Life Hacker asked people: How would you use Google Wave? They got over 600 responses. Here is a list of their top picks. Cool! "Dozens of teachers, students, and academics of all stripes wrote in saying that they need better and faster ways to communicate and collaborate in and out of the classroom…"

NY Times reports on the emerging trend of borrowing e-books from libraries. It’s all nice but there are some cracks—e-books are treated as physical books. "Most digital books in libraries are treated like printed ones: only one borrower can check out an e-book at a time, and for popular titles, patrons must wait in line just as they do for physical books. After two to three weeks, the e-book automatically expires from a reader’s account."

Nice post by Sam Ladner on sample size when conducting qualitative research. Ladner says "Folks, qualitative research does not worry about numbers of people; it worries about deep understanding". I can relate with this because I’m writing a response to a proposal that has stated the problem only briefly but has spent the rest of the proposal describing how they want the research to be executed, along with the exact number of people to interview, etc. This is an example of a quantitative proposal to solve a qualitative problem.

Day 2 of Devlearn was much better for me. But it did not start out that way. The second day keynote was by Eric Zimmerman, game designer and author of Rules of Play. Now Eric is a very smart chap, but his keynote was a mess. There was no structure in his presentation and his incessant "ahmmm" and "ahhhhs" drove me dizzy. I was not the only one who felt this way apparently. The Tweetboard had many tweets by people having this same feeling. After the dizzy spell, I was behind a couple of people leaving the conference room and this is what I heard: "Did you find it useful?" "Nah! There were both cute and confusing moments but mostly it was distracting". Cammy Bean has captured the essence of his keynote if you want to go through it. Next I attended a very crisp and clear presentation by Dave Ragan who is responsible for training at Taco Bell.  He showed how Taco Bell is using an avatar (from CodeBaby) to present the courses and maintain consistency. He also showed the level of media and interactivity that these coursers have. But more importantly he showed how all of this training is helping Taco Bell meet its business objectives. Not fancy courseware here, just plain and simple—learn it; try it; and then show it to me—type of training. The highlight of the day however was meeting Mark Oehlert from the Defence Acquisition University. Mark is someone who gets social media. He is using many, many different tools to re-engineer processes to make them more efficient. His focus was on using these Web 2.0 tools in serious applications. The centre of his universe is Twitter and he uses it in many different ways from seeking out options available out there to searching for knowledge from his staff. They key theme I observed was that all these applications are built on the assumption that there are people who will constantly feed these applications via their tweets, blogs, comments, etc., and there are people who will constantly watch and respond to this stream of information. If there is no ‘social stream’ then it seems we’re talking of the Web 1.0 paradigm.  To put all of this in perspective, the entire social media thing is working under the assumption that if there is a problem, we can throw the social stream at it and it will somehow get solved. How? Some like Mark seem to have figured it out while others choose to use the word "by emergence" or in simpler words, by magic.

Day 3 of Devlearn was a short event day, just 1 keynote and 2 breakout sessions. It started off really well with a keynote by Leo Laporte. Leo is a wonderful storyteller. He told his story as a youngster trying to get into the mass media business. He described the difficulties and bottlenecks that the industry posed to people like him, from the high equipment costs to the very controlled distribution to the impenetrable bureaucracy. Only few people made it through the system, the rest were outliers waiting for their opportunity. The opportunity came in the form of the microprocessor and the Internet. These two technologies lowered production and distribution costs and enabled mass media to be truly mass media—from many to many. The social media or Web 2.0 tipped this ability over. Nowadays it is easy for anyone to put up a video or talk station and reach out to the masses. Leo described how he started his Internet-based station with just $15k of equipment that reached out to hundreds of thousands of people. Leo’s main idea is that the Internet and the social tools have lowered the barriers to entry for anyone who wants to work, play or learn on it. My big takeaway from this conference is that I see the acceptance of a new form of learning, one that is very social and one that is very informal. The orderly well-defined structure of teaching and learning is breaking down and yielding to a more natural way that does not depend on a specific time and place for teaching and learning to happen. My big fear is that people will take this new form of learning as the only natural way to learn. This is plain wrong. On the contrary this form of learning takes more from the learner, as now he has to analyse and filter from the hundreds of options and opinions that are available to him. The only natural part is that these options and opinions are coming from other people. I can describe the situation like this: for many problems there is the possibility that the solutions are ‘out there’. Before the Web 2.0 capability came along it was difficult, if not impossible, to surface all of this knowledge from the community. Now with social media we are able to lower the barriers to this hidden knowledge. For example, don’t know how insurgents are using improvised explosives in Iraq? Well, we can ask the soldiers who are coming across this on a day-to-day basis. The New Yorker has a wonderful article on this type of knowledge at work. But this is not the only way we learn. Sometimes we don’t know the discipline, sometimes there is just too much to be learned, sometimes it is all too complex. In all such cases we require detailed and serious study. It is how we become good at things. Assuming that all learning can take place through social media will do more harm than good. Let’s not forget this when celebrating Learning 2.0.

