I've got a few new things to recommend in the way of books, music, podcasts, and technology.

Equipment

I've been having problems with my phones (Panasonic and ATT&T). The handsets have poor sound quality. The speaker phones stink. The batteries die within a few months on the handsets and then are costly to replace. Now that I'm doing so much presenting over web conferencing, I need a phone system that is reliable and has the best quality sound. So I stopped by the Bang & Olufsen store here in Boston and picked up the Beocom 4 phone and the mobile headset. I'm very, very happy with the sound quality of the phone, as well as of the headset. I also really love the phone “interface.” It has got an iPod like scroll wheel that lets you access your stored numbers.

Music

Recent downloads on my iTunes:

“Firecracker” (The Wailin' Jennys)

The Wailin Jennys - a wonderful Canadian female bluegrass trio. Great harmonies.

“Based on a True Story” (Fat Freddy's Drop)

Fat Freddy's Drop: reggae-influenced band from New Zealand.

Podcasts:

Fresh Air is now available as a free podcast on iTunes. Yes!

Books:

“Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything” (Don Tapscott, Anthony D. Williams)

Recommended by my friend Kim Wilson. This is a very good introduction to the business and economic models underlying and enabling web 2.0.

“Special Topics in Calamity Physics” (Marisha Pessl)

One of the Times top ten novels. Very interesting voice. I found the story compelling and fun. Highly recommended.

“The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals” (Michael Pollan)

Fun read and fascinating analysis of our food system. The books tries to answer that age old conundrum: what to have for dinner.

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John Martin posted this comment to my post on the profile:

You've touched upon the next evolution that will likely happen to further social networks - the convergence between our own personal and/or professional profile information, our electronic portfolios and federated identity management. What will happen when we create a social network tool that allows you to create a single profile that you could then use to present yourself in other spheres of your practice: when commenting on the blogs of others, when joining and participating in communities of practice, when presenting yourself in virtual environments. Similar in theory to single sign-on, we would now have single identity, not in the sense of authentication to a service but in the sense of authenticating your persona.

Why should I need to create and re-create personal profiles when I log into a new Moodle host? Why should I need to worry about juggling multiple personas when I only want to manage one?

MySpace and Facebook started with the right idea, that each of us has a voice and that we find it important to be able to represent ourselves. But as netizens we now know that we need to make our voices heard and that it is time for social software to take the next step.

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cross posted on FastForward and Future of Communities

In the past couple of days I have had conversations with two people representing different enterprise 2.0 services (iUpload and ConnectBeam) about managing the online profile. In thinking about building second generation web communities, I have come to believe that the online profile is at the heart the new web. In the search economy, you need a dynamic digital identity. It is the means by which the right people find you and then connect with you. But in the world of web services, where oh where does my profile live? I now have mini profiles all over the place: I started with my blog and added a profile on Linked In. I thought Linked In might provide me with a good home for my profile but when the fee for service elements were added to Linked In, the really useful aspects of hosting my profile there were lost — people can't find me unless they pay for a higher level of service. I've got mini profiles on Flickr and del.icio.us but they can't act as profile central. And I've just added a new profile to our new Otter Networks service which is built on iUpload and Netvibes.

What I need is a place for my profile that can be plugged into any web service I join. And by plugged in I mean can dynamically draw text, bookmarks, images, and videos from all of these services and build them into a dynamic view of what's going on now. And I'm not dealing with the issue of residing “inside” an enterprise.

I've been interviewing people for a paper and podcast series on new communities and when I ask them about profiles, this is what I hear:

We connect into Active Directory but that is primarily for authority and authentication. We recommend that you build a rich profile on our service and at some point in the future we will integrate this rich profiling back into the enterprise directories.

Is this really how it is going to go? When and how will these things be integrated in a way that really does provide me with a rich, dynamic digital identity that can cross web services as I move in and out of communities of interest and practice?

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I reported yesterday that IBM is launching a social networking platform for enterprises. Today Stowe Boyd writes about the potential for missing the key shift in today's social networking systems: a focus on the individual rather than the work group.

The basic model of 90's era collaboration, a la Lotus Notes, is all about the group. Information was managed in group-based repositories, then passed around for review, or published to intranet portals via customized apps. Information era workflows where people are first and foremost occupiers of roles, not individuals, and the materials being created are more closely aligned with groups than individuals.

