Alerts

It’s vital that a good knowledge sharing / collaboration system find ways to continually draw the community back with relevant and interesting content. I subscribe to a lot of RSS feeds and also get plenty of subscription emails… however one of the most useful (and simple!) tools I’ve come across is google alerts.

Most of us think of google as the mother of all search engines. Well it is but it also one of the most successful examples of collaborative filtering. Matching keywords and generating a search engine results page is pretty straightforward; sorting the relevance of those matches isn’t !

Google alerts allow you to specify your keywords and then get a daily or weekly digest of the most relevant matches for these interests. You can also include results from youtube.

I’ve become pretty hooked on google alerts. I usually read through the alert because there’s always going to be something in there of interest to me.

On the other hand, I played around with friendster some time ago. This system, aims to keep you connected with a never ending stream of emails telling you when one of your friends has updated their profile, has a birthday coming up and so on. Now for me that’s overkill. In an enterprise environment we have to be sensitive to email overload. I’ve seen reports that employees spend up to 4 hours a day on email… there’s an argument for moving to the wiki workplace!

I think the ideal knowledge sharing / collaboration system should produce a google type alert to community members (optional of course) that is based on their explicitly stated interests and/or what is implicitly known about them. This of course means that having a powerful indexing and predictive results sorting component is essential.

There’s been some debate about how good google can be inside the firewall (no backlinks). Google have said that backlinks are only one part of the overall page rank algorithm. Well that’s something that I’m going to have to look into in a lot more detail.