Jeff Potts: Corporate Blogging or K-Logs

Tue, 11 Oct 2005 16:37:52 GMT

This is an interesting thread on Slashdot. Someone asked about capturing, organizing, and sharing knowledge in an IT department and the majority of folks are responding with various wiki tools and open source portals. Although the question was directed at the needs of an IT department, the advice is probably applicable to any department in an enterprise, provided the UI of the chosen tool scores high in the usability department.

Knowledge Management for an IT Department?. Slashdot Sep 30 2005 8:25PM GMT [Moreover Technologies - Knowledge management news]

The key issues, as I've mentioned before are:

it has to be easy to contribute content
it has to be easy to find content (via search and possibly taxonomy browsing)
it has to be secure
it has to have all of the "-abilities" (eg, scalability, extensibility, usability, etc.).

Something like a combination of blogs, wikis, possibly a document repository, and a search engine for the whole thing ought to do the trick.

Tue, 04 Oct 2005 18:02:22 GMT

This is worth a read. It has definite applicability to corporate use of wiki and blog technology. The key paragraph is

The Wiki and the Blog are complimentary companion technologies that together form the core workspace that will allow intelligence officers to share, innovate, adapt, respond, and be—on occasion—brilliant. Blogs will cite Wiki entries. The occasional brilliant blog comment will shape the Wiki. The Blog will be vibrant, and make many sea changes in real-time. The Wiki, as it matures, will serve as corporate knowledge and will not be as fickle as the Blog. The Wiki will be authoritative in nature, while the Blog will be highly agile. The Blog is personal and opinionated. The Wiki is agreed-upon and corporate.

Andrus goes on to add additional supporting components to the core of blogs and wikis which consists of search, feedback, and an underlying document repository.

The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community. Bill Ives finds a nice report on the use of new technology within the intelligence community...

The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community. Here is an article by Calvin Andrus of the CIA on how they can use blogs and wikis to help them change, The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community, which is not a bad idea. As... [Portals and KM]

[McGee's Musings]

Note that the Stanford Law School link to the PDF does not require registration.

I definitely like the idea of using the repository as a sort of loosely organized collection point for raw knowledge. At Navigator we call this the "unstructured data warehouse". It needs to be secure and I suppose it needs some amount of organization but the key is to make it easy for employees to contribute, easy to administer, and as open as possible.

Then, on top of that you add tools to glean intelligence from the warehouse (ie wikis) and a mechanism for expressing opinions about that separately (blogs). Index the whole shooting-match with a search engine and you've got something.

The final ingredient is incentive. You've got to make it beneficial for employees to leverage this infrastructure (and painful if they don't!).

Wed, 11 May 2005 19:13:50 GMT

Gilbane Enterprise Blog Survey.

The Gilbane Report recently posted the results of their Survey on Enterprise blog, wiki, and RSS Use. While the survey sample is not representative of a larger population of companies (the survey was voluntary and Gilbane readers are probably ahead of the curve), the results are interesting. Of the 58 respondents (mostly from companies under $25MM in annual revenues but 10 from companies of over

By noemail@noemail.org (Seth). [Enter Content Here]

Fri, 06 May 2005 22:45:06 GMT

This would be a cool corporate blogging feature...

AOL Opens Blog Service to IM Users. Members of AOL Instant Messenger gain connections to the AOL Journals blogging tool, including the ability to send posts through instant messages. [eWEEK Technology News]

Wed, 13 Apr 2005 16:28:19 GMT

"Technology" is one of the three converging forces. Under that heading, Charlie notes how blogs and CMS/Portals are converging.

Technology: the perfect storm for portals?. Charlie Wood has written a blog entry on the uncertain future of portals. To quote: The enterprise portal industry stands squarely in the path of three converging forces, any one of which could be devastating. Together, they might be fatal.... [Column Two]

Fri, 08 Apr 2005 20:47:10 GMT

Corporate Use of Blogs and Wikis.

Lauren Wood, of The Gilbane Report has an excellent introductory article on the corporate use of Blogs and Wikis (factoid: did you know that "Wiki" is a Hawaiian word for "hurry" or "quick"?). The article gives real world examples of companies using blogs and Wiki's for internal and external communication purposes. I agree with Lauren that these tools have great potential in the enterprise.

