Ross Mayfield: Enterprise

Attention Types

Thu, 24 Jul 2003 04:36:43 GMT

Agile Brain interview with Thomas Davenport, who has gone from KM to AM. Email is the most attention-getting medium, employee newsletters fail...

...And ultimately, any organizational initiative that's successful comes down to individuals changing their behavior. But if they're not paying any attention to what the initiative is about, its objectives and so on, they're not going to change their behavior. Getting real change to happen in organizations becomes a matter of individual attention...

From his attention economy book:

TYPES PRINCIPLE: Six basic units of currency are exchanged in an attention market, each emphasizing a specific facet of focused mental engagement.

Six types of attention can be paired into three dimensions. Each pair contains two opposing kinds of attention: (1) captive or voluntary, (2) aversion-based or attraction-based, and (3) front-of-mind or back-of-mind.

Captive vs. voluntary

People pay attention not only to things they have to pay attention to, but also to what they want to pay attention to. When someone straps you down and props your eyelids open with toothpicks, you tend to pay lots of attention. Movie preview advertisers understand this and pay dearly to sell products (particularly upcoming movies) in the dark of a movie theater.

But we give an equally strong form of attention to those things on which we freely choose to focus. Some products are best advertised in magazines or newspapers because they take advantage of "voluntary" attention. It is actually easier for readers to turn the page than to stop and look at the advertising, but when they do stop, tremendous amounts of information can be communicated to the voluntarily attentive mind.

Attraction vs. aversion

We tend to pay the most attention to things at either end of the attraction/aversion continuum. Think about yourself people-watching in an airport or some other public place. Which people are the ones that actually get your attention? One category is those that you find most beautiful or attractive - or at least the ones that are "your type."

The other category is the exact opposite - the freaks, the truly ugly, the deformed. We hate to admit it, but either one of these categories is likely to make us stop and stare. Partly because it is so politically incorrect to stop and stare, the urge to sneak a peek can become almost obsessive.

Front-of-mind vs. back-of-mind

The difference between front-of-mind attention and the back-of-mind version is very simple. Think about yourself driving down the street talking to a friend. Your front of mind attention is the topic of conversation. At the end of the drive you'll be able to think back on it and remember most parts of the dialogue.

You probably won't remember much of your back-of-mind attention -- but it was equally important. You probably did not run a single traffic light down the whole road. You paid complete and devoted attention to driving your vehicle, and to all the state and local traffic laws, and you don't even remember it.

Trade Winds

Tue, 22 Jul 2003 18:51:45 GMT

The community that was fostered at AO2003 is now providing more pensive analysis. This is a great time to reflect on how social software is changing the events business and the "trades" in general.

An excerpt from Conferenza, which provides a tad more traditional paid research coverage of trade shows, contains this golden nugget of controversy:

Still, there were interesting insights, some intended and some not...

· As a demonstration of the power of interconnection, a panel on Web services featuring Salesforce.com CEO Mark Benioff provoked the most talked-about moment of the conference – at Benioff’s expense. Asserting that the largest e-commerce software supplier is Amazon.com, Benioff pointed toward co-panelists from IBM and Sun Microsystems and said, “None of these companies has any position in [that] market at all. Even Apple’s iTunes music store was built on Amazon,” and asserted that Amazon has 300 people working on its proprietary software.

We thought this was news, until Ross Mayfield, CEO of one of the Web’s leading blogging software providers, Socialtext, led an online chat charge showing that most of this was apparently untrue: Amazon uses standard XML out-of-the-box stuff, and Apple’s iTunes doesn’t use Amazon’s software at all, the chatters charged. As Benioff continued, the audience watched as a group of online contributors disputed fact after fact, input Benioff apparently did not see. “It was sort of like a ‘Saturday Night Live’ skit,” said one attendee. “As Mark spoke, we could see his nose growing longer, like Pinocchio.”

How it played out in the Chat (Archive) was Kevin Marks did the fact checking, which was simultaneously projected on to the big screen:

[11:51] KevinMarks: no he didn't
[11:51] adina: bthey /are/ mentioning public web serivces
[11:51] KevinMarks: he licensed the patent
[11:51] KevinMarks: iTunes backend is not Amazon
[11:51] toughcrowd: this panel is showing lots of promise - but I love that cynical suspicion "lovefest"
[11:51] Ross: Amazon's real smart move was an API for developers
[11:52] adina: tross
[11:52] Ross: but they dont get decentralization. witness http://www.allconsuming.com
[11:52] adina: ross again
[11:52] Ross: Kevin, did he say it was?
[11:52] KevinMarks: Apple had ahuge online store already selling Macs
[11:52] KevinMarks: they built on that for iTunes
[11:53] Ross: real-time fact checking Kevin, I love it
[11:54] DariusD: Do you know that the Apple onnline store was not built on Amazon technology?
[11:54] KevinMarks: It is built on Webobjects

Here's Apple's story of how iTunes was built and how they licensed the one-click form from Amazon. Before we get carried away with the event of a fact check, rather than dynamic itself, its important to understand the context. I doubt Marc had negative intent, he had little to gain if so, and he was just plain conversing.

This parallel channel, a second superpower on a finite scale, first emerged at PC Forum 2002 when Dan Gillmor blogged a fact check on Joe Nacchio. Clay fostered the first experiments with social software as an in-room chat tool. Supernova I was the first to formalize a group weblog. PC Forum 2003 was the first to incorporate a conference wiki. The O'Rielly Emerging Technology conference renewed interest in IRC and Hydra in parallel to the wiki. Supernova II was the first to incorporate chat and wiki. AlwaysOn was the first to add video streaming (Archive), creating a richer remote participation experience.

