I've updated the Dire
ctory
of Active Salon Blogs. Please send
me details on any missing and new Salon Blogs, and errors in the
Directory. I promise to post any updates I receive at
least once a week.
There are now 159 active (updated in the last month, or officially on
vacation but returning) Salon Blogs. Comings & Goings this past
month:
Daniel X. O'Neil, the veteran Salon blogger at
GoogObits
who uniquely chronicles the deceased, has moved to his own site.
The flight from Radio to Typepad seems to have
stopped, at
least for now.
Of the roughly 100 new Salon Blog numbers
assigned this
past
month, about 40 actually made at least one post, and the following 17
appear to be posting regularly. I especially
recommend MallowDrama, Hermit's Notebook, Hoi Polloi and I Don't Know
What Happened, which are off to sensational starts. Welcome, new
Sloggers all.
Total hits this month for Salon Blogs were about 1.1
million, up about 8% for the month, but they were very unevenly
distributed (even more than usual), with 850
thousand of these hits going to the top 11 blogs. For the typical
Slogger, December traffic was about 10% quieter than November, due
probably to the holidays. The median for active Salon Bloggers was
only
about 700 hits per month, about 30 per day.
Inbound blogs totaled about 3250, up about 5%
month-over-month, with the top 11 blogs
accounting for 50% of them. The median for active Salon Bloggers was 7
inbound blogs.
About 42% of active Sloggers are female, up
significantly
from just over 30% three months ago. That's great news, but I don't
know what to make of it.
I'll continue to keep the Directory current, with your help, and will
report at least bi-monthly on comings & goings and stats.
P.S. I've also updated my
Tables of Contents (see top left of my blog). Since Google has, for
some reason, stopped crawling How to Save the World, Google is no
longer a reliable way to find things in my archives. I'm going to test
some other search engines and change my search bar
accordingly.
I have just updated
the full Dire
ctory
of Active Salon Blogs. You can download it in Excel format by
clicking on the link at the top of the right sidebar just below my
e-mail link. It contains current information on the owner and subject
of each blog, plus current sortable data on hits/month and
inbound blog counts. Please send
me details of any missing and new Salon Blogs, and any errors in the
Directory. I promise to post any updates I receive to the Directory
spreadsheet regularly. Here are the summary statistics for the last
month:
Total hits per month were about 1.05 million, up 10%
from February (due almost entirely to a rebound in Filchyboy's hit
count). Of that total, 760 thousand hits (72%) went to the top 11 (7%)
of active blogs. Median hit count remains about 700 per month.
Inbound blogs totaled about 4150, up 10% from
February,
with the top 11 active blogs accounting for almost exactly half of
them. Median number of inbound blogs remains at 7.
The approximate proportion of female Salon bloggers
was
42%, the same percentage as in January and February.
No
longer blogging, it appears, are the passionate Toby's Political Diary
(#1282), Asia Business Intelligence (#1319), Everything That Sucks
(Come Back, Amanda! #1691), Patriotically Incorrect (#2379),.Lean for
Dean (#2429), Doublethink (#2521), Life in LA (We miss you, Claire!
#2608), and 16 relatively new bloggers. David Harris is on hiatus.
Of
the roughly 240 new Salon Blog numbers assigned this past
two months (#3412-3642 and #3743-3757), about 90 made at least one
post, and
the following 36 appear to be posting regularly. That leaves the
number
of active
Salon Blogs at 174, up 14 from February. Welcome to all
new Sloggers.
If I've missed your Salon Blog, or if you know of any active (posted
within the last month) active Salon Blogs not in the directory, please
let me know.
There's just one day left to find the missing Easter eggs (see post
below), and a few of them are hidden in the above newbie blogs.
I have just updated the
full Dire
ctory of Active Salon Blogs.
You can download it in Excel format by clicking on the link at the top
of the right sidebar just below my e-mail link. It contains current
information on the owner and subject of each blog, plus current
sortable data on hits/month and inbound blog counts. Please send
me details of any missing and new Salon Blogs, and any errors in the
Directory. I promise to post any updates I receive to the Directory
spreadsheet regularly. Here are the summary statistics for the last
month:
Total
hits for the month were about 950 thousand, down 12%
from last month (the decrease was due entirely to a drop in hits for
two blogs). Of that total, 700 thousand hits (72%) went to the top 11
(7%) active blogs. Median hit count remains about 700 per month, or
about 20 hits per day.
Inbound blogs totaled about 3700, up 16% from last
month,
with the top 11 active blogs accounting for almost exactly half of
them. Median number of inbound blogs remains at 7.
The approximate proportion of female Salon bloggers
was 42%, the same percentage as a month ago.
Of the roughly 85 new Salon Blog numbers assigned
this past
month (#3326-3411), about 30 made at least one post, and the following
12 appear to be posting regularly. That leaves the number of active
Salon Blogs at 160, almost unchanged from a month ago. Welcome to all
new Sloggers.
If I've missed your Salon Blog, or if you know of any active (posted
within the last month) active Salon Blogs not in the directory, please
let me know.
Here's
a silly publicity stunt I dreamed up to motivate people to check out
more of the wonderful Salon Blogs. Last night I 'hid' 10 eggs, like
the
one at left, one in each of 10 selected Salon Bloggers' comments
threads. They are numbered 1 to 10
inclusively. The posts in which they are 'hidden' are no more
than one week old (April 2 or more recent). Your challenge is to be
the
first to find them.
When
you do,
come back here and 'claim' the easter egg by posting, in the comments
thread below, which Salon
Blog you found it in, and its number.
Then, when you've claimed it, it's your job to hide another egg, in another Salon Blog comment thread
(remember -- no going back further than April 2 or it gets too hard).
Here's how you do it:
Select a Salon Blog from this
list or
this
list,
or any other Salon Blog you know of that has been updated since April
2.
Go to that blog and check to ensure that there aren't
already eggs hidden in the last week's posts' comments on that blog.
Then select one of the comments threads from the last week and type in
(or cut and paste) as your comment
this line of code:
Happy Easter! <img
src="http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/images/egg.gif"> xx
where xx is the number ten
greater
than the egg you found, e.g. if you found egg 7 then the egg you hide
would be 17.
Theoretically, we could end up with an egg in the comments of every
active Salon Blog. Remember, to claim the egg you have to be the first
one to do so in the comments thread
below -- if you e-mailed me about it or commented on it
elsewhere it doesn't count.
This is just for fun -- no prizes, except the discovery of some great,
and underappreciated, blogs. The hunt ends Easter Sunday. Happy
Easter,
everyone.
As you may know, I've been
maintaining (manually) detailed tables of contents of my blog posts
(one per blog 'category') since I started. They're a bit clumsy, but
they get a fair bit of traffic so I know people are using them. Right
now they exist as six 'stories' and I thought it might be interesting
to try to put them together into a single, interactive index. I'm
competent in neither HTML nor Radio's 'outlining' function (I confess
I
don't even know how to use anchors properly -- the twisties below and
the links in the graphic above don't work, and links below should
really take you to the specific subcategory within the table of
contents), so I can't
make it pretty or functional,
but you can get the idea of how it might work:
My six categories have a total of 40 subcategories,
of which five (Blogs in Business, Technology, Stories & Narrative,
New Collaborative Enterprise, and Environmental & Social Economics
& Law) overlap categories and hence appear under two categories
each. The ten most popular subcategories (most linked, and most
commented-on) are shown in bold. This taxonomy is essentially the same
one I use for my filing cabinet tabs and for my My Documents
subfolders, except that they omit the 'housekeeping' type tabs and
subfolders that house my background papers, messages and private and
personal records.
