Online Citizenship

I'm ending the year on a big question about a questionable role:

What do we as parents pass down or up to our kids about their online futures? ("Up" in cases where the digital natives run the show.) This could also be interpreted by our preoccupied progeny as their future. Period.

I've heard about parents that strictly forbid any kind of online identity, a.k.a. the personal Facebook page. I've heard about parents who don't want to cramp their child's need for self-exploration and expression. I think both extremes miss the more sensible middle position.

A more moderate stance assumes the child's social growth needs to take root in the same soil as the good kids, the bad ones, their distant cousins they never see, and the friend from camp last summer who's never going back. In all cases Facebook is more than a first stab at a public identity. It is the brokerage between the restless imaginations of teens and the larger forum where they test fledgling ideas and interests -- especially whether the new crush will reciprocate before dinner or at least before bed.

The permissive parent is confusing two worthy and conflicting goals:

(1) let the kid develop a sense of independence free from the opinions and judgments of their elders.

(2) show the child the consequence of pushing away boundaries and acting on the misguided belief that all the friends of their friends are presumed trustworthy and that the "face value" aspect of Facebook means everyone who reviews their page has passed the smell test. That doesn't mean we volunteer or invoke our own sniffers. It doesn't mean that we ask our kids to friend us so that we can shadow them with instant texting updates of what they say and do.

Here are a couple of suggestions designed to hold the line on a reasonable set of guidelines for our kids:

1. Personal Settings: Make full and diligent use of the security tools available in Facebook. Your kid can control who sees their profile, right down to key details. They can also control who can search for their profiles.

2. The Hard Boot: Perhaps the most airtight solution to would-be stalkers is the block option. Singling out a potential creep causes all ties to dissolve in one simple and elegant stroke. A block conceals your page from any Facebook search, profile browse, or site interaction (such as Wall posts, Poke, etc.). This is a major send-off of any pre-existing bonds. Any ties to the blockee are vanquished (for example, friendship connections, Relationship Status, etc.). Parents should hold the block card in reserve if your kid lets on that they suspect that any networking relation of theirs may be taking advantage of their better nature.

3. Personal Details: What they cannot do is post their contact details -- specifically their home address and phone number. Get ready for their GEN Millennial eyes to roll around this one. Their ideas about privacy may sound a lot like naivete, even surrender to the marketing giants who lord over our online lives. Our kids will tell us to get over this one. Whether we do or don't the point is that until the credit card bills come in their name to their own residences, no physical addresses and phone numbers, please. Thanks. Think whatever you want about how unfair I am. Thanks again. Now do your homework -- on the computer with the dial-up modem. And if you're really out of line you will be forced to live from moment to moment as I will disconnect you.

4. Direct Experience: I'm leaving my diciest suggestion for my parting advice. I understand that youth is wasted on the young, yada yada do. Yes, the temptation is great to leap in and save our kids from posting a comment or relating a story that will come back to bite or embarrass them later. Unless the oversight puts them in harm's way I say resist that impulse. Let them retain the reputation restoration squad when it comes time to exhume whatever statements they will one day regret. It's experience that our kids need. It's direct experience that speaks louder than we do.

Happy New Year to all.

Online Citizenship

I'm ending the year on a big question about a questionable role:

What do we as parents pass down or up to our kids about their online futures? ("Up" in cases where the digital natives run the show.) This could also be interpreted by our preoccupied progeny as their future. Period.

I've heard about parents that strictly forbid any kind of online identity, a.k.a. the personal Facebook page. I've heard about parents who don't want to cramp their child's need for self-exploration and expression. I think both extremes miss the more sensible middle position.

A more moderate stance assumes the child's social growth needs to take root in the same soil as the good kids, the bad ones, their distant cousins they never see, and the friend from camp last summer who's never going back. In all cases Facebook is more than a first stab at a public identity. It is the brokerage between the restless imaginations of teens and the larger forum where they test fledgling ideas and interests -- especially whether the new crush will reciprocate before dinner or at least before bed.

