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Tuesday, September 2, 2003 |
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Current Thoughts in String Theory [Slashdot] 11:41:16 PM 
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Blogs for What Business?. Jimmy Guterman's new piece on business blogging (sub. required) is sure to cause a stir. He charges the blogging community as being "self-absorbed and elitist" and says its not essential for business. He cites a Forrester study to back up his claims:
You don't have to believe me on this. Finally, some data asserts that blogs are hardly a popular pursuit. If anything, blogging is more marginal than its critics contend. Forrester Research (FORR) conducted an online survey of 3,673 people and found that 79 percent of its respondents had never heard of blogs, 98 percent had never read one, and 98 percent said they'd never pay to read or write one. Blogs can be wonderful things, but if a mere 2 percent of Internet users read blogs, the pastime is far from mainstream. The Forrester survey notes that the typical blog reader has been using the Web for an average of six years. For the most part, blogs feature the Net elite writing to the Net elite. This continues to be the case only as long as the elite are underemployed. I believe what Jimmy is saying is that there isn't a consumer market for blogging and that it isn't essential for businesses to address it. The problem is we are at the very beginning of a technology adoption lifecycle. Some serious companies have forecasted this market to grow and made their bets accordingly. Every time a journalist tries to wrap themselves around the existing market, what's visible are early adopters. What stands out are the leaders in using blogs for publishing, who benefit from preferential attachment as the earliest entrants. And if you take the innovator dialogue to seriously it looks like a one ring circus. The other story folks pick up on is unclueful attempts by businesses and PR firms to market to bloggers as an emerging and influential segment. Any attempt to treat bloggers as a segment will fail. Today the influence of participants who act more as producers than consumers is the attraction. The number of participants is growing at 400% per year, and that's before AOL's entry. But the real story in the consumer market is how increasing numbers of real people are using blogs , but as a way to communicate an form their own communities. Its that skinny tail of the power-law distribution that's going to wag the market. A way to share with friends, communicate post-by-post and remain open to new people joining your community. Conversational Networks provide the most value to your average Jane. Rick Bruner does make the case that there are lots of businesses using blogs in the consumer market and points out this is like the web in 1995 and where the weblog as publishing market is headed. And many of them are making money. I agree that more evidence in this area would help, always does, but give it time for these new ventures to tell their story. There is another story of weblogs and business that is less visible becasuse the real action is behind the firewall. At Socialtext we are adapting weblogs for use within enterprises. Weblogs are one Enterprise Social Software tool, because they are necessary but not sufficient for communication and collaboration.
The enterprise market is entirely different than the consumer market. What is in common is an efficient, and dare I say fun, way of having conversations that contribute to productivity. Maybe its time we start telling more of our customer stories, but the distinction between consumer and enterprise needs to be made. [Corante: Social Software] |
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A Real Community Library. The Distributed Library Project is an attempt to get individuals to register books they would be willing to lend out to one another, in the manner of a library. Unfortunately, the traditional library system doesn't do much to foster community. Patrons come and go, but there is very little opportunity to establish relationships with people or groups of people. In fact, if you try to talk with someone holding a book you like - you'll probably get shushed. The Distributed Library Project works in exactly the opposite way, where the very function of the library depends on interaction.What's interesting to me is that if it recapitulates a regular library, where users simply have access to the book lists, it will fail in exactly the manner the famous white bicycles of Amsterdam did, where white bicycles would be left in the street for "the community" to use. The problem is that communities don't ride bicycles, people do. The white bicycle idea was tried in the late 60's and again in the late 90s, and failed both times because of the collective action problem (w00t Mancur Olson w00t!) -- it would be to everyone's benefit to have community-owned bicycles freely available, but it would be of much more benefit to each individual to own their own bike, so the bikes were (duh) stolen. The books in the DLP will be stolen too, even if through inertia, e.g. I forgot to return the copy of 1984 I borrowed, and the owner rightly figured that the hassle of getting it back would have a higher opportunity cost than the value of having it back. The one potential saving grace will be the DLP's attempt not to recreate a standard library, but to include a repuation system and book recommendations as a way to punish defectors: While this is a community site based on good will, we have an ebay-style feedback system for managing trust. Lenders have the opportunity to leave positive or negative feedback for borrowers when an item is returned. These positive or negative points contribute to an overall "score" which lenders can use to gauge the trustworthiness or responsibility of a borrower. Lenders can also leave comments along with the points to be more specific.We know that humans will punish defectors even when it is costly to do so [PDF], but we don't know if book-borrowing creates enough value to trigger that altruistic behavior. With the DLP, however, we may find out. [Corante: Social Software] 11:27:25 PM
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How Do You Organize Your Data? [Slashdot] 11:26:00 PM
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ZOE 0.4.6. ZOË Maintenance Release 0.4.6 available now. Changes include: Changes Bug fixes Enhancements New Features Note - This release is not backward compatible. For instructions on how to migrate your data from an earlier version, please refer to the wiki. [justinknol.net - a stack of useful stuff]11:23:03 PM
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PS3 will play PS2, PSone games. Official. Emulation station [The Register] 5:10:55 PM
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Last update: 5/18/04; 12:34:52 AM .
