Portals and KM

Forty Highly Rated Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 Bloggers (Part 2)

Yesterday, I listed Twenty Highly Rated Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 Bloggers. Below I provide the next twenty on the list. The inbound links reported by Google and the Technorati ratings and the number of reported blog reactions are provided and they are listed in order of Technorati blog reactions. I used Technorati inbound links for the order since Technorati ratings were not available for all of the bloggers. The Google reports of inbound links were taken today. The Technorati stats were taken a few months ago and the results for both sources are constantly changing so the relative order may have shifted if you look today.

I found these bloggers through a combination of methods. I could have easily missed some. Many are well known. I found other bloggers through Google and Technorati searching on the terms web 2.0 and enterprise 2.0 and noting their stats and who links to them. Since many, like myself, cover both topics I did not attempt to divide them into those two groups (web 2.0 and E 2.0). The numbers are always changing as the web is dynamic. If you know of bloggers on these topics that rate higher than these and those that I listed yesterday, I welcome your input and would appreciate at. However, since ratings generally go up, at least in terms of Google and Technorati inbound links, the ratings for these twenty and those listed yesterday are also likely higher today.

I think the difference between numbers 22 and 24, for example, are not significant because of the dynamic nature of the data. What is important is that these blogs are well read and well respected. I look forward to hearing about other bloggers on web 2.0 and enterprise 2.0 who have this level of traffic and reactions.

Nick Carr - Rough Type - Google reports 3,980 inbound links. Technorati has 8,629 blog reactions and an authority rating of 1,741.

Jeremiah Owyang - Google reports 3,690 inbound links. Technorati has 8,627 blog reactions and an authority rating of 2,101.

Lee Lefever - Google reports 2,000 inbound links. Technorati has 7,570 blog reactions and an authority rating of 2,427

Programmable Web - Google reports 1,670 inbound links. Technorati has 7,129 blog reactions and an authority rating of 749

Valeria Maltoni - Google reports 2,580 inbound links. Technorati has 5,085 blog reactions and an authority rating of 571.

Dave Weinberger - Google reports 5,380 inbound links. Technorati has 4,843 blog reactions and an authority rating of 786.

Paul Kedrosky - Google reports 4,070 inbound links. Technorati has 4,398 blog reactions and an authority rating of 936.

Erick Schonfeld. - Google reports 2,650 inbound links. Technorati has 4,276 blog reactions and an authority rating of 571.

David Silfrey - Google reports 2,500 inbound links. Technorati has 3,918 blog reactions and an authority rating of 820

Joe Wilcox - Microsoft Watch - Google reports 3,000 inbound links. Technorati has 3,643 blog reactions and an authority rating of 710.

John Jantsch - Google reports 812 inbound links. Technorati has 3,596 blog reactions and an authority rating of 2,258.

Douglas Karr - The Marketing Technology Blog - Google reports 916 inbound links. Technorati has 3,417 blog reactions and an authority rating of 845.

James Governor - Google reports 2,660 inbound links. Technorati has 3,287 blog reactions and an authority rating of 376

Euan Semple - Google reports 1,830 inbound links. Technorati has 3,244 blog reactions and an authority rating of 249.

Dave Pollard - Google reports 3,030 inbound links. Technorati has 3,243 blog reactions.

Stowe Boyd - Google reports 2,690 inbound links. Technorati has 2,800 blog reactions and an authority rating of 564.

Group authors - Fast Forward - Google reports 1,020 inbound links. Technorati has 2,732 blog reactions and an authority rating of 316.

Dion Hinchcliffe - Google reports 1,640 inbound links. Technorati has 2,711 blog reactions and an authority rating of 468.

Emily Chang - Google reports 538 inbound links. Technorati has 2,550 blog reactions.

Gavin Heaton - Google reports 2,030 inbound links - Technorati has 2,429 blog reactions and an authority rating of 434.

Twenty Highly Rated Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 Bloggers

Here is a list of 20 bloggers that are important voices in the web 2.0 and enterprise 2.0 market. The inbound links and Technorati data are provided and they are listed in order of blog reactions reported by Technorati. There is a wide range here. The statistics here will continue to evolve for each blog. These stats were taken a few months ago and will continue to evolve. I am not saying these are necessarily my favorites, although I respect them all, these writers command the numbers. Let me know if I left off a higher rated web 2.0 blogger (by these three stats) than these twenty below. I have listed multiple authors in some cases. There may be a few others that have multiple authors. Yesterday I reported on a list of top 100 analysts blogs by Technobabble. Number one on that list, Jeremiah Owyang just missed this list with 8,627 blog reactions from Technorati when I did the numbers.

Note - I have updated the Google results on 7/31/08 as there was some wide variations in the numbers I had before. Thanks to Niall Cook for pointing this out to me. I also noticed the the Google numbers are generally down, perhaps they have a different approach to doing the stats. The returns are still quite high for all but one. This does to change the order as I used the Technorati numbers to determine the order.

Michael Arrington (and others) TechCrunch - Google reports 15,800 inbound links. Technorati has 141,377 blog reactions and an authority rating of 23,975.

Pete Cashmore - Mashable - Google reports 6,790 inbound links. Technorati has 108,230 blog reactions and an authority rating of 15,487.

Jordan Running - http://www.downloadsquad.com/. Google reports 4,260 inbound links. Technorati has 78,630 blog reactions and an authority rating of 4,069.

Richard MacManus (and others) ReadWriteWeb - Google reports 7,200 inbound links. Technorati has 41,727 blog reactions and an authority rating of 8,706.

OM Malik - Google reports 8,920 inbound links. Technorati has 40,748 blog reactions and an authority rating of 6,340.

Guy Kawaski - Google reports 8,270 inbound links. Technorati has 35,178 blog reactions.

Robert Scoble - Google reports 8,000 inbound links. Technorati has 30,857 blog reactions and an authority rating of 6,020.

Merlin Mann - Google reports 4,090 inbound links. Technorati has 29,779 blog reactions and an authority rating of 4,245.

Leon Ho - Google reports 2,150 inbound links. Technorati has 26,177 blog reactions and an authority rating of 5,765

Seth Godin - Google reports 13,000 inbound links. Technorati has 23,440 blog reactions.

Tim O’Reilly - Google reports 4,220 inbound links. Technorati has 23,007 blog reactions and an authority rating of 5,184.

Rafe Needleman - Google reports 2,550 inbound links. Technorati has 18,665 blog reactions and an authority rating of 3,954

Steve Rubel - Google reports 6,990 inbound links. Technorati has 16,066 blog reactions and an authority rating of 3,418.

Signal vs. Noise - Google reports 4,280 inbound links and Technorati has 14,290 blog reactions Authority: 2,604

Dan Farber - Google reports 2,000 inbound links. Technorati has 12,231 blog reactions and an authority rating of 2,736.

Katie Fehrenbacher, Liz Gannes, Mike Gunderby, Anne Zelenka – Web Worker Daily - Google reports 2,650 inbound links. Technorati has 12,191 blog reactions and an authority rating of 2,790.

Robin Good - Google reports 2,030 inbound links. Technorati has 10,726 blog reactions and an authority rating of 2,144

Ilkeryoldas - Google reports 53 inbound links. Technorati has 9,678 blog reactions and an authority rating of 3,077.

Mary Jo Foley - All About Microsoft - Google reports 1,640 inbound links. Technorati has 9,635 blog reactions and an authority rating of 2,044.

