Susan Scrupski – Page 29

Exiting Stage Southwest– Weird Austin. Home, home on the Strange. AND mashups.

As Marc Andreessen says, the new B2B is “back to blogging.” My posts are really thinning out because I’m in the throes of moving to Austin. If you’re following me on Twitter and Facebook, you all know this already. I’m going to to try and jam a few posts in today that have been in the backlog queue.

First, my sincere apologies to Vyew and Freshbooks! Two fantastic interviews I have done in the past few (jeez it may be over a month now) that I have not had time to write up. I promise I will get to these ultimately! It may have to wait until after Office 2.0 at this point.

Second, I am in fact, finally relocating to AUSTIN. Wow. Whatta town. Every time I go to Austin I learn something different that I like about it. If all goes well, I should be there by the end of the month, probably sooner. Speaking of relocation… Remember my relocation fantasy? While I was at Mashup Camp, I had the great pleasure to meet IBM’s Dan Gisolfi in person who took me through the personalized QEDWiki mashup he made to satisfy my wanton mashup desire… (OH THE SPAM I will be attracting because of this post. C’est la guerre, n’est-ce pas?). Dan was able to mashup the GreatSchools.net web site with available real estate and customize a viewable “situational app” just for my personalized benefit. Well, not just me, but for anyone who is interested in relocating. Awesome.

You can view the demo of that QEDWiki mashup at this link. Please give it a looksee.

What struck me about this mashup was although I was thrilled personally, it occurred to me we were invariably disrupting a 1.0 business model in the process. Sites that depend on advertising and eyeballs stand to lose with mashups. The challenge with mashups will be how to rationalize the web services sharing in ways that benefit the content providers. This is still new to me, but the ramifications were obvious even for a neophyte.

The Original Unconference: Mashup Camp

What is not to love about Mashup Camp? This is my first unconference event, and I am an easy convert. It defines the free-form, emergent foundation of enterprise 2.0 in that it is completely user (developer) driven. No formal speakers, no imposed structure. What’s interesting is that developers mix easily with vendors and sponsors because from what I’ve seen they’re all intellectually curious and are asking a lot of the same questions. I don’t see a lot of marketing and selling going on here.

The day starts by mapping out a series of sessions the camp wants to discuss with peers. Developers get to pick time slots first, then sponsors, then other vendors.

Next, each session is posted on a large, paper schedule that is transfered by David Berlind onto a wiki that everyone can access and annotate with session notes all day long.

Then, everyone self-assembles and visits sessions that interests them. There was a lunch a break (day one), and the favorite part of the day for me was “speed-geeking” which consisted of 5-minute demos of about maybe 2 dozen mashups located at tables in the grand hall at the computer museum. Each participant had five minutes to explain his or her mashup, show its main features, and answer questions.

All the mashups were impressive, but I know I and Jeff Nolan were particularly impressed with the Plaxo mashup demo. Straight from the press release, the 3.0 version:

“has a content sharing feeds system, which several networks are leveraging, especially after the combined success of Facebook apps with its newsfeeds feature. Individual feeds for Plaxo users will initially include those for Flickr photos, blogposts, Amazon wish lists and Plaxo contact info modifications.”

I videotaped the demo here for you to see for yourself. I apologize, but the “night vision” option was accidentally selected on the camera I shot it with. Grrr… Still viewable, though. This is Joseph Smarr, Architect for Plaxo, demoing Plaxo’s new 3.0 version.

Office 2.0 The Sequel: Adds Enterprise 2.0 Track

Well, planning has begun for the 2nd annual Office 2.0 Conference. Yay! I’m pleased to announce that Ismael Ghalimi has nominated me (for BSG Alliance), Jevon McDonald, and Catherine Shinners to be the lucky volunteer team who will put together the Enterprise 2.0 track for the conference.

If you can only make one conference for enterprise 2.0 next fall, make this one. The conference will again be held at the St. Regis in San Francisco. Ismael has booked a lot more space in the hotel this time, so there will plenty of room for networking and visiting panels and demos. The conference web site should go up tomorrow at this link as early as tomorrow. Keep checking for it. Oh, you might want to sign up early too. The conference was a huge success last year, and Ismael is intent on keeping it small, so it may sell out. There is also a Facebook event and group for Office 2.0.

The format for the conference will change somewhat this year. There will still be killer demos, jaw-dropping celebs, and investors from the 2.0 insider crowd, but the focus this year will be on customers and real adoption of Office 2.0 tools and technologies.

Regarding enterprise 2.0 specifically, we are interested in showcasing user case studies. If you have a particular user case study you’d like to share with us, please let us know as soon as possible. Frame your pitches in terms of business benefits, or possibly, social benefits that led or will lead to increased business benefits. We’re also interested in security, privacy, governance issues– typical IT issues and how they’re impacting enterprise 2.0 adoption. The stories don’t all have to be positive; if something didn’t work, and we can learn from it, we want to hear that too.

Send any questions or interest in participating on the enterprise 2.0 track to me, Jevon, or Catherine directly. My email address is susan at bsgalliance dot com.

Photo courtesy of Brian Solis.

#2. Write about your passion, passionately.

Today I participated in a wonderful introductory webinar for some of our CIO and IT director customers. My role was to talk broadly about what is happening in the blogosphere. Part of my task was to identify the do’s and don’ts of blogging. I put together a list of about a dozen, borrowing from other blogger’s suggestions, and adding a few of my own. I re-ordered them at the last minute and gave “passion” here a higher ranking. Passion is sticky in the blogosphere, so it has a lot of benefits to readers and bloggers alike.

To exemplify passion, I need to point to my good-friend-whom-I’ve-never-met-in-the-blogosphere, Luis Suarez who has just completed a seven part unpacking and analysis of the the McAfee-Davenport debate. The effort took Luis several days to publish; he released each “chapter” separately over the period of about a week while he was traveling from his home in Spain to NY for a conference. Luis’ passion is knowledge management, collaboration, social media, and enterprise 2.0 among other things related to these general areas.

Luis ends his seven-part article with this:

I couldn’t have agreed more with that statement as perhaps one of the most representative ones that describes not only Enterprise 2.0, but the entire movement behind Web 2.0 as well. With it, things have gotten a whole lot more exciting and interesting, because, for the first time in many years, knowledge workers have got the opportunity to have a voice, an opinion, and share it with everyone else collaborating with others, exchanging knowledge, improve their social capital skills and their subject matter expertise and, as a result of that process, innovate at a higher rather than in the recent past. And all of that dealing with their own passion for whatever the topic!

That is why, to me, Enterprise 2.0 is not only revolutionalising the Enterprise, but also our own ways of life, because, after all, social computing is a philosophy, a way of life you breathe and learn to nurture, that inspires constant change that you rather embrace … or not. And at the end of the day, whether we like it or not, it would be a matter of choice to adopt it or not. And that choice is yours. And yours alone. So it would be up to you (And not higher up in the management chain), whether you would want to change your organisation or not, whether you would want to change your life or not. And if I were you, I would not wait for others to tell you about it… Make it happen!

Make it happen now!

Now I know not all bloggers are passionate, but I think passion is a pre-requisite to good blogging. Luis is a great blogger and has a strong readership and following. I know all bloggers don’t express themselves with gusto and emotion, but beneath the surface of their writing is a driving passion and basic hunger to communicate and connect. When I look at the folks I’m proud to list on my blogroll, it’s the one unifying trace of blogger DNA that links me to all of them, and every other committed blogger in the hood. Like a wise English poet, well songwriter, once said, “Passion is no ordinary word.” (Graham Parker.)