November 26, 2003

Jon Husband Riffing on Esther Dyson

Jon Husband's Wirearchy : Riffing on Roland Tanglao's post of Esther Dyson's comments on the dark side of social networking software.

Caveat...I already know my conclusions will be construed as mushy and naive. Oh well.

For now, no one online social network has enough heft to matter. But these issues will inevitably arise when the services approach critical mass. Consider the undercurrents of discomfort already swirling around Google because it is perceived to control the content we see. Imagine a service that controls information about people, even if it only runs algorithms.

Posted by Stuart at 7:03 PM

Robert Scoble on Traction

Traction claims to have the best Enterprise Weblog software. One problem: the price. Enterprises aren't ready yet for wholesale weblogs. They need to be evangelized. I can't afford $250 to put something in place for myself inside Microsoft (and I don't think I'd get that approved cause there are already good free tools available). Plus, what happens if I'm successful at evangelizing this? Oh, then you gotta spend $5000 (actually more). Oh, wait, UserLand's Manila costs $900 (and you can create an unlimited number of sites with that). Moveable Type is free (well, once you buy a server). And if I'm gonna spend $5000 why not buy Sharepoint, which is a product from a huge company (er, Microsoft) with known support?

Not to mention, I visited the product page and can't figure out whether or not the product supports "the five pillars of conversational software" that I laid out the other day? You know, is it: easy to use, discoverable, expose community behavior, build permalinks automatically, and build RSS syndication services?

OK, looks like it has ease of publishing, permalinking, and syndication. Doesn't look like it has a discoverability system. (ie, if I'm Bill Gates, how can I see when every weblog inside Microsoft's firewall has published?) I'm not sure it has a community system either. For instance, can I tell who is linking to my weblog? Can I see how much traffic they are sending me? Anything else? These features are very important for weblogs inside your corporation.

Hint: my "internal blog" inside Microsoft's firewall doesn't have these features either, and that's one reason I don't use my internal blog. Any blog software that doesn't have these five things built in really isn't blogging software. At least not blogging software that'll be useful in 2004.

[The Scobleizer Weblog]
Posted by Stuart at 4:14 PM

Alan Atkinson - Indicators are Reality

Another World Is Here: Indicators Are Reality

Our topic is "Indicators - Global".
The next three websites could feed your statistical curiosity for the next several months. And these are just the free options; if you're willing to plunk down a hundred bucks here and there, you will be happily swimming in data for several years more.
We're talking GDP per capita (see the map - can you tell who's rich?), carbon dioxide emissions, education levels, biodiversity, air quality, AIDS infection rates, teen births ... These are the numbers that reflect the physical and human realities of the world. They are the very definition of big picture.
It's all there for the downloading.

Posted by Stuart at 3:08 PM

Ross Mayfield lists Social Software Reading

Contributing to the Eventspace of the Bay Area Futurist Salon gave me an opportunity to go back and dig up some key posts from the past year. An enjoyable exercise I recommend for any blogger. By all means, this isn't an all encompassing reader for Social Software and Social Networking, but some highlights from a personal perspective.

Some stuff on Social Software

Some stuff on Social Networking

[Ross Mayfield's Weblog]
Posted by Stuart at 2:39 PM

November 21, 2003

Jim on the Status Reports Post

Status Reports 2.0. At a start-up, there are two organizational inflection points which drastically change communication within the organization. The first change occurs around fifty or so people -- this is the moment when, if you're an early employee, that you first see... [Rands In Repose]

Some nice reflections on the potential for wikis and weblogs to address that perennial necessary evil in organizations--status reports. Comes down slightly in favor of weblogs for most organizations given the open-ended, unstructured, nature of wikis.

Overall, I'm inclined to agree, although the hybrid strategy that Ross Mayfield is pursuing at SocialText is intriguing as well. Another take to factor in is that taken by the folks at Traction Software. The start up curve appears a bit steeper, but they seem to have thought more about how to operate at the structured team level.

What I'm continuing to struggle with is how best to introduce these concepts into organizations that are just beginning to grasp the limitation of email as a management tool.

 

[McGee's Musings]
Posted by Stuart at 11:52 AM

November 19, 2003

Joi on Deconstructing Identity -- New Listening Required

I had an iChat with my sister Mimi last night. (Luna and Eamon are my niece and and nephew 3 and 5)

iChat with Mimi
Mimi: It's so funny... watching Luna and Eamon. they are sure that they are going to get married. They were both so crushed when we broke it to them that it is not the way it works, though now Luna's latest is that she is going to marry her best friend haley

Joi: hehe

Mimi: kids are so great because they don't buy the societal expectations yet

;-) I thought this was great. I've been thinking a lot about identity after danah boyd helped connect my notions of identity on the level of privacy and security and identity on the level of my personal identity as a Japanese/American chanponite. I promise to post my notes from this weekend which will put a sharper point on this from a Japanese identity perspective, but what is amazing as you start to deconstruct the notions of identity is how contextual, cultural and artificial it is. I think that approaching the issue of identity from a technical perspective or a "productivity tool" perspective is the wrong approach and that we have to listen to the sociologist and anthropologists in this space A LOT MORE before we get too far down the road.

