Library clips

I opened my RSS Reader today and read a couple of articles in relation to collaboration, how it differs to emergence, and whether a collaborative culture is a pre-requisite for companies to use social tools.
If you want a summary of the essence of this post read, Enterprise 2.0 culture.

Personal InfoCloud

COLLABORATION

Thomas Vanderwal illustrates that collaboration is about individuals coming together to contribute their bit to an object, “…but it done so with everybody working together to build one understanding.”

The following gets to the heart of it:

“The depth and of understanding is flattened - if the object is a picture of a sunset, once it is annotated as being a sunset there is no value in many others making the same statement. Quite often a wiki page on a subject is used as an example of a collaborative effort.”

The value and aim:

“The collaborative understanding has value as it allows for capturing consensus and usually aims at completeness.”

COLLECTIVE

A collective is where “the individual’s voices and annotations are held separate as each individual is working as an individual.”

I really like that he used the term “Collective” rather than a relationship term like “Networks”, for a review see a comparison and a clarification.

The following gets to the heart of it:

“The individuals annotations and contributions can be aggregated or collected (a helpful connection is the collective is based on collecting) and surfaced as an aggregate.”

The Value and aim:

“The ability for anybody and everybody to tag and annotate and object and have their perspective captured is a very strong value for each individual who has hopes of refinding the object in their own perspective and context, as well as having others whom have similar understanding find the same object.”

The above is in relation to social bookmarking and folksonomies, but anything can be tagged. A blogosphere can be examined by tags where people are writing their own individual stuff, but in aggregate, perhaps by a tag cloud, we can see emerging patterns of things that are being talked about a lot or a little, and this analysis can bring like people together, and help with decision making.

This succinct difference I get is, collaboration is everyone adding a perspective to the same object, whereas a collective is acting on their own, but when we aggregate the collective information we get value out of seeing potential emerging patterns and the value of serendipity and discovery such as browsing tags or users, or searching to see similar stuff…plus we act like a hive where we do some gardening on tag terms evolving a less amibguous and tidy folksonomy, acting like there is a group agenda when really there isn’t, it’s moreso a collective intelligence.

Transparent Office

Michael Indinopulos states that, “Culture is a destination on the collaboration journey, not a prerequisite for taking the first step.”

He goes on to say that non-collaborative cultures may be introduced to a collaborative social tool such as a wiki, as a way to get things done, “…to streamline and simplify existing business interactions within existing organizational silos.”

From using a social tool the culture may begin to manifest or grow:

“What tends to happen then, often quite organically, is that the members of the wiki start interacting in new and different ways enabled by the wiki. Then the wiki is discovered by colleagues in other groups who work with participants of the wiki and want to be connected to the network. As they join in, the wiki starts generating new interaction patterns and norms that cut across organizational silos. Voila! You now have cultural change, as workers collaborate in new ways with their colleagues across organizational silos.”

He has described in an earlier post ( which I covered), the above scenario demonstrating an in-the-flow process of use of a wiki (social tools)…this means using social tools to complement and perhaps to substitute currents tools that are used to get things done.

What is harder is above-the-flow where in indeed we need a social culture as this involves people sharing personal insight, ie. participating and contributing your experiences, thoughts, opinions, reviews (thinking out loud, work in progress). All this stuff is related to your job experience, but in the end if you don’t participate in the Above-the-Flow scenario, you can still get your tasks done.
This means Above-the-Flow really requires a social organisational culture, and we all know the benefits of sharing personal know-how…we get to tap into the expertise of the workplace, a kind of collective intelligence or hive mind.

This is synergistic, in that once you have an Above-the-Flow culture, this Above-the-Flow social knowledge, can be used for In-the-Flow tasks, so soon enough tapping into Above-the-Flow becomes really important to effectively achieve your In-the-Flow…with a thriving social culture the hope is that it just becomes “The Flow.”

