Emerging Practice

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Identity

There are starting to be building blocks for distributed identity, but you still have to put a lot of pieces together to get it to work.

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I was talking with Jude Yew today, a Ph.D. student at Michigan's School of Information. He's interested in facilitating learning via online forums and has been working with me on my learning blogosphere and learning remix projects. The conversation veered around a little, and we came to his idea of using threaded comments to blog posts to promote class interaction.

I won't go into what I think are the merits of that idea, but one of the key points that came up was identity. How do you consistently identify the commenters? Last November, Kaliya Hamlin and I had a conversation on that very topic, and she was convinced that establishing identity was key to community work.

Continue reading "Identity"

Bud posted this on May 19, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Moving Forward

We've got a whole host of new initiatives going on.

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I've been buried with work and obligations. There is much to report. Expect to hear more here soon about veg-o-matic, blogging bootcamps, and new initiatives.

Bud posted this on March 26, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Mass Conversation Tracking Just Doesn't Work

Sites that tell you they will help you follow conversations just don't have the coverage of the web to do so. A practical solution is to focus on a small community and use the larger services to catch general mentions.

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We're in the third week of the latest blogging bootcamp, and we're just about to cover how to track conversations. In the process, I've come to the conclusion that mass conversation tracking just doesn't work. It's pretty easy to see why.

Just consider technorati. They track 26.3 million sites and 1.9 billion links. That's less than 75 links per site. In a good month of blogging, I can generate that on one site. So, technorati's coverage is not adequate to the task of tracking every link. The same is true of icerocket and Google blog search.

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Bud posted this on January 24, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

Blog Burnout or Burning the Other End of the Blog Candle

Ken Yarmosh helps me avoid blogging burnout by giving me something to rant about.

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An issue with blogging is that it is public speech. People get to reading your blog and developing a perception of you. You feel you need to live up to that expectation. Blogging slows dramatically or stops as you attempt to stay on message. Ken Yarmosh might call this one type of bloggin burnout.

I let this blog go for a while in December at a time when I thought I might actually accelerate. As it turns out, I was actually blogging elsewhere, almost daily. Sometimes since Christmas, I have been blogging multiple times a day on a personal blog, Michigan Muscle Boy, “A michigander who sometimes feels like a god in the gym”. Hey, who's going to debate the finer points of the long tail when they can talk about feeling like a god. Not this correspondent. I was also blogging in the BIT320 Remix trying to corral the final round of student activities.

Frankly, I got tired of debating things like the long tail. I'm just not convinced they are an adequate description of what motivates people. I think I'm blogging as a part of a larger social enterprise. I'm a bit amazed that I am now keeping a personal blog, something I thought I would never do. But, it's refreshing.

I also got a little tired of blog gaming, commercial enterprises that seem to try to manipulate the blog conversation for their gain. I think commercial speech in blogging is fine, but sometimes you just want something you know is what the person really thinks. That's not always the case when it's team against team as it often is in the commercial arena.

Much in store for the new year by the way. We've got another bootcamp on the way this Saturday.

Bud posted this on January 9, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

(almost) All blogging is local

The long tail is crap for most bloggers. They're happy enough just to communicate with micro-audiences.

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Over the past month, I've come to the conclusion that all of this discussion of the long tail is crap. The idea of the long tail is that there are a few winner main stream sites that receive the lion's share of attention. However, there is hope for lesser niche sites because the Internet audience is large enough that they will still be economically viable. So, for instance, digg may be the winner for now in technology sites, but there is still room for specialized sites like the Corante web hub.

Well, maybe, but for the most part, I think it is the wrong point of departure. Most (real, not SPAM) people who write blogs are not writing them to capture some piece of a larger pie. Rather, their point of departure is to communicate with some local audience. Oh, it would be nice to gain greater general visibility, but that is not the motivator. In fact, it may be distracting from the real value creation process. Here are two illustrative cases:

Continue reading "(almost) All blogging is local"

Bud posted this on January 5, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

Safari U: Great Idea, Right Way to Market?

