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 Hybrid/RIA War: Adobe's Open Screen Project

Today's announcement by Adobe of the Open Screen Project has been well covered in the blogosphere. What hasn't been well covered is the story-behind-the-story and that this is a major salvo in the hybrid application war.

I've written before about the rich, internet application (RIA) space (here, here and here for example) and the momentum being built behind the tools, approaches and delivery containers with content, data and functionality mashed up and delivered in a hybrid manner.

As the world is increasingly connected and broadband/wireless speeds increase (and device types proliferate with internet connectivity), the demand for more and more functionality integrating the desktop and the internet is accelerating and the major vendors (and open source ones) are trying to figure out how to empower us to create and deliver new digital assets that customers will value and buy.

What isn't discussed much is the now primarily covert 'war' underway between Adobe with Flash (and AIR, Media Player, et al), Microsoft with Silverlight, Apple with WebKit (though little has been intimated publicly on what they might do in the RIA space or how they might leverage the stealth Quicktime installs on Windows with iTunes and the recent Safari Windows release) and Mozilla's Prism. All are focused on how to provide a winning environment upon and within which content creators, developers and strategists can deliver ever higher value and create competitive advantage for they and their companies. Whoever pulls that off will win.

Four very different approaches, market positioning, tools to create and develop, and overall go-to-market plans (most of which an outsider can only guess at) but the promise of RIA's is huge for applications and for us, whether we want to create-n-deliver or just enjoy the fruits of the labors of others: replacement for current web apps; completely new categories; and even one area we're already exploring in my company, a new type of subscription/self-updating ebook that RSS feeds, video and audio automagically appear within when a subscriber opens it and is connected to the 'net.

Who will win? I don't know yet but the winner will be the one with the best tools, the largest runtime container distribution, and the most support from the ecosystem surrounding them. The momentum is with Adobe but, then again, it was with Apple in 1980 at the dawn of the personal computing industry, and we know how that turned out.

Sprout: A mashup & application tool for the masses

Our pals at Techcrunch just posted about a new company that debuted today at DEMO called Sprout and thought I'd attempt to get in on the private beta and lo-and-behold...I got in.

The 'sprout' (their term vs. 'widget') you see below is one I created in 15 minutes. It took me longer to open Photoshop, reduce the size of the Connecting the Dots header and to type in the pathnames to my podcasts (yes I know...they're OLD) then it did to create the sprout!

I just grinned and shook my head in disbelief as I used it since Sprout has delivered on my pent up desire to have just such a mashup and creation tool which begs the question: why the hell didn't Adobe do this with their rich internet application (i.e., RIA or Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR)) strategy? To date mere mortals -- who are savvy enough to use InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator and the like -- can't truly deliver on AIR, Microsoft Silverlight or even Webkit apps unless the propeller on their beanie is fairly large.

There are a few nits (the words "Click on any playlist..." were bolded and italicized which didn't publish) but they're so few compared to the power Sprout has unleashed they're easily overlooked. I also want to understand what they'll charge for the service -- or those I direct to Sprout to create -- before I get too fired up about recommending people leap on the tool and deliver mission-critical products.

I also noticed a slight latency as my 'sprout' loads which you might notice also. I've been a broken record on the topic of the "dirty little secret" -- that Internetwork latency is already affecting mashups, Web/Enterprise 2.0 applications, video delivery and essentially everything we do over the Internet -- but this latency won't likely slow down the creation and delivery of mashed up applications. I hope, really hope, that this latency doesn't crush the spirit of those of us truly wanting to create and deliver significantly higher value on the Web with tools like Sprout.

Using this tool for 30 minutes tonight has sparked about 25 ideas for how I'd use it. From completely self-contained multimedia slideshows to a different sort of ebook to a poor man's RIA, I suspect many others will have exactly the same reaction and start building these things like mad.

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?

What if all human knowledge was free and accessible?

Imagine that for lunch today you had to go into your storehouse and find the peaches you canned last summer, the meat from the cow you slaughtered and smoked, and the grain you packed away after harvesting it while heading up to the kitchen to prepare it all. Pretty ridiculous to consider for we urban dwellers, heh?  We instead go to the grocery store and get what we need all nice and shrink-wrapped or just head over to our favorite local restaurant for lunch to be served to us all piping hot.

