Library clips

What actually is the email inbox?

It can be the latest private correspondence, news, questions, announcements, conversations, document collaboration, tasks, notifications etc…

This is a lot of different types of content coming into the one stream, where it’s hard to sort out priority, and also hard to organise what you’ve done, what the status is on what your doing, and where to find what your working on.

My post, Instead of sending an email…, poses that a better way is to receive this content in context
eg. IM for quick questions, forums for discussion, blogs for know-how and communications, wikis for collaboration, RSS for notifications, etc…

Now you have various places to go to do your work…email can be used for one-to-one private correspondence and for invite links
eg. you are invited to collaborate on this wiki, here is the link

Instead of getting an email about project status, a new forum topic, I check my RSS Reader where I subscribe to blogs and forums.

This has split my email inbox stream into various other services, and most of the time I can reply or take part within these other services.

And of course this content is in the open for all to benefit from, for conversation to evolve the content, and I can discover people, connect and learn.

Email stress is something that is relevant to everyone, but what are people doing about it besides re-appropriating content elsewhere as I have suggested above?

There are lots of ways to be productive to keep your inbox down, but this is still putting up with the firehose problem, you are just putting up with the problem by implementing a nifty method to deal with it. Why should you have to deal with it, why not treat the cause?

A comment I left on one of my blog posts, referncing Jack Vinson, is that the real issue is the “input problem”. Email is just a tool, it’s the way we are using it, that’s stressing us. What has to happen is a policy, rule, social norm on group behaviour using emails. If you tell Bill to use a blog or IM sometimes instead of email, then you don’t need to solve your inbox problem as Bill is doing it for you, by re-purposing the content in the first place.

We don’t use RSS Readers at my work, we are using email to subscribe to blogs and forums. This is OK as you can post replies and comments from within your email, you can even post a forum topic and blog post via email…people like this.
We are in the open, having conversations, discovering people, creating serendipity, which is doing the right thing as we are leveraging the social capital, creating a corporate memory, creating conditions for emergence, etc…
We are starting to collaborate with wikis.
NOTE: this is not enterprise wide, we are in pilot mode

Even though I still have the problem of all this stuff (notifications) coming into my inbox, at least it doesn’t live in my inbox, at least I’m not actioning stuff as a new email. Once I read the email I delete it, as I know where the content lives.

One other benefit I forsee is that when people get the hang of blogs, I won’t be pushed so much stuff anymore, I can choose to subscribe by email. We already have an issue with a flooded inbox with stuff that’s relevant, last thing I want is occupational spam.

Another option over the RSS Reader subscription model is to have profiles and be able to network by subscribing to people:
- your profile
- what your subscriptions are doing

Luis Suarez’s email detox posts and podcasts (and another) are a perfect example of this re-purposing email for both personal well being and social benefit.

One thing that stuck in my mind is when Luis said he was sick of answering the same question all the time.
- he would rather answer a question once in a community forum or blog post where it is visible, and allow people to search or be pointed to it
- if the question was asked in public perhaps others could see it and answer it if Luis was unavailable, or didn’t know the amswer himself

This is similar to our support database where people log calls…if I can’t answer a call or I’m absent at least someone else can see it in the cue.
When people email a call, I have been instructed to ask them to log the call, please.

Luis is proposing this concept to any sort of question, just search the blogs or forums, if no luck then choose a forum to ask the question, or ask your network.

He is also doing what I do with support calls that are emailed to me, he is letting people know that what they just emailed him could of been done by IM, or a forum topic, or a blog post, or a wiki, etc…and he is letting them know by using this social tool to deliver the message.

Since our community pilot I have been doing the same.
Everytime I get an email that is an announcement I remind that person that they could have blogged it.
Everytime I get an email that is a question or discussion query I remind that person that they could have posted a forum topic.
Everytime I get an email that requires a more synchronous feel I ring that person or answer using IM.
Everytime I get and email that asks to collaborate on something I inform that person that we can use a wiki.

