Blog

When I want to write something, writing on computer is much more efficient than writing it with pen and paper. But then I want to throw in a quick diagram or a drawing to illustrate my point, and the situation is reversed. There’s nothing inherent in the technology that says it has to be that way. It’s simply because our user interfaces aren’t sophisticated enough … yet. These are some quickly fetched ideas for how this situation could be remedied.

Drawing Diagrams

All...

Knowledge management is one of those very ill-defined buzzwords that everybody claims to be doing. Also, it’s an area that exposes some quite fundamental ideological differences. Which is why it’s an interesting area. Here’s my take on it.

The Problem We’re Trying To Solve

Knowledge Management is fundamentally about creating a forum where people can teach each other. The same person will contribute with his knowledge in some areas and learn from other people in other...

In order to share your thoughts, ideas and knowledge, you often have to write them down. This will often take the form of a short document, a memo if you will. But a memo is really static and boring. What’s interesting is the evolution of thoughts and ideas through collaboration. This paper outlines a software system to support this (on the web, of course).

The Scenario

Say Wendy Wise has a great idea about how to make politicians tell the truth. She writes up some initial thoughts...

WAP will fail, because every single assumption it is built on is wrong. The instant someone delivers true, always-on internet to a handheld device, nobody will ever care about WAP again. And it will inevitably happen, because that’s what people want.

Freedom

The WAP is built on the old-fashioned broadcast model as we know it from TV, a model that could be described as “TV with a buy button”. That model has nothing to do with the internet.

Telcos want tight control over the...

Here’s a few things that you want to avoid when you’re building your website. Don’t worry, you’ll save time by avoiding them. And the world will benefit.

Don’t Make Links go Bold on Mouseover

Some sites think it’s cool to make links turn bold when the user moves the mouse over them. Please don’t do this. Your users won’t be able to click on the link.

Chances are that your link will fit neatly on one line under normal circumstances, but when the...

The Big Picure

LDAP is basically a specialized database. Some of the characteristics are:

• It consists of entries organized in a hierarchy.
• It favors reading over writing.
• Every entry has a primary key called the Distinguished Name (DN).
• It’s notion of schema is much more flexible than that of a RDBMS.

You typically use an LDAP directory to store information about entities like people, offices, machines and that sort. But you could equally well store most other relatively static...

This page contains several ideas on how to help rank and categorize content on a web site, to help users find the information they are looking for. The basic premise is that by watching what users actually do and counting that as implicit votes, we can generate much more precise information about how valuable content actually is to users, than by asking users to explicitly score items.

Categorization

As is well known in the Human Sciences, especially Information Science, Categorization is in...

These are some thoughts that <a href=”http://www.branimir.com”>Branimir Dolicki and <a href=”/lars”>I, generated while developing Knowledge Management for Siemens. I hope to one day put reality behind all this and see how it works in real life.

The huge picture

What is “knowledge sharing” or “knowledge management” (km) anyway? It’s basically people teaching each others. So a km system must ultimately be built on ideas of how...

There are two seperate and equally important parts to being a great programmer. You need absolute technical mastering of the technologies you use. But that’s the easy and boring part. The hard part is designing software so that it’s useful to the people using it.

I’ll present a lot of stuff here. Don’t be overwhelmed! You don’t have to learn everything at once. You don’t even have to learn everything I say here at all. But it does help to have some sense...

Random pieces I enjoyed reading.

Software design

These are on the top of my list. Cooper’s book is great for learning about the process of developing software in general. Philip’s book is about web sites, and since all interesting program in the next few years will be web sites, it’s equally relevant. Scott McCloud’s book is about the combined visual and written language used in cartoons. As it turns out, these are the same elements available to most software. Finally,...