Unbound Spiral

A Wonderful article "Smarter, Simpler, Social".  provides a great introduction to social software.

A few perspective sentences that really grabbed me.  

•  " Enterprise software itself is grounded in out-dated "process thinking".....
• “free online social applications are achieving usage levels and a depth of user engagement that enterprise software purchasers can only dream about....”
•  “the popular model of the value chain is also an engineering concept, derived from expanding the process view to the business as a whole. …
•   closed networks amplifies predispositions….
•  Maintain a healthy level of connections between people so that when and where they need to they can connect effectively with others….

The authors also make a nice point about emergent metadata.---- goes beyond syndication toward synchronization.  ….. Manage personal knowledge according to their own individual perspectives.  This all after starting the piece noting busineses face a crisis

It's the individual area I think I'd like to learn more about.  Maybe it is just a suspicion, but smarter, simpler, social seems to miss out an individual element.  Perhaps it is self evident.  Smarter simpler software at the individual level then enables new opportunities to emerge.  Just like mass customization I suspect the individual has a larger role to play. I’d add the individual is also the customer.

Personal knowledge spaces are very real-time. Expanding real-time PKS will enable more innovation though better connectivity.  Some time back I blogged a short piece PKnF – Personal Knowledge networking Friends.  

A parallel piece --- one that is completely counter-intuitive to most is www.xpertweb.com and what Brit and Flemming are doing.  It’s a new form of knowledge contracting.  It’s time is nearing.  Add to that the capability to hold the library of congress on our key chain, the question may be how we make it much more useful?  

Howard in Smart Mobs - on Social Software.  Great links. 

"note that when a particular group of people uses social software for long enough -- whether it is synchronous or asynchronous, deskbound or mobile, text or graphical -- they establish individual and group social relationships that are different in kind from the more fleeting relationships that emerge from task-oriented group formation"

Something new is happening, truly, in terms of the kinds of software available, and the scale of use. But in many ways, this something new would not be happening if many people over many years had not coded, experimented, socialized, observed, and debated the social relationships and group formation enabled by computer-mediated and Internet-enabled communication media.

 

Like most things it turns out Blikis' and BlogWiki's are not new, in fact a few pioneering spirits have been working on this meme for some time. In my last post I mentioned my desire to explore wiki/MT connections.   

See BlogTweaks which should be written as a WikiWord is Chris Dents integration of Purple numbers and his MT blog.  It's not clear to me yet if this has progressed to an MT plug-in. 

Collaboration Roadmap (WebSeitzWiki) Bob Seitz says he's interested in making groups more effective at both thinking and doing.  "Collective Intelligence" is the paradigm I think he's looking for.  I particularly like his "Universal Inbox".  The word "dashboard" is particularly appropriate. 

Martin Fowler's Bliki says "I wanted something that was a cross between a wiki and a blog - which Ward Cunningham immediately dubbed a bliki. Like a blog, it allows me to post short thoughts when I have them. Like a wiki it will build up a body of cross-linked pieces that I hope will still be interesting in a year's time." This later thought could be very powerful in a collaborative blogging environment.

From there I caught a link to SnipSnap  some free and easy to install Weblog and Wiki Software written in Java. I was ready to download that too and try it.  Except the install instructions were on the cryptic side. I wasn't really sure I'd get it to work on my server in just a few minutes.   

Are blogs and wiki's converging?  Are bliki's the future?  There's merits in following this scenario and keeping more than a watching eye. 

Tom Coates article "Discussion and Citation in the Blogsphere" is a must read for anyone thinking about the impact of blogging on threaded discusssions.  Great diagrams and analysis. 

What made this post particularly relevant for me it I'm trapped between a set of forums and an online blog discussion.  Not to mention e-mail, IM and Wiki's.  I've been on a mission, both personal and with colleagues to create a more collaborative roadmap for ourselves, while innovatively using many of the lightweight tools that are emerging.  None of us are programmers --- our use and roles is helping to define and prototype how we use them and move future forward while overcoming distance and lack of resources. 

As a group trying to come together to form a new proposition I'm sure we are not alone.  It's an iterative conversational process. However, few would be experimenting concurrently with so many tools.  When conversations get split between e-mails, blogs, forums, IM, wiki's it becomes apparent that improved methods to thread them all together is required. 