The permissive parent is confusing two worthy and conflicting goals:

(1) let the kid develop a sense of independence free from the opinions and judgments of their elders.

(2) show the child the consequence of pushing away boundaries and acting on the misguided belief that all the friends of their friends are presumed trustworthy and that the "face value" aspect of Facebook means everyone who reviews their page has passed the smell test. That doesn't mean we volunteer or invoke our own sniffers. It doesn't mean that we ask our kids to friend us so that we can shadow them with instant texting updates of what they say and do.

Here are a couple of suggestions designed to hold the line on a reasonable set of guidelines for our kids:

1. Personal Settings: Make full and diligent use of the security tools available in Facebook. Your kid can control who sees their profile, right down to key details. They can also control who can search for their profiles.

2. The Hard Boot: Perhaps the most airtight solution to would-be stalkers is the block option. Singling out a potential creep causes all ties to dissolve in one simple and elegant stroke. A block conceals your page from any Facebook search, profile browse, or site interaction (such as Wall posts, Poke, etc.). This is a major send-off of any pre-existing bonds. Any ties to the blockee are vanquished (for example, friendship connections, Relationship Status, etc.). Parents should hold the block card in reserve if your kid lets on that they suspect that any networking relation of theirs may be taking advantage of their better nature.

3. Personal Details: What they cannot do is post their contact details -- specifically their home address and phone number. Get ready for their GEN Millennial eyes to roll around this one. Their ideas about privacy may sound a lot like naivete, even surrender to the marketing giants who lord over our online lives. Our kids will tell us to get over this one. Whether we do or don't the point is that until the credit card bills come in their name to their own residences, no physical addresses and phone numbers, please. Thanks. Think whatever you want about how unfair I am. Thanks again. Now do your homework -- on the computer with the dial-up modem. And if you're really out of line you will be forced to live from moment to moment as I will disconnect you.

4. Direct Experience: I'm leaving my diciest suggestion for my parting advice. I understand that youth is wasted on the young, yada yada do. Yes, the temptation is great to leap in and save our kids from posting a comment or relating a story that will come back to bite or embarrass them later. Unless the oversight puts them in harm's way I say resist that impulse. Let them retain the reputation restoration squad when it comes time to exhume whatever statements they will one day regret. It's experience that our kids need. It's direct experience that speaks louder than we do.

Happy New Year to all.

In Defense of Poor Searching

I recently did a trial run with an online distance learning university. The other auditioners were the other prospective teachers in the program -- each with their own expertise and curriculum for teaching it.

We all needed to post an introductory lecture and discussion question to the school's web server. The other instructors would then field the question and three days of required threadings would ensue.

I found the response to my own web investigations course materials instructive. The feedback was useful not so much for its originality as a confirmation that the same excuse for poor information management practices is a dead-ringer for the reluctance I face on a daily basis as a knowledge planner for a management consulting firm.

Here's the responding thread:

"The problem we have with that is out staff just between too many tasks to remember all the options. "

It's true that the multitude of search options can be a little intimidating to a tech-savvy workforce and absolutely petrifying to the average Googler with no support (both technical and managerial). The trick is to let each student seek out their natural fulfillment. They've already agreed to wonder outside their comfort zones in signing up for the course. It's my job to get them to drive the search car to where they want to be -- not to confuse them under the "search hood."

Each new tool and method needs to be about problem-solving with the problem being something they've experienced firsthand many times prior to taking the web investigations course. One way to keep their receptive heads open to so much new material is to get them tagging their important discoveries on del.icio.us. I find that by not expecting them to memorize particular sites it frees them up to retain more of the course material, and more importantly, problem-solve more effectively.

Just as important to what's retained is what's left out I stop short of assigning any books or texts in a course that cuts a very diverse technology profile: some are never offline -- some are challenged to send an email attachment. I teach to the problem and then introduce filtering approaches (syntax) and the word choices and ordering (semantics).

The search section concludes with each student creating their own CSE ("Custom Search Engine") using the Google Coop tools. It complements the framework of Ocean-Lake-Pond -- that the size of your data set is just as important as the query you formulate.

