On participation

I was listening to the radio this week when I heard an interview with a film producer on triple j. Of special note was the comment by the female dj that perhaps casting for movies should be done the same way as decisions are made in those reality tv shows. Just sms your vote! The film producer was [...]

On information research

The latest issue of Information Research is online. A couple of the articles of particular interest to me were on household information practices and Flickr: a first look at user behaviour in the context of photography as serious leisure. The sample sizes used in both research articles were quite small but the articles did prompt my [...]

On being in touch

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has just released a report based on a survey, How Australians spend their time. The section I want to comment on says this (from the media release):
“Time spent on recreation and leisure activities has decreased by 1 hour 45 minutes per week since 1997 (to 29 hours 31 minutes a [...]

On real work

A couple of weeks ago Euan Semple wrote a blog comment about real work. I made a hastily scribbled note to come back to the sentiment at a later date.
The prompt for me was the notion held by some people that social computing activities (blogs, wikis, virtual communities, social networks) are not of value for real work. And this negative [...]

On tagging, the grey side

My last two posts have been about tagging based on my presentation last week at the conference in Sydney, ”Enhancing search and retrieval capabilities and performance”.
I want to look at some of the perceived disadvantages of tagging that I briefly mentioned in my presentation:

Lack of specificity - refers to the fact that an item can have [...]

On the positive side of tagging

In the light of what I discussed yesterday with respect to my conference presentation on Tuesday, I want to move on to tagging. Tagging is essentially unstructured metadata that is assigned by the content creator and the readers/users of the content, the latter called collaborative tagging. The user-generated classification that emerges is called a folksonomy.
Examples of digital content using [...]

On search and tagging

Yesterday I gave a presentation at the Ark Group conference, “Enhancing search and retrieval capabilities and performance”, in Sydney. The presentation, called “Tagging and the enterprise”,  is available to conference attendees and I am rejigging some of the slides to load up onto Slideshare.
There were two key points I tried to emphasise yesterday in a conference [...]

On the wisdom of crowds and volunteering

My latest Knowledge@Wharton newsletter has this article about a new book called: We Are Smarter Than Me: How the Wisdom of Crowds Can Help Businesses Succeed by Barry Libert and Jon Spector. It’s a timely reminder that networked knowledge has a significant place in the competitive world of business. I recommend the article and the book to [...]

On what’s all this fuss about?

Some friends of mine have been encouraging me to open up a Facebook account. I understand the mechanics of Facebook, especially it’s college mentality origins. Intellectually I can see why Facebook has become popular, but personally I am not so enamoured. But then again, I don’t watch much televison (especially useful at this time in [...]

On everything is miscellaneous

I have been discussing podcasts recently. I have also been doing a bit of long-distance driving. One benefit of the driving has been listening to podcasts.
One good podcast I listened to yesterday afternoon on my MP3 player was a recent interview with Dave Weinberger, author of the book, Everything is miscellaneous. Weinberger discusses web 2.o, web-based [...]

On KM Australia 2007 (Part 1)

Wow. Today was the first day of the KM Australia 2007 conference in Sydney. I was very impressed with some of today’s presentations, although I must say it was sometimes difficult to hear the speakers due to the noise coming from the vendor and catering area next to the stage.
Not surprisingly, Dave Snowden was in fine [...]

On the cult of the amateur

I have on my “to read” list the book, The cult of the amateur, by Andrew Keen. I read the review of Keen’s book in the NY Times recently and hastily sent off for a copy of the book [the book has now arrived as at the 23rd July].
The basic premise of the book is that the internet and [...]

On searching (for time)

I have to say that finding enough time to do everything I want to do, let alone everything I have to do, is quite a challenge. The 21st century communications revolution hasn’t changed that. My discretionary activities like blogging and reading have been on the back-burner in the past week, unfortunately. Consequently, with a recent book [...]