Ross Mayfield's Weblog

Mr. Institutional Memory

[via Rick Klau via Joy]

The Web as a Platform

Really looking forward to the Web 2.0 Conference next week. John Battelle just invited participants into a private Eventspace -- the web platform for the web as a platform event. Folks are already posting good questions to speakers and signing up for workshops.

I'm providing a workshop on Enterprise Social Software with Socialtext Customer Mike Pusateri from Disney. You might recall his great presentation at the at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Confererence in February. Mike and his team are leading the way with how they are using lightweight web-native tools as a platform for productivity. Not just how they use Socialtext for project communication, but how they stitch it together Moveable Type and Newsgator for an ecosystem of tools with RSS.

Wiki AP

The Associated Press has an article on wikis that highlights Socialtext. Steve Rubel:

AP's Nick Jesdanun has written an overview of Wikis that basically says the tools have the power to change how we live and work, replacing e-mail as a collaboration tool. I can already hear Ross Mayfield's cash register ringing!

Have to admit like the sound of that.

Distinctiveness From Implementation

Nicholas Carr, Don Tapscott face off on whether IT really does matter in an InfoWorld article. A topic I've been chiming in on for a long time. Carr keeps beating his dead but differentiated horse:

"Distinctive systems once provided competitive barriers," Carr said..."But barriers have eroded as accessibility, affordability and standardization have increased," Carr said. The economies of scale that standardized open systems provide has outweighed the costs of the temporary advantages that proprietary systems offer, Carr argued.

And Tapscott takes him to task:

"Companies can use IT to transform business processes that are not easy to replicate," Tapscott told the IDG News Service after his address. "New business processes can help drive new business models that are even harder to replicate, and can transform the whole culture of a company, which is even more difficult, and may be even impossible, to replicate."

The other part of this debate is John Seely Brown's view of Social Software, to let workers: “collectively improvise and innovate.”

At the core, this means the ease of group forming with simple tools to solve problems and adapt processes. As evidence, almost every single use case for Socialtext has been invented by our customers over the last couple of years. Why? Because users themselves, not designers, experts or managers, can create information architecture and simple applications.

Distinctiveness comes not just from systems, but in most cases, how users use them. Cases in point include user created customer care, day-to-day coordination and more. Productivity is always a people problem, and people are the best at solving them, its their own pain.

Service Level Expectations and the Pursuit of 9s

Dave Sifry shares the cascading hell that can happen with service operations:

The colo fire has led to a cascade of failures that has caused the Technorati service to be down for most of the weekend. It's also giving me a lot more respect for people who build and maintain 100% uptime of services, the trials and tribulations they go through, and also the cost of being operationally excellent.

Technorati and other consumer web services have the luxury of service quality being perceived. As an enterprise social software provider, part of service is user satisfaction, as Judith noted last month:

Kudos to Socialtext—a social software service that I never find down, or slow, or broken while utilizing the 15+ workspaces that I belong to there. This is markedly different than the experience on one or two other ‘social software’ related offerings that are ‘broken’ on occasions too numerous to count!

But operational excellence for serving enterprises with critical applications also demands a service level agreement. Hats off to our VP of Service, Ed Vielmetti, for more than SysAdmin appreciation day. He has a dedicated focus on improving our security and operations policies and procedures, despite constrained resources that not only gains us customer satisfaction, but allows us to extend the service level agreements our customers demand. What's been remarkable for me is also how he also documents his work in wiki so we can give quick answers to customers, provide transparency to resolve exceptions and enables new team members to get up to speed quickly.

Glasses for Humanity

I had one of those what can I do today moments with the idea of donating in-kind to Glasses for Humanity. 90% of eye glasses are wasted -- and Robert Tolmach's foundation is one of the most cost-effective forms of public health intervention for the developing world and beyond. I had eye training years ago to correct my vision years ago, put them on for the first time in 15 years, and noticed a difference in how I stare at my laptop. Ugh. Good intentions gone blurry.

