Ross Mayfield's Weblog

Friends of Friends of Friends

David Kirkpatrick's Fortune collumn on Social Networking is a great read and mentions Socialtext:

Meanwhile new companies like Contact Network, Socialtext, and Spoke Software are generating revenues by selling social-networking software to corporations. Typically such products work behind the corporate firewall to mine employees' contact lists and e-mail traffic patterns. They have various ways of ensuring that no employee's data are used without permission.

To clarify, we aren't so typical. We don't monitor email, a private medium, or mine contacts. We provide tools for people to make their own connections, organically from the bottom-up, through conversations that are meant to be shared.

You have to love pieces that quote bloggers:

The phenomenon may be seen as offering people tools analogous to the most powerful ones being used in business. Writes Yong Su Kim, who maintains a blog on software trends at YSK.com: "It's almost like the CRM and ERP of peoples' professional and personal lives. Social-networking software is designed to help people look for new relationships (acquire customers), maximize existing relationships (sell to the installed base), and optimize their social interactions (order management, manufacturing, supply chain, and distribution)."

The article also provides Joi as the uber-networker example of LinkedIn's value, describes a couple of models and offers another way of describing the development of social infrastructure

Mark Pincus, an investor in Friendster and founder of Tribe.net, calls this the early phases of the "peopleweb"--a user-controlled network of identities and relationships that transcends any one site or company.

Institutional Memory

Denham Grey, a leading KM practitioner who also fostered the KM Wiki provides the context for the dream of knowledge management, what went wrong and what was discovered.

The dream:

One of the central themes of KM is the design, building and maintenance of an effective 'corporate memory', a repository, a dare I say it, knowledge-base. Here the intellectual jewels of the organization will reside, easily accessible, expertly indexed, intuitively browseable. Here experts and novices will come for self-help knowledge, they will find the correct solution quickly, be able to apply the solutions with confidence, and learn from the 'collective experience of the organization'.

Many dollars have been invested, many organizations have egg on their collective faces, many repositories lie unused, shunned by novices and experts alike and yet there are more KM projects starting each day with the same vision / mission and yet another dream. Perhaps we think portals or automatic profiling or collaborative systems or social software will do it this time!

What matters is social context. Go read the whole thing, and his discoveries. Related: Spike Hall differentiates social context at the individual, group and organizational level.

Denham also shares his practices and tools (including Socialtext!).

Denham points out his focus on knowledge creation (awareness, learning, community); instead of intellectual capital (knowledge assets, branding, knowledge exchanges). His emphasis is on social capital: The real challenges lie in getting groups to leverage their learning, to combine and synthesise their insights, experience and expertise.

Perhaps what's new this time is we learned by suppporting user desires to get things done more efficiently, connect organically, and keep it simple so everyone can participate -- the result builds institutional memory When people are the intelligent agents their actions in aggregate have emergent properties. Like with weblogs on the public Internet, the best content and expertise rise to the top naturally. While social capital is a necessary precondition for the development of intellectual capital, such a lofty strategic value proposition is unnecessary. Help people produce first -- and learn as they go.

Entropic Journalism

The striking difference between traditional and participatory journalism is at the top of many minds these days. What's interesting to me is how an alternative form may have arisen unnoticed.

But first, in case you live in a cave, the story unfolds with a reaction to this post by Daniel Weintraub of the Sacramento Bee prompted this policy of editorial oversight, which has been analyzed here, here and here.

Eric Zorn puts it well [via Jeff Jarvis]:

To edit a blog almost instantly and whenever the blogger wants to post would require an expenditure of resources from the sponsoring publication that dwarfs the income -- right now, essentially zero in the free-access info-market of the web.

Yet to edit a blog conventionally -- putting it into a comparatively slow, one-way pipeline toward publication -- robs it of its essential blogness. It takes a potentially fresh new medium that, as Andrew Sullivan has pointed out, is a hybrid of talk radio and print, and turns it back into just more old medium...

...In reality, what needs to emerge here if the j-blog isn't going to die at birth, is an understanding on the part of editors and readers that, procedurally, a blog is much more like an appearance on a TV panel program or talk-radio show than it is a fully sanctioned, completely vetted declaration in cold type...

