A Firefox add on you should have

I've been out and about watching the 20/20 cricket over the last few days at Edgbaston so my time for blog posting has been a bit limited. However last week I downloaded Firefox 3 and I've been looking for some useful extensions. Well I've found one and although it is in beta it does enhance my use of Google Reader by a company called feedly.

This has provided me with a good reading platform and allows me to save articles in Google reader but also I can pass them on to other people who follow me on Twitter and can be advised instantly of a useful web site or web article. For me the good integration with Google Reader is excellent though I did have to delete some feeds that were saved to Google Reader from some of my other sites.

A nice piece of eye candy is the ability to create a screen saver of articles and then click on this to read. It would be great to have say on an intranet where new articles appear as a screen saver and then you click on the article that you want to read. A good attention grabber.

I should say that this is available on Firefox only and is still a work in progress and no doubt will improve over time. It is the one function, that would make me switch from using google reader as my standard blog reader and saver.

My tweetcloud

I use twitter from time to time and a mac colleague pointed out this useful little idea, so that I could see what words were being used. It acts like a tag cloud on delicious. It would be useful in a work setting if you could aggregate a couple of feeds and see what people were talking about in the enterprise. My blogs will be a little light this week as I'm preparing an overseas conference in Hong Kong and it's getting down to the last few days - so it tends to be all hands to the pump with last minute adjustments.

Our Nomadic future

An interesting piece in about the rise of mobility with wireless communication. The article I'd like to read and reflect on and post a note next week, but it will be interesting to read how wireless technology will impact not only on our work places, but how it might impact on cities, work patterns and the way that we design our offices of the future.  Would I like to be a permanently on nomad with the freedom to roam but also recognising that it will be easier for people to watch me though Twitter, Facebook Second Life etc etc.

The business value of Twitter

On occasions I like to go over to CIO to see what Chief Information officers are talking about. Well following my recent posting on Twitter I have been interested in whether organisations will find a use for Twitter - any way here is an article by Abbie Lundberg that could act as a starting point for discussion. I have also seen comments from other bloggers on this point so - obviously it is a technology that may come into the work place and have a role though at present I want to consider it further.

I use Twitter and might try to find fellow like minds to try it out as an experiment to see where it leads. for example I saw it being used very effectively to monitor the progress of the Olympic torch through San Francisco this week and can imagine it being used especially useful with selected groups of people in a global setting.

E-mail Collaboration vs Wiki Collaboration.

As many of my readers know, I am interested in how wikis can help us to collaborate and as a picture can say a thousand words, I thought that I’d share this diagram as used by Chris Rasmussen but picked up on via Jim McGee.

Serendipitously on the day that I picked this up a work colleague came and asked for my help in trying to pick through a wade of e-mails to try and ensure that he had not missed anything in respect of the requirements for a piece of work he was undertaking.

Well about 90 minutes later after reading through a blizzard of papers I had actually bottomed out the request. After about 30 minutes I was looking at this picture and wishing that someone had used a wiki in this instance. There have been a few times ie when working on a conference, that I have also thought about the wiki way.

However although the diagram makes it look easy, I think for a lot of senior managers it would take a leap of thought for them to move to using a wiki wedded as we are to e-mail.

Also a lot of firms don’t have RSS feeds as they are still using IE 6 and would have to put a specific watch on the page which means that you get an e-mail caught up in all the detritus of other e-mails – an interesting one would be if it linked up to something like Twitter in an enterprise setting so that the post would generate a twittergram. alternatively have a discussion with your IT department about using safari for Windows or Firefox - both excellent browsers with inbuilt RSS readers.

I'd also like to think that organisations might have two uses for wikis - one for collaboration and one for knowledge management - one to look at for the future.

Twitter and the enterprise

As regular readers of the blog will be aware, I have a regular link to the people of Commoncraft and their useful videos/animations that explain wittily some of the products involved in Web 2.0.

Well they have now done a video on twitter which is a form of micro-blogging. It basically asks people what they are doing now in 140 words.


I have been using Twitter now for about 4 months and use it to update friends what I'm up to. I'm also interested in what it might do within an enterprise setting. Imagine, what it might do - telling people where you are - if you are available to be disturbed or not or even if you are out of the office. Of course it might be of use to help you to connect to a group of people.

Jevon McDonald has recently commented on Twitter in the Enterprise and I've got doubts that at present it will work in enterprises that have only just started to implement wikis and blogs.

At the end of the day it is about demonstrating how a tool helps productivity. I think that a variant of it will exist in the enterprise and will become ubiquitous and that the I'm out of office message via Outlook will be somewhat outdated. Here are some other benefits to my mind

• If you state that you are working on a widget, then colleagues in your network may be able to help
• You could post a help message to your network.
• Awareness of others ongoing work
• Very low barriers to entry
• The system might be able to save these tweets and rank the questions and answers in a form of low tech knowledge management. I understand that IBM is developing an enterprise Twitter called Blue Twit which is getting some traction though it is in it's early days.
  

However, a bit like SMS and Novocaine the law of unintended consequences will apply and someone will think of a different but radical use that none of us who are keen on KM or E 2.0 have yet considered