Web 2.0: Leveraging Community by Ron Lichty

Anyone remember when you put a music CD into your computer and what you saw was always, ALWAYS blank: "Track 1, Track 2, Track 3, ..." unless you typed in the names of the tracks yourself?

Today, things are different. When you use iTunes today, there's a brief wait when it tells you it's checking with "Gracenote". And voila, there's the name of the CD, the artist, the tracks.

But there's no more information recorded on today's CDs than there was 15 years ago. There's no information there. None. So where did it come from?

What a couple guys in a garage started doing sometime over a decade ago, about the time the web was emerging, was to keep track of type-ins of the CD names/artists/tracks -- they made it easy to remember other people's type-ins as well. And they saved them in a database along with a "fingerprint" of the CD -- the length of the CD itself, the number of tracks, and the EXACT length of each track. The next time someone anywhere in the world inserted a copy of that CD, its fingerprint was sent to Gracenote, Gracenote sent back the content information to the Gracenote-enabled player, and it would magically display the CD's name/artists/tracks as though they were recorded on the CD's laser-pitted surface.

What started as a couple guys in a garage became Gracenote, the technology behind iTunes and almost every other playing technology not just for CDs but also MP3s as well.

Newsweek just posted a little story online (may be in the print magazine next week, but not sure they're always the same) called "To Catch a Sneak", in which Gracenote Chief Technical Officer Ty Roberts explains how Gracenote helped expose a fraud in the music industry -- the classical pianist Joyce Hatto, who was briefly called "the greatest pianist that no one had never heard of" until Gracenote technology played a role in exposing that CDs issued as hers by her producer husband had in fact been performed by others.

The fraud and the expose story are fascinating. And the article helps explain what Gracenote does in just a little more detail, if you’re interested.

"Web 2.0" in part references the power that letting readers and users of a site contribute to the site's content can bring. Gracenote is an example of one of the earliest of user-content-generated content, and of that power. Much as Wikipedia is a user-generated encyclopedia, Gracenote was and is user-generated music identification technology that shares the contributions of the first with all the rest of us to make our lives easier.

One Laptop Per Child by Ron Lichty

The status of the One Laptop Per Child project revealed to SDForum's Emerging Tech SIG this week by architect Ivan Krstic is even more remarkable than I'd previously heard.

You may remember Nicholas Negroponte and Kofi Annan announced, in 2005, this nonprofit humanitarian effort to change how kids learn, starting with a laptop so inexpensive it can fill the world's children's needs and provide a computer for every child, starting with the billion school-age kids in the developing world. OLPC is targeting an initial unit cost of $150, getting it down to $100 by mid '08.

Ivan said he was recruited with the question, "Can you secure 100 million laptops? Oh, and rewrite the file system? Oh, and by the way, your first users will be six years old." I remember going to Apple when its mission was still just six words, "We're going to change the world." This project has that feeling, in spades. He's one of a core team that until recently numbered only 12 and is still only 14.

Nonetheless, the project has prototype units and intends in the coming year to ship 5-10 million units starting later this year. Ivan says they've been approached by virtually every country in the world.

There's no longer a crank on the computer itself -- but it's designed to connect to a unique pull-cord generator -- like a yo-yo that adapts to the strength of the user; or an outboard crank; or a car battery; or solar cells. Through multiple innovations, it consumes less than a tenth of the power of the typical laptop today. It supports the 802.11s ESS mesh that lets the laptops form into ad hoc networks with or without an internet connection -- but if any one of them has an internet connection, they all do through the mesh. They've measured up to 2 kilometer connection distances via the two bunny-ear antennae, each of which can connect to a different network.

The rubber membrane keyboard is impermeable to dust, sand and dirt in addition to water, and the touchpad is the width of the entire laptop. The dual mode 7.5" 1200x900-pixel display, at 200 dpi, is higher resolution than 95 percent of displays available today and may be more visible in sunlight than any other laptop existing today. It has three USB ports, an SD card slot (added for those countries that insist on adding Microsoft OS and Office applications), stereo speakers, mic and a VGA 30 frames-per-second camera. Inside is an AMD Geode LX-700 0.8 watt, 433 MHz, with 128K L1 cache and 128K L2 cache. They're developing and focused on open source only. The GUI, window manager, security, file system and search were all written in Python.

They're expecting each country to develop OLPC software for the culture and in the languages needed by their children. Right on the keyboard is a "View Source" key -- nothing hidden, no secrets. They're providing foundational stuff like a plug-in architecture to manage software growth and bloat; the file system Ivan was brought in to work on; an object store for user's work, with version control, meta data tracking, pervasive search and ability to sort, filter and display by timeline; presence -- which feature may set a standard that doesn't yet exist for presence; and out-of-box security without requiring passwords or locking down the physical machines.

It's exciting. And it's cute. And as Ivan kept saying, cool as the technology is, it's really about changing how kids learn.

The TED Conference by Ron Lichty

Recommended viewing:

The TED Conference - Technology, Entertainment and Design - has been on my conference wish list for nearly a decade. I heard of it first from a UI designer colleague who worships Richard Saul Wurman, who founded the conference. I've had a few friends who were lucky enough to attend and came back with stories that succeeded in whetting every envy neuron in my body.

Now, the TED Conference has video clip highlights online (click on the Highlights tab).


The highlights "reels" are all short and virtually every one of them worth watching, but I highly recommend checking out:

• designer William McDonough
  
• science writer Laurie Garrett
  
• inventors Bill Gross and Dean Kamen
  
• artist Arthur Ganson
  
• primatologist Jane Goodall
  

There are also a half dozen of this year's talks -- the whole thing -- online:

• Hans Rosling's talk shows amazing information visualization technology capability.
  
• Believe it or not, Al Gore's warmup is funnier than the comedian in the short highlight clips (and Al's message is a follow-up to his recently released movie).
  
• There's a brief look at Tony Robbins and why the life coach is so compelling to so many.
  
• Finally, you DO want to listen to South Bronx community organizer and MacArthur winner Majora Carter. She'll make you think twice about how things work in New York, in New Orleans, in your town.
  

One day, I'll get to TED firsthand, but until then...

The Nonprofit of the Future by Ron Lichty

Intriguing. By 2016, what changes will technology have wrought in nonprofits? “Can you envision the nonprofit of 2016?” How will the role and the work of nonprofits change?

That’s the topic of a discussion started by writer Paul Lamb. He intends, from the discussion, to create a collective article, with attribution to contributors, and any profits from the piece to be contributed to the Nonprofit Technology Enterprise Network (N-TEN).

Pointer to this discussion was in the SF Chronicle’s The Tech Chronicles blog, which comments...

Over the last decade the number of nonprofits has grown by 68 percent and now includes some 837,000 organizations, according to a recent report by the National Council of Nonprofit Associations. Based on IRS data, the council estimated that these groups had combined assets of $1.76 trillion in 2003 -- which would make the "nonprofit economy the sixth largest in the world, larger than the economies of Brazil, Russia, Canada, Mexico, and South Korea."

If your interest, like mine, is in the community and collaboration that technology can enable, take a look at the discussion, and contribute your own vision of the technology-enabled nonprofit's future.

The next photography revolution by Ron Lichty

Think about what it will be like when every digital camera has a GPS, so that your camera not only date- and time-stamps your photos, but also location-stamps them.

Think about searching through Flickr (or just your own personal collection of photos) by first bringing up a map and zeroing in on Bear Valley to find the cross-country ski training you did for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society's Team in Training, or West Yellowstone and Anchorage to find photos of the ski marathons you succeeded in completing. Or zeroing in on your parents' street to find the photos they sent of Christmas Eve at their house, or to the PBwiki mansion on the Peninsula to find the photos of the last hackathon held there.

It makes it all the more important to get geocoding support built natively into databases like SQL Server. (Microsoft knows this, by the way. At their recent SF announcement event for SQL Server Service Pack 1, SQL Server Always On, and SQL Server Everywhere, it was Microsoft Data and Storage Platform SVP Paul Flessner from whom I first heard mention of GPS-stamped photos, and Flessner's slide of SQL Server futures had the note "Spatial goes mainstream" tagged onto version "vNext".)

new Ruby conference by Ron Lichty

SDForum is looking to bring together yet another community of technologists in the Bay Area -- programmers using and interested in using the Ruby programming language (and its associated framework Rails).

The kickoff will be the weekend Silicon Valley Ruby Conference April 22-23.

review: The Virtual Handshake by Ron Lichty

I wrote this review for SDForum's bimonthly newsletter. It was just published on page 20 of the Feb/March SDForum newsletter.


The Virtual Handshake
by David Teten and Scott Allen
reviewed by Ron Lichty

How do you most effectively leverage the new social software tools that have emerged in the past few years? As David Teten and Scott Allen ably advise in their new book, The Virtual Handshake, these tools can help you meet new people, maintain relationships, build your own flexible, lifetime network, open doors, close deals and build professional success.

The new tools include blogs, social network sites, relationship capital management software and biography analysis software. Some of the older tools include contact management software, shared workspaces, personal Web sites, e-mail lists, instant messaging and Web conferencing.

In our July SDForum / SofTech meeting, "Architecting Community and Collaboration Solutions," our panel looked at tools like blogs, wikis, meeting software, group email, and message boards, seeking to answer these kinds of questions. (There's a summary of the event, along with a lot of other discoveries both before and since, on the official event blog at:
http://ronlichty.blogspot.com/ )

Teten and Allen got the luxury of a couple more years, 250 pages and a web site (and hopefully an advance and some royalties) to explore those questions, so took them to a deeper level. It's not often that you read a book in an area where you have interest and passion and discover authors who both deepen and broaden your thinking. It's equally rare to find a book that, despite being published, as books are, months after they're written and more months after they were researched, that nonetheless introduces technologies and applications and services that seem as fresh as if they were posted to a web site yesterday. The Virtual Handshake was that for me. Here are everything from lists of providers to rules for effective use to the subtleties of using them for best success. My copy is tagged with Post-its and laced with highlighting.

Who are the providers of all these areas of online services? See the table they provide, by the way updated on the authors’ website at:
www.TheVirtualHandshake.com/map

How do you promote your blog? Have you built relationships with the A-listers, syndicated your page, connected with other bloggers, and submitted your site to the specialized blog search engines? Do you know who all these people and services are? Teten and Allen do.

What can you do that you might not have? iCohere in Walnut Creek used its own software to host a four-day online virtual conference on collaborative learning. Are you holding a business meeting? Have you checked out Cvent, LeverageSoftware.com, or PowerMingle to connect attendees beforehand, and prepare them to meet each other?

How do you improve the effectiveness of your email approaches to people you know well? How about to those to whom you’ve only just been introduced? How do you write emails that don’t get tossed before they’re even read? What’s appropriate use of email and what’s not?

How do you truly connect with people online? How do you build and nurture your network?

