Robin Good breaks the news about our new product:

“Kathleen Gilroy, CEO of the Otter Group, is right now putting the final touches on a new product that consists of a day-long boot camp introducing people to a new paradigm for working in the networked information economy. The workshop to be launched this fall is combined with blog and podcast hosting and a year-long membership in a professional social network made up of all boot camp participants.

Not only.

As part of your registration for the Boot Camp, the Otter Group will set up for you, your own blog site, modeled on the Otter Group web site. Once you are set up, you will be able to modify and update your content without the need for programmers or designers. And because your new site is built on a blog, it will enable you to build a set of outgoing links and to classify your own content with easy-to-use tags that will improve your visibility and exposure through major search engines while giving you correct first start into effectively leveraging popular contextual advertising and related monetization opportunities.

During the boot camp, individuals will learn how to build their online profile and how to publish articles, photos, and podcasts to their blog sites.

One of they sections of the boot camp is entitled, “The Feed You Need,” and Kathleen has reached out to me to get some first-hand feedback on my personal take on business RSS use, my experiences, its key benefits and advantages. According to Kathleen, this is the boot camp section in which she “will be talking about RSS and setting up filters and people in their RSS aggregator to capture and re-publish critical information.”

You can read the transcript of my interview with Robin Good at his site.

We will be launching our new web site and opening registration for the Boot Camp tomorrow, but if you would like information, please email me: kathleen@ottergroup.com and I'll send you our draft pdf brochure.

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Robin Good has an excellent video review of Windows Live Writer, the new wizzy for blog posting from Microsoft (PC only).

You can watch is video on YouTube here.

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I was contacted by Business BlogWire and asked a few questions about how to make a corporate blog successful.

You can read the interview here.

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Thanks to Aixa Almonte for pointing out this excellent article on how important networks have become for today's knowledge workers.

By Patti Shank

Why? Much of today’s work isn’t predictable or routinized. Knowledge- and information-era work increasingly involves …

• Tasks done alongside other tasks under complex conditions and with increasing distractions.
• Competing demands and the need to continually prioritize and reprioritize.
• Complex decisions made with changing and sometimes contradictory information.

Under these conditions, it’s impossible to memorize all the critical facts (they keep changing) or automate needed skills (they keep changing, too). And performance support is oftentimes more critical than training.

Because the amount of information workers have to deal with keeps growing and is continually changing, there is a growing need to support performance under these conditions. Workers increasingly need ongoing, unlimited, current, and relevant streams of information and ways to find exactly what is needed and make sense of it quickly. Formal training approaches (including online learning) are still helpful — but often, they don’t go far enough. Good resources and help that can be accessed immediately, as needed, often are more valuable than (a) no instruction and help, (b) inadequate instruction and help, and/or (c) waiting for instruction that will occur too early or late to be useful. When work is complex and information is constantly changing, there’s simply too much to know.

To address this problem, (especially younger) workers are building networks of people and information sources that help them find and make use of critical information as it is needed. Social applications like instant messaging, blogs, wikis, VoIP, online project portals, social book-marking, and other tools increasingly are being called into play by these workers, with or without organizational approval, to support workers’ skill development and information needs.

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Microsoft introduced Windows Live Writer (which PC users can download here. Sorry Mac users this is a PC only tool.) We are using Ecto and Flock to post from our Macs to our blogs but for the PC users out there, this seems like a nice tool.

Here's how it is described:

Introducing Windows Live Writer

Welcome to the Windows Live Writer team blog! We are excited to announce that the Beta version of Windows Live Writer is available for download today.

Windows Live Writer is a desktop application that makes it easier to compose compelling blog posts using Windows Live Spaces or your current blog service.

Blogging has turned the web into a two-way communications medium. Our goal in creating Writer is to help make blogging more powerful, intuitive, and fun for everyone.

Writer has lots of features which we hope make for a better blogging experience. Some of the ones we are most excited about include:

WYSIWYG Authoring

The first thing to notice about Writer is that it enables true WYSIWYG blog authoring. You can now author your post and know exactly what it will look like before you publish it. Writer knows the styles of your blog such as headings, fonts, colors, background images, paragraph spacing, margins and block quotes and enables you to edit your post using these styles.

Writer also includes other views including HTML source-code editing and web preview mode.

Now you don’t have to waste time going through the process of publishing, refreshing, previewing, and tweaking your post to get it looking the way you want. It’s all right there in Writer as you create your post.

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The Gartner Group has published a study on the Emerging Technologies Hype Cycle.

The report focuses on three key themes, including Web 2.0 (the other two are Real World Web and Applications Architecture):

Under Web 2.0 there are two themes that are meaningful for individuals and small businesses:

Collective Intelligence and Social Network Analysis

Here's how the report defines them:

Collective intelligence, rated as transformational (definition: enables new ways of doing business across industries that will result in major shifts in industry dynamics) is expected to reach mainstream adoption in five to ten years. Collective intelligence is an approach to producing intellectual content (such as code, documents, indexing and decisions) that results from individuals working together with no centralized authority. This is seen as a more cost-efficient way of producing content, metadata, software and certain services.

Social Network Analysis (SNA) is rated as high impact (definition: enables new ways of performing vertical applications that will result in significantly increased revenue or cost savings for an enterprise) and capable of reaching maturity in less than two years. SNA is the use of information and knowledge from many people and their personal networks. It involves collecting massive amounts of data from multiple sources, analyzing the data to identify relationships and mining it for new information. Gartner said that SNA can successfully impact a business by being used to identify target markets, create successful project teams and serendipitously identify unvoiced conclusions.

We are working on how small business and individuals can take advantage of the new paradigm created by the networked information economy. At its most basic level, this new paradigm affords individuals much greater capacity to do more for ourselves; at the same time we are afforded much greater ability to work in loose coordination with other.

Individuals and small businesses will benefit from collective intelligence by being both contributors to and recipients of knowledge contained in social networks. Contributions will take the form of blogging and podcasting, which enable individuals to make their private intelligence public. Blog networks and social network services like del.icio.us and flickr will aggregate these contributions and re-syndicate and organize it for continued value. Small businesses also benefit from the by-products of collective efforts in the form of low-cost software and web services that make the cost of innovation low enough to be continuous.

Small businesses can also take advantage of social network analysis by rapidly identifying experts and resources on almost any topic. The benefits cited by Gartner are applicable to any size business: being used to identify target markets, create successful project teams and serendipitously identify unvoiced conclusions

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Since we appeared in the list of top ten corporate blogs, I have been tracking our Technorati ratings. There is a great deal of useful data here:

Technorati shows you recent inbound and outbound links, a tag cloud, your recent posts, your technorati rating, and your blog traffic.

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Dave Sifry of Technorati issues a new state of the blogosphere report. Here are the significant findings:

* Technorati is tracking over 50M blogs

* The blogosphere is over 100 times larger than 3 years ago

* The blogosphere is doubling every 200 days — slowing somewhat

* As of July, 175,000 new blogs were created every day

* 70% of pings received by Technorati are from known spammers and are blocked

* Postings continue to rise, growing to about 1.6M postings per day, about double the numbers from last year.

* 11 of the top 90 media web sites (measured by links to them) are blogs

* English is currently the #1 language of the blogosphere (or is it Globish?), but not by much: 41% English, 31% Japanese, and 10% Chinese.

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