Category: Digital Dashboard

I came across an article on Syndication by Kevin Werbach (editor of Release 1.0) in the May-June 2000 issue of Harvard Business Review. Wrote Werbach: “With the Internet, information goods, modularity and fragmented distribution becomes not only possible but essential. Everything that moves on the Internet takes the form of information. The hyperlinked architecture of the Web is modular by nature. And because anyone can start a web site, there are literally millions of different distribution points for users. In such an environment, syndication becomes inescapable.”

Weblogs are a form of microContent. Think of Web Services as microSoftware (software compoments). RSS enables the syndication of content (news, blogs). Web Services enables the re-use of software, where the service is “syndicated”. Take this idea further. There’s been a lot of talk of the real-time enterprise and the event-driven enterprise. What this means is that events are syndicated. Have been thinking of how we can look at similarities to what’s happening between the content world and the enterprise world. The granularity which needs to be syndicated is the BlogPost and the Event. Need to build further on this thinking.

A very interest 4 days in the Blog world. Started with a simple idea by Matt Griffith in his blog on using the LINK option in the HTML TITLE to enable RSS aggregators find the feed easily. Matt Pilgrim and a few others then enhanced thinking on the idea, and lo and behold! It was all over the place, with implementations on the way.

What is the idea? RSS provides a syndication format — so for example, if you subscribe to the RSS format of a weblog, the updates are automatically fetched periodically into an RSS Aggregator. The LINK extension provides a URL to pick up the feed given the URL of the weblog. Earlier, one had to keep track of the URL of the RSS feed separately. The same concept can be used, as Radio has now done, for publicising links to a site (or a blogger’s) RSS subscriptions (what one is reading) and the BlogRoll.

Why is this idea important? One application of this is in figuring out social networks, or Weblog Neighbourhoods. Harvesters can look at a blog’s RSS subscriptions and BlogRoll and go a few levels deep to provide greater insights on who is it that I should I reading and what are my neighbours reading. This helps in identifying blog clusters.

On a bigger picture: the combination of News Aggregation (via RSS feeds), Syndication (publishing via RSS what one writes) and Blogging is creating a new kind of grassroots information network, with a lot of flow. The RSS Auto-Discovery was one such example of rapidly amplification of ideas can take place in this world.

The question I have been pondering about is how to apply these ideas within the enterprise. Instead of BlogPosts, one can think of Events. These events are published on to an Information Bus, and can be subscribed to my applications or people interested. This can become the foundation of what is called as the Real-Time or Agile Enterprise.

Dave Winer: The Googlish way to do Directories: “Now, instead of having two or three all-encompassing directories, anyone with an outliner and some server space can compete to be the authority on any subject.”

An article in the Seattle Times on how companies can use blogs for marketing and promotion.

“Blog speed” offers immediate feedback from the “blogosphere”: the blog-aware Web community. Web logs also have the advantage of near-instant indexing by Google, which recognizes them as a source of edgy info on the Web. And blogs create automatic ongoing archives.

Another potential plus for blogs: Companies can get out of users’ mailboxes. Instead of spamming with so-called product news and consumer updates, they can “blog” the stuff and let users who really want the information come on their own volition.

In a sense, that is what Emergic.org (this blog) is doing. Talking about our ideas and work in public. This is, I think, increasingly going to be path adopted by smaller companies with limited marketing budgets. Think of it as MicroMarketing.

Writes Jon Udell in his Byte column on Personal RSS Aggregators:

The relevance engine that powers the emerging RSS network is, very much like Google’s relevance engine, decentralized and ultimately social in nature…The raw output of the online news collective is filtered for me by people doing what they do best: spotting patterns, alerting the tribe.

Lots of people get the idea of publishing blogs to the web. Not so many, as yet, see that publishing an RSS channel, and subscribing to channels, closes the communication loop and creates a new interactive medium.

I haven’t been using RSS aggregators, but I think I will begin. Have been thinking that this is an important discontinuity in the way we get our information. Once again, Jon Udell’s post shows the way forward.

