I found this picture today, of the True Voice session with Robert Scoble, Greg Narain, and me, courtesy of Nick Fink and Flikr.

Also, I sat in on Greg's Beercasting, and Boris Mann caught me:

I return from a wild and wonderful week of conference mania, and I am more or less stunned from the experience. Not so much the late nights, the travel, and the shock to the system that conferences can be, but the impact of people's writing. Plato said that writing is the geometry of the soul, and I have triangulated myself into the souls of a long list of amazing people, now in my growing inner circle. I feel enlarged and exhilarated by exposure to their thoughts and insights.

First, I attended the Blog Business Summit, where I met a lot of new friends, like Chris Pirillo, Jon Husband, Evelyn Rodriguez, Jennifer Rice, and Biz Stone, as well as rubbing elbows with old buddies like Halley Suitt, Greg Narain, Alex Williams, Robert Scoble, and dozens of others. The BBS was a big success and the True Voice session with Robert Scoble and Greg Narain on "the business of blogging" had fifty or more people in attendence (I posted it on Friday). Halley and I had a lot of fun doing a joint session, True Voice: The Art and Science of Blog Writing. There is audio from the presentation that I will get from Steve Brobeck and company laetr this week, I hope. I will post the presos at the same time.

I swooped down to Napa (after spending a wonderful evening with Ted and Molly Rheingold in SF) for the New Communications Forum conference. More time with Evelyn Rodriguez, who also attended, as well as first exposure to Andy Lark, who is a force of nature packaged in human form. Other notable people and events at NCF: the wonderful panelists for the True Voice session, there, including Torsten Jacobi of Creative Weblogging, Julie Woods of Cymphony, Fergus Burns of Nooked, Michael Sippey of SixApart, and Mike Lombardo of Newsgator. I plan to post that session later today, after editing it.

It will take me weeks to assimilate all the interactions and potential for collaboration -- yes, I did manage to snag a bunch of Corante contributors on this tour. Much, much more to follow.

At the New Communications Forum in Napa, Jan Marie Zwiren of Edelman mentions a new approach to evaluate the return on blogging (ROB): conversation rating points (CRP), roughly analogous to TRP and other more traditional metrics.

At the Blog Business Summit in Seattle on the 24th, I hosted a session on the business of blogging with Robert Scoble as my guest and co-hosted by Get Real contributor Greg Narian. Robert had keynoted earlier in the day, but in this conversational setting, I think Robert's insights are more accessible.


MP3 File

Interesting two part piece by Tekrati, The State of Analyst Weblogs, Part 1, investigating how the various analyst firms are adopting blogs in their business models:

The high tech industry analysts have been slow to adopt blogs. That's about to change. In this two-part special report, Tekrati takes the pulse of the industry analyst bloggers. The report supplements the launch of our newest online resource, a directory of industry analyst blogs. At first glance, the slow spread of analyst blogs seems illogical. We expect the analysts to embrace new technologies. We expect the analysts to embrace tools that can increase their visibility and effectiveness as thought leaders. Where the two intersect -- new technologies and new communications channels -- we expect to find analyst nirvana. So, why the slow uptake?

Of course they will move slowly: they have built their world around a broadcast, pay-for-access model of analysis, and switching to an unmediated form of dialogue with their potential and actual clients will be very difficult. I predict that upstart companies -- like Corante -- will take the highground in areas that analyst firms don't have a dominant foothold.

Times Online quotes Ovum analyst, Julian Hewitt, on Google's rumoved move to integrate VoIP telephony with search.

Scoble's keynote at Blog Business Summit: a wide-ranging, gonzo exploration of the reasons why blogging has changed the world, for an ubertechnoid like him, for you, and for every business in the world, whether a tiny winery, your neighborhood plumber, or a multinational like Microsoft.

In what is good news for us in the blogosphere, The NY Times reports that online advertising is exploding: "Online advertising is expected reach $9.7 billion in 2004, or about 3.7 percent of United States advertising spending, according to a recent Merrill Lynch report. Still, that number is expected to grow 19 percent this year as the nation's largest advertisers shift budgets from print and network television to cable and the Internet, the report said."

Participating at both the Blog Business Summit and New Communications Forum this week.

Monday, 24 January 2005, 1:15pm to 2:00pm -- True Voice Show hosted by me, with Robert Scoble, Greg Narain, and one or two other folks from the conference on "The Business of Blogging." For telcon registration, please click here. To get the Corante discount to attend the show, click here.

Monday, 24 January 2005, 4:30-5:30pm -- True Voice: The Art and Science of Blog Writing, co-presented with Halley Suitt. This will *not* be accessible via telcon, but I plan to record and post later (via audioblog and podcast).

Thursday, 27 January 2005, 1:15-2:15pm -- True Voice: The Power Laws and You, hosted by me with participation by Greg Reinacker, founder and CTO of Newsgator Technologies, Fergus Burns, CEO of Nooked, and Julie Wood, VP of Product and Marketing Strategy of Cymphony. To register for the telcon, click here.

True Voice is sponsored by Silkroad technology.

So, I am glad to have the first Get Real show behind me. It was a messy business, with a lot of moving parts. The panelists were great, and even though we had some last minute change of plans, that was relatively smooth. But the various technologies I was trying to use -- teleconference service, Audioblog, bluetooth earphone, cell phone recording, bluetooth handsfree conference call gizmo, iPod recording -- conspired against me at every turn.

I really like my new cellphone, a Sony Ericsson T637, and the bluetooth capabilities seemed to be a way to avoid even more wires in my life. However, a series a problems arose, based on the intersection of the various components:

• During the show, we had Audioblog running, and that service (which otherwise works great) has one glitch: any key that you touch leads to terminating the audio recording. So, therefore, you have to conference in Audioblog as the last step, and then subsequently not touch any keys.
• I was using my Motorola M820 bluetooth earphone, which has the best recording quality of any phone in my office. But, it has the unforseen "feature" of timing out the audio if you don't speak after five minutes -- an event that did not arise during any testing. To redirect speaking to the headset, it is a simple selection on the cell phone -- which leads to terminating the Audioblog. Which is exactly what happened.
• I also have a record capability built right into the T637, but you need to turn it on after a call has started, and -- you guessed it -- touching any key turns it off.
• I thought that I could use a Motorola M800 bluetooth handsfree conference call gizmo, rather than the headphone, but whenever I did so some inaudible whine led to terrible sound quality with any recording tool I have -- most obviously with my iPod using a Belkin plugin for recording voice memos. That plugin works pretty well when sitting at a table with other people, but it is horrible for recording from speaker phone of any sort. So that is out.
• I looked into using Skype or Vonage Softphone on my Mac, but any audio capture tools I could discover only pull the audio out channel. There are apparently some folks who have gotten this to work on the PC (according to Stuart Henshall's blog) but the Mac technology is not as advanced, apparently. I hope that Apple just comes out with a solution.

In the final analysis, the disconnect between telephony and audio seems almost intractable. I intend in the future -- whenever recording via phone -- to

1. avoid using my bluetooth headset -- despite the fact that it sounds best -- because of the timeout issue
   
2. for short calls with one or two people (less than 30 mins) I'll use the built-in record capability on my phone
   
3. for longer calls or those involving multiple people or longer duration, I will use Audioblog recording (although I hope Eric will fix that UI problem where any keystroke leads to ending the recording).
   

Wish me luck!

host: Stowe Boyd, Corante
speakers: Joe Hildebrand, Jabber
Ed Simnett, Microsoft
David Marshak, IBM
Alex Pozin, OpenText
Chase McMichael, Oracle

Sponsored by Jabber Inc

Introduction

The Coming real Time Revolution

These are my opening remarks, largely derived from a Cutter report I wrote a few years ago, called Time to Get Real: Growing the real Time Enterprise (Transcript can be found here).

Joe Hildebrand's Remarks

Joe Hildebrand, Chief Architect of Jabber Inc, on the past, present, and future of real time collaboration, concludes "text still matters."

Alex Pozin's Remarks

Due to a technical snafu, I will be rerecording Alex Pozin's remarks tomorrow. Apologies. Alex is the Product Marketing Manager Collaboration and KM Solutions, OpenText.

Ed Simnett's Remarks

Ed Simnett, an old friend (who will forgive me for omitting to post this yesterday with the rest of the speakers), presents Microsoft's vision of the convergence of real-time communication, including VoIP.

David Marshak's Remarks

David is well-known for his work while with Seybold Group and now serves as IBM's Product Manager for Real Time and Team Collaboration. David presents his thoughts on the convergence of real-time and contextual collaboration.

Chase McMichael's Remarks

Chase is Director of Product Marketing for the Real Time Collaboration Group at Oracle, and he outlines Oracle's aggressive plans for this space.

