Ben has introduced me to another new blog, this time for Andrew McAfee. I’ve been discussing Gwagle with Ben for a while now and Andrew McAfee (Associate Professor at Harvard Business School) appears to be doing some very important analysis and thinking. He devised the SLATES pneumonic, which has been handily re-written (so I can understand it) by another blog:

Search: Find what you need, enhanced by emergent description (see tags, below)

Links: More to the point, link relationships or link ranking algorithms

Authoring: Ease of content creation – spare me the angle brackets, make it bone simple

Tags: What do my colleagues call this? I bet it works better than what the IT department calls it

Extensions: If you thought X was [good interesting important useful], you might, by extension find Y similarly so

Signals: tell me something has changed

The purpose of SLATES is “it helps expose how platforms and channels can be brought closer and made more effective in ways that enhance productivity and effectiveness. Yes, we’ve seen most of these elements before. It is in the ease of recombination that they change how things work.”