A day in the life

Today, well actually yesterday, was a day to remember:

• 9:00-10:00. In a meeting someone suggested that storytelling as a KM method for capturing knowledge on video could be improved by adding a little social context. Not entirely awake, the following scenario went through my mind: "Hi, I am Joe Blogs. My wife is called Amilia and we have three kids, a goldfish and a cat. I am now going to explain how our air-to-ground missiles can hit a peanut from 500 miles ....". Two months later. "Hi, I am Joe Blogs. My wife has left me, my bicycle has been stolen and the cat has eaten the goldfish. Fortunately, our air-to-ground missiles can still hit peanuts..."
• 10:30. An email reminding me that I have worked for the same employer for 25 years. Would I be willing to confirm this? Wondering whether this was the end of the beginning or the beginning of the end, I happily concurred. The bonus should decrease my tax debts a little :-).
• 11:30-13:30. Animated discussion with Lilia, Rogier and Robert de Hoog on weblog research in general and knowledge flows in particular. For me, the meeting demarcated the significant step of frantic hacking getting the weblog spider to work (applause), integrating Rogier's ideas on how to represent links into an ontology (it is amazing how well we co-operate despite a total mismatch in skills!) and the real thing: creating an infrastructure to support blog research. It is only the beginning, see supporting blog research for the context.
• 13:30-15:00. Adjusted some bits and pieces in the air-to-ground missile software. This is not just about peanuts (domain point of view) but also about attack and destroy (task point of view). Ontologies that contain just domain concepts are not very useful, wondering whether the semantic web folk are going to figure that out pretty soon.
• 15:00-17:00. Fed about 50 weblogs through the spider. For most, it picks up the posts from the HTML pages turns them into RDF according to Rogier's ontology and spits out a full text RSS file to support knowledge flows. Using the semantic web library of SWI-Prolog I can find who is linking who, and once Lilia and Robert tell me what they consider to be a weblog conversation that should also not be a problem.
• 17:00-18:00. Enough work done, I followed up a link that Carla provided me with a long time ago. The link is Sparklines and it is nothing less than fascinating. The idea originates from Edward Tufte. Wish I had known that earlier. Thank you Carla!
• 20:00-24:00. Played chess in a team match, my team lost for the first time this season. I won and the tally now stands at a perfect 6 out of 6.

Many people include books and records in their side bars. I don't. Shania Twain, Madonna and Beautiful South are ideal for my purposes and who wants to know I'm struggling with "RDF for beginners".

Reflecting on blogging while blogging. Is a blog an on-line diary? Today, written tomorrow, it was.

"I read the news today oh boy
Four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire
And though the holes were rather small
They had to count them all,
Now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall."