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Some wisecracks:
If Ross Mayfield developed a ‘best blogs’ list, it might look like this.
Well, of course, it's a wiki. Slashing rankism with a double edged sword.
And if you prefer more robust and hard-coded methodology: Issue Influence Index
Spent the weekend in Vegas celebrating my 10th Anniversary. The airport wasn't technically Vegas, so I can blog this bit. As should have been expected, missed a 8am flight on Sunday. Because of Oversells, we were on standby for 11 hours to no avail. It was like the movie Terminal in a bar and no smoking rules. Too bad I don't gamble. Also had a board meeting this morning, so give me a couple of days to recover to blogging.
The slogan What Happens in Here, Stays Here is the best tagline -- ever.
Time to break down the tents and celebrate another successful camp. So what came out of it?
The structure of speed geeking (speed dating for geeks) and wooden nickles to vote on the best API encouraged more prior development than on the spot. A few startups used it as a venue to launch. There was a hack that occured over at MuchoCamp (more on that later), not sure what else was mashed on the spot.
There were concrete collaborations, namely StandardsForApiDocumentation which will bring needed transparency for developers. I hosted a conversation on CommodityAPIContract -- an effort to define standard commercial terms for APIs (and SaaS, potentially, which really needs it).
Reuters is hosting a Financial Glossary Wiki, a fascinating case study for the way enterprises will host professional communities. For a major enterprise, this venture contains a degree of Risk:
The probability that an investment or venture will make a loss or not make the returns expected. This probability can be measured. There are many different types of risk including basis risk, country or sovereign risk, credit risk, currency risk, economic risk, inflation risk, liquidity risk, market or systematic risk, political risk, settlement risk, systemic risk and translation risk.
The Glossary was initially based upon their second edition, which is available for purchase. Then they baked it out with an internal soft launch. The value of this approach is you prototype in private while building a community of employees prior to launch. The opposite of the Wikitorial debacle. Content is licensed as Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial, a fundamental underpinning of the social contract, and they have adopted Wikipedia's Neutral Point of View and other values.
A well hedged position. So what is the potential reward? Reuters is putting itself at the center of it's industry in cultivating shared language. The renewable resource becomes a focus of attention that can be directed in respect of the social contract. The community that may form, their greatest challenge going forward, could contribute tangible word of mouth benefits. This is community marketing, people -- an essential move as trust and influence shifts from institutions to peers. And very significant institutions are starting to get it.
Taking issue with Wikipedia is a great way to draw attention, as Nick Carr does again. In this case, he is taking issue with the Nature survey that revealed greater accuracy in articles on scientific topics. Nick fisks it with good detail, a case study in how to draw doubt.
First he claims the article as being produced by the Nature staff paired with academic experts, instead of a peer-reviewed study. If you follow the rest of his arguments, this shouldn't be an issue. As he says, "Someone is in charge, and experts do count." Personally, I'd like to see Wikipedia's unprocess applied to critizing the article. But this first assertion by Carr does it's job of raising doubt of expertise and methodology. Even when the Nature article itself said "An expert-led investigation carried out by Nature--the first to use peer review to compare Wikipedia and Britannica's coverage of science."
Second he claims that surveying scientific articles is too narrow a challenge for Wikipedia. "As has often been noted, Wikipedia's quality tends to be highest in esoteric scientific and technological topics. hat's not surprising. Because such topics tend to be unfamiliar to most people, they will tend to attract a narrower and more knowledgeable group of contributors than will more general-interest subjects." I don't agree with this assertion. Quality tends to be highest where the greated amount of attention is directed. In the negotiation of edits, expertise within a larger group shines because it can be backed up. Excluding the unqualified implies unfounded prejudice. I personally find the selected scope of the survey more valuable for quantitative analysis as non-scientific topics will be more subjective.
Third he claims that the media took a narrow survey and implied broad implications for quality with high-level coverage. This is somewhat true, and, well, what mainstream media does. And what Carr did with his first claim. But the articles did link to the actual study.
