Social tools help improve business communications, increase collaboration and nurture innovation, but what do you do if people won't use them? And how do you grow from a pilot to company-wide use?
The Email Problem and How To Solve It
3 Sept 08
Email is becoming a problem, with people sending and receiving hundreds each day. 'No Email Days' don't help, nor do inbox size limits. So just how do you reduce email and improve people's relationship with their inbox?
Suw Charman-Anderson is a social software consultant and writer who specialises in the use of blogs and wikis behind the firewall. With a background in journalism, publishing and web design, Suw is now one of the UK's best known bloggers, frequently speaking at conferences and seminars.
She recently launched Kits and Mortar, a blog about planning a green, cat-friendly self-built home. Her personal blog is Chocolate and Vodka, and yes, she's married to Kevin.
Kevin Anderson has been an online journalist since 1996, designing, editing and writing websites for both broadcast and print media. In 1998, he joined the BBC and became their first online journalist based outside of the UK, covering the US for its award winning news website. After coming to the UK in 2005, he developed a blogging strategy for BBC news, helped launch a programme on the BBC's 5Live covering weblogs and podcasts and was on the team that launched the interactive radio programme World Have Your Say on the BBC World Service.
Kevin is now the Blogs Editor for The Guardian, where he is responsible for management, strategy and 'leading by doing' for Guardian Unlimited blogs.
I just joined GeekSpeakr, a "simple directory and connections system to help technical women speakers and event organisers to find each other." If you're a woman and a speaker, then this could be a really useful place to have a profile.
If you're a freelance, or are thinking of starting out on your own, then Going Solo will be invaluable - it has a great atmosphere and some stonking speakers! So go straight to registration, do not pass go, and pick up an early bird ticket whilst they are still around.
We've had intermittent problems with Movable Type here at Strange Attractor for months now. Every time we think it has been fixed, something else goes awry. Right now, we're battling with a problem with rebuilds which means that every time we post an entry, or someone posts a comment, the site fails to rebuild properly and spits out naught but a blank page. This is really annoying, and we are sorry if you're inconvenienced by it.
We are hoping that we'll be able to move to Wordpress soon - that's our aim, although the actual transition is in the hands of the chaps at Corante so we have no idea when it will happen. In the meantime, sorry if you have visited or tried to comment, only to get a sea of white. Please do email me if you have commented and the site is returning a blank page and I will pop in and do a manual rebuild.
Kevin Marks turned Suw and me onto the excellent WNYC programme/podcast Radio Lab. The programme deals with scientific, bordering on, philosophical issues such as Time, Morality or the biggest of big questions: Who am I? Or more precisely asking, "How does the brain make me?"
In this episode, actually an extra while they work on season 4, they talk about the craft of making the soundscapes that they create for the show. They begin by playing a clip from the Musical Language show of developmental psychologist Anne Fernald talking about how mothers talk to their babies. She said, "Sound is like touch at a distance." Listen to them play with the sound. For journalists not working with sound, this is an inspirational master class. Listen and learn.
Monday is the closing date for the The Knight News Challenge, wherein the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation gives away $5 million to anyone with an innovative idea to change journalism. Lots of info on their site, but if you haven't already started on your idea, you'd better get a move on!
You may noticed that there are a few error messages showing up when you go to individual post pages. The lovely people at Corante are aware of this and are trying to fix it. We apologise for the frankly fugly browsing experience that you are suffering in the meantime.
I expanded on comments I made at the recent Guardian Changing Media conference about community and news in a column for the Press Gazette. I go over some common mistakes that news organisations make when crafting and executing a communities strategy, and I highlight some success stories. Just to highlight the main points:
Your audience isn’t a community.
This isn’t just about choosing the right tool or technology.
This is about changing the culture to involve the public.
It doesn’t come for free. A little investment in a lot of engagement is a key to success.
