Ross Mayfield's Weblog

Remixing Out Annoying Style

Every find a style of writing really annoying, although you like the content itself? Well apparently, Eric Richardson has built a way to remix a site to be less annoying.

The Gothamist local blogs are written by individuals, but in a pretentious plural tone. Here's part of an entry on Gothamist, by mattymatt:

...The only way that night could possibly be any better is if someone said the words "and a very special surprise appearance by Olivia Newton John." We know it's not likely. But the way things are going here, we wouldn't rule anything out.

And the same, on Singularist:

...The only way that night could possibly be any better is if someone said the words "and a very special surprise appearance by Olivia Newton John." I know it's not likely. But the way things are going here, I wouldn't rule anything out.

Ah, that's better, individual voice. Of course, this hack wouldn't be possible without Creative Commons licensing. I wonder how large media organizations would react to such remix, or the Gothamist for that matter.

Wisdom of Wikis

Sunir Shah on the Wisdom of Crowds in Wikis:

The key is that a wiki's brainstorm-point form-reform model is open to everyone in your company. Because it is accessible to everyone, it allows you to tap into the full collective intelligence of your entire company. Because you can reform and condense that intelligence down into knowledge and decisions, it helps push the whole organization forward just like in The Wisdom of Crowds, rather than just small parts of it. And the best part is that it doesn't overload manager's heads because everyone can do it. It's so easy.

I'd add that you also get the benefits of individual Blink-style decisions from tagging and refactoring supporting group intelligence

Editorial Structure and Social Media

John Battelle on the LA Times Wikitorial fiasco:

But when I read about this, I instantly recognized a core problem with the approach: it was top down community, rather than bottom up. Michael Kinsley, who created the site for the Times, was attempting to force a considered, editorial structure onto a set of readers who had yet to identify themselves or their own interests in any kind of structured way. It was doomed to fail, because communities can't be created by editorial structures - editorial structures must be created by communities.

...It's one thing for the LA Times to kill the trolls - that feels like censorship. It's another for the community itself to do it.

The traditional editorial structure that we call journalism was created by a community, of journalists. Part of the problem all along is that readers were not part of this community. As new communities are formed and old ones evolve with social media, not only do editorial structures need to emerge from the bottom up, but the social contracts that bind the top and bottom.

Another prime example of how the LA Times needs to evolve it's editorial structure is that the open letter to the editors goes unrecognized and unpublished. But that's okay, the community will find a home elsewhere.

Plagiarism of the Biggest Blogger in a Small Country

Coolhunter tells the story in Estonian how the biggest blogger in a small country, Kaur Kender, an accomplished writer, stopped blogging [via Mul on Savi]. Apparently the leading newspaper, Õhtuleht, published a post of his without compensation or attribution.

Not cool, or legal from my understanding of the Estonian rule of law. I used to write a translated opinion column for Õhtuleht and am shocked at the ignorance this report implies.

The funny thing is that in the Silicon Valley, our way to fix it isn't institutional. If the article was attributed under Creative Commons licensing, the economics would favor the author. So, we would work on helping the creative talent understand what's in their interest and help them assert the rights of copyleft.

Everywhere else except save China, we would apply institutional pressure to the offending party.

I'd be interested in more facts about this incident. A young and freer press seems to have it's development stunted.

Eneken Blogs

When my wife had a bachelorette party to go to, she asked what we should trade.  Things aren't so transactional, but I caught her off guard and said she could attend Blogher and start a blog.  It's in Estonian, so even I won't get most of it, but it's great thing. 

Mul on Savi means or "I've got clay," or in slang, "whatever."

Me, I'm babysitting during BlogHer.  Fair 'nuff.

Socialtext Comic Life

The other week we had the Socialtext team in town... Dave Sifry turned me on to Comic Life -- one of the most fun Mac Apps ever. You too can create a comic book with drag and drop goodness. Look how others are using it.

Speed Portals

Adina Levin just posted a concise summary on how wikis, weblogs and RSS are the next step in enterprise portals:

Corporations still need "home pages" to provide a shared set of starting points and departure paths. But the portal isn't the tool that publishes the content or manages the data aggregation. The publishing and subscription processes are being radically decentralized by the use of wikis, weblogs and RSS.

I'd add that Portals simply suffer from feedback deficit disorder (FDD).

