Friday, January 27, 2006

Open Source KM Technologies: OpenSharePoint

For those of you looking for a good open source technology to use to improve web-based collaboration, check this piece of software out: http://sourceforge.net/projects/opensharepoint/. It is an open source clone of Microsoft's Sharepoint and visually uses the same concept. It is easy to use (checkout the demo).

For those who look for more, please checkout TIKIWIKI. InsightKnowledge Inc.'s website is build with it and provides a variety of features all targeted to improve personal knowledge managing efficiency. Feel free to contact me for a demo. I will provide a free web presentation soon.

Thursday, January 26, 2006

Free Knowledge: Stanford University delivers courses free of charge via ITunes

Stanford University has started to provided recordings of select lectures, speeches, interviews and events available on through iTunes for free: http://itunes.stanford.edu

Providing knowledge for free is generally a good thing and a lot of people have the possibility to benefit from it. The effeciency of this effort could be much better, if there would be communities that could help assimilate this knowledge and serve as the 'virtual classroom'.

For more 'Free Knowledge' links and/or if you want to start a virtual classroom or community around any of the stanford offerings, please visit http://www.insightknowledge.com/

Tuesday, January 17, 2006

Web users judge sites in the blink of an eye

A study by researchers in Canada has shown that the snap decisions Internet users make about the quality of a web page have a lasting impact on their opinions.

So, you better update your website with some catchy design if you want people to stick around - is that what it means ? Shall we focus less on content ? Again, my believe is that a middle-way is the best way to go. No compromise on the quality of content, but improving the end-user interface experience is an increasingly important component of information technologies nowadays.

What does that mean ? I think it means that people are fed up with un-intuitive, complex, hard-to-use interfaces. It means that people work harder and longer and do not want to deal anymore with anything that makes it more difficult. My two cents.

Read more at http://www.nature.com/news/2006/060109/full/060109-13.html