Photo by Peter Wood, cc-by-nc-nd license.

This last weekend I finally got drafted and posted Closing the Books on WordCamp Boston 2011 over on WCBOS site.

Planning WordCamp Boston the last two years has been quite an experience: challenging, at times high-stress-inducing, but well worth the effort. It’s only really been possible, of course, because of the first class team of organizers and volunteers, many of whom worked quietly behind the scenes getting all the hard tasks done, especially in the weeks leading up to the camp.

Thanks are due (much overdue) to my fellow organizers and all the volunteers, speakers, sponsors, and attendees who made WordCamp Boston 2011 a great success!

Now, on to 2012.

Even at a smaller camp there were multiple parallel tracks of presentations, and I found myself wishing talks had been recorded so I could see some of the ones which overlapped, my inability to be simultaneously two places at once hold me back yet again.

Program for DrupalCamp CT 2011 - click for larger

My favorite sessions of the day were Benjamin Melançon‘s “When there isn’t a module for that” and John Zavocki‘s keynote “From the Margins to the Center.”

Ben’s talk, which was an updated version of a talk he gave at Western Mass DrupalCamp (which I was not able to get to, but for which slides are available), covered the basics of Drupal module development using the x-ray module as an example. Nothing new for an experienced developer, but presented with clarity, color commentary promoting the community ethic, and humor, including this graph of “Community Karma Required to Escape Punishment” for specific crimes:

Community Karma Required - from Benjamin Melançon's slides (click for full size)

He was also the lead author (coordinator? driving force?) of The Definitive Guide to Drupal 7, and brought a copy to show. That is one serious tome of Drupal knowledge – over a thousand pages! (Ok, I’m including the index – but it really is massive).

One of Ben’s core themes – the ethics of contributing back to the community in multiple ways and at multiple levels – also ran through John Zavocki’s keynote. (John uses a mindmap to present rather than slides – he’s put two versions of the mindmap up on his site).

Zavocki – an engaging presenter with more than a touch of self-deprecating humor – starting by announcing this was his first keynote, and therefore was either going to go extremely well or suck entirely: turns out it was the former. A self-described fourteenth-century Venetian painter with post-modernist and feminist tendencies (or was it sympathies?), John focused on what professional ethics might mean to those in the Drupal community, the number of web developers who get to open source via non-traditional or ad-hoc career paths (what, my PhD in literature isn’t standard training for web development?), the need for project management and specialization (“find out what you’re good at and do that – hire people to manage you”), and the importance of reputation and long-term relationships.

In the end, the five-point outline he posted on his blog captures all the right themes, but misses all the crucial energy:

1. Your reputation is the most important thing that you have in our development community
2. If you are not allocating human resources for Project Management, you cannot say that you are doing have ethical business practices
3. Clients want software engineering (results) not Computer Science (theory)
4. Get the right person for the right job
5. The most important thing you can do is contribute back to the project.

After the “formal” section of the keynote was over, the audience kept feeding on his energy, asking questions and engaging with him on his sense of where the Drupal community is going. I wish I had some video of Zavocki jumping up and down on stage pointing to the mind-map projected behind him, if only to convey some essence of the experience.

It was also good to see such a strong Drupal community at Yale – yet more evidence of how Drupal is enabling higher education institutions. During the lunch break I had a chance to walk a bit around campus. The camp venue – Luce Hall – is on Hillhouse Avenue, a very storied street which Wikipedia tells me both Charles Dickens and Mark Twain declared “the most beautiful street in America.” Luce Hall itself doesn’t quite fit the description, being instead one of “Yale’s architectural embarrassments.”

(Photo by Adam Solomon, cc-by-nd license)

It’s Henry R. Luce Hall, of course, after the Yale Alumnus, founder of Time, Life, and Fortune, also, later, the staunch anti-community and author of “The American Century” – I wonder what he would have made of the impact of the internet on mass media publishing, as well as the open source movement and its core ethos of cooperation?

What would the “Lord of the Press” have made of citizen journalism, the rise of the hyperlocal, and a real-time web in which nearly anyone can become the source of news?

Photo by galawebdesign - http://www.flickr.com/photos/galawebdesign/2315810343/in/pool-644862@N21/

It wasn’t so long ago that Drupalcon was in the upstairs rooms at the BCEC while AIIM met downstairs in the cavernous expo hall. The contrast between the suits and huge corporate sponsors at AIIM and the open source designer/developer culture of Drupalcon was pretty palpable that year, and the two felt worlds apart.

Now AIIM has launched some online communities of their own and they appear to be using Drupal Commons to do so, with some excellent theming (and I assume development) work by ForumOne Communications:

Enterprise 2.0 Community for AIIM on Drupal Commons (cropped)

Check out Drupal Commons and the AIIM Communities for a sense of what it can do:

• Enterprise 2.0
• Capture
• ERM
• Sharepoint

Yes, there really is an AIIM Microsoft Sharepoint community running on Drupal Commons. Not sure I would have predicted that at Drupalcon 2008.

B2B Buzz - New Community for Small Businesses from Hoovers Online

(Via MediaPost) Hoovers and several business cosponsors have launched a new “social community” for small business users called B2B Buzz. The site’s focus is primarily content:

The voice of the social community will guide the direction for a portal and business consortium that Hoover’s and contributors Outsell, Selling Power, and Shore Communications plan to launch Tuesday. For the first six months the group will focus on building and sharing its collective expertise on marketing and sales, along with a variety of business topics for entrepreneurs.

In essence there’s a “self-assessment” and a blog (the site is on WordPress) for each of their three primary audiences: Sales, Marketing, and Small Business. The assessments walk you through 10 questions designed to determine how effectively your business is leveraging information – and end with an “enter your email address to get your results” style capture form (which gives no indication as to what happens to the email address you provide – shouldn’t a best practices site do a better job of explaining the privacy policy at the point of email capture?).

The Assessment ends in email address capture form

The site also links to a Twitter account (@b2bbuzz) and a LinkedIn Group though these links aren’t specific to the sub-audience but cross the three user types.

So is it a community? (Nevermind a “social community” which was MediaPost’s redundant term – the site merely bills itself as “a community of business information experts”).

Users can comment on blog posts, of course, and interact with the site authors via Twitter. According to the contributors page, “Experts from across the industry are invited to join our contributor ranks,” though the site’s beginning with five (including 2 from Hoovers and 1 from co-sponsor SellingPower). There isn’t, however, anything to register for – no user profiles, discussion forums, or call for user-contributed ideas and stories. Even the comments form is a simple name, email, and (optional) website link.

Given the recent Forrester report on the “plateau” of content creation, is this a smart strategic move to focus on where the companies involved can add value, or is it just the first step in the direction of a more robust community to come? (Or, I suppose, both?). Or has “community” become the new default generic term for “site,” displacing “portal,” “destination,” and “blog” itself?

Email Invite from Sears.com

When I got the above email from Sears inviting me into a new social shopping experience, I hoped that they’d found a way to combine MySears and Sears.com together more contextually and pervasively, letting me move easily between the “get advice before you buy” approach of MySears.com (with its action verbs being join, explore, and connect) and the shopping focused Sears.com.

They haven’t, but what they have done is introduce more social functionality into the shop. Visit sears.com and in the utility navigation right underneath the multi-brand bar (Sears, Kmart, Crafstman, Kenmore, Lands End, etc) you should see an option which toggles between “visit our social site” and “leave our social site.” Clicking on “visit our social site” and you’re greated with this splash screen explaining the new experience:

Sears' New Social Experience

It seems Sears has added a bit of social networking functionality as an overlay to the shopping experience, letting you “message” and “follow” other users, seeing their (on site) social activity. You can view profiles, see who other users are following and followed by, get badges, join groups, and do many of the other activities we’ve come to expect in the era of Facebook and Twitter.

The Bearded One - a Sears Associate and one of the public profiles on Sears.com Social Experience

What’s more unusual is the relationship this new social site has to the existing store and community. MySears.com continues to exist on it’s own tab, suggesting a separation between the researching activities (“get advice before you buy”) and the shopping activity of Sears.com. But the new social site is essentially a kind of layer over the regular shop.

