Paul: Collaboration

Sat, 04 Feb 2006 21:03:51 GMT

It will be interesting to keep an eye on this. I don't see much of a chance for this in our shop.

Forresterâ€™s corporate blogging solutions evaluation, Part 1. I'm conducting a review of corporate blogging solutions this quarter and could use your help in the process. Forrester has been doing evaluations -- we call them waves of technology solutions for the past few years and we thought this... [Charlene Li's Blog]

Thu, 11 Aug 2005 01:43:04 GMT

Wiki for Business? You bet!. I have now had the experience of using a Wiki information system for a variety of purposes and I am entirely sold. If you need to build up and information source with other people, it can be the easiest and fastest method.

Anyone can edit a wiki page to add or change information, but you can put the wiki behind a password to limit access. One friend is using an internal wiki to collect and share information on the myriad of procedures that staffers must use to process loans with a variety of banks.

This posting from LifeHacker, links to a particularly good article from Information Week magazine on wikis and their use in a business environment.

How To Use Wikis For Business
Over at Information Week, there is a very nice overview/tutorial on the use of Wikis in business. Wikis can make for a good, inexpensive collaboration tool or content management replacement, and this article may help decide if a wiki is right for you.

How To Use Wikis For Business [Information Week]

(Via Lifehacker.)

By noemail@noemail.org (Douglas). [Career Opportunities: The High-Tech Career Handbook]

Sun, 10 Jul 2005 17:49:11 GMT

Slingbox.

From the Slingbox website......

"What is the SlingboxTM?

The SlingboxTM Personal Broadcaster is a consumer electronics product that a user connects to their personal TV source (including a TiVo, cable box, analog cable, satellite receiver, or virtually any other AV device) and to their high-speed network/internet connection (including DSL, cable modem, or other solution) for the purpose of "placeshifting the content" - enabling them to view their TV programming on any device. Once connected, the user can watch and control their personal TV experience from virtually any computer, PDA or mobile phone. Your TV. Any Device. Any Location."

Now tell me that isn't freaking cool!? Anything that timeshifts or placeshifts (it seems like those aren't even words for some reason...?) is cool in my book now. TiVo starting the timeshift revolution and now I believe slingbox will start the placeshift revolution. I'm a gadget geek and this thing has me going. Slingbox will be available at BestBuy and CompUSA starting tomorrow (Thursday, June 30th) and will run $249 with no montly fees.

[Alex Lowe]

Sat, 21 May 2005 01:12:43 GMT

Google announces â€œMy Googleâ€. Ok, itâ€™s not really called My Google, but a confused name called â€œFusionâ€, but I think you get the idea. Available in the test area of Google Labs, the personalized home pageallows users to choose content (like Gmail, the New... [Charlene Li's Blog]

Sun, 13 Mar 2005 20:28:13 GMT

Blog Hosting - Steps for hosting a blog. The first installment in a range of info guides to help you setup blog hosting for personal and business blogs. Blog hosting : weblog host features Once you have registered your domain name, you will need to find a blog hosting provider. When comparing blog hosts, be sure to look at all ... [Blog Weblog]

Sun, 09 Jan 2005 16:34:06 GMT

Young Cell Users Rack Up Debt, a Message at a Time. In the last two years, text messages have become a rage among teenagers. But text-messaging can be expensive. By By LISA W. FODERARO. [NYT > Technology]

Tue, 04 Jan 2005 00:32:50 GMT

Lessig to revise his book via a Wiki.

Larry Lessig is doing our book idea one better. He's putting the thing (his five-year-old book named Code) up on a Wiki and asking his readers for help in revising it.

[Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger]

Fri, 10 Dec 2004 23:27:44 GMT

Draft of a book proposal.

Shel Israel posted a book proposal draft today. Join the discussion. That's terrifying, to tell the truth, but no more terrifying than sending Tim O'Reilly or Gary Cornell an email pitching them a book project. Blogger]

Fri, 03 Dec 2004 00:44:21 GMT

My Leadership Jotspot is still in development so I was glad to see some analysis that matched my postive feel aobut the product.

JotSpot First Impressions.

Playing with JotSpot was once of the things I'd put off until the book was done. Tonight, I grabbed the intro email (almost 2 months old) and signed in.

