Connecting the Dots

Virtual Communications: Using Lessons Learned Elsewhere

Moviemakers of the suspense, horror and drama genres learned long ago that in order to build tension in the audience, slowly lowering the sound makes moviegoers start to strain to hear the dialogue (and yes, music and other sound is added to build to a crescendo). Tension builds, the muscles in the bodies of the audience tighten, they begin to lean forward slightly and THE HAND FLIES INTO THE SCREEN, GRABS OUR HERO AND THE AUDIENCE JUMPS IN THEIR SEATS SCREAMING!

Works every time.

Now take a technology we've used for a long time -- conference calling on the Plain Old Telephone System (POTS) -- and realize that people calling in on a variety of devices (headsets, cell phones, office phones) add noise and the telephone system (and conference bridge) sample at only a measly 8khz. The result? Tension builds, our muscles tighten and we actually shift our attention (you know who you are....you surfin' the web folks when you're supposed to be listening to us on the call!) and the quality of the conference and what we're trying to communicate to one another suffers.

Let's look at Skype and how using it decreases tension and increases the quality. Sampling at 16khz means the quality is substantially higher than POTS and is so good that you can hear people breathe, move something on their desk or even click their mouse. The "resolution" of the audio is much higher and thus the call quality is better. The result? Lower tension (or none at all), the callers are relaxed and the communication is higher. Thankfully there are emerging conference bridges that can handle call-ins via Skype and sample at 16khz to maintain call quality (e.g., HighSpeedConferencing).

Let's take this one step further to other forms of social media: Imagine you hosted a party and when your guests arrived, no one greeted them at the door, clusters of people were broken up into little cliques ignoring them, and as you glanced over at them in the doorway thought, "They're on their own and are just going to have to figure out how to participate."

The Cognitive Age: Why Social Media Matters

Our economy is down, gas prices are up, jobs are being lost and outsourced, we're at 'war' with possible escalation (e.g., attacking Iran), and there is tremendous uncertainty in nearly every industry being disrupted in some way by the connecting of the globe and the increasing influence of the Internet.

Let me submit for your consideration that the impact of social media -- technologies, software and approaches connecting any of us willing to participate with them online -- is pointing the way toward new systems and behaviors that will enable us all to move higher up the value chain as we learn how, together, we can create and deliver what the world needs in new and innovative ways.

One of the best op-ed pieces I've read in some time, The Cognitive Age, was published in the New York Times on Friday by David Brooks.

In this piece he's putting globalization in context in this election cycle, which is chiefly on competition with other countries and the policies of government that ostensibly is accelerating job loss in the US. Brooks puts forth this premise which bears emphasis:

"The chief force reshaping manufacturing is technological change (hastened by competition with other companies in Canada, Germany or down the street). Thanks to innovation, manufacturing productivity has doubled over two decades. Employers now require fewer but more highly skilled workers. Technological change affects China just as it does the America. William Overholt of the RAND Corporation has noted that between 1994 and 2004 the Chinese shed 25 million manufacturing jobs, 10 times more than the U.S."

Then he outlines his central argument which, I should add, I completely agree with:

"The central process driving this is not globalization. It’s the skills revolution. We’re moving into a more demanding cognitive age. In order to thrive, people are compelled to become better at absorbing, processing and combining information. This is happening in localized and globalized sectors, and it would be happening even if you tore up every free trade deal ever inked."

What does this have to do with social media and why does that category of technology matter?

Behind The Eyeballs: 75% of All Ads and Content Ineffective?

So many designers, user interface creators and arm-chair critics think they know what makes really compelling content, how ads should be displayed or even how a web site or application should be delivered. But do they? Do any of us really know what it takes to present and communicate content and ads that are truly compelling, cut above the noise, and garner attention from an increasingly scattered audience who have in front of them an overwhelming and accelerating number of choices?

One company is staking a claim to an understanding of the cognitive landscape behind our eyeballs with their quantitative and measurable solutions: NeuroFocus (via AdLab). Dr. A.K. Pradeep, CEO of NeuroFocus, said this in a follow-up interview with Media Post: "We've found that about 75% of all content--not just advertisements--is not neurologically optimal."

