Curiouser and Curiouser!

Curiouser and Curiouser! on conversations http://matt.blogs.it/ RSS feed for topic conversations Copyright 2006 Matt Mower Squib/0.1 self@mattmower.com self@mattmower.com en-gb Big Night Fri, 02 Apr 2004 14:54:02 +0100 <img src="http://matt.blogs.it/Carluccio's%20Cafe%2031st%20March%202004/Carluccios_files/Photos/105_0585%20(web).jpg"> A little belated thanks to the someone digging up one of Telewests main fibre channels for the London area but here is my post about the Bloggers dinner on Wednesday. Photos are <a href="http://matt.blogs.it/Carluccio's%20Cafe%2031st%20March%202004/Carluccios.htm">here</a>. Euan organised it for Jon Husband who is visiting in the UK and invited a bunch of us ner' do wells to ensure the wine bill would be truly prodigious. Most everyone was meeting everyone else for the first time which didn't seem to get in our way in the slightest as we got on with the business of good food, good company and good conversation. In particular I had the pleasure of speaking with: <a href="http://www.blogue.com/wirearchy/">Jon Husband</a>, <a href="http://www.eviltude.blogspot.com/">Jim Osler</a>, <a href="http://www.alphaport.com/categories/alphaBusinessCommunities/">Torben Anderson</a>, <a href="http://www.community-intelligence.com/blogs/public/">George Por</a>, <a href="http://chocnvodka.blog-city.com/">Suw Charman</a> and <a href="http://www.synesthesia.co.uk/blog/">Julian Elvé</a>. Alas time did not permit me to chat with <a href="http://olderandgrowing.blogspot.com/">Andy Borrows</a> or <a href="http://weblog.garyturner.net/">Gary Turner</a> but I hope to run into them again at a future event. Many thanks Euan! http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00002047.html #joiito, #kmtalk Fri, 09 Apr 2004 18:24:19 +0100 Since the <a href="http://matt.blogs.it/2004/04/02.html#a1394">dinner</a> last week I have found myself hanging around in <a href="http://joi.ito.com/joiwiki/IrcChannel">#joiito</a> quite a bit.  <a href="http://chocnvodka.blogware.com/blog">Suw</a> kindly introduced me to the folks there.  It's a great group - if a little schizophrenic at times - full of interesting people.  You can always be assured of something to whet the appetite! But, beyond this, I've realised what a fabulous community building tool IRC is.  Instant messenger has become an essential tool and IM (and I imagine, even more so, Skype) conference chats are great for focused collaboration.  IRC seems to have something different.  It's something about the way the channel is permanent, but people drop in and out as they can.  Bots are written to offer assistance.  Conversations run into side conversations.  It's all a big mess, but a beautiful one and it works. For this reason I am now going to hang around in a channel called #kmtalk on <a href="http://www.freenode.net/">freenode</a> IRC (details of how to get there are <a href="http://www.freenode.net/using_the_network.shtml">here</a>).  If anyone is looking to chat about knowledge management, communities of practice, collaboration, effectiveness or any of those sorts of topic I am offering this as a good starting point. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00002053.html Conversations Mon, 12 Apr 2004 23:22:39 +0100 A few days back I had the pleasure of a <a href="http://www.skype.com/">Skype</a> call from <a href="http://www.terryfrazier.com/weblog/">Terry Frazier</a>.  Unfortunately I was busy Skyping with someone else at the time so had to call him back.  At that point he was Skyping with <a href="http://www.henshall.com/blog/">Stuart Henshall</a>, so Stuart conferenced me in to that call.  So there were were London, Atlanata and California on a free call with great quality.  Thank you Skype. And speaking of conversations with people from far flung places <a href="http://www.blogstreet.com/">Veer Bothra</a> (Bombay) was the first person to visit the <a href="http://matt.blogs.it/2004/04/09.html#a1399">#kmtalk</a> IRC channel that I setup.  <a href="http://chocnvodka.blogware.com/">Suw</a> dropped in also.  