Google Docs, Mind42 for projects

Google Docs is of course well-known. But maybe like me you were aware of it, tried it a while ago, and then didn't use it for some time. If so, have another look. It's truly brilliant now. You can upload an Excel workbook and retain all the sheets, and most of the functionality. And of course, in addition, you can use it collaboratively, and it keeps a change history. I've been using it on a project for a client recently. My client is an accountant. He described it as 'cool'. How often do you hear an accountant say that about anything? ;-)

I've also been using Mind42 for a little while now. I've got a few pretty hard-baked developers hooked, and the accountant I just mentioned likes it, too. There are a number of mind-mapping programs, such as Mind Manager and Freemind, but as far as I know thay are not SaaS and not collaborative. Mind42 is. It's only real weakness, for me, is the lack of a facility to relate concepts laterally by drawing arrows.

The more I use collaborative tools the more I like them, and the less I like the 'old way': emailing versions around and then losing track of them.

Do you agree?

The New KM - a year ago and still spot-on

Ever up-to-the minute, I have just come across this article by David Tebbutt, which encapsulates extremely well my own views on 'KM', and how Web 2.0 tools change that particular game.

I always find David's articles in IWR worth a read.

Google and blogs

A friend and neighbour told me today that he'd found my weblog. Wasn't too sure how, but thought it was probably via Google. This reminded me how I had been surprised, when I first began this blog, how quickly Google had indexed it.

So far, so trivial, perhaps. However, it reminded me of what for me is one of the key points about information management and the Web. Search. As Andrew McAfee has pointed out with his SLATES notation, search is one of the central tenets of Enterprise 2.0. And it's an area where the contrast between the World Wide Web and the average corporation or not-for-profit organisation is extreme.

Because the WWW is all web-based (obviously), but the internal organisational environment isn't.

Do you agree that this is a fundamental (and quite puzzling) point?

I finally get Twitter

Oh dear, is it really nearly a month since I last posted? I'll have to make a belated New Year's resolution to post more often. Perhaps little and often, the little I hope referring to quantity rather than quality.

On that note, I 'got' Twitter today. I've had ambivalent feelings about Twitter for a while. It seemed to be about, well, (t)wittering on about trivia, yet many raved about it, including Euan Semple who posted about how Twitter made him feel safe.

I've been supporting Brian Paddick's bid for mayor, and signed up to 'follow' him on Twitter. Today I received a text message from Twitter, relaying a Tweet in which he said he was going to Croydon today then appearing on a TV show at 3.00 pm. So now I know what Twitter is for - being alerted to what selected people are doing, if you want to be.

I feel a bit sheepish writing this. I can almost hear "Call yourself a Web 2.0 expert, man?" ringing in my ears. But that's what blogging's meant to be about, isn't it? Letting it all hang out, dirty linen and warts and all.

Don't worry, that's all for now...

Blogs don't have to be for blogging

..And wikis don't have to be encyclopedias.

A blog is a website with a predetermined format - posts in date sequence. It doesn't have to be used for writing an online diary or collection of online musings.

A wiki is a website that anyone can edit. Wikipedia is the only wiki that many people have heard of, so these people often think wiki equals encyclopedia.

What might an organisation's collection of written material be like if was all on blogs and wikis?

Doc Strangelove:

Or how I learned to stop worrying about documents and love web pages.

Enterprise 2.0 is going mainstream

It was a year ago, at the Online Information exhibition, that it first occurred to me that a combination of blogs, wikis, search, social bookmarking and RSS within an organisation could create a new and viable approach to knowledge management - KM 2.0, if you like. I've just been to this year's event, not least to see how much prominence is being given to Web 2.0 and the rest of it. There's a whole conference stream this year devoted to the subject. Knowledgeable folk like Euan Semple and Lee Bryant of Headshift, as well as the legendary Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia were down to speak at that.

Being a cheapskate I didn't pay to attend the conference but instead headed for the free seminars in the exhibition hall. I failed to get into the first two sessions - both on the subject of RSS - because they were full. A lesson there, and a clue: this subject is now very popular. The third session, with Crispin O'Brien, Chairman of KPMG's Technology Group, I did get into, by being much earlier.

Crispin was clearly an enthusiast for Enterprise 2.0, and argued strongly for the benefits. He quoted some impressive statistics from a recent Economist Intelligence Unit survey that indicated very strong support for Enterprise 2.0 concepts among mid-level executives. Refreshingly, for an evangelist, he also saw clearly how high the barriers are, especially in highly-regulated industries. He reminded us that, as a partner, his liability is unlimited, and that he was a little nervous of the idea of employees saying what they like in print, without regard to defamation or intellectual property laws.

Enterprise 2.0 seems to be turning into an oxymoron: it's a sort of 'inevitable impossibility' ;-)