MarkItUp

Just reading Jimbo Wales' comment on the home page of the Search Wikia project which states that "search is broken" and then goes on to say:

Why is it broken? It is broken for the same reason that proprietary software is always broken: lack of freedom, lack of community, lack of accountability, lack of transparency. Here, we will change all that.

We're going to see a lot more of this in the coming years where people flock to non-proprietary, collaborative systems (think Wikipedia, Linux, Flickr).  If you don't know a lot about the economics of mass collaboration I'd really encourage you to grab a copy of this book:

I purchased the CD audio version and have listened to is a few times in the past couple of weeks - it really has my mind stirring with new ideas.

This is good to see... 

Brad Abrams : Visual Studio in Second Life

I wonder how long it will be before Readify has an apartment in there?

See you in there! 

There's been a lot of talk about the amazing speed at which information gets updated on Wikipedia, but this is just crazy: 

Death of Nancy Benoit rumour posted on Wikipedia hours prior to body being found - Wikinews

Remember the "olden days" when you just purchased a set of encyclopedia's and they sat on your shelf? 

An interesting read:

Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - RE: Life at Google - The Microsoftie Perspective

Make sure that you follow the link from there through to the full phatbits article.  Something that each of us may be confronted with at some stage I guess.

Quite often I'll hear Readify referred to as a virtual company.  The 'virtual' tag is applied to us by both internal as well as external observers - but what does it actually mean?  And is it an accurate tag to apply to us?

To me the term 'virtual' means "not real" or "almost real" - certainly not something that I equate with our company.   After all, it was only last week that I sat down for a meal with a bunch of our guys at Darling Harbor in Sydney.  Heck, it even set me back 70 bucks... what could be more real than that?  To me "virtual" is more of a SecondLife type of experience.  Actually I believe that as mechanisms such as Ideagoras and Crowdsourcing start to play a bigger part in how we share knowledge that will start to see true "virtual" organizations start to take shape - maybe virtual organizations that look nothing like organizations of today but which look more like virtual swarms that exist to solve important problems and then disassemble and vaporize just as soon as they formed.  But this is not anywhere near where we are at today.

I prefer to think of Readify from the viewpoint that we are highly distributed and decentralized.  In this sense we are more like a "remote" (although I prefer the term "distant") company.  Another, probably better term is that we are a highly mobile organization.  You see, to me, "mobility" means that we are able to work from anywhere.  This is closer to my real working model where I work from wherever I am at any given point in time.  The  slight (although significant) difference from "remote/distant" is that the latter implies that you are simply working offsite.  A minor differentiation but one which is important when you live and work how I do each day! 

Actually, according to this article, many more of us are at least migrating away from our ties to working from a central location.  If the statistics quoted in that article are correct, 14% of the US workforce currently works "from home" at least 2 days per week.  This is up from 11% in 2004 and is expected to rise to 17% within 2 years.  Certainly worth considering in terms of the opportunities that will arise from this new growth.

The trick with a mobile organization is having the right tools to enable key scenarios - such as collaboration as well as communication at a human level.  This article touches on some aspects of these key points.

At Readify we're experiencing all of these exciting new developments in our daily lives and it's an exciting place to be.  Moving forward I can see further evolution in the mobility model.  Increased mobility - and hence less dependence on location - will lead to us having:

1. Access to a wider recruitment audience
2. Greater collaboration with external parties
3. Access to more diverse pools of knowledge

Phil writes about the fact that Microsoft appears to be getting more behind open source development: 

Christmas For .NET Open Source Came Early This Year

This is going to be really interesting to watch.  Is this the beginning of Microsoft opening up?

At home I have this habit where, whenever I purchase a new article of clothing, I turf out an equivalent number of old items.  Buy a new shirt - turf an old one.  In with new socks, out with some old ones.  New hanky in - old hanky out.  You get the picture.  The idea is to drive towards a wardrobe of clothes that always represent a current set based on what I prefer to wear.  It's like survival of the fittest where each article of clothing has to compete to remain in the fold - although old jocks can only survive for so long .

