Community Services for Enterprise Blognets

While your firewall protects you from intrusion, it also cripples the community software that keeps the blogosphere hopping. Here's are some of the services you might want to bring inside to help your blognets grow and prosper. The list grows, changes, and is not complete.  

I've grouped these services, arbitrarily, into three categories: Discovery, Reading, and Writing. Discovery services help you find stuff and navigate, and understand blognets and the blogosphere as a whole. Reading services help you keep up with relevant information. Writing helps you author and publish. Basic blogging service is extra.

In your workplace:

1. Which 3 are mandatory for a blognet pilot?
2. What risks do you assume if you don't provide these services?
3. Which services might you be better off operating in support of public employee and customer weblogs, even though they are the open blogosphere's services?
4. What policy and IT operations issues do these services raise?

Service	Description
Discovery
Intranet search	Covering the intranet and DMZ, your private search engine must update its index frequently. Best is if they re-index within a few minutes of fan update server being pinged. Engines which work well in public, because they use hypertext links to establish relevance, may not work as well in the intranet, where there are fewer links or other cues. For example, the Google appliance.
Location tagging and search service	Find blogs physically near me; find posts related to a location or system. For example, Geourl.org.
Referral logs	Who's sending traffic to me? It's sometimes useful to understand your readership. Other times you discover people with similar interests.
Weblog neighborhood	Who is like me? Who writes about things like me? Who else is cited like me? For example, Technorati link cosmos.
Topic service	Find posts related to this one within my weblog, across the intranet, and perhaps across a collection of partner blognets. See K-collector and Easy News Topics.
Realspace	Generate live meetings using information from blogspace. For example, Meetup or Evite.
Random walk	Manufacture serendipity. Sample the intranet, get a bigger picture. See also wanderlust.
Directory	So you have an employee directory, maybe even a yellow pages for services and departments. How about extending the yellow pages to people, by topic, updated automatically? For example, see blogarama, Eatonweb, Oblix.
Advertising	Text ads for internal announcements. Think of it as the new bulletin board.
Cemetery	A directory of abandoned weblogs, because of personnel actions, lack of interest, or because their focus or relationship is completed. See Fucked Weblog.
Product or object watch	Analyze weblogs for well-understood references, store and analyze the results, and notify subscribers. For example, seeing what books people mention in their weblogs. Or people. Or competitor products.
Peopleroll and social network	I'm sharing some of my friends, and friends of friends. See FOAF, Friendster, Ryze.
Reading
RSS portals	server side directories of RSS feeds, aggregation and browser presentation of those feeds
Updates	What's new? A central service that writing tools notify when a blog is updated. Sometimes called a "ping service". Like weblogs.com and blo.gs.
Blogroll & WebRing services	May be linked to enterprise directory services, the better to provide automatic maintenance of blogrolls that match the formal org chart. Of more value, giving users the ability to create their own blogrolls. This reveals informal and temporary social networks. Blogrolling.com is an example.
Blog distribution gateway	Distributes blog posts by email, SMS or other channels.
Buzz watcher	What's hot on the intranet? What's hot in my circle? Services that answer this include Blogpulse, DayPop News Burst, Popdex, and Blogdex
News Readers and Aggregators	Aggregators collect a user's selection of RSS feeds, keeping them current, formating them for reading, and making them available for users to cross-post. News readers do the same thing, except from a user's desktop. Server side aggregators have the effect of concentrating traffic (they pick an RSS feed only once, instead of each user picking it up) so publishers don't experience "slashdot effects". They also hide the level of attention from publishers, useful if the publisher is a competitor or industry insider. Syndic8 is an example.
Re-aggregation service	These services combine content from multiple sources into a more focused feed. This can be fully automated or humans may approve contributions to a feed. Moreover is an example.
Machine translation	Do you span countries? Machine translations of posts and RSS feeds helps people get the gist of what their colleagues write. Systrans is an example.
Writing
Posting Gateways	Use these services to write to your weblog using non-browser devices or software. Post from voicemail, your phone's SMS/MMS, email, calendar, or IM.
Comment Service	Manages posted comments like the blog server manages weblog posts.
Conversation Threading	Tracks the flow of conversation across weblogs using methods like trackback and link analysis.
Render Services	These convert blog posts to RSS, and to document formats like PowerPoint .ppt, Flash .swf, Adobe Acrobat .pdf, or Microsoft Word .doc.
Template Farm, Widget Library	Stores styles, templates, graphics and other ways to customize the look and feel of your blog.
Weblog Medic	Checks your blog for dead links, broken images, speed, accessibility, valid RSS and html, language encoding, etc. For example, BlogCheckup.
Blog Fodder	Actively provoke blogging by suggesting themes or topics. For example, blogfodder and The Friday Five.

I'll be updating this page for a while.

[a klog apart]

I'm back from BloggerCon.

I bet few people are prepared the first time they become California governor. The reality of the job is harrowing, demanding, and requires knowledge and skills rarely produced in the private sector. Understanding the law. Developing consensus. Managing compromise. Finding a third way. Making lose-lose choices decisively. I think Truman said to surround yourself with people smarter than yourself and who frequently disagree with your point of view. I wish our new governor wisdom and patience.

I met James Moore of Berkman on Sunday. He writes today that the Clark campaign team is constipated (my word) by inner circle control.

By contrast, the Dean campaign is open to people and ideas.  It is "out of control" in the best sense of the word. Innovators such as the people of MoveOn and Meetup and DeanLink are embraced. The campaign is fresh, alive, and inviting.

Exactly.

What do you think this means after Dean becomes President?

Can you run a White House this way?

How would this affect your relationships with the Hill?

How would this kind of openness change the way the executive branch is governed?

The military is increasingly moving combat operations into rigorously decentralized control with more individuals having more information to go along with their authority. I talked with a Naval captain who said that when a battle might last 30 seconds, there's no time for running things up a chain of command. The Dean campaign staff is the only one getting it. They understand the campaign is not the staff, it's the million people on the ground talking, meeting, paying for change.

Voters come to Dean as much for the openness of his campaign as for his message and the hope to beat Bush. His campaign makes you believe you matter, you make a difference. And then they prove it. Repeatedly. When was the last time that happened in Democratic politics?   

Governor, remember the California Bloggers Platform, an invitation to transparency, community, productivity, and literacy. And take Winer's saying to heart: Ask not what the Internet can do for you, ask what you can do for the Internet.

[a klog apart]