The irony is that In-the-Flow processes don’t neccessarily require a pre-made social culture, so it’s In-the-Flow “collaborative practices” that would be naturally adopted first, and the hope is that this may change or evolve cultural dynamics where people start using Above-the-Flow processes, and as mentioned above this could feed In-the-Flow processes…

Michael alludes to In-the-Flow or collaboration as a first step to building a social culture:

“…most companies need to work their way up to openness, beginning with incremental operational benefits derived from better collaboration within existing boundaries.”

eg.
IN-THE-FLOW
- Using a wiki for setting up meeting and minutes
- People really like that there is no longer ping pong emailing

- You team uses a blog for announcements, instead of broadcast emails, and comments discussion
- People really like that there is no longer ping pong emailing (no-one is left out, information is centralised and searchable)
- You get major benefits from one of the comments, in fact what that person shared, the people they put you in touch with, and the documents they linked to in your DMS, will save you half the cycle time on your project
- You don’t even know this person, they work in another office, and somehow came across the blog post
- This person who left the comment is interested in progress you make, so you decide to blog instead of email as the blog platform has been good to you so far

ABOVE-THE-FLOW
- you now blog stuff you come to know, like a project diary
- that person who left a comment earlier on, is now leaving comments on your “work-in-progress” blog posts, this discussion leads to brilliant insight, other people are becoming regular readers and commenters
- the commenter is now setting up her own blog (project diary)
- you read their blog and find more valuable information
- others join the blogosphere (they’ve caught the virus)

The idea is the readers, become commenters, and eventually become bloggers.

Most important from the above example is, In-the-Flow benefits have led to Above-the-Flow usage, which in turn you gain insight to use in your In-the-Flow tasks.

Collaborative Thinking

Mike Gotta adds to Michael’s post by taking a somewhat similar Directed vs Volunteer approach:

“If I use a wiki within a business process where people are directed by role, workflow and functional needs of the procedure - that’s not all that emergent at all - in fact, it’s not really a valid Enterprise 2.0 use case scenario. But it is indeed use of a wiki for collaboration and it can thrive without the culture issues that this post correctly points out. However, it the wiki was open and allowed participation from others in the organization even though their role, workflow or functional duties did not direct them to interact with that wiki group - well, now we have crossed over into the emergence aspects of Enterprise 2.0 - and, we’re back to “the culture thing”. So you can see how tools, context and whether the interaction pattern is directed or volunteered all collide with each other”

Mike is saying that when a directed approach is taken with social tools to achieve job tasks/functional duties (deliverables), you may not even need a “social culture” upfront, whereas a volunteered approach (people participating for the heck of it) indeed requires a social culture for this to happen and sustain. And a directed approach is not an example of emergence which is a defining aspect of enterprise 2.0…more from Mike.

Does this mean…

In-the-Flow = Directed

Above-the-Flow = Volunteered

Directed ≠ Emergence

Perhaps not, because in another post Mike concludes:

“But even within a scenario where participation and contributions are directed - there are often opportunities for emergence - there is no exclusivity here between the more structured work that occurs within an organization and the informal interactions that E2.0 emphasizes.”

And what if like the old school approach, you are directed/mandated or encouraged (job description/rewards) to use social tools in an Above-the-Flow way, could this lead to emergence?
I think not, in KM 1.0 as soon as the mandate wore off, people stopped using these tools to contribute to the sharing agenda, and I think this would also happen in KM 2.0 even though the tools are more social, easier, simple, effective, etc…

As the meme says it’s all about nuturing culture, people have to want to participate and share Above-the-Flow…

Andrew McAfee in his pioneering article says that if managers didn’t have to look over your shoulder to make sure you were using email and IM, why should these new social tools be any different, he says “…if the new technologies are so compelling, won’t people just start using them without being directed to?”, that is “if we build it, they will come.” The article goes on to say this is not good enough and lists several essential deployment and adoption methods.