Social Site Version of Product Detail Page

Non-Social version of Product Detail Page

Look at these two cropped product detail pages. Both are of the same product in the Sears.com product catalog – a Blu-Ray DVD player. One image is from within the social site (note the toggle says “leave our social site”) and the other is from outside the social site (“visit our social site” being the link). The language suggests that the social site is a separate place (one you visit and leave) but the experience suggests that social is more like a layer you turn on and off – like the virtual reality overlay in an iphone application which adds review information to your camera view of the street on which you’re walking.

In other words, there’s only a few rows of difference, mixing some social activity (Q&A) in place of specifications, adding a product wiki, and repeating the social network information (people in your network who like/want/own the item being viewed) again later in the page.

Unfortunately there’s a lot of empty social areas at this point – not many items that lots of people in the network have liked/disliked/wanted/owned. It also seems like asking a lot to require users to now find new folks to follow, rather than importing and matching their social graph from Facebook, Twitter, or an email address book search. You can invite people via email, but I didn’t see any easy way to build a new network.

My Network is not very robust - nor I suspect will most user's be at first

What do you think of what Sears is trying here?

I love the idea of activity streams (and the standard for syndication of them) in the context of shopping (see Swipely, Blippy, and Shwowp), but I’m not sure how Sears will get enough critical mass built up if users have to specifically choose to follow each other, and their activity is only visible inside Sears’ own walled garden.

Like Automattic, they’ve essentially avoided the Facebook “like” button in favor of their own – but will users go to the trouble of liking a product in multiple places, or will Sears just end up with a quiet network where the only active users are associates?

Photo by ThinkPublic, http://www.flickr.com/photos/thinkpublic/3042777307/

Eureka Streams, which was announced in late July, is built on the Open Social standard and Apache Shindig. The focus is clearly on (as the name “streams” implies) lowering the barrier to information sharing, in the style of microblogging (think twitter, status.net, and yammer, but also tumblr, posterous, and xxxx). As Ostatic’s coverage put it:

Visually, Eureka Streams is a combination of Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Personal profiles let workers to put a face to a name, which is particularly useful for making remote workers feel connected to each other beyond a disembodied voice on a conference call. Plugins allow for real-time sharing of business-related information, including the ability to share articles from Google Reader and import bookmarks from Delicious. Powerful search features help employees network and connect with other professionals within the company.

The video (below) shows the polish Lockheed Martin’s put on the framework, which I’d say competes well with any proprietary platform from a design and usability perspective:

There are many more videos on the Eureka Streams site, showing off various pages and their functions.

Drupal Commons, announced back in April and released at 1.0 in the beginning of August, is built as an install profile for Drupal, leveraging that platform’s legendary strength as “community plumbing” and community contributed modules long familiar to Drupalistas building social sites.

In this video Jay Batson of Acquia walks through a preview release:

Also worth checking out are DrupalRadar’s First Look and Review, and Jay’s other videos on the Business Value of Drupal Commons and the Features of Drupal Commons.

Finally, you can try it out yourself by joining the Drupal Commons community and checking out some groups there which match your interests.

The Assembled Web is not experienced as a set of discrete web applications and sites, neatly separated from each other and organized into categories: it’s an indiscriminate field of content, functionality, and people interacting in multiple contexts and in unpredictable ways: like life.

New web applications are assembled from other projects/applications/frameworks/services, sometimes on the server, sometimes in the browser, sometimes in the cloud. People’s accounts, identities, and networks come with them across sites, applications, and contexts.

How should enterprises not only come to grips with this bewildering confusion but thrive in it?

By embracing the assembled web and participating fully in it.

Assembled Web First Principles:

1. You should always be thinking multi-site, multi-interface, multi-project. If you think you will (always) only have one interface to any given set of content of functionality, you’re mistaken, and you will paint yourself into a corner.
   
   
2. Success on the web is no longer (if it ever really was) about driving traffic to your site, or keeping eyeballs there once they arrive. It’s about engaging audiences everywhere they already are. It’s about improving the size, quality, and velocity of your “digital footprint.” Ubiquity is the target, not exclusivity. The danger is not that people will say bad things about you but that you will be ignored.
   
   
3. Your brand is not what you say it is, but what your prospects, customers, partners, and employees say it is. In short, your brand is what the Internet says it is. You influence this not through marketing but through creating appropriate experiences and getting users exposed to those positive experiences. (Micro-interactions are ultimately assembled into and become brands).
   
   
4. Design is critical, and design is not about pretty shiny objects. It’s about usable interfaces, in the sense of traditional HCI (Human Computer Interface) design, visual design, and technical design. Creating usable experiences for users and usable projects for developers are both essential, and to ignore either is to invite failure.
   
   
5. The internet itself, like the *nix operating systems on which it (almost entirely) runs, is a set of small pieces loosely joined. Every project you do must be composed of smaller discrete components communicating with each other. The corollary is that every project you do must also be composeable or consumable by other projects – including projects you know nothing about. This is true across multiple projects (within your organization and outside it) as well as over time within a given project.
   
   
6. The difference between “behind the firewall” and “out in the cloud” is trending toward zero. Same for the difference between employees and contractors, customers and prospects, competitors and partners. If you’re still thinking in terms of intranet, internet, and extranet, remember that the difference between them is (from a technology point of view) entirely arbitrary. What differentiates them is business processes and decisions.
   
   
7. There is no defensible reason to invent a proprietary standard wherever an open standard exists. In fact, even where no open standard exists, great efforts should be extended to create one, rather than implement a proprietary version.
   
   
8. Working in isolation from the rest of the internet is inherently limiting and dangerous. This is true whether you’re a one-developer shop or a 5000 developer IT department in a Fortune 100 company. Collaborative engineering with appropriate participants (which almost always means open source licensing arrangements) is required. Why continue to work alone now that the Internet exists?
   
   
9. Consumer Technology is beating Enterprise IT, and soundly. If your “in-house” IT can’t compete with a consumer-grade provider available “on the web” you need to catch up and compete or concede the function.
   
   
10. Small incremental releases are essential. It isn’t just a question of not putting too many eggs in one basket – it’s also about lowering the cost of failure and therefore raising the level of innovation. Don’t accept quarterly releases of functionality, or even monthly. Web applications should change hourly or at least daily. The web is live, not pre-recorded.

Users on Kmart’s and Sears’ web properties can now use their OpenID credentials to sign up and log in to these sites. MyKmart.com and MySears.com, which are both owned by the Sears Holding Company, implemented technology from Viewpoint and JanRain to allow users to use their login credentials from Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Google, Yahoo, AOL, and Windows Live, as well as from any other OpenID provider. This marks one of the first times that such a large, mainstream online retailer has adopted OpenID.

As Sears points out in its press release, it simply makes good business sense for the company to allow its users to use their social IDs to log in to its properties. After all, not having to sign up for yet another new account on yet another site greatly reduces the likelihood that a potential customer would just abandon the process and head to a competitor’s site.

I’m a huge supporter of OpenID – and identity portability generally – and would absolutely agree that it makes good business sense to lower the barrier of entry for new registrations, in order to encourage more reviews, comments, questions, and ultimately purchases from end users.

But what exactly is Sears letting you sign in to?

My Sears or Yours?

It seems that the use of OpenID here is restricted to the community sites – MySears.com and MyKmart.com – as opposed to the commerce sites – Sears.com and Kmart.com. (Speaking of which, since these are community sites, shouldn’t it be OurSears and OurKmart?)

The sign in / register process for those sites does nicely now handle portable identity (this will look familiar if you’ve seen other JanRainRPX powered sites):

Sign in using existing identities on MySears.com

Where the whole system breaks down is when you get to the point of actually making a purchase.

If you use your Facebook identity, for example, to register on MySears.com, the experience is relatively smooth. You pick a screenname (which they suggest based on your name as Facebook knows it), provide an email address, and accept the terms of service, and you’re in.

Say you read some reviews and decide to make a purchase, say of this Crafstman(tm) Mower:

Lawn Mower detail on MySears.com (reduced)

Clicking on “Buy it on sears.com” takes you out of the community, MySears.com, and over to the commerce site, Sears.com. (It doesn’t actually add the item to your cart, but puts you on the product detail page).

