Poductivity

box on N 42nd street

2007-06-02T12:17:00.001-07:00

Rumble in the Jungle (OK, in the Kruger, not the Jungle)

2007-05-25T19:17:00.000-07:00

WoW. A herd of buffalo vs a pride of lions and a couple of croc's. Who do you think won this one? Watch this phenomenal video ...

We traveled to the the Kruger (National Park) a few times when I lived in Johannesburg. A house mate's father once had a medical practice in the Skukuza Camp, so we spent a few weekends there while we lived together. Once, while leaving the park we had to drive off the road to pass a male lion who wasn't going to move for us. That was unforgetable. His face was literally a few feet away from mine as I drove by. It must have been mind-bending to watch this go down. Thanks to YouTube and the nice folks who uploaded the video!

Scoble's 9 things about Social Media

2007-04-25T03:59:00.000-07:00

This is a bullet point summary of Robert Scoble's 9 things about social media (first mentioned in this post).

Can be changed (updated) in real time.
Allows audience interaction.
Popularity is transparent.
Permanently available archives.
Can be a mix of media.
Author = Publisher.
No limits on the quantity of content.
Freely Syndicated.
Can be mashed up.

Hope I read you right, Robert :)

Watch the show, get the shirt, write the wiki

2006-07-12T19:43:00.000-07:00

If you haven't yet, click above & watch the show -- Ze Frank's the bomb -- the show is my favorite entertainment online. Ze's changed my opinion on small-screen video -- I'm going to have to get a new iPod. GRRR.

I bought 3 t-shirts from Ze. they arrived yesterday. Sweet. Is this new media? It isn't old media.

Ze's a talented writer, fearless performer and entertaining editor -- but most impressive is the audience participation he's built into the show experience. Most shows have been transcribed to the show's wiki by the fabulosos -- who have twice authored the show on fabuloso friday (using he wiki) -- and who also use the wiki to strategize their next chess move in the game they're playing against Ze. Fabulosos are the most active Sports Racers. Who are the Sports Racers? Check out the definition in the show's wiki.

Ze's making the web a better place and something tells me his impact will be way bigger than (even) the show -- Ze, if you read this, thanks for the shirts, the laughs and the knowledge!

States I've Visited

2006-06-30T20:42:00.000-07:00

Way to go yet ... exploring WA has just been too good the past few years - that and the odd trip back to SA etc.

create your own visited states map

You know that your web service rocks when ...

2006-06-30T08:29:00.000-07:00

... it is natively supported by device manufacturers.Check out this laptop from Packard Bell -- its the Skype edition -- natively supports Skype video-conferencing with custom skype call control buttons at the top of the screen. Can you think of another web service with that kind of adoption? I can not.

This is yet another sign (IMO) that skype is the world's favorite web service -- and that the eBay investment in skype was smart -- and that eBay could be a great web2 investment at this point (more on that later -- FYI: I dont own any EBAY -- yet).

HT to the skype blog.

CONGRATULATIONS iStockPhoto !!!

2006-02-09T17:20:00.000-08:00

.... on being acquired by Getty Images (down the street here in Fremont, Seattle). See the announcement to the iStockPhoto community here.

This is a brilliant deal for iStockPhoto, a necessary and extremely genius move for Getty and possibly the 1st Web 2.0 acquisition that actually makes sense for users.

I'm going to review this in MUCH more detail, but just uickly wanted to say BOOOOOOOYAAAAAAA - great work and very well deserved. Thanks iStockPhoto for being the first team to really put your community's interests first while growing your company.

I still think iStockPhoto is of the best Peer Production examples we have today and the Getty relationship will only improve on that as Getty legitimizes the "microstock" model for the last of the industry's old guard.

The message for other succesful community-built startups is clear; when looking for funding / liquidity, the portals and VC's are far from your only option, and are probably your suboptimal choices.

Full disclosure - I'm a proud contributing photog (and customer) at iStockPhoto ;-)

58 Days

2006-02-08T17:18:00.000-08:00

Without cigarettes.

If you laid all the smokes I haven't smoked (so far) end-to-end, they would span 30% of the Space Needle. [observe graphic] Props for this creative approach to quitting go to Seattle Times graphic artist Kriss Chaumont. Cool.

Yep, No Ciggies. Nada, Zip, Zilch, not one freekin' drag. [an '05 resolution that just squeezed in right before Christmas]. I quit cold turkey in N.Carolina. There's a song [probably country] in there somewhere.

So far so good - side effects (besides weight gain) are subsiding - my attention span's finally returned to normal (yep, I'll be bloggin' again) and our marriage is thankfully in tact (thanks for your patience w/my ranting babe ;-) [p.s. how could you ever kiss a smoker ? yuck!]

I could honestly smoke a pack tomorrow.

If you read this post, keep me honest & ask for an update on my progress; besides finally growing up, I think that peer pressure may be as effective in quitting as it is in starting smoking.

It's going to be hard

2005-11-11T07:10:00.000-08:00

to concentrate today ...

Our Mountain opened with the deepest base in the world this week ... sorry to rub it in, but you know where I'm going to be first thing tomorrow - and the boards and wax are coming out tonight. I can't wait. It looks like we're going to be blessed this season, which is in order considering what a snow-less winter the N/W had last year (even Whistler shut). Baker also holds the record for the most snowfall in history - and in a normal season, you can predictably ski in 6 months of the year.

Mt. Baker was also just rated 18 / 780 ski destinations by skiing mag. ... and number 1 in Washington. Not good news for the lift-lines (typically better than elsewhere in WA). But definitely good news for our investment - Laura and I picked up a qtr acre plot in Glacier, next to Mt.Baker late last year - we've already been offered 6X what we paid and it looks like demand will continue to increase. We're not selling and we'll build in '06 - nice to see though. Now, more importantly, where did I leave my boots again ... ?

just imagine ...

2005-10-30T08:36:00.000-08:00

... imagine you read a GREAT Dilbert comic. Not hard to imagine. Now imagine this ...
.. the time comes when you stop rolling with laughter and you're thinking about what Dilbert's creator, Scott Adams was thinking when he drew this. You're thinking about your worst boss, or his most stupid ideas. You're wondering what Scott's editors thought when they saw the first draft.
Imagine you could find THAT stuff out at a click of a button.
That would be cool.
Actually, it IS cool. Scott has a BLOG, "The Dilbert Blog" (what else) and his typings are as fascinating, punchy, laughable and cynically insightful as what his sketches are. Go check it out ... Scott's got a cunning conversation going on on his blog.

3 quick observations;

Blogs don't discriminate in who they are valuable to; blogging benefits professional & amateur alike, and for much the same reasons. It's a rediculous notion that professional writers don't need to Blog.
The MSM and BSM compliment each other. Scott's blog's audience benefits from his MSM popularity, and vice versa. The result is cumulative.
The argument that "citizen content" is not valuable to consumers (predictably touted by MSM moguls and other fools) must END. As Scott has has demonstrated, having a Blog will become a mark of quality professional media. Not having one may actually define poor quality, and would definitely call the author's credibility into question.

I personally think Blogging allows the MSM to gain back some of the credibility its lost over the past few decades. Scott's one who probably doesn't need to work on his credibility with his audience; but there are many TV news anchors who should consider blogging.

Getting BIG Things DONE Voluntarily

2005-10-28T12:28:00.000-07:00

Finally, an update on The Business Experiment. The short story is; "to get peer production, you have to live it".

I think The Business Experiment is trying to solve the most complex peer production problem of them all; it's a cradle-to-grave commons-based approach that I'm yet unsure will succeed. I AM LEARNING THOUGH, and I can imagine few better communites to highlight the major challenges, strategies and tactics that will define successfully peer produced stuff, of any kind.

The latest highlights & lessons are:

We've voted on a decent brand-name for the first company we're creating, (was "WOU2"), now ASKSPACE.
ASKSPACE will quickly evolve into a one-of-a-kind online community for rapidly providing optimal solutions to every-day and complex business problems. The platform is unique in its converged use of a) expert domain knowledge, b) the wisdom of crowds and c) peer production. I'm pumped about the potential for this & investing some time in seeing it happen.
About 200 of TBE's 800-plus members seem to "get" ASKSPACE and want it to happen. Deciding on the most effective incentive for their participation is still an ongoing challenge, and therefore, so is participation itself for many members. Yet ...
about 30 folk joined 4 leadership teams and then a CEO stepped up to the plate to lead ASKSPACE (yes, Rob May, ever the diplomat, is taking a back seat ... every-time he does, things accelerate; the participation of non-participation, perfected by Rob). Organizing these groups functionally has been a challenge; mostly to the democracy that made TBE so appealing in the first place. Email threads proved an unproductive communication mechanism for the distributed teams, and probably only the tech. team made real progress, although directionless due to lack of agreement on the strategy team (of which I'm a member). A dot-project implementation hasn't been well adopted by users.
We quickly regrouped and made 5 individuals publicly responsible for the project's initial direction. It seems to be working. My inbox is overflowing with email from the others (yes, I put my hand up again - I tell you, I believe in this, the lessons alone are priceless). The other 4 are very smart folk; Sean Clauson,Asheesh Dewan, Carolyn Burke (interestingly, the world's first weblogger), Bill Moran, and of course I managed to drag Rob into the conversation.
The group met via Skype for the 1st time this week. (Apologies to Asheesh for not figuring out how to con-call > 5 folk). A 2HR call!!! Folks on the East coast ended at midnight. Rob recorded the session & we hope to start podcasting these & other TBE meetings. It's also a great way to simplify content on what is a already a far too busy website at TBE (we're looking for a designer - a volunteer of course).
Because of all the friction we've had in moving from the "idea" phase to the "execute" phase, there have been some mistakes made and many lessons learnt lately. Surprisingly, this friction has driven some innovation at TBE;
The most notable of which actually came from my frustration with Rob calling for a CEO. I saw this as the end of the democracy; wanted a better solution and came back to Haque's microchunking idea (which is the key to all this). If you could "microchunk" traditional business and project roles, you could probably get business and projects done by volunteer peer producers. I pitched Rob, he liked it & pitched TBE, and they
Put Microchunking the projects we do at TBE to a vote (like everything else). Results from the past 6 votes are shown below. As you can see, at 91,3% FOR, proceeding with building a Microchunking platform is about the closest we've had to a unanimous decision at TBE lately. Interestingly, it's closely followed by Bootstrapping, suggesting Peer Production's the Zeitgeist driving at least the pasrticipants who are voting (25% to 60% - avg is 41.2%)

A New Name for WoU2	AskSpace (askspace.com)	33.5%
Markup on fundraising merchandise	Wouldn't buy at any price	35.0%
Should WOU2 Find Funding or Boostrap?	Boostrapping. TBE techies can earn points for doing the design and programming	69.5%
Should WOU2 Find Funding or Boostrap?	Marketing	36.5%
Microchunking	yes	91.3%
Microchunking	Sean (WOU2 leader) assigns them	38.0%

The result is we now have 2 projects, 3 if you count TBE separately. MICROCHUNX (un-named) will become a highly automated platform for getting BIG projects voluntarily executed by distributed participants. From a user's perspective, the community will be a place to develop a reputation for your expertise and trade your productive passions for various rewards. For Entrepreneurs, it's a massive distributed workforce that GET BIG THINGS DONE VOLUNTARILY.

There are a LOT of details to work out, the most important of which is how ASKSPACE will use the MICROCHUNX platform and how to sequence the to-market strategy for both products given this interdependency. But, we now have two killer peer-production products in the funnel!

I'll close out with thoughts on a tough issue we continue to deal with at TBE and have to solve for MICROCHUNX. The question is, in a world where participants are voluntarily peer-producing and contributing varied skills, how do we systemize the rewards they receive for their efforts? Here are some suggestions I sent the core group for how Projects could be VALUED on our platform. Its important to assign whatever reward it is that the recipient receives for executing the project. Let Me Know what you think and whether you'd participate in a project run under any of these compensation frameworks ...

4 models for assigning TOTAL VALUE OF OPEN PROJECTS

Our "theme"" should be that participants INVEST their time, spread RISK across multiple projects and share REWARD if they succeed. Merely selling people's time is a crowded marketplace. So, what are models for "buying" the execution of projects?

1] SOCIAL Projects.
Project sponsor has to justify the total SOCIAL value created by their initiative ... either in $ value created for society or in the cost it would take to execute the project commercially. "Raise $100,000 for Katrina victims" could be an example of such a project.These projects can frankly be launched with $0 value and still succeed because participant passion for the initiative is high.

2] OPEN Initiatives.
Just like Open Source Software, the incentive to participate in some Open Plan Communities will be in using the result of the project to generate private income streams. Here, the project sponsor would need to calculate the potential earnings per participant in the community. The total value of any project hour is the value that participant "could" earn over X months once the initiative launches.

3] BARTER Projects.
This is where participants earn points to then use to get their own things done. This is a complex system. A few thoughts:
a) where do we start? We have to let participants who dont own points award them - that's tricky.
b) we should cap the number of hours you can assign to a max. based on your historical participation
c) and possibly also pro-rate the value of your points awarded by your productivity
This is HARD. We should consider selling these points to people wanting to sponsor projects to get started. Maybe that's how we fund our business.

4] COMMERCIAL Projects.
The only solution I have for this is that $$$'s are attached to warrants executed with and administered by us. Warrants are like stock options but against future revenues, not equity. Repayment against warrants carries similar risks to stock options - and the company would probably have to agree to be audited to prove eligibility to collect. Typically, the deferred payment bears interest with time penalties but is perpetuated until the company succeeds or is folded. Due to the complexity in tis, we add this LAST.

UPDATE: BARTER is a tool that could apply across all of the other 3. Thanks Sean.

... that was FAST

2005-10-25T16:24:00.000-07:00

Now all that's left to do is list my service on Craigslist and eBay. Skype Voice Services has launched. This is a game-changer.

Yes, I Love to be Right!

the FINAL CHANNEL frontier?

2005-10-24T10:31:00.000-07:00

ALL Business is done via "Channels". And we're about to get another one.

A "Channel" is a nice description of a company's various "conduits to revenues". "Channels" help us control, manage, record and process our interactions and transactions. We LOVE Channels! Retail Channels, Advertising Channels, Media Channels, Communication Channels ... Channels are how we get things done ... Channels are how we make our million$.Without Channels, where would we be?

So, basically, channels rock. New Channels disrupt our economy. And that's about to happen again. All Channels are ultimately commoditized, yet the most prevalent Channel today is neither organized nor commoditized. It offers a massive OPPORTUNITY which some bright folks are currently working on.

So, give me some examples of "Channels". Well, there's all the old-school channels of;

(physical) Retail stores,
TV & Cinema
Radio
Print Media
(Snail) Mail & Parcel Delivery
Door-2-Door (Avon Calling)
Utilities
WAN & LAN (Client / Server Network Computing)
Mobile 2 Mobile Text Messaging
(SYNCHRONOUS) Voice including Mobile & IVR (yes, the telephone)

The last of these, SYNCHRONOUS Voice is your tele-sales agent, customer service rep., cellular provider, IVR service and company PABX etc. It's important to this story, we'll come back to it.

Now, the old channels compete with the new flavors. We recently, added a whole bunch of super-efficient highly-automated new channels;

eCommerce & P2P Sales (including auctions)
eMail
Electronic Directories (Search)
P2P File Sharing
VOIP (synchronous Voice Again)

Now, we're in one of those "new Channel" phases all over again. So Soon? Technology's letting us extend some of the new channels to add

Blogging
PODcasting
The Metadata Channel (Tagging etc.)
(& the rest of) Web2.0 (yet to be defined :-)

Some folks make a killing each time a new Channel is discovered. Why is that? Well, through smartly organizing and commoditizing new channels, smart (and lucky) folk manage to turn new channels, whatever they are used for, into profitable businesses.

There's a single MASSIVE Channel (in use today) where this has not yet happened. What is it?

ASYNCHRONOUS Voice

I think that the ASYNCHRONOUS Voice channel will come of age and be a significant addition to global productivity over the next 5 years. I also think, that despite being YACh (Yet Another Channel), this one, like ASYNCHRONOUS email before it, has a massive potential to;

simplify our lives and give us back some control
increase our "life-archival" functionality
improve our productivity
integrate our collaborative activities to our productivity tools

There's a reason that email is much bigger than chat; Asynchronous. There's a reason that Blogging's competing with eMail; increased asynchronous. The iPod; ASYNCHRONOUS!!! The internet, PODcasting, wiki's, VIDEOcasting, TIVO, even online dating; all ASYNCHRONOUS. ASYNCHRONOUS Channels are super-cool right now, what started with email has become a personal productivity revolution, and it's common platform? Yes, ASYNCHRONOUS'ity.

Let me participate, but on my time, and the chances that I will are greatly improved.

We're learning that asynchronous channels are highly productive. They let each user both collaborate with distributed peers (all the rage) and simultaneously get on with their own stuff, prioritize tasks as suits their personal schedule. asynchronous channels have become essential to Getting things Done.

SYNCHRONOUS Voice was there before any of the other channels. Ever since there were masters and servants, we've been getting things done by telling people what to do - and then having them run off and ASYNCHRONOUSLY do them. We've learnt, that to control our lives, most of what we do needs to be accomplished ASYNCHRONOUSLY, sometimes by us, and sometimes by others. While SYNCHRONOUS voice has been good channel for this collaboration, but if the activities related to a task are ASYNC then why should the collaboration that triggeers it be SYNC? Surely using ASYNC methods for both the collaboration and the task itself, you add more visibility and control = which is good.

Voice is the most effective channel we have. Not accessible, just effective. Let's face it, we weren't born to type (he types).

