A software TESARAC

test post

Demos, a publisher who i have read more than a couple of books is organizing Glasgow 2020.
<blockquote>Glasgow 2020 is the non-institutional story of Glasgow 92s future - a project to
collect-together the imagination of the city through workshops, competition=
s,
events and creative-projects. </blockquote>
I'll be there - should be interesting to see how others see the future. Haven't seen a mention of technology though - seems to be concentrating on thearts ("poets, writers...") which is odd considering the future will largely be about technology - off course combined with these other areas.

I really have to add this post as a big thankyou to my wife. I had managed to write a stored procedure where a particular part of it is killing the CPU on the machine i host the site on. The other people using the server weren't next happy.

Unfortunately where i am just now is behind a firewall so i was unable to connect to the server to make the SQL update to fix the problem. This is where my wife saved me. She successfully managed to update the SQL Server 2000 stored procedure (with some telephone support) and the problem is now fixed.

Amazing what you can do when you put your mind to it!

steven

Have a look at http://taghop.com

and follow the blog over at http://taghop.blogspot.com/

Will be interesting to see where this one goes....

steven.

Was thinking about Flickr today. Then SmartMobs. Then something came to me. Maybe something new.

I will be working on it over the weekend and hope to have something to show you next week.

I hvae to admit, it's not business focused (well at least not predominantly) and targets the same kind of Flickr folks, so if you're one of them tell me and i'll tell you when something is ready to try.

Links to conversations on tags - more to come...

Feeding Yahoo! Term Extraction Service results into tags
Automated Tag Creation
Technorati launches Related Tags

Accounced

BLOG NOMINEES
Boing Boing
http://www.boingboing.net
Flickr
http://www.flickr.com
hicksdesign
http://www.hicksdesign.co.uk/jour...
The Snowsuit Effort
http://snowsuit.net
WorldChanging
http://www.worldchanging.com

SOCIAL NETWORKING NOMINEES
43 Things The Robot Co-op
http://43things.com
AOL BlackVoices America Online, Inc.
http://www.aolblackvoices.com
BookCrossing.com - Read and Release! BookCrossing.com
http://www.bookcrossing.com/
glimpse.com - gay and lesbian personals MatchNet plc
http://www.glimpse.com
MySpace.com MySpace.com
http://www.myspace.com

Hmm, no linkedin, zerdegree or other's i'd have expected to see....

You may have noticed i now have a calander for events here in Scotland on the right.

EventDB has got some good backers so one to keep an eye on.

I like the idea - just wonder whether they could extend it to reminders and such. This isn't really a physical event as such, but i sure want it to be in my calander. Early beta, but would like:

• better "add event" button - or more obvious
• Edit my events (i.e. change location from US to Scotland!)
• Sync with Outlook - very, very, very easily!
• Few more, but just starting using it...

Have any Scottish Events? Then tell me and we can avoid 8001 calanders of the same thing.

Siderean
"Seamark lets users pinpoint information fast and in the right context with just a few mouse clicks. You can always be confident that information is accurate, current and complete. In addition, users can easily set up alerts that let them know when important information has changed. "

Endeca
"Information Discovery"

Trumba
"The community community"

WikiWikiWeb or WardsWiki or Wiki
"The ideas of 'Wiki' may seem strange at first, but dive in and explore its links. 'Wiki' is a composition system; it's a discussion medium; it's a repository; it's a mail system; it's a tool for collaboration. Really, we don't know quite what it is, but it's a fun way of communicating asynchronously across the network."

HaloScan
"provides a free, easy to use commenting and trackback system for weblogs and websites, allowing visitors to leave instant feedback. By copying and pasting just two lines of code into your site, you will enable your visitors to easily leave their feedback, opinion or a comment on the subject at hand."

NewsGator
"Aggregated News Feeds"

Feedster
"Search the Blogosphere"

Technorati
"Technorati is a real-time search engine that keeps track of what is going on in the blogosphere — the world of weblogs."

