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If you're thinking you should try your hand at blogging but you're still unsure how to start, take a look a Jeanine Zeitvolgel's discussion of story telling and knowledge management on the IAOC blog.

Start with "Everyone Loves a Good Story," where Zeitvogel relates how the new science of knowledge management has tapped into the ancient traditions of story telling to capture exactly the information that knowledge workers need to know.  Good story telling, she says, helps you capture the attention of your hoped-for listeners or readers.

In her next article, "How do you get a crew to want to get off of a submarine?" Zeitvolgel addresses the critical, often difficult task of documenting and sharing the real know-how held by an organization's experts (the objective of "knowledge management").  She describes how the appeal and pleasure of story telling can turn information hoarders into teachers and mentors.

In "It Doesn't Have to Be Hard: Tools to Make Sharing Easy(er)"  Zeitvolgel gives Microsoft's Sharepoint "5 hammers," her highest KM tool ranking.  Finally, in "Life in the Void," she provides some personal reflections on her work as a counter to the isolation of life in the black hole of the office cubical.

You can try your own hand at story telling on this blog.  Do it soon and you might win one of the prize books in this month's contest.

Don Dunnington
Moderator

Flyash is a result of the combustion process that takes place in coal fired power plants.  This ash is collected and disposed of.  However, in recent years use of flyash has increased.  Cement producers and concrete manufacturing batch plants all use flyash to enhance the composition and value of the product they produce.

However, flyash is collected and stored in silos at the power plant, cement plant and concrete batch plant and the inventory of this material needs to be monitored for various reasons.  Flyash is lightweight, low in dielectric constant and extremely dusty, especially during silo filling operations.  These characteristics present challenges to nearly every form of level measurement technology.  This makes obtaining a consistent, accurate and reliable measurement very difficult.... until now.

A new "white paper" is available that discusses the nature of flyash, why it is difficult to measure and where it is used.  This paper then proceeds to offer a solution for measuring and monitoring the level and inventory of this increasingly used and valuable commodity and by-product of coal-fired power plants.

Click here for access to this free "white paper" entitled "Flyash Level Measurement Solutions".

If you have any questions or comments about this free "white paper", please let me know.  Thanks!

Joe Lewis
Vice President
Monitor Technologies LLC
jlewis@monitortech.com
www.flexar.info
www.monitortech.com

If you've been waiting for the right moment to start blogging about your business, Debbie Weil just eliminated every delaying tactic you've ever thought of (and maybe some you hadn't gotten around to yet).  In The Corporate Blogging Book, "Absolutely Everything You Need to Know to Get It Right" (Portfolio, August 2006), CEO Blog guru Debbie Weil has written the book that will get you started.

Your Days Of Doubt, Fear and Blog Procrastination Are Over

In a Q&A, Weil says the thing that makes her book different is that she has "written it for the skeptical or even fearful manager – someone who's heard about this 'blogging thing' but isn't sure how or why it applies to them."

There's no bandwagon for you to jump on when you read Weil's book, no "blog or die" predictions, just clear, non-technical business advice.  Weil has organized the book so you can jump into any chapter and find the answers to questions that are confronting you right now. 

Feeling a bit fearful about blogging?  Try "Time: the Top Fear Factor" (page 40), or "The Mother of All Fears: Losing Control" (page 47). Or try chapter 7, "Top Ten Tips to Write and Effective Blog" (page 98).  And don't miss the "Bonus Resources" at the end of the book, including a great discussion by web design master Jakob Nielsen on "Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes."

Just Blog It: In this Contest the First 5 Blog Authors are Winners

You can download the first chapter of The Corporate Blogging Book free. You can buy it on Amazon, or at your local book store.  Or best of all, you can get your own free copy just by posting an article on this here on this blog.  That's all you need do: sign up for a free author's account (or use the account you already have but never used), write a blog article (not a  news release, not a corporate white paper or brochure, just a simple, short article that lets your own unique point of view show through).

Just a Few Rules

Our publisher, Joe Taylor, is feeling generous with this contest.  He's let us open it to anyone associated with or knowledgeable about this industry.  That includes readers, advertisers, or anyone else who wants to write a short blog article that is appropriate and on-topic for this audience.  If you aren't sure what "appropriate and on-topic" means, email of draft or outline of your article to me before you try to post it.

Things that aren't appropriate include news releases, stuff lifted straight out of a sales brochure, or other corporate literature, or rants about other people or organizations.  A good test for your article: is this something you would want a potential employer reading five years from now?  The contest ends at midnight (Eastern Daylight Time), September 30, 2006.

To get a blog author's account, email me at don@powderandbulk.com. Type "Sign me up as a powder blog author" in the subject line. 

Don Dunnington
Moderator