Startup Philanthropy

Brad Feld highlights examples of startup philanthropy. Salesforce.com mixes donation and employee service with 1% of their employees time, 1% of their equity, and 1% of their profits to the Salesforce.com Foundation. Rally Software has a 1% fund for their local community.

This week, StillSecure announced that they are taking a similar step and donating 1% of revenue through 12/31/04 to the Lance Armstrong Foundation. Like Ryan, Raj Bhargava - StillSecure's CEO - has a strong personal philanthropic philosophy. With this action, he's integrating this philosophy and awareness into his company with an immediacy that is impressive. StillSecure is still a young company so it doesn't have the infrastructure to create a foundation, but Raj and his team are laying the groundwork today for having StillSecure have a component of its business that is philanthropically aware and subsequently more tightly integrated into its community.

Too many entrepreneurs leave philanthropy for when they personally succeed. The benefits of a philanthropy program go beyond cause-related marketing, its a way of engaging communities and employee satisfaction. Donating revenue is a difficult step for an early stage company, and there are alternatives. Providing employees time for worthwhile pursuits (Socialtext employees contribute on their own initiative to non-profits, politics and open source) lays the groundwork for programmatic efforts to come. Providing discounts and a commitment to serve academic institutions and non-profits helps build a more robust network of customers. In-kind donations take this a step further, but needs to be done in a non-discriminative program.

The simple step any startup can take is to make social contribution part of the vision and mission of the company at a formative stage. If you plan on success, recognize that its partially due to supportive communities -- and have a plan for what to do with success at each stage.

Airport Express

Using the CNET Bandwidth Meter, this my connection on Airport Express (1120.3 kbps) and this is my connection on my old hotspot (837.1 kbps). That's 5 dial-up accounts. Although performance is more dependent upon the WAN than the LAN and requires greater sampling, its nice to know the modest difference between 802.11a and 802.11g. Also a noticable difference in range, but now I wish I had other Apple Airports to mesh. Playing music from iTunes works great, haven't tried printer sharing. But the best thing is having a hotspot in your pocket for travels.

Looksmart Acquires Furl

Looksmart acquired social link manager Furl.

Makes sense for a search engine that prides itself on hand-picked web sites organized into categories to enlist users to do some of the hand-picking. Should be an interesting case of when communities and ontologies collide. My guess is that Looksmart saw more than than a complement to help compete against features at the social fringes of things like A9, but recognizing the bottom-up disruption occurring in search.

Venture Capital Blogs

The Mercury News has a roundup of our neighborly VC bloggers. You really have to hand it to them for making a private equity a little more, well, public.

Sometimes a cheat sheet is better than a term sheet, below are some of the better ones in no particular order:

• How to Shop for Venture Money
• Valuation
• Valuation Methods
• Beauty Contests and Venture Valuations
• The Exploding Termsheet
• Participating Preferred
• What Does Pro-rata Mean?
• Operator or Investor VC?
• When Technology Lead Doesn't Matter
• Accelerating Acceleration
• When VC Isn't Right
• Financial Fitness for Entrepreneurs
• Running an efficient board meeting
• Putting the "Power" In Powerpoint
• Torturous Powerpoint
• Investor Rationale for Newsgator
• VC Clichés
• We don't like surprises
• Being Diligent

Its a little cliché, but venture blogging has put a human face and open rationale for what is a mysterious process for many. You quickly learn that the venture boys have their own lives and interests. Also of interest is Jeff Nolan's blog which is like getting VentureWire for free with honest commentary and the VCs that dabble through AlwaysOn. I've been pleasantly surprised at the level of civility that venture bloggers receive, given the generic blame pointed at them since the crash -- something that should encourage new voices to join the chorus.

As an entrepreneur, there is no better reference for who I might choose to work with over a long term than their long term reputation and thoughts shared through blogging.

If you have a favorite resource, share it on this wiki page.

Wikipedia Surpasses 1 Million Articles

Joi Ito:

Wikipedia has just announced that it has reached one million articles. Congratulations Wikipedians! Wikipedia is in more than 100 languages with 14 currently having over 10,000 articles. It is ranked one of the ten most popular sites on the Internet according to Alexa.com(trumping Reuters, the Wall Street Journal and the LA Times). At the current rate of growth, Wikipedia will double in size again by next spring.

