In this fourth part of my series of posts on Learning 2.0, I would like to present some of the ideas I have been exploring in parts 1, 2, and 3, in the context of specific examples. This article will look at how networked learning helps to improve productivity and innovation for individuals.

I am a networked learner. I am looking to hire networked learners. Networked learners are distinguished by:

• Larger and deeper social networks.

• More people outside of our organizations in our networks.

• Being more aware of who and where to go to to get critical information.

• Investing significantly more time in the development and maintenance of their networks.

Here's how my personal learning network works for me:

Here are three people in my network. I know Al Essa from some work we did at the Sloan School at MIT. He was CIO there. Through Al I met Bill Ives. Bill is an avid blogger and wrote a book on the subject. I scan his blog for information and find useful things in it.

In December I read in Bill’s blog about a guy named Rod Boothby who is writing a blog called Innovation Creators. Bill’s excerpt of Rod’s work led me to Rod’s blog Innovation Creators.

I use a personal desktop aggregator to scan about 100 or so blogs each day. Of the 100 I scan for headlines, there are only a couple that I read word for word. Innovation Creators is one of them.

After reading Rod’s blog for a month or so, I realized that we were working on very similar problems and that in an ideal world we should become collaborators. So I called Rod up and had a long chat with him about our mutual interests.

Now I am connected to Rod == networked to him by virtue of common interests and personal camraderies. So we’ve shared our professional networks.

And I can track who else is reading Rod’s stuff by looking at who else has tagged his worked on the social bookmarking service del.icio.us.

And I can track the blogs that Rod is reading. My connection to Rod is very valuable. He is an “intelligent filter” of all sorts of useful information that I need to do my job. And he is one of about 20 people with whom I am networked in this way for learning. People like Rod make me look a lot smarter than I really am. And I hope I do the same for him.

Networked learners use the Learning 2.0 toolkit to build personal learning networks populated by carefully cultivated intelligent filters in the form of people like Rod. But we also use search and aggregation tools to create our own intelligent information filters.

In part 5 of this series, I will look at networked learning in the context of a specific business process: innovation.

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I've just added Andrew McAfee's weblog: The impact of IT on business and their leaders to the Learning 2.0 reading list.
McAfee started blogging on March 6 with this goal: This blog has two overlapping aims: to explain to non-technologist business leaders how, where, and why IT is having an large impact, and to articulate their roles in maximizing this impact. In other words, I’ll describe both what IT does for managers, and what managers do for IT.
McAfee recently published an article in the Sloan Management Review entitled: Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration (Spring, 2006 - available for purchase through the link). In it he argues that “there is a new wave of business communication tools including blogs, wikis and group messaging software — which the author has dubbed, collectively, Enterprise 2.0 — that allow for more spontaneous, knowledge-based collaboration. These new tools, the author contends, may well supplant other communication and knowledge management systems with their superior ability to capture tacit knowledge, best practices and relevant experiences from throughout a company and make them readily available to more users.”
There has been much discussion in the blogosphere around how readily Enterprise 2.0 tools will be adopted. McAfee argues in a follow-up post in his blog that:

It’s very reasonable to believe that most busy professionals are only going to blog if it helps them get their job done. But it’s also pretty reasonable to conclude that blogging will do exactly that.
Lots of knowledge workers spend lots of their time on two activities: keeping their colleagues appraised of what they’re doing, what progress has been made, what they’ve learned/concluded, etc. and trying to locate resources within their own organizations— facts, references, work that’s already been done, people with relevant smarts or experience, etc. Blogs (like the other Enterprise 2.0 tools) can help with the first of these tasks, and in doing so also help with the second. It’s not too farfetched to envision companies in which people use Enterprise 2.0 tools to report progress, collaborate, and share the outputs of these collaborations. These same people would probably also search the company’s internal ‘collabosphere’— the collection of blogs, wikis, group-level instant messages, tags, etc.— early and often in any effort.
In short, I completely agree that most workers these days feel busy, and hard-pressed to keep up with both demand and supply of information. The tools of Enterprise 2.0 can help do both.
I can think of two other plausible reasons that Enterprise 2.0 will not become a widespread phenomenon. First, most companies might not have a sufficiently long tail.

