enterprise blogging systems

idea management

Business Development Ideas

Government Blogging and Citizen Influence

jim wilde — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 13:59:26 +0000

"Government Blogging" by Shel Israel on red couch.

"The simple answer is to be closer with their constituents.

In government, it may be starting from the top down, but it is starting. I think it will be most valuable, when the middle of government services& mdash;people like Nadia—start to blog, but some like Miliband are demonstrating that a blog is like an old fashioned town meeting, where impassioned community members get to stand up and speak and be heard in front of the elected officials who are entrusted to serve them.

Finally, there is another reason why government will be joining the conversation. Citizen groups are blogging and in some cases starting to gain the same influence as local lobbying groups."

Shel's last point is a good one. We've been working with an engineering/architectural firm that provides services to governments on a local/state/federal level as well an on an international one. The firm is seeing more and more citizen groups blogging. What's intersting is that the firm has traditionally ignored citizen groups. However, the firm now gets it that these groups have real influence and need to be part of the process for winning and sustaining contracts.

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Social Media:

community software management

connecting with customers

Purpose Driven Social Network Software

jim wilde — Mon, 02 Oct 2006 19:54:04 +0000

Christopher Carfi, The Social Customer Manifesto, has pulled together ten good reasons why business development managers should consider using social network solutions and community software solutions. I've snagged the bullets but go a head and read his full post.

"The Top Ten Ways Businesses, Associations and Organizations Can Use Social Networking Applications"

"Here are the top ten (and two bonus) ways that businesses, associations and organizations can use social networking applications in the professional sphere. Some of these are ways to use social networking to connect with customers and members, some focus on internal organizational communication, some focus on the network as the way to find knowledge within the organization. Enjoy!"

Customer and Member Relationship Development
Customer Support (Connecting The Customer With The Right Resource)
Use The Network To Find An Expert Or Locate Implicit Knowledge
Ease Post-Acquisition Integration
Provide The "Whole Product"
Understand And Visualize The Actual Communication Paths Within The Organization
Supercharge Meeting Facilitation And Preparation
Increasing The Value And Extend The "Shelf Life" Of Conferences
Pull Together The "All-Star Team" That's Right For This Customer
Share Knowledge
Differentiate Your Service With Brand You
Prepare For Coming Demographic Changes In Business"

Give us a call, 973.433.4007, to learn how the wisdom of crowds can help your business become more profitable.

We've been setting up social networking applications and community solutions, mostly on intranets, for the last three years. Even though there are many good reasons to use them, the biggest obstacles we run in to are that most people are afraid to express themselves in the narrative sense and they are afraid of looking stupid for posting half-baked ideas.

Here are a couple more reasons to use social network systems:

Innovation Platform
Idea Management
A Process Network that fills in gaps where IT systems are too inflexible.

Tags:

wisdom of crowds

social web applications

xml

privacy

social customers

Social Media:

community software applications

Services Science

jim wilde — Wed, 24 Aug 2005 08:48:41 +0000

Here's an article, "A Techie, Absolutely, and More" about new areas of research in computer science called services science.

... research is spiced with anthropology, sociology, psychology, psycholinguistics - as well as observing cranky couples trade barbs in computer instant messages. ... in a hot niche called computer-supported cooperative work, which studies the ways people use technology to communicate and collaborate in work groups and social networks.

We, as in Advancing Insights, don't have a real budget for R&D. However, we have a rich source for new ideas and collaboration. We use the open source communities that we are involved as a model to learn cooperative strategies. What we've learned from the open-source movement and the blogosphere is that people want to contribute to endeavors of mutual benefit. We pass it on one
person, small business or big business at a time.

"You've got to constantly keep learning, I've got to constantly upgrade my skills. That's what gives you that edge."

What about you?

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collaborative software

Business Development Ideas

Enterprise Blogging for Cooperative Strategies

jim wilde — Thu, 28 Jul 2005 14:37:28 +0000

In Seth's post The magic word, I think the confusion he talks about is pervasive and applies to many of us outside of marketing. In the following posts, both Seth and John write about mutually shared goals inside and outside of the organization and how to achieve them.

The magic word from Seth,

No, it's not please.
It's ego.