So, all the activities that take place via SYNCHRONOUS triggers today, and those that take place ASYNCHRONOUSLY via text, could actually, probably, most likely, be MORE efficiently triggered via an ASYNCHRONOUS Voice Channel.

To say that the problem space of new and viable solutions here is HUGE is an understatement. Smart People working on this are Nivi who commented as much on my last post and the Edgar project referred to in it. Who else?

I think that new products and services in this space will be massively prolific - possibly for the next decade. Is this the FINAL CHANNEL? I doubt it, but it could be HUGE. Its amazing it's so late-coming (other than voice-mail that is - yes, I discounted voicemail, OK?). I don't think the money's in how you get it though, it may be in how you use it. What do you think?

Sessions Impressions > Peer Production

2005-10-23T09:02:00.000-07:00

Union Square Ventures hosted the first "Union Square Sessions" last week. The Session topic was "Peer Production and related opportunities including Open Source Software" ... Naturally, I'm reading through the Session Transcript word for word. I think the Session is a Brilliant idea ... (even though I wasn't invited :-). If you need to learn a new space that's ill-defined, what better way to hash it out than to get all of the experts into one room and make them thrash it out. Yochai Benkler and Umair Haque were both there. Thanks for publishing the transcript, Union Square.

The discussions are fascinating. Much of what was said reinforces & extends my own thoughts on the fascinating topic of Peer Production. Predictably, not all of the experts agree, and I think that some interesting insights can be drawn from the variance in their opinions. As I read through the transcript, I'm going to take notes that are of interest (to me):

1] Yochai Benkler (way ahead of the rest):
I'm going to try and translate Benkler's definition into layman's English ...

The "non-economic" activities we all undertake in our every-day lives; our chores and hobbies ... have recently been discovered to be valuable to economic production,
... and are increasingly favored as a preferable operating strategy in new business plans and economic models.
This is a NEW way of getting things done, it is creating new OPPORTUNITIES and will also result in new PROBLEMS to be solved, the most important of which is how to,
... use this new output for GOOD, while not exploiting and corrupting the social values and systems that gave rise to it in the first place.

Here's Benkler's quote ...

"I think what peer production is intended to capture is the fact that a whole set of other behaviors that have grown up in the household, in friendships, in communities, the motivations that they capture, the signals that get people to explain what it is that they desire, how they desire, what they want to do, what they're trying to do, all of these things are suddenly becoming integrated into the core economic activities of the most advanced economists, and all of the players inside of these economies need to begin to think. It's a new set of social competition. It's a new set of opportunities. It's a new solution space for ways to solve production problems. And we need to start learning how to live with, use, provide platforms for, use the outputs of without undermining this new set of social cultural practices."

2] Marc Pincus is talking about "one service" and eradicating duplication of effort, aggregating all the services into one central service for each internet user. Marc's got it totally wrong and it's important to remember Benkler's words that "our sociology is moving into the economy". Social structures will be replicated in economic communities ... and just like we don't each have only one social support system we subscribe to, and there isn't one system that resides over the rest, we wont all have one point of peer participation.

It's a peer's responsibility to embed themselves in each of the communities that they are passionate about, not the communities' responsibility to become "vanilla" to all participants. The big web portals don' get this. Personally, I'm all for many purpose-built "passion hubs". Duplication should not bother investors given the low cost of software development now.

Marc's wrong that "one service" would be in the interest of users ... he's blurring web2.0 and peer production objectives a bit here. Praying for a "controllable monopoly" couldn't be further from the spirit of Peer Production. "Redundant" & "abundant' resources are why Peer Production works (it's why P2P software works).

My advice: don't sit around waiting for (or worse yet, working on) the UBER-service!

3] Interestingly, Tim O'Reilly lists as the originally published piece on the topic;

... the formative essay for me on the subject was one written by Dan Bricklin called the Cornucopia of the Commons, which he published in 2001.

In this essay about Cornucopia, I thought the interesting note was that what Briklin & team found was that;

"Use brings overflowing abundance."

There it is again, in Peer Production, ABUNDANCE is good ... it was waste in the last economy ... it was the last economy's greatest LIABILITY ... Abundance is Peer Production's primary ASSET and as we saw in [2] above, technologists are battling to "get it". Peer Production, unlike the "old economy" doesn't demand return on abundance the way in which the old economy demanded returns on waste ... this is the secret to the HUGE upside in the profitability of peer produced products.

4] A lot of talk about the value of "the commons". "The commons" is the shared space created by participating in a community. Good discussion about how Creating the Commons, can either the "direct" goal of the community, or it can be an "indirect" byproduct of the community's activity.

It's obvious that the venture folks are looking to own the commons, seen as the "free" valuable byproduct of the community. Longterm, I personally think that "consumers as producers" are too smart to just line others' pockets ... I think the direct model will yield far more valuable production that the indirect model, yet that's clearly an unpopular opinion today.

For me, the "indirect" model simply tries to sell my own productivity back to me; I won't stand for it ... your service may be useful but it could easily be replicated ... don't abuse my participation because it's your only asset!

5] Jeff Jarvis gets it ...

"If you give people control, they'll use it, and if you don't, you'll lose it."

6] Michael Parekh is also thinking about;

a) how do you make these systems more efficient?
b) how do you get more people to participate?

(b) is the right question to be asking, I think that asking (a) is a waste of time in a Peer Production community. Because production is outsourced (to the peers), so is the "pain" of poor efficiency ... Inefficient peer producers will atrit ... and that's OK.

7] "Reputation" will clearly be much more important online than "Privacy Concerns" have been. To web1.0, still obsessed with anonymity ... "Get over it".

8] A LOT of talk about what we called "Personalization" in Web1.0 - reading this transcript it's like these guys are inventing "customers who bought this, also bought that". There is a major problem with focusing too much on "indirect production" and it's a trap that the VC's are falling hard for.

9] ASYNCHRONOUS VOICE. This is the first time I've seen someone else talking about this MASSIVE opportunity - Scott Heifferman ...

"there's a company being incubated at Klein & Perkins called Project Edgar, which is about asynchronous voice, and the way it was pitched in a deck is "Now you can talk without talking."

and this interesting sound-byte recalling Napster-euphoria:

"... You walk down the street and ... You know, this mass of strangers, some of them gave me music last night,""

10] Mark Pincus thinks EBay's a "closed" company because they don't give him RSS "feeds" from his sellers' profile. How ridiculous, this guy really doesn't get it! EBay has created financial independence for 750K Americans ... probably more than any single company in history ... the only "feeds" that those peer producers are interested in is the feed they put on the table for their families daily ... yeah Mark, that feels like a "walled garden" to me.

Web2.0 and Peer Production clearly have some different priorities ... "open" companies do not necessarily = "open content", and likewise, I think that very few "open content" models will create value close to that of peer produced "open companies".

Web2 is looking to share content. Peer Production is looking to share revenues. I'll take door number two please.

11] REPUTATION = f (CONTEXT)

The group is again grasping for one "uber-service" that would store & forward our online REPUTATION on demand. Then, Mary Hodder recounts how a) you actually can get reputation data out of eBay ... but ... it's not very useful ... she describes how reputation on eBay is largely binary ... with a 3rd "middle" state, the "B+" state dominating most reputations.

My read of what Mary's saying is that the eBay reputation is not useful in communities that aren't p2p auctions. Each community is defined by its core passions. Likewise, good performance and good standing in those communities are defined by the context within the community. The parameters that define reputation are a function of context - the context of the community - and is specific to that community. It may be true that "poor standing" could be generalized to global standards and shared amongst all peer production communities. That's definitely NOT true for good standing however. A "good" reputation at eBay does not translate to good standing at iStockPhoto. About the general "uselessness" of the eBay reputation data, Hodder says,

"But because they've made these really weird social parameters, we're making it a very strange way."

a) All the current work on centralizing and standardizing "Reputation" is a HUGE waste of time ... stop it!
b) Your online reputation is still important ... but no-ones going to build it for you.
c) Frankly, in my opinion, the productive "reputation engine" online is the blogstream ...

12] Benkler is Brilliant ...

When he simply summarizes all the "indirect" talk by saying he thinks it's important to draw a distinction ... and he actually calls this stuff "Social Production" ... and it's not "Peer Production" ... mmmmm'kay ... no wonder this space is so hard to groc.

I actually think the "Social Production" space is a massive red herring. Benkler contrasts it to and says that Peer Production on the other hand is ...

"the more self-conscious cooperative platforms."

It is clear that focus and investment is going to be split between the two ... and that the HYPE is in the "social" space, not the "peer space".

Benkler goes on to criticize the group's focus on Reputation, saying that "ranking" members better than each other is seldom productive sociology in productive communities. Good Point.

13] ... Debating whether Craigslist destroyed value in the newspaper industry. I fully agree with these quick quotes by Brad and Fred; they obviously think about this one a lot ...

MR. BURNHAM: Well, if you think about value as being the most efficient delivery of a service, delivering the service more efficiently doesn't destroy value, it destroys pricing.
MR. WILSON: It's wealth transfer, not wealth destruction.

14] Jarvis spot-on that this is a VERY competitive space ...

Somebody else can come along and be more open, and if the user, the job seekers and sellers benefit more, that will win out. That will win, if it can.

15] Seth Godin says that the 3 "F"s are driving consumer behavior ...

a) FRICTION - is a good thing - "make people pay" and they value your commodity more - despite free content everyone wants to have a hard-cover copy of the latest blockbuster.
b) FOCUS - we need the "TV Guide" more today than we ever did ... some-one needs to tell us where to focus with all of the potential media choices we have.
c) FAIR share - peer producers will only share if they get their "fair share". Godin says that where he sees this conversation the most right now is in agreeing a "fair share" of internet traffic in exchange for contributing to the community.

It would seems like Seth believes that the microcontent aggregators would do better as a "point of departure" than as a "point of destination" ... and thinking about it, that definitely applies to GOOG's success with search.

***************************

OK _ enough for today - I'm about half way through the transcript and will pick up where I left off again tomorrow ...

If you could change One Law ...

2005-10-20T11:33:00.000-07:00

What would it be?

If I was asked 1000 times on 1000 different days, my answer would always be the same ... in the US, I would outlaw at-will employment.

My tirade about "at-will" employment contracts was what you missed ...... in my last post that Blogger managed to loose for me!

It was a duzi, so I'm going back to the salient pont; that the US Leadership deficit in our corporations is one scary deficit no-one seems to be doing anything about. It's also a deficit that's reached a phenomenal global imbalance, all due to the simpe error in judgement in how incentives were removed for US companies to develop their human resources. "AT-WILL" employment contracts are the evil'ist invention I've come across yet in this fascinating system we call Corporate America.

In most US corporations, "hiring & firing" is run like that of a major-league base-ball team ... the newest-ringer gets the highest income, your spot is only as secure as your last inning, and the bench is deep & constantly vying for the coach's attention, which if won will cost you your job in a heartbeat. Pro ball players get compensated for this lack of security ... 95%+ of US employees don't ... they live from paycheck to paycheck, under contracts with no more guarantees.

There is no cost to poor leadership in the US, so GOOD leadership is not valued ... In the US, due to "at-will" contracts, managers can and do ...
1) hire irresponsably, on a whim
2) ignore developing people into roles they can rather recruit for
3) replace entire teams with new employees who have "flavor of the month" skillsets
4) never have to bother with implimenting & develoing a real career development plan for their employees

From my experience here, I'd say all 4 of the above are more common management tactics than for example, sending a talented employee for a week's training in new & useful skills twice a year.

Bob May in some brilliant analysis, juxtaposes US to EU views on leadership as a desirable trait amongst executives when he points out that;
a) In 2004, 1400 US CFO's agreed that "people-skills" are 1% of what they consider to be a good leader
b) yet when Rob heard Richard Branson answer what he looks for in management talent, here's what Virgin's CEO said ...

"The number one thing that matters, especially if you’re going to be manager at Virgin, is how good you are with people. If you’re — if you’re good with people and you’ve got — you know, and you really care, genuinely care about people then I’m sure we could find a job for you at Virgin. I think, you know, that, you know, that the companies that look after their people are the companies that do really well. I’m sure we’d like a few other attributes, but that would be the most important one."

If that's not a deficit, what is? There's a major global imbalance in how leadership is valued in corporate circles. We clearly do not value leadership in the US - and it's because we're the only country that perpetuates this crazy "at-will" system. I'd even stretch this to suggest that leadership and ethic are corellated ... now, there's something to really think about ... we all know what Enron cost ... could the deep-rooted cause actually be this rediculous "at-will" system and its resulting incentive to NOT appoint leaders to positions of responsibility. Great people-skills, by definition puts others first; I more than suggest that if US corporations did prioritize people-skills in position of authority, a natural by-product would be good ethics. It's not proposterous to call "at-will" employment "a" cause of the poor ethics prevalent in today's boardrooms.

In my original post I explained the origins of this crazy contract at lenght but dont have tim to repeat myself. For a good explanation, read this by Ronald Standler. I also came up with a lot of suggestions for changing it. Sometime, I may type them up again, but for now, I'd rather just get your thoughts ... and sign off with this promise that when my startup launches, no-one employed by us will sign an "at-will" contract.

web2.0 gets physical

2005-10-19T19:19:00.000-07:00

Something that fascinates me about this new internet is how it seems to embrace both the physical & the virtual worlds. That just wasn't the case with web1.0, where you were either "click" or "brick" ...

Check out "thebubbleproject" to see what I mean ... The people on the streets of NYC didn't even know that they were creating a website, and writing a book when they "annotated" or better yet, graffiti'd the bubbles that Mark Batty stuck on advertisements all over the city.

The project involves more real-world production than virtual-world production. Initially, Mark stuck up all the bubbles and took all the pictures. Now he's also employing Web2.0 to distribute bubble templates and takes uploads from the site's fans. The internet, and Mark's "grafiti aggregator" is mainly a tool though for showcasing the bubble-writers' work, which is produced off-line. It's like the listeners at KWJZ who program their favorite radio channel using email & their online community. Even Radio is becoming a product of web2.0. It would seem that web2.0 has far more of a chance of leaving our LCD's and following us into "the real world". It's a good thing!

Question: is this Web2.0 or Peer Production? Mark's first artists probably don't even know about the website. Now, a community of the site's fans can submit their own ad-maush-ups, so surely the project has become Web2.0? This project does a good job of illustrating the difference though ... and it maybe indicates that it's Peer Production, and not Web2.0 that's the prerequisite community-produced products. This one thing is true - Mark's proved that a community doesn't always need to collaborate to "peer produce", that's interesting.

The Bubble Project is also a great study in effective web design, sans the (normally obligitory) white space. It works for me. Mark's obviously a principled guy; me, I'd merchandise the &%^$ out of the Bubble Project's traffic ... Mark's entire premise for the project is that we're being over-run by public advertising; so advertising revenues are _out_ but, Mark's got a book in the works. Smart guy - Mark Batty publishing is a business worth watching.

I HEART The bubbleproject, it's cheeky, irreverent, but mostly DANG FUNNY. Here's just one of many of the pieces that made me smile ... [yes, for more reasons than one, Im trying to appeal to a wide audience OK - sheeeessshhh]

IT IS GETTING A BIT bauhaus

2005-10-18T12:58:00.000-07:00

around here WOT ?

What do you think ... what else would you change on Poductivity (besides the author) ... you get to see me work live - just make a (decent) proposal below in the comments for changes to Poductivity. We're still under reconstruction ...

THANK YOU FOR YOUR PATIENCE.

eh - Blogging is just too much fun

Under Reconstruction ...

2005-10-18T12:10:00.000-07:00

DO NOT ADJUST YOUR MONITOR

Poductivity's going to look a bit odd for the next few days while I work out a template that actually does my content some credit. Let's face it ... it's going to be easy to improve on!!! I'm going to test out a few new layouts ... blogspot's my dev / backup & production environment all in one, so you're going to have to bear with me ... sorry 'bout that but we're ...

UNDER RECONSTRUCTION around here!

Laszlo for Dummies

2005-10-18T12:00:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, I need a good "visual" to explain why new technologies are super-cool.

It's been a long time since I've seen a demo that communicates as well as this Laszlo development demonstration.

This thing kicks ass!

Perfect Business Blogging

2005-10-18T10:55:00.000-07:00

OK, all you corporate Blog consultants can go and find another line of work.

Seriously, I think that American Express has officially perfected the corporate blogging business model. AmEx are promoting an event in their Open for (Small) Business product line. They're holding a conference, OPEN Adventures in Entrepreneurship in Miami this week which leads with a discussion with Virgin's founder, Richard Branson. What an excellent initiative for the corporation to Blog about!

And here's where it gets really interesting. Instead of suddenly turning a few PR-shy staffers into hack-bloggers against their better wishes, AmEx took a different route. I think that this model could trump most other corporate blogging strategies. Note: for small corporations, I don't advise this model and suggest that finding your own voice in a blog online is essential to building a (big) small company. For corporations, however, AmEx may have perfected the recipe ...

1) They hired an internet genius, Clay Shirkey, to put together a panel of 3 contract bloggers.
2) Clay's a detail-oriented technologist, so I imagine his next steps were to thoroughly understand the "message" AmEx were trying to communicate - and the audience that they were targetting.
3) Clay then matched AmEx's expectations to the content & writing style of 3 GREAT bloggers. The awesome thing about "recruiting" bloggers is that we're already at the point where a blog is way more effect than a CV/resume in communicating a person's strengths' and bias'.
4) AmEx is flying the bloggers to the event, covering expenses & paying for their time.
5) I've spoken with one of the bloggers, Rob May who blogs the excellent Business Pundit and who also founded The Business Experiment. To paraphrase Rob;

"they've asked me to blog my own thoughts on my own blog - about business & entrepreneurship - that's what I do every day!"