Unfortunately, Sears.com doesn’t seem to know I was signed in over at MySears.com. It asks for my zip code, to show in store pricing and availability, and has the ability to show me reviews, including the option for me to write a review:

Write a review on Sears.com (reduced - click for full size)

So what’s the difference between the reviews here on Sears.com and the reviews over on MySears.com, other than two letters in the domain name? Why are some reviews part of the community experience and other reviews part of the commerce experience?

If you add to cart, and proceed to checkout, you’re once again asked for your email address (from my point of view, one of the benefits of using OpenID or other portable identity systems is that you don’t have to keep re-providing the same info multiple times) and whether or not your have a Sears.com password:

Easy Checkout at Sears.com

Similarly, throughout Sears.com there is a “My Profile” link in the upper right corner, but apparently “My Profile” on Sears.com is different than my profile on MySears.com (which is actually labeled “My Home” in the nav). Thus clicking the MyProfile link results in this modal dialogue:

Register on Sears.com

Perhaps I’ve belabored the point – the community experience and the commerce experience clearly aren’t sharing registration here. Letting users leverage existing identities is a great leap forward, but why does it only apply to the community? I can bring my identity to MySears.com but not to Sears’ Sears.com?

But why are there two experiences in first place? Presumably because one is hosted by Viewpoints, the reviews/community vendor, and the other is powered by Sears’ ecommerce platform. The problem is that the end user should neither know nor care which parts of the experience are provided by what vendor, or managed in what technical platform.

Perhaps there’s concern about associating an OpenID or other portable identity to an account with actual credit card information in it?

If you’re an ecommerce site working to leverage the power of community, are you providing two separate-but-equal experiences?

If you went to the mall, chatted with the sales clerk and maybe other shoppers about some item you were considering buying, wouldn’t it be odd if they asked you to go next door to the store to purchase it after you’ve made up your mind? Why do so online?

Currently, however, they are running a Campaign to Save Paste, soliciting donations to offset operating losses. What does the need for such campaign tell us about the future of online publishing?

Many people, myself included, got hooked on Paste via the CD-sampler which accompanies each issue and lets you hear many of the artists being discussed and reviewed.

Paste has also made interesting moves to reflect the popularity and primacy of the Internet as a mechanism for discovering music, while still retaining their editorial vision and curatorial role.

First, they moved the sampler CD online. Instead of distributing physical CDs with every copy of the magazine sent to subscribers or sold at newstands, the CD is available for download, with subscribers having accounts and print versions containing a code to access the download. Subscribers who prefer the physical CD can still request one.

Digital VIP

• 12 Free Albums (downloads) selected by Paste editors, plus often bonus albums
• Digital versions of the magazine, including access to back issues
• Early access to the sampler and magazine
• A Paste t-shirt
• The ability to give gift subscriptions (not VIP but regular) to friends for $10

It’s a great program – allowing the brand evangelists to pay more and get premium access, while also enabling them to spread the brand. (Disclosure: Paste is not a client. I’m just a very happy subscriber and brand enthusiast!).

I wish, in fact, that magazines like Mojo and Q, which I often buy in print while in the UK, would emulate this model: keep publishing in print, but let people choose to subscribe to a digital edition and get the tunes which would otherwise come on a physical CD online.

None of this, however, has enabled Paste to completely avoid the global economic meltdown current recession. They’re recently launched a “Campaign to Save Paste,” calling on readers, musicians, and other supporters to help them get through what they’ve described as “a little cash infusion to make up for running at a loss for a while.” (See Save Paste FAQs).

The campaign itself is very well executed, including a letter to readers, a Facebook Group, a twitter account, over 70 tracks (many rare and otherwise unreleased) made available by musicians and labels to anyone who donates, and even banners supporters can take and embed on their own blogs, myspace profiles, and the like:

So what does this campaign, and the model of Paste in general, tell us about publishing in the age of the assembled web?

The pessimistic view would be that it demonstrates that even a small, dedicated, niche-focused print magazine can’t survive. Music, film, and book bloggers have taken over the curatorial role and publish mp3s, trailers, and samples – often with less respect for the strictures of current copyright than a published magazine can manage. In this view, even though Paste was doing everything right they can’t survive without the voluntary donations of supporters. Philanthropic patronage is the only hope of the print publication.

A more optimistic view, though, would take seriously the version Paste themselves offer. The model is fundamentally sound, subscriptions are growing, and the future looks bright. As they write in the Letter to Paste Readers:

Long-term, Paste will emerge in good shape. Even with the fall-off at the end of the year, 2008 was our best year yet—print subscribers, print ads, online readers and online advertising were all at record levels. Readers (print and online) remain strong. And new advertisers have come on board even in the recession, with more ready when their advertising budgets come back.

In the meantime, we’ve adjusted our business to weather this storm. We’ve cut costs, and we developed a robust online business that’s among the best in the industry. Fundamentally, we’re in good shape and won’t need another appeal down the road.

I have, of course, no visibility into Paste’s finances and can’t really discern which of these views will be more accurate in their specific case. But I truly hope it’s the latter.

Making Ice Cream
(Photo by Rachel J)

This weekend, freshly jet-lagged by back-to-back trips to the UK and Switzerland, with a brief stop in between for BarCampBoston 4, I attended the Northeast User Group Leader Summit, sponsored (thanks!) by O’Reilly Media and Microsoft. (Although I don’t technically lead a user group, I play host to BostonPHP at Optaros, volunteer for BarCampBoston, and participate in Boston’s Drupal and WordPress groups, as well as North Shore Web Geeks up in Newburyport.

The event, hosted in the new Microsoft NERD facility, brought together user group leaders from across the technology spectrum, and from New York to Maine. (See a shortlist of user groups represented in the wiki).

Sessions Board (Photo by Rachel J)

It was simultaneously frustrating and reassuring to see that the core issues are so similar across user groups:

• Attracting and retaining members, speakers, volunteers
• Dealing with financing, venues, sponsors
• Keeping members and organizers motivated, active
• Making meetings useful, interesting to a broad audience
• Balancing newbies with ‘experts’

Reassuring because it shows that these problems are well understood – frustrating because no simple easy solutions will make them go away.

Ingredients we used for instant ice cream (my photo)

A few of the interesting sessions I attended, with links to notes which are all accessible from the event’s wiki:

• Care and Feeding of a Large Group / Large Event Financing – a combined session, for which I was the scribe, led by Shimon Rura from BarCampBoston and Darius Kazemi of Boston Post-Mortem
• Managing Event Overload – a more casual session, which the two of us attending turned by popular vote mostly into a discussion about NewB Camp, taking advantage of the time with Sara Streeter, who organized this session and also NewBCamp.
• Moving past the presentation – a very interesting session about the other ways one can manage a user group meeting, beyond just the traditional “talking head” format most folks are familiar with.

In addition to the formal sessions, Jeff Potter delighted all to a reprise of his food hacking demo from FooEast and BarCampBoston 4, making instant ice-cream using liquid nitrogen. This time, I participated, with a group of fellow vegans (and one ‘fellow traveller’).

Making Ice Cream with Liquid Nitrogen (Photo by Rachel J)

(Note for future food hackers: soy milk, at least the Light Vanilla variety we used, required a bit more liquid nitrogen and a bit longer to ‘set up’ – lower volume of liquid in the mixing bowl, longer time to mix in. At first it all just foamed up and spilled over the bowl, but thanks to a patient chef we were able to enjoy banana-coconut-rum soy ice ice cream custom made in a microbatch).

Ultimately, of course, what really makes any community successful is the people. While the problems of open source and commercial software user groups can vary a bit (I heard several Microsoft technology user group folks talk of having too many sponsors and too much schwag from companies to give away – a problem I’ve not seen in any open source based user group) they share an essential component, which is competition for people’s attention. The key to breaking through the noise and consistently getting their attention? Good, relevant content, consistency (of venue, time, and quality), and true community.

Community minus people = empty (Photo by marilynpratt)

It suggests than an “online community” is something you build like you build: a web site, or a portal. It suggests that the community is the site itself. (It’s a strange kind of synecdoche, in which the web platform where some community interaction takes place is taken to be the actual community itself).

But a community is not a site – it is a group of people who interact with each other. And an online community isn’t a web site, it is a set of people who interact with each other online.

