Last week, if you would remember, I created a number of different weblog posts to touch base on a number of different weblogging tools available that I have been trying out lately apart from my two favourite ones so far, Qumana and w.bloggar. It all started with the new FireFox extension called Performancing for FireFox and then it went to discuss a bit more regarding the weblogging component from Flock.

Now that I have managed to have a working build for the weblogging component of Flock, I thought it would be a good time to share with you folks what I think are some of my top 5 favourite features at the same time that I will share what I think needs still some more improvement. Pretty much like what I did with Performancing for FireFox. Thus here we go with that short review from the things I like about Flock’s weblogging capabilities:

• Spell check: Yes, indeed, this was one of the very first things that I was very glad to see. Not only from the perspective of having the option to proof read the contents from my own weblog posts but also from the perspective that as a non-native English speaker I now got a chance to ensure that words are spelled correctly without having those doubts if the words are correctly spelled or not.

• Drag Stuff to Blog it!: This is also another of my favourite features that I have tried so far. It pretty much reminds me of Qumana’s DropPad and it basically allows you to drag stuff directly into the square box on the top right that you can then use to continue shaping up the body of your weblog posts. Really handy, specially if you just want to read a bunch of stuff and weblog about it at the same time. Pretty impressive.

• Integration with Flickr: Oh, and what about this other capability ? You have seen how I have been weblogging on a regular basis about some of the pictures that I have been taking while I have been over here so now with this particular component from Flock things will be a lot easier, because to start things off, you can just simply drag and drop the pictures from the top box taken from Flickr and you can weblog away ! I love this one capability for sure as it is making it very easy to share pictures with least effort involved.
• Keyboard Shortcuts: Oh, yes ! Another one of my favourite capabilities from any weblogging tool. In the past I have mentioned how both w.bloggar, Qumana have got plenty of these, and also how thanks to Jed’s comments I discovered about some of them as well for Performancing for FireFox. Well, it looks like Flock’s weblogging component has got quite a few as well. Something that will certainly help me stick with this tool whenever I would need to create weblog posts on the fly.

• Tagging: This is also another of my favourite features but not only from this particular component, also from another of the different social networking tools out there. Certainly tagging is very much related to Web 2.0 and the fact that Flock is incorporating it is a great advantage to us all because it would certainly help make things a lot easier, pretty much like what Qumana does.

And now after mentioned the features I enjoy the most here you have got some further comments on those capabilities where I feel that Flock could improve a bit:

• No Pingbacks / Trackbacks: Indeed, I talked about this one already for Performancing for FireFox. If this particular weblogging tool does not provide both at some point I doubt that it would help it sink into the different options available that webloggers can take advantage of because, as I have already mentioned elsewhere, weblogging, whether we like it or not is all about having conversations with others with similar interests to our own, and if we cannot establish those conversations through the usage of Pingbacks and Trackbacks we will go nowhere. So this is one of those items that I will be looking forward closely to see if it would happen in the end or not.

• Unable to Select Categories to post to: I am not sure about this one, folks, but when trying to post this particular weblog post from Flock’s weblogging tool I am not able to select any categories where this post should go. I can see a second tab called Categories but it looks like everything in there is greyed out and I cannot select anything at all. I am wondering if I have got some setting wrong, but so far I haven’t figured out what is wrong. Simply that categories does not seem to be working all right. So another item I will be looking forward to seeing some improvements.

• Limited Rich Text Features and some quirks: Although I have been posting this from the Flock’s weblogging tool I am finding out how some of the WYSIWYG options are rather limiting like the fact that I cannot get quotes, unless I know the HTML tags, nor to mark text in whatever the colour, pretty much like all of the other tools are already providing at the moment. Also I have noticed how when highlighting a text to create a hyperlink with it everything that gets written afterwards will also be part of the hyperlinked text when it should not be the case. And a similar thing happens when working with bullets. It looks like when hitting Enter on a bullet it will create another one but it would not allow lots of spacing in between and when trying to add some spacing hitting Enter again just creates a bit more spacing than what I would need. I am sure that I would get better with this one till I figure out how it actually works out, but not a major issue. Something more along the lines of learning how to work with them.
  
• Quick access to Default Weblog Settings: This is one of those features that I am finding out very handy to have for all of the different weblogging tools that I use more than anything else because while I am starting to have more than a single weblog it should be increasingly easier as well to have the capability of checking default settings and options from each weblog engine in the shortest time possible. So I am thinking that the whole empty space next to the weblog posts on the top left could be used to include some of the basic setup options for each weblog in order to provide some more of those advanced features that advanced webloggers would be looking forward to.
• And last, but not least, ease of use and setup improvements: Yes, yes, yes! I am not sure about this one and how things could be improved, but the thing is that setting up my weblogging accounts for each of the different weblogging engines that I use, WordPress and Roller, has not been very friendly lately. It looks like I am still having difficulties for the component to automatically detect the different settings since on the WordPress weblog it still keeps on coming with Movable Type and unless I select the manual option to set it up, it will not work. Again, and like I have mentioned previously, this is one of the things that Qumana is really great at and maybe something other weblogging tools could leverage some of that work. I do hope so, because so far it is a rather painful process. Let’s see how it will all work out in the end.
  

So there you go. Those are the different features I really like about Flock’s weblogging component and also some of the things that I shall be looking forward to in future releases of this web browser. I know that there may be some other features that you would enjoy yourselves (And you are most than welcome to comment about them below) but I think that with those, for the time being, I think I am going to start making use of each of the different weblogging tools I have mentioned so far and after a while I will decide which one would be the one I would like to take advantage the most. So far it all got started with w.bloggar and Qumana, but it looks like both Performancing for FireFox and Flock’s weblogging tool are coming through pretty close. What do you think ?

technorati tags: Metablogging, Performancing, Qumana, w.bloggar

Indeed, folks, it is that time of the year again. I know I will be going off topic with this particular weblog post but I just wanted to take this opportunity to wish you all readers of this weblog (At least, for those who would be celebrating it) a very

With lots of health and peace for us all !

Weblog posts at elsua will be back during the course of next week so until then have a wonderful one and enjoy the holidays with your loved ones !

Peace & Prosperity !

In another weblog post Lloyd Budd asked me to created an updated weblog post since last time I talked a bit about the topic of Flock and I thought that this time around it would be a good time to share some thoughts on the latest build I have been trying the last couple of days.

Lloyd suggested that I should go and download one of the latest continuous builds available by going into http://tinderbox.flock.com/, which I have done a couple of times, the last one being this morning where I downloaded the 0.4.11 build. So I got it installed and the process went rather smoothly.

However, and just because there are so many things to talk about this web browser, and to not try to bore people to death with a lengthy weblog post, I am going to focus, for the time being, and on this particular post on the weblogging component from Flock, since I have already been sharing my thoughts about Qumana, w.bloggar and Performancing for FireFox.

Ok, before I get started with sharing some of those thoughts I must say that this is not the first time that I have been in contact with the weblogging component from Flock. I have tried it out in the past and being such a big fan from w.bloggar and Qumana I wasn’t very much impressed to be honest. However, Lloyd suggested that I should give a try to some of the latest builds as there have been some substantial improvements as far as the weblogging component was concerned, amongst others. So I decided to do just that, as I have mentioned already, and got the latest build installed.

I must say that after I have done that, I am not sure what has happened after the installation itself, but things seem to have gone totally wrong, at least, from my initial reaction. Apparently, I have been doing a clean install of the build after having tried out reinstalling and a few other things and it looks like the weblogging component from the browser, along with a whole lot of other options are not longer working. I mean, I can click on different buttons and options but nothing seems to be happening. There is no activity taking place, no action executed, nothing ! Nada! Zero! Anyway, I thought it may have been a problem with my machine so I installed the same build on another machine, also running XP, and still the same problem.

I couldn’t create a weblogging account through the Tools > Options > Blogging menu option. I had to go through the Default drop down list to select Blog Topbar and then I got prompted indeed to enter the URL and set it all up. So I did and after being prompted to enter the URL address of my weblog it came up with the settings but selecting Movable Type, instead of WordPress, which is what I have got running for this weblog. So I changed that to WordPress, then click on next, entered my userid and password and it got rejected ! I thought it may have been a temporary problem, but it wasn’t. It is still there and persistent. So instead of selecting WordPress I select MetaWeblog API and that seem to do the trick as it accepted the settings and set up the account. Hoearaaa !

Thus I decided to give it a try out now and see how it would go, with the creation of this particular weblog post, but alas, it doesn’t seem to work. I try to click on the top left button Create a Blog Post, or clicking the cross on the top of the screen or through the Tools > Blog Editor and nothing happens. I see no action taking place at all and this is something that has got me really worried that I have may messed everything because, on the 0.4.10 build everything seemed to be working just fine, as far as the setup is concerned. So from there onwards I have tried to reinstall everything with a clean start and I am still getting the same thing. Nothing happening and frustration increasing by the minute.

