from the January 13, 2006 edition - http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0113/p09s02-coop.html

Libraries as places to linger and mingle
By Alex Wright

RICHMOND, VA. - Recent news of the massive book digitization efforts at the Library of Congress and other major libraries has renewed public interest in the long-standing dream of a universal digital library. Proponents argue that digitization will do more than just expand public access to books; it will change the shape of human knowledge itself. As digital books supplant physical ones, they argue, fusty old hierarchies like the Dewey Decimal System will give way to the liberating pixie dust of Google searches. Books will mingle with blogs. And we will all become, in effect, each other's librarians.

But if the shift from physical to digital books is so inevitable, then why did public libraries break attendance records last year? Why did publishers produce 300,000 printed, bound books in 2004 (up 14 percent from the year before)? Despite the enormous volume of information already available online, we seem to keep gravitating back to the physical world of books and libraries. All of which raises the question: Is a library really just a collection of books?

Advocates of digital libraries often invoke the image of the Library at Alexandria as the archetypal universal library. This was, after all, the last time a civilization managed to gather all of its accumulated knowledge under one roof. But the real Alexandria was much more than a giant papyrus warehouse; it was more like a Greco-Roman think tank, built with great colonnades and wide open spaces designed to draw scholars together, giving them a place to work together, engage in dialogue and debate, and practice Aristotle's famous peripatetic method: meaning literally, to walk around. The 500,000-odd scrolls were certainly a big draw, but the library was more than a depository. It was a living, human institution.

The great monastic libraries of medieval Europe, contrary to the popular stereotype, were not silent study halls for cloistered monks. They were noisy places where scribes, bookbinders and other artisans collaborated to create the astonishing illuminated manuscripts that flourished in the age before Gutenberg. Some visitors called them "houses of mumblers" because the monks liked to recite their texts out loud while they copied them. These, too, were living places, devoted not just to book preservation but to bringing scholars together to work with each other in the three-dimensional world.

Even in the silent reading rooms of our modern libraries, a kind of quiet collaboration takes place among readers, librarians, and authors. There is a tacit sense of community, and a reassuring solidity in the shared physical space that seems to provide an antidote to the specter of loneliness. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that the emergence of the Internet has coincided with a doubling of public library attendance?

The current vision of the digital library rests on a deeply flawed assumption: that the function of libraries is to connect solitary readers with isolated texts. If that were so, then we could easily replace our libraries with book scanners, search engines, and laptops. And if the shape of human knowledge really rests in the Dewey Decimal System, then, well, we are surely in trouble.

Technologists have an unfortunate tendency to view the world in mechanistic terms, as a set of problems waiting to be solved. As a result, they often fixate easily on the most obvious and reducible problems - like retrieving a book from the stacks - while discounting the subtler and qualitative dimensions of human experience. We need books, yes, but somehow we also seem to need physical places to read them, together. This is why a collection of digital books is no more a library than a stack of paintings is a museum.

• Alex Wright, a former Harvard librarian, is currently writing a book about the history of the information age.

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The Clock and Library Projects

Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span. The trend might be coming from the acceleration of technology, the short-horizon perspective of market-driven economics, the next-election perspective of democracies, or the distractions of personal multi-tasking. All are on the increase. Some sort of balancing corrective to the short-sightedness is needed-some mechanism or myth which encourages the long view and the taking of long-term responsibility, where 'long-term' is measured at least in centuries. Long Now proposes both a mechanism and a myth. It began with an observation and idea by computer scientist Daniel Hillis:

"When I was a child, people used to talk about what would happen by the year 2000. For the next thirty years they kept talking about what would happen by the year 2000, and now no one mentions a future date at all. The future has been shrinking by one year per year for my entire life. I think it is time for us to start a long-term project that gets people thinking past the mental barrier of an ever-shortening future. I would like to propose a large (think Stonehenge) mechanical clock, powered by seasonal temperature changes. It ticks once a year, bongs once a century, and the cuckoo comes out every millennium."

Such a clock, if sufficiently impressive and well engineered, would embody deep time for people. It should be charismatic to visit, interesting to think about, and famous enough to become iconic in the public discourse. Ideally, it would do for thinking about time what the photographs of Earth from space have done for thinking about the environment. Such icons reframe the way people think.

