Mike Pusateri, Elisabeth Freeman and Eric Freeman at Disney shares their enterprise blogging initative. Its very similar to the experience we have had with Socialtext, without the integration of blog and wiki with enterprise requirements in mind. The focus on blogging for project communication instead of just individual expression is spot on.
Using RSS for content distribution
Using RSS Enclosures to deliver video to 2 million broadband users. Some argue that enclosures don't scale and their not enough bandwidth, but >500M videos have been delivered in less than one year an dhav been able to scale bandwidth to demand, now moving towards caching at the edge. Most of the delivery is off-peak hours, especially from them to the cable head end, so bandwidth cost is nominal. P2P like Bittorrent and others may broaden this.
Enterprise Blogging
In ops/engineering there are 100 people that log into the 6 weblogs. In DIG, 1 blog and 50 users, the wiki has been over 1.5 year 200 users and lots of groups.
Mike works where coordination is king. Info flow between programming, marketing, traffic and operations, etc. Consistent flow is critical, constant change occured and must be communicated, catch up must happen easily or problems result, archives. People don't like loggingm dont know whats new and difficult to forward.
Shift Logs
* 24 hour positions necessitate the creation of a shiftr log to report information to coworkers and management about what occured on the shift
*Previous solution was specialized FoxPro database with minimal features, mot even search
* Now a MT-based group blog
Distribution
* New weblog styel were popularm but requests for email of entries began
* Instead of email notification, used RSS
* Newsgator chosen as aggregator because of the outlook plugin
Discrepancy Reports
*Detailed info on mistakes, problems or opther events that affect the broadcast
*RSS feed reduced use of email
Ratings Information
* Daily need for overnight ratings information
* Generating RSS feed that encloses a styled table
Furture
*News Clopping Service (currentl web app)
* Playdate Memor changes (currently email
*Addition of RSS feeds to existing intranet portal modules
* Use of ATOM to replace RSS (when 1.0 arrives) and compliant tools for simple publishing. Because it is inherently 2-directional, for interaction
* Syndication of some media content for review
Conclusions
*RSS feeds and Weblog software are useful for multitude of business need where information flow is critical. Its not about opinion its about information flow
* RSS feeds are for much more than weblog sndication
*Use of RSS feeds is inexpensive comparatively
*RSS aggregation into Outlook integration was critical.
*Client side aggregation needs to move toward server side aggregation
*Need for authentication is immeadiate
They also use wikis inside. Disney Internet Group is also using wikis and blogs
*Wide variety of areas of expertise within our group
* Each person can contribute research and articles of interest to the entire group
* Best shared through a system that will notify, Notifications have had an impact -- email and RSS
* Did some stylizing per group
* Repurpose internal datafeeds
*Had training sessions to get it going.
Reuters uses wikis instead of blogs as it was harder to adopt.
Problem security and authentication; provisioning new spaces and resources. Disney has restricted write access, but not read access. Comment from a person at the BBC affirmed they ran into this in some areas too. They don't have Socialtext's ability to manage and work with lots of workspaces.
