Dave Taylor, a co-moderator with me of the members-only LinkedinBloggers Group on Yahoo!, has an interesting read on his blog titled "Walmart and Edelman PR lead the way on working with bloggers." Lately I've been reading about the increasing acceptance of blogging by corporations as an extension to their ongoing corporate communications with their customer and the public.
In my article Web 2.0 and Maintaining the Integrity of Online Intellectual Property I discussed what happens when information flowing through the Internet can change between the time it is created and the time it is consumed.
This can be both good and bad. Good aspects include the addition of new information and the resulting rich functionality and utility that can be created. Bad aspects include the possible loss of control over quality and authority as information "morphs" in ways that may have been unintended by the information's originators.
"Web 2.0 and Maintaining the Integrity of Online Intellectual Property - Is 'Meta-Information' the Answer?" is a Sys-Con "Web 2.0 Journal" article, published March 3, 2006, that addresses what happens when individual writings become modified and changed -- sometimes accidentally, sometimes on purpose -- through the collaborative and transformative functionality of content-oriented Web 2.0 applications.
I've worked a lot with call centers and contact centers, primarily those that handle incoming calls for things like customer support, product purchasing, account inquiries, and trouble shooting. Many's the time I wondered, while poring over statistics on incoming call type, call volume, and call resolution, "I wonder what the rest of the people out there think of us?" Well, there are now ways to find out.
Linkedin Bloggers is a members-only sub-group of Linkedin members who have created the group to discuss issues related to blogging and professional networking. The group is growing. We've decided to try an experiement we call "blog boosting." We've randomly selected one of the group members' regularly updated blogs -- in this case Itzy Sabo's Email Overloaded -- and group members have agreed to write about and link to Itzy's blog today, March 1, 2006.
I’ve been trying to figure out what the impacts of “web 2.0” applications and processes will be on “the enterprise.” There are a couple of blogs I read that do tend to evangelize but also they regularly offer useful thinking to put Web 2.0 developments into perspective.
First we had the release by Halderman and Felten of their masterly dissection of Sony’s DRM rootkit fiasco. Now we have Kathryn Cramer’s exposé of how some media companies are trying to buy off Congress and force consumers to make current technology obsolete by artificially retsricting the quality of digital signals fed to certain types of display devices.
WEB 2.0 MANAGEMENT SURVEY 2/22/06: While I work on a longer formal progress report and podcast I've posted a brief progress report describing where the Survey stands right now. (12 interviews so far!)
I've been experimenting with NetVibes, an online tool that lets you build a re-usable and bookmark-able central page where you can load a variety of services. I've added my Yahoo! Mail link (you can add a link for Google mail if you like), RSS feeds for various Web 2.0 and Yahoo! Groups I'm active in, as well as the feeds for various blogs I check regularly. Since I move around several computers during the day this tool could provide a great service, if only I could figure out a way to tie in my Eudora email that resides on my main machine and the custom Access database I use for contact tracking!
One thing you can do with Google Analytics is compare the references your web site gets from different sources. This installment in my Learning Google Analytics series compares one weeks' visits referred from Google itself (e.g., from searches on Google that resulted in someone linking to my web site All Kind Food) with one one-week's visits that were referred from one particular web site where I had left comments and a link back here on a blog entry.
J. Alex Halderman and Edward W. Felten have published their "Lessons from the Sony CD DRM Episode" after an open and collaborative publishing and review cycle on their Freedom to Tinker blog. In my review I've tried to hit what I think are the high points. I recommend the entire paper to anyone interested in the complex relationship between the music business and technology given continued erosion of the music CD's market viability.
On of my favorite blogs, Fashion Incubator, has an interesting post about "best practices" (she calls it "standard work") applied to manufacturing in the clothing and fashion industries.
I'm a member of the Linkedin professional networking group. I've found it to be quite helpful in making connections with new friends and colleagues around the world. While most of the features of the network are available and visible on the web to members only, Linkedin recently added a feature whereby the internal Linkedin member profile can be displayed publicly on the web. Here's a public view of my own profile:
If I write something that is likely to be changed by the distribution system or by the actions of collaborating authors, what do I own? What if, when I write a blog article I come back and regularly change, update, and correct the original, and add comments? Do I have a way of knowing if people who read the original will know that I've made corrections or changes? These are difficuly questions, and one way to help answer them is to develop registration systems to help identify and describe works and their owners (or creators).
Part of the evolving Web 2.0 environment is the collection and redistribution of original content and conversations as well as meta-information (tags etc.) relating to that content. What we are seeing are not only the easy creation of online content and media but also the sharing of that content and associated information and conversations. Functions such as aggregation of feeds and mash-up of application services are examples of operations that take place where original content and functionality may be combined and recombined in new, unique, and potentially powerful ways. We need to make sure, though, that in the process we don't destroy the integrity of the intellectual property we now find it so easy to copy and manipulate.
In looking at Google Analytics data I have seen that about half of all visitors came to my web site All Kind Food via the main page (which I call “Recent Postings”) and half come directly to other pages. One question that arises is, what do people do before and after they go to a specific page on my web site?
In the downloadable MP3 audio file Google vs. Uncle Sam, Martin McKeay, Dan Sweet, and I talk about the U.S. government's request for search information from Google. (This is a Podcast Roundtable podcast.)
Collaborative Deconstruction of DRM
There's a terrific series of articles and comments over at Freedom to Tinker that involves the authors' pre-publication of a detailed analysis of DRM technology. Some of the stuff is pretty technical, but if you take the time, you'll be impressed with the analysis and with the many intelligent comments that are being left (I left one, for example!)
While there is nothing new about the concept of peer review this project is a very serious use of "web 2.0" technologies in service of a very important societal function, i.e., patent review.
Recent events have pointed out how differently these two companies operate.