Google’s Little Scriptlet of Big Ideas
October 11th, 2006 (11:12pm) Om Malik 20 Comments
Earlier this morning I had to moderate a panel, Office 2.0: Where Are We?, at the Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco. During the course of the conversation, one of the panelists, Rajen Sheth, Google’s product manager for enterprise products revealed a Google secret which I think is worth sharing with you folks, especially useful for those of you who are work for a start-up or a large company from a remote location, and want to help build the institutional knowledge of your company.
Apparently, Google encourages all its employees to send things they learnt or want to share with coworkers as a snippet of five lines - no less, no more. The employees have to be very precise and focused. It can be anything from executing a simple task or if they figured out a better way of doing something that is part of their daily work. Or just an aha moment. All they have to do is email it in. Google then indexes all these emails and makes them searchable. Think of it as giant FAQ database about Google by Googlers.
To me it is a great way to build corporate knowledge base. If you have tips or tricks to share, do let us know.
20 Comments Post your own comment
Richard says: October 11th, 2006 11:39pm
Right, so an internal blog.
Or! So email *isn’t* where knowledge goes to die.
Rex Dixon says: October 12th, 2006 7:04am
Little things like this is the reason why Google is where they are today. I like the idea, and think it’s a very good one.
Rex
Om Malik says: October 12th, 2006 10:11am
Actually not a blog - email goes into a big box and they use their own search to basically build an index out of it, which people use. not such a bad idea.
Labnotes » Rounded Corners - 44 says: October 13th, 2006 1:45am
[...] No less, no more. Another good use of constraints from the Office 2.0 conference, via Om Malik: “Apparently, Google encourages all its employees to send things they learnt or want to share with coworkers as a snippet of five lines - no less, no more. The employees have to be very precise and focused.” [...]
Rulepark says: October 13th, 2006 8:32pm
Smart little “dictionary”.
Eliot Landrum says: October 19th, 2006 11:13am
So, pretty much just like Code Snippets.
Peter Cooper says: October 19th, 2006 12:45pm
Not quite like Code Snippets, but I can see a massive opportunity for the code base by expanding into areas like this..
everythang says: October 20th, 2006 9:08am
For non-Google employees I can recommend the ScrapBook firefox extension. It can provide similar functionality as Om describes. I use it to save code snippets, lengthy command, etc. A must have!
Stephen says: October 20th, 2006 12:26pm
Replicate this by creating a new Google Group. Google Groups can be invite only and viewable only by members, so can be used group-private info.
There’s no mechanism to limit the emails to 5 lines. However, maybe by just naming the group kb-5lines@… (or similar) rather than kb-snippets@… would be enough to coerce people into doing the right thing.
Oh, and Google Groups have feeds, so you can keep up with the latest in your feed reader or by email. You can categorise messages after the fact too, to facilitate browsing.
I guess there’s a lot of services and technologies you could impement this simple idea, but by using Google Groups you get ‘Google Search’ — it’s like we already have the tool that’s mentioned here.
Stephen says: October 20th, 2006 12:30pm
A refinement: you could use a Firefox search extension plugin to add your Google Group ‘knowledge base’ to the search box at the top right of your browser.
Now you don’t have to think about it as a ‘group’ or ‘mailing list’. It’s just a bucket you email knowlege to, and when you want it back, you search.
Enlaces de la semana [2006-42] :: Amedias says: October 23rd, 2006 6:48am
[...] Web Worker Daily » Blog Archive Google’s Little Scriptlet of Big Ideas « [...]
Mexico501 » Blog Archive » Google’s Little Scriptlet of Big Ideas says: October 27th, 2006 1:06am
[...] Page Summary: It can be anything from executing a simple task or if they figured out a better way of doing something that is part of their daily work. Google then indexes all these emails and makes them searchable. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. I use it to save code snippets, lengthy command, etc.read more | digg story [...]
Nearbie Blog » Blog Archive » 5 lines says: October 27th, 2006 8:49am
[...] The people at Google have come up with a good idea to prolong the life span of all the smart things their employees think of. According to this post at WWD Google encourages its employees to write a five line note and submit it to a searchable database. [...]
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Web Worker Daily » Blog Archive Google’s Little Scriptlet of Big Ideas « says: June 10th, 2007 2:13pm
[...] http://webworkerdaily.com/2006/10/11/googles-little-scriptlet-of-big-ideas/ Tags: google, tips, knowledge(del.icio.us history) [...]