Email, instant messaging, forums, code forges and other collaboration tools make it possible for distributed teams to get work done - but they're not great tools for making decisions. The team behind Loomio wants to solve that with a new Web-based tool for focused, concise discussions that allow all team members to be heard. 

If you've ever worked with a distributed team, you know how difficult it can be to make decisions as a group. Discussions are unstructured, rambling affairs with dozens of messages flying about and no good way to track consensus. Even worse, requests for feedback can go without comment entirely, or with only a few stakeholders raising a voice.

Agree, Disagree, Abstain, Block

Discussion in Loomio starts with a discussion and specific proposal, and members have the option of voting on the proposal. A group can define the options (defaults are yes/no, abstain and block), and each member can give their view summary. As votes are tallied, everyone can see get a chart that shows how many folks are in agreement, how many aren't, how many have abstained, etc.

This sounds pretty simple, but most of today's collaboration tools don't provide a good way to focus a discussion. The key to Loomio is that it provides a central tool for discussions and (if used properly) narrows things down to decisions that are easy to vote on. Central is key here. It helps a lot to confine activity to one tool rather than making users look all over for information.

A lot of online teams communicate in several ways, including email, IM, IRC, over the phone and face to face. Stakeholders who prefer one medium (like email) lose out if discussions are held in IRC, or vice-versa. Even worse, stakeholders may be totally unaware a decision is being made at all. If a group settles on Loomio, it would enable the group to say "decisions are made here and nowhere else." If something isn't put up in Loomio (or another approved tool), then a decision wouldn't be legitimate.

Settling on a decision tool like Loomio should also help cut down on noise in other communication channels. It's popular to have discussions in email and CC everyone who might have an opinion or might need to vote on something. An active team can inspire email fatigue pretty quickly with discussions that are neverending. Loomio would allow users to visit, vote and get back to work.

Actually, Loomio isn't only for distributed teams. There's no reason it couldn't be used in any organization, but its especially appropriate for situations where team members or stakeholders are far-flung.

Can Loomio Solve the Problem?

Like any tool, Loomio would only be effective if used properly. The early design could probably do with some modification - a more obvious start and end date for votes, for example - but the initial design is solid. The Loomio team says it's already in use by some organizations. New Zealand companies or organizations like Enspiral and BuckyBox are among the first adopters - though no one seems to be providing a public instance that we can point to.

If you want to help, the group is looking for contributions from Ruby on Rails developers, as well as a little extra cash (NZ $5,000) to help the volunteer team devote more time to Loomio development. The project is sort-of open source and already on GitHub. It's "sort-of" open source because the site says it's open source, but if you look at the license text on GitHub it's basically a stump saying: "We need to add the license. GPLv2?" The pledge drive (through the Pledge Me platform) ends on May 18th. The developers have already raised more than their target, but more money might mean more time spent on development.

If adopted a bit more widely, Loomio might help take distributed teams to a new level - much like GitHub has helped with development. It is a simple concept, but bringing order to decision-making could help teams communicate better and make better decisions, no matter where they happen to be located. 

Most startups fail. Nine out of 10 never amount to anything more than fond memories and a forgotten Facebook page. One reason is that they often lack a clear picture of exactly how they’re doing until it’s too late. But there are tools designed to help you assess your startup's progress compared to similar companies.

The best way for startup founders to improve their chance of success is by learning to make better decisions. But if you want to make better decisions, you need better data. And that’s where Startup Compass comes in: It’s designed to help you benchmark your startup’s performance against thousands of others to identify what you’re doing right and what you need to improve.

Startup Compass collects data from tens of thousands of startups around the world. It collects lots of data, then creates best practices, recommendations and benchmarks to help entrepreneurs make better product and business decisions.

Big Data for Small Companies

“This is a big-data approach to startup success,” says Startup Compass co-founder and serial entrepreneur Bjoern Lasse Herrmann. “Big companies have analysts to make sense of their data, and executives can make decisions based on that data. But startups don’t have any access to that kind of analytics. We wanted to put analysts in the cloud for startups.”

“Startups can learn three key things,” Herrmann says. “First, which key performance indicators actually matter. Most startups don’t even know which KPIs they should track or why they should track them. Second, they learn how their KPIs compare to other companies’ KPIs so they will know if they’re on the right track. See, for example, their customer acquisition costs. The third thing they learn is what actions they need to be taking. We help businesses take the next steps.”

Startup Compass calls its approach “cracking the code of innovation.” We call it “how not to kill your startup.”

The 5 don'ts

The real value of Startup Compass is comparing your company to others like it, but Startup Compass also summarizes its findings in its Startup Genome report. Here are nuggets of wisdom from the first Startup Genome report, five things not to do:

1. Don’t scale too early. This is the No. 1 cause of startup failure. Startup Compass has found that 70% of startups crash because they scale prematurely.

2. Don’t work part time. Sleepy? Get used to it. People who work full time on their startups raise an average of 24 times more funding than those who work part time.

3. Don’t go it alone. Maybe you are the smartest guy in the room. But solo founders raise less than half the money that two to three co-founders raise.

4. Don’t ignore customers. Yes, they’re annoying. (What do they know?) But startups that track customer metrics have 400% more user growth.

5. Don’t forget about the technology. Startups without a tech-oriented co-founder are twice as likely to scale prematurely and have three to five times less user growth.

If you want advice on an ongoing basis, you can join Startup Compass and in exchange for data on your startup, the company will benchmark your startup monthly, comparing you to similar outfits, so you can keep your priorities in line.

Startup Compass has 17,000 companies now using the service for things like checking whether their churn rate is too high or their retention rate is too low - or if they should be spending more money on customer acquisition.

“We have a number of companies that have gone through the process and tell us they used our product and realized they were falling behind on this or that metric and were able to fix those things and adjust accordingly. As a result they were better able to acquire customers in the long run and didn’t waste more money on things that were not productive.”

Images courtesy of Shutterstock.

That's the theory behind a new product announced tonight from Mindjet, a nearly two decade old company that is best known for its mind mapping software but is extending itself into a larger corporate collaboration market. The company's new product, Mindjet SP, is a Mindjet plug-in for SharePoint - it takes SharePoint document trees and collaboration and displays them in mind map format. As mind maps go, Mindjet looks good (the company's free iPad app is a joy to use) - but not everyone loves mind maps in general. Can Mindjet save your company's SharePoint investment?

Mind mapping is an interesting practice. It's a method of using visual representations of interconnected concepts to explore non-linear relationships between things. It can be great for helping you think of details in a big complicated situation that you might not have thought of, or been able to write down the context for effectively, in a linear list.

Mind mapping is very popular in Japan, where systems thinking and design are given great respect. The paradigm is also often appreciated by fans of Neuro-linguistic programming, another controversial but also widely appreciated movement.

There's something that can feel a little hokey about mind mapping too, though. On the most benign end of the spectrum, it can be hard to remember to do. I know I like it when I remember to do it but only sit down and think things out that way a handful of times each year. On the other end of the spectrum, it can sometimes feel like mind mapping is a cult. Sometimes when you really like your mind map hammer, everything in life can look like a mind map nail.

