Time together is too important to spend working
-- Pete Kaminski (via Adina)
Michael Singer of Internet.com covers an enterprise view of the BlogOn event: The industry itself has shifted from its early adopter stage to an "awkward adolescence," according to experts attending last Friday's BlogOn 2004 conference here. But major IT players like Microsoft, IBM, and others are finding that they can embrace blogs instead of fearing them and transition the communication platform from a technical tool to an enterprise goldmine.
Socialtext CEO Ross Mayfield attributes much of the recent explosion in blogs to a ease of use and the relatively low cost aspects of the technology built on top of a Linux, Apache, MySQL, and Perl stack."Social media builds relationships. Connection happens before conversation, but still, this is business," Mayfield said. "What you will not find on your balance sheet is an underlying value proposition of enhancing social capital."
To clarify, there are a couple of points I believe I said. Social media puts emphasis on participatory publishing within the Social Software space. With Social Media and Social Software, conversation comes before connection. The relationship remains implicit with initial interactions (first comes the posts then explicit linking in blogrolls). With Social Networking, connection comes before conversation. The former is closer to how relationships form in real life. The latter is networking on steroids. Business has always been about relationships, Social Software is creating a business of relationsips.
The article mentions Microsoft's use of wikis in their developer community, "Whoever thought that people would want to help us edit Microsoft.com?" Jeff Sandquist said. And captures part of the conversation on Enterprise Social Software from my panel:
Jim Spohrer, IBM venture capital relations group CTO, said the company is seeing a lot of value that can be created inside organizations with tools like RSS, Atom and XML."Businesses can be more efficient in tapping into their internal IQ," Spohrer said. "I'm on calls every day with people all over the world, and it appears that there's a lot of value that could be captured instantly. There's a thing called Coase's Law that touches on transaction costs inside a firm versus transaction costs outside the firm. The point is to have the internal transaction costs as low as possible. This first hit home with me at a recent meeting. We went out to dinner, we're sitting around a table, and there were 15 people other than myself. There was a sense of discomfort I hadn't felt for a while, and I realized that I wished I was on a teleconference with these people. I couldn't use my tools to learn more about them and their work, their goals, their achievements. I felt I was in the Stone Age. I'd have to be very slow to get information and rely on conversation.
While this comment only covers meeting augmentation, syndication offers a great proposition for reducing transaction and total costs of ownership, a major proposition for Enterprise Social Software.
Jerry Michalski comments on the discomfort of not having meetings augmented by Social Software:
It's a slightly spooky scenario, but I'll confess to having wished for a heads-up display that projects inside a pair of glasses who's who at a cocktail party, including who used to work with whom, who's friends with whom (hey, orkut) and who's dating whom.
At Socialtext, our meetings are augmented by voice, IRC (with a bot to post to the wiki) and Workspace. By the end of each meeting, enough artifacts are captured in a social context to enable group memory. Similar to using an Eventspace at a conference. When we meet in person we find it to be terribly inefficient. But that said, there is no such thing as virtual beer, the kind of schmooze we go to events for anyway.
