Ross Mayfield's Weblog

Stockcamp

This week the whole Socialtext team is in the office for a F2F meeting and we just had a session on VC 101.  It dawned on me that education about how venture capital, and specifically employee stock options, is in high and continual demand.  For a venture backed firm, officers find themselves unable to answer many questions without making forward looking statements that would be a liability. 

Thanks to blogging there is more information on this topic available to anyone, but it is outside the competencies of many kinds of employees and even some founders. Getting a firm understanding requires a lot of Q&A in personal context. 

I'm wondering if there is interest in a Barcamp about stock.  Perhaps everyone would need to sign a waiver promising not to actually follow any of the advice, but you could involve accountants, lawyers and VCs.  I don't think it would be longer than an afternoon and it would be in the interest of startups to send their employees to participate.  After all, isn't it a core motivator in the valley?

One Spreadsheet Per Child: SocialCalc on the OLPC XO

Dan Bricklin has ported the SocialCalc spreadsheet to the OLPC XO as an Open Source project.  The One Laptop Per Child XO currently doesn't have a spreadsheet, but the simplicity and small footprint on client or server of SocialCalc may give it one.  As Dan blogs, Socialtext is supportive of this very good project:

The One Laptop folks had been encouraging me to make wikiCalc and then SocialCalc run on their machines for a long time, but it wasn't until now that I finally had the software in an architecture that was appropriate for the OLPC and a machine of my own on which to test. (I think that because the G1G1 campaign got a lot of these lovable computers in the hands of developers a thousand new flowers are sure to bloom...)

I showed my testbed application to SJ Klein of the OLPC project and he reacted favorably and encouraged me to continue. The executives at Socialtext encouraged me to follow through and are supporting what I'm doing.

I've now packaged the code I have a little better and am making it available for others to see. I'm calling the project "Sweet SocialCalc" because when we are done I hope we will have native OLPC code driving this (written in Python) so the JavaScript integrates with the OLPC user interface environment (which is called Sugar, hence the word "sweet"). (See my video of a presentation about Sugar and OLPC from last June.)...

One Laptop Per Child News writes about the need for a spreadheet solution:

Currently, the XO laptop from OLPC does not have spreadsheet software. The One Laptop Per Child developers did not think there was a need for it when they designed the initial Sugar activities, and to an extent, they are right.

Children do not need the ability to run macros on numeric data - that's an adult request. But it is an opportunity for children and adults to bond over basic math, as the Thailand pilot showed:

One of the most engaging project that has involved both students and parents is the family accounting initiative. For six years, many families have recorded their income and expenses in order to better manage their spendings. It was originally done using a simple balance card written on paper.

Later, many had switched to Excel (via desktop PCs at the school's computer lab and the help of their children). It was a case where the benefits of technology was clear and well appreciated. Thus, having a spreadsheet on the XO has been one of the most widely requested features from the parents. Being able to do their accounting at home through the help of their children is extremely attractive.

Dan is looking for feedback and volunteers to help advance the project.

Lotusphere: Mike Rhodin Blogger Q&A

Chris Miller: With the entrance into Social Networking with Connections, what will Lotus do as we get to 3.0?

MR: Challenges hierarchical systems, business systems could break down private information shared.  dangers regulatory meltdowns on sharing regulated

upside is the transformaitonal power that could be pheonominal. seeing beginnings inside .  global consulting business talent pool.  find and leverage experiece is the competitive : The virtual worlds phenomenon is experimental but interesting.  Innovate, a game on how to do IT training in a game mentality was cool.  Get to certification by playing levels in the gaming, which appeals to the gaming generation. That' a close system, but with multiuser and immersive experiences it can get somewhere.  Research that Tivoli did around virtual datacenter visualization was very interesting.

I asked what is the most disruptive thing he has seen that he needs to, perhaps through this audience, get you people to pay attention to?

Social Software (I'll link to someone else's notes)

IBM Research is a great place for me to go shopping.  Bluehouse's live charting and Cattail file sharing came out of IBM Research quicker than before.

