Real time web is not a cure-all (and twitter won’t kill blogs)

July 10, 2009 By 2 Comments

We can hear that microblogging is killing blogging and that, globally speaking, the future of web is real time. An hasty discourse I don’t subscribe to. It does not seem to me that a trend is replacing another but that they are complementary.

This applies to the general public web but also to the corporate web.

This complementary nature can be explained by postionning a given message according to two axis : consistency and temporality.

Consistency

No long demonstration is needed to explain that it’s hard to deliver a message and a consistent information in 140 characters. If all the information had to comply with the 140 chars rule, we would be informed of many thing without really knowing anything. In the other hand it’s hard to fill out a blog post when the message is short, terse. In this case, the title is often meaningfull alone and the body of the message brings nothing new. That’s what made a part of the blogosphere switch to the twittosphere. Not beacause one is better than the other but because its format  fits more with the needs of most of people (remember that pure “creators” on social medias are only a few per cent).

Temporality

Some messages are here to stay and make their place in the worldwide informational inheritance. Some others only have an instant value and won’t deliver it if they don’t spread quickly. When one writes blog post, he aims at his regular audience, but indexation by search engines gives the post a kind of permanence. Then the long tail makes its job. Even of the indexation of the messages on twitter improves, its archives only have a few interest. If a message is missed, there are many chances it won’t be of any interest one day later : either the information will become valueless or it will become available for everydoby through more conventional channels. In the worst case, if something has a real value, it will keep on resonating (being retwitted) long enough in order it will still be able to be caught a few days later.

So a two speed web is emerging. Consistent messages that have to remain and deliver a complex message, and short and instant messages on a faster track.

It’s easy to realize how real time can reach its limits while traditionnal blogging does not have the needed reactivity in some circumstances. The complementarity between both allows to cover the full range of needs.

Some may say some messages meet both conditions. That’s why many people use twitter to mention blog posts. What reminds us the need for articulating both.

webconsistency-eng

Filed Under: Management & HR, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Did enterprise RSS die before having lived ?

June 12, 2009 By Leave a Comment

According to a very old tradition which cycles are accelerated by internet and that wants people to get rid of their idols with as much energy as they spent to adulate them, there is not a single week without the announce of the death of a technology. The future dead of the week is : RSS (we’ll talk about portails and emails in the upcoming weeks).

Lee Bryant wrote a very good note about that. A note that said so many sensible things that there is no need to add anything. So I’ll focus on two points that I consider being very important : the very usefulness of RSS and its possible replacement by microblogging tools, embodied for the general public by Her Majesty Twitter

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Software & Tools, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , , ,

Social Media needs a better signal to noise ratio : discovering Microplaza

March 6, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Information is key for efficient business operations. The way it circulates must be facilitated and fluidified? Everything may be very valuable at a given moment for a given person while being useless for anybody else. Identifying week signals is critical but it implies to increase the amount of information that circulates through the enterprise. People can’t manage more than a given quantity of information but we know that if we want everyone to find what’s needed, more and more information will have to circulate.

Companies are not comfortable with this paradox : the need for making more and more information coming from many people accessible while protecting people from information overload and delivering a clear signal about “what matters”. Knowing that “what matters” depends on the people. So it’s not a surprise that for many businesses, even if they understand there’s a real potential, social media is seen as a source of confusion and information overload.

I often say that, in order to improve things, two main lines have to be explored at the same time

• a human line : trust your environment to filter. Knowing that people you are professionally close to share your concerns, the information filtered by your network is often relevant.

• a software line : tools have to identify “strong weak signals” from the informational hubbub.

Of course, we’re only at the beginning but we can see emerging initiatives that prefigure what things may look like tomorrow. To illustrate my words, let’s have a look at Microplaza.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Intranets and digital workplace, Knowledge & Information management, Management & HR, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Twitter in enterprises : a question of usage or culture ?

December 27, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Unless you suffer from a strong myopia, you should have noticed that 2008 big thing was microblogging, embodied by his majesty Twitter. It didn’t take a lot of time until twitter clones for internal company use, like Yammer, start to appear. Soon legacy vendors started to offer their own twitter like. In other cases, the ‘status’ indicator does the job : whatever the name is, the logic remains the same.

So, will it work or not ?

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Software & Tools, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Ambiant tools to catch your company’s social signals

September 14, 2008 By Leave a Comment

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 ?

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Intranets and digital workplace, Knowledge & Information management, Management & HR, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Newer Posts »