John Hagel does a great job asking the tough questions about the eBay purchase of Skype:

[from Edge Perspectives with John Hagel: EBay and Skype]

I agree that adding voice to transactions makes for richer communication and reduces friction, especially in certain types of transactions and certain national cultures. But then again, adding shipping services helps to reduce friction as well -- does that mean eBay should go out and buy FedEx? Yes, markets are conversations as Ross Mayfield reminds us, but does that mean you need to buy a phone company to participate or even orchestrate those conversations?

Pay per call lead generation models are an interesting step beyond pay per click models, at least for certain kinds of businesses. There clearly are interesting opportunities to cross market to each other's user base (one interesting statistic from the presentation -- there is only a 1% overlap in their US user base -- although this can be read both ways, as either an opportunity or a challenge).

But here are the bottom line questions:

* Is this acquisition going to improve the performance of the individual businesses in ways that either would not be possible or at least would be much more expensive without an acquisition?
* Are there any other business relationships short of acquisition that could have produced these improvements in performance?
* Will the improvement in performance be sufficient to earn an acceptable return on the very high price paid for Skype?
* Why couldn't eBay simply have licensed Skype's (or any other VoIP provider's) service and embedded it in its platform to deliver voice-enriched transactions or pay per call lead generation programs?
* Why couldn't they have negotiated cross-marketing programs to reach each other's user base?

And John does go on to suggest that as eBay begins to rethink its place in the world as more than just a big auction house, and as a competitor to media messes like Google, Yahoo, and the half of Microsoft that is online, then this may be just the initial piece of a new platform puzzle for eBay. They may be preparing to join the War of the Web Apps -- who is going to dominate as the platform and services provider of this brand new day?

With Skype they get an internet telephony play, which is also an instant messaging network. Note that Google just released their own IM product, and that Yahoo has moved aggressively in the IM/VoIP arenar recently, too.

This may be a case of eBay planning to invest much, much more than the few billion they spent on Skype. What's next to be bought, I wonder?

Back in July, I read a piece by Tom Coates, called Where are all the UK start-ups? His question is interesting, sociologically, because Americans -- who he contrasts with the Brits -- seem so prone to creating start-ups.

My main question is this: Where are all the bloody start-ups? Where are the small passionate groups of creative technologists (people with clue) getting together to build web applications and public-facing products that push things forward? Where is the Blogger or Flickr or Odeo or Six Apart of the UK? What aspect of this country is it that confounds these aspirations? And I know that Audioscrobbler is wonderful. I really love it. But eventually you have to ask - is that really all we can do?

So is it a lack of money or a poverty of ambition?

A recent ChangeThis manifesto may provide some of the answers to this question. John D. Gartner has produced The Hypomanic American that suggests that Americans are naturally inclined to the euphoric, almost manic mindset of entrepreneurialism, perhaps because the frontier has selected the foolish dreamer types of the world to congregate here.

One statistic in general from the manifesto sparked this juxtapositioning of ideas:

When asked, “Do you think that starting a new business is a respected occupation in your community?” 91 percent of Americans said yes, as compared to 28 percent of British and 8 percent of Japanese respondents.

There you have it. If only 28 percent of British think entrepreneurial activities are likely to be respectable, guess where they are going to work? At larger, more well-established (= less risky) companies.

Coates suggests there is an antipathy in Britain between engineers and business people, and that this leads to a disconnect in their dealings. Personally, I believe there is a complete mismatch between risk-averse banker-types and risk-seeking hypomanic types. The crash-and-maybe-burn-or-maybe-strike-it-rich attitude of many entrepreneurs just runs counter to the mindset of the traditional business sort.

Gartner points out that the hypomanic temperment also leads to all sorts of risky behavior -- including sexual indiscretions -- which may account in part for the attitudes of normal folks in countries that have been exporting their foolish dreamer types for centuries. Britain may have to import hypomanics, or breed them, for a surge in new business startups to occur. Maybe its time for a BBC TV series, glamorizing some team of entrepreneurs, played by very, very beautiful people?

[PS Anyone have Tom's email address? Please email to stowe -AT- corante.com]

I may be misrepresenting the gist of Evelyn's intentions in her recent post, Not For Everyone, but her approach to recasting her consulting services struck a resonant chord for me.

I have long held that a useful consultant has to miss big with at least 25% of potential clients, or maybe more. She quotes Henry Beckwith -- "Avoid nice." -- and Laura Cutler -- "Nice is nowhere. You do not want everyone to like what you do... You want 10 percent to love it." -- and concludes "Avoid nice. Go for remarkable."

