journalism.co.uk has a bit up about murdoch’s news international expanding their online community presence. if you’re on e-mint, you would have known this a couple days ago when one of our members put out the recruiting notice. those of you in london… go go go ….

great article on a list apart re: coding your site for global & local audiences

these articles are about a month old but business week has a few up concerning social networking sites getting VC money, visable path which is enterprise focused and analyses your connections within an org by watching your email and linkedin. there’s also some other BW articles linked from w/in the 3 articles.

all the articles seem to be from april 2006. did they just decide to do a big package on social networking or are the folks at BW really this far behind the curve?

vyew is a document sharing collaborative whiteboard real-time meeting room web app. currently it’s free and you can have up to 20 people in the room at once. you can also set 2 permission levels for each person – very black & white though – they either have permission to edit or they have to sit back & watch.

rearranging the deckchairs blog has an interview with karen lojeski about ‘virtual distance’.

karen’s research shows virtual distance can cause competitive disadvantage, project failure, and economic loss. the research also showed that virtual distance does NOT only occur with geographically dispersed teams. yep, geographic distance is NOT REQUIRED. instead, the focus of the definition is on electronic communication.

Of course, geography can play into virtual distance, but the concept itself is really independent of location. You are at risk for virtual distance any time electronic communications becomes a substantial substitute for talking on the phone and meeting face-to-face. That lack of perceived “closeness” can have very real effects on the productivity, efficiency, and ultimately on the success of, IT projects.

there’s lots of research out there concerning the problems of electronic communication so this isn’t a new revelation. i don’t know of any research that shows how much in-house teams use electronic communication in comparison with f2f but i think it’s pretty obvious electronic communication is on the increase. at what level does it become to the detriment to the team?

karen consults and the website doesn’t reveal much but i’m intrigued and repulsed by this:

Using a set of metrics coined the Virtual Distance Indexâ„¢, VDI helps global corporations quantitatively measure the extent to which they are exposed to Virtual Riskâ„¢.

i can understand the desire to have a lovely little quiz or checklist which you can apply to your team in order understand problems and then used as a roadmap out of those problems but i don’t think they work very well.

having used a psychometric instrument in my research, i don’t have a lot of faith in them. i think it’s too easy to administer the instrument, get a result and rely very heavily on that result as the whole story. i think some instruments out there are easy to see through and there is research that some people try to answer these the way they think the administrator wants them to be answered. an example from my research, was collaboration was the #1 preferred way of dealing with conflict. if you think about conflict in your teams, is collaboration really the preferred way? that wouldn’t be my answer from previous experience. however i do think people know consciously and subconsciously that they should be collaborate as much as possible.