Talk about an overlooked search lesson.

In Defense of Poor Searching

I recently did a trial run with an online distance learning university. The other auditioners were the other prospective teachers in the program -- each with their own expertise and curriculum for teaching it.

We all needed to post an introductory lecture and discussion question to the school's web server. The other instructors would then field the question and three days of required threadings would ensue.

I found the response to my own web investigations course materials instructive. The feedback was useful not so much for its originality as a confirmation that the same excuse for poor information management practices is a dead-ringer for the reluctance I face on a daily basis as a knowledge planner for a management consulting firm.

Here's the responding thread:

"The problem we have with that is out staff just between too many tasks to remember all the options. "

It's true that the multitude of search options can be a little intimidating to a tech-savvy workforce and absolutely petrifying to the average Googler with no support (both technical and managerial). The trick is to let each student seek out their natural fulfillment. They've already agreed to wonder outside their comfort zones in signing up for the course. It's my job to get them to drive the search car to where they want to be -- not to confuse them under the "search hood."

Each new tool and method needs to be about problem-solving with the problem being something they've experienced firsthand many times prior to taking the web investigations course. One way to keep their receptive heads open to so much new material is to get them tagging their important discoveries on del.icio.us. I find that by not expecting them to memorize particular sites it frees them up to retain more of the course material, and more importantly, problem-solve more effectively.

Just as important to what's retained is what's left out I stop short of assigning any books or texts in a course that cuts a very diverse technology profile: some are never offline -- some are challenged to send an email attachment. I teach to the problem and then introduce filtering approaches (syntax) and the word choices and ordering (semantics).

The search section concludes with each student creating their own CSE ("Custom Search Engine") using the Google Coop tools. It complements the framework of Ocean-Lake-Pond -- that the size of your data set is just as important as the query you formulate.

Talk about an overlooked search lesson.

The Day the Earth Fell Ill, Stood Pat, and Sat

You don't have to be a sci-fi buff, campy nostalgia eBay trader, or part-time planetary improvement hobbyist to be lulled into last week's remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still. Your enjoyment/enrichment rides on your willing suspension that the next two hours hold any elevated wisdom or enlightenment that a 21st century citizen can use to understand, deal with, or even engage the challenges of our day.

The highest suspension is "not" that smarter beings are cast in the role of celestial guardians and interstellar police beings. The real nosebleed make-believe is the baptismal slate-cleaning that our race is "now" only being cuffed, booked, tried, and convicted of all our loopy human frailties and excesses. Name a change. Pick any violation of logic. Any common standard of decency. Guilty as charged.

The problem is that these allegations undergo their own form of weightlessness in the complete vaccuum between the aliens' arrival and now -- when are they coming? They're almost here! Maybe if we had more time we could have summoned the collective responses that form around these big spherical speed bumps in our evolutionary roads. We see stock footage of lootin' and Putin. The only talking heads that roll are for fugitive Joe Klaatu -- he's on the loose! Never do we overhear any words on any streets about how today we're all moslems, jews, christians, hindus and all non-believing heathens not classified as islamic radical fundamentalists on some no-fly list.

If the producers truly wanted movie-goers to suspend their disbelief they could have made Klaatu ... well ... earthier. This time out Klaatu is even more detached and remote than he is pensive and aloof. He's not returning calls. Heck, he's not even talking to RAWPA Gort ("Retrofitted And With Plausible Acronym"). It might help to have included the term "neutrino." That would make him "Nort", a precursor to "Nano" and hence a little less menacing. If they wanted a cardboard eco sidekick perhaps they could have swapped out the big techie "T" for the earthlier "E" and changed GORT to GORE. Al could have suited up -- albeit in a larger suit.

