One of the directions that keep on popping up when I’m thinking about blogging in KM context is topic-based blogging. There are a couple of reasons behind it:

• personal - if blogs are used as a personal knowledge management tool than ability to tag posts is important to be able to organise, retrieve and share them
• corporate – once weblogs are used in a company one would want to be able to slice an aggregated stream of posts into topic-based streams to support knowledge sharing

liveTopics and k-collector are good examples of personal vs. corporate implementations (see also: liveTopics and k-collector compared) and del.icio.us is an example of connecting personal and shared views on topics together.

In this post I’d like to focus on personal side and describe what topic-based blogging functionalities one may want as a blogger. And because I’m very practical and selfish I’d describe it as my liveTopics wishlist :)

What liveTopics do now

• allow adding topics for every weblog posts – e.g. check this post via browser
• display a list of posts per topic – e.g. my posts about liveTopics
• display topics as a frequency list or recently updated list – e.g. my topic index
• provide an interface for managing topics (renaming/deleting + backup + some settings)

My liveTopics wishlist

• Printing
  • I’d like to be able to print posts for a topic or combination of topics (so far I can think of AND/OR combinations, but may be I’d want more once related topics are there ;)
• Aggregation
  • Topics indication in my RSS feed (e.g. in ENT format)
  • RSS feed for each topic (ideally for a combination of topics as well :)
• Related topics
  • Indication of a relation (below are different overlapping! dimentions)
    • Automatic vs. manual
      • Automatic: based on co-occurences in the same post – e.g. related tags for innovation at k-collector or del.icio.us
      • Manual: added by me to indicate how topics are related in my head – e.g. I’d like to be able to specify that blog communities is a narrower than communities, but also related to blog ecosystem
    • Internal vs. external
      • Showing that my posts on blog communities are related to my del.icio.us link collection on blogCommunities
    • Me vs. others
      • Showing that my posts on innovation are related to post on innovation at k-collector
  • Inference
    • Once relations are there one can do all nice things with inference rules.
      • For example automatically including narrower topics when broader topics are selected, e.g. when someone selects communities posts on blog communities are shown as well even if they are not explicitly marked that way
• Visualising
  • Dynamics
    • I’d love to see how my use of topics changes over time; something similar to temporal rhythms of interactions with others visualised from email arhives
  • Relations between topics
    • Just a nice image :) Something like delicious mind
• Small liveTopics/Radio specific things
  • Shortcuts for topics added automatically
  • Expanding of posts by topic in topic index pages

Of course, I wonder how many of those things are “nice to have”/”Lilia specific” and which features would be used by many blogger, but this is a “further research direction” as I’d write in a paper :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/10/13.html#a1384; comments are here.

• How do I search my weblog?
• The orange pill: Matt and Paolo are getting ready for BlogTalk
• Questions on personal categorisation

My three weeks of travel are over. I’m back home, unpacking, tuning into regular rhythms and trying to connect bits and pieces into a whole…

Themes to think about:

• Networking: from awareness to action, dynamics, scaling
• Interplays: tools and practices, users and developers
• Reflective practices
• (PhD) research methodology: design research, multiple perspectives, Niels Bohr, (in)visibility as a lack of dimensions
• Conversations: multiple media

Lessons learnt and other unrelated notes in no particular order:

• never ever think of finishing a paper while travelling to conferences – spoils all the fun of sightseeing and f2f time
• how comes that I was meeting “hypertext guys” at all places I went?
• survival Italian: spremuta di arancia
• when you decide to have a “laptop-free” day you need it most (or: one step closer on investing into something light and small)
• where to eat in Milan (or: poetry and food) – find link!
• lunch at a conference venue is not necessary the fastest one: sometimes it makes sense to walk more
• before blogging a conference check if there are collaborative notes
• for a real-life metaphor of being lost on the Net, get into the net labyrinth at Mur insel in Graz (and while you are in Graz, remember that the best time to walk to Schlossberg is 2 at night :)
• walking in Lugano be prepared for salsa dancing
• when you start believing that there is no one to talk about weblogs, you find a great company to do so
• it’s easy to start falling in love with everything Italian
• three weeks with a small suitcase is not that impossible
• it’s not about getting to the colourful house, it’s about conversations with people on the way there
• it’s a pleasure to see Earth from above again and again: each time there is a discovery
• in spite of another round of Radio problems, I’m not going to change the tool (at least until liveTopics functionality gets into k-collector ;)
• and, of course, all interesting personal KM discussions happen when I travel…

I’ll be editing old posts during coming week, don’t be surprised…

Something else: my weblog turned two years the day before I started travelling and I forgot to post about it. I guess blogging is getting so much interwoven into my way of doing things that anniversaries do not matter anymore :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/07/11.html#a1275; comments are here.

