Portals and KM

Boston’s Best Fried Chicken

It is the Fourth of July and what is more patriotic than fried chicken. The Boston Globe ran a story on Boston’s best fried chicken, Fried and True. The article makes you hungry and there is even a video. They list a number of local spots but indicate that you have to go to Virginia to Mrs. Rowe’s Restaurant & Bakery in Staunton to get real pan fired chicken. Well, I am very lucky as my wife makes wonderful southern pan fried chicken that she learned how to make in Arkansas. It has to be the best in Boston.

My wife looked at the video and noted more similarities than differences. She uses more spices and Mrs. Rowe uses buttermilk in the coating but regular milk, like my wife, in the gravy. Otherwise ingredients and methods are the same. Now I was introduced to real fried chicken in New Orleans as my mother made amazing fan fried chicken in the style of what my wife and Mrs. Rowe produces.

Here are pictures of the process starting with the floured chicken this then pan fired. Then the white gravy is made as well as the mashed potatoes and biscuits. A nice champagne goes well with this.

But if you are not able to come to our house, then look at the following. We plan to check some of them out.

Highland Kitchen in Somerville, on Monday nights only, produces buttermilk fried chicken. This will be our first stop as it is not too far away. It is located at 150 Highland Ave, Somerville, MA (617) 625-1131

Poppa B’s. PigTrip wrote æPoppa B's opens at 7:00 AM (9:00 AM Sunday), so their breakfast items are a main attraction: served with the usual eggs, pancakes and waffles are atypical hot sausage, biscuits and sausage gravy, grits, steak, fried pork chops and fried fish. Lunch and dinner items lean more to soul than barbecue, with smothered pork chops, fried whiting, fried catfish and fried chicken leading the way. The ribs (both beef and pork) are billed as dry rubbed and hickory smoked. Chicken is available smoked, smothered or fried (various piece options). Pulled pork is available on a sandwich.” It sounds good to me. It is located at 1100 Blue Hill Ave, Dorchester, MA (617) 825-0700.

Summer Shack has multiple locations. It more of a seafood place but the chicken is good. The Boston location is at 50 Dalton Street in the Back Bay, across from the Sheraton Hotel entrance and the Hynes Auditorium. Upstairs from Kings Bowling Alley. 617-867-9955.

Mrs. Jones, It is located at 2255 Dorchester Avenue, Dorchester, MA 02124
(617) 696-0180 in the Lower Mills neighborhood. Hidden Boston writes “the menu is a lot more interesting than your typical takeout joint. Tender brisket, mouthwatering cornbread, buttery pork chops (perhaps the best this writer has had in Boston), gooey macaroni and cheese, flavorful cornbread stuffing, decadent candied yams… whole deep-fried chicken or turkey (the deep-fried white meat and dark meat turkey are both tremendous), ham hocks, and smoked turkey legs. And there are some really interesting entrees that are served every now and then here, including neck bones, pig feet, oxtails, and fish and grits.” I will take the chicken.

My Fast Forward Posts for June 2009

Here is the monthly listing of my Fast Forward blog posts. I find it helps me with an archive and hopefully is also useful to you. There is a separate category for these summaries in my right side column on this blog. There will be more in July.

What will be the Business Model for the Cloud as Data and Content Storage Becomes a Utility?

We Need to Tear Down the Social Media Silos Launching Social Networks for the Enterprise

My Notes and Thoughts on Google Wave Video Demo

My Notes on Dion Hinchcliffe Enterprise 2.0 Conference Workshop - Part One

My Notes on Dion Hinchcliffe Enterprise 2.0 Conference Workshop - Part Two

Mike Gotta’s Reality 2.0: Getting Started with Enterprise Social Networking at Enterprise 2.0 Conference

Mixing Old and New School Communication

Tom Davenport recently posted a nice piece, Why 1.5 Is Greater Than 2.0, that discussed the benefits of mixing old and media. Always the rock of reason, Tom wrote that asking which is better Web 1.0 or Web 2.0 is actually a false dichotomy. They complement each other. I would agree.

Enterprise 2.0 brings a new dimension but it does not replace anymore than TV replaced the radio or the telephone replaced in person conversation. Tom cites healthcare where this is very evident. We still need the scientific/medical establishment's 1.0 use of research, clinical trials, and licensed practitioners to fight disease. At the same time social media can offer patient-generated content and communities than provides an enriched dimension.

I trust the medical establishment will not abandon the old school ways of sharing information and I do not want them to. I also like that I can use Web 1.0 email with some of my doctors now. However, there are situations where I wish I had the patient’s perspective before I made certain healthcare decisions. I applaud the rise of online healthcare communities where such information is shared.

In a similar way, crowd sourcing does not replace the need for expertise. Malcolm Gladwell and James Surowiecki had a mock debate a few years back on this (see Blink vs. Wisdom of Crowds – Experts vs. the Multitude). For example, Gladwell asked Surowiecki if a 1000 people in a village in China would be better at collectively looking at x-rays than a single highly trained radiologist. I commented that I think both theories have their place and each counters a standard decision model.

Many of the enterprise 2.0 vendors recognize the need to support old and new ways of working and provide ways to integrate Web 2.0 and Web 1.0 tools. I recently talked with both Telligent’s Rob Howard and CubeTree’s Carlin Wiegner, Ross Fubini, and Gita Gupta on this. Enterprise 2.0 tools can provide the social side of collaboration to complement the transactional side.

Tom closes with, “the key word is "augment," not "replace." 1.5 is greater than either 1.0 or 2.0.” Yes.

A Short History of Micro-messaging from Marcia Conner

The Fast Company blog recent posted, Twitterbursts: It’s Not About The Tools; It’s All About The Tools by Marcia Conner of Pistachio Consulting (aka @marciamarcia on Twitter). I always appreciate getting the history of communication channels, especially when there is a cognitive twist thrown in. In a past life I was a cognitive psychologist who studied how media effects cognition. The series of posts, History of Knowledge Management in Six Parts, took on a similar task which I originally called, Knowledge Management is an Emerging Field with a Long History.

Marcia notes that meaning is bigger than words. The more you know someone, the fewer words you need to convey meaning. In fact, very young children learn meaning before words and often invent their own words before they learn their parent’s language. I was told I had about 50 variations on ugh, each with its own meaning. Parents who pay close attention learn this vocabulary and provide validation to their children that helps with their language acquisition.

