Posts from the Collaboration Category at The Social Software Weblog

Imagination Cubed online whiteboard

Posted Jul 10th 2006 5:00PM by Dan Lurie
Filed under: AJAX, collaboration

From the same nice people who brought us that dishwasher churning away in the next room comes an exiting new way to visually brainstorm and collaborate with your friends! Ok, so it might not be all that "new," and some of you might not find it particularly "exciting," but dammit, I thought it was cool. Developed by General Electric, Imagination Cubed (hence-force to be known as I^3, for the self-serving purpose of me not having to type it out each time) is another one of them multi-user online whiteboards. As I said, nothing particularly special about that. The cool thing about I^3 that sets it apart from other similar tools is the fact that there are no accounts, and therefore, you never have to go out of your way to make sure your friends and co-workers are registered. Simply visit the site and invite up to 2 other people to simultaneously use your white board. When you're done, you can print your final product, see a replay of what happened, or save the white board for later. I can see this being really useful for those times when you are trying to explain to their mother-in-law how to use tivo to record "Today in Cats," and that she needs to "push the green button, not that one, the other one, I mean the big green button shaped like a rhinoceros, here let me draw it for you!" You can also add text to your drawing, change the background color, and display a grid to help you draw more geometrically.

Wrap all this up in a delicious ~~nougat~~ AJAX interface and you've got yourself a winning web 2.0 application. Now, if only they could find a way to monetize it...

Via Lifehacker

MySpace teams with print mag, Nylon

Posted May 23rd 2006 12:57PM by Marshall Kirkpatrick
Filed under: collaboration, companies, MSM, social networking

MySpace has announced it will partner with the print magazine Nylon to prerelease an online version of the mag with links to the MySpace pages of bands and others profiled in Nylon stories. Sounds like a good idea. The publication in question appears predictably vapid, but the model here could foretell similar agreements in the future.

The move brings to mind the thesis of Nick Carr, who predicts in his forthcoming book and current Gilmor Gang appearances that on-demand media and contextual advertising will decouple high-revenue low-value content from the low-revenue high-value content it has effectively subsidized in traditional media institutions. (Think Britney Spears coverage selling the ads that then pay for the investigative journalism found in section A or F, whichever the case may be.) Perhaps the analogy here is that MySpace's partnerships like this one with Nylon will help raise funds to help pay for the hard-hitting critical thought of Fox News. Hmmm.... no it's probably an example of the kind of cultural destruction that Carr sees on the horizon. Fluff will pay for nothing but profits and more fluff while journalism that, for example, challenges those in power, will become an underfunded, far less visible niche market.

One way or the other, agreements like this, the WaPo's Technorati partnership and now Time.com's embrace of newbie Sphere all point to a real blurring of the line between traditional and new media. That doesn't even seem a relevant question any more. It's about being smart, not about whether new forms of media will beat old ones.

MySpace/Nylon story via Alex Bard and WebProNews.

Female-named chat users get 25X more malicious comments

Posted May 19th 2006 7:54PM by Marshall Kirkpatrick
Filed under: collaboration, Identity 2.0, IM

The University of Maryland has released a new study finding that chat room users with female names receive twenty five times more malicious comments than users registered with typically male or gender ambiguous names. Female usernames, on average, received 163 malicious private messages a day in the study! It appears that the definition of malicious was relatively straight forward, too. Further proof that technology doesn't solve all our social problems (did we need further proof?) even if no one on the internet does know you're a dog.

Found via Nancy White, author of the Full Circle Online Interaction Blog and an expert in IM/chat. Several months ago I interviewed Nancy about international chat strategies and related topics.

PC shipments to Latin America up 29%, laptops up 76%

Posted May 19th 2006 3:16PM by Marshall Kirkpatrick
Filed under: collaboration

ITFacts cites a Gartner study finding that "PC shipments to Latin America in Q1 2006 grew a robust 29.5% compared with Q1 2005, with notebook PC shipments growing a solid 76.2%." Sounds like very good news to me. For all the talk of ubiquitous connectivity, much of the world has a long way to go. The more our conversations include people who aren't at least white and middle class the better.

