My Cat, Spam, Guy Kawasaki and Chris Ware

My Cat Scanning the View

The title looks like a potpourri. It’s normal.

When my cat is allowed to go out in the morning, the first thing it does is to scan the neighbourhoods from the terrace. It stands on a small pillar and turns its head, slowly and zooms on the propitious spots. Mouse, lizards, cats are on the radar. Trees and high grass are hiding them. It takes 30 seconds and here it goes. It jumps into the garden to get a close eye on something.

I have about the same attitude when I check my mail or the RSS aggregator in the morning, a mug of coffee in my hand, looking to cat on the terrace.

The first thing that pops to my eyes and tries to capture my attention is spam. Obviously those behind this plague know that orders, banks, credit cards are high on our agenda. For this reason scanning the Inbox is usually very deceptive and useless. So the very first task is to run the spam filter(s). What the spam filter does (after obvious steps) is to take a suspicious look into the contents, scanning for outrageous hints. Any deceiving term would flag it as spam. Scarcity of terms in our field of business and abundance of engaging term (free, money) are impacting as well. The point is that scanning to remove spam is similar but different in the fact that we look for exaggerated proliferation or out of subject terms instead of informative messages.

It becomes more and more the same with RSS. RSS are not cluttered by spam but with 3 million and counting bloggers it is over abundant. Twitter started a new era and we get now from our friendfeed a continuous flow of messages about all and everything. I was not going to spend time looking for a pearl in this sea.

We have a nice tool in Kneaver which takes a text and evaluates it against our personal knowledge. Basically a natural language parser will take it, identify terms available in the corpus, compute their frequency. Up to here pretty common. Now what is less common is that we compute some sort of distance between the terms in the text but also in the corpus. For this we use graph distances and semantic vectors. What we are really looking at are texts mostly residing in our Knowledge Frontier. They are the most likely to bring us something new but still in the focus. This is really similar to the cat approach. Is this grey color likely to be a cat, if yes I should see another hint nearby: something moving or another grey patch.

Now we are testing an RSS valuator filter base on this feature. What you get is exactly the original feed but some styles are added so that your RSS newsreader will display it in colors depending on the foreseen interest. It is now easy for the relax reader to spot the most interesting news. Nice feature and very personal.

However what you will not get are the hidden pearls. The interesting piece of news, totally out of context, lost in the stream of professionally oriented streams. To illustrate this when I reviewed my daily delivery of news from Guy Kawasaki (I follow him for informations and hints in the perspective of his books) , filtered by Kneaaver, I could see, lost like a bottle in ocean, a piece about Chris Ware. I like his work and so do my son but this piece was completely outside of my job interest. Kneaver couldn’t catch it, I could. We, human, remain better than software. We can adapt at once any procedure and incorporate extraneous exceptions on the fly. Yes but without Kneaver raising the visibility of interesting pieces, I wouldn’t have the spare time to look for an out of band piece.

Wow! the cat was stung by a wasp while I was writing. She’s young and need also to enhance her scanning procedure.

A Blog a Day: Eric Blue

Location: http://eric-blue.com/

I came across this blog while looking for combined use of Wiki and MindMaps. Kneaver combines naturally both as being alternative displays of the same body of Knowledge. Presentations is yet another.

Back to Eric Blue. Eric had a post about visual Wiki. This is the link: http://eric-blue.com/2009/05/12/the-visual-wiki-a-new-metaphor-for-knowledge-access-and-management/. It was conference from John Hosking  (http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~john) about Visual Wiki. IMO the video is a not very conclusive. May be the most interesting is the mention of thinkbase (see it directly at http://thinkbase.cs.auckland.ac.nz/)

Eric has a goal of building his own Personal Memex from open source components. I fully agree with him on the necessity of graphical capabilities. Alas Kneaver is not open source so I can’t help otherwise Eric would be able to continue his mindmap directly on Kneaver

 Back on the question of open source and how much technology can be projected client side. This is a very complex issue since most path leads to dead ends.

• Anything based on Flash uses a proprietary software not uniformly supported (iPhone). Howver his mind map is running with Flash and freemind browser and it works.
• Anything on java is likely to causes issues as well. Either browser not running java or performance. Thinkbase on top of java is hard to start (even with Chrome). We experienced this also in another project. The graphic was neat, interactive and all but most visitors just didn’t see that an applet was present
• HTML5 canevas has also a caveat: Internet Explorer don’t support it and still it is 70% of the market.
• SVG had limited support via a plugins supported by Adobe. Adobe don’t support it anymore (normal in between they have flash and there are svg viewers based on Flash). 
• No client technology. Just plain jpeg files.

Today we support SVG, jpeg (server side computed, will work everywhere including cell phones) and mm (can be visualized with Freemind viewer). Youcan swicth from one technology to another.

