I'll be showing how Attensa collaborates using Jive Software's Clearspace for cross functional projects. The presentation will be 4:48 (that's specific) on Thursday, September 6 at the Office 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. I've posted the Attensa presentation on SlideShare

I left Portland late Sunday night, or was it Monday morning? Anyway it was way dark thirty. I arrived in Boston at 11:00 am. I headed over to the Enterprise 2.0 Conference and sat down with CMP's Alex Dunne for this podcast interview. Excuse me if I sound rummy.

Andrew McAfee gave Enterprise 2.0 a report card at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference yesterday.

A - awareness of the concept
A- - Technologies
C - Communication of the results

And the professor has given us homework. He called on the industry to do a better job sharing best practices, applications and case studies. The Enterprise 2.0 Uncoalition might be just the forum to share the love.

In that spirit here's a start. We put this together for an enterprise customer who is using the Attensa Feed Server to improve corporate communications across their organization. I've blogged about this earlier in a series but here's the complete document.

Download Attensa's Feed Reading Best Practices

I'm in Boston for the Enterprise 2.0 Conference today. Got in Monday after taking the redeye from Portland. I sat down yesterday with Alex Dunn who is blogging and podcasting the conference for CMP. I'll post a link when the podcast is up.

Today is focused on connecting with the people who are driving the promise of connection, collaboration and change through Enterprise 2.0 technologies and tools.

It's the 40th anniversary of another big catalyst of connection, collaboration and change...the Summer of Love. In that spirit we are trying a new approach. We are quietly kicking off the Enterprise 2.0 Uncoalition today at the Enterprise 2.0 conference. Janet Johnson is blogging about it here.

The concept is to start a discussion and create the connections and integration points that will make Enterprise 2.0 technologies and products work together for real people. So customers can pick and choose, mix and match the best of breed products they need to solve their specific communication challenges.

Beneath the promise of Enterprise 2.0 apps things are missing.

Some of the obvious missing pieces are:

• The ability to securely and seamlessly move attachments from publishing platforms through feeds to desktop, web and mobile feed readers
• Consistent tagging across collaborative publishing and feed serving and reading platforms to make folksonomies and searching viable across tools
• Dealing with identity and security across apps - to many passwords...so little time.
• The ability to easily create custom feeds from blog and wiki apps that get the right information to the right people with no information overload or underload.

We've already started the conversation with Foldera and Jive and this is just the beginning. The are nearly 50 companies exhibiting at the conference.

Attensa will be exhibiting at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston June 18 - 21 in Boston. Here's CMP's official description of the conference.

"Enterprise 2.0 Conference provides thought leadership and instruction for forward-thinking IT and business professionals on the new Web 2.0 tools for the enterprise, the infrastructure required to support them and the cultural changes that must accompany them."

I think it might be closer to the Enterprise 2.0 version of Lucha Libre:

Monday features Harvard's Doctor Cerebro Andrew McAffee  versus Tigre Metalico Tom Davenport as they go mano a mano on the relevancy of Enterprise 2.0.

With nearly 50 exhibitors wrestling for attention the conference is destined to be the free fight.

The photos are from Malcomb Venville's amazing book Lucha Loco a striking collection of portraits and interviews of the real luchadores. Get this book. Your other coffee table books will tremble.

 Oh.... and get your tickets to the Enterprise 2.0 Conference here. You can get a free pass for the exhibits and a $200 discount on the conference when you use the priority code: MLQUEB48 to register. Tell them Attensa sent you.

Ephraim Schwartz has a thought provoking post - Dumbing down and smarting up via the Web - on his Reality Check blog.

He comments of the thinking of Marc Prensky who came up with the descriptors Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants (way back in 2001) to describe different approaches on how humans use technology to process information.

According to Prensky, Digital Natives are all "native speakers of the digital language of computers, video games and the Internet."

Digital Immigrants are "those of us who were not born into the digital world but have, at some later point in our lives, become fascinated by and adopted many of or most aspects of the new technology."

