Twine and Knowledge Management - I started my beta test yesterday and wow!

On Sunday, whilst catching up on my favourite blogs, I read 'Do you want early access to the Twine beta', from Nova Spivak, at Radar Networks.

As I have been following Twine for a while, it really was no problem for me to blog why I wanted an early access, which was the condition Nova had set, and then email him.

I hoped for a reply sometime in the following week.

Two hours later, I received a reply from Nova from his Blackberry!
"Thanks, nice to meet you - we will let you in next week"
That's extraordinary service.

Yesterday, Wednesday morning, I was let in to Twine.

Three hours later I had created three Twines of my own. I thought I had better keep them private, and not make a fool of myself, until I understood what Twine was really about and how to use it properly. Well I needn't have worried. It is quite intuitive.

In just one hour I had added into my first Twine, which is a project with a small team that started three months ago, all the associated team emails, an MS Powerpoint presentation, an Excel spreadsheet, several Word documents, my Blog, several Websites and some notes.

That alone made me feel better organised. Especially having the emails for the project all together in one place. (Twine allocates an email address for each Twine, so you can email them in).

Next thing I know, Twine reads all of this and starts to auto-tag. It starts to tell me the 'people' it came across in the project, the 'organisations', the 'places' and 'other tags' or concepts too. Already the list is impressive. If Twine gets better at learning what your interests are, the more you use it, and I get results within a couple of hours from 49 items, I cannot wait to see more.

The sad thing is that I now have to go to some intense project meetings for a couple of days, and I will not be able to get to know Twine better until I return. But I will be able to find time to show the people I am meeting what Twine already knows about them, and the project, after a couple of hours!

I feel much more organised too! I think tools like Twine are starting to show us what Web 3.0 is really about. I am pretty sure that my personal and team knowledge management work practices are in for a radical change!

So far, I have had extraordinary service from Nova Spivak, and an extraordinary experience in starting to use Twine.

Much more on my beta testing of Twine later.

It's certainly worth following Twine. Check it out and please let me know what you think.


Ron Young

www.knowledge-management-online.com

Better Personal Knowledge Management and Twine

I have been an interested follower of the writings and work of
Nova Spivak, CEO of Radar Networks in San Francisco.
If you haven't yet come across him, he is the grandson of the late
Professor Peter Drucker, one of my all time heroes,
and Nova has a very enviable track record in founding and
developing web companies to successful IPO's over the years.


Radar Networks have been in stealth mode for quite a while but
in October 2007, they launched an invite-beta version of Twine at
Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco in October 2007.

From their press announcement:

"Radar Networks, a pioneer of Semantic Web technology, today announced the invite-beta of Twine, a new service that gives users a smarter way to share, organize, and find information with people they trust. Twine is one of the first mainstream applications of the Semantic Web, or what is sometimes referred to as Web 3.0"

I immediately put myself down for a beta version as they expand the
final testing phase. I am hoping for an early beta version as I believe Twine could start to change paradigms, both as a teaching tool, and, most importantly, as an effective personal knowledge management tool. I hope that Twine will greatly accelerate my ability to teach, consult and help individuals, teams and organisations, and move more people into the more meaningful Web 3.0 world, to use the Web as a resource to achieve even greater results.

Nova Spivak believes that we can combine the best of the
people focused social web 2.0 tools together with the
semantic technologies that aim to make more sense of documents and the connections between people, and people and documents.

Watching a video from Web2.0 Summit, I respectfully chuckled at
Nova's remark that he is combining the 'wisdom of crowds' with
the 'wisdom of computers' and that Web 3.0 is Web 2.0 with a brain!
Cool!

It's certainly worth following Twine. Check it out and please let me know what you think.

Ron Young

More about Open Source Knowledge Management at:

www.knowledge-management-online.com

Share, comment and rank your Knowledge Management (KM) Definitions with us all

Over the next few weeks, we are rolling out a new collaborative website that will allow us all to publish, discuss, review, improve and rank knowledge management topics at www.knowledge-management-online.com.

Today, we launch the first collaborative feature, which is to invite you to share with us all, your definition(s), comments and ranking of knowledge management definitions.

'KM Definitions' is the most popular page on the website, and we are keen to help students, practitioners, consultants and organisations more easily understand, develop and further improve their own meaning and definition.

We will announce further features through this blog, as they become available, in the following days.

Ron Young

More information at www.knowledge-management-online.com