Blog glues other tools together

Providing some interesting insights in his project-blogging experience, Erik van Bekkum writes:

The blog is about conversation and not about project-related issues (tasks, co-authoring of documents). We had this right from the start, but the limitations of what the blog is good for comes strongly forward as the need to do these project-related issues, arises... Even just weeks into the experiment with the p-blog, the venture has proven its value next to the other tools (community, project management software, email etc) because it has distinctive advantages that allows the project blog potentially to unite (glue) all the other tools together.

If “innovation is the organizational equivalent of evolution” The Business of Innovation, by Bean & Radford, then we can expect that it will use evolution's dual engine, differentiation and integration, as its drivers. Here's how:

At its birth in the late 60s, the only form of electronic communication was email. Out from that grew bulletin boards, asynch text conferencing, chat, shared-whiteboarding, wiki, and more recently, Quick Topic for co-authoring, SMS, MMS, blogs and its variations such project blogs and community blogs. All these species of our tech ecosystem brought the users more functionality, variety, and ... more headaches and challenges because:

1. Interfaces are not inter-operable, thus they oblige us to learn too many "languages" if we're to be effective communicators with the multiple groups we belong to.

2. There's an increasing variety and complexity of choices that one has to weight regarding into which conversation held by which group, using what channel, would be the most useful to insert a thought to generate the most traction.

The second challenge is evolution's trick to make us smarter as individuals and communities. I can shot down in front of that challenge, stay in my little corner and don't bother to use my newly gained freedoms, or take responsibility for learning to use it wisely.

The first challenge, the lack inter-operabiity of interfaces will be alleviated over time when major standards--ike XML and RSS--will emerge in the world of user interfaces and connect our currently disjoint tools. That will also attenuate but did not resolve the second challenge the root of whch is not in the technology but the short term attention limitations of the human mind.

But what can we now to nudge social software development towards more inter-operability? For one, we can notice, appreciate and encourage the baby steps, the examples of which include:

• pMachine has blog and bulletin board in the same package, though very little integration between them

• kuro5hin makes comments to entries in the "Diaries" URL-addressable, thus providing one of the ingredients of any decent forum software inside a blogging system.

• I keep on eye on future developments in Moveable Type because they got some of the smartest people in social networking software, so maybe they will understand and respond to the essential need for complete inter-operability, if not integration, of free-flowing personal publishing in blogs and focused, results-oriented conversations in forums.

Whoever will come up first with working solution to that challenge will harvest the first-mover's significant economic advantages.