The farming, ranching, slaughterhouse, bakeries, food service and distribution system (e.g., refrigerated trains, trucking, grocery stores) ensures that most of us don't need to think too hard about where we'll get today's lunch or tomorrow's remarkably inexpensive calories. We also expend laughingly few calories to obtain what we need compared to even a generation ago (thus why we're so fat...but I digress) and this whole food ecosystem has allowed all of us to move to a higher level and specialize in our work in ways our great-grandparents could never have foreseen since we're not expending so many calories (not to mention time) to grow, gather up, store and prepare them.

One thing is clear if you're investing any time staying abreast of the acceleration in Internet-centric knowledge repositories (e.g., Wikipedia, Google Knol, Instructables, Connexions), as well as higher learning institution initatives (e.g., MIT Open Courseware), then you'll begin to understand the vision and promise embodied in a new initiative by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and Rich Baraniuk, respective founders of Wikipedia and Connexions, called The Cape Town Open Education Declaration (via Smart Mobs).

We are on the cusp of a global revolution in teaching and learning. Educators worldwide are developing a vast pool of educational resources on the Internet, open and free for all to use. These educators are creating a world where each and every person on earth can access and contribute to the sum of all human knowledge. They are also planting the seeds of a new pedagogy where educators and learners create, shape and evolve knowledge together, deepening their skills and understanding as they go.

This emerging open education movement combines the established tradition of sharing good ideas with fellow educators and the collaborative, interactive culture of the Internet. It is built on the belief that everyone should have the freedom to use, customize, improve and redistribute educational resources without constraint. Educators, learners and others who share this belief are gathering together as part of a worldwide effort to make education both more accessible and more effective.

Does this mean that your training, learning, knowledge work or content is going to be free or cause you to give it away?

Molding and Shaping Perception in an Internet Age

My daughter had a college paper to do and ended up doing it on, "Old and New Media Influence on Anti-American Sentiment".

What was fascinating was to read this report (PDF) from May, 2007 entitled, "The Communication of Anti-Americanism: Media Influence and Anti-American Sentiment” by the Department of Communications at Cornell University and see that this massive research study focused on traditional media and completely left out new media!

They examined all sorts of statistics and variables in the report: country, age, income, media habits, and much more. The problem in leaving out new media is that  most people under 30 have radically reduced their consumption of old media and instead are having their perceptions molded and shaped by exposure to all sorts of opinions and alternative new media forms.

Her argument was that negative perceptions of America were being molded and shaped by all media, not just traditional media. In an age when many globally are eschewing broadcast media for social network's, YouTube, SMS, blogs, and shows like The Daily Show or even Al Jazeera offerings, there is no doubt that any thoughtful consideration and examination of public opinion and cross-cultural perception must include new media forms.

As I wrote this looking at that goofy picture of Ze Frank (which must frighten children and small animals), I thought about how tough it would've been for Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbel's, to have done what he did for perception-controlling had the Internet existed in the 1930's.

Newtek and the Video Toaster

Had a conversation with a buddy about the Video Toaster and the shrink-wrapped copy of the VHS marketing video I still own called "NewTek Revolution." This friend sent me a link to this video below which I haven't watched for at least ten years. Underneath the video is an original post from 2005 I did that I wanted to repost since this conversation brought back a lot of fond memories made more acute in today's time of user generated content, video delivered everywhere on the 'net, and how startling it is that the tools have changed so dramatically in such a short time.

---

When I think what could've been with NewTek and the Video Toaster, I must admit feeling a twinge of sadness. NewTek could've been the next Apple Computer if, in my opinion, one thing would've happened that was a pretty clear tipping point.

In April of 1990, NewTek introduced the Video Toaster. A board-level product (with great special effects and switcher software) that plugged in to the only video-ready computer at the time (the Commodore Amiga). It revolutionized the video business and kickstarted the desktop video category.

Two guys I'd become acquainted with, Reid Johnson and George Johnson (no relation but college buddies), owned a video dealership that had introduced the Video Toaster to the Minneapolis/St. Paul area to great success and acclaim. Tim Jenison (founder & owner of NewTek) and his VP, Paul Montgomery (sadly now deceased), were so enamored with what they'd done that they hired Reid and George to open a sales headquarters in Minnesota.

