One thing caught my eye, in particular — a quote from Stephen Abram, a past president of the Canadian Library Association, who said …

(we) need to “stop telling and start listening, to start working from the reader’s, the user ’s, the experiencer ’s contact in. Then they can start creating the products that actually match the behaviors of their user base. In many markets, the traditional publishing formats are misaligned with what needs to happen.”

The reading of static text is a poor substitute for a visceral experience and always has been, said Abram. Plain text sufficed because there was no alternative, no superior way to convey complex data. That’s changed. Abram argued that it’s up to publishers to pick among the available media tools—including video clips, audio files, even virtual reality—and pull them together into a package that facilitates learning, not just reading.

“Do you want your cardiac surgeon to walk into your room before he does your surgery and say, ‘I read the article last night’? No, you want him to have had a thousand experiences putting his hand in someone’s chest and know what it feels like. It should be just like an experience a car mechanic has where he can put his hand on the hood of your car and say it’s the manifold because he’s seen it, heard it, smelled it a thousand times.”

What fascinates me with this line of thinking is how it related to the development of expertise (central to my PhD research) and also how this ties to the use of knowledge media to disseminate and acculturate knowledge. Another area of interest for me is Participatory Design (or User-Centered Design). Stephen introduces the notion (inadvertently) of user centered publishing — an interesting framing of the opportunity. Congrats, Stephen! And thanks for these insightful comments from which I will derive many useful quotes.

In this column I try to keep the language and terms distinct – social networks, social (knowledge) media, social networking.  This is also one of my areas of research as I try to understand the role of social networks in expertise management / location. If you come across any references in this area; I would be glad to hear from you.

I found this post recently on Business Week that referred me to a survey done by Barracuda Networks (who sells tools for email and web security). In the survey, they asked customers (those with their security tools .. and not a random sample of businesses) whether they blocked social networking sites. Of 2400 customers surveyed, 50% said they block access to Facebook or MySpace.

Contrast that with  Serena Software in San Mateo, California. This company now promotes social networking Fridays for staff to keep their pages up to date.  It is also using Facebook as an alternative to a corporate intranet – a place for their staff to collaborate.

Seems to me that many companies are missing out opportunities to use these tools to their advantage.