Hillis, who developed the 'massive parallel' architecture of the current generation of supercomputers, devised the mechanical design of the Clock and is now building the second prototype (the first prototype is on display in London at the Science Museum). The Clock's works consist of a binary digital-mechanical system which is so accurate and revolutionary that we have patented several of its elements. (With 32 bits of accuracy it has precision equal to one day in 20,000 years, and it self-corrects by 'phase-locking' to the noon Sun.) For the way the eventual Clock is experienced (its size, structure, etc.), we expect to keep proliferating design ideas for a while. In 01999 Long Now purchased part of a mountain in eastern Nevada whose high white limestone cliffs may make an ideal site for the ultimate 10,000-year Clock. In the meantime Danny Hillis and Alexander Rose continue to experiment with ever-larger prototype Clocks.

Long Now added a "Library" dimension with the realization of the need for content to go along with the long-term context provided by the Clock - a library of the deep future, for the deep future. In a sense every library is part of the 10,000-year Library, so Long Now is developing tools (such as the Rosetta Disk, The Long Viewer the Long Server) that may provide inspiration and utility to the whole community of librarians and archivists. The Long Bets project - whose purpose is improving the quality of long-term thinking by making predictions accountable - is also Library-related.

The point is to explore whatever may be helpful for thinking, understanding, and acting responsibly over long periods of time.

-Stewart Brand

Updated March of 02002
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>By Alison Maitland
>Published: September 28 2005 03:00 | Last updated: September 28 2005 03:00
>>

The grey hairs are rapidly showing in the oil and gas industry in Europe and the US. At an estimated average age of 49, half the workforce is expected to retire in the next five to 10 years. The US nursing and teaching professions face a similar demographic crunch, as do aerospace and utilities companies.

These sectors are experiencing labour shortages as younger people balk at heavy manual work, unsociable hours and "unsexy" skills such as engineering. Employers are being forced both to find imaginative recruitment solutions and to consider how to hang on to mature workers for longer.

It is into this tricky territory that IBM, the world's largest technology company, is stepping with the launch today of consulting services to help companies prepare for the potential loss of skills as the baby-boom generation reaches retirement.

IBM says it is offering a comprehensive package that includes analysis of companies' workforce demographics and skills, job modification and training of older employees to maintain productivity and methods to capture their knowledge and pass it to the next generation, possibly through modern apprenticeships.

"The ageing population will be one of the major social and business issues of the 21st century," says Mary Sue Rogers, head of IBM's 3,500-strong human capital management consulting group that will provide the new services. The company is responding to requests for help from clients, especially in the US, Canada, Scandinavia, Germany and Italy.

Niche consultants and human resources specialists such as Mercer and Hewitt Associates are already active in the field. Angela Watson, worldwide partner of Mercer, says: "There has been a bit of a push from the marketplace in terms of addressing critical skill shortages re-lated to age and experience."

But global consulting companies have not moved in with innovative services, say independent experts. Deborah Russell, head of economic security at the American Association of Retired Persons, points out that many employers have not yet woken up to the demographic shifts that may confront them within a decade.

"I can't say there are droves of consulting firms advising employers about ageing workforce issues as yet," says Ms Russell. "We are always looking . . . because we see the value of working with big consulting firms. Employers still view the AARP as advocates - so of course we are going to say positive things about older workers. Consulting firms bring credibility."

As this is an emerging market, estimates of its potential size are hard to come by. Ms Rogers expects to have a better idea in the next six to 12 months: "We'll see this market mature and change over the next five years and we want to be in there at the beginning."

There are pointers, however, in population projections. In five years' time, for example, nearly 30 per cent of the Japanese population will be over 60, up from 17 per cent in 1990, according to US Census Bureau data. Around 26 per cent of Italians and Germans will be over 60, up from 21 and 20 per cent respectively in the early 1990s.

There is also survey evidence that many people expect to work beyond traditional retirement age but in a more flexible way, posing challenges for employers in reshaping jobs to attract or keep them. A new survey for IBM of 1,000 American workers aged 45 to 65 shows that half plan to work beyond 65 because they need the income or want to stay active. Two-thirds think their experience is transferable to other sectors.

The experience of employers in countries with fast-ageing populations such as Finland and Australia shows that successful recruitment and retention of mature workers requires sensitive management and culture change, areas in which occupational health and psychology play an important role.

IBM plans to use "cultural anthropologists" and social scientists to help clients understand the impact of an ageing workforce. But its new service draws heavily on its existing strengths in IT and outsourcing. "The solutions are going to be increasingly process and technology-driven," says IBM. The taxonomy of [companies'] population is data-driven. Capturing knowledge is in many ways IT-driven."

