For those who need to understand how the Web is transforming the way businesses work, yada yada yada
Meta Data
| Issue: Feb. 22, 1999
Author/Editor: David Weinberger Central Meme: Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy Favorite Beatle: John. Duh. Current Personal Crisis: Realized that I'm not afraid I will be like my father to my children but that my children will be like I was to my father. Home page: http://www.hyperorg.com Contact information: Click here. |
ContentsBusiness Turing Test: Does your business have a human voice?
|
Back on the Air!We apologize for the three days (or so) our home page was off the air. Not to point the finger of blame, but it was the fault of InterWeb (www.iwebb.com), our former web hosting service. Interweb has gone beyond offering poor service all the way to not responding to phone or email messages, no matter how frantic or threatening. Instead, they have a beleaguered answering service operator who faxes the questions, requests and death threats over to the Iwebb bunker where the fax line is connected directly to the shredder, resulting in a 47% increase in productivity. We are now safely nestled in the bosom of Shore.net (www.shore.net) where the service has been fantastic (thank you Tabor Wells!). Not only have they treated me like a human being, they have also responded to dumb-ass user questions via email within 1.5 minutes. I think I'm in love. |
|
It's a JOHO World After All Chris "RageBoy" Locke has sunk to a new low — yes, it is possible — with a recent mailing to his readership. In yet another pathetic sign of his repressed longing for my corporeal being — I thought after all these decades of social consciousness raising, we'd all feel more comfortable about these certain peculiar feelings — he has written a screed that looks at the dirty underwear of the JOHO home page — the should-have-been-hidden contents of certain directories. Rest assured I have since cleaned up the errant files, not that there was anything really to be ashamed of. If you want to dignify such topics with your valuable attention, you can squander your funds at http://www.rageboy.com/wein-bunny.html A new Knowledge Management zine, from out of sexy, sexy Antwerp, cites JOHO in its first issue. Uh oh. http://www.chironpub.com/edito140299.html KMWorld's web site has run a column of mine (familiar to JOHO users) on the use of narrative
as the real way to express knowledge: http://www.kmworld.com/feature.articles/index_articles.cfm? (Don't forget to unwrap the whole URL.) |
Business Turing Test
Businesses don't know how to sound any more. This is because they don't know how to *be.* And this is because the landscape on which business happens has been reconfigured. It's like lifers who have been only able to communicate by tapping on the walls being taken one day to a prom where they're told, "OK, the walls are down. Invent a new way to communicate." Do they make small talk? Do they dance? Do they go straight to the dirty parts? Or do they find a hard object and go back to tapping?
Many forces have conspired to change the landscape, but the Web is foremost. It's given your market a way to talk with itself, to discover that it really does consist of individuals — real people — and that it no longer has to accept the old common denominator view of us. We — your market — have discovered that we can support each other better than the vendors can because not only is our knowledge born of experience, we tell one another the truth. We've discovered that in talking with one another, we do more than swap information. We actually have contexts — aka lives — that engage in unpredictable ways that range from the amusing to the stirring.
Now we go to talk with our vendors, the people selling us the stuff we care about, and we hear the same old patter, although sometimes it's repackaged in a one-to-one manner that says: "Choose us. We're the company that really, really pretends to care."
Businesses haven't figured out how to talk to us because they haven't figured out how to *be* in this new scene. "What's my motivation, CJ? What are my lines? And what are we trying to achieve with this scene, CJ?"
Some things are clear, however. The paper wall that companies have erected around themselves are being knocked down fast. The marketing literature, sales guides, corporate slide shows and happy-face t-shirts designed to keep customers from seeing what's really going on inside the company are all looking pretty pathetic. And companies erect exactly the same paper walls inside so that their own employees won't penetrate to the secret truth.
What is that truth? Get ready for a shock: Businesses are run by fallible humans who don't really always know what they're doing, who are frightened, who make mistakes, who are blind to their own faults, and who — less forgivably — think that greed is a virtue and admitting fallibility is a weakness.
The paper wall is tatami: it only keeps us from hearing what's going on in the next room so long as we've willed ourselves into not hearing. And we, the market, the people, have lost our will to be deaf.
One great virtue of the paper wall is that it allowed companies to master a single type of rhetoric that would be acceptable for all occasions and all listeners. That this rhetoric is highly artificial and just plain weird — as fake and contrived as the badinage in a French court — won't really strike us until we've all stopped talking that way.
