There's more than one way to look at things.

Take a presentation, for example. Microsoft's PowerPoint offers multiple views of the same document.

• Slide entry
• Outline
• Print Preview
• Presentation Preview
• Storyboard
• Notes

Both presentation and manipulation are adapted to meet different goals and different user styles.

Microsoft put a small fortune into designing each of these experiences.

But this isn't enough.

There are a zillion kinds of tasks, goals, problems to solve, situations, cultures, personalities. Every combination needs reflection in software, especially as the software becomes smart enough to adapt.

So you have several architectural challenges.

How do you discover new work sets in a way that's useful? résumé handling or writing a book review, for example.   (problem/solution/model/experience design) 

How do you assemble 3 or 4 ISO/OSI layers, and their components, on the fly?

How do you navigate through the equivalent of 1000 tabs?

How do you scale the  

How do

Some progress:

See http://www.xulplanet.com/tutorials/xultu/intro.html for an intro to XUL (XML User-interface Language) , a cross-platform language for describing user interfaces of applications. The only player of XUL today is Mozilla; we need more players or ones that convert XML to optimized code. Part of the idea is there: describe the UI as an abstraction.

The next step is to have dynamic XUL generators, driving user experiences from underlying application designs.

From Seb's Open Research:

Wired has a list of books that are similar to Smart Mobs. Related books include:

• Digital Biology by Peter J. Bentley, 2001
• Beyond Chaos by Mark Ward, 2001
• Emergence by Steven Johnson, 2001
• The Moment of Complexity by Mark Taylor, 2001
• Linked by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, 2002
• Nexus by Mark Buchanan, 2002
• The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, 2000
• Six Degrees by Duncan J. Watts, 2002

The Wired article summarizes the main contribution of each book. The general theme is that the role of the connections between objects in emerging networks can account for everything. Remember back to dynamic systems, differential equations and probability, no, well these are the basis along with biology for a new generation of patterns and ideas. [David Crow]

Do we need a book on emergent behavior in the blogosphere? On klognets?

Professor McGee teaches a class, noted by student  Mark Kaczkowski

Leading grassroots KM efforts.

Tuesday Night Takeaways – My Random Thoughts from Class (4/23/02)

• I like the description of the course as being part technology, part philosophy. I would add that it should also be one part theology because you need faith and religion that this will all come together by the end of class.

• I think I am finally understanding the concept of a weblog. The key for me was the comment in class to think of it as a journal, rather than only a place to post and discuss articles. I had it in my head that this was similar to a discussion group. I think that somebody suggested that this is similar to a discussion group, but you are writing for yourself.

• One question raised in class was if Knowledge Management involves moving culture. I think if it is done well, there has to be a shift in culture. The organization needs to embrace knowledge management both top-down and bottom-up. Bottom-up is the better way to start a knowledge management process, but to be embraced by the entire organziation, it also needs a top-down approach, with upper management approval and funding.

[Mark Kaczkowski's Radio Weblog] (emphasis added)

Several points to respond to here.

The issue of "faith" and of culture change are tied together here. Back to those in a minute, but first I want to react to Mark's observation about weblogging.

Weblogging is one of those mirror-like ideas that seem to reflect the experiences and expectations of the viewer. Journalists looking at weblogs compare them to newpapers or magazines. Political pundits compare them to op-ed columns. Not too surprising for any new technology (can you say horseless carriage?). I think the key point that Mark gets here is that you have to write for yourself in a weblog. It's a tool for helping work out what it is you are thinking. Putting it out there for others to react to is an important element of helping you think more clearly, but the blogs I find most interesting are the ones that let me peek over someone's shoulder as they work something out.

As to the organizational change that KM might elicit, I believe it will take much more time than the next quarter or so to figure out. All organizational change takes time to play out. The curious challenge for me about KM is how to get the right kind of senior executive support. I believe that the issue is much more than a statement of support and adequate funding. It takes some degree of leadership by example rather than exhortation. This could be a huge barrier for KM of any meaningful kind.

One question this raises for me is whether knowledge-based organizations will demand a different kind of leadership than organization's produce today.

