Connecting the Dots

Why pay for software in a day of open source?

You may have noticed the highly visible online argument going on between SixApart's Anil Dash and Wordpress founder Matt Mullenweg. It escalated today when Matt continued the "open source vs. paid" debate (which is really open source ecosystem energy vs. a perceived slow-to-move commercial vendor positioning against open source).

This is amazingly healthy in my view and the competition for the hearts-n-minds of bloggers clearly is driving SixApart to build and deliver better and more robust services (and I've been waiting for them!).

I'd reframe this debate like this however: why should you pay for software in a day when open source is free and the ecosystem surrounding the successful projects is immense?

When I made my decision to begin blogging in earnest in 2004, there was only one vendor I was willing to bet my blogging on: SixApart's Typepad hosting. Though I can easily install, run and maintain numerous types of open source packages (and could've with Movable Type, the software at the root of Typepad), I knew myself well enough and that I'd be twiddling bits instead of writing content if I used the then fairly immature Wordpress. Typepad looked like a sure bet and had the momentum so that was my choice.

Even though I've been at the enterprise software level with Vignette and Lawson Software in leadership positions, for some clients I've chosen Joomla, Drupal and even used Wordpress as a low-end content management engine. But when it comes to betting your business or a new initiative on a new category, it's imperative there's someone or some organization available to ensure a successful outcome with the software used.

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.

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?

Giving your value away...

As the weeks go by I'm more certain than ever that monetization of any intellectual capital-type efforts will be Internet-centric or people won't give money in exchange for it -- and, ironically, that giving value away over the Internet may become 'table stakes' to be in the content or software game. 

Traditional distribution channels for intellectual capital (TV channels and non-online video, bookstores, video rental and music stores, industry publications and newsletters, learning in classroom or DVD, et al) can't scale in the same way they can on the Internet. There is finite shelf space; it takes too long to deliver information when something is published and distributed; people want the information or training when they need it vs. when they can travel somewhere to learn it; and people are shifting their demand criteria anyway in a day of on-demand, always-available access.

Something you might not have considered is that people are also increasingly expecting complimentary sources for what they consume so they can get multiple points of view and perspective as well as having multiple sources to compare and from which to choose (it's where my "experts don't exist" mantra comes from since I demand more than one or two sources for anything). Shopping services; memetrackers to get multiple blogger points of view; voting sites (e.g., Digg) so the community decides which articles are most important and so on.

What's unique in delivering intellectual capital-type efforts over the Internet is that more of us are expecting it to be delivered for free and many of us take advantage of it. The kicker? People simply taking the value without paying for it increases its intrinsic value IF the act of taking it in some way adds a form of personal perspective or influencer metadata above it and provides the intellectual capital-type efforts with more attention, importance, word-of-mouth buzz or informal guidance (premise based loosely on Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns).

Here are three examples.

Adding a forum? Consider phpBB 3.0

Many of my clients, other business owners I know and even me are either implementing, or considering deploying, discussion forums. Engaging the participation culture means that you need to empower those using your products and services so that the community can help one another.

I was at Apple in the 1990's when the company had essentially unlimited 800# free support calls and the Austin, TX call-center exploded with humans answering phones. It was easier to pick up the phone and call Apple than it was to look something up in a manual or go online and seek an answer (and, of course, online support hadn't yet reached any sort of critical mass and slow dialup connections made it tough to do much regardless).

When Steve Jobs returned in 1996 (the year I joined Apple), within moments it seemed that there were a lot of layoffs in Austin and a focus online as well as new policies to handle support. Apple invested in Jive Software's world-class forum software and the discussion groups you see at Apple today run on Jive. The result? Users and moderators can help one another rather than pick up the phone and call Apple with easily answered questions (as an example, my staff first searches discussions and 90% of the time we get answers from Apple, Adobe and other vendors we use).

One of my favorite open source discussion/forum software is phpBB™ and they're releasing their version 3.0 today: phpBB, the leading open source forum and online collaboration system announced today the availability of phpBB Version 3.0. This release includes enhanced collaboration features, better security and delegated administration features, extended support for open source and commercial database management systems, and optimisation for mobile devices and search engines. phpBB is available at no cost, released under the GNU General Public License.

While the underlying technical capability has been upgraded which is vitally important, it's the new look-n-feel features that intrigue me (e.g., themes). Why? As I've pointed out here and here, design matters. Too often developers forget that there are people using the underpinnings of a site or application and they we like it when layout is intuitive, functionality obvious and the eye candy integral to the overall experience.

I suspect that we'll see new focus on look-n-feel options that make it easier to integrate phpBB in to existing web sites, blogs and within other themes. This is a really well done open source application and worthy of serious review if you'd like to engage your community, employees or foster digital conversations in new ways...or just significantly enhance your the support of your customers and community.