EVDB
"the Events and Venues Database"

Nice ideas in this one. Combines features of blogs with that of calendaring - i.e. a structured blog. Think this may get more popular! Hope so ;)

del.icio.us - social bookmarks
"del.icio.us is a social bookmarks manager. It allows you to easily add web pages you like to your personal collection of links, to categorize those sites with keywords, and to share your collection not only among your own browsers and machines, but also with others."

wikipes
"Wikipes is a community-contributed recipe database. In other words, we allow anyone to contribute recipes. Our feeling is that this will create a more diverse collection of unique and delicious recipes and in the long run you’ll be able to choose from a vast archive of drinks, appetizers, main dishes, desserts; the possibilities are endless! "

Now this is a cracking idea! Not that they need any advice on boiling water or "making" toast so i can't help. I'll be following this one...

Question is.. is it a better concept that http://www.recipezaar.com/ - "the World's Smartest Cookbook & Cooking Community"?? If your view on a recipe differs from someone elses how is this handled? Also needs rating i'd say!

Wikipedia
"the free-content encyclopedia"

Saw an overview of this :
Ontology is Overrated: Links, Tags, and Post-hoc Metadata

I like ontologys - everything has a meaning and you can use it anywhere, from anywhere. Tie it to profile though.. users don't want to make too many choices!

Clay is apparently trying to get an transcript up. I've asked if there is an audio version - how i miss technetcast.com!

here n.b. please only click if you are UNDER 13 years of age - otherwise it makes no sense!

2 years old... wonder what to expect by the time hes my age...

OK, so i've been converted. I am interested in whether i actually use this.

My brand new Flickr account is over at http://www.flickr.com/photos/46873523@N00/

Oh, Flickr community ideas

Looked into ZoomInfo as pointed at by Ross Mayfield. A search on "Steven Livingstone" scared the crap out of me.... just wander how long it will be before we get the "Steven Livingstone" community on the back of this stuff.

Well, there is apparently 3 of me, which is probably more worrying. At least it never called me "steve", "stevie", "stephen", "george" and the other curious variations my name usually attracts. Still for some people i tried it worked great - even giving details on positions help, company affiliations and so on. Some data must be fed from somewhere to be so accurate.

Some of this may be useful to TESARAC...

Innovation with 'lightweight tools' for collaboration at Google
"describes how Google is using simple, Web-based collaboration tools to drive innovation among communities of practice. Google's product development team uses collaborative Web pages to enable team members to quickly and easily post reports, updates and other snippets of pertinent project information to a common knowledge base."

Google's Exponential Returns
"There is more to Google than useful, simple and powerful products. In the end there will be less Harvard business school cases about its product than its organization. At Etech, first employee Craig Silverstein discussed Google's product development process and the systems that support it. What's different is the use of smaller organizational units (groups of 3 on average) supported by lightweight inter-group communication with a culture of sharing."

Google eats own Pyra dog food
"Weblog designed to foster internal communication"

Evan Williams - Pyra Labs Founder
"Co-founded and CEO'ed Pyra Labs, the creators of Blogger, in 1999, before coming to Google (with Blogger) in 2003. "

Craig Silverstein
"Craig is Director of Technology at Google"

COMMUNITY-SHARED WEB PAGES
"The current state of the web is strongly biased towards reading previously authored documents. Changes and additions to Web pages are solely the purview of the original author. Sparrow Web promotes a different genre of web page: the community-shared page. Like any web page, a community-shared page is originally crafted by a single author, who defines the initial content and scope of the document. But unlike other web pages, a community-shared page can be modified or added to by any interested contributor, and the barriers for doing so are lessened by allowing changes to be made in a lightweight manner. Community-shared pages increase the collaborative capability of the web. "

Innovation with "lightweight tools" for collaboration at Google

Why New Ideas are Both Disruptive and Necessary
"Management consultant Laurence Prusak on Idea Practitioners, organizational fads, and where to look for new ideas (surprise! It's not on the Net)."

