Live blogging the panel I am on at the Gilbane Conference on Content Management Technologies -- see the Gilbane Whitepaper on Blogs & Wikis and the ongoing survey for background.
Lauren Wood describes the broad uses of wikis and weblogs. Some for short term information (updates), some for long term (solve a problem). Different facets of information sharing solution. About 1/4 of the audience uses blogs or wikis internally.
I provided an introduction to wikis: Download my presentation on wiki basics.ppt
Peter Quintas introduces Silkroad, emphasis on using blogs as an alert network.
Joe Kraus from Jotspot talks about his personal story, democratizing the web, wiki use for consulting firms, facilitating conversations and building proposals. Says wikis become kitchen sinks, and the solution is adding structure into a wiki (another view is wikis are messy when they are poorly implemented and don't take advantage of empowering practices -- the tool is not a panacea)
Dan Farber from Cnet doesn't have a dog in this hunt, talks about what he thinks is important. Keeping it simple...collaboration, communication, easy to set up, low cost, doesn't take programming talent, makes it accessible for people in a corporation to contribute in ways they haven't before, easy to scale. In the past everything is high cost, complex, difficult to use, feature rich -- like Lotus Notes and even Groove to a degree. From the bottom up, we have different tools that are simpler and more accessible. They have source content that you can push out through alerts and syndication, but then you have RSS and syndication APIs that lets others build upon your content. With blogs and content refactoring tools like wikis, you have new ways to use content and take advantage of it to make your people smarter and get more points of view. Shows a screenshot of their wiki, people set it up on their own and suddenly it becomes populated, wouldn't have happened if it was from the top down. Shows an Intranet blog where people can express themselves within guidelines. What we want is somewhat standard connumications infrastructure. Compose your own blog or wiki with whatever features you want, some blogs won't stay simple as people add features. Will all be refactored in some way. Don't get accustomed to what we have today, it's bound to change.
I'm not able to take notes while participating during the discussion part. Hope the above is useful.
UPDATE: DJ missed my intro, but took good notes on the discussion. Thanks! Also see Chris Jablonski's take and Jason Lewis' highlight of the tension with structure.