Fourth he claims the study filtered out the comments by expert reviewers that criticized the writing style of Wikipedia. In fact, the summarized them in the article. The objective of the survey was a quantitative comparison, which was later complemented by supplementary qualitative information. Carr picks three examples of full expert reviews to highlight how the qualitative information may be more important than the quantitative. Fine and good, but I'd bet out of the 42 reviewed articles, you can find other examples that qualitatively favor Wikipedia, like this one:
ERRORS IDENTIFIED: WIKIPEDIA
Chandrasehkar, Subramanyan
1. Nobel Prize in Physics for key discoveries which have led to the currently accepted theory … [not for formulating the theory itself]
2. From 1933 to 1936 Chandra was a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.
3. Chandrasekhar joined the staff of the University of Chicago, rising from assistant professor of astrophysics (1937) to Morton D. Hull etc.
4. Books: Principles of Stellar Dynamics (1943).ERRORS IDENTIFIED: WIKIPEDIA
Chandrasehkar, Subramanyan – no errors identified
Same goes for the following Wikipedia entries: Lipid, Punctuated Equilibrium and Quark.
And Brittanica entries: Woodward, Robert Burns and Mayr, Ernst. Which is part of the point. No editing system, closed editorial process or open, is perfect. Instead focus on media literacy and a little wabi sabi.
Lastly and most imporantly he claims hierarchy rules:
The problem with those who would like to use "open source" as a metaphor, stretching it to cover the production of encyclopedias, media, and other sorts of information, is that they tend to focus solely on the "community" aspect of the open source model. They ignore the fact that above the community is a carefully structured hierarchy, a group of talented individuals who play a critical oversight role in filtering the contributions of the community and ensuring the quality of the resulting code. Someone is in charge, and experts do count.
The open source model is not a democratic model. It is the combination of community and hierarchy that makes it work. Community without hierarchy means mediocrity.
The open source metaphor for wikis is more than apt. Here is a whole (unfinished) chapter on how. Yes, in open source you have the role of project manager as a gatekeeper for contributions to ensure quality. One person is hardly a heirarchy, but in writing code it is required. Coding is vertical information assembly, marked by the dependencies between contributions. Contributing in wiki does not have dependencies between contributions. If you insert one wrong fact, it does not have a cascading or virulent effect. This distinction is critical, as it provides permission to participate which has driven adoption.
I would also argue that open source is democratic. Part of the reason you have a project manager is the same as an elected representative, the manager is a proxy for the community. The community as the right to fork which holds the leader in check. Any community member may gather a constituency to support the inclusion of their contribution. Debate is open and largely civil, such as the British Parliment operating under an unwritten constitution, but a key difference is the actual operations are transparent. A model that democracy will trend towards.
The open source model is a democratic model. It is the combination of community and leadership that makes it work. Community with hierarchy trends toward tyranny.
Aside: I think it's great having Nick in the blogosphere as it makes for fun and fair debate. As a thought excersize, consider if our two posts were on a Discussion page and a group had to sort out what the Article should be.
Ingy döt Net, creator of Kwiki and Socialtext dude, has created Jemplate -- the first template toolkit for Ajax.
Jemplate is a templating system for Javascript, but it's not just any templating system. It is a complete port of Perl's ubiquitous Template Toolkit. If you don't use Perl, don't stop reading. Perl (and the Template Toolkit) is only needed to compile the templates. The templating lingo itself is Perl agnostic and full featured. It resembles Python, Ruby or Javascript more than Perl.
A lot of you stopped reading, but it's a pretty great open source contribution. Meet Ingy at MuchoCamp.
A wise man once told me he tries to go to a conference in an entirely different discipline once a year. This year I'm thinking about the Neurotech Industry Investing and Business Conference on May 18 in S.F. It will either make me smarter or richer in the long run.
Euan Semple tagged me into participating in this damn meme.
