Yes, indeed, the trip continues. What I started a couple of weeks back with the details and further pictures from a recent ferry boat trip I took from Arguineguin to Puerto Rico and then finishing off in Puerto de Mogan and back is entering its last stages covering now the last part of the trip, which is the way from Puerto Rico to Puerto de Mogan.

You have probably seen already how I have been sharing some more pictures from Puerto de Mogan over at my Flickr account but this time around I am going to be sharing the same charming fishermen’s village but from another perspective, that is while entering the harbour coming from the sea, as opposed to coming from mainland. One thing for sure about this whole round of pictures is how stunning they are to watch, specially when you come to think about the different cliffs and how they have managed to build the roads on top or in the middle of them and still keep them safe for everyone to drive through.

I tell you quite an experience, but this time around from a ferry boat, which is something that you wouldn’t normally see unless you decide to take the trip yourself. But judge for yourselves. Here you have got three of my favourites for the week and the rest, as usual, you can find them over at my Flickr account:

Impressive, eh? I knew you would like them. I must say that this time around I have found it very easy to share these pictures directly in my weblog. And that is one of the main reasons why using WordPress is a big plus for me. Why? Because of all the cool stuff that several folks have been involved with and without which I am sure the experience would have been completely different and not as good, for sure. If not take a look into WordPress Flickr Post Bar to find one of the nicest and coolest (Sorry to repeat that word again, but it is true!) plugins to integrate your Flickr pictures with your WordPress weblog. Very nice work indeed by Joe Tan ! Thanks for that, Joe !

[tags]Puerto+Rico, Puerto+de+Mogan, Little+Venice, Flickr+Post+Bar[/tags]

As you may have been able to see over at the archives I have been weblogging externally in elsua for a bit over four months and so far the experience has been very good and very enlightening. I have been able to make a whole bunch of different new connections in the KM world and engage in some very interesting conversations that have made it all worth while. By the way, now that I mention that, expect some changes on my blogroll since it has changed substantially since last time I updated it so you will be able to see what are my favourite reads at the moment.

Anyway, the main reason why I wanted to share this particular weblog post is the fact that although I did not anticipate it this particular weblog seems to be having a life of its own, because during the holiday period I got approached by Tim Ribich over at ITtoolbox who provided me with the opportunity to join the ITtoolbox community of webloggers in the area of Knowledge Management.

Of course, I just couldn’t help but accept the invitation and join such a powerful resource as ITtoolbox. I guess that if I would have had other Internet weblogs out there I may have thought about it twice since I would need to see how the timing and all would go, but since that would be my second weblog on the Internet I thought I would give it a try and see if I would be able to manage it. Thus over the last couple of days I have been doing some initial setup on the new weblog space and I am now glad to present to you my second Internet weblog adventure: elsua @ ITtoolbox.

So, right now I have got two different weblogs:

• elsua ~ A KM Blog
• elsua: The Knowledge Management Blog

(Yes, you could say I have tried to keep things relatively simple)

I think it is going to be an interesting and exciting experience as this will be the first time that I will be weblogging on the Internet outside of my own environment, like my own hosted server and favourite weblog engine and so forth, and it is kind of intriguing how it is all going to work out. For the time being I will be exposed to, yet again, another weblogging engine. In this case, Movable Type. I have never been exposed to it so I will just have to wait and see if I can get my favourite weblogging tools (w.bloggar, Qumana, Performancing For FireFox and Flock’s weblog component) to work with it. But that will be something that you will be reading further in my new weblog: elsua: The Knowledge Management Blog.

One other thing that I wanted to mention about this announcement itself, before I will let you go, is the fact that I am still going to share some further content on elsua with the same frequency as before, if not more. Yes, indeed, just because I have got a second weblog up and running it does not mean that my personal weblog would have to suffer in the attempt of working with both. Besides, there are plenty of webloggers out there who are weblogging in multiple weblogs, so why can’t I give it a try and see how it would go, eh? Thus let’s get things started and let me welcome you to elsua at ITtoolbox where I have already started to share some content and much more that will be coming out of it as well. Yes, Knowledge Management, Collaboration, Communities of Practice and Social Networking are very extensive topics so I am sure this would be a great opportunity to expand some more further !

Oh, and just in case you miss out on this particular notice or that you may not remember after a little while I have updated the weblog template to include a link to the new weblog. So it is always easily accessible to everyone. Along with an upcoming update of my blogroll. Thus stay tuned !

[tags]ITtoolbox, Movable+Type, Metablogging, KM+Blog[/tags]

Today was the day where I was back at work trying to weblog in my Intranet weblog and to take things for a spin I decided to see how the Performancing for FireFox extension from FireFox would work. If you would remember, not long ago, I created a couple of weblog posts on my overall experience about Performancing for FireFox and back then I mentioned how I saw some initial issues when trying to get this extension to work with one other Open Source weblogging engine, which is Roller Weblogger. And the same thing happened with Flock’s weblogging component.