My intention is that once all community leaders discipline their members, they will hopefully re-habitualise (is that a word?) people into using the right tool for the right job.

Another thing that came across is that “email detox” is a great selling term to get people social online. Email stress affects everyone, and a process/program to help with that is a great disguise for getting social tools adopted. It will soon be realised that email detox is just a by product of social tools, and the real benefit is being connected.

What if you want to annouce something and some people you want to reach don’t subscribe to the blog?

Firstly if it’s a team blog, perhaps you could subscribe the group email to the blog.
But sometimes a team announcement may affect another party, in a past post I suggested that if you can post a blog my email, just include these other people in the address bar as well.
The end of the email can contain a link to the blog homepage so these people are aware that the content is archived, and not siloed.

How do I share links with people?

If I want to share a link with a friend that is not private correspondence, how do I do it?
- and what if she doesn’t subscribe to my bookmarks, or what if I haven’t bookmarked this link anyway, but I just want to tell them about it

This is what I like about the Facebook comment wall…I can share a link with one person, but it’s public.
- others can see it when they visit that page
- others will be aware of this via their News feed.

What about if I want to share a link or an email someone sent me, with three other people?

I wonder what Luis does for this type of communication.

Wiki idea

I’m thinking perhaps we should do something similar to Andrew McAfee’s latest post with example scenarios of when a social tool would be beneficial.

Perhaps we can create a wiki for re-purposing email examples:
- blog
- forum
- wiki
- IM
- tasks

And also have wikipages for each wikipage above, example:
Blog
- status
- announcement
- news
- etc…

I have started going through my current inbox and am filing emails in re-purposing folders.

I’m finding that I don’t know where to file some emails…maybe we can have a wikipage for emails that we don’t know how they could be re-purposed. This is especially happening with task type emails.

If a task is to request the team to sign off on the latest server upgrade testing, then a blog post is OK.

But what if the task is just for me to carry out something on my own and report back…I guess this is where something like the Activities module of Lotus Connections is the right social tool.

In some cases a task request may be a question to me and cc:’d to two people in another team. In this case the requestee has perhaps spoken to these two people and has said I’ll email John and cc: you.
I really think that on-the-fly forums are essential, as not all work is done within a team or community. Sometimes you are cross-collaborating so you want to have a quick task and discussion space quickly set-up rather than resort to email.
Or maybe the task could be a wikipage and the comments can be used for discussion.

I’ll perhaps do a follow-up post with some examples of the type of content we could include in a “re-purposing email wiki”

Related

Wiki for gathering a list, and the need for comments and notifications
Blogs can solve cross-departmental communication silos
Email is not the centre of my universe!
Email needs to know it’s place
Enterprise email and blog processes

James Dellow (ChiefTech) is interviewed by Matt Moore (Engineers without Fears) on a podcast all about Enterprise RSS…good listening.

One thing I disagree with is the terminology, an email broadcast was referred to as “pull”, and RSS as “push”.

To me email is “push”, as I can push (send) you an email and you have no choice, it just ends up in your inbox.

Whereas RSS is “pull”, as I publish and people can subscribe to it and “pull” it down to read.
Technically once you are subscribed new posts are, I suppose, pushed to you…it’s not like I have to pull each post everytime. But at least you have control, you can decide to disable the subscription.

The podcast wasn’t just about RSS, there was a lot to take away in relation to enterprise 2.0 in general.

One quote I liked was something like…social software doesn’t have to be used socially.

This really hones into a post I published on knowledge visibility, and how collaboration is different than emergence.

Blogs and wikis can substitute email and Document Management Systems for certain types of processes and communications.

A blog can be used to broadcast news, announcements, project status…
A wiki can be used to collaborate on a document

These scenarios are not anything unusual, you still are doing the same things and tasks you normally do, only using more appropriate tools for particular types of tasks (In-the-Flow).

Using tools this way makes things easier, centralised and more visible, and comments offer people to participate for all to see…and the fact that it’s visible allows more eyes to come upon this content and perhaps add value.

