Microsoft teams up to improve its Enterprise 2.0 offering

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Microsoft has just announced at the Web 2.0 Summit that it is partnering with Atlassian on its enterprise wiki product Confluence and Newsgator on its newly released Newsgator Social sites, which is “a collection of site templates, profiles, Web parts and middleware”. Both products will be integrated into Sharepoint.

This is a very interesting announcement on a number of fronts. It shows that Microsoft recognizes that its Enterprise 2.0 offering (what Microsoft calls “social computing”) needs bolstering. Sharepoint is fundamentally a collaboration and document management system, and in fact provides both the underlying capabilities and many of the functionalities required in applying Web 2.0 approaches inside the enterprise. However these are not always easy to set up and use, which is a requisite of Web 2.0 technologies. For example, since Sharepoint is among other things a richly-featured document management system, wiki-style functionality is a core part of the offering. However it is not an out-of-the-box capability, meaning administrators usually need to configure the setup, at least in the first case. RSS, another staple of Enterprise 2.0, can be enabled in any Sharepoint document. However again this is not an intuitive end-user function.

In this case, Microsoft is choosing to partner with leading companies in the space. Atlassian was featured as one of our five showcased companies at our Web 2.0 in Australia event, and ranked second on my list of top 60 Web 2.0 Apps in Australia earlier this year. Atlassian is the leader in enterprise wikis, saying 4,000 organizations globally using their wiki product. Its ease of use is one of the major advantages over the current Sharepoint wiki offering.

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Newsgator implements APML: the value of standards in an open world

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Attention Profiling Markup Language (APML), the standard for sharing attention profiles that I wrote about recently, has received a major boost today. The prominent RSS aggregator Newsgator has announced that it is implementing APML, while Engagd reports that a range of significant players are joining the APML working group, including social bookmarking site Ma.gnolia, feed reader Bloglines, online application provider Peepel, social recommendation tool Me.dium, and the semantic content platform Talis.

The diversity of the new participants in APML points to some of the value of the standard. Starting from the more obvious applications, APML can be implemented by any news aggregator or feed reader to provide personalized, relevant information to the user. Those aggregators that provide this extra level of value will be more useful. One of the most interesting emerging spaces at the moment is that of social browsing recommendations. I wrote a few months ago about Cluztr, a website that gathers complete data about everything that users do online, including every site that they click on and how long they spend there. One of the most valuable things that emerges is the ability to find what is most interesting to people with similar interest (or attention) profiles to yourself. Clearly appropriate security and boundaries to the use of the data are required, but given that, extremely personalized recommendations can be made. Me.dium provides a related service, overlaying the browsing recommendations with a social network that enables users to link to people with similar interest profiles.

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Why Web 3.0 is a meaningless term

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A couple of months ago when I was spending a few packed days of meetings up and down the 101 in Silicon Valley, several people asked me about Web 3.0. I told them pointedly what I thought, and at the time I determined to write a blog post on why Web 3.0 is a meaningless term, but never got around to it.

This seems worth coming back to, since Jason Calacanis has just proferred his own definition: “Web 3.0 is defined as the creation of high-quality content and services produced by gifted individuals using Web 2.0 technology as an enabling platform.”

Which is a fabulous illustration of my point: that when people refer to Web 3.0, it means whatever they want it to mean. In other words it’s a meaningless term until the point that there is a reasonable degree of common understanding of its meaning, so it can be used in a sentence and actually convey something.

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Video interview on Enterprise 2.0 by Melcrum/ KM Review

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The other day Alex Manchester, Editor of the Melcrum publications KM Review and The Internal Comms Hub, did a video interview of me, covering a broad range of issues relating to Enterprise 2.0 and the application of social media inside organizations. The video is posted on the Melcrum Blog as well as below. Soon Melcrum will post a slightly longer version on their site – I’ll post the info on this when it’s available.

A brief summary of the questions and answers in the video are below.