Q&A and Closing remarks

Questions to Ed Simnett and Joe Hildebrand, and thanks to all: speakers, sponsor (Jabber Inc), and listeners.

Stay tuned for upcoming Get Real shows: I will be posting a calendar later this week, but I plan a show on the third Tuesday of each month, at the least.

[These are the prepared notes for my introductory remarks for yesterday's Get Real Show, largely derived form a report I wrote for Cutter a few years ago, called Time to Get Real: Growing the Real Time Enterprise
(still seems fresh though). The audio is accessible here.]

To imagine a zero latency organization – with near frictionless communication between applications and people – you have to grapple with an even more difficult idea: a network of companies, linked through a cascade of commercial transactions and communications, which all together represents a real time meta-enterprise.

Truly, no company can become real time enabled in isolation. And as individual companies seek to improve their operations through the operational application of real time techniques and technology, they will find that the biggest payoffs come from the touch points with partners, suppliers, and customers. The net effect of these thousands or millions of partial solutions is a social transformation, as the business economy moves from traditional, slow-time operational models, to a revolutionary real time footing.

The real time organization is not a starry-eyed quest for the unattainable, even though squeezing out the last iota of latency in every business process and interaction is an unachievable goal. It’s an adjustment to a new economic context, where new survival strategies will need to be tested, refined, and applied, and where much of what worked before will not only become obsolete, but dangerous. Business processes and market positioning based on the premises of even a few years ago could spell disaster today, in many sectors. The economics of real time business will require a reassessment of sources of value, and areas of risk.

What are some of the features of this new real time landscape? Even without introducing the more esoteric, controversial, and complex elements of my rants from the past few years, I can enumerate a short list of principles driving the move toward the real time enterprise:

1. Today’s performance enhancements will largely come from cross-enterprise communication improvements, rather than the internal improvements of the past decades. Companies have invested billions to soup up internal processes, but they will need to revisit those processes again.
2. Real time communication is not just slow-time communication sped up. Linking applications and people around the concept of zero latency means that processes and applications will have to be rethought, rebuilt, or -- in some cases -- jettisoned. There is a qualitative shift in how things work when they’re moved to a real time basis, independent of the quantitative benefits of doing things faster.
3. Real time principles are applicable in all contexts. Analysts who suggest that companies that don’t compete “on speed” are missing the point. There is a qualitative change in all operations of a company when it’s organized around real time principles, not just a quantitative one. Even those who compete on customer intimacy or engineering excellence can cut costs, increase customer satisfaction, and increase innovation through the ‘side effects’ of applying real time techniques and technologies.
4. Real time organizations will be much more tightly linked to their commercial ecosystems to reduce the risks associated with market volatility, and to gain better information about market trends. Connectedness has its dark side, since tighter links means more volatility because of synchronization across the ecosystem: we have to relearn how to react in such a brave new world.
5. There will be much more communication going on in the real time organization, but fewer wasted communication, and less store-and-forward mechanisms. Many researchers suggest that as much as 40% of all business phone calls lead to voice mail, for example. This is a glaring waste of time and money. Likewise, we will see much less e-mail, nightly batch files, and weekly inventory updates, but more direct, synchronous communication between applications and between people. We will soon look back on today’s style of business communication and wonder how it ever worked at all.
6. Perhaps the most disruptive factor of the real time revolution is presence, the Siamese twin of instant messaging. Instant messaging has exploded upon the world, growing to more than half a billion users. It is, however, still considered a teenager’s toy by many in the IT community, which is both silly and pointless. As Ed Simnett of Microsoft pointed out, those teenagers are entering the workforce today with the assumption that instant messaging is productive, cheap, and ubiquitous, not a novelty to be analyzed, but simply a tool to be used. The idea of presence – the ability to know if an agent is available to communicate – is being carried forward into group and corporate scope and past the ‘buddy list’ of today’s consumer IM networks, and will change business communication almost beyond recognition as presence is threaded into everything – every app, every phone, every device, every part on the warehouse shelf.
7. The Internet has become the Petri dish in which we’re creating a new business culture, and we’re entering the exponential tail of the value curve due to the connectedness that modern information technologies offer to business. The real time Internet that is emerging through several key technologies – higher bandwidth, wireless connectivity, voice-over-IP, and instant messaging/presence – that are amplifying the potential for creating more and richer social groups.
8. The value of the network has risen exponentially, and extracting that value requires mobilizing around real time Internet technologies. The means to tap the exponential value growth of the real time revolution is through real time communities – social groups linked through real time technologies. Integration of legacy applications or processes, even across enterprises linked together in complex value chains, will only yield linear returns on investment. This is a course that has been followed for years, and while the results are positive, they are limited. However, exponential value growth comes from the reorganization of cross-enterprise operations around support for real time communities – social groups organized around specific activities or functions. Rethinking applications and processes to support the needs of these meta-enterprise social groups will be the path to achieving and tapping this exponential value.
9. All this means a new model for enterprise architecture. Enterprise architecture has been approached in recent years as a means to automate the business processes within a company, and perhaps to integrate with the business processes of other companies. The new model for enterprise architecture will be driven by the goal of supporting social processes across the meta-enterprise, which will require not only new technologies (such as web services, mobile connectivity, and instant messaging), but a radical departure in how we architect systems. The platforms being rolled out by the companies on our panel today will form the basis of future real time enterprise architecture, but global services – global identity authentication and presence services, for example – will be threaded into every company’s architecture as well, so that social groups can be formed in real time, on demand, allowing teams of companies to respond collectively to real time events on the fly.
10. Operating in the new real time economy will be in many ways an extension of what we already know, but will also require the adoption of a new mindset, and a new set of management principles. In the past 10 years, we have witnessed a decision-making shift from “the center” or “the top” (centralized management) to “the edge” or “the bottom” (front-line managers and team members). This trend will accelerate as real time technologies come online and disrupt the corporate reporting topology. As such, senior management’s role will increasingly shift from time-based decision making (responsive decision making in the face of opportunities or threats) toward space-based decision making. By space here, I’m speaking figuratively, as in choosing the markets or market niches in which to operate, the bases upon which to compete, the alliances to structure, and so on. But space is not just an externally focused, macro-economic dimension; it also has an internal side. The other critical role for management is inward-focused: supporting the capacity of the organization to support rich social groups; to, in essence, create an environment in which the organization can monitor and respond to threats and opportunities effectively. And “effectively” will come to quickly mean “in real time.” The mechanism of monitoring and response will be much more fluid social groups, created in some cases on the fly to respond to real time events. This will be the end of the organization chart as we have known it. The lessons of successful online communities will change the way organizations work and how cross-enterprise work is accomplished. Management is being shown the path to a better way to manage for the real-time era we are entering.

