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Trust your life to a piece of Nokia

The following text is a condensed version of an article published on Nokia's intranet (restricted access) on March 11, 2004. I've omitted part of the original text for reasons of company confidentiality and the confidentiality of interviewees.

[STARTS]

Trust your life to a piece of Nokia

By Jos Schuurmans March 11, 2004, 16:00

HELSINKI, Finland. -- A dozen brains at NVO Multimedia Applications in Ruoholahti have combined their visions of mobility, their entrepreneurial spirit, technological expertise and marketing skill to work on... the "memory prosthesis".

Well, sure, there you have an exaggerated metaphor. No external device is likely to replace the human brain any time soon. But the larger idea certainly holds water and the first tangible result of their efforts will be version 1.0 of Lifeblog, a preview of which will be shown at the CeBIT fair in Hanover, Germany, next week.

NVO Multimedia Applications team's Director Christian Lindholm has been pushing the case for usability within Nokia for a long time. He invented the Navi-key and has, more recently, been standing at the crib of the Series 60 platform, which he is now actively promoting and developing.

The Cluetrain Manifesto on the rebirth of conversations

IMHO, the Cluetrain Manifesto is still the most visionary book, indeed a feast of recognition, of how the Internet is accelerating the shift from broadcast to search, from push to pull, from controlled messaging to open conversation.

From where I stand, the three most relevant themes in the Cluetrain are:

1. The significance of conversations, and how the Internet is bringing them back.
2. Why and how businesses need to change as a result.
3. The power of storytelling.

Below is my collection of references from the book, with an emphasis on the first theme, the rebirth of conversations.

[UPDATE, July 29, 2007: Doc Searls refers to my excerpts from the cluetrain on The Doc Searls Weblog:  Saturday, July 28, 2007. In response, I submit that we should combine the teachings of the Cluetrain and the Long Tail theory to be able to engage in the conversations that matter most to us.]

Dugg: The porous membrane: why corporate blogging works | gapingvoid

In a very simple and elegant fashion, Hugh MacLeod zooms in on one of the core themes of the Cluetrain Manifesto.

He explains in 15 points how and why a more porous membrane between its internal and external conversation will make it easier for a corporation to align itself with its market.

NOTE TO HUGH: Hugh, I hope you don't mind I copied your diagram above :-)

read more | digg story

We need to learn to let go!

The five-member team I work with (we develop and content-manage internal news and participatory media channels) have decided to (re-)read the Cluetrain book over the summer and discuss it when we're all back at the office.

A colleague from another team the other day requested ideas as to whom we could invite to speak at our yearly global corporate communications days. (The name Andrew Keen came up.)

Even though things have moved on since 1999, to me the Cluetrain is still the most visionary book, indeed a feast of recognition, of how the Internet is accelerating the shift from broadcast to search, from push to pull, from controlled messaging to open conversation.

Many corporate communicators, I feel, are still struggling with the concept, clinging on to an illusion of "controlled conversation" or some such compromise. Well, it won't last, will it? And the sooner we all grok this, the better for all involved: WE NEED TO LEARN TO LET GO!

If I had to suggest a speaker to our communications teams, I'd be humbled should any of the four Cluetrain authors be willing. Perhaps the chapters that spoke to me most were those written by Christopher Locke and David Weinberger.

We're in the finals!

(Photo by Andrew Mason shared via Flickr.com under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license)

Nokia's intranet news service, the News Hub, has made it to the finals of the CiB Awards 2007, by the British Association of Communicators in Business.

We are looking at an award of excellence for 'Best navigation/usability for intranet' (Class 14B).

Thank you RedHouse Lane! Thank you team mates at Nokia Corporate Communications!

As I wrote on April 24:

In the March issue (.pdf) of their Red Current newsletter, communications consultancy Redhouse Lane tell how they worked with my team at Nokia to rebrand and redesign the News Hub, Nokia's global news and conversation intranet site.

"(...) The result is  a striking exhibition of the power of Web 2.0 giving staff the tools to access the information they need, in the way they want - and then encouraging them to comment, contribute and collaborate. (...)"

"(...)The introduction of affiliate program has assisted the small business to run their business profitably as affiliates. The webhosting strategies of famous companies like godaddy cater all necessary attributes with respect to customer’s demand. They can even make a website design according to their customer products and update it with the passage of time. The search engine manager utilizes all strategic techniques of search engine marketing to increase their profits. The rates of internet phone service are very economical along with high speed and quality internet voip. There are different kinds of online website design software or templates to develop website easily. (...)"

Digg.com serves "Story of the Century" on my first day

(Image: Our Solar System, from Wikipedia's entry on "Planets", public domain, by NASA.)

As luck will have it... the day I started using Digg.com, it offered me what a journalist on the BBC World Service this morning called "(...) potentially the news story of the century in terms of the future of human kind":

First Habitable Planet Oustide Of The Solar System

(The BBC, of course, have their own version: 'New 'super-Earth' found in space')

Why I started "digging" yesterday was that a colleague of mine - after hearing about some of the stuff I do in corporate communications - had asked me if I'd like to help introduce some new collaborative news selection functionalities to Nokia's intranet.

So I decided to get some first-hand experience with Digg. The concept seemed interesting and so I wanted to get a "feel" for how it works, what works and what doesn't.