I meet a lot of confused marketers, and the primary cause of their confusion is that they believe that money equals motivation.

That employees can be persuaded to do things by paying them more and that consumers will buzz something if you reward them with cash.

The next time you're in a meeting and someone pulls out a spreadsheet, realize that you're about to hear about money/value = ego. That's fine. But what about everyone else? Ignore the rest and they'll feed their ego somewhere else.

Confronting the Offshoring Challenge John Hagel, Edge Perspectives, says American businesses are too focused on efficiency and not enough on growth and innovation.

...companies need to re-conceive their roles in terms of accelerating capability building. In an increasingly competitive global economy, the reason people will join companies is because they believe that they can get better faster by working with others in a company rather than acting as free agents. If companies don’t deliver against this expectation, they will find it harder and harder to attract and retain talented employees. Delivering against this expectation will require a much greater focus on growth and innovation, rather than narrow efficiency. It will also require deeper skill in collaborating with other highly specialized companies to get better even faster.

Enterprise Blogging for Cooperative Strategies.

We are that specialized company! We provide the necessary tools and services to create cooperative environments so that employees can work together internally and externally with specialized companies as well as customers to get better even faster.

Additional resources and information on:

IBM Previews Enterprise Blogging Tools. IBM is throwing more weight behind Weblogging as an enterprise collaboration application with two upcoming versions of new blogging tools, provided as part of its Workplace collaboration platform.

Enterprise Blogging Great references and articles about enterprise blogging.

Our Enterprise Blogging Tools and Services

Stratagility Our south east Asia partner.

If you are interested in enterprise social software, then read the article "A Practical Guide to Social Networks" from the March 2005 issue of the Harvard Business Review. The lead author is Rob Cross.

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orchestrating resources

Social Media:

Social Network Software

jim wilde — Sun, 10 Jul 2005 14:02:13 +0000

Advancing Insights provides - social network software - digital publishing tools and services to businesses. Business managers and project teams use them as tools to improve innovation, productivity, and customer service. These tools are a class of social network software. Social Network Software and Community Solutions connects employee wisdom with business strategies to create, innovate, and adapt offerings, processes, and skills, which prevents lost opportunities and the loss of talented people to better-positioned, more-interesting organizations.

The Power of Weblogs or Blogs - Social Software

"The power of weblogs comes not just from their easy publishing and management of the content, but the social networks of readers and writers that weblogs participate in, as well as the ways in which audience is addressed by the weblog writer in order to participate in the conversations of the Web. Understanding the power of personal webpublishing through blogs is not accomplished by conceptualizing them as huge documentation repositories; it is their ability to support ever-expanding networked connections in the mega conversations on the Internet. In thousands of groups across the blogosphere, communities are defined through the memes they create, not a specific virtual location, a "conversational mess," as Tom Coates describes it, enabled by permalinks, RSS, and trackbacks." Read more...

Blogs

Blogs: A blog is basically a journal that is available on the web (it can be private or public). The activity of updating a blog is "blogging" and someone who keeps a blog is a "blogger." Blogs are typically updated daily using software that allows people with little or no technical background to update and maintain the blog. Postings on a blog are almost always arranged in chronological order with the most recent additions featured most prominantly. From the WSJ, Businessweek, Fortune and countless other publications - Blogs - corporate or personal are influencing more people. ...more info.

Enterprise Blogs

Enterprise Blogs - Enterprise Blogs are a collection of blogs that are tied together using a shared content repository. Enterpise Blogs provide greater security, functionality, and taxonomies (structured vocabularies) as well as folksonomies (unstructured). Enterprise blogs serve multiple purposes such as: knowledge and idea management, PR, marketing and customer interactions, as well as providing an informal platform for people to collaborate across the organization. Enterprise Blogs should have an internal bookmarking and tagging system similar to del.icio.us. for users to find, discover, and share internal and external information. Enterprise blogs should have an internal work-flow process and be able to support static and dynamic pages/posts, forums, wikis, and podcasts, as well as multiple methods for organizing content (posts, pages, groups, sections, books, and content type and terms).

Enterprise blogs or enterprise blogging platforms (comparison of systems). Enterprise blogs should have all of these features and functions:

user administration,
advanced and group publishing, revision control with rollback,
security for publishing internally (inside the organization) and externally (what the public sees and commnets on)
workflow management, multi-threaded discussion capabilities within blogs, wikis, forums, group chat
private messaging,
trackbacks on all external posts
auto discovery of internal links
full wysiwyg (WIZ-zee-wig) editor for posts and comments (configurable)
news aggregation on topic and keyword,
metadata functions with controlled (taxonomies) vocabularies
tagged - folksonomies (internal and external)
hooks and links (API's) to 3rd party services (del.icio.us, technorati, flickr, et al). These API's are important to weed through - recommendation engine - the "conversational mess" to find and discover ideas that are revelant to your task at hand.
XML/RSS publishing for content sharing purposes.
Granular permissions and role based privilegeson all posts for view/edit/change functions
Forums - Archives - Surveys - Polls - Webforms
Support for a diverse range of projects, from simple blogs and wikis to large community-driven meeting places with hundreds of blogs and e-commerce.

Note: We support e-commerce in our enterprise blogging platform not so much to sell external products (you can), but as a way for organizations to hold auctions for internal resources. Ross Mayfield has an interesting post from the Collaborative Technologies Conference in NYC that covers ideas from Thomas Malone, author of "The Future of Work". ("Intel Scenario: internal market for manufacturing capacity. Plan managers sell futures for producs they could produce at specific times in the future, Sales people trade it to be able to sell to external customers, prices fluctuate as knowledge of supply and demand changes, prices determine which products actually get produced in the factories and who gets to sell them. Could this let them produce faster, cheaper and better matched to demand? Enable greater profitability and innovation?" ...read more about Malone.

Taxonomy and Tagging

Taxonomy - Folksonomy - Tagging Are methods to classify and categorize information. Check out del.icio.us for an example of social tagging or broad folksonomies. Ideascape supports all three methods as well as both hierarchical and relational classification using a robust taxonomy based on your vocabulary. Users can use any combination of structured or unstructured methods to find and use information.

Follow this great discussion on tagging and folksonomy from Bokardo web blog.

What's a Tag?

Think of a tag as a simple category name. People can categorize their posts, photos, and links with any tag(s) that makes sense.

What is a TagCloud?

TagClouds are a visual display of tags that depict, by size, the popularity of a given tag/term with the largest being the most popular. Clicking on the tags link will display a list excerpts from posts based on the selected tag keyword.TagClouds are created automatically from tags and published on your site so others can easily find and discover information. Ideascape supports individual and group TagClouds as well as internal ones and external ones - del.icio.us tags. For more info see... Tagclouds and cultural changes and Clay Shirky Dynamic Growth of Tag Clouds

How do you trust tags? Wuffie baby.

Cory Doctorow's "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" tells a gripping, fast-paced story that hinges on thought-provoking extrapolation from today's technical realities. This is the sort of book that captures and defines the spirit of a turning point in human history when our tools remake ourselves and our world. The story is about a population that doesn't have any need for money. Instead, what they aspire to is "Whuffie", which serves some of the functions of currency, but is much closer to such concepts as "the approval of your peers" or "respect" - think open source software communities. In other words, wuffie is your digital credibility.

Social Bookmarking

" Feedback, Motivation and Collectivity in a Social Bookmarking System" by Ericka Menchen. "Abstract: Social bookmarking systems let users store, classify and share their bookmarks online. They are global grassroots classification systems. Classification is a basic mental process that determines how we see (or ignore) the world. The first social bookmarking system was del.icio.us which came online in late 2003. I performed a pilot study of a survey of del.icio.us users focusing on feedback, motivation, and collectivity. The paper linked below is an abbreviated version of a term paper submitted for a graduate methods course in communication this past spring term. I plan to continue researching this topic for my master's thesis over the coming year." You can read the presentation on watch it as a QuickTime movie on Ericka's site.

Blogosphere

The interconnected realm of blogs. Stories - conversations are said to ''gain traction" in the blogosphere when numerous bloggers comment on them, and link to one another's comments. (Yes, the blogosphere can feel a bit insular and self-referential at times.) Sites like Bloglines.com and Technorati.com maintain lists of blog posts. Read more here...

