Toogle Image Search

Toogle Image Search: "The most comprehensive image buggery on the web."

Try "chocolate"!

[via David Weinberger]

The New York Times: Internet Bullies

This NYTimes (free registration required) article is garnering quite a bit of attention. Internet Gives Teenage Bullies Weapons to Wound From Afar:

"The episode reflects one of many ways that the technology lubricating the social lives of teenagers is amplifying standard adolescent cruelty. No longer confined to school grounds or daytime hours, 'cyberbullies' are pursuing their quarries into their own bedrooms. Tools like e-mail messages and Web logs enable the harassment to be both less obvious to adults and more publicly humiliating, as gossip, put-downs and embarrassing pictures are circulated among a wide audience of peers with a few clicks.

The technology, which allows its users to inflict pain without being forced to see its effect, also seems to incite a deeper level of meanness. Psychologists say the distance between bully and victim on the Internet is leading to an unprecedented - and often unintentional - degree of brutality, especially when combined with a typical adolescent's lack of impulse control and underdeveloped empathy skills.

What seems most important to pay attention to is the comment about how this bullying flies under adults' radar and less visibility of the effect of the work OF the bully by the bully. I see this dynamic show up in adult interaction as well, but usually with much less or little intent to do harm. But the individual experience on the receiving end can be devasting, particularly if it happened in a public online space or was rapidly forwarded among email networks.
It's like you may survive the earthquake, but the aftershocks get you -- to the core.

First Monday: E–learning and language change

E–learning and language change — Observations, tendencies and reflections by Henrik Hansson and Sylvia van de Bunt–Kokhuis

This paper discusses the globalization of e–learning, changes in languages as an effect of distance technologies and the lingua franca of modern times, English, and its effects on other languages. Hybrid languages such as Spanglish (Spanish English) and Swenglish (Swedish English) emerges as an effect of the increasing interaction between non–English languages and the dominant English language. The need for speed and efficiency in communication and the adaptation to new technology changes language dramatically as is observed in chat and SMS–mediated communication. The complexity of modern human communication is discussed with a historical perspective — the old modes of communication can now be used via Internet but this transfer changes their characteristics.

Creating a Learning Culture - New Book

Creating a Learning Culture, edited by Marcia Conner, is out. I have a few friends and colleagues with essays in this book -- it looks interesting. (I have to read a few on the stack before I can buy more.) Has anyone read it yet? Comments? From the PR:

Creating a Learning Culture features insightful essays from industry observers and revealing case studies of prominent corporations. Each chapter revolves around creating an environment where learning takes place each day, all day—fundamentally changing the way we think about how, what, and when we learn, and how we can apply learning to practice. Three sections address key aspects of learning culture: the modern business context and the importance of learning at every juncture; the organic and adaptive approaches organizational leaders can take to design enduring success; and the expanding role of individuals within organizations and the implications for business leaders, educators, technologists, and learners. Identifying the steps companies must take to remain competitive for years to come, this book explains how learning strategies applied to all aspects of every job can provide swift returns and lasting results.

Contributors include: Douglas K. Smith (Foreword); John Seely Brown and Estee Solomon Gray (Introduction); Harlan Cleveland; William M. Snyder and Etienne Wenger; Eileen Clegg and Clark N. Quinn; Karen Kocher; Mitch Ratcliffe; David Grebow; Laurie Bassi, Karen L. McGraw, and Dan McMurrer; Edgar H. Schein; Rob Cross, Lisa Abrams and Andrew Parker; Wendy L. Coles; Marc J. Rosenberg; Dori Digenti; Brook Manville; Brenda Wilkins; Gunnar Brückner; Garry O. Ridge; Cliff Figallo; Marcia L. Conner and James G. Clawson (Afterword)

Evaluating Collaborative Policymaking

National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation: "New Report on Evaluating Collaborative Policymaking Processes

...the Center for Collaborative Policy just released a Hewlett-funded report called 'Is Devolution Democratic? Assessing Collaborative Environmental Management.' The report proposes a normative framework for evaluating the democratic merits of collaborative policymaking processes in terms of six criteria: inclusiveness, representativeness, procedural fairness, lawfulness, deliberativeness, and empowerment. The framework is then applied to random sample of 76 watershed-based stakeholder partnerships in California and Washington State. You can download the report at www.csus.edu/ccp/publications.htm."