By noemail@noemail.org (Seth). [Enter Content Here]

Thu, 07 Apr 2005 21:58:19 GMT

The March 28 issue of Infoworld has a cover story on corporate blogging called The Enterprise Blogosphere. It covers both blogs and wikis in the corporate environment and sidebars on JotSpot, Movable Type, TWiki, and Socialtext.

Fri, 21 Jan 2005 01:59:33 GMT

Case Western Reserve University uses Movable Type to host blogs. They've got a nice FAQ and some good explanations of the various features available to their community. Might be a good reference for the corporate world.

Thu, 30 Dec 2004 15:22:24 GMT

Cadenhead's Radio UserLand Kick Start - 50 Book Challenge.
Radio UserLand Kick Start
Cadenhead, Rogers

A must-have book if you use Userland's Radio weblogging tool. It extends and supplements the sometimes sparse documentation. It is also a nice introduction to how you can go about extending and improving your weblogging toolkit.
[McGee's Musings]

Mon, 25 Oct 2004 14:25:52 GMT

KMPro panel on Blogs in Business. It was a lot of fun riffing with Scoble, Ian, and John about blogs in the organization. I've got some notes and reflections I'll want to post later, but wanted to get this nice summary from Jack posted while I had a moment.[McGee's Musings]

Tue, 24 Aug 2004 03:17:09 GMT

Information routing. Everybody processes a ton of email. And nowadays, some of us also process a ton of RSS feeds. In both cases, inbound items fall into three categories...[Jon's Radio]

Wed, 05 May 2004 05:04:56 GMT

How blogs and wikis can help knowledge management. Cutting Through May 1 2004 8:51PM GMT [Moreover - Knowledge management news]

Thu, 29 Apr 2004 17:00:15 GMT

Jack of all trades, master of none.

E-mail is the jack of all trades, but the master of none. There are better ways to transfer files, hold discussions, deliver notifications, broadcast newsletters, schedule meetings, work collaboratively, and manage personal information. But even though e-mail isn't the best tool for any of these tasks, it provides a single interface to all of them. Here's a challenge: Let's improve the various functions performed by e-mail without multiplying the interfaces people must learn in order to use those functions. [Full story at InfoWorld.com]

A favorite example of mine is RSS. It's an inherently opt-in, spam-free channel of communication that can replace certain of email's most broken functions: broadcast newsletters, notifications. But, as NewsGator shows us, RSS can still look and feel like email to the user. ... [Jon's Radio]

Mon, 23 Feb 2004 04:22:13 GMT

Blogging for Business - 37 Signals. 37 Signals are a web design and usability firm based in Chicago. They've got a good prezzy introducing blogs, discussing blogging for business, and covering blogs as a business. They call Blogs "tiny but mighty cms". Take a look: Blogging for Business... [cms~wire]

From the 37 Signals article...

Businesses are starting to use blogs internally to share knowledge, disseminate information across the entire organization, and manage projects. Some advantages of using internal blogs include:

An archive of contributions if an employee leaves
Central spot for communication instead of email here, IM there
Written record of who said what, approvals, comments, etc.
Central location eases bandwidth requirements
Central location for project assets (logos, fonts, documentation)

This is a really good article with many links to helpful resources, particularly if you are looking to use blogs within your company.

Wed, 04 Feb 2004 04:47:51 GMT

Our internal blog pilot has failed to move off the mark after a little more than a year. Here are what I think are the top reasons why. Note: This feedback should not be taken as "Why Radio Sucks". It's just a brainstorm of some of the reasons why it hasn't taken off (yet?) within our particular organization. Most of the issues are probably things to watch out for regardless of the blogging tool being used.

What we did

We gave a copy of Radio to our most ardent "sharers of knowledge". We basically painted a modest vision of what blogging could do for us internally, showed how the tool worked, and then let nature take its course. We gave each blogger space on an internal Zope server (running on Linux) and provided detailed instructions on setting up a category within Radio that would upstream to the Zope server.