Communities, the sweet spot of radical business innovation
"Indeed, many successful companies are finding that relinquishing some control — specifically by creating the conditions that enable employees to self-organize in virtual communities — is an effective strategy for responding to market pressures."

"Aren't communities just greatly enhanced projects?"
"Working with a client organization on the design of a constellation of virtual communities, we run into the question of "what kind of communities."

Etienne Wenger
"I am an independent thinker, researcher, consultant, author, and speaker. I am mostly known for my work on communities of practice, though I consider myself a social learning theorist more generally."

http://www.cpsquare.org/
"...the community of practice on communities of practice. "

Smarter, Simpler Social
"An introduction to online social software methodology"

CustomerVision 3.0 Enhances Business Solutions with Enterprise Wiki Technology
"CustomerVision Delivers Next Generation Business Solutions for Sales, Training, Application Support and Business Collaboration. "

JotSpot Unveils New Wiki Appliance for Enterprise Workgroups
"PALO ALTO, Calif., March 21 /PRNewswire/ -- JotSpot, the first application wiki company, today announced "JotBox," a new enterprise appliance that offers all of the features of a JotSpot wiki, but resides behind a corporate firewall. The JotBox is designed to easily plug into existing corporate networks, offering a simple, no-hassle solution for enterprise workgroup needs. The appliance is available today in limited quantities."

Wiki Providers Eye the Enterprise
"The two leading wiki providers are retooling their services in an attempt to attract larger enterprises to using the still-emerging form of online collaboration. "

Year of the enterprise Wiki
"Lightweight Web collaboration gets down to business"

Social Software and the Politics of Groups from Clay Shirky
"Social software, software that supports group communications, includes everything from the simple CC: line in email to vast 3D game worlds like EverQuest, and it can be as undirected as a chat room, or as task-oriented as a wiki (a collaborative workspace). Because there are so many patterns of group interaction, social software is a much larger category than things like groupware or online communities -- though it includes those things, not all group communication is business-focused or communal. One of the few commonalities in this big category is that social software is unique to the internet in a way that software for broadcast or personal communications are not. "

Workspace: PC Forum Eventspace

IntroNetworks
"Gated communities for people who share interests"

LudiCorp
The folks behind Flickr

Peer-Directed Projects Center

Jerry Yang On Buying Flickr

by Clay Shirky...

Politics of Groups
Grid Computing
Social Groups
Micropayments
Social File Sharing
Semantic Syllogisms
Situated Software
Nomic World
Flaming and the Design of Social Software

Combat Over Collaboration"Microsoft and IBM are fighting to control the info-sharing software market"

Nokia's Upcoming Launch of Mobile Social Networking
“This research project considered how a mobile phone could be used to augment face-to-face conversation. How can one express some public information about yourself to others? What if you could retrieve some information about your shared social network?”

Younghee Jung and Per Persson gave an interesting lecture

Open Hyperdocument System
"The OHS Project is developing open source tools for collaborative knowledge management, building on XML and other open standards as well as Doug Engelbart's groundbreaking NLS/Augment system. It is being designed to manage and create knowledge across the Internet, allowing users to package and share information for collaborative work. A scalable system meant for true international use, the OHS is being designed so that all groups and nationalities can build on top of its architecture. "

Bootstrap Institute
"The Bootstrap Institute was conceived by Dr. Douglas C. Engelbart to further his lifelong career goal of boosting individual and organizational ability to better address problems that are complex and urgent"

Couple of important articles for TESARAC that discuss the long tail of software.