John Battelle - Google reports 6,460 inbound links. Technorati has 8,921 blog reactions and an authority rating of 2,018

Top 100 Analyst Blogs from Technobabble

I recently came across this list through Jason English at iTKO of the Top 100 analyst blogs from Technobabble. The author comments many analyst companies are unsure whether to give away their IP in this format. But he writes, “nevertheless, some people and striving ahead in this field as their readership soars and the number of people linking to their blogs increases.” This list of the top 100 analyst blogs was determined by “PageRank, subscribers, recent inbound links, frequency and focus of posts as well as the number of comments.”

Charlene Li was one of the first analyst to start a blog and she is number 4 on the list which is topped by another Forrester analyst, Jeremiah Owyang. I praised Charlene at the time and think that any analyst that blogs is making a smart decision. I believe that you have to give a little to gain credibility. I did not do an exact count but I have about a dozen of them on my list of interesting blogs. I will not repeat it here as you can find them on Technobabble. It is a good list.

Tomorrow, I will provide my list of the top twenty web 2.0 blogs by Technorati ratings, blog reactions and Google inbound links. I collected this list a few months ago. None of the analyst blogs are in my top twenty web 2.0 bloggers (by the numbers). Jeremiah is the closest at number 22.

Alternatives to Tag Clouds?

Jeffrey Zeldman is a well known lecturer and author on web design according to his entry in the wikipedia. He has maintained a blog, Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report, on the topic since 1995. In April he ran a post, Tag clouds are the new mullets, semi-trashing tag clouds as being over done. So I wondered what his thoughts were on alternatives. I went to put in a comment to this post asking the question and noticed that he apparently does not take comments, at least on older posts. I did see that there are lots of comments on his most recent posts but the tag cloud one does not list comments or have a way to add them.

Anyway, I remain very interested in the concept of tag clouds. Typepad provides this option for category listing and I used it for a while. I then dropped the on my blog as I found the regular listing easier to read and it seemed redundant to have two categories archives, especially since I experiment with so much other stuff in my side bars. However, I many of my blog clients like tag clouds and I think it works for them. I may add mine back.

So I am interested in starting a conversation and will keep this comment field open to all legitimate comments. What do you think about tag clouds? Equally important, what do you see as alternatives to tag clouds?

J. M. W. Turner's Work Stops First at the Met in New York

I have always been a great admirer of Turner. I viewed many of this works in London at the old Tate. Now there are 150 works in oil and watercolor spanning more than half a century that are touring this country. The New York Times recently did a nice review, Storm-Tossed Visionary of Light. Roberta Smith wrote, “Hard to believe, but this show, which has been organized by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Dallas Museum of Art and the Met (July 1- September 21) in association with the Tate, is the first major retrospective in this country devoted to Joseph Mallord William Turner.” I hope to get to the DC stop. She goes on the write, “Turner’s best work lies somewhere in between tumultuous and placid.” Roberta concludes that, in her view, Turner leaves little room for the viewer in his ambitions. I found it easy to get caught up in his work, and found it full of energy, a blend of emotion that does not go completely abstract. Take a look if you can.

White Mountain NH Sunset in Five Parts

I was recently hiking in the White Mountains in New Hampshire and stayed at the Madison Springs hut run by the Appalachian Mountain Club on the ridge between Mt. Madison and Mt Adams. You can only get there by hiking up over a three thousand foot elevation gain on rocky trail. They serve wonderful meals and the staff carry all the food up on their backs all summer. The sunsets can be great as the hut faces the northwest. Here is a five part one that occurred on the first of my two nights. The sun kept setting behind clouds and then reappearing so there were multiple sunsets. If you click on the pictures they get much bigger so you can really see the differences.

Planview Offers Increased Transparency Through Enterprise Insight Analytics

Planview, a project portfolio management software supplier, has just rolled out a comprehensive new analytics product, Planview Enterprise
Insight Analytics. This cross-post from the App Gap overviews what they are doing with this product. It serves as an executive dashboard to track spending, progress, and general updates on IT-related projects. Last week, I spoke with Patrick Tickle their Executive Vice President of Products. After we discussed the wonders of Austin, Texas, where they are located and I started my childhood, Patrick first gave me a bit about the company. Planview has been working in the resource management space since 1989. Their original founder, Pat Durbin, is still the CEO. For the first 15 years they ran on cash earned. Four years ago they took some venture funding to accelerate their move to the next level. Their market faced a subsequent wave of acquisitions as many of the big players picked up this capability through the “buy” mode. Planview remained independent.

Patrick said they have now become the largest independent provider remaining in this space,. This allows them to be the independent alternative in a growing market and “sit amongst giants in the right Gartner quadrant.” He mentioned that Gartner reported 23% growth last year in their market space, 18% the year before and 14% the year before that. I am not surprised with this growth as the new tools are opening up the enterprise, allowing for greater transparency and accountability. Patrick thinks the market is still ripe for further growth and I agree.

Planview Enterprise
Insight Analytics is built through .Net on Microsoft SQL Server and SharePoint with OLAP reporting functionality. This allows executives to access data sets through a variety of interfaces including SharePoint, Outlook, and Excel. Integration with the Microsoft platform expands the access to portfolio management metrics as people can start from the places they normally work. It also allows clients to drop the Insight Analytics tool into other Sharepoint-based portals within their enterprise. In addition to providing familiar starting points, clients can drop data from Insight Analytics into such tools as Excel and Powerpoint, giving it greater exposure, especially to executives. With Insight Analytics you can find data on such issues as total cost of ownership, resource allocation, work management, vendor costs, and alignment of actual implementation to strategic goals. There is also role-based security. Here is a screen shot of Insight Analytics seen through Outlook.

Here is a screen shot of Insight Analytics embed in a Powerpoint presentation.

Planview’s decision to build Insight Analytics tightly integrated with the Sharepoint platform came though three stages. First, they put their help system in Sharepoint for Planview Enterprise, their flagship project portfolio management system. This created a dynamic help system that allowed them to infuse it with the existing portfolio management expertise they can developed over 19 years, currently offered through Planview PRISMS®, another of their products. It also allowed Planview to integrate their extensive library of computer-based training modules that already existed. Next, they integrated Sharepoint as their content management and collaboration system for their project portfolio management system. Based on the success of these first two moves, the final step was the creation of their new Insight Analytics in .NET, tightly integrated with Sharepoint. Here is a screen shot of Insight Analytics accessed through a Sharepoint portal.

Patrick said are three main areas within companies where Insight Analytics is being used. First, there are the large IT organizations, their traditional base. Product development groups are an emerging market for them. Product development groups across industries face many of the same issues, such as getting things out on time, on budget, and with the best feature set. As a result, Planview has found take up in a variety of industries from complex IT firms to a company that makes baseball cards and has to make sure the right cards are available for opening day. The third area of growth is corporate strategy. The enterprise needs to monitor progress and alignment of initiatives with strategy and Insight Analytics can offer the needed data. Planview reports that the tool is not primarily being used to curb spending but rather to allocate spending towards projects that will deliver the greatest value. Providing greater transparency within the enterprise to the right people is a growing trend in enterprise 2.0. I see Enterprise
Insight Analytics as an excellent and timely move by Planview to enhance their product offerings. They also provide the Enterprise Navigator blog to offer insights on project management.