Attention Stream

A relatively new concept, an attention stream gathers all the content that shares the same tag, regardless of where it lives on the Internet, and presents it on the same page. For an event like Supernova, that might include photos and blog entries that have been tagged ''Supernova." It provides an impressionistic picture of what people are thinking and talking about, as well as what they're taking snapshots of. See my post on Accidental Magic.

Filters

They will be necessary to help sort through the mess of choices that the long tail presents. Professional critics are filters, but so is the NetFlix.com commendation service, software that suggests movies you might enjoy, based on how you've rated movies you've already seen. Friends and family members might also be filters, pointing you to content they think you'll be interested in. Future versions of TiVo, for instance, might let you designate a friend who'd help fill your set-top box with the best foreign films or cooking shows. See my post on Missed Opportunities?

XML

XML - Extensible Markup Language is a simple, very flexible text format derived from SGML (ISO 8879). Originally designed to meet the challenges of large-scale electronic publishing, XML is also playing an increasingly important role in the exchange of a wide variety of data on the Web and elsewhere. ...more info.

Attention.xml

Attention.xml - Steve Gilmore, on attention.xml "An xml feed that describes the usage patterns of reading XML or RSS information. All of this is about the second order of magnitude of RSS information routing that's going to occur as people switch over from a Web-based or browser-based model to an RSS reader or consumption pattern." Listen to the podcast.

RSS

RSS - Really Simple Syndication is an XML-based format for content distribution. Ideascape offers several RSS feeds for use in news readers and Web logs (blogs). These feeds include headlines, summaries and links back to your content. ...more info.

Search engines love RSS feeds which means your content has immediate and broad exposure on the Net! Staffers and others blog about company and product news from your site using Ideascape. They also link to other blogs, and encourage links to theirs. Those relationships in the blogosphere drive Google search results -- and, so, orders.

RSS Readers: Idescape has a built-in RSS reader and aggregator. You can read and scan RSS feeds for keywords, such as your company name, offerings, news, ideas, etc., as well as categorize them based on your descriptions. You can add feeds lly from the any Web site by clicking on the "Subscribe" or the "XML" orange button next to the feed.

RSS Readers: Ideascape has a built in RSS aggregator. Click on syndication for an example. RSS feeds are set for sources (news sites and blogs) and categories. Users can set the timing of each feed down to an hour or up to a month.

Trackbacks

Trackbacks were designed to provide a method of notification between websites: it is a method of person A saying to person B, "This is something you may be interested in." To do that, person A sends a TrackBack ping to person B. ...more info.

Wikis

Wiki is a piece of server software that allows users to freely create and edit Web page content using any Web browser. Wiki supports hyperlinks and has a simple text syntax for creating new pages and crosslinks between internal pages on the fly. ...more info. An example of the biggest wiki, wikipedia.

Podcasting

Podcast: Podcasting is making audio files (most commonly in mp3 format) online in a way that allows software to automatically download the files for listening at the user's convenience. ...more info.

* The Common podcasts; approximately half of them
- Add value
- Respect copyright
- Follow the law
- Cite and link
- Discuss with your manager

Roadcasting

Roadcasting: A new type of radio - Roadcasting. Roadcasting is collaborative, mobile radio. "It is a system, currently in prototype state, that allows anyone to have their own radio station, broadcasted among wirelessly capable devices, some in cars, in an ad-hoc wireless network. The system can become aware of individual preferences and is able to choose songs and podcasts that people want to hear, on their own devices and car stereos and in devices and car stereos around them." read more...

Chat - self-explanatory

Forums - self-explanatory

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community software applications

Business Development Ideas

Principles of tagging

jim wilde — Fri, 08 Jul 2005 17:57:14 +0000

Tagsonomy is introducing a new member, Don Turnbull - an Assistant Professor in the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin. He teaches a couple of courses related to issues that could revolve around tagging, including a course on what he calls "Knowledge Management Systems" as well as "Web Information Retrieval, Evaluation & Design" and even about designing information systems from the perspective of "Information Architecture & Design".

Don's first post is on tag_good vs. tag_bad?

