http://martin.cleaver.org "Ideas are like Raindrops!" Martin on Web 2.0, Wiki, Conceptmapping, Middleware and Organisations Tue, 22 Jul 2008 02:56:01 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Tim Berners-Lee's intended the web to be writeable by all. Yet, for decades it's been stuck in a "read mostly" mode. Everyone web surfs, some add content but very few really get to fundamentally re-express and re-structure web content. We know this. We wiki. Problem is, many don't. Today marks the ... http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2008/06/19/wiki-this-site-the-universal-edit-button-launches-today/ Below is a copy of an email I sent to Wordpress Pro mailing list addressing the dynamic between information stored in a wiki and knowledge spurred on by conversations in a forum. In it I make recommendations as to why and how to link the two assuming that the community ... http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2008/03/27/forums-and-wikis-providing-conversation-knowledge-linkage-for-wordpress-mu/ Feedwordpress is a mechanism for automating syndication of blog entries from one blog to another. I use this alongside WordpressMU to power the blogs at http://www.wikiconsulting.com Feedwordpress is documented at http://projects.radgeek.com/feedwordpress/ and is run by the incredibly busy Charles Johnson (RadGeek). I think it would be better if Charles put a ... http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2008/03/25/feedwordpress-wiki-for-users-contributions/ A bit of news - I've been asked to be on committee to hold the position of Chair for Demos and Posters at WikiSym 2008 in Portugal this September. This is great as I'll not only see breaking ideas as they happen around the world, but also be responsible to ... http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2008/03/05/wikisym2008-im-chair-for-demos-and-posters/ At PodCamp Toronto yesterday I sat next to someone who tried to comment on my blog. It failed! I've fixed it up (it broke after an "upgrade" last year). Please email me if you notice it fail. http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2008/02/25/blog-fixes/ I'm just going to give a quick mention for Onaswarm, a product of Toronto firm BlogMatrix, and run by my friend David Janes. The web has seen a plethora of sites become platforms, each site now holding some fragment of our digital lives. From that stems a problem: many of us ... http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2007/12/03/quick-plug-for-onaswarmcom/ Shove over Rogers, Bell and Telus. I've been long griping about the Canadian Telcos and their stupid, exorbitant data rates: [Canadian oligopolistic Telcos] will only voluntarily drop their prices if they thought that they'd make more money by doing so. Their duty is to please their shareholders, not the public, though they ... http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2007/12/03/wirelessnorthca-launches-with-news-of-the-opening-of-the-canadian-telco-market/ Wordpress 2.0 introduced a mechanism for programmers and plugin authors to schedule programmatic tasks to be run at designated times in the future. Glenn Slaven in his article Timing Is Everything does a great job of describing how this works. (Sadly, Wordpress's convention is that people write Wordpress documentation to ... http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2007/09/22/pseudo-cron-dashboard-display-for-wordpress/ What is the Future of Work using Enterprise 2.0 technologies? It's the wrong vision to take today's apps from the desktop and put them out to the web. Instead, innovation will be from finding new simple apps that do new, different things. You have to look at the value proposition: reduce costs, ... http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2007/09/06/snippets-from-office-20-opening-panel-on-the-use-of-office-20-suite-of-products/ Looking back on my blog writing tool, I have something like 50 unsent posts, and that's after I've deleted those I'll never want to share. Therefore, I'll pushing for shorter posts, especially when reporting events such as Conferences. http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2007/09/06/shorter-posts/ I've accepted an invite to speak on two panels (Thurs-Fri) at Office 2.0 in San Francisco, California this week: Cultural and Technology in Enterprise 2.0 rollouts (hosted by Jevon MacDonald). This will explore the cultural nuances related to designing, developing and deploying Social Software in the Enterprise. Being a wiki kind of ... http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2007/09/02/im-speaking-at-office20-on-mindmapping-and-culture-of-enterprise-20/ Last night was http://barcamp.org/VizThinkToronto4 "Concept Mapping"- presented by David Gelb of York University, Michael Jones from Sheridan College and myself. (Sorry, for all the promotion we did with my pause in blogging I forgot to blog about it). At the present count there are some 84 pictures of the event on ... http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2007/07/18/last-nights-vizthinktoronto4-conceptmapping/ 10.2c Imagery and recall The Buzan Centre promotes many memory aiding techniques. The underlying theme to these systems is to incorporate the creative and logical functions of the brain. By synthesising informational, perhaps abstract facts with experiences we are able to commit them to memory. This is related to an issue ... http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2007/03/28/conceptmapping-thesis-chapter-2-part-102c-imagery-and-recall/ Imagery and recall To explain point 9 of Figure 2-1, we note that a principle law of Mind Mapping is to emphasise. [p. 97, The Mind Map Book] advises 'Always use a central image' and 'Use images throughout your Mind Map'. The justification for this is simple: "While both words and pictures ... http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2007/03/26/conceptmapping-thesis-chapter-2-part-102b-imagery-and-recall/ 2.10.1 Omitting background words - a key principle in the Mind Mapping Technique An important principle in Mind Mapping is the deliberate omission of the many background words; these are simply not needed because the purpose of these words in the text would be to imply structure. The mind map has ... http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2007/03/23/conceptmapping-thesis-chapter-2-part-101-omitting-background-words-%e2%80%93-a-key-principle-in-the-mind-mapping-technique/ 2.10Projection onto a representation space What is included on a map is the choice of the map-maker. Several sources [NOM, LTL] indicate that any transformation of reality into a symbolic representation is a PROJECTION. This transformation often acts as an abstraction, from a person's particular viewpoint and indeed, may distort facts ... http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2007/03/22/conceptmapping-thesis-chapter-2-part-9-explicit-appearance-2/ 2.9 Explicit appearance A map's value is gained from its explicit appearance. It is open to gestalt feeling and can be usefully viewed in part or as a whole, from varying distances and it can be addressed from any starting point; the same is simply not true of a piece of ... http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2007/03/20/conceptmapping-thesis-chapter-2-part-9-explicit-appearance/ 2.8 Structure more than content The key word is structure. Korzybski concluded that the map was so useful simply because it retains the structure of the territory that it mimics. Whatever the medium for the target representation, reality has to be translated in order to fit it onto a representation, if ... http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2007/03/18/conceptmapping-thesis-chapter-2-part-8-structure-more-than-content/ 2.7 Graphical representations Graphical representations, and in particular, maps, are a rich topic for cognitive research: Each person carries with him his cognitive field as a map of the world. He responds not to the world, but to the map. When he receives the stimulus of a communication, the meaning it has ... http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2007/03/16/conceptmapping-thesis-chapter-2-part-6-graphical-representations/ Spatial world and analogy Adult humans have had plenty of practice in mentally modelling space and, because of this, we become adept at recognising patterns in it. So when we are presented with a conceptual instead of spatial problem, it can be both advantageous and natural for us to draw analogy ... http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2007/03/14/conceptmapping-thesis-chapter-2-part-6-spatial-world-and-analogy/ Text Language, especially its permanent textual form, is a format that virtually every human has the ability to use and is undeniably powerful, emotive and expressive. Carefully selected, words can ring an air of stark truth and clarity, and can drive a deep understanding directly into the human subconscious. However to ... http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2007/03/10/conceptmapping-thesis-chapter-2-part-5-text/ Since 2004, the terms Social Media, "Web 2.0" and The Architecture of Participation, have been about getting the masses to provide full engagement, and are taking leaps and bounds as a dominant means to put publishing on the web into the hands of the common public. Brought into an Enterprise context, ... http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2007/03/09/the-military-believes-in-edge-organizations-your-firm-should-believe-in-enterprise-20/ 2.4 Natural conception of space The extent of our experience thus dictates an arbitrary limit on the dimensionality that we understand. However, there is no such limit on the complexity of relationships between objects. It is these relationships that dictate the pattern of a system that we seek to comprehend, and ... http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2007/03/08/conceptmapping-thesis-chapter-2-part-4-natural-conception-of-space/ Wikis - Making Sense out of a House of Shards(c) Martin@Cleaver.org2 December 2004 A wiki can be a posting board, knowledge base, project tracker, photo album, and discussion forum. It's all of these, yet none alone does it justice. Even for the most experienced, a Wiki can be infuriatingly difficult to ... http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2007/03/07/wikis-%e2%80%93-making-sense-out-of-a-house-of-shards-2004/ 2.3On Space The environment or "milieu" that we live in is partly composed of a space and as such, some of the earliest things that we need to describe during childhood exist in a spatial field. We become accustomed to understanding the spatial dimensions and become experienced at describing them. Survival, ... http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2007/03/07/conceptmapping-thesis-chapter-2-part-2-on-space/ Note: I no longer work with Helix Commerce. Some of my readers will know me from presenting with Bill Ives at KMWorld on the