Weblog Collaboration Blog

Semantic Blogging

2005-03-01T10:32:00.000-06:00

Crayzer, Steve. "Semantic blogging and decentralized knowledge management." Communications of the ACM, 47 (12), December 2004, 47-52.

Steve Crayzer discusses the needs of the HP Laboratories' Semantic Web research group (Bristol, UK) to set up "a system capable of aggregating, annotating, indexing, and searching a community's snippets." Snippets being small pieces of information that might be relevant for retrieval later.

Crayzer points out that blogs alone do not meet the group's requirements. While blogs allow easy capture of information, decentralized data-gathering, and easy methods to add to the collected information (through comments and annotations), Crayzer wants his system to have a flexible data model, be extensible, and make it possible to infer new metadata from existing metadata.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Crayzer uses Semantic Web framework tools to add the necessary functionality to the weblog framework. Specifically, RSS1.0 and RDF.

What I find most interesting about this article is Crayzer addressing the other models for ontology creation, albeit briefly and as a contrast to the Semantic Web model. Decentralized ontologies, such as those created through Flickr, del.icio.us, and Topic Exchange enable a user community to set up its own ontology by creating a list of tags or bookmarks for content. "However, in all of these systems the ontology lacks semantics and are both centralized and universal. The Semantic Web may be better served by precise, local, domain-specific vocabularies that are loosely coupled, rather than by a one-size-fits-all central ontology, no matter how collaborative." (p 52)

This argument parallels the debate between controlled vocabulary searching and full-text searching, and human-created indexing versus automated indexing (relating specifically to exhaustivity). The Semantic Web approach allows for individual disciplines and groups to take more control over access to their information. While this may enable more precise search and retrieval for knowledgeable experts, the ability of John Q. Public (or the sales guy in the field) to obtain rapid access to the same information may be limited by a lack of familiarity with the thesaurus.

I think within an individual business enterprise, the Semantic Web approach recommended in this article could be the most effective approach. However, if you conceive that the information may be used by a wider audience (up to and including the average consumer or general public), being able to search full-text (or through a publicly available and generalized tag set) will better promote access.

Both approaches have merit. As I've said before, if you only learn one tool, and it's a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. The more tools and approaches you are willing to examine, the more creative you can be in proposing solutions.

There are several links at the end of this article I will be looking into, including Planet RDF for communal blogs, Platypus for wikis, the semblog platform for aggregators, and Compendium as an authoring tool utilizing Semantic Web blogging ideas.

This is a good article, and thought provoking! I hope you have a chance to read it.

And while we're at it....

2005-01-27T10:25:00.000-06:00

In the same Library Stuff post is a presentation from the Blog Business Summit entitled "Enhancing Internal Communications with Blogs, Wikis, and More."

The presentation lays out how the authors (Nick Fink, Mary Hodder, and Biz Stone) use these technologies in their work life. I thought the presentation was very well done, and had many interesting points.

JotSpot

2005-01-27T10:09:00.000-06:00

In this post from Steven Cohen's Library Stuff he mentions that a friend, Andrea, had introduced him to a software called JotSpot. JotSpot provides a hosted service for creating wikis.

Looking at the JotSpot website, I think that JotSpot could do for wikis what hosted software like Blogger has done for weblogs. The ease-of-use functionality (and even the style of the user interface) bear more than a passing resemblance to the Blogger interface.

This would be an excellent service to use for trying out a wiki on a collaborative project. Just look at some of the possible uses for JotSpot listed on the website. More than enough ideas to get the creative juices flowing!

Corporate Library Blogs Article

2005-01-20T09:05:00.000-06:00

In the November/December 2004 issue of the b/ITe newsletter, Stephen Cohen writes an article about corporate library blogs. Brought to my attention by his Library Stuff weblog, excellent as usual.

This article nicely addresses the types of basic questions you need to answer prior to embarking on a project to create a corporate weblog. You need to have information that must be communicated, you need to understand who will use the blog (internal employees or the general public as well) and how the blog will be used. A mission statement helps to establish the goals of the blog and focus content meaningfully.

