I have mentioned a few times the growing importance of social software to virtual teams and organisations.

The Virtual Collaboration Dream Team’ - blogs, wikis and RSS? ‘Blogs Build Business Appeal’, 1 June 2005, in Linuxworld Australia, suggests that blogs are evolving beyond ‘personal things’ to tools which could support collaborative working in virtual project teams.

There is a debate raging (see below) over the blogosphere at the minute about a new type of software - 'social software'. It was fanned about a year ago by an excellent article in Darwin Magazine where Stowe Boyd described "social software" as the "opposite of project oriented collaboration tools".

In a previous post, Bioteams are 'always on' - 'presence' technology introduced, I talked about the need for virtual team members to be able to reach their colleagues at any time on whichever device they are 'present'.

Microsoft's new version of MS-Office promises contextual collaboration and presence awareness