stressfree - blogging

Using Blogging as a Research Tool

David — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 10:26:51 +0000

This post expands upon a talk I gave recently about using blogs as an academic research and thought development tool.

Identify interesting people in your field of study

Academic research is one part original thought and ninety nine parts identifying the limits of existing knowledge. This task can take up a good part of your time and when it comes to the Web identifying movers and shakers in your field can be frustrating and highly unproductive task.

Online communities: social networks and newsgroups

The first place to start when identifying interesting people in your line of study is the various social networks and interest groups on the Web.

As far as social networks go arguably the two most productive for finding people are Facebook and LinkedIn. Whilst Facebook is aimed at the casual user there is a diverse range of interest groups forming around nearly every topic imaginable. Don't despair at the variable quality of the content within these groups, the fact you are almost always dealing with real people makes the effort needed to browse through these groups worthwhile. Likewise whilst the business-centric LinkedIn lacks Facebook's group capabilities you'll be surprised how many people in your extended professional network share similar interests or could be of benefit to your research.

At the more traditional end of the spectrum newsgroups like those at Google Groups and Yahoo Groups are good places to to find clusters of people interested in your research. Most newsgroups are welcoming to newcomers, especially those that have something to offer, but it pays to passively monitor potential groups for a while in order to properly gauge the tone and style of the people involved. Whilst it may seem easy to charge straight in, it is hard to rebuild bridges if you start things off on the wrong foot. For example it is not good karma for your first newsgroup posting to read "can someone tell me everything about subject X".

A typical Google Groups group (click to enlarge)

Social bookmarking

There are a growing number of websites dedicated to storing and sharing your Web bookmarks.

The most notable of these is del.icio.us but there are others such as Diigo and Simpy that are also very good.

These online repositories assist your research by helping you find people with similar interests as yourself. This is achieved by browsing through the 'tags' people associate with their bookmarks, whilst some services can even recommend people who appear to share similar interests as yourself. Social bookmarking can also act like a human powered search engine by enabling you to track popular or new bookmarks on a specific topic. However the drawback of social bookmarking is that for the system to function at its full potential you must publish your bookmarks for the world to see. This maybe a problem if privacy is an issue with your research or you just don't like the idea of being 'on show'.

Traditional search engines

When it comes to academic research most fields of study have large, searchable repositories of published work such as digital architecture's Cumincad and the ITC Digital Libraries. Alongside these targeted resources are generic academic search tools like Google Scholar and many more. Using a traditional search engine like Google or Yahoo for research purposes is possible but it can be of limited value as these tools are tuned to provide relevant rather than current results. Whilst fine for background purposes such a characteristic is not ideal for identifying leading edge thinking.

Blog search engines

Blog search engines like Technorati, Google Blog Search and Icerocket are focused on providing a window into current activity on the Web rather than identifying the most relevant (i.e. linked to) content. Using these tools is beneficial from a research perspective because it helps identify people out there that are currently writing about your field of research. This is different to academic journal repositories and conventional search engines where the actual content can be months or even years old.

Unfortunately by focusing on current events rather than relevancy blog search engines are prone to returning a lot of chaff (rubbish) alongside some useful nuggets of information. As a consequence the value of blog searching needs to be measured over a long period of time rather than a couple of minutes. Like panning for gold the same blog search repeated every day for a month will eventually yield a useful set of results. Performing this search and collating the results every day is very time consuming and subject to error, but fortunately there is a technology called RSS to help you out (more on that later).

Personal and corporate blogs

All going well you should be on your way to uncovering some key people in your field of study. These people maybe visionaries or just very good at keeping track of what exactly the leading edge is in your field of research. At this point it is important to determine whether these people (or people closely associated with them) maintain personal or corporate blogs. A blog is often the most efficient means of information discovery because unlike search engine results or academic journals you are able to access and disseminate the thoughts of these people as soon as it becomes available. Also the casual writing style often used in blogs can provide an emotional angle on research which highly crafted academic papers or books often lack.

