eastwikkers

Wikia’s Openserving: A Business Without a Model

You’ve got to love the honesty of Wikia’s CEO Gil Penchina on plans to launch openserving.com to provide free hosting of wiki-based collaborative websites:

“If we give away the bandwidth and the storage, and we get none of the advertising revenue, what's the business model? Well, I don't know yet.”

Wika just received additional funding from Amazon.com Inc., and I wonder how the investors are responding to the comment. But if it’s experiments we want, then this is a good one. It’s an opportunity for individuals or small groups who otherwise couldn’t to launch a content venture that might make some money and get some notoriety. It will be interesting to watch the adoption here. How much value? How much noise?  And will a sustainable business model follow?

Die Uberwikimeister Von SAP

A few days ago, we picked the SAP Apollo Wiki for the 33 Wikis series.   Just learned today that the "Apollo Überwikimeister" is SAP's Mark Crofton, based in New York. We will be following his blog, "The Village View."  Interesting perspectives, from one of SAP's supernodes.

Hey Miki, You're So Fine ...

Eastwick client Socialtext announced this today:  a wiki optimized for mobile devices.  What's this all about?  A little thing called "adoption." 

“A natural extension of Socialtext’s wiki workspaces is delivering a mobile user interface to spur adoption among business users,” said Peter O’Kelly, Research Director, Burton Group. “Wikis are revitalizing the collaboration software market. Their accessibility and intuitive user experience make them highly effective for many collaboration scenarios that are not well addressed by more sophisticated enterprise products.”

One of the great things about wikis is that they adapt to how people work.   Miki is another step forward in that direction.

PS:  Note how Steve Rubel might tie this to his "how I work kit."

The Gatekeeper and The Collaborator

Not so long ago if one wanted to find information on say, lipids, the Encyclopedia Britannica was a first stop to learn more about triglycerides and cholesterol. These days, however, we're more likely to key in "define: lipids" in Google or check out the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Ever wonder which source would be more accurate?

When the scientific journal Nature compared Wikipedia to Britannica in a Dec. 15 report, it found that: "Wikipedia comes close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of it science entries." When it compared the two sources' entry on lipids, Nature railed Britannica for its "outdated nomenclature."

This week, as the Wall Street Journal reported, Britannica is firing back and planning to run ads saying the Nature findings lack validity. The venerable Britannica versus an online upstart? It shouldn't be a surprise. Afterall, the Internet has transformed the way we perform research and consume information. It also calls into question issues of trust and accountability. Wikipedia suggests people are more likely to trust information built on a model of collaboration, while Britannica banks on what media theorists term the "gatekeeping" approach. At least for now, it would be worthwhile to read both sources.  Eastwikkers are keeping a close eye on Wikipedia. As the "33 Wikis" series progresses, stay tuned for more insight.

Forrester: Institutional Power Declines

From Steve Rubel.  Consistent with what we've been tracking in the world of DIY communities.  Grassroot groups are now competitive with the "establishment," in business and in politics.

Danah Boyd: It Ain't Easy

So, David Callisch (Ruckus) and I will soon be behind the mics at Heather Gold's SxSW panel on "Open Source Management."   In prepping for this, I remembered that there are basically three things that have happened to marketing:  (1) it is getting more transparent, (2) it is becoming more collaborative, and (3) most interesting of all -- from my perspective -- it is becoming more ad hoc.  Thus all the interest in DIY community tools which theoretically might help companies to more easily and more cost-effectively enlist the masses, tap the wisdom of crowds, and attempt big things in marketing that years ago would have required a massive budget. 

The idea is really appealling to small companies, of course, who will never have such a budget.  But how easy is it to do this? What's actually involved in getting a community up and running, and sustainable over time? 

Check out Danah Boyd's recent article on the challenges of building heterogeneous communities.  If you are thinking that your company can become the next craigslist, Flickr or MySpace, you'll need to first understand the skills, stamina and creativity that are required of a good community manager. 

These three sites have many attributes in common. They all grew organically. They each have public personalities that early adopters feel connected to. The early adopters really felt as though they were participating in and creating an intimate community, even as the community grew to millions. Users are passionate. Designers are passionate. They feel a responsibility to it and are deeply invested in making users happy. Character was not boiled out of the site; the text on the system is natural and goofy, reflecting the personality quirks of the developers rather than the formal speech of a corporation. Each site has a unique culture that was born early on and evolved through years of use and growth. The culture evolves with the designers and users working in tandem.

Customer service is not a segregated group who simply answers questions of a finalized product. They are completely integrated into the design system and the senior people are the most deeply embedded in user culture. There is a strong commitment to the needs and desires of the users.

