"IDC’s 1Q07 AppStats survey, nearly a quarter of the 258 U.S. respondents reported that wikis are already in use at their organizations."

]]> Jeff Brainard posted a the results of an IDC survey along with a Q&A with collaboration analyst Mark Levitt on the Socialtext blog.

"IDC’s 1Q07 AppStats survey, nearly a quarter of the 258 U.S. respondents reported that wikis are already in use at their organizations."

This is the only research to date we have found on the current penetration of wikis into the enterprise.  Gartner predicts that 50% of companies will use wikis by 2009.  Perhaps we are halfway there.

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]]> http://www.webpronews.com/1-4-of-enterprises-use-wikis-2007-06/feed 0 http://www.webpronews.com/corporation-2-0-businesses-embrace-blogging-2007-05 http://www.webpronews.com/corporation-2-0-businesses-embrace-blogging-2007-05#comments Tue, 01 May 2007 15:19:34 +0000 Mike Sachoff http://www.webpronews.com/?p=37360 More than half of global corporations are using Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs, online video and RSS, according to a study from Melcrum. Those that are not yet embracing such communications tools plan to within the next 12 months.

]]> More than half of global corporations are using Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs, online video and RSS, according to a study from Melcrum. Those that are not yet embracing such communications tools plan to within the next 12 months.

The study also found that over 40 percent of companies are using podcasts and social networks.

When it comes to blogging, a lot of firms say they plan to start a blog, while those that have existing blogs are used mainly for internal communications, as few companies have public blogs.

Socialtext tracks public blogging by Fortune 500 companies and Global 1000 firms. The ongoing study found that 8 percent of the Fortune 500 corporations had public blogs, while just 4 percent of the Global 1000 do.

Fortune 500 companies that publicly blog have actually doubled since April 2006 but does not indicate there has been strong growth in public blogging. While many firms use Web 2.0 for internal communications, most are reluctant to put company details in plain view.

Nearly half of the respondents in the Melcrum study said that employees discussing their firm online was a threat to the corporation’s reputation. Another 70 percent said they had no policies or guidelines for blogging or other social media tools, revealing that they were not prepared for public communications.

Communications professionals believe that social media is a good way to communicate internally and that it helps with employee engagement and internal collaboration.

Companies thinking about opening up dialogue with senior executives need to consider who they are willing to have participate in the conversation.

]]> http://www.webpronews.com/corporation-2-0-businesses-embrace-blogging-2007-05/feed 1 http://www.webpronews.com/salesforce-launches-startup-incubator-2007-04 http://www.webpronews.com/salesforce-launches-startup-incubator-2007-04#comments Thu, 26 Apr 2007 19:52:08 +0000 Ross Mayfield http://www.webpronews.com/?p=37290 Salesforce launched an incubator for startups.  It is a similar proposition to the Socialtext Coworking space, but has a cost for the startup and is structured as a partnership program.  A BusinessWeek article interviewed me about it.]]> Salesforce launched an incubator for startups.  It is a similar proposition to the Socialtext Coworking space, but has a cost for the startup and is structured as a partnership program.  A BusinessWeek article interviewed me about it:

The corporate wiki firm Socialtext, for instance, just took on more office space in Palo Alto, but isn’t using it all yet. So it’s offering some of it to software developers who will write open-source wiki software that supports Socialtext’s and other companies’ wiki software.

"Real estate is the leading cause of death for startups," notes Socialtext CEO Ross Mayfield. "This is sort of a commune for nerds." That’s the vibe Salesforce will need to create if it wants to hatch its vision of a new software industry.

I think I said geek instead of nerd, but no matter.  And I stand by my fear of real estate not being put to use effectively.

We started Socialtext virtually, and most of the company remains distributed.  When we got our first office space over two years into the company, we had some extra room.  So we hosted the first Barcamp and gave space for Podtech and Mozes to get started.  Now we have some new room next door and the coworking practice (check out coworking spaces in a town near you) provides a more unstructured way of opening the door to others.  A couple of folks stop by and cowork regularly now and the we just finished the noisy construction.  If you are ever in downtown Palo Alto, just stop by.

