Library clips

On a post about news boxes on Virtual desktops, I was mentioning that I’d like a RSS news box on my actual PC desktop, well this seems to have been around for a while via Yahoo! Widgets…check out the gallery for an RSS feed box (I can’t find one to customise, so many widgets).

Also checkout Klipfolio…round up some klips at the klipfarm.

Some of the main start pages that allow you to create a whole public page devoted to RSS display boxes are pageflakes, and protopage.

Bozpages has a RSS display box view, same with Etamp, and also MyToday (can’t make your own yet, but I got mine and mobile too)…and 24eyes (sorry no public pages)…fyuze gets an honourable mention…and come on Netvibes.

Solution Watch has a write up on the new tag-based forums, Vennt (private release only).

Thanks to Brian’s screenshots we get a glimpse of what’s going on…so instead of forums as a pivot for discussion it is around tags.
When you sign up your interests are tags, you can see posts with these tags…so is this a de-centralised discussion forum.

Old School
- Set up a forum
- Obey the owner and the rules
- Become a participant
- Post a topic
- Reply to topics
- Displays a thread
- no feeds

Web2.0 version
- You are your own person, you are not explicitly a member of a forum
- Write a post and tag it, now it will be the latest post within that tag (no owner, no rules, no join-up)
- Or search for a tag and then write a post within this tag (forum)
- This way you can write posts to heaps of forums (or should I say tags)…I wonder if one post can be posted to multiple tags (I think you can)
- I wonder if you can select multiple tags and see a river of news posts

How cool, just surf all day writing posts for tags (forums)
…since it is a tagging system you can view users, tag clouds, etc…there must also be a way to track replies to posts you have made, kind of like an inbox (or RSS feeds).

The great thing about tag systems is usually for each tag you can see related tags (discover similar forums), and for each post you may be able to see other tags this post also appears in…great for discovering other forums and users.

You user space can be your blog post stream and each forum is a category for your posts, but all within a social tagging environment (I’m not using the term “folksonomy” because I’m not sure if you can tag each other posts, ie. global tagging)

…wow, this is like Forum World, every tag is a topic, bounce around and discuss!

More

Brian also points to Talkinghub, this lacks a user space (post anonymously by default)…but it seems to be similar to Vennt, so it’s worth a play in the meantime.
Notice their blog is simply a tag
…this wouldn’t work well as I could just start posting any type of content with that tag and ruin it for them…a user space is essential.

Another pointer is to SayOutLoud, this is a much more polished interface, here is an example of a post.
For each post you can bookmark it, memedigg it, email it, reply with a comment, grab the feed, click to the topic poster and commentors user spaces, and discover (browse the tags, posts related by tag, users who replied to this topic also replied to…)
It would be good if you could view tags at the user level, and if the user space had it’s own tag cloud.

I posted on the idea of blog-based tagging services a while back, see Tagsurf: tag-based forum.

[ADDED 26/06/06: Blogoforum]

[ADDED 27/06/06: startplane]

I’ve posted before on email to RSS services, well SocialMail is the newest on the scene.

Use a SocialMail email address to sign up to any websites email alert, or just create your own email feed and use it as a discussion group, or as a support desk email…any way you use it what ever gets sent to that email can be read as a feed.

Interesting…re-syndicate the feed of your support email or a discussion group to a website.

Also check out InstantFeed, another RSS to IM tool, similar to ZapTXT, and Rasasa.

Big in Japan have a whole tool kit…MailFeed (maybe an email subscription service for your feed) and FeedVault (OPML Reading List save/share) seem interesting…an oldie is FrankenFeed (RSS splicer).

Create your own live feed stream, remember livemarks, now you can limit this to a del.icio.us tag or even combine tags, soon you can put in your own feeds…check out Zoka.

That sounds good, live newsmastering…check out Solution Watch for more.

Similar:
DiggLicious: real time fun
Digg spy
What’s all the chatter about Clipmarks?
Technorati Mini: obsessive search

ITToolbox is the type of km2.0 tool that I think we will see in popping up more frequently.

It is basically a newsmatering tool for external news, articles, papers, as well as a collaborative tool for internal news, such as blogging, forums, wiki’s, etc…

Features

Blogs
- Create a blog
- Blog discovery by topic or A-Z
- Blog aggregation (river of news)…lacks topic level river of news
- Also see Recent Comments
- Popular Blogs
- New Blogs
- Spliced feeds
(what about sub-topics, I might only be interested in Knowledge Management)
Actually it’s a bit odd that I can see a river of news for a sub-topic, but it doesn’t have a feed, and I can’t see a river of news for a top level topic, but it does have a feed.
- Email subscription
Wiki
Groups
Jobs
Events

Knowledge Bases
- this is the homepage for each sub-topic…here is the Knowledge Management homepage.

Notice when you click on a section it opens within the Knowledge Base
- check out KM blogs on it’s own page
- check out KM blogs within the Knowledge Base…still no spliced feed
Also notice that on this page you can view blog posts by 4 communal categories
(not sure if this achieved by the blog categories or structured blogging fields)
I like how it list the comment links below each post excerpt.

Search posts with the standard search box.

The Knowledge Base also has some added sections
Vendor
News
- this is external newsmastering (lacks a spliced feed)

I’d like to create my own external news search feeds, or also internal news (blogs) search feeds
…although I just noticed the Subscriptions page offers keyword alerts, as well as Newsletter Digests.

Also the external news section doesn’t show content by source, or categories (text analysis).

More Content has external information that is non-news type such as Academic Articles, etc…

Another section is Topics
- view content within the KM base via a Topic eg. Internet Communication Tools

Lacks

Social bookmarking/Memedigger/Clip blog
- rate or bookmark an internal item or external item (news)…or create a Clip blog digest from internal/external content
Memetracking
Lacks a Reading List (OPML)
Mini-technorati
IM
RSS Reader
- a knowledge worker would probably use Outlook 12 anyway
Document Management
- although you can simply point to word, excel, etc.. documents which live in your DMS
People Directory
- but then again, this is a collaboration tool, not an all-in-one km tool
Outgoing links view (not popular posts from the internal blogs, but popular posts they are talking about)
- see postgenomic

The ultimate would be to create your own “my knowledgebase”
- choose the blogs you want in your river of news
- choose the external news sources you want in your river of news
- or create delivered search results for internal blogs and external news
…at the moment you can do this sort of thing by subscribing to the RSS feed or email alerts, but how about presenting the results in your own page.

I really like how this comes together, like a professional version of a service like Zimbio, Complore, or GROU.PS (as opposed to a personal tool like Peoplefeeds, ziki, or tagalag, or even SuprGlu).
[ADDED: check out IBM’s Fringe Contacts (people tagging), along with blogs, forums, social bookmarks (dogear), this enterprise is a social exchange.]

What a great idea for a Communities of Practice Portal or a Business Unit portal or even a Project Portal
…this type of tool (the ITToolbox) is the new KM, keep abreast of just the content you want to see (external/internal)…as well as teasing out tacit knowledge via blogging, and providing discussions with blogs and forums, and communal websites with Wiki’s.

People will want to use these tools, people will become topic experts, they will be sought after, it naturally induces people to express, share and learn off each other…without these tools people are an untapped resource.

Similar post:
Internal communication blogs and km2.0

[ADDED: a blog I’m really enjoying from this portal is elsua: The Knowledge Management Blog]