Twitter Revisited

A while back I discussed why I don't use Twitter. But despite my disclaimers, my curiosity about the service was unabated. Finally, after yet another friend asked for my Twitter ID, I decided to give it another try.

This time I made a concerted effort to use Twitter. By that I mean there is no driving need to use it, but it might provide benefits to my life and/or work. And there was no way to know without giving it a try.

I conscientiously used Twitter for two months. This took more effort than I would have liked. I had to remind myself to tweet. Occasionally it seemed like I was making things up to post (usually trivia about what I was doing -- cleaning the basement, making dinner, etc). But more often than not, there was something on my mind that seemed it might be remotely interesting to others. And at times I became quite voluble, as thinking and twittering became almost one and the same activity.

Let me just say Twitter is useless without friends -- and I have to thank a number of people, in particular Brian Halligan and John Tropea, for making my Twitter experience successful and enjoyable. In many ways, the two months flew by. They taught me a tremendous amount about what is interesting and what is not on Twitter.

For example, I discovered (as I had expected) that I do not like hearing the minutiae of people's personal lives: what pastry they are eating, how long they had to wait in line at the bank, what they are drinking, where they are drinking, how drunk they are, or who they are making out with while doing it.

On the other hand, it is quite exhilarating to see the breadth and depth of ideas people are pursuing within my fields of interest. A number of times I became engaged in conversations with fellow practitioners around the world re: the pros and cons of various KM concepts or methodologies, poetry, etc.

Finally, the open conversations in Twitter have introduced me to some surprising new members of a constantly expanding circle of friends and associates in the topics that interest me (and some I had not expected to pursue).

The world doesn't need yet another "why/how to use Twitter" blog entry. So I will refrain from that activity. (I think Mr. Tweet's 5 Stages of Twitter Acceptance is perhaps the best and most succinct of that species.) But I have noticed a few commonalities that I find interesting.

The most obvious is the personal/professional tweets dichotomy. There have been many posts arguing against flooding your twitter feed with too much personal trivia (even Tim O'Reilly mentions it as a cause for early pessimism about Twitter). However, this is not a black and white issue. For some people that is exactly what Twitter is for: a personal stage in an ever-expanding virtual social gathering. So it is a matter of personal opinion whether overtly private information is objectionable in tweets or not.

Also, it is not necessarily just a question of personal vs. professional. There were a number of times I found someone's professional tweets trite and almost intrusive. Too many "I'm at the office", "In a meeting with an important client", or "my PC is rebooting" type of tweets can be as uninteresting as what someone is having for lunch. So the personal/professional dichotomy might actually be more accurately a temporal/ideological split.

It is also not black and white because not all temporal tweets are annoying. In fact, I find that the people I am most interested in following tend to tweet a mix of ideas, actions, and questions. There are multiple layers: personal vs. professional, ideas vs. actions, statements vs. questions, theory vs. practice, proposal vs. proclamation... The twitterverse begins to look like one of those medical anatomy diagrams covered in transparencies -- each with its own brightly colored orgains, veins, muscles etc -- you uncover one at a time to understand the different ways in which the body works.

The twitter interface asks "What are you doing?" (It is the naive simplicity and flexibility of that question that imparts much of Twitter's power, allure, and mystery.) But that's not really the question. Just like someone asking "what's up?" at a party, the question is more of an opening for you to use as you see fit than a specific request. A party where everyone is listening and the conversations go on 24 hours a day.

When Memes become Meaningless

I was reading the magazine InformationWeek the other day when I came across the following statement:

"Microsoft's SharePoint is the T. rex of collaboration products: big, fiercely competitive, and standing atop the social computing food chain..."

--Andrew Conry-Murray Startups Use SaaS To Take On SharePoint

SharePoint certainly shows signs of being the 800 pound gorilla. And Microsoft is definitely big and fiercely competitive. But what struck me most is the assertion that SharePoint is "sitting atop the social computing food chain".

