Weblogs aka "Blogs"

History

Weblogs are a very wide-spread format of social software. Casarez et al. (2009) reports that the name has been traced back to the early 1990s and a community of surfers who started to write down and publish (log) their surf highlights on the internet(web) (p. 30). Though the first weblogs appeared in the internet years before anyone talked of Web 2.0 the format only became widely adopted when technological advances (like online WYSIWYG editors) enabled people to set up a blog and publish posts easily.

Definition & Description

“The term web-log, or blog, [...] refers to a simple webpage consisting of brief paragraphs of opinion, information, personal diary entries or links, called posts, arranged chronologically with the most recent first, in the style of an online journal” (Doctorow et al. as cited in Anderson 2007, p. 7). To the given characteristics in the definition, one should add, that a blog is publicly available, may concentrate on a certain topic of interest and that new article are posted on a more or less regular basis. All posts are archived in reference to their publishing date and each post has a permanent link which enables people to access it directly without having to crawl through the whole website or blog archive. The CMS report (2009) stresses that blog posts are mainly informal and personal with a sense of immediacy; informal due to an absence of control and structure, personal because of a diary like style and use and a sense of immediacy since ideas, opinions and knowledge are shared in an ad-hoc way (p. 18).

Social

The most obvious social feature of blogs is the possibility to comment on a blog post. It enables readers to give direct feedback and discuss the content of a blog post directly underneath it and sometimes long conversations between the author and the readers arise. While usually commenting is allowed for anybody anonymously there are some blogs who require registration and very few which have it disabled completely. In the end of the 1990s when the weblog community was still small it was common to display a list of the blogs one followed in the sidebar of one’s personal blog. This list was called “blogroll” and is still used today but rather as a means to show recognition and respect towards other bloggers (KoopTech 2009, p. 196). The blogroll hence contributes to establish and deepen relationships between bloggers. Another key social feature of blogs is the trackback function. The trackback function recognizes when a post contains a link to another blog. It then sends the original blog a snippet of what has been said about it along with the link to the post containing the reference. The snippet and the link are then displayed under the original blog post so that everyone can see where else in the internet the blog post has been discussed (CMS 2009, p.19). A similar functionality is provided by pingbacks but instead of sending a snippet and a link they just ping all blogs referred to in a post. Thus a blogger will be notified that and where his blog post has been discussed but has to visit the website to see what has been said about it. Pingbacks, trackbacks and comments serve as major motivation for bloggers to keep on writing and posting. A key factor here is that people who are blogging do this voluntarily mostly about a topic that really matters to them. Being able to share their experiences, knowledge, passions and hobbies with similar interested persons provides major fulfillment for most bloggers. Recognition and social awareness are some of the major success factors for social software in general (cp. KoopTech 2009). Over time these social features of weblogs lead to the establishment of informal social networks and the worldwide network of blogs which has grown immensely over time is usually referred to as the “blogosphere.” So what started out as a format for personal publication has evolved to a communication medium on a worldwide scale or a “conversation ecosystem” as Casarez et al. (2009) call it (p.43).

Enabler

An important factor for keeping the conversation going in the blogosphere is the ability to search blogs. Traditional search engines such as Google or Yahoo can help but are not optimal for blogs as they only scan websites for new content every once in a while. As a consequence special blog-search-engines like Technocrati evolved who approached the importance of currency in weblog search results by taking part in a so called pinging scheme. Involved in this scheme are blog-search-engines, ping-serves and blogs. When a new post is published on a blog the blog software sends a ping to one of the ping-servers who adds the information about the updated blog into a list. This list is frequently checked by the blog-search-engines to identify which posts they have to scan and index. The pinging scheme helps to circumvent the “limited reliance of polling” and significantly reduced the “latency in the transport of stories” (Casarez et al. 2009, p.32). Critical to the success of blogs is the RSS technology. Having to keep up manually with every blog by entering the URL and checking whether something new has been written would be a very time consuming process even for an just averagely interested consumer of blog posts. The solution to that matter lies in the RSS technology. RSS which stands for Really Simple Syndication and the competing standard “Atom” enable people to subscribe to a blog and getting new posts delivered to them instead of having to check blogs for updates manually. The only requirement for subscribing to a blog is the use of an aggregator-application. There are various programs available ranging from dedicated online (Google Reader) and offline variants to standard Email Clients with built in RSS aggregation capability (Mircorsoft Outlook). Once subscribed to a Blog the aggregator application will check for updates of the blogs RSS-Feed which is an advertised X Markup Language file (XML; structured text file) containing recent post and their respective time stamps. RSS is a key technology in the attempts to control information overload. It is the basis of a paradigm shift in online communication, away from push-technologies like email towards pull technologies, which give users the ability to choose what they want to read and what not. RSS evolved with blogs but is used by all kinds of social software nowadays.