Now businesses are going to have to learn to speak the way humans do. Not in any one voice, but in many voices.
In case you've forgotten, here's what human voices sound like:
Each has a point of view that may be in line with some corporate interest but isn't identified solely with that interest.
They have attitudes that are embodied in things like rhythm, word choice, pitch, hesitation. There's not a richer human medium, except maybe for the human face.
Voices talk for a reason, not just to fill the space between cash register rings. The reasons are hugely varied and deeply inform the content that is being conveyed. It is only very rarely that humans speak merely to convey information...and even when they're pronouncing their credit card numbers digit by digit, they're doing so not merely for the joy of transferring data.
It follows from this, by the way, that the voices you hear are almost always inspired by a basic optimism. They speak because they think that by so doing, mere voice can bring about success. And the project they want to succeed with is a collaborative one with you. Do you think maybe there's an economics that can be built on this fundament?
Human voices don't speak all the time. They sometimes do this thing where they stop speaking. We call it "listening," but it really is more than just being silent. It means you try to learn what the other person's interests are and understand how the world looks to them. But this is an advanced topic that we should save until you've gotten your feet wet.
Now we get to the really, really
hard stuff. Voices come from individual humans. Everything else is just the
sound of a voice, an imitation, a trick. But corporations aren't individual
human beings. So how can you have a voice?
Don't despair. It can be
done.
First, try letting
people speak for themselves as well as for the corporation. Let your customer
support people admit in frank words, in embarrassed words, in funny words —
in their own words — that your products don't always do what they should.
Let them become advocates for your customers. Take the Powerpoints away from
your sales folks and give them corporate mythology, history and narrative they
can speak in their own voices. Tell your marketing people that nobody believes
their brochures anymore. Customers want lots of information, and then the opinions
from people they trust. Maybe ... it'll be hard, but just maybe ... some voices
in marketing can gain customer trust by speaking as humans proud of the company
they work for. Oh, and smash the printing press that publishes the corporate
newsletter. It's just embarrassing you.
Second, let your corporate
personality emerge. It's there. It may be frightening and you may feel like
Sybil for awhile, but ultimately the cacophony of voices will result in a look,
a feel, a sound, a style, an approach, a point of view, an attitude, a sense
of humor, a sense of decency, a sense of outrage.
Third, listen. Your
market is just beginning to find its voice, too. Do not be ashamed.
Begin with the sound of joy.
I find myself deeply troubled
by the question of rich content. How rich do we really want it? Take email. Here's a medium
that's succeeded because when you write a message, the expectations are so
low. Everyone knows you've used a primitive text editor and everyone forgives
you if you didn't run your spellchecker on it — because then they're
forgiven for being equally sloppy. They forgive you for poor turns of phrase,
overstatement, bad jokes, and the use of emoticons in place of actually communicating
what you mean. If we had to perfect our
messages, then apply complex typographic formatting, and maybe put in some
run-arounds, and fire up the old graphics package because an email without
graphics is like a day without a random act of kindness, we'd see a lot less
email crossing our desks. Sure, that wouldn't be
such a bad thing, but it'd eliminate precisely the sort of email that counts:
messages from people who just want to say something, and don't want to sell
us on themselves and their prowess with a formatting engine. You can think of this
as a rush for the bottom, a desire for the least common denominator, but you'd
be wrong. We — and here I'm speaking for the human species — like
our email rough hewn for the same reason we like speaking to our friends without
notes and teleprompters(tm). It's direct, it's easy, and we're confident that
what we mean will shine through what we've actually said. (The ability to
understand what we say despite the mistakes we make in saying it is one of
the firmest confirmations of friendship.) So, email is going to
stay flawed and ugly. But how about the Web
itself? One line of thought says that the Web is primarily text-based because
we have insufficient bandwidth to allow for true multimedia interaction. This has to be wrong. Won't you use every excuse
you can to avoid installing video-conferencing equipment? When we finally
have sufficient bandwidth to make it possible, and when every home computer
comes with a video camera as standard equipment, sales of black electrical
tape will skyrocket as people disable this technology in crude-but-effective
fashion. Tell me the truth: Are
you really looking forward to the day when you have to comb your hair before
you sit at your computer? The text-iness of the
Web has several correlative benefits: It can be asynchronous,
which is a fancy way of saying that it's convenient — I can read my
texty messages when I want and can reply within 48 hours (which seems to
be the current maximum delay before you have to apologize for not responding) It is funny. Most of
our intentional humor is word-based. And the physical humor is hard to accomplish
while sitting at a computer. It's searchable. It's skimmable. Sure,
we could leave each other voice messages, and those messages could even
be automatically turned into text so that they are searchable. But you can't
skim voice messages. You have to listen to the whole bloody thing, whereas
I can easily skip over the incredibly tedious and self-concerned portions
of your email — a lesson you all have learned by reading JOHO. But, what about the virtual
world evoked in Snowcrash?