I think there’s also a long tail among people, and it relates not to willingness to consume (i.e. demand) but rather to willingness to produce. In November of 2005, the most recent month for which comprehensive stats are available, Wikipedia had over 850,000 articles in English, and 2.9 million across all languages (including more than 10,000 in Esperanto). This content was generated by fewer than 50,000 contributors in English, and 103,000 total.
If companies only get the same fraction of Intranet users to use Enterprise 2.0 tools, these tools will be roundly and rightly acclaimed as failures. Business leaders have to find ways to increase the ‘ambient percentage’ of internal wikipedians, bloggers, taggers, etc. well beyond what we’ve observed so far on the public Internet. Demonstrating that these tools will increase productivity, decrease workload, and put hours back in the week will certainly help, but I wonder if such demonstrations will be enough.
Perhaps the biggest leverage business leaders have in encouraging Enterprise 2.0 is that maddeningly vague word culture. If they can convince their organizations that using and contributing to the internal collabosphere is part of the fabric, identity, and life of the company, some interesting things will happen.
The third reason to be pessimistic about Enterprise 2.0, however, is also culture, especially as it’s defined and shaped over time by business leaders. If these leaders signal that they really don’t want open, freeform, and emergent collaboration, they really won’t get it. I predict that the diffusion of these tools is going to sharpen differences among companies as some work to foster the new styles, modes, and practices of collaboration and others work (subtly or overtly) to squelch them.

I encourage you to read all of the articles in this very interesting blog.

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I am proud to announce that our Library 2.0 Innovation Boot Camp launched this week. This is a model that we have developed to allow groups of people to learn about learning 2.0 tools and services by using them and planning how they can be applied to specific business processes in an organization.

If you would like to follow the progress of the Boot Camp, you can read the central weblog: Library 2.0 Boot Camp.



You can also subscribe to the podcasts in the iTunes music store. Just go to the podcast area and search under Library 2.0. You'll find our feed there:

The basic structure of the Boot Camp is adaptable:

We are using a new model for delivery that is very different from other e-learning programs you may have joined. In the traditional model you have a course management system where all of your activities take place. In the traditional model, all of the activities and your participation in the course is highly structured within this typically closed and proprietary system.

In the Learning 2.0 model, you will be participating in a Learning Network. This Learning Network can be thought of as an online platform with a constantly changing structure built by distributed, autonomous, and largely self-interested peers. On this platform participants build their course collectively. We use blogs and podcasts to create content. Links and tags will knit this content together. And search and RSS will make the content visible and navigable and help you stay on top of it all.

Learning Network Structure

The components of the ALAL2 Learning Network are described below.



ALAL2 Central

This weblog, http://library2.0.alablog.org, will act as a “course central” for the program. All of the critical information you need will be hosted here.

You can find a directory of participants here. You can also find the readings lists, tutorials, syllabus, project information, and help for using all of the components of the learning network here. The portal blog will be where we host the main discussions and highlight information from around your network. Plan to read everything on this blog. It will help you keep track of what is going on throughout the program.

Your blog

Each of you has been given a weblog for managing your learning. You will receive an email with the url for access to your personal blog and once you have logged into to the front of your blog, you will see a whole bunch of resources that you can use to manage your blog. You'll want to use your blog to document what you are learning, to share the development of your project and to link to interesting things that relate to your project and to the topic of Library 2.0.

BlogBridge

You will also want to download the RSS Aggregator Blogbridge.

All of the pieces of this learning network have RSS (short for Really Simple Syndication) feeds associated with them. That means that each blog, the blog portal, and your reading material can be accessed via an RSS reader. BlogBridge allows us to group and publish collections of feeds called “reading lists.” When you paste these lists into your Blogbridge, you will have a dynamic and persistent subscription to any feeds that we choose to add to the collection. For this program You will be subscribing to the following reading lists:

• Library2.0CourseMaterials
• Library2.0 Advanced CourseMaterials (Optional)
• BootcampBlogList
• Learning2.0
• Delicious ALAL2 tag
• Flickr ALAL2 tag
• Pubsub ALAL2 search feed
• Technorati ALAL2 search feed
• Technorati Library2.0 search feed

Once you have installed Blogbridge, you will set up a new guide for each list and then select properties and paste the URL into the guide. You will then be subscribed to all of the feeds in the collection. If Michael or Jenny decide to change the list of reading materials, you will automatically receive the change in your BlogBridge.