She hasn't completely outlined what the result of this soul-searching is. My sense is that those who realize that their calling is consulting -- advising others -- have to have an epiphany at some point that includes the understanding that you can't help everybody. Some are not ready to be helped, and in some cases, there may simply be a mismatch of personalities or worldviews that makes the dynamic between the consultant and client difficult or impossible. Or, the company may be strangled in political infighting, or dominated by a unrealistic market strategy. I have seen all of these, and more.

I fire approximately half of my clients: some in the initial contact (I get dozens of folks approaching me every month seeking free advice, for example, and I weed through those for the likely ones), some in the early discussions, and some even after an engagement has started. I rig all engagements to start with an initial day of intense work, so that I can quickly take the temperature of the client -- the individuals, the company style, the politics -- and determine if there is any hope for my prospective advice to take root. If there isn't, what's the point? Aside from the fees, of course; but my true goals lie beyond.

For example, my writings about social tools and architecture have led to interesting engagements with a variety of entrepreneurial start-ups with very engaged, very interesting people. On the other hand, I have had some really agonizing work with larger, more conservative, and slow-moving companies who -- in principle -- want to gain the benefits of social media for their companies, but are unprepared for anything but the most superficial adoption of the social mindset necessary. I plan in the future to be even more active in weeding out those that I think are unlikely to undertake change necessary for progress.

So, like Evelyn, I will be characterizing my personal consulting services -- and those of Corante, as well -- as really only suited to one in ten or less. We are ready and eager to work with those who are committed to change, open to new perspectives, and poised to act. Those who are merely going through the motions, who are hoping to find a shortcut, or a way to make superficial tweaks to their business plans, technologies, or marketing programs, please don't contact me. The rest: let's talk.

BEA Acquires Plumtree for $200M

As the market begins to heat up for the Fall frenzy, it looks like BEA got a jump on everyone else buy acquiring Plumtree yesterday for $200M.

Plumtree (www.plumtree.com) went public in June, in a tough IPO market, but last Wednesday, they got an unsolicited offer from Sutter Capital Management for $5/share ($2 cash, and $3 as a 5-year promisory note). Evidently this did not go over well with Plumtree shareholders.

Plumtree, is one of the portals CS has been tracking because it has good collaboration funcitonality built in, and is one of the only portal that does. The BEA (www.bea.com) offer, was a bit sweeter than Sutter Capital's at $5.50/share, and the deal should close this fall.

Since BEA already has a portal (WebLogic Portal Server) why would they want to buy another portal company? Does this mean the end of Plumtree?

In short, no, Plumtree will maintain it's brand (and portal) as will BEA and both will be sold by BEA. In addition, a combination product that merges the best of both ports will be available in a year or two. What this means is that some of the collaborative functionality from Plumtree and the ability to support both .Net and J2EE environments will be rolled into a future version of WebLogic. I think at that point (a year or two down the line) we will see the Plumtree brand begin to dissappear.

The Plumtree portal has been designed to make application building so easy that non-technical people can do it (kind of like putting Lego blocks together), whereas BEA's WebLogic Portal 8.1 is only J2EE-based and provides a full framework and lifecycle management. So in some sense Plumtree and WebLogic don't actually go after the same market.

In addition, Plumtree has many ways to connect to other ERP data, which is one of the stated initiatives of BEA ("think liquid").

What do you think of this acquistion?

Ben Stein wrote a piece in the Sunday Times -- Hey, Guys, Hairy Knees Are for the Beach, Not the Office -- advocating more conservative dress as a benefit not just for stylistic reasons, but as just "good business":

To put it as boldly as it needs to be put, men at work these days all too often dress like total slobs, and it hurts the eyes, the spirit and, I suspect, the bottom line.

Sometimes, I get a clue of this when I go to see my lawyer and am shocked to find that men who should be wearing suits - to keep up their propriety and their sense of dignity - are wearing casual jeans and short-sleeved shirts instead. I get a whiff of it when I appear on television and see employees of major networks dressed in casual slacks and sport shirts with no ties.

But the most stunning blow came a few weeks ago when I did an industrial film on a super-advanced videoconferencing system made by a very large, very successful high-tech company. The men who worked at the company's campus in Oregon were uniformly smart and uniformly courteous, but they dressed like children at summer camp - cut-off jeans, shorts, T-shirts and sandals without socks. I asked if this was some special dress-down day and they all looked at me as if I were insane. "No," they said. "This is how we dress."

