Cool Tool: ORB Networks

If you have your own server running and you are into sharing your knowledge and media with others - you've got to check out http://www.orb.com. The company provides a streaming server system (for free) that allows you to install and run your own media distribution from your own machine. While this alone may not be unique, ORB's features include picture, audio and video sharing (only of your own media !) and allows you to access your content from pocket pc (wireless or GPRS) and other devices besides a PC - basically expanding your accessible knowledge to any kind of media beyond text. The combination of TikiWiki and ORB is very powerful. For any advice, questions or services, please do not hesitate to contact me.

FlickrGraph - Social Network Analysis for users of Flickr

Social Network Analysis is going to be the big thing of tomorrow. Look at things happening on the internet - now Flickr has a social network browser (http://www.marumushi.com/apps/flickrgraph/index.cfm). It shows you the relationships of friends of Flickr users. Very cool ! Managing our social knowledge of tomorrow.

TAGCloud for popular Knowledge Management Blogs now available at InsightKnowledge

TAGCloud (http://www.tagcloud.com) is a service that extracts the main keywords out of blogs that are setup as feeds and presents the viewer with a list of keywords (resembling a cloud) to choose from.

This service is nice and helpful for setting up a lot of feeds and using the tagcloud to navigate this information.

InsightKnowledge has setup a TAGCloud for about 50 popular blogs/weblogs about and around Knowledge Management, allowing you to easily browse and read up on the opinions of experts in their field about this topic.

KM Jobs on the rise

As a KM professional, I am harvesting information on a daily basis, filter it and review whats left for impact on things I know about. This includes the job market around Knowledge Management. Following the postings, I see more and more KM positions being offered. There are still quite a few out there that mis-use the term Knowledge Management, but in general it looks like the industry is slowly getting to the point where the recognition sets in (in the mainstream) that the only way to do more (increase performance, competitiveness or other values) with less (money, resources, time), is to utilize the knowledge that the organization contains within their employees better (->Organizational Intelligence on Wikipedia).

Self-promotion again ! -> InsightKnowledge provides a discussion forum with postings of jobs in the KM area. Check them out.

What your brain can do to you

i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno't mtaetr waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae.�The rset can be a taotl mses and ouy can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuuhot slpeling was ipmorantt!

Off-topic: Time to change your investment strategy

Yahoo News reports a major trend that may force you to change your investment strategy soon. More companies are turning away from retirement contributions. HMM... time to rethink how I will be able to live when I get older. How do I put money away now so that I will be living safely later ? Real Estate ? - interesting, but has its own challenges; Stock ? - only good if you really invest a lot of time; Casino ? - yeah, right. How about making your knowledge pay for you ? Knowledge Subscriptions - checkout more details at http://www.insightknowledge.com.
Yahoo News Link: http://news.yahoo.com/s/usatoday/20051207/bs_usatoday/evenhealthyfirmsfreezeorcutloosetraditionalpensions

HOT: Microsoft Research released: SNARF, the Social Network and Relationship Finder

Microsoft Research, the guys who invent some cool stuff (like Microsoft Portrait), just released SNARF, a tool to utilized Outlook to check your contacts and emails for your social network and its relationship. I'll give it a try and report experiences here - http://research.microsoft.com/community/snarf/

McKinsey recommends that new organizational structures will set the knowledge workers free

McKinsey has published an article (for which you have to register for free to view it), that talks about the need for companies to break away from traditional organizational structures to allow productive professionals / knowledge workers to improve their company's competitiveness.

The future of organizational performance - and that is where fact stops and my believe begins - is in the enablement of team and networks. Enable project teams to efficiently communicate and collaborate - and they will succeed; enable networks to form and adapt and structure themselves to the purpose and goal given - and they will be ideally prepared to succeed.

Power teams, organizational networking, business network analysis - keywords for things that are waiting to happen.

My thoughts on CORANTE Blog - US Engineers concerned about competitiveness

Corante is a weblog loaded with thoughts of experts of their fields. A posting about the reasons for US engineers getting concerned about the US being able to keep competitive lead me to share my thoughts - here and there.

How Google supports its Knowledge Workers

Why is Google so successfull ? Could it be that their business model breaks away with the 'how you are supposed to do it' and enables 'how it is supposed to be' ? How about Google valueing their Knowledge Workers and setting them free to strive for bigger and better things. Hmm, hasn't Google become bigger and better lately ? Could it be related to understanding the value of organizational intelligence for the success of the business ??? Read what Google's CEO has to say about it

ConceptWikis - the next step from blogging to wikis to conceptwikis

There is a development happening in the way everybody can describe his/her knowledge.

Blogs are very popular, because they allow everybody to be a publisher of their thoughts and opinions with text and video and audio and reach a worldwide audience. What it does not do, is to provide a efficient capture mechanism for knowledge to be re-used, shared and worked with.

Wikis are becoming very quickly very popular. They provide the capability of blogging, but also allow for knowledge to be very easily capture as single pages, automatically linking to eachother with keywords. One can capture thoughts similar to how one is thinking, link pages they way one remembers things, and can discover someones thoughts they way the person thought about it and captured it. What wikis do not do, is to capture the relationship between the linked pieces of information. The relationship itself is an important part of the information between two knowledge entities, like in 'ThisInformation is part of TheOtherInformation'.

ConceptWikis are the next step. Based on the ease of use of wikis, it provides the capability to capture the relationship between to pieces of wiki information, more closely representing how knowledge is formed and linked to eachother.

If you are interested in this topic and wish to learn more about it, play with it or use it for your business, please contact Stefan Lafloer at InsightKnowledge Inc.

Just a thought .. could KM help here

A double warning by Greenspan - Read .. hmm, what if Knowledge Management would become mainstream and knowledge could be transferred and re-used to dramatically increase efficiency of organizational competencies to support the burden put on the shoulders of the younger generations ?

KM World 2005 presentations are available online

For all the KM Practioners and those who want to become one, check out the KM World 2005 presentations at
http://www.kmworld.com/kmw05/presentations/. And while you are at it, check out http://www.insightknowledge.com too :-).