beatnic - just wondering

One of the things I find tricky with blogs is remembering to go back and check whether anyone’s followed up on any comments I’ve made.

There’s a system called coComment which is designed to help with this, but for some reason it feels like too much effort - or at least it did when I tried it - so I’ve given up with it.

For Wordpress blogs - this blog uses Wordpress - you can also subscribe to comments using an RSS reader. But again that can be a bit of a hassle to set up.

So I’ve just installed a plug-in for this blog which means that if you leave a comment you can ask to have all the following comments on that post emailed to you. Details on the plug-in are available on the Wordpress website.

I’ve seen this on one or two other blogging platforms. I think this should be available as a standard feature across all of them.

[Update: I've now tested this and it works a treat.]

Are you involved in intranet (in its broadest possible definition) content, design, management, publishing, thinking, consultancy, evaluation or strategy?

What’s on your reading list?

I’ll kick off with my blog subscriptions tagged “intranet” in google reader (view posts/subscribe to this list):

• Column Two - James Robertson in Australia, who is also behind the Intranet Innovation Awards.
• Currybetdotnet - Martin Belam, who I first met and worked with at the BBC when he helped us with our intranet search strategy back in 2002.
• Dilbert - keeps me sane.
• FastForward - stuff on so-called “Enterprise 2.0″.
• Globally local - locally global - Jane McConnell in France. Useful international and strategic perspectives. Annual global survey giving excellent insight and evidence if anyone needs to build a business case for an intranet.
• InfoDesign: Understanding by design - digest of design-related posts and articles (including interaction design, user experience design and information architecture) compiled by Peter J. Bogaards.
• Inside out - A relative newcomer to the intranet blogging scene and a must-read from Richard Dennison at BT.
• Intranet Blog - Toby Ward in Canada. Has worked with numerous companies and seen a lot of intranets - useful case studies and advice on avoiding common pitfalls.
• IBF Blog - Rotating bloggers on a monthly basis offering insight and analysis from research and evaluations of dozens of company intranets. [I wear an occasional Intranet Benchmarking Forum hat]
• Is this wisdom - Richard Hare on networking and sharing ideas.
• Learning Trends - Elliott Masie’s newsletter on the world of learning, work and technology.
• New Thinking by Gerry McGovern - killer content and the long neck.
• The Obvious? - Euan Semple, who started the BBC’s internal blogs, wikis, discussion forum, profile pages long before anyone was talking about Enterprise 2.0 or other such neologisms. Thought-provoking ideas and ruminations on social media, the internet, society and work.
• Signal vs. Noise - The blog from 37 signals makers of Basecamp and other useful, usable and desirable web apps.
• Webcredibles - Accessible writing on accessibility.

This gives me a manageable amount of info and insight and points to other conversations going on that are relevant too.

It’s difficult deciding what to tag “intranet” and what to tag “intranet-related” - as Richard Dennison asks what is an intranet after all?

I’ve tagged quite a lot, including the frequently updating news-based sources, as intranet-related to try to see the wood for the trees as it were.

Right, wrong, good, bad? Too introspective? What’s missing? What do you recommend?

I get asked regularly - particularly by colleagues in the intranet/enterprise portal management world - how many people use the discussion forum, wikis and blogs which live on Gateway, the BBC’s intranet, which I manage.

Below are some snapshot numbers I pulled together in May.

To give some context, the monthly reach for Gateway is roughly 30,000 people.

In themselves they don’t tell a story. For some narrative we need to look at our trend data and qualitative research.

talk.gateway (discussion forum)

23,204 members have posted a total of 31,951 replies within 6,736 topics in 102 visible forums.

496 “Thanks” in the last 6 months

Gateway wiki usage

Examples: Future Media & Technology Projects overview, BBC Monitoring
staff map, Global News Division “Big Stories”

Blog usage numbers were unavailable, but they continue to thrive.

These tools were started by Euan and John in Digilab - they’re now looked after and developed by my team on behalf of our colleagues.