Transitions

One of the hardest things about change is that it often involves good people.
We're keeping most of Socialtext as a distributed company, but as Socialtext Founders, we committed a while ago to move to the Bay Area when we took the step to get a physical office. I've written before about the rewards and sacrifices of Foundership. Ed Vielmetti, co-founder and VP of customer service, decided recently not to make the move. The change is constructive and Ed will always be a co-founder of Socialtext. In December of 2002 we took a great risk together, all wore a thousand hats, rolled up sleeves and worked against constraints. And I look forward to a long standing friendship.

Bye Bye, Vonage

We were enthralled with Vonage as a reliable and cheap VoIP service for our home phone. But after several weeks of non-service because of an error in their OSS and incompetent support, we're making the switch to Skype.

Most of our phone bill goes to calls with Estonia. Now we have an Estonian SkypeIn number and voicemail for 30 euros per year. Our friends and family in Estonia can call us for free (Joi did a similar international arbitrage trick with Vonage). SkypeOut is used for calling a handful of people who aren't on the network.

Skype numbers are available for Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Hong Kong, Poland, Sweden, the UK and US (not in major area codes from a quick glance). When other countries with ethnic diasporas are supported, I'd expect a significant switch because of the allure this arbitrage. Then imagine if they supported multiple SkypeIn numbers, not just for arbitrage, but as a decentralized PBX.

Skype is hardly perfect. We use it for Socialtext and it frequently hangs when people are trying to get together for a timed call. But for consumer use with mobile phones as a backup, phone companies are scared for a reason.

Browser Lock-in Ajaxed

Advertisers and Publishers point out that Ajax may have a negative impact on ad revenue, but that's just because an Ajax app that feeds heightened interactivity to Adwords hasn't been available yet.

Ajax lets us tool developers do cool stuff like click to edit without touching the server. We are designing past the limitations of the browser.

But as Firefox eclipses IE and the browser war just gets better -- what's the impact of Ajax? Think for a moment about what holds people back from switching:

• Form auto-complete -- well, less so these days with Ajax auto-complete, the main point
• Bookmarks -- well, less so these days with social bookmarking
• Authentication -- mixed bag these days, as more sites are using cookie-based auth
• Cookies -- that's the rub and cumble, love them and hate them
• Bandwidth -- now downloads and updates are almost fun
• Hardware -- now it's easy to run multiple browsers, at least for testing

On the one hand, Ajax lowers browser switching costs. On the other, it raises switching costs between sites.

I run Virtual PC on my Mac solely because I am dependent on websites like Quickbooks that chose Active X and thought IE meant security. I'm sure I will not have to for long. Ajax is a metaphor for the browser wars and scrubbing platforms clean.

Always On 2005

The third AO Summit was a blast, and if you missed it, the video and chat archive is available.  Some of the highlights were the Skype videocast from Estonia (wonder if I could get Tim Draper to do one of our board meetings in Tallinn), China with Sandy Berger, our panel on the Open or Closed Web, Bob Sutton's Dangerous Half Truths and a raucous panel with George Gilder, Bill Joy and Jaron Lanier on if Technology is Making us Safer.  By the third day, the content really kicked into gear. 

The photo above is by a jetlagged Steve Jurvetson.  I got a lot of great feedback that our panel stood out (partially because Marc Canter moderated) because issues of the open web are at the core of today's innovation.  Would be interested in your feedback.

Tony Perkins and Marc Canter gave us a sneak peek at their Open Media YASNS, GoingOn, which could be amazing if built.  You might recall that Socialtext provided big screen chat and wiki for the first Always On, a tradition that has continued in chaotic fashion to become one of the most entertaining frontchannels.

The other tradition I helped start, blogger passes, continues today to their credit.  Tony always throws a great party and this was no exception.

Is the Whole World Going Open Source?

Notes from a panel at AO on Is the Whole World Going Open Source.  Here is the video and chat archive of the session.

Ray Lane
Industry being democratized.  Interesting developments from other parts of the world.  Business models changing, the focus of Software CEOs, they know they need to change to something different from a salesperson pitching software for perpetual use.  Top 15 companies represent 84% of revenue.  Hundreds of companies without profit or value.  MSFT, ORCL, SAP = 75% of Profit pool.  <5% are really innovative.

Rahul Kapoor
Business rationale: open source is more stable and secure.  Diversity in open and closed source products and licenses.  We are still at the infancy of the open source, but what is mature is more stable.  Linux or Apache.