"For example, consumers interpret info on different parts of a screen with different sections of their brain. [...] So an advertiser or TV show producer has reduced the engagement potential and effectiveness of their content from the onset if the bulk of the textual and numerical info is placed on the left side--with the imagery or brand logos on the right."

The company obtains their results through biometric measurements. That means volunteers strap on a skull cap with electrodes on it and engage with the content and advertisements of which they're presented. The thing that troubles me a bit, is that like the uncertainty principle in quantum physics, my experiences have shown that when observers know they're being measured their behavior and cognitive processing changes. It does seem, however, that NeuroFocus' research at least provides a baseline from which content and ads can be more precisely delivered. Then further refinement can occur (with we unaware and passive brains behind eyeballs) with other analytical tools or simple measures of clickstream data.

The Nielsen Company (the grandaddy of TV measurement) has made a strategic investment in NeuroFocus so they're obviously on to something.

The promise (to advertisers) of the shift to internet-based ad delivery is measurement and to us (the online user) it's ad relevancy, contextualized or personalized ads. Rarely does significant  and ongoing ad placement occur without measurement nor do venture capitalists sit still for long as ad-dependent-for-revenue companies attempt to drive user engagement and expansion of our involvement with their offering...and thus garner advertisers.

Solid measurement is healthy. Best practices more so as they're indicators of actions we can take with understandable and quantifiable returns. It's still pretty early in the evolution of the internet, but knowing what to do, how to deliver it and how to measure it is key to economic success on the 'net and continued innovation.

To read more, take a peek at this well done New York Times article here and the CEO has a couple of mp3's and a white paper here.

Freeconomics: What about MY cost for YOUR free?

Am somewhat amazed by the backlash against Chris Anderson's new Wired piece, "Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business". Charges that he wrote a "communist manifesto" were probably the harshest ones, but many people I've been talking with, both in person and virtually, share somewhat of that same opinion: "something is wrong if you have to give away your value" and "we can't all make money by grabbing mass numbers of eyeballs in order to deliver advertising to them."

They're missing his point and he missed one I think he shouldn't have.

Anderson's "it's the falling costs, stupid" premise can be summed up in this paragraph taken, ironically, from his article in the Economist magazine:

The dominant business model on the internet today is making money by giving things away. Much of that is merely the traditional media model of using free content to build audiences and selling access to them to advertisers. But an increasing amount of it falls into the free-sample model: because it is so cheap to offer digital services online, it doesn’t matter if 99% of your customers are using the free version of your services so long as 1% are paying for the “premium version”. After all, 1% of a big number can also be a big number.

Free is a major shift and a huge trend, especially with any sort of online service. If you thoroughly read Anderson's article in Wired you may or may not buy into the argument he makes, and may even accept his premise that free is driven primarily by the fall in producer costs as the costs associated with delivering them continue to drop online.

But wait just a minute.

Are you suffering from attention overload?

In my work it's imperative I stay abreast of new technologies, approaches and how social media startups are figuring out how to increase our capability to connect to one another in more interesting and meaningful ways.

But how many places can we focus our attention?

I blog. Follow and skim 138 blogs and dozens of news feeds in Google Reader. Deal with dozens of emails per day. Scan Techmeme and Blogrunner. Post and follow people on Twitter and now Pownce. Barely use Facebook but feel compelled since so many people I know are using it. Just joined Seesmic (in private alpha) which is a social network for participatory video (see what your friends post, you can post, and a 'conversation' can carry forward). Scroll through Digg's feed and often click on an article.

Oh....and I have work to do for my clients and business!

Since one my strengths is "input" (collecting information is something I love to do), I thought my scattered focus and partial attention was atypical until I talked to dozens of other people. Nearly everyone I talk to is feeling the effects of traditional media clamoring for our attention, more coverage and news with less analysis than ever before, and thousands of new media methods (some which I mentioned above) that are connecting us in ways that making it very challenging to think, mull it over and breathe.

