This morning I arrived in Milano to attend the Web2.Oltre Conference that tries to summarize the status of "Web 2.0" in Italy. I am amazed how similar those conferences are, always in a nice hotel that looks the same, no matter if you're in Italy or elsewhere and also the same format. I have to admit that I like the unconference format of Barcamps a lot more.

However it is interesting to hear what initiatives are being launched in other countries and what interesting ideas and topics occur here. I'll post a writeup tomorrow, as soon as I have seen everything. Anything special that I should take a closer look at or ask?

Sometimes you need other people to point you to things that should be obvious. I had an interesting chat with Karsten in Munich on the weekend, discussing the general problems of Knowledge Management in Organisations. He then sent me an article from Dirk Baecker from 1998 that I wasn't aware. Dirk has written a great number of articles in our journal, but in this 20 page piece he deconstructs KM in a way that is wonderful and mindblowing at the same time.

So if you search for an insightful piece that challenges all the truisms of modern management literature, I recommend

Dirk Baecker
Zum Problem des Wissens in Organisationen
in: Organisationsentwicklung 17, Nr. 3 (1998), S. 4-21

For the last couple of months we have been working almost night and day to get our ASP offering ready for launch. It is always the same story when developing software: you think you have a launch ready product and then a dozen of new tasks and wishes for improvement pop up, not because the software doesn't work, but because everything should be perfect in the eyes of the creators.

That is good and bad at the same time. Almost every developer and product visionary would buy into the common "release early release often" mantra, however most people want to launch something polished and beautiful, because they care about what they do. That makes deadlines shift, causes delays and hopefully a better product.

So please bear with us a little longer, we are just about to launch and I promise it is going to be nice! There's a lot of new features and even more improvements in the software compared to the screencast, so I bet you'll like it.

Recently we got an inquiry asking us why we developed a network data model instead of sticking to existing relational models. Apart from the general design of System One that would have made it nearly impossible to transfer the hyperlinked structure to a relational model without some cost, we are true believers in a networked perspective of information. And that perspective starts with the most basic structure that we can think of, which is the data structure itself.

One other reason is currently an issue in one of our projects, where we work with the Neue Galerie Graz and the Büro für Perspektivenmanagement to bring the complex and important topic of Fair Trade and Globalization to the Net and also to an exhibition taking place in Graz during the Steirischer Herbst.

We will use System One as general research and Storage System for all digital material contained in the exhibition. Naturally the topic itself has many perspectives that one could look at, so we decided to do some visualisations that will also be used as artwork in the exhibition. Actually the whole exhibition will be built around the visualisations.

When we started to talk about the visualisations we found out that based on our current data structure, it is very easy to provide different perspectives on the data itself without the need to reformat or restructure it. Because we look at it as objects that are related and interlinked it is very easy filter, slice and dice it according to some properties. Also simple inference is possible, showing dependencies and relations in the data that haven't been visible before.

I'm looking forward to the result and I'll share some of it here, during the process.

Due to popular demand I wanted to give a little more detail about the UTR conference here, just some random thoughts and observations.

Unfortunately Julian is right when he talks about Microsoft loosing traction in the Office space with a rooster of very good Online Office applications coming along. But there are two other topics that were very present during the conference that I consider very interesting: intelligent ways of connecting data streams and the fast vanishing of the Online/Offline boundary.

Services like Mashery (http://mashery.com/), Proto (http://www.protosw.com/) or WorkLight (http://www.myworklight.com/) show the way to a SOA for the Web in general. Most amazing is what Teqlo (http://www.teqlo.com/) does, some sort of Yahoo Pipes, but much more flexible and much more powerful. I'm looking forward to all those things building and transforming the Web and the way we interact with it.

Many tools are coming with powerful offline capabilities now, erasing the border between the Desktop and the Web. Scrybe (http://iscrybe.com) is one of those applications, but I think this will be the biggest topic coming in 2007, and will settle in 2008.

