The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience. Eleanor Roosevelt (1884 - 1962)

It’s been a little while since I’ve returned to this series, but with a few minutes to spare I thought I’d continue on refactoring your digital life.  To recap, the steps so far are:

Step 1: Get a better browser

Step 2: Explore your mail hosts options and consolidate your mail into fewer accounts

Step 3: Update your blog software and template

Step 4: Be consistent and be you!

Step 5: Evolve your digital life

Step 6: Interoperate and connect

What does all this mean? Well if you can’t be bothered re-reading all the posts, my steps towards digital re-factoring are essentially around updating your tools and your on-line identity.  Put yourself out there with your best foot forward and don’t be afraid to be you and use the best available tools to make your life easy.

At this point, much of what I’ve been suggesting has been internally focussed on streamlining your own identity and resources.  With this in place, you’re now ready for step 7; reach out and connect to new people.

There is no easy answer to the question “How do I build my online network?”.  Ultimately you need to figure out what works for you; still I have a few tips that you can explore.

1. Join Twitter, then use Twitter search.  Twitter is an micr-blogging service which is a little confusing until you get the hang of it.  If you’re new to Twitter, I recommend that you set-up your account, download Twhirl (a good Twitter client that makes it a bit easier for a newbie user to get their head around Twitter) and start following people.  If you don’t know who to follow, then use the twitter search to look for things your interested in, then start joining the conversation; before you know it you’re part of a bigger community and participating in ongoing conversations.
2. Use a service like Technorati to find other bloggers who are writing about things you’re interested in.  This can be a challenge (because you’ll be hit by a flood of content) but find a few interesting bloggers and again, join in the conversation by commenting on their blog and providing links back to your own.

Let me know how you’re steps towards re-factoring your own digitial life are going and if there is anything in here of interest.

As I’ve matured through experience in the use of social media, I’m impressed by the number of times that this can be leveraged into supporting “real work”. My most recent post (which I’ve created as a page so it stays retains relevance) on the 10 Principles for Enterprise Social Software Adoption is a great example of this.

As a Twitter user, I’ve been tracking the usage of Lotus Connections and the buzz around it as approached its version 2.0 launch using Summize, (now Twitter Search). I set up a custom filter search which I shared with the community (through Twitter again) which let me monitor various tweets.

A couple of things came together. I tweeted about the fact I was working on the principles for Social Software adoption for my employer, and @Idonotes asked if I’d share which I was happy to do.

Through monitoring Twitter I also came to “know” at @lbenitez , a passionate evangelist for Lotus Connections. He tweeted about discussing principles for Lotus Connections and I shared the post I’d made on my blog here. Luis provided some feedback and so I took this on board and then we moved our collaboration into the real world, setting up a phone call and a discussion.

Luis took on the “job” of road testing these with his clients, while I shopped them around internally and on the blog. As a result of this collaboration I think we’ve acheived a great outcome and one that demonstrates how social networking can help you produce an outcome. I believe the new principles are now more sound than anything I’d of produced individually, my employer benefits, Luis has benefited and hopefully the community also benefits.

Two ideas have converged.  Elias Bizannes wrote about the Value Chain for Information which I have been thinking about, then I saw Sacha Chua’s Web2.0 @ Work which was done with a Nintendo DS and got really excited about wanting to make something similar. The main difference is I wanted to try make mine as an actual movie, rather than a series of slides.

I give you the Value Chain for Information - The Movie!

This is my first attempt at using a Nintendo DS to create a presentation and I’ve learnt a few things on the way.  I’d do it differently next time (For example, the each stroke ends up as one frame so I’d use more strokes!  On the Nintendo there are lovely sweeping wipes of each screen, but you don’t see these as they are a single frame in the movie), I’d also probably use some more colours! But I’m content enough for a first attempt. Sacha has a great guide here that tells you how to do it, I also used Wired’s more detailed Wiki as well.

I hope you enjoy it and that it adds some value along the way to Elias idea which is growing on me as I consider it further.

Would you like to buy the Brooklyn bridge?

I was reflecting on some internal conversations around blogs a couple of days ago, and it really struck home that Enterprises haven’t really “got” blogs as one example only.  “What!” you cry. We have a blog, that our (insert marketing / managing director / team leader) regularly pontificates on things for us to read.  But how many Enterprises that have blogs have a rich internal blogging culture that exists on the internet, of these how many of them are non-technology companies?

