I think that I have some cognitive barrier around the the concept of "not getting it." I always think that when someone says that a group of people "don't get it", it means that they are somehow missing the underlying essence of the thing in question. Though, as I frequently see, and become increasing irritated by, people are saying that 'such and such still doesn't get it' when what they really are referring to is the simple fact that some are not as far along on the adoption curve as an enlightened few of us.

I pose the following:

At the AMA seminar in Seattle, I posited that 'adoption' of weblogs & RSS of weblogs would reach a desired critical mass when Lotus Notes had an RSS reader. Why did I say that (notice, I did NOT say that most corporations don't get RSS or blogs). I meant that for a large number of major corporations (including almost the entire US gov) there are certain barriers to adoption, including technology, awareness, policy, ROI & justification, and personal bias that get in the way. It doesn't always mean that 'they don't get it', rather, it's a function of adoption.

Seriously, tell it like it is. If there really is something that people are missing in a big way, then I can agree that 'they don't get it', however, if it's simply a function of adoption, then keep pushing, but again, tell it like it is.

There are some technologies, like RSS, that are a "no brainer". People who will demand a proven ROI have no idea how the technology is used. The problem is that the "expense" that will be eliminated by something like RSS does not show up on any income statement, yet it is, in fact, there. For example, how much time do associates spend "researching" (read: surfing) the internet for information they need? Doesn't show up anywhere but we know it happens.

I tried to access my on line RSS aggregator, bloglines, from work and it was "blocked" by my company's firewall. But I could spend hours going to each individual site and try to find what I want. That is an example of "not getting it".

Agreed. I brough this up at the Blog Seminar in Seattle. I switched to newsgator for that reason. I concur - that's an example of not getting it, because they've thwarted the whole concept of the adoption curve and outright blocked productivity.

There are RSS readers and aggregators for Lotus Notes -- The most well-known is www.madicon.de . There is also a way-cool tool called iWatch for Lotus Notes which monitors things like Google alerts. http://www.openntf.org/Projects/pmt.nsf/ProjectHome?ReadForm&Query=iWatch