Even the eco play seems stolen and unconvincing. Klaatu is likelier to develop a cat allergy than a warm fuzzy for the fishes in the deep blue sea. We see any number of frogs, snakes and winged subjects succumbing to the magnetic trance of the eco-spheres cum hybrid arks. The closest remade Klaatu comes to fondling our own magnanimous charms is when he huddles at the Mickey Ds rest stop off the Jersey Turnpike with a fellow alien-superior. There we learn that his tribal elder would rather die on earth with his coke and fries than shed his mandarin skin and climb back into the cradle of advancement.

I suppose the closest thing to cosmic headway here is the bottled lightening that bolts from John Cleese as the Einstein action figure with the same long, dangling math equation. He beseeches Klaatu to look at the race not based on 1st, 2nd, 3rd or infinite screw-ups but based on the last chance, backs-to-the-wall scenario. The same death door that knocked the Klaatunians back into line! The more immediate legacy translates better to mafia dialect than pep talks at half-time or motivational loudspeakers. In fact it was subliminally buried in an op-ed in today's NY Times.

In the original the space capsule handled like the UFO you saw in the dealer showrooms of its day. It descended with cushioning thrusters on the Washington DC mall at 3:47 EST. This time out stillness set in closer to 9:00-ish judging by a glancing watch piece. By then the credit crunch had put the brakes on the assembly line -- and the assembly.

If the updated time stamp and switchable departure / arrival gates are any indication this is a remake for which originality doesn't come easily. I was hoping for a sign or a banner. Maybe: Humans -- the earth's original earthlings? The interconnectedness of our sloppy emotions and complex trading systems never surfaces in the gathering of good-faith efforts. Some kind of public forum would have been particularly useful in this era where the spreading of anything -- whether it's wealth, germs, or financial risk is assumed to be contaminated, unmanageable, and far more valuable as an avoidance exercise.

There's no reckoning. There's no persuading a meeting of the UN General Assembly. Is the U.S. just too unitary? Is Kathy Bates too butch? Are folks too busy to have their medications lapse? Michael Rennie's Klaatu could have found the time to hit fungos and coach little league. Remade Klaatu is a free agent. He can't make any promises and he may not get back to us before our cardiovascular vessels are terminally bugged.

But how can we evolve beyond self-interest and stupefied hysteria unless Klaatu shows a little heart -- not just a change of one? Ultimately this is not a message movie. It is an instant movie and that's the instant message. That said you might be entertained for two hours. I'm not committing to it though.

The Day the Earth Fell Ill, Stood Pat, and Sat

You don't have to be a sci-fi buff, campy nostalgia eBay trader, or part-time planetary improvement hobbyist to be lulled into last week's remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still. Your enjoyment/enrichment rides on your willing suspension that the next two hours hold any elevated wisdom or enlightenment that a 21st century citizen can use to understand, deal with, or even engage the challenges of our day.

The highest suspension is "not" that smarter beings are cast in the role of celestial guardians and interstellar police beings. The real nosebleed make-believe is the baptismal slate-cleaning that our race is "now" only being cuffed, booked, tried, and convicted of all our loopy human frailties and excesses. Name a change. Pick any violation of logic. Any common standard of decency. Guilty as charged.

The problem is that these allegations undergo their own form of weightlessness in the complete vaccuum between the aliens' arrival and now -- when are they coming? They're almost here! Maybe if we had more time we could have summoned the collective responses that form around these big spherical speed bumps in our evolutionary roads. We see stock footage of lootin' and Putin. The only talking heads that roll are for fugitive Joe Klaatu -- he's on the loose! Never do we overhear any words on any streets about how today we're all moslems, jews, christians, hindus and all non-believing heathens not classified as islamic radical fundamentalists on some no-fly list.

If the producers truly wanted movie-goers to suspend their disbelief they could have made Klaatu ... well ... earthier. This time out Klaatu is even more detached and remote than he is pensive and aloof. He's not returning calls. Heck, he's not even talking to RAWPA Gort ("Retrofitted And With Plausible Acronym"). It might help to have included the term "neutrino." That would make him "Nort", a precursor to "Nano" and hence a little less menacing. If they wanted a cardboard eco sidekick perhaps they could have swapped out the big techie "T" for the earthlier "E" and changed GORT to GORE. Al could have suited up -- albeit in a larger suit.

