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Community and social computing
Guide to the Gamer generation for managers
rawn 100000R0P5 Tags:  games 2 Comments 3,081 Views
I picked up a copy of The Kids are Alright by John Beck and Mitchell Wade at the airport a few weeks ago. The subtitle How the Gamer Generation is is changing the Workplace is very apt. It is a sort of business-oriented sociological report on the behaviors, interests and incentives of this particular generation.
This is probably a must-read for all current managers and those who simply don't consider themselves as part of this generation. What is this generation you say? It's a cohort/generation that probably started around the early 1980s up until the current block of 10-year olds. They generally consider anyone over 34 or 35 to most likely not be part of this generation. I'm in that generation myself although I'm just about exactly at the cut off point.
This is one of those books that talks about the implicit life lessons that influenced those in this generation, even if they were not heavily into game playing. It is very likely that those in this generation were surrounded by this and the closer you get to the current time, the less likely that they know a world where video/computer games were not commonplace. The preface lists 7 Habits of Highly Typical Gamers which seem quite relevant to the behaviors I've experienced amongst others in this generation. I'd even put it as something to think about when designing or delivering products and services.
The book appears quite on the point but almost dates itself, not because of time necessarily but because it was likely written at the turning point in the game industry: the rise of MOGs (for the non-gamer generation folks: multiplayer online games). At one point of the book, it talks about how gamers are tuned into solely individual experiences, in that the game-world exists solely for them.
While this is/was case for single-player games, recent years have shown that multiplayer games can become successful, recurring sources of revenue. While single-player games are still the vast majority, many leading games now are either designed solely, or have special modes, for squad (4-6 players), team vs team (16-32 players), or massive-players (up to hundreds of thousands simultaneously).
Most WoW players today probably won't even understand that even ten years ago, even squad-team games were not worth their development time. I recall in 1996 trying to convince a VC and game developers to consider creating multiplayer games. Most just shrugged or plain laughed at the idea. Thank goodness for a reversal on that. (For me, it does suck to be way too early to a party and no one's there).
Anyway, MOGs may change the rules for gamers once again. One key point in this book is that because it's a world customized for your experience, it does not emphasize the more-challenging issues of building social connections within games. Even when players get together to play a game, with SP games, it was mostly a solitary experience. With MMOGs, players once more are faced with social relationships and often with total strangers from other locations, and with much larger crowds and changing people. On top of that technology has evolved so that it is even simpler to interact: actual live audio conversations rather than typing a lot of text, greater bandwidth and better computing power for richer environments, and even social networking sites for recording/blogging events, etc.
It's my belief that games are so much better these days for their multiplayer aspect. For myself, I started on MMOGs back in the text-based MUD days around 1990 or so, so I'm pretty ingrained into this from an early date. So when I play a top-10 single-player game like Oblivion, even with one of the richest environments, most detailed graphics and storyline, open ended gameplay, and a reactive environment, it still feels a little dull because of the lack of other real human players.
In any case, I'd be curious to see a followup to this book in another 4 years examining how MOGs have affected the gamer generation. Let's face it, after a certain point, you can't really call it a separate generation because games are likely going to be here from now on.
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SecondLife, playability, Nintendo Wii and the Age of Conan
rawn 100000R0P5 Tags:  games secondlife 2,428 Views
Eric Sniff and I were having a conversation on MMORPGs today starting with Age of Conan and eventually ending at SecondLife.
Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures (AoC) is an upcoming MMORPG that is based on the character and fantasy world created by Robert E Howard back in 1929. They are doing several things fairly interesting with this MMORPG starting with how you get into the game: you start off isolated in single-player mode within a fixed area playing until you develop your character to a certain degree and generally become familiar with the controls. It then transitions into the multiplayer world alongside everyone else. It solves a common current issue of game development and getting started on multiplayer games (dealing with noobs). The game is visually gorgeous, on par or perhaps better than Oblivion, one of the top single-player games of 2006.
One interesting aspect of the game is that rather than fixed predetermined attacks ('press this button for "slash"'), it is much more analog allowing more realistic combat. This means you actually have to direct the sword where to hit. This exact same feature is what I liked about another game available for the Nintendo Wii, Red Steel. (ok so I really do like swordfighting, and not just in real life)
The Wii itself is raising a new phenomenon in game, that of 3D motion-sensitive game controllers, where you have to move the controller around to perform an action, rather than simply a joystick or by pressing buttons. The Wii Remote and Nunchuk is changing how people play games rather than what they play. For example, if you're playing tennis, you have to wave the Remote around like a bat. Just look at what everyone is doing with it: tennis, bowling, fishing, swordfighting, etc.) It's only starting out and there's not a huge selection of games, but I for one am excited that this new direction is succeeding. Rather than playing an ever increasing war of more complex systems--not that I mind the improvements in graphics--Nintendo came up with real outside-the-box innovation. Now if it will only spread to PCs and other consoles.
This kind of playability got us talking about other issues of MMORPGs. This introduces even more information about each player's movements that have to be conveyed across the network to other players. It would be interesting if it strikes a good balance between playability and performance with this level of complexity. Some of it lies in the problem of managing servers... I'll come back to that.
Where most MMORPGs require a lot of work in development is filling out the world. SecondLife which is not a game in particular but still a MMO system solves this by letting users develop the world. That however results in a wide variety in the environment from the well-made to the random garbage and litter. But the question remains: can you design an MMO where the game is networked and functions peer-to-peer style, rather than a multi-server based system run by a company like most MMORPGs.
With most true peer-to-peer systems, each client itself is smart enough to provide the application environment and only the peers that interact exchange traffic, rather than a more centralized system of servers (even if distributed). Games like AoC have the capability to display everything in one user's direct view in 3D, but it works well when all that data is local on the drive. If new data was available (new buildings, environment features, etc.) in each peer, they would need to be transferred to other peers that interact with them, and in a 3D world, that may be a lot of data.
SecondLife does a slightly different model I believe (I only understand the server system on a basic level), where each island is a server and all avatars on that island are essentially on the same server. When you move off an island by walking, flying or teleporting, it transfers the avatar object to the other island. This can be slow in redrawing all the details when receiving the data a bit at a time. This isn't bad or incorrect, it is a matter of complexity and traffic.
Who knows? The net certainly has grown by a billion percent since the old days of text muds with a max of 3000 simultaneous players. Game development has reached magnitudes of greater sophistication. MMORPG players today simply demand a lot more and there are a lot more of them. They're certainly taking over or replacing other forms of entertainment (in terms of dollars).
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Tim O'Reilly on future of Web 2.0/Internet
I listened to our pre-release version of the 40-minute podcast interview with Tim O'Reilly, recorded by our editor Scott Laningham recently. It starts out as a backgrounder for how O'Reilly & Associates got started but moves quickly into the nature of participation, how the Internet and the web is the medium for new business, and the participatory nature of the net (what is now referred to as Web 2.0). Tim agrees with the other Tim (Sir Tim Berners-Lee) that really the term web 2.0 only serves to clarify the aspect first initiated with the Internet: network effects.
It's available on dW Radio and definitely worth listening to. I'll probably make it a supplementary piece for our MIS students to listen to for the class.
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Russian IPTV beats my cable box
Well, I'm back from vacation and in Tucson, after a few weeks in Austin and Ft Myers to see the folks. My mom in Austin saw the baby for the first time, and so did her dad in Florida. Her dad in fact, got to relive an experience he last had many years ago: changing a diaper. Florida was nice and warm. We even got to spend a day at the beach, which started out with a few people but was completely packed by the time we left. We also drove down to Marco Island to visit my old friend Tom and see their new baby Grace (and their new house).
In any case, back to the topic...
I recently got my first glimpse of practical IPTV in action in the form of Russian TV channels that you can watch over the Internet. Both were streamed down from other countries: Russia and Canada. Considering that I have a very common cable modem set up here, the quality of the picture was amazing. On my big screen TV, one of the streamed video came down at 640x480 size (I'm guessing) as a media player in the web browser. Completely clear, no jitters, no lost data or any kind of performance issues. The other IPTV service was from a site in Canada I believe and that was an even larger picture, 4:3 proportion but taking the full height of my 46" TV. The wonder was that this looked even better than some of my local (non-digital, non-HD) cable channels.
I'd have to see it again during busy net times like Monday morning to see if there are lags, dropped packets, etc., but I think I'm pretty sold on IPTV. YouTube is complete rubbish compared to this. If the two were cities, YouTube would be like Dhaka (overpopulated and a complete mess), compared to the Singapore quality of these IPTV stations. Now if they only had more stuff worth watching than Russian news and TV shows. I'm sure I'll have to hunt around.
The Consumer Electronics Show is also underway in Las Vegas this week and according to CNet, IPTV is one of the lead topics, with speakers like Bill Gates, Bob Iger (Disney), and Leslie Moonves (CBS) all on it. I wonder how much longer it will be before IPTV streaming through a media device like the SlingBox--letting me combine not just my own AV sources at home, but also those from the net--becomes a reality?
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Function of a community manager
rawn 100000R0P5 Tags:  community_manager 2,026 Views
Ed Elze from our jStart team asked me what I think is the role and job function of a community manager. Ed and I were manning the both for our respective teams at the recent O'Reilly Web 2.0 summit. jStart and their parent organization created QEDwiki, a mashup builder that you can try out on the alphaWorks services site.
In any case, per Ed's question:
I describe the Community Manager (CM) role as a team leadership, and support role, which doesn't require technical programming/development or systems administration knowledge, but does need some experience in using the tools for the community. I'd divide their job up into the following areas:
While the term "manager" is part of the name, this is not a classic functional manager or even a matrix manager role. This is primarily because the expectation is that the people in the community may not be part of your team (in the organization), or even part of your organization at all. If they are to support an external community, they need to treat each member with the proper respect due to a customer, even if they are part of your organization. This complicates things in some peoples minds: are they a tech support person, a marketing person, a PR person, a sales person? Probably none of them solely, and perhaps all of them to some bit.
In a perfect world, you'd have one community manager per community, but it is more likely they'd have multiple if not dozens of communities to work with in an organization. Even the definition of a "community" is vague here. In terms of size some communities could be a dozen people while others could be thousands-strong. The work is not quite proportionate, and what's worse, the amount and which elements of the above work you need to do, may vary with the mission, activities, and even tooling of the online community. For example, I tend to look at a blogger as being the center of their own community, and having a hundred bloggers, means that you have a hundred communities; however, the issues you may need to help your bloggers with can be different per blogger, or different when compared against a discussion forum-based community.
However, what is key to note is that when they are not present, things start to fall apart. A typical scenario I've seen is that a company decides they need forums and blogs started and really don't set guidelines or have a CM. If say a member starts harrassing another member, they turn to the sysadmin to fix it, as if it is solely a technical problem. There are right ways of handling situations and wrong ways, and unless the sysadmin takes the time to do the things that a CM does, then you might end up in a bigger pickle. In many similar situations, the sysadmins have to figure things up from scratch, eventually playing the role of a CM.
The key skills needed for the job are:
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my dW Interview
In the mix of the travel and other things, I'd almost forgotten about this dW podcast interview I did earlier this month. Scott and I talk about the online communities course in this interview.
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Upgrading the Managing Online Communities course
We'll be upgrading the Managing online commuities course next semester. The last I heard, the new course number will be MIS 424/524. This means that it will be a both undergrad (senior) & grad level course. Partially it is administrivia: grad students and professionals want to take it and can't do that as a 300-level (junior) course. Next semester, you don't have to be a degree-seeking student to register for this course, but yes, it is still local (rather than an online course) and a full semester long.
To go with that we will need to revise some of the cirriculum as well as add additional work appropriate for graduate level students. Unfortunately, I have not had much time to think about that and may not have it done before I leave on vacation in two weeks. I guess I get to take my laptop along and work a little over the holidays.
One of the regular assignments we have is analysis of news articles and papers on Web 2.0 and social projects and sites, and a presentation to the class. This semester has been more freeform to see what students will come across. For the grad level, I think we will need them to provide greater insight into the site they review: what is their business model/how do they make money or pay for it; how do they attract/retain visitors; how do they reward members; etc.
The final project also needs to start much earlier to give our students more time to complete the work. Apparently there was some confusion on what they were supposed to do. Also the selection of tools at their disposal were not sufficiently varied. We'll try and look for more tools per my previous note.
We like the aspect of interfacing with high schools, but we may need to expand to more schools to have a larger user base. The complication is that each trip to the high school has some overhead involved for both parties; the high school computers have firewalls/filters for some sites which are relevant; they may not be adequately equipped for enough students; high school classes may have a lot of movement (people come in and out of class often). A better way would be to bus the high school students to a controlled environment like the Hoffman ecommerce lab at UAMIS.
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Managing Online Communities course on local ABC TV
The local ABC affiliate in Tucson (KGUN9) came by on Monday and recorded our Managing Online Communities class. Our students were presenting their final project concepts at Howenstine High school at the time, so you won't see me in it. The video shows some of the students presenting as well as the high school students participating. They interviewed one of the high school students, their teacher and the UAMIS teacher, Andrea Winkle, talking about the event.
It was a little chaotic from the students presentations' perspective: power was out for half the workstations and they were trying to fix it in the middle of class; the media crew and later the photographer (hired by the University) were all around; the high school Internet access blocked some of the sites that our students built their project on; and people just kept coming in and leaving for random reasons. Anyway, I still think it was successful but we may need to rethink the format a little and perhaps the tools our students can use.
Their final project requires them to create and build a concept for what their audience may want to use out of any combination of Web 2.0 tools they want. Some of our students are more technical than others so some actually wrote the software, while others used the service apps we had or on other sites. We can't show the projects until our students are done with it but I can describe some of them:
I think next semester we need to pick out a selection of free resources they can build their project on. From the Web 2.0 Summit, I added to my list of such resources that let you build your own social network on their service: Ning.com, GoingOn.com, Xing.com, netvibes's ecosystems, ITtoolbox.com.
I'll keep looking for more; we want to offer people a number of different options so they can work on innovative ideas. Again, this is not a programming class, and we don't expect that they'll build one of their own or modify these extensively, but you never know what will happen.
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SOA Compass in Russian and Japanese
Our SOA Compass book is out in Russian and in Japanese, on different international book vendor sites. These were translations done from our own English version and released just recently. Norbert from our author team, indicated that they tried to translate the meaning of the title rather than a literal translation. Our names are also translated phoenetically according to Norbert's wife who learned Russian in school.
Now if I can only figure out the web site enough to purchase a few copies for myself... Can anyone translate?
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Tim Berners-Lee initiates "Web Science" academic research
According to a recent New York Times article, Tim Berners-Lee is partnering with MIT and the Univ of Southampton (UK) to launch their Web Science Research Initiative. I don't have much more information than that but it sounds like a graduate level research space into a more modern version of social networking analysis. The key people are Berners-Lee, Wendy Hall (head of School of Electronics and CS at U of Southampton), Nigel Shadbot (prof of AI, Univ of Southampton), and Daniel Weitzner (principal research scientist at MIT).
Quote from the release:
Commenting on the new initiative, Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of theWorld Wide Web and a founding director of WSRI, said, "As the webcelebrates its first decade of widespread use, we still knowsurprisingly little about how it evolved, and we have only scratchedthe surface of what could be realized with deeper scientificinvestigation into its design, operation and impact on society.
"The Web Science Research Initiative will allow researchers to take theweb seriously as an object of scientific inquiry, with the goal ofhelping to foster the web's growth and fulfill its great potential as apowerful tool for humanity."
I'm pretty sure the web is already an object of serious scientific and even commercial inquiry, but more effort is always a good thing. In comparison, our undergraduate UAMIS class seems much less conceptual. I'm sure those ideas will eventually trickle down to us too. Social network analysis is a complex enough task, and not a simple topic; i.e., it'd need a full-blown semester to teach.
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We're now on Podtech.net too
Thanks to Greg Hamilton and Scott Laningham, we are now on Podtech.net as well. Some of the entries are specific podcasts that Scott produces, and ther is a on-page player in the right hand column after the tag cloud that's pretty cool looking.
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web2 conf coming
rawn 100000R0P5 Tags:  web_2.0 conferences 2,494 Views
Wow, almost every hotel I looked around in SF is full for this Web 2.0 conference. Serves me right for pushing it till this week (although I just got confirmation from O'Reilly this week). Anyway, while I'm not at the booth, I'll probably go to a few sessions and need to figure out which ones would be the most interesting to attend. Unlike many other conferences, there are only a few which are multibooked; most of the sessions are sequential, which gives time to see everything (if you're free and so inclined, that is). Unfortunately, some of the session descriptions are so vague, I have no idea what they plan to talk about.
For example, take this workshop's description:
As business software begins to learn from Web 2.0, a new class of enterprise software services is emerging: Enterprise 2.0. We will discuss how Enterprise 2.0 services can and should work, and how such software can leverage the behavior of users to become smarter and more useful the more people use it.
Seriously, that could mean just about anything.
Yahoo's web 2.0 strategy may be a good one. Rod Smith from our Emerging Internet Technologies will be talking about what SOA has to do with Web 2.0 and that's relevant to my area too. Although, Don Tapscott has another session at the same time too.
The Launchpad event should be interesting to see what startups are coming up with. And certainly all the "Conversations" with all the big names out there. So many to see... Makes me wonder how much time I'll actually be able to spend attending these.
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SOA Compass book still in the lead
Our SOA Compass book is still going strong after one year on bn.com and on Amazon. It changes places sometimes when new books come out, or with events, but I'm just glad to see it in the top ten for SOA books. It's been a year to this month that the book went out and we've had quite a few comments, reviews, and questions about it over the year. . In that time, the number of SOA books out there are rapidly climbing and as this technology (or is it business?) evolves, I'm sure even more will emerge.
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MIS course in the press (a list)
Several people have asked me where this news about the MIS course went out, so I've compiled a list and placed it on my wiki. There are at least 10 articles in traditional media and a bunch of blog entries.
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my left wiki and press on MIS course
It's been quite exciting past few days. The news about the MIS course just went out on Wednesday, and I've been playing catch up since on email.
You can check this quick Google News search, for some of the stories from ComputerWorld, Dr. Dobb's Journal, ebizQ, TMCnet, RedHerring, and even a digital learning cluster in Finland. Here in Tucson, it was the lead story in yesterday's Arizona Daily Star business section, and was mentioned in the Tucson Citizen, and while driving I heard it over the radio from the local PBS station, KUAT.
I've also finally put up my wiki with this quick path to info on the MIS course (the rest of the wiki is still mostly blank).
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Web2.0 conference, topics and the course
rawn 100000R0P5 Tags:  education conferences 2,686 Views
No end of activities going on for me. I just returned from a trip to talk about Web 2.0. Lot's of interesting discussion and actually the bigger interest was on how dW manages a community.
