My colleague Will Thalheimer has just started blogging (after a big push from me). His blog can be found at Will at WorkLearning.
Will always has interesting things to say so I will be reading his blog and have bookmarked it under the Learning 2.0 category on del.ici.ous.
My only disappointment is that Will chose Typepad for his blog rather than our blogging software, Pingware. Pingware is better than Typepad on a number of fronts, including very good built-in search, the ability to subscribe via category, and a system of components that are completely programmable. It has a much better notification structure, where readers can select how they receive information (via email or subscription) down to the category and its comments. Pingware offers much greater flexibility than Typepad. Pingware has also just added a comment spam-prevention feature where you must type a hidden word before you can post a comment. This has completely eliminated spam from our blogs.
Typepad has been having some performance problems lately. This is something that seems to be endemic to the blogging platform. We have also experienced problems that the platform seems to have stabilized and our hosting partner, Tucows, is doing a great job of troubleshooting the platform.
So Will, before you get all “linked up” on Typepad, reconsider.

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Here is a very good outline of the issues enterprises face when implementing RSS systems behind the firewall.

Enterprises will use RSS on an intranet differently than consumers on the Internet. The biggest differences are driven by:

• How enterprise collaborate within an Intranet. For example, feed ratings for public Internet sites are useful but do they have a role for Intranet sites? Maybe, but how do they apply to enterprise applications providing personalized feeds?

• Teams within companies work closer together and need to work from a common set of information.

• Access control is a much bigger concern.

• Companies have tiers of staff and management that have access to different things.

• Often times Sarbox controls use the words “need to know” so access to information not directly attributable to your job also needs to be addressed.

• Companies have different computing infrastructure components such as identity management systems and system management suites.

• Companies need to manage internal IT services. They need to understand system capacity and performance trends. They may want usage reports to properly assign costs of resources.

In my opinion enterprise RSS requirements fall into these categories:

Identity

This has to do with determining the identity of the user monitoring a feed and handing that identity to the application serving the feed. This often gets lumped in with “Security” but identity is an important requirement all on its own. It not only determines access control but also provides the basis for personalization of information delivered.

The technical challenge here is integrating with a Company's single sign-on system.

• For desktop-based aggregators operating within the context of a browser this may not be a problem since many enteprise SSO systems are web-based and the aggregator application may share the same credentials as the browsers.

• For desktop client systems this can be a challenge since RSS is delivered via a web server, which are protected behind a web-based SSO system.

• For server-based aggregators this becomes more challenging since it involves using delegated credentials. The server is requesting access to a URL (which can map to a database transaction or just about any application function) and must be able to provide identity to the system serving the URL (the web server or enterprise application). For that matter, the user may not even be online when the feed URL is fetched.

Security

Where are the risks in the RSS system that can be compromised and how do we mitigate that risk?

Some that come to mind are feed credentials (for external feeds that do not take part in the enterprise SSO system) and maintaining the privacy of a user's feeds. Any part of the feed information may have sensitive information whether it is the URL, feed title, or contents of feed items.

This could mean simply limiting access to an individual's feed to the individual only, but not always. Perhaps we want to provide limited access, possibly based on groups defined in a corporate directory, to feed data. Although searching across multiple feeds is a good thing it too must honor the privacy of individual feed owners; showing results the searcher only has access to and not showing those feeds that are not allowed.

Integration

How does the RSS system integrate with the company's identity management components? How can the service be managed? Can we monitor it's health and availability? How can we backup and restore the system? Finally, can other applications integrate with it using an api, xml/soap, or even (are you ready for this?) RSS.

Administration and Service Management

Administering systems is probably the biggest headache for IT departments. The best gift a vendor can provide is the ability to delegate administration to the end-user as much as possible.

Adding users should be a non-event if it integrates with SSO.

Also, can it provide for sharing of feeds? Perhaps a department wants everyone to see the same set of feeds. Can these be bundled, shared, and access controlled by an end-user?

Finally, what type of reporting does the system provide? Are we running out of capacity? Are there feeds that take up room but no one is using?

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We have updated our site this week to include a new set of links to Del.icio.us,
a social bookmarks manager that allows you to easily add sites you like
to your personal collection of links, to categorize those sites with
keywords, and to share your collection not only between your own
browsers and machines, but also with others.