I like this article because it puts first things first: get straight what you want to convey, to who, and for what purpose. A corollary objective to be achieved in finding the answers to these questions is: get buy-in from users and your IT support staff. People issues dominate the decision to begin such a project, not technological issues.

The article also points out that one of the primary advantages of blogs over e-mail communication of this information is that the blog groups user comments with the original post for an easily-followed "stream of conversation". Trying to tie all follow-up e-mail replies to an original e-mail can drive you batty! This grouping of like-subject comments also facilitates collaborative efforts among staff members sharing similar interests or expertise.

How to find those experts for a collaboration

2005-01-18T10:14:00.000-06:00

There's a nice article in the January 10 edition of Computerworld about the work of Bernardo Huberman at Hewlett-Packard. He has developed software algorithms to analyze e-mail flows through an organization in terms of a concept called "business centrality," which measures the visibility of individuals within the organization. Through this analysis, Huberman identified communications patterns that he interpreted as belonging to communities of experts (either de facto or otherwise).

Huberman has also developed software that creates profiles of users based upon their access of documents and Web pages through the computer network. These profiles can then be used to help other users identify experts.

All of this activity is in the patent process, but it is interesting to think about the possibilities. This type of information could help an organization formalize some of its communities of practice and improve communication between the expert community and the larger organization.

10 Ways to Use Blogs in Businesses

2005-01-06T08:18:00.000-06:00

One of my favorite blogs is Jenny's "the shifted librarian". Here is a post linking to a page discussing "10 Ways to Use Blogs for Managing Projects."

Jenny's point is that one can substitute "libraries" for "projects". A very valid point. I have read Tom Peters, who says that all professional work in the future will be project work. As librarians are information professionals (aren't we?), we should expect the nature of our work to evolve in a similar direction to the work of other professions.

The Social Networking Weblog

2004-12-30T11:51:00.000-06:00

I found an interesting entry on this weblog about a "Collaborative Communities of Practice 2004 Online Conference".

Following this link takes you to a page presenting the program for the conference. The abstracts of the presentations on this page provide a pretty good outline of the content covered by this conference. "Collaborative Communities" (or "Communities of Practice") is one of the central concepts of knowledge management, that informal, socially networked communities of experts form around specialized knowledge. KM believes that organizations should foster and tap into these networks in order to develop new solutions. Weblogs represent a simple collaboration tool that businesses can use as part of a knowledge management program. However, I believe it is important to avoid becoming too "techno-centric" in your approach to KM. The most important thing that anyone implementing a KM program can do is to first understand the community members and how they communicate. Technological (or Luddite) solutions will follow naturally by adapting the right tool to the right situation.

Business Blog Consulting

2004-12-10T13:22:00.000-06:00

This blog, hosted by Rick E. Bruner, is focused on the use of blogs for marketing and customer communications. Mr. Bruner runs his own consulting practice, Excecutive Summary Consulting, that specializes in research and writing services about Internet marketing and media.

The category "Articles about Biz Blogging" in the Business Blog Consulting blog seems to keep regular posts on short articles appearing in the business and popular press regarding the use of blogs as business tools.

Blog Collaboration Presentation - AOK

2004-12-07T09:15:00.000-06:00

I presented a 30-minute discussion of weblogs and their use as business collaboration and communication tools to my LI 841 class this Sunday. During our "play time" in the computer lab, I got a charge out of seeing how many students created a Blogger weblog for themselves. At the beginning of the presentation, I showed how to set up a weblog using Blogger and begin posting within 5 minutes, using a refractory marketing team as an example.

I enjoyed the other presentations as well, particularly Chad Jira's on Cascading Style Sheets and Ginger Shields's on RSS and syndication. I'm sorry I missed Tobin's on setting up a weblog on your own web server using open-source tools (nasty thing about needing to work Saturday morning), but I hope to get an image disk to play with later.

