There is an increasing amount of research on gossip. Gossip can, apparently, be good and bad. Gossip can be a way for us to jostle for social standing. But gossip is not a fixed state - gossip moves along lines of communication - and as it does, it enters the land of the Chinese Whisper. That, whatever the value of the gossip, is bad, bad, bad. It may even make you wonder whether anything in the world of blogs is true.

What is gossip?
Chris Corrigan, [via Heath Row on the Fast Company Blog] led me to an article by Offra Gerstein

“The origins of gossip date to early man. Primitive societies used negative information to discredit the reputation of their rivals and defeat them. In old English, gossip evolved from “god-sibb,” referring to a close female friend present at the birth of a child, to whom she will assume the role of a godparent. This woman was the confidant and attentive listener to the new mother. Later, the term evolved to describe friends’ intimate sharing of personal information. It further expanded to the current use of evaluative talk about a third party in his or her absence.”

The key distinction for Offra is between good and bad gossip. Bad gossip is something we have been aware of for centuries. As she says, from her admittedly slightly psychotherapisty angle

“Ancient Indian mythology considers gossip a form of mental illness. Religions abhor and disallow it. Psychoanalysts report that gossip is harmful to the individual and creates many emotional difficulties such as suspicion, fear, mistrust and depression. Gossip is toxic to one’s soul and destroys friendships and relationships.”

That’s the bad gossip we all know and love But there’s good gossip too, and it’s good for groups, whether they be companies or societies.
read on »

January 30th 2004 | Comments(2) | Thoughts on Brains, communication, conversation, gossip, groups, KM networks

It’s easy to forget how good computers are at the grunt work. IBM, perhaps unsurprisingly, look to have been turning huge resources loose on the web to try to extract meaning from all that information. [Thanks Jeff for the pointer]

“IBM’s breakthrough is called WebFountain - half a football field’s worth of rack-mounted processors, routers, and disk drives running a huge menagerie of programs. All this hardware and software is dedicated to one purpose: making sense of the churning ocean of information, opinion, and falsehood that roils the Internet every second of every day.” [ IEEE Article]

Essentially, what they’re doing is structuring the web. XML, shock horror, is not something most people are concerned with. IBM send agents with specific “knowledge” (e.g. about doughnuts) to trawl for everything and anything on that subject, and then make sure it’s in a sensible, searchable XML format.

And they’ve teamed up with Factiva (a Reuters and Dow Jones news company) so that something can be done with all this structured information.

Clare Hart, president and CEO of Factiva thinks “this is the next logical step toward giving people intelligence that they can act upon”.

Possibly. It certainly seems exciting. But what sort of people? Moderators is my guess. And if you’ll excuse the pun, this WebFountain of knowledge is great, but you need a good WebGardener to put it in a sensible context.

Links:
IEEE Article - A Fountain of Knowledge
IBM - Press Release

January 15th 2004 | Comments(1) | Notes on automation, IBM, information, moderators sense

Technology both enriches and constrains memories. It enriches them through tools such as pens, books, and PDAs. And it constrains them through the power of its metaphor.

First Rose explains a little about scientific metaphors. There are three types of scientific metaphor: the poetic, the evocative, and the structural.
- Poetic Metaphors provide little more than a useful visual image. An example might be Rutherford’s early twentieth century description of electrons as planets revolving around an atomic sun.
- Evocative metaphors provide both an image and a means of transferring a principle from one sphere to another. The Ancient Greeks tried to explain the movement of the sun as if it were being pulled through the sky by fiery horse-drawn chariots. The explanation is bogus, but the principle is transferable.
- Structural metaphors provide useful visual images, allow transference from one sphere to another, and enable the description of principles. So Harvey’s description of the heart as a pump was structural because allowed mathematical models to describe its operations.

