Ross Mayfield's Weblog

Wiki as Platform

Don Dodge, citing Socialtext and wikiCalc as prime examples:

These new wiki and blog based platforms are an example of the promise of Web 2.0. They introduce a whole new way to build collaborative, interactive, web ready applications that can be hosted "in the cloud" or inside the firewall.

Platform shifts happen every 10 to 15 years. We may be witnessing the start of a new platform shift with Web 2.0 style blog and wiki platforms.

i hesitate to call what we do a platform yet.  It is hard to think of a startup that started and remained as a platform.  Instead we are focusing on being a killer application first.  Apps that gain widespread adoption become attractive for others to develop upon, and if managed right, become platforms. 

That said, Don is right that we are at the beginning of a platform shift.  Wikis and Blogs have from their very beginning afforded open source and open APIs.  They make great containers for orchestrating web services to form composite applications, or for being mashed up elsewhere.  And more importantly, they are collaboration and communication tools that demand and enable redesign of applications.  Not just slapping them on a web page.

Weak signals that this is already happening include how Angel.com leveraged Wiki Web Services for a public wiki knowledge-base with Excel documents.  Or Joe Gregario's leverage of wikiCalc and his Sparkline generator to prove out the spreadsheet as a mashup fabric:

I recently pointed to a cool thing Jon Udell did with my sparklines generator. In that article Jon asks:

    How can more people be empowered to do such redesigns, for print and for the web?

My answer is based on my opinion that any solution needs to be Document Centric. I believe an online spreadsheet is an excellent starting point for building a mashup fabric: a document into which a range of online services can be combined. To that end I downloaded and installed wikiCalc and tried to integrate my sparklines service into a spreadsheet...

Mini-Meme

Gabe at Techmeme created Mini versions of his meme trackers for mobile users.  Just add /mini to the end of the URL of your favorite Memeorandum site or /miniriver for an extended version.

This of course, is going straight into my list of links and notes in Miki, the mobile wiki.  All web apps should have mobile versions like this.

Certifiable

There is a recursive irony in the public debate about the Generic Attribution Provision proposed before the Open Source Initiative.

In blogspace, David Berlind raises the red flag broadly and narrowly on vendors and projects calling themselves open source without using an OSI approved license or having their license certified. In fact, there is no trademark on "open source." The commercial open source vendors David identifies broadly and narrowly in his second post are not breaking any rules or undermining the community. This doesn't mean David's flag is moot, there is an underlying confusion in the market he is bringing to light.

There are clear incentives for companies and projects to seek to be OSI Certified, because it is a trademark. Trademark is the the one body of intellectual property law that largely supports innovation with relative Freedom -- and trademark is attribution. Open Source projects that have followed the process and gained certification have earned something. It is a process that is inevitably burdensome and risky, as is any process, especially subject to an open community. But because it is difficult, no matter how helpful those involved, it garners meaning. The certification mark means something, a signal of trust, relative efficiency to the noise of the market, acceptance in the bazzar backed by conversations that others can join.

The recursive irony is that Socialtext seeks certification attributable to OSI for a license that includes attribution. The OSI Certified badge will be proudly displayed. A signal that we are playing by the rules of the open source community and by doing so contribute value to the community.

For the Socialtext community, to be part of it must mean something. Those that preceded you must have done something. Being spawned and rooted by a commercial open source company must mean more than a value proposition that attracts. Leadership means more than creating something on your own and citizenry means being a part of an inevitably larger whole. People participate through social contracts. Agreements build upon agreements to constitute a body made of bodies. We think that the Socialtext Public License attribution provision will compound community value as the OSI Certified badge does, and will not stifle innovation as the Creative Commons attribution provision has proven.

Some companies may not choose or be able to attain the value of the OSI Certification mark. They can use the term "open source" to describe their offerings, but it is of less value to be part of the non-standard part of the market.

I already find the license-discuss mailing list full of noise, engaged in personality conflicts and not deliberating the approval in question. Partially this is because of the mailing list as a tool, which is lacking the attribution affordance of hypertext, and the emphasis of identity of contributors without persistence leading to personal flame-wars, the babel problem revisited, lack of memory, permanent addressability and all the things new tools have moved past. The conversation even spiraled into notions of an explicit reputation system outside of certification (the horrors, for goodness sake move this to a blog or wiki and let the community imply judgment). Oh, wait, this is not about our tool, but tooling the machines of the future.

The World Wide World

Part of the future is being prototyped in gaming.  As it always has been, play is always innovation at some level.  But at the massive level, part of the future is playing itself out today.

My last post took an unexplored tangent off of Raph Koster's insight into Second Life's Copybot, exploring the arbitrage opportunity when content production costs are increasing, but it was too generic.  See Raph's comment and his deeper thoughts on the future of content.  He clarifies that he thought rising production costs applies to the content industry, not end users.  I'd say that platforms will emerge for end users to have their day.

Second Life is actually the closest to this, which makes it interesting.  Can you imagine an end user demanding a VCR that doesn't copy, but only plays?  Or wanting a CDROM that doesn't burn?  Perhaps when the tools of production are evenly distributed, but the culture doesn't follow.

Part of what I guess is happening in SL is distorted rates of change.  See, I remember when I first met Raph at Supernova and he said something to the effect of, "we gamers are evolving faster than you n00bs." People believed intellectual property rule of law was established, and then the game changed.  Only the Marxists would be happy with this.

Or the people, like Raph, that realize that the physics have changed.  Better yet, that there are no closed systems.

Joi first for me and most naturally realized that MMORGs don't adapt to the real world enough.  The business is still perceived as a content business with a captive audience.  Where users are not content generators, but accumulators.  SL, to Philip Rosendale's credit, breaks this mold where content is pre-dominantly generated by users.  It also breaks the mold of embracing an open economy with other economies.  But how much of the mold is broken?

The former could be broken more.  Where is the standard that allows me to create a 3D representation of a character or object that is portable across worlds, even if rendered and with different attributes?  Where is the accessible scripting language, the HTML of worlds? 
A long time coming.  While I believe Virtual Worlds will eventually be part of the web, not just the internet, the walled gardens are profitable and defensible in absence of alternatives.

The current view is due to capital costs, in a hit or miss business that harkens to Hollywood, content production is in the hands of vendors.  I hope SL gets through this successfully, because at the level editing level, they enable a user-generated alternative.  In fact, they have their first SL Millionaire.  Wonder how she would play with inevitable erosion of digital property rights.  Is she creating experiences, or just playing a spot market amidst DRM countermeasures?

If you want to see the future of content creation, a controversial glimpse of it is in this documentary.  In it, the entrepreneur who manages a gold farming venture that resembles a college dorm (until his PayPal account connection is terminated) provides the insight that it is simply a service business that transcends distance and privilege.

Warcraft makes user-generated content globally accessible.  And despite efforts to the contrary, the result is a service industry in support of the game.  Second Life affords a role, but favors a different kind of player that relates to other players.

These are only two datapoints that could make up a rich ecology.  But today the ecology is not there.  There is an ecology of shared experiences with gaming, and a far greater potential with non-gamers.  And most game design provides negative incentives for what is outside worlds. 

Sometimes I wonder if anything like the Web will happen again.  It was a glorious triumph that such interop and culture happened before it was taken disruptively.  Today almost every game acts as though it has its own monopoly in its own world.  But I have to think that users have had a taste of how things should work, even if not rich in experience, and even with the limitations of how portable identity, relationships and content are in the web today.  And the next disruption could force worlds to collide.

Human CopyBots

Raph Koster applies the impact of CopyBot on SecondLife's intellectual property economy as a broad lesson for the industry.

In the last decades, we have seen the content business have to adapt to a frightening new reality: The cost to create a minute of content has risen exponentially, but the fair market value of a minute of content has plummeted. In our brave new world of digital assets and user contributions, we tend to forget that this will be hitting not just media companies in the pocketbook, but also all those Web users who are merrily uploading their creations to platforms that by their very nature are fundamentally defenseless against copying.