Succeeding at Open Source Through Engagement and Participation at Mozilla

Here is a rare cross post from Fast Forward but I liked this story, and I like Firefox, and wanted to share it here. McKinsey published an interview with Mozilla's Mitchell Baker, titled Succeeding at open-source innovation. Like many people, I use Firefox (I also use Apple’s Safari) so I was especially interested. The noted that Mozilla, “relies extensively on people outside her company—not just for creative ideas, but also to develop products and make decisions. The result: Mozilla’s Firefox browser, with 150 million users, has become a rival of Microsoft’s market-leading Internet Explorer. As Firefox flourished, the process that created it became a model for participatory, open-source collaboration.” So what are the lessons?

Michell said, “our mission is about keeping the Internet safe and open, but also about building participation. We do that by setting up frameworks where people can get involved in a very decentralized fashion. These frameworks embody our values and our goals and get embedded in other people’s minds. We attract people who care about those things, and they go off and participate in the mission in a very decentralized way.”

She said that for some things at the core of their technology they must have extreme discipline. But she added, “there are lots of areas for participation—whether it’s building an extension or localizing the product or building new products—that don’t need that degree of discipline. And a key point is for people to “own” what they are doing, not in a financial or legal sense but in an emotionally committed sense that gives them a chance to decide.” To be successful they reply on a growing set of employees and volunteers from their large community.

Their volunteers are motivated by a desire to keep the Internet open to cut down on abuses like spyware, pop ads, etc. Mitchell said that this participation has made a difference in the volunteers’ lives. She added, “I don’t know if you could build this degree of motivation for something that really didn’t change people’s lives, something that they weren’t emotionally committed to. But the number of people who feel that Firefox is partly theirs is very high.”

Mitchell added some important points on motivation within an organization. She said, sometimes, just giving people permission does wonders. In addition they created scaffolding for people to work from, so that even if they were not innovating themselves, other people could. All this makes a lot of sense to me and is very inspirational. There is much more in the article. The Firefox story sounds in many ways what I learned from the Obama campaign and its use of the web, staff, and volunteers, (see especially, How Barack Obama is Using Web and Enterprise 2.0 in the US Primary Campaign Through Central Desktop, Rolling Stone Magazine and More on Obama’s Use of the New Web)

Executive Suite – Another New York Times Blog

In this case, Joe Nocera talks business on the Executive Suite. Joe is the Talking Business columnist for The Times. He “loves exposing the hurly-burly of clashing executive egos, the deal-making bravura, and the occasional (or not so occasional) stumbles that powerful executives make. But he also loves pointing out those (more than occasional) times when they get it right.”

Here is Joe’s post on Birth of a Blogger. He explains why he started this blog. He says, I’ve got as many random thoughts about business as the next guy. And I can write just as fast (most of the time, anyway). Although The Times has more than 100 blogs by now, what harm could one more do?” He says he resisted starting a blog for some time but came around for several reasons. First, his weekly column only appears once a week, and there are good stories everyday. Sounds like one of Andrew McAfee’s reasons for his blog.

Joe also said he gets hundreds of emails after his column appears and it not possible to carry on individual dialogs with each reader. So the blog should consolidate these conversations and make them accessible to others to join in. His solution is that “every week, I plan to post a short preview of my column on Friday, with a link to it once it is posted on nytimes.com, after which I hope you’ll weigh in with your own response.”

I remember when editors on the NYT hated blogs. Now then have come over to dark or light side depending on your view.

Larry Chait’s Twenty Cool Web Sites

I greatly enjoyed the recent KM Forum on Categorization and Tagging - Where’s the Beef? On June 25. I led a session on Social Bookmarking within Enterprise 2.0. It has taken me a while to get to my notes.

Instead of the usual wrap-up, Larry Chait gave us 20 interesting web sites to consider. You can find his list at the link above. He includes all l the links. I had fun playing with Google Street View. Scoople is for all those who are not yet familiar with all the possibilities of Google and all the required syntaxes. Larry showed us how to do investigations as well as generate fake names to avoid those investigations. Answers.com told me the real first name of Doc Rivers, our Celtics. The site also provided an ad for his speaking booking services. There is much more like where is the cheapest gas in Boston. Take a look.

E20portal.com – Everything Enterprise 2.0

I met Nick Barker at the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. He said he is starting the E20portal.com as a resource for enterprise 2.0. It features, events, resources, a directory, feedback, and their own blog. The about section says, “At E20portal.com we have brought together Enterprise 2.0 news, articles, case studies, events and other useful resources into a single, easily accessible place. Our goal is to provide business decision makers and strategists with the information they need to understand this emergent approach, and how you can use Enterprise 2.0 to bring real value to your organisation.” They invite contributions.

Under resources, they have started a series on featured blogs by writers in this space and they asked me to serve as the first of these bloggers. I picked my five favorite blog posts on the topic. The other featured blogger so far is Andrew McAfee. The resources section also includes case studies and industry reports. The directory section includes software resources and consultants. They have made a good start in each of these sections. But there are lots more to add. Kudos to Nick and his partners for starting this resource. We should support these efforts.

Antonio López García at the MFA

To complement the Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, El Greco to Velázquez - Art during the Reign of Philip III there is an amazing exhibit of the contemporary Spanish painter, Antonio López García, who is a realist with soul. The MFA site give you a tour of the exhibit. He does landscapes on Madrid, not showing the historic old part but the more modern suburbs. There are also details of his studio. I was most amazed by his pencil drawings that captured such detail with only a pencil. Some of the pencil drawings were quite large. This was an unexpected treat to go along with the main exhibit.

El Greco to Velázquez - Art during the Reign of Philip III

I recently went to the great exhibit at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, El Greco to Velázquez - Art during the Reign of Philip III. As their site says the show, “examines a fascinating period (1598–1621) bracketed by the two giants of Spanish painting, El Greco and Velázquez. Discover the masterpieces of Philip III’s court and the artists who flourished during his reign. To separate themselves from Philip II’s approach to governing, Philip III and his court "issued in a new style of grandeur."

I have seen a lot of this grandeur in Spain, as well as a wonderful exhibit of Spanish Still life’s, I saw at the National Gallery of London in 95. I brought the catalog and these Spanish still life paintings have influenced my own painting. It was nice to see them more closer to home. I had to get this MFA catalog, as well. I liked the still life paintings the best and may try to do a few of them. This was new form for these Spanish artists and they used a lot of black backgrounds and very modern compositions for their day. The MFA site gives you a slide show.

Serena Upgrades Mashup Composer and Brings in Application Release Manager

I have written about Serena on a number of occasions on this blog, the most recent was “Serena Moves into SaaS, Project Management, and Agile Application Development.” Recently, I spoke with Nathan Rawlin, their Senior Director of Product Marketing, and Kyle Arteaga, VP, Corporate Communications to catch up their latest moves. Serena continues to upgrade its mashup offerings and has added two major enhancements since my last conversation so I am cross-posting on this from the App Gap.

First, we looked at the Serena Mashup Composer, a visual design tool to build and test mashups without coding, now allows you to incorporate widgets, which have primarily been used in the consumer world. Now users simply drag and drop widgets, RSS feeds, Flash components and more into their business mashups. This means that people can now pull in information from any widget on the Internet – details from a Facebook profile, a photo from Google Images or the local weather forecast from Yahoo! Weather -- into a mashup. This traditionally consumer information can enhance enterprise applications.

