The Workplace Blog

Wanting to learn more about wikis? Interested in some of the research behind wikis and their current usage. Hop over to the Proceedings of the WikiSymposium 2006 and you’ll find enough thoughtful reading to keep you busy for a week. I found the survey on corporate wiki usage particulary useful. Did you know that wikis are most successful when used for tasks requiring a novel solutions with information from credible sources being published?

The research also identified two types of wiki users - synthesizers and adders. Synthesizers post more based on their impact on other wiki users while adders’ contribution frequency was affected more by being able to accomplish their immediate work.

You know something is a lot more than a fad when you have an international symposium dedicated to it. That’s the case with wikis today. Some of the more interesting research papers from the symposium include Wiki Communities in the Context of Work Processes and Are Wikis Usable?

If you’re looking for a Social Media conference to attend, you may want to take a look at the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media that will be held in the Spring of 2007 in Boulder, Colorado. This academic oriented conference will address ethnographic analysis through social media, human computer interaction, unstructured knowledge management, social network analysis and visualization among other topics.

In reading the conference description, I particularly liked the phrase, “people at once act as creators, observers and influences of the space in which they participate.” Companies themselves play these roles in real time too. But alas, we do not have social media tools that capture the aggregate behavior of employees to depict how a company truly functions.

Forrester is holding its annual IT Forum 2006: GigaWorld this week in Las Vegas, Nevada. They’ve published several of their presentation decks online. Among the many interesting presentations, The Information Workplace (PDF) sesssion by Erica Rugullies and Connie Moore is worth reading. Also take a look at SOA Application Platform Strategy (PDF) by John R. Rymer.

Pat Frend and I will be speaking at the DCI Portals Conference tomorrow morning in San Diego. We willl be talking about the Ford Dealer Portal case study. If you’re attending the conference, please attend our session! It will be interesting.

In a keynote address at Convergence, an annual conference for users of Microsoft Corp.’s business software, Bill Gates discussed how Microsoft is working on a “missing piece of software” - one that would use rules to determine how to respond to people trying to contact an individual. The software would use the caller’s identity to determine how best to answer the call or email. He also talked about the coming together of the structured worlds of financial and human resources applications with elements of the internet world, such as mashups.

Here at Avenue A | Razorfish, we’re excited about these trends and have already started developing solutions for our clients that merge the structured applications world with that of the web and improve employee productivity.

One of the sessions at the mix.06 conference covered web services and the multitude of options available. Everything from REST, POX, RSS, SOAP, and WS-* is available through the windows communication framework (WCF). This provides a wide set of choices when building applications. From REST - WS-*, each approach has increasing overhead. Building a REST call is a lot less work than building a SOAP call. SOAP allows the addition of great metadata to your service, but if you aren’t using it, why incur the overhead. Go here for the overview of the session From HTML to Services.

” The Web is evolving. There’s a little bit more maturity now, in terms of business models with advertising coming in, with some of the late-’90s mistakes understood. But we’re probably, as an industry, making some of those same mistakes. And that’s OK. The ferment, the creativity, is incredible to see,” says Bill Gates at MIX06 Read his exclusive News.com interview where he talks about Web 2.0, Microsoft, Office Online and Ray Ozzie.

Each year, Avenue A | Razorfish hosts an invitation only client summit that brings together Fortune 1000 marketing and technology executives from the company’s client base for 2-1/2 days of fun and knowledge sharing. The theme of this year’s event is “The Art and Science of Digital Marketing.” Steve Ballmer, president of Microsoft, and James Surowiecki, New Yorker writer and “Wisdom of Crowds” author are keynoting the event. Watch the blog for updates from the event.

If you’re not familiar with O’Reilly Radar, run to that blog now. The blog is written by Tim O’Reilly and other thought leaders at O’Reilly. It is filled with very interesting technology news, thoughts and perspectives. This week, the blog is even more valuable as it discusses some of the presentations made at the Emerging Technologies Conference in Las Vegas.