Joe Kraus (excite co-founder)
http://longtail.typepad.com/the_long_tail/2005/03/the_long_tail_o.html

Chris Anderson (Wired Chief Editor)
http://bnoopy.typepad.com/bnoopy/2005/03/the_long_tail_o.html

"Jambo is peer-to-peer personal area matching technology, designed to let people directly network face-to-face with WiFi. Jambo uses PDAs, laptops, and smartphones, connecting them without intermediaries. You don't even need to be on the Internet to use it. It's easy. You just need Jambo, a mobile device and a desire to meet someone nearby. "

Link : Jambo Networks

Reminds me of when i read SmartMobs a while back. I love all this stuff - i am contstantly thinking about how businesses could use this kind of technology.

So I'm thinking conferences. Imagine being able to network with people in a lecture and match up with partners with "have" and "want". "Have Quantum Physics" - "Want Fourier Analysis" - would have got me out of a hole!

Things now come back to my age old question though. What would make someone pay for this?
In fact - would *I* pay for this and if so what for. Would I have to change something about me in order for it to be useful - in which can it will probably got next to my XBox and non-achoholic beer archives.

I really can see that it could be useful - i just can't see *how* it would be something i really can't do without.

... however.... let's take a step into the enterprise. I have LOTS of wants in there... someone to advice me on certain aspects of the business i am trying to create. Someone else willing to try it. Someone else still who may help extend it.

The main problem i have with a lot of these link-up technologies is how you know you *want* to be linked up. Most of the time you already know the people you want the information from - if you don't then you ask someone. In a project this is particularly true. What gets dynamically linked up in this situation?? However, could this cross projects - say project A needs someone to help this with an aspect of Project B.

As someone earlier this week said - there are lots of great technology, but very few make any money. I'd love to hear from anyone who has bought from Jambo and how they are benefiting.

Very interesting. If you want to know about TESARAC have a read...

"Think back to a conversation you had months ago with someone you know well enough to trust, but with whom you haven’t spoken since. Chances are you’ll remember only vague outlines of the exchange. Call the person and raise the same subject again, though, and more likely than not, the two of you will find yourselves picking up where you left off, remembering the details of significance and expanding into new areas."

Read Quantum Theory of Trust

Extracts from "A WEBLOG-BASED CONTENT ARCHITECTURE FOR BUSINESS" by Dave Pollard.

• Rather than using a document submission process or enabling automated knowledge harvesting, as occurs in many organizations today, the individual would simply post to his or her personal weblog all of the documents that would normally be placed in the individual's filing cabinet or saved to the My Documents or Sent E-mails folder.
• An enterprise-wide interface would be developed to index and publish each individual's posts to the company's Intranet. This interface would allow posting of entire documents, or just document titles or links, and would allow the user to specify whether each post could be viewed by anyone in the company, or selected communities only, or (for confidential information) no one at all.
• The Intranet would then archive all posts by account, project and/or subject, using the enterprise's taxonomy or an automated taxonomization tool. Newsfeeds and articles purchased from external vendors could be similarly archived.
• The individual employee would be able to extract knowledge from the Intranet using a variety of tools:
  By subject, using a browsable table of contents or catalogue
  By keyword, using a search engine
  By subscription to any additions to documents on a particular account, project or
  subject
  By subscription to any additions to another person's weblog
  By subscription to any additions in a specific category on the weblog of any person in a
  specified community.
• The knowledge culture change program of the company could be simplied to "Publish Your Filing Cabinet".

• The employee would author or amend documents, e-mails etc. using an HTML-capable text/document processor (most commercial weblog tools include one, and allow simple posting from most other processors).
• Rather than Saving to File or Sending documents, the employee would Post each document to his or her weblog. If necessary, documents could be indexed by the company's taxonomy, and access restrictions specified, at the moment of posting.
• 
  The employee would access knowledge from the Intranet, Extranet, Internet, peers and external vendors from his or her weblog home page, using any of the following tools:
  
  Table of Contents of the individual's weblog, or the enterprise-wide Intranet (browsing)
  
  Search Engine to search the individual's weblog, the enterprise-wide Intranet, the public Internet, or the pertinent categories of all the weblogs of a particular community
  
  The News Aggregator for automatic feeds of external vendor and public Internet news, publications, others' weblogs and new posts to the Intranet on specific subjects, to which the employee has 'subscribed'
  
  The BlogRoll, to link directly to others' weblogs or send an e-mail to canvass others in one's community

The knowledge of the community is simply the sum of the knowledge residing in the weblogs of the community members (within any shared categorizations the community members decide to establish, and pushed to other community members by the weblog's 'subscription' functionality.