For the brainstorming and general freeflowing conversations we've been using a private blog.  We've been stumbling when it comes to forums.  The discussion seems to be whether blog are up to the challenge (note there are differing degrees of forum / blog / other experience in this group):

• Beat the Forum's structure from the home page though the 4-level nested hieracthy - category, forum, topic, reply (each of which can be referenced with its own URL).   and...
• Quick Representation - whether there's topic with new content since last visit, the number of topics and posts, date and author of the last post.  and 
• Access Rights by forums and groups of users

I tend to find forums very hierarchial in their structure and format.  How does one rewrite a business development proposition in a forum?  It's not easy.  In a wiki I'd make additions and the diff key would highlight the amendments for others. Paste is simplified.  Notations are made directly.  With two people problems of version control are easily handled.  When three or more become involved then it becomes more difficult. 

Perhaps that why I'm trying out some of the WikiBlog tools that are emerging.  If someone has one for me I'd be happy to use it and report!  Need a collective set of testers?

After blogging for sometime being able the reach a piece of my personal content that also links to others is a valuable "connectivity" tool easily shared and for both parties creates an intermingling that couldn't have happened otherwise.  On the collective level I'm wondering if the reverse is not true.  If blogs were feeding a wiki and vice versa then the collective repository would become much more valuable overtime.  Similarly, edits and revisions could contain quite a history.  

Of course this post could have been a category 4 summary if Tom and I both both had Purple Numbers .  I could provide a summary linking to each diagram without pasting them in and knowing relevance was retained.  (Now would that create a mess for Google?).  Similarly my comments could be more descrete. Instead go and read it for yourself.   

Interesting to see Jim McGee postings on Wikis Part 2 after finally starting my own PurpleNumbers based one last week. I'd say they still have a way to go to be a whiteboard in a conference room. However once collaborating on a document goes beyond 1 to 1 then group access and edit capability on a Wiki is just common sense.

His earlier posting covers connecting wiki's to blogs and blogs to wikis. But it's more than that. Jim says "I believe Sunir understands Wiki philosophy better than anyone else I know. His contributions to framing the concept and patterns of soft security that underlie the social architecture of Wikis are what made me an early convert to Meatball.

I think there's a lot there.  Better add NexistWiki to the list.  Jack Park writes

"Historically speaking, the NexistWiki experiment centered around something called Augmented Storytelling. A talk given by me at StoryCon 2002 about Augmented Storytelling can be found here.

NexistWiki exists at the intersection of Weblogs, Wikis, and Douglas Engelbart's call for massive improvements in addressability and evolvability of information resources. Each object presented on a Webpage with NexistWiki is followed by two objects:

• a # (pound sign or hashmark) which reveals the full URL of the object
• a tiny blue arrow which is a link to a homepage for that object

NexistWiki, thus, provides two kinds of addressability to every information resource, also known as an addressable information resource or AIR.

From the individual homepage given to each AIR, NexistWiki provides for evolvability: the object can be edited by its original creator, and, it can be annotated and linked with other information resources.

How might the growing interest in linking digital identity, blogging wiki's, RSS feeds etc evolve?  How might the emergent functionalities in these tools benefit our evolution and daily experiences. How will they combine and spiral to augment our collective intelligence? How will they reframe the KM knowledge innovation paradigm? For most companies it's happening more rapidly than they think. 

There's a saying "the future is here  - it is just unevenly distributed" (William Gibson). This couldn't be more true when we start to apply it to emerging lightweight knowledge innovation tools and combine it with what we know about mobility, decentralization, hyperconnectivity, online identity etc. 

Yet using the metaphor "standing in the future" we almost inevitably find ourselves reframing the space we compete in today. 

I facilitated the chart below about three weeks ago before going somewhat silent (at least on my blog) when exploring early ideas for transforming a "systems integration business" into an innovation engine.  As the tools paradigm developed we kept spiraling back to the benefits. Each iteration breaking a new frontier, each new technology providing new functionality.   

It's a WIP (work-in-progress) and making the point that all these technologies are already available they are not just effectively connected yet.  For the most part it will be bloggers reading this.  Some have the curiosity to ask:  Is corporate blogging just noise or part of a greater shift.  What about wiki's and the broader aspects of augmented social networks? Etc. 