People are running from Domino and Exchange to Gmail, wdyt?

In September we announced hosted Notes.  Logical thing.  Domino access light is a good first step.  From an SMB standpoint with Foundaiton, consistent UI, opaque if it is hosted or appliance to the user.  More interest from different walks of business around Foundations today, a non-profit in Africa for example.  We see it, recognize it, but we have a long way to go.  Dont have to go on an 18 month lifecycle, doing it Agile with 4 week iterations.  Symphony is on 6 week iterations.  First question it the press conference was how did you get your team to do it so fast, a great start to talking about it.

Rob Novak: dependencies on Active X and others?

We'd love to work those out.

Rich Schwartz: Love the SMB initatives, they look real, but how can you solve the key problem -- every month in my mailbox I get flyers from local organizations offering MS and Cisco courses, but never from IBM.  What is going to be done about certification for small to midsize markets?

Not going to pre-announce something, but certification should be very high on my priority list.

In my day job I work for a large company (Colgate) and working on winning over the Microsoft camp.  How are you going to overcome the toolbar for Outlook that you see on every popular SNS?

Started working on it, needs to be done.  When you have a new product like connections, they (YASNS) are trying to figure out if they are friend or foe, but we are working it through.

A Scot asks, Lotusphere always has somebody fameous speaking, what happened this year?

Room laughs.  I thought Bob Costas was fantastic.

Microsoft?

The last thing Microsoft expected us to do is launch Symphony and at such a rapid release rate.  Microsoft is still running around saying they've got blogs.  Now they are renaming things.  They can't compete with what we have got in social software.  In addition to the client and catalog on Mashups is the app dev environment.  30% of Sametime deployments in Exchange shops. 

Traditionally when they attack somebody they don't expect people to defend and fight back.  It wasn't expected that we would have this level of investment in the brand.  The development organization is the biggest its been, across 11 countries.

Bruce: Lets talk about the Notes franchise.  Notes client has a lot of value, but how can we expand the out of the box value?

You saw the new templates in the Web 2.0 style.

Alexander Kluge: As a business partner, with Bluehouse, I am interested in what is in it for us.

Only started to show you the beginning of Bluehouse.  Positioned with Foundations for a reason. Extensions to Foundations, taking content and putting it in a marketplace, but we haven't talked about how it is a loosely coupled environment to allow you to integrate what you are good at into the environment.

Don't know the business model and margins yet, will run experiments.  What is right for clients, partners and ecosystems is unclear because of a radical shift in the value chain.  All I know is the ad model eventually runs out of gas because there is a fixed amount of advertising in the world.

Warren Elsemore: Foundations seems to be competitive against Small Business Server, its a different bunch of people that who you are used to selling to.

When you open a new front in a battle you ensure your supplie lines and amunition are well stocked and you don't telegraph your locations.  We see some interesting new channel models that we are doing through acquisitions.  When you acquire companies that are serving SMBs you need to listen them and expand the role that their channel partners play.  Also some non traditional ecosystem lays in surrounding areas.  Playing to win, agressive on cost, reveal TCOs.  Easy to give it away when you charge $400 per copy of Office.

Bright yellow hair: last year was wisdom of crowds, this year it is emergence, how do you see lotus leveraging the social aspect that surrounds you?

Remember when we had Connections up last year and took it down after the conference?  Our business partner community went non-linear, but had some concerns.  24 people from Redmond here.  But we put it back up. Encourage everyone to join the Greenhouse.

Lotusphere Opening Session

So I'm in Orlando for Lotusphere.  Took a crappy delayed red-eye, so I missed the very first part of the session, with Bob Costas talking about how good the Chinese are at controlling their people.   Ed Brill is live blogging it.  Alan has better notes on Mike Rhodin's opening Keynote. 

Lotus and SAP announced project Atlantis, a joint effort around composite applications. 

In Demo, Notes and Domino Web Access seems to provide a robust implementation of all Ajaxy web services that Zimbra has.  But given that its 2008, there of course is an iPhone version. Demos Google Gadget and other widget type inclusion within Lotus Notes then letting you distribute the widget by email, so someone can drag and drop it from the email view to a My Widget sidebar. 