One particularly interesting thing about UTR is the system of judges that are present in any of the sessions, asking questions to the presenting companies and also giving feedback to the product and the business model. This worked very nice, the  judges were really challenging, but the feedback was mostly to the point and provided good feedback. I think this is a model for many conferences, where overly positive product pitches are often diminish the quality of the conference.

And all judges asked what I call the "adoption question", dealing with adoption of Web technology within the enterprise. And that question is really an important one, not easy to answer.

We are currently here at the Microsoft Campus at the Under the Radar conference, which is very well organised and an interesting forum of products and technologies coming up. The topic in general is Office 2.0, which is a little mistermed from my point of view. There are many products here that provide a lot more features than just classical Office products. But anyways, it seems that there is a general topic coming up, that is not a technical one: Adoption.

This is very interesting to see, because it finally brings this issue to a social sphere and not a technology sphere.

If you read blogs frequently, you might have stumbled upon some predictions for 2007, because it is a. fun and b. a great way of trying to think about the future.

Jevon MacDonald, from Firestoker, thinks 2007 will be the year the Enterprise woke up. Some think that it will be the year of the Wiki, including Walter Rafelsberger, who does some amazing visualisations and works on his Mail-Wiki-Hybrid.

ReadWriteWeb thinks it will be the year of almost everything (including RSS). The readers of ReadWriteWeb believe more in Online Video. CNN backs that with the year of the mobile TV.

Newsweek calls out the year of the Widget. Probably the year of the dashboard? The year of the Social Network fatigue? SOA, RFID and Ajax? Search engines and social media? Or is the Herald Tribune right with the year of the Backup (reminds me: should do a backup this year)? Or will it be the year of OpenID?

TechCrunch thinks, it will be the year of the deadpool.

And if you're tired of all that predictions, you can still stick to the chinese calendar, there it is the year of the pig.

Thanks to the excellent Elektrischer Reporter, a Video podcast made by Mario Sixtus for the german newspaper Handelsblatt, I got the opportunity to muse about how Enterprises are going to change, what role networks play in that change and how software could help with that.

Today I stumbled upon a post that very much reflected a thing I said in the interview:

It’s ironic that enterprise business units (without the permission of the IT department, perhaps) are starting to subscribe to services like Basecamp, which was built by the inventor of RoR, and yet the IT departments in these companies turn their noses up at RoR.

That is very true and really puzzling. How long are enterprises going to withstand the pressure from their employees that illegally install tools, use external services and setup things like wikis without caring about corporate security policies or the like? I hear from so many people who are not happy with the applications that they have, that it is very likely that those who are eager to work with efficient, slim tools are going to find a workaround and (even worse from a company viewpoint) introduce that to their colleagues and to other teams.

Some software vendors like IBM are making good moves in offering solutions that at least sound like those that you'd find out on the Internet, although the resulting implementation is still much more like traditional Enterprise software than a real Web application.

I guess it was rather surprising for most people when the Time Magazine announced its pick for the person of the year, being "You" meaning the anonymous Internet User, that brought along some change in how we interact with the web, not only last year, but in the past years, but 2006 definitely made something of that ongoing change visible.

Now Andrew McAfee once agains applies the statements that the Time journalists made, to the Enterprise 2.0, saying:

The article doesn't mention Enterprise 2.0 -- the application of Web 2.0 tools, approaches, and philosophies within organizations, but the quotes above are as relevant for the Intranet as for the Internet.

If you're a business leader and you're not just a little bit curious about Enterprise 2.0, why not? Do you not want your organization to become any more lateralized, searchable, multi-voiced or self-organizing? Do technologies that help put into practice managerial philosophies other than command-and-control make you uncomfortable?

Or are you completely happy with how people in your company intersect and interact? Do they have all the tools they need to do so?

Or do you think that Enterprise 2.0 technologies are currently too insecure, unstable, expensive, hard to install, and/or hard to use to
be worth the bother?

Or do you think that there's really nothing new under the sun? Are you so tired of IT hype that you've simply stopped listening?

That, I think, would be a serious mistake.

