Teblog

R. Todd Stephens on Enterprise 2.0

Sometimes it's easy to be overwhelmed by new ways of working. Enterprise 2.0, for example, has crept up on us over the past few years. Those who've tracked it from the start have something of an advantage in that they pretty much know what all the elements and issues are. Anyone coming to it cold might find themselves misled by evangelists or confused by the propellor-heads.

It's not easy to get on top of things and see all the elements in a sensible perspective. Three cheers then for R. Todd Stephens who is Senior Technical Architect of Collaboration and Online Services for the AT&T Corporation. He has been involved in corporate IT for 25 years with a high focus on enterprise information management since 1999. He has produced an Enterprise 2.0 Blueprint, a chart which can act as a checklist for all the elements of Web 2.0 for the enterprise.

Enterprise 2.0 Blueprint (click chart to get download)

The chart totally avoids product names, with the sole exception of 'Office', but even that is a functional description rather than an explicit plug for Microsoft. The chart is in five columns: Business Drivers (for investing in Web 2.0 technology); Actors (the people involved); Technologies (and related technologies); Methods (how the technologies are used); and Value-Add (to the employee, the department and the business).

The chart is enterprise-centric, in the sense that the final column doesn't mention value to customers. Or, for that matter, suppliers. Mentions of clients and customers are dotted around the chart, so it's not as if they're being ignored. But such an extension to the Value-Add column might help stimulate more consideration of who the business exists to serve.

Clues do exist in the minutiae of the chart. Sub-boxes contain items like Education, Training, Consulting, Self service and so on, but you sense that these are primarily seen as revenue or cost-saving opportunities. A box for 'Customers' has 'Consumers' and 'Producers' as sub-boxes. Quite often customers have their own forums where they help each other out. It costs the enterprise very little but is a tremendous value-add for the customers. But then again, you could argue that this drops the support costs for the company.

Perhaps I need to wake up to the fact that value-add for customers will nearly always brings a reciprocal benefit for the company.

The good thing about this chart is that it is pretty comprehensive in terms of identifying all the Web 2.0 elements and shows how they fit into an organisation's activities. While setting up an 'under the radar' blog, wiki, IM or whatever is a trivial exercise, to derive real business value someone somewhere has to look at the bigger picture and figure out how to turn skunk works initiatives into corporate processes while retaining the spirit that made them attractive in the first place.

I think it was Napoleon or Nelson who used to toss a coin when faced with difficult decisions. If, when the coin landed, he was disappointed with the outcome, he'd go with his instincts. A chart like this is similar. Without it, you'd be trying to make this stuff up. With it, you have a framework and if any of it jars, just alter it or extend it.

IMHO it makes a fine starting point.

Don't put lipstick on the pig

Today's issue of PR influences covers 'greenwashing' - "the act of misleading consumers regarding the environmental practices of a company or the environmental benefits of a product or service."

It's good to see professional PR folk in action. Part of their job is to make sure that companies don't get carried away with their rhetoric and make fools of themselves. Of course, there will always be poor PR folk who see their job as "putting lipstick on the pig". We have to take a certain amount of personal responsibility for filtering good PR from bad.

Once upon a time, it was easy to pull the wool over most people's eyes, by writing good press releases, advertisements and brochures. The public didn't have much of a voice - the letters page of the newspapers, the complaints desk of a company or the local advertising standards authority. In other words, except in newsworthy cases, not a lot would happen.

Now, with bloggers galore, some will always be expert enough to see through the greenwash and blow the whistle. And we all know how fast bad news travels through the blogosphere. And how mainstream media organisations quickly pick up juicy stories.

We hear about companies that claim to be carbon neutral which is wonderful, if true. But, if close examination were to reveal that one of the directors drives a gas guzzler or that the heat from the data centre is being vented to the atmosphere, then the carbon neutral claim falls apart and the company risks ridicule.

The best option is transparency. To show what steps are being taken to run a sustainable (financially and socially, as well as environmentally) business and not make any pretence that things are better than they are. Some IT companies - IBM, Sun, Hewlett Packard, Cisco and Fujitsu Siemens spring to mind immediately - seem to be very forthright in their claims and their explanations.

They still fly people around when necessary, but they'll talk about how much travel has been cut. They still have to run high-powered data centres - even more so for those who offer hosted software services, but they'll talk about how much they've slashed their energy bills through consolidation, virtualisation and other measures.