The analogy for me is the plain old car.  Which came first? The car of the petrol (gas) station?  For cars to work, there is a rich eco-system (aside: is using the word eco-system and car in the same sentence an oxymoron).  For cars to operate effectively and safely they need, to name just a few things:

• Roads
• Petrol (gas) stations
• Standards (Road rules, safety standards etc.)
• Maintenance

Each of these in turn is part of a richer eco-system that maintain and produce these.  I don’t need to understand how roads are maintained, or how petrol is refined to know that I’m glad these things happen and I can reap the benefit.

Which brings us to blogs.  The first time user of a blog rapidly comes across these kinds of issues:

• How do people find out about my new posts? Ahh, well you need RSS / ATOM feeds. Oh and you need to deploy these readers to all of your staff and train them in how to use them.
• But how do I trust what this random person I don’t know has written? Oh, that’s easy, you need pingbacks, trackbacks and it really helps if you have a service like Technorati which provides an authoritative rating.
• How can I find what I’m interested in amongst these hundreds of posts? Easy! Just implement a feed aggregator and subscribe to a collection of tags.
• But no-one is writing anything! Ahh - you need a critical mass of 1000’s if not 100′000’s to be sure that your generating enough content for all these rich services to actually “trigger” in a meaningful way.
• Do you want to buy the Brooklyn Bridge?

The Internet has evolved (and continues to evolve) a rich and mature set of integrated services and standards that are not easily transportable to the inside of the Corporate Firewall, particularly when people tend to look at only one part of the problem “I need a blog”, “I want a wiki” etc.

This is why products like Lotus Connections, Jive and Sharepoint are important to Enterprises because while no individual component within them is as rich as a given tool in the OpenSource world, they help transplant an eco-system that works.

The current situation is a bit like a sucker-punch for Enterprises that are trying to move in this area, failure to see the bigger picture makes it hard to drive the culture change which is needed to be transplanted along with the technology.

Gia Lyons tweeted “[can someone tell me] the value of the data portability movement for enterprises, i mean. Not consumer sites”.

I thought I’d put my thoughts down here, not least because I know that Elias Bizannes and Chris Saad, both players in the Dataportability movement occasionally stumble across my musings and will no doubt carry the conversation back to Gia.

So, while under time pressure to watch a movie with my wife, here are three reasons to describe the value the dataportability movement brings to the enterprise.  Chris has also blogged on this just recently and I have appropriated some of his themes here.

1. Dataportability provides a language to combine previously disparate standards.  As an Enterprise Architect, I love standards and I love them even more when my two largest vendors, Microsoft and IBM are expressing interest and supporting at least some of the same ones.  Some Enterprises may not care about dataportability as a whole, but they will care deeply about the artifacts it produces and helps drive, like APML, OPML, OpenID etc.
2. Enterprise Social Networks are rapidly evolving.  Todays solution may not be tomorrows winner.  To be able to move and migrate easily between Confluence, Jive, Lotus Connections etc. etc. at will is always appreciated.
3. Enterprises will begin to break down the firewalls.  Ultimately Enterprises want to work with their clients; it won’t be tomorrow, but Enterprises will realise that clients don’t want to fill out yet another profile form, but want to share their own data in controlled ways with them.

There will be bumps along the way, but while the dataportability debate may not be critical to Enterprises today, the outcomes will be crucial.

I saw ManyEyes at LotusSphere in the labs this year and was reminded again of it when I found a link to it on this blog.

It’s a powerful tool for embedding dynamic visualisations into your site.  The most powerful feature I think, is the way that comments posted on a visualisation keep a link to the visualisation the user who commented was seeing.  This is something that could be extended into many different arenas — imagine a dynamic comment system in wordpress where you could click on a comment to see the text someone had highlighted when they made the comment etc .  Or YouTube, where users could comment with linkbacks to the footage they were specifically commenting on.  I’m sure we will see more of this.

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.

This is something that’s been consuming my thinking recently.  I believe quite strongly that tools like Wikis, Blogs, Social Networks and others clearly represent real value for the enterprise.  But I also believe that there is a gap at the moment, the tools haven’t crossed the divide from the consumer world to the Enterprise (see my earlier post on this http://binaryplex.com/2007/05/27/what-start-ups-should-know-about-enterprises/).

I think there is a lot of evidence this is beginning to change, you only need to look at both IBM and Microsoft to see that features and tools that have evolved on the Internet are beginning to eek their way slowly into their product sets.  In some cases, there are partnerships to short-circuit their gaps, in others the big boys are starting again from scratch.