Many business leaders feel that this continuous partial attention is a Millenials or kids phenomena, but my own anecdotal research shows that this is increasingly cutting across all age groups, demographics and cultures (Linda Stone has the seminal thoughts on the topic).

Anyone with a computer and internet connection is now a mini-media mogul since it's trivial to publish, create radio and TV (even live streams ala uStream, Qik, Stickam), deliver screencasts and learning content, and stake a claim in the micro-blogging arena (e.g., Twitter, Pownce) and snag followers tuning into your thought stream.

With all of these sources coming at us (or those we choose feeling compelled or pressured to stay abreast of their content) while we pay continuous partial attention to each, what happens to these attention traffic jams in our brains? How can we discern what is worthy of our attention since not all of it is?

Google "doing evil" by invisibly observing?

Google is known for it's internal guiding phrase "Do No Evil". What I've never seen is a strict definition of what "doing evil" really means to the folks at Google. Have you? Should you care? What data is Google looking at when you're online?

An article in SLATE yesterday entitled, "Google's Evil Eye" about summed up what I've talked about previously (a key post is here and another handful are here, here and here) and all of this should at least make you stop and think about all the Google services you're using and how much you're simply handing over to them:

Google's fingerprints aren't just on your e-mail. Last week, the Senate held hearings regarding Google's proposed acquisition of Doubleclick. Google dominates the micro-end of Internet advertising with its text ads. Doubleclick is the leading provider of banner ads, like the one at the top of this page. A combined Googleclick would be a force in Internet advertising—Google makes 99 percent of its profits from ads—and have an awesome ability to track your online behavior. Google will be able to inform advertisers what sites your browser has visited, what ads have been clicked on, what search terms have been used. The company can also get a good idea of your physical location from your computer's IP address. And that's just the tip of the data iceberg. If Sony wants to target teenage PlayStation 3 owners in Southern California with a special promotion on flatscreen TVs, who do you think they are going to call?

When I was at Vignette during the dotcom heyday, I recall the Doubleclick controversy in 1999 that showed, for the first time, the unprecedented capability of tracking and measuring. From Wikipedia:

"In 1999, at a cost of US $1.7 billion, DoubleClick merged with the data-collection agency, Abacus Direct, which works with offline catalog companies. This raised fears that the combined company would link anonymous Web-surfing profiles with personally identifiable information (name, address, telephone number, e-mail, address, etc.) collected by Abacus. This merger made waves and was heavily criticized by privacy organizations. Controversy grew when it was discovered that sensitive financial information users entered on a popular Web site that offered financial software was being sent to DoubleClick, which delivered the ads."

That was over seven years ago which is an eternity in internet time.

What if a 1% increase in broadband penetration equaled 300,000 jobs?

Often I take Robert X. Cringely's columns with a grain-of-salt, but this one entitled, "Game Over: The U.S. is unlikely to ever regain its broadband leadership" really hit me since I make my living on Internet-centric management consulting and view broadband as the key enabler of business going forward. Cringely's article is an important one to read if you care about US competitiveness in the future.

Back in the mid-1990's I had an ISDN line with a whopping 128kbps access for $69 per month. Incredibly fast at the time, I even considered their bonded option for 256kbps (well over $100 per month) but I wanted to stay married. Today I have 8mbps per second downstream and 768kbps upstream for essentially the same price.

I have friends in San Francisco with 10mbps symmetrical (both upload and download) for under $100 a month. Others using Verizon's fiber (FIOS) and getting 15mbps down, 2mbps up for $50 per month.

But Cringely talks about the 100mbps speeds in Japan, others have complained about them being ahead of us too and the OECD's April, 2007 report (which showed the US at 25th in global broadband penetration and speed) is open to debate. So is it important for us to have competitiveness in broadband speeds and why aren't we -- the inventor and creator of the Internet -- in the world's leading position for broadband speed and penetration?

When you think about the relative sizes of countries vs. US states, you begin to get a feel for the enormity of the problem. Japan is roughly the size of Montana, for example, and (as of 2001), 79% of the population lived in urban areas with ~20% in Tokyo alone. That makes it considerably easier to provide a high speed broadband infrastructure for the overwhelming majority of Japanese. It's a lot tougher to do so across the vast geography that is the United States.