Four Jobs I've Had:
* Boy Scout Camp Counselor
* Movie Theatre Usher
* Presidential Advisor
* CEO
Four Movies I can Watch Over and Over
* Blues Brothers
* LOTR
* Blade Runner
* Star Wars
Four TV Shows I Love to Watch
* The Office
* Entourage
* Duskwood
* The Daily Show
Four Places I've Been on Vacation
* Estonia
* Costa Rica
* Tunisia
* Eurorail
Four Favorite Dishes
* Thai Peanut Curry
* Babooti (African curry)
* Lasagna
* Carnitas
Four Places I'd Rather Be
* Interlaken, Switzerland
* Aitutauki, Cook Islands
* Tallinn, Estonia
* Lakeshore, CA
Four Bloggers I'm Tagging
* Steve Gilmor
* Tom Foremski
* Matt Mahoney
* Jonas Luster
A closing Keynote by Mitch Kapor at OSBC.
Kinda cool to see Mitch give this talk, as he has a strong interest in the community process behind Wikipedia and I joined him in Frankfurt at the Wikimania conference.
Matt Asay: Grateful to finally have Mitch here. First interaction was
for the organizational meeting for a industry lobbying group two years
ago in Santa Clara. He was quietly typing in the corner, and I was kind
of amazed that this unassuming guy was contributing. Mitch is President
and founder OSAF.
What I want to talk about today is not so much where OSS is today or
where it will be in 2007, but slightly beyond. Please suspend a bit of
disbelief. The object of meditation is Wikipedia.
It can't possibly work. When I describe it to people as an online encyclopedia is that free and open and written by volunteers, people don't believe it. But it does. One of the top 20 websites in the world. Everyone in the room knows it, visits it, maybe 10% of the audience raises their hand to say they have written in it. The English version is bigger than the Brittanica. Random person off the street will say something, vaugely, about the Seigenthaler affair when asked about Wikipedia. If you use it, you must find it useful. Most people find it more useful than conventional reference sources. Becoming a reference source of choice.
Zen masters give you something to meditate on, like the sound of one
hand clapping, for you to muse over for years in a cave. As long as you
think in conventional terms, you are saddled with thinking that keeps
you from understanding. There is an essential fact, that anyone can
edit any article at any time. Most people start to freak out at this.
How could you trust that? Isn't there vandalism, there is no quality
control? Isn't it not to be trusted? The fact that anyone can is what
attracted people to begin with. As a chronic social outsider from my
youth, I love inviting social systems.
Myths include someone has to be in charge. Mainstream
media sieze on this idea that it is problematic that nobody is in
charge, the stories correspond to and reinforce our prejudices. I
discovered even in myself that I find this to be true. Was talking with
Jimmy Wales about how they do SysAdmin. A complex system with volunteer
SysAdmins. I had assumed that since they need it to be up 24/7 they had
a schedule where people sign up for coverage. Turns out that's not the
case. They have 100 qualified people, so statistically there are always
enough people around. If found that remarkable. I didn't have the
faith. Writing content, sure, but maintaining system integrity?
Without experts, how can you trust the information? Deep seated
assumptions that experts actually count. I grew up in the 60s and
learned about trust in experts, VietNam. Now it's WMDs. Its a cultural
thing where we are wired to not accept things.
Anyone can edit any article at any time -- the very openess that leads perpetually for opportunities for improvement. If there is a problem, it can be spotted and fixed by anyone. MSM failed to notice that after the Siegenthaler affair, the Nature article showed a comparison in favor for the quality of Scientific articles over the Brittanica. The quality was roughly equivalent for Wikipedia and fact, not statistically different. But in the Brittanica article were poor. But after the article came out, the quality of those very articles improved.
I became convinced that Wikipedia was going to be the next big thing. And things like it. I have some history here. Next big things I have gotten right before:
I like these weird things just before they hit. So why am I talking about wikis? I made a study of it, here are the learnings:
Community. Genuine community
of people behind the wiki. Not an anthill or marketplace where each
does their own thing and it magically aggregates. People are really
tied together, Wikipedians. They are in relationship to one another and
that is the glue that holds it together. You are not suprised about this
Vision. Promulgated by Jimmy Wales: create a free
encyclopedia of the worlds knowledge for all the worlds people. Jimmy
started as a commodities trader. Thought about what he really wanted to
do. Started a mailing list, hired someone, created Nupedia with a
complex process. Then went to the mailing list and called for help.
Lots of people talking about vision started making progress in two to
three weeks to launch Wikipedia.
