High Context Consulting

Archive for July, 2002

July 9, 2002

Test Page for KMpings

I’ve created a test page for KMpings for those folks out there working on building TrackBack functionality for their blogging software and for those who just want to test the ping function before hitting the main page.

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July 9, 2002

The KMpings Experiment

I created a little blog called KMpings that allows any blogger writing about knowledge management to ping their post to a tracking page (if their software supports it). Think of it as a themed www.weblogs.com for the knowledge management community.

I wanted to try out this experiment since I think the TrackBack function created by Movable Type has a lot of potential for aggregating blog posts within communities of practice on the web or an intranet. Please post any feed back you have to this message or shoot me an e-mail.

Check out the KMpings blog for links to information on how to configure MT as well as a TrackBack hack for Radio.

If the page takes off I’ll look into enhancing features based on feedback from the community. One I’m definitely going to work on this week is creating an RSS feed of the pings.

Happy KMpinging!

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July 8, 2002

Pre-click Confidence

How Real People Search - Resnick and Lergier puts forward an interesting concept: pre-click confidence. They have defined this as:

In testing, we measure the Pre-Click Confidence (PCC), which is how sure the user is that the selected link will have the needed information. When the PCC for a link exceeds a match quality threshold, they click. We call this a satisficing constraint because the user is satisfied with the PCC. If the user is in the mood to browse, she can set the PCC threshold low. In this case, she should expect to get lots of false alarms and may not be as frustrated when the link doesn’t have what she is looking for. On the other hand, if she is in a “just the facts” mood (Rozanski et al, 2001), she will set the PCC very high. If she gets fooled by a poorly written description, she will be much more disappointed in the search engine performance.

Here is my summary of the above article’s findings on real people searching:

Users searching for a specific fact or item have a very high PCC threshold. If none of the search result titles and/or descriptions meet their PCC requirement they will not click on anything.
Users searching for a general topic compare the perceived PCC value for each result in the set and click on those they have the highest confidence for.
All searchers want descriptions included with search results.
Very few people click to see more results beyond the first page returned by their search.

As I think about the search engines and sites that I use, I pretty consistently assign very high PCC values to links posted in weblogs compared to any other source.

www.searchtools.com, who published the article, is an excellent site for researching search technology, btw. I read the reference to this article in their Search Tools News e-mail newsletter.

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July 7, 2002

First Blogging Article Sighting in Association Press

I just spotted an article on blogging in GWSAE’s Executive Update. This is the first mention of weblogs in the association trade press that I’m aware of.

It is very brief and makes a few points that I could quible with, however, I’m very excited that the topic has been picked-up by the trades. No mention of the knowledge angle yet but that will come.

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July 7, 2002

Ernie Pyle: Brave Men

I’ve been reading a collection of Ernie Pyle columns from WWII 1943 -1944 this summer. This book is a must read if you have an interest in the regular people who were participating in that war.

The following excerpt from pages 317-318 really struck me with how much communication and communication technology have changed from then to now. Pyle is describing the environment of London just prior to D-day:

After going the rounds I decided that if the Army failed to get ashore on D-day there would be enough American correspondents to force through a beachhead on their own.

…

There were at least three hundred correspondents, and the report was that transmission facilities were set up to carry a maximum of half a million words a day back to America.

On a high traffic day, this little web site matches the transmission capacity (but certainly not the content generation ability) of a D-day journalist brigade. I had one of those ‘Whoa’ moments when I read that page.

If he were around today I think Pyle would be a natural blogger. His stories were really about his personal reaction to and interaction with the men and women he met in the war. Very blog-like.

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July 4, 2002

Added search function to highcontext.com

I added a search function to the weblog today. I wrote a PHP script that accesses the blog entries in the MT MySQL database and then display the matches. It is not real fancy and doesn’t provide permanent links (which are difficult to create due to the database structure) but it’s good enough for me! I’ll probably continue to tinker with it.

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July 4, 2002