being social

Today I was fortunate to get the opportunity to share my passion for all things “webby” with my team at work. We always start every Monday with a staff meeting to talk about things and share what we did the week before. Today I got to share what’s happening with our internal team wiki and also the wiki sandbox for our team and the other teams within our larger group.

I guess I should back up. We are running a bit of a pilot before we run a “formal” pilot with more people from the company I work for. My audience is VERY new to social media and the “Web 2.0″ technologies, so I created Wiki Academy. Wiki Academy consists of informal “brown bag” sessions every other Tuesday to show people in my team here and our team in CA, how to do things in the wiki. This first week I’m going to show them

Wikis in Plain English

by Common Craft and then go through the steps to logging on, creating a profile and adding a page. We’re going to use GoToMeeting so we can record the audio and the screen action. By doing this, we’ll be able to post the session on our wiki for those that have missed a session and want the information.

Later in the day we had a couple people from my team talk about the Inverge conference they attended last month. That got a whole other conversation started about blogs, wikis, and forums, mixing them together. etc. Somehow in that meeting people were asking about Twitter, RSS feeds, blogging, etc. I couldn’t help but join the conversation and talk to everyone about what I knew. At the same time, I was giddy with delight that the team I’m on is so interested in social media, web 2.0, or whatever the “hot” word of the day is for it. I think the best part was after the meeting I showed a colleague how to create a FriendFeed account, add twitter to the account and how to find me. I also showed him the basics of Google Reader too. How COOL! I could talk about this sort of stuff all day. I’m so excited that I will be on the team working to implement a wiki in our company. Who knows, maybe it will be more, like blogs, wikis, and forums. I’m so excited, I can’t stand it!

Tagged as: sharing, social_media, web_2.0

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You know I’ve been a blogger for several years and really like the idea of the whole thing. I love that I can share with my family what I’m up to and how things are going. It’s a little passive, I know, but it’s great because I stink at making the monthly or weekly phone calls to family to tell them what I’m up to. So… blogging.

When I moved to a new group in the company I once worked for I was challenged by a colleague, who was an early adopter of technology and rich media, to put my professional thoughts down on topics. She felt I had something to share with others and really encouraged me to share in this webisphere. So I did, and here it is.. of course this is the second version of it all.

So where does this lead? Ok, my point is this. I love the web and social networking. Because of this medium I’ve had the opportunity to hook up with some great people. I’ve been working on a project for the company I now work for that entails determining authoring tools for us as a group. Because of this medium (the web etc) I’ve been able to hook up with some great people like Steve Case and talk with him about different authoring tools and LMSs and LCMSs. He in turn has led me to other people that use LMS’s etc that I can talk to and get a real commentary on the tool(s) they’re using. It’s so much more valuable than just talking to vendors because they’re always going to tell you their tool is the best. I’m just so excited about this all. It’s great to be making connections with people around the globe and networking with others with common interests. It’s great too because I have to wonder, if not for the web and blogging, would this have been possible? Would our spheres of contacts really reach as far as they do? It’s an exciting time for sure.

Tagged as: web