Category Archives: Knowledge Management

Five Useful OPML Files

I’ve been wanting to put together some good OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language) files all week, inspired by Anne Zelenka’s giant Blogher file and the conversation I had with legal blogger Dennis Kennedy about the incredible potential for this medium.

An OPML file is, in this case, a single file you can use to subscribe to a number of RSS (definition) feeds all at once. This means that with one link you are subscribed to all future content from selected sources. I think that selecting a handful of key feeds in certain topic areas and offering those to other people is going to be a powerful way that information-overload gatekeepers help the rest of the world find and easily subscribe to the best news sources available. In this sense everyone who puts together OPML files is like an editor of anthologies; only the authors that the editor selects provide ongoing, dynamic contributions.

Without further theoretical ado, I’ll tell you how to use these files and then tell you what I’ve put in them.
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Google Images China on Tiananmen vs. Our Images of Ourselves

This is interesting, you’ve read about the bizarre combo of Google refusing to give up US search documentation on one hand but agreeing to censor what Chinese users can see at the behest of the Chinese government on the the other hand. Check out what Google China users see when they do an image search for Tienanmen. That’s a popular page to link to in the blogsphere today.

Witness the shocking difference between that and, for example, a US Google user’s image search results for Christopher Columbus. Comparably benign, are they not?

So while it would be no small technological achievement for Google to successfully hide the images that the rest of the world associates with Tiananmen from the Chinese people themselves, I would contend that they still have a ways to go before they can rival the scale of cultural “information organization”/obfuscation that goes on all the time in the United States.

Like what? US history aside even, how about the following:

  • “Current estimates are that $500 billion to $1 trillion in illegal funds are laundered through banks worldwide each year, with about half going through U.S. financial institutions.” US Senator Carl Levin
  • “Trafficking of women and children for the sex industry and for labor is prevalent in all regions of the United States. An estimated 45,000 to 50,000 women and children are trafficked annually to the United States…” From Cia.gov
  • “The U.S. has the largest per capita prison and jail population in the Western industrialized world, with approximately 2 million inmates…As Americans continue to recoil at the sight of photographs and videotapes showing handcuffed prisoners piled naked on top of one another, being bitten by dogs, being sexually exploited and subjected to other forms of debasing abuse at the Abu-Ghraib prison in Iraq, human rights advocates say similar constitutional violations occur on a regular basis in United States prisons.” via Common Dreams.

We may be able to find these things on the internet in the US (the fact that they are true is bad enough) but how often do we discuss or consider them? Isn’t the effect similar at least?
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Educational Multimedia: Open or Proprietary Infrastructure?

George Siemens over at eLearn space likes iTunesU, Apple’s new system to facilitate academic content delivery via iTunes. But a fight is underway between Apple’s use of “Digital Rights Management” (content reuse restrictions) and many folks on the web, now including the people behind the GPL (general public licence) software framework. Will largess and convenience defeat grass roots openness and collaboration? Impassioned discussion on the conflict between the newest version of the GPL and DRM over at the always interesting Dan and Dave Show podcast.

Alternatives exist! Check out the Educational Podcast Network, where you can find everything from the Countryside 4th Grade Podcasts to the School Improvement Industry Weekly podcast.

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Interview with John Smith on Learning and Communities of Practice

John Smith is the community liaison for CPSquare, a community of practice about communities of practice. The group brings people together from around the world through online, telephone and face to face meetings to share their knowledge and learn together about how communities of practice can best function and learn in any field.

The following is a summary with key excerpts from a recent interview we did together. Discussion included John’s thoughts on group learning and new technologies and those are what I’ve focused on here. You can click the "excerpt" link next to any of the summary points to hear John in his own words.

Click here to go to the interview or continue below for discussion of technical struggles I had with this interview, specifically using the Gizmo Project VOIP system.
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Interview with Gary Price

Online researcher Gary Price was gracious enough to do a long IM interview with me last week and I’ve posted it over at the Net Squared blog. Price is the editor of ResourceShelf, a news wire of databases and research resources, and the News Editor at Search Engine Watch. Lots of good info shared.

We focused on the following topics:

  • Libraries and Google
  • General Web Search Beyond Google
  • RSS and Email
  • Web Site Watcher, ResourceShelf and Research Methods
  • Consulting, Speaking and Inspiring New Learning
  • Building Organizational Support for New Web Tools
  • Some of Gary’s Favorite Book Search Engines

I hope you’ll check it out and look around the rest of the Net Squared site and conference info while you’re there. Interview with Gary Price

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RSS to IM: The Bleeding Edge of RSS, Part 2

I have to confess, few things have excited me as much lately as immedi.at, a new service that will notify you by Instant Message any time a selected RSS feed is updated. Wow!

I’ve written in the past about how to make RSS (definition) a tool for decreasing, not increasing, your information overload. This is the next step beyond pulling high-priority feeds out of bulk folders so that new items in these key feeds are immediately discernible. Some feeds are even more important and time sensitive than that.

For example:

  • There might be times when you want instant notification of anyone linking to your web site or blog – subscribing to the feeds searching for such links is a basic first step, but sometimes an IM might be especially important.
  • You might want to be instantly appraised of any new press releases from relevant government agencies or business, before you publicly address what you believe to be their position on some matter of interest.
  • You may want to develop a relationship with a certain blog wherein you consistently make comments on relevant posts promptly after those posts are made.
  • Think of the application mashups possible! Using Tag Central, FeedDigest, FeedBurner and Immedi.at together, for example, I can get an IM whenever the term “search” appears on Emily Chang’s eHub, or in items tagged “web2.0” in del.icio.us, Furl.net, Technorati or Flickr. Just by visiting the page for this RSS feed: Select Web2.0 Sources on Search and telling immedi.at to monitor that feed. (If you’re curious, this is what is in that feed right now.) I can only imagine what sorts of things are possible…including outside the tech-sphere of topics.
  • Using RSS in general will make you one of the most quickly and thoroughly informed people in your field; selecting key feeds from which to receive IM notification will take that timely knowledge to the next level.

This is a tool with incredible potential. That said, this particular implementation (immedi.at) is somewhat buggy so far. I’ve found that it works far better in Firefox than it does in Safari, and with MSN Instant Messenger far better than AIM. I’ve been in contact with Peter Brown, apparently the lead developer of immedi.at. He’s been incredibly helpful and engaged. That bodes well for the tool, as far as I’m concerned.

But this is a powerful enough way to leverage RSS that I expect there will be several more options available some time soon. As the web world further refines its handling of “attention,” I imagine new possibilities similar to this, currently unimagined, will probably emerge as well.

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