James Robertson and Step Two Designs has been blogging an intranet project he's been working on. Reading the whole thing from bottom to top is a great outline for managing a project, getting feedback from stakeholders, and developing a plan.
An article at Context Magazine discusses the Seven Myths of Knowledge Management:
According to Phil Windley's weblog, Utah has a plan for reorganizing IT for the state.
The goal is to increase capacity for developing e-Government intiatives that can cross agency lines and get at information in ways that are useful to the state's residents.
OTC in California is beta testing a plug and play device that will connect any two RS-232 devices together wirelessly.
Radio Free Blogistan has a recent entry comparing Blogger to Radio Userland.
Among the differences:
Phil Windley, Chief Infomation Office of the State of Utah, has a weblog.
He has also issued a challenge to his IT staff. He'll pay for the first 50 to 100 IT people who sign up for a weblog. There's a list on his home page of people who've taken him up so far.
If your content management system is more difficult, more frustrating, or more limited than the 'old way' of doing things, people will find a way around it.
Kalsey Consulting group has gathered links to a number of articles concerned with managing content management systems:
Here's a transcript of Lawerence Lessig's keynote address at OSCon. If you want to know what he had to say (and it's good stuff) but don't want to download the complete presentation done up in Flash (which weighs in at a hefty 8.5 Mb) this is a good place to go.
The starting points from which Lessig discusses intellectual property, copyright, and why we should care, are these:
At Edge, Howard Rheingold talks about Smart Mobs.
Using rapidly updated websites, cell-phones and other modern communicatin tools, people are able to organize demonstrations, gather for parties, respond to deadlines, and act together.
Rheingold has a new book--Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution--coming out on this topic.
Usability guru, Jakob Neilsen, suggests that you design your site to engage and empower users. This doesn't mean content should be frivolous, but it should be active and engaging.
A seven round Head to Head Powerpoint competition
The IPTPS 2002 Electronic Proceedings includes papers on such topics as:
Edward Felten, a professor at Princeton, says at Economist.com, that all of us have a right to tinker with the things we own. Tinkering has traditionally led to innovation and progress.
Further, he says:
“We construct the world by observing it and interacting with it, not just by letting things control us....You can't learn to write only by reading.” And just as tinkering with words leads to new ideas, he explains, so does tinkering with technology. It is a necessary first step to innovation. Being able to reverse-engineer software, for instance, is a necessary first step for writing better programs.
The Digital Millenium Copyright Act is being invoked to keep researchers from doing research on security issues, from looking closely at the way hardware and software tools are constructed, and, critically, from talking about what they find. In addition, companies are increasingly selling us licenses to products rather than ownership of the products themselves. Our freedom to use things as we would want to use them is eroding.
Felten has a blog now at: Freedom to Tinker
Uzilla.org is the not-for-profit arm of Uzilla. Uzilla.org offers web behavior data under an open data license.
Uzilla, the product, consists of an application server and a custom browsing client intended to help web sites evaluate usability.
Uzilla.org is currently conducting A Day in the Life study to look at how people access web pages now.
Singer-songwriter Janis Ian has a couple of excellent articles online: The Internet Debacle--An Alternative View and Fallout--a follow up to The Internet Debacle.
The Internet Debacle discusses her take on copyright and online file sharing (music sharing). She questions the music industry claims that music downloading is destroying the industry and cites examples from her experience and that of others.
In Fallout, she continues the discussion, talking about the feedback she's received, the effects making her own music available on the web has had on sales (positive) and she suggests some alternatives to the music industry to address the issues of copyright and music's availability.
Here's an O'Reilly.net column by Andy Oran on The Semantic Web
The concept of the Semantic Web is that, using XML and other technologies, web creators can formally tag text and objects so that automated agents can help us deal with information overload.
But how do we make all that up-front tagging worthwhile? And can tagging, even if it's all done and done excellently, really provide the queues that we, the humans using the system, need?
What we really need is a system that understands how we track and sort and interpret and makes that process simpler and broader.
Herewith, papers from a global summit on online knowledge networks. Topics include: Lessons of Collaboration, The Real Experience of Online Learning, Building Online Communities for professional networks, Future Trends in eLearning: Lessons from History.
According to a recent article at Wired News, DMACC's West Des Moines campus has gone almost entirely wireless, paperless, and library-less. They've substituted a resource center for the library, required PDAs of all technology students, and supplied faculty with smartboards on which to write notes that can be downloaded into PDAs.
Dean Tony Paustian says, "We are heading toward a world where, instead of reading a bunch of Bill Gates' quotes, you want to have a video clip of him actually speaking that quote..."
I have to admit that I'm still a 'Social Life of Paper' adherent and that I find it much faster to read a bunch of quotes than watch someone say them, and in fact, Paustian also says that students still print e-documents out to read them and adds:
"Once they have surpassed that amount (of allotted printouts), they have to go back and add more copies to their account," Paustian said. "Otherwise, they'll print off reams of paper."
So, maybe not quite the end of paper, but an interesting experiment, nonetheless.
According to a recent article at vnunet.com the IT workstyle--long hours, lots of deadlines, high stress--may be linked to increased risk for heart attacks.
The article quotes a recent report in Occupational and Environmental Medicince which says that men who work 60 hours or more a week and sleep less than five hours a night at least twice a week, can more than double their chances of having a heart attack.
A recent report by Jupiter Research indicates that many companies are spending too much on online content management systems.
According to the research, businesses without a large Internet presence may be better off looking at low-cost or even home-grown systems.
Understanding the specific needs of your orgnization can help target the right CMS for you. In addition, it's important to keep in mind that deployment, integration and customization can increase the final costs of the CMS system by as much as a factor of 6.
I'm adding a new category on intellectual property because I think it's going to be one of the defining issues in the next few years for the Internet and computers. It's a complex issue with lots of room for discussion, reinterpretation, and reinvention.
Among the questions: What intellectual property ought to be part of the commons and the common good? And what intellectual property ought to be protected so that creators can reap a fair return for their labors? How should these protections be applied? What are the intended and unintended consequences of what we do? Who gets to be involved in the discussion?
One interesting place to begin, if you're interested in this issue is the Creative Commons website. Creative Commons is:
...a non-profit organization founded on the notion that some people would prefer to share their creative works (and the power to copy, modify, and distribute their works) instead of exercising all of the restrictions of copyright law.
Creative Commons is working on ways for creators to make clear what rights they want to keep and what rights they are willing to make available to others (like copying, distributing, etc.)
According to a recent article at MSNBC, businesses are starting to recognize the potential of blogging for their organizations.