Ross Mayfield's Weblog

Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Social Software

Gartner Research released the first Magic Quadrant report on the Enterprise Social Software market this week.

This is a pretty big milestone in the development of the Enterprise 2.0 category at-large.  Just a few years ago, the only analysts covering the space were blogalysts.  Now, perhaps the most rigorous and influential vendor analyst reports in enterprise software says it really is enterprise software. The analysis rightly says we all have work to do.

It also says that Socialtext is the most visionary provider and behind only Microsoft, BEA and IBM in execution.  This tells me that if we want to be the leader we need to demonstrate better execution (mind you, I'm not taking out IBM next year, but it is good feedback).  SuiteTwo, of which we are a core component, also scored well in vision but has a way to go in execution.

Status Contests and Attention Aggregators

I find myself updating my status, or answering the question "what are you doing?" across Twitter, Jaiku, Plazes and Facebook.  This is made easier through clients like Twitterific, Juhu, Plazer and some Facebook hacks that are less attractive.  I'm using these clients for more than updating status easily, however.  They are a new kind of attention aggregator -- bringing the status or lifestreams of my social networks to me in real time.

They are pretty cool tools, if you haven't tried them.  For Twitter, having a client fits my laptop-oriented daily use, so I can mostly turn the mobile client off (text "off" to 40404, and "on" when you are roaming around) and subscribe to a larger social network.  For Jaiku, having a client brings continuous partial presence to my laptop, that is far richer because people are lifestreaming (adding feeds from other tools like blogs to enrich their presence).  For Plazes, the Plazer has always let me share my location, but now it is richer with status sharing and a reverse-chronological view of your network.  Facebook will surely have a better client soon as part of their quest to be the social operating system, and hopefully incorporate your Mini-feed.

But all this client development seems like one-offs, status service providers have stayed out of development perhaps wisely, and there is ample room for innovation.  As is usually the case, we've been here before -- a lack of standardization and cooperation yields less and leaves room for a large service provider to monopolize.

I don't think we want to wait for Google, Yahoo or Microsoft to provide a status and lifestream integrated user experience that flows through clients, let alone browsers or operating systems.  I do think this will happen as status services fill a valuable niche in our demand for social interaction, let alone being a new command line for web services.

Compare where we are to how RSS and Atom provided common standards for developers to innovate.  There was a time where almost every graduate CS student would write a news aggregator for fun and new startups proliferated.  Adriaan Tijsseling leveraged Atom from the earliest versions to create client blog editor, Ecto, and went beyond the Flickr Uploader to also offer aggregation with 1001.  Some, like Newsgator, plunged deep into clients across operating systems, email clients and mobile clients to let you work across them.  But the result isn't the case where one vendor, could own publishing, syndication and reading including clients.  We have a healthy marketecture that continues to innovate.

There is a new kind of aggregator, for more real time attention, that needs to be build to work across status services.  I'm not sure if it will be built into existing news aggregators, if existing status clients will evolve into them, or it will be something new.  I just know it is coming.  It will leverage status service providers and Lifestreaming you find in services like Dandelife and Jaiku.  You will be able to edit your status and perhaps more, like location to Plazes or a blog entry.  Maybe it will be built on Apollo or Google Gears, maybe a Firefox extension or a mobile version on WidSets.  But it won't happen too soon.

The problem is, while the REST APIs are easy to work with, they aren't standardizing.  Maybe they will converge on using the Atom Publishing Protocol.  Maybe they can work out a way to let you write your status once, publish everywhere, and remove dupes when aggregating.

Jaiku Tips the Tuna?

Did Jaiku tip the tuna yesterday?  Leo Laporte  jumped ship from Twitter to Jaiku, his 4,000 followers followed.  The Twitter herd debated platforms, has herds do when chosing to migrate.  Suddenly the story was Twitter vs. Jaiku and Jaiku team dealt with digesting a big chocolate Easter Bunny.