Now on the lower left hand column, you will see a set of links called Del.icio.us Categories;

We have organized each set of bookmarks around key topics
related to our work. By clicking on these links, you will be taken to
my del.icio.us account and from there you can track and read all of the
links we think are important regarding the topic. The Otter blogs link
contains all of our personal blogs, as well as blogs that we have built
for our customers.

Please feel free to send us your suggestions about links to add to these categories, and we will include them.

Each time we give a new presentation, we will tag source material in
del.icio.us with the name of the presentation. This allows us to share
the links behind the slides with you.

Last week I presented on B2B 2.0 to a local advertising agency, PJA. You see the slides for my presentation here and look at the underlying source materials on del.icio.us here.

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This wonderful cartoon by Hugh Macleod is also available as a t-shirt (currently sold out).

To see more of Macleod's work, see gapingvoid.

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In my recent presentations I have been talking about the upcoming war
over the desktop between Microsoft and Google/Sun. I believe that the
desktop is no longer going to be a window into your personal computer's
hard drive. It will be an aggregator for your “personal web.â€
Microsoft clearly agrees and is moving towards building hosted
applications of its key office products. We understand that all of
these products will also be RSS enabled in the new Vista operating
suite. What that means is that you can subscribe through your desk top
aggregator to documents in Sharepoint, CRM, and ERP. This is an
important step towards Learning 2.0.

Microsoft is leaping into hosted applications big time. InformationWeek reports
that Microsoft plans to offer hosted implementations of SharePoint, CRM
and ERP applications. But the best quote in that article was left till
last. A “Microsoft insider†was asked which other products and
services Microsoft would host and the reply was: “Everything. Hosted Office. Everything hosted.â€
Ahem, can anyone say Web 2.0 Office? Exactly a month ago I wrote what turned out to be a very popular post entitled The Web-based Office will have its day.
My main focus in that post was all of the small start-ups that are
currently building web-based office apps. I forgot to mention that of
course there's nothing stopping Microsoft from building their own Web 2.0 Office! Perhaps that's their only option to head off Google, because Google Office has been rumored to be around the corner for 1-2 years now… [Full Story at ZDNet]

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Here's another important and well written article on Web 2.0 by Jared Spool. He says, “

Web 2.0 isn't a 'thing',
but a collection of approaches, which are all converging on the
development world at a rapid pace. These approaches, including APIs,
RSS, Folksonomies, and Social Networking, suddenly give application
developers a new way to approach hard problems with surprisingly
effective results.

Then he looks at
each of these approaches–APIs, RSS, Folksonomies, and Social Networking
and explains why they are so important. Here are some highlights that I
think are relevant to Learning 2.0:
APIs:

This new
generation of APIs, from Google, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, the BBC, and
others, is at a higher level of abstraction for more niche information.
For example, Andale
produces reports of the hottest selling products on eBay, using eBay's
API to extract the data, to help sellers identify and price their
products.
It isn't just the big boys who are creating these APIs. The designers of Kiko,
a new AJAX calendar application, are promising to have APIs available
fairly soon. Even specialized niche applications are starting to make
APIs available.
Years ago, the inventors of object-oriented systems and standardized
libraries made a promise that, someday, we could quickly assemble
applications out of their component parts. Until now, that potential
has remained at arms' length. It's possible that this new generation of
APIs could help us finally fulfill that promise.

As learning
moves outside of applications onto the web as its platform, APIs become
a very important part of building learning networks. It will be
possible to build niche applications for learning and performance
support that combine components of web services.
RSS as an Interface

RSS (which stands
for RDF Site Summary, but often referred to as Really Simple
Syndication) is a computer-generated data-file format that sites use to
communicate their contents to other sites and applications. Using a
really simple definition structure, (thus the name,) RSS makes it easy
for developers to extract and integrate data from other sources into
their own.
For example, Airtight Interactive's Flickr Related Tag Browser
takes an RSS feed of a user-supplied search term and generates an
alternative interface to browsing pictures on Flickr. Alternatively,
the Marumushi Newsmap reads the headlines from Google News and displays topics to explore patterns in how stories are emphasized in the media.

