Friday, June 21, 2002

How to boost employee productivity by using a news aggregator.. An interesting claim. "A small change in the way we work could shave 45 minutes off of the average workday.  That small change is to use a news aggregator to get news instead of gathering it by hand."  - John Robb via Jeff Cheney: Radio.  It might even be true; it feels true. There are two problems. We need proof. Some evidence will come from learning more about klogging behavior. Combinations of surveys, interviews, and ethnography will help.  Klogging metrics, generated from Radio and Radio Community Servers, will also help calculate payback. The other problem is thornier. Time saved gets reappropriated. We either: find something else productive to do consider it saved for "non-productive" time (which may be indirectly productive) do more of what we were doing before, but faster. You get to this by observing use before adoption, during adoption, and after. [a klog apart] 5:51:45 PM

The Staffing Value of Klogs.. Dear Klogger: Over the last five years, how many hours have you spent on your resume or CV? One? Two? Ten? Let's say 2 hours a year out of 2000 working hours, being generous. Now how much time have you spent writing to your blog? Ten minutes a day, one day off? That's 50 hours a year. Time spent describing yourself, whether that was your intention or not. So at least an 10 times more information lives in your weblog than your resume. And it is fresher. And in your voice. And covering a broader range of topics. And hyperlinked. And linked-to. So there is more of you in these documents. How does this create value, from a worker lifecycle view? It improves search. I'm looking to fill a present or future job. That job needs the person doing it to know things. It helps if they have experiences (stories) that prove they can do what we'll ask of them. We want them to fit not only the job, but the people with whom they will work. And we hope they bring points of view that complement the existing/prospective team's strengths and weaknesses. Before, I had to try to find the right interview list working off of 500-1000 words of advertising on your stale "resume" (updated on average 2-3 years' ago). Now I can use Google and other tools to find many small connections that sum up to the job's requirements.   Your blog's oodles of datapoints say who you are better than any darned resume. What interests you? What you've been reading and studying? Who you know, how you think, how you face social challenges and life obstacles. This is richer information. And you are more likely to turn up correctly in a search even if some darned "keyword" is missing. So more of the right people show up in the short list. Start with just your own small to mid-sized business. This value is massively important in knowledge driven enterprises, like law firms and other professional service orgs. It helps manage careers, assign projects, coordinate work, solve problems, plan for succession. Or, looking outside your firm, to find your circle of prospective employees and business partners. Fortunes are now spent on managing "resumes". Google applicant tracking system, job ad distribution, and job board for examples of this $billion industry. Klogs, and tools that help you mine them, improve your marketability (as employer or worker) over those who only use "resumes". Now is the time to understand the medium. Time to develop and integrate those mining tools. Time to klog. Phil: <A title="Add Phil Wolff to your AIM Buddy List" href="aim:addbuddy?screenname=evanwolff">AIM Y! @Ryze [a klog apart] 5:50:50 PM

vCalendar and Radio. Part 1 and 2.. Jenny said: Phil, how did you create the vcs file??!! I've wanted to learn how to automatically generate these in our online calendar at work, but I don't know enough about vCalendar. Imagine these puppies flowing through your news aggregator at work! Part 1. Recipe. How did I do this? Manually, for now.  Click here to add this event to your Outlook or Netscape calendar.   I posted two graphics to my blog: vcalendar.gif vcalendarsmall.gif (the one I used) I created a Radio shortcut. vcalsmall. for the picture.   I created the event in Palm. You can do this in your Palm Pilot or from the Palm Desktop. I think Palm Desktop is free, and it works with or without a Palm Pilot. Open the calendar. Type the event name into a time block. Right/Option-click to add a note.   Create the vCalendar file. Selecting the new event, File | Export vCal... Save the file as a Radio gem (I created a gems/events folder) Naming: I try to start with the yyyymmdd format to: make it easy to sort events on my hard disk avoid duplication of similar events. Should have the .vcs extension. It is a text file; you can read it in notepad. You can tweak it in your text editor, but shouldn't have to.   Upstream the event file.   Refer to it in a post. Outlook and Netscape Calendar claim the .vcs extension, so the browser knows to open your event with it. Using Outlook?  You can do steps 3 and 4 with a few differences. Outlook has an Action | Forward vCalendar command, but you have to save the attachment to your hard drive. Part 2. Futures. I'd like to: add one or more events to a post, with fields like start date, time, end date, time, etc. see them as part of the post on my web site have them flow out through RSS sort a category by event-start-date instead of by post date I've been working on adding attributes to Radio blog posts. Still learning the basics of the various callbacks, frontier syntax, how renderers work and build on each other. [a klog apart] 4:20:38 PM

