Share and share what you like

Flipboard has just launched a private magazines service for groups, a development that could well be of interest for departments or work teams looking to keep up to date on a specific subject, allowing them to collect related news items while navigating the internet from any device just by installing a plugin or an app.

Keeping shared information repositories is the perfect solution for innovative organizations, which need to be constantly updated about what is happening out in the world. These types of tools, such as Pinterest’s shared notice boards, provide an easy-to-use way of sharing information along the lines of “the more eyes the better”.

A magazine of this type can be used for anything from a corporate clipping to collecting relevant news items for a specific project, providing team members with a place to keep up to date and to be motivated. A private internal magazine that employees can send news they consider relevant for their work will doubtless generate many interesting possibilities for those who know how to take advantage of them.

Aside from an efficient and attractive presentation format, the important functions in a tool of this type are being able to reduplicate the sending of multiple messages (preferably with a “sent by” indicator” that can be updated on the basis of the number of members in the team that found the item useful), as well as being able to find articles through a reasonably efficient search engine (an area that Flipboard still needs to work on), and also being able to comment on articles, thus creating a certain social environment. In my area of work, I can imagine a group of students compiling interesting background reading on the subjects they are studying, or the members of an entrepreneurial project that want to keep abreast of news about the competition or interesting developments in their sector.

I’m sure this kind of participative approach based on discovering and sharing content will play a big role in the learning organizations of the future. We are seeing more and more of these kinds of developments, with Facebook and LinkedIn launching their own versions, with many other competitors set to join them. Social environments are increasingly being used as a way to share information, and the corporate sphere is a logical extension of this trend.

(En español, aquí)