For those who don't know, I am a student at Emporia State University's School of Library and Information Management in Emporia, Kansas. The class for which I generated this blog, LI 841, is titled "Advanced Retrieval & Repackaging for Business & Industry." I will graduate with an MLS in May, 2005, as well as an Information Management Certificate for studies about information management in non-academic (and potentially non-library) environments. I would recommend this program to anyone interested in becoming an information professional or corporate librarian.

A good short intro to wikis - Darwin Online

2004-12-03T13:29:00.000-06:00

Boyd, Stowe. "Wicked (good) wikis." Darwin online, February 1, 2004.

This short article by Stowe Boyd talks about wikis and compares them with weblogs, with wikis providing "...a faster pace and ...a more intensely collaborative feel" than weblogs.

For those of you in LI 841, I look forward to seeing you at class tonight!

Brief Look at Socialtext

2004-12-02T21:00:00.000-06:00

Socialtext offers four different products for business collaboration.
1. Socialtext Workspace is the enterprise-level solution, hosted by Socialtext. It includes enterprise weblog publishing (including the ability to update the weblog via e-mail), wiki collaborative documents/webpages, persistent workspaces for use during meetings, and database/knowledge base and administrative tools.

2. Socialtext Appliance is a hardware device containing all the functionality of Workspace. You can plug the device in behind your corporate firewall, and you have a secure collaboration software solution for blogging, wikis, etc.

3. Socialtext Eventspace is a collaboration tool tailored for conferences. It allows conference organizers to set weblogs, wikis, and event spaces. The content generated can be accessed later from persistent workspaces. There are also chat features.

4. Kwiki is Socialtext's open source offering. The company developed Socialtext products as extensions of the Kwiki open source project. Kwiki is highly customizable; the base module is an extremely simple wiki, and all kinds of features and functionality are available as plug-ins to make your Kwiki into the wiki you desire.

Of course, Socialtext has its own blog!

The company culture at Socialtext is different from what I saw at the Traction Software webpages. Socialtext consciously avoids the annoying ® symbols trademarking every product name. They even seem to make fun of the competition over this in a disclaimer on their homepage: "Socialtext, Socialtext Workspace, Socialtext Kwikspace and Socialtext Eventspace are trademarks of Socialtext Incorporated. All rights reserved. We put this obvious statement here because we didn't want to have to bother you with ugly TM's everywhere."

Socialtext also states that "Traditional groupware and knowledge management tools use top-down constraints: pre-defined roles, workflows, and categories. Socialtext takes a bottom-up approach to collaborating and empowers people to develop their own solutions."

By contrast, Traction Software writes with a more command/management tone in their write-up: "Traction Software's Enterprise Weblog software is deployed by business and government teams to create an information sharing system that works like the web. Traction provides a dramatically efficient communication, collaboration and knowledge-sharing medium that presents business information and working communications in context, over time."

I thought both Socialtext and Traction Software had interesting product offerings, and I hope to have the opportunity to explore this type of collaboration software more in the future.

Another Business Blogging Resource

2004-11-29T08:25:00.000-06:00

Jessica Baumgart of the "j s scratchpad" blog has pointed the way to another excellent resource for information on business blogging. Bill Ives is an independent consultant with extensive experience in researching media effects on human cognition. Mr. Ives has a PhD in Educational Psychology, and he has done some research into what blogging can do for business. In this post on his "Portals and KM" blog he writes about an August article, "Big Time Blogging," in Portals Magazine that is now available online.

The article itself is a basic summary of information covered in other articles posted to my blog. However, check out his blog for more interesting posts on blogging and knowledge management.

Weblog communities - KM bloggers

2004-11-24T08:40:00.000-06:00

I just got handed a stack of work, so this is my last blog post for today - honest!

Stephen Cohen posted on his Library Stuff blog that he will be reading this paper at lunch today. The abstract states that the paper presents a social network analysis of links between weblogs to identify a community of KM bloggers.

Hope you enjoy!

Business/Corporate Blog Samples

2004-11-24T08:24:00.000-06:00

From the Blog Business Summit web site, a list of links to business blogs that the organizers regularly read.