The problem is that if SharePoint is considered "social computing", then the term no longer has any meaning. Sure, SharePoint wants to be seen as web 2.0-ish. It even mimics wiki and blog functionality (within its own secured, highly structured environment). It may even be top of the heap of the content management/collaboration/intranet/you-name-it-latest-corporate-fad thingies. But SharePoint is anything but social computing.

It's not SharePoint's fault. SharePoint has significant value for corporate customers and serves its specific audience quite well. The problem is that the term "social computing" is being used so broadly it, in effect, has no meaning.

The Wikipedia entry for social computing acknowledges this situation and defines the term in both a "weaker sense " and a "stronger sense". But in its weaker sense, the term encompasses many technologies -- such as email -- that few of the advocates of web 2.0 would recognize as part of the recent social computing phenomenon.

As they spread, memes such as "social computing" and "web 2.0" take on a life of their own. That's what makes them memes. However, on their viral journey from person to person they are often reinterpreted or distorted to make them match each individual's idea of what they want them to mean, rather than what they were originally intended for. A sort of global game of telephone.

The consequence is that as a meme becomes more popular, its meaning tends to be diluted. Of course, if that were the only effect, all memes would eventually blur beyond recognition, which is not what happens. Why not? I believe a large part of the resilience of memes is dependent on the effort put in on their behalf by their advocates, authors, and enthusiasts.

When there is an obvious and recognized author of a meme -- such as Tim O'Reilly and "web 2.0" -- there is a clear source for authoritative definition. Tim's company started it, he defined it, he continues to maintain it. People try redefining it or stretching it, but the meaning can be traced back to an authoritative source which others can reference.

Other memes are not so lucky and do not have a specific moment of conception. Agile software development methodologies are an example. Although there is an agile manifesto, the term itself has no single author and has been used to identify a number of different methodologies. Advocates of one or another of these methodologies argue for or against others being more or less faithful to the tenets of agility, causing some amount of confusion to those outside the fray.

Other memes fall in the middle ground; not having a single starting point, but having well-known advocates who continue to promote the refinement and correct usage of the term. A case in point is folksonomy, which came into being in the course of an online discussion. Many people misappropriate the term to describe things they are doing, but Thomas Vander Wal continues to argue for a more precise definition in his blog, writings, and on Wikipedia. This effort has an effect: the term tends to remain true to its original roots.

However, the effort is somewhat of a thankless task. People like Thomas, for all their valiant efforts, are sometimes seen as pushy or just plain cranky for their adamant stance. However, without it, the term (and possibility the activity itself) would suffer a significant drain on its effectiveness.

So all is not lost for "social computing". Although there is no single advocate that supports it, many in the web 2.0 world and burgeoning social software industry continue to push of a "stricter" interpretation. And fortunately the success of sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Songza etc help maintain a focus on that stricter definition.

Internetless

The week before Christmas, the New England area suffered severe ice storms. Many regions, including my own, lost power. Our neighborhood was blacked out for approximately a day and a half.

Unfortunately, although power was restored to our neighbors, falling branches had ripped the service lines off the side of our house, including power, cable, and phone. Because of the severity of the storm and the amount of damage, services were not restored to our house for eight days.

I am not complaining. In fact, we were amazed to wake up eight days later and find the line crew working on our house during a raging snow storm at 4:30 in the morning. Besides, since we had experienced two extended outages previously, we had bought a generator. So we had enough power to maintain heat, hot water, and lights in a few rooms. We were better off than many.

What was new was the loss of cable, which took with it our phone, TV, and internet connectivity. In previous outages we had lost power, but the phone and internet were available as long as the modem was up.

But even with a generator, no line to the house meant no cable. So I was without phone or internet for eight days.

I had plenty to keep me busy during the blackout. But I expected -- since I have been working with computers for almost 30 years and on the web for the last 10 almost 24 hours a day-- that I would miss the internet. Funny thing was, I didn't.

In fact, since power and cable have been restored, I have only returned occasionally to some blogs and web sites I read religiously pre-blackout. I didn't miss the news, I didn't miss the email and IM's from friends. Well, perhaps a little bit, but not nearly as much as I thought I would.

