So today I was at the virtual worlds conference in San Jose. Tomorrow our very own Christian Renaud is the keynote speaker!One of the topics that kept popping up during the various sessions I attended was community in networked virtual environments and the idea that 2D, 2 1/2 D, and 3D spaces help foster community.Cisco believes this to be true. Since our inception in Second Life we have created a Cisco News Group which is now well over 200 strong. There are also many non-Cisco created yet Cisco related groups in Second Life for example: Cisco User Group, CCIE Group, Cisco Italy Group, Cisco French Group, etc. I couldn’t tell you the number of times I have helped out newbs in Second Life; Cisco fellows as well as non-Cisco fellows. It can be intimidating when you are born in a virtual world; I remember it all to well. You have this awful skin, bad hair, and not so great clothing…and as a recent NY Times article stated even in a virtual world stuff matters when it comes to status and acceptance in the community. It is truly groovy that people do help each other in these virtual worlds and more importantly they want to help each other. After all isn’t that what community is all about? To that end Cisco is using virtual worlds like Second Life to extend our community. We want to help our community learn about us, each other and how we can collaborate with one another. One of the ways we foster this is to hold virtual events on subjects that we understand to be top of mind for our community. Tomorrow we will hold a TechChat in Second Life at noon PDT on Application Intelligence on Your Router: A Technical Discussion of Performance Routing. Read More »

Last Friday, I had the privilege of speaking to several groups of college seniors on the Cisco campus. They came to get a better understanding of Cisco and some of our technologies, and we get the chance to speak with them about their role in potentially changing the world. As the “speaker”, I approached it as a wonderful opportunity to be a student of this captive audience of soon-to-be colleagues or future customers. Read More »

Here’s something you might not notice at first on cisco.com, but will surely appreciate once you discover it: Automatic print friendliness. Read More »

Over this past weekend, the Cisco.com Support area adopted a new navigation model we call “Task Based Navigation.” We think this is an easier way to get around the support area, and this model is well suited for an audience that performs discreet tasks regularly as part of their jobs. We’ve been testing it over the last few months with lots of our support customers, and some of you saw it in person at our booth at Networkers. Read More »

On the Cisco.com team, we’re often asked by colleagues in other companies “what are you doing with Web 2.0?” The answer depends in part on how you define Web 2.0. At Cisco, we include a wide range of elements, like user participation, engagement, user-generated content, short-form videos, and a mobile platform. We’ve made a concerted effort to include these in Cisco.com over the last year. Some of the efforts have been quite successful, and we’ve learned a lot in the process. One key thing we’ve learned about Web 2.0 features is that it’s important to integrate them into the total experience. Cisco.com is a large corporate website that serves many purposes for many different audiences--customers seeking pre-sales information, others looking for post-sales support, analysts seeking financial data, and/or press seeking the latest news ASAP. It’s a site that inherently has many purposes. I think about it as a manifestation of the entire company online, communicating to and with the market. So, when we can use 2.0 devices to improve communication, integrated within the overall experience, we’re going to be all over it. Here are some of the more popular 2.0 elements we’ve integrated into our pages: Read More »