In his report from the Online Community Unconference East 2009 (which I was unfortunately unable to attend but have heard good things about) Bill Johnston list as one his three key takeaways the importance of thinking about your online community in the context of a broader eco-system:

One point that I have evangelized for many years is the fact that online communities generally don’t live in a single location. Most successful community strategies engage the entire ecosystem of touchpoints that members (or potential members) find valuable. This ecosystem can be made up of destination community sites, but relationships are also forming on blogs, social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn), mass social media (YouTube, Flickr), and even offline at meetups or user group meetings. Conversations at the OCUE this year generally spilled beyond the boundaries of a hosted community destination, and most folks were thinking about how to prioritize various opportunities for engagement in their community ecosystem.

Absolutely! The community is the people, not the site.

Just as a company needs to learn to think of its digital footprint across the assembled web – all the interactions consumers, partners, and employees have with the company’s products, brand, and content – online community managers need to think about all the ways in which the members of their community interact with each other across the Internet, not just the interactions they have on the official community site.

What this should tell you? That large companies at the forefront of enterprise social computing — like Intel, Dell, and others — routinely turn to multiple suppliers for different types of internal and external communities. This may have something to do with inter-departmental politics and silos, but I think it actually makes sense: different vendors in this marketplace target different scenarios and will therefore be better suited to different business objectives

While I certainly agree that different vendors target different scenarios, I’m not sure I’d so easily accept the notion that multiple internal and external platforms make sense. He continues:

For example, Telligent sees some internal implementations, but is known mostly for its external-facing community implementations, while Jive’s Clearspace can and does get implemented externally, but is mostly known for its behind-the-firewall implementations. You the buyer should not assume that one size fits all.

Of course there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to community building. But does that necessarily mean the answer is to license multiple competing proprietary platforms for a single enterprise?

How well integrated are an internal implementation of Java-based Clearspace and an external implementation of .NET-based Telligent ever going to be, given that both are proprietary?

• What happens when Intel’s business needs suggest sharing content from the internal Clearspace community with users in the external Telligent community? How difficult is it to migrate content from one to the other?
• What happens when the internal community realizes it might benefit from external input, or the external community starts to involve internal users?
• Do users who have a presence in both maintain separate usernames and passwords? How easily can both be pointed at a shared user repository?
• How efficient is it from an IT management point of view to have ongoing enterprise license agreements with two vendors? Do users joining both communities essentially increase the license fees for both vendors?

Of course, imposing one monolithic solution may not be possible either. I regularly deal with clients who have not just two core content management systems but as many as five or six: due to the “inter-departmental politics and silos” Tony mentioned above, or due to corporate acquisitions which bring their own legacy systems, or due to serial leadership changes and different IT strategies over time.

How do you enable the right balance of “fit-to-purpose” (which might identify different platforms for different social scenarios) against “fit-to-enterprise” (which would explore the impact of platform proliferation and silos)? What happens when the community you expected to be purely internal suddenly realizes that it would benefit from external input?

Leveraging mature open source platforms- and customizing them to fit the specific scenarios of the community being served- will better preserve long term business agility and ensure that those silos don’t become islands, but can share data and functionality with each other.

See also: CMIS, ECM Interoperability, and Services-Oriented Content Management

One of the favorite keynotes of any Drupalcon of course is the State of Drupal address. Here’s video of Dries from Szeged:

(I took the one supplied by archive.org and cut out the first 37 minutes, including Drupalcon logistics – 10% female attendance!- and a welcome from the vice-mayor of Szeged, Sandor Nagy, who revealed that Szeged is open source friendly but unfortunately uses Joomla! to manage their web pages).

I love Dries’ approach. Most of the talk is structured around this list of the five things preventing Drupal from achieving world domination:

1. Slow porting of contributed modules
2. Learning curve
3. Restricted access to Drupal talent
4. Drupal.org Experience
5. Lack of Features

He basically walks through each, commenting on what might be going on and how the Drupal community at large can address the issue.

Highlights:

• Seems clear that more features need to move into core. Some (more) aspects of pathauto, CCK, and Views into core, perhaps a WYSIWYG editor (though Dries said he isn’t quite ready to pick one here). Looking at what modules most people install helps determine where core should go.
• Multimedia handling and file handling generally – cleaning up the relationship between files and nodes.
• Usability improvements – here the focus is on Drupal.org as well as Drupal itself. The default install and administer experience is still too confusing. There’s an initial step for first time users that is still too high.
• RDF/Semantic Web – moving beyond the assumption that output = xhtml (This was also a theme at Drupalcon Boston)

When will Drupal 7 be frozen? When it is ready to be frozen. Not likely before January 2009, maybe not even then.

Russell uses the occasion of some nasty comments in Digg on a Caryl Shaw article for PC gamer (and a series of presentations at OSCON a few weeks back) to reflect on the issue of sexism in free and open source software communities. Ultimately, the issue is really about what kinds of communities we want to be building. As he notes:

the frustrating conclusion [is] that this is the outcome the community allows. Surely this kind of objectionable behavior wouldn’t show up so frequently if we were closer to gender balance in the OSS world. But the larger tech world seems to be addressing the topic badly if at all and OSS is no exception.

Many have argued, of course, that free expression is the ultimately value above all others, and that keeping the purity of free expression inviolate somehow requires allowing people to behave badly. But it is important to think not only about the positive value of free expression but also the negative impacts of the kinds of comments commonly seen in IRC channels and public forums:

degenerate behavior in support channels or on discussions about popular links serves no principle, rises to no higher cause than prurient interest, and builds no “community” other than those who tolerate the objectification and denigration of half (or more) of the world’s population. Frankly, that’s not a community I want any part of.

How does this particularly apply to free and open source software? Given the self-forming nature of community, the reliance of our projects on participation, and the attention paid in such communities to issues of governance, one might expect free and open source software projects to be ahead of the curve in this respect:

the Open Source world finds itself debating the moral and practical consequences of obtuse licensing aspects on a daily basis. What makes norms of community behavior around race, gender, and other forms of bias so different and loaded that Open Source community leaders then can’t or won’t speak to them? If we’re developing this software with society at large, for society at large, why is absence of half of society from the process not the largest topic of discussion in the OSS world? It’s certainly much more disturbing to me personally than any of the dickering over licenses that consumes so much time and attention.

Of course there were a number of presentations at OSCON which touched on this issue or addressed it directly. Unfortunately I missed Emma Jane Hogbin’s talk, about how she managed to get 50% female participation and speakers at her conference.

I did get a chance to see Pia Waugh’s talk on Heroes: Women in FOSS, which focused on creating visibility for women already in free software and going directly to primary schools to show young girls that technology is an option for women. Danese Cooper’s keynote Why Whinging Doesn’t Work — which was originally focused on women in open source, but was broadened for the “general audience” — also focused on creating and making visible positive success stories, including the directive “teach your daughters to code” as a core mechanism for breaking this cycle. (Whether they go on to become programmers, I’d say, is nearly irrelevant – think of the whole digital literacy and set of assumptions that gets broken in the process of learning to program – changing the kind of “magic” of making the machine work into a tactical, knowable process).

Russell links to a draft code of conduct for all Dojo Foundation projects. I’m sure this will generate lots of discussion – some of it serious and well meaning, some of it snide, sarcastic, and misogynist. (The blogosphere in general loves to attack codes of conduct perceived as too idealistic).

But ultimately the more important thing, I think, is the social norms we all as free and open source software community participants enforce and encourage on a daily basis. It’s all well and good to have a code of conduct or other document which encodes those norms and makes them clear to new participants, but it ultimately comes down to what behaviors we all tolerate or engage in.

It brings me back to the same thoughts I had at and after ROFLcon, in which many aspects of “internet culture” were being celebrated that I hoped would be more critically examined.

If free and open source software is produced by and for communities, what kind of communities do we hope those will be, and what are we doing to ensure that they are communities in which we’d like to live?

I came to software (mostly web) development (and FOSS) from the academic world, in a graduate English department, having done a doctoral dissertation which (in part) was on the reconfigurations of race, gender, and class in US history at the turn into the 20th century, and how “the city” provided both the geographic context and dominant trope for the exploration of anxiety generated by these changes.

In essence what that experience taught me is that the stories which community members tell each other — about what they are trying to accomplish, about what values they share, and about other participants as well as non-participants — are critical to community definition. More critical, ultimately, than even the explicit foundational governance documents.