...Very, very rarely -- never in my case -- this freedom causes real problems.

Eric is right that the primary challenge is getting editors and readers to understand what is new. That's why blogging purists have raised their voices. Introducing editorial process into blogging practice is entropic. Social editing after publishing has proven its differentiated value. We need both.

But the way Daniel blogs now, running posts by an editor before posting is different from blogs or collumns -- its traditional journalism without deadlines. Something any journalist would like. Write when you want.

It may be a third form, but its not write what you want and publish when you want.

Dysfunctional Relationships

Must read piece by our very own Jerry Michalski on Social Networking. He makes a good case for the pragmatic (complexity, explicitness) and moral (explicitness again) challenges facing these services. He also makes 3 suggestions:

* openness and integration among all these tools, so services interact smoothly and triple-, quadruple-, or even quintuple-entry of data vanishes.
* more training on how to manage social systems appropriately, so productive relationships can be enhanced, not disrupted; and
* more emphasis on rethinking and improving the basic tools we use to express ourselves, so we cease thinking in 7-bit ASCII email, HTML, and PowerPoint, and start communicating better and building lasting resources together.

Do Call List

Seems the House has moved fast to approve legislation granting the FTC authority to execute the Do Not Call list. Steps remain to make it possible to go ahead before the October 1 start date.

Maybe I am being paranoid, but if the list was provided to telemarketing firms in advance (necessary for compliance) and then legislation falls through, it would provide very evil people a perfectly groomed list.

Collaborative Proposal Development

We are starting to talk about our ecstatic customers. Here is a customer success story of an international design consultancy that uses Socialtext. One of the greatest values they have found is collaborative proposal generation.

Getting the right thing out the door is often tough. You have to gain the contributions of others, particularly domain experts who are in different divisions of your company. Workflow and revision control get in the way of forward motion.

Swarming on opportunity is something poorly supported by most existing solutions. Its an interesting case that almost ever team deals with, read the whole thing.

Life's Imagination

George provided this great excerpt from the Seven Pillars of Wisdom for my b-day:

All men dream: but nor equally,
Those who dream by night in the dusty
recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity:
but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men,
for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.

Reminds me of something Christopher Columbus wrote:

Life has more imagination than we carry in our dreams

A Game Neverending

My daughter: Daddy, I invented a new game, wanna play?

Me: Sure, what's it called?

My daughter: Guess What the Rules Are.

Skype's Business Model

Stewart "Skype Crazy" Henshall, Mitch "Business Blog" Ratcliffe are wondering what Skype's business model will be.

Skype will either go the way of a single global flat rate within their network once they have raised barriers to entry through network effects, or leverage the demand they have aggregated to charge for bridging to the PSTN, something Mitch pointed out as a challenge.

If they choose the latter, its not that much of a challenge technically and they can create intermediate peers in different countries connected to a softswitch to avoid paying for transport.

Skype has realized the geographical arbitrage dream while retaining call quality. Beyond Vonage arbitraging the local loop and originating carriers, it bypasses the need for terminating carriers. See a brief history on telephony arbitrage.

Finally a P2P app where content is self produced. Now all they need is a Mac version. 660k downloads and counting...

Life Follows Art

After listening to Terry Gross' interview with the front-man of Polyphonic Spree made me want to impulse buy the album. You will recognize their Light and Day song from Apple's Pods Unite commercials with a VW Bug and iPod.

Problem is the iTunes store doesn't carry the band. Huh?

My Inner Child is a Year Older

Okay, its my Birthday.

The remarkable thing about this year has been the great people I have met and do stuff with.

Joi, of course, congratulated me first (he has a timezone and birthday roll advantage). Was thinking of writing something really smart and soulful. Something to the effect of how I am a year wiser, time being relative and how my kids and job make me feel young.

Then danah found the perfect gem, How old is your inner child?.

My inner child is sixteen years old!

Life's not fair! It's never been fair, but while
adults might just accept that, I know
something's gotta change. And it's gonna
change, just as soon as I become an adult and
get some power of my own.

Hee hee.