"Tags are good because:

They show a user’s view of the data,
When in a hypertext system, they provide easy ways to sort and browse data,
They help with search because they may offer additional keywords for a resource that aren’t in the original resource,
Experts are not good at describing every possible keyword or concept that may apply
Tags are additional (meta)data that can be analyzed by information retrieval systems

Tags are bad because:

Experts may be a little better at describing resources (assuming that experts are the one posting and creating the resources in question),
Tags may be too focused on one community of users for wide utility,
Once tagged, a dynamic resource may change, but the tags may not necessarily be updated to reflect this change,
Tags are just another system of resource identification to spam, spoof and game (especially tags as links to Web pages)".

Although this covers his post, the richness is in the comments. Since we support internal tags as well as external tags in 3rd party systems (del.icio.us and technorati, et al), we face many of the mentioned situations. However, our primary purpose is to deliver a rich-information environment that connects people, places, and things to ideas and information. We never stop trying to make you the first to know the meaning and context of:

who, what, where, when, how, and why,
questions, answers, concepts, solutions, problems and ideas,
to get your work done.

Tagging in general is used heavily in Ideascape as a method to make it easy to define information from a users point of view. ...learn more about tagging and social software, and Missed Opportunities?

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What's so productive about blogging?

jim wilde — Wed, 22 Jun 2005 19:50:59 +0000

You can find/discover ideas from the web/blogosphere and shape them into whatever or wherever they fit or makes sense. In this case, I am talking about a simple idea for businesses to interact with customers that has far-ranging implications on work and play.

Wikis, Weblogs and RSS: What Does the New Internet Mean for Business? from Knowledge@Wharton

The Internet may be entering a new phase:

decentralize control inside companies,
enable employees to collaborate more easily,
drive efficiency [and innovation].

On the marketing front James Cherkoff from Collaborative Marketing Services, has Scoble's Test. " Scoble mentioned that a company that was prepared to let its customers add commentary to the front page of its website was a modern organisation." James adds that we, as customers, always check around, google, technorati, et al, for background information on products/services. " Companies that understand the simple fact that their customers are swapping notes about them regardless of their involvement are going to be at an advantage in many ways. At the very least they will be living in the real world - at the very best they can embrace it as part of their marketing".

The Scoble test is one of the main building blocks for invention and innovation. There are many great ideas floating around the net 24/7 that every business has the opportunity to participate in.

BTW If you have not read James's manifesto, " Open Source Marketing Goes ‘Outside-In’ ", I highly recommend it, even if you're not in marketing. His ideas have many applications to improve internal communications. I wrote a post, Connect people, places, and things to ideas and information yesterday that goes over the resources we are using to find/discover information and how they can be applied in business.

Internal communication at a dead end is a post from Corporate Blogging about the results of an internal communications survey of Scandinavian companies. Their answers paint a dark picture.

"The survey points to three main problems.

Top management is neither visible nor credible. Just 4 out of 10 think the top execs do what they say.
Strategic communication doesn't succeed. Only 50 % of the employees say they know the goals and strategies of their company.
50 % feel that they are not enough informed about changes in the company."

There you have it, from what is happening on the net to how businesses can use new tools to communicate. What's your next step?

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Dynamic Group Blogs

jim wilde — Fri, 03 Jun 2005 13:30:06 +0000

Since ideas are everywhere, both inside and outside of your organization, there is an immediate, urgent need for new tools that can harness ideas, concepts, information on the group level. Markets are getting more and more ephemeral, and you need to get the information you need in the right place at the right time to be able to make fast decisions and grab your 15 minutes of fame before your opportunity is lost. Having an environment where employees can easily find and connect ideas at the right time is essential for staying on top of this increasingly volatile marketplace. To get another shot at fame requires re-invention and innovation.

Here's a demo of an enterprise 2.0 system.

Ideascape is a robust journaling system with a heavy emphasis on tagging and content/user management, with a blog at it's front-end. It is a deep product, and includes functionality well beyond blog management with much of the complexity hidden from users.

Further differentiating Ideascape from simpler blog systems is its intended audience. Ideascape is designed to be used by multiple users and groups and incorporates a sophisticated permissions system to enforce security. The product is also built for scalability and can manage hundreds of thousands of entries, well beyond the scale of most hobbyist tools.

