Curiouser and Curiouser! on wiki

Thu, 09 May 2002 11:56:55 +0100

The Wiki application I have chosen to start with is JSPWiki. I chose this because it is, as the name implies, implemented as a Java Server Pages application. Whilst I can still recall a little perl, I would much rather get involved in a Java project.

JSPWiki already provides an XMLRPC interface allowing other applications to interact with it. SOAP may follow in the future. It also provides some basic RSS capabilities so might be compatible with weblogging tools...

Email vs. k-logging

Mon, 15 Jul 2002 22:23:33 +0100

Email Email Everywhere.

E-Mail Storage Issues Facing North American Companies

According to a recently-released whitepaper from Osterman Research, 31% of North American companies say the average size of an e-mail mailbox in their message system is between 26 and 50 megabytes (Mb). Additionally, 46% of these companies say that e-mail users in their system send up to 50 messages per day....

There has to be a way for k-logging to help with this for at least a percentage of these people. Luckily, we don't have quotas in place at SLS or else my external email would be a real problem. Here I am with my own blog, I'm trying to move into k-logging, and I really haven't integrated email into that equation yet. How on earth am I going to get my staff to do this?

Are there any guidelines out there yet for how to integrate various information sources (web, email, chat, etc.) into a k-log, or is the format still too young?

[The Shifted Librarian]

» Too many good questions here I'm afraid.

My experience of KM leads me to expect that k-logging will not provide a turn-key answer to managing email. What it will do is, in all practical terms, to kill email. That's the solution.

Many of the business contexts for e-mail could be replaced by publish & subscribe RSS feeds and Wiki leaving e-mail purely for private correspondance. If we could solve this spam thing too then you might see mailboxs drop back to pre-1996 levels again.

I'd be interesting to hear what other people think on this topic.

Klogging up the intranet

Sun, 18 Aug 2002 23:26:04 +0100

Just thinking about intranets and klogs.

I think klogs bring the role of a web or intranet editor sharply into focus.

Much as the users of a Wiki should occasionally re-factor pages that are becoming "busy" I think that a good intranet editor should be grooming the klogs in their organization and drawing together useful strangs to form part (or all) of the static intranet.

I wonder what kind of tools would make this easier?

Ad hoc group forming with liveTopics and BlogPlex

Wed, 09 Oct 2002 16:42:14 +0100

Making group-forming ridiculously easy.

Now, the idea is this. When I come across a post on an interesting theme that seems like it might have lasting value, I want to be able to

Create a topic, with a title of its own and a definition or description in plain English (which may contain arbitrary hyperlinks). Just "where" the topic is stored is unimportant. The important thing is that it is a public entity.
Subscribe to that topic. Subscribing has two effects: it adds the topic to a personal topic list of mine, and it means I'll get posts by other people on that topic in my RSS aggregator because each topic is associated to a shared RSS feed.
Post to that topic whenever I talk about it in my weblog. This has to be *easy*, like checking a box or selecting from a drop-down menu displayed under the box where I write my posts.
Access an archive of posts on that topic somewhere on the Web.
Let anyone edit the description of the topic when important things are added to the "state of the art" on the topic, or when other related topics spring out of the discussion, to let people know where the conversation has branched off.

Basically, from where I stand, this sounds a little like a witch's brew of liveTopics, standalone TrackBack, and this peculiar brand of editable web sites known as wikis.

[Seb's Open Research]

» What you are describing sounds very like the idea behind the BlogPlex Server, for forming ad hoc communities, I put forward a little while back and is the start and endpoint for liveTopics.

In order to form BlogPlexes you need enough good metadata in someones weblog to being to make connections between them. When I looked around I realised categories weren't going to cut it, AI wasn't ready and hence I began working on liveTopics.

Obviously since those initial thoughts (which I don't claim are particularly original) I have come across lots of other new ideas like RSS, XFML and so on. These will all feed in to the design and I think improve it. For example in considering item (5) one of the powerful features of XFML is to allow us to connect topics together.

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!

The purple cow of knowledge

Tue, 18 Feb 2003 11:25:37 +0000

I've been reading In Praise of the Purple Cow in which the author, Seth Godin, proposes that, in order to be truly successful, a product must be remarkable. His claim is that being very good is also failure. These days everyone is good or very good, you have to be remarkable to stand out and get the notices (good and bad).

The purple cow idea jives very much with what I've read of Gary Hamel's notion of how revolutionary approaches create new markets and deliver profits. Unless you also invest in new purple cows then building upon success is the road to stagnation. Ask AOL, Palm and Yahoo. This idea feels right to me.

Which lead me to thinking about knowledge management products and how so many of them are good, but hardly remarkable. Personal Brain is a remarkable product which was never exploited. The Wiki idea was remarkable, but none of the Wiki software I've used has been. In fact when I think about it, the whole field of KM is dominated by the idea of being good enough.

For example OpenText Livelink is a very successful KM product. Which gives you some idea of the state of that market. Livelink is a well-dressed document management system. Hardly innovative, definitely not purple cow territory. But it's been successful. Why is that?

I think the answer is partly about OpenText being an aggressive sales driven company, partly that the KM market is dominated by large, conservative, corporations, and partly because the whole market is ripe, waiting for a real purple cow.

Can anyone say "Moo!?!"