An SXSW Wiki Project

We're southbound this morning, heading to SXSW Interactive, where we'll be conducting a little experiment on a wiki on behalf of Eastwick client Ruckus Wireless.  Objective:  we're tapping the wisdom of crowds at Heather Gold's "open source management" seminar, Tuesday March 14.  We're hoping to round up some of the best minds in interactive media to help us develop this baby wiki into something that will help to organize the rather fragmented market for IPTV in the U.S.  Ambitious?  Yes.   Impractical?  Yes.  But we're giving it a shot anyway, and looking forward to your support (you don't need to be at SXSW to contribute to the baby wiki -- it's already open to the public).

Another reason that SXSW Interactive makes a good spot for this experiment:  all the indie filmmakers next door, many of which we are certain are wondering when IPTV really coming.  Our take:  there's no place like home for indie film distribution.

Supernodes drive wiki adoption

Eastwick client Ross Mayfield (CEO, Socialtext) links to a great primer on wiki adoption.  The author is Suw Charman, who has been working with Socialtext onsite at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, home of one of the largest (if not the largest) corporate wiki.  We like Suw's observation that a top-down strategy alone will not drive wiki adoption (that's been our experience at Eastwick).  Behold the "supernode," one of the key drivers of wiki adoption:

2. Identify and understand key users
Once you have identified key user groups, you need to know which users within that group are both influential and likely to be enthusiastic. Then consider how social software fits in to the context of their job, their daily working processes and the wider context of their group's goals.

• What specific problems does social software solve?
• What are the benefits for this person?
• How can the software be simply integrated into their existing working processes?
• How does social software lower their work load, or the cognitive load associated with doing specific tasks?

Ideally, key users will be 'supernodes' - highly connected, in contact with a lot of people on a daily basis, and heavily involved with the function of their department and the transfer of information within the group and between groups. This may not be the group executive, but could well be his PA or a direct report. Frequently, people's supernode status is not reflected by official hierarchy.

Tour begins!

We began our Winter/Spring tour tonight at the New Communications Forum, the three-day new-media luvfest brought to you by the most excellent Jennifer McClure and Elizabeth Albrycht.  We led a Wiki 101 workshop this afternoon, and the assignment was to build out the NCF event wiki.   It was a fun, engaging project, and you can see a live snapshot of it here (check out the "five questions"). 

Tomorrow, we're moderating a panel on the future of online publishing; the group includes Tom Foremski and folks from Corrante, IDG and Rojo.   Then next week, we're on the road, with a first stop at PRSA Seattle, where we'll mix it up with people from SAP Labs, Microsoft, Port of Seattle, and others.  And then, we're off to SXSW, where we will participate on Heather Gold's panel, "Open Source Marketing."  Fun tour -- we're talking about some of the more interesting community experiments we're involved in at Eastwick.

Vyatta to the Public

Last night, Om Malik pulled back the covers on Eastwick-client Vyatta, a start-up that has launched a community to create an open-source alternative to traditional routers. We like this project for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that the community is using a wiki. Wikis have often been used in projects involving collaboration between developers, but the Vyatta community may bring new visibility and understanding for just how this works. The community is "vyatta" (Sanskrit for "open") to the public. Check it out.

Wiki Worries?

It’s been referred to as ''the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit," and Wikipedia and its collaborative editing capabilities have made headlines recently. Amidst reports that a former staffer edited Sen. Dianne Feinstein's entry, along with the deletion of potentially unflattering material from the biographies of other legislators, a wiki-related debate has been sparked: With the power of free Internet content and an open source information site, how can sabotage, spin and inaccuracies be prevented? Or can they? No doubt, an issue we’ll be watching, as Wikipedia has become, for millions, an authoritative information source. Read more here and here.

The Wiki Way

We're at Web 2.0 tomorrow, a show so hot, say the organizers, that the fire marshalls forbid them to sell another ticket.   Client Socialtext is there, along with several other Eastwick compatriots, and they all plan to partake in what looks like the most fun, underground event of the three-day fest:  an evening of dining, networking, and partying, "the wiki way."  Guest of honor during the first leg is Ward Cunningham, inventor of the wiki. 

Constantin

Hats off to Constantin Basturea, producer and organizer of Global PR Blog Week.  He pulled off this multi-country/multi-personality event again, while ably dealing with a lot of backstage drama.  No surprise, he's a master gardener of his wikis, and no one else quite compares.

Wiki Beats the News (For Many)

Check out this article on the Reuters wire, posting some impressive stats on the rise of Wikipedia as a news source (quoted material below).  How do they do it?  We think there are a number of things at play here, including trust.  Wikipedia has become a compelling alternative for many folks who use the Internet to find the best and most recent information on any particular topic.  And Wikipedia's strict adherence to the "neutral point of view" sounds like an ideal that journalism has often tried to embrace but has given up on either because it does not make for interesting copy or simply because it doesn't sell.  Might not work for the news, but it certainly appears to be working for Wikipedia.