Enterprise considerations

What has been said for Wikipedia in terms of scale equally applies to the blogosphere for blogs. One cannot take the example of the interconnectivity of blogs in the open web and assume that blogs will be equally successful in an enterprise deployment. The gigantic number of people in the internet provides an audience for almost any topic whereas the audience in a company is limited. Nevertheless it is valuable to explore the possibilities a blog offers in terms of making knowledge shareable and creating new connections between employees.

Social Software Map

The idea of weblogs is easy publishing and discussion of content online. There is a wide range in the use of blogs but from diary like posts about everyday life to tech talk about programming languages all blogs have in common that there is an author expressing himself or herself and being answerable for what is been published. A blog ties information to a person who sometimes are using their blog just to promote themselves so it is communicating and sharing identity and information. Thus blogs are bordering on fields four, five, eight and nine as can be seen here:

Wikis

History

The idea behind wikis was developed long before social software was coined. In 1994 Ward Cunningham published the WikiWikiWeb, a website on which anybody could easily create and edit pages without having to know hypertext markup language [HTML] (Casarez, Cripe, & Weckerle, 2009, p. 39). Following his programming principle of trying to create the simplest thing that could possibly work he had created a software format which would enable the creation of the world’s biggest encyclopedia and one of the 10th most frequented websites in the internet: Wikipedia.org (cp. Alexa 2009).

Definition & Description

A short definition for a wiki is given by Newman & Thomas who state that “a wiki is a system of web pages that can be easily created, edited and viewed” (Newman & Thomas, 2008, p. 180). With this definition they emphasize the easiness in using a wiki and thus contrast the process of creating and editing a wiki page to creating or editing a page the traditional way. Before the emergence of wikis, an author always had to create or make changes locally on his computer writing websites in HTML and then upload the files onto a web-server. Another differentiator of wikis towards traditional websites is that anybody can edit them making a wiki a platform for collaboration as the following definition highlights: “A wiki is web-based software that allows all viewers of a page to change the content by editing the page online in a browser. This makes wiki a simple and easy to use platform for cooperative work on text and hypertexts” (Ebersbach, Glaser, & Heigl, 2008, p. 12). In this way, a wiki basically is an accumulation of interlinked pages (or articles) within a website. The strength of a wiki lies as indicated by Newman & Thomas (2009) lies in the low effort and minimal technical requirements to create and edit pages and the lack of access restrictions which in combination leads to a great mass of potential editors and viewers. Usually a wiki has a certain topic or purpose which in the case of Wikipedia is very general (store and make accessible the knowledge of the world) but can be more narrow like for wikitravel.org which provides information about holiday destinations and recipeswiki.org which is about sharing recipes. In contrast to traditional websites, which had a taxonomic structure and a hierarchical navigation, the structure of a wiki is non15 linear. Users navigate through a wiki using the integrated search function and by clicking on highlighted words within articles which are linked to other wiki-pages. An exception to the non-linear navigation is made for a set of special pages which have direct links that are always visible in the navigation bar of the wiki. This set usually contains a search page, a recent changes page, a help page and a so called sandbox which is an editing space for learning how to create and edit pages (Ebersbach, Glaser, & Heigl, 2008, p. 20).