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]]> http://www.webpronews.com/salesforce-launches-startup-incubator-2007-04/feed 0 http://www.webpronews.com/twitter-short-sweet-sleek-2007-03 http://www.webpronews.com/twitter-short-sweet-sleek-2007-03#comments Mon, 12 Mar 2007 19:30:21 +0000 Brajeshwar Oinam http://www.webpronews.com/?p=36030 Alright, Twitter has suddenly attained the status of a notoriously popular Application. After being fueled by SXSW, everybody else is talking about Twitter including those who don’t even have a blog. Talks in the Blogosphere have spit out stats that Twitter got 1 million messages sent recently. Finally after about a year of its launch, Twitter has won.

]]> Alright, Twitter has suddenly attained the status of a notoriously popular Application. After being fueled by SXSW, everybody else is talking about Twitter including those who don’t even have a blog. Talks in the Blogosphere have spit out stats that Twitter got 1 million messages sent recently. Finally after about a year of its launch, Twitter has won.

Of course, it is not everybody that loves Twitter, some seriously hate it.

Wait, I just got a Twitter from BBC News – Train services resume along a stretch of the West Coast Main Line in Cumbria after a fatal train crash. http://tinyurl.com/2jkv4c

Twitter

Ross Mayfield, CEO of SocialText has an in-depth article on Twitter, its statistics, etc. He describes Twitter as, “a mobile social software that lets you broadcast and receive short messages with your social network. You can use it with SMS, on the web or IM.” “A darn easy API has enabled other clients such as Twitterific for the Mac. Twitter is Continuous Partial Presence, mostly made up of mundane messages in answer to the question – What are you doing?. A never-ending steam of presence messages prompts you to update your own. Messages are more ephemeral than IM presence—and posting is of a lower threshold, both because of ease and accessibility, and the informality of the medium.”

Ah! I got another Twitter from Digg – The Pirate Bay gives diploma to the King of Sweden – http://tinyurl.com/ypwgb3 – The Pirate Bay guys congratulates the King of Sweden for go.

At the time of writing this article, here are the Twitters that I follow (and perhaps you might be interested)

• Molly E. Holzschlag
• Eric Meyer
• Anil Dash
• Jason Calacanis
• Jeffery Zeldman
• Steve Rubel
• ArsTechnica
• BBC News
• CNN Breaking News
• Digg
• Emily Chang
• Ross Mayfield
• Defamer
• FlashGuru
• Jesse Warden
• Keith Peters (Adobe)
• Apollo (Adobe)
• Flex (Adobe)
• Mike Chambers (Adobe)
• Mike Downey (Adobe)

Another Twitter from BBC Business – Price cuts for British Gas customers, lowering their gas bills by 17% and electricity by 11%, come into force. http://tinyurl.com/2k2okk

So, when will we get the first Twitter Spam? Or will that affect just those who follow the public timeline. Ok, let me leave that innovative idea of a spam to the spammers, I ran out of ideas on that one.

Twitter your RSS Feeds

A Mac-Friend of mine, Paul Stamatiou have a good idea on how to Twitter on Steroid. Well, not really to that extend of irritation but that’s what I come up with – Twitter on Steroid. Here’s how. follow all the steps from Paul to get an RSS to Twitter using PHP. Now, get an array of all your RSS Feeds – your Blog(s), your Flickr Feed, your YouTube Videos – combine them into one (there are lots of services that does that). Finally, twitter this Mother RSS Feed. Paul have a cron job to do the RSS push, I’m sure we can work out a way to ping the app to Twitter whenever there is a publication from the Feed. That’s it and you might even have a non-stop twitter-ing; to the point that your followers might get irritated. Use it wisely.

Yet another Twitter (in fact lots in between)

• jesterxl: TWITTER, come on and raise up, take yer shirt off, twist it ‘round yo head; spinnit like a hellah-coptah!!!
• Stammy: cutting my nails w/ el swiss army knife.. the nail clipper was all the way across the room.
• aral: wakes to a lovely, sunny morning in Dublin. Going to head out to consult with a client in about half an hour. Great bunch – can’t wait!

