This week Guillaume du Gardier, Managing Director of PR Planet hosts "Blogging Europe" on IAOCblog Week. Guillaume has invited bloggers from France, Spain, Ireland, Denmark, Poland, Germany and Sweden. Topics include:

• Blogs and journalists: a country-by-country view of how European media are embracing blogs, and who, if anyone is making money blogging
• Blogs and politics: how do Europe's political candidates use blogs for their campaigns, and do politicians and government officials treat political bloggers the same as the press
• Corporate blogging (external): case studies, who's leading the way, do European companies see blogs as an opportunity or a threat, are any small, nimble companies using blogs or is it only the big multi-national companies
• Corporate blogging (internal): do European corporations view internal blogs as a way to make employees more effective or as a waste of time, are internal blogs in multi-national companies being written in English or in the local language
• Blogs and brands: Tracking European and global brands in the blogosphere

Darren Guarnaccia of RedDot Solutions suggests in an article at CIOupdate.com that Stephen Covey's principles can make for better websites. Perhaps applying the "7 Habits" to your web can bring more customer satisfaction and greater success to your organization.

Philippe Borremans, PR Manager, IBM Belgium & Luxembourg, concludes his discussion about IBM’s recent online activities in a Q&A with IAOC president Don Dunnington

In your post about Online Jamming you mention IBM's experiments in social computing. In following that link, I was interested to find this discussion concerning translucency:

We call systems which provide perceptually-based social cues which afford awareness and accountability 'Socially Translucent Systems.' In such systems we believe it will be easier for users to carry on coherent discussions; to observe and imitate others' actions; to engage in peer pressure; to create, notice, and conform to social conventions. We see social translucence as a fundamental requirement for supporting communication and collaboration.

People who write about blogs and wikis often cite the importance of transparency in online communication, but translucency is a new one to me. Can you elaborate on the difference between translucency and transparency?

Well Don I would say that translucency will enable full transparency in online communities. Let me try to explain in the words of a colleague:

In our work at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, we are designing "socially translucent" systems that support groups working within online communities. We are interested in making people and their behavior more prominent, enabling the creation, exercise, and mutual observation of social behavior.

To do this, we combine support for conversation with visual representations of people and their activities vis à vis the conversation space to provide a community-oriented environment for carrying out work. We are explicitly interested in blending work and social talk, synchronous and asynchronous interactions, and private and public discourse.

So once you have such a system in place (because today it is still in the research phase) you will be able to actually see the transparency of an online conversation/collaboration through visual representations. I hope this helps, I am not a specialist in this area but for those who are interested in the topic I can point them to Social Translucence: An Approach to Designing Systems that Support Social Processes written by Thomas Erickson and Wendy A. Kellogg, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center.

Once your Socially Translucent Systems get out of the lab, we hope you’ll come back and give us a demonstration. You mentioned that in an earlier ValuesJam session, IBM'ers engaged in a dialog concerning corporate values that dated back to Tom Watson, Sr., IBM's founder. IBM may be the only organization whose corporate values could be summed up in one word: THINK. Is "think" still at the core of IBM's values?

Through the Values Jam our employees defined the 3 following values for all IBM'ers:

• Dedication to every client's success
• Innovation that matters -- for our company and for the world
• Trust and personal responsibility in all relationships

I do not think the two actions are related although they mutually support one another. IBM has always believed in the importance of open exchange and learning. We also believe in contributing to the world in various forms, be it through technology, volunteering or through public dialogue.

Certainly in the online environment, where transparency and employee empowerment reign supreme, I expect clear corporate values and an open corporate culture will prove to be a benefit. One of the unanticipated benefits may be that it makes companies more flexible and able adapt to revolutionary changes (as blogs have been portrayed) and treat them as a natural evolution.

Hi everyone,

Just received an update that IBM's CIO's office is testing out RSS for internal communications. At this moment we have 3 feeds up and running on the IBM intranet. Currently the RSS feed generator identifies all the content for a given topic (Example: In the news) and selects only items targeted for all IBM employees.  

The intranet is the first source IBM'ers turn to when they are looking for information and contains our profile, our contact details, personalised data according to profession etc... With these 3 RSS feeds we're certainly going in the right direction.

Philippe Borremans, PR Manager, IBM Belgium & Luxembourg. The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

There's a great podcast discussion about Philippe's post concerning IBM's online jamming. You can hear it on the latest "For Immediate Release: The Hobson and Holtz Report." If you haven't listened to this well done talk show, try it now.

Some 3 years ago IBM tried a new approach to what is called "social computing" - within IBM we call ...   more »