Rob writes on his blog about the disclaimer he will have to publish (literally, AmEx's only stipulation regarding content);

"So keep in mind that despite being paid, American Express wants me to say what I really think. They just want you to realize it is me saying it, not them."

I think that this model is awesome!
In terms of value, this strategy is HUGE --> It brings third party credibility and an instant audience to the corporation recruiting the contract-blogger. If you choose a good blogger, this is like getting a PR-service and Marketting distribution in one neat cheap package.
In terms of the Author's Integrity, this model is the first I've seen that doesn't compromise the ethic of the blogger in the content they produce and that simultaneously ensures that they can be rewarded for their efforts while still maintaining ownership of their work.

I think that business and blogging finaly made a match that is a "win" for both parties - and you know how I'm all about "win-win". This sponsored blogathon is important - read Rob's insights and those of the other bloggers:
Anita Campbell
Dane Carlson
Clay Shirky

The challenge in doing a startup ...

2005-10-18T10:33:00.000-07:00

Is there's so much to do ... where do you start - I could spend all day just itemizing all the things I have to do. Somedays I do.

The reward in doing a startup ...

2005-10-18T10:31:00.000-07:00

Is there's so much to do ... you notice progress with everything you touch

Things that make you go MMMMMM

2005-10-18T07:58:00.000-07:00

Internet Browser Usage Statistics.
Flash Player Version Ubiquity.

Observations:
1. IE (6, the latest version of) is at its highest usage (68.9%) since 2003.
2. Microsoft is doing a great job of converting IE5 users to IE6 but there are still some die-hards, a non-trivial number still > 5%. C'mon Dad, upgrade already!
3. To match Flash 7 ubiquity, you have to develop for the top 3 browsers - today, that includes IE5.
3. It is improbable to match Flash 6 ubiquity even by developing for the top 7 browsers and definitely impossible to maintain browser code that match's Flash 5 ubiquity.
4. Laszlo compiles to Flash 5,6,7 - is this the world's most ubiquitous open source web development framework? It certainly is if you only want to maintain one code base.
5. For Flash Players, "the only way is up". Flash Player Version Ubiquity can only increase w/time, unlike browser usage which competes for popularity. Simplistically, unless the Flash community now stops upgrading (unlikely), its safe to assume that the growth in adoption of any new Player Version will mimic that of previous players. By Version 7, it's safe to say that this rule holds. Which means, that one can safely predict that any new Flash Player Version will reach similar (98%) ubiquity to that of Version 5.

Frankly, it doesn't matter which Flash version you start developing with because even if it's "8", for which Macromedia aren't publishing data yet, the Player will still have more browser penetration than your website does. Users online _t_a_k_e_ _f_o_r_e_v_e_r_ to adopt even the greatest websites ... what Flash ubiquity has shown is that their plug-in is NOT a factor to users when they do! Maybe the best advice is ... You will never have as much browser penetration as your chosen Flash Version, whatever that is - just pick one.

Laszlo vs Flex

2005-10-17T19:24:00.000-07:00

Laszlo vs Flex.

I ask myself about 100 times a day. About 50% of those times, AJAX also pops into the argument.

Pete Freitag asked the same question on his blog and is getting some interesting comments.

I didn't know for example that Laszlo doesn't support Unicode. Interesting. If you have an opinion, go join the discussion on Pete's blog!

I made a Bla Bla list to keep score - check it out; I've shared my list, Laszlo vs Flex vs AJAX - Bla Bla list is a lot like ta-da lists from 37Signals, except it's built in Laszlo, not RoR. The 37Signals application is way better - but they are the kings of usability & getting things done. Bla Bla is still well worth the visit, if nothing else to check out what Laszlo can do.

Adsense - it's Brilliant but it doesn't Add-up

2005-10-17T13:08:00.000-07:00

When something new works well, it's amazing how the prevailing herd mentatlity is to totally discard or dismiss the previous "method". Even if there was significant merit to the way "we used to do it", a new smart approach seems to eclipse the tried and true.

In US corporate circles, this tendancy is often called "throwing the baby out with the bathwater". After taking another look at Google's fantastic adsense program, I'm convinced that it's what the internet and advertising industries have done with Branding and Marketing online.

This diagram is a partial screen-capture from a business plan we're working from. This data is public, sourced by Universal McCann & presented by Double-Click.

Note three things:
1) Internet advertising is growing at a phenomenal rate in the US - 65% between 2000 and 2004 (no surprise there).
2) Internet Advertising also has room to grow; in 2004, internet advertising only constituted 4-to-5% of all US advertising spend. Contrast that with an online population in the US of just over 200 Million. 70% of the population are online. That 70% probably represents 85%+ of total US consumer spend. Yet, these eyeballs only get 4-5% of total ad-spend. There's room to grow. Obvoiusly the time users spend online will cap this potential, but Web2.0 is also raising that ceiling - the subject of my next post!
2) Ad-sense-like advertising, which I'll call click-through ads constitute $2.8Bn Dollars, or 40% of the online advertising spend (listed as "search ads" above).

The more I think about it, that 40% number just doesn't add-up!

Before I even joined Amazon in 2001, Jeff Bezos had figured out that only a small % of even those products that could be fulfilled online, would actually be consumed online. Jeff took this dicovery and made lemonaide - he realized that all retailers would face the challenge of building out an expensive technology channel to only see what Jeff guessed would be a maximum of 10% to 15% of demand fulfilled via that channel. Jeff learned that the online channel would only actively "convert" 10% to 15% of consumers ... and so he decided to offer his platform as a low-cost outsourced technology option for any retailer who came to the similar conclusion that the "internet" would never be their core fulfillment channel. That's how the Amazon marketplace was born.

So, it's with this filter that I review the massive spend in click-through advertising, and it doesn't add up. When we are "clicking-through" ad-links online, we are "converting". But even Amazon learnt that we only convert 10% to 15% of POTENTIAL CONSUMERS online. This data is more of a comment on how users view the internet than on the efficiency, reliabiltiy and trust we espect from internet service providers. By now, we've put those issues largely to rest. What this data does indicate, is the mindset of users when they're online: consuming is not their most prevalent activity ... they have other outlets for that!

The internet is less a "fulfillment channel" than it is an "media center". Web users are far more often "comsuming media" than "consuming products" online. And, as many internet writers have pointed out, that media that is popular online is mostly expected to be free. So, what we're doing when we're online, is, _on_average_, most definitely NOT buying, we're on average most definitely NOT "consuming stuff". The internet works (very well) as a channel for those activities, but most of the time, "we users" are actually in the "mode" of consuming "free" media.

The other media channels (TV / radio / newspapers) have learnt the difference between conversion & marketing. Why hasn't the internet? Just because we can convert users online, does that mean that we MUST? Is this the proverbial dog licking his privates? We'd be foolish to assume that the reason was that the other media weren't capable of "conversion" ... just look at The Shopping Channel & QVC! It can be done but its not popular. Even very few television ads call for you to immediately pick up the phone & order!!! Not because they can't, but because advertisers have come to understand that while we're consuming "free" media, we aren't consuming products ... but we are consuming; we're consuming their message, nicely wrapped up in the "free" media. The advertising industry has learnt over decades that they can reach a consumer while she is consuming media ... but it's not through conversion ... because media consumers don't convert until they "change mode" to product consumers.

Why isn't this wisdom more common on the internet? Why does click-through, conversion-based advertising account for 40% of internet advertising when only 15% of consumption is converted online?

There are many probable answers to these questions, of which, the "herd mentality" is likely to be a main culprit. Placing blame isn't appropriate because of the obvious potential for growth in online advertising. The bigger story here than "the herd buys conversion" is that branding & marketting is very cheap online right now. I'll conclude with some suggestions for learning from what is obviosly an imbalance in online ad-spend;

Lessons from this Adsense non-cents:

1) If you spend any of your ad-dollars online, then take a closer look at branding & marketing opportunities before you increase your search-ad budget! Right now, branding and marketing online has very little (peer) competition relative to the other media and is DIRT cheap compared to all other popular forms of advertising. By far the best value for your ad-dollar.
2) If you sell advertising online: a) get into the rich media & display-ad space (there's very little competition) and b) increase the price of your display advertising; you are currently undercutting a massive market!
3) If you use search-advertising, like google's ad-sense: then pay more attention to the way you "brand" your links. Use consistent, smart taglines - differentiate your offering in how you describe it! Have a copywriter review your links! Try and always appear in the same prominent spot on the page - buy the premium spot on popular searches!
4) The Best advice for Last ... If you monetize internet traffic, like on your blog, then adsense might not be the best way to earn dollars for your efforts. Theoretically, your internet eye-balls are 8 times more valuable to marketting advertising spend than they are to click-through advertising spend. Obviously your content will also dictate how valuable your eyeballs are - but my advice is if you're going to sell advertising on your blog, you may make much more money if you find a way to sell Branding and Marketting.

Something(s) to think about; there's alot of missed opportunity here. Please understand that despite having also blogged about the pending irrelevance of internet search, I have nothing against GOOG - I think that they rock (except for not supporting the mac with a few of their cunningest tools). The point is that GOOG (as we know them) "are totally that, but ain't ALL that" and as Web2.0 shakes out, there are going to be a lot of new opportunities; this is just one of them, but it looks like a MASSIVE, ripe, low-hanging fruit of some kind.

fantastic ftp service

2005-10-13T15:32:00.000-07:00

Sometimes all you need is secure ftp. Solid, reliable, secure ... ftp & nothing else, just ftp, archival capacity & bandwidth. That's exactly what I was looking for to enable file uploads in Backpack, which I blogged about at length here.

The perfect solution exists ... strongspace

I signed up for strongspace access & integrated it to Backpack in less than 10 minutes. Its a popular choice amongst Backpack users

Cost of StrongSpace ... $8 and up. per month
Cost of Backpack ... $49 or $99 per month for the two 'business' versions ... also available free ... I went for the $49 version which is capped at 35 simultaneous projects but otherwise includes unlimited functionality & community growth. When we're managing an infinite ammount of projects, then we'll upgrade to the $99 version.

So, for around $60/month ... voila ... a gorgeous ready-made, fully supported, frequently upgraded, securely hosted company intranet and partner extranet in one. It is tools like these that are fueling the "small business is big business" revolution.

Backpacking It ...

2005-10-13T08:59:00.000-07:00

I'm knee-deep in the online project management tool, Backpack from 37Signals. Over the past few days, I got started with Backpack to keep track of our outsourced software development projects.

I'm very impressed so far. Backpack has its quirks (mostly in content formatting), but they're quickly learnt & once you get beyond the challenge of starting with a "blank canvas", Backpack starts to shine!

Backpack's feature list should be reason alone for any organization to re-evaluate their internal collaboration tool-set. But for any company that manages distributed efforts, evaluating Backpack should be an imperitive! Yes, that's you ... if you outsource any of your business or integrate with your clients business processes in any way that requires sharing project progress and information, then Backpack, or a similar platform (if there is one), must be a part of your planning, knowledge management & collaboration strategy.

Backpack, an entirely browser-based tool (that works perfectly in Firefox on Mac) is a fascinating study in User Interface design. Despite its grounbreaking interactivity, performance and architecture, its UI reflects less on the technical talents of its creators as it does on their philosophy about how people should "Get Things Done". Here-in lies Backpack's greatest strength.

Philisohically, Backpack DOES NOT map too well to the MS-Project school of project planning. If you're part of the 0.1% of Project users (my gues, flame me!) made more productive by that tool, then give Backpack a skip! With the recent introduction of "Writeboards", BackPack started to look as much wiki as a planner, and a "wiki" is a good analog for the approach that the tool takes to Getting Things Done. Its project plan is not a mammoth higherarchy of dependanies and probabilities. This ain't yo momma's PM environment.

In Backpack, a project is a group of people, who agree on milestones ... and shared task-lists which they check off as they populate the shared project with all the random things we love to create. In my experience, this is how projects work in the real word; I think that Backpack's got a real chance of sticking with users. Some features are designed more for long-term use than 1st-timer introduction; new users must spend some time clicking around to fully understand what they're capable of. That said, the UI is so simple, intuitive & "minimalistic", that once you've put in that time and started creating useful content, it's very loveable.

The Getting Things Done philosophy enforced by Backpack is one I subscribe to. If you can succicntly articulat a projects deliveribles, namely its milestones, in "chunks" of no more than 1 week's effort (and no less than 1 day's), then there's a good chance that you'll succeeed. In The Seven Habits, Stephen Covey explains in-depth how a goal-based approach to planning your work is better than a calendered approach. Covey encourages you to set a simple list of goals each week and rather than schedule them, he has you categorize them by their importance to your life's goals.

This is how Backpack works; I start by setting Deliveribles, or Milestones - and loosely putting them into weeks in the project. Then, as I work, I make lists of things to do to accomplish each Deliverible - checking them off as I go. Backpack lets you do that for your work, but more powerfully, for that of the people you work with. It's a simple tool that focus' on the task at hand.

Backpack is all about "the work that matters" as Tom Peters puts it. Peters said the white-collar reveloution is upon us - we must specialize and brand ourselves because in the future, work will get done by loosely coupled groups of individuals. Teams, who get together to accomplish a task, complete a project and then disband - to work on other projects. If Peters is right, and I think he is, then Backpack's the perfect platform to fascilitate his predictions.

What's missing? Well, Backpack's broad applicability to any desktop task, begs for it to be extended, specialized and mostly, integrated to business process workflows. In all but the smallest projects, the stuff we do is not only interesting to the people we work with but also to the systems that automate production in our business. We interact with them all day long, and without integration to them, a tool like Backpack is just another digital time-suck if applied to repetitive tasks. There's little automation in Backpack.

Yet most projects & tasks are the result of some or other event in some other system; content expires on a website, a software project gets budget in a financial system, a new-hire is on-boarded in an HR system. Wouldn't it be great if the projects associated with the work we do interfacing to all these other systems were easily accesible, in one place? It would be great if you could integrate events in these systems to events in Backpack. What if external events could create events in BackPack? A new-hire HR event could trigger assigning a "write up your biography on a writeboard" task to the new employee when they log in to Backpack. Imagine if finishing one project could automatically kick off a new one? Imagine if repeted To-Do Lists didn't only have a content template but could also be assigned to users automatically using business rules?

It can be done!

I think the ultimate productivity gain in using Backpack may be realized by integrating it to a Workflow management or BPM engine. [BPM = Business Process Management]. Like most great Web2.0 tools, the guys at 37Signals, who produce Backpack, have opened up a web service API to expose your project events to other systems. The API not only publishes the events as they happen in your Basecamp project - but can also allow your systeme to automagically create events and content in Basecamp for your teams to act upon! This is the perfect application for a smart BPM rules management engine; to sit between a slick and productive UI like Backpack and the various Services that make up your production environment. BPM software is coming of age and finding its niche as the glue between people and systems ... there are open source options, like JBPM - and there are now even entirely turnkey BPM devices; this one from Bridgewerx looks awesome. David Linthicum, CEO at Bridgewerx is one of the world's leading technologists in the relm of EAI; he ran Tech. for Mercator when they were my primary vendor at Amazon. The Bridgewerx device has got to ROCK with David's expertise behind it! I'd love to get one of those suckers in a rack next to my Backpack ftp server!

Obviously there's going to be more to come in my travels with Backpack! For now, I've got some tasks to do & software to design ... later!

What a difference ...

2005-10-08T22:03:00.000-07:00

... a year makes. Congratulaions to the RED TEAMS ... you both kicked ass.

It's hard to believe no-one got started in last year's DARPA challenge; it seems like this year, the BOTs made the course look like a "roll" in the park.

Web2 ... Hype or Gold ???

2005-10-08T17:09:00.000-07:00

It's a very popular question this week.

It's a rediculous question.

Here's my take ... first posted as a comment to this equally cynical post by Rick Segal.

web1 honeymoon :: USERS will CONSUME anything online
web1 business model :: ecommerce
web1 reality :: ecommerce doesn't work for all product consumption

web2 honeymoon :: USERS will CREATE anything online
web2 business model :: p2p-commerce (CBPP)
web2 reality :: not all p2p relationships belong online & not all products can be created by communities ... especially not for free

web2 has been with us since eBay ... it is nothing new ... but we're at a point where it can be sexy beyond garage sales ...

"web2" is a UI "attribute" ... either your website is interactive, or its not ... it's not a product, or a business model ... and IT IS MOST DEFINITELY NOT "AN ATTITUDE" (as it's described in a certain overhyped and less-than-useful mind-map doing the rounds right now)

That said, the viable products & models who impliment web2 as their interface to their users will make the web1 success stories seem comparatively LAME ...

The primary (new) business model enabled by web2, namely Commons Based Peer Production, IS "the ecommerce" of web2 ... and there's a mass of gold in dem' der hills

Dont Do ... Level3 Communications ...

2005-10-08T16:27:00.000-07:00

"The Network You Can Rely On" ... what CRAP !!!

I'm sick of corporations renagging on the empty promises they used to attract their customers in the first place.

For the past 2 years, we've had to listen to Sean Connery's sweet sweet Scottish lilt promise us that Level3 is ... "The Network You Can Rely On" ... well, Sean ... YOU LIED ... and Level 3 Lied ... and it makes me sick.

It turns out that you can only rely on Level 3 when they are on speaking terms with their enterprise partners. As (always) happens in business though, Level3 has fallen out with another ISP, Cogent ... and both companies have dug in their heels, turned off interconnection between each others networks ... and left their users with a fragmented internet

Savvy consumers should punish both Level3 and Cogent ... but to do so, you'd need to understand how you rely on them ... Vonage comes to mind for example ... Level3 IS their backbone although I doubt any Vonage users know that ... don't be surprised if your phone stops working next time the Level3 CEO has a bad day.