I've started to actively do the same with my RSS subscriptions.  I use the trigger of new subscriptions as a point of evaluation for items in my current subscription list.  I don't unsubscribed from feeds on a pure 1-1 basis.  What I do is to look at the number of items that the new feed will add to my reader each week and look to unsubscribe from a number of feeds that is representative of that number of individual reading items.  This helps to ensure that the signal to noise ratio is always being fine tuned on a proper comparative basis.

Over the past 6 months I've started tuning in much more to feeds that focus on the theory knowledge management and less on individual technologies and implementation related blogs.  As an example I've added blogs such as:

• http://800ceoread.com/blog/
• Wikinomics
• 7 Breaths
• and Jonathon Schwartz's blog

At the same time my interest in low level details about implementation has waned somewhat.  In recent times, to match the intake from the blogs that I've listed above I've unsubscribed to some really excellent blogs about CRM, SharePoint, and design patterns:

• Shade Tree Developer - a great blog about implementing code and design patterns.
• Same Shirt Every Day - Alex's new Rails blog.  Sorry Alex, I'd love to get excited about Rails but I lack the time
• Stunnware's CRM Corner - This guy has customized CRM to within an inch of its life but I'm not so interested in actual CRM customization as I thought that I would be.
• Steve Pietrek's SharePoint links blog - Not to be confused with his original Links Blog which I can't see myself ever unsubscribing from!

It's not that these blogs are not a good read - they've served me extremely well in the past.  It's just that, beyond a certain point, reading stuff can interfere with doing stuff.  So hence the need for constant pruning and vigilance in maintaining the right level of signal to noise.  By the same token, there's a couple of blogs that I've kept - mostly because they are friends - but who seldom update me with their articles these days:

• Rocky Heckman
• Geoff Appleby
• Dave Glover
• Nikhil Kothari - Nikhil is actually posting a little bit, but not about the sort of stuff that I'm interested in so much any more.

Although they tend to clutter my reader I've kept a hold of them in the hope that they may one day again inspire me with their tales from the trenches

I was having lunch with a colleague today and we were talking about the economics of mass collaboration.  I was talking about how knowledge is the new commodity that is driving the phenomenon of mass collaboration.  My colleague mentioned that this all sounded very socialistic.  We continued to bash that thought around and I knew where he was getting at... he was looking for the weakness in this model (he's very good at doing that ).  The questions were taking a familiar line, basically - what is the motivation for participation?  Why do people give up their spare time to contribute on these community collaborations?  And can we be sure that the motivations will always be there?  Then he asked a question from a viewpoint that I hadn't considered before:

Isn't it unfair on the people who are investing their time and knowledge that there are leeches who take without putting knowledge into the ecosystem?

This is a great question and one that I'm not sure that I have a great answer for straight off the bat.  I'll gladly listen to the thoughts of others on this question.  I guess that the real question might be... do you think that this phenomenon is nothing more than an interesting social experiment and that it will last for as long as it can capture the imagination of its participants?  Or do you think that all of this new found time and exchange of intangible goods is actually coming from a true and long-lasting source of economic activity?

Here's an interesting article by Danah Boyd which talks about the growth of these 2 social networking sites and the battle that is currently raging between them to gain an ascendency:

Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace

Some of the really important points that Danah raises are over whether these sites represent different classes of American youth.  Could it be true that MySpace is the blue collar portal and that Facebook is for the white collar mob?  Interesting discussion.  Here's a snippet taken from the article to give you a taste for it:

The goodie two shoes, jocks, athletes, or other "good" kids are now going to Facebook. These kids tend to come from families who emphasize education and going to college. They are part of what we'd call hegemonic society. They are primarily white, but not exclusively. They are in honors classes, looking forward to the prom, and live in a world dictated by after school activities.

MySpace is still home for Latino/Hispanic teens, immigrant teens, "burnouts," "alternative kids," "art fags," punks, emos, goths, gangstas, queer kids, and other kids who didn't play into the dominant high school popularity paradigm. These are kids whose parents didn't go to college, who are expected to get a job when they finish high school. These are the teens who plan to go into the military immediately after schools. Teens who are really into music or in a band are also on MySpace. MySpace has most of the kids who are socially ostracized at school because they are geeks, freaks, or queers.