We had an interesting chat.  I hope that, in time, others may find there way there also. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00002063.html Social Tools for Enterprises Symposium in London Tue, 08 Jun 2004 12:24:14 +0100 Now that we have the agenda sorted I am happy to announce the 1st, London, <div style="margin-left: 40px;"><a href="http://www.kmcluster.com/lon/LON_Summer_2004.htm"> Social Tools for Enterprises Symposium</a> </div> which <a href="http://www.evectors.com/">Evectors</a> is organising ably supported by <a href="http://www.kmcluster.com/">KM Cluster</a> and a group of the usual suspects (see the <a href="http://www.socialtext.net/stes/">Wiki</a> for details). We think this is a great opportunity to start showing people that social tools (both people tools and software tools) are ready for prime time and deliver bottom line benefits to enterprises. The event will be held on Monday 12th July at the <a href="http://www.bloomsburysquare.co.uk/intro/index.html">Bloomsbury Square Training Centre</a>. We've got a great list of people leading sessions which we hope will be a bit different to the usual chalk & talk conference fare. We really want a conversation to emerge from this event which will help to enlighten people interested in social tools but unsure how to put them to best use in their own contexts. So we have: <ul> <li>Stowe Boyd - <a href="http://www.corante.com/about/research.shtml">Corante Research</a> & <a href="http://stoweboyd.typepad.com/awm/">A Working Model</a></li> <li>Lee Bryant - <a href="http://www.headshift.com/">Headshift</a></li> <li>Prof. Marc Eisenstadt - <a href="http://kmi.open.ac.uk/home-f.cfm">Knowledge Media Institue</a></li> <li>David Gurteen - <a href="http://www.gurteen.com/">Gurteen Knowledge</a></li> <li>Euan Semple - <a href="http://www.bbc.com/">BBC</a></li> <li>Phil Wolff. - <a href="http://www.dijest.com/aka/">A Klog Apart</a> & <a href="http://blogcount.com/">BlogCount</a></li> </ul><a href="http://paolo.evectors.it/">Paolo</a> and I will also be there. I think it has the potential to be a great event and a great day I hope that you will come and join us. Please tell all your friends! http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00002290.html Mon, 05 Jul 2004 22:15:06 +0100 In <a href="http://www.blogtalk.net/">BlogTalk</a> 2.0 <a href="http://randgaenge.net/">Thomas</a> & 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 <a href="http://www.dijest.com/aka/">Phil</a> again after a year and to meet <a href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0100875/">Mikel</a> for the first time, especially as his talk prompted lots of interesting ideas we might look at for <a href="http://www.evectors.com/itkcollector/">K-Collector</a>. After a day where I had felt very tired and jaded I found the atmosphere quite reviving. I had the pleasure of dining with <a href="http://paolo.evectors.it/">Paolo</a>, <a href="http://www.markbernstein.org/">Mark Bernstein</a>, <a href="http://www.sumofmyparts.com/blog/">Stephanie Hendrick</a>, and <a href="http://blog.humlab.umu.se/therese">Therese Örnberg</a>. 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 <a href="http://blog.mathemagenic.com/">Lilia's</a> and <a href="http://www.mcgeesmusings.net/">Jim McGee's</a> of this world who used (and maybe still cling to) <a href="http://www.google.com/search?num=20&hl=en&lr=lang_en&ie=UTF-8&safe=off&c2coff=1&q=livetopics&btnG=Search">liveTopics</a>. 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 <a href="http://stes.evectors.com/">STES</a>) to think this through properly. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00002387.html Lee Bryant on weblogs to build communities where people help each Tue, 06 Jul 2004 10:17:51 +0100 <a href="http://www.headshift.com/moments.cfm">Lee Bryant</a> 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 <a href="http://stes.evectors.com/">STES</a> 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. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00002401.html