Needing someone that had channel experience to assist them, they hired me.

What an adventure! The Toaster began selling like hotcakes and we had dealers scrambling to carry it. We had three major distributors that were buying up all our production. The company nearly tripled in revenue in a year.

This was *the* cool company too. We were showcased on the NBC Evening News with Tom Brokaw. Our Christmas party had people like James Doohan (Scotty on Star Trek), Wil Wheaton (Star Trek Next Generation) and the guy that played Lurch (Carel Struycken) in the Addams Family movie that year, as well as a host of others. NewTek had a whole "cool friends" network which included people like Penn & Teller. 1993 brought NewTek and its founder, Tim Jenison, recognition in the form of a Prime Time Emmy Award for Technical Achievement from the American Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

Internet TV Studio & a Free, Live, New Media Event

Mogulus just announced to their 15,000 beta testers that they were adding some new features (a "grid" to watch multiple channels at once) but that is not why I'm posting about them. Instead, it's that you, yes you, can start and run your own TV channel and Mogulus is your very own TV Studio online.

This startup is also going to be broadcasting the NewTeeVee Live event on November 14th for free and using it as a pre-launch (end of November is launch) proving ground for what they're offering.

Why is this a big deal and why should you care?

One reason is that you'll be able to "attend" the NewTeeVee Live event as stated on their blog, "For those of you who can’t make it, the conference will be broadcast live by Mogulus, who prepared the promo below to give you a flavor of what’s to come. Joyce Kim of The GigaOM Show will be hosting the Mogulus broadcast with live hallway interviews." More here.

Besides free attendance to this event, it also means that you have an atypically intriguing method of delivering high value video content with Mogulus and are able to connect and switch live to multiple, geographically disbursed people (who can be "talent" or content experts on webcams), switch to video feeds from rooms or events with a live television-like production method, and then run recorded videos 24/7 afterwards. The Mogulus player -- though skinned with what I think is their default butt-ugly gray or even their special NewTeeVee orange like you see above -- can be embedded anywhere (and I hope they provide different skins upon launch!).

Take a peek at the Mogulus video after the jump and watch the whole thing as you'll get to the good stuff how Mogulus works, etc.) about halfway through.

Two approaches to Internet TV: Miro and Joost

No question in my mind that Internet TV (Internet Protocol Television or IPTV) is how many of us will be watching video and film within a couple of years vs. over rabbit ears, through a satellite dish or signals coming through a cable. Thousands or millions of channels are possible with the Internet and you'll be able to watch whatever you want whenever it's convenient.

I decided today to download Miro and give it a try since Leo Laporte blogged about it and that his new show (which I've never seen) The Lab with Leo Laporte was up on Miro in an HD version and Leo was puzzled over how they'd obtained his show in HD.

There are so many approaches to delivering video and I'm not going to touch on the obvious YouTube, Revver, Kyte or other deliverer's of visual media. Instead, I'm going to briefly discuss Miro and the buzz king, Joost, though my jury is still out on rendering a verdict on either one of them and I'd encourage you to try them out for yourself.

Miro (formerly Democracy Player) is an iTunes-like media player that uses Bittorrent as its primary download method. You sign up for a channel (similar to subscribing to a podcast in iTunes) and your chosen videos begin to download. Once downloaded, you can do whatever you'd like to with the shows including dumping them to your video iPod or iPhone -- though this would be manual if you're not willing to create an Applescript with Automator to ensure that any downloaded videos are automagically placed into iTunes (which, in my opinion, 98% of people will NOT do!).

The Miro interface is clean and it took zero time to figure out how everything worked -- which you'll find is the case if you have ever used iTunes. My only concern was its dependence on Bittorrent. No matter what, Bittorrent works but is inherently unreliable being dependent upon how many people are concurrently downloading. This misses the whole point of immediate access to millions of channels: I want it NOW.

Joost is fast and shows start almost immediately. Its interface is difficult to figure out at first, but is quickly mastered. I found the video quality poor, selections limited though more global in scope, and had to run it on my Macbook Pro since I've not yet upgraded my MacPro tower to an Intel-based machine (Joost only runs on Intel Mac's).

I absolutely love the "Share Joost with a friend", Joost Links feature since it's possible to send people an exact moment in a video (though Viddler has that too in a web browser and doesn't require anyone to have special proprietary software).

