On the Enterprise Blogosphere

In Infoworld: The Enterprise Blogosphere, an article on the use of blogs and wikis by business. There is not too much new here, but its a nice overview, with pointers to applications, discussions of concerns and processes. Quoted Martin Wattenberg, IBM researcher, formerly worked on Map of the Market visualization.

...To qualify as intelligence, information muct be both used and renewed. Good synapses fire fast and standard groupware can be too structured and rigid to support real-time, off-the-cuff data collection for workgroups or projects. Easy and informal, e-mail and IM remain the knowledge-sharing tools of choice for many employees. But after a message has been sent and read, it often drops into the network netherworld never to be seen or used again.

To facilitate the exchange of information and to establish customized, user-friendly data archives, companies such as Cisco, Disney, Hewlett-Packard, General Motors, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Nokia, Novell, and Yahoo are turning to a new breed of collaboration tools: blogs and wikis. Each helps fill the gaps left by traditional groupware in a different way.

“Blogs and wikis play opposite roles,” says Martin Wattenberg, a researcher on the collaborative user experience team at IBM Watson Research Center. “Blogs are based on an individual voice; a blog is sort of a personal broadcasting system. Wikis, because they give people the chance to edit each other’s words, are designed to blend many voices. Reading a blog is like listening to a diva sing, reading a wiki is like listening to a symphony.” ....

Comments

[Edward Vielmetti]

Hi Franz - interesting selection from that article to clip.

Another thing that is notable about the difference between wiki and weblogs is the nature of time in both systems.

Wiki exists in the "wiki now" - pages live with some time stamps when people put them in, but for the most part out of a linear flow of time. Blogs on the other hand are very strongly tied to time and what's current and fresh today, with old content being very hard to get to in some cases.

From the perspective of someone who works on these systems in the enterprise blogosphere at Socialtext, the challenge is to mix the best of the blog-like "latest things now" vision with the more reflective wiki-like "everything in its time" vision. From the diva vs. symphony analogy, it would be like the diva only being on the radio and you having no tape recorder, vs. the symphony only coming in a 30-volume bound set. There are varieties of both.

[Franz]

Great points, Edward ... Agree with your further distinction.

I have been part of several wiki tests, including Socialtext. In a wiki you are also trying to bring in a broader set of participants ... and thus the complexity of its use becomes a problem. In general, blogs are easier to use and by their nature their use is a matter of self-selection anyway. During the wiki tests we saw the primary users being the folks adept at technology ... relatively little outside that space ... in non technical management. I understand the relative value of wikis vs blogs, just need to make it easier for the casual, non-technical user.