But, imagine a project leader ran an experiment for a project where all participants are to have a blog (project diaries), and bookmarks (research collections).
They are to bookmark all their research which may include internal DMS, Intranet, blog posts, and also external stuff.
They are to blog the experience on this project (and also the experience of the experiment)…they are to publish: working’s out, thoughts, feedback, thinking’s out loud, review, opinion, announcements, news, insights, etc…
They are also asked to leave comments on blogs posts, and write blog posts in reply to discussion…and also browse the folksonomy.

Since web 2.0 tools are easier than what came before in order to tease out and share tacit know-how, an experiment like this, even though directed, could scale (provided everyone participated and contributed), and demonstrate some emergent behaviour.
It could show that when you participate (even unpolished thinking out loud) that discussion could evolve your work, and take you to a place that you could not have achieved on your own, and now it’s visible for others to find.
It could show that searching the personal know-how (what’s in our heads) database could reveal stuff that helps you with your job…with a feeling that you are glad someone took the time to share this, and that you feel that you should share to so benefits are reciprocated (we all educate each other).

If people did get all these benefits from participating in the social enterprise, would the next project be a volunteered drive to use social tools, would the participants demand it, as it was so successful in the experiment?

The question is would a mandated (directed) experiment that could show positive benefits (thriving use and gains) from using social tools, be enough to catapult a volunteered approach thereafter?

In the above I mentioned, “…provided everyone participated and contributed…”
If it’s a mandated experiment on one project (pilot), is this enough for people to take part in the experiment properly?

The issue is that it’s hard to explain the feeling you get from enterprise 2.0, like we do on the open web, it’s something you have to experience, and since the tools are cheap or free this isn’t an obstacle.

So is mandating a pilot, enough to generate a positive enough experience, that from thereafter use will continue on a volunteered approach?

If so, then you better get the pilot right, and nuture and guide every nuance to make the experience pleasant, smooth, and fault free…using all the essential deployment and adoption methods.

I’m not too sure I agree with my proposition of running a pilot as a mandated pilot, but as I said it’s an experiment…I tend to hope that if you set the right scenario, support, role-modeling, etc…that the tools may be infectious. The pilot participants need to be carefully studied and guided to make sure they are getting the benefits that we all know exists.

More from this post:

“We (as an industry) are still remiss in associating Enterprise 2.0 as a specific set of tools. That clouds the role of culture and other organizational dynamics which are so influential on “emergence”. What we also need is to a better job at is defining the use case scenarios and usage models around information sharing, communication and collaboration tools that make something “E2.0″”

“When you ask whether Enterprise 2.0 is important to your business strategy you are asking the wrong question. E2.0 augments your business and organizational initiatives - E2.0 is not an end in-and-of-itself. This was the false siren call of KM which lead to so many overblown expectations and so many project failures.”

“If you talked about E2.0 in business terms such as how such a program augments strategic talent initiatives, address shifting workforce demographics, assist with innovation efforts, reduce exception handling or other coordination costs, etc. you are far ahead of the game.”…this is an approach also suggested by James Robertson.

“The role of culture is spot on. Enterprise 2.0 is not about “all collaboration”, “all types of information sharing” or “all types of communication”. The context of E2.0 is anchored around “emergence”. Addressing organizational dynamics, which includes culture, is important to fully leverage and sustain the goals associated with E2.0.”

Anecodote

They continue on from their three types of collaboration post with a quiz to see just how social your organisational culture is, in both the collaborative (directed) and emergent collective (volunteered) aspects.

Related

Networks, Communities and Aggregation
Blogs : the many ways “many” come together

Google Readers friends or contacts feature is just a tease, and not exactly the approach I would take. I wrote about the ideal scenario in my post Google Reader going social: Step One.

In this post I mentioned FeedEachOther, this is a true RSS Reader social network…Google Reader could make my day and take a look at this brilliant site.
For more on Feed Each Other (FEO), take a look at my post Feed Each Other : the Facebook of RSS Readers.