I am not offering this as any
kind of framework for a 'universal' taxonomy. In fact, I've been
adamant that any personal content management system needs to allow us
to index our documents and messages any way we want,
our way, at whatever level of granularity works best for each
individual. Universal taxonomies just don't work. But if we think of a
blog as the 'public area' of our personal content, the shareable part
of our personal 'filing cabinet', I thought it might make an
interesting case study in how we might best 'present' each
individual's
publicly-available 'stuff' for effective browsing by others.
I see the blog, and at a broader level the 'tabs' of our personal
content management system, our 'filing cabinet', as nothing more than
'addresses' or destinations to send content to. So although Microsoft
would have us believe that 'saving' a document or message, 'sending' a
document or message to someone else, and 'publishing' a document or
message to a blog or website, are three fundamentally different
functions and applications, I see them as conceptually
indistinguishable -- they're all actions that move content from one
specific space to another. That's why I have
proposed
a single, intuitive Workspace Manipulation and Document Annotation
tool
to replace virtually every application users have on their PCs today,
a
tool that would finally make PCs accessible to the billions of
technologically challenged among us. But I digress...
I can envision the Interactive Blog Table of Contents working in one
of two ways:
Map Layout: The table of contents would be displayed
graphically, as in the top diagram above. Clicking on any of the 40
subcategory links would replace the map with a hotlinked list of posts
in that subcategory -- showing title, date, author (if applicable) and
a brief synopsis or abstract of each post.
'Outline'
Layout: The content would be displayed, possibly
in the blog sidebar, in 'outline' mode: Clicking on the 'Table of
Contents' box would open up the list of the 40 subcategories, and then
clicking on any of them would display (probably in a separate window)a
hotlinked list of posts in that subcategory -- again, showing title,
date,
author (if applicable) and a brief synopsis or abstract of each post.
How useful would this be for you? If you're not one of those that
browses my
tables of contents, would this kind of functionality be useful on your
own blog, even if only to help you find your own archived posts
without
having to use a hit-and-miss search bar? Could you envision using this
tool more broadly as a means of indexing everything in your My Documents folder and Inbox, and
perhaps even all the hard-copy stuff in your filing cabinet as
well?
Ultimately, I can see the development of an invisible (to the user)
'metadata layer', which would take our preferred organization of our
personal stuff and translate it into some universal standard, and then
as needed into each reader's personal organization of his/her content,
so that for example if Jon Husband wants to browse my publicly
permissioned content, he won't see it organized as I have, above, but
will instead see it automatically reorganized and relabelled using
his personal
taxonomy and nomenclature. I believe this 'metadata' layer development
will be one of the most interesting and important technology
challenges
of this century.
In the meantime, if there's sufficient interest,
I'll buckle down and learn enough HTML and Outlining to implement
either solution (1) or (2) above for my blog.
I've written before
about Blogs in Business
and the role I think they could play. But my idealism -- the desire to
have a better, simpler blog product with some better social networking
functionality before we try to sell it to business -- is giving way to
my impatience. A couple of business leaders have challenged me to
develop a pragmatic strategy for effectively introducing blogs into a
business today. Here's what I
said.
First, the strategy for doing so must respect some fairly unorthodox
principles. If it doesn't, blogs will just end up being one more
awkward and confusing part of already unwieldy and underused corporate
Intranets. These principles are:
Blogs are Personal:
Each individual blogger must retain control over the content in his or
her blog, and over decisions on what does and doesn't go into it. This
is its unique selling point to front-line workers who are used to
seeing all the knowledge they contribute disappear into an
undifferentiated massive corporate content architecture with no
personal ownership or responsibility for quality, currency or
completeness.
The Taxonomy must also be Personal:
Asking people to organize their content into standard categories is a
square peg in round hole exercise. Don't let the CKO or the CIO
presume
to tell individual knowledge workers how they should organize their
personal stuff.
The Blogging Tool must be Simple:
Select the easiest possible blogging tool, and if necessary hide some
of the tricky bells and whistles. People have enough to learn without
having to master HTML and RSS.
Involve KM, IT, Learning and Marketing in the
Project Team:
All four departments will be needed to introduce blogs effectively
into
the workplace. Make this a joint project where each of the four
departments shares in the work, and its success or failure. That may
take some advance selling but if one department tries to go it alone
they'll fail. And you need at least one Executive Sponsor on the
Project Team. For that, you'll need an Elevator Pitch for blogs in
business, which I'll talk about next week.
OK, on to the strategy. Here's a twelve-step plan I think could work
in just about any organization, large or small:
Educate the Project Team: Have a session where the KM,
IT,
Learning and Marketing people learn about blogs hands-on. Set one up
for each member of the Project Team and let them play for a few
days.
Identify the Pilot Group: Don't try to introduce this to
everyone
in a large organization at once. Pick a few cohesive groups that would
likely benefit most e.g. newsletter editors, subject matter experts
and
others who are already 'publishing' stuff internally or externally.
Focus on those who care more about content than style, those who
produce a lot
of content, and
those who produce time-sensitive content often. Ask a sample of
front-line workers this question: "Whose filing cabinet contents would
be most useful to you in doing your job?" They're the people you want
in the Pilot Group. If you have eager and experienced blogging zealots
on staff, include them even if they don't otherwise qualify, but make
them promise not to customize
their blogs for three months, until the Pilot Group is up on their
feet.
Develop a starting Personal Taxonomy for each
Pilot Group member:
This will be different for each person and should probably not have
more than 20 categories and sub-categories. Start with
the organization of their filing cabinets, or their My Documents
folder. If that doesn't work, go on to step 4 for that Piloter and see
if, once you know what the content is, a personal taxonomy suggests
itself. But don't constrain the Piloters -- this is their content and they need to be
able to organize and categorize it the way it makes sense to them. The categories and
sub-categories will usually be subjects, customers or company
products, rather than knowledge types (best practices, stories, policies etc.) Keep
the librarians in check: This is organization by what people do, not how taxonomists think about
knowledge 'domains'.
Develop a starting Personal Content Archivefor each Pilot Group member, organized by their Personal
Taxonomy. The
archive should cover all information, documents and links that the
Piloter thinks are useful or interesting and which he or she authored, customized or obtained from
outside
the organization. The types of content that each Piloter should be
encouraged to include are shown in the top-right illustration above.
If
Piloters are worried about confidentiality of some of this
information,
tell them they will be able to restrict who has access to
it.
Select a Blogging Tool:
The tool you select must be easy to use but powerful enough to
accommodate the categories and content you have identified. If the
Project Team have been playing with different tools for a few days
this
will help in the selection. Don't leave the decision up to experienced
bloggers. This will be hard
for many users no matter what tool you choose.
Get IT to convert
all the Personal Content Archives to HTML:
This is not a job for amateurs. MS Office documents converted to HTML
can get huge and ugly. At the same time, if you're an MS Office
company, develop a standard process for converting documents to HTML
going forward -- this will be an ongoing challenge, and not one you
want to leave up to the Pilot Group.
Get IT to 'bulk publish' all the
Pilot Group's Personal Content Archives:
This one-time process will get your blogging project off with a bang,
with a bunch of pre-selected useful content that the Pilot Group will
be proud of and others in the company will want to see.
Get IT to create a
Table of Contents for each Pilot Group member:
While regular blog content may disappear into the archives without
consequence, business blog content has a longer shelf life, and
readers
need to be able to browse the Table of Contents of each person's blog,
organized according to their Personal Taxonomy. Like step 6, keeping
this current will be an ongoing challenge, and will require developing
a standard process for adding each new post to the Table of Contents.