The best new tools enhance existing means of communication and this is what Twitter does. As Marcia writes, “You have been microsharing and networking since you first asked to be carried and your toys were made of wood.” What is new with Twitter messages “is how they help us do it (forcing compactness and distributing to portable devices) and who we share with (often previous strangers who share our passions).”

While the best new tools enhance existing means of communication, they also bring new capabilities as Marcia notes. We need to learn how to best use these capabilities. We generally start with the past. The phonetic alphabet first recorded oral poetry before it went on to take advantage of the capabilities text offered (See Eric Havelock’s Origins of Western Literacy). I think we are still discovering what micro-messaging can provide. Marcia writes that it can, “amplify voices and net people-picked answers fast… even update our collaboration capacity; improving our mindfulness by encouraging us to ask ourselves consistently, “Is this something I should share?”

This is all true but I wonder what else is in store. The inventors of the alphabet did not imagine War and Peace or the precise sharing of scientific information through journals. The ability to enhance random access in books took over 1500 years and it appears people did not know they could read in silence for about that long. Now I am not equating Twitter with the invention of the alphabet but the alphabet offers an extreme example of what a new media can bring. I kidded Marcia about her ability to engage in Twitter speak at the Enterprise 2.0 conference but I also admired it as both a skill and an example of how new media can effect the way we think and sharpen our communication abilities.

Summary of Some Summaries of Enterprise 2.0 Conference

I greatly enjoyed this years Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. This is the third year that I have participated and I feel it has gotten better each year. The best part was meeting new people and engaging with others I have know for a while. I went to some session but also had other things to do locally so did ot see as many as I wanted to. I also saw a number of the vendor exhibits and talked with them. Many are ones that I have covered on the AppGap and met previously via the phone. I did notes on all the sessions I attended and here are the links.

My Notes on Dion Hinchcliffe Enterprise 2.0 Conference Workshop – Part One

Dion Hinchcliffe Enterprise 2.0 Conference Workshop – Part Two

My Notes on Mike Gotta’s Reality 2.0: Getting Started with Enterprise Social Networking

Thoughts on Twitter and Business for Enterprise 2.0 Conference

A Few Thoughts from Enterprise 2.0 Conference Session on Future of Social Messaging in Enterprise

A Few Thoughts from Enterprise 2.0 Conference Session on Does Social Media in Matter in Marketing

More importantly, I have enjoyed the notes from others. Here are some of them with a few comments.

Enterprise 2.0 Conference 09: A re-cap. Is an excellent post by Sameer Patel. He said that there were a good number of practitioners from companies and a good number of tactical sessions. He thought the conference was a success for those who wanted to be able to put learning to work and I agree.

Sameer covered a number of sessions I missed and this is appreciated. Mike Gotta moderated Community & Social Network Sites: Think Adoption, Not Deployment. In it Dan McCall, Kishan Mallur and Erik Johnson cited specific examples how they generated buzz on the cheap, got influencers to become evangelists, and created a sense of ownership. Another of his was Lee Bryant’s Transition Strategies for Enterprise 2.0 Adoption and Sandy Kemsley wrote at length on it (see below).

In Metrics in the Hands of Users. Marc Smith, Kate Niederhofferand Daniel Debow kindled a great discussion on how to drive, visualize and measure performance via less geeky constructs. He also covered Reality 2.0: Getting Started with Enterprise Social Networking by Mike Gotta that I also attended. I only skimmed the surface of what Sameer offers and you should read his entire piece.

Transition Strategies for Enterprise 2.0 Adoption by Sandy Kemsley looked at Lee Bryant of Headshift session on adoption challenges for 2.0 technologies. Sandy reported that Lee said that points out that we can't afford the “high-friction, high-cost model of deploying technology and processes, but need to rebalance the role of people within the enterprise.” Having experienced much of the unnecessary and expensive pain of old school large scale systems integration I would agree.

Sandy said that many of the behavioral use cases “focused on things that people were already doing, and just tweaking the methods that they use to do them. That makes it a lot less threatening, and therefore much more likely to be adopted.” In the past, I always looked to add knowledge management to enhance existing business processes and then measure KM’s enhancement of these processes. In 15 years, I never saw a successful knowledge management system that did not do this. Sandy uses Lee’s session as background to share her own ides and it is an excellent read,

Enterprise 2.0 conference impressions were provided by Oliver Marks. I always enjoy his posts at ZDNet. He said that Enterprise 2.0 is still considered in many quarters almost a fashion statement compared to enterprise software as the heavy duty infrastructure. I agree and for now one does not replace the other. They need to integrate and co-exist. In this context, he added that from his perspective the Sharepoint ’shared drive’ approach to structured data workflows is robust, but much of the current collaboration functionality is waited to be released. However, Microsoft plans to release some of these enhancements in October. He mentioned that Christian Finn of Microsoft did tell him that Bing, which leverages the innovations of the semantic web technologies world to provide linked contextual answers, is a purely consumer play, while the FAST technologies are the enterprise search engine for the enterprise. I look forward to seeing what they do. There is more in Oliver’s post.

Looking back on Enterprise 2.0 was provided by Irwin Lazar on the conference blog. He notes Enterprise 2.0 is real, and perhaps more importantly, the business benefits are real (and so are the challenges). I agree and have been saying for several years. I find that the constant improvement to this conference keeps validating it. He added that we need to keep measuring this success and referred to Telligent’s work. I have interviewed them, like their metrics, and am working on an AppGap post covering this conversation. In his final point he noted that lines are blurring between social computing and unified communications. Read him for the details.

Post #e2conf thoughts – installment 1 was provided by Gil Yehuda, another blogger I greatly respect. He liked the conference and noted that most attendees were well informed. I found this last year and told a number of vendors who I interviewed for AppGap that it was a conference to talk with the experts rather than meet new customers. This was even more the case this year. At the same time Gil said need to further clarify what we mean when we say Enterprise 2.0, it started to get pretty slippery at times. I agree here also. That was the case with our Twitter session as I noted yesterday.

Gil gave a good example from a session I missed, Jascha Franklin-Hodge, Chief Technology Officer & Founding Partner of Blue State Digital who spoke about the lessons we can learn from the Obama campaign. Gil wanted to hear more enterprise related issues such as the “culture change” process that the Obama campaign had to accept internally as it shifted into a new strategy. I would agree. I think that the Obama campaign was the first to move from Web 2.0 to enterprise 2.0 and have discussed this (e.g., Rolling Stone Magazine and More on Obama’s Use of the New Web). I would love to hear more from an insider.