Miro is open source. Joost is closed. That alone swings my support to Miro, but so far they haven't executed well on a marketing front since no one seems to know about them! Whichever way you go -- or if you simply keep watching your videos in a web browser -- one thing is certain: you'll be doing a lot of your future TV watching on computing devices with content delivered over the 'net.

NetRadio's 1995 debut in Minneapolis

If you weren't deeply immersed in the Internet's early days as I was, it's hard to remember the pain, the obstacles and the now almost quaint state-of-the-art in 1995.

It was that year in November that NetRadio made its debut here in Minneapolis and is an invention and milestone that needs to be lauded and remembered. Invented by Scott Bourne and Scot McCombs (more here), NetRadio used RealAudio's first player and server technology to run. A former Authorware (now part of Adobe) colleague of mine, Rob Griggs, was an early investor and co-founder and he invited me to the offices you'll see in the video below (via TWiT) to see their new radio offering streaming over the Internet.

At the time I was impressed and could easily visualize the possibilities, but also knew in every cell of my being how long it would take before this was anything more than cool and a novelty. In fact, my belief as to one, key cause of the dotcom crash was that there was a HUGE amount of Web content pouring into the top of the funnel (i.e., being served) and most of us were sipping through the tiny hole at the bottom of the funnel (i.e., with dial-up 56k modems) and there was no way rich media of any kind -- including low audio quality radio -- would yet flourish over copper wires for quite some time.

In 1995 there were, as the video points out, roughly "110,000 Web sites" and that NetRadio received "about 25,000 Web visitors in the first few days". Impressive at the time, but so was the Model T in 1908.

Empowered Participants in a Connected Age

Let me tell you a little story about being empowered in a connected age in order to illustrate how a participation culture is changing communications, grassroots efforts and is undoubtedly putting the fear of God into the hearts and minds of PR and marketing professionals.

For over 10 years, the section of the upscale neighborhood in which my home sits has experienced major and minor power outages. Usually two major and several minor ones per year.

What has made this issue particularly irksome is that my neighbors behind me have never been without power while I have as has the majority of our development (my 50 home-ish section is on another part of the grid). A flooded basement that cost me $6,000 in repairs, hundreds of dollars of food thrown out, and untold irritation and frustration have been just a few of the results.

Our utility, Xcel Energy, has been about as responsive as any monopolistic, regulated and bureaucratic entity is: not very. Then, after two outages within days of one another in August after Xcel implied a fix had been done -- I blew a gasket. I had had just about enough and leveraged my squeaky wheel that needs to be greased ability to communicate and ratcheted up my pleas to an atypically responsive (and blogger!) Eden Prairie city manager, Scott Neal.

Neal opened doors for me and pushed to ensure that my voice in the wilderness was helicoptered out and not left in the woods to be devoured by bears. Neal's blog post succinctly describes the issue and positive outcome.

I'll take a little credit for being a diplomatic, nice, persistent pain-in-the-ass to everyone. It was clear I was capable of being an effective communicator and would do so in front of the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission (which I could), to the governor's office (one degree of separation from Gov. Pawlenty) and all over the Web (which I've done). I made certain it was clear to everyone that I'd NEVER let go of this until a permanent solution was planned/budgeted for and implemented. Perhaps that attitude helped move things along.

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...

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.

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?

EFF Pioneer Awards

Last night I attended the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) Pioneer Awards. Just simply being at this event and absorbing the vibe was meaningful for me and I'll bring forth a perspective that may be atypical and worth putting into the conversation about EFF.

Nearly four years ago was the first time that I donated to EFF and began my support of this organization. Though I look like "a suit", a Republican and a mainstream sort of guy, I'm an independent, a closet liberal, enjoy some Libertarian leanings and am quite open to growing in my perspective as I learn -- especially legally and politically -- as we all push against the membrane of the future.

Five or so years ago I became more enlightened. I was stunned by the multiple, parallel, onrush of efforts by copyright holders, Congress, world intellectual capital bodies, governments globally as well as intelligence communities, to command, control and infiltrate all aspects of the Internet.  As I started to try getting my head wrapped around even a few of the issues, I realized that there was NO way that I could be competently informed about even ONE of these issues shaping our future....let alone dozens of them at a time!