Social

With its concept of free read and write access for anyone even anonymously the very idea of a wiki is social. Also the underlying philosophy which Casarez et al. (2009) identify as “to favor simplicity and remove all barriers to contribute” (p. 40) is based on the idea of enabling people to share their knowledge. Very social features of wikis are meta-talk and discussion pages. If there are conflicting views about the content of a wiki page they can be discussed and resolved in the attached discussion page. As wikis focus on information and lack the ability for users to display themselves, it could be argued that they are less social then weblogs or social networking services but any increase in contribution barriers like a mandatory registration process for example would go against the fundamental ideas of a wiki and consequently undermine its social nature.

Enablers

As cross links between wiki pages are a core feature of a wiki and besides search act as the main function for navigation creators and editors of wiki pages are encouraged to make heavy use of them. To support this, the creation of links is facilitated by the wiki’s ability to automatically create a link for any word set in squared brackets (standard wiki text syntax) to a page with the same title or if such a page does not exist it will creates a new page with title (CMS, 2009, p. 22). While wiki text was already an enormous improvement in terms of usability and simplicity compared to HTML the emergence of What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) editors gave another boost to wiki use. In such an editor people can edit texts in window with a simple text editor and do not have to rely on any special syntax any more. With this editor, really anybody who has used a computer before can edit, structure and layout a wiki page. Even the creation of tables, which formerly demanded extensive knowledge of wiki markup language is now possible for unskilled users. Maybe the most important features beside the core 16 functionality of a wiki are related to change monitoring. Because everybody can edit the content of a page it is impossible for editors and users to keep track of changes manually. Choate (2005) points out that wikis have automatic version control and a repository service which saves older versions when a page is edited to deal with this problem. On the history page which is attached to each wiki page any user can see the different versions of the page. With the rollback function the user can review old versions and with the compare functions he or she can see two page versions side by side with a color highlighting of the changes. In addition to version control, change notifications support users in monitoring changes. On a general level changes can be seen on the recent change page but wikis also offer the possibility to watch a certain page, meaning that one will be notified if changes are made on a particular page. There a different ways of being notified from a personal watch list, where changes of all monitored pages appear, to email notifications and Really Simple Syndication feeds (RSS feeds will be explained under Weblogs). Good wikis can distinguish between minor changes like typos and substantial changes and they also have a “patrolled”- function, which shows that a page has been checked for mistakes by a person already. Other factorsf which are emphasized in the CMS report (2009) include the possibility to create simple templates for wiki-pages, the automatic generation of a list with incoming links, the ability to create a wiki page by sending an email to the wiki system (website), the lack of content management workflows and the ability to export wiki pages as pdfor word documents.

Enterprise considerations

To prove the power of wikis people usually and rightly refer to Wikipedia. It is important though, that Wikipedia’s success is due to the conditions in the environment of the (public) internet. Wikis in the open web have a massive potential user group that include everybody on the world who has internet access. Still, most of the set up wikis in the internet remain unused with Wikipedia being the exception to the rule. It seems that Wikipedia with its broad and appealing purpose attracted the critical mass of contributors in order to take off. Nevertheless the active participation is reported to be less than one percent of the whole audience with an elite group of 100 hundred power contributors at the core, about 4000 other active and 80 000 regular contributors around that (Casarez et al. 2009, p. 38f.). The use of wikis within enterprises has different conditions and requirements. While the number of participants is limited to the number of employees, companies have more options to promote wiki use and can incorporate them into the everyday work processes of employees. In order to avoid organizational chaos, which may arise due to the ad-hoc structure of wikis companies should provide training, governance and stewardship (CMS 2009, p. 30). In contrast to open wikis companies will want a certain degree of hierarchy within a wiki with different workspaces, authentication and rights management.

Wikis in the Social Software Map

A wiki is platform for collaboration which provides users with the ability to share their knowledge. The social operations involved are collaborating and sharing and the content is mainly information. A wiki can be used to share files by attaching them to a wiki page but this is rather an additional feature. Identity and communication have no to very little significance with wikis.

We live in a complex world (Thesis introduction)

In fact we live in a very complex and exponentially more complex becoming world. Looking back in time of mankind one sees that on the macro level all started out fairly slow. When our predecessors the Neanderthal were around they hardly met any others of their kind except their group (family) members. It took tens of thousands of years until there were humans who settled down and formed steady and slightly bigger communities. The rise of the first civilizations with beyond-local trade is a recent event in humankind’s history. It is only since about 500 years, a blink in our species history, that humans know what the world actually looks like in terms of form and continents.

