http://confabb.com/vertical_blogs/show/6 Thu, 29 Nov 2007 04:46:55 GMT Blog Posts for Collaboration http://confabb.com/vertical_blogs/entry/6?post_id=5 It is a dreary, rainy Monday, as I write this blog I am sitting on an Amtrack train from N.Y. to Boston. This seems to be a more civilized way to travel. I can go up to the club car and get food. I did not have to get searched to get on the train, and all in all it takes about the same time as an airplane and I have a table to work on and a place to plug in my laptop. Now if I can only figure out if they have wifi? I am speaking this afternoon at the CM Pros Conference in Boston. I flew to NY (Westchester actually) to spend Thanksgiving and the weekend with my mom, and then took the train to Boston which does not get me there in time for Salim’s keynote, but gets me in around 10:00 am, in plenty of time for my 2:30 talk. Before I report on some of the sessions at the conference there are a few news items worth mentioning. Zoho has announced that they now allow offline working (using Google Gears) for Zoho writer. This includes both editing and reading documents offline. If you would like to see a video of this functionality is available at: http://zoho.com/zohowriter-zoho/zohowriter-zoho.html . If you haven’t heard, IBM acquired BI software specialist Cognos for $5 billion. Live Documents, a Hybrid Office Suite debuted by instacoll in India Lotus released Notes 8 today as well as a new version of SameTime CMS Talks I attended a talk by Tony Pietrocola about Web 2.0 content management which mostly talked about web sites, how to integrate them with other sites and how to do e-marketing with these new technologies. I then went to a talk led by Rob Dawson of Ephox (Brisbane, Austrailia) about wikis and content management systems (CMS). The upshot of this discussion is that there really is not a difference functionally. Wiki’s are perceived to be more dynamic, easier to use and less permanent than a CMS, but I CMS can be configured with most of the same features as a wiki (Drupal was given as the example). I have a short discussion about this same thing in my forthcoming book Collaboration 2.0 where I said that the ability to link pages more easily is the big differentiator between a wiki and a CMS. I had a nice “Birds of a Feather” lunch on “social networking” with 3 guys from the Netherlands who had developed a CMS (called GX)which was popular in Europe and were looking to see if it would do as well in the U.S. Another person was a CMS consultant, who was sitting next to Peter Prestipino, who gave a talk later that afternoon about Social Media Optimization. We had a pretty lively discussion, and I think a few of the people who attended my talk later that afternoon were from my lunch table. Peter’s talk was very practical and looked at what you could do to make your blog more popular, and how to network on the web. Many of the things he talked about, I am ashamed to say, I don’t do. Maybe that is why I don’t have 130,000 people reading my blog like he does. For example he said writing more short articles more frequently is better than writing long articles less frequently… guess what I do? Only have 60 characters in the title and work with people on Digg to make your article more popular. I don’t do any of those either. I do key words and tags, but am not sure anyone else sees them. Anyway, I left that talk feeling pretty bad about my ability to do social networking, even though I am in LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. If you want to know more about Peter go to www.websitemagazine.com. The next session I saw was a very interesting case study about portals and communication at Siemens. They were in month 18 of a 3 year project and had some good results to report. They made some mistakes, but all in all were getting good acceptance, and had learned to do mini-portals within their overall portal for specific countries or groups. I would call these communities rather than mini-portals since they acted like communities. But it was an interesting case study nonetheless. Then it was my turn to talk. I talked about (big surprise) Collaboration 2.0. I tend to be very interactive with my audience, and asked them lots of questions, had some exercises for them to do. What I learned was that most of them were just dealing with content management for structured content. When I asked if any of them were dealing with new content from mashups or in 3D collaborative environments I got dead silence. A few people came up to me after my talk and said it was very provocative, but that in most large organizations they just were not dealing with this stuff yet. However, in every talk I went to on content management, they always talked about collaboration. Maybe it was Collaboration 0.0 or 1.0 they were talking about, but certainly not Collaboration 2.0. Not being a CMS guy I was a bit puzzled by the audience and ultimately the conference. Yes, there were a lot of CMS professionals at the conference, from mostly large companies, but they were not yet dealing with any of this 2.0 stuff. My guess is some of them have adopted the ostrich strategy (stick your head into a hole in the ground and ignore it), while others feel overwhelmed by this new technology coming in from the consumer or prosumer sector. I know Scott Abel has already set up the CM Pros 2008 conference in Chicago. My advice to him would be to expand his audience from CM professionals to people that are looking at and adopting some of these new 2.0 technologies, since the only ones at the current conference who were dealing with them was the speakers. Thu, 29 Nov 2007 04:46:55 GMT http://confabb.com/vertical_blogs/entry/6?post_id=5 David Coleman content management collaboration 2.0 social media wiki social networking blog web 2.0 http://confabb.com/vertical_blogs/entry/6?post_id=1 I attended the Mashup Summit put on by Colabria about a month ago at John Maloney’s largesse. This one-day event had presentations by a variety of mashup vendors such as StrikeIron, Mashery, Kapow, Google, Nexaweb, IBM and Serus. These presentations were great, but after a while it was hard for someone like me (one of the only non-developers in the audience) to tell the difference between some of these technologies. What was more useful was some of the introductory work by John on value networks and how a mashup was a type of value network. The final session run by John and Ann Majchrzak from USC was a discussion involving everyone in the room and was the most interesting session of the day. I wish they had cut back on some of the vendor presentations and started this most interesting discussion two hours earlier (right after lunch). Wikipedia defines mashups as “Mashup (web application hybrid), a web application that combines data