To Talk of Many Things

Commonplace book. Web journals serve the same function as the old commonplace book [Mark Bernstein]

Lighthouse: A redesign recipe for tough times. The recent boom has ensured that most of the Web sites that are needed have already gone up. The end of that boom has deadened any sense of urgency among organisations still planning their first site. And it's a rare Web site built in the past four years that couldn't use substantial improvement. [Tomalak's Realm]

New spec aimed at tripling cable capacity

Cable modems could have triple the upstream capacity by the end of 2002, enabling videoconferencing and peer-to-peer applications over cable connections. CableLabs, a consortium of cable operators from North America and South America, has completed the specification for DOCSIS (Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification) 2.0. The specification boosts the capacity of the upstream side of the connection to 30Mbps in both directions. Interoperability testing of products is due to start in the first quarter of this year, and certification testing is expected by the third quarter. [Infoworld]

TIME.com: Identity Theft: Could it Happen to You? New statistics suggest it may be only a matter of time. A security expert offers tips on protecting yourself 

Imagine this: Someone out there knows your name, your credit card information, your bank account numbers and your social security number. They are pretending to be you — running up outrageous bills, even committing crimes — and as far as your banks, creditors and various authorities are concerned, they are you.

It may sound like the plotline of a hackneyed Hollywood thriller, but hundreds of thousands of Americans may have already been victims of identity theft. Last year alone, the Federal Trade Commission logged more than 85,000 complaints from people whose identities had been pirated. That may only be the tip of the iceberg; some consumer advocates suggest as many as 750,000 identities are stolen each year.

What, exactly, is identity theft? How does it happen? And how can you protect yourself against this growing trend? TIME.com spoke with Ted Claypoole, a technology lawyer concentrating in financial services and security at the firm of Womble Carlyle Sandridge and Rice in Charlotte, North Carolina. [Privacy Digest]

David P. Reed: Asking fundamental questions. If technology improves, the regulations become unnecessarily strict. When we make better radio systems, the old ones become obsolescent, and wasteful. We could improve the entire system by junking the old stuff, and replacing it all with functionally compatible systems, based on new insights and design. [Tomalak's Realm]

Searchin' for the Surfer's Saint. News that the Pope regards the Internet as a 'wonderful instrument' may revive interest in the Catholic Church's search for the medium's patron saint. By Noah Shachtman. [Wired News]

Turning Macs on Thievery. Stolen computers are notoriously difficult to recover. But a Houston man cleverly found his sister's stolen iMac using remote control software, friends on the Net, luck and brains. By Leander Kahney. [Wired News]

Knowledge Workers and K-Logs

This is another post to K-Logs.  If you like this content, you are more than welcome to subscribe.

When I worked at Forrester (a top technology research company), the CEO George Colony used to say (paraphrased), “in a sense our business is a like a mill.  We grind raw grain into flour.   It is my job as CEO to scoop up the grain that fell to the floor and put it back on the grindstone so it can be made into useful product.  Everything our analysts think about while on the job has value.  We need to find new ways to capture that thinking and sell it to clients.”  This is profound.  In my view, this is something that all companies should strive for. 

Many, if not all companies have knowledge workers.  Some, are composed entirely of knowledge workers.  These people are domain experts.  They keep up to-date (or should) with the evolution of knowledge within their chosen domain.  They have thinking skills that have been developed to process data within that domain.  Everything they think about within the envelope of that domain has value.  Unfortunately, most companies don't capture, package, and distribute that insight. 

K-Logs makes it possible for that domain expert to share their knowledge, experience, insight, and point of view on a nearly real-time basis.  It creates a stream of thought (a body of writing) that can be searched and browsed (K-Logs organize posted items over time for quick analysis).  Also, since K-Logs are associated with an individual, it provides knowledge workers with a platform to demonstrate their expertise within the company (to build a personal brand).

The first step to enabling a Knowledge Worker is to put a K-Log publishing tool on their desktop.  Show them how easy it is to post their thinking, useful links, important e-mails, documents, and pictures to the Intranet.  Show them how to connect to other K-Loggers through community features like a http://www.weblogs.com that runs behind the firewall.  Point out news feeds (both internal and external) that they can subscribe to that provides them with up-to-date information on their domain of interest.  Now step back and watch them begin to post, get feedback from readers, respond to links from other K-Loggers, and develop the habit of frequent posting. 

Further, begin to develop categories that they can use to route posts to reader specific Weblogs for communities of practice within the company.  Develop connections to organizations that foster knowledge transfer within those domains.  Make it possible for them to publish to those organizations websites and subscribe to their knowledge streams.  Connect, connect, connect…..

The organic growth of connections and the rapid rise in accumulated archived knowledge will surprise you.  Let it grow through careful management and pruning.  Encourage it and reap the result. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]

New Radio 8 feature. Now you can post to categories without posting to the home page. If you have categories enabled, there's a new checkbox, the first one, called Home Page (it effectively becomes a category). By default it's checked. Now you can easily publish multiple weblogs, going to lots of different locations, from one edit box. Screen shot.  [Scripting News]

The ghosts of “Gosford Park”. Robert Altman doesn't just enliven the corpse of the manor-house murder mystery — he reunites it with its vital literary forebears. [Salon.com]