Beyond the actual content the hyperlinks within a blog and the comments made about it are two significant research assets. It is very common for a blog to hyperlink to at least one other source of information. These links represent a free research lead which can often prove of more value than the originating blog post. Many blogs also support commenting which is a great way of gaining the attention of the author and understanding what other people think about what has been written. Don't forget that everyone appreciates positive comments and hearing from people with similar interests. If your goal is to get noticed then constructively participating in someone's blog is a great way of beginning this process.

The principle of Really Simple Syndication (RSS)

Visiting multiple websites every day just to see if something has changed is not the best way to spend your time. Fortunately Really Simple Syndication (RSS) exists to enable computers to automatically monitor a website's content and collate it in one convenient place. At its heart RSS is a set of standards for describing new web content in chronological order. On the face of it these RSS feeds may not seem very useful, but to a computer they are a simple means of comprehending a website's content without all the graphical and textual distractions. Most time-centric websites (i.e. blogs, news and search sites) now publish RSS feeds. If you have a modern Web browser like Firefox, Safari, Opera or Internet Explorer 7 you will see a little RSS notification somewhere on your screen when such a resource is available.

Google Reader (click to enlarge)

By itself RSS does not do much until you combine it with a 'reader' application. There are numerous RSS readers available with two of the most popular being Google Reader and Newsgator. Both of these RSS readers are free and require no software to be installed on your computer. Once signed up to the service you can subscribe to any number of websites you wish by following the instructions on the Google or Newsgator websites.

Adding your own content to the mix

Research is a bi-directional process and it is no fun just being a consumer of information. Fortunately there are plenty of free tools out there for writing your own blogs, the hard part is really deciding on which one fits your needs best.

Micro-Blogging tools

Committing to a blog is a big step especially if you have not created online content before. You may find it easier to dip your toe in the online waters by trying out a micro-blogging tool like Twitter or Pownce. These are very simple hosted services that let you write very short statements online. The idea may sound a little goofy but if your primary aim is to scrapbook a bunch of ideas, hyperlinks and images such a tool is a good place to start.

Blogging tools

There are plenty of choices as far as blogging tools go but if you are just getting into it then Blogger and Wordpress are two good places to start. Both services are free and hosted so you do not need to worry about spending money or configuring Web servers. There are limitations to hosted blogging services but for academic research purposes there really is not much need to look at more complicated (or costly) blogging solutions.

Blogging tips

When you start out blogging try to resist the urge of writing lengthy formal documents that could just as easily end up in an academic journal. The key is to try and write succinctly and regularly so that your thoughts are recorded and have time to evolve. There are plenty of blogging tips out there but here are some of the basics:

Keep your posts shortish (250-1000 words) or break long pieces of writing into multiple posts.
Get your idea across very quickly - many people will only read the title and first few sentences.
Treat your post as a moment in time - if you were wrong or change your mind later write a new post.
Visual impact is important - try to get one or two interesting images to break up the text.

Citations

Citing in blogs is difficult because a traditional hyperlink is not very accurate when it comes to pinpointing specific words on a page. Fortunately there is Citebite which lets you highlight a specific quote. The service is free to use and a great way of pinpointing those quotes for future reference.

Getting noticed in a crowded world

The importance of getting noticed by others will vary depending on your personal intentions. Whilst some blogs are for personal use or sharing amongst a group of friends the overriding majority are written by people wishing to broadcast their thoughts to the general public. Attracting attention is useful from a research standpoint because it can result to new information leads or professional relationships. However like a shampoo advert; building an online reputation will not happen overnight - but it will happen.

Get into Google's index (and the rest)

Google is the most popular search engine out there and it is important that your blog gets in it. To submit your blog to Google go to the following page and submit your blog's URL. It will take Google a little while to index your site but once it has it will be regularly checked by Google for changes. If you found that little exercise easy then head over to Yahoo and Microsoft's search sites and do the same thing.

Pimp your blog

Once you have a presence on the web it is easy to direct others to your site by including its URL in the comments you make on websites and in email conversation. When you look around you will find lots of places where you can advertise your blog, for example Facebook, LinkedIn and most photo sharing websites all provide a space for linking to your blog.