I hadn't seen this before: 

Current TV // The TV Network Created By The People Who Watch It

It's a global, public TV network where you can filter and vote for content.  This is surely the future of TV where we can choose our own content and have much more of a say in how content is personalized for us but also with enough emergent behavior to influence what other people watch by voting for the most popular content.

Here's a link to an on-demand copy of the Enterprise 2.0 debate between Andrew McAfee (he is credited with coining the term Enterprise 2.0) and Tom Davenport (he doesn't think we need the term) which took place at the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston:

Enterprise 2.0 Live Debate

The debate is useful for uncovering some of the major topics behind Enterprise 2.0 including:

1. Definition of what Enterprise 2.0 is
2. What Openness means to the enterprise
3. Why collaborative contributions are important

There's a lot of good stuff in there about emergent technology and enlightened leadership.  The beauty of this piece is that it looks at the topic from both sides of the argument.

A while ago I mentioned the new themes that have been added to Google Portal and I thought that I'd write a quick note to talk what one of my standard days looks like these days...

In the morning I love to get up early and have a coffee with Paul Stovell while I read the paper and check my emails...

In the Dev Centre there's plenty of time in the morning for goofing around.  Often Paul and I shoot water cannons at one another before we get stuck into our work...

... or practice a bit of karate...

... on other mornings it's nice to just kick back with a nice, gentleman-like game of badminton...

... the weather in Adelaide has been great so we tend to grab our sandwiches and head outside for lunch...  

In the afternoon's Paul's favorite activity is water-sliding... 

... but I much prefer a quiet game of croquet (Stovell never beats me at this )... 

... anyway, when the day is done it's time to start preparing for the night.  It's been a bit cold at night this winter so we generally prepare a bit of a fire...

... which, of course leads to marshmallows and Stovell's endless stories about his data binding feats! 

.... then it's time to Sleep... 

... and Dream - although I've been having some weird one's lately...

It's a busy life

Leadership is the buzzword of today and as a member of the management team at Readify, I can confirm that it's been one of our most discussed topics of the past year.  We've constantly looked for ways to both reward leadership behaviors and to provide better incentives for people to exhibit them.  The pursuit of leadership is not only limited to management.  This year I've been given the role of managing our Professional Development (PD) program at Readify and I've already observed that it's a hot topic among the rest of our staff too.  People everywhere are demanding better leadership and at the same time they want to become better leaders themselves.

This has led me to try and learn more about leadership in the hope that I might better understand the role of PD in satisfying people's hunger for leadership.  Overall I suspect that the emphasis on leadership is somewhat misleading.  All the talk of leadership has served to distort people's own understanding of what they are truly after.  I suspect that what people really want is to achieve a sense of empowerment as well as an ability to more fully realize their own true potential.

Because of this, my emphasis for the PD program so far has been to work with people to understand their goals and what motivates them.  By focusing on goals it becomes easier to tailor a program of activities that leads to the ultimate goal - to allow a person to self-actualize goals and visualize growth in their own capabilities.

Recently I managed to awaken myself to what I had previously overlooked about Web 2.0.  As much as respectable magazines such as Time had tried to remind me, I'd managed to drift off into this state of Ajax'y unconsciousness.  And so it was as I was using Twitter to monitor the activity of my social network when I totally jumped the shark and entered the following text into my Twitter account:

My last entry on Twitter

All that 1337 speak and talk of cats drove me to this moment of insanity and it happened.  I just typed those words, closed my browser, and moved on.  And in that single moment I proved it... I had missed the whole point of Web 2.0 applications like Twitter - which is that they are "Me" focused!  To remove the noise I simply adjust the channels that I'm subscribed to and voila, problem solved.  So Web 2.0 == You.  Don't like something remove it; find something new of interest, add it; then rearrange the order of things until the information fits you.  Then take that information and mash-it up with something else to turn it into a higher level of information and you start the process of turning raw information into knowledge.

When you think about knowledge and its value you immediately start thinking about "the enterprise" - and hence the concept of Enterprise 2.0 has come to the surface quite a bit in recent times.  Mind you there's also Commerce 2.0, B2B 2.0, Security 2.0, IT Manager 2.0, and a whole raft of other * 2.0 idioms.

While I haven't explored the entire * 2.0 family my attention of late is very much centered around the concept of Enterprise 2.0 and its value to businesses.  Currently there are many ideas and theories washing around in my brain about the kinds of applications and mash-ups we need to create "Me" centered applications within the enterprise.  The prospects are very exciting indeed!  Imagine the value to business around having an Enterprise 2.0 knowledge framework that was so powerful that employees dared not leave it for the fear that they would lose access to valuable knowledge.

I've written about Shared Items on Google Reader before but wanted to re-post because they are so cool and I wonder how many people are making use of that feature.  This has drifted back to my attention after yesterday, having had a chat about them with Warren Schaefer at Melbourne airport who agrees about their coolness.

How it works is that as I'm reading items within Reader, there is a "Share" button at the bottom of each item:

As I come across articles that I think are of exceptional value I click on that button and the item is then available to be shared.  By sharing the item it is available via the following link which also exposes itself as an RSS feed:

http://www.google.com/reader/shared/17231039675326267877

There is also a nice web part that they make available so that I can present a view of my shared items on my blog:

I'm firmly of the opinion that each of us must read some incredible articles each day and without a sharing experience such as this, then this knowledge sharing opportunity is either lost or just poorly translated as time passes waiting for me to blog about it.  Clicking on a share button means that the "cream of the crop" is always shared though and so the things that I read that are valuable are available as a filtered list for people to view.

If you are interested in * 2.0 (Web, Enterprise, etc) discussions, team based development, .NET, then I'd highly encourage you to subscribe to my shared items feed because that's where you will find the best knowledge that I see each day about those topics.  And if you have a Shared Items link please add it as a comment to this post so that I can subscribe to yours - in your comment please let me know what content categories your shared items are likely to contain

Yesterday I wrote an article which questions whether or not the daily Scrum meetings stifle creativity.  Thankfully Richard added a comment which pointed me to an article by Martin Fowler about the Patterns of Daily Stand-up Meetings.  Having been on a couple of highly functional teams in the past I can relate to much of what Martin is saying but some of it was a revelation to me and, although it's a rather lengthy article, I'd highly recommend downloading it and reading it over a coffee in an appropriately quiet place.

Reading the article actually made me wonder about the suitability of Scrum daily meetings to the Dev Centre.  After all, the Scrum daily meetings are very much targeted at teams who are working on the same project whereas the Dev Centre is often a very different world.  For one, the teams in the Dev Centre tend to be highly disrupted; people tend to come and go all the time.  You might be working on a project in the Dev Centre today but in 2 weeks time you may not be there at all.  Another significant difference is that it's actually quite common to have either very small teams or, even more commonly, just an individual developer working alone.  How do you have a Scrum with just 1 regular developer?  It's a highly disruptive environment and not one that I'm certain is well addressed by the "manifesto" laid out in Martin's article - particularly when you lay "remote/virtual" over the top.

I actually wonder whether the model that I'm working with is more of the norm - let's call it the "long tail" - as opposed to the large to mid-sized teams that Martin's article (and the daily Scrum meeting itself) is targeted at?

Having said all that I do know one thing... I definitely want to tap into the goodness that teams get from Scrum meetings.  Shared ownership, better visibility, help with removing obstacles, team building.  However this would all exist within the scope of the members of the group as opposed to distinct project teams.

Maybe there is another process which is targeted at these highly disruptive groups but which is similar to Scrum?  Obviously I have more research ahead of me :-)

For the past few years nearly every project that I've been involved with has run a Scrum-like meeting.  I say Scrum-like rather than Scrum because none of these projects have had a certified Scrum-master... and I don't want to weaken my argument for the rest of this article on a mere technicality   Anyway, regardless of the Scrum'ness of the meetings, we do stick to those well known 3 questions that are associated with Scrum meetings:

1. What have you done since the last meeting?
2. What is impeding your work?
3. What do you plan to do between now and the next meeting?

