Category: Social Media

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!

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.

Stay high all the time.

As those of us who blog on Enterprise 2.0 have been pegged as counter-cultural revolutionaries and labeled “Hippies,” I thought I would extend the metaphor.

My hard disk on my laptop crashed this week. Without warning, one minute my data was there, the next minute it was gone. And no, of course I never ran backups. I initially panicked. But, slowly, I realized that most of my”work” was high above my desk… in the cloud. Whether it was documents people emailed me, spreadsheets I was working on, presentations, even my photos– most of what I really need and care about is on the web, not on my computer. My email (with all documents attached) is on my online email servers (Google mail, my own web-based ISP mail), the wiki I’ve been collaborating on (SocialText), my personal photo accounts (Flickr, Snapfish), and even good background material on the Enterprise 2.0 market on the wiki at Itensil. Further, every web site/blog that has had any importance to me is cataloged at Del.icio.us.; my daily blog reads are on NetVibes; the groups I participate in are all online (Google groups); I’m even part of a social network on Ning. I’m sure there are more proofs of my web life (oh, yeah, Second Life). So hard disk? I hardly knew ya.
Inhale the web. It’s good for your new millennium health.

IBM– still innovating

In the 90s I remember a line I once wrote about EDS who was in a constant struggle to overcome IBM Global Services. I was referencing an EDS executive who would always say in speeches how “EDS is going to be the IBM of the 21st century.”

The line I wrote back then was,

“Imagine [EDS’s] surprise when IBM turned out to be the IBM of the 21st century.”

I thought of that line today when I listened to Maggie Fox’s podcast with Louis Suarez (whom I think the world of). Louis works for IBM somewhere in Spain, but reports to a Netherlands office. He holds meetings on Second Life, so it doesn’t really matter where he is physically. I guess Louis qualifies as an adult version of Generation G that Vinnie Mirchandani has been promoting.

IBM has never failed to impress me (okay, nothwithstanding OS/2). The company was originally founded in 1888, taking on the IBM name in 1924. Although it has been widely condemned to extinction with each passing paradigm shift, the company finds its way to continue innovating. To hear Louis talk about what he’s doing at IBM with such enthusiasm and unquestioned credibility, makes me proud that I’ve been a Big Blue fan for so many years.

 

All the news that’s fit to feed…

I had a bit of traveling to do last week, so I ambled into an airport news stand. It occurred to me that the only time I read glossy magazines these days is when I’m traveling. Sometimes I’ll pick up the Journal or the Times, scan the headlines, then put it back down. Not worth the purchase.

The truth is, I do all my information-gathering in the blogosphere. If I happen to land on a mainstream media page, it’s because a blogger pointed out something I am interested in. My blog network is my daily read, in addition to alerts I have set for certain keywords I’m interested in that widen my network. But, this isn’t new to anyone who has transitioned to the new form of media consumption.

What is new is how the blogosphere is becoming less and less of an amateur hour and more and more relevant to an individual’s life. I read recently that at Davos, the bloggers had greater access than the major media:

Still, all of this meant that the World Economic Forum gave some bloggers – Jeff Jarvis, Loic Le Meur, for example – greater access rights than the regular media. Bloggers with HD camcorders could wander anywhere in the building, while professional crews were restricted to the hallways and 30-minute bursts.

Ironically, even though they’re viewed as amateurs by the major media, bloggers have replaced traditional media for me. And speaking of Davos, I read (online, of course) that the Publisher of the New York Times, Arthur Sultzberger, Jr. said at the Economic Forum, “I really don’t know whether we’ll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don’t care, either.” Well, I don’t care either. Unless, of course, they start feeding me content that is specifically relevant to my work and life.