But I have decided to persevere, I know that something must be wrong in the installation process but I haven’t figured out just yet what it is. I am not going to give up that easily on it since I think it would be worth while checking it out as it is a very promising way of providing some social networking capabilities in a single web browser, specially if those improvements that Lloyd mentioned would be a reality. I guess I will have to wait and see. But one thing that I have got very clear is the fact that so far the setup process of the blogging component is not as straight forward as many others, like, for instance, Qumana where it would only take you a few extra seconds for an automatic process to complete and have the weblog account ready. I think that if Flock would want to have that cutting edge advantage of the next best web browser experience in order to share information and collaborate with one another in whatever the environment, it would need to have some very slick features available and one of them should be its ease of use for an initial setup. And so far, and from what I have mentioned above, there is still some room for improvement. But I am hoping to have this issue sorted out soon (If you have got any clue about what I could do to try to fix it please drop a comment or send me an offline e-mail) so I can give it a try and provide a much more descriptive description of what this weblogging component is all about.

I guess that, for the time being, I am not ready to flock just yet. But it will come, I am sure.

Technorati Tags : Flock, Qumana, w.bloggar, Performancing for FireFox

After I created yesterday’s weblog post on Weblogging Directly from FireFox - Performancing for FireFox I thought it would be a good time now to take the next step and take this FireFox extension for a spin. So I have decided to create this particular weblog post using that extension and let you all know what my experience has been so far. I know that quite a few people have been weblogging about this already, but I think I am going to take a new approach to it all. So instead of just reading a review of what I think on the extension I am just going to create a weblog post where I would be detailing five features I really like from Performancing for FireFox next to another five features where I think there is some more room for improvement. Hopefully, that way I will be able to add some more into the conversation and see how people would be able to get a good idea on this extension and find out if it would help them ease the way they share information and collaborate with one another.

Thus without any further delay here you have got the five features that I have been enjoying this far:

• Ease of Use while posting the content into the weblog: Indeed, one of my favourite features is the fact that this extension includes the best of both worlds: an WYSIWYG editor, or Rich editing tab, from where I can type and see what it looks like on the fly and if I am not happy with it or if I would want to change some of the HTML tags used then I can go into the Source Editing tab where I can make any other modifications I may need and tailor them to make them look the way I want. Pretty neat, specially if you come to consider that other weblogging tools like Qumana or w.bloggar do not seem to provide that hybrid functionality. I wonder about other weblogging tools out there I may not have been exposed to yet…
• Ability of using Rich Text weblogging features on the fly: The fact that I can use much more complex features while composing my weblog posts is a big plus to me. Key elements from any weblog post like italics, quotes, hyperlinks, images, colour, bullets, number bullets, etc. etc. are very easy to get together and from the same single window screen, so you wouldn’t have to go anywhere else to enrich your weblogging experience. Pretty powerful, I would think. And if you are not happy with it, you know you can always change it through the Source Editing option.
• Ability to have access to default weblog settings while working on your content: I am very glad to see that while I am composing this particular weblog post I can have access to the different weblogs I may have set up already, at the same time that I can see, and choose, the corresponding categories (Selecting multiple categories is possible, by the way), and much more impressive is the fact that through the History tab I am able to see the previous weblog posts that I may have created already plus it would also give me the chance to reedit them if I would want to. Again very powerful weblogging options, specially for those of us who are always keen on establishing connections between different posts so that there is a much more natural flow.
• Live Preview: Pretty much like you could do with w.bloggar (Although with Qumana is a bit more complex) there is a third tab that looks pretty good so far, although it could also do with some more improvements, and that is the Live Preview, that allows you to preview the current weblog post you are creating. This is a very handy feature, specially if you would want to get the weblog post to look the exact same way you thought for it while you are busy weblogging away. This is one of my favourite features as it gives me control about how the weblog post is going to be displayed to you folks, my readers.
• Ability to save contents of the weblog post as Notes: And, finally, one of my other favourite features from this particular Performancing for FireFox extension is the fact that you can use the option Save as Note every now and then to save the contents of your weblog post so that you prevent having to rewrite the whole thing in case something bad like a crash happens, or if you by mistake click on any of the weblog entries from the History tab.