This may involve some work, but it's important.
Get IT to develop a
password protection scheme for the blogs:
Each Pilot Group member needs to be able to set who can and cannot
view
their blog content. The password protection scheme needs to be able to
accommodate different needs for this, and include an e-mail based
authorization system that will allow those who are initially
prohibited
from accessing a desired blog to get a password from the blog owner.
Access
should not be limited to those inside the company -- if at all
possible, you should allow those outside the organization with the
appropriate password to access company blogs as well. This may
be tricky, but the potential benefits of exposing useful company blogs
to customers, associates and other personal network members outside
the
organization are enormous.
Get your Learning group to offer a short seminar
to everyone in the company on how to publish and subscribe to
blogs:
This will help the Pilot Group continue to publish new material
regularly, will create an appetite for others in the organization to
subscribe to Pilot Group blogs (and to other blogs outside the
organization), and will probably identify second wave blog volunteers
once your Pilot Group are on their feet. Having a blog should be voluntary,
and the fact that it is will create a viral market and curiosity about
blogs ("why are all these people setting up blogs when they don't have
to?"). Let the size of your company blogosphere grow organically at
its
own pace.
Get your Marketing group to talk up blogs outside the organization:
Create an appetite among customers and others outside the organization
to subscribe to the blogs of their personal contacts inside the
organization, as if this were a special 'channel' into the company.
Let
them subscribe to a few showcase Pilot Group blogs (ideally those run
by people in Marketing) to see what they're missing.
Set Up a Blog Help
and Monitoring Group:
This cross-functional group could be just the Project Team, or a part
of the IT or KM Group, but one way or another you need a clearly
defined group to hold the hands of new bloggers, measure the volume
and
assess the quality and sufficiency of publishing and subscription, and
handle the demand of the second wave of potential bloggers.
Although as I mentioned earlier I think you need an Elevator Pitch to
get at least one Executive Sponsor for your Blogs in Business project,
I don't think you need, or probably want, to do a lot of explaining
and
marketing (other than to the Project Team and Pilot Group) about what
blogs are or what their value is. This project is likely to succeed
more if it's quietly demand-driven rather than supply-driven (imposed
or hyped). Think of it like Instant Messaging -- an application that
most businesses never thought would catch on, but which has become
ubiquitous and accepted in many businesses by viral marketing
(peer-to-peer word of mouth) and voluntary take-up. It's a much easier
way to sell a new technology, and as long as these 12 steps are taken,
blogging is tailor-made for it. For once, if you build it right, they
will come.
I've just adding another dozen
items to my already bloated blogroll. I'm actually quite
discriminating
in what I add, rejecting most of the requests I get to 'reciprocally'
blogroll, and never adding a blog until I've seen at least two
remarkable posts on two different days. There's just a lot of great
writing out there! Here are a few of the blogs I've added this
time:
Practical
Metaphors - Ryan Fugger finds amazing things on the Internet that
no one else seems to find. Check out this
post linking to the provocative short film 'Bullet in the Brain' you
can download (bandwidth permitting). Ryan's another reader of Daniel
Quinn's Ishmael. He's an
articulate essayist on how to make the world better, and a contributor
to the Blogger's Parliament.
A Relative Path -
Jonathan Broad has a brilliant wit and an ability to succinctly
summarize current events and contemplate their deeper meaning. He's
also a pessimist willing to look at the horrors of our recent history
and discuss what they tell us about human nature, and what we could do
to avoid repeating them.
Bastish - Kevin Cameron's
great photoblog that I neglected to include in my recent post of
favourite photoblogs. The picture above is one of Kevin's. He's
currently living in Japan, which must be a photographer's dream.
Orcinus - Seattle
journalist and liberal A-lister Dave Neiwert doesn't need any
publicity
from me, but he's a great writer and covers, prolifically and in
detail, well-referenced and supported, the foibles of the Bush regime.
Globalize This - A
new blog by Adam Hersh, a researcher at the Economic Policy Institute,
has astute observations on economic and trade matters, which are going
to be of crucial importance in the coming months and years. In
addition
to explaining economic matters in understandable terms, with a
progressive slant that I of course appreciate, Adam also covers the
work of senior economist and colleague Max Sawicky, whose blog MaxSpeak I've also
blogrolled.
And on the business/IT side, I've added Stephen Downes' and David Wilcox's
blogs, both of which articulately cover the emerging world of social
networking and its role in business and society.
People will listen
when
they're ready to listen and not before. Probably, once upon a
time,
you weren't ready
to listen to an idea than now seems to you obvious, even urgent. Let
people
come to it in their own time. Nagging or bullying will only alienate
them.
Don't preach. Don't waste time with people who want to argue. They'll
keep
you immobilized forever. Look for people who are already open to
something
new.
When presenting a new
idea, you don't have to have all the answers. It's better to say 'I
don't know' than to fake it. Make people formulate their own
questions.
Don't take on the responsibility of figuring out what their difficulty
is. We each internalize information differently. If you don't
understand
a question, keep insisting they explain it until it's clear. Nine
times
out
of ten they'll supply the answer themselves.
Above all, listen.
Your close attention is sometimes more important than your
articulateness in winning converts. And learning is always a good
thing.
When I've talked to people about the ideas I've presented in this
blog,
I get the sense that maybe 10% really understand and appreciate what
I'm saying. Perhaps another 40% are ready to listen and want to believe, but either my
inarticulateness or their internalization mechanism garbles the
message. After all, saving the world (or, as one recent commenter
'geo'
put it more accurately "changing how humans live so we as a species
can
continue to survive") is not easy or obvious, or we'd all be busy
doing
it. This reading list is for that 40%, in the hope that better writers
than I can convey more clearly and compellingly what we need to do and
why. The remaining 50%, I suspect, are not ready. Five years ago
someone gave me The Spell of the
Sensuous and I gave up after five pages -- I just wasn't
ready.
Here's the list -- 56 books and articles that forever changed my
worldview, and my purpose for living::
What Life was Really Like
Before
Civilization: Revisionist History
Full House, by
the
late Stephen
J. Gould.
The presence of man on Earth was a random occurrence, and after the
next Extinction Event life on the planet is likely to evolve
differently. We are not the Crown of Creation.
The Wealth of Man
by Peter
Jay. The life of pre-historic man was easy, idyllic, and very
pleasant. Hunt big slow game an hour a day, relax and enjoy the
rest.
The
Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race, (online) essay
by Jared
Diamond Why the adoption of agriculture was 'a catastrophe
from which
we have never recovered'.
Original Affluence,
by Marshall Sahlins.
If you wanted to defend a new society that featured rigid hierarchy,
agonizingly hard work, suffering, frequent starvation and slavery,
wouldn't you try to portray
the alternative life as 'short, nasty and brutish'?
Extinction,
by Michael
Boulter. Our planet's history is one of cycles punctuated by
massive extinctions and new beginnings. Our only choice is whether to
end this one sooner (a century) or later (several millennia).
The Axemaker's
Gift
by Jame
s
Burke
and Robert Ornstein. How innovativeness has been increasingly
corrupted
to concentrate and retain power, instead of making the world
better.
What's Going On
Under our Noses: The Real News
The Unconscious
Civilization, by John Ralston Saul.
How and why we've become helpless slaves of the political and economic
system we built.
Ockham's
Razor, by
Wade Rowland.
What's wrong with our modern values, and where to look for new
ones.
