Community Services for Enterprise Blognets.
Community Services for Enterprise Blognets
While your firewall protects you from intrusion, it also cripples the community software that keeps the blogosphere hopping. Here’s are some of the services you might want to bring inside to help your blognets grow and prosper. The list grows, changes, and is not complete.
I’ve grouped these services, arbitrarily, into three categories: Discovery, Reading, and Writing. Discovery services help you find stuff and navigate, and understand blognets and the blogosphere as a whole. Reading services help you keep up with relevant information. Writing helps you author and publish. Basic blogging service is extra.
In your workplace:
- Which 3 are mandatory for a blognet pilot?
- What risks do you assume if you don’t provide these services?
- Which services might you be better off operating in support of public employee and customer weblogs, even though they are the open blogosphere’s services?
- What policy and IT operations issues do these services raise?
| Service | Description |
| Discovery | |
| Intranet search | Covering the intranet and DMZ, your private search engine must update its index frequently. Best is if they re-index within a few minutes of fan update server being pinged. Engines which work well in public, because they use hypertext links to establish relevance, may not work as well in the intranet, where there are fewer links or other cues. For example, the Google appliance. |
| Location tagging and search service | Find blogs physically near me; find posts related to a location or system. For example, Geourl.org. |
| Referral logs | Who’s sending traffic to me? It’s sometimes useful to understand your readership. Other times you discover people with similar interests. |
| Weblog neighborhood | Who is like me? Who writes about things like me? Who else is cited like me? For example, Technorati link cosmos. |
| Topic service | Find posts related to this one within my weblog, across the intranet, and perhaps across a collection of partner blognets. See K-collector and Easy News Topics. |
| Realspace | Generate live meetings using information from blogspace. For example, Meetup or Evite. |
| Random walk | Manufacture serendipity. Sample the intranet, get a bigger picture. See also wanderlust. |
| Directory | So you have an employee directory, maybe even a yellow pages for services and departments. How about extending the yellow pages to people, by topic, updated automatically? For example, see blogarama, Eatonweb, Oblix. |
| Advertising | Text ads for internal announcements. Think of it as the new bulletin board. |
| Cemetery | A directory of abandoned weblogs, because of personnel actions, lack of interest, or because their focus or relationship is completed. See Fucked Weblog. |
| Product or object watch | Analyze weblogs for well-understood references, store and analyze the results, and notify subscribers. For example, seeing what books people mention in their weblogs. Or people. Or competitor products. |
| Peopleroll and social network | I’m sharing some of my friends, and friends of friends. See FOAF, Friendster, Ryze. |
| Reading | |
| RSS portals | server side directories of RSS feeds, aggregation and browser presentation of those feeds |
| Updates | What’s new? A central service that writing tools notify when a blog is updated. Sometimes called a “ping service”. Like weblogs.com and blo.gs. |
| Blogroll & WebRing services | May be linked to enterprise directory services, the better to provide automatic maintenance of blogrolls that match the formal org chart. Of more value, giving users the ability to create their own blogrolls. This reveals informal and temporary social networks. Blogrolling.com is an example. |
| Blog distribution gateway | Distributes blog posts by email, SMS or other channels. |
| Buzz watcher | What’s hot on the intranet? What’s hot in my circle? Services that answer this include Blogpulse, DayPop News Burst, Popdex, and Blogdex |
| News Readers and Aggregators | Aggregators collect a user’s selection of RSS feeds, keeping them current, formating them for reading, and making them available for users to cross-post. News readers do the same thing, except from a user’s desktop. Server side aggregators have the effect of concentrating traffic (they pick an RSS feed only once, instead of each user picking it up) so publishers don’t experience “slashdot effects”. They also hide the level of attention from publishers, useful if the publisher is a competitor or industry insider. Syndic8 is an example. |
| Re-aggregation service | These services combine content from multiple sources into a more focused feed. This can be fully automated or humans may approve contributions to a feed. Moreover is an example. |
| Machine translation | Do you span countries? Machine translations of posts and RSS feeds helps people get the gist of what their colleagues write. Systrans is an example. |
| Writing | |
| Posting Gateways | Use these services to write to your weblog using non-browser devices or software. Post from voicemail, your phone’s SMS/MMS, email, calendar, or IM. |
| Comment Service | Manages posted comments like the blog server manages weblog posts. |
| Conversation Threading | Tracks the flow of conversation across weblogs using methods like trackback and link analysis. |
| Render Services | These convert blog posts to RSS, and to document formats like PowerPoint .ppt, Flash .swf, Adobe Acrobat .pdf, or Microsoft Word .doc. |
| Template Farm, Widget Library | Stores styles, templates, graphics and other ways to customize the look and feel of your blog. |
| Weblog Medic | Checks your blog for dead links, broken images, speed, accessibility, valid RSS and html, language encoding, etc. For example, BlogCheckup. |
| Blog Fodder | Actively provoke blogging by suggesting themes or topics. For example, blogfodder and The Friday Five. |
[a klog apart]
[a klog apart]