Some interesting thoughts about weblogs in corporations: http://www.mcgeesmusings.net/2003/06/16.html#a3376

Here are suggestions from Todd Brehe on weblogs in business. Sooner or later this level of openness and commitment to what we think and do will arrive.  I believe that organizations that can take this step, from paternalism toward their employees to partnership will begin to dominate their industries. Yes it is a prediction.

http://www.optinnews.com/read-article.php?id=1718

A couple of good links: http://www.mcgeesmusings.net/2003/06/13.html#a3361

NewsGator 1.2 is really amazing. I have been using NewsGator for a few months this upgrade allows you FROM WITHIN MS EXCHANGE/OUTLOOK to subscribe to rss feeds (weblogs, etc.) and to forward them and to post to your own weblog. You must have weblog software but you can post from your e-mail client. Pretty amazing.

However I still prefer using FM Radio for all of this.

Many of us have been waiting for years for a web outliner. Marc Barot has almost done it. Check out the demo.

I wish I know more about file structure in Windows so I could save the outlines.

We have the streaming audio and video (QuickTime) server installed and will begin the learning curve to enhance the patients' and healthcare workers' stories with multimedia on the web. We have begun a discussion to track our progress: http://www.wwpp.org:8080/wwppDiscuss/discuss/msgReader$50. Follow along if you are interested.

I have been using Groove (http://www.groove.net)  for a little while. I think that it is the third and essential piece of information technology needed for cross-organizational communities of learning. (not counting e-mail which I take for granted). The first is Weblogs--the place to hold context, to get to know people. The second is something like WebCrossings--a place to have and keep discussions and documents by topic. And third, Groove for private, secure, multi-participant collaborations.

Here is a link to a web post that describes how I think Groove fits in. I like the idea "center to edge to center".  We get what we know from the center, we take it off and work on it and we return it with our innovations and learnings to the center for others to then elaborate and improve upon. So Paresh Suthar, in his own words http://radio.weblogs.com/0111019/2003/05/08.html

<%grooveInteropSuite.html.listFiles()%>

<%grooveInteropSuite.html.listSpaceMembers()%>

To read about the emerging world of RSS see this link by Jon Udell. It reference the opportunity and the potential problems. Also there is a link to a RSS news reader that is a plug in for MS Outlook.

An excerpt:
My guess is that's just the start. RSS readers -- for example, Radio UserLand, NetNewsWire, AmphetaDesk, and NewzCrawler -- used to be pretty far off the beaten track. Last week, though, I started using Greg Reinacker's NewsGator -- a .Net-based plug-in for Outlook 2000 or 2002. If you're an Outlook user, this is probably the best and most natural way to tap into the vital stream of information that Weblogs deliver. If you're wondering where to start, just point NewsGator at somebody's OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language) subscriptions file -- mine, for example -- to read the same feeds as I.

Word Bursts.
Six months ago I said I would write about blogging as a topic -- to try to capture my thoughts about how profound and important blogging is. There has been so much written by so many thoughtful people that it would be hard to offer new ideas about it and frankly, I have been putting off the task. Yesterday I got an email from Irving Wladawsky-Berger, my friend and former boss at IBM, about Word Bursts. Irving's note motivated me to get going and put my thoughts down -- time to blog about blogging.
----------
I think the biggest economic potential of blogging is inside the firewall. Intranets are now cluttered with millions of pages of “stuff” and most of it is poorly organized and the relevant things are often hard to find. To some extent the intranet has become an information dumpster. Portal software (like WebSphere) is making an impact but there is a long way to go for most organizations. Every company, government, university or non-profit has inside "experts" and people really care about what they think. They would find it much more productive to go to the expert's blog than do a search with the intranet search engine. Knowledge Management is not an “in” term but to me that is what blogging is about – sharing knowledge. (read more), See John's short bio, [John Patrick's weblog]

io running.  This can allow you to do two things:  1) provides you a preview of your weblog if you are publishing while disconnected (ie.  a laptop on an airplane), and 2) allows you to use Radio as a personal journalling tool that is never published (this is a great way to create a extremely private back up brain of time organized notes). [John Robb's Radio Weblog]

John Udel talks about Radio/Userland and web groupware. How to form and support groups on the WWW. That is what we are doing. We have been collecting enough content from Whatcom County, WA pursuing perfection folks that others can see what we are doing and hopefully want to work with us and communicate with us using weblogs (Radio and Manila), e-mail, and hopefully some day the shared outlines and instant messaging. We keep moving toward this vision.

We are now providing some new users of the Pursuing Perfection web site with a different tool than Radio. It is called Manila. In most aspects it looks the same on the web.

What you gain with Manila instead of Radio:

No new  software installed on your computer.
Less to learn--no need to learn how to use the above functions: subscriptions, categories, and shared outlines.
Ability to have someone else help you edit your work or add things on your behalf to your site.

What you miss with Manila instead of Radio as your weblog tool:

Active render, collapsing outlines on your web page.
Integrated RSS news reader--ability to subscribe to others weblog updates.
Categories, the ability to send your posts to an assorted group of web pages by topic, eg. Access, Diabetes, Evidence-based medicine.
Ability to see how many people are looking at your posts.
No ability to use Shared Outlines for collaborative work across organizations.

