April 2007 Archives

Will the search engines highligh pages that have been tagged with a term that doesn't otherwise appear on the page?

One of my KM2 students has pointed to FlickrBlockrs a great mechanism to "block" your images from appearing on Flickr.

Forrester's recent report, Social Technographics, has generated some discussion on the web. My first impression is that this may be a new way to think about the "1% Rule" of participation.

I heard about the Map Your Name "game" from Ton Tijlstra. A group of Portugese students think they can find out the "exact number" of internet users within a month via a viral campaign.

Lee Lefever has posted video in which he explains "what is RSS" with stick figures and an entertaining style. The short form: RSS helps you turn around the arrows.

I picked up the audiobook version of Malcolm Gladwell's Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. It's interesting to "read" this book after seeing all the buzz about the book when it first came out.

One of my students wrote a curious piece last week on "Incongruent Arithmetic." Getting divorced is an example of addition by subtraction. And continuing through the article had me thinking that this really makes sense.

Dan Keldsen on his BizTechTalk podcast talked to Raul Valdes-Perez of Vivisimo, an enterprise search provider, in Enterprise Search Grows Up.

Brandon Wirtz is the Greatest Living American. At least that's what he hopes to achieve.

This Duncan Watts article has been cited by a number of people in my reading circle. The thing that jumped out to me was the comment about how people don't make decisions independently.

Infoluenza is a problem for many of us in the age of everything online. Here are a some analgesics for the affliction.

A participant on the ACT-KM mailing list dug up a definition of "services" from The Economist: Products of economic activity that you can’t drop on your foot.

If you can be in Amsterdam in mid-May, have a look at BlogWalk Eleven for May 18th 2007 in Amsterdam. The focus is "digital Bohemiens."

The US Air Force must be pleased with the improved performance generated by Critical Chain Project Management. The Hill Air Force Base has announced their performance improvements as a result of CCPM and Lean.

Ross Dawson has a piece on the state of social networking software for the enterprise, and George Siemens posts a follow-up pair of comments. The idea of connecting people across social ties has a lot of value for the corporation.

A random find for Friday, thanks to Dennis D. McDonald. Link to a video of "leaping shampoo" and some thoughts about why it happens.

My students were given a crash course in what blogs are about by reading a dozen KM-related blogs. Now they've set up their own blogs and have been asked to reflect what they think at this point. Here's a summary.

In describing RSS and aggregation to my students, I came up with a useful metaphor of streams. Feel free to borrow and adapt this.

One of my readers, Andrew Mitchell, was inspired by my "Making sense of D-I-K-W" that he has come up with his own model for the data-information-knowledge component.

Sharon Richardson has two pieces on taxonomy recently. My take: Taxonomy fails when the design does not reflect the use. Taxonomy fails because it's too easy to get too complex and the tools see things too rigidly.

Since one of the important strategies around Personal Knowledge Management is the Covey-inspired idea of Sharpening the Saw, I see that my PKM has changed a bit since I last described it. Not surprising.

As with the past instances of my knowledge management class at Northwestern, I asked the students to reflect on their own "personal knowledge management" practices.

Art Murray has an interesting piece in the April 2007 KM World on "Breaking free of old mindsets."

Mike Gotta makes an interesting find in a recent item. Specifically, I was pleased to see the link between asking employees to volunteer information. If employee morale is low, the quality of that volunteered information is likely to be quite low.

Dan Keldsen has a podcast interview with the current World Mind Mapping Champion, Phil Chambers. Interesting.

I'm speaking at a workshop in June that brings together experts from knowledge management, organizational development (OD) and human performance technology (more on the workshop later). In part of the promotional setup, the organizers want to know about these disciplines.

Stock divident reinvestment plans are called DRIP's. What do you do with the time you save using Covey or Getting Things Done or your home grown methodology? Do you have a Time Reinvestment Plan?

Dave Swanner has a nice piece on Why It's So Hard to Move Cases at the Trial Lawyer Resource Center. I really like his application of the classic dice game to the work he does in his own office to show the impact of everyday task variation to a sequence of events.