For some, the choice of modes is overwhelming at first, something we are tuning. But Social Software and its practices for events has a reached a level of maturity where it is solving fundamental tensions of event structure.

Take Bob Frankston's experience with remote participation after in-person attendance the first day:

While it's not the same as being their in person, I was surprised how well the combination of the video and Wiki worked. Over my standard home Internet connection I had very good audio and video quality in looking at the panel.

I don't know how to capture the screen picture that included the video so I simply used my digital camera to take a picture. That's Tony Perkins summing up the conference discussion log is in the lower left. There was a lively discussion with people in the room and others outside such as Joi Itcho in Japan and me at home. Joi mentioned that he was attending in his underwear and people wanted to get a video of him. He obliged though only above the waist...

...I judge events by the attendees more than by the panelists and, by that measure, the event has gotten off to a good start. The concept of being always-on or always connected is a good one though, in my opinion, it is important to distinguish between the transport issues that enable connectivity and the question of what one does with connectivity and the implications. This confusion is reflected in some of the panels.

As I write this I'm still attending remotely. I can view the conference over the Internet with very good audio and video quality. Socialtext is provided a live commenting facility using their Wiki software. This is wonderful for those like me who want to jump up and say "that's stupid" or maybe even be positive. There were problems with 802.11 connectivity the first day so I had only a few opportunities for such commentary though I did make good use of it. Today, from home, it appears to be working better and I've been able to add my own comments on the side.

Participating from afar is interesting. The audio/video works very well but I miss the ability to kibitz with others. A side-chat facility would help. Still, this is my first time trying such remote participation. Having been there for the first day I have some sense of the context and it works very well. Of course this is early stage and I can think of a lot of improvements but it is mundanely useful rather than being a novelty.

David Weinberger recently wrote a great piece in Darwin on the Death of Panels:

...Panelists and audiences do not share the same goals. Audiences want to learn and be entertained. Panelists want to impress and sometimes want to sell. Conversations work against the panelists' natural inclination to manage their speech; conversations develop their own gravitational fields that fling panelists together in ways they can't control.

If you're organizing a conference, as an audience member I implore you to cast aside the spurious safety of panels. If you're a moderator, you'll do everyone a favor if you rearrange the chairs, eliminate the opening statements, confiscate the bulb in the projector and get your participants to just talk. Don't "leave time" for audience participation; open it up from the beginning. Hell, screw the bulb back in and project the online chat where the real life of the conference is probably happening anyway...

Mike from Techdirt yearns for conferences with semi-structured small group interaction.

...An ideal conference, then, would be more like a day full of these lunches - that forced people to think in different ways. Thus, I'd love to see a conference where people are either randomly (or carefully planned by the organizers) split into small groups, and given a task or a challenge. Let them do some scenario planning that forces them to think creatively. Get people thinking, get them involved with the ideas, get them interacting with others and force them to think outside of their own viewpoint. Maybe challenge them. Have different groups "competing" in some way to get people to really pay attention, and really try to get their minds around very difficult issues. ..

Trade Winds

Social Software and Social Networking Models provide the greatest threat and opportunity for the trade industry (trade magazines & shows) -- because they change the notion of audience into participants. The rise of weblogs and participatory media allow domain experts to contribute without making contribution their full time job. Networking models allow people to connect regardless of space or time as is the case with LinkedIn, or in space and time with Meetup. Because these tools work so well in virtuality, it is natural for them to be extended to reality (whatever that means).

Trade shows will fundamentally change their structure to become more participatory -- and the result is more connective, constructive and conversational. Remote and in-room participants will moderate panels, there will be greater use of working groups and communities will persist between events. We used to come to trade shows for the people in the place. As Dr. Weinberger says in Small Pieces Loosely Joined, the web is a set of places itself. Now we have places upon places, where the network is the conversation.

This isn't the place for me to talk about commercial value for event organizers, but let me say this. There is no such thing as a closed system. Bloggers are coming to your conference. You can't throw up Walls. The energy can dissipate or enjoin with the event. Do what Tony did and give out blogger passes. Augment experiences. Create a greater and more open context for your event and the wind will blow at your back.

7 Enterprise Open Source Projects

Fri, 11 Jul 2003 20:19:05 GMT

Tim O'Reilly captures a talk from OSCON on seven areas of enterprise software that could be served well by open source projects:

Distributed cron
Asset Management
Single Sign-on
Messaging
Change Management
Relationship Management
Source Terminator

Blogs in the Workplace

Mon, 07 Jul 2003 01:55:17 GMT

An NY Times article on weblogs in business that somehow missed Socialtext ;-(

..."People are starting to use Web logs to archive data that would have otherwise been lost," Mr. Tang said. He noted that much of the company's internal communications had been via instant messaging — and was lost as soon as the correspondents closed their chat windows. Now, though, employees are starting to post transcripts of relevant discussions on the Web logs, he said.

"It's not just making life more convenient," Mr. Tang said, "but actually giving us something new we didn't have before."

