Web 2.0 in the Enterprise

Peter Rips posted on the EarlyStage VC Blog "So What Does Web 2.0 in the Enterprise Look Like?", a topic that i among others who are interested in information delivery within the enterprises have been thinking about and discussing.

Some of the aspects that interest me and that i am dealing with in the enterprise space with my customers is that Web 2.0 principles are shaping application development inside the firewall and user requirements are pushing for two-way flows of information between users and the Web, user initiated organization of content, and the increasing use of social software tools to create communities.

I certainly agree with Peter Rips that "Several years from now the big influence of Web 2.0 on Enterprise apps won't look like a Flickr, Mappr, Taggr, or Tiggr behind a firewall. They won'’t look like a wiki, digg, or a space. Collaboration will be a feature, not a purpose. Many if not all Enterprise apps will include tagging, collaborative markup, etc. But collaboration will become a feature of business process applications the way printing is feature of desktop apps." I am however having a hard time believing that "Web 2.0 in the Enterprise looks a lot like Google 2.0" and hope along with the Peter Rip that users don't stand by and become complicit.

There is more and more conversation about this topic popping up. A while back i was introduced to Dennis McDonald's blog via Jeremiah Owyang who co-authored a White Paper on Business/IT/Web with Dennis McDonald's based upon their observations and findings about IT, Business and Web 2.0. They also published a podcast update to that WhitePaper in April Enterprise IT and Web 2.0 Update. Dennis's site is a great resource on enterprise adoption of Web 2.0 with a focus on how business and IT can work together. He even has a Web 2.0 Management Survey of how companies are managing "web 2.0".

Do you know of other resources focused on Web 2.0 in the Enterprise that you can comment on?

The you got to see this site e-mail syndrome

Cruising around this evening catching up on my blog reading i checked in on my fellow Factivate bloggers and i actually chuckled out loud.

In March i posted links to other factiva employee blogs and i am pleased to add two additional ones (there are others that are more personal blogs so i will only post business related ones).

• Pat Williams Guerilla HR -- tips and tricks to help manage your staff and your career

• Greg Merkle thinking --AVP of Product Design and UX at Factiva- design | analog | digital | guitars | other good stuff

So why did i chuckle on my 'factivite blog tour' this evening? because of the realization that we are all doing the same thing-using e-mail-perhaps because it is easier and personal-but some of us are going the extra mile to share the conversation with folks we might never meet.

Jim Muntone blogged about the 'you got to see this site e-mail' around Web2.0 applications that are filling up our e-mail servers, i know i get them constantly and even admit to sending them as well and obviously things are a buzzing back in Princeton. Looks like Jim is going to help us out by starting the conversations on his blog, good because i haven't been on his e-mail distribution list since i had left for fame and glory on the west coast by the time he joined factiva. Jim is a user experience manager focusing on usability, interaction design and all things user-center so i am looking forward to his reviews (and hopefully meeting him when i head back east this month). Greg is also talking about Social Search services over on his blog. excellent stuff- keep it coming folks.

Web 2.0 Titling Debate

A copyright/labeling-Debate that has gotten legal involved over the use of the title 'Web 2.0' in a Conference:

• O'Reilly's official response
  
• Thomas Hawk's Digital Connection
• Mule Design Studio : Anatomy of a Snoozefest
• Technorati Search
  

in the spirit - real time marketing leads to this (sucker/geek i am-i got one).

Newspapers Print Ads online - am i behind the times?

we are yet again looking for a new car. fuel efficient but big enough to chart around this guy. So we have been looking mostly on craigslist and on local dealer websites. According to this article in Auto Racing Daily, Online Used-Vehicle Classifieds Outpace Print Ads Two to One and " Buyers under the age of 35 are more than four times as likely to be led to the vehicle they purchase by information found online than by print classified ads." Makes sense to me, especially for used cars. We are not quite sure which way to go - new or used- (although a new car will quickly become used once the big guy steps in with dirty feet!

I was thinking of walking down to the local cafe to pickup a copy of the San Mateo Times or The Mercury News to see what car advertisements they had. Before i did that i checked SFGATE.com which lead me to their online print Ads and then went over to the Mercury News to check out theirs. What i did not know is that some newspapers made their print Ads available online (how long have i been in the dark about this?) and could not find anywhere when this 'started'. The Ads are full size and in color and meet the same needs that a print version provides. Makes perfect sense since advertisers need to submit their Ads electronically anyway. Yet another interesting value that online newspapers offer to their readers.

