Microsoft Offers RSS for the Knowledge Base

If you were looking for a convincing reason to persuade an IT department to start using RSS feeds, this might be it:

Microsoft Offers RSS for the Knowledge Base

(via Projectified)

More on Sapient

Having climbed down off my soapbox about the idiocy of Sapient, here’s the opinions of a couple of analysts who take the contrary view:

Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li issued a report in November saying that “blogging will grow in importance companies should monitor blogs to learn what is being said about their products and services.” 

File under clueless

File under clueless: “Blog tech doesn’t live up to blog talk, according to Sapient CTO”

Via InfoWorld, I came across this pearl of wisdom from Ben Gaucherin, CTO of Sapient:

[blogs] are a fad fueled by pop culture’s desperate search for the next big thing. [They are] the digital equivalent of the pet rock.

If you’re not currently working for one of the FTSE100 or Dow 50, you may well be unaware of the existence of Sapient - they’re a high powered consultancy, dedicated to solving the technological problems of their clients with a blizzard of vague adjective-laden statements. You know the type: “We align business, customer, and technology goals to create executable road maps that improve business performance through technology.” And they’ve got the usual rollcall of high-profile clients who are busy executing the roadmaps. So far, so Dilbert.

Not being a high-powered consultancy, we tend to be more interested in what the tools can do - unfortunately we don’t get paid by the adjective. And it seems that Mr Gaucherin’s concerns stem from the ease of use of a blog:

“Unless you are willing to put in place controls over what is being said,” Gaucherin says, “these stream-of-consciousness thoughts might touch on things that they shouldn’t.” As examples, Gaucherin cites the possibility that a company could be liable for a sexual harassment suit for comments made in a blog or that a blog might reveal proprietary financial information.

All of which apply - in spades - to email, for example. And it completely misses the point that every technology has drawbacks and limitations, and completely fails to balance those with the benefits. So by the same logic taken to extremes, we presumably should be adopting executable road maps which remove email from the picture.

I suspect that part of the issue here is that tools such as blogs are just too end-user to appeal to a firm like Sapient. If you’re wrapped up in the world of “using your unique model to help clients solve their most important business and technology challenges”, then you’re probably not going to see the wood for the trees. Blogs are a small-scale tactical solution, and that just isn’t relevant if you’re attempting to justify a seven-figure consultancy fee.

The irony here is that I’m not likely to hear another of Mr Gaucherin’s opinions for a good long while, because the only way he’s got to communicate with his market is through press releases and PR. Whereas if he had a blog, I’d have already subscribed to his webfeed and would be reading his thoughts as often as he posted them. As would many of his current (and potential) customers. His loss, I guess.

Election blogging

Unless you’re a) not in the UK or b) have been hiding under a rock for the last 24 hours, you’ll have heard the announcements that Tony Blair has been to the Palace and the General Election is underway. Cue a month of wall-to-wall political coverage in the media, and a tidal wave of apathy from the British electorate.

This is the first General Election where blogs have been around to play a part, and it’s going to be fascinating to see if this time it’s a blog that breaks a Jennifer’s Ear story. If it does, then chances are you’ll hear about it through the 2005 General Election blog, the brainchild of Nick Barlow and to which I’ll be contributing.

The major parties seem to be getting on the webfeed bandwagon, with the notable exception of Labour - here are links to the Conservative and LibDem feeds. Of the minor parties, only Respect have a feed - Veritas, UKIP, the Green Party, the SNP and Plaid Cymru don’t seem to have got around to it yet. And I didn’t bother checking the BNP, before anyone asks.

Mindmapping enthusiasm

If you’re into mindmapping, then the chances are you’ve come across MindManager from MindJet. If you haven’t, then it’s well worth a look - although nothing will ever replace the sheer flexibility of pencil-on-paper when it comes to mindmapping, MindManager comes pretty damn close.

Via Projectified, I came across Hobart Swan, who’s a MindJet employee just starting up a blog covering the product - it’s relatively new, but he’s covering some interesting ground on topics such as using MindManager with a Tablet PC. That’s about as close as it’s going to get to pencil-on-paper.

But what struck me about the blog were the reasons for starting it:

“I am starting this blog because I believe passionately in the company I work for. There, I’ve said it. I came up in a period in our nation’s history when allegiance to a company was not exactly what my friends and I aspired toward. Old habits and predelictions die slowly. Nevertheless, here is sit four years after I began working for Mindjet amazed at my affection for a company.”

Which by any measure is exactly the kind of sentiment that you want from a company blog, and is the absolute antithesis of the old-style communication-by-press-release which we’ve accustomed to ignoring.