I was interested in CorporateBloggingBlog, produced by Fredrik Wackå, a communications adviser in Malmö, Sweden. He has written a 16-page "Beginners Guide to Corporate Blogging," and has been a corporate blogger since 2000.

This beginner's document is very useful. Mr. Wackå identifies six classifications of corporate blog, 3 external and 3 internal.
External Blogs
1. Sales blog
2. Relationship blog
3. Branding blog
Internal Blogs
1. Knowledge blog
2. Collaboration blog
3. Culture blog
He goes on to define the purpose of each, who is the blogger, and the target groups of the blog.

For collaboration blogs, the purpose is "To provide a working team with a tool for research, collaboration, and discussion." The team serves as both the bloggers and the target audience. Interestingly, Mr. Wackå notes "There's only a fine line - if any - between this blog category and business wiki's."

This document also has practical advice for those intereseted in setting up a business blog, as well as some links to business related blogs.

Blog Business Summit in Seattle

2004-11-24T07:47:00.000-06:00

Seen on j's scratchpad, coming up January 24-25, 2005.

Notice the session topics. Of special interest to readers of this blog would be sessions like "Enhancing Internal Communications with Blogs, Wikis, and More," and even more appropriately, "Collaborative Blogging: Team Workflow and Tools."

I'm sorry I won't be able to go this year, but hopefully there will be conference proceedings to read. It would be nice to have enough material for a session proposal for next year!

Four Short Bibs & Abstracts for Lil' Articles

2004-11-23T20:30:00.000-06:00

Conlin, Michelle, and Andrew Park. "Blogging with The Boss's Blessing; More companies are helping employees to speak freely -- and bond with customers." Business Week, i3889, June 28, 2004, 100.

Discusses the growth of blogging in business. Credits the usual suspects (Sun Microsystems, Macromedia, Dell, Microsoft) as early adopters. A year ago, Microsoft had 100 corporate bloggers, today they have 800. Ziff-Davis now has internal blogs to cut down on company e-mail. Article mentions the dangers inherent in publicly available corporate blogs. "Therein lies the rub: The more truthful they are, the more valuable blogs are to customers."

"From Blogs to K-Logs." Computer Weekly, September 2003, 40.

The article distinguishes personal blogs from k-logs, or knowledge management blogs. A key quote from Matt Mower, a knowledge management specialist working with the company Evectors: "Blogging is less about capturing tacit knowledge and more about building informal networks...If you find an employee in the company that frequently blogs on a particular work topic, you might identify that employee as an expert in that field, ...If you create a link to the employee's blog in your own blog, their reputation will spread. Moreover, you can access any other experts that have been identified in the blog."

Kirkpatrick, David. "It's hard to manage if you don't blog." Fortune, Oct 4, 2004, 46.

An executive-level summary (what else appears in Fortune?). Sun Microsystems, Microsoft, but also mentions in passing the following companies with corporate blogs: Yahoo, Google, Intuit, Monster.com - and Maytag.

Pack, Thomas. "Through the blogosphere." Information Today, 21(10), November 2004, 41-42.

Mostly of interest for some useful background information on the history of blogging, including pointers to a Yahoo history of blogging (with a bad link) and this alternative history by Rebecca Blood.

John C. Dvorak - Blogger (no joke!)

2004-11-23T19:48:00.000-06:00

Dvorak, John C. "The Blog's better purpose: awesome information archive: not just digital bullhorns anymore, blogs will double as searchable, useful databases." Computer Shopper, 24(9), September 2004, 38. Accessed through Expanded Academic ASAP

In case you are not up on computer cognosceti, John C. Dvorak is an influential columnist with Ziff-Davis publishing. In recent years, I have admired (and laughed heartily at) his critiques of technological innovations with no apparent useful human purpose. For Dvorak, weblogs fell into that group, until recently.

No more. "Simply put, a blog appears to be nothing more than a collection of random thoughts--and many blogs are simply that. But if the blog owner thinks about blogging differently, then it can become an amazing personal resource others may benefit from. Let's explore this possibility."

