Ross Mayfield's Weblog

Friends of Friends of Friends

David Kirkpatrick's Fortune collumn on Social Networking is a great read and mentions Socialtext:

Meanwhile new companies like Contact Network, Socialtext, and Spoke Software are generating revenues by selling social-networking software to corporations. Typically such products work behind the corporate firewall to mine employees' contact lists and e-mail traffic patterns. They have various ways of ensuring that no employee's data are used without permission.

To clarify, we aren't so typical. We don't monitor email, a private medium, or mine contacts. We provide tools for people to make their own connections, organically from the bottom-up, through conversations that are meant to be shared.

You have to love pieces that quote bloggers:

The phenomenon may be seen as offering people tools analogous to the most powerful ones being used in business. Writes Yong Su Kim, who maintains a blog on software trends at YSK.com: "It's almost like the CRM and ERP of peoples' professional and personal lives. Social-networking software is designed to help people look for new relationships (acquire customers), maximize existing relationships (sell to the installed base), and optimize their social interactions (order management, manufacturing, supply chain, and distribution)."

The article also provides Joi as the uber-networker example of LinkedIn's value, describes a couple of models and offers another way of describing the development of social infrastructure

Mark Pincus, an investor in Friendster and founder of Tribe.net, calls this the early phases of the "peopleweb"--a user-controlled network of identities and relationships that transcends any one site or company.

Institutional Memory

Denham Grey, a leading KM practitioner who also fostered the KM Wiki provides the context for the dream of knowledge management, what went wrong and what was discovered.

The dream:

One of the central themes of KM is the design, building and maintenance of an effective 'corporate memory', a repository, a dare I say it, knowledge-base. Here the intellectual jewels of the organization will reside, easily accessible, expertly indexed, intuitively browseable. Here experts and novices will come for self-help knowledge, they will find the correct solution quickly, be able to apply the solutions with confidence, and learn from the 'collective experience of the organization'.

Many dollars have been invested, many organizations have egg on their collective faces, many repositories lie unused, shunned by novices and experts alike and yet there are more KM projects starting each day with the same vision / mission and yet another dream. Perhaps we think portals or automatic profiling or collaborative systems or social software will do it this time!

What matters is social context. Go read the whole thing, and his discoveries. Related: Spike Hall differentiates social context at the individual, group and organizational level.

Denham also shares his practices and tools (including Socialtext!).

Denham points out his focus on knowledge creation (awareness, learning, community); instead of intellectual capital (knowledge assets, branding, knowledge exchanges). His emphasis is on social capital: The real challenges lie in getting groups to leverage their learning, to combine and synthesise their insights, experience and expertise.

Perhaps what's new this time is we learned by suppporting user desires to get things done more efficiently, connect organically, and keep it simple so everyone can participate -- the result builds institutional memory When people are the intelligent agents their actions in aggregate have emergent properties. Like with weblogs on the public Internet, the best content and expertise rise to the top naturally. While social capital is a necessary precondition for the development of intellectual capital, such a lofty strategic value proposition is unnecessary. Help people produce first -- and learn as they go.

Entropic Journalism

The striking difference between traditional and participatory journalism is at the top of many minds these days. What's interesting to me is how an alternative form may have arisen unnoticed.

But first, in case you live in a cave, the story unfolds with a reaction to this post by Daniel Weintraub of the Sacramento Bee prompted this policy of editorial oversight, which has been analyzed here, here and here.

Eric Zorn puts it well [via Jeff Jarvis]:

To edit a blog almost instantly and whenever the blogger wants to post would require an expenditure of resources from the sponsoring publication that dwarfs the income -- right now, essentially zero in the free-access info-market of the web.

Yet to edit a blog conventionally -- putting it into a comparatively slow, one-way pipeline toward publication -- robs it of its essential blogness. It takes a potentially fresh new medium that, as Andrew Sullivan has pointed out, is a hybrid of talk radio and print, and turns it back into just more old medium...

...In reality, what needs to emerge here if the j-blog isn't going to die at birth, is an understanding on the part of editors and readers that, procedurally, a blog is much more like an appearance on a TV panel program or talk-radio show than it is a fully sanctioned, completely vetted declaration in cold type...

...Very, very rarely -- never in my case -- this freedom causes real problems.

Eric is right that the primary challenge is getting editors and readers to understand what is new. That's why blogging purists have raised their voices. Introducing editorial process into blogging practice is entropic. Social editing after publishing has proven its differentiated value. We need both.

But the way Daniel blogs now, running posts by an editor before posting is different from blogs or collumns -- its traditional journalism without deadlines. Something any journalist would like. Write when you want.

It may be a third form, but its not write what you want and publish when you want.

Dysfunctional Relationships

Must read piece by our very own Jerry Michalski on Social Networking. He makes a good case for the pragmatic (complexity, explicitness) and moral (explicitness again) challenges facing these services. He also makes 3 suggestions:

* openness and integration among all these tools, so services interact smoothly and triple-, quadruple-, or even quintuple-entry of data vanishes.
* more training on how to manage social systems appropriately, so productive relationships can be enhanced, not disrupted; and
* more emphasis on rethinking and improving the basic tools we use to express ourselves, so we cease thinking in 7-bit ASCII email, HTML, and PowerPoint, and start communicating better and building lasting resources together.

Do Call List

Seems the House has moved fast to approve legislation granting the FTC authority to execute the Do Not Call list. Steps remain to make it possible to go ahead before the October 1 start date.

Maybe I am being paranoid, but if the list was provided to telemarketing firms in advance (necessary for compliance) and then legislation falls through, it would provide very evil people a perfectly groomed list.

Collaborative Proposal Development

We are starting to talk about our ecstatic customers. Here is a customer success story of an international design consultancy that uses Socialtext. One of the greatest values they have found is collaborative proposal generation.

Getting the right thing out the door is often tough. You have to gain the contributions of others, particularly domain experts who are in different divisions of your company. Workflow and revision control get in the way of forward motion.

Swarming on opportunity is something poorly supported by most existing solutions. Its an interesting case that almost ever team deals with, read the whole thing.

Life's Imagination

George provided this great excerpt from the Seven Pillars of Wisdom for my b-day:

All men dream: but nor equally,
Those who dream by night in the dusty
recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity:
but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men,
for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.

Reminds me of something Christopher Columbus wrote:

Life has more imagination than we carry in our dreams

A Game Neverending

My daughter: Daddy, I invented a new game, wanna play?

Me: Sure, what's it called?

My daughter: Guess What the Rules Are.

Skype's Business Model

Stewart "Skype Crazy" Henshall, Mitch "Business Blog" Ratcliffe are wondering what Skype's business model will be.

Skype will either go the way of a single global flat rate within their network once they have raised barriers to entry through network effects, or leverage the demand they have aggregated to charge for bridging to the PSTN, something Mitch pointed out as a challenge.

If they choose the latter, its not that much of a challenge technically and they can create intermediate peers in different countries connected to a softswitch to avoid paying for transport.

Skype has realized the geographical arbitrage dream while retaining call quality. Beyond Vonage arbitraging the local loop and originating carriers, it bypasses the need for terminating carriers. See a brief history on telephony arbitrage.

Finally a P2P app where content is self produced. Now all they need is a Mac version. 660k downloads and counting...

Life Follows Art

After listening to Terry Gross' interview with the front-man of Polyphonic Spree made me want to impulse buy the album. You will recognize their Light and Day song from Apple's Pods Unite commercials with a VW Bug and iPod.

Problem is the iTunes store doesn't carry the band. Huh?