The problem in Email with the notion of Inbox and folders is that (a) as soon as messages came into the Inbox, one wants to get rid of them — reply and file, or delete (b) once the mails go into the folders, it is hard to see an “aggregate” view.

It is like walking at “street level” (a phrase used by Steven Johnson in his book Emergence). At the street level, one misses out on many of the networks / relationships which are present. One needs to get a higher-level view.

So, imagine if we could do the following:
– mail blog, which has all that I write shown on one page (all emails sent)
– mailroll, which automatically lists out my favourites — people whom I have corresponded most with in say the last 1/2/3 months
– mailmap, which shows the clusters of people I communicate with. Distance could be based on the frequency of my communication.
– mailpost, where each mail that I write (and dont delete) gets a unique URL, so I can refer to it

Mails are ongoing conversations with people — colleagues at work, friends, family. It would be good to browse through them via the weblog metaphor. A lot of our writing is being done in mail — it is a natural narrative environment.

Dave Winer on Real-time blogs: “In no more than a couple of years, probably a lot less, conferences will seek out people who write weblogs to broaden the reach of their conferences.”

For people who are in some of the emerging markets of the world, weblogs and audio/video broadcasts are bridging the digital divide. While conferences enable great networking and there’s no replacement for the face-to-face interactions, from a knowledge-gathering and mind-broadening point of view, reading the blogs and listening to the talks via the Internet is a great help. Through bloggers, one can get multiple viewpoints of the presentation in near-real-time. This type of feedback mechanism isn’t possible easily even at a conference.

We’ve been working with Outlines in the past 2 weeks. We have ready a Personal Outline Viewer (in a browser). This allows users in a company to create their own outlines, and edit the top-level nodes independently. Its a very simplified tool, but it works. Next step: to makes Outline nodes shareable with others in the company. This should be done shortly.

After this, I’ve been thinking of two possible paths: one, to make Outlines “Instant” (notifies others of updates) and Group Outlines (where multiple people can update/post to an outline), or to work on Weblogs (K-Logs) for narrating work. Earlier, I was inclined to go through the Outlines in greater depth. But now I think, it will be better to do the Blogs part next.

Not all people think in Outlines — publishing an outline doesnt come naturally. Where an Outline is very good is for hierarchically representing thinking and ideas, like a Table of Contents. Weblogs, however, can be used by everyone. Its about regular narration of what they are doing. What is needed is to make Weblogs publish RSS feeds which can be (a) visible to others, as decided by the author and (b) posted directly to create a community blog.

So, using the mix of Outlines, Blogs and RSS, we can create a nice read-write environment — one which allows people to make their daily notes, as well as create in-depth outlines on specific topics/projects. We want to use these building blocks together in our company to create a new collarborative environment, which will work on Thin Clients.

Fortune has a story on Google:

“They’re the eBay of information,” says Mary Meeker, Morgan Stanley’s Internet analyst. “You go to eBay to find things that are hard to find. You go to Google to find information that is hard to find.” Another eBay comparison that’s worth mentioning here: Google is three times as profitable as eBay was at the same age–3 1/2 years after it was founded. Last year, at age six, eBay made $90 million on revenues of $614 million.

An interesting monicker and comparison. The one difference which Google needs to be aware: in eBay, the sellers own the stuff they are putting on eBay, while Google aggregates the stuff that the publishers put out. As Steven Johnson points out, an aggregation of blog links and clusters can emerge as a potential challenge to Google.

Jon Udell on Tacit Knowledge:

When we narrate, we externalize what we know. We convert tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge. This can help software become more usable for two reasons. First, when technologists narrate what they know, they’re more likely to realize how much tacit knowledge they have and expect in others. Second, when non-technologists narrate what they know, technologists can see more clearly that the expected tacit knowledge is missing.

Very well said! By telling our stories here, we hope to help in the process of “externalising tacit knowledge.” It’s a two-way street.