Jon Udell: The LinkedIn dilemma
Here's what stopped me from writing an endorsement for somebody on LinkedIn today: the requirement to define our relationship as one of these choices:
I have a colleague who's going to love this. Alf has partnered with RJ at Audioscrobbler.com to enable people to automagically obtain R(DF)SS feeds of whatever music goes through their player. Using a RSS-to-HTML device like feedroll, letting others know what you've been listening to recently on your weblog becomes a snap.The view from 10,000 feet is even more promising. All of Audioscrobbler's data is published under the Creative Commons licence, and so are the user feeds. Which enables clever people to build crawlers ("Musicrati"?) and devise algorithms that exploit the distributed database and add value, for instance by matching participants' listening profiles (à la blogmatcher) or by building new playlists out of the raw materials.
Seb's Open Research
Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo! Finance just gazed into his crystal ball for 2004. Inside it, both RSS and search look big.
'Tis the season for ambitious prediction. Other heavy hitters like Steve Gillmor at eWeek and Scott Rosenberg of Salon also see RSS breaking through into the mainstream.
Oh come all ye Feedster-reading bloggers--December's prediction parade is open to all. Blog your own guesses about the coming year. Just be sure they include the phrase "crystal ball" somewhere so that they'll show up in this targeted Feedster search.
This is Betsy Devine signing off and reminding you to be careful out there with all those crystal balls.
View Extended Entry [The FuzzyBlog]
Jonathon Delacour: Overloaded [via Edward Bilodeau]
Self-employment, a constant Internet connection, a weblog, and a mildly addictive personality turn out to be a killer combination—even for someone who no longer feels compelled to post regularly, let alone every day. Liz Lawley went cold turkey by taking a vacation with her family:The best part of the trip was that by midweek I'd stopped blogging things in my head. I hadn't realized how much I'd begun to detach from real life, always running meta-commentary in my head to save for later blogging. Letting go of that was very refreshing. It's not that I don't want to blog, it's that I don't want to do it all the time.
Although Liz didn't say this explicitly, I think she realized that having a weblog turns information overload into a two-way process: first you suck all this stuff into your head for processing; and then you regurgitate it as weblog posts. And, while this process isn't all that different from the ways in which we manipulate information in our jobs, it's something that we've chosen to do in addition to our jobs, something that detaches us even further from "real life".
At the beginning my news aggregator was giving me the same sense of being overloaded - too many things to comment on - but then I've learnt to leave "delete after 48 hours" setting on and to let go. I've also learnt to rely on Google (if there is a good stuff, then I should be able to find it back) and on printing out (if I want to have it, I'd better have it on paper). I've learnt to select weblogs I read. And I'm conctantly trying to make blogging (at least reading other blogs) part of my job. I still feel overloaded, but now it has more to do with ideas boiling inside me than with outside flows of information.
Anyway, the original post and comments are worth reading for getting an overview of how people cope with information overload.
[Mathemagenic]
I went and picked those quotes out because I was thinking about the principles of the open source movement, and about how I better can do something useful in the world. Notice that most people who're developing open source software are following the principles outlined above, even if the individuals doing so might not at all resonate with the lofty aims described. But it ads up to the same thing. If you develop some little software utility just to scratch your own personal itch, but you actually put it out into the world for others to freely use, and it turns out that it is useful for others too - you're doing exactly that. You, as an individual, are guiding your actions by your own intuition and decisions, not taking direction from any authoritative group outside yourself, doing it entirely you own way, and you give your work to the world with few or no strings attached. Ming the Mechanic: Individuals working for the worldPosted by Stuart at 10:36 PM
Common Craft - Online Community Strategies: Case Study: Using a Weblog to Achieve #1 Rankings in GoogleCase Study: Using a Weblog to Achieve #1 Rankings in Google
(ARCHIVED IN: Weblogs and Business )
December 8, 03 04:38 PM
This is a case study documenting best practices in using a weblog to achieve #1 rankings in Google. Below you will find a link to a .pdf file as well as the complete text of the case study as a weblog entry.
Knowledge-at-work: KM pickingsWhat lies ahead for KM?
Working taxonomies
Firms that develop a lingua franca, really share meaning, will be the first to take advantage of emergent technologies such as semantic web, autonomous agents and enabling the virtual agile organization.Patterns
Gathering validated solutions to repetitive problems and involving the community in the formulation and testing is a proven way to capture expertise. Firms that identify, name, use and apply patterns will leap-frog ahead. They will have the foundation to avoid costly errors, see new opportunities, build on past winners and spot gaps.I'm waiting to see what new knowledge practices emerge from WIFY, VoIP, SMS, Blogging and P2P file sharing.
Please let me know if you see any!