Podcasts

All of the multimedia materials for the program will be delivered via podcasting. All of the podcasts will be posted to a podcast weblog where they can be viewed. But you can also access the RSS feed for these podcasts through iTunes. Just go to the music store and search for Library2.0 and you'll find the feed. If you click subscribe, each new podcast will be automatically downloaded into your desktop iTunes when it is posted. You can also paste the url into your iTunes using the “Subscribe to Podcast” under the advanced menu.

Projects

You have been assigned to a project team for this program. ALA has assigned each team a project topic, which you will have a chance to revise as you start to learn more about Library 2.0. You will work in your team through a structured process to develop your idea into a viable plan for a new a product, service or model based on Library 2.0 concepts. You will use your blog to document the development of your thinking about your project. And you will produce a podcast that explains your project to other members of the Boot Camp.

Opening and Closing Sessions: Live Meeting

We will convene and close the program using the telephone/web conferencing system, Live Meeting. You will receive email instructions for logging onto Live Meeting prior to the opening session. You can test your system requirements by clicking here. (Mac users will need to use Sarfari or Internet Explorer to access the system).



Campfire

You will have a common chat area for which you can use to manage your synchronous communications with your teams members.

If you are interested in developing a Learning 2.0 Boot Camp for your organization, please contact us by emailing me: kathleen@ottergroup.com.

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This is the third post in my series on Learning 2.0. In part 1, I talked about the key ideas in web 2.0 that are important for learning. In part 2, I looked at RSS aggregation and talked about why it is so important. In this post, I will look at the three key components in what I call the Learning 2.0 toolkit:

• Weblogs and wikis
• Podcasts
• Aggregators

Weblogs

Blogs are perhaps the best known of web 2.0 tools. A blog, or weblog, is a new kind of web site that is easy to update. Data is entered into a simple form (usually with the title, the category, and the body of the article) and then submitted. Automated templates take care of adding the article to the home page, creating the new full article page and unique web address for the page – known as the permalink – and adding the article to the appropriate date- or category-based archive. Blogs differ from static web sites in several important ways. The biggest difference is what I call “linkology.” Blogs are about links. Bloggers’ have a propensity for linking and new services can search links, blogs and other platforms readily lead the searcher to further sources. Blogs are about posts, not pages. These posts or “items” help organize Web content into clean, crisp chunks that have vital metadata associated with them, like the date of publication, authorship, categories and tags. Linking among posts is the connective tissue that makes the blogs an important social network on the web.

Wikis are much like blogs but they serve a different function. A wiki, which is the Hawaiin term for “fast,” is server software that lets users create and edit web pages. Wikis differ from blogs in that while content on blogs is cumulative, content on wikis is iterative. On a weblog, the author or authors add content in reverse chronological order. On wikis, content is added by anyone and then can be edited by anyone. An article on otters on wikipedia can be modified or updated by anyone who wants to change its content.

Weblog Structure

RSS Aggregators

RSS is the most important new development for interconnecting the tools and services of intranet 2.0. RSS, or really simple syndication, has become the language of syndication of content between the all systems on the web. An RSS aggregator or news aggregator will most likely become the new user interface to the intranet. An aggregator is a type of software that retrieves syndicated web content that is supplied in the form of a web feed (RSS, Atom and other XML formats), that is published by weblogs, podcasts, video blogs, and mainstream mass media websites. The aggregator provides a consolidated view of content in a single browser display or desktop application. RSS is the new pathway for information flow on the web. Users now have better control over what reaches them and how it arrives.

With an aggregator, subscription channels are called RSS feeds. The “SS” in RSS stands for Site Summary because that is typically what a feed contains – a summary of what is on a blog or web site. When something new – an article, a photo, a podcast – is published, it automatically goes out in the RSS feed. If the aggregator is tuned – or to use RSS language, subscribed – to that feed, it collects whatever is in the feed. In terms of the user experience, RSS aggregators can be thought of as “Tivo” for the desktop. You subscribe to a set of channels through which information will flow. Aggregators can subscribe to feeds from every major media outlet and of course the huge blog universe. But feeds are not limited to blogs and news.

Aggregators can also subscribe to a feed that lists the new books available at your library, or the latest changes to a company’s policy manual, or the houses for sale. A feed is just an envelope and the possibilities for what it can receive in that envelope are limitless.