IBM cites the transformation of its own internal travel expenses process from a paper-based system to an online tool. It says the 3,000 processing staff, many of whom are babyboomers, have been transformed into consultants, selling the application to other companies. "They went from being an internal cost centre to an external billable resource."

Project BackPack and SeedWiki

Saturday 10 September 2005
Berkeley, CA
----------------

Last week, three school-age sisters in a Washington DC suburb watched the televised stream of images of Katrina refugee families. They wanted to know how they could help their peers, the children in their age-groups now in temporary shelters, far from their destroyed homes and forever away from possessions that helped frame their lives. These sisters talked to their father about an idea: the idea was to send children the thing every kid has - a backpack of things ranging from clothes and small toys to school supplies.

Project Backpack - a relief effort for the children of Katrina, was born from this simple idea and helped along with a handful of emails to fellow parents in that suburb. Within a few days hundreds of children and their parents were filling backpacks and preparing them for shipment to refugee sites in Texas. Three days later, participants numbered in the thousands. A public radio news piece about these children helping children fed the strength of the effort. People from all 50 states emailed they wanted to help. From a goal of 1000 backpacks, over 5000 were collected in the first week and shipped to kids who need them.

What we are seeing is an amazing example of grass roots activism that emerges with remarkably little organizational support.

Support has come from another approach.

From the earliest days of the effort, the girls' father -- Steve Kantor -- used a kind of software that's only recently attracted any press attention. What Mr. Kantor used is something called a wiki.

Wikis are best thought of as a set of tools you use to build the kind of web site you need. They offer a collection of features that remind us of email, online meeting software, web- and desktop- publishing, databases, web portals, and social networking sites. In the case of Project Backpack, what was needed and what was quickly built was an interactive online 'place.'

Project Backpack selected an online environment named SeedWiki -- a product created and supported by a small eponymous Berkeley, California, company.

While it's impossible for anyone involved with this software genre to claim a long history, SeedWiki makes a convincing argument for its veteran status from having offered this tool for almost four years. SeedWiki has been a pioneer in creating easy-to-use online environments and it has led the nascent wiki industry in offering free and universal access to its services. Project Backpack is one of hundreds of organizations and work groups that use SeedWiki's hosting service.

In the first few days of the Project Backpack wiki, nearly 11,000 visitors have had the ability to read and contribute practical information and new ideas to the effort. This is more than a democratization of input: it is nothing less than accepting the reality that groups can collectively steer an organization. It is, as the wiki community often states, a reality where 'Everyone is smarter than any-one.'

The mushrooming success the Project Backpack is in no small way a by-product of the fact that site visitors from across the country have created links to more information about contacts and distribution centers. They have suggested other relief agencies that can work alongside this effort. And they have created new logos and brochures for volunteers to use as they help gather and ship these precious new possessions to the children of Katrina.

Steve Kantor says this best:

Project backpack took off because SeedWiki provided a tool to create something where no one was in charge but everyone was in charge.

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ESSAY; A Design Epiphany: Keep It Simple

By JESSIE SCANLON
Published: May 20, 2004

''WHAT'S that movie where the guy says, 'Plastics -- there's a great future in plastics'?'' John Maeda asks me. Before waiting for me to say ''The Graduate,'' he adds, ''I feel like that guy.''

If he were truly the Mr. McGuire of the 21st century, he'd be touting Google or biometrics, but I see the parallel. Dr. Maeda, an associate professor of design and computation at the M.I.T. Media Lab and an award-winning graphic designer, has spent eight months putting forward his own one-word vision of the future: simplicity.

There is too much needless complexity in the world, he argues. Technology, which was supposed to make our lives easier, has taken a wrong turn. In 20 years we've gone from the simplicity of MacPaint to Photoshop. While the first fostered a creative explosion, the second gave birth to an industry of how-to books and classes. And such complexity is commonplace, Dr. Maeda says. Despite the lip service paid to ''ease of use,'' ''plug and play,'' and ''one-click shopping,'' simplicity is an endangered quality in the digital world, he adds, and it is time to break free from technology's intimidating complexity.

This was the argument Dr. Maeda made last August when he called to tell me about the Simplicity Design Workshop, an initiative that would bring working designers to the Media Lab to collaborate with researchers. He had signed on Bill Moggridge of the design consultancy Ideo, Alexander Gelman of the New York-based graphics studio Design Machine, and Charlie Lazor from the hip Minneapolis furniture company Blu Dot as fellows for the first year of the program. He wanted me to be the design-writing fellow -- someone to shadow and chronicle the workshop proceedings.