Measuring Expertise

Jon Udell's latest column discusses the Moneyball approach to doing more with less through measurement. You can't manage what you can't measure and when it comes to human and social capital opportunities for advantage abound:

...We know that the best coders are far more productive than the norm. Arguably, that variance might lie in the patience, discipline, and research skills required to recycle rather than to reinvent. If so, finding ways to measure and value these qualities could yield a pivotal advantage...

...A piece of software isn’t just a bag of bits; it’s the nexus of a community of developers and users. In the case of open source projects — and increasingly of commercial ones, too — these communities live online. Mailing lists, personal e-mail correspondence, RSS feeds, weblogs, and Wikis are all grist for the social network analyst’s mill. By mining such data, this new breed of statistician are able to measure the strength of a person’s ties to a community and can assess his or her reputation within that community.

Membership in multiple communities is another potentially valuable clue. In software development as in science, breakthroughs often occur when insights flow across disciplinary boundaries. The conductors of these flows are typically generalists who belong to several (or many) communities and who form bridges among them.

We know intuitively that these are good people to have on your team. Although we can’t yet quantify the difference they make, the data, for the most part, is already available for inspection. Perhaps even now another Bill James is making discoveries that will revolutionize what we think we know about the price/performance ratio of software teams.

Of course, there is a risk in experimentation with performance metrics. It takes time to verify what is an input to performance, consensus on metric use is as important as the metric's methodology and tying them to real world incentives can cause more damage than good. Valuing intangibles, how data is sourced and presenting information without context is a big grey area. But careful use of these tools for advantage can been the difference between black and red.

Ban Email, Save Time

An email study by the American Management Association finds employees spend 4 hours per day in their inbox. Keep finding the same number, otherwise I would discount the study because its sponsor is an email monitoring firm.

As Clay posted on Friday, A UK company has responded in extreme according to LawMeme.

Provided they notify their employees of the practice, employers can legally monitor employees' use of the company's email system. One corporation is going a step beyond this measure, however, by eliminating email from the workplace altogether. News.com reports that Phones 4U, a mobile phone company, is imposing a no-email policy in the office. The regulation is predicated on efficiency concerns: the company's CEO believes that slicing email out of the workplace will free up 3 hours of productivity per employee each day.

The mobile phone company hopes to save $1.6m per month of the time of its 2,500 employees.

But please -- man cannot work by phone alone.

So here is where the story gets wierder.

“There is now one briefing e-mail, which is circulated among all 2,500 staff every morning. Other than that, staff are being told they will have to communicate either face-to-face or by phone,” the spokesman said.

So that means people still have access to email and one can assume it can be used for personal communication. Oh, and another thing:

Customers will still be able to contact the company via e-mail and can expect a reply in kind. Phones 4u will also continue to contact some suppliers via e-mail, he said…

“It’s a very effective tool if used properly,” he told BBC Radio. “While I do believe that e-mail in general is the absolute cancer of British business, I only believe that because of the misuse of it.”

Now this sounds less extreme. It sounds like Policy and Policing, which couldn’t assume 100% effectiveness.

This is a far cry from an optimal solution, especially for users, but it highlights a Very Big Problem.

The World's Game

Richard Gayle has a great post about self-organizing site that, like a wiki, decentralizes contribution of soccer scores. A perfect opportunity for me to ramble about the game of life.

I play soccer about twice a week. Also play volleyball, but don't play my other college sport, Lacrosse (being hit with sticks tends to make you quite sore). Mom & Dad met on a soccer field, Sis played in college, now my daughter plays too. My Dad was one of those fantatics that watched Spanish broadcasts of games with the volume at 11, although he didn't understand a word. Its folks like him that have driven the game to become the most widely played youth sport in the US, the formation of Major League Soccer and the recently cancelled WUSA (a real tragic loss, and world-class National teams.

Now these fanatics have a home. Fox Sports World is almost all soccer. At almost any time you can pick up a game from the UK, US, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Brazil and Argentina. Soccer is the world's game, played everywhere, the only equipment you need is a relatively round object. There is a huge difference from the play at the top of the profession and otherwise. See Jerry's post on how AYSO kicking circles are dysfunctional swarms. Most die-hard Football fans can't appreciate the real Football, mostly because they haven't seen it played well.

Funny thing about American Football is how American it is. Hierarchical, process-driven about controlling change to win. By contrast, Soccer has little coaching influence during play. Only modest moves of pointing out positional changes and substitutes allow the coach to intervene. Soccer embraces change, relies on subtle communication between independent agents and order is emergent.

