Wishlist: RSS of LinkedIn “Questions from my Network”

I love LinkedIn’s Q&A feature. It consistently delivers genuinely useful answers from amazingly qualified people.

I also want to contribute with answers to questions from my network. But who has the time to manually check the “Questions from your Network” page?

Why doesn’t LinkedIn feed me questions via RSS?

Wishlist: skimmable video content

Stowe Boyd is angry that Scoble doesn’t provide a transcript for his videos. He doesn’t have 30 minutes to watch a video. Frankly, neither have I.

Increasingly, I don’t have patience for 1 hour, or even 20 minutes or 5 to watch the news. Not even when I get it conveniently delivered to Miro every day. I do want the video content. But video is so out of sync with the basic principle of Hyper-time skimming that I lose interest in 30 seconds flat.

To skim videos, I want a table of contents in a sidebar – preferably an expandable outline. If a topic fails to catch my interest, I’ll go on to the next. And I want to be able to jump straight to the 1 minute that I really want to see.

Viddler gets it. Time-marked comments and tags, who-hooo! Leaving it all to the community, however, is not enough. Video content creators need to provide at least an initial structure.

How to hold meetings on a wiki

In the days immediately following our first World Cafe, our team couldn’t find time to hold an evaluation meeting. We decided to try holding the meeting on our wiki, and found that the results were better than in a traditional meeting. Here’s what we learned:

1. Allow enough time for the discussion. While a traditional meeting can last as little as a dozen minutes, the time-distributed nature of a ‘wiki meeting’ makes it necessary to allocate at least one day, depending on how busy team members are with urgent projects. Don’t expect people to drop everything and participate on a wiki discussion. We created the wiki discussion as soon as the World Cafe ended, and within 24 hours had obtained input from all team members.

2. Offer structure. As you create the wiki page, populate it with questions and issues. Make the structure simple and specific. Add content, don’t just post the meeting agenda. Include all relevant information, spell out your opinions on each subject and ask for more information where necessary. People are much more likely to respond if all they have to do is agree / disagree with an opinion or answer a specific question.

3. Encourage participants to openly sign their contribution. Mediawiki software parses three or four tildes (~~~~) into the signature of a participant to a discussion. A simpler option is to simply preface each comment with “Ron says:…” While most wiki software allow readers to find out who performed each edit, openly signing content goes a long way to keep the tone conversational.

4. Provide participants with tools to follow the discussion. Whether your software produces RSS feeds or simply sends email, make sure everyone knows how to set up frequent notifications. (Wouldn’t it be great to have wiki software produce Twitter feeds?)

5. Manage the discussion. While a moderator is usually not necessary once you have created structure and obtained participation, a discussion will often require participants to gather additional information or perform external tasks. Someone might have to install and demo some software, make some phone calls, cross over into the office of a non-participating coworker to obtain his expertise on a particular issues, or simply dig up some information. While participants will often self-organize, it is your job as the initiator of the discussion to follow through. Above all, make sure you keep contributing with any information or ideas made necessary by the discussion.

6. Capture actionable items. Regardless of the project management system your team uses, it is very important to capture and act on any requests made during the discussion. At the very least add ideas to a “To consider” or “Someday” list that everyone can see. Discussions on a wiki are available for reference, and few things discourage people from participating as much as the evidence that their contribution was not followed through.

7. Declare the meeting closed. Give participants 3-4 hours’ notice to put in a last word. After, that, formally close the meeting. Post a notice at the beginning of the wiki page. Don’t leave the conversation open-ended. It’s discouraging.

7 enterprise uses for Twitter

Toddlers explore a dozen different ways to use a new toy. Twitter is an oddly seductive new toy. Twitterers – and non-Twitterers – are busy looking for productive ways to use it. Some find it can offer personal wellbeing, support networking, amuse professionals, or create “social proprioception”. Others find out that it’s better not to bang yourself on the head with it .

So how can enterprises / small businesses play with this toy? Dodging the danger of helplessly floating in a river of tweets, here are seven theoretically productive enterprise uses for Twitter:

1. Task status updates from team members.
Your team probably spends considerable time asking each other “What have you been doing”? Once members start twittering their activities, most verbal updates become obsolete. Added benefit: If I see that Laura is doing some research on The Monkey Corporation, I’m more likely to let her know that I just happened to tag a couple of blog posts about them on del.icio.us over the weekend.

2. Real-time presence status for IM.
Few people update their IM status regularly. Using Twitterific to automatically update status messages on Adium or mood messages on Skype will encourage colleagues to consider IM status before interrupting. If my status says you are “Crafting the Best Article of the Year”, the guy next door might be less likely to IM the latest joke.

3. Informal timelog.
As a personal motivational timelog, Twitter is without equal. By the time the entire world knows that I’m Crafting that Best Article, I feel a little more disposed to actually launch MS Word. If my co-workers know as well, I might actually write a couple of sentences by the end of the day. Added benefit: If someone forgot to log billable hours on a project, the information could be extracted from Twitter postings.

4. Assign tasks while away from the office.
In good GTD manner, items should be processed only once. If I’m on the subway and suddenly remember that Alex should install a new MediaWiki plugin, I can Twitter it from my mobile phone – rather than write it down and hope I’ll look through my notes by the end of the week.

5. Notify of important wiki updates.
Teams using wikis for project management can twitter mission-critical wiki updates. Bill: “Just off the phone with Jobs; see http://monkeycorp.server/mediawiki/apple_hostile_takeover“

6. Update everyone on last-minute schedule changes.
Whether I’m running 10 minutes late for that staff meeting or my next client meeting just got delayed, I often end up calling one co-worker and asking her to update critical others. Twitter will easily update everyone from my mobile phone.

7. Process IM in batches.
Twitterrific is automatically set up to receive updates every 30 minutes. This hits a sweet spot between the immediacy of IM and the impossible ideal of checking email once a day. If it’s burning, co-workers can use direct IM. Otherwise, message updates are processed in batches every 30 minutes. I remain available but retain some sanity.

Twitter is no corporate powertoy. It still lacks usergroups; you can’t get privacy, either (Update: as twittersweet indicated in the comments, you can make your updates private and improvise groups). Small businesses might cope by using anonymous accounts. In corporations, do you think we’ll see Twitter look-alikes in next-generation IM systems?

Missing RSS feeds

Three places where I need an RSS feed and can’t get one:

• Technorati Video Tag Search;
• WordPress Tag Surfer;
• Video RSS for MIT World;

RSS is so simple to produce and so widespread. Both WordPress and Technorati live and breathe it. Yet they’re not offering the feeds that people need. If you’re not asking people how they want to get their information, you’ll be missing the very obvious.