Mission. Community of peer production, not abstract. People who do things all see their activity as being related to a larger goal.
Wikipedians. I went to Hamberg for the Wikimania
conference, their first gathering in person. People come from all walks
all over the world, a little different than the software world of open
source. Writing good code is hard. Making contributions from lots of
people work together is even harder. Wikipedia is very modular,
everyone can work on what they want. Every article also has a talk page
to discuss that article, and every user has a talk page for talking
about themselves, some of the best aspects of virtual communities.
People are strangers, but others cluster together.
Leadership. The leader has to
serve the community. They are volunteers, a different paradigm, not a
business paradigm where somewhere under the surface there is a
heirarchy. Leadership in a voluntary inspiration, moral leadership,
empowering and recognizing people. Jimmy calls himself a Libertarian,
which makes sense in some context, but there is something about
empowering a community that can be an unruly bunch that can be
difficult.
Values. They talk about values openly, not a dirty word.
Notes from a panel at OSBC
Peter Fenton, Accel Partners, Moderator
Ranga Rangachari, GroundWork Open Source Solutions. Has a hybrid OSS model, 100 customers.
Daniel Frye, IBM, works on their open source strategy team, manages a ton of OSS developers.
Adam Tractenberg, eBay developer evangelist
Clint Oram, SugarCRM, from inception a commercial open source entity
Mike Olsen, sold his company, Sleepycat, to Oracle today
It's pretty remarkable that MashupCamp filled up before having a date or location. Mashup developers that didn't commit in time and are looking for more -- can now attend MuchoCamp. Socialtext is accomodating Mucho at our office in downtown Palo Alto. Mashups at Mucho get to enter the contest when the camps come together. See you here or there on February 10-21st.
In this post, I'll describe the origins of Advisorship, what it takes to run an effective Board of Advisors and the benefits, how to handle conflicts of interest and best practices for disclosure.
Building a Board of Advisors is one of the first tactics any startup should employ. Initially, this construct was used by startups with a high degree of technical complexity with Technical Advisory Boards largely with experts from academia and research. Companies increasingly employed Business Advisory Boards to help them with business development and strategy beyond the activies of the Board of Directors. During the bubble, Technical Advisory Boards also played a role in driving sales and partnership. Telecom was particularly excessive and replete with conflicts of interest (Om could point us to them), such as gaining Advisorship from potential acquirers and customers. Direct conflicts of interest were clear, where vendors gained an advantage over others through the leverage of options and in some cases, cash.
With the rise of social software, Advisors also play a role in the marketing mix of a startup. Advisors have always provided more than advice, but lend credibility to emerging companies. The opportunity today is to let Advisors lend more than their name, but have their participation in the conversation. As with most business ethics, the ethics themselves are not necessarily new, are mostly common sense, and are simply a matter of recognizing and complying with best practices.
Running a Effective Board of Advisors
Startups mistakenly think a BoA is a list of references compensated with stock options. In practice, they can play an active role in the development of a company. Like a Board of Directors, they need to be actively managed to derive business benefits. When I was the CEO of a later failed (praise failure!) Risk Management Software company, I worked with an A-list board of advisors that even included startup guru John Nesheim and a nobel-prize nominee. One of the members, Robert Berger, taught me a structure that participated in at Covad, which was widely recognized for having an effective BoA.
And Advisor should:
Calls and meetings follow a simple agenda:
Since then, I've made a couple of tweaks.
I'm being eaten by a BoA Constrictor
I liken the role of a BoA as a group with strong ties to the company, playing a role in it's social network as the first degree. Initially, names alone provide credibility or thought leadership, but to really gain advantage, a structure such as above needs to ensure information flow and set expectations. Who to recruit should be fairly obvious for your startup. Look for people who are leaders in their industry, where you can build a foundation of trust and above all make sure you form a diverse group. I think trust is essential, so you won't hold back on sharing what's really going on in your business. So is honest conflict -- your BoA needs to be able to tell you when you are on the wrong path or blind to opportunities.