Suw and I are speaking at the Guardian Changing Media conference today. I'm on a panel with Google, Bebo and a production company talking about Care in the Community. Suw is speaking later this afternoon on What is the business model for 'free content'. Suw and I are very much looking forward to scaring a few dinosaurs today, and when we're not lobbing rhetorical hand grenades, we'll be live blogging. And if we don't blog something, I'm sure Jemima Kiss will pick it up over on the Guardian's Organ Grinder or Greenslade blogs.
Like all bloggers, I’m becoming a bit of a stats junkie, and I love the simple easy to understand information provided by StatCounter. It is so much more intuitive than so-called professional systems that I struggle with at the day job. Looking through recent keyword activity, I found this: I dont want to continue using yahoo id anymore?
It’s one of several anti-Yahoo searches I’ve seen pop up in our stats recently. Sunnyvale, you’ve got a problem. Better roll out the Yahoo damage control brigade fast. You’re alienating your users.
I’m in Washington DC next week (March 3-11) on a working holiday (as much as that is an oxymoron). If you’re a blogger, in new media or want to talk about digital journalism, drop me an e-mail, and we can grab a coffee or a drink. Looking forward to being back in the old hood.
OK, so that's the lot! All my FOWA notes are now up. I'll do a round-up tomorrow and actually talk about how I thought the conference went, but meantime I hope you find my notes useful. Please remember, though, that these notes were taken live and I can't vouch for their accuracy, both because I am fallible and because I am only reporting what speakers said and not fact-checking them.
I've a lot of notes from yesterday still to blog, and will obviously generate yet more today, but with the wifi at the conference as good as dead, I may not get them up in real time. Sorry. We have to lay the blame for the bad wifi not at FOWA's feet, though, as I know that they paid good money to have the same excellent level of connectivity as last year, but it seems that BT whichever provider it was, which may or may not be BT, although I was under the impression it was, has let them down.
Although the blog's back and faster than ever, we seem to now have acquired a few problems with our RSS feed. If you're not receiving updates in your aggregator, that'll be why.
Despite the guys at Corante making some good advances in fixing our blog, we're still having a few uncooperative moments from the MT installation. Sometimes Strange is here, sometimes it isn't. Sometimes you can comment, sometimes you can't. Sometimes we can get in to the admin pages, sometimes we can't. At least now I don't have to connect via my mobile phone to access the admin pages! All I can say is please bear with us and with Corante. They're working as hard as they can to fix things!
No, Suw and I have not been lazy bloggers, as a matter of fact, we’ve been itching to blog. A lot of you have mentioned to us in e-mails how slow Strange has been and time outs you’ve had when trying to post comments. Corante has been getting pummeled with spam (still is), and Movable Type doesn’t really handle spam or lots of comments very well. Lots of MT sites are struggling with this issue. The Corante tech team has been working hard to sort this out. An MT upgrade ‘borked the server’ and we’ve been down. But we’re back.
After a long podcasting hiatus, you’re going to think we’re podcasters gone wild. No, Suw and I recorded a year in review podcast with our friend Chris Vallance of BBC 5Live for the Pods and Blogs show. If you heard enough about 2006, the last couple of minutes are Suw and I talking about what we expect to see in 2007. Chris put the whole podcast up on his own blog Pocket Planet Radio.
I’m just coming back from my annual unplugged week - this year in the Mogollon Range in New Mexico - but before heading off to the mountains, I managed to talk to Jennifer Jones of Marketing Voices at PodTech, and I told her that “interactivity trumps celebrity” when trying to build a blog and community. Go here to listen to our conversation.
I had a lovely chat with John Buckley the other day, talking about all sorts of stuff, from biometrics and digital rights to blogs, journalism, Second Life, wikis and why I hate the phrase 'citizen journalism'. You can listen over on Citizen Scoop.
How did a scruffy blogger like me get an invite to the Monaco Media Forum, akin to Davos for the media? No clue, but I’m here. I had intended to do the full live-blogging here while doing highlights and video on the Guardian’s Organ Grinder blog, but they don’t have WiFi in the main hall. I’ll do a couple of meaty posts here later. The Guardian post is here. Interview with Jason Krikorian of Slingmedia here. Interview with Loic Le Meur on blogs and being a global citizen here.