Theoretically, depending on the robustness of the company's networks, the Intranet could be slimmed down to nothing more than a set of organized links, with no actual 'content' whatsoever.

Fantastic point! The world of the semantic web and metadata. It is almost more important to know how to find information that the information itself. If done correctly, these "links" can mimic people in your enterprise and getting to content is simply a manner of connecting through the people/links until you get the information you need - even if that means gathering no information during each hop.

Each employee thus defines his or her own taxonomy (the same way each employee currently decides how to organize and index his or her own filing cabinet and My Documents folder). Each employee defines his or her own communities (by who is included in the BlogRoll), so communities truly become self-organizing and self-managed.

I made the point in a previous post that i agree with this 50% of the time. However, i do feel that an imposed, yet transparent structure can be very powerful. If your entire team are working on a given project, you want to make sure the union on your posts equals 1 set of collected posts and not a set of distributed posts. equally, there should be some kind of network between those of you on a project, those of you across of the nework working on similar areas and such. Transparency is the key however.

Culturally, these two features of a weblog-based content architecture are hugely advantageous, because they turn control over the management and sharing of knowledge to individual employees, allowing them to organize knowledge in accordance with their personal mental models (the way they think and learn), and allowing them to retain pride in and responsibility of ownership of their personal knowledge 'stocks'.

This is where i fully agree that a lower level dynamic web has to operate. However i wonder if this may work better as a community - i.e. the ability to organize not only your own ideas, but others as well. Build better knowledge together.

The advantages of this architecture are therefore:

• Much more knowledge is codified and available for sharing (including sharing with customers via Extranets)
• Knowledge is kept more current and complete
• The context of knowledge is more apparent and hence richer
• Knowledge is easier to find
• Less centralized Intranet management and technology is needed
• Evaluation of individuals' contribution to organizational knowledge is easier to gauge
• Less effort is needed to persuade individuals to share knowledge
• Communities of practice can develop spontaneously and flexibly
• Peer-to-peer knowledge transfer (the most valuable kind in most organizations) is facilitated, and new knowledge is automatically 'pushed' to 'subscribers' on a timely basis

Extracts from "BLOGS IN BUSINESS: THE WEBLOG AS FILING CABINET by Dave Pollard.

"We have all struggled with ways to capture tacit knowledge (mostly 'know-how') as effectively as we capture explicit knowledge (mostly 'know-what')."

It may also be argued that this conept can also be applied to explicit knowledge that we don't currently capture anyway. They may be used for the same or different purposes. It also depends on your definition of how such things are captured - or at least the value implied on the fact "something" has been captured "somewhere". So we may be able to say that an email is explicit knowledge and has been captured - however, if no-one can ever find it again, or it i is in a typical flat email structure, then it is easy to say that it really has no value and hasn't been captured (differentiating between "stored" and "captured"). A similar concept could apply to the metadata around meetings, decisions, chats and so on.

• Know-how is knowledge in the context of its application , so simply capturing the sales executive's rolodex contents, sales presentations and client visit schedule is not enough. We want to be able to capture what it is (the know-how) that enables him to leverage this 'know-what' so much more powerfully than others with the same 'know-what' at their disposal. Some of this know-how is process, some of it is style, some of it is existing relationships ('know-who') and some of it is interpersonal skills.