Even the eco play seems stolen and unconvincing. Klaatu is likelier to develop a cat allergy than a warm fuzzy for the fishes in the deep blue sea. We see any number of frogs, snakes and winged subjects succumbing to the magnetic trance of the eco-spheres cum hybrid arks. The closest remade Klaatu comes to fondling our own magnanimous charms is when he huddles at the Mickey Ds rest stop off the Jersey Turnpike with a fellow alien-superior. There we learn that his tribal elder would rather die on earth with his coke and fries than shed his mandarin skin and climb back into the cradle of advancement.

I suppose the closest thing to cosmic headway here is the bottled lightening that bolts from John Cleese as the Einstein action figure with the same long, dangling math equation. He beseeches Klaatu to look at the race not based on 1st, 2nd, 3rd or infinite screw-ups but based on the last chance, backs-to-the-wall scenario. The same death door that knocked the Klaatunians back into line! The more immediate legacy translates better to mafia dialect than pep talks at half-time or motivational loudspeakers. In fact it was subliminally buried in an op-ed in today's NY Times.

In the original the space capsule handled like the UFO you saw in the dealer showrooms of its day. It descended with cushioning thrusters on the Washington DC mall at 3:47 EST. This time out stillness set in closer to 9:00-ish judging by a glancing watch piece. By then the credit crunch had put the brakes on the assembly line -- and the assembly.

If the updated time stamp and switchable departure / arrival gates are any indication this is a remake for which originality doesn't come easily. I was hoping for a sign or a banner. Maybe: Humans -- the earth's original earthlings? The interconnectedness of our sloppy emotions and complex trading systems never surfaces in the gathering of good-faith efforts. Some kind of public forum would have been particularly useful in this era where the spreading of anything -- whether it's wealth, germs, or financial risk is assumed to be contaminated, unmanageable, and far more valuable as an avoidance exercise.

There's no reckoning. There's no persuading a meeting of the UN General Assembly. Is the U.S. just too unitary? Is Kathy Bates too butch? Are folks too busy to have their medications lapse? Michael Rennie's Klaatu could have found the time to hit fungos and coach little league. Remade Klaatu is a free agent. He can't make any promises and he may not get back to us before our cardiovascular vessels are terminally bugged.

But how can we evolve beyond self-interest and stupefied hysteria unless Klaatu shows a little heart -- not just a change of one? Ultimately this is not a message movie. It is an instant movie and that's the instant message. That said you might be entertained for two hours. I'm not committing to it though.

On the Edge of Our Armchairs

Time has the reputation for being a clock. It's not. It's what you make it and the National Bureau of Economic Research has decided to make it disappear from recent memory.

They have collapsed all semblance of the time stamp continuum into the newly revised start date of our dark and stormy economic night. This leaves the media to fish through its Blackberry-world view for competing forecasts of a morning still seasons away. This leaves you and me to glint through our jaundiced eyes at what was happening a year before the Bureau had hindsight at its back:

* Investment houses that have since collapsed were lavishing their traders with larger-than-lifetime Christmas bonuses

* The Illinois AG inhaled the first public whiff of Countrywide a year ago next week

* Citigroup lost more money the last quarter of '07 than any team in the history of capitalism but the mullahs flush on $100 and rising oil are the rescue package of choice (back in the day)

No bailout package will go wide or deep enough to dig out the worthless debts piled at the fringes of our great ownership society. Could this new revisionist history be a step forward? Is it the prequel that spares the sequel? Prequels emancipate us from the present mess and what could be a worse sequel than a messy recession -- a really deep recession? Perhaps lengthening the unendurable by a year will make temporary the perils staring us down and make permanent the promises we've yet to keep -- and we will keep them, right?

I urge PE Obama to reconsider that the Bureau did not go far enough. What if the starting times could be pushed back to '06? Then we'd really be due for a rally. Two years? That's so ancient the Surge was just a glimmer on the horizon, as was an Obama candidacy.