My last summary comes form someone who did not attend the meeting, The secret sauce to successful Enterprise 2.0 adoption was nicely written by Oscar Berg from Europe. He quoted a number of summaries, including some of mine. He started with Hylton Jolliffe discussing the new direction in our FastFoward blog. “While selecting the right tools for the job can certainly prove a barrier to adoption for some organizations, even after they select the right tools they are always faced with the more formidable barrier to adoption - one based on social, cultural and business process issues.” I look forward to being part of this discussion.

Oscar also referenced Ben Kepes on Community & Social Network Sites: Think Adoption, Not Deployment that picks up on this theme. Ben noted that you need to reach out to existing communities of interest to drive adoption and pre-determine community champions to answer the initial questions until critical mass is reached and the community self-perpetuates. These are both long-standing best practices that remain useful in enterprise 2.0 adoption. There is much more in Oscar’s post.

I am sure there are other excellent summaries of the conference. Please add any that you feel are useful in the comment section of this post. Thanks in advance. I look forward to more next year.

Post Script - Here are more that I just learned about. Andrew McAfee How Beautiful it is, and How Easily it can be Broken Susan Scrupski And they’re off… Postcard from Enterprise 2.0 Boston and Doug Cornelius Enterprise 2.0 Keynotes on Tuesday

More Follow-up to Our Enterprise 2.0 Conference Panel on Twitter and Business

Thanks to all the people who came to our session at Enterprise 2.0 Conference on business uses of Twitter, How Twitter Changes Everything. My panel co-participants include Jessica Lipnack, CEO, NetAge (our moderator) Isaac Garcia, CEO, Central Desktop, Clara Shih, author of The Facebook Era, and my fellow AppGap blogger, Patti Anklam. Last Wednesday I posted the thoughts I shared at the session and some additional comments (Thoughts on Twitter and Business for Enterprise 2.0 Conference). Here I want to expand on them and look at what some others have said.

I should first add that our session was about Twitter as business tool and not about micro-blogging within the enterprise where issues like security are critical. There was an excellent session on the latter topic the next day (see Thoughts from Enterprise 2.0 Conference Session on Future of Social Messaging in Enterprise.) Pistachio Consulting provides an excellent Enterprise Microsharing Tools Comparison.

We have started to use the term Twitter like we did Xerox or Kleenex so there can be confusion here. Twitter, like Facebook is a consumer Web tool that has great business uses. It is not designed as an enterprise 2.0 tool for use behind the firewall. This does not mean that it does not have business uses. It just means that these uses are out in the public space. (see Enterprise 2.0 is not Web 2.0 nor is it an Oxymoron).

This is the third Enterprise 2.0 conference session I have done with Jessica. I always like her introductions and her style of getting everyone involved. I think her energy is contagious and I look forward to more.

Several of the other panel members, as well as those in the audience have continued the conversation. I want to summarize what they said and provide links to their complete thoughts in this post.

Enterprise 2.0: Twitter Up, Facebook, MySpace Down appeared in Information Week. It noted how quickly usage switches on the web with twitter on the upswing down but people are still sorting it out.

How Twitter changed to include everyone – Our panel leader Jessica Lipnack posted a number of pictures from the session and provided us with the stream on tweets on the panel through the Twitter tag #e2conf. More have surfaced since her post.

Twitter in the Enterprise - Patti Anklam another panel member shared her thoughts from the panel and more. She related what happened when the CEO at one of her clients requested a “twitter channel” for questions during an all-employee forum. Patti added benefits to using within the enterprise: situational awareness, crowd sourcing: tweeting questions and getting answers from friends but also friends of friends (via the Retweet mechanism), developing and maintaining relationships. Tweets also help you get a sense of who a person is, and whether it’s a person you may want to collaborate with. In addition, tweets with links, and especially retweets with links provide a good information filtering mechanism.

Patti also provided a useful list of challenges to implementing a twitter-like micro-blogging tool within the enterprise. In addition to dealing with the very real security concerns, these include migrating people who are already using Twitter to an internal tool. It is also important for enterprise micro-blogging tools to enable the option to post out to Twitter anything posted internally. Then there is the issue of Integrating micro-blogging with social networking and collaboration applications that already exist or that are in plan. There is much more in Patti’s post and you should look at the complete piece.

Enterprise 2.0 2009:Twitter’s Influence Everywhere & A New Realism was posted by my fellow AppGap blogger. Jenny noted that Twitter’s influence pervaded the Expo floor with micro-blogging/social messaging functionality being demoed at booths from Lotus Connections through the latest release of Atlassian’s Confluence Wiki to Thoughtfarmer. I would add Central Desktop, Cubetree, and Traction TeamPage to this list. I think that soon every enterprise 2.0 collaboration platform will have one.

Irwin Lazar expanded on Jenny’s point about the migration of Twitter like capabilities to the enterprise and wrote that there are “over a dozen press releases now on the E 2.0 site, almost all with a common theme of taking the capabilities of Facebook and Twitter and bringing them into the enterprise in a manner that meets requirements for security, compliance, and governance, but that also enables support for both internal and external collaboration.”

I am saving the most controversial part to the last. Issace Garcia stated that there is a lot of spam in Twitter and that RTs are spam. While I would agree with Issac that there is too much spam in Twitter, I respectfully disagree with the RT point. Many others including Luis Suarez and Alex Howard joined the disagreement. Alex did a nice follow-up post, Does RT = spam? Unlikely. A retweet is social media currency. I should say first that I have great respect for Isaac and have covered his work at Central Desktop many times (for example, Central Desktop Using Twitter for Sales, Service, and Brand Monitoring Conversations and How Barack Obama is Using Web and Enterprise 2.0 in the US Primary Campaign Through Central Desktop).

Alex first offered a definition of spam from the Wikipedia (currently) “Spam the abuse of electronic messaging systems to send unsolicited bulk messages.” He added that CNET reported that, in 2009, spam makes up 90% of all email. Alex said, if anything, that’s actually down from the 95% estimate he read a few years ago. I have heard similar numbers.

Alex then noted correctly that it is easy to avoid spam by not following those who you consider spam. Of course one person’s spam is not person’s steak but you can decide. Alex asked his followers on the more specific point about RTs and got some good responses that he posted.

