Ambiant tools to catch your company’s social signals

I know that many of my readers are more “enterprise” than “2.0″, but it’s important to have a look at what’s happining to the general public in order to understand what will happen to businesses tomorrow. First because the behaviors being developped always impact in one or anoter way the way people behave at work, second because (and that’s really new) because general public tools are now more advanced than those companies provide to their employees.

Let’s talk about twitter.

Although I’ve always been sceptical about it, I’ve been using it when I’ve nothing better to do, when I feel like joking with whoever wants to read. Of course, sometimes you get good surprises, as when I twitted my vacation route and find myself having breakfast in Boston with a very interesting enterprise 2.0 specialist I’ve never known about before. But how much noise is needed to find a small signal. So twitter is something like my trivialities’s garbage but, as you can throw valuable things out by mistake, perhaps one day you’ll find in my tweets something that may be interest you, since what’s mud for some may be gold for others. The problem with twitter is that it has a so large range of use, of audience, that it mixes everything and, as a consequence, often lacks some focus. I often tell myself that, limited to a given domain and audience it must make sense and bridge the wap that exist between existing tools, blog, IM and email for example. Of course you can have x private twitter accounts but it’s really makes things more complicated.

So there’s something behind twitter that goes far beyond the current poverty of this tool and what we (me included) to with it. But what ?

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Blogs as a self development tool

images.jpegSome people say that blogging is a kind of therapy for them…for most of the it helped them fighting againts shyness since they can express their ideas and expose themselves to public opinion. If their posts meet success they are strenghtened and then they dare more and more…

I was asking myself if, for example, blog based intranets could have the same effect and could improve self-development in an organization. Listening to others, collaborating, daring, asserting oneself in a group, being closer to employees, showing the human side of a manager….those problematics are very important in companies today and, as web 2.0 tools are deeply human driven I think  such intranets, in addition to facilitating communication, discussion, KM and collective intelligence could help HR in their self-development projects.

For example I’m convinced that blogging could be a first step to improve self-confidence, to dare to speak and share one’s ideas.

I think I’ll have to digg deeper this subject…perharps we have here another  significant contribution of intranets 2.0 as real people-centric tools.