Hot Flash- Innovation will continue

After my post from yesterday i pinged one of my collegues on the enterprise portal team, this morning i got access to a corporate blog that i can use. Seems we have had the software internally for a while, but no one has been using it. ask and you shall receive-how's that for speed! thanks!

Innovation Creators Need Enterprise Blogs

Rod Boothby a blogger at Innovation Creators has a great 'screencast' that he just posted about Enterprise Blogs. i encourage you to view/listen in to this 16min video. Aside from making some great points about innovation and blogs as a productivity tool, he also shares how his company uses internal blogs (he works at a big 4 consulting firm). i have been reading his Blog for a couple of weeks now and Rod and i would probably get along very nicely because i am right there with the following:

Enterprises must turn knowledge workers into innovation creators, innovation creators need to know what is going on, they believe in reciprocal altruism and trust that they will eventually be rewarded. Innovation creators need enterprise Blogs...

Back in February, i blogged about Corporate Internal Blogs and mentioned that at my company we had an internal blog that had been put together for the launch of the Search 2.0 product. I have no idea what happened to that blog as it was hidden in the first place and i think it just died a quick death, but just recently during my Sales Club trip as we discussed 'business strategy ' (yes they made us work) i brought up the fact that we should definitely use blogs in our enterprise to communicate and share knowledge. I know that some internal groups like product development are using wikis and blogs that they themselves have set up, but so far it has been absent from the enterprise portal. I don't have the luxury of having a web server on the enterprise network like they do, so no dice for me to go off and do something by myself. I recently asked one of the portal administrators if we were looking at any blogging tools because i am desperately trying to get one going for myself (i truly believe in reciprocal altruism but i honestly i will tell you it is really hard when you get nothing back and you start to lose trust that your colleagues will reward you-i have faith that a blog type tool could bring that trust back) ...so as far as i know, we don't have anything and the recommendation came back to look at SharePoint capabilities (not in this version of SP will i get what i want!). i just repinged him...just trying to push the Corporate Membranes.

Another spin on 'enterprise blogs' is within a vendor<>client relationship. i have used shared sites before during client engagements to share meeting minutes, project plans etc. mostly static information that is produced with other software. i am currently working with a client and we have decided as a follow-up to a best practices session, we would create a 'blog-like' environment to encourage the conversation to continue. Their culture promotes the use of blogs and i am hoping that this would be a great way to connect the dots with various people in that organization about information delivery concepts that our key contacts are discussing with us.

The Times they are a Changing

Ok i admit- figuring i am in a Bob Dylan mood today i would title this post relevantly....

I had a first appointment today with a VP at one of the banks based out on the West coast (ok yes say it...everyone is a VP at banks!). This one was responsible for their internal portal and we had some good conversations around surfacing relevant external content to various groups that use the portal as a one-stop place to go for both internal and external content on their clients and prospects.

We had a good conversation about how the outside world is important to various types of users in the bank enterprise. The interesting nugget-is when we started talking about information delivery-and RSS. We talked about the issues around the term RSS- and she confirmed that they would probably call it a 'content feed' or something the users would understand and not use the RSS label because the majority of the users would shy away from it if it looked and felt 'technical'. I had a BIG grin on my face. Just a couple of months ago some of my clients were asking me what RSS was- now some of them are getting it and are ready to define it for their users in their own terms....the times they are a changing.

Dan Keldsen, with the Delphi Group today posted a response on my recent RSS in the Enterprise post focusing on the questions of standards in the enterprise. I will continue this conversation here as well as on his blog.

Bob Dylan Turning 65- Come celebrate at the Hotel Utah

Bob happens to be top on my list and tomorrow we will be celebrating his 65th birthday (actually on the 24th but we will start early!) at the Hotel Utah.

If you have followed Bob's career you know that he constantly changes what he is doing- i think it is great that Bob is DJing Theme Time Radio hour on XM and taking advantage of new technology to continue to entertain his fans. I am sure that this new venue will grow his current fan base and re-engage those fans that over the years have stopped listening to the new stuff he is producing. His Theme Hours have been great to listen to as he introduces the songs and the song selections are songs that you probably won't hear anywhere else. Wednesday's radio theme is Baseball.

