Portals and KM

Jeff Pulver’s Top Internet Only TV Shows

There is a rapid increase in the broadcasting of video blogs. Jeff provides a rating list and here is a fecent one, Jeff Pulver’s Top 35 “Internet Only TV Shows" – Week of September 18th, 2006. The top three arehttp://www.crooksandliars.com/, The Show with Zefrank, and Mania TV!. I was not excited about any of them. I did like some others. Especially, Rocketboom which does areally funny news take off. There is also Cooking Up a Story which tells good stories, often behind the scenes, on food topics. Recipes are including. I have written about them before and they use a variety of ways to interact with their audience which many web TV sites do not try to do except to sell t-shirts.

Others I looked at include Wine Library TV. In the show I saw, Host Gary tastesd 4 wines and tastes 4 cheeses and then talks about how they work together. He tries to be funny but isn’t really. Its better when he gets to the core topic. Goodnight Burbank is another news take off which I did not find as good as Rocketboom. It sells t-shirts & other merchandise.

Addendum: I got email responses from several fans of WLTV who defended the humor of Gary Vaynerchuk. So I went back and looked at the recommended episode 100. As one of the respondents said, "some of his humor is related to inside jokes that his regular veiwers get" so he is a aquired taste. There were some funny moments even for the first time viewer. I was immediately friendly to it when I saw "I hate Peyton Manning" written on the white board, being a New Englad Patriots fan, among other reasons for liking this statement. He used searching for the missing wines tobe used for the episode to give a tour of the place, good idea. Then he trashed Kenwood chardonney. I especially liked the strong finish with the Mission Impossible theme. It really jazzed up the close. So there is humor here. I stand corrected and I appreciate the feedback. Did I miss anything else on the other shows?

Swarm Creativity Blog – Peter Gloor

My friend Peter Gloor of IQuest has started a new blog, Swarm Creativity Blog, that builds on the ideas in his book by the same name, Swarm Creativity. There is a recent series of posts about his experiences in Ghana that include examples of swarm creativity such as Repairing a car in Ghana - an exercise in Swarm Creativity.

There is also a nice piece, Facebook feeds - How Swarms turn the Power of Swarms on to themselves, on how Facebook users used the new very open RSS feed like feature to mount a protest against this feature. As he said, “it was fully transparent to everybody who joined the campaign against the new feature, this was an avalanche of protest breaking loose in full public view.” The operators of Facebook relented and gave control back to the user. This was transparency used to contact too much transparency. As Peter concluded, it is “another example that swarms are great in self-policing and self-enforcement of their community's standard, even while the standards are evolving.”

My Web 2.0 Reading Lists

Yesterday I wrote about Harvard’s H20 Playlist, a social bookmarking tool that the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School has developed. I have started using the H20 Playlist myself. Since I have been writing a good bit on Web 2.0 recently I needed a way to keep track of my research and the links. I found it very intuitive to use and was able to get started without assistance which is unusual for me and tech tools.

Here are my current Playlists. I will keep adding to them. One of the commitments you make when you publish a playlist is open access through the Creative Commons licence. Please feel to use them and let me know if you have any suggested additions.

Web 2.0 & Business

Social Bookmarking

Business Blogs

Business Wikis

Community Sites

More on H20 Playlist as a Social Bookmarking Tool for Business

I have written about the H20 Playlist, a social bookmarking tool that the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School has developed, see The Berkman Center’s H20 Project – Creating Innovative Learning Environments. I think it is a tool that fits well into the business environment. Here are some more thoughts. First, social bookmarking can provide a number of benefits to the organization:

• Enabling topical resource lists than can be personalized and shared – creating personal “knowledge management” systems through lists of winning sales proposals, best practice deliverables, etc. around specific topics or work efforts

• Offering support to online workgroup activity through integration or connection with team work spaces

• Enhancing individual or team profiles to let others know what content the individual or team considers important

• Facilitating discovery of employees or teams with similar interests or facing similar issues

• Measuring popularity of intranet documents and their authors through numbers of tags

H20 Playlists have more structure than del.icio.us and this makes the service a good candidate or model for business use. Each Playlist has a title with its own URL separate from its tags, which makes it a unique entity that can be shared as a whole, a key feature for business applications. You can also rearrange your Playlist to reflect changing priorities instead of being limited to the reverse chronological order in delicio.us. There can be headings and subheadings. Like iTunes, a person sets up a library of all their links, and then creates Playlists on different topics that draw on these links, adding to the flexibility. You can search to see all the Playlists that contain an item, as well all the comments that others have made about the item.

How could Playlists work within a business? Individual project teams can collectively create Playlists to support their work. These can be attached to their wiki or blog. They can be shared and discussed at virtual meetings. At the enterprise or division level, a knowledge manager can create an ongoing library of links to critical documents with annotations on their importance. These could be drawn from the best of team Playlists. Then official enterprise Playlists can be developed that represent the best thinking on specific issues that are important to the company.

Employees or teams can download Playlists to fit their work needs. Then, they can make these Playlists once again personal as they engage in work activities by modifying them with both new annotations on the usefulness of existing links, as well as new links. Anyone in the firm, including the original knowledge manager, can access these new derived Playlists to enhance their own or add back into the official enterprise Playlist on the topic for continuous improvement.