If you'd like to pose questions for today's Get Real show, do so through one of these IM addresses:

stoweboyd@mac.com on AIM
stowe@corante.com on MSN
stoweboyd on Yahoo
stoweboyd@2entwine.net on Jabber

PS The telcon is full, so no use trying to sign in at this late date. There will be one every month, though.

David Marshak, well known analyst (formerly with Seybold Group) and now of IBM, will be joining the panel today at 11am ET for the first Get Real show. Adam Gartenberg, who was scheduled to speak cannot make the show, alas. But David is an old friend, and it will be great to talk to him again.

I just read Malcolm Gladwell's new book, Blink, which is a wonderful exploration of our ability to "thin-slice" the world around us: to rapidly make judgements at an intuitive, almost instantaneous level. I expected, but never encountered Pascal's quote "The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of."

One of the issues that arises in a world full of real time information feeds is how to thin-slice when we are attention-starved. I have written a lot about continuous partial arttention, which sounds like a disorder, but is actually a winning strategy for thin-slicing many different information feeds on a time-sliced basis. However, effective CPA will require more technology better suited to thin-time-slicing than conventional technologies geared toward traditional full attention modes of use.

One simple example are the increasingly prevalent "tombstones" -- those small, transient windows that emerge from the toolbar on your PC -- that indicate some state change of interest: a friend has come online, an appointment reminder has come into a warning state, or your MP3 player's sync has completed. They come, you momentarily shift attention to register the snippet of info, and then shift back -- or maybe follow that info nugget, by IMing a buddy who has just come online.

But the other side of our brains -- away from text and foreground focus -- haven't really been tapped very well in the business context.

I stumbled across a piece in Wired about Accentus, who is trying to help financial traders thin-slice using music. In lieu of graphs, charts, and text -- which are based on using eye focus and reading centers of the brain, Accentus software indicates various sorts of state changes in the financial world through different sorts of musical sounds. This exploits a rich "vocabulary" of music innate in people's (except for the tone deaf) brains.

