Enterprise RSS

Live From Defrag!

Day 1 at Defrag turned out to be well worth the trip out here. With approximately 250 people in attendance it is the perfect size to meet pretty much everyone and wtih people like Doc Searls, Brad Feld, Phil Windley, Andrew McAfee, Esther Dyson, and Jeff Clavier in attendance, well you are certain to have some good hallway conversations.

Dave Weinberger opened with a keynote that was insightful and philosophical, my favorite takeways were that "links are not information, links do what information doesn't" and ""words are not carriers of meaning, but pointers to shared understanding" (UPDATE: read Dave's comment on this). What I found fascinating about Weinberger's keynote is that he makes the web and what we are doing with it meaningful in a big picture kind of way.

The panel discussion that followed the keynote featured Jerry Michalski, JP Rangaswami, Joshua Schachter, and our own JB Holston. This discussion covered a lot of ground but one thing that caught my attention was how there is a tension in enterprise organizations between open vs. closed, and young vs. old. It's nothing new to suggest that there is a generational divide that dictates ideology and tools.

Dan Farber posted a summary of the first two keynote sessions.

Michael Barrett has a presentation on security which can be summed up as "web 1.0 security is broken and web 2.0 just adds more stuff that will break". Phil Windley captured the presentation in an appropriately named This Stuff Scares the Hell Out of Me post.

We had an open session slot on the agenda where we broke up into working groups to discuss various topics, such as who owns the data, and platforms, which I participated in. The platform open session was interesting because it illustrated the dramatically evolving nature of what it means to be a platform. One thing we all agreed on is that platforms don't declare themselves to be a platform, what happens is that success with customers creates the conditions by which a application evolves to be a platform.

There was a lot more going on in the platform open session, which could have spawned several blog posts but one thing is clear, the platform game is changing and if you want to play in that world you had better understand the new world order.

Next up was a vendor presentation from BEA, which is a sponsor of the conference. All speculation about their future aside, I really like their Aqualogic product line but wonder if the evolving nature of portals chips away at their market opportunity outside of the large enterprise segment.

I saw Andre Durand and Kimbal Musk, was a great conversation and then Jeff Clavier walked up and we went out for coffee.

I moderated a panel on enterprise mashups with Adam Gross from Salesforce.com and John Crupi from Jackbe. We covered a wide range of topics related to enterprise mashups, including security/governance, APIs, monetization, start page apps, social networking, and user interfaces. I enjoyed this discussion and I believe we may be on the cusp of delivering some cool mashup capabilities to enterprise users.

My mashup panel would have had a larger audience were I not going up against another panel on "social networking the enterprise". It's pretty tough to compete with that session right now so we had maybe 40 people in it, however at the end a couple of guys from a company doing mashups came up to me and commented that we covered some good topics not normally talked about in mashup presentations so I'll take that as a success.

We next had a sponsor challenge from NewsGator CTO Greg Reinacker, who I thought did a great job presenting RSS in the enterprise. He's actually very funny, you should book him as a speaker at your next conference.

A highlight of the day is Dick Hardt fragging identity at defrag. It was a new presentation and, as would be expected, very good. I'm sure a slideshare version or video will be up in due time. Esther Dyson gave a presentation about stuff that was way to deep for me to appreciate.

Doc Searls gave a very entertaining presentation on "customer reach vs. vendor grasp", which can be summed up as how little control over your personal profile data you really don't have. Doc is insightful and pointed in his presentation, which like Weinberger, usually takes days of thought to fully grasp. Smart people like Doc think at a different clock rate.

One slide that said a lot more than the words allowed: "we lost more than our identities at the end of the Enlightenment, jobs replaced crafts". Doc makes an important point about identity should mean something more than a name and attributes, identity should reflect a transactional relationship between systems and people.

Lastly, Doc's project around Vendor Relationship Management (project VRM) addresses the way in which we interact with companies. VRM is misnamed though given that in enterprise software circles the term has been used for years and means something completely different, although upon second thought it's really the same thing with different players (b2b instead of b2c)

Last up today is Ross Mayfield, who had great news this week about Socialtext raising more money and getting a new CEO. Ross is never at a loss for entertaining presentation titles is closing out the day with "What to do in Denver when your corporation is dead". I'm running out of battery so I'll have to deprive you of Ross' wisdom for now.

PS- Here's some images on Flickr taken through the day.