We think it is a good starting place for some people, especially those in communities other than Whatcom County, WA. IF YOU ARE ASSOCIATED WITH THE ROBERT WOOD JOHNSON FOUNDATION PURSUING PERFECTION GRANT IN ANY WAY feel free to contact me to ask for a weblog of your own. mailto:mpierson@peacehealth.org Availability will depend upon our available resources and your organizations agreement for your participation.

Jenny's so on the ball!. The RSS Future's So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades.

Where Next for RSS?

"People who hang around with bloggers all know what RSS is (if you don't, I'll introduce it.) RSS is headed for some interesting times as regards client software, traffic management, and business model, and it would be reasonable to expect some breakage along the way.

RSS FOR THE UNINITIATED: The history of RSS is fraught and complicated and I'm not going there. To summarize, RSS is a little XML language that you use to describe changes in a web site. Usually this is called an 'RSS feed'. Then all kinds of different programs can read the RSS feed and give you clickable news summaries that mean you don't actually have to visit all those websites unless you know there's something there you want to read.

Most people, once they start using RSS to check the news, just don't go back, the amount of time and irritation saved is totally, completely addictive....

When I turn on my laptop in the morning, NetNewsWire goes out and scans 21 RSS feeds. Then it checks up on them at 30-minute intervals after that (this is configurable). I don't know how typical that is, but I know there are people who track way more than I do. There's a problem here - if RSS becomes as wildly popular as a lot of prognosticators (including me) predict, there is going to be an ungodly traffic bulge every morning, and then at half-hour intervals all day.

People who read RSS through web-based products like the Userland offering are going to present a much smaller load to the sites providing the RSS. But I think that RSS-reading is going to get wired into Mozilla and IE and Safari and people will just do it from their desktop.

Fortunately, I think the Web's caching mechanisms will hold up under the load assuming everyone plays by the rules. Unfortunately, at the moment we're not...

I hate to be a wet blanket but I just don't see RSS readers persisting for too long as a standalone application class, this stuff just belongs in the browser. It will take a couple of years for it to get cooked into mainstream browsers in a mature enough form to be usable, so the guys with the RSS-reader software should make hay while the sun shines and start figuring out their Next Big Thing.

RSS was driven by the Weblog-technology companies and I suspect they'll continue to do just fine, Weblogging ain't going away any time soon. Also, anyone who does any kind of publishing software had better start offering a real-easy-to-use RSS interface and sooner rather than later or they're just not going to be in the game." [Textuality, via WebReference]

Emphasis above is totally mine. I'm up to something like 175 feeds in my aggregator, and it scans once an hour.

I can't say "me, too" loudly or often enough. I'm a big believer in RSS (in fact, I've based our entire grant project on it), and I agree that RSS readers will go mainstream and become background like browsers. In fact at this rate, I think RSS will make great headway with PDA and cell phone browsers first. I think there's a huge future for multimedia enclosures in RSS. My plan is to revolutionize communication between Illinois Library Systems using RSS.

Resistance is futile! Bwahahahahahahaha

[The Shifted Librarian] [Robert Paterson's Radio Weblog]

We at WWPP.org are in the process of adding audio and video to our weblogs, in about a month. Jon Udell posts on innovations in this area. There is even an audio search engine available now. I will add that to my wish list. He supports audio as adding meaning protecting against misquoting.

Politics and audioblogging. I'm reading Sarah Vowell's The Partly Cloudy Patriot today. One of her stories, about media misrepresentation of an Al Gore talk to a Concord, NH, high school, suggests to me again that the mix of technologies I've been writing about lately -- including weblogs and searchable audio -- is transformative. ... [Jon's Radio]

Discussion forum as another method of communication. The thread can have multiple participants and it can be referred to from anyone's weblog

I have just started two discussion threads. One is on the QuickTime Server that will allow us to add audio and video file to our weblogs. The other is on Search Strategy for our Pursuing Perfection weblogs.

Do feel free to read and participate. If nothing else we will learn how to use our discussion group tools so that we can use them with our various teams and communities. 

Also feel free to create and use discussion threads with any of your teams. If you have questions or issues ask Jack Mancilla.

Dave Winer the originator of Radio (weblogs), Manila (easy desk top management of complex web sites), and Frontier (a robust content management system, the basis for Manila and Radio) will become a fellow at Harvard.

Outline biography of Dave Winer's work.

InfoWORLD article on use of web logs in industry.

Weblogs Refine Enterpirse Focus

"...the best argument for Radio will be the development of non-techno communities of teachers, musicians, doctors, lawyers, gamers, golfers and candlestick makers."

"...by allowing amateurs like us to get in the game of shaping a micro-world in the public square - that is, the stuff in life for which we have a passion - the Web (and companies like Userland) are still plowing a revolutionary furrow."

Russ Lipton

Here is an interesting post  from the a retired IBM CIO.

You can subscribe to John Patrick's web log by placing http://patrickweb.com/weblog/rss.xml in your NEWS Subscriptions.