The stakes are too high, however, to NOT solve this accelerating need for true broadband. ArsTechnica has a good article on House Democrats and discussions about 'true' broadband. I'm not even going to get into the lobbying and politics of broadband, telephony and wireless, but suffice to say there are alot of complexities on why we're NOT the world's leader. What most discussions don't focus on, however, is that broadband is viewed as a driver of gross domestic product (GDP) output and we need to be accelerating the Internet -- both in speed and penetration -- now.

What if a 1% increase in broadband penetration equaled 300,000 jobs? Read on for a very interesting set of data...

Being dependent on applications in "the cloud"

Vonage's dashboard page has been down all morning. This is the place where all features of the service can be tweaked like voicemail, forwarding phones and so on. Fortunately this hasn't been a deal killer for us today, but it reminds me of my increasing dependence on service levels for applications that live in the cloud (i.e., hosted applications served via the Internet).

More of my life is entangled with Google (Gmail; Reader; Notebook; Analytics) and when there is a hiccup with email specifically, much of my communication grinds to a halt.

This Vonage "upgrading" is bothersome since there isn't any convenient way to perform tasks with Vonage offline (I could do it via the phone itself, but the help system is online!). Google Gears is interesting as is other offline use for other Web applications, but if you haven't sync'ed recently and the hosted application goes offline, it's a moot point.

Get Smart about Helping Others Understand Technology

Was poking around Brightcove's site this morning and found a Time/Life channel with the clip below. I remember this show, Get Smart, and its bumbling spy Maxwell Smart (played by Don Adams). It was campy as hell but was fun to watch nevertheless.

This clip -- complete with a pinkish red wrapper and an ad for the series on DVD (Note: for some reason I noticed today, July 12th, that it had been taken down so I put up a new version) -- was still one I wanted to include in this post today. Why? Because the way Maxwell is using all his phone gadgets is how I sometimes think people see me when I'm goofin' with all my gadgets and technology. This might be an enjoyable clip that may also make you stop and think about what those of us deeply embedded in Web 2.0, the Internet, software and gadgets present with our use of technology. Let's help the rest of 'em catch up, heh?

Communication breakthroughs...

With free time this weekend to explore online, I was able to perform a cursory examination of the landscape of breakthrough communications providers in telephony, web conferencing and streaming video (the last one I'll discuss in this post). Certainly not a comprehensive analysis by any means, but it gave me a good sense of where we are and what needs to yet happen.

As you can see from this screenshot from one of my non-public 'test' blogs, I was goofin' around and testing streaming video offerings from Stickam and uStream. The former has been around awhile longer so I like their technology better and it works great, but they're targeting a young, social network crowd and positioning streaming as a way to connect with one another. Cool but not yet useful for business purposes (yeah...I care about the social stuff but we need commerce too!).

uStream is certainly driving toward a more serious technology user -- and people that are interested in delivering value of some sort with shows and connecting with an audience -- so it suits my needs, those of my clients, and just about everyone else I know that is in business, education or an organization of some sort....but can it or any of these shows deliver?

Listening (and once watching a uStream streaming video) Leo Laporte of TechTV and now TwIT fame, he'd talked with the founders of uStream (on Net@Nite with Amber Macarthur) about one of his shows which he had streamed live. He had just over 4,000 viewers and the server blew up. The uStream team is remedying that problem but this brings up my #1 issue: to be serious contenders, these communications technologies must scale.

I've brought up scale over-n-over again on this blog and I know that streaming video is really hard and the bandwidth needed is expensive. What if a hot 'show' is streamed on Stickam or uStream and has even 1% of the disappearing network TV show audience (37.5 million viewers in the US in March for broadcast networks), there is NO way that any of these lower end solutions would be up to the task of streaming to an audience of 375,000 people...let alone millions.

When individuals, companies or organizations start down a path of choosing superior communication technologies, they are placing a bet. I view many solutions -- Skype, Stickam, uStream, and many Web 2.0 solutions -- are bleeding edge and not a safe bet. That said, I'm experiencing many solutions myself and know exactly what I (and many of my clients) want but believe that we're not quite there yet...

