Ross Mayfield's Weblog

Dark Sucker

There are certain cases when people are wrong. Allow me to let them illustrate:

What Mike is trying to say here: Using a few important thermodynamic principles, air conditioners are machines that move heat from one area to another. Typically, they move the heat from inside to outside.

This is ludicrous. He goes on to argue that we shouldn't set our thermometers. I mean, come on, doesn't the word set mean anything in our turbulet world? Yet, sadly, this is a consistent pattern. A phenomenon, if you will. We assume the world is 80% outside and we should simply give up. But have you ever heard the expression, something something the cold wind blows? Then you know what I'm talking about.

Thomas Munchine, before links were invented, proved definitively that lightbulbs do not emit light. They suck dark.

Corporate Blogging and the Boss

Scott Rosenberg thinks corporate blogging will be inhibited by control issues. Namely, people are afraid of pissing off their boss.

...But for large numbers of workers in America, particularly those at big companies, the dominant fact of life remains don't piss off your boss...The blogs you're going to see from within most traditional companies will be either uninformative snoozes or desperate attempts at butt-covering and -kissing. Not because people don't have great stories to tell -- but because telling the truth has too high a cost...

This follows comments on the same panel at Supernova by Tim Bray: Any corporation that doesn't do this in the future is going to be playing catch-up.

David Weinberger replies:

I do agree that it'll take a long time for corporate public blogging to spread beyond easy industries, such as high tech. But, I think it'll happen faster than Scott does. First, internal blogging will happen relatively quickly because it's a great way for employees to build their reputations, a motive as powerful as the urge not to piss off your boss. Those internal blogs will go onto the extranet and eventually some will make it onto the Internet...

The prospect of being fired up (a cheesy cheerleader way of saying promoted) is as much a motivator as being fired. Whether large scale adoption of corporate blogging will occur outside tech because of control has less to do with characteristics of industries than leadership. It happens first in information intensive industries, but can happen anywhere a manager wants to gain competitive advantage and is willing not just to give up some control, but recongize its already lost. The same dynamic already happens with email as publishing, with less transparency.

David points out a natural cycle from internal to external blogging that we have seen in recent cases. Internally, blogging can also begin in less disruptive activities, like projects or lines of research.

Blogging Supernova

Supernova has been a blast so far. Was taking dilligent notes until I realized that the zen master was here. Here is Heath's transcript of my panel.

So I'm playing in the Eventspace and IRC...see you there.

Next Best Thing to Being There

Next Best Thing to Being There: A New Breed of Software Can Help Far-flung Employees Work Together in Inc. Magazine, profiles Socialtext, Sharepoint and Groove. Until its published on the Web, the article is available courtesy of Groove Networks (.pdf). It will be great to be there with Ray Ozzie at Supernova.

Oh, and if you can't be at Supernova, you can listen into the audiocast and participate virtually.

Newsgator Raises Series A

Newsgator, Greg Reinacker's primarily Outlook-based RSS/Atom Aggregtor, raised a Series A from Mobius.

There is a great deal of investment activity going on around the fringes of RSS. Expect more announcements within the next month. What you are beginning to see is the impact of companies founded on spec early in the market's development that leverage the open source paradigm shift where the network is the market. If you think this space is interesting now, just wait for the impact of form following funding.

Congrats Greg!

Rate-limiting Moonshine

Larry Seltzer posts an opinion that rate-limiting, or capping the number of emails a consumer account can send, should be used in the war on spam. Its appealing because cutting it off at the source would in theory effect only 1% of users and it does raise costs for Senders.

I think the time has come to be more specific. Set a rate limit for outbound mail for consumer accounts. There are systems available to enforce it. And it would be yet another sign to users whose computers have been taken over that they need to clean them out.

Like any solution to spam there are tradeoffs. But this prohibition could have the effect of handing a drunk a shotgun with instructions to plug a hole in a leaking dyke with it. There is a better mixed metaphor, but you'll get my point.

Senders will arbitrage by setting up more accounts to acheive current volumes. This will increase marginal costs for senders, but the marginal cost for managing whole new accounts would be greater. Also, this new form of email jail would be arbitraged by service providers as the disaffected 1% would be seeking alternatives, when say, their bulk mailing for the yearly event they produce is capped. Add to this a new cost for rating and how it goes against stupid network principles.

Spam is an economic problem, we don't have models that account for all incentives and this is just the opinion of one Spamonomist. In general, this is a form of price-fixing that may have negative externalities.

Site-Flavored Yummy

Fresh from the labs, Site-Flavored Search. From their Kaltix acquisition.

Just working on my Google PC. This isn't that big a deal, restricts queries to categories, but you can get your own.

Open Texts in Wiki

The Mercury News stumbles upon as an example of how the Internet is not shit. It's JD Lasica's opening of his book Darknet for editing in a Socialtext wiki:

One of the more interesting trends to emerge lately is the practice of book authors inviting strangers to collectively edit their manuscripts online before they are published...

``I realized the underlying theme of what I'm writing about is that we're entering an era where creative people are sort of losing control of their work, and it's not all bad,'' Lasica said. ``I wanted to experience that. I didn't want that experience of a big media conglomerate where you say `Take it or leave it.' ''...

Lasica said his Wiki experience has been a mixed bag. Readers have enhanced his writings by pointing out facts he missed or fixing grammatical errors.

On the other hand, some readers took it upon themselves to insert Web links to important Web sites throughout his manuscript -- links that will not work in the printed edition of the book.

Nonetheless, Lasica said he would probably use a Wiki again if he writes another book. His editor originally questioned the idea of ``publishing'' his book on the Web before it is printed. But Lasica said he supports the Wiki experiment. In fact, his editor is now exploring whether to set up a Wiki where authors can help edit each other's work.

Lasica said the only major change he would make next time is to put his writings online earlier in the process.

``I just think this is where our culture is headed,'' Lasica said, ``where things are more collaborative.''...

The article also mentions Christian Crumlush's use of a wiki for his book The Power of Many. Christian put it up after we paneled together at a publishing conference to create a collaborative glossary.

For more on wikified books, see (and edit) this page.

While writing this post my daughter stopped me to tell her a story about her dream last night. Of course, the length and detail was less recall and more improvisation at the moment. I told her she should write these stories down and I would type them and by the end of the summer we would have a book to put on the web. She said, "you mean put it on the Web for people who don't have anything to do? ...Maybe if I publish that book I will get a Caldecot medal."

Cold IM

This is insane, but perhaps a sign of things to come. I got my first cold call via IM today. They got my handle off of a mailing list archive. Now I get a lot of cold calls. That's what I get as a CEO trying to answer his own phone. There is no do-not-call for B2B. Most times you try to be nice and hear them out.

What's worse, they pretended to be someone else initially, someone I might sell to. Later in the conversation they admitted they were someone selling KM trade show nonsense. That's where the conversation ended. Block User. But no satisfacion of slamming handsets.

Identity and Email

...There are a number of ways to look at relationships. One is ties in a social network. If you plotted a graph of directional ties using email and and one using RSS they would be different, perhaps even the opposite. Email ties would point from Sender (A) to Receiver (B), a Push Model. RSS ties would point from B to A, a Pull Model. If enough positive message flow exists between A and B you can imply a confirmed tie with either Email or RSS which is an indicator of a relationship...

From a rather long piece I posted on Many-to-Many...