Some of the benefits of a BoA:
BoAs can be effective at scales greater than that of a Board of Directors, because their role isn't to make decisions (where BoDs of 3 or 5 work well). Start with a BoA that is a mix of technical and business advisors, when conversations start bifurcating you will know so too should the BoA. The constraint for expanding the BoA is your time managing and scheduling them and your stock option pool. Compensation for a board of advisors is typically in the form of stock options. Grant sizes are typically on par with that of a new employee. Vesting in accordance with the Employee Stock Option plan, which sets an effective term of service to the company.
Advisorship Ethics
Unlike a Board of Directors, they do not have a feduciary duty to act in the best interest of the company and it's shareholders, so as a founder or CEO it's important to watch for and manage potentitial conflicts of interest. Advisors have this duty as well, ethically, not legally. Sometimes an Advisor may work at company of strategic value to a startup. In this case, it is essential for the Advisor to disclose internally, if not gain approval prior to accepting the position. There may also be conditions in which the Advisor needs to excuse themselves.
Disclosure is the meme of the moment. It goes without saying that companies should disclose their Advisory Board openly and with pride. Some of the best advisors these days are also active bloggers. While blogging is informal and conversational, norms have developed for disclosure.
First disclosure is perhaps the most important one. An Advisor should disclose the relationship prior to or at the time of writing about the startup. For example, I have not blogged in mention of Dabble until this post. When I blog specifically about Dabble, perhaps about playing with their alpha, it's important for me to do specifically within the post, but also recall past posts that may be influential in framing their category. In this case, I posted that 2006 is a big year for video on the net, partially influenced by more insider knowledge of video sharing startups. Blogging about companies you advise is natural and should be encouraged given the passion required for affiliation.
Ongoing disclosure, given the nature of blogging, should not be required within each post mentioning or influencing the perception of the startup. The norm today is to list your disclosures on your About page. Unfortunately, Wordpress and other blog tools are breaking the genre when it comes to including an About page on the blog. This oversight fails to encourage other good practices we could borrow from journalism (bylines) and the net (you own your own words, thanks to the Well).
I participate on the following BoAs:
Socialtext has an outstanding BoA that includes Tom Gruber, Zack Lynch , Jerry Michalski, Mitch Ratcliffe, Doc Searls, Clay Shirky, David Weinberger and Kevin Werbach. We'll have some announcements in this area soon.
Free Crap
A directly related issue is disclosure of products received from vendors as a blogger. Over the past year, I've witnessed a change where bloggers once got a free book or two a year. Nowadays, an influential blogger is overloaded with everything from free cell phones to toilet seats. I'm a member of the Silicon Valley 100 and get a bunch of free crap, for example.
The norms for disclosure of free crap are fairly well developed. If you blog about a product you got for free, you mention it in the post. The distinction here is you only have a transient attachment to the free crap, as opposed to an Advisory relationship with aligned long-term incentives. However, there is a very big grey area here. Journalists who get free crap are required to return it (one of the secrets of living cheap in the Silicon Valley is you can count on free lunch from journalists or VCs). Bloggers tend to keep free crap. And I'm not sure that's unethical, if the norm for disclosure is further developed.
Instead of the current witch hunt, I hope for more constructive attention by mainstream media to how to pass on practices from journalism. Ethics are central, but there are things you learn in j-school and on the beat that could make us a better complement to the mainstream. I also discount the gatekeeping echo chamber impact of blogging, especially compared to the mainstream. By contrast, the blogosphere celebrates diversity with attention and there is no gate to be kept.
There's a really cool conference on the Future of Web Apps happening in London. Linked off the homepage of the wiki, you will find great notes on talks by Josh Schacter, Cal Henderson, Tom Coates and many more.
The first three lines in a spam email:
This email is: [ ] actionable [x] fyi [ ] social
Response needed: [X] yes [ ] up to you [ ] no
Time-sensitive: [ ] immediate [X] soon [ ] none
A weird bastardization of this email is: [ ] bloggable [ x ] ask first [ ] private
Live and un-cut notes at the Enterprise Software Summit.
Jeff Nolan starts by pointing out what he blogged about the event yesterday was on Memeorandum.