They say you play the game the way you are. People have all kinds of different styles: possessive, unassuming, reliable to defend, aggressive, etc. Contrast the Beautiful Game played in Brazil, which emphasizes improvisation and creativity, with Germany's technical game of physical play. The US has its own style, physical, emphasizing the athlete and moments of brilliance.

The complex adaptive system that is a team in action can teach us a great deal about teams for business. We all exist at the edge of chaos, much like in the game. Positions and information constantly change. The best a coach can do is help the team understand the game, reinforce skills and good habits, mildly intervene occassionally -- but overall rely on good people to make the best decisions their ability and context allows.

CBS Marketwatch Excerpt

The CBS Marketwatcharticle by Bambi Francisco on the VLAB event disappeared for non-subscribers, so I'm posting the Socialtext excerpt here:

...There is also Socialtext, a software company founded by the very articulate Ross Mayfield. Socialtext, which provides software functionality on an outsourced basis, is trying to create environments where people can collaborate more efficiently, like they do on e-mail and chats. That's in contrast to enterprise software, which creates a top-down environment with constraints, he said. Read Mayfield's blog. Essentially, because Socialtext software is outsourced and doesn't involve heavy clients, it's a tool that's relatively cheaper to deploy. Why is Socialtext part of this social-networking trend? It enhances social capital, which is the "ability for a group of people to take coordinated action because they have a basis of trust between themselves," Mayfield explained.

I subscribed to get Bambi's newsletter. May have convinced her to start a blog as Don suggested. Proselytize what you love.

MIT/Stanford Venture Lab: Social Networking

Fun and interesting evening at the VLAB event that begged the question: Social Networking: Is there a business model?

I think we answered this question. Duh, yes. Actually, the attention swung to the other side: Social Networking: Is there a bubble? Interesting how quickly something can swing from the pejorative to the affirmative so quickly. I actually like how cynical we have become these days. Anything with the slightest market traction or investor interest is immeadiately suspect. Keeps us in check.

Oh, and the news of the event is an unconfirmed investment of $10 million by KPCB & Benchmark. The Boys of the Valley were there, including Bill Gurley who introduced me to my co-founder for RateXchange and the rest is history.

Anyway, here's my answer: yes.

Social Networking: Reid did a good job at the top of the talk describing how Social Networking is a classic consumer Internet play (low investment and customer acquisition costs), why the timing is right, how much room there might be in this space and the basics of the business model. What makes these plays great is the ability to have a low capital investment grow virally to achieve scaled value. Couldn't have done this before the infrastructure was in place, startup costs declined, competition was hampered and a critical mass of people engaged socially online.

Reid make a key point of how Social Networking is differentiated. Compared to Communities: based on common affinity, not connections facilitated by known individuals. I'll add to that that networks don't require a mission, a central cause for being there, its an individualistic phenomenon. He also pointed out that its different from marketplaces or directories. He raised point that didn't get debated: Is there room for many graphs or is there one? I think there is room for several, something I'll revisit later.

Jonathan said he will explain his business model and the supposed investment on his LiveJournal blog called something like hornyteenagegirl or something. You have to admire how fun it must be to be chief pimp, and thank god he was there to keep it interesting (we never got into the meaty social network theory we should have). I can't blame him from ducking. He also attempted to debunk the notion of a social networking space. The marketer in me says horse-pucky. He has a great category he is in front of, he has metrics and momentum to prove it, there is a unified theme and value proposition of enhancing social capital. But what does that matter to lonely people?

Cynthia made some good points about the lower cost of group-forming using free services and and open source software enables the creation of guilds like SPM. But hey, these are communities, not networks. And these tools allow people, not communities, to build their own networks.

Marc Canter asked his usual open question (FOAF), Reid responded sensibly that as the graphs mature its certainly an option.

Social Software: I don't know if I got my point across, so let me make it here. Our business model is antithetical to traditional enterprise software. Top-down software, with lines of code as barriers to entry, process and ontology that users are expected to fit themselves into, long sales-cycles and inordinate TCO -- is by all accounts dead and leaves users stranded with email.