The truth is there are plenty of software for mind mapping (http://www.mind-mapping.org/full-list.php) but a lack of standardization. Most of them operates like powerpoint. You work on a single map at a time and end up wondering where is the best place to store your notes. This is one of the barriers we break. Maps are only a view among others of your thoughts.

Now what is the most exiting part of his blog is the Personal Memex. Taking the idea from Vannevar Bush and to start pick and add building blocks as they appear on the market. That’s very inspirational. http://eric-blue.com/my-projects/personal-memex/

It’s like a shopping list, we are waiting to see what the cook prepared with the ingredients.

• Core – Mediawiki (Content Management System, Wiki)
• Document Management
• MindMap
• Semantic capability
• Search
• Bookmark
• webpage capture
• Timeline browsing, faceted browsing
• Multimedia integration

You can also see the requirements

• Capability to act as a “bit-bucket”. That’s really our KneaverTray and the Kneaver pipeline or Knowledge hose.
• Ability to store “Notes”. Ok again.
• Timeline access. goes back to facet browsing and mental frames.
• Navigation beyond traditional hierarchy. for me it is the same as above.
• Comprehensive search
• Ability to store meta-data. I would add meta-linking.
• Ability to import, export and share. I would share as much as possible or import and subscribe to stay current.
• Integration with mind maps. I would add Powerpoints, texts, databases.

What is missing IMO:

• Automated discovery system that will connect things together. My input is a text, a mindmap, a document but I want the system to automatically understand where it stands.
• Continuation prompts: inductors are a generalization of pending wikilinks. This is a cumulative knowledge database and I want to be able to continue from any pending links, find them and kneave them together.
• I need to be able to turn seamlessly some part of existing knowledge into meta data. For a recipe I need the ingredients, the time it takes for preparation and then a body of text or a video. Now go back to every recipe and check this is available.

Eric Blue’s blog is very active. Since 2004 several posts per month. Real good work and plenty of interesting contents. I wish I have the occasion to return to read it often.

A Blog a Day: APS Consulting Group

Location: http://apsblog.com

This post is starting a new category. In the process of building Knowledge Management Software, methodology is a major issue. I am continuously reading and exploring the web. Trying not to reinvent the wheel. I think that it can be valuable to link to existing blogs that I discovered during this process and say how I feel they contribute to the goal. This could be either in Methology or in Technology.

I discovered this blog while writing my post about Knowledge Capture. So my first page was http://apsblog.com/site/knowledge-capture/knowledge-capture-exploring-the-knowledge . There is a whole category dedicated to Knowledge capture with several list, questions that will help to get to the point quickly. There are so many places investigating the process of collecting knowledge and specifically loose workflow strategies.

I understood this is the view of consultants with underlying expertise in medical environment but most of the advices are reusable in many fields.

I like that along side with Knowledge Capture, Learning is also a category. For me that’s like standing on both legs.  There are some post about Learning 2.0 although it stays somehow theoretical for me. I would like to find some actual stories of experiments on this.

Like many of us interested in Knowledge Management and Technology there is a mention of Douglas Engelbart. This is like a dauting signal for me. Douglas Engelbart was also on the track of the Memex see “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework”, . I am wondering if this the goal, the limit or a dead end.

Yoga and Blogging

Blogging is a primary importance in the view of collecting Knowledge. It can be fully public or totally personal. Jotting down our thoughts is a good and easy way to build a jetty in the ocean of our experiences. It can be reused later and be starting point for further insights. This is the reason Kneaver supports all types of Blogging.

Now, most of my contacts are reluctant to spend time writing. They are also shy and I can understand it if you compare to champions of blogging posting 3 times a day. Same if you a some videos of yogis. This is why I take this occasion to give some hints from a layman of both Yoga and Blogging.

Yoga and blogging have a quite a lot of similarities for me.

• If you practice regularly it is easier to maintain the pace.
• Whenever you stop, it’s hard to restart.

I wonder if I am the only one to face this difficulty.

First these are the reasons I usually stop practicing yoga: Travels, jet-lag, short deadline, illness. Strange, it is about the same reasons that interrupt my flow of posts.

Second Yoga and Blogging require some effort and motivation. Taking time off from our hectic life, staying in a quiet place with between 30 to 60 minutes uninterrupted. This sounds difficult at first view.

Depending on the location I practice Yoga differently. While in India, in Madurai this is every morning 6:30 am, before any breakfast. I rush to the class and stay for an hour.  it is very soft and ends with a long relaxation. Then a shower and at work. When in Berkeley it is weekly only, 6:00 pm. Yoga is usually much more demanding and atlethic. Relaxation is an occasion to pour in your brain various informations.  When in France it is at home at the end of the morning. A video will be my guideline (I use passion of Yoga II mostly). So rule 1 is to practice at a suitable time in the agenda and stick to it. Suitable obviously depends on you, your environment.

