How to Make the Web More Social

Google’s Joe Kraus (ex JotSpot) got interviewed by Wharton Business School’s Kevin Werbach on How to Make the Web More Social, here’s the mp3.

Joe Kraus, director of product management at Google, believes every killer app on the web — instant messaging, e-mail, blogging, photo-sharing — has succeeded because it helps people connect with one another. For Kraus, this means the Internet has an inherently social character, but it can be enhanced further. Wharton legal studies professor Kevin Werbach spoke with Kraus recently about the socialization of the Internet. Kraus will speak about social computing at the Supernova conference in San Francisco on June 16.

Intranet.days 2008: Muss es immer gleich Web 2.0 sein?

Next post from Intranet.days 2008 at Frankfurt: Ein Vortrag von Eckhard Oberfrank von Detecon zum Thema “Mitarbeiterbeteiligung im Intranet der Deutschen Telekom – Muss es immer gleich Web 2.0 sein?”

Kleiner Rundown zum Thema Web 2.0 – angelehnt an die Web 2.0 Meme Map von Tim O’Reilly – mit besonderem Fokus auf Folksonomies, Social Bookmarking, … und wie Social Media im Unternehmen eingeführt werden kann.

Intranet 2.0 – welche Elemente der Tim O’Reilly Definition gelten für das Intranet:
– Vision: Intranet wird eine Plattform
– Benutzer steht im Zentrum
– Erschließung der kollektiven Potenziale
– Trust the Mass – kollektives Regularium – Intranets haben aber oftmals nicht die kritische Masse (frogpond: sehe ich nicht ganz so kritisch, in Intranets kann auch mit wenigen aber interssierten und engagierten Mitarbeitern viel wertvolles entstehen – zum anderen reicht es oft aus, wie vorhin bei Leila Summas Vortrag gehört, wenn die Mitarbeiter passiv daran teilnehmen und dadurch besser informiert werden)
– Bewertungen von Informationen -> Bewertung von Personen schwierig
– Kollaborationsanstoss im Unternehmen schwierig

Captain Obvious strikes again: “Social Media for Collaboration is different from generic Social Media on the Internet.”

Einige Beobachtungen:
– RSS ist bei T-Systems anscheinend noch in der Testphase
– AJAX und Eye Candy muss im Intranet anders verstanden und eingesetzt werden – es geht nicht darum Stickyness zu haben
– AJAX und Eye Candy können aber das Intranet (und die Corporate Strategy) emotionalisieren
– Mr. Clemens blog is well accepted – employees are checking the contents, yet there aren’t too many comments until now
– internal blogs at T-Systems try to build up #authenticity, connecting to employees – while talking with authority
– es gibt auch eine nette Reihe von etablierten Kommunikationsmethoden und -instrumenten die dabei helfen können die Authentizität der “corporate message” zu erhöhen
– user generated rich content (videos) im Intranet der Telekom – über 30.000 Beiträge wurden von den Mitarbeitern im Rahmen einer iPhone-Verlosung (?) eingesendet

Geek breakfast, email and RSS observations …

Last Friday morning I had the pleasure to host Luis Suarez and his IBM colleague Matti for an improvised geek breakfast at my house. I didn’t take any photos, Luis did, but you can believe me that we had a gorgeous time sitting on the porch, sipping coffee and exchanging trade secrets of the enterprise social software market – IBM and all.

Luis is one of the bloggers I really dig, his contributions range wide – from enterprise knowledge management to collaboration software, from social software suites to personal/knowledge worker productivity. Check his talk at Next08 for some insights on living without email (“Thinking out of the Inbox – More Collaboration through less e-mail“).

Here Jon Mell talks with Luis on escaping Email (mp3). This experiment has some interesting learnings, so check his status reports and Jons summary of the talk. There’s also an extended version of the “email detox experience”, in another podcast Luis did with Matt Moore and guests.

Yes, instead of email we’re moving conversations, knowledge exchange, and collaboration to wikis, instant messaging, and other social tools. Here, RSS is one central tenet, and this is where I want to chime in, adding some compiled RSS notes I was collecting since the Enterprise RSS Day of Action (initiated by James Dellow of ChiefTech) and the Mai 1st RSS Awareness Day.

RSS is a technology, which in my perspective is still underrated – this holds true also in corporate settings. RSS can ease the life of knowledge workers, yes this is an obvious fact, but one that got reinforced today in the sessions I attended yesterday at the BarCamp Bodensee. Yet, a big problem is awareness – it’s hard to teach people, you have to help them giving it a try, and help them see how RSS comes in when dealing with information work.

In the enterprise RSS provides a channel for notifications, delivering content automatically and intelligently: Monitoring recent changes in internal wikis, moving information privisioning from push to pull, integrating various sources of information – RSS sits right at the intersection of information management and collaboration.

So here you go:

  • Recently AvenueA/Razorfish communicated that RSS was the social media tool with highest growth rates. Nice news, via pheedo:

RSS growth surprises many when the hear the numbers. It is used by over 50% of online users according to AvenueA/Razorfish. RSS has been growing under the radar for some time. According to a 2008 study from Universal McCann, RSS use is exploding, growing faster than all other key social media platforms, including social networking and video sharing. According to the study, the number of RSS users jumped 153% between June 2007 and March 2008. Publishers today recognize that their content is increasingly consumed away from their website by their most loyal, dedicated readers. For many top publishers, their page views consumed outside their domain are greater than their website page views.

[…] enterprise RSS adoption is coming into fruition – but why has it taken us so many years to finally get here? Why do the folks considering enterprise RSS today have to be the ‘forward thinking’ ones?

  • James Dellow sums up his learnings:

Overall, I don’t think that Enterprise RSS Day of Action changed the world, but this was never the intention – I’m just pleased that we’re having this conversation. However, I’m also feeling a bigger disconnect between what excites the external world of Web 2.0 and the reality inside the firewall
[…]
In these still early days, being an Enterprise RSS champion requires a delicate balance between being visionary and pragmatic.

Designing for the Social Web

Joshua Porter of Bokardo announced Designing for the Social Web at New Riders (Amazon link):

Social design was the term I used when thinking about and designing for the social interactions between people using software. It was clear to me that web sites and applications were “going social”, meaning that they were realizing that improving the interactions between their audience was key to their ongoing success, not just having conversations with the audience themselves.

Highly interesting, thinking about design, design-thinking and social software are naturally interlinked (in me too, there’s frogpond and there’s bmid).

re:publica 08 – people make the difference

re:publica ist zumindest für mich (fast) vorbei – viele Vorträge und Workshops (die ich zum Teil ausfallen lassen musste) und Gespräche von wenigen Worten bis zu mehreren Stunden (sic!). Danke an Alex, Alexa, Andi, Andrea, Andreas, Anton, Basti, @Bosch, Christoph, Christian, Connie, Cven, Eric, Frank, Frank, Frederic, Henning, Holm, Jaqueline, Jan, Joe, Jörn, Kosmar, Matias, Mike, Norbert, Nicole, Oliver, Patrick, Peter, Peter, Sascha, Sebastian, Silke, Stefan, Stefan, Stefan, Tea, Tim, Tim, Tino, Tobias, viele viele andere und natürlich Markus und Johnnie fürs Organisieren.