Nothing more to add.

Once again, TV on Sunday evenings really sucks, so I figured I would rather look at some of The Top Ten Best Presentations ever. One of the most intriguing presentations is the one from Guy Kawasaki, talking about the Art of the Start. One of his best statements is really his first: If you want to build a company, do so to change the world, to make meaning. System One is really about increasing the quality of life of people working with it and we want to right the wrong of so many IT systems that have created the opinion among people that collaboration and information management must be hard, bulky and painful. We really want to make meaning.

When you hear people talk about Youtube and del.icio.us or digg clones, and they appear not to be programmers, computer science students or some other sort of enthusiasts, but people that didn't care about all that few years ago, you know something has changed. And that happens. More and more people I know talk about those things, some of them are also using them, but it probably will take again some years until they majority really uses those tools.

Nevertheless I find it very exciting, that the Web and especially Social Software are really changing the way things work. I guess I'm not the only one. That's why new services and communities are popping up every month, always claiming the "social" nature, building on user generated content. That is fine, that's exactly what it needs that those things get into the mainstream. When Apple first introduced the original IPod, only few people bought one, now everyone has some sort of MP3 player, from different vendors (although Apple managed to stay ahead of competition in terms of market share). That is what's happening with all the popular services we like and do use for years now.

The really interesting question if you work with all those technologies is, what can we possibly do, what could we achieve with all that data that we collect, by people using those services. We have to consider security of course, but the more challenging question is: are we really using all that interactions to generate something that is more useful? Now we all can publish within seconds, tag, annotate, link, bookmark and group various items, but are we really using that information, or is it there "just because we can"?

The goal has to be, to do more with the existing information, by combining other methods with the strictly social approach that many services have. In many cases people tend to belong to one of two groups, the one that favors algorithmic, "scientific" approaches (call them the "Google News People") and others that believe all good mechanisms have to be of social nature (probably the "Wikipedians"). Of course this is a little exaggeration, but why isn't there a service that tries to combine both approaches and apply them to problems that are suitable for either. Sort of a "Social Semantic Software" paradigm, that is much more defineable than other popular buzzwords. Some examples:

• Let people contribute and build Wikipedia, but let machines try to find similar or connected pages, cluster the content and provide better insight.
• Use all those machines of Google for search, but let users find really similar pages (not the ones that Google offers) by using the opinion of people?
• If Folksonomies work on services like del.icio.us, why not support them with Entity extraction?
• When will we be able to use all that data of digg to learn something about dissemination on the web and user behaviour?

And I think there should be some more great applications of Social Semantic Software. If we only could accept the fact, that combined approaches are generally more successful.

Since the very beginning of the WWW, Wikis have been an integral part of Webculture, driving the Hypertext principle to its very edge. The governing principle of Wikis is really, that everything is (possibly) connected with everything. Every keyword is possibly a new node in the network, every item can be linked to every other item, forming a dense network of intertwingled wikipages. Hypertext to its extreme.

As the name promises, in a Wiki everything works fast, however observations have shown that not all user can easily relate to the imminent "chaos" of a Wiki, were structure is up to the user, rather than partially predefined by the system. Probably we humans need or have got used to predefined structure because we are facing it every day.

Establishing connections in a Wiki is rather easy, because relations are explicit, mostly created by the user with some support by the system itself. But this requires a quite disciplined, focussed and conscious user. You have to willingly maintain connections between the items to receive the benefit of the system. If you just publish content without intertwingling it, you could use a simple Content Management Software or a HTML Editor as well. The added value of a Wiki is, that your personal information space gets more dense everytime you add an item to it. It evolves and possibly depicts useful and meaningful connections between information bits and pieces after a while.

And that seems to be the second (possible) point of failure for newbies in the Wiki world: there is nothing such as a starting solution. Nothing that you can explore an see the benefit of such a system before starting it on your own. You have to invest in the system before it actually gives a return on your investment. Within groups of people such system usually pay off earlier due to the multitude of people and therefore content that goes into the system. When used as a personal information or knowledge management tool this benefit takes much longer to realise.

