Dave talks about what kinds of opportunities are emerging from the new network.
“This is all about connection. Important for all the realms where we humans relate to one another.”

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Here is a great three part harmony that my husband Harry Fix recorded.

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Check out this post from Read/WriteWeb:

Plenty of interest this week in our poll, asking which online collaboration platform do you use? So far, after over 1,100 votes, Google Apps is way out in front - 47% of respondents use it. Basecamp is next with 20%, with Zoho on 10% and ThinkFree 6%. The two Microsoft options, Office Groove and Office Live, have only 2% each. Sign of the times, ay?

There's still time to cast your vote; and remember that the poll is multiple-choice.

Poll Survey - Take Our Poll

(from: What's your online collaboration platform? Nearly half of R/WW readers use Google Apps)

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The Enterprise 2.0 conference kicks off next week in Boston. I have a number of friends who are speaking: Bill Ives, David Carter of iUpload, Dave Weinberger, Andrew McAfee. It promises to be an interesting event.

I've just returned from a few days in New York where I was introducing the E20 tool kit to a global advertising and marketing firm with 10,000 employees. I've done this a number of times and I have started to witness a recurring pattern. Here's what it looks like:

Step 1: there is a clear and demonstrable need for the things that enterprise 2.0 or web 2.0 can do for the organization. Email is the only real two-way channel and it is overwhelmed and effectively broken. Information is not getting to the right people — a problem that RSS could easily solve. It is not possible with the current content-managment systems to use the new interface that Andrew McAfee calls SLATES: search, link, author, tag, extend, and signal (rss). Creating these new interfaces would give people much more control over their information environment and create new means of publishing, sharing and learning.

Step 2: When presented with this new platform and interface, which moves the control from the administrator to the individual, the people who currently control the way information flows and is managed are threatened. I have now seen this happen in five different industries, including financial services, engineering, high tech, and advertising. The resisters may be the IT department, the CTO, the CFO, or a group that has a lot of power over a line of business. The pattern is the same. They allow a prototype to be built and then as soon as it is presented to a group with the authority to make a decision to start rolling it out to a larger group, the power players move in and kill it. The reasons for the kill are multifold: security, integration with existing apps, Microsoft dominance, an unwillingness to give people control over their desktop “real estate.” The effect is the same: any possible implementation of e20 is DOA.

I know there are enterprises that are taking baby steps toward adoption and I believe that the services that e20 provides will ultimately win over. But in my personal experience it is going to be a hard fought battle. Enterprise 2.0 is very threatening to the existing power structures and is a profound cultural shift for enterprises. Until these more basic issues are addressed — who has the power to publish information and the benefits of transferring that power outweigh the risks to the people who current control the organization, no e20 solution is going to be adopted.

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I have been working on a presentation to global advertising and marketing firm that is bring web 2.0 “in-house.” This firm is in New York and I have been riding the Acela from Boston to New York to attend meetings. Last week I spent my trip with the CTO of an Internet analytics company. We started chatting because we both pulled out our Macbook Pro's and popped in our Verizon cards so we can work wirelessly on the train. He uses all of the tools I use: bascamp, blogs, podcasting, aggregators. We talked about the new platforms for enterprise 2.0 and we both agreed that they were problematic. He said that the designers couldn't quite get them right because they tended to design them for administrators rather than users. We agreed that the tool set of the consumer web is really the best option but to get set up requires installing several web services and pieces of software: wordpress blog, ecto or comparable blog authoring tool, del.icio.us, flickr, Basecamp, Netvibes, Blogbridge, Facebook, Linked In. Once you get set up, these services are incredibly easy to use. But it is cumbersome to get them all installed and operating and it is complicated to a “newbie” set up.

The alternative for the enterprise is to use one of the emerging enterprise 2.0 platforms. I am very familiar with iUpload, which I think is great — with some important reservations in that you cannot post to it from a web client and you cannot configure your own space inside the platform to meet your needs. It also lacks tagging. It is a very powerful tool but it was designed with groups of users and administrators in mind. Web 2.0 is about empowering the individual to use the web as a platform for expression, connection, and participation. When you try to suppress individual needs and features you end up with something individuals don't really want to use. I have just started using the wordpress blogging platform and it is really spectacular. It works so well because it is supported by a huge community of developers who make improvements for themselves and then share the code with the community. The enterprise software development team simply can't compete with the diversity and creativity of this large community.

There are a number of e20 platforms coming on the market: Lotus Connections, Clearspace from Jive. I will be curious to see how well these platforms perform against the 10, 20? easy pieces of the web 2.0 toolkit.

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I am listening to a great podcast interview with Seth Godin who says at the end, “I don't have any clients.”

I don't do any consulting at all. I write down random ideas and people buy my books and pay me to give a speech. If I take money from someone it is my job to solve their problem. It is not my job to solve my problem, they have to solve their problems. I never take credit when someone succeeds because I don't take blame when they fail.”

He's my role model.

Here is the podcast:

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Here is a test of the post to blog feature in blogbridge.Check out this post from O'Reilly Radar:

By Brady Forrest

At Where 2.0 last week Steven Johnson showed off new features on his local news and blog start-up Outside.in. The site initially launched with a blog post driven look at neighborhoods, but now more map-centric features have been added that provide some informing views. It is a great demonstration of why bloggers (and blogging platforms) should start geotagging their content.