Let me provide some context first.  I was exposed to Jaiku at Aula in Helsinki last June.  From my notes:

Jyri Engeström and Mika Raento on social peripheral vision.  Phones are designed with the assumption that you know who you want to call before you do.  You need to process social signals before using the device.  Jaiku, their startup is looking to augment basic functions of a phone by pasting onto it what is happening on the internet.  If you can't find anyone in your contact book, you can search a directory made of everyone's contacts. Calendars let you share future events to let you plan together.  The demo shows very rich profiles based on phone usage (automatic data) and more social signals (more manual) -- which provides a different form of Presence.  In usage, people still call regardless of presence, but when someone doesn't answer, you leverage the presence to understand why. Integrated IM is more convenient than SMS, and includes group messaging.

Since then, Twittr came on the scene and Jakiu's web interface got a major upgrade.  It's important to understand the significant differences between the two services, their design thinking and strengths.  Joi Ito:

Looks like a bunch of people are trying out Jaiku after "tasting" co-presence with Twitter. To me, Jaiku, which existed before Twitter, is a bunch of Helsinki mobile jocks getting into the Web 2.0 of it all whereas Twitter is the Web 2.0 crowd "getting" co-presence...

Jaiku comes from a "presence" background allowing bluetooth proximity, phone idle time, ringer mode and other things to trigger state changes - the messaging came later. Twitter, on the other hand, is primarily messaging, which as we all know, is just a flexible and manual vector for presence information.

To understand where Jaiku is coming from, I encourage you to read this interview with co-founder Jyri Engeström and his post on social peripheral vision (the ability to have your finger on the pulse of your friends, family, and colleagues).

  Twitter on paper 
  Originally uploaded by jack dorsey.

In digging around for some of the thinking behind Twitter, I found Jack Dorsey's napkin design for Twitter:

from a note circa Jan 2006.

casual awareness.
"what are you up to?"

multiple entry point to set status
- web
- email
- phone
- sms
- im

multiple ways to "subscribe" to status
- web
- email
- phone
- sms
- im

3 aspects
- set status
- timeline (collaborative)
- configuration

The interesting thing is that I found it on Jack's Jaiku page where he had included his Flickr stream as part of his presence.  For a long time I've wanted the Xfire for social software, and today Jaiku provides this kind of persistent presence.

Jaiku lets you incorporate feeds from your blog, bookmarks, photos, location -- and Twitter if that is where you prefer to post status.  Every post of any kind becomes an object for conversation, through comments.  This works easily in the web UI, but it also works in the Nokia mobile client because presence isn't overwhelming. Presence is something you can glance at, not an SMS interruption. 

Unfortunately today this requires a Nokia phone, but they are working on a Java version that also specifically supports commenting (kind of like Radar.net, more on that later).  People coming from Twitter won't expect the ability to add their attention breadcrumbs to their attention stream (developers will) and will probably expect something they can adopt on their mobile easily.  In the US, this is a significant barrier (Sidenote: fuck you Cingular.  Making me change calling plans to switch SIM cards from my Blackberry and claiming the handset wont work because you don't sell it even though it runs the same software is an easy way to lose me as a customer, as if I had alternatives.).  Jaiku isn't ready to Tip the Tuna until their next mobile client comes out. 

But until then I'd expect a lot of people to use the web version as an attention pool.  Posting to Jaiku via Twitter is a no-brainer and I'd hope you can do the opposite without loops and dupes soon.  Rafe asked the right question:           Is it possible Twitter and Jaiku will end up sharing users, instead of hoarding them like the IM services did early on? I responded: systems of record are being replaced by systems of discovery. 

In other words, in the first web I would worry about which service I would commit my social network, presence and persistence to.  But services are increasingly making data discoverable and discovering data from other services.  We used to worry about transporting our FOAF relationships, but then I think we realized that each tool is different and being able compose a different social network was a virtue (not just because of faceted identity, but that different tools need different filters and the social network is the filter).

