I just spotted an article on blogging in GWSAE’s Executive Update. This is the first mention of weblogs in the association trade press that I’m aware of.
It is very brief and makes a few points that I could quible with, however, I’m very excited that the topic has been picked-up by the trades. No mention of the knowledge angle yet but that will come.
I’ve been reading a collection of Ernie Pyle columns from WWII 1943 -1944 this summer. This book is a must read if you have an interest in the regular people who were participating in that war.
The following excerpt from pages 317-318 really struck me with how much communication and communication technology have changed from then to now. Pyle is describing the environment of London just prior to D-day:
After going the rounds I decided that if the Army failed to get ashore on D-day there would be enough American correspondents to force through a beachhead on their own.
…
There were at least three hundred correspondents, and the report was that transmission facilities were set up to carry a maximum of half a million words a day back to America.
On a high traffic day, this little web site matches the transmission capacity (but certainly not the content generation ability) of a D-day journalist brigade. I had one of those ‘Whoa’ moments when I read that page.
If he were around today I think Pyle would be a natural blogger. His stories were really about his personal reaction to and interaction with the men and women he met in the war. Very blog-like.
I added a search function to the weblog today. I wrote a PHP script that accesses the blog entries in the MT MySQL database and then display the matches. It is not real fancy and doesn’t provide permanent links (which are difficult to create due to the database structure) but it’s good enough for me! I’ll probably continue to tinker with it.
Here is a case study about applying a usability methodology to a short, iterative, design project: Applying usability techniques to deadline-driven projects (found via Column Two).
This piece gives some good questions to ask when starting a project.
Check out the flow-chart. How many boxes in the chart did you hit during the last design project you worked on?
Phil Wolff’s klogging 101 slides.
Halley’s Comment has posted a transcription of an interview with Chris Locke on NPR about weblogs. (Found via JOHO.)
Found a couple of interesting, new-to-me, weblogs this morning:
Column Two by James Robertson. The blog is primarily about KM and Content Management. Australia seems to be a real hotbed for this kind of stuff.
Bloug by Lou Rosenfeld of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web fame. He writes about IA, oddly enough. He also flags any narcissisitic posts with a hot dog.
Speaking of narcissism, I found Column Two by following a referral link back to his site. I’m addicted to parsing my referral logs. C2 then led me to Bloug.
This essay by Jeff Veen (found via Column Two) provides a method with which to catalogue the static html files of a site in preparation for converting to a content management system. The article also includes a download of the spreadsheet, which is handy.
Here is an important bit to read to yourself several times before embarking on this kind of project:
After you’ve filled in a couple hundred lines of the spreadsheet, you’ll inevitably start to wonder if there is something – anything! – that can speed this process up. Surely technology can come to the rescue. Sorry. The best we’ve been able to do is enlist the help of a programmer to write us a script that will crawl a Web site and spit out the URLs it finds. And that merely ensures that we don’t miss any pages. Even with this head start, we always go through the pages by hand. A content inventory is a decidedly human task. In fact, we find that the process can often be as valuable as the final spreadsheet. If you invest the time in scouring your Web site and deconstructing every page (or at least a good selection of pages), you will end up as the uncontested expert in how it all goes together. And that’s invaluable knowledge to possess when redesigning your site.
That matches our experience when we went through this process during our conversion from static files to a database-driven CMS. It was long and tedious but you really know your content afterwards.
The spreadsheet we developed for our project also included some rows that we used for mapping the existing content to a new location since we had redesigned our overall site structure during the conversion.
Found this link (via a Wired article on NPR’s linking policy) to some writing Tim Berners-Lee did about the nature of links:
Normal hypertext links do not of themselves imply that the document linked to is part of, is endorsed by, or endorses, or has related ownership or distribution terms as the document linked from.
So why call it a link? I wonder if this tendancy for the unclued to imply copyright violation or some other tangible impact by hyperlinking comes from the very word itself. To link, in the traditional sense, implies some physical connection or tie. From my copy of Websters:
link vt: To couple or connect by or as if by a link.
If hyperlinks had been called hyperreferences (which is what they are) from the start perhaps the widespread misunderstanding about the nature of linking would be a little less pervasive.
From Paul Holbrook’s Radio Weblog:
Down the rabbit hole of blogging …
Sometimes following other people’s blogs is like talking to someone who won’t shut up: you ask one question, and you’re in for a 15 minute answer. Well, it’s a little like that, except it’s not: it’s a lot more interesting. Case in point: I pulled a little piece out of my news aggregator this morning on a k-log pilot experiment, and many hours later, I’m left with a pile on interesting pages scattered around my screen that I’m trying to make sense of. (I can’t even remember where I found the reference to the k-log item; it’s already gone from my aggregator.)
I got turned on to the whole weblog/klog thing after a few experiences like the above. Knowing that I helped someone else tumble down a rabbit hole is very gratifying.
Alice down the rabbit-hole is a great analogy for a multi-hour klog clicking session:
In another moment down went Alice after it, never once considering how in the world she was to get out again.
The rabbit-hole went straight on like a tunnel for some way, and then dipped suddenly down, so suddenly that Alice had not a moment to think about stopping herself before she found herself falling down a very deep well.
Either the well was very deep, or she fell very slowly, for she had plenty of time as she went down to look about her and to wonder what was going to happen next. First, she tried to look down and make out what she was coming to, but it was too dark to see anything; then she looked at the sides of the well, and noticed that they were filled with cupboards and book-shelves; here and there she saw maps and pictures hung upon pegs. She took down a jar from one of the shelves as she passed; it was labelled `ORANGE MARMALADE’, but to her great disappointment it was empty: she did not like to drop the jar for fear of killing somebody, so managed to put it into one of the cupboards as she fell past it.
C. David Gammel, CAE 