topic of Blogs and Wikis. Well, Bill, Cindy and I have teamed with IBM to provide a training version for corporations and the public. Here's an extract ... http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2007/03/06/helix-commerce-and-ibm-blogs-and-wikis-in-business/ 2.2 Mental Models People construct internal representations, called mental models, of the situation in the world that they want to reason about and then change those models, in ways corresponding to the ways the world can change, to try to find solutions to their problems. [Mind in Action, p 68] The creative ... http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2007/03/05/conceptmapping-thesis-chapter-2-part-2-mental-models/ 2. Background Investigations "It is in symbolic, visual terms that the designer ultimately realises his perceptions and experiences; and it is in the world of symbols that man lives. The symbol is thus the common language between the artist and spectator" Brian Lawson - How Designers Think In this chapter, we survey ... http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2007/03/02/conceptmapping-thesis-chapter-2-part-1/ Chapter 1: Language, maps, communication and memory. "The horror of that moment," the King went on, "I shall never, never forget!" "You will, though," the Queen said, "if you don't make a memorandum of it." Lewis Carroll ( 1832-98 ) - Through the looking glass (1872) To exchange thoughts is a fundamental need ... http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2007/02/28/chapter-1-language-maps-communication-and-memory/ Abstract When referring to a problem, we often speak of a space in which the problem's parts exist. This allows us to speak metaphorically and to apply knowledge constructed in a given field to be useful in a less familiar one. Concepts are universally separate from representation, yet the representation often subtly ... http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2007/02/28/my-msc-thesis-on-concept-mapping/ 40,000 Minds are better than 1: A case analysis of idea management at Bell Canada (Weds 24 Jan, 11:30am-12) Meaghan McKnight and Rex Lee - BELL SYSTEMS AND TECHNOLOGY Rex and Meaghan from Bell Canada talked through some pretty exciting Enterprise 2.0 internal projects at Bell Canada. The one that got my ... http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2007/01/28/mcmaster-congress-enterprise-20-id-ah-at-bell-systems-and-technology/ I just spent a few hours this morning installing, configuring and troubleshooting http://subscribe2.wordpress.com/tag/installation/ The idea is that readers can register and get emailed about certain categories of topic I write about, as many people are not yet using an RSS reader. This would especially be a boon to my friends and ... http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2006/12/22/added-email-subscribe-to-my-wpmu-blog/ Thanks to Mark Kuznicki and Rob Schaumer who both pointed out my feed was down. As my RSS reader (GreatNews) was failing I got behind in my reading, to the point that I had no way to be alerted that my own feed was down. RSS really does recenter a ... http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2006/12/20/my-rss-now-coming-via-feedburner/ In My Blog Got Me a New Job ex-Ernst & Young Rod Boothby explains how his blog enhances the chances of landing a new job, and how he attributes his job offer to having lowered the risk to potential employers by being seen to be more transparent and open. In ... http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2006/12/18/blogging-for-a-job-in-a-transparent-mass-socialized-world/ (than the real one) Bringing online what other’s have observed in the past (in addition to what’s available in the here-and-now), and extending one’s reasoning into the knowledge of others (in addition to what one knows themselves) is a key value-add of participating in an online community. Clues from eBay reputation ... http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2006/12/12/there-are-more-clues-available-in-a-virtual-environment/ Innovators & Influencers: From Web 2.0 To Enterprise 2.0 (Digg) http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=196602773 Lots of CIOs pay lip service to Enterprise 2.0, the sometimes esoteric movement toward using consumer technologies like blogs and wikis to create a more collaborative business environment. JP Rangaswami not only is driving those Web processes internally as CIO ... http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2006/12/11/wiki-promoting-cio-moves-to-bt-global-services/ Ian Delany in http://twopointouch.com/2006/12/07/blogging-asia/ offers this insight into the huge variation between adoption of blogging in Asia vs. the Western World: Blogging Asia: A Windows Live Report shows that blogging is already a significant force in Asia. [I] haven't been able to find the original report online, but I've been able ... http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2006/12/09/46-of-online-asia-has-a-blogs-8-of-us-web-users-of-canada/ You may have noticed yesterday this site's not displaying the background. This post is in two halves: 1) implications for typical users of Zoundry and Wordpress, and after the (more...) 2) My notes to investigate why this happened. The latter half of this post is more technical. Symptoms: a) the site's ... http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2006/12/03/zoundry-causing-display-errors-in-my-blog-resolved/ Zoundry: submitting multiple trackback