UPDATE: This post was written in haste before going out for Easter.  Jaiku released their API and developer site.  I forgot to highlight Marko Ahtisaari's why I use Jaiku:

1. Silent sociality - checking up on what my friends are up to when convenient, and posting my own state knowing that I won't be disturbing others (unless they have explicitly asked to be alerted).

2. Small-group sociality - Jaiku is not about celebrity. I'm interested in sharing state with a small group I'm nearly always in contact with, what Mimi Ito has called full-time intimate community.

3. Mobile sociality - Jaiku was designed with the mobile "living phonebook" interface in mind. SMS alerts crowding the inbox of one of the few working personal and functional communication channels is not my idea of improving communication. I use the SMS-in posting to Jaiku when I'm using my Nokia 8800 and with my N70 I use the Jaiku phonebook.

4. Background sociality - Jaiku allows me to integrate other online identities and feeds (including delicious, flickr and any RSS) into my single jaiku presence feed. This is done in a way that doesn't confuse these background posts with my explicit state messages.

Rafe posts about adding your Twitter to Jaiku.  And I wanted to add one last thing.  If you aren't trying it with a mobile client, you can't get the real experience.

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.

RSS Advisory Board

I joined the RSS Advisory Board with Meg Hourihan, Loïc Le Meur, Eric Lunt, Rogers Cadenhead, Jenny Levine, Randy Charles Morin, Greg Reinacker and Dave Sifry.  Now, I'm an Atom fan and can't say that the previous board accomplished anything.  But RSS is a critical standard for our industry and I hope to bring a perspective as a toolbuilder for the enterprise.

First order of business, draft 1 of a new RSS specification.

The Ping War

Somewhere in the middle of the Google Books debate last night, it confirmed for me that we are in a ping server war.  It's a little hard to see, but the ping server will become the new center of the net.  Verisign's acquisition of Weblogs.com was the first salvo.  I'm not sure Robert Cringley is right about Google-Mart, but he isn't entirely wrong.  Google Base isn't just about volunteered structuring of data, but pushing pings (Mark Pincus isn't entirely wrong either, but that's another issue).  The important point is there is tremendous value being the first to have information pass through your central node.

As an aside, the reason it occured to me in the middle of last night's debate was how part of the copyright argument was shifting from opt-in to opt-out, regardless of the specifics of this case.  Google is suggesting that instead of getting permission from copyright holders first, others would contact them to opt-out.  The reason this is an issue at all is because there is no registry of rights holders that is kept up to date.  Maybe one day there will be a technical solution, and I'd imagine it would look something like an RSS page for each copyright holder that pings a server (or many) when ownership or contact information or license has been modified.  In a moment of madness, I considered Google Books to be a marketing ploy for Google Base.

Now, a supposed ping war may not matter.  Any time a network hubs around a node where the flow is valuable, an arbitrage exists.  Central power of a ping server leads to the recognition of alternative servers.  If that fails, the spiders start crawling faster.  The only drawback is the network becomes inefficiently loaded trying to find even distribution.  Such redundancy is a great reason to love the net.  They dynamics here hold far less ability for control than the lower levels, we should be aware of them, but more gravely concerned about the concentration below.

So I'll apologize for this post.  Can't make it groove like Steve Gillmor.  Just a musing.

Content Industry Outlook

Notes from an industry overview session at the Buying and Selling eContent conference in Scottsdale, Arizona.  I just arrived so I might have missed a little of the intro, and already missed David Weinberger's keynote (podcast).  Here's what I didn't miss:

Rafat Ali, Paid Content (pictured Podcasting the session later)

M&A and Venture Deals: M&A came back over the last year.  On the B2B side most of the activity is focused on the business database.  On the VC side it is about organizing, organizing RSS feeds, tags (as noted in David Weinberger's keynote). 

Open Source Media Ethic: Convering of consumer and the open source media ethic (being open to different sources of information and trying to incorporate into your company to use other's expertise).  Notes the Business 2.0 article I read on the plane on open web services.  For media and business information companies, using search data and open APIs, its a hot area. 

