Dear K-Loggers,

Carol Tucker brought up an interesting scenario (see below for a quote). A
similar thing happened to Jim McGee at Northwestern's Kellogg School of
Management recently:

http://www.kellogg.nwu.edu/faculty/mcgee/htm/blog/

Luckily Jim was using a desktop K-Log tool. That allowed him to keep posting
even when the publishing conduit (the University's network) was down due to an
attack. When it went back up he could publish everything that he had entered
into the system while disconnected in one easy step. BTW, Jim is a pioneer in
the use of K-Logs, having taught a course at Kellogg this spring (Kellogg is
often ranked the #1 business school in the nation by Business Week) on knowledge
management with Radio on each student desktop.

This scenario could also become a disaster if you are using a K-Logging service
and it either suddenly goes out of business (as we have seen with many Web
companies) or has a catastrophic failure. While the site itself may be saved if
it is published to a third party or safe location, the fact that the data and
logic used to build your K-Log is stored in a database that is now unavailable
would make your work a stranded artifact. The solution is either to publish
from the desktop and keep a back-up of the files on CD, tape, or back-up drive
-- or -- to set up your own hosted solution on a server you own in order to make
sure the database is back-up (this is easy to do). Keep it in a place you can
control.

This also brings up another note I saw recently from Dody Gunawinata. He is
running a K-Logging vertical community for AIESEC (an organization of 50,000
members devoted to cultural exchange through global internships). He is using
a mix of Manila hosted sites -- and -- Radio sites published from the desktop.
This allows people to select the type of tool they feel most comfortable with.
You can see his community here:

http://www.aiesec.ws/

Dody brought up the fact that for 80% of the world, per minute Internet access
is too expensive for extended time online. That means that if you are working
with individuals in countries were cost of Internet connections are expensive
relative to income, the best way to extend K-Log publishing to them is through
an online/offline publishing. This will allow them to keep costs down (I know
there are lots of NGOs and non-profits out there that are looking at this, this
info may help). For example: a person working in the Philippines can work for
hours on several K-Log posts offline and then connect for a couple of minutes to
publish them and collect news items from subscriptions. Dody expands on this
with:

"Any software that allows offline-online usage will do well in this type of
environment. That's why the rest of the world can afford to use email (POP).
Radio will do well."

Sincerely,

John Robb
http://jrobb.userland.com


Great public example of a K-Log in action

Rory Perry, a clerk to the Supreme Court of Appeals in West Virginia, is running
an excellent K-Log for lawyers in his state. He is his site:

http://www.state.wv.us/wvsca/Clerk/Recent/

He covers recent WV supreme court decisions and publishes them to his K-Log.
This K-Log also produces and RSS newsfeed that lawyers at firms in the state can
subscribe to. The updates to Rory's site are immediately distributed to the
subscribed lawyers. They can then use this information as the basis for their
own annotated posts to their K-Logs running on their firm's Intranets.
Excellent!

JR



There is one other scenario that comes to mind, but this is more pertinent
to the issue of keeping information up on an intranet without a copy
elsewhere, rather than personal versus professional blogging: A manager is
writing up a manual of procedures, posting it on the blog to make it
available for comments and questions. S/he comes in one morning, tries to
open the blog to check on a policy, and receives a message that the
organization has decided to freeze the content because there is evidence of
an outside intrusion. Because all of the information existed in that blog,
s/he must retract their steps and duplicate the research to get the answer
to the question.

thanx
carol

Carol H. Tucker

"Ideas are capital; everything else is just money" [Deutsche Bank advert]





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