@pmhesse wrote what many others said “RT is about sharing information with your friends that you found valuable, informative, or entertaining.” @eric_andersen added “I couldn’t possibly follow all of the original sources of info/links I’m interested in; rely on others to RT. IMHO sharing info via retweets is part of the “lifeblood” of Twitter; without sharing much appeal of the medium is lost.” I agree with both.

Alex further defined variations of RT. “A retweet is social media currency. It’s a validation of the tweet you are passing on and a stamp that you have not changed it. I use PRT, for partial retweet, if I have to edit for length. I use via or HT for “hat tip” if I pass along someone’s link but write my own text, which provides proper attribution.” I agree with the social currency concept. I also learned something here and will think about using these variations. He also mentioned the major spam problems on Twitter and noted an @spam account to report it to but RT is not spam if used right.

Isaac defended his position in a reply on Alex’s post. He only wants to see the original thoughts of people he follows and not the ideas of others they consider useful to pass on. We can just respectfully disagree here but with Twitter you can un-follow those who you feel are misusing the RT feature. Bringing micro-blogging into the enterprise may raise similar issues but I still think that RT could be useful there if done right.

Tomorrow I am going to post on some of the overall summaries of the Enterprise 2.0 conference.

Quick Painting of Turpentine Can

I did this 16 x 16 acrylic sketch in about an hour. There are quiet a few things wrong technically but it was fun and I will likely leave it as is. I think I am going to explore a more spontaneous style simultaneously with the more reworked stuff such as Painting of Woman with Flip Flops.

Painting of Woman on a Stool

Here is the second in a series of women sitting stools. Like Woman with Flip Flops, it is an 18 x 24 acrylic.

A Few Thoughts from Enterprise 2.0 Conference Session on Future of Social Messaging in Enterprise

There was an excellent Enterprise 2.0 conference session on Future of Social Messaging in Enterprise with David Marshak IBM Lotus, Fernando Egea Alcatel-Lucent, Joe Burton, Cisco, Marcia Conner, Pistachio Consulting, Mike Gotta, Burton group, Tim Young Socialcast, Dan York, Vixeo. Unfortunately, I did not get to hear all of it but here are some notes from what I did experience.

Marcia provides a series of pithy statements that fit the 140 character limit for twitter. I kidded her afterwards that she has learned to speak Twitter but this is a real complement.. When I was with a large consulting firm we were trained on how to be interviewed by the press and told to think sound bytes to get quoted. Twitter has raised that art. Here are some of the things she said that I agreed with and I tweeted the first two at the time.

Waste of time to be thinking about which tool to use rather than doing the job.

Need to know how to reach people who have insights.

Need to figure how to work smarter rather than focusing on tools.

Do not create app centric organizations but create people centric organizations.

An enterprise micro-blogging tool needs to help us capture and rate information. We need to be able to filter to avoid being overwhelmed and/bored.

The other panel members were no less insightful and here is a bit of what they offered. We get richer knowledge of people that work with us through Twitter and Facebook. We often do not have time to obtain this context in real time so these tools enrich our understanding of our colleagues. I agree and found this very much the case with blogs.

It is important to be able to search to find what someone said a month ago. This is currently an issue and flaw with twitter. It is also important to be able to look at correlations between what is going on across social media.

Many of these debates about how open to be have been going across many generations of tools. There is the share everything camp vs. keep everything secure camp. Granularity of access is an issue that we have been struggling with for some time.

Governance has two sides – how to look at data and store it. This can be solved. The bigger issue is a human issue. You can engage in bad behavior through many media. You cannot lock everything down. This was an issue with blogs but is timeless. It comes up with every new media. Transparency breeds respect. People tend to behavior correctly when given trust. You cannot send a one to one communication and not be sure that no one else will see it.

A Few Thoughts from Enterprise 2.0 Conference Session on Does Social Media in Matter in Marketing

This was an excellent panel at the Enterprise 2.0 conference. I was distracted and did not get everything but here area few bits. Ben Foster, Allstate, Morgan Johnson. JetBlue and Greg Matthews Humana participated on the panel. Peter Kim was moderator

Ben said social media can be a cure chasing tool. Morgan said it was important to manage both followers and following. I like that they are reciprocal to many of the their followers. I try to follow as many of my followers who seem sincere in their efforts even of they have a only a few followers so far. I guess I am a softy but I also believe in reciprocation.

Greg Matthews said they are trying to push forward in a new frontier as a company and not just be a health benefits company be a heath company. They want to help people take care of their health. For example, they launched bike sharing program. Humana has created an Innovation center web site to aggregate their social media efforts. Their content lives all over the web and the Humana innovation site brings it together.

The panel said there are two emerging area where social media matters – customer service and innovation and new product development. People are talking about needs and frustration that will help you design new products.

Humana is looking beyond marketing but marketing remains important. Social media is helping with their geographic expansion and proving a positive image and brand recognition as they come to new areas. On the issue of internal support there is always tension when you introduce something new into an organization. Bottom up generation of ideas creates tension. They have a big data security concern as we have health data on people. They work with IT to stay separate from core data with social media.

The panel advised us to not focus on one tool as another will come along and replace it or go in a new direction. Used to be how to use technology. Now you can build your own technology. The greatest technology does not seem like technology. A good example is the iPhone.

66 Notable Knowledge Management Sites and Blogs from Lucas McDonnell

Here is a useful list from Lucas McDonnell. He wrote, “while the original list was only 26 sites, and eventually almost doubled to around 50, I’ve now got the list up to 66 sites that are really cranking out some quality content.”

There are some good sources here and I was pleased to see this blog on the list. Most of them were already on my blog list but I added a few more.

Thoughts on Twitter and Business for Enterprise 2.0 Conference

Yesterday I was on panel at Enterprise 2.0 Conference on business uses of Twitter, How Twitter Changes Everything. My panel co-participants include Jessica Lipnack, CEO, NetAge (our moderator) Isaac Garcia, CEO, Central Desktop, Clara Shih, author of The Facebook Era, and my fellow AppGap blogger, Patti Anklam. Here is what I planned to share at the session. I ended up saying most of it but there was not time or it did not fit the conversation to say all of it.

There have been many creative business uses of Twitter and a lot have been written about them so I will not repeat that stuff here. In these comments I am going to share my own personal experiences of twitter with business. I mainly do two things for business. I serve as a paid journalist bloggers for two blogs on enterprise 2.0, FastForward and AppGap, and I provide consulting to firms and individuals on their business blogs and other uses of social media. I will close with Twitter’s impact on these two business activities.

