Feb 24
Blogs, Echo Chambers and the Art of Blogging Conversations
Darren Rowse has written a really good piece on How to add to blogging conversations… and eliminate the echo chamber, containing eleven great suggestions for enriching the conversational – as opposed to soap-box diatribes and hyperlinkomania.
Here’s how he finishes:
“Bloggers have always had their egos – but one of the things I first loved about blogging was the way that there was a ‘vibe’ of generosity, giving, sharing and community. At times I still see this as a feature of the blogosphere – but on other occasions I see competitiveness rising it’s head. We quite often talk as bloggers about ideas like ‘open source’, ‘collaboration’ and everyone having a voice – but when it comes to the crunch we often do what’s in our own best interests at the expense of others.”
Thanks Beverly.
Feb 23
What Makes Social Tagging Work
Tim over at LibraryThing has writen an excellent analysis of what makes social tagging work, by comparing the strategies used by Amazon and LibraryThing. His primary observations are that social tagging works when:
*taggers need to remember “their” stuff
*tagged content collections are associated with people (this enables what I call rich serendipity)
*you get sufficient scale in both tags and taggers to get meaningful tag clouds associated with content
Tim is mainly thinking about tagging in an ecommerce context, but the same factors will also apply in an enterprise environment. I keep encountering social tagging advocates who are In the first headrush of enthusiasm for a new fad, and don’t recognise that a corporate intranet environment is not the same in openness, scale, diversity and transactional support as the internet. They are different beasts, and the things that make social tagging work on the internt are not necessarily present inside the corporate environment. If those factors of scale, diversity and personal findability motivation are present or can be designed into the environment, then maybe it will work.
One thing Tim has underplayed in his analysis is that LibraryThing employs social tagging as its primary findability aid after author and title, whereas Amazon has much richer findability support, using a wide range of methods.
Feb 22
Going over to the Mac Side
If anybody has noticed an increased posting frequency over the past few days (anybody?), the photo below should explain all… life has become so much easier all of a sudden! Now I understand Kathy Sierra’s diagrams about user control and ease of use in all their eloquent fullness…. bet she uses a Mac too…
[Thanks Maish for the photo]
Feb 22
How to Use Enterprise Wikis - Patterns and Anti-Patterns
Atlassian is a company that sells an enterprise wiki called Confluence. They obviously believe in their product, and in the principle behind wikis – they’ve set up an open wiki community to share “patterns” and “anti-patterns” and there’s some really nice stuff there – brief outlines of different approaches to setting up wikis successfully (patterns), and approaches that seem to hinder takeup and participation (anti-patterns). There are also “people” patterns and anti-patterns, such as wiki-gnomes (pattern) and wiki-trolls (anti-pattern) – all in all a wonderful resource for anyone considering setting up internal wikis to foster greater collaboration. One of the commenters on the site refers to the barn-raising tradition in the rural US, where neighbours gather from miles around to help someone raise a new barn for their farm. You help on my barn, I’ll help on yours, and it’s all wonderfully practical. Thanks to Emanuele for this reference.
Feb 22
We are All Different
I had to laugh at this comment today on one of the best, most dynamic and comprehensive KM sites I know (no, not Green Chameleon)... “I think this website is a bit boring. I mean ther’s no games and the video doesn’t even work!!! What a joke!!!”
It is good to be reminded sometimes that not everybody belongs to the Episcopal Church of KM, that things “suck” and that games are important…
Feb 21
Dr David Vaine on Knowledge Outsourcing
Our Advisory Board member Dr David Vaine of Apparently KM PLC has kindly agreed to be interviewed again for Green Chameleon. In this three part broadcast he outlines his company’s new approach to knowledge outsourcing, and explains why it will become a viable alternative to traditional knowledge management programmes.
In part two of his interview, Dr Vaine describes his “people-oriented” approach to identifying knowledge outsourcing opportunities, using a SQUAT Analysis.
In the third and final part of this interview, Dr Vaine outlines his company’s unique approach to Six Stigma as a quality priented approach to identifying knowledge outsourcing opportunities.
Dr Vaine would like to acknowledge suggestions and ideas contributed by Graham Durant-Law and David Snowden in developing Apparently KM’s knowledge outsourcing approach. The views expressed in this video interview are those of Apparently KM, and Green Chameleon will not be held responsible for any damage, injury or loss arising from following the suggestions outlined therein.
Feb 18
Managing Know How - Mathematically
Jack Vinson critiques this article on Managing Know-How from Harvard, using an economic model to “prove” a series of propositions about the management of best practices. While the article is interesting, it draws some odd conclusions (such as, recording best practices is more useful than failures, which must surely depend on the impact and propensity of failures) Jack points to a fundamental flaw:
“The model makes assumptions about best practices that make many people criticize the whole idea of managing and recording best practices – that best practices are clear representations of what people should do in a given situation. It also has a very idealistic view of how people use best practices and how best practices are typically recorded in corporate history. The model simplifies a best practice to a strict action-payoff pair without adding all the nuance that is at the core of the value behind best practice and lessons learned literature.”
Feb 17
Welcome to Sustainable Blogging, Kim!
Our good friend Kim Sbarcea has finally started blogging, and seems to be building up a nice rhythm over the past week, blogging on the theme of sustainabilty and KM (on which she keynoted at our recent KM Singapore conference). There’s even a video clip of Kim speaking on the topic by video-reporter David Gurteen, caught on the fringes of that conference. Welcome Kim!
Feb 17
Why We Need to Talk to Each Other
We’ve been having problems with our hosting service provider the past couple of weeks. Not on our public website thank heavens, but on our private collaboration spaces serving our clients. The whole thing is powered by an application called Expression Engine, and for our clients to be able to login and receive notifications of new updates, the application talks to our service provider’s SMTP server – or tries to.
Last week, all on different days, the notifications stopped working, the login page stopped working, and my permissions to post to specific pages got blocked. And this was happening to our clients too. Each time, I’d call Maish Nichani, our master web architect, and each time he’d call the service provider and get them to fix the problem by changing the settings on the server. Then a day or two later the same problem, or a different one would creep back in.
Feb 16
The Insignificance of KM Projects
A nice office lunch recently with Patrick and Edgar suddenly slipped into “play acting” when the two of them began their antics, pretending to be the tough guy out to pick a fight, in jest of course. I got entangled in the conversation and ended up sharing a little confrontation I had with my sibling when I was much, much younger. 