Enter the EFF. I learned that here was an organization whose mission was to be that competent, informed entity who'd act to intervene, stop or shape the debate about the most important issues facing us in our digital future. With more and more of our relationships, commerce, free speech, entertainment -- you name it -- being created or delivered digitally, I (and you) could either pull the covers over our collective heads or get involved...and support those who've rolled up their sleeves, dug their hands in the muck and are in the fray.

So that's what I did.  Last night was great for a lot of reasons and validated (in spades) the vital importance of this organization and the people who've dedicated money, support and all or part of their lives to the mission.

Why TV Will Never Be The Same!

I'm amazed at what comes my way every single day as the Internet explodes as a platform and -- besides the obvious sites on everyone's radar screen like YouTube, Revver and Brightcove -- there are other very interesting ones *and* the tools to create extremely high quality visual content are accelerating too. So let's connect a couple of dots that hit my radar screen today as further evidence as to why TV will never be the same.

Case in point: a colleague's son-in-law is involved with JumpTV and he sent me an email as an FYI with several attached links (here, here, here and here) about the company.

I went out to their site and was delighted to see the capability to stream live video from many other countries all over the world. Though there are other solutions for streaming live TV, this is the first one that seems as straightforward as needed so that non-technical people can subscribe and watch IPTV.

I immediately emailed my friend John who married a woman from Peru (who works in international marketing here in Minnesota for a Fortune 100 company and my family and I traveled to Peru for the wedding two years ago...but I digress). I'm pretty certain that she'll find it wonderful to be able to watch a channel(s) from home over the internet (as well as her ex-patriated friends from Peru now living here). JumpTV is making the world just a little bit smaller by this enriched content being available to those interested.

An Embarrassment of Riches in Digital Content

As I get ready for a trip, I found myself in front of my computer this evening picking-n-choosing podcasts to subscribe to and load on my iPod. Since I'm so busy and have so much content to prioritize and consume -- and generate myself with my blog and podcast -- that it's been a few months since I really took the time to poke around iTunes and see what's there.

Holy Schnikey! I hadn't realized that there was such an enormous wealth of new stuff. TV news, public radio and more has flooded the iTunes podcast section. Though I should probably pay closer attention, I hadn't and was a bit stunned.

Since I usually like thought provoking podcasts, public radio is more to my taste than alot of other content. IT Conversations is another favorite as is the Social Innovation network.

This reminded me of my post from January of last year entitled, "Information Overload: Can You See What's Coming?" that said in part:

The river of content is flowing faster and faster. This river of content available on the internet is reaching flood stage and is in a variey of media types. As newspapers, magazines, radio and television lose eyeballs to the internet and become ever more desperate to cling to their advertisers, they are finding increasingly garish and dumbed down methods of getting the attention of the eyeball owners back (which, in my view, will only push people away faster).

As broadband continues its adoption and more people get on the internet and attempt to connect their own dots, it's becoming exponentially more difficult to see or tap in to the collective consciousness and stay on top of changes in an industry, area of interest, or even to stay relevant in the workplace. Primarily it's more difficult to understand change and to see disruptive technologies or business models coming...and having time to act.

Even entertainment options are accelerating. There are more DirecTV channels than I could ever watch. I've pared down the number of shows I TiVo since I could barely keep up with what I really wanted to watch. I recently took out a machete to my RSS aggregator to cut down the number of blogs I track (currently over 200) and news sources (35). It was becoming too much and I just felt anxiety over all of it.

In his book "The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less", Barry Schwartz argues that the proliferation of choices essentially causes us to be paralyzed with indecision.

Why You Should Care About the Open Solutions Alliance

Just came across the Open Solutions Alliance (OSA), "a nonprofit, vendor-neutral consortium dedicated to driving adoption of comprehensive open source business solutions" and am so pleased to see SpikeSource and CollabNet -- along with Sourceforge and others -- playing such an integral role.

Why should you care?

There are over 140,000 open source projects listed on Sourceforge. Some are incredibly active...others less so...but there is such a wealth of useful software available that it's creating a baseline of information technology products that the world is leveraging. The result is that all of us can then strive for ever higher possibilities in efficiency, creativity and innovation driven by technology and the Internet as a platform for the future.

