If you would remember last week I shared a round of pictures about a place up in the mountains here in Gran Canaria where after some heavy rain it would create a stunning waterfall for everyone passing by with the car to enjoy it, since it is just very close to the main road. Last week I created a weblog post on this very same subject and although the waterfall didn’t have much water running I mentioned later on this week I would be sharing another weblog post where I would be showing the same waterfall with some incredible pictures of water running all over the place after having had some heavy rain a few weeks back.

Thus here is the followup weblog post so that you would be able to check out what it would look like with lots of water running along the mountain and what is even better check out also some of the surroundings where you will be able to see lots of different almond trees and certainly lots of vegetation that will probably remind you of being elsewhere. This time around I have shared a whole bunch of these pictures in my Flickr account as well, but, as a teaser, here you have got three of my favourites that I have uploaded so far, so that you get to see why I said that particular location is mind-blowing.

Oh, and if you would want to explore further the differences between the before and the after check out the Waterfall tag I created for the whole round of pictures. You will be able to see how much it changes from one day to the other, specially in the overall surroundings.

Finally, here is another pretty slick tool related to Flickr that will keep you busy for a little while. It is Flickr Related Tag Browser and you can find it over here. The way it would work is you would enter a particular tag you may be interested in and right away it will start grabbing smaller thumbnails of pictures tagged with that particular word(s) and within seconds you would have access to a couple of dozens of pictures for your enjoyment. And all that with a zoom effect so that you get to check the picture(s) and with a direct link to the picture(s) if you would want to see the original. Nice ! Very nice! Certainly another Flickr tool to add to the growing list.

Technorati Tags: Gran Canaria, Waterfall, Flickr, Flickr Related Tag Browser

Ever since the first day that it came out, and ever since I first weblogged about it, I have always been very fond of Qwika, a powerful search engine that allows you to search content of multiple wikis hosted in different places but bringing you that collective wisdom under a single point of entry. In the past there wasn’t a single and unique service able to search the content of wikis so by the looks of it it was very much needed to have something like Qwika to be able to share for knowledge and information from a wide range of wiki spaces and without having to search in multiple places. Back when I first weblogged about it I actually mentioned how most of the content seemed to be coming from Wikipedia, but just a couple of hours ago I got an e-mail from Luke Metcalfe where he was pointing to a new press release where we would be able to read the following piece of news:

“Qwika, a search engine designed specifically for searching wikis, has today included an additional 1,144 wikis and 21,964,380 articles in its index. This brings the site much further to its goal of indexing all wiki content.

These wikis span an wide array of topics including travel, music, genealogy, trains and games. They provide a level of detail that would not be considered encyclopedic in Wikipedia. Most are hosted at How, recently renamed from WikiCities.“

WoW! 1.144 and coming closer to the 22 million articles of good and relevant information and knowledge ready at your fingertips and ready to be reused. This is just terrific ! Those folks who have been trying out Qwika would certainly agree with me how easy it is actually to make use of it and even better to be presented the results in just a single window and then navigate from there regardless where the original resource may be. It will eventually get you there. Very nice, indeed.

If in the past most of the content indexed by Qwika was coming from Wikipedia, it looks like with this press release it will now also search the contents of Wikia, the former Wikicities, a place I have been watching closely lately where you can find a good number of wiki spaces related to Knowledge Management. In fact, here you have got the results from Qwika related to Knowledge Management. As you will be able to see lots of interesting resources related to the KM world and which would fit in quite nicely next to a weblog post I shared not long ago: KM Awareness - Tell Me What You Read and I Will Tell You Who You Are. Another resource we would need to add to the growing list of KM resources.

Thus if you haven’t checked out Qwika yet, I would suggest you take it for a spin and see if it would allow you to find relevant wiki content to whatever you may be looking for. I am surely it will meet your expectations and much more. We will have to wait and see what will happen in future upgrades. Perhaps adding Wikispaces to the list of resources? We shall see. But so far things are looking good. Very good, indeed!

Technorati Tags: Qwika, Wikia, Wikispaces, Knowledge Management, KM

It is that time of the week again where all of the members from the LinkedIn Bloggers Yahoo! group are encouraged to link to a particular weblog as a way to help boost some further activity and also as a way to help further build on the community building aspects of such strong group. In fact, ever since I got started participating much more actively in the group, apart from being just another lurker, I am finding out that I am learning a whole lot more from the different community members not just by getting to read from them in the corresponding e-mails but also by this very same blog boost. The fact that I can go into community members’ blogs and check out what they are up to, what their thoughts, expertise, interests are and so forth it allows me to start to know them a bit better and, why not?, perhaps build up some more trust in the way we collaborate with one another. Certainly, an interesting exercise for those communities out there that may want to get things started in their own community space but may not know how to get things rolling. A weekly blog boost would certainly provide the perfect icebreaker to get things going.

