That was way, waaaay too easy…

This either a) makes me rather sad; or b) marks me down instantly as a child of the 80s, but my first iTunes purchase was Def Leppard’s Hysteria. And there aren’t nearly enough “are you really sure you want to add to an unfeasibly large credit card bill by buying this track”-type of warnings before you do the deed.

Pinging UKBlogs

Does anyone know what URL I should be pinging to get this blog back on the UK Blogs RSS feed…? It’s something I forgot to make a note of before I hosed the old Moveable Type installation…

Why, oh why, oh why…

High on the list of my current diversions is house-buying, timed nicely to purchase at the top of the market just before the incipient crash. Which means that as well as carting all our worldly goods from one side of the town to another, I’m going to have to sort out shifting my broadband service. Broadband is higher on the list of required features in a new property than doors and windows, believe me.

The only slight snag in this is that I haven’t yet found a way of guaranteeing that the new place will be able to actually get broadband prior to buying the place and moving in, short of persuading the current owners to order it before we complete. There must be some other way…

Preventing Death By Powerpoint

Love it or hate it, you can’t get away from Powerpoint - so for those who are stuck with it, beyond bullets is a new blog from Cliff Atkinson covering “new ways of using media to help you relate better to other people”. Interesting material, some ideas in which we’ve tried in the field, and our impressions are pretty positive.

Outages

I could claim that the reason this site has been up and down like a whore’s drawers these past few days was down to the problems at Akami, but I’d be lying. It was all my fault, my hand-rolled DNS unravelling.

Although I’m still waiting for the miserable failure to declare the ‘problems’ the work of Al-Quaida and launch a pre-emptive attack on Telehouse…

And if this works…

…then the transition to new platform and new host is done, complete with new hand-rolled DNS and Apache configuration. Which must surely make me some kind of an alpha-geek…

To structure or not to structure?

The summary of the Blogwalk discussion on the Knowledge Board provides a rather definitive statement of how communities of practice have certain advantages over weblogs as a knowledge management tool:

Communities are better social structures for problem-solving, knowledge stewarding and innovation

Part of the justification for this is as follows:

A weblog is usually very poor in content structure… In order to be reuseable, a body of knowledge geared towards action typically has more structure: description, keywords, type of information, type of content, type of data, type of document, summary, domain of knowledge, subdomain, attributes, etc.

I’m somewhat sceptical about this. Much of my involvement with our projects is in technical areas - in fact sometimes, it seems that all I do is solve technical glitches that prevent our solutions from working. One of the main tools for this is the collective knowledge of people who have been there, done that with the particular problem I’m facing - and increasingly, their knowledge is expressed in the form of a blog entry. “I’ve been wrestling with problem x, and here’s what I did to resolve it’ is a typical style of entry that will be thrown up when you Google a ‘how do I fix this kind of problem’-type question.

And occasionally, that’s something I contribute back to the world at large, relating a tale of how I tamed the recalcitrant beast of PHP - or whatever - through breathtaking feats of daring-do. (Or more prosaically, fixing typos in the code
But if I had to structure that knowledge, by codifying it and entering into some kind of knowledge base, it’s probably something that I wouldn’t bother with. Firstly, publicly-accessible formal knowledge bases of this kind are few and far between in the types of areas I find myself working in; and secondly because the knowledge is dispersed around a community of involved individuals, it’s unlikely that there would be any grand coming-together to agree such a codification structure in the first place. In that respect, dealing with open source developers is somewhat akin to herding cats.

So perhaps the issue here is not about the codification and classification of the knowledge in the first place, and more about the ease of search and retrieval afterwards. One of the frustrations I encounter daily is knowing how to phrase searches so that they will bring back the hits that I’m after - there are broad similarities in the way that problems are referred to and explained, but ultimately every description is personal. Formal codification would solve this problem, but it would be at the cost of much of the knowledge not being expressed in the first place - so perhaps here is a situation where it’s more a question of quantity, than quality?

Can blogging replace communities of practice?

There’s an interesting article at Knowledge Board focussing on the use of blogs within communities of practice - and in particular, how they compare with other “online community tools” like forums and mailing lists.

“the reader has no obligation to read, comment, trackback, blogroll, or subscribe to the RSS feeds. “Online communities” on the other hand often include some form of social obligation on behalf of its members and typically push entries in a central location were everybody can (and often must) read them. Thus, they are much more invasive and time-consuming.”

For me, this is one of the key advantages of blogs (and particularly of webfeeds). I maintain control of my interactions with the community - while I’m kept aware of what’s going on through the flow of webfeeds, I can respond in my own time and asynchronously. Forums and bulletin boards, on the other hand, demand that I make a point of visiting, even if there’s nothing updated to view. So you could argue that one of the major advantages of webfeeds is avoiding the cognitive dissonance that occurs when you visit a forum only to find there’s nothing of interest there.

A network of weblogs is open and self-organizing. New ideas and information can circulate freely across the planet through referrals and trackbacks.

An interesting observation - although there was nothing stopping me linking to, or quoting from, forums or mailing lists. the advantage for an individual as a content creator is that you can be aware of how people are reacting to, and linking with, your postings. It’s a form of feedback loop - if I utter something controversial, the pings and the trackbacks will keep me in touch with the reactions of others.

There’s a downside to this of course, which the more contemplative bloggers refer to as the “echo chamber” - from an outside perspective the ‘blogosphere’ (a term I loathe, personally, but it’s a useful shorthand for ‘the blogging community’ which doesn’t sound much better) often seems like a inbred clique of individuals who’s only obsession is commenting on what A said about B. Which is exactly what this post is, of course, but you get my drift…

Open versus closed

For all the talk about the merits (or otherwise) of open-source software, sometimes it needs a specific event to make the benefits obvious. Which is exactly what has happened this morning.

I’ve had two things on the go today - an installation of the Wordpress blogging engine; and tweaking a graph within an Excel spreadsheet. Both hit problems around the same time - Wordpress was throwing up errors when I tried to load a particular page, and Excel crashed when I tried to change the formatting of one of the graph axes. My default response in such situations is to Google the symptoms and see if anyone else has come up against the same problems - because it’s very rare that I’m ever the first person to come across a bug. Usually there’s a workaround or a fix within the first couple of pages of results, so normal service can quickly be resumed.

That was the case today - both problems were well-documented in various places; Wordpress in the support forums and Excel in the Microsoft Knowledge Base. But this is where the two problems diverged. While there wasn’t a direct solution to the Wordpress issue, there was at least a description of the problem - whereas the Excel bug was listed with a “we know it’s a problem and we’re working on a solution” notice.
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Hosting dilemmas

One of the factors to consider when setting up a blog - or any kind of web presence, for that matter - is how and where your site is going to be hosted. There are no shortage of web hosts out there, but the features and services on offer - not to mention the level of service - are distinctly variable, so finding the right solution can be a bit of a minefield.

Most of us start out with shared hosting - you simply rent some space on a webserver that is shared with other people. The advantage of this is firstly that it’s the cheapest and simplest way of getting going, as someone else is taking care of all the fiddly bits of looking after the feeding and watering of the boxes that your site sits on.
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