Richard Filing

From Jens Meiert
Excerpt: Website maintenance and quality assurance mean the backbone of high quality offers of information, and they represent the difference between an amateurish or professional approach to web design and development. Consequently, guidelines for quality web design define maintenance and quality assurance as important process ingredients which have to be applied continuously. But let’s see what this really means for our work.
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Great story in INC Mag’s March issue about Blogger.com and Twitter founder Evan Williams
Excerpt: Eventually, Williams sends me an apologetic text message–we resolve to push back the meeting slightly–and then he does something else: He uses Twitter to send a text message to, oh, a few thousand people: “Late for my first meeting of the year and in need of a shave.”
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This is welcome news from Milissa Tarquini at Boxes and Arrows.
Excerpt: Holding on to this disbelief – this myth that users won’t scroll to see anything below the fold – is doing everyone a great disservice.
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A little off topic but such a great post that I can’t help pass it on …. Kevin Kelly’s ‘Better than Free’ posting is right on the money. Here’s an excerpt:

From my study of the network economy I see roughly eight categories of intangible value that we buy when we pay for something that could be free.

In a real sense, these are eight things that are better than free. Eight uncopyable values.  I call them “generatives.” A generative value is a quality or attribute that must be generated, grown, cultivated, nurtured. A generative thing can not be copied, cloned, faked, replicated, counterfeited, or reproduced. It is generated uniquely, in place, over time. In the digital arena, generative qualities add value to free copies, and therefore are something that can be sold.

Read the entire post here

Excerpt: … But the pain is not just a MySpace problem. It seems to be an industry-wide issue. The total audience of U.S. social networks seems to be stuck at a low-to-mid-single digit growth rate, while the engagment metrics are falling for just about everyone. Time spent on Bebo.com has been sliced in half over the last four months, while Friendster’s time spent has plummeted nearly 75% in the same time period. Overall, minutes spent per site fell 5% in December 2007 compared to the year-ago period. Read full article here

Google recently started to include a set of links below some results to pages within the site. These new links are called Sitelinks. Google displays Sitelinks if a web site is an authority site for the search term.  Google Webmaster Help Centre

From McKinsey
Technology alone is rarely the key to unlocking economic value: companies create real wealth when they combine technology with new ways of doing business. Through our work and research, we have identified eight technology-enabled trends that will help shape businesses and the economy in coming years. These trends fall within three broad areas of business activity: managing relationships, managing capital and assets, and leveraging information in new ways.
1. Distributing cocreation
2. Using consumers as innovators
3. Tapping into a world of talent
4. Extracting more value from interactions
5. Expanding the frontiers of automation
6. Unbundling production from delivery
7. Putting more science into management
8. Making businesses from information
 

Looks like a plan …
1. Make governance an enabler. The reason why most large organizations are slow to adopt Enterprise 2.0 tools is that senior executives are uncertain about the implications, and as a result cautious or worse. Governance needs to be in place to allay those fears, without stifling the emergent, participative nature of how the new tools create value for organizations.

2. Start from business applications, not tools. Far too often people want to implement blogs, wikis, tagging, or other tools. This is completely the wrong way around. The starting point has to be a specific business application, such as project management, product development, sales support or any number of functions that relate directly to business value.

3. Make work easier. None of the rhetoric or practice around Enterprise 2.0 makes any sense unless it makes the everyday work of employees easier, more effective, and more productive. If that is the principle around how all initiatives happen, things will necessarily be on the right track.

4. Build strategies at the architecture level. As described in more detail in my Successful Enterprise 2.0 and social media speech, a core issue is gathering inputs such that they contribute to valuable emergent outcomes. Any enterprise strategy has to be at this level, not at the level of implementing tools.

5. Allow users to experiment. This principle is often overlooked, yet Enterprise 2.0 is founded on end-users being able to adapt the tools, processes, and working to something that suits them. Everything must be changeable by users so the end result of how tools are used is unpredictable.

6. Create pilots that yield useful lessons. Understanding that no organization has got Enterprise 2.0 “right” yet, and that every organization is different, the task becomes one of trying things, seeing what works and what doesn’t, and evolving systems so that they create value. Designing projects to learn useful lessons and acting on these lessons is at the heart of this.

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