Our very own J is a Feedster Contest Winner!

J created two very nice tutorials on RSS for Newbies and Feedster searching. Congrats!

Knowledge Jolt with Jack: KM Chicago: Clare Hart

As I've said before, top-down KM is pretty limiting. All types of incentives have been offered, but the knowledge creators still lose control of their stuff. Vinson reports from this meeting that:

"There was an interesting discussion around change management and a shift from 'if we build it, they will come' mentality to a 'if they use it, it will build itself' mentality. With a focus on individual knowledge worker performance and capabilities, this kind of idea could find a lot of traction"

Of course, he goes on to say that responsibility should be at the workgroup level. I disagree. I believe that knowledge workers need to take responsiblity for their own knowledge and that km should be devolved down to the individual where possible.

Lois Scheidt (PhD student and blog researcher) Posts her Reference List

(PDF) Her page. Her blog. Her main research is on teens in the blogosphere but she's got some good stuff here. She's another academic who uses multiple formats for PIM/PKM: a webpage, a bibliographic manager, a blog, forums, etc. I posted my ProCite output early on in this blog, but since then I've pretty much moved away from ProCite -- which I really regret since my blog doesn't help me cite while I write in a word processor. It is better at annotations, though. I'm hoping someone will combine tools a little better. Update 12/10: link has been updated

Online2004 Blog Track: Clyde Presentation, "Enterprise Blogging"

Oh, to have been there! Clyde is a professor of the library school at the University of Iceland. She also has a new book (not in open worldcat, look here) on blogs.

Putting Math Online

During the question period of this panel, someone asked about ways to put mathematical notations online. The other day, a physicist just happened to mention something that caught my attention and I learned a bit about LaTeX, which allows mathematical and scientific notation. He mentioned the Wikipedia article about it and the encyclopedia uses it for their mathematical and scientific notations. The Wikipedia entry shows some examples of math notations rendered with LaTeX.

Mopsos - Blogging to become a legal obligation?

This is in response to a very good question received at the talk. When all the data/information/knowledge you share at work belongs to the company, what happens when you leave? Does every idea you expressed in your company blog belong to them? The general idea in the US is that whatever's done on company time using company resources (to include your brain?) belongs to the company. Dugage blogs this from a French point of view which seems pretty extreme to him but I believe is more typical in the US. If your company has a knowledge hoarding atmosphere or if your colleagues feel they need to hold back because they're getting ready to leave, this whole blog thing and KM thing won't fly. He ends his post with this suggestion

In the end, it might well be that the best interest for both parties is to have every employee keep written logs –one per community- of everything they do. The employee can then use the blog records to prove that he did not withhold information from the company. If he cannot, well, too bad for him.

Sound like a place for blogs? Maybe?

Charlene Li: One company's use of internal blogs

Charlene Li is the Forrester researcher who recently wrote a report on corporate blogging (November 5, 2004, Blogging: Bubble Or Big Deal? When And How Businesses Should Use Blogs). In the post linked above she describes what one forward thinking company is doing with blogs. As a couple of information architects asked at ASIS&T, how is this different from a portal? I think blogs can be part of the content that feed the portals, automatically generated XML feeds make this easier - not instead of but as a content generator for. This reminds me of a recent article from the Lecture Notes in Computer Science series (Perret, Borges, and Santoro, "Applying Group Storytelling in Knowledge Management" LNCS 3198 (October 2004): 34–41, here for everyone else) UPDATE 12/2: somehow the rest of the post is missing... I said something like this: The authors discuss the richness and value of adding stories to km and im for projects and companies. They created another software to allow for collaborative storytelling. My issues were 1) it's separate from other project information 2) everyone hates when someone finishes their story for them and ruins the ending -- IOW, I'm skeptical of the collaborative part. I think you need each individual's story from their point of view, then you can read them all and see a better view of the whole. I think blogs like what Li suggests might be a better way, and they can be incorporated into the project managment content.