I’ve set up a basic analysis of High Context using MTWordStats.
I’ve blogged just over 22 thousand words and have been writing at the 10th grade level, which is too high for content targeted at the general public. Luckily, I’m not targeting them. 🙂 No big surprises in the word frequencies. I do wish there were a filter to block articles and common verbs.
Anyone aware of tools or plugins that will do a rudimentary content analysis on weblog posts? A plug-in for MT that calculates simple word frequencies in posts would be very useful in identifying potential categories.
Update: Found WordStats over at MT Plugin Directory. I’ll give this a shot this evening. Note to self, google before posting.
I’ve had a few questions lately about how to create a service such as KMPings in MovableType. The basics are pretty simple:
1. Set up a category in MT and enable Trackback pings. Note the Trackback URL that should be used to ping the category.
2. Put the code below into an index template in the MT template library. Edit the category name to match the one you want to use. Only index pages update on ping so you have to do this to show a current listing without manually rebuilding the site.
3. Publish the url that people should use to ping the category.
That’s it!
James Robertson: Where is the knowledge in a CMS?
Interestingly, the knowledge is not in the content itself. Instead, it’s in the processes and practices that surround a content management system.
This article puts forth the idea that the configuration and design for a content management system deployment contains valuable knowledge, more so than the raw content that is loaded into it. In order to deploy a complex system like this you have to learn about how your organization operates, what it is trying to achieve, and collaborate to develop a solution to support those efforts. Very valuable knowledge that should be preserved.
The lesson I take away from this: document your CMS deployment processes and research and archive it for reading later by those who follow you (or yourself five years later). You need to capture the ‘why’s of how you designed things since they may not be obvious to someone maintaining or updating the system who was not involved in the original project. A project blog would do this nicely.
A Weblog-based Content Architecture for Business. Wow, great ideas on how to integrate weblogs into an Intranet. (Found via Column Two.)
Jim McGee continues to clarify exactly what weblogs contribute to KM:
There is a category of knowledge that lies between explicit and tacit–what a colleague of mine, Jeanie Egmon, labels as “implicit.” This is knowledge that is actually fairly simple to write down once you decide that it’s worth doing so and once you have tools that make it easy to do so. It’s the knowledge of context and the whys behind the whats. It’s the knowledge that’s obvious at the time and on site, but mysterious even to its creators six months and six hundred miles later.
Emphasis added. What a success it would be to capture even a fraction of the implicit knowledge of everyday work in a weblog.
Here are a few definitions from Webster’s of the milestones along this continuum:
Tacit:
expressed or carried on without words or speech
Implicit:
capable of being understood from something else though unexpressed
Explicit:
fully revealed or expressed without vagueness, implication, or ambiguity
A Day In The Life Of BBCi Search is an excellent look at how BBCi mines the searches of their users to learn about their needs and to better serve them. I highly recommend reading this if you have an interest in improving search results and learning from the activity on your web site.
(Thanks to Ease for the pointer.)
If you are interested in KM in general and the application of weblogs as a KM tool specifically, you really need to be reading Jim McGee on a daily basis. One of his recent posts explores knowledge work, weblogs, and fair process. Here is a quote:
As I’ve argued before one of the principal benefits of weblogs is the way that they can make knowledge work more visible. In this context, weblogs serve as a tool that makes fair process a natural byproduct of the work itself. They are a place where explanation can be developed and shared as it is worked out in real time. Moreover, if you can get an institutional environment in which everyone can potentially contribute their perspectives by way of their own weblogs and these perspectives can flow through the system by way of RSS, then you also increase the degree of engagement.
The flip side of this is that without a belief in and commitment to the notion of fair process, weblogs by themselves aren’t likely to last very long inside organizations. While they can be a tool to promote those values, I don’t think they can create those values if they are otherwise absent.
I agree that to successfully deploy weblogs at an enterprise level (across the entire organization) requires an organizational culture that is receptive to knowledge sharing and fair process.
However, I think that weblogs could be used within small islands of an organization that is otherwise not open to this style of knowledge work if given local sponsorship and protection. Over the long term this might lead the rest of the culture in a direction where knowledge sharing could occur more broadly. At a minimum, it would help one section to do their work more effectively. This approach does carry some risks from going against the grain. Use good judgement in how far to push.
I discovered today that several important e-mails addressed to me over the past couple of weeks had been blocked by our spam filter at work. The person writing them had the word ‘free’ in a line of her signature, advertising a free seminar her company is offering. That plus html formatting was enough to trigger the filter threshold. I had to scramble quite a bit today to make up for the delay in getting the information.
There are a couple issues here. One, I need to talk to our admins about raising that threshold a bit. I’d rather get some spam and all of my genuine mail rather than no spam and not all the valid stuff. I may also start sending domains to the network admin that I want added to the whitelist so I don’t lose stuff like this in the future.
I wonder what else I may not have been receiving? There is no easy way in our current system at work for me to review what messages have been blocked. My spam blocking at home works great since I can see exactly what has been filtered out at will.
Many Federal Employees Consider Leaving Jobs, Survey Says (washingtonpost.com)
More than one-third of federal employees who took part in a government-wide survey released today said they were considering leaving their jobs.
Ouch. Hard to imagine how much expertise and knowledge will be walking out the federal door. Of course, that assumes they can find other jobs first (those who aren’t retiring).
C. David Gammel, CAE 