The Future of Documents

Interesting Wired Article on the Future of Reading book.

The author’s view of the future of reading books resonates strongly with my view of the Future of Documents: in order to move away from paper in many usages, the electronic document needs to provide affordances than the “legacy” format (paper here) does not provide. This includes annotation, but more importantly the capability of allowing these annotations to be shared with some of your colleagues through “Web 2.0″ channels, as is provided by technologies such as WebNotes or reframeit.

As the author concludes: “Taking them digital will unlock their real value: the readers.”

Twitter has become a phenomenon for social networking and real-time updates, inventing new information dissemination models. But 140 characters is a serious limitation to the amount of information you can pass around to your followers.

Wouldn’t it be great  to be able to “tweet” full documents in this great Web 2.0 distribution channel?

That’s what TwitDoc is all about – allowing you to upload and share interesting documents or reports in a simple, streamlined way. Just select a document, write a short “tweet” about it, and TwitDoc will upload your document, generate a short url, and post the tweet and the URL on twitter.

TwitDoc was launched earlier this month, is already gaining lots of attention. Although sharing videos, music, or pictures through Twitter channels already existed, TwitDoc takes it to the next level, by letting you post standard Office / OpenOffice, PDF files or images very easily.

It leverages scribd, the excellent online documet sharing application, for storage – only regret, it is apparently not yet possible to tweet directly from Scribd.

To learn more about TwitDoc, try it out, or follow this link for an interesting interview with the TwitDoc creator.

Xerox just launched its official Facebook page - if you are interested in learning more about Xerox, and how people experience it from the inside and the outside, check it out!

If you want to know the answer, please check out one of my latest podcast - a chat with Ismael Ghalimi, organizer of the Office 2.0 conference, and CEO of Intalio, an open-source Business Process Platform available as Saas / on the cloud.

Ismael discusses some of his visions for Office 2.0, why the association between Xerox and Cloud Computing / Web 2.0 seems natural to me, while I digress about the panel discussion around Document 2.0, as well as some of my “visions” of the Future of Documents at the expo.

Check it out !

(you can also check out my other podcasts at this URL)

The document is evolving from a static, confidential container information to a social, shared and tagged device. Web 2.0 is paving the way to the “Future of Documents”.

I am currently following a great training by Sharon Crost on how to cross-fertilize the various media which constitute Web 2.0 and how to make your interactive marketing much more powerful through Web 2.0. Definitely worth it, if you get a chance.

In doing that, I am trying to see beyond the obvious ways to improve my blog audience and content, and to draw parallels with the “document” as we know it – how do you cross-fertilize documents and sources of information to make your customer documents more focused and more impactful? How do you differentiate your documents from others, so that customers drowning in Information Overload pick your documents over others? How do you make your documents “viral”?

These are a few things I’ll try to reflect upon over the next few weeks – although my blogging might be a bit disrupted by my XPLOR participation.