Scott Kirsner

[from Listening to the market]

You hear: Staccato G, B, and C coming from a bassoon
It means: Dow Jones is up 50 points on the day, most recent move up 10.

You hear: Harpsichord playing two notes, second higher than first
It means: German DAX index just ticked up.

You hear: Short ascending clarinet melody
It means: Canadian dollar gains 0.1 percent against US dollar.

You hear: Lush strings, punctuated by ascending double bass notes
It means: Trade made on options portfolio; risk position moved up by $6,000.

Years ago, when I was a researcher, I could could tell if my compiling of a program had been successful or not by the noise that the Unix hard drive made. Our ability to make sense of subtle auditory feedback cues will be a huge area of growth over the next few years.

This is probably another are that we should look at massively parallel online games for innovation: whatever becomes commonplace there will be adopted by business, in some form, by the end of the decade. The idea of playing an online game without instant messaging is inconceivable; while many in business still operate without it, as if that makes sense today.

Thanks to Dave at Online Dating Insider, I learned about Imaginary Girlfriends, a new service: $40 for two months. "This is a service provided by a real life girl where she will pretend to be your long distance girlfriend by sending you personalized love letters, emails, pictures, leave phone messages (if you want), and provide other girlfriend-like services. This relationship appears real to others that may see these things, but it is not. There will be no actual real life meetings or relationship between you and your Imaginary Girlfriend other than that specified in your order."

David is in rare form in Web as world:

[...] some things become clearer if you do not start with the premise that people are fundamentally isolated and battle against noise in order to connect with others. Instead, we find ourselves in a world shared by others. Connection comes first. Isolation and alienation are withdrawals from the pre-existence of what is shared. I think that helps explain why some sites "work" and others don't. Many of the sites that work for me are ones in which I see that my participation helps create and enrich this shared world; I have that sense at del.icio.us and Flickr, at every place I leave a review or join in a discussion, and every time I blog. I can't explain that by thinking of the Web only as a medium, but I can explain it if it's a shared world that we are building together.

I believe that this is the defining figure/ground issue of our time. Those, on one hand, who see the Internet as plumbing and the junk pouring through the pipes as the real important stuff; the publishers' viewpoint, where information is pushed to a passive audience. And us, on the other, who see the Internet as a shared space, where new forms of social interaction structure shared experience; a communitarian viewpoint, where dialog and conversation within groups can reform the world.

Its all in how you look at it, or what you want to get out of it.

Clay cites Many-to-Many: Coates' new definition of social software: "Social Software can be loosely defined as software which supports, extends, or derives added value from, human social behaviour - message-boards, musical taste-sharing, photo-sharing, instant messaging, mailing lists, social networking."

Ed Simnett, Lead Product Manager Real-Time Collaboration, Microsoft, will be joining the panel for the first Get Real show, 18 Jan at 11 am ET. Ed is an old friend, and I am looking forward to his incisive wit as a foil to my ranting.

I will he hosting the second True Voice show of 2005 at the upcoming New Communications Forum conference, 26-27 Jan in Napa, as I announced a few weeks ago. The topic for the panel is "The Power Laws and You". I will be joined Greg Reinacker, founder and CTO of Newsgator Technologies, Fergus Burns, CEO of Nooked, and other speakers from the conference.

The format will be my usual style: After I speak briefly on the subject, I will let each panelist in turn respond to my rant, followed by some dialog between me and the speaker. After I have sparred with each panelist in turn, I will lead an open discussion with all participating, during which I hope to insert questions from the floor or from those listening in remotely (via email and IM -- you can also direct questions to me in advance, if you'd like.) I will likely post some initial version of my rant here, prior to the conference, as well, which will deal with finding the line between propaganda and influence in the blogosphere.

Be sure to register early (click here), since we are limited to around 100 max for the call-in.

Another True Voice show lined up: Alex Williams and I will be hosting a session at the Podcast and Portable Media Expo, Nov 11-12 2005, in Ontario CA, on Podcasting

Suw comments on Waterstone's firing of Joe Gordon, leading to a huge backlash and public outcry, which she files under the apt and damning category of "Blog Fuckwittery" which, alas, is destined to become a large series of posts over the next few years. Also plays into the growing sense of outrage as characterized by movements like The International Bloggers Bill of Rights.

