I would like to welcome you to the new web site for the Otter Group. We have chosen to build our new site on a weblog so that we can easily update it and so that we can make the information on the site available via RSS. For a complete explanation of our site philosophy, please read this.

Over time, I hope that the site becomes a reflection of what we believe about the power of online communities and learning. I believe that our fundamental purpose in life is to help each other, learn from each other and grow together. By making connections to each other, we get smarter, better, faster. And I believe that weblogs, organized into networks, are the most powerful means available for us to make connections over time, distance, and culture.

I believe that crowds are smarter than experts and that groups can advance themselves by tapping into their collective wisdom and intelligence. I believe that independence and diversity and the freedom to speak one's mind are qualities that must be present for us to take advantage of the power of networks. I have learned that the best blogs, the ones I keep going back to, maintain a good balance between being self-serving (reputation building) and altruistic (knowledge sharing). I try to maintain this balance in my own blog and hope that we will collectively maintain it here. I also profoundly believe in the mission statement for our new service Ping Networks. It comes from a Beatles' songline on Abbey Road and goes, “And in the end…the love you make…is equal to the love you take.” I hope I am not naive in believing that this is all I really need to know and live by.

On this site, I hope to document what I am learning about a number of topics that are related to our business of building and managing blog networks for connecting peer groups into communities of interest and practice: elearning, weblogs, social networking, emergent systems and technologies, feedback and pattern recognition, RSS and newsreaders, data mining. I hope that we are able to use this site to share what we have learned from our experience of designing and managing online communities and learning. I hope that you will join us in discovering and uncovering what really works well.

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Ping Networks is a service that builds and manages blog networks for
connecting peer groups into communities of interest and practice. 
A Ping Network is made up of individual weblogs, a blog portal and
powerful search tools that combine the blog network with proprietary
databases.  Ping capitalizes on two rapidly growing communications
technologies which are ideal for creating personal and peer networks:
weblogs and RSS.*

* RSS is a format for syndicating web content. Its name
is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication. RSS is an open and simple
way for applications to publish, for users to locate and subscribe and
for subscribed content to be accessed, processed, and ultimately
scanned and consumed, discussed, archived and subsequently retrieved.
RSS can be used for distributing any kind of content — blogs, news,
updates to a web site, as well as music, photos, and video.

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Ping enables the creation and growth of communities of interest and
practice, offering their members ad-hoc ways to collaborate. Ping
stimulates high levels of participation in online communities by using
weblogs to lower the technology barriers of participation to almost
zero.  With RSS, newsreaders and specialized, proprietary search
technologies, Ping makes it very easy for community members to find and
track, people, ideas, and information.

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Ping can be applied across a number of applications and settings:  


•    Corporations, for both internal team management and       external marketing
•    Alumni associations of colleges and universities
•    Associations of hobbyists and collectors.
•    Nonprofit and NGO programs managers.
•    Teachers and primary and secondary schools.
•    Trade and professional associations.
•    Research scientists.
•    Work groups within corporations and nonprofits.

Since we have launched Ping, we have found the groups best qualified
and likely to use Ping are people who need to both document their work
and lives and also to share what they know and learn. 

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Ping is built on best-in-class weblogging software called
Blogware.  On top of Blogware, we have added a layer of templates,
components, and documentation that make Blogware more adapted for use by
communities of interest and practice. We call our package for
blogging networks Pingware.

Pingware has many advantages over other weblogging software on the
market.  First and foremost, Pingware is designed to support
groups of users rather than individual bloggers.  It is highly
customizable–templates can be built that organize features into classes
of users and groups. Each community has its own “branded” look and feel:

  Components can be created for each group of users, which
enables smoother collaboration. Pingware can be programmed to call up
the most widely linked-to weblogs within a group of users, for
example.  Pingware can be custom-programmed to do almost anything
you
might want to do with your community.

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•    No paid advertisements on your Pingware blogs.
•    Completely customizable look and feel of your network's blogs.
•    A unique URL address for your blogs:  (e.g., http://kathleengilroy.com)
•    Multiple photo albums on your blog.
•    Bigger bandwidth and storage with Pingware than with free blogs.
•    You can make your blog completely private with
Pingware. 
      Or you can restrict access to some parts of your blog
and not others.
•    A built-in search tool with your blog.
•    Your blog readers have highly customized email
notifications from your blog. 
      Readers can get email notifications
by category, comment, and trackback.
•    Little if any comment spam on your Pingware blog.
•    Best-on-class file and image storage and management.

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Ping is
available to bloggers through their communities of practice or
interest.  We charge an initial set-up fee for creating your blog
or portal.  If you would like to receive a quote for setting up
your blog, please email aixa@ottergroup.com, and we will contact you to
ask you some questions about what you want to do with your blog.



(Sample Portal)


Once your portal is set up, your costs are incremental depending upon
the number of bloggers in your network and the types of blogs they
maintain.  You can choose to subsidize your bloggers or pass the
costs of the subscribing to their blogs directly on to them.  The
table below outlines pricing for Pingware’s three levels of
service.  Each blog starts with a 30-day free trial.  Additional discounts are available for large numbers of bloggers.

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Unlike other blogging services, Pingware includes a full complement of
features with the Starter level.  We differentiate our blog
offerings only by storage and bandwidth.  If your members will be
blogging exclusively or primarily with text, then the Pingware Mini
package should be fine.  If you or your members plan to use
photos, file storage or other data-heavy media, you may want and need
to start with the Basic package.  Once you or your members hit the
ceiling on storage and bandwidth, we will notify you and ask you to
upgrade to the next package. 

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The Otter Group
and
Ping Networks, a service of the Otter Group

147 Magazine Street
Cambridge, MA 02139

phone: 617-973-9400

Email to: otter@ottergroup.com

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