[McGee's Musings]

 

 

 

Mark Woods says

"As webloggers, especially corporate webloggers, we must take responsibility for what we publish; ensuring its integrity, ensuring its accuracy, and presenting other points of view."

In Mark's essay, Will Corporate Legal Groups Present a Barrier to K-Logs?, he says:

"They prefer Joe Somebody not write unreviewed pages to be posted on internal websites. At our company, they don't want anybody publishing pages without some kind of formal approval or legal review process."

Steven Vore says

"I don't see the difference between using a weblog or using any other method of employee-publishing."

Steven is right, blogging is just another form of expression. So what do you do?

Remember email.

Companies have been through this before. It was called email.

Start with formulating policy.

Compel management to choose between two schools of thought.

The first school is about Control through power. The way to prevent problems arising from communication is to screen messages. This is often through a combination of chain-of-command (senior personnel) and gatekeeper (legal, HR, investor relations, media relations, product management) approvals. Pessimistic, authoritarian, centralized, restrictive, vindictive.

Limits to this approach:

• It doesn't scale up.
• It doesn't trust employees.
• It discourages communication.

 

Next, communicate and educate.

I wrote "The Desktop Bill of Rights" to set  

Third, support and enforce compliance.

 

 

 

encourage you to reply to this in my discussion group with your comments. :-)