• Some know-how is not individual at all, but a team dynamic. This sales executive and the industry specialist with whom he normally works are far more effective as a team than they are individually or working as part of other teams. Why? Probably because each has know-how, know-what, and know-who that covers gaps in the other's knowledge set.

And sometimes these "teams" don't even know the are operating as such. Chains of decisions and points of view work their way around an organization and influence its decisions. You may catch something in an email that you learn from, or is related to something you are working on, but in general we won't know most of the things the organization does. Re-inventing the wheel is very, very common i'd argue. In summary, such teams can operate along a number of dimensions.

• Not only do we not know how to capture (or codify to use KM jargon) know-how, we don't know how to motivate or reward the sales executive to get him to codify his knowledge. He's so good at selling, why would he want (or we want him) to take time away from that to codify or blog what he knows?

This is in fact the key point. It's probably the reasons weblogs work. Bit clunky KM systems are great for your formal processes and knowledge and the stuff you find out later, but there is a gap where finding what knowledge is important to you is very very difficult. No-One would argue Google isn't a great technical company success, but fundamentally Google doesn't help me or my organization to understand any more, or even find anything other than a keyword hit.

But let's look at what a blog has to offer relative to the filing cabinet:

• It allows each worker to personally identify who he or she thinks actually belongs to and participates in his or her networks (using the blogroll - the blog equivalent of a rolodex), rather than who their manager thinks should be in those networks

Perhaps there is a middle gound - where we can suggest communities. These communities may be interest orientated, project orientated or something else. If you choose your own network, it's unlikely you move outside your good friends - we need to be gently told there are other networks out there we may can be a part of. I love social software - none of my friends do and i've got no idea how to find other people in the company who do!

• The blogroll consists entirely of active links to the blogs of the other community members, so knowledge is electronically and personally connected

• Knowledge can be simply and flexibly indexed (and sorted or filtered) by date and category (using each indiviual's personal taxonomy or 'filing system', not some standard taxonomy system imposed by management)

Again, we need some help here too. Personal taxonomies are great for our own very simple uses, but useless on a grander scale. Finding things on the internet alone is ridiculously difficuly and often you go back to Google. We need a base taxnonmy, but flexible dyanamic taxnomy that can sit underneath that and can be managed by the community.

• Instead of containing redundant copies of knowledge from other people like a filing cabinet, the blog simply hotlinks to the 'permalink' (the dynamically-generated URL for a particular piece of knowledge or 'knowledge object') in the other person's blog/filing cabinet

This falls down in cases such as this one. Rather than being able to comment on sub-conversations you have to resort to copying and pasting the original source. Ideally we should be able to annotate any piece of information we can find, without having to duplicate the data.

• The knowledge is enriched by dynamic links to URLs of relevant news, bibliographies and other external resources used in its compliation, thus greatly increasingly its shelf life by allowing it to be more easily updated

• The key external resources (journals, manuals etc.) that the worker uses frequently can be stored in a 'resources roll', consisting of the URLs of these resources; by copying and using an expert's 'resources roll', an apprentice could discover and mimic the 'continuous learning' process of the expert

• E-mails are the most valuable untapped codified knowledge resource in most companies, and blogs allow knowledge to be simultaneously posted to one or more e-mail addresses and to the owner's indexed blog/filing cabinet

• Workers can easily 'subscribe' to another worker's entire blog (or an individual category/folder subset of it), so they are immediately notified about new knowledge or news that their work teammates or mentors deem valuable

Sure - we also want to subscribe to unions and intersections of blogs. In reality these blogs may be tied to a project or other non-human end-point and so we often just want to know the data rather than know "about" the item it is applied to.

• Blogs do not require the learning of HTML or database management, though they perform both functions powerfully

• Blogs can easily be designed to either live within a company firewall or to transcend organizational boundaries, and to be accessible in whole or part to some or all other employees, as the trade off between security and value-of-sharing dictates.

