Archive for April, 2002
April 23, 2002
Grassroots KM
I’ve been getting up to speed on what has been discussed and discovered in the past couple of years about using web logs for knowledge management. I continually find articles and analysis that clarify the ideas that have been bouncing around in my head.
The latest is an article on elearningpost.com that provides an analysis of how weblogging fits into the traditional view of KM. The core idea I take away from here is that weblogs (or knowledge logs or klogs) facilitate tacit-to-tacit knowledge transfer. This is essentially the sharing of wisdom about a certain practice or profession by an individual for an audience. Tacit-to-tacit is the hardest to facilitate and the piece that has failed in so many other KM initiaitves. Perhaps blogs are the answer….
This article came out on May 14, 2001. Only a year to go to get caught up!
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April 23, 2002
Taxonomy and IA
There is a great interview with Samantha Bailey over on boxesandarrows.com about the relationship between metadata and taxonomies and what they mean for information architecture overall (they start to get into this on the second page of the interview).
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April 23, 2002
Joel’s Programmer’s Book Shelf
Joel Spolsky has reviewed a set of books that he thinks every programmer should read. In addition to outright programming, he discusses books on UI, managing people, making a difference in the world. It is a great list.
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April 22, 2002
Multinational Membership Web Sites
10 Lessons for Mutlinational Web Sites by Lynn Johnston. This article provides a broad overview of some of the issues you will run into in creating a global web site for a membership organization. The article is based on Johnston’s experience at the American Management Association.
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April 21, 2002
Deep Linking
A case is heading to court in the European Union on the legality of deep linking to content on another web site. (A ‘deep link’ is one that links to something other than the home page for that web site.) A newspaper in the Netherlands is trying to block a web site from linking to its content.
Here is my opinion on the issue of deep links:
Misrepresentation of content ownership via framing of pages or content-scraping without permission: BAD.
Normal links to pages anywhere within any site: GOOD.
The thing to note here: the BAD category actually has nothing to do with linking to content. It is the same as traditional copyright infringement and is achieved through techniques other than a standard HTML link.
Outlawing deep links to other web sites is like outlawing page references in bibliographic citations: a link is merely an HTML tag that provides a citation to another page on the web.
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April 19, 2002
Knowledge Logging 101
Here is a course in knowledge management at Kellogg where the course web site is a knowledge log and each student in the class has to write their own weblog.
Following this log is like a free course in KM for the exposure to new ideas focused around the topic of the class. You obviously don’t get the full benefit of the class but I still find it valuable. I wonder if registration for the course will go up over time as more potential students read the log?
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April 18, 2002
On Being All Things to All People
Jeff De Cagna in Executive Update:
“Although we routinely and openly reject the approach, we continue to operate our organizations as if they are ‘all things to all people.’ We consume our financial resources and the attention of our talent on work that does not create new value for our stakeholders, and then we wonder why we?re becoming irrelevant.”
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April 18, 2002
What’s Going on Here
I finally decided after much delay and procrastination to launch my own weblog (what is a weblog?). I’m still tweaking the layout and design so things may continue to change a bit here until I’m happy with how it looks.
I’ll be linking to other sites and news items related to technology, knowledge management, associations, and whatever else catches my interest on a particular day.
Drop me a line if you have any comments on the site.
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April 17, 2002
Shell Gets a Clue
Looks like someone at Shell read the Cluetrain Manifesto. This article describes how Shell has opened a public forum for their customers. They do not delete posts, they don’t give non-responsive responses (well, not many at least). Any employee at Shell can respond to a statement or questions posted by anyone on the forums. Here is the conclusion of the article that sums it up very nicely:
“So here’s how it works. A company opens a forum. People post messages of every sort, from the supportive to the stupid to the righteously indignant. Employees respond in their own voices. Readers of the forum see in the answers not just words but a real sense that the employees care and that the company is confident enough in what it stands for to allow employees to say what they want. As a result, the company’s social commitment avoids sounding like every other company’s trendy mouthings. Shell’s lack of control over the forum is precisely equivalent to the depth of its real commitment. It’s that simple.”
After reading some of the messages on that board, I am very impressed that Shell has stayed behind this concept since they launched it in 1999. Many other companies would have run away screaming and shut it down long ago.
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April 16, 2002
Thesauri Management Tools
I came across this site recently while researching thesaurus management tools. It gives a nice overview of what thesaurus software should do and lists known products, including a feature comparison table. Even though these pages were updated recently, a lot of the software listed is no longer supported or hasn’t been updated from DOS versions.
It amazes me that there are not more options out there for this kind of thing.
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