So Bob Dylan adopts new technology to continue to entertain and even talks about cyberspace and fuzzy logic-at 65 what else did we expect?

If you are in town and what to come celebrate- you know where i will be. My husband, will be playing in two of the bands, Crooked Roads and Warehouse House and a bunch of our work colleagues and friends will be out.

Everyone wants your attention

Back in March, i posted about a couple of things including TechCrunch a "weblog dedicated to obsessively profiling and reviewing new web 2.0 products and companies". On a daily basis Michael Arrington posts on various types of web 2.0 products. Thanks to TechCrunch, i have spent hours playing with Web based applications, have more usernames in various applications then i care to have and i am definitely on my Tech help desk hit list of people who download/use non-standard applications and browser tools . oh well...

If you are interested in Web 2.0 applications and how it will affect not only consumer interaction but also enterprise interaction with the web, you should definitely check them out once in a while- throw it in to your RSS reader.

Yesterday's post about Mytago was quite interesting because of the bridge between online and offline interaction. The concept is a user creates something that looks like a barcode and puts it on a poster or some other physical item, whoever sees the physical tag takes a snapshot with their mobile phone camera as a bookmark for the event. What comes next seems a little convoluted- but will definitely be streamlined with user input in the near future. Check out the 'who built Mytago' section on the help files- weekend tinkerings- lot's of that around here. This could potentially be a great way for vendors at conferences to interact with booth visitors-right?

An interesting application that i found through a comment on a different blog, by one of its creators is a "Attention management engine" called Touchstone. Back on the East coast i worked with a couple of clients that wanted functionality like desktop alerting of highly relevant news content. Client slide applications however tended to be a huge deterrent if we were looking at custom built applications. We even came out with a 'Factiva Alert' product that is no longer in the product line because it was client base and it didn't really fly with corporate IT support groups (and honestly the UI functionality was weak). Most alerting therefore is email or browser based. That was about 3 years ago, and i think that a convergence of the Web 2.0 functionality with client sided applications might be very interesting in today's enterprise world. I am going to keep an eye on this...perhaps even volunteer as an Alpha tester.

Bay Area Living - Wavy turning 70

Ok at times i admit i was born around 25 years too late. My formulative years (which continue!) were spent listening to music from the Rolling Stones to Bob Dylan and of course the Grateful Dead fit in there very nicely. Last night we went to Wavy Gravy's 70 birthday bash at the Berkeley Community Theatre. The line-up was highlighted by Gillian Welch and David Rawlings (one of my current favorites) and the legendary David Lindley. We have certainly seen Wavy before at different shows and stuff (you used to be able to find him at many summer festivals)- but it was great to see him on stage in Berkeley, especially in between sets sharing stories of the good old days. The Google folks also did a map-ograpy of Wavy's life using google maps and pictures and John Gage, Sun's Chief Researcher- spoke about being on the bus with Wavy back in the day. all very cool..

We go out to see a lot of music in the area and are starting to repeat venues quite a bit. There are some great venues in the Bay Area here is a tasting of where we were at this month:

Great America Music Hall-this is a beautiful place. we just saw Gary Louris and Mark Olson (of The Jayhawks)- if you haven't heard of the Jayhawks - you should check them out
The Fillmore- we just saw Sun Volt
The Warfield (weird they do not have a website?)- we just saw Phil Lesh and Friends- with Larry Campbell who is great and is one of the former guitar players for Bob Dylan

Try it yourself

After my post yesterday someone sent me a note to tell me to point my post to factiva's home page were folks can give Search 2.0 a try. Good idea. It gives you a chance to play around with the discovery pane but you can't get to the full articles. But you know what, i am not too enamored by our new website redesign- so instead try it here for the same experience.

Corporate Blogging and tools to look at trends

i have posted a couple of time on corporate blogging and i am constantly talking to my work colleagues as well as my customers about the importance of monitoring customers through not only their corporate sponsored blogs, but their employee blogs as well as consumers commenting on those companies and their products and services. Regardless of what industry the client is in- the message is becoming louder and louder- you need to listen and join in the conversation.
According to an article in PR Week this week about how Blogs are just a reflection of overall consumer empowerment trend... There are about 37 million blogs out there... 75,000 new ones each day, a new one each second... half of which will be inactive within three months. About 50% of blog writers are under 30, and 57% are male - a reversal of the gender balance three years ago. The largest number (37%) are in Japanese, and about 30% are in English. Only one in five US consumers has ever read a blog, and half that many have read one in the last week. But, significantly, 67% of journalists say they read blogs at least weekly, and about half of those say they get story ideas from blogs. ...(on average, blog readers spend 20% of their waking hours online - twice that of the non-blog reader)....

