Teblog

Be heard. Be seen. Be green.

The push for environmental sustainability must have been music to the ears of those involved in videoconferencing and its many derivatives. It provides another strong weapon in the vendors' sales armoury. Now, not only can organisations save staff time and reduce travel costs, they can also cut the use of fossil fuels into the bargain.

Add a couple of other things into the mix, like the growth of IP-based broadband and the advent of high definition screens, and the scene is set for an explosion of online face-to-face activity ranging from top-end lifelike telepresence systems right down to desktop applications using webcams. Each plays its part in an organisational collaboration strategy, depending on who the users are and what they're trying to achieve.

Task-oriented people who work together and who know each other can probably put up with lower fidelity or less comfort than strangers who might feel more at ease if they feel they're 'sitting around the table' with other participants. Broadly speaking, the environments could be summarised as boardroom, meeting room and desktop. Although you could add venues such as hospitals and police stations for remote consulting and interviewing, respectively.

As you might expect, you can pay from very little to a great deal depending on the level of sophistication you need. The major vendors are Cisco, Tandberg, Polycom, Teliris and Hewlett Packard. You can get a specially fitted multi-screen room, a 'room within a room', facilities added to a room, a deskside system, a desktop system or, at the lowest level, something that will run on your laptop or other mobile device.

Some services are managed, so you have no technical hassles. Others are provided as equipment to be managed by IT or whoever. At the bottom end, the user is in charge. In terms of hard ROI, Teliris claims that its payback period can be as short as 28 days. In one particular example, 52 business trips between Sweden and Japan were cut to eight or nine. Bingo! Every trip saved from then on is a bonus. Apart from the monthly management fee, of course. Mack Treece, Teliris president, said "Every customer has paid back their room in under twelve months."

LifeSize can supply room systems, at a cost, but it takes a more relaxed approach than some others. A couple of screens hung at the end of a meeting room is good enough. One can be used to check what your end looks before using it for presentations, shared whiteboarding or whatever. As the name suggests, the screen image is life size, but the fact that it's halfway up a wall doesn't seem to matter much. Once the conversation is under way, you tend not to notice. And eye contact, as with the central zone of most systems, is fine.

Some systems require some hefty dedicated bandwidth. LifeSize can do a reasonable job across a conventional broadband line. Most, if not all, high end vendors will adapt to the available bandwidth, losing high definition along the way if necessary. When I finished a recent conversation with Texas-based LifeSize CEO, Craig Molloy, one of the UK distribution people turned to me and said, "That cost us nothing, that call." That's because the company already had a megabit available in each direction on its DSL connection. Bear in mind that each participant was using just one screen/camera combination. It is theoretically possible to scale LifeSize to twenty screens or more.

Before long, we won't be speaking of these things as separate systems. They'll become as much a part of the organisational make up as the furniture in the boardroom, a whiteboard in the meeting room or the phone on a desk. Large organisations will probably install a few top-end systems in their main offices, complemented by larger numbers of the more traditional in-room systems and tiny systems that run on laptops or PCs. At this level, expect a great deal of blending with other collaboration and communication systems such as those provided by IBM/Lotus, Microsoft and Adobe, for example.

On our desktops, it will become quite natural to flick from looking at each other, to sharing screens, to presenting, to whiteboarding to IM, for example. The work itself will take over from the need to see each other although the option is there if visual contact is needed.

Possibly the biggest downsides at the moment concern interoperability and the local loop. Although lip service is usually paid to standards, some systems still do not play nicely with others. And, if reception flickers and stutters, you can almost certainly point your finger at the local loop. But, weighed against the alternatives, the odd glitch is a pretty good trade-off.

A quick route to unified communications?

A cheeky little outsider from Spain has been quietly snitching large unified communication (UC) deals from under the noses of major competitors.

(Reminder: a major benefit of UC is the acceleration of business processes, especially when participants are separated geographically.)

When I was invited to meet with Dialcom, I was amazed that it was still in business. In 1982, I was using Dialcom for my Telecom Gold email account. As it turned out, this is a completely different Dialcom and one that's keen to change its name. It is in the process of transitioning to the more meaningful Spontania, which happens to be the name of its UC software suite.

Yep, that's right, software suite. No hardware at all. Not even an appliance version, it just goes on a Linux server while ActiveX or equivalent controls are stuck in the clients. Clients can be Firefox and Internet Explorer, plus a number of mobile phones and PDAs. Flash, Macintosh and iPhone will be supported later this year, as will SIP. RIM's BlackBerry isn't yet on the radar.

The company has around 100 customers, mainly in Europe, but is beginning to pick up some decent deals in the USA. It targets medium to large organisations as a rule and plans to serve Europe through major VARs. It sells directly in North America but, globally, its ISVs and SIs provide vertical solutions. Vertical markets include health, energy and pharma'. If someone would care to deliver the functionality as a service to smaller businesses then Dialcom would definitely be interested.