Well, you aren't insane, Ben; but you are advocating (implicitly) that people should be wearing ritualized clothing to work -- clothing styles that have literally nothing to do with the job, like hospital whites for doctors, or coveralls for mechanics -- but which serve... what purpose exactly?

Basically, men's suits -- which is what Ben wants to see us wearing -- are a holdover from the bourgeois clothing of the 1800s in Europe, when a growing middleclass began to ape court dress in an attempt to establish itself as distinct from tradesmen and other workers that we would call blue collar today.

The sheer dumbness of men's suits are a holdover from design elements that may have made sense then, before central heating and indoor plumbing: like the phony buttons on the cuffs that don't really work, or the button hole in the left collar for which there is no corresponding button on the right, and the tie, which is a remnant of a scarf used to keep the neck warm in drafty halls.

One of the direct consequences of the mindset advocated by Stein is to label those who do not wear such extravagant and expensive get-up as being childish, or boorish. $1000 suits that require expensive dry cleaning, $500 shoes that require regular polishing, $100 shirts that require ironing, and so on -- these are simple, everyday barriers that define a caste -- the managerial caste -- and exclude others who do not wish to or are unable to play.

This is like the recent Fairchild Publications flap about flip-flops (see here) where summer interns at the publishing concern were directed by memo not to dress like fashionistas, despite working for fashion magazines. But the real subtext in both cases is older people trying to tell younger people how to act if they want to be perceived as grownup, based on some antique and perhaps completely senseless kind of etiquette.

Ben's closing represent the darkest perception of what is at work when younger generations simply disregard oldster's preconceptions about new ways of doing things -- new ways to communicate, organize, balance work and personal life, or dress:

A suit says discipline, maturity, style, respect for yourself and respect for the people you are meeting. Casual clothes say - well, the word "contempt" comes to mind, although maybe it's too harsh. Maybe just "too cool for school" is what I mean.

You can certainly tell that the neo-conservatives are in power when people suggest that deciding not to wear a suit denotes lack of respect or even contempt. Perhaps it is better to characterize it as a radical, even revolutionary act: not slobbishness, but an active rejection of the slavish conformism and caste-mindedness that seems to dominate the country, today.

Is Technorati selling? Rumours are that it is being sold to a "large search company" in about a week. BL Ochman bets it's Yahoo. Tris bets Google. If rumour mills are accurate, as they were with Flickr, we'll see the sale go off.

Making a huge bet on the emerging socialization of the Internet, The New York Times reported today that News Corporation is acquiring Intermix -- whose primary asset is MySpace -- for $580 million.

The conglomerate is clearly making the claim that MySpace will have staying power in the fast-evolving online world. Part of MySpace's success has come at the expense of similarly conceived Web sites built around online communities, like Friendster, that have seen the number of users skyrocket but then decline.

A News Corp. official said MySpace generates "healthy" annual profits of "a few million dollars." Overall, Intermix reported earnings of $4.5 million on revenues of $78.9 million in the quarter ended March 31, compared to a loss of $12.4 million on revenues of $57.3 million in the year earlier period. . Its shares were trading at $11.82 this morning, up $1.10 on the news. News Corp. shares were down 11 cents to $17.36.

The agreement is scheduled to close in the fourth quarter, and both Mr. DeWolfe and Intermix Media's chief executive, Richard Rosenblatt, are expected to stay in their current positions.

News Corp looks to be trying to take a run at Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, based in part on its FOX Interactive efforts, and likely based on the proven social architecture (see Social Architecture) in MySpace. The new boom is here, and we can expect more bubblicious acquisitions in the near future.

The fuzzy wuzzy usage of the Long Tail term has led Chris Anderson to author What the Long Tail isn't:

There are many distortions of the term, but the most common one is to use it as a newly-positive synonym for "fringe". Invoking the Long Tail is not a magic wand to explain away the apparent lack of demand for what you've got. The Long Tail is not a get-out-of-jail-free card for poor-selling product. Or weak sectors. Or bad ideas.

The fact that something isn't popular doesn't mean that it's just a matter of time before it will benefit from all sorts of powerful demand-creation Long Tail effects. More likely, it's just not good enough to be commercially interesting, and probably never will be.

Most of the "niche" products in the tail are simply crap.

I have stumbled across the growing proliferation of the Long Tail in a lot of odd places. I got a piitch from some entrepreneurs about a 'long tail' social tool where the term was really out of context, for example. As Tim Oren points out, Chris had better get his book done before all the chewy goodness has been sucked out of the term.

