Dear Bridget Prentice,

I am deeply disturbed by the arrest of Damian Green MP. I am even more deeply disturbed by the response of the government and the lack of any sense of responsibility for this unacceptable erosion and undermining of the privilege of parliament, which I take as a key guardian of my freedoms as a citizen.

We know too much and are convinced of too little, T.S.Eliot, Selected Essays 1928.

One of the pressures I try to resist is the feeling that I ought to keep up with the streams of thought and knowledge concerning my areas of interest. Apart from the fact that it would be a futile attempt, I am convinced that in these days of knowledge economy the way of wisdom may be, on occasions, to close the door and find time to reflect. Knowing as much as possible is no guarantee to right action.

With so much material being generated on the web, how do we find those ideas that represent real quality? And how do we go about promoting content of our own that is worthy of the attention of others? I have experimented over the last year and a half with web-logging or "blogging". My motivation has been twofold.

Firstly, I have wanted to use a weblog as a tool for personal knowledge management. It has worked up to a point. I have noticed that I have not blogged as often as I have had ideas that needed to be jotted down. Instead I have waited until I had time to craft something I was happy to publish to the web. This has meant that I have not noted down some potentially useful ideas, meaning they don't get developed, and so some of the benefits of a weblog as a personal knowledge tool have been missed.

Summary of an article published by Harry Scarbrough of the Warwick Business School in KM Review called "Why employees don't share what they know"

A table showing 4 different modes of knowledge behaviour. The appropriate intervention should reflect the prevailing mode. If not we may be addressing the wrong problem.

The 3Cs of Knowledge Sharing:
Culture, Co-opetition and Commitment by David J. Skyrme

Looks at reasons people don't share knowledge, and finishes with incentives to overcome this.

David Wilcox on technology, engagement, governance

A site that explores the relationship between human relationships and structures and internet technology.

Jack : Knowledge Jolt

A consultant active in KM

I have modified a script from here to make a simple export from Moveable Type into Drupal. I had to make some small modifications to get the correct count of entries into one of the tables (_sequences, which holds the maximum id number for other tables of content).

I had 2 weblogs to import, one after the other. Only entries and comments are imported. All I have to do now is sort out the taxonomy, which I wanted to revise anyway.

The bug I found in the import script:
1. sequences table has elements using table prefix (prefix_), not used by the import script.

A fascinating interview with Richard Thieme | Linux Journal who is described as a philosopher of information technology, describing the interactions between technology and human experience. A number of points stand out for me in this interiew by Mick Bauer. Here are three that I think are particularly worthy of consideration.

Thieme asserts that computer technology defines our reality in a similar way to language. Modern culture has been formed through its interaction with and interpretation of written texts:

I could see by contrast that interacting with text on computers created a different experience, shifted how we thought about our possibilities, our work, meaning, ourselves--everything.

Secondly, the long term impact of technology:

In the short term, we always overstate the effects of new technologies. But in the long run, we always understate them.

Finally, on the role of unconventional thinkers who cross the boundaries of disciplines and conventional ways of acting and thinking:

First, they sound crazy. Then, they sound funny. Then, people attack them. Then, everybody believes that they always agreed with them all along. That's when you know their way of seeing things has become the core of a new consensus reality, and already new truths that contradict that are arriving on the edges.

One of the major problems in managing a weblog, or any site where visitors can leave comments, is that there are some that abuse the open nature of the web in order to advertise either unsavoury goods or copied software. These are the spammers. Their ploy is to insert their url into as thousands of sites in order to achieve a high search engine rating.

Their are various solutions to this, none of them entirely effective, but I found an interesting discussion on the alternatives at Sitepoint.

The danger in all this, as in any community that includes those that abuse freedom, is that the security measures we find necessary start to undermine the very freedoms we wish to preserve. This is where measures taken at the individual level are inadequate. We also need action at government level to put web abusers out of business.

Heres an article I want to think through some more: Shirky: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy

I owe this link to George Siemens: HBS Working Knowledge: Innovation: Caves, Clusters, and Weak Ties: The Six Degrees World of Inventors

Its an interesting article, and I won't comment further until I have read it more carefully.