I believe this evolution is already well on its way in the workforce because it's generational. Look at how the newest information workers choose to work and the tools they choose when given the choice. They drive multi-tasking to an entirely new level using multiple IM chat sessions and collaborative workspaces (powered with RSS) to communicate and deliver  information where and when they need it.

They bring a new work ethic based on continuous partial attention that I believe increases productivity. They keep multiple dimensions of their tasks in in their peripheral vision and in their peripheral attention simultaneously. When these techniques are used to optimum advantage, opportunities are spotted more quickly, rapid responses seize theses opportunities and the power of collaboration is brought to bear on problem solving in a natural, free flowing way. 

When attention tools - the power of intelligent prioritization and the automatic discovery and sharing of critical business information are added to the mix -- there is real potential to unlock a new level of productivity.

Ephraim Schwartz has written a great overview of Attensa in InfoWorld based on interview with our co-founder and CTO, Eric Hayes . InfoWorld is featuring an enterprise startup a day in the month of May and we are delighted to be selected.

Here's the take away.

"Attensa's software works by pushing RSS or managed Web feeds to specific users and groups behind the firewall, allowing knowledge workers in the enterprise to cherry-pick just the info they want. On the back end, the Linux-based Attensa Feed Server gathers feeds in the background, and gives IT administrators control of where those feeds go. Meanwhile, on the client side, Attensa has software for Windows, Mac, and BlackBerry, plus plug-ins for Outlook, Lotus SameTime IM, and others. Conveniently, the server takes care of syncing, so that if a user reads something on a BlackBerry, that same item is marked as having been read in Outlook as well.

Behind this basic infrastructure is AttentionStream, the real substance of Attensa's IP. AttentionStream prioritizes content based on a user's behavior, pushing that information to the top of the reader. "AttentionStream has the ability to intelligently and automatically pull information that is important to the user when they want it and push away information that isn’t important when they don’t want it," Hayes says."

This occasionally crops up in our discussions with companies investigating Enterprise 2.0 technologies. In some corporations BLOG is four letter word conjuring up images of sociopathic rantings, and way too much time being devoted to cat pictures and reviews of LOST.

If you ask me, this paranoia boils down to fear of the unknown or maybe it's about lack or respect and lack of trust in employees to do the right things with the tools they have to work with. When you think about it, if you were inclined, you could do more damage to a company's reputation and morale with email and confidential attachments sent to the wrong people than you can with a secure internal blog post.

I'm not sure what drives this perception about blogs and I'm not the only one who has experienced this fear from corporate management. Six Apart's Anil Dash makes getting beyond fear of blogs a key message in his evangelism. The Burton Group's Mike Gotta has seen it and heard it too.  His take away is that companies need examples of how blogs can be used effectively to solve business and communication challenges.

I'm republishing the highlights from his post "Getting Over Fear of Blogs and including the list of blogging applications that make sense for business environments.

You can read Mike's complete post on Collaborative Thinking.

Mike takes it from here:

Regarding Web 2.0 and social software, I find that people are often captivated by the use of these concepts and tools in the consumer market. While some technologists are skeptical, there are also a growing number of people that are wondering how such practices and technologies could be applied internally and whether such use could bring about some degree of business transformation – especially in terms of leveraging worker know-how and collective insight.

The tone and emotion levels however get quite passionate however, when the topic of blogs comes up. There does seem to be agreement that public-facing blogs can have real business value from the perspective of marketing, PR, customer intimacy and community-outreach. That perspective however does not seem to transfer broadly when the conversation shifts to possible internal adoption of blogs. In fact, it is not uncommon to hear a range of opinions that could be represented by the following statements:

• Risk-related: “We’re afraid of what people will say.”
• Productivity-related: “We don’t want people wasting their time.”

Performance-related: “We don’t see the business value.”

The conversation often swings back to the Internet and how blogs are used as a public soapbox to express personal opinions and how bloggers add fuel to emotionally-charged debates on topics many organizations view as a workplace distraction (e.g., politics, sports, entertainment, religion, breaking news, etc.). A good number of people I’ve talked to feel that blogs introduce risk (e.g., hostile workplace), negatively impacts productivity and hinders overall performance of business processes.

