Stephen Dale's Posterous - Passionate about the social web, collaboration, learning, sharing and trying to make sense of an increasingly complex world.
Web 2 in Local Government – How and why local authorities and Government should be planning to exploit the collaborative features of Web 2.0
technologies.
Groundswell – Companies often approach Social Computing as a list of technologies to be deployed as needed — a blog here, a podcast there — to achieve a marketing goal. But a more coherent approach is to start with your target audience and determine what kind of relationship you want to build with them, based on what they are ready for. You can use the tool on this page to get started.
Anecdote: When should we collaborate? – When thinking about good times to collaborate, it’s useful to start with a simple model that helps us understand the nature of the types of issues we might encounter in an enterprise. Here I’ve illustrated the Cynefin (pronounced cun-ev-in) framework which categorises organisational activity into four domains [2]:
Circling Around To KM – There is a certain level of know-how involved in getting technology to properly augment KM efforts – but the more challenging barriers are the people and organizational factors that remain regardless of the tools involved. Some of the latest blog and twitter conversation threads on KM vs. social computing or KM vs. Enterprise 2.0 or KM vs. social-anything miss that subtle point.
How and why should local authorities and Government be planning to exploit the collaborative features of Web 2.0? This article was originally published in IT Adviser late last year.
These are my links for January 3rd through January 8th:
21st Century Learning: The Art of Building Virtual Communities – With the rise of virtual learning community platforms like Ning and Elgg it is becoming evident that many CoPs are dead on arrival and many others die of neglect early on, in their toddler stage.
MSNWS Position Paper – Social networking forms an important part of online activities of Web users. Web sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Orkut have millions of users using them everyday. However, these sites present two problems. Firstly, these sites form information silos. Information on one site is not usable in the others. Secondly such sites do not allow users much control over how their personal information is disseminated, which results in potential privacy problems.
Five Reasons that Adobe Air is Going to Change the Game – Adober AIR is a runtime environment that allows developers to focus on coding for one environment (AIR), and the Adobe VM will take care of the rest. This allows desktop apps coded for AIR to work seamlessly with Windows, Macs, and Linux (soon)
Instant mash: empowering communities through the web – From virtual worlds, to CoPs and 'mash-ups' – Kent County Council is using all of these to
promote knowledge management. Members are now more confident when it comes to using other online resources, like the IDeA’s communities of practice (CoPs).
Kent has 16 CoPs of its own on the platform, which are all relatively vibrant. There are already 700 officers at Kent who are involved in the CoPs. CoPs provide a safe environment where members can practice their techniques and learn the benefits of online social networking without huge expense or bureaucracy.
IBM, for its part, has more aggressively shown willingness to move forward with Lotus Connections, which right now has a better design than the social software features in SharePoint, which is largely still a document management system.
I think most people would agree with that – well at least those that are struggling to implement Sharepoint as a social software solution.
The CIO article goes on to say:
But both companies are further removed from innovation than the enterprise 2.0 vendors. While enterprise 2.0 vendors mimic what they see in the consumer market, thus keeping them a degree of separation away from where the innovation actually occurs, the incumbents are even further removed; they simply copy the enterprise 2.0 vendors.
This isn’t a sustainable model for innovation in the enterprise Web 2.0 market. With shrinking access to venture capital, there’s reason to believe some of the enterprise 2.0 start-ups will fail or struggle to make money in 2009. When this happens, they’ll either fold or be purchased by IBM or Microsoft.
Sure, Connections is ahead of SharePoint when it comes to some of the key aspects of social software – but I find “Enterprise 2.0 vendors” to be ahead of Microsoft and IBM when it comes to certain technical capabilities or user experience aspects. Sometimes I think that Microsoft and IBM are so intent on stealing away the install base of the other, that they are not paying attention to other market signals regarding what customers are looking for in social platforms. Still, the economic downturn will make it difficult for smaller vendors to survive so IT strategists should expect some vendors to fail and others to be acquired (which really is not anything terribly insightful based on past downturns and bubble bursts).
So, on reflection, I’d say that Google are pretty well placed to just get on with mopping up the Social Computing space that the ‘Enterprise’ boys are ignoring. The key differentiator (and potential weakness) between enterprise vendors such as IBM and Microsoft and their erstwhile nemesis Google is the very fact that they only know ‘enterprise-speak’, i.e. negotiating and selling at a corporate level, whereas Google’s market is the end user, a market they they know far better than their competitors in the social computing stakes. So, whilst users wait for their organisations to provide what they really want, Google is out there delivering it, e.g. Google Groups, Google Apps, Google Sites, Google Friends Connect etc.
