Educause Review: Social Software and the Future of Conferences – Right Now

Pointed out by SC. Vicki Suter, Bryan Alexander, and Pascal Kaplan. "Social Software and the Future of Conferences – Right Now." EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 40, no. 1 (January/February 2005): 46–59. Wow. Explains the difficulty of moving to all online conferences by analogy to throwing a good party. Discusses the value of f2f conferences:

We attend conferences for the conversations, among other experiences. Through conversation, we create a common ground from which we can explore the issues and problems of our professions and practice, as well as potential solutions. Conversation is the engine for work, for community, for decision-making, and for collaboration. However, the conversations we have at conferences are ephemeral. If we could find a way to make the conversations persistent, what effect would that have on our ability to construct knowledge collectively?

Talks about moving from virtual interaction to f2f (we should have conference name tags that transmit our online identities and can be set to alert us if we are in proximity to someone with whom we have an online relationship, it's possible, I saw it on morning tv... )... The important point that we don't have to choose between online and f2f interactions or the interface between the two

We tend to think of a virtual space as some sort of alternate electronic analog for face-to-face, as a replacement location when the physical is not available. Given the evolution of increasingly sophisticated social software and of the social architecture that can manage its effective uses, we might realize significant advantages if we think of virtual spaces as interwoven or intertwined with face-to-face experiences in equal partnership. The combination may augment the benefits of each—through complementarity (the strengths of each compensate for the weaknesses of the other) and synergy (the joining creates properties that did not exist when the experiences were separate).

Update 2/17: A new case study web-only add-on is up. The Future of F2F

Cote's Weblog - Enterprise Blogging in Practice, Notes

Found on CorporateBloggingBlog. There's a follow-up post here. Note: I posted this over the weekend but the post is missing. Regrets if you're seeing this twice.
What's very interesting about this post is that the author gives honest feedback from an IT guy on setting up blogs on the intranet. He brings up some interesting points. First, users should be able to create new blogs without admin help. Second, the blogging guru can make comments on different blogs and talk about blog posts in the halls to encourage users. Some other things I knew, but I'm glad to see repeated: fear of sharing, need for enterprise search, need for local aggregators, opposition from the people who paid $$$ for a complex content management system... See also his survey of types of posts.

Tech Republic: Why blogging matters to your business and your IT

Pointed out by Topix (which has been doing really well recently in delivering meta information on blogs and blogging).

1/21/05, commentary by David Berlind (also available via podcast, here, I think).

Berlind has recently started using a Userland blog and has started a conversation with Userland CEO Scott Young.

In this brief article, he neatly places blogs in corporations and contrasts them with e-mail and complex content management systems. For organizations that have spent lots of money developing CMS-es and portals, how do you sell blogs? How do users decide to e-mail, wiki, upload to a CMS or document management system, or blog some piece of information?

Anyway, it's an interesting article worth at least a quick scan. He's a real RSS believer, too.

Campus Technology:Blogs in Higher Ed: Personal Voice as Part of Learning

by Ruth Reynard Pointed to by CorporateBloggingBlog

Finding personal voice as a pedagogical method is important to establish learner identity and focus, and journaling has long been recognized as an effective way to provide space for this to occur. The blog, however, provides a context in which personal voice can be 'published' by the student, which means that attention is given to content, relevancy, and connection with learning outcomes to a higher degree than a traditional journal submission. The idea that more than one person will view the work is quite powerful in promoting a sense of ownership from the student.

I think research in corporate settings whether for pharmaceuticals or aerospace is a form of learning. Aren't lab notebooks a form of journaling; researchers are learning from nature, not necessarily from others...The access to the blog should be limited and the outcomes should be measured appropriately... Update: I finally fixed the spelling of the title.

Free pint article on "enterprise blogging"

Knowledge Jolt with Jack: Blogs in business article

I'm really quoting most of his post here:

Howard Baldwin writes in the 1 January issue of Electronic Business Online, Blogs for business?

Forget about all the hype you've heard about blogs (a.k.a. Web logs) as the latest outlet for personal journalism. It turns out they also have a remarkable ability to aid communication in business, whether within internal workgroups or among external chains of suppliers and partners. For an industry such as electronics -- where relationships are far-flung and time-to-market pressures require fast communications -- blogs can bring a new agility to the workforce.

[via micropersuation via new KM blogger Eugene Giudice]

b/ITe: Corporate Library Blogs

Pointed out by the author. It's a very general article that really just gives an overview of points to consider when starting a blog for a corporate library. If you read this article and want to know more about corporate blogging policies, see Charlene Li's blog post linked below. He also makes some good points about dealing with IT. It never hurts to make friends with those who control the servers!

Gigablast Site Search Added

It's still indexing, but I've added a Gigablast site search box on the rhs at the bottom (scroll...). I've found that it actually works pretty well on my Library Rant.

Professional-Lurker: Notes from HICSS-38

Scheidt blogged her notes from the Thirty-eighth Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. The proceedings will eventually either be on ACM or IEEE, I'm not clear on that. Her notes and links to presentations offer more informative abstracts than the original program. The link above goes to a particular set of notes, but look up and look down because there's a lot of content here on blogs in different settings. Update 2/11: The articles have shown up in ACM

kLog News

kLog News focuses on enterprise knowledge management weblogs and includes links to a number of bloggers writing about KM. It's not a new source, but it's new to me. Bill Ives of Portals and KM profiled it in December.

It seems familiar, though. Perhaps someone already wrote about it here and I just didn't find the entry when I searched. One of the challenges of group blogging is remembering what other people might have posted in this space. ; )