• Best Company Values Explanation Ever –
• Business: Community Advocates: Your Secret Weap… | Jive Community – The tactical way in which you locate or engage with your advocates may vary based upon the type of community (employee, customer, product support, etc.), but the principles I’ll describe below can apply to either type of community.

  What are Community Advocates?
  What Advocates Do and Why You Need Them?
  First, advocates can share in Community Work.
  Second, advocates can increase your community reach and word of mouth promotion.
  Third, advocates can be a powerful front line source of end user and member support.
  Fourth, advocates can help you prune and curate community content.
  Finally (although the list could go on!), your community advocates can be a trusted source of user feedback.
  What’s the Bottom Line?

  by Claire Flanagan

• Bildung nach dem digitalen Klimawandel: Das Buch verdunstet in die Wolke – taz.de – Tatsächlich änderte sich dann in den Klassenzimmern aber gar nicht viel. Bis heute blieb es im Prinzip bei dem System, das sich Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts zusammen mit der industriell-bürokratischen Organisation herausgebildet hatte: Der Lehrer ist das Medium. Die Schule hat das Wissensmonopol. Wer nicht mitkommt, ist selber schuld.
• BrowserID: A Better Way to Sign In – Connect with BrowserID, the safest & easiest way to sign in.
• sprint.ly – Make beautiful products. –
• Don’t Be A Free User (Pinboard Blog) – What if a little site you love doesn't have a business model? Yell at the developers! Explain that you are tired of good projects folding and are willing to pay cash American dollar to prevent that from happening. It doesn't take prohibitive per-user revenue to put a project in the black. It just requires a number greater than zero.
• Scripting Languages: PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby – Hyperpolyglot –
• „Gib mir ein Plus – Alle Tipps und Plugins zu Google “ auf karrierebibel.de – Jeden Tag mehr Erfolg! – Logischerweise bevorzugt Google seinen eigenen Chrome-Browser, daher überrascht es nicht, dass es dafür die meisten Google+-Plug-Ins gibt. Die wichtigsten haben wir für sie – alphabetisch geordnet – zusammengestellt.

• When Should You Migrate Your File Shares to SharePoint? – Yes, there are circumstances and scenarios where it makes sense to leave your file shares where they stand. For most organizations, it is a combination of factors rather than any single factor that drives this decision: typically, it's a large volume of content combined with low hardware/maintenance costs, and low interaction with target content (its fairly static, rarely changes). You need to weigh these factors, and make an educated decision about what to do with your environment. And yes, there are great vendor solutions on the market to help you manage your content should you stay put.
• Social Media versus Knowledge Management – Anthony J. Bradley and Mark P. McDonald – Harvard Business Review – On the surface, social media and knowledge management (KM) seem very similar. Both involve people using technology to access information. Both require individuals to create information intended for sharing. Both profess to support collaboration.

  But there's a big difference.

  Knowledge management is what company management tells me I need to know, based on what they think is important.
  Social media is how my peers show me what they think is important, based on their experience and in a way that I can judge for myself.

  Wer seit den 1990er Jahren versucht, Wissensmanagement in die Unternehmen zu tragen, steht den jüngeren Tools und Konzepten rund um Social Media oft misstrauisch oder erstaunt, manchmal auch fasziniert, gegenüber. Wer Unternehmen beim “Management” ihres Wissens unterstützen will, denkt häufig in Konzepten, die sich nur schwer mit der Selbstorganisation und Eigendynamik von Netzwerken vertragen.

• Understanding what “Adaptive” means | Collaborative Planning & Social Business – However, my goal with this post is not to change terms in use, but instead to simply give people an easy way to understand what the concept of adaptive.

  When you hear that something is adaptive, think about how muscles respond to use by growing, how exercise is used to increase strength, and how practice is the way to learn to do things.

• Benign and dark ‘informal’ supply chains | ZDNet – Enterprises theoretically lust after these types of individuals inside their organizations to ‘think outside the box’, shake things up and innovate. Culturally it is very hard to introduce agility into hierarchies with bureaucracies that tend to cross check and ratify everything
• Freer than free, opener than open: The fight for the learning management systems market is heating up (again) | opensource.com – Probably the difference here is that we are taking care of a single puppy (a single Moodle installation for a single class, in a single server), and that it is running outside of the University network. It probably will be a different story if it was the service for hundreds of classes, maintained by a centralized organization.

  Maybe the learning lesson here is that: there are things that are better done by distributing the load to many users. For example, it is better for all of us to have our own word processors in our laptops than to setup a University centralized server that host the "word processing" services for hundreds of users.