Won't our avatars get together for coffee and casual monkey sex (since avatars
can have as many apertures as you desire) in cyberspace? Yeah, sure, bunky. But
when they're done, our avatars will sit down and write text-based email to
one another. Michael Zisman, executive
vp for strategy at Lotus, is a man I once annoyed for a quarter of an hour
that he's sure to have forgotten by now. (Prediction: In the future, everyone
will be annoying for fifteen minutes.) Infoworld (Feb 1) interviewed him about
knowledge management. The interview is painful to read because it's so obvious
that Notes has so little to say about KM ... except the phrase "KM"
"KM" "KM" over and over as a mantra against Notes' coming
obsolescence. By happenstance I came
across Zisman's own, unedited inner thoughts as he answered the interviewer's
questions. Judge for yourself: First
we couldn't explain what groupware is which is why Notes stalled for
its first five years. Now Notes is KM which is even broader and we still
don't know what it is. Omigod,
did I just say that Notes and collaboration are two different things?
Maybe the interviewer won't notice...
From Us magazine, February:
Jada Pinkett explains how
she fell for Will Smith. They were having dinner in 1966. She says, "He
said, 'See that glass of water? When you look at it, it's to your left.
That's a fact. But I'm sitting across from you, and that same glass is to
my right.' I looked at him and thought, this guy has everything I need." Clearly, I need to redo
my pickup lines: Life is
a mystery: Mirrors reflect left to right, but not up and down. Jada, babe, my number is on my web site: www.dumbguysrule.com If you want to get your
finger on the pulse of Korporate Amerika, where would you go but Mikrosoft?
(Pardon the K mania — it's 60s shorthand for "the fascist insect
that preys on the lifeblood of the people," derived from the K-rich Kafka's
spelling of "Amerika" correctly in German.) Office2000 has an expanded
series of "autoshapes," also known as clip art, provided out of
the box by Uncle Bill. This rich melange of instant cliches is divided into
categories. Given JOHO's penchant
for wasting your time chasing down meaningless metaphors, we of course were
drawn to the category "Metaphors." Inside we found 27 images The
Masters of Redmond feel will be very useful in our business Powerpoint presentations. It tells you a lot. Although some of the
images are ambiguous and some are just plain twisted, by our count they break
down as follows: success 5 danger, strife, risk
4 bewilderment 3 failure 3 gossip, conformity
3 harmony 2 authoritarianism
2 drudgery 2 ideas 1 high value objects
1 home page 1 In other words, for every
image of success, in the eyes of the Minions of Monopoly, you are going to
need 3.5 of danger, failure, bewilderment and grinding authoritarianism. Further, what counts as
success in Microsoft's visual world? Lazing about sprawled
across the top of the globe (causing tsunamis in the PacRim, massive caribou
outages in Canada, and skidmarks in Greenland) A granite-chested executive
juggling four balls in a pattern that defies the laws of gravity, geometry
and graphic design. (He also has a pornographically large protruberance
on his hand which may be intended as a thumb.) A squiggly man approaching
a door with a key almost the size of the door itself. One worker being pulled
up a squiggly graph arrow by the person ahead of him. Gold bars piled up next
to two dice showing 12 — a loser bet if ever there were one. In short, these are surprisingly
passive images of success — kicking back, juggling, gambling and being
pulled up. The most active is the picture of the man approaching the door.
Why, you'd almost think that if you own, say, the operating system used by
95% of the market, success doesn't require a lot of work. Also, all of the people
pictured are white men. Just a coincidence, of course. Hey, white men have
to succeed too, you know! As in any nightmarescape,
the most important images are the oddest. Ignore the predictable pictures
of people jumping through hoops (literally) and three images of people at
crossroads. Let's turn our attention to two weirder drawings. One shows a man with a
trench coat writing on a piece of paper while another (smaller) man inside
his trench coat is also writing on it. You don't have to be named Sigmund
to see that this is a picture of the psyche itself, the id writing one script
while the superego writes another. The dream itself is the piece of paper.