What I did find myself wanting back was my PC. Each time I walked into the office, I instinctively moved the mouse or pressed the shift key to switch off the power saver and bring the screen back to life. For the first day or two, I was surprised and disappointed when it didn't light up. By the third day, I instinctively reached for them, but stopped myself, realizing the power was off.

It wasn't the content I was missing. I could easily catch up with that later if I wanted to. (I didn't, in many cases.) What I missed was the physical companionship that my computer provides me.

It turns out my computer and keyboard have become a physical manifestation of the many virtual relationships I have with friends and colleagues. Some who I have never met; some who live only a few miles away from me; some who I only know through what they post to their blogs or websites but who I still consider compatriots in a common endeavor.

I would have happily sat in front of a blank screen in the dark. No browser, not email. Just a desktop. Why? What I was nostalgic for was the being connected. The people I knew and the ability to interact, whether I did or not. I didn't miss what they said or posted, because in almost all cases, the relationships are serendipitous. There is no telling in advance what will be said, shared, discussed. But it is the ability to share that my computer represents.

It is the sharing, not the having shared. It is the responding, not the accumulation of responses. It turns out the immediacy you experience in face-to-face interactions also happens online, but in an asynchronous fashion. Blog entries from a year ago are not old -- they are brand new when you encounter them. So your experience of the social network is a constant state of discovery, with each user's experience being unique based on the path they choose, links friends recommend, interests they pursue, etc.

Yes, it is the internet that enables these interactions. But what took me by surprise is that the visceral response is to the PC, the physical endpoint I speak through, the window I see through.

So I didn't miss the internet or the content the internet provides, I missed what the internet enabled and the people I have come to experience it with and who have become my friends.

KM Starts at Home

Yesterday, while discussing a project with a friend and colleague, I made the statement "KM starts at home." I didn't mean that literally, but figuratively.

In other words, don't go designing new knowledge management programs without first seeing what people are already doing. The fact is, we all practice KM to a certain extent without any outward influence. We talk to friends, we call people we know, we join groups, follow blogs, read magazines, etc.

There is always an existing knowledge ecosystem within any environment. And the informal ecosystem is often larger and more diverse than the official one. It is important to understand that ecology before introducing new elements for several reasons:

• If the existing ecosystem is successful, you don't want to accidentally break it.
• Even if it is not tremendously efficient, people are using it and so if you introduce a competing system you will have a serious uphill battle for adoption.
• If it is not effective, it is a good first target for your initial KM efforts.

This is particularly true for collaboration and communities of practice. If people within the company have established informal communities either locally or outside the company, they may be a good target for pilot communities since they already know the benefits and have a defined group. But it needs to be done with their cooperation to avoid bad blood. On the other hand, if they are running efficiently, you might simply want to "ordain" them as a CoP and move on to less effective parts of the organization.

One of the most overlooked aspects of the knowledge ecosystem in many companies is the outside connections employees establish. This is even more true in the era of social computing, blogs and wikis, etc. There is tremendous potential for bringing in new ideas through these interpersonal, inter-company networks. You don't want to damage these connections where they are effective, but they are often not sufficient by themselves to fully leverage this knowledge to the company's advantage. (This may seem like a terribly selfish corporate point of view. But the fact is an employee who follows lots of blogs but never shares this information internally is often doing neither themselves nor the company much good.)

Identifying these networks and helping connect like-minded individuals internally is often more effective and far less expensive (in terms of time and energy) than trying to stimulate a CoP from scratch.

A Month of Poems (Part 3)

[This is part 3 of a month of poems as described in the preface]

"There's no Place to Sleep in this Bed, Tanguy" by Charles Henri Ford
from Out of the Labyrinth, City Lights 1991
[Saturday, Nov. 1st]

Ford is one of the few (only two?) American surrealists in the true French tradition. (It is odd to speak of Surrealism and tradition in the same breath. There are so many variants, but the French progenitors form a unique aesthetic around which others invent and improvise.)

