Library clips

I thought I’d blog about this as a way to remember my path and as an informal report as I go along…more like a quest really.

A work colleague and I constantly share links, attachments and some discussion via email and IM, we are thinking of using a more appropriate method.

We are the smallest informal network you can get (2 people), we have very high abstraction (same wavelength, in tune), but at the same time we also have different interests, and most of all we trust each other.
These three elements make for a thriving network that is not too narrow in content, ie. we aren’t exactly the the same, we read some different feeds, one of us is a librarian, the other an enabling technologist…in the end our interests of learning 2.0 and KM 2.0 overlap into what is basically social computing.

Anyway, this post is a meandering path on my quest to find the right tool for the right purpose. I thought I’d share it as you may have the same need…any similar or related needs may also be found in this post, hence I included not only my final findings but rather my whole workings out (how I got there).

NOTE: this is what I like about sharing experiences, this post may not be for you, but a little section of it may hit home for something you need, in this regard I’m glad I shared how I got there, rather than just the end findings.

What we do now

Email is virtually instant, it’s in your face, as soon as I flick an email my friend receives it, it’s on his radar instantly. It’s also great to share attachments.
So far what we like is the ease of email; since there is only two of us, no-one is left out of the loop, but this could change in the future if we let others in to our informal network.

What we don’t like about email is it’s in a closed system, we’d like to access our content away from work, search it, browse it, etc…

Sometimes we send links via IM, especially if we want immediacy, so this is OK…IM is great for quick chats.

What ever we choose it has to be as easy and instant as email, to me I picture clicking a bookmarklet, clipping/entering text and done.

Criteria

- bookmarklet
- add a description to link posts
- text posts
- add comments
- private
- maybe all archived in one place

RSS Reader tag page (with RSS)

If I tag items from Google Reader with my friends name, he can then subscribe to the RSS feed of this tag in his IE feed reader.

He’d have to do the same for me, but he doesn’t use Google Reader.

Blogs (Link blogs) usually represent the interests of the author/clipper, but this is more a stream you make dedicated to someone else.

ISSUE

I can’t include a description in the item

What about external items (items you find outside Google Reader)

Can’t leave a comment on an item I publish in this tag page…this lacks the discussion we can do in email.

It’s so easy to clip an item in Google Reader, but it doesn’t meet the criteria.

External clip blog

Above explained how to share items from your RSS Reader, but what about items you find surfing the web.

Another clip blog blog is in order, a few tools available are Siphs and Google Shared Stuff.

These have a bookmarklet and offer description, comments, and RSS feeds, so either of these seems the ideal tool.

The only limitation here is that they are link blogs, what about sharing text posts…

Edge feeds

Another option is an edge feed like publi.sh this is a blog admin service and an RSS feed…that’s all you get. You don’t get a HTML page, you only get your content in RSS.
You can post via the web form, a bookmarklet or email.

NOTE: The blog editor has a field for a URL link, but you can ignore it.

I can subscribe to my friends feed and he can subscribe to mine, but since there is not HTML page, how do we leave comments for discussion.

Splice and Re-syndicate

To solve the comments issue with using edge feeds, we could use SuprGlu or MySyndicaat as a re-syndication blog/auto-blog/curated blog.

The great thing here is that any tags you use to label your blog posts via your edge feed, will come across in SuprGlu or MySyndicaat.
Only thing is you can’t tag posts in publi.sh, I know you can in the other mentioned clip blogs.

Using this method means we could browse content by: date, tags, search…

Instead of subscribing to each others edge feeds, we can both subscribe to the SuprGlu feed.
NOTE: Even though we may merge these 2 feeds into a blog, I can still subscribe to only my friends feed, as subscribing to the blog feed would update me about my own publishings as well.
From a comment perspective it’s easier to subscribe to the blog feed; when I want to comment on a story I click on the title, it takes me to the blog post and I leave a comment.

Naturally both of us subscribe to the comments feed of the blog.
But SuprGlu doesn’t have a comments feed, so instead of SuprGlu we may need to re-syndicate into a regular blog using a RSS splicing and RSS to HTML service like FeedDigest.
Unless anyone knows how to makes a comments feed for SuprGlu, we may be able to try a intelligent scraping tool like PonyFish.

Hang on, there are plenty of commenting tools you can add to your blog, plus a few more I haven’t blogged about yet.

The only thing email has over this now is immediacy, as feeds are polled…now when I share a link it won’t get to my friend within the minute, it might get to him in 30 mins.

Blogs

What about posting directly (via a bookmarklet) into a multi-author blog…this is getting real simplified, yet effective.

You can get private blogs at: Blogger, Wordpress, TypePad

We will be updated by the RSS feed and the comments feed…and we could even use a service like SendMeRSS to get content in email, or FeedCrier for IM…and don’t forget about the magic 3: Rasasa, ZapTXT, and Blastfeed.

In saying this it’s still not as fast as email to email, as it’s still polling a feed, the only difference is converting and delivery of the content.

Micro-blog network

An alternative to SuprGlu is Tumblr (even has tags and private posts), and there is the option of 3rd party comments service via disqus.
You can either re-syndicate feeds (like SuprGlu) into Tumblr or publish posts.I posted on Tumblr when it was first released, but it has heaps of new features.

The beauty is that besides offering a feed, someone can add you as their friend to follow your posts. When you follow a friend your dashboard is no longer your own posts, it’s a stream of posts from you and your friends…kind of reminds me of Twitter. To see posts just from yourself or one person click on the avatar, and if you want to reblog a post, that is, clone someone elses post in your stream just hit the reblog button. The post will say how many people have reblogged it, with a link to each person’s post.

There are so many ways to add posts: web, bookmarklet, email (email an audio file, text, photo or video your phone), IM (also via IMified), SMS, Jott (ring a number and leave a voicemail post)…there’s even a mobile web version of your Tumblr.
You can also choose to make a post private “this can be seen by just me.”

This is fantastic, but a Tumblr will represent me…some of these links I’m sharing aren’t of interest to me, I just share them as I know they are of interest to my friend.
So I need something that doesn’t publish into my own stream, we need a group stream…in comes Tumblr Channels.

Channels are the answer…this is a group stream, better known as a multi-author Tumblr. Much easier than a multi-author blog (or even a sharing the same Tumblr), you don’t need to share a log-in…Tumblr is very simple to set up and use.

The great thing is you have the same dashboard, you can either post it to your Tumblr or a channel…you can’t post it to both.

This seems like the most effective choice so far as it fits all the criteria, and is super easy to use. I like that I can have a personal Tumblr that represents me, and also post into a channel stream.