	John Robb	Jim Roepcke	Phil Wolff
	(source)	(source)	(source)
#	Here's my thinking on why Instant Outlining (I/O) and weblogs provide value beyond what's provided by e-mail and instant messaging.	Sell What You Have is a long-time UserLand tradition. (It's not a bad tradition mind you) So take it with a grain of salt that they push their stuff and dis what they don't offer. Prediction: As soon as Radio has tighter integration with Jabber and the benefits of IM (whether high level or low level like event notifications) become clear, IM will become a great thing again and only e-mail will remain as inferior. Until Radio does e-mail, of course, at which point e-mail will be good too. :-)	SWYH, the small businessman's creed, is virtuous: little vapor, less FUD. However, I think JR (wait! there are two of them! I mean John) is fumferring-about for understanding of the I/O medium. Context, fit-to-application, spirit and joy. Let's see how he does.
#	Both IM and e-mail are great tools for conversations between consenting individuals. Beyond that, e-mail and IM break down, and weblogs and I/O take over. Here are three reasons why:	Who has unconsenting IM conversations? That doesn't make sense... if you don't want to IM set your status to away or quit your IM application.	The way JR & JR use it, "conversation" seems to mean "back and forth" messages. An ongoing question: How important is the number of writers? If you recall IRC or public chat rooms, the doors are open to strangers, unlike with IM or private invite-only rooms. Controlling the doors, perhaps restricting poster population, improves relevance and quality. When we talk of scale, lurkers are important to mailing lists and other many-many media. With topical changes and time, lurkers shift gears, becoming vocal, replenishing the stock of active posters. Counting lurkers separately is almost as important as counting posters.
#	Scalability and information overload. Everyone is facing information overload. There is too much information that the average person needs to know to function effectively. So how should you get this information? Right now, most people get it through e-mail. However, for those of us on the leading edge of online workflow, the volume of informational e-mails has exceeded our ability to parse it. Why?	Email clients have the ability to filter email into different folders. Some are better at this than others, but there are clients that do a remarkable job of this. I filter each mailing list into its own folder, and I set up rules to filter email from people I know into their own folders. The personal filters only apply to emails not already filtered by the higher-precedence mailing list filters. The only email I see in my inbox is mail from people I rarely or never have received email from. And spam, but most email clients and servers have tools available to effectively filter most of that.	I agree both JRs on this. I use Nelson and Outlook to manage and navigate my mail. I need smarter tools: Detects clusters of similar ideas among different emails (e.g. here is a collection of mails from the KMnet, politech, and klogs mailing lists on a supreme court ruling). Show me posters who think alike on about a given topic. Distinguish personal correspondents vs. bulk mailers. Learn to prioritize incoming mail by looking at my behavior, what I open, what I delete, what I read.
#	E-mail is a terrible one-to-many publishing tool. Not because the technology can't do it, it can, but because the volume of information published by an increasing number of publishers crowds out its basic functionality: conversations.	UserLand has many (dozens?) of mailing lists intended as one-to-many and many-to-many conversations. If this is so ineffective why not turn off all the lists and make everyone communicate via weblogs and instant outlines? Hey it's a bootstrap!	Mail works. Reliable. Persistent. Pervasive. Democratic. Don't walk away, build on it. Embrace it. Look at the zaplet folks.
#	Finding a valid conversation in the stack of inbox spam from friends, co-workers, and nameless hawkers of "penis enlargers" is frustrating and increasingly futile.	I totally understand the weakness in e-mail for ad-hoc conversations. It would be nice if all email clients had the abilities to create "one time mailing lists" for discrete one-on-one or group conversations. But you know what, email already does that, with the in-reply-to field, it's just that most email clients don't show your email in threaded form. Side note: Conversant understands threads and shows conversations threaded on the web and through NNTP, even for communication that originates solely through email. Side note 2: I think it's cool that Conversant sites/lists are called Conversations. They GET the importance of conversation in collaboration.	John, I like my penis enlarger very much thank you. Like my email clients, it needs features that address the problems attendant with success. Volume of messages. Compound messages (like mailing list digests). Exploding number of contacts (see Ryze). Multiple languages. Threading, with splitting and merging threads. Categorization to help with search and retrieval. Sounds like Google? Among other things: Please treat different objects differently: Time based events (meeting notices, television programming alerts, appointment confirmations, conference schedules) want to interop with my personal calendars (Outlook, Yahoo!, Palm, Nokia).   Commerce transaction mail (buying, payment confirmations, banking statements, bills) wants to interop with my wallets (Quicken, ebanking, PayPal).    Career objects (CVs, resumes, job listings, interview appointments) want to blend in my jobspaces (job boards, candidate management systems, address books, CRM, resume subsites of personal web sites, bloggers for hire). You get the idea. Mail is the medium; let's get to the messages.
#	In contrast, weblogs and I/O provide publishers a place to put relevant information where it can be found by interested parties.	Only if they know to look. That problem is lessened with pub-sub systems but one still has to subscribe to be notified, and the notification typically doesn't describe what the update is as clearly as an email subject header or an instant message. Email is also an audit trail of sorts. If you sent the person the email, and it didn't bounce, they GOT the email (for all intents and purposes, anyway). That doesn't apply to pub-sub pull systems like email and weblogs.	In this respect (a place to put relevant information where it can be found by interested parties) IO is no different than any other content sharing strategy. I can write in Microsoft Word or do an app design in Excel, saving it to a common file share. From what I can see blogs and IO don't offer a particular advantage for scale. The key is, are they appealing enough that authors and readers and conversationalists choose to use them? It has taken a lot of money, effort, and a decade to get half of all Americans to check email once a month. I'm not voting for one medium/technology or another, but the successor technologies must offer something so compelling that the average AOL Time Warner user changes behavior, adopts new habits, and demands their family, friends and collages join them.
#	It rationalizes the flow and allows it to scale. It is a parallel processing environment for the mind.	We're at the end of the Scalability section but he hasn't explained how weblogs or instant outlines scale, or how they rationalize the flow as he puts it. I don't understand that "parallel processing environment" comment at all. Humans don't parallel process conversations. If he's referring to parallel data sources, then forking off your email into folders based on rules/filters is just as effective, and it's local and typically indexed for fast local retrieval of information. Weblogs have scaling issues in that the information you need in a one-off search is probably going to be surrounded by a lot of other information that is out of context and of no value to your immediate information need. Most weblogs also have inadequate localized search facilities. This can be remedied by having more advanced meta data on weblogs and weblog items, and having more weblogs for more discrete topics. I didn't write this with the intention of mentioning Conversant a bunch of times, but I think it's worth mentioning that each "conversation" in Conversant can have as many weblogs (individual and/or group contributed) as desired. And conversations are thoroughly indexed and searchable. Instant Outlines have huge scaling problems. Each time an outline is found to have been updated, the whole thing has to be downloaded again. If the updated information isn't at the top (or bottom in the case of chronological outlines) it's hard to tell what's changed since the last update. Downloading updates takes longer and longer as the outline gets longer (over time). The remedy is to trim the outline, requiring the author to archive their history. Weblogs already do this, they're inherently chronological and permalinked from the start. Instant Outlines don't have permalinks. Radio's outliner doesn't support the equivalent of HTML anchors, so you can only link to whole outlines, not particular outline nodes.	