This article was first published in October 2007.

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An Intranet start page is a valuable piece of real estate. You can decide who gets to see what based on roles and permissions, ensure that everyone is fed group-wide announcements and even get brand-buy in by exposing your employees to your products, messages or even corporate identity on that space. HR situations such as “I didn’t get the email” or “that A3-sized safety warning must have fallen off the wall while I plugged my fingers into the socket” may be averted to some degree.

Web start pages target the individual user and aim to provide them with their favourite links, feeds and widgets. They have really come a long way from the days of Windows Active Desktop. Google, Netvibes, Pageflakes, My Yahoo! are playing in this space and making their start pages almost indispensable, much like the portal strategies of a few years ago wanted.

Google personalised start page

Intranet start pages and web start pages are quite different: one facilitates work for the enterprise, the other provides a launching pad into the web mostly for general interest. Now I like a CMS for my documents and I like web pages for their “Daily Me” functionality. How can they be merged?

I don’t have access to an intranet full-time, I consult from my notebook. There is no point in setting up a start page in my browser saying “Me, do this!”, “Well done I!”, “Comment on this document and send to self for review”. However, I do use a content management system (Drupal) to categorise my research, past articles and files related to my own bookkeeping. It runs online as well as offline when I may be somewhere with fluctuating or no connectivity (read: beach). Microsoft desktop applications have never made it intuitive to manage your own server on your desktop, and even the lag time with waiting for the native document format, Word, to open or close has turned me off it.

Content management system

I would like to see an online service that will be the first thing I open (after my eyes and the kettle) which acts as the current web start pages do. My RSS feeds, my widgets, probably some more interactivity with my own blogs. However, when I take my notebook offline, I would love it if I had that service on my own machine so that I could use it as a CMS for my articles, blog posts, get to read those RSS items that I’d starred but never got around to. Then when my wife says “No internet today!” I can concur but still take my essential reading along.

When I go online, the service would ask me what I’d like to upload to live, re-sync and all would be well with the world again. Perhaps when I view a page online I could select it for offline viewing, where the service uses some smart screen-scraping to provide me with just the post or article, not the visual gumph that comes with it. Go online again, and the screen scraping info gets submitted towards the semantic web project.

It would store my local files online as a backup or for sharing. That way, the web and desktop are both used as a platform, both with the latest copies. The application probably most likely to effect this is Google Gears, an open source browser extension that lets you create web applications that can run offline.

Essentially I want the freedom of a web start page with the structure and support of a local CMS. The two should be the same service. I know with a bit of working around one could get this working, and that one can theoretically achieve these aims with products like Google Gears and Google Documents.

I would probably accept cached advertising if it was a free service, so that when I view offline I still get the advertisements that were meant for my online experience. Otherwise I would pay for such a service in my personal capacity. For an enterprise? Syncing already works well or logging into your intranet via VPN, although you may have marketers without constant access to the network and they would do well to be able to display from their notebooks without relying on connectivity. Salesforce.com have done something along these lines using Gears. Their graph for depicting the process is as follows:

Salesforce.com process using Gears

I would like to the start pages vendors or the embedded service players like Google and Yahoo! step into this market. Other technologies flying around at the moment like Yahoo! Pipes (mashups), XUL, Google Office applications, MS Sharepoint (enterprise 2.0 enabled) and plain Open Source projects are all brilliant solutions looking for a problem.

Perhaps they can begin with the marriage of the desktop to the web.

Research firm Gartner have published a report underlining what many in the Enterprise 2.0 field, and what the previous post referred to: your organisation will have Web 2.0 technologies in it, some for business and some not, whether you like it or not. This change will come from your current and next generation of workers who grew up with internet technologies and will expect to find it waiting for them. If not, they will move on or create their own to the consternation of your IT policies and HR officers.

Admittedly, that sounds dramatic. However, if you have juniors who are more adept at networking, real knowledge management and rapid turnaround times than your incumbents, you may find yourself with a hierarchical problem.

Vertigo
On that note, the research rings a bell with a favoured theme of mine: vertigo and the silo approach. Web 2.0 is as horizontal as you can get. I know vertical communities and vertical search sound sexy and practical and make easy Powerpoint slides, but reality is different. Information-seekers mill about your corporate website like indoor dogs on rainy day to get a feel, you can’t push them down silos.

Surprise! Investors, analysts, applicants, suppliers and journalists do the same. You would be a poor fool if you just took the official line, and didn’t probe a bit more.

If this current working generation is the multi-task generation, the ‘digital natives‘ must be the multi-source generation.