Simplicity is hardly a new idea. ''Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler,'' Albert Einstein is often quoted as saying. His actual wording was a tad more convoluted, but in any case, few in Silicon Valley heeded his advice. Conventional wisdom held that to sell the latest version or next generation of a product, you had to add new functions. ''That's not the only thing driving the industry,'' says Walter Bender, the executive director of the Media Lab. ''But I don't think I've ever seen a piece of commercial software where the next version is simpler rather than more complex.''

The Windows operating system is a case in point. According to Gary McGraw, chief technology officer at the software consultant Cigital, the 2000 version of Windows had 20 million lines of source code. XP, released in 2001, had 40 million -- a doubling in less than two years. Critics of such complexity have offered myriad solutions. Writing about the ''threshold of frustration,'' Bill Buxton, a former chief scientist at the graphics software maker Alias who now runs a consulting firm, called for engineers to focus less on technology and more on who, what, when, where, why -- that is, how it's being used. He promotes the idea of information appliances, or machines tailored to a specific task, rather than general-use PC's. Others have criticized the industry for an obsession with beauty and technology at the expense of user-centered design.

Dr. Maeda says the solution is not better design or better technology but a better partnership between the two. Hence the Simplicity Design Workshop, which could leverage the lab's understanding of emerging technologies and the real-world experience of the designers into a series of concrete, well tested principles.

In January Mr. Moggridge of Ideo met with a Media Lab group led by Cynthia Breazeal, an assistant professor of media arts and sciences, to try to define simplicity. It was easy to embrace the concept, with its connotations of beauty and elegance and its promise of a better way, but what did it mean in practical terms?

They considered examples of simplicity: the iPod for its minimalist form and intuitive interface; Google for its straightforward, no-fuss approach to searching; the Screwpull wine-bottle opener for its mechanical elegance; Apple Keynote (rival to PowerPoint) for its subtle pop-up indicators that help you align and position elements like a pro. (Not to mention the Citroën 2CV for its, well, social engineering: a high roof to accommodate the hats of French farmers, and other details that helped the car blend seamlessly into its drivers' lives.)

The brainstorm suggested crucial elements: transparency, aesthetic appeal, restraint, just-in-time information. ''We started with the big picture: what does simplicity mean in the context of our work?'' said Dr. Breazeal, a pioneer of social robotics whose current project is building a learning companion robot called RoCo. ''But the real value is to see how Bill approaches the problem of design.''

''Our interaction with Bill introduced us to alternative techniques,'' she said. ''For instance, he shared Ideo's brainstorming cards, which will be a wonderful tool for thinking about how to incorporate human-interaction issues into the early stages of design.''

In a second collaboration, Mr. Gelman of Design Machine teamed up with a group developing OpenAtelier, a Web-based collection of software tools for drawing, painting, photography, video and text-editing. Specifically, he designed a series of interfaces that, through simple changes in the size of the icons or in the use of boxes to delineate options, were geared toward different users: adults, children, the elderly.

The principle seemed to be macro-personalization -- the equivalent of this newspaper's special Large Type Weekly edition for the sight-impaired -- rather than the micro-personalization offered by a My Yahoo page. It's easy to see the potential for, say, type-enlarged TurboTax forms for aging boomers.

From the first year's efforts, some tenets of simplicity have emerged:

1.Heed cultural patterns. The iPod, for instance, succeeded not just because of its sleek form, but because, in conjunction with iTunes, it solved so many of the problems of buying and storing music.

2.Be transparent. People like to have a mental model of how things work.

3.Edit. Simplicity hinges as much on cutting nonessential features as on adding helpful ones, the Newton MessagePad and the Palm Pilot being prime examples.

4.Prototype. Push beyond proof-of-technology demos and build prototypes that people can interact with.

Beyond principles, the project seems to have coalesced around specific emerging technologies that promise to be the pillars of simplicity. The first is visualization and the need for tools to display complex information in a meaningful way.

''Think of the sophistication of interacting with today's video games compared to working with an Excel spreadsheet,'' Dr. Maeda says. ''We need to bring dynamic, immersive, engaging visuals to a whole range of information-display problems, from handling messages in your e-mail in-box to mapping the genome.''

Another important research area is ambient intelligence. Wi-Fi, radio-frequency identification, and other wireless developments will allow people to obtain and transmit digital information through ordinary objects and surfaces. The mouse and keyboard won't be our only bridge to the digital world.