For my part I've seen no clear model of where corporate blogging is heading.  Yet I firmly believe that blogs are part of the emerging value creation spiral.  The recent wave on posting on wiki's, forums, corporate blogs reaffirm this interest.  Similarly thoughts keep emerging about creativity and innovaton. The underlying thread is a move from systemic innovation to transformative innovation (about which I will define separately).

A few years ago Tom Stewart wrote "Intellectual Capital" and more recently followed it up with "The Wealth of Knowledge".  I'd suggest if we really think about the chart above -- IC /KC merely set us on a pathway.  The (not new) idea of "Collective Intelligence" is just now beginning to reframe how we think about capital and the types of organizations.  We now know that organizations will increasingly compete through their collaborative networks. While it's not just asking better questions -- it's the capability to capture and harness the hidden ones.  More peer driven, more decentralized; almost certainly. 

It's transforming innovation capital (lets not get hung up on definitions of Capital here) simply because what we are now after is hidden.  It is primarily social and these new tools are helping us to uncover the wealth that was always there, always undisclosed, tacit unless tapped, and too infrequently accessed.  Even a small start would include employee who's thoughts or interests you never before knew, to teams doing collaborative manual building, and spontaneous connections enabled through who we know in trusted networks. 

This is nothing less than the beginning for framing tools and an evolutionary path to a  radical shift in the collective intelligence of teams, communities of practice and organizations.

There could be much more to this post.  A little encouragement and a few questions and I might just get back into writing again. 

A little over a week ago I had the pleasure of listening to Doug Engelbart at the Planetworks conference.  Doug's summed up his life's work for the conference: "As much as possible boost mankinds collective capability for coping with complex urgent problems." 

As he developed his view of the world I realized there were similarities to the chart above  -- originally tracing to conversations I'm in with George Por which started and were furthered in France a few weeks ago.  In Doug's chart the frontier (cloud in mine) is constantly changing.  His concepts which I'm still discovering include... The "Hyperscope", "NIC's" - network improvement communities and "DKR's - dynamic knowledge repositories.  They fit easily within the above. 

One word of caution.  This is a somewhat generic chart.  Organizations wanting to explore this space must develop their own pathways augmenting their current competences and enhancing the culture of their organization.  Then having the "foresight" to take this forward begins with a few small bets or prototypes and a few committed individuals.  The key to motivating individuals to participate is creating the clear need for change and building the excitement for what the future might bring. 

What’s Coming? --- Augmented Social Networks:

“Could the next generation of online communications strengthen civil society by better connecting people to others with whom they share affinities, so they can more effectively exchange information and self-organize? Could such a system help to revitalize democracy in the 21st century? When networked personal computing was first developed, engineers concentrated on extending creativity among individuals and enhancing collaboration between a few. They did not much consider what social interaction among millions of Internet users would actually entail. It was thought that the Net's technical” architecture need not address the issues of "personal identity" and "trust," since those matters tended to take care of themselves.

This is a clip from the Linktank paper posted as part of the Planetwork conference.  Like the Smarter, Simpler, Social paper referred to earlier on this blog here it is worth reading.  For me together they provide a useful entry point into thinking about where we are going.  For me these two papers are further warning indicators that reaffirm my belief that radical innovation is being redefined by those that use ASN related tools, within their organizations, CoP's and simply with their circles (business, professional, social). 

I also just re-read a post from my earlier blogging days on Radical Strategy Innovation. (One that gave me some concern at the time for mouthing off.)  Looking at it today and thinking about the tools I've become more accustomed to using and participating in I believe the key messages still apply.  Five points for Radical Strategy Innovation.

1. First organize your lines of inquiry to be network and community centric.
2. Then collaborate to create compelling friction points that give your community "an innovation voice"!
3. Seek out "hidden" connections - collaborative responsive highly connective networks are important to framing the fullfillment of unarticulated needs.
4. Build-in collaborative community skills into facilitating markets - value creation. 
5. (New / revised) Add to the collective and spiritual values -- without them you will have a system rather than a transformation.

Summary:

In a world of increasing hyperconnectivity, how will augmented social networks impact on innovation? Is your current dogma for Radical Innovation collaborative and spiritual enough to make a meaningful transformation?  How will your communities best be served -- strategically and through what architecture to facilitate the change?