Nathan gave me an example. Suppose a sales rep is preparing for a big meeting with a new customer. The rep might start with the customer's record in salesforce.com, and have the mashup fetch related information like a photo and details from the customer's LinkedIn or Facebook profile, external news feeds showing the company's latest stock price, credit report information from a Dun & Bradstreet Web service, and widgets showing local weather and traffic in the customer's location. Soon, the rep has all the information needed for the meeting. This mashup can be reused as a template for other meetings, saving the time and effort of rebuilding the mashup, visiting multiple data sources again and again for the same information.

This makes a lot of sense to me. The Mashup Composer remains, free. The charges start after you have built and tested the mashup and need to have it hosted.

Serena has also launched a new Business Mashup designed specifically for the application release process. It provides an automated way for application developers, IT operations, and business users to communicate and collaborate with each other during the release process. Serena’s Application Release Manager combines Web 2.0-based workflow capabilities with ChangeMan® ZMF, a Software Change and Configuration Management (SCCM) application for the mainframe, to manage the application release process, from initial change requests through final deployment into the production environment. Nathan said this is the first browser-based app to mainframe mashup he knows about. This is a positive development, as the mainframe is certainly not going away but the people who can work with it are declining. Enterprise 2.0 will need to get along with it.

There are many large companies that still generate an extensive number of mainframe applications. One of their clients created 484,000 new mainframe apps in the past year. The number of IT people who can sit and stare at mainframe green screens is getting smaller. Now users can monitor and communicate through a browser-based system that is more familiar to the current generation of IT people. As with any Serena Business Mashup, the Application Release Manager includes a visual process designer with out-of-the-box process templates that can be customized to suit individual needs. As a result, all of the project stakeholders can coordinate their activities, including application developers, IT operations teams, and even business users who traditionally had no visibility into mainframe applications. The templates include the following: Issue Tracking, Request to Test, Agile Backlog, Change requests, Hardware and Software Changes, and Demand Management.

These two developments represent nice bridges in opposite directions, to the consumer web world and to the mainframe world. In each case, Serena is going to these worlds for the right business reasons. I look forward to hearing about further developments such as their announced future moves into Agile application development.

One of the Serena announcements mentioned that Forrester projects the enterprise mashup market will reach nearly $700 million by 2013 (see Forrester’s May 2008 report called "The Mashup Opportunity”). If anything, I think this underestimates the total volume as mashups are becoming a major application development mode that underlies much of SOA application development. Perhaps, they are only thinking of the market for specific mashup tools, as the divide in enterprise tools is getting grayer. At any rate, mashups are a big deal.

Here is some additional commentary on the Serena move by Dana Gardner, including a response to my App Gap version.

More on Andrew McAfee's Travels

I wrote about Andrew McAfee at the Fast Forward Summit a while back. Now I am catching up on email. Where is Luis Saurez when I need him. Here are some additional useful Notes from an Andrew McAfee Speech at a Mark Logic user conference by Dave Kellogg, CEO of Mark Logic. Andrew has been getting around.

Here is a bit I like as Dave writes, "First time he visited Wikipedia, the term he typed was skinhead, hoping to see the failure of Wikipedia as (what he asserts as) the two completely different types of skinheads battled it out in flame war. What he saw instead was a fantastic article on the topic. And he thought: there's something different here. Maybe the 2.0 stuff isn't oversell or hype." Dave recounts some other challenges that Andrew gave to web 2.0 tools and they passed each one.

Dave adds later, that "Metadata is becoming emergent. If we think we know in advance what the right metadata is, we're probably kidding ourselves...Users / knowledge workers will vote with their feet. Only way to get them not to use Google would be to block it at the firewall." It is important to foster this emergence within enterprise 2.0 without letting it become chaos. I used Andrew's contrast of impose and emerge to cover taxonomy vs. social bookmarking at a recent KM Forum.

Looking Closely at Lotus Connections

Since I have been writing about IBM’s social software efforts for a while and most recently about Lotus Connections in small bits, (e.g., Activity-based Computing Moves Forward at Lotus Connections) I wanted to cross post his from the App Gap. I was pleased to recently have the chance to have an extended conversation with Suzanne Minassian, Lotus Connections Product Manager. As Suzanne writes in Synch.rono.us, Connections was developed from applications that have been in use inside IBM for years (see The story of Lotus Connections). Connections has six major components: Profiles, Communities, Blogs, Dogear (social bookmarking), Activities, and an aggregation component called the Home Page.

We started our tour with Profiles. Suzanne said that it began in the CIO office in 1988 and eventually became the IBM Blue Pages. Each employee has a page with information about their job, location, background, picture, organization, and more. It provides a place to run searches for people based on those attributes, helping IBMers identify those who might be interested in their work, people who could help with their projects, and teams working on similar projects from across IBM. There are over 360,000 IBMers and over 150,000 more related people on Blue Pages, including consultants and partners, so we know this can scale. A version is now offered to the market through Profiles. Here is a Profile page with widgets, including social tags, reporting structure, colleagues, links. View contact information, background information and aggregated contributions. Download vcard and pronunciation.

The Communities function was also initially developed by the IBM CIO office for internal use. It origins came from Community Maps which provided a way to manage communities, email, and Sametime (aka IM). Elements were added such as discussion forums, ways to share blogs within the community, integration with Sametime as a broadcast channel, and integration with wikis. IBM partners with Socialtext and Alassian for traditional wiki functionality. They will also soon offer wiki capabilities within Connections through Quickr (the new version of QuickPlace). The Quickr wikis tend to be primarily used for team workspaces, which is not surprising.

The blog functionality in Connections came from Blog Central, also developed by the CIO Office from an open source tool called Roller. Blogging was introduced as a way to encourage knowledge sharing within the organization. Many IBMers had external blogs, but an internal blog service gave employees the ability to discuss projects and work at a level of detail that otherwise wouldn’t be suitable externally. I wrote about these early days of Blog Central in a 2004 Portals Magazine article. “IBM set up Blog Central without any restrictions or predetermined uses as a pilot to see what creative uses evolve. Dan Gruen observes that this “hands off” approach has paid off and enabled “bottom up” innovation by individual IBMers. Serendipity, itself, is one of the emerging benefits. Recent blog posts of everyone are displayed at the IBM Blog Central site so participants can see what the others are doing, discovering new ideas, as well as people who have compatible interests. Many new initiatives and relationships are generated this way. This serendipity extends to regular meetings as each participant can look at the other’s blogs to find previously unknown common interests or new ideas to discuss, getting to know more about the others in less time, making meetings more effective. “

Suzanne says that Blog Central is still going strong, serving many different specialty areas within IBM. Sales, engineers, researchers, product evangelists, and experts use their blogs to share information and promote discussions across boundaries. They have updated the interface. There are also many ways to find blog content. Search results within Connections bring back related tags, forums, blogs, wikis and profiles, along with traditional search results. Blogs can also be rated and you can see featured blogs. Here is th blogs tool with ratings and comments.