So far this is not km 2.0, it’s just using social tools to replace ways of getting our tasks done.

What KM 2.0 and enterprise 2.0 is mostly about is emergence, ie. people participate and contribute their know-how, whether it’s blog fragments, presence status, research bookmarks. This content may also be tagged, and from a tag cloud we can see emerging patterns.
This participation is also about transparency, allowing anyone in the enterprise to be heard, as value and innovation is not just generated by supposed experts.

The most valuable part to knowledge workers is that publishings and conversations are taking place online, and you can tune into the flow.

Knowledge Management is about flow, maybe we could call it K-flow.

It’s no longer about capture and store it, and if you have a task go search the knowledgebase.

It’s about publishing fragments, and conversations, we are educated everyday with what people are saying in the Enterprise Conversation Market.

We can tap into this k-flow whenever we want to be informed, and we can also tap into it to ask questions…it’s all about people and conversations.
Sure this stuff is also archived by default for later searches, but the point is that it has flowed around the place, maybe evolved, and may come to rest, only to be resurrected and evolved again perhaps later on.

Twitter is the perfect example of flow. I subscribe to people I trust, and watch the tacit flow, I tune into what I like, I converse, stuff evolves. I can also ask questions to the sources of my flow (subscriptions/contacts) and get answers or have discussion, others, perhaps weak ties can add value or perhaps eaves drop and learn.

Twitter is about people, stuff I’m interested in comes to me, and stuff I want to know will be returned to me…you are no longer on your own, people are the filter to finding stuff and discovery.

Ross Dawson refers to research that identifies this is how people work anyway, so social tools are just encouraging and harnessing the way humans work:

“The research showed that in an organization, people were five times more likely to go to people than to databases to get answers to their questions. So knowledge workers’ productivity is strongly related to their social networks, in terms of who they know who can help them, and whether there is sufficient trust and reciprocal value in the relationship that they get a response.”

Two quotes I have posted before have to be mentioned again:

O’Reilly - “…it’s more important to have a shared memory than a shared workspace.”

McAfee - “…focus not on capturing knowledge itself, but rather on the practices and output of knowledge workers.”

McAfee’s SLATES model is also mentioned in the podcast:

Search
Links
Authoring
Tags
Extensions
Signals

James Dellow uses the term “Awareness” in reference to RSS picking up signals, and I think this is what k-flow is about, we are participating, we are each others daily news…forget about knowledge management, this is a learning organisation.

A couple of weeks ago I was writing a wikipage primer on blogs for my work, and when tryng to describe that you can get email updates to new blog posts, I used the traditional subscription model as a metaphor.
James mentioned a newspaper subscription sent to your house, I used a similar description explaining email updates to new blog posts is like a magazine or journal subscription.

This is what I said:

“Blogs are different than email as you are not pushing a message to a set of people, instead you are publishing an item, making it visible to all. People may visit your blog, or decide to pull content by taking out an email subscription.
This is similar to physical magazines or journals, people publish these, and you may browse them in a shop, or you may decide to take out a subscription.”

James has taken this more granular and has mentioned that it’s a little different as you can use an RSS Reader to create your own personalised newspaper. A daily newspaper has many articles by many contributors, similarly everyday your RSS Reader can have many blog posts by many people.
The great thing is you have decided on all these sources, or you have decided on the topic content (search feeds) you want in your daily newspaper.

My post on, Web 2.0 : assemble and tune in goes further on about the new many-to-many model and the new authority model.