Blogger Fallout

I was at a 5 day meeting and had little time to blog. But I clipped a bunch of things in "draft" mode for when I returned. This evening, as I went to edit, everything is gone from yesterday and today. Poof! As if I could remember what I had snagged. Oi vey. I am not a happy blogger.

That said, I probably have 30 things in draft mode I could use. But it was TODAY'S stuff I wanted. Pout pout.

Institute for Connectivity in the Americas

Connecting People. Connecting Ideas. Connecting the Americas.

"ICA showcases success stories, lessons learned, and best practices that support knowledge creation and capacity building in the Americas. In addition, the Institute promotes virtual collaboration networks to facilitate the exchange of ideas."

[Recommended by Steven Clift]

Cliff Figallo: Communities don't die...

I'm hip deep in meetings for five days so am simply sharing stuff that has been thought provoking to me.

Cliff Figallo wrote a few days ago of how the net has reconnected him to an important community from his past. Communities don't die...:

"It's only been in the past 5 years that the Net has begun to serve as our reunion space. One of our email lists is called the Prayer List. On the Farm we lived as a spiritual community. That was what we called our first cause. We didn't have a codified religion; we simply believed that as humans we had a spiritual bond between us that deserved to be honored. Since we dispersed (most of the Farm's members left the Tennessee land and our collectivity in the early 80s) we've taken many different spiritual and religious paths.

The Prayer List is ecumenical, but it's a way to stay in touch to provide support for those of us who need it. And as we age, we find that we are naturally facing more illness, more suffering, more death. Our kids get sick, hurt and sometimes die. We want to know that people we trust are paying attention and praying for us, or at least projecting good wishes to us during our hard times.

It's amazingly powerful to know that hundreds of friends are aware when there is a crisis, and it's heartening to know that the Net can extend the loving relationships we worked so hard to build over 20 years ago. And to have it work through a simple email list is an illustration of how basic the tools can be to deliver the most essential messages of all."

This feeling that a community can be "there" for you, even though the "there" is dispersed, almost indescribable, rings true for me.

Full Circle Online Facilitation Workshop - Starts Sept 6

Hm. I realized I can use my own blog to market my work. Shocking, eh? In any case, I offer about twice a year an online workshop called "Facilitating Online Interactions." I've been offering this alone and with others since late 1998. It is three VERY active online weeks spread over five weeks. Intense. Perhaps too intense for some, but it gets participants to an experience that can open up possibilities they never imagined. There are always interesting participants from all around the world. It is mostly asynchronous, but we also have 2 telecons and weekly synchronous chats.

Interested? Details can be found on the workshop homepage. The two non profit/NGO scholarships are gone, but if you want to take the workshop and will commit to full participation, and you are broke or you work for an NGO, email me and perhaps we can find a way for it to work.

P.S. This workshop is a labor of love.

ReliefWeb: Directory of Communities of Practice

Mark Hammersley has been doing amazing things connecting relief and aid workers using simple web based tools such as emails and webpages. Here comes another great contribution: Directory of Communities of Practice (for ReliefWeb)

"This is a work in progress, listing online communities for relief workers. Email discussion lists and other community resources have been selected for inclusion on the basis of relevancy and usefulness for humanitarian practitioners."

Stiki Wiki - Wiki Subtleties

Stiki Wiki floated across my digital world this morning. I like it. I like it.

Go look at this wiki. What do you notice first? What do you notice after you swim around for a while in this lovely gray and sage pool? StikiWiki adds context. CONTEXT! (yes, I'm shouting). Intuitively I'm jumping up and down at my desk because that is what I sense baffles some people with wikis -- it can feel like there is a lack of context because it is presented to us in unfamiliar ways. I'm going to play with this wiki some more!

[via David]

Common Craft - Differences Between Message Boards and Weblogs

Lee at Common Craft just posted a thoughtful piece on the difference between message boards and weblogs. I had the chance to see his draft and really appreciate the distinctions (and similarities) he is trying to articulate. As I reread the final post tonight, I'm more strongly hit by the coming convergence of these forms. Perhaps in a year, we will have new hybrids and combinations. Here is a snippet:

Worlds are colliding, people. Your friendly neighborhood message board is not alone in the online community world any longer...

...in the last few years, we’ve seen the arrival of a new set of tools and processes that offer additional opportunities for message board-based online communities. The appearance of weblogs have left many observers, including me, wondering about the differences between the two technologies and how they will be used inside online communities.

