Aggregation, syndication and the delicacies of smart knowledge worker workflows ™

Now this has evolved into one hot topic, huh? And so it’s about time to sort, aggregate and systematize my thoughts on the smart knowledge workers workplace and lifestream configuration.

Well, I was blogging about my personal workspace before, and that post and this one have blurring boundaries. See there for my general setup, my choice of browsers et al. Here it’s about processes and ways to channel and refine content.

I got triggered by various posts and inspirations – one being recent posts by Robert Scoble (on what it needs for better content curation), Louis Gray (on how he proceeds with sharing content), Steph Booth (on why she likes Tumblr and how it fits into her lifestream), Andi Gohr (on his lifestream configuration) and Mac Slocum (on how buzz can be perceived as hybrid blogging). Other inspirations include people asking me on buzz how I share links (Christian, yes!), why I continue to use and enjoy buzz (DT, yes!), and how I refine the contents I share.

All this made me compile this post to share some of the tweaks and lifehacks I have chosen to tailor content I share, how I get a grip on the topics myriad of people whose work I am following et al. Basically most of these tweaks are in place to avoid needless redundancy, ie. channels get selected depending upon content (and audience) – hoping that the stuff I share to different platforms will be interesting (or valuable at times).

So here’s the basic setup:

Complicated infographic, yes. So let me explain: Basically I am depicted in the middle (ie. the neat frogpond logo) – and I am busy filtering, refining and curating content (from the top down to the bottom).

Most of the things I am learning on the web reach me via RSS – and in my reader of choice, the Google Reader. Currently I am subscribed to +1000 feeds, including podcasts, Tumblr feeds, a ton of blog feeds, searches and everything – all sorted into folders (yes, these folders have varying importance to me, you sure believe me when I say that the _fun folder is less important and funny than the _e20 folder, will you?). Moreover the Google Reader is the focal point for all the recommendations I am subscribed to, ie. the Google Reader items my buzz contacts and friends are sharing (top left). This is the lions share – and you will understand that I basically live and breathe by RSS.

Other sources of inspiration and content include my buzz lifestream (now following 400 people) and my twitter lifestream (following roundabout 1600) – and the usual suspects, ie. mail, skype, IRC, Google Talk, telcos, talking to actual people, working with customers et al.

All of this – remixed, refined and reworked – gets pushed out via various channels again, the easiest being my delicious bookmarks (bottom right). I am bookmarking and tagging a lot – yet, I must confess that not everything I hamster is public. As of today roundabout 75% of my bookmarks are marked private – I bookmark them so that I alone can find them again, come time. The 25% of my delicious bookmarks that I think are interesting to share in public get spliced into the main feed of frogpond by Feedburner.

Then I am blogging – in WordPress blogs here and there. Mostly I am pretty happy with generic posting, but sometimes it’s more convenient via Posterous, ie. via frogpond.posterous.com. This Posterous blog also allows for manual autoposting to my tumblr, a range of self-hosted internal collaboration wordpress blogs (my interpretations of a linkblog and an aggregation site), to Facebook, to Friendfeed and even to delicious. Heck, I could even tweet directly from Posterous …

All of the posts that make it to my regular blogs are syndicated to Google buzz – which in turn is feeding Twitter (via the Feedburner socialize solution, employing Pubsubhubbub) and Facebook (via Twitterfeed). Notice that I only feed native and generic buzz to Facebook, no @-Replies, no Retweeting, no redundancy, no nothing. And no, it’s not because I like Facebook and I want to keep it clean and easy. It’s more the other way round – if you want to interact with me you better use the spaces I engage in, ie. buzz and to a lesser extent Twitter. No point in aggregating my replies into Facebook when nobody there knows why I am replying ..

Ok, onto buzz – you notice it’s bigger than the rest (hey, almost as huge as Google Reader …). This is for a reason: I just love the platform. And I use it daily. Via mobile access or via old-school generic usage. Daily.