I should be heading out again to the Web 2.0 conference by O'Reilly in November. (If you are at the show please come by the developerWorks booth and keep me company for a few minutes.) Things are obviously heating up for the startup market in this area. I'm going to have to take a closer look at some of the companies going to the conference.
One question I do get about our MIS course is what Web2.0 products we use and talk about. We use mostly open source tools like MoinMoin for a wiki, Wordpress for blogs, and Audacity for recording podcasts. However, we do talk about a whole lot more sites and products than what we use. Obviously it is hard to put all of these into use for several reasons: (a) time, (b) longevity, (c) utility, and (d) topic.
Even with a 14-week semester course there is a whole lot to discuss in this space. Any tool that you put into the course requires us to at least have a half-class on using the tool (as well as time in followup classes to discuss uses), and preparing a proper assignment for the tool. Next, the Web2.0 market is changing so rapidly, today's players may be tomorrow's laggards; it's hard enough to follow. The utility of the tool may depend on the environment we have; not all tools are readily something you can use for a class environment. Finally, the most important is if it fits into the overall topic. This is not intended to be a tools or programming class and we want to build a general knowledge about the types or categories of tools that are the most prevalent or significant.
This is why the majority of the tools mentioned in the course are discussion or presentation items only. In time, we may accommodate more tooling but that is still secondary to the knowledge we want the students to gain.
So for the Web2.0 conference, I'll be keeping an eye out for dW, for this class, and just for general interest too.
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The most expensive coffee I've ever had... ($150/lb)
rawn 100000R0P5 Tags:  caffeine 3 Comments 4,754 Views
My friend John--also known as Action Figure John but that's a different story--brought by the most expensive coffee I'd never heard of until then. This coffee is so hard to produce that I doubt Starbuck's or Peet's could ever list it on their boards.
Jamaican Blue Mountain, you say? Pshaw... that's middle class stuff... :)
Around $150 or more a pound for the roasted beans, this coffee has to be shipped directly from the plantation. It is the legendary Kopi Luwak... and here's where the snickering begins.
This exotic coffee from Indonesia can only be found on plantations in Sumatra, Java and Sulawesi. Not only do they have to grow a good bean but it requires the assistance of Paradoxurus hermaphroditus, the Palm Civet (/snicker). This small mammal is common in many parts of South-East Asia and does the very important function of eating the raw red berries, digesting them, and then pooping them out! (/snicker /snicker) The enzymes from the digestive tract apparently help to break down some of the bitter proteins. The happily fed mammal then walks away to eat another day. Farmers collect the beans and give it a light roast, then vacuum pack it and ship it to coffee extremists worldwide. John ordered it from AnimalCoffee.com I believe.
I just had to try this out, even though I'm not a coffee drinker myself.
For our afternoon of watching the Tivo'd new season episode of Battlestar Galactica, John brought his pristinely packaged poo poo coffee, along with his shiny brass coffee pot and burner, which he uses to make Turkish/SE Mediterranean coffee (yes, the true gritty stuff).
John ground a handful of beans in his brand new matching brass hand-mill coffee grinder, since it gets smaller grains than an automatic mill. It takes about a good 5-10 minutes of grinding to get it that way though. Then with some fine drinking water for fewer impurities, boiled over a small alcohol stove, the coffee came out quite nicely.
Not being a coffee connoisseur--here's a link from someone who's more in tune with it--allI could tell is that it was still a little bitter but had no harshness atall. It was strange to me but the others liked it.
He thinks we stillneed to refine how much coffee to water and how fine to grind it. Thegrit was not as fine as the Turkish coffee he usually drinks (about 2pots a day). But as you can see none of it went to waste, and people quite enjoyed it to the bottom. (/snicker)
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Crowdsourcing community use-case
rawn 100000R0P5 Tags:  collective_intelligence use-cases education 1 Comment 3,429 Views
We talked about crowdsourcing as a particular community use-case. It definitely counts as a use-case because of the use of multiple community services, tools and need for potential CMs.
(I looked up Wikipedia but there's no entry right now, so perhaps I'll have to add one)
The concept itself is far from new but the delivery is. The core idea is that you pick a topic, invite a crowd to discuss or brainstorm on it, pick top ideas, let people vote on it. The way it's being applied in online communities is interesting. Take a look at a recent Businessweek story on this (and an earlier one from July).
The following is from our slide on this item that draws some from this:
There are plenty of other examples I'm sure that I left out.
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Class notes from the MIS course
rawn 100000R0P5 Tags:  education academic_initiative 2,844 Views
I do get requests from others on what the notes for this couse contains. The course is definitely one "in the moment", as in, "it's trying to keep up with the latest." The topics we discuss does involve tooling but more for experiential purposes than core training. Because it's so recent, I have not found a single book that could apply across the whole topic. I found about a good 15 books or so that could do it, but I don't think the students would enjoy having that much to read. Nonetheless, there's a need for a book and the students expect it.
In the meantime, the course is a combination of :
I'll ask the public: do you think I should put this information together into a book?
I've written or co-written about 6-7 books already but they are always so much more work than the time/payoff. There are a lot of books out there but as I said, this is a how-to course and not specifically on tools or a particular category (e.g., blogging). Anyway, let me know what you think.
So far, I have not mentioned more details of the final project because we have not yet told the students--if you're reading this--what it entails. We'll probably describe this in the next week or so, and I'll post it then.
I've asked our dev team to set up a wiki for me and hopefully should have one soon. I'll see about post the notes, and files there.
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UofA MIS 300 student blogs
rawn 100000R0P5 Tags:  education academic_initiative 2,868 Views
As part of the Managing online communities course, students have a semester-long assignment to blog weekly. This is to force the habit of writing on a regular basis and feeling the experience for themselves. As a Community manager they would have to try to encourage other people to blog regularly, but as most bloggers know (most blogs fail due to lack of updates) it isn't trivial to write on a regular basis. When you hit the workforce, it becomes even more difficult.
In any case, all our MIS 300 blogs can be read by the public. I think only the first 38 of those blogs are operational (the number of students we have). You'll find varying degrees of creativity and coverage, but that is to be expected.
Other tools-based assignments include those on forums, group editing a wiki, and creating a podcast. I'll try to point to those when they are ready.
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Better micro-vacuum cleaners
Nevermind the big Hoover, Dyson or other whole house vacuum cleaners, what someone needs to invent is a small/micro version to use in small areas like say inside computers, around your media equipment, etc. You won't believe how dusty it gets in Arizona, even in a house where we don't open windows or such, and a whole house electrostatic filtration system (like the Shaper Image Quadras but built into the ventilation system).
It could be just as simple as a much more flexible and small attachment to a regular house vacuum. The attachment should be small enough to fit my palm but the hose needs to be long enough to reach all the crevices and such.
(Guess what I'm doing today)
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Marketingprofs calls attention to ads in virtual worlds
rawn 100000R0P5 Tags:  marketing secondlife virtual_environments 2,461 Views
Marketingprofs has something to say about using virtual environments as the next venue for advertising. The examples they give come from SecondLife, CokeStudios, and others like it. Unfortunately, it ends with a lot of questions everyone else is asking already, but its a nice overview.
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Good Player mods deserve more credit
rawn 100000R0P5 Tags:  virtual_environments games secondlife baby 2,498 Views
In search of more turn-based games to fill my baby-watch time (see my reasons), a friend told me about this fantasy mod for Civ IV where they redesigned the gameplay almost from ground up. I went looking for it and found Fall from Heaven, a free player mod (version 1.0 released in April) that rewrites much of the Civ IV game from classic countries and developing nations, to more of one set in a fantasy world where it is about improving characters and combat. If you want to download this use the download.com site; they also have some screenshots there.
The set up is that there are a number of different races: orcs, merfolk, minotaurs, knights, etc. that each have their own religion. The units are very different and there are many more upgrades/enhancements that each character can get. Thus most people start with Warriors that can actually last quite a while gaining new skills. The city buildings are completely different with lots of added benefits: with wine, your brewery raises revenue and food; hunting lodges to improve your scouts to hunters and assassins. You can tame wild animals, etc. The tech tree is very different, and so are many of the Wonders.
While the map style looks the same and some of the units are still around, the gameplay is quite original. This took a lot of work to put together. This is what I call a player mod done right. Most other mods are simply changes to the units, or smaller fixes here and there. I'm surprised Firaxis doesn't consider licensing and selling this commercially. I'd put this comparable to the Rise of Nations commercial add-on, Rise of Legends, but instead of three new nations, this one has about eight. It's obviously more well known because of the big marketing engine of Microsoft Games behind it.
It's these kinds of player mods that I really enjoy. From over a decade ago, the MMORPG text-only games like MUDs had a programming aspect to it so users could add more areas to the game. Most MMORPGs don't allow that any more because of uncontrolled growth and often poor execution on most users parts. Secondlife, while not really a game, is gaining a lot of success (see Wired article) because it goes the very opposite direction: build all you like. It can be chaotic, but this is really pure capitalism at work: the successful ones should get the most attention and reward. To make a success, you need good planning and execution, as well as all the other things: marketing, delivery, customer satisfaction, etc., but it still starts with having a good idea that people will want.
I was about to go pay $50 to buy a new game like Caeser IV, but I thinkthese guys should get my money instead, if I can figure out how.They're off working on the next version, Fall from Heaven 2.
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Computer games for new fathers
rawn 100000R0P5 Tags:  games baby 2 Comments 2,929 Views
I was discussing this topic with several other friends today: when it's your turn to watch the baby, what computer game do you play?
I have a night shift from 8 to about 12 to watch the baby and the best game I can play is Civilization IV. It's a little older now but it's still a good game and the turn-by-turn basis gives me a lot of time in case I need to stop and attend to him. Also Civ IV is can be played almost as well whether you have just a keyboard or just a mouse, which is an important factor when you have to do your turn one-handed (while bouncing on a big rubber ball holding the baby). Also, the game takes many hours to finish and that is just what I need.
My friend Eric is/was quite into World of Warcraft, but when the baby cries, he put his priest character into "follow" mode. Unfortunately, that doesn't always work so well, when the others need your help. E.g., they're off fighting a creature and you're just standing there while others are begging you to heal them. So, I won't mention what his character's name is...
Another friend plays a version of Half-Life--I think it's Team Fortress--where you can turn your character to Observor mode, thus essentially making your character invulnerable but ineffective in the game. Your teammates still probably won't appreciate you taking yourself out.
Anyway, I've played Civ IV to death and new I'm looking for another building/management strategy game. I hear good things about Caesar IV, so its next on my list.
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MIS 300 Managing online communities going well
rawn 100000R0P5 Tags:  academic_initiative education 2,883 Views
I've certainly been slow blogging this month, and I'm using the "new baby" excuse :) Not entirely true, but I'm catching up with things at work and the on-going projects we have.
The UofArizona MIS 300 course is going well. We're about a month into the semester and the enrollment has been at 37 students. It's larger than we expected but not unmanageable. Per my previous post, this course is on preparing students for roles in community management. We certainly have hands-on work with social software tools, but the overall goal is more around designing and planning your community, how to keep it growing, how to market and measure it.
The course is also about cooperation, communication, and leadership, so there are other in-class exercises when the Junior level undergrads have to do activities like presentations, pair tasks, group tasks and of course the final project of building a community of other real students and helping to train their community. It helps also to make it fun.
The hopeful outcome is a base level of understanding where they can go into a new entry level position as community manager for a company. Since these roles are still quite varied and evolving, there would be a lot of learning on the job that still needs to happen, but at least they will understand the basics and the personality aspects required of them.
My other hope is that we can reach out to other companies who are looking for such people for coops or internships with these skills.
This week we've started everyone on blogging. They each have to post several times a week on Wordpress accounts and connect with other bloggers, and continue doing so for the rest of the semester. This will likely be trivial for some but not for others. It takes a bit of motivation to blog on such regular frequency and that depends upon the people. Hopefully later this year, I'll demo some of this. This is so they understand what they are asking of a potential blogging community, learn the components of blogs, and experience the issues themselves.
They will also go through assignments to collaborate on a wiki, create their own podcast or videocast, and so on, all the let them become familiar with these from a users perspective.
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KodakGallery and Bluetooth/wireless sniping
I'm back from family leave. The baby and mom and doing great, and we have no end of pictures. We've even started a site on Kodakgallery.com just for the family and friends. It's a much simpler way of selectively sharing a large number of photos with a group of people, although not quite an open social site. It's more of a private portal per owner. I think this used to be Ofoto before Kodak reopened it under their brand name. Unlike Flickr, it doesn't openly share pictures with everyone, but each site has its use. In fact, the better way would be to have both visibilities (public and private) through proper access control mechanisms, and let the owner figure out what they'd like to share.
Anyway, I found this article on Tom's Networking on building a Bluetooth sniper rifle, where you can scan open bluetooth devices from hundreds even thousands of feet away, all built from common parts for a few hundred dollars. So, if you have bluetooth cell or laptop, please make sure you try to keep it secure.
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sword cutting science 101
rawn 100000R0P5 Tags:  swordfighting 2,103 Views
I was reading over the Association for Renaissance Martial Arts site the other day on The Myth of Thrusting versus Cutting swords and What did historical swords weigh? Both are excellent pieces from a european weapons background. The first describes the classic question of swordfighting on which attack style was more effective. European swords diverged early in the medieval period into war weapons and lighter weight day weapons, until the Rennaisance era espoused the benefits of a light thrusting point as the most effective in terms of speed. This light weapon which we today see in the rapier, epee and foil became the weapon of choice for the gentry; nothing as crude and barbaric as a heavy war weapon. In modern terms, it's the equivalent of arguing on if you are Heavy Truck Guy, or if you prefer nimble sports cars.
In terms of effectiveness, the thrust can be quite a damaging attack since it sinks deep, can puncture multiple layers of tissue and organs. It creates a small open wound (rather than the blood-splurting everywhere Quentin Tarantino/John Woo-sytle), but without modern medicine, a strike at the torso could easily become lethal. On the other hand, if you don't hit an important spot, the opponent is still there. This works great for gentlemenly duels but not very practical in actual combat.
The cut or slash takes more strength and physically takes a greater distance of sword travel to be effective, but if it didn't totally amputate something it would eviscerate the muscle and probably break the bones, essentially disabling that body part. You may need more strength with this but that depends upon your weapon's weight and fighting styles.
European heavy weapons were not generally huge and weighty but ranged around 3 pounds and certainly less than 6 pounds for most backswords, broadswords, and such. This is still more than most katanas that are around 2.5 pounds. Also the katana is primarily a two-handed weapon, thereby balancing the weight more evenly, whereas a 3lb backsword is still much heavier to carry on one hand, even 2.5 pounds.
I've never weighed my own primary katana precisely but it's probably about 2.5 lbs, maybe a little more. I do cut single handedly with that but it takes a lot more control with finer muscles. Two hands gives not only more strength but also more importantly better control of the weapon. While the first article talks about the katana being a very effective thrusting weapon, we primarily teach only a single type of thrust or tski.
I was watching National Geographic Channel the other day, a show called Fight Science. This was a really good show but when it came to the bit about the dynamics of swords, I was again disappointed by the poor technique they presented. The thrust for example was shown as an underhanded (rather than overhanded) one, and with the elbow even bent some. This technique simply ignores the skeletal structure, body positioning and only uses muscle to power the thrust. In other words, it takes more strength than necessary to be effective. Thus it would take an extremely fit 200 lb man to deliver the same blow as something a medium fit 100lb middle-schooler could do. (We have had both 300lb 26yr old football players and 80lb 15yr olds in our class, and they both can do almost the same level of attacks). One thing we tell our students is not to waste energy if you don't need to. All you need is one really good hit.
I was really impressed with their Kyudo (archery) demonstration in the show. I'm unranked in Kyudo since I never carried the practice very far, but it looked very serene. Yoga joke: After many hours of yoga practice in a full room, the one person that remains still standing on one leg tree-pose shouts out: "I AM THE SERENEST!" :)
Unfortunately the martial arts world is full of people with heavy egos. The dedicated ones feel slighted if you debate with them, but their intentions are still true: they want to interest and excite more people into their field of study. Even the own style I learn could do a lot more than focus on good cutting techniques. It could do well with more stamina building, more groundwork, more balance work, more disarms and trips, etc. All in good time and there's plenty to learn from. It should be interesting as we go to start an entirely new class/club at the U of Arizona this Fall.
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What people and companies are doing on SecondLife
rawn 100000R0P5 Tags:  secondlife virtual_environments 2,327 Views
Ian Hughes pointed me to the eightbar teams summary of what some companies have been building on SecondLife over the past months, including Warner Bros., American Apparel, Major League Baseball, the BBC, and Amazon.
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Welcome Ryhan Haroun Shah
Our son Ryhan Haroun Shah was born on Friday 8/18 at 12:19pm.
He was 7lbs 3.5oz and 19 3/4 inches. Both mom and baby are doing great.
I'm taking a couple of weeks off, so I may not blog for a while. Incidentally the MIS 300 course on Managing Online Communities is also starting today at the Univ of Arizona.
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workstation problems and bluetooth keyboards
rawn 100000R0P5 Tags:  toys virtual_environments 2,743 Views
I spent the whole weekend trying to get rid of some undetected virus on my machine, even to the point of upgrading to a newer version of Windows. Still no luck and our internal helpdesk hasn't gotten back to me yet. Quite frustrating after about 20 hours of this (over three days). Now, I'm just sitting and waiting for tech support to call back.
Anyway, in the meantime, I went out and picked up the new Logitech MX-5000 Laser bluetooth keyboard and mouse. This one has a much greater range, with a claim of 60 feet. I can't really test that out in our house but I'm glad that I don't have to trail an RF wireless box across my carpet so I could use my previous keyboard/mouse. It seems to work fine from at least 40 feet away so that's much better. The old one needed almost line-of-sight of maximum 4 feet.
Our home computer is hooked up to our big screen in the family room, so we can use it whenever as well as watch any online video or play music from it. This set up works to a point. The screen is a Sharp Aquos 45" LCD TV which advertises 1920x1080, but that is really only for the HD signal and not the PC signals. The PC input channel only goes up to 1280x1024. However, on top of that, since it's wide screen, the text will look squished. So pratically, the maximum resolution you can get is 1280x768. Unless you actually expect to read anything from our couch (9' away)...
To get actual practical use out of it, we have to drop the resolution down to 1024x768 (since there is no widescreen 1024x600 on this nVidia GeForce card. It's not too bad, especially when some of the games can automatically change the resolution to higher settings. The Aquos is a nice TV certainly and uses only a third of the power of a plasma screen which makes me happier. This one uses less power than our previous 27" Sony Wega CRT TV.
