Inspiration is a bitch

Frederick Giasson

It comes and goes. I cannot grab it: it is like a ghost. My mind is like a haunted house where ghost of inspiration lives. Sometime you see it, but when you hunt it you never found it.

The last time I had such a lack of inspiration it was when I got sick. Last week-end I had a total lack of inspiration because all my time had been invested in a single project last week. It drained all my inspiration… and my will.

You are thinking: yeah, but he blogged a lot last week, did not he? Yeah, I do, but I emptied my ideas sheet. There is the problem. I grabbed and stroke all the ideas on it without adding new ones. It is why I say that the ghost is currently hiding somewhere. I need to stimulate my inspiration; I need to hunt and find that ghost. I am a ghost buster, am I not?

It is what I am doing with now; I hunt it by writing these sentences. It is a trick. Sometimes it works, other times it do not… any idea of how I could re-populate that sheet?

PS: I also had a lack of inspiration for my title: is it appropriate? I mean, I took the first thing that comes up in my mind and I wrote it… it was that one.

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Why do people read A-List bloggers?

Frederick Giasson

Adam came up with a really interesting post about some A-List bloggers (Robert Scoble / Scobleizer, Dave Winer / Scripting.com and Steve Rubel / Micro Persuasion). He analyzed the content of their publications and tried to understand why people are reading them. This is not the first analyze done on the subject but it is an interesting one.

The main question is: “Why do people read these guys?”

“In fact I’d say they’re acting more like radio DJ’s (playing attractive mixes of someone else’s original content), rather than artists.”

“but for the most part, the A-listers in my industry are simple, useful link brokers”

If you take a look at his graphs, you can say that he could is right. However, I think that their success is a little more than this.

Why these guys become influent on the Blogsphere? I think that they are much more than just link brokers. I will give you a clue on why they are a little more than DJ’s with something that Adam said in his post:

“I do check in with these rockstar blogs occasionally and have even met several of them in person”

They are social; they easily connect with people; they have a whole lot of contacts. The result is that they have daily breaking news to broadcast and they take the time to comment and describe how they view them. Another factor is that when they write their comments on something, they do it in few lines: it gives the time to people to read them.

Adam pointed out another factor that I think is really important: they are passionate. This passion is transmitted by their writings. This passion is contagious and it is a factor why they easily connect with other people.

In conclusion, they are passionate people that master the art of socialization. I think that it is enough to try to explain why they can influence the way people see the Blogsphere and the Internet. I do not think that this is a question of blogging, but much more a question of social and human skills.

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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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