You are now warned ... next time you buy from an ISP or a VOIP provider, I recommend that you first check whether they are supplied by Level3 / Cogent ... neither company seems capable of behaving like adults and it is obvious that neither is ...

"a network that you can rely on ..."

I hope that SKYPE picks up on this. This story is excellent validation for the P2P model in ANY architecture that ...
a) must be always-on
b) is dependant on the "public" internet

... come to think of it, there should be a P2P solution, which, if installed on all the internets routers, would do away with the need for ISP's altogether ... who's working on that ????

This is the Internet for Pete's sake ... can we get all the eggs out of the few big baskets now PLEASE !!!!!!!

so what's so great about a google newsreader ???

2005-10-07T13:46:00.000-07:00

... it's the business strategy.

I can't really elaborate on Umair Haque's awesome description of the value of owning the tool people use to aggregate their news feeds. This paragraph sums up what we used to jokingly refer to as "the power in the model" everytime some-one came up with one of these wickedly self-propelling strategies. Nice one goog.

Now, here's a textbook example of how to arb micromedia, thanks to Google. Give away a reader; pick up nice marginal ad revenues from microads, but much more importantly, begin to build a profile-based ads competence, and hugely increase switching costs by creating demand side scope economies.

more GEMS from WEB2CON

2005-10-07T13:24:00.000-07:00

... it doesn't rain but it pours ...

1 Million thanks and a whole stacka' respek / good karma / props etc. goes to Doug Solomon, VP at Omidyar Network for writing up very useful and comprehensive notes from the conference.

Among Doug's many excellent notes ...

alpha version of new flash tools posted on nov. 17th at: http://www.macromedia.com/go/web2

Dave Sifrey, CEO, Technorati: about 30% of bloggers use tagging. This allows people to find blogs of interest to them.

Stewart Butterfield, Founder, Flickr: "One thing about my being acquired by a big company is that my powerpoint skills have improved."

Micky Hart, drummer, Grateful Dead: "The tapers wanted it real bad. We had the option of letting them in to do taping, or becoming the police. So, we said, let them come, and they came and they taped. And they created the Grateful Dead free tape exchange." "We gave it away willingly. Everyone who came to the concert had an equity, they had a part in the creation. If we ever made a good album, they'd buy it." "I know there is more than a billion tapes out there." "We used to think music should be free and it should be subsidized by the government." "And we always played better when it was free." "It is a good idea to give away some for free and then to charge for something." "It is a complex issue. Loosen up a bit and give it away a bit. " "Music is a necessity of life and people who make it bring incredible thoughts up to the surface...transforming an energy, a feeling into a sound...it borders on the sacred." "These musical adventures are like your children. You wouldn't want them taken from you." We had one page contracts with Warner Records.

Alan Eustace, VP Engineering, and Jason _____, from Google Research: A simple rule at Google: As we scale the number of people, we have to scale the number of things we are doing. Emphasis on innovation: every idea is heard, 20% of time to do whatever engineers want to do, promote small teams for creativity and speed and spontaneity.

how to start a startup

2005-10-07T12:16:00.000-07:00

Great Essay by Paul Graham.

I'll be coming back to this.

... at last ... some Web2Con VALUE

2005-10-07T11:18:00.000-07:00

stop the presses: some actual value (no, not "valuation") from the Web 2.0 Conference ...

I've been scouring the posts of attendees all week but have been largely disapointed by the lack of innovation announced at the conference despite the mass of free publicity its attracted.

Then I found this ... open-source structured blogging ... and it's going to be HUGE! Definitely read Joshua Porter's excellent review of the Structured Blogging initiative at Bokardo. I'm going to obviously give Poductivity's spin on this monumentous initiative ...

Finally ... some out of the RRS-box thinking. I've blogged about how RSS is about the worst possible architecture for adding usable value to Weblogs - it's hillarious to the geek in me that the next generation improvement comes from a group called "pub-sub".

Structured Blogging is Symantics all over again ... this time the S-web is made usable for us 19 Million mere mortals who've hacked at a blog. Structured Blogging will take the Blogstream places no-one imagined - as long as we find a good way to explain it to Bloggers.

Pubsub Concepts Inc. has sponsored an Open-Source initiative to bring Structured Blogging to all of the major Blogging Platforms.

From the Pub-Sub Press Release ...

The universal Structured Blogging format is designed to make it easier to publish and find information on the Web. Structured Blogging lets users add different styles and tags to each type of blog entry that they post. These styles and tags ensure that movie and book reviews don't look like calendar or journal entries, and that each content type can be quickly recognized and processed by automated search services and other applications.

What does this mean to the Web2.0 business shake-up?

It means that even more content will be moved to Blogs, more content types, more high-quality content, more niche content.
It means blog content will be more relavantly syndicated.
It means that simple ol' "so-2004" blogs, will be able to "give" relevance to ANY media OR product that can be produced by a blogger, not just text posts.
... read that again ...

It means that simple ol' "so-2004" blogs, will be able to "give" relevance to ANY media OR product that can be produced by a blogger, not just text posts.
It means music, art, videos, cartoons and photography produced by citizens will get the same level of respect as journalism produced by citizens.
... and that they WILL woo away the advertising & syndication revenues from Main Stream Meadia as Citizen Journalism is doing with Main Stream Journalism.
It means that once this same logic is abstracted to the "discussion" i.e. comments on today's text blogs, that the next generation LOGICAL platform after this one will enable P2P transactions on your blog with the look and feel of selling out of your trunk ... putting anyone, anywhere, who can start a blog, in business pursuing their passions at 0 cost, in probably 10 minutes or less.

oooohhhhh boy ... when this blow's there's gonna be be a helluva shake-up !!!

the portals are dead !!! long live the blog aggregators !!!

... only one problem ... all of today's b'aggregators are, sorry to say, crap ...

so ... in the meantime, the race is on between ...
1] the Blog Stream claiming its rightful dominance over ALL media through useful agregation, which will be its only route to legitimacy and
2] the Main Stream buying the fledgling Citizen Stream operations & putting their energies to Corporate uses ... before they crack the code on [1]

... seems like an endless loop to me ... until some-one ignores [2] long enough to make [1] happen.

I am smiling about the fact that the innovation train is rolling again ... those Web2Con posts were starting to really depress me.

"Producers"

2005-10-06T17:02:00.000-07:00

After being inspired by the BBC to take a look at how Public Broadcasting may be ahead of the game in aggregating quality Citizen Journalism, I wasn't surprised when I noticed the "producers" link at the bottom of PBS's website.

PBS' program shows many years of working out the kinks of Citizen Producers ... and the importance of giving quality citizen journalism a main-stream voice.

Funding works on a proposal basis & funds to compensate the producers seem mostly donations. Not sure I like the "icon" for funding ... a man teasing a dog with a scrap of food isn't the mental imagery that should be mapped to this otherwise awesome initiative.

Citizen Media

2005-10-05T11:03:00.000-07:00

Great interview on Citizen Journalism - JD Lasica interviews BBC technology reporter Jo Twist.

JD talks about the "personal media revolution".

Jo links the old concept of "community" to citizen journalism ... & talks about the value of relationships, interconnections & difference ...

"it's a really exciting time at the moment."

Watching the BBC has always felt more like (public service) reality TV than a heavily bias'd publicity channel. Surely they'll integrate citizen media well. Good idea from this ... "maybe include podcast recordings in our news" ...

Also, this discussion from Blogher wrestles with some important issues RE: online citizen journalism ... at the end of the discussion, some-one mentions that

"unsoliscited op-ed pieces only get paid $150 by print papers ..."

also ...

"every newspaper in the country knows that they need to be into blogging ... they just don't know how ..."

P2P Radio ...

2005-10-02T10:49:00.000-07:00

I've started to see Peer Production everywhere ... (I'm also not the first to write this.)

I try to check myself, but when I see my local radio station moving their programming to Commons-Based Peer-Production, I start to realize just how important this is going to be. I think that online communities as a "productivity supply channel" will be far more pervasive than the "online demand fulfillment" channel has been. We've figured out that demand and fulfillment only works online for some products. And we've learnt that even for those that do benefit from online demand and productivity, that a minority of demand-side transactions will take place online.

Why has such a productive fulfillment strategy not had more penetration? Because on the demand-side of the commercial equation there's very little competition ... little reason to "consume productively" ... and many options other than the web that are engrained in our sociology, that we prefer to pursue.

Not so for the supply-side! Competition demands that if there's a better way to aggregate supply for, and produce our products, it HAS to be adopted ... or market share will be lost. This dynamic will apply to Peer Production ... as industries move to sourcing productivity from Peer Producers, CEO's won't have the luxury of choosing whether or not to move their supply chain online ... as they did with ecommerce. Confuse Peer-Production with "the internet" at your peril ... this time the internet users aren't fickle, impressionable consumers, they're savvy, shrewd & competitive producers ... they will realize that they are much more productive online, and will gravitate to the communities that best combine their collective productivity.

I was driving South on the 5 yesterdy, listening to a kickin' Herbie Hancock track on KWJZ, 98.9 fm, here in Seattle ... I was paying attention for the track name so I heard the DJ say ...

"go to our website, join the KWJZ Listener Advisory Panel ... we'll email you song snippets ... you rate them ... we play the songs you like."

Brilliant ... KWJZ is outsourcing their programming to their more passionate listeners. How much more likely are you to listen to a channel that listens to your requests? How far away are we from 100% listener-programmed radio shows?

Naturally, I checked it out ...

There's actually a massive music rating and distribution platform underlying the little Jazz afficionado's community in the Pac N West.

The KWJZ listeners panel is part of the larger "rate-the-music" community. I read the disclaimer ... always a good way to get a feel for what a site is really about ... rate the music is owned by Clearchannel ... the massive communications & advertising company. These guys are smart. The fineprint reads like the business plan for an onlin music store ... with massive customization ...

On average, the KWJZ listeners who do want their tunes played on the radio will be more passionate about the music, more regular listeners, and more likely to buy the music they hear ... that's where Clearchannel comes in. You don''t need to open a fancy online music store when you can send the most lucrative segment exactly what they like to hear.

Nice One !!

pink sunshine

2005-09-29T18:59:00.000-07:00

pink_sunshine
Originally uploaded by _david_g.

we had pink sunshine in Seattle for the past week - what a treat - thanks you guys - you're always welcome.

You Are What U-I

2005-09-28T16:42:00.000-07:00

In all of Web2.0's noise about (user) Interactivity, it seems like Web1.0's obsesion with the (user) Interface is all but lost.

In another time, not so very long ago, before Kottke was king, it was the gospel according to Jakob Nielsen that we looked to for our roadmap through the maze of internet opportunities. Nielsen was to the (user) Interface what Kottke is to (user) Interactivity.

Today, relatively speaking, Nielsen's voice seems lost - his focus on the UI relatively irrelevant. Now that I think about it, in my past year of internet analysis, I've not seen Nielsen quoted in a single blog that I read - but I may have missed a few posts. The point is though that if we had been blogging in 1998, Nielsen would've been bigger'n Kottke; because the perfect UI was considered the mysterious entry point to a succesful Web1.0 company.

I think it still is in Web2.0 and that it's probably not smart to emphasize interactivity over interface. As a web business, your U-I is WHAT YOU DO - it is your company's strategies, plans and resulting actions, laid out, in plain sight for your audience. You can say what you like in the press or to the analysts, but your audience; your consumers, will measure your progress by your UI and adopt your product according to it. You can add bells and whistles to your "back end", but success will be determined by how you present them to your users.

An ecommerce company's UI is a window to its strategy; study the direction that the UI is taking and you will understand what the business' leaders are thinking.

Yahoo has made an incredible comeback to the fore-front of internet hype this past 2 years - their stock price over the same period also reflects this. Yahoo's adoring analysts focus mostly on the acquisition numbers, attributing the resurgence to "synergies" created by integrating a bunch of interactive stuff. But looking at www.yahoo.com, it is clear to me, that if there's reason for the hype, then the action that Yahoo took to reignite it was to overhaul their UI - on the home page - in yahoo mail - and in groups - it's all new, all subtly changed - highly graphically effective - much more focused content - more intuitive usability - daily becoming the OSX of the www from a usability perspective. I'm one user who has returned to using a Yahoo tool a few times a week - I had abandoned the portal a few years back for all but spam-mail - but lately, I'm sucked back in again - signed up at a few new groups - bought a handful of URL's - and am trying to get my inbox back into a usable state.

I think that it is still critically important to study Nielsen. You should start with Nielsen and not move to Kottke's thoughts about what users are "doing" until you understand what the user should be "seeing" when they hit your site! As Web2.0 becomes more competitive, Nielsen's gospel will become critical again. Usability will be the primary friction to the winner-take-all predictions of analysts like Bubblegeneration's Umair Haque (if this stuff interests you, fact is you should be reading Haque + Nielsen + Kottke right now!) But Nielsen is vital because usable Interactivity will trump Interactivity for Interactivity's sake - no matter how large the potential community that may need your bells & whistles. The "message" you send in the stuff you throw at your URL should be the first filter in deciding on the viability of any new interactivity feature - no matter how sexy / synergistic (whatever that is).

But Yahoo isn't the only internet giant to overhaul their UI in '05. Skype has evolved through 10+ major upgrades - inremently improving performance while keeping its UI consistently simple. Skype gets the importance of the UI - in their app., on the site, in supporting more OS's than any other similar utility, in account management and intuitive FAQ's and Forums - all within a click or 2 of each other - their UI and incredible knack for usability is yet another reason (additive to this one and this one) that the eBay deal is probably risk-free. And hell knows, eBay could use some free usability consulting - I sometimes think they took the garage sale metaphor too far.

In mid '04 when I was packing up my desk at Amazon and trading the last of my options at $51, (now $43), water-cooler hype was frenetic with talks of "UI-2.0" ... a better Amazon, to be released in '05 ... and of which you are by now, probably a user - maybe preparing a wishlist for Christmas '05.

I went back this week and read Nielsen again. I was surprised to find useit.com as current as it always was and pleased to be greeted by a familiar UI - an old friend. I waw most fascinated that Jakob had updated his recurring series, first started in the 90's, about what we all can learn from the Amazon.com interface. While I worked at Amazon, every new Nielsen update of this type was an ego-trip bar-none; his public compliments alone were reward enough my miniscule part in his reviews and for the sleep-deprivation that went with the territory.

I'm now wondering if today's Amazon-ian's have read Nielson's '05 update ... if so, they'd be shocked ... to find that as the next internet bubble rolls madly at us, that Nielson holds up the new Amazon user interface as a perfect example ... of how NOT to build a historic internet business.

Nielsen offers advice to online businesses when he says ...

But people often prefer to be told just one thing. For many years, that one thing in e-commerce design was "Do like Amazon." No more.
Amazon has recently changed so much that the average e-commerce site will reduce its usability by emulating its design too closely.

and,

Summary:
Many design elements work for Amazon.com mainly because of its status as the world's largest and most established e-commerce site. Normal sites should not copy Amazon's design.

In Web2.0's hype around YAHOO, Google, eBay etc., Amazon's relative obscurity in the press rivals that of Nielsen in the Blogstream. A comparison of the momentum in all of these company's valuations reflects a similar fall from favorcompared with Amazon's peers benefiting from the new web-boom.

As I read Nielson's lists of Plus's and Minus's for Amazon's UI, it's uncanny how the Minus's, which are mainly features of the new UI, can be mapped directly to deeply-held strategic opinions of the company's executives about how the web should be won. Amazon's UI refelcts Jeff Bezos's brainstorms, handed down to his Executives and absorbed by the workforce through the culture we loved to call the "cool aid".

Nielsen's list of Minus's seem obvious but are clearly mistakes anyone can make. I recommend studying his analysis ad reviewing your Web2.0 offering ... and then find roll models that avoid the temptations of Nielsen' List of Minus' ...

Cluttered pages.
Internet-wide search feature.
Advertising on product pages.
Lousy UI for specialized product categories.
Lack of integration with its international sites.
Co-branding.

Conversely Nielsen Plus's listed for Amazon's UI are mostly the simple smart things we all liked about the site when it first nailed e-commerce in the late 90's;
- a simple, intuitive login,
- personalized recommendations,
- a wide product selection,
- garuanteed fulfillment,
- and a simple email to let us know that our package has shipped.
But there's nothing new in the Good list - and the Bad list seems to have it outweighed.

Nielsen is possbly being kind when he suggests that maintaining this strategy may work for Amazon. No Amazonian would agree that resting on your laurels will beat out your competitors.

To close then what became a longer than intended post - with a hopefully useful summary -

You Are What U-I ... give your U-I more thought before you get all Interactive with your users ... it will show in your company's valuation.

patently ranting

2005-09-24T16:02:00.000-07:00

Patents on software workflow and business processes that assign ownership of nothing more than the product of "logic" and "knowledge" are starting to really irritate me.

In all the time I did at Amazon, I always felt that "our" 1-click patent was a crock-of-sheet.

Logic should never be constrained or owned; it was freely given to us and we should be allowed to freely apply it. Full Stop. Amazon discovered nothing when it implemented 1-click; it was merely applying simple logic & public knowledge. Amazon never created or invented anything in this logical implementation; other than, perhaps, giving it the name, "1-click". I concede that they could claim copyright of that name and am all for protecting creative works, but the patent for the process is proposterus.

The two most rediculous patents I've read about lately;

1) The Feds at the National Security Agency have patented a method for working out your exact location from your online presence. It's already nauseating that we're paying taxes to have our privacy violated in the name of "patriotism" but this takes the cake - from the description, it would appear that they intend to protect this patent from commercial competition even relating to non-defense-related funtions. Maybe Dubya plans an internat advertising startup. Is this how we plan to pay for Katrina?

