vanderwal.net

CM and KM Blog

A new (to me) blog on content and knowledge management can be found at Column Two compiled by James Robertson.

placeless documents

Xerox parc offers placeless documents. This approach classifies documents by the documents properties and not the location where the document is stored.

Peter discusses Social Network Analysis and includes a bevy of links to great resources. This is a great way to learn the interaction of people and the movement and sharing of information.

Six Degrees software sounds like it may actually aid with knowledge management. The toughest part of knowledge management is getting the information and data into the KM system. This software's approach provides a cure to that at the desktop, where data and information are turned into digital knowledge. Joel has an overview of Six Degrees on his site.

Last Days of the Corporate Technophobe the NY Times headline reads. This article on how business is driven by information and the organization of information is paramount. The business world, or now those that did not "get it" before, is a knowledge-sharing and information processing realm. Those with out the ability are lost, or as this article states:

Not being able to use a computer in the year 2002 is like not being able to read in the 1950's.

This is important for us that create applications, Web sites, and other technologies. We have an important job in assisting the ease of information use and the process that helps this information become knowledge. Digging through the heaps of data can be eased so that the user can find the information that is important for their purposes. A large part of this job is creating an environment that will make for the ease of information use and mining the desired bits and bytes. A centralized or a minimum interconnected system of data stores that have the ability to keep information current across resources. Finding the snippets of information is often daunting in a large database centered system, but even worse in environments that have stores of segregated documents and data files (like MS Access). Information Architecture is vital to this effort assisting in helping create a navigatible structure of information. Looking at Google and its great improvements in vast information searching is the right direction also.

I continually turned down my free offers to receive the Darwin magazine, but this article on failure to communicate, about computers communicating to replace our rote tasks. This article focuses on Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which was the sponsor for the advent of the Internet; MIT's Project Oxygen; and the University of Washington's Portolano Project.

Peter Morville is writing on his new site, Semantic Studios LLC. It is good to have both of the polar bear guys back and accessible again.