0000

Why I Like Poland.
For those just tuning in, I recently came back from a three-week visit to the old country, my first in three years.

Courtliness

In Poland, the proper way for a man to greet a woman is by kissing her hand. The proper way to address a person with whom you are not on very close terms is as "My Lord" or "My Lady". When writing to someone, you capitalize the second-person pronouns and leave the first-person ones in lower case. You address the envelope to the "Respected Lord/Lady So-and-so".

These formalities are absolute - even when you're swearing at a cab driver, you are expected to observe decorum. This can make even the most minor fracas in a bus queue sound like a tetchy day at the House of Commons. "My Lord is a filthy pig! My Lady is a tramp and a harlot, and her Ladyship's face looks best suited for sitting on!"

Carp

In America, this king of fishes is practically impossible to find outside of a goldfish bowl. Maybe it's because carp can have a muddy river-bottom taste if not properly prepared. But a correctly purged carp (left to fast for a few days before slaughter, with time to contemplate its sins) is the most heavenly, delicate fish there can be, pan-fried and served up hot. And besides, Americans seem to enjoy the inveterately muddy catfish.

I suspect the real reason carp isn't eaten here is because Americans are too wussy to deal with all the cunning little bones embedded in its flesh. This is, after all, the land of the individually-wrapped cheese slice. We are a people grown fat on convenience. And to American restaurants, a carp must look like a liability lawsuit with fins. So its consumption is limited to people like the Poles, the Chinese, and the Jews, who are used to hardships and don't mind a little risk with their fish course.

Applause

In all of Eastern Europe, it's traditional for passengers on an airplane to applaud when it lands. The cynic in me is tempted to call this a legacy of the Tupolev days, when a safe landing was truly a special occasion, but I prefer to think of it as an acknowledgement that flying ten kilometers above the Earth at near-sonic speeds is something to appreciate. For unknown reasons this custom irritates the stuffing out of certain of my American friends, who will be glad to know it is slowly dying out, reserved now only for more spectacular landings in heavy rain or turbulence.

A second great innovation of the Slavic tribes is rhythmic clapping, which serves as a useful intermediate stage between loud applause and a standing ovation. I believe this is the same thing as the slow handclap in England, but in Eastern Europe it has a very positive connotation. Not only does it sound cool to hear an audience segue from general applause to a slow, rhythmic clapping, but it makes it much easier to lure a musician or performer back for an encore. After all, you can't hear a standing ovation.

The Giant Holiday Aid Orchestra (Wielka Orkiestra ÅšwiÄ…tecznej Pomocy)

The Orchestra is Poland's version of the Jerry Lewis telethon. It started in 1993 as a fundraising event to help buy equipment for the children's cardiology unit in the main Warsaw hospital. Over the next 11 years, it has grown by leaps and bounds, to the point where the one-day drive is practically a national holiday. In the process, the Orchestra has raised $44 million to fund equipment for pediatric surgery, transforming Poland from a backwater into one of the world leaders in treating serious congenital defects and diseases in children. Last year, Poland became the first country on earth to test the hearing of all newborn babies. The survival rate for pediatric surgery has doubled since 1993, due entirely to the Orchestra. Polish hospitals, which have traditionally had very well trained medical staff and microscopic budgets, now have the resources they need to operate at a First World level.

All of this is the effort of one single man, Jerzy Owsiak, who has turned the telethon into a public carnival that turns out massive crowds in every major Polish city. On January 11, it is almost impossible to find a Pole anyhwere who does not have a big red heart sticker on his lapel, indicating that he's donated some money to one of the hordes of children deputized to take up collection. Particularly inspiring is the fact that the Orchestra spends 100% of its funds on aid - what administrative costs there are are paid out of interest on the previous year's donations. Because the Orchestra pays in cash up front, it has been able to negotiate major discounts, so each dollar collected goes even further. It is the largest charity effort of its kind in Europe.

Soup

Poles eat three meals a day - breakfast, a small supper at around seven in the evening, and the main meal of the day sometime between one and three o'clock. This last always consists of a soup course and a second course, usually some variant on hunk of meat + starch. Because soup is served every day, Polish cooking has evolved a great variety recipes, all of them delicious and most practically unknown outside the country: chicken soup (rosÃ³Å‚), sorrel soup (zupa szczawiowa), fermented rye soup (Å¼urek), pickle soup (zupa ogÃ³rkowa), potato and vegetable soup (kartoflanka), sauerkraut soup (kapuÅ›niak), beet soup (barszcz), mushroom soup (zupa grzybowa), split pea soup (grochwka), barley soup (krupnik), tripe (flaczki), tomato soup (zupa pomidorowa), chilled beet and sorrel soup (chÅ‚odnik, also know by me as Pepto-Bismol soup, for its color) and a thousand others, including many regional variants. Whole civil wars would have been fought about the proper way to prepare barszcz, if not for all the invasions.

Dairy Bars

The dairy bar (bar mleczny) is where frugal and impecunious Poles go for soul food, a cross between a school cafeteria and an old-style American diner. Dairy bars were once ubiquitous in the socialist era, operated by the dour tribe of professionally hostile white-coated women who effectively ran the country back then (they continue to thrive in the civil service, which functions as a kind of wildlife preserve for homo sovieticus). The name 'dairy bar' comes from the fact that most of these places did not serve meat, or at least not regularly (meat was a "deficit product"). Dairy bars specialized in soups, dumplings, crepes, noodles, omelettes, and other basic dishes, served with alumium cutlery on a worn porcelain plate, with the weight of each portion always scrupulously listed on the grooved notice board that serves as a menu.

Many of these bars have gone out of business since 1989 - they were subsidized to the gills - and many others have converted into Ye Olde Inns, Rustic Peasant Kitchens, and similar monstrosities, but those that remain are generally still in business for a reason. The only difficulty is figuring out which dish is the establishment's secret masterpiece. For example, the dairy bar on the way to Wawel Castle in KrakÃ³w will feed you a marvelous plate of scrambled eggs with sausage, served on a little individual frying pan. The bar across from the Old Town on the east bank of the Vistula in Warsaw makes delightful crepes.

Visiting a dairy bar can be a little tricky for a foreigner - anyone who can speak English can probably find a better job than serving derelicts in a dairy bar, after all. So I would suggest coming armed with a clear list of Polish dishes, and submitting your request in writing. After all, you don't want to accidentally wind up with a plate of blood sausage and beef tripe, unless of course it's the dairy bar in Zakopane, where the tripe is to die for... [Idle Words]

If (like me) you've never read Maciej before, do yourself a favour and go browse soon. Other higlights for me were PC Forum and Warszawa.

First outing for People Centred Knowledge Management

Thu, 22 Apr 2004 13:04:12 +0000

City Information Group April seminar - A trip to t .... City Information Group April seminar - A trip to the virtual world - 27 April 2004 - London, UK - Roger Brown from GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), will describe the dramatic transformation of the GSK libraries from physical to virtual, focussing on the implications for their information vendors. Matt Mower, partner in Evectors Software, will discuss exciting new developments in people-centred knowledge management. He will focus on "social software" including weblogs, aggregators and instant messengers [Feedster.com Results For: evectors]

I shall be speaking on April 27th to the City Information Group. I am presenting the first fruits of the work that Paolo and I have been doing over the last couple of months. I'll be presenting our theme: People Centred Knowledge Management, talking about issues such as collaboration, innovation, and trust, and illustrating how social network tools from weblogs to wikis to IRC combine to address those issues in a way existing tools cannot.

Presenting People Centred Knowledge Management at the CiG

Thu, 29 Apr 2004 18:16:24 +0000

On Tuesday night I did my first proper speakers gig, giving a 20 minutes presentation of People Centred Knowledge Management (PCKM) to members of the City Information Group (I'll link to their event page when it's been updated). I had a great time doing the event and I've had some positive feedback - I hope everyone there got something out of it. My thanks to the organizers Jackie, Genevieve and Nick.

Web version of the presentatin. (Should work in all browsers, but you know PowerPoint)
PDF version of the presentation here. (447K)
Speakers notes (This will give you a better idea of what I said).

I'd like to express my thanks to Paolo, Phil, David, and Suw who were all invaluable in helping me to get prepared. I think it really paid off.