Have to test out comments and a comments feed.

NOTE: just out of interest, I wonder if you can re-syndicate feeds into a channel, like you can do with your own Tumblr.

ISSUE

I’d like to reblog my own posts into a channel.

- I can post in my Tumblr. OK

- I can reblog my post into a channel. NO

- I can post just in the channel. OK

SOLUTION

We both have our own Tumblr account, and follow each other.
We subscribe to each others feeds or just keep Tumblr open to see new posts.
If I see a post in my friends Tumblr that I like I can reblog it to our channel, and vice versa.

But, this means my friend has to put up with seeing all my Tumblr posts, as it’s a personal stream.
Or maybe I will just use the channel for posts that have interest to both of us, but then I can’t have these posts in my own Tumblr.

One more thing, if I post by phone email, how do I choose a channel rather then my own Tumblr. I guess I can post into a channel using the mobile web version.

One of 2 options….

1. We can both have our own streams, and follow each other, if something is of interest to both of us, we can reblog each others posts into the channel stream, if something is of interest only to the friend we can post the item into the channel (this way it’s not in our own stream).

2. Or we can just post into the channel stream and that’s it…as some of our posts include questions to one another, like we use email.
It would it seem silly posting into my own Tumblr asking my friend a question, unless it had a Twitter like reply feature “@friend”.

So this brings up a whole new criteria, in that text posts may be directed at someone, like one-to-one email, so I’d rather these posts be in a group stream, rather than on a personal stream, as the post is directed at one person.

Here is the criteria again:

- bookmarklet
- add a description
- add comments
- private
- maybe all archived in one place
- text posts
- one to one posts

So far I’m going for choice 2…this means TOO BAD for stuff I publish to the channel that I wish was also in my stream.

What are other micro-blogging choices…

Jaiku Channels (review)
- similar to Tumblr channels…but Tumblr is more suited to our needs.

Pownce (review)
- posts can be links, free text, whatever…
- great file sharing
- comments/replies
(these are also duplicated as new posts in your stream)
- posts in your stream can be limited to just a set of friends
- posts can be private (one on one)

A post to a friend or set of friends has a list of recipients on the sidebar, this acts like email names in an email address bar.

So even though this isn’t a formal group, posts by others can be sent to the same people to keep everyone in the loop of the discussion, if they choose to reply in the original, this reply becomes a public default message anyway.

Only problem is that since it is not a formal group, there is no place that aggregates or distills a discussion, everyone has their own version of the discussion…

What I mean is, the initial discussion post lists all recipients, the only way to keep the conversation together is to reply to the post and all these recipients will receive it…technically people could create their own post as a reply and send it to the same people, but then in hindsight how do you group all these posts together as one conversation. The best idea is to keep the conversation as replies under the same initial post.
Pownce enables you to forward a post to someone, if this did happen and that person wanted in on the conversation, they could add a reply to the initial post, does this mean this person will now receive any followig replies, and are they now on the list of recipients.

Hmmm, now Pownce seems just as effective as Tumblr, just in another way…and now they also have a mobile version and also a Facebook app.

I really like that posts can be directed to just one person, just like email, or you can publish a post to the public just like blogging.

They don’t seem to have a bookmarklet as of yet, but a desktop widget is just as convenient…otherwise IM via IMified.

Only the public profile has a RSS feed, so this doesn’t help for being updated or notified about new content, and what if my friend doesn’t use IM or the desktop widget. All is not lost as there is email notification for absolutely everything.

Attachments

Since Pownce has file sharing this isn’t an issue, but if we were to use other methods we would try the following.

It’s so easy to share attachments in email, maybe we could use a bookmarklet from a storage site like Box.net to generate a hotlink and then post that via our edge feeds, blog, or Tumblr, or better
still save attachments in Slideshare and Scribd, and post the links. Tumblr will host audio files, and video via Vimeo, not sure about documents yet.

Recap of tools

Share links with description
- edge feed (publi.sh or my.notify)
- clip blog (Siphs or Google Shared Stuff)
- bookmark tag page (del.icio.us or Faves)
- RSS reader tag page (Google Reader)
- micro blog (Tumblr or Pownce)

Share blog notes
- a bookmarklet for quick posts straight into a communal blog (Wordpress)
- edge feed (publi.sh or my.notify)
- micro blog (Tumblr or Pownce)

Re-Syndicate (SuprGlu or Tumblr)

Link sharing Social network or groups

This whole scenario can be seen from two perspectives:

Individual centric
- I publish and bookmark, it’s up to you to subscribe to my stream or tag stream
- I can even make tags for you to subscribe to
(tags are versatile as I can tag the item for myself and even add a tag with your name, this way we are both benefiting for hardly any additional sharing effort)
- from my reading stream I can send you links into your email or profile

Group centric
(Not only do I have my own dashboard, but I also have to go to another place to share stuff)
- re-syndicate content into the group page
- I share links into the group page
- it’s possible to have your own profile within a group, making it a combination of both centric alternatives (Ning)
- but the fact you are joining a group takes you away from your individual centric dashboard
eg. I want only one blog, only one bookmark…I don’t want profiles of the same content format all over the place.

Ideal
- individual centric; as you publish and bookmark stuff you could additionally choose to send it to a group page as well…this way we have best of both worlds
- this is a social network dynamic like Facebook

eg.
publish a note and tag people in your network
- this way you have published in your own blog, and have also notified a friend in your network (less fuss than email)
- this friend can leave comments, and always access an archive of notes I have tagged him on
- and it’s all private to your network

I don’t know why Facebook don’t have this functionality for Shared Items.

The issue with this is what if I don’t want anyone but myself and one other person to see this note.
What if I want to share an item, but I don’t want to publish it in my own profile…I guess I could send a private or public message.

The problem with all of this is I don’t read feeds in Facebook, and it’s blocked at my work anyway.

And the award for most suitable tool goes to…

…Pownce

All these tools are great and have different features for different purposes, after going through them all I think Pownce serves our situation and purpose the most:
- it is publishing, but at the same time it’s like sending emails
- we have replies for discussion
- it can be private
- we can send links or free text
- it has file attachments
- we can interact from a desktop widget, IM, and mobile web
- it has email notifications

It’s individual centric as I can use Pownce for personal publishing, but with the same tool I can post stuff to a set of friends or a private one-on-one, which enables me the option to personalise the message like email, rather than a published post.
And depending who looks at my profile, they will only see the posts they are meant to see.

A bookmarklet and an extension for Google Reader would make this tool perfect.

Other ways to share using a group site

In this quest I wanted sharing stuff to be an extension of my personal dashboard, I didn’t want so much to have to visit a group site for this special purpose.