Why it hasn't grown like crazy

1. We made it harder than it had to be for people to upstream to the internal server

The blog pilot particpants are typically always on a client engagement. The Zope server sits on the intranet behind a firewall. You have to VPN to get to it. Most of the time that works but not always due to proxy configs at the client. So, upstreaming to the internal blog web server was an extra step for most and impossible for some, other than what little time could be spent at home or at the office upstreaming.

2. We didn't index the blog content

Our Zope server does not currently get indexed by the corporate search engine. So, the content that does get created by our bloggers for the internal server doesn't get seen by people who aren't subscribing to those feeds.

3. We didn't drive traffic to the blog content through the portal

This is related to the search engine point. One way to drive use would have been for people to get to valuable content and then ask, "Where did that come from?" or "What are you using to create that?". We could have driven more traffic to the blog web server by dropping in a couple of RSS portlets on the main page of the portal.

4. Email is easier

As much as I hate getting "internal spam", for most people, email is still easier to use when sharing links, news clippings, or thoughts on a topic. The client is almost always open on a user's desktop and the interface is very familiar. And, many things you want to share about come in the form of email so you hit forward and go. Also, unless everyone is aggregating internal feeds religiously, you cannot be sure someone got your post. Email is closer to a guaranteed read.

Because not everyone uses an aggregator, I always felt like I had to do double-entry--post once on my blog and then send a link to my blog post via email to the people I thought would be interested but who don't aggregate feeds.

5. Radio is still beyond "typical" corporate users

Although it is a relatively simple tool, I think Radio is still beyond "typical" corporate users. Yes, the install is fast and simple. Yes, you can be publishing in minutes. But, there are a few things that should be table stakes for a desktop tool that aren't there yet. Reliable backup/recovery/migration procedures are a good example. Try installing Radio on a different computer than you have now and moving all of your posts and stories over intact, even if you are using the built-in backup tool. The two or three times I had to do this due to laptop swaps, I was able to get all of my posts, but the stories had an annoying feature where the original post date was updated to the file modified date. I'm not sure a non-technical user would be able to execute the recovery procedure.

Debugging and troubleshooting has also been an issue. If a business user is having trouble upstreaming and the events page doesn't have an obvious indicator as to what's wrong, it can be tough to figure out how to get them going again.

Modifying the navigation is another example. It is extremely easy to update the XML file that controls those links. But would our CxO be up for doing that? Maybe. Maybe not.

6. Radio is a desktop tool but sometimes you need to blog from anywhere

For the most part, I like that Radio is a client-side tool, but there have been times when I wished I could get to it from a different machine. I know you can set up a POP3 account to send mail to that Radio would look at, but that seemed lame. And, I know you can set up Radio for remote access, but for me I'm not sure that would work very well. Radio is installed on my laptop and my laptop is not always-on or always-connected.

7. We didn't offer clear instructions on when to use a blog versus a teamroom

We have standardized on a teamroom technology for group collaboration. Usually, the subject area for a team room is a project or client engagement. Sometimes, though, it is more horizontal, like in the case of a teamroom focused on a particular vendor. We handed out Radio to our early adopter/collaboration junkie types and said, "Here's this cool tool. You can aggregate RSS feeds from the net and each other's blogs." But, we didn't clarify the types of things that should go in a blog versus when a teamroom is more appropriate.

I don't think it is too late for blogging to catch on here at Navigator. And, I will continue to use Radio because I like the tool despite some minor annoyances. But, the items listed here are going to have to get addressed to re-energize the original pilot group and to grow it beyond that.

Mon, 08 Dec 2003 03:10:44 GMT

Scoble: "I don't like group weblogs." This is a current topic with me. A bunch of people I know wanted to do a group blog. I said okay give it a try. I'm watching from a distance. I prefer to write for my blog and develop a way to route posts to categories so readers can assemble their own group blogs out of their favorite authors (of which I hope to be one). Scoble is a pundit and a very wise man. He's onto something. [Scripting News]

Mon, 27 Oct 2003 03:46:31 GMT

I'm trying out NewsMonster on my home machine. Seems pretty cool so far. I like the UI. A large number of feeds is much more manageable using its folder metaphor than Radio's flat list. I'm sure it's got a lot of nifty features I haven't stumbled onto yet. If someone just wants to aggregate feeds or doesn't mind that the aggregator isn't integrated with their blogging tool, this is just the ticket. Note that if you are using Blogger, you can right click on a news item and post to your blog. Maybe someone's got an add-in that does the same for Radio.