All of this has had me thinking about what does a model of the Web2.0 look like within the Enterprise.  Not what is the tool and who wrote it, but if you could design a system supported by standards (some of which exist), what is enterprise ready today, and where are the gaps.

I present my first cut of my model of Web 2.0 for the Enterprise.  I’ll take some time over the next week to post further and explain the concepts on here.  I’d love to take your feedback — I think a proper “joined up” design is what we need to work out where the gaps really are and how Enterprises want to use them. 

One simple example of the kind of joined up thinking required (not on the model funnily enough) is security - inside the enterprise I don’t want 15 different security models, or to log in repeatedly as I move between my blog and my wiki.

As I see it, the model is laid out in four parts, from bottom up:

• Services - fundamental elements that provide consistent experiences and management throughout the stack.  These are broken down into:
  • Notification Services
  • Validation Services
• Tools - the components that a pull together into a solution, they may exist discretely or combined together. These are broken down into:
  • Content Creation
  • Social Networking
  • Content Sharing
• Discovery - the “glue” that pulls it together, and often missed in the Enterprise today (how many of you have blogs without a service like Technorati to surface content and find blogs from feeds.  This is where I believe the emerging smarts are only now really starting to mature with tools like Particls, Spock and others to name a few I’ve mentioned. 
• Presentation Layer - the UI layer.  Critical for the consisten experience that the enterprise expects.

So there it is, as I say, feedback and comments welcome and appreciated — I going to expand further on this and explain the reasoning and functions behind each component in more detail, and look at what tools exist today that fill some of these gaps.

I’ve just returned from LotusSphere 2008 and had a great time.  While the presentations and demos are interesting, I found the most insightful part of the time there was spent in the Innovation and Development labs talking with developers about the advances they are making.  In the Innovation lab in particular, deep conversations can develop and you walk away feeling that some of the concepts will make it into a code.

 Loosely speaking, you can categorise a lot of the Web 2.0 tools and concepts into two very high level, broad categories like:

• Organisational Networks - LinkedIn, FaceBook, MySpace, Digg, Del.i.cious etc.
• Collaborative Creation  (Wisdom of Crowds type tools) - Wiki’s, Blogs etc.

What’s clear from LotusSphere is that IBM are clearly taking these broad brush categories (perhaps more or less) and building out tool sets like Quickr and Connections that apply these into the corporate world.

There are many reasons why this is appealing to corporates, not least command and control within the firewall on what is going on, but the most interesting idea is how it relates to Knowledge Management (KM). 

In my nearly 20 years in IT, I’ve been involved in various projects in different companies that again and again have tried to address the issue of KM.  What these Knowledge Management 1.0 efforts have all had in common, and why they’ve failed, is that they try and formalise the capturing of knowledge that is expressed and documented.  When I have to consciously make an effort, through modifying my natural processes and procedures, to share with you, then ultimately the effort will fail.  It fails because ultimately, the value in it for me, is not as great as the value in it for you.  Once the latest KM drive loses steam, I’ll drift back to my old ways and the path of least resistance.

In KM terms this type of knowledge is called Explicit knowledge.

Nickols, F. W. (2000). The knowledge in knowledge management. In Cortada, J.W. & Woods, J.A. (Eds) The knowledge management yearbook 2000-2001 (pp. 12-21). Boston, MA: Butterworth-Heinemann.
It’s worth taking a moment to browse the citation as it gives an excellent summary of the three main types of Knowledge as described in KM terms, I’ve paraphrased what I think are the key three here:

• Explicit - What has been expressed and captured
• Implicit - What can be expressed, but isn’t captured
• Tacit - What can’t be expressed (so by definition isn’t captured).

As an aside, I suspect the categories of Tacit knowledge are decreasing over the years (biometrics probably couldn’t be expressed years ago, but now we have computers that can recognise faces in crowds).  Anyway, my point is this, while the Web 2.0 world and the categories of tools bring real value to corporations, one form of value I haven’t heard expressed until recently is that they will help corporations capture Implicit knowledge by mining my behaviours and actions.

When Lotus Connections 2.0 announced at LotusSphere promises to deliver a Colleagues version of the friending concept, it’s really building an Implicit knowledge network that can be mined for real information that is accessible to all users across the organisation.  Atlas mines your e-mail for your connections and expertise. Spock mines social networks for Implicit knowledge on who you are and who you know.  Wiki’s mine the knowledge of the crowd through the creation process. 

