Albert Tanutama

BusinessWeek highlighted Wiki as “Web sites anyone can edit — and they could transform Corporate America”

Pisarro has wikis transforming the way people work at the company he founded, software maker Aperture Technologies Inc. Two dozen of the Stamford (Conn.) company’s 100 employees use them to brainstorm, track projects, write and edit documentation, and coordinate marketing. That has eliminated countless meetings, conference calls, and back-and-forth e-mails. Says Pisarro: “Wikis allow this collaboration much better than anything else, so we get things done faster.”

Scoble highlighted Channel9 interviews with Ward Cunningham who invented the Wiki.

Brian Dear asked “Where Have All The Users Gone?”

The Alexa rankings for many name-brand websites are way, way down. And going down more. But it’s not all doom. Some sites, including some international ones, and some of the social networks, are trending upwards

I must admit, that the downward trend is pretty obvious for those big sites like AOL, Apple, CNet, etc. Geoff Mack from Alexa highlighted that this could be attributed to the global web usage which is outstripping US web usage.

Robin Good has a compilation of Social Capital definitions

The list is an open-ended starting point that facilitates and stimulates better understanding of where and how the social capital component can be made to become an acknowledged and nurtured asset of the modern modular, decentralized and individual-centered community/enterprise

My first encounter with this term is from Carroll’s HCI in the new millenium book. The HCI community should understand the social impact of the design. I’m interested in this aspect since weblog design would have significant impact, for example, permalink, comments, trackbacks, and blogrolls.

Eva Kaplan-Leiserson described how RSS is being used in the world of content, what its potential is in the learning arena, and how it?s already being used in educational settings

Learning object repositories that let users contribute and access objects developed by others outside their organizations haven?t taken off in the corporate world. Rather than collecting content in a central repository, requiring an expensive software application, the RSS model distributes content across the World Wide Web, allowing access piece by piece.

Hear hear…

Learned a new jargon – Pierre Salinger syndrome (n.)

The tendency for online users, especially new users, to assume any information published on the Internet is automatically true.

The term was highlighted by JD who said that “distinguishing truth from myth is a necessary human skill, all the more important with the web’s ability to help anyone publish quickly.” Who’s Pierre Salinger? Read more about him here.

Cameron Marlow presenting a paper at the International Communication Association Conference in New Orleans titled Audience, Structure and Authority in the Weblog Community.

Looking only at popularity by blogroll rank, it does appear that the ?rich get richer,? but another assessment of authority, permalinks, might be an equally good proxy to authority and a better measure of influence.

The paper is an analysis of two different metrics for measuring authority within weblogs using permalink and blogroll. I personally feel that the authority is best measured by permalink, that is based on the number of posts that were cited rather than popularity.

David Huffaker posted his thesis, “Gender Similarities and Differences in Online Identity and Language Use among Teenage Bloggers”.

Overall, the results indicate that teenagers reveal a considerable amount of personal information in their blogs, including name, age, and location, as well as contact information in the form of an email address, an instant messenger name or a link to personal homepage. The content of blogs typically reflects what is expected to impact a teenager?s life. While almost half of teenage blogs are abandoned, active blogs demonstrate high levels of loyalty in terms of frequency of posts (daily or weekly) and length of posts (which average 2000 words per page). Contrary to prediction, the results indicate that there are more gender similarities than differences in blog use. However, some gender differences were noted, regarding emotive features, sexual identity, language use, and some components of personal information.

The paper takes a look at the teenage segment to understand the methods used for establishing online identity.

Chad Dickerson, from Infoworld, write about the benefits of corporate blogging on his article, Blogging behind the firewall.

First, it forced the team to strategically organize its IT initiatives into a coherent roadmap fit for broader internal consumption. Next, it created a sense of accountability for these initiatives within the IT team. Finally, posting our plan for the entire company to see helped foster a sense of accountability to our non-IT colleagues within the company. Our meetings no longer have agendas or redundant handouts, because we don?t need them

For me? I found it more exciting to write blog than documentation. Why? It suits my writing style. That means, I could add personal notes (tips, troubleshooting, etc) which actually useful in the future (as part of organization knowledge). To capture such information is what Knowledge Management aiming. Weblog helps to achieve it in much lesser costs.