In the past I have mentioned a couple of times how crucial storytelling is for the spreading and sharing of knowledge across different organisations, amongst other things. I talked about it both in KM Insights - Capturing Knowledge and Companies Struggle To Pass On Knowledge That Workers Acquire but this time around I thought I would also draw your attention towards another weblog post that Shawn Callahan shared over at Anecdote where you can watch a very short video clip on quite the opposite theme: what storytelling should not be. Indeed, in Instructional video on storytelling you will be able to watch a very funny video clip that with a very clear example demonstrates everything that storytelling is not and that given the date and the time of the week would make for an amusing time during the course of this Friday.

You will just need to load this web site and then scroll to the bottom till you find the clip called “Principles of Organisation Storytelling“.

Thanks to Shawn as well for sharing this particular link over at their weblog and for the good laugh !

Technorati Tags: KM, KnowledgeManagement, Storytelling

It was about time that this week I would update the Photography section of elsua.net adding some more pictures that I have been sharing already in my Flickr account. This time around they are a bit mixed since there are two different blocks. One from a recent visit to the capital of Gran Canaria, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, where you would be able to see some pictures from the stunning auditorium of the city, The Alfredo Kraus Auditorium, one of the symbols from not only from the city but from the entire island and honouring Alfredo Kraus, a Spanish tenor famous for some memorable performances and born in the same city. You will notice that it is quite an interesting building since it is just built closed to the Las Canteras beach and it shows quite an interesting architecture.

Then the second block of pictures that I have shared are from one of the most touristic places in the south of the island, Maspalomas, where lately there have been lots of heavy rain that have resulted in one of the canals having running water, something that you do not get to see very often. But the best part was the scenery after the heavy storm, which is what I will be sharing in here with one of my favourite pictures from the series. So without any further delay here you have got a selection of my favourite three pictures from this series:

You will be able to see a huge contrast between the sunny day over in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and the darker sunlights after the heavy thunderstorm. The funny thing is that the weather is most of the time quite the opposite, very sunny in the south and somewhat cloudy in the north of the island. You will be able to see the rest of the pictures series over at my Flickr account.

Technorati Tags: AlfredoKrausAuditorium, LasPalmasDeGranCanaria, GranCanaria

If you remember, not so long ago I created several weblog posts around the subject of promoting your own weblog out there in the blogosphere so when I bumped into Blogging for Business and this particular weblog post, Blog and RSS/Atom search engines - registering blogs, I just couldn’t help add my two cents worth of comments and share through this Trackback a couple of other good weblog posts on the subject that I have found in some of my RSS Newsfeeds and which I thought were quite an interesting read for the good amount of tips contained in them. I am not too much into getting lots of traffic for my weblog(s) as that is not the main purpose why I created them in the first place, but I can imagine that other folks would be interested in these tips as a way to try to attract as much traffic as possible, so since Ted Demopoulos is looking for some other suggestions here we go with them:

• Ten Ways to Attract More Traffic to your Website or Blog from LifeHacker.
• How to Get Traffic to Your Blog - Interview with Yvonne Divita from ProBlogger.
• Building Blog Traffic Podcast from ProBlogger again.

As you can see lots of good options and tips that we will be able to follow if we would want to give a bit more promotion for our weblog(s). I know that in its due time I may be going back to all these different resources and try to attract some more traffic to my weblog(s) but for the time being I just thought about sharing them with others hoping they may prove useful to them, just like they may well do with me as well whenever I decide I am ready to embark on doing some more aggressive promotion.

Technorati Tags: Metablogging, Blog Traffic

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(By the way, if you haven’t subscribed yet to Blogging for Business I would strongly suggest you do since both Ted and Shel are posting some very interesting findings about why companies should be paying attention to this refreshing, relatively new, way of sharing knowledge and information)

Yesterday I created a post over at my other weblog (elsua @ ITtoolbox) with the title GROU.PS - Your Ideal Community Collaboration Tool Suite ? and while I was actually writing down my thoughts with that quick commentary on GROU.PS and while I was playing around with the application to see what it actually offers and how it works (By the way, if you would want to give it a try you can join elsua - Knowledge Management and Collaboration and play around with it) I was actually thinking what it would be like to have the perfect collaboration tool suite in place in order for distributed teams / communities to collaborate.

What would be those key aspects that you would consider fundamental for a collaboration tool suite to become the focal point of entry for every single team / community member? I know it is not an easy question as it would probably have multiple answers but I just thought I would venture to draft over here what I think would be some considerations to take into account whenever a community would be about to get started in choosing whatever tools they would want to make use of. And to get things going I am going to use the example of GROU.PS and see how far I could go with that ideal community collaboration tool suite:

One of the capabilities of GROU.PS is the possiblity of using Google Maps to help contribute a little bit to the aspect of social capital by allowing people to identify themselves and indicate what their location is. I think that this is an option that every community should have if they would want each community member to have a sense of belonging to the group in such a way that it can be used as an excuse or icebreaker to establish the initial conversations to enable trust to be built up. And pretty much like Google Maps a couple of other good options would be Plazes or Frappr, to name a couple of them.

GROU.PS has got also the possibility of handling the membership list of a specific community and I think that this is also one handy feature from any collaboration tool suite that would need to be put together. However, I would add another key element to help boost the real-time interactions within that membership list management. Yes, indeed, Instant Messaging for the community members, so that they would be able to work together on demand and without having to wait on whatever the tool. We have seen how more and more Instant Messaging is starting to be considered a critical business tool and I would think it would also make sense to have it added into that collaboration suite. And in this particular case I think that examples like Meebo would make perfect sense to have them added..

Moving forward there are two other different options available within GROU.PS that I was very happy to see: weblogs and wikis. Indeed, I would think that every single collaboration tool suite should have both of them in order to allow community members to collaborate by allowing each member to have their own voice, through a weblog, to share their thoughts and to also collaborate actively in a collective way by sharing knowledge and exchanging information on a community wide space, i.e. a wiki. That way community members would be able to share knowledge both on an individual space like a weblog at the same time that they would be able to collaborate actively in the group space.

And getting closer towards the end of the components for a indispensable collaboration tool suite GROU.PS adds two other different components which are very powerful for what they have to offer: first the possibility of sharing your Flickr pictures, which will help you as well in the area of helping your community members to build on their social capital skills by sharing pictures they would allow them to create a connection with. Yes, indeed, a picture would be worth a thousand words, but it is way better to share it with others and make a connection through it. Secondly, the other component is the integration with del.icio.us in order to be able to create a collective range of links or key web resources for the community itself but that would be built by everyone else. So instead of having one or two folks creating that index of must-have resources it would be the entire community, which will help create multiple connections and interactions between members by using the handy features of tagging and annotations. This is one of those features that would be very handy especially to help build the collective knowledge of the community which can then be shared with the new members of the community.

And that would be it, folks. Those are all of the features that GROU.PS puts together in this particular offering and which in my opinion would make for an interesting approach towards the creation of that ideal community collaboration tool suite. Perhaps the only one other aspect that I could think of that could be added and which would be very much needed would be the existence of a knowledge repository where not only the Intellectual Capital would be stored but also those knowledge snippets that could then be reused by other community members.

In short, and from what I have mentioned above, I would think that a good community collaboration tool suite should be based on some kind of (web / location) presence indicator, a membership list management capability, that would include not just Instant Messaging as I have mentioned above, but also with VoIP included. Then it should also have weblogs and wikis for the reasons I mentioned above as well and, finally, integration with already existing great services like Flickr, to share your photos, and del.icio.us, to share your community and your own favourite web links. And in the end it would also be a key component to have that particular searchable knowledge repository database where IC could be stored and reused in order to help improve the quality of the community interactions.

So with all that said, that is what I would consider a key community collaboration tool suite, but what do you think ? Do you think that GROU.PS would be able to make it as a strong offering from the myriad of tools in the Web 2.0 space ? Or will it be just one of those tools with a bit of hype that will disappear within a few months. I am not sure what would happen, if it is going to disappear or not, but I am surely liking the concept of what they have put together and somehow I hope one way or another it continues to survive and provide a unique approach for communities to collaborate.

[tags]Collaboration+Tools, KM, Knowledge+Management, Plazes, Frappr, Meebo, Flickr, Google+Maps, del.icio.us, Web 2.0[/tags]