Weblog Collaboration Blog

Jessica Baumgart of the "j s scratchpad" blog has pointed the way to another excellent resource for information on business blogging. Bill Ives is an independent consultant with extensive experience in researching media effects on human cognition. Mr. Ives has a PhD in Educational Psychology, and he has done some research into what blogging can do for business. In this post on his "Portals and KM" blog he writes about an August article, "Big Time Blogging," in Portals Magazine that is now available online.

The article itself is a basic summary of information covered in other articles posted to my blog. However, check out his blog for more interesting posts on blogging and knowledge management.

I just got handed a stack of work, so this is my last blog post for today - honest!

Stephen Cohen posted on his Library Stuff blog that he will be reading this paper at lunch today. The abstract states that the paper presents a social network analysis of links between weblogs to identify a community of KM bloggers.

Hope you enjoy!

From the Blog Business Summit web site, a list of links to business blogs that the organizers regularly read.

I was interested in CorporateBloggingBlog, produced by Fredrik Wackå, a communications adviser in Malmö, Sweden. He has written a 16-page "Beginners Guide to Corporate Blogging," and has been a corporate blogger since 2000.

This beginner's document is very useful. Mr. Wackå identifies six classifications of corporate blog, 3 external and 3 internal.
External Blogs
1. Sales blog
2. Relationship blog
3. Branding blog
Internal Blogs
1. Knowledge blog
2. Collaboration blog
3. Culture blog
He goes on to define the purpose of each, who is the blogger, and the target groups of the blog.

For collaboration blogs, the purpose is "To provide a working team with a tool for research, collaboration, and discussion." The team serves as both the bloggers and the target audience. Interestingly, Mr. Wackå notes "There's only a fine line - if any - between this blog category and business wiki's."

This document also has practical advice for those intereseted in setting up a business blog, as well as some links to business related blogs.

Seen on j's scratchpad, coming up January 24-25, 2005.

Notice the session topics. Of special interest to readers of this blog would be sessions like "Enhancing Internal Communications with Blogs, Wikis, and More," and even more appropriately, "Collaborative Blogging: Team Workflow and Tools."

I'm sorry I won't be able to go this year, but hopefully there will be conference proceedings to read. It would be nice to have enough material for a session proposal for next year!

Conlin, Michelle, and Andrew Park. "Blogging with The Boss's Blessing; More companies are helping employees to speak freely -- and bond with customers." Business Week, i3889, June 28, 2004, 100.

Discusses the growth of blogging in business. Credits the usual suspects (Sun Microsystems, Macromedia, Dell, Microsoft) as early adopters. A year ago, Microsoft had 100 corporate bloggers, today they have 800. Ziff-Davis now has internal blogs to cut down on company e-mail. Article mentions the dangers inherent in publicly available corporate blogs. "Therein lies the rub: The more truthful they are, the more valuable blogs are to customers."

"From Blogs to K-Logs." Computer Weekly, September 2003, 40.

The article distinguishes personal blogs from k-logs, or knowledge management blogs. A key quote from Matt Mower, a knowledge management specialist working with the company Evectors: "Blogging is less about capturing tacit knowledge and more about building informal networks...If you find an employee in the company that frequently blogs on a particular work topic, you might identify that employee as an expert in that field, ...If you create a link to the employee's blog in your own blog, their reputation will spread. Moreover, you can access any other experts that have been identified in the blog."

Kirkpatrick, David. "It's hard to manage if you don't blog." Fortune, Oct 4, 2004, 46.

An executive-level summary (what else appears in Fortune?). Sun Microsystems, Microsoft, but also mentions in passing the following companies with corporate blogs: Yahoo, Google, Intuit, Monster.com - and Maytag.

Pack, Thomas. "Through the blogosphere." Information Today, 21(10), November 2004, 41-42.

Mostly of interest for some useful background information on the history of blogging, including pointers to a Yahoo history of blogging (with a bad link) and this alternative history by Rebecca Blood.

Dvorak, John C. "The Blog's better purpose: awesome information archive: not just digital bullhorns anymore, blogs will double as searchable, useful databases." Computer Shopper, 24(9), September 2004, 38. Accessed through Expanded Academic ASAP

In case you are not up on computer cognosceti, John C. Dvorak is an influential columnist with Ziff-Davis publishing. In recent years, I have admired (and laughed heartily at) his critiques of technological innovations with no apparent useful human purpose. For Dvorak, weblogs fell into that group, until recently.

