E-Book, Englisch, 280 Seiten
Smarter, Lighter and Cheaper
E-Book, Englisch, 280 Seiten
Reihe: Chandos Information Professional Series
ISBN: 978-1-78063-187-5
Verlag: Elsevier Science & Techn.
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Dr Paul Jackson is an information and knowledge management specialist who has been a systems developer, product development and project director, strategic consultant and university lecturer during an international career spanning 25 years. He has published widely and consults to government and industry.
Autoren/Hrsg.
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2 Web 2.0 tools and context
This chapter describes some of the key tools within the Web 2.0 suite which have potential corporate applications. These tools are essentially knowledge tools: they support knowledge creation, interaction and collaboration, networking and sharing. One can use them to mediate interaction between the personnel within an organisation, with the organisation’s customers or with business partners such as suppliers and vendors. This is not the intended function of these tools, which have their genesis in the role they play in the lives of Web users. It so happens that they have characteristics that make them useful for the management of working knowledge, knowledge which is a key productive resource for the delivery of industrial production or services. We shall discuss a number of tools: some provide functionality which is used directly by users, such as wikis, blogs, social networking and RSS readers. Others provide underlying capability to the end-user tools, improving the usability of those tools: AJAX, REST, the semantic web. The tools we discuss offer a complete and mutually complementary suite for the management of knowledge in the corporate environment. This is a key point of this chapter: that the Web 2.0 tools, although individually useful, should also be seen as a set of configurable components which, when working together, provide strong functional support for the production and exploitation of organisational knowledge. This platform of tools provides open-ended, highly flexible support for knowledge transformation activities and, I believe, wherever possible should be left to the devices of self-organising, dynamic groups and individuals to design, use and combine according to their requirements and capabilities. This is not only an emancipated and ethically correct approach, but I suspect that this is also the most likely way to achieve success. Web 2.0 – the concept
The expression ‘Web 2.0' emerged as part of a conference workshop conducted by O’Reilly media and was coined by Tim O’Reilly and Dale Dougherty as they discussed the aftermath of the 2001 dot com collapse.1 It was mooted that far from being over, the potential impact of the Internet was as great as ever but taking a different form. This form was exemplified by moves to new types of website, product or service, for example: from static, carefully designed personal websites to a blogging stream; from file downloads on mp3.com to peer file-sharing using Napster; from online malls and third-party directories to the social tagging of content by shoppers and users; from the Encyclopaedia Britannica to Wikipedia. These shifts contained some underlying principles which at least warranted the claim that a qualitative change was taking place. The ‘meme map’ in Figure 2.1 shows the major elements in this transition,2 but in essence the change was from a ‘Web 1.0' which was predicated on the provision of data or services via a ‘server’ to a ‘client’, to a ‘Web 2.0' which provided a platform for users to participate on an equal footing. A platform is a toolbox of capabilities which are open-ended, adaptable to many purposes and contain low levels of inbuilt constraint. Software tools and websites were appearing and constituting a Web toolbox platform which enabled any non-technical, low-budget user of the Internet to create, use and control information and information exchange as they chose. This context of user-driven, user-managed Web participation led to a rise in the provision of services (rather than finished products), which users could configure and mix, and enabled users to themselves provide ‘services’, even if that service was a stream of their own opinions in a blog. Figure 2.1 Meme map – the gravitational core Source: http://oreilly.com/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html These services could start cheap, small and simple, but were infinitely scalable in both volume and function. One did not have to invest big to have an impact and it became possible to start a long Internet journey with a single step: the functions of the website could be upgraded in increments as a ‘perpetual beta’ (or stream of prototypes) without bigbang risks and costs. The speed and simplicity of communications products led to the development of interactive conversations (as opposed to just shouting into the void), allowing participation in persistent, prolonged conversations around shared areas of interest. Solid, dependable information and other forms of digital products, such as software, bookmarks, recommendations and reference works, emerged, based upon the collective intelligence of many participants. These outcomes became a service to others. These tools were not invented to manage knowledge and information exchange in corporations. But they are tools which are integral to the system of knowledge creation and sharing which now dominates the Internet. They emerged because they play a role in capturing, exchanging, storing and classifying information symbols in a form which is persistent and shared by users across the physical and temporal ranges reached by the World Wide Web. So is the expression convincing and durable, and are there essential characteristics in the definition of Web 2.0? There are certainly some tools in the Web 2.0 suite which existed before the expression appeared and even before one could imagine talking about Web 2.0. Other tools considered to be in the Web 2.0 set, such as Twitter’s microblogging technology, have emerged since the term was coined. And one needs to be ever mindful of sales hype in a rapidly moving marketplace of ideas in which the participants are constantly seeking points of differentiation in search of profit or acclaim. But there does seem to be a use for the concept, which embodies a new paradigm of interactivity, collaboration and self-service. This piece of language can be used to convey a message to corporate decision-makers, marketing personnel, designers of websites and e-business marketplaces, namely that forms of information exchange and generation are changing and that a product catalogue with secure credit card transactions is not enough to make a successful website, indeed that control over the future use of that information will restrict its generative power and the return on its investment. The expression Web 2.0 provides an umbrella term which can be used to strategically harness the existing and rapidly multiplying tools into coherent yet responsive organisational strategies for interactions with customers, partners and between people within the corporate firewall. The elasticity and usefulness of the term are reflected in the emergence of terms such as ‘Library 2.0', ‘Enterprise 2.0' and ‘Government 2.0' to reflect the same attributes of networked, interactive, accessible and participative information creation.3 Charles Leadbeater even talks of ‘Art 2.0', in which the artistic avant-garde of the twenty-first century develop mechanisms and a culture which encourage people to create common works across the Internet.4 But we need to bear in mind, that the tools are a necessary, but not sufficient, part of the definition of Web 2.0. The way the tools are used is also definitive: using a wiki as a corporate intranet content management system, in which content is only allowed to be added by a certified administrator, is not Web 2.0. Blogs
A blog is simply a sequential log of writings or, more recently, video expression, published in reverse chronological order, such that the newest entries are at the beginning of the log. ‘Blog’ is an abbreviation of ‘weblog’, a form of personal record or narrative that first appeared on the Internet in 1997. It allows personal publishing with no editorial intervention or review. Blogging software became available in 1999 and since then has exploded as a form of expression and personal website management. The ‘blogosphere’, or collective community of all blogs, contains anything up to 180 million blogs in the English-speaking world alone (and over 70 million in Chinese). Almost all mainstream media publishers use journalist blogs and the most popular ones are overwhelmingly theirs.5 Blogs are generally personal in that they are owned by an individual (who may be representing a firm) and the blog is a vehicle for the expression of their views. But a blog can also be a ‘normal’ high-function website containing multimedia content with sophisticated presentation capabilities. A blog entry can be commented upon by others and responses can be built upon to form a cascading chain of comment and response. Each of these blog entries has a ‘permalink’ which is an individual web address, simplifying access to and distribution of a particular entry. For example, you may have read an insightful and particular comment in a blog: so you simply copy and send the permalink URL to a friend who may be interested. Blogs are often personal or political opinions, commentaries, news items and corporate announcements. They can become open forums for discussion and collaboration, but they still retain personal ownership. Blogs also...
