The Zen Of Blogging

Darren Rowse pointed me to the Zen of Blogging by Hunter Nuttall.

Photo by Clearly Ambiguous

It starts: They say that when the student is ready, the master will appear. One day I felt ready, and I began the long climb to the top of Mount Blogmore. Was the legend true? Did the old man really exist? No one knew for sure, but we knew that every aspiring blogger had felt compelled to seek him out when their time had come. We also knew they were never seen again. And so I climbed Mount Blogmore, with a strange force pulling me to the summit even though my knees quivered with fear. It wasn't my choice, it was my destiny. I had to know if I had it in me. I had to know if my inner blogger was ready to be awakened. And ends: There is no blog! A blog has no inherent value; it's just a medium for conveying value from one person to others.

Wikis in SharePoint 2007

The Firm has taken its second step into Enterprise 2.0 with the launch of our first wikis in SharePoint 2007:


Our first wiki was an import of our existing knowledge management wiki into the SharePoint platform. I wrote about that wiki in a previous post on Making Wikis Work - Success Factors. That wiki had been very successful on the external platform and I expect it will continue to be successful on the SharePoint wiki platform. There have already been several edits.

The downside to moving the wiki was that all of the links in the wiki broke. The links to our intranet were already broken as a result of the upgrade of the intranet from SharePoint 2003 to SharePoint 2007. Now the internal wikis links are broken.

We had debated on whether to move the wiki. The winning argument for the move was that "we need to eat what we cook." If we are going to pitch the use of wikis in SharePoint, we needed to be using them ourselves.

We also launched a second wiki for managing HotDocs and our HotDocs templates. The vision for this wiki was to create the manual for each of the HotDocs templates and to share information among the HotDocs developers. The wiki page becomes the item returned on a search for the HotDocs template.


We found one great feature of wikis in SharePoint is their ability to combine structured and unstructured information on the wiki page. At the bottom of the image above you see the words "Template In Production." I had created a new column/field in the wiki page library called "Template." In the Template column I allowed for the choices of "In Production", "Under Development" and "N/A." You can edit the field right from the wiki page.

By adding the structured content we can also create views of the wiki page library to expose content, rather than having to rely solely on links in the wiki pages. In the image below, the sections labeled "HotDocs Templates", "HotDocs Templates Under Development" and "HotDocs Wiki Recent Edits" are all separate views of the wiki pages library.

Document Behaviors

With my use of wikis and the adoption of wikis at The Firm, I have been focusing a lot of attention on the behaviors towards documents. After all, a wiki page is just another type of document. When producing documents, I have noted five types of behaviors: collaborative, accretive, iterative, competitive and adversarial.

Collaborative
With collaborative behavior, there are multiple authors each with free reign to add content and edit existing content in a document, and they do so.

Accretive
With accretive behavior, authors add content, but rarely edit or update the existing content. Accretive behavior is seen more often in email than documents. Each response is added on top of the existing string of information with no one synthesizing the information in a coherent manner. I have seen this in wikis as well where people will add content but not edit others content.

Iterative
With iterative behavior, existing content is copied to a new document. The document stands on its own as a separate instance of content. The accretive behavior is distinguished from the iterative behavior by the grouping of similar content together. With accretive behavior the content is being added to the same document, effectively editing the document. With iterative behavior, the person creates a new document rather than adding to an existing document.

Competitive
With competitive document behavior, there is a single author who seeks comments and edits to the document as a way to improve the content. However, interim drafts and thoughts are kept from the commenters. The transmission of the content to a client or a more senior person inside the firm will result in a competitive behavior.

Adversarial
Adversarial behavior is where the authors are actually competing for changes to the content for their own benefit. Although there may be a common goal, the parties may be seeking different paths to that goal or even have different definitions of the goal.

Collaborative, accretive and iterative content production are largely internal behaviors. Competitive and adversarial are largely external document behaviors. Of course, a document may end up with any or all of these behaviors during its lifecycle.

I have an article coming out in KM Legal and Inside Knowledge magazine that further discusses these behaviors in more detail and in the larger context of wikis and document management systems.

Putting the Social into Social Media

Kevin O'Keefe hosted a group of Boston Bloggers at Emmitt's Pub last night. Kevin is in town for a presentation to the New England Chapter of the Legal Marketing Association on How to Work a Room in the Digital Age: Social Networking for Law Firms.

It was great to spend time with Kevin (Real Real Lawyers Have Blogs) Bob Ambrogi (Robert Ambrogi's LawSites, Media Law, and Lawyer 2 Lawyer), David Hobbie (Caselines), Joshua Paulin (Boston Immigration and Nationality Blog), Jessica Foley (Massachusetts Driving Laws), Leanna Hamill (Massachusetts Estate Planning and Elder Law), Emmanuel Dokter (Family Law Solutions), Kysa Crusco (Her blog is coming soon from LexBlog) and Gerald May.