[via Scripting News]

Socialtext Raises Angel Round

Mon, 23 Jun 2003 14:10:56 GMT

Great news. Socialtext closed an Angel round of funding with some really great people, including:

Reid Hoffman, CEO of LinkedIn and former EVP of Paypal
Joi Ito, Venture Capitalist with Neoteny
Mark Pincus, former co-founder, CEO and Chairman of SupportSoft
Erik Josowitz, former VP of Product Strategy of Vignette
Oakstone Ventures
Freedom Technology Ventures

This new funding provides resources to accelerate the development of enterprise social software, improve how we serve our customers, and give customers greater confidence that we will be there for them.

But it's more than that -- it's a network of exceptional people. A little while back, Pete, Adina, Ed and I talked about who we wanted to work with and who we thought "got it." Raising money these days is a challenge, and it says a great deal that were able to do so with the people we wanted. I don't think we could have picked a better group. Here's what Ed Niehaus, general partner of Freedom Technology Ventures LLC said:

"We're proud to back Socialtext's experienced founding team. The company's customers tell us that Socialtext made it simple for them to discover this new flexible communication form, the Wiki, and use it to create, discuss and decide. Such early customer satisfaction is rare for a new business medium, and it makes us confident that the company will have an impact."

Since the end of last year we have accomplished a great deal with relatively few resources. We developed a tremendous advisory board and I must credit Clay, David, Doc, Jerry, Kevin, Mitch, Ward & Zack with keeping us on the wiser track. We now have over 20 enthusiastic customers. Our product is moving beyond being the the first of its kind to one that has had real success advancing teams.

So what's to come? We have a new release of our product soon, but let's not get ahead of ourselves. Mostly its continuing to spend time with customers and focusing on their needs. It sounds a little cliche, but that's what its really all about. Great products develop in social context.

Socialtext in Business 2.0

Fri, 20 Jun 2003 20:54:15 GMT

Small Socialtext mention by Jimmy Guterman's Media Notes (I really miss his Media Grok) in Business 2.0: The Net's Killer App Keeps Connecting People

Now that even businesspeople have caught on that the Net is more about connecting people than delivering pop-under ads, there's been an explosion in social software, from modest blogging services like Blogger and LiveJournal to elaborate systems like SocialText and Groove.

Most of the article is on Social Networking Models, with this very good point:

One day, perhaps, you'll respond to an ad that reads, "I'm a Virgo. My turnoffs include liars and salespeople who don't meet their monthly quotas. I'm at the next table at Starbucks (SBUX). Turn around." The next step in social software may be way more intrusive -- but that may be what people want.

Dave Snowden

Thu, 19 Jun 2003 17:46:02 GMT

Matt Mower has posted some great notes from a talk by KM guru Dave Snowden: Cynicism and Serendipity.

...For 20-30 years we've operated a model of the human brain closer to cybernetics than neuroscience. The assumption is that thought is a logical, rational, linear process. This is wrong. So is Myers-Briggs and all these other attempts to put people into boxes. It is reminiscent of Brave New World...
The human brain is adaptive. The way we see the world changes according to context. Disruption changes brain patterns and the key thing in human intelligence is patterns. We match stimulus against patterns to know how to act. The brain creates patterns. Hence KM has a problem: We cannot codify patterns for use in text books...

3rd generation approach to KM (Post-SETI - Nonaka) separate knowledge into:

context
narrative
content management...

Trust is not a property. It's an emergent property. You can't make people trust each other. You can't train people to have qualities. It doesn't work...

Many other gems in this long post, good frameworks, worth a full read.

Wikis & Weblogs in the Java.net Developer Community

Wed, 18 Jun 2003 16:29:24 GMT

Last week Sun launched Java.net, the first large scale developer community to incorporate wikis and weblogs (disclosure: Socialtext consulted on its design). Serving up to 3 million users, it will expose new users to these powerful communication and collaboration tools. But it is no accident that the largest business case of weblog use is a developer community, developers have been using these tools since they were invented.

The community also leverages editorial content from O'Reilly and CollabNet developer tools. Any developer, particularly open source projects, should consider taking advantage of the free resources provided. Smaller companies should consider hosting their own developer communities there as well.

Aside from the community-wide weblogs (Daniel Steinberg, James "the Java guy" Gosling) and a wiki, each wiki and weblogs are tools within sub-community projects. You can even view weblogs by community. One evangelist blogged JavaOne using his phone cam. This community is bringing some great new voices into the fold (all RSS enabled), like Richard Gabriel who lays out the vision of Java.net:

...We think of creativity as an individual talent, but communities can be creative, too. And the sorts of things a community can build are considerably larger than those an individual can. There are many examples. Cathedrals in the Middle Ages were built by a long-lived community of builders, artisans, carpenters, sculptors, stone cutters, woodcutters, ceramics makers, glass makers, painters, and ordinary people working as laborers, based on a model created by an architect perhaps decades earlier, but inspired by a common vision of what that cathedral will be.

Programming languages have been defined by widely dispersed communities using email and similar tools. Linux -- itself a cathedral-like project -- has spawned tens of thousands of other projects, some adding well-known pieces to Linux and others stretching the imagination or bringing to Linux functionality once found only elsewhere. The software patterns community was self-created without any support whatsoever from funding agencies or corporations; similar stories are true of the Agile and eXtreme Programming communities. These are all highly influential and widespread communities now.

The vision of java.net is to build a self-creating and self-governed web place where communities can join together -- either loosely through federation or tightly by living on java.net -- to build something like a diverse city of diverse communities, individuals, and companies who are engaged in using the Java language and technology in both routine and innovative ways. The purpose is to bring people together to increase the density of triggers so that new markets and resources are created...