10 Reasons Why Blogging Is Good For Your Career

From Tim Bray, who’s been practicing what he preaches for so long he was probably blogging by morse code - Ten Reasons Why Blogging Is Good For Your Career:

1. You have to get noticed to get promoted.
2. You have to get noticed to get hired.
3. It really impresses people when you say “Oh, I’ve written about that, just google for XXX and I’m on the top page” or “Oh, just google my name.”
4. No matter how great you are, your career depends on communicating. The way to get better at anything, including communication, is by practicing. Blogging is good practice.
5. Bloggers are better-informed than non-bloggers. Knowing more is a career advantage.
6. Knowing more also means you’re more likely to hear about interesting jobs coming open.
7. Networking is good for your career. Blogging is a good way to meet people.
8. If you’re an engineer, blogging puts you in intimate contact with a worse-is-better 80/20 success story. Understanding this mode of technology adoption can only help you.
9. If you’re in marketing, you’ll need to understand how its rules are changing as a result of the current whirlwind, which nobody does, but bloggers are at least somewhat less baffled.
10. It’s a lot harder to fire someone who has a public voice, because it will be noticed.

There really isn’t anything there to disagree with…

Broken, but working

There’s an awful lot of rubbish being spouted presently about the semantic web, classification, tagging and folksonomies - from both sides of the argument. Euan Semple works in the field for the BBC, and has come up with one of the more intelligent summaries of the situation that I’ve read:

The web works because it is broken and not owned.

Yes, there is rubbish on the web but the availability of relevant, accurate information at your fingertips has exploded in ways that even ten years ago most people couldn’t have imagined and which have never ever been delivered by “conventional” means.

There were nay-sayers then, and indeed there still are, but I would be cautious about assuming that the collective, applied intelligence of millions of people is more fallible than a small group of experts with the power to confer meaning.

Using weblogs to manage project change

It’s probably not too far an exaggeration to say that it’s changes that kill projects. Whether it’s because requirements were incorrectly specified at the start, or the business environment has changed - moving the goalposts mid-way through the game can really screw things up.

So it’s no suprise that most methodologies have a lot to say on the subject of capturing and managing requests for change (RFCs). And a well-run project environment will have some kind of formal process for dealing with requests as they arise.

Some of the problems

But often a project environment won’t have a process - and what processes exist are actually irrelevant in day-to-day use. Do any of these situations sound familiar?
Continue reading »

Strangeness from Blogger bloggers

I’ve noticed a number of interesting blogs over the past couple of weeks that are hosted on Blogger - mostly because there are comments or trackbacks to postings here. As a rule, I’ll go and read a few posts on the blog that’s linking, and more often than not I’ll subscribe to it - but that’s almost impossible to do if it’s a Blogger blog.

Why? They don’t have RSS feeds.

Apparently (after digging through the Blogger FAQs) RSS feeds are a Blogger Pro feature. The standard service doesn’t provide any kind of syndication - instead they recommend you go to Feedburner

Which strikes me as quite frankly daft. What’s the point of offering any kind of blog service - free or paid for - that doesn’t provide syndication? Surely that’s an integral part of what blogs are about - it’s a bit like a rental company offering their cars without steering wheels unless you upgrade to their premium rates. I can understand wanting to hold back some features as an incentive to upgrade to a higher revenue service - but surely syndication is a fundamental?

UPDATE: Commenters have commented, and I stand corrected: standard Blogger does have syndication - Atom 0.3 to be precise - but it’s not necessarily obvious if the blogger (this could get complicated - “I’m a Blogger blogger”) uses custom templates and doesn’t push their feed.

Which is just as bizarre as a blogging service not having feeds in the first place if you think about it - why would you want to have a blog without a feed? It’s a bit like hiring a rental car, but then declining the rear offside wheel along with the collision damage waiver…

Shhh - don’t disturb the librarian, you’ll only annoy him

Filed under ‘reactionary old farts’:

A blog is a species of interactive electronic diary by means of which the unpublishable, untrammeled by editors or the rules of grammar, can communicate their thoughts via the web.

That’s the president-elect of the American Library Association, reacting to some criticism of his article in the Los Angeles Times which suggested that Google digitizing texts and making them available for search might not be such a good idea.

Which actually illustrates rather neatly the intersection of two rather 20th century viewpoints - on the one hand, you’ve got Mr Gorman who seems to view bloggers in much the same light as he no doubt views people who chew gum in his library. Information, it seems, isn’t for everyone - instead it’s to be handed down piece by carefully-selected piece to the great unwashed masses by those who have made it their lives’ work to mediate, filter and carefully shelve it.

And on the other, you’ve got the Los Angeles Times, who have locked the original article away behind their paywall, neatly removing it - and them - from any relevance as far as the web is concerned. I could have linked to them, sending a few visitors their way perhaps, or used my fair use rights and quoted a line or two.

The irony given the subject of Mr Gorman’s rant is that rather than hand over $5 or so to the LA Times, his article was available for free after a few minute’s Googling…