Becoming the Center of Gravity:For media companies, new models to contend with.  My site is a blog, pure news aggregation, news intelligence service.  We are doing well compared to to become the center of gravity.  The reason for my existence is to send people to other sites.  How to incorporate social tagging?  Look at InfoWorld's use of del.icio.us.  Aggregation and vertical search, custom branded news readers (Guardian, News.com) lets you become the source of information for your topic using all the resources out there.

Content packaging and distribution: new opportunities, especially mobility.

John Blossom from Shore, a research and advisory services for the content industry.

Content and technology plus people to get high human input and value, high productivity and high content value.  Publishing has moved from being a black art to being a pervasive tool with things like weblogs.  From where content was a rare commodity to raining content and a challenge of extracting value with abundance.  The Star Wars kid video with 15 million downloads and lots of remixes.  Google News takes content from premium sources and creating context for it that is of greater value.  "Good content is where you find it."  Database era meant you had to go log in to get it, now entire libraries of content go where they want to go.

2005 is about the 4 Cs.  Cooperation, Commercialization, Containerization and Consolidations.  Cooperation: publishers, advertisers and search partnering around highly contextual audiences, authors and markets (weblogs, wikis and social networks), institutional clients and content technologists, instiutions and public content outlets.  Commercialization: Google Scholar, Rich Data mining technologies, monetizing in open contexts (Reuters.com, BBC/Moreover, CCC, ValeoIP), empower users as aggregators (RSS, desktop search, iPod, Weed, collaboration tools). Containerization: more options, DRM is the beginning of letting content be useful, but a taboo word, eBooks growing.  Consolidation: Collapse of quality mass print circulation, titles search for identity in a search-centric ad world, huge multiples for key companies that fit (Capital IQ for functions, MarketWatch for ad pages).

Winners

• monetizers of contextual value
• close to the user
• leverage affordable power of publishing
• source-agnostic content integrators
• licensors creating useful content objects

Losers

• product centric (vs. user centric
• under investors in content technologies
• anyone wishing that it would all be simple again

Jeffrey Dearth of desilva phillips provides an investment banker's perspective.

Customers are in control.  Search engine disruption: Google scholar, library and news -- look at their acquisitions to see where they are going in fulfillment of their mission statement. Google informs reader and advertiser, the brand equity belongs to the search engine.

Tradition information providers are consolidating (Thomson, Lexis-Nexis, McGraw-Hill), feeding frenzy for eyeballs.  Traditional publishers scrambling to position themselves online (NY Times, WSJ, etc.).  New media companies buying strategically (i.e. InfoUSA, Google, IAC), private equity firms are flush with cash and targeting content companies, banks are providing great debt leverage to fuel higher multiples. 70% of the revenue for AskJeeves is driven by Google, he doesn't understand the billion plus valuation.  Oneline ad growth an gaining share of market, 20-30% growth next year, while the B2B publishing market is only growing at 4% -- pick which market you want to be.  2005 is going to be one of the best years for eContent in M&A, a seller's market.

What's hot:  New Vertical Aggregators, lead generation such as franchise solutions that arbitrage google keywords, SEM/SEO/Affiliate network companies, vertical search/local search, rich media, blogs & RSS, business/financial data.  "Technorati likely to be snapped up one of these days, at least that is the rumor." 

Case study with Carroll Publishing: used to have to lug big manuals around, now its on the web and his biggest customer is a 411 lookup directory that sells oursourced services for mobile telephony, paid $0.02 per lookup -- shows that you don't know what new markets you will find until you make your information available in a user friendly way for others to use.

Janet Ligget, Pfizer, representing content buyers

The mission of our information management group is to provide information and knowledge from employee to patient.  Most popular resource she provides is electronic journals.  Challenges for content buyers: cost and price structures, integrating information, access and some big changes on the horizon.

Cost and Price structures is a boring topic that wont go away. Budgets are relatively flat. Monopolistic market inhibits innovation in pricing structures: site based pricing (doesn't work for them, people are remote and travel all the time), named user pricing (restricts agility, creates a burden on the buyer to manage user IDs, we don't want to spend our resources managing your products), and unpublished prices (when rationalizing licenses in a merger the variation in prices are really unrelated to the product and more to the skills of the negotiator).   Site pricing works for small companies, but when you consolidate locations it doesn't necessarily reduce prices.