2) The other absurd recent patent is more widely reported Microsoft patenting of technology that first appeared in Apple's iPod.

The thing with logical processes is that they are never unique ideas. The same sequence of cause and effect reasoning will produce the same conclusion in all individuals equally exposed to the same knowledge. Knowledge is free, Logic is free, why is Knowledge X Logic not free?

What's up here? No wonder we have an innovation gap in the US; the market for "logic" is sewn up! Scrap patents, let's start innovating !!!

The embarrassment of immigration

2005-09-20T10:02:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I crossed the US/CA border with two good friends from the UK. The 2-hour long treatment we received from the immigration officials was the most disrespectful "service" I have ever had to endure - in my entire life.

I drove away from the border after this ordeal embarrassed to live in the country that supports treating people like dirt - that perpetuates prejudice - and that seems to have abused the power created by a national fear of terrorism to excuse obliteration of civil liberties on immigration into the country. The "policy" of victimizing innocents as though they were presumed guilty seems to govern this piece of our government. As a taxpayer, I'm furious - and would appreciate your feedback as to possible recourses.

I could rant on about how we were mistreated, left totally uninformed throughout the 2-hr ordeal, and clearly victimized in comparison to the treatment received by others waiting in line. I could also rant on about watching 20+ "shiny uniforms" standing around doing nothing for a 1/2 hour while their shifts changed. I realize however that it's within these officials rights to be complete jerks and totally inefficient while at it - and so, I'll rather just ask for your opinion on the legality of what happened next ...

1) First, it's important to understand their process. They flag either vehicles for inspection or immigrants for passport control as you cross the border. One of my friends' Portuguese passport is of the "non-biometric" variety and so, he was flagged for I-94 processing. We were specifically told not to drive to vehicle inspection but rather to park, and go in and have my friends passport processed.

2) About an hour into the ordeal, a bitter, rude, red-faced official says to me .... "Let me see your keys". I handed him my car key and with no further explanation he disappeared with it and our passports to continue what he was doing behind his computer.

3) 10 min's later, my friend told me that he was out there, going through my car and our stuff! I was furious. This official hadn't asked or demanded to search my vehicle and hadn't informed me that he was going to do so & I was given no opportunity to accompany him on his search.

4) To me, this looked totally wrong, I felt violated - and I asked another officer if this was legal. He laughed and dismissed me saying "read the signs". When asked to explain the rude treatment we received all he'd offer is "sometimes some of the guys work that way."

5) I did go and "read the signs". They say that an officer can search any vehicle "upon demand". Is this "upon demand" piece important - I think it is - no-one demanded to search my vehicle - is this within their rights?

6) After the treatment we'd received my biggest fear when I saw him going through my car alone was that the jerk was going to plant something in it. Luckily that never happened but it could have at any time in the hour that he retained my keys. They lost track of our passports twice during the process - it's fair to assume they could have misplaced my keys. Surely if anything had been found in my car, it would have been inadmissible in court as a result of the lack of procedure followed by this officer.

Please let me know what you think. I'm embarrassed and furious - and will take this matter further if I'm legally correct.

prodigii - taking OSS from passions to profits

2005-09-16T08:21:00.000-07:00

This morning I had a great discussion with David Dundas at Prodigii. Prodigii caught my eye because Rob May (the Business Experiment) and I have been discussing the protentil for a new venture incubator for bootstrapping commons-based ventures. Prodigii is an Incubator for Open Source Software and so, I was fascinated to find out how it worked. David's a real smart guy & I'm reminded again of the strength of loose ties (I have no idea if we're connected on LinkedIn!)

Like all good Peer-Production businesses, Prodigii doesn't force the issue and wildly spawn their own Open Source Projects - I think this will be a key to their success. Why is Prodigii CBPP? Because the OSS team and Prodigii continue to share risk and make contributions until the business is funded - all startup participants share in the rewards when it is. David is a master-boostrapper & recognizes the abundance of good OSS initiatives and his role in bringing them to a commercial market. Prodigii mines this abundance for the teams and software that have he most commercial potential, and then helps them productize their offering to the point that it could attract Venture Capital.

I think it's a great model - and that Open Source teams should get on Prodigii's list (now 50 prospective projects long). David is a techie at heart - I'm convinced he'll attract the brighter development teams. I had thought that OSS's primary revenue model was professional services but in speaking with David, it's clear that Prodigii's got more up their sleeves in terms of smart ways to generate and share profits in exchange for open source development passions.

If you're looking for a sustainable and highly rewarding way to support the efforts of the participants in your Open Source Software project, I highly recommend contacting Prodigii.

David and I took the conversation on to discuss how software developers may be recruited for startup CBPP ventures that weren't open source software but would result in a productive, commercial, online community. Could a community like iStockPhoto have started as an open-source initiative, the company shared amongst its founders? A question that's infered daily in The Business Experiment forums. The answer may lie in the concept David jumped to as we discussed this further - what about a "Fundable.org for startup HR?" - the concepts Rob and I have been kicking around finally have a good metaphore - for me anyway. We agreed to discuss this further - and went our separate ways.

I would love to get your thoughts on voluntary participation in commercial startups - pitfalls & promises.

pollution is a MYTH ...

2005-09-15T10:51:00.000-07:00

... for me, the environmental movement just DIED and frankly, my message to environmentalists is ... stop wasting your time and our money - what a strange opinion for some-one who wants to make the world a better place .. read on ...

Simply, if the rings around Saturn can "dramatically change" (CNN), in less than my lifetime, before we've even figured out how to put a single HUMMER on that planet's surface, then chances very good that the depletion of the ozone layer has equally little to do with successfully populating the US with SUV's.

Th environmental movement should clearly focus all its attentions on deailing with change and quit whining about what they speculate is causing it.

For a hillarious (fictional) account of how our fearless leaders responded to this news, I highly recommend reading Tom Evslin's entertaining post.

just 1 quick thing ...

2005-09-14T12:18:00.000-07:00

an undisputable "truth of the universe" ...

FATBOY SLIM KICKS ASS !!!

Listening to "Praise You" - rockin' at my desk - this was Laura & my 2nd dance at our wedding - groovy memories.

Norman Cook, you made my day - I have to Praise You, innit?

Buy my Attention: $0.02c / min. on eBay via Skype

2005-09-13T20:28:00.000-07:00

So (all great Seattle monologues begin with "so"), here's a cunning thing you can do, or rather, may be able to, now that eBay's bought Skype ... sell your attention online on a $/minute basis ... this is quite whacky, so, I'd recommend you read my analysis of the acquisition first. If you have, this is an extension of that idea and explores the "passive" sale of our time, another new marketplace for eBay/Skype, additive to the "active" selling of professional services I discussed earlier ...

Like any GREAT idea, this one's not new. It's been predicted by Steve Gilmore at ZDNet when he says in this epic thesis;

What does matter is a pool of attention metadata owned by the users. This open cloud of reputational presence and authority can be mined by each group of constituents. Users can barter their attention in return for access to full content, membership priviliges, and incentives for strategic content.

What Steve, nor anyone else could have predicted is that eBay & Skype could be the first to make it happen - a global marketplace for our attention.

I know that I have some-one's attention while I'm on a skype / phone call - better yet, on vskype. How much more "attention" do you want than when I'm speaking with you? Surely measuring a conversation online is the optimal way to monetize our attention? I think this is the "passive opportunity" that the skype/ebay marketplace creates.

My most-read blog, is A_VC, by Fred Wilson. Fred's audience has debated the acquisition up and down - a good discussion. Fred and I are both Bloggers, but, as a Blogger, my time's worth about $0.02c / min to Fred's (at least) $1,350.00 / min (Fred's readership X $0.02c). Imagine you could get Fred's attention! Today, you can, by podcasting your elevator pitch for him to hear on his morning bike ride, or doing the same with a song you think he'd like - and may blog about. But not all VC's are that tech-savvy, or frankly, that generous (/ efficient) with their time. Sometime soon Fred and I will be able to "list" our attention for sale on the eBay/Skype marketplace ...

... the clock starts ticking when we answer the skype call, click the "icon" on the pop-up on our screen, and appear on your screen by streaming video. You get to interact with us, tell us about your products, ask us our opinions. You'll probably have to pre-purchase Fred's attention, me, you'll mostly get "on demand". Major corporations will buy attention in bulk and hold direct to consumer interactive "press conferences" with individuals in target audiences who can influence the adoption of their products. The more the marketplace knows about you, the more passive income your attention will attract, provided you fit the demographic that is. When we hang up, our Skype account is credited, yours is debited, and we have the option to cash out via PayPal. Kiss "privacy" sweet goodbye online, "publicity" is about to become profitable on SkypeBay.

Hey, where did you buy that cool job?

2005-09-12T13:29:00.000-07:00

One of the most fascinating trends as Peer Production becomes popular, and as Peer Producers compete for attention in Marketplaces ... will be that it will become increasingly common for you to actually "buy" your next job ...

Here's a simplistic example.

At ShadowShopper, I can sign up for free to become a mystery shopper in my area. Some of the ShadowShopper assignments are soooooo attractive however, that to limit the size of the community, ensure genuine interest and oh yeah, make some cash along the way, I'm required to spend $99.99 to become a "gold" member. That may sound like a stiff ticket to charge a "volunteer" but it's not a bad price for a Cruise Vacation, currently one of the perk'ier jobs reserved only for Gold Members

The community can only grow - and at some pont "Gold's" will either be given all the work or membership will be capped - either way, it looks like the rich get richer at ShadowShopper ... so if you've had designs on being paid to shop, you'd better sign up soon.

Why eBay bought Skype

2005-09-12T10:30:00.000-07:00

Amazing marriage today of the 2 most viral solutions online - ebay bought skype.

The pundits have been in a tailspin since rumors leaked a few weeks ago and since then, speculation has been rampant and varied as to whether or not this deal made sense.

I just realised that eBay's heading directly into a space I've spent a lot of time working on, here are my predictions ...

At first, it was obvious that eBay was buying PayPal's largest potential competitor and I'm still convinced that this was what started the talks, but after reviewing skype's press release, I'm kicking myself for not predicting the future synergy in this deal ...

1st prediction;

the market that ebay + skype will create will, within 5 years, dwarf ebay's existing consumer products business.

Use case: Instead of just buying your ipod on eBay, you will now also browse ebay for cheap support for your ipod when it breaks. If you find a service provider you like, you'll chat with them live, instantly, simply by clicking on their ebay profile. When you've been helped and your call is complete, your ebay/skype account will be debited a service fee which will be divided up between skype for the communications piece, ebay for the marketplace piece and the ebay seller / consultant. I can't understate the latent demand in the US and EU in both the small business and consumer markets for globally-competitive professional services. Service has become so expensive on-shore that we've learnt to do everything for ourselves while 50% of the world's workforce remains under-and-unemployed. eBay and Skype will create a global services marketplace that makes the Enterprise trend of off-shoring look tame. A headline for this story could be --> eBay's already-global marketlace starts to sell products that aren't constrained by Geography. Enough said ... it'll be HUGE ...

Here's my second prediction;

the market that ebay + skype will create will be FAR MORE PROFITABLE than even ebay's existing consumer products business.

Understanding this prediction requires a bit more mental exercise than a use case ... consider the model below that illustrates how revenue is shared with peer-producers in open marketplaces. I use this diagram to illustrate how markets should think about compensating their participants. A "microchunk" is that piece of "work" that participants in online communities contribute to the product; the term is stolen from Umar Haque's presentation, the atomizing hand - and the model is an adaptation of Haque's prerequisites for Commons-Based Peer-Production namely that "microchunks" be re-usable and "modular", forming component parts of the product of the community.

As you can see, the right thing to do is to share more marketplace revenues with participants as their share of the product increases and as their ability to re-use or re-sell their "microchunk" decreases. Today, I added the future skype / eBay professional services to the model. With Pro-services, the percentage contribution to the product by the participant is the same as in the current marketplace but the beauty of moving the eBay marketplace to services is that eBay thereby increases the "re-use" of the work that their sellers do. Unlike a used product, a professional service, once listed can be sold MANY MANY times. This is how service businesses make their money - by "productizing" the services they are good at - and then re-selling that service to as many customers as have that demand. A good management consultancy finds a niche, owns a program and replicates similar projects at multiple clients (obviously making each client feel like they're the only one).

What does this mean for eBay? Simple - eBay will retain a higher % of revenue of services transactions than they do of product transactions. They're creating more value for services sellers than product sellers because they introduce re-usability to the marketplace. How much will eBay retain? I'm not sure - their challenge will be in the fact that not all services are equally "productizable" but I'd expect the retained revenues to be at least twice those of the current product marketplace ... the future never looked so bright ... not just for eBay ... but for every individual globally who has invested time & effort into becoming an expert in "something" ... who can now finally see a roadmap to being rewarded for pursuing their passions ...

My final prediction is that;

eBay will go on to create financial independence for marketplace sellers of global professional services that will surpass and greatly exceed the similar effect they've had on the lives of countless garage sellers in onshore markets.

Update: If you're still shaking your head, you're not alone. Try simply asking yourself these 2 questions:

Q1 - What is the consumer spending category that is primarily fulfilled via the voice channel?
A - Professional Services.

Q2 - What is the largest consumer spending category not / poorly represented on eBay today?
A - Professional Services.

Get it? What do you think?

Brushed Metal & Mike ...

2005-09-10T10:58:00.000-07:00

iTunes 5 is released & apple has pulled another upset and pulled and replaced the long-time favorite "Brushed Metal" user interface theme. I'm off to download it to get a look at "the future of functional simplicity", Jobs' stock-in-trade, but before you do ... you have to read this hillarious dialog between "Brushed Metal", and his agent, "Mike". If you're not alone, read it out loud - I laughed my head off. Thanks to Daring Fireball for some of the most creative citizen journalism yet.

enough ...

2005-09-09T23:59:00.000-07:00

politics - I just deleted my most recent post - no more politics! I'm leaving the other bleek posts on here .. for my kids to read one day ... and in support of those who will rant on ...

... but for poductivity ... it's a week (at least) of only the good stuff ... I'll let you know how I feel on this again next weekend ....

have a good one - aloha - peace

CNN: Profiteering Katrina

2005-09-09T13:33:00.000-07:00

This world is funny.

I just tried to watch CNN to get an update on Katrina. I say "tried" because I can never remember CNN's programming so interupted by advertisements. No, I don't have any stats to back that - does anyone else agree?

I have such mixed feelings about this post because I believe that the Main Stream Media has been our primary savior again in sorting through Bush's lies for the truth, but frankly, profiteering is profiteering & if I'm right, CNN's behavior is despicable.

Every minute spent flogging shampoo is another wasted opportunity to call attention to the need for reform, or the personal plight of separated family members.

I don't profess to know what's going on in the heads of the exec's at CNN - but any incremental advertising revenues over scheduled ad programming earned due to this is, to my mind, "blood money" that should be considered for donation to Katrina's victims ...

I've contacted the network for their response, and truly hope that they have some data that proves me wrong. I'll update this post if/when I hear from them.

There's just no escaping capitalism "in all things" ... what an incredibly depressing week ...

updates:

1) this auto-response received from CNN;

"While we are unable to personally reply to every e-mail, your comments are important to us, and we do read each and every one. Comments become part of the viewer response report that is prepared and made available each day to our producers and senior management."

politic'ing the blogstream

2005-09-08T14:45:00.000-07:00

This is going to be fascinating to watch ... within the next week, we'll have a very clear picture of how badly the blogosphere wants to see George Bush's reign of arrogant ignorance end.

"impeach bush" is the 3rd most searched term on technorati right now.

Communal vs. Social Ventures

2005-09-08T10:53:00.000-07:00

originally posted at Omidyar Network (Onet) ...

I'll set the tone for this post with a few alternate Titles;

Now that we can fish, who brought the Ocean?
EBay, the World's most succesful Social Venture
Did you hear the one about the Socialist Communist Capitalist?

What I'm looking for is your feedback to the question ... are "communal ventures" the future of "social ventures" ... which pursuit will have a bigger impact on leaving this world a better place than we found it? Will communal ventures be built by social or traditional entrepreneurs?

Background ... I was impressed with myself earlier this week when I finally settled on a job title that I like and decided to call myself ... "Social Venture Developer" ... until I bumped into O'net. Here, I quickly learned that "social ventures" are already well defined, can be for-profit or not-for profit, and have as their common theme "giving back" to needy individuals, communities and ecologies.

My dilema ... "Social Ventures" are awesome but it's not what I was trying to convey with my job title. I've had to re-think it and in the process decided that their is a difference between "communal" and "social" ventures ...

I'd love your thoughts.

Communal Ventures ... About 6 months ago I started researching businesses that outsource the production of their product to the public at large ... and pay them for their efforts. I bumped into what's called "commons-based peer-production" and have become obsessed. What I've found is that there's a strong argument for the fact businesses run in "the commons", that rely on the voluntary participation of the online public, not only provide new and cumulative income for their participants but also deliver greater return on investment than traditional companies do. CBPP seems to defiine a "new" math where 1+1>2.

CBPP and Social Ventures ... I think CBPP could be the "third generation" of social ventures. As we know, social ventures started out by "feeding the needy", but quickly realized that the higher calling was "teaching the needy to fish". Simplisticly, all social ventures today can be split into one or the other. Then along comes CBPP. The simplest way to describe its impact on social ventures is that CBPP delivers an ocean full of fish to the person we just taught to fish. CBPP creates a global market-place for global resources that previously saw no demand.