What if there is no equilibrium?

One result of an increasingly interconnected world -- and we humans who are leveraging this network, adding ourselves as nodes to it -- is that hundreds of thousands or millions of changes are occurring everywhere. Change is being accelerated because people can help people; ideas are propagated at the speed electrons can traverse the 'net; and thoughts inform others thoughts which build upon one another quickly.

New companies are popping up all over, industries are being disrupted globally, and the fear most status quo holders have is about the disruption we will NOT see.

I've been observing this massive change enabled, in no small part, by the Internet-as-a-platform, Web/Enterprise 2.0 space and have slowly realized that no one, no analyst organization or set of thought leaders is going to be able to track and even identify disruption and emergence everywhere on our planet.

When I think about industries that have been disrupted by quickly emerging competitors in the past: railroads; vacuum tube companies; minicomputer makers; today's newspaper and television providers; or even the printing industry my 94 year old father-in-law worked in for his entire career; I see now that disruption occurred but there was ample time for adaption. Companies adapted, industries figured out how to stay relevant or go away, economies discovered new revenue streams, and equilibrium was reached.

But what would happen if equilibrium is no longer within reach?

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?

The World is Awakening...

What happens when everyone becomes awake? I don't mean from sleep, but rather have fully developed a level of consciousness that ensures they're aware of human connection, ideas and possibilities in new and radical ways?

If you're a C-level executive, strategist, marketer, in product development, sales, are a teacher or small businessperson (or frankly anyone), the accelerating shifts in consciousness will impact what you do or deliver...and probably already is whether you're aware of it or not.

My work in Web/Enterprise 2.0, community and communications through the Internet-as-a-platform means that I am seeing and experiencing this awakening on a daily basis. Simple things like watching people come together in a collaborative space and discovering how important it is to have everyone see the same vision of a product so they're in sync; understanding the importance of ritual in a virtual meeting (e.g., how to lead a session and ensure everyone has a voice); deepening their understanding of markets and the people within them; and the inner drive people are exhibiting to move toward a vision for humanity that they live by. Businesses ignore this at their own peril.

This article in Fast Company (a publication I'm respecting more than ever as they push against the membrane of the future with articles like this one) is kinda, sorta a mashup about new concepts in 'green', activist capitalism, and open source and is one of the most fascinating examples I've seen for some time about strategies and concepts tapping into this awakening world and an ever-expanding human consciousness.

It starts out, "Somewhere between the Oscar for Al Gore's planetary-disaster epic, An Inconvenient Truth, and the canonization of Angelina Jolie by the United Nations (in association with People (NYSE:TWX) magazine), the message started sinking in: The cultural conversation around the environment, social change, and human rights is approaching maximum velocity. What is arguably urgent has become inarguably hip." To me, the operative words are "cultural conversation", "maximum velocity" and "inarguably hip" in that paragraph and it is blatantly obvious to me that the company discussed in this feature couldn't have happened until now.

As I read I realized that all that I've been seeing and experiencing recently -- both on and offline -- is but a tip-of-the-iceberg of this global awakening.

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?

Barcamp: MinneBar

Though I had another commitment so left a bit early, I attended 60% of today's Barcamp:Minnebar. Our fearless facilitators are shown at left: Ben Edwards, Dan Grigsby and Luke Francl locally here in Minnesota. This unconference drew >350 signups and I don't know how many people ended up attending...but it was more than I've ever seen at a Minnesota geekfest.

Thankfully there were great sponsors including Dow Jones Online, SplitRock Partners, Electric Pulp, IconNicholson and New Counsel, with reasonably speedy Wifi provided by ipHouse. It made this a seamless event with all needs met and, with our fearless facilitators Luke, Dan and Ben scrambling to ensure it ran smoothly, I was stunned it flowed as well as it did.

The event kicked off with William Gurstelle who I originally saw on TechTV's The Screen Savers with his backyard potato gun project.  Here he is showing it off:

Read on to see a brief snippet video of the opening introduction by our fearless facilitators and a few more pictures...

CTD Podcast for March 28, 2007

Interview with Mike Shaver, Mozilla Corporation

The Mozilla Corporation's CEO, Mitchell Baker, recently published a Mozilla Manifesto providing a guiding set of principles that sets out a vision of the Internet as a piece of infrastructure that is open, accessible and enriches the lives of individual human beings.

My friend Marc Orchant of ZDNet's Office Evolution and Foldera, was kind enough to invite me to sit with he and his interviewee today, Mike Shaver, (and they graciously agreed to my lurking behavior recording the interview) to talk about the reasons behind the Manifesto, what it means, why it came into existence and why it matters.