Update: It occurs to me that really you don't get very much from my slides. The presentation was a lot about me talking, waving my arms and hopping up and down. You don't get that from PowerPoint. Next time I'd like to be able to webcast the presentation. Anyone have any advice about that sort of thing?

Social Tools for Enterprises Symposium

Wed, 19 May 2004 07:27:36 +0000

Yesterday at various times around the world we held an IRC chat in the #kmtalk channel to get started organising an event in London in July (July 12th it now transpires). The working title is 'Social Tools for Enterprises' and the event is aimed to be a practical get go for CxO's in Enterprises as to how social tools & methods can help them with problems like insufficient collaboration, low innovation and unmanaged risk.

This first session was really a chance to ensure that everyone had a similar vision of what we want to achieve and to get some vital details like the date sorted. Over the next couple of days we'll be working on the programme and there is another chat planned for Friday (details will be on the wiki soon).

Everyone with an interest is welcome to join the next IRC chat and get involved.

K-Collector client demystified

Thu, 20 May 2004 08:49:02 +0000

More on Topic-Sharing Community.
There's already been a great response to my post last night (see the comments to previous entry). Greg suggested his aggregator Blogdigger could be included in this - I agree! Matt and Andrew also posted very thoughtful responses.

Here's some of my feedback (copied from the comments - I must get these enabled inline...):

Overnight while pondering my post (which I regard as just a 'starter for 10' btw, not a final solution by any means), I did conclude that KC essentially already does what I describe - polls registered RSS feeds with ENT in them and aggregates them. It would be great if TE also had that functionality.

It's the client ping that I think is unnecessary and possibly holding back community uptake - with TE the ping is a manual process for the blogger, and with KC you need to install an add-on tool to enable the pinging. Both require too much manual effort for the blogger (IMHO of course). eg Bloglines does all its aggregation automatically (every hour I think), with no pinging required from the blogger.

Although Andrew I take your point about bandwidth utilization. But if Bloglines (and Blogdigger) can do it, why not KC and TE?
[Read/Write Web]

There seems to be some confusion about how K-Collector server works and the role of the K-Collector client so I thought I would try and give an explanation of how things fit together.

The first thing to understand is that you absolutely do not need the K-Collector client for your blog to be part of a K-Collector site. The client offers a set of benefits aimed at improving the experience for the user, but they are entirely optional. We currently aggregate many feeds to the W4 site which are not using one of our clients.

There are three reasons why we think using the client is beneficial:

1) The ping (it's the least important, but seems most misunderstood so I'll cover it first)

The K-Collector server contains an aggregator which reads all feeds on a rotating basis. It aims to read each feed more or less once per hour but this isn't guaranteed. It collects posts from feeds and assigns them to topics using either ENT metadata supplied in the feed or choices which are auto-discovered using various word-stemming and matching techniques.

This all happens entirely independent of the client ping. All the ping does is to move your feed up the list so that new posts you have written are likely to be collected sooner. If you don't ping the server just reads your feed automatically a little later on, that's all.

2) The topic manager

Through the client, the topic manager is integrated into the blog editing process and gives authors the ability to assign community topics to their posts as well as being able to create new topics. The topic manager also attempts to suggest topics which may be relevant to the content of the post to make choosing topics easier.

Without the client you have no way to decide which topics should be assigned to each post. In this case the server will, when it reads the feed, use it's own automatcher to automatically assign those topics it thinks are relevant.

3) ENT feeds

Where the author has choosen topics in the topic manager the client adds the appropriate ENT metadata to the outgoing RSS feed. K-Collector can then use this metadata to accurately assign posts to topics.

In summary the K-Collector client offers what we think are very useful benefits to weblog authors, however it is entirely optional and you do not need it for you weblog to be part of a K-Collector site. Equivalently K-Collector itself only cares about RSS. It doesn't care whether ENT metadata was created by our client or some other application, we're completely agnostic about that.

I hope this goes some way to clearing up how the K-Collector system works.

Lock up your journalists

Tue, 15 Jun 2004 15:51:22 +0000

Reporters in chains. Under Homeland Security orders, journalists from England, Sweden, Holland and other friendly countries are being detained at U.S. airports, strip-searched and deported. [Salon.com]

"Most countries that require special visas for journalists tend to be totalitarian states." said Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

As I read Elena Lappin's story I found myself becoming very angry at the way she was treated both personally and in a more abstract sense. I would say that, if this was a report about how UK immigration had behaved, I would feel disgusted right now.

Though my experience was far removed from the images of real torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, it was also, as one American friend put it, "conceptually related", at distant ends of the same continuum and dictated by a disregard for the humanity of those deemed "in the wrong". American bloggers and journalists would later see my experience as reflecting the current malaise in the country. Dennis Roddy wrote in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: "Our enemies are now more important to us than our friends ... Much of the obsession with homeland security seems to turn on the idea of the world infecting the US."

For all of us hostile aliens I guess this puts the whole "blogging as journalism" debate in a new light doesn't it?

These would have been comforting thoughts the following morning when I was driven back (in handcuffs, of course) to the communal detention room at LAX, and spent hours waiting, without food, while the guards munched enormous breakfasts and slurped hot morning drinks (detainees are not allowed tea or coffee). I incurred the wrath of the boss when I insisted on edible food. "I'm in charge in here. Do you know who you are? Do you know where you are? This isn't a hotel," he screamed.

The Salon piece ends with a good question:

The other unanswered question is: Whose idea was it to crack down on the supposed menace of invading foreign media hordes. "The Bush administration doesn't like the press?" Goldberg asked rhetorically. "That's the best I can come up with, frankly. They've been reluctant for almost four years now to give information out to the press. They don't deal with the press on a level playing field. They've made life hard on other civil liberties. I can't imagine them bending over backward to help the press."

Getting creative: five social tools to give you an edge!

Mon, 28 Jun 2004 23:33:29 +0000

Tomorrow I'm speaking at the Gurteen Knowledge Conference. My topic is:

Getting Creative: Five social tools to give you an edge!

My aim is to establish the link between creativity and social networks, and then to show how tools like blogs, wikis, instant messaging and topics can be combined to help build a culture of creativity.

This is only my second speaking engagement. Wish me luck!

BlogTalk 2.0 begins with Social Physics

Mon, 05 Jul 2004 08:19:22 +0000

Thomas is making some opening remarks and wishing us a fruitful conference. Available bandwidth seems very low so i'll be using bits sparingly. Mark Bernstein has just started on the social physics of blogging -- interesting stuff.

Mon, 05 Jul 2004 22:15:06 +0000

In BlogTalk 2.0 Thomas & crew have, once again, brought together a lot of interesting people & wherever possible conversations are flourishing as evidenced by tonights get together. It was good to meet Phil again after a year and to meet Mikel for the first time, especially as his talk prompted lots of interesting ideas we might look at for K-Collector. After a day where I had felt very tired and jaded I found the atmosphere quite reviving.

I had the pleasure of dining with Paolo, Mark Bernstein, Stephanie Hendrick, and Therese Örnberg. Mark gave a very interesting keynote this morning which provoked lots of questions for me. Stephanie & Therese gave, I think, the most stylish presentation of the day (including an amusing near-death audioblog to end) and their discussion of presence and spaces was stimulating. From my perspective a happy coincidence that we all ended up together. We had an interesting discussion about a range of topics spanning language, blogging, literary discourse, topics, flame wars, comments & trackbacks, software tools and how you build them, tinderbox, Dave Allen, and test first development.

Taking antibiotics means I cannot drink alchohol so my opinions whilst maybe better formed were far less robust than usual & I was open to colonization ;-) I got persuaded that comments are bad and that even trackback requires considerable architectural revision to work properly. Mark's suggestion of making trackback default to being private (i.e. you get a file of trackbacks and you decide what, if anything, to do with them) seems to be a good one. I think this can be assisted by some sort of intelligent filtering of trackback contents & authorship to help you decide about those you do & don't want to handle. I think emulating the LinkedIn FOAFOAFOAFOAF network model could be useful in this regard.