When corporations ask what value in Web 2.0 concepts and social networking, they are undervaluing what most would say is their greatest asset - the collective knowledge of their employees.  I believe that the real value in a lot of what we call Web 2.0 will be realised when these tools begin delivering ways for corporations to finally tackle Knowledge Management 2.0 — non-intrusive KM, captured by tools that work the way people work and ensure that the Implicit knowledge of the organisation is captured effortlessly by people simply doing their job in the way they want to do it.

Based on this, my final three thoughts are simply that:

1. The reason Collaborative Creation tools are being adopted by corporations today (and will be at an increasing pace) is because they deliver a form of Implicit knowledge that corporations (slowly and eventually) “get”.  Content is delivered in a relatively concrete way that mimics a document to some degree.  The stretch is less.
2. Social Collaboration tools will begin to boom as Corporations realise that they are a promising solution to unlock the Implicit knowledge within their organisations that they can’t see.
3. Discovery and Surfacing tools (of which Spock, Atlas and Particls are all examples of) will become even more critical.  Smart ways of unleashing the networks and information people are building to capture and deliver value that was not easily attainable before.

Working for a firm that deals in sensitive information with clients, a recurring theme is the desire to work in the Web 2.0 world, but do so with some inherently closed walls.  For example, LinkedIn is a great tool, but is it really a contact management tool when your clients and business partners may be confidential.

IBM have released Atlas for Lotus Connections (check out Alan Lepofsky for pictures and links to the press release).   It works with your internal social profiles and build networks based on e-mail and other assets to create a graphical, LinkedIN type mesh of contacts for the internal network.

This is a big step forward for enterprises which have the size and mass to be able to leverage social tools like this internally, but can’t expose all their dealings to the external world. 

Using the API’s, a logical extension in this would be linking in CRM and Contact management systems to create a comprehensive internal marketing tool that brought together the internal and external networks that matter to large organisations. 

I posted about the concept of a Steam Engine Time, so is it time for an intelligent RSS reader.  A friend pointed me in the direction of Illumio, which I’d characterise as a kind of combination of intelligent RSS filtering similar to Particls, and a group discussion thread like Tangler, with a touch of an ask the expert interface about it as well.

There is a short video below — I’m yet to install the application, so this isn’t a real blow by blow comparison of various products, but I am interested in the idea that there are emerging applications addressing a similar problem space.

One interesting feature of Illumio is the way that it can apparently scan your hard drive for topics and items of expertise and use this to promote your expertise anonymously.  A feature like this would be powerful for Knowledge Management within an enterprise, if only there was an enterprise friendly version!

Farewell Plazes.  Regular visitors will know that I’ve had a Plazes locator on the top right of my sidebar for several months now.  After trialling it for a while, it hasn’t made the cut and I’ve finally decided to remove it.

Now lets start by saying there really isn’t anything “wrong” with Plazes, it’s a well presented tool (little bit buggy in some early releases but nothing terrible and the team fixed this), but ultimately it just wasn’t… well, useful!

 I feel that location based services really are just an iteration away from being “the next big thing“, but right now, while we can get excited about the fun things that they do (I love geo locating photos in Picassa), for business there really isn’t a requirement.   I’ve firmed up this after using Plazes from a position of thinking there probably wasn’t a requirement for corporate, to now being quite certain about it.

I’ll be keeping an eye on it, but at the moment it’s a bit like being the only person around with a Fax machine.  Cool technology, but not a lot of point!

Oh and to the Plazes team if they read this — keep it up guys, it’s a great idea and is touching on what I think will be a successful area.  I just don’t get it yet and no doubt am in the wrong demographic.

A resurgance once again in the local press about the wisdom, or lack of it, in crowds.  I’ve posted here about this a little, and that was added to very eloquently by Chris Saad of Particle who pointed out that media is additive.  There is place for both wise crowds and smart people. So what more to add to the debate? Well I was sufficiently impressed by the differences and the power of both Google Streets and Microsoft Lives Photo Synth to want to contrast them here in this context.

What’s interesting about this when it comes to the Crowds Vs. Expert debate is that both do a similar thing — street level perspectives of our world, yet they tackle the problem in different ways.

Googles view of the world in Google Streets is high quality, “expert” imagery taken presumably from a car with a special camera and then stitched together. 