Social Bookmarking within Connections is provided by the well-known Dogear application created by IBM Research in Cambridge. It was one of the first enterprise social bookmarking tools. In 2004 some IBMers were using del.icio.us but it had its limits. There were also security concerns with having bookmarks on a publically available site, and while you could bookmark internal pages, metadata on that bookmark could share confidential information. Once inside the firewall, the developers added authentication and other features. While they provide the opportunity to make bookmark private, about 4% are marked this way. You can view most popular bookmarks and tags and filter tags to view related ones. You can create watch lists to see what people are doing in Dogear, as well as to follow your favorite tags. You can see who has watch listed you. Within the enterprise you can use tags to find people with similar interests and build your reputation. Internal thought leaders develop a following through watch lists without having to write a blog. You can also provide notifications of tags and write a comment, saving the trouble of writing an email. You can also filter your tags by asking to see only combinations of tags. Now there are over 418,000 public bookmarks within IBM on Dogear.

Activities is another tool developed by IBM Research. It is designed to simplify the work process by connecting the many different communication channels and social software functions related to a single project. It takes the information out of the silos of individual tool and makes information activity centric. You can information directly into Activities or drag and drop information from other tools and add comments. It also has calendaring and contact information. Here is an Activity list with prioritized activities.

Connections allows for extensions through plug-ins that allow you to embed Connections into other tools. This is a good idea and Suzanne said it has increased adoption. You access Connections through Microsoft Office tools, as well as Lotus Symphony. IBM Research and the CIO office are working on new features and capabilities. People have seen the popularity of twitter so now there is an experimental BlueTwit for inside IBM. The Beehive tools are exploring how to use Facebook features like fun walls, photo posting, and high 5’s inside the enterprise. With the opportunity for use and testing within the large IBM population, potential products can be evaluated on usage data across a range of audiences, not just the IT people.

I asked Suzanne about how people can deploy Connections as they are misunderstanding in the market on this issue. You do not need to purchase or have IBM Websphere Portal Server or other IBM products. Connections is offered as a standalone suite of tools. You are provided Websphere application server and access to DB2 at no extra charge. You can also use other databases such as SQL and Oracle. IBM also provides standalone versions of Profiles and Activities. Connections is an on-premise software offering. However, some IBM partners will host it for you, and IBM itself is now offering BlueHouse, a hosting service for small firms, which includes some elements of Connections.

Lotus has been developing community-based software long before Web 2.0. Now with IBM Research and an active CIO office testing new ideas on a portion of the over 500,000 IBMers and external people in the IBM environment, it gives them an opportunity to really test and improve social software in a large enterprise context. I am going to be having several more conversations with Suzanne this summer on this application development process and some of the other tools that have emerged.

KM Forum Notes: Analysts Examine Tagging and Categorizing

I greatly enjoyed the recent KM Forum on Categorization and Tagging - Where’s the Beef? On June 25. I led a session on Social Bookmarking within Enterprise 2.0. It has taken me a while to get to my notes. Here are notes from one of the others sessions. More will follow.

Analysts Ponder Tagging and Categorizing - Geoff Bock, Lead Analyst for Collaboration & Social Computing & Lynda Moulton, Lead Analyst for Enterprise Search, The Gilbane Group. Lynda asked the questions and Goeff responded.

Q. You have been following collaboration technology tools; which ones have good business use that support tagging and/or categorization?

A. Having been around a while we are circling back - some things are getting closer to days of client server and Lotus Notes – intersection of blogs and wikis is a potential area. We are seeing a shift from local practitioners versus parts of large organizations – law firms & healthcare – power by collaboration technology

The wiki model is very interesting. We are seeing interesting applications that are unique to wikis – instead of threaded discussions than wander around – wikis provide a single source of truth but you can drill back in time to see how conversation evolved – then some wikis support threaded discussion about the wiki content

There is the issue of digital publishing – things are frozen in time – prehistory is cut off – in pre-word processing we could see older versions in some cases.

We need systems that allow us to focus our attention. Intel did an experiment recently where engineers turned off email for three hours to see if there is a productivity increase.

Tags are artifacts to get somewhere else – the issue is how to organize flow of information

Q, There is a big uptake in collaboration technologies – are any of these are enhanced by the use of tagging?

A – There is ongoing discussion between explicit vs implicit tagging, as well as explicit vs tacit knowledge - past tools depended on context – we now have more powerful tools – I come down in the middle on the tagging vs taxonomy issue– I like a combination of bottom up and top down – people who advocate folksonomy do not realize chaos that can result – at the same time – top down can be frozen - we have to pay attention on how tags are stored – in publishing there are two levels of tagging – library of congress that allows book to be found – then TOC that goes with the book

Let’s take a digression – are we creating an expectation that people do not need structure to find information with all this tagging (Geoff told a story about student not knowing what and index is).

Q – Are any of the tools that allow people to create structures for creating explicit metadata?

A – I spent time looking at E content management & collaboration tools – the grandfather of ECM is shared file drive – it can end up as a mess - the folder metaphor can result in a muddle going forward – There are two design themes to consider.

1. Organization of information is good but best if we do not have to explicitly organize it - old check in and check out process does not work because you have to fill out forms to do anything

2. Now analog world trained us to have to have a standard way to organize – in a digital world we are not limited to this – real interesting systems allow for multiple ways to look at data

Can We Survive Without Twitter?

I am getting increasing pressure to go on Twitter from multiple fronts but am resisting so far. I recently got this message from the Berkman Thursday Blog group I used to attend regularly.

“Tonight, let’s talk about surviving Twitter outages - from competitors like Pownce or FriendFeed or Plurk to Summize, tweetscan, clients and any other tricks we’ve got up our collective sleeves. What do you do when a service you rely on isn’t particularly reliable? Tonight, let’s talk about surviving Twitter outages - from competitors like Pownce or FriendFeed or Plurk to Summize, tweetscan, clients and any other tricks we’ve got up our collective sleeves. What do you do when a service you rely on isn’t particularly reliable?”

Now I have to admit I would feel lost without my blog and that was not a consideration when I first started going to the Berkman meetings in the Spring of 2004. I do manage to keep the blog going on vacations (when I do not remain online) with advance postings. I am actually in Quebec if you read this on the day it appears. Can Twitter people take a vacation? Can you survive without Twitter? Is it an addiction I should be concerned about?

Here is an old but classic post on The Asymptotic Twitter Curve. It speaks for itself with a great chart. Kathy Sierra writes, "email, IMs, social networking, and blogs are nothing compared to the thing that may finally cause time as we know it to cease. I'm talking, of course, about Twitter." and then goes on to say, "Twitter, it seems, is the solution to the one problem we all have: it's just too damn hard to keep updating our blog every few minutes to tell the world what we're doing at that very moment." BTW - Today I am preparing to climb some mountains in New Hampshire where I will be completely disconnected.

Symmetry in the Gardens of Paris

The New York Times recently ran an article on the Hidden Gardens of Paris. I spent several days going to some of them in the fall of 2006. Here are a few photos of the symmetrical nature of Paris gardens. The article provides a useful listing of gardens. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did.

The Summer of 1970 Part Two - Meat Cove, Cape Breton Nova Scotia

Last weekend I wrote about The Summer of 1970 - Our Farm House in Cape Breton Nova Scotia. We would travel around Cape Breton a bit. It is one of the more beautiful parts of the world. By the very top of the Cape Breton is a small space above the Cape Breton Highlands National Park. You go over a ridge and it was like stepping back in time. At the end of the a winding dirt road along the shore is a small place called Meat Cove. The road went up and down and there were wrecked cars lying at the bottom of many bends. At the very end was a beautiful field. We camped there a few times. In the 90s when I took m daughters back to see the farm we drove up to Meat Cove. Someone had set up a commercial camp ground in the field which was fine for us. You could hike to beaches where no one else was around. I found this description of the place in Google Maps that linked to the wikip[edai entry. here is tis.