Too many people to congratulate. To put this in perspective, if each article took 1 person week to produce, getting the next million would take 40,000 full-time equivalent resources to get it done in the same amount of predicted time. Co-incidentally Wikipedia has about the same amount of registered users, but they have day jobs too.

Mobile Majority

This is one kind of political speculation worthy of engagement. What if political polls were false because they failed to sample the coming mobile majority? The answer to this question contains a skew. Let's figure it out.

Update: Here's a great summary of the issue, via Dave Winer. Samples are skewing right, 5% of phones (and growing) are cell-only, cold-calling cell phones is against the law. With unrepresentative samples, purchased call lists, closed models, statistical massaging and more its hard to say why you would trust polls today and its going to get worse.

Media Value Unchained

I got the preview of this over coffee yesterday, Tim Oren's analysis of the disruption of the media value chain, as evidenced by Rathergate, is an absolute must read:

...But from an investor's perspective, there's the possibility that one of the major value chains in modern society - media and advertising - will be rearranged, at least in part. That makes an economic analysis of the issue rather interesting...

Tim goes on to discuss transaction costs, how search cost incent bundling, which is furthered by economies of scale in traditional media. Subscriptions are bundles, a model that relies on renewing churn instead of investing into sustaining content quality. His primary assertion is that Rathergates will force unbundling because one bad item leads media consumers loose trust in the whole. Add to that the ability for consumers to create their own bundles, which begs the big question: If the winds of change have blown apart the legacy media bundles, can the value of transaction cost reduction be recreated in another fashion, and revenue extracted for it?

Tim speculates that the new media value chain could include components of:

• Google's bundling around declared interests rather than demographics (IMHO, that's a better description of the social networking ad proposition and it gives too much credit for context)
• RSS Aggregation enabling users to generate their own bundles, which Tim points out is great for delivering user value, but hasn't extracted value, yet.
• Technorati's approach for reducing search costs for micro-content: But, there's also the problem of a lacking business case. Perhaps that can be found from the advertisers' side. If promotion to demographic or general interest bundles is giving way to selling by influence, then tracking the conversation becomes of value. Technorati appears to be a radical unbundling hypothesis on both the reader and advertiser sides.

Jeff Jarvis suggest some other ways to play this game, now that its afoot: In this new distributed, unbundled, post-marketplace, molecular, commoditized media world, value can be added in many ways. It's about relationships. It's about relevancy. It's about service. It's about uniqueness. It's about perspective.

Now if this level of disruption is happening around us, traditional media would be resisting commoditization greater than it is. After all, the Innovator's Solution has been written. Rex Hammond provides a case for sustaining media value that I would summarize comes from branding. But branding is built upon trust, and Tim's first point is that its being shattered.

Someone pointed out to me today that Rathergate is unfortunately an adversarial event. Most blogged to death and fact-checked ass issues are because identities are so strong. But we have to have our victories to get a sense that participation matters.

Last night's Future Salon on the Tao of Extreme Democracy was about the opposite, how collective sense making with diverse groups works, empowering participation and driving constructive institutional change. Yin is to wikis as Yang is to blogs.

To see the future of trust in media, look how strangers are learning to trust each other by sharing control with wikis. Besides transaction and search costs falling to enable user bundling as readers, for both blogs and wikis, transaction costs are falling for users as writers and the search costs and coordination risks for finding who to write with. Both with RSS in hand are more efficient at bundling at a moment in time.

I'll assert that wikis have unprecedented ability to bundle a product whose quality increases over time. Once you have participated in Wikipedia, because the transaction costs are so low and the brand benefits of participation are so high, you never churn, you'll be back. Even Yogi Berra wouldn't say of Wikipedia: nobody goes there anymore, its too crowded.

Some ask why I am dabbling in we media and new ad models, given what my company does. A large part of it is that we are an enabler, but its also that understanding new production and distribution models of media teach you how an enterprise really works in our so-called knowledge economy. On another day I'll make it clearer that media isn't the only value chain being disrupted by social economics.