Purple thy name is: SocialText?

Tue, 18 Feb 2003 16:41:05 +0000

Interesting, I just post about Wiki and here I read that the SocialText crew (Adina Levin, Ross Mayfield, Peter Kaminski, and Ed Vielmetti) are releasing a Wiki product of their own called NiceLittleWiki. I hope it will solve some of the current problems with Wiki software (ugliness, impossible media handling, lack of ability to format text when you need it, bad indexing, etc...).

SocialText may turn out to be one of the Purple Cows of KM. I await their next move with interest!

(With thanks to Terry for reminding me about SocialText)

PHP based Wiki systems

Mon, 09 Jun 2003 18:12:43 +0100

Does anyone have any experience of PHP/MySQL based Wiki implementations?

I have a friend who is considering:

Does anyone have any positive/negative comments about these? Or an alternative suggestion?

Thu, 08 Jan 2004 13:10:14 +0000

Ross Mayfield on Wikis [Weblogsky]

Ross's point:

By giving users the power to create, link and form groups it serves the domain of business practice, the unstructured collaboration that leverages informal networks.

is well made.

Easy Wiki integration

Tue, 02 Mar 2004 08:29:47 +0000

Whatever happened to the Wiki API?

Getting Real with Stowe

Tue, 20 Apr 2004 21:46:17 +0100

Had a first chat with Stowe Boyd this evening. Enjoyed it very much despite some troubles with Skype (poor voice quality in one direction or another at various points) which we augmented with IM. We talked about K-Collector, IRC, Wiki, Sense making, Cynefin, social tools and how KM is suffering from fatigue. Thanks Stowe!

First outing for People Centred Knowledge Management

Thu, 22 Apr 2004 13:04:12 +0100

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 +0100

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?

Getting Wiki

Sat, 01 May 2004 13:08:37 +0100

Wikis described in Plain English. Lee LeFever has made an excellent effort to describe wikis in plain terms. To quote: Ultimately, a wiki is a specific type of website. A wiki is special because it allows a group of people to build, edit and modify... [Column Two]

I wish Lee had posted this before my PCKM presentation earlier this week - it would have saved me some time. I gave a very brief description and there was definitely some interest from the audience at the time and, later, in discussions. Whilst I mentioned that there were many free packages available I referred people to SocialText because I think the challenge is not buying or installing the software but to find the right partners to help you use & sell it internally.

EditMe if you can

Mon, 10 May 2004 14:04:51 +0100

Terry put me on to EditMe which is a hosted Wiki service and it's quite impressive.

Two things really strike me:

They got rid of Wiki markup and use a WYSIWYG editor like blogs do. This is great. I'm not terribly anti- WikiMarkup except that it's grown into this horrible overblown formatting language, or should I say into a hundred overblown formatting language and every wiki has it's own damned brand of it. Hello? Standards?
They have a good, simple, security model. Pages are visible to public, registered users, administrators. Pages can be edited by public, registered users, administrators. You get a drop-down on the page. Neat.

It's priced to go at $5/month for the basic service. If they have an open Wiki-API too I'd be in heaven.

Social Tools for Enterprises Symposium

Wed, 19 May 2004 07:27:36 +0100

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.

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

Mon, 28 Jun 2004 23:33:29 +0100

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!

Get yer boards in Sync

Tue, 04 Oct 2005 19:23:05 +0100

WriteBoard is the latest app from 37signals. It's a simple, single page, wiki facility. You create a page and can then share it with other authors. Hrmm... okay. They've just announced you can lock pages to prevent conflicts between author edits. Hrmm... okay. But how about implementing SynchroEdit instead?

Tools

Thu, 06 Jul 2006 21:57:09 +0100

Yesterday I upgraded to the newly released VoodooPad 3.0 personal wiki. I bought VP about 2 weeks ago to use as my primary note-taking application and I'm really impressed with it. The improvements in 3.0 (such as tabbed pages, swapping the drawer for OmniGraffle style inspectors, and the print to PDF inside a VoodooPad page) are just icing on the cake.

I now mainly use a trio of tools when working on a project. I use VoodooPad as my note taking tool to track ideas, links (I never really got on with del.icio.us or ma.gnolia), and so on.

Then I use MindJet MindManager for brainstorming and thinking things out. As an aside I think MindJet are to be commended on having done a fabulous job with MindManager for Mac. It's a beautful Cocoa application not some crappy conversion of a Windows app.

Lastly I use OmniOutliner Professional to flesh things out, drill into the detail, and organize. From there I tend to either go straight to implementation, or create a Word document or a PDF.

In the last few days the division of labour between MM and OO has shifted though. MindManager has a great, free, viewer for Mac & Windows. This means I can share maps with the rest of the company. I haven't found anything like a good solution for sharing outlines with my windows using colleagues and it's a real problem.

This means I am tending to use maps more than outlines, even when the outliner really is the better tool for the job. I wish the folks at OmniGroup would do a decent outliner viewer for Windows and solve my problems.

Other tools I have kicking around in the information tools category are Microsoft Office (although I only tend to use Word), KeyNote, OmniGraffle Pro for when I need to diagram, EasyCrop for screen captures and general image futzing, CMapTools when I want to draw concept diagrams, and of course the veritable TextMate for general text wrangling.