Ludoo

Constantin sent me a few selected Internal Business Blogs resources to aid with my project.

Even though they are all quite dated, they are very interesting given the scarcity of literature on what is going on behind the corporate firewalls. If you are interested in Corporate Blogging they may be worth a look.

It may be the first time an Italian blog makes the headlines in national news. Gianluca Neri, the host of the popular group blog Macchianera, has published today the full "declassified" text of the US report on Calipari's death in Baghdad. Gianluca has been the first to notice that the Acrobat file of the report distributed to the press was not encrypted, and had basic editing operations still enabled. Copying the text and pasting it a new file allowed him to restore the full text, circumventing the black mask applied to classified parts. The news is making the rounds of all national newspapers and TV stations. A commented timeline of the events (in italian) on Webgol. Bravo Gianluca.

I am still working on the Corporate Blogging brief I have to present to the head of our organizational unit. I had a look at a few resources mentioned on Constantin's extensive NewPRWiki, but the vast majority of them deal with external corporate blogs, which we are not yet ready to tackle. The most relevant resource I could find is the audio from Euan Semple's presentation at LesBlogs, and it's a bit ironic that I had to listen to it at home even though I was there, and had Euan seated on my right at the speakers' dinner. Guess I was too busy meeting people and worrying about my panel to be really interested in Euan's experience, since I only asked him a question about corporate politics in their blogs which he did not like too much and to which he gave me a half-answer.

Unfortunately I do not think we can follow the same bottom-up approach that has worked for the BBC, as we are a larger, more hyerarchical, less creative, and much much more conservative institution. People here tend to stick to an established routine and to use well known tools and practices, even outside the office when surfing the web at home (if they do it at all). So to be of any interest and attract a sufficient number of users, our internal blogs must either offer a valuable service, or serve as a direct communication channel with the upper management so that people will use it as yet another tool in their corporate politics arsenal.

It may be ugly, but I do not see other ways of introducing blogging here. If I can get the top management to adopt internal group blogs (what Fredrik Wackå calls Knowledge Blogs) as a way of efficiently communicating with their units, and people to read and comment on those blogs so as not to miss an opportunity to show off in front of their bosses and to have they voice heard, I'm pretty sure we will later be able to adopt other forms of internal blogs like "project blogs". And maybe start using news readers, and aggregating on the blogs data coming from various enterprise repositories.

Am I totally off the mark? Is there anything I'm missing?

I only learned about sparklines today thanks to a post by Sam Ruby, where he mentions the Ruby (as in "ruby the programming language") library RedHanded. Sparklines are a concept by Edward Tufte, which he describes as "wordlike graphics, with an intensity of visual distinctions comparable to words and letters".

Sparklines are more easily understood by example, as this simple graph of daily page views for this site or this one visualizing the same data with a different notation . If you cannot see the two examples, you should get yourself a better browser as the preferred way of embedding sparklines in HTML is by using RFC 2397 "data: URIs", which IE does not support.

If you're interested in creating sparklines, there are quite a few tools already available: the Ruby library Sam wrote about, a PIL-based Python script (the one I used to create the above examples) or a matplotlib-based one, and a PHP library. If I ever find the time, I'd like to add sparklines to the "about" section of my posts.

Back from LesBlogs, I finally decided to write to the top manager in charge of my organizational unit to try and sell him on the corporate blog thing. It turns out he knows a bit about blogging (one of the things that made me write to him is his tech-savyness), and he asked me to put down a brief on possible internal uses of blogging and discuss it with him. Which would be a good thing if we were a tech company, possibly located in a more technologically inclined country, instead of a huge old-economy institution in Italy.

Blogging requires a change of mindset from the usual corporate apathetic routine, and pays off in proportion to the efforts that go into it. We will see, for now I am writing my brief and collecting resources on Internal Corporate Blogging, most of which come from Ross Mayfield, which seen from a distance a few days ago in Paris seemed to be one of the brightest of the a-listers.

A friend just asked me how to convert a bunch of MySQL tables from MyISAM to InnoDB, and since it seems that Google yields no practical answers to this question, I am posting the following few lines as a reference for other people. Nothing new, but useful if you are not familiar with either MySQL or bash.

Just got back from the speakers' dinner, which was a bit chaotic (ie nice). I was sitting next to Doc Searls and Halley Suitt, but made frequent trips to the "nanopublishing ghetto" on the other side of the room, where Jason and Gaby Darbyshire were running the show.

Nice to meet so many people I have been reading daily for quite a while. The picture is of Hugh sitting on my chair, and talking with Doc after having eaten half my dessert, yet managing to be the nicest of all the people in the room. [Technorati Tag: lesblogs]