Either way, I decided to give it another try today and to my surprise even though I initially had some issues getting it to work in the end I managed to set up the account manually for my Intranet weblog, which uses Roller and right away I thought I was off to a good start. Whooops, but not so fast, Mr. Apparently, the account got set up all right and I could see that there was a successful connection to my Intranet weblog. However, I do not seem to be able to get the listing of categories nor the previous weblog posts that I have created already. It just displays a grey screen. Nothing happening.

As you may have figure out already I had to set up the weblog through the manual process since it is protected in an Intranet and while doing that initial set up I had to choose the option for MetaWeblog API in order to be able to connect to it since Roller is not listed as an option on the list of weblogging engines available. So, I said, fair enough, as long as it connects I should be fine. But now that I am connected, I am not that fine. As I said the listing of categories and previous weblog posts do not seem to be working, which means that it is rather awkward to post a article to a place where some of the options are missing.

I have read somewhere (Wish I could find that link again, grrr ! Where were you BlinkList when I needed you!) that this may not be a problem with Performancing For FireFox per se, but from the MetaWeblog API option that fails to grab the categories and the history from a weblog based on Roller. Thus I am not sure if that is something that would be fixed eventually. What I was hoping for is that Performancing For FireFox would eventually fix this issue by allowing the possibility of having Roller Weblogger added as another option to choose from other weblogging engines. That way, we would not have to go through the same thing and still be able to function properly with our own weblogs regardless of what engine they run.

Oh, but don’t worry, because this same issue is happening to other weblogging tools that I have been talking about over here: Both Qumana and the weblogging component from Flock have got this same problem and unless Roller is added into the list of options available for selection I doubt we would have any success to make full use of the capabilities of each of these weblogging tools for that particular weblogging engine. And that, to me, would be a pity, because although this engine may not be particularly popular like Blogger, TypePad or LiveJournal it is still an option out there for quite a few of us and therefore it would be just like shutting us down from the benefits of weblogging in general. That is why I just hope that one of these days this Open Source weblogging engine would be part of all three weblogging tool options.

In this particular case, w.bloggar is the big winner since it includes a whole bunch of different weblogging engines, Roller included, that none of the other tools current offer that people can choose from. This, on its own, is what is making me continue using extensively w.bloggar as my default weblogging tool as opposed to other options since it just simply does the job. And quite nicely !

[tags]Roller, Roller+Weblogger, Performancing, Qumana, Flock, wbloggar[/tags]

Another interesting weblog post that I have found on my RSS feeds for today has been the one that Phil Windley has shared over at Phil Windley’s Technometria regarding the subject of using screencasts as a very powerful way to augment instruction. And I just couldn’t have agreed with him more on this very same subject.

Having been involved myself with providing different education sessions on different topics and tools regarding KM and Communities of Practice during the course of 2005, and most probably during 2006 as well, I can certainly agree that screencasts are very powerful means of delivering content and education, specially to remote, distributed and virtual teams. There are plenty of reasons and benefits as to why screencasts are very powerful while conducting different education events but I am just going to mention five reasons why they have been very beneficial to me thus far:

• Ability to record education session for later replay so that people who may not have been able to attend the education session at the time are able to listen to the original event without missing out on the audio and video of the event. And they can do that at their own leisure, while at work. Yes, indeed, what you would called informal learning.
• Ability to save time and effort by not having to repeat the same education session with others over and over again and during whatever the period of time. In here I think I could also include the good amount of costs saved by not having to arrange multiple conference calls or even arrange face to face events to conduct those sessions or even reserve whatever the web meeting room I may have thought about scheduling ahead of time.
• Ability to improve the amount of online resources for specific learning courses or tutorials. That way there is a growing amount of learning material that could be used extensively to increase the number of intellectual capital available for whatever the business and dealing with whatever the topic.
• Ease of use for wider distribution through the usage of media files, Flash or whatever other web format where in most cases people would just need to have a browser or their favourite multimedia player. Indeed, in this case there is no longer a need to have expensive software running in your computer in order to attend those events. In most cases now you would just need to have a browser or a media player so that you can view the modules with just a single click.
• Easy to create, edit and produce for later distribution and without hardly any intervention from the presenter in order to share the results with the audience. This is probably one of my favourite benefits since in most cases it would require very little technical knowledge to produce your own screencast and off it goes. Available to everyone.

So as you can see screencasts are certainly one of the most productive ways of getting virtual teams to enjoy different education events without having to worry about anything else than just getting the participants to make use of their favourite browser or media player and with no additional costs involved. By now though you may be wondering about what are my favourite tools to create screencasts and over the last couple of years I have developed an inclination for three of them:

• CamStudio (Freeware)
• Wink (Freeware)
• TechSmith Camtasia Studio (My favourite and, perhaps, the most powerful one with some very useful online tutorials in TechSmith Video Training Materials)

If you are looking for a more comprehensive listing of different tools available for creating screencasts you could also check out the link best screencasting tools where you can find a very good listing with a good number of reviews as well for each of them and many more.