Also, based on comments by Stephanie and Mark, I have finally concluded that I must do something in K-Collector for the Lilia's and Jim McGee's of this world who used (and maybe still cling to) liveTopics. I think that part of my problem has been misunderstanding where they are coming from. liveTopics, for me, was a stepping stone towards a larger vision which, at that time, I couldn't achieve. But for them it was actually what they were looking for. No wonder then that I've had a hard time convincing them that K-Collector is better.

I haven't quite worked out the answer yet but I think it may be as simple as offering some kind of discriminator where you can choose whether K-Collector should default to showing you only your own work, or the work of the community as a whole. We may even have enough smarts in the database to do this without requiring additional work but I'll have to get some clear space (i.e. after STES) to think this through properly.

Lee Bryant on weblogs to build communities where people help each

Tue, 06 Jul 2004 10:17:51 +0000

Lee Bryant is giving what I think is the best presentation of this conference. Plenty of real, credible, user experience being presented to demonstrate some powerful points. I'm really pleased we have Lee involved with STES next week. The event is going to be very conversational in nature (think Late Night with Letterman) so we'll have a great opportunity to dive into the details.

Do it in your own backyard

Wed, 07 Jul 2004 20:07:50 +0000

I thought it would be useful for me to jot down some of my thoughts about dropping comments & trackback while I can still remember them. I used to think that comments & trackbacks as they exist in todays weblogs were a good idea. Mark's keynote at BlogTalk 2.0 and our subsequent conversations have converted me to his way of thinking.

Here is my best anology (so far) for understanding the situation as it is today:

Imagine that you really don't like me. One evening you get mad at me and drive over to my house where you daub the message "Matt Mower is a total asshole" in bright yellow paint on my walls for everyone to see.

The next day I start in horror on seeing this and spend the morning cleaning it off. You may not have signed your work which is lucky for you because I spend the afternoon driving round town with my paintball gun looking to get even. After you've done this a few times I get the message and protect my walls so that nobody can write on them.

But you're not done yet. Since you can't deface my walls any more you go around the neighbourhood painting your message on other peoples walls whether they agree with your message or not. There's not much I can do about it, I probably can't even help them scrub their own walls. The neighbourhood becomes divided over the issue and heated and pointless arguments break out all around.

Note that you haven't daubed your own walls with your message of hate. I think it would be very different if that was what you had to do. I think the inevitable consequence of that would be that you would have to learn to be more moderate or people would stop coming by.

Our comments form part of the overall picture of what sort of person we seem to be. But our comments are dispersed over the many sites we visit. One here, one there, dotted about. Even though they may bear our name the association is made weaker by their not being collected under it and taken together.

If all our comments appeared in one place (our blog) we couldn't so easily escape from them. They would take their place as part of our whole online persona. Anyone whose blog consisted entirely of vitriol and hatred would probably end up ostrasized. But it would be our choice.

Note that I'm not talking about restricting free speech. If people wanted to go visit such sites and read what was said there, that's fine. Even if it's about me. If people think something is fair comment, they can quote it just like always. But the point is that it's in their back yard, not in mine (nor spread - unwittingly - around the neighbourhood) and that they have to take action to do so. Unfair and unsupported comment will stay where it belongs, hung around the neck of it's author.

MaxB on k-logs

Tue, 10 May 2005 13:34:26 +0000

Max Blumberg is talking about using Weblogs for Knowledge Management. That's interesting both because Max and I did work on that together while I was at Evectors but also because I am currently persuading people in my company of the value of blogging over e-mail for much of our communication needs.

Terry Frazier MIA

Thu, 12 May 2005 20:56:57 +0000

Can it be true? My good fried Terry is gone?

We are sad to report this morning the tragic death of blogger Terry Frazier. Mr. Frazier, whose real name was Mr. Frazier, disappeared from weblogs.com sometime in late March or early April. His unheralded and unmarked disappearance went unnoticed for some time, until friends and relatives reported him missing. Authorities have been uncooperative to date, ignoring repeated calls for assistance. -- [From the ghost of Terry Frazier's Weblog]

Perhaps we should call in the Feds?

Control your destiny or somebody else will.

Fri, 13 May 2005 08:26:12 +0000

Scoble nails my view on corporate blogging:

...
So, why are we bringing them here? We're bringing them here to find out what they think and to start an interesting new conversation. One that we can't control.

As I met with Boeing and Target over the past few days that's what I told them too. You can't control this new world. At best you can participate in it. Just like if you hear someone talking about you at a cocktail party. You can't make them stop. You can't make them change their minds about you. At best you can join in the conversation and make sure they have a complete picture of who you are. [Watch out for that Scoble guy, he's just trying to control your mind]

Guess I'll have to buy his book after all ;-)

Who aggregates the aggregators

Thu, 19 May 2005 16:17:48 +0000

I've been reading Stowe talking about following Jon Udell's lead and unsubscribing from feeds. The reasoning being that anything good will bubble to the surface anyway.

Jon's [Udell] choice is to withdraw the feed tube on a blogger-by-blogger basis. Bloglines and de.licio.us have helped cull the wheat from most chaff feeds, so Jon is willing to forego the main feed and wait the additional few minutes it takes for other filters to bubble up the occasional gem to the surface. But multiply this effect by thousands, as Bloglines reports indirectly via its public subscription data, and a power law begins to emerge. When thought leaders like Udell stop subscribing, thought readers follow suit.

It's hard to argue with on one level since blogs are often about finding stuff other people are doing and reporting on it. People posting what they find that's relevant. This is added new layers.

But I think it takes care to select the channel from which you are going to receive these gems. What's most relevant to you is down to how content gets analysed. Do you always get the right analysis? As in every case where you appoint an intermediary you have to trust they will report what you need to hear.

Of course at a certain point 80/20 is good enough I suppose.

For myself I'd rather find ways of scaling better.

Browsable blogging

Fri, 20 May 2005 13:49:39 +0000

Over at How to Save the World, Dave Pollard is talking about how to make blogs browsable.

The task of making weblogs' architecture more robust should be much easier. Weblog software with more dynamic information architecture would not only make blogs much more valuable to those browsing for information, they would make weblogs much more valuable in corporate environments. The current emphasis on adding 'tagging' information is, in my opinion, misguided: That would make their content easier to search, and might solve the information overload problem when they're embraced by keyword search agents, but it won't make them easier to browse. Much of the readership of weblogs is serendipitous -- people stumble on them (usually through search tools) when they're looking for interesting reading. Or, they blogroll a weblog because some of its content is of interest to them. What is needed is a way for people to browse through a selected subset of weblog content, all of the articles on a particular topic.

I guess I'm a little surprised not to get a mention. My recollection (am I wrong?) is that I chatted to Dave about this (among other topics) back when Paolo and I were working with K-Collector.

The basic idea is to allow authors to mark up their posts with topics (I still don't like the phrase tag in this context but I accept I may be in a minority) which are fine grained. Categories for me have always been too inflexible and unwieldy. The use of multiple topics allows rich description of a post.

The magic part is what happens next. In my current experiment it means I can generate a page which allows my content archive to be explored by topics. Clicking a topic name takes you to a page that lists the posts, in reverse chronological order, associated (I would say tagged if I didn't think it was confusing) with that topic. Under each post is a link to the other topics associated with that post. Hence each post also offers a cross-reference facility throughout the rest of the content. It makes my blog into a fully-browsable content index, automatically.

These topic pages like Aggregators, Psychology, and Blogging are, if you check the URL, actually RSS2.0 feeds (with ENT topic metadata) being rendered in the browser as HTML. But you could also subscribe to a topic like RSS in an aggregator and only read my posts on that topic, blissfully ignoring what I write about Politics, or Microsoft.

But there's more to come. I also publish a Facet Map of my weblog in XFML format. The potential value of this is not just in improved browsing because XFML also offers a way to connect topics together. This offers us the opportunity to make sense of each others tagging schemes, harmonizing the view of data whilst allowing us to preserve our own preferences.

Two level, even three level, categorization is possible by grouping topics together although things can get tricky at this point. The approach Paolo and I took was to use a simple 2-level structure comprising

Who
What
When
Where

At the moment I only use two of these. My topics are currently implicitly What and I have automatically generated Date of Publication topics in my facet map file. I might do the other again, maybe.

