Disruptive Conversations

Okay, I admit, there's something about reading Jeff Pulver's account of he and Chris Brogan trying out Ustream.tv yesterday that just for whatever reason makes me want to try it out...  perhaps next time I'm at a conference (like VON Europe in about 2 months). I think I'd want to do a session with a partner, though, so that it wasn't just a talking head...  hmmmm....

Yesterday Alec Saunders' "Silverlight vs. Flash: the battle for the platform" was where I first learned that Microsoft was officially releasing "Silverlight", the product previously known as "Windows Presentation Framework/Everywhere (WPF/E)" (and yes, I'll agree that "Silverlight" rolls off the tongue a bit better than "WPF/E".... (although not quite as easily as "Flash" but perhaps all the good one-syllable words have been taken)).  The press release shows some pretty impressive support (but you would expect that) and it's definitely great to see Microsoft also providing a version for Mac OSX as well as the other browsers of Firefox and Safari.  To quote official materials:

Microsoft Silverlight will enable content providers to deliver media experiences and rich interactive applications that incorporate media, graphics, animation, and much, much more with full application functionality on both Windows and Mac platforms and inside IE, Firefox and Safari. Silverlight users will also enjoy compatibility with the broad ecosystem of Windows Media (VC-1) enabled tools and solutions, including existing and upcoming IIS and Windows Streaming Media server technologies.

Microsoft blogger Tim Sneath provides more details which definitely sound interesting.... I need to investigate XAML more personally, but I like a lot of what I read there.  The ways in which video are to be supported are also intriguing to me.   As hinted here and other places, there will be more announcements at Microsoft's upcoming (and sold out) MIX conference April 30th.  There has obviously been a ton of blogging about this since the announcement, but here are some links I found of interest:

• Wall Street Journal: "Microsoft, Adobe Set a Collision Course on the Web"
• Robert Scoble: "Microsoft smacks down new Media Player too..."  (comments are good)
• Microsoft blogs relating to Silverlight

With, as Alec says, Adobe Flash already installed on 84% of desktops, how good are Microsoft's chances of success?  Flash has been out there for many years now, has a very strong developer community and has a great number of tools to help in Flash creation.

Despite that, I have to say that Microsoft's chances are probably quite strong, for several reasons:

1. Microsoft has an incredibly strong developer community, and looks to be integrating this Silverlight into its development tools, including the .Net framework.
2. Microsoft has incredible desktop and browser penetration (which leads to #1).
3. They are making this available for other browsers and for MacOS X with apparently the identical capabilities.
4. They are stating support for
5. They are being very open and transparent about all that they are doing.

To this last point, I would reference Tim Sneath's followup post about feedback to the Silverlight announcement, where he talks about the fact that he's left intact all the blog comments and addresses several points directly and ends with this:

Our success or failure with Silverlight is contingent on whether we satisfy developers like yourselves - time will tell how we do, but I hope that you'll at least give us a chance to earn your trust.

Kudos to Tim for the openness and honesty and yes, they'll have to earn our trust, but at least in the mind of this writer (who has a very strong Linux and open source background) they are certainly off to a good start.  Let's see what comes next...

P.S. And yes, Adobe also announced their Media Player to further increast the battle between the two companies.. but I'll take a look at that separately in another post at some point. And yes, it would have been great if MS also announced a version of Silverlight for Linux desktops, too (which Adobe does have)... but, hey, I do give them credit for providing a Mac version and also supporting other browsers.

Today my friend and fellow blogger Alec Saunders invited me to join ecademy.  I hesitated and almost just deleted it.  I've been a LinkedIn user for something like 3 years.  I've had a Xing (OpenBC) account for about that long as well, although I don't use it as much.  I've recently joined Facebook and I still have an Orkut account floating around from when it first launched in 2004.  There's probably a few others out there that I joined at some point and have now forgotten about.

Why do I need yet another membership in yet another social networking site?

If anything, I need fewer and to just focus my networking there. So my inclination was to simply decline the invitation (well, just delete the email). 

So what stopped me?  Why did I actually click the link and join ecademy?

