Curiouser and Curiouser!

A Blogger in Their Midst.

Harvard Business Review, Sept 2003, leads with a case study on blogger behavior at work. The case is kinda fun. A woman writing a blog calling herself "Glove Girl" is responsible for a big increase in the sale of the company's products, but she blogs without permission, and without following the company line. (Imagine that.) What is the CEO to do? [smirk]

As usual, HBR invites four 'experts' to offer their views on what to do. The advice is not bad. It ranges from figure out how to take this blog-marketing thing mainstream to what's wrong with the way you communicate internally that you didn't know Glove Girl was blogging.

Here are my comments:
(I used to be a Chief Operating Officer for a design-build commercial builder.)

• Create mechanisms for employees to engage fully in the mission of the company. Some people are just dying to make bigger contributions. Blogging is just one way to share ones voice.
• Blog with company bloggers. Ray Ozzie founder of Groove took up blogging and discovered his own voice along the way. (If you can't beat 'em, join 'em?) Learn first-hand how the blogging medium (genre) can support the company mission.
• Encourage group blogging. As companies become more and more virtual (physically separate) we risk becoming detached from our peers. A group blog, where each of us can post, read, and comment as it serves us and the group, nurtures relationships. Group blogging may be the safety net for distributed project teams.
• Bring the marketing department together with the company bloggers. Prepare yourself to mediate the conversation! My experience of bloggers is they are VERY well-intended. Help people find ways to create something new from an intentionality between the groups.
• Look for other 'marginal practices' that may be contributing to the success of the company. Instant messaging for supporting clients immediately comes to mind. Wikis for supporting the folks who are supporting the customers? How about unsanctioned websites?

Creating a blogging presence was too easy. It took me all of 3 hours on a weekend. Just imagine what is happening at work with all the 'friendly support' available! Don't wait...harness it.
[Reforming Project Management]

I really like #1:

• Create mechanisms for employees to engage fully in the mission of the company. Some people are just dying to make bigger contributions. Blogging is just one way to share ones voice.

Companies clueful enough to want to listen to their participants will find blogs to be a great way to tease them out and get them interacting.

It's an amazing group of people K-Collector has acquired in just a few short months.  I wish I knew half these people or at least who they were!

Today I have been mostly listening to Limbik Frequencies.

(At the moment I don't care that the iTunes store doesn't work for me either)

Want to visit Britain? Join the fingerprint queue. Biometric visas stamped [The Register]

Ah yes, good 'ol Fortress Britian.

Doesn't anyone use anti-virus software?

I've received more than 1,000 messages from people spawned by the Sobig virus. The happy note is it is almost all from spammers who are revealing their actual address, which creates all sorts of opportunities for fun. But, seriously, there are applications that can stop this.

Or, one could use a Macintosh. People chuckle about the Mac, but not being a major target of opportunity for virus writers is a big plus.

[RatcliffeBlog: Business, Technology & Investing]

Some of us would love to be running AV software but have trouble doing so.  I now have a brand-new shrink wrapped copy of McAfee Virus Scan (bought even though the eval version wouldn't install -- i'll hang my data out to dry before I give Symantec another red eurocent) sat on my desk waiting to be installed.  But I can't do that until I have safely uninstalled my non-upgrading NAV2002.  Who knows how hard that might turn out to be..?

Continuing to test the aggregator.

This may take some time & many posts.

We're rewriting part of the K-Collector aggregator using a new design.

Hydra is now called SubEthaEdit due to legal issues. I really don't like this name, the old one was way better. Anyway I love this product and already tried it in two meetings some weeks ago. It rocks. Yesterday I co-edited a wiki page using SubEthaEdit and it's been damn great, save from having to copy and paste from the editor to the browser. Thinking about it...wikis are collaborative web editing, SubEthaEdit is realtime collaborative editing. Where could this lead if the tools could someday integrate? Realtime collaborative web editing? Wouldn't it be great? Inserting a picture and having it suddenly appear inside the web editor of the others concurrently editing the web page?
[Cristian Vidmar: CRISTIAN VIDMAR: M y P u b l i c W e b l o g]

Ah.. this confused the hell out of me today when I followed a link, downloaded a package and ended up with a program with a different name!  Okay, so I do have Hydra.  Cool.