The tidal wave towards free online news: New York Times online flourishes, Rupert shifts the playing field, Business Spectator challenges AFR

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A few days ago Rupert Murdoch reaffirmed his previously stated intention to make the Wall Street Journal online free. At this point WSJ.com is the biggest-earning online subscription content site, so this in itself is a critical shift for the industry. He has been reported as seeking 10-15 million viewers for the site, compared to the current 3 million, which given the fantastic reader demographics, would make up for the lost subscription revenue.

To support Rupert’s case, the September Nielsen Online figures for online newspapers are just out (see Editor and Publisher’s figures for the top 30 US online newspapers for September). These are the first figures since the New York Times disbanded its Times Select subscription section, making the whole paper free. The net result is 2.9 million more viewers in the month, rising to 17.5 million. It’s a tidy result. See the video interview of NYT’s Vivian Schiller on beet.tv for the background.

As has been reported in The Economist and elsewhere, the Financial Times firmly plans to maintain a subscription section. However it has opened up to the point that it allows 30 free article views a month, hardly a lock-out policy.

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Opening keynote/ video interview: IIR Enterprise 2.0 event – Sydney 3 December

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Conference organizer IIR will be first off the block with a conference on Enterprise 2.0 in Australia, with their Enterprise 2.0 event on 3-5 December in Sydney. At Future Exploration Network we had originally planned to run our Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum that week, so we had to rethink when IIR set their conference dates to coincide with ours. What we ended up doing is that we rescheduled our event to 19 February, I agreed to do the opening keynote at the IIR conference, and we will be allowed to distribute information about our Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum at the IIR event.

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My opening keynote at the IIR confernce will be on:

The Potential of Enterprise 2.0

* Applying Web 2.0 to the enterprise

* Understating the foundations of Enterprise 2.0

* Outstanding examples from Australia and internationally

* Understanding key implementation issues

* The Future of Enterprise 2.0

I’ll post more detailed notes and content from my keynote after the conference.

Aside from my keynote, there are a wealth of interesting presentations scheduled at the event, including from vendors such as Atlassian and Socialtext, case studies from companies including AGIMO, Telstra, Janssen-Cilag, Cochlear, Google, and NineMSN, and analysts such as Ovum and Ernst & Young. It will be a great kick-off for putting Enterprise 2.0 on the agenda for corporate Australia. The attendance fee is rather substantial compared to that for Future Exploration Network’s Executive Forum, though ours is a highly intense half-day event compared to the two days plus for the IIR event.

I did a video interview for IIR to help them promote the event, particularly in helping to explain to organizations why this is an important and relevant topic. The interview is below.

The attack of the killer online clones: how to keep ahead

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The availability of online services exchanges has been changing the nature of the online development business for a couple of years. Over two years ago in a blog post titled The rise of online services exchanges I described how sites such as elance.com, guru.com, rentacoder.com, and getafreelancer.com were globalizing services and tech development, and rapidly commoditizing fees to get work done.

Today Techcrunch has written about someone in Turkey who is asking on getafreelancer.com for a clone of Tangler.com, and is willing to pay $1500 for it. In an interesting coincidence, I caught up with Martin Wells, CEO of Tangler, at an event at Stanford University on Thursday evening, and we were talking about the online service exchanges, though more with a bent to getting work done.

Daniel on DRM finds other people looking for clones of Digg, eBay, Twitter and other leading online sites. I’m surprised that this is seen as noteworthy. None of this is new. Well over a year ago I saw over a dozen requests for Digg clones on Rentacoder. Has this resulted in the demise of Digg? Hardly. There are a few factors at play here.

The first is what the commentators today have focused on: the bidders are rather unlikely to create a worthwhile clone of these online sites for what they are getting paid. It shouldn’t be too hard to emulate a fairly simple site like Digg, though the rich functionality of Tangler is a bit more of a handful. Certainly you can’t expect robust, quality code at this kind of price.

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Network Roundtable: the state of organizational network analysis

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Having spoken at several of the Network Roundtable conferences since they were initiated three years ago, it was fantastic to come back to speak again at this year’s event in Charlottesville, Virginia. The predominant impression is that of maturity. At the first conferences, most of the speakers addressed the potential applications and the early insights. At this event, it is clear that there is widespread use of organizational network analysis (ONA) in US and global organizations, and that much of it is both well established and creating substantial value.

Rob Cross, the driving force behind the Network Roundtable and the success of Organizational Network Analysis, has now firmly established the discipline as a mainstream discipline. In three years the Roundtable has grown to have 98 leading organizations as members.

Major ONA initiatives at organizations such as Microsoft, Lehman Brothers, Montgomery Watson Harza and the like over a number of years have created both a longitudinal history of how networks evolve in organizations, and highly valuable business outcomes.