However, I have yet to see full 1080p on this, since we don't own a hidef DVD player yet. The closest we come is the Cable TV HD channels which are 1080i. The shows which are actually recorded in HD look absolutely stunning, especially the nature shows where they go to the trouble to get the color right. The ESPNHD channel is also pretty good, but Cox cablevision doesn't receive all the HD channels as satellite does. The digital non-HD channels really do look and sound better than the regular ones; something I had not been able to tell until we get this newer TV earlier this year. Sci-fi channel really needs to get their own HD channel if they haven't already. Battlestar Galactica on the UNIHD (Universal Studios) channel looks just amazing.
My only lingering complaints about this TV is that they still haven't gotten black down and it needs better viewing modes. The blacks still look a little grey even at the lowest settings. You don't even need special equipment to tell that. Also the viewing modes allow Smart stretch, and Zoom but what they need is a second Zoom to allow widescreen movies (from DVD) to truly take up the full height. It's annoying to have a widescreen TV and still see DVDs showing in letterbox format. On cable, the cable box is able to do the second zoom (although you loose a bit of the sides) to fill the screen from letterbox. Eventually, more videos will work straight for widescreen TVs and that issue will go away but those DVDs are few and far between.
I have to say Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion on the 45" screen looks amazing.
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More community building books, the services industry and Services science
rawn 100000R0P5 Tags:  community_building games books ssme 2,603 Views
Okay, another hunt at the bookstore and came across two morebooks I need to read in depth, although I'm still finishing The Long Tail and The Wisdom of Crowds. (see my reading list).
The first book is MassivelyMultplayer Online Game Development 2 published by Charles Media in 2005,and edited by Thor Alexander. The first edition of this book was much more focused onthe programming issues around this topic, but this edition also has a number ofchapters—almost a third of the book--on managing the overall community,building guilds (groups), policing/managing member conflicts, analyzing memberbehavior, reward and punishment methods, and even pricing policies and marketadoption strategies. I'm surprised by the amount of detail they have in here. I have not seen a copy of Richard Bartle's Designing Virtual Worlds around here but that is also something to add to the list.
The other book is Richard Florida's The Rise of the Creative Class …andhow its transforming work, leisure, community & everyday life. Thislatter book is interesting due to new ideas that I learned the other day on theimportance of Services and the service industry.
IBM has an ongoing focus on what we call Services Science, Management and Education (SSME)which is a look at the science (or business theory) behind the serviceindustry. The reason is because in leading nations and even some emerging ones,Services is becoming a significantly larger portion of the overall GDP versusAgriculture and Industry. We're talking 70-90% of the Gross Domestic Producthere version less than 5-20% for Agriculture and 10-30% forManufacturing/Industrial output. It's hard to describe, but for example,Starbucks is a service company (a café or caffeine delivery service) eventhough it produces caffeinated input for others; grocery stores are the same:they sell stuff, but selling is a service action not a production action.
The word "Service" in terms of an industry is difficult todefine; it is generally considered is different than a physical (or virtualproduct), although products are sometimes outcomes of services (and is oftencalled 'consulting'). Even much of IBM's revenue comes from services.
So if you look at the stats, the real "business" in topnations is in the service industry, producing stuff for the other customers.Yet, there is still a lot of vagueness about the subject (even after 200-300years). The Communications of the ACM has a special issue just on the subject,contributed by social scientists, business folk, technical folk, and more,indicating the wide range of applicability of this new science.
For the community side, services have a lot of impactespecially on measuring the value of each service provider. Any community is aninformal (or formal) environment for brokering knowledge or other services. Soa greater focus on this can only help us.
In any case,
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Maps in your blog
How to use WikiMapia to paste a Google Map in your blog posts. Very handy
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How Communities leverage the Long-Tail theory
rawn 100000R0P5 Tags:  books long-tail community_building 2,342 Views
I've been looking for relevance of
The three forces he mentions are democratization of production, democratizationof distribution, and connectionsbetween supply and demand. I can actually see correlations between thoseforces and social software systems, which aren't hard based on the manysuggestions he makes:
For example:
This just fulfils the applicability of the forces, but Ineed to still explain the application of the strategy to software products.
Many software applications are consumed in a different waythan content focused items like books, movies, music, etc. Most obviously, theyare usually tools used to accomplish, build, or fulfill something. Not all fitthis of course: computer games are still primarily a similarentertainment-consumption model. However, tools that a vendor, say IBM,produces are typically used to create or manage other things like applications,data, or knowledge.
This means that you can usually reuse a piece of software todo different tasks (assuming it is not restricted by the license-usage) if youwant to. More so, the deployment of such tools can be different for eachcustomer; and unless there is consulting involved, most vendors do not keepprecise track of exactly how they are deployed. Instead they tend to focus onthe type and number of products purchased (and, very often, how to get thecustomer to buy more).
Across the whole industry however, there is some level ofparity. Many customers with similar businesses may deploy the product insimilar fashion, or come across similar issues, a concordance of some sortaround the usage. These concordances are fuzzy (i.e., not identical) and ofvarying size.
Vendors may sometimes investigate if these concordances orniches of product use represent a potential market. In other words, they arelooking for that next 'hit' product that will sell profitably. What are missed in many cases are the smaller non-hit niches.In other words, there is a correlation to long-tail idea.
Vendors do want to capitalize on these opportunities but thediscovery and development of such opportunities can be difficult. Thetraditional business-case approach very quickly: make a hypothesis on apotential product, conduct research on market potential, shape the product,more research, more development, then marketing, launch, support, etc.
The niche products are often eliminated in the market researchstage usually because it is difficult to find proper subjects to interview andconduct the research with.
Changing business-case development
There is another way about this that can work forestablished or existing companies but it is yet to be tested enough to becalled a process.
Assume you have a base of users (a great many exisingcompanies) that have deployed or are interested in deploying your softwaretool.
The approach here is the opposite or bottom-up approach to definingmarkets that self-emerges from healthy active communities, rather than thetraditional top-down (the vendor trying to come up with new ideas). More so, itallows the potential for directly involving customers and users into theproduct-development lifecycle.
The role of online communities here is crucial. This meansnot just the passive approach of "let's deploy something and leave it outthere", but actually building relationships with the customers in thesecommunities, finding the influencers within, and trying to encourage healthygrowth. On other words, you need an active program to develop your community.
The dropping costs of "creating" such niches (moreaccurately: encouraging them to develop) through online mechanisms, means thatit is possible to explore many niches simultaneously, if you have a goodmeasurable system. Those with most potential automatically elevate to thehigher rankings, larger groups, and most activity.
I may be reaching here but it is almost like what quantumcomputing promises: calculate all the variations of an equation simultaneouslyto determine the correct—potentially multiple—result based on the highestprobability. (It might only truly apply if you have a really huge number of usersand a really huge number of products).
More Web 2.0 books just in
Just got my copy of Anderson's The Long Tail and Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds. There's just no end of reading and research for this new field of Web 2.0 and that is what makes it exciting. Check out my reading list so far.
I have already read through about 70 pages of Anderson's book in one sitting at the bookstore; it is just that easy to read. The ideas so far seem focused primarily on mass retail opportunities like the music, movie, book, etc. industries, rather than specialized ones like our software industry. For example, there are thousands of book titles, hundreds of genre's and a long history of specialization. Software on the other hand tends to be generic one-size or a-few-sizes-fits all. Most people don't expect a software vendor to carry thousands of different/specialized offerings (although the game software market comes close). I guess I'll have to read further on how it can apply.
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Game development courses in universities
rawn 100000R0P5 Tags:  academic_initiative education 2,614 Views
In talking to undergraduate students in Computer Science, I find that a fair share of them joined this particular major because of their interest in game development. Unfortunately, this does not seem to be sinking into the mindset of the educators in many major universities. For them, its either simply below their radar, or just not as interesting as what they are interested in. Heck, they even ignore their own historical origins: one of the very first applications created for the Unix system, in the hands of its original creators, was a game.
On one hand I hear professors in this field describing the ongoing drop in enrollment in this field since the dot-com bust. They want to find ways of making their program interesting again and appeal to the students. Back back to my point, they are simply ignoring the driving force behind why these students want to become developers in the first place.
Take in comparison, the movie and theater industry which has long been established over the centuries and is available in most universities with an arts programs. The schools are not keeping up with the fact that traditional entertainment-going audiences are continuing to drop across the board. On the other hand, the software game industry is continuing to grow, in some cases bigger than some of the largest movie or music hits. Even traditional media stars are starting to recognize this, as they transition to roles in animation and game titles. On another front, the number of game development books on the shelves continue to be some of the most popular published titles around. All this means a good future for jobs in this industry, and because of its very technical nature, a good market for education.
The good news is that newer schools and smaller colleges are appreciating this. Jay Clark who has just started his blog on our site writes to this fact; and here in the Southwest US, I see commercials for game design and development from independent technical and design colleges as well.
The basic industry is evolving. Even after three or four decades, it is still young. E3 and other major conferences have shown it to be a huge market with lots of players, but most academia, which are far behind do not see it as a priority. What it needs first is a generational change, but more importantly, it needs the actual properly skilled educators to come back from industry to teach the subject.
For industry members: you can't complain that there aren't a general pool of skilled developers in proper techniques, if there aren't enough people to teach the next generation the subject. Send your best teachers and managers back to train the future.
For educators: this is where one part of the industry is heading which involves deep programming experience in many different areas including software engineering, programmed/artificial intelligence, network & distributed programming, graphics programming, and more. You need students. Students want to learn what is involved to get into this industr. Figure it out!
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Runamok peer networking and contact dbs
rawn 100000R0P5 Tags:  peer_networks 2,178 Views
I came across a box of old business cards from the days I was afreelance writer and editor (7-10 years ago I think). There's probably200 very outdated business cards in there, some famous, somenot-so-famous, some not-famous-anymore, some too-famous-to-remember-me,all in IT business one way or another and most during the heyday of thefirst Internet boom. I'll mention some of the companies not names:dimensionX, network99, TurboLinux, RandomNoise, WebLogic, Sendmail.com,Axcess magazine, Axil Computer, Net-It Software, Artisoft, MaxSpeed,dozens of book and magazine publishers. The funny thing is that I canstill remember a lot of these meetings that I've had. I keep themaround as a sort of memorabilia, I guess.
About two or more years ago, I started using LinkedInto try to keep track of contacts, but even that takes work. I just cameback to take a look at how many people I know have joined the site, andit's just grown enormous; almost too many people to find particularones. I went ahead and tried to refresh some of the entries and addnewer names, anyway.
The kinds of Peer networking and contact systems like LinkedIn, and OpenBC,all serve a very good purpose in themselves but I think that they willsoon start to relive the problems we had with contact managementsystems of the past, on a whole new level. We can exchange contact infonow with standards like vCards, but peer networking introduces manymore capabilities that become relevant in a social network context thatsooner or later will need to interact between web sites.
Rather than importing/exporting data, the greater significance is theability to exchange data through some services endpoint. XML-definedentries (I'm not sure if vCards can do that) that can be accesseddirectly for more specific information, all with the right accesscontrol.
The good thing is that this issue will take some time to hit: when manymore companies not only consider the use of peer networks, but rely onthem for their business. This is starting to happen in at least a fewsites: Alibaba.com, even eBay to a degree. However, they haven't quitegone the full depth of peer networking towards degrees-of-separation,detailed contact history, message propagation through peers, etc.
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Managing Online Communities course at U of Arizona
rawn 100000R0P5 Tags:  community_building education academic_initiative community 3,115 Views
I'm helping the Univ. of Arizona Management Information Science dept start a new course on Managing Online Communities.It started out as an idea through my involvement in the IBM Academic Initiative.In a meeting with the IBM AI Director, Kevin Faughnan, the U of A MISDepartment Head, the U of A Computer Science Dept Head andothers, we were exploring ways of how academia is keeping up with theIT and CS topics of interest to incoming freshmen undergraduatestudents. My point was that the MySpace Generation is already wellentwinned into the net today and actively participate in more onlinesites that older generations. You need courses that appeal to thisrising interest in online technologies, as well as being potentialfuture job possibilities in this field. I suggested the idea of acourse that touches on all the technologies involved in onlinecommunities and social network systems, and in particular, how tomanage such communities for a business.
This is our first step course to see how much people areinterested in the topic. It's 3 credits (about 3 hours a week) for a4.5 month-long semester at the third year Undergraduate (Junior) level, startingthis August. There are multiple goals but the primary idea is based onthe notion that many companies are finally beginning to create jobpositions of a Community Manager or other IT support role for creatingand managing online communities. They call it by different names butthis is essentially what they are pointing to. This is quite differentwhat people think of in terms of a Web site manager. The whole courseis an experiment but I think it has a chance of expanding to alarger/wider scale. This course will at least get them started in thatarea, but I think there will still be a lot to learn about thisevolving future.
I don't think it will be that hard or new for them to grasp consideringthat we are talking about the MySpace generation, but we want to showthem that this might become a future work opportunity in the industryif they know how companies themselves are interested.
Aside from just getting the students up to speed on all the differenttechnologies and topics in social networking and community, there'd beassignments and group projects. The final project I think will beinteresting to many universities all over: the students taking thiscourse will subdivide into pairs, and each pair will be working with asmall group (micro-community) of 4-5 high school (secondary school)students from a school that we are partnering with. The goal is for ourstudents to teach some of these ideas to the high school students, andtry to build and manage that community (on a short term basis).
Other regularly/weekly assignments are of course, blogging or postingin forums on a regular basis to get them used to the rhythm.
We have great support from the head of MIS (Dr. Mohan Tanniru) aswellas the principal of the High School we are going to work with. I willbe helping the MIS Lecturer, Andrea Winkle teach the course; she hasbeen running SummerCamps for high school students on the topic of IT, so she hasexperienced working with them before, which as involved in the FinalProject adds a valuable aspect to the course. (Just working with somany highschool students is an interesting juggling act as it is)
The following is our general list of topics that we are basing it on.It's not complete but hopefully we should have a good range of topics:
Course Topics
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Eclispe and the long-tail
With Chris Anderson's book The Long-Tailfinally out, it's the season to talk about the subject at length. Ifyou aren't familiar with it, a one-liner might be: consider all theniche products or niche uses of your product(s) that you have ignoredbecause they were not a very feasible source business, until thelowered cost of Internet distribution and cataloging has changedthings. The phrase 'long-tail' refers to the hyperbolic demand curve ofproducts, with the top hits near the head of the curve making largenumbers of sales, and "rest" of those that are not hits, in the tail.In fact, this tail can be quite long (and hold a lot of businessopportunity). It counters the long-held aphorism the "80/20" rule,where 80% of your business comes from 20% of your products usingtraditional physical distribution and inventory.
To me, the Eclipse project is an example of a technologythat demonstrates how it can work. The first related idea from Eclipseis that it is an industry de facto standard for application userinterfaces (although primarily focused as a development environment).This means that there is wide access to the technology, and commonapplication to many operating systems and application needs. Then thereis the well defined open interfaces and APIs, and detailedcustomization options that allow anyone to create and add plugins tothe base system, allowing users to customize the system in greatdetail, each for their own niche areas; while still maintaining adegree of usage compatibility industry-wide. Finally, it's developmentenvironment, enabling users to bring new ideas into realization.
It only allows niche development of the base environment to eachperson's needs, but it also serves as an enabler to create other newtools. So it is a "long-tail" enabled system and you can use it tocreate yet more.
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Are bloggers/community members the new analysts?
rawn 100000R0P5 Tags:  reputation community_building metrics blogging 2,637 Views
We had a call today posing the question of how to work with Influencersin your community. I compared community influencers similar to how theindustry works with Analysts. Many organizations have Analyst Relationsteams whose sole job is to interact and communicate with analysts thatcover their products or services. Analysts come from many origins, butare usually recognized as experts in their topic, and hold a primaryjob function to cover the topic, or consult and interact with manycompanies, the press or other customers about the topic.
It's not a far stretch to say that leading bloggers, forum members, andothers who interact in a community are starting to gain (or evenbecome) the same status. The primary difference for most is the"amateur" status: rather than "being an expert" as their official job(the professional analyst), they are experts because of an existingjob, function or coverage they have. However, my point is that weshouldn't disregard them because of their amateur status. In fact,quite the opposite: this represents an opportunity to work with otherwho can help spread the word.
For the converted, this is not news, but in general this is still a newnotion. In fact, many organizations haven't even considered how toaddress this new population of amateur-analysts. They are looking for anew generation of PR/AR people who do get it. Businessweek's July 24th issue raises this issue.
On the other hand, some have (see the Nike examplein that article). Or on the other hand, there's the current debate onblogging-for-pay, where some bloggers are looking to get paid for theiractivities when in relation to product mentions, etc. I find thisdebate not very surprising when you consider this is already exists inthe field of professional-analysts. What is happening is that they aretrying to make a transition from amateur to professional status.
That is a bigger leap than a lot of people may think.
It's more than a matter of showing that you have X number of people whoread your blog, hence you should be paid $Y. In fact, what it points tois the somewhat mysterious/mystical reputationfactor. Anyone who tells you they have an equation for fame is talkinghorse's eggs (it's one my mom's favorite Bengali sayings: ghorar-dim).
This circles back to our Influencers and trying to figure out who theyare, and how to support them. With the social networking software oftoday, however, it is possible to learn some general behaviors like howmany people read something you've written, how often they may come backto it, what they think of your posting, etc. (Obviously, this onlyenters the picture when the influencer in questionwants to actually participate in this. Otherwise, you'd be running intosome heavy privacy invasions.) You need a number of different softwareelements to find that out, including a good metrics collection andanalysis system, a ratings system, per-user histories, peer networks,etc. This is more than a few separate pieces of social software we aretalking about, which means a lot of investment in developing the righttools. It's already going on in the industry as apparent by the growingnumber of social software sites and products that many new startups aretrying to capitalize on. So, there is and will be many different waysfor companies to start leveraging social systems.
But what is the value to the company? How do you even value somethinglike that, especially when they are so widespread across many differentsocial networking sites, tools, all of which provide different types offeatures, metrics, etc.
Many web sites in the industry have generally agreed upon the UniqueVisitor metric as a common measurement for people coming to sites, buthow do you measure reputation.Just because you have a lot of people reading the post, does notnecessarily mean you have any kind of influence over them. In fact, thepopulation may actively dislike an influencers views. Amusingly enough,this reminds of how Howard Stern became a big hit: not just his fansbut also those anti-fans listened to his show. Because of how thetraditional Wanamaker advertising model works (see my earlier post),it is considered a success. Is this still true in the evolvingpin-point targetted marketing model available on the Internet? (I'msure Mr Stern's producers certainly hope so: can he deliver on his$500M salary).
Do we need an industry-wide reputation metric? Is that even possible?Would this have any impact on what people use now: the traditional CPMadvertising/marketing metric model?
Well to get off the pontification of where it may go, I'll step into what we are thinking in terms of a reputation model next...