--- Jeff Nolan is VP Corporate Development for NewsGator.

Longhorn, Blogs, Linux: Predicting '05

Smart predictions round-up from BigBlogCompany: 

Yep, it’s that time of the year. Predictions everywhere. Let me start with a list I understand. Well, it might have to do with the fact it mentions blogs…

Michael Gartenberg of Jupiter Research peers into his crystal ball for Computerworld:

2. PDAs will become passe. Disconnected ones, that is. Over time, the real action will be moving core PDA functionality, centered on personal information management, to other devices such as cell phones. This will cause major IT headaches, since few cell phones are controlled by IT these days.

So, Tomi Ahonen was right about the mobile winning the battle of the most ubiquitous gadget. Which is good news for us since Tomi also thinks (mo)blogging is the future.

3. More people will lose their jobs over their weblogs. It’s happened already, and it will happen again. If you’re posting about your job or employer without consent, you’re taking a lot of risk with your future.

And more people will gain jobs over their weblogs. But essentially right, there are legal issues as well as cultural that will make it likely that some blogger may loose a job. This is why we set up the Big Blog Company, so businesses do not have to fear blogs but embrace them. In which case, you’d better change from pyjamas into something more suitable… And guidelines. Guidelines help. And treating your employees as intelligent agents and explaining to them why writing about some things may not be a good idea.

4. But more corporations will create official blogs. Corporations have seen the weblog light, and blogs will become common for business use. Unfortunately, far too many of these efforts will just be marketing fluff disguised as weblogs.

I like this prediction. A lot. Have corporations seen the weblog light? Certainly not in the UK, but we are working on it. But I too expect to see more faux, marketing fluff blogs with ‘jumped on the bandwagon (that we don’t really understand or care to understand)’ written all over them…

6. Wi-Fi will be ubiquitous, but not in the workplace. Wi-Fi is readily available in public places such as coffee shops, airports and hotels. IT shops, however, will slow deployments a bit over fears of security. End users will take matters into their own hands, so expect to see lots of ad hoc networks springing up.

Good news, more wi-fi everywhere enables me to leave the house, which has got to have a positive influence on my well-being. Also, good for meeting people in a cafe and being able to show them the blogging marvel live over a cup of coffee. Priceless.

7. VoIP will be a mainstream technology for business users. Voice over IP is perhaps the hottest technology in the telecommunications industry today. VoIP-based services will grow even more as a mainstream technology for business use. Expect a lot of competition for the trillions of minutes and billions of dollars’ worth of voice calls that business users make each year.

Marvellous. Where would we be without Skype...?

Oh, and there is some stuff about Longhorn, Moore’s law and Linux. 

Related...

[the Big Blog Company]

Round-up

Newsweek -- all praise Alpha bloggers

Openwave story about micro-targetted advertising ... via Rubel...

PR Week interview with Rubel on blogs and .... p.r.

Moonwatcher, who agrees 2005 is the year of enterprise RSS, talks about how it will unfold...

Radiant Marketing Group now explicitly a business blogging consultancy

WSJ on blog market research

Simon Waldman's various wisdom on the atomization of media

List of UK Journalist blogs

Round-up

Scoble has a blog around his book-in-process on business blogging, on MSN Spaces  He's sorta building his book transparently on the blog.  And he says that MCI is about to begin blogging behind the firewall.  (update: thanks for the link-fix, Charlie!)

(and this unrelated claim about MSN Spaces: "overnight the blogosphere will double in size...")

iUpload points to this IT Business article on business blogging

Rubel points to the new Business Week on blogging

Moonwatcher agrees that 2005 is the Year of Enterprise RSS

Big Blog Company's powerpoint on effective use of blogs in business

Round-up

WSJ on the value of real-time blogosphere and webworld tracking

"The key is the ability to get a pulse so quickly," says Steve Sommers, senior manager of market research at Sony Corp., which hired Cincinnati-based Intelliseek Inc. to monitor what people are saying about Sony and its products online. "We move at a pretty fast clip here."

Scoble's compleat MSN Spaces blogospheric round-up .  And, Charlene Li says its integration with other MSN tools creates more blogging-incentive...

Lockergnome updates the US Govt's RSSorizing...

Weblogs' Inc now has 62 weblogs!  Is Jason Calacanis the new Bill Ziff? What about Wikimedia - the eBay of media??