People
Before Profit, by Charles
Derber -- How rampant corporatism ravaged
the vast
majority of people worldwide in the 1800s, and is doing so
again.
State of the
World,
by WorldWatch
Institute, The 7 trends that most threaten eco-collapse:
population
growth, rising temperature, falling water tables, shrinking cropland
per person, collapsing fisheries, shrinking forests, and the
extinction
of plant and animal species.
World Scientists' Warning
(online), by the Union
of Concerned Scientists. "Human beings and the natural world are
on
a collision course. No more than one or a few decades remain
before the chance to avert the threats we now confront will be lost
and
the prospects for humanity immeasurably diminished. A great
change in our stewardship of the Earth and life on it is required if
vast human misery is to be avoided and our global home on this planet
is
not to be irretrievably mutilated."
Dream of the Earth
by Thomas Berry.
"We are in trouble just now because we do not have a good story.
We are in between stories. The old story, the account of how we
fit into it, is no longer effective. Yet we have not learned the
new story."
The Future
of Freedom, by Fareed
Zakaria Why we can't change another
country's culture from outside it.
The New
Rules of the World, by John
Pilger
An accurate, devastating
portrait of the world in 2003.
The
Demon in
the Freezer, by Richard
Preston. How vulnerable we all are to
individual acts of terror, chaos and sabotage.
Against the Grain,
by Richard
Manning. How grain monoculture evolved, and how it's ruining the
Earth.
Population
Projections,
by US
Census Bureau. They're no longer assuring us that US and Global
Population will level out at 300 million and 9 billion. Would you
believe 1 billion and 12 billion by the end of the century, and still
rising?
Global
Warming, by
NOAA.
An online synopsis of US scientists' consensus on the causes and
consequences of global warming.
This Overheating World -
Worried? Us? (online essay) by Bill McKibben. Article
in the UK journal Granta explaining the psychology, and
cynical political expediency, of denial.
Are Cities Changing
Local
and Global Climates?, (online) by NASA.
Studies of urban microclimates and how they contribute to local
climate change and instability.
Restoring Scientific Integrity
(online) by Union of
Concerned Scientists. The Bush regime's distortion of scientific
research to forward its
own political agenda.
Climate Collapse,
by David Stipp
(online article) from Fortune Magazine. The possibility and chilling
implications of
global warming producing sudden drastic climate shifts.
Conservative Myths
on
Global Warming (online) by Blogger
Carpe Datum. A brief but thorough explanation of the science
behind
global warming, and the reasoning behind scientists' connecting it to
human activity and worrying about the risks of resultant
instability
The Empire
Strikes Out,
by Kenny
Ausubel. Corporatism and acquisitiveness run amok are ruining our
world, but nature always bats last.
The Tragedy of the
Commons,
by Garry
Harding. The commons, that which belongs in common to all of us,
is
disappearing -- Why nobody really cares.
Elizabeth
Costello, by JM
Coetzee.
Why we tolerate a holocaust against our
fellow creatures on Earth.
The Machine in Our Heads,
by Glenn
Parton.
How the ecological crisis is rooted in a human psychological
crisis.
About Gaia: What
Nature is Really About
When Elephants
Weep,
by Jeff Masson. Compelling
scientific evidence that animals feel deep emotions.
Mind of the Raven,
by Bernd
Heinrich. Compelling scientific evidence that animals are
intelligent, complex, rational and communicative.
The Sacred
Balance
by David Suzuki. A
passionate explanation of James Lovelock'sGaia Hypothesis, the need to
redesign how we live, and the importance of spending more time in
nature.
The Hidden
Dimension,
by Edward
Hall. We need space and a natural environment to be healthy and
human. When we're deprived of them, we get mentally ill.
The Spell of the
Sensuous,
by David
Abram. How to reconnect with nature, and rediscover wonder.
Radical Analysis, Radical
Solutions (these are the most important readings, but you
probably won't 'buy' their arguments unless you've first read much of
the material above)
Ishmael, The Story of B, and Beyond Civilization by Daniel Quinn.
Also the IshCon
discussion forum. The first two of these three books
are fictionalized stories about human history from a different,
anti-civilization perspective, with penetrating, astounding analysis
and insight. Ishmael is more
popular but I prefer The Story of
B
which recapitulates the entire theses in a series of 'lectures'. The
two critical lectures are online here.
Beyond Civilization is about
what
we should do about all this.
A Language Older Than
Words, by Derrick
Jensen.
A profound and disturbing argument for why moderate answers to our
current predicament won't work.
The
World We
Want, by Mark
Kingwell.
Why we are best served by trusting our
instincts rather than what we are persuaded is moral or
rational.
Toolkit for Change: Knowledge We
Can Use
to Save the World
Freeman Dyson's
Brain
(online interview), in Wired Magazine.
The
twin keys to building a better world are (a) establishing viable
self-sufficient local communities to replace big centralized states
and
governments, and (b) selective more-with-less technologies like
solar/wind energy coops and biotech medicines.
The Developing Ideas
Interview (online) with economist Herman Daly.
An economic and tax program that favours communities and commons
instead of corporations, and a 'contract' to reduce our population and
ecological footprint.
The
Unconquerable World, by Jon
Schell.
Why non-violence and
consensus-building are the only viable way forward.
The Support
Economy, by Shoshana
Zuboff A model for a post-capitalist economy.
Unequal
Protection, by Thom
Hartmann. The case for denying 'personhood'
to corporations.
When
Corporations Rule
the World, by David
Korten.
The need to get corporations out of politics and create localized
economies that
empower communities within a system of global cooperation, overcoming
the
myths about economic growth and the sanctification of greed, and
focusing
instead on overconsumption, poverty, overpopulation, and reining in
untrammelled
corporate power.
Radical
Simplicity, by Jim
Merkel.
How to free yourself from
possessions and wage slavery without sacrifice.
The Tipping
Point, by Malcolm
Gladwell. What makes things change.
Ten Ways to Make a
Difference, by Peter
Singer.
A pragmatic recipe for change.
The Truth About
Stories,
by Thomas
King. The truth about stories is that that's all we are. Want a
new
society? Write a new story.
The Corporation,
by Joel
Bakan. An action plan for undermining corporatism.
Humans in the Wilderness,
by Glenn
Parton. How we might reintroduce humans, well-spaced-out, into a
primarily wilderness Earth.
At Home in
the Universe, by S
tuart
Kauffman. How self-organizing,
self-managing systems work.
EarthDance (entire
book online), by Elisabet
Sahtouris. Eleven steps to cultural metamorphosis (my summary is
here)
eGaia
(entire book
online), by Gary
Alexander. How to achieve of peace,
cooperation and sustainability (replacing war, competition and growth,
the fuels of our current culture) and a future state
vision with vignettes from
individuals' lives in a balanced and harmonious future
world.
A simple way to
simultaneously send new blog articles, as they are posted, to any
number of user-maintained, editable e-mail lists (from which people
could easily unsubscribe, of course).
10.
An
automatically maintained Table of Contents with one-sentence abstracts
for each of your blog posts, editable by you and sortable by your
readers by title, date, and category/sub-category.
9.
A
simple, meaningful measure of total readership, that weighs blog hits,
visits, average duration of stay, RSS subscriptions, inbound blogs,
e-mail subscriptions, and visits to copies of your posts on
aggregators.
8.
An
ability to create standing-order 'profiles' for all blogs, as you now
can for newsfeeds, so that you can receive a single daily e-mail or
web
page that aggregates everything posted that day, anywhere in the
blogosphere, on a specific topic or containing specific keywords or
phrases.
7.