Making sure your blog URL is recorded in as many places as possible is important because Google and other search engines rank websites based on the number of other sites that link to them. This concept, often referred as PageRank, was the key behind Google's initial success in web search engine market during the mid-90's. Ultimately your objective is to have your blog linked to by a website that Google considers really important. Once this occurs a few times you will notice a definite increase in the quantity and quality of people taking notice of what you write.

Optimise your RSS feed

These days all blogging software can produce an RSS feed for other people to subscribe to. Unfortunately even though RSS stands for 'Really Simple Syndication' the technology itself is far from simple. There are now three RSS standards (RSS-0.9x, RSS-2.0 and Atom) and many of the programs for reading or writing RSS can only understand one or two of these formats.

Feedburner statistics (click to enlarge)

Fortunately there is a free service called FeedBurner which gets rid of all this hassle by ensuring that your RSS feed can be read by anybody. After signing up for a FeedBurner account point it to the URL of your RSS feed and it will create a special RSS feed that any program can understand. Not only this but FeedBurner will also automatically submit your content to search engines and track who is reading what you publish.

Notifying search engines of new content

Blogging is a time-centric medium; we generally read blogs to get an understanding of someone's thought process rather than for sources of definitive information. Traditional search engines can take a while to index your blog and even after this happens it can take a very long time before your content begins to feature near the top of searches (if at all).

Fortunately there are a range of blog search engines out there ready and willing to index and present your content to the world as you write it. Before this can happen they first must be told you have written something which is where Ping-o-matic is useful. This free tool is very good at notifying all these search engines you have new content on your blog. Within minutes of using Ping-o-matic your content will be indexed and displayed in search results from the likes of Technorati and Google Blog Search.

Tracking your impact

If you are trying to build an online reputation it is important to be able to gauge where you and your content stands. Is all your hard work paying off or are you being ignored? Even when people start reading your work what was it that brought them to your blog in the first place? Believe it or not but it is very easy to answer these questions by studying the behavior of your readers through free web-metrics tools like Google Analytics.

Google Analytics (click to enlarge)

Setting up Google Analytics can take a little bit of effort but overall it is not that hard to do. Like all statistical processes the results you get initially cannot be put to practical use but after six months the accumulated data will paint a very clear picture of who reads your work and what drew them to your blog in the first place.

Concluding thoughts

Contrary to popular belief starting a blog will not lead to instant fame or earn you piles of money from advertising. As a research tool however understanding how to consume and produce blogs can be very beneficial for developing ideas and building links with new people. This being said any results you experience will take time and certainly don't expect to the leading thinkers in your field to come knocking at your door the very next day. Persistence and a little bit of luck is the key; but like any long journey the satisfaction comes from the path you take and not the eventual destination.

Capturing workplace knowledge with Drupal

David — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 12:03:11 +0000

Formally recording what we have learned in the workplace is a worthwhile process that is often forgotten or not undertaken because there is no time or immediate incentive to do so. Web-based technologies such as wikis and blogs have demonstrated that enabling people to quickly publish and publicise their knowledge within their peer group is potentially a very powerful means of undertaking collaborative knowledge capture. This article explores how Drupal, an open-source content management framework can be used to facilitate this process in a community centric manner.

So much to know, so little time

A workplace such as an architecture practice generates a lot of 'on the job' knowledge which at the time can seem obvious or worthless but afterwards can be invaluable. Such knowledge can range from the most appropriate window detail to use in a certain situation, to the most efficient way of modeling that window detail in the office CAD package. Usually these little morsels of knowledge are never formally recorded because it is just more work that typically is not budgeted for, or acknowledged by, management. As a consequence finding an answer to one of the aforementioned questions becomes dependent on your ability to understand the workplace's knowledge topography (i.e. who knows what). But even though it maybe common knowledge in your workplace that Bob has a collection of decent window details or Andrew 'the CAD guy' will help you out, what happens when they are not available, or even worse quit their job to work at the more fashionable architecture practice across town?