I think part of the problem is due to a lack of examples of how blogs can be applied to solve the types of business challenges organizations face on a daily basis.

Internal Communication

There are many situations where organizations need to broadcast information to its workforce without the need for that information to be pushed to its workers in an intrusive manner (e.g., e-mail).

• A Human Resources department can leverage blog technology to continually keep employees updates on various benefit plans, awareness of enrollment dates, etc.
• CXO-level management can leverage blogs to informally communicate company issues related to markets, economics and its competition.
• Organizations can use blogs to communicate information to employees on the various community-outreach and social programs in need of volunteers.

Program / Project Management

Program management offices (PMO) and project management teams often establish operating environments where information may not always be captured and disseminated in a timely manner. The structure of these organizing bodies may challenge its ability to quickly respond, making it difficult to communicate credible and relevant information.

• A PMO blog could provide a journal of activities, issues and future actions that could be valuable not only to workers within the PMO but to those monitoring and tracking the PMO elsewhere in the organization
• A group blog for developers and quality assurance teams could act as a clearinghouse to voice design concerns, for developers to record and report findings or to capture/disseminate software build and fix notifications discovered during development or testing cycles (e.g., shift notes)
• PMO and project teams create a variety of guidelines, procedures and other types of documentation. While wikis are good vehicles for the collaborative work on the content itself, blogs can provide a platform for individuals to provide deeper personal commentary.

Community-building

Organizations have struggled to find common off-the-shelf tools that allow for the capture, dissemination and augmentation of information while also enabling broad participation and community interaction. Facilitating open communication is a key aspect for organizations interested in sharing know-how and creating effective community-building environments (e.g., knowledge management).

• Research organizations have long valued the importance of personal journals and lab notebooks to catalog observations and record insight. Blogs within such an environment not only are of benefit to those within such communities but enable others to “look over the shoulders” of those engaged in such activities.
• Government organizations can use blog systems to enable first responders to share insight and lessons-learned from on-the-job experiences
• Specialists in many different professions (e.g., utilization management nurses, fraud investigators, security experts, underwriters, engineers) can use blogs to more easily communicate methods and practices relevant to their work activities

Business process

A multitude of business activities include capture of unstructured information as part of processing a particular task. Many applications do not naturally handle the type of free-form commentary and annotation users would like to add to a transaction or append to a case file. There are other situations where applications need to deal with conversational information that are not well-supported by traditional application models (e.g., issue tracking, exception handling, problem resolution).

• A competitive intelligence process is often dependent on capturing field observations, rumors and collating information detected from various news sources. Blog systems can provide the platform the collecting and vetting this type of market monitoring, analysis, and opportunity/threat assessment.
• Certain support processes require workers to capture notes as part of their remote activity (e.g., field repair). Offline authoring tools (e.g., Microsoft Windows Live Writer) could be used to compose analysis on a worker’s laptop and then upload to a group blog when network connectivity is available. In other situations, certain work activities might include capture of notes into operational logs. Blog technology can enable capture of task-related notes inline with performance of that operational process.

OK, I'm back.

We use the same tools and techniques internally.

• Our CEO as a blog to share the big picture with Attensa employees
• Our marketing and development teams use secure blogs to keep each group informed on project status, customer wins and the buzz surrounding Attensa
• Our sales and marketing people share competitive insights on a secure blog.
• We've set up a secure blog with our PR and SEO teams to share strategies, metrics and status reports.

Analytics on the Attensa Feed Server gives insight into how this information flows through the organization and helps assess and identify the most effective channels for communicating specific information

Attensa tools make publishing to these internal blogs incredibly easy. I used one of the republishing tools in Attensa for Outlook to share Mike's post this morning. I scanned the headlines from his blog in the River of News. The title "Getting Over Fear of blogs" caught my eye. I hit the Attensa publish icon which launched Windows Live Writer and pre-populates a new  blog post with the all of the copy, links and images - all nicely formatted. I just select the blog I want to publish to from a list. I can easily edit and add context, categories, tags and then republish the post with a click. These tools make it incredibly easy to share these thoughts with everyone subscribing to the blog. 

