Mathemagenic

Why Ask Questions in Public? (via David Carter-Tod)

So please, unless you have a question that only I can answer for some reason, ask it in public on a newsgroup or mailing list. I'm more likely to be in a question-answering mood when I encounter your question, you're giving more people the chance to help you, you're helping all the people who come after you that have the same question, and you won't be contributing to the problem that many of us have in keeping up with our private e-mail. You're even likely to get a better answer, and could spark a discussion of your problem that would give far more information than you would have gotten out of any one individual.

Read the whole article for the arguments of choosing to discuss things in public rather than in private. It comes just in time for my thinking on a paper abstract :)

People prefer personal spaces: it feels more comfortable, fast and easy to ask personally, to have documents on your local drive or to search your inbox for copies of corporate reports...

Think of e-mail. E-mail is where knowledge goes to die (Bill French): most of e-mails I have in my mailbox could be shared without any problem within my company, but nobody could see them and to learn from them. For example, within a company one of the targets for introducing on-line communities usually is about moving one-to-one conversations to a space where more people could learn from them.

In a corporate context most people are not eager to use public spaces (for example, they continue storing documents locally instead of using document mananagement system). I keep on wondering why.

I think that in most cases people don't mind sharing, but they also need their own, not a "corporate" or "community", way to do it. So in most of cases they choose to do things in private spaces in their own way rather putting effort "to confirm" to standards of public spaces.

Now think about the power of weblogs for thinking in public or bookmarking with del.icio.us. I guess their sucess is in supportting personal ways of doing things in public.

See also: public - private - secret, professional/personal or public/private balance and your conversation might be public domain

Robert Scoble at RSS Winterfest:

• 300 weblogs in Microsoft (internally?), reading 1200 external feeds + 200 internal
• Social pressure is keeping weblogs alive
• "Now the entire world can have a conversation about you before you wake up in the morning"
• Public weblog posts get more attention internally than internal e-mails
• Bill Gates considers writing a weblog (internally :)
• "E-mail is where knowledge goes to die" (UPDATE: it was said during Robert's session, but I'm not sure by whom; Seb suggests that it's likely to be a quote from Bill French)

Robert on reading weblogs via RSS (see also: RSS vs. HTML), RSS can bring 10x improvement to your productivity:

One last thing. What's funny is I've spent a bit of time making my weblog more efficient for the folks who read my blog via a Web browser. What's really weird is that people are still using browsers to read blogs at all.

Why do I say that? Because if you read my blog via an RSS News Aggregator, it's at least 10 times faster to read there than to read via a Web browser. How do I know that? I have been timing how long it takes to read an RSS feed vs. reading the same thing in the browser. There is at least a 10x difference.

Listening to RSS Winterfest again (my links). There is a lot of pleasure in not blogging knowing that others do :)

For notes, check Ronald Tanglao on day 2.

Links

• Web-Based Content Syndication in the Enterprise 
• see also Case Study: Triple Point Technology
• http://www.socialtext.net/rss-winterfest/index.cgi?action=attachments&;title=Microsoft%20and%20content%20syndication

Will be updating this page, be patient...

Recently I promised to write about connecting existing community and weblogs using Knowledge Board case. I have been thinking about it since starting KnowledgeBoard blogroll...

Problem description in more detail: Ton Zijlstra after his contribution to the KnowledgeBoard went down because of blogging (scroll here)

What I would like is to re-start contributing to KnowledgeBoard but I am not looking forward to putting in double the time to keep up with both blogging and KnowledgeBoard, especially because there is overlap in topics and readership.

Is it a useful addition to be able to ping KnowledgeBoard with relevant blog-entries, and then have them incorporated into the KnowledgeBoard, with a link to the originating blog? That is taking this blogroll one step further, namely to provide KnowledgeBoard not only with the links to more content on KM, but also with the content itself. Making it searchable within KB would be nice too.

It would be nice if Knowledge Board allowed each member to create a weblog, but I don't think it's feasible: it would require too much resources to develop and to maintain. So I'm thinking about simple ways to integrate existing infrastructure and blogging.

*** do it right now, ** do when there are enough resources, * dreaming :)

Make Knowledge Board content accessible via RSS

Add RSS feeds to

• *** Newswire
• ** Each of SIGs and ZONEs
• * Each article and forum threads (to monitor comments)

Support KnowledgeBoard blogroll

• *** Make special URL for it
• ** Aggregate KM-related blogs (at least something like "15 recent posts", but better by topic)
• ** Support search across weblogs in the list ** (could be done by third-party tools, but I couldn't make it work :(
• * Create an infrastructure to submit weblogs (e.g. a field in member profile) that automatically lists and aggregates them 

Connect Knowledge Board with KM-related weblogs

• *** Have "view RSS" code on the server and make it easy to include into exiting pages
  • The code should display recent RSS items without publishing a page!
  • Uses: pages with aggregated news from KM sources/weblogs (including personal profiles - check my blog posts as part of my KnowdgeBoard profile)
• ** Make all articles/discussion TrackBack-enabled

Any other suggestions?