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Hitting the front page of del.icio.us: Studying the power of influencers and amplifiers

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Last weekend my blog had the most hits ever in one day by a factor of seven, as my blog post on Eight steps to thriving on information overload was featured first on Lifehacker, and in turn appeared on a variety of prominent sites, including del.icio.us popular, popurls, and then the front page of del.icio.us. It also received a good number of diggs, though it didn’t hit the front page of Digg.com.

It’s instructive to unpack how this happened. The first element was clearly content that hit a hot button for people, and was useful. A large part of my job is throwing at executives wild, provocative, and instructive insights from across everything that’s happening in technology and business, and helping them to make sense of it and take useful action. One of the most common responses, especially recently, has been to ask how I manage to keep on top of so much in a world run amok. Everyone is experiencing increasing pressure to keep up, and feeling they are not succeeding. Interestingly, my blog post was a repost of a magazine article I wrote ten years ago on this topic, showing the issue is a perennial. It’s only going to become more acute as years go by.

After I posted the article on August 27, there were a few blog posts about it, most notably by Jack Vinson, who excerpted the article on his blog two days later, and then mentioned it again a week after that. Jack has good, influential readership, especially in the knowledge management community.

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Six Trends that are transforming Living Online: Presentation at Influence conference

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Tomorrow I’m going to the Influence conference organized by Phil Sim and Mediaconnect, an invitation-only event held in the heart of the Hunter Valley wine region. Originally the event was only for technology journalists and the tech companies that wanted to reach them, but it has now been extended to the all most powerful influencers in the technology community, whether they are journalists, analysts, or bloggers.

Last year I spoke on the Web 2.0 panel, where I described what User Filtered Content is, and why it is such an important foundation to Web 2.0. This year I will be speaking on the Living Online panel, which is devoted to looking at where life online is going for consumers. In my brief introductory talk I will touch on six trends that will transform living online over the next years.

1. Pervasive connectivity

The trend underlying all the others is that we will be far more connected, wherever we are. Broadband speeds, while still disappointing in most countries, will continue to increase. A good way to think about it is to consider when the majority of consumers will have 100Mbps in the home. In Australia, probably not by 2010, but I would certainly hope by 2014. Gradually WiFi will become pervasive – and hopefully free – in metropolitan areas. WiMax has the potential to offer high speed roaming Internet access over large areas. As importantly, 3G mobile technologies that require less power and thus can be used for extended periods by handheld devices will enable access to the Internet by anyone anywhere. The critical enabler here will be reasonable pricing of mobile data. In Australia it is in most cases obscenely expensive, so big price falls will be required to make access pervasive. A key indicator of pervasive access is when car radios become IP-based, as this will indicate there is always good access to the internet, and all radio stations simulcast over IP.

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Tapping the Zeitgeist: Powerful tools for spotting online trends

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One of the most fabulous aspects of the online world is that trends are visible as never before. Since people’s interests are visible in what they search for and where they go, the zeitgeist becomes visible. Here is a brief review of some of the tools that give us insights into up-to-the-minute views on what we are collectively thinking and following.

Google Trends

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Google’s original Google Zeitgeist was replaced in May by the current Google Trends, which allows you to compare searches made on terms, correlates these with news and events, and enables you to drill down to activities in regions, cities and specific languages. The Hot Trends feature shows the hottest searches (as in most increased relative to usual levels) of the day.

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Eight steps to thriving on information overload

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Many of my keynote speeches focus on the future of business and where technology is going. One of the most common responses, and one I’ve heard many times after my speeches over the last few weeks, is to be staggered by the implications of where this is all going, followed by the question, “So how do I keep on top of everything that’s happening?” In a world in which the pace of developments and amount of information available in any given domain is soaring out of sight, it’s a very valid question.