Twitter Powered

• GeoTwitter: Google Maps API + Twitter API
• Twadget: Windows Vista Sidebar gadget
• Chitter: MAC OS X plugin for iChat
• Twitterific: Mac OS X tool
• Twitgit: Mac OS X Dashboard Widget
• Prom Queen: turn all your followers into friends

Another Twit – bbcnews: West Indies legend Sir Garfield Sobers officially opens the Cricket World Cup on Sunday. http://tinyurl.com/2qz4sa

Some must-read articles about twitter

• A Twitter Top Ten
• Twitter Blog
• Can Twitter Save Lives?
• 5 Ways to Use Twitter for Good

Another Twit – digg_feeds: Dark energy, an invisible, undetectable force – http://tinyurl.com/yu2udc – Three days after learning that he won the 2006 Nobel Prize

TinyURL

TinyURL shortens your long url to a short redirect URL. TinyURL makes it extremely easy to use their service – on their website, browser toolbar – and an even easier API which makes Twitter so easy to have tiny URLs replacing long URLs that people twits. Twitter have made the best use of TinyURL and is perhaps its best companion.

For instance, in PHP, it can be simple as

// the url to be shortened$theurl = "http://".$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'].$_SERVER['PHP_SELF'];// the final result$tiny_url =  file_get_contents("http://tinyurl.com/api-create.php?url=" . $theurl);

And finally before I post this article, here is another twit – emilychang: checking out laughingsquid’s great photos

Hey; Why don’t you comment your Twitter profile URL? I would love to know What you’re Doing? You can follow me through my Twitter Profile. Technorati have spidered my Twitter Profile too (I guess, you should also claim your twitter profile).

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]]> http://www.webpronews.com/twitter-short-sweet-sleek-2007-03/feed 0 http://www.webpronews.com/enterprise-2-0-in-informationweek-2007-02 http://www.webpronews.com/enterprise-2-0-in-informationweek-2007-02#comments Tue, 27 Feb 2007 19:58:40 +0000 Ross Mayfield http://www.webpronews.com/?p=35653 InformationWeek cover story is Enterprise 2.0, based on a survey of engagement:

 Despite the risks and problems, a solid minority of the 250 business technology pros surveyed by InformationWeek are behind this IT strategy push that has come to be known as Enterprise 2.0 (even if the overplayed 2.0 terminology makes some people wince). Nearly a third, 32%, describe their Web 2.0 strategies as fully engaged, our survey finds.

]]> The InformationWeek cover story is Enterprise 2.0, based on a survey of engagement:

 Despite the risks and problems, a solid minority of the 250 business technology pros surveyed by InformationWeek are behind this IT strategy push that has come to be known as Enterprise 2.0 (even if the overplayed 2.0 terminology makes some people wince). Nearly a third, 32%, describe their Web 2.0 strategies as fully engaged, our survey finds.

Reticent companies ignore the movement at the peril of their competitiveness. Within a few years, rich, collaborative software platforms that include a slate of technologies like wikis, blogs, integrated search, and unified communications will be the norm. Employees will expect to work that way, and it’ll be up to IT to solve the still significant problems and deliver.

I like the disclaiming sidebar with fair commentary about the category name:

The reason it gets used is there’s real meaning behind the tag [Enterprise 2.0] today, giving businesspeople a way to talk about the kind of collaboration and information sharing they must move toward. There will come a time when Enterprise 2.0 loses its meaning entirely, much as e-business did when Internet-based commerce became less of a novelty. When the kind of Web-based, highly interactive collaboration and information sharing that defines Enterprise 2.0 becomes commonplace, we’ll hang this one up, too.

InformationWeek suggests Nine Easy Web Collaboration tools, highlighting Socialtext.  I need to clarify one mistake in the article, however, the following paragraph should refer to Socialtext Unplugged, the offline wiki, not Socialtext as a whole.

Socialtext offers wiki software with a twist — you can copy the wiki to your desktop, work with it disconnected from the Internet, and then merge it with the online version; Socialtext [Unplugged] is based on TiddlyWiki, a popular single-user Wiki that stores both data and JavaScript code in a single Web page that can be stored locally on the desktop or on a server.

In general the article is a fair survey of where adoption of Enterprise 2.0 is, just beginning to mainstream and a trend embraced by incumbent vendors.  And it also highlights the varied experiences enterprises have had.  Some overspent on security, some failed to gain adoption, some have a wonderful mess of experimentation they need to clean up.  The article failed to mention SuiteTwo as a solution that encompasses wikis, blogs and RSS, but all in good time.