Lucky for me I've got a sister in this space too. ;-)

[Joi Ito's Web]
Posted by Stuart at 2:58 PM

Lee's notes on Verna Alee's Presentation

Notes on Verna Allee's presentation about knowledge and value networks [headshift moments]
Posted by Stuart at 2:51 PM

Lilia and KM Europe Links

This is the growing list of other weblogs posts on KM Europe (see also conference presentations online). Please don't be angry when updated :)

Martin Dugage: A quick report on KM Europe in Amsterdam

Lee Bryant (Headshift): general notes and more about

Ton Zijlstra: Squarewise: KM's Soap More Slippery Than Suggested, On the KM-community, Keynote Dave Snowden

Sam Marshall: The Kindness of Strangers (see also notes on KM Asia 2003)

[Mathemagenic]
Posted by Stuart at 2:48 PM

November 12, 2003

Blogger Jack Summary on Comments

(Via JD)I think this is a pretty good question too:

Tony Perkins, creator and editor-in-chief of AlwaysOn and the event's host, questioned whether newly emboldened readers will continue to be engaged by Web sites that don't allow them to comment on stories, editorials or columns. What the blogging and social networking era has done for these readers, he said, was reveal "the power of participating in media... the average citizen out there has something to say." As a result, he believes every Web site will eventually have to open itself up to readers' comments, or risk losing their trust.
I know that I almost expect to be able to comment back to most of the writers I read. I keep wishing Josh Marshall would allow his readers to leave feedback because I'd love to see how his insights stand up to other interpretations. And as I've said previously, I think the power of comments in many ways defines and shapes what writing in Web logs is. Without that interaction, it's primarily essay. With it, it's something slightly different, I think. When your readers are "fact checking your ass," you really have to pay attention to the accuracy and thoroughness of what you are writing about. That's why I want to develop that Web logging style and voice in my students. [Weblogg-ed News]

[BloggerJack Reporter]
Posted by Stuart at 12:07 PM

November 11, 2003

Dave on PKM

In a recent post I argued that IT and Knowledge Management (KM) should merge into a combined TechKnowledgy department that would, in addition to the traditional responsibilities for managing the financial, HR and sales systems and technical hardware of the organization, take on these two important new responsibilities focused on the individual 'knowledge worker':

1. Social Software Applications: Development of new social software applications for front-line employees, including:
  • Expertise locators - to help people find other people inside and outside the organization they need to talk with to do their job more effectively.
  • Personal content management tools - simple, weblog-type tools that organize, access and selectively publish each individual's 'filing cabinet', as a replacement for failed centralized content management systems.
  • Personal collaboration tools - wireless, portable videoconferencing and networking tools that save travel costs and allow people to participate virtually in events where they cannot afford to participate in person.
  • Personal researching and reporting tools - technologies and templates that enable effective do-it-yourself business research and analysis and facilitate the preparation of professional reports and presentations.
PPI2. Personal Productivity Improvement: Hands-on assistance to front-line employees -- helping them make effective use of technology and knowledge, including the above tools, one-on-one, in the context of their individual roles. Not training, not wait-for-the-phone-to-ring help desk service -- face to face, scheduled sessions where individuals can show what they do and what they know, and experts can show them how to do it better, faster, and take the intelligence of what else is needed back to HO so developers can improve effectiveness even more.
I've written before about social software applications, and noted that Business 2.0 has named these applications the Best New Technology of 2003.

Now I've put together, in Word format, a downloadable Business Case for Personal Productivity Improvement. I've written this so that it can be used by both:
  1. IT/KM professions inside the organization, to get executive buy-in and resources for it, and
  2. external IT/KM consultants who want to sell this service to organizations that prefer to outsource it.
I hope you find it useful and I would welcome comments on it. I am looking to organize a virtual collaborative enterprise of IT/KM professionals interested in providing this service, so I may also post it on Ryze/LinkedIn.

What do you think -- could people make a living doing this?
[How to Save the World]
Posted by Stuart at 8:51 AM

November 6, 2003

Emergic Nicely Sums Up Dave Pollard's Post

Dave Pollard writes about Business 2.0's article which selects social networking as the Technology of the Year, and makes a point (which I agree with) that "they missed the companion technology that will provide the data essential to the functioning of future Social Networking Applications. That technology: Personal Content Management and Publishing Applications (notably Blogs and RSS). You can't have one without the other."