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new battodo graduates, and japanese sword edges
rawn 100000R0P5 Tags:  swordfighting 2,384 Views
I wanted to send congratulations to our newest black belts, Monica,Stephanie and Bianca (you know who you are :). After about 3-4 years,three of our students from the middle school/high school class haveachieved their first black belt level of proficiency. They have alsobeen consistent over the years of study. Unlike other schools ourstakes quite a while of training to get to this level (in the US) andthen more years to go beyond. We also tend to focus on fewer kata andtry to increase our proficiency on them, starting with just the woodensword (bokuto) practice to eventually being able to perform all thesekata on live targets with a shinken (live sword).
The high school level students don't get as much practice with the livesword even after a few years unfortunately, depending upon theirparental approval to do so. Even though it takes more skill thanstrength to cut targets with a shinken, you still need a degree ofcontrol that only comes with swinging the shinken over time.
The weights of the wooden and live sword are very different and thistakes getting used to. The bokuto tends to be uniform weight along itslength (although holding the handle still makes it tip heavy), whilethe live swords have more metal forward of the handle. Unlike someEuropean and other swords, Japanese swords are not counterweighted:other swords sometimes have extra weight in the form of a pommel orrounded ball (I think from the French "pomme" - apple) at the end ofthe handle. This moves the fulcrum (balance point) closer towards themiddle of the handle. They did this because the weapons were heavier(4-15 pounds, sometime even more) because of the metalworking andthicker blades (I'll explain why later), and the pommel made it easierto hold it in balance.
Japanese swords did not introduce the counterweight. More of the weightis in the blade portion, so it adds to the cutting power as that weightfalls down. The blade overall is also lighter (2-5 pounds), which makesit easier to hold. Thus, they focused on stronger, lighter swords butwith more forward weight to aid in cutting.
Their edge (the ha) is alsoconsidered sharper in general. You might hear it called a 'razor'sedge'. This is more to point out the shape of the edge if, you take across section. The shape is more like a really long wedge starting atthe middle or thickest part of the sword and coming to thin point;although it looks like a straight wedge, it really is rounded thecloser you look. When hitting soft targets (flesh), it is much easierto slide right through with the target. The rounder the cross-section,the greater its ability to cut into harder targets (and not dull ordent the edge), but you sacrifice how easily it bitesinto the target and how much strength you need. You'd need morestrength anyway to hit a harder target, but you also need the rightshaped blade to do so.
Knife-edges on the other hand, are triangular in cross-section near thetip, if you look carefully. What this does is take the older Europeansword edge route, of trying to hit hard targets (say plate mail ormetal chainmail). When hitting a hard target, it is easier to bashthe surface armor in hopes that it will break open, and then try to cutflesh. This edge is also easier to create, and does not require as muchwork to produce a sword. On the other hand, this edge would last muchlonger than the thinner wedge which needs more maintainence over itslifetime. Of course, it also depends upon the metals and craftsmanshipof the sword, whichever type it is.
This is also why we tell our sword students to never try to use a knife sharpener or take it to The Knife Storeto get it sharpened. What you end up with is the wrong kind of edge andthis only makes it harder to cut the soft targets, requiring morestrength to do the same amount of work as a wedge shape.
Each was made for the type of combat it "typically" encounters. Justsomething as small as this difference also leads to differentapproaches on how to fight an enemy.
PS: The first black belt testing requires the ability to cut a fulltarget in several different ways. At its thickest, it is said to be thedensity of a person.
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Economist article on Internet advertising and marketing
rawn 100000R0P5 Tags:  marketing 122 Comments 5,897 Views
The July 8th issue of the Economist had a really good overview article on Internet advertising and marketing.(Access to the article unfortunately is not free after the first week,and you may not be able to access that link unless you're a subscriber).
The gist is that current advertising model across the world (innovatedby John Wanmaker back in the 1870s) takes the approach of carpet-bombeveryone in a city with the ad, rather than what the Internet enables,pin-point targetting individuals who would be interested (rephrasingRishad Tobaccowala, chief innovation officer of Publicis, one of theworld's biggest advertising groups). It also talks about viralmarketing by word-of-mouth and attempts to measure this, as well asother possibly effective methods.
Definitely worth the read.
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Bloghud & Baseball in SecondLife
rawn 100000R0P5 Tags:  secondlife blogging 2,242 Views
Ian pointed this out that you can now Blog from within SecondLife using BlogHud. (connecting back from Virtual me to Real me, or is it? Who am I again?)
Also, the Eightbar bloggers went to a baseball game, complete with afull diamond & stadium, foam fingers, and fun.You have to see theirpics before and during the game. Even MLB.com likes it.
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SOA Compass going international
I'm told our SOA Compass book ( Barnes&Noble , Amazon)has been translated into Korean and will soon be available, withJapanese and Russian versions down the line. Now, I can pontificate inlanguages I don't understand. :) [My Japanese is too rudimentaryto read this level of text] Nonetheless, I'm going to get a hold of acopy just for keeps. It does well still I believe, but I only get realdata twice a year, and not again until October.
The funny thing is that the five authors (Norbert, Marc, Sanjay, Keithand myself) have yet to still get together in a single face-to-facemeeting. We all live in different parts of the world and we justhaven't had the chance to find a common event we can all go to. Isn'tglobally distributed collaboration fun?
PS: Also check out other IBM Press books and the latest addition to the developerWorks line under it, Visual Modeling with IBM Rational Software Architect and UML, by Jim Palistrant and Terry Quatrani.
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Basic socio-economics: A surplus of resources leads to new opportunities
I like Jared Diamond's book Guns, Germs & Steel which is now showing as a documentary on PBS.The Putlizer prize winning study of how some cultures and civilizationsmay have succeeded over others because of different inventions in theirhistory, suggests that back in some primitive time, it all started witha geographical advantage: good geography, climate, and luck of the drawin terms of wildlife (potential livestock) led to successful transitionfrom a hunter-gatherer society to an agrarian one.
The progress started with people found new ways of supplying the basicneeds, and as the supply increased, this allowed new professions, andskills to rise. The general statement is that the surplus of availableresources is what allowed people to develop their knowledge to newlevels. It took a long time and often different situations for somejobs to come about but that's how it starts. It could take a dozenfarmers to supply a village enough that one metalsmith might becomenecessary and useful; perhaps a hundred more for merchant; a thousandfor a philosopher, and so on.
That nugget around a surplus of resources I think still holds true inthe information age. The resources we are talking about here are ideas.It may take many, many ideas to come forward, before new viableopportunities arise.
Take this with what people in community and social networking havealways said: the combined value of people in a network is significantly(perhaps even exponentially) better than the sum of individuals in it.(Reed or Metcalfe's "law"). This means that the greater number ofpeople interacting in the network, the more ideas become available,leading to that surplus.
You need to cultivate the full environment of idea exchange,irrespective of whether a high percentage of them lead to a success.Often we miss sight of the need for a surplus, in the popular cultureof seeking to "turn every lead into a sale". What is really necessaryare ways to better support interaction and engagement between people,keeping track of commonalities, and analyzing the leads to try to finda few really good ones.
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Going from social networks to Communities
rawn 100000R0P5 Tags:  community community_building 3,281 Views
I'm not sure if I've posted this graphic before but I use this inslides quite often to familiarize those who new to community buildingbut have heard of Web 2.0.
I've heard a number of comments from people within IBM and beyond thatthis makes sense, in terms of how think of the different "levels" ofpopulation in groups, starting from a General Population, moving intoan Audience (or specifically categorized population), to a SocialNetwork, and finally to a Community. The final level above is sort ofdisconnected and may start off in its own way: the Organization.
As you can see from the graphic, most of dW is currently at the levelof an audience. This is natural when you start with a magazine formatas we did. Most magazines have audiences but not social networks orcommunities; some do, especially when they have means for members tointeract with each other (in online forums, live events, conferences,webcasts, etc.) Building the interaction gives the first level ofsocial networking, but you can improve this in many ways to exposesocial network especially in online systems (e.g., social tagging,wikis, forums, comments, polls, etc.)
The distinguishing factor between social networks and communities isthe level of group identity. This is when people start associatingthemselves with a particular idea (an interest, a hobby, a belief, atechnology, a product, a company, etc.) and regularly return to thatgroup of people with the same interest.
Social networks may have this behavior, where people start buildingrelationships with each other, but it is when they start to organizearound the idea, is when you start building a community. It takes work,leadership and time to keep the group together and build a community.The rewards are that the communities tend to collaborate and create newresults of their own. If it is a strong and vibrant community, you evenget community members evangelizing their ideas to others. The morepeople behind the idea, the easier it is to accept or adopt the idea(unless it directly conflicts with yours of course).
- rawn
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Wetware Grid/"Crowdsourcing" idea
rawn 100000R0P5 1,869 Views
Ian Hughes talked about that the idea relating to Amazon's Mechanical Turk as I mentioned last week. While having lunch with my wife today, and reading an article in the previous issue of BusinessWeek, I found a connection to the Simple PC/Community PC idea popularized by Nicholas Negroponte of MIT.
Say you have thousands of people with such low-cost PCs, even shared insome netcafe, if must be. Then take the idea of wetware/human grids todo processing to analyze data. Add a payment mechanism per itemprocessed. This'd be a solution looking for a problem.
How is this for a problem:
Millions of hours of video and similar numbers of photos are takenevery day at security checkpoints such as banks, the motor vehicles/IDcard department, airports, ports, etc. This already happens widely inthe US for example. Now take a security issue like the Top Ten wantedcriminals with photos provided of each of them. How about sending allthat data soon after they are gathered to process in a wetware grid totry to identify potential suspect-matches. People are usually better atmatching faces than computers, even if it is not a perfect method. Paythe grid members a small amount per photo processed (2 to 5 centsperhaps) and ask them for sets of e.g., 100 photos to look over in asingle session; and pay a big bonus ($1000?) if an identificationeventually leads to the criminal's apprehension.
People living in many first world countries may say that $5 for aboutmaybe 1-2 hours work is simply not worth the time. But again this goesback to the "PC for the People" idea: make computing cheap for themasses in nations where $5 is a lot of money for some and $1000 is anunbelievable sum. Take a 1000 or 10,000 people in this wetware grid andyou have parallel processing of photos on a large and stillcost-effective scale.
Obviously there's a lot to be thought out here but it is the seed of an idea that could help:
PS: You might also want to read this month's Wired article on Crowdsourcing.
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The Psychology of new-product adoption
rawn 100000R0P5 3,621 Views
The HBR June issue has an article(requires subscription) by John Gourville which is one of the firstI've read to explain so clearly the issues behind the psychology ofadopting new products. I take this to mean not just products but alsoservices from any organization.
In summary, the idea was raised by the Nobel-prize winning psychologistDaniel Kahneman that explores why people deviate from rational economicbehavior. This combined with other work, on how individuals valuechoices in the marketplace, define the basis on how people handle theintroduction of a new product or service.
The four behaviors that arise are: people evaluate new product asalternatives, based on perceived value rather than subjective value;they consider new products relative to points of reference to existingones; they view such references as benefits/gains orshortcomings/losses; and finally, the most important behavior, losses have a far greater impact than gains.
This leads to the endowment effect whichthe author reports as the behavior where people hold things theyalready have in much greater value than those they don't. In fact, itleads to a multiplying effect in the market where consumers value theirexisting holdings as three times more valuable, while organizationswith new ideas/products value their own holdings as three times asvaluable. Thus, to convince consumers to change from the old to the newproduct may require up to nine timesthe improvements over the older product. As the author explains, AndyGrove of Intel has held the belief that an innovaion that can transformthe industry rapidly needs to offer a 10x improvement over existingalternatives. (I know my Sharp Aquos HDTV doesn't quite reach thathigh, but I still like the switch over from my 25" inch Sony tuber :)
The author continues by giving several categories of probability: the Sure Failure, the Easy Sell, the Long Hauls, and the Smash Hits. AnEasy Sell indicates limited (small) changes to the existing product andlimited changes to the behavior necessary. A Smal Hit has significantchanges to the product but only limited changes to the behavior.
I strongly suggest you pick up a copy of the HBR to understand the full extent of this article.
This has direct impact on any new technology, a topic of constant focusfor us at dW. Every company wants the smash hit, but for many it ismore by accident than on purpose. However, often they focus onimprovements to products based on what they think is important, andduring the product development stage do not really consider the factorsof user adoption behavior because it is so hard to measure. I've comeacross so many cases where the technology is considered quite advancedby the technical team that develops, supported by surveys of groups ofthe bleeding edge customers who are already raring to use it; but, theyfall short when they call out to the general market which issignificantly slower to adopt the idea.
In fact, in some cases, the improvements are just not enough (per theabove marketing theory). In other cases, the perceived value of theproduct is just conveyed either adequately to the consumers, or by the right influencers who can change perception. Ittakes the right mix of technical know-how, eloquence, stubbornness,ingenuity, and charm to find the proper evangelists for a project. Butfirst you need to be able to find those who are fans of the idea in thefirst place (goes back to my other thought on building a fan-base); theevangelist themselves must be a convinced fan, or others willeventually consider them a sham.
This theory applies to the tens or hundreds of thousands of newprojects that start up on the internet. A product manager needs toconsider if the product falls into the win category of Smash Hit or will be a Long Haulsell as much as the innovation of the product itself. This meansunderstanding the user behavior and need for the product in the firstplace. The difficulty lies in quantifying the improvements.
In some cases, you can do it by this process:
The impact of the endowment effect is the old adage: people fear change.It's not fear per-se, but more inertia. To overcome the inertia, youneed to change perceptions. To grow customers and fans, you need tobuild the audience and community around the idea, to build up momentumof understanding and acceptance to overcome this inertia. (I mentionthat this is a crucial second step of the Open Source business model earlier)
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Marketing in the virtual world
rawn 100000R0P5 Tags:  secondlife virtual_environments 2,527 Views
As I mentioned previously, the HBR article, Avatar-based Marketing, talksa bit about how 3D worlds and online characters are becoming asubstantial population online. The author (a senior editor at HBR)mentions the big names like World of Warcraft, Everquest, etc. thathave millions of members focused in game-based environments, and theopportunity to market to this audience. He also mentions the otherenvironments that are more based on socializing such as SecondLife, Stagecoach Island, MyCoke/Coke Studios, There, etc.
The article has potential and certainly opens this topic up to a wholelot of others who would probably not be familiar with this newtechnology (i.e., HBR readers tend to be high-level business andmanagement folk). This is a hot topic obviously if it is starting toinvade such ranks.
However, the article seems to focus primarily on how to advertise in such environments as the marketing strategy, in subtle or obvious forms. This is a certainly of interest to the avant-garde advertisingand marketing firms. My interests lie elsewhere primarily in the newdomain of building online communities as not just an advertising basebut an actual loyal following of members.
The utility of the online world still seems to be lost on many people;instead they focus on existing strategies/mechanisms that they couldtranslate into an online setting, such as the advertising strategy.Advertising will always have a place in the world, but it is only thevery first stage of gaining a following.
In my view, there is actually a progression of "people interested in what you have": the uninitiated, the aware, the casual member, the customer (or user), and finally the fan (theeager customer). Advertising primarily focuses on driving the firstthree towards a vague hope of them becoming customers. Most companiesare happy when people become customers, even if some are reluctantcustomers. The real wins come from those who become fans.
The thought goes that the fans are the ones who assist in acquiringother new customers. This makes it easier on the organization's effortstowards growth. The fans are worth a whole lot more to an organizationthan just a regular customer. An easy example is Apple, which has asignificant number of fans compared to regular customers. This hashelped them not just stay in business but also in the lead as one ofthe most insipiring and innovative companies.
The honest truth is that it takes a lot to elevate customers towardsbecoming fans. This is based on not just the creation of innovativeideas technology but also on how these innovations are conveyed anddelivered. Then comes the on-going support of these fans, not just theproducts and services.
The million dollar question: How do you start and cultivate fans?
I'll give a hint, it's not a short-term process...
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What are conferences for?
rawn 100000R0P5 Tags:  secondlife community virtual_environments 2,497 Views
I picked up the latest Harvard Business Review first to read what their Avatar-based Marketing article was all about (more on this later) but also came across a few other articles which I thought were very useful. The first was an interview with Richard Saul Wurman on making events meaningful or useful (requires subscription).
Wurman has put on many events and conferences before but is best known for this Technology, Entertainment, and Design conferences. For an event-holder, his view is that the conference business sucks up huge amounts of marketing dollars, and is an enormous waste of the time of both participants and businesses. It is a fixture of the industry (and certainly the IT/Software industry).
However, his main issue is that most people go to these gatherings only to network and play golf. They don't really listen to the CEOs who can't really talk about all their vision. Marketers have to beg and plead exhibit-goers to take a look at their products, and pnael discussions are usually uncoordinated unrelated speeches. No one gets inspiration and overall nothing sticks.
Amusingly, I see a different view of what Wurman considers negative: "the networking". The term usually implies some sort of negative: the sleazy businessman trying to kiss up to their customers/bosses/etc. However, whether they know it or not, that is what most community forums are. An opportunity not just to learn more and ask questions, but to find that right person who may be able to help you. The way to do it is "networking". Or you could simply sit in a room where everyone is talking for long enough, and eventually someone might say something that can help you. Either way, this implies that some people need to be in the same venue to discuss topics. Others may participate or just listen in.
The venue is the issue. A physical forum like a conference is usually by far a better way to meet others, but obviously there are cons such as cost to travel and participate, time, etc. Virtual forums like discussion groups can provide many of the similar effects but it is more natural human behavior to want to meet others in person. Most real conferences are variances on different settings for in-person meetings.
The mode of how the forum occurs can also affect the benefits or usefulness of a forum. For example, an online group chatroom gives a more immediate interaction point, although if too many people are in the room, it makes for haphazard communications unless you have some sort of moderation/chat leader. A different mode is the bullentin board system that most of us just call plain old "discussion forums", that allows people to come whenvever they want, say their piece, have it recorded as part of their group, and then leave, only to return later to check for responses. This is much more asynchronous a mode of discussion.
The online chatroom is closer to the format of a physical conference than the discussion forum/bulletin board format (synchronous vs asynchronous mode). However, most chatrooms suffer from being in a text-only mode (with minimal graphic smileys), thus the impact is not quite the same as in a real conference, and almost will never be because there is a lot of social cues just simply missing when you cannot see another person. There are certainly new ones that you can notice in text-form, but humans are very visual animals, and we consciously or unconciously rely a lot on how we see others react.