I had previously compiled a list of Massachusetts Blawgs (law blogs) over at my Real Estate Space blog on commercial real estate finance.

That after-work "meeting" was preceded by a great lunch with Dal Keldsen of AIIM International.

All of these real-life meetings were derived from on-line social networking. It is always better to hang out with people face-to-face. But the limits of space and time prevent me from being able to have face-to-face conversations with everyone I want to, as frequently as I want to. This blog, Twitter, Facebook, Legal OnRamp, and other social networking sites allow me to keep that conversation going and to to keep the connections fresh.

Blogging in SharePoint 2007

The Firm has taken its first steps into Enterprise 2.0. Using SharePoint's blog platform we launched our first blog today. Mark Puzella, David Hosp and Robert O'Connell started their Trademark, Copyright and Trade Secrets Blog.


They put up four posts the first day and a had handful of comments. (The comments were mostly the authors trying out the comments feature on the blog.)

In early April, we upgraded our intranet to SharePoint 2007. The blog feature works great in SharePoint. Certainly you can't add on the numerous widgets and other tools that you could with WordPress or Blogger. You can add categories to the posts. At first we thought you were limited to one category per post, but quickly found the setting to allow multiple categories per post.

Most of our planned uses for blogs are targeted at hosting firm announcements. It was great to have lawyers dive in and want a real law blog. I hope the Trademark, Copyright and Trade Secrets Blog will be a beacon showing other lawyers the power of blogging inside the enterprise. This may also lead to some external blogs.

Using Wikis for Project Management

I am sitting in on a webinar from PBwiki on using wikis for project management. Chris Yeh ran the presentation. (Of course it was focused on using the features of PBwiki for project management.)

One feature that I like about PBwiki is that it is easy to create a template. Just tag any wiki page as a "template." When you create a new wiki page, the splash page allows you to pick a template. Any page that you tagged as a "template" shows up on that list.

Chris showed us a Projects Tracker page with a summary of the few projects and their status. From this Tracker page, there are links to each individual project.

Each individual project page, started with an overview of the project, the objectives of the project, the team members, the timeline and the tasks and milestones.

Obviously using a wiki means the information is not in a structured format. So you cannot create dependencies and all the fancy stuff that something like Microsoft Project does. (Of course I have been trying to use Project for years but it is frustratingly hard to learn and use. I have found a wiki page to be so easy to use, that it is easy to get people trained [2 minutes] and using the wiki page.)

It sounds like PBwiki is looking for ways to structure some data to allow it to roll-up into other places in the wiki. (SharePoint 2007 has some interesting abilities to deal with this. I will post on this later.) In the wiki, you need to double enter information on the project page and on the master page. If you design which data goes where, you can minimize the double entry.

With a wiki, you give a common space for the project team to keep information and share information on the project. As items on the project are updated, the subscribers to the wikis get the notification of the change. (We have been using PBwiki to manage our knowledge management projects for almost year. A wiki is a great way to centralize information and publicize information at the same time.)

The webinar large ran through the features of PBwiki and lots of requests for functionality in the wiki. Since I have several active PBwikis and am familiar with many of the features so I got a little bored.

One challenge with a wiki is the lack of structured content. I have found that the more structured content you have, you more complicated you make the tool. My IT development manager and I always butt heads over whether to use a structured data or unstructured. Since I am an attorney, I am used to the unstructured content of document contents. He is from IT and is used to databases.

The key to using a wiki for project management is making sure everyone on the project team has an RSS feedreader. (Even better get an enterprise RSS feedreader and push out a subscription.) The wiki compresses the updating of information and the distribution of the updated information into one step. You edit the wiki page and the wiki page sends out a notification.

I have been using a wiki to run a client team for a few months. Each matter has a separate wiki page. On that page is a list of the needed diligence information and list of the closing documents and their status. I keep my notes on the page as does my junior associate and paralegal. I can go to the wiki page and see the current status. I would have gotten RSS notification of changes to the items. The old method was keeping the list of diligence information and closing documents in a word document in the document management system. The responsible person would edit the word document and then email it around to the working group. I would have to open the email and open the word document to see the changes. If the document was redlined to show changes, then I need to decipher the mess of edits to see the current status. If the document was not redlined, I would have to try to distinguish the changes.

Readings on “Knowledge Management 2.0 - Reality or Hype?”

As part of the Boston KM Forum Symposium on Knowledge Management 2.0, Lynda Moulton put together a list of additional resources for reading on the subject:

Half-Baked or Mashed: Is Mixing Enterprise IT And The Internet A Recipe For Disaster?
Andy Dornan.
Information Week 09/10/2007
“

Enterprise mashup tools are the long tail of SOA, letting ordinary employees build applications that aren’t on IT’s radar screen. But what about the risks?” A good summary of Mashups and issues related to the technologies involved.

