The web works because it is broken and not owned.
...via The Obvious?
Mind Hacks points us to the one hundred most influential works in cognitive science
Cutting Through reports on General Motors entry into blogging:
I’ve mentioned GM and their blogs a couple of times in the last week or so - now there's another first from them. The Director of New Media from GM Communications has been interviewed for a podcast, conducted over Skype. How's that for innovative?
It's an interesting insight into how GM have gone about using blogs as part of their communications strategy, but there are a couple of exchanges in particular which are worth seeing / hearing:
Neville: Who are the commenters? customers, employees, dealers? Are you happy and pleased with the spread of commenting?
Michael: I was completely blown away by the level of comments and the thought that goes into those comments. We didn't know what to expect and in many cases you feel that people have been waiting for years and years to be able to vent their feelings to General Motors, so even the negative ones aren’t sniping, they're just giving us their sincere feelings and thoughts on what we can do to create better products. We're appreciating most of them!
The response speaks clearly to the fact that some of the folks at GM at least really do 'get it.' Organizations almost always get in trouble when they try to control the message too tightly. People want to be listened to. And they want to know that 'real' people are speaking to them. It'll be interesting to see how GM and blogging go forward.
If you want to do something that's going to change the world, build software that people want to use instead of software that managers want to buy.
...from Groupware Bad by Jamie Zawinski
Six Apart, the company that created Movable Type and Typepad and recently purchased LiveJournal has updated their entire web site.
On the LiveJournal page, they post
- Total Accounts: 6148154
- Active Accounts: 2606583
- Posts per hour: 20455
- Posts per minute: 341
Marc Eisenstadt has analyzed eight years of email stats so you don't have to:
The totals in Table 1 tell me that the subjective 'quantum leap in spam' in 2002/3 that led me to install SpamAssassin as a full-time companion is certainly corroborated by the numbers. There's simply no other way to cope with the large volume of junk. But now (auto)strip away that nasty spam, and we're still looking at some scary numbers. Let's call the emails that are left over, after stipping away the nasty spam, "OK emails" (let's face it, they are never going to be "GOOD emails", right?). What we see then is an increase from 5-6K annual "OK emails" in the late nineties (15-ish daily) to 8-9K annual "OK emails" today (25-ish daily). A bright note in all this is that the numbers for 2004 are surprisingly steady compared with 2003, i.e. there's no exponential growth, even though things are clearly getting 'intense'.
25 emails daily (and thereare many I know who have WAY more than this) is a lot to deal with, especially since the emails don't cluster evenly throughout the week. To get to a 25-per-day average, you're looking at more like 30-40 per working weekday, if you're the kind of person who switches off at the weekend (ha!). If each email requires 3 minutes of thinking/response time (you're lucky if you can average that), then you've got a guaranteed two hours straight down the tubes every day.
Read the whole thing. He's got tables and everything. The comments are also interesting--tech people apparently save everything.
43 Folders gives some more tips for wading through all that email:
- Shut off auto-check - Either turn off automatic checking completely, or set it to something reasonable, like every 20 minutes or so. If you’re doing anything with new email more than every few minutes, you might want to rethink your approach. I’m sure that some of you working in North Korean missile silos need real-time email updates, but I encourage the rest of you to consider ganging your email activity into focused (maybe even timed) activity every hour or three. Process, tag, respond to the urgent ones, then get the hell back to work. (See also, NYT: You There, at the Computer: Pay Attention)
- Pick off easy ones - If you can retire an email with a 1-2 line response (< 2 minutes; pref. 30 seconds), do it now. Remember: this is about action, not about cogitating and filing. Get it off your plate, and get back to work. On the other hand, don’t permit yourself to get caught up in composing an unnecessary 45-minute epistle (see next item).
One of the beauties of weblogs is that sooner or later someone writes what you were going to write someday--and probably does it better anyway.