addresses with a single post. I'm using v1.0.36. http://forums.zoundry.com/viewtopic.php?p=1196#1196 says: Developer Release Version 1.0.29 (June 29, 2006) says: 8. Multiple trackback support - Episode I:You can now enter a comma separated value (CSV) list of trackback urls. The only problem is theUI for this has not changed i.e. you ... http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2006/12/02/zoundry-multiple-trackbacks-are-maybe-possible-but-the-ui-is-incomplete/ There are so many people and good topics in the Blogosphere, its very easy to get overloaded with postings. This article is my investigation of how to blend and filter RSS feeds using Digg, how much of Digg accomplishes what I want, and thoughts of how Digg might in the ... http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2006/12/02/rss-overload/ Jon Husband in Wirearchies applies principles of Inspector Lohmann's building invisible comic community to the blogosphere: [Inspector Lohmann] explores one of the central reasons why (IMO) blogging and connecting with each other to work at building new relationships is so important now, and why it will grow in importance. Hierarchies have always ... http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2006/11/29/mass-socialization-a-threat-to-hierarchy-and-control/ Techies that need to background information for RSS for newbies won't go too far wrong with Fagan Finder's All About RSS guide. Galan Bridgeman's article at Microsoft.com explains some good software options at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/web/expert/bridgman_05november21.mspx http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2006/11/29/all-about-rss-from-fagan-finder/ I met Bryan Watson of EP-Enterprises for a meal about a month ago. Last week Bryan telephoned me to ask if I'd mind re-explaining the relative merits of Wikis compared to Email, Discussion Groups and Blogs. This is the slide I'd shown him. Based on some notes I'd made a few ... http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2006/11/28/wikis-compared-to-email-discussion-groups-and-blogs/ Thomas Baekdal's idea for a bridge between Web pages and RSS feeds is a simple and good one: WEB2RSS is a simple web application that can convert almost any normal website/page into an RSS feed. Thus, if a site you want to watch doesn't emit RSS (and many don't), you should instead ... http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2006/11/26/web2rss-great-idea/ Kami Huyse gives an overview of her most popular articles about blogging in dialing_8_kami; I particularly liked 7-habits-of-highly-effective-blogs Thanks Kami. :) http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2006/11/26/kami-huyse-on-effective-blogging/ Canadian corporations need to experiment with Social Media technologies such as blogs and wikis. Twopointouch: reports in Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Britain : A new UK report into customer engagement produced by e-consultancy reveals that UK firms are likely to significantly deepen their commitment to Web ... http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2006/11/25/2007-uk-firms-42-user-generated-content-35-blogs-33-podcasting-35-videocasting/ Following % breakdown of RSS Reader by use. Zoundry to post I learnt that GreatNews and Zoundry can be configured to work together. Finally I found Lee Hopkin's advice on using-greatnews-and-zoundry-together which slows you down to actually read the Options | Configure Blog Tool | Tool Details, selecting "Generic External ... http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2006/11/25/greatnews-and-zoundry-integration-details/ Stuart Brown runs through in whos-using-what-for-rss the following chart outlining how people are reading their RSS newsfeed: Personally I use a combination of Bloglines and GreatNews for reading, plus Zoundry for writing. Will Humes provides another comprehensive review and says: GreatNews is a very fast reader. You can scan thru articles quickly, ... http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2006/11/25/breakdown-of-rss-reader-by-use-zoundry-to-post/ Blogging is a high touch, low cost way of developing contacts and maintaining networks. Does it change the nature of sales? I think so. I think it alters the norm from transactional to relationship based. As I recently commented to a client in an email: On a blog, anyone can read what ... http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2006/11/22/blogging-as-presencing-instead-of-marketing/ I tap away at this blogging malarky for many reasons but, as in everything, I strive to improve. So, I was looking to augment the technology powering this blog, with a means to gather quick feedback. ds-rating-plugin is a candidate: it provides the means to allow readers to star-rate postings. Ideally I'd ... http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2006/11/21/a-ratings-system-for-postings/ In his post, The relevance of knowledge management today, says about Knowledge Management: The terminology and tools have substantially moved on, yet the fundamental problems are not new. As such, the wheel does not need to be reinvented, and those who have been in the knowledge management space can apply their ... http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2006/11/20/knowledge-management-is-dead-long-live-knowledge-management/ Planet KM PlanetKM.org serves as an aggregator of knowledge management blog sites that provide RSS/Atom feeds. It's our labor-of-love