This is one reason why I find 3D worlds like SecondLife and other MMO environments compelling venues. They can provide the synchronous mode feel, with actual visual representation, without the forced geolocation that live conferences require of us. SL for example, still requires a lot of the user to make it a universal tool, not just in terms of your computer's ability, but also in terms of behavior, tool controls/usage, and environment support, to overcome the substantial inertia that people have to new things (something for a future blog), but it is a solution to expensive live conferences. FYI: There have been a number of separate events (meetings, conferences, awards ceremonies, etc.) already held on SL. I wish they were all documented somewhere (by Linden Labs) to analyze the social behavior, issues, and successes or failures of these SL events, because it is these kind of events that can draw big crowds and more new subscribers.
Anyway, back on Wurman: his view is that rather than large conferences with many exhibits, sessions, etc., he would rather than one large meeting by invitation to all the people that the organizer feels wouold be interesting and active participants on the main or multiple topics at the event. This does away with the many failings that he sees and focuses entirely on enabling the exchange of ideas and facilitating discussions, rather than doing presentations and sales pitches.
He may be right in some sense. I'm a veteran of more than a decade of trade shows from every angle: hoster, promoter, attendee, booth bunny (I prefer "rabbit"), exec, press, and now more the "floater"/researcher. While seeing the range of products is nice, it's the constant shilling of products/services that makes it a drag, whether on the exhibit floor or session room. I prefer the conversations that are "in between", during the event but not necessarily part of it. This seems to me what Wurman is pointing out as his ideal.
If that's the case, I guess I'd agree with Wurman on that part. At the same time, I'm still looking around for alternatives in my purview and some of these MMOs are good possibilities.
PS: The HBR issue this month (June) has at least 4-5 articles that I found relevant which was worth the high $17 retail price for a copy.
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Day 3 RSDC 2006
Day 3 came and went quite quickly.
The interesting event of the day was Amazon's sessions on its Web services. Amazon Web Services is the software side of the company, sort of separate from the main sales/retail site that they are so well known for. The retail side uses some of these same Web services within the site, but they are also available to external customers as well. I listened to Jeff Barr from Amazon describe them some of which include:
and many more... You should go to aws.amazon.com to find out more.
-rawn[Read More]
Day 2 RSDC
Okay, it's really Day 3 but I'm posting on yesterday's events.
I took a bunch of photos. Unfortunately, they're all off a 5MP camera so I have to resize them each time. Maybe it's time for me to get one of those cellphones that can post photos directly to your blog. Anyway, I'll have photos back-posted soon.
The blogger meetup went well with some analysts, execs and tech folk all around. It was mostly a leisurely meet up with folks we work with but rarely see. We signed a big get well soon card for Grady that's being sent out today as I speak.
I spent part of the day manning the booth (okay only an hour or two compared to the other dW staff members) talking to different people as they come by. It feels like there are a lot of first-timers to the RSDC this year, and we had about 50-50 split on people familiar with dW and others not. I had an interesting conversation with a gent from Amazon Web services and there's a session later today on Mashing with Amazon Web Services that I intend to visit.
I'm heading back to the booth again for now.
-rawn[Read More]
Day 1 Rational Software Dev Conference 2006
rawn 100000R0P5 Tags:  conferences 2,415 Views
I'm at the Rational Software Development Conference 2006, taking a break between sessions. If you haven't seen it already, there is a lot going on. You can start on our blog and podcast page for this event.
The first interesting session I found was on Building a Strong Software Business on Open Source, by Palle Pedersen, CTO of Black Duck Software. His company works on testing compliance in software products. In particular, they have taken a look at the issues around licensing, usage and behavior of teams who use open source software or incorporate them into products of their own.
Interesting factoid: there are now about 600 different variations of open source licenses. Can you imagine checking compliance of code/products that incorporates that kind of range/possibility of OS software?
More interesting to me is his point that there is a common best practice to how to incorporate OSS into your own line:
This is oversimplification of the whole thing but its step two of this business model that obviously catches my eye. In fact, there were a few questions about how to do Step 2. This is in fact exactly what our Community team in dW is tackling. I'm just glad that people are starting to recognize the importance of this as a required part of the open source business model.
We've known this for a while but many groups tend to just gloss over this. The assumption is that if you start a discussion group, you've satisfied that step. It's not as simple as that. In fact, there are many OS products with discussion groups but that still never take off as a success. What is needed is a more scientific way of performing this overall step (which is what I'm hoping would become the outcome of my current side-project to create a course for Community Management at the University of Arizona MIS dept. More on that later).
In any case, I think there's a story there in what Palle said around this OSS business model and community development to pursue.
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rawn 100000R0P5 Tags:  secondlife 1,771 Views
3D Scanning/Printing in SecondLife
rawn 100000R0P5 Tags:  virtual_environments secondlife trust_models 2,641 Views
Ian Hughes from our IBM Hursley Research Labs led me onto this company that does 3D Printing of objects from Second Life. Essentially, any 3D object in Second Lifecan now be "printed" as a physical sculpture/model out of foam or waxfor about $30 or $60 up to a size of 9" x 5" x 5". I can't quite tellwhat kind of 3D milling/printing device they use but you can contactthem for more info.
I was thinking of modes of real business services in terms of virtual environments and came up with this list:
I bring this up to consider where the business opportunities lie. WhileI considered the above scenarios for SecondLife (SL) in particular,this is really a generic model that may apply to any online retail website. In the vast majority of such retail web sites, the trade is forcurrency for real goods, but this exchange can occur between a realperson and a virtual identity (it might be one person, it might be awhole company of people). E.g., on eBay, when you bid and buysomething, you never really know if that person on the other end is asingle real person or multiple people.
This is a factor to consider for conducting business. I tend toconsider all interactions significant. The more you interact withsomeone, the more trust (or distrust) you build with that person. Youmight remember fondly of previous exchanges or, after some few basicexchanges to build familiarity/trust, you suddenly find that you aresuddenly suckered out of your money when that big exchange happens. (atypical con-job as we say here).
Trust models thus play an important part in exchanges and mostmultiplayer environments these days have to build in some sort oftrusted exchange system. Most MMORPGs that allow users to exchangeitems have a special "Trade" window where both parties must check a boxto accept the trade for it to complete. This is a scenario that happensin type 4 virtualuser2virtualuser exchanges.
On the other hand, on eBay (realuser2realuser),since the actual exchange involves some form of physical exchange orshipping, they need another another way to designate each identity'strust level, within the system. Thus, you have a rating system tosymbolize that level.
One thing to note is that there is a continuing rise in virtualuser2virtualuser as well as realuser2virtual usertrades. In fact, the latter even applies between you as a real personand your character. E.g., in SL, if you transfer your Linden$ into realdollars through Paypal (i.e, withdraw currency from the game), you arein effect doing an exchange between your physical and virtual selves.
Also interesting is that there are some virtualuser2realuser servicesemergine like the Pizza example. I would daresay this isn't the firsttime this has happened. Some in the late 1980s (if I recall right), atMIT, you could actually order real sodas from the soda machine throughyour emacs text editorenvironment on your online Unix account identity which would chargeyour school food account (one of those cool hacks that Stallman andcrew did with emacs). If this 3D printing service was paid entirely inLinden$ then it would fit into this mode as well.
The biggest deal out of all this is not just in the types of exchangesbut the value applied to virtual objects. That'll be a future post...
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Second life virtual economy
rawn 100000R0P5 Tags:  virtual_environments 1 Comment 2,757 Views
In Second Life,the economy is based on Linden dollars (named after Linden Labs, thecompany that created it). This isn't unusual in itself, but thedifference here is that there is an actual exchange rate from Linden$to US dollars, about 300 to 1. Thus, if you sell something in the game,you can make money. Right now it's small change, but what is happeningis that there are enough players that are interested in there where youcould technically make real income from it.
The way it works is that every player by default earns a certain amounta week. A first basic level membership is free for anyone and gainsthem L$50 a week. A premium player paying US$9.95 a month getsL$500/wk. With this ingame dollars, you can buy things from otherplayers or the game itself. You can also create prims and sell those toothers for L$. It's market-driven based on what others really wouldbother to pay for your creation.
These creations really come from two types of labor: visual creation,and/or programming effort. The former is what the object looks likeusing the 3D basic shapes. There are some cute works of art, but itcould also be a house, a park, a toy, etc. The latter is what you cando with the object based on its programming. Most prims are somecombination of both. Even those that don't really do anything have somedefault code.
It takes time, effort and brainpower to build anything since the mostbasic shapes you have are cubes, spheres, pyramids, cones, and otherpolygons. You can grow, squeeze, extrude and combine multiple shapes tomake more complicated ones, then apply colors or textures to it. Usingsuch building blocks, you can make more and more complex objects. Thus,any developer working on a prim would need some level of drawing skilltoo. Any object you create is yours alone, but you could allow othersto copy it, or if you really want to risk it, edit it. More on thislater...
This is a pseudo-real currency (like the Reward points etc fromAmerican Express or other credit cards, or airline mileage cards)because of the tie to real-world currencies. You can extract some ofyour L$ to real currency via Paypal or credit cards, that Linden Labspays you. Thus, if you have earned L$3 million, you have just made$10,000. (Not that that's trivial to do). If the BusinessWeek articleis correct, some of the top players have made hundreds of thousands ofUS dollars from things they have created and sold in the game.
The economy is smart enough and the world is well-managed enough thatthings don't go awry easily. E.g., you can't kill anyone and take theirprims and/or money. It doesn't work that way, and in fact, just bumpingpeople can start raising eyebrows until you get banished.
First thing to note: Linden Labs gives you $50/wk or about $200 amonth. That's about US$1 a month that they have to put into the game(since that dollar could get extracted from the game by the player).That's quite trivial in real dollars but what it really does is incentyou to play the game. You can think of it as a customer-acquisitioncost which at just $1 is really low. A premium player gets more like$10/mo, which is about what they pay in real dollars for their accounteach month.
Technically with the ability to create and sell a prim, it is possibleto mint your own money. The practicality however is that with asufficient number of players, you have a large number of producers, andthe consumers have a lot of choice on what they want to spend theirmoney on. Also it takes time and effort, thus, nothing is really free.Still, the amount of currency in the game is based on two factors: howmany premium players are in the game and how many active basic playersexist. The total wealth increases every month in proportion to this.Not all players are active, and leave after a while (you have to appearon the game each week to gain your L$ stipend).
However, when it becomes really successful, and Linden has a millionactive basic players, they'd have to pay a million dollars into thegame each month, which can be quite expensive. However, the truth isthat more of the active players would likely go towards premiummembership.
So far, I haven't talked about how Linden Labs itself makes money.... in the meantime, you might want to read this article on Virtual Worlds, Virtual Economies.
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Second life
rawn 100000R0P5 Tags:  virtual_environments 1 Comment 2,707 Views
I started out on the game Second Life justrecently to investigate how it works. It's not really a game per-se inthat it is not a goal-oriented activity like other 3D games. However,it can be pooled together with the other Massively multiplayer onlinerole-playing environments. It's free to try out, so I registered,downloaded the game, created a character and walked around. It's a 3Dworld like many others. However, the here the point is more that youcan create objects, buildings, vehicles, toys, clothing, etc. I'm stilllearning how to move my avatar around so I haven't taken any photos yet.
What struck me is the similarity to the concepts in LPMuds where Ispent some years playing away in. LPmuds had a C-like programminglanguage that (once you've been promoted to a wizard) you can use tocreate any kind of event-driven software objects. Essentially, the gamehandles much of the work for you and you define the behaviors of theobject. In SL you can also draw and visually create the object as well,starting from simple generic shapes.
For a developer, this is really a bit of virtual heaven. You can pretty much build any kind of object (a primor primitive) you can conceive of and utilize it. E.g., some peoplecreate clothing fashions for the characters, others create new actionsthe characters can do, yet others create houses, buildings, cars, toys,etc. In fact, when you first enter, you are on Help island, wherenewbies go. Here, you can experiement with your own prims or you cantry out some other prims that others have created. For example, thereis a Simon game (remember those), a Sudoku board, a mahjonggtile-matching game, and an arcade Space Invaders style game. These areprims that others have created that allow your avatar to manipulate toplay; so you are playing a game within a game.
For each prim, you have a scripting language that looks similar to C,Java or Python, familar control structures, a library of functions forstring manipulation, math, communication and lists, an event system,and system standard constants. A number of other functions areparticular to the 3D environment and geometry.
All that is not surprising to build into a game these days, but what issurprising is the economy and the impact of retail activities...(continued).
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Spaces for projects
I came across this recently: ProjectSpaces, a hosted service offered by a company called Forum One Communications seems worth a look.
They actually charge for a hosted space that features, a contacts db,calendar and scheduler, tasks list, document library, and discussions,with each space allowed 1 GB of storage (sound familar Google?) andunlimited members. There's a pricing sheet starting around $129/mo perspace.
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Top article topics on developerWorks by interest
I came across a little gem out in the field of data we collect on ourpageviews yesterday: "Topic Popularity". It looks at the pageviews toour articles and tutorials, per the taxonomy topic keyword in metadataof each article, then divides it by the number of articles that keywordappears in to get an average pageviews per article (per topic name).
Current top ten hot topics in our articles:
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developerWorks Korea has launched its Community
rawn 100000R0P5 Tags:  photos community international 2,338 Views
Our sister site developerWorks Korea has launched its own community page!
It's in Korean (Hangul, if I'm right) at: http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/kr/community/
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Measuring the performance of Knowledge workers
rawn 100000R0P5 Tags:  knowledge_workers reputation unstructured_knowledge trust_models 4,996 Views
The late great management guru, Peter Drucker, helped to innovate theidea that there is a whole economic class known as the Knowledge Workeronce said: "Nobody has really looked at productivity in white collarwork in a scientific way. But whenever we do look at it, it isgrotesquely unproductive." In other words, trying to define how tomeasure the productivity or performance of Knowledge workers (commonlycalled white collar workers), is an exercise in futility.
Davenport's bookpoints out that it is hard to create a common correlative measurementaround "knowledge workers" as a whole class. In fact, he describes thatthe typical way of dealing with knowledge workers is the HSPALTA approach: Hire smart people and leave them alone. Unfortunately, this doesn't really examine how to improve the system or help people improve themselves.
Maybe we will eventually discover some future magical formula thatmeasures this performance and how to improve it. In the past, inAgricultural societies, we had found ways to improve agriculturaloutput. Farmers from the dawn of time will tell you that "farming is anart", but the truth is that farming is also a science. Art issubjective, hard to measure, quantify and teach. Science is morestructured and actually can be taught (although not necessarily easily).During the Industrial Age, we achieved similar goals for manufacturingoutput. Now that we are in the Information Age, we are stumped, becauserather than a physical unit output, it is more of a mental qualitativeoutput, and that seems to us a very subjective element.
The good news is, as Davenport points out, there is at least one way to measurethe quality of knowledge. It's been done for centuries: the Peer Reviewprocess. It's most common in academia, whereby a group of your peersexamines your output and gives an analysis of what they think of it.It's how Masters and PhDs are still given out for the most part,worldwide.
I think that this is a good thing for us because that Peer Review process is atechnique that can be applied to unstructued knowledge on our site. Inits simplest form it is a Ratings systemwhereby anyone reading a piece of information on the site can vote 1through 5 on what they think of the article. It's entirely subjectivebut if you get a large number of ratings, it tends to average out whatpeople think of the information. This can apply to structured as wellas unstructured knowledge. This is the first level of a Ratings model.
That's a very basic notion. In fact, to be more useful, you may want tocollect all those ratings per a person's knowledge output and store itand those knowledge output items as part of their identity. Thus, youcan see what a person has contributed and produced and what peoplegenerally think of their output (their level of quality). This is amore evolved Rating system, generally referred to as a Reputation model.
Then, in turn, you could use a person's current rating as a weightingfactor to any rating they apply to others; i.e., normalize the value ofthe function of "my current rating" multipled by the rating value theyascribe. Thus when an industry luminary says you have a good idea, itweighs more towards the rating of that information, than when a novicerates it. Thus you have a weighted average of your Reputation based onwho actually rates your articles. This is a second evolution of Ratingsinto a weighted or a Ranked Reputation model.
How do you yourself become such an "industry luminary"? Essentially, alot of high-ranked people giving you good ratings implies that a lot ofknowledgable or influential people think that your output has a highlevel of quality. Thus, you would appear higher on the rankingshopefully amongst those lofty people who are the luminaries.
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What kind of knowledge activity do you do as a knowledge worker?
rawn 100000R0P5 Tags:  unstructured_knowledge use-cases knowledge_workers blogging 3,478 Views
Davenport in his book Thinking for a Living points out that the are essentially four basic types of activities carried out by Knowledge Workers in a line starting from :
For example, developerWorks is involved primarily in the activities ofPackaging and Distribution. We rely on authors, contributors, bloggers,and other experts to create the knowledge. We then package thatknowledge in various forms: articles, tutorials, blogs, briefings etc.We then offer a distribution mechanism for these pacakged knowledgethrough our web sites, our live events, etc. This is made available toour readership so that they may try to apply it each to their own uses.
The packaging part is the difficult proposition now in the light of unstructured knowledge.The dW web sites has typically been a e-zine in the past with manyZones each reflecting a magazine along some topic that appeals to someaudience. The knowledge comes from many sources, both within andoutside IBM to attempt to get the best coverage on a topic we can.These are structured into the semblance of an article or a tutorial.
Unstructured or less-structured knowledge, however, is where dWCommunity comes in. It's less structured because it does necessarilyfollow some kind of content format that people are familiar with: thereisn't necessarily an order to how the information is formatted, wherethe answers lie, where to look for more resources, or sometimes evenwho wrote the information or what their reputation/skill level in thesubject is. There is also usually little formal or standardized editinginvolved.
On the other hand, unstructured knowledge is where there is a hugeamount of growth, everywhere on the Internet. Take our blogs forexample: every blogger has their unique style on how they post theirknowledge, or even what kind of info they provide; while it isstructured according to the goals of that person, every visitor has totry to figure out each post or each blogger in context of others. Thisis both good and bad; it invokes style and personality to a greaterlevel. However, not everyone is a born-writer or blogger. Lots ofpeople go to school and study journalism just to learn how to do it;others, I will daresay like myself, have a natural apptitude for it.
To become more useful to those Knowledge Appliers, it helps to know howto better package your knowledge. While blog systems provide a tool forpresenting the knowledge, they don't automatically make you a betterwriter or a better blogger. With unstructured knowledge like blogs, fordW for example, we now share the workload of knowledge packaging withour experts, in exchange for greater freedom for them to carry oncreating knowledge about their activities. We also carry out anotherpart of the Packaging aspect through the blog tool itself.
What we (dW) need to provide is guidance. We collect the ideas,information, practices and success stories on what makes for goodhabits, techniques and practices for more successful blogs. We sharethat information with our bloggers as much as we can. In addition, wecontinue to workon ways to better distribute this knowledge across the site and the net.
