January 2005 Archives

I read an interesting post by Steve Rubel who was attending the Blog Business Summit over the past couple of days. He was reporting on a presentation about using blogs for emergency PR (his profession). Reading the post, I wondered what it really had to do with blogs. It seemed to me that he was really just talking about a web communications channel, of which blogging is one example. So, what's so special about blogging?

Just thought I'd drop a quick note about progress with The Community Engine. We have a few exciting developments over the next few weeks:

• We will be getting out a white paper on the BIT320 Blogosphere. That should be quite an effort, with lots of PR.
• We may very well get a podcast going on the site. Podcasts are just a new way of distributing MP3 files using xml syndication. The main point being that you can subscribe to the podcast and have it delivered to you. A very nascent technology, but potentially big.
• The full web site should be complete sometime next week. The trick will be getting it paired down appropriately, so that it gets completed.
• The Community Engine should soon start work with Menlo. More on this one later.

I completed the first phase of designing del.icio.us WebCites yesterday. I think of it as a sort of information service. In that regard, there are a few questions to ask:

• Who's the audience?
• How does it make money or contribute to the business?
• How do I decide on next steps?

Let me give a brief treatment of each:

I actually mean this kind of in jest, but I am struck by the style of this post on IP and syndication. Scoble is acting as a human aggregator and interpreter of blog posts. Now, at the end of the day, people are probably best at understanding and interpreting text meaning, but we have been hearing so much about folksonomies lately and ways of automating them that I have to wonder how long guys like Scoble are going to be able to keep on in the aggregation function.

Steve Rubel and David Weinberger have written interesting pieces on why business people should pay attention to folksonomies. Folksonomies are self-generated taxonomies that people use to categorize their own blog postings and other material they have archived on the web. The key thing about folksonomies is that they consist of one word tags, with perhaps multiple tags applying to a resource. These tags allow archivers (including people writing posts to weblogs) to more clearly signal what the resources they catalog are about. Folksonomies also allow people to more easily determine which archives are relevant to them by providing an extreme summary of the relevant themes. I wonder if all of the attention they are getting is deserved.

I've started a sort of advanced link blog at the site del.icio.us WebCites. It will become part of the whole community engine site as I develop that. A link blog is a blog with very short posts about pages of note on the web. For me, it serves as a sort of archive of significant resources.

To be honest, this would be a boring development except that I tied it through the del.icio.us social bookmarking system. Del.icio.us allows you to tag your bookmarks with categories and extended descriptions. The interesting thing about the category tags is that you can search on combinations of them to get narrowly defined subsets of your links. I know of no category system that allows you to do this.

I've started a sort of advanced link blog at the site del.icio.us WebCites. It will become part of the whole community engine site as I develop that. A link blog is a blog with very short posts about pages of note on the web. For me, it serves as a sort of archive of significant resources.

To be honest, this would be a boring development except that I tied it through the del.icio.us social bookmarking system. Del.icio.us allows you to tag your bookmarks with categories and extended descriptions. The interesting thing about the category tags is that you can search on combinations of them to get narrowly defined subsets of your links. I know of no category system that allows you to do this.

I think this phrase is going to be sticking with me for a while. I'm currently helping a client, Leaders Connect, try to launch into the world of blogging. It was all based on some rosy predictions about how we could do things along the lines of the BIT320 Blogosphere, a blogging community composed of participants in a class I taught in fall, 2004. Boy, did that turn out not to be the case.

This post marks the launch of The Community Engine. The Community Engine is dedicated to helping companies create thriving online business communities for increased sales and lower costs. The online communities may be internal to the company, external to the company, or a combination of both.