Basically, because of a Skype public chat.  Well, two Skype public chats really.   Ever since Skype rolled out the beta for Skype 3.0 back in November or so, there have been a number of us who have remained logged in as participants in a public group chat that Jaanus Kase started up from the Share Skype blog and then a second public chat started up by Phil Wolff over at Skype Journal. These chats are "persistent" in the sense that you basically never leave them unless you click the "Leave" button or are ejected by the host. (Jaanus occasionally "cleans up" his chatroom by ejecting people who haven't been participating, primarily because there's a limit of 100 participants and its usually at the max with others looking to come in.)  Discussion goes in spurts, sometimes without any discussion for days... and then a whole flare up.  I read it every now and then and contribute from time to time... it's just a background thing that actually winds up providing some great info for my main line of work (VoIP).

So what was that got to do with ecademy?  Well, one of the other participants in both chats since those early days is a gent named Julian Bond, who is... well... the CTO of ecademy!  (Gee, I've noticed a number of CTO-ish types in these public chats... might have a wee bit to do with being charged with evaluating emerging technology....)

So just as I was about to delete Alec's invite, my brain thought "Hmmmm.... isn't that the site that Julian Bond is involved with?  Maybe I should check it out.  Hmmmm."

In the end, it so often does come down to recommendations from "people you know".

Will I stay there?  Or will I check it out for a bit and then just go back to using the other sites?  I don't know... time will tell.

In the meantime, if you are an ecademy user (and I know you) feel free to add me as a connection.   I'd also love to hear why you use ecademy versus the various other ones out there.

You knew it had to come. Google already had documents and spreadsheets-  the remaining major office category was, of course... presentations.  And so yes, sure enough, here comes word from Google that they'll be adding presentation cababilities this summer through the recent acquisition of a company called Tonic Systems.

As a huge user of PowerPoint, I'll certainly be curious to check it out.  From a collaboration point-of-view, I could certainly see the benefit.  It also makes it rather easy to get your presentation to the conference staff or display it, i.e. no need to plug in your laptop to the display, just pull up a web browser and login.

However, I think about the fact that very often when I am presenting I am either:

• At a conference in a room/facility with NO Internet access.
• At a conference in a room/facility with crappy/overloaded Internet access.
• At a customer location presenting behind a corporate firewall - and not always with Internet access.

In all of those places, you really need an offline version.  Perhaps Google will provide a way to export to PowerPoint or PDF.

For public presentations I could certainly see the utility.  Many of my own presentations include proprietary info, though, and so I wonder what the security of the system will be... will companies feel comfortable putting their data up into Google's servers?

It will also be curious to see if Google just puts it up as a presentation tool or whether they will include social networking aspects like those in SlideShare.

Anyway, it's interesting to hear about... I look forward to seeing it whenever it comes out this year.  Meanwhile, I'm still waiting to see what Google does with JotSpot, which is annoyingly still undergoing "integration" with Google.

This isn't exactly new news, "Linden Lab to Open-Source Second Life Servers", but the fact that Information Week is running the story will undoubtedly give it more publicity.  What Information Week blogger Mitch Wagner is focusing on in his article is comments made by Linden Labs VP Joe Miller as part of the "Platforms and Technologies Panel" at Virtual Worlds 2007 in March in New York. In that presentation on March 28, 2007, he mentioned making the server side available as open source and included this now often-quoted (in blogs) phrase:

Second Life cannot truly succeed as long as one company controls the Grid.

Indeed it cannot... so it's nice to see that voiced by Linden Labs.  In addition to the great writeup (by blogger Mark Wallace) of the panel session, the audio for that panel is also available, which makes for great listening (if this kind of thing is of interest to you).

The thing missing from the Information Week article (and others quoted) is, of course, a timeframe.  It's great that Linden Labs has the objective of open sourcing the server code.  Ultimately, they really have to do so if Second Life is going to become the dominant "virtual world" as we look at how to make a 3D web.  It's really a question of when Linden Labs can do it... not just from a business model point-of-view, but also from a technical point-of-view.  They control all the servers right now and therefore can ensure the (sometimes limited) degree of stability that SL has.  But allowing others to connect into that grid is a big step and is fraught with all sorts of issues that could even further destabilize the virtual world.