Download or listen to the podcast

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.

Mobile Global Grid: When the World is At Your Fingertips

Like me, if you're paying any attention to the signs, trends and foundational elements upon which innovation in technology occurs, then you have to be seeing what I'm seeing...it's sooo close.  Do you see it?

Right there. Don't see it yet? OK then, let's push against the membrane of the future together for a minute.

If you look now you can just make out a mobile device, connected to a ubiquitous wireless network (that you can use even when you're miles from a major metro area, off the autobahn or Interstate highway system, or at some point in the future on the Serengeti plain in Africa) and is so simple to use that you're able to connect and re-connect to the global grid in an instant and have all the world's knowledge at your fingertips.

When you're in your car, at a restaurant, a dinner party, at a business meeting, at school...anything connected to the global grid you're authorized or able to grab is yours for the snagging from a device in your hand.

We're partially there now and more is coming.

Unless you've been living under a rock, Apple's eagerly anticipated iPhone is the closest concept yet to a just beyond the membrane of the future simple to use, multi-function device that will be useful for the masses to leverage our currently decent wireless network...and is one set to expand dramatically.

According to GigaOM today, there are distinct chunks of spectrum that hold the promise of mass geographical coverage and expanding the grid. An increasing number of mobile communications online applications are proliferating (e.g., this list at eConsultant). The World Wide Web Consortium's Mobile Initiative adds even more fuel to the fire of a mobile, global grid.

Couple that with the always-on, always-connected, culture of participation (see "Rise of the Participation Culture") and you have a brew from which all sorts of possibilities come forth!

Though I look like some geek when I do this, at least twice a week I'll be in a conversation and someone will say something like, "You know...that ocean...the one by (country here)....what's that called?"  I'll whip out my Treo, go to Google, enter a search string and, I swear to God, almost instantly I can find a reference to that country and there's an obvious link that contains the data where I can answer that question. It's a bit of a conversation stifler at the moment as I futz with the device, but I'm pretty good at glossing over my thumbing on the Treo, we carry on the conversation, and I circle back to the fact and insert it into our discussion. Works great.

Did this at a dinner party one evening awhile back when people were struggling with an artist and a song. No one knew, the conversation continued, and about two minutes later I mentioned the artist. "OH YEAH!" came the head-slap comments and we carried on. Trivial in the scheme of life I realize, but extend this to the DOZENS OF TIMES PER DAY that I look something up on Google, use Google Maps, find a phone number on Directory Assistance, send SMS messages, send a photo/blog post to one of my private client blogs, use Instant Messaging....all from applications that run on my Treo!

So how is this going to transform the world? In ways predictable but mostly ones that are not. Who knows what will be the killer application for the always connected world -- especially when better geotracking is in the mix?  What I do know is that some of it is already here...and if you push just hard enough on the membrane of the future you'll have a good indication of what's coming.

Qwaq Launches Virtual Workspace

Last week I was delighted to receive an offer to be in a hosted session with Greg Nuyens, CEO of Qwaq, to take a pre-launch peek at a secure, virtual workspace product called "Qwaq Forums"...a product built upon the open source Croquet project (site Croquet Consortium site here).

In April of last year I wrote a post entitled, "Is Second Life the Future of Collaboration and Social Software?" since I'd been thinking deeply about the implications of metaverse world's like Second Life providing us with ever higher ability to be involved in an immersive, persistent, engaging, fun and creative space. But just like Skype's proprietary protocol limits the ability to leverage their IP telephony or Apple's closed iPod (and soon to be closed iPhone launch) limits the expansion, this seemingly needed control limits what organizations can (or will) do with technology.

Qwaq's approach is that their product, Qwaq Forums, "...enhances the productivity of distributed teams by bringing critical resources together in a virtual place, as if they were in an actual physical location, and providing them with all the tools and collaboration capabilities they need to work more effectively together. With Qwaq Forums, users can work together to establish workflow steps, create or review information in software applications, and evaluate designs in 2D and 3D, all while discussing topics using built-in text and voice chat. Further enhancing employee productivity, Qwaq Forums virtual workspaces are always available so users can return to a forum at another time to access and view changes that have occurred since they last visited the virtual space."

So what was my experience like and why should you be keenly interested? I think you might be surprised by my perception...

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?

Web 2.0: Are you in the top 5-10%?

Why does it seem that -- regardless of the endeavor, employee base, or community -- such a small percentage of people seize opportunity?  A buddy of mine once said (horribly twisting a crass old adage) that "ideas are like a#&holes...everyone's got one."  Though this is a sweeping generalization, my experience has been that roughly 5-10% of any body of people will actually DO something about their ideas and the other 90-95% will come up with a million excuses as to why they cannot.