Now its only a week old, there are more projects than you can count, and some really active communities like Java Desktop and Java Games. The community isn't all Sun and Java, other communities are either hosted, federated or linked. By design, communities can easily cross-polinate to spark new projects.

Other open developer communities leverage wikis, like OSAF's Chandler project, Technorati and the Social Software Alliance. Its a natural fit because the tools work for more than talk, but getting things done. What's different about Java.net is the corporate initiative, scale of participation and breadth tools made openly available. Sun, to its credit, provided this in an open ethic to create new opportunties for new people and stands to gain the just reward of loyalty in return.

Its a rather simple equation, give people tools to meet people, talk and code and great things happen.

Communication and Collaboration Convergence

Tue, 17 Jun 2003 20:54:45 GMT

Uh oh, there's that word again. Convergence. The solution to all our problems.

Siemens has released OpenScape, which integrates phone, voice mail, e-mail, text messaging, calendaring, instant messaging, and conferencing services. Its all centered on IM to synchronize use of different modes of communication, with a SIP server (Session Initiation Protocol) for telephony integration. OpenScape 1.0, however, requires Microsoft's forthcoming Windows Server 2003 and Greenwich collaboration server. Its the latest in a long line of communication and collaboration solutions to leverage Outlook as a platform. And its estimated to cost as much as $400 per seat.

This may just be unified messaging redux, but Mike from Techdirt is right that it has potential as a productivity tool if its simple enough for people to use. People use many modes of communication. Optimize only a one or two and you may make communication in its entirety even more sub-optimal.

With the falling cost of more traditional communcations (original videoconference sessions were $100k a pop), putting users in the driver seat is not a bad thing. Problem is this approach of deep integration creates greater costs and risks.

Corporate IM is a good center for user management of complexity, but who knows if they have gotten this right. If as advertised, its designed to fit within workflow, it may be on the wrong track. Communication is not a process, its an informal practice whose patterns cannot be pre-defined.

Hiawatha Bray on Blogs

Mon, 16 Jun 2003 15:13:33 GMT

The Globe on Blogs. The Boston Globe today runs an article by Hiawatha Bray in the Business Section on the Weblogs Business Strategy conference last week:

Consider: Every business needs to know what its employees know. Companies are crammed with experts on various topics whose knowledge goes to waste -- because nobody knows what they know. Now give these workers an internal corporate blog, and encourage them to use it. Let them natter away on every topic that intrigues them. Harvest and index the results. You've mapped your workers' brains. With a few keystrokes, a manager can find out who's been blogging about skiing or bowling or restoring classic cars -- just the thing when you're trying to sell something to an avid collector of '64 Mustangs. The company's hidden experts will cheerfully reveal themselves, and the firm's institutional memory gets an upgrade.

[via Joho the Blog]

Jupiter Coverage

Mon, 09 Jun 2003 17:28:24 GMT

Topic Exchange for the Jupiter Business Weblog conference. Master live-blogger Heath Row is providing the best coverage.

Here's a nice list of people blogging/attending and here's another one.

And the IRC room irc://irc.freenode.net/#jupiterConf ; Im hanging out there off and on today. Rvr just added a bot to log conversation into a wiki.

The Reporter's Notebook

Sat, 07 Jun 2003 20:28:35 GMT

With the NY Times scandal, like Trent Lott, weblogs again sustained a meme to the point where it influenced the media to impact institutional change. This time in the media itself was the institution. A clear example of alternative media providing oversight of traditional media, an increasing role as the industry consolidates.

But the root cause of the scandal could be addressed by social software as well. Jayson Blair took advantage of a culture that allowed contribution without context and a process of filtration that borders on obsolescence.

A copy-editing and fact checking process is typically a top-down defined policy of filtration. Filter processes inevitably result in false positives and false negatives and have a cost of time to press. Accelerating time to press is in the interest of both journalists and publishers. Journalists and copy editors with topical domain expertise and solid journalism ethics are the best accelerator. Culture is the ultimate means of sustaining such quality. However, the external pressures of business ultimately threaten this culture. And topical expertise is expensive and difficult to maintain in an increasingly complex world.

Much of the discussion of journalism and weblogs is centered on the threat participatory journalism holds for traditional media. Either in its power of oversight or as a credible substitute. But countervailing trends are often co-opted by those seeking to retain power and capital. Systems have an amazing power to shape institutional cultures when they involve participants. Before systems arise to this level of impact, individuals experiment with potential component parts outside the institution.

Witness how Dan Gillmor and Jon Udell engage in participatory journalism by posting outside the process. They engage with those with better domain expertise on difficult topics. They harness collective investigation and social filtering. As a result their stories that flow through the traditional process are better informed, facts are checked and if a copy editor needs context they have a wealth linkages to draw from.

At the core of a journalist's practice is her notebook. Stories are built from component parts gained from interviews, research and investigation. A reporter's notebook is traditionally a private resource, and parts of it should be private, but opening components of the notebook could unleash a different kind of source.

If reporters shared their notebooks with their newsroom it would be similar to internal blogging. A resource of journalists and editors alike, it would provide a base of contextual information to draw upon, perhaps increasing quality and speed of publication. A structure to involve specialist freelancers would further diversify expertise in context.

Tools would need to evolve beyond today's personal weblogs -- to facilitate a balance between privacy and sharing, internal and external, speed and quality. And some new forms of collaboration may arise to extend the byline.

Shared notebooks could have brought Blair's poor practice to light or be stemmed from a culture of feedback. The question is if the practice of journalism could accept such transparency and openness within a newsroom. Of course, if it doesn't, the world outside the newsroom will pry open its cold dead fingers.

