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If I had to pick a non-obvious candidate for blogging, then bespoke tailors would come fairly high up the list. How wrong I was – English Cut is the weblog of Thomas Mahon, a Saville Row tailor of high renown.

It’s interesting stuff – not just as a marketing exercise, but as a source of inside information for us hapless consumers:

If the tailor tells you a hand canvas is overrated or unnecessary, he is either incompetent or dishonest. Probably both. Turn around and leave his shop at once.

His expertise doesn’t come cheap at $4000 a suit, but as a way of educating potential clients of the benefits of bespoke over off-the-peg, this is a fascinating exercise.

Over at Projects@Work, there’s an article by end-user analyst Cathy Webber about “Making Collaboration Work”, in which she outlines a roadmap for collaborative success with five suggestions for managing that process. It’s a very well-written and cogently-argued piece – well worth reading – but stops short of being too prescriptive about how to go about putting those suggestions into practice.

I thought it would be interesting to map the tools that we use on a daily basis with our clients to the suggestions that Cathy makes. It’s probably worth a read of the article first, but here’s my take on where weblogs and wikis could fit in.

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Richard Allan is a Liberal Democrat Member of Parliament, and has a (deserved) reputation as one of the few UK politicians who a) cares about or b) knows anything about technology. He’s also a fully paid-up member of the awkward squad when it comes to chasing answers to questions about how government is wasting spending our taxes on technology.

Sadly, he’s standing down at the next general election, which means he won’t be around to ask more awkward questions about the disasters that will have occurred by then. But in the meantime he’s able to put Prime Ministers on the spot, and blog about it afterwards.

As an aside, one of the more impressive uses of webfeeds that I’ve come across is directly relevant here – theyworkforyou.com provides an enormous amount of information about the workings of the UK political systems, including webfeeds for the activities of every single one of the 658 MPs in the House of Commons. And equally impressive, or depressing depending on your point of view, is that the entire site has been built by volunteer efforts.

UPDATE: Richard Allan has posted a transcript of the exchange in question – see Tony Blair squirm…

Here’s an interesting idea from knowledge management researcher Magdalena Boettger:

Pieces of information act as “cues to knowledge”, or mental bookmarks to the knowledge in our head. If you’re writing a mental bookmark for personal use, it can be a very rough shorthand that’s only going to make sense to yourself. But if you’re writing for a wider audience, then the information has to be clearer and more structured. And there are dangers in making a bookmark too rough – can you be sure that you’ll be able to understand the abbreviations and shorthand in, say, a couple of years?

She’s got a diagram which expresses this pictorially.

Which seems obvious enough, but then perhaps this implies a quick rule of thumb for writing: the wider and more generalised the audience, the more effort you need to put in to eliminate the ’shorthand codes’?

(via Knowledge Jolt With Jack)

Surely there can’t be anyone that wants one who hasn’t got a Gmail account yet? If you’re still looking for an invite, we’ve got 50 to give away – leave your details as a comment and we’ll send an invite over.