ENTERPRISE 2.0?... GOINGON NETWORKS IS ENTERPRISE 2.0I came across
Dan Farber's post on "Enterprise 2.0 = Next Generation IT" and the various discussions around the term "Enterprise 2.0." His colleague, Dion Hinchcliffe,
drafted a definition with a nice graphic:
Enterprise 2.0 in general describes the liberation of often previously inaccessible corporate information to be opened up to general discoverability, consumption, and reuse using a Web-based model.
I would add to Hinchcliffe's definition that
it is not simply opening up corporate information but opening up the corporate culture to the commonly practiced behaviors within the consumer "Web 2.0" space. While obvious and esoteric, this is important to emphasize because it will be a point of tension and conflict within companies for years to come as they struggle to deal with open conversations between themselves and their customers, partners and the media. As the number of "Web 2.0" users grow, the workforce will become more familiar with blogging, sharing, mashing up, and other behaviors and practices of this new era and companies will eventually be forced to play catch up.
Our team, at
GoingOn Networks, deals with this everyday since we are by definition an "Enterprise 2.0" platform and actively selling to the market. After we did our "soft beta" launch several weeks ago, we started poundng the pavement to sell our "private label MySpace" to companies and organizations. Through these discussions, we learned an incredible amount in terms of what companies want, expect, and don't know about. And we continue to learn.
Dan Farber points to related posts, so I read Jerry Bowles' post on
"Top 10 Management Fears About Enterprise Web 2.0" which comes more from an IT perspective. This is important for our company down the road, but not so relevant now since we're strategically focused on selling to marketers as a first step. Why? Least path of resistance. We're providing powerful communication tools for marketers and making life easier for them where they don't have to go through their IT departments. This is similar to tools such as WebEx and Citrix's GoToMeeting. Corporate employees didn't have to go through their IT departments anymore to access and use such meeting tools. All they needed was their PC and a credit card.
Vinnie Mirchandani has an interesting checklist definition of "Enterprise 2.0," which I'll answer some of them from our startup's perspective:
a) supports choice of customer deployment of functionality as a service, and in installed mode YES
b) is architected and priced/sold as a series of services YES
d) largely automates bug fixes/upgrades which require little customer (or service partner) interventionYES. The beauty of software-as-a-service and the benefit of being a GoingOn customer is that we are constantly upgrading our platform and integrating the best features and
third-party technologies into it.
g) commits to transparency to customers around product quality, customer service ticket resolution, outages (where provided in SaaS mode) etc.YES
i) actively encourages a on-line developer/integrator community and pushes for an "open source" licensing of community intellectual propertyYES. We will be opening up our platform in the near future, so developers can build on top of it. Since our platform is based on modules, we want developers to create modules to share or sell to the greater GoingOn community.
It has been exciting and fascinating to watch the market unfold as the months go by. After we started to spec out our software platform back in early 2005, BusinessWeek came out with their
"Blogs Will Change Your Business" cover story. We didn't expect the market to move so fast towards what we envisioned. Now it's not simply about blogging but more companies and organizations are seeking out the transparency of their customers or members. Intelligence gathering capabilities are important for companies and something we planned from the very beginning to offer to them.
When we begin selling to IT departments for internal corporate communications and collaboration, it will be interesting to see the response and resistance which will be different from our current experiences. Our product will also have more options for these types of customers. You will see our message board module coming out soon along with a job board, wiki module, and file sharing capabilities. Any other modules or functions that are important for enterprise? Ping me and we'll definitely consider it.
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ARRINGTON VS. CARR, ROUND TWO!... LINKING TO A-LISTERS' POSTS? THAT'S SO 2003
It's been amusing the past couple days seeing all the action around
Nick Carr's post, "The Great Unread"Robert Scoble,
Shel Israel, and
Michael Arrington are but a few of those who rip into Carr. For me, I didn't understand what he was complaining about. That he, Nick Carr, has to kiss ass to A-list bloggers (I'm assuming his traffic doesn't put him in the A-list)? That he, Nick Carr, only ranked 615 on Technorati? That he, Nick Carr, wants more attention since he doesn't have too many friends? :) (okay, that was mean)
For me, I blog as an outlet to my random thoughts and as a service to those who visit my blog. I read a fair amount each day, so I try to at least share the links and articles I come across. Whether it was just a couple hundred to a few thousand readers, who cares? I don't since I'm not trying to get rich through this or sell books or fill a gaping hole of loneliness. Due to work and our recent move to Palo Alto, I barely blogged for two months and now I'm slowly getting back into it. Also over several months my Technorati ranking dropped considerably from about 2,500 to 11,898. My traffic dropped too, so I probably moved from a B-lister to a C-lister. Do I care? No. I know I lost readership, but I'm more focused on simply sharing information with others and amusing myself through writing. Eventually, as long as I write some interesting posts, I know new people will visit and stay on as readers and some old ones will come back.
One specific point I disagree with Nick on is his comment that "the best way, by far, to get a link from an A List blogger is to provide a link to the A List blogger." That's SO 2003. Since Nick is an author of a decently known book, he might have by-passed some of the long steps towards building your blog's audience. From my experience, the best way I received links from A-list bloggers, which created more visibility, is when I wrote an interesting post and emailed them asking to link to it. I never wrote to specifically kiss ass to a certain blogger, so that he could link to me. This sounds stupid to me. I would just focus on writing good posts, so more people would appreciate my writing and decide to link to my blog without prompting. The beauty of the Blogosphere is that it is egalitarian.
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JOE FRANCIS IS A TOOL... "GIRLS GONE WILD" CRUISE?HatTip to
Paul Kedroksky. My wife hates it when I call out people and use 4-cent words to describe them, but after she reads this article that reveals Joe Francis to be a 1-cent fool then she'll give me a free pass this time.