World 2.0.
David Gurteen
The Gurteen Knowledge Website
03/21/2008.

“Most of us understand what Web 2.0 is all about as we move from a read-only web to a read-write or participatory web. And we are starting to come to grips with so called Enterprise 2.0 where the concept and technologies and social tools of Web 2.0 are moving from the open web into organizations.”

Academics butt heads over enterprise 2.0.
Chris Kanaracus.
InfoWorld (IDG News Service)
01/11/2008.

“Scholars from Harvard and Babson business schools spar over question of use of social networking and other Web 2.0 technologies in business environment.” Debate between Andrew McAfee of HBS and Tom Davenport of Babson on the spill-over and influence of Web 2.0 social tools into the enterprise to form a new paradigm, Enterprise 2.0.

Consumer Technology Poll: CIOs Still Fear Web 2.0 for the Enterprise
C. G. Lynch
CIO Magazine
03/14/2008.

“From blogs to wikis to hosted e-mail from Google, CIOs, on the whole, value command and control over user empowerment.” “The majority of CIOs didn’t seem enamored with Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs, wikis, RSS and social networks, either. Only 30 percent of IT decision makers said they offered wikis as a corporate application. A mere 23 percent offered blogs, while18 percent utilized RSS. Only 10 percent of respondents brought social networks into the enterprise.”

The Hype is Real; Social Media Invades the Inc. 500.
Eric Mattson, Nora Ganim Barnes, Ph.D.

The University of Massachusetts Dartmouth's Center for Marketing Research conducted a nationwide telephone survey of those companies named by Inc. Magazine to the Inc. 500 list for 2006 under the direction of blog researchers Eric Mattson and Nora Ganim Barnes. All interviews took place in November and December of 2006.

Andrew McAfee/Tom Davenport Discussion [on Enterprise 2.0]
Jim McGee
FastForward/KMworld
01/11/2008.

Commentary on the Webinar debate between McAfee and Davenport,

Knowledge Management Revitalized; KM in a Web 2.0 World
Mike Murphy

There are several factors contributing to the revitalized interest in KM, or KM 2.0. It is important to remember that Internet, HTML or audio/video content weren’t part of the equation when KM first entered the discussion - people were just getting comfortable with a relational database management system (RDBMS) and records-oriented content. It therefore wasn't obvious why you needed another content storage system. With the arrival of the Internet and its evolution leading up to today, unstructured data exists easily in so many forms that cannot be accommodated in an RDBMS.

Common Pitfalls of Building Social Web; Applications and How to
Avoid Them, Part II.
Joshua Porter
User Interface Engineering
07/31/2007

Web 2.0 pressures IT, shows benefits.
Robert Smallwood
KMWorld
11/01/2007

“Business today relies heavily on e-mail. Maybe too much so...So why haven.t KM and
collaboration tools that can organize and leverage this content caught on like wildfire?”
“A new report by Forrester, “Web 2.0 Social Computing Dresses Up for Business,” supports the contention that although corporate IT departments have seen the benefits of Web 2.0 technologies, the vast majority have made limited investments in a formal implementation of them.” “The combination of the volume of e-mail and lack of user friendliness of collaboration tools has created an opportunity for a new wave of smaller, lighter and less expensive tools that leverage Web 2.0 technologies but are less obtrusive and demanding of users.”

Open-Door Policy, a Special Report.
Jimmy Wales.
Forbes
05/05/2007.
“

But the great lesson of the Web 2.0 era is that to control quality, you don’t lock things down; you open them up....Leave your doors unlocked and your windows open’ and creeps will sometimes come in. But the way to chase them out before they cause harm is to have plenty of friendly neighbors who are looking after your interests, which turn out to be remarkably similar to theirs.

”The 2.0 agenda: Get ready for transparency and collaboration.
Steve Wylie
Information Week
05/28/2007.

Describes Andrew McAfee’s six key attributes of Enterprise 2.0, which he shortens to SLATES: Search, Links, Authoring, Tags, Extensions, and Signals.

Are Blogs Marketing Tools?

If your answer to this question is no, perhaps you should take a look at the website for Hill| Holiday. For those of you outside of Boston, Hill | Holliday is a PR/marketing firm with clients that include the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Chili's, AOL, Anheuser Busch, and Dunkin' Donuts.

The home page of the Hill| Holiday website is a blog. You can even scroll down to the bottom of the page and see the "proudly powered by WordPress" designation. They even have comments activated.

Is your marketing group still unsure about whether blogs are useful? The biggest marketing firm in Boston thinks a blog is a useful marketing tools for themselves. Does you marketing group know something that Hill| Holiday does not know?


