A Day In The Life Of BBCi Search is an excellent look at how BBCi mines the searches of their users to learn about their needs and to better serve them. I highly recommend reading this if you have an interest in improving search results and learning from the activity on your web site.
(Thanks to Ease for the pointer.)
If you are interested in KM in general and the application of weblogs as a KM tool specifically, you really need to be reading Jim McGee on a daily basis. One of his recent posts explores knowledge work, weblogs, and fair process. Here is a quote:
As I’ve argued before one of the principal benefits of weblogs is the way that they can make knowledge work more visible. In this context, weblogs serve as a tool that makes fair process a natural byproduct of the work itself. They are a place where explanation can be developed and shared as it is worked out in real time. Moreover, if you can get an institutional environment in which everyone can potentially contribute their perspectives by way of their own weblogs and these perspectives can flow through the system by way of RSS, then you also increase the degree of engagement.
The flip side of this is that without a belief in and commitment to the notion of fair process, weblogs by themselves aren’t likely to last very long inside organizations. While they can be a tool to promote those values, I don’t think they can create those values if they are otherwise absent.
I agree that to successfully deploy weblogs at an enterprise level (across the entire organization) requires an organizational culture that is receptive to knowledge sharing and fair process.
However, I think that weblogs could be used within small islands of an organization that is otherwise not open to this style of knowledge work if given local sponsorship and protection. Over the long term this might lead the rest of the culture in a direction where knowledge sharing could occur more broadly. At a minimum, it would help one section to do their work more effectively. This approach does carry some risks from going against the grain. Use good judgement in how far to push.
Doug Fox has been been tracking how bloggers have been interacting at live, f2f, meetings via their blogs. In this post he mentions:
Right now, there is no convenient way for presenters/attendees to reference educational sessions.
I think he is getting at the fact that there is no way with most meeting event web sites to find out who is blogging them live or immediately after the fact.
This sounds like a job for trackback. Attendees could ping individual sessions so that other attendees can see reaction and feedback in a central place. As a matter of fact, Ben and Mena Trott did exactly this for the Mac OS X Conference last year.
Amzon.com has begun taunting me on their home page with items from my wishlist. They appear under a heading of ‘You Know You Want It’. Ha! I love marketing with a sense of humor.
I thought I would post a link to my CAE Study Notes since the next exam is about a month away. I used these to review for the test last year when I had a few minutes downtime in the week or two before the exam.
Good luck to everyone preparing for the exam!
(CAE stands for Certified Association Executive, which is a professional certification program for association staff.)
Came across the Regular Expressions Library web site. It provides a searchable database of over 200 regular expressions. (Searching regular expressions is wonderfully self-referential somehow.)
It also provides web service access to the database.
This page lists links to recent reports on Internet usage statistics sliced and diced just about any way you could think of. Came across it when researching some info for a coworker.
Here is an April fools post from the Google blog that had me puzzled for a minute until I remembered today’s date: The End of the Google Blog.
The Google Compute Project is an extension of the Google Search Bar that will add your computer to a network of others that are working on collaborative processing projects, ala the wildly successful SETA@home project. (No ETs found yet, though.) Google will use your computer to do computations during periods of time that it has extra processing power avaiable (such as when you are reading weblogs). Looks like they are donating the processing time to charities and/or academic research projects. (Via Google Weblog.)
I discovered today that several important e-mails addressed to me over the past couple of weeks had been blocked by our spam filter at work. The person writing them had the word ‘free’ in a line of her signature, advertising a free seminar her company is offering. That plus html formatting was enough to trigger the filter threshold. I had to scramble quite a bit today to make up for the delay in getting the information.
There are a couple issues here. One, I need to talk to our admins about raising that threshold a bit. I’d rather get some spam and all of my genuine mail rather than no spam and not all the valid stuff. I may also start sending domains to the network admin that I want added to the whitelist so I don’t lose stuff like this in the future.
I wonder what else I may not have been receiving? There is no easy way in our current system at work for me to review what messages have been blocked. My spam blocking at home works great since I can see exactly what has been filtered out at will.
C. David Gammel, CAE 