May 2003 Archives

This is very exciting, although I have not read all the listings, I think that it is wonderful that someone has compiled this list.   Here is the text from the site:

Taxonomy Warehouse is a free service (free to users and free to vocabulary publishers) provided by Synapse, the Knowledge Link Corporation (on the web at www.synaptica.com) for the benefit of the information and knowledge management community.

The Warehouse aims to provide a comprehensive directory of taxonomies, thesauri, classification schemes and other authority files from around the world, plus information about taxonomy references, resources and events.

The Release 1.0 site, launched in April 2003, is considered a "Beta" version. It has approximately two hundred vocabularies, but our researchers are busy identifying and listing other vocabularies and hundreds more will be added to the service over the next few months.

Business Is Toying With a Web Tool,

I, frankly, do not understand teh allure of Wikis.   Although I regularly look at content in Wikis, I find the presentation of content cumbersome.   Also, a good wiki, requires lots of good content, and unfortunately, I have not found a Wiki with that attribute.  I like the idea of group editing.

Charlie Mingus is my favorite jazz artist.   The complexity of the orchestration and especially the way he uses trombones in his band completely blows me away.  Whenever I am in NYC, I go to see the Mingus Big Band.  There are a number of good sites on Mingus; the one I mentioned in the title of this post,  The Charlie Mingus Home Page, a discography on Amazon.

I discovered an excellent site with lots of posts to various XML applications.   You can also submit to this site, so that it will be kep current for all of us.

Ross Mayfield writes in his blog about the value of informality in writing for weblogs.  Weblogs may be a form of micropublishing, but they are not journalism.  Weblogs most frequently provide a navigation guide to a diverse set of content.  Authors acquire authority by providing good navigational advice to a community, pointing out the most important postings and sites.   At their best, weblogs can provide a forum for a thoughtful discourse about a subject and it is the richness of this unedited conversation that makes weblogs endlessly interesting.  I find weblogs most engaging when people are courageous enough to assert a position and provide a logical argument for that position.   I can follow the thread and see how the argument has developed.   I find the conversation in weblogs much more accessible then the disjointed conversations in newsgroups.  So, I am all for the informality, for thinking while writing, for the sequential presentation of ideas in weblogs.   It is the accretion of postings, the spontaneity, and the diversity of thinking that creates understanding.

Gautam Ghosh wrote: > hi folks, > >Is the world of blogs destined to remain a very tall pyramid, with a handful of blogs that are visited by most and the majority of blogs in the bottom of the pyramid...being visited by none other than the author and a couple of friends? > >How does a blog create a buzz around it and get linked to 1000s of other blogs and eventually get picked by non-bloggers too? > >Does the nature of the content disproportionately affect traffic? >

Interesting question, there is statistical evidence see: an important post on the topic from Clay Shirky, that suggests that only a handful of weblogs will get the majority of attention.  But one must ask themselves why do they blog.  Is it for the recognition and the ego satisfaction of the hits and subsequent email, or is it because one likes to document their investigations of the web, the flow of their thinking, and their increasing understanding of a topic.  I find the buzz boring.  For example, Ray Ozzie's site got thousands of hits even when he neglects it for months.   So, the number of hits says nothing about the importance of the thinking.  I find following the thread of an argument through a number of blogs fun and it is, most fun, when the writing is personal, informal, and small.

I have two vintage Macs that I rarely use and are taking up space.  One is a PowerPC 9600, and the other is the first Bondi Blue iMac.  I have been thinking of taking them to the MIT Computer Swapfest this weekend and selling them or installing Yellow Dog Linux on one or both of the computers to see if I can breath new life into them.  I would like to build a linux web server to experiment with, but since I have never done this before I am a bit timid.   I don't have the resources right now to buy a more powerful server.   Oh well.

I found this post by Paresh Suthar in his weblog.  I agree that Groove is bet used for more ephemeral work in process.   I have found the tool most useful when there is an agreed upon deliverable and the project team comes together to work on it, until its done, then publishes the result.

Groove as a Conduit,

Yesterday I was part of  a meeting with a company that has been developing enterprise scale Groove applications for a while.  During the course of the meeting, one of them indicated what they see as the value proposition of Groove - "center to edge to center".  That is, taking data from center based systems and putting it into Groove for collaboration, and when the collaboration is complete, taking the data from Groove and putting it back into a center based system.

As the meeting progress, they were asked about the average lifetime of Groove spaces that they were creating.  Their response was that the lifetimes of the Groove spaces exceeded their usefulness - not exactly a direct answer to the question, but interesting none the less.  They expanded to say that the actual period of collaboration could be measure in months/weeks, but the typical user did not delete the Groove space after collaboration activity waned/completed. 