This article by Claire Hoffman is solid and a great perspective into the character and lifestyle of the "Girls Gone Wild" founder. Definitely a revenge article that needed to be printed and glad the LA Times editors gave it the green light. Seriously, what a loser and tool.
'Baby, Give Me a Kiss' The man behind the 'Girls Gone Wild' soft-porn empire lets Claire Hoffman into his world, for better or worseJoe Francis, the founder of the "Girls Gone Wild" empire, is humiliating me. He has my face pressed against the hood of a car, my arms twisted hard behind my back. He's pushing himself against me, shouting: "This is what they did to me in Panama City!"
It's after 3 a.m. and we're in a parking lot on the outskirts of Chicago. Electronic music is buzzing from the nightclub across the street, mixing easily with the laughter of the guys who are watching this, this me-pinned-and-helpless thing.
Francis isn't laughing.
He has turned on me, and I don't know why. He's going on and on about Panama City Beach, the spring break spot in northern Florida where Bay County sheriff's deputies arrested him three years ago on charges of racketeering, drug trafficking and promoting the sexual performance of a child. As he yells, I wonder if this is a flashback, or if he's punishing me for being the only blond in sight who's not wearing a thong. This much is certain: He's got at least 80 pounds on me and I'm thinking he's about to break my left arm. My eyes start to stream tears.
This is not what I anticipated when I signed up for a tour of Joe Francis' world. I've been with him nonstop since early afternoon, listening as he teases employees, flying on his private jet, eating fast food and watching young women hurl themselves against his 6-foot-2-inch frame, declaring, "We want to go wild!" (
full article)
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PHOTOSHOP AND THE MAINSTREAM PRESS
Not sure if you've been following the recent unethical behavior of several photographers and news outlets, such as Reuters, but definitely chalk up another win for the blogosphere. Several blogs caught these idiots doctoring photos to promote their own biases.
TCS Daily has a good piece by Peter Glover called
"Photoshop of Horrors":
The recent discovery by the Blogosphere that Reuters had doctored a photograph taken in Beirut throws the spotlight once more on the thorny issue of ideological bias, intentional or otherwise, in the mainstream media (MSM).By refusing to investigate the many other photos supplied by Adrian Hajj (though the news agency has withdrawn all of them) Reuters betrays two fears. First, of exposing its reputation further and, second, facing accusations of institutional bias. A British blogger has raised serious questions about the coverage generally and the German newspaper Bildt has revealed that the "soldier" carrying a dead girl from a house allegedly destroyed in an Israeli air strike in a photo beamed worldwide is actually a professional Hezbollah PR man. Elsewhere the Blogosphere has revealed discrepancies in other Hajj photos, inconsistencies in time stamps on other media photos, and evidence of the same photo being used more than once in the MSM as evidence for separate Israeli attacks. (
full post)
The People's Cube has a hilarious post on this,
"Flat Fatima - Revolution In News Photography"Improve your war footage and get Pulitzer-winning dramatic pictures with the moaning Flat Fatima™. Her classic heartbreaking posture will easily manipulate audiences into forming the desired opinion on any conflict.
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"HOT FROM SILICON VALLEY"
I came across this
new podcast blog during the
AO Stanford Summit, and the person's content is pretty good. Some good interviews here. Only thing is that I would change the formal name:
A Hot Web 2.0 blog from Silicon ValleyWeb 2.0, Hot Startups, Entrepreneurship & Stories of Innovation from Silicon Valley.I don't know the guy, but he needs some marketing advice. Anyway, content is good, so check it out if you're interested in what's going on in Silicon Valley.
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I'M PART OF THE HERD... "MY WAY, THE ENTREPRENEUR NETWORK”Tom Evslin was nice enough to invite me to his new FeedBurner network called
"My Way, The Entrepreneur Network". He's explains all of this in a post called "
Herding Entrepreneurs" and Brad Feld,
our advisor, also
blogs about it here.
FeedBurner is a strategic partner with
GoingOn Networks, my startup, but I never signed up with their service for my personal blog. This was a good excuse to do so.
Also it was a good time to join this network since I needed some motivation to keep up with my blog, which has been lacking in posts from me over the past month. Tom's indirectly put pressure on me to blog more :)
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SERIOUSLY ANNOYING, ANGRY AT THE WORLD LOSERSJust a brief post before I go back to work. Since
we're in a beta stage there are bugs and issues our users face and we try to answer or fix them as soon as possible. 90-95% of the people we deal with are reasonable. A small percentage of these users are upset about some issue, which is cool with me because they have a reason to be. But there is a very small group of users that are serious drama queens. In my eyes, they have no reason to be upset, but want to get upset. Angry at the world losers really annoy me.
Of course the customer is always right, so I have to swallow my pride and deal. Maybe next year I'll clarify this vague post and write some details down but without the names to protect the dorky...
Valleywag watch out!
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"VALLEY BOYS?" YOUNG, SEXY, WE'RE NOTAnother two weeks went by without a post which is lame on my part even if I'm not sleeping :) So I'll take step forward today in the right direction.
Anyway, BusinessWeek has an amusing article called
"Valley Boys" putting a spin on the renewed entrepreneurism and energy in Silicon Valley. It focuses on the young, sexy, founders of companies, such as Digg. As I was reading this article, I realized that this sucks for us.
Our startup,
GoingOn, is a bunch of old, middle-aged farts. I'm the youngest at 35 and then you have Carl and then we have Tony and Chris, who are in their upper forties. If GoingOn takes off, will
BusinessWeek cover us? No. And definitely not Vanity Fair or GQ.
We do not have sex appeal. Zero. Maybe we should hire some hip twenty-somethings to be our public images? Or at least be our body doubles :)
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