Using dynamic tags or static categories on your blogs?

Frederick Giasson

Recently I was questioning myself about some uses of tagging systems. Then I found that tags could be interesting to use to handle some specific tasks. Yesterday I found another interesting use of tags.

Some days ago, IonZoft started a new service called TagCloud. What is a tag cloud? There is the tag cloud of my 25 last posts:

FredOnSomething’s tag cloud

The service will analyze your feed and add the most important words, and their frequencies, as tags in a “cloud”. The new service seems to work like a charm.

The simplicity of the system leads me to ask a question: should I use traditional static categories on my blog or should I use a dynamic tags cloud?

I think that the question is interesting. I know that some bloggers was questioning themselves about the real utility of categories. It is true that sometimes I do not know where to classify my posts.

What about using dynamically changing tags cloud instead of static categories? It could be interesting. Your “categories”, the tags in the cloud, will always reflect the thoughts you were having while writing your posts. You do not need to bother yourself with questions like: in which category should I put this post?

No really, I think that this application of tags could be really interesting. It would be even more interesting of blog systems like Radio Userland would implement such a feature.

What do you think of this new service? Do you see other good applications of such a service? What is interesting is that you have nothing to tag, and nothing to do; all the analyzing is done by a Yahoo content analysis web service.

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Using blogs to manage tacit knowledge in enterprises?

Frederick Giasson

There are 2 types of knowledge in enterprises: explicit and tacit. The explicit knowledge is easily explained, documented and verbalized. This type of knowledge is easily handled by today knowledge management systems.

However, what is a tacit knowledge? This type of knowledge is much more subtle and hard to define, grab and communicate. We can call it the savoir-faire, the know-how, of employees. Normally, the organizations do not know the presence of, or take care of, this knowledge before that a worker possessing a lot of tacit knowledge stops working for them.

The goal of an organization will be to try to identify, to collect, to classify, to verbalize and to diffuse all the tacit knowledge present in the enterprise.

These personal experiences, that create the tacit knowledge, are hard to grab. How could we try to diffuse them, and crystallize them into the organization, if we have difficulties to define them?

The problematic of enterprises is to:

  • Find the knowledge
  • Preserve it
  • Valorize it
  • Actualize it
  • Manage it

The real problem is not to perform these tasks on explicit knowledge, but on the tacit knowledge. How could we find, preserve, valorize, actualize and manage the personal experiences of our workers? How to handle this precise experience, that savoir-faire, which makes the tacit knowledge so critical for our enterprise?

A possible answer: Blogs

I will take a small development team of 5 or 10 people to do my demonstration.

A way to try to crystallize the tacit knowledge is to diffuse it into the enterprise. The problem is that tacit knowledge is not really the knowledge that you will find on the knowledge base of the MSDN library. The tacit knowledge, as we described it, is composing of personal experiences. However, personal experiences could be anything: past working experiences, scholar experiences, personal experiences, etc.

Then, how could we take on this type knowledge? Is there a way?

I think so. A solution would be to implement a blogging philosophy into the working group. Take into account that there are 2 or 3 old school developers into the development team with 7 or 8 fresh graduated university students. The 2 or 3 old schools developers have experience, savoir-faire, and this is that knowledge we need to transmit to the 7 or 8 others.

The best way to transmit the tacit knowledge is probably by informal interactions. It is exactly what is behind the blogging philosophy: a formal interaction between a blogger and his readers. So, think about it. You would give 2 or 3 paid hours to your employees to blog into the internal blog system of the enterprise. You tell them: wrote what you want. Wrote about your past experiences, wrote about your family, wrote about the way you resolve problems, wrote about anything.

These informal communications will give critical information to the enterprise. First of all, the old school developers will diffuse their tacit knowledge to the fresh university graduated students; our first goal is then reached, or at worse partially solved. In addition, the managers will know how their employees think and are. It will help them to manage them more effectively and find if something goes wrong with one of them or a whole working team. Depending on the blogging system they will use, they will be able to find knowledge, preserve it, valorize it, actualize it and manage it.

It is how I think that blogs could help enterprises to grab and diffuse their tacit knowledge: by implementing the blogging philosophy into their enterprise, into their working teams.

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The Blogsphere is becoming a huge distributed discussion forum

Frederick Giasson

What makes a blog a communication tool? It is the fact that blogs are published over the Internet. However, what makes blogs a possible communication tool between two people? It is the posts aggregator and search engines like Technorati.

How it works? Technorati give you the possibility to create a feed where all items are the blogs’ posts that link back to a specific URL. By example, here is the feed created by Technorati for the URL http://radio.weblogs.com/0140770/. Then, when someone on the blogsphere is blogging about something I wrote, and link back to my blog, I am immediately notified.

Sometimes, bloggers answer to a question or to a specific post by posting a post on their own blog. The only way to be notified that someone is talking about something you wrote is by using such services. It is also why linking is so important in blog posts: it enables people to follow discussions.

I think that eventually we will be able to talk about the Blogsphere as a: distributed discussion forums.

  • The forums. The forums would be the Blogsphere in itself.
  • A forum. A forum would be composed of the blogs sharing the same topic.
  • The topic. The forum’s topic would be the blog subjects.
  • The threads. The threads would be the bloggers’ posts.
  • The messages. The messages would be the comments wrote by the readers.

The whole Blogsphere is slowly developing itself as this. I can only hope that it will continue in this direction. We now have the technologies to archive this goal and to build such a network.

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My comments and observations of the robotic world for the next 4 weeks

Frederick Giasson

In the next month I will rediscover one of my old loves: robotics. I will help Darren Rowse with his blog about robotics breaking news. He asked to his readers if some could help him to take care of some of his blogs for his 4 weeks vacation. When I saw the robotics blog, I was not able to resist the temptation to help him with this one.

So, I will do what Darren was doing: posting breaking news on robotics. However I am not a great fan of copy/pasting breaking news on a blog so it is why I will add my personal touch to each of these pieces of news I found. I will add my comments and observations on each post I will publish in the next 4 weeks. I hope his readers, and mines, will enjoy reading the pieces of news and my comments and observation.

I am not the alone guest blogger, Andy Merette is also on the team.

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What is the most important: a high traffic or high number of subscribed feed readers?

Frederick Giasson

How should we consider if a blog is a success: by analyzing his incoming traffic or by his subscribed feed readers? The traffic is defined by the number of unique visitors or page views per day. On the other hand, the number of subscribed feed readers is defined by the number of unique reader who asks to read the content of the blog’s feed each day.

Someone could say that they are same. The more you got traffic, the more people subscribe to the feed. In most cases, I think that this reasoning is good. However, what if the blogger is an ace when come the time to increase his search engine ranking but that his content is not so interesting? There is the difference when come the time to analyze the meaning the two numbers. The meaning of the two numbers is independent and tells the blogger two different things.

What is the most important: a high traffic or a high number of subscribed feed readers? It is definitely the high number of subscribed feed readers. This number tells me that I have 103 people that open their computers every day and check if I said something interesting that day. They have an interest in my writings. It makes all the difference in the world.

The FredOnSomething blog do not score high in traffic. To tell the truth, I have approximately 30% more subscribed feed readers than unique visitors every day.

So, I would like to take this time to thank you all of you for your support. I reached the symbolic number of 100 subscribed readers yesterday and it is the reason why I wrote this post today. I hope you always enjoy reading it and that I will be able to keep you as a reader in the next months/years.

I would have a question to ask to my readers. Why are you reading this blog considering the not so good English writing? What make you keep reading it?

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