The Orange Chair

I had a client ask me if I could share IBM’s blogging guidelines. I am happy to say I can! You can find them here:

IBM Blogroll | IBM blogging policy and guidelines

And how did I find them? By blogging about them internally. (There were other ways I could find them, but I included the question as part of a longer post and another IBM employee read it and pointed me to this link).

The thing to remember here is that a wiki starts with a lack of structure so that its users can define the structure that best serves their needs. That’s what makes it so successful. People don’t have to learn a new structure, and fit their work into that structure, which is automatically limiting. Instead, they can focus on their work, and build a structure as they go - one that evolves with their information and doesn’t get in the way!

- Stewart Mader, “The nine-letter word that determines wiki success”, Wikipatterns blog

A few weeks ago, I would have agreed whole-heartedly with Stewart Mader, whose Wikipatterns site and book have taught me a lot about wiki adoption. But working on getting a wiki off the ground has made me wonder if I need to learn more about information architecture in this Web 2.0 world. I want to make it easy for people to browse through resources and contribute their own. As a wiki gardener, I’m not trying to make the wiki follow the clean, formal lines of an English garden, but I do want to encourage it to grow and make sure the good parts get enough exposure.

I’m building scaffolds and seeding the wiki with content, but I’m still figuring out how to balance making the wiki useful and making it rough enough to invite participation. I’ve started reading about information design and information architecture, but the hyperlinked, organic nature of wikis makes it an interesting challenge. When is it better to break things up into lots of small, addressable bits, and when is it better to combine pages so that someone can edit everything at the same time? How do you balance people’s desires for sophisticated interfaces with the ease of modification of simple markup? How do you create enough structure to make it easy for people to navigate, but not so much structure that people feel restricted?

Here’s how I’m dealing with those challenges:

• Focus on getting lots of content into the wiki. Comfortable page length will depend on whether your wiki engine supports section editing. If you can’t edit sections, break pages apart into sections that you can edit easily. Don’t think too much about the level of detail, though, as you can always refactor pages. I started with pages of about 500 words, and then I combined or separated chunks as I needed them.
• Optimize for input. Make it easy for casual wiki readers to add to the content. Whether that’s an inbox page that they can add to if they don’t know where else to put things, section editors so that they can quickly find the part they want to update, or an e-mail address they can send wiki content to, help people just get the information into the wiki.
• Build multiple paths through the content. People can come to a wiki page from anywhere, so provide plenty of links to related content and context. Create pages for navigation, too.

I’m looking forward to learning more about the topic!

I love checking out other people’s bookshelves to get an idea of their reading habits and to find out about interesting books. It’s like that with RSS and Atom feeds too. People’s feed readers and blog rolls help me discover other interesting blogs. Here are 8 Enterprise 2.0 blogs I enjoy reading:

The FASTForward Blog (http://www.fastforwardblog.com)
Bill Ives and Jevon MacDonald are always great reads, and this group blog is a good place to find out about everything that’s going on.

Column 2 by Sandy Kemsley (http://www.column2.com)
Sandy Kemsley is amazing. I love reading her conference reports, and she’s just as insightful in real life as she is on the Web. When I grow up, I’m going to be like her.

Blog on Wiki Patterns (http://www.ikiw.org)
Stewart Mader’s Wikipatterns website and book are must-reads for enterprise social computing evangelists. He’s currently running a video series called "21 Days of Wiki Adoption". Make sure you check those out! I want to do similar patterns and tips for other social computing technologies.

Dion Hinchcliffe’s Web 2.0 Blog (http://web2.socialcomputingmagazine.com/)
Content-rich, well-written, and easy to read, too–what’s there not to like about Dion Hinchcliffe’s blog? Go here for lots of original analysis.

E L S U A ~ A KM Blog by Luis Suarez (http://www.elsua.net)
Luis Suarez is one of my favorite people within IBM. He’s an amazing social computing evangelist who brings together Web 2.0 and knowledge management. Read his blog to get all fired up about the possibilities.

Portals and KM (http://billives.typepad.com/portals_and_km/)
Bill Ives posts interesting things on his own blog, too.

The Shed 2.0 (http://theshed2.wordpress.com)
theshed gives me an entertaining glimpse into another Enterprise 2.0 evangelist’s life. Nice writing voice - conversational, down-to-earth, friendly.

The Orange Chair (http://theorangechair.com)
And of course, The Orange Chair is in my feed reader too. I’m a big fan of my team members (Aaron Kim, Bernie Michalik, and Jennifer Nolan), and this blog is a great way to find out what else they’re reading and thinking about.

I’m always looking for Enterprise 2.0 recommendations. What’s in your feed reader?