While I believe this is generally true, there are notable exceptions for more open systems.  And all systems trend towards open.  The gaming industry is bifurcating into content creation and game engines.  A split driven both by the cost of content creation, but mostly the complexity and cost of creating the game engines that power it.  SecondLife is one of the most open virtual worlds, but the tools for creating content within it are still limited.  Especially when compared with the diversity and accessibility of our standards-based web.

In some areas of the media sector, the cost for creating content is plummeting.  It may still be expensive for a single user to create quality content, be it amateur or professional.  But it is getting cheaper:

• create crappy content
• sift through said crap to discover gems

How?  Well, its made of people, silly.

In more closed virtual worlds, such as World of Warcraft, content creation is largely the burden of the toolmaker.  And copying is expressly forbidden.  So what happens?  The arbitrage condition is so strong that people are applied to the problem.  Chinese gold farmers are human CopyBots.

Badgeware

Bruce Perens calls web applications with attribution provisions "badgeware."  Somehow this seems familiar.

The original quotation comes from the 1948 film The Treasure of the Sierra Madre with Humphrey Bogart. One of the most memorable scenes in the movie is where a Mexican bandit leader (Gold Hat, played by Alfonso Bedoya) is trying to convince Fred C. Dobbs (played by Bogart) and company that they are the Federales.

Dobbs: "If you're the police, where are your badges?"

Gold Hat: "Badges!? We ain't got no badges. We don't need no badges! I don't have to show you any stinking badges!!"

Source: Wikipedia

I hereby issue the Gold Hat challenge.  Find me a mashup of open source applications (not infrastructure) with attribution requirements that adversely constrain the interface and I'll send you a legal copy of the Treasure of Sierra Madre.

Badgeware is oh so catchy and cute.  But the underlying issue is attribution is an incentive for innovation with freedom, or a burdensome constraint.  And if the deputizing body functions. I'm with Bogart on this one, you are either one of the Federales, or not.

Don't Bogart that cert from me, pass it over, my friend. 

Socialtext Proposes Attribution Provision

When going through the process of opening Socialtext, we need to choose a license that is a fit for a commercial open source company.  Commercial open source strikes the balance between freedom and profit motive, and the license you choose becomes a contract not just for the company, but a community. 

The decision to open is easier for vendors than it was just a few years ago because of the common practice of Mozilla Public License-based licenses by companies such as SugarCRM, Zimbra, Alfresco, Scalix and about 10 others.  MPL is the most popular OSI license and it allows for extensions (MPL section 6.1 says "However, You may include an additional document offering the additional rights described in Section 3.5." Section 3.5 ensure that the modifications must apply equally to every developer or contributor.). 

Good thing too, because in my humble opinion no other licenses are a fit for commercial open source web applications.

For Socialtext, we made three modifications:

1. Attribution: We believe that attribution provides positive incentives for creativity and innovation, as witnessed by the success of Creative Commons attribution licenses. Trademark is attribution. We require the display of the project's mark within the UI, not just the code, with a link back to the community that contributes to it.
2. Network Use: Delivering an application over HTTP should the same as compiling, burning and distributing on a CD.  If you distribute over the network, you should share your contributions with the community.  See this wiki page for more details.
3. Trademark Use: Section 6.3 says that if you make a modification to the license, you cannot use Mozilla trademarks within the license. So we called it Socialtext Public License, but we can reference MPL publicly or in the license expressly to point out the first two differences between SPL and MPL.

We put SPL out into the world after a lot of research and conversation, but decided to be open to granting more liberal rights in the future if demanded by the community.  More importantly, while SPL is consistent with the Open Source Definition, we firmly believe in the mission of the Open Source Initiative and desire to submit to their process for sake of license proliferation.

While it is inside baseball for some, David Berlind has a very well researched post that asks, are companies using MPL extensions are abusing the term Open Source?  I've spoken with David about this several times.  I think his article provides a balanced view of those who believe the licenses are OSI compliant and those who do not. I'd also like to highlight OSI board member Danese Cooper's blog post on attribution.

But unfortunately I haven't had a chance to talk with David in a little while, as I would have highlighted that Socialtext submitted a memo to the OSI board for consideration on November 14th -- proposing a Generic Attribution Provision.  I've shared the attribution memo on a wiki page, where you can find additional background information on the issue and the proposal to resolve it through a standard attribution clause that OSI could certify for any OSI license.  This structure would be similar to how Creative Commons enables attribution as an option.

