The Social Software Weblog

Social Networking for Staff Development

Marshall Kirkpatrick — 2006-05-17T19:52:00+00:00

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?

Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments

Sponsored by: Userplane Apps: Live communication applications powering the world's leading online communities.

Enterprise wikis for knowledge capture

Marshall Kirkpatrick — 2006-04-25T12:45:00+00:00

Filed under: wikis

InternetNews.com has a long story about a new enterprise wiki service called BizWiki from CustomerVision that includes some interesting discussion about enterprise wiki use in general. Some highlights from the article:

It's all about capturing knowledge before oldsters retire - retaining intellectual capital and dynamically building a content bank. Mass retirements may be right around the corner and organizations need to find effective ways to prevent devastating knowledge loss.

One Bank exec says he's using the wiki to respond to e-mail questions more efficiently.

"Financial services entities need quick, clear and concise responsiveness to electronic customer inquiries; these cannot take days to be responded to, nor can they build up into a project," he said in an e-mail to the author of the article.
The wiki company doesn't talk about wiki technology, they say, instead they focus on the need to collaborate. The company site's front page does have the word wiki all over it, though - so it's not as if they are hiding anything.

The company says their software (and I'd contend wikis in general) are as easy to use as email and have much of the power of a formal document management system.

An interesting cautionary point: the company emphasizes that enterprise-wide wikis are far less likely to be useful than wikis targeting particular communities of interest in an enterprise. That's true of knowledge management initiatives generally, it's said. It's in the Community of Interest/Practice context that key information is most likely to be findable and shared.

Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments

Sponsored by: Userplane Apps: Live communication applications powering the world's leading online communities.

Movie production by wiki

Marshall Kirkpatrick — 2006-04-07T14:48:00+00:00

Filed under: wikis

Heather Green has an interesting piece on the use of a Jotspot wiki in the production of the new Morgan Freeman, Bruce Willis movie "Lucky Number Slevin." (Warning: movie's site is annoyingly media rich and almost ate my browser.)

Gotta admit, the first thing I would have edited is that awful title. But it wasn't the important parts of the movie that were subject of wiki-ization, it was the production documentation like contracts and budget details. If the movie is a critical success, perhaps it will be a humorous addition to our growing list of wiki case studies.

If wiki case studies are your thing, don't miss the 33 wikis profiled in 33 days - it's about half way over already!

Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments

Sponsored by: Userplane Apps: Live communication applications powering the world's leading online communities.

Wikicities gets $4 mill in VC funds, changes name to Wikia

Marshall Kirkpatrick — 2006-03-30T18:09:00+00:00

Filed under: VCs, wikis

This is a couple of days old, so maybe it's only news to me - but Jimmy Wales' private wiki initiative has received $4 million in venture capital from a very hip crowd of investors. Many people love the MediaWiki system that Wikipedia runs on. I think others find it too complicated.

Wikis are interesting, but I can't believe they are going to be exciting enough to be funded by advertising. I like Wikis a lot, so I hope all these hip investors will be proven correct. I'm not sure I can see truly mass audiences editing pages and reading edited pages on very specific topics. I hope I'm wrong, though!
Found via alarm:clock

Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments

Sponsored by: Userplane Apps: Live communication applications powering the world's leading online communities.

33 wikis to be highlighted

Marshall Kirkpatrick — 2006-03-27T15:44:00+00:00

Filed under: wikis

A company called EastWikkers is highlighting 33 different wikis over the next 33 days and explaining what kinds of innovations and best practices can be learned from each one. A very, very cool project. Check out, for example, their profile of This Might Be a Wiki, a fan site for They Might Be Giants.

Not only is this a great way to explore the world of community editable web sites, it's also a pretty good exercise in company promotion through fostering discourse by EastWikkers. Three cheers for their understanding of new media put into action.

Thanks to Ross Mayfield for this link.

Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments

Sponsored by: Userplane Apps: Live communication applications powering the world's leading online communities.

Chemists who love Wikipedia

Marshall Kirkpatrick — 2006-02-28T15:18:00+00:00

Filed under: wikis

Chemistry World has posted an interesting article about a group of chemists who are deeply engaged in Wikipedia and believe that it is a very valuable source of information. One went so far as to say that Wikipedia could become the main source of chemical information within 5 to 10 years.

Martin Walker, assistant professor of organic chemistry at the State University of New York at Potsdam says "a general rule on Wikipedia is that an article that has been heavily edited and around for a long time is usually pretty good, if it hasn't, it may be flawed."

It has always seemed to me that more important than the accuracy of any given entry on its front page is the use of Wikipedia as a set of living documents that have to be carefully evaluated along a continuum. Lots of changes made by registered users with good user histories and clear explanations of their changes are a sign that an article has more validity than one with the opposites of all those qualities.

Perhaps if for no other reason we all have incentive to make Wikipedia the best resource it can be, lest our lives get touched by technical professionals informed by the darned thing. So go tell your favorite responsible professional to fact check and change Wikipedia in their field of interest.

Article found via Peter Suber at Open Access News.

Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments

Sponsored by: Userplane Apps: Live communication applications powering the world's leading online communities.

Reuters releases a wiki for financial terms

Marshall Kirkpatrick — 2006-02-17T21:28:00+00:00

Filed under: MSM, wikis

The innovative folks over at the Reuters Labs have just opened to the public a wiki glossary of financial terms. Ross Mayfield wrote a very philosophical post about it today, though it uses Mediawiki and not Mayfield's SocialText software. He points out that the experiment is poised to avoid the key mistake of the LA Times editorial wiki because this one built a community of dedicated users behind a firewall before going public. The question remains whether a glossary of terms is really well suited for a wiki format.

So now Reuters has a wiki, the Washington Post uses Technorati to integrate blog posts linking to their online stories, and PR Newswire has del.icio.us baked in. Kinda makes the NYTimes paid subscriber firewall seem all the more ridiculous. Perhaps that's why a former NYTimes ombudsman said this week that he's concerned that blogs may soon overtake the mainstream media.

Anyone else have favorite examples of mainstream media integrating with Web 2.0?

Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments

Sponsored by: Userplane Apps: Live communication applications powering the world's leading online communities.