This is an interesting idea. I'm not sure if RSS is the interface, but I do believe the aggregator will become the interface.
Folksonomies

Every time
Infoworld.com publishes a new article, which they do a dozen times a
day, the editors post the URL to the InfoWorld user id on the
del.icio.us bookmark service. With each article, they add relevant
tags, such as “IBM”, “blogging”, and “search”, based on the content of
the article. Anyone can use del.icio.us to keep track of the latest
InfoWorld stories on their favorite topic, such as Microsoft Office.
In addition to giving users quick access, the editors gain other
benefits from having tagged each article. The tags give them an
immediate, informal information architecture for categorizing related
articles. They can also inspect the tags that readers give the same
topics and get a quick measure of an article's importance by seeing how
many different people post the article to the del.icio.us bookmark
archive.
This style of community tagging, commonly referred to as a Folksonomy,
allows a site to create an alternative categorization scheme, created
by the users of that site. While less accurate than other styles of
organizing a site, it's appealing because it involves the entire user
population in the categorization process. You can think of it as a
continuous, full-site card sorting exercise that produces a dynamic,
live navigation scheme as the users sort the cards.

I am in a
“wait-and-see” mode about how adaptable the concept of folksonomies is
to learning. The key, of course, is getting people to tag their
entries. I just started using del.icio.us to tag links for
presentations. Yesterday I gave a presentation on B2B 2.0
to a group at a local advertising agency run by a friend. So that the
people in the audience could access all of my source material, I built
a delicious set and tagged each entry with PJA, the name of the agency.
So now they can easily access the sources by going to: http://del.icio.us/kgilroy/PJA.
What I did not do was tag these bookmarks in any other way. Unless
the tagging serves some important business function, I am skeptical
that people will take the time to do it.

Social Networking

In a typical networked
application, there is just your data and everyone else's. You can
browse your data and you can ask to review all the data everyone has
entered.
However, when you introduce a social network into the mix, you can
separate out the people in your inner circle from those people you
don't know. And sometimes, that separation adds tremendous value.
The photo sharing, Flickr, probably has the simplest social networking
capabilities we've seen. As a user peruses the images of other users,
they can designate those users as a “contact”. Once a contact, Flickr
makes is easier to see any new images from those users. Contacts can
also be designated as “Friend” or “Family”, allowing users to have
images that they only show to close connection. (Images of the baby
taking a bath may only be of interest to family connections, whereas
images of last night's toga party may only be of interest to friends.)

This
is a very important “approach” in the world of Learning 2.0. I believe
it is going to happen through your aggregator. Sets of feeds will be
published to your aggregator from people in your social and
professional networks. We are thinking about building big public
aggregators for groups of professionals. Imagine that you are a
librarian and you would be able to publish your feed collections to
this public aggregator. As in the Flickr example, cited above, you
would be able to designate people in your network to see and share your
feed collections.
It is possible to put all of these ideas to work now and to make
powerful new web services very fast and relatively inexpensively.

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Attached below are slides for a presentation I gave to a B2B advertising agency.

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Here is a zipped copy of my slides for the ALA in powerpont, as well as
a draft copy of a white paper, “The Path to Learning 2.0,” which
outlines a  scenario for a new learning model.

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The Otter Group announces the launch of a new podcast series, Innovation Tip of the Week. Each Tip will typically start with a piece of news around a new product or service and then expand to consider broader issues, highlighting new ways to make business innovation more successful.

You can find all information about the podcasts on the Innovation Tip weblog or to directly subscribe to the podcast go to http://feeds.feedburner.com/OtterInnovationTip.

Eric Mankin, Executive Director of the Babson Executive Education Innovation and Corporate Entrepreneurship (ICE) Research Center has been publishing these weekly updates since August 2000 and The Otter Group is very pleased to present them as podcasts.

Dr. Mankin has spent more than 20 years working with companies to implement new management technologies that improve company performance. Since 1991, he has focused his efforts on helping companies enhance their product development and  innovation performance and he has led innovation enhancement consulting initiatives at over twenty companies in the US, UK, Singapore, and India.

The Innovation Tip is Otter Group’s second podcast series. Josh Weiss of Harvard’s Program on Negotiation, has been offering tactical advice on negotiation in his Negotiation Tip of the Week since April 2005. Dr. Weiss’s series has enjoyed rapid success, with each episode already averaging approximately 600 downloads.

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“This was far and away the most beneficial class I have had the privilege of attending in CDM's strong training program.”

– Mark Peters

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