Complicating the situation is the connection between mind mapping, and Mindjet in particular, and a man named Tony Buzan. Buzan claims to have created mind mapping and is a very charismatic figure. He's got his own mind mapping app and is a frequent lecturer and author. Mind mapping is cool and I do believe that it could be useful in helping expand and strengthen the brain, but there's something about this man that makes me more sympathetic to his critics than I feel towards him. Mind mapping is cool but Tony Buzan seems at high risk of being obnoxious. Maybe it's his absolute statements more than anything else. He does tell a good story, though. Here's Buzan's explanation of mind mapping, wrapped in an infomercial.

Mindjet's interface looks a lot like Buzan's and the company makes mention of him occasionally in passing around its website. It would be nice, I think, if Mindjet's organic interface view was more loosey-goosey like Buzan's.

None the less, Mindjet has almost 2 million users of its software. There is a free version, but paid versions have ranged from $20 per month up to $160 per month for up to ten users. It's a strong business and recently acquired collaberation management web app Cohuman, a startup with a beautiful interface that companies willing to use the public cloud can use in conjunction with Mindjet mind maps. Those two technologies will be much closer integrated in the near future, the company said last week.

Most companies will still prefer to store and share their documents and other files on the private cloud behind firewalls. While critics of Microsoft are abundant, Mindjet believes that Microsoft is going to be a very important part of the enterprise for a long time. The mind mapping and collaboration company believes there's plenty of opportunity to focus on helping companies get the most out of Microsoft software.

Mindjet SP is an intriguing offering - can traditional or inhospitable interfaces be made more lovable through interpretation into a mind map format? Mind mapping always seems like an idea with great potential. Maybe a use case like this is what will make it finally catch on.

The project is called Disqus Ranks, and it should be rolling out shortly. Disqus did not return a request for information about the timing of the rollout.

The commenting features mimic those already used internally by bigger publishers, who evaluate a user's influence by assigning badges to confirm to the network and community some measure of a commenter's significance.

Community managers who don't have their own custom-made evaluation systems will love this, because it provides them an easy-to-use social ranking system in plug-n-play format. Once the beta is released, it will show up in the interface as another feature in the menu list.

The site owner or manager can use a preferences list to calibrate from "most important" to "least important" the weight that each of a certain type of interaction has on the network or the blog.

Then, he can create custom titles for each of those qualifications and assign them to users. At Fred Wilson's blog, AVC, for example, Wilson is going with a bar theme and assigning himself the title of bartender. He assigns different types of users other titles, like regular, or semi-regular, depending on how often they visit the site and how often they leave a comment.

The new features would be an improvement over straight-up commenting, especially since social search and discovery seems to be a huge trend developing Web communities. It's no longer enough for a site manager or a publisher to make commenting available to build the community. The new move seems to be towards being able to identify experts within the blog or the network.

Screenshot comes from Fred Wilson's AVC blog

BBN Technologies was recently awarded a $29.7 million contract to develop a universal text engine that will capture intelligence and render it usable to humans as well as artificial intelligence (AI) systems. Officially called the Machine Reading Program, this new system will "automatically monitor the technological and political activities of nation states and transnational organizations - which could mean everything from al-Qaeda to the U.N." for the US military. BBN expects there may also be many useful civilian applications for its new reader. The company has also developed a real-time audio stream called the the BBN Broadcast Monitoring System that automatically transcribes real-time audio streams and translates them into English.

With this new project, BBN hopes to "develop techniques that can generalize across the linguistic structure and content of diverse documents to extract relations and axioms directly from text rather than relying on a knowledge engineer to encode such information." Here's how it will work:

Although it is not immediately clear when (or if) this new machine reader will be available to civilians, we are certainly looking forward to trying something like this out. Some paranoid types will believe this is nothing more than "the man" trying to spy on us, but those people need to realize everything we do online is being watched by someone. If you are really concerned about your online privacy you should secure important data on your computer, call your government leaders and try to change privacy laws, or stay off the Web altogether.

Researchers, medical professionals, consumers, students and others are all likely to benefit from such an application. Not having to spend unnecessary time searching through mountains of information on the Web for something relevant makes life easier and allows us to be more productive.

While there are already numerous browser extensions that try make editing Wikipedia articles easier, the default interface and markup language of the Wikipedia can be quite intimidating for first time users.

Helping First-Time Authors

As Sue Gardner, the Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, points out in the announcement, most of the current Wikipedia authors have a "moderate-to-high level of technical understanding." This, however, excludes a large number of potential contributors who aren't very tech savvy, but would like to participate in the project.

The Wikimedia Foundation will use this grant to create a team of developers and user interface designers that will work on reducing barriers of entry for first-time authors. Specifically, the team will look at hiding the more complex elements of the user interface from users who don't need to deal with them.

To us, this seems like a worthwhile project. Anybody who has looked at the markup language for the Wikipedia knows that is anything but intuitive and that there is quite a learning curve involved before one can start to contribute anything more than simple edits. Reducing these barriers of entry will allow a whole new group of users to contribute their knowledge to the project.

The true cost of a licensed product is much higher than just the software. Here are other things to factor in:

• Hardware costs: You have to either buy machines or add your software to existing servers and manage them. If it is a mission-critical application, you will probably need dedicated machines and back-ups.
• Additional software costs: You will most likely need an OS, application server software, a database, monitoring software, etc. Many of these products are open source now, but there are still associated costs.
• Implementation costs: In my experience, the implementation costs associated with a behind-the-firewall solution are always higher than those of a SaaS application. There is simply more to do. You will either pay consultants or use your own valuable resources and time to worry about installing software, integrating it, building servers, configuration, etc.
• Maintenance labor: If you have in-house software, there is going to be some level of effort required to keep it happy. Your IT people will need to take care of it, which will keep them from doing more value-added activities.

Another huge factor here is the ability to get the latest and greatest technology. Once you install software in a data center, it becomes more difficult to upgrade and maintain it (especially if you customize it). In such a case, you will be stuck with old software that you will have to replace in the same time frame described above. In other words, unless you are absolutely sure, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that your licensed software is going to meet your business needs for 5 years or more, then SaaS might make financial sense.

Let's look at a real-world example. A 100-person company has been sharing files via email and internal servers. The executives have finally concluded they need to join the 21st century and put a solution in place. One option is to implement SharePoint. Here is a rough estimate of what that might cost:

Year 1
MOSS server = $4,500
User client access license = $90
Hosting and maintenance = $5,000
Implementation and developer support = $20,000
Total = $29,590

Year 2 and on
Hosting and maintenance = $5,000
Developer support = $3,000
Total = $8,000

I know of a SaaS solution that has 80% of the file-collaboration functionality of SharePoint but charges $850 per month for 100 users.

Year 1
SaaS fees = $10,200
Implementation support = $10,000
Total = $20,200

Year 2 and on
SaaS fees = $10,200
Total = $10,200

It would take over 4 and a half years before the licensed software became cheaper. By that time, I'm quite sure there would be another solution that could replace SharePoint, and the cycle would start again. We can quibble about the numbers, but you get the point. Plus, the numbers don't reflect that the SaaS solution is likely to improve and innovate faster than the licensed software by a significant amount.

What do you think? Have you done this analysis, and what did you conclude?

