I came across this post from Andrew Gent today, regarding ‘Management’s’ precoccupation with measuring the value of KM in their organisation, and – for example – using ROI as a measure of the effectivenes of CoPs. I suspect this will resonate with most KM practitioners, who must balance the demands of their managers to provide an empirical measure of value with the cummulative benefits to the organisation of establishing a learning and sharing environment. In other words, you don’t dig up a tree to measure the roots in order to verify that it is growing!
Came across this today, which seems to be gathering a body of support. I like the sentiments; pity it’s not enforceable!
Joseph Smarr, Marc Canter, Robert Scoble, and Michael Arrington have authored a bill of rights for users of the social web. The bill states:
We publicly assert that all users of the social web are entitled to certain fundamental rights, specifically:
- Ownership of their own personal information, including:
- their own profile data
- the list of people they are connected to
- the activity stream of content they create;
- Control of whether and how such personal information is shared with others; and
- Freedom to grant persistent access to their personal information to trusted external sites.
Sites supporting these rights shall:
- Allow their users to syndicate their own profile data, their
friends list, and the data that’s shared with them via the service,
using a persistent URL or API token and open data formats;
- Allow their users to syndicate their own stream of activity outside the site;
- Allow their users to link from their profile pages to external identifiers in a public way; and
- Allow their users to discover who else they know is also on their
site, using the same external identifiers made available for lookup
within the service.
I’ve recently seen a flurry of blogs about the merits (or not) of Facebook as a social networking environment. I was stirred to action when I read Elsua’s blog this morning, which in turn refers to the question posed by Mitch Joel "Can you claim to be in social media without having a Facebook account".
Now, whilst I don’t disagree with many of the points made by Elsua, or for that matter Euan Semple, who writes about Facebook being all froth and no substance, I would like to pose the following question:
If you’re serious about Social Media, and profess to be an ‘expert’, where there is a major gathering of like-minded socially-active individuals, can you afford to NOT be there?
Yes, there are a lot of shortcomings with Facebook, but if you want to comment about it with any authority, you need to be a part of it, not a bystander watching on the periphery.