Live TEXT lets you scan a Notes message for a pattern, like a stock symbol, and invoke a widget (similar to Zimbra).  Addresses have Google map integration. Domino Designer demoed as a way to take a crappy old discussion web page and make it all Ajaxy and Web 2.0 pretty.  Lotus Symphony, an open office distribution, gets a makeover and performance improvements too. 

Lotus Sametime, the real-time collaboration offering, is ten years old, and had two new developments. Sametime Advanced lets you tap into "communities" to chat with strangers -- with broadcast chat, persistent chat rooms, chat room file sharing, screensharing with buddies.  Sametime Unified Telephony which lets you click to call with multiple telephony systems. Some good instead some good cases of real time collaboration business value. Celina insurance group sells through 500 agents, service phone calls have been cut in half. At Carestream health, a richer and visual set of real time collaboration tools aid communications between doctors and radiologists.

Websphere Portal achieved #1 market share during the decade, but this year they added Accelerators to snap on functionality, some vertical specific.  Sunguard, GoPro and NFL (apparently that's where broadcasters get their stats) Accelerator announcements.  "Consumer" Google Gadgets and .Net and Federating other portals, plus new BI connectors.  "More exploitation of Web 2.0 technologies?  You bet." 

Lotus Connections was the first integrated social software solution for businesss, and Lotus Quickr made it easier for groups to collaborate.  In 2008, we have tens of thousand customers who have team rooms and quick places.  With Quickr, it needed to be easy with immeadiate provisioning of everything you need.  Quickr made easier, with integration with Filenet P8 ad IBM content manager.  New filesharing features, file ratings and watchlisting.  Fairly simple way to grab a file and kick off document management workflow and policies into FileNet, but still being able to see it in the context of Quickr's team space.  Shows some pretty nice podcast/media management capability.

Lotus Connections changed the market naad how organizations viewed collaboration, they created new categories and metrics.  Next release will take this nto new levels, embedding it in eveything we do, mobile to global.  Arabic, Russian and many other languages.  Embedding language translation into social networking services.   Integrated with Yahoo Answers, Facebook, Socialtext and Atlassian.  Changing the paradigm.  Version 2 will have attention management to let you use widgets and mashup abbility to focus on what is important to you.  Atlas for Lotus Connections lets you visualize your social network.  Mobile version.  Suzzane demos a new homepage based on a set of widgets you can drag and drop.  Federated search with integrated results and people that relate to the query.  Profiles now have attention info assigned to it.  New in Communities, you have a discussion forum, and persistent chat.  Also worked with leading industry players like Socialtext, so now Communities can now have their own dedicated wiki.

Launches Lotus Mashups, as a mashup catalog and platform, based upon an open stadard (OpenSocial?).  Nice clean UI to let you overlay data and functionality and wire widgets together.  The wiring reminds me of Yahoo Pipes.

Mike closes by saying they are putting Web 2.0 to Work, but not done yet.  Historically they haven't been able to serve SMBs well.  (suddenly the band starts doing the Olympics theme song)   Lotus Foundations is a new line of servers -- collaboration server, communications server and other servers based on ISV solutions.  Fast to deploy and configure.   On Friday they acquired Net Integration Technologies.  Last week Jobs took a laptop out of an envelope.  In this server (that he pulls out), is an entire collaboration server you can plug in.  The bulk of smaller companies need to work with others, launching Bluehouse, a SaaS extranet solution for companies with less than 500 employees. 

Later, sitting in the press conference (I'm here on a Blogger Pass):

• More on Lotus Mashups: QEDwiki did in-market experimentation, this is the official IBM productization of it.  After people create Mashups with the client tool, they can publish them into the directory  The missing piece is where they come from, they have iWidget 1.0 going through standardization.  An advanced Rad tool lets you generate widgets based on backend systems.
• Channel partners and business fundamentals of SaaS are still under development.  "Not everything can be supported by advertising."

