Wiki35 talk:Community Portal

From Wiki35

Jump to: navigation, search

Contents

Corporate Use of Wikis

Peter Thoeny, creator of TWiki, a leading open-source wiki program, says at least 35,000 people have downloaded TWiki since 2001 - over 20,000 of those programs are going into businesses -- Walt Disney, SAP, Macromedia/Adobe, and Motorola are among them.


QUICK FACTS

  • Some feel that wiki technology will utimately be incorporated into existing commercial collaboration software such as IBM's Lotus Workplace.
  • Wikis that are public can be targets for pranks and attack, but because the previous version of a page can be restored with a click, those that are monitored by many people (like Wikipedia) are generaly quickly corrected. In sensitive corporate situations, access will most likely be restricted. The software does allow for tracking of edits by user name and IP address.
  • Wikis are likely to have more of an impact as a movement for change in how businesses operate and how employees work, than as a moneymaking software.
  • As interest in Web 2.0 picks up speed, the development and implementation of social software (such as blogs, wikis, and photo- and bookmark-sharing systems like Flickr and del.icio.us) is also gaining traction. Although these platforms are still relatively new, their presence in the world of business is growing quickly as they gain complexity and robustness. Chief among them is the wiki.


A wiki can be edited by anybody who is granted permission. In a business environment, that can mean a workgroup, a department, or even the whole company.

  • The people who access the data and documents in a wiki are also the authors of the wiki, making it ideal for information sharing.
  • Wikis are not the best tools for discussions or real-time collaboration - rather, they can be used as resources for archiving documents and tracking workflow.
  • Wikis can link to external webpages, spreadsheets, Word documents, PowerPoint slides, PDFs – anything that can be displayed in a browser.
  • Open-source wikis are free for companies who implement them, and even licensed versions – which include implementation and support – are cheap when compared to standard project/content-management software.


QUOTES on WIKIS

Ross Mayfield, CEO of Social Text "The hardest part of getting rid of corporate controls is beginning to trust people" "Ease of use has made blogging take off" "Blogs are better for individual voice and for conversation. Wikis are better for group voice."

David Berlind, executive editor of ZDNet "Blogs and Wikis are tricking people into becoming HTML authors. Watch out for the new generation of employee who has grown up with IM and MySpace. When they enter the workplace, things will be changing."

Coach Wei, founder & CTO, nexaweb "Blog and Wiki software is essentially a CMS system which is provided to individuals."

Companies are using Weblogs to track and promote brands...

"Catch the Blog Buzz" by Christopher T. Heun InformationWeek - Feb. 6, 2006

Companies are using Weblogs to track and promote brands, but the blogosphere can be testy about too much corporate invasion.

"For marketers, public-relations firms, and companies looking to promote a brand, blogs have become a valuable resource for understanding what consumers want or like--and, even more important, what they hate.

Because these online exchanges come unprompted and unfiltered, they're a rich sounding board for corporate spinmeisters looking to gauge reactions to a new advertising campaign or hear customers describe their lifestyles. Sometimes it's just as valuable to learn what bloggers think about the competition. A few companies weigh in with their own responses--or even paid bloggers--though that terrain is riddled with pitfalls in a blogosphere that's ruthless when wronged.

To monitor the vast landscape of opinions recorded online--which in addition to blogs includes message boards, user groups, and Web sites--Factiva, Umbria, and others rely on natural language processing and text-mining applications to parse the Internet for mentions of brands, people, or companies. Umbria determines the demographic group of individuals based on language patterns. Intelliseek, which tracks more than 20 million blogs and discussion groups for such clients as Ford, Microsoft, Nokia, Procter & Gamble, and Toyota, describes it as bringing measurability to word of mouth.

Factiva Insight: Reputation Intelligence, launched in August, mines content from 9,000 news sources, including the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, and 15,000 Web sites. Through a partnership with Intelliseek, it also keeps an eye on 4 million blogs.

"Marketing and communication is going through a big change," says Alan Scott, chief marketing officer for Factiva. But not everyone is catching on. "We're having to educate many people in corporate America about how to use blogs," he says.

Most businesses insist that understanding their customers and responding to their needs is the most important thing they do. Tapping into the blogging community can be boon for those efforts--if it's done wisely.

read entire article http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=178601677


E-Mail Is So Five Minutes Ago

by Michelle Conlin, from BusinessWeek Online


"... email is beginning to fade as the collaboration tool of choice. Instead, workers there, as well as at places like Walt Disney, Eastman Kodak, Yahoo!, and even the U.S. military, are ditching e-mail in favor of other software tools that function as real-time virtual workspaces.

Among them:

  • private workplace wikis (searchable, archivable sites that allow a dedicated group of people to comment on and edit one another's work in real time)
  • blogs (chronicles of thoughts and interests)
  • Instant Messenger & chat(which enables users to see who is online and thus chat with them immediately rather than send an e-mail and wait for a response)
  • RSS (really simple syndication, which lets people subscribe to the information they need)
  • and more elaborate forms of groupware such as Microsoft Corp.'s SharePoint, which allows workers to create Web sites for teams' use on projects.