That doesn’t mean I think codes of conduct are a bad idea – it helps to be able to point to values in an encoded form when bad behavior occurs – but that the informal, social norms based enforcement of a living community is always a stronger and more lasting mechanism.

I had thought about calling it “From Content Management to Community Management” or maybe “Content Management is Dead” but ended up instead with: “Upload, Tag, Share, Discuss: Content Management in the Age of Participation.”

Here are the slides – note that the last slide is full of credits for photos (creative commons via flickr) and links for sites referenced. Can be hard to see in small size so you’ll need to either full-screen it or download the file (which you can do at slideshare).

| View | Upload your own

Seth had some nice things to say about the presentation: Web Content 2008 Notes.

So did Deane at Web Content 2008: Day Two.

Thanks Guys!

It was really a great conference: not heavily vendor driven, no “expo floor” you have to walk through to get to the food, small enough that you could actually mingle with and talk to the attendees. My only wish would have been to have spoken earlier, maybe even Tuesday am, so that people interested in my talk could have known who I was before the conference was basically over. I also would have come in to Chicago Monday night to catch more of the opening keynotes.

Online Communities: What Should a Retailer Do?

Abstract:

Most retailers have found success in providing online product ratings and reviews, and many have dabbled in engaging directly with participants in social networks. Many retailers are seeking to do more in the area of community, but the lack of clarity in both ROI and specific implementation ideas are causing many to pause and look for guidance.

This paper describes two specific community concepts that leading retailers are beginning to successfully deploy with positive economic outcomes—private event retailing and fan networks.

Registration (free) is required.

Description:

February 27, 2008 2–3pm – Are Your Products Open or Closed? How to Respond to the New Openness– at Online

Overview: Companies in many industries are struggling to determine how best to deal with the power that social computing gives their customers as an open forum to share how they feel about products with millions of fellow consumers. This newfound power in the hands of customers is creating an openness of information (positive and negative) that is having a dramatic impact on the success of new products and overall company revenues.

Join Josh Bernoff, Forrester Vice President, Principal Analyst and co-author of “Groundswell,” along with Colby Dyess, Product Manager from Endeca for this live TechRepublic Webcast to hear how leading companies such as Endeca and Swisscom Mobile are engaging with their customers to drive new product innovation through the “new openness”.

Tags: open innovation open source community marketing product development social computing customers groundswell forrester Josh Bernoff Colby Dyess Endeca Optaros

This hCalendar event brought to you by the hCalendar Creator.

This Webcast will address these important topics followed by interactive Q&A:

• ROI of Engaging with Your Customers for New Product Innovation
• What You Should Do to Tap Into Your Customers for Innovation
• Case Study: Building an Online Customer Community–Endeca’s Developer Network “EDeN”

Tuesday night Mike Krigsman (twitter.com/mkrigsman) organized a “tweetup” at the Boston Beer Works in the Fenway. I won’t try to list all the attendees, but a few notes on folks I talked to:

• Silona (twitter.com/silona) was in town from Austin (League of Technical Voters, Transparent Federal Budget, We Are All Actors)
• Met Laura “Pistachio” Fitton (twitter.com/pistachio) – now I won’t be just another face in the crowd of her ~1500 twitter followers
• Met David Fisher (twitter.com/tibbon) who works with Nate at Jazkarta
• Nathan Burke (BlogString, twitter.com/?), who works with Michelle at MatchMine
• Met Jack Vinson (twitter.com/jackvinson) from Aspen Technology, who lives in the Boston area despite his Twitter account saying he is in Evanston IL.

I also met Dan Bricklin, which is really a brush with greatness. (No offense to my fellow tweetup attendees, but dude basically invented the spreadsheet).

Not bad for a tweetup on Super Tuesday (also Mardi Gras, aka Fat Tuesday), in not so great Boston weather. Apologies in advance if I left anyone out – I did have to run out early to catch a train.

Last night (wednesday) was the February BostonPHP meeting, on “Choosing a FOSS License for your project.”

Karen Copenhaver and Ira Heffan presented, but it was less about formal presentation and was really a conversation with the whole group – we talked about different classes of licenses and degrees of reciprocity they encourage/require, GPLv3 versus Affero GPLv3, CPAL, etc. The audio was recorded and will probably turn up as a podcast shortly.

After the meeting Mark Withington, Ira Heffan, Greg Rundlett and I went out for drinks and talked about life, the universe, and everything. ;)

Tonight, I’m headed to the North Shore Web Geek Meetup in Newburyport – although this means missing out on Silona’s presentation to the Berkman Thursday Blog Group.

Sheesh. So much to do, so little time. Good to see a vibrant local community.

There’s really only one rule for community as far as I’m concerned, and it’s this – in order to call some gathering of people a “community”, it is a requirement that if you’re a member of the community, and one day you stop showing up, people will come looking for you to see where you went.

Brilliant, though as he himself notes there are many offline communities where the same could not be said. (Come to think of it, I believe I’ve worked in companies which might fail that test).

Like an arranged marriage of members of distant royal families, they are talking about a union that will bring together very different worlds. The Web companies expect to become rich as advertisers pay more to reach an audience that can be sorted and selected on any set of attributes. Advertisers and their agencies are drooling that they will deliver highly targeted advertising messages that audiences will find more relevant, producing better results than they’ve seen in the mass media. The big question is what does the consumer, the commoner, think of this proposed royal wedding?

In other words, we’ve evolved from a scenario in which traditional and new media (or offline vs. online media) mistrusted each other and battled for the consumer’s attention into one in which they cooperate in their attempts to reach users – but this hasn’t made the situation any better for the end user – the one whose attention the ad buyers seek.

It’s a very good description of what I increasingly see as a major problem. Advertising, as advertising, is an annoying interference for most web users, just as it always has been for TV viewers and radio listeners. (Dougherty uses the metaphor of a tax – a relatively minor annoyance we put up with in order to enjoy the subsidized content).

So what’s an advertiser to do?

What’s a developer of a web property (media site, social network, community – the distinctions are getting less clear all the time) to do, since they rely on the advertising dollar to fuel their growth?

It’s starting to look less like an arranged marriage and more like some delusional, co-dependent pas de deux. It creates a world in which you have, on the one hand, AdBlock Plus, and on the other Facebook Beacon spamming your friends with what you bought in the vague hope that you might buy one too. (Is it just me who thinks it is wrong that I can become a “fan” of major brands in Facebook but I can’t become, well, whatever the opposite of a fan should be called in the context of a social network. This is a conversation in which you can only say good things – double plus ungood).

The most common strategies focus on dissolving the distinction between “advertising” and “content” – just like all those Dorritos product placements in Survivor (or on the Colbert Report), the idea is to make the brand’s presence Tivo-proof. (The YouTube inline ads have a similar function – you can’t skip them without also missing content).

But aren’t these just new ways of trying to push to the user a bit of content they didn’t want along with some content they did?

Dougherty also discusses the challenges that social networks like MySpace and Facebook face as they introducing increasingly obvious commercials into the fabric of their sites:

If sites or services become too commercialized, or as users catch on that the content is really a commercial in disguise, then they can choose to go elsewhere. They can shift their attention to a new site. I hope the threat of user migration is enough to keep Web 2.0 sites honest, and counteract the aggressive tendencies of advertisers. This is the risk that MySpace and Facebook are confronted with as they increase the amount of commercial activity on their sites. If advertisers increase the level of annoyance, even worse than strangers asking to be friends, then people will look for new sites that get it right. It’s a bit like FM radio. Get the balance between songs and commercial chatter wrong and people will flee to a new alternative.

How do we get beyond the dialectic of the users’ desire to avoid advertising and the advertisers’ desire to reach more users?

To put it another way, how do we make “relevant messages” really mean something?

There are certain brands from whom I’m happy to receive communication – eMusic’s updates on what albums are new in my favorite genres, for example – but those are rare moments in a sea of noise. Far too many companies can’t even track the basics, like all the direct mail pieces I get from credit card companies for cards I already have, magazines to which I already subscribe, and newspaper subscriptions I’ve already turned down three times this week.

I might even pay, at this point, to belong to a social network in which no advertising was allowed, if such a thing were even possible. Where my actual friends could tell me about things they like, but the actual makers of those things could not influence, encourage, support, market, or seed such activity. It’d be like an all organic, Astroturf free, commercial-message-free zone. Kind of like Usenet was before Canter & Siegal.