Of course, they would all like to sell more equipment, software and services and they will dangle the cost and environmental savings that are possible. But they are also well aware that new equipment brings its own environmental costs, including the disposal of old equipment. Honest discussion around these issues will win vendors more customer loyalty than misleading claims based on dodgy premises.

Indeed, they may well find that their revenues rise for hosted services, consulting and software, even if an increasing awareness of sustainability among customers were to lead to a slowdown in hardware sales.

You calling me a consultant?

Adriana Lukas was the person who first opened my eyes to the potential business value of social computing. She starred in an Online Information conference a few years ago and, soon after, I trotted round to her office for some indoctrination. We talked about blogs, IM, wikis, RSS, feed readers and all the other technical paraphernalia that supports this new form of collaboration.

Today, Angela Ashenden (she works for Macehiter Ward-Dutton) and I whizzed over to the same office to get an update from Adriana on some project work she's been engaged in. A huge organisation knows that it has to engage more effectively internally and externally, but it is tightly regulated and is fairly traditional in its approach to business. Hierarchies come more naturally than networks. And, quite rightly, reputation has to be protected at all costs.

The user-driven style of social engagement does not sit comfortably with this organisation. Yet it is willing to experiment and find out whether there's anything of value to be had from this dangerous new activity. The fact that the project has been going for a couple of years suggests that it is tolerated at least and that some parts of the organisation are extracting benefit.

To cut the story brutally short, Adriana introduced people to information discovery, sharing and collaboration opportunities, then demonstrated some tools which might help. The list included blogging, wikis, Skype, RSS and social bookmarking. The tools are just the supporting mechanism for new ways of working together.

Prompted by our visit, Adriana posted What’s the real value of social software in enterprise  to her blog a few hours after we left. She gave the example of a wiki which was introduced for one task but which touched 41 people. Some of them, in turn, found other uses for wikis to accelerate and improve their collaboration.

Adriana says, "I’d argue that this is the most significant and long-term value of social media and social software tools at this stage of their use in enterprise. If anyone tells me they can put metrics on that, I’ll just call them a consultant (not a nice thing in my book!)."

I'm inclined to agree with her about determining the metrics beforehand. After all, no-one could have predicted these time-saving uses of the technology. So no IT department, or anyone else for that matter, could have planned and cost-justified the introduction of the software.

But, after the event, I'm sure that metrics could be applied and value measured. This would form a useful backdrop for future discussions about the benefits of introducing social computing to other parts of the company. So, I only half agree with her. And if that makes me a consultant, I guess I'll just have to live with that.

ISPs and householders in the front line

Oh dear, oh dear. Seems like our government is continuing its sleepwalk towards another disaster. What do you mean, "which one?" Okay, you have a point. Two things in particular. One is that it has a plan to shrink the police force and get neighbourhood watch members to take over some of its duties. The other, according to the Times newspaper, is to get ISPs to ban users from the internet if they are caught downloading illegal copies of copyright material.

Don't both of these proposals sound a bit daft? In the first place, I thought we paid the government to keep us safe. Although to listen to recent news, it's been failing spectacularly in that particular duty. Members of neighbourhood watch are a) probably scared witless to patrol the streets after dark and b) even if they caught someone, then what? The odds of the fuzz turning up in time to do anything useful is close to zero. There's a disconnect between the government mind and reality.

Now the government is a step closer to asking ISPs to catch people who download stuff they shouldn't, then to act as prosecutor, jury and judge. How convenient. Be seen to suck up to the entertainment moguls without actually having to do anything more than issue yet another set of regulations.

And what's the ISP to do? Inspect every single packet that passes through its hands? Divine what the content is and issue warning emails to infringers? If they infringe again, make sure they're disconnected. And, if they get reconnected and infringe again, ensure they never darken the internet's doorstep again. This, apparently, can be done by notifying other ISPs of the identity of the guilty party.

It's mad. Utterly mad. Bureaucracy gone totally insane.

Listen. With a partner I sell software online. Have done for years. We can be fairly certain that illegal copies have been made (despite our rather clever mechanisms for avoiding it). But whose responsibility is it to deal with the issue? Ours.

We try to be nice to customers so they tell others what jolly decent people we are. We try not to rip people off price-wise, although some would argue that we fail in that respect. But they wouldn't be customers anyway, so what are we losing? Some customers pay us more than once, which suggests our price can't be that wrong.

It's up to us to get the business model right so that the decent majority do the right thing. It's up to us to decide whether to chase commercial-scale infringers through the courts - a horribly expensive process and a distraction to boot.

