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Surprise ending

garym — Wed, 26 Mar 2003 01:06:48 -0500

If you haven't already clicked through to check it out, which is what most people did, then you don't yet know that while this seemed a really good idea, it turned out to be a really good illegal idea: In Ontario, according to the Real Estate Board, it is illegal to relay information about properties for sale without a license. You can't tell your neighbour about them, you can't write articles about them, you can't show someone the picture you found on a public website, and you can't even quote what the real estate agents themselves say about the properties.

Whether or not this is a Good Thing or a Totally Brainless way of doing business online is not mine to say. What I can say is that I will personally never trust a real estate agent to market my property online, and I can tell you about the stats which show BLOG the BOB skyrocket up through our weblogs in just three days attracting several hundred page reads per day by the end of the third day.

That's with no media splash, no announcements other than one email (foolishly) to the real estate agents and to the economic development office. This was purely the effect of the blog ecology and if you ask me, it was a roaring success. We proved without a doubt that, when propelled by a constant stream of content that appeals to the audience, the blogroll ping and RSS ecology is a powerful sales channel.

too bad it was illegal.

Blog Mindshare is Building

garym — Mon, 10 Mar 2003 17:37:38 -0500

This story appears to be getting a lot of traction in the mainstream press. There's been a CNN story (with the sidebar that defines "what is a blog?") and now also this one in BizReport. Time to watch the newswires for evidence of an upturn out of the slump ... and who knows, maybe all these years of experiment with chickens and rats will finally pay off!

Post-production Filtering on WikiPedia

garym — Fri, 31 Jan 2003 15:18:22 -0500

As a footnote to that story, the last I heard from Larry Sanger was an email in November 2002 calling for support of an initiative "to select and post Wikipedia articles that are up to a certain standard."It never happened, and it shouldn't because, just as Nupedia failed to grasp what Tim Bernards-Lee had wrought with this web thing, this second notion to have the expert few hand-pick and pre-certify the contributions of the masses was doomed not only because the task is just too mammoth for anyone to fund out of any single entity, but mostly because again, it betrays a naivity of the media: All the WikiPedia really needs is a distributed aggregation and rating system, exactly as we find with the weblog impact on Google, and the cream will rise to the top.

May and I were watching a James Bond film set in Rio at Mardi Gras. I said to her, "How much does that festival cost?" and got the usual "He's flipped out again" look ;)

"Nothing," I responded to my rhetorical question, "Nothing at all. It costs nothing because it's $5 here from this person, $15 from that one, this shop spends some on decorations, this one on a band, this one spends a bit on their float ... and it all adds up."

The total expense is unknown, like the expense of rolling out the world's railways or telecommunications systems, like the cost of paving the world's highways, like the cost of Linux or Apache --- we know the costs of our little bit of it, but the grand cost is unknown because it all adds up from aggregating thousands of small, individual and voluntary contributions, each paying what they themselves need to contribute, and each participant virally marketing only what they themselves enjoyed.

And before you know it, you have a festival --- or an encyclopaedia or even software --- that is the envy of the entire world.

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?