I've personally installed and learned (albeit from a high level) a couple of dozen of the most popular projects in content management, blogging, ecommerce, forums, courseware and groupware as well as other categories. Here's the kicker: it's VERY difficult to coordinate and orchestrate (as an administrator) a deployment of these packages since every administration model and user interface is different...and forget about it if you're just a power user trying to deploy something for your non-profit or small-to-medium sized organization. You wanna make 'em present on a Web site like they're an integrated whole? Whaddya nuts! Better hire a bunch of really smart developers and keep your fingers crossed that you'll be able to upgrade any of these software offerings individually without breaking integrations and thus your Web asset/site/application.

Want to present them to your customers, prospects or constituents as a whole offering that looks-n-feels like one, holistic Web asset/site/application? Again, good luck and happy budgeting. Want to teach and train others on how to deploy and use all of them? Time and money is all you need and alot of hair 'cause you'll be pulling most of it out of your head.

Why else should you care?

Gorillapod: A useful tool for you content creators

Over my lunch hour I stopped at Best Buy and picked up a Gorillapod for $20. I normally don't play fanboy and gush about products on this blog, but this little product instantly met a need: steady low light photography with my new Lumix as well as being able to place the camera in places to snag video...and I've fallen for it.

The Joby Gorillapod firmly secures your camera to just about anything- anywhere and everywhere! Unlike traditional tripods, the gorillapod doesn't require an elevated surface for you to take the perfect shot.

On the way back to my office from Best Buy, I attached my camera and wrapped the Gorillapod around my rear view mirror and grabbed some video. It was shaking a bit and there was some rattle being picked up (I hadn't secured it very well) but I shot 10 minutes of video of me talking in the car. While not useful for anything but ridicule (which is why I'm *not* posting it), it did allow me to test a quick proof of concept and it worked!

It's so laughingly lightweight that it'll fit in my briefcase alongside the tiny Lumix camera and I'll be able to capture steady video and low light snapshots easily. They also have beefier models for prosumer and heavier SLR cameras if you need that capability. 

Print Publishing is Dead...Or is it?

Friday's post by IDG SVP of online, Colin Crawford, was one that hit my radar and I immediately forward his permalink to my bride (with whom I co-own a small publishing company) as well as several other senior level people in publishing I'm involved or acquainted with so they could see what he revealed...and think about this piece of evidence with respect to their own businesses.

Then Scott Karp posts about Colin's writing and goes further to discuss the rapid acceleration in the death of print publishing. When I posted back in October about one clear death rattle for the printing industry -- namely prepress behemoth Banta closing a big shop four minutes from my offices -- it was interesting to me that it had taken roughly eight years for their business to downtrend as prepress activities migrated to the desktop and online increasingly became more important to their customers delivering content.

Though I'm still a consumer of print newspapers (Minneapolis StarTribune, New York Times, Wall Street Journal) I've let most of my magazine subscriptions to Forbes, Fast Company, Fortune and others lapse, keeping only BusinessWeek and Wired. Most of the 60+ trade publications I used to receive in print (e.g., Computerworld, eWeek, CIO Insight, Information Week, et al) I now read skim through an RSS reader.

For me, I find that the #1 issue with print publications is cycle time and the inherent inefficiency and time lags this creates. The number of cycles it takes to gather, edit, and decide what should be published in the limited real estate on a printed page means that I've already exhausted the topic by the time the print version appears.

Case in point: When Steve Jobs put up his public manifesto entitled, "Thoughts on Music" discussing digital rights management (DRM) in the music industry,  there was an absolute explosion of conversation in the blogosphere which I watched unfold on Techmeme...and read several perspectives from blogger's I trust. By the time more traditional publications weighed in with their perspectives, I'd already formed my opinion and no longer cared what they thought. Instead I looked online for what reactions might emerge from the music industry which were forthcoming pretty quickly...and the story continued to unfold.

So is print publishing dead or not?

iPhone: Changing the paradigm of connection

There are dozens of thoughts swirling through my head after Jobs' keynote at Macworld, but there is one that is uppermost in my mind and, perhaps, is a slightly different perspective than others about the amazing package Apple has delivered with the iPhone.