If the government really does want to prosecute copyright infringers, then it should do it through the normal legal processes. Just as asking householders to catch criminals is mad, so is expecting ISPs to do its dirty work.

Safe corporate social computing?

Look around at social and collaborative computing and what do you see? A complete hotch potch of different systems, some of which run safely behind the firewall, others which sit out there on someone else's servers. You hop from Flickr to Outlook to Skype to Facebook to discussion groups, or whatever. Each has its own approach and, often, integration is only possible through hyperlinks or copy/paste.

Add to this the fact that you're working on different devices, laptop, desktop, internet café terminal, mobile phone, Blackberry and so on and what have you got? A lot of time wasting, a lack of security and data distributed all over the show.

It can't last. To move forward we need to get to a point where all we're concerned about is doing stuff with our information and other people while the systems themselves move towards invisibility.

Of course we're going to have to get from where we are now to where we'd like to be then. One issue is integration. Another is multiplatform. And a third is security. I'm sure there are others, but they'll do for now.

We need common interfaces, the ability to surface our information to whatever device we happen to be using and to do it in a way that doesn't  expose us or our organisation to risk.

Enter stage left an organisation called Outblaze*. I had some minor contact with its CEO, Yat Siu, in 2005 and I'm ashamed to say I totally forgot about his company name. His tale about internet connection speeds in the Far East is what stunned me at the time. He was talking about 100 megs being common, with up to a gig being possible, if you were prepared to pay $215/month at the time. He now has a 1 gig connection to his home.

This means that using the internet is a totally different experience over there. And the software and user interfaces that have evolved are highly visual and engaging - you feel more as if you're in a virtual cartoon world than working a computer.

Outblaze sits quietly in the background providing 'white label' messaging and social computing services to a wide range of clients. Try MSN, AOL and Yahoo! for size. It's big. It has 76 million users tied to 480,000 web domains. Its clients offer Outblaze services as if they were their own. Outblaze picks up a monthly fee per user based on which particular services are picked from the company's long menu. At a broad level, it provides messaging, security, collaboration, community/social networking, digital identity, compliance and gaming facilities. Each heading contains, on average, half a dozen or so sub categories.

If you took the community/social networking stack, for example, it contains: social networking platform, online video editing and sharing, photo sharing, bookmarks sharing, blogs, wiki, chat, forums/message boards and dating/friend matching. It supports devices from mobile phones to desktop PCs and anything that can use the web.

The company is already hugely successful around the world and it is now extending its reach into the enterprise and, at the same time, it wants to increase its European presence, where it (vaguely) claims to have between five and ten million users. It thinks that Europe is more ready for its approach than the USA.

Richard Bye is the company's vp of sales and corporate development for EMEA (Europe Middle East and Africa), so he's the guy in the hot seat for this initiative. He believes, and he's probably right, that enterprises want their own social networks but they can't do it in-house and they don't really trust the public services. Nor do they want the capital expenditure or the disruption associated with such an initiative.

It's obvious where this is heading. With a solid base of experience of running enterprise-class hosted and integrated systems, Outblaze's system appears to check all the boxes. No doubt it will try and get its leverage from working through the third parties that already serve these prospects. Potentially, it's a straightforward value-add for them and huge leverage for Outblaze.

It will come into conflict with some presently outsourced services. Messagelabs springs to mind, but I'm sure there are plenty of others.

And, who knows, perhaps we can learn to relax a bit and allow a little of the Far Eastern culture to penetrate our rather stolid computer interfaces. All we need is a bit more bandwidth.

PS The above blog was written just before I left for Lotusphere on 20th Jan. On 21st January, IBM/Lotus announced  the beta of its own social/collaboration hosted service called bluehouse. If IBM can get its rollout and provisioning strategy right, it could put the company centre stage.

*Outblaze's new website should be online by the end of January. Having looked at the old one on Wayback Machine, I can't blame the company for hiding it.

Dealing with social media addiction

The internet is silting up with ego-driven dross. It's little wonder that the anti-network-neutrality brigade would like to turn it into freeways and side streets, depending on willingness to pay. And, equally, it's no wonder that the network neutrality supporters want everything to stay the same and for the pipes to be fattened ad infinitum.

With limitless capacity and fixed price access, anyone who can afford a few dollars a month is able to promulgate whatever they want out to an unsuspecting world. They could do it with blogs, podcasts, videocasts, social networking sites, Second Life or Twitter.

