Lee and Saachi at CommonCraft have done it again. Here’s their video explaining podcasts
SharePoint in Plain English
via commoncraft.com
“The focus of the video is to introduce Sharepoint and illustrate the old way (project info exists on multiple computers) vs. new way (project info lives in SharePoint).”
Nice work again by Lee and Shari …
Social capital theory – nicely explained
Via Bill Sherman I stumbled upon a CommonCraft video, that I missed upon at first sight.
Social capital theory nicely explained, that is, citing Bill:
Dr. Nan Lin, professor of Sociology at Duke University, defines social capital as the ability to locate and mobilize resources within your network. It’s not just who you know, it’s who will actually invest effort to help you towards your goals.
In this video, Common Craft teaches the basics of social capital theory. If you listen carefully, you’ll hear aspects of Nan Lin’s social capital model, Ronald Burt’s structural holes theory, and Mark Granovetter’s “strength of weak ties.” […]
Geek breakfast, email and RSS observations …
Last Friday morning I had the pleasure to host Luis Suarez and his IBM colleague Matti for an improvised geek breakfast at my house. I didn’t take any photos, Luis did, but you can believe me that we had a gorgeous time sitting on the porch, sipping coffee and exchanging trade secrets of the enterprise social software market – IBM and all.
Luis is one of the bloggers I really dig, his contributions range wide – from enterprise knowledge management to collaboration software, from social software suites to personal/knowledge worker productivity. Check his talk at Next08 for some insights on living without email (“Thinking out of the Inbox – More Collaboration through less e-mail“).
Here Jon Mell talks with Luis on escaping Email (mp3). This experiment has some interesting learnings, so check his status reports and Jons summary of the talk. There’s also an extended version of the “email detox experience”, in another podcast Luis did with Matt Moore and guests.
Yes, instead of email we’re moving conversations, knowledge exchange, and collaboration to wikis, instant messaging, and other social tools. Here, RSS is one central tenet, and this is where I want to chime in, adding some compiled RSS notes I was collecting since the Enterprise RSS Day of Action (initiated by James Dellow of ChiefTech) and the Mai 1st RSS Awareness Day.
RSS is a technology, which in my perspective is still underrated – this holds true also in corporate settings. RSS can ease the life of knowledge workers, yes this is an obvious fact, but one that got reinforced today in the sessions I attended yesterday at the BarCamp Bodensee. Yet, a big problem is awareness – it’s hard to teach people, you have to help them giving it a try, and help them see how RSS comes in when dealing with information work.
In the enterprise RSS provides a channel for notifications, delivering content automatically and intelligently: Monitoring recent changes in internal wikis, moving information privisioning from push to pull, integrating various sources of information – RSS sits right at the intersection of information management and collaboration.
So here you go:
- Recently AvenueA/Razorfish communicated that RSS was the social media tool with highest growth rates. Nice news, via pheedo:
RSS growth surprises many when the hear the numbers. It is used by over 50% of online users according to AvenueA/Razorfish. RSS has been growing under the radar for some time. According to a 2008 study from Universal McCann, RSS use is exploding, growing faster than all other key social media platforms, including social networking and video sharing. According to the study, the number of RSS users jumped 153% between June 2007 and March 2008. Publishers today recognize that their content is increasingly consumed away from their website by their most loyal, dedicated readers. For many top publishers, their page views consumed outside their domain are greater than their website page views.
- Janet Johnson expands on Enterprise 2.0 and RSS adoption, linking back to me:
[…] enterprise RSS adoption is coming into fruition – but why has it taken us so many years to finally get here? Why do the folks considering enterprise RSS today have to be the ‘forward thinking’ ones?
- James Dellow sums up his learnings:
Overall, I don’t think that Enterprise RSS Day of Action changed the world, but this was never the intention – I’m just pleased that we’re having this conversation. However, I’m also feeling a bigger disconnect between what excites the external world of Web 2.0 and the reality inside the firewall
[…]
In these still early days, being an Enterprise RSS champion requires a delicate balance between being visionary and pragmatic.
- And finally Common Craft’s basic but brilliant explanation of RSS in plain English:
Social Media in Plain English
New video by Saachi and Lee of Commoncraft: Social Media in Plain English:
This video focuses on basics of social media: new technology that makes everyone a producer and tools that give everyone a chance to have a say.
Google Docs & Presentations (nicely explained …)
Via Lee LeFever:
Another great video, this time on Google Docs:
And yes, the long awaited Google Presentation has been launched, it’s of course integrated into docs.google.com, with all collaborative features you know from Docs & Spreadsheets. Yes, you don’t have to CC around those powerpoint presentations any longer, rather you could collaborate on a deck of slides remotely. What I like most about it is the way virtual conferencing is supported, ie. chat and synchronized online viewing of the presentation … This is a feature that is missing in sites like slideshare etc.
For more information, here is the blogoscope review (via Greg).
Social Bookmarking in Plain English
Here’s the latest video from Saachi and Lee LeFever’s Commoncraft Plain English Series: Social Bookmarking in Plain English, taking del.icio.us as an example. Nice work, you’ll see that they have again refined their style and presentation.