Health Care Integration. (From John Patrick)

I just read a piece in CIO Magazine entitled "Health-Care Integration May Be an Expensive Prescription". The story talks about a bill proposed by Senator Edward Kennedy which would require that hospitals, doctors' offices and insurance companies develop systems for sharing administrative and patient data. The story says that experts in health-care IT "are leery" of backing the proposal without "proof of its ROI". I don't belittle the importance of ROI overall -- spending money without a ROI is foolish.

On the other hand some things seem so obvious. Did companies do a ROI analysis to decide to buy a fax machine? Would a company without a web site have to do a ROI to invest in one? I believe we are about two percent of the way into what the Internet has to offer. When we get to esoteric applications then it will be time to sharpen the pencil and discriminate between investment opportunities based on ROI. I am not suggesting that prioritization isn't important at this stage too but there are some things that businesses should be racing to do regardless of the ROI calculation. We are not even to the early stage of addressing the basics. (read more)

[John Patrick's Weblog]

A useful way to navigate Radio: Create a folder in favoiries, drag in to it your Radio Home Page URL (http://127.0.0.1:5335) from your home page, the URL from your Radio Web Site (http://www.wwpp.org/users/0000002/), Ranking by Page-Reads (http://www.wwpp.org:8080/rcsPublic/ranking) Referrer Ranking for (http://www.wwpp.org:8080/rcsPublic/referers?site=), a link to your www-outlines http://127.0.0.1:5335/outlines/?folderView=1); a link to your PC's outlines ("C:\Program Files\Radio UserLand\www\outlines") news aggregatory link (http://127.0.0.1:5335/system/pages/news), and a link to your Radio program ("C:\Program Files\Radio UserLand\Radio.exe")

One of our P2 team has asked to understand what we are really trying to do with Radio. I have attached a prior posting to show one piece of the vision. Healthcare is a community undertaking, from the patient perspective. We must be able to learn together as a community if we are to improve the system of care that we all practice and experience healthcare in. I hope that Radio becomes a key to cross organizational cooperation and learning. Some of the most meaningful learning is through sharing stories. Also knowing each other, having relationships is important. Radio can facilitate all these things if we use it. Another concern that we all have is how can we know what is going on. So much is happening that one quickly feels out of the loop. I hope that Radio become the way that all interested people keep as in touch as they wish.

Here is a model of community learning. Try to imagine Radio as a communication method to support this kind of learning. Of course we will need to adapt all of this to our local situation.

 

Communities of Learning - Apply to Healthcare?

Royal Dutch Shell Oil Company links key people through out the world in ways that promote learning. Health care would be wise to copy this practice. How a Learning Community Really Works (From Linkage, Inc.'s Best Practices in Knowledge Management & Organizational Learning Handbook) Although each learning community could determine its own method for sharing knowledge, most follow an approach first developed by the petrophysics group. The petrophysics community links across teams in five different ways: 1. First, the community holds a weekly agenda-less meetings where anyone can get input on any topic. These are very different from most agenda-driven meetings in the organization. They emphasize open dialogue for exploring issues, with no pressure to come to resolution. Members are encouraged to discuss real problems they currently face and not to use the community as a rubber stamp for analyses and decisions they have already made. These are the public events of the community. 2. To share knowledge that is more explicit the community hosts formal presentations by vendors on new technology. 3. To ensure their data is consistent and widely available, the community has a data library that lets them compare data from many different sites. 4. To ensure that informal help is available at any time, one of their members acts as a community coordinator. The community coordinator's most visible community work involves facilitating the community's meetings. The majority of this person's work is in the private space of the community, making one-on-one contact with community members. The community coordinator talks to people between meetings to ensure that the topics people bring to the meetings are interesting to other community members and that the right people for a good discussion are present. Most importantly, the coordinator maintains relationships among members, connecting people with common interests or finding people who can serve as resources for particular daily work problems. 5. Finally, to educate people entering petrophysics from other disciplines, the community manages a mentor program. While the organization already had a mentoring program, most of the mentoring burden fell to a few senior petrophysicists. When the community took on mentorship, they were able to distribute the work of mentoring more evenly among the staff. One of the key qualifiers of the success of the petrophysicists' community work is the tone of their meetings. They openly discuss alternate interpretations of their data, new ideas and approaches, and new technology, without incurring the obligation to act on each other's ideas.

As we ramp up the use of Radio we will want to learn from the professionals, the reporters. I have been reviewing a couple of books on reporting and looking at web sites. I have nothing profound to bring to you yet but I will include this link to get us thinking about what our own guide lines can become. http://powerreporting.com/rules.html

I am looking for the ability for PeaceHealth employeesand HInet  users to subscribe to RSS feeds. Do we have that capability somewhere in our arsenal of web tools? This would allow us to dramatically limit the number of people who need Radio and increase the number of people who can listen in to the conversations and comment (without posting).

We know what would be required with MicroSoft products to get this capability.

I believe that following the Pursuing Perfection community and their communication across the community and the corporation will be enhanced by this "subscription" capability.