I’ll mention these group/network options:
- GROU.PS
- CollectiveX
- Google Groups
- Mugshot (Groups)
- Facebook Groups
- PluralList
- Bzzster
- Tellfriends

If you still want email or profile sharing, but want to be able to do it from the web (ie. web to email, profile), and have an archive of what you have sent to people, then ShareThis is your answser.

Related

Google Shared Stuff and other common ways to share
Siphs : link blogging and sharing
Link sharing with ShareThis and others
Streamy : Social Network RSS Reader, lifestreams and attention groups
Feed Each Other : the Facebook of RSS Readers
Google Reader, clipmarks and SuprGlu splice up
Collaborative recommendation

OK, I’m on holidays as of now…catch me on Twitter…by the time you read this long post, I’ll be back

[ADDED 19/07/08: Slingpage, Mento, Friendfeed Rooms]

Lately I’ve been talking about knowledge flow and how the ideal RSS Reader would enable you to connect and share with others, well fortunate for me Google Reader is taking the first step…let’s see if it eventually becomes a social network RSS Reader like Streamy and FeedEachOther.

Step One

When I launched Google Reader this morning a prompt box told me that I was automatically subscribed to the Shared Items feed of my Gmail/Gtalk contacts..you can hide friends using the settings.

Now I have access to what my contacts are sharing with the world, before hand I had to do this manually by grabbing the feed from their Shared Items page.
A bonus for Google is that you can invite those Gmail/Gtalk contacts that don’t use Google Reader…yet!

I guess this really isn’t social yet as we could already do this, as I mentioned above, but I imagine it’s a sign of things to come.

Only issue I have is if I want to follow someone’s Shared Items the new way, I have to add them as a Gmail/GTalk contact. Why this committment, if I’m adding them as a “real” friend that’s different, but it’s not really a social network friend feature. The word “friend” here is too powerful, but as I said, it may be a start of things to come…

Potential Step Two

My friends Shared Items are items they find interesting in their Google Reader, if they find interesting items outside of Google Reader there is no way to share this here. Google have the perfect tool for sharing found items called Google Shared Stuff which they could incorporate.

These two ways to share would be a lite alternative to del.icio.us…somehow I think Google needs to get Shared Items, and Shared Stuff, into Google Bookmarks.

In Google Reader you can make various Shared Items pages via tagging an item instead of clicking Shared Items. If your tag was a friends name, then this would be more handy for them to subscribe to, as it would be items you are choosing to share with one person…a bit like del.icio.us “links for you”.

I haven’t visited Google Bookmarks for a while, when I hear it’s like del.icio.us maybe I’ll try, but there is the community factor.
What I think is that we could bookmark items from Google Reader and Google Shared Stuff to appear in Google Bookmarks.

So far we are saving and sharing stuff in 3 spots, I think these all need to be integrated and streamlined:
- Google Bookmarks
- Google Reader Shared Items clip blog and tag clip blogs
- Google Shared Stuff link blog

Potential Step Three

I can email links both from Google Reader, and Google Shared Stuff…why not be able to explicitly share a link into my friends Google Reader profile, or even Google Bookmarks, just like del.icio.us “links for you”.

Potential Step Four

To be able to share links directly with an individual we need to do more than subscribe to their Shared Items feed, we need to instead or as well, subscribe to the actual person. This way we could share links with each other and we could also private message each other…adding friends and messaging are the two main features of a social network. Let’s not forget GTalk (click to talk) from anywhere.

Potential Step Five

If you can subscribe and interact with friends, why not visit their public RSS Reader, even leave a comment on their wall, view mutual friends, view mutual feeds, see who they are connected to.

Potential Step Six

Based on my friends, Google Reader would now be able to recommend feeds are bit more accurately…we could even browse a feed folksonomy.

Potential Step Seven

Presence updates (status)…similar to Facebook, or perhaps Twitter.

Potential Step Eight

Private/Public groups would be handy for a research project, being able to share items into a group page, and if there are some essential blogs you could have items automatically appear via subscribing to some blogs…check out mugshot groups.

Potential Step Nine

Lifestream on your profile widget and a content stream, friendstream…at this stage we would have what we get with Streamy.

I’d like the profile widget to also include stuff from:
- Grand Central
- include links to various profiles you use (like Google Notebook, YouTube, Flickr, del.icio.us…basically your lifestream)
- be able to communicate with you via phone, email, IM
- share a link by dragging onto your avatar

It seems when I hover of a friend in Gmail I don’t get to see a link to their Shared Items…the general profile pages need to be similar to Gmail profiles.

Potential Step Ten

Since we have profiles, why not find people by “people tags”, this makes it an Expert Locator, even a Q&A.

This is as far as I’d go for features (I haven’t asked much have I , for my needs I would use Google Reader instead of Facebook to communicate and share…let’s just see what happens.

How would I access other Google’s other apps like Documents, Email, IM, Blogs, Calendar, Notebook…could these be sidebar widgets in my Google Reader.

Will Google Reader be a productivity dashboard in a social network…I hope so, because I’m not really productive in Facebook, I just find myself fooling around. But the Facebook features are so good in the way you can share and communicate with people.

Or will the iGoogle startpage be the primo social network…then there is Socialstream.

More

In other news is Google Knol, which is kind of a take on wikipedia without the wiki element (thrown in with a bit of Squidoo).
Basically it’s a similar encyclopedic venture but contributors have profiles and there can be many pages on the same topic, the most popular getting higher in the search results.

Hmmm, most popular, shouldn’t it be most authoritative, will the wisdom of crowds bump up the more accurate page for a topic.
Anwyway, formerly Google was an aggregator of knowledge, assembling and organising links…now we can customise our news, share stuff, and even publish using blogs and knols. Now Google search results can point to Google content, yikes…more advertising dollars.

Related:

Social network and graph ecology

A while back I wrote on how the blogosphere manifests distributed networks, these are people that have each other on their blogrolls/Reading Lists, read, comment and link to each others blogs. Each blogger has a slightly different view of this implicit network, just like you have different connections in a social network.
See a recent post on Lasagna and chips - unexpected combinations for creativity and innovation: The new shape of online community…this is a typical example of a distributed blog network.

To make this type of network explicit you would have to get all these people to join the same network eg. MyBlogLog (blogs), FeedEachOther (RSS Readers), Ziki (Lifestreams). I’ve posted in the past and recently on how much benefit we could get out of blogs we read and interact with if we were directly connected in a social network.

But this isn’t possible, it’s very hard on the open web to get people to use the same product, whereas in the enterprise you may have no choice.

