13:51 11/06/2004 Mathemagenic: Mathemagenic
Mathemagenic
...giving birth to learning...
        

Mathemagenic

  Friday, July 30, 2004


  Brain vacation

Not able to write - only consuming. It's probably contagious: once your brain sees another brain on vacation it decides to go as well :)

Anyway, I'm lucky enough to be able to follow my brain. I'm going to Moscow... Going to have fun with friends, eat raspberries at my parents dacha (my sister says that strawberries are over :(,  read books, go out in Moscow, talk to smart people, do some things I have to do, work a bit, may be even blog, forget about alarm clock, and have fun in all other ways.

More on: travel 

  Thursday, July 29, 2004


  Sometimes this blog is a personal diary...

...quiet in the office and it's finally summer outside... time to read interesting papers and to think... even unanswered e-mails do not make life stressfull... very good project news... new ideas... new books to read... finally car is getting fixed... getting a bit more travel budget... a friend is back after almost a year travelling... flight home day after tomorrow... another friend is back to singing and if I'm fast getting my laggage at the airport I'll be in time at her concert... and she is getting married - good reason to change tickets and stay in Moscow longer... less and less lines in "to do before leaving" list... managed to catch people to discuss urgent work... starting to pack presents... wasps are sleeping now instead of scaring me in the kitchen... new haircut... Dido singing late at night... lots of things to finish tomorrow... and finding all these presents to pack... peace inside... so many reasons to be happy...

...sometimes this blog is a personal diary :)

More on: flow 

  Tuesday, July 27, 2004


  Strange Attractor

Suw Charman joins Corante blog family with Strange Attractor (RSS feed) exploring patterns in the blogoshpere:

If you could visually represent the ebb and flow of my thoughts, you'd find a lot of swirly folded patterns emerging. The cause? Blogs - my very own strange attractors.

But blogs have a far wider effect than just making me think in swirly folded patterns, they are perturbing the business world as well. A disruptive technology that is more often than not smuggled in through the back door by evangelist employees, blogs are helping to unite previously scattered communities of interest.

Like instant messaging, blogging is gaining such a strong foothold amongst business users that by the time the management realises they have been infiltrated, they no longer have the power to switch it off. The corporate cat has to sit back and watch as the Trojan Mouse struts its stuff.

Loved the title: although there are not many formulas left in my head from my first degree in mathematical modelling, I still think about the world in terms of strange attractors and bifurcation points :) 

  Monday, July 26, 2004


  On reading in a train and problems with task-based view of knowledge work

Spent the day reading papers on knowledge work in trains... Funny that reading papers in a train goes much better then reading them at home or in the office (I guess because of the rhythm and lack of distractions :). May be I just should schedule short meetings somewhere at far end of the Netherlands each time I have a pile to read :)

Two main things as a result: knowledge worker definition and thoughts on task-based view of knowledge work.

Knowledge worker definition (let's see if I reinvented the wheel :)

knowledge worker is someone who creates value by being subjective

Not sure for how long it will stand, but so far I think it captures two things:

  • value: something more or less objective, existing outside of a knowledge worker, defined (?) by a community/an organisation/"client" (don't know yet)
  • by being subjective: unique input of an individual (knowledge, experiences, intuition...)

Of course, this definition has a problem: it doesn't reflect social side of knowledge work. Will think about it.

Thoughts on task-based view of knowledge work

Today once more I realised how much current knowledge work literature is driven by organisational perspective on knowledge work. Will try to explain.

Last year I suggested that there is not enough attention to knowledge work:

organisations focus on things they can control and can measure, thus knowledge work is left to knowledge workers

I guess now I can refine it:

existing research on knowledge work takes process/activity/task-based view of knowledge work, but not personal (knowledge worker) view

I believe this is not enough and taking knowledge worker perspective is important. Don't have very strong arguments yet, just gut feeling and some people saying the same :)

Of course, focusing on specific processes or tasks of knowledge workers can be very valuable: one can design a system that supports a particular task in intelligent way. Lets assume it works.

The problem is that in most cases knowledge work is multidimensional and requires multitasking (for example, as a researcher, I need to be able to do different types of studies, write papers, present my work to different audiences and so on...). Optimising specific tasks will never optimise work of a knowledge worker.

Giorgio De Michelis provides nice example in his paper, The "Swiss Pattada": Designing the ultimate tool. It's the Swiss Army Knife: lots of carefully designed functions packed into one tool which is not easy to use at the end. He also looks at an alternative design: the Sardinian Pattada, a simple knife used by shepherds that allows multiplicity of uses...