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]]> http://www.webpronews.com/enterprise-2-0-in-informationweek-2007-02/feed 0 http://www.webpronews.com/1-wiki-best-of-both-worlds-2007-02 http://www.webpronews.com/1-wiki-best-of-both-worlds-2007-02#comments Thu, 22 Feb 2007 02:28:36 +0000 Ross Mayfield http://www.webpronews.com/?p=35453 Andy McAfee shared a great wiki case study from Avenue A | Razorfish.  They adapted MediaWiki to meet their needs.  Leveraging open source, a great approach for a company that builds custom Intranets.

But Jeff Walker of Atlassian Confluence, a commercial wiki vendor, disagrees:

]]> Back in November, Andy McAfee shared a great wiki case study from Avenue A | Razorfish.  They adapted MediaWiki to meet their needs.  Leveraging open source, a great approach for a company that builds custom Intranets.

But Jeff Walker of Atlassian Confluence, a commercial wiki vendor, disagrees:

It strikes me that if Razorfish invested all this effort and money, then the question needs to be asked: Is Mediawiki an enterprise wiki? Certainly not out of the box.

One full-time intern and two part-time developers is at least $50-100K for one year! Probably the latter number. Mediawiki in this instance became an enterprise wiki but only after considerable work.

To which Shiv Singh of Razorfish replies:

… Our wiki did not take a full year to build and the part-time developers were bench resources. In other words, it did not cost us $100,000 as Jeffery implied. Furthermore, enterprise 2.0  as coined by Andrew McFee is not about cost but about what the software does for its users and how they shape the software themselves.

Commercial enterprise 2.0 software like Socialtext, Brainkeeper and Atlassian Confluence are great options for some business scenarios and we often recommend them to our own clients. But in other cases, simply modifying open source sofware can get an organization what it needs. Furthermore, by modifying mediawiki we were able to get exactly what we needed. Most importantly, by virtue of how it is being used, we know that it is social software in an organization – and that’s the most important part of an enterprise 2.0 solution.

Anu Gupta of Headshift attempted to comment (as did I and I’m stealing the structure of this post from Anu):

Shiv – not sure I agree with you…

I think you’re lucky (or unlucky) in having bench resource available – a lot of companies aren’t in that situation and have a constant battle to get developer time. So, faced with that situation – what is the cost of having 2 developers available, part time, to develop and look after your mediawiki instance over 18 months ?

Secondly, would spending the relatively small amount on an unlimited license for Confluence ($8,000) or Socialtext, and getting out of the box AD integration, search and granular permissioning, represent better value than developing it from scratch ?

Also, developing inhouse commits you to a codebase that with an audience of just yourselves (until you release it out to the community ?).

I can see both sides here.  Jeff’s point is that MediaWiki wasn’t designed for Intranet use out of the box.  I believe there is truth to this, that MediaWiki will always be optimal for running a public online encyclopedia or similar community.

But you can’t slap down open source development on the basis of cost alone.  Going with a proprietary vendor inherently restricts freedom — both through lock-in and the ability to extend. Open source enables a company to both manage risks, share risks across a community and adapt software for their situation.  Engaging internal developers also engages core stakeholders that can help wiki adoption.   

I also find the cost argument to be misleading. The closed option has a license cost, the open option has no license cost.  But the customer’s customization requirements would have to be met somehow, and who knows how the buy vs. build works out in this case where pricing isn’t transparent.

Anu’s System Integrator perspective provides a third way, where a third party gains economies by providing solutions across a base of customers.  But to remove the question mark at the end of his comment, so does an open source community.  It seems Razorfish benefits from having the bulk of its codebase be community maintained, and I would suggest sharing their extensions are in their best interest. I’m not questioning the value of such integrators, each has their own proposition and value add, but the customer would be better off if an SI serviced codebase was, again, open source.

The fourth way involves me tooting my own horn.  If Razorfish started their project today, they could use Socialtext Open and get the best of both worlds.  The best of breed enterprise wiki and the freedom of open source. 

We chose a commercial open source business model because it strikes a balance between freedom and profit.  Not because we are hippies.  But because it is in the best value for end customers.  As first to market and first to feature, we continue to innovate and there is the chance that one day Razorfish would find having us service the software to be a valuable option.  But that is up to them.

When competing in a market full of choice, you have to be a choice leader.  Not just in providing on-site, Appliance, SaaS and open source deployment and licensing options.  But enabling your customers to make their own choices.

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