B. Mann Consulting

So, I've been accused of using the title for this post -- "Email is the place where information goes to die" -- quite a lot.  I figured I should probably claim it by making this blog post.

Update: Roland found the original quote by Bill French, April 2003. 

And yes, I still believe it: email and mailing list is great for quick back and forths. It's terrible for synthesizing information and finding a conclusion a week later.

I'm in favour of web native / crawlable archive systems. Email for notification and quick discussion, but give it a permalink to the conclusion.

I have many (many, many, ...) gripes with Basecamp, but even if you use it as nothing more than a centralized email archive, it's pretty decent. Other strategies? The Trac wiki/ticketing/SVN repository, email enabled forums (with RSS, of course), etc.

Synthesizing and collecting all the resources we deal with is import. Help make information not die, your future self will thank you

I tend to agree with Rands:

My question remains. What is the purpose of a tag cloud? It's more interesting than a bulleted list, but as user interface goes it's a aflutter with clutter. If you tell me this is intended to a casual interface for browsing tags, I'll buy it, but if it's intended to more useful than a stumblable interface, I'd like to hear your theories...
Rands In Repose: A Chance of Tag Clouds

Favourite two phrases: "aflutter with clutter" and "stumblable interface".

What do I want? I want "top tags today", "my top tags", "popular tags of all time", and ways of applying these tags as I add AND browse content. The whole issue of a personal tag space vs. a global tag space is something that needs exploring on an application by application basis, too. Which opens the door to permissions models and identity, of course...

Are tags really just an aid to search? I think we can begin to do more interesting things when we can make links between different people's thoughts on tags. My "restaurant" means the same thing as your "restaurant". My "Vancouver" is Vancouver, BC, not Vancouver, WA.

I've been talking for a while about knowledge gardening, as it applies to running wikis, large community sites, or other interactive, collaborative knowledge stores. I really like the metaphor -- it implies a fertile ground for organic systems to grow, but also a gardener to take care of the weeds that inevitably grow. Translation: you need a site mom/gardener/etc. to get the most out of your shared space.

Tagging is new to the party, and we're still figuring out how to use it. Jordan Willms (as well as creating lots of great Drupal code) has been thinking a lot about mixing tags with a little more control: gardened hierarchical folksonomy. Follow the link to check out his ground rules:

What I propose is a concept called 'gardened hierarchical folksonomy'. The basic idea is that you let the site visitors build and construct the taxonomy tree. While this sounds like pure anarchy, it can be effectively controlled with a few ground rules:

stream of conscious: gardened hierarchical folksonomy - the next evolution in semantic classification

Update: WordPress is appointing Bug Gardeners. Pretty much the same thing, except I don't know if a bug or knowledge is the easier thing to garden :P

The server version of Tiger will offer weblog hosting with Blojsom. As far as I know Apple servers are used mostly in office environments. With Safari RSS and Blojsom Apple is becoming a very interesting k-logging environment.
Paolo Valdemarin: Tiger k-logging

And an iChat server based on Jabber (well, it's a Jabber server, so it works with all Jabber-compatible clients as well). And of course, both the IM server and the blog server both tie into Open Directory for user accounts and authentication. Like Scott, I want iChat to start supporting arbitrary SIP servers as well. Somehow, the fact that there has been absolutely no word out of Apple about support for SIP makes me think they're up to something.

Check the server preview for all the other Tiger Server stuff.

As noted above, KM has traditionally been about building and populating databases with useful content, creating portals -- generally, making more information readily available. The consequence has often been to drown workers in hard-to-find information of dubious value just in case they should find themselves in a position to use it. We have actually made workers' intellectual activities harder rather than easier, by presuming, top-down or back-office-to-front-lines, to understand what information they need, and how, when and why they need it. In a world where jobs are more and more specialized, and everyone's information needs are increasingly unique, it's not surprising that KM has failed to live up to its promise.
How to Save the World: CONFESSIONS OF A CKO: WHAT I SHOULD HAVE DONE

There's something missing in here about serendipity -- sometimes "non-value added time" can be very hard to identify. But overall, this is a very good post from Dave Pollard.

American companies are suffering from a personality crisis. They talk about the virtues of flattened hierarchies and bottom-up organizations, and they laud the genius of the market. But when it comes to what they actually do, companies prefer authoritarianism to democracy. Success, most corporations assume, depends on the efforts of a few superlative individuals. As a result, they treat their CEOs as superheroes, look on most of their employees as interchangeable drones, and remain fond of command-and-control strategies that wouldn't have been out of place in the Politburo. In doing so, firms are neglecting their most valuable resource: the collective intelligence of the organization as a whole.
Wired 12.06: Smarter Than the CEO (James Surowiecki)

"Internal decision markets" are described as one potential way to address these issues -- helping all the employees of of a company make good decisions. I remember thinking about "collectives" back in university -- some way to have "good" centralization -- economies of scale, benefiting from shared infrastructure and back-end services -- plus still allowing individuals.

If we look from a hierarchical perspective there is a need for having all available information at your disposal. It is what keeps you on top of it all. The usage of the term information overload implies a hierarchical situation. Taking the emergence perspective, information overload dissolves into nothingness: it is not about the individual information items, it’s about the overall shapes and patterns they in combination convey, which you should be alert to.
Ton's Interdependent Thoughts: The Emergence of Blogging

Scott found Zoe again and checked it out this time. I keep hoping it will get to a usable state at some point. Since I now have a laptop, it might make sense to start having all my email on this box.

Actually, I'm going to be making some choices about email soon. I have my DNS and my hosting separated now, and my email is still with my old provider. I'm debating moving all my email services to an outsourced provider. The wishlist includes:

• IMAP
• spam & virus filtering
• web access
• large (100-500MB+) mailboxes

In any case, read on for Scott's take on Zoe.

There are some good concepts coming from the personal publishing and social software world that need to be applied to corporate knowledge management and sharing. I think many of the same values hold true, it's just that the tools are easier to use and the social software aspect has been increased. In all, I think this means that knowledge sharing projects (and cultures!) are more likely to succeed. More likely to succeed == better ROI == more organizations sharing knowledge.

I would like to take this issue and turn it into a seed question. "What would be common ways to convince management to use lightweight, social collaboration tools for knowledge management?"
ECCoP blog: Erik van Bekkum

(via Column Two)

Furl is a web-based application that lets you save links, including actually archiving the page you are looking at. John Battelle has some ideas on how it might evolve, especially on an "Internet-scale" platform like Yahoo, Google, or Amazon.

But wait...there's more. You can share your PersonalWeb with others. And Mike just added a recommendation engine, so you can see links the service thinks will be interesting to you, based on what you've already Furl'd. Now, let's play this out. Imagine Furl on, oh, Yahoo, for example. Or Google. You now have a massively scaled application where millions of people are creating their own personal versions of the web, and then sharing them with each other, driving massively statistically significant recommendations, and...some pretty damn useful metadata that can be fed into search engine algorithms, resulting in...yup, far better search (and...far better SFO (Search Find Obtain) opportunities).
John Battelle's Searchblog: Grokking Furl: Storage, Search, and the PersonalWeb