UPDATE: Gillmor downplay's the role of weblogs in the NY Times scandal.

No Email Make Homer Go Crazy

Thu, 05 Jun 2003 21:23:26 GMT

Email Downtime More Stressful Than Divorce. A new study suggests just how dependent business people have become on email. In the US, twenty percent of people immediately get angry if their email doesn't work. However, the calm ones don't stay that way very long if things don't come back. After five minutes downtime, another 13% have switched over to the angry side of the fence. By the half hour point, two-thirds of users are furious, and by the one hour mark, a full 82% of email-less business users are ready to burn down their cubicles...

take pity on IT:

...20% expect to be fired if they were to ever let downtime reach a full day. A full 37% say that if they ever experienced a week's downtime, it would be more stressful than going through a divorce. [Techdirt]

Socialtext at Weblog Business Strategies

Thu, 05 Jun 2003 16:13:32 GMT

Adina Levin, Socialtext co-founder and VP of Products, is on the Managing a Business Blog panel at the Jupiter Weblog Business Strategies conference next Monday in Boston.

Boston Blogs, hosted by Shannon Oakley, which regularly hosts social events for bloggers, is hosting a party that night.

MySQL Nabs Venture Capital

Wed, 04 Jun 2003 20:14:00 GMT

MySQL AB, the open source database software provider, gained a $20M investment from Benchmark Capital. MySQL is often used as a primary example of how open source can be a component of a real business model. May be a harbringer of things to come, but their case is unique in that the core product is a commodity and they have achieved massive penetration.

Had a chance to meet their CEO, Mårten Mickos, at PC Forum. Terribly nice guy, wish the best for him.

Socialtext in Release 1.0

Wed, 04 Jun 2003 15:51:11 GMT

Socialtext is profiled in the latest issue of Release 1.0, Social Software: A New Generation of Tools.

Abstract:

Social software – software that supports group interaction – is one of the most profoundly important uses of the Internet. It is a category that groups together several kinds of application, from online community applications to groupware to collaborative tools, but the common thread is that it amplifies or expands our social capabilities. Because it comprises all the complexities of group behavior, from collaboration to one-upmanship to backstabbing, designing social software is a problem that can't be attacked in the same way as designing a word processor. Designers of social software have more in common with economists or political scientists than they do with designers of single-user software, and operators of communal resources have more in common with politicians or landlords than with operators of ordinary websites.
The term "social software" describes patterns of use more than technologies. It includes everything from simple group e-mail to vast 3D game worlds like EverQuest. It can be as undirected as an AOL chat room or as task-oriented as an installation of Lotus Notes. Some types of social software are highly centralized, like WebCrossing’s Web-based discussion forums, while others are decentralized and work to make the servers invisible to the users, as with Groove.
Businesses have typically invested in social software (neé groupware) that is aligned with management preferences for control over flexibility, often leading to software that is centralized, process-heavy and locked down. However, real-world collaborative patterns are better supported by software that is decentralized, flexible and extensible.
The Web actually dampened the development of social software. Users kept using mailing lists and chat, of course, but most new software was designed for a one-way conversation between writers and readers of Web pages; two-way conversations were often an afterthought, with a BBS or "Contact us!" button tucked away on the side.
Now, after years of sites and software designed to support big and largely disconnected groups, developers are working on social software again. This is in part because there are a number of interesting problems involved in helping people interact (identity, reputation management, conversational threading), and in part because the ubiquity of Web protocols means that developers can treat the Web as a platform. Rather than attempt to provide all functions to all people, the tools and services being developed can be combined easily and as needed, without having to be formally merged.
Taking their cue from people’s actual behaviors rather than some idealized projection, a number of startups are designing tools that help people get what they want from group interaction.

Group Voice

Mon, 02 Jun 2003 21:00:39 GMT

Lots of good blog posts these days on the differences of wikis and weblogs. Of course, since they are all blog posts a clear consensus is never reached. A good way of explaining the differences between the two tools, as wikis drive current state consensus.

Dave is right to define weblogs (there are other definitions too) as a tool that allow the unedited voice of single person to speak. He contrasts this with content management systems, where workflow drowns out individual voices. And wikis, where your contributions can be edited by others.

At Socialtext, our product combines a wiki and a weblog (some call that a wikiblog), among other things. I dont want to add fodder to the criticism of more talking than doing social software. But I will impart from our doings that we have seen clear differences of use, and how we explain them:

A weblog enables individual voice. This is important as no other tool has shown the ability to gain the participation of people in a larger, dare I say, system. Perhaps because it give so much back. The simple format of weblogs and ease of use allows wide participation. A post reflects a person's understanding on a given issue at a moment in time. Individual voices exist in a social context that urges continued participation. Post-to-post communication and feedback encourage continued use and sharing that otherwise occurs only in private. A weblog is a great source for what's new and the narrative thread that got us there -- a simply powerful tool for communication and publishing.

Wikis let the group voice emerge. Many people participate within a given wiki, each with an equal voice in a shared space that anyone can edit. Its a different act of sharing to contribute your words to a page that others can build upon. Our instinct is to at first believe this would create conflict and distrust, but it actually builds trust. Each wiki page reflects the current consensual understanding of a given concept. A page isn't a complete or perfect understanding, information and conditions change too quickly for it to be possible Instead, a little wabi-sabi and trusting others allows something powerful to emerge and stay current -- a simply powerful tool for collaboration.