Duopoly between SAP and Oracles. Looked at political campaigns. People like Ross vs. people like Jeff, not easily swayed to cross party lines. Looked at the DoD Information Operations Roadmap. To win a war it was essential to propogate a message, manipulate media, drive citizen commentary and decentralize internal operations so field officers had authority on message. We realized you can no longer control the message.
Talks about Richard Edleman's Me2 Revolution. People don't trust institutions, they look to peers, user reviews. Trust Barometer surveys consumers in 11 countries. In 6/11, they found that peers ranked higher in trust and authorities than institutions. This is a pervasive change that have widespread impact.
Phil said bloggers have inherent credibility because they are not paid and are not viewed as insiders. Media is viewed as part of the game.
Was with SAP Ventures for 8 years, 73 investments. Recently took oever as head of strategy for our Competitive Office. Got interested in blogs three years ago. Now working on new methods for competition, distruptive non-linear strategy. Initial challenges are "How do I use social media to expeand and improve SAP's reach, both internally and externally."
Social meadia enables content, choice and conversations. No way I will ever get through all my email, stuff gets forgotten and SAP is still an email culture.
This stuff is being adopted. "45% of the largest 1,000 publicly held companies in north america have blogs or plan to start them sometime this year" Yahoo!, April 2005.
Biggest challenge internally is changing culture, not the infrastructure. Now we have Apollo Blogs, set up in a couple weeks. Finding people who have voice, willing to communicate, is the challenge. People have to be conversational, not formal. If you write like a press release people will think it is a press release. One of the reasons I havbe been able to susstain 3 years of blogging is that I write like I speak. I don't have a lot of time in my day. If I treated it formally it would take two weeks to get a post out. Boundryless information -- there is far too much information that is labeled as confidential, isn't. We start with the assumption that nothing is confidential until after a review process.
We published our product roadmap. I packaged it up and sent it to the VP of Engineering at Oracle and said this is what SAP is going to do, we are still going to beat you and out execute you.
Old way of a daily email newsletter for competitive intelligence. You have to read the email and open and read the attatchments, two steps too many. I have 52 analysts who do competitive intelligence, but have hundreds of employees reading the same material who can share on a blog out of their own interest. Then you get commentary.
We rolled it out quietly, not sure how well the server can currently scale. Get an email from a hedge fund manager who covers SAP. He said, I hear these Apollo Blogs are popping up all over the place. Word of mouth marketing propogates the blogs. Oracle runs a misleading ad, we dissect it. They ran one yesterday in the WSJ and by 10 am EST they had the ad dissected and a Powerpoint available for download by the field. Don't have to do an email blast out to 15k people anymore.
One critism of public blogs is that people end up writing about the same things. If you limit your scope of reading that may be an effect for you. But RSS lets you aggregate your own way. Internally this isn't such a problem. Have competitive news, industry tactics, defense industry and other topical blogs. The Defense Daily blog stays pretty focused on the vertical. Product blogs like CRM Daily.
RSS poses a bit of a challenge for companies that do not have an RSS Reader as part of their desktop model. Could do it myself, but would have a training and support burden. Microsoft IE7 will provide some solution. I used Firefox, but others don't. IE7 works well for 10-30 subscriptions. RSS will change the way companies will communicate internally.
We use Socialtext in a bunch of business units. Ross may have coined the term SAPedia. An SAP Encyclopedia on products, people, technologies. My team is using them for extended project management. Shows his Apollo Wiki. Shows his project page with all the things his team is working on. Shows how to email to a wiki to create or update a page. Lets me take constantly streaming information and share it with a group. Uses Categories (tags) effectively. Socialtext lets you blog your wikis as an output -- which allows people in my chain of command and the rest of the company see what we are working on. Eliminates the need for status reporting, reduces his need for useless paperwork, self service resource.
Social media strategy is embodying blogs, wikis and search. How do you deal with bloggers? You can't manage them. People blog for personal and social reasons.
The Necessary Elements of an External Social Media Strategy
Looked at who is blogging about enterprise software, then evaluated who is actually influential. Jeff's blog is four times more influential than SAP's website. Using Umbria for blog analytics, intellisynch, Technorati conversation tracking. Interesting tools let you put some intelligence into this.
