As some of you may know, I’ve been based in London on secondment for the last 10 1/2 months, this came to an end as at 29th July and I’ve since been relocating with my family back to Melbourne, Australia - my home town.

A combination of facts, including holidays, lots of house priorities and a lack of broadband at home for a couple of weeks has prevented me from blogging for a while.  Things are starting to settle and I think I’ll be back in business soon.

I have continued to participate in the community however and am taking a bigger interest in the Australian Web 2.0 community which is very active and has really matured in the 10 months I’ve been away. Either that, or maybe I’m just more in tune with it, I’m not sure.  In doing so I’ve engaged in some debates through comments on a couple of blogs, something which led to me being quoted on one blog as “Tim Bull from my employer“.

I’m not ashamed of my employer at all, I’m proud to work for them and if you want to check out my LinkedIn profile, they feature prominately.  However I have always had an implicit editorial policy that I never mention them, not least in part because ultimately the ideas expressed here are mine and don’t represent those of my employer.  Actually if I was found to be representing the view of my employer, that could be cause for an issue given what we do, so I’ve always kept the two things separate — my personal blog where I expound my own ideas and theories on things and participate in the community, and my professional profile which is me at work.

Consequently, I decided an implicit policy was not enough, so I’ve now written one which you can find here.

It’s nothing special, but the time has come to make explicit the distinction between my professional opinion (although it may draw on my personal experience) and my personal opinion (although it may be shaped by my professional experience).

I’ve added in feedburner to get better stats on readers (I’ve used it for ages on some other blogs but just never got around to putting it on here!).

I’ve also added the wordpress plug-in which should automatically re-direct your feeds to feedburner, if you have trouble, perhaps re-add the feeds.  Although of course how will you know if you don’t get this feed?  It’s a twisted world…

I spent a great couple of days this week discussing ideas around Social Software with some people who are researching, developing and thinking about it.  A lot has been discussed under a blanket NDA however so unfortunately no names or product mentioned here.

A really interesting comment that came up which I hadn’t really thought about too much before, was that social software is inherently selfish software.  The idea behind this is that ultimately the tools and mechanisms that drive social software adoption are really self serving.  The beauty of course is that why social software works is that my selfish behaviour drives a collective good, but ultimately it’s selfish.

Let’s consider a few of these:

• Technorati lets blog authors track their authority and relevance.  Why do I ping them, because it lets me know who’s linking to me.
• Tagging of any form — tagging is about helping me find me content again.
• Blogging — because it’s the easiest way to (be heard; say something; speak to a crowd; insert your reason here).

The feedback mechanism that encourages users to participate on most social software type sites is also a selfish one in the sense the reward you derive is a personal satisfaction.  How many comments did I get? How many friend requests? How many notifications? How many links and ping-backs?  Would you keep blogging if no-one read what you had to say?

I went searching to find some sites that support this idea, but didn’t come up with too many standouts, however I did like this one:

• http://12frogs.com/12/work/iasummit2006/ I love the poster on this site as it really shows the circular nature of the software and how increasing usage feeds itself.

If I re-word selfishness, I’d say it’s self-reward that promotes the use of social software.  The best social software promotes me to interact and share with others because there is a direct link to a personal reward.

You’ll notice a Feedjit widget now in the right pane.  I’ve been admiring this on other peoples blogs for a while and decided I should add it in — also I’m too lazy to check the server logs to measure traffic!  I’ve always found it interesting when I come across it, hope you enjoy.

It’s been a long time between posts.  As always, my real work has got the better of me and taken my attention away from the blog.  Since my last post I’ve moved continents with my family on secondment to the UK from Australia and the personal blog with photos of happenings has taken priority, so if I’ve been distracted from this blog, I feel I have just cause!

Now the long winter nights are setting in, the T.V. in the UK is no better than it is in Australia (in fact it’s worse) and there are some interesting things happening to write about.

Let’s call this a test post to dust off the cobwebs and I’ll be back with some more musings soon.  For those of you that have stuck with me during this hiatus, thanks!

You’ll notice many posts being updated over the next week — I’m slowly going through and removing all the  symbols that were added to these posts when I last upgraded WordPress.

If anyone has any hints or suggestions on how to do this quickly and efficiently (I’m pasting into word and search / replace), let me know!

Tim

It’s been a bit of a hiatus on the blog.  Not intentional, but work has been crazy with a lot of travel over the last couple of months, which means my evening have been better spent:

• Catching up on sleep
• Catching up with the family

 I seem to be back in the groove however and there are more than a few things I want to catch up on.  Hope to get a few posts up over the next couple of nights.

Cheers,

 Tim

Call this a random thought.   I’m travelling up to Brisbane in a few weeks, so have contacted Chris Saad at Particls in the hope we can catch up face to face.

What is it about a face to face conversation that the ongoing, in depth blog posting and conversations can’t replace, at least for me?   Is there something unique and irreplaceable in the experience we have when we meet someone that Social Media, no matter how social, can’t replace?