Yell At Me

The Canada Globe and Mail has an article on wikis as a shortcut to cost savings. It discusses internal use as well as customer facing.

In addition to running an employees-only Wiki that is protected by a firewall, Xten used a Wiki platform to beta test its latest VoIP software product, eyeBeam. The code was made available to potential customers such as large telcos and cable carriers, who explored it and published feedback to the Wiki.

"Testers can download the code or upload a fix to it. It's a great interactive forum for building software," Mr. Lagerway said. He added that the interface of his open-source Wiki package wasn't "pretty" and there was little technical support, but it was "functional" for his company's needs.

"For large uptake you're going to need a commercial product with more polish and better documentation. You're going to want someone that you can call and yell at when something isn't working right," Mr. Lagerway said.

You are darn right. Call and yell at me anytime, that's my job.

Patents, RFCs and Reputation

Here's a thought, which is more valuable: the Eolas Patent on browser plugins or Dave Crocker's RFC for email?

Eolas recieved a half a billion settlement from Microsoft, and the original inventors could realize a considerable reward, if appeals reach an end. I'm using Eolas as one of the perfect examples of pure return, and this is in no way a knock against the inventors. A patent and a standard are hard to compare because the process of invention is so different. But to you personally and society the answer is clearly the latter.

The real question is, have standards surpassed patents in reputational return?

My supposition is yes, not just because the patent system is so dysfunctional and abused. But because communal inventors have set great examples for how to spend their social capital.

Aaron Swartz is right to be proud and congratulated on RFC 3870.

Tao of Extreme Democracy Future Salon

Tomorrow night I'm speaking at the Tao of Extreme Democracy Future Salon with Zack Rosen of CivicSpace (formerly DeanSpace, which supports sites like Mitch Kapor supported Baobabs) and Tom Atlee, author of the Tao of Democracy.

We'll be talking Extreme Democracy from 6-9pm at SAP Labs North America, Building D, Room Southern Cross, 3410 Hillview Avenue, Palo Alto.

Hey Joe

Its time I tip my hat to Joe Kraus in the tradition of linking to competition. Joe is working on another wiki company, Jot. Its September 15th, and the PR plan must call for blogging just prior to coming out of stealth, but regardless, Joe is on the same side of changing business for good.

QuantumArt

For sake of full disclosure, I joined the Board of Advisors of QuantumArt, which has a different take on content management systems and RSS/Atom they will start talking about soon. When they start talking about it, I will as well. I would anyway because their CEO is a friend and its pretty cool stuff.

Socialtext Atom Support

Adina Levin posts on the Socialtext Weblog about our support for Atom. Its less about the Atom syndication format than the API at this point (using a Kwiki plugin), and has really got me writing more in Etco (an offline editing client whose latest version simply rocks).

If the above means nothing to you, consider this: by supporting open standards, our product just got a whole lot better because of its ecosystem. Soon I'll be writing anywhere and publishing anywhere.

Subway Perception

When I was an Intern in DC, I was dependent upon the subway for exploring a new city. At first, I only took the red line between office and home, but gradually used the tube to get to different neighborhoods. Each stop was an entry point into a different world. Only rarely did I walk between stations. So even with a map of the city, I gained a sense of space similar to a gopher with eyes sensitive to sunlight.

When I moved back after college, after a cross-country trip, I found myself with a car. The distance between metro stations proved to be smaller than I thought. No longer was I a subterranean gnome. My world not only expanded, but I connected the dots to find it smaller.

Most web traffic flows through a few key portals. As people learn the command line or follow blogs, its a experience of expanding and connecting space, because of the availability of context. Maps help, but can't compete with landmarks and journeys.

Foo Camp Friends

Had a wonderful time at Foo Camp this year, described as "A Face-to-Face Wiki." Seeing how the first Foo was an experiment in the simplest thing that possibly work and somehow did, there was no way to top the first eureka. I expect the self-organizing approach to become a feature of many events. Partially because of the tools, partially because of the economics and access to the practice. Heck, there is even AnarchistU, a free school running on wiki, as an example of how far this can go.