More general advice? There's some of that here, too. As you set up your web site and your blog, they advise, make it easy for others to republish your content, perhaps using the Creative Commons licenses.

The Virtual Handshake removes some of the mystery of blogs that newcomers often struggle with, such as terminology like “Permalink” and “Trackback”.

To the other extreme, one of the most fascinating aspects of the book are examples of how people are using social software and services in ways that even long-experienced online networkers have likely never thought of.

Take the Value Investors Club, an exclusive investment ideas network where membership requires writing up an "A+" investment idea for the other members -- and maintaining membership requires two to six more such analyses each year. It’s fascinating that the 250 members know each other only by aliases and can communicate only to the entire community –preventing private messages for purposes like cross-firm recruiting.

Or did you know branding expert Rob Frankel "runs a weekly public chat every Monday morning in which he donates one hour of his time to anyone who drops by. He likens it to the academic tradition of 'office hours.'"

Or do you know the story of the Lockergnome service, a score of free tech newsletters with over a million subscribers -- as well as the annual Gnomedex convention, the exclusive Pirillo.com thinktank, regular TV hosting spots and magazine columns, and a couple books – that Chris Pirillo first began in the form of emails of his online discoveries to his college friends? All that activity has made Pirillo a recognized leader these days in email publishing.

From how to manage the e-mail deluge to setting up the virtual you, from increasing the relevance of your network to doubling your “weak ties” (and why you’d want to), The Virtual Handshake can help. Whether you’re a rookie or a veteran at using these services, and whether you’re in marketing or sales, or looking for a job (or preparing for the eventuality that you one day will be), this book will point you in the right direction.

Blogging in Business by Ron Lichty

"...the real excitement here is not how much money business can make from blogging, but how dramatically blogging will reshape the world of business from top to bottom and create new sources of competitive advantage for firms that learn how to use this new medium intelligently," says David Kline in his AlwaysOn post The Voice of the Customer :: AO.

That's a pretty good description of what we were trying to get at, regarding not only blogs but community and collaboration software of all kinds, with our SDForum/SofTech event, Architecting Community and Collaboration Solutions.

Kline notes it's not so different from the Web itself, where "...the real story of corporate America's embrace of the Internet in the last 10 years is not so much a tale of how much money has been made online, although that is considerable, but of how thoroughly almost every facet of global business has been altered by that embrace."

He goes on to make the case for the opportunity businesses have to leverage blogs for product definition -- to invite customers "to tell you directly, in their own often-rambling but always revealing words, exactly what they would like your new product to look like and why? All firms have to do is get their engineers and marketers blogging with their customers."

Kline is co-author of Blog!
How the Newest Media Revolution Is Changing Politics, Business, and Culture.

For more insight into the varied uses of blogging in business, visit David Kline's BlogRevolt.com

Web 2.0 and ALL that... by Ron Lichty

Always On is hosting Marc Canter's amazing tour-de-force through Web 2.0, Breaking the Web Wide Open! :: AO

Want to know about microformats and mashups and the semantic web, and get understandings of SIP (Session Initiation Protocol for internet telephony and conferencing), FOAF (Friend Of A Friend, a schema to describe people and relationships in a way that computers can parse), xHTML, XFN (a microformat standard for representing your social network), and OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language, a hierarchical file format for storing microcontent and structured data developed by Dave Winer of RSS and podcast fame)?

This is the place.

Podcasting by Ron Lichty

Podcasting was the topic of back-to-back presentations at BayCHI's September meeting, and not only were the presentations highly enlightening regarding podcasts and how to do them, but so was the coverage by Liesel Mendoza that came out last last week in BayCHI's newsletter. Liesel's excellent writeup is not online yet, but is provided under the Creative Commons license, so I am reprinting it here in its entirety.

BayCHI is the Bay Area chapter of the Computer Human Interface SIG of ACM, the software professionals organization. The writeup should be posted to the event's page later this month or early in November.

------- keep reading for Liesel Mendoza's coverage of the Podcasting presentations at BayCHI --------

September Meeting Report

by Liesel Mendoza, lmendoza@baychi.org

Insights on Podcasting: Podcast Solutions and Podcast Problems
Dan Klass, The Bitterest Pill
+
Podcasting: Media Evolution or Revolution?
Doug Kaye, IT Conversations

Audio and Slides: http://www.baychi.org/calendar/20050913/

-----

Insights on Podcasting: Podcast Solutions and Podcast Problems
Dan Klass, The Bitterest Pill

Dan Klass asked what the audience wanted to know about podcasting and
said he would be happy to share what he knows.

Dan introduced himself as a stay-at-home dad. He is often fetching
milk, fetching juice, turning the channel, changing diapers, making play
date phone calls, and driving kids to and from pre-school and play
dates. He expected his BayCHI presentation would be the longest he has
spoken without interruption in years.

Before becoming a stay-at-home dad, he was a failing actor in Los
Angeles. He was failing in the sense that the hook has been in his
mouth and fallen out, again and again. He was also a comedian.
Performing became less attractive once he had children. He said he no
longer feels the sick and psychotic need to be loved by an audience now
he has kids. However, the need to express oneself and be creative in
some way does not die.

Dan's venture into podcasting started when his wife gave him an iPod for
his birthday. To him, the iPod is the technological equivalent of a
Faberge egg. Once you take it out of the box, you have to immediately
guard it so as not to be scratched or marred. He surfed the internet to
look for that glow-in-the-dark scuba suit that people put on their
iPods. Instead, he found an iPod icon on a video of a couple of folks
talking about Adam Curry and podcasting, Adam Curry being a long-haired
MTV VJ he admired from the '80s. This triggered his interest in doing
his own podcast. He dragged his children to Radio Shack, got a
microphone, hooked it up to his computer, and started recording his
first podcast.

He started podcasting about stay-at-home dads on the fringes of the
entertainment industry.

Dan tackled questions from the audience:

Q: What is a podcast?

A: To generalize, a podcast is a sound file (an MP3) on the internet.
You can subscribe to a series of podcasts. Software is available to
subscribe and automatically download podcasts through RSS (Really Simple
Syndication).

There are probably over 10,000 podcasts today. If you have a specific
topic in mind and don't find a podcast on it, you may want to do a
podcast on that topic. Someone just like you is sitting somewhere
looking for a podcast on the same subject.

Q: How did you come from wanting to have a podcast to actually doing
one? What were the challenges you had to face?

A: The biggest challenge is that Dan is not a technological person. His
background is entertainment, laziness, and fatherhood. To read about
RSS on the internet was not simple. But he did it.

He started recording his show, turned it into an MP3 file, and then
published to his blog. He used RSS, which he figured out by stealing
some code and looking for the part where it has ".mp3," hoping that
replacing it with his file would work.

Dan says, to start with, you must have something to say. Content
creation is the big deal! If you have something to say, you should do
it. His book contains a section talking about the importance of content
creation.

As a comedian, he made fun of other people, society, or anything other
than himself. When he started podcasting, he decided that he will only
talk about himself, about being a stay-at-home dad. He had faith in
narrowcasting. He was not alone. True enough, he received a lot of
emails identifying with him, such as, "I am a dad and I don't like to be
a dad like my dad was. I want to be the dad that you seem to be trying
to be." He started building a community about being a dad. That was
when he knew he was on to something.

Q: How is building the community taking place?

A: Initially, people emailed asking him to check it their own podcasts.
After a while, that faded out, and the emails were from active listeners
of his podcast.

The community building starts with podcasters doing their show. This
becomes the first dialogue with the audience. The users download the
podcast and listen to it at their own time, whether on the train or
while driving. Most podcasters have a blog. There is a blog entry for
each podcast. People who had listened to the podcast start posting
comments on the blog, sending email, leaving a voicemail, or emailing a
sound file. As time goes by and people become more sophisticated, they
may start using Skype. The podcaster then talks back to these people
through more podcasts. The dialogue is phenomenal.

Q: How do you promote your podcast? How do you use the web or your blog
to promote your podcasts? How do people find you?

A: A podcaster needs to get into directories by submitting the podcast's
name and feed URL to iTunes, Podcast Alley, and Podcast Pickle. Dan
even designed his own podcast logo, a funny little head. Never
underestimate the value of a good logo. His logo is worth thousands of
listeners! Never underestimate the power of your own blog. Never
underestimate the value of a good title for your podcast. For example,
he would use a title like "George Clooney and Diapers and Jesus What a
Podcast?" Someone has to stumble into this title somehow.

- Google will crawl your blog.
- Send out press releases.
- Submit to podcast directories.
- Use mailing lists and forums.
- Be active in the community of podcasting.
- Use word of mouth.
- Spread the word through friends.

These are ways to promote your podcast. The podcasting community is an
incredibly supportive and incestuous community. When new people show
up, it's all about getting them started. Money and competition have not
turned podcasting into something evil. It is still a very warm and
nurturing atmosphere as opposed to a commercialized one.

Q: Will this change with more and more large corporations getting into
podcasting?

A: Yes, it will change. Dave Winer, one of the creators of podcasting,
wants podcasting to be kept pure. Not going to happen.

Human nature gravitates towards what is familiar. When someone looks
for a podcast, will he look for some guys working in a small room or for
a well-known network? However, Dan's optimistic side tells him that
there will always be an audience for the underdog. There will always an
audience who rejects the establishment, the corporate-fed and nurtured
product. Will it be harder to get noticed? Yes, maybe. iTunes has
always left a space for the small guy. Can the little guy survive?
Sure hope so. Not everybody likes Britney Spears. Not everybody loves
Raymond. Those who don't will look down on the other part of the tail.
There will always be a need for the narrow part of the tail that is
wagging furiously today.

Q: Have you ever been contacted by any organization to advertise for
them?

A: No. Dan jokingly says had been waiting for Pampers or Juice Box to
contact him. There are sponsored podcasts. Dan would consider doing a
sponsored one. However, some people believe that once you start
accepting money, then it turns into something other than honest content.
If Disney is paying you, you can't make fun of Disney!

Q: Do you have Google ads?

A: No. Dan recommends using Google ads in his book, but hasn't used it
yet.

Q: Is vidcasting emerging?

A: In producing a podcast, you create an RSS feed with enclosures. The
enclosure points to a file, usually an audio file, but it can be a video
file. Yes, they are coming. Video files are much larger, unless
they're shorter. But they are coming. One vidcast example is Tiki Bar
TV (http://tikibartv.blogspot.com/). The guy is funny. The girl is
cute. The show teaches you how to mix a drink in the end. It is just
about four minutes.

Q: What are the copyright issues in podcasting?

A: In radio, you can play any song. When you create a podcast, you
cannot put just any song on your podcast. The difference is that radio
does broadcasting; when you create a podcast, you are distributing
peer-to-peer. You can not include a song in a podcast without explicit
permission from the recording companies. The solution is to find music
that you have permission to use. There's the Podsafe Music Network
(http://music.podshow.com/). Go to garageband.com or magnatune.com.
You can find over a million pieces of music from any genre that you can
download in two seconds.