Jonathan Schwartz
Open source cures cancer.  CFO reaction to open source was grumpy, but explained that Linux didn't get in the data center because of their decisions.  Not anti-Microsoft, it's anti-expensive software.

Rod Smith
Businesses are recognizing risks and how to address them.  Microsoft used to put stuff out that helped you be productive in a matter of hours, now people go to open source for productivity.

Kim Polese
IT is now in the driver seat.  Every industry at some point figured out the need to standardize so they can focus on architecting the solutions. Open source solutions and mixed stacks will increasingly be what we see in the enterprise.  It's about an industry maturing.

Jonathan Schwartz
Three costs:

1. Cost of acquisition
2. Costs of operation
3. Cost of exit

In your average ERP app, significant cost and lockin.  With OSS 1 & 3 are nominal.

Marten Mickos
Open source was always the better way, even in the 50s or 60s.  Companies had a temptation of closing things for profit.  Today it's the same companies that have problems with open source.  Google and others do not have this issue.  More lines of code will be written on MySQL than Oracle.  Enterprise software is not just ERP, you have email, collaboration and others built on top of it.

Rod Smith
Businesses think they are in the drivers seat.  They always know their problem is a bit different and need to tap communities to commoditize.  Open source communities are a way to mitigate risk.

Rahul
On open source motivators...If you are a business, price has to be a factor.  China moving because they don't want to be dependent.  If it is open source, I know what it is I am using.  Cost of operations includes the legal/IP aspect.

Jonathan
Customers frustrated because they are locked in.

Ray
Customers want to buy open, but implement closed.

Jonathan
If SAP was open, would it matter? (Ray argues that there would be better economics)  Where it matters is in replaceable applications.

Rod
Setting up with new suppliers quickly as an example motivation. 

On new business models... 
Rahul: need for service, integration, mechanism to help open source packages work together. 
Kim: the value of the business is shifting from bits to services.  Testing, information, integration wanted by CIOs.  Moving from the basic LAMP out to the long tail, applications to really run their businesses.
Marten: millions of net-connected developers that can innovate themselves, even as users with open source.

Rod
If you look at the skill level of people doing innovation, it's people with a little scripting skills, but deep domain expertise -- not PhDs.

Jonathan
slams Redhat distro.  Single biggest impact of OSS is it drops the cost of getting a product down to zero.  The fact that they can add and enhance to it is a little less important.  (Ray: I get better responses for bug fixes with open source) Jonathan with MySQL there are 500k people ready to help.

Rod
They are actually very process driven, they have wikis to coordinate.

Kim
Interoperability has not just been an open source issue.  Testing is rising in prominence.  DrKW CIO: testing and certification is how open source comes together, refactoring the biggest shift.

Marten
LAMP is not just four letters, you have lots around it like SugarCRM.  In just a few years it has grown to be a similar alternative to .Net and J2EE.

Kim
SugarCRM is a new breed of enterprise apps, gaining traction.  But when they use it they have to make it work with other parts.  We created an integrated installer that gets it up and running with the LAMP stack in minutes.  People also like extending SugarCRM.

Marten
Very few people buy cars and open the engine, but the assurance that you can get at the engine is necessary.

Jonathan
This is a replacement for source code escrow.

Rod
Open source doesn't address everything, standards are important.

Kim
Now that I am going beyond the LAMP stack, I want one source of support.

Jonathan
It's about changing the barriers to adopting your product in the short run.  Open standards matter more than open source in the long run.  Firefox is being adopted because it is a better browser than alternatives.

Ray
Similarly, it's either a good business or not for VCs, not whether it is open or closed.

Marten
Open source says we can't predict all your needs, so we leave it open for you to innovate.

Rod
Hybrid models coming out.  You want the innovation, but also want to get to the customer to make sure you are delivering value.

Had to go to the ready room before my panel, so couldn't take notes on the Q&A.

Where's the Vertical Exit?

Vertical Search is one of the hottest sectors these days, with startups being built to flip in every vertical and horizontal you can think of.  Reminds me of B2B, although there is decided value being created by many of them.

But doesn't it strike you as odd that there hasn't been any Vertical Search acquisitions?  I might be wrong here, but it does seem like a very big assumption that the otherwise acquisitive search players will buy instead of build.  Maybe it's just to early.

