Ross Mayfield's Weblog

Supernova: The Publius Project, The Internet's Constitutional Moments

I'm at my favorite conference today, Supernova.  At the first one we were inspired to found Socialtext.  Instead of going to the VC or consumer web panels, I thought I'd learn a bit about a Berkman project.  Here's an impressionary transcript.

Panel Abstract: As established governing bodies of various sorts attempt to impose rules and restrictions on the Internet, the Net continues to have its own "constitutional moments," including many that are bottom up. The Berkman Center's recently launched Publius Project (http://publius.cc) is an effort to understand how the Internet is actually being governed, and how that might be changing. During this session, four diverse perspectives among the many represented within the project will examine how decision-making processes --whether via Web 2.0 technologies, international organizations, or business models -- give rise to norms, rules, and "constitutional moments" that affect both our behavior online and ultimately define the nature of the Net.

• Moderator, Colin Maclay (Berkman Center, Harvard University)
• Joichi Ito (Neoteny)
• Lili Cheng (Microsoft)
• Susan Crawford (Univ. of Michigan)
• Wendy Seltzer (Berkman, American University, Chillingeffects.org)
• Doc Searls (Linux Journal) couldn't make it.  His post is here: what you frame is what you get.

Colin: We are creating our future and the decisions we make will make change in the network.  This is governance to look back to the origin of the word, steering.  Tacit and explicit ways of steering.  Now lets take turns presenting an idea and then we can explore them.

Wendy: Here as a lawyer, so I will defend rules.  That is rules and openness, as openness is achieved through regulation.  In response to Weinberger's norms based tacit governance.  But I think there are problems scaling that (I think regulation happens because of scaling issues, but it doesn't necessarily have to).  Wikipedia has rules that have been developed that shouldn't repulse participation.  This comes up in network neutrality debates.  Yes it is important, but we wouldn't want the government involved, some say.  But we need rules to retain that openness.  To keep monopoly carriers from blocking content or VoIP or bitorrent.  If we don't get into the regulatory fight then the rules will only be set by the carriers. 

Susan:

Central question for governance is who gets to boss who around. ICANN is an experiment in governance of a resource, essentially a defense contractor in experimental form.  What happened with this greenfield experiment and why you should be paying more attention.  A general trend to get more people involved in governing the net. 

It is a CA nonprofit, formed to give advice about policy.  This is a choke point where  you could exert content control, cooperate with law enforcement to plunge people into darkness.  The notion was to stay away from those issues and be a private group that would just coordinate.  And the US would be a good steward of the goal, supporting global free flow of information. 

How do those rules get made?  there are contracts between ICANN and the companies that run DNS that require them to adhere to policies for global security and stability.  Few global rules and most things were left to local control.  Who gets to change those rules?  In 1998 Whois was supposed to be accessible, but the database has become very valuable for law enforcement and others, even though it goes against some norms of privacy.  And its now locked in place with no sunset.

The effect on business of the ICANN model.  It has set up a particular way and business model without the ability to vary or evolve because of vested interests.  It is hard to allow local variation in registries.  Governments have more of a say on what domains will be created and policies that govern them. Now it is difficult to avoid being a choke point for top level domains.  Regional and national government involvement is playing out, a constitutional moment for this private group -- we need to pay more attention to retaining the non profit model, or the government and law enforcement model to take over.  Domain names are not that important, they say, but I want to point to this model as a experiment that is challenged by the titanic forces going in the other direction.

Lilly:

I used to be an architect of physical cities.  Where you design an infrastructure and set of rules, in a way that is fluid and flexible to allow for change.  Any city has a 20-50 plan designed for change.  Designing an operating system or the web is like designing for rules and fluidity.  No matter what UI and interaction you put out will be wrong, and the best will come from the core community and their norms of use.

