Roundup of blogs and ideas

Today’s Friday, and the reviews of the latest paper are taking their time (as well they should :-)) so I thought it’d be nice to go for a little browsing to pick ideas for the weeked. The results:

• Through Anedote’s blog, we find this multi-authored podcast with tips and ideas from David Maister, about «managing up» (your boss or your customer), something every consulting professional, and many others, can profitably improve. Shawn explanation’s almost as good as the podcast. And it’s not the only worthwhile recent post either.
• The Clue Implementation Unit has recently (date missing) released their 21st podcast, returning to the idea of «Community as a business«. Compulsoy listening for a bit later this weekend.
• Lee LeFever, one of the authors of the above mentioned podcast, is also behind the CommonCraft business and set of explanatory videos. He’s been busy with more, and also thanking people for the good reviews. He doesn’t mention this humble blog :-), but since he confesses that he’s left the Dark Side and bought a Mac for his video making, we’ll let it run… and congratulate him again.
• Confused of Calcutta (JP Rangaswami) gathers a lot of recent posts that should illustrate our friend Ed on the relevance of those «private» things that go on in our minds. Sometimes thinking in public is not just not bad, but interesting for others. Even if we’re not talking business or metaphysics. Of course some things happen mostly to well-known executives with a well-read blog, but I can attest to similar examples of reaction both to comments and to complaints. So he may be right there too.
• Hildy Gottlieb’s latest posting about (or against) competitive funding processes for social initiatives give, again, a curious insight into something we usually take for granted.
• Andy Roberts has several interesting new posts. One of them adds to the current interest in Facebook after it opened its API to outside developers, sparking dozens of new services to its user base. The other (kick-started from the same place) is a good reflection on music business models on the internet.
• On the more abstract side Dave Pollard’s gone analytic (and graphic) on the way the world actually is, as opposed to the way community and technology fans tend to see it. Nice read.
• Blogwalking, I fell on the blog of Jeremiah Owyang and his report on a current event (2007 Portland Internet Strategy Forum). Didn’t know the author nor the event (blogging is not quite my core interest), but it looks interesting.
• Through Bokardo (this series of posts on building social web applications is good), I came across this: Seth Godin’s written a short post about one «job of the future» called Online Community Organizer. It’s nice, but the general response is better and quite telling. As mentioned earlier here, the abundance of community (and networking) users is leading too many people to believe that just about anybody can do the job of setting up and running them. And that’s just not true…
• Luis Suarez is back up and blogging, with substative comments from several events attended (and a few personal stories).
• We’ve already commented Nancy White’s latest, but I’m impatient to know about the outcome of these day’s Global JAM on Online Communites for Social Innovation (having missed out on the registering phase, again).
• One (of many) interesting recent posts by Patrick Lambe at Green Chameleon harps on the need for clear, coherent, well-integrated policies on knowledge management and related issues. Couldn’t agree more. And he’s got a Dilbert cartoon to illustrate.
• Professor Andrew McAfee announces the Cases2.com, a Socialtext-backed effort to document Enterprise 2.0 cases using the firm’s wiki platform. Three points of interest: the cases themselves (and their hoped-for growth), the possibility to evolve them, and Socialtext’s marketing practices. They’re doing things well.
• KM4Dev’s Lucie Lamoreux has posted the June results of CPSquare’s survey of Cultivating Communities of Practice in a Development Context. I’m a bit confused as that title is familiar, but here goes the link (again?).
• Jack Vinson’s piece (missed it somehow) about «11 deadly sins in KM» links several conversations and an old article, plus his own ideas, into a good practical read. Regardless of one’s opinions :-), it’s a good place to plunge.
• The Headshift people, coming back from Reboot 9.0, share some thoughts on conferences that mix well with what I’m hearing and seeing of late. A bit more «unconferencing» seems to be in order. Hmm…

That was just running down the blogroll to the letter «M». There’d be many more tidbits to chew over but, for some reason only known Unto Their Righteous Selves, the IT managers of Getronics have gone and configured WebSense to exclude a couple of blogging services from employee navigation. Granted, quite a few blogs are unfettered wastes of time (which anyway requires having time to waste… and cutting off some blogs does not staunch the waste) but many others provide interesting and productive insights into business news and opportunities.

Anyway… no, I won’t comment further on that today. And the WebSense people throw nice parties too, so I’m not complaining.