So with all that said this week’s weblog boost goes to Jeremiah Owyang’s Web Strategy by Jeremiah. Jeremiah’s weblog is all about discussing how “web tools enable companies to delight customers” but instead of just talking about the weblog in general I am just going to comment further on a particular weblog post that he shared yesterday and which I think is worth while commenting on. It is about metablogging, I know, but I think it would also put into perspective how important it is for any weblogger to be able to find their own weblog style and stick to it if they would want to become a successful weblogger (And I am just not talking about having thousands of daily reads or anything like that).

The weblog post is titled Don’t forget there are “Professional” or “Career” style blogs and you can find it over here and in it you will see how Jeremiah talks about the different types of weblogs out there that could be classified in four different groups:

• Pro-employee blogs
• Anti-employee blogs
• Corporate blogs
• Employee blogs

And then in the commentary he links to Wikipedia’s Types of Blogs. But from the whole bunch of weblog types he gets to discuss and mention I found it interesting that he has also introduced another type of weblog. A new weblog type that I wholeheartedly agree with and which is a Professional or Career weblog. Main reason being that I feel quite identified with his definition of what it would be:

“The Professional or Career blog is focused on an individual’s craft or passion with little ‘personal’ information, but does not represent a company or employer they work for. It’s likely this blog will retain it’s life when the blogger changes employer“

Yes, indeed, although I am actually sharing quite a bit of personal information I still feel that both of my Internet weblogs, elsua and elsua @ ITtoolbox, would be Professional / Career blogs that will continue their way despite whichever employer I may have. That is actually the purpose of the disclaimer present in my weblog templates. What is important to note down from this is that weblog type is all about the individual’s craft and passion on whatever the particular subject and stick to it through thick and thin. Yes, indeed, finding your own weblogging style in whatever the subject you are passionate about and commit to it. That would be the key to me as to why I keep on doing it and what will make a successful weblogger.

I guess I could well stick around with the Corporate / Employee weblog I maintain inside of IBM but then again at some point in time I felt I needed to go out. I needed to have a space out there that would allow me to expand further my horizons, to explore further possibilities, to be able to share what I want to talk about with a wider and more diverse audience. In short, I wanted to find my own weblogging style out there in the Internet and find out if it was much more different than the one I have got in my Intranet weblog and certainly it looks like my Professional / Career weblogs do fit that profile. But how about you ? Have you finally discovered your weblogging style ? Are you sticking to it ?

Technorati Tags: Metablogging, Professional Blog, Career Blog, Blogging Style

In a recent weblog post Tom Godfrey was wondering what was happening in the world of Knowledge Management as he was not seeing anything inspiring for a few weeks now. And while thinking some more about that particular weblog post I just couldn’t help thinking about a recent article I bumped into that clearly indicates a strong shift in the way Knowledge Management, Communities of Practice and Collaboration have been perceived so far and where they are potentially starting to head to thanks to the help of social software and Web 2.0 related technologies. The article itself is titled The Shift to Social Computing by Dion Hinchcliffe and you can find it over here.

That particular very nicely written article by Dion actually puts into perspective where the focus in Knowledge Management should be placed from now onwards, if not before all along. We are no longer talking about organisations, or whatever other hierarchical / mechanical groups, pushing for KM; we are now talking that it is actually the communities themselves the ones that will be pulling everything together and get people to share their knowledge and collaborate with one another making use of that social software that Web 2.0 has been inspiring so far. Yes, indeed, what Dion mentions as Social Computing.

In that article you would be able as well to see listed the three main principles he mentions as responsible for the shift to Social Computing:

1. “Innovation is moving from a top-down to bottom-up model
2. Value is shifting from ownership to experiences
3. Power is moving from institutions to communities”

I must say that while going through this same list of principles it reminded me of another weblog post I created some time ago titled Useful Distinctions in Social Software - Where Passion, Trust and Involvement All Meet where you can see how it is that passion, trust and involvement that helps knowledge workers break that command and control attitude from the hierarchical business and allow themselves to become members of different communities and share what they know with others going beyond whatever the organisation(s) they may belong to.