What I've done others can do just as easily. As much as anything it's a mind-set issue. If you think in terms of categories you're thinking in terms of a rigid hierarchy. Topics are more granular and should be used liberally since the tools at the other end will make them usable by users, as I have done.

The Radio Event Horizon

Thu, 14 Jul 2005 12:08:30 +0000

I've wanted to move my blog from Radio for quite a while. It has served me well and I've had fun with it but I feel those days are gone. It's been a while since I saw Radio as a product with a viable future and I have no more interest in working with Usertalk despite having a number of blog ideas I'd like to develop.

However a working, developed, blog platform with a large chunk of content creates a pretty strong gravity well. Migrating to another product is going to be hard. I've not found a product which could give me the escape velocity I need.

I love working with Ruby. I'd love to have a blogging platform that was written in Ruby. But, then again, now that I have a Mac I can finally use Tinderbox and, apparently, Mark Bernstein is working on making Tinderbox a 1st class blogging tool.

Maybe this time next year I'll be using a new tool and developing new ideas again.

Weave a circle round him thrice

Mon, 22 Aug 2005 14:12:22 +0000

I just Kevin Burton's response to Jason Kottke abandoning Technorati in which he says:

I'd rather have a Technorati that was fast and always worked even if that meant only indexing 1M blogs. Even 500k blogs as long as they are the top 500k blogs.

Which is, I think, indicative of a class of problems people are experiencing in thinking about the blogosphere that revolve around a concept I'll call Leaderboardism.

Right now Technorati are claiming to index 15.7 million blogs and have a database of 1.4 billion links. WOW! Those numbers are certainly impressive. But what does this huge data-warehouse buy us? Gripes about performance and database outtages aside, not much it would seem. I don't get anything from a Technorati search that I value over, say, a Google search. In particular I don't seem to get value from Technorati understanding the blogosphere better than Google which you would think they really should.

Kevin thinks a better idea is to just index the most important 500,000 (3% of Technorati's claimed reach) of blogs in the blogosphere. Sure that would make Technorati fast. But would it make it more useful? After all, who is deciding who is important? How are they deciding it? And isn't importance subjective anyway? To my way of thinking what Kevin is advocating would make Technorati faster and less useful in equal measure (unless you are mainly interested in what the usual suspects think).

The problem is that the blogosphere has grown too large for summary statistics to be relevant to a large group of people anymore. Your Top 100 isn't mine because you aren't interested in basketweaving and vole racing and I am.

I think Technorati (and Feedster who seem, so far, to have avoided many of Technorati's pitfalls) should abandon Leaderboardism and focus instead on how to make their database relevant to each individual.

Relevance is about understanding the context of the reader and delivering the results they would have asked for if they'd only known what they were. I will consider it a success not when I can see The Top 100 Blogs but when I can see The Top 100 Blogs you've never come across but will wish you had! For reference I read 2 of Technorati's Top 100 (although I have read about 30% at one time or other and am familiar with over half) so clearly their measure of relevance doesn't match mine very closely.

This takes me all the way back to where I started thinking about Village Shops in Blogspace.

Update: This post lead to me being asked to contribute to an article on Technorati, and later to my posting a follow-up item.

So it's a social world after all

Thu, 08 Sep 2005 13:12:43 +0000

At the last minute it looks like I will be attending Our Social World tomorrow in Cambridge. Some old faces, some new. The best part is that it was my CEO who has suggested I go along with him!

There has to be a last nail

Mon, 19 Sep 2005 16:57:44 +0000

After 3+ years of near-regular service Radio has now started issuing me warnings about damaged free lists in it's database. So far as I can see I've not lost anything but this kind of thing is just one more reason to get my act together and find a new blogging tool.

The main things which make me not want to think about this are:

Migrating nearly 2000 posts
No it's not that simple because I need to edit several hundred of them to fix my crappy HTML
Breaking a shit load of permalinks
Or duplicating Radio's all posts in a day with anchors funky permalinks
Choosing what tool to use anyway damnit!

I need a de-inertia ray...

It's really desktop publishing innit..?

Wed, 21 Sep 2005 15:36:02 +0000

After going to Our Social World a couple of weeks ago my CEO, Graham, asked me to set-up a blog for him (he'd already asked me to go ahead and setup a company blog). He's an old hand in publishing and now adopting the new media pretty fast (today we talked Purple Cows). I predict Graham will podcast before I do ;-)

Normal service will be resumed (maybe)

Thu, 20 Oct 2005 10:38:53 +0000

Posting is a little infrequent right now because I'm having some issues with Radio Userland. I've reached the crunch point: finally deciding whether to migrate to Mac and stick with Radio or replace it. I've favoured the last option for a while but not found another package I wanted to migrate to.

Yesterday I made a few baby steps on building a replacement by importing my database of about 2000 posts into MySQL and building a small Rails app around them. Although I am somewhat loathe to build my own tool it would allow me to get what I want:

desktop solution
renders a static weblog site that can be uploaded to the site where Paolo kindly continues to host it for me
supports radio's permalink style
have things my way in terms of tags, rss feeds, and so on

I'm not persuaded but while experimenting with a new solution seems less unpleasant than doing the migration I'll probably hack at it until I am certain one way or another.

Life after Radio

Fri, 21 Oct 2005 00:23:53 +0000

After much wailing and gnashing of teeth I not only have my entire weblog archive in MySQL with all the entities playing nice (although much of the older HTML needs tidying up somewhat) but also have Rails rendering archive pages to disk which will honour the Radio permalinks. This is actually a fair chunk of the work required for a no-frills weblog.

I guess I may be looking at life after Radio after all...

Another little mile-stone

Sat, 22 Oct 2005 01:25:25 +0000

This evening I figured out how to do upstreaming to a Radio RCS server from Ruby. The tricky bits were all the implicit details not covered by the spec. In the end I just threw Ethereal at the problem and watched Radio do it's thing.

At this point I can fully render my weblog archives by day, month, year, or everything and I can now upstream to my blog space.

Remaining tasks include:

a theme
an editing interface
implement tagging (acts_as_taggable to the rescue I expect)
implement a calendar

At that point I'll probably call it 1.0 and switch.

At the moment it's designated codename: noradio.

Looking for a helping hand...

Mon, 09 Jan 2006 20:29:20 +0000

Does anyone know anyone at Google who can help me? I refer to the problem of my blog suddenly and apparently arbitrarily disappearing from the results of a search for "Matt Mower" that I reported in November and confirmed earlier in January. Google don't appear to respond to a message sent via their request form so what the hell are you supposed to do?

It's not like some other Matt Mower suddenly became more relevant than me and knocked me down a peg or two. That I could live with. What has happened is that my blog has just gone and the rest of the search results (which are still primarily about me) have moved up a rung or two.

Since everybody these days equates what's in Google with what exists on the web, Google are effectively saying "This guy's blog doesn't exist." How can this be right? Where was my right of appeal? As a blogger, as a person, this sucks.

Surely there is some kind soul out there who can help me? Please.

So I do exist

Tue, 10 Jan 2006 13:01:04 +0000

Some interesting things have been discovered since yesterdays post. First Phil Ringnalda has observed that I am still in Googles index. Phil who also suffers from Googlitis but is perhaps a little more sanguine about it observes that

When your weblog is result 151 for your own name as a phrase it feels like you have been disappeared.

He's not wrong. I looked through quite a few pages of results to find my blog but, never guessing it would suddenly be down in the 150's, I obviously didn't go far enough. Still, it is comforting to know that I am still in there somewhere. Thanks for spotting that Phil.

Something I want to clear up about Phil's post is that my weblog was never really here. This is a test weblog I created when I was first tested Squib, long after this problem began. I'm glad Phil pointed to it though because I had understood that Userland would have deleted it by now and I'm a little surprised it's still there. My original weblog was here which does redirect to it's present location.

Over night Terry Frazier emailed to ask whether Googlebot was still indexing my weblog. The answer is that it is, as recently as 4am this morning it went over the entire thing. Good suggestion Ter, but apparently that's not the answer. With reference to a lack of comments on this blog, they will be back soon in some form or other.

