Web 2.0 – Page 6 – ITSinsider

Love WordPress?– Me too; just don’t live here.

worldpress logo

I love my WordPress blog, but there are certain things you cannot do if you host your blog on WordPress. Like ZoHo Polls, for instance. I wanted to get a poll out about the Davenport/McAfee debate, but couldn’t get the poll to show up on my blog. So, I asked my BSG web 2.0 (can I say geek with affection?) buddy Brian to help me out… the conversation went like this:

3:42 PM bmagierski: ok, got it to work on my wordpress blog using the RunPHP plugin that i Have installed … wordpress strips out iframes by default it seems, so I tricked it by sticking the iframe into php code

however, i don’t think i can install the RunPHP editor in your hosted blog

3:43 PM me: good job, zorg! (i have no idea what you just said)

bmagierski: i found a couple of other tricks that I’m testing

do you want me to post the poll on my blog too?

me: yes, the idea will be to get as many bloggers to post the poll as possible

3:45 PM bmagierski: Ok, but i’m still trying to get it to work on your blog!

me: keep the faith, young jedi knight!

In the end, Brian discovered WordPress won’t allow something-or-other so I can’t post the poll on my blog. You can see it all explained here from WordPress. If you don’t host your blog on WordPress, please consider hosting the poll on your blog. I’m curious to see who will win the popular vote.

You can see the poll on Brian’s site and this is the code to post it on your site:

<iframe frameborder=’0′ src=’http://polls.zoho.com/external/scrupp/davenport-v-mcafee-enterprise-2-0-hype-or-reality’ width=’260′ height=’210′></iframe>

Hello Brits — Sign in to your Free Agent Nation

I fear poor, fellow Enterprise Irregular Dennis Howlett has been bitten by the startup bug. After taking the product for a test drive– I completely understand! FreeAgent is an online record-keeping, invoicing, banking, project management, tax liability keeping, time management, AND community-based, knowledge-sharing resource for freelancers, contractors, and independent contractors. (I probably missed a few dozen other features.) I was originally delighted by the pleasing user interface and easy to navigate design of the application and site. But what really impressed me is the depth of the product resources.

freeagent features

Having been an independent consultant many more years than I have been an employee, this product is a consultant’s dream! I’m not sure what the long term plans are for the product, but with some minor modifications, I could easily see this product morphing into a time-tracking powerhouse for large consulting firms or growing ones, such as ours.

For today, however, my only beef with the product– and it’s a good problem to have– is why UK-only? Us small fish –in the colonies out here– might be worthy of the privilege of such a fantastic product. Not only do we have local banks of origin outside of the UK, we typically serve global clients. I know my best client was based in Amsterdam when I was an independent consultant, and I had other international projects and clients. It would really have been handy to have a global platform where I could have been paid in Euros in a European bank. I can think of dozens of others of freelance friends of mine who were ex-pats living in Paris, London, Germany doing freelance writing and consulting gigs. My hope is FreeAgent will spread the love throughout the British Empire. 😉

On a more serious note,

freeagentnation book I remember snatching up Dan Pink’s, Free Agent Nation, when it first came out. The book resonated with me because I don’t typically fit in well with large companies and much prefer to fly solo, like so many of my writer, analyst, consultant, and researcher friends. But the worst bit, anyone will admit, about being an independent is the @#$%^ bookkeeping and paying the tax man. What’s interesting to me about FreeAgent and Dan Pink’s first book is how web 2.0 technology has created the platform to deliver on the promises of what Pink forecasted for the new frontier of work. But even if you’re a digital Bedouin who happens to work for a corporation, like some of the guys I work with, it’s clear to me that whether we can thank AJAX or Ruby or a larger zeitgeist virally propagating as we collaborate and share across boundaries and nations via the next generation Internet– so much of the baby got thrown out with the bathwater in the 1.0 dotcom bubble.

