Lilia Efimova, 23-Jan-04 @ 12:10PM

Connecting KnowledgeBoard and blogs

Just to let you know:

1. You can find a bit of KB weblogs statistics (e.g. how many do not have RSS feeds or not updated)

2. I created a public Bloglines aggregator of KB weblogs (only those with RSS feeds of course). You can also see this list as OPML.

3. I wrote a blog post about possible ways to connecting KnowledgeBoard and blogs and I would love to have your comments on it. I would appreciate if you comment in your weblog (or use comments in my weblog): I'd like to get more feedback from bloggers before posting a summary with an intro to general KB public.

4. This page is loading quite slow, I guess it's due to the number of comments. I'll try to find out what's wrong and what could be done about it...

Don Mezei, 27-Nov-03 @ 16:54PM

kmtheory.com

hi all,
I've started up a new website, http://www.kmtheory.com Hope you have a look. Free stuff! :)

Don Mezei

Chris Macrae, 27-Nov-03 @ 15:14PM

December 1 Blog Theme Brand

I heard on the grapevine that December 1 is a day for blog discussions of brand

I have put some story beginnings from 25 years of working on he beast at
http://www.knowledgeboard.com/download/3166/brand2003.doc

and would welcome a chat if you want to polish up your own story - chris at wcbn007@easynet.co.uk

Nuggets include:

Doc Searls' perspective on how brands in knowledge markets will have customers who are contextualy smarter than their vendors

Why Naomi Klein is right in declaring that most global brands and mass media are destroying communal value, but it didnt have to be so if brands were marketed around true huan responsibilities instead of billion dollar image-making budgets

How the brand and knowledge and leadership investments should form a golden triangle for systemising human organisations, but dont yet seem to have grown up to this level of integrated communicating and doing and learning

My pro bono brand architecture and next 5 years work: open source peacemaking leadership links across humanitarian networks

Val Samonis, 09-Jul-03 @ 13:25PM

Blogs and KB

Ton Zijlstra's comments about the relationship between blogs and KB are surely to the point. Val Samonis.

Miguel Cornejo, 09-Jul-03 @ 10:57AM

It does show up

Hi again, Gary and all,

some more comments. I'm still working on the tool comparison framework :-), so please bear with me: I'm trying to understand the uses and advantages of blogs for CoPs.

It's fun, but I did the Google search. This page appears as the first link :-). I don't know how often this site's spidered, but I guess it's often. It would only be a problem with dynamically-generated forum pages, and even those are eventually spidered.

On the other hand, blogs need to be standardized, RSS feeds and all, in order to be aggregated (the technical difference between a CMS-equipped personal page and a blog being that the blog is RSS-enabled). I guess the ability to find content is not a relevant advantage for blogs.

Blogs do support more individual freedom of expression than (most) forums, though only for the authors. In both content and form, they give more control to the author.

They don't facilitate opinion exchange or collaboration, on the other hand.

It's hard to qualify a single blog's views, as you say. Since I believe "cloistered" is an attitude, not a technology characteristic ;-), I think it's even harder for a blog's cloistered readers to get different points of view than for a forum's cloistered members.

But there's something under that: members of a forum are more likely to constitute a self-contained community, each bringing in news from his/her environment and sharing them, than blog readers are. The "community role" of a blog reader is quite similar to that of a list's "lurker" (don't like the word), because most usually he doesn't get the chance to engage the author in an exchange and he "participates" in many lists.

Blogs are one-to-many, and mostly unidirectional. Forums are many-to-may and bidirectional. A wholly differente dynamic.

I think I see blogs as tools to empower the individual, not as community tools. Not in themselves, at least: a good mix of tools can profitably include them, just as there have always been personal pages. Individuals with a lot to say and a will to stand up may enjoy having them, and the rest may benefit.

Best regards,

Miguel

Gary Lawrence Murphy, 26-Jun-03 @ 16:52PM

Blog communities vs forum communities

As Cindy points out, there are all kinds of blogs, and it's nearly impossible to say anything generally true across all of them, but all forums are closed communities of members-only, so we can say there is a buy-in that must happen, even if that buy-in is free. There's an additional buy-in that you must make the effort to travel to the forum site and wade through the irrelevent, but that's partially true of blogs too.

But only partially.

