Curated for content, computing, data, information, and digital experience professionals

Category: Collaboration and workplace (Page 49 of 98)

This category is focused on enterprise / workplace collaboration tools and strategies, including office suites, intranets, knowledge management, and enterprise adoption of social networking tools and approaches.

Google Released Knol Yesterday

Well, we can now let the cat out of the bag. Google released Knol yesterday. Knol is guaranteed to generate lots of discussion in the blogosphere and press, especially among fans and detractors of Wikipedia. It is not really the same kind of animal as Wikipedia however, and we’ll talk more about this in another post, but it is something you will want to check out.

Udi Manber, was planning to announce Knol’s release in his keynote at Gilbane San Francisco last month, but unfortunately, it wasn’t quite ready. Fortunately, we had a back-up plan and Udi instead gave an excellent and audience-pleasing presentation on search quality.

Google Releases Knol

Google announced that Knol is now open to everyone. They announced Knol back in December. Knols are authoritative articles about specific topics, written by people who know about those subjects. From their blog post:

The key principle behind Knol is authorship. Every knol will have an author (or group of authors) who put their name behind their content. It’s their knol, their voice, their opinion. We expect that there will be multiple knols on the same subject, and we think that is good. With Knol, we are introducing a new method for authors to work together that we call “moderated collaboration.”

With this feature, any reader can make suggested edits to a knol which the author may then choose to accept, reject, or modify before these contributions become visible to the public. This allows authors to accept suggestions from everyone in the world while remaining in control of their content. After all, their name is associated with it! Knols include strong community tools which allow for many modes of interaction between readers and authors. People can submit comments, rate, or write a review of a knol.

At the discretion of the author, a knol may include ads from our AdSense program. If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the author with a revenue share from the proceeds of those ad placements. We are happy to announce an agreement with the New Yorker magazine which allows any author to add one cartoon per knol from the New Yorker’s extensive cartoon repository. Cartoons are an effective (and fun) way to make your point, even on the most serious topics. http://knol.google.com

OutStart and Eedo Knowledgeware Merge

OutStart Inc. and Eedo Knowledgeware Corp. have combined their operations, making the new company a provider of software for creating and sharing organizational knowledge through learning and social collaboration. The company will work to serve the LCMS and learning market, while supporting the emerging need for a business social software platform to enable effective informal knowledge sharing. The combined company has more than 300 customers, including commercial, government and defense organizations; a global base with close to 40 percent of its business coming from international clients; and, solid finances with 50 percent of its revenue coming from recurring business. The company will make its headquarters in Boston and maintain offices in the United States, Canada, England, Germany, Ireland and the Netherlands. http://www.outstart.com

Acrobat.com…

was announced yesterday, and is available now as a public beta. By all means, check it out. I have been playing with Buzzword, and like it. I did manage to break it trying an Export to Word 2003 XML, but it is a Beta after all.
I do wonder about the export choices, which, apart from Acrobat, zipped XML, and plain text, are all Microsoft–Word 2003, Word 2007, and Word 2003 XML. This makes perfect sense if Adobe sees Buzzword as the Web interface in a Microsoft-centric document workflow. But I can see other use cases, especially ones where the content is destined for a Web CMS (or is already in a Web CMS and is being updated. In these cases, the Web CMS would likely not want the overhead of the complex Microsoft file structures.
I think we are getting a briefing on Acrobat.com shortly. I will see what Adobe has in mind.

Vignette Enhances Web Experience Platform

Vignette (NASDAQ: VIGN) announced significant enhancements to its Web Experience Platform foundation. Vignette’s integrated Web Experience Platform foundation is meant to help organizations quickly manage and deliver targeted content and facilitate user interaction and collaboration with the high performance and scalability required to support large-scale deployments. Vignette Content Management lets users streamline the creation and management of Web content and reduce bottlenecks associated with the delivery and publishing of that information. Enhanced features include friendly URLs to increase search engine site rankings, skip level upgrades to reduce the steps necessary to upgrade from older environments and integration with Vignette High-Performance Delivery (HPD). Vignette Portal allows business users to elevate their brand identity and engage in more personalized Web interactions with key audiences. New capabilities include integration with HPD and Vignette’s recently announced Community product line. Vignette Collaboration helps organizations drive productivity, improve knowledge management and more efficiently direct business processes that require interaction across disparate geographic and organizational boundaries. The latest release features new social computing capabilities including ratings, reviews, tagging and usage analysis. Additional enhancements include improved usability and performance and enhanced support for blogs, wikis and discussion forums. Collaboration also supports auditing and retention policies which enable organizations to more actively manage knowledge relative to compliance.

Marketbright Uses Social Media in New Offering to Enhance Customer Experience

Marketbright, an on-demand emarketing solution with an integrated web content management platform, launched Brightsite, a new product that uses aspects of social networking to create a stronger bond between sales, marketing and the customer. Brightsite creates the equivalent of a B2B shopping cart for enterprise web sites. Brightsite provides a plug-and-play membership management tool for any enterprise website. Brightsite also provides the customer with a member account page with links to all events and offers they have accessed in the past, their account team, and other account-specific information, creating an easy-to-access history for new team members. Customer members also can invite their colleagues into a private, shared collaborative space. The new, interactive and personalized widgets can be easily introduced into existing web sites. Brightsite also allows greater cooperation between sales and marketing teams, allowing a customer’s microsite to become a branding tool with enhanced collaboration opportunities and fresh content. With Brightsite, the marketing team will be able to blast new content, but it will look customized for the sales person’s named accounts. Sales personnel will be able to review beforehand to ensure appropriateness of offers/content, to block the content, or to put a personalized note and pick and choose which items get forwarded on to their customers. http://www.marketbright.com

Multilingual Social Computing: Questioning the Wisdom of the Crowds

The holy grail in translation is the speed versus quality dilemma. That creates controversy. Here’s what we’ve noted after posting our Multilingual Social Networking Alert citing Facebook’s crowdsourcing effort:

No doubt that these references are the tip of an iceberg. How to say “poke” in different languages is clearly not the only conversation going on. And BTW, here’s Facebook’s Translation Application.

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