Friday 5 February 2010

And a long time passes

Up until now most of my blogging-like activities have been participating in some old-fashioned Internet mailing lists, a few web forums, and various other social media inside my employer's firewall. It has been interesting to compare the experience of using the different tools, to see what is the same and what is different.

Mailing lists are pretty much a free-for-all, generally with an archive that is accessed by date, more or less, and no real structure to the discussions except the shared topic, and whatever is hot today. For some things they are really good, but I've come to wonder why mailing lists have not shifted into a form that allows them to be accessed other than by email clients or a simple 1990's archive website structure.

Forums have more structure beyond the overall shared topic. They are generally subdivided into one or two levels of subforums and when you write something, you reinforce the filing system by choosing the appropriate subforum. And if you don't pick the right subforum, there is generally a moderator who will fix it up for you. This structured filing system makes it fairly easy to jump into a forum site and zero in on the postings that are of interest. However, if the shared topic of the site changes or grows, it can be difficult to adapt the forum structure other than by adding or deleting subforums.

Blogs on the other hand have both structure and malleability. If you tag all your postings and delete irrelevant comments, then a blog site is at least as indexed as a forum, and pretty easy to jump into. But it also has the same kind of time indexing that a mailing list archive has, so you can zero in on a certain time period if you want to. And if you want to change the structure of the existing postings, you can do this by editing the tags and/or adding new ones. Maybe you decided that BABY was not really an appropriate tag once your toddler is talking up a storm, because it draws too much attention to those postings. But you don't want to delete the posts, just de-emphasize. Just delete the BABY tag, or change it to a more general one like FAMILY. This kind of subforum merging is generally harder to do, or impossible with forums.

And then there are wikis. Some wiki engines have blog-like and forum-like features. Others lean towards collaborative document editing. And then there is Wikipedia which is much-imitated within corporate firewalls. I have contributed lots of articles and a few templates, and some help guidelines for my employer's wiki encyclopedia. It is ranked high by our intranet search engine so we use it to provide a few sentences about important intranet pages that would otherwise be lost in the noise. A user looking for info does a search, hits our wiki encyclopedia page, and finds a brief explanation with links to intranet sites or collaboration wiki pages with comprehensive info. If it is an acronym definition article, a template inserts automatic links at the bottom of the article to search Wikipedia, our collaboration wiki, or the whole intranet. The template also adds the acronym to categories such as Common Acronyms, Our Company Only, or Specialised Local Meanings. Note that I mentioned a collaboration wiki. We have a completely separate wiki installation for people to do collaborative work from building documents, to tracking projects, to publishing weekly reports. More people use that wiki than use the Sharepoint installation.

We also have an internal blog site but I mostly post comments on other people's blogs to encourage them to post more. A good blog is a dialog, and in a business environment you need people to take the lead and show everyone else that it is OK to comment on a blog, even if it is written by a senior manager. Now that we have 30-40 blog postings a day, and about a dozen new blogs being started every week, I've decided to switch from commenting to posting, but to do it out here on the Internet because I think that what I have to say is more useful to a general audience.

Much of my postings will be about technology but there will also be some about futures, and about society. And some wild ideas because I like to keep my out of the box thinking engine fully tuned.