Private CoP knowledge across an organization and its partners.

But they do represent a potential breakthrough in both personalization and democratization of the process of grass-roots, peer-to-peer knowledge sharing of unfiltered knowledge, the paramount task according to Drucker's Management Challenges for the 21st Century . They represent the best-yet compromise between the anarchy of personal websites on the intranet, and the straight-jacket of most 'corporate-owned' repositories.

http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2004/02/05.html#a615
"I've written recently about the future state of business, a world incorporating powerful, versatile social networking tools. And I've played with most of the first-generation social software and read volumes about how it will, or won't, work in business and ultimately affect our daily lives. The concept is wonderful, and the technology is fun, but the tools developed so far suffer from three fatal flaws:"

PERSONAL KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
"Since February 1st, David Gurteen, one of the pioneers and brightest thinkers in the field of Knowledge Management, has been busy, to my delight, reinventing the discipline as Personal Knowledge Management (PKM). As readers of my business posts know, that's what I've been advocating for some time. A group of leading KM luminaries has been discussing this all month on the AOK (Association of KnowledgeWork) discussion group, an online community of practice moderated by Jerry Ash. This has been tremendously helpful in enabling me to flesh out my own vision of how PKM could work, the latest rendition of which is diagrammed above."

BLOGS IN BUSINESS -- WHAT WE COULD DO NOW
"I've written before about Blogs in Business and the role I think they could play. But my idealism -- the desire to have a better, simpler blog product with some better social networking functionality before we try to sell it to business -- is giving way to my impatience. A couple of business leaders have challenged me to develop a pragmatic strategy for effectively introducing blogs into a business today. Here's what I said."

The Barriers of Content and Context
"Social networking is suffering the curse of all attractive innovations in the modern era: As even the most winning innovations rise into popular consciousness, the backlash against them begins instantaneously. The traditional lag between initial adoption by a small percentage of hip, connected "innovators" and the later contact with the "majoritarians" that comprise the overwhelming bulk of the market has been squashed to an almost immediate effect. Just as truckers' caps begin to diffuse out to the average metrosexual a few weeks after becoming cool, the glitterati already declare them passé."

Cracking the Social Code
"Can networking tools work their magic on your bottom line? Some companies hope so. "

the foaf project
"The Friend of a Friend (FOAF) project is about creating a Web of machine-readable homepages describing people, the links between them and the things they create and do."

Connect in Silicon Valley

A Working Model
"We advise both users and builders of these tools -- instant messaging, collaboration and community tools, real-time conferencing, and other social tools -- and we track the real time enterprise architecture that is emerging from the collision of real time communication and enterprise application integration. We consult with venture capitalists and other investor groups interested in the potential of this marketplace and the players in it. Our goal is to provide incisive and actionable analysis and advisory services."

The Eurekster Platform
"Eurekster is the first truly democratic search engine platform because it allows people and web sites to have a search engine powered by the people that matter to them."

SOCIAL NETWORKING SOFTWARE: HAVE IT YOUR WAY
"The greatest challenge for developers of Social Network Enablement software will be to allow each of us to portray our knowledge and our network(s) any way we want to represent them."

World of Ends
"What the Internet Is and How to Stop Mistaking It for Something Else - by Doc Searls and David Weinberger"

A HIGH-LEVEL SPEC FOR BUSINESS WEBLOGS AND SOCIAL SOFTWARE

Delphes
"The DioMillennium integrated information system generates interest among your employees in capitalizing more on your company's informational assets, by letting them find intelligent information rapidly and efficiently."

Selling Social KM

Part 1 : Business Ignorance
"Nobody Knows What's Going On"

Part 2 : Trying Technology Painlessly
"This piece talks about how tough it is to sell software these days, and why, and a marketing idea we've cooked up to try to remove the risk from buying software, which I think ought to work well beyond our patch of turf."