How do you design for change?  Outlook may have open calendars or closed in different companies.  When it is time to change this and make it open, but what happens?  If I use it to make private notes and you suddenly make it public it will freak me out.  Perhaps you should design to not have past things public.  People have different rulesets and norms, so how you make norms clear to people, their importance and how they should be followed.  Sometimes they hear governance and don't understand how it effects what they do, but they know of the violations and fears.  How can we make these governing principles relative to people's every day lives and make them flexible enough to change over time.

Joi:

Going to take the position from the business side.  What's the differenence between corporate and nonprofit governance, the lack of lawyers?  Corporate governance in the US, protecting the shareholder and making more money.  Money is lonely and it like to go where other money is.  But the tendencies like monopolies or causing standards to be in your favor, plus short term shareholders. IWB at IBM defined an open standard as something that was not controlled, because if we have control I have to exert influence to take care of my shareholders, but it is against our long term interest.  With all the businesses on the internet, some structures cause good, some cause bad.  The VC startup ecology is more innovative than big company R&D.  Shirky says open ource is great because of a low cost of failure.  Some of my investments have users before money, then get money and get up to 1M users, and have fully tested a product.  By constrast, a Japanese company spends two million to decide to do something.  Larry and Sergey connected a server to the internet and connected to every user on the net, instead of having to negotiate a bilateral agreement with every country.

Small companies have a similar alignment to those who want to keep it open for democracy reasons. With Creative Commons, it is a standard set of rules on top of the stack, which reduces switching costs.  The standard making process is different than the mishmash of social norms. 

My fear is we are so excited about mobile, but where does the money go?  $330M goes to advertising, $4-5B content, $4-5 commerce -- most of it to carriers, bloated monopolies.  And the money doesn't get pumped back out.  Looking at where the money goes and if it goes to an ecology, given that each layer connects, if the top layers don't offer choice and freedom and money flowing to innovation, the whole stack suffers.  Everybody need to realize that you can't have one chakra out of balance.  In Japan they say bad content needs to be filtered from kids and they accept it, the carriers celebrate having a new filter.  On the net we wouldn't put up with that.

Susan:

So Joi, what do we do?  We had a glimmer of hope with the Clearwire deal, anything like that happening around the world?

Joi:

People are naive about the political nature of how money works.  The telecom industry is the biggest voting block in Japan.  Nothing more or less than politics.  You can argue all you want, but you will never win.  You need to bring in more money or more politics.  Not like a Congressional hearing, its a real war.  On the other hand, the internet fought that war and won, because the startups were able to compete.  The environment let it happen and back then they didn't think that was where the power is.  Users in a Japanese university said that the police should be running the internet, so they won't fight for it.

Lilly:

Take a longer term view.  Its easier to get on the same page if you are thinking bigger and broader. Where do we want to be in 20 years, what do we want it to look at, what should we expect from individuals to get us there.

Susan:

ICANN was set up to be long term, but the interests entrenched it.

Colin:

Seems like the interests are more effective in rule making bodies, how do we break that cycle?  Given that this space is new, more impacted by technology decisions throughout the industry and what users do.  Companies will make good decisions for themselves, but not the net.  But if we have agreem

Susan:

We need ways to route around and have users thing of themselves as the internet.  Onewebday.

Jonathan:

I agree that the politics dominate a lot, but there are opportunities here.  The norms decend from principles.  In the 1990s with telecom WTO, a new regime created because the ITU was hopeless so they moved the conversations -- trade ministers trumped the communication ministers.  Opportunity to move on from current round.

Greg Wolff:

Interesting to look outside the developed world, where the spotlight is not, Gramene Phone or Bracknet.  Where the corporation carriers have as part of their charter to serve the communities first.  They are NGOs, but big players in Bangladesh.  The policies are serving the individuals first.  In the UK you have social corporations.  If and when those corporations have the financial wherewithall they could play the same role startups have for the net.  Microfinance is not just about the money but a way of doing things.

Patrick Hobbs, Neighborhood America:

I struggle with how we achieve alignment between practice and theory.  Advocacy model is slow, collaborative model is fast. 