Then they called up the influential bloggers. Offered some information access. 100% of people contacted, just 30 blogs, all said they wanted to have further information on a regular basis. Only deal is that we are not going to manage you. If you write something negative about SAP, the first thing is, is it true? If it is, then we may even get you more access for the issue. Just give us the opportunity to respond.
The best way to deal with people that are truly negative on SAP is to engage them. Stick to the facts, engage in conversation, perhaps nobody wins the debate, but that's okay. Nick Carr writes a lot of negative stuff on SAP. On the one hand, I think he has an axe to grind with the industry, but I haven't chosen to engage him because if I did it in the way I want to, I'm not sure it would reflect positively on SAP.
Moved on this project in October. Takes time to change the course of your battleship. Decentralizing the chain to let people use their judgement has challenges. Legal challenge, this may violate a code of conduct. Went from having a 120 day timeframe to about a year to fully get traction. They had to modify the code of conduct to enable blogging. Be prepared to take the bad with the good, if we "manage" message we will be ignored.
I think executive blogs are a waste of time. We have them. Shai Agassi writes his own, others leverage their staff so they are not particularly credible. I would like to think that CEOs would have better things to do with their time, but some like Jonathan Schwartz pull it off. The untapped goldmine is the level of executives that are direct reports to the CEO who are more tactical, tend to be credible, give them a voice.
Disclosure: SAP is an investor in my company, Socialtext.
I'm at the Enterprise Software Summit in Sundance, Utah. When I was here two years ago, the talk was on Consolidation (with Siebel and Peoplesoft executives in attendance) and Business Models. Today we heard from a successful SaaS vendor and a good discussion on open source business models.
The structure of the event is great. Sessions from 7-10am and 4-7pm. In between is open time, and while it is a ski resort, you can get work done. Sounds great in theory, and it is disarming and good for building relationships, but perhaps I'm just trying to one-up Scoble and Euan from their Swiss Chalet expo.
Jeff Nolan is taking far better notes than I, but I've included my chicken scratches on Greg Gianforte on SaaS and Matt Asay on Open Source Business in the extended post...
InternetWeek and InformationWeek have a good in-depth article on enterprise wikis. It includes interviews with Socialtext customers Nokia and Angel.com, discusses acquisition and adoption strategies, changing corporate culture and the "wiki effect."
Some excerpts:
At Nokia, the first wiki was brought in as an experiment by the Corporate Strategy team without consulting the IT department. Stephen Johnston, our contact in the department, told us, "After installing it we were told that it was probably against company policy." According to Johnston, resistance from the IT team stemmed from misgivings about overhead costs, the delegation of control to users, and the fear that wikis were a fad. However, the wiki (built on an open-source platform) quickly proved to be an effective means of saving time and effort previously dedicated to the task of distributing and storing corporate intelligence.
Johnston says wikis have proliferated within Nokia since the initial test. The company has purchased 200 seats [Ross: the real number is far greater, but I don't have approval to share it right now] of Socialtext, and four wikis, on both open-source and proprietary platforms, are being used by between 1,000 and 1,500 employees. As a result of the wikis' success, Nokia has agreed to fund and support a companywide wiki as well as a host of other collaborative tools. A skunkworks, or new technology project team, has also been established "to provide new tools such as wikis within days to business groups that ask to test new tools," says Johnston...The wiki ran for several years on a Linux box under the desk of Sam Aparicio, Vice President of Products and Strategy at Angel.com. When it became clear that the wiki was a stable and functional tool, the company moved to Socialtext's hosted wiki to minimize the burden on the IT team...
Because wikis are designed for collaboration, forcing their use is contrary to their nature. Instead, wikis are most successful when they are allowed to grow from a grass-roots effort. The value of wikis, says Angel.com's Aparicio, becomes clear through exposure to the tool and its benefits. It is in the interest of everyone who needs access to the knowledge held in a wiki to participate and maintain a presence.
I found the observation of the "wiki effect" insightful: What is most compelling about wikis is how they can induce very similar behaviors in very different environments: They are able to normalize the way information and intelligence move around corporate systems, regardless of their size.