Taking it to an extreme: researching specific knowledge work tasks will result in designing perfect "blades" for those tasks without taking into account how these "blades" are supposed to work together. 

One can argue that if we analyse all important tasks for a particular role in a specific context, we can think of an "optimised solution". Of course. This works if you believe that knowledge work is something that happens "at work" and that people do not have other "knowledge work" roles when they are out of the office. Which is never the case: cooking dinner or raising children is knowledge work, as many other things we do in life. 

I guess this is my main problem with task-based approach to knowledge work: I suspect that somewhere deep behind it there is an assumption that you can optimise "knowledge work at work" without taking into account "knowledge work outside work", without taking into account that multiple roles and contexts of people make their input so "subjective" and so valuable.

***

I know that this is messy and probably not understandable, but I need to get it out of my head, so sorry :) I'll work it out coming weeks and give you something nice to read ;)

Disclaimer: I need to do more careful reading of "task-based view on knowledge work" literature, I'm likely to take less extreme position. Especially because Jeremy Aarons is in task-based KM camp (1, 2, 3) and this means that there is something useful there :)

More on: knowledge networker 

  Sunday, July 25, 2004


  Blogging in NL: people and events

Ton makes a list of professional weblogs "around Netherlands":

On several occasions I have complained about the fact that it seemd hard to find Dutch blogs with a professional orientation. Most Dutch blogs seem to be lifelogs or linkdumps. But over time I did come across several of course, and now I have put them all together in a list.

I hope some of you will be able to add more!

Go over to my Wiki, to see or add more professionally oriented bloggers (in Dutch, or by Dutch or written in the Netherlands) to the list.

So, if you qualify make sure you add your name :)

And, because we are in a small country, we don't have much excuses for not meeting face-to-face. I took the liberty of adding DutchBloggingEvents page to Ton's wiki for coordination.

And, to make it even more practical - I'm in Amsterdam tomorrow (Monday 26 July) late afternoon, so if you are there and want to meet for a drink or a dinner, let me know (e-mail or call at 0615304114; of course I know that you had to put it in your agenda two months back, but who knows? ;).


  Now I'm blogging in Russian: Edges

Finally my Russian weblog goes public: Edges (RSS feed). A few things to explain:

Domain name

It lives at edges.twowayweb.ru. I took the domain name thinking about the future:

  • I believe in empowering people and being able to contribute actively to the online world is a part of it.
  • Although I'm not in Russia now it's always there when I think about the future.
  • I'd like to be able to share domain name with Russian colleagues who decide to start blogging or (who knows :) turn it into a business one day.

Weblog title

Actually, first I called it Boundary object, as a way to reflect the fun of building bridges across boundaries between communities, disciplines, countries, languages... But "boundary object" is a bit difficult to translate into Russian and it doesn't make short subdomain :) So, I called it Edges.

Why it took me so long to start blogging in Russian?

In fact I started it ages ago, but was struggling with difficulties of writing in Russian. I explained it in more detail in Russian, so just a quick summary for those who don't understand it - why I find blogging in Russian difficult:

  • Technical problems
    • finding software that would allow me blogging in Russian and provide enough functionalities for a professional weblog
    • being reluctant to go public before domain registration and proper domain mapping (because moving weblog to another domain is not a good idea)
  • Language of professional community
    • most of my professional community is English-speaking, there is not that much happening in Russia (and I'm not alone choosing English instead of my native language)
    • no critical mass of Russian bloggers with similar interests
    • difficulties of translating terminology
  • Difficulty of writing for non-existed audience
    • starting "Mathemagenic" was easy because I wrote for myself and only later discovered social effects of blogging
    • I started writing in Russian thinking about "an audience" and reputation building only to find out that I can't write for "an audience" without having one
    • decided that writing for "an audience" kills authenticity, motivation and all other things important for good blogging and stopped caring about it :)
  • Fear of schizophrenia
    • using weblog for personal knowledge management I prefer to have all ideas and notes in one place and one online identity, so having another weblog makes my life difficult
    • drawing a line between "in English" and "in Russian" is quite artificial because I'm a whole :)

Ideally I'd love to have one multilingual weblog, but I guess it's not that realistic at the moment (I need Radio for organising my PhD thinking and it doesn't support Cyrillic). I will see how writing in Russian goes...