This is a big story. That is why ReadWriteWeb is dedicating a new "channel" to Enterprise 2.0. I will be editing this channel and we are looking for part time writers to contribute. More on that later.

The Firm

Peter Drucker, the greatest management thinker of all time, pointed out that the "firm" is a relatively recent innovation, designed to do the things that individuals cannot easily do on their own. Ronald Coase later created a theoretical model (Coase's Theorem) to describe why firms exist, based on the difference between internal and external transaction costs. If the transaction cost was lower internally, then it made sense to organize that work internally. If the transaction cost was lower externally, then it made sense to organize that work externally.

Coase's Theorem underlies countless management books on subjects around reengineering, outsourcing, core competency, spinoffs, spinouts and so on.

Enterprise 2.0 - first innings of a new game

This is a fascinating story for me. For 20 years I worked in traditional IT enterprise vendors selling to large enterprises. It was a great game for a while, based on the fact that you could get license fees for copying a tape, effectively 100% margin. At scale, after paying for a base level of R&D and sales, it was fantastically profitable.

Around the turn of the century, it became clear that this game was in the final innings. Larry Ellison, one of the masters of that game, announced that it was game over. Innovation in enterprise software was over, the problems had all been solved, the only thing left to do was sell to Oracle and let them restructure you. Ellison may actually believe this, but mostly it is self-serving. He, and other big incumbents would like start-ups and their investors to believe that the enterprise market is worthless. Leave it to the big boys. That is clearly self-serving.

And wrong. As Salesforce, Basecamp, Google Apps, Zoho, LinkedIn and countless other start-ups that we cover here on ReadWriteWeb, prove every day. One game is over, a new one is in its first innings. This is the best time to be a start-up in enterprise software. We will profile the vendor landscape and the opportunities for new vendors in the next post. For now, I want to focus this from the point of view of the enterprise, the buyer.

Large enterprises and globalization

The fundamental restructuring of enterprises is mostly a developed world story. In developing countries such as India, Brazil and China, huge new companies are being created. They have totally different challenges and a different opportunity. They are still in the phase of organizing scarcity, which requires the deployment of large resources - scale is an advantage. America and Europe did this in the years after the Second World War, the Asian tigers (Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore) followed a few years later with a similar strategy. Now China is doing the same and, to a lesser extent India, Russia and Brazil.

We will write more about the emerging giants from the developing world and how they are impacted by social media in future posts. This post is focused on the challenges faced by large enterprises in the developed world. They don't need to organize scarcity, they need to organize for innovation. Nobody really knows how to organize for innovation, certainly not within traditional organizational structures. But we do know that scale is not an advantage and is often a disadvantage when the prize is innovation.

The perfect storm hitting large enterprises

Large enterprise face a "perfect storm". These are huge challenges. Start-ups that help them navigate these challenges in real and fundamental ways will do very well:

1. The demographic time bomb of retiring baby boomers. They have mastered the rules of the traditional enterprise and, with only a few years to retirement, they will tend to resist fundamental change. When they leave, they take with them accumulated decades of experience, knowledge that is not easily codified for handing down to the next generation.
2. The difficulty of bringing in Generation Y. This generation has grown up in the fluid world of social media. GenY are not enticed by rigid command and control structures controlled by a generation that does not want to hand over power. This is a big problem for enterprises. Ask a random sample of GenY how many view Fortune 500 companies as their ideal employer. If large enterprises don't get the best and the brightest in this generation, they will be in deep trouble from the start-ups and global challengers who do.
3. Enterprises are all about secrecy, structure and control. Social Media is exactly the opposite. Secrecy, structure and control have served real needs for a long time, they work. When the irresistible force of social media hits the immovable force of a traditional enterprise, it makes a loud noise. The strategies are not obvious. "We will make social media technology bend to our rules" will lose a lot of the real value. "Blow up all the rule books, let self-organizing networks evolve" may work out brilliantly, or it may blow up catastrophically; the risks are unlikely to be easily contemplated by existing management and investors.
4. Figuring out what is core and what is non-core is hard. Implementing that is even harder, when careers and power rest with the current definitions that assume that most activities are core and should be done in-house.

Historic opportunity

This is a massive shift. A bit of historical perspective helps. In 1955, 1/3 of the US GDP was controlled by Fortune 500 companies. By 2000 that share had tripled to 2/3. Within that cold statistic lies thousands of human stories of family farms, Mom & Pop stores and other small businesses trampled by WallMart, Agribusiness and other large companies. The drivers mentioned above may reverse that trend. It is not written in stone that large companies should control 2/3 of the economy.

That is huge opportunity for a lot of start-ups. There has never been a better time to be an entrepreneur. It also a huge challenge for the incumbents. Big companies need to re-define themselves in fundamental ways to find new ways to be big in a meaningful way.

Adoption of social media will be the central theme in that story.

The next post will focus on the Enterprise 2.0 market landscape and the opportunity window for start-ups. At a time when advertising is challenged and the VC window is a less open, this is a vital area of opportunity for start-ups.

Tell us what you think? Tell us where you sit - within the large enterprise trying to figure out how to manage this huge wave of change? Within a start-up or VC looking at the opportunities?

You can subscribe now to our special RSS feed for the Enterprise channel.

UPDATE: Part 2, 11 Things Startups Should Know About Enterprise 2.0, is available now.

All these links are from his Trends: KM/Portals category, which I read specifically for the posts on KM storytelling:

a) From Stories and Organizational Learning:

b) On KM success:

c) From History of KM Part 6: Digital Age Offers Scalability with New Possibilities for Dialogue. Bill finishes his excellent "History of KM" series (which I thoroughly enjoyed reading) with this sentence:

What an excellent way to conclude a history of KM - it's saying that we're in the middle of making history right now, with blogging.

d) Another series of posts I enjoyed was "Storytelling and Knowledge Management" - another 6-parter. In Part 4, Documenting and Sharing Organizational Knowledge, Bill says:

Which again, is where blogs come in according to Bill.

e) In Part 5, Enhancing Learning, Bill explains the benefits of stories as a learning device:

f) In a later series called "KM Stories", Bill writes about specific case studies. In Part Two he says:

g) In his postscript to that series, Bill lists the factors for successful KM projects. I won't re-list them all here, but suffice to say (for me) that the first two are people-related factors:

I suspect that's why KM projects are so wont to fail. When you require the support of lots of different people and a strong leader, well that's Politics - not technology. And we all know how contentious politics can be!

Thanks to Bill Ives for writing so much valuable content on the subject of KM and storytelling. I hope to read more soon.

I've always maintained that blogging isn't for everyone and that applies inside corporate walls too. Blogs and wikis are not going to suit everyone in an organisation, so they're not the perfect KM solution by any means. One way around this is to look for those 1 or 2 people in a team or group who are natural writers or have an interest in Web writing - and encourage those people to take responsibility for their team's content. This is also the approach most companies take when running their Content Management Systems.

But I was thinking about an alternative approach. What if organisations hired a specialist writer, whose job it is to go around the different teams and elicit stories from people. That person would be a kind of journalist (but forget about the whole "are bloggers journalists" debate, that's not important). The person I'm describing would interview team members and coax stories from them. Those stories would then be transcribed onto a team weblog - with all team members encouraged to comment on or add to the stories. The point is that there needs to be at least one person who knows how to spin a narrativeÖ write compelling content.