No more. "Simply put, a blog appears to be nothing more than a collection of random thoughts--and many blogs are simply that. But if the blog owner thinks about blogging differently, then it can become an amazing personal resource others may benefit from. Let's explore this possibility."

Dvorak sees the possibility of data-mining blogs. Blogs could serve as a personal archiving tool for random facts. The extension of Dvorak's ideas to a business use is straightforward. Knowledge management, innovation management, and other programs seek to develop better ways to identify, access, and use information from diverse and often unstructured sources. Business blogs clearly provide a platform for recording such information for later use.

"As we analyze the blogging scene today, we're only seeing the beginning of a long-term phenomenon in personal public archives....once people realize its amazing usefulness, the blogging phenomenon will explode."

This "explosion" in the world of personal blogging, I feel, will be accompanied by a corresponding explosion in use of blogging and other asynchronous collaboration tools (like wikis) by business. Once people understand and appreciate what a blog can do at a personal level, it will be no time at all before innovative and enterprising individuals are blogging at work with full support from management. This is already happening at Sun Microsystems and other leading-edge companies.

Vizard, Michael. "Collaborate Freely." Computer Reseller News, Sept. 27, 2004, 26.
Accessed through Expanded Academic ASAP

"Originally, collaboration nirvana was to be provided by software such as Notes or Groove. But today, many people are starting to wonder if the collaboration functions provided by these products have become little more than expensive redundancies. After all, a Weblog that resides behind a firewall should be secure enough for most companies, and the cost of deploying collaboration software on every client is a time-consuming task that dwarfs the expense of the initial software licenses."

This short article shows how business writers are beginning to position weblogs (at least "secure" blogs behind corporate firewalls) as a key communications medium for collaboration.

The article continues: "For solution providers, instant messaging and the advent of Weblogs provide new collaboration mediums that allow them to greatly expand the number of businesses using this type of software well beyond the existing base of Notes users. That's because the costs associated with using these tools are minimal; what has previously hampered the broad adoption of traditional collaboration software has been the total cost of ownership. And truth be told, what most companies are waiting for is an intrepid solution provider to show up at the door and show them how to do it."

Vu, Uyen. "How online diaries change knowledge management." Canadian HR Reporter, 16(18), October 20, 2003, 1-6. Accessed via ABI/Inform on DIALOG.

The author makes good points about why blogging can be an effective KM tool (and, by extension, good for some businesses):

1. "Unlike many knowledge management systems, blogging is cheap and easy to implement - 15 minutes should be enough to get someone started."

CAVEAT: The learning curve is not steep, but employee self-discipline is required to ensure regular posting of relevant information so that the blog is both accurate and up-to-date.

2. "Another advantage blogs have over knowledge management systems is they provide a context. Knowledge management systems have often been criticized as a way of storing information, not knowledge. Knowledge is information in context, said Brian Guthrie, director of innovation and knowledge management at the Conference Board of Canada. To the extent that blogs deliver insights woven in a thread of conversation, one finds nuggets of useful knowledge but often within the context of a set of problems, a personal approach, even a worldview."

Uyen Vu makes a very good point here. While we can debate the completeness of the definition of knowledge presented in this quote, I believe that no one would dispute that examining information within a context provides a better understanding of that information. By understanding the context, we can determine how to best apply what has been learned in other circumstances.

In order to gain such insights, however, companies must not restrict the language used on the blog too tightly. While profanity has no place on a corporate blog, posts that are burdened with too much political correctness (toeing the company line) will not prove enlightening either. Corporate policies on blogging style and content must strike a balance that allows for frank, balanced consideration of business challenges/opportunities and their solutions.