Yesterday I said too little about George Por's role and Collective Intelligence in my post "Collaborative Spaces - Transforming Innovation Capital. He's influenced my thinking lately.  So when this post was picked up it was neat, but it also signals the need for a broader conversation and exploration of the CI community and their work.   

So this post is a little about sharing George.  He's an expert in CI and long time evangelist.  We have different and I believe complementary takes on the diagram and how to use it; sensing there is a new kind of operating system emerging.  I wouldn't have labelled it CI2.0 without a push from him.  I've been keen to understand the emerging tools and the corresponding benefits and provide a synthesis and premise for accelerating innovation and strategy development. I do think CI2.0 frames it.  I'm also a believer that part of very premise (of CI) - is to share and learn together.  So posting / blogging is like testing.. / prototyping. I'm hoping George that you and others will join in and take it to the next level. 

From George's Blog of Collective Intelligence: Cognitive relations, relations of knowledge production  "The main infrastructure concern of today's enterprise is still how to best use technologies for managing data, information, and knowledge, not for augmenting human intelligence, individual and collective. ..."

Separately, this links to George's workshop "Collective Intelligence 2.0" which may provide another line of inquiry and suggest other ways of exploring the path forward.

Dave Pollard writes in How to Save the World about business weblogs and five software tools needed for social networking enablement. He makes great points about making it simpler and more transparent and describes the need for the user to determine how and to whom it should be published with each post. I think underlying this is a very decentralized structure that docks with the enterprise while the lifestream is maintained with the user.  There are some very Net Deva like implications to this model.  Similarly the learning from Ryze, and Linkedin etc apply. What am I saying?  I like where this is going, just so far my experience has been that we have to deal with the trust / reciprocity and identity issues.    

I'd like to see Dave's next post around categories.  How are the taxonomy issues resolved?  While a few categories are permanent, we need to structure emergent taxonomy systems.  When fellow workers find they are working on similar questions then they become connected.  I continue to believe that this is topic map related. 

Get these things right and weblogs will be part of the innovation and trust engines that enable social networks. 

 I have to confess... I'm envious of my daughter's (11) buddylist. I'm also fascinated how AIM adoption amongst all her friends in the last year is changing communications patterns.   I don't think I've ever had six or more buddy screens open at the same time.  Yet for her it's common place and I think she loses interest when it is less than three.   Of her list 96% are from her year which means about 50% of the kids in fifth grade are on her list.  Is it the norm?  How would I know. No matter it changes how I communicate with my kids.  IM is great and makes me more accessible. 

So when I saw this link via Many to Many and Clay Shirky.  Social Software How Instant Messaging Augments Conversations I followed it though to Stewart Butterfield.  There are more appropriate references there.  Still in the context of my daughter this helped.

"Part of this is because it is OK to not answer an IM until you are ready—a pause of 30 seconds is perfectly acceptable where it wouldn’t be in voice (and the answerer doesn’t even have to hold the question in their mind while doing something else, but can refer back to it later)."

There is also a great set of comments there.  Despite K's list and visible groups they seldom use a chat room together, according to her it not as much fun.  I'm not sure if this is just time, experience, or gossip. 

Still the italics above are consistent with what I've observed.  The kids are no longer shy or embarassed to "talk to boys" -- they have time to think about their responses.  The old phone paranoia is gone. 

From my own interactions she periodically corrects her short-hand spelling in the next post with a "*word" the asterik meaning correction.  Of course I don't have a technorati on her buddy list (although there is a program that does it from memory). Still this group has their own shorthand. and it's not just "wut u tnk"

Should I be worried? It beats having the phone tied up. 

 I have to confess... I'm envious of my daughter's (11) buddylist. I'm also fascinated how AIM adoption amongst all her friends in the last year is changing communications patterns.   I don't think I've ever had six or more buddy screens open at the same time.  Yet for her it's common place and I think she loses interest when it is less than three.   Of her list 96% are from her year which means about 50% of the kids in fifth grade are on her list.  Is it the norm?  How would I know. No matter it changes how I communicate with my kids.  IM is great and makes me more accessible. 

So when I saw this link via Many to Many and Clay Shirky.  Social Software How Instant Messaging Augments Conversations I followed it though to Stewart Butterfield.  There are more appropriate references there.  Still in the context of my daughter this helped.