A Conversation with James Surowiecki author of "the Wisdom of Crowds": The Promise and Perils of Collaborative Tools by Stowe Boyd from Corante. Surowieki, "the more we interact, the more we will be influenced by each other, and therefore, the independence of thought that we know is critical to good collective decision-making can begin to fade away. So, finding a balance between the two is important, especially when you consider technologies like the Internet."

However, John Hagel from edge perspectives looks at the noise to signal ratio on the longtail, Quality and the Long Tail, "...the sheer quantity (rather than the quality) of items increases as we move down the tail and the ready availability of information about these items diminishes - that's what increases the difficulty of connecting with relevant resources as we move down the tail."

Ideascape's dynamic group blogs address group think and "connecting with relevant resources" using open API's that seamlessly interact with 3rd party services such as del.icio.us, technorati, furl, pubsub, et al, which makes it easier to discover a whole new level of independent, diverse ideas and resources.

Peripheral vision and ambient knowledge by Lee from headshift, "...techniques such as social tagging, feed aggregation, presence sharing, etc. can help package up small pieces of potentially relevant information into feeds and trails that we can process with peripheral vision." Enabling us to make sense of information relevant to the task at hand, "Where the focus is not on sharing knowledge but on enabling better decision making, creating the conditions for innovation and understanding the way we make sense of our world."

As Ideascape penetrates further into the enterprise, we see customers increasingly looking to build not just blogs but complete corporate communications systems. Ultimately, I believe group blogs will grow out of organizations needing better, more flexible ways to communicate and to compete for products, services, and talents.

So, in the end we need new ideas and stories for people to act on. The flip side is "We don't have to care, part II" and "We don't have to care, part I".

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wisdom of crowds

social web applications

xml

privacy

gated social networks

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Open Source Software Lessons for Business

jim wilde — Tue, 17 May 2005 13:01:19 +0000

For any person that is interested in developing a website or any piece of software for that matter, they need to check out the oss projects that are scattered all over the net. Check out the leading tags on del.icio.us to get started.How Linux Could Overthrow Microsoft by Charles Ferguson, from Technology Review.com - " With some improvements, the open-source model could even become the dominant global production model for software."Read what else is going about MS from Dan Gillmor on "More on Microsoft's Pay-to-Fix-Our-Mess Business Model". Well, light my LAMP (linux, apache, mysql, php)! Who would have thunk it that little ol' oss projects are displacing the software giants. Software is a service! The businesses that are using Ideascape are more interested in the so-called holes to hang their pictures on than in the drill that makes the holes. In other words, ideas are everywhere and they, clients, would rather be ideascaping instead of screwing around with software. In fact, there are many lessons for any business to learn from the oss community (Boston Consulting on OSS). From project management to innovation and operations.Seth's New eBook is ready, should be your next stop.

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IBM is catching on~

Fri, 13 May 2005 19:48:19 +0000

Looks like IBM is catching on to what we've been talking about with Ideascape! It will be interesting to see how their experiment works; we'll be waiting for the calls, emails, and posts to follow...

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Cooties, Terriorists & Blogs

jim wilde — Fri, 13 May 2005 15:31:38 +0000

"Viruses, worms, Trojan horses, Remote Access Trojans, hackers, organized crime, terrorists, and others continue to make the Internet a dangerous place due to fraud, extortion, denials of service, identity theft, espionage, and other crimes. Now, blogging is emerging as a threat to the Internet user community."November 11, 2004, Fisk Bait, Posted by Michael O'Connor Clarke - "What fresh hell is this? A news release hit the wires today from Dublin-based Research and Markets . Here’s a tiny sample: "Companies Need to Raise Employee Awareness Regarding Blogging and Associated Threats … Blogging is rapidly emerging as a threat to Internet users.""Blogs are like terrorists? Like viruses? Sorry. My flabber is too gasted to permit any kind of rational response here."BTW The report Mike refers to cost $1500. The unfounded lameness continues with a new report form eMarketer.Steve does a great job of pointing out the what eMarketer neglected to talk about. Let the Blog Bashing Begin from Steve Rubel, Micro Persuasion "Pete Blackshaw predicted this would happen and he was right. A blog bashing movement is underway. In a new report, eMarketer is questioning whether businesses will ever blog. They're following the effervescent Nick Denton. He got the ball rolling with his "Up with People-like" quotes in Sunday's New York Times."Every day I learn new ideas from blogs. The idea that blogs are dangerous is only reinforcing that blogs are a force to be reckoned with, so to speak. Blogs are not a trend - at least not one that is going to go away. Anymore than Rock and Roll is temporary insanity. Hey, hey, my my. Do you think it's possible to stop the tsunami-like wave of transparency, of everyman having a chance to be heard and taking it? I don't think so! If you're smart, you will embrace it. That is what we are doing with Ideascape; helping businesses embrace and employ this and other emerging technologies to not only keep their businesses on the edge but to use it to their advantage. These reports are silly at best, a little damaging at worst for those that don't accept the reality. Hell, we sell enterprise blogging systems to big companies. You won't see their blogs since most of them are being implemented internally at first. I tell you, even the execs are having a blast using them. As they gain confidence in the idea of blogging, you'll see a whole new wave of blogs. Sure, you can believe the doomsayers and do nothing. And you can believe your bottom line will stay the same as well.