We aren't the only one to think of the differences between weblogs and wikis as individual and group voices. Elwin Jenkins describes it as weblogs turn individuals into webpages while wikis turn communities into webpages.

There are lots of similarities between the two tools. Both are web native, are easy to use, are link-intensive and encourage sharing.

Both are being widely adopted, wikis less visibly because of private group use and at different paces in different areas. A customer once explained to me how he thought wikis were more popular than weblogs in Asia because group voice is valued greater than individual voice. Regardless of popularity, different cultures and organizations will have different values that is reflected in their tool selection.

Its not a choice between one or another. The temporal structure of weblogs and logical structure of wikis are a complement for lasting effects. One of the more powerful patterns in an organization is how an opportunity is published in blog, possibilities are swarmed upon in blog conversation and then driven to consensus and outcome in a wikified document. After the outcome, the knowledge and its social context remains.

Both tools together create powerful effects for publishing, communication and collaboration.

Wiki as a Whiteboard

Fri, 30 May 2003 01:27:15 GMT

Jim McGee is on an aggegator and synthesis tear these days. This time he is getting up to speed on wikis. The analogy that finally made it clear for me was to a whiteboard in a conference room.

Some good links, but he is missing one.

KM is a Social Phenomenon

Tue, 27 May 2003 20:56:34 GMT

Jim McGee follows up his aggregator bricolage on weblogs and knowledge management with a part 2.

He includes Rick Klau on Gartner's hype cycle, Dina Mehta's perspective on the challenges of introducing weblogs into corporate environments, Jon Udell on using weblogs to improve project communications and other great posts. Specifically notes that ease of set up, as well as use, are qunitessential.

Jim picks up a gem by Gary Murphy at TeledyN and adds the pointed comment that KM is a social phenomenon:

Both searches were initially pointless because, for very good reasons, both the sought after data items did not exist in the superficially logical locations. This is probably the number one flaw with most dead-robot KM systems: They fail to accommodate how Reality is inherently messy!

The only possible method to locate either the ribs or the cards was to do what humans have done since the dawn of archives, ask someone who knows. In both instances, we needed someone who knew where the target was, and who could refer us to someone who knew how to extract it.

Murphy provides the critical link here between weblogs and organizational need. It is the realization that KM in organizational settings is primarily a social phenomenon and not a technology one. Most prior efforts to apply technology to KM problems in organizations have been solutions in search of a problem. They have been driven by a technology vendor's need to sell product, not an organization's need to solve problems.

Weblogs are interesting in organizational KM settings because weblogs are technologically simple and socially complex, which makes them a much better match to the KM problems that matter. One thing that we need to do next is to work backwards from the answer - weblogs - to the problem - what do organizations need to do effective knowledge management. We need to avoid the mistakes of other KM software vendors and not assume that the connection is self-evident. [McGee's Musings]

Moneyball

Sun, 25 May 2003 20:13:06 GMT

Andrew from VentureBlog reviews and reccomends Moneyball, the new book by Michael Lewis on the Oakland A's which, despite a low budget, outperform in winning:

How they've done this is straight out of the entrepreneurial playbook: by using intellect and analytics to replace money as the solution to problems. As Michael Lewis relates in great detail, the A's take a fresh look at what makes a baseball player successful and are able to exploit inefficiencies in the market for talent. They don't spend top dollar on big names but instead hire for efficiency in what's important in baseball (getting on base). The A's create the equivalent of a personal stock option plan for baseball players: they take underappreciated players and give them a chance to excel knowing that those who do will rise in value and eventually get hired away by the big money teams. The A's can then use draft choices (which they get as compensation when their players are hired away) to reinvest in new young, underappreciated players.

My favorite quote from the book, which is directly applicable to life in a start-up, is one of the rules Billy Beane uses when he searches for talent to sign:

"No matter how successful you are, change is always good. There can never be a status quo. When you have no money you can't afford long-term solutions, only short-term ones. You have to be always upgrading. Otherwise you're fucked."

The Matter of IT

Tue, 20 May 2003 06:38:47 GMT

As the technology industry emerges from the bottom, it criticism has been lowered to the nature of being. Information Technology has always been a source of competitive advantage. At the bottom of the business cycle, advantage is basic survival, risk taken only on low hanging fruit. But now, as the leaky pipes have stopped dripping, some wish to relegate the job of IT to that of a plumber.

Friday's article in the NY Times by Steve Lohr asks the question, "Has Technology Lost its Special Status?" Technology as an industry is 10 percent of the economy and 60 percent of business spending. According to John Gantz of IDC, technology spending has increased 2-3 times the rate of economic growth since the 1960s. The question is if the industry will return to its historical growth rates, the driver of valuation multiples. Lohr reports:

That assumption about technology's special role is questioned in a provocative article this month in The Harvard Business Review, titled "IT Doesn't Matter." The article asserts that information technology, or I.T. for short, is inevitably headed in the same direction as the railroads, the telegraph, electricity and the internal combustion engine — becoming, in economic terms, just ordinary factors of production, or "commodity inputs."

"From a strategic standpoint, they became invisible; they no longer mattered," Nicholas G. Carr, editor at large of The Harvard Business Review, wrote in the article. "That is exactly what is happening to information technology today."