"Part of this is because it is OK to not answer an IM until you are ready—a pause of 30 seconds is perfectly acceptable where it wouldn’t be in voice (and the answerer doesn’t even have to hold the question in their mind while doing something else, but can refer back to it later)."

There is also a great set of comments there.  Despite K's list and visible groups they seldom use a chat room together, according to her it not as much fun.  I'm not sure if this is just time, experience, or gossip. 

Still the italics above are consistent with what I've observed.  The kids are no longer shy or embarassed to "talk to boys" -- they have time to think about their responses.  The old phone paranoia is gone. 

From my own interactions she periodically corrects her short-hand spelling in the next post with a "*word" the asterik meaning correction.  Of course I don't have a technorati on her buddy list (although there is a program that does it from memory). Still this group has their own shorthand. and it's not just "wut u tnk"

Should I be worried? It beats having the phone tied up. 

How does one think through new product development for chat? Last October I found this an intriguing question and with a little help developed the exploratory framework below.  Today it is perhaps more relevant to the learning required to enhance collaboration with emerging social software. The target of this chat exploration was focused on determining the consumer frameworks to aid decision-making.

I really appreciated the recent comments to the buddy list envy.  So it seemed natural to step from IM to CHAT.  May also open up some thoughts on IM. Afterall an exercise like this could similarly apply to IM.

Visit chatrooms and one soon realizes how dynamic the conversation is, even if you don't fit in. While many may delight in referring to chatrooms as a waste of time, I have a feeling that they are an emerging world. Perhaps fantasy or a warped reality, yet lump them with broader collaboration tools and new avenues open up for exploration.

So in this post I'm purposely sharing some diagrams (click to expand), without all the words.   Last October when these were done I thought there may be a mulit-client possible in this area.  (There still is - or could be.  I'd be delighted to do it! I'd add this is all inferred it's not from a statistical sample or at an x% confidence level.).

For others the model and segment names will either provide the justification or a few laughs. 

Why do this? What research objectives might you consider? (From a chat perspective).

• To provide a dynamic framework for understand the chat /IM market, and the various need segments within it.
• To determine the relative strengths of the various brands, how they are positioned within the market, and how they are positioned to satisfy the needs fo the various segments within it.
• To identify what opportunities exist in the chat market for new brands / products (Use this for collaboration building, not necessary to restrict it to MSN/AOL and Yahoo!)

Chat is to the digiworld, like the street, nightclubs, bars, restaurants, diners, bingo halls, and the PTA meeting is to the physical world. It why I'm sharing a model with you that draws on my food and beer days.  (This is adapted from the Heylen Model for those in research)

Why is chat interesting

• Rapid expansion is reaching critical mass. Like IM - CHAT skews younger.
  • Instant messaging: 59 percent of those aged 19 to 34, compared to 49 percent of those aged 35 to 54, and 45 percent of those 55 and over.
  • Chat: 47 percent of those aged 19 to 34; 37 percent of those aged 35 to 54; 31 percent of those 55 and over.
• Access new business opportunities - growing corporate interest
• Service not yet a money spinner --- new entrants
• Rapidly increasing functionality around voice, video and mobility….
• Emerging promotion and marketing opportunties.
• Peer to Peer evolving communities… becoming more realtime…
• And as we know instant messaging is a super e-mail that lets two or more people hold a real-time conversation online.

My temptation is to say more about why chat communities are posed to forever change marketing.  However this post is about disecting the chatroom, what goes on and the bare minimum detail to infer the life inside. 

These are stories framed around a dynamic segmentation.  One size does not fit all.   By dynamic this approach reflects that as a market evolves and chat users become much more sophisticated they may not just have one set of Chat needs solved by CHATTING in a particular situation, but can be motivated quite differently at other times. The guess is that chatters often select and act in different occasions in the same week. They may very well approach this using different brands.