Looks like Andreessen is trying to break into the blogging/social networking marketspace, according to CNet:

[ from Netscape co-founder eyes video blogs | CNET News.com]

24 Hour Laundry (24HL) is a blogging and social networking site for consumers that will include video, according to sources familiar with the company's plans. The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company--which boasts alumni from Netscape, Google and Excite--is currently looking for user interface designers, a director of engineering and other executives. While Andreessen has put money into the company and sits on the board, Gina Bianchini is the CEO, according to sources.

A number of folks are suggesting Andreessen is a bit late to the party, like Om Malik:

I guess the only thing that needs laundering is the reputation. Like many Web 1.0, Marc is looking for redemption. Lots of investments, including in 24HL which is video blogging, blogging meets social networking meets something …. in other words, yawn! Start-ups, just a quick read on Marc’s un-midas touch! You have been warned! (By the way this is just a slight poke in the ribs Marc!)

Marc Canter says come on in, the water's fine.

Personally, this is just the beginning of the land rush in the coming socialization of everything internet. All the money will be trying to get on board. Brace yourself. I'm just surprised that Andreessen and company haven't called me up yet. But then again, people with lots and lots of money usually think they know everything already.

Tom Malone gave a very interesting keynote focusing on a new shift in big business that has resulted in the economies of scale we are used to with the creativity one gets from small business. Scale and freedom. How did we get here? Part of it is a technological shift decreasing the costs of coordination. Part of it is that people gain satisfaction in participating in a community and in creating value. The technology makes the shift possible, but people make it happen.

Tom draws out an interesting example around this shift in business. First, he looks at society. First we had decentralized bands that together make decisions for each other. Then, with the development of writing, it became possible for larger areas to be connected through a central power that would make decisions for all - kingdoms. Next, with the advancement of the printing press, literacy spread and people could be informed enough to contribute to decisions - democracy.

The shift in business follows the same decentralized -> centralized -> decentralized but connected shift.

At first we had small businesses where everyone could help out. Next, big businesses achieving economies of scale and working in a hierarchical environment. Now, we have the opportunity for decentralized decision making with "empowerment, outsourced, networked organizations."

The technologies of coordination make it possible for people to be empowered with greater decision making. This makes them more motivated and creative. And creates the value and innovation that lead to today's success.

Not all companies will, or should, move to this business model. For knowledge-based businesses, it makes sense. It also makes sense for knowledge units in production-based businesses. There are also many points of variance along the way from centralized to decentralized decision making - it's not an all or none type of thing.

Some interesting points:
1. Standards can create and foster decentralized decision making and freedom - the Internet
2. You gain power when you give it away

The innovations we make now will continue to be, in some ways, technological ones. But those with greatest impact on business will be innovations in the ways we organize ourselves. Personal innovations. It all drives down to people. It's something we all need to remember, in this scenario and others. It's not the technology that makes collaboration possible. It's people. People collaborate by nature. Technology is only a facilitator.

Yahoo! has had a frenzy of activity this year, and it's still early. It has just been announced that Yahoo has purchased dialpad, a VoIP provider. Rather funny since everyone has just been waiting for Yahoo to scoop up Skype. Well, right idea, wrong company.

Yahoo's purchase of Dialpad will give them fast entry to VoIP services on their own terms, rather than using the services of others (such as their past use of Net2Phone). As well as VoIP, Yahoo gains all of Dialpad's fraud management detection that can be made use of in other Yahoo areas.

So, we can see Yahoo moving all over the place to build an integrated space with value adds. Definitely moving much faster than either MSN or AOL. Wonder what kind of ripple effect this new acquisition will cause.

I caught wind of this news on Andy Abramson's blog, but Om Malik broke the news first.

John Hagel comments on my recent post, All Edge, No Center:

[from comment at post]

Stowe - Sorry you were disappointed by our interview with Wharton. I hope that will not discourage you from listening to Ross in terms of reading our book. I sense that we are much more aligned than your post suggests. We make the point in the book that we are in the midst of a major change in the focus of IT investment in the enterprise from process automation to practice enhancement. The new technology tools are largely being adopted in a bottom up fashion by communities of practice who are wrestling with better ways to address the exceptions that standardized processes can't cope with. The point I was trying to make in the quote above is that there is a side-benefit of making local innovation and learning more visible to the rest of the organization rather than risk having it be lost forever. But this is only a side benefit - the primary value (and the reason the new technology is being adopted within the enterprise) is that it is really helpful to people on the edge in harnessing the power of swarm intelligence and distributed communities of practice (and, by the way, much of the relevant swarm resides outside the walls of the enterprise - something that previous generations of enterprise-centric technology failed to acknowledge).