Or am I showing my age and for many of you the face to face meeting is no longer meaningful?   What do you think?

I’ve been on the road last week and will continue to be for the next couple of weeks. Unfortunately it will mean that my ability to spend time blogging is substantially reduced in the mean-time.  Undoubtably the posts will be a bit shorter for the next few weeks.

Still, there should be a lot of new material when I get back – I’ve enjoyed the conversations and debate this blog is generating.

Hopefully Akismet is up and running properly now.  The spam demons were getting to me.  Sorry for the inconvinience, but hopefully it’s better than trolling through caribeean cruise offers you were never likely to take!

The pressure is on to find an RSS / News solution for the Enterprise.  But it’s not coming from the users (I think this is because users that want RSS just install their own client anyway).

Every time it’s been raised internally in the last couple of years it’s come from the “Knowledge Managers” (inverted commas indicate sarcasm at the use of this title) who see it as a new communications channel that can achieve cut-through over e-mail.  The two major requirements they present are:

1. At an Enterprise level we can force users to subscribe to their knowledge channel.
2. Any news reader has an alerting mechanism (pop ups) so that it gets peoples attention.

Primarily this is because the copious lotus notes databases, intranet sites, e-mail bulletins etc. are NOT getting the attention that they supposedly deserve (I try and argue that they are in fact getting EXACTLY the attention they deserve, but that’s not always well recieved).  I quickly point out to them that implementing a news reader for every staff member that allowed us to force feeds on them would be quickly swamped by the competing parts of the organisation with their individual information spam which would turn users off and leave us back in the same mess.

As you can see, it’s really not a subscription problem at all – it’s actually an attention one, and in an Enterprise there are two important halves to the attention equation;

1. Am I as a user being told about the things that are important to me?
2. And as an Enterprise how can I be sure that users are seeing the things that it’s important that they see?

After thinking about this for a few weeks now, I’m going to express the high level problem domain for the Enterprise like this. We need a solution that:

1.  Allows us to “declutter” e-mail and remove alerts and news from e-mail notification.  E-mail should be for inter-personal communication ONLY.
2. Provide a new channel (Enterprise RSS) for all “bulletin” or one-to-many styles of communication.  Satisfy the needs of the Enterprise by allowing sophisticated profiling of both RSS feeds and users, so for example particular alerts can be automatically subscribed to particular groups of users.  Most importantly provide detailed reporting and therefore added value on the read counts for each feeds and even the time spent browsing content.
3. The content aggregator needs to function like Technorati, allowing me to browse feeds by searching and by tags in a central location — I shouldn’t need to go to every corner of the organisation to find feeds, they should be in one place.  I also want some way of valuing the feed.
4. Provides RSS “connectors” to other sources to allows users to aggregate their monitoring behaviours into a single location (big thumbs up to Lotus who have added an RSS feed generator to do this automatically with Domino databases).
5. We need an Attention Client Engine (like Particls) which can monitor the news reader and provide two sophisticated features:
   1. Learns from peoples behaviours, profile and feeds what is important to them and alerts them accordingly.
   2. Provides this information back up to an Attention Server to aggregate and understand the attention profiles of the user base and then manage sophisticated alerting back to all users of information they may have missed that could be important to them all.
6. Finally, lets the users have a degree of control over the information they are alerted to, personalising their own attention profile so that they are interrupted with the things that matter to them, while still being able to browse the news client for the things that matter to the Enterprise.

Here’s one attempt at a high level model for this. Feel free to comment on it — I can already think of a few additions, so I’d love to hear from you on yours.

Of course the Attention Engine and the News Client could be combined, but I think back to the values of the APML work group and even some basic architectural principles, there is value in seperating these — I can select, train and tune an Enterprise Attention Engine seperate from my subscription engine, and I’m not beholden to one subscription engine, or even one attention engine if I can seperate the two.

I don’t think we are there yet — open standards would need to be created to allow News Readers to publish their attention statistics to an attention engine (ie. even simple things like feed read counts etc.), but a solution like this would begin to radically alter the way in which users in an Enterprise experience information.

I think Particls and News Gator are two companies both approaching this same problem space from different sides of the equation — I’ll be interested to see how they resolve the issues and the solustions they propose.

 So that’s what I’m looking for; I’m still to evaluate a number of vendors more fully, maybe my utopia exists, but I haven’t seen it yet.  If you think you have something in this space, then feel free to contact me or comment below — I’d love to see what you’ve got.

In the mean time, I’ll resist Enterprise RSS until I can be sure that we don’t just end up with another mess like e-mail has become — there’s only one chance to do this right.

Welcome to BinaryPlex - my blog about everything, but primarily a business centric view on Web 2.0 and various emerging sites surrounding this.

This domain has been around for a year or so now and used for various experiments — so this may not be what you were expecting to see! However if you’re interested in new technologies, and in particular the impact these have on your IT strategy, then this is hopefully a place you’d like to come back to.

Happy surfing!

Tim