Ross Mayfield's Weblog

Paths of Resistance

This image has been in my investor presentation for over a year.

Hrm. That seems like an odd place to put a barrier. It's not like there's a cliff to fall over.

It's from Peter Merholz, who also coined the word blog, about IA in at the turn of the century.

In a presentation I gave a long time ago on emergent information architecture, I used the first birdseye photo to demonstrate how people will take a planned design and modify it to fit their needs. In the face of this, designers have two choices -- allow the modification, or throw up obstacles...

In the 17th Century the streets of Boston were paved where cows worn trails.

Today, Peter points out that shit is too hard.

Objects aren't simple any more. They don't just turn or push. They behave. And these behaviors are often played out over many steps, in particular orders. And each step is an opportunity for failure. Through the work that my colleagues conducted on business value and user experience, I learned the six sigma concept of "rolled throughput yield."

The probability of being able to pass a unit of product or service through the entire process defect-free.

At the beginning of Peter's post I thought he was making a point against iteration. As each step that involves a person is prone to error. But he is making an argument for simplicity.

...Anyway, the nub of this wee rant is, of course, simplify. It feels like we're reaching a breaking point with new technologies -- if we thought the blinking "12:00" on the VCR was sad, what terrors can we expect? Think about the lesson of rolled throughput yield -- how can we minimize the steps involved? How can we enable people to plug something in and *just have it work*? How can we do a little more work on the design and engineering, so the customer has to do none on their own?

As tool makers, I'll assert there are five bad decisions we can make:

• Create false barriers
  
• Don't trust users to create
  
• Keep it complex and smart
  
• Pretend you are objective and don't make a statement
  
• Apply scorecards to your work instead of providing experiences
  

Wikiland News

Socialtext was featured in the Wall Street Journal today in an article by Kara Swisher on wikis at work.

What's really interesting is what's happening in the Kwiki developer community -- new SubEthaEdit and Technorati plugins. Plugins on the open source Kwiki framework also run on Socialtext.

There's also an interesting thread on wiki implementation failures on Many-to-Many, where Adina provides a great comment, which I share in full:

A wiki without social conventions for organization is like a meeting without an agenda.

If you gather a group of people together around a table, they will have an unfocused conversation, unless someone has thought through and communicated the topics and goals for the meeting.

The agenda is not a "feature" of the table (!) Yet people know to create an agenda, because that is a social norm for an effective meeting.

The table does not enforce the agenda -- chairs doen't give shocks to people who speak out of turn. The meeting agenda is carried out, with some flexibility, by the meeting facilitator and participants.

When people are looking for wikis to "be organized" by themselves they are looking to the wrong place. People plan meetings, and people organize wikis.

There are social practices for organizing wikis, just like there are social practices for organizing meetings.

Most business software is like a table with a built-in set of agendas that are generic for a few kinds of meetings, and chairs that shock a speaker if she talks out of turn. The agenda designer is invisible, and long gone.

A wiki is more like a normal meeting room, which you can use for any kind of meeting. But the participants need to do the organizing and facilitating.

Implementation takes experience and understanding.

Credentiality

[Daryl Cagle via CNN Blog Roundup]

Elsewhere: OSCON & DNC

Places I wish I was.

If you are at OSCON, do meet Brian Ingerson, our lead developer. He's there contributing all kinds of things and also talking about something he created, Kiwki. Socialtext adopted Kwiki as an open source platform and we rearchitected our product to share its plugin architecture. O'Reilly adopted it too, for such things as a conference wiki.

If you are at the DNC today, do meet Rick Klau, our VP of Business Development. Besides doing a great job with Socialtext customers and partners, he makes his own contributions to his passion. You may know him as the guy that set up Dean's blog. He happens to have done the same for someone you are just beginning to know, Barack Obama.

The rest of us are following along at work.

Political in Business

Political bias in media is a big topic, especially in blogging, but what about political bias in business? We pretend to be objective and for business and government to be as seperate as church and state. Executives are people too (boo hoo) and have political views, but they rarely make it past the political filter. Basically because we are afraid of loosing customers.