Into buzz there goes
a) generic buzzes – say I want to macroblog a link or an image or, err a tweet
b) my GReader recommendations (GReader is linked with buzz, ie. every time I click on “recommend” in Reader the item gets added to my lifestream)
c) all content I share via my secondary Posterous-Blog buzzpond (this is directly linked to buzz, while frogpond.posterous.com ain’t linked).
d) content from my blogs
e) all mobile (picture) buzzing and all public Flickr additions 😉

Now I should elaborate as to why buzz has hit a nerve with me, but I will keep this for another post …

Q&A, TGIF und mehr

Weekend at last, a little gap in between – and a bit of time to blog some of the things that happened during the week – like:

– interviews on Enterprise 2.0 consulting and wikis (german language),
– discussions on buzz and on buzz,
– a lengthy explanation on what to aggregate and where and how to do it,
– a post on last week’s SOMESSO summit in London,
– some compilation posts on smarter work and knowledge work,
– my proposal for the upcoming Lotus JamCamp (german language, explaining the rationale in English),
– and whatever else is worthwhile. There’s been quite a lot, yes.

I will link to the individual posts later, as I come around in writing them (psst, we’re doing some redecoration house DIY work this weekend too, check out my buzz to see pics 😉

Arbeit der Zukunft

Via Anika bzw. dem Lotus Twitter-Account habe ich eines der Videos, die vom #LJC Team während der CeBIT gedreht wurden gefunden. Zwar wird deutlich welches Geräuschniveau in Halle 2 herrschte, aber man kann dennoch gut folgen:

Auf der CeBIT bot sich die Gelegenheit mit Dirk Wittkopp, Vice President Developent des IBM Forschungs- und Entwicklungszentrums in Böblingen, zu sprechen. Wir haben ihn gefragt, wie in seinen Augen der Arbeitsplatz der Zukunft aussieht, wie wir mit Hilfe von Technologien, vorhandene Daten intelligenter nutzten können und wie er den Trend der Kommunikation in Echtzeit einschätzt. Im Forschungs- und Entwicklungszentrum werden täglich die Innovationen von morgen entwickelt. Deshalb unsere Frage zum Schluss: Wo geht die Reise hin?

Rund um das Thema Smarter Work sind mir zudem in den letzten Tagen ein paar weitere Inhalte aufgefallen, u.a. dieser Podcast im DRadio - Wie sich die Arbeitswelt verändert hat, mp3:

Vorbei die Zeiten, als man von der Lehre bis zur Rente im selben Betrieb arbeitete, die Stechuhr die Arbeitszeit diktierte und harte körperliche Tätigkeiten Alltag waren. Heute ist der flexible und mobile Arbeitnehmer gefragt, Rationalisierung und technischer Wandel prägen die Lebenswirklichkeit der Beschäftigten.

Zum anderen dieser Podcast von SWR 2 Leben – Ich bin mehr als mein Job, mp3:

Sinnvoll leben unabhängig vom beruflichen Status. Von Susanne Harmsen. SWR2 Leben vom 10.02.2010 Karin Meissner war eine mustergültige berufstätige Mutter in der DDR. Zwei kleine Söhne, trotzdem Schichtdienst als Fernsehtechnikerin. Doch dann kam die Wende und die Kündigung. Als Fernsehtechnikerin hatte sie keine Chance mehr und damit ist ihre Geschichte typisch für die Postmoderne: Eine unveränderte Lebensstellung ist heute die absolute Ausnahme und das verlangt eine neue Haltung zur Arbeit, sagt der Psychotherapeut Albert Pietzko.

Beide Reportagen drehen sich zwar nicht explizit um Wissensarbeit und Co., aber insgesamt passt das doch alles sehr gut zu den Themen des Lotus JamCamps im April, und sei es weil es um lebenswerte Arbeit geht:

  • Arbeitsplatz der Zukunft: Was erwarten die Digital Natives, wenn sie ins Berufsleben einsteigen? Was fordert die Wirtschaft von ihnen?
  • Enterprise 2.0 – das vernetzte Unternehmen der Zukunft: Was bedeutet das für Unternehmen?

