Disney Enterprise Weblogs and Wikis

Mike Pusateri, Elisabeth Freeman and Eric Freeman at Disney shares their enterprise blogging initative. Its very similar to the experience we have had with Socialtext, without the integration of blog and wiki with enterprise requirements in mind. The focus on blogging for project communication instead of just individual expression is spot on.

Using RSS for content distribution

Using RSS Enclosures to deliver video to 2 million broadband users. Some argue that enclosures don't scale and their not enough bandwidth, but >500M videos have been delivered in less than one year an dhav been able to scale bandwidth to demand, now moving towards caching at the edge. Most of the delivery is off-peak hours, especially from them to the cable head end, so bandwidth cost is nominal. P2P like Bittorrent and others may broaden this.

Enterprise Blogging

In ops/engineering there are 100 people that log into the 6 weblogs. In DIG, 1 blog and 50 users, the wiki has been over 1.5 year 200 users and lots of groups.

Mike works where coordination is king. Info flow between programming, marketing, traffic and operations, etc. Consistent flow is critical, constant change occured and must be communicated, catch up must happen easily or problems result, archives. People don't like loggingm dont know whats new and difficult to forward.

Shift Logs
* 24 hour positions necessitate the creation of a shiftr log to report information to coworkers and management about what occured on the shift
*Previous solution was specialized FoxPro database with minimal features, mot even search
* Now a MT-based group blog

Distribution
* New weblog styel were popularm but requests for email of entries began
* Instead of email notification, used RSS
* Newsgator chosen as aggregator because of the outlook plugin

Discrepancy Reports
*Detailed info on mistakes, problems or opther events that affect the broadcast
*RSS feed reduced use of email

Ratings Information
* Daily need for overnight ratings information
* Generating RSS feed that encloses a styled table

Furture
*News Clopping Service (currentl web app)
* Playdate Memor changes (currently email
*Addition of RSS feeds to existing intranet portal modules
* Use of ATOM to replace RSS (when 1.0 arrives) and compliant tools for simple publishing. Because it is inherently 2-directional, for interaction
* Syndication of some media content for review

Conclusions
*RSS feeds and Weblog software are useful for multitude of business need where information flow is critical. Its not about opinion its about information flow
* RSS feeds are for much more than weblog sndication
*Use of RSS feeds is inexpensive comparatively
*RSS aggregation into Outlook integration was critical.
*Client side aggregation needs to move toward server side aggregation
*Need for authentication is immeadiate

They also use wikis inside. Disney Internet Group is also using wikis and blogs

*Wide variety of areas of expertise within our group
* Each person can contribute research and articles of interest to the entire group
* Best shared through a system that will notify, Notifications have had an impact -- email and RSS
* Did some stylizing per group
* Repurpose internal datafeeds
*Had training sessions to get it going.

Reuters uses wikis instead of blogs as it was harder to adopt.

Problem security and authentication; provisioning new spaces and resources. Disney has restricted write access, but not read access. Comment from a person at the BBC affirmed they ran into this in some areas too. They don't have Socialtext's ability to manage and work with lots of workspaces.

Comments

[Tom Coates]

W/R/T the BBC - bear in mind that the BBC is an enormous organisation with a large variety of component parts which apply technology in different ways in different places. Best practices spread over time. At the moment the part of the BBC I work in has resolved some of the problems that New Media are still working with - just as they have resolved some of the issues that we need to sort out - and the two parts of the organisation are in regular contact about how to more evenly distribute the lessons learned. Otherwise a profoundly useful session.

[Ross Mayfield]

Thanks Tom. To clarify, someone from the audience commented that it was an issue for his part of the BBC, have no idea who or where.

There is a very common refrain for companies that deploy consumer blogging tools or open source wikis and then realize later that something is missing. Particularly as it scales, groups are formed and new boundaries inside an organization practically need to be set.

[Euan Semple]

Hmm

Not sure it is about the tools.

Is it that something is missing or that most organisations aren't ready for the dynamics of the web to prevail over conventional powerplay?

[Dave Winer]

Ross, I'm sure you meant they'd support Atom, in addition to RSS, not replacing RSS.

[Bill Seitz]

The references to Reuters and BBC could use a bit of context...

[Ross Mayfield]

Dave, Bill, as you can imagine these were rapid fire notes.

Dave, you are probably right, will ask around today and modify the post if someone heard differently.

Bill, added more on Reuters and BBC.

[Antonio Ortiz]

My CMS dosen´t have Trackback, but i have cited you. Very good entry

Sorry my english..

[Ross Mayfield]

Reading the trackbacks and comments, more clarification:

They are distributing broadband video as a commercial service using RSS enclosures.

I talked to them about if Atom would entirely replace RSS this morning and they said that while they may upgrade to Atom, they still have token ring and other legacies and its rare to make the effort to pull something out once its in. So it would be more accurate to say they would keep it in the system, but using it is another thing. May be an obvious point.

[Dave Winer]

Thanks for clarifying Ross.

Someone should show that to the Blogger folk, about token rings, etc.

I remember so many "important" technologies that thought that they were going to take over from deeply entrenched competitors, only to find that nothing in technology is less likely.

My PC can still run ThinkTank, an app I shipped in 1984. I suspect the PC they ship in 2024 will also be able to run it. And I might add that today's PC runs it much better than the PC of 1984. ;->

[David Foster]

Is there supposed to be a link to the article by Pusateri et al? All I saw was the summaery...

[Debt]

Debt: "How To Get Out Of Debt By: John Mussi "

Debt: "Eliminating Credit Card Debt By: Alan Barnes "

Debt: "We all know about debt. If you don't have too much as an individual you can increase the quality of your life, but with more than you can handle it can make your life a nightmare."