Though the likeliest scenario is that e-mail will remain the prime tool for notification and one-to-one communication, "a huge percentage of collaboration will occur outside of e-mail, with a continued rise in these other tools," says Clay Shirky, associate teacher in the interactive telecommunications program at New York University. "There's an enormous untapped value to be gotten by getting collaboration right."

read more at http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_48/b3961120.htm

Internet research firm Gartner Group predicts...

Internet research firm Gartner Group predicts that wikis will become mainstream collaboration tools in at least 50% of companies by 2009.

  • Personally, I'm not sure that it will take that long for companies to be using wikis or whatever forms evolve from them. I don't believe that public wikis will prove to be very useful, but that the collaboartion of project teams within an organization using wikis will be the dominant use.
  • Thomas Friedman's popular book, The World is Flat won the first Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year award. Friedman has talked about seeing the book become an an open-source product,(open source is one of his world "flatteners") having it available on the web, letting the public update and edit it. I'm not sure he (or his publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux) see this as a commercial/moneymaking idea or a genuine experiment. It certainly fits in well with the book's themes of a globalised, interconnected world.
  • Joseph Thornley is CEO of Thornley Fallis Group. The Group's operating companies, Thornley Fallis Communications, 76design and Corum Research, work together to provide clients with a full-range of integrated communications services public and media relations, strategic communications, marketing, graphic, web and multimedia design, and opinion/market research through offices in Ottawa and Toronto.

"My company shares the belief that Wikis are the way of the future. In fact, we've been experimenting with a Wiki to replace our traditional Intranet site with a fully multi-authored, collaborative space.

What we are finding is that authoring on the Wiki requires users to adopt a new mindset that does not come naturally to a generation raised on MS Word. At this time, the Wiki Learning Curve is limiting adoption of the Wiki by many of our users. They are telling us that they require Help files geared to the nontechnical user and a more intuitive editing interface.

We'll keep working on this. But I think that we are like most organizations in only having started up the learning curve."

His group's website http://www.thornleyfallisgroup.ca/ and their corporate blog is at http://www.thornleyfallisgroup.ca/propr/index.php/2005/11/

The World Is Flat Becomes a Wiki? - is there money to be made?

The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman has garnered more postings and reviews than it needs already. It's a good book. I bought it as one of three books for my son who was heading off to freshman year as a business major at the University of Maryland and I read it before he left. Definitely worth a reading - or listening.

An idea beyond the book that I find very interesting is that the author has talked about the book becoming for it's "final" edition a wiki version that could be constantly updated - this being perhaps the only way to really keep it current.

Friedman started the book in March 2004. Then, podcasting didn't really exist. A year after the book came out you could download the audio version of it on Apple's iTunes site.

What is WIKICOMPANY?

http://debianlinux.net/wikicompany/wikicompany.png


There are many more companies in the world than Wikipedia is willing to include in its encyclopedia listings. Since most companies are not encyclopedia worthy (Sorry folks, but it's basically, the same reasons they wouldn't have appeared in World Book and Encyclopedia Brittanica in the previous century), because they are too small and insignificant to add real value to Wikipedia, Wikicompany was created.

Wikicompany is not about building an encyclopedia, but a service to locate and understand companies and their products and services better. Wikicompany is a free, worldwide business directory that anyone can edit. Companies found there are large and small.

Some clicks on the "random page" menu item there turned up:

Links to encyclopedic articles are less important here than product/service descriptions, the relation of a company to other companies, sectors, service regions - a good company profile.

Information on a company might include:

CONTACT INFO: Website, email, phone, fax, address, geocode.

GENERAL: Stock info, Web searches, news, blogs, articles about, photos, audio & video files, job opportunities.

SECTORS: products, type, regions, open times, founding, employees, key people

RELATIONS: Parents, subsidiaries, affiliates, partners, customers, competitors.


Wikipedia and Wikicompany should benefit from each other via:

  • Availability of even more company profile information under a free content license.
  • Increasing interest in and contributions to Wiki websites.
  • New MediaWiki software-related development see http://debianlinux.net/wikicompany/
  • Develop new ways of using the MediaWiki software to new fields.


NEW at Wikicompany

  • Wikicompany is moving towards a semantical tag based system instead of categories.

--69.125.180.36 18:03, 18 Mar 2006 (EST)

Some Sample Wikis

  • wiki for the Creative Digital Industry National Mapping Project

http://nmp.ci.qut.edu.au/confluence/display/NMP/NMP+Home



Enterprise Wiki Software and Services

JotSpot Founded in 2004 as the first company to provide an application wiki. JotSpot has since launched several other products, including:

  • JotSpot Enterprise Wiki Solutions - host the JotSpot wiki behind your firewall
  • JotSpot Tracker - an online spreadsheet, much like a wiki
  • JotSpot Bug Reporter - a simple, web-based bug tracking database

http://www.jot.com/ watch a video about JotSpot http://www.jot.com/video/What%20is%20a%20wiki.html


Confluence http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/features/


Socialtext http://www.socialtext.com/ Socialtext provides both a hosted service for maximum convenience and a hardware/software appliance for easy behind-the-firewall installation. According to the company, it is "the enterprise wiki trusted most by Global 2000 corporations."

Retrieved from "http://dl.njit.edu/mediawiki158/index.php/Wiki35_talk:Community_Portal"