I wonder if Safari U's Web 2.0 business model can really outproduce the storefront copy center, the traditional channel for custom books. In the latter, publishing and delivery are integrated. O'Reilly's Safari U decouples publishing and delivery, making the process more complex and less certain for customers.

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I'm building a text book for the next rendition of the High Octane Blogging Bootcamp using O'Reilly's Safari U. The main advantages I see are:

  • Good corpus of material.
  • (Potentially) Convenient web interface.

But, I wonder how they are bringing this thing to market. In many ways, they are tied to their book publishing model. A lot of the recent content is not really available because it has not been converted for custom publication. Also, the custom book has to be ordered in quantity, no one-offs. This requirement essentially dictates that the book be pushed through traditional marketing channels. You can't really offer it to small client groups over the web. Finally, any access to the book is only available online for a fee. Why not provide a preview as in their regular Safari offering? Frankly, such previews would just provide more reason to purchase a Safari subscription.

I'm having some frustrations getting the material I want out of this service. I may resort to a last minute coursepack from a local copy center. The copy center will call O'Reilly for permissions, and the book should be done in time for the January class. Ironically, although the bootcamp is about Web 2.0, we are likely going to have to resort to pre-web methods to get the textbook produced.

Local copy centers integrate publishing and delivery, simplifying up the process of creating custom books for customers, and providing more certainty. Oddly, O'Reilly decouples these two processes making the process more complex and less certain, all under the veneer of advanced web technology.

Bud posted this on December 7, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

MBA High Octane Blogging Bootcamp 2.0

In the High Octane Blogging Bootcamp, we teach MBAs blogging as an interactive business process. MBAs, create blogs, find conversation partners, execute blogging strategies, and measure success.

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Over the past couple of months, I've been developing a new rendition of the high octane blogging bootcamp. We ran the original at The University of Michigan's Ross School of Business last Spring. In that bootcamp, 33 MBAs were able to alter the search landscape in Southeast Michigan for queries on the cleaning and restoration industry with 6 weeks of blogging effort.

This rendition will be offered at University of Michigan's Ross School of Busines starting in January and at Quinnipiac University starting in March. In the bootcamp, we treat blogging as an introduction to the interactive web. Teams of participants will have as their project to create a family of blogs around a partner business or their own business. The projects will be judged on the extent to which they follow strategies that build search visibility and traffic.

The bootcamp is broken into a set of seven modules that build on each other. Each module includes an overview, some practical examples, and exercises for participants to complete in service of their project. Here are the modules:

Continue reading "MBA High Octane Blogging Bootcamp 2.0"

Bud posted this on December 5, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Greasemonkey: Becoming Less, Not More

User-agent XML scripting is a key enabling technology for remixing web content. For security reasons, the most recent release of greasemonkey doesn't allow you to use a large portion of firefox's native XML support in greasemonkey scripts. Using firefox as a centerpiece in remixes just got harder.

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A few months ago, I announced the veg-o-matic project. We developed user scripts using Greasemonkey to then republish microformatted content into reblog 2.0 Alpha. The idea was to create a way of generating an attention stream that could be shared with a group of people. This attention stream would extend beyond material made available in RSS. For instance, members of a work group could extract contact information of an important sales lead (formatted using the hCard HTML microformat) from a web page and post it in their information stream for other members to use.

The advantage of using greasemonkey was that it allowed full access to firefox's exemplary XML-processing capabilities in a pretty easy-to-master scripting environment. For security reasons, the most recent release of greasemonkey doesn't allow you to use a large portion of firefox's native XML support in greasemonkey scripts. This change effectively breaks the front-end of veg-o-matic, and it is unclear there is an easy fix.

While I understand the developers' security concerns, it seems like one of the major selling points of using greasemonkey just went away without much compensation.