For a technology with Simple for a middle name, users are baffled by how to create custom feeds and content. The new version of the Attensa Feed Server provides a very simple answer. Use your email client. Users can create and deliver custom feeds and articles as easily as writing and sending an email. Your feed can be shared on the server and team members with permission can contribute to feed using email. It's a great publishing/subscribe mash-up tool. Here's how it works: (but to really see it in action, request a Feed Server demo).

 Rod does it again. Here's a solid introduction on putting internal blogs to work.. With our RSS reader integration with Outlook and our development work on Notes and Sametime, why not have the feeds come to you instead of using a web based reader?

"Are you a CEO? Do you want you people to across silos? Do you want your engineers or your designers to know exactly what the sales people are asking them? Or better yet, do you want everyone in your company to have a deep understand of what your clients actually want, need and will pay money for?

Do you want your people to be personally motivated?

Has anything in your company taken off half as aggressively as blogs and social media have taken off in the open Internet?

Now I have a simple question for you. Do you know how to use blogs within your organization to help you get work done? There are plenty of blogs out there that can tell you how to use blogs as a PR and marketing tool to communicate with your clients. But, when people actually think about getting work done within the organization, not a lot has been written.

This post aims to tell you exactly what you need to do to use blogs efficiently within your organization.

Activity Centric Worksites

First, you do not need to buy a multi-million dollar system to get the benefits of Activity Centric Worksites. You can use a regular blogging platform, such as WordPress or MovableType. You will need to hire some consultants to make those consumer systems do the job for you. Total set up cost, in my experience, is $50K to $100K. Or you can spend about the same amount with a pre-built enterprise class system from companies like iUpload, Blogtronix or Traction Software.

The idea behind Activity Centric Worksites is to use blogging tools to facilitate focused business communication. Instead of using a blog as a tool for one person to broadcast their thoughts on “whatever”, use blogs as a platform to help people within your company communicate about what they are doing for work. To make it easy to frame the conversation, provide structure around simple concepts that make sense for your company.

If you are running a consulting company, you might have following Worksite types:
• Project Worksites - these are used to exchange information about a specific project
• Client Worksites - these are used to talk about a specific client
• People Worksites - these are like internal resumes that show who is working on what
• Practice Worksites - these are used to communicate amongst a whole team
• Focus Worksites - the only thing that resembles a consumer blog, these are written by a small group and are like internal e-journals dedicated to specific technical topics

Finding the Right Set of Worksite templates

Depending on what your company does, you are going to need a different list of Worksite templates. Ask yourself what do we talk about here? If you are a software company, you might have whole worksites dedicated to specific modules in the new release of your product. Instead of Practice Worksites, you might have a Release Worksite that coordinates information about each module within the release.

If you are a bank, you might have Clients, Products, Market Overviews, Projects, and People.

Start with Search

Most internet experiences start with someone going to Yahoo, Google, MSN or Baidu. They are all search sites. If you want your people to be productive, your main internal home page shouldn't be some waste of time portal. It should look like Google, and it should help people find the information they need.

Your People will Need Wizards to Help Create New Worksites

A Worksite is more than just a blog theme. For example, a Project Worksite should include a list of the people working on the project with links back to each person's People Worksite. The Project Worksite should probably also include a link to the Client Worksite.

To create a copy of a blank Project Worksite, you need to create a simple wizard that walks your employees through the process of creating a new site. You also need a system that has CMS capabilities which help deal with access control, user authentication, backup, audit trails of who read what, and given admin tools to support the re purposing of posts - write once, publish in many places.

Many to Many Communication

There are very few software systems out there that can even define the notion of a Worksite type, let alone give you the frame work to automate the creation of a new one. The only systems I know of today that can do this are iUpload, Blogtronix and Traction Software.