I was at a conference today at Portcullis House, APIG's Parliament and the Internet Conference which was examining a whole range of internet-related issues, which I wrote up over on the Open Rights Group blog. Here are links to the four sessions I blogged:
I’m in Amstedam at the massive IBC broadcast conference to give a talk about blogging and breaking news. While I’m waiting to give my talk, I’m of course blogging about the conference over at 5Live’s Pods and Blogs blog. I’ve found a WiFi video phone that I want for Christmas, and I’m on the hunt for the Swiss Army knife of moblogging gear. When I get back to London, I’ve got a few posts to write here on Strange Attractor including: TV as a social media? Discuss.
I’ve just read through all of Merlin Mann’s brilliant Inbox Zero series, and have taken the step of moving all 3333 conversations out of my inbox into a ‘pending’ folder. I now have no email in my inbox. I can’t begin to tell you how weird that feels. However, I’m hoping it will help in the fight for freedom from email.
Email is broken. But I’m not gonna let it break me.
Neil McIntosh lofts the ball of citizen journalism high into the air and hits it with a heavy bat. Not quite a six, but certainly a respectable four, although some of those runs are in the comments.
Jon Udell writes about how IBM are developing techniques to pour "through unstructured text looking for named entities (people, places, companies, or products, for example) and relationships among them", thus allowing machine analysis of text without requiring people to tag their work with semantic markup.
Mmm, the semantic web sans metacrap. Delicious. I'll take two.
The guys over at Last.fm have have finally merged the Last.fm music playlist sharing and internet radio site with their Audioscrobbler.com site, which served the plugin that you need to make Last.fm work (fyi: my page). I spoke to them about that before Christmas, but sadly didn't get the chance to work with them. What's really cool about the new redesign is that they've added tags to the mix, so you can forget about all that horrible music taxonomy stuff and just tag stuff however you like. Plus there seem to be a lot more in the way of charts now, for the statistically obsessed. Good work, guys.
NYT article about the fact that one in six Americans now reads blogs, based on the Behaviors of the Blogosphere (PDF) report from comScore Networks, which I've downloaded but haven't had a chance to read yet. I've a three hours train journey tomorrow, maybe I'll get a chance then.
danah boyd blogs about the patterns she observes in bloggers' linking behaviours, some of which are very interesting. A few of her comments, though, leave a little to be desired in terms of comprehension of existing technologies which address some of her problems with links - something Joe Clark ably discusses.
Tom Coates writes a great post asking why all the cool tech start-ups seem to be in America, and why there are so few of them here, despite the fact that the UK has some amazingly smart and inventive people. Comments on this post are a great insight, and I don't just say that because I commented.
Technorati have now implemented language filtering for keyword searches, with their beta providing the opportunity to filter by Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese or Spanish. So, I can search for 'pledgebank' in all languages, or I can narrow it down to just French. Nice!
This is only a beta at the moment, but Dave Sifry tells me that they will roll out more languages in due course.
Newsweek are now using Technorati to provide a list of links to blogs which cite their articles. On their front page are the most blogged of Newsweek's articles, and then each feature itself, such as this one on podcast porn, links through to a page of excerpts from the blogosphere. It's a nice little feedback loop, creating a two way street between mainstream media and the blogosphere. I hope we see more of this.
Rather than repeat myself here (I always feel a bit odd about cross-posting), I'm going to send you off to Chocolate and Vodka for an update on the digital rights pledge drive I am involved with. Although, if you want to know the score, it's 450 signees, 550 to go. If you want to support us, please sign and blog!
Technorati have released the beta of their newly spruced up site for us to all go play with. It's a vast improvement on the old design, with some cool new features too. I particularly like the way that your watchlists now show you the latest hits. The tag pages have been nicely tidied up too.
Anyway, pop over and have a look, then give them feedback!
Old news that Google Maps now has a UK version - I meant to blog about it when it launched but never got round to it. I am amused, though, to see that whilst the UK now exists, Google has lost the rest of Europe. Give you a hint, guys - it's down and to the right a bit.