Dvorak sees the possibility of data-mining blogs. Blogs could serve as a personal archiving tool for random facts. The extension of Dvorak's ideas to a business use is straightforward. Knowledge management, innovation management, and other programs seek to develop better ways to identify, access, and use information from diverse and often unstructured sources. Business blogs clearly provide a platform for recording such information for later use.

"As we analyze the blogging scene today, we're only seeing the beginning of a long-term phenomenon in personal public archives....once people realize its amazing usefulness, the blogging phenomenon will explode."

This "explosion" in the world of personal blogging, I feel, will be accompanied by a corresponding explosion in use of blogging and other asynchronous collaboration tools (like wikis) by business. Once people understand and appreciate what a blog can do at a personal level, it will be no time at all before innovative and enterprising individuals are blogging at work with full support from management. This is already happening at Sun Microsystems and other leading-edge companies.

Collaborate Freely - column by Michael Vizard

2004-11-23T19:29:00.000-06:00

Vizard, Michael. "Collaborate Freely." Computer Reseller News, Sept. 27, 2004, 26.
Accessed through Expanded Academic ASAP

"Originally, collaboration nirvana was to be provided by software such as Notes or Groove. But today, many people are starting to wonder if the collaboration functions provided by these products have become little more than expensive redundancies. After all, a Weblog that resides behind a firewall should be secure enough for most companies, and the cost of deploying collaboration software on every client is a time-consuming task that dwarfs the expense of the initial software licenses."

This short article shows how business writers are beginning to position weblogs (at least "secure" blogs behind corporate firewalls) as a key communications medium for collaboration.

The article continues: "For solution providers, instant messaging and the advent of Weblogs provide new collaboration mediums that allow them to greatly expand the number of businesses using this type of software well beyond the existing base of Notes users. That's because the costs associated with using these tools are minimal; what has previously hampered the broad adoption of traditional collaboration software has been the total cost of ownership. And truth be told, what most companies are waiting for is an intrepid solution provider to show up at the door and show them how to do it."

Blogging as a KM Tool

2004-11-19T11:24:00.000-06:00

Vu, Uyen. "How online diaries change knowledge management." Canadian HR Reporter, 16(18), October 20, 2003, 1-6. Accessed via ABI/Inform on DIALOG.

The author makes good points about why blogging can be an effective KM tool (and, by extension, good for some businesses):

1. "Unlike many knowledge management systems, blogging is cheap and easy to implement - 15 minutes should be enough to get someone started."

CAVEAT: The learning curve is not steep, but employee self-discipline is required to ensure regular posting of relevant information so that the blog is both accurate and up-to-date.

2. "Another advantage blogs have over knowledge management systems is they provide a context. Knowledge management systems have often been criticized as a way of storing information, not knowledge. Knowledge is information in context, said Brian Guthrie, director of innovation and knowledge management at the Conference Board of Canada. To the extent that blogs deliver insights woven in a thread of conversation, one finds nuggets of useful knowledge but often within the context of a set of problems, a personal approach, even a worldview."

Uyen Vu makes a very good point here. While we can debate the completeness of the definition of knowledge presented in this quote, I believe that no one would dispute that examining information within a context provides a better understanding of that information. By understanding the context, we can determine how to best apply what has been learned in other circumstances.

In order to gain such insights, however, companies must not restrict the language used on the blog too tightly. While profanity has no place on a corporate blog, posts that are burdened with too much political correctness (toeing the company line) will not prove enlightening either. Corporate policies on blogging style and content must strike a balance that allows for frank, balanced consideration of business challenges/opportunities and their solutions.

3. Blogging does not represent an end-all for knowledge management. "Phil Wolffe [VP of extrapreneurial strategy and technology director of Adecco] states, 'The best KM is the one people practice...For all I know, (knowledge-blogging) may address only 10 percent of your KM goals...But try it. It is a critical 10 per cent[sic]. This wedge gets people owning their expertise, sharing it willingly, getting credit, getting feedback, being social about knowledge. How does this compare to any other tools you've ever introduced?' "

I think Phil Wolffe's quote addresses some of the great possibilities of blogging. We want our employees to be empowered and responsible, and to take a sense of pride away from their work. Blogging can provide a status-enhancer to motivated employees who can showcase their expertise in one or more areas through the medium. The cost of providing blogging to employees can be extremely small, so even if viewed only in terms of the benefits to employee morale, the return on investment is quite attractive.

