I’m not exactly sure why, but I’ve been avoiding Twitter for a long time now. It’s not that I’ve had some deep dilemma over the validity or usefulness of Twitter — it’s more that I was worried I’d get engrossed in Twitter-ing my day away.

But I’ve decided that fear of a new technology is never reason enough to avoid it. So in case you’re interested in the minutiae of my everyday life, you can find me on Twitter as ‘lucasmcdonnell’ (yes, I was feeling particularly creative).

I’m not sure what my experience with microblogging is going to bring me, or whether I’ll get bored of it in a week and forget to update Twitter at all, but the experiment’s part of the fun.

I’m determined to try it out at least for a while though, so that I can determine if it’s for me or not. I’ll make sure to post my thoughts on how I’m getting along with Twitter after I’ve been using it for a while.

Since I’m at home sick today with a particularly nasty throat infection, I was browsing through some of my old posts, and noticed that my Google PageRank had mysteriously returned to it’s old value of 4 (I use SearchStatus in Firefox to see PageRank values).

While I don’t really care too much about PageRank, I still find it odd that a redirect had dropped my PageRank to 0. Since I wrote that initial post though, I did a few experiments with my search results, and noticed that none of my Google results had changed at all.

What this seems to indicate to me is that PageRank can only be interpreted over the long term. Looking at the number even over the course of a few months seems to be pointless, since it doesn’t really give you an accurate picture of how Google treats your site or pages.

Angela tagged me to let my readers know 8 random facts about myself. Believe it or not, this is harder than it seems. Here goes:

1. I’m gadget-obsessed — anything electronic usually sucks up a huge amount of my time (and money). Nintendo Wii’s the obsession du jour.

2. I love plants. I have a ton of plants around my home — and I’m always looking to get more. I usually go for cacti, since while I may love plants, I’m chronically forgetful (so they may have to go without water for a long time).

3. I’ve always wanted to go to South America, but I’ve never been there. I guess it’s never too late though.

Continue reading »

Matt Moore’s got a short but insightful presentation on demonstrating the value of knowledge management (found via Bill Ives’ post), — and surprise, it’s not about the amount of documents your user base downloads or how many community members you have.

I think Matt’s point is a good one. While it’s important to demonstrate the value of your projects, it’s also important to be selective in what metrics and measures you use to describe that value.

However, I think the value of knowledge management in a specific organization is often dependent of what that organization is looking to get out of KM. In one organization, it may be a better quality of work than previously existed, whereas in another organization, it may be cost savings.

Nailing down what you really want to get out of KM (just like you would for any endeavour) is one of the keys in making you get what you want out of it in the end. The “we just want to do everything better than we do now” approach is always going to fail.

I’ve been waiting a while now to get my 13000th comment spam (don’t ask me why, I’ve just noticed the number creeping up to 13000 lately, and I’ve been counting down the days).

A while ago, I had decided to go with a challenge question as well as Bad Behaviour (which are both ways to block comment spam before it even happens). Unfortunately, however, Bad Behaviour slowed down the admin of this site to a crawl, so I had to dump it.

As for the challenge question, I didn’t notice any decrease in spam at all. While I didn’t exactly do any before-and-after quantitative analysis on the effects of the challenge question, I have noticed that most of my spam is of the automated bot type — not some spammer sitting there typing in long comments about shady online pharmacies.

So my conclusion would be this: challenge questions aren’t really an effective way to fight spam (at least not in my case). Has anyone else had a different experience with the spam they get or the tools they use to fight them? With all that spam out there, it makes you wonder how much more we can really handle.

Due to the inherent difficulty of trying to maintain two different blogs, I’ve now moved the posts from memetiks.com over lucasmcdonnell.com.

I had initially created memetiks.com in order to focus posts there on memes and meme-related topics, but it occurred to me recently that I didn’t need a separate site in order to write posts about memes and memetics — hence my main reason for moving the posts here.

I’m not sure how FeedBurner is going to treat these new posts, so apologies if any readers of this site get a one-time flood of six or seven posts. Likewise, those subscribers who had tuned in to memetiks.com will be able to pick up anything that was on that site here at lucasmcdonnell.com. Thanks for reading, and hopefully this will simplify things for everyone!

Inside Knowledge has a short, but interesting article by Dave Ulrich, who is a professor at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan.

The article is mostly about what motivates people to work (Ulrich uses the equation ‘talent = competence + commitment + contribution’ to suggest that talent is no good without the other three components).

I talked about something similar last summer when I described work as an increasingly fractured narrative (although I’ll admit that maybe my undergraduate degree in literature makes me just think of everything as a narrative).

Professor Ulrich uses the word contribution to describe a situation where “employees feel their personal needs are being met”, and where the employee feels the investment of their is meaningful.

Continue reading »

I signed up for Plaxo a short while ago, and I have to say, I’ve been less than impressed so far. While the Plaxo platform is not necessarily bad in itself, I kind of feel like it’s just a somewhere between Facebook and LinkedIn — both of which I already use.

I’ve tried to give Plaxo a chance, but ultimately I haven’t really found anything I’m too excited about, not to mention I’m not overly eager about having yet another social networking site to fill in endless minutiae about myself.

I posted before about the questionable importance of LInkedIn, wondering whether most people actually have that much of a use it (besides being a way of keeping in touch with people you normally might drift apart from).

So is there something obvious I’m missing with Plaxo? Some kind of bell or whistle that has escaped me? I’d be interested to hear opinions from either side of the question — does Plaxo actually offer anything we haven’t seen before?

In case you haven’t heard, ‘rickrolling’ is everywhere. What’s rickrolling? Well, in a nutshell, it’s when you provide a link that is supposed to be to one thing, and actually links to a video of the 1987 Rick Astley song “Never Gonna Give You Up”. Wikipedia has more on this (yes, it’s really a link to Wikipedia, I won’t rickroll you).

Rickrolling has also been used as a form of protest, with the Church of Scientology being a particular target for anti-Scientologists. I’m a little confused as to what Rick Astley has to do with Scientology, but I digress.

Now different people certainly will have different opinions about rickrolling. Some may think it’s stupid and pointless, others may think it’s funny and entertaining. But guess who’s probably happier than anyone about rickrolling? That’s right, Rick Astley.

Continue reading »

I’ve been using FeedBurner for about almost a year and a half now (if anyone’s counting, that’s since the first month that I’ve been writing here. and FeedBurner’s been managing my subscribers since then). I’ve been lucky to watch my subscriber count grow consistently — with one notable exception.

This site has hovered around 400 RSS subscribers for months now, which is to be expected I think, since I have sometimes had less time to post than I would like in the past several months. But in the past two months, my subscriber count was suddenly cut in half.

That’s right. One day I logged into FeedBurner, and there were now roughly 200 subscribers instead of 400. I chalked it up to something weird happening on FeedBurner’s end, and didn’t think much about it (I’m not as obsessed as I used to be with subscriber count, fortunately).

Continue reading »