Dynamic Group Blogs

Since ideas are everywhere, both inside and outside of your organization, there is an immediate, urgent need for new tools that can harness ideas, concepts, information on the group level. Markets are getting more and more ephemeral, and you need to get the information you need in the right place at the right time to be able to make fast decisions and grab your 15 minutes of fame before your opportunity is lost. Having an environment where employees can easily find and connect ideas at the right time is essential for staying on top of this increasingly volatile marketplace. To get another shot at fame requires re-invention and innovation.

Here's a demo of an enterprise 2.0 system.

Ideascape is a robust journaling system with a heavy emphasis on tagging and content/user management, with a blog at it's front-end. It is a deep product, and includes functionality well beyond blog management with much of the complexity hidden from users.

Further differentiating Ideascape from simpler blog systems is its intended audience. Ideascape is designed to be used by multiple users and groups and incorporates a sophisticated permissions system to enforce security. The product is also built for scalability and can manage hundreds of thousands of entries, well beyond the scale of most hobbyist tools.

A Conversation with James Surowiecki author of "the Wisdom of Crowds": The Promise and Perils of Collaborative Tools by Stowe Boyd from Corante. Surowieki, "the more we interact, the more we will be influenced by each other, and therefore, the independence of thought that we know is critical to good collective decision-making can begin to fade away. So, finding a balance between the two is important, especially when you consider technologies like the Internet."

However, John Hagel from edge perspectives looks at the noise to signal ratio on the longtail, Quality and the Long Tail, "...the sheer quantity (rather than the quality) of items increases as we move down the tail and the ready availability of information about these items diminishes - that's what increases the difficulty of connecting with relevant resources as we move down the tail."

Ideascape's dynamic group blogs address group think and "connecting with relevant resources" using open API's that seamlessly interact with 3rd party services such as del.icio.us, technorati, furl, pubsub, et al, which makes it easier to discover a whole new level of independent, diverse ideas and resources.

Peripheral vision and ambient knowledge by Lee from headshift, "...techniques such as social tagging, feed aggregation, presence sharing, etc. can help package up small pieces of potentially relevant information into feeds and trails that we can process with peripheral vision." Enabling us to make sense of information relevant to the task at hand, "Where the focus is not on sharing knowledge but on enabling better decision making, creating the conditions for innovation and understanding the way we make sense of our world."

As Ideascape penetrates further into the enterprise, we see customers increasingly looking to build not just blogs but complete corporate communications systems. Ultimately, I believe group blogs will grow out of organizations needing better, more flexible ways to communicate and to compete for products, services, and talents.

So, in the end we need new ideas and stories for people to act on. The flip side is "We don't have to care, part II" and "We don't have to care, part I".