Wikipedia recently attracted 22.3 percent of users searching for information on "Gaza Strip," tying the CIA World Factbook (http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/). It has drawn five times more U.S. traffic than Google News, Yahoo News or BBC, according to Hitwise analyst Bill Tancer.

Similarly, in April, Wikipedia tied with CNN.com as the No. 2 most visited site among U.S. Web users searching for details on the new Pope Benedict. Newadvent.org, a Catholic encyclopedia, was the most visited site among people seeking to learn more about Joseph Ratzinger, according to Hitwise data.

Wikis: The Killer App

Here's a fantastic article on wikis by Ezra Goodnoe that is an excellent primer for anyone still not completely familiar with wikis or how to use them in the business environment.  Goodnoe points out that wikis are the killer app for corporations wanting to collaborate and share information because of their low cost of implementation and support.

Gripe ala Wiki-style

Ed Foster of InfoWorld has decided to open a "reader advocacy" channel as a way for his readers to share opinions and ideas with him. The medium? A wiki!

Ed Foster: "Knowing my readers as well as I do after all these years, the more I heard about wikis, the more I had to agree that it sounds like a very, very good fit."

Visit the GripeWiki

ITtoolbox Gets Wiki

Techies around the world will be happy to know that the highly popular ITtoolbox network for the IT market has issued a press release announcing its new wiki today. ITtoolbox  has over 2 million subcribers so its installed base of users are sure to leverage the ITtoolboxwiki to its fullest.  Also, check out the list of RSS feeds on almost every topic. Those of you looking for blogs specializing in programming, networking, enterprise software and emerging technologies should check out the index of blogs that ITtoolbox has put together.

Fear and Blogging in Las Vegas

We continue our tour of PRSA events with a stop in Las Vegas.  It's our first visit to this city, and our guide -- or our Virgil, depending on your perspective -- is the erudite Jack Chappell, manager of community relations for Nevada Public Radio.  Eastwick is sitting on a panel for government, non-profit and commercial PR pros who want to know what this blogging thing is all about, and why the PR profession needs to adapt.  One thing we'll talk about is how the media -- one of our key constituencies -- is already adapting, out of fear, neccessity or opportunity.  On that subject, check out Jon Fine's article in Business Week today, Net to Newspapers: Drop Dead.

Wiki Wacky Woozy

What's a new-media practice without an official mascot, slogan, or, er, cocktail?  eastwikkers got the latter today with the discovery of the Wiki Waki Woo, a concoction invented by the folks at Cafe Bernardo near U.C. Davis, and now publicized via the amazing U.C. Davis Wiki.  Take a close look at the recipe, inspired by the success of its East Coast cousin, the Long Island Ice Tea.  Should you try to make the drink at home -- perhaps this Fourth of July weekend, in honor of the state that gave the drink its name -- scroll way down to see a critical step that the author of the Davis post neglected to mention:  a straw filled with 151.  It's the "wisdom of crowds" in action, a community of like-minded people working together to get things right.  [See also: Wikipedia (they also got it right)]

Wikitorial Shuts Its Doors -- For Now

So, we spoke too soon.  The wikitorial experiment at the LA Times has ended -- temporarily, at least -- after a tough bout with vandals.  We expect an interesting post-mortem, with lessons learned about the implementation of wikis in the media world.   Two quick lessons:  (1) the need to restrict membership (there are acceptable ways to do that) and (2) alternative uses for media wikis.

Hail the Wikitorial

In our world, this was by far the biggest story of the week:  the LA Times is conducting an interesting social experiment on its editorial page, enabling readers to edit Times-authored editorials on a public wiki (managed by Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales).  The reaction from top journalists and bloggers has been spirited, from jeers, cheers, to an inspired editorial in Slate calling for the outright abolishment of traditional editorials because they "then either toward timidity, at one extreme, or posturing, at the other."  A Corante blogger opined, "there are better ways to bring the community into the paper."  We agree -- sort of -- but still applaud the Times for this bold and fun experiment.  Little ground has been broken in the new world of community journalism, and this represents a major if inconclusive step.  In the meantime, there's much to figure out.  When asked by Editor & Publisher to explain how the wiki works, Michael Kinsley (the Times editor who is leading the project) admitted, "I am not sure."

UPDATE:  1:30pm -- See Eastwick client Ross Mayfield's comment on Corante, about the flexibility of the wiki platform in news and editorial environments.   You will learn about things such as forking, and fisking.

Group Rethink

An excellent article in MIT's Technology Review shows how technology tools such as social networks, blogs, and wikis are helping pave the way for greater group knowledge. Author Michael Fitzgerald says that the idea of collective intelligence is that groups, then, can act as parallel-processing decision engines, pooling disparate knowledge to answer even hard questions in areas like public policy.