Wendy:

Collisions in the private orderings and contracts.  Cease and desist letters from the AP.  They sent a copyright complaint, the quotes get pulled down because they invoke the language of the law that is hard for individuals to resist.  Chillingeffects works by sheading light on abusive claims and making it more costly for companies to assert the law is something else than what it is.

Susan:

Most order in the world comes without law.  But it is an elephants and mice story.  When the elephants are attacked they ask for laws.  But the mice keep going.  The soverigns are being undermined because people are able to do their own work and the evolutionary order of self-organization progresses.

JP Ragaswami:

I'm with a breed of enterprises called  carrier and trying to make changes.  The answer I have comes back to what Shirky said the cost of repair vs the cost of damage.  Not failure as in the open source model.  The reason the model works is we have sharply reduced the cost of repair.  Even law will work if we can reduce that cost. 

The underlying model that scares me a lot has to do with expertise.  Susan said, who decides?  The difference between the internet and law or a corporation is the people who decide have invested in status and cant relinquish.  We have lost sense of what that status is.  We thing of expertise on the internet differently.  Not an acquired elitist class. 

Historical concept of the expert is dead and the cost of repair needs to be at least as low as doing damage.  The thinking looking at the cost of repair has not yet looked at how expertise has changed.

(I wonder how to explore the point on expertise along with new means of influence)

Brad Templeton:

High cost of repair comes from old principles.  Efforts against spam outside of the existing systems.  If one person is a spammer we shall censor all of you was an idea because there was no structure without appeal.  Not doing as well in the extra legal systems as I had hoped.

JP:

When I see it costs eight cents on average to take chewing gum under the table, that problem won't go away.  Wikis worked because the cost of repair is kept low, which meant things could be corrected.  If we can alter the law similarly...

Me:

Take an edge of the organization, relax control to enable moderation and repair.  You can retain the rest of the system's structure.

Lilly:

People who make rules and design stuff get separated.  Things have become so complex that the people who make things are not making rules and not using things.  Design the rules so the are more fluid, regardless of open or closed.  Make the process for making change easier.

Elliot Noss:

Want to try to be the optimist.  We are missing the progress that is being made.  This is a 25-50 year exercize in change.  Think about how the net threatens institutions over time.  In Canada the government engaged in a multi year exercize to engage users on what policy they needed and a week before implementation the carrier went back door to gut the whole policy.  But beyond the day to day, look at momentous changes like Obama's fundraising on the net.  Take a step back and look at the progress.

Ken Banks:

The accidental stuff.  Tendency to excessively control.  SMS was an accidental use of a signaling channel.  Then they planned and created MMS and it was a failure.  Web 2.0 was an accident and people came together and gave it a name.  Web 3.0 is a job creation thing, or a planned thing that will fail.

Phil Wolff:

When problems are buried, how do we take the things discussed in FCC backrooms and make them less arcane for regular people?

Joi:

Smart people like big books because it is nuanced and it really depends. When you plan things you get it wrong.  But emergent things go off in the wrong directions as well.  Users tend to choose non-commercial with (CC). People want to lean against the norms of commerciality, but don't get it. What should I do in my role from the top down.  Hard to say one way of doing rules is better than another because it depends on who is involved.  No silver bullet, but it requires general literacy, transparency and voice to as many people as possible.  Fight chaos by making each node as smart as possible.

Lilly:

Things have even changed in the last five years inside of Microsoft.  But how do you structure things so when people believe in change are protected within their organization.  Figuring out how to let people help.  What can I do, in my role to make things better?

Susan:

We make progress on things when we can see them.  The most important thing we could do is make things visible.  Hope you will be involved in onewebday.

Wendy:

We need rules that are flexible enough for disruptive innovation, the accidental change, cheap enough failure and where we get those rules, well, go back to constitutional principles.  Our founders had thoughts like checks and balances even before there was a network.