IBM's Lotus Notes does not have "straight out of the box" support for Activity Centric Blogs - although they do have their own Activity Centric Computing notion. In Hannover, your email inbox is organized into folders that are called activities.

In mid 2006, IBM Lotus CTO Doug Wilson said

Right now, the ‘glue’ that associates tasks and objects within an activity remains in the users’ heads. But if we’re able to create and save the thread of an activity, we should also be able to preserve it as a pattern that others can reuse when performing the same or similar activities."

In Nov of 2006, Domino Blogsphere V3 said

Currently in very early development stages is a new application that doesn't have an official name yet but it is basically a Blog Manager.

I am currently unaware of any other system that can support true enterprise class blogging that could support "Worksites". Microsoft's Sharepoint does not have this functionality.

The issue is one of creating a platform that supports many to many communication, as opposed to most consumer blogging tools, which were originally designed to support one to many communication. There are tools out there that support multiple people authoring one blog, but that isn't the issue here.

For example, in a Big 4 consulting firm of 100,000, you could easily end up with a huge number of blogs:

100,000 People Worksites
400,000 Project Worksites per year
100,000 Client Worksites
5,000 Practice Worksites
5,000 Focus Worksites

Examples

Here are some screenshot examples of what these things could look like. When I created these, I simply called them "Pages" instead of "Worksites". I term "pages" is confusing, because it makes people think they are looking at one page, not a whole site about a specific work topic.

Why not use a Wiki?

Wikis are a useful tool for collaborating on a document. They become less useful when they are used to communicate about events. For example, Wikipedia is a great encyclopedia. But, when you think about daily events such as updates on the relationship with a client, or the latest events in a project, blogs already have the built in notion of time stamped posts that communicate that information.

This is not to say that a company should never use wikis. Instead, there is a time and place for both wikis and blogs within the Enterprise.

Motivation through Recognition

To get people to contribute, you have to give them a personal reason to use a new system like this. One way is to make sure that people get credit for the good work they do.

Other tips and Tricks

• Email Integration - Transition in to using the system by making sure that your Worksite system supports an email address for every blog / Worksite. That way, people can just cc the blog instead of CC'ing to CYA. This also gives people an easy way to start to use a big system.
• Dos and Don'ts - People will recognize that the new system is a powerful reputation management system. Some will be worried that it could damage their reputation as much as help them. Give them some guidance with a firm set of dos and don'ts/
• Screencasts - The success of YouTube has proven that people LOVE videos. Use videos and screencasts to teach your employees about the new system and get them excited to use it.
• Use Weekly Email Updates - Blogs do not replace email. They only simply an additional communication tool. To get people excited about a new system, and to make sure they learn how it is being used and where it is succeeding, send out weekly update emails to your user base. Some people will take a long time to switch over to the new system. Weekly emails will keep them in the loop.
• Forget Dashboard - Use an RSS Reader - If you are a senior executive responsible for a whole cascade of projects, use a tool like Netvibes to monitor each of those projects. Skim the headlines. Click on the posts that seem to need your attention.
• Enterprise Digg - Cogenz is an example of a tool that you can use to help your people let each other know about interesting ideas.
• Folksonomy - Order Emerges from Chaos. And people will standardize on what keywords and tags to use to describe their articles. While it is important to give some structure, such as defining Worksite types, it is not necessary to dictate everything.

Source: How to use Blogs in the Workplace
by Rod Boothby

We met Jeff Whitehead and Jon Sofield of the Real Time Matrix at the Office 2.0 conference in October. We quickly hit it off and it became clear to all of us that the work they are doing with precision search technology using real-time matching and filtering and our attention driven prioritization are a perfect fit for helping enterprise users cut through information overload.

Today, Jon and Jeff are launching iJ.am, a new breed of search engine (they descibe more accurately as a "matching engine and content router" that precisely matches and delivers personally relevant content from the web the instant it is published.