3. Blogging does not represent an end-all for knowledge management. "Phil Wolffe [VP of extrapreneurial strategy and technology director of Adecco] states, 'The best KM is the one people practice...For all I know, (knowledge-blogging) may address only 10 percent of your KM goals...But try it. It is a critical 10 per cent[sic]. This wedge gets people owning their expertise, sharing it willingly, getting credit, getting feedback, being social about knowledge. How does this compare to any other tools you've ever introduced?' "

I think Phil Wolffe's quote addresses some of the great possibilities of blogging. We want our employees to be empowered and responsible, and to take a sense of pride away from their work. Blogging can provide a status-enhancer to motivated employees who can showcase their expertise in one or more areas through the medium. The cost of providing blogging to employees can be extremely small, so even if viewed only in terms of the benefits to employee morale, the return on investment is quite attractive.

Also, we should view blogging as a social activity, not as a lone writer typing posts into a digital repository, where no one will access the information again. These blogs are meant to be read and used. Readers can e-mail the post's author, or attach comments directly to the entry. The blog makes possible a coffee-shop conversation with a customer or employee located miles away, and records the dialogue for future use by anyone in the organization. If the business is ready and organized for good communication between employees, blogging will provide a new and better channel for some types of business activity.

In an appropriate business environment, and with the right kinds of incentives and controls, blogging can increase the networking of employees to solve those insidious long-term business problems that only increased communication and social pressure will bring to a solution.

Disclaimer: Traction (R) is a registered trademark of Traction Software, Inc.
Disclaimer #2: Traction (R) Communicator (TM) and Traction (R) TeamPage (TM) are trademarks of Traction Software, Inc.


First, some information from a review article:

Levack, Kinley. "Traction digs in with traction TeamPage." EContent, 26(2), February 2003, 13-14.

Traction's TeamPage is an enterprise weblog designed for use behind corporate firewalls. TeamPage enables creation of a large store of data in XML format, posted onto a Web server and searchable by database. The product is positioned as a solution for competitive intelligence and market research professional. The end goal of the software is to create a "durable archive" for this type of intelligence.

The CEO of Traction Software, Tim Simonson, sees TeamPage as an extension of the communication strengths of e-mail. The issue, in Simonson's mind, is how can you store, organize, and retrieve information from an e-mail client? E-mail communications are by their nature unstructured. TeamPage allows the users to publish e-mails to the weblog and to sort based upon date/time or a category/classification (or both).

At the time of this article (February 2003), Levack quotes pricing: "The solution is priced at $10,000 per server and $125 per named user, plus an additional 20% annually for maintenance and support. A 15-user workgroup package is also available for $4,995."

My comments:

Even $4,995 + annual maintenance isn't peanuts!

A look around Traction's website shows that there are two levels of product, the Traction Communicator and Traction TeamPage. Traction Communicator is a simple environment with two named users and three "workspaces", while Traction TeamPage provides a full enterprise-wide application.

Most of the salient, distinguishing features of the software appear to be convenience-related. These features enable the user to import content quickly, to organize it and present it in multiple formats with little effort. Given enough time (and some computer programming expertise that I lack), I believe that a similar system could be put together from open-source tools. Of course, a business would buy the Traction package over open-source if the use of open-source and internal programmers is perceived to be too risky (in terms of cost, integrity of records, you name it).

I think that much of the future value of using a system like Traction TeamPage is determined by the effort the company puts in on the front end defining the organization and classification system used to identify content later. A corporation implementing TeamPage would greatly benefit from a well-planned approach to creating this classification system, involving both employee users and an information professional skilled in taxonomies and the creation of thesauri. The software doesn't help you determine this classification system (and I don't think that I would want any business intelligence software that forced a fixed taxonomy on my company). You have to know what you are doing, what kinds of information your employees need and how they will want to search for this information. These sound like obvious statements, but experience has taught me that ill-defined and unwritten expectations at the outset lead to disappointment and poor reception and use of the tool down the road.

In summary, Traction TeamPage software seeks to make weblogs "respectable" for business by providing in one package a journal and workspaces (weblog) with additional security and classification options. TeamPage also facilitates the addition of content to the blog, and provides additional publishing options (like a regular company newsletter from the blog).

There are other companies operating in this space. I will review Socialtext software soon. Socialtext is a wiki, a type of application closely related to weblogs that creates web pages that can be edited by essentially any reader.

Dragoon, Alice. "A travel guide to collaboration." CIO, 18(4), November 15, 2004, 68-76.