The ability to stay current is facilitated by the Playlist feature that allows you to see what Playlists are being derived from existing ones, as well as what Playlists are influenced by others. With tagging behind the firewall, the best thinking in the firm can become more transparent and constantly updated to the benefit of all. Knowledge is easily shard and communities can consolidate their key documents and resources.

I have been talking several clients about social bookmarking through tools like Playlist and there seems to be good interest. Tomorrow I am going to share my own experiences with H20 Playlists and my Playlists on Web 2.0 topics. enterprise tagging

Knowledge Management 2.0 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS)

Mauro Cardarelli provides a useful summary of the capabilities of Sharepoint and knowledge management. He covers knowledge management from a web 2.0 perspective and looks at blogs, wikis, RSS, search, and social networking. A number of people (e.g., Khaitan, Boothby, McAfee) have written recently about how web 2.0 can fulfill the promise of knowledge management. Here is what Microsoft can bring to this table through Sharepoint.

Sharepoint now has templates for blogs and wikis. It allows its content to be RSS enabled. The enterprise search engine is much improved. Sharepoint has also incorporated social networking through its Knowledge Network. Employees can build profiles, MySite, so others can find them. See the Knowledge Network blog for how it integrates with Sharepoint. It includes a people search component as well as the My Site feature (an enterprise facebook). enterprise 2.0

Women and Blogging – A Few Points

Here is an interesting set of facts from a Boston Globe article, Women tap the power of the blog. First, “A survey by Perseus, a marketing research services company, indicates that 56 percent of all blogs are created by women and that women abandon fewer blogs than men do.” And Pew indicates that “the total number of women online is now slightly larger than the number of men.”

Second, “But a fraction of the so-called ``A-list" blogs are authored by women.” This seems consistent with many other areas. Women, as a group, are more persistent, but get less recognition than men. Not a fair or good thing. Gender equity seems a goal, not an outcome yet for the blogosphere.

The article goes on to write that, “ This inequity is not lost on San Francisco Bay area entrepreneurs and writers Lisa Stone, Elisa Camahort, and Jory Des Jardins, the trio that started BlogHer.org, a sort of yellow pages for women bloggers. BlogHer's mission is to create opportunities for women bloggers so they can pursue exposure, education, community, and economic empowerment.”

The second annual BlogHer conference was held July 28-29 in San Jose, California. I talked to some attendees who came away very excited about the contacts they made.

The Globe article tells the story of a number of women bloggers, including Lisa Williams, regular Berkman Thursday attendee. I have written about her work a bit and she is a case in our book, Business Blogs, A Practical Guide. She is a former analyst for Yankee Group who now works from hone with her tow young kids. Lisa said has gotten several consulting jobs H2OTown, her blog about Watertown, as well as her personal blog, `Learning the Lessons of Nixon." Two great blogs.

Eating in Honfleur, Normandy Coast

Honfleur was once an important seaport guarding the entrance to the Seine. It is a now a fishing village and vacation place with a nice old harbor full of sailing boats. Our hotel gave us a list of places to eat. We had time to do some comparative menu shopping and were pleased with the two choices we made. The first has a great location beside the old harbor with good food. The second is in town on street with many old buildings in the half timber Norman style. It has the best food.

L’Ascot is right on the harbor edge, along with many others. After going around the harbor this seemed to have the best menu. We had mussels in a cream sauce, skate wing ina brown butter sauce, and chicken in a port wine/shallot/mushroom sauce that was so good I tried to replicate when we got home. Meanwhile, the sun set over the harbor and the moon rose. It is located at 76 Quai Sainte Catherine, Honfleur, 02-31-89-15-31.

Le Beard attempts to rise above the bistro food served in most places we encountered and largely succeeds. It is certainly value for money with more complex cooking than the other places we went, even in Paris, at very reasonable prices. They provided multiple tastes on each plate. We started with a fish soup with crème and some excellent duck foie gras pate. Then, we had a beef in red wine sauce encased in a pastry shell. It is located at 7 Rue du Poits, Honfleur, 02-31-99-53-48.

Meals in Paris September 2006

After spending a week in Paris and trying out a number of places suggested by guidebooks and by friends, we concluded the friends picks won out. Here is what we did. There will be more on Normandy tomorrow. The first three came from a friend and I have listed them before but now have tried each myself. The next one came form a guidebook and the last was just found.

L’ Epi Dupin 11 Rue Dupin 6th Ardst. – tel. 01 42 22 64 56 – It is a new French style. As the Economist guide says, “With its charming interior (note the Provençal-style stone walls and ceiling beams), inventive, affordable and oft-changing menu—this tiny restaurant…is deservedly a local favourite.” It provided the best single dish of the trip, a very tender duck breast with mushrooms and small potatoes in a creamy sauce.

La Bastide Odeon 7 Rue Corneille 6 th Ardst. – tel. 01 43 26 03 65 – It does French Mediterranean cooking and provided a change of pace for our last meal. We had an eggplant starter, followed by a wonderful roasted farm chicken in a light brown sauce. Desert was a chocolate cake with hot chocolate sauce trapped inside.

Boeuf Sur Le Toit 34 Rue du Colisee 8th Ardst. – tel. 01 43 59 83 80 – It is Brassiere style and the art deco setting provided a great context for our party of ten. It provided the best environment of all the places were tried and the food was decent.