This is where eBay comes in ...

eBay is a CBPP business, that hosts outsourced P2P transactions. eBay has put food on the tables of countless garage-sellers and delivered financial independence to more individuals than possibly any other initiative in history. From a business perspective, an investment in eBay is worth 3X the same investment in Amazon. In CBPP, everybody seems to win!!!

So, my job title has changed again - to communal venture developer - but I'd still appreciate your thoughts on my questions ...

... are "communal ventures" the future of "social ventures" ... which pursuit will have a bigger impact on leaving this world a better place than we found it? Will communal ventures be built by social or traditional entrepreneurs?

who is Douglas C Engelbart?

2005-09-08T09:42:00.000-07:00

He's an "inventor" and you're touching one of his devices right now ... we have Douglas to thank for the computer mouse. Engelbart's true legacy however will be that this man, in the 1950's, was given the crystal ball that foretold the future of man's relationship with machines and with each other ... Possibly the foremost thinker of our lifetimes ... his biography had a real impact on me and is a highly recommended read.

I'm truly fascinated with and buy into Engelbart's model for "bootstrapping" defined as follows ...

A-B-C's of bootstrapping. Any organization's stock in trade is called here an A-activity; its ordinary R&D work to improve on A is called a B-activity. The bootstrapping strategy serves to improve on B and is called a C-activity. The value of C may be perceived as garnering compound interest on an organization's intellectual capital.

I've tried to explain this distinction to my peers throughout my career - hoping to move their focus beyond product and process improvement to "program" improvement.

The connection to Commons-Based Peer-Production is strong in Engelbart's work and fits the bootstrapping model above perfectly. In CBPP, the "A" is the work of the Peer Producers and "B" is the "Wisdom of Crowds"; R&D that serves the market for "A". Lastly then, besides joining their peers in "A" and "B" activities, the real work of the founders and creators of CBPP businesses is "C", "Bootstrapping".

This is a healthy definition of Bootstrapping - which is usually only defined by its symptom, namely "frugality". But "frugality" is not the "cause" of bootstrapping , the "cause" of bootstrapping, accoring to Engelbart, is ...

"how you improve how you improve your core product" ... get it?

the 10 most important trends in business ...

2005-09-07T12:57:00.000-07:00

What an awesome list from Dave Pollard.

Take note of the first entry ... "Open Source Business"

Mostly, I love that Remote IQ has already started working on opportunities that cover 7/10 items on this list.

The future never looked so bright ...

The MSM embraces the BSM

2005-09-07T08:41:00.000-07:00

The Main-Stream-Media have officially embraced the immediacy and the reality that the Blog-Stream offers. PoynterOnline says that;

CNN.com and MSNBC.com are requesting photos, videos, and stories from Katrina witnesses and survivors through Hurricane Katrina special-report sections

Amongst the painful memories, the Katrina hurricane disaster will also be remembered as the tipping point for the legitimacy and value of what will be known form this point on as the rise of the "citizen journalist".

This is poductivity's 100'th (live) post, it's a momentous personal occaision. In that time, Blogging has significantly changed my average day. The community created in Web2.0 has forever changed my outlook on the future of commerce and interpersonal collaboration. And most fortuitously, I've connected to a surprising number of inspirational people who's existence I was previously totally oblivious to.

I don't profess to understand where this is all headed but I am spending some time to try and understand it. What I do know, is that "citizen journalism", "web 2.0", "open source" and "online communities" are different. They are different to traditional communications, media or business. They are extrmely different in the way in which they value and reward our personal participation.

Mostly, they are juxtaposed to traditional cooperation in their valuation of the personal rights of the individual over all else. Here-in lies their allure.

free marketing takes work

2005-09-06T11:48:00.000-07:00

a good post on blog-2-blog marketing with some interesting examples from Brian Sweeting ...

Brian's conclusions ...

I hope you see a trend here. Never before have companies been able to use word-of-mouth advertising so efficiently since the rise of blogging. Now just because this type of advertising is free, it isn’t necessarily easy. You have to put in the time.

3 steps to redemption ...

2005-09-04T10:19:00.000-07:00

step 1. Get out of IRAQ
step 2. Get into NEW ORLEANS
step 3. PRAY for forgiveness

Smoke it like you mean it

2005-09-03T15:08:00.000-07:00

smokin
Originally uploaded by _david_g.

I've been meaning to start image-blogging for a while but have been a slacker - actually, correctly prioritizing stocking istockphoto over photoblogging, when I get the time.

Anyhooooo, today, I photosh0p'd this self-portrait Laura snapped of me in Alaska, uploaded it to flickr as my first entry there. flickr truly makes life easy for a digital photog and I'm intrigued as to whether the community features could be "used for good". I'll keep our smugmug account running for now, but predict I'll become hooked on flickr once I figure out the automation features.

Anyhow, here's a photoblog, my first hosted at flickr - smoke it like you mean it ...

both are unacceptable !!!

2005-09-02T16:40:00.000-07:00

quote du'jour ...

"... indeference and incompetence, both are unacceptable."

Rev. Jesse Jackson of the US Federal Government's non-response to the Katrina aftermath, today on CNN.

RSS has failed ...

2005-09-02T10:58:00.000-07:00

I could type for days about the perils of pub-sub systems integrations and the requirement for event-based protocols to support a truly scalable distributed architecture. I was lucky to learn these hard lessons first-hand at Amazon 5 year ago when they first tried to get real-time inventory information from large vendors who shipped direct to customer. In multiple instances, a "blind-to-event" pub-sub approach using XML feeds was proven to be both very expensive and unscalable for large implementations.

If I did have to bore you with the architectural constraints of distributed systems integration, the conclusion would simply be:

RSS is, next to "nothing", the worst possible technical architecture for what we're trying to do in the Blog Aggregator space.

I was shocked as I became addicted to blogging this year and saw RSS touted as the solution to all of the new opportunities blogging creates. Why use a technology with such an incredible technical overhead? Why knowingly incur such latency in content aggregation? In a space defined by "citizen publishing", why introduce such a rediculously large opportunity for automated abuse? What value does the feed add to the content?

From a reader's perspective, FEEDS are not catching on. That's not the headline here but for a blow-by-blow account, just read Fred Wilson's latest insights on the topic. From an Aggregator's perspective, feeds are clearly almost useless for aggregating quality content. This is the crux of today's headline.

Today, to my mind, Technorati acknowledged that RSS is useless to quality content aggregation when they released their [new] "Blog Search" functionality. Am I the only Technorati user that finds it odd that a business that came into existence to allow us to search blogs, would roll out "Blog Search" this late in the game. Errrrr, Technorati - please tell me what it is I've been trying to do on your infrequently updated site (besides "ping" it) if it's not "Blog Searching". I must have been missing something all along. technorati's "Blog Search" basically asks us Bloggers to go in and describe and "tag" our blogs, because its become an impossible job using RSS feeds alone. I personally think the auto-blog owners, who do this for a living, will probably be the first to snap up the opportunity to tag their "quality content". my prediction is that "Blog Search" will further muddy our quest for the best of the Blogstream's content.

Whats cool, is that with today's announcement by Technorati, I'm more convinced that the alternate aggregation strategy I've been working on will meet massive demand. If authors are frustrated, the far larger reading audience and more lucrative advertising industry must be pulling their hair out. The problem in the Blog Aggregator space is expanding daily, which means that a productive solution should see rapid traction. My Business Plan for Remote IQ's first venture is 80% complete and will be finished today. The "air" of excitement has come back to my work with a vengance this past 2 months; I can't wait to start executing! First up: Building a Better Blog Aggregator.

... a country on autopilot ...

2005-09-02T08:13:00.000-07:00

... it's both so incredibly sad and simultaneously amazingly encouraging to continue to watch the world's most powerful country run on autopilot ...

I'm amazed at the resillience of the US nation. I can't fathom another country anywhere on Earth actually surviving the incredibly inept and arrogant tyranny of a government as useless to its constituents as that led by George W Bush. Yet living here, daily, I see the people of this amazing democracy side-step its leaders' shortfalls and rise to the challenges he has either created or is too dumbstruck to deal with. It's an incredible time in History that both illustrates the frail imperfection of that humanity which we endow with superhuman powers, and the perfect resillience of the-men-and-women-in-street, which we don't.

Long before Bush's speechwriters had found the inapropriate words to convey his late interest & total distance from the tragedy wrought by hurricane Katrina, the rest of this amazing country had already sprung into action - countless PRIVATE rescue missions were launched - numerous PRIVATE relief agencies mobilized. It's OK that the US government is totally uninformed; they get their news from the amazing PRIVATE services like CNN, just like the rest of us do. I just wish GW would switch over from the Cartoon Network, "the daily oil-man" or "the hunter's rifle review" a little more frequently so that his response rate to natural disasters could keep up with that of his voters. Meanwhile, the county's few remaining defence forces, now stretched to breaking-point fighting George's pointless expensive war for oil in Iraq, are photographed helplessly standing by as New Orleans is looted and the wounded float their dead down the city's main streets. All the while, Ms Rice is shopping for a new pair of heels on 5th Avenue. I don't blame our least-loved pawn, Condaleeza; a fish rots from its head. Ms Rice; "Smell the rotting fish, get a spine, and get out of there. When his term is over he will still be "a" president - what will you be? You will still just smell of rotten fish." That's a smell that doesn't go away.

George Bush - there are no good words that can express my contempt for you. FUCK YOU. And FUCK YOU again for making me type FUCK on my blog. You are the first and hopefully the last person on earth that I will let defile my personal web space with this type of language. But, frankly, for you, I couldn't come up with anything better, so, finally, if you didn't get it the first time; "FUCK YOU GEORGE BUSH". The Wheel Turns George, and I can't but conclude that karmikally, you and yours are in for an extremely bleek future as a result of the havoc your selfish tenure in office has wreaked. And for lying to us, all I can offer is "FUCK YOU". I'm dumbstruck at your arrogance in pulling the wool over the eyes of the World's most powerful nation. Have you NO RESPECT? Who the HELL do you think you are? The America I have come to Love is worth more than that.

America - there are few good words that express my love and admiration of you. I LOVE your resillience, your sense of community and I LOVE YOU for your generosity towards your neighbor. The US is a hard-charging, work-aholic and sometimes socially dysfunctional society but what I never expected to find here was your GENEROSITY and EMPATHY for those in need. It's a love and respect for the basic rights of every man that I personally think is unrivalled anywhere else on Earth. It's not shared by all of your leaders but it runs deep in the blood of every citizen of your great society. I now know that respect for life and basic human rights can only be achieved in territories where that ideal is actually attained by the majority. At first, it seemed like a paradox to me that in a country where so few were needy, so many were giving. Your generosity has brought me renewed shame for mine and my forefather's lack there-of (I grew up in South Africa). THANK YOU. I love you for your FAITH - your FAITH in the correctness of a government built on a foundation of recognizing the rights of the individual. You don't pay lipservice to human rights - you live it.

Your Faith has been abused and you've been lied to but because your foundation is strong, you are resillient. George Bush will still ensure that more of you are needy by the time he is through but his legacy will be short-lived because of your resillience, your generosity and your empathy. America, you will again triumph, your generosity inspires me, I Love You.

Update ... 9/11 ... 2005
If there is any question of the validity of my rant above, please read this Newsweek artical, "How Bush Blew It" in its entirety. Here's my favorite quote ...

The reality, say several aides who did not wish to be quoted because it might displease the president, did not really sink in until Thursday night. Some White House staffers were watching the evening news and thought the president needed to see the horrific reports coming out of New Orleans. Counselor Bartlett made up a DVD of the newscasts so Bush could see them in their entirety as he flew down to the Gulf Coast the next morning on Air Force One.

Blogspotting - Mulungu & the Artiste

2005-09-01T12:14:00.000-07:00

I just remembered I should've spread some link-love 0n blog-day to two amazing peeps - strong ties who just started blogging;

The First is James Ross Anderson. James and I are born a few days apart & we share similarly "cooked" thought-patterns. Keep a close eye on James' blog for such wondrous musings as "if we can go to the moon, why is it that we still have to wait at a red traffic light when the streets are deserted at 2AM?" James is on a mission with his gorgeous wife, Ida. They're moving to Ida's homeland, Sweden and should be arriving as I type; be sure to follow James' insights as he blogs the experiences of a "Mulungu in Sweden"

Next up is Mikee T. Mike is an extremely talented artiste and a good friend. I intend to follow his new blog, daddy longlegs, closely for developments with his webdev, deee-jay, photography, and music recording projects. To say Mike is talented is a rediculous understatement - he's a large part responsible for my interest in digital photography and for many many wild nights spent partying with his band, grannysmith back in Johannesburg before they split up (as all the great bands do).

Two kick-ass new additions to the blogstream - eh - can't wait till the rest of the Brighton crowd become bloggers - gonna be wicked, innit?

blog day & katrina's aftermath

2005-08-31T20:07:00.000-07:00

Blog-day 2005 has been spent text-less, flabergastedly rivetted to cnn and the aftermath of hurricane Katrina. The surprising frailty of and damage in Louisiana is sad, sad tragedy. For my children when they read this; 80% of the city of New Orleans is submerged followin the hurricane, the dykes that hold back canal waters were breeched, and in places, totally washed away. People scrambled for air in the ceilings of their homes & many were hacked free through their rooves and hoisted to safety by helicopter.

I didn't fulfill my first Blog-Day's responsibility --> to blog with wild abandon about 5 new blogs I hadn't read before. Frankly, nothing else has held my attention today.

Then, just now, I tripped over a phenomenal blog, Thinking Home Business, by Des Walsh. I love Des' practical advice in what seems like a sea of hot air and hype. Des seems to have his feet firmly on the ground, yet his mind is clearly ahead of the curve. Highly recommended reading. This year, it's quality not quanity - next Blog-Day I'll get to 5 blogs.

Building a Better Blog'regator

2005-08-30T11:47:00.000-07:00

I've blogged about the shortcomings of the way Blog content is agregated today.

But how is it improved? What are the foundations of a Better Blog'regator? I'll take a swing at it here and would appreciate comments. The Better Blog'regator will ...

connect authors to readers, not just to each other,
recognize the importance of the immediacy of good blog content and be able to keep it fresh as the blogstream expands,
value an author's content over their popularity and give an equal voice to all bloggers,
understand that readers can never read all good content or predict its existence (i.e. search for it),
recognize an author' copywright to their creativity and financially reward authors for the value it creates in the agregate,
know that blogging is about what people think not what machines do and exclude auto-blogs from the agregation,

why the blogstream beats the mainstream

2005-08-28T19:54:00.000-07:00

Not only is blogging dang addictive, but I'm starting to think that blogstream content is better for you than the mainstream;

Mainstream media feeds up popular opinion - you learn nothing! The Blogstream randomly knocks ya sideways as you delve into the mind of the individual - jarring opinions make you think - by thinking you learn - give me the Blogstream!

what would happen if ...

2005-08-28T14:30:00.000-07:00

... all of the reviewers of books on Amazon.com decided not to post the reviews on the site ... and instead, posted on a shared blog like this one on the blog "Ex Libris Book Reviews" - and then collected amazon associates revenues from readers that click through and buy on the site.

The answer is ...

Reviewers would actually get paid for their work ... welcome to Web2.0 ... now that you are participating, I recommend that you seek out a productive annuity revenue for your work ... stop giving it away for free ... mmmmm'kay?

Lone voice in the Blogosphere

2005-08-28T13:05:00.000-07:00

Sometimes (often) I feel like a lone voice in the overcrowded Blogosphere. If herd mentality ever reigned, it is in the concepts evolving around how blogs are agregated, ranked, rated and listed. Surowiecki's "information cascades" are clearly at play - The resulting "swarm" of blog agregators mostly perpetuate these myths about what makes a GOOD blog and the result is an unnavigable morass of inbreeding that doesn't have a method for identifying quality in anything other than the most prolific themes. Blogrolls on good blogs have become more reliable content-navigation, at least for this lone voice.

Technorati is rightly coming under some harsh criticism. I honestly can't remember another technology that so poorly delivered on its promise yet became so highly elevated in its popularity. I could rant for days about my frustrations w/Technorati as a blog-author and blog-reader - but I'd rather you take an "A-Lister's" word for it and read this post by Kottke that highlights obvious shortcomings - the site's performance indicates that Kottke's list is the tip of the iceberg.

Personally, I think the herd misses the essence of the problem. The essence of this problem with blog agregateion is that its still focused on finding GOOD blogs. Think about it; when you read a newspaper; do you first check who the author is before reading a story? Do you only read stories written by prolific writers? Hell No, of course not - when we read the newspaper, we seek out interesting stories, not interesting authors. Authors are secondary to their content. Why have we put that equation arse-about-face when seeking out useful content online?

When I read the web, I want to read GOOD _posts_, not GOOD _blogs_. Get it? Does anyone?

The lone voice drones on on the low-rated blog, its post relegated to permanent obscurity ... unless I do something about it ... who's with me?

Innovation is ...

2005-08-28T11:54:00.000-07:00

... the conceptual dimension of great execution.

Just a random thought.

"Innovation" is not "the big idea"; big ideas are a dime a dozen, seldom "new" and never unique. How "big ideas" are realized is the "bigger idea" --> this is innovation. "Innovation" is also NOT the fulfillment of the "big idea" --> that is productivity; the activity dimension of execution. When productivity experiences innovation, effectivity and efficiency are the result.

VoIP is HARD

2005-08-24T07:17:00.000-07:00

Something I learnt in the call center trenches is that quality VoIP is HARD. We were spoilt with the QoS (Quality of Service) on the purpose-built telephony network.

Google launched Google-Talk. I LOVE Google but I'm not rushing to install it ...