Anyway, Ford follows the French style of Breton, Peret and others, resulting in the same thrill of inventiveness for the reader. However, his poems also contain a persistent undercurrent of anger and cruelty. It shows through in the language and the images ("lasso of love... wires are cut... menacing... the painted trigger... torture-machines... whose quarry is fear... set new traps..."). And this is one of the less violent poems.

Where at first this sense of anger is part of the excitement of the poems, over time you realize the anger is undirected and unmitigated, poisoning the poems and leaving the reader uncomfortable -- not at the "newness" of the style but at the lack of control or self-awareness of the persona behind them.

"3:59" by Ruth Forman
from We Are the Young Magicians, Beacon Press 1993
[Sunday, Nov. 2nd]

I like this book. I like these poems. I know I shouldn't. I can name the reasons why I shouldn't: the story lines are heavy-handed, over-simplistic, the self-conscious writing in dialect -- a pet peeve of mine -- ("n i could sure use some a them lil white pills"), the unnecessary use of lowercase, the predictable and sometimes trite endings... But despite all that, I still like them. There is a driving beat to the lines that keeps them moving to the end and as predictable and hammy as they are, Forman carries them off with style and you kind of like her for the audacity of it all.

"Promesse" by André Fenaud
from Poètes d'Aujourd'hui 37 André Fenaud, Pierre Seghers [year unknown]
[Monday, Nov. 3rd]

"When you give me your hand it is your entire being" (translated). Only a French poet can get away with a line like that. In the hands of an American writer, it would seem like pretension. We know it's not true, as much as we may wish it were. And because of that knowledge, we refrain from saying it. We work towards the truth, we dance around it in elaborate and -- in their own right -- moving ways. (See John Ashbury's "Some Trees", W.C.Williams' "Dance Russe", or Roethke's "I Knew a Woman")

But the French defy all logic and, despite all proof to the contrary, make such grand statements with pure, unadulterated conviction. And get away with it besides.

"Some Comfort" by Martha Fritz
from If the River's This High All Summer, Pym-Randall 1974
[Tuesday, Nov. 4th]

This is a beautiful book. It is one of only two or three I own where you wonder what happened? Why the poet published one book and disappeared? Because Fritz is an exquisite writer with a gorgeous sense of language. The images suspend you in air as you soak them in ("Blossoms are words in the long-winded streets"). There are few first books as beautiful or as fully formed as this. There are the occasional poems where her images get caught up in themselves and leave the reader stranded. (Thinking, what exactly does that mean?) But in general there is nothing here but the joy of language and intense emotional discovery.

"The Wood-Pile" by Robert Frost
from The Poetry of Robert Frost (Collected Poems), Holt, Rinehart & Winston 1969
[Wednesday, Nov. 5th]

I was never a big fan of Robert Frost. I thought of him as too artfully rustic, too grade school English class. But then my son asked me to read him some of Frost's poems, so I was forced to find poems that I would be willing to read. It was far less difficult than I expected.

Frost is intentionally rustic. He is also overtly philosophical, openly sentimental, while at the same time grumpily misanthropic. But he also has a tremendous sense of native speech (which I may understand better now having lived in New England for a number of years) which makes the rhythm and rhyme of his poems integral to their narrator's sensibility.

I like Robert Frost now. Not everything, but many poems that were ruined by grade school teachers have now been reclaimed and many "lesser" poems (lesser only because they are more complex, less "ta da!" like or easy to stereotype) newly discovered.

"Everyone Knows the World is Ending" by Alice Fulton
from Palladium, University of Illinois Press 1986
[Thursday, Nov. 6th]

Fulton is a master of her craft. She writes finely-honed poems filled with incredible language, an expansive vocabulary of images. ("Each thought a focused mote in the apocalypse's iridescent fizz.") The only danger is that her writing is so inventive, it can overpower the poem itself. The intense focus on the language can distract the reader, making the subject of the poem into more of a pantomime rather the driving force, to the poem's detriment.