Not sure what the answer is but recently there are a few posts going round suggesting the blogosphere as the ideal open social network.

It is mentioned that a social network isn’t quite your own space and identity as your open source blog, a social network being referred to a place you rent as opposed to your own house.

This movement is gaining momentum with the DiSo project.

Also see the differences and similarities DiSo has with BuddyPress (seems like a distributed version of Ning using WordPressMU).

I understand the OpenID and oAuth stuff, blogrolls, and widgets are very open and work on all blogs, but how can I add another blogger as a friend besides just placing them on my blogroll or subscribing them to my RSS Reader.

My wish a while back was using MyBlogLog in a distributed way, ie. being registered with this service as a blog network, but not having to visit the site. Instead using widgets on your blog to be able to add friends, message friends, see friend updates, etc…just like the Recent Readers widget (see the section heading “What I want” in the post).
In essence my blog would be my profile page with lots of network sidebar widgets, compared to Facebook being my profile page.

My blog would have widgets:
- private message
- comment wall
- friends
- presence (status)
- recent readers
- poke
- friend request

Someone visiting my blog could send a friend request.
Once they are accepted, they could poke me from the widget on their own blog, this poke would appear on the widget in my blog.
Friends could message me from the widget on their blog, and I would receive it on the widget on my blog (all secure of course).

In fact regular visitors to my blog wouldn’t be able to read the comment wall or see my friends status, etc…as they are not yet part of my network. The widget would not show content for these people…this makes it a bit hard for my network as when they visit my blog they would have to login to see the widget content.

But really they don’t need to visit my blog, if I’m added as their contact they can see my lastest posts, status, etc… from the friends widget on their own blog.

This could extend to Newsfeed widgets, notification widget, and so on, pretty much a distributed Facebook type of network centred around blogs as your profile.

Maybe some of these more admin widgets like Notification, and Friend Requests would be in the admin section of my blog and not as a widget on the blog itself.

So we all still need to join a service like MyBlogLog, but this is only the glue, our space to interact and our profile is on our blog, this makes it very open to use.

Now if Wordpress and other blog platforms became their own MyBlogLog somehow, then this would mean we get to fully own all our data, everyone’s data doesn’t live in a central place…just like our blog content data not living in a central place.

This would be a truly distributed social network, there would be no central site to visit that is owned by a company, it’s totally open and decentralised.

This is what the blogosphere is already like, it’s just that we aren’t quite explicitly connected yet.

More

I think the idea is too start with Wordpress as it is popular and Open Source-TypePad is now also Open Source-and move on to other blog platforms, appling an OpenSocial type of principle. In the end if your blog platform is built to the open standard, you will be able to connect to the distributed blogosphere network.

What would be cool is to write a blog post and tag people in your network, or write a comment on someone’s blog post and tag people in your network.

Often I have left comments on a blog and want to let some of my friends know that I have left this comment. Problem is I can’t trackback a friend’s “about page” from a blog comment box…see my posts on this point.

Valdis Krebs left a comment on Anne’s post saying:

“Back to blogging? yes!

Person-centric? Hell YES!

WordPress? Nope.

What if I want to stay with Blogger or Live Journal? Same problem as with Facebook/MySpace/LinkedIn/etc… you still have to join something[WordPress] to “network”, you have to choose one product/service over another. That is NOT how we network in real life! In RL we network in various ways/medias that overlap and that seems to work on-line also… blogs, email, chat, groups, skype, etc.
December 11th, 2007
7:36 PM PT

Steve Ivy said:
Hello,

I just want to address something Valdis said: “you still have to join something[WordPress] to ‘network’”. The DiSo Project is working on WordPress plugins that could be installed anywhere - be it a hosted service like wordpress.com or your own server. Yes, it means knowing how to run a blog, or know someone who does.

Wordpress is a starting point (not the end goal) for us because it’s easy for a moderately technical user to manage, it’s open-source, and it isn’t - life Blogger - limited to a single provider. If you have suggestions or ideas, join the group and participate.

Thanks,

–Steve
http://redmonk.net // http://diso-project.org
December 12th, 2007
4:56 AM PT

Nick O’Neill said:
BuddyPress was created for this purpose. This was started a few months back and appears almost complete. I covered this on the Social Times over a month ago:

http://www.socialtimes.com/2007/11/buddy-press-turns-wordpress-into-social-network/

Chris should partner up with the creator of BuddyPress. It looks like he needs some help.
December 12th, 2007
5:54 AM PT

steveivy said:
Jim,

Please back up with the “shaming”…

Andy’s work on BussyPress is awesome, and I’m hoping that we can learn from each other. But BuddyPress is focused (from my reading) on using WordPressMU (the multi-user/multi-site version that is also being used on wordpress.com) to create social networking sites - connecting users hosted within that hosted instance of WPMU+BuddyPress (someone please correct my understanding if I’m wrong).

The DiSo Project is focused around helping Wordpress users (or more specifically those running their own instances of Wordpress) turn that blog into the focal point of their social network participation. The DiSo plugins are intended to help enable things like social network portability and identity consolidation in a distributed way - so the network grows organically, not dependent on a particular provider.

I hope we can collaborate with Andy to be sure that the work we’re doing on DiSo will be compatible with BuddyPress as much as possible.

Sincerely,

–Steve
http://redmonk.net/ // http://diso-project.org
December 12th, 2007
8:12 AM PT

Nick said:
DiSo is built on ideas around OAuth, OpenID, and Microformats like hcard and XFN. If you take the time to understand these, they will fully understand what DiSo will become. OAuth, OpenID, hcard, XOXO, and XFN are all open standards that anyone developer can play with today. Open Social tried to re-create this all with proprietary standards. And where is Open Social toady? The hype from last month is gone. An it seems it is really only open to the big network apps like MySapce, Freindster, Orkut. I don’t see any blog posts about hackers saying “hey, look what I did with open social” because it is not open.

Self-hosted Wordpress is the best place to start for this idea. It is open, a lot of people use it. DiSo could become a set of standards that will power other applications all over the web that have nothing to do with blogging or social netowrking. DiSo+Wordpress will be a proof of concept using several existing open standards. That’s all. Those that understand the benefits will use it. Those that don’t will come around later. DiSo could be a fork of Wordpress. DiSo may or may not become part of Worpdress.com hosted blogs. It is too early to tell.

BuddyPress seems really cool. I cannot wait to play with it. But BuddyPress is kind of like having your own, LiveJournal or install (that means multiple blogs, multiple users, networked together). It can be public or private. It uses WordpressMU. This allow for multiple blogs to run on one server. It is great for communities or even intranets.

