Fast Company has yet another blogging article, which nonetheless contains some interesting information about blogs in the corporate sector:
Dynamite, indeed. The burgeoning blog world--1.6 million keyboard tappers at last count--is making big inroads into corporate culture. From tech companies like Microsoft (which says it "respects and supports" blogs like Scoble's) and IBM to decidedly nontech outfits like Dr. Pepper, companies are starting to use blogging both as a medium to market products and monitor brands and as an internal knowledge-management tool. To meet corporate demand, both UserLand and Six Apart, makers of popular blog software programs, are coming out with enterprise-level products later this year.
However, one of the issues for corporations and other organizations is the same thing that provides weblogs' greatest strength--the voice of the weblog poster comes through. This creates trust and builds reader loyalty, but it also makes people used to promoting a shiny polished message uneasy:
But that informal transparency is precisely why many companies' embrace of blogs is at best uneasy. Internally, blogs have the potential to let employees who wouldn't otherwise be seen as authorities have a voice with a lot of impact. "[Companies] are not going to be able to stuff it back into the box," says Greg Lloyd, CEO of Traction, a business-oriented blog software company. Externally, the fears are even greater. Letting employees speak directly to customers requires a huge amount of trust. A loose cannon might reveal corporate secrets, give out the wrong message, or even open up the company to legal trouble.
...via elearningpost
NASA has a new device that allows them to 'hear' subauditory speech. In other words, to hear what you're going to say before you say it:
"A person using the subvocal system thinks of phrases and talks to himself so quietly it cannot be heard, but the tongue and vocal cords do receive speech signals from the brain," said developer Chuck Jorgensen, of NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California.Posted by dcoates at 09:01 AM
Doc Searls talks about tacit knowledge and how weblogs help to capture it in ways that knowledge management systems have proved unable to do:
I also believe they will succeed where "knowlegdege management" (and every other kind of management) has failed. It's the same reason online bazaars like eBay are succeeding where every business intermediary with a 2 in the middle of its acronym is struggling. They're about us. They organize themselves around whatever topic gets us going, for as long as the topic stays interesting. Then we — whoever we are — move on, keeping safe in the tacit what those who operate only in the explicit will never understand, much less "manage."Posted by dcoates at 09:00 AM
elearningpost talks about the possibilities of Learning Experience Design, extrapolating from design that considers user's experiences (user experience design):
I sense a similar shift in e-learning design: from instructional design to learner experience design (LXD). If this too is going to be a mind, body, and soul shift, then we are need to be more holistic. We need to look beyond learner characteristics and learning objectives. We need our own set of learner experience methods to help us understand the complexities of learning, working, and decision making in the real world.
No Doubt Research presents Zen and the Art of Knowledge Management:
...grappling with tacit knowledge is a lot like coming to grips with a Zen koan. When we work on 'making tacit knowledge explicit' we find our usual techniques let us down, leave things out, or seem to miss the point. As with the Zen koan, what is really needed to come to terms with tacit knowledge is to suspend our usual expectations and to search for a new viewpoint.
They identify eight things organizations can do to promote the flow of tacit knowledge:
About a change in culture, the paper goes on to say:
...because genuine sharing is always voluntary, the challenge is to create a culture where people are eager to share their knowledge. Yet make no mistake, even rudimentary knowledge management efforts require a requisite shift in culture. To take one obvious example, the creation of a 'knowledge map' will be of no use in an organisation that is resistant to knowledge sharing. Knowing that Helen in marketing is an expert in dealing with e-commerce in Asia will be no use to anyone if she is not motivated to share her experiences with others. Knowledge management is therefore also about change management. This is a complex topic all of its own, and Trevor Williamson's workshop tomorrow will address some of the key elements in dealing with this kind of change.
Stewart Butterfield come up at the top of Google's list for sylloge: Instant Message Question Answerer. He has a blog with some of the IM conversations he's had as a result.
Here's an excerpt from the very first one:
SweetRoxy215: hello
sylloge: yes
sylloge: it's true
SweetRoxy215: whats true
sylloge: "hello"
sylloge: I can see that you're typing
sylloge: I can hardly wait to see what's next!
SweetRoxy215: are you the question answerer that i can ank anything and get a true answer from
sylloge: yes, that's me
sylloge: I normally go by "Oracle" or "Great Seer"
sylloge: so, shoot: what's up?
SweetRoxy215: Is New Zealand a part of Australia?
sylloge: nope
sylloge: They are separate countries
sylloge: next?