Antarctica Systems
"Antarctica's mission is to provide applications that complement all the leading Business Intelligence (BI) solutions. BI solutions are designed to allow organizations to access, analyze and visualize corporate data. Antarctica’s flagship product, Visual Net, is like a Navigation System for business – geared specifically towards the business users – to let them see what’s really going on in their organizations and understand the root causes of performance. Visual Net extends an organization’s business intelligence strategy by providing a highly visual reporting/data presentation analytics tool that is especially well suited to non-technical users. "

Walmart KM
"2 cases of real world KM"

Revive KM
"If a purple KM cow could revive the discipline before it goes the way of TQM and BPR, where could we find one? "

In Praise of the Purple Cow
"Remarkably honest ideas (and remarkably useful case studies) about making and marketing remarkable products. "

The nonsense of 'knowledge management'
"Examines critically the origins and basis of 'knowledge management', its components and its development as a field of consultancy practice. Problems in the distinction between 'knowledge' and 'information' are explored, as well as Polanyi's concept of 'tacit knowing'. The concept is examined in the journal literature, the Web sites of consultancy companies, and in the presentation of business schools. The conclusion is reached that 'knowledge management' is an umbrella term for a variety of organizational activities, none of which are concerned with the management of knowledge. Those activities that are not concerned with the management of information are concerned with the management of work practices, in the expectation that changes in such areas as communication practice will enable information sharing."

THE TIPPING POINT, AND HOW IT WORKS WITH BLOGS
"What got me most excited was how Gladwell's thesis -- that diseases become epidemics if and only if they meet three criteria -- lends itself by analogy to just about every change initiative (what Gladwell calls "social epidemics") you can imagine: getting your blog recognized, achieving enduring change à la John Kotter in business, or changing the world from a consumer culture to a citizen/conserver culture. The three criteria are:"

Tipping Point, Continued
"In my recent posts reviewing, and then discussing the Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, I tried to express some of the things that don't sound right to me in the book."

Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality
"Prior to recent theoretical work on social networks, the usual explanations invoked individual behaviors: some members of the community had sold out, the spirit of the early days was being diluted by the newcomers, et cetera. We now know that these explanations are wrong, or at least beside the point. What matters is this: Diversity plus freedom of choice creates inequality, and the greater the diversity, the more extreme the inequality. "

Organizational Networks
"Social network analysis software and services for organizations and their consultants."

Side by Side
"From Open Space Web Conferencing ToLiving And Collaborating Together In A "Private" Space"

WHAT'S WRONG WITH FIRST-GENERATION SOCIAL SOFTWARE
"I've written recently about the future state of business, a world incorporating powerful, versatile social networking tools. And I've played with most of the first-generation social software and read volumes about how it will, or won't, work in business and ultimately affect our daily lives. "

Knowledge Papers
"· Social Networking· Blogs in Business· Knowledge Management· Innovation· Entrepreneurship· Natural Enterprise· Aids for K-Workers"

Visible Narratives: Understanding Visual Organization
"Now that we understand the basic ways to visually distinguish objects, we can look at the big picture: using visual relationships to tell a coherent story. Elements within a “visual narrative” are arranged in an easily understood order of importance. A center of attention attracts the viewer’s attention, and each subsequent focal point adds to the story. This logical ordering is known as a visual hierarchy."

When Will Business Embrace Blogs?
"Newsletter writers and Content Aggregators in our Communications and Marketing departments, and our National Practice offices who wrote technical briefs on regulatory and professional matters;
Subject Matter Specialists, who knew the most in the firm about specific major accounts, industries or professional disciplines, and who could reduce the enormous volume of incoming information requests by making their 'filing cabinets' available to others; and
Community of Practice Coordinators, whose job it was to make communities work by pulling information into shared 'spaces', pushing it out to those who needed it, and responding to daily urgent information requests"

How can you build a successful community of practice that is integrally linked to your company’s strategic vision?