The article however did not see the power of the few-focusing on the fact that a small amount of consumers actually read blogs- the following posts discuss the importance:

Is the Fortune 100 Participating in the Blog Conversation? Published New Communications Review By Eric Mattson - Where eric asks- 1. How often do other major corporations get talked about? 2. Are they participating in the online conversation?

Applying Opinmind to Eric's Mattson's Fortune Blogging List Published Saturday, May 20, 2006 by Jeremiah Owyang. Where Jeremiah uses Opinmind to present instances of positive mention (+),and instances of negative mention (-).

OK folks what follows is blatant Factiva promoting- but hey i have unlimited access to this tools and i actually use them! and remember- The opinions expressed on this site are my own and do not necessarily represent those of my employer. So in responding to the following two posts about Fortune 100 corporations and blogging i used the Factiva services to do some comparisons with mainstream media:

Over the last few weeks many bloggers have been using new services like Google Trends to do visual comparisons of whatever they are posting about. Visualizations are a great way to

view large amounts of content and with the new tools out there they are pretty fun to play around with and help validate their points. It is like an economics class- look to the data.

Factiva has for years been working on tightly integrating visualizations into our products. I went ahead and used two premium services - Factiva Search 2.0 and SalesWorks- Note although Jeremiah mentions Factiva analytics services neither of these are doing pure media Analysis which the Insight suite of products covers.

The results can be seen here in PDF format and include:

• Media coverage graph for each company by corporate entity (ticker) for the last 90days against Jeremiah's sentimeter by Opimind.com.
  
• News Clusters for each company : The News Clusters filter utilizes text mining technologies to identify top trends, relationships and patterns within the search results in this case the companies i searched. News Clusters examine the first 100 articles to find repeated occurrences of hidden ideas or trends so you immediately uncover information from deep within your search results. The more mentions that larger the words
  
• Comparison list of the 17 companies that the posts discussed, with graphical representations of # of employees, locations and industries across all the companies as well as some financial information for each company ranked. All together the employee population across these 17 companies is around 4.9 million employees and they probably touch a large amount of the global population of 6.6 billion so i am sure that even beyond the main stream media that Factiva covers, the blog searches through Technorati
, the googling and the Opmind that the three of us have done there is much more customer feedback out there.
• Of the 17 companies- i have personally had interactions with 7 of them as a client in the last 2 yrs and know that my collegues who work with the others.


Note: addition post publishing- Factiva Search 2.0 is in Beta- if you are interested in giving it a whirl in order to submit feedback to our product group let me know.

A look at Outlook 2007

Yes while others are out and about on a Friday evening i am watching Robert Scoble's interview with Jessica Arnold, a PM with the Outlook 2007 team who gives us a first look at the Outlook 2007 features. The video post came through on my Channel 9 RSS feed- if you haven't seen a Channel 9 interview you should take a look- Scoble does a great job interviewing the folks at Microsoft that are working on the products (and once in a while executives show up as well).


Here are some highlights that will become great time savers for me:

• A 'To-Do Bar' that gives you a quick view of your calendar and task bar
• >>>i always flip back and forth from my inbox to my calendar and this looks very useful
  
• RSS Reader with seamless integration with IE 7 for quick subscription (available in browser and outlook)
• >>>i have said this before- adoption of RSS will increase when and only if end users have an easy way to subscribe to the RSS feeds-
  
• Interaction with SharePoint- quickly upload and download
• >>>excellent news for those of us that live in outlook and may spend a lot of time offline and now can have the ability to quickly post documents and send out emails in one action
  
• Live review of fonts- this will be quite useful
• >>>this is a simple thing but very cool and will shave minutes off when figuring out what font to use. Looks like Office 2007 is going to have this live review feature across various features including adding tables.
  
• A feature to send your calendar as an HTML email - so you can quickly choose to send your calendar for a time period so folks that are not permissioned for your calendar can see when you are available.
  
