O (b LOG N)

Enterprise 2.0 Implementation - Integrate Web 2.0 Services Into Your Enterprise

I’m not sure if I mentioned that I recently did some work with Jeremy Thomas and and Aaron Newman on a book for McGraw-Hill. I provided the technical editing. It was a lot of fun, informative, and I got paid. Heck yah! I guess this makes me an expert on Enterprise 2.0 or something.

I’m excited to see the book hit the stands and to read the final version. The book is really a fantastic resource that provides just the right mix of technical and high level information. It will prove highly useful to the IT and business reader alike.

Pre-order today and save 37%.

Social Glass » Why It’s Been Quiet

Aaron Newman and I have been working for several months on putting an Enterprise 2.0 implementation guide together. Aaron Fulkerson, CEO of MindTouch, has been doing the tech editing for us. And we’ll have another all-star, Jevon MacDonald, doing the forward for us. This is my first book, and let me tell you the process is extensive. Figures and illustrations have to follow a special naming pattern, chapters have to meet pre-determined page counts, and the tone of the book has to be consistent (which is tough when you have two authors writing it). Aaron and I edited each other’s chapters as they were completed, then sent them on to Aaron F. for more editing.

Hulu

Hulu gave me butterflies in my belly, but will they last? I have my doubts.

Hulu means “cease” and “desist” in Swahili and in case you missed it, Hulu.com is a new site that’s a joint venture of NBC and News Corp. Here’s what the Hulu About page says:

Hulu’s ambitious and never-ending mission is to help you find and enjoy the world’s premium content when, where and how you want it. We hope to provide you with the web’s most comprehensive selection from more than 50 content providers including FOX, NBC, MGM, Sony Pictures Television, Warner Bros., Lionsgate, and more to deliver premium programming across all genres and formats, television shows, feature films, and clips. Watch full-length episodes of current primetime TV shows such as The Simpsons and The Office the morning after they air, classics like Miami Vice and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and clips from Saturday Night Live, Nip/Tuck, and others. Hulu also offers full-length feature films like The Usual Suspects, Ice Age, Three Amigos!, and The Big Lebowski as well as clips from films such as Napoleon Dynamite, The 40 Year Old Virgin, Devil Wears Prada and many more. Hulu is free and ad-supported — available anytime in the U.S.

Hulu was founded in March 2007 and is a joint venture owned by NBC Universal and News Corp. In addition, Hulu has closed a $100 million investment from private equity firm Providence Equity Partners.

Hulu’s small, but growing team is headquartered in Los Angeles, California with a Research and Development team in Beijing, China.

Hulu launched publicly in the last week (or two). The site’s user interface is fantastic, the video quality is good enough for me, and the content is remarkably sparse. In fact, the lack of content is down right disappointing. When I heard of the site’s impending launch several months back I had high hopes. Tonight I visited the site for the first time hoping I could watch "Heroes"; unfortunately, only Season 2 is available. Another complaint: Why can’t I embed videos? They’re running ads periodically in the video, they’re getting their money. Why not allow me to embed videos?

Even with the disappointing lack of content the site got me excited. Maybe the TV networks are waking up. There can be no doubt the future of TV distribution is the Internet. I hope the networks embrace this sooner rather than later and provide us with the content we want, on our terms. Hulu hasn’t realized this, but it’s got promise. More than any other implementation, I’ve seen thus far.  I hope they don’t lose interest or steam, but I’m realistic about these things. Check it out yourself, it’s free if you don’t count the commercials every ~10 minutes.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      

Windows Live Writer

I just read Roy’s blog post about XML-RPC interfaces and client side blog writers. I’ve tried out ScribeFire, which Roy reviews with:

ScribeFire seems *very* *very* unpolished. Their forums are filled with reports, and nobody responding to them. It didn’t seem to work very well with my test Tabulas account, so I’m not exactly filled with hope on that front.

I tried out ScribeFire a few months back and was initially very pleased with it. However, after a couple weeks of fighting with bugs I abandoned the plugin. It was just so damn buggy. Anyway, Roy mentioned Windows Live Writer; so, I downloaded and installed it. This is my first official post with it. Wow! this is frickin’ sweet. This is a really polished product. It’s even elegant, which is a clear indication this product was a Microsoft acquisition. It even has a bunch of useful plugins for things like Flickr, Picasa, paste from Visual Studio with syntax highlighting, and more.

I do have to complain about the install experience. It took forever. I have no idea what it was analyzing, but it "scanned" my computer for minutes. Also, it’s a damn shame Live Writer isn’t still open source as it was prior to the Microsoft acquisition of the company. Why Microsoft felt the need to close source this is beyond me. Doing so only diminishes the value of the product to users and Microsoft. Just idiotic.