Thoughts on using Google Buzz for collaboration and knowledge work

Ah, all the buzz about Google Buzz. Everybody is kicking the tires, experimenting and playfully learning. This is fun – at least for geeks and I can say that the overall experience has been pretty cool. It’s slick, has seen some very good ideas implemented and integrates nicely with my (private) Google account. Some feature requests and some questions still remain, and right – mine are not so much focussed on the consumer experience side but rather on the side of collaboration and knowledge worker’s processes. So no thoughts on mobile usage of Buzz now, nor about usability, complexity or design and only a smallish thought on adoption near the end of this post.

One – I am really waiting for the Buzz to arrive in my Google Apps domain (mail to frogpond adresses is handled by Google Mail, yes, there are a lot reasons for putting mail and apps into the cloud) – and the official announcement wasn’t clear I think:

We also plan to make Google Buzz available to businesses and schools using Google Apps, with added features for sharing within organizations.

Hmm, does this include the standard edition of Apps or is this planned for Premium alone?

Two – let’s applaud Google for relying on open communication standards for its social web endeavours – it’s playing, integrating and – as Chris Messina writes here – leveraging the fabric of the open web. Of course this is helping Google but it’s also helping us, and it’s a wildly disruptive move too (hey, everything that uses Pubsubhubbub is a friend of mine …).

Three – Right, Buzz both validates and marginalizes Friendfeed (I so dig the tag line “FriendFeed Reborn. On Growth Hormone” at Techcrunch). Indeed, the idea of an aggregated life-workstream was just too good to go unsatisfied – and I am now waiting for rooms and/or persistent searches to find their ways into Buzz.

Knowledge workers they need to arrange their groups and channels of communication, finding information from sources that are contextually relevant (and then act upon them, sometimes this may just mean more information filtering, analysis and refining et al.). All in all the knowledge workers workplace can need some more nifty tools that improve productivity – and yes, this is a big topic in Vulcan too everywhere.

Four – Commencing on the context topic of three, what Buzz already has done for me is a boosting of the volume (and so far the usefulness) of Google Reader recommendations. I really like the pre-filtered stuff that gets channeled to me through my social network (and I hope they enjoy the stuff I am recommending and bookmarking on a daily basis).

And now there’s more of it – and it’s easy to “buzzify content” that may start a discussion on Buzz. So I guess we need some more Backtype wizardry to include the Buzz discourse on blogs. That said – we’re still missing threaded conversation, individual favoriting of comments et al. in Buzz. Until that arrives I would rather have the conversation and discourse in here, yet I am not sure how this will work out in the end. But yes, I see and I like that Buzz will allow for more finetuning, filtering and finding stuff that interests me.

Let’s assume then that the adoption rolls in the enterprise sphere too? That’s asking for much now (and let’s not forget that these are beta status thougts …). One reason is that Google is not exactly in the position to enter the large enterprises market, even taking into account the considerable amount of consumerization of corporate IT and collaboration instruments. But I am sure that collaboration systems that merge IM, mail, wiki style collaborative editing, content sharing and communication will succeed in the enterprise too.

So yes, I think they can mount the 9x challenge – Susan asked here whether Buzz can overcome Andrew McAfee’s famous test – and I commented that it’s the integration with Google Mail that helps Buzz access a huge initial user base and network, of which:

[…] some may use it at times, even when it’s not 9 times better than the other ways we communicate

From this initial user base I guess it’s a downhill battle …

So yes, and to sum it up – for now Buzz may be immature, but it has lots of promise to change the way people collaborate and communicate.

PS. I know this could as well been a BMID post – as Buzz pondering touches and meanders around the cultures of innovation, the nerve and resilience to pull through with your innovation and ideas (some have fears Google may not), all in all the excitement and the wonders of technology innovation. And it’s relevant from a business model innovation perspective too, I feel a bit so …

Upcoming: Lotusphere 2010, part 2 : conferencing

OK, one more thing before I rush to the airport. You know, I’ve said it’s about the networking when going to conferences – both on site and virtually.

For the latter documenting and live-blogging & -tweeting an event is essential as it gives the people who are remote a chance to participate in the event. Here, an etiquette needs to be followed when live tweeting (avoid noisy keyboards, add suitable and clever hashtags, keep the signal-noise-ratio sensible while still filling the back-channel with (first hand) information and valuable front-line impressions, don’t tweet behind the back of the presenters).

