Ross Mayfield's Weblog

[Link]

Happy Birthday Eveli!

After midnight, got a Technorati ping:

Joi Ito's Web
2013 inbound blogs, 3311 inbound links
... Happy Birthday Eveli ! Register your birthday New Comments ...

:-)

Gillmor Gang Up

I'm on the Gillmor Gang today.
While were originally going to read the G-leaves, the topic shifted to the breaking news of Longhorn delays. In the end, though, its the same topic as this opens up opportunities for Google and others developing the web platform.

Here's the Stream/Download Page

The delayed release of the file system either means that they are ceding it to the Google File System or completely rethinking their approach because they couldn't compete with it in the long run. (update: GmailFS)

Related: Mary Jo Foley, IT Garage, Channel 9, Shorthorn, G-spot, Gates

Influence This Ad

Battelle(383) > Mayfield(391) > SELL ($400)

John Battelle builds upon Cost Per Influence with Sell Side Advertising . A guy named Mike comments: "Easily the most interesting concept I have read on your blog." Seth Godin is cautious about what he calls upside down advertising (I prefer Bottom Up Advertising, but no matter), but: "On the other hand, I can't imagine a better scenario for the future." The other side is, of course, The Buy. Jeff Jarvis: I really like [make that Love] this new online ad model that's been bubbling up... be ballsy and Let the consumers create the ads. Mitch Ratcliffe: The fact that an ad was an implicit endorsement may have multiplied the price... Doc: I think it rocks. Joi: Anyway, awesome idea. Lets build it!

If this is starting make sense to you, please pass along this ad and influence others. Feel free not to, or sunsubscribe.

Starting a Tech Movement

Marc suggests how to start a tech movement:

- call Ross Mayfield - get a Wiki setup - keep it private at first

- use Wiki to constitue org with core members - ascertain scope, goals and rules of group

- then worry about a site, deployment, specs and opening up the effort to the public

IMHO

He's actually doing it with JD Lasica for OpenMedia, which looks really promising.

Note this is both core group theory and intimacy gradient pattern over time with a goal.

Blog Sourcing

Anytime you have news about funding, the phone rings off the hook with services firms. I try to answer the company phone as often as possible, and appreciate the hard work of sales, but have little tolerance for cold calls. But unlike previous startups, we are already take care of by our network:

• Recruiting -- a gazillion calls from recruiters, simple answer: we hire by blog
  
• Honest People Looking for a Job -- see above, but take introductions through LinkedIn.
  
• Outsourced Sales & Marketing -- by blog
  
• Banking -- still trying to figure how to do this by blog
  
• Conferencing Solutions -- ever try FreeConference.com or AVChat?
  
• Offshore Dev -- not agile enough
  
• Realtors -- um, virtual company and staying that way to make a better product
  
• Give Us Your Info -- sorry, evil company, what you do and your tactics like emailing every employee doesn't work, we are all synched by wiki

Now I know why Google and others only accept contact over the web. The phone isn't going away, but people need to realize that VentureWire should be correlated with the network at hand.

Decentralizing IT

This week I gave a private talk to an investment bank that was touring the west coast to hear public company pitches. As we were setting up, someone asked about my PowerBook. I pointed out that since I switched it hasn't crashed or caught a virus and simply runs everything I need (especially as the most important apps are web-native). The real point is that supports my lifestyle and how I want to mix with media.

Jonathan Schwartz traces the trend of decentralization of IT decision making from CEO to CIO to IT staff to user.

Does constantly being within reach of the network cause your work to follow you home - or allow you to take your personal life to work? Either way you answer, I'd argue the latter phenomena is one of the most important trends in the technology industry. And has been for more than twenty years...

Thus began the PC revolution, which put many CIO's and IT staffs into a defensive mode of reacting to the needs of the workforce - it was enormously empowering for employees, and a royal pain for CIO's...

Why? Over time, employees brought PC's into their lives - for budgets, for taxes, for letters and gaming. And that started driving IT decisions - in that employees weren't just bringing work home - they were bringing their home life to work. How many PC's in your enterprise have CD players? How many of your employees look at consumer web sites at work (can you imagine watching the news at work 30 years ago vs. peeking at cnn.com today)? Do you limit your daily email to colleagues and customers? Ever IM at work? 10 years ago, the consumer eCommerce wave began - has it had an impact on the enterprise? Clearly...

