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!
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March 9th, 2007 at 10:10 am
Hi, Lucas. First, thank you for the link to my Predictions post. It’s actually a summary of the predictions made by a number of staff writers at the Read/Write Web.
Second, I find it very interesting to observe the design of your website/blog and how you give incentives to visitors to comment on your posts by listing the top commentators and linking to their sites. Very tempting indeed to emulate you.
Third, yes, I’ve thinking about the “follow” and “nofollow” issue too, especially after reading Loren Baker’s list of 13 Reasons Why NoFollow Tags Suck.
Finally, I like your simple, unassuming writing style and your open attitude towards knowledge sharing. Truly look forward to further online interactions with you.
March 9th, 2007 at 11:30 am
Thanks for stopping by J.K.
The “follow/nofollow” issue is one that I think I didn’t know enough about before in order to communicate an intelligent opinion on — so I thought I’d experiment with my own site to see what the results were. Honestly, I haven’t noticed much of a change at all since instituting “dofollow” — but we’re still early in the game.
Feel free to emulate!
The “Top Commentators” plugin is very easy to install in Wordpress, and certainly provides a nice incentive to get people talking.
And thanks for the complement! I’m glad you enjoy the site. I definitely look forward to interacting again with you as well.
March 9th, 2007 at 4:51 pm
I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on how to successfully transfer knowledge from individual to individual within the workplace.
For example: I’m a web developer at a major media outlet. One day, I won’t be there. On the one hand, I think that it’s my employer’s responsibility to put practices and measures into place to ensure that all of the things that I know about “how we do things” and “how things work” get transferred to the next person when I’m gone. On the other hand, in an ideal world, it is my responsibility to create documentation that explicitly explains what a certain process or piece of code is accomplishing for someone who isn’t me. Realistically, I don’t have the time to write documentation. I always think… “ok, I’ll do it when this project is done”. But that never happens. What suggestions can you offer? FYI, we already have a “programmer’s wiki” in place at work.
March 9th, 2007 at 8:18 pm
Great question Greg — it’s a complex one, so I think there’s probably a complex answer, but I’ll do my best to give you some initial thoughts on it.
One of the major issues you’ve articulated is how to transfer knowledge from tacit (in your head as a programmer) to explicit (a manual or codification of ‘how things are done’) to tacit again (getting that new person to understand why things are done that way). Too often I think we rely too much on that middle step — writing things down as a way to transfer what we know to someone else (you can check out the Nonaka-Takeuchi model of knowledge transfer, it kind of clarifies what I’m talking about).
So far, that’s not really much of an answer. Pragmatically speaking, I’d say you need to focus on ways to transfer knowledge from tacit to tacit (person to person). A wiki is a great start, but doesn’t really get you there. One thing I would suggest is some kind of informal apprenticeship-type situation — a scenario where a new person to the organization could hang out with somebody more experienced to ‘learn the ropes’, instead of having to sit through days of training on the explicit ‘how we do things’ (which is usually not how things are actually done — which they then need to unlearn to figure out the real answer).
Another technique that works well — a videotaped interview. If you get someone who’s a pretty good interviewer (a post-grad journalism student for example) to sit down with your key people and get them to talk about what they know in a relaxed way, you end up getting a good deal of that juicy ‘ohhh that’s why you do it that way’ knowledge.
Great question by the way, I think I’ll have to expand on this a bit, possibly in a whole post.
March 13th, 2007 at 9:05 pm
Hi again. One thing I’d really like to see on this site would be a good search feature and/or some listing of past articles (or posts).
For example, I spent some time just trying to look for your posts on your decision to use DoFollow and the TopCommentators.
March 14th, 2007 at 9:16 am
Absolutely excellent suggestions. I’ve written a post to announce the new features. Feedback on these would be greatly appreciated!
And by the way — I tried out the search refinement using your DoFollow example, and was able to find the post quite easily. Thanks again for the suggestions!
March 14th, 2007 at 9:37 am
Strange. When I did a search, I get a listing of sites that don’t look like yours, for example:
kimmo.suominen.com/sw/dofollow/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/shawnblog/377930392/ - Supplemental Result
http://www.affiliateprofitcenter.com/now-using-the-dofollow-plugin/
etc.
March 14th, 2007 at 10:21 am
Right, that’s just the regular search engine searching most sites, but if you click on ‘Uncommon Knowledge’ right below where it says ‘Refine results for (your search term)’ on the search results page (after searching for your search term), it should refine your results to include only this site. I think that should solve the problem you’re having with the search results.
I hope that explanation wasn’t too confusing!
March 14th, 2007 at 10:30 am
The explanation is clear, but the interface is not (especially earlier). What I’m supposed to do does not jump out. :-p
March 14th, 2007 at 10:36 am
I was worried about that when setting this up — unfortunately the Google user interface does not really allow for much customization. I’m definitely going to look for a way to make this clearer or somehow provide instructions within the sidebar on how to search just this site.
March 14th, 2007 at 7:40 pm
Hey Lucas, after reading Andy Beard’s Ultimate List of DoFollow Plugins, I’ve decided to reward commenters with 3 or more comments and not just anyone. So, I’ve switched to LinkLove. I hope this won’t be perceived as calculating. I merely think that a dialog on a post surely isn’t made up of just one comment.
March 15th, 2007 at 1:45 pm
I don’t think it’s calculating at all. Deciding to reward only people that leave a few constructive comments just narrows the focus of who you want to reward — and after all, it is your blog!
March 15th, 2007 at 7:30 pm
Thanks for understanding. To further explain, NoFollow started because of spam. DoFollow started because we think that we’ve got spam under control through spam filters. However, there are other more subtle forms of spam — e.g. useless/meaningless one-liners. btw, Looks like there’s an even better plugin that rewards *special* comments. This would be much better since Quality and not Quantity would be rewarded.
April 26th, 2007 at 12:30 pm
First let me say I l really like your theme. I don’t see a tagline saying who designed it though. Did you? If so great! If not then I would really like to know who did. I am always tinkering / changing / massacring my theme as well.
Glad to see the DoFollow movement is continuing to grow. I believe in rewarding commenters regardless if they post one contributing comment a month or twenty. Speaking of which, I found your blog while researching for my latest challenge the DoFollow Pingback Challenge. I have DoFollow turned on for my blog and the challenge is to see how long it takes me to find 100 blogs that have it on as well. Hope you pop over and take a look, either way glad I found your blog.
April 26th, 2007 at 1:09 pm
Hi Susan — unfortunately I was in no way responsible for this theme. It’s called Gridlock, and was designed by the very talented Eston Bond.
That’s a really cool idea for a challenge. As I said in the comment I just posted before this, I work hard at my blog, and I think both me and the people who comment should get their links followed. That’s what the web is about — while ‘nofollow’ was put in place to try to help the problem of bad links, it just ends up penalizing the people who are actually working hard at creating great content. Nofollow? No thanks.
June 11th, 2007 at 4:12 pm
Personally, I would use the dofollow trackbacks plugin by Turkhitbox
June 25th, 2007 at 10:09 am
Yes, that’s another great suggestion for a ‘follow’ plugin — there are certainly lots out there. Thanks for mentioning this one!