Microsofts PhotoSynth uses Flickr (or presumably any photo source with a sufficiently high level of detail) to locate photos as “points” in space, pulling the wisdom of crowds to give us a point by point overview of the object in question.

Both give a very different view of the world.  Googles is a seamless experience, where you can browse from one end of the street to the other, rotate and view in any direction.  Microsofts points give an eerie overview of the object, with detail highlighted where it’s of interest and gaps where there is nothing that is worthy.

Both are amazing pieces of technology, regardless of their respective perspectives on the world.

Ultimately the power of the new web is the power of information - with Google Streets, users will be able to not only tag their favourite restauraunt, but also show a picture of its front door.  Photosynth enables a virtual tour of buildings and places and provides context to endless Flickr photos, not just on a map, but in space as well.

Crowds and experts live will together in the new world and more fool the journalist who tries to seperate the two.  To paraphrase Chris once more, the long tail of information means that there are consumers for all views of the world.

As Elias pointed out on my last post, evidence of the semantic web is emerging all around us.

I’ve mentioned Spock a couple of times, if you’re not familiar it’s a new “people” based search which crawls web-sites and social networking site to build a comprehensive picture of people.  If you haven’t checked it out, it’s worth a look.

I recently wanted to get back in touch with an old friend who had moved and whose details I’d misplaced.  The white pages were no help — over 100 matches in N.S.W alone.  Spock on the other hand lead me straight to her linked in profile and there was sufficient information their to ascertain that she was exactly the person I was after.

It lead me to two conclusions:

1. Spock is getting it right — it was the location that helped me find the person I was after.
2. There are still a heck of a lot of people (100+ in one state for one name match alone) who still have no profile on the Internet.

Bernard Lunn commented on my last post  that when it comes to Enterprises and Start-Ups, we are thinking along similar lines.  His second post on his blog B2B media 2.0 and globalization is a well thought out discussion along similar lines, but with some minor differences in perspective to my comments.  If you enjoyed my post, then I can recommend Bernard’s as adding some great value to this conversation.

One thing he says that really got me thinking is:

The gatekeepers still have veto power but only if the software breaks the rules on privacy and security. It is not just start-ups buying this way, it is self-managed teams and departments. Try it free and use the credit card to buy a bit and expense it; the credit card vendors do a good job at expense tracking and those miles and other benefits are nice bonus.

As someone whose role is as a bit of a gatekeeper, I think he’s right.  It’s harder and harder these days to keep the gates shut against the storming hordes of Web 2.0, especially when the software is on the internet and essentially free. 

Hard earned stripes on implementing innovation tell me this isn’t a bad thing.  There’s nothing like passionate users in the business to drive the need for Enterprises to sit up and take notice — there are very few IT shops left I would think that don’t value their user as their customer (those that aren’t are probably only a swift signature away from being outsourced) and as we all know, customer is king.

That said, the problem space changes when it moves from individuals making independent choices, to trying to implement an enterprise wide solution.

I’ll use Word Press as a great example (and I’m biased as this is a Word Press blog as well).  As Bernard points out:

Add a few colleagues/partners as posters. Add some traditional semi-static pages. Add some social network, a bit of video and a podcast or two. Pretty soon I have a modern CMS, with minimal implementation costs and all on a pay as you go basis.

For individuals or small groups, word press is fantastic and can achieve exactly this, but it’s still lacking some features that would make it really appealing in an Enterprise.  For example, LDAP groups to manage the large numbers of starters and departers, centralised comment management so the marketing mafia can monitor what’s going on across multiple blogs and any number of small, incremental value adds.  Enterprises will want a real Enterprise Content Management system implemented underneath, users will cry out for single sign on so they don’t have yet another password, then marketing will want a reporting system to see whose hot and whose not.

Unfortunately (and to my own point maybe because they’ve already paid for it) Enterprises will wait for their major vendors who are on the roadmap and mostly only months away from releases that begin to incorporate many of these features (with “committed” roadmaps for the next 12 months that show when the missing ones will come).

It’s not all doom and gloom, I think Enterprises are slowly changing, and the gatekeepers are become more shepherds — letting the users mill around while trying to keep the flock from coming to too much harm!  Open standards are the glue that will let the start-ups and the Enterprise meet in the middle.

I love Bernard’s quote from Einstein that he concluded with, I’ll borrow it here:

“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler.”

It’s my increasingly strong belief that open standards will help us on this road (see some thoughts on this here: Poor-Rich applications).