The accelerating human-to-human connection that a global internet and mobile telephony provides is astounding. But when you think about the implications of the world's knowledge AT YOUR FINGERTIPS with extremely powerful handheld devices it gets even more interesting, lifechanging, and truly an enormous catalyst to drive interactions online.

Not that smartphones haven't existed before...it's that they've been "just OK" since they're replete with compromises. I love my Treo 700p and think it's cool...but the operating system and applications on it (I use the PalmOS version) feels like the old, shaky, MacOS 9 instead of the robust, unix-based Mac OS X operating system (which the iPhone is based upon). The Windows Mobile version of the Treo is worse since Windows Mobile feels like Window98 stuffed into a phone and has a PC-centric user interface.

The iPhone is a reinvention of the concept of a portable, rich, elegant, comprehensive communications device for your hip or purse and if the keynote or Apple web site animations are any indicator, this is going to be one phenomenal device. Are there tradeoffs and compromises? Probably...but sitting on my desk right now is the first generation iPod which looks laughingly clunky right now even though it was launched in October of 2001. My...how things have changed with the iPod devices in that short time. We can expect the same with this class of device from Apple and others.

Now think about the trends in social software; in Web applications; in video, audio and animations; in education. How cool is it that you could easily and seamlessly interact with them all from wherever you happen to be at the moment?

I can only imagine the possibilities of searching Google and having location-based advertising show up. Or being able to grab a picture and moblog on the spot. Or working on some machine and quickly looking up the manual online (I do so now but go to my computer, find the PDF, print the page and take it with me). Learning (education and training) is the category that promises to be changed the most since why bother to memorize tons of information and data when you can just look it up? Having the world's information at your fingertips will have profound implications and I'm already experiencing many of them today via my Treo and the fast Verizon EV-DO network.

I have one year left on my Verizon contract with my Treo 700p but will undoubtedly buy one of these anyway and sign up for Cingular. Wow.

Value 2.0: Your Value in a Box?

Wikinomics just arrived and I've leapt into reading this new book by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams -- and am already 25% of the way through it. It's a very good book for those needing context about the accelerating change occurring with an increasingly connected globe and the disruption, changes -- and exciting opportunities -- being enabled by the Internet and the emergent culture of participation.

I've been thinking deeply about -- and searching for thought leaders discussing -- the non-monetary, non-barter value exchange accelerating globally (or what Tapscott calls "non-market production"). Wikipedia, open source software and even cooperative non-profit efforts are manifestations of the phenomena. Mass collaboration fostered by a globally connected consciousness is certain to exponentially increase it and is at the core of Tapscott/Williams argument.

Though 1/4th of the way through it, Wikinomics has already crystallized my thinking on one, key point imperative to all of us if we intend to be a marketable commodity in a globally connected world: how can we put our value in a box? How can that value be encapsulated so it can "plug in" to strategies, projects, and efforts where mass collaboration is required? How can others trust that the value is real?

I've written before about extreme specialization and clearly mass collaboration will allow each of us to more narrowly focus our personal value propositions and deliver our value if a way emerges to offer our value into a marketplace and plug-n-play it into a larger effort. Step #1 is identity management, but my thinking is expanding:

• What if there was an agreed upon microformat or profile (LinkedIn has the closest thing to what I'm describing) that would telegraph to others our capabilities, experience, strengths, knowledge and, especially, our availability to be hired?

• Who would be the trusted authority to certify that our stated value representation was authentic? Or would it be as simple as a reputation system and a trusted authority would be unnecessary? (e.g., eBay's seller feedback/rating). (In my view, reputation is where LinkedIn falls down since most "recommendations" are from friends or close colleagues and are thus tinged with too much positive and is more evident of the effort someone has put into LinkedIn and harnessed others to recommend them).

• Or perhaps it could be as simple as participating in a value marketplace. "This work is worth $X" and "you need reputation Y to bid on it" so teams would be self-assembled and willing, available participants could come together to mass collaborate and receive monetary value in return equal to their effort and merit.

Patents: Ocean Tomo ETF May Spark the Trolls?

As our world accelerates toward the connection of human consciousness made possible by the ever-increasing capability of the Internet and the applications that sit on top of this "platform", the intellectual capital contained within ideas, inventions, new processes and methodologies will become more valuable on a global basis.