Whenever I stop I am apprenhensive to start again. It takes one or two session before my apprension stops. Yoga is quite easy and after just a session you feel the benefits and stiffness disappear. Same for blogging. What shall I write ? who will read ? does it matter ? Not really. The first goal is to start writing something wil come out of it. For me value of blogs is in the long term. Each post is obviously incomplete, the sequence is gives the general view. Blogs allow each of us to express views and iterate on them. Web and linking make it possible to find our opinions even after years.

When after interrupting Yoga or blogging I start over again it is a large satisfaction. Continuity is the key. For the writer but also for readers. I consider that a weekly post is very honorable. It shouldn’t be more than a month. For this I get into the habit of writing down short notes (with Kneaver Tray) on potential subjects and to pick from this store when I am ready to write.

The longer the stop, the harder it is to start again. Alas ! no trick here. Long term motivation for Yoga is to maintain health and vitality. Similarly a long term motivation in Knowledge Management is that it is stimulating to expose our experiences and someone will be able to make profit from it.

Knowledge Vanishing Risk on the Down Slope.

Interesting meeting of the ASP yesterday morning at the SRI in Menlo Park. Speaker was Mark Morgan. Strategic Planning On the Down Slope was really Portfolio management. He described the predictable way most companys will act on uncertains time. He mentionned in particular the first step being to cut of staff, followed by the lost of Tacit Knowledge and the effect being unability to support customers and the difficulty to scale up again when the crisis is over.

I think is is well predicting that the current crisis will increase the urgent need of implementing knowledge retention strategies event in medium size companies. Together with the inevitable aging workforce effect neglecting knowledge collection is a big risk.

Interesting also was the second part of the discussion on impact of culture on merge of businesses. We recalled the merge HP/Apolllo which I contemplated as a customer of Apollo. Strange that in the sketch displayed the market and the customers are totally absent. In my opinion a company cannot be described only from its inside but also by the reflected or proxy image of its exterior like customers, suppliers, partners and competitors.  This is at least how we encourage users of describing their company inside Kneaver.

Return on experience of Young Entrepeneurs

I attended yesterday a panel of young entrepreneurs at Stanford Graduate School of Business. I was surprised at the difference of tone the four of them had. Aaron Patzer, CEO of Mint.com was taking it in very good part. Refreshing, is it the mint effect ? I checked the web site and the blog. I will keep the idea of the private beta.

Final talk with another particpant on the parking lot. Don’t you think they had a given advantage ? like being introduced to the right people. Yes sure you can say it after that there is a common factor. But can forcast success on the existence of this factor ? I don’t think so. Reminds me of another conference in soma last week. A speaker was talking about “the outliers”. I don’t believe so.

Collecting Knowledge from Senior Workers

From my contacts with customers and talks with various organisations it very constant that collecting existing knowledge is a challenging task. To start with, knowledge frequently resides in senior employees’ mind. It doesn’t take long before they realize what is at stake. Getting their expertise and know-how requires to take into account several aspects:

• It must be easy to collect knowledge on the working place. Kneaver tray is precisely done for that. It is non intrusive, fast and allows everyone to take note of what comes in ones mind at once.
• Senior employees are also often low tech. They are ready to contribute but you can’t ask them to suddenly become editors. Audio recording and videos are a great substitutes to writing.
• Triggers: The motivation to enrich the system is often prompt by a call from a customer or a supplier, a question asked by a junior member of the team. Scan this paper, take a screen shot and just ask enough to remember what was the point.
• Be prepared to have some editing work behind. It can’t be the work of the management but a temporary hire versed in writing can be a good help. it’s a triple win strategy. increase the value of contributors, saves management effort and gives the makeshift editor a good opportunity to apply writing skills. However based on experience don’t count on junior members of the team. They have too much to learn, they are already too much involved in execution and they lack perspective.
• Keep track of who contributed, how often and the quality. Be prepared to reward in a way or another any contribution to keep the motivation high. Since this is out of past tasks attribution of employes the beginning will be slow. Falling short of ackowledging contribution will not encourage mor effort. Be also prepared to reward outstanding contibutors with an extra bonus or other incentives.
• Contributing requires to be extroverted. The fact that Kneaver allows contributions to remain private helps contributors to become accustomed to what they did and eventually make it visible. again it is important that he feeback be positive.
• Extracting knowledge, turn it into procedure cannot be a strategy aimed toward the team itself. Obviously have some know how confer some knowledge. The perspective of both losing this advantage and having it turned the other way round is not an attractive promise. Be reassuring about the ultimate, long term goal of the knowledge capture.

Grand Opening

Starting a blog is like moving in a new house. What are the features, how do I do this and that.

So this Blog is aimed at collecting the journal of what is going on at Kneaver and more specifically the technical aspects.

A lot of hesitation before hosting the blog itself out of Kneaver. Kneaver do have a blog feature itself so what ? As the saying “The shoemaker’s kids go barefoot”. let’s say it this way blogging is on task, developping and using our own software another. While blogging it is better to concentrate on the contents.