I guess I wasn't disappointed in the interview, since I didn't really have any preconception of what might be said. But maybe I was dinged by the tone or angle of the discussion, which seemed to be following familiar ruts in the road.

I am still certainly planning to read the book, and I look forward to it more eagerly now that John has cleared up my misperceptions of the authors' intentions. Thanks John.

Ross Mayfield tells me I must, must read the new book by John Hagel III and John Seely Brown, Can Your Firm Develop a Sustainable Edge?. I haven't had a chance, but I did see [pointer from Ross] an interview with the authors at Wharton's Managing Technology column, interviewed by Kevin Werbach.

Many of the premises that were developed in the piece seemed almost shopworn -- executives need to think about competitive advantage in dynamic terms rather than static, sustainable advantage requires people at the edge being able to perform new work, the need to be faster to develop capabilities faster than competitors, and so on.

I think what I was struggling with most is the implicit premise: the book is written for executives of large companies, rather than speaking to individuals living in a new world. If it's people at the edge doing all this invention of new capabilities, isn't that where we will see the new use of social tools? Is that itself one of these capabilities? My bet is that fatcat senior executives are not going to invent much of anything in this regard, although -- in typical self-congratulatory, great-man-theory-of-history fashion -- if various front-line engineers, customer support staff, or product managers develop innovative ways of applying social tools that enable increased productivity, better products, and more profits, the lions of industry will certainly take credit for it.

One comment in particular jumped out, though:

[from Can Your Firm Develop a Sustainable Edge? Ask John Hagel and John Seely Brown]

Hagel: One of the big issues we see is that to date most of the social software tools we are talking about have tended to be one-off kinds of tools. You have instant messaging, Wikis, a whole array of collaboration workspaces that have been developed, but there isn't an operating environment where all these social software tools can come together in a seamless environment. Part of the opportunity here is that as you create these environments that are open ended so you can plug in social software tools as they develop and evolve, you can also create a record-keeping facility. By doing that, not only are you helping people to resolve the exceptions, but you are also creating a record of who came together over what kinds of issues, what was the context of the issue, and what was the resolution of the issue. That creates the basis for doing pattern recognition and dissemination of the learning to a broader part of the organization.

This is an echo of the Nerdvana meme I have been chasing, although my desire for the Nerdvana model is not really motivated by an enterprise vision of analysis and feedback about handling exceptional cases in defined workflows -- I spent what feels like eons chasing a dream of the perfectability of process, and have left it aside. While I believe it is still useful to define business scenarios -- how to process an insurance claim, and the like -- increasingly, the work left to people are the exceptions, where automation fails. In this domain, the language of process holds no power.

The dynamics of group interaction and the interaction between groups, when all is not known, and people need to invent solutions, is very different. The critical factor is not each person doing the role assigned to them, but each person applying their own personal knoweldge and network to the issue at hand, based on their own imperfect reasoning. This moves into the realm of Surowiecki's Wisdom of Crowds: swarm intelligence works where people do not converge to a consensus, where they independently apply their own thoughts, and then share them through social connections. Paradoxically, providing the same information to everyone can lead to bad outcomes, because it can lead to information convergence, and then to bad decision making.

So the vision for the Nerdvana client is not about the enterprise gathering information about how individuals respond to exception situations, so that the enterprise home office weenies can analyze it and send it all back out to the edge as a new operations manual. Nerdvana is about the individual, managing in a complex and fragmented world, but bringing together all the threads of our social relationship of the world into one metaphor. It is a focus on the needs of the individual, not the need of the enteprise to have it all managed in one seamless, centrally controlled social architecture

Learning naturally follows social paths, so I think all of the sorts of things that Hagel and Brown are talking about will take place at the edge. The future of work is that there is only edge, no center: there will be no one at HQ analyzing invention going on at the edge. Any analysis will be direct, on both sides of the social connections that link us. Any model of social architecture -- as outlined by Brown and Hagel -- will need to account for the intensely personal, as opposed to corporate, forms of social interaction that increasingly typify the world of work.

Ev Williams responds to some heckling about his new company Odeo, where the trons are apparently not not working like hamsters on the treadmill:

[from evhead: Mr Gutman: Second-time entrepreneurs.]