A third arm of research focuses on making computers smarter. One method, a new branch of artificial intelligence, aims to give computers common sense in the form of a vast database of mundane truths about the world (the sky is blue, coffee wakes you up). A second approach, affective computing, gathers information about the state of the user through a range of sensors, enabling the computer to adapt by, say, holding delivery of all but high-priority e-mail when it detects stress.

As the first year of the workshop ends, the most obvious conclusion is that it has barely scratched the surface. With every Consumer Electronics Show, we seem to wade deeper into the ''paradox of the digital age,'' in the words of the computer scientist and design critic Donald Norman: the very technologies that we hope will simplify life ultimately complicate it. But there is hope. As Mr. Moggridge says, ''Technology is the villain, as well as the exciting opportunity.''

The Business of Design

In an economy where style is king, we all need to start thinking and acting more like design.

Quick, what's your IQ? No, not your intelligence quotient -- your imagination quotient. In this turbulent, get-real economy, the advantage goes to those who can outimagine and outcreate their competitors. So says Roger Martin, who has devoted his professional life to the study of competition -- first as a director at Monitor Co., the Boston-based consultancy, and now as dean of the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management.

Martin believes that the North American economy is radically transforming. As the production of goods and services increasingly becomes routinized, the cost advantages across a growing array of industries accrue to China and India. Scale alone is not enough to thrive in a world where markets are rapidly globalizing; incremental improvement won't deliver a decent ROI. Our companies will continue to prosper only if they push to the higher ground of innovating and creating "elegant, refined products and services" -- which might well be produced elsewhere.

The upshot, says Martin, is nothing less than the emergence of the design economy -- the successor to the information economy, and, before it, the service and manufacturing economies. And that shift, he argues, has profound implications for every business leader and manager among us: "Businesspeople don't just need to understand designers better -- they need to become designers."

In a global economy, elegant design is becoming a critical competitive advantage. Trouble is, most business folks don't think like designers.

In a recent interview in Toronto, Martin asserted that real value creation now comes from using the designer's foremost competitive weapon, his imagination, to peer into a mystery -- a problem that we recognize but don't understand -- and to devise a rough solution that explains it. "For any company that chooses to innovate, the foremost challenge is this," Martin says. "Are you willing to step back and ask, 'What's the problem we're trying to solve?' Well, that's what designers do: They take on a mystery, some abstract challenge, and they try to create a solution."

The trouble is, when confronted with a mystery, most linear business types resort to what they know best: They crunch the numbers, analyze, and ultimately redefine the problem "so it isn't a mystery anymore; it's something they've done 12 times before," Martin says. Most don't avail themselves of the designer's tools -- they don't think like designers -- and so they are ill-prepared for an economy where the winners are determined by design.

And that, Martin claims, means traditional organizations must reinvent themselves to perform more like design shops. In this new world, there are fewer fixed, permanent assignments. Instead, work flows from project to project, and people organize their lives around their projects, just as in a design shop. Accenture, for example, is more efficient in part because it's a project-based organization -- it doesn't staff up for things that aren't projects, and it doesn't allow projects to become permanent.

Design-influenced companies also understand their customers at a profound level and mobilize around that insight. The Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts' detailed study of customers led it to conclude that it could win by offering first-class service, and so it invested enormously in recruitment and training. The chain visualized the desired outcome -- "make people feel great" -- and reinvented itself to deliver an exceptional "user" experience.

Organizations that embrace a design-based strategy also employ the practice of rapid prototyping. Whereas conventional companies won't bring a product to market until it's "just right," the design shop is unafraid to move when the product is unfinished but "good enough." Designers learn by doing: They identify weaknesses and make midflight corrections along the way.

Design's powerful impact on business strategy will require a whole new way of thinking. Martin asserts that traditional companies "reward two types of logic: inductive (proving that something actually operates) and deductive (proving that something must be)." Designers combine inductive and deductive reasoning to create a fresh approach -- abductive thinking -- which Martin defines as "suggesting that something may be and reaching out to explore it." Instead of acting on what's certain, designers bet on what's probable. Companies such as Apple act like design shops by saying, "If everything must be proven, we'll never make the likes of an iPod."

Martin believes that business schools are also out of position for the emerging design-based economy. In his view, even the degree -- a master's of business administration -- is problematic. "We're telling students that the big bucks are made by administering linear improvements -- getting better and better at doing essentially the same thing," he says. "But the real challenge lies in getting better and better at a different thing: devising clever solutions to wickedly difficult problems."