Also, we should view blogging as a social activity, not as a lone writer typing posts into a digital repository, where no one will access the information again. These blogs are meant to be read and used. Readers can e-mail the post's author, or attach comments directly to the entry. The blog makes possible a coffee-shop conversation with a customer or employee located miles away, and records the dialogue for future use by anyone in the organization. If the business is ready and organized for good communication between employees, blogging will provide a new and better channel for some types of business activity.

In an appropriate business environment, and with the right kinds of incentives and controls, blogging can increase the networking of employees to solve those insidious long-term business problems that only increased communication and social pressure will bring to a solution.

More about Traction Software

2004-11-17T20:54:00.000-06:00

Disclaimer: Traction (R) is a registered trademark of Traction Software, Inc.
Disclaimer #2: Traction (R) Communicator (TM) and Traction (R) TeamPage (TM) are trademarks of Traction Software, Inc.

First, some information from a review article:

Levack, Kinley. "Traction digs in with traction TeamPage." EContent, 26(2), February 2003, 13-14.

Traction's TeamPage is an enterprise weblog designed for use behind corporate firewalls. TeamPage enables creation of a large store of data in XML format, posted onto a Web server and searchable by database. The product is positioned as a solution for competitive intelligence and market research professional. The end goal of the software is to create a "durable archive" for this type of intelligence.

The CEO of Traction Software, Tim Simonson, sees TeamPage as an extension of the communication strengths of e-mail. The issue, in Simonson's mind, is how can you store, organize, and retrieve information from an e-mail client? E-mail communications are by their nature unstructured. TeamPage allows the users to publish e-mails to the weblog and to sort based upon date/time or a category/classification (or both).

At the time of this article (February 2003), Levack quotes pricing: "The solution is priced at $10,000 per server and $125 per named user, plus an additional 20% annually for maintenance and support. A 15-user workgroup package is also available for $4,995."

My comments:

Even $4,995 + annual maintenance isn't peanuts!

A look around Traction's website shows that there are two levels of product, the Traction Communicator and Traction TeamPage. Traction Communicator is a simple environment with two named users and three "workspaces", while Traction TeamPage provides a full enterprise-wide application.

Most of the salient, distinguishing features of the software appear to be convenience-related. These features enable the user to import content quickly, to organize it and present it in multiple formats with little effort. Given enough time (and some computer programming expertise that I lack), I believe that a similar system could be put together from open-source tools. Of course, a business would buy the Traction package over open-source if the use of open-source and internal programmers is perceived to be too risky (in terms of cost, integrity of records, you name it).

I think that much of the future value of using a system like Traction TeamPage is determined by the effort the company puts in on the front end defining the organization and classification system used to identify content later. A corporation implementing TeamPage would greatly benefit from a well-planned approach to creating this classification system, involving both employee users and an information professional skilled in taxonomies and the creation of thesauri. The software doesn't help you determine this classification system (and I don't think that I would want any business intelligence software that forced a fixed taxonomy on my company). You have to know what you are doing, what kinds of information your employees need and how they will want to search for this information. These sound like obvious statements, but experience has taught me that ill-defined and unwritten expectations at the outset lead to disappointment and poor reception and use of the tool down the road.

In summary, Traction TeamPage software seeks to make weblogs "respectable" for business by providing in one package a journal and workspaces (weblog) with additional security and classification options. TeamPage also facilitates the addition of content to the blog, and provides additional publishing options (like a regular company newsletter from the blog).

There are other companies operating in this space. I will review Socialtext software soon. Socialtext is a wiki, a type of application closely related to weblogs that creates web pages that can be edited by essentially any reader.

CIO Magazine talks Collaboration

2004-11-16T10:48:00.000-06:00

Dragoon, Alice. "A travel guide to collaboration." CIO, 18(4), November 15, 2004, 68-76.