This post is similar to the two linked above, here are my 7 concise points:

1.My GTalk contacts are not the same as my potential Google Reader contacts
- I know you can hide these contacts from Google Reader
- but, at the moment if I want to add personA as a Google Reader contact I have to add them to GTalk. I find it weird to have to chat with someone (or add them as your chat buddy at the least) in order to add them as a Google Reader contact and see their Shared Items

2. How do I know who is a user of Google Reader in the first place?
- I’d like to search a user database and visit a person’s profile (or like Facebook, request as a friend first before seeing their profile)
- once confirmed they are added as a contact to my friends shared items, and I would also be able to click a link to visit a public version of their Google Reader

3. Public Profiles
- once at their profile I could see what feeds they read, and who their friends are…networking is the most trusted way for quality discovery
- plus all the other goodies like message a friend (Gmail, GTalk), comment wall, etc…

4. Default shared items are OK, but this is more a network stream (also filter by person)
- like FEO you can click on a contacts shared items or a river of news of shared items from all your contacts, this is a network stream of posts your contacts are sharing with the world (not with you in particular)

5. What about sharing being one to one, rather than just one to many
- you can do this by tagging items with personA’s name and they can subscribe to that tag, but this should be easier
- you can email an item to a contact, why not also be able to share this item with personA within Google Reader, with the simple click of a button…I’m not saying private message the item, I’m saying sending the item to that person’s friend stream
- the way you could filter these posts is, show me Shared Items from personA, then, of these items, which are the one’s explicitly shared with me
- or their could be two streams, one for Shared Items with the world, and one for Shared Items to just me
(as someone may share an item with me which is not necessarily in their Shared Items feed…they may share the item with me because they know I will like it, this same item may be of no personal interest to them).

Share a link with a selection of friends
- another choice in Google Reader is to tag items with a group name, and then person A,B,C,D can subscribe to this same tag…this is handy when wanting to share the same item to a bunch of people
- FEO makes this easier by organising your contacts into groups, so you can share an item with a bunch of people in one click. Unlike Google Reader, there is no need to send these people an RSS feed to subscribe to, this is too manual, instead the system works it all out in the background.

Share a link to a group/topic page
- can’t remember if FEO has topic/group pages, Streamy does (a similar RSS Reader social network)
- this means not only can you share a link with the world in general, with a friend, with a selection of your friends, but also to a group/topic page

6. Comment on shared items
- like FEO or even del.icio.us I’d like to be able to leave a description on an item I’m sharing, and others can leave comments
- only problem is that you don’t want Google Reader to steal the comment space from the blogosphere, personally I’d rather comments on my posts rather than in another system/s

Streamy (mentioned above) also allows you to post notes, like blog posts, ie. posting text without having to share a link.

7. News feed
- Like FEO I’d like to see an activity feed of what my contacts are doing (like the Facebook News feed)
- eg. shay just added the feed “profy”
- eg. richy shared this item with dee
- eg. neilo added becky as a friend (that is, he visited her profile and chose to subscribe to her Shared Items)

More
Just had another thought, subscribing to personA’s shared items doesn’t equate to adding as a friend.

At the moment if I know of a Google Reader users Shared Items page/RSS feed I can subscribe to it, it will appear in my regular subscription set, rather than my friend Share items subscription set.
If Google Reader was more social I could roam around profiles and grab their Shared Items feed, this doesn’t mean I want to add this person as a friend. I can go to any social bookmark site and grab a users feed, this doesn’t mean I want to be their friend, it just means I’m subscribing to their link blog, just like I may subscribe to their blog.

Now, if I did want to add someone as a friend, this would go a bit further, not only would they appear as a subscription in my Friends Shared Items set, they would also appear as a node in my friend list, and I could message them, share items with them, etc…
Let’s not forget if this friend I’m adding doesn’t have Shared Items to my liking I can just hide them like I can do now in Google Reader. But, what’s important about the friendship is that if they want to message me or share an item with me in particular they can do so (this item may or may not appear in their Shared Items feed).