IT managers generally don't warm to the idea of 'their' network being used for video or unified communications. But this stuff can be throttled back to suit the circumstances. Bob Johnson, the company's president and COO says, "256k to 512k would support seven or eight people in an active collaboration session."

At the desktop, we're talking about video, audio, application and file sharing, remote control, collaborative whiteboarding and instant messaging. And it works. Its adaptive bandwidth monitoring optimises performance to fluctuating network conditions. Images downgrade reasonably gracefully.

It's pure IP, as you might expect. But the firm has all sorts of edge connectivity bits so that companies with legacy switchboard equipment can still benefit. It also interoperates with H.323 video and can be incorporated into Outlook and Notes.

Price-wise, the Linux-based system, probably comes in below the competition, especially when you take into account that installation is the work of a few hours at most. 25 concurrent users comes in at just under $40k. Obviously, the more users, the lower the per-seat price.

It's an interesting take on the UC business and it's one that will satisfy the demands of the majority whose needs are straightforward. They want to see each other, talk to each other, show each other stuff and exchange files during the session. All this, and more, is available with barely any upheaval for the IT department.

I think I'll close with an "olé".

Unless you'd like to tell me what's wrong with the idea...

IBM's Bluehouse: a human hub?

Even after 42 years in IT, I still tend to forget that projects are always at their most attractive before they're implemented.

A good idea captivates and it's easy to get carried away with enthusiasm, temporarily forgetting that there's a whole lot of hard work in moving from idea to reality.

In the case of an IT product or service, the hurdles are not just technical. You have inconvenient things like channels to market and user acceptance to consider.

All this flooded into my mind following a visit to Lotusphere Comes To You at the Wembley Stadium the other day. Having visited the main event in Orlando earlier this year and been really fired up by Bluehouse I started to mull the reality behind the idea.

Bluehouse is intended to be a software-as-a-service offering from IBM for companies with 5 to 500 employees. According to IBM/Lotus, it will "provide extranet collaboration services for open social networking, instant messaging, file sharing, project management and web conferencing." And it is designed to appeal to those with no internal IT.

It still sounds good to me and I am sure that IBM will have no trouble pulling it off technically. But the way ahead is murky. IBM isn't used to dealing with small companies and its channel isn't used to selling subscription services. Nor, in the main, are the users ready for this kind of SaaS.

It would be interesting to think of IBM as a latter-day web business with curvy corners and off-the-page selling. This strikes me as an unlikely route to market. Or it could jump into bed with (or buy) someone with a ready-made channel. But this seems expensive for an idea which might still be ahead of mainstream user thinking.

I suspect that IBM is being driven by wishful thinking and the prospect of all that lovely monthly revenue pouring in from millions of SMBs who are presently beyond reach. Once attached to the IBM mothership, the opportunity exists for lots of additional revenue from an incremental expansion of the services which can be pushed (or is it pulled?) down the pipe.

But then, another scenario occurs to me. What if a company wanted to connect its business partners to its own collaboration services? It might have already bought into the Lotus collaboration story big-time and sees value in extending its reach. This might be possible, right now, using an assortment of publicly available services, but it might not offer the security, accountability or reliability that matches the company's governance and integration requirements.

Auto-makers and insurance companies provide intimate access to their suppliers and agencies for commercial transactions. I wonder if Bluehouse could end up becoming a hub for human transactions?

You calling me a consultant?

Adriana Lukas was the person who first opened my eyes to the potential business value of social computing. She starred in an Online Information conference a few years ago and, soon after, I trotted round to her office for some indoctrination. We talked about blogs, IM, wikis, RSS, feed readers and all the other technical paraphernalia that supports this new form of collaboration.

Today, Angela Ashenden (she works for Macehiter Ward-Dutton) and I whizzed over to the same office to get an update from Adriana on some project work she's been engaged in. A huge organisation knows that it has to engage more effectively internally and externally, but it is tightly regulated and is fairly traditional in its approach to business. Hierarchies come more naturally than networks. And, quite rightly, reputation has to be protected at all costs.

The user-driven style of social engagement does not sit comfortably with this organisation. Yet it is willing to experiment and find out whether there's anything of value to be had from this dangerous new activity. The fact that the project has been going for a couple of years suggests that it is tolerated at least and that some parts of the organisation are extracting benefit.

To cut the story brutally short, Adriana introduced people to information discovery, sharing and collaboration opportunities, then demonstrated some tools which might help. The list included blogging, wikis, Skype, RSS and social bookmarking. The tools are just the supporting mechanism for new ways of working together.

Prompted by our visit, Adriana posted What’s the real value of social software in enterprise  to her blog a few hours after we left. She gave the example of a wiki which was introduced for one task but which touched 41 people. Some of them, in turn, found other uses for wikis to accelerate and improve their collaboration.