• >>>this is awesome. you can choose at what permission level to send it (with appt details or just blocked out) in an HTML format. Lately i have taken to just sending a screen shot because it is SO tedious to have to write out all the times available. There can be times that it takes me longer to schedule an appointment with a client then the actual appointment itself!
  

Endless Choice is Creating Unlimited Demand

Last Friday I went to see Chris Anderson speak. I took some notes which have promptly been in my notebook that i currently do not have access to but i do remember a couple of things that certainly interested me.

-content creators are increasing and their distribution channels are also- news,books,music,movies etc.
-aggregators will provide access to more in little chunks
-there is a huge value in archives that are untapped- people want access to those archives for various reasons
-the notion that talent by these 'amature' creators isn't there is not true- there is a lot of talent out there even if it doesn't conform to the norm.
-question what the role of the editor is when the marketplace begins doing that job and building trust

This morning as i read through my RSS feeds-i noticed that Chris Anderson was pointing to Tim O'reily post on "Long Tail evidence from Safari and Google Book Search" which of course ties in very nicely to what Chris spoke about on Friday.

Club at Jackson Hole

I am headed to Jackson Hole for a 4 day trip as part of making sales club this year. Although we do have a lot of free time for fun at the resort and time to head out to Yellowstone and Grand Teton on the official agenda are also some meeting with fellow global factiva colleagues who also made club this year. I am looking forward to these meetings--

I will try to post if possible over the next few days....

Social Bookmarking in the Enterprise

Wikipedia- defines Social bookmarking as a web based service, where shared lists of user-created Internet bookmarks are displayed. The entry on Wikipedia provides a good overview including advantages and disadvantages and a comprehensive list of bookmarking services.

I am very interested in how the concept of social bookmarking within enterprises is going to affect collective knowledge sharing. I think that official enterprise sponsored bookmarking services have been slow to pick up due to the fear of a loss of standards with enterprise and privacy issues. Bookmarking services typically are free web-based services and the behind the fire-wall requirements for most enterprise applications has probably slowed down enterprise wide adoption.

I was pushed this paper on how The MITRE Corporation is piloting the use of Social Bookmarking on a Corporate Iintranet (it came from one of my listserv subscriptions -from the The Information Architecture Institute) . Now MITRE is not a typical corporate enterprise they are a not-for-profit organization chartered to work in the public interest through federal funding mostly- but the paper points to the benefits of an enterprise wide system for social bookmarking tools. I hope this group continues to present their findings as they move out of pilot.

Searching a bit more i also found this ACM article on Social Bookmarking in the Enterprise on the internal IBM Dogear project.

From a Research and Develpment perspective the benefits of such tools is highly apparent. Of particular interest to me is how Sales Organizations could benefit from social bookmarking tools. As sales teams browse the web, internal corporate sites, subscription services and even internal applications ( e.g. web based CRMs)- they should be able to quickly bookmark the web based content-tag it to specific clients and projects and have those bookmarks automatically available to other team members who are working on that account- perhaps through RSS feeds. I am having very interesting conversation with customers about this concept and hopefully will have more to share soon.

San Francisco Living

This goes out to all my east coast folks-most who could care less about my enteprise information thoughts and ramblings....

We had a late start yesterday when we headed over to the Kfog for the fireworks show, so when we got to pier 30-32 it was jammed pack so we conceded to watching it from behind the baseball park- we however had tentative plans to meet with some folks and it turn out that they were hanging with someone that had access to the back of a private pier. so we had an incredible view of the fireworks. My ears are still popping! great stuff-

The official Kfog fireworks video is here - but more importantly my handy video work is here on my YouTube account.

I also uploaded some pics to my flickr account as did many others. an excellent example of using tags to view common things.

now we are heading out to the SF Giants game.....yep maybe today Bonds will do it for his mom.

Networking outside of my blog conversations and work

A couple of months ago, on my one year anniversory of moving to the San Francisco area from New Jersey, i promised myself that i would work harder at networking and meeting new people in the Bay area that may or may not have anything related to my work. Of course i meet people (i am not a ogre)- at social events like music gigs, festivals, hikes etc. but overall most of my interactions from a professional development prespective are with folks i work with or customers. I have made excuses that i have simply been too busy with work- so i am going to focus on doing it right. I have also started to post comments on blogs- some bloggers respond- others don't (which i don't expect anyway). Those blog 'conversations' are valuable but i have been yearning more person to person conversation as well.