Cristian Vidmar thinks I will never get back the No. 1 slot. But Christian seems to be referring to a search for "Matt" where I was never the first hit (nor even on the first page). I'm talking about hits for "Matt Mower". You'll notice that the top for that search are, directly or indirectly, referencing me. Nothing new has become more relevant.

So the situation seems more hopeful. If I'm not in the #1 I am, at least, still there at #151 and Google is crawling my blog regularly. This suggests that I, or somebody, did something to make this happen. If Googlebot keeps visiting then maybe it can be undone.

So I am left trying to understand what caused my downfall and what to do about it. I don't favour a general de-emphasis of weblogs as Christian suggests, it's been two months already surely others would be bemoaning their rotten luck as well?

And why do I think this is very important?

Yahoo, MSN, and Dogpile all put my blog as the #1 hit for "Matt Mower". Yet I never even thought to look and see if it was a general effect. Rightly or wrongly for me, as I suspect for many others, Google is search.

Thanks are due

Sat, 14 Jan 2006 16:46:46 +0000

Well I have a nice new weblog really. The last vestiges of the old site are now pretty much abandoned. First I have a lovely new banner graphic that my friend bethlet has created from a photo she took while we were out having cocktails last year and Andy was able to quickly modify Squibs Fragen3.14 theme to support banner images. I wrote Squib and even I am impressed at how easy that was!

In other changes Andy and I have done a round of SEO optimisation and our sites now get pretty good ratings using an SEO analyzer and, for the first time, my site (the homepage at least) is XHTML trans compliant. I'm not sure how useful that is but it's satisfying none the less.

So, my grateful thanks go to Bethlet and Andy for their hard work! I'm really pleased with how it's turned out :-)

Was it something I said?

Mon, 13 Feb 2006 17:36:35 +0000

I'm living with the fact that Google have decided my blog is mostly worthless. None of the changes I made to try and address search engine considerations seem to have made the slightest difference.

But now I hear that GTalk is available in the GMail client? News to me. I mean, I don't want it but it would have been nice to be able to turn it down. And, at the weekend, I saw that my Dad's GMail client has a shiny delete button (which I do want). But, no, I don't have one of those either.

What's up Google? Was it something I said?

Comments last stand

Mon, 13 Feb 2006 19:32:40 +0000

Euan and I have just had a healthy disagreement over the value of comments.

I would summarize Euans point of view as being that of the enabler. He sees comments as an integral part of creating communication around his weblog and ideas:

I've written 1354 posts on my blog and had 2118 comments. Anything that makes that less likely is negative IMHO

I would summarize my own point of view as being not contrary to the aims, only the means. I don't get nearly as many comments as Euan (probably about 10%) so perhaps I am less convinced of their value. But I would like more people to comment on what I write. I often try to write provactively in the hope that it will spur some kind of conversation or debate. My curse, I guess, is that I am either preaching to the choir or seen as a blowhard.

Nevertheless my beef with comments boils down to:

the wrong ownership model. If I leave a comment on your blog you own the comment. It is in your space and appears (or disappears) at your discretion. At the same time this lack of ownership leads, I think, to a sense of disassociation between you as the writer and the comment (and it's impact)
the wrong attribution model. Even if I don't comment anonymously I can't really be sure that someone who leaves a comment as you, is you and nor can anyone else. If it's on your blog, I can be sure.
the wrong social model. If people know where to go to find out what you're saying then it's likely you will have that in mind when you say stuff. Being a consistent asshole will make you the billboard of your own buffoonery

In a sense I am contending that comments are like email. We often say things in email that we would never say face-to-face because we are detached from the meaning and the human being at the other end. By placing our comments in a self-context we may be subconsciously encouraged to think more deeply about what we are saying and it's likely impact.

Euan raised the concern that disabling comments necessarily means people with a blog will be left out. To this I would answer that the solution is most likely technical and here I think CoComment, whilst they may be addressing the right problem, are not being radical enough. Leaving a comment on most blogs these days is a sign-up type process. So why not have someone sign up with a comment-log service.

I envisage a comment-log as a blogging lite service which just acts as an aggregator for an individuals comments. A kind of "blog this" system where instead of leaving a comment I end up writing a post to my comment-log with it automatically formatting the response post and linking to the original post.

The evil of comments

Mon, 13 Feb 2006 16:57:57 +0000

Back in July 2004 I wrote a post Do it in your own back yard which was my initial reflection on a discussion about the use of comments in weblogs. In short I was persuaded, over dinner, by Mark Bernstein that comments were evil.

The long and short of it is this:

It's relatively easy to come to my house in the dead of night and daub "Matt Mower is a total asshole" in bright yellow paint on my (or my neighbours) walls for everyone to see, but you must truly believe it to paint "Matt Mower is a total asshole" on YOUR own walls!

Your comments should be in your own space where they can be properly attributed to you and you have to live with them. Services like Technorati make this possible. The hump a lot of us will probably have to get over is the crack-like pleasure the immediacy of comments can give. The less comments you get, the more precious they may seem.

(And please don't comment on this post!)

Update: Further discussion here.

Almost four years for me too

Mon, 27 Mar 2006 11:37:03 +0000

Paolo writes:

4 years don't sound like a lot of time from here: it's about 12% of my life.

My blog comes up to 4 years in May, I can't remember the time before I blogged. What was it like?

Paolo was the second blogger I met (introduced to me by ex-blogger Marc Barrot who was the first). That was a good time, it was exciting and an affirmation of what I think we hoped blogging might be.

I'm not blogging much anymore on the English part of my blog, I write a little bit more on the Italian side. I'm not involved in many conversations or I don't feel I have much to add to what is discussed. The atmosphere is changing, pretty soon you won't even be able to say that blogging is not "mainstream media".

After 4 years of pouring stuff out I think we're all a little jaded. Terry and I have talked about this often; That feeling that you've nothing interesting left to say.

But I don't believe that's true, and I think the reason that neither Terry, Paolo, or myself have closed our blogs is that lurking feeling that the spark may come back. Interesting things happen all the time and sometimes to us.

Here's to four more interesting years! Happy birthday paolo.evectors.it!

Combining OPML and RSS to create an export format for a blog

Mon, 10 Apr 2006 09:30:46 +0000

Marc Canter links to Joe Brockmeier's post about weblogs having a shared format. Timely.

I've been thinking about this myself because I want such a format too. Although I have written a tool to serve my own needs I won't be using it forever and I (probably) want to take my blog with me. I've also been thinking about how to do backup and restore. The two problems appear to be the same to me.

I think we already have the answer: RSS. It's already a natural format for holding the essential data of a weblog and namespacing is an easy way to store the tool-specific data. A tool that understands another tools metadata (e.g. ENT topics) can import it, a tool that cannot can safely ignore it. Actually why are we even discussing this?

The real question seems to me to be: how best to use RSS for this purpose? Do we have one gigantic RSS feed for a weblog? In my case with about 2100 posts it would be pretty big and unwieldy. Back in 2004 Paolo and I were talking about how to do weblog archives.

I was messing with an approach that combined RSS and OPML to create a weblog archive. For each post/day/month (pick your granularity) create a corresponding RSS feed of weblog entries. These feeds are then referenced from an OPML file that defines the overall structure of the archived weblog. In this way you can quickly narrow down to find an individual post, or suck up the whole thing (useful for tools like Sigmund).

For convenience the whole lot could be wrapped up in a .tar.gz. It might be helpful to include some kind of (optional?) metadata file at the top-level that describes the contents (ala JAR archives).

I'm not sure why I stopped working on that, maybe it just got shoved aside by other things. I might have a go at adding this feature to Squib since we need a backup format anyway.

Atom is better than RSS

Wed, 12 Apr 2006 23:16:10 +0000

I think I can hear a sterile argument brewing about using OPML and RSS to create weblog archives. For example: Wouldn't Atom be a better choice? Maybe hAtom? And how about XOXO? Or perhaps our old friend RDF?

I don't know. Frankly I don't much care either. I have a hard time working up any enthusiasm for such questions.

I'm not building a CAT scanner or putting a man into orbit. This is an archive of my weblog entries. Is OPML good enough? Is RSS good enough? Only time will tell. But if they're not, and you can do a better job, then please lead the way.