Vieux Bistrot, 4th Ardst is listed in the Time Out Guide to Paris. I used Time Out a lot when I lived in London and they provide objective reviews. The guide said it was traditional bistro food done well and not to be discouraged by the tourist location next to the Notre Dame. I would agree on all counts but the prices were considerably higher than other places we tried. I had frogs legs and then duck with a green peppercorn sauce. I guess a few others read the guide as mostly Americans and Germans filled the place, unlike the other places we ate.

Pre Aux Clercs, Rue Jacob, 6th Ardst, was near our hotel. We found it for lunch when we were getting over our overnight flight and hungry. It gave us comfort food when we needed, a fine beef roasted in red wine sauce, a duck confit with fries.

Cognitive Edge – A New Blog

Dave Snowden is starting a blog. Who is left now? I talked with Dave about blogs in Feb 2005 at Braintrust in San Francisco and he was very skeptical. Now he has come over to the blogside with Cognitive Edge. Dave has been on the conference circuit for years but now has settled in Singapore for three months and started this blog. It will be interesting to see what comes out as Dave has always been an entertaining speaker. I see that he is moderating his comments (actually he is see not moderating - my misunderstanding - see note in the comment section)

The blog is promoting his company by the same name. As the site says, “Headquartered in Singapore, Cognitive Edge Pte Ltd was created in 2006 to take on the work originally initiated in IBM as the Cynefin Centre for Organisational Complexity. Cognitive Edge has three main focus areas:

1. The creation of an open source approach to the development of consultancy methods
2. The development of an approach to research based on participation and discovery rather than normative methods.
3. The invention of software products (branded as the SenseMaker Suite) that leverage themes of narrative, complexity and networks for impact.

Minting Money through Community Sites

I just heard this: NEW YORK (Reuters) - Social-networking site Facebook is in serious talks to sell itself to Yahoo for an amount that could approach $1 billion, The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday. Facebook also held separate discussions with Microsoft and Viacom, the Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

This is not the first big offer for a community site as I wrote about in Want to get Rich? – Start a Community Space and Community Spaces Bonaza Part Two What's next? web 2.0 marketing

Opps – Some One Lost the Moon Walk Video Tapes

Stan Garfield sent me a link to this interesting article on the value of knowledge management. Using a more clever title than I did Knowledge Street wrote Raiders of the Lost Tapes about how the original video tapes got lost in the government retention facility where they were sent for safe keeping. They wrote that the fuzzy image we saw was not a factor of the transmission from the moon. In fact, “the video frequency of the lunar camera was incompatible with broadcast television. So the signal that went to the world was actually coming from a conventional TV camera, which was pointed at a monitor at the telemetry station.”

The actual image was much better. When some people went back to find the orginal tape in 2002 to transfer it to a more permanent digital format and presumably to share it with the world. Knowledge Street continued, “they couldn't find the tapes. There's no evidence they were destroyed or moved, but nobody can remember what became of them. They're just lost.”

Now I lose things from time to time. I just moved and I am still looking for some of my books like Blink and Tipping Point. But this was the first walk on the moon. Hope remains. There is a web site in Australia supporting the search. Contact the The Apollo 11 tape search site if you find the tapes.

The authors go on to discuss the importance of KM and the role of narrative in useful ways but that is content for another post. I am still thinking about their opening.

More on Enterprise 2.0 or Enterprise Social Software

The was a bit of controversy about a month ago when the Wikipedia deleted the growing article on Enterprise 2.0 . Andrew McAfee, who appears to be the first to coin the term, responded, Help, Help -- We're Being Repressed!, as did Jerry Bowles in more detail, Enterprise 2.0? NFW. (Not for Wikipedia). It seems to reappear for a bit, Enterprise 2.0 rescued from the salvage pile? (Wikipedia re-votes).

While I am troubled by the seeming censorship, I do not have time to follow all the fine points of the controversy but I am interested what more I can learn about the concept and its applications from the related discussion. Dion Hitchchcliffe had a nice post to that effect, "Enterprise 2.0" as the example that proves the rule.

I especially liked a few points he made on why web 2.0 is interesting to the enterprise. “.In fact, Enterprise 2.0 in general describes the liberation of often previously inaccessible corporate information to be opened up to general discoverability, consumption, and reuse using a Web-based model. And it's not just employee experience that's more usable with Enterprise 2.0 either. Business information that would otherwise be hoarded en masse within Microsoft Office documents of every description, e-mails, and data files stored privately in user's computers, accounts, and home directories — thereby severely curtailing its utility to the rest of the organization — can and often should be easily opened up and shared.”

Instead of going to one more siloed application, the knowledge management system, that people have to take the time to contribute to, the entire intranet 2.0 becomes a searchable archive that is open to those who should have access. Knowledge exchange (and management) is a byproduct of using the web 2.0 tool (blog, wiki, tagging, etc.) not an added required that often does not get done by busy people. And security is in some ways tighter because you can both control access within web 2.0 and the transparency makes bad activities more difficult to hide.

As of September 14, the term has reappeared in the Wikipedia as Enterprise Social Software, redirected from Enterprise 2.0. It begins, “Enterprise social software refers to social software used in enterprise business contexts. Enterprise 2.0 or Enterprise Web 2.0 are terms derived from Web 2.0 that are sometimes used to cover the introduction and implementation of such software, and the social and organizational changes related to its use. Enterprise social software includes social and networked modifications to company intranets and other classic software platforms used by large companies to organize their communication. In contrast to traditional enterprise software, which imposes structure prior to use, this generation of software tends to encourage use prior to providing structure.”