Macro-level excuses include "everyone is doing it" or "there are probably patents out there already."  Carl Jung, the eminent psychiatrist and founder of analytical psychology, was a proponent of the collective unconscious which, "refers to that part of a person's unconscious which is common to all human beings. It contains archetypes, which are forms or symbols that are manifested by all people in all cultures. They are said to exist prior to experience, and are in this sense instinctual."  It's been one explanation as to why ideas seem to popup simultaneously...sometimes in different parts of the world causing great consternation amongst venture capitalists and entrepreneurs.

Some are worried about the land-grab occurring in intellectual capital and use that as an excuse not to move forward on their idea. I've written about the acceleration in intellectual property capture by Intellectual Ventures (post here) and how even an exchange traded fund, Ocean Tomo, (post here) has recognized this momentum and is trading on it. Google is obviously taking steps to capitalize on this global trend too (post here). The kicker? It's easier than ever before to discover patents, applications and prior art of spontaneous and simultaneous ideas from those who've seen them early on and find your entry point that's relatively safe and secure.

So who is in the 5-10% of Web 2.0, what are they building and what should you do?

Gizmo Project Game Changer? Or still not one-click?

Key to staying on top of developments in Internet-centric communications means not just reading about something...but leaping in and actually using the products and services. It's one reason why I invest an inordinate amount of time in Web 2.0 betas, currently shipping offerings as well as installing and using lots of different communication technologies and open source software.

In May of last year I posted about putting Gizmo, Skype and Vonage through my own, personal usability testing and quality of service (QoS) subjective use. Vonage won for having a rock-solid, land-line-like system and Skype because of the sheer ecosystem surrounding it as well as the critical mass of users. Gizmo, though using my preferred open protocol SIP, lost.

Reading Om Malik's post this morning about Gizmo Project's new Flash-centric call product launched this afternoon, I decided to put Gizmo through its paces again. As before, several Gizmo features didn't work like recording a voicemail,  setting up a conference room, calling to the "Record" or "Conference" numbers (they just disconnected) and other weird behaviors. I absolutely *love* the Gizmo Project software and, especially, it's built-in call recording feature for podcasting and other uses. I'm not sure it's enough to get me to use it much...but I'm going to keep trying.

But I am *very* impressed with Gizmo Project's new Flash-based product! Could this be the game changer to get people to use it vs. Skype?

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?

Prediction: Apple Will Own Mass Market Web Applications

Web 2.0 is about the Internet-as-a-platform. The operating system as the focal point of our knowledge and information life is over. The next phase of the Internet will be dominated by those who understand that enabling people is the key. Not just providing packaged solutions, content, advertising and other stuff tossed in our faces hoping that it's what we will buy...but giving us tools to assemble, create and deliver content and chunks of application functionality that we choose and consume. No one does tools better than Apple which makes me predict that Apple will own mass market application creation and delivery.

Let's look at a few obvious facts (with some opinion interlaced) so you can follow my logic:

1) NeXT, Steve Jobs' company bought by Apple which is the foundation of today's Mac OS X operating system, delivered WebObjects in 1996, the first object oriented Web application server enabling rapid Web application development. Patents like this one -- done with WebObjects clearly in mind -- points the way to what I'm starting to sense is how Apple could very well "own" the mass market Web application space.

2) Building on the unix foundation from NeXT and delivered as the operating system we know today as Mac OS X, at MacWorld in January of 2006, Apple delivers the next iteration of their iLife suite of products that delivers a completely integrated series of applications for video (iMovie), photos (iPhoto), audio (GarageBand), DVD creation (iDVD‚ and adds Web publishing (iWeb). Critics laud the seamless and elegant integration of these applications and they're an amazingly powerful catalyst for those deeply involved in the participation culture

3) March 22, 2006: Google releases Google Pages, an amazingly simple (and I think embarrassingly so) Web page creator. They also buy Writely, release Google Calendar, and host of other services like Google Reader, Patents, etc.  Hmmm....could Pages be the way Google will enable people to assemble numerous pieces of functionality together to create their own Web applications? Yeah...but only if people want their stuff to look like my Grandpa built it in 1997.

4) August 29, 2006: Dr. Eric Schmidt joins Apple's Board of Directors. He's a smart guy and Google's hot, but if you think at all deeply about the implications of this you'll understand that Google is the only company in a position to be the engine of the internet-as-a-platform and Schmidt recognizes that the DNA of Google means they design like my Grandpa who, by the way, never used a computer. Schmidt must understand that the totality of what Apple offers, their design sense and their ability to execute is the perfect front-end to the back-end Google delivers so well.