Sun, 07 Sep 2003 03:21:57 GMT

Chicago Tribune article on blogging in the workplace. [Scripting News]

Sat, 09 Aug 2003 03:44:52 GMT

Dan Gillmor on Microsoft's blogging software. "This strikes me as no threat to the current and upcoming end-user tools from the vendors we use today." [Scripting News]

Tue, 08 Jul 2003 03:36:41 GMT

Heads up: I do not work at UserLand anymore. People have been calling me and sending me e-mails about this, so this should set the record straight. Final resolution of my departure isn't over with yet, so no details will be released until then, if ever.

In the meantime, I am going to work on building the Weblog Network, K-Logs, and more...There is a huge amount of forward motion in the weblog world from organizations that will pay real money (this answers Scoble's question) ;-> [John Robb's Weblog]

Mon, 30 Jun 2003 05:44:45 GMT

RSS and Echo. Well the big companies have finally made their move in the weblog world with Sam Ruby being directed by IBM to take control of an emerging syndication standard...IBM is very interested in this given their longstanding and extremely lucrative relationship with the WSJ ($500m over the last three years) and other publishers. It would be against their interest to let a simple syndication standard emerge that didn't require lots of IBM iron and software expertise. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]

Sat, 14 Jun 2003 03:53:18 GMT

I'm BACK! What a week. I went to Orlando to the IBM Content Management and Portal Conference. I had every intention of blogging the event, but Sunday night, my hard drive bit the dust. My hotel and the conference hotel were both WiFi-enabled so I was really disappointed.

I thought everything was totally gone (including the web log) but it turned out I could still read from the drive once I added it to the modular bay of my laptop. It's pretty spotty, though. I snagged everything I couldn't live without.

Restoring Radio was a pain. I thought I was covered because I used the backup utility. After reinstalling and setting my serial number, I tried using Restore but it didn't do anything. I'd click Restore, it'd give me an "are you sure?" message, I'd confirm, and then it'd be back to the backup/restore page.

To fix it, I uninstalled Radio, went back to my old hard drive, pulled the entire Radio directory, reinstalled on the new drive, and then overlayed the directories with my recovered Radio directories. Worked like a charm.

Tue, 06 May 2003 01:49:37 GMT

Read 'n Blog.

Tiernan Ray of eCommerce Times in Wireless Newsfactor: Why Blogs Haven't Stormed the Business World. I gotta roll, so I'll let the rest of ya handle this one.

[The Doc Searls Weblog]

This link provides an interesting perspective on blogging and the corporate world. I agree that current blogging tools are creating heaps of information that are largely uncategorized. However, I will take a search engine indexing blog content over not capturing tacit information any day.

[Tom Pierce's Blog]

Thu, 01 May 2003 04:05:07 GMT

Michael Hall gives an example of how he used a weblog at work and also mentions wikis. He briefly digresses into Sharepoint toward the end of the article. Might have a couple of good blurbs for the uninitiated.

Tue, 29 Apr 2003 03:34:33 GMT

Weblogs in organizations and finding voice.

An interesting little piece in Business 2.0 about corporate use of weblogs

Business 2.0 - Web Article - Management by Blog?

Most of the companies I've observed using blogs are trying it on their customers before unleashing it internally on their staffs. The external need, apparently, is more pressing. Many businesses already have other systems in place for managing internal information, ranging from simple brown-bag lunches to overkill knowledge-management regimens.

I disagree that the external need is more pressing. I suspect that the truth is that the external weblog strategy presents less risk in the eyes of the implementer. Or to put it differently, internal weblog experiments feel risky...The chronological structure of short posts encourages and gently forces continuing practice...Helping weblogs to succeed inside organizations has little to do with technology features. It depends instead on nurturing a grassroots process of tentative practice evolving into confident process. Think Harold Hill in The Music Man not General George Patton in Patton [McGee's Musings]

I agree with McGee. At least in our firm, blogs offer a way to move knowledge capture closer to the source--it's a more organic approach to KM than our previous efforts. I do agree with the article author, though, that it really depends on the culture of the organization.