Joho the blog!

They went to LotusSphere. They came back all excited about social networking, blogs and wikis, dogears and Notes/Domino 8 and Quickr... IBM did what I could not achieve in 5 years: convincing the guys who run my company of the benefit of using social software such as blogs and wikis in a corporate environment. But the result will be brilliant: everyone in my company will get his/her own blog. And every project will get its wiki.

While doing more research on the internet on these matters, I stumbled upon a very nice article on Joho the blog!, David Weinberger's weblog. I like his style, hence the title of this post. And BTW, you should read this as well.

Corporate blogging

We saw the era of Knowledge Management. Boring. Didn't catch on, at least nowhere where I worked. In the traditional way, it relied on forcing (or teasing) employees to document after their work was done. Blogging is completely different: everyone gets the opportunity and means to just write about their work every day and in any way they want. Above all, they have a great feeling of ownership: it is their own blog. Within companies, this concept is very powerful: knowledge is collected and shared where it happens, on the workfloor itself. So blogs could just be the leverage employees need to share their knowledge.

Choosing the right blogging tool

We will use IBM Lotus Notes/Domino, but we have to choose one of the existing solutions. IBM blog and BlogSphere are the first candidates. Above that, I was very happy to hear that my own blog template could enter the competition as well. Happy, but also concerned: my blog template was only intended at first to serve my own needs. But I am eager to take the challenge. May the best blog template win. I will keep you informed of the winner, and also the requirements it was challenged with.

What about wikis?

Everyone knows Wikipedia by now. Its main strength is allowing lots of users to work on one big documentation system. Everyone can contribute freely. All pages keep a history of changes and you can easily compare versions and do a rollback. This might be a very fast and convenient way of collecting information on projects or knowledge domains within an enterprise. There's one negative point however: navigation is purely based on inline links between the pages. Maybe wikis should have some sort of traditional tree based navigation system on top of that.

Dogear

Dog-earing is another word for sharing your favorite internet pages: Enterprise Social Bookmarking. Dog ears is an informal name for folding the corner of pages to mark where you are in a book, as opposed to using an actual bookmark (from Wikipedia). In the enterprise, dog-earing is sharing your hyperlinks with collegues. This can be a great source of information. You can add value by keeping track of how many people have bookmarked a link and adding a rating or comment system. Software can even extract interest profiles or expertise domains of employees by analysing the links he shared.

Bye for now

My next task will be: preparing my own blog template to enter the competition: it has to be cleaned out and some annoying misbehaviours have to be solved. I also have to add more flexibility, because not everyone has the same blogging style: some blog in small, frequent bursts, other write long posts, but only now and then. And I have to make a few styles, options and skins to choose from. I will keep you posted.