Blogging, wikis, jazz communities and Industry too

Yesterday, Stuart Henshall presented a Virtual Talk "From Blogs to Augmented Social Networks" to us and pursued the theme that community development of blogging could follow the theme of "Jazz in the Blogosphere".

Stuart on the concept:

Blogs to augmented social software is best thought about by combining two metaphors. Jazz and the jukebox....combine a weblog and RSS feeds and you get more than just the capability to publish frequent updates to a website and similarly aggregate information from other sites. While building context over time you instantly become part of a web of data exchange, one connecting many people who are cross-linking and sharing information. ...It’s also important to recognize that a good jazz community isn’t only comprised of musicians.

According to Stuart, companies embracing and adapting blogging and wiki tools will enable the conversation on the fringes that will enhance and power greater innovation and productivity. All members of this Jazz band must be allowed to both play together and have their own "instrument" or voice heard.

Such a Jazz community requires the "innovation Spices" I discussed earlier in the week with Leif Edvinsson. Are blogging tools one of the important Spices to enable a successful community to actually engage in conversation, to really make an online Knowledge Cafe work, to empower the Knowledge Cultivators inside and outside the firm? It appears they hold promise, but will require adaptation for the business world.

We were joined by Markus Heggi, CEO Colayer, for an interesting discussion that stretched our conversation into the business application of blogging. Colayer itself has many aspects already of a collaborative blogging environment or wiki, in that community and working group members may dynamically and continuously publish to each other within the ongoing context of shared posts, documents and online meetings.

Together we discussed developments in blogging from the business perspective. I asked how could blogging be adapted to a corporate culture that follows the "need to know" principle. And if we introduce moderation and access levels how is the blogging phenomena affected? How does such a resulting blogosphere turn out and how will companies embrace it?

Stuart indicated that there would be a movement towards collaborative blogging, wikis integrated into KM systems and there would be an increasing role for integrated VOIP tools, such as Skype. Markus emphasised that companies may insist on more controls and moderation in areas such as salesforce management and that the exercise has to be more than just individual publishing. Stuart elaborated on how wikis could be used for group-shared conversations of new ideas, with moderated blogging used for publishing more broadly across the company. And so our conversation continued...

Stuart has recently posted on his Blog some further thoughts on Jazz Communities in his "From Conversational Blogging to Jazz Communities" post.

A further summary on the concepts covered by Stuart in the talk is located in a Previous Post. If you wish to hear the full talk and discussion which extended to 75 minutes or so, please visit the KM in Pharma & Life Science CoP site at innovationwell.net