Check out the announcement on the Miro blog: Miro 1.0 is here.

There’s also:

• Comprehensive Feature Guide to 1.0
• The official Press Release
• Explanation of co-branding potential
• A comparison of Miro and Joost

(People I’m reading on this include my colleague Sebastian Wohlrapp, Marc Andreessen, Josh Catone, and Jeremiah Owyang – of course there are a gazillion others as well).

Did I miss something somewhere in the API documentation or the Campfire Video? (It has been a busy few weeks, and I would be happy to be wrong).

As I see it, in short: Open Social is not Social Network Portability. It’s social network widget portability.

Open Social enables widgets written to its OpenSocial API to be deployed (without rewriting) to multiple containers, but it doesn’t link my profiles on various networking sites, or allow me to carry my relationships with other people across network boundaries.

So if I make a “photos of my dogs” widget, and deploy it on Orkut and Hi5, I can share photos with my friends on both of those networks, but the two are completely separate. I’d have to log in to Orkut and share some photos there, then go log in to Hi5 and share some photos there.

My friends who are only on Orkut won’t see photos I share to Hi5, and vice versa. If I add someone as my friend on Orkut, they don’t “automatically” become my friend on Hi5.

In fact, as I read it, nobody but me even really knows that these two profiles (one on Orkut, one on Hi5) are the same person.

This mostly helps developers of widgets to run inside social networks. Instead of having to write an application for Orkut, and another for Hi5, and another for X, developers can create one application adhering to the Open Social API, and it can be used on all those networks.

This also helps small social networks, who don’t have a large enough user base to convince widget developers to create widgets for their platforms – the long tail of social networking platforms, if you will.

If anything, this will enable small, silo-style, disconnected social networks to continue to proliferate.

Can anyone point me to any example demonstrating how Open Social is more than described above?

I know the Container API / SDK – which will tell networks what they need to do to become containers – has not yet been released, and perhaps more will be clear when it is. But for now, this seems like a good thing (I do think an open API for widgets is a good thing) but certainly not a great thing.

[Update]
See Tantek’s comment below and his post on Open Social and Portability, as well as this O’Reilly Radar post from yesterday, which I just came across: “It’s the data, stupid.”
[/Update]

[Update2]
There is this text in the description of Hosting OpenSocial Apps:

To host OpenSocial apps, your website must support the SPI side of the OpenSocial APIs. Usually your SPI will connect to your own social network, so that an OpenSocial app added to your website automatically uses your site’s data. However, it is possible to use data from another social network as well, should you prefer. Soon, we will provide a development kit with documentation and code to better support OpenSocial websites, along with a sample sandbox which implements the OpenSocial SPI using in-memory storage.

(I added the bold). I guess we’ll have to wait to see just how data from “another” social network might be used, or even how data from many social networks might be used.
[/Update2]

At MTV, we’re pretty psched – being our fans BFF has always been important to us as a company.

It’s no accident MTV started as a cable channel – youth were most open to the potential of cable.

Together, we define what MTV is – it is the world’s largest brand gallery.

What we’ve learned: Four Guiding Truths that burn in all of us at MTV

1. It’s not the medium, but the content that matters most.
2. Build an emotional relationship with the users based on content they find compelling.
3. Give your audience a place and mechanism to find each other.
4. You have to let your audience help you shape your brand.

Message over Medium

Create compelling content, then figure out the best screens and experiences through which to engage users.

MTV.com – 10,000 video library – let users play what they want when they want. It isn’t enough to just play what we want online. Also Rock Band, which will let people engage with music in a new and interactive way – but even this starts with the creative impulse and the emotional connection first, then the technology approach.

Tools make a great experience possible – but you have to have a great idea first. At heart, we’re a company of great ideas.

How do you make it stick?

Start with a foundation of great content – then build an emotional relationship on that content with which users want to engage.

52 bands. What if we took all the time we spend promoting our programming – 11.5 hours every week – and gave it to different artists. So we did. We gave that time to new bands – to connect users to new music and up and coming artists.

In an era in which the music video has become a commodity, 52 bands has been a great way for listeners and bands to find each other.

College students were the first to raise their voices about the genocide in Darfur – the MTVu college network creating programming, PSAs, campus events, and a viral video game.

(Christina masterfully transitions from genocide in Darfur to Jackass via George Bush.)

MTV JackassWorld – coming soon.

Let your consumers speak to each other

Give your audience ways to find each other.

Think.mtv.com – “the largest online activist community ever”

Find others who are passionate about the same things you are.

Also the You-R-Here area on MTV.com – MTV’s always covered lots of tours, but this year we’re allowing users to help report through You-R-Here.

Help your audience shape our brand

We want our audiences to feel ownership of the experiences we create, the brands around which we collect.

The MTV Tr3s network for hispanic youth in the US, in which the brand itself was created with deep participation with users.

Real World Online Casting site – tapping into people’s connection with the Real World experience.

Choose or Lose and the presidential election – engaging the audience in a new way, with an outlet specifically targeted to their needs.

Summary:

First, start with great ideas.

Next, add a strong emotional connection.

Let the audience find people like themselves.

Give them ways to let us know what they think – good and bad, and listen to what they say – co-create the brand.

—–

Q: What about the stormy side of the BFF relationship?

A: I’d rather have people be passionate and upset than not carrying. We get lots of positive and negative feedback, but that’s good – we want engagement. It’s ok if people say bad things.

Q: You have the perfect audience who wants to consume, produce, and even be in media – but what if you were in an insurance company, or a paper goods company. Do these principles apply?

A: I think they do. The principles should transfer – it is about putting the audience or consumer at the center of what you do – you’d have different users perhaps, but the point is to focus on the user before the technology and before the tool.

Q: Are the youth audiences of MTV beyond TV, and beyond advertising?

A: Television is important to them, but it is just one of many screens. So advertising has to adopt and change – but that doesn’t mean it isn’t possible. As an example, one of the “remixes” at the VMA was with Herbal Essences and sponsored – that is advertising, but in a different way. The key is an additive experience for the users – not a separate or extraneous piece – but a good show with good content in it. A great piece of entertainment, not an infomercial for Herbal Essences.

Q: Is the MTV brand splintering? How can you cover all these different needs and not lose brand focus?

A: The music industry isn’t splintering – it’s dying, or undergoing an immense change. But the audience isn’t splintering, they want different experiences and we provide multiple different experiences – if you’re giving the audiences what they want you stay relevant. We get lots of criticism on MTV for not showing videos like we did 20 years ago – but you have to evolve and grow as your audience does. Every year new people join the audience and bring new expectations and new experiences – you have to keep in tune with what they are interested in and looking for – that’s what keeps your brand relevant.

Key point: Objectives, not technology, need to lead your effort

Don’t build a community just because your competitors do. Don’t just try to “generate buzz” – what is the goal you hope that buzz will accomplish? Figuring out what you’re trying to achieve will let you then measure what you are doing.

It isn’t “how do we get involved in the groundswell” but what problem are we trying to solve or what opportunities are we trying to create.

These are the main objectives:

1. Listening
2. Talking
3. Energizing
4. Supporting
5. Embracing

Analogies to organizational roles:

Research -> Listening
Marketing -> Talking
Sales -> Energizing
Support -> Supporting
Development -> Embracing

In the groundswell (ie, in the web 2.0 era), each of these needs to be transformed a bit. He went through each of them with some examples, including vendors.

Unfortunately, I didn’t hear a single mention of the use of open source to help deliver on these objectives – each objective ended with a brief table listing approaches and vendors – but no mention of assembling your own solutions with open source frameworks, despite the reality that open source frameworks are often the best solutions in many of these spaces.

I know Forrester hasn’t historically focused on open source and I don’t expect them to – but buying product solutions from proprietary vendors isn’t the entire universe. He also didn’t really cover how you integrate these solutions together – so that you don’t end up with five siloed solutions but a cohesive strategy and integrated set of applications which exchange and share data. [Note: this did come up during the Q & A - see the end of the notes below.]

Listening

Listening – this is like your old research department, which is designed to get information from customers.