Thanks to Stewart Mader at WikiPatterns for pointing this out in his Random Things he reading this weekend post.

Martindale-Hubble, LinkedIn and Legal OnRamp

Over at the The Official Blog of Martindale-Hubbell, John Lipsey; VP Corporate Counsel Services, comments on Larry Bodine’s Crowded but Silent piece in Law Technology News: Corporate counsel and Online professional networking.

Larry is right to point out that the power of any social network site is derived from the number of people using it. That power to you is relative to the number of people you know that are using that social network site. That is Metcalfe's law.

In the last few months, I have seen lawyers poring into LinkedIn (Doug's profile in LinkedIn). As lawyers see more and more of their fellow attorneys joining LinkedIn, it becomes a more useful tool.

Lipsey misses the point of social networking sites. I do not expect anyone to contact me just because I have a listing on the site. That is not networking. That is just advertising. (Just like a listing in Martindale-Hubble.) The power of social networking sites is your ability to create a flow of information about yourself. Networking is about contributing useful information to the people you know and keeping your name in front of them.

I assume that Lipsey's post was to try to proclaim the value of Martindale-Hubble, but in the end his description of what corporate counsel are looking for sounds a lot like Legal OnRamp:

[Corporate counsel would] be willing to use a professional networking site to make it easier to get to those referrals. But that network must be trusted, limited to other legal professionals, and protected from relationship “spammers” who litter strangers with relationship requests. . . . . What they would find valuable is a trusted professional community of lawyers, and a “safe place” that enables corporate counsel to find each other, and outside counsel. They want the tools develop their own communities within these sites to exchange information and collaborate – away from the watchful eye of would be vendors, competitors or hostile counsel.

And sounds like LinkedIn:

"If a professional network can allow a corporate counsel to get the lawyer information as well as connections linking him or her to that lawyer – voila."

But does not sound like Martindale-Hubble.

Are Social Networking Sites Knowledge Management?

Last week I presented to a gathering of law firm knowledge management leaders on social network sites. As I have been exploring various social network sites over the last year, I have also wondered if this was knowledge management? And if social network sites are not part of knowledge management what lessons can the knowledge management community learn from social network sites?

I explained my use of six social network sites: LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Upcoming, Legal OnRamp and LawLink. There were a few common themes I tried to draw out.

The first theme was the power of the network and Metcalfe's law. Any communications tool and any of these social network sites are only as powerful as the number of of people that use them. That first person with a fax machine was very bored until lots of other people also bought fax machines. I also pulled the lever on the way-back machine and made everyone think back ten years ago when email was just coming into law firms. Ten years ago, I clearly remember asking people if they had email and if I could send something to them by email instead of FedEx. My theory is that email has become ubiquitous, because it is ubiquitous. A social network site is popular because it is popular. The more people that use the medium, the more useful that medium becomes.

I was intrigued by Upcoming, a social network site focused on events. It became many times more useful as I connected with more people in Upcoming. Then I got the benefit of seeing the events that they were publicizing.

The second theme was connectivity. There is an incredible ability to connect with people and to jump into their stream of information. This ability on these external sites far exceeds anything that our law firms have inside our firewalls.

The next theme was the ability to communicate. On these sites, you are able to put more context around the communication. You can also communicate in a variety of different ways. Again, looking at our internal communication systems made our internal systems pale by comparison.

Another theme was the ability to share information across systems. For example, Twitter updates my Facebook status. The posts from this blog feed into my Facebook feed. Facebook, LinkedIn, and Upcoming all push out updates by RSS so they are pushed into my feedreader. I can also repackage the feeds into my friendfeed or lifestream.

One thing that jumps out at me is the ability identify and find expertise. Certainly one of the challenges of knowledge management is the ability to find and identify subject matter experts. These social network sites are chock full of ways to find expertise.

The final theme was cost. That is, these social network sites are free. So it is cheap and easy to experiment. You can see what things are useful to you and where the people you know are connecting.

Several people pointed out that they had resisted using these sites. But lately they have started joining and trying to figure out how to use them. I pointed back to Metcalfe's law. These sites were becoming more interesting to them because more and more people that they know are using them. I also used Metcalfe's law to explain my difference in interest between LawLink and Legal OnRamp. Both are social network sites targeted at lawyers. There are many more lawyers in LawLink. But more people I know are in Legal OnRamp. Therefore, Legal OnRamp is more useful to me.

I never reached an answer to the initial question. Because, of course, the answer depends on your definition of knowledge management. Since the group seemed to be interested in these social network sites, that is probably enough to indicate that at least some element of social network sites are associated with knowledge management.

My slides: (I am big believer in using slides to show what I mean, rather that what I am saying. So the slides are just pictures.)

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