UPDATE, from comments:

• Shopping.com acquired by eBay
• workzoo acquired by Jobster

 

Dvorak on Wikis

John C. Dvorak on wikis:

The most talked-about thing going on right now is the wiki.

That's the first sentence, from there he goes on in his usual fashion to say wikis doomed, entropic, deterorating and utopian. Funny stuff.

Nobody Expects the Cubicle Escape Pod

Been too busy to mention that I was interviewed on the Cubicle Escape Pod last week on entrepreneurship.  Fun show, and the guys are working on some kind of KM-mod called Modcasting.

Funny how a stranger came up to me last week and said I must be really busy, given the dearth of posts.  Yeah.

The Things we Forget

Lately I have been thinking about the things we forget. Think how Englebart invented everything we are trying to implement today. Sure it is easier, perhaps even possible. But perhaps because it hasn't been built yet, it's really hard to build upon the work that preceded us.

We laud blogs as a personal memory bank, but it is limited to our memory. And search to augmenent. I do think, despite obvious tool bias, that Wikipedia and more specialized and private wikis hold the chance of constructive recall. Wikipedia doesn't defeat Google, yet. But how we accrete knowledge today still sucks (time, at least).

So let me share an honest story about enterprise wiki use. We recently improved search in Socialtext by what I perceive as a 10x enhancement. I say perceived, because any search enhancement is not something you can purely measure, but is a function of user experience. Sure, I can say that it's friggin' fast and have metrics to back it up. But making it fast, expanding it's scope to include MS Office enhancements, or limiting it's scope by tag let's you discover what may be relevant. Relevance is is in the proverbial eye of the user.

The point is that good search combined with wicked fast page and editor load enables a different mode of wiki use. The easy way to create a wiki is messy. A repository (non-PC term being garbage dump).

Some repositories rely on structure to restrict our inclination to dump. Dumping is inherently human, we give brain dumps and want to as a function of sharing. We create waste and want the system to recycle. Any system is inherently powered by systems and isn't closed. We may automate to gain efficiencies, but unless it augments the system simply processes instead of augments.

But as designers, no matter how much we believe in the perfection of our expertise or what we may create, it still sucks. And the perfection of how users use is several orders below what we intend.

Still we structure. Bind users with rules we think is best. If they obey, the world is in order. At least our small world, perfect world, Such is the folly of thinking you are a designer. Ego is easy. Knowing that the people who really can grant you ego are the people you don't intimately know is knowing when you have been psyched out or when you are affirmed. When you apply structure you are governing others. A power to wield graciously. Something easy to put aside for sake of progress, but that's just your short term progress.

I am a pompous ass, but stay with me...

So, we are building a wiki. We can slap on structure and call it a panacea. If you think past one use, you may believe it, and buy into it. But life, and work, isn't static -- and it is diverse.

So you are building a wiki. You can certainly learn great practices to keep a tidy garden as it seeks to grow around you. But you can't boil it all down to forms and structure and get real contribution. People already have that, and they don't use it ( they use email instead). Embracing mess offers a third way to enable contribution and delivery value.

This is a round-about way to say that the dumping ground use case for wikis is not just accessible, but valid. Good search enables people to get past form applications, even get pass formality of contribution practices. It let's us simply contribute, knowing that we can recall later. Others can recall, edit it, link or tag it, and it will pop back to top of mind if it is important. We can forget when immediately processing what crosses our desk when we have confidence in rapid recall.

Today we don't have good enough search, at least to us. It relies on people being smart in how they discover. But we can acknowledge what we have built and where it needs to go. Openly, you might even help us take it in a better direction.

Team in Town

The whole Socialtext team is in town this week. Some will meet their co-workers for the very first time.

Given all the F2F time, light posting is expected this week. And hope to see you Thursday night.

Fridge as Philosophy

Chris Dent posted a Manifesto: Fridge as Philosophy of Everything

Architect your hardware, your software and your life so your environment helps you out and you don't have to waste your brain deciding on things that shouldn't need deciding.

A nice read that ties in system architecture, personal productivity, simplicity and Engelbart.

Apology to the iTunes People

When I mistakenly tagged iTunes for introducing DRM into Podcasting, I offered a few apologies.  But I forgot to apologize to the iTunes people.  I guess because it's easy to forget there are people there (are they even allowed to Podcast? or mention they work for Apple when Podcasting?).

Anyway, I shouldn't have left those people out.  I apologize and hope you keep working through the issues and making cool stuff.

