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.

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. 

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.

Apparently the Attensa toolbars we introduced more than a year ago for tagging, identifying, previewing and subscribing to feeds and our tagging toolbar are pretty good ideas.

Newsgator just announced a beta of their toolbar today.

With the Attensa browser toolbar you can:

- identify all of the feeds available on a page
- preview the feed and articles to see if you want to subscribe
- subscribe with a click
- access all of your feeds and articles in your browser
- tag articles and synchronize with del.icio.us

Here's a duplicate of a post I wrote in December 2005 describing the wonders of the Attensa toolbar for Internet Explorer and Firefox.

The Chiclet problem surfaces at the Syndicator Blog. The rash of badges is totally out of hand.

Attensa has another approach to finding feeds and easily subscribing from a Web page or blog from your browser.

We use a toolbar in IE or Firefox to identify feeds and to let you see what kinds of articles are available before deciding to subscribe. This eliminates the need to clutter a page with branded badges. On the one hand this may not be the brightest marketing move on Attensa's part... but it sure makes sense from a user's perspective.

Here's a screenshot of Attensa auto feed detection at work:

And here's the feed preview

Let us know what you think.

P.S. Thanks for letting us know it's a great idea, Newsgator.

I'm the head of Customer Service at Attensa. The other day, my boss (you know, that Scott guy) wandered into my office and told me to blog.

OK.

I get pretty busy testing things and logging issues, but every day I hear and read and discover things about Attensa for Outlook that make me love my job. So, I can blog. Here we go...

I used to build catalogs of bookmarks. My bookmark file has travelled from computer to computer as I've upgraded my home office over the years, becoming ever more bloated and less organized. I'm a messy person. I have stacks of papers and kids toys and art projects living on my desk. I will never take the time to open my bookmarks file and clean it up properly... the best I can do is make a half-hearted attempt to purge broken website links once in a while.

Then along came tagging... wow! My life has suddenly changed!

I love tags. As I work through my feeds in Attensa for Outlook, I can tag articles on the fly to use later.... and the cool thing is, I get to make up my own tags (keywords) that work for my brain. When I'm working through my various projects and I need to put my hands on information quick, finding a web page in my catalog is as simple as pulling down the Attensa Tags menu and looking under the most logical keyword. No more hunting under bookmark sub-folders looking for a bookmarked site. With tagging, I don't lose web pages anymore. I use my del.icio.us account with Attensa so I have access to my tagged items from any computer.

Tip:
Attensa's River of News has its own tagging button, on the article toolbar, making it really easy to save that article for later. When you tag the article, a link to the web page itself is created in your tags, not a link to the article in Outlook.

P.S. My boss made me write this.

The Spring issue of the MIT Sloan Management Review has a terrific overview of how blogs, wikis and group messaging software are defining Enterprise 2.0 - Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration.

The author, Andrew P McAfee, an associate professor with the Technology and Operations Management Unit at Harvard Business School, coins a new acronym -- SLATES (search, links, authoring, tags, extensions and signals) to describe the tools and communication patterns that are essential to building highly collaborative environments that can drive productivity to new levels.

You can buy a copy of the report here.

Attensa for Outlook includes the features that top the must-list for business class RSS readers necessary to track and monitor the signals

• persistent search tools
• easy to use tagging, auto-feed detection and preview
• ability to handle secure feeds
• one click blog publishing

Peter Caputa asks if Attensa is AttentionTrust compliant and whether information on what he has read can be exported in a standard file format.

The questions are straightforward and so is our answer to Peter's first question. Attensa supports the basic AttentionTrust principles.   

The answer to Peter's second question is more complex because the Attensa technical team and other industry players are working to create standards that address the mobility issues surrounding attention. We are collaborating with other Attention technology pioneers and working on the attention.xml standard to bring technologies to market that will deliver on the promise of Attention. 

I thought it would be useful to take a look at what we can do today to meet the spirit of the AttentionTrust principles.

1. You own your attention and can store it where ever you wish.
2. You can securely move your attention wherever you want  whenever you want to.

