Added Value Chat

There is chat for fun and there is chat for the sake of sharing knowledge and information. So far sharing knowledge was restricted to the realm of forums and blogs. Information chat on the other hand exists within enterprises via instant messaging systems (IM).

In companies colleagues and project members refer to shared documents for references and how-to information. But generally efficient knowledge transfer occurs, most of the time, after talking to other people. The key to such efficiency is the informal way the subject is tackled and the straight approach consisting of a direct question and a direct answer. This is not available with formal documentation because it contains lots of literature to explain the context and the scope of the document before delving into real material. Certainly these are most needed when starting a project. Project members need to know all the factors involved in the project.

However as the project goes on, questions start to rise from here and there. Sparse questions are met with sparse answers with lots of email exchange or direct discussion. Due to the workload and deadlines the documentations are rarely or never updated to reflect the topics discussed. This results in losing crucial information used on day to day basis.

One of the possible solutions to this problem is to encourage discussion between team members via chatting system and save those discussions and make them available to others so they can benefit from the information they contain.

www.Simpleconnexion.com is a service that pushes forward this concept.

Interview Your Contacts

Whether for professional purposes or for fun any discussion between two people could be viewed as an informal interview in which opinion and/or information is exchanged. Interviews are not only a formal discussion between a journalist and a celebrity; it can also be a chat between two friends, or two colleagues. What matters is the information contained in such interviews and how valuable it is for the public.

Obviously interviewing has many forms, it can be on TV, in a newspaper or magazine, and it can also be online! With the unprecedented success of the internet and the adoption of the web, there is no reason that interviews can’t be done online.

Actually, informal interviews have been practiced since the early days of internet through the chatting services. The only difference from the formal ones, other than the style of course, is the persistency of the interview. While the latter are published and made available to virtually anyone to read, the former was mostly confined to the private domain.

There‘s no doubt that chatting is a form of interview. Even if it does not involve a well-known celebrity or an experienced journalist, nevertheless it still can contain valuable information that could benefit others.

Consider an example where one is asking his colleague about technical matter related to a certain project. Sometimes this exchange is done via email but there are other times when it is done over a chatting service like MSN. The best thing to do at the end is to publish this discussion that can be also thought as an interview. Even though there are no nationally or internationally known figures involved, however the contributors are valuable to their colleagues and other project members, and their issue they discussed is certainly important to them.

www.SimpleConnexion.com concept goes into this direction and tries to promote the concept of publishing added value discussions.

Chatting or Blogging

This might seem odd to compare two distinct activities. One might think like comparing apples to oranges! Although at first this appears to be the case, but when looking closer, some similarities emerge to the surface.

Blogs (web logs) are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Most blogs are interactive, allowing visitors to leave comments and even message each other via widgets on the blogs and it is this interactivity that distinguishes them from other static websites.

On the other hand online chat can refer to any kind of communication over the Internet, but is primarily meant to refer to direct one-on-one chat or text-based group chat , using tools such as instant messengers, Internet Relay Chat, talkers and possibly multiple user dungeons (MUD)s. The expression online chat comes from the word chat which means "informal conversation".

So the differences between blogs and chat are persistency and formality. Blogs are persistent meaning they exist on a webpage and they can be accessed any time. They are also formal (at least a good part of them) and they address a whole audience and not a particular person. On the contrary, chat is transient, ephemeral; it does not live beyond the life of a discussion and of course the majority of the chat is informal.

Although differences seem to weigh considerably, similarities on the other hand exist. Blogging and chatting can both carry information that is valuable to others. Meaning, a person seeking a piece of information or looking to solve a problem, can find it either on a blog or in a chat room. The only concern related to the chat is that the info might have passed or not yet arrived so the timing is critical.

However, this can be solved by simply saving a discussion and convert it into an informal blog. This method offers good benefits to the reader because he will be seeing an interaction between two people and this means some specific questions and clarifications might be also evoked in the course of the discussion. To the person who is giving this information he is freed of the task of writing formal blog.

In this context www.SimpleConnexion.com is looking to promote this concept.