KMPings Bookmarklet Generator

I have created a KMpings Bookmarklet Generator for those users whose software doesn’t support TrackBack yet. This allows anyone to ping an entry to KMpings no matter what software they are using.

I adapted the bookmarklet generated by Movable Type and hit the ping script directly from the bookmarklet. Kind of an ugly little hack but it works! Let me know if you have any feedback about the tool.

Who Will It Be?

From Scripting News:

Good morning weblog fans. I got a few emails overnight about a project John, Jake and Lawrence are doing with a famous publication while I’m reading books and watching movies, walking and recuperating. Murphy-willing we’ll be hosting thousands of weblogs under a new brand quite soon.

My guess as to the mystery publisher: Salon. Hosting a bunch of independent and opinionated weblogs seems to fit their style.

Blogware as Disruptive Tech

Via Terry Frazier’s weblog: Blogs as Disruptive Tech – How weblogs are flying under the radar of the Content Management Giants

This piece is definitely worth a read.

Increasingly, there’s only a thin layer of functionality separating blogware from low-end Content Management solutions. Features like:

* Basic Workflow, so administrators can approve content and templates
* Permission Levels, so you can easily separate content editors from template designers
* Update Histories, so you can track whose updating what (and when)
* Multiple Types of Data, so you can do more than just post blogs (e.g. post Press Releases or Job Listings)

A blogging software company that adds those functionalities to basic blogware could start to eat away at Content Management market share on the low-end. It’s already starting to happen with corporate weblogs: knowledge management blogs, corporate communications blog, and marketing blogs are all making a splash in the marketplace without much participation from the low to mid-end content management systems.

I think it represents the growth of more diverse tools to meet the diverse needs that have always been there. Why buy a $100k hammer if you have $0.02 nails?

It is the technology. And the people.

From McGee’s Musings:

KM as a technology issue

What if knowledge management actually is a technology problem?

This perspective suggests that technology’s primary organizational contribution to knowledge management is in establishing a uniform infrastructure and contributing to a consistent language and terminology environment.

To me K-Logs represent the most interesting recent effort to address this need with a simple solution available right now. They offer a starting point that a knowledge worker can understand and build from.

The catch-22 I keep finding myself in is trying to encourage the grass-roots development of KM tools and sharing while simultaneously crafting an organized taxonomy for our klog network. Too much top-down planning and structure will stifle the creativity of klogs during the start-up phase. Yet not enough structural planning will eventually lead to chaos as the network grows.

Anyone worked this out yet?

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!

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.