Update: The lead developer of Greasemonkey has posted a comment in which he assures me the removal of the XML processing capabilities is only temporary due to a bug. The one nit I would pick is that how to convert legacy code to the now-supported E4X, an emerging javascript standard for XML-processing, is not always obvious. Let me recommend this resource for it which got me going enough to realize the extent to which my stuff did not work.

Bud posted this on December 4, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

Mashups are more than just using big company data

There is a real mashup business model in providing infrastructure for people to create their own ad hoc mashups. I agree that, if you are basing your business plan on a creative way to redisplay some large company's data, heaven help you.

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A lot of perspectives on business opportunities for mashups are just too driven by the idea of using big company data. The real value-add in any information business is the information, hard to easily duplicate if the business is viable. So, of course, companies are not just going to give this away for you to generate revenue off of. Matthew Hurst and Greg Linden state this well:

On the other hand, the commercial examples are, as Greg points out, making offerings with no guarantees. In fact imagine the following example: data is made freely available; everyone throws in their idea; whenever a killer app emerges, the data is suddenly no longer free (I believe Alexa has been very open about this strategy). Now what do you do with your users?

There is no business model for mashups. If Web 2.0 really is just mashups, this is going to be one short revolution.

Is Web 2.0 Nothing More Than Mashups

Data Mining: Greg on Mashups

But I think this misses a larger point.

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Bud posted this on December 2, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

SuprGlu — Corante Web Hub in a Box?

This may not be a Corante hub in a box, but it could be a cheap, quick way to set up a knowledge sharing, community site.

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As readers of this blog are aware, I've been running a sort of mini version of a Corante hub in class at University of Michigan's Ross School of Business. Our hub, which we call a “remix” is different because it is meant to serve as a distributed blog space for the class to see each other, share information, and interact. There is no editor, it's sort of self-editing.

Well, just the other day, Lindsay, one of the students, came up with a real coup when she discovered suprglu. My cut, it's the 15 minute facsimile to the class remix (one guy has actually done this with his creative writing class). I've also done one so my bodybuilding personal trainer friend can track some relevant blogs I have found.

It lacks some things though. Let me provide a quick list:

Continue reading "SuprGlu — Corante Web Hub in a Box?"

Bud posted this on December 1, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Helped develop and now have joined the Corante Network

The Community Engine played an important role in developing the new Corante hub network. In future posts, I'll be writing about the technology challenges we faced in bringing the network together. I also have some ideas for how to create bottom-up communities across network member blogs that I will share in future posts.

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As Stowe Boyd mentioned yesterday, Corante has established a network of topical sites that re-aggregate content from “thought-leading” bloggers and provide editorial insight on emerging trends. I'm honored to note that this blog was chosen to be part of Corante's web hub. I'm also proud to announce that The Community Engine played a pivotal role in getting the technological infrastructure to work.

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Bud posted this on November 30, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Corante Symposium on Social Architecture Wrap-up

I'd like to see conferences like this make more use of the available social tools to create pre and post conference opportunities for interaction and learning.

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It's probably best to just quickly state likes and dislikes about the Corante Symposium on Social Architecture:
  • Likes:
    • The cocktail party the night before at the Harvard Faculty Club was great.
    • Lunch was extremely good, a whole table of people who just wanted to talk on topics of interest.
    • The general quality of attendees, in particular the people who were not speakers.
  • Dislikes:
    • After lunch, I thought the explicit exclusion from participation of people sitting in the back section of the auditorium was ridiculous. The fact that the exclusion was repeated by two marquee speakers was just over the top.
    • The level of audience participation was good, but might have been even better.

I really learned some things at lunch and the cocktail party. I really liked the people I talked to and their openness to conversation. Now, let me spend a moment detailing how I might fix some of the things I did not like.

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Bud posted this on November 15, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (1)

How Will the Social Web Change Media?

When you run a conference where people pay to attend, don't be a snob to them.

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Still at the Corante Symposium on Social Architecture. Intriguingly, JD Lassica starts of suggesting that we re-invoke the Liz Lawley rule, namely that people who want to participate need to come to the front of the room. Remarkably, this comes after Liz's observation that there is only so much room at the front.

