Archive for the 'Applications' Category
February 20, 2008
Wiki Markup: What You See is Hard to Do
James Robertson has point out the obvious weakness of wiki tools: Wiki markup has no future:
The lack of WYSIWYG editing is a big barrier to adoption within organisations, and on the wider web. There are only a limited number of users that have the time, skills and inclination to learn wiki markup. It’s a fundamental usability problem, and the spread of wikis will always be niche as long as wiki markup remains.
This is a rather heretical point of view among wiki aficionados, however it is right on the money. If the outcome of using a wiki is to make content creation easy for a distributed group, wiki markup gets in the way of achieving that outcome. Most people can use a WYSIWYG editor if they have used a word processor in the past. This covers most Web users, especially in a corporate environment. Using obscure text code is an unnecessary and anachronistic hurdle to put wiki users through.
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December 20, 2007
Stop Blocking!
Shel Holtz has started a site that encourages corporations to not block their employees from large chunks of the Internet: Stop Blocking!. From the site:
Companies everywhere are blocking employee access to the Net, fueled by questionable research and irresponsible pronouncements of self-serving individuals and organizations. This site is designed to serve as a hub information resource for those who believe the benefits of providing access far outweigh the risks.
Shel was kind enough to post a link to my idea about making online holiday shopping a benefit rather than an infraction. Shel’s initiative is combating all the misguided rules put in place instead of actual good management practices. Bravo!
Not to mention the damage companies do their employee’s ability to engage online on their employer’s behalf. Plus the recruiting implications. Think the generation coming out of college now will take well to corporate nannyware?
A final aside. Discovering Shel’s Stop Blocking initiative only happened because I wrote an entry and someone commented on it pointing to Shel’s site. I love the serendipitous discoveries that blogging creates for me.
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December 11, 2007
Shopping Online at Work
I am quoted rather extensively in a West HR Advisor feature article on whether and how to monitor employees shopping online at work.
This article won’t be available online for long, so check it out now if you are interested. Funny how the president of an internet usage monitoring system recommends tracking both time spent online and content viewed by your employees. Gee, why would he say that?
My rebuttal:
Given the pros and cons of time-based monitoring, employers should put more effort into performance management. “Employees should be evaluated on how well they are achieving the outcomes they are supposed to do for their employer, not how long they spend surfing the web. If someone is meeting or exceeding their goals, who cares how long they spend online at work?” Gammel asks.
I even get the bottom line quote at the end:
“Ultimately, those who want to goof off will find ways to do so even if the web isn’t viable. This is a management and motivation problem, not one of monitoring,” Gammel says.
You have more fundamental problems in your business than online shopping if you have to go Big Brother on a regular basis. Installing nanny software may seem easier in the short run but it is not going to help improve the value of your employees’ contributions to the organization.
Here is an idea: if you know your employees are going to be shopping online during the day anyway, why not make it a benefit?
Announce that each employee is encouraged to spend up to 2 hours shopping online for the holidays. Tell them they have to work out coverage and scheduling with their bosses but that you want to recognize all they do for you year round by making their shopping a bit easier. You gain good will and scheduling efficiency while losing nothing that wasn’t going to happen anyway.
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October 23, 2007
Stikipad Losing It’s Stick
I have recommended Stikipad as an inexpensive host wiki service for the last few years. As far as I can tell, the owners of the service have abandoned it since June and it’s performance is degrading. If you are using it I highly recommend migrating your stuff to another site before it goes away. Such is life with using start-up web-based services.
Here are a few alternatives:
- Google Docs (free, wiki-ish, web-based, Office clone)
- PB Wiki ($500/year for up to 5 users)
- Wikispaces ($50/year for one wiki, unlimited users)
- Confluence ($500/year for up to 15 users)
- SocialText (Free for up to 5 users, call for pricing otherwise*)
* Come on SocialText! At least put entry level pricing online.
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October 17, 2007
Internal Search Stats Coming to Google Analytics Soon
Google announced new features for Google Analytics this week. One of the best is the addition of internal search reporting. This will allow you track queries on your internal search engine in pretty great detail. Here is a nice preview of the feature and how to use it effectively.
Tracking your internal search traffic (searches within your own site) is excellent data for understanding what your site visitors are looking for and where they may be having problems finding content.