AboutUs Gets Funding

Congrats to Ray King for getting $1M for AboutUs, a wiki-powered index of the web.  One step closer towards Wikipedia eats Google. 

If you haven't tried the AboutUs domain directory, it mashes up all kind of information about a given website and lets anyone build upon it.

wikiCalc Screencast

Dan Bricklin just put up a new screencast of wikiCalc that shows off some of the features in the same release that will become SocialCalc.

The screencast shows the latest version. (The last one was done in June.) In addition to the normal run through of the product features shown in the last screencast, this one has a short introduction that positions the product and adds a few minutes of demonstrations of the work flow, Live View functionality, embedding on other web pages, etc. For example, it shows viewing a consolidated report, clicking on a link to a divisional report, logging in to view that page, clicking "Edit This Page" on that report, making a change, and then viewing the updated consolidated values. It also shows using a normal web page with a form to call up another page with an embedded spreadsheet that includes calculations that are based on values provided by the form.

Press Conference in World of Warcraft

UPDATE: GAME ON

TechCrunch reports the big new trend is for companies like Sun and Dell to hold their press conferences in SecondLife.  To further advance the state of the art, the next Socialtext press conference will be held in World of Warcraft.

• Time: December 1st, 5pm server time
• Location: Goldshire, Elwynn Forrest, Eitrigg Server
• Rules of Order:
  
  • No ninjas.
  • Questions will only be taken from journalists in PvP mode   
    
  • We have developed means of determining if you are a Chinese Gold Farmer, so do not outsource your participation
  • Safe passage will be provided to Horde characters, but your questions may be lost in translation 
  • Keep your armor on, do not /dance unless you are an orc, use of other emotes are encouraged
  • If the spokesperson is not forthcoming, you may duel for information
  • Those that survive the experience will gain 1 gold piece and a Socialtext tabard

Learning Conversational Estonian

A reader wrote to me a question another reader might be better prepared to answer:

I'm currently trying to learn Estonian, but finding it difficult to find
material.What little I can find in English tends more towards the
"conversational" style of learning, whereas I much prefer the more old
fashioned grammar-based approach, where you actually learn off
declensions etc. Do you know of anything like this?

Please respond in comments...

Web 0

I'm giving up on version numbering.  The future of the Web is Web 0.

Here's a thought experiment, one I had in a hallway with Jerry Michalski and Linda Stone last week.  What if attention, the last good some of us think will be scarce, is actually abundant? Yeah, I need to have that conversation with Steve Gillmor. 

Attention isn't an act of consumption, but one of giving.  Steve went past that with gestures, a framework I can buy.  But are we really limited to an amount of gestures we can give?  Does it cost me something to mention Steve's name, let alone linking to him, in a post?  Or wave to him in a hallway?  The cost of either is nominal.

Linda, who I am so happy for btw, had a counterpoint, or so it would seem at first.  She is focused on the notion of focused attention.  When we have a session, how much continuous attention are you giving?  We all want the undivided.  We all believe we can time-slice in the moment, and what we have to give is more important than it will actually be perceived.  This is true, with our current notions of focus and privacy.

Just watch how Jerry gives. 

When you make your gestures public, enable them to be discovered, you are acting with abundance.  This is what I think is changing.  Sharing control over your gestures creates more value than the gesture inandofitself.

Somehow this conversation has to wade into how people can get into the middle.  As though there was a buyer and an influencer and the vendor has to stop it and pay for the lead, even at its mark-to-market value.  And offering the buyer more privacy is the solution.  It is part of it, especially in a world where there is no trus in the vendor.

But it might become one where is abundant with opportunity that attracts both buyer and influencer.  And they are abundant themselves.  Leads self-select, trust is verified, respect for attention or otherwise is part of the deal.

This must be built upon the absence of a number.  I think I'm on to something, but don't know yet.

Learning in the Shower

Eugene starts to shift towards an emphasis in learning in LearningCommunity, realizing he isn't learning enough, and shares this:

DougEngelbart often says that high-performance communities are experts at CoDIAK -- collectively developing, integrating, and applying knowledge.  I hate the acronym, because I think it's unnecessarily esoteric.  What CoDIAK boils down to is:    (LJ9)

• Learn.    (LJA)
• Share and apply what you know.    (LJB)
• Repeat early and often.    (LJC)

Do you ever find yourself in the captive audience of your shower, reading shampoo labels?  You know you aren't learning anything by reading them.  Yet you are trying to do more than kill time.  And there it is: Lather, rinse and repeat.  How many times have you thought of these instructions?  Not just because they are part of popular culture.  I personally think it is a scam to use more shampoo than is necessary to get the job done.

If there ever was a problem confronting eLearning, I think it is that enterprise users view their solutions in the same way people do instructions on shampoo bottles.

The fix, and this is where the shower metaphor breaks down for some people, is that 80% of learning is social.

Confabb Confabulation

Somewhere along the way with Socialtext, I found myself partially in the events business.  We developed a service called Eventspace to provide wikis for events.  By now we have facilitated over 150 conferences, tradeshows, workshops, seminars and camps.  The upside is this how many influential users first gained exposure to wikis and now using a wiki to augment an event is common practice.  The downside is I go to way too many conference.  Part of this is my job, the other part is not complaining.

So I have significant interest in my colleagues Salim Ismail and Cameron Barrett's new venture Confabb, a site for conferences.  I have to wonder if the brand stems from Confabulation (Verbalizations about people, places, and events with no basis in reality) or Confab (chew the fat: talk socially without exchanging too much information).  Both make sense, the former does more for me.

There is a decent degree of overlap with the broader visions of Eventful (disclaimer, I'm an advisor) and Upcoming.  Some features are lacking (the search feature needs work based on ego tests), but Confabb is off to a good start.  It could be useful, but I won't know until I have tried it through the lifecycle of an event.  The upside is the events business is ripe for high margin advertising, the downside is, as anyone in the business will tell you, it is a hard business.  But maybe they can help fix that.

There is no Web 3.0, part, uh, 2

John Markoff writes in the NY Times that Web 3.0 is coming.  Apparently he missed my post last week, for There is no Web 3.0.  The funny thing about my summation last year (Web 2.0 is Made of People!) is the web has always been that way -- and always will.  At first glance, John seems to think the next web is made of machines.

From the billions of documents that form the World Wide Web and the links that weave them together, computer scientists and a growing collection of start-up companies are finding new ways to mine human intelligence.

Their goal is to add a layer of meaning on top of the existing Web that would make it less of a catalog and more of a guide — and even provide the foundation for systems that can reason in a human fashion. That level of artificial intelligence, with machines doing the thinking instead of simply following commands, has eluded researchers for more than half a century.   

I'd bet the future is less the Matrix than Soylent Green.  Less semantic fuzz than social discovery.  Less artificial intelligence than human intelligence.  Less automation and more augmentation.  Wandering around the Web 2.0 Summit I saw more presentations using 3.0 than I can enunummerate.  Some were about more immersive platforms, some desire the singularity, but most just wanted to be new and cool.

John does end the article with a view similar to mine:

“With Flickr you can find images that a computer could never find,” said Prabhakar Raghavan, head of research at Yahoo. “Something that defied us for 50 years suddenly became trivial. It wouldn’t have become trivial without the Web.”

Besides, Web 2.0 will be known as the name of a bubble.  And 3.0 would only be a marketing disaster.

The Lobbyists

Here is to the lobbyists.  Those that pressed the flesh in the corridors of power that was the Web 2.0 summit.  Not taking no for an answer, the tireless souls that for three days made the public spaces of the Palace Hotel their home.  In the mold of a K-street pro, but selling themselves. It was not the stench of power, but the smell of money that moved them.  Some cracked the DRM, others bought silver sponsorships just for two included tickets -- but it was the lobbysts who showed up for the hallway conversations.

SuiteTwo Launched: Enterprise 2.0 in a Box

A small dream of mine came true today.  We've been preaching an ecosystem of tools for some time now.  We've helped customers stitch them together in interesting ways.  In fact, Andrew McAfee's original article on Enterprise 2.0 was borne from observing what was happening in one of our customers and projecting into the future.  Well, future happens fast.

