Category: Corporate Blogging

Thoughts on the use of blogs and wikis for Knowledge Management within a company.

Search for Radio using Google API

Here is an EXTREMELY cool way to add search capabilities to your blog using the Google API. All you really need to do is sign up for a Google key (for your Google API searches) and use this code to add a nifty little search box to your blog. I’ve added mine below the calendar in my theme. [Tom’s Blog]

BOOYAH! Great find, Tom. I tried this once using the advanced search through the google search site but I didn’t have any luck. I’ve been looking for a reason to futz with the Google API and I need to search my blog so this kills two birds.

Note from Daimler-Chrysler:

 I’m using Manila at the Corporate Level in Manufacturing to cascade information to the various Transmission/Casting/Machining plants. In fact, I’m in the process of finishing my dissertation highly recommending Manila as a cost effective solution for corporate knowledge sharing. My case study data shows that there is an improvement not only in sharing knowledge but communication as well.  I will keep you posted as my Manila site is becoming more popular.  Manufacturing loves it ….

[John Robb’s Radio Weblog]

Zen and the art of blogging

Some of my co-workers are beginning to participate in our internal k-log pilot. Here are my tips for new bloggers based on my experiences thus far…

1. The blog is primarily for you. It is your backup brain. To think that you have “nothing important to say” is a natural reaction when starting out. When you realize the primary audience of your blog is you, it frees you from the burden of trying to be interesting, entertaining, or even particularly informative. Our ability to harvest the knowledge captured in everyone’s backup brain by indexing all of the k-logs in our company with a search engine is a great side-benefit.

2. Let the focus of your blog happen naturally. If you don’t already know what you’ll focus on, don’t worry and don’t push it. Eventually, the content will speak for itself.

3. Use categories from the beginning to organize your posts. Don’t worry about setting up a perfect personal taxonomy right off the bat. When you start to notice a trend in your posts, create a category. I haven’t found a convenient way to categorize or re-categorize old posts. I’ve seen some discussion around it and it does not seem straightforward.

4. Promote your blog internally. If you used to send links and/or commentary to co-workers via email, post those instead to your blog. Until adoption becomes widespread you may need to continue to send email. Instead of sending the primary links, though, send permalinks to the relevant blog post. The goal is to train people to refer to your blog for the type of information you used to send to their inbox, and, maybe you’ll spark some interest in the blog pilot.

5. Update your blog often, but do not force a post just because you haven’t posted in a while. It is important to incorporate scanning the aggregator and making posts into your daily routine. If a post isn’t forthcoming, spend the time looking for interesting news feeds you haven’t subscribed to yet or surfing content outside of the scope of your aggregator.

6. Mix business with pleasure. Your blog is obviously a great way to share your subject matter expertise with your colleagues or other interested parties. Don’t be afraid to incorporate personal content. In our company, we spend so much time with clients that we run the risk of losing touch with our co-workers. Mixing business and personal content can be a good way to stay in touch with co-workers and it makes the blog more interesting. Use common sense about what to post based on your company culture.

Blog as backup brain

Thinking in public – knowledge management with a small k. I started experimenting with weblogs and precursors to weblogs several years ago and began to publish a public weblog about 18 months ago. I’ve found the notion of weblog as backup brain to be a powerful metaphor for finding the value of weblogs to the work of an individual knowledge worker within an organization.

One of the central things that occurs with this strategy is that you have to start learning how to think in public. That certainly can feel like a risky thing to do. In some organizational settings it might well be risky. But I’m increasingly convinced that developing that skill will be an important aspect of what organizations must learn to do to survive and thrive in today’s world. [McGee’s Musings]

Udell’s book on collaboration

Blogs, scopes, and human routers. Back before there were blogs, my groupthink laboratory was the NNTP protocol, which I used at roughly four levels: workgroup (my new media development team at BYTE Magazine), department (the BYTE editorial team), company (all of BYTE), and world (BYTE’s public newsgroups). I learned something then that was, and still is, quite difficult to describe — but critically important. I call it the principle of scoped collaboration, and I illustrated it in a chapter of my book like so: [Jon’s Radio]

Judging from the chapter excerpt, Jon’s book looks like it is probably worth a read even though it was published back in 1999.

Groove

Groove 2.5.

 
Team blogging

The scenario shown in the screenshot uses Tim Knip’s Groove interop tool — a Radio UserLand add-in based on Groove Web Services — to create a genuinely new experience of team blogging. Until now, team blogging has meant that a group posts to a common weblog. This setup does that too, but it also does something I find much more powerful — it synchronizes the inputs to the collaborative process, as well as the output. In this case, the input is the combined set of RSS feeds subscribed to by the members of the shared space. Everyone knows that everyone else is seeing the same feeds. Discussion can grow around items in those feeds, and can take various forms: replies to the forum that receives the feeds, IM-style text chat, Roger Wilco-style voice chat. [Jon’s Radio]