Once that narrative is "up there" on the blog - it acts as a springboard for the non-writers to contribute bits of content, eventually adding up to a store of knowledge about the organisation. Think of the writer's narrative as a star, with the resulting contributions being planets that are created around the gravitational pull and life-giving energy of the star.

Just as there are specialist programmers and designers on Web teams, I think there is a need for specialist writers or storytellers to act as a Knowledge Management nexus for organisations. This is an idea I'm exploring for a business - where I set myself up as a consultant KM StoryWriter.

And yes it uses the same skillset that I'd need to write a biography of Web 2.0. I guess I'm exploring ways to fulfil my ambition to write stories for a living. The future of fiction is non-fiction - there's very little market for novelists these days. I think there is a market for non-fiction stories - for example in the form of non-fiction books, or as a Knowledge Management tool in organisations. I feel I'm getting closer to finding my nicheÖ

Snowden is like the Jakob Nielsen of Knowledge Management - he's a very influential figure in the community. In these conversations, he held sway with other KM practitioners like Jack Vinson and James Robertson. This discussion format brought out the best in Snowden I believe. Here are some of the highlights I picked out and my thoughts based on them.

Ecology

In recent years, it's been difficult to pin down a definition of what Knowledge Management is. What it appeared to be in the 90's was Information Management in wolf's clothing. Or is that: mutton dressed as lamb? :-) Either way, what was being 'managed' in the 90's by so-called Knowledge Management Systems was not in fact knowledge - but information. There was, as T.D. Wilson put it:

"A tendency to elide the distinction between 'knowledge' (what I know) and 'information' (what I am able to convey about what I know)."

In the conversations, Dave Snowden put it like this:

"As we move into the third millennium we see a new approach emerging in which we focus not on the management of knowledge as a 'thing' which can be identified and cataloged, but on the management of the ecology of knowledge." (pg 21)

I love that term: ecology of knowledge. It emphasizes that knowledge is a fluid, almost living, thing; and that it's closely related to its environment - or put another way, its context (a word which Snowden uses a lot).

Head, Mouth, Hands

Snowden went on to explain a basic principle of KM in this 'ecology' view of it:

"The process of moving from my head, to my mouth to my hands inevitably involves some loss of content, and frequently involves a massive loss of context." (pg 21)

Which is to say: during the act of speaking and then writing what is in your head, you will probably lose some content and a lot of context.

To extrapolate from what Snowden said, this is how I think his body metaphor works out:

Head = Context
Mouth = Narrative
Hands = Content Management

The Role of Narrative

Snowden uses narrative (storytelling) to add context to information. He said:

"...as for strategy, I use narrative techniques to contextualize the model for a company so the heuristics and boundary conditions are defined not in some abstract language, but are rooted in the defining stories of that organization." (pg 24)

This is of great interest to me. As a writer, narrative is one of my skillsets. So I'm thinking this could be a way for me to leverage my skills as a writer in the world of KM (see, I'm even using the word 'leverage' with gay abandon now - I'm drinking the KM Kool-Aid!).

You know what it also reminds me of? My two favourite contemporary literary writers, Michael Lewis and Tom Wolfe. They are both pioneers of writing non-fiction using literary techniques. I was thinking about this the other day (in another context!) and wrote down this as a note to myself: The future of fiction is non-fiction.

To relate this to KM, I think there's room for a literary sensibility in business too.

Narrative Context

Snowden talked about rejecting "generic models" of knowledge management - typified by KM Consultants who speak in buzz words and cliches. He explained:

"If a model is rooted in the stories of an organization’s histories and its possible futures (narrative techniques) then the model has meaning to that group. My approach is to get the organization to tell stories and then to populate a framework with those stories, draw boundaries between spaces and then move forward to action." (pg 26)

He hates "consultants who just roll out their model regardless of context".

Be a Chef, not a Recipe Book User

The approach Snowden prefers is what he labels a "heuristic" one - heuristic meaning to discover or find out. He has a lovely metaphor to explain this:

"Here we have the chef, not the recipe book user, with all the differences in quality that metaphor implies." (pg 27)

The best chefs are artists, so this view of KM plays to my artsy-fartsy nature :-)

KM is...

So after all that, what is KM? Well Snowden defined it as "the creation of shared context". He said knowledge must be volunteered (not conscripted), which is where the narrative techniques come in. When people tell their own stories, they naturally put information into the context of their lives.

Not coincidentally that is also the pattern of blogging, which encourages people to tell their stories on the Web and "share context" with their particular community. The blogging communities for Web Design and Knowledge Management itself best illustrate this to me - they both have strong communities where bloggers constantly comment on each others sites or trackback one another.

Snowden's own KM model is called Cynefin and he described it like this:

"...the contextualization takes the form of gathering anecdotes (naturally told stories, around the water cooler etc.) from that organization’s own history, and using those stories to create the [KM] model." (pg 29)

He later referred to this as mapping what people know, using narrative techniques (pg 33).

As yet, I'm not sure what role literary techniques might play in this. I'll read some more on Snowden's theories, plus other peoples, and see what I can come up with.

I'd like to think that a skilled writer has a lot to offer in the KM process of transcribing peoples stories into a compelling narrative. Just as Michael Lewis wrote an amazing narrative based on the stories of the Oakland A's baseball team in his book Moneyball (which I've just finished reading). The stories came from the Oakland A's people, particularly Billy Beane. But it was Lewis' skill that stitched it all together to produce a very insightful book - chock full of knowledge, in fact.

I've crossed oceans of time to find you...

Lastly, Snowden defined the generations of Knowledge Management as he sees them:

"In Generation 3, we acknowledge Gen 2 (content management) but also see knowledge is simultaneously a flow and a thing—so for the flows we manage channels." (pg 37)

A flow and a thing... I love that definition, because I've blogged about 'flow' before.

To wrap up the chef metaphor, Snowden said:

"We are chefs using prior knowledge, experience and natural talent to create original solutions, not recipe book users." (pg 37/38)

I like to think that describes the art of writing too. And originality is something I place a high premium on, so I have a feeling Dave Snowden's theories on Knowledge Management are going to serve me very well.

'weblog as a pen' ---> pen as a genre ---> pen as the creative potential in relationships ---> pen as a metaphor ---> (metaphors in general) ---> the future of the pen with Gen Y.

My contribution to this meme, like Dina's, takes a detour from Lilia's main point (but then that is what's fun about the social aspect of blogging - people pick up a post from someone else and use it as a springboard for their own ideas). So here's my riff on the 'pen as metaphor' theme.

Being John Baldessari

I have an image in the top-left of my homepage, borrowed from a photo of a John Baldessari artwork called Read/Write/Think/Dream - in which he transformed the facade and interior foyer of the Geisel Library at the University of California, San Diego, into a colourful and interactive work of art. (nb: I wrote about it a month and a half ago). The whole artwork resonated deeply with me, but that sliver of an image you see in the top-left of your screen (you have to get out of your RSS Reader to see it!) seemed to 'fit' with the themes of my weblog. I hadn't really analysed why, until today.

