Richard Filing

I subscribe to Fast Forward’s RSS feed and here’s another good reason why - it originates from a NY Times article - If the US State Department Can Use Wikis and Blogs Effectively, So Can Your Organization ?
Excerpt: I came across a recent NY Times article about the growing use of wikis and blogs within the US State Department, an organization that clearly has interest in controlling its messages AND in understanding better how to use information, knowledge and brainpower to be effective. Read in full here

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.”
Read the entire story 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

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.

Trends in the Living Networks Blog

From Steve Eisner’s The Social Life blog (ageing unfortunately):
Except: There are two remaining solutions to the tag mess, assuming you’re sticking with standard methods of tag browsing: 1) re-tagging content later based on observed usage, and 2) tag equivalence (or at least tag migration.) #1 isn’t going to happen, so let’s focus on the more practical #2. What this means is that users can tag items with some original term, but if another term becomes more popular, the first term can somehow be declared equivalent to the new term, so searchers will find the intended content. Whether automatically applied or added manually, this equivalence can greatly increase the network benefit of a bookmarking application. 
Read the full post here

Excerpt: XML, on the other hand, is focused on structure only and does not say anything at all about how information should be presented. Billions of web pages today contain unstructured information. To people, this is a non-issue because we are good at semantics and we do not need primitive XML annotation to make us understand. But for computers, lack of structure is a deal-breaker - they can’t interpret unstructured, non-standardized information very well. Read Alex’s full article here

Lynda M. Applegate from the Harvard Business School is spending the next 12 months looking at the role of disruptive change in kickstarting enterprise innovation.

Information Week with some lite case studies
Excerpt: Facebook and other social networks in the workplace can suck up employees’ time and worse. But managed right, they may be the next breakthrough in business collaboration.