But this time, it was less about the fascination of the format, or even the new tools and projects, but the simple conversations between new and old friends. There was wonderful contrast to the sessions themselves, from David Weinberger sharing about his meta meta book project to a session on Categories/Tags as the new Folders, or solid talk of fostering open calendaring/contacts/rss to good thinking about communication tools with context. Memes were spawned and new beginnings hatched. People were hacking Kwiki plugins in the dead of night and coming together to form a FeedMesh.

Foo got a little older this year, with more people bringing their families. I brought Eveli (pictured left) who immediately made new friends, got to ride a Segway and needed so little supervision that it truly made me feel old and proud. With so many week long or weekend conferences, being family friendly should be more than a necessity. After all, its what we are working for.

Foo2Foo

Nat Friedman 2 Tim O'Reilly: "Foo Camp is like a Face-to-Face Wiki"

Foo Bound

Heading to Foo Camp with Eveli.

Personal Softswitch

My ideal Lazyweb, the last telephony arbitrage.

The first telecom arbitrage of the PC era was callback: a foreign caller would call a softswitch in the US, enter a destination, hang up, the software would call both the originator and the destination and bridge the two together.

Today an increasing number of consumers have softswitches in the home with VoIP services like Skype. But more people can use these services with the convenience of mobile phones that can leverge wifi, there is a need to phone home, or through home. This would let you route around last miles, captured locations and roaming long distances.

A personal softswitch would let you dial to your VoIP account, which in turn dials out to a final destination.

Of course, I called something the last telephony arbitrage before, and there may be others, so lets call this the final arbitrage.

RSS Consumption or Production

Scoble theorizes that RSS has bandwidth cost scaling limits, because aggregators ping for updates more than normal HTML traffic patterns. Mostly because the default for aggregators is to ping hourly.

Perhaps the solution is changing defaults. Or perhaps this is a sign that we should be producing content in at least hourly interviews to give the readers what they want.

Now get to work...

Do Wikis Have a Place in the Newsroom?

Mark Glaser, in the Online Journalism Review asks a very big question: Do Wikis Have a Place in the Newsroom? He covers the latest tests to Wikipedia authority, the Wemedia Project and gets comment on public wikis:

"Most user-generated content isn't content, but conversation," Mayfield said. "Cultivating community is a decided practice. It boils down to the social contract you make with your readers-turned-writers. If they trust that their effort and words will be appropriated appropriately, while providing social incentives for participation, it can very well work. Of course, fostering this kind of trust means giving up control -- something I don't think most traditional media is ready for."

And private workspaces:

If Wikipedia has some value as a journalist's resource, what about the wikis themselves? Within news organizations, a password-protected wiki might be valuable for editors and reporters as a workspace for their story in progress. At the least, an internal wiki might help as a small repository of shared knowledge. Your story budget could be a wiki. Your staff covering sports might start a wiki of all their sources, and how good they are.

The BBC is already using wikis internally to help streamline their work, according to Wales. And Socialtext's wiki software has been in use at 1Up.com, a Ziff Davis news site for gamers. Mayfield says 1Up.com even tried a group wiki to gather the news of Nintendo's new handheld gaming device.

Mayfield believes the rise of participatory journalism might lead to wikis that allow journalists to collaborate with sources and readers. "Consider if reporters shared their coveted notebooks openly," he said. "If they shared sources and copy didn't end on the newsroom floor. If bylines ebbed and flowed, and even contained those outside the newsroom. If the newsroom developed a group memory even after people moved on."

Read the whole thing.