It doesn't matter that most of the utterances are ignored by most of the world. For most people the joy lies, I suspect, in the uttering. It's like vanity publishing. Everyone has a story and this is a way to get it out.

Most people like making connections and 'friendships'. By participating in a social site like Twitter, they can delude themselves about their connectedness. Enough of the digital glitterati hang out there to make it worth dropping by and picking up what these A-listers are up to. Even if it is as boring as 'stuck in traffic on 101', or whatever.

If we were able to really restrict our appetite for social media consumption to our genuine friends and work colleagues, for example, then we'd probably derive a lot of value from it. I wouldn't mind knowing what my four analyst colleagues at Freeform Dynamics were up to at any time although I really wouldn't welcome a continous stream of the stuff.

And this is the issue really. If you get involved in any big way with blogs, podcasts, videocasts and social sites, it can be like a drug. But this drug doesn't so much mess with your head as mess with your time. "I'll just see what [name your own guru] is up to at the moment" and that's another chunk of your life thrown away, never to be recovered. It's even worse with videos, which are becoming all the rage in Twitterati circles. A bit of puff and a tiny URL and, if you're not careful, you end up watching some nonentity on an ego trip.

I think we ought to start accounting for our time in the same way that lawyers do. And then measure the value extracted from each social media engagement. Did it entertain? Did it educate? Did it inform? Choose your own criteria and monitor your online activity. If you're dissatisfied with the outcome, ask yourself what else you would have spent that time doing. If the answer to that is 'something better' then you have a problem. Only by recognising the consequences of the addiction can you form your strategy for beating it.

PS For social accounting purposes, that probably took you 135 seconds to read.

To Twit, to who?

Okay, I confess. I've been Twittering over the holiday period. As part of my social computing beat for Freeform Dynamics, it's up to me to try and understand what the heck's going on, even if it isn't (yet?) mainstream.

Like blogging, Second Life, instant messaging, Facebook and all the other social computing activities before it, at first glance Twitter looks a bit mad and potentially very disruptive. It is, essentially, mini-blogging. 140 characters to say what you like when you like. Your posts appear on your followers' screens or on their phones.

You can be certain that companies like IBM and Microsoft are watching with interest. And, no doubt, many of their staff will be participating enthusiastically. As with all the previous social activities, they'll mine value out of it, if there's any value to be mined. Then they'll try to either replicate it within their own collaboration suites or, if they have to, make sure that this stuff can be surfaced within their own offerings.

The early adopters of social media tools are a fickle bunch. They swarm. Because they are so connected, ideas spread rapidly and they find themselves flitting to the next new thing. And, presumably because there are only so many hours in the day, marginalise whatever social computing activity they previously indulged in.

Facebook was de rigeur among these people and now they're Twittering. I have no doubt that they will be on to the next good thing very soon. But they leave a trail. I was going to say like animal spoor, but that sounds rather negative. First of all the creators of these tools have probably worked for nothing and shared their tools freely. If they end up with a 'hit' on their hands, then they have masses of beta testers, also working for 'nothing'. (In actual fact, they disclose a lot about themselves.) They will have identified value in the offering, even if they subsequently move on.  For the Microsofts and IBMs of this world, this amounts to free research.

When blogging first caught on, it seemed to comprise mainly of people wittering on about nothing in particular to an audience that largely couldn't give a toss. Some bloggers, though, actually made sense and started to attract followers. Just like journalism, some educated, some informed and some entertained. It didn't really matter. By writing authoritatively about their interests, they started to attract those who were interested in similar things. Communities started to form, through adding comments and including links from their own blogs. This often led to other more conventional forms of contact. Beside this undeniably valuable human aggregation, a massive pool of permanently stored information is there for anyone to explore in the future.

So what about Twitter? Time-wasting nonsense was my predominant reaction to it for several months. I made the same mistake that I did with blogging, predominantly that I thought I had to keep up with everything. It's not possible. I thought the posts were largely pointless. Many of them are. Just like blogging, some are silly, some are irritating while some deliver direct value. Some Twitterers do all three, depending on their mood. The best ones are of the 'hey look at this' variety. If someone you respect enough to follow says this, then you're probably going to welcome such a tip-off.