Looking back, look what I blogged just before the first Web 2.0 conference:

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.

That was then, this is now. This morning I provided a workship on Enterprise 2.0.

Today we announced SuiteTwo, The Enterprise 2.0 Suite powered by Intel.  Intel is distributing the Best of Breed wiki (Socialtext), blog (Six Apart), Feed Aggregation (Newsgator) and Feed Publishing (SimpleFeed), supported by Spikesource, through its channels including Dell, NEC, Ingram, Novell and Red Hat.

This fulfills Andrew McAfee's vision of Enterprise 2.0.  In a box.  Made simple for Small-to-Mid-sized Enterprises.  Extensible because we've all supported open APIs.  Enterprise 2.0 is freeform social software adapted for organizations.  SuiteTwo is the first offering to realize the SLATES paradigm:

SLATES = Search | Links | Authorship | Tags | Extensions | Signals

In the latest issue of the Harvard Business Review, McAfee went further to distinguish this Network IT (NIT) from Functional IT and Enterprise IT:

As the DrKW example illustrates, NIT’s principal capabilities include the following:

• Facilitating collaboration. Network technologies allow employees to work together but don’t define who should work with whom or what projects employees should work on. At DrKW, ad hoc teams have formed because employees read one another’s blogs. These teams have used the wiki to accomplish tasks, and they have disbanded without orders from senior executives.

• Allowing expressions of judgment. NITs are egalitarian technologies that let people express opinions. DrKW employees use blogs to voice their views about everything from open-source software to interest rate movements.

• Fostering emergence. “Emergence” is the appearance of high-level patterns or information because of low-level interactions. These patterns are useful because they allow managers to compare how work is done with how it’s supposed to be done. Emergence is also valuable for users. For instance, employees can easily search and navigate DrKW’s blogs and wiki for trends and data even though nobody is in charge of making them easy to use.

...Employees exploit older NITs such as e-mail and instant messaging on their own, but business leaders have a role to play in exploiting newer technologies like blogs and wikis. They can help sustain and increase the use of complements to make the technology continually more effective, primarily by guiding users. Darren Leonard, a managing director in the global equity derivatives business at Dresdner Kleinwort, recalls how he got his colleagues to use the company’s wiki: “First, if a wiki has no structure, it’s perceived not as an opportunity but as anarchy, and our people have no time for anarchy. I went back to my initial pages and rewrote them to be a lot more directive. For example, I made a page with the agenda for an upcoming meeting and asked people to add to it. Second, wikis have to be clearly better than other ways of collaborating. There have to be uses [for them] that demonstrate their power. One of these uses came prior to a special senior management meeting where we could bring questions from our groups and get them answered. I put up a page…asking my [team members] what questions they wanted me to ask on their behalf. People used the page to post questions, edit them, and discuss which ones were the most important and why. That really accelerated wiki use. Finally, old habits are hard to break. The tendency is for people to keep using e-mail because that’s what they know....I have to [tell them], ‘I’m not reading e-mails on this topic. Use the wiki’ or ‘Everyone’s assignments are on this page—use the same page to report on progress.’”

Lead users and enterprises already work this way today.  Only they do so without usable efficiency.  Integrated single sign-on, search and tag cloud are just the beginning.  One click subscription to a page, blog post, search query, report, weblog and wiki make feeds usable (unlike today's user experience, when they click on an orange icon and think their browser is broken).  Rapidly form groups, draft together on a wiki page, publish to a blog and track results. 

Beyond making such tasks efficient, the benefits to productivity, discovering emergent intelligence and high-engagement marketing are significant.  Very soon a user will wake up in the morning, log in to SuiteTwo, immediately recognize something emerging.  With the top blog posts telling her what the company is talking about, the top wiki pages showing her what people are working on, top posts from the outside that her company is subscribed to and the feedback from what they are publishing
-- something will emerge.  She recognizes the opportunity, pulls on the social fabric and easily forms a diverse group of experts.  They follow new feeds and generates others while working with a little productive friction.  They develop a plan and draft a new offering in the wiki.  They publish to a public blog and track where it goes. The feedback loops continue, she goes home for the day and the organization is bound to adapt again.

