Why Blogs Could Be Bad for Business

As an extend to a previous post “Blogging l’entreprise” here is Why Blogs Could Be Bad for Business in which Neil McIntosh comments that business weblogging will not be adopted in the way being touted today and a change of culture will be needed.

“Information is power” is a more likely mantra in many organisations. Whenever you hear those three words, you’re hearing the signal of the kind of closed information culture where there’s also a heads-down, bunker mentality utterly unsuited to the openness required for a convincing weblog, be it an external PR effort, or knowledge-sharing internal one.

There are plenty of areas of business where people are judged on their knowledge, and the competitive edge – and thus the safety of everyone’s jobs – is the thickness of a single good idea. Share it all on a weblog, with competitors or (worse) an office rival? You must be kidding.

And, alas, changing that kind of culture is going to take far more than merely installing a smart piece of software on a server, and encouraging everyone to blog on.

J2ME Resources

A list of J2ME resources.

JavaServer Faces Specification Still in Progress

The JavaServer Faces specification is still under development. The outcome might be a big progress in Java web application UI development. It should help assembling reusable UI components in a page, connecting these components to an application data source, and wiring client-generated events to server-side event handlers

WiFi News Resources

A list of WiFi news resources

When BeanShell Scripts Become Real Java Classes

Introduction to BeanShell for the utilization of scripted code in a runtime environment.

5 Days in Greece

The Akropolis with its Parthenon, the Piraeus at dusk and the beauties of the island of Tinos

Educational Modelling Language – Introduction

With EML, educator can specify instructional designs, based on different pedagogical models, for e-learning applications. More than ordering and sequencing resources used in e-learning, EML adds the ability to integrate instructional design to enable more advances e-learning applications. Currently there is no integrative framework to model “units of learning”, integrating all types of learning facilities (tests, communication services, learning activities, learning objects), which one would come across when modelling e-learning applications.
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The Swiss Centre for Innovation in Learning

The Swiss Centre for Innovation in Learning (SCIL) started operations on 1 March 2003 (received some CHF 6 million as seed money) at the Uni St.-Gallen devotes itself to the sustainable use of new media and learning technologies in universitiy education. In the eyes of the scientific director Dieter Euler, the strategic dimension of the new learning culture is important if a significant improvemet in the quality of teaching is to be achieved. “Seperate projects, as found in the Swiss Virtual Campus, are individually laudable and demanding. But they offer no promise of permanence if they are not anchored in the structure of the teaching institution. [...] It is therefore a key task to develop it further, as well as to ensure the long-lasting impact of e-learning in universities through the creation of qualification and advice services”.

Project for Public Spaces

What makes an effective and meaningful public place? The Project for Public Spaces is dedicated to creating and sustaining public spaces that build communities. The site contains a number of best practices information on such places as parks, plazas, streets, public buildings, and public markets that will be of great interest to planners, civic officials, landscape architects, and anyone seeking to restore meaning and usability to a wide variety of places.

Small World Project at Columbia University

In 1967, social psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted an important experiment to test the hypothesis that members of any large social network would be inevitably connected to each other through short chains of intermediate acquaintances. His results, now a part of popular culture and common parlance, was that the average lengths of the resulting acquaintance chains was approximately six. This “six degrees of separation” hypothesis is now being tested in the Small World Project by Professor Duncan J. Watts and his colleagues at Columbia University. Professor Watts and his team hope “to test not only average properties of lengths of acquaintance chains, but also the distribution of lengths, along with the effect of race, class, nationality, occupation, and education.” Source: The Scout Report