But the two are inexorably tied. We often don't recongize business ties to government until special prosecutors and boycotts are invoked. Somehow I think that's starting to change. As more executives and employees blog publicly, their views are going to come out. And its time we start accepting it and even celebrating differences and debate.

Most successful people in business have a political bent that comes with thinking through decisions and leadership. They are also adept at working through differences. I'm left leaning, but I worked for a conservative foreign President and also a former Special Advisor to Reagan. My company has served companies from the left and the right and I have a fiduciary responsibility to act like a phone company (as in neutrality, not monopoly) for the benefit of shareholders. When we worked with Dean and now Kerry, I of course was enthused and passionate, I am for most customers, but to say that serving Bush would be more than doing the work would be a lie.

When David Weinberger says "Objectivity is a worthwhile objective, but it needs to be recognized that it can't be reached," this is true for more than the press.

When giving my little stump speech on Social Media, I drifted into politics. Saying something to the effect that its ironic that we are having a conference about tools to build relationships while our nation is dismantling them. What I meant to also say is that people are dying right now to protect another important part of Social Media -- freedom of speech. I care a great deal about what's right about politics and business. You can care about both and you can take stands.

What's more, if you don't act with this care, especially with the social goods and costs of your company, your corporation will be a bad citizen. And that's bad business.

Related: Joi's research topic, Socially Responsible Investing I and II, role of government (.pdf) in advancing corporate sustainability.

IT Heavies Lifting Dollars for Wikis

Time together is too important to spend working

-- Pete Kaminski (via Adina)

Michael Singer of Internet.com covers an enterprise view of the BlogOn event: The industry itself has shifted from its early adopter stage to an "awkward adolescence," according to experts attending last Friday's BlogOn 2004 conference here. But major IT players like Microsoft, IBM, and others are finding that they can embrace blogs instead of fearing them and transition the communication platform from a technical tool to an enterprise goldmine.

Socialtext CEO Ross Mayfield attributes much of the recent explosion in blogs to a ease of use and the relatively low cost aspects of the technology built on top of a Linux, Apache, MySQL, and Perl stack.

"Social media builds relationships. Connection happens before conversation, but still, this is business," Mayfield said. "What you will not find on your balance sheet is an underlying value proposition of enhancing social capital."

To clarify, there are a couple of points I believe I said. Social media puts emphasis on participatory publishing within the Social Software space. With Social Media and Social Software, conversation comes before connection. The relationship remains implicit with initial interactions (first comes the posts then explicit linking in blogrolls). With Social Networking, connection comes before conversation. The former is closer to how relationships form in real life. The latter is networking on steroids. Business has always been about relationships, Social Software is creating a business of relationsips.

The article mentions Microsoft's use of wikis in their developer community, "Whoever thought that people would want to help us edit Microsoft.com?" Jeff Sandquist said. And captures part of the conversation on Enterprise Social Software from my panel:

Jim Spohrer, IBM venture capital relations group CTO, said the company is seeing a lot of value that can be created inside organizations with tools like RSS, Atom and XML.

"Businesses can be more efficient in tapping into their internal IQ," Spohrer said. "I'm on calls every day with people all over the world, and it appears that there's a lot of value that could be captured instantly. There's a thing called Coase's Law that touches on transaction costs inside a firm versus transaction costs outside the firm. The point is to have the internal transaction costs as low as possible. This first hit home with me at a recent meeting. We went out to dinner, we're sitting around a table, and there were 15 people other than myself. There was a sense of discomfort I hadn't felt for a while, and I realized that I wished I was on a teleconference with these people. I couldn't use my tools to learn more about them and their work, their goals, their achievements. I felt I was in the Stone Age. I'd have to be very slow to get information and rely on conversation.

While this comment only covers meeting augmentation, syndication offers a great proposition for reducing transaction and total costs of ownership, a major proposition for Enterprise Social Software.