Do these guys realize how they come off? Clearly not, there is no feedback loop. Maybe, they just do not care. After all, they are the ones not paying the conference fee while the rest of us are. We are here to participate with them, not the other way around.

I'm not sure I entirely endorse the view I just expressed, but it certainly goes through my mind as I sit here. I think both JD and Liz would just like to be closer to people. Why don't they walk into the audience? Frankly, when you are creating a market, you need to go to the people as much as you tell them to come to you.

Bud posted this on November 15, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Great Lunch with Kaliya Hamlin and Kevin Marks

I think getting to know Kaliya Hamlin means getting her to exhaust her array of possible business cards on you.

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I started out with Kevin Marks and shared with him my misgivings about his session, namely that there was no there there. I did point out to him that he had succeeded in getting me to contribute to the IRC room by putting it on screen, something I never do.

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Bud posted this on November 15, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Is Social Software a Mirror or a Lens?

Humorously, Liz Lawley's greatest contribution to this talk is to exclude everybody but the inner circle who is surrounding her.

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Liz Lawley is leading this. She notes that there is a tendency for people in the blogosphere to just hang out with birds of a feather. She also notes there is a core group that comes to all of these events and some new people. Liz is an absolute jerk by demanding that people who want to participate come to the front half of the auditorium. Hey, not my fault the auditorium is set up the way it is. Unimpressive and overly exclusive, paying to go to a conference and having someone tell you you are not part of their space.

Tina Sharkey and a guy (Joe ?) who used to run Friendster are also on the panel. Tina remarks that AOL wants to facilitate meta-social interaction (people figuring out how to interact and making connections vs. talking on topic). Joe remarks that people in different cultures use the services differently.

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Bud posted this on November 15, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

How Do We Scale Meaning

You don't scale meaning by putting an IRC chat window on the presentation screen during your talk. You ablate meaning.

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Hosted by Kevin Marks and Mary Hodder. Kevin is making the case for why we have centralized top-down control in communications. There are just too many voices.

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Bud posted this on November 15, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Is Business Ready for Social Software

To achieve its highest value, social software has to exist outside of the corporation.

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Participants are: Stowe Boyd, Seth Goldstein, and Kaliya Hamlin. The central question seems to be why is business adopting social software now? Stowe Boyd thinks there is huge potential for businesses to transform themselves. My question is this: do existing institutions want to change? Or is it that new institutions will arise?

Seth Goldstein seems to think it is the API. How many people know about APIs? I don't know of any managers who are thinking about APIs. My wife who now uses social software does not know about APIs or any of the mash-ups they enable. She just likes to communicate. She also likes being able to look back on past conversations

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Bud posted this on November 15, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

At Corante Symposium on Social Architecture

Is this conference a new old boys network? Breaking the temporal barrier to participation might help that.

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I'm at the Corante Symposium on Social Architecture being held today at the Berkman Center. Things are rather informal and plans are evolving as it moves forward. I think this format is fine for people in town or nearby but hard for people coming from out of town.

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Bud posted this on November 15, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Google Reader 2: How I browse the web

Editing is the real trick to manage large volumes of information. To avoid bias, use multiple editing strategies with some referral to raw sources.

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My little post on the Google reader prompted a couple of responses inspiring me to lay out how I browse the web. The Google reader is one of many offerings that allows you to follow web sites using their syndication feeds. Essentially, the reader gathers the feeds from each site and presents them to you in one single web page, making web surfing much more efficient because you now only have to go to one page.

If you think of feedreaders that way, then it's clear that the issue is how to construct the most efficient display. This screenshot illustrates my most recent strategy:

Googleig

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Bud posted this on October 9, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Google Reader, I don't get it

Basically, Google portal beats Google reader as a feedreader.

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I like Google's portal pictured on the left. Their new reader, announced at Web 2.0 today and pictured on the right, just does not compare. The portal outperforms the reader on all measures you would think the reader would be better at.