Take the example of our blogs and multiply it for each other type ofcommunity tool (wikis, forums, podcasts, etc.) and you can see the rolewe provide in this Knowledge activity line in terms of unstructuredknowledge. When you consider that much of this is still fairly new orbleeding edge, we sometimes have to do the bleeding in the process offinding out what works and doesn't to better support our unstructured knowledge creators.
Unless of course someone else wants to handle that function ;)
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Open standards in dress code
Bob's got a good and amusing idea on how open standards can become more pervasive... especially in the dress code segment.
Now I have to hunt down a high-school photo. I actually have verylittle photos of myself for an entire decade (I think there are aboutless than a dozen photos of me during the nineties...) High-schoolpredates that obviously but most of it got scrapbooked by my wifesomewhere... so I need to hunt one down and post it here.
Sad but true: I once found a photo of myself going on an overseas triparound 1989 and could identify everyone in the photo except for thisskinny guy with a mustache at the end... after staring at it for 5minutes I realized that it had to have been... me;I'm still only 90% sure about that. Wow! things change.
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The Living Web: Is it a generational thing?
Cyberspace, The Virtual World, The Matrix, Mainframe, ENCOM, etc. Now The Living Web.
For being part of a generation that has grown up with online games,books, stories and movies about virtual worlds and moving at the "speedof the Net", it seems like it is taking quite a bit of time to get tothe idea of having such a world in common use (and hopefully not adystopic vision like that in The Matrix). I get the feeling we arelooking so far ahead that we are not focusing on taking the stepsinvolved in getting there.
Most of the mainstream media (books & movies) still focus on the 3Dworld, because obviously it's cool to imagine an alternate reality thatyou can actually move around. Even games tend toward that directionbecause it is the environment that can more easily excite people. Theyall talk about having a persona that moves and interacts with thisworld and the other personas in it. In fact, in the Matrix, the worldis so real, it is the "real world" as we know it; it's only when youunderstand the actual world of the Matrix behind it that you can dointeresting things like defying gravity.
The truth is probably a little depressing. Most of the virtual worldthat we know as the Web is 2D; in fact, by just a guesstimate, I'd sayover 98% of all the info we have online is in text. I also think for along time to come, the virtual world will still be overwhelminglytext-based for decades to come. To get to that futuristic vision asportrayed in the media, a lot of work behind the scenes still needs tohappen.
Ten steps (not in order) to get to virtual worlds:
Don't get me wrong: in limited areas, most of these properties alreadyexist. In particualr I'm talking about online games and MMORPGs.However, they are limited in the sense that they create a separatefictitious world that you have to apply your context to. In otherwords, yes, it's make believe, which is also why it is fun. Also theyare limited in the sense they exist almost entirely within their owndomain. You don't see characters moving outside a game like Everquestand moving onto World of Warcraft; or even any reason or correlation todo so.
In terms of people and businesses however, the information is real (notartifically created to role-play) and pervasive across wherever you go.The good news is that some of these items are already starting tohappen, as you can see per what Newsweek describes as The Living Web.What's more, these personas are a limited thing. My belief is thatpeople in general do not want to have to maintain multiple personas,for the same reason, people do not really want to have to keep track ofmultiple email accounts.
So there you have it. There's much work to do in the middle to get to pervasive virtual worlds.
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Innovation and the new Live Web
rawn 100000R0P5 Tags:  web_2.0 innovation community 2,586 Views
I came across two interested reads in the last two days well worth thetime. The first is the cover story on Newsweek magazine ("Putting the 'We' in Web") titled The New Wisdom of the Web. Ittalks about the new trend on the Web towards user-generated content asa way to drive more interaction on the Web, and to let your users leadand drive your communities.
The other interesting article is in BusinessWeek (requires registration) Innovation: The View from the Top,which is an interview with our own CEO, Sam Palmisano, on a recentsurvey about where the areas for innovation lie. Sam talks aboutbusiness-model innovation as the source to look for to gain acompetitive edge. In comparison in this day and age, many competitorscan catch up on product-level innovation.
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Posting on the Net and Image control
rawn 100000R0P5 Tags:  trust_models web_2.0 community blogging social_computing 2,802 Views
Michelle Conlin's Businessweek article You are what you post,talks about the troubles of growing up in the Net generation. With theadvent of search engines being so "efficient" that it can find any kindof information that is associated with your name, people are startingto find that others including their bosses, potential employers, orclients can find out all kinds of information from your past. Anythingthat you might post online can show up including embarrassing orprivate facts about yourself, even things others might saw about you,whether true or not. How can you possibly know what is harmful to yourcharacter or can be misunderstood by others, tomorrow or even ten yearsfrom now?
This is causing fear and panic amongst individuals, companies and PRagencies worldwide. The idea that you image is always at risk on thenet. In fact, the rule of thumb is usually to always assume that "ifyou post it, they will find it." To some that means, "don't use theInternet". However, the right reaction is not to stick your head in thesand and assume that it will simply go away. It is to be proactive.
Michelle actually points out an important fact that is missed by many:there are two "yous", the physical real-world you, and the online imageof you (or what others learn about you from info online). Because yourphysical person is always with you (duh!) it's usually possible to knowwhat's happening around it. However, it usually not possible to knoweverything going on around the online you. The Businessweek articlepoints to five ways to manage your online doppelganger, which aredefinitely helpful hints.
My thought on this line however, is that companies and people may eventually realize that the online you isjust as important as person to maintain. The best way to do this is tohave an online tool to keep track of that you and what happens. What'smore, it becomes the basis of how others can communicate with theonline you. It's not only nice to have that tool but imperative, if youwant to have a proactive say around what the "online you" really does.Otherwise, you are at risk of leaving it in the hands of what anyoneelse may say about you.
In terms of philosophy (in the classical Greek sense), this is mind-bending in terms of what that persona is becoming: all that is online you is what others see around you. You don't have strict control of it, but you can contribute to it.
Aside from a tool, the other idea this points to is that it's unlikelya single individual will be able to know what the best ways ofpresenting themselves is. It's a brand new online world, and most ofthe social rules are still being figured out. The best way is to havesomeone who watches and understands the behavior across the net toprovide advice on how to use the tools according to the properfunction, and more so, in the most effective manner. In the physicalworld, these people are often called image consultants, PR agencies,etc., although that's really the extreme end of a business that isgeared specifically to your own needs.
Another way to look at this is in terms of getting people to understandor even share your views. If you're interesting enough, you might evengain a fan club of your own (the goal of many bloggers). Yourreputation helps build an implicit or even an explicit community aroundwhat you are or what you're doing. I, for one, don't believe anyone cantruly force others to agree with them wholeheartedly; therefore toconvince others on your view, you need to be persuasive and use theright tools and right means of persuasion. Thus, you should take a lookat this from the perspective of how to develop this community aroundyou.
The root of all this is your reputation online and how others see it.Take charge of your online reputation because, whether you like it ornot, it has or eventually will have a direct impact on your future.
In summary, the online you is already being "created" on the Web bywhat you and what others post about you online. You should considertaking an active part of owning and operating this "online you", andhandle this from the perspective of trying to build a community aroundyou.
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20 kids rolling on the floor
rawn 100000R0P5 Tags:  swordfighting 2,133 Views
I went back to our Japanese swordfighting (Battodo) classfor middle and high school kids on Tuesday, for the first time thisyear. I really enjoy helping to teach that class since kids do goofyfunny things. This time around, we practiced rolling on the floor andit was quite the sight. Our o-sensei(instructor) is a long-time Jujitsu teacher as well--actually he knowsat least 4 different martial arts. He wanted to show the kids some verybasic rolls, throws and disarms. These can be very dangerous if done imporperly or carelessly.
You may or may not be surprised that most people don't know how to rollon the floor in a safe or coordinated manner. As we grow older, this isprobably one of the last things we do on a normal day but it's one thatcan be really helpful on rare occassions (e.g., taking a dive off abike, or even just tripping). In any case, it can be fun and even alittle exercise.
You'd think kids would have an easier time doing this. Almost. We hadabout 20 of them of various sizes from half my height to those over sixfeet (who'd have just as much trouble as I did originally), all rollingdown the mats on the floor getting woozy and running into each otherfrom time to time.
First they learn the basic roll from a squatting position, then from astand-drop-down-to-a-squat, and then just from a stand. Eventually, itbecomes one flowing motion. After they learn know how to roll, we canshow them some basic ways to throw people. After that, some sworddisarming and throwing techniques.
Rather than roll head-over-feet (gymnastics style), the idea they firstlearn is from squatting with one knee down (say your right knee down,left up), putting your arms in a diagonal line (left elbow pointing upabove the raised knee, the other pointing down), and then rolling overyour (left) shoulder. This is much safer that head over feet, sincerather than landing on your neck, you land on the meaty tricep,shoulder and back muscles.
I could make a business-philosophical quip about "learning to roll withthe flow properly and stay on track", but I think just actually rollingaround is fun. :)
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Virtual environments/3D Games as training tools
rawn 100000R0P5 Tags:  virtual_environments 2,499 Views
BusinessWeek's article On-the-Job Video Gaming talks about how companies are using 3D games as a visual training tool. Essentially, some game companies are taking existing 3D game engines they have created or even some of the "free" engines out there to build a 3D world that recreates their real-world environment and puts them into a role-playing scenario like a retail store or a virtual bank... Except I guess you don't get to hack up the customers :)
-rawn[Read More]
Virtual environments/3D Games for training
rawn 100000R0P5 Tags:  virtual_environments 2,141 Views
This Business Week article On-the-Job Video Gamingtalks about how companies are using 3D games as a visual training tool.Essentially, some game companies are taking existing 3D game enginesthey have created or even some of the "free" engines out there to builda 3D world that recreates their real-world environment and puts theminto a role-playing scenario like a retail store or a virtual bank...Except I guess you don't get to hack up the customers :)-rawn[Read More]
Ideas from blogs contributing to a common repository for innovation ideas
rawn 100000R0P5 Tags:  knowledge_workers web_2.0 blogging innovation 2,776 Views
Continuing my thread on knowledge workers, and how to get them to share their knowledge...
Davenport indicates that knowledge workers value their knowledge skills, but often do not share it easily.
The former part indicates that knowledge workers are proud of the ideas and knowledge they produce, and of the fact that they were able to come up with it. They see value in them. Therefore, one idea to increase productivity of knowledge workers is to give visibility or accolade to their ideas.
Unfortunately, the latter part is oh so true: if a knowledge worker does not feel secure in their environment or community, they are unlikely to share it, especially if it means that by sharing that knowledge, they may even be helping someone else take over their job.
Im an optimist in this area, and with the rise of open source and a more open worldwide environment (especially in our industry), we may be able to trust others enough to break down this barrier.
Take a look at this earlier post on a sort of universal meme about communities. This suggests that to get towards innovative ideas, you need to progress your community of people from the earliest stages of first getting them to interact to create a level of understanding and familiarity between the people in the organization. With a level of understanding you then have a platform that allows people to build trust between the community-members, and with that trust, some can explore and experiment on ideas and thereby develop a greater entrepreneurial spirit. Finally, once you get that level of mentality, you can finally succeed in innovation through your community.
Obviously, with Davenports statement, the sharing of knowledge lies in the very first few stages. If you cant get people to trust each other--even in a contained environment--you wont get knowledge sharing in action.
If you have a strongly-connected employee base, you have developed that level of trust or at least a level of understanding amongst the people in your organization. You still need to encourage others to experiment, as in our Think Fridays in IBM. For a small organization it is easier to distribute new ideas, but to achieve knowledge sharing of those ideas in anything beyond a few hundred people, you really need to consider a common tool to collect, rank, sort and share all those ideas.
That kind of tool is exactly what we have in IBM right now in the form of our ThinkPlace tool and system. The IBM Innovation team offers this tool whereby any of the 300,000+ people in IBM could share their ideas; these ideas are then sorted or ranked by popularity (by software and also by hand). Not only does this do great justice to enabling knowledge workers in our organization but it is also leading a lot of our own innovation, not just for new product ideas, but also for company-internal improvement.
In its simplest form, it is a sort of open discussion group with many threads that anyone can start up around their idea. This is more than a 21st century version of the old "Suggestions Box" found in many companies yesteryear which was a closed box only viewed and analyzed and action taken on by management.
Thinkplace is a more open process whereby your peers can look over the ideas and weigh in on its merits, rather than someone in management dealing out commandments. In fact, it is also a way for employees in other divisions to mine this idea database for things that might relate to their work. The managers from the Innovation team, in this respect do exactly as their titles suggest: they manage the flow of this output in useful channels to find the best ideas.
We have ThinkPlace in operation already, but now consider the next step towards integrating community.
As I mentioned in a previous post, you can use your blog to implement free-thinking time (e.g., Think Fridays in IBM), since many bloggers use this tool to share their ideas and knowledge. This certainly provides a useful business case to retaining and supporting knowledge workers.
Now consider how to export some of those ideas from your own blog into a community tool like ThinkPlace. Each blog post which is specifically is an idea should probably be tagged and then "pushed" (through software preferrably, or via manual copy) to the ideas database.
The reason to do this is because blogs are part of the new Web 2.0 mentality of a model of participation. In other words, people who are bloggers are starting to embrace a more open and willing stance on sharing their knowledge.
An experienced blogger is used to the idea of posting to their blog on a regular basis. All we are talking about here is categorizing particular posts and make it easier to export that into a public space like the ThinkPlace tool. This reduces the tool-usage time to transfer knowledge into a tool where that can be considered by a wider audience. In fact, for bloggers thats also a good thing: more exposure to your ideas on your blog, and possibly even showing some real outcome of your ideas.
Thus, the knowledge workers can create their ideas and contribute for a mass audience to consider and analyze; the organization behind that audience can create an idea pool that is self-defining and self-directed to produce new innovations; and both the members and the organization can benefit from discovering and implementing these innovations.
For the knowledge worker, this suggests not only building a regular practice for participating in communities but also offers a reward mechanism in seeing some of their ideas appreciated and maybe even implemented by the overall organization.
So, unless you think you dont really need innovation out of your organization, this suggests a useful business case for different kinds of community tools, for the growth of the organization as well as the happiness of your knowledge workers. And, oh by the way, in doing this, youve just created a knowledge sharing and capturing process.
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Intranet enterprise blogging needed for happier Knowledge Workers
rawn 100000R0P5 Tags:  blogging innovation knowledge_workers 2 Comments 6,422 Views
On the last two points that Davenport made in his book: to get commitment from a knowledge worker, it is important give freedom to experiment and work on ideas rather than to always dictate or direct them to work on specific things. Also, just as it is difficult to describe the job, it is also often hard to describe the knowledge output; for that matter, knowledge workers may not even seemto be in their best interest to share their knowledge.
The concern is that if you do not provide the correct supportive environment for your knowledge worker, they are quite likely to move to another organization that does (i.e., jump ship to a potential competitor who does offer the right environment).
This has direct relevance to a number of activities in IBM. For one, we now have Think Fridays. Basically, Fridays of every week should be freed up so that you have some peace of mind to consider, experiment, or talk about new ideas. Each person should apply that to their job as they see fit. I hear that 3M has something similar in that engineers should put aside 15% of their time to this kind of free-thinking.
For me, this tends to free up my regular weekday packed with phone calls with different groups, and sit back and think of the issues and changes to our project, or new ideas that have emerged. Others in our division use this time to experiment with new technology. C.J. and Peter on our team have even extended this to Think Friday-Build Saturday-Test Sunday, which I agree is certainly going beyond the call of duty, and very applaudable.
Now, consider Think Fridays on a different level across all IBMers. In particular, think of what people do in blogs and different community areas: discuss, digest, or produce new ideas. In fact, if youre an avid bloggers, you probably have Think-Mondays, Think-Tuesdays, etc., but in less than a full days time. Thus by blogging, as a knowledge worker, you are very likely and effectively using that free-thinking time.
So my advice to bloggers in IBM (and even beyond): Consider using a portion of your Friday to blog, because by blogging you are in effect implementing the spirit of Think Fridays.
Obviously, not all the ideas that you have are something you would want to discuss on a public blog. In that light, for IBMers we have an global intranet system called BlogCentral, which is a safe environment to discuss ideas with other IBMers. This quickly points to the necessity of having a blog system not just for an external audience but also one for a company-internal audience. Therefore, for knowledge workers within an organization, it is important to have an organization-wide blogging platform.
So for those looking for a business case for why you need a blogging system inside an organization, this is one good example. Blogs allow an expression of Think Fridays (or your organizations equivalent) which many companies think is an important aspect of encouraging, supporting and keeping happy their knowledge workers. I would generalize that to any number of other community tools, not just blogs.
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Digging away in the Knowledge Worker mines
rawn 100000R0P5 Tags:  unstructured_knowledge knowledge_workers social_computing 2,497 Views
Ive just started reading Tom Davenport's new book Thinking for a Living, a great book on the issues surrounding knowledge workers.
If you havent heard of this term, you may not realize that you are (in the IT industry) very likely a knowledge worker yourself. This kind of work is a difficult to quantify, and even describe, but essentially involves all those jobs where people spend the majority of their time thinking of solutions for a living (doctors, lawyers, managers, programmers, etc.) rather than building many unit pieces of the same thing (e.g., manufacturing, production or labor-intensive work). This may still be an unfair description.
In fact, even the book indicates that the term has been measured in many different ways. In the US, the Labor statistics report is not categorized this way, so analysis by different academics point to there being anywhere from 30 million to over 100 million knowledge workers in the US alone (thats from 10-30% of the population).
The book makes for a fascinating read. For me, it provides valuable context to understand how developers worldwide do or think of their work. For example, Davenport indicates that there are some common attributes for knowledge workers, no matter their job:
It is these last two points where I find good relevance to my own job. Im probably a typical knowledge worker; in fact, my current job can be categorized as heavy knowledge work, but also some production work.
For the production work-side, I am responsible for getting more people blogging, discussing, debating, and interacting on technical topics on our site through our various community areas. Loosely, that translates to getting more instances of blogs, forums, wikis, and other such tools, started and running. I certainly have help from many others to get this going.
On the knowledge work-side, I work on our community strategy and direction, and lead our large community project currently in development in dW. This means I work with our infrastructure and development teams to describe the technical idea and debate solutions. I work with our research team and do research myself on different Web 2.0 and community activities around the Web. I work with our design, user experience and information architecture teams to consider how to present, organize, and direct this information. I work with our content teams to consider how to use or how to get others to use our community system, generate content, and participate in activities. I work with our management to present, consider and strategize what we should be doing in all these areas. Finally, I work with other teams and people outside dW, in IBM and beyond, to discuss many of these areas in relation to Web 2.0 and community. Believe me, that's a lot of phone calls and knowledge exchange.
To summarize: I suck information in and spew (hopefully useful) knowledge out across many different personas (people and groups).