An excellent post on how to introduce new communication/technology changes into your business (aka Enterprise 2.0). I include post here with it’s attention-grabbing headlines:

DO NOTHING

And then your bright, thoughtful and energetic staff will do it for you. Trouble is they will do it outside your firewall on bulletin boards, instant message exchanges personal blogs and probably on islands in Second Life and you will have lost the ability to understand it, influence it, and integrate it into how you do business.

The second easiest way is to find ways of allowing this to happen inside the firewall which can be as simple as sticking in some low cost or free tools and then making sure your existing organisation can:

GET OUT OF THE WAY

The third easiest way is to do the second easiest way and then engage those who would have done the easiest way and get them to help you:

KEEP THE ENERGY LEVELS UP

 You’re going to need it.

In an important body of knowledge, Thinking for a Living, Thomas Davenport argues that knowledge workers don’t respond to normal methods of management and extracting value from them. They demand the tools

Dimension Data recently published a paper, Seven Key Considerations for Deploying Unified Communications Successfully, by Gavin Hill. I wish their superlative research allowed one to comment or engage with it (missed opportunity), but to the 7 points:

1. Organisational Culture and Change Management
2. Environmental Considerations
3. Architecture
4. Security
5. Ongoing Support
6. Enterprise Integration
7. Project Management

Hill readily acknowledges the impact that IM is having on the enterprise, as well as Presence and collaboration servers (Sharepoint). If knowledge workers are to have the autonomy and tools made available to them to facilitate enterprise 2.0 behaviours, their CIOs and support staff would do well to read this paper.

Graphs by Forrester

The opportunity to make KM a byproduct of work was what got me excited about web 2.0 when I first encountered it – Bill Hives

Knowledge management (KM) is the new practice (1995?) of orchestrating a set of practices to capture, share and use information that comes into an organisation, in order to teach, make aware or compete.

It sounded a bit fuzzy when I read it in a Business 2.0 insert in 1998. I remembered the name and the great organograms and Adobe-type images they used, but I felt the whole thing was a bit too fuzzy. Granted, I didn’t know anything about corporate culture and competitive principles at that stage. Now I do.

Like many good ideas that were shelved post dot-bomb, KM makes so much sense know. Think about your employees coming across interesting information online and, with a click, bookmarking for all others to see. Or adding to the Wiki. Or posting about in their blog. Or sending a tweet (this verbage has to go).  Or tagging.

This has been big news in the US earlier this year,  and we’re on this late <sigh />

Some top guys in this market (preaching Web 2.0 to established organisations) are independently realising the need for a new position in the company; titles vary from Geek Marketer, Community Evangelist and Community Manager.

Job description: able to interpret new Web trends and translate them into the Enterprise. Must be able to publish to the internet and monitor the internet for feedback. Developing digital strategies around formal and informal communities (also known as stakeholders) imperative. Must be able to interpret the needs of the Business to IT implementors, as well as to the community, and back.

Enter Geek Marketers. These cross-trained specialists are fluent in both worlds and bridge them. They are marketers by trade, yet they also have a hard-core interest in technology and social anthropology. As curious individuals, they are constantly studying how digital advances are changing our culture and media. Armed with these insights, they regularly apply them in a marketing context by working closely with brand teams to codify new best practices.

Want to know the progression of the ‘Net Web ‘sphere? Consider the titles of the day:

1. Webmaster (very IT, D&D reminiscent: pre-1999)
2. Web Producer (Hey, this things like TV! 1999-2000)
3. Internet Manager (Just run the damn thing, 2001-2005)
4. Digital Strategist (We’re nervous. Find out what it is and tell us)

Explaining Web 2 often goes like this. IT ran the corporate websites, and had to give that up in 2001 after management thought propellerheads and Venture Capitalists need to be separated. Marcoms got the job, and were slow on the uptake, but with most Web 2 tools being communication tools they are finally getting it.

I find many people in this field who were around in the early Naughties (1999-2001) and usually qualify for the above titles have the following in common:

• appreciation for new tools (RSS, bookmarking)
• acumen of a business unit manager
• mindset of a citizen journalist
• technical skills of a developer
• built-in crap detector when it comes to sentence ending in “…ship it and we’ll all be rich!!!”

Know them by their signs.

This article was first posted to BizCommunity in September 2007.

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A microblog is a smaller version of a blog, usually limiting posts to 140 characters. Woo-hoo, so it’s a variation on the blogging theme, but less space to make an idiot of yourself. Why then is it one of the fastest-growing applications in the history of the Internet? Is there a place for it in your digital strategy?

