I’ve just started reading “The Cultures of Collecting” (ed. Elsner & Cardinal), and it looks to be a corker.

The science of classification is, in Stephen Jay Gould’s words, ‘truly the mirror of our thoughts, its changes through time [are] the best guide to the history of human perceptions’. And if classification is the mirror of collective humanity’s thoughts and perceptions, then collecting is its material embodiment. Collecting is classification lived, experienced in three dimensions. The history of collecting is this the narrative of how human beings have striven to accommodate, to appropriate and to extend the taxonomies and systems of knowledge they have inherited …

Then a little bit later introduction the notion of rulers and leaders “collecting” individuals is talked about, and how they classify castes, heretics and the like. What struck me was the role of the individual in all this.

read on »

September 29th 2004 | Comments(1) | Notes on books, collecting, History Quotes

Fingers crossed …

September 24th 2004 | Comments(4) | Asides on monkeymagic

You’ve got to love Philip K. Dick

It is proper that technically qualified non-lunatics should sit in judgement on lunatics. How could things be otherwise?

- Valdis

Q: How do I find a good feed?
A: Cook your own

I was taking a colleague through the process of aggregating and posting today and he asked me how to go about finding good feeds. And it stumped me slightly, because I’d taken it for granted. We chatted about searching on Google and adding the keyword blog, we chatted about blogrolls, and we chatted about services such as Technorati, del.icio.us and Share My OPML’s “People like me“.

And then it struck me that to really begin to get the benefits, you need to post up things that interest you. You post, you cook your own feed, and you comment, trackback - all that engagement stuff. And sooner or later, people find you. It’s a little like dinner parties - serve up good grub, a little schnifter of wine, and some interesting conversation, do it often enough, and soon you get invited back. (Of course there are homophily issues around this - call them echo chambers, cliques, whatever - but as I wrote a while ago in a post on Invisible Colleges, I don’t think they’re too severe )

So much, then, for finding feeds. Pure serendipity though has it that Suw has been saying some interesting things about blogging and getting it going “behind the firewall” - a subject dear to my heart(!).
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September 23rd 2004 | Comments(2) | Thoughts on discovery, novelty, RSS social computing

Looks as though Siemens will be selling their next phones with mints

A German telecommunications company says it is developing the first mobile phone that will alert users when their breath is bad or if they are giving off offensive smells. The phone will use a tiny chip measuring less than one millimetre to detect unpleasant odours, a spokeswoman for Siemens Mobile said on Tuesday. A research team in the southern city of Munich is developing the device using new sensor technology.

Source: BERLIN (Reuters) -

September 21st 2004 | Comments(2) | Asides on phones smells

David, Suw, and Stowe are extolling the virtues of chit chat at the moment. And I completely agree that it is a virtue we need to hold on to. But the tea-break is not just about small talk. In fact, small talk is not just about small talk. It is as much about the ceremony of small talk as it is the content.

Last February I pointed to some research indicating that the tea break addressed four seemingly key elements of groupwork: social glue, relaxing, structuring work and helping. Stowe puts quite a burden of expectation on social tools, though, when he says that

“social tools are the only hope we have of holding on to the annealing benefits of small talk-ish interactions.”

I think he’s right to worry - very much so - but do blogs, IM and the like cannot cover all four elements?

Hmm. Not sure at all. Let’s say you and your boss go for a pint after work - who buys? What does that imply (if anything)? How does that affect your working relationship? Allowing the chit chat to happen is a great, valuable wonderful thing. But there are ways of making it happen - tea breaks, beers after work and the like - that gain much of their value not just from the chit and the chat, but from the ceremony.

September 16th 2004 | Comments(2) | Thoughts on business, coffee, ritual, social tea

Just stumbled across an old (2002) discussion at Intertwingly where Dave Winer makes this point in the comments:

Here’s another problem with using RSS subscriptions to solve this problem — you have to remember to unsubscribe. Further, it puts the burden to remember in a place where there’s little incentive to remember. But bandwidth costs on desktop aggregators are starting to become a concern for some, and only likely to be more so in the future.

Now, one area where people track conversations with grit and determination (and sometimes a wideboy image)is sales and CRM. So how about treating feeds as “customers”? It might allow us to use CRM software (and the various bits of sophistication it brings) to the party.