Supernova Backchannel

I participated in the closing panel at Supernova with Mary Hodder and Suw Charman: a chat about the backchannel that was as chaotic as a backchannel.  Technical difficulties provided a disarming tension at first and kept us from showing a video Mary made.  Here's the posted version, unfortunately the funniest part was edited out for mature audiences.  Suw posted her notes here.  At one point, I ran through the silliest powerpoint I could come up with. 

Despite my best attempts, Rohit said it was the best panel of the conference, which had little to do with the panelists and much to do with participation.

Social Physics Takeaways

John Clippinger of SocialPhysics.org provided some Provocative Take Aways at the end of his Supernova speech:

• Trust is biologically encoded and supported by emotions
• Can have principled strategies for acheiving high levels of trusted exchange
• Identity is multiple. distributed. contextual, role based and reputational
• Markets are a kind of social networks and depend upon the social emiotions - trust - empathy - reciprocity - to function
• Long tailed markets are aggregates of social contexts
• Trust feeds on transparency

Linda Stone on Continuous Partial Attention

Was too distracted to take complete notes for her intro to a Supernova panel on Attention...

To cope with complexity we have stretched attention to it's limit. it is motivated by a desire not to miss opportunities. We want to ensure our place as a live node on the network. We feel alive when we are connected. To be busy and connected is important. We are increasingly over-stimulated, overwhelmed and unfulfilled.

Email free fridays as a mechanism. Sending emails around is a terrible way to make decisions. Some ban Blackberries at meetings. Three kinds of meetings at Microsoft: free for all, one where the front of the room has to pay attention (in the back it's okay to slack) and ones where total attention is demanded.

We count on experts to filter for us. It used to be that productivity made us feel alive, now its feeling connected. Social networking where quantity of connections makes us feel connected, but the lack of meaningfulness is disconcerting. Dan Gould; I quit every social network to be able to have time to have dinner with real people. The aphrodisiac in the coming era is committed attention. Experiencing engaged attention is to feel alive, through trusted environments that enable meaningful connections. Our opportunity is to create tools and technologies that really do enhance our quality of life.

Distributed Business Panel

Supernova Panel following JSB's talk: Philip Evans (Boston Consulting Group); Julius Genachowski (IAC/InterActiveCorp); Dick Hardt (Sxip Identity); Greg Lloyd (Traction Software); JP Rangaswami (DrKW)

This panel circled around one core issue to me: adapting identity to how social networks really work.  They addressed opportunities in the consumer space that are held back by competitive forces.  The enterprise issue could have been put more clearly: enterprise directory management is incompatible with easy group forming.

Philip Evans (Boston Consulting Group)

I found John's comments persuasive not least because they were going to say.  Im intrigued by the Toyota story when a a factory burnt down that make a brake part and was the only source in the network  Faced the prospect of shutdown in 36 hours.  10k workers and 62 companies swarmed the problem, organized themselves into teams, devised their own strategies for emergency productions.  the owner of the factor sent out blueprints, gave away machinery that survived.  A small company delivered a win.  In 8 days they were back up to full production.  Single sourcing and zero inventory was supposed to be a weakness.  Exemplifies the extreme emergency what they have embedded in day to day relationships.

We see the same principles being followed in Linux and elsewhere:

• Technology needs to be simple and pervasive (more important than complexity), linux is written
• Common IP, as IP creates incentives as well as transaction costs.  From GPL to sharing of process knowledge
• Scientific discipline, focus on trial and error, Test and report. 
• Granular diffusion of knowledge.  Do and tell everybody about experiments.  This is how blogging works. 
• Develops a rich semantic, chatter develops into a richer language and shorthand concepts that are signals of a rich and productive community. 
• Develops trust.  Trusting the other player is a a rational strategy when it is iterative.  As in the case of the world of wiki and blog: visibility and iteration.

