You’re It! is a new blog on tagging (aka folksonomy) written by Jon Lebkowski, David Weinberger, Christian Crumlish, among others. Looks like this one should be worth adding to your aggregator of choice.
You’re It!
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Category Archives: Knowledge Management
AJAX in CMS Screencast
CMS Watch posted a nice screencast a while back that demonstrates how some CMS packages are currently using AJAX techniques to enhance their user interfaces. Definitely worth checking out. I especially like the autocomplete feature for users tagging content with keywords from a controlled vocabulary. (Thanks to Mark T for posting about this and bringing it back to my attention.)
Somewhat Unrelated Links Gathering Dust
I have a bad habit of stashing links to stuff I want to blog here and there (well, mostly here) and then never getting around to posting about them. In an effort to circumvent my usual behavior, here are a few slightly dusty links.
Extreme Usability
Great post about the benefits of pairing a usability/interface person with an engineer to rapidly iterate improvements in design. I’ve had the same experience when working side-by-side with our web admin.
Password Design Pattern
Good tips on designing password protection systems. Directly related to my earlier post today.
IBM Gets Folksy
Post about how IBM plans to implement folksonomy tagging to its massive intranet operation.
CiteULike
CiteULike is a free service to help academics to share, store, and organise the academic papers they are reading. When you see a paper on the web that interests you, you can click one button and have it added to your personal library. CiteULike automatically extracts the citation details, so there’s no need to type them in yourself.
This is delicious for scholarly research. Looks pretty interesting and a great way to conduct collaborative research on like topics. Spotted via David Weinberger.
Hiring: Community and Intranet Manager
Ever wanted to manage a staff intranet and a member community for a large membership organization in Rockville, MD? Have I got an opportunity for you! 🙂
The Community and Intranet Manager works on our Community and Knowledge Management team along with myself and Brenda, our Knowledge Manager. I think it is a wonderful position, in that you get to play (er, work) with a lot of fun technology, partner with some of the best web staff in the association world, and facilitate our member and staff communities.
Follow the link above for details on the job (including starting salary range) and how to apply.
Asking Why
Just got hooked into Mark T’s Information blog. He wrote a nice stream of consciousness post on knowledge sharing recently:
Getting back to real basics, what appears to be key in KM is certainly not the individual as an individual, but tying the individual into groups and groups into organisational objectives, because, let’s face it, KM is about making businesses work better.
It all has to come back to whether KM, knowledge sharing, communities of practice, what have you, actually contribute to achieving the organization’s goals. Excellent point.
Weinberger on Tagging
David Weinberger really has a way with describing web phenomenon. Here he talks about the context of tagging (think delicious) and what we are doing collectively with it:
So, we’re creating this context-free realm of free-floating metadata, like word magnets on a refrigerator door, that we will paw through and assemble, and, most important, do things we haven’t yet thought of.
The web still delights me even after working with it full-time for the past 6 or 7 years.
del.icio.us
I’ve been using del.icio.us to store my bookmarks lately. If you haven’t seen it yet, del.icio.us is a social bookmark application. You can add your bookmarks to the site and store them under specific keywords. You can then easily browse your stored links by the topics you have added.
Where it gets extra-nifty is that you can also see what other users have been posting under the same keywords. Each keyword provides an RSS feed of new entries, so you end up with nice feed on a particular topic. For example, here is the feed for KM. You can even subscribe to an RSS feed for all the links posted by a particular person. Here is my del.icio.us feed.
Del.icio.us also provides web service access to its data, so you end up with tools like Foxylicious, which is a wonderful extension for the Firefox browser that imports all of your del.icio.us entries into your Firefox bookmarks. Excellent.
Collaborative Innovation Networks
Just learned a new acronym/concept today: COINs. Denham Grey posted a comparison of
Collaborative Innovation Networks (COINs) to Communities of Practice (CoPs): On COINs and CoPs.
As I now understand things, a COIN is a specialized form of CoP, an informal network that spans business boundaries and has a prime focus on innovation rather than individual participant identity, awareness and learning.
COINs follow examples of the open source ethos, participants are early adopters and they adhere to principles of collaborative knowledge networking. This seems to a fusion of social networks, enabled by web technology and knowledge sharing.
Denham provides several links to source material in his post. Check it out.
Effective Executives
Spotted this via Seb’s site a while back:
“Effective Executives are not a product that we can make, but an emergent property of correctly functioning organisations.”
I think I’ll use that in a presenation soon. I also like the paragraph that immediately follows:
Then again, there are the innovators who will always drive the rest of us nuts because they want to break stuff all the time, and we need them as well, and there are the leaders, people who, dammit, break all the rules, do nothing that Drucker thinks they should, and succeed anyway. And any business that knows how to tap the last two will be out of sight before the starting pistol’s echo has died.
My recent posting activity is from going through all the clippings I have stored up in Bloglines over the past couple of months and porting choice bits here. Installing WordPress seems to have gotten me back in the mood to post.
C. David Gammel, CAE 