November
An article originally posted on Read/WriteWeb
“It would take over 4 and a half years before the licensed software became cheaper. By that time, I’m quite sure there would be another solution that could replace SharePoint, and the cycle would start again. We can quibble about the numbers, but you get the point. Plus, the numbers don’t reflect that the SaaS solution is likely to improve and innovate faster than the licensed software by a significant amount.”
Read the full article at www.readwriteweb.com
When considering to run new software there is more than the licensing cost to consider. Jason points very well that a software you buy will probably be outdated before it starts to be cheaper than an online solution and that usualy SaaS software improve quicker than traditional software. Always good to keep in mind.
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November
An article originally posted on emitgraphics.com
“Digg, Reddit, Mixx, Slashdot, and so on. They are all great social news and media websites, but how do they rank in terms of how easy they are on the eyes? Here I will rank all the top social news and media websites based solely on their layout.”
Read the full article at emitgraphics.com
The amount of social websites is increasing rapidly and the concurrency is hard on the internet between all those websites which are providing almost the same services. That is why they need to distinguish themselves from the others.
There are several ways to get out of the mass and try to be “the chosen one” for the final user. A very important aspect, even if it could seem insignificant to some developers, is the design and the layout of their application. Indeed, the first thing the final user see is the look and feel of the website, and for this reason they will stay or they will leave.
This article is just discussing about that point and is trying to compare some famous social news websites on the level of their look and design. It’s interesting to see how a final user is considering the sites he visited and to understand why he made that ranking.
A good design is indeed one of the major factors in user-adoption, besides usability and the functionalities offered, which are all determining the ‘lifetime’ of these social tools.
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November
An article originally posted on www.ariadne.ac.uk
“If a company doesn’t know what is being said about them, that doesn’t stop it being said; it just means that they are not in a position to contribute to or influence that discussion. Surely it becomes more, not less necessary to be aware of and to search this content - just to keep up to date, if nothing else.”
Read the full article at www.ariadne.ac.uk
I would recommend to try Social Mention. I tried this with a few company names and it is a nice place to start monitoring things. Unfortunately, you can’t subscribe to RSS feeds that warn you when new content is available. Still you need to create feeds directly from sources like Delicious, Digg or Technorati and grab them all in a one place
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November
An article originally posted on www.socialenterprise.it
“Knowledge Plaza offers without a doubt a new and extremely powerful platform for locating and capitalizing business knowledge, skillfully mixing advanced concepts such as social filtering, people tagging, the merge of taxonomies, tags and facets, the use of experts such as vertical search engines. (…)”
Read the full article at www.socialenterprise.it
Emanuele Quintarelli, an information architect, user experience and social software consultant, wrote up this complimentary article about Knowledge Plaza. If like me you are not Italian literate, check out the following English translation.
Grazie mille per il relè Emanuele and we’ll be glad to gather your feedback for making the interface even more intuitive. 
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November
An article originally posted on www.theappgap.com
“Knowledge Plaza is a Web-based platform for enterprise search, social bookmarking, knowledge management, information brokerage and expert identification. Every tile, or piece of information, has its own page like members so you can see all the activity related to the information. You can also send a link to the page so others can see the context around the information. I like this in the same way I think the Mosaic concept adds value. You get the context surrounding information and you can share this context. This concept of providing context is pervasive in Knowledge Plaza and I think that is one of its greatest strengths. It takes knowledge management nicely into enterprise 2.0.”
Read the full article at www.theappgap.com
Bill Ives wrote up this excellent article about Knowledge Plaza at the App Gap, after only a brief tour of the solution. We’re already looking forward to further interaction and collaboration during his next visit to Belgium.
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November
An article originally posted on pistachioconsulting.com
Laura Fitton from Pistachio relayed this short business use case story for Twitter written by Gary Koelling of Best Buy and Blue Shirt Nation fame.
Image via CrunchBase
“We had a meeting today, about 30 of us in a room, where we heard from some very high ranking executives as they took us through their thinking on how to implement a relevant digital strategy. Sounds dreadful right? What was different was that there was a huge tv screen next to an overhead projection of the ppt. On the screen was a web app created by @benhedrington call spy. It was rolling every tweet tagged with #BBYCDS from Twitter. Almost everyone in the room and lots outside the room were tweeting thoughts and questions throughout. There were enough tweets, in fact, that the tag #BBYCDS trended on summize to number two right ahead of “sarah palin” and right behind “halloween.”
And what struck me was the dynamic of this meeting. It was participatory. No one was talking out loud except the guy presenting the ppt. But the conversation was roaring through the room via twitter. It was exploding. People we asking questions. Pointing out problems. Replying to each other all while the ppt was progressing along it’s unwaveringly linear path.”
Read the full article at pistachioconsulting.com
Microblogging in a single room is the behaviour you’ll see at conferences nowadays, but I was thrilled to discover a company actually practicing this to manage all their meetings and presentations.