For instance - and this is off the top - let’s say you aggregate with something like Newsgator - an MS Outlook-based tool. And lets say you also have an MS Outlook-based tool such as MX Contact, shouldn’t you then be able to set up a system where you can track which feeds are dry, which are your key “customers” and which are new opportunities?

Think I’ll have a play around with it and report back

[Update: Further thinking (green with envy) about the Blogwalk discussions on blogging behind the firewall due to start happening this weekend and was thinking that this sort of approach could have a number of benefits - relating feeds/comments to tasks on an Exchange server etc.]

I’m beginning to get interested in museums, collections, exhibitions and the like as a metaphor for blogging. A sensible place to start seemed to be the beginning of museums, and so I did reading around the subject and came across the wonderfully named Antoine Chrysethome Quatremere de Quincy (1755 - 1849). Quatremere was the last of the “armchair archaeologists”. He lived at a time when museums and collections were beginning to change radically the way we viewed art, and he abhorred what they were doing. For him, work placed in a museum is

“lifted from its original function, displaced from its birthplace, and rendered foreign to the circumstances that gave it significance”

- Considerations morales sur la destination des ouvrages de l’art (1815)

Quatremere’s Olympian Jupiter

Museums stripped art of its context. So for instance when, in 1796, the little genius Napoleon decided it would be a good idea to relocate the artworks of Rome to Paris, Quatrem�re was furious

“The true museum of Rome consists … of statues, colossi, temples, obelisks, triumphal columns, baths, circuses, amphitheatres, arches of triumph, tombs, stucco decoration, frescoes, bas-reliefs, inscriptions, fragments of ornaments, building materials, furniture, utensils, etc., etc.; but it is composed no less of places, sites, mountains, quarries, ancient roads, the particular placement of ruined towns, geographical relationships, the mutual relations among all these objects, memories, local traditions, still prevailing customs, the parallels and comparisons that can only be made in this very place.”

- Lettres sur l’enl�vement des ouvrages de l’art antique � Ath�nes et � Rome. (1815)

Initially, I found myself liking Quatremere. The divorcing from context angst was something I (up to a point) shared. More to the point, there is much about collecting and museums that smacks of commodity fetishism, which I abhor (although, erm, I do love my new laptop … ).

But here’s the rub. What else am I doing quoting Quatrem�re but “fetishising” his thoughts?

In fact, what is anyone doing when they post to their blog quoting someone else’s comments but acting like Napoleon?

Going to have a cup of very rare PG Tips now, and ponder. I suspect I’m getting my knickers in a twist - after all there are differences between the little genius and me, which is comforting, but …

September 14th 2004 | Comments(2) | Thoughts on blogs, collecting, History, museums, navel gazing social computing

Over the last few months I’ve been working on developing a Knowledge Service Methodology (400K, PDF) for Templeton College, University of Oxford (where I work) and the Metokis Project (EC Framework 6). I’ve summarised the conclusions below, but the full (albeit first draft) document can be found on the link above. It’s 60 odd pages - though there are pictures - and I’m aware some parts flow better than others, nonetheless I thought it might be of interest? Do let me know any comments/criticisms etc. - I’m thinking about wikifying the thing (and so practising what I preach …) but I thought this might be a sensible first step.

• We need to optimise the moderating layer in knowledge systems to improve knowledge worker productivity
• Optimising this layer is essentially a context problem
• This context problem is typically addressed in one of two broad ways.
• The first way - the positivist approach - looks to model actor, task and system to embed context into the moderating layer. This plays to the strengths of the IT Agents in the moderating layer
• The second way - the interpretivist approach - argues that context cannot ever be successfully embedded into a system because individuals and their environments are complex and ever changing. This acknowledges the needs of the human agents in the moderating layer.
• Non-linear dynamic systems provide us with a model which might offer a valuable compromise between the positivist approach that supports much of context-aware computing, and the interpretivist approach, which makes sense of how we as human agents work with and develop context.
• Such a model offers some valuable insights as to how, and when best, to model user, task and system in such a way that helps improve the performance of the moderating layer.
• Consequently, using this model to help support knowledge systems should improve knowledge worker productivity.
• Happily, tools already exist and are being developed that support implementations of this model.

The argument from theory and practice outlined above indicates various lessons that need to be taken to heart in any effort to optimise the moderating layer of a knowledge system.
read on »

September 13th 2004 | Comments(1) | Thoughts on balance, KM, methodology, research, semantic web, SNA social computing