Monday, July 07, 2003

Is your email program the ultimate microcontent manager?. Lilia wrote: One of the questions from the audience was about number of technologies that one can cope. I share this concern given the number of communication/discussion tools I use. Everything becomes email, according to some theories. Usenet, for example, was blended into mail clients, treating the usenet post like an email message. Completely hiding the plumbing from users, the differences ceased to matter. The usenet post became just another email message. Perhaps blogging tools will also blend into mail clients. Posting from your mail client (your blogs are just special email addresses) and IM/irc/SMS. Read your RSS feeds with Outlook or Eudora or whatever Macheads use these days. Configure your weblog with a properties dialog your mail client. If so, there are some bonuses. Safety and Comfort Exploit mail's ability to block spam and advertising (you're expecting RSS advertising in your feeds, aren't you?) Scan RSS posts for active or hostile organisms (viruses, worms, etc.) Filtering, Search and Notification Organize incoming posts by content (not just point of origin or date) into folders. Search your archive across email and RSS archives, one big database. Alert the user to very interesting posts, using filters.  Apply family filters. Workflow and Collaboration. Perhaps everything on a project gets cc'd to a project weblog Trigger user action from enterprise systems you have an invoice to approve you have a meeting to summarize  RSS as transport for distributed calendaring and scheduling. Subscribe to my public calendar via RSS. Request meetings via email.  Manage my groups of people. One tool (my Address Book) to manage: blogrolls friend of a friend LDAP directories personal distribution lists lists blogosphere neighborhoods, and externally managed memberships (egroups, social networks). Servers conflate also: Mail servers cache and aggregate RSS feeds, just like usenet. Servers following the IMAP model can hold backups of your email/blogging databases and address books. Server managed access control to private feeds. Microsoft, for one, believes users want all variations in microcontent to be manageable from one place, with one interface. Their standalone task-reporting tools for project members went nowhere until they blended them into the email clients. Now your Things To Do Lists work with the MS Project servers, communicating by specially formatted emails. The upside? Blogging as we know it becomes a feature. And everyone has it. One user experience means lower learning curve. As email clients become smarter, blogging benefits too. The downside? Blogging becomes boring, routine, work-like. The browser interface becomes less important. Newsreading must compete for time with your inbox. It starts to feel employer-managed vs. personally controlled, just like your at work email. A prediction: The vendors who dominate messaging will shape blogging. AOL and Microsoft have fat clients, web clients, and chat clients. Watch them: Bring blogging into their messaging family. Absorb blogging user and group digital IDs into their identity mechanisms. Offer faceted blogs (everyone sees just what they're intended to see and not what they don't want to see) using digital ID. You're not part of their ID world? No facets. Push blogging into all their customer touch points (voice, SMS/iMode, handhelds, desktop software, etc.) Fold blogging community servers (the Technoratis and Popdexes) into email and search servers. Offer tools for good citizenship (i.e. censorship, filtering) via community servers. I'm not recommending this, mind you. I just have a hard time imagining a sustainable alternative scenario. [a klog apart klogs] [a klog apart] 3:38:17 PM

Knowledge Management is In. Richard Karlgaard (Forbes) has a collection of CEO quotes from the CEO summit. His conclusion: "Of surprise to me was how much these CEOs talked about knowledge management. In fact, this tenet was universal at the Microsoft CEO Summit: Smart companies will prosper; the rest will die. CEOs are happy to buy technology that makes their employees smart, especially about customers." A few quotes: Joe Forehand, Accenture: "As the economy improves, it's going to be all about the customer again. If we want to win, we're going to have to win the battle of the customer. The cost of acquiring and servicing customers is higher than ever. Brand loyalty is at a lower point than we've ever seen. Technology needs to integrate the whole marketing cycle--marketing, branding, sales, customer service and postservice support. We need true insights about the customer." Klaus Kleinfeld, Siemens: "If I have people sitting in Sweden who specialize in offshore oil drilling and I have a customer sitting in Texas who wants to do some offshore oil drilling, I need to make sure that the data flows between these two parties in the shortest time possible. Companies have to tap the knowledge that sits with every individual. There's huge potential if we can do that and do it quickly." Marks: "I have 100,000 employees, 25,000 of whom are knowledge workers. I write an e-mail about every week to ten days,distributed to everybody in the world. People like to hear from me because they feel I'm talking to them directly. So I can send that e-mail out, and within about 24 hours everyone will have read it. The amazing thing is how I can change the direction of the entire company within 24 hours. Ten years ago I couldn't do that." Anderson: "What do I want? A device that provides precise just-in-time information about a specific customer and provides just-in-time learning for the employee so that we can leverage information for the benefit of the customer.That would be a powerhouse killer app." Kleinfeld: "I would love to have a structure for just-in-time knowledge and one for just-in-time access. When you're out in the field somewhere, you want to have the answer right there, right away. The power of that would be unbelievable." My favourite is by Forehand: "Microsoft should create an Xbox for the business world [general laughter]. Seriously! Start with that in mind--everything is included, you can see things in color and see what's right and wrong. Start with how you approach Xbox, and tie that to business." [E M E R G I C . o r g] 3:02:00 PM