What about blogs from(and in) Omidyar Network? How can the site include RSS feeds of existing members? I know Gideon Rosenblatt and a handful of the other folks (including myself) kick out blogs that are related to building networks and social enterprise.

It is a huge challenge to keep conversations going with so many communities that should be connected. (Skoll Foundation,here, network-centric advocacy blogs, civicspace tools) It seems like each network wants you to write content exclusively inside the walls of the community and using tools unique to that server.

The challenge is not to move it all inside but to allow folks to suggest posts that can be slurped into different communities for trackbacks and comments.

The network approach would suggest you resist efforts to centralize voice and community and that you strategically think about ways to push connections to this community out to bloggers like Pierre.

Marty raises an important point here. This is a great community, but not only one in which I find myself wanting to be active. Using RSS, there are easy ways to segment different categories within my blog and spit out different feeds. If this community were able to suck in those feeds (as well as spit them out of course), I could easily imagine setting up specific categories within my blog and then distributing the most relevant here in my space on this community. We are currently experimenting with this technique in some collaboration tools for NW environmental groups.

There will always be conversations between people that will be generated between members of this community - and most appropriately hosted here. But pulling in (appropriate) feeds from the outside makes for good discovery and connections between people on topics they might not think about if they had to pop out of the community to each other's blogs.

See what happens when you build a cool tool like this? All the wisecrackers come in and start suggesting a bunch of crazy stuff... :-) Consider it testimony to you're being onto something interesting...

Marty's thinking is exactly the sort that went into designing the "DeanSpace" project for the Dean campaign. The goal was to build a web-app toolkit that could be deployed for Dean campaign constituent communities to organize themselves / have a voice - but build lots of XML data interchange (FOAF / RSS / Event RSS) functionality so sites could interconnect with one another. The point was to build community between communities, and knock down the walls between differnet constituencies and the different strata of the campaign (local - state - national).

We are carrying that kind of thinking forward with the CivicSpace project. CivicSpace will support RSS, FOAF, Event RSS export and import. And we will be building out a lot of functionality to that end. But now the universe to network is the progressive movement, not the Dean campaign.

Gideon, I'd love to take a peek at what you've got going for NW groups. Is there a demo / white paper up anywhere?

Sorry for neglecting this space -- and I missed the earlier comments -- clearly a sign of the difficulty of following so many conversations, as you all said!

Regarding RSS, I don't know if you've noticed the 'Syndicate' links at the bottom of the left column on this page and others... there are a variety of RSS feeds available here already.

This tool is quite nascent, but I hope it will evolve quickly to meet the needs to all identified.

I have never had a blog, but I have been looking for an interactive communication system like what OmidyarNet has devised for my institute: Toda Institute for Global Peace and Policy Research. How can I adopt this system for the Toda Institute?

Hi Majid. Welcome to omidyar.net. You can create your own workspace and/or discussions right now. Then, you can invite others to collaborate with you or just see who joins on their own. In the Community-General group, you can find more information about getting started. For instance, the home page of the Community-General group has useful links for new users such as the Welcome Wagon. Looking forward to seeing more of you online.

Pierre, I'm glad you posted this. The syndicate link is something I'd entirely missed.

I'm a syndicated columnist with CBC Radio Canada, and the dynamics of my own personal workspace have changed entirely. My homepage is currently set to MyYahoo, with newsclippers, etc. Where I once kept Reuters, AP, et al. headlines at the top of my page, they've been replaced by the diaBlogs I follow via RSS. This was a welcome addition to Yahoo, because it makes it easier to aggregate the 100 or so news services I scan for my column, but more importantly, to gleen the more immediate pulse of the independant columnists that are blogging in realtime.

I think this will be an really valuable aspect of this community. There's some incredible discourse occuring, and a lot of important activities being cultivated as a result.

Thanks!

Sue.