Example of Lynn Perry, cancer patient, on waiting for treatment at the treatment center – sitting in the waiting room, recognizing “my time is more precious than theirs” – the importance of scheduling and managing people’s tasks in that context – while spending tons on treatment equipment, don’t ignore the need to manage people’s time.

National Comprehensive Cancer Network forum – supporting patiences and caregivers everywhere (SPACE?) – built by Communispace.

This is an example of using a private community (he points to vendors like Communispace, MarketTools, Think Passenger) to create listening opportunities.

The other approach is monitoring buzz in the blogosphere, etc.

Talking

This isn’t just about talking – but it is about conversation, and building brand by participating in the conversation.

Adidas Soccer page on MySpace – when you friend this profile, you get graphics you can use in your own MySpace layouts.

4 million impressions for 100k. This is highly effective talking strategy.

Talking can also mean blogging, something Forrester gets lots of questions about.

Energizing

This is about helping your best customers recruit other customers.

Jim Noble and eBags – energizing with ratings and reviews. He wrote a good review. The zipper broke. He engaged with the head of design from eBags, who actually took his changes to the factory in HongKong where they implemented the suggestions he provided.

Use ratings and reviews (vendors like Bazaarvoice, PowerReviews)

Or designate lead customers to energize others – by creating a brand ambassador program.

Supporting

Dell Support Forum – Posts from predator – 20,452 since 1999.

“I actually enjoy helping people. That’s what got me hooked: when you help people and they say ‘Thank You’.”

The point is people will be willing to help each other. (Vendors: Lithium, Jive, Prospero)

Or, enable customers to build solutions together (Vendors: SocialText, Confluence, Wikia)

Embracing

Work with users to create and prioritize new features, new products.

Salesforce.com idea exchange as the primary example. (Vendors: Communispace, MarketTools)

What about objectives before technology?

Getting back to objectives, Bernoff went through some ROI calculations – cost of running a forum versus answering support calls, cost of corporate communications (in and outbound) versus blogging, etc.

But it isn’t just about ROI – as you start doing this it is a reformation in the way you do things – it will change the company in more profound ways than just the ROI calculation.

–
First question from the audience – is about “who can help us” – he mentions that there are many companies which “can help you build communities” (quick plug – mine not Bernoff’s – companies like Optaros).

Another question from the audience asked about “an integrated approach” – he cautions that companies shoudl start with one objective and then grow from there – integrated is good, but it should be integrated which grows from initial successes – know where you are going in being integrated, but don’t try to do everything all at once.

(Note: somewhere in between disclosure and a plug: Optaros‘ work with Swisscom Mobile Labs is a Groundswell Awards finalist).

• Don’t get caught up in the next shiny object: forcus on creating experiences for people
• People ask how much control to give customers – but customers have already taken control and we’ll never get it back
• Twitter (with friends)
• Flickr

Carrie Johnson and Christine Overby just finished the day 2 opening remarks, talking about things carried over from day one – Richard Edelman’s “Windy City Rules” and “Be It, Don’t Buy It” (see Jeremy Pepper’s notes); Christine Hefner on Playboy’s use of new media (myspace, Playboy U) and organizational change (as in, if you can’t change the organization you’re in, change organizations).

Next up Josh Bernoff keynote.

I’ve left a brief comment there, but wanted to expand on it here. This isn’t just a question of two different approaches to delivering Internet TV – it’s a fundamental difference of passive consumption versus active participation.

The fundamental difference between Joost and Miro is seen in these two quotes.

From the Joost FAQ, section on “Content Related Questions, ” the question is “Can I upload my own videos?“:

Not at the moment. Right now, we’re concentrating on high-quality TV content from well-known TV brands, so that we can provide entertainment to the widest possible audience. Future versions of Joost may allow you to upload your own material, but we have no immediate plans for this.

As opposed to, on the GetMiro site, the entire first-level tab called create, where one reads:

How do I get my Videos on Miro?

Miro converts any media RSS feed into a channel. Don’t worry if you’ve never heard of RSS — it’s an open distribution format that works with Miro, iTunes, and lots of other tools. Many blogs and video sharing services automatically generate an RSS feed. Once you have a feed that works in Miro (please test it first!), you can submit it to the Miro Guide.

With pointers to the Make Internet TV site, where you’ll find:

We have created a detailed set of guides for shooting, editing, publishing, and promoting internet video. We think it’s the best resource anywhere. If you are getting started with creating internet video or if you want to learn more about a specific topic, it’s the best place to start.

To me, this is the clear difference between Internet TV imagined as something brought to you by “well-known TV brands” (turning the internet into TV) versus Internet TV imagined as something inherently participatory (turning TV into the internet).

It shouldn’t be hard to tell which one runs on my machine(s).

Help spread the word:

I written before about both Dopplr and Tripit but never specifically to compare the two. Both track information about your travel as well as the travel of your friends, in order to let you know when you and your friends will be in the same place at the same time.

Well, next week I’m headed to Chicago for the Forrester Consumer Forum, so I thought I’d take this opportunity to compare the use of the two sites in relation to that trip. All the images below are thumbnails, click on them to see full size.

If you just want the conclusion?: The fight’s not over yet, but Tripit has become more consistently useful to me. Dopplr’s facebook app and existing userbase is all that keeps me there at the moment, and that is an advantage easily lost.

Adding Trips

Dopplr users add trips by just putting in start date, end date, and name of the city they are visiting:

It’s a simple, clean interface, which tries to autocomplete what you type. They use place names drawn from Geonames, and seem to have most major cities covered. (See posts here and here on how that autocomplete has evolved).

Notes are optional, and can help store things like airline confirmation numbers, hotels, etc.

Tripit users add trips by forwarding confirmation emails (from airlines, booking agencies, hotels, etc) to plans@tripit.com from one of their registered addresses. Tripit receives the email, parses out the information, and tries to assign it to an existing itinerary where that makes sense, or creates an “unfiled item” for things it can’t assign to existing trips.

Here’s what Tripit created based on my forwarding of email from the airline and the hotel:

Tripit recognized, since I sent the airline email first, that the Chicago Hotel belonged to my Chicago trip, and automatically added to my itinerary directions from the airport to the hotel, as well as a map centered on the hotel. (I deleted the generic “Map of Chicago” which had been added before I sent the hotel confirmation email).

In detail view, Tripit also retains things like loyalty program numbers, confirmation codes, seats if noted in the confirmations, etc. All of this can also be seen in a print-friendly format for carrying with you – very valuable if you travel alot and can lose things like confirmation numbers. I also like the “Help Us Improve Tripit!” section, which lets you give live feedback on how well their engine parsed the emails you forwarded to it.

Adding Friends

Adding friends in Dopplr can be done by inviting them to join the service (put in name and email and Dopplr will invite them), by allowing Dopplr to look through your gmail contacts, twitter followers/friends, and/or facebook friends. It can also import hCard format data. As Dopplr also has a facebook app, it has access to your friend information. For twitter, it doesn’t even need to log in as you since your followed/following relationships are public once it has your username. For Gmail, you have to provide your username and password, though Dopplr promises never to send messages without your specific approval.

In addition, you can also view “New Travellers on Dopplr” and “People You Might Now” – these use second order connections (people who were invited by people with whom you share trips, people who share trips with other people with whom you also share trips). This creates a nice mix of deliberate invite (I want to share info with a colleague) and synchronicity (I haven’t seen that person since last year’s SXSW but it might be fun to see if we’re ever in the same town).

Dopplr is still in private beta, meaning people do have to be invited, but invites are unlimited for those already in the system. (Want one, just leave a comment below).

On Tripit, which is now open to all users, you add friends simply by putting in email addresses and customizing the message – no links to your address book, facebook, twitter, etc.

What am I sharing?

Dopplr’s model resembles Twitter’s, in the sense that you have a bi-directional relationship (those whose trips you can see, and those who can see your trips – not necessarily the same people). You explicitly choose for each “friend” you’re connected to whether they can see your trips or not, and they control whether you can see theirs.

This is great, from a “not accidentally disclosing more than you want” perspective, but it actually can be a bit confusing – several of my colleagues thought they had shared their trips with me when in fact all they had done was accept being able to see mine – they missed the extra step. (If you browse over to connections this gets much clearer, as they call out who can see your trips versus whose trips you can see, but if you just glance through the setup process you can miss it).

