Enterprise RSS Day of Action - April 24

The Enterprise RSS Day of Action is April 24.

I consider RSS to be the glue that holds together Web 2.0 and especially Enterprise 2.0. Blogs and wikis are great tools. But they are even more powerful when they are pushing content out through RSS feeds. It is much more efficient to have relevant content pushed to you, rather than you having to seek it out.

I previously posted on knowledge as an artifact and a flow. RSS is the flow. Enterprise RSS is the flow for the enterprise.

Of the 2.0 technologies, RSS is the least recognized. Most people recognize blogs, wikis and social networking sites. Tagging like del.icio.us tends to fall down on the list. But most studies I have read put RSS way down at the bottom for recognition and use. Enterprise RSS falls even father down the list.

Enterprise RSS is the key tool that would turn a collection of blogs and wikis into communication tools. To much internal communication happens by email. As a result, your email inbox becomes an information warehouse. That email does no good to the person who starts at the firm the next day. The knowledge is lost to that person.

Lots of internal communication could be better handled by using a blog, wiki or similar tool to host the information. As new information is added, the subscribers get the notification of the change and the content. The big plus is that the content is on a platform that should be easily indexed and retrievable by a search engine.

To really make this work well, you need to force subscriptions on people. That is the keystone to Enterprise RSS.

To learn more about Enterprise RSS:

• Listen to this great podcast with James Dellow of Chieftech and Matt Moore of Engineers without Fears: podcast - james dellow - enterprise rss action day
• Enterprise Day of Action Wiki
• Attensa an Enterprise RSS vendor
• NewsGator an Enterprise RSS vendor
  

Lifestream - Aggregating Youself

As social media is spreading and as I am using more social media tools, I find that the information about me is being spread across more and more sites. Of course one of of the great things about most "2.0 tools" is that they allow you to easily manipulate the information.

I created a lifestream using Yahoo Pipes:
http://pipes.yahoo.com/dougcornelius/lifestream

Shortly after putting that together I ran into Friend Feed:
http://friendfeed.com/dougcornelius

I am recombining the feeds from several sites into one more comprehensive stream. Anyone who is interested can see a large swath of what I am writing about, what I am doing and what I am thinking about.

Now translate this to a use inside the enterprise. It is possible to pull disparate communication and authorship from a particular person and display that information in one place inside the enterprise. You can combine someone's internal blog, external blog, internal postings, internal tagging, external tagging and other sources and create a dynamic profile of that person. If you then store that "story" as it grows, you are creating a searchable repository of experience, expertise and interest for that person.

Currently, my friendfeed and lifestream are both pulling together information I add from:

• KM Space
• Real Estate Space
• Twitter for dougcornelius
• Shared Items from Doug's Google Reader
  
• Del.icio.us bookmarks for Doug Cornelius

Of course, like any good "2.0" tool, my friendfeed and lifestream each have a separate RSS feed that you can subscribe to or easily publish.

RSS and Law Firm Knowledge Management 2.0

Right behind wikis in the toolbox for law firm knowledge management 2.0 is the use of RSS feeds. Without RSS, a wiki is a much less powerful tool.

RSS is simply a notification of a change or new content on website. The notification can be sent by email. Even better is through feedreader. Google Reader, Bloglines, Attensa, and Newsgator are examples. (Most of you reading this are getting it through a feedreader. There are few getting it by email and some keep coming back to the page to read the content.)

RSS disaggregates the content from its source. You do not need to go back to the website to find the change or discover the new content. The content is pushed to the subscribers of the RSS feed for the website. Wikis publish the changes to a wiki page or the addition of another wiki page to the subscribers of the wiki. Blogs push out new blog post with RSS.

The power of RSS is to showing the flow of information rather than just seeing static content. RSS turns a webpage from a repository of information into a broadcaster of information.

RSS Feed Readers

The most popular RSS Feedreader in October of 2007 was Google Reader in October of 2007. It had the most feeds being added to it during that month. It had 37.4% of all feeds added to a feed reader, according to AddThis.com.














Google keeps its crown for another month, continuing to grow its share. This growth looks to be due mostly to losses by Bloglines and NewsGator. Based on the year to date trend, Google continues to grow its market share.

How Does Bill Gates Use Office 2007 and SharePoint

In my feed from SharePointPedia, I came across a post from Bill Gates on how he uses Office 2007 and SharePoint. Yes, it is a pretty fluffy post about how wonderful Office 2007 is to use.

Mr. Gates points out the ability to use SharePoint as an expertise locater. He also talks about creating internal websites, collaboration and discussions in SharePoint, but never uses the terms "blog" or "wiki" or "RSS." I find it interesting that he is playing up the social networking features of SharePoint.