Are weblogs really that different from message boards? How?

More Wiki Resources: DokuWiki

DokuWiki:

"DokuWiki is a simple to use Wiki aimed at a small companies documentation needs. It works on plain texts files and thus needs no database. It has a simple but powerful Syntax which makes sure the datafiles remain readable outside the Wiki. It utilizes GNU grep for fast text search."

Note from Nancy: Do you know of a distributed community of practice that uses wikis as their main online interaction tool? Please let me know. I need some case studies for a report some of us are working on. Thanks.

[Via Brian Dear]

Blogs, Communications Possibilities and "WHY?"

The recent Tech Soup online conversation on blogs and this article in The Chronicle, Advocacy Groups Discover the Power of Blogs to Spread Their Messages, has gotten me thinking more about the role of communications in organizations, particularly organizations that have a large geographic spread or which are distributed (i.e. the members are rarely or never colocated - together!)

What kinds of communication do we need? How much is too little? How much is too much? How public? How private? How much inward facing? Outward facing? Blogs and other forms of easy distributed publishing open up doors that ask us to then think about our strategic communications choices. "How" has given us opportunity. The "what" abounds. The "why" of what we do becomes even more important than ever.

What kinds of decision making ideas do we have to get to the best "why" possible?

[via Vermont Nonprofit CommunIT]

Olympic Athlete Blog Blackout

I mentioned this news in the previous post. Thought I should blog it as context. USATODAY.com - Olympic athletes largely barred from posting online diaries

Athletes may be the center of attention at the Olympic Games, but don't expect to hear directly from them online — or see snapshots or video they've taken.

The International Olympic Committee is barring competitors, as well as coaches, support personnel and other officials, from writing firsthand accounts for news and other Web sites.

An exception is if an athlete has a personal Web site that they did not set up specifically for the Games.

The IOC's rationale for the restrictions is that athletes and their coaches should not serve as journalists — and that the interests of broadcast rightsholders and accredited media come first.

Why Don't We Hear this Story in the News?

First I reeled when I heard yesterday about the Olympic's athlete blog ban. What do they want to hide? Then David Weinberger blogged Tom Matrullo's experiences recovering from Hurricane Charely. IMproPRieTies: riders on the storm

The first moment after a disaster, we do not need news anchors unchained to any news, no shred of useful information, but plenty of unctuous sympathy. We do not need roads filled with NBC-2 vehicles containing anchorites powdering their noses in rear view mirrors. These we have, in droves.

--

Disasters happen. Some learn from prior experience. MCI, with its Big Blue mobile phone/broadband satellite trailer, with AC, water, snacks, has learned. They have been to Oklahoma City. To New York City. They have acquired some knowledge, and it shows. MCI’s unit posted itself near the worst hit area, but also near a Publix, (another company with some memory of what can be done), which reopened within a couple of days of the storm with generator power, and porta-potties. To these essential ingredients came people from Siesta Key offering burgers and hot dogs, cold water, etc. State Farm set up its mobile office. In very little time, a self-organized multiple-use node has replaced a distressed stripmall parking lot.

Later Tom wrote:

Mr. Bush, your disaster recovery agency is intensifying the lack of housing, taking up valuable space with its own infrastructure, and failing to take the simplest steps to alleviate a jot of the monumental problems here. I applaud FEMA's effort to undermine your political future; I simply do not wish anyone who is not the "beneficiary" of the agency's services to believe it has anything other than a hollow political purpose in being here.

I live in Southwest Florida under a mask called FEMA, a latter day Republican meta-agency. Its task is to mitigate the impact of any natural disaster upon the political fortunes of the Bush Administration -- the major disaster from which we all need immediate long-term relief.

We need peoples voices heard. Not stifled.

[via David Weinberger]

Robin Good's e/merge Synchronous Collaboration Presentation

At June's e/merge online conference originating out of South Africa, Robin Good's Synchronous Collaboration live presentation won raves. You can hear/see/experience it now from the archives. Robin has put together a set of criteria then ranked a variety of tools and providers.

Resource: Open Source CMS Evaluation Site

More folks are looking not only at open source products. In the content management category (CMS) - an expensive option in the propriatary software world, it is nice ot see an option like opensourceCMS for evaluation.

"This site was created with one goal in mind. To give you the opportunity to 'try out' some of the best php/mysql based free and open source software systems in the world. You are welcome to be the administrator of any site here, allowing you to decide which system best suits your needs."