(continued...)[Read More]
Waiting for my Roller upgrade
Okay, you may have heard that we're also upgrading to Roller for our blog engine. We're in the process of migrating all our existing blogs, blog entries, comments, categories, links, etc. all into Roller. Even with less than a hundred blogs, this is time-consuming.
I can't wait to get at the new features. One of our bloggers, Todd Watson is already using a Blog publishing tool called w.bloggar to create and post to their blog. Others are experimenting with what their blog presents, such as James Snell's tag cloud.
Me, I'm still handcoding HTML. :< (even my smiley's aren't graphical yet)
I guess I have to wait my turn.
And hopefully it's not like that time in Logan's Run to "Renew" (and never be heard from again).
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Recognizing the importance of social computing
rawn 100000R0P5 Tags:  social_computing community 2,146 Views
Good news for social computing: people are finally believing in you.
Forrester Research has published a 24-page report on Social Computing tying innovation to this topic. (This is a paid report)
Even within our own IBM Global Innovation Outlook 2.0, innovation through social computing is one of the top subjects.
The general feeling has gone beyond "there's something important there" to "how can we make use of that"?
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Federated identities and online information
rawn 100000R0P5 Tags:  trust_models virtual_environments 2,284 Views
The notion that there are bits of information about us all over the Web has been a nagging feeling for many although theyre not quite sure how to deal with it. A few react to it with pride. Some people consider it as a minor issue with a reaction of needing to be careful but not in panic. Others more wary are who the insurance and financial companies are trying to target with new service offerings.
Kathy, our marketing leader, recently showed me a site that uses a combination of two Web 2.0 technologies, search and user identities, and it brought up not just a surprising collection of info but also a small shock and that old nagging feeling.
If you go to Zoominfo, youll find a whole new way to feed either your ego or paranoia, or even both. You can type in the name of any person or organization and it will search the Net for all the info it can where your name is published, most likely areas that do not require registration.
I came across only a handful of results mapping back to my name at previous jobs (LinuxWorld, RTD System & Networking, etc.), and automatically builds a new online profile about me. I could then register as a member and create a more detailed profile by editing it. In some ways, it builds on what LinkedIn is missing, that is, auto-filling in my information rather than entering it by hand.
Thats probably not as surprising as the other linkages it finds. For example, it does a lateral search of other people who have worked at these organizations to find my peers and coworkers. Youll probably be surprised who you remember and who you dont. It probably doesnt find info which requires you to enter an account and password but I have not explored this fully yet.
The core idea in this model is to build an online profile that can be reused. In Web 2.0 terms, you can then probably use this profile in other applications, sites, etc. in ways the dreamers, innovators, and entrepreneurs will figure out.
I dont know how the tool is implemented but my guess is that it involves one or more of the large search engines to perform the searching. This application focuses on conducting multiple sequential relevant searches and consolidating it under a common presentation, backed by registration and other tools.
This is an example of a federated identity but not in the sense of user-account identities and single-sign-on applications. It is federation around online information centered on your own real world identity, or at least your name.
-rawn[Read More]
Tag-based ad-hoc communities
In a discussion with erik_k of help.com it seems apparent that tag-based communities are one of the premier forms of ad-hoc community building.
Rather than a formal process to start a community, people create tags around what they are working on or are interested in and it matches the folksonomy of others with the same tags, and what they collectively post about it.
This form of tag-based community isn't unique to help.com; there are other sites like 43 Things, del.icio.us, jeteye.com, etc. that all allow people to "bubble up" a community based on what they tag.
If people use the same keywords, they automatically become a collective or group of participants around the topic. With sites like Jeteye, you can create multiple types of content elements in each tag. Still others allow member of a shared tag to start a discussion area, etc.
This kind of ad-hoc process allows a population to rapidly organize and create communities around what they are working on. You can build quite a sizeable community this way if you have a general purpose site like help.com or del.icio.us.
The downside is that it can be chaotic and hard to track. Some tags get buried under others; there can be many, many tags that refer to the same thing but are disjoint, simply based on how you word the tag; there may not be a central or high-level navigation system. Finally, it's hard to "value" what one person creates over another.
The alternative is to have a formal community creation process and then build community tools around the created entity. This also has its weak points which primarily center around the fact that the process can become bureaucratic.
This isn't limited to just information, but also to other scenarios such as situational applications, where people get together to quickly prototype or build an application in a group setting. More on that later.
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Social entreprenuerism is not just an activity for rural environments
I ran into someone who was taking an honors class in Social Entrepreneurism at the University. Their focus is on rural education and micro-economic enablement through micro-loan systems. If you have not heard about this concept, it was pioneered by Grameen Bank in Bangladesh a number of years ago and has since become a worldwide phenomenon.
As I was describing to them, however, social entrepreneurism (SE) isn't limited to helping the poor. There are other groups of people out there who need help and education just as much. Even dW is a form of SE in terms of helping emerging topics and technologies grow within the realm of software systems.
There are a great many valuable ideas out there initiated by people who know a lot about technology and software. However, not every developer knows what to do to keep a project running, sharing it with others, or getting recognition for their efforts.
We hear of many successful and innovative open source projects created purely on the basis of successful leadership, and even a hefty dose of good luck. However, there are tens of thousands of other projects which fall off the grid because the lead(s) of the team simply don't know what to do to get it to the next level.
Many technical people simply say "Oh well that's a marketing thing to get more people to use it", but that's only one element of it.
Towards that goal, the idea of dW started as one whereby we could help that kind of project that either came out of IBM or one we were involved in to help them grow and become more successful. It has grown in many ways beyond just the needs of IBM and we think that is a good thing for the whole industry.
Our community areas are no different. Our SE role is in the same domain: helping projects, topics and ideas to grow. That means we need to focus on providing tools, knowledge and other forms of assistance to fuel this.
Obviously, with a limited team there's a limit to how much you can do for anyone one group, and it always depends on the leaders of that group. However, by documenting successes, identifying best practices for different situations, we think we can help the situation for others. The learning and education here is not just in terms of solving a particular technical issue but addressing how to actually improve the human side of the equation.
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still climbing
Okay, I take that back. We're not behind Stephen King. Right now it's #21, ahead of Jim Collins' Good to Great.
-rawn[Read More]
We're #1: SOA Compass
Okay, I try to avoid being the braggart but I have to say that this week our SOA Compass book that I co-authored with four other engineers from IBM is today's #1 in all computer books on the Barnes & Noble's site, amusingly enough even ahead of Lou Gerstner's Who says elephants can't dance?.
This is only for today and only on Barnes & Nobles rather than Bookscan or the NY Times list of course, but it put a smile on my face. After years of writing, this is about as good as it has gotten. This is a good day for developerWorks Books.
Amusingly enough, we are also #24 amongst all fiction and non-fiction books right after Stephen King's latest book Cell and ahead of other books I admire like Robert Kiyosaki's Rich Dad, Poor Dad, Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point, Larry Bossidy's Execution: The discipline of getting things done and even Dan Brown's paperback version of Angels and Demons.
Okay, it's still not yet the top ten of all books alongside Friedman's The World is Flat, or Steven Levitt's Freakanomics.
Of course, all such success is fleeting.[Read More]
How community groups interact
Whether formalized or ad-hoc, there are several common types of communities based on the goals of that group of people
Some of these types include:
The behavior of the groups, the tools they need, the processes they use, etc. are different. Some groups may start out as one type and change into another. It really helps the group to identify what they want to accomplish.
The failure of most groups to develop or encourage a healthy, growing community stems from not setting up that initial direction.
For example, a project-based community need tools help manage the project and the product they are developing. This can be software, but it can apply to any kind of product really. Having tools to monitor activity, define schedules, and record achievements are all hallmarks of a good project management system. However, not all projects need complex PM
tools; in fact they can be quite intimidating or cause bureaucratic overload, which just leads to frustration.
A community of practice needs means for the members to get together and collect their ideas and experiences. Very often, you see this happening in Wikis and other group editing tools.
A community of interest exists to gather more energy and followers to a topic but may not be focused as much on developing knowledge, just sharing experiences. Thus, regular communications through some form of discussion tool is quite healthy.
This is not to say that any of these require only one specific tool to achieve their goal. Quite the converse. You will find that many communities will use the same type of tool for different purposes and many will need multiple tools to interact.
This is one of the reasons why when developing a community, you cannot base it on a single tool like a forum or a wiki, and similar why a single tool does not signify the extent of the community. So far, I have not seen no one perfect solution for all communities.
If you're a community of many other communities like we are at developerWorks, then you will likely have each of these different subtypes within yourself, and then you really need to expand the tools that allow your community members to interact.
-rawn[Read More]
Convertible notebooks need improvement
rawn 100000R0P5 Tags:  innovation 1 Comment 2,924 Views
Laptops are the ubiquitous tool of Networked Man. It's also how you identify them in the wild.
I'm a very heavy laptop user. I take it with me almost every day when I leave the house. Hence, I need something that won't drag me down in terms of weight. I've been using one kind of Thinkpad or another for years, honestly, because this is what they provide me at work. It seems to do the job well and isn't too heavy (current one is about 5 lbs).
On the other hand,I really like the idea of convertible notebooks or Tablet PCs where you can flip the screen over
and lay it flat on the keyboard and then write on it. IBM's PC division (before Lenovo) had one for a brief time together with a notepad, but that went away. In fact most Tablet PCs were similar size (12" screens), which was a little too small for me.
The one I see out there now is Gateway's 14" widescreen version. However, they haven't made a good docking station for it, just a port replicator.
I'd like to a tablet PC with a docking station you can just plug into vertically to turn the unit into a sort of
all-in-one monitor-PC. There'd be a keyboard, mouse and cabling connected to the dock of course. But the core idea would be to have a dock that works like an adjustable monitor base (turning it, raising it, etc.)
When you're on the go, you could simply suspend, unlock and lift it off and put it into a locking hard case/shell rather than having to strap into a laptop bag.
Honestly, the five minutes it takes for me to hibernate my computer, undocking, and pack it; then do the reverse when at my location turns out to be about an hour a week I've lost. That's 40-50 hours a year; i.e., a whole week of work.
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Is project collaboration across the globe a rarity?
rawn 100000R0P5 Tags:  virtual_environments 2,294 Views
There are many examples for successful projects that are being built by a team of people across the globe (e.g., Skype). This is becoming less and less unusual. What is rare however, is an account of what this experience is like and what it takes to successfully carry out such a project.
This is project management to a new degree with people you may have never met before, who may not even be in your organization. Undoubtedly, our industry has advantages because it naturally allows this kind of collaboration using tools, and communication mechnisms that are cheap or even completely free.
What we don't hear about are the specifics:
It's these kind of questions that really bug me and generally where I think a lot of people need a lot of guidance. I do think that software tools are just the first step.
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From communities to encouraging innovation
rawn 100000R0P5 Tags:  community innovation books 2,617 Views
I'm not sure if you've seen this meme but I've come across it in several books both about online and offline communities:
Interactions in communities -->
Creates Understanding --------->
Develops Trust ----------------->
Allows Exploration & Entreprenuership ->
Sets stage for Innovation
The most recent place I saw this meme again, in a slightly varied form was near the last chapters of The World is Flat (ok, maybe I make references to this too often these days :)
Now these are "grand" notions that often follow in a sequence like this above. You need to have one stage happening before you can really reach the next stage. Thus you don't really jump ahead and ask "How do we innovate?" but need to ask "What are we doing to set up an environment such that innovation can happen?"
It's important to realize that the arrows in the diagram above are not trivial. In other words, when you have one stage, you need to do something to progress it to the next stage. That something could take a whole lot of effort. But in terms of managed innovation, it gives points where you can measure how your population is doing and how you can recognize if you've reach that stage.
There are many books out there describing how to innovate and get others to innovate, and I certainly have not read nearly enough of them. I still wonder if some of them consider going through that meme sequence above.
The somethings are also where the opportunities lie. Many innovation and leadership management trends have come and gone, and still many exist in parallel. I'm no certified expert at it and there are likely some really good sources out there too. (Okay, maybe people like Steven Covey)
Right now, I'm just trying to develop an idea for the early stages of this meme, those focused on the developing the community. Hopefully more smart people will come along to explain what to do next.
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One week of brainstorming is over, another one coming up
rawn 100000R0P5 Tags:  web_2.0 innovation community 2,757 Views
We just ended our weeklong meeting with the infrastructure, applications and design teams of our developerWorks. We have them once or twice a year bringing all the members of our distributed organization into a single physical location to talk about their projects, brainstorm, and engage each other in coordinating efforts.
This is our own internal community of developers and designers that help maintain and improve the extensive network of sites that is developerWorks, supporting over 5 million members, dozens of acclaimed topics, and many sites for other countries (locales). We call this collective "Scott McAllister's team" refering to the multiple teams and managers that report up to Scott. The event is our own Geek Week.
We have a whole other team of folks who do the great work behind creating our content on the many sites. That team is meeting at the end of February.
For my part, I talked extensively about our planned Community strategy, and the involvement of these teams. The plan is a holistic look at the evolution of communities, predicting what the next stage of evolution is, what that means to us in terms of future opportunities, what we should build, and even the next stages of what we could do.
Needless to say, Web 2.0 played a large part, but rather than in bits and pieces, I mapped out the overall solution that brings Web 2.0 to our whole site. I'd like to tell you the plan, but it's a secret. ;)
I can say that I get a number of people coming up to me and saying they really liked the presentation (gives me warm fuzzies :), some also wanted to know how they could get involved.
What I should say is that I had to consider what projects and experiments we were already considering and how it might relate to this plan. There are many smart people in our organization and many ways to interpret ideas. My strategy (behind the strategy) is to consider the many ideas and see if we can make good use of it in the overall plan. I like to be inclusive wherever possible.
That's actually much harder than it seems. For one, while we have a such a structure, we are not a strongly hierarchical organization (i.e., siloed) and have many cross-teams across the functional teams. This is not an unusual situation for many companies these days. One person may have different roles in several teams, so part of the time I'm trying to consider which role I'm talking to. We are also distributed across at least six different states in the US (not including the international teams), that makes it hard to just get appropriate time with people.
It's events like this week that greatly reinforce the "wholeness" of the team, as well as help spread ideas. It is a great offline community that most of our readers never hear about. It's when people connect that innovations--small or large--happen.
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New federal guidelines on online job hunting makes silly demands on job-hunting
rawn 100000R0P5 Tags:  virtual_environments 1,783 Views
Maybe, I'm misunderstanding the goal of this new US federal guideline but it sounds like a bonehead idea to me. The goal of this guideline is to standardize how employers track data on diversity of job applications. However, it requires very specific aspects that makes it quite impractical to apply for jobs online.
Per this article on Money magazine, one item is that you need to exactly match the text in your resume to the exact qualifications that the job posting requires. Otherwise the employer will never see the application in the first place.
If you have written enough job postings before, you may know how challenging it is to describe exactly what you want. Not only that, the not everything is so exact that people describe the same skill by the same definition. So if the applicant doesn't understand what the potential employer means by it, they can rewrite their app to match but that doesn't mean that they have a proper match. This means false matches.
Another way to look at it, even if you do want to apply for a job, it has to be written exactly per the employers needs. While it's not a bad thing to design your resume around the employers needs but, just mechanically having to format your resume and application per each employer is just time consuming (and I argue wasted effort).
I don't know who was involved in this but it doesn't sound like they spent a lot of time researching the user experience on how people apply for jobs online.
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Situational applications rising
Cnet's article on Small is beautiful for Web 2.0 start-ups gives attention to the growing sentiment that the application development process needs to become more lightweight.
This is something that can go in several directions:
While Jason Fried of 37Signals believes the idea of enterprise software is "dead", it's more likely a space that small projects just don't play in. Also there may be a great many more small projects going compared to large projects but it's difficult to argue either way that a number of small projects equals one large project or vice-versa. (Obviously, I'm not defining what "small" and "large" means; think of those as what they mean to you)
On the other hand, small projects may be a difficult idea for some organizations to handle, especially when they are focused on going for large ones. It's a matter of overhead; With each small project, the relative size of the overhead for running the project may seem a lot higher than the overhead of a large project.
However, the techniques needed to operate a large project many not be the same as the ones needed for small ones.
The real winner is the one who figures out what kind of project management techniques are most appropriate for any given project, anticipating its complexity and size. Of course, if you could see the future and know how much work was involved right away, it'd be a simple trick.
-rawn[Read More]
Someone's failed podcast strategy
Again with Business 2.0's 101 Dumbest Moments in Business. This time #53 on podcasting strategies that don't work.
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The silliest open source strategy
rawn 100000R0P5 1,420 Views
Business 2.0 list of 101 Dumbest Moments in Business #43. I don't like sniping at others, but that's just so darn funny.
-rawn[Read More]
The Economist Jan 21st issue on The New Organization
rawn 100000R0P5 Tags:  community web_2.0 virtual_environments 2,554 Views
The Economist issue from last week has an 18-page in depth section on how people and organizations are evolving in the face of globalization, online Web 2.0 technologies, and changing ideas on organizing teams. This is one of the best articles I have seen on the subject (even better than Friedman's "The World is Flat")
You will need to be registered to access this premium content online, unfortunately.
-rawn[Read More]
your_money += (Virtual economy assets != real assets) ? free_money : -irs_tax;
rawn 100000R0P5 Tags:  virtual_environments 1,858 Views
Whew! It's getting almost too busy to blog already this early in the year...
Ok, my thoughts on Virtual economies affecting the real world is already starting to happen...
CNet had an article on Julian Dibbell's stance on Are Virtual Assets Taxable?" brings a real question to the face of the Internal Revenue Service, the US authority that taxes everyone (even people who don't live in the US).
Julian's story is on his virtual world of Ultima Online which coincidentally was one of the first graphical MMORPGs I used to play years ago. I spent many hours of my childhood playing the single-player Ultima games, so UO was a godsend.
In any case, the same problem exists as I mentioned before, in most if not all virtual worlds, such assets can be freely created and there is no hard limit to resources. This makes it easy to keep increasing the amout of "space" and "stuff" that's all around you. Continue to sell that virtual stuff for real money essentially amounts to devaluing real dollars.
Everyone considered it an amusing diversion but chuckled because "how many players can there be actually doing that?" According to the CNet article the combined number of players already ranks in the millions and the combined asset value (in terms of fair market value) could be in tens or hundreds of millions.
If you consider the number of online gamers is simply increasing as well as the number of titles, then the possibility for continual growth in that combined asset value is also real. How long before it really matters? Does it matter when that value is in the hundreds of millions now or soon? How about in the billions? Still no? How about in the trillions? Yes, or do you still think it just ridiculous?
This brings up another point in that there are still a limited number of human players. Possibly, but the ability to create in game bots to play for you is becoming more and more intelligent. Just the same, consider those bots, familiars, servants, etc. that are collecting assets for your main character. Now it becomes easier for a (really dedicated) person to amass assets at a faster rate.