I love a blogger who tells it how it is, and it's even better when they are laying bare the oh so shiny world of PR and advertising. Michael O'Connor Clake is back. Prepare for a good fisking.
Mark Brady, a PhD student at the University of Essex and a friend of mine, is doing some research into blogging. He's put together an online questionnaire to gather some basic data, so if you have 20 minutes to spare, please do pop over and fill it out for him.
Just in case you were wondering why I've written so little here over the last month, it's because I'm up to my eyeballs in deadlines. One rather unexpected event was that I got myself a literary agent, so suddenly had to put together a book proposal. More news on that as I get it. I'm also working on some stuff for this blog which I think you'll find worth the wait, so bear with me!
This is only funny because it's true. Somehow, I find myself hoping this Adobe/Macromedia merger doesn't go through. Monopolies are no good for anyone.
Up in London again today, this time to see Mark Thompson, Director General of the BBC at the London School of Economics. Should be an interesting evening. Will attempt, if not actual live blogging as I'm not sure what the wifi situation is in the Hong Kong Theatre, then at least some rabid note taking. Give Thompson a taste of just how fast and accurate bloggers can be. And, of course, I've got my question planned...
Murdoch speech encourages journalists to work with bloggers
Jeff Jarvis blogs Rupert Murdoch's speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in which he encourages them to take blogging more seriously and to start working with bloggers. Whilst technically this is good, it does give me the screaming heebiejeebies.
The three bloggers being sued by Apple for publishing leaked information now have the support of eight US newspapers and the Associated Press, who are concerned about a dangerous precedent being set regarding the protection of journalists' sources.
Podcaster Eric Rice has managed to wangle some sponsorship from Warner Brothers for his podcast The Eric Rice Show. The deal includes exclusive interviews, banter and impromptu jams from The Used, a band on Warner Brothers' Reprise label. Question is, is he just a jammy git or is this the way forward?
Six Apart have organised an event on 24 March at 6.00 PM in London called Blogs in Action, which will examine how individuals and companies are using blogs in business. The panel includes Neil McIntosh from the Guardian Online, Dominique Busso CEO of Vnunet Europe and Charlie Schick of Nokia Lifeblog, John Dale from the University of Warwick and Business Blogging award winner Paul Dale.
At the risk of Strange Attractor turning into a sort of TechnoratiWatch, Dave Sifry has posted his latest round-up of Technorati stats in the first part of his State of the Blogosphere address. Read the comments too, though - lots of good points and questions, particularly about the quality of the data.
Steve Rubel writes a long and thorough primer on business blogging as a marketing tool, but ignores the use of blogs internally for knowledge sharing, project management, team building etc. He's not alone - it seems that more and more the focus in business metablogging is on external uses. Stick around - I'm going to change that very soon.
Jakob Lodwick discusses how tagging reflects how humans process information and how tagging tags (metametatagging? metatagtagging?) would allow us to build an emergent 'tagweb' which would allow for visualising and understanding relationships between tags. It's a long article, but the movies help and it's worth the effort because it might even change the way you view the usefulness of tags.
Susan Mernit and Blogcount.com discuss Yahoo's blog launch. I agree with Phil that the use of RSS in the My Favourites blogroll and in the tracking of subscribers to your blog is great. Wish more blog tools would utilise RSS more.
GM Chairman Bob Lutz has started his own official blog, FastLane Blog, neatly illustrating that such blogs do not have to be sterile and rammed full of marketing speak, nor do you need to be an angsty teenager to blog (Lutz is 72).
Business Weblogs Are Double-Edged: Michael Gartenberg writes sensibly about external business blogs on Computerworld, although I still get the urge to cry “But marketing blogs aren’t the sum total of business blogging!”.
Corante have just implemented this new inline linklog facility, which they’ve called ‘blinks’, so now I can do real short entries whilst working hard on the longer ones. Top banana!
Hold unlimited Web conferences for one flat rate with GoToMeeting, the easiest-to-use and most affordable online meeting solution. Free 30-day trial. Free 30-day trial.