This post also appears on channel multilingual blogging

More on: blog new Edges 

  Friday, July 23, 2004


  Davenport on personal information and knowledge management

Reading Stephanie Carlin's overview of a talk by Tom Davenport at APQC KM conference (via Bill Ives)... Some interesting points:

Why the idea of managing personal information to transform KM will take off:

  • information overload becomes a problem (hmm, there is an alternative opinion :)
  • "thanks to the Internet, Google, and other knowledge resources, there are greater expectations for information access"
  • "because of self-service strategies employed by many large organizations, employees often feel they are on their own"
  • "devices and tools for personal information management are multiplying, and they do not always integrate well with other knowledge tools in an organization"

There are three levels of activity in companies in personal information and knowledge management (based on talking to 21 managers of information and knowledge)

  • already there - "these corporations realized that individual productivity was important and were using technology to enhance personal information and knowledge. Moreover, they also focused on strategies to increase use and change behaviors"
  • on the road - "These corporations relied on technology to manage personal information and knowledge management, but did not focus on changing behaviors to improve the way people manage their information. Although they recognized personal information management was important, they were often consumed with other issues, such as platform integration or technology conversions."
  • not much on the horizon - little awareness or activity

What are leaders in this first level doing to successfully manage personal information and knowledge? Not surprisingly, many of these leaders are information technology companies that rely heavily on the use of emerging technologies such as instant messaging, personal data assistants, and shared repositories. Within these organizations, there are often individual-oriented support groups that exist with a holistic focus to personal information and technology. In addition, companies successful at managing information have defined productivity initiatives underway and an explicit knowledge management focus internally.

Issues that needs to be addressed:

  • focus of personal information and knowledge management: on jobs, a single process, or key tasks?
  • difficulty of measuring beyond "time saved"
  • "although many companies implement self-service strategies to encourage workers to be more resourceful in managing everything from benefits to vacations, it is worth asking whether they are really making life easier and saving time"
  • "finding the right way to change behavior is important. Specifically, personal information management needs to be integrated in the day-to-day workflow of a typical worker, and this may require behavioral changes. Whether through technology, education, or coaching, it is important to identify the right way to influence behavior in an organization."

Results of survey of using technologies to process work-related information: 3 h 4 min a day average and lots of other numbers. And:

It is interesting to note, said Davenport, that coping strategies are not necessarily sophisticated. When users are asked directly what they would change in their information environment, the majority of respondents said they "did not know." Others said they would not change anything, and a third group reported they would like to eliminate "junk mail and Spam" from their e-mail accounts. This reveals that most individuals either do not acknowledge a problem with their information environment or simply do not know how to begin to make a positive change.

Those who developed successful coping strategies:

  • use a few devices as possible, but learn their capabilities well; resist temptations of moving to new tools
  • invest time managing information on a weekly basic (e.g. "cleaning up" and organising their stuff)
  • get instructions in searching

And a bit more:

How can organizations put personal information and knowledge management to work? Individuals need to recognize how much of their time and productivity is tied up in personal information and knowledge management. At the same time, companies need to realize that their workers are wasting a lot of time trying to manage personal information and that better personal information and knowledge management means greater organizational success. Vendors will also play in integral role in successfully managing personal information and knowledge. In terms of technology, vendors provide "features and functions but not reliability," which Davenport described as "the biggest waste of our time." Also, vendors need to do a better job integrating tools and technologies within a corporation and provide training and education on effective use of these tools. Finally, all companies need to provide more instructors, role models, and insights on how to manage personal information and knowledge.

Interesting... My few cents:

1. Would like to know what are the companies that do it already. If you know some, please, let me know :)

2. Based on which criteria people with successful coping strategies were identified?

3. Here is comes again - lack of distinctions about information and knowledge, information management and knowledge management :) So at the end the data from study of personal information management is used to make conclusions about personal information and knowledge management (I know that disctinctions are difficult, but still mixing is not such a good idea).

4. I guess the main challenge is that people do not feel a need to change or do not know how to do it. So, it's not even about behaviours, it's about awareness and motivation...

More on: knowledge networker 

  New blog: Steve Denning on storytelling

Carla brings great news:

I just found out that Steve Denning also has a weblog. The postings in the month of July 2004 contain excerpts of chapters of his new book A leaders guide to storytelling. He did the same with his former book The Squirrel, posting parts on his homepage, and now in his weblog.

1. I'm curious to see if Steve will go beyond posting pieces of the book :)

2. I wonder why there are no links to RSS/Atom feeds at the weblog? Bloglines autodiscovery shows Atom (which is ok) and RSS (which seems to be abandoned as it doesn't include recent posts). Strange if you ask for a feedback.

  PhD is just a bumpy road, sooner or later I'll be there

I knew that doing a PhD is about ups and downs, but it's a kind of special fun to discover the bumpy road as you go along. This time it's about mixed feelings of discovering a good paper...