Our Hypothesis There are two fundamental dynamics, which drive consumer CHAT behavior.  (click to enlarge diagrams)

• First an occassion based dimension around usage, frequency, times etc
• 
• Second a horizontal based axis around social dynamics and orientation

Two additional elements. Trust / Transparency and Involvement. These provide an inverse interplay around the social dimension which affects our interpretation of usage/frequency occasions

• First levels and types of Trust and Transparency in groups and between individuals
• Second the type of involvement be it extroverted or more introverted; telling or listening, controlling or facilitating, testing or supportive…. Etc. >

  

This enables six segments to be defined.  They are not all equal in size or profit potential.  Approaches to brand, product/services and the needs in each segment are different.  Even where products should be launched, lifecycles etc can be defined.  Typically a chart like this is provided with stories, encounters, (collages help).  Examples would include names from chatrooms.  Much could be said about the use of colour, fonts, size, the impact of music, welcoming rituals, emoticons etc.  

This final chart may encourage a few to really consider the Exploring dimension.  This realm is i'm certain the largest segment --- (American SUV territory, or Bud territory) and biggest opportunity. For online auctions this space is eBay.  If one ever needed to think though the ramifications of social software it is in this realm.  For my two cents this is where "fast trust" and digital identity solutions will really make a difference.  The opportunity exists to enable this within corporate communities. 

Is chat like beer?  I can't be certain. I do believe that chatters can be comfortable in more than one environment. Just like a fancy restaurant serves a long neck beer, in another setting clearly a can or even a mug may be more appropriate.

Traditional chatrooms were limited to words yet today, voice and cam’s are becoming more commonplace. Perhaps more importantly these's a whole world here growing rapidly running 365/7/24. It different to our physical world and yet similar. It’s only now that we can begin to see how people live virtually – and accept that is part of life that we can begin to look at the sheer variety of online exchanges that a person might have. Particularly when we think consumers and traditional entertainment or out of home “friendly connections”. Think for the moment about the venues and exchanges we have day to day… from the coffee shop to RSA, and Nightclubs and Bars, to more passive theatre. Then add in online gaming etc. 

It's late.  I hope you still know where to go for a drink after playing with the Chat Map. They tend to serve them up in room 9.

Is the current Social Software meme really just part of something much larger? Will the ideas behind Collective Intelligence shape the future development and direction? Sometimes I look at something and intuitively know there's something relevant but perhaps not ready for transmission or simple to translate into plain english.  I have a suspicion tonight that Britt Blaser, Flemming Funch and Xpertweb may just be an illustration - an early indicator of this style of model. 

From the University of Ottawa and the emerging Collective Intelligence Lab.  The top half of the chart represents our collective Intellectual Capital in the virtual world.  Contrast this with the lower quadrant which more closely represents the collection of structural capital, social capital and process capital found in the physical world. 

I find this model interesting for two reasons. 

• First there is no real mention of financial or customer capital.  This is a real departure and a major shift re "collective". If delight exists... then it is in the top half...and experienced on a higher plain.  
• The second, is more an observation.  The debate around social software continues to focus too often on the physical manifestations rather than the virtual - spriitual elements that enable - augment and benefit real collective intelligence.  

Note the following charts can both be found via the link above. 

This second chart suggests for each pole a two way relationships.  While this looks incredibly complex I believe it could be simplified into a short questionnaire and then provided in a radar format as a development tool.   

One item is certain.  Unless they all interplay together --- spiraling value creation is a pipedream.  There is also an underlying thread in these postings.  Pierre Levy talks about informational capitalism which includes; Cooperative competition Competitive advantage to the inventors of the most cooperative games. Well Xpertweb is a cooperative game.  While contrasting this with conscious consumption controlled by a transparent cybermarkets could bring with it unexpected communism.

This is worth following for: Knowledge Innovation, Strategic Foresight, human tools development and the evolution of our desires.

Another brilliant post in the SEVEN SURVIVAL TIPS FOR KNOWLEDGE MANAGERS Kept me up tonight for a few last thoughts.  I really liked it. 

Dave describes three new, looser methods to standardize how things get done, shown on the chart. 

I'd like to add a fourth.  Stretch and Learning: Every organization today must be able to to stretch to new futures, and perceive alternate environments in which their decisions may play out.  This requires the capability to embrace uncertainty, complexity, and an element of chaos.  So doing creates the intuition, the creative space where new solutions are found. 

Dave then adds "What does this mean for the struggling, once-hyped discipline of 'knowledge management'? Here's a 7-point strategy for knowledge managers ...."