First, I want to make a confession. I used to make fun of Twitter. I compared the endless stream of 140 character bits to Luis Borges' Library of Babel where, as the Wikipedia conveys his work published in 1941 conveys that, the "order of the books is random and apparently completely meaningless. Though the majority of the books in this universe are pure gibberish, the inhabitants believe that the library also must contain, somewhere, every coherent thought. This glut of chaotic information was leaving the librarians in a state of suicidal despair. But somewhere there was a book, the Crimson Hexagon, that contains the log of all the other books and the librarian who reads it is akin to God."

When I made fun of the chaotic stream of chatter on Twitter, many of my fellow bloggers rose to its defense and urged me to join their conversations. Finally, I meet with several at a conference in Vegas and they showed me the Crimson Hexagon for Twitter, TweetDeck. Now I could bring some order to the chaos. I could segment the people I am following into manageable and meaningful subgroups. I began to use it more actively and discovered that it served several functions that I will describe. But I had to go to another tool to find value. One study said that Twitter provides the 37th best interface to its own data. This is one of two potentially fatal flaws that may send it to join Friendster.

First, I discover a lot of interesting ideas. I like the human filter aspects. When I first started my blog over four years ago, people knew I blogged and would email me interesting stuff to blog about. I said I had a human RSS feed and rarely had to go to mechanical RSS readers. Now Twitter serves this purpose even better as people I respect tweet about an article or blog post with links. As Dion Hitchcliffe said in a tweet, Twitter can serve as a useful filter as he would rather have info endorsed by people he knows. Twitter has become my main source for blog content but only through tweets that point to longer pieces.

Second, I use Twitter search as an alternative to Google search. It has not replaced Google, just supplemented it. Twitter search is for what is happening right now and Twitter makes it easier to engage the person sharing the content. I find it good for niche topics like agile development or cloud computing. However, Twitter’s range is fleeting and Google is still more comprehensive.

Third, like my blog, I use Twitter as a personal knowledge management system. I retweet interesting links I find from others and tweet things I find myself. Then I can go back to them to read later and perhaps blog on them. However, this is fleeting and exposes the second of the potentially fatal flaws with Twitter. It dumps its data index after three months so you cannot go back and find stuff beyond the rolling three month window. If I tweet about this conference or record links I had better convert the information to another format if I want to save it. In addition, the interface makes it hard to go back more than a few weeks away. Someone needs to do for Twitter archiving what TweetDeck did for immediate use or a better micro-blogging system might take over. I found my blog to be very useful in preparing for what I would say on this panel. Twitter was much less useful and only helped with stuff that happen in the past week.

I also used my blog to record my notes on the excellent conference sessions by Dion Hinchcliffe and Mike Gotta. But I used Twitter to let others at the conference know that they existed and received over 38 RTs of these alerts and a few came with nice additional comments. There was also a spike in page views for the blog with many coming from Twitter. The two channels complemented each other. Twitter does not replace blogs.

Fourth, like with blogs, I meet new people on Twitter and better engage with people I already know. I also can create greater awareness for what I write in other channels, primarily blogs. Twitter does not replace blogs because there is only so much you can say in 140 characters but it is good way to point to more meaningful content.

So how has this affected my business? First, as I mentioned before, it supplies many stories for my journalist blogger role. Second, I now advise my blog clients on how to use Twitter to compliment their blogging efforts. Just as I experiment with blogs to better serve my clients, I have been experimenting with Twitter for the same purpose.

I have learned a lot and that could be another session. But here is one example. With blogs it is important to think in terms of key words as one of the best ways to expand your audience is through search. You need to speak to search engines through these key words but not in a gaming way. You will (and should) get in trouble for this as HabitatUK found out. With Twitter, you can apply the same key word strategy but instead on focusing on choosing the right words for blog titles and other content, you focus on the wording of tweets and use hashtags in a meaningful way. I find that I often get new followers directly related to a hashtag I recently used.

But of course you need to provide some value to the readers you attract or it is a waste of time. I you are just offering another get rich on Twitter scheme you will only attract fellow travelers.

Twitter is currently raising the slope of unrealistic expectations for business and consumers. It has great potential but it needs to continue to improve or someone else will take micro-blogging to the next step.

I Tried These Five Recommended Twitter Tools

I found this post on 5 Killer Twitter Tools from Jim Goldstein, a photographer who also writes about social media. These tools came from his attendance at the 140 conference. I tried each tool and would say they are killer but they are interesting. Some were more useful than others here they are. Go to Jim’s post for more detail.

TweetReach lets you know who found your Tweet of interest and retweeted it. I looked at this first for topics and found that the TweetReach for the term, knowledgemanagement, reached 9,288 people via 20 tweets. The term, KM, is used much more for kilometers than knowledge management. In contrast, the TweetReach for the term, enterprise20, reached 101,321 people via 50 tweets. I am not sure how it applies to individual tweets.

I also looked at my Twitter name, billives and found the TweetReach for billives reached 30,533 people via 50 tweets. You can see you have the top contributors for each term so I could see who was putting terms including my twitter user name in front of the most people.

The catch is that they only look at the last 50 Tweets for free so you only see recent activity. If you want a 30 day history of the activity you have to purchase their report.

xefer 
helps you find out when any Twitter user is most active on Twitter. This information is useful if you’re trying to time the release of certain information for widest distribution. I tried this tool and found that I am more likely to tweet at 9AM and 9PM. The next times are 10PM and 8AM. The fifthe most hour was 8PM. This all makes sense as I tweet more at the beginning and end of the day.

TweetBeep
 sets up an automated alert to be notified when certain keywords are detected in a tweet, when a particular person has tweeted or if someone has tweeted near a particular location or any combination there of. You can also narrow down the alerts by the “attitude” of the post whether positive / negative or if it contains links. I signed up and am still waiting for results.

Twist: see Trends In Twitter
 tracks trends on particular topics or people. I tried this and you can see trends in usage in a line graph and most recent examples. The most recent examples is no different than Twitter search fir the term. It does give you a quick sense of volume overtime.

Backtweets.com
 allows you to type in a link URL to see who has tweeted/retweeted it and who is discussing it. I tried the tool and put in this blog’s url. I found that it will unpack tiny urls to see what is behind and also go to the root url. In other words it reported links to specific posts in this blog, even though I only put in the general home page url for the blog. These features make it quite useful.

