June 2005 Archives

Kevin Briody with some interesting opinions about why internal blogging hasn’t caught on at Microsoft, especially when compared with external blogging. Also an interesting internal communications wish list:

• Create a formal internal blog site and tools, integrated with MSWeb (like the effort around My Sites, but focused on blogging). Put real resources and headcount behind it, don’t rely on volunteers.
• Invest in tools for discoverability of internal blogs and RSS feeds (e.g. a Technorati of sorts)
• Encourage a culture of blogging for communications, to replace status email blasts. Let me just subscribe to your team/group/project blog if I want to keep up on what you’re doing. Break the culture of “cc for importance” and our focus on subscribing (or being subscribed) to vast amounts of email discussion lists or team/group aliases. Execs need to set this example.
• Enable RSS on every part of our Sharepoint portals and team sites – whatever it takes. Let’s look at how Basecamp uses RSS for project and document collaboration. Please make this happen.
• Set up some pre-canned internal OPMLs — role, division, and interest based. Say you’re a product manager  here’s an OPML with internal blog and SPS feeds of interest to your career development. Or you have a strong interest in the VS05 launch - here’s an OPML with feeds for the key launch news blog
• Finally, heavily promote RSS aggregator use – go talk to Dare and get simple instructions on RSS Bandit, pre-load (private label in effect) it with those role/division based OPMLs, and drop it on MSWeb, with tech support set up. Make it a default part of the laptop OS images for new employees. Or go strike a deal with the Start folks, whatever works.

[Read Internal blogging at Microsoft]

Technorati Tags: internal blogging

I often don’t think of Google Ads as advertising, but almost a form of recommendation engine - the blogs I'm subscribed to are in my area of interest, and the ads in the feed are much much more likely to be of interest and relevance than general advertising. And here's an example: reading (I think) Jason Calacanis's feed, I saw a Google ad for Free Hosted Wikis, and found: schtuff.com. I've taken a quick look, and it looks interesting if your needs are fairly simple - there's also a permission model to allow or prevent viewing and editing. RSS feeds and file uploads are also part of the mix - it's a pretty good feature set. Shame they don't use Markdown or Textile for the mark up though (actually it's a shame they haven't integrated a WYSIWYG editor). Don't know anything about the company behind them, how stable they will be, and what their ongoing plans are. This is one of the biggest problems for small providers, and even more critical when the service provided is online (and hosted) - how do you establish enough credibility to get users to entrust their private data ? Companies like 37Signals and Flickr have managed it, but what did they do apart from create great looking applications and communicate with the user base ? Is that all it takes ? Technorati Tags: wiki

OK – I seem to be turning into a bit of a Euan Semple fanboy – but this article about him is great.

Running the unusual line between rebelling against senior-management expectations and over-delivery on objectives seems to be Euan Semple’s forte. Since his appointment as head of KM solutions at the BBC, he has jumpstarted collaboration and knowledge sharing among employees on a budget that would make most software vendors squirm.

 

Euan Semple with some well founded concerns about the rush to audio and videoblogging.

[…] the video was simply imparting factual information that I could have got better from text - including the hyperlink that David had to hold up scribbled on a bit of paper and speak two or three times in case I missed it!

I've already posted some reasons why I think podcasting is an inefficient way to deliver information, Euan has more in his post. Ultimately it comes down to what "mode" people are in when reading blogs or listening to audio or videoposts. Most of the time when I'm sat with my computer, I'm in "lean-forward" mode – wanting to interact, multi-task, click away at a hundred different links in a hundred blogs. When I'm in this frame of mind, I even find it hard to pay attention to a 3 minute music video deliberately designed to hold the skittering attention of the MTV generation, and I'm just not going to sit through repeated "errms", coughs, and general boring randomness, just to get to the few useful nuggets. Now, when I'm watching TV, or travelling to work and listening to my iPod, I'm in "lean-back" mode. My demands for interaction are vastly reduced, and I'm prepared to watch and listen. It sounds promising, but in this space the competition for my attention is even hotter. A-V bloggers are up against the might of mainstream media and their production values (and budgets), and so far they're losing. To be fair, how can they really compete – this isn't like blogs, where it's all about conversations, authenticity and information. Now it's all about my attention – it's all about entertainment:

Jochen Specht from Siemens presented a useful overview of some of the things you need to do to implement blogging with an organisation at the Corporate Communicators Conference. Great job of blogging the conference by former IABC president – Charles Pizzo.

Roadmap to internal blogging

Back in 2003 I had a little discussion on sigia-l about why RSS was better than email for things like newsletters. I'd totally forgotten about it, but found it whilst googling for information about me.

I still think it's ok and relevant, so here it is.

Subscribing to an email newsletter involves handing over a potentially valuable piece of data: your email address. Subscribing to an RSS feed only requires that you give away your ip address, which for most people reveals far less information. Subscribing to a feed is also often just a quick drag and drop, rather than a tedious registration like process.

The moment a feed you are subscribed to starts to change into a marketing piece of junk, you delete the feed from your aggregator. That's it. No more feed. An email list gone rogue involves far more pain.

The fact that RSS is XML and has real structure is good - you get better granularity [ie you can read one news item, and leave all the others marked as unread]. Typical email newsletters have several news items in them, and reading one leads to the whole email being marked as read.

You get nice things like categories within a feed, allowing you to sort a feed in different ways.

However, that said, it's not like RSS is some kind of magic universe altering technology. It's just a file format that eases certain aspects of information exchange. Still useful though !

[Update – couple of edits for spelling and readability]