Just Seven Things

Exploring why and how we do what we do, and how we can do it better

Archive for the day “September 10, 2008”

10 Sep 2008

Google and Knowledge Management

Digging through some old articles (old! – last October 2007. Getting too hooked to webtime)

Eric Schmidt in October at Google’s annual analyst meeting gave an interesting view on a potential future of knowledge management. He said that social networks as a phenomenon were very real. Although it was ‘too early to say’ whether this would influence the underlying ‘information structure’ of the internet as users start to organise and access more information through the power of their social connections.

So a future where a further parameter to the Google search algorithms is based on your accumulated profile information as held by Google. Matched through your social network connections to the information snipped/ tagged or recommended by your ‘friends’?

Posted in Knowledge Management, Learning, Social Networks and tagged Google, Knowledge Management, Learning, Social Networks | Leave a comment

10 Sep 2008

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Does Everything Come Back to Simplicity (and are Our Minds Hardwired to Fight This?)

A midnight thought from Chicago where I’ve been at the Global Online Recruitment Conference talking for Madgex over the last few days.

My talk was about user experience. I found in my practice and then delivery of the presentation that the main focus of the points I was making was all around simplicity. I had to make lots of references to us not fooling ourselves into thinking we know what’s right for others without a lot of deep thought. To the need to stand back and really consider whether steps are necessary vs. an alternative with fewer steps or stages.

The crux of the thought for this post, wider that online recruitment is as follows: do we trick ourselves into thinking that complex is good. Do we effectively have an in-built bias to believe that sophisticated is good?

Even if we remove the loaded word of ‘good’, can we assert that the conscious intellect defaults to an assumption that because we can handle complexity and multiple steps, that this is something that may be factored without cost.

There are obviously many references in our language to the beauty of simplicity, and we are often told to strive for simplicity. However I think that really living the dictum of continually reviewing and evaluating (in effect engaging in deliberate practice in all that you undertake), rather than reaching a lowest common denominator, you in effect achieve the maximum of simplicity with the minimum of dumbing down.