People are central

It's a photo-mural of pens and pencils and it's just one part of the Read/Write/Think/Dream artwork. The image shows two people looking at the pencils and pens - one has stopped to look, the other is about to walk past it. Those people (and the ones who will follow) are just as much a part of the artwork as the pencils/pens. 

Baldessari said about the work: "The whole concept of the piece deals with the obvious: students are central to the university." To relate this to how I used that one image on my weblog: my readers (people) are just as much a part of my blog as my writing. To extend that even further: people are central to the blogosphere.

Order and Ideas

What's not immediately obvious in the Read/Write/Think/Dream artwork is that the pens and pencils are ordered according to the color spectrum of the rainbow. Here is one explanation of this:

"On one interior side wall is a photo-mural of pens and pencils in a neat row, each a different color, aligned according to their sequence in the color spectrum. These tools, neatly ordered, and the students, gathered in a row like carefully collected types, reflect Baldessari's deep-seated interest in sorting and systems of organization." (emphasis mine)

Once again, I can apply this meaning to my blog. These days I style myself as an Analyst, which is my way of saying that in this weblog I strive to examine and organize information - and from that create new ideas.

People + Tools =

Baldessari also said that "the pens and pencils represent the tools of the students' trade". This gives me an opportunity to return to Lilia's original point that pens - and weblog authoring systems - are just tools. We can use them how we like, but it comes back to the sum of: Person + Tool = Self-Expression OR Creativity OR Knowledge OR Blogosphere OR Etc. 

Applying this to Knowledge Management

My point here is: we need both people and tools in the equation. And thankfully, I think this is where the current Knowledge Management theories are heading. As Mike Gotta put it - "Knowledge Management: It Was Always About People". 

The problem with KM during the 90's was that everyone thought of Knowledge Management as being Technology-driven. Companies tried to implement Knowledge Management systems and tools. Well actually that theory wasn't total nonsense, because the reality is KM is about both People and Tools. If you look at Dave Pollard's principles of KM (which I found very inspirational), you'll see that it's a mix of tools and people-oriented principles that he advocates. 

I have a new catchphrase to express this: People are Central, but Tools are Crucial.

Would you like fries with that segue?

So that's my take on the 'pen as metaphor' meme. Heh, I took a big segue! but I think I learned something along the way ;-) However I didn't get to address Dina's point about "the future of the pen with Gen Y" - which is a fascinating question. I'll think about that some more and address it in a later post.

"I think I've unfairly maligned servers in the past. It's not the server I dislike, it's the idea that as an end user I am disempowered if the work I want to do depends on the administration of a piece of software I don't control, can't get access to, and plays by a different set of rules. The PC-era pioneer in me says, "get rid of it". Another approach might be, "tame it and make it serve me".

Electricity comes out of the plug in the wall reliably (in the developed nations). Landline telephones have reliable dial tone. Why can't we have utility-level connectivity for user data? And why can't it be open source? This is a big, ambitious vision, and it's not just about servers per se, but operational reliability as an overall system function (think Google with its hundred thousand servers) but maybe there's something here. More on this later too."

There are a number of themes here that interest me. It's early in the day where I am and I haven't got my head around it all yet, but it's to do with: operational reliability, user empowerment on the Web, integration of the web system with one's person, control, "taming" computers, commoditization, and of course the old chestnut of browser-based apps vs desktop apps. This is a placeholder post, while I mull over it. If anybody has any relevant pointers or links, feel free to make a comment. p.s. isn't it interesting that when people discuss heavy themes like this, Google always comes up...

"Social researcher Hugh Mackay said yesterday that younger generations were herding together like never before, using new technologies such as SMS and email chatrooms to foster tight social bonds.

Having grown up knowing only "instability, uncertainty and unpredictability", Generation Y had instinctively drawn together to cope, Mr Mackay said. [...] "They are the most intensely tribal, herd-based generation of young Australians I've ever known."

The words "tribal" and "herd-based" are words you wouldn't normally use to describe a Generation X'er. We're mostly characterized as individualistic or selfish, lazy, and cynical towards society. In some respects those attitudes were a backlash against the flower-power idealism of the baby boomers, although I'm one of those who thinks environment - or context - has a lot to do with the values and attitudes that a person or group of people has. So Generation Y are both a product of the computerized environment of the 1990's onward and are also rebelling against the "bite me" attitude of Gen X by adopting a, well, a "hug me" attitude I suppose.

The aussie social researcher quoted above goes on to say:

"I'm not predicting a revolution but I think it's the early sign of a genuine culture shift away from individualism to a more communitarian kind of culture."

I'm not so sure that individualism is on the way out, because two-way web culture promotes freedom of choice and individual creativity. But we definitely are seeing mass market culture slowly but surely being replaced by niche markets - that is, small communities of people based on shared topics of interest. Nowadays we increasingly have a large collection of small communities (niches), rather than a small collection of large communities (mass market).

btw doesn't "communitarian" sound eerily close to "communism"? or is that me being cynical? ;-)

After reading the above article, I went searching for more and came across this article from Chief Learning Officer magazine on how Knowledge Management should cater to Generation Y. They concluded that Generation Y will expect the following 3 things from a KM system: real-time access, personalization, and community. They state:

"By the end of this decade we will have moved from a workforce that often has to be sold on e-learning to one that demands e-learning, knowledge management and communities of practice."

Then I came across Dina Mehta's latest post, about youth in Urban India. I found this very interesting, particularly regarding youth's preference for IM (Instant Messaging for you oldies) over email. Dina talks about:

"...an "always on" world which is facilitated by technology like IM, VOIP, forums, blogs and online journals (have you ever left a comment at a youth journal or blog - either at a specific post or on their guestboards, and noticed how very promptly you will get a response to your comment - not just from the author but from a whole host of readers ?), simple SMS to enhanced functions offered by new generation mobile phones. How this is impacting and changing the way youth thinks, communicates, and takes decisions. And the implications this might have for the future as they enter the workplace, bringing in their new "culture-of-use", and for marketers seeking to address this segment." 

As I read this it occured to me how the field of Knowledge Management is undergoing a seachange right now. Knowledge Management has been a failure for Generation X from the 90's up till now and frankly most KM consultants haven't got a clue about the changes coming in Generation Y. The very changes that Dina summarises so well.

People in the blog world such as Dina know what's up, but if you look at professional KM articles elsewhere on the Web it's the same old same old. They continue to witter on about "leveraging" or "capturing" knowledge, how to uncover "tacit knowledge", and "optimizing operational efficiency". Frankly that sort of mumbo-jumbo annoys the heck out of me, but unless you talk that language you don't make any headway in the business world. If I look at this in a positive way, maybe that's my "niche" to explore. Knowledge Management for the 21st century, two-way web style.

In other news, Mark Bernstein wrote a good post today about the recent "bad behavior" of the blogosphere (the MT pricing scandal and the weblogs.com kerfuffle). The best piece of advice in his post was this:

"Slow down. Take the time to write well. Think things through. Relax."