This isn't your Dad's enterprise, but one you will be working with soon.

Web 2.0 Starts

From the Mercury News this morning:

`The conference as an event has evolved from something that's fairly bleeding edge to representing the core of our industry's community,'' said Ross Mayfield, the CEO of SocialText, which makes wikis for business customers. Mayfield is attending for the third year in a row and says that ``If you look past the hype, you see that it features real companies with real traction, and that there's still innovation coming.''

Lisa Lampert, a managing director at Intel Capital, will also be at the show. ``We see the Web 2.0 conference as a very important venue to launch our first enterprise suite for Web 2.0. We see it as the best way to get out (our) message.''

Whether next year's event is as popular remains to be seen. Said Mayfield, ``The downside to the conference's success is that Web 2.0 may become the name of the bubble itself.''

See you at the Enterprise 2.0 Workshop at 8:30am.

Our Industry Doesn't Participate

Am I the only one to notice that the first day of Web 2.0 is Election Day?  Or am I just upset that I won't have time to get to the polls and am digging through junk mail to find my absentee ballot.

Are we too busy making money to even put it on the agenda?  Can you point to one campaign that made a difference leveraging Web 2.0?  In a nationalized election that could restore checks and balances, I'm sure something overcame the short-term profit motive. 

I know of some campaigns that used wikis within the organization.  Really I may just be faulting myself for not being involved enough this time.

Enterprise Gap

Mark Masterson highlights the need for Enterprise 2.0 to work with Enterprise 1.0:

...This is interesting, and it addresses real concerns -- in a brief conversation recently triggered by my post, a CSC CTO said to me that one of his biggest concerns is the potential for silos of information that are (but shouldn't be) isolated from one another. In other words, he's just as concerned about there being useful information in some blog or wiki, that some Enterprise 1.0 user needs but can't get access to, as the other way around. The BEA software looks to be aimed at solving the Enterprise 1.0 -->> Enterprise 2.0 gap, and not the other way around. Nevertheless, it is interesting to see that people are thinking about this.

Fear not, Mark.  We're trying to get it right this time.

No Enterprise 2.0 company in their right mind would want to be an island, no matter the paradise.  Most of us began working on interop even when our own apps were half-baked.  RSS, Atom and other ad hoc standards proliferated.

But while we make an effort to work with existing enterprise architecture (e.g. Socialpoint), we'll stay on the side of the web.  Because the web as a platform compounds innovation that eventually makes itself into legacy architecture.  Just look at the amount of enterprise applications leveraging RSS and Ajax. This morning I came across a funny way to describe this, in an intro to a new book about REST:

There are lots of books about Big Web Services: complex distributed-object systems that reproduce the mechanics of method calls over HTTP. The problem is 1) these systems are way too big for what they do, and 2) they're on the web but they aren't of the web. They don't use any of the web's features, or interact with anything else on the web. They just use HTTP as a transport protocol. They could just as easily run over TCP and get better performance.

These un-weblike systems were able to take the name "Web Services" away from the competition because the competition is... the web. Just writing programs that interact with the web. Sounds pretty sketchy! The web may be all right as a platform for serving movies, or selling books, or trading stocks, or democratizing publishing, or coordinating huge volunteer projects, or searching much of the information currently in existence, but there's no way it's up to the task of managing Accounts Payable! For that you need... Web Services!

As Big Web Services gathered steam, the pro-web forces rallied behind the banner of REST: a name for the design philosophy that made the human-visible web so successful. They preached simplicity, addressability, statelessness and the uniform interface of HTTP. They also got into lots of heated arguments about what REST really meant.

Some organizations created services that claimed to be RESTful, and others critiqued those services and said they weren't RESTful really, and is "RESTful" even a word? Meanwhile the world's programmers started finding options in their IDEs that generated code for Big Web Service clients and servers, so they wouldn't have to do so much programming.

..."Speaking of Ajax, did you know that an Ajax application is basically a REST web service client that runs in your web browser?"