My Notes on Mike Gotta’s Reality 2.0: Getting Started with Enterprise Social Networking

I attended the Mike Gotta session on Enterprise Social Networking at the Boston Enterprise 2.0 conference. I have been following Mike’s Collaborative Thinking blog for some time as I was pleased to be able to see him in person for the first time to hear him talk about adoption issues. Mike said he is going to provide information from actual cases from project teams that he has interviewed. I am doing these notes real time so please forgive any typos and missing words.

There is a history of software and communities. Many tools have come and gone since the 80s. So what is new? The consumer Web tools helped to great more awareness. Now we have evolved from social networking sites to services to platforms. They are no set answers yet. Platforms for the enterprise can use profiles, social graphs, relationship controls (for people and admin), social presence, participation tools, and application services.

He showed an example of a social network site from Booz Allen that they built themselves. It showed the total social context of an individual within the organization.

Mike offered a graph of the market space. The domain specific vendors include: Jive, Telligent, Newsgator and others. The three platform vendors include IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle. He also showed transformational vendors (Facebook, Twitter, Google and others) and emerging vendors (Drupal, Cubetree and others). He moved to another slide before I could get the rest.

Mike related a field study he conducted. Interviewed 21 organizations, interviewed 65 people, got 45 hours of conversation, and looked at 1,700 data points. Rather than guide the conversation with a lot of questions, he set a framework and let people talk and tell their stories. Good idea.

Mike made a good point up front. It is all abut adoption not deployment. Major findings include the fact that everyone thought they were behind, even if they were not. Everyone is at the starting point. Few organizations have made a organization-wide decision on social networking. They are still trying to figure it out. Even organizations that have a strategic vision are in the proof-of concept stage. It is not about the tools that is the critical factors. It is overcoming the cultural issues. Social networks do enable more adaptive organizations. This make intuitive sense so it is nice to see some validation.

They found three approaches – people to people, people to work, and people to organization but its work best when these three integrate. They found two main gaps. People have not focused on social network and identity and search was not considered. This was surprising to Mike. He feels that their should be a lot of synergy between social networking and search strategy.

One of the first issues that project teams faced was properly identifying what social networking means for the enterprise. There is a lot of confusion here. Analogies to the consumer web such as Facebook were often not successful, as people did not want Facebook in the enterprise. Most teams ended up with the term collaboration and not anything social. This is exactly consistent with Dion Hinchcliffe in the morning session. I certainly agree with both of them

Found innovation best from bottom up from people closest to the work. So give them a voice and a way to collaborate. I found this over and over again in the old knowledge management days. In those days you needed to do anthropology on the jobs to uncover best practices.

Mike he found other issues such as the above and that these are not new issues. What did I just say? Shifting generations play several roles in adoption. Need to be able to appeal to all generations and allow for greater integration across generations. Older workers can be social networking leaders to share their expertise and provide status to them for retention. Also look for emerging experience that is developing in the younger workers. A culture of participation will identify good skills in ways that might not come out otherwise.

Social networks are also ways for people to organize and create their own training to meet their individual needs. Informal learning can complement formal learning. Also, social networking is great for on-boarding. They offer the back channel for what is really going on and who to interact with.

The business side often has pain points but do not link them to a business requirement when they talk with IT. They also sometimes come to IT with a tool request not linked with a business requirement. In both cases IT needs to not dismiss but explore to uncover real business requirement. It is usually there if you ask questions.

There was a lot of debate on ROI. It was hard to make very concrete. There is no agreement here. Some people said it was the wrong question and others said it was important. It is essential infrastructure or can it be an intervention with a concrete ROI linked to work process improvement. Often ROI was found after deployment but hard to predict specifics. Most pilots did find business value once they started.

Some project teams worked behind the scenes to get supporters in decision roles, often younger people. Others went out to get support form the field. Stories can be the best ROI, especially for potential of approach to get pilots going. Gaining approval and ROI is more art than science. I would agree here. This is brining back early days of knowledge management when it was all fresh. Again, I think this similarity just validates the issues.

Mike next addressed the issue of how to balance business and culture or how to defeat the enemy within. Organizational structures cam impede social networking. Middle management can be threatened and try to sabotage efforts. They were used to controlling what went up the reporting chain. Now the lower level employees can talk directly to senior management. The top and bottom of the organization liked this but the middle did not. Managers would tell workers to not put stuff in a blog but send to them in email.

Sometimes there are social caste systems. People at high levels do not talk with people in junior levels. This can carry over to social software. Workers feel senior management would “never take an idea from me.” This is a red flag that the culture can be a barrier. Another company that had a good culture and questions and suggestions were answered quickly. They made over $500k in savings from the system.

There is no clear answer as to whether you must change culture first before implementing social networks or you can use social networks to change culture. Regardless you must address the cultural issues in the implementation. Culture can trump almost everything. Trust is important here. One guy said he did not want to fill out his profile because it would make it easier to find him and lay him off. How do you cross culture boundaries in social software that are not crossed in person on the job? This needs to be figured out.

There was mixed opinion on whether to bring legal, HR, and security into the project pre or post pilot. There was agreement that they need to get involved. Pre-pilot course would say that you know what to avoid. Post would say that you do not yet know what you need to get by-in for.

Other issues that came up include the role of social business activity in annual reviews. There were all sides on this. Do not want to drive gaming the system but you also want to recognize good corporate citizen behavior. Also, what about consequences for negative behavior? Should people be concerned about career limiting moments? There needs to be policies on this so issues are clear. Some companies have terms of service before you start to use the social networking site. I think this could be okay but only if what really happens. I had something similar on an email system with a past employer but everyone ignored it. It said you cold only use it for business uses but everyone used it for personal uses. Finally, the company recognized the folly of their requirement and removed it. If you get too controlling no one will come.

I had to duck out a bit early so welcome anyone filling in what I missed. I liked the fact that this session came from actual research with real stories and was not simply platitudes. It was also better as stories than stats.

Dion Hinchcliffe Enterprise 2.0 Conference Workshop – Part Two

This is part two of opening workshop by Dion Hinchcliffe on Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at the Boston Enterprise 2.0 conference. Dion brought up a guest speaker David Stephenson who he said is the “world’s leader in democratizing data.” This was the tile of his discussion, the concept of democratizing data: the data-centric organization. This makes it automatically available to those who need it based on roles and responsibilities while maximizing security. He said that data democratization can actually increase security. I agree here.