1) ... another google BETA ignores apple users - this is a rediculous blind spot for google at this point - picasso, desktop search and now talk all without MAC clients - unacceptable google! We've come to expect more for free!

2) QUALITY - without testing this, I'm convinced they can't compete with skype and won't for a while. Here's the 1st review I've read:

"But Google Talk had an intensified lag which occurred every 3 minutes. Furthermore, in comparison with Skype, the quality of the voice is lower for Google Talk"

VoIP is hard - it's not your average web-service. From a reliability, security & quality perspective skype is a Rolls Royce in comparison to any of the other "free" tools. Free VoIP calls have been offered by net2phone and others since the 90's - but skype's the first only to nail (and continue to improve on) security, reliability & quality. The codec in the skype client is the same indutrial-strength software that nortel and other telephony hardware vendors embed in their enterprise solutions. There is a difference - and there will be for a while still. If google can't even find the resources to develop a client for the mac, they surely can't staff the project with the expetise it takes to nail this stuff.

Do me a favor, please don't switch - for now, just skype me at david.gibbons

B3.0 licketyship

2005-08-22T20:44:00.000-07:00

I suggested licketyship's business model at The Business Experiment almost 2 months ago - ideas are a dime a dozen. This model is going to be fascinating to whatch - same day deliveries direct to your home using existing brick & mortar inventory - at TBE, I proposed this business under the name "click-a-brick" - licketyship sells the same day delivery promise better though. Nice One!

online librarian

2005-08-22T18:28:00.000-07:00

Great book readers community in the UK. Less random than bookcrossing - more infective by the look of it. P2P used sales without the fee is probably next.

I still think that this model will KILL NetFlix in the US if done with DVD's.

Hilarious - friendster

2005-08-21T23:21:00.000-07:00

While typing up a piece that will (hopefully) help me get my mind around where peer production was headed, I came to the conclusion that the myriad of social networking solutions that perpetuate our strong ties online are all DEAD ON ARRIVAL.

You'll have to wait for "the manifesto" for the proof but here's a hilarious video that hits on the same issue - WATCH THIS!

bookcrossing

2005-08-21T21:18:00.000-07:00

... is an amzing community that may just go on to be the P2P version of Amazon. I LOVE the community's mission statement and believe it has the power to ignite the book-reading passion in it members. From the site;

Our goal, simply, is to make the whole world a library. BookCrossing is a book exchange of infinite proportion, the first and only of its kind.

A nobler cause ...

2005-08-19T12:27:00.000-07:00

... than the terrapass, that also promises to rid the earth of gas fumes for a small contribution ...
athompson at thompsonlife is selling good karma for $20. With $20 each from 45 people, raised at fundable.org, athompson will buy a scooter and save the world from the fumes from 1 more car ... use the gas savings towards charity ... and blog about it on the way ... I can't put it better than thmpson;

"I plan to take the funds raised here and purchase a motor scooter (that gets 75-90 mpg!!). Each month I'm going to donate the amount of money I save by using the motor scooter, in place of my car, to charity (say for example $80 each month). I'm going to document all of this via my website thompsonlife.net and provide articles, video, and more so that you can see how your $20 donation continues to keep giving each and every month for an entire year."

Blogging's Future

2005-08-18T07:56:00.000-07:00

Today, there are 2 outputs of blogs:
1) links
2) posts
Actually, blogs can be seperated into;
a) those that link
b) those that have essays
c) hybrids - a bit of both
My question is, which is the nobler, and more profitable pursuit, if there is one? linking or writing? Today, because the web is vast, and we've only just started collecting links, links are all the rage.
I think essays have a future though.

Web 2.0 - wiredreach

2005-08-17T07:07:00.000-07:00

It looks like Microsoft's awesome collaboration platform, "Groove", has just picked up some open source competition - I can't wait for this one ... wiredreach

ZOTOB - reason #378 why to switch

2005-08-16T22:55:00.000-07:00

... ... to mac.

before you start typing, yes, I am touching wood!

iStockPhoto - Agent productivity through empowerment

2005-08-16T22:38:00.000-07:00

When I last blogged about iStockPhoto, I mentioned that their one downfall was - photo review lead time. Well, I'm pleased to report that they seem to have fixed the backlog in their queues. How did they do this? Read on ...

What now happens when I upload a batch of photo's to istock:
a) it takes about 2 days before the accept / reject notifications start coming in.
b) they don't come in sequentially anymore - about half the batch get either rejected or accepted in a mad flurry and,
c) then the rest sit there for another day or so before another flurry.

What's at work here? Are iStock getting fewer photos? More reviewers? Maybe - but I think it looks more likely they've employed something that the call center industry calls "agent empowerment". Clearly iStock has a multi-step photo review process - and I presume the 2nd step was the backlog. So, now the reviewers in the 1st step have been empowered to take authoritative go/no-go decisions on photo's that clearly pass/fail the community's standards - and only the more marginal photo's go through to round 2. Review workload could be decreased by as much as 25% at iStockPhoto.

Lastly, I'd still like to know how iStock reviewers are remunerated - as a result of my study into iStock-like communitys. If you know, please comment.

"breaking the rules"

2005-08-15T16:38:00.000-07:00

Rob, at "The Business Experiment" sure knows how to keep my attention ... the site's new tag-line is "Breaking the Rules of Business" - how apropo

B3.0 The Business Experiment - Third Lesson

2005-08-15T15:26:00.000-07:00

OK, I've been learning lots at "The Business Experiment" and its time to add Lesson 3 to;
Lesson 1 - "Set Your Ideas Free" expanded on here and,
Lesson 2 - "Get your SITE in order"

So, Here's Lesson 3 ... "KNOW what your (community's) Passion is"

Rob May, who started the business experiment, has (so far and to my knowledge) admitted to 2 mistakes ... or lessons learnt at The Business Experiment ... the 1st was not using a more exclusive "gmail-like" invite-in mechanism which Rob's convinced would have attracted a larger crowd quicker ... and the second was "not picking an idea and running with it".

I disagree with Rob about the first and think he did the right thing in casting a wide net. "google" didn't start with gmail and by the time they did email, were trading on massive "cache" - it simply would not have worked for TBE without any cache. Social Networking and "working for a common communal good" and "deferring earnings" are not exactly popular social "memes" today that probably wouldn't have gotten far virally, however "free infinite email" is far more "primed" for viral spread.

I agree with the 2nd mistake however - and think that the fact that Rob is grappling with it is important to discovering the secret sauce in buliding productive communities. It's interesting that Rob, who founded TBE on the premise that "the business idea is irellevant" has reached this conclusion. Hell, not just interesting, this is astounding - Rob was really commited to the irrelavance of "the idea". Rather than just recognizing the mistake however ... let me suggest this ...

The "community idea" at TBE is that an open community can produce a company. Rob's (valid) concern is that once a (single) "business idea" is chosen, he won't be able to maintain the interest of those parties that don't share a passion for that idea. He is right! From the TBE forums & polls it's clear that the new business ideas have the ability to polarize the community & that not all ideas equally captivate or "tap into" the passion of the crowd. It's clear that Passion and Trust will become the most important assets to communities and their members. Without both, a community will not grow - with both, it's growth is only limited to the size of the population that shares the passion.

TBE could retain the bulk of its membership post selecting a business offering if it stops to consider this question a bit further ... "what is our (common) passion"? That may sound like a rediculous question to ask a bunch of loosely affiliated total strangers - but it's answer shouldn't be! There's a reason that The Business Experiment has 760 members - and it's so obvious that I don't think that Rob sees it. Rob has already united a Crowd around a common passion - this crowd's common passion is ... "p2p production". This crowd joined The Business Experiment because they believed that open-communities could build business.

There you have it - now, it becomes easy to select "the product idea" - just pick a product that either is itself, or fascilitates "open companies" - do this and Rob will retain most of the members - hell, some will even go on to not only create the community but also become a producer in the community once it is built.

So, I don't think it was a mistake to open the decision as to how the company makes its money. I do think it was a mistake not to limit suggestions to what is clearly this crowd's passion i.e. crowd-run-businesses. All ideas should have been required to either be;

a) a business that leverages peer production communities (the more the better)
b) a business that serves peer production communities (Rob's currently thinking down these lines)

All 10 of the ideas that TBE is currently voting on have merit. They aren't all suited to peer production however - especially not in the way they are currently positioned. Interestingly, there is only one idea heavily dependant on peer production. It's getting favorable reviews in the forums and frankly, is the one I'm pulling for. It's a consulting business which isn't necessarily my passion, but it is built on a "wisdom of crowds" peer production model - which is what has me fascinated, and will be the reason I stick around if it is chosen. Actually, if "the Wisdom of Crowds" holds, then it's quite easy to predict that this idea will win ... it represents the "most common" passion currently shared by the crowd - the reason we got together in the first place. It would be statistically improbable that some-one else will even be able to suggest another idea whose core premise we have more in common than one based on t.w.o.c. A clever member would have realised this and only proposed t.w.o.c. related businesses - I wish I had been smarter at the time - as does Rob.

Here's the lesson then - "Know your passion(s)" - and start your communities based on those. One of my passions is now definitely "peer production". What's yours? Wanna start a business?

I round out with the (up to the minute state at TBE):
Members: 760
Avg Participation: 46,4% (going up)
Polls Conducted: 15
Total Forums Posts: ~950

... the end of research ...

2005-08-15T14:48:00.000-07:00

I need to bring my research phase into communities and social networks to a close. Not because I've exhausted the topic or have anything better to do ... but because I need to EXECUTE. So, today, I start down the road of building Remote IQ based on what I'm now convinced will be the Dominant Institution of Our Future, namely "peer production networks" - or whatever they become known as.

The research phase concluded with a detailed read of "Linked" and "The Wisdom of Crowds" as well as extensive online research spurred on by refererences in both books while Laura was travelling last week. This research ended with a quick critical review (below) of both books. Execution begins with the ">2 Manifesto" and the "Remote IQ Mission statement and Business Plan" - both of which are my currently most pressing projects - watch this space.

Here's the critical review of both books which I posted on The Business Experiment today ...

So, I finally read "the Wisdom of Crowds" last week - back to back with "Linked" by Barabasi - here are some thoughts.

1st Note: this is a critical review - both are GREAT books - important to their time.

Now, overall - I'm disappointed with t.W.O.C for many reasons - and I think Linked stops just short of being applicable - but is a far higher recommended read!

"the Wisdom of Crowds"

Had I not spent any time on TBE or never thought about the voting process in general, t.W.O.C. would have been a good read - and I'd recommend it as a "1st primer" for anyone who comes from a very autocratic school of leadership.

My problems with t.W.O.C are numerous - my problem with both books is that neither answered the pressing question that I went into them with ... namely, "if open crowds are so wise, then can they also be productive? And if so, can they be competitively productive vs. the top-down corporate model?

Neither book answers that - though Linked gets the closest to explaining a framework for measuring community adoption & growth - that could possibly be extrapolated to managing a willing crowd's effectiveness.

t.W.O.C is clearly written by a layperson who has fortuitously bumped into a phenomenon (much like anyone in this crowd). As a result, Surowiecki starts to "see crowds at work" in every system - using t.W.O.C to explain common stuff. This would be OK if he was accurate, but he gets it glaringly wrong ... on a few occaisons ... The worst (for me) is when the author explains availibility in the grocery supply chain as "the wisdom of crowds" ... it is anything but ... if it were, we'd all agree to use a shared grocery store ... and we'd inform the store ahead of time of what our needs were. Supply Chains work (unfortunately) because of only 1 thing: Safety Stock - which is imperfect, and therefore, in agregate, in EXCESS. This illustrates a very important point that the author totally misses ... namely the importance of abundance to t.W.O.C. "Abundance of crowds" is why the supply chain works - not its wisdom - and both are important to execution. Actually, you could argue that without abundance (of opinions), there is no wisdom - yet Surowiecki remains focused purely on ensuring diversity. Maybe if you looked to tap into abundance instead, diversity is just a natural result?

In t.W.O.C. the author suggests that there are 3 types of decisions that crowds can make and that their are 3 conditions to be satisfied for the decisions to be "smart". These points are the entire substance of t.W.O.C. The author then goes on for the rest of the book citing studies and examples - some that do, and some that don't support his case. I do think that the principles in t.W.O.C. are accurate - they're just far from justify an entire book to explain them - two chapters would have sufficed.

"Linked"

"Linked" on the other hand would not easily be grasped without the complete story - Barabasi introduces some amazing concepts about how communitys grow - and then builds upon them. By the end of the book, as a reader, the "scientific discoveries" have caught up with what we're witnessing in Blogging and elsewhere in Web 2.0 ... you feel as though you are part of an ongoing process of discovery ... and I highly anticipate "Linked 2" because its clear that there are still some unanswered questions. Barabasi, unlike Surowiecki is a MASTER of the topic at hand - it truly is a 1st-person vs reported account. Yet, Barabasi is possibly the most modest author I've read - and does an amazing job of attributing credit to the originators of the science of links - no matter what their contributions.

If I can criticize Linked at all, its that Barabasi DOES NOT leap to conclusions (unlike the previous author). I think there are some devastatingly powerful conclusions & predictions that can be drawn from "Linked" that Barabasi doesn't go near. For example, to me, after reading Linked, it's clear that online search will be relegated to relatively little importance to our web experience - probably within 5 to 10 years. That is Dramatic - I can now see that google are ahead of this - but it does mean we'll see advertising entirely reinvented - again - in the next decade!

"Linked" also didn't answer my pressing question - but it gave me a framework to thing about how to measure communities - and thereby possibly manage them - I now think that is an important piece of the puzzle.

Lastly, for those that have bothered to read this far, I have found an EXCELLENT text that does a better job of answering my question, and is a more recommended read than either book ... check out this presentation on Peer Production ... by Umair at bubble ...

http://www.bubblegeneration.com/resources/peerproduction.ppt
www.bubblegeneration.com

More "Ripple"s for the banking industry ...

2005-08-13T20:52:00.000-07:00

... I like this one ... "ripple" represents the ultimate spririt of open social network:
1) the software is open source
2) ... it will work on p2p tech.
3) TRUST is the central functionality - we allow lines of micro-credit to those we trust
4) this network will agregate micropayments into loans that can be put to bigger uses - all within the network - no bank - beautiful!

Banking does seem to be peer to peer production's first big killer application.

I'm not sure how huge it will be. It does fly in the face of our "loose ties" being the more productive (loose ties probably won't extend you credit in these societies) - and money as a "common passion", which I think is essntial for a productive hub, is probably not strong enough to truly engender trust - or reciprocity there-of, on a large scale. I think I perefer the model, like fundable's, where funds are pooled around a common cause; preferably a cause benefitting even loose ties.

Check out Ripple!

Banking's first deathnail - zopa

2005-08-13T12:39:00.000-07:00

... well, well, my zero readers. Remember when I wrote that the banking industry would come under threat from direct-lending communities?

Well, it's started - ZOPA - highlighted by Rob at TBE. Get out of banking - now!

... now here's a post from the twilight zone ...

2005-08-11T21:40:00.000-07:00

This is remarkable. (and also a mini-TBE-update).

THESE 3 THINGS JUST HAPPENED PRACTICALLY SIMULTANEOUSLY ... (please comment if you can appreciate this)

1) About 1/2 way through "The Wisdom of Crowds" by James Surowiecki, I stopped to check the forums on The Business Experiment ... but first post this quote from the book on poductivity's sub-title ...
"Things only got worse when 1 monkey was given a grape for doing nothing at all."
2) ... then I logged on at The Business Experiment, posted a random reply in the forums in which, amongst other crap, I said ..
"we don't have a board who can be held responsible when our virally built viral network virally leaks your trade secret"
3) ... I saved the post, and checked my status ... I AM CEO at TBE !!!

Hillarious!!! Very funny. I feel like I'm clutching the hot potato.

This week I met Rob May, The Business Experiment's founder, via skype - we chatted for about 30 minutes. Rob's an electrical engineer, so already ahead of me on the (eng.) food chain, a bright, witty guy from Kentucky. My new promotion could be the result of some algorithm, a joke - or most likely, another "experiment" - Rob's out to learn from TBE if nothing else - so he'll definitely try anything once and with my growing read of James' book, it's clear in retrospect that he already has.

One thing I now know for sure - that after the dismal failure of my 2 idea nominations to attract votes, and after goofing the 1st agregate vote (which made the FL-ballot look like a single check-box), it's surely a dilbertean crowd that now has me as their CEO - my parents will be so proud.

B 3.0 - More and more MicroStock sites

2005-08-10T16:12:00.000-07:00

I think that a study of the stock photography websites called "microstock" sites, where the community contributes (the bulk of) the product and is paid a % revenue share on sales, would be an interesting one, providing insights into the business models that will feed growth of "poductive" communities.

I've blogged about iStockPhoto, but after reading this post by Graham Stewart, will nvestigate at least 3 of the other commnities as well. Graham does an exellent job summarizing his experiences, the popularity of each service - and how their models differ. A worthwhile read. Looks like there's a gap opening between microstock sites that would provide services to photogs that wanted to focus on shooting more and computing less.

don't do ... vonage

2005-08-09T13:10:00.000-07:00

all is clearly not well behind that catchy whistle at vonage ... Damien Katz has written extensively about his horrendous experiences with the upstart VOIP provider. Because a good friend is considering the service for their UK operation, this posts serves as further warning: buyer beware vonage:

First, for a taste of vonage corp. culture read this post ...
Then, if still in doubt read the experiences that preceeded it in this post ...

