Monday, February 17, 2003

Groove 2.5. Team blogging Groove founder Ray Ozzie and his teams have always pretended to build application software. But what they have actually delivered are the operating systems of the future -- years ahead of schedule. The XML business Web is only now achieving the architecture that Lotus Notes laid down 15 years ago: message-oriented exchange of semi-structured documents. As today's operating systems catch up with that paradigm, Ozzie is tackling the next set of challenges in Groove: drop-dead simple secure collaboration, presence management, coordination of user and device identities, and ad-hoc group group formation. [Full story at InfoWorld.com.] The scenario shown in the screenshot uses Tim Knip's Groove interop tool -- a Radio UserLand add-in based on Groove Web Services -- to create a genuinely new experience of team blogging. Until now, team blogging has meant that a group posts to a common weblog. This setup does that too, but it also does something I find much more powerful -- it synchronizes the inputs to the collaborative process, as well as the output. In this case, the input is the combined set of RSS feeds subscribed to by the members of the shared space. Everyone knows that everyone else is seeing the same feeds. Discussion can grow around items in those feeds, and can take various forms: replies to the forum that receives the feeds, IM-style text chat, Roger Wilco-style voice chat. ... [Jon's Radio] 10:18:54 AM

More on the deal. The NY Times has a story Google Deal Ties Company to Weblogs. Internet News reports in with Google Acquires Blog Software Firm. But Google still doesn't have anything up in their Press Center. And Blogger.com still, oddly, says nothing about the deal. Nor does the old Pyra page. [megnut] 10:15:49 AM

I think this is where Google is headed with their purchase of Pyra. If I remember correctly, Pyra developed a project management package but did not have the resources to develop Blogger and that package so they shelved it. Having weblog (authoring), schedules, a document repository, enterprise search, and RSS feeds makes for a pretty nice package for the enterprise. More: Pyra's Killer APP: Stating the Obvious, May 1, 2000 "Contrary to popular opinion, Pyra's killer app isn't Blogger, it's Pyra. Of course, that's mostly semantics, since Blogger's an application built on top of the Pyra framework. Which means that Pyra could not only be your next project management app, but your next content publishing platform as well. An integrated content, template, task, issue, and discussion database? Sounds like a killer app to me." From: [a klog apart] Google Pyramaniacs Pry Open Enterprise Sales.. Why did Google buy Pyra Labs? "Klogging". Watch for their Google Search Appliance to come bundled with a version of the Blogger Pro server. Search, or the lack of it, holds back intranet blogging. When everyone uses Google to search the universe, you expect blogs inside the firewall to show up too. But they don't. Unless your Google Appliance crawls them. This is the Lotus Notes killer. A harsh stab at the next Microsoft Office's collaboration tools. When everyone is writing in to their blog, and content is immediately available, why do you need this other stuff? What's left to complete the picture? Two things: RSS push to the Google search crawler. A converged microcontent client. Who's going to buy? The military and security complexes. Big business, especially those who with a human capital self image. Civil government: cities, states, public service agencies, larger not-for-profits. Why buy Pyra? Klogging creates searchable, linked content, and that sells appliances. Further reading: Anil Dash's microcontent client: searching, aggregation, and authoring. Blogging things besides text: From .blog to converged client: support many types of microcontent. Multi-payload klogging: a world of content.  What is Mediablog literacy?  Gonzo Marketing in my own words, after a few drinks. Where the intranet bleeds to the extranet. Management concerns: Are klogs and klognets adhocracy enablers?  Project Management as Journalism: intranet blogging for project collaboration.  Does blogging get you laid? Judging social effects. Where klogging meets moblogging - Part 1, Part 2.   9:21:39 AM

Google, Blogger, and the Stupidity Temptation. Now we see what Google is made of. Google got to be the #1 brand name world-wide, beating Coke and Osama not by out-spending them or by having a catchier jingle. No, they did it the way (frankly) Cluetrain said: by having value and values. Marketing was invented to solve a distribution problem: How do we let potential buyers know about what we have to offer? The answer was to buy distribution channels that, by their nature, reached a mass audience with a one-way communication, AKA "a message." With thirty seconds to make their case (or, in the print world,... [Joho the Blog] 9:12:18 AM

Afterblog. Some retrospectives on Live from the Blogosphere in L.A. on Saturday night: Mark Frauenfelder's photos, taken with a camera so small you could drown it like an olive in a martini glass Tony Pierce's all-true account of What Went Down, including a perfect exposé of Journalism as Unusual... if you want to know why Google bought Blogger look no further than this very story Random$Foo, live Ev (the hands-down star of the thing, even without delivering his closing Fuck Whoa salvo) has this account... Everyone got quiet for a second while they read "Google buys Pyra." Doc said "holy shit." For what it's worth ($millions, I hope, in pre-IPO Google stock), Ev offers these Bloogleplications. Pretty amazing: I was there and even now I still have less to say about the Bloogle Thing than anybody else. Just wait. By the way, the L.A. Times will have something on the show in the Calendar section, I'm told. [The Doc Searls Weblog] 9:10:50 AM