Mathemagenic

Via Roland Tanglao: KLogs: ClickZ Weblog Business Strategies 2003 Conference & Expo, June 9-10, 2003, Boston

This two-day conference will discuss the evolution of blogs from a mere "log" of favorite URLs from the late '80s and '90s to a platform that the business world is taking seriously. ClickZ Weblog Business Strategies 2003 Conference & Expo will present trends and analyses, expert opinions, case studies, and "how to" sessions that will help medium to large enterprises add Weblogs into their business strategies. Here are a few highlights:

• The New Communication Channel of Blogging
• Business Blogs - Hype or Opportunity?
• The Success of Knowledge Blogs
• The Revenue Opportunities of Blogs
• A Blog Tutorial - Everything You Need to Start Your Own
• The Trend Lines of Blogs: What's Next?

Ton Zijlstra is back from silence with two great posts.

The first one is about Listening as the Road to Acquiring Knowledge.

Now listening to me is a basic part of every interaction with another individual, even if the interaction is not based on verbal language but e.g. body language. My eyes can listen as well as my ears, which probably turns my definition of listening into the interpretation of my surroundings.

Listening, using the above definition even wider namely also in instances where "surroundings" does not entail any other individual or only mediated as when reading texts, is then my only road to acquiring new knowledge. The storyteller, or the environment in general, gives me information, and my listening turns it into personal knowledge, by the act of placing the information into the pre-existing context of my mind.

Summarizing listening has at its core the concepts of action ( I decide the things I pick out of a story), contextuality (only within my personal context does what I listen to gain value) and knowledge acquisition (the value gained from listening).

The second is about Blogs and Knowledge Sharing (bold is mine):

What do blogs do for me in this sense?

It's a place where I can tell stories. Stories that originate from me, are packaged in the context of me. However I do not broadcast these stories, since I don't think my blog a broadcasting medium although a blog could well be. Ross Mayfield has some interesting posts on different settings for blogs from broadcasting to private channel (Blogging Bubbles, Repealing the Power-Law, and especially Distribution of Choice).

My stories are stories I use to accomodate my listening, I recount, and thereby interpret and give a place to what I listened to in my own mental context. By telling these stories publicly I also put the information I can barter you as a listener for in the window. This is not something I can do in a forum, or on a bulletinboard, because there it is not only me that determines the context of my stories. In my blog I do, you can retrace my steps by scrolling down on this page, and see the amalgam of impressions that went into forming my opinion for yourself. I think that is important, more important than the actual outcome, to be able to see the road that led there, and which sideroads were passed. So that I, or someone else can decide that it is time to retrace my steps and turn into the sideroad. I hate minutes from meetings that only say what was decided. I can see that from your actions. I am much more interested in what made you decide: a blog works at making those processes visible. Wikis only make the (collective) product visible in comparison.

Ton suggests new metaphor for processes versus products discussion (see also Jim McGee's agrument that blogs can increase visibility of knowledge work). I'm waiting to hear more from Ton:

This text is not finished yet: I need yet to address relationships through blogging, and what the road of discovery and dialogue look like in the blogosphere. Especially because not all of that takes place on the face of the blog.

Micah Alpern's microblogosphere search tool [via Seb's Open Research]: if you use Radio try it to search your RSS subscriptions. Most likely you will need to get Google license key (could be done within a few minutes, see Micah's instructions).

This is something that I wanted so much! Now I have to figure out how to add the code to my blog...

• download this page
• open it and change values of myweblog, mygooglekey, and myopmlfile (more in Micah's instructions)
• save, upload to your blog and link

Later: Micah comments

You can also strip out the "prefs" part of the HTML and incorporate the feature directly into your template (see www.alpern.org/weblog for an example). Please let me know how it goes and if you have any suggestions.