That view has led Martin and a handful of other pioneers to lead a groundbreaking effort to redesign business education itself. In a first step, Rotman has allied with the Ontario College of Art & Design to launch a series of joint courses. The Illinois Institute of Technology's Institute of Design recently launched a nine-month-long executive master's degree program in design methods. And Stanford University has committed $35 million to launch its "d.school," where people from large companies and startups alike will come to learn design thinking. "We want to produce T-shaped thinkers," says David Kelley, the chairman of Ideo and founder of the d.school. "That means combining analytical thinking -- the vertical leg of the T -- with horizontal thinking: intuitive, experimental, and empathetic."

And that's only the beginning. Rotman, the Institute of Design, and the d.school are in the early stages of mapping out a new discipline, "business design," which will seek to yoke business schools' rigor, practicality, and business relevance with design schools' creative problem solving and intensive understanding of the customer. The goal is to create a new generation of design- and business-based talent factories that will help fuel the North American economy as it undergoes its next great transformation.

Environmental Heresies
By Stewart Brand
TECHNOLOGY REVIEW: May 2005

http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/05/issue/feature_earth.asp?p=1

---

Over the next ten years, I predict, the mainstream of the environmental movement will reverse its opinion and activism in four major areas: population growth, urbani­zation, genetically engineered organisms, and nuclear power.

Reversals of this sort have occurred before. Wildfire went from universal menace in mid-20th century to honored natural force and forestry tool now, from “Only you can prevent forest fires!” to let-burn policies and prescribed fires for understory management. The structure of such reversals reveals a hidden strength in the environmental movement and explains why it is likely to keep on growing in influence from decade to decade and perhaps century to century.

The success of the environmental movement is driven by two powerful forces—romanticism and science—that are often in opposition. The romantics identify with natural systems; the scientists study natural systems. The romantics are moralistic, rebellious against the perceived dominant power, and combative against any who appear to stray from the true path. They hate to admit mistakes or change direction. The scientists are ethicalistic, rebellious against any perceived dominant paradigm, and combative against each other. For them, admitting mistakes is what science is.

There are a great many more environmental romantics than there are scientists. That’s fortunate, since their inspiration means that most people in developed socie­ties see themselves as environmentalists. But it also means that scientific perceptions are always a minority view, easily ignored, suppressed, or demonized if they don’t fit the consensus story line.

Take population growth. ...

February 15, 2005

YahooGroups, Groove Or Socialtext Wiki: My Personal Impressions
Online Collaboration

Social Networking

Thanks to the courtesy of Ross Mayfield (founder/CEO of SocialText -- TP), I have been experimenting with my small geographically dispersed team, how effective a wiki can be in supporting projects in which multiple professionals contribute and complement each other.

-------------------

In the past I have made heavy use of technologies at the extremes of the asynchronous collaboration spectrum. From completely free ones such as web-based YahooGroups, which offers everything from a mailing distribution list, to files archiving, polling of the group and calendaring, to much more versatile and rich commercial applications such as the desktop-based P2P full collaboration solution offered by Groove Virtual Office.

While the first approach has severe drawbacks in terms of privacy and intrusion from ads, both in the online facilities as well as in your inbox as a consequence of having signed up for a Yahoo service, the second one has issues relating to the level of computer hardware required, and the performance impact it may have on your other applications. Groove is also plagued by an excessively conservative and rigid access and protection system, great for enterprise customers, but absolutely suicidal for the SOHO and small business user.

I don't know how many of my colleagues and teammates have had to recur to re-install Groove from scratch as a consequence of the difficulty of storing or retrieving access codes once they are created. I myself have just lost my laptop, who died of over-resistance to being patched, and I am at a completely loss as to how I will be able to access again my account on Groove. I know I am not alone in this and I have duly reported my frustrations to Groove in the past. What I am asking is the provision of an option that allows the end user to select the level of security that she wants to enable at installation, while providing the ability to safely store and later retrieve one's own username and password with ease.

On Yahoogroups this is never an issue as, like most web-based systems it allows registered users to safely retrieve their username or password with a few steps that are easy and now familiar to many Internet users.

YAHOOGROUPS

But, and really I am just speaking of my own experience, I was never completely happy with either one of these systems.

As said, Yahoo annoyed me with too much advertisements both on its online facilities as well as in my inbox.

With Groove, I am never sure who I can safely invite without getting them in a complete nightmare. The issues that most frequently annoy my potential teammates are:

GROOVE

a) the need to download a large application

b) the fact that Groove demands a pretty recent hardware setup with a fast processor, lots of RAM memory and possibly a fast connection to the Internet too.

c) issues dictated by its complexity and richness, whereby not everyone can easily and promptly understand or find out how to achieve something.

d) the fact that Groove works only on the Windows platform. Like for all collaboration tools to be used in cross-enterprise teams, being limited to interoperate only with people having the same type of operating system is a great limitation today.