I have been keeping a Google Calendar- that is feeding me some great conference alerts etc. from published RSS feeds which i will be taking advantage of (for example tommorrow i am going here to listen to Chris Anderson) . I have also been asking around about what local bay area organizations i should join and today i was recommended the following which also look very interesting :

www.churchillclub.org

www.sdforum.org

Today, during my lunch with a great new contact that i met at a conference a couple weeks ago, we started discussing the difference between West Coast and East Coast networking. He is also a recent transplant (although he has lived out West before) and shared with me that the West coast networking events are way more interactive and people are willing to share more about what they are working on and how they are successful. That is very inspiring. i learned other things as well during our lunch- proving that indeed face to face conversation is refreshing and needed.

Fine of $100,000 for blog post

i have ESPN on this evening (watching the barry bonds at bats that they keep breaking to because i had too much work to this this evening to actually go to the game and of course i am only reading my RSS feeds and getting lost in webspace instead of doing actual 'work') and they just covered the Mark Cuban 100K fine story for a post that he made a couple days ago.

A lot of bloggers are picking this story up. This is not the first time that Mark Cuban has received a fine for his blog posts according to the Mercury News story- are there others out there? The fine is being imposed by the NBA- which is not an official court fine but still interesting. I know of the Apple ISP court case that i commented previously on- but who else is being fined (of course i am sure there have also been firings)? for this

Creators and Aggregators- Part 1B

Ok i am still working on the Aggregator Part 2 post- mostly because i have a lot to think through and i need to put all the post-it notes into some sort flow (i tend to post note thoughts and then use my sun room window ) to sort my thoughts out. I have done that with client projects, school work and now will use it for blog posts that i need to think through.

following on the content creators- Andy Lark posted a 'Plagiarism Rampant in the Blogsphere' he writes abut 'content orginators- content illuminators- and -content pointers. i am pointing.

Practical advice in section 321

Last night trying to become part of the collective history, a couple of my work colleagues and i took some customers out for some baseball- not just any baseball game but a potential long-term memory one with the San Francisco Giants. Unfortunately we were robbed by Juan Pierre of the Cubs.

I did however get chance to have some great conversations with Jeremiah Owyang who i have linked to on various occasions and also meet two fellow bloggers Mark Wiens, and Julio Garcia. Jeremiah and i have a lot in common and i have been ingesting his blog on a daily basis for months. We have both become outspoken evangelists internally at our respective companies about the affects of blogging in the enterprise- Jeremiah has also become an evangelist outside and uses his blog to very effectually discuss and create conversations about how web tools enable companies to delight customers. I will go so far as to say that he perhaps is himself creating some 'history' that could be referenced in the marketplace soon enough .

On a daily basis i can potentially touch 5-10 customers with various mediums (phone, e-mail, IM and i even mail handwritten notes!)- my blog has just become another one- one that empowers my customers to choose if they want to listen and participate. He gave me some good practical advice that came by the way of Robert Scoble around 'Corporate Membranes' which he promptly posted this morning on his blog....because the conversation is to be shared --and that is what it is all about!

thanks guys let's do it again soon! and on a reference of the picture i have included- that guy on the surf board was in McCovey Cove being pulled by two other sufers- i saw him come around from Mariposa launch area and he did not once look like he was going to fall off- for a while i thought it was a doll but as he got close he waved- if you have ever tried to get on a board this guy has amazing balance.

ok i have some membranes to go push.....

Creators and Aggregators- Part 1 the Creators

For the last 7 years i have worked for a premium content aggregator. sure we do more then just aggregate content -we categorize it - we archive it - we mine it - we build many tools for users to get to it using search, push and discovery technologies- we let enterprise applications serve it up to their users - plus we help our customers 'figure it out' with their content through advisory services- we do lots but the driving force is the content we aggregate and the huge value we add through our post processing to normalize and add metadata- to get the right information to the right person in the right context at the right time.

there is a lot going on in the 'marketplace' of content creators and aggregators that is of much interest to me - why?:

1. Because i am participating
2. Because it is an established service whose model is shifting- and so must the traditional content creators and aggregators
   