Social Networking for Staff Development

Posted May 17th 2006 7:52PM by Marshall Kirkpatrick
Filed under: collaboration, wikis

SocialText's Ross Mayfield quotes SAP's Shai Agassi today in a private Q&A where the enterprise vendor's giant Software Developer Network is discussed. Agassi says the online community gets 500,000 visitors per month, represents an "aggregation of knowledge that is second to none," and is like the slashdot of the sprawling SAP world. Agassi says vendors in India are sending scores of new employees to spend their first three months on the site to learn. Average time for a question to be answered is 30 minutes, the company is only creating 20% of the content and there's a reputation system for participants. That's hot.

Mayfield points out that this system is just for software developers and Socialtext is creating an expanded wiki to serve the entire SAP user community. Imagine if other communities of practice and interest could harness this model. The challenge, I imagine, will be to get less technical folks over the learning hump.

I think stories like this can be added to the list of answers to the argument that social networking sites aren't educational and should be blocked from schools. That's not a stretch, is it?

Incentivizing knowledge sharing

Posted May 12th 2006 2:53PM by Marshall Kirkpatrick
Filed under: collaboration

Randy Morin over at The RSS Blog has a post today about his 10 favorite blogging tools. The most interesting thought there to me is that he rewards whoevever tags the best link for:randymorin in del.icio.us each month with a free book of their choice (up to $20) from Amazon.com! I think that's pretty interesting.

Link love is often the incentive for knowledge sharing online, but this makes me wonder if anyone else does things similar. The engadget mobile giveaways are apparently wildly successful. The nonprofit organization I work for, Net Squared, recently gave away an iPod nano to one respondent in their survey of nonprofit organizations about Web 2.0 adoption.

What other methods of providing incentive for people to share have people come across? I think I'm going to do something like Morin is doing myself. Such a good idea, but are there better ones out there?

On Enterprise Adoption

Posted Apr 20th 2006 8:57PM by Marshall Kirkpatrick
Filed under: collaboration

I find processes of technology adoption pretty interesting and I get all aflutter when I see a burst of new users in the Web 2.0 space. E-learning blogger Tony Karrer has a nice summary, link list and analysis of a recent discussion around an off-site article titled Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration.

The basic idea is that social web tools will replace many of the clunky old tools for enterprise Knowledge Management. I like it. But my favorite line is this one (unclear to me if these are Karrer's own words or not)

Adoption Rate = Perceived Usefulness (PU) * Perceive Ease of Use (PEOU)

That's something to chew on. Mathematically limited by the fact that both factors on the right have to be positive numbers perhaps, but one way to put it. Many other links in Karrer's post for discussion of this as well.

Mobber makes inline web chat easy

Posted Mar 25th 2006 4:44PM by Marshall Kirkpatrick
Filed under: collaboration, IM

Check this out, from Mobber.com via eHub:

There are a lot of very nice features to this and I'd say it works quite well. There are down sides too, but it's only been live for like 48 hours. Login is very easy, the design intuitive and quite functional. Couldn't be simpler to install. There isn't sound or any other way to notify you that you have got a new message except for a visual cue you'll only see if you are looking at the box in the same tab, etc. Also a bummer that usernames are limited to 7 characters.

In case you are wondering, it does show all the users online on any site, but the ones on the site you are on are displayed first. I like it. One thing I'm not sure about is whether it will work if I put it in my personal blog's sidebar. Presumably it only tells me if users are on the same URL, not within the same domain? I wonder. I'll have to test that out next.

Thanks to Brian Benzinger of SolutionWatch.com who helped me test this out. He's got a review of a related product called Mabber as well. Wonder if Mobber got the URL first and Mabber got the product to the public first? One way or the other, Mobber.com looks like a winner. Any readers here care to join me in a little chat to try it out? I might even notice that you sent me a message.

Wayfaring is social tripping

Posted Nov 25th 2005 9:13PM by Barb Dybwad
Filed under: collaboration, mapping, social media, web services, web 2.0

Wayfaring is a service that allows you to create your own customized and annotated Google Map and share it. Or, just browse the maps others have created — from the Philadelphia Marathon route to LA gay bars to best places to snorkel on Maui. You can leave comments on each map or contact the mapmaker directly with questions. This is cool on a large scale to share points of interest with a wide audience, or on a small scale to set up a map of your family's recent road trip to share with your friends, e.g. — I like that it works on both levels. The keys will be getting people to come contribute to another data silo, and making sure folks can easily find something interesting when they're browsing/searching.

[Hat tip to Marshall Kirkpatrick and Narendra Rocherolle for the heads up!]

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