Technology to the rescue (sort of)

During the later bit of the 20th Century 'knowledge management' was a buzz-word because to a certain degree it was felt that with the onset of the 'knowledge economy' we would all soon be drowning in a big sea of knowledge (that's a lot of knowledge). Consequently many complicated and expensive systems were developed to act like sponges and absorb all this dangerous knowledge. Unfortunately whilst many of these systems did an excellent job of storing and searching the information that was put into them, the highly structured manner in which this data had to be entered made it painful for the average, overworked and under-appreciated employee to undertake. It must of come as some surprise to many employers when they realised that whilst their employees were not using their expensive workplace knowledge management systems they would gladly spend hours of their free time (and no doubt some of their employers) writing blogs and participating in wikis such as Wikipedia on the public Internet. Given the massive adoption of both technologies it comes at no surprise then that we are now trying to understand how to leverage these tools in order to capture workplace knowledge.

What are these two Web technologies and how are they different? At its simplest form a blog is a series of chronologically ordered texts casually written by a single person on a subject matter of their choosing. In contrast a wiki is generally a more formal and structured set of documents that any (authorised) person can edit how they see fit. Both are similar in that the processes of publishing and publicising new content is instant which provides immediate gratification and information for those partaking in the process. However whilst conversation in the form of comments is encouraged around both, blog comments generally spurs open ended debate, whilst comments on a wiki are usually intended as feedback for improving the underlying document.

Mixing and matching to find a combination that suits your environment

Ignoring technology for a moment a workplace's knowledge cannot be translated purely into an encyclopedic-like volume or assembled as a collection of personal thoughts. The best strategy to adopt in this environment is a 'horses for courses' approach. Some aspects of the business will be recorded and utlised most efficiently as a wiki-like document, whilst extracting nuggets of personal knowledge from employees will require a blog-like environment. However what is most important is that a healthy and incentivised environment for conversation needs to be created for all employees to participate in. The last thing a workplace needs is for the platform to become a venue for one person to blow their own horn or a tool for management to enforce how things should be done.

A diagram illustrating the relationship between blogs, wiki and groups in a workplace knowledge capture system (click to enlarge)

As is hopefully apparent from the description above both blog and wiki have their own set of benefits and drawbacks. Whilst a blog is an excellent means of recording one person's opinion or off the wall process it is not a useful venue for collaboratively putting together a set of 'best practice' documents. Likewise whilst a wiki enables a group of like-minded people to assemble a homogeneous knowledge base it stifles personal opinion in favor of group-think, or even worse allows the resident alpha-male to stamp his (or her) mark on everything that gets recorded. Currently we do not have a Web concept that encompasses the best of both worlds and because of the forces at play I doubt one will ever exist. As a consequence an effective workplace knowledge capture system should attempt to blend both blog and wiki in a manner which positively reinforces both functional requirements.

Enter Drupal, the jack of all trades

Most blog or wiki software packages available today are simply that, a blog OR wiki software package. There are very few that are both and even fewer that do them both well. Drupal is one such software package that is capable of enabling simultaneous and seamless blog and wiki-like functionality in the manner required of a workplace knowledge capture system. Drupal is a mature, open-source, PHP-based content management framework that is used worldwide on thousands of Web and intranet sites. Unlike a more traditional, one size fits all content management or wiki system, Drupal is intended to be extended and modified to suit the exact functionality required. This capability makes it ideal for use as a workplace knowledge capture system because it can be tailored to fit the intended environment and is capable of changing as the workplace evolves.

Blogging in Drupal

Drupal comes standard with a blog module built in which allows all users to have their very own blog that other people can view and comment upon. Creating interesting blog posts is greatly simplified through the use of word-processor editor modules such as TinyMCE with extensions like IMCE. These enable even the most technically challenged people to create rich, structured documents complete with embedded photographs and diagrams.

