Keith August 5th, 2008
“If only most companies realised the treasure trove of expertise and information that their employees would be able to access if they encouraged the use of such services.”
- Shane Goldberg
Just bumped into Shane on Twitter. He also has a blog.
He has quite a few interesting blog posts, but the current one caught my eye in particular. Shane has found that Twitter: “is actually becoming an essential part of my information-sourcing activities, which are critical to my role.” So, for Shane, a public social networking tool is far from being a distraction from “real work”.
As Shane puts it:
“… many large companies are oblivious to the type of benefits that (open, publicly available) Web 2.0 services like Twitter can provide to their employees…
“These open systems allow employees to draw on the social networks they have created in the same way they use traditional internal informal networks that are always so beneficial to those who know how to use them.”
Read the full article at Shugg’s World.
Keith August 4th, 2008
You may have caught this video on YouTube, or seen it going around on email or FaceBook.
So many emotive emails turn out to be fake - it is refreshing to find that this one (according to Today) is apparently a true story. Just looking at the hair styles in the video places this in the early seventies! The original version was shot on 16mm film (yes, remember film?) without sound (making it easier to dub schmaltzy music over it).
It appears that “Christian” the lion was actually bought at Harrods by two Australians - Anthony Bourke and John Rendall - in 1969, kept in the basement of a London furniture store for a year and eventually repatriated to Africa, in the care of George Adamson of Born Free fame. (This came about because the actors who played Joy and George Adamson in the movie just coincidentally happened to drop in to the shop one day.)
The Today article states that the reunion shown in the video took place in 1972. The YouTube version of the video linked above also shows George Adamson.
The really amazing part of the story is a later reunion in 1974. Christian hadn’t been seen for three months, but suddenly reappeared and sat on a rock outside Adamson’s camp the night before Bourke and Rendall landed, as if waiting.
Continue Reading »
Keith August 1st, 2008
An earlier post here referred to “Indlish” - a blend of Indian and English. An alternative name that I picked up since is “Hinglish”.
So which is it? The score on Google, with links to the top site in each:
- Hinglish - 104,000 (a Wikipedia reference)
- Indlish - 2,900 (a link to a book)
Maybe that tells the story.
The British government’s call for migrants to be able to speak standard English was the topic of a Telegraph article a while ago. The article defined the following variants of English:
- Hinglish (Hindi/Punjabi/Urdu-English)
- Chinglish (Chinese-English)
- Spanglish (Spanish-English) - also known as Tex-Mex
As stated earlier, this is in addition to Singlish (Singaporean English) and Manglish - Malaysian English.
The article quotes a report that makes the wise statement that English “… is no longer the preserve of the English, who are ‘just one of many shareholders’ in a global asset”.
Continue Reading »
Keith July 31st, 2008
“Every really good creative person in advertising whom I have ever known has always had two noticeable characteristics. First there was no subject under the sun in which he [sic] could not easily get interested - from, say, Egyptian burial customs to modern art. Every facet of life had fascination for him. Second, he was an extensive browser in all fields of information.”
- James Webb Young in A Technique for Producing Ideas (1965)
There have been a number of discussions on and off about what makes a good knowledge manager. In various discussions, I have always been interested to note the amazing range of backgrounds people come from - and usually a somewhat chequered career path - to get to this point. Personally, I have come via an IT degree, Project Management, Telecoms Consultancy, with a dash of adult learning and communications thrown in.
As “knowledge management” is such a broad church, there are a range of disciplines such as librarianship, information management, content management and IT that you would expect to see, but why are there so many zoologists now working in KM? I must admit that I haven’t met too many in the field from an advertising background (as per the quote above - highlighted in actKM a while ago), but these fields may well share a preference for diversity - and creativity.