The idea of the Scrum meeting is that you get in, ask your questions, and get out.  Very robotic and very focused.

In nearly all projects I've noticed a gradual decline in the level of interest that the team has for these meetings as time progresses and I think that it has something to do with the low level nature of the information that is exchanged during these meetings.  They've tended to be very task-oriented.  For example:

1. I'm going to put black borders on the buttons
2. Write the validation logic for the forms
3. Speak with the customer about how to do blah

It seems to me that the repetitive, constant, daily grind of reeling off facts breeds apathy for the process and before long these Scrum meetings become "yet another meeting".  When this happens I find that teams simply go through the motions and become less agile in their thinking about raising important issues or giving you information that could change and assist the process.  So how do you change it so that you get the goodness that the Scrum meeting is designed to deliver while getting good information from your team about how things are going and what needs to be done?

Up until this week I've been running daily SCRUM's in the Dev Centre but as of this morning I've decided to change it so that the weekly meetings will look more like this:

1. Monday morning creativity meeting.  Tell us your goals, dreams, and vision for what you are going to achieve this week.
2. Tuesday to Thursday. Either send a typical SCRUM meeting email or I'll call you on an ad-hoc basis to "kick the tyres".
3. Friday afternoon "beer-o-clock" session.  2 questions... Tell us what you achieved for the week and tell us what thing you would improve about the Dev Centre if you could improve any one thing at all.

Having meetings that are structured in this way will allow senior, responsible developers to become a little more self-managing and hopefully introduce enough creativity to produce a more creative culture.

Bottom line... take the blinkers off of your team.  The opportunity to gather should be a learning experience.  Use those precious moments together to learn from each other as to how you can improve... who knows, maybe you'll end up with a better culture because of it! 

Over the weekend I purchased 2 new books.  I grabbed this one:

I'm hoping that this book will provide me with some useful tips for inspiring creativity within teams. 

I also grabbed an audio CD version of this one:

I'm so in love with Wiki's at the moment that I simply had to buy this one.  This is also the first audio book that I've purchased so I'm hoping that it will provide me with many hours of relaxed learning on my travels

Another good news story for BlogML as the CCNetConfig blog is migrated from DasBlog to SubText:

Made the move to SubText

The Dev Centre was created by Readify to manage the software development requirements of the business as well as to harvest IP from our existing processes.  Last week I started the process of setting the goals of the Dev Centre for the coming year.  One of the major goals for next year is to turn the Dev Centre into much more of a factory for creating software by standardizing on processes and increasing the levels of automation. 

Above all of the process and automation stuff, you also have to think about the things that are at the human level - such as creating an environment that people enjoy working in.  Happy, mentally-active people are productive people, and it's these people who will add the most to the culture of your business.  One of the things that comes up in this area on a fairly regular basis is pair-programming.  That is, people regularly ask for pair-programming to be implemented as a standard part of how we do things.

I always find this to be an interesting request because I've long been a fan of pair-programming and I can attest that my most significant programming victories have taken place through pair-programming sessions.  Within Readify I can immediately recount some major pair-programming victories with Francois Beaussier, Mitch, and Paul Stovell.  So the fact that there's no sign hanging above the (virtual) door of the Dev Centre certainly doesn't mean that I don't want to encourage it - I really do. 

Pair programming leads to the following highly desirable benefits:

1. Shared ownership of code.
2. Culture of mentoring.
3. Better designed code. 
4. Less bugs.

The challenges in implementing pair-programming are almost never technology or environment based but are more than likely people based. 

So if it's that difficult to get workers to pair-up in a standard office environment, what about when you have teams which operate within a virtual environment?  Virtual pair-programming requires not only the trigger for the developers to connect but also a set of tools that enable a rich collaboration to occur.  One of the tools that we've been playing with recently that might enable richer remote pair programming scenarios is Microsoft's new SharedView Beta.  This is a very exciting tool in how it provides collaborative experiences and I can easily see it becoming very often used within the Dev Centre at Readify.

