Skype 2.0
The new Skype beta is here and worth a look. Skypejournal has more. Apparently the merger with eBay isn’t going so well – bet you don’t get to read this in Fortune anytime soon…
Journey To Torino
Steve Rubel has nice things to say about The Journey To Torino blog (disclosure: I worked on this project with the crew at Visa and Fleishman). To answer his question, the outstanding design was done by Razorfish. Saying that, this was a really collaborative effort spanning the teams at Visa, Fleishman-Hillard, Razorfish and Six Apart. And, v/casting will be coming soon…
Smart Thoughts From Mena
I’m a big Six Apart fan. TypePad is how I built and you see this blog. And I’m using MoveableType for all the enterprise blogs I’m working on. Recently the company ran into a few growing pains – they handled them well from my point of view. Here are some of the lessons they are sharing on Mena’s blog:
- Read what your customers have to say
- Ignore the tone of nasty complaints, but pay attention to the underlying messages
- Understand that the people giving feedback represent many who remain silent
- Don’t spend too much energy on distractions
- Don’t be afraid to communicate
- Trust your customers
Email Is So Yesterday…
I remember the excitement I felt when email first landed in my lap – literally, on a Dell notebook – it was some version of Lotus. Soon, I’m hoping, it will be gone in relation to much of the work I need to get done. When recently working on a major site redevelopment a Wiki did so much more for the team in terms of communication – we all edited content in real-time, in the same place, without any confusion in relation to versions. It made a significant task so much more productive.
BusinessWeek touches on the utility of blogs and Wikis as a replacement to email. They start by going down the old route that most of the email you get is a waste of time: “Indeed, the onetime productivity wonder has turned into a maddening time waster. Despite the brawniest corporate filters, more than 60% of what swarms into corporate in-boxes is spam.”
That isn’t why I don’t like email anymore. Its more about what I do like about the virtual collaboration space of the Wiki. “ Among them: private workplace wikis (searchable, archivable sites that allow a dedicated group of people to comment on and edit one another’s work in real time); blogs (chronicles of thoughts and interests); Instant Messenger (which enables users to see who is online and thus chat with them immediately rather than send an e-mail and wait for a response); RSS (really simple syndication, which lets people subscribe to the information they need); and more elaborate forms of groupware such as Microsoft Corp.’s (MSFT ) SharePoint, which allows workers to create Web sites for teams’ use on projects.”
So far, companies have invested 95% of their spending in business processes, according to Social Life of Information author and former Xerox Corp. (XRX ) Palo Alto Research Center director John Seely Brown. A scant 5% has gone toward supporting ways to mine a corporation’s human capital. That’s why fans say the beyond-e-mail workplace will become a key competitive advantage. In the global race for innovation, it’s not as much about leveraging what’s inside your factories’ machines as what’s in your employees’ heads.
It’s worth a read.
Look At Taggin
CNET has a good story on tagging – worth a read.
Also known as “folksonomies,” tagging systems are usually created by users themselves, rather than site owners, and make many online services far more accessible and useful than they had ever been before. The practice brings a social context to such resources as blogs, shared bookmarking, photography and even books.