Saturday i was gathering my thoughts for this post and some work that i am doing around information delivery and mobility- and ended up running down to the library to get Howards Rheingolds 'Smart Mobs'- published in 2002 since my original copy had been passed on- i know i was looking for something that reminded me of this topic. Rheingold talks about the then new social phenomenon driven by the collision of computing and communications in mobile devices such as digital cell phones and handheld computers. Scanning certain chapters was very useful for various projects i am working on around mobility but what i was looking for was the following straight from the first chapter:

"because it used the same wires, the telephone was originally seen as merely a speaking telegraph, but it turned out to be something entirely new. The same mistake is already being repeated with the Internet. Many people expect the mobile Internet to be the same as the wired version, only mobile, but they are wrong...Instead, the mobile Internet, although it is based on the same technology as fixed-line Internet, will be something different and will be used in new and unexpected ways." - Tom Standage, "The Internet Uthethered"

As an analogy to the 'new' content creators (bloggers <> journalists) and aggregators (web 2.0 applications <>traditional aggregators) i thought is was an interesting way to look at it. I simply don't think we can look at the phenomenon of bloggers and web 2.o social 'news' applications in the same way as the traditional business (media) because they will also be used in new and unexpected ways. (although of course in this paradigm it is the media that is trying to catch up with the technology).

I have no answers right now only thoughts and a feeling of excitement as we work through how this is going to impact the enterprise and the providers. There is TONS of commentary about these subjects but here are some of my thoughts:

The Creators:

I have searches saved on various blog search engines with a keyword 'factiva' so i can see what other bloggers may or may not be saying - no different then if i was at a bar and overheard a conversation between two factiva users- i would tune in and try to participate. (yes i would be that annoying person who would probably talk to you).

A couple weeks ago a saw this post in which a blogger asked about syndication opportunities for their blogs into traditional aggregator services like Lexis/Nexis and Factiva. Last week week Pluck released BlogBurst. Here is a description from TechCrunch "The basics: BlogBurst is a service that takes pre-screened, categorized blog content and pushes it to mainstream publishers for a fee (charged on a CPM basis). To see an example, go to the Sf Chronicle Travel Section and look for the "A Travel Blog Posts" area on the page. BlogBurst helps these mainstream publishers add more targeted content to their sites at a much lower cost than producing the content themselves. Bloggers benefit from extra exposure - each piece of content includes a prominent link back to the bloggers original post, a linked icon/photo and a byline."

This type of 'self ' publishing through a syndicated marketplace will certainly be disruptive to the main stream media especially journalists who are under contractual obligation. It will however give more voices an opportunity to share their knowledge and be compensated for it. And of course you ask- but who becomes the 'editor' or judge of relevance/accuracy. i don't know- how will technology impact it? and can we leave it with the readers?

Another thought from Rheingold's book that i agree with:

"Many-to-Many media confer a power on consumers that mass media never did; the power to create, publish, broadcast and debate their own point of view. Newspapers, Radio, television audiences were consumers but Internet audiences were "users" with powers of their own. The most important question about this new wrinkle in power/knowledge is whether it sets the stage for counter-power...or whether it is yet another simulacrum, s simulation of counter-power that really doesn't change who has all the chips"

...Like if Pluck got plucked by one of the media companies


Last year Factiva formed a partnership with Intelliseek (now part of BuzzMetrics) to add consumer content from blogs to Factiva's existing content aggregation services. Factiva receives up to 700,000 blog posts a day and indexes between 100,000 and 200,000. Our customers are asking for it and they want us to add that extra value so their user's experience is not disruptive.

Now i know i don't need to tell you but i will point out the following on the top of my blog site "The opinions expressed on this site are my own and do not necessarily represent those of my employer."

Get Web 2.0 Schwag from the Valley

Brillant- check out ValleySchwag . For $15 bucks a month these folks will send you monthly packages of the t-shirts, ballcaps, notepads, stickers, keychains, and other booty blaring the slogans of Silicon Valley startups.

Just a couple weeks ago i went to the Haight Street GoodWill and thought it was soooo cool that a lot of wares for sale where from the 'old' startup days. tshirts, notepads, martini mixers, etc. Now you can get your own 'new' stuff to collect. I went over to eBay to see indeed what kind of tradeshow and launch items collectors might be looking for. Here is a 1996 orginal Microsoft Network launch poster. Priced at $99 bucks. Hey that's almost 7months of valley schwag ;-)