I need to break form my passive del.icio.us link-blogging activities to quote a section from 43 Folder on “Writing sensible email messages”

“You can make it even easier for your recipient to immediately understand why you’ve sent them an email and to quickly determine what kind of response or action it requires. Compose a great “Subject:” line that hits the high points or summarizes the thrust of the message. Avoid “Hi,” “One more thing…,” or “FYI,” in favor of typing a short summary of the most important points in the message”

Shiv Sing posted an article on Line56.com regarding the Intranet Trends to Watch. Many of the trends Shiv lists are not surprising. Like for example, the corporate telephone directory is not the killer app on the intranet.

However, sadly with all the emphasis over the years on knowledge management, the recent hype around personal search tools and of course the web search power houses, Information Retrieval is still an unsolved problem on the intranet.

The other day I watched Brewster Kahle’s inspiring presentation at last month’s NotCon session titled, “Universal Access to Human Knowledge” (Page with 54 Minute MPEG @ 120 MB — worth every bite ;-)

For those that don’t know Brewster Kahle, he was an early member of the parallel supercomputing company Thinking Machines. From there he went on to develop, found and sell to AOL WAIS, Inc. which was probably the internet’s first global search engine (years before the web took off). Later Kahle started Alexa Internet (the “related links” service in IE), which he sold to Amazon.com.

As expected, Adobe has come back at MSFT’s InfoPath with the preview release of Adobe Designer 6.0

Jon Udell of course is spot on with a review in his blog of Designer, which can also be found in this weeks print edition of Info World:

From Jon: “Despite evident weaknesses, the Designer/Reader duo offers two key strengths: digital-paper fidelity, and a ubiquitous runtime. Using the free Reader, I was able to fill out a Designer-built form, print a high-fidelity copy for my records, and post its XML data to a Web server. No matter how the future of e-forms unfolds, that’s going to be a popular scenario.”

Ironically, the week my InfoWorld subscription seems to have lapsed in the renewal process, Jon Udell, in his latest column, makes some of the very same points I mentioned yesterday regarding the bastardization of email for file sharing.

Jon writes:

“It drives me nuts when people send me multi-megabyte files as e-mail attachments. Don’t they know a better way?”
…
“E-mail is a poor file-transfer solution in many ways, but it makes perfect sense to users. An e-mail with an attachment compresses notification and delivery into a single step.”

It is increasingly vexing to me the way email is the defacto standard for sharing files. The reality is that email was never designed for sharing files.

It is an all too common occurrence in a corporate setting where multi-megabyte PowerPoint and Excel files get slammed around to numerous recipients on a distribution list with disparate versions shooting back at the sender and no easy way to consolidate the flow.

After reading a bit about, Paper Airplane, my first impression is that it sounds a bit like Groove, but differs in that it’s integrated into the browser (Mozilla/FireFox currently) and built on-top of the Java JXTA and P2P Sockets framework. I haven’t tried it yet, but it seems worth a look even in its early beta state.

“Paper Airplane is a Mozilla plugin that empowers people to easily create collaborative communities, known as Paper Airplane Groups, without setting up servers or spending money. It does this by integrating a web server into the browser itself, including tools to create collaborative online communities that are stored on the machine. Paper Airplane Groups are stored locally on a user’s machine. A peer-to-peer network is created between all of the Paper Airplane nodes that are running in order to resolve group names, reach normally unreachable peers due to firewalls or NAT devices, and to replicate content.”

I was (and still am) fond of what the OpenCola guys created back in the P2P buzz days, but this recent spin-off, “Dude, check this out!” [DCTO?], started by a few of the OC founders and development managers, has me scratching my head — albeit OC did as well. So perhaps I’ll simply reserve dismissal and keep an eye on the progress.

For the most part DCTO seems to be a hybrid of Metafilter, Technorati, Feedster and the Delicious social bookmarks manager.

As others have predicted, we will see more an more of these…

“MUTE File Sharing is a new peer-to-peer network that provides easy search-and-download functionality while also protecting your privacy.”

I haven’t tried it yet, but it seems to be similar to Waste

Ephraim Schwartz writes in InfoWorld about how Social Networking Software is targeting the corporate enterprise, with startups such as
ZeroDegrees,
Interface Software,
ContactNetwork, and
Spoke targeting CRM…

“Leveraging advances in communication and integration, a new kind of application — corporate social networking — is being folded into the CRM feature set.”

“Companies like Siebel and Salesforce.com are watching this space. These social networking companies will be gobbled up real quick,”

In addition, I believe that Microsoft and IBM are watching this space as well, because in my opinion Social Networking Software is a natural extension to enterprise messaging software such as Exchange and Domino.