There is an easy answer: this is it’s a contraction of ‘web log’ (and so not an acronym) its primary organisation is by date, almost with most recent material at the top of the page, with older stuff pushed down the main page and eventually into archive pages often – but by no means always [...]
Following advice from Einstein on Friday, today it’s the turn of Bertrand Russell: One of the symptoms of approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important and that to take a holiday would bring all kinds of disaster. If I were a medical man, I should prescribe a holiday to any patient who considered [...]
A few years ago, a bunch of people got irritated that many MPs had no public email address, or refused to respond to emails (on the grounds that they couldn’t tell whether they came from constituents or not). The result was FaxYourMP.com – a simple postcode lookup cum email-to-fax converter (fax numbers being easier to [...]
Gary has reminded me of the joys of social network analysis: Valdis Krebs states "organization charts prescribe that work and information flow in a hierarchy, but network mapping reveals [they] actually flow through a vast web of informal channels." Social network analysis involves the mapping and measuring of these normally invisible relationships between people, providing [...]
In architecture, in making the layout of a building, adjacency is a scarce resource. You can never satisfy all of the adjacency requirements that exist. Everybody would like to be next to the coffee machine and simultaneously next to the best view and simultaneously next to the people they work with. That’s impossible. When you [...]
I continue to believe that for many companies the best path to blogging is by using them internally as a knowledge management tool. The dream of KM has been that people will write down what they know. KM regimes, however, have assumed they would have to discipline people into doing that. Blogs entice people to [...]
Douglas Rushfoff doesn’t think we should have fun at work. He thinks work should be fun – and that if it were, teeth-cloying, management-imposed ‘fun’ would be unnecessary: By making the "fun" at work extraneous – external and unrelated – to the boring and dull work that people are actually doing, it only exacerbates the [...]
How much does our working environment stifle creativity, and particularly collaborative creativity? The extract below, from some people who do this for a living suggest rather a lot. Glasgow being not always convenient for a handy bit of future drawing, what else could we do? [suggestions containing the phrase 'A0 printer' are at risk of [...]
A completely serendipitous encounter on a bus led to a fascinating conversation about the Map of Medicine with one of its inventors. The original idea came from the Royal Free, and is part of the Connecting for Health programme, but it is now being developed commercially (though apparently costs to HMG are zero, because of [...]
Douglas Rushkoff has written a new book which is published today: As my lectures bring me from industry to industry, I find myself amazed by just how little fun most people are having. Whether separated from one another by policy, competition, or cubicle, the last thing that seems to occur to people is to have [...]