Daily digest for 19 Jan, 2008

Socialtext Home Office (Palo Alto, US), 08:15pm Socialtext Home Office (Palo Alto, US), 03:39pm Socialtext Home Office (Palo Alto, US), 06:18am Socialtext Home Office (Palo Alto, US), 02:12am Pathfinder Next La Vie en Rose In the Land of Women Everyone's Hero

Daily digest for 18 Jan, 2008

Voce Communications (Palo Alto, US), 06:57pm Diary of a Silicon Valley Startup

Daily digest for 17 Jan, 2008

I'm testing out how to have my Lifestream, aggregated by Dandelife, automatically posted to my blog At my annual Superbowl commercials party, we gather before the game and go for a hike or walk. Meanwhile, the computer records the HDTV broadcast. A few hours in we start watching. We watch the football at super-high speed, slowing down for a f...

No Free Links and Why nofollow Doesn't Work for Wikis

There is no such thing as a free link.  No matter what the person who is selling you it tells you.  And the web will always adapt to make it so.  Even if its hard work.

Barry Schwartz posted Get A Free Link From Wired today on an SEO blog, noting that:

Some SEOs were saddened when Wikipedia added nofollows to external links. Perhaps they'll perk up to discover that Wired's semi-Wikipedia challenger has no such blocking.

The post proceeded to give advice and instructions for how to spam the Wired How To Wiki.  And it has been by the SEO community.  As a member of the community and working at the provider of its most excellent wiki software, I edited out some of the spam as it didn't meet the goals of the community.  But its not that simple.

I believe the intent was to point out an exploit, and not necessarily for bad.  The problem rests with nofollow being a good tool for some purposes (blog comment spam) and not for others (wikis in general).  I had a quick email exchange with Danny Sullivan and he also talked with Wired and edited the post:

NOTE FROM DANNY: We've talked with Wired about the situation, and they are putting a robots.txt block on links coming out of the wiki so that links won't pass credit. Also, our apologies to Wired in that we've ended up causing a run on the wiki with new pages being created. That was definitely not our intent -- the headline of getting a free link, and the article itself, was more tongue-in-cheek about how the system was and might further get abused, rather than advice for people to really misuse the wiki for promotional purposes. I don't agree with that type of abuse in general, and as someone who has had to deal with it in comments or submissions to our forums, it's no fun. In hindsight, we probably should have just dropped a note pointing out the vulnerability. We've also asked that our test page be completely removed -- it has served its purpose now.

If every website was a wiki I might have edited something similar on their post while disabling the link.  Later over a drink with Paolo Valdermin I was joking that we should invent the unfollow link, or make it so any traffic coming from the site doing damage was rejected.  But I'm joking and need to digress into a topic most people don't understand:

unfollow was a byproduct of Vote Links, created by Kevin Marks, which I believe I had a hand in at least inspiring.  It was designed as a tool for making blog comments not count in Google's PageRank, while letting the blog post's links count.  Blog comments are relatively good at dealing with comment spam because of what Clay Shirky described as encapsulation -- every blog has an owner who can determine how to moderate their comments.  nofollow is just one way. 

Now comments with nofollow enabled get spam anyway, maybe because the fact that the blog host is communicating behind the scenes with search engines is ignored, or that SEO isn't the only goal of the spammer.  If you own a blog, you deal with manually sorting through vandalism all the time. 

Still, nofollow is a good thing for some Social Software.  But it doesn't belong or work everywhere.  Can you imagine a web that works as good as today's if every link was tagged with nofollow?