An experimental OPML+RSS archive for C&C

Wed, 12 Apr 2006 19:48:29 +0000

Over the last couple of days I've hacked together experimental support for OPML+RSS archives in Squib as I described a couple of days ago. You can grab my entire archive from here either directly or as a .tar.gz archive.

The structure of the archive looks like this:

The weblog.opml file is an outline that contains the date-based structure of Curiouser and Curiouser. There is a branch for each year, and each month of each year. At the leaves are pointers to daily RSS files and the ID & title of entries.

It occurred to me that I could just put the entire entry data directly into the OPML file and cut out the RSS. However, with over 2,100 entries, I felt that would lead to a very big and unwieldy file. Being just a file of pointers means it can still be sensibly opened in an OPML editor.

Another reason for using RSS is to ensure that users of the archive can take advantage of all the software out there to parse RSS. Once you've figured out which days entries you want, you can hand the corresponding RSS file to a standard parser and get back the entries.

Update: I've added <link rel="archive" type="application/opml+xml" href=".../archive/data/weblog.opml" /> to my home page to allow archive auto-discovery. I did a minimum amount of research before doing this so please correct me if that's a gross misuse of a link tag or there is some established way of doing this already.

Got to start somewhere

Sun, 16 Apr 2006 11:23:18 +0000

I spent a happy Wednesday afternoon at Euan's catching up with all that he's been doing since he left the BBC and telling him about what I do for PAOGA.

That Euan (who I talk to quite regularly) was completely unaware of what I do for a living is a good reminder to me that I've never starting blogged about my work here.

I aim to change all that and soon. PAOGA is involved in a very necessary and exciting revolution in the way people live and work online. We face a huge challenge which we will only overcome if people like you think what we are attempting is worthwhile.

I'm going to write some posts in the coming week to try to get across the PAOGA vision and why we think what we're doing is so important. In the process I'm going to try and describe what I'm doing and some of the stuff I've learned in doing it.

Commentless

Mon, 05 Jun 2006 14:38:39 +0000

I'm still interested in comments and alternatives to comments. Via Dave Winer, I read that Seth Godin doesn't have comments on his blog because he doesn't want to end up writing for his commenters. I'm still looking for the right alternative.

Titles

Fri, 07 Jul 2006 10:58:33 +0000

Over the last month I've been experimenting with using a single word as the title for my posts. In the past I've always taken a pleasure in coming up with a title that amused me. Recently I've taken pleasure in trying to distill the essence of what I'm saying down to a single word.

Sometimes it's quite hard and I don't capture it. Then I'm sure I must have more than one post called 'tools' or somesuch. Then there are things where I end up using #1, #2, ... which feels like cheating (I'm writing this post because I was about to start another called pledge#2).

I'm not sure whether to soldier on and see if I can make an artform of choosing the right, one, word to capture the essence of my post. Or to go back to being creative with titles. Or both.

Making PAOGAperson practical #1

Tue, 12 Sep 2006 17:44:58 +0000

So last week I wrote a lot of stuff about the PAOGA vision of a wider sense of identity management and what it might do in the future. But we're launching PAOGAperson today so why might you use it when there's nobody clamouring for you to share your identity with them?

You might sign up simply to support the vision of empowered individuals making decisions about how their data is used and who it is shared with. If we can get enough people together who believe in that we can change the world. But on a more pragmatic note we think there are things we can do today.

The first scenarios is the secure storage of valuable, life-asset, or (as Jon Udell calls them) bootstrapping documents. This is things like birth certificate, driving license, passport (and maybe valuable visas), but might also include deeds to property, insurance certificates, reciepts and so on. In Jon's podcast with Phil Windley he talks about how they struggled to find the hardcopy bootstrapping information they needed to establish his daughters identity. This is a problem we can solve right now.

PAOGAperson includes a simple document store that helps you to track this type of document both as a set of metadata, an arbitrary number of scanned images (e.g. card and paper driving license, both sides), a pointer to the location of the physical document, and (where appropriate) an expiry date.

For example lets say you have annual travel insurance. You get a certificate and a bunch of info from your insurer. So you scan the certificate and create a new document in PAOGAperson with the policy number, notes about how to make contact with the insurance company, upload the scanned images, add an expiry alert, and record that you put the originals in a ziplock bag under the stairs.

Now when you're abroad if you need access to the information you can go online and get the details of your policy. Print out the certificate should it be required and so on. When your insurance is getting close to expiry you'll get a notification (you might think all insurance companies would let you know as a matter of course, one of our directors found out otherwise) and if you really need the original certificate the location should be available.

Other examples might be storing childrens vaccination certificates, information about their school (passwords for picking up the kids, headmaster phone number and so on).

We're not trying to compete with document management solutions but aiming to give people a secure store for "life" documents that, whilst you might not want them often, you know you want them held safely for those occasions when you do (e.g. the house burns down).

Our CEO, Graham describes it this way:

I'd like to know that if I was washed up on a beach one day I could walk into any web-cafe and get a copy of my passport (and other identifying information) to take to the embassy to help establish who I am faster. Or, if I miss a flight and unexpectedly have to hire a car that I can get a print out of both sides of my driving license. The DVLA can do this but they're only open 9-5 on weekdays.

In the future we'll be introducing ways to selectively share some of this information by letting you attach certain documents (or document metadata) to persona's. We're also looking at the sharing context around children and elderly relatives. For example giving parents the ability to upload childrens birth certificate, vaccinations certificates, etc... and both have access.

Squib: one year on

Tue, 19 Sep 2006 14:36:28 +0000

I notice that it was this day last year that the camels back got broken over Radio Userland instability.

A year later I am pretty happy with the decision I made to write my own blogging tool. It's far from perfect but it is usable and it satisfied all my criteria. I really haven't had the time to spend on it that I would have liked so development has been pretty slow beyond basic functionality.

Going forward I want to use it as a platform to keep experimenting with the medium especially in the area of tagging. I still think there's lots of interesting things to do there. Squib is also a good way for me to keep track of Rails which is something of a moving target. Having to keep Squib up to date is a good motivator.

You need friends

Tue, 26 Sep 2006 11:51:01 +0000

Over the last few weeks I've been trying to make a conscious effort to post about what PAOGA is doing and why I think it is topical, interesting, and important. So far I don't think I've done a very good job. I've been blogging long enough that you'd think I'd be good at it. Ah well.

Fortunately I'm still a young enough dog to learn and I'm very grateful to Paolo for his recent advice about tailoring my blogging voice and, generally, being a better blogger.

Thanks man.

No getting away with it

Tue, 26 Sep 2006 22:59:17 +0000

They're not permalinks damnit!

Tue, 03 Oct 2006 15:29:41 +0000

All you people using FeedBurner links as a replacement for permalinks in your RSS feeds are really beginning to tick me off. I'd not seen this a week ago, now I find three blogs using them and presumably more to come.

I appreciate the gluttony for stats but it's irritating to be forced to click through from Bloglines to get the real permalink for a post I want to reference.

Blogging rules (okay?)

Mon, 09 Oct 2006 17:41:04 +0000

I notice Don Park has switched to his new blogging tool called Daily. I'm not sure what Don's reasons for writing his own tool were. I wrote Squib because I wanted to satisfy my own requirements in my primary writing tool and to have a platform where I could experiment with the medium (not that I've had much opportunity yet!) Writing your own blogging tool is a tough road and doesn't necessarily make a lot of sense - especially with great packages like Mephisto and WordPress about - but I think it's worth persevering.

I'm looking forward to seeing what Don does with Daily and especially what his plans are for JBoss Rules (ne Drools). I used Drools a few times when I was developing in Java and thought it was a very interesting piece of technology. I haven't thought of any applications in blogging yet.

What do you have up your sleeve Don?

What do you do with a problem like conversation?

Fri, 22 Jun 2007 09:52:44 +0000

I've pondered several times giving up comments. Most recently in the last couple of days over the "breakthroughs are social" conversation which started on Terry Frazier's blog and has carried on through some posts of mine, a post from Flemming, and some comments by Flemming, and Chris and possibly other comments and posts I am not aware of.

