Does instant messaging have a place in the workplace?

Regarding the story by Carola Mamberto headlined “Instant Messaging Invades the Office” in the July 24, 2007 edition of The Wall Street Journal, there’s a story behind the story. Carola Mamberto failed to attribute any of the material to Evan Rosen, a blogger and author of two books on collaboration including The Culture of Collaboration http://www.thecultureofcollaboration.com
which our company published. Evan developed and proposed the story on how IM is changing workplace dynamics to The Wall Street Journal, and he provided much source material to Carola Mamberto including pre-qualified company contacts and a copy of his new book.

Mamberto interviewed Evan extensively face-to-face about IM and collaboration, and 3 out of 4 of the company examples in the story came from Evan—SAS, Constellation Energy and Industrial Light & Magic. In fact, Evan writes about how SAS and Industrial Light & Magic use IM in his book! An account of how IM is impacting workplace dynamics at SAS replete with quotes from CIO Suzanne Gordon appeared in a book spin-off story by Evan in the January 4, 2007 issue of NetworkWorld. Here’s the link:
http://www.networkworld.com/research/2007/010807-collaboration.html
Did Carola Mamberto attribute any of the material to Evan or quote him? No. Instead, she quoted two people affiliated with east coast universities. These so-called experts have done little or no work on real-time collaboration or IM.

Why should anybody care that The Wall Street Journal burned our author? Well, this is all too common with old media outlets. Rather than give credit to people who are the real authorities, these bastions of journalism prefer to appropriate ideas without attribution and then round up the usual suspects or people with certain approved affiliations for "big-picture quotes." This is exactly why the blogosphere is giving old media a run for its money. Bloggers and podcasters can disseminate information directly without old media filtering, appropriating, or failing to attribute their material. It’s no wonder that old media readership is declining and the business model is in trouble. As old media outlets struggle to remain relevant, they are doing more gatekeeping than reporting. Information consumers increasingly prefer their information served straight up and unadulterated with the writer’s bias obvious rather than oblique.

Katherine
Red Ape Publishing

My friends often chat with girls he met through richsoulmate.com in the workplace. His boss found out and warned him. It's funny that his boss found himself a very sexy girl on that site later.