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I gave a talk and a workshop at the excellent Portals conference from Shared Insights. One big question from people at my talks was: How do we get stared? How do we get adoption?

I advise starting small, finding pain or pleasure points and prototyping a few things that are not risky from a security or compliance standpoint. This week one of my favorite bloggers, Andrew McAfee also has some good suggestions for gaining adoption:

The great majority of companies today are far from this scenario because their empty quarters are so large. Are there effective ways to evangelize within it and convert people to Enterprise 2.0 tool use? One strategy is to keep working on the tools themselves, making them more obvious and easy to use. This is certainly a good idea, but I don't have a lot of confidence that it'll bear a lot of fruit in the empty quarter. Old habits die hard, and the 9X problem of email is particularly acute among non-techies.

A more promising strategy, I believe, lies at the intersection of coaching, leading by example, and policy-setting. Of these, policy setting is the least obvious and most risky — what would a pro-blogging policy look like, and what would keep it from backfiring? I've heard a couple clever examples. A Google employee at a conference I attended, for example, said that employees there sent a short (five line) email to a specific address each week, telling what they'd done. These became part of a searchable archive.

I haven't yet been able to verify that this is a widespread practice there, but if it is one of its smartest features is how lightweight it is. A five-line email is perceived as freeform and fast to compose, so it's not a burdensome requirement.

Other lightweight Enterprise 2.0 policies might include:

* Maintain a blog for your group / department. Identify who's in charge of it, and update it at least once a week.

* Maintain a blog for each project your lab is working on. Post whatever non-confidential information you'd like your colleagues to know about each one.

* Keep your personal page up to date. Make sure it lists your areas and industries of expertise.

* Use the wiki to make sure your portion of the org chart is up to date.

I suspect that these policies will work exactly to the extent that managers follow up on them and see if they're being followed. This is where coaching comes in — the right way to foster adherence to Enterprise 2.0 policies is not by yelling at those who fall behind, but by nudging them a bit and reminding them why it's important to comply. And leading by example, of course, is an unparalleled way to build credibility.

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John Havens has published a very good paper on podcasting for Business: Sound Theory 2.0.

It features some of our podcasting examples. John has done an excellent job of covering the key initiatives and analyzing the financial return on investment that businesses can accrue from podcasting.

To download the paper, please go to John's About.com Guide to Podcasting site.

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I am giving a talk this morning on Intranet 2.0 to the Shared Insights Portals conference.

Here is the link to my slides on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kathleengilroy/sets/72157594366361346

Here is a link to the Paper I published in May (with Bill Ives) on Intranet 2.0: Download paper.

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I gave a workshop this afternoon to the Portals conference. It was a great group of people and a very interesting discussion. Here are the links for the slides to that talk on Flickr:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kathleengilroy/sets/72157594365812173/

And for those of you in the workshop who wish to download the guide, you an access it here. Please select the pay by check option and enter your code for downloading.

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I have been giving a number of workshops lately (the next one is on Tuesday morning at the Portals conference for Shared Insights). As part of the research and preparation for these talks I have been using all of the major RSS readers. Things have changed considerably since the last time I wrote about this topic. Here's my latest thinking and recommendations:

Best overall: Blogbridge Desktop

I had stopped using Blogbridge for a couple of months in order to try out the other readers I'll reference here. But now that I'm back to Blogbridge, I still think it is the best in class desktop reader. And I think that desktop readers are preferable to web readers in that they can incorporate critical features like built in smart feeds and reading lists that you cannot build into web readers. Blogbridge has it all:

• You can construct “smart feeds” from all of the major search engines: Google Blog search, Technorati, Amazon, Feedster, Conotea, and Findory. Moreover, you can build persistent searches around del.icio.us and Flickr tags. Robin Good who is the best RSS user I know uses smart feeds relentlessly to track news and information. I have come to believe that building and managing a collection of smart feeds is a critical productivity and business intelligence skill for the new web. Blogbridge does this by far better than any other reader.
• Reading Lists - a reading list is a dynamic collection of RSS feeds. As more and more information is managed by RSS, we will need tools to manage collections of feeds. Blogbridge is building those tools. You can create a collection of feeds in BlogBridge and then publish the URL for the collection. When that URL is added to Blogbridge by other users, they get the whole collection. And if you make changes to the collection, they dynamically propagate to the Blogbridge readers subscribed.
• Integration with del.icio.us. I use del.icio.us to tag and categorize everything. Now if I find something inside Blogbridge, I can tag things to my del.icio.us account from Blogbridge.
• Integration with BlogBridge library. Another tool for building and finding feed collections. You can add collections, including my own Learning and Collaboration collection from inside Blogbridge.

Blogbridge also has some drawbacks. It is a memory hog. I have been tracking memory consumption in my activity monitor for my MacBook and Blogbridge is the most memory intensive application I am using. (I have a lot of feeds in my reader.) It can really slow things down. Pito and his development team are working on this issue and in the lastest weekly version, things are much improved. The other drawback is the flip side of its strengths: it is not web-based. Great for reading feeds on the train and plane. But I have to switch out of my browser to read and add feeds. (Firefox 2.0 allows me to add new feeds from the browser to Blogbridge.)

Best web reader: google reader

Google has recently updated its web reader and it is a terrific tool. Very fast and easy to use. It is probably the best place to start for new users of RSS. Get a google reader account, find some interesting and useful collections and start reading. Google reader also has its drawbacks: I cannot add feed collections to a folder. Instead, I add new feeds and reading lists to the reader and then I have go into the back end admin area and categorize them. This is a big pain. But the big RSS dudes like Dave Winer and Robert Scoble are using Google Reader as an interface to a river of news. They don't categorize anything. Just load it up and read everything in a long continuous scrolling window.

Other readers worth mentioning



Flock: Flock is a browser built on Firefox. It doesn't work properly with my Intel Core Duo MacBook but when it worked with my Powerbook G4, I loved using it for RSS reading in the browser. It has a very nice interface and is the favorite reader of Jaime Chamorro here at the Otter Group.

Newsgator Online: I signed up for a professional newsgator account. It has built in smart feeds but for reasons that I cannot really explain, I don't like the interface. I just find it hard to read. But if you want smart feeds built into a web reader and don't want to have to build them yourself inside Google Reader, Newsgator Online is your best option.

Newsgator for Outlook: Some folks like to read their feeds inside their email client. If you are an Outlook user and that is your preference, Newsgator for Outlook is for you.

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