This was a follow-up to Mark's previous post, where he said it would be preferable for people to respond to other bloggers in their own space (weblog), rather than leave comments in another person's weblog:

"Weblog comments incite duels. Duels are bad for society. We should all forego comments and return to carefully blogging responses -- including responses we disagree with, but excluding responses we cannot tolerate."

It's interesting to note that Mark's advice seems to go against the grain of what Generation Y does - frequent comments on other blogs, using IM to converse instantly and in real time. So on the one hand Mark's advice is old-fashioned and out of touch with what 'the kids' do these days. But on the other hand I agree that we should learn to take deep breaths and compose thoughtful responses on our personal weblogs - instead of engaging in knife-fights on someone else's territory.

Related to this topic, I've just finished an experiment where I tried to publish a short and pithy post every day. Off-the-kuff things. It didn't work for me though, as I'm more comfortable writing long-form articles and pondering things before I post. But then I'm also more of an 'email' person than an 'IM' one. Perhaps there is a generation gap (I nearly said a 'disconnect', but that's a loaded term in the Web world). Whereas Gen Y like to send messages to their tribes in real-time, previous generations prefer to 'compose' their messages and 'publish' them when they're good and ready. If that's the case, is RSS Time fast enough for Gen Y's?

Secondly, the term 'knowledge management' has become one of those awful IT cliche buzz words - like (my personal favourite) "leverage" and "portal". People who want to sound important in IT business meetings, but actually know little about IT, use buzz words frequently. e.g. "Yes we are addressing that with our new Knowledge Management initiatives, which will leverage off our Web Portal."

But despite these faults, the term 'knowledge management' is widely accepted as the name of a business discipline (alongside 'accounting' and 'marketing' and so forth). So it makes sense to go with the flow and continue to use the term. Indeed I've done so in my own weblog categorisation, which mostly matches the community topic mapping applications I use. It isn't my purpose here to try and change the term 'knowledge management'. I do however want to try and grasp what exactly is knowledge management and how is it done in the real world?

Is KM Nonsense?

I came across an interesting paper that debunks some myths about KM. Written by Professor T.D. Wilson of the University of Sheffield, the paper is provocatively entitled The nonsense of 'knowledge management'. The professor researched journal papers that had the term 'knowledge management' in their titles and he found that the occurance of such papers grew exponentially from 1997 onward. His data takes us to 2002, which was the peak but also showed signs of a slow-down. Professor Wilson discovered the following tendencies among the journals he researched (nb: I've separated the points into a numbered list):

1. A concern with information technology.

2. A tendency to elide the distinction between 'knowledge' (what I know) and 'information' (what I am able to convey about what I know).

3. Confusion of the management of work practices in the organization with the management of knowledge.

The 3 things above aren't the Professor's conclusions, just an excerpt I've selected that covers what I consider to be 3 key points. His actual conclusion later in that paper is that KM is a "management fad, promulgated mainly by certain consultancy companies". That may be so, but I'm more interested in what KM is in practice in the business world.

Work Practices

I want to pick up on the third point from above, "management of work practices in the organization". This is dismissed by Professor Wilson in his conclusion as a "Utopian idea", but I believe it is a practical way forward for KM. The current crop of personal content management and 'social software' tools (weblogs, wikis, etc) go some way to giving individual workers control over their information gathering and sharing. It's by no means a perfect solution - I've written before that I'm skeptical about how many 'normal' people (i.e. non-geeks) will use these technologies. But even so, technologies such as weblogs do emphasize subjectivity and context - which as I mentioned at the beginning of this post are two main tenets of 'knowledge'.

Bottom-up KM

One of the best articles I've seen on KM was written a week or so ago by Dave Pollard. He entitled it Confessions of a CKO: What I should have done. As the title indicates, Dave used to be a "Chief Knowledge Officer" (at Ernst & Young I think? if so, then it's one of the consultancy firms that Professor Wilson picked on in his paper!). In a previous article, Dave had outlined his principles of KM and in this latest article he tackles the processes. They are grounded in the following observation:

"...I realized that we have been looking at it all wrong, from above, from a systems perspective, instead of from ground level, from an activity level."

Which is another of saying that KM should be bottom-up, rather than top-down - a theme that I've written on before (as have many others in the blogging world).

KM Job Description

What really grabbed me about Dave's article was his ideal "job description" for KM - or "Work Effectiveness Improvement" as he re-named it. He outlined 6 bullet points and I've decided to crudely cut out the action points from those, which ironically loses the context somewhat. But generally speaking there are far too few KM action points in the world (as opposed to reams and reams of KM theory). So here goes:

1. Introduce personal content management and social networking tools.

2. Provide personalized training, tools, suggested processes and 'cheat sheets' to workers; plus provide recommendations for more systematic changes.

3. Establish standards, procedures, filters and measurements to reduce unnecessary e-mails, information flows, paperwork, meetings and interruptions.

4. Develop voluntary training programs.

5. Assess the aggregate cost to the organization of information; and objectively evaluate information adequacy, quality, and overload, and recommend changes to tools, repositories, and processes.

6. Develop a set of Work Effectiveness Principles.

Summary

The key point I take away from Dave Pollard's article and Professor Wilson's paper is that Knowledge Management isn't just a term to be used and abused in management meetings and journal papers. Knowledge Management - despite being mis-named - is a personal, collaborative, active 'doing word'. It is founded on subjectivity and context.

Let me put it this way: Knowledge Management should be a verb, not (as the word 'management' implies) a noun.

Our jobs as KM researchers or practitioners is to enable that in organizational settings. Now... if only I could get such a job! I'm currently a Web Producer, but I much prefer working at the Analysis and Strategy level. So I'd be interested to know how Dave Pollard worked his way to be a CKO, as that's something I'd like to aim towards. 

Your 2 Cents

I'd be interested in feedback from readers as to how one gets a job in the KM area. Do you work as a KM [something]? What do you do in your job to enable 'knowledge management'?

Having said that, there's no doubt that wikis/weblogs would be much stronger technologies if we could discover how to add layers of structure to the information that we produce using these tools. But that's when the Semantic Web looms into view like a giant blimp and techies start throwing 3-letter acronyms at each other like paper airplanes. Long story short: when the day arrives that we able to structure Web information from the bottom-up in a practical and user-friendly manner, that's when wikis and weblogs may begin to replace CMS's and Doc Mgmt systems.

All this doesn't stop us from implementing wikis and weblogs now as tools to foster collaboration and easy information publishing. That's basically what I'm aiming to achieve at my company. Today I had a look at Twiki and I came across this excellent presentation by Twiki creator Peter Thoeny, which he made to LinuxWorld on 21 Jan 2004. There's a lot of great advice in this presentation, but the things I want to highlight are his views on Knowledge Management. He makes the point that Knowledge Management is typically viewed as "control over content" and this is what conventional CMS's aim to achieve. He argues that knowledge cannot be managed, it can only be enabled. This is a point that resonates with me, because I think that "knowledge" is subjective and therefore cannot be 'captured' as an objective entity. Information can be captured though - and that's where wikis and weblogs come in. They enable anyone and everyone to capture (write down) information. Knowledge needs context - the reader's.