It's as if the high-pressure tactics used to rush borrowers through their loan closings could be replayed ahead of the panicking herds. A positive ID could be made. The financial whizzes who engineered complex debt instruments would be stuck with owning the agreements. They couldn't honor them but there's nothing complicated about criminalizing their creative genius -- at least until gravity returns to the weightless and value returns to valuations.

What's the good in that? Look at the politics. The unimaginative middle class stops looking at its wanting to play by the rules as a serious mental flaw. That is the going price for justice. And it needs to be settled before a single innocent borrower plead for the same loan forgiveness as our competing titans of victimized industries.

As we lurch from the banks to the cars to the credit cards and the retailers we wonder what deadening balance can absorb another pendulum swing. A year ago we began to see "that the economy will pay a price for the speculative binge of the last two decades." What the last year has taught us is that the return of gravity doesn't usher in normalcy. It spirals us into a moribund orbit. Our shackles mire us in crisis mode --not moderation as Bernanke had hoped. The opposite of extreme is not moderation. It is the opposite extreme. The only way to achieve moderation is to subsume our excesses.

Say, we've got a nameless decade that's coming to a close a little more than a year from now? What would the National Bureau of Economic Research name the 00s ('uh-ohs") if we had 2010 hindsight today?

On the Edge of Our Armchairs

Time has the reputation for being a clock. It's not. It's what you make it and the National Bureau of Economic Research has decided to make it disappear from recent memory.

They have collapsed all semblance of the time stamp continuum into the newly revised start date of our dark and stormy economic night. This leaves the media to fish through its Blackberry-world view for competing forecasts of a morning still seasons away. This leaves you and me to glint through our jaundiced eyes at what was happening a year before the Bureau had hindsight at its back:

* Investment houses that have since collapsed were lavishing their traders with larger-than-lifetime Christmas bonuses

* The Illinois AG inhaled the first public whiff of Countrywide a year ago next week

* Citigroup lost more money the last quarter of '07 than any team in the history of capitalism but the mullahs flush on $100 and rising oil are the rescue package of choice (back in the day)

No bailout package will go wide or deep enough to dig out the worthless debts piled at the fringes of our great ownership society. Could this new revisionist history be a step forward? Is it the prequel that spares the sequel? Prequels emancipate us from the present mess and what could be a worse sequel than a messy recession -- a really deep recession? Perhaps lengthening the unendurable by a year will make temporary the perils staring us down and make permanent the promises we've yet to keep -- and we will keep them, right?

I urge PE Obama to reconsider that the Bureau did not go far enough. What if the starting times could be pushed back to '06? Then we'd really be due for a rally. Two years? That's so ancient the Surge was just a glimmer on the horizon, as was an Obama candidacy.

It's as if the high-pressure tactics used to rush borrowers through their loan closings could be replayed ahead of the panicking herds. A positive ID could be made. The financial whizzes who engineered complex debt instruments would be stuck with owning the agreements. They couldn't honor them but there's nothing complicated about criminalizing their creative genius -- at least until gravity returns to the weightless and value returns to valuations.

What's the good in that? Look at the politics. The unimaginative middle class stops looking at its wanting to play by the rules as a serious mental flaw. That is the going price for justice. And it needs to be settled before a single innocent borrower plead for the same loan forgiveness as our competing titans of victimized industries.

As we lurch from the banks to the cars to the credit cards and the retailers we wonder what deadening balance can absorb another pendulum swing. A year ago we began to see "that the economy will pay a price for the speculative binge of the last two decades." What the last year has taught us is that the return of gravity doesn't usher in normalcy. It spirals us into a moribund orbit. Our shackles mire us in crisis mode --not moderation as Bernanke had hoped. The opposite of extreme is not moderation. It is the opposite extreme. The only way to achieve moderation is to subsume our excesses.

Say, we've got a nameless decade that's coming to a close a little more than a year from now? What would the National Bureau of Economic Research name the 00s ('uh-ohs") if we had 2010 hindsight today?