Lastly, this quote from Damien's posts:

"As Ronnie points out in the comments, Jeffrey A. Citron the CEO of Vonage, was indicted for Securities Fraud in 2003 (http://www.sec.gov/litigation/complaints/comp17929.htm) and he and his Datek cohorts agreed to pay the SEC $70 million in fines, of which Citron's portion was $22.5 million(http://www.sec.gov/news/press/2003-5.htm).

skype for me please!

B 3.0 - What Business can learn from Open Source

2005-08-08T22:34:00.000-07:00

Paul Graham's Essay is a Highly Recommended read. Paul nails the "spirit" of Open Source development - it's unpredictable conquering of big-business software and the coming parallel impact on business in general. Fascinating.

These great quotes from Paul's Essay:

"So these, I think, are the three big lessons open source and blogging have to teach business: (1) that people work harder on stuff they like, (2) that the standard office environment is very unproductive, and (3) that bottom-up often works better than top-down.

I can imagine managers at this point saying: what is this guy talking about? What good does it do me to know that my programmers would be more productive working at home on their own projects? I need their asses in here working on version 3.2 of our software, or we're never going to make the release date.

And it's true, the benefit that specific manager could derive from the forces I've described is near zero. When I say business can learn from open source, I don't mean any specific business can. I mean business can learn about new conditions the same way a gene pool does. I'm not claiming companies can get smarter, just that dumb ones will die."

And this one by Tracy Chapman;

Sometimes, talking about a revolution, sounds ... like a whisper.

YES!

Web 2.0 just got cooler - the EVDB -

2005-08-08T19:38:00.000-07:00

WOW! Check out the EVDB. I have no idea how long these guys have been going but they rock - and I can't wait for 43places to integrate this kickass service!

The Events and Venues Database looks to be a single service to search for "what's happenning" and "where" - they've got a way to go before the UI is a destination but as a "data-hub" they're doing well with a very accomplished API. Content already looks good too.

Blogging 101 - 3-click blogging with del.icio.us

2005-08-07T17:34:00.000-07:00

There's a disturbance in the force of blogs I read, so I join the conversation with this post of a GREAT hack for del.icio.us (& feedburner) that I've been using as a FAR easier method of adding links to my blog's side-bar ... read on ...

A debate rages over a) the slow adoption & subsequent use of tagging and b) the UI / killer app. that will unlock the value of tagging for users. Michael Parekh wrote a thoughtful piece which describes the virtue of tagging to a community like flickr but criticizes del.icio.us for being unfriendly (from a user's perspective). Fred Wilson replies on his blog, A_VC. Fred's is my most-read blog & his investment in del.icio.us is well documented. Both posts are recommended reads.

Personally, I'm now addicted to del.icio.us - not for its UI but for its usefulness - which is, after all, how the "google" guys made it, innit?

For me, so far the secret sauce in del.icio.us is ...
a) the ability to tag a page with a few (at least 3) swift clicks without browsing away and ...
b) their "feeds" which allow users simple access to any tag's list of items - and other feeds I haven't mastered yet (like the one Fred uses to add his daily tags).

... put the two together, and you have a very efficient web-browsing experience. Let's face it ... the number 1 curse in both consuming and (now) creating content on the web is that it's really tough to do both simultaneously. For this exact reason, I held off adding lists of favorite blogs & books etc. to my blog's sidebar - without del.icio.us, it's a mission. Even if your blog software supports simple lists of links (which blogger doesn't) ... you have to toggle screens - and cut and paste - even multi-tab browsers haven't got a full grip on this yet. For me, I'd rather just click while I'm consuming information - and only type when I absolutely have to ...

Then along comes del.icio.us - and let's you create content - on the fly - while you browse. My "TAGthis" link, created by del.icio.us when I signed up, is right at the front of the list on my browsers' (firefox) toolbar bookmarks - any-time I browse across some great content that I want to remember or list, I merely click "TAGthis" - del.icio.us opens (in that page) - I click on one of the prenamed tags that correspond to one of my sidebar lists, (add additional tags if I want) - then _save_ the tagged link - and I'm back on the page I was browsing. In the background, that link is automagically listed in the relevant list on my blog. That's how I added "*michael parekh on IT*" to "great tech. blogs" and "A_VC - Fred Wilson's most excellent blog" to "great business blogs". 3 swift clicks and I'm back reading more great content - and I have added a new "thingie" to my sidebar. cool. A great "game" with this hack is to bounce from blog to blog reading new blogs recommended by blogs you tag - and so forth - and see how many you can list before you come accross a crap one - or one that doesn't link out (you know who you are - do something about it)!

These are my steps for burning a del.icio.us feed to a list in my sidebar:
0) You must be a user of both del.icio.us and feedburner - go sign up.
1) I choose a name for the list & greate that tag in del.icio.us
2) Go to the tag's page - get the feed URL for JUST THAT TAG - (not the other feeds they give you).
3) Go burn that feed in feedburner. Then use their BuzzBoost tool (click publicize) like I did when I added atom feeds to poductivity in this earlier post. The BuzzBoost settings I used for this hack are: ALL items - with all content options unselected (you just get the links in the pubblished feed).
4) Paste the BuzzBoost code into your sidebar template in Blogger/whatever.
5) You're done - go forth, browse, tag, browse again - watch your blog's list's grow - without typing.

Now, let's rate this hack:

ease of hack - simple
time taken - < 5 minutes
cost of hack - $0
automation - AWESOME - never cut and paste a link to your blog again. Return on time invested is probably achieved within 5 links added.
most difficult part - finding the right spot in blogger's template HTML to insert the BuzzBoost HTML.
overall recommendation - highly recommended! Only warning: Your blog is now dependant on 2 (additional) external services who's reliability is not under your control - and not always garuanteed - live with it - it will improve.
*tools used - blogger, del.icio.us, feedburner, firefox, pb_g4,

I think this is a great example of what tagging should be for - it should enhance your total online experience - not just be limited to a single community - when you tag, you are creating content - great tagging systems will stay out of my way while I do that - crap tagging systems will get in my face with advertising etc. I think that del.cio.us fits the bill (for now).

According to the Seattle Times today, Michael may get his wish - and we could all be "jooked" - by "jookster" a new startup out of Factoria, WA - is looking to put a "name" if not a face, on tagging.

edited: I tell 'ya what is frickin' hard - it's track-backs - I hate 'em. It's polite when you write about posts like this to track back - but really, it should be a few (no more than 3) click process. We've already linked to a post's permalink - now you have to go back and fetch its trackback URL - rediculous - I wish del.icio.us would do something about this - Wouldn't it be great if I could use a del.icio.us feed to create both a trackback ping and a draft blog entry - automagically - with the title of the tag.

where is this headed?

2005-08-03T08:26:00.000-07:00

Dave Sifry at Technorati updated his stats on Blogosphere growth:

Here's a greata set of stats - 1 every second!

"Summary:

* Technorati was tracking over 14.2 Million weblogs, and over 1.3 billion links in July 2005
* The blogosphere continues to double about every 5.5 months
* A new blog is created about every second, there are over 80,000 created daily
* About 55% of all blogs are active, and that has remained a consistent statistic for at least a year
* About 13% of all blogs are updated at least weekly"

Web 2.0 - Reliably del.icio.us

2005-08-02T22:41:00.000-07:00

Web 2.0 will go through teething pains - and users will need to understand that any one service may be dependant on others for its normal functioning. And from time to time, be merciless at their unreliability.

Example: I recently started using del.icio.us feeds of custom tags to autopopulate my sidebar lists with stuff I tag (I still need to write up that hack). Today del.icio.us had a problem - their site is up but a banner reads:

"we had a minor database issue today. no data was lost, but things will be odd for a few hours while the tag indexes are repaired. 6:30pm 2005-08-02"

... so, my sidebar says "this feed is currently not available", where it should list A_VC, Fred Wilson's Blog - Fred's firm is a lead investor in del.icio.us.

Like any utility though, through increased adoption - and experience, reliabiliy "hardens", for Web 2.0, I think it'll be sooner rather than later.

shooting from the hip - more on decision making

2005-07-30T11:09:00.000-07:00

Stacy Brice replied to my earlier post on a "recipe" for decision
making with this excellent comment that intuition - and not process -
is the basis of good decision making. Here's Stacy's comment:

<>"This is probably a great process for the more logical, linear
thinker.

I, OTOH, am deeply intuitive, and cocked my head to the side when I
read the list; it's hard for me to fathom going through all that just
to make a decision!

To me, all of the info ferreted out in the process you shared is stuff
that's already known to the decision maker--it's stored internally,
and made up of the experiences the person has had with all the pieces
of the issues that have brought him to making the decision in the
first place.

It's like it's coded into his system, and all he has to do is reach
inside to access it. If he does, it really *is* as simple as flipping
a coin.

The intuition never lies; I think of it as my "wise" self.

If you think about it, we make seeming simple decisions that way all
the time. A child asks if he can run across the street to play with
Joey, and we instantly make a decision, tapping into all sorts of info
we've already stored, and intuition about what's going on around us at
the time the decision is made. All that is processed in about a
nanosecond, and we have an answer -- yes, or no.

That same sort of thing is what many of us do, even for complex
decisions, and it works beautifully."</>

I couldn't agree more! When making the decisions that I have to live
by, I always "go with my gut" - I think that this process would result
in analysis paralysis if implemented in every-day life. The author
even goes on to say so. He also goes on to discuss how multiple forms
of governance of various groups in societies implement and grant
authority for making decisions.

I do think that there's a need for "a" recipe (and that this could be
a good one) when:

1) decisions are proposed and made by a very large group - a "wise"
crowd. The Business Experiment could have adopted this recipe.

2) decisions are proposed and made by groups involving scarce and / or
valuable resources - and measuring ROI is important. We did this at
amzn - a good habit.

3) decisions are proposed and made by distributed communities of
individuals, each with a stake in the outcome.

That's (3) the part that interests me most. I'm looking at various
ways to best capture the wisdom of crowds - How can distributed
communities develop the best possible decision, and then agree on how
is to executed? Is this list a "methodology" that could be easily
automated?

Thanks for reading Stacy!

robots - allconsuming

2005-07-29T21:55:00.000-07:00

OK - he - just finished browsing the robots and totally MISSED this when I blogged here. Anyhooooooo. Remember what I said about balls in this previous post? - how's this for a url --> 43.allconsuming.net - which you can find here. Is this how the amazon financing was attracted? - possibly - maybe amazon's next acquiaition to add to communities - regardless, it's a great example of how the right investor has a vision for a win-win partnership beyond $ & c. Nice one I think. Not sure yet. Looking fwd to tighter integration between places, things & consuming.

what's your growth rate?

2005-07-29T16:36:00.000-07:00

A new community from the Robot co-op, called "43-places" was spun off "43-things" about a monh ago. I'm enjoying coloring in my map of countries I've visited - and clearly, so are ...

"6,169 people in 885 cities who (ed) are going to 3,233 places"

I really like the robot co-op's entry strategy into this emerging market. They have not put a foot wrong when it comes to giving their early adopters everything they never knew they needed - and more. What's more impressive is the "balls" that the co-op had to take on ownership of probably the 2 largest communities on the planet - they started with the community of people who are "doing things" - and then moved to the community of people who are "going places".

If I could see how they were going to monetize these communities, I'd recommend throwing in the towel - or joining them, now. You might find in the long run however that they have cast the net too wide - or that that's the plan. On "43", that goal is unclear - to me. I've thought about it a bit. What they've done with such a wide net is ... effectively set out to become the platform that all communities should use ... to understand what their members are up to - and where they are going - one place that members can put _that_ information.

Something cunning is that the robots use the 43t platform for users to request product enhancements - and for the "robots" to keep up with the "(usually) 43 things" on that list, hat they are doing. The community is not building the company - but it's close. There's a post asking the robots to open-source the core platform for extension. Interesting idea. This is how the "ikkiforollog" platforms are being merged and extended. Ultimately though, I'd prefer to see an api - and I think this is necessary for any commnity to become the "de-facto" standard in it's common cause.

Ready for the _best_ part? Go look at the sites - built by "7 robots" - impressive.

B 3.0 sell your (SUV) guilt ...

2005-07-29T14:21:00.000-07:00

... now here's a B 3.0 that I cynically think is a total scam (this came from Wharton MBA's, folks ... need I say more), but which has somewhere between 800 and 1600 paid members.

This community is the perfect solution for SUV-drivers: you go to the www.terrapass.com community and buy a "TerraPass". They agregate that cash and reinvest it in "green" projects at a rate of return promised to eliminate your annual CO2 emmissions. Great. Next time you get yelled at by a tree-hugger, just point at your TerraPass and flash a (reverse) peace sign. Hell, buy two TerraPasses and you take CO2 OUT of the atmosphere - your guilt freedom will let you buy the hummer you've always wanted! Talk about trading on guilt. Small car drivers, obviously, pay less.

So, why is this a scam?
1) If you read my post about decision making below, you'll realize that TerraPass can never keep its promise - and garuantee that their benefactors' experiments will cancel out your (very real) CO2 emissions,
2) At (my estimated) total revenue of $30 - 50K since inception (hard to determine), this business is loosing cash big time. Staff is huge for what they're doing - and there seems to be a lot of hanging out at festivals - got a job?
3) The co. plans to keep a 10% margin (doesn't say if this is before or after costs - my guess is before). Dude, I know fundraising org's don't spread your dollar far - but these guys plan to keep 1c out of 10 - and, they're turning your 10c into much less (my guess would be 3c) - how much goes to the experiments in (1)?
4) The rational behind "needing cash" to start this business - and therefore being a for-profit, is ludicrous. The site is at most a week's work for a good techie. Need cash? What for? The membership cards? Give me a break. This business could have launched (with a passionate community) for < $10K. I'd love to know how much was raised.

Let's get this straight: I think that it's OK to make a living, or even a killing by running a community - I just think you should be more transparent about it. Any "good cause" whether for or not-for profit that does not show transparency in its $'s in vs. $'s out, will only attract a very stupid crowd (or an extremely guilty one).

If I am wrong on this ... I will buy a TerraPass if:
a) the co. gets transparent about qty of funds raised vs. distributed and,
b) that (distributed) number is > 70% - which it should be, given the model i.e. no operating costs. I bet it's less than 30%.

Imagine how much cash there is in selling other "guilt-freedom". Seriously though, my vote for these kinds of initiatives is however rather to ...
a) bootstrap the tech.
b) fund "green" projects directly in a community built to do so ... www.fundable.org
c) focus on ensuring that the project gets 100% of the donation.
d) entity's that run on charity should take it upon themselves to develop their own community and tap into complimentary communities; or loose to the middlemen who jump in & do it for them. That's really not what this trend is all about.

How to make a decision ...

2005-07-29T13:47:00.000-07:00

More thoughts from H W Lewis' excellent book (why flip a coin ...)

Recipe for decision making - distilled into bulleted steps:

1) List possible (courses of) action(s).
2) List all possible consequences of each - matrix may help deal w/shared consequences.
3) Attach a value to the "gain" or "loss" associated with each action - must be relative values.
4) Attach a probability to each consequence that reflects the likelyhood that it will actually occur post-decision
5) Multiply the values in 2 & 3 and sum for each
6) Stack rank actions by sum - do the one at the top of the list ...

Next decision please!

There are no bad decisions (within reason) - there are merely, many unpredictable outcomes resulting from any action. Live with it.

idea-a-day.com

2005-07-29T12:10:00.000-07:00

possibly the simplest community-driven site - and viable business - you'll find anywhere. Imagine the founder had positioned it this way: "... ok, you give me your ideas ... then, I print them and sell them back to you" ... mmm'kay

Check it out.

giving credit where credit is due ...

2005-07-29T12:00:00.000-07:00

... lest we forget, this is where it all started ... thanks penguin ... for proving that there's a better way - to build software - and to reward the community that sets its software free!

Will some-one please do a version of the penguin with a suit & tie on?

Drink for the community ...

2005-07-29T10:04:00.000-07:00

It's fitting that an online community that trades wines directly between members calls itself a commune and not a community. So, check out the winecommune - it's an awesome community - who is succesful because their services is free - offered AT NO ADDITIONAL COST TO MEMBERS.

Whenever I hear "commune", I'm reminded of the "good years" sharing cunning homes with total strangers. Yes, there was definitely wine involved. Good Name. This model is interesting - no-one pays - anything to the business - everyone wins (or, wines as the case may be).

So, how does one monetize this rediculous idea? Surprisingly, this model for marketplace retailing will probably prove itself EXTREMELY lucrative - much more so that the old ways (ebay/amzn etc.). Read on ...

How to make (big) cash out of the winecommune ...
1) The owners are collecting near-perfect supply, demand and pricing data on their marketplace.
2) Use (1) to predict future demand and prices. Even a hacked spreadsheet would make a good go of it - but for REAL returns, buy and impliment a tool like AUTOBOX (possibly my favorite s/w engine) - to tell you exactly what the future demand of each wine will be ... and at what price ... FYI - Autobox is how Anheuser Busch knows how a degree's change in average temperature in any city in the country will effect beer sales - one software module with 35 years of coding behind it. Please tell Dave Reilly I say Hi if you speak with him!
3) ... using the data from (2), the proprieters at the winecommune INVEST in wines that they identify as being available for sale at a great price and LIQUIDATE their investment on the site - or elsewhere (paying attention to elsewhere not being their throats).
4) Look after the community - there should be strict rules govening (3) above that dont give the proprieters any unfair advantage to rapidly purchase the best buys. If not, buyers will loose interest - then sellers will - then you're left drinking your own old wine again.

Great community - many of their members will find their passion in raiding local wine farms for good value on bulk-buys and then turn around an mark that up to community members who can't do so. High end wine retailers, look out - you just joined banking as an industry ripe for "communism"!

aaahhhhh ... commune daze