1. Focus knowledge and learning systems on 'know-who', not 'know-how'. 
2. Introduce new social network enablement software and weblogs to capture the 'know-who'. 
3. Keep only selected, highly-filtered knowledge in your central repositories. 
4. Don't overlook the value of plain-old 'data'. 
5. The bibliography may be more valuable than the document itself.
6. Don't wait for people to look for it, send it out, using 'killer' channels.
7. Create an internal market for your offerings by giving valuable stuff away.

For my final two cents of the night.  My favorites are numbers one and two and five.  In this area more attention must be placed on helping to design personal dashboards.  When connectivity is embedded at the fingertips or at the click of a mouse then richer conversations will evolve.  When we have great dialogues we have great organizations.  Lets not forget the soft skills the CKO needs as organizations seek personalized knowledge in a way that also creates real deep community brands.  When we can all live this way... then we will have organizations that compell people to operate around stategy number 7.  I think it's called the common good!

Emerging Social Networking sites need to think more carefully about their brands. Too much time is spent "engineering" and not enough being conversational telling real stories. Strategic brand positioning is becoming ever more important in this realm. I continue to miss compelling stories on the new sites.

Today I was pushed by a colleague back to take another look at LinkedIn. I've not been growing my network there. My profile lacks detailed documentation. So I found myself playing around there and on Tribes getting a feel for yet another emerging social network. There's also SixDegrees (in beta), and if you are enterprise ready with money you can look at Spoke and Visible Path. also locked in beta. There are others too. Mostly clones.

Ross Mayfield ("The Network is the Market") also provides an excellent technical positioning overview of Tribe and demonstrates the innovative thought going in these offerings. Matt comments here and I'm sure there are others as a vacation means I'm late to the party.

At each one I try and ask myself: "How do we all feel here?" What's the tone? What is the brand trying to convey. Seeing as none of these are yet growing exponentially --- all have failed to get into the millions I suspect core issues remain around branding, functionality and "viral" growth strategies.

For my two cents Tribe is being too structured and planned in its layout and branding. While it is crisp and organized - when I think about my networks I do with feelings, sensations, connections perhaps even trepedations. I also think directory, business cards, phone numbers. If I'm thinking about trading things (something Tribe encourages) then my online experience is dictated by eBay. There's lots of personality in the listings on eBay. That's missing from Tribe. Similarly the book reviews on Amazon are another way of adding color. Ryze does it by using GuestBooks. While guest books aren't endorsements --- they are an informal method of understanding the conversations around people. As such they are useful and can rapidly broker new exchanges.

While I'm on these things... I have a generaly gripe about many of the registration processes. They don't quickly show me while I'm filling things in what others are putting in their boxes. A new registrant is going to be uncomfortable. What are you interests? Many... No be specific..... Human stories - and examples... please!

Then for participation they must be friendly, fun and inviting. If you don't enjoy it --- it won't get done. Tribe might take on Craigslist or take people away from Friendster. I know it still in beta and I bet there are many new functionalities to come. However from what I've seen so far... play, chaos, individuality, is in my view too restrictive.

So I'm going out on a limb.... just before Ryze - rumoured to be readying a relaunch shows its new stripes I'll reinforce that from a brand point of view - Ryze's inelegance is part of it's brand strength. Ryze was clearly created by human hands, the journey of a special person. Its useablity inelegant. Still at Ryze I feel like I own my own page. Ryze's pages often have a chaotic appeal that Tribe in it's current format will never achieve. At Tribe I'm part of a database - the tight pages.. no scrolling. It's an important distinction. Ryze could learn some lessons from Tribe, while Tribe still has to learn some Ryze lessons. Yep they are ostensibly focused at different markets. Still if I was Ryze I'd add their listings functionality.

So... make these brands about people.

Some functional desires in support:

Try SKYPE out. When I've made a few more calls I'll report. If you are thinking about the future of IM, social networks, progressive disclosure, disruptive innovation and thought the founders of Kazaa were smart. This will probably confirm it. Read their Skype discription here. Provides some interesting strategy insights. Wish it would work with my Mac based friends.