The Call and Response of a Content-based Architecture

One of the prime points I'll raise tomorrow at the Boston Gilbane Conference: Where Content Management Meets Social Media is the garbage-in, garbage-out notion that post-Google content production is really all users about picking through the information scraps for that one unsuspecting gift of credible, airtight, leverage-worthy understanding.

It's about the yard sale of search results where my precious time is suddenly not billable because I'm no longer on the clock -- I'm on Google and anything that turns up is free and clear or I turn it down.

The idea that a corporate intranet could become the pleasure center of a redemptive search ain't gonna happen because of one vendor over the next or because our corporate intranets are rebranded as incubators for the soon-to-be monetized grand designs of our wannabe thought leadership elites. No one slaves over their best strategic thinking on a corporate intranet. No one honestly believes that the answer to better content is to pay a premium for it (or any fee at all).

The ultimate triumph over unlimited content in a time-sensitive world is to hook-up the content pipes to the quantifiable demand for knowledge (information worth putting to use). Do that and that surplus of supply can be a blessing. Of course that means understanding what your customer need to inform their decision-making. Does that mean invasive surveys? Does that mean reading the long tail of your search logs in dubious hope that a pattern emerges? Does that even mean that your users know what they want (in advance of seeing it)?

Here are a few pragmatic pointers:

1. Do that hookup maneuver in your metadata structure. Connect your taxonomy to how people complete their work (actions) -- not some unwinnable debate about what to call things (nouns).

2. Make your search tool do the heavy user lifting. They should not have to guess about where their next productive experience is coming from. Conversely you must be vigilant with your providers to make sure they are sensitive about where they locate their content -- otherwise your users have to care too (they're probably more interested in telling their life stories to Survey Monkey).

3. Create one dignified and significant workflow where an important milestone triggers the telling of those teachable moments that keep people like me employed as KM professionals. Maybe it's dissecting a win-loss. Perhaps it's an illustrious use case. Either way it's an instructive lesson about how to model success and draw important distinctions that were not obvious prior to when the story takes place.

4. Include in the storytelling the other relevant links and deliverables that document the life of the project in question. That's how to grow the content base in step with the knowledge deficits you're trying to balance.

The Call and Response of a Content-based Architecture

One of the prime points I'll raise tomorrow at the Boston Gilbane Conference: Where Content Management Meets Social Media is the garbage-in, garbage-out notion that post-Google content production is really all users about picking through the information scraps for that one unsuspecting gift of credible, airtight, leverage-worthy understanding.

It's about the yard sale of search results where my precious time is suddenly not billable because I'm no longer on the clock -- I'm on Google and anything that turns up is free and clear or I turn it down.

The idea that a corporate intranet could become the pleasure center of a redemptive search ain't gonna happen because of one vendor over the next or because our corporate intranets are rebranded as incubators for the soon-to-be monetized grand designs of our wannabe thought leadership elites. No one slaves over their best strategic thinking on a corporate intranet. No one honestly believes that the answer to better content is to pay a premium for it (or any fee at all).

The ultimate triumph over unlimited content in a time-sensitive world is to hook-up the content pipes to the quantifiable demand for knowledge (information worth putting to use). Do that and that surplus of supply can be a blessing. Of course that means understanding what your customer need to inform their decision-making. Does that mean invasive surveys? Does that mean reading the long tail of your search logs in dubious hope that a pattern emerges? Does that even mean that your users know what they want (in advance of seeing it)?

Here are a few pragmatic pointers:

1. Do that hookup maneuver in your metadata structure. Connect your taxonomy to how people complete their work (actions) -- not some unwinnable debate about what to call things (nouns).

2. Make your search tool do the heavy user lifting. They should not have to guess about where their next productive experience is coming from. Conversely you must be vigilant with your providers to make sure they are sensitive about where they locate their content -- otherwise your users have to care too (they're probably more interested in telling their life stories to Survey Monkey).