Happily, Groove can now be utilized also from ANY other operating system, thanks to the great work done by the PoPG team in the UK, who sells access to a supercool service called Blended Groove ($30/user/month) and which provides web-based access to your Groove account from anywhere and with ay type of OS.

But, as you can imagine this doesn't come for free. The Groove full version costs in excess of USD 170, (price actually varies depending on where you are located and in relation to the version you choose).

So, when I headed out to test Ross Mayfield's SocialText wiki workspace, I didn't expect much, as I thought wiki spaces allowed yes for collaborative posting of notes and files but not for much more of what I had become accustomed to find in these more established and popular collaboration solutions.

I was wrong.

As you can find out yourself by accessing the free 30-day try-out offered by SocialText, wikis can provide a very effective collaboration workspace that is both easy-to-use and rich enough in features to support many teamwork-based projects.

While each wiki (there are tens of different types of wiki technologies out there) can be rather different from another one, all wikis share one thing in common: they let users edit web-based content in a very simple and straightforward fashion providing great support to those projects where you need to post, comment, annotate and update information with other team members on a daily or even hourly basis.

Access is as fast as to getting to any standard web page. No software needs to be downloaded, no plugins need to be installed.

Navigation is immediately simple and once you understand how to do two things (create a new page and make a link to it) you can do most anything you want.

You can create pages with assignments, references, attached files and images that your selected teammates can access privately and update, extend, re-organize at any time they wish.

It is as simple as working inside a normal text editor. Text can be formatted very easily, and making a change to an online document requires only a few seconds.

Weblogs and RSS are integrated from day one. You can also create as many "workspaces" as you want and utilize each one of them to manage a different project or workgroup. Each workspace is in fact associated with the people you select and it is extremely easy to remove or invite new team members.

SocialText wiki workspaces generate email notifications, RSS feeds and Update pages that allow any team member to easily monitor and rack any progress and changes to the workspace without needing to access it directly.

Everything that is composed, edited and written in the wiki maintains a full track record of the changes made, and the administrator(s) can easily revert any document /web page to any previous state it was in.

Workspaces in the SocialText wiki can also receive emails from any of the team members, which are immediately organized and made available to all the other workspace members.

For my own experience, this is indeed a great collaboration technology that can be extremely useful to virtual teams of non-technically oriented people. It bridges ease of use and access with all the advantages of being web-based and open to any operating system.

If I were to recommend an alternative solution to the likes of Yahoogroups (and similar ones), Groove and other asynchronous collaboration spaces I would have no hesitation in indicating a wiki, and the Socialtext implementation in particular, as a great alternative to such other approaches.

Having worked daily on the SocialText wiki workspace for a few weeks now, I only have a couple of issues that I personally look forward to see improved:

a) Speed. For a web-based solution like the SocialText wiki, speed is of the essence. I mean, if I click on a Web page to edit it and I need to wait for 20 or more seconds while being on a T1, I may as well go back to Groove.

b) Cost. The SocialText wiki workspace is presently priced at $30/month/user. At this price level Ross is cutting out all of the professionals, SOHO companies and non-profit institutions out there, including a great deal of academic organizations. Not that the tool isn't worth that money each month, but being totally innovative collaborative technology, at least for the mainstream, a much lower entry price would positively guarantee much wider adoption. What is most ironic to me, is that those customers groups are probably the types of organizations that can take best advantage of this new technology, as large corporate accounts take a much longer incubation time to comprehend, test and certify such innovative technologies for adoption. My suggestion therefore is for greater diversification of the price offering and for a substantial lowering of the cost to professionals or small business teams (1-10) like the ones I often operate with.




To those of you that already use a wiki with productive results, I wish to ask which are the true alternatives to Ross' system and what are the differences in terms of costs and features?

For independent publishers, professional consultant, small virtual teams operating online is money spent on the SocialText wiki workspace well spent or should we be looking elsewhere?



posted by Robin Good on Tuesday February 15 2005

Tom Foremski: Blogging technology opens doors for enterprises
By Tom Foremski
Published: February 23 2005 07:50 | Last updated: February 23 2005 07:50


There is a new phase of the internet emerging and it is being fuelled by a new class of technologies coming out of Silicon Valley that don’t even have a name yet, but they have the potential to be disruptive in their application.