The reason for this is the rules and opportunties have changed. You can't screw your customers. You can't lock them in. You can't ask them to take significant risk up front. Risk is shared with customers by providing incremental proof of value in-line with them taking risk on you.

While startup costs have declined, some have increased. Notably, its harder to sell traditionally (top-down) and you can't raise barriers to entry by locking-in your customers. The only entry point is bottom-up. The only marketable barrier to entry today is network effects.

The business model shares risk with customers, provides software as service, provides trial and open source options, maps to security requirements, is priced in-line with value, grows organically and above all, meets user needs without false constraints.

What Social Networking and Social Software have in common is people trying to connect. Someone please tell me what is more fundamentally valuable than that.

Email Group-forming

A must read piece by Jon Udell on the email's properties for easy group formation.

Jon suggests that email substitutes exist for some of its uses:

For broadcasts: as some of us have lately been pointing out, newsletters, mailing lists, and other automatic notifications can easily be converted to RSS feeds and can work more effectively in that mode.

For inter-personal communication: Instant messaging would take up some of the slack. But the odds of finding every intended message recipient online at the same time diminish as you multiply recipients.

For Asynchronous messaging: Web-based forums, Wikis, and Weblogs are some of the messaging hubs that can enable groups to communicate independently of time and space.

But the above tools have a drawback: What they can't support as easily or as effectively as e-mail is the dynamic formation (and dissolution) of those groups....Software that requires people to explicitly declare the formation of these groups, and to acknowledge their dissolution, is too blunt an instrument for such ephemeral social interaction.

Clay points out the need to unsubscribe from threads and the opportunity for iterative group forming:

There is a very interesting space between the low-overhead, short-livedness, and poor user control of CC line conversations vs the relatively high setup costs, long-livedness, and good user control of mailing lists, a space that might be occupied by software that easily converted CC line conversations to mailing lists that would let the users unsub, but would vanish unless the users periodically re-ratified its existence.

At Socialtext, we complement the best use of email by forking other uses to shared spaces. This can be as easy as CC to wiki.

Top-down & Bottom-up Social Networking

Posted a piece on Many-to-Many about the The Weakening of Strong Ties.

Scarcity of Space

Greg Papadopoulos, in a talk about the fulfillment of a 1997 Saffo vision, described the cycle of centralization to decentralization of networks. In the absence of network, nodes are state attractors. When a network is present, nodes are state distributors. His comments on states (functions) could also be applied to connections.

Fifty years ago economists were holding conferences on the concern of running out of physical space. The rise of Appliances made people fear a wall. Sometimes you expect scarcity of space. And with Greg's point there is a scarcity of connections. So we build multipurpose devices. But lo, we have iPod, a single-state device. He had a personal aside that all consumer devices trend towards fashion. Which gives us:

Cory calls it Future Sarcastic

Many-to-Many Upgrade

Many-to-Many, re-launched on MT with a new design (thanks Liz!) and new hosting provider (thanks Hylton!).

Be sure an update your RSS feeds. The new feeds are at http://www.corante.com/many/index.rdf (RSS 1.0) and http://www.corante.com/many/index.xml (RSS 2.0).

We are hosting guestbloggers on a regular basis, starting with the incomparable Stewart Butterfield.

Really have enjoyed having a group blog to contribute to. I am at a little disadvantage compared to my peers as I don't have an academic position to expand my social software readings. So I post less frequently and have rely on others. Grass is always greener, they say.

Side note: still owe my readers notes on the Mark Gronvetter talk, but in the meantime see Jay's post. Enjoyed the first day of the Accelerating Change conference, although I missed the afternoon (had to shape the future, not just think about it {daughter's b-day party}) -- although much of the discussion was beyond meta, truely meta-physical.

O' Happy Day

Today is Septemeber 12th!

Quick, find the nearest person you can and make them smile!

A new blog of cascading positive emotion: Uplift

Enjoy your weekend!

Wild and Precious

Guestblogger: Matthew Mahoney

(Guest intro: I've been in New York City the past few years, helping companies learn and attempting to do the same with public schools. Ross implores me daily to "get a life -- get a blog.")