One of the first things I wanted to do, naturally enough, was change the machine generated password to something I thought I could remember, so I went searching for the usual Preferences link and sure enough found it. What happened next, however, surprised me. When I clicked on it, I got just another wiki page with an edit button. When I edited the wiki page, I got a form instead of the usual freeform wiki entry box. The preferences forms are completely built inside the JotSpot form system. I liked that right off.

I worked through some of the examples in their cook book to get some experience with their forms. They're pretty slick, using the page metaphor to store data and create applications. I'v been intrigued for a while with this idea of pages as the basis for applications and this gives me some food for thought.

Overall, the execution is professional and things worked pretty well for a beta. There were a few times that I suspected it didn't like Safari (my browser), but I was able to work through the issues. For example, the default editing mode is "WYSIWYG" which requires IE. Seems like that would be easy enough to default to something else when someone is not using IE. Changing my default preferences to "Script Markup" fixed the problem.

The tool panel on the right hand side is context sensitive and customizable. I couldn't find out how to install what JotSpot calls "applications." Applications seem to be pre-packaged sets of forms and pages for a given task (like recruiting). There was a way to browse the gallery, but no way to install them on my Wiki even though some of them looked very cool.

All in all, I spent a fun hour playing around and seeing what Joe Kraus and Graham Spencer have been doing with their free time. I'm curious how JotSpot will be perceived by the market with respect to other wikis like SocialText or Twiki. (Bonus link: Analysis of JotSpot by the Twiki team.)

I think that regardless of feature set, JotSpot has a leg up because they're hosted. It feels like going to a Web site and starting to play around--something people are conditioned to do. JotSpot can thus sell to a marketing or sales person with a corporate credit card without the CIO or IT manager ever being involved. That's a huge win because it removes some significant friction from the transaction. If JotSpot is smart (and Joe and Graham are plenty smart) that's where they'll focus their marketing. Position JotSpot as the no hassle way to get things done that the IT department never seems to get to. They're well on their way with their CookBooks and pre-built applications.

[Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog]

Wed, 17 Nov 2004 23:07:37 GMT

Another social app to try out.

Another .NET app that I've been hearing a lot more about lately is Grouper. It's a private, secure, network of your invited friends. Someone just invited me in. My boss's boss was raving about it. [Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger]

Sat, 30 Oct 2004 20:49:04 GMT

Signed up for this. Loks like it mihgt be a nice product to try out.

Wiki startup JotSpot draws crowd for product beta. A Silicon Valley startup aiming to catapult wikis into the mainstream and transform the editable Web sites into an application development platform has attracted a flood of interest for its product beta. [InfoWorld: Top News]

Thu, 23 Sep 2004 00:24:59 GMT

I really do need to get more involved n why we are not moving in this direction

How Americans use instant messaging.

From the Pew Internet & American Life Project:

2004 Pew Internet & American Life surveys reveal that more than four in ten online Americans instant message. That reflects about 53 million American adults who use instant messaging programs. About 11 million of them IM at work and they are becoming fond of its capacity to encourage productivity and interoffice cooperation.

(Emphasis added.)

[GovTechNews: A government-technology blog]

Wed, 15 Sep 2004 00:27:03 GMT

Microsoft, Polycom team on collaboration products [IDG InfoWorld]

Sat, 07 Aug 2004 21:34:07 GMT

Using Wikis at Workshops. This blog entry about using wikis at face-to-face events to create an ongoing dialogue is interesting to me. The piece describes the use of a Wiki to have participants at a workshop create, on-the-fly, a book about the event. There were over 400 pages of content on the Wiki at the end of the event and then the workshop organizers assembled that into a book with ongoing collaboration of the participants. The O'Reilly folks use a wiki at their conferences, but I'm not sure how many people use it after the event. [Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog]

Wed, 04 Aug 2004 01:55:18 GMT

PowerPoint of Fact III. FC Now reader Cliff Atkinson emailed earlier today about a Financial Times article about the ouster of Rentokil Initial's newly installed CEO -- in part because of "death by PowerPoint." Atkinson respondes by offering some presentation lessons highlighted by the... [Fast Company Now]

Sat, 17 Jul 2004 01:25:48 GMT

Interesting, Just last week I looked at this software when I downloaded and installed "Hello". Google Acquires Picasa, Improves Blogging Tools [Slashdot]

Tue, 15 Jun 2004 02:03:28 GMT

SNIM: Social Network Instant Messaging?.