However, and while all this is happening there is something equally important and crucial that we should not forget about. From the very beginning and while KM was following a much more traditional and hierarchical method where the focus was on the explicit knowledge exchange and the different organisations themselves we should not fall into the same trap and identify that this shift is all about the tools themselves, once again, but in this case related to the Web 2.0 offerings. We need to ensure that we go beyond that. That we just make use of Web 2.0 technologies as powerful enablers, not the end result, that would allow people come together and share their knowledge and collaborate with other community members. Yes, indeed, we need to ensure that the focus is in the right place: the people and their tacit knowledge.

Thus I think we are witnessing exciting times ahead of us in the KM world, but then again, are we ourselves ready as well to make that cultural shift ? You decide.

Technorati Tags: Knowledge Management, KM, Social Software, Web 2.0, Tacit Knowledge, Explicit Knowledge, Social Computing,

In the past you would remember how I have been creating a number of different weblog posts around the subject of social bookmarking indicating a good number of benefits in the Knowledge Management area about why people would want to make extensive use of such tools in order to be able to contribute to that collective wisdom by sharing their favourite bookmarks with everyone else, not just the closest teams / communities to themselves. I have also been indicating how so far I am currently making use of two different social bookmarking tools as my preferred choices: IBM’s Dogear (For my Intranet bookmarks) and BlinkList (For my Internet bookmarks). Reason why I like these two options is because I feel they are the ones providing with a much more complete experience of what I think social bookmarking should be: i.e. as interactive as possible.

However, I can imagine that other folks may be interested and would want to make use of other options, so just recently I thought I would go and give it a try to one WordPress plugin that would allow me to extend those capabilities to all of the different weblog posts I get to create over here and allow you folks to bookmark whatever weblog posts on the fly and in your favourite tool(s). That way you will not be restricted in any way other than making extensive use of your favourite social bookmarking tool. The lovely plugin currently available and which I am testing over here in elsua is Sociable. For those folks who are also using WordPress as their default weblogging tool, and who would want to give it a try, you can download it over here. Basically, Sociable allows you to select a number of different popular social bookmarking offerings and through some basic configuration add them to every single weblog post you may be sharing directly from the Admin panel.

The result is that within minutes, and without hardly coding from my side, I have now been able to include a bar of items, of bookmarking tools, that people could click on if they would want to bookmark whatever the weblog post. That is why you would be able to find a button for BlinkList (Of course!), del.icio.us (An even more quite an interesting option at the moment since it looks like it apparently allows you import your bookmarks now, once and for all, so I can now see a lovely integration between my BlinkList bookmarks and my Dogear bookmarks coming up using del.icio.us as the connection between the two. Just brilliant!), Digg, Spurl, Furl, Ma.gnolia (An interesting tool I will be weblogging about some time soon), Newsvine, Scutle (Of course, Jean-F, I couldn’t resist the temptation!), Shadows (For those Flock users out there), Simpy and TailRank.

Thus now you would be able to bookmark whatever of elsua’s weblog post along the way in your favourite bookmarking too and if you see that I have missed any of the popular social bookmarking tools out there just append a comment and if it is available I will gladly go ahead and add it right away. Or alternatively, you could also have a look into the attached weblog post, over at 3spots, 30 Social Bookmarks ‘Add to’ footer links for blogs, in order to be able to add manually up to 30 different social bookmarking buttons to your weblog posts. But remember that most of that would have to be done manually, as opposed to Sociable where you would only need to get it working by clicking a couple of options and off it goes.

Finally, if you are looking as well for an overview of the different social bookmarking tools available out there I would suggest you also take a look into another weblog post I shared a couple of days ago: Web 2.0 Commoditization - ALL Social that CAN bookmark. Over there you will be able to read of an extensive listing of bookmarking tools, with a brief description of how they work and a direct link to it to try it out further. Then over the next few weeks I shall continue weblogging every now and then about the different tools that I may give a try and see how they would fit in not only as collaborative tools but also as Knowledge Management tools so that with my two cents worth of comments there may be other knowledge workers who may benefit from that experience. Thus stay tuned !

Technorati Tags: Sociable, Social Bookmarking, Dogear, BlinkList, del.icio.us, digg, Spurl, Furl, Ma.gnolia, Newsvine, Scutle, Shadows, Simpy, TailRank