by Heather Negley

1. Start small: Use a test case with a group of people who already work together.  Don’t use a group who works in silos and never share information.
2. Find a manager who support collaboration and who is willing to spread your vision throughout the upper ranks of management
3. If someone does not want to participate remember that you can not make them.
4. Provide one-on-one training for people who want to use the wiki. Make sure they know they are free to use it whenever they want
5. Choose a wiki tool that is easy to implement to start. The point is to show people how the tool can improve efficiencies in their daily work lives.
6. Facilitate autonomous user updates in each information silo to help free up roadblocks and get people used to updating the wiki. Teach groups to own the wiki by contributing to it.
7. Create a “resources” page in your wiki that contains frequently needed information for the group.

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I recently wrote an article about  Twitter for Twitips.  It covers how an individual may approach using Twitter for the first time. What’s exciting is that this barely scratches the surface of Twitter’s potential.

Twitter is quickly becoming a tool that businesses use for marketing and PR. For example, real estate agents love Twitter to list new houses. Here is a real estate agent in Phoenix, AZ. @tmh_phoenix. Southwest Airlines even has a personal PR employee whose job is to monitor their Twitter feed and respond and listen to conversations about the company. Follow Southwest @southwestair. So how do you monitor whether or not people are talking about you or your company. That’s easy. Go to Twitter Search and type in your company name or Twitter user name. The results will show tweets that mention you and offer a great opportunity to join a conversation. It’s also a good technique to use to see who has retweeted your posts. The more retweets you get, the better you are able to determine what content your followers find interesting.

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Sometimes you might encounter someone who asks about Twitter but may not be ready to use it. Here are some things to look out for.

1. If you get other people to print out your emails for you and put them on your desk before you read them,  your are not ready to use Twitter.
2. If you tell someone you work to “cut and paste” and you mean to get a pair of scissors and glue out, you are not ready to use Twitter.
3. If you’ve think  a blog is a part on a boat,  you’re not ready to twitter.
4. If you “won’t give in” and sign up for Facebook because  well, just because…, your not ready to Twitter.
5. If anything relating to the Internet, you refer to as “that computer stuff,” you’re probably not ready to Twitter.

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by Heather Negley

Capitol Words is an interesting new tool from the Sunlight Foundation. The presentation of reminds me a little of  Wordle which is a good thing. It’s nice to see government information in an easy to asborb format. On Capitol Words users can view an image map or tag cloud of the top words of the day, week, month or year used in Congress. It’s very captivating and a quick way to see the topic trend over a period of time 

As you might imagine, “budget” has been the most popular word in recent weeks. There is also an option to view by most vocal lawmaker by a specified period of time. Richard Durbin (D-IL) is the most vocal member of the past 60 days.

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Editorial Observer - With the Downturn, It’s Time to Rethink the Legal Profession - NYTimes.com.

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I played around with Wordle tonight and dropped the RSS feed for this blog into the Wordle tool. It made a pretty cool picture. Wordle is fun!

See bigger

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Analysis: Which URL Shortening Service Should You Use?.

by Danny Sullivan

URL shortening services are experiencing a renaissance in the age of Twitter. When every character counts, these services reduce long URLs to tiny forms. But which is the best to use, when so many are offered and new ones seem to appear each day? Below, issues to consider and a breakdown of popular services, including recommendations and services to avoid (the new DiggBar being one of these).

The URL Shortener Mega Chart

To make recommendations, I reviewed various services and how they stacked up in a variety of features. All this got dumped into a spreadsheet, below. You can also view it in full-screen here.

Each column represents a feature. Want to know more about that feature and why it is important? Each is explained below the chart. Green indicates that a particular service gets a good grade for that feature. Red indicates that it is lacking. Not all features are of equal importance, however, so don’t let the occasional red mark make you think a service is lacking. But in general, the more green, the better. 

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This speech pulls together Pew Internet Project data about how people’s use of the internet and cell phones has fundamentally changed the “information ecosystem” in 10 ways. Lee discusses how this has changed the role of libraries in the digital age and he points out ways that libraries can adapt to meet the expectations and demands of patrons.

via Pew Internet & American Life Project .

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 It lets anyone ask a question and then people can vote up the questions that they’d like answered.

Google Moderator » a blog about Google’s Moderator .

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Scopus Info - Scopus in Detail - How does it work?.

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