DiSo will allow separate self-hosted Wordpress installations to talk to each other in new and cool ways. Sort of like how anyone can e-mail anyone else. Email apps can send Email to other e-mail apps. Not just Yahoo mail to Yahoo mail or only Hotmail to Hotmail. They reason email works across email apps is because they all use the same standards. Now expand the idead beyond email, trackbacks, friending, blogrolls, think of and think of all the Facebook applications that are out there. That will be possible with OAuth+OpenID+hcard+XOXO+XFN=DiSo.
December 12th, 2007
10:50 AM PT”

In a recent post I described how social filtering enables us to to enage with people, our trust filter, on what’s happening in the world and their world (experiences). This is augmented in a social network where we not only get information from people we choose to trust, but also are able to share links and directly talk to each other…plus discover and recommended new people and content via your trusted connections in the network.

The new step is moving from isolated RSS Readers where we subscribe and read content via our chosen social filter (subscriptions), to a social network where we connect directly with the author.
Now I can not only read their blog and bookmarks, I can also see their Reading List , explicitly share links, send private/public messages, see who they are connected to and what they are talking about with our mutual friends and other friends.
It would be also good to comment on the original post and the network version of a post from within the social network, this is a feature of social RSS Reader fav.or.it (not quite sure if it’s an actual social network).

The network filter is what makes the Facebook experience so great…but I’m after a Facebook service more oriented around an RSS Reader, but still with the killer features of Facebook. So far I have found FeedEachOther and Streamy…there is also Spokeo (but this is not a social network, it’s an RSS Reader with a unique subscribing feature, you enter a person’s name and it attempts to fetch all their online profiles).

The technical issue at the moment is unifying the experience so you can read/write and interact with content and people from all these social networks in the one central place (which no doubt will be a network itself).

In a few past posts I mentioned the new knowledge diffusion and the advantage of blogs and networks over the codified approach of knowledge management. I won’t go into these differences and benefits here, but it’s clear that effective sharing and diffusion happens with easy and freeform tools, in an informal way (people you trust), and expressing fragments of information as they happen (not because this information it part of a deliverable, but just to share yout thoughts for no immediate purpose).

In this post I want to highlight another important area, and that’s sources.

Source discovery

The idea of a network is when you join you have to find people to subscribe to, who’s going to be your trust filter…once you find someone, you can visit profiles of who they are connected to and so forth. Besides connecting with people you can also see from their profile what internal/external blog feeds they read.

As you join a network and form your connections you discover both internal and external people, so your social filter is already working for you from step one, you are discovering people and feed sources via the last person and source you found.

So you have looked at profile pages and discovered other people to connect to, and looked at Reading Lists and blogrolls and found external feeds to subscribe to, and now you have quality sources where knowledge will flow to you.

You may wonder, how did this happen, there is so much out there on the web, traditonally I would find good blogs to read via a search engine or directory, then once I come across some feeds, I’d test them out and see if I like them, etc…

In the traditional method above you are on your own…some people will get lost at the first step, and that’s unfortunate as there are so many quality blogs out there, it’s amazing, if only you knew about them, how do you find out about them.

The answer is people, in a social network or simple subscribing to one blog, and visiting their blogroll and seeing blogs they point to is a social way to discover content and people…this is how you build up a view of the world from people you trust, these people are part of what you base what you know on.

It’s amazing that for knowledge flow (information publishing and sharing) we need trusted people in a network, but to be able to even form our network we are using the same method of using people as a filter creation.

Next time a beginner asks you how do I start with web 2.0, all they need is an RSS Reader that is subscribed to one blog, once they read this blog and it’s blogroll, they can subscribe to more blogs, then more, then drop some, then start commenting, then blogging, and people will comment/trackback you, then you subscribe to them, keep blogging, etc…

Soon enough you are reading and engaging in this wonderful ecology of conversation, it manifests, and you don’t realise how much a part of it you are…all this opposed to some spectator or person who relies on authority?? broadcast information (one to many) and has no way to express and interact.

What I like about the above approach is that you are learning as you are assembling, it is very empowering. I look back now and consider I am part of distributed blog networks, and that when I blog I’m someones knowledge flow, and discussion occurs. This all happened because I had intention and interest, that’s all you need, it’s not hard, it’s very organic.

From my intention and interest I’m reading brilliant stuff from regular people, they are not official journalists, they are just learned people having conversations.
This is my daily newspaper, with which I can interact immediately, if only others new they could have their own personalised daily newspaper, all they need is intention and interest and an RSS Reader subscribed to one blog as a start.

The other beauty of being immersed in this egalitarian read/write knowledge flow is that what you read, meshes with what you already know and comes out as something new, and someone reads that, and it has the same effect, and so on…this is a hive mind, an organic process in a cyber ecology (sorry about the new age poetry).

Is there still a need for a source library?

Discovery of people and feeds via a social connections is a quality experience, as you are finding really relevant things, with less frustration and time spent…but this doesn’t make other methods of discovery any less viable.

Earlier I mentioned the traditional way of seeking/orienteering on your own, and how frustrating and time intensive it is without using a social graph…but what if a representative has already done this:
- found sources
- organised sources
- tested quality
- written source reviews

To kick things off in the enterprise I still think there is a need for a champion to scout blog feeds and create a library, librarians are people who specialise in this sort of thing.

A topic feed library can help if people are lazy with their intentions of taking part in the social enterprise, there’s nothing easier than a spoon-fed topic directory…this relates to the RSS experience from a while back.
The difference here is that you are trusting a directory, instead of people you trust in your network and recommendations based on your social graph (based on your content, activity and relationships). Someone in your network may say, why didn’t you ask me (I know what you like-ie. we have high abstraction), I could of told you that feed was no good, or the blogger is a beginner, or their style won’t wet your appetite.

This is all true, but at the same time, we may like finding things out for ourselves, also if we rely on our immediate network we may never read diverse blogs or topics…maybe you could introduce some blog feeds about on topics like “native cultures” or “archaeology” to your close network, which in turn could have great similarities to your body of knowledge.

An equilibrium of social filtering, and plain old hit and hope discovery is essential for diverse and quality knowledge flow network.

How to build the source directory?

- Search the web, browse directories
- Search your internal network and aggregate all these feeds
- Organise into topics
- Also organise into tags people use to organise these feeds in their RSS Readers
- People could also tag feeds in the directory itself (but don’t rely on this, as this is totally altruistic, there is no direct personal benefit in doing this)
- People can submit feeds to the feed library
- Subscribe to the whole library in a master RSS Reader so you can get feed recommendation from the RSS Reader community

Now you can browse feeds by:
- topic
- tag cloud
- user

NOTE: “user” refers to the first part of this post, discovery via people as a filter.
But you are not limited to finding people on a type of referral basis, public profiles enable you to browse a people directory or people tag cloud.