The TinyMCE rich-text editor within Drupal (click to enlarge)

Wiki-like functionality in Drupal

Drupal does not yet have wiki functionality built in by default. This being said it is possible to create a versioned document type that can be edited by all users with only a few mouse clicks. When combined with the diff module this versioned, fully editable document has the same characteristics of a wiki document without the annoying wiki syntax (which many would say is a good thing). There are wiki syntax modules in development for Drupal but in reality a rich-text HTML editor like TinyMCE is far easier to pick up and use by your average employee when compared to the often cryptic world of wiki-markup.

Taxonomies in Drupal

Having lots of content is a great, but like our mothers always warned too much of a good thing will lead to stomach aches and tooth decay. Just because something has been written down and is in a database does not mean it will be easily found. Drupal allows content to be categorised in many different ways from a highly structured taxonomy through to very fluid, user defined tags. Both types of categorisation have their benefits and drawbacks, but being able to mix and match both systems depending on the type of content enables staff to locate what they are trying to find in any number of ways. For example taxonomies can be browsed or viewed as a cloud, used to assist in search request or, with the aid of modules like 'similar entries' can forge links between disconnected content.

Identity in Drupal

Identity management is another hot topic within the I.T. world at the moment and Drupal is very powerful in this regard. By default Drupal uses an internal user database but it can be configured to pull user information from a central source such as an LDAP server. Functionality such as this enables it to be integrated seamlessly into an office environment where employees generally have existing accounts for file and print services.

Building communities around business topics with Organic Groups

On an active website what generally turns out to be the hardest part of the interaction process is deciding what is or is not interesting to you. The last thing you want to do on a busy work day is comb through all the new bits of information on the workplace knowledge base just to find out nothing touches on your specific interests. The Organic Groups module resolves this problem by allowing users to create groups within the Drupal site which can be subscribed to by associates who have similar interests. As content is posted to this group the subscribed users can be notified by email or RSS feed of the developments rather than having to manually check. A secondary but no less important aspect of the module is that it enables the group to flag what they are discussing as private so that only those subscribed and authorised can view and partake in the conversation. In a large, multi-faceted organisation a capability such as this is important because not all knowledge capturing is a public affair, especially if the information is confidential or sensitive.

There is no such thing as a free lunch, but the food is cheap

Drupal does not have a 'workplace knowledge capturing' module because each workplace is different and for such a tool to be successful it needs to be tuned to its environment. Fortunately Drupal is a fluid platform so deployment can happen very quickly with the intention being that the system will be changed to suit the workplace based on feedback and uptake by the staff. Being open source with a large user base there are very little setup cost s and support from the community or local consultants is easy to come by. If you are considering setting a knowledge capture system up then I would recommend exploring how blogs and wiki can be used in partnership with each other in your workplace and whether Drupal could be the stage where it all takes place.

Note: For a list of useful Drupal modules checkout my Diigo Drupal bookmarks for many of my favourites.

A great short video about the 'Long Tail'

David — Fri, 13 Oct 2006 02:03:38 +0000

The "Long Tail" is a term thrown around a lot by Internet entrepreneurs and marketeer/philosophers like Doc Searls as a means to describe the rediscovered sales base across all industries.

During the early and mid-90's the notion of the blockbuster was everything. Films like Jurassic Park and Independence Day epitomised this concept of putting all your eggs in a couple of well defined markets and selling it to the public like there was no tomorrow. However the blockbuster ignores the common fact that for every exclusive, overpriced item (be it fashion label or computer) there is thousands of smaller, cheaper alternatives that don't sell as well individually but combined make up an overwhelming majority of industry sales.

The low cost, distributed nature of the Internet has allowed these smaller brands to sell their wares on an equal footing with more established name-brands. This exploding market has been termed the 'Long Tail' and is the target of 99% of Internet shopping sites and the subject of this very good short video.

blogging

Structured Blogging, Microformats & PeopleAggregator

David — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 05:37:30 +0000

I first read about and subsequently looked into Structured Blogging and Microformats a while back but a recent podcast on IT Conversations by Marc Senasac reminded me of them. Marc is CEO of PeopleAggregator, a company that is trying to successfully bring together and market more buzz-words under a single umbrella than most people care to know about.