This comment reminded me again that some people are seeing Groove as a destination or a final storage mechanism.  While this might be viable for non-enterprise situations/use, it typically will not be for enterprises.  Enterprises have significant investments in server based systems, not to mention the people who manage them, and they want data to live there.  Groove complements server based systems by providing a facility for collaboration - it does not compete with them.  Perhaps another way of thinking about Groove is that it is a limited lifetime conduit between people and data, where the data is pulled in/pushed out of the conduit on demand.

 

"While more than two-thirds of successful customer relationship management (CRM) programs will have integrated advanced knowledge management (KM) practices into their CRM processes by 2005, confusion persists about what KM is and what it can do for CRM, according to a new report from technology consultancy Gartner."

Don't be mislead by the  rhetoric about tech's "midlife crisis.  The point of the article is not that tech is dying, or that innovation is drying up. It's that enterprise technology is moving into a new phase. Bigger, faster, and more feature-laden are no longer selling points in the same way. (from Werblog)

At www.headshift.com  the author has provided an extensive paper on Social Software with lots of good links.

I have discovered two sites focused on social change that are inspiring and, I think, use technology well to create enthusiasm for social change.  Changemakers.net is funded by the Ashoka Foundation and focuses on catalyzing social entrepreneurship worldwide.   The site is currently providing a forum for solving water problems globally, and  the Smart Commons Mosaic provides a place to share experiences people or organizations have solving these problems in communities.   SocialEdge.net is a platform for discussing and sharing experience in social change.   It is presented by the Skoll Foundation and again provides a forum for discussing and posting successful change management strategies and practices.

Economic indicators, and comments from Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, are indicating that what we all have been hoping for is about to happen - The Baghdad Bounce. Now that the war is over, at least from a "fear of disaster" perspective, economic growth is expected in the second half of the year. Oil prices have fallen and manufacturing orders rose 2.2 percent in March. Greenspan hinted that interest rates, currently at a forty year low, would not be lowered again, and that the economy was on its way to a rebound. Expect the Federal Government to do everything in its power to jump-start the process. The Republicans and the President know that economic issues are one of the only things that can dislodge them from power.

Presidential candidates are getting into blogging.  Howard Dean is probably the furthest ahead   I think this is a good strategy to connect to people.

CMS Review is a new resources website for those trying to select the

right CMS. We hope it will be valuable to new members of this list, and

to veterans as a place to point the newcomers. It's where you can find

articles, books, research reports, magazines, seminars, trade shows,

weblogs, and lots more great CMS websites.

CMS Review has a database of vendor-editable feature descriptions that

enables Search for a CMS with particular properties (like operating

system, middleware framework, programming language, license), a powerful

side-by-side CMS Feature Comparator, and a faceted CMS Directory..

All these functions are available as code snippets[2] to paste into any

CMS-related site. A data feed web service will provide Search,

Comparison, and Directory services to the site's visitors. They are like

news feeds, but not so ephemeral as today's headlines, so we are calling

them "knowledge feeds."

There is no charge for this service. The data is licensed under a

Creative Commons license[3]. The hope is that if the knowledge feeds are

used widely in the CMS community, vendors will then be pressured to

maintain their data themselves. With hundreds of CMS and hundreds of

features, this work is beyond any single website editorial team. If we

collaborate, all our CMS websites can provide this valuable service to

their visitors.

The Search and Feature Comparator are now playing on Content-Wire.com[4]

and cmsInfo[5], the faceted Directory at CMS Review and at OSCOM[6].

Note that each website has easily styled the feeds with a CSS to match

local colors and fonts[2].

The current database set is small (about 50 open-source CMS and 25

proprietary CMS, only the first 30 of some 125 features, and many

products have no data at all entered). It is initially biased toward

open-source CMS because of our work with the OSCOM conference coming to

Harvard May 28.

* Where is the knowledge in a CMS?

http://www.steptwo.com.au/papers/kmc_wherek/index.html

In answering this question, light will be shed on the long-term

value of a CMS in capturing organisational knowledge, and its

role in a broader KM strategy.

Related articles:

* Losing sight of the content in a CMS

http://www.steptwo.com.au/papers/kmc_content/index.html

Why spend millions on managing content that no-one understands

or needs? This article provides tips for getting the best value

out of your business content.

* Using usability to direct KM systems

http://www.steptwo.com.au/papers/kmc_usability/index.html

KM has much to learn from usability, which can provide many

useful starting points for structuring and managing KM projects.