"Haunted Importantly" by Jack Gilbert
from The Great Fires, Knopf 1994
[Friday, Nov. 7th]

Jack Gilbert is a serious poet. A very serious poet. Too serious for some... He takes his poems seriously and he takes his subjects seriously.

What's surprising is that his subject comes first. He crafts his poems and his language with precision. And the reward is lines that are close to perfect. For example: "The music that thinking is". For almost any other poet, arriving at this line would be sufficient, it would be an appropriate close to the poem. But Gilbert wasn't done with his subject and so he needed more: "He wanted to know what he heard, not to get closer." It takes the reader by surprise. It isn't as pure or as perfect a line as the previous one. But he needed to say it. It is this private sense of direction that gives his poems a unique kind of atonality you don't find in other American poets.

"America" by Allen Ginsberg
from Howl and Other Poems, City Lights 1969
[Saturday, Nov. 8th]

Rereading "Howl" and "America" I'm reminded of how talented Ginsberg really was. Yes, there's a lot of broggadocio and chest thumping, but there's a lot of talent too. So why don't I read him more often?

It's related to why I don't listen to the Beatles more often as well. It's not that it's old or out-dated, it's not. But it is kind of like driving a car that is stuck in one gear. It's not all the same; you can drive it fast or you can drive it slow. But its still only got one gear. Ginsberg's got his points, and he makes them one way. Loud (like "Howl") or quiet (like "In back of the real"), the point comes out the same.

"Killing My Pen-Pal" by Loren Goodman
from Famous Americans, Yale University Press 2003
[Sunday, Nov 9th]

This is an interesting collection of poems, ranging from single line poems to poems that look like they were copied directly out of TV Guide. More importantly, Goodman plays with what we think poems are about. Many of these poems are like overheard dialogs -- fragmented, partial, still under construction. ("I plan an escape as I would plan / to take off my clothes. / That is, there isn't much planning / I just undress...")

It is exciting to see art being stretched like this, testing the edges of what makes a poem a poem. Of course, the fear is that you are just being conned. (e.g. Is this Andy Warhol the artist, or Andy Warhol the commercial shill?) The fact is it is hard to tell.

Even time can't differentiate in all cases. The artists themselves sometimes get caught in their own inventions. I am thinking here of people like e.e. cummings and Jackson Pollack. Fame and invention are not necessarily friends

"Somewhere a garage door goes down..." by Noah Eli Gordon
from Novel Pictorial Noise, Harper Perennial 2007
[Monday, Nov 10th]

It's not surprising that Gordon's book was picked for the National Poetry Series by John Ashbery, because in many ways it reads like Ashbery's writing in prose. The linguistic gymnastics, the element of surprise, the circling, feints, and verbal shadowboxing. ("Clouds gather, disperse. Let this suffice as a working formula for working a formula...")

I haven't read the whole book, and it is hard to tell whether it is more of a book of individual poems or a single poem that is divided into chunks. But reading it as individual poems demonstrates the flaws in Ashbery's and Gordon's style. For all the amazing verbal play, there is a lack of substance, a resolute avoidance of subject matter.

I could be wrong. Read as a book rather than as a separate poems, a subject may emerge (as in Ashbery's best book, the Double Dream of Spring). As individual poems you can enjoy the playfulness. But it begins to wear thin after a while without something to hold it together. And based on current reading, I don't see a meaningful thread evolving yet.

"If I Could Wear the Pain" by Janet Grey
from Flaming Tail Out of the Ground Near Your Farm, Illuminati 1987
[Tuesday, Nov 11th]

A friend recommended this book to me a number of years ago. I have read it through a couple of times and I pick it up every now and then. It is a strong piece of work. Gray's poems pack a punch and her writing is close, personal, and direct. ("If I could wear the pain / like perfume, for example [...] if the source of it / could become unimportant, / or simply interesting -- the stories I could tell...")

This is a good book to read whenever you've read too much mediocre poetry or when your head gets clouded by the murky stuff you find in literary mags. When you begin to doubt the effectiveness of poetry or its social relevance, her poems will ground you quickly in what poetry is capable of.