Let's get right to one of the quotes of the year, from Michael Schrage (codirector of the MIT Media Lab's eMarkets Initiative):

"Having lawyers drive collaborative initiatives is like having drunk drivers drive Pintos on New Year's Eve in Boston...That's an algorithm for tragedy." (p72)

This article examines collaboration as a currently-hot business phenomenon. Alice Dragoon defines collaboration in this way: "In its purest form, collaboration consists of two or more individuals or companies working together to achieve a common goal or create mutual value." (p70)

Collaboration, in these terms, embraces interactions between competitors, "friendly" companies, and work within a single company as well.

Ms. Dragoon points out several "danger zones" to avoid when embarking on a collaboration project, including a zero-sum game attitude (I win and you lose, or vice versa), mistrust, the intellectual property arrangements colorfully discussed by Mr. Schrage above, and security and integration issues.

As for how to have a successful collaboration, Ms. Dragoon stresses the importance of agreement on a mutually defined value to be gained by collaborating, building trust between the parties, choosing the right collaboration tools, minimization of need or requirement to integrate systems between the companies, and to handle security issues directly and visibly.

The article discusses e-mail, web conferencing, portals, online workspaces, and instant messaging as technologies to support collaboration. Interestingly, no discussion of weblogs. However, the article states that "Asynchronous tools also serve as a persistent, always accessible archive for discussions and document versions, keeping track of who decided what and when." (p75) Weblogs can certainly serve as an asynchronous collaboration tool, as illustrated by the KM presentation weblog I discussed in a previous post. I think the article focuses on enterprise-wide software $olution$ and neglects to mention that a little grass-roots effort by some properly-informed tech-savvy employees could provide many of the services offered by this software at a much lower cost to the organization.

At the end of the article, there is a URL pointer to links to an article introducing wikis as a possible collaboration tool "that allows users to create and edit webpage content."

I would recommend this article to anyone who wants insight into the developing consensus of top-level executives about the nature and technology of business collaboration.

Christina Pikas, Garrett Eastman, Kris Liberman, and Jessica Baumgart have been using this neat group blog on Knowledge Management to prepare for their presentation "Blogs for Information Dissemination and Knowledge Management" at the ASIST Annual Meeting.

Certainly one of the great advantages of a weblog approach over e-mail when collaborating with several geographically dispersed individuals is that all the communication resides in one central repository. As one of the posts on this blog mentions, however, keeping track of threads of ideas (at least within Blogger) is not trivial.

Radio.Userland allows you to keep track of messages by classifying/cataloging the posts into user-defined categories, which will help for blogs covering a wide range of topics. However, how well will such a system work when a blog deals only with a specific type of issue in population genetics?

Tobin Cataldo plans to discuss the creation of blogs from scratch as part of his presentation. This involves setting up your own web server, creating a database and using some PHP scripts to facilitate communication. According to Tobin, you don't have to be a super-tech to do this, and building from scratch will give you the ultimate flexibility in the organization and appearance of your weblog.

For those who are interested, I now have an RSS feed on this blog, courtesy of Feedburner. You can learn a little about RSS on their website. For those of you who might be in LI 841, we will be learning much more about RSS technology the weekend of December 4-6, thanks to Ginger Shields' presentation.

As seen on Steven Cohen's weblog, this post presents a 6-point corporate blogging policy attributed to Charlene Li.

The policy points express similar values to those discussed in my earlier posts: understand that the company would prefer that some topics not be discussed on company weblogs, appreciate the need for confidentiality and don't reveal proprietary information, be respectful to the company, your fellow employees, and your readers, etc.

As I pointed out yesterday, some of these values run counter to the dominant personal "blogging community" culture, with its openness, frankness, and irreverent tone.

Udell, Jon. "Trends bode well for KM." InfoWorld, 25(11), Mar 17, 2003, 34-35.

Accessed through ABI/Inform on DIALOG.

Jon Udell states that "Knowledge is power, and many people are (not surprisingly) reluctant to share that power. Somehow we've got to engineer environments in which sharing knowledge feels like an empowering behavior. There's no silver-bullet solution, but current technological and cultural trends provide clues that point toward a brighter future for KM (knowledge management)."

