adoption curve dot net

Two (independent) articles that point to a cause-and-effect:

WebWatch – RSS: 98 per cent of surfers shun it

A report from Forrester Research has found that just two per cent of US internet users are making use of RSS feeds.

7Nights: Fixing (RSS/Atom) Newsfeed Subscription
There has been a whole bunch of talk about how unusable the blogging subscription/syndication model is. The problem is that it’s not an easy thing to explain, and many developers and designers have gone and made it harder by spreading around terms and conventions that don’t really work.

I don’t find either conclusion particularly suprising – you have to consider that for most people, the cutting edge of IT usage is what they experience in the workplace, and the majority of workplaces have yet to progress much beyond basic email and file storage in the way they (fail to) exploit the potential of the systems they are using. And home computing is still dominated by a virus-and-spyware ridden AOL paradigm.

So perhaps the surprise is that RSS usage is as high as 2%?

[UPDATE: here's the original source from Forrester, and an interesting comment from The RSS Weblog - far from lack of knowledge being a problem, it could actually be a symptom of a successful shielding of the technology from those who don't know (or care) about it...]

You hear the phrase “free as in beer” bandied around the open source world a lot – sadly “beer as in free” doesn’t crop up that often, but this is a new take on the idea:

Students from the Information Technology University in Copenhagen is trying to help by releasing what they are calling the world’s first open source beer recipe.

If you’re in the midst of trying to roll out any kind of collaborative or knowledge-sharing system, this article might be well worth a read – destinationKM.com has an article by Carol Kinsey Goman on “Five Reasons People Don’t Tell What They Know”

It’s worth reading the full article, but here are the headlines:

People believe that knowledge is power
People are insecure about the value of their knowledge
People don’t trust each other
Employees are afraid of negative consequences
People work for other people who don’t tell what they know

A quick way of forcing Project to handle non-standard resource availability:

Task calendars can be used to good effect if, for example, a specialist person or a piece of equipment is only available on certain dates and times. It is also useful when you need to force Project to schedule a task to start on a specific day of the week, say Fridays.

It’s a neat idea, but I’m not entirely convinced by the idea of the Personal MBA. At it’s lowest level it’s a reading list – with some interesting and useful titles, but also some of the biggest wastes of trees this side of the Da Vinci Code. Now there’s also the start of an online community, which could be the beginnings of something really useful – 43 Folders, anyone?

My reservation stems from the same problem that afflicts the distance-learning route. A significant part of the value of undertaking an MBA isn’t in the qualification itself, or the reading list, or even the academic content – it’s in the interactions that you have with the other members of the cohort that you’re studying with. A decent course at a reputable school will pull together a group of people from a wider variety of backgrounds, nationalities and experience than you will ever experience in a business environment; so the value of the qualification comes as much from learning from your colleagues as it does from learning from the faculty or reading list.

So if the proposition of the Personal MBA is that you can learn everything you need to know from reading 40 books, it’s being disingenuous. If the reading list is the start of a broader interaction through the site and the discussions, then there’s the possibility of really reading something. And if it’s the source of inspiration to go off and do some real networking with real people, then it’ll be adding some real value.