"Of" by Deborah Greger
from And, Princeton University Press 1985
[Wednesday, Nov 12th]

Boy, I must spend a lot of time in the "G" section of the local book store because I just noticed a pretty impressive lineup of poets coming up: Debora Greger, Linda Gregerson, Linda Gregg... These three are all excellent poets. Not the same in any way, but all what you might call masters of their craft: finely honed poems of imagery and emotion.

Of the three Greger is perhaps the most overt with her craft, her manipulation of language. She is also my favorite of the three. Which is somewhat strange since she is also the most overtly "poetic". You always feel the hand of the poet in her writing. ("a glossy centerfold dissolves into / modesty -- black, cyan sequestered / under magenta's blush, and yellow / unmixing the muddied glow...")

Normally, this would disturb me. But in Greger's case, she not only shows off her control of language, she uses it deftly and with surprising variety. She writes personal poems, historical poems, dream poems, reimaginings of fairy tales... Each with the same deft touch.

"Ship" by Linda Gregerson
from Fire in the Conservatory, Dragon Gate 1982
[Thursday, Nov 13th]

Gregerson may be the most emotional of the three poets, also the least controlled. Her poems ooze feeling. Unfortunately, sometimes that sensation is hard to nail down and therefore hard for the reader to share. ("Our hope's a kind of geography: each place it lands, a city like ours springs up. Your daughter's dowry hangs by a bolt of silk in the hull. Another bolt shortened to stitch up the corpse.") This sort of hop, skip, and jump of imagery is emblematic of her work. At its best, it's a fascinating and intriguing collage of images and emotions. At lesser moments, it is a murky jumble of pictures as if the poem slipped out of the poet's grasp at a critical moment.

"Singing Enough to Feel the Rain" by Linda Gregg
from The Sacraments of Desire, Graywolf 1991
[Friday, Nov 14th]

Gregg is also emotional. But in her case, the emotion is as finely honed as the poems themselves. She is also perhaps the most personal poet of the three. Her poems slip seamlessly between the eternal and the immediate, the global and the intimate. ("I am alone writing as quickly as I can, dulled by being awake at four in the morning. Between the past and the future, without a life, writing on the line I walk between death and youth, between having and loss.")

The poems here never escape her grasp. They do, at times, cleave so closely to her personal life (or that of her persona) that they are hard to decipher for an outsider. But they are always under control. And even if the details are confusing (e.g. "I am far from there in a hurry not to miss the joining" There where? Joining what?) the poems' momentum usually carries you over these gaps.

"Painkillers" by Thom Gunn
from Collected Poems, Farrar Straus & Giroux 1994
[Saturday, Nov 15th]

For those who don't know, I was born in England. When I was six my family moved to the US, which is where I grew up. As is often the case in situations like this, I had a fascination with my "homeland" and when I got interested in poetry in college, I read both American poets and contemporary English poets. This was unfortunate because I didn't like most of the English writers I encountered, including Thom Gunn. (I won't go into it here, but in general I find modern English poets are -- for all their rebelliousness -- still slaves to their literary past far more than American writers.)

So why do I have this book? I suspect I thought I'd give Gunn another try. But I haven't got very far with it. The fact is, I don't think these poems are written for me. There is too much tell and not enough show. This might be a peculiarly American aesthetic. If so, so be it. Besides, for all the talking, I find the ideas in these poems trite. ("What was the pain / he needed to kill / if not the ultimate pain / of feeling no pain?") Just not my kind of thing.

"Nervous Collapse" by Paul Hannigan
from Holland and the Netherlands, Pym-Randall 1970
[Sunday, Nov 16th]

Hannigan is perhaps the most underrated, unread American poet of the past 50 years. His poems are a perfect mix of reality, absurdity, and wonder. I have been meaning to write about him at more length, but find it hard to be objective -- I am that fond of his work.