True international interconnectivity and the resulting complexity on the world-level began after the industrial revolution with first steam and later diesel run boats and trains. Cars and planes followed and today we live in a world where you can reach any place on the planet within three days. So on one hand innovations in mobility drive complexity by adding connections between humans all around the globe while on the other hand this trend was accompanied (interestingly also pretty accurately in time) from the very beginning with the evolution of human communication. Starting off just with just body language and simple sounds mankind has taken several significant steps in the development of communication namely: Speech (language), scripture, letterpress and telecommunication (from the telegraph to the internet). What becomes evident is the rapid increase of overall complexity within the last 300, 100 and 20 years. Increased mobility, communication and population growth are driving the complexity of worldwide human interaction on an exponentially incrementing curve (Klotz).

All organizations and especially companies are facing this complexity, summarized under the term globalization, being in competition with firms- and having customers from all over the world. Organizations have to keep up, change and adapt to meet the exigencies of our complex world. A lot of companies fail or struggle at doing so clinging to traditional organization-paradigms, culture and technology.

In the opinion of the author they are not only missing a chance but acting negligent and will eventually be pushed out of their markets unless they change their course and consider acting upon what has been discussed in the field of Enterprise 2.0. 2 The term Enterprise 2.0 relates to the term used for the second phase of the Internet evolution: Web 2.0 with its most prominent examples Wikipedia, Facebook and Twitter. These examples have shown what power lies in the interlinking of great masses of people. Enterprise 2.0 incorporates using Web 2.0 concepts (blogs, tagging, wikis, etc.) and technology but goes beyond that.

The law of requisite variety says: The larger the variety of actions available to a control system, the larger the variety of perturbations it is able to compensate (Heylighen & Joslyn, 2001). Broken down for the business world this means that the more flexible a company is, the higher is its’ chance of succeeding in a complex world with turbulent markets. The goal is to have a company which is set up in a way so that flexible competence networks (of persons, resources and technology) can emerge, that are able to respond quickly to changing conditions in the markets and thus make the company get ahead of its’ competitors.

At the core of these networks are employees who have to be transparently interlinked and given a platform on which they can freely collaborate in order to leverage their collective intelligence. In this respect, social software opens new opportunities where traditional communication technologies like telephone and email have shown their limits. Social software is not an entirely new phenomenon but the use of social software in enterprises is a recent development. Social software promises to unleash employee potential in a way it has unleashed the potential of internet users to collaboratively create the world’s biggest encyclopedia: Wikipedia.

However when companies consider implementing social software they do not have a solid basis on which to compare social software products in order to find the right tool for their specific needs. Especially the emergent social software suites which try to combine all the functionality of social software, based on their background, have strength and weaknesses in different areas. This is where this thesis is attempted to provide some theoretical groundwork by proposing and pre-testing a set of application fields for social software suites within companies.

The result a comparison of leading social software suites in different business relevant use-cases and categories can be found on the website www.socialsoftwarematrix.org!

Enterprise 2.0 - Social Software Classification

All those charts about social software just didnt seem right to me so I created my own. Check it out:

This charts classifies social software according to its focus in terms of social mode (sharing, collaborating & communicating), content (Identity, Information, Files) and action (the golden words).

The y-axis of the chart is interesting. It kind of resembles turnover or currency of content in the different social software formats... the "live" factor so to say; Realtime for chat, Almost realtime for Twitter, quite current for networking (status updates), almost current for blogs, and not very current for the rest...

What do you think about this chart? Give me your feedback!

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The roots of social software

Social Software Predecessors

As Koch (2008) points out, the roots of social software go back into the 1940s when Vannevar Bush developed the concept of “Memex” an information system that was designed to support the human mind in its capacity to make associations (p. 38). Though “Memex” was a technical utopia at the time it has inspired many software architects and some of its principles have resulted into actual technologies like hypertext, which is the basis of internet websites (cp. HTML; Muenz, n.d.).

