Tuesday Dec 9, 2008 | Forty years after the Mother of All Demos
On Dec 9, 1968 Doug Engelbart stepped onto a stage in front of about 2,000 people. He adjusted his headset and sat down before his mouse, chord key set, and twenty-two foot TV projection screen. His NLS/
Doug Engelbart Video Archive: 1968 Demo - FJCC Conference Presentation Reel Dec 9, 1968 Internet Archive, the so called Mother of All Demos. See also From Pranksters to PCs chapter about Engelbart's 1968 FJCC demo from John Markoff's book What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry, authorized excerpt.
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Do Something Differently - Spend less for better results
JP Rangaswami offers typically sound advice for businesses looking at how to cope with hard times in his October 19th post Invented Here. He says when times are hard, a firm has four choices:
Live blog with Traction TeamPage
from Michael Angeles, Traction Software Director of User Experience: Live Blog is a new plug-in for TeamPage 4.
Light up some classrooms! DonorsChoose.org Challenge
On Oct 1 DonorsChoose opened their Blogger Challenge 2008 to help spread the word about a great model for charitable giving. It's simple: Teachers ask. You choose, Students learn. Click the badge below to learn more and bring some light to classrooms where any contribution can make a difference. You'll feel good on a person-to-person level, and help children succeed in life.
Avast Ye Enterprise 2.0 Seekers!
If ye be seeking Enterprise 2.
Who's on Your Team ?
Web-based social software makes it possible for people to discover connections and stay in touch on a global scale without imposing undue work on either the sender or receiver of information - unlike email, face to face meetings, or any other medium in human history. In Who’s on Your Team? Enterprise 2.
No need to curb your enthusiasm ...
Read Prof Andrew McAfee's recent blog post Curb My Enthusiasm for a very concise summary of the model, analysis and conclusions of a July / August 2008 Harvard Business Review article he co-authored with MIT's Erik Brynjolfsson. McAfee poses a polite challenge that I'll paraphrase: For a bold and important claim, where is he wrong?
Why Enterprise Search Sucks
Ron Miller of EContent wrote a very good article AIIM Study Finds Enterprise Search Still Lacking about an upcoming AIIM report on Findability and disappointed expectations for enterprise search. Ron's title is more polite than some of the words I've heard (and used) to characterize enterprise search. Bluntly - if we all agree that enterprise search sucks, what is to be done?
Borders, Spaces, and Places
One big problem for collaboration has been too many borders - technical or cultural - creating silos of information for no good reason - and many bad ones. There's also a big problem if you don't have a good way to mark borders that enable collaboration where there's a natural expectation of privacy.
Get a Bike Mr Kagermann!
WSJ.
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. . the most important features for the managers who buy business software are still a system’s security and reliability, and whether the system helps a business comply with an ever-growing number of government regulations, says Kagermann. Systems bought by individuals or departments don’t have the company-wide perspective necessary to meet these goals - The Reason It's Called Management Software, WSJ. com
On Mr. Kagermann's last point - systems from small, agile suppliers are perfectly capable of meeting security, reliability and other business requirements based on a company wide perspective. And small, agile mammals discovered their niche and evolved to reshape the world of ah.
A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower Strategy | Video
I'm just back from the 2008 Current Strategy Forum at the US Naval War College in Newport. This year the topic of panels and presentations (including addresses and extensive Q&A by the Secretary of the Navy, Chief of Naval Operations and, the Commandant of the Marine Corp) was the Cooperative Strategy for 21s Century Seapower - a joint strategy for the US Marine Corp, Navy and Coast Guard. The strategy raises prevention of war - deterrence, cooperative relationships with more international partners, trust built through humanitarian assistance and disaster response - to an equal level as the conduct of war. In the very best sense this is a positioning statement: what a nation should expect from its maritime forces.
Our citizens were involved in development of this strategy through a series of public forums known as the “Conversations with the Country.
Connections
To the best of my knowledge, Clay Shirky is responsible for popularizing the term Social Software. By his definition, it's primarily about patterns of connections:
Social networking promotes new and serendipitous connections among people (and in TeamPage 4.0 the content they create and comments they make within a business context). But the public Web - and bounded world of Enterprise 2.
Network scale search of blog content is one Web scaleable way to find out who's actively talking about or working on a topic that interests you. Once you find a relevant hit, you then have the opportunity to: 1) make a personal connection; 2) subscribe to a syndicated feed from that individual or group; 3) make your own blog post or wiki link to tell let others in your strongly connected group - and anyone else in the who can read your post - that you've found an interesting fact or connection. Blog / wiki connections make it possible to add situational context - including time based patterns of interest - to search, which is particularly valuable in the relatively small and link-poor enterprise.
Your post then becomes a new item which others can discover - or read if they subscribe to your personal or group blog / wiki - as a potentially valuable source. This weak signal amplification creates a spreading activation network that can quickly span the globe - and further extends and reinforces the network. It also reinforces the value of old fashioned and irreplaceable face to face connections by letting people keep in touch with their extended network without creating undue work for either the sender or receiver.
Welcome David, Kellen, Michael !