TechnoBiblio has a great post about the coming convergence of social software and instant messaging in libraries. A must read.

[The Shifted Librarian]

Wed, 19 May 2004 01:03:43 GMT

Wicked (Good) Wikis. Collaboration and Messaging Analyst Stowe Boyd has a seriously great article on wikis in Darwin . Its a good intro to wiki, compares them with weblogs, highlights their emergent properties and role as social tools. ...Wikis are built upon an inherently open model of social interaction and collaboration, with very little constraint placed on the participants. In a sense, this puts the onus back on the members of a project group to self-police: to build structure out of the minimalist forms... [Socialtext]

I also liked this description of blogs

Much of the value of a blog network is the social capital that is built from relationships. People read each others' blogs to see what their friends (and enemies) are up to, and then they add value by linking, commenting and elaborating what is being said. The implicit or explicit "swarmth"[online reputation] that individuals accumulate can be a vital indicator of their worth to the organization — who trusts whose recommendations, whose proposals seem to garner the most attention and who is a respected authority — which can be more effectively managed (if managed is the right word) in the social matrix than in the command-and-control hierarchies that still seem to form the architecture of most businesses. Non-social solutions — such as traditional content management solutions, portals and newsletters — cannot compensate for the missing social dimension that social tools engender. ("Social Tools: Ready For The Enterprise?" Cutter, January 2004)

The same social interactions seem to take place in Wikis, but at a faster pace and with a more intensely collaborative feel. Wiki structure is so open it can be morphed into any of a variety of collaborative modes

Wed, 19 May 2004 00:49:28 GMT

Plogs. Michael Schrage has a great article in CIO on the Virtues of Chitchat, or using a blog for informal IT project communication. He calls an informal project weblog a plog, extolls their benefits for project members and management alike. So... [Ross Mayfield's Weblog]

Tue, 18 May 2004 00:48:48 GMT

100 Conversations with 100 CEOs. This week Red Herring is hosting 100 Conversations with 100 CEOs from the Red Herring 100 on 100 Socialtext Weblogs -- an unprecedented opportunity for direct conversation with leading private companies. Socialtext is facilitating an Eventspace for Red Herring... [Ross Mayfield's Weblog]

Tue, 11 May 2004 02:00:44 GMT

PR Plans in Wiki. Shared spaces with customers is a great way to get things done and build trust. Especially when you use a wiki page for the agreed plan, or statement of work, which you fulfill together, clearly -- through the page. Mike... [Ross Mayfield's Weblog]

Sat, 08 May 2004 17:35:31 GMT

Using a Wiki for knowledge sharing and SQL Server database documentation An article describes using a Wiki for knowledge sharing and database schema documentation. Very nice stuff If I ever do up a Wiki
Jonathan Hodgson

Wed, 05 May 2004 00:41:12 GMT

Customer Relationships, Relatively Speaking. Ross Dawson of Advanced Human Technologies has written a useful piece about the wide range of customer interactions -- and how various technologies can help reinvent customer customer relationships. I like the map that is portrayed in the article

[Fast Company Now]

Thu, 29 Apr 2004 00:16:40 GMT

Need I say more? THIS is the top way to improve collaboration in my organization. And if Gartner says so, it must be so! :)

"IM is among the top strategic technologies for 2005 selected by Gartner.

Given the popularity of instant messaging, enterprises who want to keep employees happy and more productive will need to set policies for the use of instant messaging. In the future IM will be more integrated into applications, rather than an island of online dialog that vapourises when the window is closed. (via Dan Farber ZDNet Australia)" [Smart Mobs]

[The Shifted Librarian]

Wed, 21 Apr 2004 01:17:05 GMT

Eugene Eric Kim: A Manifesto for Collaborative Tools. Eugene Eric Kim makes the case for developing a shared language for collaborative tools:

A shared conceptual framework for collaborative software would provide a common vocabulary for thinking about and discussing these tools, and would also reveal opportunities for standardization. In order to create this framework, we need to identify the commonalities between different collaborative applications.

This is ambitious but very important work. In a followup post on his weblog, Eugene replies to some objections and explains how his group is approaching the problem:

Our approach is to mine for patterns of effective collaboration and to disseminate these patterns widely via a PatternLanguage.

[Seb's Open Research]