In his blog post about the evolution of social software Allen (2004) reports that the first implementation of collaborative software took place in the 1970s when major US American companies (IBM, AT&T) as well as state agencies initiated a project called Electronic Information Exchange Systems (EIES) which had the mission to build the first office automation tools. In the 1980s these kind of collaborative tools were enhanced to support group work and consequently referred to as “Groupware”.

Scientists with backgrounds in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and Information systems (IS) were interested in this new kinds of technologies and how they affected work-processes but not content with the term “Groupware” for research so they united under the name and research field of Computer-Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW) (Allen, 2004 “1970s Electronic Information Exchange Systems”). The relevant theoretical concepts and results of CSCW for Social Software Suites will be discussed in (REFERENCE). For now it is sufficient to point out the paradigm shift and the new challenges that arose with the emergence of Groupware. As Marca and Book declared in 1992 Groupware was not an evolutionary step in the history of Information Technology but

“a conceptual shift a shift in our understanding. The traditional computing paradigm sees a computer as a tool for manipulating and exchanging data. The Groupware paradigm, on the other hand views the computer as a shared space in which people collaborate; a clear shift in the relationship of people and information”

(Marca & Book, as cited in Koch, 2008, p.40). Koch adds that the combination of the social component (group) to the human-computer interaction increased the complexity of software immensely and has resulted in many failures. The key to a successful implementation of collaborative software is the integration of the social system and the technical system but it is very hard to achieve because social, political, organizational and motivational issues play a major role and have to be managed carefully.

The most successful groupware has been Email. It’s success is due to its similarity to traditional mail which persons had been used to before and its direct value to each individual user which ensured a high participation rate from the very beginning up to the point where it was no longer possible to avoid email as a medium.

Though originally being defined very broadly, Groupware today is often equalized with Microsoft Outlook/Exchange (LOTUS Notes) functionality like email, shared calendar and tasks. In contrast to Groupware which was developed specifically for group collaboration within companies social software emerged in the open web with a focus on the individual user.

While in Groupware a certain number of people is directed (top-down) to collaborate for a limited period of time, an unlimited number of people is voluntarily (bottom-up) participating in an ongoing conversation (e.g. Blogosphere) or collaboration (e.g. Wikipedia) for an unlimited period of time in social software.

Thus it makes sense to differentiate between social software and groupware like on the chart below that displays Groupware and Social Software formats & functionality:

Science can be fun!

You just need the right hypothesis:


see more Fail Blog

What is Web 2.0?

What is Web 2.0?

Understanding Enterprise 2.0 asks for having understood Web 2.0. So what is Web 2.0? A Google search on the question returns 348.000.000 (348 million) results in a quarter of a second (16.09.2009). The first one is the Wikipedia article of Web 2.0 including more than four attempts to define “the” concept behind the term and a reference to an interview of the inventor of the World Wide Web Tim Berners-Lee calling it a “piece of jargon” (Berners-Lee, 2006). The second search result on Google points to the online white paper “What is Web 2.0” by Tim O’Reilly, the third is a blog post discussing the term and the fourth one are two YouTube videos trying to explain it.

This Google search is paradoxically pointing at what Web 2.0 is while clearly pointing out what makes it hard to understand what is meant by it. The problem: Web 2.0 as a term is extremely famous and used extensively in a variety of context without being clearly defined. Though having a rather slow start (the term was coined by Darcy DiNucci in 1999) it took off after when in 2004 O’Reily Media, John Batelle and CMP announced their summit about the future of the internet as the “Web 2.0 conference”. Of course the hosts had no idea they were naming the “next big thing in the computer industry” and merely trying to show their trust into the future of the internet after the burst of the dot-com bubble (Tim O’Reilly in the foreword to Shuen, 2008) but the timing seemed just right so when the expression had gotten attention it spread around quickly. Too quickly for the large number of critics like Tim Burners-Lee who turned it down as a buzzword and mere marketing slang (Berners-Lee, 2006 , Brodkin,2007).