Blogs provide such an environment. Udell argues that bloggers are like Pavlovian dogs with respect to Google's PageRank algorithm, in that they will compete fiercely to have their blog ranked highly. To succeed requires sharing lots of information useful to others, and having them link to your blog, thereby building your reputation. While this could be the motivation for some bloggers, I think Udell stretches the argument to fit his hypothesis.

In Udell's opinion, the key stakeholders in the organization who have the most to gain by sharing information are the project managers. Udell brings up this insight by way of introducing Traction Software, self-proclaimed as "The leader in Enterprise Weblog software" on its website. I will post more on different enterprise weblog software companies later.

I am becoming aware that the idea of a monolithic "blogosphere" or blogging community does not hold as I learn more about weblogs. The popular press, to the extent that it has considered blogging at all, has focused on personal weblogs. People writing personal weblogs adhere to an irreverent, frank writing style. These personal bloggers are very open about who they are and what they think or feel at the time of the post. Uyen Vu states that weblogs have been adopted "...at first among narcissists given to detailing how they're toilet training their pets, then among experts and researchers who use blogs to exchange news, research updates and ideas with their peers and aficionados. These days, CEOs are getting in on the act as a way to bond with customers and workers." ["How online diaries change knowledge management." Canadian HR Reporter, 16(18), Oct 20, 2003, 1-6 accessed from ABI/Inform on DIALOG]

This personal blogging culture will not translate directly into appropriate conduct for blogging in a business culture. This explains to me the number of articles warning about the "dangers" (still pretty overblown language) of corporate blogging. Companies do have to examine their culture and decide whether weblogs are an appropriate tool for them.

I am a firm believer that technology alone cannot change culture, so if your company cannot share information now, blogging won't appreciably change the situation. However, blogs certainly could be an important component in an effort to change company culture by creating new opportunities to share information.

This blog is published through Corante.com, a website that "...is a leading news and business intelligence service on technology and science that's read by many of the sector's top entrepreneurs, executives, funders, followers and thinkers. An information
service that delivers targeted news coverage of multiple verticals via its website and email newsletters, Corante is also helping to pioneer the emergence of blogging as an influential and important form of reportage, analysis and commentary." [from the "About" section of their website]

"Faustian Bargain" discusses corporate blogging from the point of view of the PR department. While PR-types might initially have misgivings about "unauthorized" messages about the company, Michael O'Connor Clarke points out the benefits of a direct communication channel between interested outside parties and your more dynamic and engaged employees.

With a little employee direction, this channel can remain unfiltered and vital for both the employees and the external readers. O'Connor Clarke's rules for blogging employees:
1. Stop and think before you post
2. Don't disclose proprietary information (directly or by allusion)
3. You represent the company, and the reader may not distinguish between you and the company.
4. Be real, don't try to be a promoter. Readers will spot a faker quickly.
5. If you get a question in your comments section of your blog that you are not comfortable handling, route the inquiry to the appropriate department.

Rosencrance, Linda. "Watch your weblog." Computerworld, 38 (44), November 1, 2004 40-41.

The author points out four areas of concern about use of weblogs in a corporate environment. Through a combination of effective policies and employee training, these difficulties can be avoided. The areas of concern are:
1. Libel and trade libel
2. Trade secret or confidential information disclosure
3. Any off-hand or casual statements made about the business that could be used in litigation against the company
4. Employees who are "loose cannons" who stray from the company line

Obviously, if attorneys can obtain weblog content during the discovery portion of litigation, it is important that company-related weblogs focus on company business. This usage differs dramatically from the "personal journal" approach that constitutes one of the popular images of weblog usage.

However, I believe this article tries to close the gate after the horse has left the barn. The fact is, weblogging is out there. In Computerworld several years ago there were a number of gloom-and-doom commentaries on employees connecting to the corporate network from home over wireless connections, and the potential catastrophe of a hacker attack through this unsecured network access. Yes, this can happen. No, the company cannot both free their employees to work more flexibly and lock down security. And yes, the IT department needs to learn to deal with this new, unauthorized technology.

In subsequent posts, I hope to provide short annotations of articles presenting both the positive and negative aspects of business weblog collaboration. Hopefully, this account will supplement the material I will present during my classroom discussion the weekend of December 4-5.