The point is not that transaction costs cease to exists.  Lower transaction costs by focusing on trusted relationships enhances the pace of innovation.  Wiki communities exemplify the scaling of the network that drives down transaction costs and in turn drives up the scaling of the network.  A virtuous cycle that is removed from what conventional business people understand.

Julius Genachowski (IAC/InterActiveCorp)

Talks about how big IAC is.  When they started: can we identify categories on the net that lend themselves to commerce, can we build a product that will add value, and if we have identified both should we build or buy?  That got us into travel and ticketing?  Looking at a new phase because of increased competition. Trying to figure out the next phase of the company.  One element is increasingly important: community.  Used to think of people as users (as consumers), and didn't set out to create communities.  With Match.com and other properties, community was an unintended byproduct.  Now the quesiton is how to turn users into participants.  We are experimenting at some of our sites and the results are exciting.  At Ticketmaster, put up a forum, 10k users 106k threads and 2.5M posts practically overnight.  Trip Advisor didn't do transactions, but focused on user generated content and attracted tremendous traffic -- saw the power of empowering the community by leveraging the next generation tools.  Now Expedia is transitioning to enable participation.  Thinking about how to use wikis and blogs across businesses.

Dick Hardt (Sxip Identity)

Dick's identity is multi-faceted.  Identity is really reputation -- what others say about you.  It isn't filling in forms.  Authentication proves you are a directory entry.  Identity is what a site says about you, but sites are closed silos.  You want users at the center for Identity 2.0. 

Greg Lloyd (Traction Software)

Use of social software tools and their expectations set on the public internet will drive the architecture and structure within enterprises.  People's expectations about how to keep informed are changing.  Tools need to adapt to address specific audiences, groups.  Private conversations foster trust.  To broadly deploy conversations you need identity that works across all stakeholders, but also local permissions without having an IT organization hardwire everything.  If I am an engineer at GM and someone in Germany opens up a blog and puts it on the network.  If the content of the group weblog talks about a design.  Would like to find out about the blog by searching, finding someone's elses blog that links to it and be able to subscribe to the blog without having IT be involved. 

JP Rangaswami (DrKW)

To repeat Cluetrain, markets are conversations.  Even the work bankrupt relates to a breakdown in trust.  Business of a bank is relationships.  When four guys from the bank show up here?  They are here to learn.  How do you differentiate from employees, partners, customers?  They are all part of a group.  JSB said you have SoA and Virtualization working together with Social Software.  If I try to figure out what we are trying to solve, look at Hugh's cartoon saying our job is to make a membrane between customer and firm more porous.  Learning how to use tools to share and collaborate.  I want to focus on the role of the individual as the modern firm is redefined.  Used to be the firm defining the individual, now the firm needs to have a value set in line with theirs and provide a toolset that allows for their creativity to flower.  My customer (user) expects to be able to choose from devices  connections.  What is being transfered, the connection and the device is up to him.  It needs to be recordable, searchable and content independent.  These things are possible provided that identity and IP are resolved.  Collaboration always existed, now an individual has knowledge, content and skill to be able to produce something with others that no one individual can do alone.  We use these tools to attract the right people and let them choose to stay.

Julius: As we have more social software on our sites, we need to address identity.  But not likely we will make it easy to let users access competitor's sites.  But there are models where competitive quotes are encouraged. 

Philip: the way these connections become open is a coalition of the weak and strong.  Companies that cannot create a proprietary reptuational marketplace to compete with eBay will attempt to be open. 

Dick: Open and simple always wins long term.

Greg: the business or enterprise group might lead the way as there are business reasons for open identity.

JP:  KM and info security merged a while ago.  Need to keep policies lightweight.  Screams about security are less valid than the issues of security.  Can only have trust with transparency.  I'm a regulated institution. Tech enters the bank from the bottom up.  If I make it top down, it's likely my staff won't adopt it in the right way.  Adopting the technology by the alpha consumer as an individual, then you get what you might need for it to work in a corporate environment.  Employees of tomorrow will demand a set of capabilities for the firm, not through a central statement of what they will and can do.