Business 101: Making the Virtual Real. Business 101: Making the Virtual Real You may have noticed that my blog output has been a little slow recently.  I've been dealing with making my consulting practice much more real.  Here's some of the steps I have taken: Teamed up with a partner.  Although we've been working together for a while, it's really come together in the past 2 weeks. Made the partnership solid and one that I think will not only work but work *very* well. Incorporated. Set up a business banking account. Setup a real address. Setup a voice mail system. Got business cards. All of this has been hugely time consuming -- hence the relative lack of blog entries -- but also very rewarding.  We both feel much better about the future.  In this essay I'm going to talk about #s 3-7.  Since there are so many of us working as consultants from home these days, I thought an essay about this was worth while.  Each of these topics are short -- but I think quite useful. ==> Read Story <== [The FuzzyBlog!] 4:19:43 PM

TECH TALK: Rethinking Enterprise Software: Digital Dashboard (Part 2). What RSS does is get information to you from the sources you want (your subscriptions). This fundamentally changes the quantum of information that one is able to process, very much like the way Samachar has changed the news habits of people. Earlier, one used to go to multiple sites and [E M E R G I C . o r g] [StickyString] 3:59:43 PM

WiFi. It'll Change How You Compute. WiFi.  It'll Change How You Compute I'm blogging this right now after a long day.  And I'm on the 2nd floor of my house connected by a WiFi link.  And I'm sitting up in bed with full Internet access.  This is just plain cool.  Here's some of the places that I've used my WiFi link from: Bed -- blogging Attic -- surfing Basement doing IM to Norway while folding laundry Kitchen -- reading www.slashdot.com while cooking Kitchen -- doing IM with Norway, California and Watertown, MA while I did the dishes Upstairs Bathroom -- No, not that! -- I was regrouting the tub while also doing an IM discussion with someone explaining my comment about how bookmarks just plain don't work Kitchen Table -- reading blogs while eating dinner or breakfast or lunch (yes, I do live alone) Front porch -- in a rocking chair while watching the sun rise So here's my contention -- Wifi is fundamentally changing how I compute.  I'm still plugged into the "collective" but I am also able to get other things done at the same time.  I'm no longer desk bound and that feels wonderful.  And, while some people will say that this is being just unbelievably geeky, I'm not so sure.  Is this really all that different from talking to someone on the phone while you do dishes?  Or work around the house?  Or is it that I'm now able to interact with some of my favorite people in a way that I really like?  And that helps with the thinking process (a lot of these essays are a result of an IM interaction).  This honestly doesn't feel geeky at all -- if anything it feels very human. Here's the other dimension that's being changed by WiFi: I read more.  Let's be honest here -- reading in a desk chair basically isn't a lot of fun.  It's not all that comfortable and when I really want to read is NOT when I'm doing email or trying to code or write documents.  I want to read when I am comfortably sitting on the couch or at the kitchen table while eating dinner or even sitting up in bed.  I can honestly see this actually cutting into the number of magazines I read regularly.  And, what do I read?  Mostly blogs to be honest.  And slashdot and I'm now starting to read Kuro5hin. WiFi.  You won't expect it to but it really can change how you compute.  At least for me, it makes the computing experience much more human by liberating me from the confines of my desk.  That's wonderful. [The FuzzyBlog!] 2:26:38 PM

John Robb. How to boost employee productivity by using a news aggregator. [klogs] A small change in the way we work could shave 45 minutes off of the average workday.  That small change is to use a news aggregator to get news instead of gathering it by hand.  Applied across a 200 person company, that 45 minutes of savings could be worth $1,650,000 a year.  The wild part is that the cost to implement this is only $8,000 and requires little if any support from the IT department.  If we are going to really boost productivity, we are going to need to focus on those improvements that provide the most bang for the buck.   Small changes in work habits can have amazing results.  To get at these nuggets, companies need to spend time really watching what people do with their time.  If they did, they would find that much of the time they spend is wasted on simple tasks that could easily be automated.  Other things to focus on: 1) Auto-categorization of e-mail. 2) Integrated search (desktop, LAN, K-Logs, Web) with all proprietary doc formats revealed as HTML. 3) Voice mail on the desktop PC.  4) Accurate K-Logging of current activities:  status, thinking, plans, projects, etc. 5) Online presentations, to-do lists, project plans via outlines.  6) K-Log personal portals that integrate all connection info (e-mail, IM, phone, address, bio, resume, picture). Very simple stuff can yield big results. [John Robb's Radio Weblog] 11:19:51 AM

© Copyright 2002 Jim McGee.