A
gigabyte or two of free storage on the hosted blog server, so you can
keep a copy of your entire My Documents folder on the server, link to
anything in it from your blog without having to FTP a copy, and be
able
to access your entire 'e-filing cabinet' from any computer anywhere
anytime.
6.
An
easy migration path from the asynchronous, polished
anonymity of the blog to the real-time, one-to-one, face-to-face or
voice-to-voice, halting interactive iterative intimacy of other media,
media
that
move you from talk to action.
5.
Inclusion of our posts,
if we want them to be, in Google News.
4.
More
first-person accounts, first-hand news, live photos and reports, and
investigative reporting in
the blogosphere.
3.
A
blogging tool so simple even our parents can maintain one.
2.
No
more fear of your blog or your computer crashing and irretrievably
losing everything
you've written on your blog.
1.
The
end of the terms 'weblog', 'blog' and 'blogger', and to be simply
called An
Online Journalist.
HELP COMPILE "THE WEB USER'S ESSENTIAL LINKS AND FREE DOWNLOADS" LIST
My Salon Blog colleague Ted Ritzer keeps a list
of Useful
Web Sites (for all web users, not just bloggers) originally
compiled by Kevin Kelly, of Wired,
The Well, and Whole Earth Catalog fame. Kevin no
longer maintains his list, and instead has an intriguing Cool Tools site, but it's only
for the rich -- virtually everything on the site costs money, often a
lot of it. So Ted and I agreed it's time to update the Useful Web
Sites
list, and we need your help. What links and free
downloads should every self-respecting Internet user have on their
desktop?
The list should not
include pay
sites, nor should it include news sites, blogs or other sites that
appear on blogrolls (too many, and too subjective). Nor should it
include highly specialized sites (I have a personal list of favourite
genealogy sites, but I realize that few people would consider these
'essential').
To make the list manageable, I've identified 21 categories for the essential links
(let me know if you think I've missed an entire category). If I get
enough response, I'll publish a list of the Top 3 in
each category and keep it on my sidebar or Spurl it (Spurl lets you keep your
web bookmarks online and share them with others).
The examples shown for each category are my personal favourites and
some of them are eccentric, so they may not make the Top 3 list. Quite
a few of them come from the excellent Jason
Lefkowitz' Quality Software list (thanks to Internet Time for the
link):
If
you're a regular reader of this blog, you probably know that I'm
opposed to unregulated 'free' trade, very worried about the
extraterritoriality of the WTO, NAFTA, Davos and other corporatist
captives, strongly opposed to domestic corporations 'offshoring' jobs,
using influence with the Bush regime and other right-wing governments
to circumvent social and environmental laws and responsibilities, and
a
great believer in taking the pledge to buy local, and in community
self-sufficiency.
At the same time, I'm a strong supporter of the UN and other
multi-lateral NGOs, and I believe that we each have a responsibility
for the well-being of all the people and creatures of this world. Some
readers have said this view is inconsistent, and I wasn't quite sure
how to respond to such charges. Fortunately, Peter Singer, in his
recent book on global ethics, One World: The Ethics of
Globalization,
has come to my rescue. Singer sees no inconsistency between strong
local autonomy, community, and self-sufficient economies on the one
hand, and global responsibility on the other. The book is based on the
Dwight Terry lectures at Yale in 2000, but has been updated to
incorporate reflection on the events of 9/11 and the appalling Bush
social, environmental and economic record.
I'll have more to say next week about Bush's fraudulent and despicable
Earth Day media blitz, and the major media's shameless lack of
critical
evaluation of the utter nonsense that his propaganda machine has been
churning out this week on the environment -- newspeak of Orwellian
proportions. The first part of Singer's book deals with environmental
responsibility, and his prescription for increasing it -- immediate
ratification of Kyoto by the US and other holdout countries, and
introduction of an emissions trading mechanism to make the realization
of Kyoto feasible (subject to the need for some oversight on the
disposition of the proceeds of such trading when it involves
autocratic
governments).
The second part of the book deals with the global economy, and Singer
adroitly tears apart the Economist's (and other neocons') naive
assertion that economic globalization somehow benefits both rich and
poor countries. He then goes on to prescribe a substantial reform of
the WTO and the GATT, which could actually lead to more equitable
distribution of wealth and more efficient production of economic
goods,
while safeguarding human rights, labour and the environment.
Unfortunately, the multi-national corporations and corporatists who
hold sway in the WTO would never tolerate Singer's prescription, since
it would entirely divert the benefits of economic globalization from
their pockets to those of the world's poor.
The third part of the book deals with international law, and Singer
lashes out at Bush for his unconscionable refusal to ratify the
International Court of Justice, and for the UN's continued hesitancy
to
accept a duty (not a right) to intervene in situations of genocide and
other humanitarian crises, even within a single nation. Singer is
sanguine about the limitations and dangers of 'global government', but
supports strengthening the UN to enable it to act as a 'protector of
last resort', and including in its mandate the responsibility to
supervise elections in all
member nations.
The fourth and final part goes back to ethical principles and proposes
that countries must, in this world where national boundaries no longer
have any logistic meaning, set aside national interest and embrace,
once and for all, global interest, impartially. That does not mean
cultural homogenization, but imposes a responsibility for the
reduction
of inequality, both of economic resources and personal rights and
freedoms.
Always the pragmatist, Singer concludes by worrying out loud about how
the responsibility for a global ethic could be managed:
It
is widely believed that a world government would be, at best, an
unchecked bureaucratic behemoth that would make the bureaucracy of the
EU look lean and efficient. At worst, it would become a global
tyranny,
unchecked and unchallengeable. These thoughts have to be taken
seriously. How to prevent global bodies becoming either dangerous
tyrannies or self-aggrandizing bureaucracies, and instead make them
effective and responsive to the people whose lives they affect? It is
a
challenge that should not be beyond the best minds in the fields of
political science and public administration.
I'd like to believe that this was possible, because if it isn't, we're
in serious trouble. We cannot expect national governments to set aside
parochial interests, especially when this entails accepting a
responsibility that would, for the richer nations, inevitably lead to
a
drastic redistribution of wealth to poorer nations and hence a sudden
and sharp reduction in, at least, economic living standards (if not
necessarily well-being). But as John Ralston Saul has so eloquently
argued, larger organizations and institutions, whether public or
private, are almost always, and inherently, less efficient, less
agile,
more resistant to change, more hierarchic, and less transparent than
smaller organizations. So the challenge is to achieve the best of both
worlds, having organizations of global scope and authority and
responsibility, but broken up into sufficiently small, autonomous and
dynamic units that they are sensitive, resilient, responsible and
responsive to the people and communities they serve. We can only hope
that "the best minds in the fields of political science and public
administration", wherever they are, are up to the task.
Schadenfreude. It's a German word that literally
means "joy from damage". It refers to the perverse pleasure we take in
observing or hearing about the misfortunes of others. That pleasure
seems to be enhanced by talking
about it with others -- gossip would be empty without it, and when we
hear about a disaster, like the horrendous catastrophe of this week's
Asian earthquake and tsunami, we have an almost instinctive need to
share the news with others.