Update: FrankArr tells me that the actual numbers of MS staff as at now is more like 72,000 full time staff and another 30,000 contractors... do the math on that!

Last night I wrote a post titled "Where did the time go?" In that article I did some maths to highlight just how many hours are worked each week by a small 7 person team.  After writing that article I went to bed thinking about the size of Microsoft and ran the maths over their bulk.  I'm not sure exactly how many employees Microsoft actually have - but for the purposes of my exercise I used 60,000 as a number for the total pool of employees and contractors.  So let's look at it:

Microsoft

Each day: 60,000 * 8 = 480,000 hours

Each week: 480,000 * 5 = 2,400,000 hours

This company has access to 2.5 million hours of time per week!  What could you do with that?  Well think about it... let's say you live to be 80:

You

Your entire life: 80 * 365 * 24 = 700,800 hours

If you live to be 80, and you never sleep, and you never stop working, and you are productive for every day that you are alive... you will have access to 700,000 hours.  So each week, Microsoft has access to a pool of resources which represents 3.5 times the sum of your entire existence!

The other day I was thinking that when you write things, that maybe you should try to be as clear as possible.  I think that this makes it a bit clearer for the person who is reading what you have written to understand exactly what it is that you are trying to say.

I used to write that way.  Lots and lots of words.  Hard to read right?

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.

- The Elements of Style

Let's take another crack at that opening paragraph...

Be clear in your writing.  Remove unnecessary words and write in a positive tone.  Your readers will thank you!

That's better

I'm a DHSB 

Take the test

Time is an interesting resource.  There's no way to get more of it and so we have to make do with the time that we have.  You can use your time in any way that you choose but remember that whatever you choose to do with your time, that's all that you'll get. 

It's very easy to get caught up with the business of things and in the process believe that you are making good use of your time - but do you ever stop to analyze what you do with yours?  How much time is spent on things that don't matter?  How much of the time that you spend is spent actually moving away from your goals?

As a manager of people I believe that time is something that you should always be acutely aware of.  Each week I stop to think of the pool of people that I have working with me and I stop to do a quick check of the numbers:

"7 people, that's 56 hours per day.  56 hours per day multiplied by 5 gives me 280 hours this week."

For a team 7 people that's 280 hours per week that can be used to move closer to the company goals... or to fritter away on email and drinking coffee.  Stop and think about those numbers for a moment and the impact should dawn upon you.  280 hours is 35 days.  At an average of 21 working days per month, that means that 1 week of a team of 7 people equates to nearly 2 calendar months of your time if it were laid out linearly.  Now think of the conversations that you've had recently about the "things I'm gunna do", or "I thought about doing that but..." and you start to realize what a valuable asset such a block of time amounts to.  So I suggest that each week when you arrive to work to meet your team of 7 that you should think about that week in the context of what you'd like to achieve if you had 2 months of focused time to work towards achieving your goals.

To truly maximize that 2 month block of time invest a little effort in working out what that activities that you do are which don't help you get closer to meeting your goals.  Is it reading email?  Is it surfing the web?  Or is it the greatest time killer of all... procrastination?  Whatever it is, you must change your environment to assist you in maximizing what you get out of your allotment of time.  I'll say it again... "CHANGE YOUR ENVIRONMENT" to assist you in maximizing what you get out of your allotment of time. 

If email is your killer habit - unsubscribe.  If it's the Internet and the vast distractions of Web 2.0 - unplug.  If it's procrastination - change your location.

It's your time.  You have 1 shot at what you will do with it.  Whatever you do with your time is what you will be remembered by.