Whether you are 5 or 500 people, the ability to instantaneously share ideas and conversations without disrupting presentations almost sounds too wild to one day become common practice. My first impression is however that this could be slightly overkill for smaller groups/companies. Also the fewer the people, the closer the speaker and therefore the more potentially disturbing could microblogging become.
Should critical mass therefore be a requisit? Could we apply the same to web conference meetings and training sessions to dynamically gather feedback? Next step is now to convince the boss to try this out
What are your thoughts about this?
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November
An article originally posted on www.readwriteweb.com
Oliver Young, an analyst at Forrester Research, stated that despite there being a lot of buzz about the consumer market for web 2.0 applications, “the greatest opportunity today for vendors is in the business-to-business collaboration space”.
Read the full article at www.readwriteweb.com
The trend is definitely about social networks and mashups, but what about B2B collaboration spaces? Tools like Basecamp started early by providing a simple SaaS solution where one can manage projects with his clients. In the enterprise, trends are clearly growing towards solutions answering such needs: not only can project management be done with your clients, but so can knowledge management.
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November
An article originally posted on www.socialglass.com
“Recent discussions at work have prompted me to re-iterate something very fundamental that often gets overlooked when it comes to Enterprise 2.0. An organization will never adopt a single social productivity tool. Knowledge will ALWAYS be scattered.
Enterprise search will unlock data and increase the propensity for information (and the knowledge workers who create it) to be discovered. Discoverability leads to recognition, and recognition leads to increased participation. Enterprise 2.0 must be approached holistically.
Clearspace doesn’t do this. Thoughtfarmer doesn’t do this. Mindtouch doesn’t do this. There is no “Enterprise 2.0 in a box” solution. Period.”
Read the full article at www.socialglass.com
I recently stumbled upon Jeremy Thomas who stated a few months back on Twitter that “Data within the enterprise will never be unified in one place i.e. a wiki, community, KM platform” and that “Search is key”. This followed his post on Social Glass which had been followed up by people such as Jon Husband and Chris McGrath with whom I couldn’t agree more on the fact “Enterprise 2.0 is as much a mindset than tools”. However, I guess you realize that closing the door to new potential solutions actually opens a huge one for being challenged?
Search is of course important, but in its current state search alone is insufficient. Enterprise search is as broken as web search: too many different sources, too little context. The fact is although it brings silos together, unfortunately context is either left behind or difficult to homogenize when brought in from this diversity of sources and formats.
The only option left is to then give users the ability to build context themselves around all this information once it’s been discovered and/or retrieved.
Funnily enough Jon Husband mentioned PKM (Personal Knowledge Management) which we’ve believed for a long time to be an essential step towards proper adoption of EKM (Enterprise Knowledge Management) solutions.
“Personally essential, collectively critical” : these are actually thoughts which lead our team to develop a few months back what is being recognized as a very elegant I&KM receipe which gathers any form of information (docs, websites, emails, contacts, search tools), but which more importantly allows users to interact around these items. Not only is all your information searchable, but it becomes contextualised under a single coherent umbrella: “No more silos, just context”. Social interaction and productivity then kick in to give you (what we think is) an all-in-one enterprise-wide solution for EKM.
Either way, I’d be more than glad to share thoughts on this with you guys. We are getting very positive feedback about the platform, but it’s definitely a treat to get dubious people on board and convince them this is actually possible;-)
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November
An article originally posted on www.cioupdate.com
“Enterprises must reconsider and redraft their knowledge strategy for this “2.0″ world (…) the traditional deployment of centralized content management systems will have to be merged with this newer phenomena of community-driven content generation.”
Read the full article at www.cioupdate.com
Human factor is often forgotten in knowledge management. This article shows that human is the epicenter of KM. But how to extract and manage knowledge from people ? According to Raj Datta, CKO at MindTree, the solution is in social media and web 2.0.
People need to discuss, give opinions, share and have the feeling to belong to a network, they are not computers. It is why the traditional process-driven approach of KM must be changed into a people-driven approach. Furthermore, the work style of new generations is more fluid and collaborative.
Social media seems to become more and more important for Knowledge Management and can bring innovation in enterprise, just look at open source communities …
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October
An article originally posted on googleblog.blogspot.com
“Until now, alerts have been delivered via email only, but those days are over. Now your News, Web, Blog, Video, and Groups alerts are more easily accessible than ever.
Once you sign in to Google Alerts and create an alert, you can opt for feed delivery by clicking ‘Edit’ next to your alert on the ‘Manage Your Alerts’ page and changing your ‘Deliver to’ selection from ‘Email’ to ‘Feed’ (click on the image to see larger).”
Read the full article at googleblog.blogspot.com
If you’ve been wanting to monitor all websites, news, blogs, videos and groups indexed by Google, now is the time to get your Google alerts configured – RSS is up and running!
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