We'll see.  In any event, it is good to hear the continued public statements about making the server code open source.

By the way, the Information Week article also pointed to a couple of other articles that make for good reading:

• Notes from a New World: Interview with Wagner James Au (Part One)
• Notes from a New World: An Interview with Wagner James Au (Part Two)

It's interesting to note, too, that on both of those articles as well as the Information Week article, there were lengthy comments left by Prokofy Neva, which make for interesting reading in their own right.

In report today into For Immediate Release I raised the question of "What do you want to see in a corporate blog portal?"  Either one for internal blogs on an Intranet, or one on a public site.  I first posted this list back in February, but have refined it a bit since then... and this is where I'd like your help:

• What do you think a corporate blog portal needs to be effective?  (intranet or external)
• Are there specific corporate blog portals you have liked better than others?
• If you have implemented one, what have you found made it most successful?
• Also, what software (or combination of software) did you use?

I would love to have your comments either posted here or sent in to FIR ([email protected]) for the next show.

P.S. If you don't understand the kind of site I'm talking about, take a look at http://blogs.sun.com/ or http://blogs.cisco.com/home as two examples.

DESIGN REQUIREMENTS FOR A CORPORATE BLOG PORTAL, version 2.0 

The following is a list of requirements for a "blog portal" for a company or organization.  This could be for either an internal or external (i.e. public) blog portal.   I've broken this into two area: 1) the web interface that visitors see; and 2) the technology used by the software program implementing the blog portal. 

User Interface Requirements 

1. LIST OF AVAILABLE WEBLOGS - Ideally if you went to the blog portal you would first see a web page that listed all the various weblogs that are hosted on the website, complete with brief descriptions, links to their RSS feeds, etc. 

2. AGGREGATION OF BLOG ENTRIES ON A MAIN PAGE - There should be a listing of "recent entries" across all blogs. This would allow someone unfamiliar with different blogs to simply look there and see what people are writing about. Two approaches I've seen work for this: a) raw aggregation of all recent entries across all blogs; or b) recent entry for each of the various blogs. 

3. RSS FEED FOR ALL BLOGS - It would be great if the portal provided an RSS feed for this aggregation of blog entries. Think of it as the "everything" feed. There might not be many folks who would want this "entire" feed (outside of true company junkies, analysts, and competitive intelligence staff at competitors) 

4. SEARCH ACROSS ALL BLOGS - On that same "main page" that lists all blogs on the platform, there should also be a Search box that allows you to search across all blogs for any entries in any weblogs that have the search words/phrase. Another search box (or the ability to use the same one with an option) for "tags" or "categories" would be a bonus. 

Technology Requirements 

5. DESIGN INTEGRATION WITH MAIN WEBSITE - It probably doesn't need to be said, but a company is going to want to integrate this with the rest of their corporate website, so there needs to be the ability for the web design to be modified, customized, etc. to seamlessly fit in with the rest of the enterprise web site. So full ability to modify CSS, change headers, footers, graphics, etc., etc.

6. SUPPORT FOR USERS AUTHORING IN MULTIPLE BLOGS - Ideally a user should be able to login to the blogging platform and then contribute to whichever blogs they have been granted access. I don't want to have to login separately for each of them - and from the admin side, it would be nice if there was an interface that made it easy for the admin to set permissions across blogs. (Step 1 could be requiring the admin to config ACLs on each blog, but ideally a Step 2 would centralize that into an interface that shows who can write where, etc.)

7. PRIVACY/PASSWORDS - There should also probably be the ability for a weblog author to "opt out" of the cross-blog search and appearance on the main page. Similarly, I could see the use in the ability to restrict access to *viewing* the weblog (and/or subscribing to its feed) to specific users. There could be a blog with content that is ideally only for executives, for instance. To me this is a lower priority because I think the greater value is in sharing information widely... private information can still be kept in email or on a specific hard drive. Still, I could see it being a request at some point. 

