Ok, so I might’ve said “blogs and wikis are dead”
Categorised under: Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0
It seemed that my keynote talk at KM Singapore helped to change some people’s thinking about intranets. Challenging the notion that they are old, dull sites containing policies, I generated new enthusiasm for what intranets can (and should) do. But the most controversy came during the question-and-answer session, where I found myself saying:
“Blogs and wikis are dead.”
This caused quite a stir in the room, and more than a few follow-up questions during the breaks. So I thought I would expand on this statement here. Let’s start with wikis.
Wikis
Wikis aren’t the easiest tool to use. While wikipedia has been a stratospheric success, this hasn’t translated into huge adoption for wikis. Most people don’t know what they are, and this number is falling rather than growing.
One of the problems is wiki markup, which I’ve argued against in the past (wiki markup has no future). Even the wiki products themselves are ditching wiki markup, replacing it with WYSIWYG editing.
So while we should be doing more collaborative content creation, it needs to be simpler and more intuitive than wikis.
Blogs
Let’s face it, blogs have struggled within the enterprise. It’s a great idea to give a voice to senior management and key experts, but people are hesitant to take up the baton. In part, it’s the name “blogs”, which can be quite intimidating. It also takes real commitment to keep blogging, and it’s hard to sustain in the medium to long term.
Why not just add commenting to news? And then open up news so that most (all?) staff can post news items. (This is something I’ll be covering in an article soon.) Better this than a separate “blog central” that competes with other communication channels.
Escaping tools
Both wikis and blogs sell a technology. They are fundamentally geeky tools, alongside RSS and personalisation. The majority of staff don’t really understand them, beyond a vague familiarity with the name.
Am I arguing against collaboration and social tools? Quite the opposite! We need to substantially grow these capabilities within organisations, and spread their adoption and use.
But instead of pushing tools and functionality, each delivered on a separate platform, we should be providing simple, integrated and coordinated experiences. Facebook doesn’t need to provide a “blog central” and “video central” — these are just two elements of the overall solution (they don’t even get a distinct name).
So let’s stop talking about “blogs and wikis”, and instead talk more about helping staff to work better together.
Tags: blogs, Collaboration, Intranets, social tools, wikis
James Robertson is the Managing Director of
8 Comments:
Completely agree with you James. Simply because a blog and a wiki is a collection of features, that engineers certain behaviors, support some specific activities. Take them as a package and apply them for your intranet and we run the risks that they do not work – common sense.
We’ve been really good in the past to define specific requirements for our systems. But this ability seemed to have deteriorated as we see many cases of wholesale application of blogs and wikis.
While I may not have put it like this
I completely agree with the sentiment James, and interpreting feedback from our users backs it up too.
Users are desperate (!) to interact and collaborate via the channels and platforms which are already integrated into the way they work. We need to make this happen, not just add another platform to the too-many we already have.
Now if we could just find an easy way to do it …
Hi James,
I agree. And then, I don’t. I don’t believe blogs and wikis are that geeky.
But I believe “we’re using it wrong”
Basically, how people should post, should be like posting to Posterous: Write a well formatted e-mail, that’s how the post is going to look like. Click send. You’ve created the wiki article.
And, integrate the creation into apps like Outlook or whatever other email programs people use. Make it a part of their daily way of working, a natural thing.
@Jo, agree that staff are desperate to collaborate. And that’s where it’s our responsibility, when staff come to us with the classic “I want a wiki” request, to have a conversation with them. This conversation must uncover their underlying needs, and (if necessary) point them in a new direction…
@Jacob, wikis are definitely the more “geeky” of the two technologies. They also require the greatest change in working practices, due to their collaborative writing capabilities. (If only one person is editing a wiki page, then it’s just an intranet page with an easy to use publishing tool behind it.)
Blogs are the simpler technology, but don’t underestimate how much of a change in thinking is required to publish one’s thoughts. Only a tiny percentage of the general population ever blogs, and in the much smaller population of organisations that may not add up to much…
News articles and blog posts have two different purposes, in my opinion.
News feeds are often about what is decided, “his master’s voice”.
- You must pay the bills no later than Friday.
- The management has now decided on a new travel policy.
- On Tuesday, our new employee Annie begins is working her first day.
An organization needs to send out this type of operational information, preferably on the intranet which is often a suitable channel for this.
Blog posts are often less about decided things, and more about a person’s thoughts, maybe even a person’s indecision on an issue (because it is a difficult question). Blogging is often about REACHING a decision.
Is it wise to call these two different things (both necessary in an organsation) for the “news” and joining them in the same feed on the intranet? In my language the word “news” sends the signal “here is one-way information”, not two-way communication/discussion.
I agree that the word blog is a technical term and that we should find another word for the phenomenon, but I do not think “news” is the solution. And just like core content and back office content are two different types of content that have to be treated in different ways and reside in different parts of the intranet, I think we have to treat “news” and “thoughts” (hey, maybe this is the word?) in different ways on the intranet, in order to make the difference clear for the users so that they can act appropriately.
@Jesper, agree that there is a distinction today between “news” and “thoughts” (perhaps “discussions” is a better word?).
In part, I think this is because we’re conditioned to think of “news” as the boring corporate updates. Two big changes are bringing news closer to discussions:
- activity streams are surfacing what’s happening in social and collaborative spaces, and these start to sit oddly next to established lists of news
- more mature intranets are allowing more than just a few staff to publish news, and are then targeting/tailoring news to keep it relevant
But in the short term, I agree that it makes sense to keep them separate. Just don’t call them blogs!
@Simon, I think it’s worse than just “blogs” and “wikis”. How many organisations are deploying “yammer”, or “my sites”, or a half-a-dozen other product-specific features?
And for how many of these do we provide *any* training or support to end-users (staff) within organisations?