Group items tagged

simply because people work together to meet objectives and reach goals, doesn't mean they are collaborating

efficiency

'Collaboration' thrives on difference, insight and spontaneity, rather than structural harmony

At the same time, a recent InformationWeek survey of IT departments are showing considerably wariness for doing the same thing inside the firewall with employees, with over half being either skeptical or wary of the utility of Web 2.0 apps in the enterprise.  The biggest concerns: Security, little expertise with Web 2.0 products, integration issues, and unclear ROI top the list.  In other words, the group inside most organizations that's most familiar with IT and software, is thinking carefully before deploying things like Enterprise 2.0. This is an interesting contrast, with a growing list of companies cautiously but clearly testing out the Web 2.0 waters with their customers while remaining largely on the fence for its use inside the enterprise.  Certainly, many organizations likely believe that consumer facing sites that extensively leverage user generated content, mass participation, and social networking have been proved to work on a large scale by sites like MySpace and YouTube.  And that organizations have already purchased and deployed countless IT tools that were already designed support internal business processes, ad hoc collaboration, and information capture and storage.    Another probably contributor to the increasing use of customer-facing Web 2.0 applications by large organizations is simple competitive pressure.  This is something that IT departments have only recently started facing in a serious fashion with outsourcing and other budget diversions in the enterprise as business units decide that they can do better by pitting their internal IT suppliers with external ones.  Thus, because of industry competition, a company's external products tend to improve faster and be more innovative since the concern over the displacement and dislocation of falling behind one's competitive peers is often pronounced in many industries.  Competition is usually much less, and often non-existent, for internal IT products.

it doesn't help us understand if Web 2.0 concepts like crowdsourcing actually work well in the enterprise.  For one thing, instead of recruiting people who have previously had no relationship with you and cost-effectively aggregating their time together to create large levels of new output, employers have a zero-sum game with Web 2.0 inside the firewall.

the best that Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 applications like blogs and wikis can do it increase the productivity of existing business processes by improving efficiency as well as allowing them to self-improve through emergent structure and behavior.

Me.dium's collaborative browsing vision When we wrote about Me.dium over four months ago, we described it as 'social browsing'. Perhaps a refinement of this would be collaborative browsing, and that would be a more precise definition of what the company is trying to do. At the heart of Me.dium is the idea that by enabling real-time discovery and communication during browsing, this will enable people to get things done faster and in ways not possible before. During my interview with the company founders, we discussed the typical scenarios for using Me.dium: You and your friend are trying to accomplish a common task; You are trying to do something on your own and meet others who are trying to do the same thing; You are observing the patterns of crowds nearby and so you are able to discover new things.

So the $15M dollar question is what is Me.dium planning to do next? In a nutshell, the company is planning to spend the money on refining and scaling its sophisticated matching technology. The secret sauce here is in connecting people based on their browsing patterns.

ONLINE PRODUCTIVITY GOD: 400+ Resources To Make You Smarter, Faster & a Demon in the Sack 30+ AJAX-Powered WordPress Plugins 70+ Tools For Job Hunting 2.0 40+ Firefox Add-ons for High Speed Blogging 20 Ways To Aggregate Your Social Networking Profiles Online Music: 90+ Essential Music and Audio Websites Podcasting Toolbox: 70+ Podcasting Tools and Resources Blogging Toolbox: 120+ Resources for Bloggers 14 Personalized Homepages Compared, Feature by Feature 230+ Keyboard Shortcuts for Top Web Services Online Photography Toolbox: 90+ Online Photography Tools and Resources Video Toolbox: 150+ Online Video Tools and Resources Online Productivity Toolbox: 30+ Resources to Get Things Done The Ultimate RSS Toolbox - 120+ RSS Resources Analytics Toolbox: 50+ Ways to Track Website Traffic Google vs Everyone: 10 Markets Where Google Wants to Win The Tagging Toolbox: 30+ Tagging Tools Wiki Toolbox: 30+ Wiki Tools

Many free RSS services let you subscribe to oodles of news sources that so you don't have to hopscotch from site to site to get the scoop. But the $29 FeedDemon 2 is the best RSS reader for steamrolling through thousands of feeds. Need headlines from the science section of the world's major newspapers? Check. Want the latest research from insider blogs about solar power? Check. FeedDemon is faster and more customizable than browser-based freebies, and it also lets you access feeds online.

2. Wikipedia You might shun this online, open-source encyclopedia if you've ever been burned by prank entries or fudged facts. But because anyone can edit Wikipedia, it's a richer resource than Britannica for subjects off the beaten path, such as the > 1960s underground press > or > rivethead subculture > . Though it's not the only source you should reference in term papers, at least Wikipedia gets you started. >

Corporate Wikis reviewed: Confluence, JotSpot, WetPaint, Socialtext by Troy Angrignon on Mon 10 Jul 2006 06:30 AM PDT  |  Permanent Link  |  Cosmos Wikis are on the rise in corporations. And it's about time. One of the principles of Web 2.0 is that your user community can generate content that is better, faster, and probably easier to read than you can as a vendor. One way to enable them to contribute would be to build a wiki and let them flesh it out. Some good examples are coming up in this article: "Corporate wikis breaking out all over: MSDN Wiki" by Dion Hinchcliffe. (He has another great post as well called "Exploiting the Power of Enterprise Wikis") Quote of the day: "Not leveraging the contributions of a company's most impassioned and enthusiastic customers is starting to be seen as a significand oversight in many business circles." It appears in the article that eBay is using Wikis to better communicate between their users, partners, and suppliers. Now MSDN (Microsoft Developer Network) is using their pages to improve the quality of their developer documentation with the MSDN Wiki. THAT is a great usage. Your users often know your product better than your engineers and product managers because they have to live with it day to day. And guess what? If they tell the truth about some part of your product being broken - that's a GOOD thing.

Atlassian's Confluence is the best of them so far. Pros: the overall design is clean, it has advanced management tools, good security, and simple attachments.Its email function has to pick mail up from a POP box which makes it a little bit less ad-hoc but still functional. And most importantly, it also has great tools for moving pages around. Cons: Text editing, like with most apps these days is a bit dodgy, and pasting in blocks of text from Word is likely to cause problems. The pricing model is reasonable but for some reason (possibly because they're from Australia), they still don't have a directly hosted option so you have to use somebody like Contegix or deploy it on your own box. This seems to be a big and obvious oversight on their part these days. Also, their pricing model doesn't encourage small deployments right off the bat. I think this is the one that we'll use more of internally at the company where I work. Summary: The best of the enterprise wikis today, and one of the best options for scalability.

WetPaint is a newcomer that is doing some interesting stuff and that might be a better bet than JotSpot. Pros: The design is beautiful, the tool is very easy to use, the text editor is one of the best I have seen. Cons: I'm not clear on their entierprise suitability and it's not really their target market. It didn't appear that they had much in the way of administration tools, granular security, or any way to integrate into a back-end authentication system. Summary: I met one of the WetPaint guys at Gnomedex but he didn't seem to know the product very well. Hopefully next time, they'll put somebody more knowledgeable at their booth who knows the product in more detail. I think they're worth watching to see what they do in the next few months.

where we're going

software with APIs that third party developers can write apps on top of

grow a tech business more quickly if you get third party developers