If you've got the next, great Web 2.0 idea; a process you've figured out how to make more efficient; a disruptive or creative innovation you've figured out how to take to market; or are trying to understand where you should be investing for the next couple of decades; you really owe it to yourself to understand what the smartest people are doing in the realm of intellectual property and capital...

...or risk missing out on the next great wave of investment or a patent troll suing you for infringement.

I've written before about the possible patent troll Nathan Myhrvold (though the jury is still out on his actual troll status). Myhrvold has been working toward "cornering the market" on some aspects of intellectual property by patenting as many ideas and processes as possible...and then licensing them or preparing to do so. Even though he's expressed that he's taking the high road where trolls fear to tread, I'd bet that his firm (Intellectual Ventures) will take advantage of what the patent trolls are doing if the opportunity arises (suing a company that might be infringing on a patent they purchased from some other inventor, etc.).

How can you make money on intellectual property and -- if you're an inventor, an entrepreneur or involved in managing your company's patent portfolio -- what do you need to be aware of going forward in a world where patent trolls may prevail?

Time: Bloggers react to *It's all about You*

I probably shouldn't be stunned that the LARGEST number of links and blog discussions I've yet seen on Techmeme were when Time magazine set their "Person of the Year: You".

For most of us in the Web 2.0, internet and participation culture (the basis of my Rise of the Participation Culture report), most of what this article said was obvious since we're living it. The important thing, however, is that the mainstream press is bringing it to the attention of the masses who are still amazingly clueless.

A year and a half ago I was talking to a C-level executive at a company about blogging, podcasting and virtual worlds. I admitted that the virtual world thing was a little far out...but then he looked at me and said, "What's blogging?" This man headed marketing.

It wasn't until BusinessWeek did a cover story on Second Life that senior executives and my close colleagues and friends stopped looking at me like I was some technoweenie goofball out of touch with reality or far too strategic to be practical.

To see participants (i.e., bloggers) participate in the Time magazine discussion seems appropriate, but if you read some of the perspectives it proves how people leap into the discussion and mold, shape and change public discourse. At least I hope the Time magazine folks are reading bloggers writings as I have. Some...not all...of bloggers' perspectives have deepened my understanding of what Time published.

Friday evening I was at a gathering where two people (my wife was one of them) vociferously railed against the alleged inaccuracies of Wikipedia and "all those bloggers whose opinions I don't care about" intimating that all of us out here were just ill informed spewers of opinion with little regard to facts.

Others there didn't seem to see much import to the whole participation thing. During the discussion, I politely pointed all those places where I begged to differ, but realized that these people were still up in the stands watching (instead of on the field playing like we who participate) and are distracted and only peripherally watching the game. Unfortunately, these are people who are involved in trend, marketing, product and service ideations (though all 40+ so maybe it was age-related) and should've been right next to me pushing on the membrane of the future instead of fearing it or minimizing its import.

So it's good to see bloggers react like this but then all of us -- those who "get it" and those yet to -- need to understand that 98% of the world is still unaware, doesn't care, sees it as noise and inefficiency instead of what it is: connecting humankind to the next level of social, fun, creativity, problem solving and efficiency. Just like the train, car, and airplane transported our bodies, the internet is transporting our minds.

Tapping in to Crowd Media

With the acceleration of the participation culture, enabling tools (cameras, camcorders, smartphones, software for media creation) and people that know how to use them, it was inevitable that some strategic, forward looking media organization would take steps to leverage the collective capabilities of crowd media (i.e., citizen media, user-generated media, grassroots journalism, et al).

Looks like Gannett may be stepping up to the plate as evidenced in this article in Wired News which states in part:

According to internal documents provided to Wired News and interviews with key executives, Gannett, the publisher of USA Today as well as 90 other American daily newspapers, will begin crowdsourcing many of its newsgathering functions. Starting Friday, Gannett newsrooms were rechristened "information centers," and instead of being organized into separate metro, state or sports departments, staff will now work within one of seven desks with names like "data," "digital" and "community conversation."

The initiative emphasizes four goals: Prioritize local news over national news; publish more user-generated content; become 24-7 news operations, in which the newspapers do less and the websites do much more; and finally, use crowdsourcing methods to put readers to work as watchdogs, whistle-blowers and researchers in large, investigative features.