Occasionally the question comes up--why a weblog and not a mailing list or a news group or a discussion board. Some of the reasons from Cutting Through:
'Seeding' forums is very difficult
Getting a forum to a point where it is self-sustaining is very difficult in practice--it needs a large and active population to keep the dialogues flowing, but the population is drawn in the first place by flowing dialogues. This 'chicken and egg' situation is a difficult one to overcome--the overwhelming majority of visitors to a site will be passive 'consumers' of content rather than contributors, meaning that sites have to attract a very large number of visitors to get a contributor community of sufficient size to maintain forums.
Blogs tend not to suffer from this problem - it only takes one person to post articles, and comments will appear active and vibrant with a very much smaller number of active participants than an equivalent forum.
Decaying forums are very off-putting for visitors
It's very obvious when a forum is inactive, because the numbers and dates of posts are prominently displayed. This is the online equivalent of tumbleweed--although there may be a huge number of visitors to the site, the perception created by the inactive forums is that there are very few.
A blog, by contrast, can look active with a much lower level of activity - meaning that it can take much less effort to ‘feed and water’.
There's an increasing trend towards syndication
Syndication is becoming an increasingly popular way of subscribing to sites-- the benefits include being able to monitor a very large number of sites from a single application, and rapid reading of new articles as they arrive.
Not all forum systems provide syndication feeds, and those that do suffer from the transition from a threaded dialogue on the forum to the linear one-after-the-other format of a news aggregator. The effect is to disconnect each post from its conversational context, making it very difficult to follow. Blogs, on the other hand, can feed comments with context intact by including the original post and prior comments.
I gave a talk yesterday in Northeast Iowa on Computer Self-Defense, which is essentially how to keep your computer up and running, how to protect your data, how to steer your way clear of viruses, spam, spyware, and other pitfalls of network computing.
You can access the presentation (Powerpoint) here
There's also a handout: Computer Self-Defense--Six Things You Can Do to Protect Your Computer.
John Porcaro talks about wading through all that email :
Use subject-line protocols to speed communication: a.) No reply needed – NRN; b.) Thank you - TY; c.) Need response by date and time – NRB 10/30 3:00 pm; d.) Use subject line for whole message: Meet 10:00 10/30 Okay?
Determine who needs to be copied on what, what needs to be read, and what needs to be filed.
Keep e-mails short. Most should be no more than 1-10 sentences. Communicate your main point in the first sentence or two. Don't make readers work because you don't have time to focus.
...via Cutting Through
Salon has an article on distance learning and academia (requires you to get a free day pass). It covers a lot of the things we've been talking about at ISUE.
...via elearningpost
Napsterization reports that Ask Jeeves has purchased Bloglines with the intention of integrating it into their search system.
So, if you're keeping track--Google has bought Blogger, Six Apart (Movable Type) has bought LiveJournal, and Ask Jeeves has bought Bloglines...
...via blogdex
From Marnie Webb's Blog:
It's a ridiculously easy way to read the web. So, how many bookmarks do you have in your browser? How many of them have new information? Does it make you sick to your stomach to think of clicking through all of those to discover whether or not the website owners have added new, interesting content? Via RSS, you can subscribe to many websites and very easily find out whether there is new relevant content. My bookmarks no longer scare me. In fact, I rarely use them.It's ridiculously easy to share the information you get. One of the nice things about RSS is that information comes to you in manageable chunks: a NYTimes headline with a sentence-long article summary; a complete weblog entry; a teaser for a longer weblog entry; the pointer to a newsgroup posting; an email announcement list; events. You can push that information out to communities who may interested -- simply send it via email or put it on your own blog.
Via the University of Calgary, Best Practices in e-learning newsletter, a paper on Success in e-Learning: It's about Reliance and Integration, which talks about seven areas that need to be considered and integrated when developing a successful e-learning strategy: technologies, support staff, curriculum/subject matter, learners/succcess, institutions, society/culture, teachers/facilitators.