Multiply the spread of your ideas with free syndication tools | Sharing at Work

Multiply the spread of your ideas with free syndication tools

By Daniel J. Pritchett on November 21st, 2008

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Your organization generates a ton of ideas every day. Many of them disappear into a void, never to be heard from again. It doesn’t have to be this way! With the right planning and judicious use of free web-based content syndication tools you can give every idea that you create its best chance to spread. Here’s a quick three-step plan.

Step 1: Do all of your work on the web.

Step 2: Only use web tools that generate news feeds detailing your activity.

Step 3: Remix and distribute your news feeds all across the Internet.

Do all of your work on the web

We’ve covered this before. Most of our work is needlessly private. Start pushing your thoughts and your workflow through public channels and you’re inviting billions of smart people to read along with you and help create things that you could never make on your own. Your company won’t want to do everything online, so you have my blessing to dial step one back a notch and do all of your work using internal web tools like microblogs and document management systems.

Only use web tools that generate news feeds

Each of these services offers a feed of your activity

You can get a lot of work done online using the tools above. Readers of this blog likely already use a good number of the services above. Now push yourself to move even more of your work online. For office productivity, consider using Google Docs or the Zoho suite of tools. Both of those allow you to publish and distribute your work. Communicate using microblogs if at all possible - Tweets are easy retrieve and share amongst a wide audience. Marketing guru Seth Godin wants each of us to use the internet to do our jobs. The key to working online is connecting.

Remix and distribute

Now that all of the work you’re doing is public and shared, take those feeds and push them out to new destinations! Gather together the feeds generated by your work and the work of your team. Remix them into high-value streams of information. Try using Yahoo Pipes or FriendFeed to synthesize these little drips of knowledge into raging torrents of ideas. Take those torrents and share them with the world. Donate your company’s firehose of knowledge to Alltop’s web newspapers. Pipe your presentations and blog posts into your LinkedIn profile. Share the streams of your daily work with your team members and the world.

Check in next week for a writeup exploring the reach of these news streams. We’ll discuss the ways that a single article posted in one location can spread to many different sites and spark conversations amongst different groups of people all along the way.

Share and Enjoy:

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Categories: Sharing at Work
Tags: broadcast, Collaboration, conversation, news, pipes friendfeed, portability, rss, search, transparency
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204Comments2008-11-21+21%3A09%3A11Daniel+J.+Pritchett to “ Multiply the spread of your ideas with free syndication tools ”

entmike Nov 21st, 2008 at 4:17 pm

Not to poop on your idea, which is a great one, but some tools still remain tethered to the local runtime environment. An example is your suggestion of Google Docs. Good for organizing a weekend BBQ, bad for a design document or resume. I am still a proponent of rallying workplace collaboration past using E-Mail and attachments, however sometimes you have to ease the 40 and 50-somethings into the idea. Cloud computing and collaboration is still years from gaining corporate adoption and momentum, even though it works in peripheral cases such as group organization and social networking. It's a clash of the 20 and 30-somethings vs the aforementioned 40 and 50-somethings, coupled with non-agile workplaces (ours).
Daniel J. Pritchett Nov 21st, 2008 at 4:24 pm

Mike: You're right that Google Docs isn't sufficient for a lot of use cases. In those cases, I'd still want to do all of the web-based collaboration you can and then put the final result up on a SharePoint-style web-enabled file share. Even SharePoints' file shares should be able to generate an RSS item saying “Mike just posted a revision to this Visio flowchart”.

I can and should be getting that RSS item streamed to me so that I can see your work as it happens rather than when (if) you remember to show it to me.

As for the culture change required to make this stuff happen, I don't mean to discount that at all. I know we aren't going to dump our Lotus Notes mailboxes and wake up in the clouds tomorrow. I'm still doing my best to find the best way forward. By writing all of this out I'm distilling my ideas into a form that will serve me (us) well the next time this comes up in conversation with my supervisor… or yours… or a company vice president.
entmike Nov 21st, 2008 at 4:56 pm

I'll continue down the line of thought as Devil's Advocate, if anything, to help you be prepared for the retorts you would get from those who are in charge:

1) What do RSS feeds give you that mailing groups do not?
2) Why do I have to collaborate on the web and then put it all in Powerpoint? Why can't I just use what I've been using?
3) I don't want anybody changing anything I'm working on.

Reason 3 is probably the most frustrating of them all. People need to get over the idea that “I'm” working on something and shift gears and understand that “we” are working on something.
Daniel J. Pritchett Nov 21st, 2008 at 5:13 pm

1) Standardized news feeds are portable and can be repurposed and redistributed to a constellation of unforeseen new applications and communities. E-mails - a 40 year old format that predates the internet - are not suitable for contemporary information sharing purposes.

2) You are free to continue doing what you have been doing, but the continued drumbeat of economic downturn and globalization means that each month you continue operate under an obsolete workflow is a month where your organization draws closer to bankruptcy.

3) The only systems that don't change are dead systems. No one is employed to maintain those. If you want to participate in a living business, you must have to accept the fact that you have to run at a certain pace just to *maintain* your current position. Any hope of advancement will require even more hard work and optimization.
entmike Nov 21st, 2008 at 5:44 pm

1) [Citation Needed]

2) I fail to see the correlation of economics and workplace collaboration, apart from a potential gain in efficiency.

3) The AS400 gurus want to have a word with you.
entmike Nov 21st, 2008 at 5:45 pm

I also have to say that I'm playing Devil's/Workplace's Advocate. I'm not personally disagreeing with you.
Daniel J. Pritchett Nov 21st, 2008 at 8:36 pm

1) You can make email do anything you want if you rewrite the system to publicize mailboxes and export messages into a portable format, but the basic email system has none of that baked in. RSS is just a standard built on top of XML to facilitate data exchange. I'd like to focus on transparency and data portability rather than E-mail versus RSS.

2) I'm obviously not an economist nor a CEO, but I was trying to suggest that yearly gains in efficiency will be necessary to stay competitive in business. RSS feeds aren't the silver bullet to solve all workplace woes, but they'll definitely streamline operations and open up new horizons when it comes to knowledge work.

3) Got me there! I imagine that an AS400 doesn't need a huge staff to keep it running. I'm more thinking about the headcount required to build and extend new projects. I like to think that a good IT person/department automates things so well that they are no longer needed full time and can move on to someone who needs them more. I doubt many people are comfortable with that perspective though - it's hard to contemplate the end of a job.
Daniel J. Pritchett Nov 21st, 2008 at 8:37 pm

Whoops! I was having fun with the back and forth here, but my wife tells me I might have come off as shrill. Thanks a ton for participating here - the ideas put forth in this blog aren't worth nearly as much without people like you to help polish them.
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