Note: these points are eerily familiar to other commoditizing industries.

Integration information: breaking down information silos is a user demand, information needs to be in one place for users (need to search across silos.), single vendor solutions don't work, integration external information with internal information.   Want to bring in XML feeds and not use your interface, want to use our own linking tools and provide access on our site.  Want to bring in content with metadata attached to it that is industry specific. 

Access: Buyers want sellers to endorse and comply with standards -- even promote them such as Open URL and CLI.  Buyers need to use information in new ways (text mining, personalization, search across resources, search fulltext).  User Names/passwords restrict agility.

Big Changes: Open Access is a revolution in pricing structure, institutional repositories provide new challenge in finding information, author archiving.  It stands things on its head and encourages cost to be moved away from the reader, an important feature regardless of who pays for it eventually.  Senior Scientist leaving Pfizer, but wanted to continue working in academia and asked if its possible to continue accessing their archive, but licensing makes it impossible, so a retiree that we want to keep working as a society is restricted from doing so.  This is why Open Access matters. Google initiatives provide other important opportunities.

Chuck Richard, Outsell, representing the content seller

Think of the room as having suppliers, some disruptors (hi!) and consumers.  IT becoming more personal, migration from consumer to business and business to consumer.  Red Sox interlude. MLB.com is an advanced media site, is the best use of content driven from the user point of view: look at the statistics and the box score with a player's name and a number of runs linked to get the video clip of the player hitting the run.

RSS & blog experimentation will continue and evolve in ways we can't predict.   This is a new tipping point in the industry.  Already pulling some of the ad revenue, will pull in other revenue as well. 

Worldwide B2B information industry revenue $280 Billion with 9% growth in 2004.  Outsell 100 is 53% of the industry, tracked quarterly, revenue growth 12%,  approximately where it was in 2000.  If you take out Google and Yahoo it removes 4% of the growth.  Rates for online advertising is not in parity to CPM, although online is arguably more effective, prices will continue to rise.

Buyers, or readers, over the last few years have changed their preferred method of obtaining information used to be 68% seeking it out yourself, now 51%.  Search and RSS aggregation is a time sink." (Note: bullshit)  Overload is increasing: 8 hours a week in 2001, 11 hours a week now gathering and analyzing, some increase in the relative time gathering.   Users increasingly turning towards their Intranet (10% shift).  Good news is people are looking for direction and help.  What is making the news on disruption isn't effecting economics yet (one survey says barely anyone wants information delivered to their PDA compared to other devices).

Note: Lots of Fear and Loving in Google.  Complete misunderstanding on productivity of blogs and aggregation.  Demanding buyers in a commodity industries in a position to drive commoditization.  Hot and changing market with big shifts underway, perhaps with fundamentals changing faster than private equity models can keep up.

Persistent Spam

Like many over the past few months, I have happily filled my aggregator with persistent queries from the likes of PubSub, Newsgator, Technorati and Feedster.  At first it was ego surfing without leaving the couch.  Now I'm creating lots of queries for even short term memes I want to track.  There is a lot of buzz about

One of the many disturbing points a Spammer made when interviewed by Chris Pirillo was that they could even spam RSS.  Chris said something to the effect of, "bullshit, there is an unsubscribe button."  But when he explained that RSS provided perfect fodder for creating blogs that looked real, there was an Oh Shit moment.  No need for scraping, blogging has structured it for you.

All this clicked for me recently when I noticed an uptick in stupid fake blogs in my pretty smart feeds (I am not linking to examples).  All that persistence is pretty easy to use for spam.  Of course, there will be countermeasures as with any spam war.  An link-based reputation and confirmed ties beat the heck out of black or white listing.  But it is a shame when social software is a victim of its own openness.  When you have to sacrifice your peripheral vision for greater focus on nagging problems.  Ah well, at least I can still subscribe to my friends, and some of them have time to filter for me.

