Weblog Collaboration Blog

In the same Library Stuff post is a presentation from the Blog Business Summit entitled "Enhancing Internal Communications with Blogs, Wikis, and More."

The presentation lays out how the authors (Nick Fink, Mary Hodder, and Biz Stone) use these technologies in their work life. I thought the presentation was very well done, and had many interesting points.

In this post from Steven Cohen's Library Stuff he mentions that a friend, Andrea, had introduced him to a software called JotSpot. JotSpot provides a hosted service for creating wikis.

Looking at the JotSpot website, I think that JotSpot could do for wikis what hosted software like Blogger has done for weblogs. The ease-of-use functionality (and even the style of the user interface) bear more than a passing resemblance to the Blogger interface.

This would be an excellent service to use for trying out a wiki on a collaborative project. Just look at some of the possible uses for JotSpot listed on the website. More than enough ideas to get the creative juices flowing!

In the November/December 2004 issue of the b/ITe newsletter, Stephen Cohen writes an article about corporate library blogs. Brought to my attention by his Library Stuff weblog, excellent as usual.

This article nicely addresses the types of basic questions you need to answer prior to embarking on a project to create a corporate weblog. You need to have information that must be communicated, you need to understand who will use the blog (internal employees or the general public as well) and how the blog will be used. A mission statement helps to establish the goals of the blog and focus content meaningfully.

I like this article because it puts first things first: get straight what you want to convey, to who, and for what purpose. A corollary objective to be achieved in finding the answers to these questions is: get buy-in from users and your IT support staff. People issues dominate the decision to begin such a project, not technological issues.

The article also points out that one of the primary advantages of blogs over e-mail communication of this information is that the blog groups user comments with the original post for an easily-followed "stream of conversation". Trying to tie all follow-up e-mail replies to an original e-mail can drive you batty! This grouping of like-subject comments also facilitates collaborative efforts among staff members sharing similar interests or expertise.

There's a nice article in the January 10 edition of Computerworld about the work of Bernardo Huberman at Hewlett-Packard. He has developed software algorithms to analyze e-mail flows through an organization in terms of a concept called "business centrality," which measures the visibility of individuals within the organization. Through this analysis, Huberman identified communications patterns that he interpreted as belonging to communities of experts (either de facto or otherwise).

Huberman has also developed software that creates profiles of users based upon their access of documents and Web pages through the computer network. These profiles can then be used to help other users identify experts.

All of this activity is in the patent process, but it is interesting to think about the possibilities. This type of information could help an organization formalize some of its communities of practice and improve communication between the expert community and the larger organization.

One of my favorite blogs is Jenny's "the shifted librarian". Here is a post linking to a page discussing "10 Ways to Use Blogs for Managing Projects."

Jenny's point is that one can substitute "libraries" for "projects". A very valid point. I have read Tom Peters, who says that all professional work in the future will be project work. As librarians are information professionals (aren't we?), we should expect the nature of our work to evolve in a similar direction to the work of other professions.