NASA now offers podcasts. The main NASA podcasting page offers a simple explanation of podcasts for the non-bloggers out there, and offers several downloading and listening options. You can easily immerse yourself in NASA’s rich library of multimedia content, now with RSS-enabled streaming of podcasts to your own computer or other Web-enabled device.
Via BusinessBlogWire.
Joining Dots published an interesing post at the beginning of this month about the difficulties of Knowledge Management, including the five most common reasons why KM is so difficult.
Read also Jack Vinson’s notes about the same post as well as some further thoughts about the difficulties of Knowledge Management.
Michael Rudnick (Employee Portals 2.0) publishes some interesting thoughts about the usage of RSS on employee portals.
Employee’s don’t have time, nor tendency to regularly check multiple intranet site any more so than people check external websites to see if there’s anything new that interests them)… Conversely, organizations that deploy RSS readers for internal content enable employees to create their own personal news or content update site to keep track of changing information that’s relevant or interesting to them. This is the true definition of a “My Site.”
The Integrated Justice Information Systems (IJIS) Institute was selected as a BusinessWeek “WebSmart 50″ organization, in the November 21, 2005 issue, based on IJIS’s deployment of enterprise blog technology for its Website, partner extranet, and staff intranet.
IJIS is a membership organization representing information technology companies that provide systems, products and services to the justice community. The IJIS mission is to improve information sharing among government agencies. IJIS deployed Traction’s TeamPage Enterprise Blog technology as its central communications hub for the organization in early 2005.
Using TeamPage, the IJIS Institute has created and implemented an interactive knowledge management intranet, available to members and other justice community participants, as well as a TeamPage-based public web site. With over 120 participating organizations and 16 committees working on various technology issues, the IJIS Institute needed to improve the way participants communicate, report back to other members, stay abreast of developments within committees and in the industry, and collaborate to draft policies and standards. The organization was communicating “the old fashioned way”, through long e-mail threads, teleconferences, and passing around Word documents to track changes with dozens of people involved.
To that end, the blog system enables IJIS members and committee participants to easily post articles and comments in permission-based project spaces for each committee. Posted items are published immediately and interested participants can receive daily or weekly Executive Digests in their e-mail that consolidate and summarize the previous day’s new content, keeping them informed and up to date. Members can use RSS and ATOM feeds to get immediate update of new postings and subscribe to applicable industry news that may affect committee work. Committee participants can access policy and standards drafts and comment at the paragraph level, allowing leaders to quickly and much more easily assimilate comments in context and publish final documents to the member community instantly.
“With the large quantity of information needed to be shared among our members and within specific committees, it was a daunting task to keep everyone in the loop,” said Paul Wormeli, Executive Director, IJIS Institute. “Traction’s solution enabled us to meet all of our collaboration requirements by providing an easy, faster way to notify members, access information and save time working together.”
Professional blogging has a very bright future. Writing blog posts for other blogs is truly a win-win situation for everyone involved. The professional blogger gets paid to post and the blog owner has postings magically appear at predetermined intervals.
As business blogs become more commonplace as a means of communications for marketing, public relations, SEO, and busines relationship building, it seems logical that an increase in the number of professional bloggers will soon follow. While many business and professional firms would like to add a blog component to their online presence, not all of them will be able to maintain a long term business blog.
What do you get when you hand 320,000 employees the tools and corporate podcasting guidelines to internally publish their audio creations? In IBM Corp.’s experience, lower phone bills and better, more informal internal communication.
In August, IBM (Profile, Products, Articles) made its first official foray into podcasting by launching a series of programs called “IBM and the Future of…,” featuring its scientists and other staffers discussing topics like driving, shopping, banking and urban planning. Postcasts are audio files designed to be played on PCs or portable music devices like iPods; listeners can use software to subscribe for automatic downloads of new podcasts in series that interest them.