And today we are announcing our partnership with the Real Time Matrix. We're coupling our persistent search capability from within Outlook and on our Feed Server with RTM's sophisticated aggregation, matching and filtering technology to bring an indispensable research tool to our Enterprise customers. With the combined power of these search techniques business users can create precisely focused search channels that automatically and continuously deliver exactly the content they are searching for without duplication.

Jeff Whitehead says it best. "This technology cuts through information overload and puts control into the individuals' hands. Users simply set up and refine their search criteria and we deliver accurate, relevant and timely results with extreme prejudice."

With Attensa and Real Time Matrix researchers can search the past and filter the future by tuning their search criteria, in real time to deliver exactly the information they want without duplication, as soon as it is observed on the Internet.

Here are the specifics and next steps for our partnership.

First, we'll be adding the iJ.am search engine to the persistent search feature in Attensa for Outlook.

We will be adding persistent search and Real Time Matrix filtering to the Attensa Feed Server. With the new distributed admin feature, the power to create precision search feeds can be accessed by project teams throughout the enterprise.

Together with Real Time Matrix we will be offering custom integration for Enterprise accounts to tie Web and blog search with premium content and internal information search.

Here's the Attensa and Real Time Matrix partnership news release.

My river of news was flowing this morning. This post on Dion Hinchcliffes' Enterprise 2.0 blog is one of the best I've seen on the subject.

Dion ties together the updated definition of Web 2.0 included in a new report Web 2.0 Principles and Best Practices with his own view of how Web 2.0 technologies apply to workers using network software within their organization.

He includes a reminder of the ground breaking work Andrew McAfee has done in providing a framework for bringing the best of Web 2.0 tools to work - SLATES.

SLATES = Search | Links | Authorship | Tags | Extensions | Signals

"SLATES describes the combined use of effective enterprise search and discovery, using links to connect information together into a meaningful information ecosystem using the model of the Web, providing low-barrier social tools for public authorship of enterprise content, tags to let users created emergent organizational structure, extensions to spontaneously provide intelligent content suggestions similar to Amazon's recommendation system, and signals to let users know when enterprise information they care about has been published or updated, such as when a corporate RSS feed of interest changes."

There  a great deal more in Dion's must-read post.

On Friday I gave the breakfast pitch at the Blog Business Summit in Seattle. Here's a quick summary from Jason Preston on the Blog Business Summit site and here are the slides: Download file

"Scott Niesen, of Attensa, starts off the day with a presentation on the practical business applications of RSS, and RSS enterprise solutions. I've dropped my usual bullet-list of running thoughts below:

• The holy grail of marketing is getting the right information to the right people at the right time.
• The feed tools at Attensa, says Scott, are designed to use RSS feeds to get the right information to the right people instantaneously, without overloading them.
• There are stages of RSS in Business:

1. Blog posts and news headlines come in.
2. They start using them for business intelligence alerts.
3. Then they get circulated around with internal blogs and wikis.

• Then businesses get RSS-enabled enterprise systems to really harness RSS as a business tool. RSS readers allow you to access what is essentially an indispensable research tool, for example, monitoring RSS feeds from the blogosphere lets you do pretty intense brand monitoring, just by running a constant keyword search.
• Persistence & Subscription: RSS is an indispensable collaboration tool in its ability, in an internal blog for example, to make new developments available instantaneously of changes or updates. In short, a great way to track team projects.
• CEO blogging is a great way to build a shared vision - Attensa CEO keeps a private and a public blog, both of which help keep the company headed in the same direction.
• RSS connects to a ton of different data types that go beyond traditional blogs and wikis - they use RSS to deliver podcasts within the company.
• Sales force leads can be delivered to blackberries very conveniently with feeds. Good idea.
• RSS is a double-edged sword - old methods of getting information are not going away - so RSS is convenient, but it's also another possible way to get to information overload.
• The difficulty is creating a system whereby you get the news you want (or need) without getting overloaded with millions of feeds (anyone who uses an RSS reader knows how difficult this is).
• This is kind of cool: in the new Attensa reader, the feeds you look at most automatically rise to the top of your list. Kind of like the "most played" list in iTunes.
• When you're looking at enterprise RSS options, Scott has a list of 7 things to check, some of them:
  1. Is it easy to install & deploy?
  2. Access it anywhere? Offline, web & mobile?
  3. Synchronization - critical!
  4. LDAP integration and Exchange support (I don't know what that means...let me see if Wikipedia does...I'm guessing this one)
• Question: What's the smallest size company that this enterprise type solution is practical for? Scott says: well, a company of one can download the Attensa reader and get a lot of benefit about it. But for the more complex systems, they recommend you start around 100 employees."

