EXTRANET NEWS * Week of 23 September 2003

EXTRANET NEWS * Week of 23 September 2003
Editors: Joel Orr and N'omi Orr
http://www.extranetnews.com

1. BLOGS AND WIKIS
2. THE LIST
3. TIDBITS
4. QUOTE OF THE WEEK

1. BLOGS AND WIKIS

Joel reflects on these nascent forms of collaboration and self-expression – the new journalism?

Start a blog, for free, at www.blogger.com, www.motime.com, or numerous other locations. Sign in, pick a name, start posting. Tell others about it. Voila! You are a blogger.

The silly word, "blog," is a contraction of "Web log." Its catchy sound has surely helped to popularize the concept. A blog is an on-line diary, often commenting on things found elsewhere on the Web, complete with links. There are thousands of active blogs; the blog "explosion" began around 1999. Almost instantly, companies like blogger.com and GrokSoup popped up, offering free blogs; no html knowledge required. Rebecca Blood wrote an excellent history of blogging in September of 2000 (www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html).

A blog can replace or be part of an extranet. Your blog can have multiple members who are entitled to post. It can support a "comment" feature. It easily becomes a conversation--more permanent and inclusive than instant messaging, less targeted than email.

Many blogs today support RSS (really simple syndication), which offers a "feed" of the blog in XML. RSS "readers" allow you to subscribe to RSS feeds. My favorite is NewsGator (www.newsgator.com), because it installs this service into Outlook.

I Googled "blog," and got over eleven million hits. Of course, the number-one hit was for blogger.com, recently acquired by Google. GrokSoup is apparently gone; few have managed to make money from free stuff. Google did; GrokSoup didn't.

On one of my sites, www.joelorr.com, I use TongueWag (www.tonguewag.com), a simple-to-syndicate blog. Whereas RSS requires a reader in your site, TongueWag gives you a line of JavaScript to put on your Web page--and your blog magically appears wherever you put that line.

Blogs have an immediacy unmatched by other media; that's why many journalists and commentators have them, and they are a bigger and bigger part of the political process.

But blogs, while certainly interesting as a form of collaboration, are principally a simple publishing approach.

That's why there is another publishing phenomenon called the wiki. Wiki inventor Ward Cunningham says “wiki” is half of the Hawaiian word for "quick" ("wikiwiki" - see http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiWiki). The wiki was originated in 1995 by computer-industry notable Ward Cunningham, who saw the name painted on the side of a bus at the airport in Hawaii.

The fascinating--and in some ways, frightening--uniqueness of a wiki is that anyone can edit it through a Web browser, with no screening. Press the "edit" button, and you can add, delete, or modify to your heart's content.

The behavior of wiki participants has been a topic for social theorists. Wiki users behave more responsibly than most people expected.

Variants have emerged, such as the TWiki (www.twiki.org), which includes revision tracking and control; this was absent from the original wiki concept.

The largest known wiki is Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org), a free encyclopedia with 158,936 articles as of this writing.

Nobody yet knows what works best, and combinations are beginning to appear. For example, Socialtext (www.socialtext.com) is a company whose new product/service combines wiki, blog, and instant messaging.

Our take: Engineering projects are supported by a wide variety of extranets, with structured features of all sorts. Now less-structured forms of communication are becoming popular. We should explore these to see what they can contribute to the world of manufacturing and construction collaboration.

2. THE LIST

Total companies: 265 (see who's on The List at http://www.extranetnews.com/).

ADDED: Mo'time; Socialtext; TWiki.

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4. TIDBITS

· Compagnia Ltd (www.compagnia.biz) has on its Web site (http://www.compagnia.biz/h/n/ECONSTRUCTION/proj_coll/ALL/43/) an interesting specification for construction-industry collaborative software. They also sent me an excellent in-depth report on extranet usage in the UK; visit the Web site above to see how to obtain it.

· Last chance: Get into a drawing for five 128 MB "pen drives" (those amazing keychain-like devices that have become so popular); five people among the first 250 participants in a survey on extranets will receive one. Just go to <http://rebar.ecn.purdue.edu/WPMS_survey > and fill out Frank's survey. (He's a Purdue Ph.D. student.) To date, there isn’t much hard data about the impact of extranets, so studies like this one will contribute substantively to our knowledge base. And to help you “do the right thing,” Frank is offering these great prizes! Do it now!

· Meridian Project Systems User Conference, October 1-3, Las Vegas, NV. See: www.mps.com

· The Lean Construction Institute will host a seminar "Introduction to Lean Construction" in Las Vegas, Nevada on October 2 & 3. For details and registration, refer to http://www.leanconstruction.org/pdf/Introbrochure5.pdf or contact Greg Howell at ghowell@leanconstruction.org.

· BloggerCon will be held on the Harvard Law School campus, October 4-5, 2003. Info: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/bloggerCon/nutshell

· PLANT SUCCESS is not just a conference at the Philadelphia Airport Marriott, October 15-16, 2003 (http://www.plantsuccess.com). It is a community. And it comes with a free newsletter, full of thoughtful commentary and fascinating links, by industry veteran Carlton Howk. If you have anything to do with plant design, construction, or management, you should find out more about it.

· CONNECTING THE DOTS: UNDERSTANDING THE EMERGING DIGITAL BUILDING PROCESS - October 16-19, 2003; Omni Hotel, San Francisco. To register, visit: http://www.aia.org/tap/conference/2003.

· Delphi Enterprise Summit (October 6-8) and Executive Retreat (October 8 half-day) – Washington, DC. The Delphi Summit is a highly targeted event that includes over 30 presentations on topics ranging from real-time collaboration, to portals and knowledge management. See http://www.delphigroup.com/a=1/b=1087/c=hkmu74605xje2 . This year's executive retreat focuses on the topic of uncertainty. Included will be the observations of luminaries who we have been interviewing on the topic of uncertainty over the past few months, including Peter Drucker - Sam Skinner, CEO United Freightways and Former Sec. DOT - HP, CEO Carly Fiorina - USAF Lt. General Steve Croker - Motorola, CEO Christopher Galvin - MIT Media Lab - PeopleSoft, Exec VP Mike Gregoire. Info: http://www.delphigroup.com/a=3/b=1087/c=hkmu74605xje2

· PROJECT EXTRANETS IV: SUCCESSFUL COLLABORATIVE WORKING; MAXIMISING EXTRANETS FOR OPTIMUM RESULTS, organized by Ross Sturley and Construction News, London, England, 3 December 2003, at the IEE Savoy Place. The one I attended a couple of years ago was outstanding. See http://www.projectextranets.co.uk/ for information.

· Good extranets article: http://www.cnplus.co.uk/proj_collaboration/?ChannelID=35

5. QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"If ignorance is bliss, why are there not more happy people?" --Unknown

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