Let's get right to one of the quotes of the year, from Michael Schrage (codirector of the MIT Media Lab's eMarkets Initiative):

"Having lawyers drive collaborative initiatives is like having drunk drivers drive Pintos on New Year's Eve in Boston...That's an algorithm for tragedy." (p72)

This article examines collaboration as a currently-hot business phenomenon. Alice Dragoon defines collaboration in this way: "In its purest form, collaboration consists of two or more individuals or companies working together to achieve a common goal or create mutual value." (p70)

Collaboration, in these terms, embraces interactions between competitors, "friendly" companies, and work within a single company as well.

Ms. Dragoon points out several "danger zones" to avoid when embarking on a collaboration project, including a zero-sum game attitude (I win and you lose, or vice versa), mistrust, the intellectual property arrangements colorfully discussed by Mr. Schrage above, and security and integration issues.

As for how to have a successful collaboration, Ms. Dragoon stresses the importance of agreement on a mutually defined value to be gained by collaborating, building trust between the parties, choosing the right collaboration tools, minimization of need or requirement to integrate systems between the companies, and to handle security issues directly and visibly.

The article discusses e-mail, web conferencing, portals, online workspaces, and instant messaging as technologies to support collaboration. Interestingly, no discussion of weblogs. However, the article states that "Asynchronous tools also serve as a persistent, always accessible archive for discussions and document versions, keeping track of who decided what and when." (p75) Weblogs can certainly serve as an asynchronous collaboration tool, as illustrated by the KM presentation weblog I discussed in a previous post. I think the article focuses on enterprise-wide software $olution$ and neglects to mention that a little grass-roots effort by some properly-informed tech-savvy employees could provide many of the services offered by this software at a much lower cost to the organization.

At the end of the article, there is a URL pointer to links to an article introducing wikis as a possible collaboration tool "that allows users to create and edit webpage content."

I would recommend this article to anyone who wants insight into the developing consensus of top-level executives about the nature and technology of business collaboration.

Example of a Collaboration Blog

2004-11-16T08:30:00.000-06:00

Christina Pikas, Garrett Eastman, Kris Liberman, and Jessica Baumgart have been using this neat group blog on Knowledge Management to prepare for their presentation "Blogs for Information Dissemination and Knowledge Management" at the ASIST Annual Meeting.

Certainly one of the great advantages of a weblog approach over e-mail when collaborating with several geographically dispersed individuals is that all the communication resides in one central repository. As one of the posts on this blog mentions, however, keeping track of threads of ideas (at least within Blogger) is not trivial.

Radio.Userland allows you to keep track of messages by classifying/cataloging the posts into user-defined categories, which will help for blogs covering a wide range of topics. However, how well will such a system work when a blog deals only with a specific type of issue in population genetics?

Tobin Cataldo plans to discuss the creation of blogs from scratch as part of his presentation. This involves setting up your own web server, creating a database and using some PHP scripts to facilitate communication. According to Tobin, you don't have to be a super-tech to do this, and building from scratch will give you the ultimate flexibility in the organization and appearance of your weblog.

Now with RSS Feed!

2004-11-12T09:42:00.000-06:00

For those who are interested, I now have an RSS feed on this blog, courtesy of Feedburner. You can learn a little about RSS on their website. For those of you who might be in LI 841, we will be learning much more about RSS technology the weekend of December 4-6, thanks to Ginger Shields' presentation.

Sample Corporate Blogging Policy

2004-11-11T21:06:00.000-06:00

As seen on Steven Cohen's weblog, this post presents a 6-point corporate blogging policy attributed to Charlene Li.

The policy points express similar values to those discussed in my earlier posts: understand that the company would prefer that some topics not be discussed on company weblogs, appreciate the need for confidentiality and don't reveal proprietary information, be respectful to the company, your fellow employees, and your readers, etc.

As I pointed out yesterday, some of these values run counter to the dominant personal "blogging community" culture, with its openness, frankness, and irreverent tone.