Going to bed on the eve of 9/11/03, I found myself wondering how to continue to make meaning of the histories and options that surround our being alive at this time. The short answer is do things together. 'But which things?' I hear the strategists of the world shout. I think the harder question to tackle is how to create environments so people will choose to do things together (execution after all is the longest mile).

I wake today to an email from Christy Gibb who ran Ashoka in Canada. Tucked in there was part of the answer and a pointer to a gem from Yael Taqqu that helped me weather the bells tolling today at 8:46 AM.

"What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"

This is the question asked by Mary Oliver in her poem The Summer Day. It's also the same question Tony Deifell, while a student at the Harvard Business School, asked recently in The Portrait Project, a series of living portraits of his classmates. In her response, Yael gives us all food for thought on this 11th of September:

I want to be a storyteller.  At the end of each day, I want to be able to sit down and find the story, no matter how obscured it may be.  Trace a story through the weeks, through the years...

I know that my greatest liability is my fear to leap – fear of freefall, of letting go of one foothold in order to leap to another.  And so I will always embrace errors of commission (seized an opportunity, might regret it), at the expense of errors of omission (do nothing).  Because so often errors of commission are not errors at all…they are the small, deliberate affirmations, the spontaneous and unexpected moments that end up defining us, that we live for.  That we live to tell stories about.

Here's to your courage, Yael. And to each us of finding many ways to follow your lead.

Making Blogs More Than Just What's for Dinner

Washington Post article on business blogging:

But, Hourihan said, not all corporate blogs have to be made available for public viewing. Some of the most effective company blogs are posted on internal networks, or intranets. These can help different business divisions connect or allow employees from disparate offices to share information when working together on a big project. Top corporate executives can use blogs as a way to develop relationships with employees, even if it is a mostly one-way conversation, she said.

Great voice of reason from Meg. Recall that when Blogger was created by Meg & Ev, they were working on a project management application startup and developed it as an internal tool for project communication. The application failed to take hold amidst the boom, the put Blogger into the world and the rest is history.

Threats and Links

So Seybold was a wash. A bomb threat was called in just before my panel and it was canceled. Part of a larger conspiracy, I suppose.

Did get to spend some great time with the OSCOM hack-a-thon roundtable. I love when you go to a larger conference and find the folks that are overthrowing an industry by building sensible things. You can always find them by searching for connectivity. Got a lovely version of Little Bear printed by the bookmobile.

Bomb threat allowed me to make the Granovetter talk and see the usual social networking suspects. Will post notes tomorrow.

September 12th

As September 11th approaches and we are confronted with difficult memories and emotions, its important to keep in mind all the good in the world.

September12th.org is self-organizing social movement with a simple mission: each participant commit to making 10 people smile that day. Take a look at their wiki for some simple suggestions and add your own.

The Value of Latent Ties

Just posted a nugget on the Fakester debacle on Many-to-Many.

Upcoming

Speaking at a couple of conferences:

Seybold -- September 10th, 4pm -- Gilbane Content Management Conference; speaking in Adina's place on New Technologies That Could Influence Your Content Strategy

Accelerating Change Conference -- September 14th -- Social Software Solutions in the Action track of a futurist conference.

MIT/Stanford Venture Lab -- September 16th -- Social Networking: Is there Really a Business Model? You can guess the answer.

And hoping to attend one:

Institute for Social Network Analysis of the Economy -- September 10th, 6pm -- Mark Granovetter; hope to make it down in time to attend.

Commercial and Open Source Alternatives

Don Park is exploring open source wikis & weblogs and asks how Socialtext's commercial product is differentiated. Without going into too many specifics:

• Simpler and easier to use
  

• Fully integrated wiki & weblog
  

• Administration capabilities
  

• Support for multiple workgroups
  

• Extensions
  

• Integration with enterprise systems
  

• Secure hosted service
  

• Optional Appliance deployment
  

• Service & Support
  

In general, if you have the technical skills and don't mind supporting, extending and administering a wiki within an organization that is tolerant of additional complexity -- then open source is a great option. Open source wikis have served development organizations particularly well. Open source is a good way to pilot wiki use, even if you don't want to support it yourself.