I think John is referring to the IO buddy list. You can see outlines updated in real time. How does it rationalize? Which flow? I'm guessing about rational, but I think John is referring to hierarchical rhetoric, the medium imposing a structure on thought. There has been excellent work on other forms: multimedia, hypertextual, narrative, recursive. Scalability is a combination of technical and psychosocial factors. Technical scalability, in the UserLand world, revolves around the limits of a server. Without caching, a low end manila server maxes out around 3000 active sites (ymmv). How do you become a Yahoo!, MSN, or AOLTW service for 4-5 orders of magnitude more users? UL chose to push cycles and bandwidth to the edge, to the users. Scaling Search. Blogspace without robust search is mental onanism. As blogspace grows, search and retrieval becomes more expensive, challenging, and demanding. Weblogs do lots of nice things for link-oriented search engines. Physically collecting data on a short list of topics (it's amazing how many sites have both cats and knowledge management); prolific cross-site linking and intra-site linking helps engines infer topic maps. On the down side, weblog home pages are notorious for having too much on to many topics, making relevance much harder to determine, and changing focus faster than engines can believe. IMHO, most of UserLand's dissing of Yahoo! and DMOZ stems from a combination of disdain/envy for the medium (after all, these are the web's most widely understood taxonomies) and the centralized labor-cost-per-post of a human edited directory. The only way to scale them is to add people faster than the web grows (fat chance). Oh my! That applies to opml directories too! Jim's notes on the advantages of blog over IO are real, but temporary. Implementation features vs. structural weaknesses. You can tell it is early days for OPML since we only have one vendor's edit/rend tool and the number of users can be counted on the fingers and toes of a millipede. Psychosocial Scalability (my term) involves the limits of conversation and span of attention. The diminishing returns of adding one more person to a conversation. The limits to how much you can learn and retain in a given daily time budget. Emergent properties of human behavior
#	Passive vs. active. E-mail and IM demand my attention and my time (a dwindling resource) when I am least able to provide it. The tools force me to read something I am not prepared to read (granted, e-mail is more passive than phone calls).	If you don't have time to read email, don't read it. If you don't have time to chat in IM, set your status to Away or Busy or quit your IM app.
#	In contrast, Weblogs and I/O leverage my time. They put me in control. I can batch process my interactions with individuals and groups.	How is this any different than email and lists? How is this different than leaving an IM window idle until you have time to reply to the last ping?
#	I can expand my circle of personal interactions and collaboration with little fear of being overwhelmed by the resulting interactions.	Mailing lists have unsubscribe features (and don't forget about filtering). IM products allow you to restrict incoming messages to people on your own buddy list. You're in complete control. I don't understand what problems he's having that aren't already solved by the systems in place.
#	For me, the ability to time-shift in a passive collaborative environment makes me infinitely more productive.	I totally understand that. That's why I love working from home... or should I say, away from the office.
#	Thinking in a massively active and interruption driven environment is like wearing a thought inhibiter.	Sounds to me like he has problems managing the expectations of the people he communicates with. If he always reply to IMs immediately, always reply to emails immediately, people come to expect that they can get an answer quickly. But that's a problem one creates for themself. The Instant Outline buddy window with it's bold lines for updated outlines is just as interrupt driven, and worse because you have no idea what has changed (no meta data from a subject line or similar) and no idea what's changed once you look unless it's plainly obvious.
#	Quality and complexity. Weblogs and I/O allow me to construct and publish complex thinking.	True. I'm a big fan of weblogs and outliners for those reasons.
#	Further, it archives that thinking so it isn't lost.	Archives are only useful if their locations are permanent. Archives are even more usable if they're searchable. Weblogs have permalinks which are useful and are searchable. Instant Outlines do not have either today. To achieve that level of functionality will require a massive overhaul of the current system (which I think is absolutely necessary to make it useful and usable).
#	The conversational nature of e-mail and IM make sharing complex thoughts difficult and more time consuming.	John should spend some more time evaluating threaded email clients and NNTP. John should also know from his Knowlege Management research that communication skills are learned and honed with experience, and sharing complex thoughts is challenging and time consuming no matter what medium is used.
#	It's hard, if not impossible to build a body of work that conveys a complex idea or plan. Additionally, I can't easily leverage previous thinking or the thinking of others to create a more complex work.	I don't understand why not, and how weblogs and instant outlining helps in this regard. Sounds like a red herring. RSS is the only thing about Radio that can help someone incorporate others work into their own, and that still has to be massaged greatly to be made coherent in a stand alone document. If Instant Outlining was more like Paolo's Shared Outline system or the persistent threaded IM system I wrote over two years ago (in Radio), he wouldn't have these problems.
#	The ephemeral nature of e-mail and IM is like thinking in quicksand.	Is John using a really horrible email client? He needs one that indexes his email and filters it into neater piles. That statement suggests he doesn't have his IM client archive his chats on the fly and index them for fast retrieval of information. I use Mail.app on Mac OS X which indexes all my email and VERY quickly returns relevant messages to keywords in the Subject, Body, From and To fields of messages. Microsoft's Entourage e-mail client does the same and offers innovative "Mail Views" which are dynamic queries on its database of messages. I'd use it (I even paid for it) but it's database has a 2GB size limit which makes it unusable for me. I use Fire.app for IM which archives and indexes all my chat conversations. It also has a GUI for chronologically browsing and searching this information.
#	Conclusion	Conversant's threaded mailing lists / NNTP newsgroups / web discussion boards, fine grained weblogs, along with pervasive search technology solves nearly of the issues that John has brought up. Then again, so do best of breed e-mail clients and IM clients. I believe greatly in the value of weblogs when they're done properly. Outlining is also something I believe in but it's application in collaboration requires some serious infrastructure which currently is not in place in Radio. Hopefully it will be some day. Until then, I see Instant Outlines as unorganized weblogs authored in an outliner. Discuss...