A possible solution is to Wikify the Weblog. Because what makes Wikis strong is the weakness of a Weblogs. They suffer from the same problems as the WWW itself, they lack semantic connections that simplify browsing, visualisation and retrieval. Instead of getting lost in hyperspace, a wikifyied Weblog or a Wikilog could constantly provide you with connections to other places, that sometimes make you caught in hyperspace, leading from one interesting meme to another, creating a flow where it is (sometimes) hard to stop.

So what if we could derive implicit connections from exisiting information pieces and create a hyperspace network out of them, without having the user to do the work?

We can.

When thinking and talking about many aspects of the change that has captured the Web and is just about to capture the world as a whole, I often think of different concepts that seem to merge and combine naturally.

I was reading this post by Rod Bothby (from the Enterprise Irregulars). There he talks about a process of creation that involves the audience, that is inherently collaborative.

The consultant helps drive the process (which often means just setting up the meetings), provides a neutral point of view, offers access to a broader information set and a different point of view. But, the consultant does not dictate the answer.
There are interesting parallels between these two insights, and this Enterprise 2.0 idea of emergent intelligence within an organization.
When a "Chief Knowledge Officer" tries to create a system for "capturing an organizations knowledge" they have instantly failed because it is the dialog that is important. Large organizations need help facilitating the process of creation. Knowledge can fall out as a positive externality, but it shouldn't be the end goal unto itself.

Definitely true. For consulting and for the creation process in general. And that is what a lot of current tools try to achieve. Instead of defining the outcome literally, they try to provide a platform, a basis for communication that empowers people to be creative and generate results without pushing them to produce desired outcomes.

If you want, parts of this idea are very similar to those in Communism, although you would rather name them communitarian. On Read/WriteWeb there has been an article a while ago, that summed up some basic aspects on the Generation Y (people born in the 1980's and 1990's), stating that what they seek for would be

Real-time access, personalization, and community.

And that is what we currently see developing in the Web. That is the whole advent that is taking place and nothing else. What we derive from this is a huge contextual base of interlinked, trackbacked, pingbacked and tagged items, from Weblog Entries, to Bookmarks, Wiki Pages and Multimedia Content.

A universe of Microcontent.

"Meme-sized chunks", intertwingled. As Anil Dash wrote ages ago in his Microcontent Client. Or Jamie Zawinski even longer ago about Intertwingularity. Some sort of distributed Co-Creation for the masses.

So, boosting creativity by providing tools for people to jointly work on Microcontent that is naturally intertwingled is really the main challenge we face with todays Information Management solutions. Let's see where this evolves, it's going to be a thrilling ride.

I couldn't stop thinking about the post from yesterday and the wonderful Memex. It seems that the network of thoughts, the network of memes is key to what those people where: innovative. I think this is the whole story of Knowlegde Management (a totally unappropriate term, but nevertheless common), to provide a reasonable insight into your data, hopefully into information, to get more insight out and thus be more efficient in using the data.

Many corporate initatives and research projects undertook great efforts to codify, collect and manage organisational knowledge, with arguable success. Some sources argue that the failure rate of knowledge management system implementations might be as high as 70 %. The reason for this might be the prevalent paradigm of, what Malhotra calls, the technology-push, where KM systems define the way knowledge management is implemented. Information and Communication Systems provide the basis for rules, best-practices and procedures, that lead to pre-defined outcomes in the business environment. Most of those systems seem to be misaligned with the systems users' motivations and commitment. This is certainly true if we just think of the many applications and papers describing technical solutions to problem that haven't even been described so far.

But how could a different system work? What we are trying to accomplish is a system that get's out of the way, while focussing on what users want instead of what someone designing a KM process has laid out. What Joshua Porter analysed so brilliantly in his inspiring post on the del.icio.us lesson is, that the personal value always precedes the network value of any software. Not that new, but maybe a way we haven't thought about Enterprise software until now. It is the development in the "general web" that shows companies how to foster information sharing and contribution, without forcing people to do so. Because if you're honest: you're not really into sharing anything for free. You're just bookmarking for yourself, or to boost your reputation. It's a shame that we are that egoistic, but why not use this egoism and do something better for all of us.

