Tim Rosa has started a very good blog on business communications. I have added it to my Learning and Collaboration Topic Guide of blog collections.

This week he has written a few good posts on blogging for business. Here are the highlights:

Why Use a Blog for Business Intelligence?

In particular, blogs make a great platform to provide business intelligence because:

* Their standard format makes them very easy to navigate; categories, search, and content calendars make it easy to find articles of interest.

* They require no knowledge of HTML or other web technologies, so they can and are easily updated (unlike many websites).

* Unlike most websites, which are in essence one-to-many broadcast media with no interactivity, blogs enable readers to comment on posts. And, of course, blog writers can read and respond to the comments of their readers too.

* For those who prefer to get their news via email, it is a simple matter to subscribe to a blog and receive new posts by email. This way, readers never have to visit the blog, unless they wish to comment.

* For more sophisticated users who employ newsreaders to aggregate important content from the web via RSS or Real Simple Syndication, it is equally easy to subscribe to an RSS feed of the blog. (See the April 2006 issue of Focus Forward if “RSS” is new to you.)

* The “Trackback” feature of blogs is similar to the citations used in a journal article—it automatically keeps track of any blog that cites an article from your company’s blog. Using Trackback, relationships can be formed among people with common interests.

* Unlike email newsletters and other means of communications, blog posts are automatically archived and always available. Readers don’t have to worry about losing or deleting emails with important news.

Critical Success Factors for Business Blogs

* Relevance: Articles must be highly relevant to the interests of the community you’re trying to reach, otherwise they’re just wasting the reader’s time. Build a list of business intelligence keywords that represent your audience’s interest, and make sure you use them in the context of your business. Articles that include these points will be relevant to people who need to know more about these topics. Readers want to see posts about their competition, their markets, their vendors, or even themselves.

* Timeliness: News is unlike wine or cheese—it rarely improves with age. News—whether you create it or share it from other sources—should be up to date.

* Frequency: Blogs are basically publications, and as such should have a fairly regular publishing schedule. The 24 x 7 x 365 nature of the web enables more of a range of publishing frequency than a fixed format. A minimum of 3 posts per business week is recommended to sustain reader interest and a maximum of 5 to 7 to avoid information overload.

* Length: Frequency and length are linked. Business people are busy, so articles should be kept as short as possible. The shorter the articles, the higher the frequency of publication, and vice versa.

* Context: One of the key benefits of the blog as a business information service is context. Your format, subject matter, and audience contribute to the context in which you’re communicating. Part of the context may also be driven by references you make in the text and by links to other articles posted by others or by you.

* Accuracy: All links must be checked to make sure they work at the time of publication. All quotes from original sources must be properly credited.

* Format: A consistent format should be established to make it easy for the reader to distinguish between annotations and commentary and quoted materials.

I highly recommend subscribing to Tim's blog.

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Social Profiling has been one of the areas where I believe enterprises can learn from the consumer web. And with its announcement of the F8 Platform, facebook may now become the default choice for enterprises. There are already tens of thousands of company networks active on Facebook. And HBS Professor Andrew McAfee reports that Facebook offers “one-stop shopping for uploading media, blogging, calendaring, communicating, catching up and checking in, sharing information, etc.” McAfee goes on to say that these are all things that employees in a company want to do:

All of which got me thinking—isn’t this very close to what employes within a company also want to do? And if so, doesn’t Facebook provide a demonstrably powerful, popular, and easy-enough-to-use infrastructure for doing it? The site has been open to all (not just those with a .edu email address) since September of 2006. Some features still reveal its legacy as a networking site for college students, but it’s also now being adopted by plenty of folk who graduated long ago.

So what are the Enterprise 2.0 lessons from Facebook? I think one is the power of one-stop shopping, or an integrated collaboration environment. My current Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 interactions are scattered across a number of tools. While it’s not an overwhelming hassle to check them all throughout the day, it is a bit of work. I got the impression from Rachel and Sameer that a lot of undergrads are doing the bulk of their online interacting within Facebook. Shouldn’t we expect employees within a company to do the same, given the opportunity?

A more fundamental lesson concerns the incentives to participate in online communities. Some of the questions I get asked most often about E2.0 concern motivating and encouraging participation. Lots of companies have introduced technologies intended to facilitate collaboration, and most of them have been disappointed by the resulting levels of adoption and use. So collaborationware that spreads like wildfire is extraordinarily interesting, even before we delve into what it’s used for.

With the launch last week of the platform, Facebook just got way more compelling as a platform for enterprise 2.0. Now it will be possible to do things like link basecamp to facebook and pull news from a company's intranet onto facebook pages. Here's some information from around the web on the platform launch.

Today Facebook launched “The Platform”, a system enabling 3rd party companies to integrate their services inside of Facebook user pages. The platform will go-live later tonight. About 70 companies have apps set up already (more on those below). As explained in an excellent FAQ by one of Facebook’s 3rd party partners, SplashCast Media, this platform goes beyond the ability to post media from outside into Facebook and it goes beyond the previous Facebook API (a read-only Application Programming Interface (API) released on August 15th, 2006, and at the time also called The Platform). With the new platform, outside companies are now being allowed to deploy advanced functionality inside the Facebook site.