Having data at the heart of all actions is an attitudinal shift. You need to provide metadata so you can make sense of it and RSS feeds to reach user. You need to think of every worker as a knowledge worker. Giving more authority to people who fill potholes by providing them with all the data on their daily assignments increases morale and productivity as they will know the best way to complete the tasks. David said that the Netherlands government saves over 25% of reporting costs by standardizing and making data more transparent.

Dion can back and picked up on this theme. Government is picking up on the data democratization theme with the new administration. For example, wikis are being used for dealing with crisis issues for more transparency than email.

Dion reviewed enterprise 2.0 platforms; wikis, blogs, microblogging, mashups, online communities, social bookmarking, social networking and them went over the vendor space with examples of each category. There is currently no one stop shop for all tool categories but there are suites. Online communities include: Joomla, Drupal, Zikula, PHP/Nuke SharePoint, Lithium, Telligent, DotNetNuke, KickApps, Jive. Dion said these are the top ones based on usage. SharePoint is already available in many organizations that want to start enterprise 2.0. It has many necessary capabilities. It can also be adapted to implement many of the social emergent tools but usually requires some work.

Dion put up an enterprise 2.0 ecosystem chart. You have traditional enterprise systems and enterprise 2.0 systems. These can be connected through mashups and data can be found through federated search. He went on to cover some other platforms being used: Igloo, Facebook private groups (it is open source). Serena software uses Facebook (see my post - Serena has Adopted Facebook as their Intranet).

Mashups are being used and Serena, Jackbe, IBM (Lotus Mashups), Microsoft (Popfly) have tools. One creative example, Chicago did a mashup of crime data with Google Maps that is updated real time and can be sorted by time of day.

Crowdsourcing is another application. One gold company put their survey data out and invited anyone to tell them where the gold was. They had great success and paid a large sum in bounties. This can be done internally or externally. (see Innovating Through Market Games with Spigit.)

Dion then switched to best practices. Successful adoption strategies include: gain and enlist top down support, overcome turf issues in advance, align applications to key business processes, align enterprise 2.0 strategy to business strategy, develop a clear simple business case, provide strong leadership, design measure aligned to business processes. I could not agree more. These were also all the key adoption strategies for knowledge management in the early 90s. This does not take away from them. I think it just reinforces them. Dion said these factors came from actual case studies.

He added more adoption strategies: listen to users, simply the access and production of knowledge, develop a clear communication plan to promote the effort, involve all key stakeholers (but go slow on this), integrate all forms of communication, develop a clear motivation plan. Again these are all best practices from knowledge management in the early 90 but I see this as a further validation. I found that legal often got overlooked and this can come back to bite you so do not leave them out.

Dion went on to discuss the need to aggregate social data and not have silos. This is critical. Enterprise 2.0 suites are adding this. Also, social analytics is being implemented to take advantage of the transparency and make sense of it. He gave an example of Facebooks’ FriendWheel as a consumer version. In line with this you need to cultivate weak ties, as well as strong ties, and enterprise 2.0 enables this. These weak ties are often the source of new insights vs. the people you talk to all the time.

Reputation systems are another way to make use of the social data and rather input. Sezwho is one tool that works across platforms. Expertise location is an overlapping capability.

Dion offered a breakdown of effort: tools, 15%, integration, 25%, community management 25%, IT support, 15% change management 20%. These make intuitive sense. Do not short change the people issues. The quality of the community management team is a critical success factor. Community Manager is one of the roles in the enterprise.

You need to allow time for people to learn the tools and methods. Social tools are the new productivity tools like word processing and spreadsheets before so everyone needs to learn how to use them. As Dion said earlier, the more people use the tools the greater the value. There are three levels of community in the enterprise and you need to deal with each one: team level, community level, and entire network.

I found this workshop to be a useful overview of enterprise 2.0 adoption.

My Notes on Dion Hinchcliffe Enterprise 2.0 Conference Workshop – Part One

Dion Hinchcliffe is leading an opening workshop on Implementing Enterprise 2.0. I have long been an admirer of his work and was pleased to see this session. The subtitle is: Exploring the Tools and Techniques of Emergent Change. Dion said the concept of emergent and social is critical. I like the fact that many stories will be offered as I agree that they offer more than “factual” information. I did this real time so apologies for typos. This is cross-posted from FastForward.

Dion said that many companies do not like the word, social. so he uses enterprise 2.0. Again, I agree here. I wish the Wikipedia did. Three years ago only a few in his session had access to blogs at work. Last year it was half. This year it was almost everyone. Enterprise 2.0 is more about social tools for collaboration than in the consumer space. Most organization have these tools but it is every uneven.

Consumer and enterprise is blurring. Employees now put contact information in social tools outside the enterprise as something they own and can take with them. People are willing to pay for these tools themselves but most are free. We had to move to a much bigger room as there were a lot of people here. I could have predicted that. I look around and still see people standing.

In 2004 Web 2.0 tools began to be used at work. This is when I learned about them and got excited about their impact on knowledge management. Middle of last year global surveys in developed nations found about a third of all companies had the enterprise tools. Now it is a bit over half. Dion mentioned that knowledge management was an early use. Now Twitter is on the rise. It is social messaging as opposed to instant messaging. There is little interest in IM now as it does not build value because it operates in silos. I never liked IM and would sometimes copy and paste IM messages in Word before they went away. Now Twitter needs to get its archiving working better but at least there is some.

There are hundreds of enterprise 2.0 pilot projects underway. Mid to small businesses are most successful because they are nimble. Big software players are getting into it. Google Wave is designed to serve in this space. There are dozens of startups. Traditional tools like Documentum are adding enterprise 2.0 features. I did a review of this in AppGap (see EMC Documentum Makes a Series of Moves into Enterprise 2.0).

The big money principle of Enterprise 2.0 is harnessing collective intelligence. Tools have been poor for this before. He has seen 400 page Word docs with best practices. Tim O’Reilly definition, “Network applications that explicitly leverage network effects.” This is the social side of information. It is not just making connections but making use of it. Network effect occurs when the more people who use it, the better it is. YouTube is an example. Gave example of enterprise use of taking a free wiki tool inside informally at AOL. It spread virally until the entire organization uses it instead of traditional document management system. The wiki was optimizes for network effect. The traditional document management system was not optimized for this and lost out.