I'm reading A Confessional Account of an Ethnography About Knowledge Work by Ulrike Schultze (spotted it some time ago, but got a version only yesterday) and my feelings go everywhere between:

  • gut feeling of finding one of "the papers" that can make core foundations of my research
  • thinking "why the hell I didn't find the paper a year ago?"
  • admiration of research done by someone else and a way of presenting it
  • loosing confidence thinking "I will never be able to do it that good"
  • happy insights and "aha!" moments - "now I know what to do!"
  • getting a bit down understanding how much time doing it will take
  • trying to get myself together "it's just a bumpy road, sooner or later I'll be there"...

And I'm still in the middle of reading it :)

More on: knowledge networker PhD 

  Wednesday, July 21, 2004


  Radio evening: lessons learnt

Today Radio didn't behave well again, so I spent some time in the discussion group trying to figure out what to so. As some of the exchanges went back and forth I just summarise them here.

Radio discussion group has RSS feed, but it's hidden, so you wouldn't know unless you ask.

If you are (like me) struggling with lots of small problems, it's may be a good idea to clean Radio. As a result of using a tricky combination of scripts from Steve Hooker I managed to reduce my data files to half of their original size and to fix some other things. At this moment there are no simple "how-to" instructions, so check the discussion (make sure you read everything before starting :)

Steve also developed some other tools for Radio:

Btw, Steve was very helpful answering all my questions and his company also offers services in developing corporate blogging (so you know whom to ask :)

  KM journals and magazines

The list comes from my colleague Guido Annokkee, who works for our internal information center (and although Guido and his colleagues are much more than librarians I worship them :)

I'm looking for a good journal for publishing on my PhD research. At this moment I'm reworking personal something management paper into a journal article (restructuring and adding theory), but thinking about more...

Please, let me know if you know other relevant journals, have comments about those from the list or can give specific recommendations which one I should choose.

More on: KM PhD 

  On cultural stereotypes

Just filled in a survey from my company on "how do I want our canteen to operate?" (we are moving to a new building in few months). One of the questions was about time when I'd like to have lunch, giving me an opportunity to choose between 4 options of 30 minutes long.

I guess you need to be Dutch to assume that 30 minutes is enough for lunch :) I want 1-1,5h, good food and preferably a walk after it, but there is no way to fill it in... I guess I should spend lunch time in another country :)))

Just an example of how often we try to put others in the frame of our own experiences... Guilty of that as well :)

One of my professional quests is about recognising and appreciating differences, getting out of the box of your own stereotypes and habits, finding multiple perspectives... I guess it's coming from my belief in multipolar world.

Back to work.

More on: cross-cultural 

  Tuesday, July 20, 2004


  FOAF Camp - August 19 and 20 2004, Campus UTwente

FOAF Camp - August 19 and 20 2004, Campus UTwente (via Marc Canter):

Two days of talking, hacking, socializing and making FOAF better. Held in the parklike surroundings of Twente University, hometown of the Grolsch beer brewery.

This gattering will be loosely based on the ideas pioneered at the *BSD and Apache Hackathons and last year's FooCamp; i.e. a self organizing group (though do suggest topics) working on cool things together; you can also use the FOAF wiki for ideas and notes.

Organized by the FOAF community for the FOAF community.

I guess it's a bit too technical for me, but may be I'll drop by: the whole thing happens next door from my appartment...

More on: learning event 

  Monday, July 19, 2004


  Time is the currency in the knowledge economy

Since long I have a feeling that time management and knowledge management are connected, but it wasn't really clear how. David Gurteen gives a simple answer: time is the currency in the knowledge economy, not money (actually referring to the article by Larry Prusak).

Sure... Most of things we need in knowledge economy - knowledge, trust, conversations - take time.

May be we should redefine effectiveness then: instead of striving to do things faster, we need to take time doing things... Be slower and pay attention... Let knowledge, trust, conversations grow...

More on: KM knowledge networker time 

  Sunday, July 18, 2004


  Weblog conversation tracking tool

First a quote from Kenneth Burke (stolen from Piers Young):

Imagine that you enter a parlour. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally's assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.

Second, a scenario:

After coming back from a vacation you are trying to catch up with interesting stuff in weblogs you read. In one of them you find an interesting conversation on a topic you care about (let's say about weblog research :). The post you see is in a middle of the conversation: it refers to an earlier discussion and you see numerous comments and trackbacks... And of course you want to find out what was said before and after to know where to add your own 5 cents...

Third, challenges of tracking weblog conversations:

Finding earlier posts is not that difficult they are explicitly linked to, although it doesn't happen always and no one will spend time linking to all relevant posts. Most likely you will have to browse though several chains of weblog posts...