aimed to be a hub of knowledge for KM researchers and practitioners. PlanetKM.org is run by PlanetMatter system recently developed by UsableLabs under a research grant of the Knowledge Management Insitute of Thailand ... http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2006/11/19/planet-km-uses-planetmatter/ This morning I quickly hacked together a widget for wordpress to have it display the CanadianTechMob jscript badge. I did this so I can keep my wpmu installation clean of random edits to a particular theme's sidebar HTML. The code is largely a rip off of phtechnorati.php Version: 1.0 by Philipp ... http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2006/11/16/canadian-tech-mob-wordpress-widget/ Question to DrDave, inventor of http://unknowngenius.com/blog/wordpress/spam-karma/ DrDave: I recently moved my wpmu installation between hosts. In doing so I inadvertantly went from MySQL 5 to MySQL 4. That then caused problems about autoincrement flags on the sk2 tables... so I deleted all the sk2 tables reasoning that if the tables were ... http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2006/11/11/sk2-on-wpmu-reset-all-tables-on-all-blogs/ We all lead multifaceted lives. As individuals we have personal news, family news, work with organisations we treasure (such as charities) and then, of course, client facing responsibilities, internal work issues and communities of practice. Many of the most prolifant bloggers blog content in many of these facets. But readers come ... http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2006/11/05/syndicating-your-blog-entries/ Wordpress mu has some stupid defaults that means admins have to hack some core files. I just submitted http://trac.mu.wordpress.org/ticket/109#comment:6 That gives the admin the ability to override the default links that appear in the blogroll. Hopefully it will make the next release. M. http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2006/11/04/wordpress-default-links/ I added this to the bottom of wp-cron.php (1.1a) so I can see that it is loaded and when it last ran. Needs de-geeking for general consumption. http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2006/11/04/wp-cronphp-added-to-dashboard/ The files below are from my hacked version of widgets. It implements a render replacement of [[Widget Name]] with a call to that widget. This means widgets are freed from the sidebar and can be embedded into a posting. widgets/README.txt - needs updating widgets/widgets.php - see diff widgets/wpmu_widget_bindings.php - this maps [[]] names ... http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2006/11/04/wordpress-widgets-not-just-for-the-sidebar/ To: wordpress widgets team @ Automattic.com Hi, I made some modifications to the widget code to allow it to also serve widgets embedded into postings. The existing syntax is not jeopardized at all. Now you can addtionally say [[Widget Name]] and the widget will appear in a posting. Is this functionality that the ... http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2006/11/04/widgets-not-just-for-the-sidebar/ Wikis are typical playing grounds for today's 20-something age group. For the last 10 years this 'myspace generation' has been acculturated in a totally different set of social norms powered by collaborative technology. As these people take their places in corporations we are seeing totally different possibilities. Being able to ... http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2006/10/27/the-myspace-generation-has-a-new-way-to-innovate/ Preparation for the conference has taken a lot of my time in the past couple of weeks - and I am guilty of letting a couple of things drop as a consequence. The faster I can back my interests with paid work the happier I'll be. Apologies especially to the guys ... http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2006/10/25/behind-but-not-forgotton/ Picasa is really nice for editing photos, Flickr is great for sharing them. But, they are owned by different companies (Google and Yahoo) and each company seeks lock-in. Picasa is therefore hardwired to Google's Blogger service. Jim Rutherford on http://www.digitalmediaminute.com/article/1299/gmail-picasa-and-flickr has put together a nice procedure for automating the upload ... http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2006/10/06/picasa-to-flickr-to-blogsconceptmappingorg/ Great presentation about our need for Semantic Integration. Places concept maps up there with wikis... http://www.danmccreary.com/presentations/sem_int/sem_int.ppt M. (Links was broken... thanks to Jim for letting me know) http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2006/10/04/semantic-integration-the-next-wave-april-2006/ It's not everyday I get a phone call from New Zealand. But, about 8 hours after I posted that I was looking for a job opportunity, that's what happened to me. It's too early to say how this opportunity will pan out, but I will say this, blogging to the world ... http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2006/09/27/the-power-of-blogging/ Both Karel and Freddy have reminded me about this... when people comment on your blog Wordpress notifies you by email. So, the temptation is to use email to respond, but this buries the response and closes off the line of questioning to further replies. So, instead, just comment on your own ... http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2006/09/18/commenting-on-your-own-posts-keeps-the-story-intact/