...but man, are we close.

Scaling Web 2.0: The Dirty Little Secret Exposed?

Was very pleased to see Tim O'Reilly bringing forth the issue of Web 2.0 scaling and Ray Ozzie's perspective. This is such a vitally important issue and it needs analysis, facts and discussion and big time thought leading exposure.

I first wrote about the "dirty little secret" of Web 2.0 back in December of 2005. That secret is that infrastructure, bandwidth and minimizing latency is a huge issue for startups and is one little discussed.  It's one I know first hand from a conferencing startup I worked with last year -- and informing developers is an imperative since this dirty little secret will impact rich, internet applications; mashups; widgets; and other composite applications delivered going forward.

This problem becomes more acute as we all pull data from geographically disbursed hosted online services. I can't tell you how many times I've waited...and waited...and waited....for some data to appear in a widget, an ad served from DoubleClick, or a startpage pulling simple RSS text data from dozens of different sources. Imagine when several, dozens or numerous interdependent sources (ones that pull data from other services to deliver a composite web service that is, in turn, consumed by yet another new application!). It's a recipe for disaster unless managed at a world-class level.

Now that more of us are playing with video, Flash and, especially, streaming video (e.g., uStream and like what I did at a low level yesterday with Skype video), the challenges in betting a business, a workshop series, a product category or composite applications means that we all better get more informed about this issue and damn fast.

I've said before that one key to the dotcom crash was HUGE amounts of content and functionality being shoved into the top of the funnel while those of us consuming it were drinking from the tiny end of the funnel through 56kbps straws.

I fear that unless this dirty little secret is handled and done so by disseminating understanding amongst ALL creators, developers, business strategists and users of Web/Enterprise 2.0 products and services, users expectations are going to be dashed and it will create material barriers to adoption and use. Maybe not another crash, but the barriers and obstacles that will come are preventable with enhanced understanding and knowledge dissemination.

Internet Innovation and Optimizing the Status Quo

Minnesota is a great place to live and raise kids. Yes, the winters are brutal but the benefits outweigh the troubles. So much so that most of my 600+ high school graduating class members still live here after several decades.

There are A LOT of smart people in the Land of 10,000 Lakes -- both home grown and those transplanted here. Successful businesses abound like Target, Best Buy, Medtronic, General Mills, 3M, UnitedHealth Group and many, many more. World class businesses and leadership in their respective industries. But as the world of business gets increasingly mapped on to the Internet, it's highly unlikely that these organizations will lead us to the promised land of Internet innovation. They'll just wait and see who is successful and leverage capital to buy-in strategically. Sadly this is often a too-little-too-late move.

Frequently I complain about my conversations with leaders in Minnesota and how I first need to educate them on Web 2.0 and Internet-as-a-platform before we can have a productive conversation about the paradigm shifts and disruption occurring. The next challenge is how to work on driving forward strategically and embracing the changes. "Why aren't you already innovating on the rapidly accelerating Internet platform?", I'll ask. The answers range from "Not sure what to do" to "it's not a big deal for my business yet". The former we can work on...the latter closes the door.

Closing the door isn't an option in a time of accelerating change. Every client I have and every industry I analyze is being disrupted in some fashion by the Internet. Fortunately there are thought leaders guiding us.

Silverlight and Apollo: The Creation Tools Will Matter

Now that Microsoft's Mix '07 is put-to-bed and all the requisite excitement has devolved into a mulling it over stage, I'd like to add one thing to the conversation. The container for Apollo and Silverlight isn't what matters. The tools to *create* what goes in those containers is what matters.

When I wrote Microsoft Surprise: Controlling the Process days ago, I was already fully aware that the tools Microsoft had developed (Expression) could be the defining factor on who would win the container war. Though Adobe would argue this point with Flex -- and I'm not aware of what they probably have up their sleeve -- I'm not seeing the high level tools that the people working on the brushstrokes need (the graphic designers, user interface people, etc.). Flex is a tool for those creating/programming with keystrokes and is not a tool for someone who is skilled at look-n-feel, color and a users experience.