Blogspotting Intellisync

Our client Intellisync gets the spotlight in a post today on the new Business Week blog. Theme: marketing collaboration on an international wiki.

Annals in Collaboration: The Celebrity Group Blog

We could have predicted this one. Just the first of many celebrity collectives:

Arianna Huffington, the columnist and onetime candidate for governor of California, is about to move blogging from the realm of the anonymous individual to the realm of the celebrity collective.

She has lined up more than 250 of what she calls "the most creative minds" in the country to write a group blog that will range over topics from politics and entertainment to sports and religion. It is essentially a nonstop virtual talk show that will be part of a Web site that will also serve up breaking news around the clock. It is to be introduced May 9.

Wikipedia Gets Yahoo! Love

  The San Jose Business Journal reported that Yahoo Search is dedicating hardware and resources to support Wikipedia. It's also noted that content from Wikpedia will be available through Yahoo Search.

Blogger Burnout and the "Pancake People"

It's an occupational hazard, notes Steve Rubel. Super bloggers Robert Scoble, Mark Orchant, and Neville Hobson are all feeling the need to pull back a bit.  And in a recent wiki discussion, we worried about the pressure many bloggers feel to "report on every relevant thing" that comes across our screens. In that same discussion, ProfNet's Dan Forbush recalled theater artist Richard Foreman's observation that "we're all becoming 'pancake people' -- 'spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button'." A gruesome warning that perhaps we all need to slow down, focus, and relax.  (Have an egg cream -- works for us).

The Kindness of Strangers

A story in the New York Times tomorrow looks at one of the most interesting phenomena in the free VOIP movement: the preponderance of calls from strangers. And the funny thing is -- unlike unsolicited calls on land lines -- calls from strangers on services like Skype are often welcome.

"There's something confessional about this space," Mr. Barlow said about Skype. He was in Madrid for a conference, and I was in New York. "It's like a long over-the-ocean flight where the other guy starts telling you stuff that you're astonished to hear and you start talking about stuff you're astonished to say. The combination of anonymity and intimacy creates a special kind of environment."

Bottoms Up

Nice post from Steve Rubel on two approaches to building a corporate blog:  top down, or bottom up.  He praises work from the best of both worlds.  At Eastwick we're betting on "bottoms up," but there are many other ways to skin this cat.

Wikis Mean Business

Eastwick partner Socialtext is at PCForum today, where for the third consecutive year it is providing a wiki-based event space for attendees.  Earlier in the day, the company relaunched its product line to better serve its enterprise customer base.   But for the unitiated, we recommend a visit to this site, which provides a Wiki "101" crash course. 

The On-Demand Generation

See Christine Rosen's essay in the New York Times Magazine about the perils of "ego casting" technologies such as the cellphone and the DVR. While we're on the subject, let's add a few new media tools to the mix.

Is the on-demand economy wreaking havoc on existing and important social norms? Is there anything we can do to reverse the trend?

The near future promises even more of these ego-casting technologies, which offer us greater control and encourage the individualized pursuit of personal taste. Soon we'll carry cellphones that double as credit cards, toll passes, televisions and personal video cameras. At home, we'll merge the functions of these many technologies into a single streamlined machine that will respond to the sound of our voice, like the multimodal browser being developed by I.B.M. and Opera. This expansion of choice and control will foster the already prevalent expectation that we can and should be able to have anything we want on demand.

This is not a world without costs. Having our every whim satisfied at the touch of a button might encourage a childish expectation of instant gratification and could breed intolerance for the kinds of music, film and literature that require patience to enjoy fully. As we use these technologies to increase the pace and quantity of our experiences, we might find that the quality of our pursuits declines. Nevertheless, whatever ambivalence we might feel toward these technologies, we end up buying and using them anyway, not only because they make life more convenient but also because everyone else uses them and so we must as well. The traveling businessman without a cellphone will not have a business for long.

Nerd Values

Gotta love Sunday's Q&A in the San Jose Mercury News with Craig Newmark, founder of craigslist. Great comments about citizen journalism (a form of new-media collaboration, a big topic of discussion on these pages) and "nerd values" ("make a comfortable living, then make a difference").

Rebels and Gardeners

Adam Gopnik's terrific essay on Voltaire in the current issue of The New Yorker reminds me of the parallels between the most enlightened rebels of our time -- the systems thinkers who are using new media to combat the world's injustices -- and the most rebellious voices from the enlightenment. Voltaire's admonishment that "we must cultivate our garden" could be the slogan for the wiki generation, which has, coincidentally, already appropriated the gardening metaphor. Were the Frenchman alive today, he would have a blog, a wiki, and a gardener in his wiki.