Some time ago I was honored to be interviewed by Marc Giles of The Economist for an article about social networking and business. It was part of several articles about this topic. The articles were published on the web and in the Jan. 30 printed issue. A great set of articles with my two cents!
Today is my blog's birthday! Man, time does fly. Three years ago I thought I'd give it a go. Never looked back after that.
I still enjoy blogging. My blogging has changed over the years. In the first year I blogged a lot. In the second year I blogged less, and wanted to focus more on quality. I hope my readers think this worked out OK. Concluding from my growing number of readers I think the answer is 'yes'.
My reasons to blog have not changed. It's a great way to connect to people also interesting in information architecture, information management, knowledge management, web 2.0, enterprise 2.0 and innovation. Although the conversation about blog posts has almost completely moved to Twitter, writing up my thoughts is still very helpful. It helps me structure my thoughts and test my ideas. I also like the fact that I can share these ideas and thoughts at times when people need them. They're on my blog, but you don't need to read them right away. It can me months later before someone is interested in what you wrote. No problem.
Well, 2010 has started. Let's see what this year is going to bring us. Happy blogging!
Recently I was honored to co-write a paper with Olha Bondarenko and Ruud Janssen. It is titled: ''Requirements for the Design of a Personal Document-Management System" and was published in JASIST.
I think Olha's work in general and this paper in particular is very valuable for the whole information, content and document management industry. Because it truly tries to understand how knowledge workers use information and documents. That knowledge is translated into requirements/principles for a document management system.
But you decide if Olha/we succeeded! I hope you like it.
This paper was written in the context of Olha's PhD research - which was finalized recently! - about personal information management. Her PhD defense will be on February 11 (at the Technical University in Eindhoven, The Netherlands). I hope to be there and will blog/tweet about it.
Have you seen the movie 'Pay it forward'? You probably all have and I'm the last one to catch up! ;-) But if you haven't seen the movie, go and rent or buy it. It's worth your time and money. Pay it Forward is an intriguing movie with a powerful message. It's about leadership, small decisions make a big difference, change can happen, social networks, etc. Here's a very interesting part to get you to watch the whole thing. Enjoy!
For some time now I've been participating in a group of information and knowledge management practitioners ('DutchOpen KM'). These friends work in large, international companies, based in the Netherlands.
The idea is simple: We get together about 2-3 times a year, define a topic per meeting and discuss that topic. Sometimes some participants will give a short presentation about the topic and how it's addressed in their company. Sometimes a couple of lines of text is enough to spark the discussion.
I'm always happily surprised about the way these meetings go. The open way we talk, the respectful way disagreements are discussed, the great ideas that are shared, the contacts these meetings give afterwards, etc.
Is this just a coincidence? We just happen to have a nice bunch of people grouped together? They definitely are nice. But I don't think it's a coincidence. It's what I also see in the blogging community - at least the part I interact with. It has to do with what I call 'knowledge management people'. Good KM practitioners should be open, willing to share, interested in different and strange ideas, social, etc. And the nice thing is they often are. They don't have to be knowledge manager, just to be a good KM practitioner. One other characteristic is they are not self-centered and usually share their knowledge without asking back up front.
In short, it's great to work them and be with these kind of people.
My previous post was posted with Google Sidekick. I tried it before, but didn't push those 'sidenotes' to my blog. Now I've done it a first time, I'm planning on doing it more often.
Google Sidekick reminds me of Trailfire. I used to use that tool. The problem was it wasn't used by many of my friends. But it worked nicely. In the meantime Trailfire was discontinued. Google Sidekick will take it over from there.
Interesting remark by Marissa. Google has been working on automatic translation in general but also want to work on query translation. In the past I worked on this topic and participated in one of the conferences in this area, CLEF.
in reference to:""Imagine what it would be like if there was a tool built into the search engine which translated my search query into every language and then searched the entire world’s websites," she says. "And then invoked the translation software a second and third time – to not only then present the results in your native language, but then translated those sites in full when you clicked through.”"
- Marissa Mayer: An omnivorous Google is coming - Telegraph (view on Google Sidewiki)