While this is accurate, it is somewhat poorly written and the wikipedia does invite more input. Dion does a much better job. enterprise 2.0

KmWiki – a Knowledge Management Place

Denham Grey organized a KM wiki to “to explore, gather links, annotate, debate and dialog around KM - what it is, where to find stuff, and why this an important subject.. It continues, “This is our second re-incarnation. An earlier attempt 1997 - 2005 was halted due to spam. The ultimate aim is to prepare wikipedia entries on key KM concepts, develop topic and concept maps of this exciting domain.”

There is a lot of great material there. Some of it is links to useful posts by Denham such as KM strategy is easy! And key decisions to make when developing a KM Strategy. Other links go to other wikis such as this wiki for comparing wiki products. There are other contributors such as Steve Barth’s definition of KM. This is a great service to the KM community.

The Value of Networks: Vertical Networks and Methods for Leaders

The New England KM Cluster will host the The Value of Networks: Vertical Networks and Methods for Leaders in the Boston area (Waltham, MA) on October 12 & 13. This is a corrected noticed from what I wrote earlier today. There are a number of speakers. Verna Alee will lead off on Value Network Strategies: Organizational and Value Network Analysis. Others include: Oliver Schwabe on Value Networks and Financial Reporting Standards: Tools, Standards, Results, Carol Rozwell on Value Network Archetypes: Truth to Power, Patti Anklam & Joseph Hutchinson on Advanced Social Network Analysis: Tools, Concepts, Results, Kathleen Gilroy on Web 2.0: Value Networks Next Practices, ™ and Bruce Hoppe on Organizational SNA. I will also be speaking there on October 12 covering, “Web 2.0:Web 2.0. What does it Bring to Business?.”

The event will be at the Forefront Center, 404 Wyman Street, Waltham, MA which is an excellent venue. I have been there before. I hope to see you there.

NPR gets Further into Web 2.0

I heard recently from Andy Carvin who worked on the Digital Divide project and was a case in our book, Business Blogs: A Practical Guide. He is starting a new job at Nationa Public Radio. As he said on his blog, he will be

“working at National Public Radio in Washington DC, serving as senior product manager for online communities. In this role, I'll essentially act as NPR's Web 2.0 strategist, helping them develop new initiatives that encourage greater public involvement in NPR's online activities. These activities could take a variety of forms: online social networks, wikis, blogs, mobcasting, citizen journalism, original content sharing. The NPR digital media team is very excited about the possibilities>”

This is a great direction for the first place on my radio dial. I look forward to hearing about what happens.

Another Twist on Network Art from Valdis Krebs

Valdis wrote in Listening to Conversations in his blog, Network Weaving, that he has turned some of his network data into electronic music. He was inspired by Latvians at an art conference who were using transmissions form Soviet radar installations for the same purpose.

He commented,

“This talk with the (Latvian) electronic musician is an example of how innovation happens when people from two diverse communities interact. Diversity is important, but similarity in perspectives/knowledge is also required. If we did not have an overlap of experience around ambient music, his comments would have seemed silly to me, and I would have quickly forgotten them.”

Good points and good example.

Defining Knowledge Management.

I observed a robust email discussion about the definition of KM recently. I found that KM comes to life when contextualized within the specific busienss environment as Greg Reid added to the discussion. But trying to define it to someone else does help you think about what you are doing.

Here is the current definition of knowledge management in Wikipedia. A number of people have been working on improving it recently so it will likely continue to change. I like the link to context. There is much more of course.

“Knowledge Management (KM) refers to a range of practices and techniques used by organizations to identify, represent and distribute knowledge, know-how, expertise, intellectual capital and other forms of knowledge for leverage, reuse and transfer of knowledge and learning across the organization.
Knowledge Management programs are typically claimed to be tied to specific organizational objectives and are intended to lead to the achievement of specific targeted results such as improved performance, competitive advantage, or higher levels of innovation.”

Here is a recent post from Denham Grey with the following definition that lloks at outcomes and the complexity of KM.

“A practice concerned with increasing awareness, fostering learning, speeding collaboration & innovation and exchanging insights. There is a delicate balance to be maintained between explicit and tacit, between personal and community, between collecting assets and enabling flows, between looking inward and externally, between mining and capturing insights and building on shared experiences.”

There is more in Denham’s post on KM Principles. Here is Steve Barth’s 2002 definition of KM.

Here is the US government definiton of knowledge management thanks to Greg Reid of InFuture.

What is your definition?

Making Sense of the Social Side of Web 2.0

There was an interesting article recently in the Boston Globe on marketing and the new media, Hidden messages: Is new technology empowering consumers -- or marketers? By Joseph Turow. It talked about a number of ways that marketing in making use of the new internet. There were a couple of interesting quotes at the beginning.

“Where the old-media system was one-way, today's new media technologies allow consumers to talk back -- and tune out. On Internet message boards and blogs, people can slam products they don't like, celebrate certain brands over others, and help shoppers find the cheapest prices….James Stengel, Procter & Gamble's influential marketing chief, proclaimed in a much-discussed 2004 speech that ``consumers are less responsive to traditional media" and ``are embracing new technologies that empower them with more control over how and when they are marketed to."

How do you make sense of this participant discussion? How do you find out what is being said about you and your products in the new web? How do you find the most influential discussants? The available data is only beginning to be tapped. Currently, a number of Web 2.0 search tools such as Google consider participant behavior to enhance their search results. There are other approaches emerging that also feature social network analysis in their search results but look more deeply into the social side of web content.

For example, iQuest measures the “betweenness centrality” - are you between important web sites and how important are the connections that passed through your site versus others on the whole web. iQuest correlates well with Google but it is harder to spam because of the indirect social network measures. Both tools return the appropriate sites for the search term with links to those sites. However, a big difference between the two occurs in the results displayed as iQuest also shows you the social network analysis.

iQuest is also different from other social network analysis services because it also contains a content analysis tool and looks inside the content of electronic communication. Most social network analysis tools simply look at the relationships between participants in this communication. This allows a hybrid tool like iQuest to show you who is talking to whom, what they talk about, when they talk, and where those conversations take place on the Web. You get to see the social side of the search results and look directly into the participant behavior behind internet content creation. For example, this can create a visual display of what the Web is saying about your products and services and the role they play in marketplace conversations. It can let you know who are the major players in important conversations and how they are connected. You can see the gatekeepers, leaders, influencers, coordinators and innovators in each topic. You can better understand the evolving community.

Many Web 2.0 services such as Google and Amazon open up their data for others to add value. This becomes a fertile source for search combined with social network analysis. For example, you can see the relationship between the top sites on Google searches such as Cambridge Real Estate or to see the relationships between top players in the community. You can also look at the interactions of team members on a project workspace, the nature of collaboration on a wiki, who links to your blog and who links to them, the evolution of a social bookmarking term, or the patterns of communication in a community site such as Live Journal or MySpace. One of the cornerstones of most Web 2.0 applications is open architecture and this offers access to understanding the social patterns within participation.

Writable Intranet – Is this the Name for Intranet 2.0?

Indus Khaitan has provided a phase, Writable Intranet, for Intranet 2.0 a while back which may catch on. He offers a manifesto for sharing knowledge within the enterprise and frames sit as a movement not unlike the Cluetrain Mainifesto for marketing.

“Writable Intranet” is the corporate intranet of the future where employees collaborate using Wikis, Blogs and applications interoperate using RSS. The Writable Intranet does not have series of static pages where information is disseminated "top down". It is the place where employees collaborate, exchange thoughts, create plans, capture meeting notes, track projects, create documents (not word documents but documents which are web pages and have version control). The Writable Intranet marks the end of e-mail as the collaboration platform. The Writable Intranet means that enterprise knowledge is "free" and searchable by anybody. The "freedom" implies that knowledge is neither in e-mails and nor in documents but in easily accessible and searchable repositories.”

Many others have written about this including as number of posts on this blog. But I like the way he positions this transformation in how the enterprise might work. Andrew McAfee also offers some good positioning in Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration. But Indus may have won the contest for terminology. Perhaps he should lead with "people of the enterprise." It remains to be seen. enterprise 2.0 enterprise tagging

Tagging and the Folksonomy

At the next KM Forum in Waltham MA (Boston area) on Thursday, September 21, from 4:00 - 6:00 p.m. I will be leading a discussion on Tagging and the Folksonomy. This is a great group for that topic as there are a number of taxonomy experts present. You can resigter at the KM Forum site. enterprise tagging

Top 10 Management Fears About Enterprise Web 2.0 and Ten Answers

Jerry Bowles did a post on the Top 10 Management Fears of Enterprise Web 2.0. He divided then into technical and cultural barriers. Then Rod Boothby provided some useful answers.

You can go to their posts to see Jerry’s questions and Rod’s answers, Many of the technical questions have policy solutions that can be aided by the heightened audit trail that web 2.0 provides. When everything is open then those who abuse the system are more exposed. Emails, IM, phone, and personal conversation offer less efficient ways to discover the good and the bad. This openess is at the heart of a number of the concerns.

There was a training question. I think that the successful web 2.0 tools are the ones that are so simple in both concept and procedure that little, if any training is required. Charles Lamb provided a great quote in his intro to wikis.

“Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity. “ – Charlie Mingus (from B. Lamb, 2004)

I always felt that extensive software training reflects a poor design, poor UI, and lack of documentation. Then you have to turn to training. There was also legal concerns which are not new to web 2.0 tools. We had the same issues when we implemented knowledge management a number of years ago. Then we involved the legal department in drafting policies and made use of the more primitive audit capabilities of the day.

Rod provides a nice conclusion on the risk/reward of web 2.0 within the enterprise.

“Enterprise Web 2.0 technology will flatten the organization's management structure, highlight good ideas, create an environment that is more of a meritocracy, make a company more nimble and more customer focuses and most importantly increase the pace of innovation. In the face of these business benefits, the risks are minor.”

Every knowledge management strategy today is seriously lacking if it does not incorporate web 2.0 tools and services. enterprise 2.0

One Web Day

I learned about One Web Day at a Berkman Thursday Blog meeting. It is coming soon now. As the sites says, “The mission of OneWebDay is to create, maintain, advance, and promote a global day to celebrate online life: September 22, 2006.” The site goes on to say:

“OneWebDay is one day a year when we all - everyone around the physical globe - can celebrate the Web and what it means to us as individuals, organizations, and communities. As with Earth Day - an inspiration and model for OneWebDay - it’s up to the celebrants to decide how to celebrate. We encourage all celebrations! Collaboration, connection, creativity, freedom. By the end of the day, the Web should be just a little bit better than it was before, and we’ll be able to see our connection to it more clearly.”

This is a great cause to get involved with if you are an internet addict or even only a user. The internet has certainly changed my life and enabled a new way to stay in touch with friends and family as well as new business model for which I am grateful. There is a bit of irony here that I cannot resist pointing out. Thee US National Parks have seen a significant decrease in visitors in the last few years. They attribute this to tow factors, the rising price of gas and the rise of internet use keeping people inside at home. How wiil Earth Day and other green causes be affected by the “Inner Earth Day.”

Onset, MA – An Occasional Visitor’s Favorites

As I wrote last weekend, a few weeks ago we went to the 14th annual Onset Bay Blues Festival in one of our favorite towns, Onset, MA. It is located on the water near Cape Cod without having to go over the traffic filled bridges. At the same time it is much less crowded than most cape towns. We always stay at the Point Independence Inn located a beach point with water views on three sides. Every room has a expansive water views and the hosts are great.

In town, there is a great blues bar, the Onset Bay Blues Café that I have now been to several times. After a few visits, here is the story on where to eat. This is not a place for gourmet but just some good New England seacoast cooking. Those that try to rise above this are not successful so far from our experience so stick with the basics or have a picnic on the beach

Marc Anthony’s Pizza actually has a wide ranging menu and the best fried clams in town. It gets great reviews on Food Pundit. We had the clams and onions rings and they were as good as anyone’s but Woodman’s in Essex and Woodman’s invented the fired clam. This is the place to eat in Onset. The town listing says, “Every dish prepared by Marc Anthony's is completely home made and carefully cooked the slow old fashioned way. All orders are delivered hot to your office, home or function, ready to serve your guests.” They provide take out and delivery as you can see. It is located at 190 Onset Ave. 508-295-5956.

Pier View Restaurant offers breakfast only. We had a wonderful full breakfast there on a rainy October day last year. It is located at 201 Onset Ave, across form Marc Anthony’s 1-508-295-5968

Onset Bay Blues Café is known more for its music than its food but if you want to get a table early, the food is fine. The menu consists of “Kansas City BBQ. & Pub Fare.” have an Onset Bay Blues Café blog with one post. It is located at 2 West Central Avenue, Onset, Ma 02558, 508-291-2471

If you want a really great breakfast drive over to Adamsville, Rhode Island - about an hour away and go to the Barn. They had about seven variations on Eggs Benedict including one with lobster. I took the version with crab cakes. I now what to go back and try the others. It is located at 15 Main St, Adamsville, RI 02801 (401) 635-2985

Paris 2006 – A few Good Places

I am actually in Paris as you read this. I got some new restaurant suggestions from a rusted source. I first wrote about good place here in 2004, Paris Restaurants: A Local’s Favorite and then later the same year, When you go to Paris... from Frenchguys.com, Here are the new ones in the words of my source.

L’impasse
Located on Impasse Guermenee near the Bastille in the 4th arrondisement, this little restaurant is a family run, traditional French restaurant that is only moderately expensive. It is a short walk off Rue St. Antoine near the Bastille. It is around the corner from the Place des Voges, a wonderful stroll. 4, Impasse Guéménée, For reservations, call 01 42 72 08 45.:

Le Grizzli
This restaurant is more of a bistro near the Chatelet/Le Halle area. It is great for watching all the people who hang out in this area day and night. Located on 7, Rue St. Martin in the 4th arrondisement, call for reservations at: 0148 87 77 56.

Leon de Bruxelles
This is a chain restaurant that looks like an Olive Garden. It serves some of the best beer in Paris and features mussels served more ways than ever thought possible. It is cheap and is all you can eat. Yum! There is one branch on Rue Rambeteau near Le Halles and another at San Germain des Press near the Odeon.

Everybody's a CEO - Otter Group

Kathleen Gilroy and the Otter Group is introducing a new one day workshop, Everybody's a CEO, on ways to incorporate the new Web 2.0 tools into your worklife. As they says, "This one-day, interactive program will give you a solid foundation for a new, more satisfying, and more competitive means of working."

I have worked with Kathleen on a number of occasions and I am sure that this will be a wothwhile event. The first one is planned for October 18, 2006 from 8:30 am to 4:00 pm in the Boston area. It will cover how to use blogs, RSS, podcasts and learnign networks in your business to both have more fun and be more competitive. You can get more details at the Otter site.

Ford Buys Ads on 400 Blogs

Ford bought advertising on 400 blogs through the BlogAds network as Japlopnik reported. The amount spent is not available. Jalopnik reports that the ads, which promote a film in Ford's BoldMoves weekly documentary series, are running on such blogs as Gothamist, Treehugger and others.

This should be good news for the viability of blogs to support ads but the move was not without controversy with some bloggers. When Henry Copeland the owner of Blogads said this was an example of the Cluetrain Mainfesto, marketing as conversations. Jalopnik replied.

“This is all interesting...and yes, the Bold Moves videos are all about saying stuff other companies aren't saying -- but we kinda thought the Cluetrain Manifesto was all about having "real conversations" between businesses and consumers. We're not entirely sure it means buying your way onto the page the conversations are occurring.”

Jalopnik has a good point but that does not reduce the appreciation of blogs as good places for ads. They can dance around and support the real “cluetrain” conversations occurring within the blog itself. However, they didn’t approach me for an ad. I guess I don’t talk about cars enough. web 2.0 marketing

Community Spaces Bonaza Part Two

As I mentioned earlier this week, community web spaces seems to be the new frontier to get rich, here are a few more I got from the trend setting business magazine, Rolling Stone, August 24 issue.

First, there is mog.com, described as the most tunes-centric of the MySpace challengers, a cross between MySpace and music recommendation portals like Pandora.com and last.fm. Mog has members link to their music libraries to connect those with similar tastes.

Then there is Panjea.com which adds a financial incentive, allowing users to make money several ways. Musicians on the rise can sell their original music and videos online and set their own prices and keep 85 percent of the funds. This is good deal as most re-sellers charge more. You can earn point sin others ways like do a blog post and then spend your points on the videos or music of others. As Rollingstone said, ‘it’s one happy capitalist circle.”

They also mention Vox, which I recently learned about at the Berkman Thursday Blog meetings. Although RS did not say this, Vox is supposed to be an adult Live Journal (or My Space) as the makers of Live Journal are marketing it to teenagers. It allows "adults" to integrate media from sites like YouTube.com and Amazon.

Peter Gloor told me about Pandora.com which is mentioned above. It has some great community enabling functionality. As their site says, “Ever since we started the Music Genome Project, our friends would ask: Can you help me discover more music that I'll like? Those questions often evolved into great conversations. Each friend told us their favorite artists and songs, explored the music we suggested, gave us feedback, and we in turn made new suggestions. Everybody started joking that we were now their personal DJs. We created Pandora so that we can have that same kind of conversation with you.”

John Gotts may have paid $3 million (US) for wiki.com but the real money is in community spaces. Millions want to be there own DJ or whatever and see what others are doing and share it. Reality shows provide cheap amateur created content. These community spaces are doing something similar. They also may be a bigger bubble than dot.com bust one.

BTW I see that Rolling Stone also has a Rolling Stone blog.

Blogswap - 32 Weeks of Cross Posting

Here is an interesting community and blog idea. A number of Human Resource experts in the Talent area who have blogs signed up to contribute guest posts on 32 blogs, and the posts had to somehow link in with the receiving blog's subject matter as well as the contributor's. This is to go on for 32 weeks. Some of the posts are linked at the Blog Swap Blog.

Some of the bloggers who signed up for these are non-HR and non-Recruiting people like Tod Hilton who is a software developer at Microsoft, some are not even bloggers like Online Recruitment expert, John Sumser, There are CEOs like Jason Goldberg, of Joster.com, COOs like Colin Kingsb of HRMDirect an Applicant Tracking System, and ERE CEO David Manaster and Freelance consultants like Zoe and Gretchen of Jobgals, who started the idea, as well as an author David Perry.

Thanks to Gautam Ghosh, who is alos participating, for mentioning this ambitious experiment. As he relayed, it's not been an easy journey. Commitments have slipped. Getting to know a fellow bloggers POVs and their audience has been a challenge and over the last four weeks all of us have learned a lot about blogging as well as our perspectives. But is seems worthwhile for the participants so far as it continues past week seven and counting.

Traction Software – Enterprise Blogging and More

I have written a bit about Traction TeamPage before. Jordan Frank, Vice President of Marketing and Business Development, recently gave me a very informative demonstration that expanded my understanding of some of the things Traction can do. Traction combines some of the functionality of an enterprise portal with features of blogs and wikis to make a very useful enterprise platform. Here is part of what I learned.

Traction provides a platform that allows multiple blogs to be accessed through a portal like interface. The individual blogs are called projects. The interface is generally divided into three main columns, with other possibilities depending on your choice of “skin.”. The left column is primarily for navigation to specific blogs and their labels. The right side is primarily for tools. The wider central column is where the blog content appears, from one or many blogs depending on your view. Rather than simply showing a chronological list of all content, the central column can be segmented into configurable sections. Jordan’s examples included sections for status reports, recent articles (their name for blog posts), bug reports (if that is what you are using it for), recent to-dos, and an alphabetically ordered collection he authored. This allows you to partition your work space effectively. You create the labels in each project. You can make comments on any post, either as a whole or on a specific paragraph within the post. This is a cool feature to let you focus in on what you are discussing so dialogs can be more focused

There are many layers of access or permission, by post, by blog, etc. You can tag things and that tag can have an access function so only people who have rights to see things with that tag can access it. You can tag others posts and have you team see it, very useful for product development.

You can tag posts and comments with labels from their own blog. There is a social tagging capability too. So you can cross tag from one blog to a post in another blog. The blogs have an access function, so its possible that only some people will actually see the cross-tags on the blog.

You can also create PDFs or Word files based on any set of the blog content. There are many options here of what you show such as including metadata or not. You can even exclude selected paragraphs or comments as too sensitive, or for whatever reason, before you send it off. This makes a handy way of sharing blog content with clients and others. The PDFs can have active links to posts within the PDF and back to the server.

The calendar is integrated into search so you can search and navigate within a time frame or across the entire set of blogs. The calendar also takes you back in time in other ways so you only see the set of blogs and blog posts that were around at the time. This is one aspect of a very deep audit trail.

