Mathemagenic

I know it's coming... I know I'll get through... Still feels scary...

It's about loosing focus and finding it again. Not really loosing, but realising that my current scope is too wide and that I have to find a way to narrow it down.

To be more specific it's about finding out what shape my personal KM model should have:

who needs it: so far I was talking about contribution to the theory (which of course I need anyway), but I'm realising that my main driving force is about providing practitioners with a framework for thinking about knowledge work, their own or others', to be used to identify directions for change or technology fit

how deep/detailed it should be: how far should I go into describing specific activities and their relations? how do I know that I'm 'there' and the model is good enough to stop

what specific questions should I asked in my weblog studies to be able to integrate the results into the model

And - something else - if you are native English speaker and have time this Friday you can help me a lot by reviewing a paper I'm writing right now. It's an improved version of Discovering the iceberg of knowledge work: A weblog case... I was planning to take more time finishing it, but I just found out about paper submission deadline too good to miss, so time is short (as usual :) 

So, in case you are ready to help and don't know how to contact me: email or Skype

One more piece from Mark Fletcher's blog

I haven't posted in awhile because I've been busy. Busy is good. As we continue to build out the team at Bloglines, I was reminded of something that first occured to me during ONElist's early days about starting a company.

As an employee climbing the corporate ladder at a company, it's all about getting more. More responsibility, more control, a larger salary, a bigger title. However, the exact opposite is true when you start a company. A big part of starting and building a company is about giving up. A founder is in a weird position. When you first start a company, everything is yours. You own all the stock, you make all the decisions. This point of creation is the only time this will be the case, however. Forever after, the founder must give up more and more control to other people and more and more ownership to employees, investors, etc. The founder must do this for the company to be successful, but at the same time this is the opposite of what many people are used to doing.

Made me thinking about "getting more" and "giving up" as important skills that a knoweldge networker should have as it's not only about being self-driven, but also about ad-hoc projects with others... Taking responsibility and delegating and knowing how to choose between these two :)

Mark Fletcher shares Bloglines news that appear in their web services press-release a day later (thanks to Brian Dennis for the pointer):

Three leading desktop news feed and blog aggregators announced today that they have implemented new open application programming interfaces (API) and Web Services from Bloglines (www.bloglines.com) that connect their applications to Bloglines' free online service for searching, subscribing, publishing and sharing news feeds, blogs and rich web content. FeedDemon (www.bradsoft.com), NetNewsWire (www.ranchero.com), and Blogbot (www.blogbot.com) are the first desktop software applications to use the open Bloglines Web Services.

What does it mean in practice:

• eliminating RSS bandwith problem
• "Bloglines Web Services transform hundreds of thousands of existing feeds into "clean RSS" and insulates developers from the current blog syndication format wars"
• support for synchronisation between web-based and desktop aggregation (someone out there seem to listens to my problems ;)

Finally:

Bloglines Web Services are free, open source and available at www.bloglines.com/services/ for interested developers wishing to work with on current and future projects.

Usually when I talk about blogging tools and some functionality that is not there yet I bluff saying "but given that in this community developers and users find ways to talk to each other some technology is likely to be there in half a year". In some cases it actually works :)

And, while I was at Mark Fletcher's blog I discovered that Bloglines now have 'Keep new' feature to mark individual blog entries as unread that I managed to miss (using Bloglines daily :). This is something I was dreaming about since I found that marking all recent posts unread in my case results in piles of unread stuff.

One more reason to like Bloglines...

Update: I guess I know what desktop reader I'm going to use next to Bloglines :)