Mindmapping wikis

This site is pure genius, combining as it does two of my favourite obsessions - Wikipedia and mind maps.

Wikimindmap

The idea is really simple - enter a search term for Wikipedia, and the site constructs a mind-map style arrangement of the links on the Wikipedia page, with the main result in the centre and the other links on the page spread out as nodes of the map.

The mind map itself is a modified version of the Flash browser for Freemind, so it should be relatively straightforward to adapt for behind-the-firewall wikis. 

21st Century SDK

I completely missed the announcement of this, but Web21C is a series of APIs for BT’s 21st Century Network, the next-generation IP-based telecomms network that’s being rolled out.

It’s a number of APIs to core 21CN services - SMS, voice calls, conference calls, location, authentication and so on.   They’ve created an SDK which allows these services to be embedded into web apps, as well as test environment - in a particularly nice touch, there are seven virtual SIP phones for testing, each one with it’s own particular quirks.   And to distinguish each one from the other, they’ve been given names from Snow White - so Happy will answer the call normally, but Sneezy will accidentally disconnect the call after 10 seconds.  Genius!

Common Pitfalls of Building Social Web Applications and How to Avoid Them

Part 1

Part 2

(via Bokardo.com)

Twittering behind the firewall

Over the last few weeks I’ve slowly become addicted to Twitter, and I got to thinking about how Twitter could fit into a corporate environment. It’s a bit difficult to see where it could work at first, largely because it’s actually quite difficult to explain exactly what Twitter is, and how it works. In some ways it’s like IM presence, but more dynamic - my IM status reflects what I’m doing, but in a very non-granular kind of way. It’s even less helpful if you’re working in an IM environment that ties into a system like Exchange, because that picks up calendaring information but doesn’t support more detailed presence information.

Twitter on the other hand is like IM presence crossed with a very, very short blog.

It’s kind of difficult to think of too many hard applications for Twitter inside the firewall, but the soft benefits are easier to make tangible. Some of my coworkers are now using Twitter, and as a result I now feel that I know them that much better because they’re Tweeting about the mundane fine detail of their lives: the kind of mundane fine detail that real relationships are built on. If I know that they’re off to play football, or are playing with their kids, that’s social information that may not neccessarily be normally available to me - so by subscribing to their Tweets I start to build up a richer picture of their lives.

That’s got its own dangers, of course - some people want to deliberately keep their personal and private lives separate, so Twittering away too readily would break down that Chinese wall.

Travelling to Interesting2007 yesterday I was getting Tweets from others doing the same, so even though I was travelling alone, there was a real sense of a massed group of fellow slightly-mad people converging on a single point.

And Twitter was also functioning as a virtual back channel during the day - I’ve been to a number of conferences where the real action takes place in the back channel rather than the presentations themselves, but the use of Twitter - and Jaiku at Reboot, for example - means that the backchannel spreads far wider than just the physical location of the conference itself.

So is there a corporate application? I don’t know - but I’m sure if one emerges, it won’t have been overtly designed, and it won’t have been something that’s been pre-approved by a committee.

Management != Control

Over on the Fast Forward blog there’s the best skewering I’ve read for a long while of what I’ve come to think of as the military-industrial knowledge management industry:

Knowledge Management is and has always been a misnomer: knowledge cannot be managed.

Have you ever used something identified as a ‘Knowledge Management’ technology? Did it increase your ability to think or act? How much effort was required on your part? How much did you have to know in order to ‘discover’ what it was that you needed? Was the exchange of value equitable? Did any of that provide any more ‘knowledge’ to you than the collection of stuff on your desktop or accessible to you via the lone search box on the global internet?

The more I read, see and talk about knowledge management the more convinced I become that what most mainstream KM vendors are pushing is not knowledge management but knowledge control.   And most KM system-buying corporates are only too willing to swallow this.

This was after an email I got a couple of days ago (bits redacted to protect the innocent etc):

… we felt going [with an] external system would be ideal, as people are already paranoid that everything they say and do is being monitored by us.  It’ll be run according to our rules, monitored by those running it and branded in our style.  We will have constant access so will be able to gauge what is being said.  

See what I mean?

One step at a time

Humour me for a moment as I celebrate a small - but satisfying nonetheless - victory of sorts.   A WordPress-powered blog, built on PHP & MySQL no less, has just gone live for a client extranet in this so-Microsoft-centric-it-bleeds-server-licenses environment.  It’s not much, but you have to take your prizes where you can…

Nabaztag bedtime

Call me a geek if you like (OK, I asked for that one) but getting hold of a Nabaztag seemed like a really good idea. Having something other than a beige box (or strictly speaking, an Appley-white one) as the means to interact with the interweb is fascinating - I’d love to drop a few around the office just to see people’s reactions.

Only it’s just told me that it’s one in the morning, in a far-too enthusiastic tone. Nagged off to bed by a plastic rabbit…

Atlassian - 8 ways to use a wiki

http://blogs.atlassian.com/news/2007/05/15_ways_to_use.html

Previewing IE mangling

Falling into the category of “useful tools that there wouldn’t be any need for in a perfect world”, here’s a neat site that renders a url to preview how badly your lovingly-crafted CSS gets mangled by IEs 5.5, 6 and 7.

NetRenderer

Of course, if standards actually meant standard, then this wouldn’t be needed - but in the meantime it could save some wailing and gnashing of teeth.   Basically you bang in the URL of your page, and then you can preview the effect of rendering in each of the versions.   There’s also an overlay mode which shows the pixel-by-pixel differences between 6 and 7.

Welcome to the mainstream

Here’s a sure sign that Twitter has gone mainstream - “connection spam” from accounts attempting to be the first to gather 1,000 friends…