Adobe releasing Apollo and Microsoft, Silverlight is just the first skirmish...there haven't been any battles yet and the war is far from over. Why will higher level tools matter?

When I remember back to the early days of the desktop publishing revolution, I became a student of printing history and enamored with what Johannes Gutenberg had done to explode literacy around the world with his tool to create printed works. Without movable type and the press, books would still be created by hand.

Pagemaker and then Quark gave designers the tools to create printed works and pass off digital files to a prepress house and ultimately to the press. The analogue to today's Internet world is that the page layout designers are to the Web creation folks as programmers are to prepress and press operators (though my developer buddies would cough up a hairball to hear me talk about them like they're unionized keyboard bangers and ink pushers, but you catch my drift).

These higher level tools is why my wife's business of 21 years exists. Without the major cost reductions available to common folks like us, we never would've started the publishing business.

Tools are also why I think Brightcove has an excellent chance of being the company to break out in the create-your-own-video channel space. They've got tools for producers and programmers (TV programmers, that is) to perform ad insertion, replays and other workflow that make running ones own "channel" possible.

I'm less interested in the container runtime that all this stuff collapses in to and more interested in who is nailing the workflow and higher level tools to create and deliver rich, Internet applications. Microsoft appears to have a competitive differentiator with Expression and they really understand the people that do keystroking...

...but Adobe totally and completely understands the design community and it's in their DNA. I'm betting Adobe only released a developer-centric version of Apollo since they're not ready to release their higher level tools. This is gonna be fun to watch.

Vision: THE most important first step...

Nothing happens without a vision. Nothing gets created, manifested, built, or moved forward without a vision of an outcome.

Almost on a daily basis, I'm being bombarded with the benefits of visualization in my work, my personal life and as I guide others. If you don't already visualize before you set personal goals, build a plan or, especially, if you lead an organization, team, or group, then you owe it to yourself to begin.

Just to illustrate how vision is showing up everywhere, at the Web 2.0 Expo's Hybrid Designer session Chris Messina said something that hit me in the face and has stuck with me.  In a discussion about the challenges facing designers with a creative vision struggling to get programmers to see the outcome of that vision so they could code to it, he talked about how he mocked up a visual when they were creating Flock, posted it to Flickr so that the geographically disbursed development team could all get on a call and talk about that vision. Without that shared vision, Chris said, the coordination of the team on a shared vision would've taken 6 weeks and dozens of threads in a discussion forum. Instead, it took 2-3 days.

No question this sharing of vision -- and the co-creating that goes along with that sharing -- is the single reason that I'm so incredibly enthused about the accelerating connection of humanity via the Internet and all the open source projects, Web 2.0 startups, and commercial software companies that are rushing to deliver ever-increasingly functional collaborative applications and platforms.

After dozens of people my bride and I know talked about the film The Secret, she purchased it. It was very well done and focused on one piece of sage wisdom: The Secret is a feature length, historic and factually based account of an age old secret, said to be 4000 years in the making, and known only to a fortunate few. The Secret promises to reveal this great knowledge to the world - the secret to wealth, the secret to health, the secret to love, relationships, happiness, eternal youth, the secret to life. The secret? The Law of Attraction which is creating a vision of what you want and expect to show up...and how it works when you align your intent, your energy and your focus on it.

Why should I care about vision Borsch?

People Oriented Architecture

Henry Ford invented what? The automobile? Nope. Oh yeah, the assembly line? Nope. What Ford *did* do was something more profound: he and his team discovered radical processes that could be brought to automobile production and dramatically lower costs, increase efficiency and raise quality. He didn't invent the assembly line, he just mapped it on to automobile making in startlingly new ways and mass production was born.

Before Ford's breakthrough, all automobiles were assembled in one spot, with all parts and people coming to it vs. the radical departure of having the auto move along an assembly line where parts and people were efficiently placed and able to assemble it dynamically.