Commercial software gains natural differentiation because different incentives drive development. Some primary incentives are the need for our solution to co-exist with legacy systems, operate at scale and be easy to use for non-technical users. One of those incentives, developing for markets instead of users, is something Socialtext is turning on its head -- by developing for users first. For enterprise users who are not developers, Socialtext is a great option. For enterprise users who are developers, it's a time vs. money decision.

When Ward invented the wiki and made it open source he fostered more than the countless versions of open source wikis. He enabled a new way for people to work together. We owe a great deal to the open source community for advancing Ward's contributions and for readying the market for a commercial option. Our advisors are leaders in the open source community and we even hired the creator of a great open source wiki and weblog product, kwiki

When we founded Socialtext we made it a core part of our mission to give back to the open source community. Since then we have informed a whole new group of potential business users to both alternatives of Enterprise Social Software. Socialtext enabled many of the great wiki and weblog conversations that developers are having today and fostered new lines of business for consulting practitioners.

We don't compete against open source alternatives, we compliment them.

Culture of Failure

It used to be one of the most contrarian aspects of the culture of Silicon Valley -- rewarding failure. Entreprenuers who took risks and developed companies that ultimately failed were seen in the positive. People with real learning experiences that ultimately make them better entreprenuers. In risk management, without failures to model you have models doomed to fail.

Post-bubble, like many over-reactions, the valley shunned failure. This was made possible because the market for leadership was tight, so VCs and others could be so selective they could work with people that had a track record of success. Given the environmental forces we are all beholden too, such candidates also got by with a little luck of their own. The valley played it safe, but in reality was building teams of people that were predominantly risk averse.

The primary indicator of recovery I have been looking for is a return to a culture that rewards failure. Now comes the first article I have seen on the topic in years. Here is a healthy perspective:

"Having failed once or twice is a very normal and healthy thing to go through," says Roger Lee, a private investor in Friendster. "It would be virtually impossible for an entrepreneur to go through their career unscathed.

And one that misses the point:

Perhaps Evangelos Simoudis, a partner with venture capital firm Apax Partners Inc. in Menlo Park, sums up the dot-com stigma best: "We are not looking at individuals who got high-level executive positions at Internet companies and who really became successful because of the tide that had risen at the time. We've come back to the times when it's important for an executive to know how to behave when times are fast and frothy, as well as when there's a need for more precaution and slower burn."

If you weren't doing something risky and interesting during the bubble you missed more than an opportunity for wealth creation. Most people learned more in those fast years than they did in their entire career. The perspective gained of going through boom and bust at the least teaches you where you are in the cycle and what decisions matter. I can't imagine how any manager who went through it would not recognize past mistakes and false incentives (eyeballs instead of revenue, etc.). Part of an effective culture of failure is when people are recognized for conviction. Entreprenuers who continue to march on today have lived through some hard knocks and work within the constraints of market reality. Those who don't left a long time ago -- and good riddance.

If a culture can't accept and build upon failure, it will never be a success.

Football and Rituals

Fall seemed to come early this year. Back to school, work at a different clip and football.

We live a few blocks from Stanford Stadium, so we can tell when Fall is here by the sound of the band and the rah of the crowd. Watching the UCLA game, praying for a break-out year. Another season, another chance to try to explain football to my wife (her native-sport is cross-country skiing, so its a lost cause).

All sports are both tribal and ritualistic. Rupert Murdoch's entire sports media bet revolves around tribal grouping, emphasizing local and diaspora coverage. We are tied to teams by geography and moments in time (what we grew up with, fans of while falling in love, find comradeship in following, etc.). For my college tribe, its an annual pilgrimage to reminisce about the glory days and reconnect with long lost nomads. Sports are metaphores that bind communities, each one is an artifact of culture and grounds symbolic identity.

The Cockfight renders ordinary, everyday experience comprehensible by presenting in terms of acts and objects which have had their practical consequences removed and have been reduced (or, if you prefer, raised) to the level of sheer appearances, where their meaning can be more powerfully articulated and more exactly perceived. The cockfight is "really real" only to the cocks -- it does not kill anyone, castrate anyone, reduce anyone to animal status, alter the hierarchical relations among people, nor refashion the hierarchy; it does not even redistribute income in any significant way. What it does is what, for other peoples with other temperaments and other conventions, King Lear and Crime and Punishment do; it catches up these themes -- death, masculinity, rage, pride, loss, beneficence, chance -- and, ordering them into an encompassing structure, presents them in such a way as to throw into a relief a particular view of their essential nature. -- Clifford Geertz

Folklore, Festival, and Football: Cockfights and Super Bowls makes an argument that games are "highly ritualistic art forms which allow individuals to share in the creation, recreation, and co-creation of their culture." Great half-time reading, contains some real gems.