Web 2.0 social tools — largely — work around a different model. Social networks — explicit ones like MySpace and Facebook, or implicit ones in social media — are really organized around individuals and their networked self-expression. I am writing this blog post, and publishing it, personally. It is not the product of some workgroup. It is not an anonymous chunk of text on a corporate portal. My Facebook profile pulls traffic from my network of contacts, sources I find interesting, and the chance presence updates of my friends.

I very much agree with his concern and have found that the distinction between the work group and the individual in how a platform is organized can be the critical difference between success and failure in making these new peer-production communities work. A couple of data points to support this:

In early 2004 I was doing research on what happens when you shift from blogs to email in a learning program. I interviewed a Matt Kirschenbaum, a professor at the University of Maryland who found that course participation shot up when he swapped out email and replaced it for blogs. He said, “the blog allows them to see their ideas instantly published on the Web. Email is a closed world, a self-contained loop between the instructor and the other students. With the blog, the fourth wall is always open.” Matt's assessment that “the blog allows them to see their ideas instantly published on the web” is key.

• At our boot camp for the American Library Association, we decided to give each participating library a weblog (rather than use a group tool like a wiki or group blog). The librarians immediately figured out how to customize the look and feel of their blogs and quickly changed the graphics to represent their own distinctive identities.

Stowe Boyd goes on to explain how he would re-design Basecamp to make it more individual-centric:

* I would start with a profile of myself, since I am the center of my network. I would characterize my interests, history, job, whatever. This could include feeds, queries, and all manner of dynamic information, not just static text. I could tag myself, to make it easier for others to discover me.

* The buddylist is the center of the universe, so I would next start to link to those people and sources most important to me. Their traffic — flow of insights, recommendations, and presence — is the most important thing forming my world.

* And of course, I want to share my traffic with my network: links, recommendations, posts, presence. All my downstream buddies, those who want to read my traffic, can access it. But we don't need groups to do so.

* Instead of groups, we need groupings: tagging the elements of network traffic is sufficient. Sure, we still need access control, so that only those allowed to can see certain information, but I think that putting locks on the stuff flowing around is better than locking up the people in secure spaces.

* Of course, I am not just talking about the movies: people have to get work done, and to do so they collaborate, commmunicate, coordinate and so on. But the actual traffic that goes on to do so is really the same as everything else. I am working with specific individuals, and we talk, and push things around. We naturally think of ourselves in groups — departments, task forces, project teams — but the work is done by individuals communicating with each other.

We are about to launch our new learning network service, which will incorporate the design principles found in the social networking sites and adapt them to a business setting. It is useful to keep these things in mind as we work through our design. The primary node in the network is the individual profile/blog. One level up we have tagging so information can be aggregated according to topic. And one level up from that we have RSS feed collections. I hope this structure is going to satisfy the me-first requirements outlined here. When we are up, I will be scheduling demonstrations of the service, so you all can tell me what you think.

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I spent some time last week with Andrew McAfee at HBS discussing the subject of enterprise 2.0. You can listen to my podcast interview with him on the learning 2.0 podcast blog.

A transcript of our talk is attached here.

The most interesting aspect of our interview was our discussion of management and leadership in the 2.0 enterprise.

We talked about network effects:

Kathleen

Once things are up and running, success has to do with network effects. My next question is can you activate network effects inside the enterprise? Can you manage this process and what does management mean?

Andrew

This is a really fundamental question because there are not managers on the web and web 2.0 has grown and flourished without this constituency that we have inside the corporation called management.

The idea of network effects gets tied closely to the long tail. Even if a small number of wikipedia readers ever make an edit, there are still enough of them that we get the result that we observe, this huge, growing online encyclopedia.

The web 2.0 long tail will not scale down to the enterprise. The .001 percent of people contribute to a wiki. That’s essentially no one contributing to it. The biggest concern people have when they think about network effects: do these network effects still happen when they are not enough actors to activate them? This is where management comes in to create a culture where people are encouraged to contribute. We have a higher ambient percentage of people contributing to these platforms as opposed to just passively consuming them. You don’t need that many contributors before good things start happening.

And incentives:

andrew

There are a variety of things. Most of the smart managers I’ve talked to tend to prefer the soft over the hard when it comes to incentives and motivations. They do coaching; they encourage their people to contribute to these platforms. But they don’t say you must make 20 blog posts or you won’t get any bonus. I did it in my class I’ve got some very busy students. They’ve got too much else going on. Inside a company what they’ve got going on is their jobs. We don’t need to put in place super hard incentives to encourage participation. We do need to do managerial work to create a culture and spirit that this is how we are going to collaborate and share information and knowledge.