RSS provides an essential framework that organizes web content into clean, crisp chunks (known as items) that have vital metadata associated with them, like the date of publication, authorship, categories and tags. RSS is increasingly becoming the “language” of intranet 2.0. Data that is captured in many of the 2.0 services discussed in this article can be syndicated and re-circulated inside the enterprise using RSS. When Microsoft’s new Vista operating system comes out later this year, more and more enterprises will be compelled to convert their data to RSS so that it will be supported by the operating system.

RSS can easily operate behind the firewall, and this means many things for the next generation of intranets. People inside the organization can assemble personalized views of information they believe is critical to their performance. People can even go so far as to write simple lightweight programs where they very easily filter, combine, share and republish information to support specific business processes. This also means a proliferation of information feeds that need to be managed. Enterprises will need to rapidly import smart, user-driven aggregation schemes to manage the flow. New library systems are being developed that allow editors or librarians to build collections of feeds and podcasts and assign them to groups. At the same time, users should be able to submit and tag feeds and podcasts for distribution by the library system. These new information ecologies will drive the need for new user interfaces. Instead of a one-size-fits-all portal, people will access information on the intranet through the RSS aggregators discussed above. RSS aggregators can be thought of as “portals on the fly.” The same data can be viewed in a million different ways depending upon the needs and preferences of the individual. These new kinds of “home pages” sometimes called AJAX desktops because they use AJAX as in the user interface. They are being rapidly adopted outside the firewall.

Podcasting for Learning

Less than a year old, podcasting is bursting out of its incarnation as do-it-yourself radio for teenagers and geeks into a powerful new medium for training and learning for business. At the Otter Group, we started podcasting a year ago and have found it to be a simple, innovative, and exciting new medium for teaching and learning. Podcasts are simple to produce, accessible with one-click through Apple’s iTunes Music Store, and once published, available any time/anywhere for consumption — including on the treadmill, commuter train, and in your car.

Podcasting behind the firewall is rapidly emerging as a powerful new means of delivering training and learning. At one financial services firm we are advising, we have started a podcasting series, through which senior executives will lay out the firm’s areas of strategic focus. Experts from within and outside the firm will provide market overviews and competitive intelligence to help learners define opportunities for innovation. Discussion of the issues raised then continues on the learning network with continued input by executives. This year we are giving each participant a new video iPod for collecting and viewing all of the program materials. It turns out that it is less expensive for us to buy iPods for everybody than to give them thick binders filled with printed materials and CDs. They much prefer the iPods, and once they’ve got them, we have direct distribution channel for all kinds of multimedia materials–all of which is mobile–a huge advantage and times saver for this group.

We have started to build a library of publicly available podcasts on topics of interest for business. Our most successful podcast features Josh Weiss, professor at the Harvard program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School. Josh has been working with us doing elearning programs on conflict resolution. As part of a simple experiment we started last April, Josh began to capture his knowledge of negotiation in a podcast series called the Negotiating Tip of the Week. So far we have 40 episodes in this series. It is available through the podcast area of the iTunes music store and it has been downloaded over 100,000 times. Now we are packaging these podcasts on iPods for corporate customers and making Josh available to coach and counsel negotiators. Instead of spending his time teaching repetitive material, he can spend time doing much more valuable things.

These three tools make up a simple, convenient, lightweight tool set for Learning 2.0. In the next part of this series, I will look at three case examples of how Learning 2.0 can be used to support personal, process, and enterprise learning.

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We've been using an off-beat biography format for our online bio's here at the Otter Group that includes questions like: “Something you should know about me that I don't normally put on my resume,” and “What I'd be called if I were a professional wrestler.” The format always yields surprising and rich information about my colleagues.

Now we're extending this format to our customer programs. We're just about to launch an Innovation Boot Camp on Library 2.0 for the American Library Association. There are 50 people in the program and the bio's are pouring into today (the deadline was yesterday). They are wonderful. I encourage you to go to the site and read them. (http://library2.0.alablog.org/blog/_WebPages/Participants.html) I can't wait to start learning among this very interesting group of people.

The latest submission pointed out that we're not alone in our love of professional wrestling names. Karen Munro, the e-learning librarian for UCAL, Berkeley, pointed us to McSweeney's list of Bad Names for Professional Wrestlers: http://www.mcsweeneys.net/1999/11/03wrestlers.html.

I think the librarians beat McSweeney's hands down. What do you think?

Librarians:

The Eccentrist

The Great “Dane”

Kikkoman

Garanimal

LITA

Sweet Pete

Papa Smurf

The Info Masher

Hurricane Anne

Snake in the Grass

Menacing Marci

Beware!