Amazon is piloting ProductWikis, a single wiki page for each product with wikiwyg-like editing and revision history. Launched late last year, now you can view Most Edited Wikis and Last Edited Wikis in attempt to focus contributions and reverts. You are notified by email of changes to pages you contribute to, and I quickly got in an edit war with this guy. Also apparently, you can add links. You can create wiki "term" pages by linking to them from product pages, like this one.
I have no doubt that some form of this will complement that product pages of most e-commerce sites, whether hosted by the vendor or not. It's difficult to say whether this pilot will work or not, given the level of fragmented interests and how it is buried in the interface. But adding the basics for moderation and linking is a good step.
Scoble points us towards CoComment, which lets you bookmarket where you comment, aggregate and publish conversations and ping you with updates. This is a common practice for delicious users as a service, and a reminder that Web 2.0 is really just re-inventing email with backlinks and pings.
Recently Stowe Boyd suggested that having more comments/trackbacks than posts was an indicator (Conversational Index) of a popular blog (although he didn't back it up with traffic data, but his call on it is good enough for me).
Wasn't long ago that comment and trackback spam made comments unbareable. Heck, still is, less today, more tomorrow. But I still have real comments I've yet to get back to as an author (Hi Pierre).
Happens that today the NY Times has the news of an economic solution for email spam offered by AOL and Yahoo. There's the old business plan again, put a price on your inbox. Still makes sense if you can get past adoption risks. Noise is only reduced through cost.
Attention begets attention, but at the cost of time. Time spent in signal is the best indicator of success.
The other week a business user at a customer commented:
"Our outsourced IT department views upgrades as a degredation of the service level agreement."
But just think of the savings.
Wiki Wednesday London was an absolute blast. Good turnout of wiki enthusiasts, geek girls and folks I've met before. Lars Plougmann is already helping organize March 1 in London. Great turnout in Palo Alto, NYC and Montreal. Even played host to a Twiki launch in our HQ.
Some Socialtexters are already on their way to RecentChangesCamp in Portland which starts today.
I'm headed to the Enterprise Software Summit next Monday in Sundance for a good mix of networking on the slopes. I'm paneling on Building a Brand through Social Media along with the CEO of Newsgator.
The Future of Web Apps is in London on Feburary 8th, with Suw Charman attending.
On Feburary 14th, I'm speaking with Jeff Clavier, Charlene Li and Jeff Nolan on Web 2.0 in the Enterprise.
And by now you probably know about MashupCamp.
This week I participated in forward looking internal seminar at Nokia hosted by CTO Yrjö Neuvo. I presented on the the future of Our Social Web with particular emphasis on how trends such as augmented reality will only continue with support for open source and open standards which are at risk with DRM regimes. The other presentations were Beyond 3G Research in China, prof Xiao-Hu You, Software defined radio - Vision, Challanges and Solutions by prof Christer and Making Business with Open Source by Mårten Mickos. I posted my raw notes to Mårten's session here.
Before the seminar, we were introduced to the Nokia Research Center and got to play with some amazing demos. Some I cannot blog about publicly. Perhaps my favorite was Mobile Augmented Reality, which overlaid information when pointing the camera at given object, and when you pointed it down it let you see where you were on Google Earth. Others incuded a motion band that provided real time positional data to your phone, game controllers that provided positional information, 3rd sound was stunningly immersive, POS RFID that will replace your wallet if the POS terminals adopt it and user privacy concerns abated, a business card OCR reader that leveraged the Nokia N90 camera (something I could really use for instant capture of a business card into contacts while on the road) and how the open source ecosystem is contributing to their tablet platform. I had wonderful encounters with Socialtext users, great F2F feedback, conversations on the changing nature of trust in institutions and a chance to lobby for Mac support that is already forthcoming.
The next day I presented in a public forum alongside Mårten at the publishing house of their largest newspaper. Very interesting discussion on business models in Linus land.
I happened to be in Finland when they elected a new President, backed by Conan O'Brien, as if we didn't meddle enough. The weather wasn't as bad as the -25 brain freezing celcius they had two weeks before, and the thing is about cold countries is they have warm hosts which always make a visit enjoyable and stimulating.
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