The other day I wrote about creating a new website and mentioned that I was favoring a move to Squarespace.  I've continued to think about what I want to get out of this new web home and have decided that a pure blog product won't meet my needs... I really need a Wiki to do what I want.  I started looking around for a hosted Wiki offering and none really stood out.  I've applied for an account with JotSpot although they are currently offline after acquisition by Google and so I now have to wait until they let me know that I can proceed.  Oh well, this will give me more time to really think about what I want my Wiki to be

Or maybe the world is ready for SUW... sorry, bad joke, just kidding

One of the customs that we have in the Dev Centre at Readify is "the daily SCRUM".  This involves everyone who is working on a Dev Centre project to submit an email by 10AM with their answers to those 3 well-known questions.  Paul Stovell is a little different in that he tends to submit 2 SCRUM's - 1 which reflects the stuff that he does during his mild mannered daytime hours and another one which reflects the activities of his better known night-time alter ego SuperPaul.  Recently while Paul was working on one particular project he started spewing out colorful charts which reflected the level of testing that his code had achieved when measured against Requirements.  On those few evenings a couple of weeks ago was born "Scenario Coverage Analyser for TFS" and you can/should learn more about it by reading Paul's post on it here:

Scenario Coverage Analyser for TFS

Cool stuff!  We've now released this and you can grab it from our website at the following location:

http://readify.net/Default.aspx?tabid=269

Who knows, maybe soon your automated builds will be producing lovely charts such as this:

If there's one thing that I've been really crappy at over the years it is documentation - but it's definitely something that I'm getting better at!  It's when I go back through all of the 1300 or so posts that I've written over these last few years that I realize what an unstructured gaggle of information I've created.  Contrast the tangled web of data that I've created with other more valuable online resources such as Wikipedia and you soon get a good feel for the potential that lies behind information that is properly maintained and structured.   The cool thing about Wiki's is their organic nature and how they tend to grow outwards.  This gives you the ability to link articles in a manner which allows a reader to pivot around on a piece of information.

In addition to my growing admiration of wiki's I've also been giving a lot of thought to what I can do to improve the value of what I post online.  This thinking has been greatly aided by the timely reading of the following two articles:

Scott Hanselman's 23 way's to keep your blog from sucking

The Definitive Guide to Semantic Web Markup for Blogs

All of this thinking has made me realize that I need a website which:

1. Has articles that are maintained to always reflect my current views on topics of interest
2. Is a better representation of my "brand" in the online community
3. Has a nice usable theme
4. Becomes the source of truth for all areas in which I have knowledge
5. Serves as the basis for creating knowledge from scattered data - kind of like a knowledge factory

So I've decided that I'm going to start a new blog and start adding articles to it on a regular basis about a more narrow range of topics and with all of the rants removed (that's what this blog is for ).  I initially thought that I might start up a Subtext blog and host it on my server but then decided not to head down that path so that I'm forced to only focus on the content management and not on the technology.

Last night I started playing around with a few of the major online blogging providers to see how they work and to get a feel for them.  Here's some screen shots of what I tried out - you can actually click through to see them for yourself if you like:

Squarespace

WordPress

Blogger

Squarespace is the blog provider that Grant uses and so far it's the one that I like best.  I've set it up in such a way that my name is more prominent and it will use keywords, tags, and themes that better represent the types of topics that I'll be writing about.  Hopefully over time this will pay dividends in the way of better Google page rankings.  

I'm going to leave all of those blogs up and running, but if you are interested in my thoughts about Knowledge Worker topics then please subscribe to my Squarespace blog.

In the past week Google has announced Google Gears, an offline data storage solution for web applications.  This has been implemented by Google Reader so I can now take my blog reading offline to read offline:

In addition to adding offline reading support for Google Reader, Google have added cool new themes to their portal.  Here you can see that I've added the theme called "Seasonal Scape".  During the daytime the little critters can be seen at play...

But at nighttime things are much quieter...

Here's a great quote found via this link: 

I start each project with two rules: all source files must be in a version control repository, and the build must be fully automated at all times.

This is another core requirement for all projects within the Dev Centre at Readify.  Having systems that ensure that your projects are always in a known state is the thing that will allow you to sleep peacefully at night... trust me on that!

Hrmm, just found this entry from a blogger who says that BlogML failed him.  I'll have to do a bit of research into this: 

Five Years Blogging at Theoblogical at Theoblogical