At the moment to share an item with one person only in Google Reader it’s a manual process of setting up a tag, and getting that person to subscribe to it…the other way is to Gmail that person

…let’s hope for better things to come!

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

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.

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]

This is really late for Blog Action Day, but better late than never.

Experimenting with communities and blogs at work, so I have joined our Sustainable Development group and started a blog…not that I know much about this topic (yet but I figure if I post a couple of times a week I’ll get the momentum going, perhaps some discussion, ie comments, or better still others posting on their own blogs in response. Plus it means my blogging will help contribute awareness about the environment.

If I keep up this championing and persuade the CoP team to nuture key managers to blog, then I’d hope to see a viral thing happen where a blogosphere will manifest, let’s see.

This is opposed to a formal roll out, telling people they must share, here’s our latest tool (verion 2.0 conscription), eeek!

The idea is for it to happen naturally, people will have a place to read announcements and publishings by their managers and peers, and perhaps a knee jerk reaction can be augumented by offering them their own blog to post those complementing, opposing, and insightful thoughts, ideas, and arguments.

I just realised that as well as blogs within an OpenText CoP (ppt), you can also blog outside of a CoP, this way you are not limited to a topic blog (but then you can’t send or tag a blog post to appear in a CoP). I also successfully posted via email, along with subscribing by email, this is a plus as this is a familiar place for people…pity you can’t comment on a blog via email (you can do this with the discussion forums).

While I’m at it, the OpenText blogs used to have RSS output, suddenly I don’t see this anymore.
The other thing is that permalinks are buried, you have to click on an action menu and choose “view entry”, now who’s gonna do this…What results is that people will blog about a post someone wrote and point to their blog homepage instead…not good!
If they do successfully point to one of your posts, I wonder if you will be notified, as you can’t run an ego feed…there is a blog post metadata field called “references”, but I think this is for Shortcuts, not inlinks.

Whoa, I got carried away, I’ve hijacked the purpose of this blog post with my tech banter…so here is my contribution to Blog Action Day, or moreso my finding that I’d like to share.

Interesting argument about Global Warming using Uncertainty.

The proposition is that when faced with the uncertainty of global warming happening or not, the safest thing to do is to take action. The case in this clip is; whether it is really happening and whether humans are adding to it doesn’t really matter, that fact that we are uncertain leaves us no choice but to take a safe approach of “action”.

There are 2 possible situations nature is presenting:
- Climate Change is True or False

There are 2 choices that humans can make:
- Take or not take action

If we take action and eventually find global warming is false we have spent lots of money resulting in global economic depression.
If we take action and find global warming is true then it’s money well spent and we are helping save that planet, instead of helping its destruction.

If we don’t take action and eventually find global warming is false then we are happy.
If we don’t take action and find global warming is true, then this is the worse possible scenario, we will not only have a global economic depression, but a global catastrophe.

So when you do the maths; if you don’t take action the worst cast scenario is a global catastrophe, and if you do take action the worst case scenario is a global economic depression (still I wouldn’t say bad money spent).

So the arguement is that when it comes to the uncertainty of global warming, taking action is the safest bet.

The following clip has had over 12,000 views on YouTube and over 1400 diggs, I’d thought I’d spread this further.

Link

Here’s a diagram to tie you over incase you can’t watch the clip:

I thought I’d make a list of 20 blogs that have captured my attention of late, some old, and some new to me…these are a mixture of web 2.0, enterprise 2.0 and KM blogs.