Continue Reading »
Keith July 31st, 2008
Apologies if you have visited this site any time in the last 12 hours or so, and noticed that it didn’t look quite right. Something caused complete chaos…
I realised that I hadn’t checked for dead links for ages, and ran LinkSleuth. In fact, I may never have used it since setting up the WordPress blog. This is a great little program that has always worked very nicely in the past, but this time it apparently caused complete chaos. Half the posts on the site vanished, the theme changed back to the basic old WordPress look, and all the Categories vanished.
I am still not quite sure what happened. I may have entered the URL into LinkSleuth in such a way that it behaved incorrectly; the way I have my site set up with redirects may have upset LinkSleuth; or LinkSleuth may just be a bit dangerous with WordPress for some reason. I’m not sure about this, but I can’t find anyone else complaining about it on Google.
Continue Reading »
Keith July 29th, 2008
A number of other bloggers have been writing about the KM Australia conference. I have posted links to a couple on the Melbourne KMLF blog, and Ark have now posted some more links - see the following:
- Martin Dart has a few quite detailed posts on his blog.
- Shawn has put up a post that includes the results of the dotmocracy exercise on “Trust creating behaviours”.
- Cheryl Doig posted on “The Importance of Trust“.
- Anthony Coles posted his thoughts: “There were more cliches and acronyms than a orthodontists convention…”
- Che Tibby, vising from NZ, has posted this so far.
- Gene Smith posted before the conference here and here - I expect that there may be more to come.
- Jeff Kelly also posted before the conference here.
(For all posts on this topic here, see the KM Aus 08 category.)
Regarding the KMLF session - a bit hard to say more than Frank has already written at VPS-CIN!
Keith July 25th, 2008
Patrick Lambe has produced a fantastic little resource for KM practitioners - a pack of KM Method Cards. This is a pack of quick reference cards covering 80 approaches, methods and tools that can be used in KM planning, assessments and implementations. You can get the cards from the Straits Knowledge online store.
The cards give neat, useful summaries of “KM approaches (eg CoPs, Information Literacy, KM Champions), methods (eg AARs, Pre-Mortems, Anecdote Circles) and tools (eg Wikis, Taxonomies, Competency Frameworks)”. Patrick’s team at Straits Knowledge has already been using them “in a variety of activities with our clients, often in helping them to visualise and plan how they are going to operationalise their KM strategies. Our clients have used them to provide quick reference guides to their KM activists and champions, and also to identify training and competency development needs.”
They are really neat, easy to carry around and use, and give a really good snapshot of all the topics in a form that can be very quickly read and digested!
Keith July 23rd, 2008
“If something’s worth doing, it’s worth making someone else do it.”
I’m sitting in a small bar in Bourke St called “Spleen Central“, listening to a great three-piece jazz band (Heather Stewart jazz blues trio - featuring Heather on violin). Just come from this month’s KMLF meeting - more about that later. Ideal environment for a final post on KM Australia…
The quote above is in reference to another twist on social networking - Dabble Do. The idea is to use your online social network to get your friends to do your stuff for you.
The first session of the second day (which I sadly missed part of) was from Jeff Kelly. The following points are mostly from Jeff, so far as I remember. (* Late addition - I expect some were also from John Girard and Ian Farmer of Bullseye - apologies to any other presenters I may be quoting here!)
- Enterprise 2.0 is supported by three legs - technology, process and culture, and all three must be in balance. Unlike the old days of big IT installations, the technology is now the easy bit. Culture is now the challenge. We have to move from command and control to open and sharing.
- Continue Reading »
Keith July 23rd, 2008
How An Unknown Artist’s Work Became a Social Media Brand Thanks To the Power of Community - another story about the power of sharing, and social media: The Fail Whale.
This story shows the value of open content. By making an artwork freely available, an artist “is now going to profit in more ways than if she had simply made the art available for purchase.” See more of the artist’s work here.
I just love these stories. This again highlights the new direction for life and commerce made possible by social media.
Keith July 23rd, 2008
This is not one of the presentations from KM Australia…
(Thanks, Nerida!)
