PDF Version

Inside this Issue:

HQ Happenings
-IIa at 18
-HQ has moved
-IIa values campaign

Congratulations, Eglin!

Project Highlights
-Arnold
-Corporate
-Goddard
-Kirtland
-Langley

Working at IIa
-The IIa Impact Award
-Kudos from the Accounting DepartmentIIa Security Alert
-Avoid that Aching Back
-IIa Focus: Literacy
-What I Learned About Self-Defense

About IIa Staff
-Awards & honors
-Milestones
-Who's new
-Family news

Community Involvement
-Employees Raise $555 to Combat Heart Disease

IIa Corporate
Holiday Calendar
(online only)

IIa Pay Schedule
(online only)

InfoEdge Archive
(online only)

Wikis and Podcasting...What Are They?

Communications technology guru Shel Holtz says that a “wiki” is a Web site on which any user can add content and any other user can edit content. The result? A site that is run by everyone and no one at once. Holtz says the word “wiki” comes from Hawaiian and means “quick.” This is a reference to the fact that you can load in content in minutes. You don’t have to be a techie to do it. Wikis are extremely user friendly. On wikis, you usually just click a button and then you can add or edit content at will. It’s so easy to make a contribution that it has become an ever-evolving collaborative tool. According to Holtz, the most popular wiki is Wikipedia. The collaborative encyclopedia has over 1 million articles—and it logs 25,000 changes per day. The danger: no quality control. Recently, there have been complaints about entries on Wikipedia. People whose names appear as entries in the encyclopedia have disputed the credibility of what is appearing online. And it has been difficult to get the incorrect information deleted, according to the complainants.

Wikis have great potential for creating collaborative documents in organizations. The key is to harness the great power of this relatively new tool without letting it get out of control. For instance, Holtz says, wikis are the perfect tool to get input from employees when developing a mission or vision statement or for providing employee news.

Podcasting. Holtz is a podcaster—the twice-weekly Hobson & Holtz Report for communications professionals. He defines podcasts as audio programs stored as media files. These are usually MP3s. These files are then loaded into computer media players like iTunes, for instance, and then played in a digital media player like an iPod. The advantage: Listeners can take the information with them when they go for a jog or are traveling. Holtz calls podcasts “TiVo for your ears.” It is the creation of a radio broadcast, but you can listen to it anytime you want.

Research shows that retention of podcasts is high. And in our busy culture it allows for multitasking. You can listen to a podcast while you do laundry and clean the house or while you’re waiting to pick up your kids from soccer practice.

How do you go about making a Ppodcast? Get a $9 USB microphone. Now record a file to your computer and save it as an MP3 file. Once that is done, you’ll want to store it on a server, create an RSS feed with an enclosure that points to the MP3 file and publish a link to the RSS feed. [RSS—an XML based format for distributing web content)

For more details on podcasting, Holtz recommends reading Podcasting: The Do-It-Yourself Guide.