Structured Blogging

Structured Blogging is an initiative intended to bring some structure to the world of blogging. It seems like when-ever people start doing unstructured and completely random things there is always another group who wish to impose some form of framework to which they do it. Structured Blogging is attempting to infuse a little more intelligence into your average blog, mainly by first asking the blog author to give their blog post a little description (is it ramblings, a review or a podcast?). This description is recorded as a Microformat so that search engines and other such tools can do more intelligent things with blog entries than simply read them.

Because Structured Blogging is more complicated than plain old vanilla blogging its supporters are going to great lengths to make it simple and approachable through Firefox extensions and plug-ins for popular blogging platforms. The most interesting link off the Structured Blogging website is a NZ website that reviews cafes. What is troubling however is that it is difficult to identify the exact benefits (or use of) Structured Blogging, but I guess it is always useful to know about a New Zealand cafe review website. So it would seem that at the moment Structured Blogging is still a potentially great idea seeking a killer application that clarifies to the general public what it is all about and how it can be valuable.

Microformats

Microformats like their name suggests are fractions of a format. By itself a single Microformat does not amount to much, say a single address, but its power comes in the fact they are not trying to do too much for too many people. In the mid-90's XML faced this problem when trying to establish the vision outlined in the Semantic Web developers around the world began creating XML schema data structures. Unfortunately the problem with this approach is twofold.

Firstly because it was so easy to define a data standard literally hundreds, if not thousands of different standards were proposed. More often than not these competing data standards overlapped with each other which led to tension and diluted development resources. In the architecture, engineering and construction industry there emerged three XML standards that did very similar but still different things: aecXML, Green Building XML (gbXML) and ifcXML. Unfortunately for the AEC industry none of these proposed standards took hold, arguably the most successful being gbXML as it has a relatively targetted audience compared to the other, more generic models.

The second problem when dealing with a large and complex data standard is addressing the different and often competing needs of all the current and future participants. The Industry Foundation Classes are a good example of this problem. As IFC's set out to model large facets of a complex industry it has taken many years, negotiations and versions to get the data model to a stage where it can encompass a genuinely useful portion of the intended data-set.

Microformats get around these problems by focusing on a single target audience and only trying to do one thing. Whilst simple in scope even these tasks are relatively complicated. For example postal addressing on the surface appears straightforward but it is complicated by the fact each country has a unique addressing standard and means of referencing geographical locations. New Zealand and Australia are very close to each other culturally and physically but New Zealand does not have states or place as much emphasis on suburbs as Australian addresses leading to significant differences in postal address formats. These little problems can be difficult to resolve which is why Microformats by intentionally setting out to solve limited problems have been relatively successful when compared to their more complex brethren.

So what is PeopleAggregator setting out to do?

PeopleAggregator are trying to combine Structured Blogging, social networking, Microformats and identity management into a useful and user-friendly experience. Marc does a good job of explaining what it is the company does in the podcast and it is worth listening to. Also helpful is a video they have put together than in a couple of minutes gives a broad overview of what they do. The really short story is that you create an account, invite friends and then blog away amoungst each other. As you are using Structured Blogging the entries can be anything from text to video or images. The intention is that PeopleAggregator intelligently aggregates (shares) the content around all your friends without all that hassle of RSS readers and email.

Why is this interesting?

This is interesting when applied to the concepts of my thesis as the people at PeopleAggregator are using the same tool-set as I have considering to create what is hoped to be vibrant social blogging groups. Boiled down to its essentials a building design project is a group of like minded people so it is not unreasonable to suggest that useful information can be gleamed by examining how PeopleAggregtor operates and the results it receives. It is also a useful reference point because the software can be downloaded and experimented with on a local server. PeopleAggregator certainly sounds interesting although the actual results do not look all that impressive, in a kind of a MySpace meets Blogger.com way. Personally I feel that the ideas and the software itself need to go through another revision cycle before something truely practical and worthwhile emerges.

