I’m looking for pointers/recommendations for social network analysis software. I’d like something that would allow me to input people, identify their connections, and then plot the relationships graphically.
If you have a recommendation, please add a comment to this post or shoot me an e-mail. Thanks!
CMSWatch: Featured Opinion: 5 Biggest Mistakes in CMS Selection provides some excellent pointers on pitfalls to avoid when selecting a CMS.
While they are all good points, the most fundamental recommendation, imho, is to create a formal, diverse, selection team. At a minimum, according to the article, it should include both IT and content development staff. This seems obvious but I have heard of many instances where IT simply handed down a solution to the content folks without their involvement in the evaluation of products. Less frequent are cases where the content staff buy software without consulting IT and then ask IT to install it. IT people LOVE that. 🙂
The content staff are the primary users and are the best judges of authoring and publishing functionality. IT staff can best judge the infrastructural requirements and performance measures as well as the depth of their knowledge in the technology on which the candidate systems are based. You must have both of them well represented in the selection process.
(Thanks to Column Two for the pointer.)
Dave Barry’s Blog. Just like the column, only shorter.
Thanks to Shifted Librarian Jenny for the pointer.
The Glass Wall: a postmortem on a massive redesign project done for the BBCi web site. This may have made the blog rounds already but I just came across a mention of it on the Well.
Here is a niftly little plugin for Mozilla: the UAbar. This allows you to change what user agent Mozilla identifies itsself as to web servers. This will let you access those sites that require IE or even NS 4.7 with Mozilla. (They may break in Mozilla but at least you get to judge that.)
It does have a rather nasty bug that you can work around but you should be aware of it before installing UAbar.
Jim McGee’s comments on moving from need-to-know to shared awareness information policies within an organization. Here is a quote:
If, on the other hand, your focus is on the external mission, i.e. getting the job done for customers, the issue shifts to how best to let everyone have access to and know what is going on that might be relevant. In part this has to be founded on a deeper sense of trust in all the members of the organization. Trust both in their judgment to make good and appropriate use of information and knowledge and, more importantly, in their capacity to manage the torrent of bits on their own. No need to be paternalistic about it.
Exactly.
I’ve been on a blog sabatical the last couple months as we prepared for and then had a new arrival in our family. Ella Rose Gammel entered the world on January 3, 2003 weighing in at 5 lbs. 14 oz. Babe and mom are both very healthy and recovered quickly from the delivery. What a great way to start off the new year!
Spotted via drupal.org:
Third Open Source Content Management Conference
Due to the great success of the first and second conference we are organizing another conference at Harvard University, Cambridge/Boston in April 2003. To stay informed please subscribe at our Participants mailing list.
I may try to attend that one next year.
The Drupal group weblogging software (open source) appears to have excellent taxonomy support. I need to dig into this further and get a demo up and running but it looks very promising.
Check out The Weblog MetaData Initiative: Next Step: HTML [meta] Experiment. I missed this effort until now for some reason.
I think a standardized metadata model for weblogs will be very useful for indexing klog clusters within companies or among a dispersed community of practice. Not sure how useful it will be for the overall blogging community. We’ll see what happens!
C. David Gammel, CAE 