I’ve added some photos I’ve taken over the years to this blog — you can find them in the photo section of this site (just use the ‘photos’ button on the top menu).

I recently purchased a Nikon D60, so any photos that I’ve taken this year have been with the new Nikon, whereas any older pictures were taken with whatever point-and-shoot I had available to me at the time.

I’ve published the pictures as close to the date they were taken as possible (given that some were a few years ago, it’s hard to remember the exact date, so I’ve approximated in some cases). Comments are also enabled for all pictures, so feel free to leave a comment if you see something you feel like saying something about.

Currently I only have the pictures in each post, but I’m going to try to add a little bit of commentary at the beginning (even if it’s only a line or two). This will also help me remember where I was and what I was doing when I took the pictures.

I’ve been thinking lately about what it takes to successfully share knowledge, and how this type of sharing can used to maximum benefit by anyone who needs to know something someone else knows better than they do.

Here’s some ways to do share knowledge better that I came up with:

1. Share failures as well as successes. If you only ever tell others what you’re successful at, it’s going to be impossible to improve what you do. Also, there may be a critical area that you or your team is deficient at that another person or team can help you improve. Don’t be afraid to let others know where you’re struggling — that’s one of the important steps to improvement.

2. Don’t oversell your own work. Don’t go into any knowledge sharing exchange with the intent of proving the greatness of your own work — that doesn’t make for a very useful or fair exchange of ideas. Be humble, but also make sure to give yourself and your team honest credit where you should.

3. Ask questions about others’ work. Don’t just be a bump on a log — actively ask questions about what someone is telling you. It shows an interest in what they’re saying, but more importantly, asking the right questions will always get you more than just passive listening will.

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I’m not exactly sure why, but I’ve been avoiding Twitter for a long time now. It’s not that I’ve had some deep dilemma over the validity or usefulness of Twitter — it’s more that I was worried I’d get engrossed in Twitter-ing my day away.

But I’ve decided that fear of a new technology is never reason enough to avoid it. So in case you’re interested in the minutiae of my everyday life, you can find me on Twitter as ‘lucasmcdonnell’ (yes, I was feeling particularly creative).

I’m not sure what my experience with microblogging is going to bring me, or whether I’ll get bored of it in a week and forget to update Twitter at all, but the experiment’s part of the fun.

I’m determined to try it out at least for a while though, so that I can determine if it’s for me or not. I’ll make sure to post my thoughts on how I’m getting along with Twitter after I’ve been using it for a while.

Since I’m at home sick today with a particularly nasty throat infection, I was browsing through some of my old posts, and noticed that my Google PageRank had mysteriously returned to it’s old value of 4 (I use SearchStatus in Firefox to see PageRank values).

While I don’t really care too much about PageRank, I still find it odd that a redirect had dropped my PageRank to 0. Since I wrote that initial post though, I did a few experiments with my search results, and noticed that none of my Google results had changed at all.

What this seems to indicate to me is that PageRank can only be interpreted over the long term. Looking at the number even over the course of a few months seems to be pointless, since it doesn’t really give you an accurate picture of how Google treats your site or pages.

Angela tagged me to let my readers know 8 random facts about myself. Believe it or not, this is harder than it seems. Here goes:

1. I’m gadget-obsessed — anything electronic usually sucks up a huge amount of my time (and money). Nintendo Wii’s the obsession du jour.

2. I love plants. I have a ton of plants around my home — and I’m always looking to get more. I usually go for cacti, since while I may love plants, I’m chronically forgetful (so they may have to go without water for a long time).

3. I’ve always wanted to go to South America, but I’ve never been there. I guess it’s never too late though.

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Matt Moore’s got a short but insightful presentation on demonstrating the value of knowledge management (found via Bill Ives’ post), — and surprise, it’s not about the amount of documents your user base downloads or how many community members you have.

I think Matt’s point is a good one. While it’s important to demonstrate the value of your projects, it’s also important to be selective in what metrics and measures you use to describe that value.

However, I think the value of knowledge management in a specific organization is often dependent of what that organization is looking to get out of KM. In one organization, it may be a better quality of work than previously existed, whereas in another organization, it may be cost savings.

Nailing down what you really want to get out of KM (just like you would for any endeavour) is one of the keys in making you get what you want out of it in the end. The “we just want to do everything better than we do now” approach is always going to fail.