The NHL takes gets [and deserves] a lot of grief because more than half the teams get into the playoffs. But with four seven game series between the playoff teams and the Stanley Cup, no one will argue that the winner doesn’t deserve to hoist the Cup. The Av’s enter the playoffs with a NHL record 9th consecutive division championship under their belt. They seem to be back on course with two wins over the Wild after dropping the series opener at home. Sixteen wins are a long haul, but I hope to watch every one (thank you ESPN).

It’s hard to make a movie from a popular book. The core audience has already developed a relationship with the characters and the setting that must be quickly reconciled with the movie. And all in all, Peter Jackson has done a great job with the Lord of the Rings.

But I’ve just viewed the extended cut of The Fellowship of the Ring and I’m getting a bad feeling about things. The bad feeling started with Jackson’s treatment of Faramir in The Two Towers. By having Faramir attempt to take the ring to Gondor, Jackson blurs the distinction between the brothers Faramir and Boromir. And this presages further changes in come in The Return of the King.

The change in Faramir was bad enough. Now that I’ve viewed the extended cut of Fellowship, I realize that Jackson doesn’t really understand Aragorn. The extended Aragorn is afraid that he is truly Isildur’s heir and will also fail to destroy the ring. The real Aragorn has devoted a normal lifetime to becoming a warrior and a leader of men. He has traveled throughout Middle Earth to examine and thwart Sauron’s schemes.

Aragorn is the future of Middle Earth, The Return of the King marks both the end of the Age of Elves and the beginning of the Age of Men. I just hope that Peter Jackson knows it.

Scoble wonders how to overcome upgrade phobia. Everybody has it sometimes. Why upgrade, why fix what isn’t broken? We’re afraid to upgrade because of the unanswered question: What if it doesn’t work?

The question what if it doesn’t work usually usually has two major pieces:

• What if I can’t figure out how to use it?
• What if I want to revert back to what I know works? If you adequately address these two issues and establish your value proposition, then you’re in. Unfortunately, tech companies usually do a lousy job in both.

Most people are barely able to record with their VCR. If you want them to switch to TIVO, then you start by convincing them it will be easier to watch and record with one. And take a look at Joel’s take on how customer lock in can become prospect lock out.

[11 Apr] BTW, my personal hangup with TIVO is the value proposition. I’m ok with the product cost, but I just can’t get over the 12.95/month subscription cost. Yes, I could get the product lifetime subscription for 299, but it would be over 2 years before I recovered my money. With HDTV lurking on the horizon, I’m holding off on upgrading my video capability as long as everything works.

And sometimes your fights pick you. Martha Burk is getting criticized for taking on the Augusta National Golf Club when other problems are more important. But sometimes your fights pick you, and this is one of those times. Yes, there are bigger problems to solve, but none of those problems give Burk the national media attention that Augusta National provides.

Burk’s one problem is that the media light dims once the Masters Golf Tournament concludes. A problem made worse by the federal appeals court refusing a request to allow protesters at the front gate. But I’m not sure that Augusta hasn’t made an error in not providing a more visible spot for protests. After all, getting arrested is a time-honored tactic for media coverage - despite Burk’s statement that her group will not do anything illegal on Saturday.

It sometimes seems that Open Source has achieved a mythic status, able to leap tall abstractions with a single bound. But as I’ve been thinking about it, for all its strengths, it also has flaws.

The primary strength of Open Source is the software development model. It’s a meritocracy whose members are judged based upon their intellectual capital and their willingness to use it. The code tends to be of higher quality, because it undergoes more extensive peer review. And it tends to be more robust because it is used in a wider range of host environments.

The other main strength of Open Source is the support model. Open Source can have a competitive support marketplace rather than a closed market locked to the vendor. If necessary, important features can be added to the product. And there is a reasonable chance that the feature will be added into the main source tree when done correctly.

The primary disadvantage of Open Source is the business model. Open Source primarily addresses existing markets because the business model doesn’t provide the marketing resources required to develop a new market. And the resources aren’t available because Open Source gives away the high margin software market and keeps the low margin service market (software is high margin because the money rolls in once the non-recurring development cost is recovered; services are low margin because there has to be an employee for every 2000 billable hours).

The other main disadvantage of Open Source is that critical mass can be hard to attain. The advantages of the development and support models don’t come into play until there is a good sized user pool to draw upon. And small Open Source projects are susceptible to a lingering death if the founder’s commitment wanes.

About 4 years ago, I had a conversation with my CEO about the recipe for startup success. The upshot of that conversation was Time, Talent and Money. And time was the most important of the three. After all, money could buy you talent and talent would let you raise money but nothing was going to buy you another year to develop your product. So it was interesting to read that Cash is King.

The good thing – You’ve got time to think and time to execute.

The bad thing – You better settle in for the long haul.

Don Park thinks that a competitor smart enough to leverage the open source community should be able to run circles around Documentum. But things aren’t quite what they seem. If you take a look at Documentum’s Financials, you’ll see a bit over half of their operating cost goes to sales and marketing. And that sales and marketing costs are 2-3 × R&D costs.

Document/Content Management is still a market in flux. Documentum Sales and Marketing is spending a lot of that money to define the market. An open source alternative probably can’t afford to compete until the market is defined. Of course, open source could go after a different market segment and grow to compete with Documentum a few years from now.

I probably sound like a broken record, but the fundamental keys to success for a knowledge repository are collecting knowledge and finding knowledge when needed. And the fundamental obstacle to success is changing employee behavior. I think the answer lies in understanding what documents are important.

Important to the employees that is, not what management thinks is important. That means empirical measurement of how documents are used, which is where the knowledge weblog comes in. The k-log builds a web of references which allow us to evaluate what information is important and what it’s really about. And that gives us leverage to change employee behavior.

I have to admit that I belong to the “As long as I pay your salary, I make the rules” school, but that only applies when choosing between roughly comparable options. To establish new behavior, it’s necessary to frame it as a true win-win. The k-log web of references allows us to evaluate employees as content authors and content synthesizers. And if it can be evaluated, then it can be rewarded.

And behavior can be changed by framing the desirable behavior as being valued by the company and as furthering one’s career.

Dave Pollard thinks that Weblogs could be a mechanism to coherently codify and ‘publish’ the worker’s entire filing cabinet. But exactly what does that you? You end up with references to umpteen instances of umpteen versions of the same documents. It may be my document management background leaking through, but I think this really calls for a DMS integration.

The addition of a Document Management System would collapse those umpteen instances of umpteen versions into a coherent set of document references. Now, we can figure out which documents people are really using. And if we need to update them, then we can make sure that everyone is aware of the update.

And all others are but shadows. I just thought that I’d make that clear in light of my previous advice about Visual Studio. I would recommend emacs to any one investigating programming as a profession. But I don’t think Scoble is planning on changing his profession. He does need to learn how to use a debugger and the easiest way is from Visual Studio.