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Successful Enterprise 2.0 and Social Media: Speech at KMWorld 2007

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Today I am speaking at KMWorld 2007 in Silicon Valley on Successful Enterprise 2.0 and Social Media. The speech is based on Future Exploration Network’s Web 2.0 Framework, and how the framework can be applied to setting and implementing successful strategies for Enterprise 2.0.

I’ve provided the slideshow below, mainly for people who attend my presentation. As a speaker, I don’t believe in duplicating all the content of the speech in a presentation – slides should be visual cues to accompany what I am speaking about. So if you weren’t at the speech, don’t expect the presentation to make complete sense on its own, though you can get the general gist of the ideas and content by flipping through.

Alternatively download the slides as a pdf (2.9MB)

Here is a summary of the key points of the presentation:

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Tapping Networks to Bring the Best of the Firm to Clients

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Tomorrow I am presenting a keynote at the Network Roundtable conference at University of Virginia on Tapping Networks to Bring the Best of the Firm to Clients. This is the fruition of many years of work applying network analysis approaches to high-value client relationships. I will be talking about the big picture of what has been learned from a wide range of different studies of client relationship teams, and I will then hand over to Robert Burnside, Partner and Chief Learning Officer at Ketchum PR, who will discuss how Ketchum PR has been applying organizational network approaches to a number of situations, including enhancing the performance of one of their largest offices, leadership development initiatives, and their relationship with a large global client.

I usually don’t share my Powerpoint slides online, as they are primarily visual accompaniments to my speeches and don’t make much sense on their own, however in this case my presentation is far more text-based than normal and is probably is of some use to read, so I’ve put it here.

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Network Roundtable: Building Collaborative Teams

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The current presentation at the Network Roundtable conference is from Tamara Erickson, who has an article out in the latest issue of Harvard Business Review on Eight Ways to Build Collaborative Teams. Her organization, The Concours Institute, has recently completed an extensive study on collaboration in over 50 teams in 15 multi-nationals. She defines innovation as the combination of two previously unrelated ideas. Team complexity, including group dversity, size, and geographic dispersion, all led to lower levels of performance. In addition, the more educated the group, the less collaborative they tended to be. For complex teams, you have to invest specifically if you want them to perform well.

In the study Erickson identified eight factors that demonstrably improve team performance:

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Organizational networks: The variety of external networks

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I’m at the Network Roundtable conference at the University of Virginia, where I’m doing a keynote tomorrow on Tapping Networks to Bring the Best of the Firm to Clients. I’ll do a few posts over the next couple of days on what’s happening at the conference. Since the Roundtable is a consortium with some fantastic corporate members, this is the premier venue for not just the latest research into applying network analysis, but also what specific value organizations are getting from network approaches.

This morning is breakout sessions, where I’m participating in the one run by Myra Gorman from Community Analytics on Leveraging External Networks. As a small group, we’re looking both at the scope of external network studies, and a few specific cases from workshop participants.

The nominal focus of the Network Roundtable is Organizational Network Analysis, so it largely examines what happens within organizations, at issues such as organizational structure, collaboration, leadership, talent development, innovation, and so on. In this session on External Networks we discussed how networks underlie almost all aspects of the business, government, and not-for-profit sectors. Some of the key networks we discussed are:

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The state of Enterprise 2.0: adoption has begun in earnest

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Dion Hinchcliffe has written a very good piece titled The State of Enterprise 2.0 giving an overview of where we are. He says:

Increasing evidence abounds that Enterprise 2.0 adoption has begun in earnest with a typical example being Wells Fargo taking the plunge, having rolled out Enterprise 2.0 platforms to 160,000 workers. It has become clear that we’re moving out of the early pioneer phase to a broader acceptance phase. From the production side, a brand new analysis indicates that the business social software market will be nearly $1 billion strong this year and over $3.3 billion by 2011. In these and other ways, such as the growing collection of success stories, Enterprise 2.0 has arrived.

Dion goes on to list seven lessons on what we’ve learned on Enterprise 2.0. I have to wholeheartedly agree with every point, particularly the last one. I’ll expand more on this soon.

Go to the post for full details on each of the lessons.

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Announcing Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum: Sydney, 19 February 2008

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Future Exploration Network is running an Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum in Sydney on 19 February 2008. The event website is at www.futureexploration.net/e2ef.

The official description and current speakers are below. I also thought it was worth providing a bit of background to the event.

The genesis was at our Web 2.0 in Australia event, which was such a big success that it was clear we should do more on related topics. The event was at complete capacity, and we had to turn away all applications for two weeks before the event. Having been deeply involved in the enterprise space for many years, including working extensively on corporate knowledge management strategies in the 1990s, writing about corporate blogging in 2002 in my book Living Networks, organizing the Collaboration in Financial Services conference in New York in 2003, and applying network analysis to organizations globally for many years now, Enterprise 2.0 was an obvious topic to move on to. For well over five years now I have closely followed the application of Web 2.0 and social media tools inside organizations. This is now not only a mainstream business topic, it is also a phenomenon that over the next years will help transform how organizations work.

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