But what are they writing? The same document? Or is one writing out, say,
his plan for acquiring the assets of The Moron Brothers consulting company
while the other is cursing in Arabic? If we could only read that paper, think
what we might learn about the inner psychic dynamics of the Reapers from Redmond. The other twisted picture
shows four people holding up pieces of paper, each with a zero written on
it, like the judges at Tonya Harding's ethics hearing. They are not just in
lock step conformity, but they are also essential nothingness. This is, indeed,
the absence of anythingness that characterizes the oppressiveness of das Mann,
the other, l'etranger, the alienating look of Bad Faith, and the complete
works of Albert Camus. In short, is this clip
art or is it a suicide note? Where's the clip art of
liberation, the clip art of joy? Please, someone, get me a link, quick ...
with the bourbon on the side.
In the previous issue, I
made fun of Macromedia ads that show the letters WWW spelled out in various
repulsive media, including flies on fly paper. I suggested some ludicrous extensions
of this campaign.
Macromedia
has possibly outdone me by running an ad with the letters "WWW"
written on a pig's ass. Life imitating fart? IBM Global Services is blitzing the mags with full page ads showing young
and hip (in a clean-scrubbed, casual-but-dry-cleaned way) employees. The tag
line: IBM
Global Services JOHO has no choice but to declare open season on this ad. Please forward
your contributions to JOHO (yes, it's a mini-bogus contest). For example: People
who think. People who do. People who get it at the Gap. People
who think they do get it. People
who think. People who do. The people you hated in high school.
Peter Merholz's 'zine, Peterme
(http://peterme.com/), points us to a presentation
by Vint Cerf (the felicitously named Father of the Internet).
Note the dates on the slide.
John Lewell wrote to see
if we could do a little link log-rolling. He has a site that lists directories
of sites, called, aptly, Metaplus: http://www.metaplus.com/
He "hopes to include a link to JOHO soon."
Are we at soon yet, John?
According to an
article in CIO Web Business (Dec. 1, 1998), Consumer Financial Network
(CFN) is hoping that companies figure out that it's better to help their
employees access the Internet efficiently rather than try to prohibit
access. CFN makes services such as shopping for auto insurance and mortgages
— during business hours! — available to employees via the
corporate intranet. So, instead of having to pretend that you're checking
competitive information while you're actually trying to finance your
car, you can get the job done faster just by going to your own corporate
intranet. CFN doesn't charge
employers for this service. Instead, it does deals with financial service
companies. Unfortunately, that means that the employees' choices are
highly limited, and thus they will likely be tempted to go back out
onto the Internet to get better deals, destroying the entire point of
the exercise. But we like the
premise. We hope to see some forward-looking company apply it to pornography. Cool
Tool If you've noticed
a change in the email, formatting-degraded version of JOHO, you can
thank (or blame) HTMStrip, a little utility that lets you turn an HTML
page into a pure-text facsimile.
Until now, I've been
composing the HTML version in a combination of Macromedia Dreamweaver
2.0 and Allaire HomeSite 4.0. Then, I load it into Netscape and use the
"save-as" text feature. (Thanks and a tip o' the hat to RageBoy
for pointing out this trick.)
Netscape does a surprisingly
good job of rendering HTML into text intelligently, but fails at a few
basic tasks. First, it doesn't let you set the margins. Second, it doesn't
do a very good job of tables.
HTMStrip overcomes
both weaknesses. And it has many other parameters that can be set. Oddly,
however, it is a DOS app, which is why (I'm guessing) its name is "HTMStrip"
and not "HTMLStrip" — 8-letter file names, don't you know?
HTMStrip is freeware. You can get it at http://hotfiles.zdnet.com/. Group Computing (Jan/Feb) makes the incredible prediction that email
use will continue to climb! Man, they're out on a limb on that one!
They site Forrester research as follows:
So, apparently users will greatly increase the number of messages
they send per day, possibly as they discover the power of the "Reply
to all" key.
Peter Merholz responds to
a quotation from Brian Ferry in the previous issue:
His name is Bran Ferren.
Yeah, well, his name *ought*
to be Brian. I was doing him a favor.
Our special issue on the
nature of reality provoked many interesting letters.