A microblog is a smaller version of a blog, usually limiting posts to 140 characters. Woo-hoo, so it’s a variation on the blogging theme, but less space to make an idiot of yourself. Why then is it one of the fastest-growing applications in the history of the Internet? Is there a place for it in your digital strategy?

The size comparison is not sufficient to explain the power of having a smaller, pithy blog, so here’s the rest of the product list:

• You can view posts online, get SMS, email, RSS or Instant Message (IM) notifications of new posts
• You can SMS, email or IM posts
• You can phone in an update or leave a micro-podcast (these new developments occurred during the writing of this article)
• Many people can join a group or channel and add their updates and receive updates
• You can integrate microblog feeds into blogs, other websites or even into each other.

This looks like information if not acronym overload, but its actually information aggregation and simplification. Consider these three continuum (Continuae?)

1. Publishing: catalogues and reports >> website >> blog >> rss >> microblog
2. Written communication: letters >> memos & fax >> email >> IM >> microblog
3. Telephonic communication: telephone >> mobile >> VOIP and IPhone >> microblog

Microblogging is at the nexus of publishing and communication! A post is published, users are notified five different ways, and they respond to you in five different ways. At the same time, they are part of your social network and are subscribing for the news that you wish to send them. This is keeping US marketers up at night.

You could believe we’re in the nascent stage of aggregating our content together and tying up all the loose ends. A related application is when mobile phones serve up RSS feeds. Getting all your news headlines on your mobile phone (not Blackberry or PDA) as a feed (not SMS) has been widely available for some months now. Unlike the built-in camera, but like text messaging (SMS), RSS on your phone is the real killer app.

Technologies
The main microblog providers are Twitter (www.twitter.com), Jaiku (www.jaiku.com) and Pownce (www.pownce.com). I believe they’re currently fighting it out to be the standard and therefore are trying to be the microblog for all systems. Twitter has market share and a vocabulary (vb. to tweet), Jaiku allows users to setup and join a channel and some moderation of posts while Pownce is exclusive and about uploading music and video to your profile. Enterprises could wait for one of them to create an off-the-shelf package, or you can build your own. The technology is alarmingly simple.

Lawyer, social media consultant, blogger and The Times bloggumist Paul Jacobson uses Jaiku a lot.”The channel isn’t just a one way flow of links to posts and sites, it is also a forum for members of the channel to jump in and participate in conversations sparked by items posted to the channel or topics they may want to raise themselves. A Jaiku channel is a great way to let customers know what is going on in your space in a convenient and user friendly format.” His Jaiku channel at http://jaiku.com/channel/JacobsonLaw is such an example.

A similar paradigm is Tumblelogging, which for all intents and purposes has now become a feature of microblogging. It describes a stream of consciousness where multiple users add their one-liners (tumbling) either as posts, observations or breaking updates. Great for a teenage gang, you may snort into your Horlicks, but what about co-ordinating a team in disparate locations who are not all behind desktops? The Los Angeles Fire Department uses tumbling for their dispatchers: http://twitter.com/LAFD.

A social service
Will microblogging take off? Well, if you’ve heard of MXiT you either come to know it through your kid’s school principal threatening to ban it or your occupational therapist trying to wean you off it. Your FaceBook status that you update six times a day: you are “lifestreaming”, or communicating brief asides that sum up your feeling, outlook, personality and location in around 10 words or less. On the other hand, our mobile phones have prepped us into this “always on” culture where we can describe complex concepts using just a few glyphs.

Microblogging for the enterprise

The instant information retrieval nature of microblogs mean that companies can bypass traditional wire services. As Dominic Jones recently blogged:

In essence, [microblogs] can be a notification system and an editorial system. It can tell someone news is available and provide a link to it. For example: “Sun reports Results for Fourth Quarter and Full Fiscal Year 2007 http://tinyurl.com/2h5osq”

It can also be an information system by delivering the news in a concise format: “Sun Beats Profit Target Q4 Revenues $3.835 billion, EPS $0.09 vs consensus $0.05 http://tinyurl.com/2h5osq”

Sun’s recent decision to bypass PR wire services for its earnings releases is but a baby step in what is coming.

Imagine a presentation where you release run a microblog and make this available. Users can post to it through all the media mentioned above; they can even link to video feeds, picture slideshows and pull other content into the feed.

A global distribution concern, based in South Africa, had the problem of sharing information amongst its executives who were scattered over multiple continents. They hit on the idea of each member logging into a secure site, submitting business intelligence or a link to a related article. SMS notifications were the next step. This successful application was produced by us in 2006 when microblogging wasn’t even a Wikipedia entry.