Then Rose goes on to track the ascendancy of mathematical and physical viewpoints of the world (especially over biology).
read on »

“Because we do not understand the brain very well we are constantly tempted to use the latest technology as a model for trying to understand it. In my childhood we were always assured that the brain was a telephone switchboard. (’What else could it be?’) I was amused to see that Sherrington, the great British neuroscientist, thought that the brain worked like a telegraph system. Freud often compared the brain to hydraulic and electro-magnetic systems. Leibniz compared it to a mill, and I am told some of the ancient Greeks thought the brain functions like a catapult. At present, obviously, the metaphor is the digital computer. ”

- John R. Searle, MINDS, BRAINS AND SCIENCE, p 44

[Thanks to the Kog University Science Society for this]

George Siemens has an interesting post about adoption of tools for knowledge workers. (Thanks Dina for this). He says that:

One of the most consistent headaches elearning and knowledge management programs encounter is an inability to reach the full potential of an initiative or new tool (blogs, wikis, collaborative spaces).

The problem can almost be reduced to a formula/rule (principle of actual use):
Each tool/initiative achieves actual use in relation to potential, based on: the nature of tool, the environment of use, and the people using the tool/initiative.

* Nature of tool � How complicated is it? How different is it from how work is being done now? Complexity is proportional to adoption and intended task.
* People � Is the targeted user willing to adopt and explore new processes? Will it save time? Will it result in increased productivity? Will it help them better do their work? Will it improve their sense of competence (or will it reduce competence due to frustrations)?
* Environment of use � Does the tool/initiative solve real problems for the end user? (or only management)? Do people have to alter their work habits to use the tool? Can they do their job without it (if they can, most won�t adopt it)?”

I really like this people, tool, context idea, but I think there’s a question that needs to be asked before any of the (good) questions above can be sensibly answered. And that is: where, on a scale running from information to meaning, do these tools get used?
read on »

Was thinking, over a cup of revolting tea, about classification and whether it can hinder creativity and I remembered a story I was told about Gullivers Travels.

A while ago (1997?), while I was working for a digital media research lab, I had to go to a Special Effects conference in Sweden. There I spoke to someone called Duncan Kenworthy, who turned out to be the producer of Four Weddings and a Funeral amongst other things. (Yup - it’s one of those I remember him, he won’t remember me things.)

Anyway, he was chatting about a TV drama he had produced called Gulliver’s Travels. It was a joint US/UK partnership. Among the various problems they had, two stood out: the script and who should play the lead.
read on »

January 06th 2004 | Comments(3) | Notes, Life on constraints, Creativity, GulliversTravels, risk targets

Hermeneutics is the science of explanation and interpretation. I’ve been having a quick look at it for background research re metadata etc and makes you think about the Semantic Web/MetaWeb/whatever you want to call it in a number of different lights.

The below is basically a summary of an article in The Encyclopedia of Artificial Intelligence by John C Mallery, R Hurwitz and G Duffy. Some of it’s pretty heavy going, so don’t say I didn’t warn you …

Brief history:

1) Interpreting the Bible, the Koran, the Talmud, and others.
- Hermeneutics are commonly associated with theologians and interpreting passages of text in different ways.
- In days of yore, the religious method was take principle A (e.g. Adultery is a sin) and text B (e.g. a bit of the Bible) and show how principle A is evidenced by text B.
- That in itself puts an interesting spin on Luther and the Reformation. Here was some German bloke suggesting this was wrong, and that instead you should take text B and derive your own conclusions from that. No surprise that the pope et al said that the Bible was too obscure to read without their guidance.
read on »

This is a great example of 99% perspiration, 1% inspiration … [thanks to James McGee for this]

“The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot -albeit a perfect one - to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes - the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.”

Links:
McGee’s Musings
Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking by Bayles and Orland

Am just starting on a two-pronged EU research project concerning the development of a knowledge management methodology.

The two prongs are: developing a “knowledge content architecture” (the techie bit) and developing a methodology for how best to blend tools and people to help turn knowledge into action.

One thing: whatever anyone tells you, methodologies aren’t recipes, but rules of cooking.

Should be an interesting, and exciting, bit of research. Am told there’ll be a website soon, so will post the address as and when.

[Update: website is at http://metokis.salzburg.at]
[Update 2 (Sept 04): First draft of the methodology is now up, and called the Knowledge Service Methodology]