[via Stephen Downes]

Snippets from Weblogs: The Promise for Nonprofit Organizations

Here are some snippets from TechSoup: Weblogs: The Promise for Nonprofit OrganizationsSome things (snipped) out – see the article for all the good stuff.

10 Reasons You Should Start a Weblog Right Now

1. Updating is easy. It can be difficult to organize information on your Web site. The better weblog tools (such as Movable Type's TypePad, WordPress and Blogger) have … templates that give you a functional site at the click of a button. (snip).

2. Links are valuable to your readers. Most weblogs are made up of separate posts that consist of a link with some commentary. These links to other sources of information give readers a reason to visit your site. Your organization's blog can serve as a clipping editor on a particular topic, pointing your readers to the best sources of information so they don't have to do all the sifting themselves.

3. You can become a trusted information source. The more you add useful links to your weblog, the more you become a trusted source for information. (snip)

4. A Weblog gives readers a reason to visit your Web site regularly. The useful information you post gives visitors a reason to come back regularly. Frequent visitors are more likely to engage with your organization's efforts online and off-line.

5. Weblogs provide a more personal communication vehicle. Writing a formal Web site takes a lot of work writing a polished presentation of your organization, your projects, and your fundraising efforts. The nature of the weblog medium, with its quick and frequent updates, promotes a personal voice that can engage users on a more human level. For example, Andy Carvin's Waste of Bandwidth is a personal site. Andy's voice comes across. (snip)

6. Google loves weblogs. Google ranks frequently updated sites with many links (and many links to it from other pages on the Web) as more valuable than those with fewer links…. If your weblog comes in high, so will your organization's Web site, issues, and viewpoint.

7. Reverse chronological order is wonderful. The vast majority of weblogs display information in reverse chronological order, so that the newest information is automatically on the top of the page. This makes it very easy for your readers to find and follow what is fresh and topical.

8. It's easy to be topical. With the newest information at the top, lots of links, and easy content formatting and publishing, weblogs give you tools that make it very easy to be topical, pointing your readers to the most recent relevant issues and news. (snip)

9. You can use a variety of media. Look at Andy Carvin's weblog again, and be sure to check out the column on the left. There you will find an audio blog with posts that provide, for example, a narrative of what was going on outside of Fleet Center during the 2004 Democratic National Convention. (snip) By using other media in this way, you have other ways to engage with your users. And the blog tools make it easy.

10. The sum is more than the parts. The nine reasons cited so far work together to help you create a valuable, credible resource that points to outside sources, publishes a variety of media, and uses your own voice to engage your constituency in an ongoing conversation about the issues to which your organization is dedicated. (snip)

Okay, So Blogs Aren't Really for Everyone

The success of a Weblog depends on the strength of your message and your sense of audience. For this, you need people who regularly search for valuable information, relate it to your organization and audience, and posting it. Easy content formatting aside, this still takes work, time, and commitment. A weblog that was last updated six months ago does not build credibility, it begins to destroy it.

Not everyone enjoys reading them, either. In this TechSoup Community thread, you'll see that some people don't like having to follow links to follow a conversation. Sometimes links can even lead you in a circle, without a feeling that you've actually found any new information. Research indicates that weblogs are read by 17 percent of Internet users. That's around 4.76 million users. And some of them could be visiting your site.

What Weblogs Already Can Do
1. Allow you to informally gather information from your co-workers
2. Track a project at work
3. Point to outside resources related to your work
4. Provide a way for your constituency to engage with a less formal version of your organization
5. Make it easy to frequently update your Web site
6. Make it easy to turn a portion of your Web site over to your constituency, through commenting or authoring privileges
7. Serve as a personal knowledge management database
8. Allow you to share a variety of media, audio posts, images, and videos
9. Make Google love your Web site
10. Entice readers to come back to your site

What Weblogs Might Be Able to Do If We All Play Our Cards Right
1. Provide an opportunity for ad hoc collaboration
2. Raise the profile of important issues to a large, cross-organization constituency
3. Provide a World Wide Web-sized conversation in context
4. Provide access to tools to organizations that might not be able to afford them
5. Create a variety of win-win situations

gapingvoid

OD guy Dutch Driver pointed me to gapingvoid. Visual thinking. Irreverence (plenty of those four letter words my son tells me are a critical part of modern communication!) and some interesting ideas on creativity. I was chuckling at many of his cartoons like this one:



Clearly, I am not yet a commodity. I'm still trying to figure out how to explain what I do. Thank goodness for small favors!

