Weblog Collaboration Blog

I found an interesting entry on this weblog about a "Collaborative Communities of Practice 2004 Online Conference".

Following this link takes you to a page presenting the program for the conference. The abstracts of the presentations on this page provide a pretty good outline of the content covered by this conference. "Collaborative Communities" (or "Communities of Practice") is one of the central concepts of knowledge management, that informal, socially networked communities of experts form around specialized knowledge. KM believes that organizations should foster and tap into these networks in order to develop new solutions. Weblogs represent a simple collaboration tool that businesses can use as part of a knowledge management program. However, I believe it is important to avoid becoming too "techno-centric" in your approach to KM. The most important thing that anyone implementing a KM program can do is to first understand the community members and how they communicate. Technological (or Luddite) solutions will follow naturally by adapting the right tool to the right situation.

This blog, hosted by Rick E. Bruner, is focused on the use of blogs for marketing and customer communications. Mr. Bruner runs his own consulting practice, Excecutive Summary Consulting, that specializes in research and writing services about Internet marketing and media.

The category "Articles about Biz Blogging" in the Business Blog Consulting blog seems to keep regular posts on short articles appearing in the business and popular press regarding the use of blogs as business tools.

I presented a 30-minute discussion of weblogs and their use as business collaboration and communication tools to my LI 841 class this Sunday. During our "play time" in the computer lab, I got a charge out of seeing how many students created a Blogger weblog for themselves. At the beginning of the presentation, I showed how to set up a weblog using Blogger and begin posting within 5 minutes, using a refractory marketing team as an example.

I enjoyed the other presentations as well, particularly Chad Jira's on Cascading Style Sheets and Ginger Shields's on RSS and syndication. I'm sorry I missed Tobin's on setting up a weblog on your own web server using open-source tools (nasty thing about needing to work Saturday morning), but I hope to get an image disk to play with later.

For those who don't know, I am a student at Emporia State University's School of Library and Information Management in Emporia, Kansas. The class for which I generated this blog, LI 841, is titled "Advanced Retrieval & Repackaging for Business & Industry." I will graduate with an MLS in May, 2005, as well as an Information Management Certificate for studies about information management in non-academic (and potentially non-library) environments. I would recommend this program to anyone interested in becoming an information professional or corporate librarian.

Boyd, Stowe. "Wicked (good) wikis." Darwin online, February 1, 2004.

This short article by Stowe Boyd talks about wikis and compares them with weblogs, with wikis providing "...a faster pace and ...a more intensely collaborative feel" than weblogs.

For those of you in LI 841, I look forward to seeing you at class tonight!

Socialtext offers four different products for business collaboration.
1. Socialtext Workspace is the enterprise-level solution, hosted by Socialtext. It includes enterprise weblog publishing (including the ability to update the weblog via e-mail), wiki collaborative documents/webpages, persistent workspaces for use during meetings, and database/knowledge base and administrative tools.

2. Socialtext Appliance is a hardware device containing all the functionality of Workspace. You can plug the device in behind your corporate firewall, and you have a secure collaboration software solution for blogging, wikis, etc.

3. Socialtext Eventspace is a collaboration tool tailored for conferences. It allows conference organizers to set weblogs, wikis, and event spaces. The content generated can be accessed later from persistent workspaces. There are also chat features.

4. Kwiki is Socialtext's open source offering. The company developed Socialtext products as extensions of the Kwiki open source project. Kwiki is highly customizable; the base module is an extremely simple wiki, and all kinds of features and functionality are available as plug-ins to make your Kwiki into the wiki you desire.

Of course, Socialtext has its own blog!

The company culture at Socialtext is different from what I saw at the Traction Software webpages. Socialtext consciously avoids the annoying ® symbols trademarking every product name. They even seem to make fun of the competition over this in a disclaimer on their homepage: "Socialtext, Socialtext Workspace, Socialtext Kwikspace and Socialtext Eventspace are trademarks of Socialtext Incorporated. All rights reserved. We put this obvious statement here because we didn't want to have to bother you with ugly TM's everywhere."

Socialtext also states that "Traditional groupware and knowledge management tools use top-down constraints: pre-defined roles, workflows, and categories. Socialtext takes a bottom-up approach to collaborating and empowers people to develop their own solutions."

By contrast, Traction Software writes with a more command/management tone in their write-up: "Traction Software's Enterprise Weblog software is deployed by business and government teams to create an information sharing system that works like the web. Traction provides a dramatically efficient communication, collaboration and knowledge-sharing medium that presents business information and working communications in context, over time."

I thought both Socialtext and Traction Software had interesting product offerings, and I hope to have the opportunity to explore this type of collaboration software more in the future.

These articles were found in a PowerPoint presentation entitled "Corporate Blogging" at Sabrina I. Pacifici's beSpacific.com blogsite.

Kharif, Olga. "Blogging for business.". Business Week online, August 9, 2004. Accessed 12/1/04 at http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/aug2004/tc2004089_3601_tc024.htm

The author provides some examples of the impact blogging can have in the business realm, mostly through the lens of the executive blog. Examples of note: Michael Powell (Chairman of the FCC) started a blog July 7; his first posting drew more than 30,000 readers during its first week. Also, Jeff Pulver, of Free World Dial-Up, used his blog to help successfully lobby Congress to defeat legislation that would have regulated PC-to-PC calls, the service provided by his company. He found through phone calls that Congressional staffers were regular readers of his blog. He was also able to find 100 people to test a new product offering by posting on his blog; he gathered this pool of applicants within 24 hours.

Dickerson, Chad. "Blogging behind the firewall." InfoWorld, May 21, 2004. accessed 12/1/2004 at http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/05/21/21OPconnection_1.html

Here's an example of using blogs for corporate planning:
"At the end of March, my team held an off-site retreat and created a rolling six-month plan for IT initiatives at InfoWorld, which we posted to a Weblog available to all employees. ... Posting this plan on a Weblog made three key things happen. First, it forced the team to strategically organize its IT initiatives into a coherent roadmap fit for broader internal consumption. Next, it created a sense of accountability for these initiatives within the IT team because we had collectively agreed on the initiatives and documented the process. Finally, posting our plan for the entire company to see helped foster a sense of accountability to our non-IT colleagues within the company."

Also, InfoWorld is using blogs to improve business documentation. "Aside from the public Weblog, we maintain our own Weblog for more technical documentation, which has raised our level of internal documentation by several orders of magnitude already."

McMillan, Robert. "HP quietly begins web log experiment." itWorldCanada/IDG News Service, November 23, 2004. Accessed 12/1/2004 at http://www.itworldcanada.com/Pages/Docbase/ViewArticle.aspx?ID=idgml-e0975cf7-8fac-4fd8-926d-b5d37ccf2cb1

According to the author, Hewlett-Packard has rolled out blogs in a very low-key fashion, starting with blogs for software developers on issues such as XML. David Gee, VP of marketing for HP's management software organization, believes that the next employees to start publishing blogs will be the groups dealing with operating systems, compilers, and Linux. HP must play catch-up on blogging with major competitors like Sun Microsystems and Microsoft.

Sabrina's beSpacific.com also has a regularly updated section on blogging. The focus of her site is mostly for law information, but much of the content can be applied in other corporate situations as well.