Googleig Googlereader

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Bud posted this on October 7, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

Developing with Ning

Fred Wilson thinks Ning might lower the cost of entry for creating web applications designed to fulfill a specific need very well. Based on my experience, I don't think so, but I have a suggestion which might help.

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Yesterday, I signed up for the Ning developer program, and today they accepted me. Ning is a platform for developing interactive web applications like this little bay area restaurant guide, an Ann Arbor version of which is depicted here:

Screenshot of things around Ann Arbor

Fred Wilson has suggested that Ning might lower the cost of entry for point web applications, i.e., those designed to fulfill a specific need very well. In its current state, I don't think so. In the example “Things around Ann Arbor” app I tried above, there were three items that were configurable without programming: the number of items to display on a page, the map image to show, and the google maps key. Everything else required modifying code intensive php pages. Examining these, it quickly became apparent that I was going to have to spend some time with the API documentation to make any real progress beyond showing Ann Arbor on the map.

Now, my work might lower the cost for someone who wants to simply copy my application (a process called cloning in Ning), but having to learn the Ning web app structure is a clear cost increase to me for just getting started. I have a recommendation that might help.

Continue reading "Developing with Ning"

Bud posted this on October 5, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (1)

Ning

Ning might fill a sweet spot where non-programmer entrepreneurs can create applications for groups of people who want to interact with each other. That's the missing link in today's social software value proposition.

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I've been trying out Ning, which has been written about by many people. Ning is essentially a platform for creating interactive web apps. Here's one of them:

Ning

Dave Winer thinks it's a product that does not do anything original. I have a slightly different view. It's a product that has some potential if it can make developing and maintaining interactive web apps so easy that non-programmer community entrepreneurs can do it.

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Bud posted this on October 4, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)

FeedDigest.com — Feed Remixing for Geeks & Resellers

FeedDigest seems to be one of the better services oriented towards geeks and designers for incorporating RSS feeds. I suspect there are still some holes to be filled in this market.

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I discovered a service called FeedDigest today. Launched in July, 2005, it has over 10,000 users with each one generating approximately 3 “digests”. Digests are web pages or RSS feeds generated from aggregations of other RSS feeds. Currently users integrate digests into their sites either through javascript or PHP. There is no hosting of digest newspapers, likely due to load and bandwidth issues. The site blog has detailed how they are dealing with the capacity issues brought on by exponential growth over the last few months. Though nothing has been announced publicly, certain of the blog posts suggest that outside investment was secured in the second-half of August. Ten thousand users is a benchmark that Silicon Valley VCs often cite for seed investment.

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Bud posted this on September 21, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

A Tag Cloud Interface for Community

Here's a little user interface enhancement that I have created for the tag-based remix learning site.

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So, we've launched the remix learning site. The idea here is that students in a class about databases and information contribute by making blog posts and bookmarking web pages. Students tag each blog post and bookmark based on the class conversation topics they feel they contribute to. Posts with multiple tags contribute to multiple conversations.

The remix learning site gathers student contributions several times a day and archives them in a movable type blog. The interface allows people to view contributions grouped by tag. That's great, but the question is how to present these topics to people in a way that they can view: the most recent, the most talked about, the whole universe.

To do that, I have come up with this tag cloud:

Tagcloud

The key element in the default view is that items are sorted in reverse order by recency. Frequency is indicated by size of the tag in the cloud. Visitors also have the option of sorting alphabetically and by pure frequency.

Bud posted this on September 13, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

A Tag Based Learning Remix

We attempt to crack the class participation nut by mandating participation in an online self-organizing space. Our aggregation mechanism is based on the tags participants provide for their contributions. This post describes our underlying concept and the variety of technologies we employ.

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A perennial classroom issue is student participation. Even if students are enthusiastic, limited time dictates that only a few will be heard in any single session. Limited participation limits instructors' opportunities to find out what students know and inhibits the potential discovery of useful information for everybody. This post outlines a web-based learning remix project at Michigan's Ross School of Business that is designed to remove classroom limits on student participation. The system operates according to a few simple pinciples:

  • Require that everyone participate.
  • Move the vast majority of class participation online.
  • Structure online participation so that it is self-organizing.