And leadership:

kathleen

What does leadership look like in the 2.0 enterprise? Does it change?

andrew

Yes it does. I’m not sure how much it changes. I can see a couple of things. One is that these technologies really put to the test the leadership boilerplate that if you want to gain control overcomes you have to let go of control over people and events. That’s very easy to say. These technologies force you to put that philosophy into practice. When you deploy these things you by definition can’t look over the shoulders of your people and make sure they are doing the right thing. You can’t piegon hole them into participating you want them to, they are going to do it they way they want to — at least at first. It is a test of whether or not the leadership of a company means what they say when they put that in the annual report.

The other challenge to leadership here is it is going to make leaders more as coaches or as shapers of an online culture as opposed to people who get to dictate the online culture or dictate how IT gets used. If you deploy an internal blogosphere you can’t specify in advance what that is going to look like, but there are many things you can do to shape it over time so that it heads in a direction you find productive.

kathleen

Is it a modeling behavior. Do the leaders have to be bloggers?

Andrew

It is not the case that the leadership of a company is at the forefront of everything they want employees to do. I don’t think they have to be bloggers but it falls back on coaching and this vague word of culture which turns out to be incredibly important, and on signaling to the organization the behaviors they want to see. Formal and informal rewards of highlighting the great job someone did and just showing that you consider this new stuff important and that you don’t think all we ahve to do is deploy it and walk away and think the employee base will do it all on its own. That’s a very bad strategy.

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Today's New York Times reports that IBM is entering the enterprise 2.0 market with a social networking suite called Lotus Connections.

Lotus Connections has five components — activities, communities, dogear (a bookmarking system), profiles and blogs — aimed at helping experts within a company connect and build new relationships based on their individual needs…..The profiles component, for example, lets users search for people by name, expertise or keyword. The program then not only provides contact information and reporting structure details, but also lists blogs, communities, activities and bookmarks associated with the person.

This is a very powerful validation of the need for and value of these tools inside the enterprise. Later today I will be posting my interview with Professor Andrew McAfee at HBS where we talk about the managment and culture side of enterprise 2.0. Stay tuned.

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I spent the morning doing research for a podcast interview I will be doing this afternoon with Andrew McAfee at HBS on the subject of Enterprise 2.0. The resulting podcast will be posted on the FastForward blog and on my own learning 2.0 podcast series. As part of my reading, I came across Dion Hinchcliffe's list of nine ideas for managing enterprise 2.0 projects. This is a really good list and I am going to use it to describe how we are thinking about our new Otter Networks community service, which we will start to demo the first week in February. Here is how we are describing the new service:

Otter Networks is a new service for building and managing peer-to-peer networks and communities. Otter Networks will enable enterprises and associations to organize loosely affiliated groups of people into valuable empowered networks of contributors who have new means to create, share, and learn.

Let's take a look at Dion's list and see how it applies:

1. It's about ease-of-use, first and foremost. As a recent Internet list rightly proclaimed, “EASY is the most important feature of any website, web app, or program.” Blogs, wikis, and other Enterprise 2.0 apps have to be the easiest thing to use. Preferably much easier than the tools users have now or they won't start using them. As we work through the design of our prototype, I keep reminding myself of this rule - if it can't be done in one or two clicks, forget about it. Our community 2.0 service is aimed at groups of people with very specific shared interests and needs. We are designing a start page that has a very basic navigation so that entry-level users only have three simple choices: search, subscribe, and contribute. To make things even easier, we are tying the “portal page” of the community to an AJAX desktop. With one click you can add all of the content channels into a single, unified view in your browser. From this desktop, you can read content, view podcasts and videos, and ask for and contribute advice to others in the community. One click to get the desktop set up. One click to contribute.

2. Change requires motivation. Provide it. In order for our communities to get going they need two things: a connection to a vital need or process and continuous education about the benefits of contribution. Our first prototype community is around negotiation and conflict resolution for a firm where this is a continuous problem. Any opportunity or means to improve how it's done will make a big difference in people's lives. But we are changing how people learn and communicate. To do that we will be providing regular online seminars where you can spend 20 minutes getting tuned up on what to do and the benefits of participation. And you can get your questions answered.

3. Emergent doesn't mean a blank slate. Empty blogs and wikis usually stay empty blogs and wikis. a little basic structure goes a long way and prevents contributors from having to figure out how to structure all the white space and provide a simple layer of consistency. To avoid the blank slate, we are populating our community with a good deal of foundational content that is in easy-to-follow templates: podcasts, videos, documents in a wiki. And all of this is choreographed by the Community Director (we can her a Learning Director) who maintains a continuous narrative of what is going on in the community.