The first two principles are tightly connected. Today Attensa gives you control over your OPML file, a fundamental expression of your attention that you can own and store. You own your OPML file and you can create custom OPML files that can include a subset of the feeds that focus your attention. With the export feature you can store your complete file or any subset anywhere you want and share it with anyone you want.

You own your tags, another pure expression of your attention. Attensa tags are stored locally on your machine.  They are also stored and synchronized at del.icio.us if you use the service. And with the Attensa tagging toolbar for IE and the tagging extension for Firefox you can access your tags and tagged articles in your browser of choice.

3. You can securely move your attention wherever you want  whenever you want to.

To address this issue it is essential to define the components that make up your attention. Your OPML file and tags are part of it. Your click-stream can be considered a manifestation of your attention. What about all of the other ways you consume information? Attention is a huge concept that goes far beyond RSS feeds and click-streams. AttentionStream technology can be used to identify your favorite feeds and the feeds and articles you ignore or delete instantly. It can be used measure the time you spend reading specific articles. It can identify the articles you tag or forward to co-workers and friends.

Different companies will have their own take on the components that comprise Attention. Much of the attention being paid to attention is focused on its value in advertising and marketing. Attensa is taking a user-centric approach designed to improve the experience of staying up to date by addressing how AttentionStreams can cut through information overload and make knowledge workers more productive. These are two very different problems and will require very different solutions.

3. You can pay attention to whomever you wish and receive value  in return.

Of course you can pay attention to whomever you wish. (unless your IT department is controlling who gets access to specific feeds). The value you receive in return can take many forms, the pleasure of discovery, time savings from automagic prioritization, or a killer ad that arrives at the moment attention slips into intention.

4. You can see exactly how your attention is being used.

You might not want to see exactly how your attention is being used. Who has the time and inclination? Applied attention technology might be like sausage, you can enjoy the end product without watching how it's made. Business models will be based on the unique intellectual property companies will use to put attention to work. The hundreds of millions of people who use Google everyday don't have any idea how it works and I bet they don't really care. It just works. Those people who do care are putting pressure on Google to be more transparent on what they are doing with all the data they are collecting.

When attention is delivering prioritized, highly relevant information, elminating duplicates and delivering ads with 100% CTR, while protecting your privacy with opt-in processes and full disclosure, we'll know attention is being used to make life a little better.

Peter, if you have ideas on how to make your attention data mobile and more transparent share them with us. We're listening.

Del.icio.us is a great way to keep track of anything that captures your attention on the Web and to share those things with people with similar interests. Del.icio.us tags are simply keywords you add to add context to RSS feeds, articles, Web pages, blog posts, photos, even music you discover online. When you set up your bookmark page on Del.icio.us, not only can you see the pages you've you tagged, you can also see related articles from other people who tagged the same pages or used the same tags as you have. Since every Del.icio.us page has an RSS feed you can also subscribe feeds based on a given subject, user, URL, or tag.

You can use tags to organize information you find interesting, but the real magic of Del.icio.us is in its social network. Simply put, Del.icio.us is a powerful tool for sharing your attention. I am frequently surprised with the great material I find by exploring the articles that have captured the attention of other del.icio.us users.

When you find a Del.icio.us user who seems to have a gift for finding great material you can subscribe to a feed and every new article tagged by that user is sent right to folder in Attensa. In searching on attention, attention.xml and AttentionTrust.org I ran across Steve Gilmorr's bookmarks. Now I'm automatically receiving any post regarding the subject of attention that Steve thinks is worth tagging. It's better than searching. There is something inherently better about the articles Del.icio.us suggests. It's a pure crystal attention stream.

OK. I'll admit it. When I first went to check out Del.icio.us I got a wicked case of MEGO (my eyes glaze over). I couldn't figure out what was going on until Eric Hayes walked me through it. I don't think I'm alone in saying Del.icio.us is cryptic. But, once you get the hang of it, Del.icio.us opens up new doors.

We are using Attensa to de-geek the process of adding Del.icio.us tags. You can add tags to articles using a pull down list in Attensa for Outlook and by using the Attensa Toolbar for Internet Explorer. When you tag articles with Attensa your bookmark list on Del.icio.us is updated and synchronized automatically.