More Tips on Classification in MovableType

Posted on September 17, 2003 by David

*Pixelcharmer: Field Notes: Classification and MT has pointers to some new tools for MT as well as some interesting background on top-down vs. bottom-up classification schemes.

Faceted Classification with MovableType

Posted on August 12, 2003 by David

Tanya has posted a rather ingenious solution for creating a faceted classification system for posts in MovableType. This gets around the built-in functionality of MT that only allows one level of categories.

I love this closing line from her entry:

This is additional evidence to back up my observation that most problems in life can be solved with the creative use of regular expressions.

Klog ROI

Posted on July 30, 2003 by David

John Robb: ROI calculations: K-Logs vs. traditional Intranet Portals.

Project Management and Horses

Posted on July 11, 2003 by David

Spotted this gem on Anders site:

The tribal wisdoms of the Dakota Indians, passed on from generation to generation, says that ‘when you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount’. However, in many companies as well as in the UN and NGO community a range of far more advanced strategies are often employed, such as:

1. Changing riders

2. Appointing a committee to study the horse
…

It just gets better from there.

Gurteen Meeting Notes

Posted on June 20, 2003 by David

Matt Mower has posted his notes from the Gurteen Knowledge Conference Definitely worth a read.

Evolution of SharePoint

Posted on June 16, 2003 by David

Evolutionary SharePoint. A nice article on the evolution of the SharePoint suite of technologies from MS. (Via Hugh Pyle.)

The Psychology of Blogging

Posted on June 14, 2003 by David

Simon Willison is making a change to his weblog format which de-emphasizes the date posted and instead gives the title of the post prominence.

Simon Willison: Small design tweak, big difference:

By removing the day headers entirely, I hope to shift the focus of this blog from religious daily updates to entries with a little more substance. I think the psychology of a blog’s design is easily under-rated; I’ve already noticed that my blog entries have been getting longer since I started adding entry titles. At any rate, with this latest design tweak I certainly won’t be rushing out poor quality entries before midnight any more.

I believe that some staff at our office are hesitant to blog because it appears to require a rather large time committment to post every day, which the format does encourage. So, ultimately, this might limit adoption rather than encourage those who do write to post every day. Something to think about.

Another thought: if you get rid of the date emphasis, is it still blogging? It always seems that the reverse chronological order of posts has been a big element and removing the dates de-emphasizes this quite a bit. Simon is obviously still blogging but it’s interesting to see if the form is beginning to evolve a bit.

I’m sure this is nothing new and was debated ad nauseam back in ’99. 🙂 Feel free to post pointers to previous discussion if you know of it.

LinkedIn Update

Posted on June 10, 2003 by David

So far I have initiated two contacts via LinkedIn. One was to contact someone at a company where I had had a hard time getting a response to inquiries sent to their public e-mail address. Another was to find an expert on an issue I am currently researching for work.

The first request got me directly to the person I wanted to talk to and was what I would consider a successful contact. The second request eventually referred me to someone outside the LinkedIn network who is probably one of the top people in the world on the topic I am looking into. Pretty damn amazing.

In both cases, I think that the personal referral to the ultimate contact by someone they know and trust made the difference in getting an immediate response rather than sitting in a pile of unsolicited correspondence.

Based on those two experiences, I would definitely allocate some of my budget to pay an annual fee in the low hundreds for this service. I hope they don’t go higher than that for the fee. Even though I work at a large non-profit, I would find it difficult to justify an expense much higher than that for a networking tool.

Here are some features I would like to see added to the LinkedIn interface:

Browse network by job title, company name.
Show a bullseye diagram of my connections and their connections, etc. that doesn’t show who links to who but does indicate how far out in the chain the members of my network are.

There is also a wiki for comments on the LinkedIn service that is frequented by the founders of the company.

Posted on May 22, 2003 by David

After reading about LinkedIn over on rc3.org and a few other places I decided to try it out. It is basically a professional networking service that creates linkages among invitation-only networks while protecting the privacy of the participants. After making 4 invitation links I now have access to a network of over 1200 very interesting people. Pretty amazing.

I think this type of service is the kind of thing that professional associations should be focusing on: fostering quality connections among their members. That’s what they are all about and LinkedIn shows how you can facilitate that need in unique and valuable ways via the Web.