Just a short update as Bruno pointed me to another piece that tries to identify the main issues of Knowledge Work in a very simple yet pragmatic way. It's a piece by Andrew McAfee (who has generally insightful posts on various topics of current challenges in and around Enterprises) who calls his typology SLATES:

• Search: Find what you need, enhanced by emergent description (see tags, below)
• Links: More to the point, link relationships or link ranking algorithms
• Authoring: Ease of content creation – spare me the angle brackets, make it bone simple
• Tags: What do my colleagues call this? I bet it works better than what the IT department calls it
• Extensions: If you thought X was [good | interesting | important | useful], you might, by extension find Y similarly so
• Signals: tell me something has changed

[via Stuart Weibel]

Today I strolled through our internal instance of System One, a hivemind of things happening in and around the company and a true treasure chest of inspiration, and stumbled across a familiar piece about Vannevar Bush's Memex. I think the written piece of visionary Bush has been linked, discussed, cited and referenced an awful lot of times and still it remains one of those rare pieces that appear to be timeless and never to old to be considered.

In his 1945 article "As we may think" for the Atlantic Monthly Vannevar Bush coined the term Memex to describe a future device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory. His vision was quite tangible, as he envisioned the "Memetic Extender" as a desk, and while it can presumably be operated from a distance, it is primarily the piece of furniture at which the person works. On the top are slanting translucent screens, on which material can be projected for convenient reading. There is a keyboard, and sets of buttons and levers. Otherwise it looks like an ordinary desk.

Bush's vision must have seemed unmanageable then, although he argued that everything used for his memex was conventional at that time and by using microfilm a sort of Memex could have probably been built. It seems as if Bush was not the first one to think of such a device using microfilm, as H. G. Wells proposed a Permanent World Encyclopedia in 1937. So the idea of Wikipedia is not that new.



What makes his article and his vision so inspiring is not the store everything paradigm, but his clear view on the main challenge of such a tool:

All this is conventional, except for the projection forward of present-day mechanisms and gadgetry. It affords an immediate step, however, to associative indexing, the basic idea of which is a provision whereby any item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically another. This is the essential feature of the memex. The process of tying two items together is the important thing. When the user is building a trail, he names it, inserts the name in his code book, and taps it out on his keyboard. Before him are the two items to be joined, projected onto adjacent viewing positions. At the bottom of each there are a number of blank code spaces, and a pointer is set to indicate one of these on each item. The user taps a single key, and the items are permanently joined. In each code space appears the code word. Out of view, but also in the code space, is inserted a set of dots for photocell viewing; and on each item these dots by their positions designate the index number of the other item. Thereafter, at any time, when one of these items is in view, the other can be instantly recalled merely by tapping a button below the corresponding code space. Moreover, when numerous items have been thus joined together to form a trail, they can be reviewed in turn, rapidly or slowly, by deflecting a lever like that used for turning the pages of a book. It is exactly as though the physical items had been gathered together to form a new book. It is more than this, for any item can be joined into numerous trails.

He described the problem of linking various content pieces (nowadays sometimes called microcontent) to produce associations that help in the organisation and retrieval of information long before Hypertext, the World Wide Web or the Semantic Web were part of computer science. What makes us humans superior to other species is, that we are able and make wide use of our ability to link things mentally. The idea did reappear quite often in the history of computer science, Kay and Goldberg called it a "dynabook" in the late 1960s and probably we are closer now than ever to the initial vision.