Lee Bryant calls this Actionable Collective Intelligence:

“From my 300+ sources, I may skim read 1000+ items every day, of which I might bookmark 10; if something really newsworthy is going on then I might write one blog post or internal analysis based on one or more of these signals. That means that as an individual, I am rigorously filtering my information inputs by amplifying the signals of 10 stories and perhaps adding my own insight and analysis to one key development in any given day. Imagine for a moment that a significant proportion of 5000 person knowledge organisation do this every day. The resulting social signals about what is important would be incredibly useful to the organisation as a whole, and would provide a far greater return for the overall investment of time and attention than unconnected reading and research. Creating this kind of flow for signals, information and insight is one of the key objectives of a social knowledge sharing strategy. KM people used to talk about the knowledge pyramid where a wide base of information is filtered to a middle tier of knowledge and then further refined into the ‘point’ of insight. Social tools give us the potential to do this in a networked environment.”

[UPDATE: I should have read the Podchains blog post properly:

“…we’ll be putting the old Podchains back up shortly at it’s new location.”]

How would you like it if this happened to you…

You find a website that allows you to bookmark websites, it’s not an ordinary social bookmark website, it’s one for podcasts.

When you see a podcast you like you bookmark the mp3 file in the URL field, the title in the title field, add some tags, and add a note (this can be used to enter the URL where you found this file).

After a year you have 100’s of great podcasts bookmarked, browse them by tag…what a great audio library.

This library also gives you some space to upload mp3 files…but you don’t use this feature, you just bookmark mp3 files.

One day you go to bookmark a new podcast and find that this service is no longer a podcast bookmark site.

First thing you say is WTF!!!!!

Where all my stuff?

Where’s my data?

All that work creating a library of my favourite podcasts is gone.

All the time I spent creating a library of my favourite podcasts is wasted.

This is what happened to me with Podchains.net.

They were a podcast bookmarks site, now they are Video Production and Distribution for the web.
Here is an announcement of their new service, pity this blog post doesn’t allow you to add a comment.

They changed their service without telling me, so now I’m at a loss.

I emailed them, but have not got a response.

I tweeted this hoping I could connect with other victims, but no response.

I want my data so I can take it elsewhere.

It’s a pity Data Portability is in its infancy, but this is one of the reasons that confirms the need to make data portable.

I at least want a way to export this data into another service, just like some social bookmarks allow you to import your bookmarks from another service.

I’ve posted about Podchains on various occassions, if anything I have promoted them, the least I want in return is to be able to import my data into another service.

My Podchains feed no longer works
http://podchains.net/feed.php?id=a54bd677ced76a515a0cefdbac3fe255

I made a Grazr from my Podchains feed, but this no longer works.

The only thing salvaged is my Ziki lifestream, which re-syndicates all my content, so I do have some stuff I collected at Podchains re-published at Ziki, thankgod for profile aggregators.
I’m not sure if this has my whole collection as I’m not sure if the Podchains RSS feed contained every item from my collection, but thankyou Ziki.

Has anyone experience this with a web 2.0 service?

After getting burnt, I’m not sure who to trust anymore!

Can I do anything about this, is it legally my data…I didn’t read the fine print?

Dave Winer is on to something new called Twittergrams, using Twitter as a presence blog that points to mp3 files, click on the mp3 file to listen to a Tweetcast…so basically Tweets are being used to notify you of presence audio bytes.

I tweeted about my ideas on this: 1, 2, 3, 4.

Firstly I posted about a service like Twitter called MySay, only the tweets aren’t text, they are audio tweets.

Another service is NowThen, where the tweets have photos, so they are more MMS rather than SMS.
Then we have Yodio which mixes it all together (audio, photo’s, video, text).

Back to audio…

1.
MySay allows you to send audio from your mobile phone to the web (audio tweets), since Twitter doesn’t allow this the option is to point to an mp3 file in your Tweet.
When people read your tweet on the web they can click the mp3 file and stream or download it, when people read your tweet on their mobile they can click on the mp3 file to stream it (not sure how you would download it on your phone…maybe you could get audio tweets as mobile email attachments or MMS)

2.
To make this easy we preferably need two things: host for audio files, and send audio files to the web from your mobile phone.

Audio byte services like MySay, jott, Evoca, Pheeder surely allow you to email or MMS an audio file from your mobile phone, have to look into this…if they do, then this covers are our requirements.