The Kompressor

Big Cheese

The Badass Librarian (the headshot doesn’t show the tattoo or the new biker mustache & sideburns) — my personal favorite



McSweeney's

Linus

The Spiller

Lace

The Soup-Eater

Stilts

The Tailor

Mitochondria

Kimono Boy

The Really Tiny Moth

The Bulimic Cheerleader

Winston Churchill

Vasco de Gama, Jr.

Tickles

The Fig Wasp

Cookies -n- Creme (tag team duo)

The Healer

El Wusso

The Precocious Feline

The Professor

Balsamic Vinegar

The Stooge

Diabetes

Warren G. Harding

The Wilting Zinnia

The School Boy

The Yearling

The Pediatrician

The Old Coward

Naomi

The Narcoleptic

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Kathy Sierra, who writes the blog Creating Passionate Users, has become one of my favorite bloggers. Today she writes about a topic that is very important to Learning 2.0: “Why Face to Face Still Matters.” Her article is quoted in full below but here are the salient points for me:

We never had to learn to process body language, facial expressions, and tone of voice. We evolved this capability…it's innate. But we had to spend years learning to read and write with any level of sophistication. The brain needs and expects these other–more significant–channels of information, and when they don't come… the brain suffers (and so does the communication). And the problem goes way beyond just an increased chance for misinterpretation.

He said that video chat is better than any other form of non face-to-face, because you get facial expressions, tone of voice, body language, AND real-time responsiveness. But–he said there's still a very unsettling feature for the brain because there's really no way for BOTH speakers to make eye contact! If you look at the camera, then the other person sees you looking at them, but then your experience suffers. So you can either watch the person you're chatting withwhich helps your experience but causes theirs to sufffer (since you won't be looking into the camera, so to THEM you'll be looking down), OR you can look in the camera and improve their experience. But there's no way to have the camera right in your face, in a place where you can still look into the other person's eyes. Bottom line: You can see the camera or the person's eyes… but not both.

So, what to do if you're like me and work mostly remote from co-workers? Using AV chat is a HUGE improvement for the reasons I listed. But there's no substitution for face-to-face… so anything you can do to try to interact with people IN PERSON is critical. Even if it's just a once a year meeting, the very fact that you've had a chance to see and hear that person and experience them in front of you goes a long way toward helping you when you get back to your remote office and return to text.

We email. We wiki. We blog. We IM. We convince ourselves that as long as we can write well, these are all good forms of communication. Perhaps in some ways even better, since we're not distracted (blinded, biased, seduced) by the person's physical presence.

And we are wrong.

According to the neuroscientists, anyway. I've just come back from a couple of days at the Conference on World Affairs, and attended a couple of different presentations where Dr. Thomas Lewis spoke. He has a particular interest in neurobiology (including the neurobiology of love), and what the brain does and does not want and need.

One of the key points he made was that we are fooling ourselves into thinking that text is even half as effective as face-to-face at communicating a message. He rattled off a ton of studies and evidence, but I was too engrossed in the topic to take many notes, so I don't have references to most of them.

We all are aware of the notion that most of the information we get in a face-to-face communication is NOT from the words themselves, but rather from body language, facial expression, and tone of voice. What he finds troubling, though, is how we trick ourselves into thinking that (especially with all our text messaging tech) face-to-face is overrated. How we trick ourselves into thinking that we can truly know someone and experience real communication through text alone.

Although his explanation dove into the chemistry of face-to-face, LIVE interaction with another human vs. any other form of communication, one point was quite simple:

We never had to learn to process body language, facial expressions, and tone of voice. We evolved this capability…it's innate. But we had to spend years learning to read and write with any level of sophistication. The brain needs and expects these other–more significant–channels of information, and when they don't come… the brain suffers (and so does the communication). And the problem goes way beyond just an increased chance for misinterpretation.

Of course someone brought up smileys and winkies, etc. and he just gave us that “do you honestly believe that's somehow going to communicate anything remotely approximating subtle emotions?”

Part of the issue they've discovered in research is just how crucial the immediate response is. In still-face effect experiements with infants, for example, they learned that babies become immediately distressed when their mother maintains a “still face” that does not show any response/feedback with what the baby is doing. This makes sense, but what's really interesting is when they experimented with video. In some of these variations on the still-face effect, mothers and babies were on closed-circuit monitors where they could each see each other in real-time, through a television monitor. The babies were much happier when their mother's face was responsive to their own… less distressed than when the mother was right in front of the baby but maintaining a still face!

