Social Software: Scary Monsters?

By Dr Chris P. Jobling

So we’re all agreed. Blogs: good; email: bad. Wikis: good; sending round attachments to a dozen people and then having to merge all the changes by hand afterwards: bad.

This one goes out to all my colleagues who really do want to send out attachments by email and merge changes manually. (No, I tell a lie, they want to send out printouts of documents and merge red-lined versions back into the electronic documents manually!) Here’s a presentation by Suw Charman (note no Powerpoint!!) recorded at Google HQ and released in the Google TechTalks series that spells out the barriers to social tools and why it might be good to embrace change. This is why I live my life on the web: welcome to my world!
http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=5259885968345773781&hl=en
(Note: video is 55 minutes long, so lock the door, take the phone off the hook and grab a coffee before hitting play.)

Also discovered

New blog entry on the Learning Lab is a related item about using Google docs for collaborative writing. This might actually work for us!