Mike’s Digital Laboratory

Next Wednesday, (Feb 3, 2010) I’ll participating in another webinar with the folks at Earley & Associates. This time I’ll be discussing three important aspects you might want to consider if you are bringing Social Media Tools into your organizations. It’s easy to get lost in the many cool, whiz bang features that are available, but I feel it is important not loose sight of what I’ll call three aspects or dimensions of participatory activity in social media;

• Restricted vs. freedom to publish content with content metadata.
• Restricted vs. freedom to identify audience and method of notifications.
• Restricted vs. freedom to connect with people via groups, relationships, followers and so on.

Think of these as continuous dimensions on an X, Y and Z axis.  Where do you see your intranet tools in this space?  Where would you like them to be?  These are some of the questions I’ll be exploring next week.  Hope you’ll join me.

If you happen to be attending Enterprise DataWorld conference this March then I’d recommend attending this session by John Biderman and Cameron McLean.  John and Cam are sure to tell an interesting tale of how they’ve wrangled Semantic MediaWiki into harvesting a world of MetaData from one of their legacy relational databases and made it organized, accessible,  annotatable, and well… in a word wikified.

” We were given an imperative from our business leaders to provide a friendlier and more collaborative front end on our metadata…

… This in turn led us to MediaWiki and the rich and diverse array of add-ons developed by the Open Source community, particularly its semantic extensions.”

I was happy to play a small part in this project last summer.   I suppose I was more of kibitzer than anything else, but It was enjoyable to solve a few problems for the team as well as get an inside look into this very interesting project.