Well, after battling with incessant server errors, things seem to be back to normal here. I’m hoping they stay that way. Any problems you may have noticed on the site were caused by a few upgrades that were done by web webhost (BlueHost), but things seem to have gotten straightened out.

However, I thought this would be a good time to update WordPress, update all plugins that the site uses and delete some extra files that were hanging around on the server. I’m hoping that this will keep the site running quickly and efficiently — with everything updated, your experience here should be even better than before.

If you notice anything that isn’t functioning properly, just send me a quick message and let me know (or just leave a comment to this post). Thanks again for your patience through the hosting issues!

Well, it would seem 2008 has started out as a rough year for my webhost — all domains I own have been down more than they’ve been up for January. Apologies to everyone who has been trying to access the site in that period of time — I’ve spent many, many hours on the phone with BlueHost trying to get this fixed.

While I appreciate that Matt Heaton (CEO of Bluehost) has admitted that things have gone off the rails, I don’t feel terribly confident about BlueHost as a hosting company these days. After about 10 phone calls (and as I said, many wasted hours), I’ve only managed to get the site up about half the time — and problems keep returning.

What bothers me the most however, is that aside from Matt’s blog post, there has been no communication from BlueHost at all about the problems. No list of problems, no potential solutions, and no timetable for fixes.

Matt Heaton mentions that the company has grown at an unusually fast rate over the past month or two. Great — but sacrificing the satisfaction of your existing customers for new business hardly seems like a good move. If you don’t have the capacity for all that business, you need to be honest with yourself and not bite off more than you can chew as a company.

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I’m very happy to announce that the new site I have been a part of is now ready for its days in beta. The site is knowledgecog, has been completely redesigned to provide up-to-the-minute knowledge management news.

I have to admit, I spend a ton of time on the web reading knowledge management news, articles and updates. But I seem to spend even more time checking individual sites for the information I need.

So I thought, why not take the power of RSS, Yahoo Pipes, a domain and Wordpress, and turn it all into a page where I could get instantly-updated news about knowledge management, enterprise search, content management, social networking and competitive intelligence all in one place.

On top of that, I decided that it would make sense to create the knowledgecog forum to either discuss any of these topics, or to request new features for the site (but hey, feel free to even just post a hello in the General Discussion section!).

The site is still brand new, so there may be a bug or two still in there — but overall the site is working great! We’ve already had a few people stumble across the site before it was even launched which was great. So stop by knowledgecog and check it out!

Just a brief post to let you all know that there are a few new features that have been added to the site. If you’re reading this in a feed reader, make sure you stop by the site to check out these great new features.

The first new feature is that you can now now see related posts at the end of every post. This will allow you to find other related topics on the site.

The second feature I’m quite excited about — there’s now a tag cloud on the left sidebar that will allow you see what all of the content on the site is tagged with. This way, you can browse information on the site in a completely new way.

Tag clouds provide a great way to not only browse what’s on the site, but they also allow you to see what types of things I usually talk about (and it also allows me to make sure I’m not always talking about the same thing!).

I’ve currently got the 20 most current posts tagged, and I’m hoping to have all posts on the site tagged by the end of the week.  If anyone is interested in how to see set up their own tag cloud or related posts in Wordpress, just leave a comment and I can explain how I did it.

As I’m always interested in getting other people’s perspectives on knowledge management, collaboration and sharing, I’ve decided to open up the floor to guest bloggers — people who have a perspective on any of the above disciplines and would like to share their thoughts.

Interested? Great. I’m looking for guest posts that are informative, well-written and possess a unique perspective on knowledge. You don’t have to be the top expert in anything — I’m more looking for unique thoughts and ideas than I am for brilliant qualifications.

I’ve closed comments for this post, as the best way to get in touch with me about guest posting is to use the contact form (just click ‘Contact’ on the top navigation menu). I look forward to hearing from you!

Once again, I’ve decided to recalibrate things here a little bit at the site. The site had had the same look for a few months now, and I wasn’t quite as happy with it as when I first changed themes.

I’ve come up with what I think is a cleaner, less obtrusive theme (which I think makes it easier to browse through articles, as well as to find what you’re looking for).

