Virtual Office
McAfee: The definition of workplace changes, dramatic increases in productivity could be ahead; http://eicker.at/VirtualOffice
Wales: The idea of Wikia 2.0 is to attract new people who thought wikis would be too complicated to use; http://eicker.at/Wikia
Guardian: “Where Wikipedia is encyclopaedia-like, neutral (despite the regular flame wars between disputing editors) factual information, Wikia is for fan communities and more expressive. Rolling out an overhauled version in the past few weeks, Wales claims the new Wikia is far more social with better sharing features, a simpler ‘WYSIWYG’ editing interface, theme designer and improved navigation. – ‘The idea is to move into new markets, attract new people – people who traditionally thought wikis would be too complicated to use,’ Wales told the Guardian. ‘Wikia 2.0 marries the traditional wiki tools that have been so successful with newer social and editing features.‘ – Behind all these improvements is the ambition of making Wikia stickier, encouraging people to keep nurturing their wiki after the initial burst of excitement. … ‘Wikipedia is a cultural institution – and still the number five site on the internet,’ said Wales. Given that Wikia was founded in 2004, and Wikipedia in 2001, Wales’s empire doesn’t seem ready to buckle just yet. ‘I should’ve started sooner. All the tech components needed to start these projects existed several years earlier – there was no reason I couldn’t have started Wikipedia in 1996.‘”
RWW: “The company said it has a number of features in store for its users: Integration of social tools to let users share their edits and contributions with friends. Highlighting of top editors so readers can see who created the content and learn more about them. Surfacing photos and videos more broadly on content pages and including images in search results. Radically improved content editing via a new, easy to use, visual editor. Fan activity modules such as real-time streams, polls, top 10 lists, and achievement badges. New opportunities for brands to get involved in the conversation with their fans.”
TNW: “However if his software could be licensed and used to build company intranets, extranets, and platforms for writing rich documentation, websites and collaboration tools – that would be something cool to see.”
Farnham/Churchill [PDF]: “We found that for many people identity is faceted across areas of their lives, that some of these facets are incompatible, and that this incompatibility impacts levels of self-reported worry about sharing in social technologies, particularly in social networks. Family emerged as the most important facet of people’s lives, and younger, working men without children reported the highest levels of incompatibility across facets. Further research will be needed to explore the nature of these incompatibilities. People with higher levels of incompatibility were more likely to use email, and to a lesser extent Facebook, to support different areas of their lives, especially adult and media activities. – These results are consistent with the argument that identity and social context are tightly intertwined, and that tools that enable faceted identity and sharing across segmented areas of people’s lives will greatly improve user experiences of social media. Email, which enables more personal, private sharing had a much higher level on our measure of social intensity than did Facebook. Although users expressed appreciation for keeping in touch with their extended network in Facebook, they use email for their more private, bounded sharing. People with higher levels of faceted identity had higher levels of usage of social technologies overall, however they also expressed more worry about sharing, especially in social networks. Social networks in particular need better tools for intimate, private sharing – honoring the boundaries between different areas of people‟s faceted lives.”