Q: What do you think of standalone player living on a computer vs.
iPod?

A: It doesn't matter, just listen to the show. What matters is that
you can listen to the show when you have the time using any media.

Q: What do you recommend for people who can't afford an iPod?

A: For people who can not afford an iPod, Dan's podcast is broadcast on
1550 AM KYCY in San Francisco, Wednesdays 8:00-8:45 a.m. Not everybody
can afford an iPod. He is thrilled to be able to do broadcast in his
spare bedroom.

-----

Podcasting: Media Evolution or Revolution?
Doug Kaye, IT Conversations

Doug Kaye is the founder of IT Conversations, recently recognized by
Business Week Online as the best podcast provider. He is also the
author of Loosely Coupled: The Missing Pieces of Web Services (2003, RDS
Associates).

IT Conversations is a podcast channel that disseminates exciting
content, rated by listeners.

Doug was a recording engineer and sound editor in the film business. In
the '70s, he started a computer business and ran it for eighteen years
before selling it. He got involved with four dot-coms. In 2000, he
left his last IT gig. He became a consultant and started writing a
book. The first book, Strategies for Web Hosting and Managed Services
(2001, Wiley) was a success. He had fun writing it.

In the process of writing the second book on web services, he
interviewed folks about what web services are. He recorded his
interviews. It occurred to him that the people he interviewed would
always know much more than he did on web services. As an author, he was
getting in the way of sharing what they know. He was not a good
vehicle. So he went back to some of the folks he interviewed and asked
them if they would mind redoing the interview for the purpose of putting
it out on the internet as audio. They agreed. That was in May, 2003,
which pre-dates the term "podcasting." A year after the first audio
posting, podcasting caught up with IT Conversations.

The prerequisite to podcasting is to have something to say. The most
successful podcasts come from a podcaster's passion for something. The
passion translates and transcends whatever technical challenge they may
encounter to do a podcast.

Podcasting was a curiosity, but it has taken over Doug's life and the
lives of the volunteers working with him. They have produced 720
programs, publishing them at a rate of two per day. He now has a team
of volunteers doing post production work. The team is nearly 50 people
all over the world.

A bit more story about Doug's initial venture into IT Conversations:

- Started with interviews.
- Produced a couple of third-party interviews with bloggers.
- Did a live stream of eTech in San Diego with about 220 simultaneous
listeners at peak and recorded the audio.
- Put the eTech recordings up as MP3 files, which turned out to be
more popular than the original stream, with about 20,000 listeners.
- Repeated the process with more conferences and recordings.
- The top show so far has about 180,000 listeners.

From the beginning, listeners have contacted Doug, wanting to send him
money, but he wasn't set up to take money. People insisted, so he set
up a "tip jar." People started sending him audio files that they
recorded for publishing, but the audio quality and content was awful.
Instead, he gave them advice on how do better. Some did improve, and
now he publishes them.

The biggest gratification for Doug is when people tell him he has
changed their lives. To hear that is addictive. He started thinking
what he can do so he can wake up every morning to more emails from
people saying he had changed their lives.

Today, IT Conversations has 90 shows in the queue for post-production
work. July was the biggest month yet: They delivered eleven terabytes
of MP3 files!

Some UI pointers from Doug:

- People hate audio, because one can't scan audio. People who read
fast would like to consume 30 minutes of audio in five minutes.
- Listening time: Most listening habits are the same as radio: during
drive time, in flight, and while exercising.
- Show length: The most popular shows are 20-30 minutes. The curve
falls off pretty quickly for shows over 40 minutes.
- Shelf life: Almost all programs have long shelf life. Some
programs, like Dan Klass's, are sequential: Some new listeners might
go back to previous editions, but most start with the current show
and subscribe to future shows. By working on conferences, IT
Conversations strives for programs that have long shelf life. IT
Conversations stays away from news.
- Player compatibility: It's important to use a sample rate that's a
multiple of 11.025 KHz (22.05 or 44.1 KHz), because Flash players only
play those rates. IT Conversations has standardized on a bit rates
of 64 kilobits per second, a nice compromise between quality and
file size. In the future, the standard may go up to 128kbps.
- Method of download: Provide manual downloads as well as subscription.

Some questions Doug answered during his talk:

Q: How do you work your way through 720 files?

A: Find content, mark it, put it into your personal queue much like
Netflix. You can either get it manually or set an RSS reader to
download it automatically, so new shows arrive like email.

Q: How do people handle long shows?

A: It's important to break up shows that go over 80 minutes, because
some listeners want to burn it to CD and listen to it while driving.

Q: How do people find audio?

A: A huge percentage of people find podcasts through Google, because
Doug and his team invest a great deal in metadata and descriptive text.
Every program they produce has its own page with a description, a
biography of the speaker, links to associated references, and, in some
instances, a photo of the speaker. They have not done any outbound
advertising, but they achieve high search engine ranking because of the
good quality of their content. Half of Doug's team are engineers and
half are writers.

A new project Doug and his team are working on has to do with
narrowcasting. A lot of spoken word events evaporate every day. Doug's
team is developing a tool called events and venues database (EVD) that
people interested in producing podcasts can use. It's a bottom-up
approach, using grassroots, unmoderated content. They will also
continue to produce more seminars and continue recording what IT
Conversations does, which is top-down, curated content and
presentations.

Q: Do you have recommended hardware configurations for little groups who
are into narrowcasting?

A: They provide information on hardware recommendations for small
groups. They are talking about setting up a Podcast Academy for this
purpose.

Q: What are the problems working with volunteers?

A: Whenever you work with volunteers, one of the challenges is keeping
the quality up, both editorial and the audio. On the editing side, it
is about people not writing very well. You have to work with them.
They created a role called series producer. The series producer will
take all the work and decide which of them are worth posting based on
content and audio quality. Series producers also play the role of copy
editors. They improve the copy. They also created the role of mentors.
The mentors work with the volunteers to improve their work, but
recognize that some just won't make the cut.

All the shows need to be produced with the same loudness.

IT Conversations standardized on MP2 as an intermediate format, because
it's non-lossy, with MP3 being the final format for publication.

Q: For IT Conversations, how are shows being rated?

A: IT Conversations has a rating system. They send listeners an email
ballot asking them what they think about the show. They get about 20-30
ballots per show. They have three criteria: Each show must be
educational, inspirational, and entertaining. The most important
criterion is that it must be inspirational. One of the most popular
stories was about a guy who went to the North Pole!

Popularity can be measured by the number of people who listen to a show,
or by how the show is rated, and there is some correlation. When people
give a show high rating, they often blog about it, which brings in more
listeners. High value content does bring in traffic.

The most popular shows are solo presentations in conferences with
well-prepared and condensed content. The next most popular is
one-on-one interviews where the interviewer is really good. At the
bottom of the ratings is the panel discussion. People seem to have
trouble discriminating voices. Panel discussion is a cheap way out for
event producers, often sponsors of the event. The conversation tends to
be inwards, with the panelists talking among themselves rather than to
the audience.

Q: Do you find that listeners ever excerpt shows? How do you link to
the middle of a show?

A: IT Conversations has a clip feature. You can specify start and end
time, and it will create a URL that will play the selected excerpt. On
an average day, they get less than ten clicks to the clip feature.

Q: How about synchronizing audio and slides?

A: It has been very time consuming to produce. They experimented with
Flash and Shockwave. The technology is not standard enough yet.

Q: Are you planning to have translators translate the shows?

A: If someone volunteers to translate a show, IT Conversations tries to
ensure that they have the legal processes and tools in place to do so.
But they are not planning on investing in translation. They are,
however, planning on bringing in foreign content.

Q: Any plans about talking to universities?

A: IT Conversations is talking to Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, and Harvard.
Many universities are recording programs, but they do not know what to
do with them. They are trying to get them out there. SJSU has whole
podcasting department. One of the problems of universities is about
rights and permissions--ownership of content.

Conference organizers are sometimes concerned that publishing audio will
reduce paid registration. To avoid that, IT Conversations releases
conference sessions one per week. If a conference has 25 sessions, the
listener won't complete the series until about six months after the
event. And IT Conversation vastly increases the conference's reach: The
conference itself may reaches 4,000 attendees, but the podcast will let
the organizers reach 40,000 more people.

However, in universities, departments and instructors consider their
materials proprietary. It continues to be a challenge to get these
materials out to the public for free, but Doug would like to work with
universities on this.

Q: Do you foresee any problems about getting rights to content from all
over the world?

A: Yes. IT Conversations has forms or contracts that curators must fill
out to indicate they have permissions. If anyone complains, they take
the show down.

Another of Doug's missions is to keep content free. This is something
pragmatic. Content that is free has more value. Imagine a blog with a
link to a newspaper story. If the link goes to a toll gate, people
can't read the story, so the blogger won't link to it. Charging a fee
for content decreases its value, because not everyone can get to it.
When content is free, it stays in the conversation. It can be remixed,
reused, and repurposed.

-----------------

This entry of my blog is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-
ShareAlike License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, California 94305, USA.

Annotating the Planet and Google Maps by Ron Lichty

'We're turning the world into a wiki -- if it's wrong, go log in and correct it yourself.'

Must-read: Future Salon's blog coverage of "Annotating the Planet and Google Maps", a talk at the Accelerating Change conference in Palo Alto Sept. 17 by Jon Udell, lead analyst at InfoWorld, and author of O'Reilly's 1999 book on Groupware, one of the forerunner terms to today's social software.

His own synopsis: "We are turning the physical world into a Wiki, and real landscapes are becoming virtual surfaces for collaborative annotation."

Future Salon's reviewer's synopsis of Jon's talk: "With services such as Google Maps, the physical world becomes a canvas. Jon gives varied examples of Gmaps applications and muses about the location-aware future and how memory is tied intimately to place. He contrasts Amazon's A9 use of professional photographers to provide images of city and town block views with where the future is going: the do-it-yourself creation, annotating, tagging collective. 'We're turning the world into a wiki -- if it's wrong, go log in and correct it yourself.'"

Take the link on the Future Salon blog page to go see the "Google Map of Keene, NH", where Jon has created a brief tour of his hometown, starting with the tree where squirrels built a tree nest out of flags, a feature he's told friends about but never before been able to show anyone. "The physical world becomes a canvas."

For a second set of observations on hacking Google Maps and the implications of annotating the planet, check out Jon's own weblog, where he concludes, "But if the Web has degraded our experience in some ways, it has utterly transformed it in others. Nowadays we're not just using the Web, we're colonizing it."

A lesson in grassroots help, post Katrina by Ron Lichty

How can community and collaboration software help in the aftermath of a disaster?

How do organizations use community and collaboration tools to be more effective?

(What should FEMA be doing? What should it have done?)