But then you get the "I am in a sushi bar in Times Square, yum yum". Most of us couldn't care less, unless we happen to be in New York, in which case it's an opportunity to make contact. If you're thinking of calling someone and they're on Twitter, you could look at their stream and see what they're up to. Frankly, I think there are dangers in giving too much away. If I wanted to burgle someone, all I'd need to do was follow their Twitter stream to find out when they're away. Okay - a bit silly maybe, but it is a reminder of how much we give away, wittingly or not.

But, behind this, values emerge. Sign up and find some people or entities (Twitterers are all people, but some go by their company name or their interest - 'predictions08' or 'FTtechnews' for example) that you know and see who they follow. This is a useful way of finding who's out there who might be of interest to you. Watch out for the current courtesy of reciprocating 'follows'. If you look at the list of people I follow, don't assume I have the faintest idea who many of them are. I've just added them because they added me. (Unlike Facebook where I'm very fussy who I accept as a 'friend'. 'Follower' is a much more sensible term.)

Conversations emerge on Twitter, but it's not a good way to converse, any more than blogging would be. Do you track comments on your comments on someone's blog post? So Twitter provides messaging as well. You can't assume that anyone's aware of anything you've posted. Twitter is just a stream of jumbled stuff into which you can dip to 'catch the mood' perhaps or pick up tips, links and like-minded (or not) souls. And, of course, it's always a good idea to reciprocate with links to good stuff that you've stumbled across.

The very worst thing you can do is to try and catch up on everything that's been said since the last time you were on. Accept that you'll miss stuff. Or, if there are people whose every utterance you must follow, get them sent to your mobile or log in to their page when you have a moment.

I can't predict whether Twitter will prove to be a fad or whether it will go mainstream. What I do know is that the entrails are being studied and if there's anything of value there, it will surface in some form in the offerings of major software companies.

On social computing signal:noise ratio

Earlier this week Dale Vile - boss of Freeform Dynamics - posted about his frustrations following a deep dive into social computing. He's been blogging and reading blogs for a couple of years but wondered if he might be missing out on something. By and large, he concluded he wasn't.

I responded by email rather than comment. But Dale thought I should base a post around my response. Having read it through, I think I may as well share it in its entirety. Responses, private or as comments, are more than welcome.

Dear Dale

Read your 'Signal to noise' piece yesterday.

Reread it this morning.

Sounds like you've gone round the loop I went round a few years ago, except I did allow myself to become overwhelmed for a while.

Eventually, it was the realisation that you can't keep up with everything, no matter how relevant/important, that stopped me. Along with the inability to keep up was a strong and growing sense of inadequacy which was fairly crippling.

Eventually I twigged that all this stuff is a river - continuously flowing, into which it's possible to dip and sense the mood and perhaps go after the occasional fish or interesting piece of driftwood. There's always Google blog search if you want to track down what's been said recently on any particular subject. And, as you point out, tags. Although I'm less trusting of them because they're not universally used.

When Netvibes came along, it allowed me to Watch the river without necessarily going for a swim. This is where the value of a good descriptive headline comes in. Netvibes just lists the feeds in little boxes - you can choose how items many you want to display in each, but the next/previous links mean you don't have to miss stuff.

If you want to see the full degree to which I (don't) track, see the attached picture. The bold numbers are how many unselected/unread items are outstanding in each category.

Am I bothered? Not any more. Like you, I go where I want when I need to. You'll notice the 'ego' tab has no unreads. When I go to a tab with unread entries, it takes seconds to scan each one.

I agree about Twitter - lots of lost souls clinging together for comfort and reassurance. Facebook is heading the same way and they're making some strategic mistakes at the moment. I hope it will pass because groups have good potential for business use as does the general theory of 'find someone who knows'.

The water cooler/bonding aspect of these social media is important IMHO, providing it doesn't descend into pointless natter (the social media gurus will argue that nothing's pointless, it might come in handy some time). Sometimes our own Skype IM group is good, sometimes it's noise. But there's bonding going on there. These things can be good for distributed teams or collaborators.

Part of whether social computing has value lies in the size of the participating group. And this applies to wikis as well. Too few active participants in a community means that nothing happens and value isn't extracted. Large organisations like IBM, BT or BBC get value out. Signal/noise can be improved with simple ground rules. And, of course, by the fact that people's online activities are visible to all in the community.

Finally, there's the question of why people do stuff online. Blogging in particular, but it could apply to Twitter, Facebook et al. Conventional wisdom is 'post often'. I think the reason for this is that you then go up the various rankings. And, if you get visible, you go up further because people think you must be good. I've always thought this was barmy, and still do. The scheduled or frequent posting is not for the benefit of the reader, it's for the benefit of the publisher or the individual doing the post.

