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Of course you've heard of Quora . Lots of posts have been written about Quora.  I've been using it for some time now . I'm not a heavy user; I dip into it every now and then. I think it's interesting. It taps into the power of asking questions . I am surprised though that Quora took off so quickly. Is the world really waiting for a new and separate platform specifically designed to ask and answer questions? For now it seems the world is. For the long-term I don't think Quora will stay around in this form. As I tweeted I think Quora will be acquired by and integrated into Twitter (like in Yammer ). Or Twitter will add Questions functionality (like Yammer). Why? Because knowledge workers are extremely efficient. They don't want to have the tools spread out everywhere and have to look into all those tools one by one. Furthermore, we could already ask each other questions on Twitter. Tweeps would just mark these tweets with a hashtag like #question, #justasking o...

Well, Arzu just finished her Masters thesis last week with a good grade! As you know I posted   several snippets from her work. Soon her thesis will be public for you to read. I think she did a really good job and the results, though focussed on social bookmarking, are interesting in general if you're interested in technology and social media adoption. But how do you share bookmarks? Do you use a social bookmarking tool? My experience is not many people use a social bookmarking tool. Of course they bookmarks stuff and save the bookmarks in their browser. Hardly anyone knows you can share them publicly as well. At least that's the experience I have. I give workshops about social media and I always have a slide about bookmarking. I've been tempted to leave it out. Because every time I get to that slide and ask how many of them know what social bookmarking is and use it, hardly anybody does. The ratio is 1-2 out of every 10 workshop participants. Is this   the reason w...

I've always been intrigued by the concept of learning. It's one of the reason I like blogging so much and social media in general. It's a great way to learn! Every now and then I bump into a great post or interview about this topic. Just recently I read a great interview with John Seely Brown and Douglas Thomas about their new book 'A New Culture of Learning' ( part 1 and part 2 ). I was planning to read the book. After reading this interview I'm going to push it up on my to-read list. Thanks Henry Jenkins for sharing this interview with us. I'll share some interesting statements from the interview with you here: One of the key arguments we are making is that the role of educators needs to shift away from being expert in a particular area of knowledge, to becoming expert in the ability to create and shape new learning environments. Our argument brings to the fore the old aphorism "imagination is more important than knowledge." In a networked worl...

It's been 4 years now since I started this blog . 4 years! That seems like a very long time. All I can say is I really enjoyed blogging and will continue to do so in the future. I hope and plan to do more blogging. Some of them will be short (but not as short as my tweets ...). And some will be longer. I really want to share some of my deeper thinking with you and would like to hear what you think about them. I'm also looking for ways to reshare older posts. I don't want to push them at you, but my readership has grown and I'd like to hear from them what their views are on those posts. If you have any ideas on this, please let me know. I still collect bookmarks and comment on them in Diigo. I don't share them here anymore, but you can find them easily . Finally I want to thank you for reading my blog, commenting on posts and sharing them with others. Thanks a bunch, it really means a lot to me! And if you have any comments about my blog or blogging, e.g. tips to im...

Wow, this is very interesting ! Memolane, a timeline for all your social media traces. One of the things that popped up when I saw this was: hey, this is great way to find back old tweets (as Twitter search being so aweful...). And, wouldn't this also be great for a business environment ? It would tell you when you sent emails, checked-in/-out documents, searched for information on the intranet, etc.? What I understand is that Memolane is not moving into this space. Business opportunity!

Some time ago I had the privilege to give a workshop about social media and collaboration for about 50 secretaries.  I wrote about the exciting workshop in the past , but I never shared the slides with you. They're on Slideshare now and you can flip through them below. I hope you enjoy them. As always, comments are welcome. And if you have any experiences with secretaries and new ways of working, please leave a comment. I'm curious if your experience relate to mine. Workshop New Media 4 Secretaries View more presentations from Samuel Driessen .

Thought I'd share this with you now that the recording is also online. I gave a talk about enterprise microblogging at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit 2010 in Frankfurt. Please find the slides here . The talk was also recorded and can be found here . Comments and questions about the slides and the talk are more than welcome!

Some time ago I told you I have a student, Arzu , who's researching enterprise social bookmarking. We'll she's almost finished with her thesis. And I can tell you, I'm really impressed with her work. She's delivered a very fundamental and also practical piece of work. I hope to share more with you from her work in the coming weeks. I'll share a nice quote with you right now. In her final chapters she refers to research done on 'trust' which I find very interesting. Hsu et al. ( 2007 ) explored the effect of trust on knowledge sharing in virtual communities in different stages. They suggest that trust is developed in virtual communities by repetitive interaction of members over time and appears in three stages: economy-based, information-based and identification-based trust. As the relationship develops, the economy-based trust will move to knowledge-based trust, eventually identification-based trust. In the initial stage of participation to virtual co...

There's lots of buzz about 'The Future of Work'. And quite a bit is focused on technology. I don't think that's very strange. Most technology is specific, it's concrete. You can talk about how it works, which features it has, etc. The Future of Work is about more than tools. It's also about facilities (building, furniture, colors, etc) and most importantly about organization (structure, processes and networks, culture, behavior, etc). In my opinion one of the groups with the most fundamental research on this topic is Novay , specifically the Future Workspaces or ProWork group. And they ground there research in practice. Their approach is interesting because it's broad, focusing on organizational and technology issues (not facilities). They've publish about their work regularly on their blog. One of their interesting reports is titled "Connected Professionals. Flexible working in a networked society" . It shows their way of working: deep ...

Jane did it again! Her Global Intranet Trends for 2011 report is out. And it's loaded with all kinds of information about the intranet. Fact and figures, stories and trends. As in previous years I'll pass on some of my highlights from the report. For two reasons: to show you what a great resource this report is, and, to get you to buy it. I think it's worth your money. There's something strange about the intranet. The intranet has been around for a long time now. Some say the intranet is 'so passé'. Social media is the new intranet. At the same time when I read this report I wonder: if the intranet has been along for so long, how come so few companies get their intranet right? Why isn't it the case that we just copy the great practices of other intranet concepts and technologies to have our own great intranet? Of course I know the answer to at least part of this question. But still, with resources like Jane's survey you should be able to make a very go...

Michael Gotta of Cisco wrote an interesting post some time ago about "Expertise Location: Don't Forget Process & Cultural Factors" . He relates to the fact that Enterprise 2.0 is often sold by saying that social tools help find experts in the organization more easily. However what's the assumption underlying this? The general assumption includes two primary ways of identifying "experts". The first method assumes that employee use of social tools (e.g., blogs, wikis, micro-blogging, communities) and social applications (e.g., ideation), enables their talent and business insight to be more visible and therefore more discoverable by co-workers. The second method revolves around the employee profile created as part of an enterprise social network site. It is assumed that employees will readily create and maintain rich profiles where they willingly share information about their job history, interests, hobbies, education, and areas of expertise. Rich emplo...

I thought I'd wait a bit before posting this... As you know I changed jobs not too long ago. During the last year I applied for several jobs and was asked to apply for jobs. One of those jobs was interesting for the fact that they had a 2.0 approach to recruiting. This company is trying to reach out to potential new employees in new ways. They also want to be more open about themselves by using social media. Their recruiting website clearly showed their (HR) employees were on Twitter, they used Youtube to tell more about working for their company, etc. I was impressed by it. And I also thought: hey, it looks like this company really understands 'the new way of recruiting/working' . So, I applied for the job. I could upload my resume and other info to their site. Things went downhill from there... Of course I got the automatic email saying they would get back to me within two weeks. After 3,5 weeks I thought I'd ask them how things were going. It took another week fo...