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Author Archives: David
Broken Intranet Market
From Column Two:
The intranet market is broken
There are a huge number of intranets within organisations worldwide. By Martin White’s estimate, for example, there are over 300,000 intranets in the UK alone. Yet the intranet marketplace is almost non-existant.
For example, there is only one blog devoted to intranets, less than a dozen serious websites, and no active mailing lists. What is happening here?
Borrowing loosely from economics, what we have is a very inneficient marketplace. There is a need, and suppliers, but no easy mechanism for connecting the two.
I’ve been researching intranet design and solutions lately and it is true: there is not a lot of information out there.
I wish there were a trade or professional association for intranet software and design that could help create standards and foster discussion about best practices, innovation, product directories, etc. (This kind of market inefficiency is a common reason for forming an association.)
I did find an intranet association located in Quebec called API but no other credible organizations. Here is a post from Intranet Focus about API.
API could probably pick up a lot of new members if they started translating their material and programs into English.
Stand Alone TrackBack
Ben and Mena have release a stand-alone version of TrackBack.
With this you could create ping repositories without some of the minor kludge work arounds you have to do within a full-blown MT blog (such as I had to do with KMpings).
It also gives people using other blog software the ability to integrate TB into their own blogs if they can support perl cgi scripts on their server.
Nice innovation!
My Aggie Blogroll with XSLT
Anders Jacobsen placed his blogroll (list of weblogs he reads) on his site by applying an XSLT stylesheet to his Aggie opml channel list.
What a great idea! I lifted his stylesheet (with attribution, of course), tweaked it a bit and published my own blogroll.
Note: my implementation applies the formatting in IE but not Mozilla. Mozzilla users will just get the plain opml file.
.org
xml Headaches on KMpings
I just went through and cleaned up several ampersands from KMping entries that were breaking the RSS newsfeeds. If your reader barfs on malformed xml, the feed should start working again for you.
Please be sparing in the use of ampersands if your blog software doesn’t escape your text properly. HTML entities are your friends!
Employee Blogging Policy
Ray Ozzie has kindly shared Groove’s first draft of an employee policy on blogging.
If you choose to identify yourself as a company employee or to discuss matters related to the company?s technology or business on your website or weblog, please bear in mind that, although you and we view your website or weblog as a personal project and a medium of personal expression, some readers may nonetheless view you as a de facto spokesperson for the company.
They go on to outline several guidelines to help employees understand what lines the company needs to draw. The guidelines seem very reasonable to me and should help employees understand what their employer may or may not be comfortable with.
Association Bloggers
I’ve come across a couple of association-oriented weblogs written by other association types this past week. Woohoo! I’m not alone!
Jeff De Cagna got his blog going recently and Jeffrey Cufaude has been writing for several months. Both were presenters at the Denver Convention talking about leadership, association strategy and KM.
I think I’ll start a list of association bloggers. Let me know if you write one.
Association Management: Leading While Appearing to be Led
I just got back from several days in Denver attending the ASAE Annual Convention.
If you were to buy one session tape from the Convention, I would recommend ‘Formulas for Success in Working Relationships with Chief Elected Officials’. 5 former/current chief staff officers with a combined 175 years of experience talked about what they felt were the keys to a good and productive relationship with top volunteer leaders. Their advice and opinions form a philosophy of association management that is worth emulation even if you are not a senior staffer.
Click ‘More’ to see my summary of the comments in this session.
Continue reading
Membership Directories and Copyright
The American Massage Therapy Association was unsuccessful in a lawsuit against a publisher who had copied the contents of the AMTA membership directory for their own commercial purposes. Courts have held for a quite a while that the contents of a telephone directory are not copyrightable and the judge held the same standard here.
I think this will drive more associations to switch to web-based membership directories and cease publication of print versions (not to mention the cost savings). It is just too easy to give a printed directory to a temp for a few days of data-entry. Voila! A new spam/direct mail list!
Web-based directories can be structured in a way that makes it much more difficult to copy member contact data in bulk yet still facilitate individual networking. This could help reduce the risk of member data being used by outside parties in unintended ways.
Here are a few methods to protect member data in a web-based membership directory:
- Put the directory in a restricted-access, members-only area of your web site.
- Limit the number of results shown at one time in a search results set.
- Only show partial contact info (such as name, city and state) in the search results list.
- Display full contact information one member at a time.
- Do not allow browsing of the complete alphabetical list of members.
This may not stop the truly determined but it will make it much more difficult to copy the entire membership list.
Depending upon implementation, some of these methods could limit the usefulness of the directory for members. You will have to balance that against the need to make that data available to members in a form that won’t easily be abused.
C. David Gammel, CAE 