This is all fine and dandy in theory, but the practical reality is I have to convince my company that wikis and/or weblogs are a viable KM solution. A lot of people still subscribe to the "top-down" approach of KM. With regard to Intranets, the top-down approach says that Intranet content needs to be controlled. That there needs to be a gatekeeper or webmaster who decides what is appropriate for publishing and what is not. Of course, I don't agree with this approach - this weblog isn't called Read/Write Web for nothing! To my way of thinking everyone has the right and ability to not just consume information, but produce it too. And this is the fundamental benefit that wikis and weblogs provide. The question is: are corporates ready for the read/write culture, or is the need to control information going to remain for a while yet? I'm asking this question in the context of a corporate Intranet, but it's the exact same question being asked of journalism, politics, marketing weblogs, book publishing, music, etc etc.

All in all, my colleagues were open to using wikis and weblogs - as long as they're targeted at the right problem and to the right audience. That is, ordinary people must be motivated to use the tools ("passionate" is a word that was used) and it must be a suitable context. For example, a Wiki could be used to enable communication between teams, as an alternative to team members using email to send and store work-related information. My colleagues are enthusiastic (albeit slightly skeptical) about me testing out these technologies and seeing what evolves. I'll let you know how it goes!

Dina also adds, about KM in general:

I'm not sure this fits into traditional definitions of Knowledge Management (i really dislike the term) - i wish someone would coin a really neat term for it.

I feel the same about the phrase "Knowledge Management". To me, KM is full of fluffy words and phrases that have little practical value in the real world. It's too easy for so-called "Knowledge Management Consultants" to swan into organisations and pontificate about leveraging 'this' and setting up processes for 'that'. It's all so top-down, all talk and no action. The thing I like about wikis and weblogs is that it's bottom-up, there are no rules or processes or KM systems trying to pen workers in like sheep. KM is like a sheepdog and KM Consultants are the Shepherds. Except the 'sheep' are actually people, not sheep, so they resist herding.

With wikis and weblogs, people can just click a button and type (notice I said 'can' - it remains to be seen whether they actually do). People can produce information, subscribe to information they value, edit each others information. It's like a flow of information and Knowledge gets created in the mix and mingle of it all.

Information Flow is the term I suggested to Dina to replace Knowledge Management. It's not an original term, I've heard people like Dave Winer use it. Information Flow is what wikis and weblogs enable. To "manage" knowledge suggests a top-down approach where we get to tell Knowledge what to do. Well guess what, knowledge can't be ordered around. Information routes itself around of its own free will. What's more, Knowledge is in the eye of the beholder - i.e. it's a Subjective thing, not Objective. Am I mixing my metaphors? Sorry, it is late on a Friday...

Hey, maybe I can style myself as an "Information Flow Consultant" :-) I'll get the business card made up on Monday morning!

Thought b) Robert Scoble has admitted he's a "Blog Addict". He's taking a 1-week holiday from blogging to clear his mind. While I'm not on the same scale as Robert, I have to admit also that my blogging is beginning to become all-consuming for me. The positives: I'm actively writing and generating ideas because of blogging, I'm watching less tv and reading newspapers less, I'm interacting on an intellectual level with people from all over the world. The negatives: family time does suffer, I'm reading less 'real' books, there are too many interesting things to keep up with and so one tends to lose focus.

Thought c) Will blogging ever be anything but an "online diary" to Normal People? I'd like to think it will hit it big sometime soon, but let's face it - we're a minority (or is it a cult?).

Thought d) Does Location matter more than than The Blogosphere would like to think it does? Is blogging too American-centric? I live in New Zealand, so I don't get to attend any of the blog conventions, blogger lunches, etc. And I do feel like I'm missing out on something. e.g. nobody sent me an invitation to Orkut (it's invitation only). I'm probably not interested in Orkut anyway, but it did make me wonder if living in New Zealand is affecting my ability to actively participate in the blogosphere.

Thought e) Somehow related to Thoughts c & d, but was Howard Dean's polling failure related to the fact that blogging isn't REAL enough? Location (of votes in this case) matters.

Thought f) I keep thinking about my Microcontent Wiki idea, which really revolves around trying to keep up with conversations and aiming for a sense of permanance to them which is missing. e.g. when is the tipping point for when blog conversations (via the comments sections on peoples blogs) peter out? Sometimes I want to go back to a conversation two months later and re-start it, but I know that no one apart from the original author will be notified and so the momentum of the original conversation is never regained. We need places where ideas can reside and continue being debated for all time. Wikis are the right tools for this, mostly. Except they aren't good at the Subscribe part of the PubSub equation. And Wikis to me don't have the same personal touch of weblogs - Wikis ain't Avatars.
(this thought is inspired by Erik's interesting post about effectiveness, which has got my brain spinning - but I don't know that I'll have anything further to contribute until a few days, when the conversation will probably be finished).

Thought g) Attention. Where do I start with this one... Pick me, pick me. It may be a democracy of ideas, but sometimes it feels like a Horserace (in the American politics sense of the word).

These are just Saturday Morning thoughts, before the real day starts. Ah, my daughter's just woken up and needs my attention :-) 

Thus far I haven't written much on this theme, but it's something that's been percolating and bubbling away in my brain over the past year or so. It's a very important subject to me, because I'm keen to marry my interest in weblogging technologies to my day job. If my life was an XML file, then my goal with blogging would be to do an XSLT transfer from Amateur to Professional. It's that old maxim about getting paid for what you love doing. I'd dearly love to get paid to develop weblogs, but realistically the only way for me to do that is to introduce weblogging and similar technologies (such as Wikis) to my company.

My day job is Web Producer in a medium-sized New Zealand company. I've come to the conclusion that there is potential for weblogging technology to be used at my workplace, on our Intranet in particular. The company I work for is very project-oriented, as opposed to being run by a bunch of middle managers. This type of culture, I believe, could take advantage of weblog technologies internally to disseminate project and other business information. There are many advantages to a project-oriented culture - e.g. it's a flat hierarchy and so it's more dynamic and responsive to change, kind of like the Web in fact. However one of the disadvantages of a project-oriented workplace is that information stays within silos. One project team often won't know what another project team is doing, even though there may be a lot of knowledge they could share that would be mutually beneficial and therefore benefit the company as a whole.

So I've taken it upon myself to try and kick-start some weblogging and wiki initiatives in my company, to get information flowing like it should. I'm an established personal blogger now, and one of only two people in my company who even knows what weblogging is, so I'm in a unique position to begin implementing weblog technologies in 'the real world'. Of course there's still the issue that 'normal people' have no interest in writing. As Nova Spivack memorably put it recently: "I like blogging. Everyone I know likes blogging. But let's face it, we are all a bunch of geeks."

Nevertheless, corporate blogging has potential. I forsee weblogging and wiki technologies will be most useful in enabling bottom-up Knowledge Management in my company - via our Intranet.

Looking around the Web, it's quite hard to find practical information on using weblog technology in a corporate setting. What I have found so far seems to be mostly related to using weblogs as an external marketing tool. For example, Dina Mehta pointed to a Microsoft Marketing manager who uses blogging to converse with his customers. That's great, but external blogging isn't suitable for the place I work for. You really need to have a significant proportion of customers/clients who are both tech-savvy and motivated to use the Web regularly, in order to achieve anything with external blogging. So the internal Intranet is where I must focus my attention.