Being a novice to Digg, when I came across the "habitable planet" story I wasn't quite sure how serious to take it. After all, I was just being taught by way of Neil Patel's Beginner's Guide to Digg that, in order to get read, submissions to Digg should:

1. Make a statement and do not be dull;
2. Be controversial and make false promises; and/or
3. Use keywords in the title that diggers love and that are also relevant to the story.

But, whoa, am I convinced now! Every news junkie has to hook on to Digg!

By the way, the planet story reminds me of a presentation to Pop!Tech, podcast on IT Conversations, in which Carolyn Porco, Imaging Team Leader of the Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for Operations (CICLOPS) makes a passionate appeal to human kind to make space exploration a top priority.

From the podcast description:

"(...) [One of Saturn's moons], Titan, is where the Huygens probe landed in January 2005. From the panoramic images taken during the decent and the all the data that has been collected since, the CICLOPS team is excited to see signs that fluids once flowed over the surface, that the atmosphere has precipitation and that the probe itself may have landed on a shoreline. All-in-all, the Titan moon may give us a significant glimpse of what the Earth was like before living organisms. (...)"

PS: To support the point of yesterday's piece on Wikipedia As A News Medium, the site's entry on Gliese 581 c seems nicely up-to-date.

Nokia's News Hub: Web 2.0 in action

(Photo by Andrew Mason shared via Flickr.com under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license)

In the March issue (.pdf) of their Red Current newsletter, communications consultancy Redhouse Lane tell how they worked with my team at Nokia to rebrand and redesign the News Hub, Nokia's global news and conversation intranet site.

"(...) The result is  a striking exhibition of the power of Web 2.0 giving staff the tools to access the information they need, in the way they want - and then encouraging them to comment, contribute and collaborate. (...)"

Nielsen Norman's 10 best intranets of 2006

The Nielsen Norman Group's report 'Intranet Design Annual 2006: Ten Best Intranets of the Year' reveals increased use of multimedia, e-learning, internal blogs, and mobile access.

Winning companies also encouraged consistent design by emphasizing training for content contributors," Jakob Nielsen wrote in his Alertbox column of January 23, 2006.

The report reviews the designs and usability of ten intranets that were chosen from a much larger number of nominated designs.

The ten winning intranets are:

• Allianz Australia Insurance, Australia
• ALTANA Pharma AG, Germany
• Bank of Ireland Group, Ireland
• Capital One, USA
• IBM, USA
• Merrill Lynch, USA
• METRO Group, Germany
• O2, UK
• Staples, USA
• Vodafone, UK

(last year's winners)

Some of the key areas for which best practices are presented in the report are:

• Encouraging employees to self-publish content
• Training intranet publishers
• Keeping the intranet up-to-date
• Supporting factory-floor employees
• Supporting branch-office and in-store users
• Onboarding of new employees
• Consistent navigation
• Intranet favorites / Quick Access lists
• Task-based information architecture (IA)
• Multilingual intranets; supporting international employees
• Mobile intranet access
• Multimedia and video on intranets
• Collaboration tools and discussion boards
• E-learning features on intranets
• Internal weblogs
• Intranet search
• Development process for intranet redesigns
• Staffing of intranet teams; where they report in the organization
• Updating and maintaining standards and guidelines for intranet design
• Intranet branding
• Advertising and promoting intranet features
• Polls
• Staff directory and employee profile pages

According to the usability consultancy's findings, too few intranets perform careful studies of productivity improvements, and thus rarely have hard ROI numbers.

Branding took a major upswing this year. Whereas in previous years, 59% of intranets were branded, and 41% were simply called 'the intranet', now 80% of the winners had branded their intranet.

"There's no need to overdo the branding: intranets are for internal use, and you're not competing against fifty other intranets," Jakob commented.

Among the notable trends from past competitions are a consistent look and feel across the intranet, special training activities for content contributors, and the use of task-based information architectures.

Video and mobile access on the rise

"Poorly used intranet videos can substantially reduce productivity," Jakob warned. "(...) It's important, for example, to correctly set users' expectations so that they only click through to videos they actually want to see."

"(...) Mobile devices are no longer just phones; they're also intranet extensions - at least when the intranet has features designed for smaller screens. (...) O2 has a special mobile edition of its intranet that's optimized for the BlackBerry and strips the homepage down to a few of its most useful links. (...) Vodafone's mobile intranet scales back content services. (...)"

The Nielsen Norman Group also spotted a contra-trend: "(...) the first good use of overlay graphics (where an image appears on top of the content). On the Web, this is one of the most annoying and repellant advertising techniques. Nonetheless, Allianz Australia effectively uses overlays to highlight and explain useful new intranet features. (...)"

Intranets need folksonomies

"The more I read and think about folksonomies, and the more I use del.icio.us, the more I wonder how long it will take before somebody applies the concept to intranets," Shel Holtz wrote in March.

He concluded: "It can’t be that big a deal to develop an internal version of something like del.icio.us. The bigger challenge will be convincing IT that it makes sense to give employees the ability to label content for themselves."

Somewhat related on www.josschuurmans.com:

• Reading about del.icio.us (October 19, 2005)
• Web 2.0 means participation, also in the mobile space (September 8, 2005)
• Nielsen Norman Group calls for best intranets (July 8, 2005)