You talk in your piece about how few blogs have something original to say. And I agree. It's just noise. And, I suspect a lot of this is because people feel obliged to post at a particular frequency, regardless of if there's any reason to post.

It's all jolly complicated. I know there are Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays when I think "oh shit, it's blog post day". Although, mostly, something has happened in the previous week to justify some kind of post. Then there's the time it takes up.... But that's another story.

David

Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia) on successful wikis

Yesterday, Jimmy Wales blew into town to address a huge audience of information professionals at the Online Information conference. Wales, in case you don't know, co-founded Wikipedia which is intended to become "the sum of all human knowledge". Written for the people by the people. And hugely popular, to boot.
As ever with these kind of events, the question and answer session at the end was just as interesting as the prepared presentation. It was a chance for some baffled people to get to grips with some key issues. While these were Wikipedia-focused they do resonate with other wiki activity, including that in your own organisation perhaps.
Freeform Dynamics recently ran a survey asking people how they connect at work or education, as opposed to in their personal life. The 1500 or so responses came from IT professionals and, that subset that liked responding to a survey on this subject. Interestingly, in the work context, wikis were read by more than 55 percent of respondents and contributed to by about 25 percent. This suggests that wikis are certainly on the business communication radar. Wales' thoughts could well help avoid some false starts.
On participation, he talked of applying the 'neutrality principle' to writing style. I think he means avoid opinion and stick to facts. Or, to don the behavioural psychologist's hat, to keep contributions adult rather than parental or childish. A debate is more constructive and likely to lead to a better outcome than a fight.
In a similar vein, Wales urges courtesy and respect for the community. He gives the example of journalists who think its clever to edit a contribution to see how long it takes for anyone to notice. The important takeaway here is that people cannot be expected to just start contributing to Wikipedia without understanding and agreeing to some basic ground rules.
He doesn't regard Wikipedia as the place to publish original research. For a start, no-one would be able to check it. Second of all, it gets away from the principle of the "sum of all human knowledge", in the sense of a summary, understandable to the layman but with sources cited for those who want to drill deeper. In Wikipedia's case, he politely suggests that researchers get their material published elsewhere first and then cite this as a source. The 'summary' idea is a good one. The difficulty in a company wiki is that it's sometimes quicker to write or cut and paste a long discourse than a thought-out summary. But, if no-one reads it, it seems rather counter-productive.
On credibility, it's somewhat easier for humans to assess this than for it to be calculated automatically. Wales would be interested in seeing a background colour wash in Wikipedia according to the credibility of the writer. But, as he points out, a mathematical formula might regard his frequent contributions to the policy part of Wikipedia as 'argumentative' and downgrade him accordingly.
Humans take into account their knowledge of a person, whether their changes and challenges have improved the content, their engagement style generally, their biases, etc. Try working out a reliable algorithm to deal with that lot. Perhaps Wales is right to be experimenting with it but with no firm plans for its introduction.
Another thing to bear in mind is that a wiki isn't like paper. It's theoretically limitless. Wales noted that the English language write up of Pokémon provides details of all the various regions but the German version has not allowed this. People don't have to read this stuff, so does it matter whether it's there or not? Since wikis are largely textual, they demand little in storage resources.
Finally, there's the question of motivation. In Wikipedia's case, Wales believes it boils down to humanitarianisn or fun, where the fun is being part of an enthusiastic and engaged community of common interest. He points out that "doing wikis alone doesn't work". He suggests five or six people - friends, enemies, it doesn't matter - engaging day in and day out is the way to go.
In our coporate wikis, we can probably discard the humanitarian aspects but fun and community building sound like good motivations.

Because I can

Someone I know has posted a video of himself, very drunk and largely content-free. I was going to link to it here and ask him whether he might regret it. But I realised that I would regret doing this so I refrained.

He had bragged about it on Twitter, which suggests he didn't care. But then he was three sheets to the wind at the time, so perhaps his judgement was in question.

This brings to the fore one of the issues of social computing which is that people upload stuff (words, pictures, movies) just because they can rather than because it might be interesting, informative or entertaining.

This pollutes and dilutes the infosphere (Luciano Floridi beat me to that term by a wide margin). However, the good thing is that no-one has to look, tag or link. But this kind of thing can be permanent and cause damage when it's least expected.

Unless, of course, you're Paris Hilton. Which my acquaintance isn't. Despite filming himself topless.