The major critique which is voiced by critics is relating to the expression is pointing at the fact that there has not been a significant change in technologies or software that is used to access the Internet. This is correct, as still HTTP, HTML and web browsers are used to access websites (Newman, Thomas 2009) but missing the point as Web 2.0 supporter try to make clear. They argue that Web 2.0 is not primarily concerned about technological advances but refers to the change in how people use the Internet: The change from merely consuming content to actively participating in a worldwide communication process by creating, editing and sharing content with millions of others users (Laudon, Traver 2008). While in the Web 1.0 times the internet was a platform where only companies and IT savvy people were able to interact or present themselves, today this is possible for everyone without having programming skills (Huber 2006).

The internet may have been designed from the start to be as interactive as it is today but its' availability, technologies and services needed to mature to a point where a critical mass of people was able and willing to act upon it. Credit has to be given at this point to the internet bubble which while marking the starting point for serious financial recesses also had positive effects. In the early 2000s huge investments were made into the infrastructure of the internet. With it, broadband became widely available, E-Commerce became a reality and Computer Security enhanced providing the ground for the blossoming of Web 2.0 (Newman, Thomas 2009).

Coming back to the initial search conducted to find out what is Web 2.0. With Wikipedia, a Blog and YouTube being the top Google search results they include already some of the most prominent examples of Web 2.0. These websites symbolize the rise of Social Media Websites which operate as platforms for user-interaction and are driven by user-generated-content. Along with social networking (community) websites like Facebook and MySpace (Flickr) they are the figureheads of the “new” Internet and provide a feeling for what Web 2.0 is. A feeling though is not sufficient to fully understand Web 2.0 and consequently not enough to understand the concept of Enterprise 2.0. Thus the work will give a broader perspective on Web 2.0 before going into social software which is at the core of both concepts.

Web 2.0 Definition and Concepts

Following the rise of the meme "Web 2.0" to the point where it was used as a for all kinds of marketing activities without an understanding of what it was supposed to mean (O’Reilly 2005) Tim O’Reilly tried to formalize the term by summarizing the principles that were driving the online services that survived the dot-com burst. These principles were discussed intensively but people were not satisfied with them as they did not provide a concise definition so in December 2006 he published an actual definition of Web 2.0:

"Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as a platform, and an attempt to understand the rules of this platform. Chief among those rules is: Build application that harness network effects to get better the more people use them" (O’Reilly 2006)

and he adds in the blog post: “think deeply about the way the internet works and build systems and applications that use it more richly, freed from the constraints of the PC era-thinking. With that he hints at using open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and opening data and services for re-use of other but at the core of his definition is the architecture of participation he already put forward the Web 2.0 conference (O’Reilly, 2004). This architecture of participation on a basic level refers to the simple yet so important issue of usability. On a more sophisticated level it occurs when a service gets better just by using it. Which seems to be just a side effect for the user is caused by the very design of the system (Anderson 2007). Examples for architectures of participation on a sophisticated system design level include Amazons recommendations and Google search.

Closely related to the architecture of participation is the network effect that O’Reilly mentions in his Web 2.0 definition (O’Reilly 2006). The network effect is an economic term that describes how a product’s value increases in a network as the number of users increases (Melbourne Business School 2009). A standard example for the network effect is a telephone network. When there is only one person in the network it has no value but with each person who joins the value increases. This effect can be applied to social software formats like Blogs and Wikis as well as Social Networking, Video sharing or Bookmarking sites. At the beginning they are empty and useless but the more people fill them with content the richer the experience becomes for everybody.

According to O’Reilly Web 2.0 services understand the web as a platform and thus are solely internet-based which makes them accessible from any device with internet access. Web 2.0 services usually offer a platform for individuals to engage. The focus is on benefit for the individual user.

As mentioned before there are numerous other ways to approach Web 2.0. Some highlight technical aspects, some stress interactivity and others say it’s just AJAX. This work will go with Amy Shuen (2008) who states:

"You don’t have to be a technologist to understand Web 2.0. It’s not about the underlying technology but about the new ways it enables large numbers of people to come together to work, share and build"

This is why it will discover how one can work, share and build with Social Software in Web and Enterprise 2.0.