Kwwwhaaatt…oh, I mean Kwout

MindTouch - MindTouch via kwout

Kwout? Kwhat? What a stupid name. They should provide a pronunciation key. I’m pronouncing it K-what. Maybe I’m supposed to pronounce it K-wa-out. Err…maybe it’s Q-U-O-T-E. Anyway it’s it’s a painful domain. Kind of like the word “Syrup”. I hate that word. Or Persai. That’s a totally lame word too. Uncov totally flames this service here:

uncov / Kwuot. Um, what? (kwuot) via kwout

It’s not bad. The User Experience is kind of crappy. I can’t seem to get that slider to work for me. Granted I have my mouse speed maxed out and my screen resolution is 1920×1200. Well, I think it’s a novel service. Dear Ted: Like I want to fire up Gimp to take a screen shot and create an image map.

In case you’ve missed the point of K-W-OUT, mouse over the image above. You’ll notice the screen shot provides working links by creating an image map that provides click-able links of the page’s hyperlinked text and images. I think it’s cool.

What’s the business model? Got me. I would dig it if Jing did this for me and posted it to Flickr though. Now that would be an interesting challenge and it might even be a useful tool and service.

Wiki.ObLogN.com, a Christmas wiki

As you might suspect, given my affinity for wikis, I’ve a personal wiki. This is running at the un-announced shared hosted site that I won’t mention by name, but I will provide a link to it. I plan to do a complete write-up about this at the work blog in the new year when we announce the service, but by then this gorgeous Christmas theme Damien built will be obsolete. I’m using the Pro version of this service, which gives me 10GB of storage, a custom domain, and custom HTML regions that allow me to injects ads, widgets, Google analytics, whatever into the site. It’s a killer service. I use it a lot for taking notes, sharing files, aggregating content in one view from all over and for keeping private communications. The Pro version is only $60/year. The free version is ad-free and limited to 100MB of storage, but I think we’re going to drop that down to 15MB of storage. I suspect this service will cut into some of the competitors’ market in the shared hosted/software as a service wiki offerings that are charging several thousands of dollars for a weaker feature set, user limitations, and quite frankly an inferior wiki. This is the best damn wiki you can find, you can do mashups, you can run your own ads, and you’ve got the richest enterprise wiki feature set available. For free…or $60/year.

We’ve intentionally kept this service quiet since the Holidays crept up on us while we were still working out some last minute kinks in the service. Announcing it now would be pointless because it would just get lost in the Holidays. Moreover, we’ve still got some minor kinks to get around and we’re already getting a lot of traffic to the site just through the word of mouth of the community. In fact, we’re all pleasantly surprised by the number of Pro registrations we’re getting a day. I’ve seen lots of churches, schools, Universities, orgs, and some businesses going Pro in the last few weeks.

This wiki service is a great extension to a blog because it provides a fully customizable, persistent and collaborative authoring tool. For example, let’s assume you blog about online marketing. Well, your blog is a tool for you to publish time sensitive information on the subject. However, frequently there is the need for a more persistent information architecture. Also, the wiki can provide a medium for building a community around your blog by which you allow your audience to participate in the conversation in a more meaningful way than allowed by comments. It’s important to note that this particular service also allows you to easily and automatically aggregate content from all over the Internet on particular topics. Moreover, you can easily create rich application mashups to serve as interactive extensions to your blog posts. These can include interactive maps, charts, graphs, forms, countless widgets, flickr, news feeds, video, search tools, and more… I’m certain it will soon be the case that all bloggers with a community they’re looking to engage will have a wiki extension to their blog sites to facilitate a richer engagement with their audience and to provide persistent and more robust information sharing.

ScribeFire, a firefox addon for blogging

I’m writing a blog post using ScribeFire, a Firefox addon for blogging. With ScribeFire you can setup multiple blogs to publish to. It has WYSIWYG, markup, and preview modes. That’s pretty cool. It seems like a more usable interface than Wordpress’ publishing interface. Specifically because of the tabbed edit and preview modes. I’m not certain what editor it’s using, but I don’t really care because I’ll happily markup my posts. I’m not certain this auto-saves though. I don’t believe it does so beware. You can tag posts, see and edit recent posts, pages, and create notes. I’m not sure what a note is though. There is a lack of support for Wordpress tags. It labels Wordpress categories as tags and does not provide an interface for tagging using the new Wordpress tag feature. Although, it does provide an easy way to inject Technorati tags and provides an interface for Del.icio.us. Not that I care about technorati tags. Overall, I’d say this is a keeper and I’m pretty sure it’s going to save me time while I blog between both my personal and work blog.

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