• Travel plans: US in January – Hawaii/Minneapolis/Chicago
• India: dreams into plans
• I’d love to do a workshop in this house…

At last BlogWalk I was trying to explain my ideas about ideal wiki/weblog tool, so just writing them down.

I wrote about blogs and wikis for thinking earlier, so just in brief on what is important for me:

• process – weblogs are good to keep track of ideas unfolding; datestamp and preserving the original are important
• outcome – wikis are good for (collaborative) working on integrating, refactoring and connecting ideas
• connection between these two is essential – I’d like to see how bits of weblog posts turn into something more tangible

What my ideal wiki/weblog tool should do:

1. Weblog. Usual one. The only thing I need is something like liveTopics to add keywords to each post. Keywords should not be predefined and shouldn’t behave like categories in Movable Type or Radio multiplying content: I need only an index that allows retrieving posts by a keyword (e.g. blog reading).

2. Linkblog. Something as easy as del.icio.us, with only one difference: when I add a keyword the link is added to the same keyword index as weblog posts (so, my posts about blog reading and links on blog reading are indexed on one page).

2.n Ideally I could have other types of logs – e.g. file log, e-mail log, reference log, book log, recipe log. Same: keywords and joint index (with an opportunity of switching indexing off for sensitive stuff).

3. Wiki. Here all the fun starts. When I post something to my weblog or any of other logs it’s added to two places: keyword index (see above) and keyword wiki page. This is the time when I want the software to multiply my content: I’d like any new post about blog reading it is automatically copied at the end of wiki page called blogReading”. Then I (and others) can do all the usual wiki stuff – editing wiki page making a whole from posts there.

If I add new wiki page, new keyword is added to my keyword index. If I rename a keyword then everything gets renamed and reindexed.

4. Keyword indexes (see above) – list of keywords that leads to keyword wiki pages and keyword indexes (and, of course, these two are linked).

5. Keyword (concept) maps. At least three of them: (1) visualising connections between wiki pages; (2) visualising connections between weblog posts based on co-occurrence of keywords in the same post; (3) integration of the two. All organised as webs (not trees :)

6. RSS feeds of every page (especially indexes, so people can subscribe to a keyword).

7. (just dreaming ;) Time-travel machine that keeps track and visualises changes in weblog posts, wiki pages, keyword maps.

That’s it. Should not be that difficult given existing technologies. Even time-travel machines do exist. The only thing which is not in this picture is access rights (e.g. blogging to the world, to a group, to yourself). Have to think about it.

If you have a tool that integrates 1-6 I would switch to it.

This post also appears on channel BlogWalk

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/06/08.html#a1233; comments are here.

• The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think
• Wikifying the Blog?
• Trees vs. webs

My thinking about trees vs. webs was a bit implicit till I saw Clay Shirky pointing to A city is not a tree where Christopher Alexander talks about tree vs. semilattice structures. As I don’t have a good mental model of semilattice (and Google doesn’t give many pictures ;), I’ll talk about trees and webs. Or, to be more specific about tree-structures and web-structures.

For me it mainly has to do something with classification. I believe that one of the reasons classifying information is difficult has something to do with the fact that in most cases tree structures are used for classification, so we have to find “unique folder” to put an idea or a document into it. And ideas never belong to “unique folders”, they have multiple relations with other ideas, forming a web structure.

I’m thinking about tree vs. web structures in my own work:

About filers and pilers (longer abstract if you can’t access it full-text) when it comes to sorting out papers.

About saving a file on my hard drive, where I always have to remember specific folder I used, vs. adding a document to Docushare (used as a document management system in my company), which allows “placing” one document into several folders (e.g. if you scroll you’ll find out that this paper is available in four folders).

About using Favourites in IE vs. del.icio.us, which is free of “I have to decide in which folder it should go”.

And finally about using categories vs. liveTopics to organise my thinking in this weblog.

It probably matter of personal preferences or thinking style, but I always have problems with tree structures. For example, I’ve got Typepad Plus account because it offers an easy way to put photos online only to discover that I can hardly use it because it forces me to organise my photographs into albums. And I always want to sort my photos by location, by date, by theme and by many other ways that I’ll invent tomorrow.

Another example is about mind-mapping tools. Those that I tried force me to organise my ideas into tree structure. Of course, visualisation is nice to get an overview of ideas (especially if you use it for others), but forced tree structure makes these maps useless for (my) thinking. I tried to use mind-mapping software to structure my ideas for writing papers, but it didn’t work. It’s fine on paper for drawing a web of relations and thinking about steps of explaining them, but drawing a tree on my screen doesn’t make any sense: I would rather start outlining directly in Word…

Tree-relations may be easier to grasp than more complex structures. They are also easier to unfold into linear structure (think how you were taught to write an essay: introduction – body – conclusion, body consists of X parts, each of them is subdivided…). Trees are easy to draw. Easy to program.

