|
 |
Wednesday, October 17, 2001 |
 >>>>
More Sharonisms. I am starting to think this guy is insane.
""He sparked controversy in July for referring to Palestinians working and living illegally in Israel as ``lice'' and a ``cancer.'' Of Israel's 6.5 million citizens, more than 1 million are Arabs. In addition, Zeevi said about 180,000 Palestinians were living in Israel illegally.""
7:02:44 PM 
|
|
>>>>
Dave is up for the Wired Rave awards: for technology renegade. There isn't a guy in the world that deserves it more. Nuff said.
Look at this list and decide yourself:
6:20:26 PM
|
|
>>>>
Fortune: Videoconferences don't take the place of business travel. More support for K-Logs:
""Survey after survey affirms that the overwhelming majority of managers consider "meetings" to be their biggest waste of time. What is videoconferencing but high tech's initiative to re-create management's biggest time waster in cyberspace?
Videoconferencing's most persistent flaw is that it literally focuses on the wrong part of the meeting. In fact, research in both industry and academia reveals that virtual meetings work best when the topic of discussion--the schedule, the budget, the prototype--is displayed onscreen instead of fidgeting faces""
Why not a live outline with supporting material posted to a group K-Log? IF people only knew how easy it was to publish and capture information in a live Web 'document' they would be using it every day.
4:10:41 PM
|
|
>>>>>
Transaction costs, flat firms, and K-Logs. There is a concept in economics called transaction costs. These costs are mainly associated with information discovery (I don't know what is in your head, and you don't know what is in mine). The impact of transaction costs on corporate structure was developed by the economist Ronald Coase in 1937 (see a synopsis of his book: The Nature of the Firm).
Transaction costs specifically relate to corporate structure when it comes to hiring and bargaining for employees and the enforcement of employee contracts. Firms are basically structures that minimize these transaction costs. For example: it costs a lot less to hire, bargain with, and manage an employee over the long term rather than hire employees in an ad-hoc manner for short periods of time. Generally, in Coase's theory, the main role of corporate management is to enforce employee contracts.
The upshot of this theory, and why it applies to K-Logs, is that a firm that can reduce information transfer costs is very flat. Good information transfer allows a company to self organize with a high degree of transparency. People can see what everyone else is doing. Management can easily see who is doing the right thing and who isn't. Directives from management are easily distributed and enforced.
Right now, information within an enterprise isn't transparent. It's locked in information silos: e-mail inboxes, desktop directories of office docs, and in the minds of employees. This information asymmetry makes internal coordination and oversight tricky, soft, and prone to error, which leads to the following relationship: current tools = lots of management oversight = high transaction costs.
K-Logs can change that. By having employees post their status, needs, points of view, resources, success stories, and other info to a personal corporate Weblog transaction costs go down. How low? Depends on the quality of the posts and the amount of usage the system gets. Think flat. Think K-Logs.
1:04:28 PM
|
|
>>>>
NYT. McKinsey study finds that recent US productivity growth was driven by only 6 of 59 sectors of the US economy. Computer productivity rose from 45% to 66% a year. Wow. This makes the point I made yesterday about knowledge worker productivity on the K-Logs group: Most knowledge workers are not productive. It also points to a big reason that we are at risk of a major downturn, if not depression in our economy.
During the last depression, a big underllying driver (not mentioned by economists I have read) was the fact that a major portion of the people in the economy were employed in sectors resistant to mechanization and machine automation (like farming). While things were booming in the twenties due to productivity growth in mechanized industries, the nonmechanized portion failed to innovate. Over time, this lack of innovation proved to be a sufficient level of drag to sink the economy into a depression. It took over ten years of depression economics to shift people out of these lagging industries and implement necessary mechanization.
The same situation is in place today with computer automation. Fully 70% of our economy in 53 sectors currently does not fully embrace computer automation. The drag that these industries are producing is pulling us into a depression cycle where huge numbers of people will be reallocated and computer automation finally put into place. Will it take us ten years this time? I hope not.