Mapping De.licio.us Tags in a Mind Map

More visual thinking connecting into socially oriented software. Something about networks that says VISUAL!!

b r o w n h e n . c o m

Delicious Mind: I've been playing with Freemind again, a free Java-based mind-mapping application that also includes an applet for displaying browsable versions of your mind maps on the web. I tend to rotate through several different outlining tools, unfortunately—for fiction writing, for to-do lists, for just thinking.

delicious_mind is a Python script that makes a mind map out of your del.icio.us links, a web-based tool I've also been using/playing-with quite a lot. The script [pretty] [src] uses the del.icio.us api to get your tags and (by default) your hundred most recent posts and build a spartan looking mind map out of them.

Bruce Sterling SIGGRAPH 2004 speech "When Blobjects Rule the Earth"

Too many succulent tidbits to blog tonight. Flying through them...

BoingBoing: Bruce Sterling SIGGRAPH 2004 speech "When Blobjects Rule the Earth":

"Having conquered the world made of bits, you need to reform the world made of atoms. Not the simulated image on the screen, but corporeal, physical reality. Not meshes and splines, but big hefty skull-crackingly solid things that you can pick up and throw. That's the world that needs conquering. Because that world can't manage on its own. It is not sustainable, it has no future, and it needs one.

It is going to get one from you."

Collaborative Learning Environments

COSE Virtual Learning Environment

Another system that takes collaborative learning seriously is COSE from Staffordshire University. Similar in some ways to LAMS (see my previous post), 'the emphasis is on the learning opportunities provided for learners and the resources needed to enable the learners to carry them out'. COSE 'views a course as a group of people to whom learning opportunities are assigned, rather than as a body of content to which people are assigned'. It is free, apparently relatively easy to install, and last time I looked there were plans to make it open source. A new version (2.1) has just been released.

I appreciated the perspective on a course being a group of people, rather than a body of content.

[Via Martin Terre Blanche]

Blogs and Bulletin Boards

In a conversation today with Lee LeFever, we were batting around the key differences of online interaction tools like forums and blogs. Then I stumbled upon Roland Tanglao's post in my blog reading tonight. He pulls a quote by Andy Carvin that he liked from a conversation on Tech Soup this week:

QUOTE

'blogs are diaries that can be read by the public, while bulletin boards are town hall meetings in which the public can all discuss issues equally.'

I think there's also a lot of insight in the ways that these two things can be used in conjunction with one another. The town hall quality of message boards can play off of the informational/journal quality of weblogs.

UNQUOTE

He goes on to comment:

"like the town hall analogy for bulletin boards. Not sure I like the blogs are public diaries analogy (IMHO blogs, in addition to being great diaries, are also great marketing tools, support tools, etc). My favourite definitions are still 'blogs are digital paper' and 'blogs are the unedited voice of a person'.

Social and Temporal Structures in Everyday Collaboration

Danyel Aharon Fisher shares his dissertation draft at
Social and Temporal Structures in Everyday Collaboration

Dissertation draft in one 214-page file, and four happy megabytes of PDF.

From his intro:

"This dissertation shows that social networks and temporality can be used to provide meaningful, useful descriptions of the interconnections within groups of people. These descriptions allow the development of software that support the collaborative aspects of apparently individual work, by placing the single-user experience more explicitly in the wider social frame within which works takes place."

The details: Social and Temporal Structures in Everyday Collaboration, by Danyel Aharon Fisher, Doctor of Philosophy in Information and Computer Science, University of California, Irvine, 2004.

Congratulations, Danyel. I'd love to play around with the software you developed!

Readings on web credibility -- the best list ever compiled

Readings on web credibility -- the best list ever compiled. I'm looking forward to seeing this. BJ Fogg reports that

Lab member David Danielson recently wrote a chapter on web credibility for the Encyclopedia of HCI... He did an excellent job bringing together the research relating to online trust and credibility.

