Erik van Bekkum: Blogging

Best KM blog and community of 2003

Wed, 31 Dec 2003 17:24:45 GMT

Looking back at 2003 here are my favourite KM blog and KM community:

	My blog of the year 2003: Denham Gray's "Knowledge-At-Work". Profound, challenging and diverse make it an attractive and meaningful blog in the Knowledge Management area. Together with George Siemens' , Sebastian Fiedler's, Jim McGee's and Lilia Efimova's one of the best around.
	My community of the year 2003: The Association of Knowledge Work's "AOK Star Series" had very interesting guests and facilitated good conversation with a growing group of members.

Opportunities for 2004:

Social Networking software, such as LinkedIn, Ryze and more recently the "international" ones such as econozco (Spanish) are very promising and hyped, but unless they standardize on a protocol they will fail due to their diversity.
Multi-lingual blogging; I will start to blog in Spanish as well in the beginning of 2004. Work with Ton Zijlstra to get more Dutch blogging going.

Skype

Tue, 30 Sep 2003 13:14:22 GMT

Skypememe: Record a call.

Phil Wolff wants Skype calls recording. I'm thinking of using "Skype" to do the same - I'm thinking of using it for interviews... Is there any quick solution before Skype developers come up with this functionality? [Mathemagenic]

So Lilia pointed to Phil Wolff's blog where the latter is gathering ideas for improvement for the now-popular p2p tool Skype.

Phil's way to drive innovation for Skype using the blog and thus gathering ideas from other users and people all around the world is great. It shows again that blogs are an enabler of ad-hoc communities (around Skyping, in this case) - and I would like to add my two cents on this as well. I am missing in Skype:

To record conversations (Phil mentioned this in his blog, and last week I spoke/skyped about the very same issue with Stuart Henshall) so I can keep them and include them in the blog entries I am writing.
To have the ability to leave a voicemail if a user is not answering, but is online (if the user is online, I suppose the p2p mechanism does not allow for messages to be dropped on the remote pc anyway)
Skype needs to be based on an open technology, if not it will limit itself in its development and market share, and end up like many of its predecessors. Take a look at the P2P file sharing market.
If a user on my list is in conversation (skype~) with someone else, I would like to be able to see that before I call; alternatively the opportunity to switch between calls.
The technology needs to be more stable - I am having regularly these ones:

SAP introduces community of practice to accelerate products, and blog

Thu, 28 Aug 2003 23:24:23 GMT

Shai Agassi from SAP announced to use communities of practice (though sometimes he just referred to as 'networks') to:

..facilitate the transfer of knowledge and information among all of the various technical groups who are working with SAP NetWeaver and SAP xApps. SAP customers, partners and newcomers to the SAP ecosystem will find detailed technical information on evaluating, implementing, using and building with these technologies..

Not only that, but SAP also seems to include blog technology in their suite of collaborative tools. In their internal blog Vis Naidu makes a strange statement:

In the endless pursuit of creating a more manageable Portal, segregating content by interest group or organizational unit could be the most ideal approach!

(read it in his entry 'Communities of Practice' - could they be the solution to better Portal content management ? if you can)

To be continued..

K-Log Productivity: Time to find and availability

Tue, 05 Aug 2003 22:31:13 GMT

Last week John Robb summarized the benefits of K-logs for the information worker; quoting a report from WC of CIOs "knowledge workers spend 35% of their productive time searching for information, while 40% of the corporate users report that they cannot find the information they need to do their jobs on their Intranets"

Three major reasons why companies can benefit from using K-logs:

they break down the silos
they simplify information finding
easier to capture meaningful information

The full article can be read here.

I would add myself to that that K-logs allow individuals or groups to put information in a certain context, turning information to knowledge (hence the K).

Iranian authorities are keeping a close eye on blogs

Sun, 20 Jul 2003 13:26:41 GMT

Iranian authorities are keeping a close eye on the Internet amid growing online access and the popularity of weblogs.

One weblog under the name Hossein Derakhshan received 6,000 hits a day before the government blocked it, the Canadian-based author said in an e-mail to CNN.

The site contains musings with titles like "Five Things to Help Non-Iranians Know More About Iran," political observations and links to news stories.

"In absence of free papers, (weblogs) are performing an important role for spreading internal news that is very risky to publish in Iran," said Derakhshan.

He added that weblogs help young people in Iran socialize, date and keep in touch with exiled friends, help emerging writers publish their work, produce Persian content on search engines, introduce surfers to new technology -- and allow access to pornography.

Source: CNN

RSS works again

Sat, 12 Jul 2003 01:47:43 GMT

The RSS feed works again; it has been broken since April and after several support tickets and reinstalls of Radio Userland, it seems to be working again. Sorry for all of those that had subscribed but did not get updates..

Blogshares, down?

Thu, 12 Jun 2003 21:01:17 GMT

Blogshares.com - the promising and creative initiative seems to be out of the air. What did William Robb do?

Last news item I saw from them was only five days ago:

Network problems

We're experiencing some network problems which are being looked at by our hosting provider. It's the reason for the exceptional slowness over the past day and some errors as pages fail to load.

Thank you for your patience whilst the problem is being looked at.

Read full item. Discuss.

Posted 04:11 06 Jun 2003