Under the category of interesting a worthwhile sites to check out, it is definitely worth taking a look at Bill Ives’ “Portals and KM” site. Many thanks to Peter Gloor for the introduction.

Bill has been blogging for a while, and with a background in Knowledge Management and psychology, he provides some interesting perspective.

For example, Bill provides a really interesting take on Blink vs. Wisdom of Crowds – Experts vs. the Multitude.

Talking about a Slate article that detailed an exchange between Malcom Gladwell and James Surowiecki, Bill says this:

I think both theories have their place and each counters a standard decision model. There are times when each view make sense but each can be pushed to absurdity. For example, Gladwell asks Surowiecki if a 1000 people in a village in China would be better at collectively looking at x-rays than a single highly trained radiologist. How about the 120 million Americans who believe in creationism re-writing our science curriculum? Or two dozen Democrats trying to swiftly guide the Kerry campaign? Perhaps John read Suroweicki’s Wisdom of Crowds before he picked his team. A similar critique of Blink is offered by Suroweicki as there are times when detailed analysis makes sense if time allows.

Just yesterday, Bill was kind enough to post his take on my Top 15 Requirements for Web Office article.

I want to respond to one of Bill’s questions:

Then he adds that we should provide a single interface for adding material and using all office applications such as email, blogs, and wikis. Good idea but does the functionality differences allow for this? I would not want to sink into the lowest common denominator.

Certainly, I think that email is the lowest common denominator. My take is that while my gMail account UI is a little nicer than my MovableType UI, but essentially the same. If I was using something like Zimbra, the only difference between writing an email and a blog post would be a couple of key words. Within an enterprise, things like accepting comments and trackbacks are set as a default to yes.

As I have mentioned before, I am leading the development of an enterprise blogging solution for my firm. We are starting early Beta testing in the New Year, with the potential of eventually rolling it out to 130,000 users.

With 130,000 users, you have to think about how people will learn to use the Web Office technology.

Some people will jump in with both feat, and start using the project blogs and the enterprise Wiki on day one.

Many others won’t. We have to create a culture that values the act of sharing information. People have to see that they are valued for their contributions. That is different from saying that their contributions are valued. If you are a CEO running a firm that wants to pursue a strategy of constant innovation, you have to enlist everyone who works for you, just a Google has every engineer devote 20% of their time to their own projects. That’s the reason Google keeps coming up with cool stuff.

The other barrier is training. In our case, we have very diverse group of 130,000 people with a range of skills and expertise. Not all of them are going to be familiar with blogging. Not all of them are going to have the time learn about blogging and wikis.

The alternative is simple. Let them use what they are already familiar with - enterprise email.

Every one of our enterprise blogs is going to have an internal email address. To post to a Project Blog, many users will simple email the blog.

If using email is one of the patterns, and companies are moving to software as a service, with the potential to have a beautiful, robust and secure Web based email client, like gMail, Yahoo!Mail or Zimbra, then a unified Web Office interface is almost inevitable.