I was sorry to hear recently that Hannigan died in 2006. He left a relatively small body of work: a handful of books and a smattering of poems in magazines. I can only hope someone puts the effort into organizing a volume of collected poems. It would be one of the best books you've ever read.

Currently, his books are all out of print. But they are well worth the effort and cost needed to find them. Holland and the Netherlands is my favorite. A small, almost perfect volume. I'll close by quoting the poem of the day, just to give a taste for those who have never encountered Hannigan's work before:

Nervous Collapse

All the nerves collapse
All the body does a little

Nerveless dance. This is not so bad.
This is not bad at all.

In comparison to the Eiffel Tower
This is wonderful

"#20 (The mushrooms helped again...)" by Jim Harrison
from Letters to Yesenin, Sumac Press 1973
[Monday, Nov 18th]

Harrison is a great antidote to too many "literary" poems. Unfortunately, he is well aware of this and sometimes plays it to the hilt. He is not as anti-literary as he puts on. Still, his writing is refreshingly brash and straightforward.

"The star king makes cut after cut..." by Bob Heman
from 12 Prose Poems, Clown War Press 1976
[Tuesday, Nov 17th]

These prose poems are in the late American surrealist mode, in the style of James Tate, Russell Edson, etc. And Heman has studied his form. These poems are well structured and each comes to a tidy conclusion. But ultimately, there is no real meaning here and far too much imagery used simply for the shock value (homosexuality, incest, cutting flesh, etc.) That, plus the fact that the language used is just not interesting, makes this a pretty dismal book.

[Personal business interrupted my reading this month, so I will finish the post here. --Andrew]

I've Been Tagged

John Tropea was kind enough to mention me in his blog, tagging me with the question: what does blogging do for me? (Previously, How do I decide what to blog about?)

The latter is an easy question for me: I write about only five things. Or rather, I tag only five subjects -- knowledge management, information architecture, technology, video games and poetry. That is a fairly strict taxonomy, but until further notice those are the only subjects I feel compelled and knowledgeable enough about to blog. Anything else I discuss either goes untagged or is tangentially related to one of those five topics (like this entry is to KM).

The other question -- what does blogging do for me -- is slightly more complex. When I started, my first blog entry described what I expected to get out of it. I blog -- like many other people, I suspect -- as a way of clarifying my own ideas. The physical activity of writing things down forces me to verify those thoughts. Some ideas that sound good bouncing loosely around in my head can seem perfectly stupid or unsupportable when written down.

There were other incentives as well:

• Establish a reputation as a reasonably well-informed thinker about the topics in question
• Connect with fellow professionals (like John) and share ideas
• Establish a web presence for myself that is more personal and informative than a LinkedIn/MySpace/Facebook profile

However, these are all secondary goals, since there are quicker and more effective methods for achieving each of these. But the question was what does blogging do for me, not what do I think it will do for me. It turns out that my original concept has proven true. The blog has been very beneficial in helping me flesh out ideas and theories that I have had floating around for quite some time. It also spawns new ideas -- and hence new entries -- as I follow a train of thought and compare it to my fellow bloggers.

One consequence is that my blog is somewhat different than others. While others write quickly to jot their ideas down before they escape, my entries take on average a month or more to finish. I would like them to be faster, but I either don't have sufficient time or the ideas themselves take longer to foment.

Another consequence is that I have had the opportunity to "meet" several new people who I would not have met any other way. (Insert a shout out to everyone who has commented on my entries or referenced them in their own blogs. I am very grateful and in several cases they have led me to discover new ideas, theories, methodologies, or products I was not aware of. Thank you, everyone.)

The one thing I had not expected is that the blog helps me see the connectedness of my own ideas. At work, ideas are generated and applied as needed by the situation. Setting up SharePoint? you think about use cases, security policies, information lifecycle, archiving, etc. Participation in a KM program lower than expected? You think about community creation and facilitation, incentives, alignment to business processes, etc. The pragmatic need to address an issue keeps you focused and you inherently apply certain design principles. But you often do not have the time to examine the connection between the decisions. Taking the time to reflect on the ideas and decisions -- abstracted from the specific event -- allows you to understand your own motivations and how they interrelate.