John Hagel and John Seely Brown believe this is an important article because it very effectively captures the backlash sweeping through executive suites against IT spending...But Carr’s article is also dangerous because it endorses the growing view that IT offers only limited potential for strategic differentiation....and are preparing a rebuttal in the July issue of HBR:

Extracting business value from IT requires innovations in business practices. In many respects, we believe Carr attacks a red herring – few people would argue that IT alone provides any significant business value or strategic advantage.
The economic impact from IT comes from incremental innovations, rather than "big bang" initiatives. A process of rapid incrementalism enhances learning potential and creates opportunities for further innovations.
The strategic impact of IT investment comes from the cumulative effect of sustained initiatives to innovate business practices in the near-term. The strategic differentiation emerges over time, based less on any one specific innovation in business practice and much more on the capability to continuously innovate around the evolving capabilities of IT.

Some tech executives have countered in the NY Times article:

"I.T. is the vehicle by which you turn ideas and content into intellectual property products," Mr. Craig Barrett (of Intel) said. "As a nation and as a company, you either upgrade your I.T. infrastructure or you won't be competitive."

Samuel J. Palmisano, chief executive of I.B.M., made the case for his industry's growing at twice the rate of the economy when he spoke to analysts on Wednesday. "The industry is fundamentally a growth industry because it underpins productivity," he said.

Kevin Werbach speaks of new models in the Post-PC era in his Supernova report:

...The point of the article is not that tech is dying, or that innovation is drying up. It's that enterprise technology is moving into a new phase. Bigger, faster, and more feature-laden are no longer selling points in the same way. Smarter, simpler, more efficient, and more flexible are the new criteria. It's much harder to make powerful system simple than to make them complex....

Zack Lynch points how IT drives growth in other sectors:

For instance, although not a punctuated leap in competitive advantage, social software has the potential to accrue significant value for companies that leverage its potential to accelerate innovation. In some industries, two product cycles can be the difference between corporate life and death.
For example, decreasing innovation cycle times in the pharmaceutical industry by 10% could slash years off product research, development and approval processes. When translated into revenue and market capitalization impacts, intelligent adoption of social software could significantly disrupt the balance of power in this multi-billion dollar industry. Who says IT competitive advantage is dead?

What is unique about IT compared to other revolutions is how it extends the capabilities of people and groups. IT fuels competitive advantage by enhancing productivity. Erik Brynjolfsson of MIT has demonstrated that productivity gains occur not through IT in and of itself, but when it is introduced with new business practice and process.

This is actually a contrarian point for many. Some private equity investors shy away from technologies that require change of behavior, for example, because it adds risk that users will resist change. But in fact, that's the real promise of IT, to extend our capabilities in new ways. Changing behavior is good in a changing world.

Brynjofsson's studies have been in process-intensive areas of organization. Areas where economies of scale can be easily realized. When business process is defined, it is almost immeadiately outdated because environmental conditions change presenting new sets of information. This underscores the need for business practice that realizes economies of scope (agility), but also the limits of process itself.

What remains is knowledge work. Most jobs in the service sector spend the majority of their time undertaking unstructured tasks in social context. And this time is where innovation occurs (Palmisano points to IP creation, but that's just one set of montetizable outcomes).

IT will continue to drive competitive advantage for business because an incremental enhancement of how groups work still yields exponental benefits.

Wikis in Business

Mon, 19 May 2003 04:56:02 GMT

Socialtext is covered in a great New York Times Article by Amy Cortese on Wikis in Business.

...Software programmers have sought for decades to design products that help people collaborate in the virtual world as easily as they do in the real world. E-mail is by far the most successful result, but it is linear and best suited for back-and-forth communications involving two people or a small group. On the other end of the spectrum, groupware programs like the Lotus Notes software sold by I.B.M. are elaborate attempts to mimic work environments, with multiple levels of authorization, defined work flows and lots of rules — just like a corporation.

The most distinctive characteristic of a wiki is that anyone in the group (or for public wiki sites on the Internet, anyone who visits) can edit, modify or even delete material on the pages. Such a free-form collaborative process can be messy and chaotic, and it requires a commitment to the group that may not sit well with some egos. But over time, wiki advocates say, a group voice or consensus emerges into what some enthusiasts call "emergent intelligence."

The creative anarchy of the wiki is the philosophical inverse of conventional corporate groupware software. Groupware's highly structured rules and processes do not always reflect the way people really work. Employees often ignore costly corporate-sanctioned software and revert to informal social networks — whether simply e-mail or impromptu water-cooler discussions.

Ward Cunningham, who created the first wiki in 1995 and is the author of "The Wiki Way," a manifesto and how-to manual published by Addison-Wesley, says a wiki is a medium for connecting an electronic community and allows "idea keeping." A wiki presents its members with a blank slate, and their entries determine its structure and organization.

As with any community, each wiki develops its own social systems and rules to guide behavior. But there is basic wiki etiquette. For example, wiki-squatting (using a few pages of a wiki for your own personal use) and wiki spam (pushing a product or service on a wiki page) are frowned upon, and offending pages are likely to be deleted by group members. In addition, a good wiki citizen will always give credit and link to material that someone else has already contributed.

Given that wikis are easy to use, inexpensive and can be set up without a company's information technology department, it is no surprise that the software is making its way into business organizations through the back door — much as instant messaging and other stealth innovations have done. While wikis can be helpful for project managers and employees in charge of small teams, corporate managers who favor greater control are more likely to be wary.

That is why various entrepreneurs are beginning to tailor wiki software to corporate use. SocialText, a San Francisco start-up, for example, has wiki software with Web log and chat capabilities. It has also added security features and programmed the whole package to work with standard office and e-mail software.

