Sunday, January 26, 2003

• Human Filtering with RSS -- After about 3-4 months of serious blogging, and about a week of realizing the power of focused web browsing via RSS, I find that Terry Frazier points out a seed of a solution for the still daunting task of finding good stuff on the web...

"The combination of Weblogs and RSS create a global network of subject matter experts (SMEs) that bring analysis, insight, and useful opinion to a range of everyday topics and current events, but there is no easy, efficient way of finding, defining, or distributing the metadata about these sources of information...Filters are still useful, they just aren't that useful...More useful is the RSS feed from an SME..."

Terry talks about a direction for a solution, that starts with the providers. Those of us who gather and add information to the flow should pay better attention to the headlines used so that folks using these new tools know when they've run across something of interest.

New Years RSSolution...As I add things to this river of information, I promise to give careful consideration to those titles, so those downstream from my little tributary can come to trust me as a reliable SME on the subjects I choose to write about and/or pass along.

There's another part of Terry's piece that caught my attention as well. He talks about how Jim McGee writes on Murphy's Law and Design, using work from a piece I've mentioned recently, James Vornov's piece on The Origin of Murphy's Law. This building on the work of others, or standing on the shoulders of those who came before, strikes me as an informational corollary to the "open source" movement in software design, in which a whole is the outcome of many pieces of input. Those of us adding more bits and pieces to the flow, sometimes creating eddies and retracing currents of conversation, contribute to the benefits of those downstream, unimpeded by the gate-keepers, the old-school publishers, and the "certifiers" of "professional" expertise.

Something tells me I'm not the first to have this epiphany, but as my intended audience is not really the advanced webheads out there that I'm running into in the blogging community, I'd like to encourage them to jump in if they are at all tempted. The water is fine. The more comfortable you get swimming around in this flow of growing ideas, commentary, and information, the more easily you will find trusted SMEs in your areas of interest. (Check out my blogroll for some that I've found for myself in the realms of management, leadership and creativity.) And the more comfortable you will feel pitching in with your 2 cents worth.

Who knows? If and as you get into the swim of things, you may find yourself in the role of "trusted SME." And as Britt Blaser (who keeps on popping up in my stuff...see what I mean) said in To Make A Difference... "Is there any urge more basic than for your life to be of consequence? No matter how we define consequence, most of our instincts and actions seem aimed towards it.

"Now consider that we are helping in the birth of a ubiquitous global network, for it's not the "frozen" Internet Infrastructure that matters, it's the connecting of most humans who wish to be, using words and gestures that seem natural to them (not yet, but real soon). We all know this is what we're about, but it's good to pause and wonder at our good luck to be at this place at this time."

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Previous Posts

• Mechanics, Fixers, and Ronin
• TOC Applied to Medicine
• Now Available in XML
• Blogging for Business
• Agile Development and Critical Chain
• Delivering Value
• Murphy's Law
• Local Optima and Global Suboptima
• AGI's Critical Chain Basics
• Small Business Success