Out of the way

As you may have noticed, I've been largely offline in August as I've been on holiday down-under, visiting Melbourne, Sydney, Christchurch and bits of their hinterlands.

I've had the chance to catch up face-to-face with some bloggy friends round here, including Matt Moore, Sean Callahan, Geoff Brown, Viv McWaters, Daryl Cook and Tony Goodson.

It's been a great trip all round, especially as I'm travelling with one of my best friends and there's been lots of good companionship. What I relearn on hoidays is to switch off the crazed expectation that the entire time will be fabulous and appreciate that holidays bring their own stresses and strains. Their purpose isn't simply about feeling good, but about disrupting habits and routines and and allowing for new things to develop.

I did notice that the trip seemed to shift gears in the third week, with a sense of really having decompressed fully and forgotten London more completely.

Viv mentions my visit and her own holiday, and shares her own reflections that perhaps holidays are a chance to get out of our own way. I like that notion on more than one level.

The benefits of disappointment

Annette has some typically sane thoughts about the potential upside of recession.

Order and disorder

Two interesting items from David Smith's excellent daily feed.

If you want to get productive, get disorganised. Simon Caulkin riffs on the theme of A Perfect Mess.

Tim Oren on Burke's Law of Metadynamics:

In the course of the chat, Burke came up with approximately the following statement, which has stayed with me since:

"Systems dump excess energy in the form of structure."

It may not sound like much, but it's rather profound. It essentially says that a system operating in surplus won't stay so, but instead will act to build up its own structure at the expense of the surplus. Looked at the right way, it's a nutshell explanation for the existence of life - an eruption of structure in response to excess solar energy.

Anthropology of YouTube

This is brilliant.

Hat tip: Alan Moore

Emperor's Chess Board

Dave Snowden has a great post on the folly of KM professionals'

running claim that failures such as 9/11 and Katrina are in effect failures of knowledge management. Words like standards are also being bandied about which is always a bad sign and one gets a very real sniff of a bureaucracy in the worst sense of the word

In effect the argument, which is common one in knowledge management, was that the failure was one of not connecting the dots, not realising the significance of key data items early enough. The idea is that we create bigger and bigger databases with more search algorithms, centralise functions, standardise procedures, appoint an obergruppenführer and somehow or other no future errors will be made.