I firmly believe that the extreme imbalance so pervasively assumed to be a required component of startup life is detrimental to effectiveness in the long run. What I think is much more key is focus.

I agree with Ev. We are running crazy hard at Corante, but the things that jump up to bite us are not the number of hours in the day, but what happens when we get off target. For example, we have been swept into a few 'collaborative partnerships" in the past year, where we wound up putting too much time into projects that weren't owned by us, where we couldn't control events, and ultimately we had to write off the time investments involved. A focus issue, not a time issue.

NewsGator is buying up Bradbury Software, reports Om Malik. This sparks some interest for NewsGator in making more headway in the RSS-related area of development. Bradbury is known for the FeedDemon, a news aggregator product. NewsGator will now offer all suite offerings: email, Web, Outlook, and desktop (via acquisition). NewsGator customers will soon receive FeedDemon features, while FeedDemon subscripers will get a 2-year NewsGator subscription. Way to go!

In case anyone was wondering whether Dodgeball really is a cool idea, they were acquired by Google, announced today:

Q: Why did dodgeball sell to Google? A: As a two-person team, Alex and I have taken dodgeball about a far as we can alone. Since we finished grad school, we've been trying to figure out how to grow dodgeball and make it a better service along the way. We talked to a lot of different angel investors and venture capitalists, but no one really "got" what we were doing - that is until we met Google.

The people at Google think like us. They looked at us in a "You're two guys doing some pretty cool stuff, why not let us help you out and let's see what you can do with it" type of way. We liked that. Plus, Alex and I are both Google superfans and the people we've met so far are smart, cool and excited about what they're working on.

I will try to track down Dennis Crowley, who I met last year at Supernova, and see what this means for the next stage of Dodgeball. Or maybe Clay Shirky, who I think is one of their advisors.

[Update: 6:53pm ET - Clay has a post at M2M about the acquisition that includes one hundred "w00ts" as well as some insight into what's going on.]

[pointer from Ted Rheingold]

[tags: Google, Dodgeball]

Got an extremely brief email from Messagecast which has now been acquired by MSN alerts. Not too many details available at this point.

[tags: Messagecast, MSN Alerts]

It’s official. Flickr has been bought by Yahoo. This comes straight from the FlickrBlog. Word is that Flickr will stay on the same track, with some additions such as Yahoo ID login; Yahoo Photos will also be “Flickrized.” From the official release: “We'll be working with a bunch of people that Totally Get Flickr and want to preserve the community and the flavor of what is here.” Let’s hope so. Thanks to Kris Krig for the tip.

It comes as no surprise to see that Microsoft has announced its intention to acquire Groove. Around the time I wrote Groove v3.0: A Tool For Our Times, I came to understand that Groove was the perfect client to integrate with Sharepoint, and they had built very strong relationships into that part of Microsoft. At the same time, there has been a lot of political struggle in the various groups playing in collaboration land at Microsoft -- the Exchange folks, the Live Communications Server folks, teh Sharepoint team, and the Placeware people -- and bringing Ray Ozzie aboard as CTO will quickly lead to a clarification of who is the architect for Microsoft's direction in social and collaboration tools, and I guess everything else: it will be Ray.

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.]

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.

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.

I got a press release about a product release, which I generally glance at and then consign to the trash, but in this case I am posting a few comments, because I thought the company involved, Cordant, was dead.

I met Sonu Agarwal, the founder of the firm, at an early Instant Messaging Planet conference (which *is* dead), and heard later that he left the company to return to Microsoft, where he had been part of the team to build the Exchange IM product. He and Francis DeSouza left Microsoft at more or less that same time, to found competing instant messaging management firms. In Francis' case, the now successful IMlogic, which closed a licensing deal and a round of financing a few weeks later, back in 2000 (I think).

I think this market niche will rapidly close, when Microsoft, IBM, and the other major market makers include logging, archiving, and other mainstays of IM management in the basic offerings. Although Cordant has reemerged, I don't see a viable market here for long. IMlogic is a likely candidate to be grabbed by Microsoft, since they are licensing their technology already.

Jeremy Wright and Darren Barefoot are auctioning their blogging services on eBay

Listening to the furor arising from the podcasting freaks at Bloggercon, I wonder about the explosion in interest circumventing the radio networks. The entire principle of "True Voice" is perhaps carried out in a more direct way.

As the direct result of a few sentences from Steve Gillmor, I decided to register the domain name "www.podosphere.com."

Dave Winer admits that he picked Doc Searls to head the session on "Making Money by Blogging" since he is one of the people that is least likely to think that you should.