O (b LOG N)

New Media douchebag, YAAY!

1. Don’t do real work
2. Talk, type, tag, text & twitter
3. Hate a lot of stuff
4. Celebrate other douchebags

Yaaaay!!

Quite a week

It’s been a busy week. Allow me to recap. I just started guest blogging at TechZulu. My first post about the San Diego Tech Meet Up and the SDTweetUp:

TechZulu: Let There Be Wine and Tweets

First post. Well, mine anyway. Vak introduced me previously. I’m happy to be a contributor here at TechZulu; although, TechZulu is a bit different for me being I’m usually blogging on geekier topics :-), but I’ll do my best. Now down to business. 

It’s been an eventful week in San Diego…

Then I was very pleased, and flattered, when a piece I wrote on open source in the enterprise at the MindTouch Blog was picked up by LinuxWorld. 

LinuxWorld: Open source infiltration?

Aaron Fulkerson has a thoughtful response to a recent Gartner Group study. "There can be no doubt that open source will continue to grow in usage and increasingly permeate IT infrastructures, but I agree with Radcliffe, this is going to happen much faster than Gartner predicts."

Finally, and best of all, was this very flattering mention I got (and all the fellows at MindTouch) at ReadWriteWeb.

Aaron Fulkerson and the MindTouch Team

MindTouch, the makers of the DekiWiki platform, is a social media company that eats its own dog food very publicly. Every member of the team contributes to the company blog, discussing not just product developments but also general interest industry news.

The company’s active developer forums are filled with media that users are able to repurpose for their own evangelism. The company integrates with a substantial number of other developer-level social media technologies.

They also use the sophisticated Viddler video platform so their videos can be tagged and commented on. See the down-home 4 minute example demo video below, the only thing missing is audio quality.

As a result of all this material being made available and the company’s high degree of visibility in several social media fora, the marketability of the widely appreciated wiki software is further amplified. Mindtouch says their enterprise wiki software is downloaded 3,000 times every day.

I responded to this honor at the MindTouch blog. All in all, a great week.

WebVentures

I spent the first half of this week at the Dow Jones WebVentures conference in San Mateo. Ken Liu, the CEO Steve and I brought in November, presented in two sessions and I ran a booth. The booth was a good buy for us. The cost was very reasonable, there was a total of five exhibitors, and we were the only exhibitor worth talking to. No offense to the others, but they were just not interesting to the conference goers. There was an executive recruitment firm, a law firm, a financial services firm, and some booth that just had a TV playing. Seriously, someone setup a table, a tv, and hit play. Not one person even bothered looking at it. I have no idea what the company did, I can’t remember the name of the company, nor do I care to. Equally strange was the person manning the law firm’s booth. She literally barricaded herself behind with a large retractable upright banner, a table, and other things. You couldn’t even see her because she was behind the banner, behind the table, and her nose was buried in some reading material. Not exactly someone you would want to talk to even if you did see her. She may as well have setup a TV and hit play. It likely would have been more effective. Why even bother? Clearly we were a hit in this crowd.

There was a lot of interest in our newest product. With this we’re helping online publishers, media, newspapers to create and steer quality user generated content and weave it into their editorial content. In short we’re giving traditional online media companies the ability to have a social media initiative that they can have a reasonable level of control over. This provides stickiness, freshness of content, authenticity, and most importantly: inventory. It’s interesting stuff. The industry is desperate for this. We’ve began developing this product because we’ve been approached several times by media companies that have asked us for exactly this. We’re getting a lot of traction in the industry and we got a lot of traction at WebVentures.

While at WebVentures I met some interesting people and I learned about some interesting companies and lots of very uninteresting ones. The companies I found interesting included: BigTribe (which is begging for a wiki), Dapper, Mashery, and Multiply. Mashery was started by Oren who shared a table with me at DemoFall. He happened to be present when I made a total ass of myself. For the record, my nerves got the better of me when the panelist couldn’t hear me and I misunderstood this. No Marc Orchant I wasn’t being arrogant. To the contrary. Anyway, have you heard of Multiply? Neither had I. I ended up at the same table during the cocktail hour with Multiply’s Founder and CEO, Peter. He’s a really nice guy. Interesting fact about Peter: he was user #56 on Slashdot. Turns out Multiply has 4 Million registered users, 13 Million visitors monthly and 1 BILLION page views monthly! EGAD, And I’ve never heard of this company…odd. Peter was fun to chat with. We shared drinks and conversation for a couple hours. I pushed Peter on adopting OpenID and he had a very logical and disappointing response. His point was that OpenID, currently, is only interesting to smaller, up and coming, companies. For companies with medium to large sized communities there is a disincentive to consuming OpenID. Sure they’ll merrily be a provider, but why should they make it easy for their community to be mobile?

In many of the panels at this event there was much todo about many of the traditional walled garden social networking sites. I am convinced when identity becomes distributed and mobile these walled gardens will cease to exist. We the users will own the nexus of our relationships with others, the content we’ve created, the content we read regularly, and how we define ourselves. This nexus can also help us define how our content can be consumed and by whom. Will we need the old walled garden model? How will they adapt?

I ran into Dave Hersh from Jive again. I was on a panel with him at Community 2.0. He’s a bright guy and fun to speak with. I also met Isaac Garcia the CEO and Co-Founder of Central Desktop. He too seemed to be an intelligent and friendly fellow. I enjoyed speaking with him and we did so at length. He was as open about his business as I’ve always been with mine. The biggest surprise that came out of Isaac’s and my conversation was that he was as confused by the folks at Dynamo with respect to the Wiki.com domain as everyone else was. Wild stuff.

In conclusion, WebVentures was a successful and rewarding event. I even enjoyed it. I don’t know why this surprises me. Maybe I’ve just become accustomed to and fond of geeky events like the upcoming Etech that I’m attending.