Once you find a feed, you can use the social graph to make a decision before subscribing, this type of social filtering is not in finding the feed, but in helping you decide in a social way whether it’s worthy to subscribe to.

eg. you find a feed via browsing people tags, or perhaps you find it browsing the topic feed library, or perhaps you searched the internal blogosphere, and came across a great post from a possible blog subscription.

Before subscribing you can use the social graph to see:
- who in my network subscribes to this feed
- who in the whole network subscribes to this feed
- people who subscribe to this feed also subscribe to…
- what feeds are on the blogroll of this feed
- what blogs does this feed often link to
- what blogs often link to this feed
- who has commented on this feed

Asking all these social filter questions can help you in your decision making.

A tool I have mentioned before is the Blogbridge library or Topic Guides, these are feeds based on topics, each topic has an OPML so you can subscribe to a package of feeds, and each topic has an inhouse blog. It’s not quite a wiki, and I can’t remember if there is tag discovery, but it is a great way to display feeds.
The plan is for topic pages to be more than a list of feeds, but to be able to read the latest posts from each feed, even in a river of news view. This makes it more than a feed library, it’s a topic news page, with an editorial blog. Here’s an example.

Now we have a topic source library that doubles up as a topic news page.
Next we could add memetracking to this, ie. display hot stories and collapse related stories together…in fact the BlogBridge 6.0 desktop RSS Reader has this very feature.

Another option for a topic source directory and topic content news page is creating a widget page using a tool like Grazr.

Technorati is at it again, their hot news concept has changed from Explore to Topics, and now the Percolator, but this time they have got it right.

What we get is a more memetracking feel with various topic channels, and 2 streams per channel, one for blogs and the other for mainstream news.

Under each story there is a link called Attention, which is other hot posts talking about the same thing…unlike TechMeme you have to go to a new page to see the discussion…still I’m impressed.

You can limit a view of this front page to just see high rising blog content…and change the relevance from attention to freshness.

The good news is they have topic channels: Sports, Business, Technology, Entertainment, Lifestyle, Politics…check out the Technology page, then limited to blogs.

Also see Today in Photo’s, which is hot news by images in those items.

The sidebar also list tags used in these hot posts, and links to blog homepages/profiles from these hot posts.

See their webpage about the attention juice:

“…linking and attention patterns of posts, who wrote them, who’s linking to them, the rate of their popularity growth and many other factors. We use this information to determine what’s hot now and what’s gaining in attention…

Technorati measures Attention by calculating a weighted rank based on time, number of links, rate of new links, Technorati Authority, and the Technorati Authority of linking blogs. Attention changes over time, so something that was getting a lot of attention this morning may be much less interesting later in the day. A Technorati attention-based view allows you to concentrate on those items that are gaining the most attention now, even when they were created hours ago.”

Another new feature I see is Blogger Central which is kind of a summary page that brings together a lot of Technorati’s different features into the one page:
- top tags
- latest posts on “blogging” (not sure if this is from the blog directory topic)
- rising links of the day via the percolator
- top blogs
- top favourited blogs via Favourites

So when can I get a widget for every meme…idea is to paste a widget in a blog post which has the main meme link with attention post links surrounding it. As the meme grows, so does the widget in my blog post.
Basically instead of pointing to a meme URL I can embed it.

Another Twitter roundup special…

TweetChannel - A 3rd party service that offers channels for Twitter, pretty much the same concept as Jaiku, just add a hash before a word and it will display in a channel.
Next would be to follow a channel on Twitter…each channel has a feed, so I guess you could make a new Twitter account for a channel using Twitterfeed, and then follow that user.
A while ago I used my own method to create a Twitter channel for the word “electronica“, not so much a channel, it’s more a keyword thing…a channel is more purpose based where people are using a preceding symbol intentionally to get a tweet to display on a topic page. My channel is more keyword appearances, the good thing about it is you can follow the channel like a regular user, and my user channel does not require a hash symbol (this is good in a way as not all people are aware of TweetChannel).

Follow TweetChannel for the latest news…coming soon is private channels, and posting from TweetChannel.

PlusPlusbot - rate your tweets at the time of tweeting, just add a ++ (plusplus) or — (minus minus) after a word
eg. juanamolina++ is some cool folk electronica

Tweetl - a URL shortner for Twitter

@locals - like TweetChannels but based on location, get all Tweets from people in your location on one page (as long as they are all registered).
Firstly follow the user ‘locals’ in Twitter, then send your tweets to @locals. (they will go to the location you have in your Twiiter profile settings).

Subscribe to the RSS feed for your location to keep up with local tweets.

Twitter @replies update - your @reply stream contains all the tweets where people are explicitly tweeting you.
These people don’t have to be connected to you (follow/following), even if you don’t follow each other the tweet will appear in your @stream, but not your main stream.

Your main stream contains @reply tweets from people you follow, so if a person you follow is @replying to someone else it will also appear in your main stream.
Now there is a way to limit this where if someone you follow is @replying to someone you don’t follow, you can set the notifications so you ignore these tweets.

BONUS LINK:
The Twitter Toolset: 50+ Guides, Hacks, and Scripts

The other day I posted on knowledge diffusion and how effective knowledge management is more based on conversation rather than content. Now that we have the tools to effortlessly publish thoughts and discussion and be able to connect and subscribe to each other (people you trust as well as others) in a social network, we have a knowledge flow, where information comes to you, instead of you looking for it all the time…and it’s information you understand.

Blogs give us a way to participate and generate content, the message to the masses is no longer in a few hands (so to speak), in fact this is a social revolution of the media and perhaps the enterprise to follow…I consider video sites, podcasts, ideas and presence blogging in the same way.

Then we have sites we collect like social bookmarks, podcasts, video’s, documents, how-to’s, ideas, etc…

A way to consolidate the experience is to subscribe to the RSS feeds of all these sites in your RSS Reader.
You subscribe to your favourite blogger, favourite bookmarker, or perhaps you subscribe to a person’s lifestream (which includes all their blog posts, bookmarks, etc…)

Now the web comes to us, but this brings up a new issue of information overload

…I like that I no longer have to surf the web for this purpose, but now there’s too much stuff to keep up.

There are approaches like subscribing to category feeds, search feeds, only seeing content from your feeds based on past click behaviour (this kind of kills the serendipity factor, but at the same time these services usually recommend stuff outside of your feeds)…in saying this you can still choose to read all content, only ranked (based on your past clicks).

