Web designers spend a large amount of their time trying to figure out simple, intuitive ways for people who come to their web site to find information quickly and easily.
Relevare has developed a system that they're calling an 'iconic interface.' You can see it on Relevare's own site as a set of increasingly smaller boxes all nested within biger and bigger boxes. Clicking on any of the boxes zips you graphically to that information. The icons zoom in and out using Flash technology.
It's an interesting way to represent the layout of the web site, but it can also be vertigo-inducing if you look too long at the graphics as they zoom in and out.
The Relevare site itself isn't quite as vertigo-inducing as the Rowing Vortal.
Check it out.
Stephan Coleman and John Gotze have started the website: www.bowlingtogether.net.
Their report, Bowling Together: Online Public Engagement in Policy Deliberation, includes:
The ClueTrain Manifesto says that the web is a conversation. People don't just want to order things online, they want to communicate with the people they order things from, they want to communicate with each other and they want to communicate with and influence the institutions that imact their lives. The process of making government available through the Internet isn't just about 'pushing' information out to people in the form of publications and announcements and guidelines. It's also about finding new ways to interact that engage citizens and help provide better, more representational governance.
Estimates are that 95% of the fiber optics cable laid in the 1990s is 'dark,' that is, not currently being used to transmit voice and data. Most companies that lay fiber--predominantly telecommunications companies, tend to overbuild. Laying fiber involves digging up streets and parking lots. It affects the entire community and impacts businesses that may or may not ever benefit from the fiber itself. In addition, most companies have discovered that after investing huge amounts of money in laying the fiber optics cable they have no affordable solutions for going the 'last mile' and actually making the connection in people's homes and businesses.
"There's a lot of dark fiber out there that may not ever be lit," says Barry Moore, sales manager of Sprint's Seattle branch. Like most telecom companies, Sprint won't disclose how much of its Seattle network is in use....from Fiber-optic lines languish under scarred city streets in The Seattle Times: Business & Technology
In an article in the February, 2002 issue of Business 2.0, Thomas Stewart says, "Companies waste billions on knowledge management because they fail to figure out what knowledge they need, or how to manage it."
Knowledge management can't be done by technology alone. In fact, 'knowledge' isn't a commodity at all. Some of the best knowledge exchange that takes place happens in conversation, sometime when the nominal topic was something completely different. A knowledge management system designed for searching and categorizing knowledge once it's written down can't capture this kind of information as well as a chaotic mailing list with reasonable participation.
These tools are all related in some way to the process of establishing, developing and maintaining online communities.
Most online community sites are doing some of these things, but no one's gone ahead and incorporated everything. Is it possible? Is it desireable? What features really make for the best, most useful online community environment? How much does the purpose of the community affect the tools that are needed?
...from Online Community Concepts and Technologies at CamWorld
CNN.com Asia's Sci-Tech section proposes the following list of 20 trends and technologies that they believe will have a significant impact on personal computing in the coming year:
CNN doesn't claim that all this technology will be readily available in 2002. Some of it will be released, some is still in the prototype testing area. All of it will be talked about, designed for, promised to consumers in the weeks and months to come.
According to a 1999 report by the National Safety Council, 53 million computers are expected to become obsolete; 80 percent will go directly to landfills, some will be recycled and many of the remaining machines will be donated to charities.
However, as the numbers donated to charties increase, so do the headaches since many of these machines are too old, don't work, and have no operating system. Accepting equipment that can't be used simply raises the cost for the organization as they have to find a way to recycle the equipment and still get the hardware and software that's needed to run the organization.
...from Charities Say No to Obsolete Crap in Wired News
To celebrate its 20th anniversary the Chaos Computer Club in Berlin, Germany has turned the upper eight floors of the Haus des Lehrers building into an interactive computer display called Blinkenlights.
Check it out. You can dial in on your cell phone and play pong or put up letters.
The Korean government is planning to move 120,000 civil servants to Hancom Linux deluxe from Windows in the next year. This represents approximately 23 percent of its current Windows base.
Beijing, China also recently awarded major contracts to local vendors, including Red Flag Linux, beating out Microsoft in the bidding process.
...from The Register
The Museum of Online Museums includes such stalwarts as The Smithsonian, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).
It also includes:
The Museum of Air Sickness Bags
Fading Billboards
Etch-a-Sketch Gallery
Manhole Covers Arranged by Country
I particularly recommend Manhole Covers Arranged by Country.
Knowledge and people go together. Despite some rudimentary efforts in technological knowledge management, it's still true that most of an organization's knowledge is housed in people's heads. And, much of that knowledge is tacit--the people who know it, know it 'in their bones' and can't necessarily tell someone else what it is they know or how they know it.
Simply putting technology in place doesn't change anything unless the experts are motivated to put information into the system. Ways to do this include recognizing the expertise and rewarding people in one way or another for sharing knowledge.