On Art:

Myth must be kept alive. People who can keep it alive are artists of one kind or another. The function of the artist is the mythologization of the environment and the world -- Joseph Campbell

On Festival creating Discourse:

...discourse may be construed as all symbol systems, that is,that we engage dialectically with not only others but paintings, music, literature, advertising, music videos, fashion, and, of course, performances of all kinds -- Kris Murray

On Football:

As such Picasso can exclaim "art is the lie which tells the truth about life." Football as art is metaphorical. It, as a game, is comprised of a "interpretive" system of rules, which reflects peoples "natural" biologically driven penchant to acquire and defend resources through physical domination. It [Football] "is" civil war.

UCLA 14 - Colorado 16
ugh

Socialtext in PC Magazine

Michael J. Miller's Forward Thinking August collumn covers Socialtext's Conference Workspace service in a cool piece on New Ways to Communicate:

The industry conferences I attend have always attracted early technology adopters laden with PDAs, cell phones, notebooks, and e-mail gadgets way before they became mainstream. The recent Supernova 2003 conference in Washington, D.C., was no exception. I found myself interested not only in the content of the conference but also in the technology that the attendees were using...

I was equally intrigued by how the conference was run. Although it took place in the basement of a hotel where cell phone signals couldn't reach, all the participants were connected using their laptops and a Wi-Fi access point. The conference had not only an official Web site but also an official wiki—a shared online space where attendees could post comments. At least half a dozen people were commenting on the proceedings on their blogs, or Web logs. Attendees were discussing the conference over Internet Relay Chat (IRC). And needless to say, almost everyone was communicating via instant messaging.

The software people were using was not the stuff of corporate networks. Most of it came from small companies or individuals operating on the fringe of the computer industry. The wiki was created using software from Socialtext. Some of the blogs were built with Blogger, and some people were using Six Apart's Moveable Type. Jabber was the instant-messaging client of choice, and the debates about RSS and Echo as methods of sharing thoughts and headlines were heated. These tools still have some rough edges, but they are changing the way we work...

The collumn goes on to discuss consumer blogging tools (linking to a review). I think its fair to say we are still at the fringe and rough around the edges, some would say that give us character. It is, however, the stuff of corporate networks.

Socialtext RSS Feed

Okay, it took a little while, but the Socialtext Weblog now has an RSS Feed:

http://www.socialtext.com/weblog/rss.xml

There is no good excuse for us not having it earlier. Just been focused on other things.

Blogger's Block

Man, its easy to get blogger's block after a long weekend and with lots to do at work. Thank goodness I have a Typelist to help with my cop-out (look right).

I did write something today for public consumption, an abstract for an upcoming talk that might be of interest:

Enterprise software traditionally yields efficiencies by automating business processes within hierarchies to achieve economies scale and speed. However, in a services economy an increasing share of knowledge work is business practice supported by social networks. Environmental conditions are increasingly turbulent -- requiring greater lateral information flow, depreciating process and rewarding economies of span and scope.

To date, the majority of informal collaboration takes place with email and attachments. Email is no longer a productivity tool thanks to commercial and occupational spam. The latent value of communication is lost there is no institutional memory. Now software is returning to the collaborative roots of the Internet and the Democratic nature of the PC revolution.

Social Software adapts to its environment rather than requiring the environment to adapt to it. Entrusting users to make their own connections, share resources and design their own spaces while guided only by social convention surprisingly works. Relatively simple tools and rules reveal social networks and yield complex emergent behavior from the bottom-up. Perhaps there is greater value in augmenting our capabilities than automating them -- for organizations, emergent democracy and fostering social capital.

Return to Labor

Ever have one of those amazing weekends where you really unplug and tune into people and the beauty that's around you? We all have, but less these days.

I hope this Labor Day everyone had a chance to not only observe labor, but enjoy its fruits.