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Key Advantage of Open Source is Not Cost Savings

jim wilde — Thu, 12 May 2005 10:17:28 +0000

"Computer Economics recently conducted a survey of visitors to its website regarding the perceived advantages in the use of open source software. Although not a scientific sample, the results are nevertheless startling."OSS developers and users have known all along, that "Reduced dependence on software vendors appears more important than low cost".* Lower total cost of ownership* Reduced dependence on software vendors* Easier to customize* Higher level of security* Do not see a significant advantageFor a starter on open source projects, check out sourceforge.net.If you have plans on using OSS, here are a few suggestions:Find out the number of developers. Do not let one developer through you off - especially if the program/code is something you can maintain and extend yourself. Get to know, via email, chat, forums the key developers.How active are the mailing-lists, forums. This is important. It shows the level of interests in the project as well as future plans.Get involved. Ask questions. Donate your time and code. Sponsor enhancements. Enjoy!

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Gave Ya 'Rithmatic, now here's Readin' and Writin'

jim wilde — Fri, 29 Apr 2005 11:57:31 +0000

More on the fundamentals of being a better manager/person in business.Create an intention calendar from Creating Passionate Users."There is an expression, "You are what you eat." And it's true. It's also the case that "You are what you think." Every single thought in our heads is created by nerve impulses that travel between neurons."From the Mozilla Foundation, I use the Sunbird Calendar project to keep me focused on my intentions."The Sunbird project is a redesign of the Calendar component. Our goal is to produce a cross platform standalone calendar application based on Mozilla's XUL user interface language. At the moment the Sunbird name is a project name. It is not official and may change in the future."5 Minutes Daily = Work Life Reinvention, "The Daily Five Minutes will reinvent and uplift the connection you have with your employees; so much so that your relationships with them will never be the same again — they will be far better." Thanks Management Craft for the link.Anyway, I came across Windsor Media via Business Pundit. On Windsor Media they have an interview with Laurence Haughton, about his recent book, "It's Not What You Say...It's What You Do".Smart Man Online: Laurence Haughton , "We know you're going to take some valuable business insight away with you today... read on to hear what Laurence Haughton says about following through in business:Lip-sticking: Early on in your book, you advise managers to "Just make it a policy that when making important decisions everyone must put their thoughts in writing.” This is a powerful statement, which you go on to explain in the book, but...could you give Lip-sticking's readers a glimpse into why writing goals, decisions, and even thoughts, down on paper is so useful?"I like the idea of writing things down - even though it is a hassle. Over time my writing gets easier and so does the clarity of my thoughts. I recently read "Why Business People Speak Like Idiots, A Bullfighters Guide" and found in my own writing the typical bs that we hear every day in corporate-speak. What's fun here is that the authors developed a script that works with MS Word. You can run the script and it will flag the corp bs and offer alternatives. You can download the script from the author's site.For more background information on bs check out 800CEOREAD "Awful lot of BS floating around". Maybe the biggest problem is not writing things down but the basic way we communicate (too many meaningless, empty words) with each other. From Got a Good Strategy? Now Try to Implement It is a post I wrote about tying strategy to the daily work activities of employess. In others, write a strategy that makes sense and that people can understand.

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