Information System Tutorial - Week 7

Enhancing collaboration using web 2.0

I. Practice exercises
1. Visit popular social online communities (such as Facebook or Bebo). What features would entice you to visit such sites
over and over again? Do you have an account in an online community? If yes, why? If no, what is keeping you from
having such account? Is there any content you definitely would or would not post on such page?

Facebook makes it easy for me to connect and update my friends and family's activities; Besides, it is also a place to help us
find information and entertainment. Ofcourse I also have an account in an online community. I use facebook because I find it
extremely convenient. I connect and communicate with colleagues, friends and relatives mostly through facebook when we
don't have enough time or can't arrange a meeting or are far away from each other. I can save my memories, memorable
pictures on facebook and share it for friends to see; facebook will also bring up those memories in future years so that i can
reminisce. Besides, I also received a lot of information about news, weather, social issues from facebook; However, not all
information is correct. For me personally, I will not post private pictures and important personal information such as personal
identification number, bank account, ...; or unverified information, sensitive information on social networks.

2. Describe an application or service you would like to be able to use on the Web today that is not yet available. Describe the
potential market for this application or service. Forecast how long you believe it will take before this will occur
3. Describe the pros and cons of collaborating with colleagues over the Web.

a) Productivity

Pros: Online collaboration gives team members the tools they need to work with others from any location, including from home
and while travelling. This drastically reduces ”downtime” and allows people to be productive when it best suits them.

Cons: Personal contact is reduced, which can lead to confusion over what is expected of team members. They may also feel
that being connected 24/7 is blurring the boundaries between their professional and private lives.

b) Efficiency

Pros: Employees typically spend three hours a day searching for information and/or writing emails. However, when used
properly, online collaborative working tools can eliminate a lot of these redundant emails. This significantly reduces the time
spent searching through long email exchanges, meaning more efficient communication.

Cons: An online collaboration tool generating just as many (if not more) emails as it reduces, can be counter-productive. On a
daily basis, email inboxes can quickly get cluttered with the vast amount of notifications from an online collaboration tool. 

c) Cost

Pros: Online collaboration is highly cost-effective compared to traditional methods, and is within reach of all sizes of
organisation. Also, because collaborating online allows employees to work from home or other locations, you can potentially
cut the cost of office overheads such as equipment, electricity and space.

Cons: You need to choose an online collaboration package offering a fair pricing structure. Some will force you to buy licences
for users you don’t need, so be wary. On the other hand, a “per user per month” pricing model may lead organisations to limit
the access to only selected users. This, in turn, can cause a disparity in transparency and communication across the
workplace. 

d) Audience

Pros: With the right software, you can reach far beyond the ”usual suspects” within your organisation and start working closer
with external stakeholders, such as your key clients, partners and suppliers. Because it is cheap and easy to bring individuals
working together into a workspace, you can increase community engagement with your external stakeholders more than by
using traditional methods such as meetings, phone calls, paper surveys, press advertisements and similar. This brings
diversity to your collaborative working – resulting in more creativity and the creation of stronger relationships.

Cons: It can be tempting to widen the number of people you collaborate with, without properly assessing the reasons why you
need to engage with them. This can lead to a diffusion of focus and a slowing down of the collaborative process.

Trịnh Bảo Ngọc, FIT, HanU, mail: [email protected]

 e) Security

Pros: The most trusted online collaboration platforms have many safeguards in place to protect their users’ data. By having
encryptions, password protection, two-step authentication and firewalls; users can have the peace of mind knowing their
sensitive data is secure and safe.  

Cons: As online collaboration typically functions on a cloud-based workspace, securing the safety of information is vital on all
levels. Although the original concerns associated with these tools have been resolved, there are still a few people with the
mind-set that storing data in the cloud is not as secure as keeping it on their personal servers. 

f) Project Management

Pros: One of the major advantages of a collaborative working online workspace is that they ensure all project materials and
communications with external parties are kept within the same workspace. With a full audit trail of every ‘person’s interaction
with the workspace, combined with team calendars and task lists, managing any size project with users across multiple
organisations becomes much simpler, quicker and cost-effective.

Cons: A project is only as good as the way it is managed. Plan outcomes before inviting colleagues to join a workspace and
appoint effective managers to oversee progress.

Challenge

Feeling disconnected
A rapid shift to digital collaboration can leave team members feeling disconnected from one another and from the business itself.

The routine of coming in to the office every day provided an anchoring ritual that solidified each person’s identity as a member of
the team and part of the company. Working from home with little idea when they’ll be able to return to the office may create a sense
that employees are on their own with little support from the organization.

Delayed responses
One of the best things about collaborating in person is that you can usually get answers immediately. If you have a question, you
just walk to your coworker’s desk and ask.

With online collaboration, you’re dependent on others to respond in a timely manner, and your team has to negotiate strategies for
dealing with urgent questions from multiple remote workspaces.

Project management
If your team was accustomed to collaborating in person before the pandemic, you probably didn’t have the tools in place for
effective digital project management.

Quickly adopting a more comprehensive digital project management tool could be met with resistance and confusion as team
members struggle to learn new technology or even to accept the need to make changes in how projects are managed.

Advantage

Flexibility
Online collaboration with digital tools provides a degree of flexibility never before thought possible

With online collaboration, your team can work at any time, from anywhere. Mobile apps allow for quick check-ins and responses
even when an employee is away from their computer.

Productivity
Online collaboration contributes to productivity, and not only because it allows for increased flexibility in working hours and location. 

Trịnh Bảo Ngọc, FIT, HanU, mail: [email protected]

Project management
An office-based team may struggle at first to effectively manage projects online, moving your project management to the digital
sphere can improve project management significantly. Deploying a digital workplace tool that’s a good fit for your team can improve
visibility and communication on your projects, allowing everyone to do their jobs better.