In her Mom's Rule post on her Full Circle Online Interaction blog, Nancy White recounts how one woman in Santa Cruz, Grace, reads the CraigsList SOS for help to the shelters from a Mississippi volunteer, super mom Victoria, and offers to be the dispatcher -- via blog, naturally. Read it at Hurricane Katrina Direct Relief!.

Make you think at all about the Howard Dean campaign and what they accomplished, from the grassroots of technology?

While you’re looking at the site, click “Start Here”, or see if there’s something they need that you’ve got.

Back to Full Circle Online Interaction, Nancy's focus since Katrina struck has been community building and communication online. Lots there.

communities of practice by Ron Lichty

While knowledge is often thought to be the property of individuals, a great deal of knowledge is both produced and held collectively. Such knowledge is readily generated when people work together in 'communities of practice'.
—Brown & Duguld CMR, 1998, quoted by Michael Sullivan, IBM, speaking 4/2002 on the topic of Knowledge Management and Knowledge Communities

Create your own music station by Ron Lichty

Intriguing new music service...

Imagine. You're in the mood for "Imagine". Or "My Sweet Lord". Or "Box of Rain". Or Enya or REM.

And what you really want is your own channel and your own personal DJ to queue up an entire afternoon (or week or month) of music just like it.

That's what Pandora does.

They've had dozens of music-savvy listeners coding up tens of thousands of songs for their scores of characteristics in what they've called the Music Genome Project. And they're pretty darned good at matching the mood and essence of what you had in mind. (And if they miss, you can dis their selections.)

Podcast & Blogging user group talks by Ron Lichty

SDForum is starting a new Search SIG, and its first topic is an overview of the audio search market and an in-depth look at podcasting startups, directiories, and tools:

Audio Search : Selling Picks & Shovels at the Podcast Gold Rush
Date of Event : Wednesday, September 14 2005
7:00 PM - 9:15 PM
Sunnyvale


BayCHI, the Computer Human Interface group, will at its next meeting present two speakers on podcasting:

Podcasting: Media Evolution or Revolution? --Doug Kaye, IT Conversations
Podcast Solutions and Podcast Problems --Dan Klass, The Bitterest Pill
Date of Event : Tuesday, September 13
7:00-9:30 pm
Palo Alto


The East Bay IT Group's Blogging & RSS SIG will, in its upcoming meeting, explain measures to go beyond just counting blog hits, and truly understanding blogs' impacts:

Measuring the Blogosphere
Date of Event : Tuesday, September 06, 2005
6:30-9 PM
Emeryville


MIT/Stanford Venture Lab (VLAB) is having the president and CEO of Feedster talk about how his company is building a business around providing vertical search for listings, news, and blogs:

Feedster: Vertical Search - Show Me The Money!
Date of Event : Tuesday, September 20, 2005
6:00 PM Networking, 7:00 PM Presentation
Palo Alto


The SF chapter of the American Marketing Association is hosting a panel of blogging executives who will share their thoughts and ideas on the evolution of online journalism:

Blogging: Leveraging Blogs for Marketing, an Evolution of Journalism
Date of Event : Thursday, September 15, 2005
5:30pm - 7:30pm
San Francisco

Blogs and ball bearings? by Ron Lichty

Blogs and ball bearings? Believe it or not, the nation's largest ball bearing company is using blogs to communicate better with its suppliers and differentiate themselves from the competitive market.

Niall Kennedy, Technorati’s community manager, made this connection and several others when he invited readers and networkers to a geek dinner this week in San Francisco.

The Event: The Synopsis by Ron Lichty

The Event:
Architecting Community and Collaboration Solutions
July 27

There were 150-plus registrants.

And as I said in my introduction to the panel...

Most of us (at least attending the event) have used community and collaboration functionality of some type. And I'm probably like most in being pleased with the progress of this functionality but frustrated with the realization that what I really want is so much more.

The panel represents organizations that have already done it, a window through which we can begin to see the futures for our own organizations.

Moderator:

• Nonprofit: Eugene Eric Kim, Blue Oxen
  

Panelists:

• Corporate: Sylvia L. Marino, Edmunds, has been part of online communities for 17 years and has been paid for her activity in them for the last 10; she focuses her efforts these days on business value and ROI
  
• Political: Zack Rosen, DeanSpace (the Howard Dean campaign), and now CivicSpaceLabs; his is a "mission-driven company," and he focuses on delivering not monetary but social ROI
  
• Governmental: Tony Christopher, enabling the FAA and NASA and 200 private industry participants to collaborate to re-design the National Airspace System (NAS); Tony's first two decades' involvement with collaboration software was building tools; for the past two years, using today's tools, his empathy for users has mushroomed
  
• Corporate: Scott Wilder, Group Manager, Intuit's QuickBooks online communities, which launched last Dec. 31st; a decade ago, Scott product managed the very first web sites that accepted paid advertising
  

The incisive comments sprinkled through the evening started in the first minutes during moderator Eugene Kim’s opening comments. “I don’t believe in online communities,” he said. “Howard Rheingold coined the term 20 or 25 years ago. He did us a service. But the phrase created a problem as well. Somehow in among the ‘online’, we lost the notion of ‘community.’”

Eugene noted that community and collaboration software has enabled communities to self-organize online. But he advised the audience, “You can say ‘I want Wikipedia.’ But that doesn’t mean you can put up a wiki and have it ‘take.’ You can’t organize self-organization.”

Scott Wilder’s first contribution was a corollary to that. “You have to let the community decide where the community is going to go, and how the community should behave.” But just because you can’t fabricate community doesn’t mean you can’t facilitate it. Scott described how he learned five or six years ago how to pick users who would make good online collaborators.

Tony Christopher estimates the Federal Aviation Administration spent $200K the first year on its Knowledge Sharing Network (KSN), but achieved savings in the millions: savings from reduced travel, increased ability to find information, improved communication, etc. At this point, he said, “a work group that adopts KSN can see a seven percent savings in their budget in the first year.”

What has accounted for its success? He noted the configurability of the Sharepoint software, Microsoft’s collaboration server. Modules they’re using include calendar, file repositories, list repositories, and internal linking between calendar entries and anything else. “You have to let business users figure out their use themselves, so the configurability of the tools has been crucial.”

But the success hasn’t really been the tools, said Tony, but rather the processes. For example, the KSN network trains a member of every work group to be a facilitator. And the facilitators then become part of a community of facilitators that reaches across the FAA’s departments nationwide.

Sylvia Marino opened her remarks with an Edmunds user-for-life story. A new car owner was recently stranded with her two kids in a dark neighborhood, the electronic systems dead for hours. But when she got to the dealership, the car was starting fine and the repair department treated her as though she had made up the complaint. She went home fuming and got on Edmund’s site, where she found she was not alone. She quickly connected with other owners with the problem, who told her how she could get it repaired, what to tell service, the actual number of the service bulletin to have the service department look up online if they hadn’t received a hard-copy yet -- and that the repair would most certainly be covered by the manufacturer, with a national recall expected shortly.

Sylvia contributed another voice to the “let the community evolve” theme. “Find tools that allow members to share information and to give or get support. Similarly, find tools that allow users to evolve their own affinity groups.” At Edmunds, she notes, the hybrid-car people and the SUV people behave very differently.

As to ROI, Sylvia noted, “We hope that by providing this community space, they’ll reward us by using the tools on our site.”

Two years ago, Zack Rosen left his computer science studies to join the Howard Dean campaign. There was no money and no support, but the campaign had one chief innovation: the staff -- the 200 people at Dean headquarters in Vermont -- would say that the campaign was not their show. The campaign was not the national organization in Vermont. It was the 600,000 volunteers nationwide. Instead of directing the campaign’s local activities, the staff said, “we’re just facilitators. This is your show. If you have a good idea, share it.”

In fact, Zack said, the use of MeetUp, blogs, and other tools came from the grassroots. Zack’s goal became to provide better, integrated tools for volunteers to create communities online: Doctors for Dean, Pittsburgh for Dean, .… The people in Cincinnati would know what the people in Columbus were doing.

After the Dean campaign ended, he started CivicSpace to provide open source infrastructure that could be used by campaigns and nonprofits broadly. “It turns out you can’t write very good code in a campaign cycle,” he noted wryly. “We threw it away and started over.” Now he’s busy finishing CivicSpace and building a community of people trying to build communities.

The first of the Q&A questions asked how the rest of Edmunds perceived the community effort.

How do you convince companies to stick with meeting customers where they’re at?

In fact, Sylvia replied, there was initially fear that community would cannibalize the parent site’s visitors -- suck them off. But that wasn’t what happened, and through education of the business owners, over time they developed trust.

“The business has recognized the profitability community users bring. They’re:

• More loyal
  
• Use the tools more
  
• Create more page views
  
• Bring in more people – due to its viral nature
  

How do you identify community members to pay as staff?

Scott: Today we don’t pay people. Giving people recognition as an expert is often enough.

Sylvia: We’re on the cusp of paying 1 or 2 members. Most groups self-appoint leaders. And while the leaders have been volunteers, they often get perks. Take the two leaders the Subaru group looks to. Subaru has flown these two people to Subaru events.

Scott: We call them answer people or mavens. There is great pride in being those people. Our job is to make sure the internal employees give them their space.

Tony: The FAA saw one user take standard lists and turn them into a capability to send out surveys. People become clever at facilitating the work. They’re the motivators and caretakers of the community.

What staff is required for tens of thousands of members?

Sylvia: We have a part-time developer, and 12 part-time readers, people whose job it is to read every message that is posted. We had to choose between “read everything” or “have members report anything egregious.” “Read everything” provides consistency. And even though owners of one or another rough-and-ready truck or off-road car might think a certain level of profanity is ok, consistency lets our CEO make a presentation in Detroit and pull up any discussion board without fear of what might be written there.

Scott: No soliciting is enforced consistently. We have gotten positive feedback from users that they know they can come to our site without being hassled.

Do you ban users?

Sylvia: Yes, based on severity of the offense. You should know that I average two death threats a year.

Scott: We use the two-strikes rule.

What qualities should I look for in an online community manager?

Zack: Integrity, a long history in the community, investment in the community.

Tony: Being respected in the workgroup, enthusiasm for the tools.

Sylvia: Someone willing to put the members first, and worry less about marketing and how much money we’re going to pull out of a community.

Scott: You first have to consider how many people you have on your community team. Do you already have technical or marketing experience? If you have just one person, then that person must combine technical and marketing expertse, must be good at listening to the voice of the customer, must provide the works.

What resources would you recommend for setting up a large community worldwide?

Tony: There’s a book, Cultivating Communities of Practice , by Etienne Wenger, Richard McDermott, William M. Snyder. I thought this was the best hands-on guide to understanding, creating and cultivating Communities of Practice I have read. It’s not as academic as other works; it provides very practical guidance.

“And I would be glad to support your effort should you wish some additional insights or guidance to strengthen your expert groups.”