These are good methods (for more see my RSS Reader productivity post), but no matter how much you do this, there are always more feeds to subscribe to, you may feel you are missing out on stuff because your filters are too narrow, etc…

Social Filtering

The answer is social filtering, and it’s what you are doing anyway when you subscribe to blogs.
If we think about it, the author of every blog we subscribe to subscribes to lots of feeds, and in turn, those people subscribe to lots of feeds.
Then you move on to the next person in your RSS reader…..see my post, Blog network as your social filter.
When I choose to subscribe to a blog, I’m getting their view of the world based on their own insights and the blogs they subscribe to, so I’m trusting not only someone’s interpretation/understanding of what they read, but I’m also trusting their sources…who in turn have their own source filter, etc…

In my post, The many aspects of attention, the aim is to drop lots of feeds as other blogs will pick up stuff from these feeds, stuff that matters will surface.

But how can the RSS reader experience be more a social filtering flow experience.

Social Networks

Blogs are a way to share what’s on our mind, they also act as discussion and a social filter.
Blog communities or networks are distributed in nature and very blurry, they are based blogs I read, comment and link to…it’s my individual centric view of the blogosphere. Other blogs I read, comment, link to also have their own view, we may find overlap in these circles where a number of blogs read, comment and link to the same core blogs, some sort of ethereal blog community.

The way we read blogs is via an RSS Reader, and trackbacks/comments are tracked and saved via other tools, this is very disjointed, what is even more isolated is that we are only connected to content, not people.

This is where an RSS Reader social network would come in to play, the experience is more enhanced as I could subscribe to the blog, and also add the author as a friend.
Now I’m not only getting a view of the authors world via their blog, but now I can connect to them, I can share links, we can talk, I can see what they read, who they are connected to, what they talk about with their friends, what their friends read, what their status is, ask them questions, etc…

As we can see this is much easy to keep tabs on if our RSS Readers were public and joined in a social network…it totally augments the social filter scenario.

The extra beauty of an RSS Reader social network, like FeedEachOther, is that you can be recommended feeds, see another person’s feed collection, and explicitly send people links in to their reading stream. So not only are you relying on what people you trust blog and collect, but they can also send you stuff they think you will like.

Example

Not long ago Jack Vinson and Luis Suarez shared some of their Reading List, blogrolls are a good source as well.

All 3 of us read a lot of the same blogs, some of these have consistently quality posts and have great authors, these are my essential subscriptions.
But I have chosen to drop feeds that only have the occassional quality post (according to me), in the confidence that Jack and Luis are still subscribed to them, and that the occassional quality post from these feeds will surface in one of Jack’s or Luis’s blog posts or bookmark links.

So I’m relying and trust my social filter for quality content, firstly I like what they blog, and I have a high abstraction relationship where I am confident stuff that I don’t read that I like will “come to me”.

What else I found is that these guys are also my social filter for sources, just when trusting my social filter helps me relieve information overload, it also may occassionaly turn the tables, I may find and subscribe to new blogs my filter are posting about. Then these blogs have their own Reading List/blogrolls and their archive of content, may point to other quality blogs…
Anyway, this is usually a good thing, it’s recommendation to sources via your social filter, how much more relevant can you get!

What about for topics that are not your focus of interest.
I have a mild interest in the mobile web, I have chosen 3 or 4 blogs to subscribe to, a few of these are group blogs and do a great job of covering the blogosphere.
I find it so easy that even if I have a mild interest in something it doesn’t take me much to get updated on the latest, I don’t need to get too involved to find content and sources, all I do is find a few quality blogs, and the “web comes to me”, people are our filter to the web.

Putting this all together, let’s see how much smoother the experience would be if my blog subscriptions were also my friends in a social network.

I subscribe to and read my favourite blogs…here’s where a network does more…
If the authors of these blogs used the same RSS Reader I could add them as friends.
This means I could visit their profile and connect to their profile:
- see their friends (mutual friends)…recommendation
- see their feeds (mutual feeds)…recommendation
- I can private/public message them
- I can share links with them directly
- I can see their status or presence
- I can comment on the posts in the network and on the original post
- I can see their bookmarks
- activity or newsfeed will update me on what my friends are doing

I can also add friends that may not author blogs but enjoy reading, now I have a way to show off my reading list, exchange links, and communicate…they can see my history of interactions and content.

Coming full-circle this starts to become an expert network, each person/blog could have expert tags.

Most people use Google Reader these days, imagine if this was a social network, I could add friends (especially blog authors), we could read each others content, share links, see saved link stream (not quite social bookmarks), send messages, be recommended to feeds and people (make lots of weak ties).

This moves from a social filter to a social network or circle.

Social Dashboard

RSS Readers and bookmarks are not the only type of content, other places we can network and share are; presentations like Slideshare, presence blogging like Twitter, Lifestreams like Mugshot, the list goes on for videos, podcasts, documents, idea’s, link sharing, etc…

The next question, is that it’s great that we can have knowledge flow based on different networks that deal with different content types, but what about a central place to manage it all?

This is where startpages come into the equation, from one dashboard like Facebook or Netvibes you can see all your content, plus this startpage is within a social network itself.

But, although you can interact with people in your startpage network, this model lacks interaction with people in all your other networks, the idea is not just a place to manage your content, but also one place to interact with content and people from all your networks.

eg. from this central dashboard how do I share a link with my friend in my RSS Reader social network, or share a bookmark with my del.icio.us friends (linkforyou).

An alternative to a startpage is a Lifestream service like Ziki (also a social network itself), these services consolidate content from your various profiles into a stream rather than widgets. The difference is that Startpages allow the user more control to add lots of other types of widgets like email, games, IM, etc…so a startpage is a productivity space as well. In saying this we do see lifestream services like Plaxo Pulse, that are also an address book, notes, tasks, etc…

The one thing a Lifestream service usually has incorporated is a friendstream, so now you have all your friends content in one stream. The difference here compared to an RSS Reader network is that when you add a friend to your lifestream you are adding them as well as their content at the same time, and it’s not usually just their blog content, you are updated on all sorts of profile activity (their bookmarks, video’s, documents, etc…).

What I see lacking in a lifestream network is the ability to mark/unmark items in your friendstream, ie. RSS Reader type features. Most allow you to sort the stream content by person, or content type, or even inhouse groups to organise people…kind of like tag folders, I haven’t really seen a way to organise people in topic tags.
A service called Spokeo enables you to subscribe to just content type by friends eg. only your friends Flickr photo’s and nothing else, if your friends also have a Spokeo account, you can subscribe to their actual account as a subscription in your Spokeo reader.

