eastwikkers

The Power of Us

Check out this entertaining and thorough look at the collaboration craze, in the 6/20 issue of Business Week.  Covers almost everything we've been obsessing about here at Eastwick, from group blogs and wikis, to smart mobs,  dumb mobs and the "wisdom of crowds."  Things are going to get even more interesting in the enterprise, as businesses learn to integrate new media tools into existing knowledge-management systems (so predicts Gartner).   

What's driving all this togetherness? More than anything, an emerging generation of Net technologies. They include file-sharing, blogs, group-edited sites called wikis, and social networking services such as MySpace and Meetup Inc., which has helped everyone from Howard Deaniacs to English bulldog owners in New York form local groups. Those technologies are finally teasing out the Net's unique potential in a way that neither e-mail nor traditional Web sites did. The Net can, like no other medium, connect many people with many others at the same time.

The Emergence of "Splogs" aka Spam Blogs

David Sifry of Technorati released updated information on the state of the blogosphere today with research indicating that there are over 30,000 new blogs created daily. However, he cautions that "spam blogs" (or as eastwikkers likes to refer to them: splogs) are beginning to proliferate and skew numbers.

"There is a dark underbelly to these numbers, however: Part of the growth of new weblogs created each day is due to an increase in spam blogs - fake blogs that are created by robots in order to foster link farms, attempted search engine optimization, or drive traffic through to advertising or affiliate sites."

Sifry will post more research this week, which he says will focus on the frequency of blog posts and posting volume, a good measure of blog quality.

Gilbane Report: Blogs and Wikis Will Fuse

See Gilbane's excellent monograph on new media for corporate environments. It clearly articulates our position on blogs and wikis -- at some point, the functionalities will need to come together. Lots of innovation to come as businesses learn not only to publish but to collaborate.

As requirements from companies become more complex, for example as the size of the company grows, or in highly competitive or heavily regulated industries, the requirements placed on the systems also grow. The trend in commercial products is towards combined systems that have features from both blogging systems and wikis as well as full audit trails and version control. What is noteworthy about these systems is that they are using the functionality developed for personal online diaries and turning them into systems for information sharing where the individual voice and personality is less important than the information that is being imparted. This is where blogs shift focus from the sometimes hubristic to the collaborative, from the individual to the group. And thus many other types of systems that work to support collaborative efforts are looking to add blogging or wiki-like capabilities, forming hybrid systems. I foresee this trend continuing, and that just as content management systems now are expected to provide ways to take advantage of XML documents, so will enterprise systems be expected to provide blog-like capabilities and/or RSS feeds.

AMR: Standards for Corporate Blogging

In a column for CRM Buyer, AMR's Louis Columbus advocates standards in corporate blogging that follow best practices in marketing:

For any company looking to create direct, honest and open communications with their customers, blogs are a great tool, but the fact remains that they must be considered a marketing communications vehicle, not an electronic printing press. Publicly held corporations must put standards into place to ensure communication on blogs is compliant with Sarbanes-Oxley legislation and the many Securities and Exchange Commission rules about forward-looking statements.

Meta on Corporate Blogging Policies

Thanks to ZDNet for this post, quoting from a recent Meta Client Advisor:

Organizations have long had formal policies addressing discussion by employees with media outlets, postings within public forums (e.g., bulletin boards, Usenet, Web sites), and participation within professional associations. As technologies emerge that enable users to externally share information, enterprises must ensure processes exist to re-assess and update these policies, as well as inform users of revised practices. Newer tools such as blogs, wikis, and social networking services should be included in updated guidelines, and users should expect disciplinary action when employees personal blogs are interpreted by management as a policy breach.