Dick: Salesforce sells to a business unit first, then the IT department.

Julius: We have people hungry for sharing of best practices, easier ways to communicate across silos.  A big change in our organization.  If you can get companies to understand that it will be empowering, security is manageable and won't effect control, these tools have a big future.  Don't need fancy communication tools, the CEO communicates with email and people respond and he gets dialogue.  Horizontally it is trying to think about incentive structures.  What are the obstacles to rational behavior and how do we eliminate them.

Greg: align with business purpose of goals, something that intrinsically involves a larger group of stakeholders.

Philip: we have observed large corporations have different stages in a lifecycle in which issues are difficult.  Have been using a multi-layers social network analytical techniques:

• transaction network: of productive activity
• trust network: relationships
• communication networks
• network of power: formal organizations

People are connected through all four, helps you understand where and why there is organizational disfunction. 

JP: because we have to prevent silos, the issues are connected to identity but go into permissioning and authentication.  Not trivial in a regulated environment. 

Distributed Business

Notes from the opening session on the second day of Supernova 2005. First, a perspective from John Seely Brown on Innovation Ecologies: long tails, swarms and path dependencies. Curious that the last two days that the ideas discussed will play out in real ecosystems at work. John Hagel, his co-author of The Only Sustainable Edge, was stuck in London.

Four kinds of disruptive process innovations in india: what we drive, buy and wear.

Toyota taps the creativity of thousands of suppliers and their employees through productive friction. Lowest cost is not necessarily the lowest price. Bring us new ideas/innovation. Respect. An ongoing network of conversations and productive friction.

Exception conditions are the action points: when a defect is found the person who finds it stops the entire production line -- freezing the context -- until the source of the problem can be discovered. Context propagates all the way to the supplier lets them do instant problem solving. Contrast the following:

Toyota Way -- Productive friction

• lowest cost,
• deep dialog and collaboration
• bring us new ideas
• respect

The Detroit Way (little innovation) -- Destructive friction

• Lowest price,
• diode, not dialogue
• do it exactly as we say,
• shop around new ideas from one supplier to others

Motorcycles in China. The Chongquing Mototcycle Ecosystem. One entrepreneur broke out of a top down design system run by the state to make innovation modular. Locally modular architecture (based on a focal model). No detailed drawings from the assembler but rather a bottom up swarm ecosystems with path dependent practices, emergent process networks and tea houses. Now 50% of all global production of motorcycles. Evidence of disruption: Honda 90% in 1997 to 30% in 2002 market share in Vietnam. No one can compete with the cost structure. This is a lot like open source development where focal model is like a reference implementation.

Tiawan ODM Process Networks -- Digital Still cameras. Customers provide general requirements (some features, price) and a network adapts to produce the good. Customers do not determine what they want, not how.

Li& Fung's process networks. $5B revenue in 2002, $1 million per employee. 30-50% ROE, 7500 suppliers, 37 countries. A major orchestrator that picks up deep specialization in hundreds of ecologies to put together a unique garment at an almost un-matchable price point. Once they know what the customer wants, they take their expertise of ecosystems to find out what alternative inputs and processes generate a better output. The ecosystem is a learning architecture. Beyond performance metrics, benchmarking across them, let's the information be shared across the network. Orchestrating learning, not just the supply chain.

On capability building: Offshoring is not just wage arbitration, it is accessing distinctive skills. Learning is critical. A call center called eTelecare has a a management philosophy that started with low cost operations to higher skilled services within 18 months. In the US you have a 50:1 ratio of call center employees to managers, eTelecare has a 8:1 ratio with he purpose of middle management is to accelerate learning and advancement of employees. Infosys in Bangalore focused on learning, executive management spends 25% of their time on it.