I know that there are many more handy features from this particular extension but I think those would be the ones that so far I have found quite interesting and powerful at the same time. However, it is also true that there are some things where there is plenty of room for improvement and I thought, as indicated above, about indicating which are the areas where I would like to see some further improvements. Thus here we go:

• Live Preview should allow to display hyperlinks as active: Although I did mention it as one of my favourite features in the above five, I think Live Preview could also improve a bit by allowing the hyperlinks to actually be active and not just display them as regular text. The main purpose of the preview is to actually see how everything looks like, and not just portions of it. So something that would need to be improved in future versions.
• No keyboard shortcuts: I know that this may be a bit too picky but one of the things that I have always enjoyed from an application is its ability to perform different functions without having to use a mouse. So that is why I like w.bloggar and Qumana so much, because I can perform almost every single action with a keyboard shortcut and I feel that this is where Performancing for FireFox would certainly benefit from. Hopefully, we should be able to see some of that in upcoming versions.
• Not asking to save changes is a bad thing. It has happened to me a couple of times. I have been working on a weblog post, this post actually, and I wanted to check out the History and when I single clicked on one of the weblog posts, whooops ! off it went, the current weblog post was gone and I couldn’t get it back and worst of it all was that I didn’t get prompted if I wanted to save the changes or not, in order to get the new post from the history. So if you are working on a weblog post careful with what you click because you may lose the information. That is why it would be handy to click, every now and then, on Save as Note.
• No spellcheck: Indeed I haven’t been able to see one of the key fundamental features from any weblogging tool: a good spellcheck. If one of the recommendations for a good weblogging practice is to spell check the written text I think that this is one of the major flaws from Performancing for FireFox. I am not sure if this option would ever be included but certainly if it isn’t it could become a showstopper for me that would not allow me to make extensive use of this extension. So I am hoping that in future versions we would have a spellcheck available.
• And, finally, one other feature that I find quite important for every single weblog and which, unfortunately, has not been included in this first release of the FireFox extension is the fact that you cannot send pingbacks and trackbacks. And I must say that at the very beginning I was very surprised not to see this option, specially as this extension is coming from the folks working over at Technorati. You would expect that since Pingbacks and Trackbacks are so important for the weblogging world that they would be included. They are, after all, what make weblogging worth while the effort from the perspective where they are the key enablers to enhance conversations out there in the Blogosphere. So where are they? Nowhere to be found ! 

Thus, there you go, the five reasons why I like the experience with Performancing for FireFox and another five items where I feel that there is some room for improvement. Overall, I have enjoyed the experience of posting this weblog using this extension, but then again I think it would also be fair to compare it with the weblogging component from Flock. So in a future weblog post I will also be providing a quick review of the features I like the most, and the ones I feel need to be improved, from Flock, so that folks can have a good overview of what are the options and where we are going with that integration of the web browser and weblogging. Stay tuned !

Technorati Tags : Performancing, Qumana, FireFox, w.bloggar

A couple of my colleagues at work have been weblogging about a new FireFox extension made available by the folks behind Performancing and which they seem to have been enjoying ever since it came out. I actually found out about it through Steve Rubel over at Micro Persuasion and after the good reviews mentioned over there I decided to take it for a spin, even though FireFox is not my default web browser. And my first initial reaction is nothing less than disappointment. Why ? Well, because of a number of different reasons:

To start with and something that I find quite annoying is the fact that Performancing for FireFox does not seem to load properly in Opera, my default web browser. This is a screen shot of what it looks like in Opera and this is a screen shot of what it looks like in FireFox.

I know that this extension has been created only for FireFox but to say that and prevent other web browsers to display it is just going a bit too far I would think. Oh, I tried as well in IE and it doesn’t seem to be loading either ! “Helping bloggers succeed”? Hummm, I doubt it. At least, not this way.

Second thing I was not impressed with from the extension itself was the fact that it is missing one important weblogging engine from the Add Blog wizard: Roller Weblogger. That is the engine that I am using for my Intranet weblog and since it is not even listed there I am out of luck and will not be able to test how it actually works out. Too bad, right ?

But things do not just stop there. Several other weblogging tools, like, for instance, Qumana do have the possibility of using different APIs to connect to weblogging engines. So that is why although Roller may not be listed there I can still create an account using the MetaWeblog API, which seems to be working just fine. I can connect to my Intranet weblog.

However, Performancing for FireFox does not even have an MetaWeblog API that you would be able to use. So if you do not have a weblog hosted with Blogger, WordPress, TypePad, LiveJournal, WordPress Custom or Moveable Type Custom, you are out of luck again, because it will not work. At least, I haven’t found a way to make it work. Anybody knows how to fix this ?

And, finally, since elsua is running on WordPress I thought I would give it a try and see how it would go further. But alas it looks like entering the data selecting the option WordPress does not seem to work, probably because it is just configured to work if you have got a weblog hosted over at WordPress.com and nothing else. So in the end I had to go through the WordPress Custom, which seems to have worked out all right. It would have been nice to have had some instructions on what each option was meant to be used for. I know this may be far too simple, but in the weblogging world that is what most of us want: simplicity at its best.