I just found this great list of RSS applications on Steve Matthews' Vancouver Law Librarian Blog. It's focused on applications for law firms but, if you just change the word lawyer to "co-worker" and change the word client to "customer", these apps will work for any business.

1) Current Awareness - Surfing your favourite websites, newspapers & blogs is a waste of time. Smart firms & lawyers need to automate web content to come to them via RSS. These personalized collections can then be customized (through mixing and filtering) to only deliver the content that matches a lawyers' interests.

2) RSS for Firm Marketing - From blogs, to press releases, to firm newsletters and publications -- adding an additional delivery channel using RSS feeds is not a huge investment. And speaking from experience, those clients that do use it, will tell you how much they love it!

3) Vanity Feeds - Every time one of your lawyers, or the firm, gets mentioned in the news media or blogosphere, someone should be notified by RSS. Your firm's ability to use RSS could be the difference between finding out immediately or days later.

4) Internal Research Collections - Your library catalogue should offer an RSS feed for newly added materials that match your Lawyer's research interests. Same thing goes for internal KM & research collections. In the future, I expect Internal RSS will be as important to law firms as RSS is to bloggers today.

5) Client Press - Do your clients have their press releases RSS-enabled? Are you tracking your clients in the news media? What do you know about their latest products, disputes, and business initiatives? Knowing more about your client's business is always good for firm business.

6) Feeding on Marketing Content for KM - Do your firm members have blogs? contribute to an industry discussion forum? wikis? Are you feeding those public internet contributions back into your internal KM repositories? Something to think about.

7) Case Law & Legislative Changes - The importance of RSS notification for new & changing legislation cannot be underestimated. Nor can receiving the newest judgement just minutes after it has been published on a Court's website. In the future, searches on those websites will, via RSS, enable us to receive exactly the legislation and topical cases we desire. I also expect these applications may be coming sooner than most firms are anticipating.

8) Aggregated Tagging - Do your lawyers tag with a tool like Del.icio.us or Furl? (If they don't now, they might in the future, read on...) Tagging is the new 'favourites' or 'bookmarking' for online reading. Rather than creating a browser-based bookmark, these 'gems' are classified & kept in an online web collection, which just happens to be RSS-enabled! Does it not make sense to take those feeds, from multiple firm members, and aggregate them behind the firewall into a searchable repository? The line between public web-vs-behind the firewall collections is blurring. In the future, your KM efforts should be capturing firm members' public web contributions, and RSS technology will be right in the middle of that.

9) RSS Republishing - RSS helps to move web content to where it needs to be. We can automate the republication of any firm content -- from story headlines to full-text of publications -- to anywhere on a law firm's Intranet or public website. RSS is a very powerful website maintenance tool.

10) Feed Mixing & Filtering for Subject Collections - RSS should be easy for the end user, and starting from scratch building a personal feed collection doesn't always make sense. One new task I see for Law Librarians will be to create, remix and filter groups of feeds for different subjects. Creating & offering these pre-fab feed widgets that your lawyers can plug into their Aggregator could be a very valuable tool.

Attensa for Outlook can handle all of these applications - no problem. Persistent search, integrated tagging (that syncs with Del.icio.us, flexible feed and article organization tools are all built-in. Oh, and it's a free download.

I'm catching up with my feeds as the train parallels the Columbia River. Cormorants, herons and gulls sit on the wing dams and piling remnants from the days the timber industry flourished. The train is terrific.