Communities that also meet in the real world seem more viable. Do you think about scheduling face-to-face meetings for your groups?

Scott: Yes. But the mindset in the company is to focus first on online. I thought it a great idea for people to meet in person, but the MeetUp groups have all dissolved.

Sylvia: We encourage people to get together. But for legal reasons we don’t promote people meeting, but rather promote events like auto shows that would be good places for them to meet. When we told our audience that a brand manager from a car company would be at a Santa Monica track event, we had people drive there all the way from New Jersey!

What about the use of voice? Skype? Yahoo Voice? AOL, MSN, ???

Zack: For us, absolutely. Asteryx, for example, turns telephony into a web application. There are tons of interesting things you can do with voice around organizing people. For a volunteer organizer who needs to reach 15 people, the response rate to15 emails is not high enough. Phone is much higher. And the tools are free. Asteryx is free. Skype is free. We can’t wait to put them to use.

How are you integrating user feedback into the next generation of community tools and architecture?

Scott: In real-time. A lot of research. We do usability both online and offline with our users. We make some simple changes like messaging changes within 24 hours. We cultivate “answer people” who bring in ideas from other sites, and we rely on those folks and incorporate them into the development process.

Sylvia: We run an off-the-shelf product, Web Crossing, which also powers The New York Times and Oprah. We got our core functionality out of that package. We’ve worked with the platform and with other customers to move it forward. Communities of similar size tend to have similar problems, so networking with other community managers has helped understand how to integrate changes that have bubbled up through the membership.

Tony: What the FAA is doing with KSN is to expand features based on what they hear from their facilitators. There was a broad request for better workflow. They did a lot of research, and found an off the shelf product that met their requirements that’s very configurable. They’ve added business intelligence features in a similar way.

Zack: CivicSpace is very easy to configure because it’s open source. And we find the community is doing the same exact thing as others, so it’s very easy to advance the broad feature set.

How do you tame the flood?

Sylvia: You don’t want to over-manage your members. Who are you to say what’s interesting to them. When I went to Edmund’s, I had no idea people liked to talk about tires that much. Who was I to say you can’t create a community around that. On the flip side, it’s our job when we see a discussion started that exists somewhere else, to get that question to the right place where other users already are. It goes back to management.

Anyone monetizing collaborative information?

Sylvia: GuruNet, Answers.com

But beware of design that is focused entirely on intent to monetize and ignores usability and community wants and needs.

Have you seen people’s use of mobile phones foster anything new or different?

Sylvia: Before new cars come out, the car companies will cover their prototype cars with black tar-paper -- they’re called “masked cars” -- but they have to have test drivers drive them around. People who live around design centers these days routinely take spy shots with their mobile phones and share them on our site. There’s a huge community of spy shot folks. The auto manufacturers hate it. But it creates buzz. And a lot of controversy.

Twice in 9 years, we’ve had someone post something that’s inside information. The car companies will demand a user name. Having a good user agreement and making sure it has a clear privacy clause is why you need to make your Legal department your friend. It has to be clear in getting members’ to agree to terms of service that they can’t share privileged information.

Scott: We work with our software service providers, Web Crossing and Typepad. Intuit will have policies, but we also work with these provider companies’ legal groups. Our challenge is that we absolutely have to avoid mentioning features of our next versions of software, or our accounting folks will have to recognize revenue in the current quarter. Legal helps us avoid problems like that.

Have you promoted your community as a feature of your parent sites?

Scott: We’re promoting community quite a bit.

Tony: With regards to intranet knowledge management systems, one of the big issues of portals and intranet systems is adoption. Some groups do more promotion than others.

Sylvia: Our promotion is divided: If the Edmunds.com web site promotes a vehicle, we try to get them to show the five or two or three discussions on the community site. The challenge is that a lot of web managers do search engine optimization poorly. So, sadly enough, our community will sometimes rank higher than both the corporate Edmunds.com site and, amazingly, the manufacturer’s own site. Search engines focus on rich, dynamic content, and that’s exactly what our community provides, so it gets high rankings.

On the flip side, we promote our site events to other user group sites. We’ll tell other Audi user groups the date and time of our online Audi events and invite their members to attend.

Many of the panelists left contact information for both attendees and those who missed the event to follow up with them:

• Zack Rosen, CivicSpaceLabs, zack@civicspacelabs.org and AIM: uberzacker
  
• Sylvia L. Marino, Edmunds Forums, sylvia@edmunds.com
  
• Scott Wilder, QuickBooks online communities,
  Scott_wilder@intuit.com
  
• Tony Christopher has posted his handout online, and points to a Microsoft case study on the FAA's Knowledge Sharing Network. But Tony adds, "Something that I would reinforce is that process around Knowledge Worker collaboration systems – adoption, facilitation, practices, support, and training – is more important than the tools… With strong facilitation and support, a group can get a lot of mileage out of less than optimal tools because its members are working together to use them in consistent ways group-wide. And that's far better than having tools with outstanding functionality that few members use and those who do all use differently." Through his company Digital Places, he helps organizations think through their situations to identify simple but effective processes that can be employed to get more out of existing tools. That can result in a generation of users knowledgeable and informed enough to lead requirements development and selection of the next generation of tools that are a match for the processes in meeting the organization's goals.
  

Other event coverage by Ron Lichty

Julia Glenister, JAGwire, complete with list of tips gleaned from the panel.

John Breslin, Galway, Ireland: blog, complete with photo of the panel.

Tim Bonnemann's Planblog gives a quick bullet-point synopsis of salient points.

And message boards? by Ron Lichty

We'll certainly see, from the panelists tomorrow night, some examples not just of wikis and blogs but of message boards and the value they bring as well.

As a prelude to that topic, I received this note by return email today from a colleague, Paul Gustafson, now at ViewCentral:

"When I was consulting at Iron Speed, I created a 'user forum' to great effect. While it's more of a traditional BBS-style forum (not a wiki or a blog), it serves a very similar purpose of attracting and facilitating an online community through user-supplied content.

Once the forums were in place, Iron Speed found their community of developers were willing to share expertise, and even evangelize and support newbie downloaders of their evaluation software -- just because they thought it was cool!

You can check out the Iron Speed community.

Also -- FYI -- I created their entire forum with a very cool, and very inexpensive, web-based tool, websitetoolbox.

My advice for folks using wikis and blogs -- keep it simple, and focus more on the needs of the community -- and what content they want to see -- than any of the underlying technologies (BBS's, wikis, RSS, blog tools, etc.)."

Wiki or Blog? by Ron Lichty

What are wikis good for?

Knowledge collection.
Collaborative documentation.
Brainstorming across geos and timezones.

How is that different from a blog?

Blogs are good for single-author (or at least single-author-at-a-time) point-in-time reports, comments, personal insights, and so on. Most blogs are set up for readers to leave comments. But they can't edit the author's commentary. And they can't start new blog items. Only the owner can do that.

On a wiki, everyone can edit. Ownership is pretty much shared.

Let's take this Architecting Community and Collaboration Solutions event that's coming up Wednesday night. I'm going to be sorta busy on event night, but nonetheless I'm hoping, once I've introduced the panel, to sit in the front row, flip open my laptop, and write a few notes. I'm hoping a few other people will do that, too.

And where will I post my event notes?

Here on this blog.

And other people will put their notes on their blogs. (And they'll probably leave comments to my blog entry pointing to their blog entries, so someone who wasn't able to attend the event can click around and read all the commentaries.

On the other hand, if a group of us wanted to create a single document representing our combined notes, thoughts and comments, we'd start a wiki. If none of us had access to a wiki server via our organizations, we might go to a free, password-protected wiki provider like PBwiki (the PB stands for "peanut butter", which using it seems as smooth as, or something like that). It takes about a minute to create a wiki (maybe two your first time, but it's just a matter of naming it), PBwiki emails you the password and URL for your wiki, you use it to log on, you click "change password", they send you a second email with a unique URL to a new page set up just for you to change the gnarly password to something you think your team can remember. Total: about 3 minutes. You get on the wiki yourself to add your own notes to start the collaboration off. You might add them to the home page, or create another page; you do that by clicking 'edit' and entering a "word" with a capital in the middle, like EventNotes. When you click 'update', EventNotes is highlighted like a URL (because it is a URL); click on it and you're on the new page; click 'edit' on that page and you can add your notes and click 'update'. Another two minutes. Then you send the wiki URL and the password to your team to they can interweave their notes with yours (and edit, correct, and improve your notes as well, by the way). If I'm not mistaken, you can track which teammate made which additions and changes; that's certainly true of many wikis.

My co-chairs and organizational sponsors and I have just used a wiki to share writing of the description of an event we're planning, SDForum's Web Architecture Summit Sept. 14. We're collaborating on the agenda on another page of our wiki. And we're sharing writing chores for panel descriptions, and brainstorming panel members. It's useful.

I have a programming team at Avenue A | Razorfish in San Francisco that inherited tens of thousands of undocumented lines of client code. Every time any of them meet to discuss the project, they pull up the wiki where they've been slowly assembling their discoveries over the past two years into documentation.

I don't have any personal big-ROI stories to tell about wikis, but they've sure been useful to us over the past few months!

Wow, this is for us p.r. and marketing types, too! by Ron Lichty

" Wow, exciting," says Julia Glenister of The JAG Wire Group, a p.r. and marketing services group.

"It would be great if you wanted to post a comment about how particularly relevant this event is to PR and marketing types."

So PR and marketing types take note:
The Architecting Community and Collaboration Solutions event is every bit as much for you as it is for us tech types!

If you've been hoping someone would explain where blogs and wikis fit, this is it!

How does one leverage blogs and wikis to benefit their organization's goals?

It was a related set of questions I proposed to explore with a panel of all-stars in SF next Wednesday:
* Which organizations have already seen dramatic results from blogs and wikis and their ilk?
* How did they design their implementations?
* And what advice do they have for the rest of us?

I discovered that Zack Rosen, who built out DeanSpace to help make Howard Dean the best known challenger in the last election, moved his community software development efforts to the Bay Area as Civic Space Labs. Tony Christopher, who product managed development of AppleLink, Apple's long-before-the-web online system that linked it with its employees, distribution network and developers, is now helping the FAA and NASA collaborate with 200 leading aviation companies to solve the National Airspace Problem. Eugene Kim continues to consult with nonprofits and other organizations in building inter-organizational communities.

And in the corporate space, Edmunds' auto buying site and Intuit's QuickBooks group have achieved dramatic ROIs from implementing community and collaboration functionality on their sites. Their community developers, Sylvia Marino and Scott Wilder, will join with Eugene, Tony and Zack to present a panel:

Architecting Community and Collaboration Solutions event
Wednesday, July 27
San Francisco Presidio
6:30 - 9 p.m.
Pre-registration Required

Dark Blogs Case Study - Euro Pharma Group by Ron Lichty

Suw Charman's Dark Blogs Case Study - A European Pharmaceutical Group was presented, discussed and distributed by Corante Research at the SuperNova conference in SF a few weeks ago. Tracy Cohen brought back a copy to Avenue A | Razorfish, and I just finished reading it.

