From email to blog - a painful discovery

What a day! Can you believe that - as the first decade of the 21st century works it way to close (less than 18 months, unless you buy into the 2001-side of the start of the millennium debate) - there are still major government organisations that don't provide an RSS feed of their media releases and site updates? To get this info, you still have to sign-up to the old email newsletter. Now, I have always maintained that a good KM system/tool can be as simple as an email account, but I want a way to keep that email account uncluttered. I also want to be able to clip and blog things I think might be of interest to people, without having to create my own stupid email list.

So today was all about answering the question: How do I turn an email alert into an RSS feed from the user end? It took me about 4 hours to come up with the answer (yes - there is one).

For this answer, I must stand on the shoulders of giants. My thinking was guided by this blog post on the subject. The solution didn't work for me, but it got me thinking in the right direction.

Now, the process for me is convoluted, but works. It involved the following steps:

1. Create a new Google account



2. Create a new Gmail account



• This probably isn't necessary if you want to use an existing account to receive your alerts, but since you've got to create a new Google account and a Blogger blog, you might as well manage it all from the same place
  



3. Subscribe to the alerts you receive using your GMail address



4. Create a Blogger account



5. Enable your Blog to accept posts via email automatically



6. Create a Gmail filter for each alert you have subscribed to



• You can create an autoforward of all emails in one step, but I have this notion of creating multiple alerts in different blogs, so I want to keep the ability to differentiate where emails are forwarded to



7. In each filter, specify that you want to forward these emails to the email address created by your Blogger account

Voila! Your new blog now posts automatically every email you receive as part of the alert. You can then subscribe to this feed, pass it around, etc.

Those of you familiar with copyright law are probably wondering if we aren't entering into some dangerous water here in regards to republishing content on a third party site, and you are quite right. I have made the feed undiscoverable, however, so it can only be found by people I give the feed to, which salves my conscience a little. I'm also attributing the material back to it's source, and most of the emails are identical to a blog post anyway, since they pretty much all redirect back to the parent site. Still, if the AG comes knocking on my door asking me to not do this anymore, I suppose I will have to comply, and go back to forwarding his emails to other interested parties in an uncontrolled manner.

Back to School

I recently posted to actKM about my slightly insane (given my checkered academic history) desire to do a post-graduate course in knowledge management. I'm still pulling all my options together, so if anyone can recommend a good program, let me know!

In terms of my post, I received a number of very kind and helpful responses, including a link to quite a useful resource, courtesy of Boris Jaeger: the KM Education Wiki. This is a wiki listing KM courses around the globe, broken down by country - you can even do visual search via Google Maps - how cool is that!?! Well worth looking at for anyone thinking about studying KM. Thanks again to Boris for putting me on to this.

Learning, always Learning

I was fortunate to have a short demonstration of a quality induction while I ate my lunch today. The manager of a Michel's Patisserie (Australian coffee and cake franchise) undertook a job interview next to me while I was sitting in a food court. She was interviewing a young OS student who was looking for some part-time work to help fund a few weeks of holidays. Over the course of the interview, the manager really caught my attention at 2 points:

1. She described the process of trialling the new employee. They would ask the girl to staff the pies and pastries counter for 2 hours, then would sit her down, and share the story of their experiences. First the prospective employee would describe her story of how the 2 hours went, including how she felt about her performance, the customers, and the other staff. Then the manager would tell her story of how she saw the prospective employees performance.
2. The manager spent the majority of the interview talking about what the new employee would need to learn - that the job required a great deal of memorisation, and how employees were stepped through the process of learning about the products on offer.

It really struck me that for what most (including myself, as a former retail employee) would see as a fairly basic, routine job, a lot of emphasis was placed on the individual and their experience. Perhaps it was just the aftershocks of Etienne Wegner's presentation at KM Australia, but this emphasis on the journey - both for the employee and the employer - resonated with me. It made me think of how badly "good" employers and organisations sell their roles as "journeys" - an experience that starts with who you are now and ends with a different you in some way - and just what a useful method of conveying shared purpose and direction this is for any person at any level. Metaphorically, it sure beats the broken down car, 5 tonnes of cargo, and 10-year old road map with a destination that's a 500m circle with the words "get us here" scribbled in over the street name.