3.
Twitter would have to be able to recognise and action certain URL’s within Tweets…if I post a Tweet and include a link to a hosted mp3 file, we should be able to click on this and play it within Twitter, just like the del.icio.us playtagger…peterc doesn’t see why not, since their former service, odeo, was all about audio.

Anyway the same goes with actioning other file types, such as a video player for video files and an image viewer for image files.

4.
Just like del.icio.us, your Twitter feed could accept enclosures, so in the end you are Twittercasting or presencecasting.

How it comes together

SENDER
- you are walking home and have a thought to share, you record yourself on your phone audio feature
- you MMS or email your audio file to an audio byte host like MySay or evoca
- somehow you need this service (MySay or evoca) to SMS you the hosted URL created from your audio file
- then you SMS a tweet containing the link to your audio file

RECEIVER
- if a person you follow has posted an audio URL in their Tweet, this tweet will be MMS’d/emailed to you rather than SMS’d, and automatically have the audio URL within the Tweet converted into a file attachment

I’m not too techie on these things, but the concept is there…I’m sure it would be much easier if Twitter incorporated MySay type features, so we wouldn’t have to hack a work around.

Any suggestions?

[ADDED 5/07/07: Just noticed Twittergram is up and running, give your tweet a title and browse/upload your mp3 file, this will be stored on the Twittergram server, hit submit and it will post it as a new tweet.
Your tweet will also appear at another profile http://twitter.com/twittergram.
If you get this tweet update on your phone, you would have to click on the link and have to stream the audio file from the web…what I’d like to see is a kind of MMS update so you don’t need the mobile web to listen to the file.

Twittergram also has mobile phone posting…call a number and then it will record your voice (basically voicemail).

The Twittergram Twitter profile has enclosures, making it a micropodcast feed, to do this for your own account, you could register your Twitter feed at Feedburner and enable the podcast feature (giving it enclosures)]

I’ve been using Podchains to bookmark audio and video files (podcasts), but it’s a closed system, so I’m looking for something new.

What I want to do is simply bookmark media files, a little uploading/hosting space would be cool (just like Podchains), but it’s not essential.

I can use del.icio.us, but I’d rather just use it for regular websites, and use a more focused tool for podcasts.

I researched this topic a little in a past post, but it’s not my forte…this post is more of a Shoutout for recommendations.

Here’s a little write up of the focus of various services:

SUBSCRIBE
IonDB, Democracy, TVtonic, fireant, etc…
Web-based
mefeedia, SplashCast

HOST/SHOWS
YouTube, Vimeo, blipTV, OneMinuteWorld, OurMedia, Pluggd, Viddyou, esnips, divshare, PodShow, blubrry, SplashCast (also subscribe to media feeds, and create media mashups), blogTV, etc…

LIVE STREAM
YouTV, Ustream, Operator 11, Mogulus, Veodia, blogTV, etc…

BOOKMARK
Videobomb (from Democracy), Scouta, VodPod, dabble

NOTE: that some services like Splashcast and mefeedia, also provide a mini RSS Reader widget for your blog sidebar

A feature I’d like, similar to divshare and del.icio.us (playtagger) and others is that when I link to a media file in my blog post eg. mp3, wmv, etc…and I have the file bookmarked in my collection, it will display a player so visitors can play the file write from my blog post.

Another feature I like is a widget or linkroll for my sidebar, showing the latest media I’ve bookmarked, and being able to play it from the sidebar.

What about if I download any of these files and what do I use to store these files, this means I have 2 databases one with the files to stream, and one with the files I have downloaded.
I save these files on a desktop service like WindowMediaPlayer or a a client I got with my mp3 player.

There are also services where you can upload your collection, a bit like the HOST section in this post, an example is MediaMaster, see my at my post.

As you can see my choices are from the bookmark section:
Videobomb
Scouta
VodPod
Dabble

What are your experiences with the above?

What should I choose?

What recommendations do you have?

Are there similar bookmark services, just for audio?