Wikis Anonymous

Brian Lamb has a great article on wikis in academia in EDUCAUSE Review. I didn't interview for the piece (would have shared how academic communities in Stanford [our very first customer], Berkeley, USC and others are using Socialtext with our discounted academic and non-profit pricing), but Brian more than did his homework and sources from some of the better posts at Many-to-Many by Clay, Liz and myself. He even ends the piece with this:

Please, grant me the serenity to accept the pages I cannot edit, The courage to edit the pages I can, And the wisdom to know the difference —The Wiki Prayer

The actual serenity prayer by Reinhold Niebuhr is used in every Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. I raise this point to tie issues of privacy and anonymity in wikis. Back when Socialtext started, our hard security approach caused a stir with some on Meatball, although Workspaces can be easily made public or private, something Brian covers:

Many wiki systems employ more structured architectures than Cunningham’s WikiWikiWeb and feature password protection, private spaces, IP banning, and other “hard security” measures. Socialtext (http://www.socialtext.com/), an “enterprise social software” company based in Palo Alto, is pioneering efforts to integrate open-space approaches within corporate IT environments. Socialtext CEO Ross Mayfield notes that Socialtext’s “Security and Operations Policies and Procedures meet the demands of most IT organizations.”13 It’s arguable whether such approaches are true to the original vision of Cunningham’s WikiWikiWeb, but they do suggest that moderated wiki practices can function effectively within corporate environments.

Back when Ward was an advisor, we had some good discussions about this, how it was necessary for organizations, and I can tell you it wasn't outside his vision. I can't emphasize the obvious enough. That without some privacy for groups, participants can't share. Similar to how AA members are able to open themselves up to strangers provided they are anonymous to the outside world. Heck, the US wouldn't exist if anonymity wasn't provided for contributors to the Federalist Papers.

Chris Allen defines four kinds of privacy: defensive privacy, human-rights privacy, personal privacy, and contextual privacy. For most spaces and cases, the issue for wikis is contextual privacy, or what danah called the ickiness factor when something is socially off-kilter when context shifts.

The point of providing privacy or anonymity may be moot if there isn't a sustainable solution to online security and trust -- thrusting us into a transparent society. But we still have a choice to submit to the always on panopticon.

Of course, privacy comes at an opportunity cost for others to build upon your contributions. Negotiating context shifts over time proves to be the most difficult, socially and even legally, to let resources accrete value. Setting the mission and vision of a space requires a great deal of forward looking imagination while balancing the basic need to define a social context for sharing.

Coping with Accelerating Change

Steve Jurveston blogs about Kurzweilian accelerating change and does his own research on how things were 100 years ago:

...In 1900, in the U.S., there were only 144 miles of paved road, and most Americans (94%+) were born at home, without a telephone, and never graduated high school. Most (86%+) did not have a bathtub at home or reliable access to electricity. Consider how much technology-driven change has compounded over the past century, and consider that an equivalent amount of progress will occur in one human generation, by 2020. It boggles the mind, until one dwells on genetics, nanotechnology, and their intersection...

And poses some very big questions:

Exponential progress perpetually pierces the linear presumptions of our intuition. “Future Shock” is no longer on an inter-generational time-scale. How will society absorb an accelerating pace of externalized change? What does it mean for our education systems, career paths, and forecast horizons?

The best person I know to help answer these questions is Zack Lynch, but I'll make a little point. Making sense of and adapting to change is both a personal and shared discovery. When change is the one constant, and it isn't even a constant, technologies that help us cope with it will be as valuable as those that cause it. You see this in other markets where tools to help manage complexity (e.g. virtualization of IT) are at a premium today. I have little doubt that neurotechnology will play a major role in making us cognizant of change. Its almost a shameless plug to say that societal changes will be aided by social software. But consider how very early adopters, even if they thrive on change personally, are able to make collective sense of new technologies so quickly. It also helps that the characteristics of social media, impermanent and malleable by all, embrace change.

FireFox Toolbar

FireFox Toolbar rocks.

All the things I miss about the Google Toolbar, but includes Blog This for major blogging platforms, 17 search engines including Technorati, Feedster and Bloglines.

Breather

I've just got to say that taking the week of the Republican Convention as a breather from blogging (here anyway) was of great relief.

Meanwhile, life happened. School schedule commenced. Bowling birthday party with zero injury. Read to the kids in a park. Coaching soccer this fall. Mother-in-law emigrated from Estonia and already has a job. Played soccer and volleyball. Broke bread with some old friends and new ones. Meeting the local community in ways I never anticipated. After working through the summer, September came fast, but its nice to have these suburban nuggets in the midst of it all.