Both lifestream and RSS Reader networks enable group creation as a communal place to share a set of subscriptions (usually the lifestreams of the members and some external feeds), and to be able to explictly add internal/external items into the stream…see Onaswarm and Mugshot groups.

The next step is the read/write lifestream where you can interact with all your friends from your various networks, and where you can upload and post content, all from the one spot…a digital dashboard for your personal and social life.

Let’s hope that Google’s Socialstream project enables you to do all your activities within the one spot and also connect with your friends, and be updated about your friends…also see Lifestrea.ms.

Our social network environment is key for knowledge flow; social filtering, activity updates, sharing, communicating, requests, etc…our new issue is interoperability so we can unify all our social network activities.

[ADDED 13/12/07: Knowledge network filter and sources]

My recent post on knowledge sharing in the new organic KM talked about the impact of social computing in the enterprise. This new enterprise model differs to current knowledge capture models, especially in the effectiveness of transferring or diffusing knowledge successfully. The new model isn’t necessarily tied to KM and isn’t explicitly seen as knowledge sharing, it’s just basic social computing like blogging and networking, the important concept is that it is an ecology for knowledge flow.

Many of us, especially Luis Suarez, have been posting about the benefits of social computing on the open web and how they could be applied to the enterprise with the same success.
The main premise is the “come to me web” (via the new read/write and subscription phenomena), which sounds a lot like the idea of “knowledge flow” to me.
What has given this some recent traction are the writings and keynotes by Dave Snowden. He is not just talking highly of social computing, but has been identifying since the mid to late ’90’s the deficiency in the KM model and culture.
We are people and not widgets, so rather than applying manufacturing processes to deal with knowledge distribution, the answer has come to learn more about human nature and apply principles from disciplines like the natural sciences and anthropology.
As a result we have come to learn that the old KM processes (and tools) are not human friendly, and not in synch with our cognitive process (how we operate).

A few papers by Dave Snowden from the late ninties draw on new methods of codification such as narrative, and new processes of mapping and audits such as the ASCHEN model, “…helping organisations identify what they know and to move directly to action as a result of the meaning provided by the framework”.
Since then “web 2.0″ has fallen into our lap, and the nature of it’s ecology and tools fit in perfectly with the evolved concept of organic KM.

This post is not trying to encompass the whole gamut of the new KM, but moreso a different approach to; capture, transfer, share, and diffuse knowledge. This is in contrast with previous methods such as codification, which may be OK for some information, but is not effective in extracting tacit knowledge, which is seen to be the most valuable, as it’s how we actually get things done using our know-how.

A brilliant paper by Anecdote captures the essence of the tacit concept (this paper is in the context of Communities of Practice CoP).

Some quotes:

“The problem is that much of this ‘know how’ is not amenable to this [codification] treatment. It cannot be captured or converted easily. Much of it is unspoken and unrecorded.”

“…knowledge provides the only sustainable market differentiator”…tacit knowledge makes up a substantial portion of this vital knowledge-perhaps as much as 80%.”

“Tacit knowledge is personal knowledge. It is difficult to discern and difficult to express” (intuition, hunches, heuristics, talent, etc…)

“It is not ‘book knowledge’; rather, it is knowledge developed through experience”

Three types of tacit knowledge are identified:

1. stuff people understand, but take for granted
2. stuff nobody understands
3. stuff that is hard to explain or articulate (even though you understand it)

The paper identifies CoP’s as a way to manage tacit knowledge; groups share experiences, share a context (common ground), reflect, ask questions, listen…all these are ways that elicit and nuture personal know-how.

CoP’s essentially are not about achieving an outcome, they are about sharing and discussing for the sake of it…well, a common interest.
Later on you may find yourself with the aptitude to perform or apply a skill to a task even though you aren’t officially qualified (didn’t read the manual or take the course), reason being is that you may have internalised your CoP sessions, the group know-how has become a part of you. This is very organic, as you don’t even notice that you became proficient, plus these skills could apply elsewhere.

Before I start on my never ending rant, I’ll re-publish some heuristics from my last post:

1. Knowledge can only be volunteered, it can never be conscripted
2. We only know what we know when we need to know it
3. We always know more than we can tell and we will always tell more than we can write down

More:

1. If people need knowledge in the “context” of need it will always be shared
2. People don’t share knowledge in the anticipation that you need it

Here I go…

Traditional KM is making sure (even mandating) tacit knowledge is codified, then when you need to do something you go find content to see if anyone has done it before, or their thoughts on the matter.
The two problems identified were findability and usablility:
- having search skills, and being able to sort the relevant documents frmo the rest (this may be time intensive)
- is codified information useful without the knowledge holder present to help explain the context
- have they forgotten things to document at the time of codification
- what is the quality of seizing the moment and experience, it’s hard to get a feeling across when it’s passed (codification is often done in hindsight, it’s not a as it happens thing).

The new model presents an informal network connected model based on knowledge being about conversations rather than content.
Firstly you connect to people in an informal network, this already has something over the old model in many ways; and has proven itself on the open web.

1. effortless to share “thoughts” and “what’s in your head” (you normally wouldn’t share stuff with clunky tools)
2. the fact that you do share thoughts as they happen in a fragmented way, rather than an overall document later on (which may include some notes you scratched on a piece of paper, but you may not even remember what these notes mean)
3. you get your own profile, you can become an expert website ( a goto place)
4. live discussion…people leave comments and posts linking to you, as opposed to static codified documents (which never have the opportunity to grow and evolve)

You are publishing what you learn and thoughts, even sometimes questions; to help you through your day (notes, insights, feedback), this is raw and anecdotal stuff…this is a record of stuff you may have forgotten, if not published.
The bonus is this provides value to not just you, but also others (whether they are connected to you, or find your content via a search). It’s a two way thing, you publish and you read from others…discussion may add value to what you published which is beneficial for all, this is working the social capital.

You express your notes close to the time stuff happened, and it’s not an overview (a paragraph in a structured report), it’s raw and each moment is it’s own thing.

Codification is usually a structured report, from hindsight trying to encompass all that you know, it’s less about clear experiences, and more about delivering on a planned outcome…the experiences may be included, but they are not focused on.
Whereas shared fragments are just that, you are sharing an anecdote for the sake of sharing it, in codification if they are included, they are just a glance, the body of the document is more explaining how you delivered what was planned.

Codified documents are very contextual, and all encompassing, whereas blogs are smaller fragments and alive with conversation…of which later on may be distilled into