Chapter Title: Web Credibility, To be published in Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction in 2005. Edited by Claude Ghaoui , Liverpool John Moores University, UK. For more info see http://www.idea-group.com/encyclopedia/details.asp?ID=4467

Danielson's Abstract

Unique characteristics of the World Wide Web result in differences between the Web and traditional media with respect to (1) the evaluative processes users employ in making credibility assessments; (2) factors impacting the credibility of the Web as a medium; and (3) factors influencing credibility assessments of Web information sources. Web credibility research seeks to understand these underlying evaluative processes, assessments, and influences. This chapter provides an overview of Web credibility theory and research, covering (1) conceptualizations of credibility that have either been produced within the field or influential in Web credibility research; (2) unique features of the Web as a medium with respect to credibility; (3) evaluative processes underlying Web credibility assessments; (4) research on factors affecting user credibility assessments on the Web; and (5) future trends in the field."

[Link BJ Fogg]

The Future of Blogging - Snippets from Rubel and Gahran

I have picked a few snippets of this article. It has a strong PR/Marketing slant, but I think in a good way. ;-)

Radiant Marketing Group: The Future of Blogging, In Their Own Words, Part 3

The Future of Blogging, In Their Own Words, Part 3

Today, I want to feature two other commentators: Amy Gahran and Steve Rubel. [snip]

STEVE RUBEL

The future of blogging is that it will humanize business.

Do you remember what business was like in the first half of the 20th Century before the Information Age? ... People actually knew their butcher, their baker, their candlestick maker and everyone else they transacted with.

With each successive advance in technology, however, corporations became far more distant impersonal. [snip]

Blogging is significant because it is reversing this trend. It humanizes business. It gives consumers the ability to see and hear from the people inside the companies they love (and hate). And it gives companies the ability to do the same with customers.

In short, the future of blogging is public relations. This is not PR, but actually relating with publics.

AMY GAHRAN
...I don't think weblogs are a transitory media phase. I think they're here to stay, because the Internet is here to stay. I think blogs are an inevitable outgrowth of the Internet. They've become a valuable way for people to connect with each other, and to hear what individuals have to say. We might not always call them blogs, and their format and the tools used to create them will undoubtedly evolve.

[snip]

... the unvarnished thoughts and opinions of average people matter too. They may not always be articulate, circumspect, or well-informed, but they're real and vital in a way that the mass media have long since ceased to be. Even though blogs are technologically based, at heart they're probably one of the most thoroughly human media channels around today.

Even better, blogs are about conversations -- another very human function. These conversations occur in comments to blog postings, and between blogs, and between blogs and online discussion forums or Web sites. In this way, despite their apparent chaos blogs actually can help integrate and synthesize the jumble of information on the Internet and elsewhere -- because ultimate conversations are about connections and sharing. [snip]

Influence is the essence of power, and it's far more effective and less costly than direct control or theft. [snip]

Em duas linguas - Welcome to Blogging, Bev

Em duas linguas is my dear friend and colleagues blog. She is a boundary spanner: cultures, languages, ideas and her new blog shows off that strength. I am particularly drawn to her wonderings about living in many languages. Bev has spent a good deal of time looking at the issues of multilingual online learning environments and the effects of online learning in second (third, fourth) languages.

Welcome, Bev!

Cycles: African Life Through Art

Cycles: African Life Through Art, a fantastic multimedia exploration of Africa Art. From the opening page (unfortunately in flash - hard to clip or blog): "Thousands of cultures in Africa see the stages of life bound together in a continuous cycle - a circle of birth, growth, maturity, transition and rebirth."

I like how you can zoom into different aspects of the pieces. What if you could do that with a distributed conversation? What would it look like? How can you keep the whole and the parts coherent? Is there a visual clue here?

Figmento - Cliff Figallo Joins the Blog World

Figmento is Cliff's new venture into blogging. I read with interest his post today about "The Empty Cradle."

Welcome, Cliff!

TechSoup - Blogging in the Non Profit World

Starting this week, Tech Soup community talks about Blogging for Non Profits. From a quick glance it looks like basic information on blogging starts the week.

CorporateBloggingBlog: Six Types Of Business Blogs - A Classification

Ross Mayfield pointed to this blog post on categorizing types of business blogs. (Don't miss the comment conversation on Ross' blog.)

Are there "Six Types Of Business Blogs - A Classification"? Fredrik Wackå suggest that it is far more complex, but having some "buckets" helps people think about their blogging options.

Corporate (or Business, Organizational) blogs can be classified into six different categories. Each category shares common characteristics and the blog content can be expected to differ between the categories. Furthermore, there's differences in terms of target groups and purposes.

