Portals and KM

What del.icio.us needs to do.

I went back to del.icio.us recently to give it another try. I used it briefly before to help prepare an article on Intranet 2.0 with Kathleen Gilroy. It was useful for this short term purpose. However, I saw that the long lists would quickly get out of control. So I looked at H2O Playlist with its ability to have multiple playlists and to group these playlsts of tags into subsections. However, the process of adding new items is much more tiem consuming that the few clicks with del.icio.us. So I went back to it.

There is a bundling feature that I was not aware of before. "Bundles are a way to arrange previously-used tags into groups. For example, if you have the tags "design", "painting", and "moma", you may want to group these together into a bundle called "art"."

This is good but I have 66 items under enterprise2.0 and I am sure there will be many more. I do not need to bundle this tag with another one. I need to break it down into subcategories. For example, I used the tag enterprise2.0 to group all my blog posts on the topic as I do not have enterprise2.0 as a category on my blog and it would be time consuming to add it backwards (here is a needed feature for Typepad). Now I have many other items on the topic that are not from my blog of course. So I wanted to group the items from my blog under a subcategory and that was what I had hoped bundles was for only to be disappointed. I have the same needs for tagged items from other specific sources that I tag more than once.

If del.icio.us allows you to break down growing lists of items under a tag into subcategories that will be a big improvement. Until then the list expansion factor will limit its ease of use. If anyone knows how to break down a list of items under a tag into subsections, I would greatly appreciate if they share it with us. I could easily have missed it.

On the plus side, it took me less than an hour to go back through my daily blogs posts for over a year to find the enterprise 2.0 ones and tag them to del.ico.us. Of course this ease of use is one reason for rapid list growth. I will continue to try it and I added a del.icio.us link on my blog on the left side. I laos started a web2.0marketing tag which I am sure will get very long soon.

Putting my blog posts into del.icio.us also allows me to see who else tagged these posts to determine the ones that others found useful enough to tag in del.icio.us. It was nice to see that most were tagged by at least one person. The top tagged ones in rank order were:

Making Wikis Work at Novell

Social Bookmarking in the Enterprise – IBM’s Internal Tagging Tool - Dogear

IBM’s Social Software Initiatives: Blogs, Wikis, Tagging, and More – Part Three- Internal Applications

Enterprise 2.0 Predictions for 2007 enterprise tagging

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Enterprise 2.0

A recent McKinsey report on a CIO survey said “Sixty-four percent of the respondents to the 2006 survey told us they plan to implement service-oriented architectures in the coming year.” There has been a lot of hype around software as service and it is nice to see some data about proposed adoption.

This has been a discussion topic on the Fast Forward blog with Joe McKenrdick writing, Will SOA Open to the Cloud in 2007? He refers to Phil Wainewright, who said, based on Dion’s (Hitchcliffe - 2007: The year enterprises open their SOAs to the Internet?) premise that Web 2.0 is the “global SOA”: “Once your software becomes a service in the cloud, it opens up the potential to link it up with other services that are out there. For many vendors and users this is still a barely dawning realization, but it’s of fundamental importance. In many ways, the Internet cloud is one great global SOA — still very rudimentary in many ways, but flexible enough to accommodate different levels of sophistication, and evolving fast. Leading-edge SaaS providers use the Internet not only as a delivery mechanism to deliver their services to customers but also as an aggregation platform to enhance and extend their own capabilities by linking up with third-party services.” There appears to be a big transformation occurring here with many of the concepts from the Web going inside the firewall better enabling Enterprise 2.0 and then coming out again.

So what is SOA? Here is the opening from a long wikipedis article on SOA. “Service-oriented architecture expresses a perspective of software architecture that defines the use of loosely coupled software services to support the requirements of the business processes and software users. Resources on a network in an SOA environment are made available as independent services that can be accessed without knowledge of their underlying platform implementation. A service-oriented architecture is not tied to a specific technology.” So it gives some flexibility over multiple platforms like web-based apps.

Why use SOA? Here is a quote from What is service-oriented architecture? An introduction to SOA by Raghu R. Kodali, JavaWorld.co. “SOA with its loosely coupled nature allows enterprises to plug in new services or upgrade existing services in a granular fashion to address the new business requirements, provides the option to make the services consumable across different channels, and exposes the existing enterprise and legacy applications as services, thereby safeguarding existing IT infrastructure investments.” This makes sense.

SOA is also tied to mashups because of the ability to tie stuff together. As the wikipedia article says, “The term "enterprise mashup" has been coined to describe Web applications that combine content from more than one source into an integrated experience, which share many of the characteristics of service-oriented business applications (SOBAs),” Not surprisingly there is also a web 2.0 link. “While there are no set standards for Web 2.0, it is characterized by building on the existing web server architecture and using services. Web 2.0 can therefore be regarded as displaying some SOA characteristics.” I have often heard the two in the same sentence and they are both part of the new flexibility in building applications.

Here is more from Joe McKenrdick, Connecting the Dots Between Web 2.0 and SOA. He concludes, “(Steve of IONA) Vinoski suggests employing wikis and blogs to help sell SOA to the rest of the organization. A wiki, or Website that enables collaborative authoring, and a Weblog can serve as “powerful Web-based socialization tools that can help you build the shared vision needed for SOA to take root,” he writes. Wikis and Weblogs can be used to help describe your ideas for SOA adoption, provide use cases from other companies, and help build an SOA constituency within your organization, Vinoski said.” Good points for enabling Enterprise 2.0 and more good uses for blogs and wikis. Enough for now but this is going to get much more pervasive. enterprise social media

More on Onomi: Social Bookmarking on a Corporate Intranet

Recently, I gave a presentation on tagging to the Taxonomy Community of Practice. I was joined by two speakers, including Jim Smallwood of Mitre. Jim is part of the Onomi team and provided a very useful description of Onomi and its development. I twrote about Onomi before but here is more detail. Mitre did a pilot for this social bookmarking system for six months. It was built for people working on real projects. The created a core group of individuals who set the foundation for creating tags. These core people will keep the system robust. A larger group uses the system but does not add to it. Use it to see what is new and locate experts.

There is already a lot of information sharing at Mitre including Sharepoint based discussion groups. Tagging was to supplement this existing sharing in many forms. Hoped to build more communities around common interests. At the same time a podcasting effort – Mitrecast was underway. The podcast people contacted them to share tags. Also an internal RSS aggregator linked to them. They want to leverage the folkonomy created with Onomi to update the corporate taxonomy. Mitre is still exploring these issues.

The Mitre team took an exiting open source application, Scuttle. It was chosen for ease of use, extensibility, and existing feature set. They went to core users to get what features to add. Moved it form Sequel to oracle and implemented single sign-on. Help to recognize people and use LDAP. They added ability to easily email bookmarks to people.. provide default email text to add context to tag. They added ability to browse bookmakrs by users, or by corporate affiliation. RSS was also added.

You can provide a title for each bookmark and 250 characters to describe it and add tags. You can see other resources with this tag are listed and number of users who have bookmarked it. You can search by tags and by the words in the description field. You can add additional tags to your search to narrow the results.

The average tagger has about 35 bookmarks and uses 3 to 4 tags for each item on average. They have promoted it in several ways. The posting of banner ads on the corporate intranet have led to immediate increased use. They also held meetings to promote the system. They posted use cases for the system to give others ideas and motivate them to use it. enterprise tagging enterprise social media

Going to Russia via Boston’s North Shore and Western Mass

Here is an article on getting Russian ethnic food in Western, Mass by my friend Don Lesser. The article, Chef's Best: Russian Roots: The latest addition to the mix of ethnic markets in Western Mass, starts with a description of a dinner we had together at the Mirage in Revere, MA (disclosure) on Boston's North Shore. It is part of series he is doing on ethnic markets in western Massachusetts for the Chef’s Best Column. As Don writes, “This is the way to eat.” When “after dinner, the lights dim, the music comes up and from behind us, two women roller-skate into the room. Seemingly 6 feet tall, dressed in silver bathing suits and wearing white angel's wings, they skate up onto a stage and begin juggling. Joined by a large shaven-headed man dressed as a circus strongman in a leopard-skin Tarzan suit, they toss bowling pins and hoops to each other.”

He continues with a description of places to get Russian ethnic food in Western Mass, including the Victory International Supermarket in West Springfield and the Family Produce Market in Westfield. There is a recipe for Ukrainian Borscht using the ingredients that you can pick up at these stores. Also there is a recipe for Meat and Sauerkraut Soup (Meat and Sauerkraut Soup). I hope to be fortunate to have one of these the next time we visit Don.

Don is now going to take over writing another column, No reservations, for the Daily Hampshire Gazette, It covers the restaurant scene in Northampton and surrounding area.

Internet Radio Access through Radioshowlinks.Com: Music (Free) and More

You may have noticed the scrolling list of jazz radio shows accessible through the internet on the upper left column of this blog. It is brought to you by Radioshowlinks, a service of audbilities.com. If you click through the scrolling list to their site you will find this message, “No need to choose which Jazz Music CDs to bring. These Internet radio shows feature Live Jazz, New Orleans, Modern Jazz, Jazz Fusion, Bebob, and others. Many at near CD quality. Select your favorite show, or try something new.” Sounds good and it does work. For example, as I wrote this post I started listening to Jazz in the Morning from Jazz88fm on KBEMfm, Twin Cities, MN. It is a listener-supported service of Minneapolis Public Schools. Then I easily switched to A Morning Cup of Jazz, streaming from: KCSM, San Mateo, CA.

It is amazing what is around for free now. They offer access to many other types of radio shows. There is an internet radio guide to multiple internet radio shows and stations such as News Radio, Business Radio, Music, Talk Radio, and more. The music categories include: Adult Contemporary Music, Alternative, Big Band, Bluegrass, Blues, Brazilian Music, Celtic Music, Christian Contemporary Music, Christian Rock, Christmas Music, Classic Rock, Classical, Classics, Country Music, Dance Music. So I switched to Internet Radio Station: KXOT-FM 91.7 from Tacoma Washington for some blues.

They cover a lot of public radio including our own WBUR - Boston Public Radio. I listen to it in my car and now I can listen from my computer. And I just did this. It will be a wonder that I get any work done. Now I can listen to npr shows on the internet like here and now and all things considered. I could do this before by going to separate sites but radioshowlinks gives me a single site to find more so I am more likely to do it. Radioshowlinks also added a new site – internet radio for mobile devices. There is also links to international internet radio shows in such countries as the Faroe Islands or heavy metal from France. All of this is free. The internet never stops amazing me.

New IBM and Microsoft moves in Enterprise 2.0

There has been a lot of buzz around IBM’s latest moves into collaboration software with Lotus Connections. Here is a post I did on the Fast Forward blog on the topic, Latest IBM and Microsoft Social Networking Moves. There is also a bit on what Microsoft is doing.

Here is more by Jerry Bowles, Lotus Connections and the Urge to Surge. He references Dion Hitchcliffe post, Enterprise mashups get ready for prime-time, where he discusses IBM's QED wiki. I first saw a forerunner in a November 2005 media briefing and was impressed with the possibilities. Here is a piece on it IBM eyes programming for the
masses. enterprise 2.0 enterprise social media

New Home for my KM Review Articles

I have been pleased to write on knowledge management, portals, and more recently, blogs for KM Review. They recently updated their web site and created a new home for my articles. They can be found at a special section on their site and downloaded at no cost. Normally, their publications are for paid subscriptions, certainly understandable, but authors can distribute their own work and this is appreciated. Here is a link to my co-authored article, with Kathleen Gilroy, on Intranet 2.0 that is not yet on the Melcrum site. They also have a Melcrum blog now, written by their employees. There was nice post, Seeing the opportunities in Second Life, that discusses why some at IBM see it as a next source of wealth on the web. There was also a reference to Melcrum FM?, discussing the option of a company radio station through podcasting. I am sure they will be starting for some large companies with concerns about their image.

Big Consulting Firms Turning to Social Media/Enterprise 2.0?

Here is a post, Watson Wyatt evangelises blogging and social media, from Gautum Ghash on how the consulting firm, Watson Wyatt is starting a social media practice. He refers to an article by Michael Rudnick, national intranet and portal leader, Watson Wyatt. Published in Strategic HR Review, Volume 6, Issue 2. Rudnick provides some success factors for employers to embrace social media. Basically he says that you need to embrace the new wave that he labels social media but it is what others call web 2.0 and/or enterprise 2.0 as he discusses user generated content as the core. He writes that you should not try to control it but rather make collaboration easy.

The article reports that “Watson Wyatt's research found that during the last three years there's been a 400% increase in social media behavior.” This does seem plausible but I wonder how they measure it? The article also reports, “According to research by Watson Wyatt, nearly 50% of the employee population will soon prefer – and expect – collaborative and interactive methods of communication with their employers.” In other words they will want Enterprise 2.0.

The article is for paid subscribers but Gautum provides a summery at his post, Watson Wyatt evangelises blogging and social media. He wonders how long before the other large consulting firms get into the act. Perhaps some have already but the post by Jim McGee on this blog, Can Enterprise 2.0 evolve from Enterprise1.0?, indicates that some are still looking to provide more traditional and expensive solutions.

Gautum adds that you do not have to put up with the large fees of big consulting if you are in India as his smaller firm can handle the work. If you are in North America you might consider us at Pod Consulting. I first posted this on the Fast Forward blog without this last paragraph. I normally do not cross-post but wanted to share this last message here where I can have the occasional ad. enterprise 2.0 enterprise social media

Guidelines for Writing Good Learning Blogs

Using blogs inside the enterprise can create a lot of learning opportunities as transactions become transparent, accessible, and easily subject to search unlike email, most project management tools, etc. Learning here is a buy product of simply using blogs and other Enterprise 2.0 tools. What about making these tools function better as learning vehicles by adopting some guidelines from instructional design? This is what Karl Kapp and Lisa Neal do in their eLearn Magazine piece, Blogging to Learn and Learning to Blog.

As Karl and Lisa write, “Applying the instructional-design principles of organization and information-chunking makes a blog easier to read and more efficient for employees, without burdening the author. Providing templates and guidelines for blog creators can increase the usefulness of blogs and make them lead to a richer learning experience for busy employees.”

They mention the usefulness of a Table of Contents. This works best for a document with a beginning and an end. Blogs are a continuous stream with an ever evolving “table of contents.” However, I like their idea. It would be better than the list of categories that blogs have now. It would be useful to take the category concept and transform it into a flexible table of contents that the author can change and reorder. The exercise of maintaining this table of contents will help the blog writer to consider the themes that are covered and how they evolve.

There are other useful ideas in their work. Part of writing a good blog is also simply good writing. Since we often write blog posts and comments quickly we get lazy in our writing I know that I do. Here is a classic set of rules from George Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language” that Brad Berens recently posted.

(1) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
(2) Never us a long word where a short one will do.
(3) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
(4) Never use the passive where you can use the active.
(5) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
(6) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous. business blogs

Conference Blogs on the Rise

I recently spoke at the Professional Convention Managers Association on how they can open new lines of communication with blogs, podcasts, and wikis. So prior to my session I looked into conference blogs and wikis a bit. Last week I wrote about wikis, Conference Wikis – A Great Application. Here are a few conferences with blogs. Looking at them can give you ideas.

Individuals have blogged about conferences for some time. It seems now that more conference events are sponsoring these blogs and trying to aggregate those blogging the conference. It is a way to start the event on a virtual basis prior to the start and then continue the conversations afterwards and provide an archive for what happen and what people thought about it.

NCCE 2006. This is a blog for the NCCE 2006 conference in Portland, OR
Northwest Council for Computer Education – podcasting contest

Sun Developer Network - 2006 Java One Conference – many bloggers are listed – one of the issues is capturing all the individuals who blog an event. Tags can help and an aggregated site like this one is very useful

National Conference for Media Reform – blogs covering the 2005 conference

National Association of the Deaf 2006 conference blogs

World Advertising Research Center – the WARC regularly blogs from key conferences and events around the world. You can find a list on their site

National School Boards Associations has an annual conference blog – “This is a frequently updated website highlighting ideas, resources, examples, and materials from sessions, workshops, activities, and events at NSBA's 66th Annual Conference taking place in Chicago, Illinois, April 8-11.”

Fast Forward Blog – how could I not include the group blog for the Fast Forward conference on Enterprise 2.0. I am one of the group bloggers. Here is my post announcing it with more details, FAST Forward Blog and Conference.

David Warlick has set up a new service to help conference blogging: Hitchhikr. People can register conferences, suggest tags and Hitchhikr finds all blog entries that use that tag. It does what some of the conference sites do, provide one stop conference reading and viewing as Flickr images are also available. As his site days, “we can't always make it to the conferences we need to attend to mix with the people we need to see -- face-to-face. This is why Hitchhikr was invented, to provide you with a virtual space where, thanks to blogs, podcasts, and RSS, we can connect, share, respond, and grow knowledge out beyond the place and time of the event.” I have not tried it but it seems a good idea. Conferences could also do this on their own but this might expedite it. business blogs

2006 European and Asian MAKE Winners

The Most Admired Knowledge Enterprise winners for Europe and Asia have been announced. You can also find the winners for India at the site. This award has expanded with the global economy. This award is for those organizations that create value through best leveraging their knowledge. I wonder when Enterprise 2.0 approaches will be included in the analysis. Thanks for Stan Garfield for pointing this out.

2006 European MAKE Winners listed in alphabetical order:
1. BMW (Germany) - Motor vehicles
2. BP (UK) - Oil & gas
3. British Broadcasting Corporation (UK) - Media
4. Novo Nordisk (Denmark) - Pharmaceuticals
5. Repsol YPF (Spain) - Oil & Gas
6. Schlumberger (France) - Oil & gas equipment and services
7. Siemens (Germany) - Electronics & electrical equipment
8. Telefonica (Spain) - Telecommunications
9. UBS (Switzerland) - Financial services
10. Unilever (Netherlands/UK) - Household and personal products

2006 Asian MAKE Winners listed in alphabetical order:
1. BHP Billiton (Australia) - Mining & mineral resources
2. Canon (Japan) - Computers & office equipment
3. Honda Motor (Japan) - Motor vehicles
4. Infosys Technologies (India) - Information technology services
5. LG Electronics (S. Korea) - Electronics and electrical equipment
6. Nissan Motor (Japan) - Motor vehicles
7. POSCO (S. Korea) - Metal fabrication
8. Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology (S. Korea) - Research
9. Samsung SDS (S. Korea) - Information technology services
10. Satyam Computer Services (India) - Information technology services

Keeping its Secrets and its Employees Time – Apple Goes Forward

There was an interesting article from CNN on the announcement of the new Apple iPhone, How Apple kept its iPhone secrets. They used a number of tricks with the outside world such as bogus mockups and kept their employees in check. Here is a quote form the article:

“Pillow talk was a challenge at the other end of the spectrum. Keeping secrets from loved ones is especially hard. Those stresses were amplified by the frantic race over the past half year to get the iPhone ready for launch. As Macworld approached, dinners were missed, kids were not tucked in properly, and family plans were disrupted, especially over the holidays. And for what? "Sorry, that's classified" is not considered a satisfactory answer in many households when Mom or Dad misses the school play or the big wedding anniversary dinner.”

I remember developing part of the dealer training for Lisa, pre-curser to the Mac (but not driect parent), as an outside provider. There was similar stress on the employees. The Apple project manager for the training said that she had only had two days off over the past several months and one of those was Thanksgiving. But she was dedicated to the effort, like current employees appear to be from the stories. I confess that I went home on weekends and spent time with my family. I found an interesting aside in the wikipedia after the Lisa was replaced by the Mac, Apple in 1989, "buried about 2,700 unsold Lisas at a landfill in Logan, Utah and got a tax write-off on the land they rented for it."

The CNN article concluded, “Jobs paused during the keynote to acknowledge the strain and sacrifices that the past months have brought not just for the employees who kept the secrets so well, but also for their families. "We couldn't have done it without you," he said, with obvious sincerity.” I guess it can be exciting to be part of a new venture. I felt some of that excitement in the early 80s with Apple but I am sure it was much more for the actual employees.

Get Your iPods from a Vending Machine

Moving beyond candy bars to iPods, vending machines are offering another way to get stuff without dealing with a real person when you do not have time to go online. The Atlanta Journal reports that 300 vending machines rolled out to sell iPods are raking in high revenues. One in Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport that makes $55,000 a month. The AJ says: “The vending machines are user-friendly, providing easy-to-access product information through a video touch screen. And, unlike traditional retailers, they never close... The Hartsfield machines have created a buzz among travelers for dispensing a variety of iPods, but offer about 30 different electronic items, from headphones to rechargers, as well.”

What will be the next stuff offered? Here is a vending machine preview via You Tube and the If team.

Wiki Week #4 - Wikis at Work – Mat Schwartz

Here is a useful, well-written introduction to wikis, Wikis at Work by Mat Schwartz. It is consistent with my experience. He writes that wikis are often brought in by IT but “Once a group of users adopts a wiki previously wiki-averse employees often join in.” He offers some good advice, while wikis are becoming hot, there must be a business purpose to their deployment for them to be useful. In addition, someone must guide a wiki’s implementation, then nurture it long-term for it to be successful. Just like KM or most other group oriented IT efforts. So if you need a good non-vendor intro to wikis here is one option. enterprise wikis

Wiki Week #3 - Making Wikis Work with Sharepont 2007

Here is a useful article by Mauro Carderelli on making wikis work with Sharepoint 2007. The new Sharepoint is Microsoft’s main play for Enterprise 2.0. It has templates for blogs and wikis, a social networking capability and RSS. Sharepoint has used site templates in the past to provide a framework for the layout of a particular page type (e.g., a team or meeting or social event) that presets placeholders for specific content. Sharepoint 2007 extends the use of site templates by introducing a new collection of template types, including wikis and blogs. It appears very easy to use from the descriptions on the article. enterprise wikis

Wiki Week #2 - Wiki Tips from the ALA

The ALA (American Library Association) has set up wikis to support their annual convention for the past two years. It was one of the conference wikis I wrote about yesterday. Not surprisingly they offer some good wiki editing tips to those who might want to use their Mediawiki effort. They also offer links to the Wikipedia Editing Fundamentals Page and the MediaWiki Handbook For Editors for more help on editing the wiki.

Meredith Wolfwater has led this effort and also offers her lessons learned. Here are the highlights that are useful to anyone doing a wiki. There is more detail in her post, ALA Wiki: What I learned and what I’m doing with it.

1. A wiki must have a specific purpose.
2. You can’t just offer a wiki to the public as a blank slate and expect participation
3. It’s good to add some content to the wiki before making it public
4. You need to make it very clear that people can add whatever they want to the wiki or they’ll ask you to do it instead of doing it themselves
5. Yes, spam is a problem, but a manageable one if you have enough loyal users
6. It is amazing to watch what a wiki can become (if you let the users be creative)

Like blogs, you also need some clear policy statements. Meredith offers sample guidelines for the Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki that she started after her ALA experience. She has appropriately made the development of these guidelines a wiki effort. enterprise wikis

Conference Wikis – A Great Application

The rest of this week is on wikis. Last week I spoke the Professional Convention Managers Association on how they can open new lines of communication with blogs, podcasts, and wikis. Here is a bit on wikis. Next week I will cover conference blogs. While blogs are great to record the events, sessions, and the writers perspective, essentially a journalistic function, wikis can provide a broader space to allow for more in an accessible format such listings of resources, related events, things to do in the location, travel logistics, lists of attendees. Multiple people can add to these postings so it becomes a shared work space around everything to do with the event, including people’s spectives on sessions.

Here are four sample conference wikis that can give you a sense of the possibilities.

1. The Official Wiki for the 2006 American Library Association
(ALA) Annual Conference in New Orleans! - June 22-28, 2006 – as you can imagine given the expertise of the attendees this is a rich example.

2. PC Forum Eventspace - Socialtext's Ross Mayfield has put together an Eventspace wiki that is “chock full of information for this week's PC Forum. This seems like a great idea for anyone organizing an event.” Here are some of the categories: Announcements, Conversations (including Go ahead and start one on the 2005 Blog., IRC , Flickr Photo Stream, Technorati Cosmos of PC Forum, Ride Board). Other categories: Shared Notes, Sessions, People, Companies

3. 2006 O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) wiki – sample categores AttendeeList, Who is BloggingOSCON?, OScal a tool for discovering what's happening at oscon OScalMobile, Foscon Podcasts, WhereToFindSoda, EatDrinkManWoman, GettingAround, IRC and MySpace, RoomSharing, ThingsToDoAndSee, Weather forecast, SessionsOnGoogleCalendar, JobBoard. Note: the link to the wiki no longer works and I tested the one in Google and it no longer works

4. ASIST 2006 Annual Meeting Wiki (the American Society for Information Science and Technology) Since the conference is over, this wiki is now a read-only archive. Categories include (with some sub-categories in parenthesis) : Conference Program, Social Events, At the Conference (ASIST 2006 Meeting Blog | ASIST 2006 pictures on Flickr | Technorati Tags: asist2006), Austin Texas (Attractions | Restaurants | Hotels | Travel | Wireless Access | UT-Austin Wiki), Governance

As you can see there is a rich set of possibilities here. Meredith Farka wrote a very useful blog post, ALA Wiki: What I learned and what I’m doing with it, after the 2005 ALA conference - see above. Meredith also started, Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki, "to be a one-stop-shop for great ideas and information for all types of librarians." which deserves a separate review.

The KM World conference also had a conference wiki in 2005 but I could not find the 2006 one. enterprise wikis

Some New FAST Forward Bloggers

A number of people have joined the Fast Forward Enterprise 2.0 blog. “The blog's focus, like the conference's: Enterprise 2.0 and how today's companies and individuals are harnessing technology to collaborate, innovate, manage knowledge and much more.” I wrote about the original group here, FAST Forward Blog and Conference. These include the following: Dana Graber, James Robertson, and Zia Zaman. There are some great posts here. enterprise 2.0 business blogs enterprise social media

Placeblogger – Citizen Journalism from Lisa Williams

Lisa Williams has introduced Placeblogger, a project in conjunction with the Center for Citizen Media and PressThink. Placeblogger is a directory, blog, and more about how people are becoming their own local media, covering their towns and helping to spark conversations about things that matter. Lisa says, "Placeblogs - sites that focus on geographical communities - are the living laboratory of citizen journalism: they say interesting things about how nonjournalists approach covering a fire, or a town council. Looking at them gets us a lot closer to many debated questions about citizen journalism."

Lisa Williams is a citizen journalist living in Watertown, MA. She founded and maintains the Watertown-focused placeblog H2otown.info. She began working on the Placeblogger project this past summer, when skeptics of the placeblogging phenomenon insisted that hyperlocal websites like H2otown would never be popular. Lisa made a bet with Jay Rosen of PressThink that she could locate 1,000 placeblogs in the United States - and in just a few months, Lisa has found and indexed over 700 placeblogs. She is a member of the Berkman Thursday blog group and her blog, Learning the Lessons of Nixon, is a case in our Business Blogs: A Practical Guide.

Here is a nice piece in the Boston Globe, Go places with Placeblogger. Also, here is a Placeblogger piece on Press Think.

Cowboy.com – Music Site and Much More

I got a request to summit my western music and poetry to Cowboy.com. This would be great if I produced any western music or poetry. But I went to take a look anyway and found another interesting community site. I wrote a bog post on the cowboy dance bars of Jackson Wyoming after a visit there. Below is one of the bars we visited. It has produced a number of interesting links and this is likely one more of them.

There are many categories. The music one includes, radio stations, bands, music, singers, and song writers. But this is just one of many categories from agriculture to travel. You can post listings for free on the site.

I also heard from WesternEvents.com where "Your free western event listing and photo will reach thousands WesternEvents.com visitors every day." Western Artists also send me a link to their site.perhpas if I make some western art I will send it there. I am not endorsing any of these but it was fun to see what you get for very specific blog posts.

Back to New Orleans, Gently by the NYT Frugal Traveler

A few weeks ago the New York Times had a nice article, Back to New Orleans, Gently, on New Orleans tourism and how much fun it can be, while at the same time you are helping the local economy try to recover form Katrina. As the article noted, “Since Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005, wreaking havoc across Louisiana and Mississippi, fewer than half the 485,000 residents of New Orleans Parish had returned to pick up the pieces of their shattered lives, according to the city’s Convention and Visitors Bureau.”

The article covers some of the many things you can do there, places to eat, and music you can here. It describes the city as empty in some places. This was different than my experience when I went for the French Quarter Festival last April. While it was not crowded, it was also not empty, perhaps the event drew more people in. Perhaps the writer wanted a more dramatic angle to his story. Here is what I said after that trip, New Orleans Update Part One: the Paradox of Two Cities. I urge everyone to go to New Orleans. You will have a great time, find it full of life but not crowded, and you will help the city.

Microsoft Hands out Ferrari’s to bloggers and then wants them back

From the people who brought us the Walmart blogging mess, Edelman has ended the year with the great Microsoft laptop give away for some key bloggers and then, another opps, a reverse, asking for them back. There has been much discussion of the issue as you might imagine. Here is a link to some of the discussion on the Microsoft- Ferrari issue. Thanks to the IF team for pointing this out.

Microsoft sent 'Ferrari laptops' to promote Windows Vista and AMD's Turion. They asked for them back after the bloggers (surprise?) disclosed what happen in the normal blog spirit of disclosure. I pass this on as another lesson in web 2.0 blogging.

Cutting the "wireless" Cord to Blackberry

Here is a great story on what happens when asynchronous tools become real time. Paul Levy is the CEO of large Boston hospital and he writes the blog, Running a Hospital. Jessica Lipnack pointed me to his post, Blackberry Cold Turkey. Here he describes his liberation for his Blackberry. I agree so much with what he says and wrote about it at theFast Forward blog in some detail but I wanted to repeat his quote here. A good New Years resolution.

Paul writes about the bad effects of having constant access to your email when you are away form your computer, “manners disappear. We sit in meetings and, at best, try to look at our handheld screen without appearing to be distracted from the conversation. You have seen the maneuvers -- a casual glance towards the crotch where fingers are quickly at work -- a sudden excuse to go to the restroom -- a coughing fit so the person can turn away from the table and check the Blackberry. At worst, we just put the device on the conference table in front of our face and divest from the conference. Worse still, relationships disappear. A couple sits side by side at an airport, each reading and writing email on their two machines. A child impatiently waits to talk to a parent while the driver hurriedly answers an email while stopped at a red light.”

Blogging the Auto Show – The New York Times

If there was any doubt about blogs becoming mainstream, here is the group blog for the North American International Auto Show in Detroit, January 7-9. Ezra Dyer and a team of a dozen New York Times contributors will blog about the event. And, as they write, “remember to join the conversation — you can comment on the cars, offer your own reviews, and post questions in our reader comment area.” They even have a tag cloud for popular tags.

When I first stared this blog in 2004, the story would been about a group of independent bloggers covering the show as an alternative to mainstream media. I am at the Professional Convention Management Association today in Toronto talking about this topic and will post more on it next week. business blogs

Pod Consulting – Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 Consulting

I continue to be encouraged by the opportunities that Web 2.0 and its organizational counterpart, Enterprise 2.0, offer large and small organizations. To better serve this emerging market, I recently, formed a partnership with Pod Consulting, a local Cambridge-based firm, to provide Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 consulting services. If you have any questions about our offerings, please contact me at iveswilliam@comcast.net.

My partners at Pod combine deep technical skills, as well as extensive business consulting and management experience. I feel this combination of skills can best address the new opportunities in the Web on both sides of the firewall. Successful applications will need to be closely aligned with business processes and have a solid technical foundation. Some of our initial work is in Web 2.0 marketing. I am continuing my other business partnerships with Toronto-based Helix Commerce and iQuest. Here are the backgrounds on my two principal Pod partners, Nick Caramello and Don Oppenheimer.

Nick Caramello is principal and co-founder of Pod. He has extensive experience in defining, planning, building, and managing custom software applications for a variety of clients, from startups to the Fortune 500. Nick has worked with many technical platforms. Recently, he has been helping several pre-angel startups achieve solid technical and operational foundations. Nick has also built a number of Web-based applications including campustap.com, a Web site for the Harvard community that includes blogs.

Prior to founding Pod, Nick worked at Sapient Corporation as a senior technical architect. He has also served as Director of Architecture for Eze Castle Software with overall responsibility for development of a real-time, multi-tier architecture to support Eze Castle's trade order management platform. In addition, Nick served as manager of IT infrastructure, hardware purchasing, and office management for the North American operations of the UK-based technology consulting firm Logica, Inc.

Don Oppenheimer has over 25 years of general management, information technology and organizational strategy experience both as a consultant and as a Chief Information Officer. Recently, he has specialized in providing assistance in the creation, development and implementation of knowledge management programs with a strong background in Sharepoint and other technical platforms and is now working in the Web 2.0 space. As a Partner at Mercer Management Consulting, Don specialized in helping leading global Fortune 1000 companies design, manage and use information technology. He also helped numerous clients redesign their business processes and organizational structures.

In addition to consulting, Don served for ten years as the Chief Information Officer at two leading professional service firms and has an M.B.A. from the Kellogg Graduate School of Business at Northwestern University. enterprise 2.0 business blogs enterprise social media

Looking back at 2006

I did a post on predictions for 2007. Here is a nice summary of what happen in 2006 in the Web world for business. It is a collection of thoughts from a diverse selection of marketing professionals that I received from Tomoaki Sawada. Seven themes are presented: Power Consumer, Connection, 2.0, Business + Design, Video (or GooTube), Creativity, and People. Different marketing professionals provide pithy quotes on each. SlideShare is a nice Web app for hsaring such presentations, the You Tube of Powerpoint. .

Paris from CNN Marketing

You write about stuff on your blog and the marketing people find you. I have heard from Western music sites and now CNN on Paris after I wrote on a few trips and as they said in their email, “Stephane Pompougnac in Paris, the latest addition to CNN.com's highly rated 'The Scene' series has just been released! As a well-written blog on the topic I thought you should be amongst the first to know. “ They gave me some materials to use on this blog. There was also a link to a Paris site maintained by CNN that actually had some good information that prompted me to record this event even though Stephane was a bit too hip for me. I don’t often respond to the PR requests that come into my blog, especially the software vendors, but occasionally there is something of interest. See what your blog can bring you.

Some Classic Soul Masters Live in their Prime

Do you want to treat yourself after the holidays? The Boston Globe had a useful article on classic live performances of the soul masters. I was inspired to go to Amazon and got a few more, including a stray into the blues with Muddy Waters. Here is my shopping list. They all turned out to be good.

Ray Charles Live - brings together two concert LPs recorded at 1958's Newport Jazz Festival and a 1959 Atlanta stadium show.

Ray Charles - O Genio - Live in Brazil 1963 – this one is a DVD so you get the video of Ray 32 years old and in his absolute prime in Sao Paulo, Brazil doing many of his standards with a big band including Fathead Newman and Margie Hendrix.

James Brown - Live at the Apollo – need I say more – pre- funk that leads off with Try Me – one of the greatest soul ballads

One Night Stand: Sam Cooke Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963 – the sweetest sound in soul at his prime

Aretha Franklin Live at Fillmore West - rather than focusing on their own hits, Aretha performs songs that were popular at the time, and almost regardless of the quality of the original, turn them into classics. She is joined by Ray Charles for one, Spirit in the Dark, and makes Eleanor Rigby and Bridge over trouble waters sound better than the originals.

Muddy Waters - The Anthology: 1947-1972 - The Anthology covers Muddy Waters' most important period: his first years at Chess through the late 1960s. All his best-known songs are featured in their definitive versions.

Using Blogs, Wikis, and Podcasts for Communication and Marketing

On January 10 I will be speaking on how to “Open New Lines of Communication With Your Web Site” at the Professional Convention Management Association (PCMA) in Toronto. The event runs for January 7 to 10 at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. I will explore how blogs, wikis, and podcasts can be used as an effective communication and marketing tool and put this in the context of web 2.0. business blogs

Pitching Bloggers by PR

I am getting pitched by PR people more and more. Many are software vendors who want me to try their tools. Because of the diversity of this blogs content on the weekends, I also get stuff like the three from Cowboy.com. Western Artists.com and Western Events.com from one post, Cowboy Dance Bars in Jackson, Wyoming. If I actually had more than a passing interest in the topic these would be welcomed. I also receive pitches for services, including one from a cartoonist recently, Dan Rosandich. His stuff looks good but it is not in my budget.

Here is a nice set of rules from Business Blog Consuting for PR people who want to approach bloggers, Thanks to the IF team for pointing it out. The post, A case study in pitching bloggers, offers guidelines in the context of a story. The main guidelines were as follows. There is a lot more in the post so I encourage you to go there. I hope PR people are reading this as few of those who contact me seem to follow them. Does anyone want to share their expeiences as bloggers with PR people?

Do your research first
Don’t e-mail out of the blue with a pitch
Don’t call on the phone right away to push your pitch
Do tell the blogger why they were picked.
Don’t just say “I think this would be interesting for your blog” , unless you’ve already established a relationship with the blogger
Don’t be offended if they pass
Do thank them if they post
Do track mention of the pitch topic, you might be getting slammed or miss a great post web 2.0 marketing business blogs

Making Enterprise 2.0 Knowledge Markets

Here is a useful article from McKinsey on changes for the 21st century organization. It came out a year ago but is even more relevant now. The writers argue that today’s hierarchical organizations are dysfunctional for the knowledge economy. Now they are not the first to say this, of course, but they give some useful suggestions including four main changes. I especially liked this one; “Developing knowledge marketplaces, talent marketplaces, and formal networks to stimulate the creation and exchange of intangibles.”

This required change fits right into Enterprise 2.0 for this should be one the main reasons for bringing Web 2.0 tools and user-generated content inside the firewall. They add on this required change, “Real value comes less from managing knowledge and more—a lot more—from creating and exchanging it… Exchanging knowledge on a company-wide basis in an effective way is much less a technological problem than an organizational one.” While this last statement is very true, Web 2.0 technologies will make it much easier.

They go on, and this is where it gets interesting, “What's the best way of encouraging strangers to exchange valuable things? The well-tested solution, of course, is markets, which the economy uses for just this purpose. The trick is to take the market inside the company.” To address this issue they offer the following, “Among other things, working markets need objects of value for trading, to say nothing of prices, exchange mechanisms, and competition among suppliers. In addition, standards, protocols, regulations, and market facilitators often help markets to work better.”

I think this approach will be a very useful to get Enterprise 2.0 working inside the organization. In many ways, this is how Web 2.0 works in the broader internet with user generated content that is vetted through the wisdom of crowds. Enterprise 2.0 initiatives should look at themselves as knowledge markets and look at how successful markets operate to get clues to guide implementation. enterprise 2.0 enterprise social media

Enterprise 2.0 Predictions for 2007

Now is the time to make predictions for 2007. Jerry Bowles did my work for me with a nice set of forecasts in his Fast Forward Blog, post, Five Predictions for Enterprise 2.0 in 2007. I agree with all of them. Here are Jerry’s headlines with a few comments. Got to Jerry’s posts to see his explanations of the headlines.

Social networking will go vertical. What he means here is that the rage for communities led by MySpace will expand to niche areas. This is already happening and I would agree that it will get bigger in 2007. Here are a few things I wrote about the trend in 2006, The MDjunction Story – A Healthcare Community Site, Rise of Rating Sites, Building a Community to Support a Brand.

Multi-purpose collaboration platforms that deliver applications for blogging, wiki creation, and social networking within a single framework. This makes sense alothoug many people will be already invested in their blogging an dwikis tools so the added functionality will have to be sufficient to overcome the added work and to switch.

The Empire will strike back. He means that IBM and Microsoft will get into the act. They already have. The new Sharepoint is going much closer to web 2.0 functions. IBM is getting into Web 2.0 in a big way. Here a series of posts I did on a press conference they held a while back on the topic, IBM’s Social Software Initiatives: Blogs, Wikis, Tagging, and More – Part Three- Internal Applications. They continue to expand these efforts. Here is a longer piece on IBM and Enterprise 2.0 that I did for the Fast Forward blog.

The Anti-Empire will emerge. Here he refers to ““consumerizing” the experience of endless toggling between desktop and web apps.” And refers to Serendipity Technologies. There has been an anti-IBM as long as there has been an IBM. In the 70 and 80s it was called the Bunch and included such companies as Burroughs, NCR, Honeywell. It will be interesting to see how the latest David and Goliath wars pan out.

User-generated applications will become the next hot thing. If Web 1.0 was “read only” and Web 2.0 is “read/write,” the next logical growth phase will be “read/write/execute.” He refers to Teglo here. I think that mash-ups or composition applications will be big and assume that jerry is referring to this or an expansion on it. enterprise 2.0 enterprise social media

Semantic Web – Is this Web 3.0?

Happy New Years. Hope you had fun last night. I was recently asked at one of my web 2.0 sessions about the relationship between the semantic web and web 2.0. It was a good question. I became aware of the semantic web concept long before web 2.0 but had not heard as much about it recently. An article in the New York Times attempted to address this issue, Entrepreneurs See a Web Guided by Common Sense, a few weeks ago. They referred to web 2.0 as primarily characterized by mashups or combinations of applications, a limited view. They then saw the semantic web as web 3.0, a movement beyond web 2.0. In the words of the times, “In its current state, the Web is often described as being in the Lego phase, with all of its different parts capable of connecting to one another. Those who envision the next phase, Web 3.0, see it as an era when machines will start to do seemingly intelligent things.”

It seems that they defining web 2.0 based on only one dimension of it in order to place it at a more primitive level to the semantic web. Instead it seems to me that these are parallel developments.
I went to the wikipedia to see what they said about the semantic web and found the following. “The Semantic Web is a project to create a universal medium for information exchange by putting documents with computer-processable meaning (semantics) on the World Wide Web… web pages are designed to be read by people, not machines. The semantic web is a vision of web pages that are understandable by computers, so that they can search websites and perform actions in a standardized way. A computer could, for example, automatically find the nearest manicurist or book an appointment that fits a person's schedule.”

The concept sees clearer, but as many have said, the execution is quite complex, While I think the web 2.0 term is useful, in part, because there is not a better term to capture all its components, except perhaps to the participation web (but not the mashup or composite web. But the semantic web already has a good name so the web 3.0 is not so useful and can be misleading. What do you think?