5) Real Simple Syndication (RSS) accelerates in 2006 as the preferred content syndication method and virtually any updating content is rendered "RSS-able". It's still tough to cobble together a bunch of RSS feeds and republish them in any meaningful way, but just about all content is fed by RSS and can be consumed easily. Just high end tools that can incorporate RSS feeds within an overall framework are missing

6) All during 2006, Web services proliferate within the Web 2.0, Internet-as-a-platform paradigm and much of the functionality is delivered as "gadgets" or "widgets" or code snippets. These small chunks of functionality enable people to cut code and paste it into their own blog, social site area or Web site. Thousands of these Web gadgets and widgets exist (see Widgetbox, Google Gadgets) but each has their own respective look-n-feel (pretty cheesy too) and it's NOT simple to build a Web page or a Web application incorporating these and have it look good. NOTE: if you want to get some sense of how these Web services can be mashed together (i.e., mashups), then take a peek at ProgrammableWeb's directory of mashups here.

So how will Apple own mass market Web application creation and delivery?

Microsoft RSS Patent Update: Manipulate, Maneuver and Morph

After reading this post and writing this one, I have more clarity on Microsoft's approach with RSS since I just got done reading the whole patent (can you see my eyes glazing over?).

They're NOT attempting to control the RSS protocol, but their patent is a platform play designed around controlling the RSS processes and paths in order to manipulate, maneuver and morph RSS itself. The operative and important paragraph is this one at the end:

[0150] The web content syndication platform described above can be utilized to manage, organize and make available for consumption content that is acquired from the Internet. The platform can acquire and organize web content, and make such content available for consumption by many different types of applications. These applications may or may not necessarily understand the particular syndication format. An application program interface (API) exposes an object model which allows applications and users to easily accomplish many different tasks such as creating, reading, updating, deleting feeds and the like. In addition, the platform can abstract away a particular feed format to provide a common format which promotes the useability of feed data that comes into the platform. Further, the platform processes and manages enclosures that might be received via a web feed in a manner that can make the enclosures available for consumption to both syndication-aware applications and applications that are not syndication-aware.

My "co-opting RSS" concern from the last post still stands and this is why...

FutureWeb: When will we be past significant customization?

Had yet *another* meeting today with a smart, accomplished marketing communications strategist wrestling with how to empower, enable and guide his client organizations toward understanding and embracing the new paradigm of Web 2.0, the participation culture and what Time magazine calls the Person of the Year (You).

The onrush of an internet connected world is doing far more than getting people to participate. It's compressing cycles all over the place from scientific research and peer review to information delivery, communication and collaboration. Since anything on the 'net is but a mouse click away, this connection is accelerating our ability to choose from an increasing number of alternatives and knowledge at our fingertips. I don't care what business you're in, if you don't recognize that disruption is coming at you from a myriad of sources, you're either asleep, not paying attention, or in a monastery.

The connected internet is fundamentally about technology enabling, so that's the perspective I'll come from in this post. During my discussions this morning, it was clear that this fellow's clients cover the gamut of non-profits who -- like those in education struggling for funding -- find themselves relying upon donor's and sponsors in order to carry out their mission.

Just like most under-funded small businesses, all of the open source, Web 2.0 and other information technology offerings are incredibly powerful but just out of reach for most of them. They're a box of parts where what these non-profits and small businesses need is a finished automobile they can climb in and drive.

Too much customization is needed for software to meet the needs of everyone? I'd disagree with that notion. I see a whole lot of customization occurring with quasi-platform plays like Typepad, Wordpress, social networking sites, and more.  I'm starting to see interesting drag-n-drop "information builders" emerging like YourMinis and even more basic news-centric portals like PageFlakes.

So here's the question for those of you willing to comment: will Apple/Google; Laszlo; Adobe; Microsoft; or some other prescient and forward looking company build the Web application assembly tool for we normal humans to use? It's pretty clear that we've GOT to evolve the software industry past buying or downloading (open source) software and then basically building the entire car from a box of parts.

Wikia Free Hosting: The First of Many Things Free?

Wikia just announced free, open serving and "free content for all." If this was just another free site of some kind -- instead of something setup by arguably the quintessential model for open content, Wikipedia -- I'd not be so enthused or intrigued. But Jimmy Wales (head of Wikia) has done it once before on a massive scale and perhaps he'll do it again?

Can't find the article right now and don't have the time (am jammin' before heading to a charity dinner this evening) but I recall the cacophony of voices insisting that Wales monetize the enormous traffic from Wikipedia since the site was receiving something like four billion pageviews per month. If he took advertising, it would dwarf most media properties.