Even if we also see hybrid forms where blogs are examples of more than one category, an organization that professionally incorporates blogging into its communications strategy will likely prioritize one purpose (for each blog)."

I'm interested in this category of "culture blogs." Anyone have examples? Are they authentic? Manipulative?

LMS and Leveraging Collaboration Among Institutions

Ira Fuchs on Learning Management Systems: Are We There Yet?, asks a question that I wonder about not just with LMS, but with any kind of collaborative tools. (Bolding in his quote is mine)

Learning management systems have been high on Mellon’s radar screen ever since we made a grant to MIT in 2000 to support the OKI project. The purpose of OKI was to create a new framework to facilitate collaborative development of the components that comprise a modern learning management system.

That eventual goal is still in sharp contrast with where we are today. Now, if an institution acquires a commercial, proprietary LMS, and then finds that the system is deficient in some way, they often must wait until the vendor decides it is financially viable to develop the enhancement—an event that may never occur. Ideally what we’re seeking is a situation in which the schools that want a new capability added to an LMS can, if they wish, develop it themselves, and then make it available to the higher education community so that others may benefit. That’s the point of leveraging collaboration among institutions.

[Via OLDaily]

Mud Wrestling with Design Issues

I'm in the throes of a variety of projects that have 'design' as part of the task. The monumental reality of how we each differently perceive and experience an online space rears it's large, shadowy head again so I'm reading design articles. Again.

I am particularly looking for insights about the challenge of fitting content and process tasks to technology - especially when learning the technology is a secondary learning goal. Pointers appreciated. Right now I'm looking at two polarities: the polarity of simplicity and range of goals (which is like, but not quite the same as depth and breadth) and the polarity of short term efficiency with tools and long term gains of struggling with and learning new tools. If this is not clear, that is because I'm not clear. It's evolving and I'm reaching out in case someone has that insight or link which will help me go to the next level of thinking.

In my cyber strolls, I came across Uzanto, which offers an intriguing list of articles on design. Previously I've linked to their article on Roller Coasters vs. Driver's Seats: Design and the Concept of Situational Control By Rashmi Sinha, published on Uzanto.com, June 2004. Some of the other articles are:

• Understanding Organizational Stakeholders for Design Success
  By Jonathan Boutelle, May 2004.
  
• Cost-effective methods for rapid user research and usability testing. July 2002.
  
• Beyond card-sorting: Free-listing methods to explore user categorization.
  
• Persona Development for Information-rich domains. Sinha, R.
  
• Interaction Design for Recommender Systems - Kirsten Swearingen & Rashmi Sinha.
  
• Usability Testing as part of the Iterative Design Cycle
  
• User Interfaces for Music Discovery. Presented at AudioIcon 2002.
  
• Interfaces for Exploring Large Web-Based Databases: Recommender Systems & Metadata Based Browse Interfaces.
  
• Beyond Algorithms: An HCI perspective on Recommender Systems
  
• Collaborative Filtering by Humans and Computers. P

Improvisation in Business Conference October 2004

The Applied Improvisation Network " is a community of practioners and clients who value the use of improvisation skills in organsiations." They are planning a conference October 13th to 16th. I have been playing around with collegues with improv - online and offline, so this caught my eye. (Unfortunately, I can't go due to schedule conflicts. I hope someone blogs it!) Here is their line up:

• Two pre-conferences, one on facilitation with Thiagi (details here), and another on accelerated learning and improvisation with Sue Walden, Talia and Gail Heidenhain from the International Alliance for Learning
  
• 18 concurrent sessions on Thursday and Friday, and two keynotes
  
• a field trip to see several local improvisation troupeson one stage (Thursday night)
  
• a banquet and improv jam (Friday night)
  
• a Playback performance to complete the conference on Saturday afternoon
  
• and an Open Space session all-day Saturday. On the final day of the conference, you are invited to join all attendees in exploring how we can put our conference insights into action. Using Open Space Technology*, this special session will allow you to engage with others and further the improvisation ideas you really want to explore."

Some Articles from Lisa Heft

Lisa Heft is a facilitator out of the San Francisco area who has a particular strength in using Open Space Technology (a facilitator form - not a computer technology) She has offered some resources on her site, Opening Space

Facilitation
Opening Space for Collaboration and Communication (Swedish) (View in Word)
The Mouse and the Earthquake - An Introduction to Systems Theory (View in Word)
Brief Brief User’s Guide, by Harrison Owen (View in Word)