 

John Udell scribles a bit on the practical benefits of literary forms. 

Thanks for bringing the topic up again.

Great poets grok their form so deeply they seem to defy the form's limits.

Can you hear a moment of quiet irony in a haiku?

Now listen to it rewritten as a limerick.

The structure and internal narrative form of sonnets, haiku, and limerick drive tone, subject, word selection.

Do you think there is a reason why you find broken hearts, loyal dogs named Jake, and old cars in country music more than in polka? (they share a taste for drinking songs, though.)

How about editing the rambling of a Lake Wobegon story into a newswriter's inverted pyramid? Lose the joy of meandering to a quiet, well-deserved finish?

Content follows form.

So what is the weblog form? 

Short is easier than Long.

Early days seemed to evolve from annotated bookmark publishing. Tomolak's Realm, for example. 25-50 words per post makes Lawrence Lee loquacious among bloggers.

Contrast with Jonathon Delacour's long-form weblog, 1000-2000 words for most of his posts.

The tools most bloggers use, little web forms capable of displaying no more than 150 words at a time, create a natural barrier to composing, thinking, reviewing, and editing the long form.

 

Rough grabs attention more than Refined.

Sound bite, quotability.

Voice, writing how you speak, passion and blunt.

Overcoming barriers to new bloggers. Easier - dogma2000, overcoming fear of public speaking/writing

Fast is more competitive than Right.

The first to post on a topic draws the most citations, and traffic flow.

Comment & Go more less distracting than Contemplate and Edit.

For bloggers, the tools drive annotation over contemplation. BlogThis and RadioExpress lead to hit and run commentary. First order reaction.  

