- Portals - Comments

A pub blog: Excellent idea

garym — Tue, 09 Nov 2004 20:34:54 -0500

This idea of yours is maybe better than you think, providing it doesn't stray into privacy issues -- I've seen several pubs with online journals by the staff telling of news in and around their community; a pub is a community hub, so it's a natural for this sort of role online.

but be aware, someone has to actually do the work, and if you don't sustain the output, you can quickly get forgotten. Designate someone on staff as the host and give them license to ask participation, and engage your community too.

It can be cheap, and one that I often recomment is the free blogger.com just to get you started; easy to use, no awkard HTML to learn, you just enter your story and push the publish button.

If you do decide to roll out a Canadian pub blog, please do let me know!

Postscript on the POST

garym — Fri, 24 Sep 2004 14:48:51 -0400

Alas, the operative words may have been learning to share or maybe this is just an idea way ahead of it's time, but sadly, nearly one year later and there is still nothing posted to the POST list outside of a few a tiny handful of portlets and while one or two look interesting, most of the others are trivial search-forms, something far easier to cobble in-house than to learn to adapt.

I don't know why POST failed. Maybe it's politics. Maybe portals have had their day in the digital sunshine and have become pass&#233, quaint anachronisms of the days of the megalithic all-in-one website. Or maybe it's because, even after all this time, JSR-168 is still pretty obscure -- I had a request come in just this week from somebody claiming to offer me "the most advanced business portal" and they hadn't even heard of JSR-168, or Pluto, nor had they even really considered the portal paradigm as a platform for multi-vendor applications...

Blog Software

Mon, 09 Feb 2004 13:20:08 -0500

I am new to the internet and I am surfing here and this is very interesting reading. I did a search in the search engines on "pub bar entertainment blog software" and I found your web blog and although "software" isnot the Blog Software I was looking for, it was very interesting reading.
I am researching blogs as I was interested in a blog for myself, that is if I can understand how to operate a blog. The different things discussed on this website found by searching for "pub bar entertainment blog" is very amusing and from seeing and understanding more of how a blog operates, it may be more than this Halifax pub guy to handle.

thanks for the insight
see you at the pub ( some call it bar! )

B. J. Johns,
A Halifax Pub Enthusiast

Community Knowledge in Action

garym — Thu, 27 Feb 2003 16:54:23 -0500

Our thanks to Jim for posting this casestudy: The Chandler site is also a particularly good example of a use for the Drupal "Community Book" feature where members of their professional organization work together to create a comprehensive guide; as in the software-document uses of this service, the chandlers who find errors or omissions need only click the link to enter the form and submit their corrections for approval. Distributed knowledge management in action!

Definitions for KM

garym — Thu, 30 Jan 2003 21:42:37 -0500

I can already hear some of the scoffing from long time collegues about this new terminology for "Knowledge Management" so I thought I might just post a quick stab at a justification for yet another 2LA...

First off, critics will point out how 'knowledge' is classically split between that which we can enumerate and that which we can predictively understand; that's simplistic, but it boils down to epistimon and gnosis as two poles of the knowledge axis. For the purposes of KM, it does not matter because the subject matter of KM is the transmission of streams of consciousness, whether it's ideas or musings or detailed recipies, and it hardly matters if the material brings only knowledge of some event (announcing a concert for example) or deep understanding of it (the post-mortem summary after the concert). In KM, both are knowledge.

Knowledge is distinct as a special kind of data because the contents are deeply human, and a special kind of communications, because the sender and receivers are both directly human. A spreadsheet or a data table is data and information, perhaps vital, but generic and impersonal. The email message about those files is knowledge. An MP3 file in a database is data, but the reputation system that successfully recommends it to me is a knowledge system.

Now, 'Management'. yes, this can mean the Dilbert micro-management of petty demigod IT depts reading your emails, but it can also mean the sense of husbandry we get from Forest Management or Money Management, ie, the process of using what you know about the whole subject ecology, about the ways and wheres the subject moves and grows, and from that applying little tweaks here and there to make it grow more effectively.

That's the sort of 'Management' I want put into KM: Knowledge Management is the means by which we build our ships to sail on this new-found sea of information, rather than leaving ourselves to flail and flounder in the waves of it.

So what is Knowledge Management? In the sense I've just described, no, it's nothing new, "Old as the Dickens" as it were. It's that change of design in a filing system which saves one half-hour a day from each of ten thousand employees ... to net a result right there of $150,000/day corporate savings. KM is the way that document was placed into the system, and how it was found, how it got from writer to reader, how the other readers helped them find it, and how it came to be a book in the first place.

KM is about how to tell which of 500 'near fit' documents might be the 'best match', for example through applying distributed (P2P-style RDF-based) reputation systems (think DayPop on the Corporate Desktop). KM is not having to read ever spam, but if a good one happens, you don't miss it because someone caught it and KM made it possible for their knowledge about the value of that knowledge to become your knowledge.

Am I making any sense?