Jerry Michalski comments on the discomfort of not having meetings augmented by Social Software:

It's a slightly spooky scenario, but I'll confess to having wished for a heads-up display that projects inside a pair of glasses who's who at a cocktail party, including who used to work with whom, who's friends with whom (hey, orkut) and who's dating whom.

At Socialtext, our meetings are augmented by voice, IRC (with a bot to post to the wiki) and Workspace. By the end of each meeting, enough artifacts are captured in a social context to enable group memory. Similar to using an Eventspace at a conference. When we meet in person we find it to be terribly inefficient. But that said, there is no such thing as virtual beer, the kind of schmooze we go to events for anyway.

Blogger on the Bus

The first day of the Democratic Convention has left bloggers with little to cover. Its a shame that the greatest test of blogs alongside journalism is in covering a non-event (so far).

How brilliant would it be for the Kerry Campaign to grab a blogger or two to join them on the tour after the convention? To pick up (and drop off) a blogger for different legs of the campaign? Give them equal access to the press corp.

Now that would give us something to follow.

On second thought, this thing is getting kind of interesting. Carter slammed Bush when nobody is supposed to go negative. Clinton is pissed off at what Bush did to his decisions. Bloggers are the one new thing for the memory mechanism.

Something wonderful about the simple redesign of Technorati and how the Politics section is helping me listen to different sides. Wonder what happens to the center column items when the convention is over.

AO Video

Always On has posted the video archive from their Innovation Summit. All events should share like this. Of note is the Closing Blogger Panel. Skip the first half hour, listen in. At the end of it, you will hear me chiming in on Cost Per Influence (something I keep playing with).

July 15th, Thursday

Windows Media

RealPlayer

Bloggers vs. "Big" Media Competition Host: Peter Hirshberg, Cofounder, GoodMail Systems Dan Gillmor, Columnist & Blogger, San Jose Mercury News Blaise Zerega, Managing Editor, Wired Doc Searls, Senior Editor, Linux Journal Chris Nolan, chrisnolan.com David Sifry, CEO, Technorati.com Host: Tony Perkins, Creator and Editor in Chief, AlwaysOn

56k 220k

56k 220k

BlogOff

Since the conference blogging zen master is covering BlogOn and all the other usual suspects, I'm taking a break. Believe my panel wen't well and now its time to sit back and enjoy company.

The panel on Metrics of Influence was perhaps my favorite. Interesting to see Technorati, Slashdot, eBay and SAP approaches to reputation intertwingled for discussion. One thing that wasn't said is that explicit reputation doesn't belong everywhere (e.g. ranking friends) and the most elegant solutions don't use it at all.

Here's some local and trade coverage.

Discussing Social Media

This post is in lieu of Powerpoint to introduce the Defining Social Media panel at BlogOn tomorrow with Dan Gillmor, James Currier, Reid Hoffman, Michael Sikillian and Jim Spohrer.

How We Got Here

The Internet has always facilitated conversations and augmented relationships. When a critical mass of participation is gained, cooperation ensues and simple tools have complex results. The earliest innovators in this adoption lifecycle were geeks and hackers. Put enough of them together and you get a new mode of production to disrupt the software industry and enable a new phase of growth -- open source.

What we are witnessing is segments of early providers and early adopters form previously unrepresented networks and apply participatory technologies to disrupt industries. Earlier adoption segments include software, media, advertising, entertainment, politics, dating, recruiting, consumer electronics, sales, management, the list goes on. All these segments are information intensive and rely on relationships. And as Doc says, its a revolution in demand-based supply:

Social media are another example of the demand side supplying itself. We're seeing this with open source software, with new standards like RSS, and with the new media we call blogs. We're even seeing it in movies such as Outfoxed, and with Internet radio (in spite of destructive fear-based regulation). None of these things came from the Big Boys. They came from you and me and the rest of us here.

Landscape

There is little point in defining Social Software, Media, Search, Computing or Networking, except that new language parallels innovation. Here's my way of mapping the space, feel free to modify and make your own.

Social Software, a term coined by Clay Shirky, is the design of systems that supports groups with an underlying value proposition of building social capital...

A rather long post continues at Many-to-Many...