My unofficial tally of registrations for the upcoming Get Real podcast (Collision and Convergence in Real Time Collaboration, sponsored by Jabber) is around 95!

We have a technical limits with the current teleconferencing solution we planned to use that limits us to around 100 callers. We will be researching alternatives, but in the meantime I suggest that anyone who wants to attend the teleconference to hear the commentary on real time in real time (ho ho) should register as soon as possible, since we will still have some cut-off if we move to an alternative teleconference solution, although I don't know what it will be.

Click here to register -- and maybe win an iPod mini!

SUMMARY: The index that facilitates the sharing of files on a large scale is also the Achilles heel of peer-to-peer file-sharing, because it is vulnerable to litigation and closure. So what happens if the index is itself distributed? I try to get my head around the latest in peer-to-peer file sharing, and explain a bit about what I've learned, including the fact that BitTorrent's power rests in its 'swarm' distribution model, but not necessarily in your end-user download speed. What has this got to do with podcasting? (Answer: invisible P2P plumbing helps the podcasting wheel go round).

[Warning: lengthy article follows].

Continue reading "BitTorrent, eXeem, Meta-Torrent, Podcasting: "What? So What?""

"Good ideas alter the power balance in relationships, that is why good ideas are always initially resisted." Hugh MacLeod

Stowe recently got an email that he forwarded to me, from someone asking "how instant messaging can be used within an educational context" and wanting to know who was working on this.

I figure the core of my quickly-generated reply would be of interest to Get Real readers, so here it is, with clickable links left 'spelled out' in full for ease of reference:

"Without having any background context or knowing more about what your interest is, what you're working on, and what relevant literature you've already read, I'll respond with a few choice references [in a nutshell, there is LOTS going on in this area]:"

1. "Instant Messaging – Collaborative Tool or Educator’s nightmare!" by Robert Farmer, Mount Saint Vincent University, Canada at

http://naweb.unb.ca/proceedings/2003/PaperFarmer.html
(quick overview and many links to other sources)

2. "Wireless Presence and Instant Messaging" [report for UK government, written by Yanna Vogiazou, one of my PhD students], with links to full Word/PDF doc here:

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=techwatch_report_0207
(the above then contains many 'onward' references)

3. Then there's a forthcoming paper from my own group at The Knowledge Media Institute, to appear in the 2005 ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, entitled "From Buddyspace to CitiTag: Large-scale Symbolic Presence for Community Building and Spontaneous Play". The paper talks in section 3 about what we're doing with Instant Messaging at The UK's Open University (200K distance learning students annually, arguably 'The Mother Of All Virtual Universities'):

http://kmi.open.ac.uk/publications/index.cfm?trnumber=kmi-04-25
(with onward links to the full PDF file)

4. Millions of students use IM (I mean 'millions' literally)... some officially, many unofficially... here's an old (2001) but still-active link to an official use by the University of Wisconsin, which licensed the Jabber platform for 80,000 students, and may give you some leads regarding followup enquiries with Wisconsin:
http://www.instantmessagingplanet.com/enterprise/article.php/909741

5. Four random other references from one of my papers:

Nardi, B.A., Whittaker, S., Isaacs, E., Creech, M., Johnson, J., and Hainsworth, J. Integrating communication and information through ContactMap. Communications of the ACM 45:4, pp. 89-95, April, 2002.

Rossade, K-D. “Audio-graphic-conferencing and Instant Messaging in language learning.” Proceedings of the 8th biennial conference of the International Association for Language Learning Technology, June 17-21, 2003, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA.

Scott, P., and Eisenstadt, M. Exploring telepresence on the Internet: the KMi Stadium Webcast experience. In Eisenstadt, M. and Vincent, T. (Eds.), The Knowledge Web: Learning and Collaborating On The Net. London: Kogan Page, 1998.

Whitelock, D., Romano, D.M., Jelfs, A., and Brna, P. Perfect Presence: What does this mean for the design of virtual learning environments? Education and Information Technologies, 5:4, pp277-289, 2000.

Bernard Moon coins the term "slogging" over at Reality Media: "This piece marks the debut of my column Reality Media, in which I cover the intersection of the blogosphere and social networking, a phenomenon I'll refer to from now on as slogging (or to social network and blog)." This is a term that I hope does not catch on.