Tim enters the land of blogging

David — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 06:54:26 +0000

For ages Tim Woodill and I have been engaged in various email debates about 9/11 conspiracy theories. Anyone that knows Tim will know he loves a good conspiracy theory even if they are sometimes quite ridiculous. Last week thanks to a link to a story I emailed him he got entangled in a rather intense email battle with the author of this post on 9/11 conspiracy theorists. Tim spent a lot of time getting his arguments in a semi logical format and writing well thought out responses and questions to the author. They were so well thought out and written that I suggested he start a blog and he has done so, the ominously titled 'The Unpleasant Possibilities'. It only has one post up there but hopefully Tim uploads some of his previous writings and email exchanges so they can be appreciated (and ridiculed) by a wider audience than myself.

blogging

New AutoDesk DWF blog - Beyond the Paper

David — Thu, 16 Feb 2006 08:11:58 +0000

There is a new AutoDesk blog about DWF from Scott Sheppard. He has an fairly nice overview of what a DWF is exactly and then goes on to explain why Adobe and AutoDesk are not 'at war' with their PDF and DWF standards. This is something I completely disagree with and I think subconsciously he does too with comments like "if you want to solve real problems... then PDF is not enough" and "never fly in a plane that was designed from a PDF".

A primary justification for DWF is the fact that it is intelligent and allows the capture of meta-data about a project for sharing. This is quite an ironic statement considering that that is exactly what a DWG and an IFC model do, the only difference is that for the time being DWF is firmly in the AutoDesk silo. DWF does have a lot more presentational characteristics compared to these two formats but the same effects are able to be generated using these formats without needing to create an entirely new proprietary standard.

AutoDesk and Adobe are fighting a battle within the collaboration space to establish a dominant standard for digital paper collaboration. It is a battle that at least in New Zealand Adobe is winning as most AEC professionals I have experience with exchange and accept PDF formatted documents whilst I know of only a couple that have experimented with DWF. Ultimately there will come a point where DWF will gain so many features that it will almost be impossible to distinguish it from its bigger brother DWG. When that time comes will we see a DWF Lite (or perhaps DWX as it sounds sexier).

Knowledge management and blogging

David — Mon, 09 Jan 2006 06:49:30 +0000

Ellen Finkelstein has a number of good links and observations about how knowledge management is meeting blogging and other looser forms of communication. Thanks go to Mike D for these links:

Linked off Ellen's site is a couple of interesting articles and papers.

The duality of knowledge - Paul Hildreth and Chris Kimble

This paper was written in 2002 as a response to the growing number of knowledge management systems appearing that focused on purely collecting raw data without taking into account the personal nature of much of this information. The paper has a number of very useful background references for general knowledge management principles and the definition of 'know-how' and 'know-what' knowledge (or hard knowledge vs soft knowledge). There have been so many papers written about this subject that they all come across as being very boring (the Postgraduate Conference in 2004 at Manchester was stock full of such papers) and you can't help but feel a whole lot of people are reiterating the same pieces of information just to fill in pages for conference proceedings. Nevertheless this paper has a number of good diagrams and tables that help illustrate the points. The paper was written before the rise of blogging but it does begin to outline how technology based processes could begin to farm this soft knowledge resource.

Blogs in Business: The weblog as a filing cabinet

This is a blog posting by Dave Pollard that has some pretty nice concise obversations. His primary observation is that for too long we have focused on getting all the obvious pieces of data recorded without spending much time thinking about how these pieces of data relate to the understanding and relationships within the business processes themselves. He summarizes his thinking in a very good passage:

"Weblogs could be a mechanism to coherently codify and 'publish' in a completely voluntary and personal manner the individual worker's entire filing cabinet, complete with annotations, marginalia, post-its and personal indexing system."

He goes on to highlight some benefits of the blogging process, namely that it could potentially tap into the 'codified knowledge resource' that is email and that systems could easily be established to work within corporate firewall constraints (intranet based blogs vs publicly accessible ones). He balances these observations with a few warnings about how these systems could not be viewed as the silver bullet as perhaps previous knowledge management systems were. In his words again:

"They represent the best-yet compromise between the anarchy of personal websites on the Intranet, and the straight-jacket of most 'corporate owned' repositories."