In a related note, Mr. Gates talks about using email and outlook as his primary communications tool. Again, he leaves out blogs, wikis and RSS.

Organizing RSS Feeds

I recently switched from using Bloglines as my feedreader to using Google Reader. I liked the ability to publish shared items on Facebook. As the number of my feeds has exploded past 150, it has gotten harder to manage the feeds. I found this especially true when I was on "vacation" at my in-laws in Missouri two weeks ago. After a few days off-line, I had several hundred unread items.

Jack Vinson got me thinking about organizing feeds by priority instead of content. I really liked being able to view my feeds by subject, but also wanted to make sure I saw very important items very quickly.

I very pleased to find that Google Reader allows you to organize your feed BOTH ways. Feeds can be in multiple organizational folders.

As you can see from this screenshot of my feed list, I have given my feeds a ranking of 1, 2, 3, or 4. Each feed is placed into one of these ranking folders and one of the subject matter folders.

I used numbers because the folder list is alphabetical. My first attempt was using "high" and "low" but they got buried in the folder list.

I can focus on the "1" feeds when I am busy, dismiss the "4" feeds when I fell overwhelmed by the number of unread items and focus on a particular subject when I am in the mood.

Its great when software allows you to have it both ways.

Facebook and RSS Feeds

I noticed this morning that Facebook now has an RSS feed for your friend's status. I am not sure if that has been there for a while or whether it is a new feature. (I found it by clicking on the "see all" link on the Status Update section of the opening page.)

It is great to see the Facebook communication platform opening up for use in other applications.

FeedBurner Integration for Blogspot Blogs

One of the questions I always have with a blog is whether anyone is reading it.

As I posted earlier [Why Blog? My Reasons] I use this blog as a personal knowledge management tool. I put links to articles that I want to refer to later, along with my reaction to the article. I post to gather my thoughts on a subject. I find this blog to be a great technology tool to help me gather, organize and search my information and my thoughts.

Shortly after I started the blog, I noticed that people were reading it. Then curiosity got the better of me and I started tracking site visits. As a devoted fan of RSS, I realized that tracking site visits did not capture those who were reading posts through a feedreader.

Several weeks ago Google purchased the FeedBurner. The first sign of the companies integrating came out: FeedBurner Integration for Blogspot Blogs. Since this blog is based on Blogger, I made the switch to see if I could could get a better sense of the number of subscribers. The changed resulted in a tenfold increase of the number of subscribers.

I did not realize there was so many of you. Thanks for reading.

Increasing SharePoint Value with RSS

Forrester Research and NewsGator are putting on a webinar: Increasing SharePoint Value with RSS: "Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is getting lots of buzz because it’s a one-stop portal, collaboration, content management, search and business process environment. To get the most of SharePoint team sites, you need to make the experience as rich as possible for employees and ensure that content is accessible when they are away from the portal. "



Using the RSS feeds and an enterprise based RSS reader can turn SharePoint from a repository of information into a much more powerful communications tool. SharePoint produces RSS feeds for its blogs and wikis (no surprise). It also has RSS feeds for searches, changes to lists and many other objects in the SharePoint platform.

Social Software is Ready for Business, But is Business Ready for Social Software?

I missed this article in the Wall Street Journal highlighting enterprise 2.0: Social Studies - WSJ.com ($$). Ironic that I missed the article because I was at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference.

The article tracked my thoughts about the e2.0 technologies. Wikis are the most useful for business because they allow collaboration and they capture the product of that collaboration. Blogs are a useful communication tool for executives and among a project team. RSS pulls it all together by pushing the changes to wikis and blogs to those interested in them.

What is Enterprise2.0? Meet Charlie

Scott Gavin (Enterprise 2.0 Evangelist) put together a slide show: Meet Charlie - what is Enterprise2.0?

It is a nice, glossy overview of Enterprise 2.0 technologies and their uses, but very light on how they work and fit in the organization. It certainly has enough pizazz to attract the attention of those who do not know much about the Enterprise 2.0 technologies and how they fit into an organization.

RSS for the enterprise

Tom Dunlap wrote a piece on the Intranet Journal: RSS Slowly Gains Momentum in the Enterprise. It reads more like an advertisement for NewsGator, but has a few interesting quotes from Todd Berkowitz of NewsGator.

"Everyone gets too much email."
"Information workers are drowning in content -- email, newsletters, press releases, and spam. . ."

I am currently using two RSS readers.