Flemming sums up some of the difficulties inherent in blogversation:

There's a bit of a lack of a mechanism that ties these things together. A way of making blog postings and comments part of a conversation, even though it happens in several places. Could be simply a tag, I suppose, although you might easily get a lot of other things mixed into it, unless you make a very specific tag. And you'd have to count on that there's some service that picks up everything with that tag, which doesn't quite happen. Technorati will pick up posts on your front page and their tags, but is not going to pick up comments, and is not going to notice if you add new tags to older postings.

Comments are useful in that they are immediate. Certain things can only really be done in a comment, for example Phil Ringnalda responded to my prior anti-comment screed as follows:

I've got house guests this week, whose only reference for Charger is what puts electricity into their cellphones and laptops. If we're going to talk about how to get your Charger running without a three hour intro to what it is, why we're interested in it, and why you don't just replace it with a Lexus, we're going to have to do it in your backyard, not mine.

It seems that the issue here is that a post is often the context for a short response situated in a (potentially) complex situation. But I wonder is this really a problem?

I write a post about my Charger being bust and you respond on your blog with a link to my post and a comment about manifolds and sprockets and why Lexus is no better then isn't the required context available in the link. The link says "For more info, go here". If you're not interested you move on.

Phil was your problem that you don't want your backyard cluttered with your response about Chargers at all?

Then there are the technical problems: Comment spam, broken trackback, Technorati is unreliable, some people have no blog. Are these insurmountable? Flemming suggests a special type of link. I remember Steve Yost doing some work around this with QuickTopic. Then there is coComment which I tried briefly when it launched. It didn't make a big impression on me at the time. Does anyone use it?

One of the values of blogging for me is being able to have the kinds of conversations that I can't have at home (my cats always bring the conversation back to food) with people I don't meet day-to-day. I don't want to shut conversation down, that's not why I dislike comments, but to help it expand.

What are we to do?

Expectations of readership

Sat, 23 Jun 2007 10:47:48 +0000

Both Chris and Phil have argued for having comments. From Chris (in a comment):

People's own blogs are their own spaces, and sometimes we comment in other people's blogs because we don't want to talk about it in our own space.

From Phil (also in a comment):

I'm very interested in fly fishing, and I've been doing it for years, and you'd probably be interested in my comments about your problem with calf-tail wings rolling around the hook, assuming that you feel that your readers are interested in tying problems with Wulff-style wings and so you post about them, but I have absolutely no reason to think that I have readers who are interested in it, so I'm not going to post my tips to my weblog.

Both of these arguments seem to rest on what I would call "the expectations of my readership." I think it's interesting that neither Chris, nor Phil, have posted about this on their own weblog so their readership is to all intents and purposes oblivious to this meta-argument about their tastes and cannot react themselves. This seems to me yet another example of why I don't like comments.

An aspect of this argument appears to be to do with separating that with which we have expertise and that with which we have interest. To take Phil's example one would assume that if he were interested in tying flies he might have written about it already. The example presumes that he is an expert with little interest in communicating his expertise except in narrow bursts. He wants to "shield" his readership.

Chris' argument seems to me to hinge on a view he has of his weblog as "being about something" as if it were a text book and his publisher might turn him down if he litters it with too many off-topic references. Chris is the published author among us so I'll leave it to him to respond whether the pain of that process might have coloured his thinking.

I think this conversation would be illuminated with some real world examples of this argument. Can you highlight some real instances in which you wanted to leave a comment you thought was valuable but couldn't and then didn't write a post about it on your own weblog?

Change of format

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 21:32:56 +0000

This blog isn't going anywhere (in more ways than one) but as an experiment I am going to use Tumblr to collect oddments.

Digging Tumblr

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 11:01:16 +0000

I'm really enjoying the ease and freedom Tumblr brings. When I write on this blog I feel the need to be consistent with how I have used it before. It has constraints which keep a lot of things out of it. Oddments has different constraints and that creates a sense of new possibilities.

At the moment I am going to try and use Tumblr to capture the emphemeral thoughts, ideas, content of the moment, because that seems to be what it's very good at. Hopefully that will relieve the sense of tension I have developed about this blog and the functions it does not satisfy.

Reset

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 10:19:48 +0000

Lately I've been pondering what to do with this blog.

When I started blogging I was coming out of a period where I had much to say and few avenues to say it. Blogging felt like such a liberation and I feel I got a lot out of the experience. In the intervening years my blog went up and down but always ticked along. But the last year has been very different.

Here's a little history. I start blogging in May 2002.

Year	Posts written
2002	620
2003	597
2004	429
2005	372
2006	391
2007	275
2008	196
2009	45

Those first 8 months were a pretty furious exploration of a new medium. It was, perhaps, inevitable I couldn't maintain that kind of pace especially as I started writing more and re-posting less. I think I maintained a healthy pace through most of 2008 and then my writing fell off a cliff.

In 2009 I have written only 45 posts which is considerably less than the number I would write some months in previous years. What happened?

I took up music seriously as a hobby
I got Twitter

In January I started taking weekly piano lessons and threw myself into making music as a hobby. I'm a classic hobbyist I suppose but with some aspirations to progress beyond my little spare bedroom cum office/studio.

With music & music tech taking up so much of my time my former interests in technology, learning, km began to whither. I'm still interested in those things but as a practitioner rather than a practitioner-observer. That is I am using the technology, learning things, working out how to learn & remember rather than studying or building tools for such things.

This means that less of my time is spent in what I would call abstract thought and more on practical matters. When I am learning to play a blues accompaniment style it's an active task. When I am trying to make a phase shifting looper in Reaktor it's an active task. These things do not seem to lend themselves so easily to being written about.

The second major factor is that, as my output has dwindled, it has tended to be more life stuff and, since I am by nature a private individual, that means more the frustrations and irritations I need to release. Twitter has turned out to be a marvellously useful release value for me and far more effective than blogging for that purpose. For the most part even this use of my blog has died off.

The combination of these factors lead to a ~90% drop in output. Last month I began, seriously, to consider shutting the blog down altogether. But a couple of things have made me reconsider and think about restarting it in some new form.

The first year of any new phase of your life I think can be overwhelming. In this year (or a little over) I have uploaded 62 "tracks" to alonetone.com where I share my music. Some pieces are musical, some are semi-musical, some are outright experiments with sound. I'm proud of what I have achieved in a year but under no illusions about it. I've also:

gone from not being able to find middle-C on a piano to being able to play a solo piece by Philip Glass and several blues accompaniment styles
released one MIDI sequencer and built others
learning some basic arrangement, mixing, and production skills
started building my own instruments & effects in Reaktor

I am starting to feel the stirrings of having something to say about what I am doing and where I am headed. So my thoughts turn back to my blog as a way of doing that.

When I was knee deep in blogging writing my own blogging software made sense. I wanted to experiment with the platform and the only way to do that with any efficacy was to have my own. Today it seems entirely inappropriate as I know I am never going to go back and finish any of the features that would have made it interesting. Today my own blogging software is a burden.

So I have a couple of choices to make:

A clean break with the past, orphan/archive the 2925 posts I wrote and start afresh? Or continue but with a new focus/theme?
What software should I use?

No comments

Tue, 29 Dec 2009 15:58:11 +0000

Astute readers may have noticed there are no more comment links on my posts (at least the recent ones). The venerable Radio Userland comment server that was hosting those comments is no more. That's a lot of commentary gone missing but, so far as I know, they offered no means to actually recover your comments. I did ask once and was told no.

For now I hope you will either blog any response you want to make or maybe tweet it. I've often argued against comments but I seem to be in a minority so if anyone has a recommendation for a good comment service please get it to me somehow (I narrowly avoided saying "leave a comment").

Twitter poisoning

Thu, 08 Apr 2010 09:47:25 +0000

I just turned off Twitter via /etc/hosts. I've had thoughts recently about deleting my Twitter account and, two days ago, I un-followed some 250 accounts. My own Twittering has become more volatile and angry. So this is step 2 of the program.

I think that, for me, Twitter brings out all the worst elements of blogging. This blog had, until Twitter torpedo'd it, definitely acted as a release valve and I did write angry posts. But I didn't publish all the angry posts I wrote... in many cases writing a long screed was enough to get it out of my system and then I could delete it.