Thus next time you are thinking about delivering a course for an education event, you may want to have a look into the option of creating a screencast with it so that other folks may be able to benefit from it at the same time that you have got a good and inexpensive audio and video recording of the session itself. You may want to have a look into any of the different options mentioned above or the listing from the link I talked about earlier on. You will see that they would be a very successful and effective way of letting your education events sink in with your audience and remain there for later reuse.

[tags]Screencast, Wink, Camtasia, CamStudio, Learning, eLearning[/tags]

Over at Micro Persuasion Steve Rubel has been sharing today an interesting weblog post that I thought would be worth while commenting on as well. In How and When to Respond to Conversations he is actually wondering “whether companies needed to address every single comment/question that comes in on their blogs” or not.

I generally tend to agree with the comments mentioned by Steve and others, but I would go and take things even a bit further. As I have mentioned already elsewhere, I have always been saying that weblogging is all about having conversations with other people and as such I have always felt that weblogging is like having your own virtual water cooler where you invite people to participate in different discussions with you on a specific set of topics.

And like in every water cooler whenever you have got few people, therefore few weblog comments, you always have a tendency to engage with them all in the subsequent conversations. Thus in weblogging the same thing would apply. The complicated thing though would be when you have got far too many people talking at the same time over at the water cooler. Normally, you will have the tendency of summarising the different thoughts and add your own to the overall topic of discussion or, on the other hand, you will just pick up a subset of the conversations taking place and engage further with those knowing that everyone else would do the same thing, surely you know that at the same time your conversations are taking place so are others with other participants and therefore everyone is engaged into the discussion(s). No one is left behind.

That multiple level of interactions is in the end what will make the conversations ever so much more enlightening and richful and as such, before you would realise about it, you would be fostering the creation of multiple groups or networks within your own weblog or the (virtual) water cooler that would be able to carry on further the conversations while you may be busy preparing the next set of interactions. At least, that is one of the things that I have been experiencing myself over the last couple of years that I have been weblogging both on the Internet and the Intranet and how I take every single comment that goes into each of the different weblogs that I manage. And so far it seems to be working.

But how about you ? Are you one of those who prefer to manage your virtual water cooler and engage with it as much as you can or rather you prefer to let it go and allow others manage those comments for you ? Is it always good to try to be in control ? It is worth it ?

[tags]Metablogging, Virtual+Water+Cooler, Conversations[/tags]

I am sure that every now and then you come to wonder yourself what happened to all those great weblogs that you have been following all along and that all of a sudden, and for no apparent reason, content stops from being shared and discussed with other folks, specially in such a fragile world like the one from Knowledge Management, where weblog readership is not as popular as many other mainstream weblogs. Yes, you have been there, seen it, experienced it, moved on ! Well, the same has happened to me and one of the last instances has been the great weblog created by Tom Godfrey over at Why Knowledge Management? from where no new content has been shared since October 2005.

I am not sure what may have happened or what the main reason has been for Tom to stop creating some very interesting and thought provoking weblog posts but I thought I would comment on a particular post he shared some time ago and which got me thinking for some time dealing with the concept of Knowledge Management and what it is. The specific weblog post is titled: What is Knowledge Management? and even though the post was created in August last year I still think it is very relevant for the KM of today.

Tom’s weblog post points out to another article created by Colin Mc Cullough around the subject of What Is Knowledge Management - Knowing What We Know? in which, apart from the fact that we all seem to be struggling to come up with a convincing definition of what Knowledge Management really is, he comes to state that KM is all about the people (i.e. the human factor), and not the technology nor the processes, and what will actually transform organizations from a labour based to an asset / knowledge based model. “[…] the importance of the human factor in achieving a successful knowledge-sharing and knowledge managing culture.“.

However, what I really like about Tom’s comments on Mc Cullough’s article is the fact that focusing on the people as a whole to have a successful KM strategy may not longer be good enough. So he discusses the concept that it may now be up to the individuals themselves, in short, the so called Personal Knowledge Management, something that for the last few years I have been identifying myself with as probably one of the most powerful and comprehensive ways of implementing successfully KM strategies in whatever the organisation, where the main focus is on the individual to create, foster and boost that knowledge creation atmosphere that will help people share their know-how with their peers in a much more personal and committed way so that it can be reused effectively.

Thus whoever was thinking that Knowledge Management was all about tools and processes and off you go should think about it once again, because the actual focus should be placed on the individual, like both Tom and Colin state very clearly if they would want to see it succeed. And when talking about Personal Knowledge Management there is no doubt that there is a shift in the paradigm of tools to support such new approach where the focus is not on the tools themselves any longer but on the individuals who make extensive use of those tools. Yes, indeed, the so called Web 2.0. But that is another story for another weblog post. At least, you can see where all the recent hype about KM is coming from and where it is heading to. Quite an exciting road, indeed, to say the least.

[tags]Knowledge+Management, KM, Web2.0[/tags]