Finding later posts is a challenge: not all weblogs use trackbacks and tools for finding incoming links are far from being perfect.

You will have to check every post you find to see if it's really about the topic you are interested in (and sometimes to see if it's in the language you can understand :), or if it's just related reference or someone inspired to write about something quite different.

And next to it there are comments that sometimes even more interesting to read than posts...

Once you found most of the pieces of the puzzle you try to put it together into a whole in your head, which is not easy at all: instead of being clear as threaded discussion, weblog posts are interconnected into a complex web of relations (and some nice people also link to comments making it more complicated), the sequence of discovering pieces not necessary follows the sequence they unfolded over time, the arguments mix and mold...

Once you are done and ready to write your own post on the topic you probably will be kind enough to your readers to summarise the conversation and link to most important pieces, so they have a bit less work to do (but it's too much work to show them everything you found, so those who "want it all" have to follow you path by themselves).

Forth. Can we have a tool that makes it easier? What do I want from the tool like that?

  • helping me to find all pieces of a conversation, starting from any post in the middle
  • displaying them in one place, showing connections and chronological orger
  • making it easier to share with others

This should be possible, although there is a couple of obvious challenges:

  • defining boundaries: deciding which posts that do not belong to the conversation
  • visualising the whole thing

Fifth. Anyway, I have some ideas for the weblog conversation tracking tool for any developers who like challenges :) I think it could work more or less like that:

  1. You go to the tool and enter url which leads to a weblog post
  2. Tool scans incoming and outgoing links to the post and displays them
    • I guess for finding incoming links the tool have to check trackbacks and some of incoming link tracking tools
  3. You can click on all post found and decide for each of them if it is:
    • Not relevant => it's excluded from the picture or marked
    • Relevant => it marked as relevant
    • Relevant and you want to find all other related posts => steps 1-3 are repeated
  4. For all found posts the tool displays their titles and dates as well as links between them. Could be also nice to have all posts by the same author marked by colour or something like that.
  5. Once you think you are done, the tool allows you rearranging posts, so you can see the logic better
  6. You can save the whole thing and link to it. Others can open it for editing and then save as their own version of the conversation.

Comments? Suggestions?

This post also appears on channel weblog research

Also:


  Saturday, July 17, 2004


  India: dreams into plans

Instead of sleeping I'm totally trapped by Indian stories of Stephanie Booth... Just two pieces I loved:

A Day in India

As she had tried to domesticate Indian time, she had little by little, without being really aware of it, inserted herself in the outside world in this strange way that Indians have, allowing a part of her individuality to dissolve into it. The world she now lived in was not the tame world of her homeland; it was wild and unpredictable like the feral cats who lurked in and out of the kitchen and rubbish heap during the night. She was living in the uncharted territories, in a place where our rules do not apply; and to survive she had had to dive deep into it, losing some of herself in the process.

A Tourist in India

I’ve always hated being associated with ‘tourists’, in India or elsewhere.

Tourists come to see, not to share. They watch the world outside from cozy A/C boxes. They are impolite, they don’t know how to dress or behave, they can’t eat the food or find their way around without a map. They see what they are meant to see, stay in places specially designed for them, and buy things in shops that nobody else would buy. They have money, lots of it.

In some ways, I have to admit that I am indeed a tourist. I take lots of photographs. I buy loads of stuff in shops to bring back to Switzerland for my enjoyment and that of others. I don’t really keep an eye on what I spend, I eat in nice places, I go to the cinema as often as I like.

But on the other hand, I much prefer trying to share the life of ‘normal’ people or just walk around the town I’m staying in, rather than sleep in expensive places and do the things that only the tourists do.

I like people. I do my best not to turn them into objects. I like everzday life. I like soaking in the atmosphere of a place or time.

Bringing all memories of my 4-long-years-back trip to India again... One more reminder that it's time to stop dreaming and start planning...

More on: India travel 

  Improving Knowledge Workers' Productivity and Organisational Knowledge Sharing with Weblog-based Personal Publishing

In case you wonder what to read this weekend: Martin Roell published 0.9 version of the paper for his BlogTalk presentation - Distributed KM - Improving Knowledge Workers' Productivity and Organisational Knowledge Sharing with Weblog-based Personal Publishing.

This paper briefly explores the failure of traditional knowledge management to adress the problem of knowledge worker productivity and argues that a deeper understanding of knowledge work is necessary to improve it. It then explores knowledge work and how it is supported with information technology tools today, focussing specially on the email client as a knowledge work tool.

The paper introduces weblogs as personal publishing tools for knowledge workers and shows how personal publishing supports knowledg work processes, is personally beneficial to the knowledge worker and helps the dissemination of knowledge through an organisation.

Martin intergrates lots of thinking on "blogs in KM", so, next to an interesting read by itself, this paper is a good starting point to discover follow-up reading.

  Friday, July 16, 2004


  Weblog conversations: definition and characteristics

Pieces from thinking on weblog conversations...

My own (working) definition of weblog conversations:

  • weblog posts and comments
  • on a specific topic
  • interlinked

The combination of all these three is important. For example, according to my definition, these are NOT weblog conversations:

Characteristics of weblog conversations

  • distributed over multiple weblogs (without any borders: if you study 100 weblogs you can be never sure that you have all pieces of the puzzle)
  • lack of bi-directional links: in most cases there is a link from a later post pointing to an earlier one, but not vice-versa (This problem could be solved with the use of trackbacks, but many popular blogging platforms do not support trackbacks yet.)
  • tangential: each post can "belong" to several different conversations at the same time

This post also appears on channel weblog research

  Thursday, July 15, 2004


  New Bloglines

A few months back I left Radio news aggregator behind: it wasn't scaling anymore. I tried several news aggregators, but ended up with Bloglines, mainly because I need it from work, from home and from all those strange places where I get online when travelling.

Recently Bloglines selebrated one year anniversary and updated their interface. Between all other things they added three had a lot of impact on me:

  • mark unread option that I was dreaming about to make sure that I can find back posts that need more time to read without bookmarking them
  • unsubscribe option that helps me cleaning my scary 200+ blogs reading list
  • number of subscribers shown for every feed

The last one got me really scared when I found out that number of subscribers for my weblog is three times higher than I expected. The feeling reminds me the similar one when I realised I was in Google:

It’s not funny. It’s nice at the beginning to see your name at the top. It takes a lot of courage later to continue writing. Just because you feel that you are in the "spot-light".

See also: Richard MacManus on subscriber stats in Bloglines.

  On human voice, non-tech bloggers and linking

Human voice, non-tech bloggers and linking may be not that connected for you, but they are for me: bits of thinking and feeling provoked by Heather's "Marketing at Microsoft" Blog :)

On human voice

For me Microsoft is a powerful example of corporate blogging: it destroyed "evil" image of the company that I had (yes, although being on Windows myself, I always had "open source spirit" guys around :).

Some time back I articulated it replying to Heather's question about business value of (her) blogging:

Your weblog is one of 3 I read from Microsoft people :) I like the tone and style and openess. It feels like being a friend of someone recruiting for Microsoft and listening to "stories from the field" over coffee. I don't know how good it is for finding better people for Microsoft, but definitely it helps to understand your role in the process. And I enjoy it. Think of customer satisfaction :))) I may be angry when Windows crashes, but I'm more able to accept it and wait for a better version when I see human faces of people in the company.

May be not very rational, but how much of our relations are rational anyway?

Non-tech bloggers

Heather in I hate that I am jealous of the tech bloggers... 

I don't begrudge the technical bloggers here their community. I actually think it is really cool. I stopped by one of the parties at the MVP summit and it was really amazing to see how excited people were about getting together. It's just that I never felt like these were “my people”.

I realize that blogging took off in the tech space quickly. I just feel a little bit like the bumble-bee girl in the video trying to find my bumble-bee peeps. I'm very happy with the people I get to communicate with outside of Microsoft. Just wish there were some more of us on the business side in the company that could get together and share. The first round of drinks would be on me!

Unfortunately we (me at least :) don't know much about dynamics of blogging inside companies*. Outside you can always hope to find some strange people sharing your interests, but I could imagine that it could be lonely behind the firewall. I wonder if it's just a problem of growth or natural limitation for small companies or people with specific interests.

Finally, on linking. Heather asks when is it OK to solicit links? (links to your blog). I thought I'd share my experiences here...

There are two sides of it. First, about someone asking me to link to their weblog.

I'm probably bad: I don't do favours :) I find linking to someone because I was asked to totally strange... I know the value of welcoming for newcomers and the value for myself when I discover a new blog via someone's link, but still I find "just linking" strange... I usually link when something in a weblog resonates with my own thinking and provokes me to write. Then I link a lot :)

The second side is about asking others to link to you. I never did it... Partly because I started blogging for myself and wasn't caring much about incoming links and number of readers. Partly because I was lucky to start in a "good neighbourhood", quickly discovering people with similar interests, getting triggered, engaging into conversations, linking and getting linked back.