Keith Robinson regularly writes about using weblogging technology on his company's intranet. He uses Movable Type for parts of his employer's Intranet. I've found Keith's articles to be very useful and relevant to me - check out a recent article from him that describes how he implemented MT for a Policies & Procedures website. Using weblog tools as an easy-to-use and adaptable Content Management System is one way to introduce blogging into corporations. DL Byron notes:

"I'm consulting for a large corporation and it's fascinating to watch my peers embrace blogs and blogging. They're still working out how to use them internally, but have had success externally and I expect the same. Besides the communication within teams, I'm trying to help them understand the simple content management aspect of blogging."

I agree that success in corporate blogging has been mainly with external customer-facing blogs, and mostly sales and technology-oriented ones at that. Also don't forget about people like Robert Scoble, who is pushing the boundaries between personal/corporate blogging. His opinions are his own and he doesn't speak for Microsoft, yet he is quite obviously hyping his employer for all it's worth on his blog. His readers push back too, which is a sign of Robert's success and perhaps points the way forward for Political Candidates - involve your audience, engage them in conversations.

Today Digital Web asked "Is it year of the blog for corps?" I think it may be the year that internal company blogging begins to gain traction. My own corporate blogging efforts will probably be in the Knowledge Management arena - my users will be employees rather than customers. Plus my company already has an easy-to-use Content Management system for the Intranet, so I don't need to use weblog tools as a CMS.

I see that the upcoming SXSW (South by Southwest Interactive Festival) will have a panel called "Blogging for Business", featuring Keith Robinson and DL Byron. I'd love to go along to that, however I'll be stuck on the other side of the world. Hopefully someone does a write-up of it.

The blogosphere is mostly a synchronous give-and-take of content. People largely comment on and link to things that other people are commenting on and linking to. It's a circular flow of information, with a particular point in time always at the epicentre. It's why 99% of weblogs are primarily ordered chronologically - with the most recent post at the top of the page.

When I'm looking for information to quench my insatiable thirst for knowledge, I often use the Web in an asynchronous manner. That is, I like to read historical web documents and compare them to current blogosphere memes. The Wayback Machine is my friend in this regard. Why, just last week I discovered a gem of historical Web documentation: the Electronic Proceedings of the Second World Wide Web Conference '94: Mosaic and the Web. This is a record of all the presentations made to the 2nd annual WWW conference back in 1994. I intend to browse through most of the presentations in due course, but for now I want to tell you about the first one that tickled my Interest gland.

It's funny how a tool developed 10 years ago can still accurately describe the requirements of the 2004-era Web. That's exactly the case with PAINT, a "tool for individualizing the Web". Here's the executive summary:

The increasing complexity of navigating the Internet is becoming one of the fundamental obstacles to its effective use. This is due to the nature of the Internet, principally, a disorganized collection of both sites and site documents whose exponential growth rate rapidly is outstripping any user's ability to master it. There are two ways to deal with this complexity: reorganize the structure of the Internet or give each user the ability to organize an individual perspective of the Internet. Although the former would produce more global benefit, the latter is both easier to accomplish and potentially more beneficial to any individual or group of users.

Our approach, therefore, is to create a navigation tool which copes with Internet complexity at the individual, rather than the organizational, level. This tool, PAINT (Personalized, Adaptive Internet Navigation Tool), allows the user to impose a hierarchical organization on Internet sites and documents of interest by creating categories under which to group sites. Such categorization can be used not only by an individual user, but also can be shared among groups of users with similar interests. PAINT will also provide local automatic classification based on user parameters and user behavior. That is, PAINT will record visited locations and categorize them according to past use. The user is then free to examine the automated organization, modify it, and make it a personalized view of the Internet. In our report, we will describe the PAINT tool, its use, and some preliminary investigations of local, automatic categorization.

This webpage, even though nearly 10 years old, still in a nutshell describes what we're looking for in a PIM (Personal Information Management) appliance circa 2004. You can get all fancy and talk about wanting agents to gather data automatically, or using Bayesian filters, or latent semantic indexing. But really it still boils down to this: we want a tool that (in the words of Paint) individualizes the Web. 

Take the following sentence from the first paragraph in that 1994 webpage. It outlines the central problem - complexity - and the two general solutions. In red type, I've added how these two solutions are (generally speaking) being approached now:

There are two ways to deal with this complexity: reorganize the structure of the Internet (2004 = the Semantic Web) or give each user the ability to organize an individual perspective of the Internet (2004 = bootstrapping; eg what tech bloggers are now trying to do with their weblog taxonomies).

The program PAINT was designed to take the second approach. Paint wanted to put the user at the centre of their own personal Web:

This tool, PAINT (Personalized, Adaptive Internet Navigation Tool), allows the user to impose a hierarchical organization on Internet sites and documents of interest by creating categories under which to group sites.

The key things to note: PAINT enables people to create a hierarchical organization for their information, by grouping items into categories. Hmm, sound familiar?

PAINT circa 1994 was first of all an extension of the Mosaic web browser's hotlist facility. Hotlists were the equivalent of Favourites in the modern IE browser, or Bookmarks in Netscape. But at the time, hotlists could not be organized into folders. You just had the one list of documents and websites. So it could be argued that PAINT was simply a description of what IE Favorites or Netscape Bookmarks became a couple of years later - a hierarchical set of folders with which to store website URLs.

But I think PAINT's goals were deeper than that. Look at your usage of Favorites or Bookmarks today - do you use them as a way to categorize information you find on the Web? Do you organize your information into a hierarchy using the folders available to you? If you're like me, once upon a time you made an effort to do all this, but it long ago fell by the wayside. With the advent of RSS and Google I hardly ever use my IE Favorites anymore! And yet we still have this over-riding need to organize our information on the Web...

But obviously I can only take a comparison of PIM requirements then (1994) and now (2004) so far. What's different now? For a start we've had an exponential increase in the amount of data and information on the Web, thanks in part to having weblog tools that allow anyone (technical or no) to publish on the Web. But perhaps more fundamentally, information on the Web is now published as "microcontent". Information exists in "chunks", and each chunk of information is defined with a permalink. True, we haven't yet reached the stage where individual paragraphs or even sentences are given permalinks - but maybe that world of data isn't too far off.

So, could PAINT - or more likely a PAINT boosted with 2004-era technologies - be used to help us build weblog taxonomies based on categorizing our content hierachically? Well yes, but we're already building such tools. Dave Winer has developed a product called Channel Z which categorizes weblog posts into categories created by the author. k-collector allows bloggers to create and post to categories in a shared directory. And some clever bloggers (eg Paul Ford, Erik Benson, Bill Seitz) have created their own automated back-linking categorizing extravaganzas. So we're moving towards the goals that PAINT (and others I'm sure) defined back in 1994, and that visionaries such as Ted Nelson and Vannevar Bush defined decades before that. We haven't got there yet though. Most of us still muddle our way manually organizing our Web content. PIM Nirvana hasn't yet been developed. But with initiatives such as Chandler taking over the mantle from PAINT as the next big thing of PIMs, the circle of Web innovation continues and the dream lives on. Everybody wants to control and be at the centre of their information environment - will we ever succeed?