August 2004 Archives

I had an interesting exchange with Mark Fichman, a noted social scientist at Carnegie Mellon's Tepper School of Business. He asked me how something like “The BIT320 Distributed Learning Blogosphere” differs from diaries with email added on. Unlike Dave Winer's response for web logs in general, I think there is all of the difference in the world.

Ben Hammersley makes an interesting observation about how atom can be the pivot point for a number of tools to process blog content. Based on my last post, I have to say all the more power to him, and he should go further. Why not do something like make atom the output format for Movable Type and other blogging software?

Andy Seidl (MyST) and I agreed today to use Typepad for the student interface in the “BIT320 Distributed Learning Blogosphere”. The decision really emphasizes the strength of service-oriented architectures based open standards: we can pull in the best pieces each vendor has to offer to create (we hope) a best of breed composite offering. MyST is going to provide back-end aggregation and synthetic feeds. Typepad will provide the user-friendly front-end.

I've been intermediating a debate between a content management systems (CMS) guru and a search engine optimization (SEO) specialist. Both are principals in reasonably successful micro-companies (companies with between $500K and $1 MM in revenue and only a couple of full time employees). At the heart of the debate is the issue of discoverability, in this case, how easy it is for people to find you on the web. What I think has been explicitly missing in the debate so far is that they are both talking about an underlying process that is both machine-driven and social. Call it the information value chain meets the social network.

Knowledge management systems fail because people do not add information to them. Why? It has something to do with “The Last User Interface Mile”. Most people think interface has something to do with how the buttons are laid out and whether you have written clear labels. It is actually much more.

Lou Rosenfeld recently posted an article about the BIT320 Distributed Learning Blogosphere. The article and ensuing comments are fascinating. I encourage you to go read them.

One issue that was raised in the comments was the extent to which participant blogs might just become isolated islands of people standing on their own soap boxes. If this happens, the project has failed.

I had breakfast with Lou Rosenfeld today to tell him about an exciting project I have started with Andy Seidl of Myst Technologies. Using Andy's blog application server we are developing a new collaborative learning application.

Learning has always been a process distributed in time and space. If there are physical or virtual sessions where learners gather together, they only last a finite amount of time, and regardless, learners scatter between sessions. Thus, the revision, thinking, and other processes that lead to learning take place away from others. The question facing learning organizations is whether and how to support these distributed activities.

I'm publishing on the web and syndicated, as unbelievable as that sounds. This is a whole journey for me that I started in early June as I was recovering from minor surgery. I had been following blogs and RSS syndication (read further for a brief explanation of RSS) for some time. I even started teaching about RSS as the breaking wave in service oriented architectures in courses at Michigan Business School in early 2003. But, it's really only in the past year that things have launched away from the extreme cutting edge into the main stream.