But I think that there is a trick here: it's not enough to write something interesting, it is important to link to others. Internet is about social visibility, so linking gives others a way to find you (and then it should be interesting enough :).

And - if you want to know about strategies that I'd call "aggressive on the edge of acceptance" ask Peter "Attention Whore" Caputa :) He will tell you about sending tips to other blogs, 'buy a link' experiment, Weblog Invasion Tour and I guess about many other ways he will invent soon :))

________________

* I'm looking for cases of internal corporate blogging, so if you know a company ready to let me in for a study, let me know.


  Tuesday, July 13, 2004


  Trip report: index

An overview of interesting ideas during conferences I visited. Organised by themes.

[I'm going to work on it next couple of days. Links and updates will follow. Be patient, please.]

Conferences:

Themes (note: there is something on weblogs in each of them :)

Notes:

ED-MEDIA04 proceedings are offline (CD). The best way to get more is to Google/contact the authors.

I-KNOW 04 proceedings are offline (paper). I link to papers/presentations if authors provided them online. Some of the presentations will be online at the conference web-site (hopefully soon enough). I'll try to go back and to link to them, otherwise check links to the program next to each reference.

BlogWalk 3.0 didn't have any proceeding or presentations, just Open Space discussion. I have only brief notes which wouldn't help you much. Notes of other people could be found at BlogWalk channel. The best way to find out what we did there is to read blog posts, ask participants or be there next time :)

BlogTalk 2.0 is covered online pretty well, but most of the papers are not ready (deadline is early September). I tried to link as much as possible, but I guess there is more online. BlogTalkViennaNotes wiki pages give good impression about sessions and should have more links if people are good enough to add them :) Many weblogs posts could be found via BlogTalk channel as well. Or Google is always there for you :)))

MILK forum: most of the presentations are online. I tried to provide an overview in my post, otherwise check MILK web-site.

  Trip report (3): knowledge/community mapping

Ideas and presentations from conferences I visited, on community/knowledge mapping (see other themes).  

It's difficult to draw the line between community and knowledge mapping: in most cases you want to know not only who is there and what they are talking about, but more precisely who knows what. The two themes are here just for an indication of where most effort goes in a specific case.

Community mapping

SELaKT - Social Network Analysis as a method for expert localisation and sustainable knowledge transfer by Tobias Mueller-Prothmann and Ina Finke at I-KNOW

  • abstract (and link to full-text if you are ready to pay), presentation
  • really interesting presentation that I managed to miss; on SNA applied in KM context

Blogosphere community formation, structure and visualization by Juan J. Merelo, Beatriz Prieto, Fernando Tricas at BlogTalk 2.0

  • abstract, presentation (OpenOffice format which I wasn't able to open), wiki notes
  • SNA (+tools) overview, results of analysis of Spanish weblogs 
  • if you are into SNA on weblogs talk to these guys!

Applying Social Network Analysis to a small Weblog Community: Hubs, Power Laws, the Ego Effect and the Evolution of Social Networks by Michael Schuster

  • abstract, wiki notes
  • bit of theory + case: community dynamics in (relatively closed) (relatively small) weblog community

Knowledge mapping

Supporting drug discovery research through knowledge modelling and integration by Edy S. Liongosari, Anatole V. Gershman & Mitu Singh at I-KNOW KM/learning track

  • nothing is online so far, but you can check older presentation (3.1MB!) that gives an idea or check other publications
  • interesting work on creating interconnected maps based on data from different sources...

Shared Conceptualizations in Weblogs by Anjo Anjewierden, Rogier Brussee and me

Ideas from MILK: multimedia interactions for learning and knowing project

  • community knowledge maps on large screens integrated with contact/presence awareness

Ontologies, topic maps, expert profiling, visualisations, etc.

Note: there was a lot on these topics at I-KNOW, check the program and special track on Semantic Web and Knowledge Discovery (many presentations are online).

Selected presentations (didn't go personally to most of them!), all links go to .pdf files

This post also appears on channels BlogTalk and weblog research

  Trip report (2): presence

Ideas and presentations from conferences I visited, somehow connected with the theme of presense (see other themes).

From examples to theory

The blog as an immersive space: Moblogging Jokkmokk 2004 by Stephanie Hendrick and Therese Örnberg at BlogTalk 2.0

'Live'-writing: weblogs and the coverage of reality by Lisbeth Klastrup at BlogTalk

Insights for tools

Ideas from MILK: multimedia interactions for learning and knowing project

  • co-presense over multiple environments: desktop, mobile, large screens

Weblogs and Location, beyond the limits of physical and virtual space by Mikel Maron at BlogTalk 2.0

This post also appears on channels BlogTalk and weblog research

More on: BlogTalk presense 

  Trip report (1): blogs and wikis implemented

Ideas and presentations about implementations of weblogs and wikis from conferences I visited (see other themes). These are the highlights grouped in themes (relevant for our research); I'll try to link to full sources as much as possible.

