Wall Street Journal: Playing Well With Others

June 18 2007

The Wall Street Journal today featured several articles about social computing, including an overview of IBM's use of Web 2.0 technologies:

Not at IBM. Despite its century-old roots and button-down East Coast tradition, IBM has leapt to Web 2.0 -- the latest incarnation of the Internet, in which user-generated content is considered as valuable as content written by pros or company officials.

At IBM, nobody is allowed to be anonymous online. And it's easy for anyone to send someone's superior evidence of anything they regard as inappropriate. As a result, the profanity-laced flame wars that happen on many public sites don't occur within IBM's firewalls. Employees online can't disparage competitors or reveal customer names without permission.

"Any employee can have a blog, a wiki or a podcast," says Ethan McCarty, editor in chief of w3, IBM's constantly updated daily online newsletter, which most employees keep on their home page. ...

John Rooney, manager of innovation programs for IBM's chief information officer, says IBM decided it needed to adopt social-networking technology in part because "five years ago there was a concern that IBM wasn't attracting the best technical talent" from colleges and grad schools. So the company started assigning interns to making self-publishing blogging software that could contain content within IBM's walls. Originally the software was meant only for internal use, but it's now being adapted for sale to customers.
Link: Wall Street Journal: Playing Well With Others >

Ed Brill | Highland Park, IL USA Category:  IBM  Add/View Comments [14]

Post a Comment

  1. 1  Jeff Picco  | 6/19/2007 11:04:25 AM

    We are getting requests for internal blogs / wikis, but are having to answer ROI questions before we can really adopt them. How have others been able to prove the worth of blogs / wikis?

    The sharing of knowledge sounds great, but I believe the fear that not everyone can play nice is out there. Thus we are being asked all the typical questions used to delay projects.

  1. 2  Keith Brooks http://kbmsg.blogspot.com | 6/19/2007 11:44:50 AM

    If you are on 7.02 it is included with the templates.

    So free it is.

    Of course balance load and cluster your app servers.

    :-)

  1. 3  Charles Robinson http://cubert-codepoet.blogspot.com | 6/19/2007 1:24:14 PM

    @2 - There's a wiki template with Domino 7.0.2?

  1. 4  Bill Brown  | 6/19/2007 2:44:20 PM

    @3 not in the box with 702, but there's an OpenNTF project for one: { Link }

  1. 5  Keith Brooks http://kbmsg.blogspot.com | 6/19/2007 4:21:05 PM

    My apologies, thanks Bill for fixing my oversight.

  1. 6  Steve Castledine http://www.stevecastledine.com | 6/19/2007 5:20:46 PM

    Technically you could setup a wiki with the blog template with 7.0.2 - depends on how far you want to define a wiki.

    If you want to define it as being able to edit content online by a wide range of authors (including anonymous) then thats possible.

  1. 7  Charles Robinson http://cubert-codepoet.blogspot.com | 6/19/2007 7:32:00 PM

    @4 - I'm aware of DominoWiki, I was just confused when Keith said Domino 7.0.2 came with one. :-)

    @6 - I could technically do that with a regular old document library, too. I hadn't heard of anything being marketed as a wiki template with Domino yet, so I wanted to make sure I hadn't missed anything.

  1. 8  Jeff Picco  | 6/20/2007 10:45:30 AM

    I want a template that allows the contributor to choose how people interact with the document. For instance, I might create a new page and want a small group of people to do wiki functions on it while another group I only want them to be able to comment on it as in a blog.

    Why should I be limited to using only wiki or only blog technology? Why do I need an entire place in Quickr just for a blog. Seems so limiting.

  1. 9  Nathan T. Freeman http://nathan.lotus911.com | 6/20/2007 12:33:40 PM

    @8 - That sounds like a good template project.

    But "Why do I need an entire place in Quickr just for a blog." A "entire place?" Setting up a place in Quickr takes about 30 seconds. And it generates a sensible URL for you automatically. It pretty much works like Blogger. So why would you regard that as a limitation?

    Let's note that other templates have blog-like features.

  1. 10  Jeff Picco  | 6/20/2007 1:21:52 PM

    @9 - It seems like a usability limitation to me. I rather see the technology blended in to a QP place I'm using. Let's say you and I create a place to talk about template development. In that place, we will have attachments, discussions, etc. Well, there will be natural responses to our entries that will lend themselves to blog and or wiki technology. Today, we would have to go to another place in order to do that. Well, since the doc that we want to respond to like a blog or edit like a wiki is not in a blog / wiki placetype, I'm now limited.

    Did that make sense? Sorry - I'm on a conf call while typing this :-)

  1. 11  Steve Castledine http://www.stevecastledine.com | 6/20/2007 1:31:54 PM

    @8 - the 7.0.2 blog template allows this. "blikis" interest me greatly.

  1. 12  Jeff Picco  | 6/20/2007 1:38:38 PM

    @9 - Blikis. I love that. I just learned a new word.

    We rolled out the 7.0.2 blog and even applied a different style sheet to it. Sadly, it died out for various reasons.

  1. 13  Nathan T. Freeman http://nathan.lotus911.com | 6/20/2007 3:23:25 PM

    @10 - Well, first off, the Quickr templates are designed to be pretty easily modified.

    Second, I can create a wiki form on a blog template. I just tried it. It took about 5 minutes. It's literally point and click form construction. And I can see the "workflow" on the new form to allow anyone who can edit in the place to edit that document.

    I don't see how to turn on automatic revisioning in the Beta 3 version of this template, but it's clearly there.

    I think this stuff is going to turn out to be a lot more flexible than you're thinking it is right now.

  1. 14  Jeff Picco  | 6/20/2007 3:54:19 PM

    @13 - I believe it will become very flexible as well. Just want to make sure the idea is out there so one of you smart people can make it work.

    Like everyone, I'm having the daily battle against WSS, since it's been out for awhile and combines a lot of these features out of the box. So, I can't wait for GA of Quickr and just hope that it competes extremely well. I think the added place types from Rob will help a lot.

    Thanks