Podcasting makes Newsweek

A real-live Chief Blogging Officer!  Since June, '04

Roundup

Scoble (via bigblogcompany);

By the way, I really don’t understand why the press thinks there’s a browser war underway. The real war is between RSS and HTML. At the recent Gnomedex conference about 80% of the attendees said they were using a news aggregator. That’s a HUGE shift in behavior and has far deeper consequences than a browser choice does.

Wired:

Don’t think for a minute that young people don’t read. On the contrary, they do, many of them voraciously. But having grown up under the credo that information should be free, they see no reason to pay for news. Instead they access The Washington Post website or surf Google News, where they select from literally thousands of information sources. They receive RSS feeds on their PDAs or visit bloggers whose views mesh with their own. In short, they customize their news-gathering experience in a way a single paper publication could never do. And their hands never get dirty from newsprint.

What's a magazine to do?

(related-ish): General thoughts on the media biz from a p.r. heavy

Fred Wilson points to data from Korea (as does Engadget) that indicates that the next generation is off e-mail;

It seems that SMS, instant messenger (IM), and blogs (called "one man media" in the linked article) are the favored forms of communication.

The synchronous nature of SMS and IM are preferred because, according to the article:

"The new generation hate agonizing and waiting and tend to express their feelings immediately," said Professor Lee. "The decline of email is a natural outcome reflecting such characteristics of the new generation."

Round-up

-HP has developers blogs (joining Sun, Microsoft, Apple, etc) (moonwatcher)

-Apple has a weblog for students (Rubel)

-Search Engine News article -- why your business should blog

--"I was surprised to find that over 50% of the visitors of this blog access it through a RSS reader. I guess that has something to do with the fact that all feeds for the blog have the full text of the entries, eliminating the need to visit the site, but the number was above what I would expect intuitively."

--Bill French of InfoAge is running a column on RSS

I presently subscribe to about a hundred RSS feeds and my inbox is running at about 20 to 40 messages on a daily basis; very manageable. I no longer receive email newsletters and I specifically seek out newsletter sources that are RSS-based. To put it bluntly, I have no time to surf the Web; the Web has to come to me.

...As I reflect on my decision to use this less-than-mature model for staying abreast of information, I have come to realise that many of my colleagues and other early adopters of RSS have come to depend on RSS for one very simple reason: they value their time. Many people think that RSS is simply a new model for browsing, and while it is a new way to browse information, it’s far from just that. RSS provides a way for you to save time and depending on how much time you presently spend going to Web sites or hunting down updates to information sources. The more you use the Web, the more time you will likely save if you adopt RSS.

...In 1994, if someone told you that in 10 years there would be just shy of a billion Internet users, more than 100 billion Web pages, and trillions of dollars of commerce based on a globally connected network, you might have thought the person insane. It was difficult to imagine then, as it is difficult to imagine now, that more than 100 billion RSS feeds will emerge in the next six years. It is difficult to imagine a different model of search where information (that you really want) searches for you. It’s difficult to imagine anything as geeky as RSS (i.e., machine-code in a URL) impacting non-technical users in every aspect of information and their daily personal and business lives. But it was difficult to envision a Web page 10 years ago.

RoundUp

1. iUplog  pointed to this article about Coke's consumer-generated marketing.  Notable:

iMediaConnection: How has your job changed this year?

Dooley: Rather than just focusing on building brand Web sites, I've had to become educated about the wireless industry, mobile marketing, search, advergaming

Related; this summary about the consumer IS the medium, from AdTech

2.  Rubel points to du Gardier's interview on how PR Pros can use RSS

3. Business Blogger Chamber of Commerce?

4. USA Today does RSS.  As does Sony Music. And the UK Guardian's Editorial Board blogs.

5. CorpBlogs discussed on public radio

Round-up

1. Monster.com blogs -- and is going to do more
2. AP on blog volume:  "That works out to roughly 16,000 posts an hour, or about as many stories as the AP sends out in an entire day," he said. "It will get even tougher to be heard above the roar of the Internet crowd, and the business bets will have to be for greater stakes."
3. Welcome to another new CEO/Entrepreneur blogger
4. Healthcare collaboration networks --  (via maindish)

And, lest you're feeling it's all about the Benjamins...

AP - Beavers found a bag of bills stolen from a casino, tore it open and wove the money into the sticks and brush of their dam on a creek near Baton Rouge.