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Thursday, October 11, 2001 |
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Bird on a Wire Weblog map. This could be really great if a little more automation was added. Very nice.
Perhaps this is a job for Tim Bray at maps.net. A simple drill down visual would be great (much more useful than the current dmoz crud).
7:04:02 PM 
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Has anyone looked at the open directory lately? Absolutely crap. Might as well go away. I now understand why Yahoo didn't want to do this. Die open directory, die. Go the way of the .coms your time is past....
5:08:01 PM
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CNN. Sesame Street set to launch raids on Islamic Fundamentalists. This is as funny as the picture!!
"Sesame Street has always stood for mutual respect and understanding. We're outraged that our characters would be used in this unfortunate and distasteful manner. This is not humorous," Sesame Workshop producers said. "The people responsible for this should be ashamed of themselves. We are exploring all legal options to stop this abuse and any similar abuses in the future."
4:34:12 PM
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Another K-Logs Post.
One thing we take for granted in the Weblog community is automatic time-organization. It is perhaps the least understood but most powerful feature of a K-Log and critical for knowledge management.
When you post to a K-Log, it is time-stamped. K-Logs automatically group time-stamped posts by day. These groups of posts form the basis of an archive. Archives can either be simple lists of dates or more complex calendars that link to groupings of daily posts. Dave over at Scripting.com has an browsable archive that dates back to April 1997: http://scriptingnewsarchive.userland.com/1997/04/30 For extensive archives the calendar in combination with search seems to be the only solution. Simple lists breakdown after more than a few days.
Here are a some insights I have developed in my thinking about time-organization:
1) Time organization is a natural organizational method. It doesn't take any special training to understand and implement (particularly if it is automated as it is in a K-Log). We can all agree on the categories (day, month, year, hour, minute, second). It also serves as a method for establishing interop for group projects.
2) New combinations. My time-stamped posts can combine with yours to produce a single document or be routed to more complex databases for inclusion in their tools via standard protocols. In that sense, the K-Log can form the basis of a content router.
3) By grouping posts over time, a narrative can be established. This narrative forms the basis of a story that provides critical contextual information necessary to group understanding of what is going on at an individual or group level.
4) Time organization can also be extended to other documents and file types to increase productivity. Weblogs are increasingly omnivorous. You can post anything to them: e-mails, links, office documents, MP3 files, video files, pictures, and simple written text (the best part is that you can even annotate those files to provide context). Most people group documents and files via topic-based directories. While this has its advantages, it doesn't provide critical information on how you as and individual used those resources, when you used them, and why you used them. This type of contextual time-based understanding is critical to the understanding of co-workers and readers that are trying to synchronize their workflow with yours.
5) A procedural archive. A Weblog can be a powerful tool for process improvement by looking at the archive of the members contributions either on personal K-Logs or on a group K-Log, it is possible to determine what went wrong with a process and how it can be improved.
In my view, all of these items combine to create a one of a kind group organizational tool. A tool that allows me to easily gather all of the digital detritus (stuff) I accumulate on a daily basis and put it into a context that is easily understood by co-workers. My co-workers can do the same for me. That ability to synchronize thinking, is a critical part of knowledge worker productivity.
3:22:05 PM
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I watched Charlie Rose yesterday, who always gives a good interview. Bob Simon, from CBS, was his guest. He had an interesting point of view he called: the inverse aid relationship (note: this plays into the view of the US as the world's Microsoft).
The inverse aid relationship is simple. The more involved we are with a muslim country, the more they hate us. The opposite is true. The less we are involved in a muslim country the more they like us.
For example, we give tremendous amounts of aid to Egypt. The same is true for Saudi Arabia. Both countries are terrible repressive dicatatorships of the worst sort. We are seen to be on the side of the dictator.
In contrast, Bob Simon says, Americans are welcomed in Iran and Syria. They don't see us as obstacles to their progress. They are genuinely intrigued by Americans and our culture and want to learn more. We aren't see it as a threat. Hmmm. Very interesting.
11:15:10 AM
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The Economist. A review of airpower in Afghanistan. The decisive role of airpower in Afghanistan won't be in its ability to strategic targets. Afghanistan doesn't have any. Airpower will be best used as a way to find and destroy ground troops exposed on barren Afghani soil. The Northern Alliance, much to Pakistan's chagrin, will use this air support to drive to Kabul in the next month. Infrared and nightvision will allow our troops to target and destroy Afghani troop concentrations around the clock. Given the lack of air defense (no one believes the Stingers we gave them in the eighties still work), expect to see lots of advanced helicopters used. IF the US is very aggressive it will use fuel-air explosives to target troops dug into tunnels.
Note: Here is a graphic depicting how the tunnel system in Afghanistan was used by the Afghanis. Some of these tunnels date back to Alexander the Great in 300 BC. Fuel-air explosive works to create an "over-pressure" that can blow through bunker doors and kill dug in soldiers. It's kinda ugly, but it works, and is much safer than going into a tunnel ala Forrest Gump.
10:31:37 AM
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K-Logs. 52 members and growing. Here is a post I made to the K-Logs group yesterday about categories:
UserLand just turned on categories for my Radio UserLand site. I think it fairly interesting to see them in action, so bear with me on this.
Here is my Radio Weblogs home site:
Here is my category page:
-or-
Here is a link to a specific category:
As you can see there are 5 categories. I picked topics, but I don't think that is the best way to use categories, but they will serve as good examples. Click on one of the categories.
Each link goes to a complete Weblog devoted only to content in that category. Now, if I used categories to define content based on user types rather than topics, there would be a complete Weblog for each user type. I am probably going to change mine to:
Public
UserLand
K-Logs
That way I have a Weblog for each of my readers. It would work even better if both my home site and my UserLand category site were password protected. That way I could post all of my personal work product to the home site for my use alone. Those things I post to UserLand would be restricted to UserLand employees. Everything else would go in the public folders: public and K-Logs.
Categories work great with XML RSS feeds. With categories you have the option of clicking on the orange xml button on the lower right hand side of a category specific Weblog. That will give you a URL you can put into your subscription manager in Radio or any RSS news client to get a headline news feed from a category specific Weblog. Cool.
Categories would also work with "promoted" e-mail. I could start a category devoted to workgroup or company e-mail. Set a rule to forward it to my Weblog and publish it to its own category specific Weblog. That way there would be a Web archive of the workgroup's e-mail automatically sorted by day/month/year in a readable Weblog format.
Any other insights on how to use categories?
9:20:04 AM
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CBS. Yahoo continues to lose money. Expect deep job cuts this quarter. My estimate is that Yahoo will lay-off in excess of 1,000 people. What went wrong at Yahoo? Three things:
1) It failed to buy control of last mile bandwidth. Without control of a broadband cable connection to the home, Yahoo is at the mercy of AOL, Microsoft, and the regional Bells. Last mile bandwidth is virtually recession proof and can provide high quality cash flow.
2) It failed to convert its services to desktop software. Yahoo builds great software. However, all it has on my desktop is a browser toolbar and Yahoo messenger. That isn't enough to control user experiences. It needs to build a fully functional client. With Semel at the helm, this is unlikely to change.
3) It abdicated search to Google. Without last mile bandwidth or desktop software, Yahoo needs to be the center of all things search. It isn't. Its core directory is increasingly shallow and nonresponsive. An open directory based on Yahoo's categorization scheme was the solution, but the company failed to follow that trend. Google is now the center of search. Its services are clean and easy to use. Its advertising mechanism is far superior to Yahoo's.
8:37:10 AM
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© Copyright 2004 John Robb.
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