We even heard from our college philosophy professor, Richard "Little
Richard" Brockhaus, a man who at 24 seemed to be separated from us fledgling
Denksters by a gulf of decades. Dr. Brockhaus writes:
I heard your distant but
familiar voice on NPR; I'm not certain what you were yakking about, but
the voice sounded familiar. But ... you need to read Austin's "Other Minds"
on "real" and how the contraries actually wear the trousers. (Real as opposed
to toy? stuffed? ersatz? illusory?)
Richard is making one of
the right points to make. As I recall from the dust that is my memory, Austin's
point is that we use the term "real" almost always to differentiate
one thing from another. For example, we only talk about a "real dollar"
in the context of claiming that it's not counterfeit, not imaginary, not Monopoly
money, etc. Thus, the term "real" does not refer to some realm of
things but is instead simply a way of saying something is not unreal in some
specific way. So, it's a mistake to go looking for the "Real" world,
although it's interesting to study all the ways in which things can be unreal.
(If that paragraph was appealing
to you, you might want to look into Richard's Wittgenstein book: "Pulling Up
the Ladder".)
By the way, Richard takes up the marketing mantle and writes:
A good motto for you: "Now
this knowledge is not the work of your reasoning nor information passed
on to you by teachers; it is something that your mind sees, feels and handles
. . . " Descartes to Silhon (But compare, alas, with Husserl's discussion
of the "counterfeit grades of clarity" in Ideas #68.
I certainly agree with this
Descartes fellow that knowledge derives from lived context. Does anyone have
an email address for him? (I *think* he was CTO at Sun for a while, but I'm
not sure.)
Don Hosak also responds to
the article on reality:
I suspect that your examples
of "real" things being non-independent of their sustaining technology is a
bit more pessimistic than is called for.
Let's consider less dramatic
cases than the computer infrastructure completely vanishing. Imagine instead
a temporary downtime: The gate computer is not working or cannot connect with
the airline reservation system. If I have a paper ticket, there should be
no problem getting on the plane anyway. With a virtual ticket? Maybe, maybe
not. Depends on whether the person at the gate decides to believe me.
Similarly, if phone service
is down, I can still take pieces of metal and paper with monetary denominations
to the local grocery store and buy food. But if I try and pay with an ATM
card I'm out of luck (a credit card might be possible if they still have
a manual ka-chunka machine at the store and are willing to make an imprint
like that).
There's no question that
paper can serve as an adequate backup for temporary computer failures. And we
could argue over what this means for the reality of paper versus the reality
of the electronic originals that paper expresses. But I think Austin (via Prof.
Brockhaus) has it right: "real" is more like the word "very" than the word "heavy,"
if you know what I mean. (If you don't know what I mean, please write to Brockhaus,
not me.)
Daniel Dulay writes on the
same article on reality:
Consider my debit card.
With it I can make entries directly into my checking account ledger! And
there is pretty widespread acceptance of this "not real" transaction. And
I don't think that anyone believes the bank is taking some bills out of
my pile of money in the back room and placing them in a store's pile. I
think that it is safe to say that people realise that these transactions
are virtual and don't have a problem with it. They just don't think about
it.
Yet paper money is "real,"
and I think that convincing most people otherwise would be very, very difficult.
If the U.S. government were to survive and be healthy despite a financial
computer meltdown, I think that dollar bills would probably still hold value.
This physical object represents more than an electronic bank ledger entry.
I think that this complicates your question, "Which is more real, the piece
of paper or the information it represents?"
But, Daniel, "To oversimplify
is to understand" is my credo! Meredith Sue Willis, accredited Novelist, writes:
I enjoyed the JoHo article
about story-telling as an efficient and entertaining way of sharing knowledge.
It's especially nice if done on a dark and stormy night with the folks gathered
around an old stone fireplace smelling of smoky-damp logs. The telling, of course, is
the way the knowledge is created out of bits and pieces. Folktales get told
over time by many tellers and thus more knowledge accrues. One problem with stories,
though, is that they don't encourage snarkiness... If you think stories don't encourage snarkiness, you haven't been reading
Susan Cheever's biographical work. Oh, and you might want to look into that
smell of smoky-damp logs; I find it's often an indication that squirrels have
been chewing through the insulation on the power wires again.
I wrote:
The Internet was built,
as we know, in part to provide a nuclear-proof communications infrastructure.
Fred Hapgood replies:
Not even in part. The first
internet link was built to gang the computers running in four West Coast
university research labs. The guys writing the networking protocol found
some of the ideas they needed in a Rand report written several years earlier
to address the question above. This act of appropriation no more makes nuclear
survivability part of the intentional metaphysique of the internet than
car roofs are built "in part" to display pigeon shit.
