e-wot?

RDF TV – Baloney Detection Kit – Michael Shermer

Some useful questions to ask from a science, atheist perspective. Quite a bit about climate change here too.

A great post from Jakob Nielsen. I can particularly relate to this bit:

0.1 second is the response time limit if you want users to feel like their actions are directly causing something to happen on the screen. For example, if you click on an expandable menu and see the expanded version in less than 0.1 seconds, then it feels as if you made the menu open up. If it takes longer than 0.1 seconds for the revised state to appear, then the response doesn’t feel “instantaneous” — instead, it feels as if the computer is doing something to make the menu open.

I know how that feels: I’ve played online games with a latency of half a second, which is painful.

Powers of 10: Time Scales in User Experience (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox).

Some of these are truly brilliant: the personal trainer, the divorce lawyer, the dentist, among many…

Click for ‘100 (Really) Creative Business Cards’ | Webdesigner Depot.

A particularly fine article by Paul Boag. The second of his three ways, ‘Stop Designing Websites, is spot on. Click for ‘3 ways to make your site stand out from the crowd’ « Boagworld.

Also worth watching the video of his presentation on the ‘10 Harsh Truths of Institutional Websites’. He talks a lot about Higher Educational websites.

If you like those, then watch this too: 10 ways to battle site bureaucracy.

How to make an RSS feed for a Wordpress category? This is surprisingly easy.

Just add /feed to the end of a category’s URL. For example, here is the URL for my KM category:

http://e-wot.com/category/km/

And here is the RSS feed for my KM category:

http://e-wot.com/category/km/feed

Shawn Callahan just gave a great talk at an IKMS evening talk tonight at British Council Singapore. It was great.

The reason I liked his talk so much is because, apart from his stories (of course), Shawn is able to say things concisely and simply: crystallising in a very few simple words thoughts I’ve not been able to form yet about things I’ve been doing, and half-thinking. I was half-aware of these points, they’re totally relevant to my context, but I hadn’t formed them into thoughts, let alone statements. Shawn does this very well. He put into simple words things I ‘know’, but can’t say myself. These simple points resonate with me, so I have to write them here before I forget them. He made the tacit, explicit. Nice one Shawn.

On collaborative tools: “They’re not really collaborative tools, they’re communicative tools. Collaboration is a set of behaviours you might employ when using these communicative tools”. Totally agree.

“Opinions are a push strategy. And what happens when you push? People push back, right? Well stories are a pull strategy.” They’re also more engaging than a presentation of facts or opinion. Early in his presentation, Shawn explained this with a story about a manager who would move away from his computer and sit at another table with a colleague in order to give full attention to the colleague. He told us that when he first shared this story, it had great impact on the behaviours of the managers listening. The managers listening all copied the behaviour of the manager in the story. The same point, as a bullet point in a presentation, would have had little or no impact. But as Shawn says, “stories are plausible”.

Two questions I liked: “Can I do it?”, and “Is it worth it?” The first determines ability or capability, the second, motivation. Beautifully simple. He added that when looking for examples of good stories, find people who are ‘doing it’.

If people are struggling to tell a story, remind them of the key turning points and ask them what happened. Or ask them for the ‘Mood points’ and ask them how they felt at that time. Getting them to draw the event might help them externalise their memories and feelings.

Gossip is a good tool for communicating social information [my feelings exactly - I reckon that even gossip about soap operas has an important social function - exploring, confirming & normalising moral views, etc...]

Stories give permission. Tell a story about something that others have experienced, and they’ll say ‘yeah, that’s what I did. So it must be OK if someone else had the same experience/feeling.’

I had a question about stories, which went something like: “how do you tell a story about lessons learnt on the front lines of a project to senior management so they’ll listen?” My point being, that senior management are often only interested in results, completion and targets met. They might not care too much about the significant changes that have occurred in processes and values that have arisen while completing the project. So how to get this point across to management? Shawn suggested two approaches. First to get the staff involved in telling stories about what they did and why it was worth it (‘can I do it?’, ‘is it worth it?’). Then ask them to keep telling those stories until they become embedded in the project’s success [my imperfect words, not Shawn's]. Second, record the stories and present them to management with the question ‘which of these is most significant/ has the greatest impact’. This, is a great idea. I’ll try this.

Another point Shawn made simply is that being strategic often means knowing how to say ‘no’ to some projects. This is particularly important to me right now, because I’m having to turn down or delegate some great projects – I’m having to say ‘no’.

Shawn’s blog Anecdote has been in my rss aggregator for months, it’s great. I’ve also been following Shawn on Twitter @unorder. It was great to meet him. Thanks Shawn.

And thanks to Patrick Lambe, Green Chameleon & Straits Knowledge for arranging Shawn’s talk tonight. They were both in the middle of a busy schedule giving a masterclass at the Singapore International Storytelling Festival.

Great post. Great video.

Contrary to popular belief, business stories are mostly short

Talking to Olivier about this over lunch. How to add a #hashtag feed into Twitter.

I asked around and here’s how to do it – [now edited for accuracy 17 Sept 09]:

1. Set up a Twitter account.
2. Set up a #hashtag at http://hashtags.org
3. Go to the page for the #hashtag you’ve just created and subscribe to the feed or copy it (each #hashtag has it’s own feed).
4. Use twitter search for the #hashtag you want (http://search.twitter.com/)
5. Subscribe to the page for that search
6. Use http://validator.w3.org/feed/ to make sure you have a working feed
7. Go to http://twitterfeed.com/ and set up an account.
8. Feed your #hashtag feed into Twitterfeed

Now each time someone #hashtags a tweet with your #hashtag, it’ll get fed (via Twitterfeed) into your Twitter.

[edit: point 3 above. If you've just created a new hashtag, it might take a while for it to load on the hashtag website. Make sure the the Twitter account you've set up is 1. following hashtag.org - 2. make sure that hashtag.org is following your Twitter account.]

[edit. hashtags.org are having financial difficulties http://hashtags.wordpress.com/2009/04/28/buying-some-time/ - this is a real shame, because the service they provided was great.]

[edit. now it appears that you're able to subscribe to feeds from twitter search results, nice.]

Click for this great list

Fantastic.

Thanks to @elizabethkoh for tweeting this (follow her, she’s great).

Twitter. I follow people who share the most amazing stuff. Follow me: Markhamster – and then follow the people I’m following (for a start). I use Tweetdeck (iPhone too).

Feedly. It’s the best rss feed aggregator. It’s a Firefox addon. I’ll list my feeds in another post.

Buzz out loud. The best podcast about all things tech (CNet). Intelligent, and heated discussions by people who really know what they’re talking about. I listen to this on my iPhone on the way to work. Best to subscribe to it from iTunes podcast directory.

Buzz report. A vodcast (also from CNet) anchored by Molly Wood (she’s great: smart, passionate & funny). I watch this on my iPhone. Best to subscribe to it from iTunes podcast directory.

GeekBrief.TV. A vodcast – Cali Lewis anchors. Gadgets, interviews, etc… I watch this on my iPhone. Best to subscribe to it from iTunes podcast directory too.

For best results, subscribe to the pod/vodcasts in iTunes so they download onto your computer (you won’t have to watch and wait while they play – they’ll just play). I download them overnight, or while I’m having breakfast.