Skittles.com

Just days after I made a presentation about how companies can use twitter to show what people are saying about them on their own website http://www.skittles.com has gone and used a twitter search for skittles as their website. Whatever you say about skittles is now posted right there, on their site. They did have to implement an age question in an attempt to block under aged viewers from the questionable content that is present when you give people this kind of a forum. Overall it seems to be quite clever though. I think it is quite a coincidence.

Also, if you click on the link to their products via a little overlay they have set up, it directs you to their wikipedia page. This I find to be also clever and brave.

There's also some facebook integration going on here.

The White House adopts creative commons

Just a quick note today. The white house has adopted a creative commons attribution license. Also of note they are referring to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and to "subscribers". That part I don't get.

from: http://www.whitehouse.gov/copyright/

Copyright Notice

Pursuant to federal law, government-produced materials appearing on this site are not copyright protected. The United States Government may receive and hold copyrights transferred to it by assignment, bequest, or otherwise.

Except where otherwise noted, third-party content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Visitors to this website agree to grant a non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free license to the rest of the world for their submissions to Whitehouse.gov under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
DMCA Notice

The White House respects the intellectual property of others, and we ask users of our Web sites to do the same. In accordance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and other applicable law, we have adopted a policy of terminating, in appropriate circumstances and at our sole discretion, subscribers or account holders who are deemed to be repeat infringers. We may also at our sole discretion limit access to our Web site and/or terminate the accounts of any users who infringe any intellectual property rights of others, whether or not there is any repeat infringement.

Brightkite to add an Android Application

Update: The application is now in beta http://knowtocompete.blogspot.com/2009/06/brightkite-application-for-android.html

My favorite location based social networking service, Brightkite, is said to be working on an application for Android, Google's new open source phone operating system. This should allow posts to twitter with location sensing and other services. I can only imagine that the Brightkite website will already work fine using Google's Chrome browser on the Android powered phones even without application.

It also looks like Brightkite is about to release an application for the iphone as well, and they are showing some screenshots.

The T-Mobile G1, android operating system phone, is supposed to be in Denver on about November 22nd, a month after the official release. This is also when T-Mobile is supposed to get 3G access.

Brightkite is based in Denver, CO but works anywhere through the web, text messaging, and through mobile browsers.

KMWorld - Next Generation Communities of Practice

Next Generation Communities of Practice: Taking KM to the Next Level with Web 2.0

Eric Sauve - http://www.tomoye.com/TomoyeLeadership.html

notes from Eric Sauve's presentation:

communities vs social networking

design principle #1 - Communities need to prove a range of interactivity:

    options:     1) basic interaction - mouse only,

                     2) more advanced interaction - minimal typing,

                     3) power users or leaders

design principle #2 - They need to be simple

design principle #3 - They neeed to create ownership for engagement

    - enterprise idea: add a voting button similar to digg: helpful? yes /no

design principle #4 - Let the community do some of the heavy lifting

    - best practice identification

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KMWorld - How to Measure Web 2.0 Content by Carmine Porco

Carmine discussed a number of issues around measurements with web 2.0 use in a knowledge management implementation. It seemed to be much more of an all around guide to web 2.0 KM than being specifically about measurement. Unfortunately, although he included a few measurements in the presentation, he didn't focus on how to measure. Also, his presentation was outdated with old figures and references to sites, pages or products that no longer exist.

Carmine's bio: http://www.prescientdigital.com/about-us/team/carmine-porco-vice-president

Here are some notes from the presentation:

The power of groups:

 - collective guesses are closer than individual guesses.

 - Google uses collective intelligence in the page rank

Web evolution: web 1.0 -> web 2.0

publishing -> participation

CMS -> wiki

taxonomy -> folksonomy

Sun Microsystems Community Equity - tracks and rewards employees for collaboration

Webnext - Their portal is supposed to be 90% what an employee cares about, 10% ideas that the organization is pushing down

Generate data from simple surveys at the end of blog posts, etc.: Did this help? yes / no

Creating a blog at ehobbies.com doubled the conversion rate (from 2% to 4%)

 - the blog doesn't seem to exist anymore though (from my quick search)

Carmine says not to use a wiki as a Content Management System because there is no control, etc. He does say you can use a wiki with teams with time limits.

 - I argue that you can have controls on wiki's, and in my practice deploying wiki's on intranets I haven't seen the pandemonium that Carmine says exists. I think they can work, at least for a limited group, as an editable knowledge base.

He mentioned that some people won't go to your company (work for?) if you ban facebook. He discussed how some companies are using facebook or requiring employees to log on for a certain amount of time.

He showed globalincidentmap.com - "a global incident map showing terrorist acts and other suspicious events"

He suggests using an executive blog that combines posts from various executives including the CEO.

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KMWorld - Sharepoint as a Collaboration Tool - An Independent Evaluation

Michael Sampson is vendor independent and vendor neutral . His mission is to help organizations succeed with collaboration endeavors.

His presentation has parts of his white paper, The 7 Pillars of IT-Enabled Team Productivity: The Microsoft SharePoint 2007 Analysis, available on his website for a fee, although the shopping cart is down currently. http://co.michaelsampson.net/sp7p.html

How Sharepoint fares with Michael Sampson's evaluation:

Shared access to team data: (passes standards for) separate team space, many types of digital objects, ability for many people to access, "segregated."

Location Independence: In order to pass it would need connection in the office, out of the office, and on a mobile device. Sharepoint works in a web browser (works), Microsoft Outlook (problems with syncing), Microsoft Groove 2007, Windows Mobile 6 (doesn't automatically sync outlook calendars and tasks from sharepoint). There are ways around the problems, but they aren't practical for users.

A solution: Colligo Contributer allows offline sharepoint collaboration. It lets users know of sharepoint syncing errors, to avoid conflicts that sharepoint makes it difficult to discover.

Realtime Joint Viewing: synchronous sharing, passing of control, etc - fails on its own but does work if you have other services.

Exchange can not see sharepoint calendars, so you can't do free-busy searches of sharepoint. This makes sharepoint calendars somewhat useless. However, you can create all calendars in outlook and invite sharepoint to use it through email. This is a bit backwards.

Social Engagement Tools: To pass it would need to share "the implicit", instant messaging, presence & availability, and blogging. This would also work if you have OCS, but without it doesn't work.

Enterprise location independence of  Task Lists: You can't get a single task list that is separate? Can work to some extent if you have CQWP and MOSS 2007.

Collaboration auto discovery - discovery of capability, "who else can help?", deduced expertise of people, correlated interest between sites. Doesn't work.

Summary: not a mature collaboration platform, would require much additional work, collaboration is only one of the six parts of sharepoint 2007, so you may be satisfied by other things it does.

see sharepoint 7 pillars white paper

strong speaker, made black or white deductions

A final word of advice: make sure you go to training to use sharepoint designer - don't try to use it yourself

Michael Sampson has been working hard on a very detailed blog of KMWorld http://www.michaelsampson.net/

Tags: sharepoint, km, collaboration

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KMWorld - Aligning the Networked Enterprise

Gordon Vala-Webb spoke about using KM 2.0 tools in the workplace with specific examples.

What is networking? - A relationship between content and communication, also with collaboration involved, all within a context.

Networking has to do with conversing with others, while teams need collaboration. A simple solution used at his company is just collaborative spaces. For this they use Lotus Notes. This restricts collaboration to pre-defined teams though, so a wiki or other KM 2.0 technology would allow for a more flexible collaboration.

On a different note, Gordon says that customer service related call-centers don't need networking, what they need is good FAQ's to be able to answer questions quickly. I wonder, how do you get KM to work in a call center then?

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