In 1976 Richard Dawkins wrote a book called The selfish Gene and described information pieces called Memes (Singular: Meme, rhymes with dream), short for Memetic Memory as an analogy to genes). In his model, Memes represent parts of ideas, languages, skills, moral values and everything that we learn, transform and pass on to others. Memes travel along individuals of a society, leading to a Meme Pool representing all Memes currently available in a given population. Memes have the ability and the urge to replicate, creating a survival of the fittest climate along ideas. The Meme of Memetics (some kind of a metameme) took quite long to travel and disseminate, as it is only in the last decade that scientists around the world are adopting the new viewpoint of Darwinian evolution, building new theories, concepts or algorithms around it, in diverse fields such as learning organisations, innovation or financial management. Interestingly not only the words Meme and Memex seem to describe similar things, but the concept of Memes by Dawkins has many similarities to the device Bush proposed. Both are talking about small units of information that might be stored and replicated, and those units influencing our life. The way Memes achieve this is certainly more subtle, as they influence the infected people's behaviour so that they help perpetuate and spread the virus, whereas the Memex has the goal to assist people in recording, retrieving and sharing pieces of information, helping them to spread, remember or discover new Memes.

Now enough for the history lesson, the most intriguing question for me is: how do we manage to gain such radical insights as Bush and Dawkins. Both were ahead of their times, not being able to foresee the development that is so evident for us. How can something that has been written 1945 still be visionary in 2006, over 60 years later? How can we pull together pieces that are not obviously connected and then combine them to form something new? How do we use the Memes in the Memepool to be innovative?

That's what all the people mentioned and many others were capable of, Bush, Dawkins, Wells and of course Buckminster-Fuller, who had his Chronofile and would have loved to have a Memex.

After Dirk Baecker has brilliantly laid out a whole new model how organisations and corporations should be viewed, I'd like to start my first posting in the humble System One Journal with a piece I've been thinking about for a rather long time now and that focusses more in the personal side and a more structural viewpoint of Knowledge Work.

It is beyond question that the way we work nowadays has radically changed, we are dealing with information on a constant basis and have to produce decisions, carve out meaning and extract sense out of what we see, hear, read. The question is, what kind of actions or skills are necessary to do that and how software could support this process.

Dorsey defines seven skills for knowledge workers:

1. Retrieving information means searching and retrieving information.
2. Evaluating information includes judging the quality of information and determine its relevance.
3. Organizing information by using various tools in various environments.
4. Analyzing information entails the challenge of "tweaking" meaning out of data and establish relationships.
5. Presenting information to various audiences in an appropriate format.
6. Securing information by keeping its existence assured.
7. Collaborating Around information by using and understanding collaboration tools.

That fits almost perfectly with the description of Efimova (amended by Röll) concerning knowledge work processes:

1. Finding (codified) Information
2. Making Sense of Information
3. Organising Personal Information (PIM)
4. Negotiating Meaning
5. "Creating" new ideas
6. Establishing and maintaining a personal network
7. Collaborating in Communities

What Efimova adds to the perspective of Dorsey is the more social point of view, where establishing and maintaining a network is a crucial task for a knowledge worker. The current rise of social software is also present here, as weblogs and wikis are part of that software branch. It seems that this shift is nothing but a late effect where the cause is once more the World Wide Web. The web is more a social creation than a technical one. I designed it for a social effect to help people work together and not as a technical toy. The ultimate goal of the Web is to support and improve our weblike existence in the world. We clump into families, associations, and companies. We develop trust across the miles and distrust around the corner. This circumstance is part of the culture that is inherent to this model of knowledge work, which is drawn from a deep experience of weblogs, wikis and the blogosphere. In fact, many skills listed above, can be accomplished or supported with weblogs and wikis, as Röll argues:

The analysis has shown that weblogs support a multitude of knowledge work processes: They integrate personal information management and communication, making them an alternative to using the email client as knowledge repository. With personal publishing, knowledge workers can get feedback on their work witout having to interrupt colleagues and without having to know in advance whom to ask. By making thought processes "visible" to others they encourage communication between knowledge workers and open up new possibilities of collaboration.
Whilst they do not "automate" knowledge work processes, weblogs do support them in the sense that they make processes that today are not or unsuitably supported by IT tools more effcient. By giving a direct benefit to the user, they do not have to be "forced" into using the tool: Using them personally [...] integrates well into daily processes.