3. Create one dignified and significant workflow where an important milestone triggers the telling of those teachable moments that keep people like me employed as KM professionals. Maybe it's dissecting a win-loss. Perhaps it's an illustrious use case. Either way it's an instructive lesson about how to model success and draw important distinctions that were not obvious prior to when the story takes place.

4. Include in the storytelling the other relevant links and deliverables that document the life of the project in question. That's how to grow the content base in step with the knowledge deficits you're trying to balance.

Mad Men in the Aggregate

Here's what I find evocative about Mad Men, if not reassuring:

By the early sixties the U.S. was responsible for nearly one-half of the world's GNP. If there ever was an entire demographic close enough to being born on third base this was it. In the corner office or on the factory floor if you could drag yourself to work your kept wifey woman had at least another decade for domestic life emptiness to sink in. Why start a Me Generation? The Us Generation had so much pie it hardly needed carving up.

It's no accident that Mad Men takes place at the Apex of America -- the peak earning years of the Greatest Generation. They kept everything under their hats -- except apparently the same prurient lusts and cultural conceits that gave rise to Dean Martin Celebrity Roasts.

What I suck from the tail pipe of Mad Men is this: No matter how many family members we send into the workforce, feelers to the next venture that would have us, or, prescriptions down to the local Walgreens, we are cheated. We want it all. Small was never beautiful -- even in this post GOP world of the immediate tomorrow. And if we can't have it all we can crave what our folks took for granted: the autopilot obsolescence of fat cars, gender bifurcation, meat and TV potatoes (heart attacks, failed marriages, and foreign oil not sponsored, endorsed, or anesthetized by Sterling Cooper).

You look at the unattainables now of our borrowed dreams and it includes:

* Social job security
* Paper plates, plastic cutlery
* Medium health care without high fructose
* Network anchors that Fox/MSNBC viewers respect and trust
* Sports heroes who look like us

To this craven observer we're aiming for our toes (are your toenails as brittle as mine?) We don't want access to clean drinking water and quality education. We're willing to reprise familiar economic hits if you forgive us through a few upcoming mortgage payments.

Mostly I spend my Mad Men bonding time floating in a thematic pool of Flotsam Jetsons. The alternative? It would be texting away the night on Second Life immersed in anti-social media.

Mad Men in the Aggregate

Here's what I find evocative about Mad Men, if not reassuring:

By the early sixties the U.S. was responsible for nearly one-half of the world's GNP. If there ever was an entire demographic close enough to being born on third base this was it. In the corner office or on the factory floor if you could drag yourself to work your kept wifey woman had at least another decade for domestic life emptiness to sink in. Why start a Me Generation? The Us Generation had so much pie it hardly needed carving up.

It's no accident that Mad Men takes place at the Apex of America -- the peak earning years of the Greatest Generation. They kept everything under their hats -- except apparently the same prurient lusts and cultural conceits that gave rise to Dean Martin Celebrity Roasts.

What I suck from the tail pipe of Mad Men is this: No matter how many family members we send into the workforce, feelers to the next venture that would have us, or, prescriptions down to the local Walgreens, we are cheated. We want it all. Small was never beautiful -- even in this post GOP world of the immediate tomorrow. And if we can't have it all we can crave what our folks took for granted: the autopilot obsolescence of fat cars, gender bifurcation, meat and TV potatoes (heart attacks, failed marriages, and foreign oil not sponsored, endorsed, or anesthetized by Sterling Cooper).

You look at the unattainables now of our borrowed dreams and it includes:

* Social job security
* Paper plates, plastic cutlery
* Medium health care without high fructose
* Network anchors that Fox/MSNBC viewers respect and trust
* Sports heroes who look like us

To this craven observer we're aiming for our toes (are your toenails as brittle as mine?) We don't want access to clean drinking water and quality education. We're willing to reprise familiar economic hits if you forgive us through a few upcoming mortgage payments.

Mostly I spend my Mad Men bonding time floating in a thematic pool of Flotsam Jetsons. The alternative? It would be texting away the night on Second Life immersed in anti-social media.