II. Multiple choice question

1. Collective intelligence is based on the notion that distributed groups of people with a divergent range of information and
expertise will be able to outperform the capabilities of_______.
A. crowds C. individual experts
B. customers D. virtual teams
2. Social presence tools are used for _______.
A. creating an online text diary B. providing location information
C. short status updates D. customer support functions
3. Tagging is adding _______to a piece of information such as a map, picture, or Web page.
A. metadata C. blogs
B. comments D. knowledge
4. The process of adding information such as latitude and longitude to pictures, videos, or other information is called
_______.
A. flagging C. geotagging
B. posting D. podcasting
5. Successful Enterprise 2.0 initiatives consider _______.
A. organizational culture B. the organization’s customers
C. the latest social software applications D. all of the above
6. _______is the process of creating an online diary made up of chronological entries.
A. Wikiing C. Blogging
B. Tagging D. None of the above
7. Netcasts are also known as _______.
A. podcasts C. radiocasts
B. blogcasts D. blogging
8. RSS allows you to do all of the following except_______.
A. publish a video blog B. publish current news stories
C. receive current news stories D. edit a netcast
9. Wikis are a type of Web site where people can _______.
A. post information B. comment on information
C. access information D. all of the above
10. _______communication is when people are all meeting at the same time or in real time.
A. Synchronous C. Collaboration
B. Asynchronous D. None of the above

Trịnh Bảo Ngọc, FIT, HanU, mail: [email protected]

 III. Case study

Digg.com: Changing How News Is Delivered

Submit a news story or link to Digg.com, and if site users like it (i.e., “dig” it), the story moves to the front page. If the story proves
unpopular, site users vote to “bury” it and it disappears. In October 2004, Kevin Rose, a former regular on the TechTV show The
Screen Saversand his friends Owen Byrne, Ron Gorodetzky, and Jay Adelson began playing around with the idea of a user-
controlled, community-based news Web site. They launched the site on December 5, 2004, and it immediately began drawing
visitors. The original design was advertisement free, but that has changed since Google AdSense was added to the site. Digg
has so many users that “digging” a news story or Web link posting can sometimes cause a phenomenon called the “Digg effect,”
whereby increased traffic to a linked Web site can cause it to either slow considerably or even crash. According to Compete.com,
Digg’s home page attracted over 500 million unique visitors in 2009. While Digg remains popular, critics argue the following:

• The site gives users too much control over content, resulting in misinformation and sensationalism.

• Companies paying for submissions have skewed the site’s original purpose.

• The site’s operators, which are its founders, exert too much control over front-page and forum content.

• The “bury” option is undemocratic because those who vote to bury an item are allowed to remain anonymous.

• The site is too susceptible to “gaming”—to groups or Web site operators who deliberately try to dictate content.

In May 2007, when the Advanced Access Content System Consortium objected to Digg posts containing encryption breaking
code for HD-DVD and Blu-ray disks, management heeded advice from attorneys and took the offending articles and posts down.
A user revolt followed that prompted Digg’s Kevin Rose to post a comment that reversed direction: “We hear you, and effective
immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be. If
we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.” In 2009, Digg.com introduced the “DiggBar” to its Web site. The DiggBar was
a toolbar that appeared at the top of the Digg home page that acted as a URL shortener. When a link was submitted to Digg, its
URL was automatically shortened and prefixed with “www.digg.com.” When a link was clicked by a user, instead of going to the
corresponding Web site, the page appeared inside a framed Digg.com window. Using the DiggBar, users had immediate access
to features such as sharing Digg links via e-mail or social media sites like Facebook or Twitter. In addition, users could instantly
see what other Digg users had commented about on the story, check out related stories, and see the analytics surrounding the
number of people that visited the link.

However, not long after the DiggBar’s introduction, backlash from the Web community began to make news. Criticism of the
toolbar centered on the way shortened URLs started with a Digg domain prefix. Links that normally opened a page at another
domain (thereby giving that Web site a “hit” to statistics counters) opened in a frame and stayed within the Digg environment.
Since the use of DiggBar was not optional, millions of potential lost “hits” were at stake. Web site owners and operators made an
outpouring of negative feedback to Digg. Within a month of launch, Digg changed the way the toolbar operated and made it an
opt-in for all unregistered users, disabling the URL shortening and framing features.

The year 2009 also marked the year that cybercriminals used Digg to try to turn a profit. To set their trap, scammers loaded Digg
with headlines promising readers a view of leaked personal celebrity videos. Once the reader followed the headline link, they
were presented with a software download for viewing the videos. What actually installed on the unknowing user’s computer was
a program that supposedly scanned for malicious software. The bogus program, a type of malware, reported back serious
problems found on the computer and offered to fix the issues for a small fee. To make the deception more realistic, the malware
prevented the user’s computer from operating correctly. Although it was unknown how many people fell into this trap, at least 50
user accounts were determined to be participating in the scam. Digg has since terminated over 300 user accounts suspected of
spreading malicious software.

With a major redesign and update of the Digg.com home page planned in late 2010, the company’s future looks vibrant as it
continues to exemplify the spirit of user-provided-content and community based Web 2.0 start-ups.

Questions

1. What effect does the “Digg effect” have on Web sites that are featured on Digg.com?

2. What are the positives and negatives to a news site that organizes its stories using user input?

3. How do you think Digg.com generates revenue? How do you think Digg.com will do in the future? What are main threats to
its current business?

Trịnh Bảo Ngọc, FIT, HanU, mail: [email protected]