While I admire your metaphor
(gotta love it!), the Internet is somewhat larger than the original net of 4
labs. Your point — which is well taken — is like saying that the national
telephone system was built to connect A.G. Bell with Dr. Watson.
Well, it's enough like that
to keep me from having to be wrong again, isn't it?
Gershom Bazerman writes:
I'd like to note, as far
as microsoft "Getting it" that the image at the top of the microsoft homepage
looks to me like a woman achieving orgasm.
Or maybe I just have a dirty
mind. Gershom, I'm happy to confirm, yes, you do have a dirty mind. To me it looks
like she's just had her teeth deep-cleaned and is checking on the remarkably
fresh feeling in her lymph nodes. Greg Cavanagh, Ordained
Minister in the Faith of Linux, writes just your everyday
military plans to put chips in warriors brains http://www.au.af.mil/au/2025/volume3/chap02/v3c2-4.htm
Allow me to quote from the above-referenced document:
The implanted microscopic
brain chip performs two functions. First, it links the individual to the
IIC, creating a seamless interface between the user and the information
resources (in-time collection data and archival databases). In essence,
the chip relays the processed information from the IIC to the user. Second,
the chip creates a computer-generated mental visualization based upon the
user's request. The visualization encompasses the individual and allows
the user to place himself into the selected battlespace. Well, boosting the military's RAM can only help. Besides, Greg, given that
your own education is in a combination of neural anatomy and computer sciences,
aren't you in fact becoming what you eat (in the educational sense, of course)?
Actual drawing from military implanted chip document
Mike Oliver takes issue with my mindless promoting of the Communist Life
Style: Yeah yeah, communists have
it all right, and us capitalists are all power hungry oppressors of the
working class...no oppression between comrades in the politburo, no. Poppycock,
the human natures of greed, gluttony, lust, etc. are in every political
and socio-economic system if those systems have people in them and not just
theory of the authors of books and other media...like SOHO! So communism basically made the mistake of being too optimistic about human
nature? Awfully cynical for one so young. Oh, and by the way, your description
of capitalists is right on, comrade! Mind if we quote you? Something along
the lines of "Capitalists are all power hungry oppressors of the working class,"
according to M. Oliver? (I believe the authorized wording, by the way, is
"the fascist insect that preys on the blood of the working class.")
Jon Pyke passes along the following Web effluvium:
The following phrase: PRESIDENT
CLINTON OF THE USA can be rearranged (with no letters left over, and using
each letter only once) into:
TO COPULATE HE FINDS INTERNS
Interestingly, the letters in "Jon Pyke" can be rearranged (no
letters left over, and using each letter only once) into: TOO MUCH FREE TIME.
Sometime being close just isn't good enough. This issue's contest asks you
to find URLs that are just one character different in terms of spelling but
miles apart in experience.
Here are some examples (not all of which slavishly obey the one-character
rule and some of which are just plain pornographic):
Chris Worth writes:
The perfect framejack
just popped into my box. You can't find the right guy called Chris Worth,
so you... email other Chris Worths and ask if they know him..... ! ——
We won't be sure that this is actually case of frame-jacking (the radical
mistaking of contexts) or just very annoying, recklessly stupid Spam until
our judges in the Hague (den Haag — you haven't pronounced correctly
if you didn't bring up phlegm) are back from their mandatory DWI school. But
we're enjoying it nonetheless.
The following R-rated frame-jacking reply came from Gershom Bazerman:
...as far as framejacking
goes, and going on with the dirty mind thing, there is a website whose url
I forget that was sent to me. It lets users of a porn site write their own
porn movie script.
The script — terrible
of course.
Furthermore, they all make
puns on "cum."
But they are writing for
the screen, not the page. Hence framejacking. No, no, Gershom, It's frame-jacking, not frame-jacking-off. Completely different
contest! See this issue's Bogus Contest, above.
And so we singlehandedly bring this massive volume to a close, as the wipers
slap away the sky's stormy residue, the drains opening to receive this spent
issue, circling clockwise (widdershins in the southern globe) until its presence
is only olfactory...
The
following information was found trapped at the top of my washing machine when
I ran some issues of JOHO through it. JOHO
is a free, independent newsletter written and produced by David Weinberger.
He denies responsibility for any errors or problems. If you write him with
corrections or criticisms, it will probably turn out to have been your fault.