-rawn[Read More]
IBM blogging versus developerWorks blogging
James Governor of RedMonk has a point in his blog
Wake up IBM: come out from behind developerworks!!!
If it isn't obvious already, developerWorks focuses on a mixed audience of programmers, sysadmins, architects, testors, etc. all those directly involved in the software development lifecycle. Hence, our blogs fall in the same cloud too.
IBMers do have other blogs both on the site and outside, but there isn't an area for "all IBM blogs" externally from the global IBM site yet. Honestly, that falls beyond dW's scope.
-rawn[Read More]
Online identities and avatars becoming commonplace
rawn 100000R0P5 Tags:  virtual_environments web_2.0 2,405 Views
One trend that sci-fi authors, role playing games, movies and multiuser environments have talked about for decades, is finally becoming more and more real.
Examine these parallel trends:
A. Dungeons & dragons / Role playing (non-computer) characters
-> text MUD games players
-> MMORPGs (e.g. Ultima Online, Everquest, World of Warcraft)
-> Non-RPG-based environments (The Sims Online, Second Life)
-> Military Tactical/Strategic representations
-> Telemetry and Remote Imaging
-> Battlefied information systems
-> Robotic military (Remote guided aircraft/UAV, bomb-detection robots, etc.)
C. Heroic Mythology (Greek myth, Viking sagas, Chinese myth)
-> People with secret super-hero identities (Batman, Daredevil, Spiderman)
-> Robotic personas (Voltron, Gundam & Macross series)
-> Virtual worlds (Tron, The Matrix trilogy)
D. User accounts
-> Web home pages
-> individual blogs
-> Group content/documents (wikis, forums, chats, etc.)
-> Spaces (combining Web pages, blogs, other Web 2.0 services)
-> Online personas
While different in form and utility, what it is pointing to is a change in how we perceive our identities in the rise of the online/alternate world.
Call them what you like, your blog, your avatar, your character, your robot, your role in the Matrix... It all points to having a separate identity for yourself in an environment other than the one you live in right now.
I tend to see this as a continuing trend where we will see more and more of ourselves participating in the online world on a regular basis.
However, I also think that people will start making distinctions. Most of us have different faces even in a typical day: there's a similar but distinct persona of you at home, at work, at school, with your family, with your friends, with the government, etc.
They are all you, just different aspects of you. With the online world, it's easier to make those different aspects, or even create new ones based on the online environment.
This comes back to developers in a real way. There is probably a "developer" identity that you put on (some of the time, or even much of the time for others).
What that developer identity needs is a environment of its own. In fact, traditionally we have that too:
> assembly language
-> programming languages
-> compilers & other developer tools
-> integrated development environments
-> online searching
-> online code repositories and exchanges
-> online group projects and identities
The X here is where it all comes together into an online space that is yours and that you have your developer avatar participate in, and that can interact in an online community or virtual world with many other developers.
In this virtual world, we're not talking about a game of fighting other developers (aka WoW style), but in a real sense of getting involved in projects, learning new ideas or meeting new people who are working on things you are interested in. It gives the setting for participating.
Once someone builds that participation environment, you as a developer can suddenly see or be exposed to the many opportunities that lie ahead. This opportunity can translate into dollars and jobs in the real world.
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How to do a business of developing rather than publishing books online
The rise of Web 2.0 brings a new level of collaboration into the mindsets of the audience. Ideas which were previously taboo, are now actually being considered.
For example, the value of a book is traditionally considered to be in having access to the content of the book itself. For book publishers, this model means: get one or more authors, work on a book, then print and publish the thing, and distribute to bookstores where customers can buy them.
Usually, the ability a person has to examine the contents of the book is usually limited in time (enough time to read some of the book in a store), in content (having access to some portion of the content they can review), or based on the opinion of others.
While not the first, Robert Scoble helped change views while working on his book as a blog, by giving people access to its content while it is being developed online.
This idea is close to my heart and went into the reasoning behind why we needed the developerWorks Books series, and why I helped to start that as part of IBM Press. Somewhere in the following I think is the future of how books can be developed in something that benefits most parties.
It's similar to, although not exactly the same, as "open sourcing" the book since the philosophy of open source does not preclude selling the product. However, if you have access to the contents of the book for free, why would you buy it.
This puts traditional print publishers in a dilemma. Their business is based on selling the product, not giving it away online and hope someone still buys a copy.
To me, both ways seem a little extreme.
Developing a book takes a lot of time and effort and in some topics, by the time you finish writing, a lot may have changed. My guess is that most authors want not only the noteriety but hopefully would also like to get paid from the knowledge they put down. Call me a capitalist, but giving away a year or two of my life to write a book that may become outdated deserves some reward beyond the satisfaction that you've tried to impart some wisdom to the world.
In the fast changing online world, it makes a lot of sense to do some grass-roots promotion of the book by talking about the subject or showing people some of what you have been working on. This is in hopes that later, when you are done writing and editing, people will want to buy the finished product.
Therefore, I think there's a use-case somewhere in between. I say a use-case because I think this is something people will want to do online.
E.g., provide a group of authors with a tool for them to put together a document (say a Wiki), that they can all edit. Develop the outline, and start fleshing out some of the chapters and sections. Then introduce processes between the authors and an editor where they can bring in the editorial process. Then give access to a select audience or even a wide audience to some of the content so you can get some feedback and peer review. Finally, give access to the content and some knowledge about what others think of the book in progress to the book marketing group so they know what it is about and how its doing.
Thus, this package is a specific use-case for book development that involves an online tool for document development, perhaps another tool for discussion, access control to select or public audiences to portions of the content that you choose, ways to measure opinions and traffic to the publicly available/reviewable sections, and then finally a way to transfer the developed content into a format suitable for publishing/printing/distribution.
It involves giving away part of the book for free so that you get a drumbeat going as well as some feedback on coverage. In exchange, you get a better understanding of how the market may receive the work before it is even complete.
The step beyond is where it gets real interesting.
There's no real end to the book, if people are really interested. You could continue working on developing the content, adding new material, and exposing new material to others. You continue to build on a book without having to build a huge business case for a new book or a new edition, unless there really needs to be one.
Paul Dreyfus from our team is helping to make the dW series of books become real and there should be some interesting news coming out this year.
This idea above is so far just my own brainstorming. I doubt it is unique and probably already in force somewhere. It requires the expertise, experience and cooperation of a book publisher, an online publisher, and authors daring enough to try it out. From a Web 2.0 perspective, I think it makes for an interesting approach to team and even community driven content, and brings remixing to a whole new level (between print and online media).
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Web 2.0 can give you an advantage to compete against the 1.5 billion people who joined the labor market
Paper is undeniably one of the most lasting technologies the world has ever known. Even now, in the digital age, companies have considered going back to "paper disks" because the medium actually can store data for much longer than magnetic media (50 yrs as opposed to 5-10 yrs). Now imagine what would have happened if more people learned how to use paper to record knowledge, and if that became more prevalent centuries before it became "mainstream".
In reading Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat, I came across a factoid which I thought was interesting (pg 182). There are about 1.5 billion new workers entering the labor force as a result of the flattening of the world and the entrance of new players to the game of globalization (i.e., BRICK countries = Brazil, Russia, India, China, Korea, etc.)
His idea of the three convergences include: convergence into a new playing field (because of the rise of technology), convergence of new players (as above), and new processes (to enable a globalized economy).
The impact of the new technologies not just for data delivery (the net) and content sharing (the Web), but also for collaboration and workflow (the Web 2.0) cannot be understated in this regard.
In other words, to play in a new globalized field, you will need to consider not just what resources are available locally but also remotely in other areas you haven't thought of.
To technology companies, this means that there is a need to closely examine how the collaboration, interaction and workflow tools required for a global environment needs to function. And it's not just the tools, but the ways on how to use them, the human processes and guidelines for interaction, and the pitfalls and traps to avoid.
Inevitably, there will be many different (often competing) technologies and products that will arise to fill this need. Friedman paraphrasing economic historian Paul A. David, there is a historical basis in a lag between the release of these innovations and the rise of proper processes for using these technologies.
For developers, the lesson to learn here is how to take advantage of these tools, understand in context which tools are more useful for their own needs, and encouraging others to adopt the tool.
Printing, for example, was develop many centuries ago in China; however, it was limited, even restricted, in use. If it was more open, I daresay that the world might have been even more technologically advanced that it is now. The same goes for Web 2.0 technologies.
Web 2.0: learn it, use it, and find your global advantage.
-rawn[Read More]
Web 2.0 focuses on the power of enabling individuals and that's where its customers lie waiting
Tim O'Reilly's paper on "What is Web 2.0?" brought to mind the issues of individual scale that many companies don't quite get.
Tim's description of why Google's AdSense works because it allows individuals to easily slap an ad onto their sites rather than the more complicated process of DoubleClick that requires formal contracts and agreements, gives one example of the power of mass of individuals.
The blogosphere's population of many individuals talking about different topics, rather than large PR teams in organizations, are starting to make a greater difference; ie. another example
The ability to remix applications, content and data in Web 2.0 for your own personal use gives yet another example.
The common ideas across all of these that I can see are:
- individuals (as opposed to whole companies/organizations) matter in Web 2.0
- the ability to work on things on a small or even personal scale (as opposed building applications for whole organizations) also matter
- the organizations that are built to focus on large customers rather than individuals may be missing out on Web 2.0.
My point is that to take a stance on Web 2.0 you have to think about empowering the individual not just big business partners, and large customers.
This is the ever ellusive "SMB" market (small-medium business) that more big companies are starting to take notice of. But this SMB goes even smaller down the scale to individual customers. I'd even call it the "SSB" (super-small business).
Now the question of whether this is something that works only for the mass/retail customer rather than organizations as a whole is still something everyone is trying to understand.
Scenario: a developer in an organization is looking for a particular item (content, data, or service), and finds it on the net somewhere to help complete their job task. Is that worth it to a supplier when the cost of offering that item
may not be very high? That is, what would make companies consider selling millions tiny widgets at $0.10 rather than one big widget to one customer for $10M?
The classic argument why some companies don't focus on mass sales at an almost retail level is the cost of offering that product is usually quite high, leaving low margins.
That would be perfectly true for a physical item that requires proper warehousing, distribution, retailing, sales tracking, mass advertising, etc.
Now consider pure-online products that can be delivered over the network. Are all those costs still true? Is there still this barrier of high cost overheads to produce something of the sort?
Companies geared to sell expensive goods to large customers may be so locked into their sales model that offering small scale services to many individuals just doesn't seem very appetizing.
That's a substantial mental hurdle for some organizations to overcome in Web 2.0.
PS: If you're thinking that going down to the SSB scale just sounds crazy, think again about the successes of Google, eBay and Amazon, and not just for retail customers but for their business partners, and their whole community of users.
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Web 2.0 use cases are different than technologies
I wanted to point out that "use cases" are different than technology implementations in Web 2.0. I've mentioned this before but I really think people need to see the difference between the two points.
An "online diary" is a use case. Lot's of people have them. Before the rise of blog implementations we called them personal home pages. The actual technology evolved over time. There are now videoblogs, photoblogs, etc. but whatever the technology, they are still online diaries.
On the work-level, a "documentation development tool" can be implemented in a great many ways. It could even be implemented in separate application tools (e.g., a forum + a wiki, a workflow app + email + content management system, etc.) There are also many variations of this documentation development tool depending upon the needs. But across all of them the use cases have some common basis.
The idea is to figure out the common/base use cases that are useful and that can be replicated on a common basis such that it can be reused by many. That's where the real challenge lies. Technology after all will always come and go.
For that same reason, I consider the Web 2.0 as a superset of all these use-cases that everyone is so interested in. It is also why "Web 2.0 != blogging", "Web 2.0 != wikis", or any one specific technology. It is the sum of all the ways we interact with the Web under the new common aspects/principles of Web 2.0 (see end of this post).
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Web 2.0 on Wikipedia
rawn 100000R0P5 Tags:  web_2.0 virtual_environments 2,031 Views
The Web 2.0 entry on Wikipedia gives a snapshot of the many different technologies and topics that exist around it. Take a look at the image they provide:
From Wikipedia, 2006
The Wikipedia entry focuses more on the technologies behind Web 2.0 although it does give some description of the social impact behind it.
I consider this the difference between looking at the invention of the automobile itself versus what automobile-based transportation has done for the world. E.g., inside and outside a car there are many technological innovations: engine, transmission, electrical controls, ergonomics, safety structure, comfort systems, the highway system, etc.
But the impact of this mode of transportation is much wider: the trucking/containerization/delivery industry, suburbization of society, learning to drive (a right of passage of life for many teenagers), leisure travel, car racing, commuting and even telecommuting, etc. are things that have risen from exploding gas within a metal box to turn gears and push carts.
For that same reason, you can certainly be fascinated by the wonders of cars (I certainly spend many hours watching Speed Channel and reading car magazines), but the real impact of having the automobile is so much more.
I see this same difference in Web 2.0 technologies and the value of Web 2.0 itself.
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What is Web 2.0?
rawn 100000R0P5 Tags:  web_2.0 virtual_environments community 2,288 Views
I'm asked to explain what the Web 2.0 question often enough these days. There are plenty of things that have been put under this umbrella but rather than technologies it is the idea behind it that's most significant.
First of all what's "Web 1.0"?
This generally refers to the state of what the Web was primarily used for: a (mostly) consume-only service to access information. Even with all the many applications surfaced through the Web, the majority of the Web is still site for reading, gathering, and consuming information. The number of consumers is much greater than the number of producers.
To make the distinction, the thought behind "Web 2.0" is to instead make "producers" out of the majority of the users of the Web. Now, users not only visit the Web to gain information but also can contribute to the wealth of information that's out there.
It's a democratization of the Web if you will, allowing people not just to express their thoughts on their work, their lives, their emotions, etc. It is not just creating new written content, but contributing by taking existing data and "remixing" them to produce new content. It is also building application services that can work on data or app services that others produce.
Thus in the new world of "Web 2.0", people become producers of original and remixed data, content, and services.
There are quite a few books coming out around the topic of Web 2.0 and by leading literary minds like Dan Gilmor, and Thomas L Friedman. The topic is related to a number of ideas that can raise a lot of controversy including: freedom of expression, ownership of material produced, the right to use information and services of others, legal liability, and even globalization.
Web 2.0 existed from the very beginning of the Web itself, at least in concept. You could create home pages from very early on and even HTTP had rudimentary means to PUT and POST data. However, it was not until the rise of newer technologies that put it into the hands of the masses, and acknowledged significant impact on real-world issues that it really hit the mainstream.
With such a hotbed of activity, its no wonder that everyone wants to know more about how it applies to what they do:
As with any "gold rush", everyone is out to claim their stake in this. For some this rush is about new software. For others its about making yourself heard (and famous). For yet others, its about connecting with others of like mind.
Some common aspects I've observed:
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same thing, different views
rawn 100000R0P5 Tags:  virtual_environments 2,062 Views
My Linux mug is starting to crack.
It's not really a Linux mug, but Joe Barr gave me this present some years ago (when I was still with LinuxWorld), which was an oversized coffee mug with handpainted penguins and snowflakes on it. It's now starting to show some cracks after many, many times in the microwave.
My wife thinks its a Christmassy thing since it has snowflakes and penguins on it, although I think of it as a Linux thing because of the penguins and snowflakes (it's cool!). Funny how different a meaning it gives to each of us.
Also years ago, I tried convincing an analyst that there was a market for multi-player games. In 1995 that was a hard thing to prove. PC and console based games were far ahead of the text-based MUDs, MOOs, MUSHes, etc. that were around. However, a PC player long used to playing by themselves would either get it (fun with friends), or miss the point entirely ("this is so graphics-primitive!"). No one quite believed that people would actually pay to play on a regular basis.
By 1999 the time finally came for a new generation of graphical multiplayer games and MMORPGs. Another 5 years later it's widespread. In five more years it'll be almost difficult to consider a world without MMORPGs.
I guess I hadn't quite learned the business-language needed to convince folks.
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Why do we want primarily technical bloggers?
I'm finally on vacation this year. It's been a very busy season since I started to get our dW Community program on a strategic course. As a reward to myself, I got a CD of Brazilian music ranging from samba to funk.
We are having a gathering of bloggers (GoB) at our next IBM Software University event in January. SWU is primarily an IBMer event and is held every year to gather the expertise from the many thousands of IBMers (FYI: IBM has about 300,000+ employees worldwide) who attend.
[I'll admit I made up the GoB word as a recursive definition of a group of bloggers. It's my Unix heritage.]
The GoB is at SWU because most of our bloggers on dW are currently IBMers. That's not to say we don't have non-IBMer bloggers. In fact, I really want to encourage many non-IBMer technical experts to consider joining our ranks.
However, we do like to make a distinction with our bloggers. We're not really an anyone-who-wants-to-blog site. There are plenty of blogs on all sorts of topics, but here at dW we'd like to focus primarily on technical and developer-oriented topics.
That means that we want to try to keep things on topic that developers would be interested in. This is a non-trivial exercise most of the time. How can you really tell what a blogger wants to talk about? In fact, there is often a lot of interesting information that seems less relevant to a bloggers main topic on occassion.
Bloggers need freedom to express themselves but at the same time, the blogspace is full of many blogs with random thoughts that wander aimlessly, and those that die because it is not an easy task to stay on topic.
Our idea of blogging is actually to find experts that really know their topic and can write about regularly. In print publishing, this is similar to finding a regular columnist; the difference being that columns tend to be much more limited in length, content type and stringent on topic. You can't really go off-topic for an issue with a column.
There could be a wide variety of topics that our bloggers can cover but the key goal is to have a blog that, on a regular basis, is of interest to our audience of programmers, testors, sysadmins, architects, and other technical folk. You can see from the wide range of topics and technologies that IBM is involved in, from our product base to the projects we are researching, to walk across the topic-horizon, learning as you go, could take more than what any single person could do in one lifetime.
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Weird, funny, and still useful: sushi USB drives
rawn 100000R0P5 1,687 Views
The next time you're sitting at an airport or at a cafe somewhere next to someone working on their computer, and you see a piece of sushi stuck to their laptop, really try to resist the temptation to say: "Hey, you have a piece of sushi stuck to your laptop." (Or if you're me, "You gonna eat that?")
Check out the new thumb drives from dynamism.com. You get your choice of over a dozen different types of nigiri or maki sushi, from standard maguro/tuna to uni/sea urchin. The decorative/fake sushi industry in Japan & S. Korea is finally going high-tech.
These USB flash memory cards aren't particularly large in size, and relatively expensive ($99 for 128MB), but when else is someone going to say "Hey, you've a piece of sushi stuck to your laptop."
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