• Usability-Studie: Ist Google+ nicht benutzerfreundlich und intuitiv genug? – guter Kommentar:

  "Als ich mich zum ersten Mal mit G+ beschäftigte, bin ich mit dem Vorsatz daran gegangen, das es sich hier nicht um Facebook handelt, also hab ich auch erwartet, dass einiges anders ist als bei FB. Als problematisch hatte ich das jedoch niemals empfunden, es hat auch nicht lange gedauert, bis ich kapiert habe, wie's läuft. Allerdings kann ich mir recht gut vorstellen, dass ein Großteil der FB-Klientel Probleme damit hat, mal etwas anders zu machen als "wie ich das schon immer gemacht habe". Vielleicht gar nicht mal so schlecht, wenn dieser Teil der FB-User bleibt, wo er ist, sonst haben wir hier auch möglicherweise bald dieses "Du, ich sitz gerade auffem Klo, was machst Du denn jetzt?" – Niveau."

• Google+ Tipps und Tricks – Google Text & Tabellen – Ein gemeinschaftliches Dokument
  (oder wie 120+ Menschen ein Buch gleichzeitig schrieben)
• ReaderSharer Brings Sharing Options Back to Google Reader in Firefox and Chrome – I bet this works via tagging and not really through a database– similar to what ridllr.com is doing.

  Glad to see people working to fix google's massive massive mistake. However, this is only like a 40% solution since it just brings back sharing and not commenting. I'm holding out for hivemind.org

• What Motivates Us To Post On Google Plus | Media Tapper – Taken from the point of view of these 3 motivators for intellectual activity, Google+ is a platform that allows you to use all of them in the most complete and holistic way.  I have read about many people that were not actively blogging or creating content before G+, and for which this platform has opened the doors of collective creation.

  What has been your experience when creating content for G+? Do you consider that the factors delineated above are in-line with your motivations for posting?

• Creating a ebook with LibreOffice Writer – Something else you should do is validate your EPUB. Validation is the process of making sure that your EPUB books contain all the elements that ebook readers expect. Like what? Here’s a partial list:

  Complete metadata
  The proper directory structure in the EPUB file
  Valid XHTML
  Working links and references to files in the EPUB file
  A table of contents

  All of that should be fine, but it’s best to check. To do that in Sigil, select Tools > Validate Epub. Validation only takes a few seconds but it’s a useful step

• Amazon AWS: So nutzt man den Cloud-Dienst EC2 | Storage & Server | Galerien | ZDNet.de – EC2 ist das Herzstück der Amazon Web Services und stellt dem Nutzer stundenweise virtuelle Server zur Verfügung. ZDNet gibt eine Anleitung für Einsteiger und zeigt Schritt für Schritt, wie man Instanzen unter Linux und Windows anlegt.

  Amazons Elastic-Compute-Cloud-Dienste (EC2) bilden das Herzstück der Amazon Web Services (AWS). Im Prinzip ist EC2 ein Service, der Anwendern virtuelle Server zur Verfügung stellt, die er nach Belieben nutzen kann. Sie können wahlweise mit Linux oder Windows betrieben werden.

• Hack an Ikea Solar Lamp to Charge an iPad – In the past we've covered how to turn the inexpensive Ikea Sunnan solar lamp into a solar display case and today we have a hack from electronics manufacturer Voltaic Systems to turn the same lamp into a solar charging station for an iPad or other power-hungry phone or tablet.
  This hack is actually three mini-hacks rolled into one—Voltaic shows how to replace the low-capacity rechargeable batteries in the lamp's battery pack with larger batteries, mod the lamp to accept additional external solar panels, and adding a modified Minty Boost charging circuit to allow devices to pull up to 1 Amp of electricity.
• Louis Gray – Google+ – How To Make the New Google Reader Social With Google+ #rss… – It's sort of sad to see Google engaging in this type of behavior, it's what we are used to from other companies, and what made Google different. The behavior I refer to is purposely destroying the RSS sharing platform for no other reason than forcing people to put that activity onto G+. It's especially a shame because you could have had your cake and eaten it too. What you could have done is added a button at the top just like you did for games called "RSS shares", that is where users could have gone to look at the ton of RSS content their fellow Reader users share. And you could have also allowed sharing to G+. Instead you destroyed a great sharing platform just so you could force people to share to G+. And now everyone will cut down what they share one hundred fold because they won't want to spam their G+ streams.

I think David is right, when he holds that

[this] means that benchmarking is starting to die due to the increased cycle times and shorter shelf life of information. I’ve long felt that you can’t benchmark your way to the top. You have to lead and take risks. To lead and take risks you must have the top generalist thought leaders of our times on your team. People who understand things like search engine optimization as a strategic tool, social media, bottom up communities and cultures, defining a defensible data model from the start and who practice customer listening for their innovation.

This is even more true when thinking about leveraging social software in the enterprise, something I am consulting and specializing in – watching for benchmarks, trying to minimize risks, pondering adoption cycles etc. won’t carry you far … but thought leadership will.

Update: Jeremiah Owyang collects a ton of other FCF07-coverage here and here.