Tool of the Month/Group Blogs in BSCW

From AMI@Work Communities Wiki

ECOSPACE Tool of the Month.

[edit] Group Blogs in BSCW

A group blog is a powerful tool for sharing ideas and relevant information in a community of users, and the business benefits of this tool are now being explored systematically in the ECOSPACE project. As with individual blogs, all community members can comment on group blog. In addition, all members of a group blog community can also post items, and open up discussions. This makes a group blog a democratic, hierarchy-free environment that is good for creative processes and open, constraint-free exchange of ideas suitable for joint creation of business value. Through RSS, a group blog is also available on several platforms for advanced users, so content can be accessed in a variety of ways, including mobile access.

Blogs and wikis are often seen as being a part of the same "movement". However, a group blog is different from a wiki, and complements the functionality of a wiki. Through RSS, relevant information from a variety of sources (e.g. community- and topic-specific group blogs and individual blogs) can be pulled together and presented in a single, easily accessible overview. A group blog can be seen as a light-weight interaction tool that is suitable for presenting and commenting on initial thoughts, ideas and concepts to a broad community of users. Group blogs can therefore serve an important function as sources of early ideas that can be further elaborated and validated using wikis or other tools appropriate for a more substantial involvement. Where a group blog is rapid, simple and can be easily distributed to a wide audience, wikis support co-authoring and more tightly coupled forms of interaction.

In general, blogs and in particular group blogs are related to cooperative and "dynamic" communication, i.e. ongoing dialogue and discussion. Wikis are more related to working together to evolve the same content over time.

In order to show some end user benefits of the first ECOSPACE tool of the month, GROUP BLOG, a set of sample use cases have been developed:

[edit] Questionnaire

In order to explore the previous experience and the perceived end user benefits of group blogging, please see the questions, related to the first ECOSPACE tool of the month, GROUP BLOG.

Both surveys take only one minute to complete.

Pre-evaluation (to be filled out BEFORE using the ToM)

Post-evaluation (to be filled out AFTER using the ToM)

Thanks a lot in advance for your feedback!