The site now has a map that shows the most recent locations that a blog has covered. The blogmap shown below is for BlogChelsea. When you hover over one of the circles a balloon shows what other bloggers and news sites have also covered that same location recently. The size of the circle reflects the number of articles and posts.

They have also created a data visualization for Brooklyn that shows seven months of news stories and posts in Brooklyn. In the time-lapse animation you can see bloggers sticking with a story much longer than traditional news sources. It's interesting to watch the mainstream press report on something and then never really come back to it, while the people who are there keep the topic going.

This is the only map on the site like it; I hope that they find a way to automate it for all neighborhoods. Topix has been doing a lot of news coverage for neighborhoods. I wonder how their data would affect these maps; I think that the mainstream press would disappear and that there would be more stories on the map.

The stories seen on Outside.in come from about 2000 bloggers in 3255 neighborhoods in 59 cities (all of these numbers will be expanding in time). They recently just announced America's 10 "bloggiest" neighborhoods from these cities (the larger metropolitan areas of the US). The bloggier neighborhoods are disproportionally ones that are gentrified.

Steven also dived into some of the core methods for pulling in locations from a blog post. They try to be very loose on what they accept and strict with what they output. They accept many different location inputs, as Steven sent me in email:

The primary unit is the post. Posts are tagged by default with the zip codes associated with the blogger, but they will get routed to different neighborhoods (or specific addresses and places) based on a number of different criteria: internal where tags, zip code tags, GMAP links, GEORSS, our own taggers attaching it to a new location, users attaching it to a new location, etc.

Outside.in is among the many sites that now outputs GeoRSS. Sadly, these feeds do not show up in the geoindex yet (though they are in the yellow pages as reviews).

Even though the inputs and outputs are generally lat/long, the site is organized geographically by neighborhood. The neighborhoods were created by the Outside.in team. One of their guiding principles is that neighborhoods are human-scale.

Steven also spoke about his book The Ghost Map and how it inspired Outside.in. The book covers the infamous cholera outbreak of London in the 19th century. The outbreak was stopped by two men (Whitehead and Snow) who used their social network to create a map of the cholera deaths. Through this work they identified an infected water pump and saved many lives. If you want to learn more quickly here's a video of Steven talking about Ghost Map.

Snow and Whitehead would not have been able to actually solve the mystery if the following circumstances hadn't occurred:

• Open data archives - They had access to the local death records and were able to create a "Victorian Mashup".
• Density - London and its neighborhoods were dense. This density allowed the disease to spread. The density also allowed a pattern to emerge that ultimately led to stopping the pandemic.
• Local Amateurs - Snow was a physician and an amateur cartographer. Whitehead was a local vicar, but he knew everyone. Many bloggers are today's local amateurs.
• Pattern Recognition - Plotting the data on the map was obviously key. Without it they would not have been able to center in on that single pump.

Today neighborhoods are still dense and geodata is becoming available (see GeoCommons for an example), but it is difficult to know who else is talking in your area. This realization is what led to the creation of Outside.in, a place for local amateurs to connect and potentially enable future Snow's & Whitehead's.

Outside.in has a good start on this goal. They are building the framework of the site to fill out in the future with more data. As they start to aggregate more sources and expand to more cities they will start to become a valuable resource to locals and tourists.

BTW, they're hiring.

(from: Where 2.0: Outside.in's New Features and the Ghost Map)

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Check out this post from Andrew McAfee:

On May 24, Facebook (the intriguing social network site I wrote about in my previous post) announced that it was opening up its platform to outside developers, allowing them to build applications that were deeply integrated with the Facebook user experience. We can expect, of course, that most of the new applications will be as social —  as oriented toward sharing information, watching what others are doing and publicizing one's own actions, and profiting from others' experiences —  as the main site itself is already.

I haven't yet started to experiment with any of these applications, and so can't review or vouch for any of them.  I can say, though, that many people in my network have started to download them. Facebook keeps me abreast of what my friends have been up to (if they give the site permission to broadcast their activities), and over the past couple days I've noticed that lots of them have been adding 3rd party applications. Intrigued, I visited  Facebook's applications page just now and saw that there were over 100 applications available already (I believe that all of them are free). These include tools to let members:

• Add music to their profiles and see who else is going to an upcoming concert
• Edit photos and play slideshows
• Extend their profiles beyond the original fields
• Find people based on what they like to drink (!?!?!)
• And much, much more.

For people and companies interested in Facebook's potential within the enterprise, the opening of the platform is a welcome development, and probably a fundamentally important one. Developers now have the ability to customize Facebook for the needs of the enterprise, and to do so in a low-cost, low-risk, and iterative manner. 

I can't wait to see what they come up with. As I wrote before, Facebook appears to tap into a set of our deep-seated desires: to reach out to people, to be accepted by them, keep them up to date on our doings, and to stay up to date on theirs. What tools will be built to leverage and extend these desires? And what kinds of impact will they have on companies and their performance? We'll have to stay tuned.

If you're using or developing enterprise-oriented Facebook tools, please leave a comment and tell us about them. And give me some on-the-job training by inviting me to use them with you; here's my profile.

(from: Facebook Now Open to Enterprising Developers)

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