A Fremont police sergeant got on a computer and used instant messaging to persuade a distraught 16-year-old boy barricaded in his house not to commit suicide, authorities said Friday

In the Conferenza Best of 2004 awards, more Plaxo bashing: "Best Moment of 2004 -- Author John Patrick, CEO of Attitude LLC. From the floor of PC Forum, he asked Plaxo Chairman Tim Koogle why anyone should trust the company. After Koogle delivered a long-winded, but unconvincing answer, Patrick asked the audience if anyone trusted Plaxo. Almost no one did." I still don't get it, but everyone hates Plaxo -- must be all the email they generate. Email = Bad.

Check out the International Bloggers' Bill of Rights, launched by Ellen Simonetti: she was fired by Delta for her "Diary of a Flight Attendant" blog.

We, the inhabitants of the Blogosphere, do hereby proclaim that bloggers everywhere are entitled to the following basic rights:

FREEDOM TO BLOG.

FREEDOM FROM PERSECUTION AND RETALIATION BECAUSE OF OUR BLOGS:

1.) If an employer wishes to discipline an employee because of his/her blog, it must first establish clear-cut blogging policies and distribute these to all of its employees.
2.) Blogging employees shall be given warning before being disciplined because of their blogs.
3.) NO ONE shall be fired because of his/her blog, unless the employer can prove that the blogger did intentional damage to said employer through the blog.

Blogophobic companies, who violate the Bloggers' Bill of Rights, will be blacklisted by millions of bloggers the world over.

Well, I don't think 'blacklisting' is what they intend: perhaps 'boycotting' would be a better term, I think.

I am wholeheartedly in favor of this and related activities. Corporations need to wake up, and relax when it comes to the freedom of self-expression associated with blogging. Xenophobic mind control is far too common when companies are confronted with individuals who mention that they work for XYZ Corp in their personal blogs. There is an insidious notion that we are owned by the companies that employ us.

All power to the bloggers! Right on!

By the way, if you haven't seen me on IM lately, I have transitioned to iChat as part of my mac migration: stoweboyd@mac.com on iChat and AIM, now. Currently inactive on MSN and Yahoo; I plan to fix the Jabber connection in the next few days.

Halley Suitt (Halley's Comment) will be my co-host for the True Voice: Art and Science of Blog Writing session to be held at the Blog Business Summit, 4pm Jan 24 Seattle. We plan on a point/counterpoint format, loosely derived from the True Voice 20 Questions project, and will be podcasting the session.

Robert Scoble has graciously agreed to join the True Voice panel on The Business of Blogging at the Blog Business Summit: register here for the teleconference.

Alex Williams pointed out that its inaccurate to refer to the upcoming (Jan 18 11am ET) Get Real event -- Convergence and Collision in Real Time Collaboration -- as a webcast. Its really a teleconference (limited to around 100, so register right now) that we are recording and then producing as a podcast. So, I stand corrected.

The session is a reprise of the panel session I held in the middle of an INBOX workshop on Real Time Collaboration last November. I asked the various participants to return:

Speakers

Host: Stowe Boyd, Corante

Joe Hildebrand, Chief Architect, Jabber

Chase McMichael, Director of Product Marketing for the Real Time Collaboration Group, Oracle

Adam Gartenberg, Director of Product Marketing for the Real Time Collaboration Group, IBM

Alex Pozin, Product Marketing Manager, Collaboration and KM Solutions, Opentext

TBD, Microsoft

A bunch of my favorite people have launched Yi-Tan, a "guild" of smart folks -- Jerry Michalski, Stuart Henshall, Dina Mehta, Judith Meskill, Judi Clark, and Kaliya Hamlin -- who are trying (among many other things) to make a more dynamic foundation for social media, incorporating both blog and wiki-ish features. [I'm honored to be on the blogroll of the Yi-Tan Blog.]

Om Malik says Six Apart to buy Live Journal: the consolidation begins!

The revamping of the True Voice project -- moving away from a series of conventional seminars to an innovative webcast series, embedded in the conferences of conference partners -- has really taken off in the past two weeks. Along with the already announced Blog Business Summit webcast (see here, and register here), we are happy to announce that we will be working with the folks at the New Communications Forum 2005 for webcasts in Napa and Paris:

Elizabeth Albrycht

[from New Communications Forum 2005: New Panel Added in Partnership with Corante]

New Panel Added in Partnership with Corante

I am very happy to announce that we have added a lunchtime panel on January 27 in partnership with Corante. Called True Voice: The Power Laws and You, the panel will be moderated by Stowe Boyd, of Corante's Get Real blog. He will be joined by Greg Reinacker, the Founder and CTO of NewsGator Technologies, among others. The panel will be webcast live.

