This is a quick test of the wordpress Blackberry application to see if it might draw me back to blogging.
I have been silent on this blog for many months because all my posting has been done internally. Recently I have been made Enterprise Technical Architect and now find more of my internal posts could equally be external with little or no change. I’ve moved to blogger because that gives me more configurability out the box.
I’d delete this blog if it wasn’t getting so many hits on how to integrate media wiki and active directory. This will be my last post here.
Posted in General
UPDATE [Sept ’07]: I am the Infrastructure Architect for a 9000+ organisation and although we’ve toyed with Wikis we haven’t adopted them at all. Many issues around Knowledge Management have hindered adoption. For the last year all my blogging has been internal, but I’ve recently started putting some thoughts back out into the public arena. If your struggle reflects mine you might find my new blog of interest.
Although I have done quite a bit of work with Mediawiki, having had one of our teams utilising it for the best part of 4 months to document their processes, I’ve gone rather cold on the product. Firstly the lack of a GUI editor presents a huge barrier to adoption. I haven’t tried the FCKEditor but it doesn’t thrill me. Secondly the single wiki approach is fine for small organisations, or teams, but something more flexible, probably of the self-serving genre, is required for a large enterprise.
So I’ve been looking around and it seems the two players that get the most press in this space are SocialText and Atlassian’s Confluence. I’ve worked on a SocialText blog before (not version 2) and thought it an appalling wiki. I also am unimpressed with its highly restrictive infrastructure requirements. Confluence, on the other hand, looks fantastic. It strikes me as having everything you could possibly want in a wiki, with the concept of workspaces, security, not to mention the broad range of options available as supporting infrastructure.
There are a couple of other names that drop into the frame. Blogtronix has an interesting blog offering, but the wiki (at least when I saw it about 2 months ago) was appallingly weak, not to mention the fact that it seemed to want be a bit of everything else as well, it’s spreading itself too thinly. Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server, released as part of Office 2007, has some interesting contributions to this space. I’ve only seen demos of their wiki, but heard good things. Again, this product tramples over so many other parts of an enterprise service offering that it’s hard to integrate.
With the momentum fairly well built up behind RSS and blogging (see my many previous posts on the work that I had to do to get these on the agenda), I’m beginning to look more seriously at wikis. I’ll report back whatever findings I think are appropriate to share externally.
Posted in Wiki
Web 2.0 is a term referring to a new generation of web/browser based applications that allow people to interact in ways previously not possible. Enterprise 2.0 is the use of Web 2.0 applications within the enterprise.
There are many aspects to Web 2.0 but I’ve picked four fundamentals: emergence, openness, relationships and aggregation. Then I’ll look at a couple of specific Web 2.0 application and show how these fundamentals play out.
Fundamentals
Emergence
Emergence is the appearance of an overall structure that results from local disconnected interactions.
The classic example given for emergence is a colony of ants. There is no central control, no overall organisation, yet through the individual interactions of the ants they organise themselves into an organism that collects food, builds a nest and defends against attack.
Tools classed as Web 2.0 (at least the ones that are interesting) allow, even encourage, a structure to emerge through the way in which people interact with the tool. The term often used is Social Software, but it is probably worth delineating further by calling it Emergent Social Software.
Openness
There are many technologies that allow people to generate and view content. These can be split into two broad camps, channels and platforms. Channels create a private flow of information between producer and consumer (sender and receiver), for examples telephone, instant messaging (Sametime) and email. Platforms expose content to all members in a community, for example Intranet sites.
With channels, everyone is able to produce content and everyone is receiving content. However, there is no commonality in the content. What you see through your channel is different to what I see in mine. On the other hand the number of people able to produce content on platforms is often restricted to a few; yet what people see when reading the information is the same – i.e. high level of commonality.
As people paid to generate information and knowledge we will tend towards the tool that lets us express what we need to say – even if it means compromising on the extent of the visibility of that communication. I write an email on some matter and, despite thinking it should be widely read, send it only to those people I think will be really interested – I don’t want to be accused of spamming. I feel good, at least I get my message out, yet it has not been as effective as it could have been.
Web 2.0 tools break down the barriers between channels and platforms; creating platforms on which everyone can participate. Chaos, you might think, but look at the ants.
[The contrasting of channels and platforms is something I get from reading Andrew McAfee’s work – his blog is one I follow.]
Network effect
The term Network effects describes the increasing value to the whole as more entities are joined in. The participation of an individual benefits not just that individual, but the broader population of participants. Web 2.0 tools seek to lower the barriers to participation. Given the right community this enables effects like The Wisdom of Crowds – the many are smarter than the few.
The way in which Web 2.0 tools utilise the contribution of the individual often leads these applications to highlight the relationships formed between people. Some tools focus entirely on utilising who you know to benefit others; building relationships between the people who know the people you know.
Aggregation
A necessary result of breaking down barriers and the encouragement of contribution is an explosion of content. Enabling people to sift through that content, to harness what the input of others is a challenge; in reality is already a problem. Web 2.0 tools make significant use of technologies that enable the flow of information.
RSS is an alerting mechanism that helps to draw and maintain attention, and thereby contribution, over the long term.