Reference: KM and Human Nature in CIO
Generating value with Internet technology is still the subject of much discussion. Perhaps even more discussion than ever before as we've seen companies which seemingly lacked any plan for generating value fall into oblivion.
At one time, the value of new software systems was calculated on the basis of full-time employees that could be eliminated. One weakness of this approach is that following a strict policy of replacing people with software overlooks the possibility that said new software/technology might just open the door to doing things different/better/beyond what's been done before.
All too often, the bottom-line benefits of automation come at the expense of missed top-line opportunities based on new services, new partners and new markets. Innovation and differentiation are the output of a creative, empowered workforce, not commodity laborers employed because their jobs have not yet been streamlined away.
The Web's revolutionary potential lies in its interactivity. The Web is a conversation. And a community. How can we use this in our organizations? What gains can we make? The Internet is at its best, and its potential may just be the greatest, when it's facilitating creative dialogue between individuals.
As an organization one way to 'harness' this potential is to recognize that self-organizing, unmediated communities with at least a minimum level of activity are by definition creative and self-motivated. Your challenge is to find a way to harvest this creative energy toward the goal of making your organization's products and services compellingly unique.
...from Community Building as a Core Value in Intranet Journal
Land-grab fever has gripped intellectual property rights, says Seth Shulman. And he insists that only new approaches—such as "national parks for knowledge"—can protect the free flow of ideas that benefits us all...from Wanted: National Parks for Knowledge in Technology Review
Treating intellectual property in the same way that we treat products will actually decrease innovation rather than stimulate it. Patenting things that anyone could come up with (like Amazon.com's One-Click system) means that people can't freely use things that are more or less intuitive. In addition, sharing knowledge tends to increase the total amount of knowledge as others add to and refine the information.
Shulman proposes a system akin to the ways real estate is regulated. Individuals can own the 'property' but the community also has some say in how that property is managed. In addition, perhaps there should be some IP-free zones, like national parks where the information is open and available to everyone (for example, the human genome sequence).
The latest issue of InfoWorld (January 7, 2002) discusses a number of new technologies that are likely to reshape computing in the upcoming year.
'Disruptive technologies' are those technologies that are not quite ready for universal adoption, but which have the potential to completely change business and IT strategies. Often these are technologies that aren't yet robust, don't have a clear practical application and might be characterized by some as 'just a lot of talk.' But they are also technologies that as they mature and gain momentum will lay a foundation for new business models. Personal computers, the Internet, and cell phones are examples of technologies that were disruptive in their time.
InfoWorld lists the following as disruptive technologies to keep an eye on:
AOL is climbing onto the E-learning bandwagon with their launch of the AOL Online Campus, a portal offering access to a variety of online courses. The Online Campus is focusing on career advancement, degree courses, and personal enrichment (hmm...when you think about it, what other categories are there?).
In an article in InformationWeek.com, Terry Crane, AOL VP of information and education products, says that according to an AOL survey 65% of AOL users would like to take an online course. And that number jumps to 93% when offered as part of an AOL membership. Partners in the venture include University of Phoenix, University of California, Berkeley, Extension program, Keller School of Management and, according to Crane, thousands of other content partners.
If logic were ever your friend it won't be after you've spent time with software, software installations and particularly Microsoft's Windows and Office products.
For example, let's say you wanted to uninstall MS Office XP and install MS Office 97 (because, say, you have old MS Access data that you couldn't, for some reason, convert). A simple process, one might think.
However, what you may find is that although Word and Excel and Powerpoint all work fine, MS Access comes up and says 'Microsoft Access can't start because there is no license on this machine.'
Searching Google's Groups turns up some helpful hints on things that might be out of whack in the Windows Registry--check permissions; remove RunOnce and RunOnceEx under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\
Although logical these suggestions don't work.
Searching in Microsoft's knowledge base with the exact words of the error message turns up nothing useful. However, it turns out that the answer is there after all (the specific link located through Google Groups not through Microsoft's search engine itsefl), under:
ACC: "There is no license" error starting Microsoft Access
The first thing this document recommends is again the logical option of checking permissions under Licenses in regedit. Doesn't work.
Finally, the MS document recommends searching for the font HATTEN in the \windows\fonts directory, renaming it, and then reinstalling MS Office 97.
This works.
Learning can happen anywhere so they say...
At some time or other, Mic Rolph, a professional illustrator, received a The Millenium Award from The Royal Society and The British Association for the Advancement of Science. A limited number of these awards are designed to enable scientists to help advance the 'public understanding of science.' Cooperation with local institutions was mandatory, pubs were one of the examples listed, and thus the idea of science questions printed on beer mats, or the Pub Understanding of Science, was born.
Samples of beer mat science questions:
Google has published a summary of the most popular search terms were for the year 2001.
Among the top twenty gaining queries for the year were:
In decline for the year:
The top three women people searched Google for were:
Top three men:
The site also includes a time line showing the rise and fall of certain search terms over the course of the year.