Writes Jon Udell, explaining what scoped collaboration means by quoting a chapter from his book:
If I am seeking or sharing information, why do I need to be able to address a group of 3 (my team), or 300 (my company), or 300,000 (my company’s customers), or 300 million (the Usenet)? At each level I encounter a group that is larger and more diffuse. Moving up the ladder I trade off tight affinity with the concerns of my department, or my company, for access to larger hive-minds. But there doesn’t really have to be a tradeoff, because these realms aren’t mutually exclusive. You can, and often should, operate at many levels.
Blogs offer a solution, as he quotes Chris Anderson (of Microsoft):
One reason I believe that blogs are great for corporation internal communication is the question of distribution lists. Inside of Microsoft we live and die by email. However the constant spam of email to large distribution lists ends up drowning out the important information. For many types of communication (but not all) blogs provide a better way of communicating. There are many cases where you as the publisher of a piece of information don’t know who would be interested. Blogs are a way to “publish and forget” – you fire the information out there, and interested people will find it. Once I add our internal blog server to the corporate search service, suddenly I could find people that worked on products that I wanted to communicate with. Amazing.
An interesting set of ideas to build upon for enterprise weblogs. Summarises Rahul Dave: “Imagine a blogging and daily work tool which made this easy. A personal hub server.”