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July 31, 2007
World Bank 2.0: The BuzzMonitor
I just heard about a new open source application for tracking discussion of specific issues in social media (blogs, tags, podcasts, wikis, etc.) online: The BuzzMonitor. This was developed by the World Bank for their own purposes and then released as an open source application. From the about page:
Like many organizations, we started listening to blogs and other forms of social media by subscribing to a blog search engine RSS feed but quickly understood it was not enough. The World Bank is a global institution and we needed to listen in multiple languages, across multiple plaforms. We needed something that would aggregate all this content, help us make sense of it and allow us to collaborate around it. At the time, no solution (either commercial or open source) met those requirements so we decided to build our own.
We were playing with Drupal, a solid, open-source content and community platform for different pilots. Drupal being so flexible and module oriented, we decided to write the specifications for a “super aggregator” that would help us people understand, follow and collaborate around mentions of the organization online.
I asked Pierre Guillaume, who announced it on the Social Media Measurement Group on Facebook, how they are using it internally at the World Bank. His response:
Thanks David. We are rolling it out to communicators across the bank with a guide on how to use tagging, voting, rss feeds etc…there is, not surprisingly, a bit of a learning curve both in terms of “getting” social media and using the tool but some champions are emerging, embedding findings obtained through the buzzmonitor in their regular comm and web reports, adding relevant bloggers to their contacts etc.. We also feature the most recently voted on items on a page available two clicks down from the intranet home page, for all staff to see.
Sounds like a great tool for raising awareness of how issues important to the Bank are evolving online. I recommend listening to the online conversation as a key activity for any organization and this looks like a great tool for assisting in that. I have downloaded the application and will give it a try this week.
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June 20, 2007
Marc Andreeson on Facebook’s API
Marc Andreeson, founder of the original Netscape, has posted his thoughts on Facebook’s new API, which has created quite the storm of attention since it launched. This observation is quite interesting:
Analyzing the Facebook Platform, three weeks in
The implication is, in my view, quite clear — the Facebook Platform is primarily for use by either big companies, or venture-backed startups with the funding and capability to handle the slightly insane scale requirements. Individual developers are going to have a very hard time taking advantage of it in useful ways.
In short, creating a Facebook application with the API requires that you provide your own server resources to power the application. Facebook’s super-viral distribution of popular apps leads to crushing load on your web servers in a very short amount of time if you are (un)lucky enough to create a popular application.
The capacity to rapidly scale up server capacity is probably beyond even some large corporation’s ability unless they have specifically prepared themselves to do so. Your web application needs to be designed for scaling up the number of servers as well.
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June 20, 2007
Microsoft’s Hammer
Is it just me or has Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007) mania taken over the IT world?
I have heard lots of buzz about this package, especially in the association industry, but I’ve yet to see the overwhelming value in MOSS’s interfaces and services over previous versions of SharePoint. MOSS is nice for collaboratively managing documents and searching but beyond that basic project work I think its interface gets in the way. It is a horrible community platform compared to many of the open source and low-cost solutions already available.
Not to mention the organizations that are diving in head first and planning on using MOSS (with MS CMS rolled in) as the total solution for their intranet and public web sites. There is a good reason that different classes of solutions have evolved for public and intranet sites: they have vastly differing requirements for most organizations.
My advice is to bide your time and carefully consider which nails you ultimately decide to whack with the MOSS hammer.
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May 29, 2007
Engaging with Facebook
Rick Klau’s report on the Obama campaign’s Facebook application:
It’s smart for Facebook, because it reinforces their role as facilitator of the community… no doubt many people already go to My Barack Obama, but there’s a non-trivial number of people who want to hang out on Facebook and show their friends what matters to them. (Keep in mind, these people are not all college students, not by a long shot.) By embracing this, the campaign ensures that they’re where their supporters want to be, and aren’t forcing them to come to the campaign’s website in order to engage with the campaign.
If you have an interest in social networking applications, you should read the rest of the post from Rick. I think it is a good example of how to engage in an existing community in a somewhat structured way. Much better effort than the hash they made of their campaign effort in MySpace.
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May 10, 2007
First Product Wiki in the Association Space?
Avectra, vendor of one of the major association management systems, has launched a public wiki to support their products.
This is the first public wiki to support an association-dedicated product that I am aware of. I think there is a good chance this will build critical mass with their customers. Association staff are going to have high incentive to contribute since this is such a major part of their management systems yet there are few to no resources, such as commercially published books, on the subject.
It might work better if the user groups dedicated to the AMS vendors launched their own wikis, maintaining some independence.
(Spotted on Wes Trochlil’s blog.)
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