collaboration

Presentation: Collaboration, Not Competition

ALA Midwinter 2007, ALCTS Future of Cataloging presentation: Collaboration, Not Competition. (slides: QuickTime & PDF.) Stir my writings on The Google Economy and Arrival of the Stupendous post with frame four of the ALCTS And The Future Of Bibliographic Control: Challenges, Actions, And Values document: In the realm of advanced digital applications, we are interested […] » about 300 words

Involvement, Inclusion, Collaboration

<a href="http://worcester.typepad.com/pc4media" title="peter caputa">Peter Caputa</a> dropped a comment on <a href="http://jeffnolan.com/wp/2006/03/02/utr-zvents/" title="UTR - Zvents">Jeff Nolan</a>'s post about <a href="http://www.zvents.com/" title="Zvents - Main Page">Zvents</a>. The discussion was about how online event/calendar aggregators did business in a world where everything is rather thinly distributed. Part of the problem is answering how do you get people to contribute content -- post their events -- to a site that has little traffic, and how do you build traffic without content? The suggestion is that you have editorial staff scouring for content to build the database until reader contributions can catch up, and that's where Peter comes in, suggesting that content and traffic aren't where the value and excitement are: it's the opportunity to involve fans in the event planning and marketing process. » about 300 words

Jenny Levine’s Online Library User Manifesto

Drawing from John Blyberg‘s ILS Customer’s Bill of Rights and The Social Customer Manifesto, Jenny Levine offers this Online Library User Manifesto: I want to have a say, so you need to provide mechanisms for this to happen online.   I want to know when something is wrong, and what you’re going to do to […] » about 300 words

Zimbra Rocks

Zach made me take another look at Zimbra, the web-based, web 2.0-smart, very social and AJAXed up collaboration, email, and calendar suite (plus some other goodies). Go ahead, watch the Flash-based demo or kick the tires with their hosted demo. I think you’ll agree that it looks better than anything else we’ve seen yet. Part […] » about 400 words

Internet, Interactivity, & Youth

Jenny Levine alerted me to the Pew Internet & American Life Project report on teens as both content creators and consumers.

It turns out that teens, and teen girls especially, are highly active online IMing, sharing photos, blogging, reading and commenting on other’s blogs, and gaming. An especially strong trend in this group is the use of web technologies for collaboration. Interactivity, increasingly, is being defined by the teen’s ability to ask questions, comment, or contribute. Take a look at this quote, (found via this BBC report):

These teens would say that the companies that want to provide them entertainment and knowledge should think of their relationship with teens as one where they are in a conversational partnership, rather than in a strict producer-consumer, arms-length relationship.

Jenny calls this the “4Cs,” for conversation, community, commons, and collaboration. Clearly, services that allow those 4Cs are preferred over those that don’t. Competitively, where do you stand? How well have you embraced the 4Cs in your online services.

What’s Zimbra?

They say “Zimbra is a community for building and maintaining next generation collaboration technology.” What I’d like to know, however, is whether Zmbra is a community driven, social software answer to the problems of groupware — typically driven by management’s needs.