I didn't say there was more trust in the blog community, I said the thread about trust online was an order of magnitude larger, i.e. there has been 10 times the quantity of discussion, and that discussion has included commentary by the founder of eBay Pierre Omidyar, by Internet financier Joi Ito, by author David Weinberger and by many others -- while some of the commentary is actually attached to the discussion in-situo, what blogs recognize is that no blog is an island, but forums frequently are, and that makes forums isolated and cloistered, and yes, incestuous like the lounge at a faculty club (present company excluded of course ;)

There is room for both. Blogs are to forums as conference lounges are to that faculty lounge because they are open, public, and make no effort to hide themselves.

Take for example, the very distinctive phrase "atomize interactions" ... neither Google nor AllTheWeb can find this page on that queue. You may say "it's too fresh" but that's not an excuse in the open interaction space of the blogs. I can ask the blog-search Feedster for a fresh distinctive phrase, "Ballad of Marshall McLuhan" and there it is, 36 hours old.

Where the conversations come together, as Miguel requires, that's extremely easy and it's a method I use routinely to suss out the knowledge from the aggregated blog space; so easy and accurate, that I would not really trust any other source to give me the complete picture: Technorati Cosmos Links takes as a parameter any given webpage and returns the ordered (by citations or by date listings giving the context where the page in question was referenced.

For example, take a controversial story such as the item about the pregnant wife being fondled during the airport security check. Horror story? Or the inflated ravings of a whiner? It's hard to choose if you ask only one cloistered community because the laws of group dynamics will say the opinion on controversial issues will tend to be swayed by peer pressure (and that is a demonstrable principle of group psychology, well documented in cognitive circles) but using Technorati, I sample across conversations who have never met nor have any idea the others are listening to and commenting on the issue. Technorati does not pass judgement on the story, that is not the role for either KM or any machine, but it does make me far more informed about the subject, and that should be the goal of any KM system.

Cindy Lemcke-Hoong, 26-Jun-03 @ 12:41PM

KB is sub-divided into SIG and Zones

If we look closer, KB is actually sub-divided into smaller, more focus groups. Each has its own specific readers.

Blog is an individual effort and the approach is 'talking to oneself' in a diary style. And the attitude CAN BE (I am being diplomatic/careful here. Some blogs are not)this is my view, take it or leave it.

The Speicial Interest group, as the name indicted, writes for a specific group of audiences at large. Therefore the approach is totally different, which in turns influenced tones, writing styles, thoughts process etc.

Why KB is not attractive to big names such as James Moore, David Weinberger? Simple. KB is huge and not easy to move around. Whereas individual blog is focus. You either like it or hate it.

Cindy

Miguel Cornejo, 26-Jun-03 @ 11:25AM

Blogs vs lists vs forum systems as CoP tools

Over at the CoP SIG:

http://www.knowledgeboard.com/cgi-bin/forum.cgi?comment=1552&topic=28

What's better, why... and how would the perfect tool be.

Looking forward to your views :-). Best regards,

Miguel

Don Mezei, 25-Jun-03 @ 23:10PM

KM theory forum now on yahoo.com groups...

If anyone's interested, I'm starting a group on km theory at yahoo:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/kmtheory/

anyone can participate, no membership etc required.

Don Mezei

Miguel Cornejo, 25-Jun-03 @ 19:39PM

Riddle indeed

Hi, Gary, all,

first thing: I did not say that "blogs stifle innovation and impede learning", I said that they "atomize interactions". In other words, people don't see all of the interesting threads the way they would if they were written in a system "like" KnowledgeBoard. It is a fair bet that more people would benefit from each others' insights to innovate if all insights were visible.

To your riddle, "someone please tell me why Ton is favouring his blog, and why my own, Dave Pollard's, Sebastian Paquet and many others have developed a thread on online-trust that is an order of magnitude larger than the thread here on KB", there is an easy answer. Most good blogs have a focused public, smaller but more dedicated than KB's (many of whose registered members never went further than the library :-), I believe) and a very defined purpose. In other words, specialization and smallness make for more trust.

I like blogs, very much. They have a long list of virtues. But the fact is that they would be far more useful for KM if they were more easily aggregable. That is exactly what I said down in my first message, and the reason I liked Ton's idea.

The more contact there is among active elements, the easier it is to get a reaction. If you break the community into several blog parishes, something will be missed. Unless one of those blogs actually develops into a portal-community itself ;-).

Riddle solved ;-)?