IBM, based in Armonk, New York, had occasionally posted internal podcasts before on its intranet, but its new “Future” series prompted the company to extend its podcasting support. IBM drafted a podcasting policy similar to the corporate blogging policy it adopted last year, and quietly released a tool for uploading audio files and syndicating them via RSS (Really Simple Syndication). Then it sat back to see what IBM staffers would create.
Via Column Two.
Traction Software’s website is now completely supported by Traction TeamPage, the #1 enterprise weblog software. It is the perfect demo that TeamPage is not only for corporate blogging, it is also extremely powerful for ECM, wiki, document management and KM.
By the way, Traction Software have just hired Lucy, a very high profile in the web industry.
During the next year, chief information officers (CIO) should pay acute attention to how technologies such as blogging and podcasting will affect their businesses and be ready for innovation with those technologies by their competitors, Gartner analysts said Thursday.
Those innovations are driving a second Internet revolution, a time when businesses can’t afford to be content that they are simply online, said Mark Raskino, a research fellow at Gartner. Podcasting and blogging are affecting businesses both internally and externally, he said.
Via Corporate Engagement.
For the second year in a row, Traction Software is named to the EContent Magazine list of companies that matter most in the digital content industry. Traction recognized early on that blogging was more than an individual phenomenon and could be used as a strategic communications tool inside the enterprise. Combining elements of blogging and collaboration, Traction created blogging software to help project teams communicate with one another better. This year they added TeamPage Feed Reader, a tool that, used in conjunction with corporate blogging tool TeamPage, provides a way to add internal and external RSS feeds to a team blog and set up rules to distribute content to the correct project team.
Via Intelligence Enterprise Magazine: last March, Enel discovered the Teampage system from Traction Software. The company invested $15,000 and had the system up and running within “a couple of days,” Kayinamura says. The company initially took advantage of the software to deliver basic intranet-type information, including HR policies and benefits, company news and even a monthly company update from the CEO. The dozen contributors also exploited RSS features to post news summaries on renewable energy and the utility industry.
Work is now underway on a collaborative application for some 30 employees in the business development group who handle due diligence on potential acquisitions. In the planning stages is a tracking application that will reach beyond company firewalls to energy brokers and utility companies interested in buying environmental credits from the “green” energy company.
“There’s an emerging market for renewable energy credits, and we need to track what price quotes we’ve received and who we received them from,” Kayinamura says. “When we do sell credits, we need to document that.” Teampage will support all these collaborative activities.
Via Corporate Engagement:
Many people use blogs as a means of communicating with employees, friends or fellow bloggers. Well the CIA has found a new use for blogs- to help in the fight against terrorism.
It has started sharing some of its information regarding some of the more ‘interesting’ characters in international affairs including Osama Bin Laden and North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il on a series of blogs it is hosting. But don’t get your hopes up that this is finally your chance to see some of the CIA’s top secret documents- the blogs will only contain very general information.
The official line coming from the CIA is that the decision to set up the blogs is part of the US governments reorganisation of its intelligence agencies in response to the “failures of intelligence collection before the September 11, 2001, attacks”.
Read the press release.
Blogs - now thought of generally as mere personal digital depositories with sometimes questionable value — are slowly making inroads at the enterprise level, as companies increasingly realize that the tight sense of community around them works well for collaboration as well as enhancing social bonds between employees.
But the embrace of blogs opens a floodgate of concerns, such as how to establish corporate policy, how to deal with the blur between a blogging employee’s professional and personal lives and how to protect sensitive company information. Jane McConnell, who runs Netstrategy JMC, an intranet consulting firm in Paris, said many of the large,10,000-plus employee companies she consults with are “terrified of blogging.”
Are we genetically predisposed to collaborate? There may be a biological basis as to why some individuals collaborate and multitask far more effectively than others.
[...]
This means that creative people remain more aware of and alert to extra information that comes streaming in from the surrounding environment. A “normal” person would see an object, classify it, and then forget about it, even though the object may be far more complex than he believes it to be. Someone who is less mentally keen needs to filter out extraneous stimuli in order to avoid suffering from overload and a resulting psychosis.
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