This assembly line paradigm wasn't new. Eli Whitney's cotton gin manufacturing employed these principles as did the meat processing industry. One of Ford's key managers visited a Chicago meat processing plant where he saw the dis-assembly of cows moving along a conveyor belt and had an "Aha!" moment where he realized that a reversed process could assemble goods.

All of this was brought back to Ford who'd been seeking better ways of producing cars and had a vision for consumerism. His next breakthrough of raising wages to $5 enabled his own production workers to actually afford the cars they were making.

In the enterprise world, today's information technology architecture is all about running the business more efficiently and competitively. Cycle time reduction, business process and workflow, enterprise resource planning, analytics, are but a few of the buzz phrases that define the categories targeted.

Where do people fit in today's IT architecture's other than acting as production workers on a knowledge assembly line?  What is the breakthrough analog to today's business and I.T. architectures that will rival Ford's profound application of mass production?

Web 2.0 Expo: A Showcase for Innovation

Heading to San Francisco for the Web 2.0 Expo this weekend and am eagerly anticipating it. The sessions are top notch; there will be launches, announcements and many vendors; and I have several meetings I'm pleased to be in.

As is typical for me, there are numerous concurrent sessions I'd like to be in at every time slot during the day! I know it's impossible to experience it all -- and I rely on other bloggers like ReadWriteWeb to tell me the highlights of conferences that I AM ACTUALLY AT! -- so hopefully I won't miss much and the hallway conversations are routinely 10x more meaningful...so I'm looking forward to those almost as much.

Knowing what I do about the Expo at this stage (from talks with the CMP Media folks), there's no question that this Expo needs to be regionalized for other States in the US and other countries. As I've stated many times before, just look at the incredible value of the hundreds of Web 2.0 companies you can get to from lists like the ones here. How many of them have you heard of? How is a business leader, functional department head or project team even have solutions like these on their radar screens?

Over and over again I've worked with clients, friends and family to whom I've recommended one or more solutions from these lists. Over the last five quarters, I've gone through ALL these lists and looked at ALL the value propositions of these companies. This exercise has given me a solid feel for how well their value propositions are presented on their site (and sadly not very well in many cases) while allowing me to also take more "test drives" than I care to count.

What that constant trolling and analyzing has done for me is this: I can match solutions to needs or instantly provide people with a starting point for their own due diligence or exploration. The biggest consequence of these efforts is that I'm more excited and enthusiastic about the Internet-as-a-platform and Web 2.0 (or NextGenWeb, FutureWeb or whatever you care to call it) than almost anyone else I know. This excitement, the possibilities, the opportunities need to be more widely disseminated since the wide majority of people are clueless about what's going on with the emergent Internet/Web platform...let alone the almost laughingly huge number of solutions that are already built and just waiting for them to use.

If you'd like to be able to take a peek at the booths in the Expo pavilion and see for yourself, I've been provided with a code to get a $100 discount you can use when you register *in advance on the Web*:  webex07mk38

This is good for $100 off any conference pass (if you want to pay the big bucks and see the sessions) or the Expo pass (which costs $100, so using the code makes attending the exhibit area free).

Internet ID: Are we getting close to one?

I am getting very encouraged that the big kids (IBM, Microsoft, et al) are closing in on an Internet-centric identification scheme that will be really useful for ALL of us who use the Web. I wrote about extensively here so won't repeat myself, other than the major points.

This article is a must-read if you have even a passing interest in authenticity, trust, and some of the amazingly cool possibilities which might emerge once we have an Internet ID system in place. It discussed IBM's release of code with a technology they've dubbed an identity mixer which "...will will let users pick and choose what information to disclose about themselves and next (in July) an identity selector for choosing the sources of information to use."

Why should you care? The promise of all this work are practical uses like single sign-on to Web applications; verification of who you are for transactions; autopopulating of data in Web applications; and so forth. But to me, the EXCITING use will be allowing us to proxy ourselves and the data within our profile/identity to those we choose to interact with online.

Huh? What do you mean by exciting Borsch?

