ASIST 2007 Notes: Blogs and Wikis in the Corporate World
Blogs and Wikis in the Corporate World
American Society for Information Science and Technology Annual Meeting
Jessica Baumgart
Jack Vinson
Jordan Frank
Christina Pikas
Kris Liberman
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
I used Renesys’ weblogs and wiki to provide concrete examples of why and how corporations use the tools.
Jack Vinson of Knowledge Jolt with Jack talked about community and how communities use the tools and develop around the tools.
Jordan Frank of Traction Software discussed tagging. Some of the more popular tags are less informative than more concrete tags, like fun or to do. Jordan went so far as to say that personal blogs aren’t blogs, they’re use cases for blogs. Wikipedia isn’t a good example of a wiki; it’s a use case for a wiki.
After my talk, a woman asked me how many people work at Renesys and what their ages are. We currently employ 20-30 people, which is considerably smaller than the organizations of many people in the audience. Her inquiry about age baffled me at first. I replied that I hadn’t asked my coworkers their ages, so I really didn’t know. Later, I began wondering if she was trying to correlate some kind of relationship between the average age of the people at Renesys with their comfort with technology because of the idea that younger people will be more comfortable with new technology. I don’t think our average age skews younger than the average age of people in the corporate world. I’m a horrible judge of age. I don’t even want to take a guess at the age range of the oldest employees in a public, recorded space in case I am incredibly incorrect. What’s more important than their age is their comfort with technology. Not all incredibly technical people are comfortable with all kinds of technology, but my coworkers, I would guess, are probably more comfortable with working with a wiki than others. I’m not sure how long the wiki has been around, but Renesys has been using it for several years. It predates my time at the company. My coworkers’ comfort level might be as much a reflection of the fact that they’ve been using the software for a while as it might be just that they’re comfortable and familiar with many kinds of technology. We’re used to it.
Someone asked how we convince people to use the wiki. In my office’s case, most people use the wiki. Maybe not everyone logs information as much as they should, but all of the key details about our projects are on the wiki. There isn’t another way for people to get the information they seek. They have to know, at the very least, how to use the wiki to retrieve information.
During my talk, I polled the audience to learn how many of them use blogs and wikis. More people use wikis within their organizations than those who use blogs. I found that a little surprising.
I plan to put an outline of my talk on this blog at some point.
Addendum 10/30: My presentation and some more notes are now online.