Facebook’s current user base stats - Techcrunch reported that Facebook is growing 3% per week (100,000 new users per day) and the fastest growing demographic is the 25 and up age group. Active users have doubled since Facebook expanded registration in Sept 2006. The international user base is still at an early stage, but obviously has room for large growth. Currently Canada has the most users outside of the United States, with more than 2.5 million active users; followed by the U.K. with more than 1.4 million active users.

As well as quantity, Facebook has on its side that it is a very sticky site - 50% of registered users come back to the site every day. Facebook is generating more than 40 billion page views per month, from 24 million “active” users - 50 pages per user every day, which is very very high. In comparative terms, Facebook is now the 6th most trafficked site in the U.S. and gets more page views than eBay.

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I am helping a friend and colleague get “tuned up” to do podcasting and for mobility. Here's the shopping list I have prepared for her.

MacBook Pro 15″

* 2.33GHz Intel Core 2 Duo

* 1440 x 900 pixels

* 2GB memory

* 120GB hard drive1

* 6x double-layer SuperDrive

* ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 graphics with 256MB SDRAM

Ships: Within 24 hours

Free Shipping

$2,499.00

iWork 06 ($79)

this is the mac presentation and document publishing suite. love it.

http://www.apple.com/iwork/



iLife 06 (will come with your mac) This is for managing photos video audio.



USB mic for your mac ($39):

http://www.thecomputerstore.com/product/MacMice_MicFlex_USB_Microphone_System/ms-135549.html?PHPSESSID=c81fc88826b705f



Skype and Audio Hijack Pro ($32 from Rogue Amoeba)

http://www.rogueamoeba.com/audiohijackpro/

Edirol MP3 Recorder ($349 from Amazon):

http://www.amazon.com/Edirol-R-09-WAVE-Recorder-Black/dp/B000FPQFKO/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/103-3805815-8358236?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1179500730&sr=8-1

Verizon Broadband service

http://www.verizonwireless.com/b2c/store/controller?item=phoneFirst&action=viewPhoneDetail&selectedPhoneId=2910

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I did a podcast interview with Tim O'Reilly where he talks about how differently web 2.0 businesses manage data. He believes this is a key distinction between 1.0 and 2.0.

In a post on O'Reilly Radar, Tim expands on this idea and frames it in the context of asking what Google would do? It is worth reading the whole post as I believe this is one of the important differentiators between 1.0 and 2.0. It makes me think what enterprises can do in terms of exposing data and knowledge in the service of advancing talent and learning. For starters, I'd like to see a profiling system that is as rich and dynamic as the book page on Amazon. Dave Weinberger in his new book, Everything is Miscellaneous, analyzes how much information surrounds one book in the Amazon database: distinctive phrases, frequency of buying, written reviews, tags, lists. Imagine if a profiling system automatically aggregated as much information and made it public about a person. Amazon does this in order to give me as many paths as it can to finding and buying this book. I need just as many paths to finding and connecting with the right people.

This is an area I'll be exploring over the next couple of months. If any of you have thoughts, please email them or post them as comments here.

Here are some excerpts from Tim O'Reilly's article: What Would Google (or Amazon) do?

They have huge data centers, tracking our every move, learning from our behavior and making decisions based on it. They deliver services to us, not products. They are indispensable to our daily lives. The latest crop of web 2.0 companies? How about our banks, insurance companies, and phone companies?

All of these companies have a great deal in common with Web 2.0 icons like Google, so perhaps it's more productive to think about how they are different. And one way that I've found to frame this difference is to ask the question: What would Google do? What would Google do if they were our bank or credit card company, with access to our every purchase, our bank balance, our history of paying late or early, our salary and our savings rate, our preferences for where we like to eat or shop?

What would Google do if they were our phone company, with access to our every phone call sent or received, how long we talk to Joe and how quickly we call Mary back? What would Google do if they ran our supermarket's loyalty card program, tracking our every purchase?It strikes me that one of the big differences between the 1.0 class of data aggregators and the 2.0 class is the difference between “back office” and “live” applications. The credit card company mines its database to select you for direct mail offers; it may even get close to real time in monitoring your card activity for fraud or credit limit detection. But Google or Amazon mines its database in real time and builds the results right into its customer-facing applications.

If Google or Amazon were your phone company, they'd give you access to your entire call history, not just your last ten phone calls. They'd build a dynamic address book for you based on everyone you'd ever talked to — and they'd build p2p phone number lookup from your friends right into that address book. They'd get rid of 411, and just help you search for what you need, and then make the connection for you.

This is one reason I think that Microsoft's term, “Live Software” is so right on. (I thought of naming this piece “Why Live Software is a better name than Web 2.0.”) It's unfortunate that Microsoft has chosen that name for its own products only, because it goes right to the heart of what makes Web 2.0 applications so interesting: they are alive, or as close to it as you can get with a computer. They learn from and interact directly with their users (and more specifically, provide services to individual users that benefit from the aggregate interaction of the system with all of its users.)