We believe our system achieves the first and second goals and makes good progress on the third. On the input side, each student makes fifteen tagged (informally categorized) microcontributions per week by bookmarking sites in del.icio.us and making blog posts in WordPress Multi-User. Multiple times each day, reBlog and the Movable Type publishing platform gather, remix, and present the student contributions based on the tags students supplied.

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Bud posted this on September 10, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

spam is automating the social without the social

It's interesting to me that you can set up a mechanism for social interaction, use it, and then discover that voila, you have search visibility.

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Richard MacManus makes an interesting tie between blogging for business visibility and spam in referring to our recently reported bootcamp experience:

This is what could be termed The Good Side of blogs for businesses. The Dark Side is the spam and fake blogs I wrote about above. It seems to be relatively easy nowadays for both sides to gain search engine ascendancy over old-school websites.

Read/Write Web: Web 2.0 Weekly Wrap-up, 8-14 August 2005

Well, I'm glad to be on the good side, but I wonder what that really means? Where did that comparison to spam come in?

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Bud posted this on August 16, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

MBA Bootcamp Changes Local Web Search Landscape

Over seventy percent of households in the U.S. use Internet search to find local products and services. We ran a bootcamp where Michigan MBAs used Web 2.0 technologies to compete with a prominent local business for searches on its targeted keywords. Bootcamp sites beat the local company in just under half of the searches and placed on the first page of search results over half the time.

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From May 10 through June 23, 2005, we ran the first High Octane Blogging Bootcamp for 33 MBAs at University of Michigan's Ross School of Business. Our client for the bootcamp, Coach's, served the Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti, Michigan market for disaster cleaning and restoration services. Recent surveys indicate that over seventy percent of households search the web when shopping locally for services such as Coach's. We wanted the bootcamp to demonstrate how Web 2.0 technologies like weblogs and RSS could help better establish a company's search presence to take advantage of this channel. To really push the idea, we informally set a goal that bootcamp participants' team weblogs outperform Coach's site on searches for its own keywords.

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Bud posted this on August 11, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (1)

Microformats and Innovation

I see microformats as an opportunity for invention. Writing a microformat spec itself is not that hard. The politics of getting a microformat adopted by an expert group can be daunting. Innovators need to focus on areas that are truly new to avoid this quagmire.

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Microformats are a way of writing html pages so that they are amenable to automated data processing while still easily read by people. Lucas Gonze feels the standardization inherent in the microformat writing process drives out innovation, specifically:

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Bud posted this on August 6, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Microformats in Business — Structuring Content for Search & Collaboration

In my reckoning, there are two business propositions right now in microformats: 1) Structuring data for search and business intelligence, already successfully demonstrated by technorati; 2) Structuring content for collaboration, likely monetized through a service similar to BasecampHQ.

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Microformats are really just a way to combine human and machine readability in one web page. Microformats are superior to similar infrastructure plays because the average web designer can incorporate them with very little work.

So, what's the business proposition for combining human and machine readability? Right now, I can come up with two.

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Bud posted this on August 3, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Innovating for Value in Blog Search

Innovation in blog search will be more and more driven by the extent to which it can be used for business intelligence. Three players, bloglines, technorati, and blogpulse have all made important advances in this regard. Rests to see whether they can capitalize on them.

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In response to my post about blog search imitation on Wednesday, Marc-Olivier Peyer of pointblog has asked if we could not benefit from a little more innovation. That seems reasonable, and I'd like to frame my response in terms of where we have already seen innovation based on the revenue potential. I expect that that is where we will see more in the future.

The first thing I note is that blog search engines exist because blogs are different from traditional web pages. Blogs are increasing at a faster rate than the rest of the web. Blogs, with an average update frequency of once every 10 days, are updated more frequently than the rest of the web. Blogs, with an average of 100 o