Socialtext Ice Cream Social

Summer is here and it's time for the first Socialtext Ice Cream Social. Please help us celebrate our new office in downtown Palo Alto. The team is in town and looking forward to meeting you at Gordon Biersch Thursday night.  Join us for drinks, eats and ice cream that's not just for kids.

Naturally, we are asking people to sign up on this wiki page.

If you are thinking of coming, please add your name before Tuesday so I can determine if we take the big space.

London Bombings

What a horrible thing to wake up and have this at the top of your aggregator, see the story collected (Wikipedia is the best source during a disaster) and look for check-ins from people you know.  I can only admire the resolve of Londoners and wish them peace. 

If you haven't tried Wikipedia Animate, winner of waxy's contest, point it at the Wikipedia page and sit back.  You'll find early edits such as "Nobody knows what's going on WHOLY SHIT!!!!?~!!111!11!" evolve with thousands of edits into collective understanding.

Poicemail

I figure I should help prototype this whole Podcasting is the New Voicemail thing, and am asking my friends for help.

If you have my mobile number, please Podcast a ringtone for me. Keep it short, about 15 seconds. You can make it rude, add fart noises and the like, but when I answer it I will be sure to explain to those around me and hand out your URL. I'm going to use Ringo to add custom .mp3 ringtones to my Treo.

Double bonus points for something I can use for my answering machine, Carl Kasell style.

Shouldn't all this stuff be a feature?

How to Open Content

This post is a summary of wikiHow to Open Content, written in eHow format.

Steps

1. Buy a dot com out of hock
2. Select an wiki and adapt it to your content
3. Work with your community
4. Adopt Creative Commons licensing
5. Help it grow by sharing control

Tips

• Focus on developing the right social contract for your community.
• Bring up the licensing question early
• Consider open source wiki alternatives
• Bootstrap and moonlight

Warnings

• There is no analytical framework for the decision to open intellectual property
• Your existing community may not understand the benefits of Copyleft
• Bloggers may rightly give you hell for leaning Copyright

Customer Disservice

Om notes that Skype eclipsed Vonage in blog buzz. Normally I try not to blog about customer disservice, but let me help Vonage a bit.

I spent two hours on my cell phone talking to Vonage support. Escalated from one guy that couldn't speak any language from what I could tell, to another who said they weren't allowed to help with the problem, to another who ran me ragged with power cycling. The basic issue is their records think I have two ATA boxes. Fourth tier is management and they still don't know how to fix it. They promised to ship a new ATA box by Friday, who knows if it will show up Tuesday. They don't do truck rolls. The saga continues.

Why will Skype destroy Vonage? The service model.

Affective Media

Don't get me wrong, LIVE 8 was an amazing media feat.  Yes, it may be an inflection point, from cable to the net, from MTV to remix your own.  That, itself, is a victory for consumers.  But isn't there a certain irony for celebrating a victory for more consumer choice and control for a handful -- around an event on global poverty?  Is the highpoint of net-enabled media a mass entertainment event that draws us to SMS or click on a petition and feel we have done our part?

We love our technology and models of media, but we can't forget the cause (no matter how complex) and what we can do.

At Supernova, a gamer claimed that the capacities of those engaged in gaming was advancing past the rest of us.  Seemed so familiar.  And sometimes the way other bloggers help me learn makes me believe the same.

Our newer media, helps us when it engages us by deeply engaging us in the issues to understand them.  But it also enables us to effect change by organizing action. 

Maybe I have it wrong, and should celebrate all the conversations that have occurred.  It's fairly pompus to say we can do more.  Or maybe I'm hoping a handful of people are moved to build something.

"Poverty is not natural. It is man made and can be overcome by the actions of human beings." -- Nelson Mandela

Typepad Comments

This is only going to be of interest to Typepad users and commenters.

Typepad 1.6 has some good anti-comment spam measures and other goodies.  I enabled Typekey instead of the new comment moderation feature, for sake of time.  If I can think up a fair moderation policy, I may switch, as people can now optionally subscribe to comments by email for sake of discussion.

If you make changes with this release, be sure and follow the instructions, including republishing every single Typelist, or your blog will be fubar'd.

UPDATE: Apologize for continually rebuilding the site, having trouble getting Typekey for comments working.  Reverting to moderated comments with a simple policy: you have to own your own words.