So, it was the responsiveness that mattered as well as the visual information. But just how quick does the feedback/response need to be? When they took the same experiment but introduced a short delay (I can't recall the amount — but it was less than a few seconds), the babies became distressed again. Even a small degree of latency killed the feedback/interaction/responsiveness the baby's brains were expecting and needing.

Of course, we're adults, and not babies, but again–Dr. Lewis pointed out that we still have the same basic neurochemistry, and that no matter how much we practice communicating through text, the brain still finds it stressful. He indicated that the only population whose lives have improved through the use of text over face-to-face are those with a serious problem of shyness. In the brains of the shy, he said, a previously unknown face triggers a fear or anxiety response in their amygdala which doesn't happen in text.

He said that video chat is better than any other form of non face-to-face, because you get facial expressions, tone of voice, body language, AND real-time responsiveness. But–he said there's still a very unsettling feature for the brain because there's really no way for BOTH speakers to make eye contact! If you look at the camera, then the other person sees you looking at them, but then your experience suffers. So you can either watch the person you're chatting withwhich helps your experience but causes theirs to sufffer (since you won't be looking into the camera, so to THEM you'll be looking down), OR you can look in the camera and improve their experience. But there's no way to have the camera right in your face, in a place where you can still look into the other person's eyes. Bottom line: You can see the camera or the person's eyes… but not both.

And even with the benefits of adding video to your chat, there's still a lot the scientists don't know about other factors surrounding human communication that can't be captured electronically. Smell, for example, might be far more powerful than we realize–even when below our conscious awareness…

This is just a small taste of the things he talked about, but I wanted to get it down while it was still fresh.

So, what to do if you're like me and work mostly remote from co-workers? Using AV chat is a HUGE improvement for the reasons I listed. But there's no substitution for face-to-face… so anything you can do to try to interact with people IN PERSON is critical. Even if it's just a once a year meeting, the very fact that you've had a chance to see and hear that person and experience them in front of you goes a long way toward helping you when you get back to your remote office and return to text.

But there's more–he stressed that having face-to-face interaction is so crucial to the brain that even if you can't do face-to-face with your co-workers, we should all try to make sure we have a healthy amount of live social interaction. So, join a local user group. Spend more time with friends. Attend conferences. And–he stressed most of all–stop watching television. (more on that in another post, but part of it has to do with the way having television on tricks one part of your brain into thinking you're having a social interaction–all these people having conversations in your living room–but fails to give the brain what it expects and needs from that interaction.

I'll say more tomorrow, but for now I want to add that I'm thrilled to have met many of you in person at conferences and other events, and I'm hoping I'll have a chance one day to meet more of you. For now, you'll just have to trust that I have a smile on my face as I type this : )

[And photos of your face help too, so if you dare (and circumstances permit), you should post a picture of your face somewhere and make sure people have it. Ask the person you're emailing with if you can send a photo so they “know who they're talking to” a little better, and ask if they'll do the same. More on other tips a little later…]

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This 8 minute tutorial explains how to use create audio and video podcasts using Mac software.

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Otter Advisory Board member, Shwen Gwee has started a great new blog on Emerging Technologies: Etech@work.

In this week's entry, he lists a set of resources on getting support for 2.0 software and services inside your organization.

It looks like a good list:

An Adoption Strategy for Social Software in Enterprise

- by Suw Charman

Opening Remarks from SxSW (MP3): “The Curious Shall Inherit the Earth”

- by Jim Coudal and Jason Fried

- Scroll to bottom of the page

Andrew Hunt: “Leave Room for Emergence”

- On the 37signals blog

Organizing for Innovation (book excerpt)

- by Tony Davila, Marc J. Epstein, and Robert Shelton

If you have additional suggestions, you can post them in the comments on Shwen's blog.

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In part one of this series of posts, I reviewed the most salient ideas for learning and innovation in the web 2.0 revolution. In this article, I'll look at the idea that RSS aggregators will become the new desktop.

This is a snap shot of the aggregator that I use to manage the 100 or so RSS feeds I scan regularly. It is called Blogbridge, and I like it because it was designed by Pito Salas who comes to RSS aggregation from a background in developing collaborative software. Pito's background has led him to emphasize the collaborative aspects of aggregation like integration with delicious and dynamic reading lists. These features are critical to using aggregation for networked learning.