Ditto Pierre! In fact the next decade will focus on companies finding efficient ways to harness the knowledge of their employees. If you really think about it, what are some key differences between a small startup and a large corporation? A key one is that small company has a great social network (people collaborating and discussing ideas by walking from one desk to another, ability to remember all the employees names - its easy when you have 20 people in the company), making knowledge easy to share, discussing ideas around the water cooler and making things happen quickly. Once corporations grow large, this social thread is lost and knowledge management becomes a very big problem (knowing who is working on what, stopping by to ask if they can send you a whitepaper they wrote, etc.)

This is where e-mails, IMs, etc. fail - they dont provide conversation. Blogs and wikis come closest to the social network I described above. Marry blogs and wikis with a inference and search engine and you have a killer app. I am not crazy about the current UI and formats of blogs - maybe there is some beauty in its simplicity, but I think we can do better. I would also want a really cool classification system to automatically index and place blogs in various groups. After all, the blogs will become meaningless when a trillion of them are generated everyday and finding the ones that have meaning to you is impossible.

I use a blog for internal communication and personal notetaking. As a hunter-gatherer on our team, I find it works great compared to a lot of the options out there for quick and dirty tracking of all the things I read throughout a day and want to make sense of, review later, organize and share with others. It is definitely a step ahead of emailing article clips to everyone everytime I find something useful.

I think the model has to evolve a bit more in the public space since it still operates on the premise that the first posting is the most important one and the others are "comments" on it.

Personally, I am looking for ways that citizen journalism can sprout and many people can feel they have a stake in the matter. I have participated with the indymedia.org model, and that has its faults. I think RSS style syndication could be the cusp of something more significant for Knowledge management for organizations.

I'd love to see more RSS feeds used to break down walls among different online communities and allow the interchange of information and syndication to unite many disparate communities.

At the recent BlogOn conference in Berkeley, Microsoft demonstrated their Channel 9 network for developers and it is a good model for companies. I used to run the user group program at a publishing company and I just imagine all the cool things that could have done with this type of communication between authors and people who bought the books on an external basis and internally among all the people at the company.

We're currently in the process of redesigning our Digital Divide Network website (http://www.digitaldividenetwork.org). Among the new features we'll have for our users is a free blogging tool that DDN members can use to post news and information on their local digital divide efforts. Each blog will generate an RSS feed, which can then be used in any news aggregator like bloglines or My Yahoo, and can also be saved by a user's list of favorite blogs on DDN. So when they revisit the website, they'll be able to update their blog and scan their favorite DDN blogs as well.

I'll post an announcment once the new site is ready. We plan to start beta testing in a couple of weeks, so if anyone would like to experiment with the site's new features, please feel free to pop me an email.

thanks, andy http://www.edwebproject.org/andy/blog/

Hello

Omidyar radio!!

I would enjoy having many of the post received available on a MP3 media form so that payback could be permitted while in traffic or other times. We can have this process automated or design a method to upload text and the voice of the author simultaneously.

A method would also be needed to categorize the files before the files are recorded. Maybe a search via related topics, author .. would be initiated then we would have the ability to burn a copy to the media of choice for later playback.

Ultimately we can develop detailed packages for text and voice based on topics, author, etc. Making the study and enlightening process more intense and spontaneous!

Please assist me in the development of a system that can store text messages and convert them into voice playback for people who need assistance using the site. These files can be saved to various media for later playback.

The search options can also be expanded to allow search by certain authors, within certain pertaining topics, files with voice narratives, etc.

Some of the members may want to create in depth interviews on certain topics as a guide to communicating the power of your ideas in a constructive manner.

Consider yourself empowered to lend your talents to this project. The fulfillment of a project in which EVERYONE has played a major role in the development and implementations will be felt in the continued advancements for the Omidyar Network.

Best regards

Fernando Mack

Interesting topic. Sun's Jonathan Schwartz is now blogging and touting blogging for employees:

http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/jonathan

But when Jonathan made a huge pitch to Wall Street recently in New York, and Jonathan asked how many of the assembled analysts had read his blog, about 3 hands went up.