Best regards,

Miguel

Gary Lawrence Murphy, 25-Jun-03 @ 16:53PM

Biodiversity in the Blogosphere

I won't deny that there are those sites which call themselves blogs which are highly cloistered, and at the recent Biz-Blog expo we even heard pundits say managers should deploy closed circuit content-managed blogs within the firewall. I hereby predict that both approaches will fail and while I won't get into the taxonomy wars over whether or not they are blogs, I will say they shoot themselves in the foot.

Blogs that allow commentary become richer ecologies, but that does not mean the knowledge is lost here on KB -- we all know, and you'll see if you browse the list of blogs given above, that the discussions here are carried on there ... so not allowing anonymous commentary within this webpage panel only means the discussion won't happen at our house, it will happen elsewhere.

And as a result, we can't learn from it.

Cindy Lemcke-Hoong, 25-Jun-03 @ 15:29PM

Am I one of them - Incentious !

Well, I think I am a bit off-balanced, but did I write incestuous commentary ??

Time to have some quiet moments with a shrink!

WoW! I did not know that being Blogger has the benefit of being NORMAL !!

Cindy

Gary Lawrence Murphy, 25-Jun-03 @ 13:45PM

Blog Aggregations

If blogs stifle innovation and impede learning, then someone please tell me why Ton is favouring his blog, and why my own, Dave Pollard's, Sebastian Paquet and many others have developed a thread on online-trust that is an order of magnitude larger than the thread here on KB which spawned our discussions, and also explain why our individual blogs have attracted commentary by James Moore, David Weinberger and others whereas KB only attracts incestuous commentary ;) Riddle me that, and maybe I'll grant the point that blogs have a problem for KM.

As for the Trackback idea, there is a flaw in Ton's plan, but it's not conceptual, it's technical: Unless the categories match exactly, the current crop of blogging tools make it extremely awkward to add a trackback to a posting. MT lets you set a destination for each of your categories, but if that stage fails, which is very often, the whole update process is upset, and this process only works for new entries put through the bookmarklet or new-entry form.

http://www.topicexchange.com is experimenting with blog aggregation via trackback, but IMHO, it's not going particularly well. Blog conversations are best aggregated via RSS, and the technology to build cohesive threads of conversations across the blogs does not yet exist (although Technorati's Cosmos is a first baby step).

Miguel Cornejo, 25-Jun-03 @ 12:32PM

An extremely good idea, IMHO

Indeed what I dislike of blogs is just that they atomize interactions (and the less we interact with different ideas, the less we learn and innovate in turn :-)), so if a way is found to integrate your content here it would be great :-).

Best regards,

Miguel

Ton Zijlstra, 25-Jun-03 @ 10:10AM

posting to both weblog and KnowledgeBoard

Hi there,
since I've been writing my own blog, for a little over half a year now, I've seen my contributions to KnowledgeBoard plummet to, well to nothing really. When I look at what I've written here and what I'm doing in my blog, it seems as if the blog serves me as well as KnowledgeBoard did before that. A place to express thoughts and passions, and to get your ideas vetted, commented on, and enhanced, thus leading to new and interesting contacts. Both KB and my blog fulfill that service.

What I would like is to re-start contributing to KnowledgeBoard but I am not looking forward to putting in double the time to keep up with both blogging and KnowledgeBoard, especially because there is overlap in topics and readership.

Is it a useful addition to be able to ping KnowledgeBoard with relevant blog-entries, and then have them incorporated into the KnowledgeBoard, with a link to the originating blog? That is taking this blogroll one step further, namely to provide KnowledgeBoard not only with the links to more content on KM, but also with the content itself. Making it searchable within KB would be nice too.

Just a thought.

ian glendinning, 28-Mar-03 @ 22:04PM

Thanks Gary / Trusted Links

Thanks for the response Gary. You're right about the value in linking me to "polvo".

On the subject of "trusted" links I agree community concensus is the only safe arbiter, rather than any fixed filter. (In the same way that knowledge is about evolved beliefs rather than facts.) Have you guys seen how Kuro5hin works (I have a link in my side-bar) - I'm not techie enough to know how these guys make it work, but it seems both effective and based on the right principles.

Gary Lawrence Murphy, 28-Mar-03 @ 17:20PM

Trusting Blog Spaces

Lilia,

What you ask is basically the RSS feed I want to produce from my aggregated feed, but other matters are in the queue ahead of it (one of them being a SportsML webservice for Hockey Night in Canada, so of course that takes priority!) I hear from the rumour mill that Dries and the Drupal crew may beat me to this and produce the code you're describing by mid-June; I'll probably deploy their beta code long before; I will let you know.