BlogBridge has a three-column organization that allows you to collect RSS feeds into groups called “guides.” Each guide contains a collection of feeds that you have built or that you have subscribed to as a “reading list.” To read more about reading lists, see below. The content of each feed is contained in the right-hand column. Content can be scanned in the form of headlines or expanded into a full selection for reading. Blogbridge uses del.cio.us as its tagging system so that you can flag and save content from BlogBridge directly to your del.icio.us account. It also has “smart feeds,” where you build persistent search terms from inside BlogBridge and from a number of search engines including Amazon books, del.icio.us tagged bookmarks, technorati and google blog search. You can even build persistent searches from the photo sharing service Flickr into a BlogBridge smart feed. I use these smart feeds to funnel important information to me.

RSS is an acronym. For some it is short for Really Simple Syndication; it can also mean Rich Site Summary. RSS is important because it is facilitating the development the web 2.0 information ecosystem. RSS has become the language of syndication of content between the all systems on the web. An RSS aggregator or news aggregator will most likely become the new user interface to the Internet and the Intranet. An aggregator is a type of software that retrieves syndicated web content that is supplied in the form of a web feed (RSS, Atom and other XML formats), that is published by weblogs, podcasts, video blogs, and mainstream mass media websites. The aggregator provides a consolidated view of content in a single browser display or desktop application. RSS is the new pathway for information flow on the web. Users now have better control over what reaches them and how it arrives.

With an aggregator, subscription channels are called RSS feeds. The “SS” in RSS stands for Site Summary because that is typically what a feed contains – a summary of what is on a blog or web site. When something new – an article, a photo, a podcast - is published, it automatically goes out in the RSS feed. If the aggregator is tuned – or to use RSS language, subscribed – to that feed, it collects whatever is in the feed. In terms of the user experience, RSS aggregators can be thought of as “Tivo” for your desktop. You subscribe to a set of channels through which information will flow. Aggregators can subscribe to feeds from every major media outlet and of course the huge blog universe. But feeds are not limited to blogs and news. Aggregators can also subscribe to a feed that lists the new books available at your library, or the latest changes to a company’s policy manual, or the houses for sale. A feed is just an envelope and the possibilities for what it can receive in that envelope are limitless.

RSS provides an essential framework that organizes Web content into clean, crisp chunks (known as items) that have vital metadata associated with them, like the date of publication, authorship, categories and tags. RSS is increasingly becoming the “language” of Intranet 2.0. Data that is captured in many of the 2.0 services discussed in this article can be syndicated and re-circulated inside the enterprise using RSS. When Microsoft’s new Vista operating system comes out later this year, more and more enterprises will be compelled to convert their data to RSS so that it will be supported by the operating system.

People can assemble personalized views of information they believe is critical to their performance. People can even go so far as to write simple lightweight programs where they very easily filter, combine, share and re-publish information to support specific business processes. This also means a proliferation of information feeds that need to be managed. Enterprises will need to rapidly import smart, user-driven aggregation schemes to manage the flow.

These new information ecologies will drive the need for new user interfaces. Instead of a one-size fits all portal, people will access information on the Intranet through the RSS aggregators discussed above. RSS aggregators can be thought of as “portals on the fly.” The same data can be viewed in a million different ways depending upon the needs and preferences of the individual. These new kinds of “home pages” sometimes called AJAX desktops because they use AJAX as in the user interface.

There are many different types of aggregators now coming onto the market. The chart below, from a recent survey of on-line feed readers by Tech Crunch compares features on the web-based feed readers. The article concludes that none of the web-based readers attain the speed and performance of the desktop readers. Web-based readers are a good place to get started with RSS.

To download Blogbridge, look for the link in the upper left-hand corner of this blog. To read more about BlogBridge, check out this post. To read about Blogbridge reading lists and get the Learning 2.0 reading list I edit, check out this post.

(I have recently started combining Blogbridge with the web-based reader, Rojo. At my request, Pito implemented a nice feature in Blogbridge to complement Rojo. Blogbridge can generate a unique URL that publishes all of my reading lists on Blogbridge to one OPML link. I then import this into Rojo and have an up-to-date online view of my feeds. When this feature appears in the stable and weekly release of BlogBridge, I'll write more about it here.)

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