Mashups take exposed data from multiple sources and join them together in meaningful ways. For example, Google maps mashed with property details from an estate agent.
This reaches into the realms of Service Oriented Architecture.
Technologies
Blogs
Put simply a blog is a tool that easily enables the production of content and publication to a web page. It makes making a thought, idea or opinion visible to all as easy as writing an email. Reducing this barrier (ease of production) and providing the platform (a place to put it) is the power of a blog. Giving the ability to readers to post back comments encourages contribution.
However, the true power is in the mix of the blogosphere – i.e. all the blogs and bloggers and their interaction with one another and their readers. For example, if one blogger posts a references to the post of another blogger, that reference appears as a comment on the “referred-to” post – called a trackback. Bloggers will often put a list their favourite bloggers on their blog – called a blogroll. Following trackbacks or going to sites on the Blogroll leads you to the blog of someone who ‘knows’ the person you ‘know’.
Wikis
A wiki is like a blank notebook, without content or structure. A community of contributors with a common purpose (see the Four elements required to form a wise crowd) are able to easily place content into the wiki and create links between content. In this way a structure emerges. Wikis have proved immensely powerful as a tool for collaboration and .
Tagging and bookmarking
Traditional search engines identify content through the use of keywords; counting occurrences, noting proximity. Knowledge management tools often use predefined categories into which information must be dropped – a taxonomy. The term folksonomy is given to describe the (free form) tagging of information by the producer.
Several sites focus on picking up this tagged information, or utilise tagging, to identify emerging structures.
del.icio.us is a web based bookmarking site – not much more complicated than a web based IE Favorites menu. Rather than using categories (like creating subfolders in your favorites menu) it makes it very easy to tag the bookmarks. By using the collective behaviour of the entire community something much bigger emerges. For example, when I bookmark a link it is able to suggest tags that others have used, or by profiling things I have bookmarked against others it can suggest other sites that might also interest me.
Technorati tracks 50million+ blogs. One of the things it does is extract the tags associated with each blog posts. As people go about their daily lives posting to their blogs and tagging the post, Technocrati extracts that and builds the emergent structure – e.g. what’s hot now. At the moment, for example, tags like bush, china, halloween, iraq, north korea and wordpress are popular.
Posted in Web 2.0
Having just posted about adopting RSS Bandit in our organisation I read this post about why RSS Feeds aren’t popular. I’d like to add to the list: people don’t have a reader by default. I’ve spoken to so many people who go, “Oh yes” when I talk about the ‘little orange icon on the BBC web site’.
Outside of geekdom there’s a lot of resistance to installing applications, especially when the poor user has to go and find a good one. Many people who have now used RSS Bandit in my organisation (a few dozen to date) have also installed it at home, using it for non-work related feeds.
Make subscribing to a feed as easy/intuitive as bookmarking a site and it will become very popular.
Posted in RSS
I bloggedthat Max might be a good RSS Reader when Vista comes along. I finally tried it out. It requires .Net 3, so I installed that, rebooted, installed Max and Max complained that my version of .Net 3 was too new! So I removed .Net 3, allowed Max to install .Net 3, rebooted and fired up Max – it didn’t work! Anyone had more success?
UPDATE: Just to clarify – this was done on XP SP2.
UPDATE: I tried again today (17 Oct) and Max is still falling over, so thought I’d look for a reason. I stumbled a post by Mark Woodman in which he points to a whole bunch of failing in Max. I can only assume that the people writing these things don’t use RSS – well not in anger – because they just don’t get it. Disappointed I am.
I’ve been working for some time to raise awareness of Web 2.0 in the organisation for which I work. It’s been a long journey and I’ve blogged about the early stages of this process here. One of the keys requirements is to introduce a feed reader. Conventional Wisdom is that without one, adoption of Web 2.0 technologies is far less likely to succeed.
My approach has been to adopt RSS Bandit. It’s a tatical solution because in 18 months time we’ll be looking to roll out Vista and the whole picture will have changed. That will be the time to make a long term decision that can justify some spend. Well, this approach has now been ratified by our Global IT folk, so we will be looking to roll it out in the UK real soon now.
Posted in Community Server, RSS, RSS enabling, Web 2.0
Stowe Boyde writes an interesting post listing three things that Office 2.0 is NOT.
Ultimately most things boil down to conversations. I stumbled across this interesting looking book, The Cluetrain Manifesto. Chapter 4, Markets are Conversations, is published on the web – it’s quite long and I haven’t read the whole thing yet.
Conversation is a profound act of humanity.
Posted in Web 2.0
Microsoft are set to release IE7 with next months batch of critical updates, and sooner for manual download. That means that some of your clients may be using IE7 to access our external services. The link has some tools and tips on the what and how to be prepared.
Scott Hanselman blogs here about the way IE7 treats certificates.
Posted in Internet Explorer, Testing
One thing I really hate, when listening to podcasts, is people or items coming through at different volumes levels; especially in interviews. Enter the Levelator from GigaVox. A free (for non-commercial use) utility that analyses the levels across the audio stream, building a “loudness map” and leveling the volume over multiple passes. I heard of it on a podcast, which was recorded on a stage and even before it was mentioned I had noticed how consistent the level was.
Posted in Podcasting
TechnogIT 