Does the average employee have time for e2?

Having originally been employed in the core business area of my organisation, removed from the world of IT, I can appreciate what some of my previous colleagues have said when it comes to E2.0 - "Yeah that's great - but its probably not relevant to what I am doing".

Reading between the lines, as much as people arebe able to see the potential of E2.0, it is way down on their priority list in terms of achieving their work goals. Therefore they can't see how they will ever find time to sit down to write a blog or contribute to a wiki, especially if they consider the fact that this effort may not be recognised.

Ultimately, I don't think that this necessarily poses a problem for the proliferation of Enterprise 2.0 within an organisation, as long as expectations are managed, and decision makers in the organisation do not expect to see ROI immediately.

An Enterprise 2 technology such as a wiki will take time to establish, and branch out into the most visible areas of an organisation. In this early phase it will be the dedicated few that will build the community data, and influence others to get involved. However once the system reaches critical mass, and starts to achieve true visibility in the organisation, it is at this point that the technology will become much more accessible to the average employee, and the ROI will truly be realised.

Just recieved my new Moo Cards!!

I have just received my consignment of Moo Mini Cards, and I have to say I am very impressed.
These are very unique little cards, being half the size of normal business cards and adorned on the back with user supplied images. The best way to do this is using Flickr, where you can select up to 100 Flickr photos and Moo will print these on your cards complete with you personal message on the back. They are a bit pricey at about 12p/card but I think well worth it!!

Come on - jump on the Web2.0 Bandwagon!!!

A friend passed this site onto me. A funny, if not a bit satirical page promoting a new Web2.0 product Sporkk.
To me, it illustrates the emerging "Marketing 2.0" strategy, of not really explaining what the product does, but offering that illustrious beta test, where users can find out for themselves.

I personally think that the beta test model is a really valuable for emerging products, allowing user feedback early on in the process, producing a product that actually meets the users needs.

However I wonder if the real point of the Sporkk website is to illustrate that everyone is trying to get in on the Web2.0 bandwagon because of the financial interest the Web2.0 movement is generating.
If this is true (which I hope it isn't) ultimately only the good products will succeed, but will it damage the beta test model? Will users be more inclined to allow the VC's to decide what products are successful, and loose their ability to influence the product development?!

I don't think the situation is as bleak as the picture I have painted, but maybe developers of new products are going to have to be a bit more upfront about what their product has to offer, to assure aspiring beta testers that they aren't wasting their time going through the signing up process.

20 Minute Trial : Second Brain

I was lucky enough to get onto the limited Beta test of Second Brain.
I decided to spend 20 minutes to see what I could achieve using Second Brain.

What I thought I knew about Second Brain before I started:

Second Brain gives you the ability to import content from Internet services such as del.icio.us and Flickr and also personal documents from your computer. With these documents uploaded it then provides an interface for you to create mashups of this content, annotated in a free form mind map.

The 20 minute trial:

I decided that the object of this trial was to try and mind map "What is a folksonomy?". You can see my collection here.

I started out by mind mapping the question - it was nice to be able to start here, but I found the mind mapping functionality a bit less than slick, and it was frustrating that I couldn't link two nodes together without making one a node of the other. Also you don't have freedom to arrange the nodes yourself, rather they default to a standard layout.

I then began to add bookmarks from del.icio.us tagged with folksonomy.
Surprisingly, I only had the option to import my bookmarks - and no options to search the del.icio.us communtiy tags.

With these in my collection space, I then began organising them and applying them to my mind map. Unfotunately whilst I could see the title of the bookmarks, that is all - it would have been great to see what other tags are associated with each bookmark.

At this point I started to wonder if I had missed the point as to what Second Brain was. I therefore started to troll through the public collections. I settled on this collection : Media coverage of Second Brain. Essentially showing all the bookmarks where Second Brain was in the media with a few other bits of information eg. publicity photo etc.

My first reaction was that all of this could be done using a quck del.icio.us search. However it suddenly dawned on me that whilst this is true, it is a visual representation of the information that not only allows you to organise the output however you want , but also save the representation, to review and add to later.

What I think about Second Brain now:

Whilst I still believe it is essentially a mashup tool with mind mapping capabilites - I now realise its not designed for discovering new information from the web like a traditional mashup, but rather to consolidate information that you have already discovered.
For me I think second brain would be a perfect place to mind map my new blog posts and presentations before I write them especially when the interface has matured a bit.

London Wiki Wednesday

I attended London Wiki Wednesday with Scott and Simon yesterday. It was my first time there, and I really appreciated the informal "un-conference" style of the event.

Steve Lamb from Microsoft did a short presentation on Sharepoint 2007 's wiki functionality. Unfortunately he didn't actually show it to us, So I cant comment on what it is like.
Interestingly he conceded that Microsoft doesn't have a culture of using wiki's, which makes me wonder exactly how good their wiki technology will be if they aren't "eating their own dogfood" so to speak. However Steve assured me that he does use SP07 for a wiki that he contributes to , and that they are investigating a public Microsoft wiki - which will be an interesting one to watch out for!!

During a discussion session led by Simon Revell, a significant amount of time was spent discussing around the theme of how, within an organisation you decide when a wiki document is finished and what you can then do to safeguard it. My favoured solution was to follow a release model, where the document is printed to PDF which can then be stored in a document management system. However I strongly disagree that a page should be pinned down and closed for editing within the wiki environment, rather reference should be made to the current release version.

There followed a number of really interesting 5min presentations, my favourite being delivered by Angela Beesley from Wikia, who presented on the great work that Wikia are doing, in hosting, overseeing and promoting a number of large wiki's. The burning question on my mind was - how they make their money!!! It seems they are relying on VC's and Google Advertising, but are hoping to rely solely on Advertising in the future - I hope this doesn't reduce the level of service that they are offering!!

The next Wiki Wednesday is on July 4th at BearingPoint I thoroughly recommend it to anyone with an interest in Web2.0/E2.0

Microsoft Surface - At Last!!!

I like many people saw the You Tubevideo several months ago demonstrating a multi-touch touch screen (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zp-y3ZNaCqs). Massively excited but frustrated by the lack of information - I chalked it up as one of those things that undoubtedly would turn up again in the future. Since then the guys that made thsis video have formed a company called Perceptive Pixel, and have made an even more impressive demo (http://www.perceptivepixel.com/) - still not much more information, but they do at least have an email address now that you can contact them on.
However perhaps even more exciting is Microsofts release of Microsoft Surface (http://www.microsoft.com/surface/) The sample videos look amazing truely amazing, I doubt they can actually do much of what the demo suggests at the moment, but just the prospect of having a multi touch panel near the market gets me massively excited. Sadly they seem to be marketing towards to the Hotel and Entertainment industries, but I really want one on my desk!!!