Tripit, on the other hand, distinguishes between friends and collaborators. Friends can see your trips, and you can see theirs – destinations and dates.

Collaborators can view detailed info and can add plans to your trip – this is really designed for people traveling together to add details to the agenda – events, hotels, day trips, raw notes, data imported from the provided TripClipper (basically just a bookmarklet which adds urls to a given trip), and so on.

Feeds, APIs

Both offer various feeds of your own trips and trips you have visibility into.

Dopplr can give you an iCal format or ATOM feed of your own trips, or the trips you have visibility to. (In fact, the Atom feeds are geocoded, so you can do some fun and interesting things with them). You don’t seem to able to subscribe to specific fiends’ feeds, though.

Tripit also lets you get a calendar feed (iCal) of your trips, or specific friends’ trips, but not all your friends trips and yours in one feed. Their feeds are not geocoded.

What’s Missing?

Dopplr supports OpenID; Tripit does not.

Tripit allows for “collaboration” on trips, but Dopplr does not.

Tripit doesn’t get trains. Sending an Amtrak confirmation just results in an error. I know trains are less common, but in the BOS-NY-WA corridor the Acela is a common mode of business transit, and I know many European travellers use trains frequently as well. It’s also easy enough to work around, since you can add details manually. (Dopplr doesn’t care how you get from one place to another, just what cities you are in on what dates, so it avoids this problem).

[Update: Per this blog post, Tripit is working on rail support]

I don’t think either of the sites is really leveraging the value of the historical data well yet – Dopplr lets you get a geocoded feed of all your trips, including past trips, but there isn’t yet any real way to use this data – # of days away from home in last X months, for example.

Tripit, if you forward a travel confirmation in the past, accepts it and creates a trip – but then it doesn’t show up in your “upcoming trips” list (well, it isn’t upcoming). If you view your list of trips in calendar view, you can go into the past and pull up details on an individual trip, but there’s no reporting on the trips you’ve taken in the aggregate or reusing former trips in a new trip.

Open-source software projects tend to be initiated and built exclusively by programmers and their focus usually lies, as it should, with core features and technology. But a project that is exclusively driven by programmers usually won’t have an elegant user interface.

This post started as a comment on his blog, but got too long so I moved it here instead.

Reville proposed fixing this problem, in part, by establishing a “Free Beauty Squadron” which would connect designers and open source projects looking to improve their interfaces:

Here’s how a Free Beauty Squadron might work. A volunteer committee of experts asks projects to apply, explaining why they are a good candidate for an overhaul and what they hope to accomplish. When a project is selected, a paid designer flies out to meet one or more team members in person and begins developing a plan. Over a 6 week period, the designer creates mockups and interfaces flows for a new user experience, all in consultation with the coders. When the designer is done, the project has graphic files, documentation of a new UI, and an implementation plan to quickly or gradually put the new interface in place. The designer reserves 2 weeks for future consultation with the project as issues inevitably arise during implementation. The committee then sends the designer to their next project.

While I’m with Nicholas on the problem, I think this is the wrong direction in which to aim for a solution.

It’s not just that it is difficult to add design to the surface of a fully formed application (while beauty may be skin deep, true usability goes right through to the core), or that the interactions between new designers and existing Open Source projects might be difficult, or that the projects would need to take time to implement the new designs (these are logistical problems which Nicholas admits and offers what he sees as reasosonable workarounds to).

The problem is that it sets up the idea that “design work ” (specifically he seems to be targetting visual design, which is only a subset of a broader set of design skills from which many open source projects could benefit) is so fundamentally different than other kinds of production that it requires a different funding mechanism to get produced.

Put another way, why pay the designers and not the coders? Or, perhaps more accurately, why attract and encourage designers differently than coders?

Is it just that designers don’t need the tools open source produces?

Are the varied and sundry motivations which drive coders to contribute to open source somehow not relevant in the design community?

Many contributors to open source are actually paid employees of large companies using the software in question – don’t any of those patrons have designers?

I would assume many designers might appreciate the opportunity to build their portfolios with design solutions to real world challenges – for which their compensation might be reputation and experience, rather than cash.

Part of the problem must be in the code-centric nature of many open source communities, in which your ability to hack is the (only) measure of your worth – but that has been evolving in many projects to include broader skillsets.

So how does the open source community broadly engage with the designers in our midst, without having to create a separate charity brigade?

ICanHasCheezburger, or at least sites like it, should have a place on your corporate intranet.

So Why should lolcats (pictures of cats with captions in the imagined/projected diction of a cat who uses IM/SMS a lot) belong in your Enterprise 2.0?

Developed by two individuals known as Cheezburger and Tofuburger, is best enjoyed without deep explanation – just start visiting the web site, subscribe to the RSS feed (this is the one which works best on my phone), or follow them on twitter. For those who need explanation, start here:

• ICanHasCheezburger/About
• I’M IN UR NEWSPAPER WRITIN MAH COLUM: Rapidly spreading Web photo-posting phenomenon centers on felines with poor spelling (Houston Chronicle article)
• im in mai blog, postin’ bout cats: The Cuteness of Grammatical errors
• im in ur programmz, codin in ur dialect: LOLCode and Feline Dialectology

Because your employees are people too. In fact they were people long before you made them employees. As people, they have interests which only partially (or maybe even not at all) overlap with whatever it is you pay them to do (gasp!).


Part of the disconnect between the fun people have using web 2.0 properties like YouTube, Flickr, LiveJournal, MySpace, and (the darling of the moment) Facebook is the fact that they get to talk about things that are not properly corporate. Some folks react to this by worrying about wasted time and lost productivity, but I think that is absolutely the wrong approach – at least if you want creativity, innovation, dedication, and loyalty from the people you employ.

Sometimes laughing out loud at a Lolcat from ICanHasCheezburger does more for my productivity than a week of intensive sessions on strategic planning.

To put it another way, and borrow from Dave Weinberger, your employees’ [interests] are miscellaneous. Or, looked at from the other side, the things your enterprise might be interested in are miscellaneous. Trying to decide definitively upfront what’s on topic and what’s off topic on your intranet will kill, or at least fatally wound, any potential innovation which might happen there.

A few recent examples of miscellany from Optaros’ own Intranet 2.0. (Ok, we don’t really call it that – it’s just our intranet, but it is Enterprise 2.0 enabled – every employee has an internal blog, in addition to forums and wikis for projects/topics of interest, etc.):

• And now for something completely different – a discussion from one of our user experience (UX) folks about Monty Python
• A post from a senior developer on foosball strategy, complete with diagrams of optimal bank shots against which defenses are inefficient and difficult to maintain
• Results of a cracker eating contest in the Austin office
• Photos from the Swiss offices’ joint (Geneva and Zurich) Tennis tournament – our own Swiss Open)

The PEW / Internet Project recently released a report on hobbyists, showing that:

83% of online Americans have used the internet to pursue their hobbies

and:

Relatively younger American adults are more likely than their elders to look for information about hobbies or interests online. Some 86% of internet users ages 18 to 29 and 88% of internet users ages 30 to 49 utilize the medium to pursue hobbies. By comparison, 77% of 50-64 year-old internet users and 62% of online Americans age 65 and older report using the internet to pursue hobbies.

So are these users, accustomed to researching online things of interest to them, going to be asked to stop cold and speak (and read) official corporate voice only when they hit your corporate intranet?

When you’re at a conference (I’ve been at both Ajax World West and Garnter Open Source / Web Innovation Summits in the last week) or in an airport, electrical outlets are at a premium. There are countless web 2.0 knowledge workers wandering the halls seeking power. (Ampires, or wherevolts).

This little device turns that moment of potential conflict – where you spot an outlet but all the available sockets are in use – into a moment of collaboration. (In case it isn’t possible to tell from my hotel room photograph, this translates a single three-prong outlet into three. Simply approach the user of one of the existing outlets and ask to unplug them for an instant – they get to stay plugged in, you get to plug in, and you get one bonus plug for a third person or a second device.)

It’s “just good enough” – carrying a real powerstrip with fault protection, etc. would be better, from the point of view of protecting your laptop – but hey, you were plugged directly into the socket already, so this doesn’t make things worse.

It’s small enough to put in your computer bag and travel without problems.

It’s cheap enough that if you leave it somewhere by accident you can just go buy another one.

It’s even in RSS orange.