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Our blog content is now under a Creative Commons license. The version of the license we chose was pretty much what we always told people they could do anyway. There are some rights reserved which you can read about.
We have not done the same for our main site as the issues are a bit trickier given almost 14 years of content, some of it generated with custom agreements, but you can always ask us about content there, and we are fairly liberal with granting permissions.
In our informal survey of enterprise use of blogs and wikis, the most popular application that organizations are using blogs and wikis for was “knowledge management”. While our survey is a far cry from what a rigorous market research effort would be, the results are in sync with what we and others are hearing from companies. I recently heard from Rod Boothby, who is leading an effort with Ernst & Young to build an internal enterprise blogging system to support knowledge sharing, and has written an essay based on his findings while building the business case for the project. I have just read the 37 page essay, Turning Knowledge Workers into Innovation Creators, and it is a great tool for describing the benefits of enterprise blogging to senior management. Rod is publishing sections of the essay on his blog at www.innovationcreators.com.
We are getting ready for our upcoming Boston conference and hope to see you there. But whether you join us or not, you can contribute to the debate by commenting on this blog entry. Below is the session description with links to the participant’s bios and their blogs. Comments and trackbacks are on.
Keynote Debate: Blog, Wiki, and RSS Technology – Are they Enterprise Ready? Applicable? Or a Passing Tempest in a Teacup?
Most of you have probably not seriously considered using these technologies in enterprise applications. Yet there are companies using these technologies for collaboration, knowledge management, and publishing applications in corporate environments, and there are vendors marketing products based on these to businesses like yours. Do these companies only represent the experimental fringe, or are they early adopters of technologies that will soon be part of every IT department’s bag of tricks? In this session we’ll take a look at the suitability of these for corporate use and hear from both skeptics and proponents of, for example enterprise or group blogs. You will come away from this session able to discuss these issues with your colleagues back in the office.
Moderator: Frank Gilbane, Conference Chair — Blog
David Berlind, Executive Editor, ZDNet — Blog
Ross Mayfield, CEO, Socialtext, Inc. — Blog
Bill Zoellick Senior Analyst, The Gilbane Report — Blog
Charlie Wood, Principal, Spanning Partners, LLC — Blog
If you haven’t yet visited KeyContent.org, check it out. It is quickly becoming an incredibly useful wiki on issues related to technical communication, information architecture, and web design. Directors Bill Albing, Rick Sapir, and Sherry Steward got the ball rolling.
NewsGator Technologies, Inc. announced that NewsGator Enterprise Server (NGES) has shipped to several clients in various markets throughout the world. An application of RSS aggregation tools, NGES applies all of the benefits of NewsGator’s existing products, services and capabilities behind the firewall for secure and manageable RSS aggregation of both internal and external content. Companies are using NGES “Smart Feeds” function to monitor what’s being said about their brand, their prospects and their competition; others are using NGES to subscribe to existing internal blogs or RSS feeds off of their ERP and other business systems; yet others are creating internal RSS feeds for project management and corporate communications. http://www.newsgator.com
We updated our survey on enterprise use of blog, wiki and RSS technology for our presentation on the same subject to a group of documentation and training managers yesterday. With 91 respondents the results are a little more respectable. The only obvious differences from our earlier results were an increase the use or planned use of RSS, and the amount of support provided by IT for blogs, wikis, and RSS. We are not sure if there is real “hockey stick” growth going on here – our results don’t show it – but there just might be. Chris Shipley thinks their numbers show it. Perhaps they do, but we need to know more about the demographics. Our own demographics are very broad and include a sizable non-technical component, which could explain the difference. There was certainly strong interest among the doc and training folks yesterday, but deployment was almost non-existent. The only other sort of relevant survey we are aware of is Technorati’s, but that was aimed at bloggers so is a very different animal.
Based on all the evidence, my inclination is to believe the growth is hockey-stick-like. We’ll try and come to some more concrete conclusions on this in time for our keynote debate on this in Boston next month.
Almost forgot to mention the new Yahoo! White Paper on RSS (pdf). If you thought most internet users knew what RSS was you had better read this.
Addendum: Here is more info on the demographics and methodolgy we were looking for re the Guidewire/Edelman survey mentioned by Chris Shipley we referenced above.
When people think of piracy protection, they usually think about music and movies, occasionally about other media such as e-books. But I have always been interested in how Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology can help any company with intellectual property protect these assets. Think of examples like a chipmaker’s CAD drawing for its newest design, a drug company’s formulation of a new medicine, or the draft agreement that gets shared during a corporate merger. Any one of these things is highly valuable, and easily distributable in digital form.
Enter BASCAP, Business Action to Stop Counterfeiting and Piracy. Bill Rosenblatt has an interesting take over at DRM Watch.
CM Professionals founding director and all-around great guy Bob Doyle has a cute take on DITA in the current EContent Magazine newsletter. Bob makes a lot of very good points, and also offers perhaps the best plain-English explanation of DITA’s value to implementers I have read:
While it is doubtful that out of the box DITA will find widespread use without customization (called specialization in DITA speak), the ready-made generic topic, and three “information-typed” specializations called concept, task, and reference, will get documentation teams producing very quickly. These documents will also be easily exchangeable with others. Because specializations inherit (thus the Darwinian name) properties from the general topics, their default behaviors–like printing, conversion to PDF, or XHTML Web pages–will produce decent results when transformed by default DITA XSLT style sheets.
One detail deserves mention though in Bob’s writeup. He refers to a “rumor” that Adobe recently used DITA to produce documentation. We know this rumor to be true, and have written about how Adobe used DITA to produce localized documentation for the recent release of Creative Suite 2. And, to all of Bob’s positive points we can add this one–at least two major companies (Adobe and Autodesk) have already used DITA to produce major documentation releases. Interestlingly, both Adobe and Autodesk used the same core technology to work with DITA–FrameMaker on the authoring side and Idiom World Server for content management and localization.
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