And continuing that trend, think about the following: who picked the search engine you use most often? It wasn't your CIO. Yet is a search engine a part of your business toolbox? Certainly, yes. And who picked your cell phone? Likely not your CIO, either - yet do you use it for business purposes? Surely, yes. And given that over a billion were sold last year - to a vast population (some 58% (!) of the US population, says the Yankee Group in the New York Times last week). Many of those buyers had jobs. And there's no doubt mobility will have a growing impact on IT infrastructure (accelerated by its security attributes, in my mind, but that's a separate blog). The era of command and control has come to an end. Long live massively scaled shared services...

Its a great read. Harkens back to a year ago when Steve Gillmor asked Jonathan in an interview about the whole consumer impact as a seeding tool for enterprise infrastructure. While the trend is quite blogged, I agree with Jonathan on its significance and the implications need to be explored further.

Its more than consumers being an inroad into the enterprise from the bottom-up, its users becoming developers and influencers Another dimension is DIYIT or what Doc would call the demand side supplying itself.

One aspect is that the people previously known as consumers can not only source and modify their own tools if IT fails to serve them -- but arm themselves with information to influence what should be group decisions. Especially as social agreement on how to use a tool is a determining factor for realizing productivity gains.

Good Service

Love this:

Kudos to Socialtext―a social software service that I never find down, or slow, or broken while utilizing the 15+ workspaces that I belong to there. This is markedly different than the experience on one or two other ‘social software’ related offerings that are ‘broken’ on occasions too numerous to count!

Kudos to Ed and team.

Good service also means having humans help humans.

Wiki and Blog-Mania

Matt Marshall's Venture Capital column in the Mercury News covers the funding announcement:

Wiki-mania: Money is flowing into Wikis, which are Web sites that let many users read, write and edit with a single page. It's kind of like a Web blog, but for many users at the same time.

Palo Alto's Socialtext, a company that develops Wiki technology, has received more than $500,000 from a number of investors, including Jun Makihara, partner with the Japanese venture firm Neoteny, and the Omidyar Network, a group led by eBay founder, Pierre Omidyar.

Socialtext is trying to sell the Wiki idea to large companies, and it's beginning to make headway. It has 50 customers, including Kodak and bike-maker Zipp. ``Unless you cultivate a social network within your enterprise, sharing of information doesn't happen, and people don't innovate,'' says CEO Ross Mayfield.

Mayfield scored the funding in part after giving away the Socialtext software to the Omidyar Foundation, which used Socialtext to create the new Omidyar Network. Now the help is coming full-circle.

Blogo-mania: Blog start-ups are taking off too. A number of companies, including Feedster, Technorati and DayPop, track assorted blogs. Technorati, which tracks more than 2.4 million blogs, has reportedly raised $6.5 million in a round led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson. The company's value was about $12 million, according to tech pundit Om Malik.

One correction to the above is Omidyar Foundation became a paying customer after a 30-day free trial (we have academic community and non-profit pricing available).

We didn't do a formal announcement for many of the same reasons as Dave Sifry (congrats!):

Making a big deal about VC investments is unnecessary, it seems to me. One of the biggest reasons for the dot-com crash was an imbalance of attention: far too much on investments, and far too little on building real businesses with those investments. In a sane and sober business environment, the proper ratio should be completely customer-focused.

But good news should be shared with friends, and I appreciate the kind words from the blogosphere: Om, John, Susan, Thomas, JD, Oliver, Dave, Scoble, David, Jeff, Joi, Mitch, Brian, Rafat, Loic, Sean, Anil, Russell, Jeff, Rick, Christian

How's this for serendipity? The day the news was blogged was the 5th anniversary of Blogger's launch and we closed the round on Friday the 13th, when Google went public and eBay invested in craigslist. On the other hand, and to Sifry's point, the same day a stellar bubble was spotted by Hubble. Planets in alignment, back to school and back to work.

Web2.0 Eventspace

John Battelle blogs the program highlights for the Web2.0 Conference. I'll be contributing a workshop on enterprise social software. Socialtext is providing an Eventspace -- a "Web as a Platform" for people.