On the four rings of enterprise social tools

This a short post to alert people to an interesting item from Thomas Venderwal on enterprise social tools.
One of the difficulties of applying social tools in the organisation relates to how well they mesh together. Vanderwal illustrates the issue with his four rings of enterprise social tools: the tools themselves, interface and ease of use, sociality, and encouraging [...]

On the ties that don’t bind

This article from the Australian Financial Review(subscription required) discusses a recent book by human resource management academic, Lynda Gratton, on the power of weak ties in the network. Having read Gratton’s Living strategy, I was intrigued to learn more about the new book, Hot spots, albeit written for a more mass market audience.
Weak ties are people who [...]

On participation

I was listening to the radio this week when I heard an interview with a film producer on triple j. Of special note was the comment by the female dj that perhaps casting for movies should be done the same way as decisions are made in those reality tv shows. Just sms your vote! The film producer was [...]

On business and social computing

This blog post pretty much sums up the benefits of social computing for business - couldn’t agree more!

On being in touch

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has just released a report based on a survey, How Australians spend their time. The section I want to comment on says this (from the media release):
“Time spent on recreation and leisure activities has decreased by 1 hour 45 minutes per week since 1997 (to 29 hours 31 minutes a [...]

On real work

A couple of weeks ago Euan Semple wrote a blog comment about real work. I made a hastily scribbled note to come back to the sentiment at a later date.
The prompt for me was the notion held by some people that social computing activities (blogs, wikis, virtual communities, social networks) are not of value for real work. And this negative [...]

On tagging, the grey side

My last two posts have been about tagging based on my presentation last week at the conference in Sydney, ”Enhancing search and retrieval capabilities and performance”.
I want to look at some of the perceived disadvantages of tagging that I briefly mentioned in my presentation:

Lack of specificity - refers to the fact that an item can have [...]

On internal communication

Continuing my unplanned theme on communication types, I wanted to make a couple of comments about the importance of internal communications.
The responsibility for internal communication often sits with Marketing, a position that invokes the spectre of PR and political spin. In other cases, internal communication is expected just to happen, miraculously, without much thought, planning, or quality [...]

On narrative, sensemaking, and volunteering

I did promise on Saturday that my next blog post would be on narrative, sensemaking, and the volunteering project. However, Doris Lessing did come between posts with an earlier blog post this afternoon.
Looking at my notes from the debrief from the volunteering project on Friday, I took this point from Dave Snowden’s introductory remarks on complexity and sensemaking, and [...]

On vendor presentations

It has been a feature of some of the knowledge management conferences and seminars that I have attended over the years to include speaking slots for vendors. The vendor usually uses the speaking opportunity as a spruiking platform. I am not interested in conference presentations being product advertisements.
So it was refreshing to hear this morning that a vendor-run seminar proved to be less [...]

On Jeremiah’s weekly digest on social networking

Today I want to highlight Jeremiah’s weekly digest on social networking. I find it a valuable and quick read about the social networking space. Jeremiah Owyang is on my blog roll but his weekly digest is too good to hide behind that!

On what’s all this fuss about?

Some friends of mine have been encouraging me to open up a Facebook account. I understand the mechanics of Facebook, especially it’s college mentality origins. Intellectually I can see why Facebook has become popular, but personally I am not so enamoured. But then again, I don’t watch much televison (especially useful at this time in [...]

On Facebook security loophole

There is a newspaper article today about a Facebook security loophole warning. Well, I read the article and it was all very lame, unless of course you don’t have any common sense.
The “loophole” is nothing more than opening your profile up (or having a friend in your personal network open up the profile) to the [...]

On actKM Conference 2007

Yesterday I attended day two of the actKM conference in Canberra. The day was full of thoughtful speakers and enjoyable conversation. The venue was in an unpretentious room located in the lovely grounds of University House at the Australian National University.
David Gurteen opened the morning session with an overview of a range of social networking tools and technologies. David emphasised [...]

On tagging (3)

Chance encounters often reveal positive results. I came across this November 2006 blog post by Joshua Porter on why scale matters in tagging systems.
A point I want to tag onto (pun intended) is the one about the rights of the individual to tag anything with any tag the individual likes. Joshua illustrates with his comment [...]