Among the other new technologies:

1. HOME NETWORKING - Ultra-wideband
2. SUPPLY CHAIN - RFID
3. WIRELESS BROADBAND - 802.16
4. ENERGY - Micro fuel cells
5. HOUSEHOLD PRODUCTS - Gecko tape
6. SOFTWARE - Antispam software (that works)
7. CONSUMER ELECTRONICS - OLEDs
8. LIGHTING - LED lightbulbs
9. COMPUTER MEMORY - MRAM
10. MEDICINE - Bioinformatics

[E M E R G I C . o r g]
Posted by Stuart at 7:51 PM

Nice Link to Corporate Logo Design Trends

Great overview of the various trends at work in the design of recent corporate logos. From merging droplets to refined simplicity to spirals and slinkies, its all here. [Corporate Logos]
Posted by Stuart at 5:22 PM

Jenny' Adivce for RSS Newbies

The Shifted Librarian

here is what you should do now that RSS is on your radar.
Go to BlogLines at http://www.bloglines.com/

Sign up for a free account.

Find 5-6 feeds that interest you and subscribe to them in BlogLines. If you're looking for library feeds to help you stay current, try LISFeeds, Peter Scott's List of Library Weblogs, LIS Blogsource, or the ODP List of Library Weblogs. If you're looking for the fun, non-library feeds (cats, knitting, recipes, etc.), try typing in a subject at Syndic8 or NewsIsFree. You can also try this at Technorati and Feedster, but they don't specifically highlight RSS feeds so you'll probably have to go to the blog itself to get that once you find a blog you like.

Once you've found a couple of blogs you'd like to read regularly, find the link to the RSS feed on their home page and subscribe to them in BlogLines.

Track a handful of sites in BlogLines to get a sense of how RSS and aggregators work. If you get to a point where you need a more powerful aggregator with more features, then you can start looking at some of the other ones we highlighted during the presentation

Posted by Stuart at 9:24 AM

November 5, 2003

Lilia --- In Support of Weblogs

Today I had a presentation about my PhD ideas of studying weblogs. These are links for the participants (see also http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/11/05.html#a827).

[Mathemagenic]
Posted by Stuart at 3:56 PM

November 4, 2003

Judith and Jim Link on Network Analysis

DM Review - The Link is the Thing, Part 3
By Richard Hackathorn

A partial list of references mentioned in this three part series:

Valdis Krebs :: Post-Merger Integration, Scale-Free Networks, The Oracle of Bacon at Virginia, Small World Project - Columbia University, Norah Jones, Citations: Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications - Wasserman, Faust (ResearchIndex), DM Review - Farming Web Resources for the Data Warehouse , The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web - Page, Brin, Motwani, Winograd (ResearchIndex), Pagerank Explained Correctly with Examples, Pagerank Explained. Google's PageRank and how to make the most of it., SIENA, Associative Link Analysis resource site.

...Part 1 of this article (August 2003 issue of DM Review) reviews the work in network analysis of complex systems, particularly the recent research into the small-world (SW) property, aristocratic-egalitarian (A-E) distinction and tipping points. Part 2 (September 2003 issue of DM Review) applies these concepts to the business intelligence (BI) and data warehousing (DW) fields with a new methodology called Associative Link Analysis (ALA) by discussing the translation of typical warehouse schema into an associative graph form. This article, Part 3, the final in the series, describes several metrics for analyzing graphs, strategies and tactics based on the SW property, and implementation issues...

Additional reading on a few of the concepts introduced in this three part series:

"Small World Property": Locality, Hierarchy, and Bidirectionality in the Web (ResearchIndex),
"Small World Architectures": Multiple Scales in Small-World Networks (ResearchIndex),
"Tipping Points": Tipping Points,
"ER Schema": A Formal Framework for ER Schema Transformation - McBrien, Poulovassilis (ResearchIndex).

 
Great collection of substantive resources on network analysis. I wish that more of the designers of services like Ryze, LinkedIn, and the like had read and absorbed these lessons before launching into software development. I see little evidence that they have and with the lemming like rush of VC money into this space, I'm betting on a mini-bubble popping in the not too distant future.
[McGee's Musings]
Posted by Stuart at 5:00 PM

November 2, 2003

Via Danah: Business Week on Friendster.

See Business Week: "A Dud in Cupid's Quiver


Articles on Friendster have focused on the tool, the business, Fakesters and the less-than-kind portrayal of Jonathan Abrams. But today, the press took a new twist: they finally critiqued the underlying theoretical model on which Friendster depends. Oh, and they... [Many-to-Many]

Posted by Stuart at 10:16 AM