But for me ideas live as webs. Tree structure of a paper is good to help others understand creative mess of ideas in my head, but it pains every time I try to squeeze a web of ideas into a tree structure when writing (I guess that’s why hyperlinks and cross-references were invented ;).

When I think about webs of ideas I associate a lot with Christopher Alexander talking about cities:

When we think in terms of trees we are trading the humanity and richness of the living city for a conceptual simplicity which benefits only designers, planners, administrators and developers. Every time a piece of a city is torn out, and a tree made to replace the semilattice that was there before, the city takes a further step toward dissociation.

In any organized object, extreme compartmentalization and the dissociation of internal elements are the first signs of coming destruction. In a society, dissociation is anarchy. In a Person, dissociation is the mark of schizophrenia and impending suicide. An ominous example of city-wide dissociation is the separation of retired people from the rest of urban life, caused by the growth of desert cities for the old like Sun City, Arizona. This separation is only possible under the influence of treelike thought.

It not only takes from the young the company of those who have lived long, but worse, it causes the same rift inside each individual life. As you pass into Sun City, and into old age, your ties with your own past will be unacknowledged, lost and therefore broken. Your youth will no longer be alive in your old age – the two will be dissociated; your own life will be cut in two.

For the human mind, the tree is the easiest vehicle for complex thoughts. But the city is not, cannot and must not be a tree. The city is a receptacle for life. If the receptacle severs the overlap of the strands of life within it, because it is a tree, it will be like a bowl full of razor blades on edge, ready to cut up whatever is entrusted to it. In such a receptacle life will be cut to pieces. If we make cities which are trees, they will cut our life within to pieces.

Site note: Thinking about writing texts, I think about stories that somehow fit linear format without breaking a web of relations. For me there is a lot to read and to think about to understand how stories emerge from webs and is there “tree” stage in between…

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/05/20.html#a1216; comments are here.

• Google: selling your soul in pieces?
• Information overload: questions
• Blog is down

Yesterday, taking a break from writing I was reading a paper about effects of visualising e-mail archives, Digital artifacts for remembering and storytelling: PostHistory and Social Network Fragments by Fernanda Viégas, danah boyd, David H. Nguyen, Jeffrey Potter, Judith Donath (try this or this if you don’t have IEEE access).

As part of a long-term investigation into visualizing email, we have created two visualizations of email archives. One highlights social networks while the other depicts the temporal rhythms of interactions with individuals. While interviewing users of these systems, it became clear that the applications triggered recall of many personal events. One of the most striking and not entirely expected outcomes was that the visualizations motivated retelling stories from the users’ pasts to others. In this paper, we discuss the motivation and design of these projects and analyze their use as catalysts for personal narrative and recall.

Things to remember:

Example of SNA on e-mail data aimed to support individual and not corporate decision-makers. This makes me thinking about the potential “market” for tools aggregating and visualising data: may be they are more likely to be used by individuals to make sense of their own data, then by “someone” who wants to get a picture of what’s going on in a company (example: my struggle to choose between liveTopics and k-collector). People are selfish: I care more about my own archives than about my company’s :)

Inside the article there are some strong quotes on our dependence on external objects to think and to remember. I should expand on it one day, this is something that connects information and knowledge and explains why personal information management skills are important for a knowledge worker.

How much could be extracted only from e-mail headers, without any content analysis.

User reactions on interacting with systems visualising their e-mail archives:

• recalling stories associated with patterns in e-mail change and being eager to share them with others (“Given the opportunity to gain meaningfull access to date about oneself, people want to explore it and then share it with others” p.9)
• discoveries about oneself: e-mail use patterns, forgotten friends, connections between people, reflecting on relations

The most interesting finding in the paper is the fact that the users feel that visualisations themselves do not reveal stories behind them:

Some of the ways in which our users interacted with the visualizations are reminiscent of how people relate to photographs. People return to their photos to reflect on past experiences as well as to share aspects of their lives with others. Photographs themselves convey limited slices of the events they represent, but their presence allows the owner to convey as much or as little as they want in sharing the event represented. Although our stories are as deeply embedded in our email as they are in our photos, we rarely have access to any sort of “snapshot” of our email so as to have these deep reflections and storytelling opportunities. The higher-level view of our digital experiences is buried deep within the actual data. When users in our case studies began storytelling around the visualizations, we realized that these provided a missing link; they created a legible and accessible view for sharing and reflecting upon our digital experiences, without revealing too much. (p. 8)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/03/01.html#a1104; comments are here.

