James Governor's Monkchips

On RSS Signal To Noise, Cote Delicious, and Thlinking (no typo)

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Check out Cote‘s comments (italicized below) on his delicious links from yesterday. This is a feed you should subscribe to if you’re interested in stuff.

* CMDB: managing a complex world
News on BMC’s Atrium CMDB stuff. And a Jason Andrew quote!
* Dead-end jobs in Delhi
Even in India, call-center jobs are dead-end jobs. Who knew?!
* IBM Software Group Needs Clear Product Direction
“IBM SWG looks and sounds more like a systems integrator than a software products vendor.” I’m not too sure that’s a bad thing. Highly customized products, instead of one-size-fits-all products might be what customers want.
* Blogging: Bubble Or Big Deal?
“Not only did email flow die down, but less energy went into political finger-pointing because transparent blogs meant that there was no way to hide mistakes.”
* tags, tags, tags, and marsedit
AppleScript to put technorati tags into MarsEdit.
* ecto
External blog editor.
* MarsEdit 1.0
* Former Vignette Architect on RSS Opportunities for ECM
“I think the ECM vendors are struggling to prove that what they’ve spent R&D money on the past few years was worth it and as a result can’t spend on what’s important for the future.” Classic! That’s a sure fire way to stall inovation.

The two ideas that struck me on that list are the bold italicized ones. Both are somewhat contrarian which is appealing. Every IBM competitor always says that IBM’s approach is only about services, and not good products, which increases cost and so on. But folks keep buying from IBM. Why is that – Cote says its about personalization. I tend to agee; its about the Long Tail of Software Development and maintenance. Criticize it all you like but Louis Gerstner’s insights into what enterprise customers want are as relevant today as they were when he first stopped selling biscuits and took the hotseat at IBM. Integration without services–that doesn’t mean anything. Someone has to do the linking. Accenture and BearingPoint and so on get paid for MS implementations. Why does Accenture’s James Hall speak at BEA events? Because his company makes a pot of money selling services around WebLogic solutions. Does automation have a role – of course it does. But so does customer choice. Or what Cote said…

The RSS insight is spot on; me and Stepho have been wondering about RSS as a threat to Exchange and Notes too. That is – functions like expertise management and lightweight project management can be well addressed with RSS and related techs. Just ask Jon about networked intelligence via RSS (or watch it on a cool new screencast) or take a look at the Tada list. Or if you like visual mindmaps this is sick.

Cote is adding metadata to web resources with these tags, with his delicious commentary. Thanks guy. Cote doesn’t need to reinvent the wheel to usefully comment on it. That’s analysis as annotation. What comes next to make this kind of annotation more valuable and measurable and aggregation friendly – could be Attention.xml . Mr Gillmor, the human inforouter, is going to be busy.

What’s my point? Insights don’t need 100 pages, or even 10 pages, or even one page, to explain. Sometimes you just need to point at something and say why you’re doing so. Or ask what other people think of the thing you’re point at. Peter Dawson calls this quickfire annotation Thought Flickrs. Andy Lark calls them blinks.

Are we seeing the emergence of thlinking? thought/linking and embedding.

One comment

  1. Its good. You call it “thlinking”. Excellent notation. I strip it to one- thought.Emergence of “Thought Embeding”.

    I really can’t say that I have named this phenomene, but ‘thlinking’ is good. You said it first :)- !

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