"It's the bright promise of creating intellectual community among Harvard's discreet "tubs" that launched Weblogs at Harvard Law. The initiative arose, says Palfrey, from a conference the Berkman Center sponsored in November 2002 called "What Is Harvard's Digital Identity?" At that conference, Provost Steven Hyman challenged the assembled deans, faculty members, and technology-forward administrators to harness the Internet to build intellectual bridges that would facilitate the flow of information and ideas between the University's disparate schools and centers.

"There's absolutely no doubt in my mind that Weblogs are the technology for doing exactly that," Winer says. "It is an incredible medium for sharing ideas and information. There's a big bright promise for the future."

Weblogs at Harvard using Userland's Frontier / Manila platform. An example of workgroup, server-based, community weblogging. Easily implementable into any organization wishing to increase communication and knowledge retention. Centrally configured with distributed, personal, web-browser-based content mangement.

Drop this solution into an organization (or even more interesting, a would-be organization or on-line community) and see how much more people know about what's going on both inside and outside the organization.

Let's take a would-be tour of the Harvard site and try to explain the all-important right-side navigation links. Again, imagine this site in your organization. We'll open the Harvard site in another browser window so you can read here and look at the links below in the new window (you may need/want to adjust the new window size...this is an experiment). The page that pops up is the Home page described below.

Setting the Stage and Touring The Right-Side Navigation

After installing the Frontier / Manila solution, replace the 'Harvard' with 'Information Technology Services (ITS)' or 'Health Care Sector' or 'San Diego Performing Arts League' or 'San Diego Jazz Artists Guild' and imagine that each person in the ITS group has taken the opportunity to start their own blog at 'ITS Weblogs' (we'll use this example for immediate-self-preservation reasons).

Now explain the links on the right-side navigation in terms both generic and relevant:

Home: The blogmaster, in this case (by-luck-of-obsession) me (hehe), monitors the ITS blogging community and links, with excerpts, to stand-out blog posts (great meeting minutes, analysis of the vendor news and implications to existing infrastructure) and news of a time-critical nature (requests for expertise, the upcoming birthday celebration (!)). There can be multiple people assuming this Managing Editor role, with access to post the entries to this organization weblog Home page.

About: The one written for the Harvard site is well worth reading (and plaguerizing) to get an overview of what they are trying to do. Answers questions like: "What is a weblog?", "Who can create a weblog?", "What are the rules?", and "Who the editors are?". To implement: Replace all Harvard references, in due respect, with ITS references and people, and you're done.

New Weblog: The form needed to create a weblog. You launch, point people tot the About page and New Weblog page, and see who does it. It's that easy. Tie it in with an LDAP directory or NT Active Directory if need be.

Rankings: Which weblogs in your organization are getting read the most. It quickly becomes those who are posting the most organization-relevant information in the easiest to understand way. Or the blog with the best jokes.

Updates: A 'ticker' page of who is posting to their weblog. Updated as the weblogs are updated.

Directory: A 'Yahoo-like' link repository put together by your own organization. Or a group list of Favorites / Bookmarks. Links to organization weblogs, key websites in your intranet, key websites of technology news related to your infrastructure, favorite Dilbert-ish sites. And information all-stars can maintain their own directory in their own specialty which can be integrated easily into this Directory.

Aggregator: A constantly updating page of latest news from organization-selected sources. Automatically updated (no human intervention) because each news source, including your weblogs, automatically produce RSS, an XML-based news syndication format that your aggregator understands and reads. This is where it gets interesting. Monitor this page for news that you should know. Monitor this page for news that you can comment on using your weblog. The news items you see on this page can be exclusively come from organization-relevant sources outside of your weblog community. For ITS, you'd monitor CNET, ZDNET, News.com, and other relevant process and technology sites. For some organizations you'd monitor vertical or horizontal market sites. For arts organizations, you'd monitor artist, and museum, and other sites (of which I'd like to know more about myself). A Relevant News From External Sources page. OR you use the aggregator as a more comprehensive Updates page. An Updates page on steriods (a term Dave has used before). An Updates page that shows the full text of all the postings from your organizations webloggers in real time, as they happen. An Organization News page. You and your customers get the status on your projects as the status of the projects change (and your project team members blog their project's status'). I'd recommend that you create a couple of Aggregator pages: 1) An Organization News page, 2) A Combined Organization News page and Relevant News for External Sources page.

Referrers: Who is linking to the site in general. This is the only page on the Harvard site that I'm not too sure about (or it's relevance). It looks like it's the sites who are linking to the Harvard site. What would be good to see is what weblogs in your organization are getting linked to by others in the organization. Those 'linked-to' weblogs become a list of the most relevant and most authoritative people / projects / technology weblogs in your organization. Maybe someone else can help me out with the importance of this page or important uses of this page (I'm thought-out at the moment..hehe).