Chronological

The tools, rewards  and writing habits call for posting daily. Dave Winer defined weblogging's chronological nature as its only unifying characteristic.

That's great, but we're talking about Writing To The Web, Personally.

This suggests adapting the form and rhetoric to the subjects we author.  

Others worthy rhetorical modes:

• Q & A. Think about a FAQ sheet. Grouped by topic. Add a new question every week. Maybe a Friday Five?
• Procedural. Recipes. How To. Documentation.
• Problem/Solution.   
• Bystander. Kibbitzer? Annotating a topic as others report.  
• Sampling Life. Photo blogs, snippets of how a day went. First-person narrative follows someone through their day.
• Catalog. Some of the most popular blogs stick to listing things. Places to eat. New web sites. Movies seen. Books read. Beers tasted. Dead people. In each case, structure, presentation, and navigation fitting the topic is imposed on each post. 

jayme_9874 (280), Buffalo, New York, USA Rated: 3.8 out of 5   Date:  4/16/2002   Aroma Flavor Palate Appearance Overall 8/10 7/10 3/5 4/5 16/20 Deep ruby color with hints of sunset orange. Persistent thin head and lace. Nose is full of sourness, cherries, light malt and barnyard smells. Thin to medium bodied, upfront, ya get a sweet-malty cherry/fruit flavor that is dynomite. The middle shifts into sourness and acidity, the end is dry with some vinegar notes which were a bit unpleasant. Complex and challenging, one that certainly grows on you. Interesting to say the least.

• Taxonomy. Think Yahoo!'s directory or the dmoz open directory. Each leaf gets a steady stream of things to list. Everything has a name, a relationship to other ideas and things.
• Spatial. With mobility comes a need to get local. Few weblogs organize posts around location, but I expect this soon.
• Event.

 

 

So...

The writing of those fed Strunk & White, and those

Expand the form?

How is blogspace content different than all other content?

 

See also:

• LimGen: The Limerick Generator for Limerick Fans
• SPAM Haiku Archive - SPAM-ku

The ceiling fan turns.
The loaf sweats ominously.
Time is running out.

• SPAM Limerick (Spamerick) Archive 

There once was a man of St. Jude,
Who tried to cook SPAM in the nude.
He cooked it too long,
And unless I am wrong,
You expected this line to be lewd.
 

--Reber Clark, Rebermuse@aol.com

• St. Valentine's Day Sonnet Contest, 2000.
• Billy Collins, Sailing Alone Around the Room, Sonnet.

All we need is fourteen lines, well, thirteen now,
and after this one just a dozen,
to launch a little ship on love's storm-tossed seas,
then only ten more left like rows of beans.
How easily it goes unless you get Elizabethan
and insist the iambic bongos must be played
and rhymes positioned at the ends of lines,
one for every station of the cross.
But hang on here while we make the turn,
into the final six where all will be resolved,
where longing and heartache will find an end,
where Laura will tell Petrarch to put down his pen,
take off those crazy medieval tights,
blow out the lights, and come at last to bed.

• The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. via Bartleby.com.

Elementary Principles of Composition:

9. Make the paragraph the unit of composition: one paragraph to each topic
10. As a rule, begin each paragraph with a topic sentence; end it in conformity with the beginning
11. Use the active voice
12. Put statements in positive form
13. Omit needless words
14. Avoid a succession of loose sentences
15. Express co-ordinate ideas in similar form
16. Keep related words together
17. In summaries, keep to one tense
18. Place the emphatic words of a sentence at the end

 

Journalists develop a knack for knowing what is newsworthy.

• From a public relations agency perspective: What is newsworthy?
  by Paul Bates.
  • It is new (no surprises there…)
  • It is bad news or a warning
  • It contains relevant, useful or surprising facts and figures
  • It is predictive
  • It is counterintuitive
  • The spokesperson or company is well known
  • There is a good sound bite or headline.
• highschooljournalism.org - teachers - lesson plans 
• Television News: A Handbook for Writing, Reporting, Shooting, and Editing 
  • All About News
    • What Is News?
      Why Is News Important?
      What Is Well-Written News?
      What Is Newsworthy? 
  • Storytelling and Writing for Broadcast
    • Telling a Story
      Preparing to Write
  • Writing in Broadcast Style
    • Using Verbs Correctly
      Putting the Words Together
      Special Style Requirements
      Common Mistakes
      

How is this different from what is klogworthy?