It should be noted we are also plugging the gaps that Enterprise 1.0 missed. As an aside in the Shameless Plug department, Socialtext 2.0 was released as Open Source on Sourceforge this weekend, and as you tinker, here is the REST documentation.

There is no Web 3.0

The Catastrophe Constant and Fear Multiple

I was having dinner with my family last night, enjoying a quiet moment, when the TV that was left on in the next room hissed with static.  You know that feeling, wondering if you have picked up on a weak signal to a catastrophe.  Knowing that at anytime peace could be disturbed with senseless horror.  And we have been sensitized that now is the greatest time of risk.

Some people obsess about suitcase bombs, terrorism and viral disease.  There seems to be a more common belief, perhaps furthered by the current Administration, that the risk of catastrophe is greater than ever.  But if you look at catastrophe being damage done through technology, accidental or with purpose, I'm not sure this is true.

The Cold War made us fear how wide-spread the impact of a single incident could be.  Of course, such technology was only in the hands of a few governments.  Now we have super-empowered individuals and social networks.  Theoretically the odds of incidents, their frequency and scale, have increased. Regardless, society has evolved over time as well as technologies of saftey.

In the early days of the industrial revolution, I'd suggest that you had incidents of greater frequency but smaller scale.  Most of them accidental, steam engines exploding and mines collapsing, and at a time when medical and safety technology and practices were less developed.

The media has changed both the measurement, distance of awareness, memory and amplification of catastrophes as stories.  We fear things that don't threaten us directly, have our fears framed by others and it is fear itself that is the story.

I just want to offer up a small theory that I don't have time to test.  The net impact of technological catastrophes is a relative constant from the industrial to information eras, but fear in the information era compounds.

UPDATE: Thanks for letting me share this half-baked theory. Upon reflection, technological catastrophe compounds with second order effects, like global warming.  More baking to come.

Chat with Sam Ramji on Port 25

When we launched SocialPoint on Monday, I had a chance to sit down with Sam Ramji of Microsoft.  A video of the conversation and Sam's thoughts are on Port 25.

Even more interesting to me given my role at Microsoft is that Socialtext has built a Sharepoint integration ("Socialpoint").  This gives Sharepoint users access to a best-of-breed wiki and blogging engine while retaining presence, Office integration, and a unified portal infrastructure.  My inner geek got going when Ross described the new protocol handler they’ve built - "socialpoint:foo/bar" - for navigating within Sharepoint across wikis.  I think this is a good example of how Microsoft platform software should be combined with open source applications.  We continue to invest in scaling the infrastructure, and open it up to developers for innovative applications that can change as often as customers require.

wikiCalc Feature-Complete for 1.0

Dan Bricklin reached a milestone yesterday in the evolution of wikiCalc, the wiki-based spreadsheet.  In releasing wikiCalc 0.96, it is feature-complete, and he put out a call for help:

What's next? I really need help testing this product...

...wikiCalc has the potential to be an important product for the Open Source community as well as for IT in general. It is a complete server-based spreadsheet that runs on your own server, not only on a service provided by others. It keeps an audit trail that may be helpful to corporations that are concerned about such things (Sarbanes-Oxley?). It works like a wiki as part of a web of potentially editable pages in a collaborative environment. It is written in a popular scripting language (Perl) that makes it well suited for experimentation. It would be great to have the 1.0 release come out after a reasonable amount of final testing.

What's new in wikiCalc 0.96 includes support for the 109+ computational functions listed on Openformula.org, part of Open Document Format (ODF).  The product is fully internationalized, and easy to localize using a single human-readable file.

Dan also advanced the formatting and publishing abilities of wikiCalc into something truly unique:

In a visual sense, I wanted the product to be able to produce real web pages that were at a professional enough level that corporations would feel comfortable using the product for internal use and perhaps even external use. That was a real challenge which I believe that I've met.

As an example, Dan replicated the IBM Financial Statements you would find in the investor relations section of their website.  Only one key difference, the ability to let some people have the ability to edit this page.

Socialtext is working to integrate wikiCalc as SocialCalc into our Appliance, Hosted and Open Source distributions at the end of the year.