Internet TV – Joost and Miro

Steve Borsch at Connect the Dots has a post today titled “Two approaches to internet TV: Joost and Miro.”

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.

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Yochai Benkler at the Gartner Web Innovation / Open Source Summit

I spent the latter half of this week at the Gartner Web Innovation and Open Source Summits. (Officially two different conferences, but held over the same three days in the same location).

Luckily, despite some overlapping sessions, the keynote by Yochai Benkler was shared across summits and I was able to attend.

If you’re not familiar with Prof. Benkler, you should be. His book The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom is the treatise on /study of commons-based peer production. (It’s available in many formats including free versions under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Attribution Share-Alike License).

He’s also the author of “Coase’s Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm,” in which he argues that:

while free software is highly visible, it is in fact only one example of a much broader social-economic phenomenon. I suggest that we are seeing is the broad and deep emergence of a new, third mode of production in the digitally networked environment. I call this mode “commons-based peer-production,” to distinguish it from the property- and contract-based models of firms and markets. Its central characteristic is that groups of individuals successfully collaborate on large-scale projects following a diverse cluster of motivational drives and social signals, rather than either market prices or managerial commands.

What follows are my rough outline notes of his talk. Benkler’s the kind of speaker where the notes or even the slides don’t do justice to seeing him speak – but at least I’ve got some of the highlights and examples down.

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Represent

I’ve been catching up with videos since the release of the Miro player public preview. (And as I’ve had some traveling time, on trains, waiting for planes, etc).

Two recent videos stood out as worth sharing. Both focus on creative visualization, and are inspiring in terms of how some relatively simply changes in visual display of information can have a tremendous impact.

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It takes a village – hyperlocal means not going it alone

Jeff Jarvis takes the occasion of the “long-time coming closing” of backfence to talk broady about the Local Challenge:

Hyperlocal will not, I firmly believe, happen at one site. It will work only via networks: content, commercial, social. It will work by gathering, not producing.

In other words, hyperlocal efforts must be based on content aggregation and syndication models, not just content creation models. We need flexible networks for connecting together content producers, advertisers (funding sources), and content publishers.

Jarvis also points to Paul Fahri’s “Rolling the Dice” in the AJR, which asks “is there a real business in this kind of business?,” and answers that “the field as a whole is so far financially marginal.”

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Assemble Enterprise 2.0 from Open Source

Optaros this morning published a white paper I co-wrote with colleagues Bruno Von Rotz, Jeff Potts, and Dave Gynn: Assemble Enterprise 2.0 from Open Source. (It is freely available from the site, but registration is required).

Executive Summary:

Enterprise 2.0 promises a new approach to creating, managing, and consuming knowledge within the enterprise, allowing patterns and value to emerge out of relatively freeform, experimental, unrestricted exchanges. Unlike knowledge management systems of the nineties, which locked users into strict taxonomies, enforced rigid workflows, and reflected hierarchical management relationships, emerging social computing systems rely on lightweight, adaptable frameworks designed to facilitate knowledge creation across traditional boundaries, enable rapid change, and foster contributions from throughout the management hierarchy.

This new knowledge management paradigm needs to be supported by new technologies and approaches. It isn’t, however, just a matter of selecting the right set of applications or the right platform; there is no “One True Architecture” which includes all the features and functions users could ever desire.

The paper goes on to talk about Drupal and Alfresco as core platforms on top of which Enterprise 2.0 solutions can be delivered.

I’ll be at Enterprise 2.0 for the next few days – attending sessions (and blogging what I can) and at the Optaros booth during the demo pavilion hours.

Stop by and say hello!