The main difference of weblogs and wikis as personal knowledge management environment compared to other KM approaches is the bottom-up notion, some kind of grassroots movement. This personal notion has been around since the early days of knowledge management, but the connection of personal and organisational effectiveness has so far been ignored. One conclusion that all concepts focusing on the individual share, is the opinion that the individual is the driver behind knowledge management adoption and use.
Employees must be able and willing to exploit their knowledge their personal capital.

It seems obvious, but is not often said that knowledge management works best when knowledge workers take the initiative and responsibility for what they know, don't know and need to know. Doing so not only makes the individual more valuable to the corporation, it also enhances the value of intellectual capital for the corporation.

Using the classical information technology perspective, that rather sticks to systems than to people as the examples above, Mack, Ravin and Byrd find five basic task groups for knowledge workers:

1. Capture/Extract (from datasources or colleague)
2. Analyse/Organise (in folders or project workspaces)
3. Find (documents, information pieces or people)
4. Create/Synthesize
5. Distribute/Share (email, project workspace or in meetings)

Shneiderman defines the four basic activities of users as

1. Collect
   The first stage of activity, which the user might return to repeatedly. Usually she collects information, to reach the second stage.
2. Relate
   Second stage of activity, which involves relationships with others. It includes consulations with peers, mentors, friends, family and the self in order to relate the collected information to other information, opinions and existent knowledge.
3. Create
   By now, information (collect) and communication (relate) technologies are booming, so it is natural to ask what might be the next revolution?. Predictions in this field are rather diffcult, because those activities might include composing a song, planning a party, launching a business, writing a scientific paper or organizing a social movement, in general meaning personal creativity.
4. Donate
   The last stage of activity is most likely related to weblogs, because publishing information, ideas or opinions is one mode to disseminate those memes back to the memepool that might have influenced their creation.
   

Ramana Rao (via Manuel Simoni) has some other typology, that pretty much resembles that of Shneiderman:

Consider the typical information work flow of a professional:

• Retrieve — collect information from a variety of sources
• Extract — extract data, facts, examples
• Arrange — arrange documents and facts for use now or later
• Present — compose information into artifacts of value

Search is just about the retrieve and the -eaping is pretty much left to the person. Does knowledge worker come to mind? My all time favorite word for the human process [...] is sensemaking because it reaches to even the deepest levels and the broadest extent of what we are after.
Some of my friends, especially these two—actually pretty much all of my friends and yours too—are incredible sensemaking machines.

It is obvious that none of the models describes the true work of a so-called knowledge worker in a simple, intuitive yet exhaustive way. All of them silently assume, that creation is a separate process, taking place in a well defined manor and a certain time frame. But if we just think of ourselves preparing a report or writing a text, our work includes constant switching between modes and creation is not only taking place on our computers or with a writing pen, but is happening almost constantly in our head. We read, combine, analyse, structure and create information constantly, with changing internal priorities in order to be able to work. It is true that the creation process is an important phase and that might be the reason for the present models. But better model of reality would incorporate the fact of constant creation.

Nearby: It reminds me very much of Doug Engelbarts NLS, where the "NLS is: An Instrument/Vehicle for helping humans to operate within the domain of complex information structures. Context represents concepts and Structure represents relationships, helping humans to Compose, Navigate (Move about, See, Modify), Study complex information structures."

A screenshot of the legendary NLS, showing the general architecture of NLS in NLS.

A while ago I've been at the Bundestagung der Jungen Wirtschaft in Innsbruck, a gathering of young entrepreneurs across Austria, with some invited people from Germany and Switzerland as well. The most interesting thing about that event was listening to Wolf Lotter from Brand Eins, a german Business Magazine, specialising in offering a different and challenging viewpoint on economy.

Wolf Lotter has previously worked for magazines in Austria and Germany and offered a very precise and insightful picture of problems that current organisations have. If you ever have a chance to listen to one of his speaches, please do so. You'll love it.