I had a wonderful 3 days at KM World 09 in San Jose. Much of the enthusiasm was in meeting friends. I’ve known Thomas Vander Wal, for instance, only by his blog and so it was good to put a face to all those entries. I made some new friends as well. These were the winners at the Intranet Innovation Awards. Thanks to James Robertson for making this happen. (Patrick Lambe, James Robertson, Thomas Vander Wal) As for the conference sessions themselves there were some good sessions and some not-so-good sessions, as it is to be expected in any conference. Here are my takeaways from the sessions. Social media is here to stay. The keynote speakers including Andrew McAfee, Charlene Li and Vander Wal all spoke passionately about there being real ROI here. People are analysing the success of Intellipedia as a viable knowledge sharing strategy to pursue inside organisations. Here comes the wikis in force? Darcy Lemons from APQC described here research into how organisations use lessons learnt (LLs). The key idea is to understand how the LLs are to be used: immediately in a similar project or program or in the future (for long term benefits). And here’s the killer execution strategy: get the LLs into the flow of work and not as an addition or extension to it. Sharepoint is everywhere. There are many bottlenecks in the 07 version but since many organisations have sunk time, money and resources in getting it to work for them, they will continue to do so with the 2010 version of it, which by the way is getting rave reviews. Talking about Sharepoint, Stephanie Lemieux urged not to let go of information architecture issues when implementing Sharepoint sites. She is absolutely correct. Content types, columns and lists are crucial in ‘correcting’ the user experience in Sharepoint. Stan Garfield put a short and sweet presentation with a whole bunch of resources and topics to follow. His website has more of these topics (books, conferences, consultants, blogs, etc.). I’ve not described much of the other sessions and presentations. The KM blog has got more content in this area. You can also read the tweets on the conference.

Now this is interesting. The video does look very impressive.

Marti Hearst’s new book is now available for reading online - "To make this book available to as many readers as possible, the author, with permission of Cambridge University Press, has placed the full text online free of charge." This is a fantastic resource. Thanks Marti. Thanks CUP. If you want a quick reference of Marti’s book - watch her giving this presentation of her book to Google. 

Alain Breillatt summarises why companies will find it hard to innovate like Apple. First, forget about it unless you are willing to invest significantly and heavily to establish a culture of innovation like Apple’s. Because it’s not just about copying Apple’s approach and procedures. The vast majority of executives who say, "I want to be just like Apple," have no idea what it really takes to achieve that level of success. What they’re saying is they want to be adored by their customers, they want to launch sexy products that cause the press to fall all over themselves, and they want to experience incredible financial growth. But they generally want to do it on the cheap.

Here is my review of the Intranet Innovation Awards 2009 report by of Step Two Designs (thank you James for the review copy). The report has 10 case studies from around the world, each showcasing an idea, an innovation that serves a specific business requirement. The areas judged cover business solutions, frontline delivery, communication and collaboration and core functionality. I recommend that you read Alex Manchester’s summary of the award winners to get a glimpse of the detail and richness the report provides. Given below are the main reasons I find myself carrying the report along when meeting clients or when discussing intranet designs. Doable solutions: the winning solutions are all doable. This sense of it being ‘within-grasp’ does wonders getting a conversation started. I can see people thinking "Yes, that’s something I’m looking for", or "Now, why didn’t we think of this before?" Structure of the report: The report is structured to encourage action. There are sections on why this entry won, how the innovation was implemented and on principles to consider if I’m going to try it out myself. I find this really useful when it comes to take the discussions to a higher plane. Ample screenshots: Yes, a picture is worth a thousand words when it comes to understanding an idea and the report has ample of these screenshots. The good thing is that many of the screenshots show actual information and not blurred-out lines. This is extremely useful to get a sense of context and how it might apply to my case. If you are an intranet sponsor, intranet manager or intranet consultant, this report will help you get discussions off to a good start. Getting a packaged report like this that includes screenshots and commentary around good solutions is hard to come by. This report fills the gap and is a valuable addition to the literature. The report is available for online purchase at US$ 189.00 from the Step Two website.