How This All Gets Used

By Your Organization: You supply the weblogs and webloggers. Your webloggers monitor the Combined Organization News page and Relevant News for External Sources aggregator page to know what's going on in the industry and in the organization. Your webloggers write about the meetings they go to, the techniques they are learning, the code they are writing, what fellow organization webloggers are blogging about, the news of the day and how it relates to their projects. They write for themselves (because it's fun) and for their readers: their customers, their organization, and any larger entities in the organization structure (the company, the great arts community, donors).

By The Larger Entities: They monitor the Organization News aggregator to see what is happening in the organization as a whole. Hey, they could even have a weblog where they comment on how they think things are going or what's relevant.

By Your Customers: They monitor the weblogs of the project team members they are working with. They now know how their projects are going and what other news is relevant to those projects. If they are interested in other projects or the organization as a whole, they monitor the Organization News aggregator page. You could even make another aggregator page of weblogs pertaining to functional areas of your organization (all of the webloggers working on HR projects or Marketing projects, for example).

How to implement

To implement quickly, use someone who has hosted Frontier / Manila solutions before (like Weblogger.com) to work along side your infrastructure people to get the system up and transfer the administrative knowledge.

Then hire someone with experience in designing Manila site themes to create an innovative and unique look for the site or an all-important intranet / extranet integrated theme to go with the rest of your organization / companies website(s). Like Brian Bell, who did the Harvard Blog theme and lots of others. Themes are a centrally controlled set of templates, overall look-and-feel of the site...your bloggers don't need to worry about look and feel at all...just their knowledge. This time, the designer works with your web designers to transfer knowledge on the ins-and-outs of Manila site themes to allow further tweakage down-the-line.

And then you hire me to preach like Dave!

P.S. If by the end of this, I focused more on an intranet-like organization / workgroup in this post, it's only because that's where my head and obligations currently are. As I elude to above, this could easily be implemented for an organization wanting to show it's members (and their weblogs) to the world...to collaborate and share news and thoughts and art with each other in an open-to-the-web way.
11:15:53 AM    comment []  Google It!  

Oh. And Jazz. Coltrane. Mose (another white boy). And a few others I can't recall right now.

You can check out the entire interview, in streaming and downloadable MP3 formats, by following these friendly links. The Low FI MP3 Stream is prefered (and pretty HI for Low FI) because it allows me have more people listen to the interviews on the available bandwidth, but feel free to listen in Hi FI or download the MP3 if you're going on the road. Take the New with You. Where ever you may improvise.

Low FI MP3 Stream (preferred, 24kbps 16kHz, 15:06 mins)

Hi FI MP3 Stream (128kbps 44kHz, 15:06 mins)

MP3 Download (14.1MB, 15:06 mins)

When the audio starts, at the start of my show around 6:05 pm, I was trying to get recording (and backup) and in-booth microphone for the next guest and tunes picked...I was totally flustered when the bell went off. Take a deep breath. And not try to sound like too much of a geek. Doc opened up with a reading of his music library, preempting question 3 of my 4 question script, and I did my best to try and put the breaks on him and retain interview control. Not a good idea. Anyway, we settled into chat mode, mostly VO listen mode, but it was a good session for introducing folks who might not hear this stuff an intro. As planned and accepted as a mantle above. OK, maybe mantle is too formal. Something I'd love to get paied for. hehe. Right on. It was a nice chat. We'll have to do it again. Maybe he can be a TNJT reporter embedded in the New Personal Communication world and report back frequently. And he sounds like he's 25...healthy outlook on life, me thinks. Or he is saying the right prayers at Holy Thursday service.

Something is becoming a bit clearer about the show and blog. My job (and something I tried to shoot for in tonight's interview) is to make people aware of these New technologies. And these New artists. And these New musicians. And try to explain them...to a whole of group of people who have lots to say and can benefit by sharing it with others. Potential bloggers. Who dig Jazz music. Who might dig blogging about Jazz music. Sounds like a good group of people to hang with. Kind of like what I tried to shoot for in the RSS and Webcast posts today.

And I've got to get the Jazz 88 playlist our of our CD machines and onto the web. Get that party started right!

And II, Man oh man. I'm writing this post listening to the Jazz 88 Webcast at http://KSDS-FM.org, following Doc's lead and doing the Mac OS X Windows Media Player 9 download. The Jazz tunes poured right out, nice and clear at 20Kbps. I wonder if there is an integration between the WinMedia player and iTunes? Like iTunes using a helper app to play an unknown or devilishly proprietary format, but iTunes managing the files / playlists / etc...it's thing. I surely won't find out tonight (this morning), and the great Bill Yeager and Buddy Blue interviews will need to wait for posting until tomorrow, and all of great implementations to come, will need to wait until I get a tad bit o' rest for these weary aspiring radio showman eyes. Night night.
12:52:03 AM    comment []  Google It!