A list of business applications for blogging in the enterprise

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We’re getting a great response to our Implementing Enterprise 2.0 report. We’ll get up a discussion space on the site soon.

In the meantime I’d thought I’d share a brief excerpt from the book, in chapter 10 on Blogs in the enterprise. You can download four other chapters from the website, including our Social networking in the enterprise chapter.

Selected applications of blogs in the enterprise

INTERNAL BLOGS

Executive communication

Blogs are increasingly used as a tool for CEOs and other senior executives to communicate within the organization. This provides a more informal communication mechanism that is a valuable complement to existing channels.

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A fundamental question: Are we evolving faster?

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Recent research suggests that ‘microevolution’ – that within species – happens faster in warmer climates – their DNA changes faster. This leads to the extraordinary tropical diversity of our planet.

Susan Kraemer asks: what happens if the planet’s climate gets warmer? Will we all evolve faster?

Which leads me to the bigger question: are we evolving faster? And if so, what is driving that?

We only occasionally think about human evolution, but now well into the 21st century it would be worth knowing if we were indeed evolving at a faster rate, and what that means.

That’s a good research challenge: determine whether and by how much the pace of human evolution is changing :-)

The extropians would of course say it’s accelerating, and I’d have to say I agree.

Once we start to determine our own DNA, as we are beginning to do, we are playing a hand ourselves in our evolution.

We are shaping ourselves, at an increasing pace.

The story of my life: reflections on how my interests were shaped

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I just discovered that an extended profile piece on me that appeared in Inside Knowledge magazine in October 2006 is now available online under the title The Knowledge: Ross Dawson.

It is fascinating to me to read it a few years later and consider what has and hasn’t changed. It provides an extremely good overview of my life story and how my work interests have been shaped. It also picked up on my personal interests such as improvisational music and recording as well as my family.

Please have a read of the full article if you’re interested – it’s a good story. Below are a few quotes from me taken from the article.

“The network approach to open innovation is very powerful, especially when you can uncover the nodes, find out how these domains are connected and how you can link people more usefully,” he says. “Some people don’t understand the idea of open innovation. They had better get it soon as you haven’t a hope if you rely solely on your own internal innovation capabilities.”

…

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Influence in launching start-ups – who do you go to?

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One of the most important applications of influence is in launching start-ups. This is often a make or break situation – you have a great opportunity to get attention (and on the back of that revenue) when you launch a new company. If it doesn’t work and you don’t get much attention at that point, it doesn’t mean you never get another chance, but it’s going to be a lot harder when you’re yesterday’s news.

The New York Times has a long feature today about PR in Silicon Valley, which has brought an extended response from Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, bringing into focus the question of who the REAL influencers are when it comes to getting word out on start-ups.

The New York Times piece, describing the formation of the PR strategy for word-focused start-up Wordnik, says:

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Who will provide the credibility ratings for the journalists of the planet?

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Citizen journalist site Allvoices.com has just moved out of beta. CNet provides a story of the site, its founder Amra Tareen, and Allvoices’ features including a map of the world showing where the latest stories are emerging. A Reuters story, Allvoices happy to pay popular posters, focuses on how the site pays contributors and its ‘crediibility’ algorithm.

Contributors are free to post almost anything and their credibility is rated by readers and an in-house algorithm which measures postings against traditional media and other sources.

But throwing the site open to the public has its pitfalls.

One recent post with a high credibility rating said the Ark of The Covenant was about to be unveiled. Other stories cite no sources at all.

Mr Sundelof said he had not looked at the Ark posting, but the in-house computer evaluation depended on feedback from many users and there had not been enough feedback on that piece.

Allvoices did not practice gatekeeping.

“We haven’t worked out how to deal with these kinds of situations,” he said. “Basically, we can only determine credibility based on the input we have.”

In a world awash with information, having credibility or reputation ratings for information sources is becoming increasingly important. While most people have focused on the media channel as the brand, this is going to shift to the individual journalist. You may trust the New York Times, but after you’ve read it for a while, you’ll place more credibility on what some journalists for the paper write than you do for others.

Allvoices is one of the early players in this space. There will be many more.

How reputation measures will evolve, particularly those for content, will be one of the important themes at Future of Influence Summit 2009.

The border between blogging and Twittering

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Shall I tweet it? Shall I blog it?

If you’re both a blogger and Twitterer, when you get an interesting thought you want to share, you have choices.

Do you tweet it? If it’s interesting enough to let people know, then sure – very easily done.

Or do you blog it? If it’s compelling enough, competing with lots of other stuff, and it’s time-sensitive, then yes. I have a list of over 60 blog posts I’d like to write, so something has to be compelling to get in front of that queue.