This is reflected rather abstractly in the broad spectrum of subjects I have covered under the guise of KM and IA. But I expect it will become more explicit in the near future, as I outline some of the guiding principles that I have discovered myself pursuing. More on that later.

The Intranet is not a Thing

Patrick C. Walsh recently asked for input on a concept he is calling lean intranets, based at least in part on the concept of lean manufacturing. The basic concept he is promoting is very attractive: make the intranet more productive by significantly reducing the content down to only that which actually helps employees "create value".

Certainly many if not all intranets could do with some dramatic reduction in either outdated or superfluous content. However, as attractive as the concept of a "lean intranet" is, it is based on a false assumption: that the intranet is a "thing" that can be managed or controlled as a single entity.

The problem is that the intranet serves more than one purpose and more than one master. Unlike manufacturing, where there is one linear process that can be optimized to reduce "waste", the intranet is more like a city, with hundreds or thousands of diverse members each with their own goals and objectives.

The reason this caught my eye is not because Walsh's theory is fatally flawed -- in fact it is not. His prescription for creating a lean intranet may make a few spurious assumptions, but the goal and many of his suggestions are still valid. (More on than later.) The reason the assumption is important to recognize is because the same assumption is endemic to corporate managers and intranet teams everywhere.

The Intranet as a Thing and its Postulates

For any company larger than, say, 200 or 300 people, you cannot ask "what is the purpose of the intranet" as if it was a singular thing. However, this is exactly how it is treated by many, many companies, resulting in some rather spectacularly dysfunctional behavior.

Most of the time when people -- especially managers -- talk about "the intranet" they are talking about the corporate intranet portal; the internal "home page" for the company. The problem is that the portal is -- quite literally -- just the tip of the iceberg in terms of content and uses of the intranet.

This "intranet as a thing" thinking results in a number of fallacious assumptions:

• The corporate portal is everyone's home page
• Only pages linked to by the portal are part of the intranet -- everything else is noise
  
• You can control the intranet by dictate

Many companies enforce the first assumption by setting the intranet portal as the browser home page as part of their standard PC configuration. But, is the corporate home page the most useful page for employees? Shouldn't they start at their division or their department's home page? And, let's face it, most experienced users navigate through bookmarks/favorites, significantly diminishing the importance of the home page...

Some companies also enforce the second postulate -- "the intranet is what I say it is" -- by limiting the corporate search engine to crawling only "official" pages. The argument is that by restricting the scope of search, you increase the value of the results that are returned. The actual consequence is that you put up castle walls around a portion of your intranet, leaving many employees (and their content!) outside the walls. This form of electronic feudalism creates significant barriers to sharing information across organizational boundaries within the corporation.

Finally, many companies try to control their intranets by dictate: they define requirements and standards for the appearance, structure, and even content of web pages within the intranet. These rules start out as well intentioned, attempting to define a common look & feel for the intranet browsing experience (usually through a common intranet banner, colors, and fonts). But it soon extends to guidelines for the layout and even the content of pages.

Again, this mandated layout is done under the auspices of standardizing the browsing experience and simplifying maintenance, but the result is that lower level groups are handcuffed into following a structure that may have no relation to the information they need to present. A prime example is intranet guidelines that require each organizational home page start with a mission statement and "news". I cannot tell you how many times I have watched groups struggle to come up with news items simply to fulfill this stylistic requirement.

Creating a Lean Intranet

As I said earlier, Walsh's assumption that it is possible to define a single set of criteria for identifying and eliminating wasteful content on the intranet from the top is flawed because the intranet does not have a single purpose, as a manufacturing process has. However, at each of the lower levels at which intranet content is owned and maintained it ought to be possible to define and apply such criteria. Because that is the level at which the goal of the content is defined and understood.

So although I am quibbling that a process for lean intranets cannot be applied at the top level, there is real opportunities for applying it at lower levels, assuming the corporate style police allow it.