Web 2.0 - Snippets

Web 2.0: Part 1- RSS/Atom

For close to two years, I have been seeing the 'RSS' or 'Atom' logo popping up on many web pages that I visit, however I never bothered to click those links or learn about how to use them. When tried to do it once, it sounded too technical as it threw some coded web pages at me, possibly there was not much training offered in those pages on how to use the feeds at that point of time. Obviously I shied away from those for a long time. When the phenomenon was getting more rampant on the web, I finally decided to take that extra step and learn about them. Later, I discovered new ways to track huge amounts of online content in one go with really cool looking RSS/Atom aggregators . Today, RSS/Atom is an exciting piece of technology which I use every day for my work and and as well as learning.

Some of the examples of RSS/Atom feed generators or aggregators are:

Pageflakes.com
iGoogle.com
my.live.com (Microsoft)
my.Yahoo.com
rojo.com
netvibes.com
bloglines.com

The above are essentially Ajax coded and web based tools which are easy to use and highly customizeable.

There are numerous other feed aggregators available based on client software as well. A few of them are integrated into eMail client and a few are offered as part of web browsers. Some of them are Windows Internet Explorer, newsfirex.com, rssowl.org, Opera-M2, Microsoft Outlook etc.


Web 2.0 : Part 2 - Social Bookmarking

To be honest I got to learn about social bookmarking from Deloitte.com while looking for some industry reports, probably because it was one of the first web sites I browsed in the corporate arena which had the bookmarking buttons on the homepage. Later on I discovered that Deloitte was the first of the big four to even put tools like this on their home page. When I landed on the homepage, I noticed a little colorful icon which read 'Bookmark'. This was coming from an Internet service that groups numerous bookmarking tools onthe web into a pop-up menu which lets the web page viewer
bookmark the page in their favorite bookmarking tool. Delicious, Reddit, Digg, Furl, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Technorati, Slash Dot, Magnolia, Fark,... the list is long. What are these? Initially, when I looked at them they sounded like brand names of some software products or consumer products that were getting advertised on the Internet. But no, all these are tools that help you bookmark
and share your favorite web sites. Until recently bookmarking was limited to web browsers such as IE, Firefox, Opera etc. They all had one huge drawback, the bookmarks could be accessed only on the machine that they were bookmarked on. Moreover if the system is formatted or if it crashes, all the tens and hundreds of bookmarks go with it leaving the user with no way to retrieve them. Online bookmarking provided the answer to these limitations. The extended feature of these tools is that your bookmarks can be shared and you can access the favorites of others in your areas of interest.

The use of social bookmarking tools became rampant in early 2008 with the corporate and news companies vying for online visibility. Companies and news sites got creative and offered the best content and products in the most innovative ways. The question raised was, "How do we get popularity using tools other than advertising and search engine listings of Google, Yahoo etc?"
Bookmarking is one of the cheaper ways to reach more people in the shortest time. It works similar to 'word-of-mouth', but in this case the good word passes to other people by just one gesture, "Bookmarking".

While this is an Internet phenomenon, how could it work in the corporate environment/information portals or databases especially in a services organization?
Organizations are structured around work areas of functions. If bookmarking tools are implemented within corporate Intranets, good quality content or document links related to those work areas or functions could be easily traced based on their relevance categorized by keywords or tags that people commonly use to organize their favorite links or documents. These tools could well reduce the effort or time that people take to find relevant information within corporate databases or portals.

In a scenario where most large organizations are spread across vast geographic areas and where there are thousands of employees at work, information is seldom easily accessible. All the information that one would require is scattered in various locations within the company's Intranet. If a bookmarking tool that groups people according to expertise to form interest groups(Communities) or the type of work they specialize in, it could index the favorite places that people go to first for specific pieces of information. And most bookmarking tools allow these links to be shared across the network, the best hence practice of finding the right information by popular vote can be achieved by this.

Web 2.0 : Part 3- Podcasts

I would like to give an account of my experience with the Web 2.0 revolution. I was thrilled by my first experiences with Pod Casts more than 2 years ago, thanks to Deloitte's Consulting - 'Pod Casting Series' which was a little later given a boost by an internal marketing campaign with a tag line, 'Think.Commit.Do'. In my experience, this is one of the most motivating campaigns that an Organization carried had out to completely focus on client service which is the motto of any professional services firm. I was just amazed by the audio visual that promoted the campaign which went like a 'Dolby Digital' commercial. These campaigns surely had a deep impact on people and the way they learned about clients and their industries.

Knowledge Sharing

Many organizations are built on Knowledge that exists within them in various forms. The most important resource of knowledge is the learning and experience of people.

Where does the knowledge reside?
Does this get transferred formally or informally?
Does everyone get to know everything about the organization and what's going on within it?

It is well known that the success of a Person/Team/Organization depends largely on knowledge sharing which is considered part of 'Team Work' by many large organizations. Often team work through knowledge sharing results in winning and delivering great client service.

Now, let's attempt to define a few types of knowledge in a professional services environment that may be useful to people in working towards the organization's goals.

Professionals can benefit from knowledge created around various areas of functions in an Organization. They could be:

- Best practices in various areas of service
- Knowledge on tools and methods
- White papers on technology
- Process knowledge
- Industry knowledge
- Point of view - statistics and analysis
- Firm capabilities etc.

These are a few of the many areas where professionals need reference to prior work in any new task or project.

When all this 'Collective Knowledge' is captured and made available through well defined processes, it enhances performance and helps build an effective practice in any area of work. ‘Collective Knowledge’ is made available to the stakeholders via tools such as databases that are used to store information in an organized fashion. This can be categorized as a formal method of knowledge sharing. While there is another way in which it is done conventionally and is called informal knowledge sharing. Informal knowledge sharing is confined to the boundaries of what is called ‘Social Network’. This is a network which people establish by interacting with individuals that share similar views. However, there are apparent limitations of following just the informal knowledge sharing method to achieve Organizational goals.

One of the challenges of knowledge management is that of getting people to share their knowledge in a professional environment. Very few people share their best practices with the firm's knowledge bases. Knowledge professionals need to implement various strategies to get people to contribute to the knowledge base. Regular communications requesting people to share their intellectual property, launching organization wide intellectual property collection drives and internal marketing of the existing technology platform and processes are a few ways to achieve the task of capturing explicit knowledge. A few organizations have put in place a knowledge sharing and intellectual capital policy to get their professionals to commit to sharing work related knowledge.
The ultimate goal of these activities is to equip professionals with easily retrievable organizational knowledge or meta-knowledge.

The power of knowledge is experienced only when it gets transferred formally and informally.
In my experience with knowledge sharing I realized that many teams had benefited greatly from receiving advice and information on various areas such as Sales, Concept Presentations, Data Presentation to name a few. This effort often helps in minimizing the time and effort that is involved in starting something from scratch.