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Slides from this morning's presentations can be found here:

http://www.flickr.com/gp/55155517@N00/Z0pq51

Links can be found here:

http://del.icio.us/kgilroy/nercomsig2007

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Also known as blog authoring tools and universal web clients, these are programs that enable you to post to your blog without having to log-in to the back end interface.

We use Ecto for the Mac. It has everything including integration with iphoto, itunes, and amazon.

For the PC, people seem to like either Blogjet or Windows Live Writer. But I'm not a PC user so if you all have any other suggestions, please let us know.

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Google's upgrade of its personalized home page, iGoogle, lead me to look again at the issue of secure RSS. I was pleased to discover that Worklight now offers a gadget for iGoogle that enables you to read secure RSS feeds.

I pulled this table from Worklight's newly published white paper on the challenges of secure and stable RSS:

Worklight's products are designed to help “consumerize” (their term, not mine) the enterprise data experience. For me, RSS is the biggest innovation of the consumer web and I so want it to available for projects behind the firewall. I don't have the technical chops to determine if Worklight's solution is secure enough to displace klunky behind-the-firewall enterprise apps. I sure hope so.

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I'll be speaking next Monday, May 7th at the NERCOMP SIG at the Four Points Sheraton Hotel and Conference Center in Norwood. You can find details and registration information here.

Workshop Organizer/Host: Dave Wisniewski of Brandeis University

Date/Time:

Monday, May 07, 2007

9:00am - 3:00pm

Registration begins at 8:00am

Location:

Four Points Sheraton Hotel and Conference Center

1125 Boston Providence Turnpike

Norwood, MA

Pricing:

NERCOMP Members: $90

Non-Members: $190

Here is my talk:

The online campus community in a social network world

9-10:15 Presentation

Learning in the Web 2.0 world

Kathleen Gilroy

CEO, The Otter Group

How are new technologies – weblogs, podcasting, wikis, and social networking – changing models for learning? What are the economics of the new learning models enabled by web 2.0 technologies? How can libraries and higher ed deliver learning at less cost and to greater numbers of people?

What is the role of the library/higher educational institution in this new world of learning?

How can these new models be used for certification, continuing education, communities of practice, and knowledge management?

This talk will answer these questions through specific case studies of libraries and higher ed and businesses that have adopted these new learning models.

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Lee LeFever of Common Cause has produced a wonderful video on RSS in plain english. He has given us permission to re-post it to our learning 2.0 podcast series. You can watch it here.

Thanks to Euan Semple for pointing me to this great list by Matt Moore on how to start a corporate blogging program:

My corporate blogging method would be:

- Give everyone in your organisation permission to set up their own blogger/typepad account. Ask them to give you a link to their RSS feed when they've done that.

- Give them a list of things they absolutely cannot talk about. Try to make it relatively short. You can't make this list short? Then may be you aren't ready for this yet. If they want to check anything with you then give them that option & respond quickly & decisively.

- Make it clear to their managers that blogging should not be punished - provided people are doing their jobs. If they are not doing their jobs then find out why - don't just blame the blogging.

- Advise them to be nice to people. Remind them that this is in public. “The evil that men do lives after them”.

- Advise them to think of 3-4 business-related things that they are passionate about.

- Advise them to find 10 people that blog about each of those things. Look at the posts. Look at the comments fields. Do these people link to each other? What world are they about to step into?

- Let them get on with it. They can work out when they feel ready to step into conversations. They can talk about that with you if they want.

- Read their RSS feeds & give them a bit of encouragement. Be their first audience.

- Only intervene if someone really screws up. You can't handle someone screwing up? Then may be you aren't ready for this yet. Suggest that your bloggers talk to each other about their experiences.

- Don't treat them as another “channel” for messages - they are not a ventriloquist's dummy. But do treat them as conversational partners.

- See who has kept it going after 6 months. Do something nice for them (preferably involving the blog).

Blogging allows you to:

- Talk to customers & partners at all levels.

- Scan the environment for change.

- Identify potential thought leaders

Right on.

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I will be participating in the Enterprise 2.0 Rave in New York on May 21 and May 22. There is a great group of speakers participating including Jerry Bowles, Bill Ives, Andrew McAfee, Jim McGee and Euan Semple. I read all of their blogs and look forward to the brainstorming that will happen around the emergence of enterprise 2.0.

The format will run as follows:

The Enterprise 2.0 Rave will start on the evening of the 21st of May with an informal dinner and a short talk by Andrew McAfee, the Harvard Business School professor who coined the “Enterprise 2.0″ term.

The Enterprise 2.0 Rave will continue on the 22nd with four sessions, three of which will managed as group brainstorm sessions around the following topics:

* Deploying Enterprise 2.0 tools – the adoption issues

* Targeting the right business processes for Enterprise 2.0 projects

* Getting started with Enterprise 2.0 and how to measure success

The last session will be an interactive wrap-up session involving all the thought leaders who participate in the Enterprise 2.0 Rave.

If you are interested in registering, you can get a $250 discount by using the term “bloggers” (without quotes) as as discount code during the registration process.

I hope to see you there.

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