Mathemagenic

Thanks to George Siemens for just-in-time reading, Managing Yourself Through Change. Worth reading if there is any slight change happening with you. For me it was just-in-time.

When we are in Chaos, we are uncertain about what we can do to make things better. We try a variety of responses. We do more of what we have been doing, or less. We try behaviors that worked at some other time and place. We try things we have never done before, hoping that something, anything, will work. We search frantically for information, though we are uncertain about what information will help us. We yell, or cry, or shut down, or run away. We may try each of these things, one after another. Our behavior becomes very unpredictable.

To express this in a different way, we become very creative. Our stress jolts us into extraordinary creativity. We generate a great variety of possible things to do, and we try them.

For me the greatest value of Waypath is in helping me to find discussions related to my posts AND outside of my blogging ecosystem.

By pointing to weblogs beyond my ecosystem Waypath amplifies connections with relevant people and ideas. As I understand this power comes from analysing conceptual connections between weblogs' posts instead of tracing links. For me it works much better than Radio Google-It! macro, which usually brings weblogs I read regularly or those that I track anyway via Technorati.

In case if you don't know, Waypath supports RSS feeds for your searches, so you can receive updates on new posts in the blogosphere on specific topic. For example I use it to monitor posts that say something about knowledge worker.

But what I really like is Waypath plug-in that shows related posts for my own posts. I'm playing with it and so far I have discovered two ways to use it:

• finding new connections (there are some good matches here already)
• finding old connections (if it shows only weblogs I know than I suspect that the topic is likely to "belong" to "my corner of the blogosphere") 

Jack Vinson points to Knowledge Flows: Mainstream or Myths? by David Skyrme. As Jack says, it's good to read again. This time I picked up the following quote about communities of practice:

With rare exceptions it is individuals who practice, not communities.