4. Discoverability isn't an afterthought, it's the core. McAfee recommends setting up blog and wiki directories as well as good enterprise search based on link ranking (which is what Google does to make the right information come up in the first few pages of search results.) Enterprise 2.0 tools should also extract folksonomies and other structural information (from microformats and XML tags) into discoverability mechanisms like tags lists and clouds, making user organization schemes obvious, public, and emergent. On our start page, users find content navigation on the left and process navigation on the right. We will be using tags and display tag clouds to help people find what they need quickly. And everything is searchable.

5. It's OK to fear loss of control and misuse. But it's critical to put the fires out instead of preventing them altogether. Our back end system enables screening of posts but I don't think we will use it. One of the most powerful motivators of the new web is seeing your ideas published. Anything that interferes with that process shuts down the creative and motivational juices of people in the community.

6. Dynamic, effective advocates are a key enabler. Our goal is to convert readers to writers and listeners to podcasters. To do that we need to find people who are already providing these services informally and make them experts in the community. Give them status and a platform. They will be the best means of bringing others in.

7. The problems will be with the business culture, not the technology. Yes. And these communities need high-level sponsors who believe in them and will support them.

8. Triggering an Enterprise 2.0 ecosystem quickly is likely an early activity driver. This can mean a lot of things but the link structure of Web tools allows information to quickly flow, circulate, and mesh together. You can leverage this in a almost infinite number of ways to drive user activity, interesting content, create awareness of what the company is “thinking”, and more. In our communities, you can become a blogger, contribute to a wiki, or make and publish a podcast. You can also access “smart feeds” that combine RSS and persistent search to provide you with a flow of new information — jumping off points for your own ideas.

9. Allow the tools to access enterprise services. Uploading spreadsheets and other documents should be easy too. And the reverse should be true as well, getting data back out into traditional tools including Office documents, PDFs, and XML must be easy to inspire trust and lower barriers to use. We are building means to move data in and out of the community very simply.

So stay tuned. I'll be posting notice of when we will start to demo our service. We can arrange for you to take a look….

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I'll be speaking at a number of conferences this winter and spring. They all seem interesting and potentially worthwhile:

February

FastForward '07 - February 7 to 9 in San Diego

I will be the resident podcaster for this conference on Enterprise 2.0 and will be covering talks by Ray Lane, Andrew McAfee, John Battelle, Chris Anderson, and William Inmon. The breakout sessions have a focus on search and its integration into new business models. I'm really looking forward to this.

March

Community 2.0 - March 12 to 14 in Las Vegas

I'll be doing a workshop on platforms for second generation communities and will also be doing some podcasting of the conference. There is a long list of speakers, all of whom seem interesting.

April

Digital Now: Association Leadership Conference - April 11 to 14 at Disney Yacht and Beach Resort in Lake Buena Vista, Florida

I'll be talking about community 2.0 at this conference for association executives. Speakers include Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and Stephen Covey.

June

Innovations in e-Learning - June 5 to 7 at George Mason University in Virginia.

I'll be giving a keynote talk here.

If you are planning on attending any of these conferences, please drop me a line and let's arrange to meet.

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After reading about it in Dion Hinchliffe's best 2006 web 2.0 software, list, I signed up for the Jungle Disk online storage system. I have about 35 gigs of stuff in my documents folder and need a reliable off-site data storage system.

It is quite simple. First you sign up with Amazon's S3 Simple Storage Service (done through your Amazon.com account). Amazon issues a code for Jungle Disk, which you enter once you have downloaded and installed the service.

I'm on a Mac so the Jungle Disk appears as a local host in my finder. To back up, I dragged and dropped my user account onto the Jungle Disk local host. It should cost me about $3.50 per month to store my data.

I was also happy to see Netvibes appear as the best AJAX desktop in Dion's list:

Description: Netvibes won this category in last year's list and also gets the #1 spot this year. The start page pheneomenon has been an interesting online Web app trend that got underway in 2005 with the release of numerous different products in this space. In short, start pages provide a roaming desktop that can host all of a user's most common Web information such as news, weather, e-mail, RSS feeds, and more, all in a single user-controlled Web page. My overview of these earlier this year on ZDNet was Slashdotted, just another indicator of the apparent popularity of these personalized Web desktops, usually powered by Ajax but often by Flash as well. During 2006 however, not many of these products saw serious growth and their visitor traffic growth has been slow. Except for Netvibes that is, which has been growing month by month by offering things like an extremely polished look and feel, localization in many different languages, and open API. The last piece is critical for allowing others to add to and build upon the Netvibes platform (turning applications into platforms being a key Web 2.0 technique) and result of this shows clearly in the Netvibes product. The Netvibes developer ecosystem is vibrant and growing with over 500 different add-on modules from Comic of the Day to a module that will quickly turn any document into a PDF file. While Live.com has much more overall traffic than Netvibes, it's likely due to Microsoft's own mega-ecosystem since personalization has moved to the back burner of the front page of Live.com and has been upstaged by Microsoft's search engine. Click here for a more complete list of existing start pages.

