January 2009 Archives

Xenu's Link Sleuth is a great tool! It finds broken or compromised links in your website. I have over 1000 entries in this blog from as far back as 2002. Some of the links are broken. The remarkable thing is that if I go back and do a little sleuthing, I can usually find the articles and the links that I was interested in. Many of the these bloggers are still writing and very active in their fields. It is so exciting to reconnect! I have found lots of new people I can follow on Twitter, because, everyone, of course is there now.

The vision of executive recruiting in the future.

Introduction to Information Retrieval by Christopher D. Manning, Prabhakar Raghavan and Hinrich Schütze provides an computer science perspective on information retrieval. In fact, it gives you a complete picture of the challenges and complications of developing a modern web-scale search engine.

This week I spent the last three days learning the technical details of the Endeca platform for information access.  This is a hugely powerful application which combines search, business intelligence and rich access to content.  The MDEX engine allows you to build applications that can provide differentiated access to data sets with a minimum of programming.  It is easily configurable and powerful even for a relatively non-technical person.  I was primarily interested in building externally managed taxonomies to provide access to data, since metadata and taxonomy strategy is a big part of my business lately. 

CPSquare is a community of practice designed to share information about Communities of Practice.  Here is the way that they describe themselves:

"Who we are: We are a diverse community of practitioners that has gathered to share knowledge and build a practice around our passion for and belief in the potential of communities of practice as a vehicle for positive organizational and world change.

• We are diverse. We are live in all corners of the world from foothills of California to the rivers of Laos. We work in and across sectors from Wall Street to Parliament, on farms and in villages, at universities and over the internet. We practice many crafts from law to medicine, facilitation to education, farming to parenthood.
• We are a community. We are in relationship. This relationships are rooted in shared values and nurtured by cohesiveness and trust. We give to the community as much as we get in return - it is a reciprocal relationship, value is given to and created by members of the community. We are committed to each other as members and together we are committed to the success of the community's mission, goals, and objectives. We genuinely enjoy working and learning together, we celebrate our successes, learn from our mistakes, and have a whole lot of fun along the way.
• We are practitioners. We put our skills and knowledge into action. We practice our craft in the world. We bring our learning and insights from our individual practice back to be shared with community.
• We share knowledge. We come together to share our thinking, best practices and first-hand experience with building communities of practice. We do so openly and in the spirit of improving ourselves individually, as a community and as members of the broader global community.
• We build practice. We are committed to packaging our insights and knowledge into practical tools and resources that can be used by the community and shared with the world. We are committed to building the body of knowledge on communities of practice and further legitimizing it as a valid and successful approach to solving a variety of problems.
• We share a passion and a belief in the potential of communities of practice. We are passionate about our work, especially as it relates to building communities of practice. We are so passionate that we are willing to offer our time, share our knowledge, and contribute resources to support and nurture this community. We so strongly believe in this approach that we have chosen to build a community of practice for the domain of communities of practice - we walk our talk.
• Vehicle for positive world change. We believe that the formation of communities of practice will help give energy to a broader social movement for positive world change. We believe that the act of being "in community" is a more positive and effective way to operate in a world of ever increasing interconnectedness and the key to making this world a better place for us all."

Much of what we do in knowledge management to make knowledge sharing valuable is to connect people in communities of practice and give them a place to learn together.  

My wife Barbara is starting a new business selling Wool Felt Fashion Accessories, Felting Supplies and Wool. She has built a lovely site at www.bfelt.com. In addition, she has a Boutiqu3 where you can shop for Merino wool roving for making felt, and felted jewelry, scarves, shawls and 3-D sculpture.

Link: Introducing the new Web Design from Scratch Blog for 2009

he grand goal of the blog is to help “Save the Pixel” to become a rallying cry for the movement for simplicity, not just a book title. I want the fundamental principles of “Save the Pixel” to become part of the accepted wisdom of this generation of designers.

My more immediate goal is to publish a stream of information that reflects and reports on current best practice in web design, in a way that’s accessible to the whole community - whether you’re an interested bystander, a budding designer, or a seasoned professional. I want the Web Design from Scratch blog to be just your cup of tea, something fresh and fun that you look forward to each week.

Link: Movable Type Developer's Toolbox | Developer's Toolbox | Smashing Magazine

I’ve linked to this website before. I am just astounded at how good their stuff is; lots of interesting, usable information that I can apply right away. And even though Movable Type gives me fits, I eat this stuff up!

Craig Roth writing in Collaboration and Content asserts that:

Companies that come out of recessions in a stronger position than they went in are those that judiciously invest in technology and related processes that let more work get done with less resources as well as reducing costly delays and red herrings when making decisions. And when the market downturn ends - and it will - opportunistic organizations will be in a better position to succeed than those that had hunkered down during the recession.

Difficult economic conditions can create new opportunities that competitors may not be able to envision.  A company that makes smart cost reduction decisions, invests to create greater efficiency, and takes time to learn about their customer's changing business requirements stands a far better chance to emerge from the recession with better margins and a platform for growth.

I have led a number of projects to build the governance structure for MOSS implementations and it always is a challenge.  Getting the right mix of business participation in the decisions about the information architecture, how the sites will be structured, and how to measure the business value of the implementation are key concerns.  This is an interesting little video from Michael Gannotti on SharePoint that provides a few good ideas about how to document the governance decisions that your company makes.

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

I still read the Boston Globe and the New York Times every morning.  I don’t read news online unless it is very current.  I still find the serendipity of newspapers satisfying it is hard to get the same experience online.

But, Patrick Smith’s article on paidContent:UK entitled Online Or Bust: Why 2009 May Be The Nail In Newspapers’ Coffins makes a convincing argument that the current business model is broken and that classified advertising is evaporating.

This trend may present good opportunities for online journalism.

Link: HTML Reference

Confused about when to use HTML and when to use XHTML? Want to know what the syntax differences are between the two? Do doctypes and DTDs leave you all discombobulated? Or perhaps you’d simply like to understand the basic structure of a web page?