Of course, Wales knew intrinsically that such a move would destroy Wikipedia and take away the very energy and effort all the co-owners of Wikipedia (i.e., all of us) would feel about this global phenomena. He's made it clear in interviews that Wikia was his vehicle to monetize the expertise he and his team have developed with building Wikipedia.

Who but Wales might know how to deliver a scalable, free, ad supported model that relies on the collective input of many? I'm going to invest a fair amount of time in understanding their approach and offer, but the tour looks graphically boring and the categories for an openserver instance too limiting (just tried to open one for a group I'm involved in and none of the categories work!!).

So many A-list bloggers and podcasters have wondered out loud about mobile phones (and even cars) being advertiser supported. I scratch my head over that but who knows? If this model works, could it be the first mass advertising model that allows affinity groups to be self-supporting? Will people really step up and generate content? It's really quite thought provoking. 

Will Desktop Linux Be Successful Due to Web 2.0?

The tech publisher Tim O'Reilly has famously asked a question of audiences during talks about open source. "How many of you use Linux?" and a show of hands and only a few are raised. Next he asks, "How many of you use Google?" virtually all hands shoot up as O'Reilly then launches into an explanation of the fact that they're using the world's largest Linux application, Google, every time they perform a search.

Whether or not Google's Linux purity is still 100% true or not is a guess. What is true is that hosted Web applications are so amazingly desktop operating system agnostic that most of them are accessible through a Linux desktop.

As I read this blog post about the Linux-friendliness of the just launched Google Doc's and Spreadsheets (as their salvo into the hosted office application suite game), it made me realize that the onrush of Web 2.0 applications; open or ubiquitous standards like PDF and Flash (the latter, for instance, with its use in video delivery is a game-changer and there's a fabulous article here worth a read);  and super-simple Linux distributions like Ubuntu are all combining to make Linux increasingly a strong option for desktop operating system use.

I'm almost ready to predict that we'll see an upsurge in Linux desktop adoption in 2007 and 2008 due primarily to Web 2.0 applications reaching critical mass coupled with a continued increase in online functionality making the desktop operating system increasingly moot.

Game changer?

Discovered today that Spikesource has closed a Series B round of financing for $24M. They've shifted their "open source stack certification and indeminification" focus to a new one: Business Ready Open Source Solutions (for small to midsize businesses).

Their new focus is one that I cheer, especially since upon leaving Lawson Software last December this was a need I saw crying to be filled and strongly considering pulling together the resources to fill it. With the stellar Spikesource board (including former Oracle Pres/COO, Ray Lane, and former Sun CTO, Bill Joy) and management team of veterans, this is a group that will fulfill that mission in spades.

They've basically taken the sweet-spot of applications (Drupal content management; SugarCRM; email, business intelligence and more) and have put 'em in a box selling, servicing and supporting them through a channel of resellers.

This is a big deal development since, as you probably know, open source software has been the bastard child in business due to a lack of a support infrastructure. Could be a game changer.

Open Source and Commercial Software

Since I am a huge fan of open source and always look first for an open source package before paying for a commercial one, I had sort of a troubling adventure this afternoon with the open source PHPSurveyor and ended up going with the commercial SurveyMonkey.

Needing to send out a survey to a client's customers, I originally used a hosted CRM offering which had too many bugs to be useful. 36,000 emails went to one recipient, for example, and it's still a sore subject so don't ask. Next I chose PHPSurveyor since I could install, configure and run it myself.

I can put this stuff together pretty fast, so from install to config to survey creation to use was about two and a half hours. The emails being sent out hiccup'ed and stopped after the first batch. After goofing around for another hour I decided -- with my client's blessing -- to just use a paid commercial survey offering since time is of the essence.

In the past I've used several $400-$1,000 per year survey and polling services and had a buddy who'd used SurveyMonkey to great result. I signed up, built the survey and was ready to send it out in less than an hour.

Though PHPSurveyor is free and SurveyMonkey is $19.95 per month, it doesn't take much of a math quant to figure out that the extra 1.5 hours I wasted with PHPSurveyor was worth more than $19.95 (and I'm certain another 1-2 hours would've been invested to achieve a successful survey send).

Unfortunately, there seems to be an expectation in the open source community that only propellerheads are willing to install and use packages and climb the learning curves to figure them out and workaround the unfinished or buggy pieces. Sometimes guys like me -- with only small propellers on their beanies -- want to take advantage of what's available without getting under the hood and wrenching on the engine when you just want to drive over to the store for a gallon of milk.

Right now, there are about 15 packages I'm interested in using and recommending to colleagues and clients but find that there is little support available, a dearth of talent to implement them for clients and deploy them, and do-it-yourself installation and deployment is, well, challenging.

