Seven Ways to Implement a Successful Wiki
by Heather Negley
- 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.
- Find a manager who support collaboration and who is willing to spread your vision throughout the upper ranks of management
- If someone does not want to participate remember that you can not make them.
- 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
- 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.
- 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.
- Create a “resources” page in your wiki that contains frequently needed information for the group.
Businesses Use Twitter for Public Relations
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.
Capitol Words
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.
Wordle for Infoknot
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!
Analysis: Which URL Shortening Service Should You Use?
Analysis: Which URL Shortening Service Should You Use?.
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.
How libraries can survive in the new media ecosystem
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.
Google Moderator
It lets anyone ask a question and then people can vote up the questions that they’d like answered.