9:40:13 AM
|
|
>>>>
NYT. Anthrax sent to Senate found to be in potent form (military grade). So much for all the pundits saying that it is too difficult to do. The major problem with biowarfare is that it is possible to build bioweapons with a small lab. It doesn't take many people or much in resources to do. The biggest barrier is knowledge, which isn't a real barrier at all. Over time, advances in nanotech and biotech combined with an exponential increase in computing power available to an individual will make this world a very dangerous place. A place where a lack of knowledge of technology is the only barrier to its use as a weapon.
""We were told it was a very strong form of anthrax, a very potent form of anthrax which clearly was produced by someone who knew what he or she was doing," Mr. Daschle said after a briefing for senators by the F.B.I. and an Army epidemiologist. He said the sample that had been mailed to him "had a fairly significant degree of concentration of spores.""
9:10:04 AM
|
|
>>>>
K-Logs and e-mail integration. K-Logs 80 members and still growing.
K-Logs and e-mail integration. What does e-mail integration with K-Logs mean? Here are some thoughts on how e-mail would work as a:
1) K-Log authoring tool. E-mail can be used to publish to a K-Log. E-mail systems typically have spell checkers (most K-Log publishing tools do not) and the ability to format HTML through a simple point and click interface. It also has nearly ubiquitous (including PDAs and phones) availability. The downside is that it doesn't have the full feature functionality available in a K-Log publishing system: editing and deleting of posts, posting annotated news, the ability to rearrange posts, categorization, etc. At best e-mail K-Log authoring is merely an ad-hoc publishing extension for mobile K-Loggers or the extension of K-Log authoring to people that don't have a need for a fully functional K-Log tool on their desktop.
2) Source of content for K-Logs. E-mail often contains great conversations and content that can gain value through use in a K-Log. The challenge is to get it to the K-Log tool so that it can be organized and published. Three options exist: a) forward the e-mail by hand, b) manually build rules that forward specific e-mails, or c) use automated systems that generate rules that forward related conent (I haven't seen many of these systems even though they are needed -- if anyone knows of one send me a note). Once published in a K-Log, e-mail conversations and content become part of a K-Log knowledge network. Anyone with a browser can utilize these resources. Also, this content can now be keyword searched by workgroup members, categorized and routed to specific user groups through a K-Log post, and organized via an K-Log outliner.
3) Mechanism for K-Log alerts or to initiate K-Log workflow. E-mail, as well as instant messaging, can prompt subscribers to visit newly posted content or participate in K-Log workflow. Since most e-mail systems now support HTML and K-Logs are at core a dynamic content management system with a database, it is possible for individuals to send HTML e-mails that initiate interaction with polls, surveys, ratings, forms (that populates a table or interactive database), image libraries (and resource directories of all sorts), etc that run as K-Log tools. Within a permissive environment, like a corporate or university LAN, all two-way interaction (data entry) can be done directly with a desktop K-Log client directly via HTTP. In a non-permissive environment with firewalls, the recipient should be able to interact locally with their K-Log client software and relay data to the publisher via the K-Log cloud or P2P. Regardless of the mechanism, two-way interaction with a K-Log tools, initiated by e-mail, will be a useful addition to K-Logging.
For example: Bill in engineering wants to poll the marketing department about a new product feature he is developing. He can author a poll in his K-Log, send a snazzy HTML e-mail invitation to the marketing department to participate and watch the results roll in. He then has the option of adding the results of this poll to an outliner driven resource directory and/or posting it to his Weblog with annotation and categorization. His workgroup will get the poll results sent to them as an RSS news feed which then allows them to add an annotation and post it to their Weblog. All results and workflow are archived on the Intranet in the K-Logs of the team members for later reuse.
8:55:09 AM
|
|
© Copyright 2004 John Robb.
|
|
|