On the topic of searching limited blog ecologies, you might want to check out Feedster.com as this is pretty much exactly what their software does, only they have taken a larger perspective.

I also have to advocate a larger perspective: Online, you can't even trust your own mother! This is the basis of my interest in aggregators and especially cascading aggregators coupled with search methods such as Technorati: "trust" is not something we can apply black/white include/exclude to a particular blog, but rather a metric that emerges as we compare each blog to the overall consensus map on that particular issue.

But that, of course, is meat for another thread ;)

Lilia Efimova, 28-Mar-03 @ 10:50AM

Can we do something here?

Gary, I wonder if it would be possible to have a piece of code that generates a list of recent 20 (30) posts of weblogs in this blogroll? I can call it from this (or another) page.

Other options would be
- adding only post+blog titles
- adding only "today's posts" instead of most recent posts

Also - to let you know - I'm trying to find out if/how Trusted Blog Search Tool can be used to make possible searches accross the weblogs in this list

Gary Lawrence Murphy, 27-Mar-03 @ 17:56PM

Details of the Aggregator

Ian ... I love your idea of our data-mining our own dog food :) I'm also happy to report my good friend Polvo.ca has connected with a "kindred spirit" thanks to my aggregation, and that is what KM is all about, connecting people to other people.

as for the aggregator, how can you see more? well ... you can't. I'm a poor man and can't afford a huge data collector (donations are welcome) so it has to cut at a few days of posts per RSS feed. If you need more, check out RadioUserland or Peerkat as personal aggregators.

This is a feature of Drupal that is not well developed in 4.1.0 but will be more useful in the coming release. For one thing, you can't get an RSS of my aggregated RSS, otherwise you could poll me several times a day and keep your own historical record. I should have aggregated feeds sometime later this spring or early summer.

What I really need is a job that doesn't interfere with my work! (offers welcome)

Anyway, the update schedule is hit-and-miss; my webhost is being friendly about my RSS activity (it's been the topic of discussion on and off for the past 5 years since I started) I don't push it; most sites are updated every 2 hours, a few every 3 hours or even just once a day, and a very few are updated hourly.

Frequency influences the "flooding" effect that you noted. Feedster is a problem: Because I poll (instead of getting pinged with trackbacks) there's the risk that I will hit a feed with all new posts that will push the others off the list.

Feedster is giving us 30 new items taken from thousands of blogs, and while it seemed like a good idea (and I do discover new good material every day through this) I am not so sure it's productive in this context; maybe it just has to be polled more often because as it is, polling every few hours, it can give use 30 new items every time it runs, and that blows all the others off the map. I'll up the frequency and see what happens -- maybe it just means the rest of us will have to speak more often just to be seen :)

When I was at OpenCola, Joey DeVilla, Paul Kelly and I worked out an RSS P2P system that would solve a lot of the problems we're finding here, using a reputation and personal-aggregator editor; OC 'downsized' the lot of us before we could develop it.

Aggregation by robots always seems to lead to splitting the feeds as the universe expands, and that's counter to the purpose of KM -- I want (need) to simplify my 120 subscribed RSS files into something I can conceivably read like a morning newspaper, over a coffee and toast, and be done before my workday starts.

I'm down to one page here on my Peerkat, and I check three aggregations on Teledyn.com, but I still ignore more than 90% of the items because they just aren't very interesting; I want to improve that ratio.

ian glendinning, 27-Mar-03 @ 14:32PM

Queries about the K-Board RSS Aggregator

Questions for Gary ....

How are updates / refreshes scheduled ?

How do I get to see a longer aggregated list of posts than just the last day ?

ian glendinning, 27-Mar-03 @ 14:23PM

K-Board RSS Aggregator is Good News

The K-Board RSS aggregator is here

This is very good - dead simple, but excellent. I do already use RSS, but the teledynamics page combining the various Knowledge Blogs is a really useful idea. I shall have to watch my P's and Q's if my feed is going direct to this page (!) I only put my headline and the link in my RSS feed, (and not the content as some others do) so people can choose to go and read or not, depending on the headline, rather than bulk up the aggregated page with masses of text.

(I also posted on my own klog here that Feedster seemed to have swamped the feed though.)

If multiple people find this aggregator useful, it might become an excellent place to experiment with tagging conventions to classify links and content according to subject, purpose, content etc .... Whaddya think Seb ?