Yes, we know that the likes of IBM and Microsoft will survive the credit crunch, and that consolidation is a natural consequence of a recession, but I know which horse I’m putting my money on to flourish in these difficult times!
Welcome to TweetMinster – the place where real life and politics tweet. :. – Forget the corridors of power… you can take an active role in UK politics right here, right now. How? Follow and Tweet MPs and Ministers to get involved and use the power of Twitter to make your voice heard and conversations more open. You can take a back seat… or you can tweet.
Tweetree – Birds in a tree. – Tweetree puts your Twitter stream in a tree so you can see the posts people are replying to in context. It also pulls in lots of external content like twitpic photos, youtube videos and more, so that you can see them right in your stream without having to click through every link your friends post
In a recent interview Tim Berners-Lee pointed out that the infrastructure to power the Semantic Web is already here. Not only are the bits of infrastructure now in place, but we are also seeing startups and larger corporations working hard to deliver end user value on top of this sophisticated set of technologies.
Top 40 social news/media sites – TECH.BLORGE.com – The idea behind social news or social media websites is that users submit news items so that they can be shared with other users. Pioneered by the likes of Slashdot and Fark, but it was with the advent of Digg, that social news sites found a wider audience. This is a pick of the top 40 social news sites, listed in alphabetical order. The list also includes social booking marking sites, which allow users to store, organise, search, manage and share interesting web pages or websites.
Why Wiki – Wiki – Why should I use a wiki?
A wiki is a website that may be easily and quickly developed by a community using only the Web browser on their computer. Wikis are easy to use by groups with common interests or communities of practice. This link provides several reasons why you may want to use a wiki.
Twitter Grader – Measures the reach and authority of a Twitter user.
The State Of The Twittersphere (HubSpot Edition) – How many followers do most people really have on Twitter? The average number of both followers and other members people on Twitter are following is about 70, according to the State of the Twittersphere, a new report by Web marketing startup HubSpot. (Full report embedded below). But that average is skewed by elite Twitterers who have hundreds or thousands of followers. The vast majority of people on Twitter use it to keep in touch with a much smaller circle of friends and peers. For those with 50 or fewer followers (three quarters of all users), the average number of followers is 15.6 and the average number of people they are following is 18.4.
.:: NOTEPAD++ ::. – Notepad++ is a free (as in "free speech" and also as in "free beer") source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages. Running in the MS Windows environment, its use is governed by GPL Licence.
Wikipedia Official Mobile Site – ReadWriteWeb – While the Wikipedia is one of the most popular destinations on the Internet, it surprisingly lacked an official mobile version until today. Over the years, a number of companies released their own mobile versions of the service, but an official version the Wikipedia itself was never available through a dedicated mobile interface. Now, you can surf to mobile.wikipedia.com to see a stripped down but highly functional version of the Wikipedia on your favorite mobile device
Top 10 Alternative Search Engines of 2008 – ReadWriteWeb – The gap between the major search engines and their alternatives continues to widen — a lot. Google has been compared to a luxury liner that turns around very, very slowly, whereas the startups are speedboats that can turn (or innovate) on a dime. I guarantee that if you try any of these top 10 alternative search engines of 2008, you won't come away saying, "Hey, that was just like Google."
Official Google Blog: Google Friend Connect: now available – Google Friend Connect is now available in beta to any webmaster looking to add a "dash of social" to his or her site. This service lets webmasters add social features to their sites by simply copying and pasting a few snippets of code — no advanced coding or technical background required.
Main Page – Health 2.0 – This wiki has been set up as a service to the community of visionaries, entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs, policy makers, and professionals who are working on fundamentally redefining the healthcare industry along the lines of "Web 2.0". This movement was initiated at the first Health Camp, which took place in December 2006 in San Francisco, CA. A new series of HealthCamp events kicked off in June 2008. More events are planned in 2009. Check out http://barcamp.org/HealthCamp for the latest details, or at the HealthCamp Wiki. In addition since Fall 2007 the Health 2.0 Conference has been held on a semi-annual basis (Spring & Fall) with the next one planned for Boston, MA on April 22-23, 2008.
Levels of engagement with social media – Whilst working on the Mini Tutorials for the 25 Tools resource earlier this year, it became clear to me that I needed to address the requirements of three very different users. For example, with YouTube there were those that would want to share their videos online, there were those that would just want to view videos, but a third (middle) group of users who want to interact with the videos by commenting on them (and thereby help others to identify the best videos around). I named these three different levels of users as follows, (albeit after struggling for some time to find the most appropriate labels).
1. Reader or passive Consumer
2. Participant or (re-)active Contributor
3. Creator or proactive Producer