"Meat Cove is a rural fishing community at the northern tip of Inverness County on Nova Scotia's Cape Breton Island. Fisherman fish for lobster in the months of May & July. After the lobster season they fish for crab. Meat Cove is accessed on an unpaved road off the Cabot Trail. The approach is from the highlands down a steep road to the sparsely settled village in the cove. The permanent population is less than 100.
Meat Cove is the most northerly settlement in Nova Scotia and is located in the Sydney—Victoria federal electoral district. Since Meat Cove is literally at the end of the road, it is often used by wilderness campers as a starting point for the relatively short hike to Grassy Point, or the more arduous three or four day trek to Polletts Cove, for which there is no marked trail for the majority of the journey.

Communications
The Postal Code is B0C 1E0
The Telephone exchange is 902-383

The name Meat Cove probably comes from fishing fleets using the natural protected cove to come ashore and hunt moose to replenish their supplies. MacLellans and Frasers have lived in Meat Cove for generations. During the last forty years a number of US and central Canadian residents have lived in the village for various lengths of time. The name Meat Cove, came from the smell of cooking meat that sailors could catch down wind as they approached the cove from many miles away. The cove was a place to lay away and hunt and get fresh water before sailing on. Trivia - In a 2003 storyline, the main characters in Get Fuzzy went to Meat Cove as part of a vacation to Nova Scotia. Satchel, the kind-hearted but dim-witted dog, pronounced it 'nice' but not as meaty as he had imagined."

I also found this picture of the field where we camped. I have a picture on my desk of the three of us looking back down on the field from the far ridge in the picture.

Luis Suarez Frees Himself From E-Mail’s Grip and Much More

I finally met my long time virtual friend, Luis Suarez at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston in June. He talked about getting rid of email. A few days ago I found out that he had an article on his adventures in the New York Times, I Freed Myself From E-Mail’s Grip. Here is more about it on his blog, Giving up on Work e-mail - Status Report on Weeks 15 to 20. Kudos to Luis.

Luis wrote in the article, “Instead of responding individually to messages that arrived in my in-box, I started to use more social networking tools, like instant messaging, blogs and wikis, among many others.” He added however, “I never gave up my work e-mail address, because I still need it for some work-related activities — for example, for one-on-one discussions that are too private and confidential to discuss publicly.” Luis uses a lot of the IBM Connections tools that I recently covered in the App Gap (see Comprehensive Tour of Lotus Connections).

I have not been able to cut into email as much as Luis but I am offloading a lot of email around a small startup I am involved with by using GroupSwim, an online collaboration tool. It has taken out a lot of inefficient email threads as we discuss issues around our launch. A few years ago Luis moved to the Canary Islands to be in a warm sunny place and IBM went along with it. Here is a picture of him in the Canaries the NYT ran with the story. Also, here is Luis and myself at the Enterprise 2.0 conference.

My App Gap Posts for June 2008

Here are my App Gap posts for June. In addition to the Fast Forward blog (see side bar for links), I am writing in another Corante blog, the App Gap, sponsored by QuickBase, The posts began toward the end of January 2008. In this case, I am primarily doing product commentaries with a few other things thrown in. Below are the ones for June. There will be more in July.

Expert System Puts More Meaning into Semantic Search

Building and Integrating Business Forms the Easy Way with Frevvo

Traction Software Announces Team Page 4.0 with Multiple Upgrades

illumio Transforms Its Interface to Better Match Functionality

My Enterprise 2.0 2008 Conference Notes

The Secure Enterprise 2.0 Forum

Brightidea.com – Brings Focused Enterprise 2.0 Capabilities to Innovation

RightNow Brings New Survey and Online Chat Capabilities

ReadWriteWeb’s Advice on How to Comment About Your Company on a Blog

A Mosaic Created from 1001 Web 2.0 Company Logos

EveryScape Brings Enhanced Web Presence for Businesses of All Sizes

Awareness Summer 08 Release Brings Sharepoint Integration and New Features

Enhanced Web Presence for the Uniqueness in Small to Large Businesses - EveryScape

When I wrote a book on business uses of blogs a number of years ago, several local regions were starting to use the Web, through blogs, to focus on their unique local businesses and fight the spreading homogeneity of national chains. The new Web, with increasingly rich bandwidth and increased user participation, is even better equipped to support the long tail of business. EveryScape is taking this concept way beyond these early blogs to allow us greater access to what is unique. I like what they are doing so I wanted to cross post this from the App Gap.

EveryScape is creating “The Real World Online” through a visual and interactive platform for local search that is creating a virtual experience of all metropolitan, suburban and rural areas. I recently talked with Jim Schoonmaker, EveryScape's CEO who explained their business model, as well as what they offer now and their future plans. I immediately liked their site, as the top example was a virtual tour of the Boston Celtics victory parade route.

However, since we are writing about enterprise applications here, I first wanted to understand how EveryScape supports businesses. Jim explained that the way local businesses got exposed to potential customers used to be simple; you took out an ad in the Yellow Pages and did local newspaper ads. Now it has become difficult with a more complex search engine bidding process for ad space that can be beyond the interests and/or understanding of many local businesses. Users get text and maps but it is hard to get a real feel for the unique nature of local businesses.

EveryScape is designed to give local business a better way to reach customers and have a richer web presence. EveryScape will create a visual record of a neighborhood and then ask the local businesses if they want to be included in this visual record. Do they want people to be able to go inside their business? Like the traditional Yellow Pages, EveryScape is free to users and charges companies to offer a visual display of what goes on inside their restaurant, store, etc. They pay a yearly subscription fee to open themselves up to virtual foot traffic.

At first, Jim thought they would get mainly high-end retail, hotels, and restaurants. He was pleased to find a more diverse set of customers with hair salons, dentist offices, hardware stores, book shops, and many other typical small businesses. The opportunity to bring people inside their store and see their unique offerings appeals to many business owners. Everyone knows what the chains look like, now the world can see what these individual business look like. I like this support for, and focus on, the unique qualities of individual small businesses. Local institutions are also included. Here is the interior of the Harvard Museum of Natural History, a place I used to take my kids when they were young.

This service makes long tail advertizing simpler and allows small businesses to have the same or better web presence than large firms through this collective site. It helps to level the playing field. Everyscape works on the SEO for them and is also developing partnerships with sites like Boston.com that already have good traffic. They are moving into online conversion starting with hotels with a “book now” button added to their hotel descriptions. There has also been interest by some chains, especially ones that have a unique set of resorts or other locations. EveryScape has covered one million points of interest, 15,000 miles and 21 states in their first year. Now they have started an Ambassador program, designed to speed expansion worldwide through a team of trained Ambassadors, who are photographers and entrepreneurs. They can earn money by photographing the public spaces of specific destinations, as well as interiors of local businesses. “Destination Ambassadors” own a particular region, meaning he/she is responsible for capturing the photography of the region’s public spaces (streets, landmarks, etc.), with the additional opportunity to sell interiors to local businesses. “Local Business Ambassadors” are essentially assignment photographers for EveryScape.

They also support user-generated content with World Tags. Through this feature, EveryScape lets businesses upload photos, videos, links and more. For example, a restaurant could upload a video interview with its chef, or a women's boutique might want to upload photos of its latest line.