If you don't think it's pleasure we feel in these situations, here are
some more examples:
Our reaction when we hear that another couple's marriage
has broken up, or suffered a sex scandal
Our reaction when
someone we know (but don't love) loses their job, or their life
savings
Our reaction when we hear of an unexpected death or
tragedy outside our immediate circle of family or friends
The
pleasure we get from comedy that recounts the
protagonists' stupid, catastrophic or pathetic behaviours and their
consequences
The satisfaction we get from hearing about
criminals' dire, even cruel, punishments
Reality TV
The joy many felt at the bursting of the dot-com
bubble
Our media-pandered fascination with celebrities'
scandals
The pleasure we get from winning a game or sporting
event, that we wouldn't get if there wasn't a 'loser'
The
popularity of movies that dwell on, and exploit war, suffering, and
horror
I confess I'm like Calvin's Dad in the cartoon above: I don't get it,
though I recognize it seems to drive an enormous amount of human
behaviour and activity. I loathe reality TV and the plethora of
programs and films that wallow in human misery and suffering. I love
games, and play to win, but afterwards I feel badly for the 'losers',
and it is the social and learning aspect, rather than the competitive
aspect, that I enjoy: I would get as much, if not more, pleasure from
a
collaborative social activity that everybody 'won'. I find comedy that
ridicules and humiliates people to be pathetic and exploitative, not
funny at all. And although I have been predicting a growing cascade of
social, economic and ecological catastrophes, I will get no pleasure
from being proved correct. I change the station when news comes on
about disasters, crimes, and the undoing of celebrities: If there's
nothing I can do about these things, to me it seems merely morbid to
dwell on them. Can someone please explain to me how these things are
pleasurable, or even cathartic? What perverse joy can anyone get
watching people eat worms, women screaming at the loss of a child,
athletes and film stars humiliated, losers of card games groan, or
stand-ups reveal grotesque embarrassments from their past? Taking joy
from these things seems deranged to me, evidence of great mental
distress and anguish, or at best a bizarre, reality-detached
ennui.
But I will admit to a strange desire to spread bad news about others
(though only if I know the news to be true -- I don't traffic in
rumour). I don't know what's behind this. Maybe it's my natural
pessimism, an opportunity to say 'I told you so', to warn people: If
John and Mary are breaking up, we should all be alarmed -- maybe all
marriages are doomed, or maybe monogamy itself is unnatural,
unsustainable, and Tom Robbins' warning of the staggering difficulty
of
'making love last' needs to be heeded. If Frank lost his job, perhaps
this shows that all business hierarchies are fragile, uncaring, poised
to destroy the lives of those who rely on them and allow them to
continue. If Bill took his own life, maybe he's the brave one, the
harbinger of the future, the canary in the coal mineshaft. I love to
learn, to attach meaning to things, and bad news seems to call out for
explanation, for interpretation of meaning. Why would our amazing
planet be designed to suddenly shudder, and drown millions of her
creatures in a tidal wave of misery, and destroy the joyous lives of
tens of millions of others? What possible reason could there be for
such cruelty, such devastation? Someone, please, stop telling me how
many died, and instead tell me why?
AVOIDING THE LANDMINES IN ENTREPRENEURIAL BUSINESS
Today, the average North
American entrepreneurial business lasts just four years, the average
sole proprietorship even less. Yet entrepreneurship is not rocket
science; it's nothing more (or less) than making a living for yourself
with your business partners, instead of depending on some indifferent
corporation to provide you with a living wage. Running a business is
certainly no more difficult than raising a family, or landing a job
and
building a career with a big company. The essentials of
entrepreneurship could easily be taught in every school, and there'd
still be plenty of time left for the rest of the school curriculum.
But, perhaps because big corporations and the governments they control
want the 'labour force' to be meek, subservient, fearful and insecure,
most people have come to perceive entrepreneurship as a complex and
difficult art, fraught with danger, unprofitable, emotionally
scarring,
and demanding of enormous courage and energy. "It's certainly not for
everyone", I keep hearing.
Entrepreneurship requires self-knowledge of what you're happy doing,
what
you're especially good at,
how much you're willing to put into your enterprise and what you
expect
to get out of it. Without this self-knowledge, you're likely to be as
miserable in your own business as working for some unappreciative
boss,
and that unhappiness will bear directly on its success. Beyond that,
all you need are common sense, self-confidence, and a modicum of four
key, learnable skills:
creativity (the ability to discover and apply new
ideas),
communication (written and oral),
information processing (the ability to distil,
analyze and interpret it), and
Then it's simply a matter of learning and following the process that
every entrepreneur has learned by trial and error, to set up and
operate your own business successfully, on your own terms, and
actually
have fun doing it.
One of the 15 steps in the process of establishing and running an
enterprise is avoiding the
landmines.
In MBA school they now call this Risk Management. This article
identifies ten of the major landmines for entrepreneurs, using some
real-life examples. I don't believe any of the enterprises described
below is still in business (though some of the entrepreneurs have
moved
on, learned their lesson, and succeeded in other businesses):
Copycat businesses: Thirty years ago I did some
financial consulting for a small start-up cruise
ship operation. They acquired and
completely renovated a ship, which was lovely, got the licenses,
hired the appropriate staff, set up the business systems, and then
waited for the customers to roll in. After all, the competing
operations on the same run were all fully booked. But this operation
was an unknown quantity, and before they realized that just being
similar to a successful and busy business wasn't enough to succeed,
they sailed off into the sunset, empty. Franchisees beware.
Over-estimating the market:
Consultants love to sell you spreadsheets that will 'forecast' your
income and cash flow. An inventor friend of mine used one of these to
persuade himself to produce and sell a new organic nutritional
supplement he had developed. His research showed that the annual sales
of this type of product North America-wide was $X billion. The
spreadsheet encouraged him to plug this number in, along with his
estimate of what share of this market he could capture over three
years. Needless to say, he never sold anywhere close to this amount of
product, because that's not how you go about forecasting sales.
Being too far ahead of or behind the market: A
client of mine bought the North American rights to a new technology
that would extrude a rugged, colour-fast plastic that could be used in
decking, fencing, and other outdoor applications. He spent a fortune
setting up the manufacturing plant. Problem is, he did this in the
1980s, when plastics were distrusted as 'cheap', wood was
cheap, and creosote in pressure-treated lumber was not yet known to be
a carcinogen. Being 10-15 years ahead of the market cost him his life
savings.
Biting off too much:
A company that I was brought in to help liquidate had been doubling
its
sales and employee headcount every nine months. They were providing
turnkey computer networking equipment and installations to mid-size
companies, and had recently moved upscale to large corporations,
school
boards and government departments. As its receivables and inventories
soared, it started paying more money for qualified talent, and its
suppliers and bank both put it on short leash. Finally, despite record
monthly sales, it simply ran out of cash. The owner turned down two
very opportunistic 'investors', who wanted control of the business in
return for working capital, and the bank pulled the plug.
Not listening to the customer, or offering a solution in search
of a problem:
A lot of entrepreneurs are inventors, scientists, artists, artisans,
administrators, teachers or managers. Sales is not their forte, and
they're more comfortable working with ideas, materials, plans or
systems than with those pesky people called customers.
If you're not at home spending a lot of face time with customers,
better partner with someone who is. If you want to see what happens if
you don't, just browse any of the free software sites on the Web and
see how many downloads most of them have. Some of them are quite
intriguing, but because they don't meet a customer need, they'll never
be more than that. Great prescription for a hobby, deadly for a
business.
Not consulting with or listening to the right advisors:
A client of our firm in the early 1990s, a company which had been in
the commercial printing business for 80 years, brought us in for some
technology and corporate finance consulting. As we learned about the
business it became obvious, first, that they could not afford the new
equipment they proposed to buy, and secondly, that their profit
margins
were going through the floor. They had built their reputation on high
quality printing work, but the market was no longer willing to pay for
it. The new equipment would allow them to automate and eliminate some
labour costs (and keep up with newer competitors with no sunk costs),
but the cost of the new equipment would exceed the savings. We advised
the company they needed to find some new markets, new higher-margin
products, and new customers who would pay more for their quality work,
or else drastically cut costs. They were convinced their customers
would stay loyal, and the market for quality printing would rebound.