I have been using Bloglines as an web-based RSS feed reader for many months. The benefit of a web-based reader is that I can use at work, at home or when traveling. All I have to do is logon.

I also installed an Outlook based RSS feed reader from Attensa. I am running this against some external blogs and sources. More importantly, I am also running it against the RSS feeds in our Sharepoint2007 development site. I see lots of potential in using the enterprise based RSS reader to improve internal communication and knowledge sharing.

With an enterprise based RSS reader, you can force certain RSS feeds on groups of users. So everyone can notified of HR updates, but it is moved out of the email inbox and into the RSS feed. With an Outlook add-on, there is a flag for a new message. But the flag and the message is in a separate folder, instead of my inbox. Even better, it does not set off my blackberry.

My goal would be to have actionable messages from the firm to go to my email inbox and non-actionable messages go to an RSS feed.

An RSS Aggregator is a River of News

Jack Vinson, in his Knowledge Jolt blog, used the metaphor of a "Streams of news" in describing an RSS aggregator.

Attensa has a feature called the "river of news" where they combine all of the RSS feed postings into one list to literally give you a river of news as a quick to scan headlines.

The river of news is similar to what people experience with email. It is as if someone were emailing you all of these stories for you to read. But instead of them clogging your email with more items that do not require your action, they are set to the side in the aggregator.

Below is an image of the river of news in my Attensa demo.

Better Communication Through Blogs, Wikis and RSS

E-mail comes and goes. We need a place to collect and build communication.

Email has become the principal means of business communication. My theory for its widespread adoption is that is just like typing a letter or making a phone call. Therefore, it was relatively easy for users to translate their existing communication processes to email. Although email has become widespread, it took years for it to get to that place.

Blogs and wikis are still in their infancy for business communication, but we should look ahead with their potential.

I find the key to enabling them as a communication tool is to tie them to the enterprise with an enterprise RSS feed aggregator. I recently looked at the Attensa product and tied it into the next generation of our intranet using Sharepoint 2007 .

The proverbial light went on over my head. I now see the intranet as a communication tool instead of a mere content repository.

The blog becomes the way to collect communication and distribute it. But the communication is no longer a disruptive email. It moves communication that is not actionable out of the email inbox. People do not need to save the email to later recall the message. The intranet search can easily retrieve the blog posting.

The wiki combines a document with the communication of changes to the document. Instead of drafting a substantive memo and circulating the memo by email, the user creates a wiki page. Those interested in/ subscribed to the wiki topic get a notice of the new wiki page. But the notice comes through the RSS aggregator instead of email. And the reader does not need to save the email and memo to retrieve the memo. The wiki moves an email and a bulky attachment out of the email traffic flow. The intranet search can easily retrieve the wiki page.

RSS in plain English

For those of you that are unsure of RSS, feed readers, or do not know what those buttons in the right column do, this is an excellent video explanation of RSS: RSS in plain English



Thanks to the Business Filter at The Boston Globe and The Common Craft Show.

Beyond Email as Communication

As Anne Zelenka points out in her post "Busyness vs. Burst: Why Corporate Web Workers Look Unproductive" email has become a single channel of communication for the busy.

Blogs, wikis and RSS offer additional ways to communicate besides email.

Email was a relative easy transition from letters because the paradigm was the same. You write text and address it to someone. I still occasionally receive emails with the full letter text in the message (Dear Doug: . . . ). Email even carries over the antiquated "cc" and 'bcc" concepts from the days of carbon paper to produce copies. (Carbon paper for letters disappeared with typewriters).

Email was cheaper and faster than conventional letters, so it is easy to see why its use became so widespread.

Unfortunately, email has quickly become the only communication tool, rather than one of the communication tools. I often will get stuck in an email thread could have been better dealt with on phone call.

The popularity of the blackberry has solidified the prominence of email as the primary communication tool. Being freed from the shackles of you ethernet cable, all of your email can be hanging on your belt.

Email is the knee-jerk response for communication. Everything can go in there: correspondence, contacts, reminders, documents, to-do lists, etc.

If you look at your email traffic you may realize that all of that email need not be in your inbox. Much of it you do not need to respond immediately (if ever).

A blog can be a better tool if you are announcing something. A wiki can be a better tool for archiving information. Both of these are better ways of sharing information and are more retrievable across the enterprise than email. RSS alerts can be used to promulgate this information through less disruptive means than email.

Hitwise ran a survey, with Bloglines being the most popul

Hitwise ran a survey, with Bloglines being the most popular web-based RSS aggregator.

Read/Write Web ran a survey that found web-based aggregators are more popular than desktop version.