NOTE: these are not my official Top 20 blogs, they are moreso what I’m really liking at the moment…some of my favourite blogs that have been quiet lately are not included here.
There are also lots of other blogs I have found lately with some great posts, but have not made the list due to lack in consistency of quality posts according to what I like to pay attention to…

Here’s 20 blogs in no particular order:

Knowledge Jolt with Jack
Read Write Web
Collaborative Thinking
Elsua
Portals and KM
The Fast Forward Blog
Trends in Living Networks
Cognitive edge
Anecdote
Anne Truitt Zelenka
/Message
Headshift
Andrew McAfee
Web Worker Daily
Adventures in Knowledge
ChiefTech
Brad Hinton
Green Chameleon
Rex’s Thought Spot
GridLock

Maybe the people on this list, or others could make a similar list of blogs they are currently enjoying…I tag you so.

What the heck, no reading list, no matter how on-the-fly is unworthy of grazing.

Maybe others can make a Grazr OPML too, and I can list all these OPML’s as “includes” in a Grazr OPML (ie. a root OPML that has OPML’s in it)…a social organic list of feeds.

Adam Green has picked up on Dave Winer’s enhancements to the OPML spec and the biggy mentioned is OPML outlines within an RSS feed.
I think this means that a new item in your feed will be an outline you can expand to read…

Not sure how you put an outline in a blog post, but I remember posting a while back on OPML blogs, but this was more about the whole blog being an OPML outline, whereas here we are talking about having an OPML outline within a blog post or within a news feed item.

So instead of your blog post or new feed item having a bunch of paragraphs, it’s all in outline form so you have to expand each node to read contents.

Imagine a library blog utilising this so a blog post for a new book could almost be like a library catalogue entry.

Why package a feed item in an OPML outline?

As I mentioned above some blog posts or feed items don’t have to be written as they can already use an existing OPML.

In the example above imagine each record in the library catalogue was packaged in OPML…when the library acquires a new book, they create an OPML record for it, then send that OPML into a blog post or perhaps the catalogue itself has a feed for newly added items.

Anyway the new RSS item would be a neat OPML outline…why write this out again when OPML is so reusable.

I could have a personal favourite books OPML I make at Grazr
…each day I open my Google Reader and read my RSS feed for the latest library books
…if there is a book I want to read I take the OPML from this RSS feed item and drag it into my Grazr OPML.

My Grazr OPML is full of OPML includes, each one being a library book record, and I grabbed each of these records from the latest books RSS feed that the library catalogue generates.

Another example is an RSS feed item that has the latest details about a users profile (address, webpage, email, phone, etc…)
…if this RSS feed item was in OPML, then we could grab this user profile OPML and re-use it elsewhere.

What I mean here is that instead of linking to an OPML, my latest blog post itself would be an OPML of my profile, then after reading this RSS item (which is actually an OPML), you could grab it and put it elsewhere, how’s that, a re-usable blog post.

Tags in OPML

I mentioned on my recent post on Grazr that I’d like to tag my OPML’s so I can organise them.

You can use tags to mean anything, but generally it’s to describe the aboutness of something, so if I want to find my OPML’s on “library”, I just click that tag and get all those OPML’s about “library”.

Imagine that in aggregate (for the whole of Grazr), this makes for great discovery.

What about at the more granular level…with annotated OPML’s.

What I’m refering to is tagging a node in an OPML.

You may have an OPML of your Top 10 feeds, and you may want to tag each feed in this OPML.

Now you can search metadata in nodes within an OPML.

If I find an OPML with 300 feeds, and there are no folders, how do I find feeds on a topic within this OPML.
If each feed was tagged, then I could search the OPML with a tag…or the OPML could have it’s own tag cloud.

What if I had an OPML with 10 OPML includes in it, and each “include” had 100 feeds, that’s 1000 feeds.
If each feed was tagged, then I could search across these 10 OPML includes and find feeds about a specific topic.

Most Reading Lists (OPML’s where the nodes are feeds) come from RSS Readers, where the feeds are organised in folders, now if the value of these folders could automatically becomes the tag describing the feed, then this could happen automatically.
I’m aware this is more for convenience, and not good practice as folders may be used to manage stuff with methods other than by subject.

Related:
Searchfeedr : searching the limits and OPML search
My OPML wishlist
OPML for email groups
OPML email groups again