How can the supply of open source meet the demands of users? What's needed to make packages more seamless and easy?

Open Source Projects Too Hard to Use? How About Mashed-Up Web 2.0 Apps?

You know the old adage about starting a successful enterprise: find a need and fill it. There's a need to be filled that many people recognize...but it's currently too hard for the needy to figure out how fill it themselves, and no one else is filling it.

I'm speaking about the need entrepreneurs, small businesspeople, non-profit organizations and others have for a Web asset that supports their business or organizational requirements. No...I'm not talking about yet another brochureware web site or simple ecommerce, but something that meets the demands, higher expectations and increasingly global reach of an accelerating participatory culture.

In an age of internet ubiquity and a flat world, people all over the globe are accessing, participating, creating, clustering with others, learning, raising their awareness, and increasingly demand a level of interaction that is making a Web asset a business and organizational imperative. Just look at the success of MySpace, Facebook, Yahoo's offerings, all the Web 2.0 offerings and more to get a sense of what's happening.

Over the last six months, I've been working with multiple different groups, entrepreneurs, disrupted status quo companies, all of whom have a vague sense that the world is changing beneath their feet...but are unsure what's going on and how to address it. These folks have a knowing that they need:

• A multi-author, workflow-enabled, content management system
• A blog to engage with their constituents, be transparent and open themselves
• Forums to engage, support and augment interactions with their customers and learn from online discussions
• Ecommerce that facilitates digital downloading of their intellectual capital instead of just the buying and shipping of atoms in boxes
• Collaboration for project/task management, shared calendar, and more.

"But wait!" you say. "There are open source and Web 2.0 offerings that meet those needs." Yeah...but stop into any office building and ask a small, ten person firm what they have for a Web asset and I'll bet you find their internet presence woefully inadequate.

Open Source and The Long Tail

Most of the discussions I've been regarding The Long Tail have used content as the primary example of explaining what the term means. I hear, "The Long Tail means that some obscure physics book from the 1930's -- that only 10 people care about reading again -- is available." or "Some Cajun song recorded in 1925 that only Joe Schmedlap and his wife want to hear is at-their-fingertips." The thought is that *whatever* is of interest will find some kind of audience who will want to read, watch or somehow consume it if it's available in some repository on the internet. It's a powerful concept that is being played out every day that more content and data is being mapped onto the 'net.

I'd like to offer up what I'm experiencing as a potentially more profound example of The Long Tail: the ecosystem delivering plug-ins, add-ons, modules, components, themes and other chunks of functionality that somebody, somewhere wants to use with some open source software project...and they're all free! The better open source software gets, the more functionality it enjoys and the more energy around extending it, I believe the quicker value will be mapped on to the 'net. This, in turn, will incent and facilitate people PLACING Long Tail stuff online so it can be accessed by those interested in it.

I'll admit that it's the primary open source "platforms" or major frameworks right now that are receivers of the energy and effort in building all of this stuff, but nonetheless it's pretty amazing. Be it Drupal, Joomla, Xoops,  phpBB, TikiWiki or hundreds of other projects, even the obscure add-on is either available or underway by some individual or team.

Case in point: Joomla has more than half a dozen RSS add-ons. Though RSS enabled the fast growth in podcasting to emerge, it's still not even understood by all save for a tiny percentage of the tech world. This protocol is also key to reading feeds in a news aggregator or the compiling of blogs and news feeds that then appear on web sites or focused topic blogs. I've been on the hunt myself for an Joomla extension that will display what I want but haven't found it...yet. Hmmm....maybe I'll have it written.

If it were, say, three years ago Joomla would cost roughly $100k just for the software. Today it's free and an amazing amount of energy and effort is invested by the developer ecosystem surrounding it. If Joomla were a commercial software project I'd bet there would be ONE approach to RSS and ONE RSS extension on the product roadmap AND it would hit about 80% of what the market wanted (and cost a bundle). The RSS extensions I've delved into off of the Joomla site each have their own approach to managing RSS (which, by the way, is very refreshing and offers alot of choice!) and many of them cover even obscure requirements.

Chris Anderson (Wired editor who coined the term "The Long Tail") has a book coming out soon and it remains to be seen how far he takes the concept. For me, it sure seems that what is already out there in open-source-land fits The Long Tail concept perfectly.

NOTE: Larry Lessig's blog led me to the Open Source Business model site/blog. It is AWESOME and is looking at and considering some of the non-monetary, non-barter, value-based shifts I'm seeing and experiencing...and know are accelerating. If you are puzzling at all over why all the Web 2.0 companies have a "free" option (or are all free), I'd encourage you to read this post on this site to give you a sense of what's going on with current thinking and how the paradigms are shifting. It also will help you see how The Long Tail goes far beyond the availability of content.