Gary Lawrence Murphy, 26-Mar-03 @ 14:55PM

More on why you need RSS and what it is ...

Tony Laszlo talks about blogging, klogging, RSS, moblogging as well as blogging in Japan. It's available in pdf in the American Chamber of Commerce Japan Journal on Issho.org

see http://www.teledyn.com/node.php?id=284

Also, Lilia, a thousand thanks for that RSS Discovery link -- this is so much fun you would not believe; I just went through all the new blogs added here since my last run and click-click-click, I had all the RSS feeds (where they existed) all ready to fold into my aggregate feed ... ok, well, I enhanced it a little to do all that: If you create a new bookmark with the code

javascript:void(window.open('http://www.blogstreet.com/blogsqlbin/getRSS.pl?url='+location.href))

if you click it while on a blog, a window pops up to quickly show if they are on the RSS bandwagon or not.

Speaking of bandwagons, for those late to the party ... if you have recently added RSS to one of the blogs listed on this page, please send me a note so I can add you to the aggregate feed; right now, only about half of the above blogs are in on the aggregation.

Lilia Efimova, 25-Mar-03 @ 19:24PM

Mail to KB bloggers

To let you know: I've just send an e-mail to the people in this list with some explanations about RSS feeds. I will post most of it here, so people can comment (also posted to Better blogging).

Please, note that I excluded part of e-mail, which is citation of Gary's comment below.

1. What is RSS feed and why it is important to have one?

(technical people, please forgive me for this explanation :)

In short: RSS is the way to represent new content of the web-site (or weblog) in XML format. Than there are programs - news aggregators - that go to the sites you are interested in, grab their news in RSS and show them at your computer. I would say that RSS is the main way to connect weblogs between each other. In fact this becomes so convenient that many webloggers hardly read other blogs if they don't have RSS feed (because with RSS updates are delivered to their screen and without it they have to remember to check your web-site).

Having RSS feed for your weblog is important if you want to allow other people to read your weblog more easily, to make sure that they know about your updates and to make use of different services that use RSS.

Read more about RSS

2. How could you find/make RSS feed?

In some cases blogging software you use produces RSS feed, but you don't know about it. To check is you have one, go to RSSdiscovery and type your weblog address.

If you don't have RSS feed, you can make one using RSSify service. Gary Lawrence Murphy offers his help with it - check the post below.

After you found/made RSS feed - make sure that you link to it from your weblog homepage, so others can find it without using RSSdiscovery page :)

Gary Lawrence Murphy, 03-Mar-03 @ 15:57PM

Aggregated Knowledge Board

I have created an aggregate browser page for all of the above web journals where the site offers the RSS syndication feed. You can browse the latest posts (updated every few hours) at our news feeds page on teledyn.com

It's not a pure Knowledge Board feed; I have included a few other KM-topic weblogs such as Matt Mower, Blackbelt Jones and AsWeKnowIt. It's also not (yet) exported as an aggregated XML for importing into your own aggregators, but I'm working on that.

For those who are listed above but do not offer the XML Syndication service, I invite you to visit RSSify where you will find instructions on how to create a feed from even the free blogger.com service or any of the other minimal-service hosts; contact me if you need any help setting that up. Of course, you could just subscribe to teledyn.com and get your own full-service blog space for free ;)

Lilia Efimova, 31-Jan-03 @ 17:52PM

Let's try

Miguel,
does your book has individual pages/ threads? As you can see I'm adding names ("voices") here, so would be nice to keep this "personal" pattern.

But in any case we can try - I'll add it and then we see how it fits. It's may be an interesting idea as well to map all "collaborative" efforts of KB members (e.g. wiki). Could you send me a link?

Lilia

Miguel Cornejo, 30-Jan-03 @ 16:36PM

Only blogs?

Hi, Lilia,

is the project only for true-to-goodness blogs? We're thinking of resuscitating the old Econoclasta PHPNuke-powered site for dealing with our book's matters. It's not a standard blog, even if it's a collaborative, user-administered publishing tool... it used to be called a portal-generation tool.

Would this technology be selectable for inclusion :-), or should we go looking for other software? We want to participate.

Best regards,

Miguel

Lilia Efimova, 29-Jan-03 @ 10:43AM

Link to your blog?

Dear bloggers,
how would you prefer to see you blog in the blogroll: by name, by title or having both?
Let me know, so I can improve our blogroll look.

Lilia [Mathemagenic]