They didn't, and the company shut its doors two years later.
Blowing the budget:
As most women will tell you (but many men seem unable to fathom),
budgeting is simply a matter of ensuring that the cash going out
doesn't exceed the cash coming in. The problem is, every start up
costs
more -- sometimes two or three times more -- than initially expected.
It takes enormous self-discipline, patience, pacing, and sometimes
financial creativity, to mete out dollars at a rate that will ensure
there is enough cash to launch the business under the worst case scenario. I
know of a dozen businesses that closed before they opened because they
failed to do so, and others that lost control of their business
unwillingly because that was the price for a late cash infusion. 'Risk
Capital' might be more accurately called 'Heartbreak Capital' -- it is
obscenely expensive.
Groupthink:
Back in the 1970s I was appointed Deputy Receiver for a computer and
peripherals distributor. They had been put on 'close watch' by the
bank, and I had to get authorization for, and sign, every cheque.
While
I was there I attended and took notes at management meetings. I was
assailed at each meeting when I presented my factual reports on profit
and cash flow. I was nicknamed The Undertaker for my 'relentless
pessimism', and almost physically ejected when I questioned the
validity of some unsupported fees that had been paid by the much-loved
CFO, who was on leave of absence looking after a very sick relative.
The six-man management team, intact since the start of the company and
each heavily personally invested in the company, used to come out of
their meetings with cheers and high fives, confident, contrary to all
logic, that the company was poised for turnaround and sales 'in the
pipeline' would soon bring a return to happy days. They would feed off each others' boundless
optimism. They just needed to work
harder. Happier
days never came, and the CFO, it turns out, had defrauded the company
to pay for his relative's substantial medical bills.
Litigation:
A small biotech company whose CEO I met at a conference a few years
ago
was bemoaning the huge cost of registering and defending patents. He
said they had been forced to sell off one promising product to a
competitor in order to pay their legal bills to defend their other
intellectual capital. That had slowed them down to the point they now
feared that another competitor would beat them to market, rendering
the
results of the litigation largely moot. Big companies can afford
armies
of expensive lawyers. For small companies, significant litigation can
spell disaster. The competitive advantage of the entrepreneur is
agility -- when products get mired in legal wrangles, it may be better
to cut bait and move on to other ventures than to fight adversaries
with much deeper pockets in court.
Buying the MBA hype:
Graduates of business school are taught how to be middle managers of
large enterprises. Unfortunately, that knowledge often don't translate
well to entrepreneurial businesses. A client of mine brought in a
young, very successful MBA grad (he had his own daily spot on one of
the local radio stations), who had, it appeared, no experience at all
with entrepreneurial business. The company, which was modestly
profitable, bought the young man's well-delivered 'grow or die'
message
and decided to 'go upscale'. They spent a small fortune on
advertising,
and set up a sales office and warehouse in another country.
Unfortunately, the media in which the ads appeared were not the ones
used by the company's customers, and there was not enough money to
properly penetrate the foreign market. The expenses produced almost no
growth and almost sank the company. They salvaged the situation, and
their business, by finding an enterprising competitor in the foreign
country who took over the hemorrhaging 'branch plant', and then
striking a reciprocal marketing alliance with them.
Many entrepreneurs I know feel very lonely, exposed, and helpless. The
big consulting firms aren't interested in them until they grow bigger
or go public. The smaller firms are selling one or two specific
products, and rarely have entrepreneurial skills to share. And these
suppliers are expensive. The government is cheaper, but with a few
notable exceptions they aren't very helpful either. As a result, many
entrepreneurs have formed their own 'support groups', helping each other
to avoid the landmines, and learning from each other's experiences and
failures. Retired entrepreneurs are another good source of advice, and
a quarterly business breakfast with a trusted entrepreneur or advisor
with some experience in the trenches can be an excellent investment.
These breakfasts don't need an agenda -- they're run as an informal
'interview', with the advisor asking pertinent, open-ended questions
and listening and offering counsel and options and ideas. They are a
critical element of what my new business, The Caring Enterprise Coach,
offers.
Another technique entrepreneurs can employ to alert themselves to
potential landmines is establishing an Advisory Board made up of
people
who have well-rounded business experience, knowledge of markets, and
skills the entrepreneur and his partners lack. Such Advisory Boards
are
often reciprocal, offering mutual support and advice in lieu of fees.
I
am constantly surprised how few entrepreneurs use such 'support
groups', relying instead on their own instincts, the counsel of
inexperienced and costly 'professional advisors', and others (bankers,
customers, franchisors, and various 'agencies') who have only a
nominal, and purely financial, interest in the entrepreneur's success.
Some 'support groups' and networks have been set up as money-making
ventures, but these tend to be unwieldy and their members terribly
needy -- ten people looking for advice and new customers for every one
capable of offering useful information or counsel in return. It's best
to create your own.
The problem, of course, is that most entrepreneurs are paradoxically
too busy fighting fires and avoiding landmines, to be able to invest
time finding and networking with support groups and other valuable
advisors who can help them avoid the next round of fires and landmines. But, despite the
failings of the first generation Social Networking tools, such
tools hold enormous promise. Although Shoshana Zuboff coined the term
The Support Economy
to refer to federations of businesses working together to support
their
shared customers, the first true Support Economy may well be
entrepreneurs supporting each other.
Well, thanks to readers much
more tech-savvy than I am, I think I may be able to get Google to
start
picking up my posts again, and, by tightening up the code of my
blogroll, also make the page load faster for those patient readers
with
dial-up access. So far I have moved the blogroll to the right hand
column, so Google will not get bogged down in the blogroll code and
give up before it gets to the actual posts. In the process I messed up
the masthead, so I've adopted a simple one-piece masthead
temporarily.
If this post works properly, I'll then make an additional change to my
blogroll, stripping out the table HTML and replacing it with a simple
list separated by line breaks. Next post will report on the results of
that. Keep your fingers crossed for me.
In a recent
post
I advocated almost a complete replacement of existing knowledge
management systems and intranets with a three-tiered set of simple,
intuitive tools consisting of:
Personal content management tools -- to help people
organize their personal information (and other information they've
aggregated) their way, and identify who they will permit to access it
under what circumstances ('permissioning')
Metadata tools
(invisible to the user) -- to automatically
reorganize this personal content for effective, permitted use by
others
Social networking applications -- to help people
identify
other people (inside and outside their organization) with particular
expertise or shared interests, connect and collaborate with these
people and with people in the individual's self-defined networks, via
Simple
Virtual Presence, browse and subscribe to others' permissioned
personal content, and publish their own permissioned
content.
In my early thinking about this, I proposed a new consulting
discipline
called Personal Productivity Improvement (PPI) to help individuals,
starting with those in the front lines of organizations, make better
use of the tools and content on their personal computers. When I spoke
to people in several businesses in different industries, they were
very
enthusiastic about this idea.
On giving it further thought, however, I wondered whether PPI was the
solution to the wrong problem. If the tools and information on
people's
PCs and intranets are unduly complex, counter-intuitive, and
inappropriate for the key business problems that front-line people
need
to solve, so that people use other processes (walking down the hall to
speak to colleagues), other tools (the public Internet) and other
sources of information (the people in their rolodex) instead of the
ones supplied by their employer -- doesn't this suggest it's the tools that need 'improving', not
the users and the processes they use?