Where is the Open Source cup o' gasoline?

A reader of my blog, Christopher Murray, sparked a thought through his comment in my post about the iJoomla magazine framework (for the Joomla content management system) and how there is a huge gap between lower end, open source CMS'es and enterprise-class ones...which made me think of what the primary catalyst (i.e., the cup o' gasoline) could be on the embers of innovation in open source.

Every week I am stunned and delighted anew with some miscellaneous open source offering that has phenomenal functionality, a strong ecosystem of development surrounding it, and amazing fit-n-finish for free software. If you want to see for yourself, just go to Sourceforge and poke around the nearly 121,000 open source projects that are linked to from there. The power and capability that is yours for free is nothing short of astounding.

This is why, for example, all the VC's that John Furrier interviews for his informative and highly interesting PodTech podcasts seem to share a common thread: if you're a startup and don't have both open source software being leveraged or have an offshore component in your business plan, don't bother knockin' on our door (I'm paraphrasing alot...but you catch the drift). The value that is being created with so many of these projects is so high that there isn't a capitalist in his or her right mind that would want to fund development of what already exists.

Here's a real world example. I'm advising on the buildout of a new Web asset for a client and there are some chinks-in-the-armor of open source that exposes just what Christoper pointed out: there's a big gap between the low-end, easy stuff and the high-end, hard stuff that enterprise commercial software fixes. My client is using Joomla's CMS and are incorporating Wordpress for blogging (via the Joomla Wordpress connector), ecommerce (via OSCommerce connector), and are exploring forums and a learning management system (LMS) (there are forums like phpBB and SMF...as well as incredible LMS'es like Moodle). Making all this stuff work together and take on the same look-n-feel isn't trivial...regardless of how many extensions are available from the Joomla developer ecosystem to kinda, sorta deliver functionality.

This presents me with a dark side to my happy-assed optimism about all these projects: why isn't this stuff plug-n-play...and what would happen if it was?

Your Own Magazine Online

How'd you like to have your own, very professionally designed online magazine? What if I told you that one of the hottest open source content management system (CMS) packages, Joomla, had a plug-in component that would give you that capability?

iJoomla is a Joomla component that is a framework for module placement so that laying out a magazine online is a relatively trivial pursuit. I say relatively because truly architecting, installing, developing and deploying a scalable, CMS-driven web site or magazine requires skills the non-technical person doesn't possess. Yes, Joomla can be downloaded and installed in a fairly easy manner. Yes, it's kinda, sorta click-n-configure. But to truly set it up so that it's architected to scale, prepared for adding on other components and modules (like a shopping cart or forum) requires technical savvy or ALOT of time in climbing a learning curve.

Still, from what I know of jobs underway with Joomla an installed and deployed Joomla instance -- with a magazine component like this one installed and running -- would be under $20k (your mileage may vary dramatically depending upon specific effort required). Having been at Vignette for four years during the dotcom heyday, we wouldn't even take a phone call from a prospect if they didn't have $500k to spend on software and services, so this price/performance is pretty amazing.

I know, I know...comparing Joomla to Vignette is like a Honda scooter to an Acura MDX. But still the power and inexpensive nature deploying Joomla let alone it as an online magazine, makes a guys mental wheels turn.

By the way, I continue to be delighted and somewhat taken aback at how virtually the entire Joomla ecosystem simply "gets it" on the importance of design. Even this inexpensive magazine component site is absolutely first-class!

Maybe there oughta be a CampCamp?

Will there be controversy over the upcoming Minneapolis-based "CampCamp" this May?

"CampCamp is an ad-hoc, un-conference born from the desire for people to go to a camp since it appears that they're really, really cool.

CampCamp will be an intense event with discussions, demos, and interaction from attendees, as well as wiki's, free deodorant and on-the-spot blogging about how cool it is. Though CampCamp unconference organizers have yet to pick a topic nor have invited anyone to date, this is shaping up to be one of the best camp unconferences ever.

Of course, free Wifi and power strips will be available. Dress code is open, long sleeve shirts over t-shirts with jeans. In addition, all A-list bloggers (e.g., Doc Searls, Robert Scoble, Dave Winer) will be invited in order to maximize CampCamp's exposure on techmemorandum, as well as inappropriate begging to ensure CampCamp is covered on TechCrunch and Valleywag."

OK, OK...I'll be serious. Matthew Ingram has quite a post about a controversy over all the "camps" (Foocamp, Barcamp, MashupCamp, Moosecamp) that have been occurring. I won't re-create Matthews post here, but suffice it to