Organizations have tremendous cultural variations that need to be considered when designing an e-engagement plan or selecting e-engagement tools. E-engagement will be most successful when it’s based on tools that fit with the way an organization approaches technology and with the way it approaches engagement. Since organizations may approach internal (employee) engagement differently from stakeholder or public engagement it’s worth looking at a matrix for each area of engagement work.

I’ve created a draft matrix to help inform these choices. I’d be delighted to get feedback on whether the matrix is helpful, or thoughts on which tools should be added (or moved) within the matrix. See image below, or download a PDF version.

Blogging has been a hot topic here at OD2005. While there’s a lot of interest in blogging as a tool of public conversation, there’s also a lot of skepticism about the quality of information and discourse on blogs.

In my own presentations I have talked both about how to use blogging as an engagement tool and how to use blog tools for improving knowledge-sharing and collaboration among e-deliberation practitioners.

To that end, here’s my list of the 10 technologies and tools that together unlock the power of blogging as a very easy and effective way to track news, discover information, and collaborate with colleagues.

1. Really Simple Syndication (RSS): RSS feeds are constantly updated streams of information. Lots of news sites and blogs offer RSS feeds of their content so you can stay up to date on their latest content without having to visit the same sites every day. You can find an official definition, but the most important thing to know is that anytime you see the initials RSS or XML or Atom (another format like RSS) on a web site, you can “subscribe” to its content using an RSS “aggregator”. (And Michael Weiksner tells me that Atom will replace RSS.)
2. Bloglines: an RSS aggregator that lets you read and keep track of RSS feeds. This is a great way of creating a one-stop web page for reading all the newspapers and blogs that interest you. Make bloglines your home page and then create a bookmarklet for your toolbar so that anytime you find an interesting blog or news site you want to track, you can subscribe to its RSS feed with just one click. Once you’ve added a few feeds to your Bloglines account you’ll probably want to make your Bloglines page your browser’s news default page so that you’ll always be on top of the latest news in your field and the world. Check out my Bloglines blogroll to see how I use it to keep track of news, blogs, and web resources.
3. Technorati: the Google of blogs. A Technorati search is a great way of discovering who is saying what about which topics. For example, you can use Technorati to find out what bloggers are saying about e-democracy. And if you join Technorati you can turn that social security page into a “watchlist” — an RSS feed that you can subscribe to using Bloglines. That way you can stay up-to-date on what bloggers are saying about e-democracy.
4. PubSub: Like Technorati, PubSub lets you create an RSS feed on whatever topic(s) you want to track. But it’s not limited to searching blogs: it searches all sorts of RSS-based content, including press releases and newsgroups (usenet groups). You can create some pretty elaborate searches in PubSub and then keep up-to-date on the results using Bloglines. The only downside is you can’t see your results right away; once you set up and subscribe to your search, you have to wait for new things to get written before you’ll see any payoff.
5. Blogrolls: that list of other blogs that appears in the sidebar of most blogs you visit. A blogroll is how a blogger tips her cap to fellow bloggers she reads or tracks. If you find a blog you like, check out some of the links in its blogroll, because chances are you’ll like some of those blogs too.
6. OPML: a file format for storing blogrolls. Bloglines can automatically create an OPML file of the blogs you subscribe to, which you can use as a blogroll on your own blog, or as a way of enhancing your blog tracking (see below).
7. Feedster: Another blog search service, along the lines of Technorati and PubSub. But Feedster has the nifty added feature of letting you create (and subscribe to) searches that are limited to a single OPML file. So if you subscribe to a lot of different blogs and news sites that sometimes write about an issue you care abut (let’s use the e-democracy example again), you can use Feedster to search just those blogs for the term e-democracy. If you’re a BlogLines user, the URL for the OPML file for your public subscriptions (the feeds you’ve included in your publicly viewable blogroll) will be http://www.bloglines.com/export?id=YourUserName
8. del.icio.us: An online system for storing links to favourite web sites (”bookmarks”), and for discovering related web sites that you might not find on your own. Del.icio.us lets you assign tags to the web sites you store so that you can find them again, and shows you who else is storing web sites under the same tags. For example, you can create a Bloglines subscription to the RSS feed for the del.icio.us “deliberation” tag as a way of staying on top of new web resources in the deliberation field.
9. Blogger: Blogging is contagious. Once you become a regular blog reader you’re likely to get the blogging itch — even if it’s just a way of keeping notes on the other blogs you’re reading (bloggers commenting on bloggers is a proud tradition — that’s why people call the blogosphere an “echo chamber”.) But starting your own blog doesn’t have to be complicated or expensive: you can get your own blog up and running in literally five minutes using Blogger. (You can do this in Bloglines, too.)
10. WordPress: Blogging can be a great way of collaborating online. WordPress is a very flexible and extensible blogging platform that allows people to work together easily. The Online Deliberation blog is a WordPress blog that uses a number of enhancements to enhance its collaborative value. If you’re interesting in finding out more about using blogging as a collaboration or conference tool, e-mail me at alex (at) angus-reid (dot) com.

For all my tagging evangelism, I’ve been enigmatic and elusive about how I myself use tagging to be a better blogger, a better worker, and a better human being. But the whole reason I’ve become such a tagging fanatic is because it’s allowed me to dramatically streamline my workflow so that I can track and share resources much more effectively. Thanks to my Vice President of Documentation, I now have a summary of my integrated workflow using Spurl, del.icio.us, WordPress and FeedWordPress.