Keeping touch

Some of the US presidential candidates have microblogs. I subscribed to Barack Obama’s as a follower of his posts, and get woken up at 2am to read this on my mobile phone: “BarackObama: In New York – heading to the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Be sure to watch it tonight.”

You get the point? If I needed to follow breaking information, I can have it delivered to phone, IM, email, RSS or go to the website. If I need to post breaking information, I do exactly the same. There is clearly application for intranets, collaborative groups, rapid dissemination of information. If email was instant, then microblogging is inst.

Like it or not, we (ourselves, groups and organisations) are being coached by our technologies into having a “persistent presence” online; a form of branding ourselves through all channels available. Maybe instead of the 15 minutes of fame we were promised in the TV era we’ll only be allocated 140 words and a thumbnail on our microblogs.

Go ahead, tweet yourself.

I read in the Business Day that Mervyn King explained the market cap of a listed company as highly inclusive of non-financial items such as

brands, goodwill, the reputation of management, a company’s sustainability and the quality of its governance.

He added that a company’s market cap was no longer just related to its book value, especially in an age where social and environmental concerns were growing. Corporate governance is integral to the value of a company.

Those of us who have experience in the sustainability reporting ethos and King Code will naturally agree, and take heart from King’s affirmation. I take further interest (while wearing my Web hat) because you could have substituted the words corporate governance with “Web 2.0″, “online reputation management”, “CEO’s weblog” etc.

You see, Web 2.0 as applied to investor relations is about dissemination of information, access to information in various locations, reputation, communication and accountability. A blog by a board member and the related spinoffs (RSS, social bookmarking, comments, trackbacks) goes a long way to addressing previous corporate policies that were found wanting. Monitoring of the blogosphere and reacting to it, dissemination of corporate presentations, texts, videos, imagery through web and mobile are what it’s all about. Its governance by laying oneself bare, or naked reporting.

I’ll address this topic further in one of my talks or an article, its really important; Mervyn ought to blog.

Explainer:
Judge Mervyn King is the highly influential author of the King Code (I and II), advising to the World Bank and UN. He has dragged corporate South Africa and the JSE into being one of the leading exponents (as a country) in corporate governance reporting and the attendant practices of sustainability reporting and BEE.

Every listed company adheres to the JSE requirements of disclosing the practices by which they run the concern, and the trend of the last few years has been to examine the impact on the environment, social impact and economic impact (the triple bottom line) of their operations. In a resource-rich, large country like South Africa, one may think one can ravage the natural and human resources and damn the consequences (as evidenced in the last few centuries, the exploitation of the New World). Sustainability makes financial sense and moral safeguarding of an organisation’s impact.

The last few days have been a flurry of buzz around microblogging in general and twitter in particular (Note: I started jaiku before twitter but prefer the latter). First, Dominic Jones wrote a visceral article about the potential use for it to disperse investor info (this days after SUN Microsystems released their results online ). Dominic’s article led me to some others, notably: Get ready for the ‘Twitterization’ of mainstream media by David Berlind (ZDNET) and Five Quick Suggestions to Improve Twitter by Allen Stern.

my thoughts,

I see twitter as the bridge on these two continuum:
1. old media, website, blog, rss, twitter
2. letters, memos, email, IM, twitter

I’d like to see Twitter have a better admin interface, and the opportunity to easily edit your posts (if you’re all nerves and thumbs, it could be disastrous)

and

I want to use a microblog in the enterprise (2.0) field. Currently none of them are there. Your suggestions are all valid, and one of these would do well todetach itself from the ubiquitous-use market and go for a solid business platform. I would pay good (or bad) money for a business twitter. However, I think you realise too that they are all within sight of the big cheese and would it make sense to settle for second best?

Also, many ridicule Twitter for the fact that one can record one’s most inane moments and send them on. There is a service and a sale around that, and like it or not, its brilliant. Didn’t we all love 24 hour reality TV a few years back? Will we be able to pry microblogging out of the hands of an “always-on” culture?

I thought the battle for search was done and dusted, but I guess that’s before I discovered tags and the semantic web. Still, I have my means of getting information in the way I want it and short of paying Google for the pleasure, am happy to hit their energy-sapping home page.

Take a look at these other search engines, and the great narrative they are presented in (would have liked links). I rate Kartoo and Quintura, because they attempt to define the non-linear relationships of the cloud, and its quick-loading and fun.

And read this article about all the various new search engines and what they bring to the party.