"Dark Blog" refers to a blog behind the firewall -- one intended for internal audiences. The case study recounts how the pharma corp being studied installed four blogs for their Competitive Analysis group as a substitute for a KM (knowledge management) or CMS (content management system). It turned out to be less expensive, easier to use and more effective than the KM and CMS systems they'd tried.

The blogging product they picked was TeamPage from Traction Software, which had several leading edge features including:

• ability to comment on individual paragraphs within a blog post
  
• strong collaborative authoring capability that's almost wiki-like
  
• integration with LDAP so that users could be given different sets of permissions for viewing and editing various content elements.
  

Very innovative, what this pharma group did. The case study is well worth a read!

$100M RSS Fund Launched by Ron Lichty

Is RSS being taken seriously? Red Herring reports "$100M RSS Fund Launched" for ventures that leverage or simplify RSS use.

RSS reader programs and web sites let users identify blogs, news, weather and other web sites they want to follow. It's sort of a cross between a postal-mail newsletter subscription and TiVo for the internet.

(That's how you're reading this blog entry, so you can keep track of the latest, at your leisure, right?)

Great Quotes department by Ron Lichty

Great Quotes department:

"... most significant advances in software are actually advances in user experience, not in technology.

"Mosaic was not an advancement in technology over TBL's original browser. Blogger is a highly-specialized FTP client. IM is IRC++.

"The advantages that these applications offered people were user experience-oriented, not technology-oriented."
--Jason Kottke, as shared in a talk at BayCHI by last month's speaker, Evan Williams, CEO and Co-founder of Odeo

Says the writeup of the talk in this month's BayCHI newsletter, "Odeo is Evan's new project after leaving Google last year. Odeo is just about six months old. On his blog, Evan talks about how he and Noah Glass (also from Google) came to start Odeo. True to his belief that the next killer web application will be built using available technologies, Odeo is about improving user experience in audio creation and download." The blog entry also recounts some podcasting history...

World Is Changing department

Jason's site notes that a Wikipedia page about the London bombing is already being filled out.

It really makes one have to ask what the difference is between news coverage and an encyclopedia entry, doesn't it?

Jason's entry today also links to blogs covering the bombings (and news coverage of blogs covering the bombings).

Podcasts on Tech Topics by Ron Lichty

Judy Bell, our webmaster, tells us that IT Conversations accounts for
1/4 to 1/3 of the technology podcasts listed on Apple's iTunes
(iTunes/music store/podcasts/technology/all).

Ordinary companies and organizations -- and the rest of the story by Ron Lichty

The July 27 Architecting Community and Collaboration Solutions event is about ordinary companies and organizations. The premise: We predict virtually every business (as well as every nonprofit, church,and political campaign) will expand their online web presence to incorporate at least one and probably several collaboration and community solutions in the next five years.

The panel are individuals from organizations that have already seen dramatic results and ROIs from being early adopters -- talking about how they made the decisions they made and crafted the solutions they crafted -- and the results they've seen.

The event is not about companies that are in the business of delivering community and collaboration functionality -- companies like:

• Social networks: LinkedIn, Friendster, Ryze, Orkut, Tribe.net, etc.
  
• Photo-sharing: Flickr
  
• Dating services: Match.com, LavaLife
  
• Invite services: Evite, Meetup.com
  
• Voting / group consensus software: Cloudmark (determines what's spam from user votes)
  
• Dedicated product review sites: ePinions
  
• Operating systems and browsers: Microsoft, Apple
  

But what of these companies in the business?

The continuing roll-out of functionality is the subject of John Markoff's June 29 column in the Times, "Web Content by and for the Masses."

The usefulness of user tagging is the topic. The article focuses on Yahoo's new "social search engine," which uses on a new page-ranking technology that Yahoo has named MyRank. Pages are ranked based on what other users in your social network found useful in their searches.

It also calls out:

• User tagging of photos on Flickr, of blogs for Technorati search, and of web pages for del.icio.us to categorize.
  
• A Google Earth feature that lets user communities annotate fly-over photos
  
• Similar Google Maps functionality that has let users overlay the Craigslist apartment rental and real estate listings, and the London subway system
  
• From Will Wright, creator of the Sims game series, a new one, Spore, that lets users create civilizations for others to explore
  
• Apple's delivery of RSS built into its most recent OS X release
  
• Microsoft's announcement it will follow suit
  

As exciting as those central services are, though, I think the real excitement is in how organizations are no longer just static advertising machines but are becoming home planets to constellations of customers, clients, constituents and members, by enabling them to communicate with the home port and with each other.

I'm looking forward to July 27 and a vision for how all of the organizations we care about can embrace the future.

Podcast the Event? by Ron Lichty

Judy Bell, SofTech webmaster and researcher extraordinaire, suggests we podcast the July 27 Architecting Community and Collaboration Solutions event.

Interesting idea. Podcasting is not on focus to be part of the content of the event. It's a broadcast technology, at least as I've seen it so far. And the event's focus is on functionality that enables community interaction and collaboration.

But as a means to extend the event to those unable to attend, it's certainly interesting.

Interestingly enough, "How do I subscribe to podcasts with iTunes?" came up on the Ask Dave Taylor! Help Desk this week. (Be sure to read the comments following the blog entry for additional suggestions.)

The July 27 panel is complete! by Ron Lichty

We have our last panelist for the July 27 Architecting Community and Collaboration Solutions event.

Our lineup:

• Moderator: Nonprofit: Eugene Eric Kim, http://www.blueoxen.org/
  
• Panelist: Corporate: Sylvia L. Marino, http://www.Edmunds.com/
  
• Panelist: Political: Zack Rosen, DeanSpace (the Howard Dean campaign), http://civicspacelabs.org/
  
• Panelist: Governmental: Tony Christopher, http://www.digiplaces.com/, enabling the FAA and NASA and 200 private industry participants to collaborate to re-design the National Airspace System (NAS)
  
• Panelist: Corporate: Scott Wilder, Group Manager, Intuit's QuickBooks online communities, http://www.quickbooksgroup.com/
  
  

More information, including bios and photos of the panel.

It's not just about YOUR blogs... by Ron Lichty

Hmmm. In envisioning the July 27 Community/Collaboration event, I left out an entire aspect to organizations engaging with this stuff.

I was focused on the blogs, wikis, message boards, RSS, etc. that organizations will, of necessity, implement in the coming five years.

What I skipped was the necessity for organizations to connect with their constituents (customers, members, citizens, etc.) who are writing about them in online communities other people created.

Once again, Lee LeFever's blog has come to my rescue, pointing me, this time, to the Church of the Customer.

This entry cites examples of Continental Airlines CEO Lawrence Kellen being responsive to the FlyerTalk online community for frequent flyers; and Starwood Hotels being responsive on this and other internet discussion boards, by assigning an employee known as the "Starwood Lurker" to solve customer problems with its frequent traveler programs and build customer loyalty. See this earlier blog entry to get a sense of the Starwood Lurker's impact.

I'm not sure there's room in the event to shoehorn in this aspect to things. But we should be cognizant of it, as we discuss how we architected community and collaboration solutions on our own sites that delivered dramatic results.

Customer Facing vs Dark Blogs; Blogs vs. Wikis by Ron Lichty

Dark blogs?

That's emerging terminology for blogs behind the firewall.

There's more in this internet.com article on dark blogs as well as those that are customer facing, in the context of the first hours of the Supernova conference, a conference focused on "the decentralization of computing, communications, digital media, and business."

Meanwhile, Lee LeFever has added to his insightful differentiation of blogs and message boards with "A Blog Post Says 'Here It Is, Dig It'".

ROI for RSS by Ron Lichty

One of my Avenue A | Razorfish colleagues, Tracy Cohen, pointed me to a great thread on Charlene Li's blog about RSS.

Charlene, a Forrester analyst and author of Forrester's blogging reports, prompted readers for examples of how marketers use RSS (aside from blogs, of course). As examples, she cited Purina's RSS feeds for dog and cat care advice (which also happens to have exceptionally clear RSS usage instructions that could serve as a model for yours), and RSS feeds of coupon and bargain sites like Slick Deals and TechBargains.

Her readers responded:
* Burpee's seeds: product specials, newsletter content
* Dealazon: Amazon's API plus RSS
* US Cycling: news
* IBM Press Room: updates
* Tech Recipes: tutorial updates, information
* Deals on the Web: stuff
* Amazon deals: stuff
* Frontline: PBS - TV programming and news
* Luftgrop: travel
* Continental: travel
* Pheedz: travel
* Deals on the Web
* Apple: PR
* The Corcoran Group (NYC real estate): open houses, newest listings
* Craigslist: everything on the site
* SmartTravelDeals.com: travel sales and offers
* PBS: Frontline
* simplyhired.com: new jobs that fit the criteria you set
* MarCom:Interactive : marketing communications trend briefings, trend tours, new webcasts, and news
* Gallup: their content
* Intel: press releases, products, software updates, reseller center, IT operations and IT for classrooms

(If you want to subscribe to any of the above youself, there are URLs to most on Charlene's blog.)

Unusual uses of blogs:

Charlene notes, in her November Forrester report, a number of less-obvious uses of blogs, including:
* Nike, with Gawker Media: an "adverblog"
* Lee Dungarees: "90 Ft. Babe" blog chronicling the adventures of a clearly fictional giantess looking for a date
* Microsoft recruiting: what the company looks for in inbound product managers

Enterprise collaboration with blogs and wikis by Ron Lichty

Enterprise collaboration with blogs and wikis Great InfoWorld overview of enterprise use of blogs and wikis.

To quote: “Blogs and wikis play opposite roles,” says Martin Wattenberg, a researcher on the collaborative user experience team at IBM Watson Research Center. “Blogs are based on an individual voice; a blog is sort of a personal broadcasting system. Wikis, because they give people the chance to edit each other’s words, are designed to blend many voices. Reading a blog is like listening to a diva sing, reading a wiki is like listening to a symphony.”

Says the article, "A blog is like a presentation. It’s a one-to-many form of communication: a single person speaking to an audience who can comment on, but not change, the content. By comparison, wikis are a many-to-many collaborative tool. Anyone with access can add to, change, or delete information contained in a wiki. Think of it as a huge whiteboard, one where everyone has a marker and is welcome to scribble."

In that context, the article provides insight into how corporations will deal with, leverage and utilize these technologies, citing use of blogs by Microsoft evangelist Robert Scoble (his first blog while at NEC; Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz and XML guru Tim Bray; and 3,000 active internal-to-IBM bloggers. And use of wikis by customer support personnel at a consumer bank to share, in real time, news of the latest cyberthreats devised by malicious hackers; and by a tech support guy for his customers to share issues and solutions not only with him but with each other.

