TechFold - Bold tech & web commentary

Bold tech & web commentary

TechFold is technology discussion, commentary, reviews, and opinions from well outside the valley. There's no koolaid to drink here, and TechFold is not in SL, or on Twitter.

Experiments in Corporate Intelligence: SunMeme

Sun Microsystems is if not unique then at least rare in the robustness of its internal blogging community, and the willingness of the corporate legal department to make that community public. Indeed, Sun has almost 5000 publicly readable blogs - from the CEO to the developers in the trenches, from all around the world.

I think its great - I’ve been a long term advocate of internal blogging and the knowledge sharing and growth spurs. There’s more though: a corporate blog community as robust as Sun’s presents a great opportunity for aggregation and memetic analysis: so, I copied and pasted TechWatching onto SunMeme.com and pointed the system to Sun’s blogosphere and let it off its leash.

So far its tracking 683 Sun blogs, of which its actively processing stories from the 182 most active. From what I can tell, it starting to produce some good output - story clusters building around the new UltraSparc processor, for instance, or a NetBeans talk that took place in SecondLife.

There are challenges in tackling the Sun blogosphere too, however; keyword analysis is difficult as some keywords (”java”) are omnipresent, and can’t be used to link together stories. I’m convinced that there’s workarounds though, and the deeper SunMeme gets into the Sun blogosphere, the better the output is looking.

Anyway, enjoy. And if you work at Sun, please feel free to share your thoughts!

memetrackers, sun sunmeme

Workblogging is not “more” work, just different

At work right now, one thing I’ve been working on is shifting my division to using blogs as an internal communication mechanism (vs. email, phone, etc.). I’ll write another post on the why later, but for right now I wanted to share a simple graphic that I’ve been using to refute a common “push back” on adding blogs to one’s communication toolbox. The objection is that blogs just provide “another thing” that employees need to be on top of - an addition to phone, email, voicemail, etc.

My refutation is that blogs don’t add to one’s workload (either writing them or reading) - they just change the venue in which that work takes place. The width of the column below represents 100% of your communications.

Prior to email it was 100% phone-based (ignoring face to face, physical mail, etc. for simplicity’s sake).
Sometime in the nineties, email will have spread through your workplace, shifting the venue of some portion of your communications away from the phone. That portion has likely grown over time, and for many people, the transition is not yet complete.
Now blogs will be carving out a slice of your communications too.
Note: the width of the column doesn’t change - just how its divided up.

This is, of course, a gross simplification (the width of the column has changed over time, for example), but I think it communicates the basic point regardless: that adding blogs to an internal communication mix does not have to be looked at as an onerous addition to one’s existing workload - instead its a complimentary communication channel.