Mitch Ratcliffe is probably known to some of you but is new to me. This article is long and sometimes states the obvious, but overall is an interesting read that makes some good points. RatcliffeBlog: Business, Technology & Investing
Quote -- "I've been posting bits and pieces of the following article, which will appear in a book about learning organizations in 2004. It's a call for recognition that every tool is a double-edged sword about which we need to think critically."
I thought y'all would get love the fact that Movable Type has been nominated for a Webby Award in the "Best Practices" category.
BTW, would anyone mind if I changed the default from "draft" to "publish"? I keep saving stuff, then forgetting, I have to pull down the "publish" tab for it to show up on the Blog.
Privacy and Trust are major issues in promoting corporate portals' functions-gatherig, sharing and disseminating of information. Those issues are also related to all topics of KMS.
This article provides "new non-third party mechanisms to overcome" the barriers against privacy and trust, and also solutions for "finding shared preferences, discovering communities with shared values, removing disincentives posed by liabilities, and negotiating on behalf of a group" ,and techniques "to enable these new capabilities".
Web Logs: Troops' War Stories in Real Time. You will need a subscriber login to view the entire article online but I've enclosed some quotes I found interesting below. [Headings are in my words, Italics are quotes]Overall, I think the best benefit is to the troops in the field who get some way of documenting their lives (acknowledging the reality of their situation in some way) and to their families who take comfort in seeing web logs posted on a regular basis.
Noise in the information channel:
a Navy lieutenant based in the Gulf posted some news on his personal Web site: "Saddam fired a couple of those Scuds that he doesn't have at me."...In all, the glut of information from the Gulf -- from the important to the trivial -- is creating a dizzying panoply of detail, as well as half-truths. For example, the Iraqis have fired missiles at U.S. forces but not Scuds.
News from the "non-media":
One needn't run a Web site from the front to publish war news. Julia Hayden, an office manager in San Antonio, posts e-mails from her daughter in the Marines, on a Web site named Sgt. Stryker's Daily Briefing. Her Camp Guam-based daughter, whom Ms. Hayden nicknamed Cpl. Blondie, was one of the first to report in mid-March that some Iraqi troops had tried to surrender near the Kuwait-Iraq border.
An example of the need for corporate policy?
Curiously, unlike the military, traditional media outlets have been trying to quash their personnel's blogging efforts. Kevin Sites, a CNN correspondent in northern Iraq, had been posting photographs, short accounts and audio reports on his Web log until CNN pressured him to stop.
and speaking of policy: Is it ok to copy/paste quotes from the article and publish them to a KMS blog???
Slashdot pointed me to this fascinating piece by James Grimmelman on LawMeme (which I've never followed before but will watch in the future):
Accidental Privacy Spills: Musings on Privacy, Democracy, and the Internet
The article discusses the spread of a personal email by Laurie Garrett, a journalist attending on the January World Economic Forum in Davos. Particularly, iit addresses Garrett's (justifiable?) anger at learned that her "private" email had been forwarded without her permission by someone in her circle of trust and had subsequently been discussed by "techno-liberalists" on lists such as MetaFilter.
All in all, I think that this piece ties together a lot of the themes we've discussed so far in class.
I saw a piece about a new product called Newmonster over on Steven Cohen's LibraryStuff this week (He got it from Catalogblog, which I don't usually follow). It's in beta now, but if they get the bugs worked out I think it will make a really great tool. I've used Newzcrawler (also on Steve Cohen's recommendation), but I think I'd prefer Newsmonster, especially the PDA integration bit.
Newsmonster advertises itself as "the cross-platform weblog manager with a brain." It's a plug-in to Netscape/Mozilla that manages RSS feeds. We didn't really talk about that a couple of weeks ago, but RSS ("rich site summary") allows sites to publish their new content to an aggregator, which you can then get information from. So instead of making the rounds on all the sites you visit every day, you could check what's new in your aggregator. In addition to RSS feeds, Newsmonster can also check non-RSS dynamic sites and extract content.
I couldn't get it to work on my virtual test machine last weekend, but Steve Cohen apparently did. I'll play with it a bit more this weekend to see if I can get it to work. Because it's in beta, I can't guarantee that it won't break your system (that's why I keep a virtual test machine, so I can try new programs out!). Keep reading for a list of features:
Coming soon: