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What's Your Story? Story Skills Seen Essential to Information Age Survival |
September 17, 2006 |
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Posted by Don Dunnington at 08:07 PM | Comments (0) |
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If you're thinking you should try your hand at blogging but you're still unsure how to start, take a look a Jeanine Zeitvolgel's discussion of story telling and knowledge management on the IAOC blog.
Start with "Everyone Loves a Good Story," where Zeitvogel relates how the new science of knowledge management has tapped into the ancient traditions of story telling to capture exactly the information that knowledge workers need to know. Good story telling, she says, helps you capture the attention of your hoped-for listeners or readers.
In her next article, "How do you get a crew to want to get off of a submarine?" Zeitvolgel addresses the critical, often difficult task of documenting and sharing the real know-how held by an organization's experts (the objective of "knowledge management"). She describes how the appeal and pleasure of story telling can turn information hoarders into teachers and mentors.
In "It Doesn't Have to Be Hard: Tools to Make Sharing Easy(er)" Zeitvolgel gives Microsoft's Sharepoint "5 hammers," her highest KM tool ranking. Finally, in "Life in the Void," she provides some personal reflections on her work as a counter to the isolation of life in the black hole of the office cubical.
You can try your own hand at story telling on this blog. Do it soon and you might win one of the prize books in this month's contest.
Don Dunnington
Moderator
Waterblogged |
September 13, 2006 |
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Posted by jscottcoe at 06:55 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) |
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When Don Dunnington and Joe Taylor offer up a book on blogging for free, my company, Integrated Resource Management, LLC, jumps! We have long considered starting a corporate blog, and will read the book with relish. I thought I'd try to earn the book by updating an old column of our weekly water newsletter, The Weekly Leak (just starting up again after a year-long hiatus), on water news resources on the Internet. At the time (2005) there weren't too many water blogs to be found--now I find a few. It is clear, though, that the "hard" news web sources still dominate, though it is smart for such sources--like Water and Wastewater.com--to venture a blog of their own (it's surprising how few have actually done so). The following are the online sources of water journalism from which I constantly benefit (and steal links): Now for the blogs (excluding, of course, the one you're already reading): As for our own newsletter, its audience consists of water professionals, industrial clients and random hangers-on alike, so we aim to provide general water information without losing that specialized edge, offering news links on California and national issues; quantity, quality and business sector considerations; and, finally, global, interstellar, interspecies and intrinsically goofy spheres of interest. I think it would make an interesting blog, and we would like to make it into one someday--if we can ever figure out how. Of course, we’d also like you to hire IRM to help deal with the more immediate resource issues impacting your business or community, but that would be shameless self-promotion, and we don't want to miss our chance to win the free book!
Justin Scott-Coe
Editor, The Weekly Leak
Integrated Resource Management, LLC
Read the Best New Blog Book, or Enter Our Contest and Win One |
September 12, 2006 |
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Posted by Don Dunnington at 06:13 PM | Comments (2) |
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If you've been waiting for the right moment to start blogging about your business, Debbie Weil just eliminated every delaying tactic you've ever thought of (and maybe some you hadn't gotten around to yet). In The Corporate Blogging Book, "Absolutely Everything You Need to Know to Get It Right" (Portfolio, August 2006), CEO Blog guru Debbie Weil has written the book that will get you started.
Your Days Of Doubt, Fear and Blog Procrastination Are Over
In a Q&A, Weil says the thing that makes her book different is that she has "written it for the skeptical or even fearful manager – someone who's heard about this 'blogging thing' but isn't sure how or why it applies to them."
There's no bandwagon for you to jump on when you read Weil's book, no "blog or die" predictions, just clear, non-technical business advice. Weil has organized the book so you can jump into any chapter and find the answers to questions that are confronting you right now.
Feeling a bit fearful about blogging? Try "Time: the Top Fear Factor" (page 40), or "The Mother of All Fears: Losing Control" (page 47). Or try chapter 7, "Top Ten Tips to Write and Effective Blog" (page 98). And don't miss the "Bonus Resources" at the end of the book, including a great discussion by web design master Jakob Nielsen on "Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes."
Just Blog It: In this Contest the First 5 Blog Authors are Winners
You can download the first chapter of The Corporate Blogging Book free. You can buy it on Amazon, or at your local book store. Or best of all, you can get your own free copy just by posting an article on this here on this blog. That's all you need do: sign up for a free author's account (or use the account you already have but never used), write a blog article (not a news release, not a corporate white paper or brochure, just a simple, short article that lets your own unique point of view show through).
Just a Few Rules
Our publisher, Joe Taylor, is feeling generous with this contest. He's let us open it to anyone associated with or knowledgeable about this industry. That includes readers, advertisers, or anyone else who wants to write a short blog article that is appropriate and on-topic for this audience. If you aren't sure what "appropriate and on-topic" means, email of draft or outline of your article to me before you try to post it.
Things that aren't appropriate include news releases, stuff lifted straight out of a sales brochure, or other corporate literature, or rants about other people or organizations. A good test for your article: is this something you would want a potential employer reading five years from now? The contest ends at midnight (Eastern Daylight Time), September 30, 2006.
To get a blog author's account, email me at don@waterandwastewater.com . Type "Sign me up as a water blog author" in the subject line.
Don Dunnington
Moderator