Audiences.

Accountability.

Responsibility.

 

Kelly

Adecco

Aquent

Remedy

AppleOne - cool 800 number service, rings you through to your local office.

Spherion -

Manpower -

General observation: most sites bury local contact where you can't find it. The brand url is often a global, investor oriented site, fully disconnected from the most local.

SOPAG Privacy Policy Task Force SiteCreating a Library Systems Privacy Policy.

This page and related materials are the products of a University of California systemwide libraries "Task Force to Develop a Model Policy on Privacy for Library Provided Digital Services." The task force was charged by the libraries' Systemwide Operations and Planning Advisory Group (SOPAG). Supplementing the Task Force's final report, materials here represent the work of the task force and are meant to further the discussion about privacy policies within UC libraries, but do not yet represent adopted policies or procedures.

Found via The Shifted Librarian who said "A 'Task Force to Develop a Model Policy on Privacy for Library Provided Digital Services' at the University of California recently completed their work, and some of the materials they developed look to be more generally applicable than just for the UC libraries. For those of you responsible for guarding the privacy of your users (which is just about all of us), you may want to check out the documents"

[Privacy Digest]

New York Times - free registration required Fine Tuning Customer Behavior.

As one might expect, privacy advocates are not entirely thrilled at the advances being made in analytical software, which is sometimes referred to as data-mining software. Online retailers like Bluefly say their privacy policies clearly explain how a visitor's data will be used and give users the opportunity to opt out of data collection, but that may not be enough to satisfy privacy concerns.

Jason Catlett, president of Junkbusters, a privacy advocacy organization, said companies that used data-mining software to infer something about a customer should give the customer access to that knowledge, too. "This issue hasn't come up terribly much yet," Mr. Catlett said. "But it will."

[Privacy Digest]

Are your words or actions right? How you would feel if they were made very public, on the evening news, for example.

"The gap between the public and private Grahams is a shock. And yet, these conversations were private. Both public and private statements express an individual's character. Nixon's tapes, in both their making and the manner of their revelation, have made this disinction measurably harder to preserve." (By Leonard Garment for The New York Times, 3/32/2002.) [Brent Sleeper: Culture and Politics]

This runs counter to a traditional executive survival skill. You market yourself to gain clout within a hierarchy. You craft a public persona, a reputation, a personal brand to develop that clout.

Something to consider in business too.

The walls of secrecy surrounding a firm are more porous than ever. Klogging and blogging, extranets and supply chain communications, even basic email and telephone service make it easier than ever to

DRAFT

My Dad asked "What is this 'community' you're talking about?" It's a great question.

Sometimes your affiliation is rooted in proximity, geography, the physical. Neghbors in an apartment building. Elevator/lift riders sharing a moment of revulsion at bad music.   

As long as we're in the world of mind and heart, community is about your feeling of belonging. Psychologists call it affiliation. You can root for a sports team, support a political party, belong to a religion.

The Radio Community Service (RCS) amplifies the social network dimension of writing to the web.

Blogspace is enhanced by affiliation.

First, affiliation occurred through linking within content, the grist of the blog mill.

Next, affiliation was declared through blogrolls: lists of other people, organizations, and news sites.

Then, desktop aggregators (like Radio) turned blogrolls into reading machines, slashing the effort needed to keep up.

Now, affiliation with one or more RCSs lets you openly declare citizenship with a particular group.

What is next?

• The social behavior of groups.
  • Alliances.
  • Partnerships.
• Mutation of the post into diverse kinds of information.
  • Forces driving the mutation
  • Examples
  • Virtuous cycles
• Integration of communities with enterprise systems.
  • Supply chain systems.
  • Sales and customer facing systems.
  • Teaming and project culture.
  • Process automation.
• Migration of other community systems into the RCS world