I am saying “seems” because I have yet got to test it out posting a weblog entry using that FireFox extension. Something that I will probably be doing in the next weblog entry, but so far I haven’t been that impressed overall. It is certainly a very very good attempt, pretty much like what Flock is trying to achieve, but as far as I can see and although it may work for some weblogging engines it is not as powerful as many other options available out there.

We will have to wait and see how it further develops but for the time being I will give it a try and post something here in elsua and see how it will go. One other concern I will have just as a I venture into creating that weblog post is if it would be validating like the way it is supposed to. Something to look forward to, I would think. So let’s see how it goes.

Technorati Tags : Performancing, WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, Roller, Qumana, Flock, FireFox

Over the last couple of weeks you have seen how in a couple of times I have been talking about the importance of social capital and trust in order to help organisations succeed in providing the value add not only to their customers but also to their own employees. Both social capital and trust are the key and crucial components that would make teams, specially virtual teams, stick with one another in order to provide the best atmosphere to get peers to collaborate with one another.

And to follow up further with some additional input on this very same subject I would very much like to quote a couple of important sentences from an article written some time ago by one of the KM gurus, Larry Prusak, but still very relevant nowadays, specially for larger organisations with multiple distributed teams. The article itself is titled How Trust Builds Social Capital - Social Capital and Trust and you can find it here. Let me tell you that if you are looking for some online reference about the subject of social capital and trust Larry’s article is one very good start, indeed !

To give you a little bit more information without having to quote the entire article let me share with you a couple of excerpts that I think are equally important for this particular subject:

“[…] Trust is the greatest lubricant for corporate efficiency. It’s even better than information. Why should anyone do anything with anyone else, if they don’t trust them ? […]”

Indeed, this is one of the main key points about trust in an organisation. People collaborate with others in different areas not because they have been told to do so, but more because they feel they can trust the team they are working with, because if they wouldn’t they would just move on to the next thing, even to the point of quitting the company and look for that comfort zone that trust provides. So if you feel that your team is failing to provide what is supposed to be delivering I would think that one good way to tackle the problem is to find out if team members trust each other or not. And if they don’t find ways to bring that trust and social capital back into play.

“[..] Social capital is strongly dependent on rich durable networks which develop trust, which develop knowledge sharing, develop a sense of reciprocity so that it becomes generalized [..]”

Another great quote and one I have been advocating for quite some time now. One can trust one or more individuals but without the context of a network of colleagues it will not be as effective as what you would expect, which is why it is so important that in order to foster a healthy environment where trust and social capital can flourish you would need to make that work with the creation and maintenance of social groups. Indeed, communities. They are probably some of the most powerful options available to nurture trust and to allow people to develop further their relationships with one another. We all know how much more effective communities are than just individuals in performing different tasks and thinking that they can help people connect with one another is crucial to continue promoting good collaboration habits amongst them. Thus if you were not sure how to bring trust back into the table, think about the possibilities of helping with the creation of a community to increase those trust levels.

“[…]They don’t work necessarily for money. What do they work for? Recognition. Identity. Feelings about your coworkers really count […]”

Exactly ! What an interesting final quote for this particular weblog post. I am sure that more than one of you folks would be agreeing with this subject. Certainly, money is good for paying bills and for reaching certain level of comfort but after a time in a job it wears out and people start looking for something else: that recognition and identity that Larry mentions and the fact that they can get that while belonging to a particular community, or communities, will make it even much more stronger to fight for. We all know that people like to have recognition in what they do, and we all know that working with a group of folks to achieve a common set of goals, a community, will keep people motivated to reach out even further and achieve levels of collaboration and commitment not seen elsewhere.

So as you can see social capital and trust are those key elements that every single group, whether it is a team or a community, should have in order to help promote collaboration within the group and try to achieve the different goals, but one clear thing to remember is that nor tools, nor processes are going to help achieve that. It will be the people who will just try to improve their social capital skills and much more importantly, trust not only what they do, but also what other team members do as part of their job. And communities are a powerful means to achieve that level of perfect collaboration and what everyone of them should also strive for. It is so much more worth it.

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Oh, and for those who may be thinking that Knowledge Management is all about the tools and the processes I would like to point you to Larry’s article as well where you will be able to read one of the best definitions of KM you can think of:

“[…] which (Knowledge Management) is people knowing things, sharing what they know, and working with what they know […]”

I doubt I would have been able to choose a much better set of words to deliver that key and powerful message about what KM is. Even today it still remains very relevant and accurate.

Technorati Tags : Team+Building, Virtual+Teams, Social+Capital, Trust+Building