I use these tools together to:

• Store links to web sites I want to remember, along with an archive of each web page I store in case the original disappears.
• Blog easily about some of the sites I store, at the same time as I bookmark them.
• Make these blog entries look like regular blog entries, not like a linkroll.
• Keep my blog posts about a web site in the same categories that I use to tag that site in del.icio.us and Spurl.

Here are the tools you’ll need to do the same thing:

• An account with Spurl
• A “spurl it!” bookmarklet in your browser, which you can find under Settings/Setup once you’re logged into Spurl.
• A WordPress blog
• FeedWordPress installed on your WordPress blog
• Optional: a del.icio.us account. If you set up a del.icio.us account set your Spurl account to save any new links to del.icio.us, too.

Here’s how I use these tools together:

1. Find a web site that you want to write about in your blog.
2. Spurl the page (i.e. bookmark it in your Spurl account) using the “spurl it!” bookmarklet on your browser toolbar.
3. Optional: Assign the bookmark a category, if you’re using categories as well as tags (I recommend that you just use tags — or at least, avoid nested categories.)
4. Tag the bookmark with “blogthis” and any other tags you want (I have some advice on choosing tags).
5. Enter a description or comment on the link in the “description” field. This description will become your blog entry, and can include full HTML code (though you should be careful about using special characters like dashes or quotations marks in your actual text). I’ve yet to encounter its upper limit in terms of post length or number of characters.
6. Go to your Spurl account and navigate to the page for your “blogthis” tag. Click on the “ATOM” button in the upper right-hand corner. Copy the URL that loads (it will look something like http://www.spurl.net/myspurls/library.php?p=atom&userid=XXX&c=259295 ) to your clipboard.
7. In WordPress Dashboard, go to Links / Syndicated. (We’re assuming you have FeedWordPress installed.)
8. Paste the URL you’ve copied from Spurl into “Syndicate a new site” and click “Syndicate”
9. A confirmation page appears. Click on “Edit.”
10. Change the link name to whatever you’d like, and add a description.
11. Click “save changes” at the bottom of the page.
12. In Options / Syndication, set “Unfamiliar categories” to “don’t create new categories”.
13. Load the URL http://www.YOURWEBSITE.com/blog/wp-content/update-feeds.php?shibboleth=fooble to update your feed. (You should have changed your “shibboleth” secret word” in the WordPress Dashboard under Options / Syndication; use your secret word in place of “fooble”. And you may want to set up a cron job to run regular updates of your feeds.)
14. Go to your blog; your recently Spurled page should now appear as the most recent blog post. If not, try updating your FeedWordPress feeds again because it sometimes takes a minute or two for Spurl’s feed to update.

Coming soon: tips on customizing FeedWordPress for your personal workflow.

FAQ:

Q: Why use Spurl instead of del.icio.us alone?
A: Del.icio.us limits its description field to 255 characters, which is too short for most of my blog posts.

Q: Why use del.icio.us instead of just Spurl?
A: Spurl is pretty slow, which can be frustrating when it comes time to accessing your bookmarks. So I use Spurl as a nice way of storing (and backing up) my bookmarks, and del.icio.us to retrieve the. Also del.icio.us has lots of interesting complementary tools that make it useful in other ways too.

Q: Why shouldn’t I use categories in Spurl?
A: Give up on hierarchical (nested) categories; these can screw up your tags, especially if you synchronize with del.icio.us or an external blog. Single-word, non-nested categories will work well ok as tags when Spurl exports them to del.icio.us. But at that point you might as well just be using tags.

Q: What’s the relationship between tags and categories?
A: They’re basically the same thing. WordPress calls the topic of each blog post a “category” but FeedWordPress handles incoming tags as if they were blog categories. So you’ll make your life much simpler if you harmonize Spurl categories, Spurl tags, del.icio.us tags and WordPress categories. You may have a lot more tags that you use in Spurl and del.icio.us than you have WordPress categories, but make sure that all your WordPress categories exist in Spurl and del.icio.us, and that you spell them the same way in both places.

Michael Weiksner of E-ThePeople showed us a site called The Annotated New York Times, which shows what people are saying about the NYT on the blogosphere. It’s a lot like what Salon is doing with Technorati.

I’m presenting on two different panels at OD2005. My main paper (in room 380x at 2:40 on Saturday) is on “Found” Enagement: Lessons from Hacktiivsm and Blogging. I’ll be talking about the increasingly fuzzy boundary between formal consultation and spontaneous activism, and how online deliberation can learn to incorporate spontaneous participation the way offline deliberation incorporates activism. This paper is partly based on the research I did for my dissertation on Hacktivism and the Future of Political Participation.

And at 1:10 on Saturday I’ll be part of a panel on Collaboration Tools for the E-Deliberation Community (in room 041), which will look at how e-deliberation researchers and practitioners can facilitate knowledge exchange and collaboration. I’ll be talking about the DO-Consult listserv for people working in the field of online consultation and dialogue. I’ll also talk about some of the tools you see on the conference blog — like CiteULike and del.icio.us — and how they can help us coordinate our work.

I’ve created a category in this blog called OD2005 and I’m experimenting to see which blog search engine picks it up first.

At the end of this week I’m off to Palo Alto for the addthis_url = 'http%3A%2F%2Fwww.alexandrasamuel.com%2F20050515%2Fonline-deliberation-at-stanford'; addthis_title = 'Online+Deliberation+at+Stanford'; addthis_pub = 'awsamuel';