Some have begun calling this new phase Web 2.0, but I prefer the term internet 2.0 because it more accurately encompasses the broad nature of what is happening. Blogging, and blogging-like technologies such as wikis, are shaping up to become one of the most important features of internet 2.0. I would not be surprised if these technologies become recognised as the “killer applications” of the next few years.

Let me explain why I think these technologies are so groundbreaking. I know that most readers are familiar with the term “blogging” and many also read blogs. Their content consists mostly of personal views on the day’s events, and other subjects. The content of blogs, however, is not the interesting part – it is the underlying blogging software and its ability to automate the many tasks required to run a website. No technical skills are required of the writer, beyond being able to use a browser and the ability to type. For less than $100, blogging software such as the popular Movable Type, from Six Apart, is a good enough replacement for online content management systems costing more than 1,000 times as much.

That capability alone would be enough to be potentially disruptive to online publishing business models, but blogging technologies also come with a lot more, a distribution system that targets its audience perfectly. This is done through a feature called “trackback,” and a standard known as RSS (Real Simple Syndication). Trackback automatically detects if someone has published a link to your blog post, and it will publish their comment on your blog. This means that it doesn’t matter if a reader posts a comment on the writer’s blog, or, on another blog – the software tracks it all. The response of readers to a news story, for example, can be plainly seen in real-time. It also means that other bloggers, by writing a comment and publishing a link to the original story, become distributors of that content to their readers. And it shows that if the content is relevant, an audience will find it, and also personally recommend it to others through their blogs.

RSS is another way to distribute blog content. It allows readers to subscribe to a blog and read the content without having to visit the originating site. RSS makes it possible to aggregate the content from several sites within software called a “newsreader.”

Other types of related applications are wikis, which differ from blogs in that any reader can change the content of the web page. Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia written by internet users, is a good example of a wiki. It also showcases how wikis can be used as knowledge management systems.

Blogs have been around for several years and wikis are 10 years old. What is new however, is the realisation of the business uses for these types of technologies. If they can create communities of self-selected readers companies could potentially communicate directly with their customers. And customers can provide direct feedback to the companies. If it is done right, this means potentially huge savings in marketing, and market research activities.

Astonishingly, a very small number of people within the business community have figured this out. Even in Silicon Valley, the birthplace of blogging technologies, the common view is that it is a narcissistic activity by unemployed software engineers with plenty of time on their hands.

A few people are trying to educate the business community through conferences, and interest from corporations seems to be sparking up. For example, in late January 2005, I took part in a journalism panel at the New Communications Forum, one of the first US conferences on corporate use of blogging and wikis. Elizabeth Albrycht and Jennifer McClure, the organisers of the event, were having trouble reaching their modest goal of attracting 80 to a 100 people to the conference. “I don’t know why, but then suddenly, just days before the conference, we were swamped by people wanting to attend, and companies wanting to be sponsors,” says Ms Albrycht. Encouraged by its success, they are now preparing a similar conference for Paris in April, and one for New York in the autumn.

The enterprise sector is being targeted by new start-ups such as Jotspot, founded by Joe Kraus, the co-founder of Excite, once one of the largest search engine companies. “Corporate departments can use JotSpot to quickly and easily build custom business applications,” Mr Kraus says. Other entrepreneurs in this space include Ross Mayfield, of SocialText, also a developer of wikis for corporations. David Galbraith, one of the authors of RSS 1.0 has developed “Wists” a simple tool allowing users to create and publish online catalogues of images. In the UK, Fergus Burns heads Nooked, a company that helps enterprises manage their RSS feeds. And new types of web sites such as Flickr are creating novel communities and group activities that could not have been predicted.

A characteristic of these software technologies is that they behave as “platforms” that enable and support online communities on the internet or in the private corporate intranet. Social software is one label, but a more fitting one might be “community-ware” or even “community-aware” software.

Tom Foremski is a former Financial Times news reporter and now publishes SiliconValleyWatcher.com, a business news blog for northern California’s Silicon Valley. tom@siliconvalleywatcher.com

-------Hello Kind Reader,...Just a quick note that I've registered this book at BookCrossing.com, so that I can keep up on where it goes, who reads it, and what they thought of it. Please visit www.BookCrossing.com/888-287902 to make a quick journal entry, then pass the book along to someone else who will appreciate it. We can all track this book's journey and the lives it touches forever more!
-------Thank You! (NOTE: I've changed the number of the book)

Berkeley journal, Monday 7 feb 2005

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