Updated Look – It’s About Time!

I did surgery this weekend on this blog. Extreme Makeover. Although it is not totally complete, it is close. It needed one badly!

Speaking of updating looks, I am trying to customize the front page of our Social Learning solution internally. It has the default page which shows an aggregate of most recent content for all wikis, discussions and blog posts. (Trying to customize it has been difficult. A great great solution overall, but as with everything there are pros and cons.) The problem with that is that each of those three have different lives: 1) They are each created in different intervals; 2) they all have different relevancy lengths and 3) they have different audience contexts. Imagine three related but different people living under one roof (maybe you don’t need to imagine too hard…)

WIKI: The wiki, at least internally and in our stage of development, has a rapid creation cycle. We have many which are created each day. Thus, they dominate the ‘Most Recent Activity’ aggregate shown on the first page. Plus, so many are created with varying topics, that the list becomes irrelevant. Unlike RSS where you can pick and choose what you information you want to show, this page is like the newspaper. Rarely do you care about every story. You want information that relates to you, not EVERYTHING. The wiki’s active life is short. For the most part, it is created and not many are changed or added to immediately.

DISCUSSIONS (forums): These have a shorter creation cycle. Currently, one is created only every few days. I expect that to pick up in the future. Their active life is usually short, but immediate. Ask a question, get an answer – a number of answers. The problem is that they are being burried by the wikis and unless you go specifically to the discussions, you would never know a new question has been asked.

BLOGS: The life of blogs can very depending on the person(s) writing them. For us, no one (almost) is using blogs because, again, they are getting buried unless the user specifically goes to check out the latest blog postings. Their active life is relatively short. When a post happens, usually comments follow pretty quickly. Then they taper off.

Putting all three together as a “Recent Activity” will usually not produce the results you want. And the results are usage. You want people in there using everything to share information. If information is shared and it is time sensitive (as usually forums and blogs are) you will want to make sure it has appropriate real estate for its life.