I just gave my presentation. Basically, since this conference is talking about Knowledge Management, I tried to shout the words “flesh” and “desire” as often as possible.

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Gary Turner writes:

I propose that on Friday at precisely 2.30am, we all visit our local Safeway stores in our home towns and purchase

1 Pack of Safeway brand AAA batteries
1 Tin of pineapple chunks
1 Bottle of Newman’s own Caesar Salad Dressing
1 You’ve Got A New Job greetings card

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Dean in Boston. (It helps to imagine a crowd roaring as you read it.)

If you haven’t yet contributed to the Dean campaign – or even if you have – this would be a good time to. Closing the quarter with a bang would make a huge difference to the dynamics of the race.

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Fun factoid from Elizabeth Liddy (director of the Central for NLP at Syracuse U) who’s talking about doing context-aware natural language processing: The most frequently used nouns in English have an average of 7 meanings and the most frequently-used verbs have 11.

As always, I got my facts reversed. The entry above is now correct.

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Bobby Kishore of Microsoft is explaining how to create a KM system without relying on explicit metadata. People don’t like filling out forms and entering metadata explicitly. So, a KM system ought to mine content for metadata.

That’s certainly right. But here’s a related question: Why don’t people enter metadata? It’s not simply because it’s a pain in the butt: individual pain for organizational benefit. It’s also because filling in metadata makes us pull back from the world, an attitude that goes against our biology. In fact, it’s desire itself that draws us into the world and makes us shudder as we draw back from it.

David Reed comments that the way people describe how they share information isn’t how they share information. Huge implications for how you build a KM system.

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Daniel Bobrow from PARC says that Xerox tried to support its repair folks by modeling the machines in software. The repair people were impressed but didn’t find it useful. The conclusion: You can’t put the right knowledge in the box. (He goes on to explain the social life of information, as fellow PARC-er John Seely Brown put it.)

Cool way of putting it. And why did we ever think we could put knowledge in a box? It must have something to do with the fact that we think our human knowledge is in the box of bone that sits atop our neck. Knowledge isn’t in the box because consciousness isn’t in the box. It’s of the world and always outside of itself. (This isn’t mysticism; it’s just a description of consciousness that puts attention at its core.) My conclusion: It’s not just the right knowledge that can’t be put in the box because knowledge is a way the world reveals itself to us and thus necessarily transcends the box.

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I’m at the TTI Vanguard conference in DC. About 120 people are here to discuss this year’s topic: Knowledge Management. The advisory board is scarily smart and deep.

The organizers are nervous about people blogging from the conference because they want people to “speak fearlessly.” There’s a No Press rule, but they are ok with blogging so long as it doesn’t violate people’s privacy, a nicely fuzzy rule that I’m happy to hew to.

I’m presenting tomorrow, on “The Unspoken,” which unfortunately sounds like a Clint Eastwood movie. At the speakers’ meeting this morning they stressed how interruptive the sessions are: you are granted a ten-minute opening but after that, anyone can ask a question. Everyone has a microphone at her seat (along with an ethernet cable and a power outlet). This orientation meeting didn’t exactly put me at ease, but that wasn’t its point. I came here with loose ideas about what to talk about, figuring that I’d end up rewriting after today anyway. Now it’s my bowels that are loose. Ulp.

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Verisign has extended its mighty middle finger to all of us, according to this clear article at SFGate.com:

Internet users who enter unregistered domains because of a misspelling, for example, are redirected to a VeriSign Web site. The page offers possible alternative Web addresses and a search engine that presents links based on how much companies are willing to pay for top billing.

What can you do about it? Beats me. All ideas gratefully accepted.

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Peter di Pietro points to Newstran, a service that aggregates and translates world news.

The translation can be pretty rough, although this is from Chinese and thus predictably is sense not much making going to:

?center port politics has the research ?Wang Yaozong ?with the above ?law, ?refers to Hong Kong ??weak ?, ?caused the Beijing port altogether to govern ?, but the port ?entire ?Deputy to the National People’s Congress ?strength ?????law owed the principle ?, ??on “?the system” ?is fuzzy is the matter ?, but politics “?the system” ?had ?.

Aothough have to love a site that has as an entry in its pull down menu:

BULGARIAN >> ENGLISH – IT sux

It lets you use either Babelfish or WorldLingo as your renderer. Some of the languages are translated well enough to get a sense of the article. And when they don’t, you’re treated to tantalizing bits such as this from the Berliner Morgenpost:

Hans’s acorn field man stands to Josef In the preliminary investigation around compensations with the assumption of man man by Vodafone Hans’s placed itself acorn behind German bank chief executive Josef field man

It turns out that Hans Eichel is opposing Josef Ackermann. “Eichel” is German for “acorn,” so this is akin to Germans rendering a US headline about a cabinet meeting as “Grain Food advises Small Leafy Plant to Continue Policy towards Actually Exists.”

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Peter Kaminski points to a site about digiscoping, that is, shooting digital photos through a telescopic device. The difference between the snapshots you’re taking now and what you could be doing if you were willing to lug a howitzer-sized scope with you is pretty dramatic.

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