I believe personal content management tools are the place to start,
because since the earliest days of business, the principal way of
sharing information has been peer-to-peer, the most valued
'repositories' of business information have been personal filing
cabinets, and the principal schema for organizing work has been the
personal desktop. It makes sense, therefore, that tools that
facilitate
and reflect these well-established 'knowledge processes', information
sources and networks should be much more successful than the complex,
centralized, hierarchical knowledge management tools and repositories
that have been foisted on users for the past decade.
I wrote the other
day
about attempts to replace paper, and about Gladwell's study of why
paper and documents have proven so durable and successful even in this
electronic age (spatial flexibility, tailorability, browsability). And
I believe any schema for personal content management needs to reflect
and honour our most established 'information behaviour' -- the
shuffling of paper. The founders of a company called Alias Research
(now part of Silicon Graphics, but in the process of being spun off
again) were powerful advocates of making technology adapt to human
behaviour rather than the other way around, and I agree with them
100%.
Lowest common denominator, across all job descriptions, levels and
industries, are these fundamental 'knowledge worker' behaviours and
needs:
"Knowledge-work"-in-process management entails the
dynamic, three-dimensional shuffling
of paper and documents in a workspace, usually a physical desktop. The
organization of the workspace is highly personal and varied, and often
opaque to anyone else trying to figure out "how X organizes his
stuff".
People learn, and add value to others' work, through
annotation, also a highly-personal and varied
process
Conversations,
overwhelmingly one-on-one and face-to-face, are the principal means by
which almost all knowledge work is done. Even research is more
highly-valued if it is 'primary' (derived from personal
conversations),
rather than 'secondary' (derived from library or database
searches).
Context
is critical to most knowledge work. In business conversations I have
observed, three times as much time is spent understanding the context
for an opinion or fact, as is spent actually understanding or debating
the opinion or fact.
Knowledge work's ultimate purpose is
usually to enable informed decisions. Most meeting time is wasted
because the decision has already been made, or because no
decision depends on the matters being discussed in the meeting, or
because people in the meeting cannot relate what is being discussed to
a decision that they have a personal stake in. The process by which
most business decisions are made should terrify most stakeholders --
this process is frequently emotional, biased, impulsive and
uninformed.
The executive's gut instinct, and opinions offered by his/her inner
circle (usually arrived at by the same flawed process) both trump
objective assessment. Much knowledge work is therefore used only to
justify a decision already made subjectively, and contrary evidence
presented is usually either discounted or ignored. That's not
necessarily a bad thing -- we do expect decision makers to be able to
make good judgements based on their experience, and not always have to
rely on outside empirical knowledge.
So, while we must be sanguine that it's not going to make much impact
on how things are done in the corner offices anyway (which explains
perhaps why execs I spoke to were not enthusiastic about investing in
Personal Productivity Improvement), how would we design a personal
content management suite of tools to improve the effectiveness of
these
knowledge worker behaviours and processes?
I'd start by creating a machine-readable analogue of the physical
workspace. We need a Workspace
Tool
that allows us to shuffle virtual documents the same three-dimensional
way we shuffle physical ones. That tool should replace the 'arrow'
cursor with a 'hand' cursor, like the Acrobat pdf cursor but a lot
more flexible. The 'hand' needs to be able to pick up and move a
document, and to pick up and read and browse a document, and to be
able
to clip a document or a piece of a document to another, either
temporarily (so the documents could be separated again) or permanently
(so they would become a new document), and to be able to place any
document anywhere in a stack of documents. The 'hand' needs to be able
to put two documents side by side and browse them simultaneously. The
tool needs to allow the user to do this on multiple three-dimensional
virtual workspaces, that the user can label as they see fit. It must
allow the user to make multiple copies of the document, and move or
change each copy in different ways. And it must allow the user to send
any copy of the document to any number of other people (without
opening
another 'application') and to 'permission' the document to identify
who
else can 'subscribe' to it -- the set of people who they will allow
entry to this virtual workspace to access it.
Such a tool would allow us to capitalize on the economy of 'virtual'
space by doing away with the 'filing cabinet' -- that horrible black
hole invented by Dewey the librarian into which documents disappear
never to be found again, which Windows has tragically copied. Instead,
we would 'save' the entire
workspace,
with its three-dimensional array of documents intact. It would be
neatly put away but, if we needed something in that workspace again,
we
would simply open the entire workspace again, arranged in the way that
made sense to us, and instantly find what we were looking for by where it was in the space, not by having to remember what
awkward name we gave it. And then on to the next project with a
'clean' new workspace.
This tool would need to be indifferent to the document's format --
whether the suffix was .doc or .xls or .ppt or .html or .pdf would be
irrelevant. More importantly, e-mail messages and other 'recorded
conversations' would need to be seamlessly accommodated just
like any
other document.
There are some tools today that do limited parts of the above, but in
awkward and unintuitive ways. This needs to be as simple as
child's-play, and will probably require software designers to start
from scratch and throw away all their familiar technological
architecture constructs in favour of the human information constructs
we have used at least since Gutenburg. The Workspace Tool could
eliminate the need for Windows Explorer and similar 'file management'
tools on most computers.
OK, that's a start on the spatial flexibility and paper-shuffling spec
for the tool. Let's go on to annotation. I've seen some limited
annotation functionality in a program called FolioViews, that 'labels'
each user's notes an
I've updated the Dire
ctory
of Active Salon Blogs. Please send
me details on any missing and new Salon Blogs, and errors in the
Directory. I promise to post any updates I receive at
least once a week.
Here's
a silly publicity stunt I dreamed up to motivate people to check out
more of the wonderful Salon Blogs. Last night I 'hid' 10 eggs, like
the
one at left, one in each of 10 selected Salon Bloggers' comments
threads. They are numbered 1 to 10
inclusively. The posts in which they are 'hidden' are no more
than one week old (April 2 or more recent). Your challenge is to be
the
first to find them.
When
you do,
come back here and 'claim' the easter egg by posting, in the comments
thread below, which Salon
Blog you found it in, and its number.
BLOGS
& BLOGGING:
I've written before
about Blogs in Business
and the role I think they could play. But my idealism -- the desire to
have a better, simpler blog product with some better social networking
functionality before we try to sell it to business -- is giving way to
my impatience. A couple of business leaders have challenged me to
develop a pragmatic strategy for effectively introducing blogs into a
business today. Here's what I
said.
In Beyond Civilization, Daniel Quinn
says:
My Salon Blog colleague Ted Ritzer keeps a list
of Useful
Web Sites (for all web users, not just bloggers) originally
compiled by Kevin Kelly, of Wired,
The Well, and Whole Earth Catalog fame. Kevin no
longer maintains his list, and instead has an intriguing Cool Tools site, but it's only
for the rich -- virtually everything on the site costs money, often a
lot of it. So Ted and I agreed it's time to update the Useful Web
Sites
list, and we need your help. What links and free
downloads should every self-respecting Internet user have on their
desktop?
If
you're a regular reader of this blog, you probably know that I'm
opposed to unregulated 'free' trade, very worried about the
extraterritoriality of the WTO, NAFTA, Davos and other corporatist
captives, strongly opposed to domestic corporations 'offshoring' jobs,
using influence with the Bush regime and other right-wing governments
to circumvent social and environmental laws and responsibilities, and
a
great believer in taking the pledge to buy local, and in community
self-sufficiency.
In a recent
post
I advocated almost a complete replacement of existing knowledge
management systems and intranets with a three-tiered set of simple,
intuitive tools consisting of: