Tuesday 8 June 2004

It is a wiki world after all – well nearly

Much of our work recently has been on developing blogging tools for use in the corporate environment; to date we have had very little interest in Wiki’s.

But that would appear to be changing.

We recently were pitching for some new business to a new client and based on prior discussions thought that a number of solutions to their communication problems could be solved by a creative application of blogging software. As part of our proposal we also demonstrated a wiki and how that might be valuable. We concluded by showing them what RSS is and how once again that could ease some of their problems.

And do you know which element of all this grabbed their attention the most?

Wiki’s.

Which coincides with the volume of postings on wiki’s over the last few weeks in and around the blogosphere. There is definitely movement afoot e.g.

Seth Godin

Business Week

Amy at Contentious

And finally A Penny For has recently created a wiki to capture business blogs

Now I know there are many more references, but hey the list would be just too long.

Clearly the Wiki is in its nascent and having started myself to use them more and more I can see why:

- They are immediate; all readers see the latest communication
- It is so easy to do; particularly with the increasing adoption of WYSIWYG editors thereby removing the need to use html code for text formatting

- Any errors are easily resolved; as a record of all changes are kept it is so easy to roll back to the previous correct version

- All contributors are visible; which makes it so much easier to see if everyone is pulling their weight on a project

- Email volume plummets; at last a viable tool to remove the unnecessary deluge of cc. emails and large attachments – even better when you set up RSS feeds in the wiki!

If you haven’t used a wiki because it might look a bit scary – real time editing on a web page can be a bit daunting, I know that’s how I felt at first – ease yourself in have a play over at Wikipedia there is bound to be something there that you can contribute to!

And if you want to start using a wiki in the corporate environment let us know and we would be delighted to help.

Posted by Wayne at 11:59 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Category => Wiki
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Saturday 5 June 2004

To structure or not to structure?

The summary of the Blogwalk discussion on the Knowledge Board provides a rather definitive statement of how communities of practice have certain advantages over weblogs as a knowledge management tool:

Communities are better social structures for problem-solving, knowledge stewarding and innovation

Part of the justification for this is as follows:

A weblog is usually very poor in content structure… In order to be reuseable, a body of knowledge geared towards action typically has more structure: description, keywords, type of information, type of content, type of data, type of document, summary, domain of knowledge, subdomain, attributes, etc.

I’m somewhat sceptical about this. Much of my involvement with our projects is in technical areas - in fact sometimes, it seems that all I do is solve technical glitches that prevent our solutions from working. One of the main tools for this is the collective knowledge of people who have been there, done that with the particular problem I’m facing - and increasingly, their knowledge is expressed in the form of a blog entry. “I’ve been wrestling with problem x, and here’s what I did to resolve it’ is a typical style of entry that will be thrown up when you Google a ‘how do I fix this kind of problem’-type question.

And occasionally, that’s something I contribute back to the world at large, relating a tale of how I tamed the recalcitrant beast of PHP - or whatever - through breathtaking feats of daring-do. (Or more prosaically, fixing typos in the code :-)

But if I had to structure that knowledge, by codifying it and entering into some kind of knowledge base, it’s probably something that I wouldn’t bother with. Firstly, publicly-accessible formal knowledge bases of this kind are few and far between in the types of areas I find myself working in; and secondly because the knowledge is dispersed around a community of involved individuals, it’s unlikely that there would be any grand coming-together to agree such a codification structure in the first place. In that respect, dealing with open source developers is somewhat akin to herding cats.

So perhaps the issue here is not about the codification and classification of the knowledge in the first place, and more about the ease of search and retrieval afterwards. One of the frustrations I encounter daily is knowing how to phrase searches so that they will bring back the hits that I’m after - there are broad similarities in the way that problems are referred to and explained, but ultimately every description is personal. Formal codification would solve this problem, but it would be at the cost of much of the knowledge not being expressed in the first place - so perhaps here is a situation where it’s more a question of quantity, than quality?

Posted by Tim at 11:26 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Category => Blogs , Clutter Management
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Can blogging replace communities of practice?

There’s an interesting article at Knowledge Board focussing on the use of blogs within communities of practice - and in particular, how they compare with other “online community tools” like forums and mailing lists.

“the reader has no obligation to read, comment, trackback, blogroll, or subscribe to the RSS feeds. “Online communities” on the other hand often include some form of social obligation on behalf of its members and typically push entries in a central location were everybody can (and often must) read them. Thus, they are much more invasive and time-consuming.”

For me, this is one of the key advantages of blogs (and particularly of webfeeds). I maintain control of my interactions with the community - while I’m kept aware of what’s going on through the flow of webfeeds, I can respond in my own time and asynchronously. Forums and bulletin boards, on the other hand, demand that I make a point of visiting, even if there’s nothing updated to view. So you could argue that one of the major advantages of webfeeds is avoiding the cognitive dissonance that occurs when you visit a forum only to find there’s nothing of interest there.

A network of weblogs is open and self-organizing. New ideas and information can circulate freely across the planet through referrals and trackbacks.

An interesting observation - although there was nothing stopping me linking to, or quoting from, forums or mailing lists. the advantage for an individual as a content creator is that you can be aware of how people are reacting to, and linking with, your postings. It’s a form of feedback loop - if I utter something controversial, the pings and the trackbacks will keep me in touch with the reactions of others.

There’s a downside to this of course, which the more contemplative bloggers refer to as the “echo chamber” - from an outside perspective the ‘blogosphere’ (a term I loathe, personally, but it’s a useful shorthand for ‘the blogging community’ which doesn’t sound much better) often seems like a inbred clique of individuals who’s only obsession is commenting on what A said about B. Which is exactly what this post is, of course, but you get my drift…

Posted by Tim at 11:09 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Category => Blogs
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Friday 4 June 2004

Open versus closed

For all the talk about the merits (or otherwise) of open-source software, sometimes it needs a specific event to make the benefits obvious. Which is exactly what has happened this morning.

I’ve had two things on the go today - an installation of the Wordpress blogging engine; and tweaking a graph within an Excel spreadsheet. Both hit problems around the same time - Wordpress was throwing up errors when I tried to load a particular page, and Excel crashed when I tried to change the formatting of one of the graph axes. My default response in such situations is to Google the symptoms and see if anyone else has come up against the same problems - because it’s very rare that I’m ever the first person to come across a bug. Usually there’s a workaround or a fix within the first couple of pages of results, so normal service can quickly be resumed.

That was the case today - both problems were well-documented in various places; Wordpress in the support forums and Excel in the Microsoft Knowledge Base. But this is where the two problems diverged. While there wasn’t a direct solution to the Wordpress issue, there was at least a description of the problem - whereas the Excel bug was listed with a “we know it’s a problem and we’re working on a solution” notice.

Continue reading "Open versus closed"

Posted by Tim at 16:50 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Category => Technical
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Everything a non-tech user needs to know about RSS 2.0

By Dave Winer

RSS:

This is the inaugural post for a new website devoted to the community of people who create and use RSS. It’s just a beginning.

Worth watching for some creative uses of RSS I am sure.

Posted by Wayne at 11:55 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Category => RSS
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Thursday 3 June 2004

Hosting dilemmas

One of the factors to consider when setting up a blog - or any kind of web presence, for that matter - is how and where your site is going to be hosted. There are no shortage of web hosts out there, but the features and services on offer - not to mention the level of service - are distinctly variable, so finding the right solution can be a bit of a minefield.

Most of us start out with shared hosting - you simply rent some space on a webserver that is shared with other people. The advantage of this is firstly that it’s the cheapest and simplest way of getting going, as someone else is taking care of all the fiddly bits of looking after the feeding and watering of the boxes that your site sits on.

Continue reading "Hosting dilemmas"

Posted by Tim at 19:22 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Category => Project
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Tuesday 25 May 2004

Isn't technology great...when it works

You may have noticed that the volume of postings has reduced recently, this is due to some pretty heavy project workload diverting our attention.

However, this sudden peak in our work schedule has given us the opportunity to test some of the software and hardware that we have been trying to find an opportunity for.

Take today for instance, Tim was at one of end of the UK and I was at the other. We desperately needed to go on-line and jointly complete a piece of work.

With the aide of a wireless pda, skype and a wiki we got the job done - what was more impressive we even managed to do this on dial-up…whoaaa!

Now if we could just convince a few more potential customers…

Posted by Wayne at 15:05 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Category => Technical
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Monday 24 May 2004

Create RSS feeds from a search term

Just found a new search site that allows you to create your own RSS feeds from a search query.

FindForward

Simply enter a keyword and select “Get RSS” from the drop down list. FindFoward then returns the RSS feed URL that you can utilise in your RSS news reader / aggregator.

And it would appear to work like a dream.

Posted by Wayne at 13:57 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Category => RSS
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Friday 21 May 2004

Bill Gates says so...so it must be true

I have just received an email from John Robb of the Yahoo Klogs group which really grabbed my attention.

He quotes Bill Gates (although he doesn’t state where he is quoting Bill Gates from?)providing an easy to understand explanation of the power of weblogs and RSS (notification) that may be useful as a way to explain it to your CEO…

Yahoo! Groups : klogs Messages : Message 449 of 449

Continue reading "Bill Gates says so...so it must be true"

Posted by Wayne at 10:33 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0) | Category => Blogs
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Thursday 20 May 2004

If you are looking for integration

The look no further than a new browser from Opera.

They have combined email, browsing, and rss feeds into one browser application. Having used it for a couple of days I have to say it works pretty well.

If they could make life easier by being able to import an opml file I would have been happier and a plug-in for Movable Type would be nice too…please.

But hey life is full of compromises, it still makes for a neat package if you want everything in one place.

Opera Internet Browser

Posted by Wayne at 10:20 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Category => Clutter Management
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RSS feeds into your Outlook Calendar

How neat is this!

RSS to Outlook - Lockergnome’s RSS & Atom Tips

Posted by Wayne at 10:12 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Category => RSS
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Wednesday 19 May 2004

RSS & CRM...scary

Something so simple could be so powerful…if used in a focused and targeted manner.

This article by Amy at Contentious highlights how a small CRM vendor is integrating RSS into the customer communication loop.

Custom Webfeeds: Content to Support Customer Relationships: Contentious Weblog

But having spent squillions on a crm system how many companies have anything left in the bank for even more development work!

Posted by Wayne at 14:19 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0) | Category => RSS
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Isn't it time we sorted this name thing out

First we had blogs, simple.

Then we had B-blogs.

And for some a klog.

We now have plogs.

Frank Patrick’s Focused Performance Weblog

If the “blog” is to go mainstream so that my granny understands it and uses it, then we surely need a better name.

Maybe a competition on finding a new name is needed, a bit like Amy at Contentious did when seeking a new name for RSS - webfeeds.

Posted by Wayne at 14:02 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Category =>
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100 Conversations

Interesting exercise, 100 CEO’s, 100 weblogs and how many conversations?

Ross Mayfield’s Weblog: 100 Conversations with 100 CEOs

Posted by Wayne at 12:01 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Category => Blogs
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The Mavens mouthpiece

Interesting article by Clickz on the importance of blogs in PR.

“Influencers really matter,” Pete Blackshaw, CMO at Intelliseek, told me. “The whole notion that there are outspoken, expressive, highly viral experts who offer a highly credible point of view should be a really important part of the marketing equation.”

Wrangling the Blogosphere

So how do your mavens spread the word about your product/service?

Posted by Wayne at 11:45 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Category => Blogs
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Have you tapped into Feedster yet?

If you have’nt discovered Feedster yet, then you should…straight away…why…read this posting from Steve Rubel over at Micro Persuasion. It provides a great insight into not only what Feedster does but also some creative uses too!

Micro Persuasion: A Bloggerside Chat with Feedster’s Devine Feedmaster, Betsy Devine

Posted by Wayne at 09:26 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Category => Blogs
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Ads in RSS

From The RSS Resource Blog.

They say that golf is a waste of a good walk (don’t necessarily agree myself, though on a bad day it certainly feels that way!). But I do feel that way about inevitable intrusion of ads into my rss reading.

See what I mean:

“We realize that for many early adopters, ads in RSS is a contentious topic; however the reality is that content providers who make their money by selling advertising will never provide their content without an ad or a suscription fee. Given these realities, we feel our solution is a good compromise. Sites can still provide summary feeds of their content, and premium, ad-supported feeds for users who like to read articles within an aggregator. It is still early in the adoption cycle of RSS, and our service will hopefully be helpful in bringing RSS to the mainstream”

“RSSAds will allow publishers to offer a pay-per-click, per-insert, and per time period model for ads. We will also consider adding CPM as we add reliable methods of tracking usage (this is difficult but not impossible currently).”

RSS Winterfest - Advertising in RSS feeds

Oh dear.

Posted by Wayne at 09:20 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Category => RSS
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Friday 14 May 2004

Confused about RSS? Read on...

Confused about the difference between Atom and RSS? Perplexed by why RSS feeds have XML buttons? Glynn Moody wades through the alphabet soup with this article on syndication…

Posted by Tim at 18:11 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Category => RSS
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Thursday 13 May 2004

How blogs can connect you with your customers - and it's happening right now

There’s a great example of what blogging means for the way in which you relate to your customers being played out on web right at the moment. Six Apart is the company that developed the Moveable Type blogging software application which powers this and a huge number of other blogs - and they’ve just (in the past 24 hours) brought out the latest version.

This wouldn’t be news unless you were particularly interested in weblog software, were it not for the fact that at the same time, Six Apart have revamped their pricing structure. Previously, the software was free for non-commercial use, with a flat-rate fee for use in for-profit situations. Now that’s all changed, and the changes are kicking up a storm.

As you’d expect from a company writing this type of software, the changes were announced on the blog of Mena Trott, one half of the original founders of Six Apart. Her article is upbeat and enthusiastic, as you’d expect, selling the benefits of the new package and justifying the charging structure. But scroll on down to the trackbacks - excerpts of comments about the article on other blogs - and a completely different picture emerges. The changes are being universally decried as counter-productive, unfair and generally bad news for the customers of Six Apart. So on the one hand, the company is pitching its new product and explaining why the pricing was right, and on exactly the same forum, the customers are weighing in with exactly the opposite view. The conversations aren’t being played out behind the scenes in support forums or “sucks” sites - they’re right there on the front page for everyone to see.

Which is a pretty courageous thing for Six Apart to do, in my opinion. It’s not something you could imagine a large corporate business doing - imagine if Shell gave over a significant proportion of it’s corporate website to opinions protesting its activities in Nigeria, for example.

And there’s two ways an organisation could look at this. One is to throw up their hands in horror at the potential for negative publicity, and pull the dissenting views off the page. It’s probably not being too cynical to wonder if that’s not what the vast majority of organisations would do - scarcely a day goes by without another story about a company seeking to shut down a site or a forum where customers are expressing negative views.

But the alternative would be to look at this as customer feedback of the most direct and valuable kind possible. Here’s one of the most important decisions a company can take, and the feedback is almost universally negative. At the very least, you’d want to revisit some of your assumptions in the light of the criticisms, if not start to wonder “have we got it completely wrong?” And you’re not getting this feedback in six months time as the sales graph starts to head south - it’s as soon as the product hits the market.

What Six Apart will do remains to be seen, but we can be fairly sure that they’ll be sitting up and taking notice of the comments.

Posted by Tim at 19:23 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0) | Category => Blogs
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PTV - A Future State Story

Here’s an intruiging look at what a converged future could hold, from Dave Pollard:

It’s 2015. Thirteen-year-old Kari Ross just got a PTV for her birthday, the much-anticipated PC/TV convergence product

It’s somewhat William Gibson-esque, but I like the sound of MC²:

MC2, which stands for Managing Content & Communications, is the only software package Kari ever learned to use. It has three ‘modes’, represented by a pencil cursor (for document/message writing and annotation), a hand cursor (for saving, sending, publishing and otherwise moving content from one place to another), and a telephone cursor (for connecting with other people and their content).

Posted by Tim at 16:45 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Category => Clutter Management
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