I really appreciate very much Pat Metheny, an incredible Jazz guitarist and a very kind and humble person, at a minimum on stage ;-) I bought recently a DVD of one of its concert with the Pat Metheny Group (PMG): Imaginary Day, recorded live and filmed in 1998 at the Mountain Winery in Saratoga (USA, California). Pat is technically and melodically an extraterrestrial, so good! The band is doing a very good job in the background, special mention to Lyle Mays, the pianist. The sound quality and rendered surround-mix is execellent. The production is…quite bad, so to speak, funny! As when you are discovering and testing the visual effects and transitions of Adobe Premiere for the first time :-) Anyway, all in all, a very interesting DVD and musical experience with Pat Metheny!

I’ve seen Pat for a while in another band-context – his Trio – during the last Montreux Jazz Festival.

Email client as a knowledge management tool?

“Email is often described as “the killer application of the Internet”. Based on our research, we think it is possible to be even more emphatic; email is a serial-killer application! It is seriously overloaded and has been co-opted to manage a variety of tasks that it was not originally meant to support.” (Ducheneaut & Bellotti, 2001)

Weblogs as a Personal Filing Cabinet

A weblog can serve as a personal “filing cabinet” of information (Pollard, 2003a). By “blogging” items – that is: referencing and citing pieces of information, annotating them and publishing them on a weblog – a weblog author (“blogger”) can build up his own personal information repository. The simplicity of the weblog system encourages filing and annotating things that were previously left unfiled. Ths structure of hyperlinks and free text and the absence of imposed hierarchy makes it possible to archive items that could not be organised well in file systems.

By linking to older entries in one’s own weblog or to other items found elsewhere, the user can build his own personal information structure that is tailored to his needs. When working on a specific task the weblog becomes the starting point of a search for information.

Weblogs as Knowledge Journals

Journal writing has always been an important task of learners and knowledge workers. Taking notes of things learned and expatiating thoughts is an important process to intensify learning (Kerka, 1996). Weblogs can serve as a medium in which to record ideas and thoughts and reflect on current work and things learnt. They become “representations of patterns of meaning” (Fiedler, 2003) or: representations of knowledge.

Weblogs and Feedback

Weblogs are published in public or at least to a defined audience. Weblog-authors are therefore not only using weblogs as personal journals but also to get feedback on their thoughts. Often, weblog-authors will publish “half-baked ideas” to get feedback on them and develop them into something more meaningful. Also, readers will often help an author with tips on where to find more information on a topic blogged about.

Source: Martin Röll

Google launched a new version of its tool "Google alerts". You have to enter the keywords you want to monitor. New management possibilies, good utility to check the evolution of your sites and the ones of your competitors…

Interesting article (html, pdf) from Martin Röll, the content was presented during the BlogTalk 2.0 in Vienna-Austria on July 2004. As the author of the paper, I am convinced that an email client cannot be the base of proper knowledge management. Some important mandatory functionalities are simply missing. I agree also with his analysis when he says that weblogs could and should be used as a central personal knowledge management tool. In this field, I will also post some comments and inputs about the usage of Groove and its new version in the coming days.

Some abstracts of the article:

Knowledge work processes

Source: Framework for Knowledge Work Analysis (Efimova, 2004)

From this framework the following processes can be identified:

Organising personal information (“Personal Information Management”)

Making sense of information (personal)

Negotiating meaning (social)

“Creating” new ideas

Establishing and maintaining a personal network

Collaborating in communties

Finding (codified) information

Source: Knowledge Work Processes (own illustration, based on Efimova, 2004)

I like music, generally speaking :-) In different forms: lives, CD’s, DVD’s, documentaries, books, etc. I do often forget to mention … lithographs. My office walls were full of them for some years, and it’s growing again. I have three lithographs of the Montreux Jazz Festival, including the one of 2004:

And I just ordered two U2’s limited edition lithographs.

Our sunflowers blossomed for the first time in July and we lived a second strong blossoming at the beginning of August. Great results. France-Anne did a good preparation job with the seeds :-)

For a while, I wanted to give the service of FeedBurner a try. This tool is converting an Atom feed to a RSS feed “on-the -fly”. Blogger is still only generating Atom feeds…

FeedBurner is free and still in a beta-mode. But the service is quite convincing: great interface, lot of options, very stable, good availibility, and so on. On the other side, I don’t think that publishing Atom feeds is seeing actually as a limitation. A bunch of famous newsreaders are supporting Atom feeds. And one big annoying thing in using FeedBurner is that you shift a part of your traffic on another platform. It is very difficult (although FeedBurner contains a statistics module) to track correctly your overall blog traffic and to analyse it.

That’s the reason why I de-activated the RSS feed. Sorry for the inconvenience, if any!

I read this post on the Google blog, it’s about the Google store.

I decided to have a look and I was quite impressed by the new design and buying process of the Google store. All worked fine and I bought some “very important things” ;-) The only limitation is the quite high shipping price…

[Via vowe]

The answer of anakata is …umh… an interesting kind of prose. anakata is “polite as usual” and completely politically incorrect. I must say I like this answer. Advice: read the full text of the answer :-)

Dreamworks’ lawyers:

As you may be aware, Internet Service Providers can be held liable if they do not respond to claims of infringement pursuant to the requirements of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). In accordance with the DMCA, we request your assistance …

Response:

As you may or may not be aware, Sweden is not a state in the United States of America. Sweden is a country in northern Europe. Unless you figured it out by now, US law does not apply here. For your information, no Swedish law is being violated.

I was in Frankfurt (Germany) today for a very interesting business meeting about Offshoring and Nearshoring (Software development). I will publish an article in the coming days. In the meantime, some pictures of some towers in Frankfurt.