Wikis and vlogs and more oh my

1. rant- i am a simple girl with simple needs- i work from everywhere and for years after touching multiple networks on any rocking pc it stars running turtle juice- urgh, if i calculated the amount of time wasted trying to connect to networks in the last 18 months a great ROI story can be made for those that can fix it- outside network T-access is frustrating...to do one thing can take me foreeeever - i had a fairy tale dream i would move to Silicon Valley and i would be forever connected instead it takes me hours to get on the network or even find a WIFI access point.

2. i love the fact that i am hearing the words- web 2.0, wikis, rss, blogs, vlogs, podcasts, social bookmarking- from my customers and definitely internally at my company. why? cause if you have spent years looking at usability from the end-user perspective when things to talk about are user empowered like these tools, it just makes us happy- just like driving a hybrid-

Here is a good find in case Wiki is still strange to you: O'Reilly - What is a Wiki (and how to use it for your projects) coming to you from Librarian in Black.

3. tie in # 1 with #2 and the power of Web 2.0 can have a huge impact on remote and field enterprise users that work from various locations. so because of #1 i have been cruising on the internet off my home PC quite a bit in the last few weeks. even if i am not doing 'work' i ALWAYS run into things that i might want to reference later on related to projects i am working on or should be. I can log into the network via a web VPN solution, but i still need to authenticate etc. and i tend not to be very creative and efficient when i need to jump through hoops to record a reference for future thought. I recently started using Google labs notebook, it is still in the lab which means it needs some work but i like where it is going and see how Google can deliver an enterprise version tied to their search appliances. In the lab version you can set your notebooks to private or public- in an enterprise version they can essentially use network access controls to govern who gets to see what and also allow the user to choose who to share with. I have seen a couple of applications out there that are using Google APIs to create shared 'notebooks' as well.

I have used Microsoft OneNote 2003 before- useful but since it is a local client app- i can't flip from one computer to another outside of the corporate network-also had a quick look at 2007 and it looks like it is staying only behind the firewall-not sure. As i was looking for OneNote2007 blog posts i ran into Microsoft Knowledge Network for Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007, which includes an Outlook plug-in that scans for expertise and social connections in email and a server component that displays the information in a discoverable and searchable manner -i must have missed the announcement on this one, the product team a la Microsoft style has a blog, with an interesting post on Knowledge Network vs. "Expert " location Systems. A couple of reviews and announcement posts including Ross Dawson but not much else past the June timeframe. Email-knowledge which equals all the stuff sitting in our inbox or archive folders- helping to find someone that knows something about whatever is needed. I still have an email on how to hook up to the network printer at my desk in Princeton which is probably over 3 yrs old (and i have been in SF for 1yr1/2- and i recently sent it to someone who was having problems that i was IM'ing with. Interesting, I wonder if Scoble's email was being beta tested with this new tool.