• Weblog research ethics
• From creative mess to products (blogs and wikis for thinking)
• Personal side of social media: learning from weblogs

I’m using del.icio.us for a few weeks now, but there are some changes in my bookmarking habits already:

• I add post to del.icio.us bookmarklet to all computers I use (including adding and then deleting it at Internet cafes!)
• I stopped sending e-mails to myself with links!!!
• I have less “just a link” weblog posts.
• I do not keep many things in my news aggregator just to decide what should I read them, send e-mail to myself or write “just a link” weblog post :)

I definitely like an opportunity to assign tags that emerging with my thinking. For me it works the same way for accessing my bookmarks as liveTopics for accessing my weblog, but with one important difference: it allows both my own and a community views on bookmarks and tags describing them. This is something that could be done by combining functionalities of liveTopics and k-collector in a way that allows switching between personal and community views on weblog content.

I do not know if del.icio.us will scale in time for me. Also I would love to have a better integration of it with my weblog. I’m thinking of using Radio‘s multiAuthorWeblogTool to get links posted to my weblog automatically via my del.icio.us RSS feed. This will make them searchable with the rest of my weblog, but still leaves the problem of integrating two sets of topics (liveTopics for weblog posts and del.icio.us tags for bookmarks).

I still hope to find time to write on linkblogs, so this reflection may be a first step…

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/01/17.html#a901; comments are here.

• Bloggers as public intellectuals and writing about them in a research report
• PhD blogging and paper writing
• Converging metadata and emerging ontologies

I put it here, because this is not the first time I’m collecting links explaining k-collector in one e-mail :)

• k-collector at work
• Intranet aggregator, a model that explains the idea
• Recap: ENT, k-collector and WWWW, more complicated explanation

Once I started to write about k-collector, I’ll ask a question I have in my mind for some time… I’m thinking about possible uses of k-collector in companies and about motivation of bloggers to use it. I believe that the idea is great, but as a potential user I’m not motivated to use k-collector because:

I’m a liveTopics user. I use liveTopics because this tool provides me with a way to structure and access my own ideas. K-collector doesn’t (see also earlier post on liveTopics vs. k-collector).

K-collector provides a topic-based overview of different weblog posts. Fine, but Waypath does it better, indexing all blogs and not only small fracture that uses k-collector. So, why should I narrow it down?

To use k-collector before it gets smarter I have to add topics to my posts. I can’t use them to navigate my own weblog, so the only motivation is to make navigation between all weblogs easier. Nice and altruistic, may work for me, but my experience is that it doesn’t work for most people (e.g. people tend not to add keywords to documents in a corporate document repository even if it makes their own documents more accessible).

• And I’m also not sure how smart k-collector will become to suggest right topics. In many cases I use topic that says something about pattern behind a post and doesn’t have visible connection in the text. For example, the “suggest” button liveTopics does not suggest “technology adoption” topic unless I mention it explicitly.

At the end my main point is simple: I believe k-collector has more chances to be used if it offers more to endusers. Personally I’d like to have an opportunity to switch between “all weblogs” and “my own weblog” views :)

Update: Paolo and Matt answered some of my questions by demonstrating and explaining “to be released soon” k-collector version. The system is not perfect yet, but I like their future-customer-friendly way of working :)

And I missed one link – K-collector update: topic matching

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/09/30.html#a773; comments are here.

• Topic-based RSS feeds from K-Collector
• More on Microsoft: aggregation and feedback loop
• BlogTalk: who owns narrated experiences?

Just a brief thoughts about my ways of finding something in my blog:

• If it was recently I scroll
• If I remember the date and it’s not too far from now, I use calendar
• If I know the words I used before I use Google search on my site
• If I can recall it by seeing its title I use All posts by title archive
• If I can recall associated theme I use liveTopics (I don’t use categories anymore because they break RSS feeds)

Otherwise I get lost. No, in fact if none of these works I assume that something I’m looking for wasn’t in my weblog, but somewhere else on-line.

I wonder how my readers search my weblog…

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/07/22.html#a688; comments are here.

• K-Collector is launched
• How Technorati works? (2)
• Good research…

Klogs can improve the value of what you write as a follow-up for this post

But there are other options, for example a Radio weblog with liveTopics adds another dimension for relating posts together to create a train of thought. You can follow a topic from a post into a table of contents where you can see other posts referencing that topic. You can also see, for each post, other topics that were associated with it allowing you to hop from one subject of conversation to another.

I saw liveTopics and I’m curious to try… After coming back from KMSS.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2002/08/29.html#a197; comments are here.

• Blog is down
• GTD tools: SlimTimer
• Time in blogging: writers time and readers time