An enabling confluence of IT architectures

• Interaction tools (productive friction): Collaboration on demand with social software, wireless access and eLearning
• Service Oriented Architectures
• Virtualization

We don't talk much about how you take social software tools and wrap them around SoA architectures. Because as the only thing to expect is the unexpected. We spend our time handling exceptions. But we don't build tools to support exception handling. May try to build rules for exceptions, but how do you freeze the context, use an action point, call the stakeholders together and resolve the breakdown. The fabric underlying an accelerating capability.

A new strategic triad:
* accelerate capability building
* dynamic specialization
* access complementary capabilities

The only sustainable edge is figuring out how to accelerate capabilities better than anyone else. Do this through partnerships that have mutual learning as an objective. Real purpose of the firm is not lowering transaction costs ( ac commodity), but how to accelerate through productive friction, the ability to learn and innovate.

Q&A out-takes: Doesn't think that Detroit will adapt in time. Dell and HP have. An executive visiting Bangalore was asked what they learned, and he said "no, we where here to show them how to do it." Many are doing it without thinking about what and how they can learn.

Amy Whol asks, does this work better if we wrap the social software tools around the processes formally or less formally? Fundamental intuition is that processes basically work for machines, it is work practices that we humans do. Handling exceptions is the basis of our practices.

Look at Cisco and how they work with their platinum dealers. They apply sophisticated eLearning tools to help them get better. Using those learnings get you to talk and see the world in a different way. How do you use assets that you don't control? Think about how you can work from an influence point of view and it will reveal a change of mindset that requires trust and respect. Need a transition from transaction thinking.

Yahoo Social Search, Act I

At Supernova 2005, Jeff Weiner, SVP Yahoo! Search crunches the numbers on social search.  When regular people can share their knowledge, on subjects like how to buy real estate, and enough of them do...10 pages per subject -> 5k subjects per person - > 50 pages per person -> 7b people = 350 trillion pages ... you get orders of magnitude increase in searchable knowledge.  Today's search is a representative democracy without a fair election process.  The problem is not everyone blogs, but if they had a way to participate, make it easy for people to public and "vote" -- with personal, social and economic incentives --  Yahoo Music has 5 billion ratings, so just imagine feedback at that scale augmenting search (James notes in ITVC that HOTorNOT has 18B ratings, hardy har har).

They view the web as a play with three acts.

• Act I: Public (e.g. Web Search)
• Act II: Personal (e.g. Desktop Search)
• Act II Social (e.g. search communities)

Talks about their FUSE concept.  Highlights the role of Trust.  Demos My Web: saving a web page to My Web, then returning to Yahoo Search, where there is a second button to search what you have saved.  Demos search combined with Yahoo 360 reviews.  In other words, Our Web, with shared annotations between 2 degrees of separation.  Talks about Flickr and social discovery.  Marrying search and community.

I'm under embargo on something related to Jeff's talk.  Not sure if I am even allowed to say it is related, but there is an Act II and III to this play.

Backtrack

I had to turn off Trackback because hundreds of nightly trackback spam are drowning out conversation and killing my time.

Flying today to the Collaborative Technologies Conference in NYC.  Back Tuesday morning for Supernova in SF.  See you somewhere.

What Does the New Internet Mean for Business?

Perhaps the most fascinating conversation I've had in recent weeks was with Kevin Werbach, Janice Fraser (CEO, Adaptive Path, recently authored A Whole New Internet) and Philip Evans (SVP at Boston Consulting Group, author of Blown to Bits).  In advance of Supernova 2005, a good part of it is posted on Knowledge@Wharton:

Wikis, Weblogs and RSS: What Does the New Internet Mean for Business?
The Internet is entering a new phase that will decentralize control within companies, enable employees to collaborate more easily, and drive efficiency. But corporations that want to use the web strategically to build corporate value will not just need to make radical cultural changes, they may also need to master a new vocabulary with terms such as Wikis, Weblogs, and RSS. What will this new Internet mean for business?

Skyped Podcast of the Conversation. The text goes up behind a registration wall, like the JSB and Hagel interview, so read it now.  And see you at Supernova next week.