Technology

information & communication technology

Blog Rules

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I’m being asked more questions about the value of blogs and how they can help to engage customers, suppliers and employees. Via Dina is this story by Stuart Henshall on what happens when a dedicated blogger is engaged by a corporation:

Blog Rules:

  • For blogs to work there must be trust. Let it be a warning to you when an employer is critical of your blog, or implies that they must approve every post you make first.
  • Blogs are strategic, but the messages must be personal. Planning out a blog strategy and topics in advance fails to account for the immediacy of the daily events and the need for responsiveness.
  • Make sure the company is large enough to have "personalities" blogging — otherwise own the company. The blogger is likely to become an important public face.
  • Think through where the blog should be on what URL. Is it better at blogperson.com or under the corporate banner? What is best to harness the blogger and readers?

Warnings to other Bloggers:

  • Your blog may be perceived as a personal asset and not a corporate one. You personal blog can become a corporate asset but only if the conditions above apply.
  • Corporate positioning is a must. If the company isn’t mature enough or is afraid to enable the blogger to talk about "category" developments then blogging will be difficult.
  • If topics and content are limited then you may lose your friends, lose access to thought leadership and potential partnerships and associates for the company – or even simply good press.
  • If the company fears balanced perspective on other products then you will find life difficult.
  • Blogs require a time commitment, if you are not getting it or there is no time left over for it then it is not valued. My target has always been in the ten hours a week category. That includes the use of my newsreader. Make sure your employer signs off on the time commitment to the blog.
  • If the company asks you when you will transfer your blog URL to the company then they really don’t get it.

As the value of blogging as a medium to connect producers with markets becomes more evident, corporate blogging may move into the mainstream, just as telecommuting (which means less control over workers) is accepted in some areas but not in others.

Into the Blogosphere

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Hosted by the University of Minnesota’s libraries, is this collection of essays, Into the Blogosphere, looking at blogging from multiple perspectives. It is all under a Creative Commons license as well.

This online, edited collection explores discursive, visual, social, and other communicative features of weblogs. Essays analyze and critique situated cases and examples drawn from weblogs and weblog communities. Such a project requires a multidisciplinary approach, and contributions represent perspectives from Rhetoric, Communication, Sociology, Cultural Studies, Linguistics, and Education, among others. We encourage you to post your responses to the essays …

This site should be a valuable resource for anyone studying the blog medium.

Blogs & Information Literacy

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Will Richardson has a good post on how many of the competencies required for information literacy can be addressed through blogging. Will’s quote from the American Library Association:

The information literate student validates understanding and interpretation of the information through discourse with other individuals, subject-area experts, and/or practitioners.

This is the kind of educational outcome, based on a process, that makes more sense than mastery of subject-based content. The content discussed in blogs is not as important as the skills developed through the process of blogging. The content is just grist for the cognitive mill.


Do It Yourself (DIY)

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After to listening to an interview with Doc Searls, Jay Cross expands on the analogy of open source software as the material for DIY’ers of information technology.


The DIY crowd just want to build things. The closest analogy is to the construction industry. They share a common language ("builds,""tools,""builders"). Linux is the DIYers’ lumber, a raw material for virtually any job. Neither software construction nor building houses locks you in to a particular supplier. The housebuilder doesn’t say, "We’re building this house on a Weyerhauser platform…."
…
The fact that Open Source code is free delegates decision-making lower in the organization. You don’t need a purchase order — or official approval — to use it.

As IT becomes ubiquitous, many of us just want to build things that will address our issues, and open source gives us the material to start with. No, open source is not perfect, but without it we couldn’t afford to test out many of our ideas. Open source lowers the barriers to innovation, because you have free building material, and only have to supply the labour.

Cycling and KM

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Denham Grey has the perfect presentation for my tastes, but I won’t be able to get to Cincinnati to see it. Denham is using cycling as the metaphor for knowledge management (The only sport I love more than cycling is cross-country skiing) .

Having cycled across France & Belgium, as well as climbing three passes in the Alps in the same day, I must admit that cycling is a passion, and Denham is going to link it to my business – great!

Ever had that sinking feeling you are being dropped from the peleton as new technology decends?, looking for new ways to collaborate on a strategy or coordinating to chase down a break-away?, is your team self-organizing or do you rely on command and control?, do you have the agility and the shared mindset to react to a sudden event?

I hope he posts his notes. Allez-y!

Networks Replace Hierarchies

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Jay Cross has synthesized many of the same themes discussed in my previous post on the The Dummies Guide to Change. There are also some good links on his post, which covers some previous material because Jay has been having problems with comment Spammers.

I am certain that we are about to experience a tipping point in business organisations as well as organisational learning. Observations made in The Cluetrain Manifesto are becoming obvious to the Early Majority. Informal learning is the huge growth area (not online courses), and will prove John Chambers (who said that e-learning will make e-mail look like a rounding error) correct. We are also seeing the rise of connected natural enterprises, as Jay says:

Networks are the next step in computing, business organizations, and more. As internodal communication costs drop, networks replace hierarchies.

The world is a different place because [almost] everyone can talk to everyone else. That changes business as well as learning.

 

Sakai 1.0 to be Released Today

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The Sakai Project will be releasing the first version of its open source learning management system today:

The University of Michigan, Indiana University, MIT, Stanford, and the uPortal consortium are joining forces to integrate and synchronize their considerable educational software into a pre-integrated collection of open source tools. This will yield three big wins for sustainable economics and innovation in higher education:


* A framework that builds on the recently ratified JSR 168 portlet standard and the OKI open service interface definitions to create a services-based, enterprise portal for tool delivery

* A re-factored set of educational software tools that blends the best of features from the participants?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢ disparate software (e.g., course management systems, assessment tools, workflow, etc.)

* A synchronization of the institutional clocks of these schools in developing, adopting and using a common set of open source software.

It will be interesting to see if this changes the balance in the higher education marketplace.

Update: More information and related links are available at ICTlogy.

Furl helps to create the personal web

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Via Weblogg-ed is a good overview of Furl, and how it differs from the usual bookmark managers. Greg Ritter goes into detail on how you can use Furl. It seems especially useful for students and researchers. I use Furl (see Home Page) when I’m too lazy to blog or if a want to share a series of web pages on a single topic. It’s a great tool for collaborative web research. I think that the use of tools like Furl may surpass blogs in the near future – they’re too easy.

The LMS Industry

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Scott Leslie discussed the increase in LMS vendors in the marketplace in a recent newsletter, something that most analysts did not predict:

While it’s definitely true that a few of the 50 seemed to have slowed down their release cycles (no bad thing in a sector that at one point seemed to be averaging close to 2 major releases a year), none of them have actually closed shop. Add to these all of the small open source projects popping up (and some of the bigger ones too), as well as a seemingly neverending supply of elearning startups from India, and one could get the impression that this marketplace is somehow expanding, not consolidating.

Scott goes on to say that organisations should ensure that any system they purchase have the ability to export content in a standards-compliant format, and that this should be proven prior to purchase. This is good advice, as there are numerous purchasers who are locked-in to their sub-optimal systems because they cannot export their content to any other system.