According to Tim O'Reilly, Web 2.0 can be thought of as
"a set of principles and practices" that underlie a new
conceptualization and usability of the Web, born out of the dot.com crash in
2001. Although the term itself has been
widely used, (and misused) its core features persist. Some of the key features of Web 2.0 are the
concept of the Web as a platform, with an architecture of participation, in
which the users control their own data, but allows for endless remixing so as
to harness the power of collective intelligence.
O'Reilly noted that "hyperlinking is the foundation of
the web" and pointed to the rise of blogging as one of the central
features of Web 2.0. Blogs are personal
weblogs or online diaries that are predominantly a chronologically ordered set
of text-based entries. Gradually, the
inclusion of imbedded images, audio and video made the blogging experience more
multimedia. There are two critical
features of a blog that make it different from an online forum discussion board
or a wiki. The first is tagging, and the
second is permalinking. These two
features (discussed in more detail below) gave me the idea of using a blog as a
collocation conversation management device for virtual teams.
First, what do I mean by virtual teams? "In today’s business environment,
project teams comprise highly specialized members, many of whom may not be collocated.
Thus, rather than forming traditional teams, virtual teams, comprised of
members from different geographic areas, are assembled to collaborate on a
project. Virtual teams are commonly used for tasks such as developing systems
and software; for example, the programmers are located in India, the project
managers are in the United States, and the testers are in Europe."
(Valacich and Schneider, 2012).
In a sense we are all involved in a large-scale virtual team
through the mechanism of Blackboard which is facilitating our distance learning
and collaboration in this class. I am
involved with such a virtual team in another class that is working on a large-scale
business process modeling case. In
thinking about how best to organize our efforts and keep track of our
communication, noting that some of us are in different time zones, I considered
using a blog. In part this is due to
that fact that I am familiar with blogs and have been using them off and on
since 2003, and that there are numerous free platforms online to support
blogging. (I personally use
blogger.com).
The two features that O'Reilly mentioned (tagging and
permalinking) make blogs an especially versatile and useful tool for this kind
of collaborative work. Although
Blackboard's discussion forum does allow for the creation of different
discussion threads and stimulates the back and forth of online conversation, it
is limited to a hierarchical, nested structure.
Individual posts have a fixed location in the existing structure, but it
is not possible to tag particular posts or to do searches of all posts across
multiple conversations.
What do I mean by tagging?
Tagging is a simple, yet powerful means of establishing an emergent
structure out of multiple conversation threads and discussion topics, on the
fly. Some refer to this as
"folksonomy" as opposed to taxonomy.
Taxonomy refers to a systematic classification into ordered, predefined
categories, like that found in any encyclopedia. Folksonomy refers to "a style of
collaborative categorization of sites using freely chosen keywords," ie.
tags. Tags can be applied by the author
of a post at the time of posting, but the real benefit is that the possibility
of tagging can be opened up to the readers of a post as well. This feature is sometimes called "social
cataloging." "Tagging allows
for the kind of multiple, overlapping associations that the brain itself uses,
rather than rigid categories." (O'Reilly, 2005). Blogs offer the additional functionality of
allowing searches and reordering or filtering of posts by tags, something a
discussion board cannot do. Another
feature is the tag cloud, (see example) which is a way to "visualize user generated
tags or content on a site ...The size of a word in a tag cloud represents its
importance or frequency so that it is easy to spot the most important or
frequent words or tags." (Valacich and Schneider, 2012, 207). Out of a tag cloud comes an emergent dynamic
structuring of the posts.
Permalinking is the second feature of blogs that make them a
good tool for virtual team collaboration.
Permalinking a blog post gives it an easy handle, a way of referring to
any specific part of a conversation utilizing the power of hyperlinks, making
it "relatively easy to gesture directly at a highly specific post on
someone else's site and talk about it."
This is extremely useful for teams with multiple participants who are
geographically and temporally dispersed.
Without having to search throughout the discussion board to see which
threads have new "unread" posts, I can dynamically follow the
asynchronous updates from multiple team members and easily refer to the
embedded permalinks to refresh my recollection of the previous step in the
conversation. Each blog post can also
have a nested set of comments appended to it, tracking the flow of a discussion
with multiple participants.
The combination of tagging and permalinking means that a
blog can replicate the functionality of either a wiki or a discussion
board. Tags create a user defined
folksonomy and allow one to search or reorder posts based on that new
classification schema. Permalinks let us
pin important posts which define terms, establish procedures, set goals,
identify measures or outputs as permanent, but changeable, fixtures in our
emerging dynamic structure.
I am assuming, of course, that all of the virtual team
members are empowered as administrators or authors of a team blog. Each participant can make his or her own
posts, edit others postings, suggest edits or changes, make comments on other
peoples posts, and set tags on her own or on others posts. Blogging creates a record of the process that
the team is going through, it can be reviewed as a set of minutes of the
meetings that the team has had, as well as a record of the evolution of a draft
proposal or a process redesign. It
provides not only a historical document but also, if used properly, a dynamic
conversation management device. An important
benefit is that unlike discussion boards, blogs usually feature a mobile app or
email interface which allows one to easily publish to the blog through an
email. Like any tool, it can be
misused. One of the drawbacks to blogs
is that readers with no special privileges can only make comments. To them it may only seem like a static
chronological list. Another serious
consideration, brought up by Valacich and Schneider, is "the damage that
can be done to the company when a poor choice of words, an unpopular stance, or
a rogue employee’s rant is posted in a blog." But overall, I believe the benefits outweigh
the costs and that team blogs can be a valuable means of managing the
collaborative work of dispersed virtual teams.
Works Cited
O'Reilly, T. "What is Web 2.0?" oreilly.com. (September 30, 2005).
Valacich, J. & Schneider, C. (2012). Information Systems
Today, Managing in the Digital World.
Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall.
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