I intend to spend more of my time answering this question in a practical fashion, as this has become an absolutely vital issue in a world of information run amok. For now, I thought I’d post an article I originally published 10 years ago in the October 1997 issue of Company Director magazine. Everything I wrote is still completely valid. However now we have access to many technological tools, which if used well, can assist us in coping with information overload. More on that later, along with some of the tools and approaches I find effective. The original article is here:

Information Overload – Problem or Opportunity?

“We have for the first time an economy based on a key resource [information] that is not only renewable, but self-generating. Running out of it is not a problem, but drowning in it is.” John Naisbitt, author of Megatrends.

Information overload is a fact of life for company directors, senior managers, and all professionals. Information is coming in from all sides in the form of reports, memos, newspapers, journals, and letters, and now the advent of e-mail and Internet has turned the torrent into a flood.

How can directors cope with the onslaught? Or rather, since we are businesspeople, it seems the question should be how can we turn the reality of the new business environment into an opportunity and a competitive advantage?

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Marketers accepting loss of control is on the way to the mainstream

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A recent article in Smartcompany magazine titled Web 2.0: The risk, the reward, discussed the opportunities and risks of Web 2.0, focusing on the lack of control in marketing in the new online world. It quotes extensively from lawyers on some of the legal realities of dealing with negative commentary online, and then goes on to quote from me:

If you also prefer to avoid lawyers altogether, another option is to hop into the online debate yourself. Internet strategy consultant Ross Dawson says web 2.0 is really about participation – and any company that ignores this does so at their peril.

“It cuts both ways,” says Dawson, noting that companies can’t choose to be invisible online. Web 2.0 is not about companies deciding to be rated; consumers comment on whatever they like.

“It’s important to understand that web 2.0 is not just about technology. It relates to social trends, including the trend towards self-expression,” Dawson says. “We’re living in a world where people can express their opinions far more freely.”

At a minimum, Dawson sees web 2.0 as a great opportunity for companies to monitor – for free – what consumers think about them and their products, competitors and industry.

“This is an extraordinary tool that any business should tap,” says Dawson, describing web 2.0 sites as a “treasure trove” of customer feedback. “Corporate Australia has been a massive laggard – two or three years behind many countries – in terms of takeup of web 2.0.”

His advice, if people say bad things about your company online, is to avoid lawyers and old-fashioned press releases. “If you want to respond effectively you have to be part of the same conversation. This diffuses the negativity and creates a balance in the conversation.”

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The future of video search

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One of the transformative technologies over the next 5-10 years will be improved video search. With video becoming the majority of digital content on the web, the ability to find what is relevant and useful is a vital task. Imagine being able to find, in a world dominated by video content (accelerated by eventually most mobile phones including video capabilities), the video segments most relevant to what you. In an interview on Beet.TV, Google’s Gabriel Stricker talks about Google’s ambition to search all video on the web, including the content on YouTube and the dozens of other video hosting sites. As he mentions, only a tiny fraction of existing video is on the web, so part of the task is helping video to migrate or be accessible on the web. On one level, this is about making it easier and more compelling for video creators – professional and amateur – to post their content on the web. Another innovation that will advance this is when all video cameras and video processing software come with one-step functionality to get content on the web.

One thing that Gabriel didn’t mention in the interview was the mechanisms that Google intends to use for video search. At the moment most video search uses only the title, any tags given by the author or others, and potentially words used in links to the video. To be truly useful, video search needs to index both the words and images in the video in a meaningful way. The first phase of this is now possible, with fairly good voice recognition technologies allowing traditional text search capabilities to be overlaid on the video search. Examples include Blinkx and Nexidia, which allow video search using its voice recognition and text indexing capabilities. One of the applications is to have contextual ads next to the video changing depending on what people are speaking about as the video proceeds. However the next phase, of recognizing and indexing the images in video, is largely beyond current technologies. Image recognition of even simply objects has proven to be one of the most difficult tasks in artificial intelligence. Massively greater computing power than we currently have available, along with far better evolutionary algorithms, will be necessary to be able to reasonably accurately identify what is relevant in video content.

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