EveryScape is also working on social networking features. Their new "Scape Memo" lets people share favorite locations with friends. You can create a private link on EveryScape.com with up to 200 "memos" that identify your favorite locations to share with friends. For example, you could create a link pinpointing your 30 favorite restaurants nationwide, or you could send your friend a link with a memo identifying a new dinner location. Scape Memos are private and are shared via email. In addition, users can embed any memo within their favorite social network such as Facebook or LinkedIn. Take a tour of the world, or your own neighborhood, and see what is unique.

See Wire and Media post, EveryScape Takes You Where Google Can’t, for more media mentions. Here is a screen shot of the actual Cheers Bar in Boston through EveryScape.

My Fast Forward Posts for June 2008

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. Here is a link to my summary of the posts prior to the Fast Forward Conference (November to February 9) and here are the posts for the rest of February for March April May and June July. August, September and October, November, December 07, January 08, February, March, April and May.

Below are the posts for June in chronological order. The blog continues and there will be more in July.

More on the Twitter Market from Dion Hitchcliffe

The Cloud According to Google at Enterprise 2.0

Enterprise 2.0 Conference Notes – Pete Fields of Wachovia on What Impresses Senior Executives on Enterprise 2.0 and what Doesn’t Make Much Impact.

Enterprise 2.0 Conference Notes: Simon Revell on the Origins of Enterprise 2.0 at Pfizer

Enterprise 2.0 Conference Notes: Reality Check with Andrew McAfee

Enterprise 2.0 Conference Notes: Three Approaches to Social Computing Platforms

Fast Forward Summit Notes – Andrew McAfee

Fast Forward Summit Notes: Jeff Fried on Business Transformation Powered by Search

Web 2.0 is Bringing Back Intimacy to Customer Service – Heather Johnson

The following post was written by Heather Johnson who asked to be a guest writer on this blog. I gave her a topic and appreciate her efforts. You can find more about Heather at the end of this post.

If there’s one thing that occupies a higher rung than product quality, it’s customer service. Organizations are scrambling to even retain existing customers, let alone gain new ones, amidst a fierce battle for a better share of revenue in an extremely crowded marketplace. And with today’s instant grapevine – Web 2.0 – there’s all the more reason for businesses to take their customer service operations seriously or end up having to close shop in the near future.

Web 2.0, filled with social networking sites, blogs, and instant update applications like Twitter, has given birth to what is now being touted as the innovative next generation marketing tool – interactive marketing, a process where the message in the advertisement is communicated directly to a potential customer. Besides this, this new avatar of the Internet has spawned a revolution in the way customers and their grouses are handled by company staff.

From unanswered phones and emails to unsatisfactory and automated responses, the regular customer has seen it all – the nonchalant attitude of the customer service employee has irked almost all of us at some time or the other. Well, thanks to Web 2.0, this situation has already begun to change. Enterprises are beginning to wake up to the fact that word-of-mouth notoriety spreads like bushfire, more so when it’s done using a medium as powerful as the Internet. One negative review on a blog, one bad experience posted on a forum or one angry customer venting his rage in an email – that’s all it takes to build a domino effect of negative reviews pouring in from all corners of the globe.

Cable provider Comcast recently learned the hard way that they could use this publicity to their benefit; by responding almost immediately to a post on a continuous outage, the company earned itself a few brownie points in the customer service department. And to make sure they have their fingers on the pulse of things, they’ve set up the Comcast Cares program to monitor Twitter, blogs and other social networking sites and take care of customer complaints posted on them.

Others are setting up their own forums for customers to air their grievances and seek remedies. Most organizations are also offering customers a common platform to ask questions and have their doubts cleared by either company employees or other customers who subscribe to the same product or service. A greater number of companies are taking suggestions from customers seriously and basing new products or services on what the customer wants, rather than pushing on to the customer what the company wants to sell. A significant change indeed in the attitude towards dealing with customers from just the recent past to the days that followed Web 2.0!

This article is contributed by Heather Johnson, who regularly writes on best travel rewards credit cards. She invites your questions and writing job opportunities at her personal email address: heatherjohnson2323 at gmail dot com.

The Summer of 1970 - Our Farm House in Cape Breton Nova Scotia

Recently, I was talking with a friend who was going to Nova Scotia for the first time. So I told her about the farm house and land I used to own with many others in Cape Breton near Loch Lomond and showed her how to get there on Google Maps. In 1970 was living in the Lower East Side on New York between Avenues C and D. One of my roommates had worked as a cook on a boat that went through Cape Breton the summer before. He said you could buy farms cheap there. He told great stories about the natural beauty which as a stark contrast to our surroundings. So we put at ad in the local Cape Breton paper that we wanted to buy a farm and gave our New York address. We got a lot of replies. This was in early Spring. So we got two other friends who had a car and drove up in April. There was still some snow on the ground as we followed up on the letters and saw some wonderful farms and had great conversations. This was one of the better trips I have taken to get to know a place.

We settled on a 200 acre piece of land with a farm house up several dirt roads away from the main paved highway. The barn was gone. The owner cut lumber and wanted to move out to the pavement so the school bus could get his kids better. I think he was the last family with young children on the dirt road. The land had a forty acre field in front of the house, that a neighbor hayed, a stream and wooded hills behind it. Nearby were some nice lakes for swimming which was good in the summer as there was no indoor shower or tub. In winter visits we heated water in a pot and washed off in front of the wood stove.

Even though the farm house and land was a only few thousand we did not have that kind of money then. So we put together a group of friends and sold 30 shares in the farm at a few hundred each so we could buy the place. These members were mostly grad students in the Boston area where I had just came from and soon went back to. I was only in New York for a year. That summer I quit my job in New York and spend most of the time in Nova Scotia until it was time to return to school in Boston. I went up with friends several times during the coming year, including the middle of winter. We would leave at 8 at night, drive all night, and get there at 10 the next morning. I spent a good bit of the summer of 1971 there also before hitching hiking to San Francisco to meet a friend. There were a lot of good times and too many stories to tell now. I eventually sold my share as it became harder to get there and there was a small annual fee to pay taxes and for upkeep on the place. We did not set it up to make money so you could only sell your share back for what you paid for it.

I took my daughters back in the mid-90s. Several of the original share holders still owned it. No one was there when we arrived. We camped out in the field by the house that was filled with blue berries. The house was locked so we could only look in the windows. The next morning a local farmer came up to check us out. I remembered him from the 70s and could validate my relationship to the place. He had a set of keys and let us in. I found a picture of a some cut flowers in a bell jar that I taken in 1970 hanging on the wall. I wrote the story behind the picture on the back and re-hung it. Much of the interior was the same except someone had installed a shower. The pictures below are from that trip in the mid-90s but it looked just like it did in the 70s. It was a nice time and space to occupy

Cambridge Art Association Summer Art Fair 2008

The Cambridge Art Association will host its annual summer art fair at University Place, 124 Mount Auburn Street, Cambridge, MA from July 3 to September 3. It is in the lobby at the University Place office building so it is open during all lobby hours, Monday through Friday 9am to 6pm and Saturday 9am to 1pm. There is parking underneath the building. All works are priced at $300 or under. The phone for the Cambridge Art Association is 617.876.0246. I have four paintings in the show as seen below. Stop by.