The SocialText software, which starts at a price of $995 a year for five users, is being used in about 20 companies, typically small businesses or departments within larger ones, according to Ross Mayfield, SocialText's chief executive.

One SocialText customer is Composite Tech, a $10-million-a-year maker of bicycle tires sold under the Zipp brand. Since early April, Composite Tech, based in Indianapolis, has been using the SocialText wiki for a variety of tasks. Employees contribute informal notes on what the competition is doing, for example, while product development engineers keep track of production schedules as well as advances in materials and other innovations that they might use in future models. Notes from meetings are kept in a wiki, and sales and customer service employees can consult the pages to check on production status and plans.

Denham Grey, the production manager at Composite Tech, says the wiki has become a central repository for information that formerly was shared only in an ad hoc way through e-mail or face-to-face encounters. The wiki, he says, is making it possible to build an "informal corporate memory."

Another SocialText user is Global Business Network, a consulting company in Emoryville, Calif., that employs the software to create comprehensive records of client meetings. Chris Coldewey, a consulting associate at Global Business, says he likes the fact that the wiki can be used by anyone. "The bar to participating is very low," he said. "You don't have to have any skills other than typing."...

"You just have to do enough things well enough and cheaply enough," says Clay Shirky, a software guru who is an adjunct professor at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program. "It's the attack-from-below strategy."

Wabi-sabi

Sat, 17 May 2003 17:19:40 GMT

Turns out Pierre was busy and is still blogging. He is at ease with his boundaries of institutional and personal speech, and sees value in acknowledging imperfection through a standard disclaimer:

...So blogs don't have to be perfect, or even try to be. There is value in their imperfectness. Maybe it's all about wabi-sabi.

I agree that it would be a shame if I were held to be somehow institutionally responsible for statements I make here. A standard disclaimer, in a very easy to understand form like the Creative Commons licenses, would be great...

The wabi-sabi wiki page offers a little zen for wikis and blogging:

    Ring the bells that still can ring
    Forget your perfect offering
    There's a crack in everything
    That's how the light gets in.

eLearning Forum Today

Fri, 16 May 2003 14:20:24 GMT

I'm learninging and speaking at eLearning Forum today with some great people. You can participate remotely (its no Happening, but listen in):

We're using WebEx to broadcast presentations: https://mcdemo1.webex.com/mcdemo1/j.php?ED=76915766&;UID=7642151 (or log in manually at http://trainingcenter1.webex.com, meeting number 692258187 and meeting password america)
The dial-in number is 1-408-678-2429
Please join us on the Community Page to see webcam images from the meeting and more.

The whole story, with detailed instructions, is on the remote access page. There is a whitepaper and results from a survey of attendees on informal learning.

The Value of Informality

Thu, 15 May 2003 21:49:13 GMT

If there is one factor that keeps great voices from emerging in blogspace and holds back the development of new journalism, its the blurred distinction between informal and formal speech. And I think there is something we can do about it.

For example, Pierre Omidyar was beginning to emerge as a great voice in our conversations. But then he stopped. It could be that he was too busy. But his last post was on institutional versus personal speech. He explained the difficulty of being to blog informally as a person while being a visible member of an organization. The mainstream media would jump on his words without distinguishing them from something said in a speech or press release. Could spill over into financial or legal repercussions. The Pyra guys have had a sudden transition that almost made them go radio silent. Esther finds it difficult to relate her great experiences. Joi took flack from being an investor and blogger at the same time. With the large companies I have worked with, initially on internal blogging, they raise the prospect of real human executive communication. Only to be hindered by the need for editoral and legal workflow.

The same problem of formality is at the core of the transition to new journalism. The old means of editorial process, meant to distill journalism as fact, poorly serves the ends of analysis. Relegating it to the opinion section whose diversity suffers from bipolar disorder.

By contrast, weblogs offer sheer diverse opinion and analysis. Reader beware, enlightened and participatory. Fact is derived over time through conversations. Blogs don't need to be journalism. What makes this work is informality. The editorial filter is a post-production process. First cuts are made open, raw and exposed. Its faster, social and more honest.

Over the next year or so blogging will experience the quickening associated with large media portals bringing in later adopters. If the boundaries of formality and speech don't take hold, it will be accompanies with horror stories that would hold back the development of the medium. An executive who was slammed for something she said as an individual. More journalists loosing their jobs and further tension between old and new.

The conflict inherent in formal and informal modes of speech or press is a transition of norms. Blogging at first glance is silly, which is what makes it work. We shouldn't strive for better blogging, but strive to let the world know its imperfecture. Hammer this point. Let the world know these words are your own and they are just words. Establish the cultural norm of low expectations and indvidual expression aside from institutional affiliation.

But we live in a real world of jurisdictions and consequences. Recognizing this, what's needed is disclaimers. What I suggest is that there is an opportunity to standardize such a legal agreement. If this doesnt occur, every time an executive or journalist who wants to raise their voice as an individual will result in custom legal work done by internal and external counsel working outside their domain. A standard agreement would accellerate the process of approval for voices to be heared. It wouldn't capture all facets, just the basics, allowing the remaining conversation between individual and institution to be constructive. It would reduce the risks for both the individual and institution. Its core purpose would be would be a legal seperation between individual and institution as an established normative option. One that could be marketed to bring new and free voices into expression.

This may be a job for the EFF, Creative Commons or ACLU. But there are many legal bloggers who could flush out the prospects for such an initiative first. What do you think (if you are free to say it)?