SweetRoxy215: does the continent Australia have any countries in it at all, or just cities?
sylloge: it has one country on it: Australia
...
SweetRoxy215: thank you
SweetRoxy215: do a lot of people bother you with questions?
sylloge: Nope. You are the first one.
SweetRoxy215: o...really...are you some type of genius
sylloge: Well, I'm pretty smart. But it is just a coincidence that my IM name came up first in that search. Just the way that Google works, I guess.
sylloge: I don't normally answer questions like this.
SweetRoxy215: o okay
What we all know:
The Shifted Librarian and Library Stuff have a .pdf file up on an introductory blogging presentation that also covers RSS and its uses as well.
The presentation provides these reasons why librarians (and plenty of other knowledge workers) should blog:
I'm going to have an article on weblogs--Weblogs as a Disruptive Technology for Extension--published in the Journal of Extension.
I don't know the pub date yet, but will post here again when it's up.
Ed Felten tells us (well, me, anyway) about a game created at Carnegie Mellon University called The ESP Game:
A group at Carnegie Mellon University has created The ESP Game, in which a pair of strangers, shown a photographic image, are each asked to guess the single word that the other will use to characterize the image....The brilliant part is that the game “tricks” its players into doing an important and incredibly time-consuming job. By playing the game, you’re helping to build a giant index that associates each image on the internet with a set of words that describe it.
Dave Winer talks about a plan for merging RSS and Atom.
And if you want to know why Dave says, RSS rules...
Steve Gillmor has a piece at eWeek about Sun's Adoption of RSS:
Sun Microsystems has always been about communities. Those communities early on in the company's existence were probably nowhere near as well connected as they are today, certainly in nowhere near the same real-time mechanism as they are today. And RSS is increasingly becoming the principal means of real-time communication.If you look now all across Sun and our developer properties, you're seeing RSS feeds--little blogs and wikis--popping up everywhere. That to me is more representative of what needs to be our mainstream strategy rather than the work of a few creative individuals who want to have our big admin portal picked up by people who care about Solaris system administration.
Stephan VanDyke has an interesting graphic proposing how news travels on the Internet
Edward Felten at Freedom to Tinker reports on Utah's Anti-Spyware Bill:
The Utah state legislature has passed an anti-spyware bill, which now awaits the governor's signature or veto. The bill is opposed by a large coalition of infotech companies, including Amazon, AOL, AT&T, eBay, Microsoft, Verizon, and Yahoo.The bill bans the installation of spyware on a user's computer. The core of the bill is its definition of "spyware", which includes both ordinary spyware (which captures information about the user and/or his browsing habits, and sends that information back to the spyware distributor) and adware (which displays uninvited popup ads on a user's computer, based on what the user is doing).
He provides a good quick summary of the bill. Spyware affects network connections and computer function. It plays on people's trust and makes it more difficult for technical support staff to do their jobs (once burned/twice shy--people don't want to install anything, even things that can help them).
The eLearning Forum is now the Emergent Learning Forum:
eLearning has reached adolescence. It has grown up and we elders have to let it get out of the house make its own friends. The action is moving from eLearning itself to what happens as its relationships with others. That why we added this plank to our mission: "Position learning as a core business process."Emergence is what results when complex systems interact. It's up to us to mold Emergent Learning into a useful concept. My notion of Emergent Learning includes:
- Greater than the sum of its parts
- New arrangements of components
- Multidisciplinary
- Self-organizing
- Dynamic, evolving
- Often surprising
- Becoming, not established
The new Emergent Learning Forum recently had an event to talk about social networking, relationship capital, and expertise management
Our topic, the impact of social networks on corporate learning, perfectly fit the bill. Social network software is a relatively recent phenomenon, pundits and investors feel it is ready to take off, and very little consideration has been given to how it can improve the quality of learning.
More good stuff coming, I'm sure. Some of the issues of social networking are trust, privacy, how dynamic it is, how to make it useful place for everyone before everyone's using it, and other things. Integrating learning adds another level of participation with lots and lots of potential.
MaxDesign has a tutorial on The benefits of Web Standards to your visitors, your clients and you:
2. What are Web Standards about? These 'Web Standards' are designed to:deliver the greatest benefits to the greatest number of web users
ensure the long-term viability of any web document
simplify code and lower the cost of production
deliver sites that are accessible to more people and more types of Internet devices
continue to function correctly as browsers evolve, and as new devices come to market
For web designers and developers, Web Standards are about using standards (Structural, presentational, Object and Scripting languages) and best practices (valid, semantic and accessible code) to benefit your users, your clients and yourself.