Weblog imlementations in corporate settings

Distributed KM - Improving Knowledge Workers' Productivity and Organisational Knowledge Sharing with Weblog-based Personal Publishing by Martin Röll at BlogTalk 2.0

Informal, joined up knowledge sharing using connected weblogs in pursuit of Mental Health service improvement by Lee Bryant at BlogTalk 2.0

Using Weblogs as Project Management Tools in innovative projects by Michael Schuster at BlogTalk 2.0

  • abstract, presentation, wiki notes
  • case study: multi-author project weblog with students for real-life project => used as discussion board, not very interactive, topics not used

Enhancing Blogs with a dual interaction design by Brigitte Roemmer-Nossek at BlogTalk 2.0

  • abstract, wiki notes
  • case study: virtual communication among a class of trainees and among their coaches during on-the-job training
  • results
    • coaches didn't expept the tool (not many, mainly to communicate with trainees, but not between each other), trainees did
    • weblogs worked better than discussion forum and chat in two previous cases

Learning from weblogs of others (re: weblog apprenticeship)

Legitimised theft: Distributed apprenticeship in weblog networks, our own work, presented at I-KNOW KM/learning track 

    • paper, presentation
    • conceptual framework, "public weblogs" case and possible limitations of implementing in companies

Using weblogs for eliciting new experiences and creating learning elements for experienced-based information systems by Gabriela Avram, Eric Ras, Stephan Weibelzahl, presented at I-KNOW KM/learning track

    • Gabriela, is anything online?
    • a case of weblog implementation in a company
    • study of how weblog posts could be useful as resources for (more) formal learning programs => yes, they are useful

Collective blogging from the view of a context-oriented understanding of knowledge by Markus Glötzel at BlogTalk 2.0

    • abstract, wiki notes
    • a case of weblog implementation
    • study of how people contextualise observations through blogging and what others can learn from it => weblogs allowed totally exterior person to construct narrative based on what information had been stored in the weblogs

Beyond webpublishing: a journey into reading... lurking... learning... - my presentation at EdMedia symposium on weblogs and learning

Weblogs in educational settings

Seeding conversational learning environments: Running a course on personal webpublishing and weblogs by Sebastian Fiedler at BlogTalk 2.0

Don't remember the title, but it was interesting by Adrian Miles at EdMedia symposium on weblogs and learning

Blogging as a dynamic, transformative medium in the writing classroom of an American Liberals Arts College by Barbara Ganley at BlogTalk 2.0

Blogging in higher education: 10 thoughts/lessons by Tom de Bruyne at BlogTalk 2.0

Weblogs in journalism

Blog to work: blogging and journalism by Jane Perrone at BlogTalk 2.0

  • abstract, wiki notes
  • on experiences writing weblogs for Guardian Unlimited: personal blogging vs. blogging for work; role of weblogs in news coverage

From weblogs to wikis

Bottom up Knowledge Management with Weblogs and SnipSnap by Stephan J. Schmidt & Matthias L. Jugel

Roughing up processes the Wiki Way - Knowledge communities in the context of work and learning processes by Frank Fuchs-Kittowski, David Fuhr, André Köhler at I-KNOW KM/learning track 

  • hope presentation will be online soon
  • one more case of wiki implementation in Fraunhofer, this time in connection with formal learning program

This post also appears on channels BlogTalk and weblog research

  Monday, July 12, 2004


  Online communication tools: designed for a group, experienced by an individual

Nancy White on something we discussed at CPsquare meeting last month:

There is insufficient experience and practice to slap labels around and make claims that completely ignore a key factor of online interaction technologies.
  • They are designed for a group experience.
  • They are almost always experienced by an individual in the isolation in interaction with their computer.

My experience is not your experience. Further more, it is hard to even describe OUR experience. We romanticize the concept of group interaction, but in truth, it is imperfect, online and offline. And online we don’t see the consequences as quickly nor are our communication antennae, trained for millennium to F2F communication, as attuned to online communication. I think we are getting better. I see changes. But I can’t see if you are smiling, frowning, curious or pissed off as you read this. And if I want to communicate and engage with you, that matters to me. (If I just want to spout and publish, well, you are out of luck!)

A simple example: smileys look different in all IM tools I use and I never know what is used on another side... It keeps me wondering how my ;) looks at your end...