This week I achieved something I’ve wanted to do for about 5 years: I earned my CAE designation from ASAE.
I put some of my study notes onto this site prior to the exam so I could do quick reviews of them during the day. They aren’t comprehensive but they might be helpful to you if you’re sitting for the exam during the next go around in November.
Editors at the Oxford English Dictionairy are looking at adding blog to their official list of words. Wow. (Found via www.scripting.com via Dane Carlson.)
An article in the Chronicle of Philanthropy gives several examples of how foundations are using e-mail and the web to collect donations.
The examples in the article confirm that e-mail solicitations combined with web-based payments can be a powerful tool in the fundraising bag of tricks but they do not even come close to being able to replace traditional direct mail campaigns.
I’ll be converting the blog portions of this site to Movable Type this coming weekend. I need a tool that I can use to post entries from multiple computers and locations. I don’t do laptop at the moment so MT fits the bill better than CityDesk or Radio (Radio can do posts via e-mail, however, I don’t want to rely on my desktop box at home staying up 24/7 during extended trips).
My hope is that I’ll be able to convert all my entries to MT without breaking existing links from other sites. If that isn’t possible I’ll leave the original files in place as an archive and start fresh with MT.
I’ll continue to maintain the rest of the site in CityDesk.
By the way, whoever designed the css templates for MT is a true artist. Beautiful work.
There is a seminar in Alexandria next month on Topic Maps. It looks very interesting but it doesn’t fit into my budget this year given its relatively high cost for a one-day seminar.
John Fraim puts forth several interesting ideas in his article Electric Symbols: Internet Words And Culture that was published in First Monday. He writes that aggregate data about searches on the Web can provide insight into cultural attitudes and beliefs. Here is how Google Zeitgeist data can be interpreted:
“While the Google Zeitgeist is interesting, for the most part the top ten Google words (weekly or monthly) simply reflect leading things and people coming and going from the attention of popular culture. The top ten words offer few surprises and little insight into the hidden forces behind popular culture.
Far greater cultural insight exists in the larger database of words ranked outside the Google top ten words. It is at the lower ranking levels that words move away from reflecting external cultural events to expressing internal attitudes.”
He goes on to write that the lower ranked words “are closer to collective psychology and the internal world and are more expressive of the internal world.”
I think this has some interesting implications for weblogs and the sites that track them, such as Daypop. The Daypop Top 40 shows the daily froth of popular culture and news. A Yearpop Middle 100 might provide insight into common themes and values in the blogging community over a longer period of time.
Comparing analysis of distinct groups of blogs could be valuable too. Do Radio bloggers tend to focus on different issues than Blogger bloggers? How different are warbloggers and techbloggers?
Another application could be comparing the lower ranking word searches on the intranets of two organizations considering a merger. Differences and similarities could provide valuable insight to those who are considering merging the two organizations. Do they compliment each other? Are they largely redundant in their searches, showing high compatibility of organizational culture?
That is just one idea cherry-picked from the article. I highly recommend reading the whole piece.
We just had some pretty severe thunderstorms cruise through our neighborhood. At some point our voice line went out but our DSL line still works fine (or you would not see this message). It amazes me that our data line is more reliable than the voice line, which has had, what, a century in which to perfect its technology? Maybe Verizon voice just sucks.
I’ve been trying out a variety of desktop newsfeed aggregators lately and I think I’ve found a winner: Aggie. It does require installing .NET service pack but other than that it was easy to install and use. I like how it keeps track of what I have already read and only shows new entries. Very nice.
GWSAE is offering an telephone/web seminar this month on knowledge management. The program features Larry Prusak (who coined the term) and Seth Kahan. Seth was one of the folks who developed the World Bank’s KM program, which I have heard very good things about. I’ll be signing up for this one.
C. David Gammel, CAE 