Not so with Twitter. 140 characters isn't enough to let off steam and it's too easy to write Tweets. Frankly I am surprised so many people follow my Twitter feed because there seems to me precious little of value in it. And that brings me to my second criticism of Twitter.

140 characters isn't enough to write anything interesting. It's enough, just, to link to something interesting but since I began using Twitter I feel like I've entered a period where I have nothing interesting to say.

The truth is you can't say it in Twitter yet Twitter makes blogging feel slow and tiresome.

But 140 characters is so easy to type. So easy to dash off a half-formed thought or reflection. And then that's what you get, endless streams of them.

I'd been hoping that someone would write a client that would allow people to "take a holiday" from someone in their stream (I'm sure there must be people who would have welcomed the ability to take a holiday from me) without un-following them. It's never appeared and I have neither the time, nor the will to write it myself.

On Tuesday I began to feel like being on Twitter was poisoning me. Someone just told me I need to take a break from the internet. I think it's true that something needs to change.

My first step is to change my relationship with Twitter. I haven't actually deleted my Twitter account like I did my Facebook account. Maybe I will in time, maybe I won't. But blocking Twitter will significantly lessen its impact on me and my participation in it. I'm also going to make an effort to come back here and try to write again and, maybe, be more thoughtful.

Matt.

Back on the air.... (almost)

Tue, 22 Jan 2013 22:51:31 +0000

After a hiatus of 652 days this blog is back on the air. More or less.

Some time in 2011 the virtual machine I'd been running Squib on (Squib being the blogging software I wrote in 2005 as a replacement for Radio Userland) broke down. I was able to recover the code & database for the blog but Squib, a Rails 1.2 app, was not in great shape and I couldn't get it to work on the new VM. My enthusiasm for writing being at an ebb I kind of punted and figured I'd come back to it one day.

I've spent some time recently bringing Squib into the world of Rails 3 and, in the process, casting Squib aside. It's now just Curiouser and Curiouser! The software to publish the weblog of the same name. Simpler that way.

There's still a lot of things to fix and the site could do with a revamp. But it feels quite good to have my writing space back again.

Spring cleaning down memory lane

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 23:07:58 +0000

So, again, I've nothing really interesting to say but I'm trying to get back into the habit of thinking about writing every day. Even something short.

There's still quite a lot of work I need to do on CandC before it's 1.0 but I didn't feel like coding this evening. Instead I decided to clean out my blog folder.

I started blogging in May 2002 using an application called Radio Userland, now sadly defunct. One of the things Radio got dead right was that it made it trivial to send files to the cloud. Years before Dropbox figured it out for everyone, you could put a file in a certain folder and Radio would stream it to your blog. It made ad hoc publishing super simple.

I've been cleaning up that mess this evening and it's been a trip down memory lane. Lots of not quite half-started experiments and lots of stuff about topics, topic maps, live topics, k-collector, old presentations, old photos (some as large as 100K), random javascript, mind maps, diploma work.

Almost none of it is usable but a few ideas still resonate with me and, if I find time, I'll be implementing them here in CandC.

But not tonight.

So why should I bother?

Thu, 24 Jan 2013 23:30:21 +0000

It sort of occurs to me ask myself the question "Why should you bother now?" My blog has lain dead these many months, why fix it? Why now?

The galvanising factor was reading a post by Chris about his own changing blogging habits in a world of social media. Responding to Chris made me think through the value of my own blog.

This is my writing space, my own place. Chris has been blogging 7 years already. I started in 2002, that's over 10 years. A bit sad that I didn't reflect on that last year.

I started this blog because I wanted a voice that I didn't have. Twitter, to some extent, diluted that need but increasingly I have found myself dissatisfied with the game of trying to fit a thought into 140 characters.

I've thought many times that I should just chuck this in and try WordPress, or maybe SquareSpace, or Tumblr. They're all easy. Yet I held back. I could never quite commit to giving up.

Because this is not only my writing space but also a playground for exploring content ideas. Some of the topic (ok, ok, tag) related stuff I've done here in the past has not, to my knowledge, been replicated or improved upon.

Maybe because it was not useful enough, maybe because we never got to demonstrate where the real value was. Certainly I have some ambitions to have another go at some of those things, and in a conversation with Jerry Michalski

You have failed me for the last time Admiral

Sat, 26 Jan 2013 12:12:26 +0000

While much of the code behind C&C is new something it has retained from it's forebears is that it's a static site generator. A bugbear of this approach is that embedded sidebar content goes out of date quickly. So this blogs archives are littered with out-of-date events, links, blogrolls, and so on.

Unlike Squib, and Radio Userland before it, CandC is a server based app so, in principle, I could have it republish the whole site whenever I change something important (whereas uploading the whole content of this blog, even over 3mbps, is a bit impractical). However it occurred to me last night that a better solution is to allow the main content and sidebar to vary independently, i.e. to put the sidebar into an <iframe>.

There's a good deal of hate for iframes but it seems like a good solution to this problem, especially now that I can use <base target="_parent"> to ensure links are opened in the parent frame. With some jQuery to resize it based on content, and some CSS to blend it in, it seems indistinguishable from the main content.

There's still some backend work to do before I can even republish the entire blog but, once I do, I should be able to banish stale content for good.

That's a heavy looking rock you have there

Mon, 28 Jan 2013 00:16:25 +0000

It's taking a little time but I am gradually making progress with getting the blog ship shape. Today I implemented layout support in the rendering engine which turned out to be a pretty simple job. I'm going through the various templets now fixing them up to use layouts.

I'm hoping that in a couple of days I'll be in a position to republish the entire blog going back to 2002. Given that I'm pretty sure there's been missing and/or broken content in the archives for years it'll be nice to have it all accessible (and presentable) again.

I've been stumbling over some UTF-8 issues. It seems that, out of the box, MySQL is setup for the Latin1 text encoding and, somehow, I've been ending up with some strange characters in my posts, possibly due to Latin1<=>UTF-8 issues. I've switched MySQL to UTF-8 and reimported all the data so, hopefully, that'll have it sorted.

Next on the plan is to start to do something to improve the useful of the tag data I have here.

Curiouser and Curiouser! on blogging

For whom the Blog flows

Categories, topics & audiences

Another point of view

Blogging by email

Blogging is the first killer app of Personal Publishing

Chalks away

Why TrackBack?

Process logging?

Blogging books & Trackback

Why Radio?

Why Radio?

Blogs as external brain packs

Faster damnit! Faster!

BlogRings on the cheap

More on TrackBack

Redesign in progress.

It's all in the title

Something worth talking about.

Something Unexpected: Scott's Radio

Will Blog for Food

Blogger representation : uncovering the implicit

Klogs can improve the value of what you write

Republished everything

Sing me a blog

It's your weblog

Comments are cool again!

Weaving an Intranet

For a well baked blog, add topics

Would you like a test drive?

A taste of randomosity

Microsoft Blogger

liveTopics 1.1 close to release

Seeds & notes

BlogStreet

Pretty Damn Cool: BlogStreet

BlogBrowsers

Tracking the link cosmos

Metalogue

Making ends meet

Blogroll clickthroughs

BlogTalk: We finally get our chance!

klog as sounding board

Seb's open Surveys

BlogStreet: How Useful Are Blogs and Wikis for Sharing Knowledge

Hit-and-run weblogging

p-logs

Semantic blogging

Corporate bloggers manifesto

What's in a name?

Will we catch this wave?

What do weblogs do?

Happy birthday to you

Cast off your discreteness

You mean I'm not an enigma?

Shared transcripts for the masses

A new blogging tool

Blogging steady state

The weblog method

Engage with the mission

A journey with Phil

Feedster top-100

Licensed to aggregate (pt #3)

Lurkers within

Blogging summary

DIY blogging stats

Blogging archetypes

Making projects a little bit easier

Yikes

Strip Mining for Whimsy

She canna take it anymore

My Lord is a filthy pig!

First outing for People Centred Knowledge Management

Presenting People Centred Knowledge Management at the CiG

Social Tools for Enterprises Symposium

K-Collector client demystified

Lock up your journalists

Getting creative: five social tools to give you an edge!

BlogTalk 2.0 begins with Social Physics

Lee Bryant on weblogs to build communities where people help each