Wiki Witch of the East– C’est moi.

I fear a house will soon fall on me. I am finding myself increasingly frustrated when I can’t persuade non-e2.0 evangelists to use wikis. DEATH to group email is my new motto. Jeff Nolan wrote recently about how Workday had mimicked Apple’s fabulous spots for the Mac comparing the dweebish PC guy to the cool Mac guy. Obviously I don’t agree with Jeff, but don’t have time for that right now. More on that for another post. Anyway, I want someone to do a similar series for wikis vs. group email.

wikiwitchI have taken to putting this photo on my company IM as a subtle reminder for all those who might be adding me to their group email list…

Tomorrow, if anyone happens to be in the NY metro area, Adam Carson is hosting his first Enterprise 2.0 Meet-up. A good time should be had by all. It will be at the Penthouse at the Hudson Hotel ( 356 W58th between 8th and 9th) starting at 5:30pm. There is also a great afternoon seminar if you can fit it in on such short notice. All details are on the Meet-up site.

Hope to see you there. Come say hello– I’ll be the one with the pointy hat.

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UPDATE: 6/28/07   I just got around to checking out Wikipatterns, which I’ve been meaning to for a long time.  It turns out– I have the profile of a wiki bully!  The shame!

Brilliant!

tebbo mashup slide

The Brits throw that word around a lot. But, David Tebbutt proves his authentic brilliance in this slide presentation on new technologies. The more I coach new users on adopting enterprise 2.0 tools, I realize it all begins with education. Fantastic visual presentations like this in our body of knowledge makes it so much easier. (Plus, I generally learn something from these presentations!) There are comments on David’s blog to turn this presentation into a YouTube video which could be more easily distributed around the web. I’m all for that. I hope he chooses to do it– for the good of the glorious cause, of course.

Side note: David also did a fairly entertaining podcast with Maggie Fox on her Social Media Today podcasting series. I’ve been catching up on her weekly podcasts on my trips to the gym. David’s interview had me cracking up on the treadmill. I highly recommend downloading all the Social Media Today podcasts. Maggie chooses at least one member of the Social Media Collective to interview every week. The podcasts come out on Wednesdays.

Wow– Software2007 is shaping up to be some gig

A few of our CIO customers (along with Steve P) are going to be on a few panels at the Software2007 conference in Santa Clara this week– May 8-9. Out of curiosity, I asked MR this morning for the media registration list. He sent me a list of over 100 reporters, editors, bloggers, and analysts including A-lists from every genre. I was really impressed. they’re expecting over 2,000 attendees. I had no idea the conference was so well known and widely attended. I was under the impression it was more of an insidery Valley software VC get-together. I don’t know why I thought that. Maybe because of its affiliation with sandhill.com. Now I regret not going!

Oh well, I’ll look forward to the reports, as always.

On other gig news, I got a disappointing call from Francois Gossieaux that the Enterprise 2.0 Rave was canceled. That elicited a big c’est dommage from me and much empathy for poor M. Gossieaux who was in the unfortunate position of having to call a host of influential bloggers and tell them the party failed to draw a guest list. I know they’re still working on some backup plans, so we’ll see if something can be salvaged. In the end, it shouldn’t surprise too many people. It’s a testament to the power of time-tested market research. Take your standard bell curve– Enterprise 2.0 is somewhere in the beginnings of early adoption and Francois had an unusual, innovative approach to enlighten these early adopters– therefore, statistically, about 2 people should have probably registered, which sounds about right judging from Francois’ tone. Aww, I’m just having a little fun with research, but it is true that there weren’t enough people signed up to justify the expense of holding the event, and after all, it was backed by VCs not conference organizers, so they had no problem pulling the plug.

Speaking of VCs, we announced our first round financing today. A nice $20M validation from Silicon Valley (including Foundation Capital and Hummer Winblad) that we’re onto something. I guess I can file my expense report now. 😉

Enterprise 2.0: what’s in and what’s out?

I found myself surprised that Euan Semple is a Facebook user. I asked him about it, and he says it’s not just for kids, “There are loads of my friends in Facebook and it is good at helping us be social.” he replied. And like a select few of the bloggers I follow, I have not succumbed to the Twitter addiction, but find myself a little jealous that Stowe Boyd is now a friend of John Edwards and Barack Obama if only for a few random minutes at a time.

Social media knocked me over again last week reading the reports from my fellow Enterprise Irregulars who were blogging at Sapphire– SAP’s flagship conference for its friends and fans. This screen shot of SAP’s Harmony, an internal MySpace/Linked-in of sorts, got forwarded immediately to our head of HR. We’ve been using Ning for our internal communications– which we are really having a lot of fun with, but seeing this, I realized how much more fun we could have if we customized Ning for our company– and then for our customers.

SAP's Harmony

Harmony screen courtesy Craig Cmehil

What really caught my eye last week was Stephen Danelutti’s initial attempt at drawing up a framework for enterprise 2.0. I comb the web daily for enterprise 2.0 posts and news, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone take a stab at defining what is including specifically in the definition. For instance, we probably all agree that McAfee’s SLATES is included (Search, Links, Authoring, Tags, Extentions, and Signals). This would include all blog, wiki, and search technology. McAfee talks a lot about predictive markets too, though. I would add mash-ups, most SaaS apps, and anything AJAX-built, no? I don’t have Dion Hinchcliffe’s gift for drawing diagrams, but I’d love to hear some input on this.

Just a Footnote on SAP’s SDN

I tried twice to post a comment on Jerry Bowles’ blog on his site and on the Enterprise Irregulars’ site and was unsuccessful. Since I don’t have time to keep fooling around with the software, I will post a link to Jerry’s post today here. Back from Sapphire, Jerry posted on how SAP is getting enterprise 2.0. religion citing among a few things, the SDN network and Harmony, its internal HR web platform, which I was getting around to writing about myself.

On the SDN network, Jerry writes:

The granddaddy of these communities–the SAP Developer Network (SDN)–has grown from 340,000 members in 2005 to more than 750,000 today. (SDN has its own “evangelist,” Craig Cmehil.) The Business Process community (BPX) was launched in the third quarter of 2006 and already has more than 100,000 members. Both have proven to be invaluable resources and converted even the most skeptical oldtimers to the belief that there may be something to this Enterprise 2.0 business afterall.

What I wanted to communicate to Jerry was this:

Hi Jerry. So wishing I had gone to Sapphire! It’s good to hear that SAP is getting religion on enterprise 2.0. It’s worth noting, however, that the SAP Developer Network is run on a Confluence Wiki (Atlassian). I’m pretty sure about this, although I’m sure someone will correct me fairly quickly if I’m wrong. Even a technology giant like SAP with its billion dollar R&D budget can benefit from innovation at the edge from a couple of college kids who started a company on a credit card a few years ago. I just couldn’t resist the irony.