The panel is part of Corante's True Voice project. We are very happy to have them with us! I hope you can join us as well.

I am looking forward to talking with Greg again, as well as several other technolgists and analysts.

Note: Corante readers will receive a $150 discount on the conference registration: click here and use the code NCFV150.

Based on the paradigm introduced by MusicPlasma, John Battelle is thinking about building Blog Plasma: a blog visualization tool that would enable a way to wander around in a virtual network model of blog relationship, based on collaborative filtering, blog linkage, or semantic analysis:

The I thought of MusicPlasma. The thing I like about it is how intuitive it is - put in the name of a band you like, and you find more that you might like but had never heard of.

Hey, I thought, what if we did that with blogs, and instead of Amazon data, we used Technorati cosmos data, or Feedster data, or Findory, or Bloglines, or some combination of all of that plus more? "Folks who read this blog also read that one," for example. Or "Blogs who link to this blog also link to that one." If we put a sophisticated interface with some dials and levers, it could really be a neat tool for exploring relationships in the blogosphere. I could imagine some cool slices that might parse this wildly growing ecosystem in interesting ways. (I've always been fascinated by the visualization of data, I was the force behind the Standard's metrics section, if any of you recall that.)

So I think I'm going to try to do it. But the honest truth is, I have no idea how to. I've contact the folks behind the various sites listed above, and they all stand ready to help. I just need a technical lead, and ideally, to talk with the MusicPlasma guys, to see if we might share their skin, so to speak. Anyone know them?

What do you all think? Would this tool be a valuable addition to the conversation?

John's motive initially seems to be some sort of pedagological tool, to help the unknowing understand the blogosphere. Personally, I am interested in Blog Plasma as a way be better negotiate my travels in the blogosphere. And of course, again, everything in the future will be socialized -- structured and mediated by the actions and analyses of your network of friends and contacts -- so Blog Plasma is potentially a cool way to realize and represent the socialized model of blog relationships.

Where do I sign up, John?

I missed thisannouncement back in November. Friendster is launching its first mobile service in the Philippines to test cell phone integration with social networking service -- Friendster is making lemonade from lemons, since the service has been overrun with Philipino teenagers rather than the types of business people they were hoping for.

Looks like Netflix is confirming my prediction that all e-commerce in the near future will be built on a social tools infrastructure: they are testing Netflix Friends (if anyone is a member, please invite me)

An interesting observation or two at SiliconBeat about the recent appointment of Ben Golub as Plaxo's "first CEO":

Matt Marshall

[from SiliconBeat: Plaxo gets new CEO]

This is also an noteworthy appointment given the commotion that rocked the company over the past year, and which seems to have left Plaxo treading water strategically. Note that the statement declares that Golub is Plaxo's "first CEO." We seem to remember that Sean Parker, the company's co-founder who was pushed out last year, carried that title -- though maybe it was only "interim CEO". In any case, this ends a long, long search for a CEO. Hopefully Golub will help the company realize its full potential. This could be interesting.

Possibly, although I find the foot shuffling about the former, er, zeroth CEO strange.

I met with Plaxo folks a handful of times, and never could understand where they were headed, except for the generic answer: "we will charge companies for an enterprise version." Specifically, when I poked at the potential for the enormous social network lieing dormant within their system, they more or less said "not interested." Plaxo's push toward being an online competitor to Outlook -- including calendar, to-dos, and so on -- seems either quixotic or inadequate.

Perhaps the former Verisign VP will steer the company toward more of an infrastructure role, one involving verification of identity, or the like. But the current description of the company and product is fairly tame, and does not presage anything. I will need to follow up with these guys again, when I am out there at the end of the month.

[from the press release]

Plaxo has raised nearly $20 million from Cisco Systems, Sequoia Capital, Globespan Capital Partners, Harbinger Venture Management, and angel investors including Ram Shriram and Tim Koogle. The company has developed technology that seamlessly integrates and synchronizes with Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express, so that users can maintain and universally access their address book, daily calendar, tasks, and notes from any Internet-ready device.

Lots of money raised to really build just a cool way to sync up on address changes; but no way to really collaborate with calendars, to do lists, etc., like that offered by Basecamp, for example. Definitiely promising based on the number of subscribers, but they seem to lack a compelling vision of where to go from here.