Within the enterprise you can see all the blog collections that you have access to. So there can be one for every client or topic, etc. Through what they call skins, you can customize the layout and functionality of the blogs. In summary, there is robust functionality here. I only talked about some of the things I saw. Traction combines some of the great features of blogs and wikis with the features that an enterprise portal would want to possess. enterprise 2.0

Want to get Rich? – Start a Community Space

Bebo has just passed MySpace on UK traffic so they turned down a 300 million offer. That is UK pound not US dollars. Michael Arrington writes in Tech Church, “Michael (of Bebo), or his VCs, still seems to think that £300 million is way too low and are holding out for more. When asked about a sale, he said “If I sell it, I’d have to start from scratch.” Translation: “Give me a billion dollars please.” If the dollar continues to decline he can get a billion dollars at the current price.

Michael adds, “The Financial Times is reporting that the company is in acquisition talks with Viacom, the owner of MTV and other cable stations. This is the third try for Viacom, which lost out when bidding for both Myspace and Facebook (with Facebook reportedly shunning an offer of at least $750 million)..”

They are many, many community sites in the new web. This seems to be the new gold rush. It is the new dot com boom. What to know what is happening in all these community sites? Look at iQuest. It can let you know who are the major players in the conversations and how they are connected. You can see the gatekeepers, leaders, influencers, coordinators and innovators in each topic. You can better understand the evolving community.

iQuest also looks at relationships over time and provides “movies” of these communication patterns as they evolve. This allows you to see how relationships within a community change and the impact of temporal events on these relationships.

Onset Bay Blues Festival – Some Great Acts

A few weeks ago we went to the 14th annual Onset Bay Blues Festival in one of our favorite towns, Onset, MA. We saw three great acts on Saturday afternoon at the town band shell over looking the bay. There were many others but I doubt they could top these three. This is an event to attend next year when they do the 15th one.

Lisa Marie and All Shook Up is a New England group on the rise. Lisa Marie was nominated in the Female Vocalist category for both the 2006 Worcester Music Awards and the Worcester Magazine 2006 Turtle Boy Music Awards, She sang very earthy blues and would make some great Janis Joplin covers. I could almost hear her doing Ball ‘n Chain but she stayed with more traditional blues. Here is her MySpace page. Look att eh schedule and go hear her.

Ricky King Russell followed Los amarie. We have heard him before at the Onset Bay Blues Café and bought his CD. This time he brought Kit Holliday to add to the vocals and they worked well together. Ricky has been around a long time. His site says, Ricky is a guitarist/vocalist/songwriter forty year musician with a list of credits and accomplishments too long to list here. Described as "volcanic" by the Boston Globe, Ricky always delivers from the heart…Harvard University has bestowed upon him an honarary "Doctorate of the Blues.” Never heard of this but it sounds good anyway. Ricky plays on the Cape a lot so look for him there. of the Blues".

Magic Slim & the Teardrops were the headliners and they lived up the task. The others were great but this was Chicago blues flown in for the event. I heard Slim in Chicago a few years ago and had one of his CDs. As the Blind Pig (his label) site says, “Slim's live performances have become legendary. Standing well over six feet, Slim cuts a commanding figure on stage, prowling the boards in his large cowboy hat, filling the room with his slash and burn guitar and booming vocals, commenting on the action throughout, slipping occasionally into a feral, Howlin' Wolf-like voice.” This is what we heard.

Painting Summer in New England

I went to a great exhibit at the Peabody Essex museum in Salem, MA. Titled, Painting Summer in New England, it “assembles an astonishing array of paintings, ranging from the 1850s to the present, including works by Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, Childe Hassam, Andrew Wyeth, Stuart Davis, George Bellows, Marguerite Zorach, Edward Hopper, Lois Dodd, and Alex Katz. While some works reflect the leisure activities of the summer, others touch on the counterpoints of city living, rural existence, and the impact on natural settings and resources.” I am going to take a landscape painting class this fall so I was especially interested in learning from what these artists did. The exhibit closes on Sept 4 so hurry if you have not seen it.

In addition to the more well know painters. I liked Arthur Wesley Dow, Margaret Jordan Patterson, and Ross Turner. In the regular exhibits there was also a watercolor sketchbook that Ross Turner did in Paris in 1913 that is brilliant. The catalog was sold out but I was told you can order it through Amazon which I will.

I was also motivated to look up more about the three artists above. I was amazed at what I was is on the web. I found extensive bios and many images of their art. I was able to download these images and create little book on their work so I could study what they did more carefully. Here is the web at its best. These images came from galleries that were trying to sell the paintings that are all likely outside my current art budget but their images came out quite nice on the color printer that came free with my Mac.

Aloft In Second Life: Starwood Hotels Builds New Hotel Concept Virtually

This seems fairly amazing to me but then I am not a seond life addict nor have I even looked at it. I use the computer to connect with others on real life issues and to gain information but not as recreation like many others. Now a major hotel chain is investing (it must costs something and what about the ad campaign?) in building a chain of hotels in virtual reality. See the post, Aloft In Second Life: Starwood Hotels Builds New Hotel Concept Virtually, for details. I guess I am old fashoin enough to want to taste my food, feel the breeze, and smell the flowers, etc. etc. to check into a virtual hotel. Fortunaely that real life is quite rich so I see no need to go virtually but then I am certainly not critical of those who do. Everyone has their own interests and I am sure many people do not share mine which continue to evolve. Has anyone tried this?