Web 2.0: Socialtext
: I’m at Ross Mayfield’s SocialText and wiki session.
Ross says enterprise software has failed us. 90 percent of collaboration is done with email; knowledge management software goes unused by many. His view is to give people simple, bottoms-up tools to let the people all join in.
“It’s actually worth the risk to let users step up and create something.” The’s the moral of the web, eh?
Mike Pusateri at the Disney ABC Cable Networks Group uses Socialtext and he’s going to tell us how.
Note that Disney is also the company that is using RSS as a transport mechanism for video content and commercials in ESPN Motion. Note, too, that Disney has employee blogs. Who would have thought that Disney would be so advance in technology and vision?
Pusateri says these tools are “multiple orders of magnitude cheaper.” That will go a long way bringing this new grammar of interaction to the enterprise and then the world.
He said they didn’t call blogging blogging when they introduced it. They said here’s new software, period.
They use these tools, for example, for a “shift log” to share information from one shift to the next. Switching to blogging software was better than a proprietary solution; it was cheaper; and it added functionality — e.g., search. Then they added RSS to give people alerts. They didn’t call it RSS. They just used it. The architecture is invisible, as somebody said in the prior session on RSS.
It was also a corporate benefit that they could hack at the software to make it fit in with other software.
Now Ross is demoing the software.
(They rescheduled this session and so lots of people didn’t know it was here now. Somebody just told me that he saw this post and so he came over here. That’s knowledge management at work.)