UPDATE: Josh Hallett points to a conversation with Bob Wyman around RSS spam.

Personalized Aggregation

At a Yahoo! briefing on Personalization and syndication this week, I had three questions:

1. After the most likely true claim of being the largest, how many aggregator users do they actually have?
2. Given how user testing shows that when people click on an orange RSS button they think their browser is broken, how can we get to a single subscription button for people who don't use My Yahoo?
3. More critically, why doesn't personalization have social discovery available in other Yahoo! silos, or how do we get from personalization to socialization?

Follow that link for a rant on personalization in general.

Searching Wiki Feeds

Tim Oren picks up the RSS deficit in wiki land, via a Google translation of a German post and Dave Johnson post where Scott Rafer comments:

“Much of the work to be done is on the wiki side, unfortunately. Feedster, et al, would be thrilled to make wiki changes as easy to search as everything else, but (…) the Wiki vendors need to make RSS output a standard option”

Much of this thread was started by Jeremy Zawodny's valid complaints about RSS feeds that are barely-human-readable Recent Changes statistics.  He picks on the Channel9 feed, but its a common feature for wikis.

Socialtext was one of the first to provide RSS feeds for Recent Changes (partially because Steve Gillmor was bugging me for them).  We chose RSS 2.0 full text feeds as the first implementation in recognition of how news aggregators were adding track changes, which complements the diff of History when logged into the Workspace.  You can find the same approach with Kwiki, Purple Wiki JSP Wiki and other open source wikis by now.

The problem is in high volume wikis, getting a copy of every changed page is too burdensome, a problem noted by Jeff Nolan (btw, go read his 10 questions to ask a VC).  This part of the reason we offered tightly integrated group weblogs within Socialtext.  Any wiki page can be added to a weblog which has its own RSS feed.  One of our users created a convention called a Track Blog, where instead of flagging or bookmarking things of interest, they add it to their own blog (like a Watchlist) which pings them when there is an update.

The Pull Model of attention management puts the user back in control of what consumes their time.  Email notifications at the interval of their choosing, RSS the subscribe to, and more imporantly, unsubscribe from on their own accord.  To state it once again, RSS is pull, not push.  The model only works when a user can leverage:

• Transparency -- when everything is on a need-to-know and C.Y.A. basis, occupational spam proliferates and social discovery suffers.  When people work openly you can browse the periphery of your attention when its less scarce.
• Amplification -- when other people find something of interest they can edit it or link to it to bring back to top of group mind.  In other words, when you miss something in a first scan, there is a greater chance people will bring it to your attention. First order merits of attention are usually personal, covered by email and IM. Second order merits of attention are more difficult to judge at first pass and are best offloaded to a group.
• Search -- when you have confidence in your ability to recall the past, you can focus on the critical path of the present.

Which brings me back to Scott's comment.  I believe we helped start a general trend for RSS in wikis and this conversation may help raise the bar again.  Even though the vast majority of Socialtext wikis are private (providing private syndication), our handful of public spaces will ping cooperatively (we ping Technorati today). 

Meanwhile, Jimmy Wales and others are working on Wikia, a wiki search engine, and Wikipedia produces a nice diff feed.  Adapting to MediaWiki covers 1/4 of public wikis.  There are well over 100 open source wikis, a wonderful diversity to respect, and search engines would do well to adapt to them over time just as they have with less standard blog implementations.

Tim's basic point was Wikis do not supply contentful RSS feeds.  I'd suggest that blog search engines have had the ethic of just ping us and feed us, we'll do the rest -- which should apply not only to blogs, but wikis and whatever else we dream up.

As almost a side-note, I should mention that the wiki world isn't wild about nofollow for at least one simple reason. On a blog you have an author and the audience (commentators?).  Within a wiki, everyone is an author.  We are still evaluating where we will use nofollow, I personally see it as  great industry cooperation creating a tool to use.