I manage a number of sites and I have lots of images that I use. I have, until now, stored these photos in my computer on my hard disk and uploaded them to the various sites when required. Now I am creating of online stores on Etsy and eBay and I think it would be simpler to store the photos on a site that would assign a URL, so the image could be reused on a number of different sites.

Here is what I have done so far, I have three possibilities that I am experimenting with: Picasa, Flickr and Box.net. Each assigns a URL so that I can reuse the asset. Who has experience doing this? Are there other suggestions for sites that have greater flexibility???

Disk Cleanup has probably always worked this way, but I have been having fits figuring out how to get rid of Windows.old, which contains the previous operating system and files from my Vista implementation.  I got some things I needed from the .old directory, but administratively it is very difficult to delete.

Disk Cleanup a utility that comes with the operating system works.  I got the directions from How to Delete and Remove the Windows.old Folder.  Here are the instructions:

Step by step use of Disk Cleanup to Remove Windows.old Folder

Click on the Start button on the task bar for our task to windows.old removal.
Follow the "All Programs - Accessories - System Tools" path on the Start menu.
Click and select "Disk Cleanup".
When the Disk Cleanup Options dialog screen is displayed select Files from all users on this computer option.
Select the hard disk Drive where the Windows.old folder resides.
The Disk Cleanup utility will scan the driver for not used and unnecessary files.
When the scan is completed check the "Previous Windows installations".
When the wizard requests your confirm to delete the Windows.old folder and its content files, select Delete.

In discussions about social media and its value, the question of the business case for social media often comes up.  This short presentation form SpinWeb describes the benefits of social media for business.

FT.com: Ten principles for a Black Swan-proof world – this is an excellent article on how to fix this financial system by not resorting to the solutions of the past which failed.  It makes perfect sense but is largely ignored.

Today, I published a new leadership and executive development search engine on my Learning to Change Business Website. Over the past three years I have been creating this search engine to enable users to more precisely find content related to leadership education.  Google provides the capability to isolate the best sites that I find and target them for the search.   I hope you find it useful!  The search engine is also displayed on this page.

I found this slide deck via Jeff Dirks' post on twitter:  For all of us working in Information Management. Interesting post on Peter Morville's http://www.findability.org: http://twurl.nl/bdarnl that led me to this post on Peter Morville's blog: 

"Architecture for the Information Age

Yesterday, at IUE 2009, Dan Klyn gave a talk called Now That I See It. I really wish I'd been there. It takes a bit of work to recreate the experience, pulling together the slides and the notes and the tweets, but it's absolutely worth it.

As an extra bonus, Dan has posted a short excerpt from his interview with Richard Saul Wurman. I found it surprisingly refreshing and inspiring."

Here is the post that Peter was referring to.  It is a great discussion of the importance on Information Architecture, User Experience and User interface design.  We are deeply indebted to library science for many of the concepts used today in site design.

.

Semantic, Structured Authoring is an important concept in writing content for the web.

Semantic authoring has been defined as "to compose information content semantically structured according to some ontology". (If you've never encountered the word ontology before, the dictionary defines it as "the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of being".) A much better explanation of semantic authoring is "knowledge markup". Simple tags such as <policy> aren't the only way in which knowledge is categorised, indexed and labelled within XML. Tags can contain attributes (such as the id attribute in <section id="upg11">), and metadata can be stored in tags separate from the content itself (such as <author><firstname>Tony</firstname><surname>Self</surname></author>).

The most common semantic markup languages for documentation are DocBook and the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA). DITA specifies a number of topic types, such as Task, Concept and Reference.

Within DITA, a Task topic is intended for a procedure describing how to accomplish a task; lists a series of steps that users follow to produce a specified outcome; identifies who does what, when, where and how . A Reference topic is for topics that describe command syntax, programming instructions, other reference material; usually detailed, factual material .

In Coherence Group’s business, writing structured content is important because we combine knoweldge, learning and software development in to performance support tools so that knowledge workers can avoid the integrative effort of putting this content together themselves.

Jeff Bezos worked in Amazon’s distribution center in  Kentucky for a week recently.  This was not a press stunt; he actually worked with the hourly employees.  Bezos is reportedly a micro-manager and the company culture is fast lean and frugal.  But, he is able to achieve good results by paying attention to details.  I am sure he was find new opportunities for improvement which is especially important in a recession.

The Sunday Herald - Scotland's award-winning independent newspaper reports in a recent article entitled, How the US forgot to make Trident missiles, that the “US National Nuclear Security Administration lost knowledge of how to make a very hazardous material named Fogbank.  As a result, the warhead refurbishment programme was put back by at least a year, and racked up an extras $69 million.”

.”…vital information on how Fogbank was actually made had somehow been mislaid. "NNSA had lost knowledge of how to manufacture the material because it had kept few records of the process when the material was made in the 1980s, and almost all staff with expertise on production had retired or left the agency," the report said.”

This is a clear and very compelling case for knowledge management.  The NNSA says it will strengthen its “management procedures” but knowledge is an extraordinarily costly commodity as this fiasco demonstrates.

1. Reduce cost of sale? faster sales cycle; increase yield
2. Reduce cost of lead generation? Less expensive marketing mix...
3. Reduce marketing collateral development costs and time?
4. Get answers faster
5. Reduce reinventions ... use the combo of bookmarks and search
6. Reduce errors
7. Speed up discovery process
8. improved quality of role-role interaction
9. Make faster decisions
10. transparent policy making lead to improved efficiencies
11. cost savings from shutting down low yielding projects

I would add several others:

increased win rate.
increasing customer retention
increasing number of non-competitive sales opportunities
increasing reuse of solutions
increasing utilization of subject matter specialists
greater job satisfaction
increasing customer satisfaction
increasing number of new service offerings
faster time to market