Now it can be told. For the past few months, one of my favorite social software startups, Blogtronix, has been working with publishing giant Reuters to create a new online community around environmental markets called ReutersInteractive, which quietly opened in beta last week. For those of us who are fans and charity users (Social Media Today runs on Blogtronix), the demands of the Reuters project on a small, growing company has meant having to wait for the long-promised release of a major update of the Blogtronix platform.
Jigsaw is a fast-growing, controversial online marketplace that lets people trade their business contacts for more contacts or cash.
One of the most formidable barriers to the widespread adoption of social media tools within enterprises is fear of failure.
What if we make blogs, wikis and other social collaboration tools available and nobody uses them? Unlike the consumer side of the web where the fact that individuals seek out, self-select and manage the social software they want to use is a reliable indication of their motivation to use it, corporations simply have to take it on faith that somebody within the organization will think of something useful to do with these new tools.
Way back on February 9, 2004, I wrote a famous (well, Doc Searls
linked to it) post called The Internet Does Not Scale/The Internet Is Not Random (scroll down) on the collapse of Howard Dean’s mostly internet-fueled campaign in the cornfields of Iowa. It said, in part:
The biggest challenge that most managers or work team leaders face when they decide to use a wiki is getting their coworkers to use it too. Some organizations have been extremely effective at getting mass participation on their wikis, others have simply failed altogether.
If you're one of those people who've been waiting for somebody to create a tool that would let ordinary mortals without programming expertise mix and match applications and create their own mashups, today's your big day.
Back on July 30 I posted a piece called 5 Good Reasons Not All CEOs Should Blog.
Based on a just released study of familiarity and adoption among Inc. magazine's 500 list of America fastest-growing companies, social media appear to be making greater than among the Fortune 500 firms.
If you want an idea of what's ailing America these days, shuffle over to Digg and check out the top posts for the past 24 hours.
You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows and you sure don't have to count circulation figures and ad pages to know that internet has been a disasterous paradigm buster for newspapers in particular and print journalism in general.
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