Wall Street is about as wont to share information as the FBI counter-terrorism crowd (as one reads in Seymour Hersh's new book), since proprietary algorithms are the great differentiator and holy grail. That's probably why the anonymous options trader blogger

http://klugo.blogspot.com/

remains anonymous. His bosses would no doubt simply plotz if they knew he was giving away the strategy for free. Wall Street and the open-source ethos? Only kicking and screaming and by act of Congress! Doesn't Sun realize that? Well, actually, I think it does, since it won't reveal the names of any of the Wall Street firms it says it is working with on its new pricing models for utilities computing. It sounds like John Kerry, claiming the support of unnamed foreign leaders.

Community specific IM? Surely as good, if not better solution, especially if it allows you to open 'discussion conferences'. I am looking at a company which promises to create such communities in the Universities space and I really think this could be a winner, more in terms of exchange of information than necessarily financially. With open windows on the desktop, and flashing alerts, it is far easier to follow discussions than on a system such as this - since 99% of people never shut down their workstations these days, it seems to present a reasonable and less hassle solution than 'notification from blogs' and involves less of a paradigm shift - I would say 50% of corporate America uses or is familiar with IM.

Of course, I'll weight in and say Social Software is good for business. Some case studies on enterprise use: http://www.socialtext.com/customers/

I'll amplify Shashi's comments, but also point out that there are different values at different scales (and phases in a company's growth). Part of what's being realized is that even with established companies, Social Software can be a significant change agent.

Fortune's latest issue has an article about execs at Sun publishing their own internal blogs:

It's Hard to Manage if You Don't Blog

Jonathan Schwartz, president and COO of Sun Microsystems, has recently criticized statements by Intel executives, mused that IBM might buy Novell, and complained about a CNET.com article—all by writing a blog on a Sun website.

Yep, blogs—which are a way to post text to a website—have found their way into business. Schwartz is the highest-ranking executive yet to embrace the new medium, which is burgeoning globally. About 35,000 people read his blog (http://blogs.sun.com) in a typical month, including customers, employees, and competitors. Schwartz encourages all Sun's 32,000 employees to blog, though only about 100 are doing it so far. But they include at least three senior managers other than Schwartz as well as development engineers and marketers.

<snip>

http://www.fortune.com/fortune/technology/articles/0,15114,699971,00.html

I think Gideon's idea of a way to synidicate content INTO the Omidyar Network as oppose to out of the space is a great idea.

Imagine being able to set your personal news on Omidyar to simply pull from an RSS feed. I agree with Gideon-- good way to stay connected to the community without having to be completely imersed in the community.

Sorry, you really need http://tinyurl.com.

I haven't looked at your filing because of the obvious overlap of the phrase "c2c financial services arena" and a business I'm already involved in, PayPal.

I'm sure if you have a meaningful business plan, you'll find plenty of potential funders elsewhere.

Here here on the TinyURL.

Medha- Possibly you can get some ideas or more by posting here, where business ideas and plans are discussed. http://www.omidyar.net/group/issues-business/

Alternatively you can post to the Web group if you prefer to talk about the technology or related. http://www.omidyar.net/group/web/

I'm used to mailing lists and Usenet discussion groups, so I find the linear format of these discussions irksome. Can we have multi-threaded discussions or a Wiki, please?

I hope that you are right that following the RSS versions of my favorite conversations here will be easier and pleasanter.

It does take a bit of getting used to, but I find the linear format helps when I am a few days behind on a discussion: it's easier to catch up by reading linearly, start to finish. If ever comment started its own thread of reply and counter-reply, it would be a bit difficult to follow.

However, I grant you, the linear format really isn't great for power users. I'm also quite familiar with Usenet, which I find very effective for complex and lengthy conversations -- but only when the participants all know how to use the tools and protocols, which you have to admit, are not for the faint of heart.

Oh, and we do have wikis -- we call them Workspaces here, and every Group has one.

I'm another fan of the linear format. The WELL still has the one I helped design in.

Linear is convergent, threaded is divergent. I'm more interested in convergent discussions. And I agree with Pierre that catching up is far easier in linear mode.