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While I’ve owned knowledgecog.com for a few months, and I’ve had a few ideas of what I wanted to do with it, it wasn’t until recently that I actually put my ideas into practice.

I wanted to create a site that acted as a portal for all the great knowledge management blogs out there, and would automatically pull content onto that site so that I (and anyone else of course) could read it all in one place.

So I created Knowledge Cog — which pulls in the feeds from a bunch of knowledge management blogs (you can see which blogs on the right-hand sidebar) every two hours. And the site updates automatically, so we can always read the latest posts.

But I also didn’t want to detract from anyone else’s page views or visitors, because that wouldn’t really be fair to the people who create this great content. So instead of displaying all the content of a post, the site simply display the first 125 characters, and links to the original site’s content.

This way, you can browse through a whole bunch of fresh knowledge management content on the front page of Knowledge Cog, and click on the post link, which will take you to the actual article on the site of choice (you can also visit the site directly from the right sidebar).

My hope with this site is that it provides a new way to present and explore content, as well as showing only the freshest content — so one visit to Knowledge Cog will show you what’s new in the knowledge management blogosphere.

There a few bugs that I’m still working through with this. For instance, the feeds don’t always display a summary beneath the post title (I’m assuming this is because the feed is not fully syndicated, so I don’t think there’s much I can do about that).

I still also need to install a plugin to forward the original Wordpress feed to the Feedburner feed that I’ve set up for this. Apologies in advance — the RSS metafeed will be working soon enough. If anyone has any comments on how to improve the site or functionality they would like to see on it, please just let me know! UPDATE: The RSS feed is now working.

Thanks to the (much-appreciated) feedback of J.K. from ClappingTrees, I’ve instituted some new features that should make searching for posts and browsing past posts much easier.

The first feature is a new refinement in search, called simply ‘Uncommon Knowledge’ (it can be found at the top of the search results page, beside the other search refinements, which are ‘Knowledge Management’ and ‘Technololgy’). Clicking on this refinement after entering a search term will allow you to search just this site — thereby allowing me to still make my knowledge management and technology search engine available, but also allow you to actually find stuff on this site.

The other features I’ve added are a list of recent posts (thanks again J.K.), as well as a listing of monthly archives, in case you want to browse through past posts that way. We’re up to around a hundred posts here, so these features should make it easier to find things I’ve written about in the past.

One other feature that’s in the works right now is a listing of recent comments in the sidebar. That way you can see what other people are commenting on without having to browse through all the posts. Enjoy the new features — and thanks again to J.K. for the great suggestions. Update: This feature is now up and working in the sidebar and showing the last 5 comments.

I was discussing this site with a few people yesterday and for the first time, stopped to realize how much I have learned while creating and promoting this site. I talked about defining and differentiating your site the other day, but I wanted to take a moment to both stop and reflect on the past of this site, as well as its future.

So as of the writing of this article, we’re up to around 85 feed subscribers. To everyone reading this through the feed, thanks for subscribing! If you haven’t subscribed to the site yet in a feed reader, it’s free and easy to do. Below this paragraph is a live icon telling you how many subscribers we have so far.

So what’s next for Uncommon Knowledge? If you’ve been reading for a while, you probably know that the site has went through many, many redesigns (I like to play with designs, even if I’m not that good at it — but I’m trying to brush up on my XHTML and PHP). I’ve been quite happy with the current design, and will be further refining the details of the design in the next few weeks.

If there are categories you would like to see or topics you’d like to see covered, please leave a message below and let me know. Blogs and blog ranking have both been hot topics here, but I’d like to hear what interests you. And don’t forget — leaving a comment here gets you a followed link back to your own site through the top commentators on the sidebar. Thanks again for reading and for following along in this knowledge sharing experience!

A while ago, I introduced a Google Custom Search box on this site that searched all the major knowledge management and technology sites. I’ve received a few messages asking me where that box went.

So you’ll be happy to know (admit it, you’re happy) that I’ve reintroduced Google Custom Search. The idea behind this search box is to extend search beyond Uncommon Knowledge to other KM- and technology-specific sites. The search box is at the top of the sidebar on every page (if you’re reading via RSS, please just visit the site).

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