social-software - Tom on Diigo

18 Apr 08

Dogear exploits the enterprise by allowing people to bookmark pages within their Intranet. In addition it uses enterprise directories to authenticate the user’s identity. This allows people to find experts on specific topics within the company. For example, an employee looking for someone knowledgeable in Java can look at the dogear “java” tag to see who has been bookmarking pages around that topic. Dogear will also show tags associated with “java,” which may help to refine the search. Once users have found a potential expert, they can see that person’s bookmarks, internal blog, and contact information. This form of expertise location helps spur collaboration and sharing of resources within the company. - thomasneal on 2006-07-15
I hope that Social Entrepreneurs will come to understand the benefit of sharing knowledge and information through Diigo and Blinklist. These services might be used to spur collaboration between, and increase impact of social and humanitarian entrepreneurs. - thomasneal on 2006-07-15

Obviously, these social bookmarking applications have enormous potential for large enterprises and organizations—finding and sharing relevant information for specific projects that might otherwise be missed or identifying experts on particular topics, for example. IBM managers say the talent scouting ability has been a especially handy feature of dogear, the internal

23 Jul 06

It’s an emerging rule of thumb that suggests that if you get a group of 100 people online then one will create content, 10 will “interact” with it (commenting or offering improvements) and the other 89 will just view it. - thomasneal on 2006-07-23

15 Jul 06

But other applications have come to seem like natural parts of my daily life. Google Calendar is worth the effort -- for the appointments that my wife needs to know about. I find that I leave Google Earth running all day, to check aerial views of a foreign site I've just read about or a neighborhood where I'm meeting someone for lunch. The discount travel broker Kayak has gotten my attention; eBay has retained it, for all the obvious reasons. Flickr is a good way to share photo files with my family -- and keep them from jamming up my computer. I'll continue using Gmail as a backup site for important data files. As Ajax-enabled sites spread, they'll make sites that still require you to hit "refresh" or a "submit" button seem hopelessly out of date. I still don't like the label Web 2.0, I will continue to mock those who say "mash up," and I will never use Dodgeball. But I'm glad for what this experiment has forced me to see. - thomasneal on 2006-07-15

10 Jul 06

Clearly, we’re starting from the wrong end of things. Let the students show us how they use online spaces to present themselves, and let us go to them and teach them how to harness what they are already doing for purposes like reflection and job hunting. Applications like FaceBook and MySpace are pretty easy to build these days; we shouldn’t have to invest big bucks into designing ePortfolio apps. They already exist. From the software perspective, what we mainly need is a tool that makes it harder for students to carelessly or accidentally throw out the stuff they did for class that may be important in ways they’re not thinking about yet. We need that Box-’O-Stuff, where they save their first assignment drafts and where it becomes natural and automagic to keep all subsequent drafts. Then we need easy hooks so they can suck that content out of their boxes and post it on whatever MySpace-like application (whether integral to the LMS or a third-party service) suits their specific portfolio purposes. The mmain focus then becomes on teaching them what to put in the portfolio and why, rather than on how to build the widgets. - thomasneal on 2006-07-10

08 May 06