With the release of Traction TeamPage 4.0 it's been a busy week! I'd like to take time out to welcome three new Traction Software employees:
The Rise of Enterprise 2.0, Andrew McAfee | Video | Enterprise 2.0 Summit 2008 Tokyo
The Rise of Enterprise 2.0 - Professor Andrew McAfee, Enterprise 2.0 Summit Tokyo (2008) from Traction Software on Vimeo.
Email isn't dead - It's only sleeping
Caroline McCarthy has a wonderful post The future of Web apps will see the death of e-mail. She quotes Kevin Marks:
I don't exactly think email is dead - and don't think point-to-point email will ever go away - but as a medium for broadcast collaboration it should be considered as lively as Mr. Praline's parrot.
Blogs, wiki's and IM displace use of broadcast email for group working communication. Email is a great medium for one to one - back and forth - communication, but it's a terrible medium for group collaboration. Clay Shirky says:All enterprises have more knowledge in their employees as a group than any one person, even (especially?) the CEO. The worst case is where one person has a problem and another knows a solution, but neither knows the other – or that the other knows. Despite e-mail’s advantages for communication, it falls down as a close collaboration tool on complex projects: E-mail makes it hard to keep everything related to a particular project in one place; e-mailed attachments can lead to version-control nightmares; and it’s almost impossible to get the Cc:line right. If the Cc:line is too broad, it creates “occupational spam” – messages from co-workers that don’t matter to everyone addressed. If the Cc:line is too narrow, the activity becomes opaque to management or partners. -- Social Software: A New Generation of Tools by Clay Shirky, Release 1.
Enterprise 2.0: Radical Change by Revolution or Mandate?
Ross Dawson's Enterprise 2.
Steve Hodgkinson, Ovum research director, sees Enterprise 2.
0 as a genuine opportunity for technology to act as a catalyst for changes in organisational culture. "Enterprise 2.
0 is emerging as the most practical way of sharing and managing knowledge in a range of contexts, from team collaboration to customer self-service forums. This leads to the ability to bring about cultural change with the personal power of informal networks such as wikis, blogs, profiles and forums." "The root of its culture change power, however, is its ability to unleash the personal power of informal networks," said Hodgkinson.
Key ideas within this new system include:
* The need for a flat organisation, rather than an organisational hierarchy
* Folksonomy rather than taxonomy
* User-driven technology rather than IT department control
* Short time-to-market cycles; to continue and increase flow
* Global teams of people, rather than locating the whole organisation in one building
* Emergent information systems, rather than dictated and structured information systems
* The opening of propriety standards
Could I interest you in a Memex?
Today Weblogged News (Will Richardson) has a thoughtful post "Proficiency in Tossing Stuff Out", reflecting on Thomas Washington's essay in the Christian Science Monitor. Washington says: "The pursuit of knowledge in the age of information overload is less about a process of acquisition than about proficiency in tossing stuff out."
The least entertaining game ever
Good Morning Silicon Valley's Off Topic section for 18 Jan 2008 links to this page as "the least entertaining game ever". Unfair, unkind, funny, but with an element of truth: close to a perfect example of what I'd call a good cheap shot. To restore my karmic balance and express a personal opinion that the authors of the game might appreciate, see this page.
re: A Web That Works | NHS Orkney
See also David's Oct 4, 2007 post Understanding the "corporate" mindset. Thanks for the kind words, David!
Searching for the Perfect Fried Clam | Rhode Island
Bill Ives of Portals and KM shifts his usual focus to raise a question near and dear to all of us who live in New England, Searching for the Perfect Fried Clam. He lists three tempting choices in Massachusetts, settling on Woodman's in Essex as his first choice. I'll certainly put that on my list, but must nominate Evelyn's Drive Inn in Tiverton RI for the Clam of Honor. Not only do they have great fried clams, but they're also my top choice for Rhode Island style (clear) clam chowder and traditional Rhode Island stuffies ("Fresh local quahogs halved and filled with our spicy blend of chopped clams and chourico").
A Web That Works | NHS Orkney
David Rendall, National Health Service Orkney created his A Web That Works blog to complement his poster presentation at the UK's National Health Service conference: Delivering Healthcare in the 21st Century, 11-12 Jun 2007, Glasgow UK. David co-authored a 30 July 2007 Intranet Journal article about his experience with Traction Software's Jordan Frank. Visit David's blog ! To download a full-size copy of David's poster (3.
Learn by watching - Then do
JP Rangaswami writes an excellent blog - Confused of Calcutta - where he shares his experience as an "accidental technologist" who moved from investment banking to the services arm of a telco. His post on Facebook and Knowledge Management tells a great story about what happened when he decided to open up his mailbox to his direct reports:
Looking for a new Fake Steve Jobs ...
Learning Fake Steve Jobs' real identity is about as much fun as learning that Santa Claus died on 6 September 1959 of pneumonia and complications from a stroke. Adopting an anonymous persona for for satiric or polemical rants has a long and honorable history, unlike the self-serving sock puppetery of some real life CEO's. The former FSJ takes a nice parting shot at Valleywag:
And here's what Enterprise 2.0 looked like in 1968 | Dealing lightning with both hands...
The video This is what the web looked like in 1994 - a DEC promotional video of that era - got a bit of attention recently. Just for the record - here's what Enterprise 2.
Building pleasant and stable islands in a storm-tossed sea
Traction Roots: A Whirlwind Tour (.
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