Evan caught this:  Skype.  P2P telephony.  From the Dutch developers of FastTrack (the system that powers KaZaA).  In my opinion, this is the first true legitimate application of P2P technology.  Next step:  a pro version with call waiting, voicemail, etc.   I am going to try it out to see if it does provide the quality level claimed.  If you are on, let me know so we can try it out.  Also, I wish they had skins for this so it won't look bad on my desktop (nobody needs an ugly ICQ-like system on their desktop). [John Robb's Weblog]

I did a little further checking on Skype this morning. Try this search. Here's another article from InfoWorld With 10000+ users in a week I think it will blow all previous viral records.

I also looked up Stowe Boyd's Corrante blog on IM to see if it was being reported and then e-mailed him. Within minutes he was calling me. Very cool. I'm easy to find "stuart_henshall". I'll confirm the sound quality was much better than any Yahoo or MSN voice connection I've ever had.

It also turns IM on its head. It's ring centric. All those adults.. that are failing to understand messaging... understand how to make calls. Yep your PC will soon be ringing. Now what I want to know is:

There's plenty more out there on Skype today. The number of users online has doubled (from my observations) in a day. Currently there are 10049 users online. This is up from the 4500 approx early yesterday....... I noted yesterday. They claim 160000 downloads. So at this point probably close to 10% of the Skype population is staying online.

How many users will they need to have more computing power than the traditional switching networks? With 10000 online now.. Only 5% to 10% are actually staying online. I'd guess we can expect this to increase. If not it suggests consumers are using a particular strategy with the system perhaps wary of being connected P2P all the time. Eg... Use a current IM client turn on and switch to Skype for Voice. From a brand point of view the associations with Kazaa are both good and bad and I'm going to address that separately. Why isn't the % participating higher? Well many will have problems with mics and sound. Others won't have got their buddies on yet. Not everyone does it immediately. Easily fixed (get a headset) see the helpful hints below.

Things that ... make you go hmm

160,000 Skype downloads in 12 days Skype helpful sound tips
Here's a Miss Cleo prediction: Skype is going to be huge. Yesterday I tested (while working on a few technical support issues actually), chatting with several folks on both broadband and dialup and I remain very impressed with the sound quality. Remember, it's still beta software, and thus there are some kinks, but it is catching on fast. Here's a few helpful tips:

Stowe Boyd also reports on his take at Corrante IM I've also received a number of comments and trackback about "Spyware" concerns (any proof anyone?) and comments read the Eula. I've read the Eula - as much as one reads it... What should I be scared of there? Where is Larry Lessig on this? John Robb remains equally enthused.

Seem worthy to note... that from my perspective this is another one of those "blogging accelerates knowledge sharing" examples. I went to IMPlanet this am. Looking to see what they might be advising. Nothing! There is an IM conference in less than a month. Enterprise focus or not I think they should be hustling to "think outside the box". Bloggers are beating the papers on this one! Combined Skype and blogging demonstrates how viral the "knowledge exchange" really is.

My rec... keep watching feedster on this one.

An excellent overview of Skype. Note Robin's comments re Vonage and similar services.

Please Skype Me: Disruptive P2P VoIP Technology Allows You To Call And Talk Free To Any Windows PC - Robin Good' Sharewood Tidings

The advantage(s) of this over other similar new services like Vonage and Free World Dialup is that Skype does not rely on a centralized infrastructure to maintain the directory of users and to route each and every call. This means that for those services based on a centralized infrastructure costs scale proportionally with their user base while providing quality and reliability becomes always more difficult to achieve.

Where I'd disagree with advice later in the article which recommends accepting calls only from friends. I'm happy for example to accept calls from around the world. However I will check the info button before answering. Or I can simply treat it as one to call back. You can't always answer your computer. If I don't know / recognize your name or it is made up.... and there is no country etc. then the caller isn't providing enough info to encourage appropriate courtesy.

David follows up today with another detailed posting Skype P2P VoIP App: One in a Million?
"If they don't screw it up with a confusing and overpriced subscription service, Skype could possibly become one of those extremely rare apps that comes along and truly changes communication and networking on the web." David also puts a stick in the ground on pricing. I'm not sure I agree either in the global context or the method. What's important right now is the appropriate business expectations are created. Skype may well have launched with more "noise" than expected.

What I do want from David is his method for signaling whether Skype is online or offline on my blog. Come on David share! They will want it on Ryze pages and on Ecademy.

In the early reviews some emerging features are being missed.