Subscription
information, or requests to be removed from the JOHO mailing list, should
be sent to [email protected]. There is no need for harshness or recriminations. Sometimes things
just don't work out between people. Dr.
Weinberger is in a delicate nervous state, but if you want to send positive
comments to him, his email address is [email protected]. Dr.
Weinberger is represented by a fiercely aggressive legal team who responds
to any provocation with massive litigatory procedures. This notice constitutes
fair warning.
Any email sent to JOHO may be published in JOHO and snarkily commented on
unless the email explicitly states that it's not for publication. The
Journal of the Hyperlinked Organization is a publication of Evident Marketing, Inc. "The
Hyperlinked Organization" is trademarked by Open Text Corp. JOHO gratefully acknowledges Open Text's kind permission to use
this felicitous phrase. For
information about trademarks owned by Evident Marketing, Inc., please see
our Preemptive Trademarks™™ page at http://www.hyperorg.com/misc/trademarks.html.
How Text-y is the Web?
Zisman on Knowledge
Why
do you feel it is necessary to come out with a concept like knowledge
management?
Clearly
there has been a tremendous amount of vibration in the marketplace about
this thing called knowledge management.
Must
follow market! Must follow market! Must be leader in following market!
And so we
have both the opportunity, and in some sense, the obligation to our customers
to add some structure to it and define it.
Omigod,
I've said we're clarifying KM. Please let me get a phone call before he
asks me what I mean. Or a heart attack. Please...
Frankly,
I feel it is a natural evolution from groupware. In fact, the world never
got a good definition of [groupware], other than to say groupware was
Lotus Notes. I see KM as a natural evolution of that. [But] Notes and
collaboration is only a pillar of KM. It is much broader than that.
It's
the inherent broadness of the term, though, that confuses people. It is
almost like a Rorschach test for IT — it can mean dozens of things
to many people.
It's
not like there is one answer. It can be arbitrary, but you have to apply
some common sense to it. We are starting with the notion that you clearly
have a process within a company of creating knowledge, organizing knowledge,
and distributing knowledge ...
There
aren't many answers. There are no answers. Unless knowledge is whatever
crap you shove inside a proprietary, flat Notes database...
Is
part of the problem asking IT to think about broader concepts and not
products ...?
I won't
necessarily disagree with that. I think part of our role is to lead the
market. But I want to emphasize that you can't lead by only having what
they will need two years from now. You can only lead by supplying things
people need today.
We're
two years behind the market.
What
mix of products and services do you envision...?
...I think
there are a lot of similarities between ERP and knowledge management,
and that services will be a large part of KM.
Let
the service providers figure out what the hell KM is. Heh-heh.
How
can chief financial officers be assured that this isn't a formula for
disaster through runaway costs and open-ended consulting engagements?
...I don't
think people are going to say, "Well, if KM is collaboration and
business intelligence and three other things, maybe I'll do all five of
these things right now..."
This had better be a formula for runaway costs and open-ended consulting
engagements
If
people take KM to heart, will this result in companies massively redoing
their business processes?
I think
it will continue to enable something that is going on fairly fundamentally
today in organizations, which is virtual teaming and dynamic work relationships....
Say,
we could call this the hyperactive organization! No, the hyperlanky organization.
No, no, how about, oh, oh, Groupware-enabled KM. Yeah, that's it!
Low Expectations in Hollywood
Hey,
pretty lady...
I
can't see my own eyes. Wow.
Live
around here?
Want
to go for a drive in my Jag?
Planes sink
in the ocean but they fly in the air. What's up with that?
I
love this song.
If
you were 10 and I were 20, I'd be twice as old as you. But thirty years
after that, you'd be like almost caught up.
You
wanna party all night long?
My
nose runs and my feet smell.
Deconstructing Clip Art
Bad Ads
People who think. People who do. People who get it.
Links I like
Middle World Resources
A Compendium of
Resources
Walking
the Walk
For the Hyperlinked Organization
Email, Arbitrary Insults, and Suspicious Hacking Coughs
Bogus contest:
Off by One
Contest Results
-Original Message——-
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected] Date: 27 January 1999 07:15
Subject: Gargoyles!!
I am looking for the chris worth on the CHEVY comercial!! The one with the
Gargoyles in the comercial? PLEASE help ME find HIS WEB PAGE!!! CAN NOT
FIND HELP!!!!THANKX!!!!!
Editorial Lint