Reading articles offline with Attensa for Outlook is one of the real benefits of a dedicated feed reader compared to relying on a browser based reader.

This got my attention. Rod Boothy at Innovation Creators hits it just right with his post - Participation is the killer app.

"Whether it is end user participation in content driven conversations on blogs and wikis, or end user developed applications, mash-ups and widgets, I think that it is participation that key difference between Enterprise 2.0 and Enterprise 1.0."

Last week I attended the New New Internet Conference in McClean, Virginia. The conference featured TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington and Harvard Business School professor Andrew McAffee. Michael gave a hilarious and insightful overview of what separates the winners and losers in the Web 2.0 business arena. Andrew McAffee is credited with coining the term "Enterprise 2.0." If you are not reading his blog you should be. His whitepaper on Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration is essential reading.

Professor McAfee is a brilliant and engaging speaker who made me want to quit my job and go to Harvard (unlikely that they would have me). His talk included practical advice on how to introduce Web 2.0 technologies in the enterprise by starting with collaboration tools. He also addressed the tension between structured systems and the open social network of Web 2.0 behind the firewall. A vice president of marketing I once worked for summarized this tension by saying, "Iron sharpens iron." It was his way of saying that the best decisions are reached and the greatest results occur when the strengths of two opposing forces are brought together for a common purpose. Forward thinking business and technology leaders who successfully integrate social networking tools with structured infrastructure will experience new heights of innovation.

To get to the New New Internet conference, I flew from the Forrester Technology Leadership Forum in Phoenix to Baltimore, expecting to arrive at midnight, giving me time to catch a few hours of sleep before setting up my demo station at 6:30 AM. Instead, because of a series of mechanical problems (a tear above the wing on the first plane and a leaking sink on the second, fixed with duct tape) I arrived in Baltimore at 3:00 AM, picked up my rental car and proceeded to drive around for two hours before finding my hotel. Was I lost? No, just bewildered. I talked the hotel manager down from a $300 room rate to $119. Took a $119 shower, shaved, suited up and headed to conference. I guess I'm gung ho for enterprise 2.0.

At 7:15 AM I demonstrated Attensa for Outlook and the Attensa Feed Server to a panel of judges including Jonathan Aberman of Amplifier Venture Partners , Phil Bronner of Novak Biddle, Charles Curran of Valhalla Partners, Karl Khoury of Columbia Partners and Tom Weithman of the Center for Innovative Technology.

Attensa was deemed to worthy of the title "Technology Pace Setter."

Here's what they had to say about us:
"Attensa - a world class RSS reader that solves the problem of synchronizing your feeds among multiple platforms, and also has shared intelligence technology, so that "group wisdom" can be applied to news feeds over an enterprise. You should check this application out I particularly liked the idea that within an enterprise a user could get a sense of which feeds were drawing the most attention."

Rahsaan Roland Kirk released an album in 1973 titled Prepare Thyself to Deal with a Miracle. It features a live 21 minute saxaphone solo. When you listen to it, it's impossible to discern when the man took a breath. Incredible.

We are in the process of transitioning sections of Attensa.com to the MoveableType platform. Yesterday our crack web team showed me MoveableType Enterprise in action working on our servers. We're starting with the news section so that loading news releases, updating our news coverage and event schedule will be as easy as posting to this Typepad blog and there will be a feed for each section. I'll be working with this miracle. Incredible.

As part of Attensa's Project Dogfood we've been using BaseCamp  and Central Desktop to manage projects and collaborate with partners. These tools definitely makes working with a distributed team easier. Both of these collaboration tools feature: milestones, to-do lists, file storage, messaging and Web feeds.

Apparently we aren't alone in experiencing the communication and collaboration benefits.

Benchmark Research recently completed a sponsored research study looking at the returns from the use of collaboration technology in the construction industry.

• 98% of collaboration technology users felt they benefited from having information held centrally
• 93% of users said there was less chance of losing important documents
• 90% said it was easier to find and retrieve their documents.

I'd add, getting project updates in a Web feed makes it easier to stay on top of progress.