We are using the Netvibes desktop and API as the user interface for our new learning network/community offering, which we will be announcing soon.

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The group discussion on enterprise 2.0 on the fast forward blog has been very interesting and valuable.

Here is a very good outline of what it means to move web 2.0 into the enterprise. The principles are drawn from the consumer web. Zia Zaman has translated them to the enterprise:

* Organizing the Unorganized. The value of metadata is increasing. As we gather more metadata about our enterprise data, we have the opportunity not just to mine it, but also to act upon it in ways that achieve better business results, including gaining a 360-degree view of the customer, avoiding duplication of existing analyses, and gaining new perspectives from combining external, rich media, structured, and unstructured data.

* Enhancing Who Enterprises Choose as Consumers - Narrowcasting. Forget the Long Tail’s effect on consumer choice. Think about narrowcasting and the newfound ability, through the Web, to create niche markets that are profitable by precisely selecting exactly which products and services to sell to which micro-audiences. This is a matching exercise, at its core.

* Empowering Individuals to Be the Creators of Enterprise Data. Now, almost everyone in the enterprise is able to contribute to a business decision. Blogs, wikis, and search give the employee the ability to find, create and share insights that can be applied to decisions across the organization. Expert location may be the next killer app in the high performance workplace.

* Facilitating Constant Communication. Employees are more connected now than ever. Instant messaging and mobile email have elongated the work day and allow the employee to stay in touch with the enterprise 24/7/365. The opportunity to more easily communicate with each other, and with customers, opens the door to new business processes and collaborative innovation that takes advantage of constant connectedness.

* Sharing with Friends. Personal networks exist within the Enterprise. They are a constant source of support, advocacy, advice, and political capital. They are also the number one source for answers. Sharing with friends is the most easily applied Web 2.0 theme, especially for the younger Web natives who don’t separate their online and offline, on-the-job and off-the clock lives. Enterprise cultures are about to change as your employee base is infiltrated with Gen Yers, who have grown up without any distinction between virtual and actual interaction.

* Enabling a Multimedia Revolution. Multimedia will change certain enterprise communication patterns and the very nature of what is considered enterprise data. Collecting voice data from traders on the trading floor to feed it into the bank’s CRM is just one example of how traditional unstructured media can now be harnessed to deliver keener insights. Extraction of context and meaning from voice in real-time may be the salvation for the telcos.

* Making it Easier to Find and Spend Online. Web 1.0 featured search engines like Google and portals like Yahoo. Now on the Web, vertical search enables searching for specific categories of information. Jobs, news, video, coupons, products, photos, and myriad other categories have their own search engines. This extends nicely to the Enterprise and to the networks of companies that sell to each other, creating a B2B search explosion.

* Democratizing Labor Markets: Outsourcing. This is the first Enterprise 2.0 trend to hit mainstream media in a massive way back in 2002. The Internet enabled the outsourcing of business processes and IT and customer service and so many other functions so effectively that it is no longer visible. And we are moving towards a new granularity of outsourcing; for example, 5 people project team outsourcing partial research to a team of 3 contractors for a short range pay for performance contract). This new p2p (project to project) outsourcing is inherently a search/matching problem.

* Breaking Down Geographic Barriers. Collapsing time and space to make the enterprise operate in a unified fashion isn’t easy, but this old Enterprise 2.0 theme has been at work for the past decade, creating a revolution in the virtual office. The benefits to the firm go beyond costs and hiring the best talent but also give the individual work processes the chance to benefit from expertise that is globally distributed.

* Engaging the Individuals in Conversation with the Powerful. Never has it been easier for average people to engage in conversation with the powerful. Associates at all levels have real access to a conversation with their senior management, empowered by Enterprise tools such as Blog comments, interactive chats, Innovation Jams, virtual town halls, and other forums. These conversations improve the senior management’s decision making by helping them better understand what matters and by getting great ideas. And it lessens the sense of frustration that many have had in the past about being disenfranchised and incapable of accessing their CEO.

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