8. STATISTICS - Everyone loves stats and at some point champions of a blogging project will be asked how it is going. Anything that can give overall stats, typical web stats like number of page views, etc., but also more blogging-specific things like total number of posts, average number of posts per day/week/month, total number of comments, average number of comments per day/week/month, avg number of comments per post, subscribers to RSS feed (which I grant is tough to discern), number of posts in last day/week/month, etc.. If the portal was for external blogs, you could get fancier and give stats on number of trackbacks, external links, etc. Overall summary stats would be great, but also stats for individual blogs. Ideally even a page that compared all hosted blogs in those stats. This would enable the champions of the blogging program to see which blogs might be doing exceptionally well, which might be struggling and indeed which have stopped - without having to visit all the individual blogs. Bonus if the software generates nice pretty charts that can be used as eye candy in powerpoint presentations.

Comments and feedback are definitely welcome!

Chris Brogan today posted "Why Do New Media Types Like Multiples" asking why so many of us involved in new media/social media are involved in so many different things (i.e. we might have many different blogs, podcasts... be using all sorts of tools, etc. etc.).  Many people have now commented (including yours truly) and the responses are definitely very interesting.  Do give it a read... (and add your thoughts as well!)

Per Alec Saunder's great post this morning, I learned that Kathy Sierra wrote a "final post" on her blog and is now debating what to do next... but fairly certain it won't involve blogging or public speaking, at least for some period of time.  Her post is a good one and includes at the end of her text a collection of some of the great pictures that populated her posts.  I always enjoyed her posts not only for her great content, but also for all these great graphics that she created.  She has a fun and witty way of simplyifying complex issues into simple pictures.  If you haven't seen her work, do scroll down through her post to see the images.  They're worth it.

I think it is a loss for us all if she is now ending her blogging (at least in this form and place), but I don't underestimate the issues with which she is grappling.  Given all that has transpired and the heinous images and text she had to deal with, it's definitely understandable that she's going to take some time to figure out what's next.  I do hope she does figure out a way to continue her teaching... she's good at it and her continued voice would be good to have out there.

Alec's post, though, brought my thoughts back to the third post I was intending to write here on the situation.  When the whole storm started, I wrote some initial thoughts and wondered if maybe this might make people think.  I followed up with a post of links, but I had another post I started which I titled "Kathy Sierra and the Blogosphere's Mad Rush to Judgement"... but then life intervened and the time to write that post never materialized...  in the meantime, though, others did perhaps a far better job than I would have. Two in particular I liked:

• Stephanie Booth, "Disturbed About Reactions to Kathy Sierra's Post" (and yes, I mentioned this in my second post)
• Ronni Barrett, "In the Matter of Kathy Sierra"

Stephanie's post included this text, which said it well:

Please, Blogosphere. Keep your wits. This is a messy ugly story, and oversimplications will help nobody. Holding people guilty until proven innocent doesn’t either.  <text snipped>

If you have something thoughtful to say, then say it. But if all you have to say has already been said out there ten times, or if you won’t take the trouble to check your sources, read carefully, calm down before blogging, avoid over-generalisations, and thus avoid feeding the already bloated echo-chamber — just go out for a walk in the sun and let the people involved sort themselves out.

Indeed.  That's largely why I didn't post here more on the issue... I didn't have the time to check sources and do the other work to add anything thoughtful.  Without that work, what could I have added?   Not relying on a single source is absolutely critical... and yet it is something that seems to be forgotten by so many as rumors simply propagate through the blogosphere.  (I found myself just this morning sitting on a story that I could have run with (for an internal blog)... but waited until I could confirm with a second source.)  It's a lot easier just to hit Publish and send the words off.

I also was not involved directly in the issue... and it seemed that certainly initially there was a huge amount of posting - without hearing from all the folks involved.

It's also key to remember that we have many other ways of communicating and getting information directly from people involved in the situation.  Jim Turner has provided some good and detailed coverage of the whole situation and one of the things that I have most respected is that he has done the extra work and done things like, oh, calling up people involved on the phone!  Novel concept, eh?  In our online world, people often tend to forget about that little phone thingie sitting on their desk...  but having that direct conversation can be so critical. 

I note that the storm continues... the NY Times: "A Call for Manners in the World of Nasty Blogs"... Tim O'Reilly issued his draft code of conduct... Business Week: "Web Attack" (which isn't about Sierra but about similar online nastiness as it relates to business) and "Managing the Menace of Online Mobs"...

