Just got off the phone with Disney reservations, double checking that I did in fact book a room for myself at the Great Ideas conference in Orlando. Good news: I did! Listening to Disney hold media for 10 minutes to do so made me realize I need to brace myself for the full Disney experience. Maybe I’ll re-read Cory Doctorow’s book while I’m there.
I am participating in two group blogs (glogging?) at the moment.
One is the Great Ideas Conference Blog, developed in conjunction with ASAE’s Great Ideas conference. It is being written by several folks who will be presenting at the conference in Orlando starting this Sunday.
The other blog is one that I am writing with several association consultant colleagues that we hope to eventually publish as a short book. We’ve Always Done It That Way: 101 Things That Associations Must Change. Our premise is that doing things the same way as you’ve always done it probably isn’t working out too well these days. We are helpfully providing a few changes (101) you might want to consider. Jamie speaks for me in his post about the group of folks we are working with on this.
This week I’ve had reports from clients and colleagues that messages they sent to me were not making it and that my web host (which had been handling my e-mail as well) had been placed on a blacklist for suspected spam activity. I know they work hard on dealing with those issues, but I’d had enough and my e-mail is worth an extra investment to keep up and running. So, I signed up with an e-mail hosting service where that is all they do: webmail.us.
I came across this company a few months back when I had first researched the issue. I also found a blog by their CEO, Pat Mathews, which I subscribed to. In the intervening time, Pat came across as level headed and very passionate about his company via his blog posts, so I decided to give them a shot. Good example of blog marketing at work.
So far, their IMAP service is BLAZING fast compared to what I had before. Their tech support was also very responsive when I sent in a couple suggestions on the registration process. I’m very hopeful this will be a good investment for me ($120/year for five 1GB mailboxes).
Update: I won’t bore you with details but I inadvertently blew away my MX records at my DNS host, which means the Internet doesn’t know where to send my mail. I have reset it so hopefully it will be back in order soon. If you sent something to me today and have not received a response, please resend in the morning (Friday 12/2) or e-mail me at davgam at mindspring dot com.
Here are a few standards-related links I’ve been meaning to post. Hope you find them useful!
Chris Spurgeon works on the American Public Media family of web sites. He recently posted on the Well about some changes he made to the Marketplace web site:
I just changed the tab navigation of the Marketplace radio show website (www.marketplace.org) from vertical tabs along the left hand side of thepage to horizontal tabs along the top. Other than uploading the new tab graphics, all I had to do was tweak 2 CSS rules and the change instantly appeared on more than 5 thousand static pages. So damn cool.
Chris graciously gave permission for me to quote his post here. This is a fantastic example of how going to a CSS design allows you to make significant changes quickly by editing just a single file.
Another thing to note is that if you look at the source code for the page, you can see that it includes corporate branding and search elements for the overall organization that do not cleanly separate content from presentation. The reality of web design in large organizations is that you often don’t have control of everything and have to work around various things that are not open for negotiation. However, the rest of the page does separate presentation from content markup, which enabled Chris to make that big change so easily. This shows how you don’t have to follow a purist approach to still benefit from these techniques.
Kevin just thanked his first blog commenter since he started writing as part of Thanksgiving. Great idea!
So, without further ado, thank you Phil Murray for posting the first comment to my blog on August 2nd, 2002! The post Phil commented on was one I wrote questioning whether a KM system had to be deployed enterprise wide in order to be considered a success. Why not just do something locally within a group using free tools for their own benefit? I still think that makes as much sense now as it did to me over 3 years ago. And Phil agreed with me and expanded upon the idea substantively, which is a nice bonus for a first comment. 🙂
I have truly learned so much from writing this blog and connecting with others who read and write on the same topics. Thanks to all of you for participating in this public conversation.
Update: To continue being a bit meta, this turns out to be my 500th post on this blog. Only took 3 years! 🙂
Microsoft has just published an extension to RSS and OPML to enable updates to be share back and forth (I think) via RSS and OPML.
This is fun: Warning Label Generator.
(Via Ben Martin.)
I’ve been thinking lately about how an unconference style event for an association could work. I’ll be posting some ideas on that later on. I thought it would be good to start by comparing the characteristics of conferences and unconferences. So, in no particular or meaningful order, here is my initial list:
| Conference | Unconference |
| Attendees | Participants |
| Exhibitors | Participants |
| Recruiting speakers | Recruiting participants |
| Content planning | Content facilitation |
| Direct marketing | Word of mouth marketing |
| Handouts | Wikis |
| 12 month planning cycle | 12 week planning cycle |
| Sponsorships | Donations |
| Once a year | As often as needed and desired |
| Large budgets | Shoe-string budgets |
| Maximize value for organizers | Maximize value for participants |
| Best practices | Innovation |
| Top down | Bottom up |
| Wisdom of experts | Wisdom of crowds |
| Magazine coverage 2 months later | Live blogging/podcasting |
| Slides | Stories |
| Panels | Conversations |
| Best practices | Practicing |
| Hierarchy | Networks |
| Directive methods | participatory methods |
| Participants | Contributors/creators |
| Speakers | Conversation starters |
| Sharing information | Learning collaboratively |
| Instruction | Discovery |
| Best learning in the hallway | It’s all hallway! |
I’m sure a lot more can be added to this but it’s a start.
I also just created a Wikipedia entry for unconference. I was surprised it didn’t exist yet.
Update: Added a couple more items suggested by Rich Westerfield. (I changed Powerpoint to Slides.)
Update 2: Added several more contributed in the comments by Nancy White and Jeff De Cagna. Thanks Nancy and Jeff!
Slacker Manager has a interesting post on what he calls theDrucker paradox:
…why Drucker’s ideas are so widely quoted and so rarely practiced…
Good question! I posted my thoughts on it in the comments of that post.
C. David Gammel, CAE 