Andy McAffee put forth three pillars of enterprise 2.0: emergent, freeform, social. They are primarily to address collaboration challenge. Capture institutional knowledge and make it discoverable. It is globally visible, persistent collaboration that has very low barrier to entry. Like open source, anyone can improve knowledge. Workers are put into the central place for contribution. Tools adapt to environment rather than the reverse. In studies of early adopters social tools get much greater use for knowledge management than traditional tools. There is also less duplication of effort, increased transparency, and higher levels of productivity.

Dion used stales acronym – search, links, authorship, tags, extensions, signals - as critical components. Tags provide emergent structure and standard use of terms. I found that the users of taxonomy are the best at creating it. Now we have the way for this to happen. These tools will interrupt workflow less. Dion said this is a critical point and I agree. The other is that the content can be leveraged as the content is persistent and discoverable. I see this as knowledge management as a byproduct of work and not a separate activity. This is what got me excited about Web 2.0 for business in 2004.

Now we have a break so I will post this first part. More later.

Twitter Usage is Very Concentrated According to Harvard Research

I was somewhat surprised at recent research reported by Harvard Business School that suggests that Twitter usage is very concentrated. Bill Heil and Mikolaj Piskorski found that “the top 10% of prolific Twitter users accounted for over 90% of tweets. On a typical online social network, the top 10% of users account for 30% of all production. To put Twitter in perspective, consider an unlikely analogue - Wikipedia. There, the top 15% of the most prolific editors account for 90% of Wikipedia's edits ii. In other words, the pattern of contributions on Twitter is more concentrated among the few top users than is the case on Wikipedia, even though Wikipedia is clearly not a communications tool. This implies that Twitter's resembles more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service more than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network.”

They looked at 300,542 users in May 2009 to come up with these results. While I cannot argue with their facts, I do not agree completely with the last statement. I find that Twitter can be very two-way between people who are closely connected. It also opens up two-way exchanges with people you did not know before. Now this two-way exchange may only occur in the top 10% of users, but I have observed it occur many times.

At the same time, I continue to observe many people using Twitter as a one way broadcast channel as implied by the researchers. I think these people are missing the value of Twitter and their broadcasts likely fall on deaf ears. It becomes the tree falling in the forest thing. While many broadcasters may have many followers listed in their profile, I wonder how many of the these followers actually read their tweets if they are not a celebrity.

The researchers also found that 80% of twitter users are followed by or follow at least one user. By comparison, only 60 to 65% of other online social networks' members had at least one friend. Twitter's usage patterns are also very different from a typical on-line social network in another way. A typical Twitter user contributes very rarely. Among Twitter users, the median number of lifetime tweets per user is one. This translates into over half of Twitter users tweeting less than once every 74 days. Since many Twitters, myself included, average multiple tweets per day, there must be a lot who never tweet and I have observed this.

I think the research needs to focus on what people who are really using Twitter do and not the vast number of people who start it but do not use it. Although they might look at the characteristics of users and registered non-users. I was in the registered non-user category for the first five months of my Twitter experience. Then some friends showed my how to use it properly and my usage accelerated. I found value in using Twitter for several reasons, including sharing interesting links. Once I started using it, my followers rapidly grew. It continues to be fun.

Twitter may be like golf. You have to get to a certain level of proficiency to enjoy. However, getting to this level in Twitter is much easier than golf. I speak from experience here on both counts.

Cotswolds UK Door and Windows

I was struck by the wide variety of doors and windows when I was in the Cotswolds this late March. Last weekend I posted my photos of driving around. here are some doors and windows. You can click on a picture to enlarge it.

Signs of London

In my recent trip I was struck by many familiar signs from the time I lived in London. Here are some.

What Is the Best Business Model When Data and Content Storage Becomes a Utility?

This post started with a conversation with Paula Thornton (twitter.com/rotkapchen). We were discussing the implications of the cloud for business processes and software and Paula used the term, data as a utility. It got me to thinking about the implications of this. Here, I want to address the business model issue that will either carry forward or compromise the potential with the cloud.

Most SaaS providers I talk with are doing very well in the down economy. Some are having record profits. For example, Jen Grant at Box.net said that as a SaaS provider they continue to exceed their revenue targets. She attributed this to pressure on IT departments and business units to keep expenses down. With Box and many other SaaS tools, it is easy to get started and there are no implementation or systems integration costs. Employees still need to do work. Box and other SaaS tools provide a lower cost way to accomplish many content related tasks.

While Spigit, the innovation management software firm, offers both cloud and on-premise solutions, 95% of their customers are choosing SaaS. SkillSoft, the eLearning company said that an increasing majority of their customers are selecting the SaaS option. GroupSwim has gone to a total cloud offering so they can scale quickly, another major benefit of the cloud and making servers virtual. QuickBase has also seen significant growth for its SaaS based shareable database despite a down market. They feel that companies are seeing this class of applications as a way to both cut costs and increase productivity.

SaaS is an important component of the move to Enterprise 2.0. The analysts seem to agree with the software providers I have talked with. IDC recently issued the report, Software as a Service Market Will Expand Rather than Contract Despite the Economic Crisis. They projected that by the end of 2009, 76% of U.S. organizations will use at least one SaaS-delivered application for business use. SaaS applications are also getting an increasing percentage of IT budgets.

So where will this all go? According to the Wikipedia, electricity was once generated on premise but through a series of technology innovations, the grid and remote sourcing of power became possible. It took a while to get the business models sorted out and FDR won his first election, in part, on the promise to clean up the corrupt electric utilities of the day.

I am not suggesting there is anything like that corruption going on now with the cloud. However, as use of the cloud grows the final business model does remain to be determined. Will it become a utility in the business sense, as well as the practical sense? Will it need regulation? I hope not but how to we ensure its potential is realized?

The cloud players continue to grow. For example, Amazon went from selling books online to also becoming a major cloud service provider. However, it and several of the other major cloud players have not signed the Open Cloud Manifesto. I am not taking sides on this issue, just noting that there is an issue.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology, a non-regulatory arm of the US Commerce Department, has helped by developing a draft definition for federal use of cloud computing. They are ahead of the private sector here. Let’s hope that those who stand to benefit from the cloud can come to agreement that allows the cloud to reach its potential and helps the users, as well as our economy.

It will take a while for the final business model to evolve as the cloud moves data and content storage toward becoming a utility in a practical sense. Let’s hope we do a better job that we did with electricity.