Overall the rule seems to be – don’t waste the time of your audience. Keep it short, that’s why it’s over and out for now.

Upcoming: Lotussphere 2010, part 1 – preparing and travelling

OK, it’s only a few hours till I am leaving for Lotusphere 2010 – I packed some Lotus podcasts on my Sansa, ran through Andy’s excellent guide, checked the Lotusphere 2010 Blog’s session overview again, then bookmarked the online directory at ontimesuite on my Android phone, earmarked the sessions I want to participate in, added more people to my #ls10 twitter list (there will be more additions over the next days), thought a second about Smarter Work, then jumpstarted again into some pre-conference news and posts, told some poor souls who must stay in cold Germany about the Webcasts the german Lotus team will do, and promised to bring back insights (and a tan).

Speaking of tans insights – making this trip to Orlando is cool if you’re coming from an icy frogpond city, even cooler is it to meet people like Luis and Luis and …

Luis compiled another post on how to get the most out of Lotusphere (virtually) – where I earmarked again some sites like the Posterous web site, the Slideshare space for presentations, Planet Lotus and more – hmm, it seems Lotus Knows how to spread the word.

Sounds like flattery? Isn’t meant to be, transparency & disclaimers as usual apply – I was invited to Lotusphere by IBM Germany, knowing that I’m a blogger and would probably write about it, no further arrangements have been made, I am writing my honest opinions anyway, yes, IBM Germany has employed me at times for consulting assignments is a valued customer and I know and like people working there.

Don’t make we write that whole sentence under each of my posts or tweets, will you?

Upcoming: 2010 conferences calendar (and what are they good for)


Yes, the social web continues to change this consultant’s and analyst’s work – it’s changing the ways we think, interact and work. Yikes, one could say that the plethora of networked information and virtual network opportunities should be enough for everybody, but I don’t care for information overload fears and shivers.

Thus information-(over)loaded conferences are fine for me (that is if they provide some inspiration, they’re always wonderful and productive interruptions …), but besides these and some other reasons of going there as a freelancer, it’s basically about the opportunity for meeting old friends and real networking. They are chances to have the real personal conversations that deepen networks. And that’s why here’s my preliminary schedule for 2010:

First and right around the corner is Lotussphere, next week in Orlando. I am basically sitting on packed suitcases, but the whole event has it’s own tag here already and will trigger a lot of posting for sure. More coming up later on …

Did I say real conversations need face-to-face contact? I need to reframe this, otherwise my participation in the Virtual Enterprise 2.0 Conference on February 2, 2010 won’t fit, huh? I expect this to be equally good as my virtual participation in last year’s E2Conf in San Francisco (much of it is buried inside tweets and bookmarks, alas).

Now, it’s so much easier to participate in such an event than actually getting there, that’s why I am hesitating to register for Lift Austria in March. But the topic “Enable!” is as tempting as Vienna in spring …

Mechanistic models and a deterministic worldview may have worked well for the last centuries, but are not apt for the upcoming challenges we are facing today. Rather, we need completely different concepts and attitudes, accepting that the underlying processes escape our control and are unpredictable. It seems that the concept of “Enabling” is the key to this shift of thinking. Enabling is the art of carefully configuring adequate levers (physical space, networks, resources, etc.) that best support specific innovation processes, such as idea generation, prototyping, market entry, etc.

OK, then, on with already booked events – starting with re:publica April 14-16 in Berlin – Germany’s blog, social media and digital society main event. Then CeBIT & WikiCAMP in March, the german LinuxTag 2010 in Berlin (will see if I can make it there, June 9-12) – because it may collide with my travel plans for the 2010 E2Conf in Boston, June 14-17. Later this year I will try to return to Copenhagen for another reboot …

Add to this several BarCamps – including the Barcamp Nürnberg (February), Barcamp Furtwangen (May), BarCamp Bodensee (June) and possibly BarCamp Ruhr too (may collide with Lift Austria, sigh).

Oh, and right – I need to get some work done in between as well 😉

Above picture of cute calendar work http://www.flickr.com/photos/booberrystudio/ / CC BY 2.0