Lots of people have written about http://www.blogtree.com which allows you to indicate what blogs inspired the creation of your own. I finally got around to setting up my record here.
I was honored to see that someone flagged the KMpings blogtree record as a parent/inspiriation for a book review repository they started using TrackBack.
John Robb has written some documentation for knowledge webloggers using Radio who are just getting started. This is definitely a piece that needed to be written. Another that they need to write (and it looks like John is working on it) is a deployment white paper on how to set up klog network using the Userland tools.
I have dropped the referral script from most of my templates due to some javascript errors it was creating under certain conditions (thanks for pointing it out Brian!). I think I know what to fix but it will have to wait until the weekend most likely.
Welcome and thanks for participating to James Robertson and Anders Jacobsen who have recently begun sending KM-related TrackBack pings to KMpings!
Be sure to check out Blogpopuli for a similar site that tracks entries related to blogging (plenty to track around that topic).
Ray Ozzie has published an essay on why he works in the collaborative software market. Below is an exceprt where he points out the tension between private space and open space sharing:
Of course, blogs are (and the theory behind klogs is, I believe) at the complete opposite end of the spectrum – being “make public by default”. By choosing to work “in the open”, others surely can benefit from work that “should” be published. And let there be no doubt: if you can get people to work in the open, it can be quite valuable to others so long as people broadly understand what should be shared and what shouldn’t.
I love this blog: Don’t Link to Us!. They link to stupid linking policies around the web. I noticed at least one mention of an association.
New Software (and Bosses) at AOL is a great article on the NYT web site today. It discusses how the revamped leadership of the company is moving back to being user-centric in their approach to business as opposed to investor-centric. Here is a snippet about their plans to reduce pop-up ads:
The worst fears of Mr. Leonsis and his colleagues became evident late last year as AOL’s monthly surveys found member satisfaction starting to dip. Mr. Leonsis formed a task force to look at why members were canceling their service. It zeroed in on pop-up advertisements, a longtime feature and to many a longtime annoyance. As revenue began to fall last year, AOL had increased the frequency of pop-ups, and members began to complain louder than usual.
A study showed that when the number of pop-up ads was cut in half for a group of members, their satisfaction improved notably. That led not only to a cutback in the number of pop-ups across the service, but was, according to Mr. Leonsis, the catalyst for a revolution within AOL.
The article also indicates they are trying to refocus on the supporting the community of AOL users. Sounds like they are coming back to reality.
blended perspectives: MT-RefSearch to the Rescue! is a brilliant little script for MT. It detects if an in-bound reader is coming from a google search and displays a local set of search results at the top of the page based on the google query that led to them. This can quickly route users to an MT post that may have slid of the home page since Google last indexed it.
This takes an approach I often use at work in a completely new-to-me direction. I always make sure that our PR folks keep us up-to-date on media mentions of our organization so that I can get a link and/or a blurb on our home pages that will quickly direct those users to info relevant to the media exposure that guided them to us. Gotta grab those people right off the bat if we’re going to engage them.
I had never considered applying the same approach to in-bound searchers from Google and other seach engines. We could even create special messages for certain keywords that are hot-button issues for us in addition to supply our local search results for their query.
I need to think this through a bit more but it is a fascinating idea. Thanks for the idea Eliot!
James Robertson has been giving us a view over his shoulder as he reviews the intranet of one of his clients. In his latest entry he outlines the main issues they will need to resolve in improving the intranet. Thanks for sharing your ideas and experience, James!
The IT guy concluded that, “You guys are making it way too easy to share with others.” And then he dropped the bomb: “Listen, our business users are stupid, we have to help protect them from themselves.” Yea, and if you allow them to share and work securely with others this company JUST might keep up with the demands of the street, because human interaction is the rocket fuel that propels innovation.
This is the same concept as companies restricting access to the web for their employees because they fear they will goof off by surfing. Hello! People have been goofing off at work since the dark ages. If not the web, they’ll find something else.
If your organization is incapable of judging an employee’s performance and work product well enough to know when they are not meeting objectives then you’re in trouble and no restrictive blanket IT policy is gonna help fix it. You may even be harming the work of your most productive employees by developing a policy for all based on the short-comings of a few.
C. David Gammel, CAE 