In Free Agent Nation, Dan Pink says, “The basic unit of this Free Agent Operating System– the 1s and 0s of the underlying code– is trust. Trust , as scholar Francis Fukuyama noted in a magnificent book of the same name, is essential not only to a just society– but also to a healthy economy.” Trust is the currency of web 2.0 and its business partner, enterprise 2.0. As the individual continues to supplant the organization in power and influence, I’m continually reminded of these early visionaries that set the stage for the freedom we’re seeing today on the web.

Allen & Overy: An about Face on Facebook

I picked up this story up from Scott Gavin’s blog (who sources Tim Duckett), “Staff complaints force red-faced A&O into Facebook U-turn” about the London office of Allen & Overy (A&O) that first banned Facebook, then re-instated it.

Scott writes:

Before your company blocks a site such as Facebook why not consider the following:

Is the site being used because of a lack of social software/enterprise 2.0 implementations behind the firewall? Put simply, what are the alternatives for the employees? If it’s none, then consider finding someone who can talk to you about implementing enterprise 2.0

See what Andrew McAffee has to say about the enterprise potential of Facebook and alike.

Consider issuing guidelines for usage instead of a ban. Be up front with people about why it might be a bad thing to do certain stuff.

Think about the young, net savvy internet generation your company is probably looking to attract. Will banning sites such as Facebook without offering any viable alternatives attract them to your company? Or keep them at your company?

This isn’t a rant at IT departments, as they are trying to come to terms with the boom in web2.0 applications and social networking as much as anyone. Instead I just wanted to point out that it’s not always a bad thing to do a bit of social networking on company time. The real answer is to learn from what’s going on and build on the desire to connect, collaborate and innovate. Not sweep it away with a block on firewall port XYZ……..

In the past few weeks, I’ve become a Facebook fan myself. It’s very true that the blurring of the social and professional is blurring with the ease of use of social media tools, but in the case of A&O, the IT department had a practical reason why they wanted to shut it down– downloading videos was degrading the performance of the network. Sure you could say– oh, that’s B.S. They’re control freaks! But, hey, it sounds pretty reasonable, doesn’t it? I’ve been feeding a number of IT blogs lately that are talking about enterprise 2.0 and I’m hearing a lot more of these type of practical concerns vs. the command and control/sovereignity type issues.

Similarly, Bill Ives wrote a blog post I commented on over at the Fast Forward blog. I wrote there:

Hi Bill. Over the past week or so, I’ve seen a lot more IT bloggers talking about e2.0. This is encouraging to me. It’s going to take a “village” to enable enterprise 2.0 to take root in large corporations. I’m starting to believe that without the endorsement, cooperation, and/or tacit permission of the technology overseers within large companies, collaboration platforms and nextgen tools will be limited to yield their full potential.

I expect Tom Davenport and Andy McAfee will be touching on a lot of this in the live debate which is now scheduled for June 18, 10am at the Boston Westin Waterfront (Enterprise 2.0 conference). We are going to tape it for future videopodcast playback, but we are also attempting to livestream it as well. A big THANK YOU to Brian Solis who is helping out with this. Details and updates are on the BSGAlliance blog.

Andy (I hope I can quote him here in fun) says he’s, “looking forward to… publicly humiliating that Davenport unbeliever.” Remember, Andy, everything you say to a reporter is on-the-record 😉 I’m just waiting for Davenport’s retort!!

A good time will be had by all. Hope you can make it in person. The room only holds 45 seats– it’s first-come-first-served. And free bagels, donuts and coffee. (Now who can I get to sponsor that?)

ThinkFiftyBucks would have worked for me…

thinkfree logo Earlier in the year, ThinkFree offered bloggers a free version of its portable office software. I passed on that offer, but when it came around again last week, I said I’d give it a go. I remembered that Ismael Ghalimi has been a big fan of ThinkFree for a while now and thought I recalled the offer for the free software had something to do with Ismael’s valiant crusade to free us all of our hard drives. For him and for Brian Solis (handles PR for ThinkFree), who wrote a blog post today that was just poetry to my blogger reading eyes, I decided I better start really experimenting with ThinkFree and then let you all know what I think of it.