and/or functionality from more than one source.” The Wikitionary definition is: “A derivative work consisting of two pieces of (generally digital) media conjoined together in some interesting way, such as a video clip with a different soundtrack applied for humorous effect, or a digital map overlaid with user-supplied data.” It was clear that everyone was talking about mashing up a variety of data sources (public and private) and there were even some vendors that were providing data services to help with this (StrikeIron). But a term I kept hearing was “collaboration.” Why were all of these propeller heads talking about collaboration? Terms like SOAP, REST, Flex, AJAX, ATOM, XML,SOA, RIA and WIZDEL were bandied about with alacrity (I had to look up some of them, fortunately there was good wireless connectivity at the event), but those were the details of implementation. What was clear from many of the vendors is that mashups had taken hold in the consumer space but were something completely different in the Enteprise. Stefan Andreasen the founder of Kapow technologies suggested that the best way to get started in the enterprise was to focus on some specific areas for mashups including: Business Intelligence, Portal Content, Data Collection, Content Migration, Lightweight Integration, and Automation of processes. What was clear from many of the presenters was that mashups would not take the place of traditional ERP applications and processes, but rather they were for “opportunistic applications.” Those are the applications where you go to IT and they tell you it will be months before they can get to it, and then ask for a huge chunk of your departmental budget. In reality these applications could probably be done in a day or two and without even having to get on to the IT calendar. In one case 30 MBAs were being trained to create mashups from a wide variety of feeds and applications. Orwen Michels CEO of Mashery felt that the ROI for IT with mashups was a hard sell, because these were small applications that may not have a big ROI for the enterprise, until you add up the hundreds or thousands of them, and then in aggregate they do have a compelling ROI. This is kind of the “long tail” argument that is present for content in the consumer space, but it does make sense in the Enterprise context, and also fits with what I have heard in briefings with IT executives when “mashups” comes up in the conversation. Mashups However in the enterprise three things came up that do not always come up in the consumer space; they are: security/access, data integrity/quality and accountability for the results of the mashup. MASHUPS AND THE SEMANTIC WEB The semantic Web, or Web 3.0 isn't a new idea. This notion of an inter-dependent network of machines that can better read, understand, and process all that data floating through cyberspace—a concept many refer to as Web 3.0— first entered the public consciousness in 2001, when a story appeared in Scientific American. Coauthored by Tim Berners-Lee (one of the inventors of the Internet), the article describes a world in which software "agents" perform Web-based tasks we often struggle to complete on our own. He saw “the Semantic Web will be a “place”—a combination of tech-nologies, systems, networks, standards, workflows, taxonomies, ontologies existing in the ether of cyberspace —where machines will be able to read Web pages much as humans read them. It will be a place where search engines and software agents can better crawl the Net assembling bodies of context-sensitive content based on or explicit and implicit requests. While Web 3.0 will not be any more interactive then Web 2.0, per se, it will feature a greater degree of standardization for coupling content, applications and meaning, along with better tools to find people, web objects and content.” I believe that Mashups are one of the bellwethers of the semantic web. Mashup backbones like the Salesforce AppExchange, WebEx Connect, OpenSam, etc. are also offering standardized ways for people to create applications that can access data across a variety of different data silos. Another aspect of this type of standardizations is through widgets and gadgets. Wikipedia defines a widget as “Web widget, a third party item that can be embedded in a web page.” The most common example of the use of gadgets or widgets is Google Gadgets, where you can put any number of these gadgets on your Google search home page (I have 3 full tabs of these gadgets on my google page). Another way this works is in Facebook, there are now 4,000 applications that you can clip into your Facebook site, from Super Wall, which lets Facebook members leave messages, photos or videos on one another’s profile pages, is an expanded version of a Facebook function built in on profile pages, called the Wall, to iLike tool, which lets users post clips of their favorite songs, has since been added to the pages of 8.6 million of the service’s 43 million users. We are also starting to see widgets appear in collaborative applications. A good example of this is Near-time, which is a team space and collaborative publishing environment that now allows you to embed widgets. A widget is a micro-application that you can embed in your Near-Time wiki or weblog. Click on the link to see which widgets are in the Near-time widget library. Some of the widgets Near-time has integrated into their collaborative environment include: • real-time chat from Meebo, Gabbly, and Skype widgets • video and widget aggregators from Widgetbox and Spring Widgets • polls and surveys from SurveyGizmo, Poll Daddy, and Wufoo • maps and mash-ups from Google and Trippermap • news and information from Yahoo! Finance and Forbes Unfortunately, today you need to paste in code snipits today to make the widgets work, but in talking with Reid Conrad, the CEO of Near-Time the widgets will be drag-and-drop in the near future. Mashup backbones, gadgets and widgets are all indications of the coming standardization of the Web. But what does that mean for collaboration? It means that when you create an avatar in one 3D environment you will be able to easily move it to other 3D environments. When you create a virtual team space that there will be a web-wide ID check and authentication service that will let you know the person you let into this space is really them. You may even have a standard profile that works across all social networks or online communities. Although these changes may seem small and more focused on infrastructure, the implications for the end-user are enormous, and will change the way we live, work and play on the Web. Tue, 20 Nov 2007 00:23:15 GMT http://confabb.com/vertical_blogs/entry/6?post_id=1 David Coleman mashup semantic web collaborative team space 3D environment real time chat polls and surveys