Thank you, Mr. Gurteen

David Gurteen, a conversation facilitator par excellence, wrote to me referring to his tweets as ‘throw aways’. I heard that and felt terrible because I do follow him on Twitter and most often than not, I feel that I get a lot of value from his ‘throw-aways’.
I think his response alludes to one of the failings of Twitter – the inability to mine information effectively – described in detail in this post [Again, shared by David in one of his tweets] by Luis Suarez. I experienced this myself when I went to his Twitter stream and tried to find a ‘needle’ in his tweetstack especially when I wasn’t sure exactly what needle it was that I was looking for. All I remember is a pdf file on Enterprise 2.0 and collaboration that I came across in one of his tweets in perhaps September this year.
The good news is that I did find the needle – that was posted on [believe it or not] Sept 01! In my search, however I happened to browse through a river of tweets and I just couldn’t get over David’s remark of calling these tweets ‘throw-aways’.
So I decided to map the tweets that I found useful. Given that David is a profilic user of Twitter, running this exercise over a quarter [Sept - Nov] was daunting but I began with this mighty task ahead of me. Starting at Sept 01, as I moved past Sept 15, my Internet Explorer crashed – something I took as a sign to stop and examine what I’d found so far. Below are the results.

Summary of stats:
Total number of tweets [Roughly]: 80 tweets between Sept 01 – Sept 15
Ratio of tweets with links to those without: 65:15
Number of tweets useful to me: 26 [100% of which were tweets with links]
Number of tweets that I really liked out of the 26 above: 5
Number of not useful tweets for me: 10
Number of not current tweets to me: 43 [26 of these tweets fell into the 'Me' category, 15 were tweets without links]
Looking at the numbers above reinforces the FALLACY of calculating ROI or ‘value’ based on numbers alone. Volume and higher percentages are NOT the only indicators of value.
To illustrate this, I further took the 26 useful tweets and grouped them into a map of ideas that convince me why I follow David Gurteen on Twitter. David and I and many of you are part of a community of practice – and through his tweets, I am able to participate, engage, learn and respond to this practice. We don’t have to be intimately aware of what we’re individually working on, but together and yet seperately we’re working to steward this practice along. I say we but I really am talking about David here. Take a look at my Twitter stream and I doubt you’ll find much of the stewarding of practice going on… but the graphic below reinforces for me what good looks like and what I can aspire to include in my ‘Personal Knowledge Management’ behaviors.

Here is the list of links per ‘topic’ – the ones in BOLD are my ‘super-useful’ ones – I share this in the hope that you too will find some value in these and thank Mr Gurteen like I did for his ‘throw aways’ :
Morals:
Cost of ignoring best practices:

http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/hbr/cramm/2009/08/are-we-failing-theory-or-is-th.html

Wikipedia and Enterprise 2.0 KM

http://www.slideshare.net/TSystemsMMS/the-wikipedia-myth-enterprise-20-knowledge-management

Secret to Enterprise 2.0 success

http://www.euansemple.com/theobvious/2009/9/14/the-secret-to-success-with-enterprise-20.html

Common Practice:
Enterprise 2.0 and emergent collaboration
http://adamkcarson.files.wordpress.com/2006/12/enterprise_20_-_the_dawn_of_emergent_collaboration_by_andrew_mcafee.pdfWhy KM fails:

http://www.nickmilton.com/2009/08/why-km-fails.html

Posturous Guide

http://mashable.com/2009/09/06/posterous-guide/

Presentation editor

http://prezi.com/

FQ

http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/cs/2009/09/a_single_question_haunts_me.html

Online syndication

http://www.masternewmedia.org/guide-to-online-content-syndication-part/

Network strength:
Most prolific #KM tweeters

http://tweettrail.com/?q=%23km

Meet Alfie Kohn

http://www.gurteen.com/gurteen/gurteen.nsf/id/L001599/

Stories:
Mobile phones doing ‘good’:

http://www.crisscrossed.net/2009/08/31/citizen-scientist-how-mobile-phones-can-contribute-to-the-public-good/

Opening speech – KM Singapore

http://www.blip.tv/file/2540594

Google OS

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009/09/youre-already-running-google-chrome-os.html

TED – Sixth sense technology

Towards the smarter enterprise:

http://www.elsua.net/2009/09/01/ibms-smart-work-global-jam-towards-the-smarter-enterprise/

Motivation and Dan Pink [2]

http://www.elsua.net/2009/09/07/the-surprising-science-of-motivation-by-dan-pink/

PKM and Twitter

http://www.elsua.net/2009/09/14/can-twitter-serve-as-a-personal-knowledge-management-tool/

Morality:
Live your moment

http://www.successful-blog.com/1/10-ways-to-live-in-the-moment-every-moment-of-your-life/

Rewarding trust

http://ow.ly/olnt

News:
Skype sold:

http://mashable.com/2009/09/01/ebay-sells-skype/

Women and wikipedia don’t mix

http://mashable.com/2009/09/01/women-wikipedia/

Twitter trends

http://mashable.com/2009/09/06/hot-twitter-trends/

Apple tablet vs Kindle

http://mashable.com/2009/09/12/apple-tablet-eats-kindle/

Me:
About my knowledge cafe