Grassy Knol

Google has launched its 'other' wiki tool, called Knol. This will an interesting experiment to see whether the introduction of advertising cash and author accountability injects some formality into the wiki process and what impact this is going to have on the quality of the information.



TechCrunch is predicting a lot of attempts to monetize and a kind of land-grab approach, presumably people will rehash wikipedia's content to do this. It seems an odd idea but this is definitley a potential tool for peer review of ideas that sits outside of the published journal method...

Prioritising and over-optimising

I'm suffering a bit from overload at the moment so I thought I'd share two prioritisation tips that I'm making use of:

1. The first was taught to me by a former teacher and is used everywhere in some form or another: label and sort your tasks from A-C in terms of priority (A highest) and then by estimated time to complete them from shortest to longest. Do a few of the short ones, then a few of the long ones, rinse and repeat, that way you feel like you are making progress and don't get demotivated.
2. Don't over-optimise your workflow: you can spend all day making a to do list and making sure that it is 'at a glance understandable', that your emails arrive and are labelled, that your desk is neat and that your status reports are up-to-date. If you make this a task in itself it will be the only task you do!

The Wisdom of Crowds

I know a lot of people beleive in the Wisdom of Crowds but Mister Splashy Pants thinks it's more like the lowest common denominator.