2004 July | Wigley and Associates

Chief Blogger: Northfield Police Chief Gary Smith

By Griff Wigley, on July 30th, 2004

Northfield Police Chief Gary Smith has a new web site with a weblog.

Blogging and business moving mainstream

By Griff Wigley, on July 30th, 2004

USA Today: Blogging and business moving mainstream

In a sign blogs are moving mainstream, major technology companies including Microsoft and IBM came together at a recent conference to discuss the profit potential of the Web publishing format. The growth in the number of blogs, and those who read them, continues to attract attention from business leaders, including Microsoft’s chairman Bill Gates, as a means of enhancing companies’ communication more directly with employees, partners and customers.

Blogging to arrange your ideas

By Griff Wigley, on July 22nd, 2004

Amy Gahran (“writer, editor, trainer”) has a weblog called Contentious: News and musings on how we communicate in the online age. Last week she blogged a piece titled: Arranging Ideas: Knowledge Management in Human TermsÂ and it speaks directly to a leaders and business owners who keep a weblog. (I found her blog via elearningpost, which in turn I found from Lee Lefeever’s Common Craft.)

In my book, knowledge management boils down to arranging ideas. In other words, I prefer to view this as a real human process, not a technological or abstract one… I see the process of arranging ideas as comprising three core tasks:

Recording your thoughts in useful, creative ways that yield even more interesting ideas, context, and insights.

Organizing and storing your thoughts with tools that help you easily retrieve, juxtapose, compare, or combine specific ideas.

Sharing your ideas and observations with a select group or the world in a way that encourages and enables further mixing, matching, insights, and creativity. (Actually, the “sharing” part is optional, since it’s possible for knowledge management to be a strictly individual matter. Still, I think sharing ideas is generally desirable.)

The result of this process is what I call structured thoughts Ã¢â‚¬â€œ ideas, observations, and insights that are organized within a system that both gives them rich context and makes them easy to find, use, and share.

Dan Brown and Associates website/weblog

By Griff Wigley, on July 21st, 2004

Dan Brown, owner of the Trials Training Center (a recent weblog client) and a Professor of Engineering at Auburn University, has a new website with a weblog for his new company, Dan Brown and Associates.

U.K. e-democracy project to visit Northfield

By Griff Wigley, on July 19th, 2004

Steve Clift, of Minneapolis-based Publicus.net, is hosting e-democracy officials from the U.K. this week and after meeting with edemocracy projects in the Twin Cities, they’ll be spending some time in Northfield learning about Northfield Citizens Online and Northfield.org, the community portal that I volunteer for.

Visitors include Dylan Jeffrey and Julian Bowrey from the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister and Isobel Harding from North Lincolnshire Council and the Local e-Democracy National Project.

Joining us:

1) Eden Prairie City Manager (and blogger) Scott Neal, former Northfield City Administrator and frequent participant in NCO’s time-limted, online community forums from 1996-2003;

2) Eden Prairie Police Chief (and blogger) Dan Carlson.

3) MN State Representative (and blogger) Ray Cox, former Northfield School Board member and frequent participant in NCO’s time-limted, online community forums.

New editing features in Blogger

By Griff Wigley, on July 16th, 2004

Blogger announced new features for its editing tools yesterday.

See the All about Blogger’s post editor page for details.

So far, I like what I’ve seen, especially the Composing window and the new features in it such as:

Different fonts
Different size fonts
Colored text
Bulleted lists
etc!

James Gang Coffeehouse & Eatery website/weblog

By Griff Wigley, on July 12th, 2004

Jim and Joan Spaulding will soon be posting to their weblog on their new web site, James Gang Coffeehouse & Eatery.

Archeopaleo website/weblog

By Griff Wigley, on July 11th, 2004

Dean Kjerland’s Archeopaleo website is taking shape. He’s opted to not have his weblog on his homepage.

Larson’s Printing website/weblog

By Griff Wigley, on July 8th, 2004

Kurt and Karin Larson will soon be posting to their new weblog on their revamped web site, Larson’s Printing.

Trials Training Center website/weblog

By Griff Wigley, on July 7th, 2004

The Trials Training Center in Sequatchie, Tennessee now has a weblog on their site. Owner Dan Brown should be blogging any day now. I met Dan at the World Round USA in Duluth last month.