Future of Media Summit 2008 – Silicon Valley & Sydney

The third annual Future of Media Summit 2008 will link events on both sides of the Pacific to create insights into the future of media. Speakers include thought leaders such as Mark Scott, Managing Director of ABC, Loic Le Meur, CEO of leading firm Seesmic, Mark Dorney, CEO of Macquarie Media Group, Chris Saad, Chair of DataPortability.org, Ross Dawson, Chairman, Future Exploration Network, and many other US and Australian media leaders. It will be held Monday July 14 - 1 - 9 PM San Francisco time at the Computer History Museum, 1401 N Shoreline Blvd, Mountain View CA. I would likely go it I was in the area but I will be celebrating Bastille Day back here in Boston.

Their Future of Media Summit Blog said that the UK and Australia lead the world in online advertising per capita. Not sure if that is a good thing or a bad thing. Denmark is third and then us laggards in the US come in fourth. Ross Dawson also said in the post that, "Another interesting statistic is that Canada spends little more than half the US per capita in online advertising. Possibly US advertisers accessing the Canadian market are not accounted for in these figures. Canada was in fact the first country in the world where broadband overtook dial-up in number of users, in 2003."

Cisco I-Prize – Mining the Web and the World for Innovation - Part Two

Yesterday, I posted on Brightidea’s Webstorm Idea Collection and Ranking Portal that facilitates the innovation process (see Brightidea Brings Enterprise 2.0 Capabilities to Innovation – Part One). Today I will cover one of the uses of Webstorm outside the firewall, Cisco’s I-Prize. I think this is a great story with some lessons learned for others who want mine the wisdom of crowds, so I will explore it more here.

Cisco has launched a contest and invited the world to give it great ideas. The winner gets to join Cisco and is funded to make the idea real. More specifically, “the winning team may have the opportunity to be hired by Cisco to found a new business unit and share a $250,000 signing bonus. Cisco may invest approximately $10 million over three years to staff, develop, and go to market with a new business based on your idea.” While the Cisco site did use the words “may’ this is a very tangible commitment. Cisco is committing a lot of time and money to the process. This attractive prize has brought in ideas for over 100 countries. Brightidea’s Webstorm is used to manage these inputs, and facilitate to discussion and rating of them. Matt said that he felt one reason this has been so successful is that it is short-lived competition with a clear conclusion and reward. It is not simply collecting ideas like the traditional idea suggestion box.

Here is the rest of the story on the process from the Cisco site, “It’s simple. Register on the Cisco I-Prize Website. Post your idea and comment on other ideas posted by fellow entrepreneurs. Use the Human Network to refine your concept and form an idea team of all-stars that can take your idea to the next level. Cisco will select up to 100 semifinalist teams that will work with Cisco experts using state-of-the-art collaboration tools to build a business plan and presentation. Next, up to 10 finalist teams will present to a judging panel for the ultimate prize: the opportunity to start a new business unit with access to the resources that Cisco has to offer.”

So there is a bit of “American Idol” plus at lot of social networking. Ideas are posted on the public site and others can promote or demote the idea. At the same time the ideas go into the internal review process. The ten finalists work with Cisco’s support to refine and present their idea to the Cisco review panel. In addition to the implementing the winning idea, Cisco is reaping many other benefits. It gets access to all the other ideas. It also wants to position itself as the place to think about when you have an idea. It wants to be seen as an employer of choice. The final teams presented their ideas between April 14 and May 3 and the winner should be announced soon. It will be interesting to see where the winner goes and if some of the runner ups make it big also. I can see a TV reality show in the making; I hope it works and becomes a model for gathering innovation.

Brightidea Brings Enterprise 2.0 Capabilities to Innovation – Part One

I think that Brightidea has a smart strategy for bringing social computing capabilities into the enterprise so I want to share this cross-post from the App Gap. They have picked a focused application that addresses a critical issue for any organization. Brightidea adds the capabilities of social computing to the idea generation and implementation process. Their WebStormTM product is an Idea Collection and Ranking Portal that facilitates the innovation process. It configured as the front-end interface to their Innovation Pipeline Management (IPM) platform. The IPM Platform is a suite of tools used to manage ideas from conception to reality, with modules for research collaboration, cost estimation and revenue forecasting, and other aspects of the product development process.

This week I spoke with Matt Greeley, the CEO at Brightidea. They started out in the consumer web in 1999 and moved to the current enterprise focus in 2003. While they currently work inside the firewall, some of their customers are having them reach outside to get customer and business partner input on innovation. One of the impressive uses of Webstorm outside the firewall is Cisco’s i-Prize. Here Cisco has launched a contest and invited the world to give it great ideas. The winner gets to join Cisco and is funded to make the idea real. I will cover i-Prize in a separate post tomorrow, as it is a great story. Brightidea’s Webstorm manages the collection, ranking, and discussion of these ideas from over 100 countries.

Matt said they decided to put increase support around their innovation process as it is increasingly becoming a critical differentiator in today’s faster moving economy. You innovate or die. My local area is littered with companies such as Wang and Digital that failed to understand this. It is not sufficient or often feasible to just throw more people at the challenge rather companies should evaluate how technology can help. Since innovation is, in reality, a social process, it makes sense to apply social computing capabilities to this issue. Matt said that their research indicates that they are the first in this space with a comprehensive social computing solution.

Matt indicated that they also selected a specific business process so they could show concrete and measurable value for a social computing application. This struck a strong chord within me as I have been promoting a similar concept for knowledge management for years. I think that for most new IT applications to succeed they need to be tied to real business problems within real business processes and then measured by how they effect these processes.

One of the examples I used to use for the need for concrete business measures was ironically in the innovation process. In 2000 I helped develop an enterprise portal for Sainsbury’s, the UK consumer food chain. The first application within the portal served their innovation process. It was the most pressing business challenge they faced at the time. We used such measures as decreased time to market, number of first to market ideas, product success rates, etc. We used the relatively primitive portal and content management technology of the day. While it was successful, I wish we had Brightidea and social computing then. Matt said they and their clients are now looking at such measures as time to market, time to decision, value of the total innovation pipeline, and on schedule product launches. Their customers are taking these results to the Wall Street analysts to demonstrate the progress they are making in innovation and the projected future value of the company.

The controlled transparency offered by the social computing capabilities within Brightidea helps moves things along. Those who need to know, now know. Those that do not need to know are not distracted. There are dashboards that senior executives can use to monitor progress of their new product pipeline and apply resources where needed. Transparency leads to accountability and this can lead to productivity if managed in a supportive manner. Many of their clients previously used siloed applications such as Excel and now they have much greater access to knowledge and the ability to provide input throughout the product development is dramatically increased. There are likely a number of paths to taking enterprise 2.0 within organizations. I think that Brightidea is traveling down one of the most promising ones. Tomorrow I will into more detail on the Cisco I-Prize story. Here is the landing page of one of their innovation networks.

30 Top Social Bookmarking Web Sites

A list of 30 Largest Social Bookmarking Sites ranked by a combination of Inbound Links, Google Page Rank, Alexa Rank, and U.S. traffic data from Compete and Quantcast was provided by eBizMBA not too long ago. I was not surprised by the top three; digg, Technorati and del.icio.us. While del.icio.us led in inbound links, dig led in overall score. A number of the others were also familiar but I learned some new ones to explore such as Propeller at number 4. It seems to be a general news site and has a Propeller blog. You can vote for a story and give it a negative “sink” vote. The more familiar Stumebleupon was fifth and reddit was sixth. For the web news junkies, I recommend going to see the larger list.