More ROIs for community/collaboration software by Ron Lichty

More interesting ways community and collaboration solutions are used to delivery measurable ROIs for the organizations that field them:

Create your startup virtually. Ross Mayfield says, "Real Estate is the leading cause of death for startups," and leveraged a set of tools to let everyone at SocialText work from home - globally:
* Socialtext -- the building and garden
* IRC -- the hallway
* FreeConference.com -- the conference room
* Skype -- the meeting rooms
* IM -- talking over the cubical
* VNC -- peeping over the cubical
* Our blogs -- the front porch
"The benefits go beyond cost... generally it is more productive."

Thinkcycle: a forum for designers and engineers to create open source solutions to the problems of developing communities and the environment

URLs: blog-building, map to services and tools, the future by Ron Lichty

Re-architecting a website with community features: Jason Coward recounts how he relaunched TheVirtualHandshake.com web site, at the behest of its owner, online-community author David Teten (with coauthor Scott Allen, the forthcoming book by the same name, The Virtual Handshake). Here's what he did, why he did it, and how he did it while spending very little of David's money.

Highly worthwhile Map of the Social Software Landscape -- really a table of categories of community and collaboration applications areas and the companies providing solutions.

Setting up blogs at your university, college or school -- runs through some of the options for serving blogs.

Wikis foster trust: That's the word from Time magazine, in its coverage of companies setting up wikis. "Business wikis are being used for project management, mission statements and cross-company collaborations... at a hundred companies, including Nokia and Kodak." Includes a couple paragraphs of wiki history, including its founding in 1995 by programmer Ward Cunningham, a few of whose comments they share. The rest is on Wikipedia.

Not sure about this community stuff? Not yet bought in that you need to re-think how to enable communications with and among your customers, members, constituents, and clients? Consider that your next generation of customers is the current younger generation, which is growing more and more virtual. How virtual is the subject of this blog entry, Teens Set Trends in Online Interaction

Side benefits to event planning by Ron Lichty

One of the great side benefits of planning a panel for an event like the July 27 Architecting Community and Collaboration Solutions presentation is the opportunity to meet great minds, and I've met a few already.

Ten days ago, I met Tim Lundeen by phone. We were introduced by Harry Chesley, whom I invited to speak this month at SDForum's Software Architecture and Modeling SIG. Tim, who did Microsoft Works for the Mac back when integrated sets of home and small business applications were the rage, these days knows his way around the organizations and people implementing community and collaboration solutions, certainly in the Bay Area. His company, Web Crossing, is a supplier of community and collaboration solutions.

It was Tim who told me that Microsoft now mandates its product managers have support boards up and running before releasing new products, as a result of a study they ran showing customers 2.2 times more satisfied with the company and the products than when they provided telephone support alone. He told me about Edmund's, the auto buying service, and the ROI they're seeing from their community efforts. And we talked about my experience with Apple, and his with Cisco.

Nancy Frishberg introduced me by email to social architect Amy Jo Kim, who authored Community Building on the Web: Secret Strategies for Successful Online Communities. AJ says she's been focused on mobile game development for the past few years, so is not actively implementing community solutions with corporations. But she pointed me to...

Lee LeFever in Seattle. I sure wish we were doing this event there, because it would be a great excuse to tap Lee's mind, both from my own curiosity and for our audience's benefit. Lee, in his last experience as an employee, at Solucient, a health care industry data warehousing provider, had found himself helping hospitals figure out how reduce costs in their emergency rooms by sharing solutions with each other. He first implemented a Yahoo! Group, and when that achieved almost immediate success, moved them into a bunch of forums via Web Crossing.

Lee had found his passion. He’s a connector. He likes to facilitate networking, and to bring people information they weren’t aware of. "I'm from North Carolina: it's in my nature," he notes. He was soon "online community manager". "I couldn’t get over how excited, confident, and passionate I was about all that stuff," he says. He learned all he could there, then went independent, focusing on Social Design for the Web, what he thinks of as a new consulting specialty that he and a few other people are even now creating. Like my own company, Avenue A | Razorfish, he's not a technology-focused consultant, instead believing the key to making his consulting successful is understanding what clients really need.

Lee says companies have "a huge opportunity in opening their doors wider. Using message boards as one of primary support mechanisms can cut support costs in half," he says. "And a lot of the risks companies worry about are not born out."

Lee spent a year consulting at Boeing in knowledge management, one of the internal forms of this community/collaboration stuff, implementing online functionality to reconnect executives who had previously come together for leadership meetings only to return to the isolation of their home offices. He's been working on ShareYourStory.Org for the March of Dimes. He's developed message boards and blog elements for Geffen Records' fan sites. He's started to work with Microsoft around using blogs for IT professionals who use their enterprise solutions.

And he sent me URLs to some wonderful thinking he'd done on his blog about subjects like the difference between message boards and weblogs, and how to combine those two elements with wikis for organization, browsing and archiving.

Amazon: canonical community by Ron Lichty

Message boards to enhance support sites. Blogs to communicate with customers. Wikis to generate shared documents. Chat sessions where your company's notables can answer questions live. RSS to keep track of what other thought leaders -- and your competition -- is thinking.

But what's Amazon? (It's certainly a canonical example of one form of community and collaboration functionality!)

Isn't every Amazon product listing really a blog? Amazon puts up the product information (including print reviews) about a book or other product -- everything it knows and wants to share.

And then it invites comments. Which on Amazon are called "customer reviews".

Which is more or less a blog, yes?

Community / collaboration: Financial services??? by Ron Lichty

I made the sweeping prediction, in pitching the July 27 Architecting Community and Collaboration Solutions event, that "We predict virtually every business (as well as every nonprofit, church,and political campaign) will expand their online web presence to incorporate at least one and probably several collaboration and community solutions in the next five years."

Every business? Will that be true in financial services?

Certainly, the credit card associations may provide secure extranet collaboration opportunities with and among their member banks.

But that's business-to-business. How about consumers -- B2C? Is there a compelling role for community with and among bank, brokerage or credit card customers?

In conversations this week with colleagues at Schwab, Wells Fargo and Barclays banks, the formidable barrier of regulation repeatedly came up. When I was at Schwab, nothing went into print that an audience outside Schwab could see without intense scrutiny and approval from Schwab's Compliance department first -- not a technology white paper, not a JavaOne Conference slide deck, not a comment to someone else's blog.

Schwab did try out some online webinars. I don't know if public questions were allowed, but I'm certain they would have been highly moderated. Regardless, time-and-place events did not seem to fit well with the timeless philosophy of the web -- at least there didn't seem to be a rush to attend. (Of course, that was the era in which our investments were all making money. Maybe we just all thought we were already smart investors and not in need of help!)

Thoughts?

RIAs: An overview by Ron Lichty

I just saw a superb survey of Rich Internet Application technologies.

The venue was eBig's Web Development SIG (a recent name change from User Experience SIG).

The presenter was Luke Wroblewski, Lead UI designer for eBay, author of Site-Seeing: a Visual Approach to Web Usability, and principal of LukeW Interface Designs.

I was paying attention to the topic this month because its new chair, Cate Calson, at the suggestion of its first chair, John Armitage, had asked me if I'd talk. And this is the topic I'd have talked on. I wrote a detailed competitive analysis for Flex while I worked at Macromedia two years ago. I went to Schwab in '96 to manage development of the first rich internet application on Schwab.com in one of the only two available technologies at the time, Java. In my later Schwab role leading technology change across all of Schwab's business units, I was involved with three separate initiatives that looked for a better RIA technology, including a pilot with Curl. I'd given survey presentations of RIA technologies.

Luke did it better. Much better.

In his slides, he's got a great one early on that positions the major options graphically on a continuum, from Thin Clients, to Rich Internet Applications, to Rich Clients. And then a series of charts, one per solution, that lists advantages and disadvantages across the categories of User Experience, Deployment & Reach, Processing, Components & Customization, Back-End Integration, Unique Features, Future Proofing, and Staffing & Cost. In his presentation, he alternated between those charts and an example of each solution.

Luke was followed by Angelo Inanoria, VP Engineering and Sr. Research Engineer from JWay Group, presenting a solution that was new to me last month. JWay supplies XUI , a server-side tool, perhaps much like the Flex or Laszlo servers, that translates XML and Javascript, not to Flash, but to DHTML. More intriguing choices.

If you're interested in the architecture of this stuff, SDForum's Software Architecture and Modeling SIG, which I co-chair, will be focused on the topic of "Architectures for RIAs" at our June meeting June 22. Laszlo's chief architect Oliver Steele will lead off, based on his white paper, Serving Client-Side Applications. Isomorphic's chief architect Charles Kendrick will play off that, and compare and contrast AJAX solutions with Flash solutions. (Yes, I know, Laszlo can be re-targeted to an engine other than Flash. But until it is, it's a Flash-based solution.)

If, on the other hand, you're interested in the design side, Luke will be presenting the same night at Yahoo! He'll be talking at BayCHI's Interaction Design BOF Event on "Visual Communication Principles for Web Application Interface Design".

I realized the conflict tonight when I went to put his Yahoo! talk on my calendar.

Darn!

Offshoring solution to message board concerns? by Ron Lichty

I was telling a colleague about my prediction that "virtually every business (as well as every nonprofit, church,and political campaign) will expand their online web presence to incorporate at least one and probably several collaboration and community solutions in the next five years."

He looked at me a bit askance.

He was, not long ago, VP Eng for one of the largest consumer entertainment, home and personal software companies. So I gave him a couple examples of product company use. I told him the story I'd heard from Tim Lundeen that Microsoft now requires all product managers to have boards in place when they launch products. They'd done research that showed that customers who have both phone support and boards available are over twice as happy as those who have only call-in support.

I pointed out that the product support message boards on Apple's site -- while hardware instead of software -- had worked wonders ferreting out an "impossible" problem I'd had with our iMac. First, other iMac users reported the problem, letting me know I wasn't crazy. (I'd had random "Kernel panics" -- the white rectangle of death -- but only when a CD was in the INTERNAL CD drive but NOT in use.) Then an iMac user with the problem identified a solution. (Change the sleep settings, of all things.) Apple's warranty folks were nice enough, and their repair folks had replaced my CD drive -- to no avail, of course, despite their certainty that that would solve it. But it took another user to finally identified the odd combination of triggers that could provide a workaround to the fatal flaw and let the rest of us know.

My colleague was with me. It turns out he'd provided message boards for product support at his own company. But, he noted, somebody has to watch those message boards for miscreants -- the message board version of graffiti or spam -- and that's expensive. (Though in Apple's case, I doubt managing the boards is as expensive as all the CD drive replacements -- and motherboards, power supplies, and other components of other users before me who had my problem during warranty -- hardware fixes they did NOT have to make, thanks to one user providing others with a simple solution. Which is why Apple is smart and provides message boards.)

