I’ve posted a new article at PebbleRoad on intranet governance. This article offers a system view of intranet governance. It is based on a simple strategy that can be applied across different areas. The areas that I’ve covered are: information organization, publishing, collaboration and applications. This article is based on a presentation that I put together for the KM Singapore conference.

Now this is serious fun. I’ve seen this happen so many times. From Tales from Redesignland. Read the entire episode.

We’re organizing a 1-day Masterclass in SharePoint Collaboration with Michael Sampson. This is taking place on 5th Nov at Grand Hyatt in Singapore. We’re offering an early-bird price of S$420 if you register before Oct 20th (a real bargain folks).  So why are we doing this? There are many SharePoint projects taking shape these days and that’s good in one way—it tells us that collaboration is getting the attention and budget it deserves. But many of these projects are done solely from a technical point of view, and this is a problem. Collaboration as we’ve come to understand demands more than just a technical perspective. It requires asking the right questions, planning to get the right answers and making the right decisions along the way that align with business objectives. This is the gap that we hope to bridge with Michael Sampson in the seminar.  So if you’re in Singapore or in the region, this is an opportunity to understand the many paths ahead with SharePoint (or any other collaboration tool) and how to choose the right ones (and how to avoid the wrong ones).

Google announced yesterday that they’ve enhanced their search results page to include page sections of long pages in the snippets area. Here is an example they’ve given. The rationale is that we can do directly to a section in the page if that’s what we’re interested in. That’s a nice idea—it’s an attempt at auto-indexing the page using page sections. It provides more information on the page, assuming that the page sections are labeled properly. But what’s really interesting that is the fact that this is another opportunity to reveal sequence, like in a table of contents. Showing a sequence in a page really gets to the guts of what the page is all about. Google already shows a sitemap in the search results, which gets to what a site is all about. Now the only thing Google needs to figure out is how to reveal sequence across pages and sites. So for example, if I were to search for "diabetes" then I should get a sequence that links to different pages and sites and the sequence includes what is diabetes to treatments to living with a diabetic to home remedies. Guess that was what the Knol was supposed to do.

Oliver Marks cautions on using the 2.0 prefix as another way to bottle old wine—for example, KM before and Enterprise 2.0 now. Like the vast amount of blogs, there’s now a glut of content online with mostly nothing new to say (with honorable exceptions of course) on the topic of using web 2.0 technologies in business, the wonder of Twitter and on and on, in slide format. It’s far from clear who most of this material is aimed at - like the CD Roms ten years ago not many people actually look at this stuff unless there’s a compelling reason to.

Ginny Redish explores when to PDF large documents, and more importantly when not to. "However, realize that, with most PDF files, you are providing a paper document on the web rather than web-based information. If the document looks like a paper document or if it is large, people are likely to print it rather than read it on the screen. You have distributed the document; you have saved the printing and shipping cost; you have shifted the cost and effort of printing to your audiences - but have you really met their needs?"

The Harvard Business Review has an article by Robert Stickgold where he writes about the benefits of sleep: "A report in the June 2009 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed that a nap with REM (or "dream") sleep improves people’s ability to integrate unassociated information for creative problem solving, and study after study has shown that sleep boosts memory. If you memorize a list of words and then take a nap, you’ll remember more words than you would without sleeping first. Even micronaps of six minutes—not including the time it takes to fall asleep, which is about five minutes if you’re really tired—make a difference."

Jason Kincaid writes about how YouTube tries to constantly test out and understand how its users are using the website. "To help gauge the Watch page’s ideal layout, YouTube invited in a number of users and gave them magnets that represented different elements from YouTube and other popular video sites. The results were not surprising, but they present an interesting challenge to YouTube: the vast majority of users chose to streamline their page as much as possible, featuring a large video player, a search box, and a strip of related videos. But the site’s heavy uploaders, who are obviously key to YouTube’s success, tended to favor a more complex site with a greater emphasis on analytics, sharing, and social interaction. YouTube’s task is to figure out a way to appeal to both sets of users."

Bill Ives has summarized a Forrester report on "What’s Holding Back Your Intranet?". The findings are not surprising. "They found that 93% of employee respondents said they use an intranet or company portal (Forrester uses the terms interchangeably) at least weekly, and more than half reported daily use. However, they found that these intranets were mostly accessed for basic functions such as company directory, benefits information, and payroll. Access to collaborative tools, what some might called an enterprise 2.0 capability was ranked fourteenth."

Jane McConnell writes about 7 principles for decentralised publishing on the intranet. "If you are a large, global organization, you will have many different types of content with varying degrees of ownership depending on the source: business unit, country, function, etc. Ask the different business units and functions to define their own guidelines for what type of content require approval by what level or role."