First of all, ThinkFree basically has cloned Microsoft Office, Excel, and PowerPoint and is offering these common office applications essentially free if you use the online version, or for about $50 if you use the portable version, which I was sent from the PR firm. I believe there is a server and desktop version, as well. ThinkFree’s bizarro version of Microsoft’s products are Write, Calc, and Show. I launched all three applications, and it was uncanny how similar they are. BUT– at a fraction of the cost– if not for free. What’s not to love??? As I trolled around the web, I found more advantages of ThinkFree over Microsoft, such as their variety of choice in viewers, plug-ins, APIs, widgets, and even the ability to download the apps to your ipod. Wow. Very cool.

Now granted. I don’t pass myself off as a product reviewer for a moment. But as a mere mortal user who writes documents, uses spreadsheets casually, and creates simple powerpoint presentations, ThinkFree can satisfy all my basic needs and more. Why would I want to enslave myself to Microsoft Office for these simple apps? I actually bristle when Office makes me do something annoying these days, like I saw in this post on Outlook archiving while trolling the web.

Is ThinkFree the web 2.0 killer app for the Enterprise? Probably not, unfortunately. In an interview with ThinkFree’s Jonathan Crow, Director of Marketing on the Under the Radar Blog, Crow is asked about his target customer:

Who IS your target customer? Who is NOT your target customer?
Of our over 250,000 ThinkFree Online users we estimate that roughly 35% are SMB users, 30% are educational users, 15% are individuals within Enterprise organizations, and the remaining 20% are consumers.

What we’ve been seeing in large enterprises, is painfully slow adoption to web 2.0 alternatives, but as products like ThinkFree are mind-numbingly easy to use, familiar, and either free or so cheap it’s not worth expensing, we may start seeing user-revolt-creep start infiltrating the walled gardens of enterprise command central. I guess it’s just a matter of time. The best imagery I heard recently along these lines was Euan Semple‘s description of unleashing “a thousand Trojan mice” into the enterprise and seeing what happens. ThinkFree is a killer mouse that could roar.

I’m a convert. Give it a try. I’d be very surprised if you’re not as amazed as I am at how perfectly the ThinkFree team has replicated the Microsoft user experience with none of the Microsoft baggage.

THIS changes everything— Now it gets interesting.

5/18 OKAY. Just got a WSJ alert that Microsoft is buying aQuantive which owns Avenue A|Razorfish. More on this later.

5/20 Update:

I was going to write a new post, but I didn’t want the headline I feel I must attribute to this acquisition to show up on feeds… which is this:

It’s the People, Stupid. (!)

I haven’t studied the coverage, blogs or commentary on this, but I’m giving you my off the cuff reaction to this acquisition and why I was so excited about it when I first saw it. It’s not how much Microsoft paid for Aquantive, the fact that now Microsoft will get into the advertising game, a revenue play, a beat Google strategy, a grease the skids for Yahoo strategy– none of that analysis is meaningful to me from my perspective. Microsoft IS enterprise 1.0; it still is the evil empire, I suppose. (Just humor me here, please? Here I go mashing up Star Wars with Trekkie zealotry, but like I’ve said before, we’re trying to save the galaxy for geeks of all nations, eh?) To introduce Aquantive to the Microsoft family which owns the #1 worldwide interactive agency in the world– whose median age worker is probably 27? Just a guess, but I’ll confirm… is real progress. With this acquisition comes fresh thinking– new ways of applying web technology to consumers and business. Doesn’t anybody even remember Andrew McAfee’s “Now THAT’s what I’m Talking About!” ?

Shake. Rattle. And Roll.

The evangelist in me sees a potential cometojesus awakening at Microsoft through the eyes of these nextgeners… yet, the old analyst in me fears my friends at AA|RF will sit in endless meetings much like canaries in a coal mine. But, I’m a glass is half full person– I gotta believe. Time. It’s on our side.