It also turns out my colleague had come up with a solution for the high cost of management as well. They'd outsourced to India the job of reading every message. The readers were somewhere near 100% at raising red flags to stateside management for anything that looked out of bounds.

Creating the Event by wiki by Ron Lichty

I've also put up a wiki to explore all the context for the event, as an experiment in event planning.

For the moment, only my event assistant producers -- my SIG co-chair and SofTech's program chair -- have access. But my intention is to expand from there to the moderator and panelists and perhaps wider again.

Bob Suess and I collaborated on the original event description via email. But the the event is advancing -- I'm inviting a moderator and panelists -- based on my own vision of the event. (e.g., 1) the event is about adding community and collaboration features to existing business, nonprofit, government and political campaign sites -- not about organizations whose business is this stuff, like LinkedIn or Match.com; 2) vendors can't adequately share the impact of this change -- for our panel, we must have solution builders who have seen dramatic results from implementing this stuff on their sites and ideally have been able to measure dramatic ROIs; and 3) what we want to talk about is how they identified appropriate community and collaboration features and then how they architected and evolved their solutions.)

So I'm putting all that context on the event wiki (I cross-posted some of it here in the More Event Details & Context entry, including some initial questions and some notes on ROIs that look good), and I've so far invited my assistant producers to join in -- to see if they agree with how I've put it and to tweak, suggest, edit, comment or otherwise attempt to improve it. "Do it. It's live."

This is an experiment for me, too. Including the "maybe someone will wreck it" worry. :=)

My thinking is that this truly could be a "groupware" kind of organic development of the event. We've used wikis very successfully to develop documentation. But is this an appropriate use, too?

Internal communities by Ron Lichty

I've been mentally classing internal community / collaboration solutions as KM -- knowledge management. But realized through some of the conversations I've been having via email and voice that my mental model has been much too "clean".

Certainly KM is a piece of internal enterprise community / collaboration solutions. And a necessary one.

Apple, in my last year there, '93-'94, was pressing Radar, its bug tracking system (!), to this use, making it a system in which employees could share their interests and knowledge bases with each other.

In the three-year initiative I ran at Schwab to transform application development from any-language-goes to a single cost-effective Java platform company-wide, my first hire was a webmaster. Fundamental to the challenge, it seemed to me, would be getting the organization to share and move toward common best practices, standards, tools, patterns, frameworks and other forms of reuse. That would require building a sense of being part of a Java community at Schwab. And that meant everyone would need to know who the other members of the community were and what they were doing.

We attempted to make our Schwab internal "Java Portal" comprehensive, with links to everything significant that was Java, both internally and externally. The first functionality on the Schwava Portal was a page that listed every Java project in the company, who worked on it in what capacities, what tools and application servers they'd used, and what approaches they'd taken. When we started, mid-'99, there were only a score of Java applications at Schwab and probably 40 developers. We went out and gathered data and had a static HTML page up with all that information in just two weeks. Three and a half years later, with 400 Java applications and a thousand developers, testers, project managers, and people managers involved with developing all of them, we were working in a virtual Java user group. We'd achieved our goal. By then, we'd coded and re-coded our knowledge base twice, and the "projects" section of the site had become a searchable, sortable database.

With the Event focus on blogs and message boards and wikis, it was easy to think of the software that supports internal communities at companies as being knowledge management software. But I was ignoring what I had just, over the weekend, thought through, when I listed email as one of the early community enabling solutions.

Intercommunication software is, in addition to KM repositories, also core to building community. At Schwab, even before we built our Schwava Portal, we'd created an Outlook group email list to include every Java developer (and later created similar email groups of managers and testers). And we started our initiative's email group from a group we'd started two years earlier, in '97, to facilitate creating our first Java developer community, an internal Java Developers Group.

And beyond email and other communication tools, the internal community/collaboration space includes groupware...

The tools core to internal enterprise communities are not so easily classed.

More links to thinking about community solutions by Ron Lichty

What is a blog, and can we describe blogging not in terms of what came before (as we now refer to “cars”, not requiring reference to “horseless carriages”).

More good community / collaboration links by Ron Lichty

These were dug up by Judy Bell at SofTech:

23 Success Stories using PmWiki software. As much a tribute to the usefulness of wikis as anything.

The challenges of choosing a wiki platform! So many wikis, so few complete.

Community / collaboration links by Ron Lichty

I'm finding fascinating reading to share with our audience on the topic of social software, specifically message boards and forums, blogs, wikis and RSS:

Introductions
"RSS Described in Plain English" by Lee LeFever, Common Craft.

"What are the Differences between Message Boards and Weblogs?" by Lee LeFever, Common Craft.

Wikis, blogs, message boards and social networks... Review of companies using them, review of the companies writing the software. It opens with the story of Ingersoll-Rand being clueless for days while word passed through the blogosphere that its seemingly indestructible Kryptonite bicycle lock could be undone with a Bic pen. Not monitoring blog coverage of its products cost an estimated $10 million for a lock exchange program and untold damage to its brand. --C|Net News.com, first published in TheDeal.com

2004 Howard Dean campaign coverage portrayed the role of technology in drawing together Dean's youthful campaign volunteers. --Samantha M. Shapiro, The New York Times

"The Internet Gives People a Connection -- and a Voice -- in Campaigns" --Matea Gold, December 21, 2003, the Los Angeles Times



How does one measure the ROI of an online community?
"Measuring the success of an online community” by Joseph Cothrel, Strategy & Leadership


Message Boards
A customer and developer support solution that integrates message boards and blogs (for interacting with customers) with wikis (for archiving ideas of ongoing value) by Lee LeFever, Common Craft.


Blogs
"Blogs Will Change Your Business" --Business Week

The legal implications of corporate blogging… by Ephraim Schwartz, InfoWorld


Wikis
The most widely known general-purpose successful wiki implementation, Wikipedia, a project to create a complete and accurate free content encyclopedia, entirely created and updated by users.

Try out a wiki youself, at the wiki sandbox.

How to set up a small wiki for purposes of your own.

Choosing a wiki platform (software and/or services) when you want to set up a WikiWikiWeb on your own servers.

More Event Details & Context by Ron Lichty

Architecting Community & Collaboration Solutions
San Francisco event: July 27, 2005, 6:30 - 9 p.m.

Joint sponsors:
* SDForum
* Softech
* Software Architecture and Modeling SIG of SDForum


First thoughts on key questions for the panel to address
* What brought them to implement community/collaboration functionality?
* How did they select a community/collaboration solution?
* How did they implement that solution? What challenges to doing so? What issues came up?
* Did they have to sell it internally? Was that hard? easy?
* What ROI did they predict? What results did they expect?
* What ROI did they see? What results did they see?


Context for this panel

Community software (defn): software that enables many-to-many interaction
--Joseph Cothrel, “Measuring the success of an online community”

Community software focus for this event:
* Message boards and forums
* Blogs
* RSS
* Wikis

Recently adopted applications that may enable community, depending on their use:
* IM
* online presentation software
* email groups
* meeting invite services

First generation of applications that enabled community:
* mail
* web portals
* message boards

NOT part of the topic for this panel: Social networking sites whose business is developing community.

This event is about the spread and imminent ubiquity of community and collaboration applications onto EVERY ordinary corporate, nonprofit, governmental and political web site. With perspectives from early adopter implementers who can tell us not only about doing it but about the results and ROIs.


Potential Positive ROIs
* cruise lines and travel sites give their guests opportunity to plan their trips, share best destinations and ports, and ask earlier guests what to see via discussion boards and wikis
* cruise lines and travel sites help potential customers find travel partners who share their interests
* manufacturers enable users to endorse their products (as well as share suggestions and ideas) online
* manufacturers and distributors provide message boards to let their customers provide a significant portion of customer support to each other
* Internet marketplaces enable buyers and sellers to exchange information, recommendations and endorsements
* Internet commerce site invite their customers to find common interest with each other related to the products offered on the site
* online information services enable discussion among their customers of information provided on the service
* corporations enable their employees to share best practices to improve processes, products, and services
* health clubs let members form affinity groups and find tennis, racketball and golf partners through the club
* bridal registries enable wedding guests to connect for gift buying -- and to leave messages for the bride and groom
* companies like IBM, Sun, BEA, Microsoft, Macromedia and Apple provide developer communities online


Calculating community ROI….
Here are some data points from four actual commerce-related online communities:
* Company A: Online community members are only 5 percent of the customer base, but make more than 30 percent of purchases.
* Company B: Average transaction size is twice as large for community members as for non-community members.
* Company C: Online community members are almost twice as likely to refer others to the site.
* Company D: Customer retention rates are 50 percent longer for community members than for non-community members.
--Joseph Cothrel, “Measuring the success of an online community”

Description for SDForum / SofTech Event by Ron Lichty

I'm finding myself the event producer for this July 27 San Francisco event jointly sponsored by SDForum, SofTech and my own Software Architecture and Modeling SIG of SDForum. The draft description sums up what I think the mandate is for the topic of...


Architecting Community & Collaboration Solutions

We predict virtually every business (as well as
every nonprofit, church, and political campaign) will
add at least one and probably several collaboration
and community solutions in the next five years.

It's been shown that users provide each other better
tech support than companies provide, and the more
progressive companies have already put discussion
software on their sites to enable their users to do
just that.

How long will it take before cruise lines and travel
sites give their guests the opportunity to plan their
trips, share best destinations and ports, and ask
earlier guests what to see via discussion boards and
wikis?

How long before ALL manufacturers enable users to
endorse their products (as well as share suggestions
and ideas) online? It had better not be long, because
many people do all their buying based on user
endorsements these days.

How long before health clubs let members form affinity
groups and find tennis, racketball and golf partners
through the club? It had better be soon, or they'll go
elsewhere where it's easier to get up a game!

Community and collaboration software is going to
be everywhere -- and already ought to be!

How to choose the right wikis, discussion boards,
community conversation and membership facilitation
tools and where to apply them is the topic. We will
show the impact of making those decisions well by
telling the story from the vantage point of
implementers -- organizations that have implemented
community and collaboration software and experienced
profound impact.

Join us at our panel discussion to hear how
implementers in business, politics (the Howard Dean
campaign!) and nonprofit groups made their
organizations successful with this software!

Pointers to my ski Blogs by Ron Lichty

I'm in my second season training to complete a cross-country ski marathon to benefit the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.

This year's blog: http://www.teamintraining.org/personalpages/page.adp?user_id=156079&event_id=549156

Last year's blog: http://www.teamintraining.org/personalpages/page.adp?user_id=156079&event_id=160237

Cross-country ski marathon length, striders (what I did last year): 25K
My goal this year: 35K
Longest training day so far this year: 19K
Date of the event, the West Yellowstone Rendezvous: Sat., March 12

Minimum fundraising required to participate: $3,500
Raised last year: $5,448.47
Goal this year: $7,000
Raised so far this year: $3,782.50