Wikipedia enabled nofollow, much to the chagrin of the SEO community, for some good reasons that also need additional context:

• Wikipedia is an exception to any other wiki community on the web
• Wikipedia has no feature to detect and delete spam, instead it is a feature made of people, who are better at such decisions when one of the goals of the system is openness
• Wikipedia's core editors are extremely burdened with this task because of how valuable its attention is
• The result is Wikipedia gets lots of link love, but doesn't give any to anyone

IMHO, Wikipedia made a mistake implementing nofollow.  While blogs have one or a couple authors, a few commenters, and many readers -- wikis have many authors and many readers.  In an a wide open wiki, just one possible configuration, you can't tell who is trustable or accountable given the missing identity and reputation layers of the web.  nofollow doesn't work for wikis because:

• Wikis are part of the web of links
• I haven't seen a partial and prudent implementation of nofollow in a wiki.  And its hard to picture one that doesn't discriminate upon users automatically.  You could make nofollow apply to links from "trusted users" but different communities should develop different rules for trust.  And such rules could kill communities, especially nascent ones by hard coding rules too early.
• There are other wiki spam countermeasures
• If you enable nofollow, every link gives no value, regardless of its value, and that value is best defined by the community using it

Part of how wikis deal with spam is the phantom authority -- there is a higher transaction cost for damaging a wiki than fixing it.  And people are generally good.

That said, even though I may not want to be in business with a web like this, I care about what's been created on this wiki.  And so I'll be spending some of my time this weekend reverting vandalism.  Better that than giving in by shutting it down, or uninformed suggestions to bluntly implement nofollow.  Besides, the irony is that some of the SEO posts actually have some good How To content that actually needs a little human editing.

Some links to SEO Posts about all this (maybe they will pitch in if I link to them): WebProNews, Wired News and Mashable!

Daily digest for 09 Jan, 2008

Find out the latest news about OpenSocial's 0.6 release and what Shindig and Cajoling can do for your next web application.Work with developers of OpenSocial Social Networks to get your applications up and running.What to bring:- Your laptop-... Wikis for learning NewsGator Makes Client Apps Free Send the CBC’s Spark Story Ideas

Nick Carr's New Paradox

Nick Carr's new book, The Big Switch, takes on IT from a different angle and rests upon a metaphor -- that IT will not matter because it will move to grid computing in the same way electricity moved to the grid.  From the first chapter:

If the electric dynamo was the machine that fashioned twentieth century society - that made us who we are - the information dynamo is the machine that will fashion the new society of the twenty-first century.

And a Network World interview:

Carr explains that factory owners originally operated their own power plants. But as electric utilities became more reliable and offered better economies of scale, companies stopped running their own electric generators and instead outsourced that critical function to electric utilities...

"Some of the old-line companies will succeed in making the switch to the new model of computing; others will fail," Carr writes. "But all of them would be wise to study the examples of General Electric and Westinghouse. A hundred years ago, both these companies were making a lot of money selling electricity-production components and systems to individual companies. That business disappeared as big utilities took over electricity supply. But GE and Westinghouse were able to reinvent themselves."

Now I'm quick to liken computing to a commodity.  And Carr is right about the general trend line.  But with a bit of experience in commodity bandwidth, as a provider of SaaS and Managed Service Appliances, I can say there is something very different at play when it comes to enterprise computing and energy.  The difference is that bandwidth carries something of subjective value to sender and receiver.

From the buy side, enterprises will believe in firewalls at the edge of their networks and centrally managed infrastructure for a long time.  Perhaps its just easier to not outsiders, if not their own employees, to create their own firewalls around them.   It will take a long time for this perception, and the vested interests to vest, for this to change. And for every economic benefit argument of shifting to the grid

From the sell side, let me share something I learned from sharing a very personal namespace.  There happens to be another Ross Mayfield, so I reached out to him over the net out of obvious interest.  The former Pepperdine professor and security expert had come up with Mayfield's Paradox:

The cost of security is the greatest for the many or few in this well curve.  Sellers of grid computing will have the greatest cost of ensuring its security. 

Now, I don't believe that this cost will be prohibitive for providing grid computing as a utility to third parties.  But I do believe the cost of providing utility service plus utility service will be greater than the cost of providing behind the firewall virtualized datacenter service and security.  Or at least, the perception of it.

With Socialtext, we take the position of offering both options for topological deployment, while retaining the benefits of SaaS connectedness to our customers.  See Phil Wainwright's article.  The only vendor I don't think will end up there is Salesforce.com, because its their brand.

Carr is right about where we are heading, but it will take time.  But in the meantime, it makes for a fun argument for years to come.