This decision changes over time. I’ve blogged for seven years, and was slow to get on Twitter because I thought I had plenty on my plate with blogging. Now more and more idea sharing happens over Twitter. Of course, there’s only so much you can say in 140 characters and sometimes you have to flow beyond that. Comments and blog posts can do that – they’re part of the content creation landscape.

I will explore this issue more later. I’m working on a blog/ Twitter framework that will show how they relate to each other.

It certainly seems to be an interesting topic to explore: what is the border between blogging and Twittering?

Twitter and the ever-faster moving news landscape

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Associated Press has just released a story titled Is Twitter the news outlet for the 21st century? which examines the role of Twitter in the news cycle.

It examines the role Twitter played in the news of Michael Jackson’s death, in the Iranian election, and in the Mumbai terrorist attacks, and goes on to quote tweeters such as Ashton Kutcher and Lance Armstrong, and commentators including TechCrunch and Andrew Keen to explore how Twitter is changing the news landscape. It also draws on my comments from an extended interview:

“Twitter absolutely changes the media landscape,” said Ross Dawson, author and communications strategy analyst. “I like to refer to Marshall McLuhan’s description of media as `an extension of our senses.’ Now, Twitter is extending our senses to tens of millions of people who are often right on the scene where things are happening.”

My views are expressed in more detail in a recent post How Twitter impacts media and journalism: Five Fundamental Factors, which reviews in particular the role of Twitter in breaking news.

I’ve had a few other thoughts on the topic recently so will post more on this later.

Twitterboard and the rise of distributed conversations

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Twitterboard – a very interesting way of aggregating Twitter conversations on a website – launched in alpha yesterday.

I’ve installed it on this blog to give it a try. You should see a tab on the left hand side of the page. When you click it this will bring up the Twitter thread. I’ll give it a whirl and see how it goes.

Twitterboard describes itself:

Tweetboard is a fun and engaging micro-forum type application for your website. It pulls your Twitter stream in near real-time (max 1 min delay), reformatting tweets into threaded conversations with unlimited nesting. Conversations that spun off the original conversation are also threaded in-line, giving your site visitors full perspective of what’s being discussed.

The way it works is that tweets on the site are appended with posted.at/ and inreply.to/ short URLs which take people to the conversation. This means that people who see parts of the conversation on Twitter can go to the site to see a single threaded discussion.

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What’s happening in the living networks – an irregular update

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I send out an extremely irregular email to keep people posted on what’s up in my world and the most prominent content I’m creating. I thought I might as well post it on my blog as well…

What’s happening in the living networks

June 2009

This is a quite extraordinary year for me. It’s now been 15 months since I’ve sent out a ‘newsletter’, so this email is a bit of an update on what’s going on in my world, which makes it quite a long email…. The most important of all this is the birth of my daughter Phoebe on 7 June, packed into a time of great change and development in my work, writing and businesses.

I believe that 2009 is the turning of an epoch. Linear shifts are giving way to exponential change as we call into question existing structures. The key theme for me is divergence: there is a rapidly growing gap between those thriving and those struggling. These are very, very exciting times.

In this update I provide links to some of the more interesting content we have generated over the last period. The best way to keep up with what I’m doing and finding interesting are my Trends in the Living Networks blog or my Twitter updates.

In this update:

– I morph into futurist and entrepreneur

– Launch of leading events firm The Insight Exchange

– Implementing Enterprise 2.0: New book and consulting work

– Recent keynotes in Abu Dhabi, San Francisco, Sydney, Perth etc.: videos and presentations

– Future of Influence Summit coming soon!

– Relaunch of Advanced Human Technologies

– Media coverage: New York Times, The Guardian, ABC, SBS, SkyNews etc.

– Most popular blog posts: influence framework, future of finance, Twitter and media, organizational change etc.

– Phoebe Dawson is born

[NOTE:] You have to be viewing the full article for the internal links above to work

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New iPhone app: Steampunk view of global climate – ideal for world travellers!

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Graham Dawson of OzWeather fame has launched his latest iPhone app Climate Eye, which promises to be another big winner. It enables users to look up any city on the planet and find out official current weather and forecasts, including how much colder or hotter it is compared to expectations for that time of the year.

mycities1.png

It also shows average weather for any month or day of the year in each location, including temperatures and rainfall, even the likelihood of rainfall on any particular day.

Among other uses, the app is great for travellers who want to know what the weather is likely to be when they arrive in their destinations, or even for choosing where they want to go at a particular time of year.

The innovative interface design (which I am told is referred to as “steampunk”) reminds me of the world in The Golden Compass – antique brass instrument style to access digital data – very cool.

Forthcoming apps from Graham will provide additional insights on climate and climate change.

See screenshots of the app on Graham’s blog

FULL DISCLOSURE

Graham is my brother :-)