Let me explain further about what benefit letting out a proxy of ourselves might do. Imagine you're interested in buying a new HDTV. You shop and shop and shop online attempting to educate yourself about what's available before you plunk down your dough. Once you've decided on a make and model, the fun of finding the best deal begins. But what if instead you could put your request for a quote online and advertisers, marketers and sellers of HDTV's could come to you? Since they'd be able to verify that yes, you have the money (since your ID would contain your credit score, income verification and so on BUT would be opaque and private so they couldn't attach it to a real human...yet), they would feel comfortable coming after you and your business.

What if your ID also contained your online reputation? Now a maker of HDTV's could say, "Hmmm....Schmedlap is an influencer, a blogger and a user of social networks and a geek. If we get him to buy our HDTV -- and get him to blog about it and tell 10 friends -- we'll give him a better price." Several companies come after your proxy with proposals that toss in stuff (e.g., cables, screen protectors, stands, etc.) and other things that steer you toward their offerings.

Tim O'Reilly wrote about a Blogger Code of Conduct with some controls built-in to handle the trolls and anonymous people on blogs so that the blogosphere doesn't devolve into chaos. I submit that -- once an ID system was in place with the ability to anonymize ourselves or create proxy/pseudonyms THAT COULD BE VERIFIED against a real, secure identification system -- there'd be need for a code of conduct but people would be less willing to do things publicly since it would be trivial to have their comments traceable back to an actual human. (Note: For every system like this in place, I'm well aware that gaming the system or hacking it is often trivial...and I'm not qualified to assess the security of IBM or anyone else's approach).

The increasingly connected world needs something like this that works with, of course, all the requisite watchdogging for privacy...but I'm mainly interested in the exciting stuff.

Enterprise 2.0: Will Cisco/WebEx Win?

After putting together this post, Why in the world would Cisco buy WebEx?, I've been continuing to track publicly delivered information -- and thinking-through that info -- that confirms my premise Cisco bought them as a platform play in the unified communications space.

If you're in the Web 2.0 space focused on delivering great value with hosted Web applications, then you're into being nimble, fast and focused which is why Web 2.0 as an umbrella term is so damn exciting. Unfortunately enterprise I.T. has never been known by any of those adjectives and "exciting" is a term not often used with big, costly, organization-wide software implementations.

In the Web 2.0 space many developers find themselves leveraging API's from companies delivering their functionality as a Web service so it can be consumed inside applications and thinking about Web application hybrids or "mashups" (peek at ProgrammableWeb to see hundreds of these mashups).  In the dozens of conversations I'm in every month with Web 2.0 companies, rarely do the concepts service oriented architecture, web services, software as a service (SaaS) or composite applications ever come up. But these latter ones have been around a long time in the enterprise, monolithic application, portal, mainframe space and enterprise-class independent software vendors (ISV's) and I.T. leadership are keenly tracking all the innovation in the Web 2.0 arena. Their interest lies in continuing their quest to find better and more efficient ways to leverage information technology and deliver ever higher value. You'll be hearing a lot about Enterprise 2.0 going forward as ISV's and CIO's embrace the Web 2.0 concepts that have been proven to work as they seek that ever greater value.

As the world increasingly connects and knowledge work is scattered around the globe in loosely coupled groups of organizations and people, enabling effective collaboration is mission-critical for most companies. Not only for work to get done or innovation to occur, but to manage the increasingly important imperatives of energy conservation (i.e., less travel), risk mitigation for the potential negative impact from terrorism, natural disasters or viral pandemics, and to cater to the changing expectations of their participative work force. 

WebEx Connect is WebEx' attempt to move beyond simple screen sharing. As business process is increasingly driven down into the middleware and infrastructure layers -- with high level tools for business people to lay out a process and assemble information technology to drive it -- having a scalable and extensible platform that ISV's, enterprise I.T. or Web 2.0-centric developers can simply leverage and use on a global basis makes a ton of sense.

(UPDATE: Graeme Thickins of Tech~Surf~Blog just alerted me to this article about John Chambers, Cisco CEO, encouraging channel partners to embrace Web 2.0).

Is WebEx Connect that platform?  Most importantly, will Cisco/WebEx win the battle for the hearts-n-minds of ISV's and the enterprise to make it THE unified communications platform?