The RSS stock exchange

Things just got more transparent in Radiospace. Rankings were the motivation for this feature. But as I mentioned on OReillyNet, transparency as a constitutional value of Radiospace has lots of interesting ramifications. For example, direct one-click access to RSS sources -- a feature also available, in a different way, here on my own homepage -- is suddenly a lot more interesting. It used to be that RSS aggregators were few. Now they are many -- because every copy of Radio is one. The people running these aggregators can now start to trade channels as we used to trade links.

The benefits of this new RSS fluidity, which kicks things up a level of abstraction, seem obvious to me, and will seem obvious to anyone who finds there way here to read this. But those benefits will not be obvious to most people. Casual use of ordinary links is still not nearly as prevalent in routine business and personal communication as it ought to be. The kind of meta-linking possible with channel exchange will seem even more exotic. The challenge -- and opportunity -- is to make all this as easy and natural as most people think email is.

[Jon's Radio]

Spot on assessment. One of the general challenges as we begin developing meaningful toolsets for knowledge work (and that is what we are doing here) will be helping people realize that they are knowledge workers and that these tools will be a necessary component of all knowledge work jobs.

The challenge is twofold. One, education and most jobs are still steeped in industrial economy thinking. Which means the system is still stuck on the assumption that jobs are a kind of standardized, interchangeable part. Two, the hard part of the solution is the need to change levels of abstraction. Abstract thinking is not something looked on with enthusiasm in most organizations. And, it is not a skill that we know how to develop systematically.

I have a hypothesis that one of the reasons for the relative success of those with technology backgrounds is that the core skill honed in developing technology is the capacity for abstract thinking.

8:49:27 PM •  • comment  

The Pepys Project

"The purpose of this is to collect URL's for web logs, diaries, and journals from around the world, indexed by geographical area and then country. I have excluded places which are territories of larger nations, so in the unlikely event you live on Christmas Island, you would add your URL to Australia's listings." [via Daypop Top 40]

This is a great idea, but what we really need is subject access to blogs. I found this out first-hand when I was putting together my presentations last week. I wanted to show personal, corporate, newspaper, and different types of library blogs. I had a heck of a time trying to find what I wanted. Again, you can tell that librarians were not involved in the development cycle of blogging software. I mean, if we're going to start using blogging for knowledge management and information dissemination (along with everything else we're already using it for), then we're going to need better access to the content.

[The Shifted Librarian]

It's a curious thing, and a disappointing one, to realize how little input librarians have had in the design of several generations of putative information management tools. Here we have the only field that's explicitly dedicated to linking information and users and we ignore them. Maybe Jenny will help change that.

As an aside to our friends in the media who are now trying to shackle librarians in their quest to put a meter on every scrap of "content" in the universe. I started my bibliomania courtesy of the public library in Racine, Wisconsin in the early 60s. I had to visit a couple of times a week because I could only check out 4 books at a time. Since then I've graduated to bookstores and their electronic brethern. Today my personal library is over 3,000 volumes and I've probably donated nearly that many titles back to my old high school library and elsewhere. While my CD and video collection isn't quite in that category, I've helped contribute to a few executive bonuses there as well. Maybe if more of those executives actually enjoyed their own products, we wouldn't have so much stupidity around trying to put a lock on everything. Didn't we go through this all once with software copy protection long before napster? Wasn't anybody in the industry paying attention?

8:11:00 PM •  • comment