Do we need a defined "code of conduct" for the blogosphere?  I don't know that we need something formal to which people agree... I'd like to hope we're all adults here (and yes, I realized that there are kids posting out there)... and if you look at Tim's code of conduct, you could more or less summarize it as:

• Do Unto Others As You Would Have Them Do Unto You
• "Didn't your mother always tell you: 'If you don't have something nice to say about someone, don't say anything at all.'"

Call it what you will... in the end I think we all need to just be a bit more civil to each other... to make sure there are verifiable sources for what we write... to take deep breaths (and breaks) before responding to emotionally-charged issues/comments... to treat other bloggers the way we want them to treat us.

Will we?  The optimist in me would like to hope so...   (they cynic in me says we've been dealing with this issue since the dawn of time and so while this whole episode is a welcome reminder, it's certainly only a matter of time before it crops up again...)

Hmmm.. so the "Technorati Authority Widget" I mentioned in my previous post (and described on the Technorati blog and Tools page) does NOT do what I thought it would do.  Based on this:

What's your Authority? Are you considered an authoritative blogger who's fluid prose rakes in link love by the bushel? Now you can proudly display your official Technorati Authority with our new Authority Widget.

I assumed that the widget would return your Technorati "ranking".  Instead, it returns "the number of blogs that link to you", which is an okay thing to display... but not my expectation.   It's also the opposite of the "ranking" in that you want a higher link count.

It seems to me that Technorati needs to clarify, at least for this widget, what they mean by your "official Technorati Authority" because they have two (well, really three) measures in their stats (example - stats for this blog):

1. Technorati Ranking: lower is better - ranking of your blog against all others based on some metric Technorati developed. Down side is that widget could get quite huge due to large numbers and there is also little incentive for someone who is #1,891,345 to put it on their blog.
   
2. Number of blogs that link to you: higher is better - number of blogs that have linked to your site in the last 6 months.  Appears to be a major input into "ranking" and is a good sign of potential "authority" of blog.  Widget size is probably no issue because count grows up and realistically won't get too high (top blog list currently has high of 26,866). More bloggers might use it because again it is counting up and not on such a massive scale as the "ranking".
   
3. Number of links from other blogs: higher is better - number of links to your blog from the blogs counted in #2.  Useful in that some blogs might link to you many times.  The challenge is how to interpret the number.  Knowing that a blog was linked to several times by a highly-regarded blog is useful information.  Having it linked to many times by a spam blog (or one of the author's other blogs) is not terribly useful.  This number would seem very easy to game.

Obviously they have chosen #2 for this widget... but my feedback to the Technorati folks would be to clarify in the text on their Tools page exactly what this widget is showing.

UPDATE: See my follow-up post about how the "Technorati Authority Widget" does not work like I thought it would. 

I enjoy the fact that the folks at Technorati continue to roll out new tools of interest to bloggers.  This month brought new sidebar widgets for tag clouds, the top technorati tags and also for blog authority.  While I haven't yet decided whether I do want to add them to my sidebar, they are interesting to consider.  I'm going to try posting the "blog authority" widget here in an entry, primarily because Technorati's tools page says that it may take a bit to generate the widget:

View blog authority

I will be honest, though, and wonder how many people will actually use it outside of the truly "top-ranked" bloggers. I mean, currently this blog is ranked around 42,000, which, out of 71 million blogs, is admittedly quite good.  But is it good enough that I really want to clutter up my sidebar with something like that? (As well as adding yet one more thing to delay the loading of my page?)  I don't know...  I'd need to think about that a bit.

I also don't know about adding the tag cloud... but I'm thinking about the top tags, if for no other reason than the fact that it's interesting to see one way to view "the pulse" of what people are talking about.  (And I see my own blogs whenever I post, which means that I would see the list of top tags, which might then make me curious about what people are writing about.)

P.S. And yes, regarind the "authority widget", I fully realize that Technorati rankings are a very imperfect way of understanding how "important" a blog may or may not be... but until someone else comes along with something better, it's one of the few tools we have in our arsenal, IMHO.