Adriana says, "I’d argue that this is the most significant and long-term value of social media and social software tools at this stage of their use in enterprise. If anyone tells me they can put metrics on that, I’ll just call them a consultant (not a nice thing in my book!)."

I'm inclined to agree with her about determining the metrics beforehand. After all, no-one could have predicted these time-saving uses of the technology. So no IT department, or anyone else for that matter, could have planned and cost-justified the introduction of the software.

But, after the event, I'm sure that metrics could be applied and value measured. This would form a useful backdrop for future discussions about the benefits of introducing social computing to other parts of the company. So, I only half agree with her. And if that makes me a consultant, I guess I'll just have to live with that.

Vendor Relationship Management UK-style

One of the most challenging, charming, intelligent and irritating people I've ever met is one Adriana Lukas. She was a leading blogger in 2001, long before most people had ever heard of blogging. She understood the ramifications of social software before we knew that there were any ramifications. That would be at the end of 2002. She really was a classic voice in the wilderness and, through speaking engagements, massive amounts of networking and, in my case, arduous discussions, she brought many people to an understanding of the potential of social computing.

Now, she's mounted her charger again and her lance is firmly tilted at people's control of their personal data. In classic Lukas fashion, she's looked askance at the accepted ways of doing things and asked 'why?' Incremental developments creep up on us and we don't realise that the status quo is possibly not where we'd be had we realised the implications of each micro-step.

In this particular case, we're talking about the data that other people hold about us. Banks, social software sites, wine merchants, anyone, in fact, with whom we have dealings. Adriana's view is that we should be in charge of our personal information and reveal appropriate parts when it suits us. Thus, a bank might be given permission to check our address. This would be done through a standard feed mechanism (probably Atom) and the bank would be given an access key. It could poll the address whenever it felt like it. And, if it were a new account, the bank would be given the key and all the relevant pieces of information could be picked up, without the individual having to do yards of typing. At the end of the relationship, the ties can be cut and potentially valuable new personal information put beyond reach.

A wine buff might decide to expose their drinking habits and wine-tasting findings to the local wine merchant. Same thing. Merchant subscribes and, in the gift of the information owner, gets a glimpse into their client's life. Some people might mix their feeds (no pun intended) and others might feel more secure with separate feeds for separate 'friends'. Some might want to encrypt information. Providing the standards chosen are those which are acceptable to the accessing party then this is possible too.

This is an inversion of the relationships we have come to expect. It makes the supplier the supplicant. It puts the buyer in charge. Or, if we're talking government and civil service scenarios, it makes them the servants and the citizens the masters, which is as it should be.

This is all part of the vision of Project VRM. And, yes, this stands for Vendor Relationship Management, a deliberate inversion of the Customer Relationship Management term which, of course, is nothing of the sort. While born from the same roots and overlapping to a large extent, you will notice that Adriana's take on it is totally individual-centric, while the American-led version is more all-embracing. But, in each case, the aim is to restore some balance into the relationships.

In 2001, when Adriana started blogging, people probably thought her mad. In 2002, when she started articulating the value of social networking inside and outside organisations, she was still alone. In 2003, when Google bought blogging service Pyra, she knew she was on to something. And then, in 2005 she was finally vindicated as the mainstream media picked up on social networking.

Right now, I suspect she feels as lonely with respect to VRM as she did when she was blogging in 2001. It will be interesting to see if, once again, she has managed to hit the nail on the head.

Safe corporate social computing?

Look around at social and collaborative computing and what do you see? A complete hotch potch of different systems, some of which run safely behind the firewall, others which sit out there on someone else's servers. You hop from Flickr to Outlook to Skype to Facebook to discussion groups, or whatever. Each has its own approach and, often, integration is only possible through hyperlinks or copy/paste.

Add to this the fact that you're working on different devices, laptop, desktop, internet café terminal, mobile phone, Blackberry and so on and what have you got? A lot of time wasting, a lack of security and data distributed all over the show.

It can't last. To move forward we need to get to a point where all we're concerned about is doing stuff with our information and other people while the systems themselves move towards invisibility.

Of course we're going to have to get from where we are now to where we'd like to be then. One issue is integration. Another is multiplatform. And a third is security. I'm sure there are others, but they'll do for now.

We need common interfaces, the ability to surface our information to whatever device we happen to be using and to do it in a way that doesn't  expose us or our organisation to risk.

Enter stage left an organisation called Outblaze*. I had some minor contact with its CEO, Yat Siu, in 2005 and I'm ashamed to say I totally forgot about his company name. His tale about internet connection speeds in the Far East is what stunned me at the time. He was talking about 100 megs being common, with up to a gig being possible, if you were prepared to pay $215/month at the time. He now has a 1 gig connection to his home.

This means that using the internet is a totally different experience over there. And the software and user interfaces that have evolved are highly visual and engaging - you feel more as if you're in a virtual cartoon world than working a computer.

Outblaze sits quietly in the background providing 'white label' messaging and social computing services to a wide range of clients. Try MSN, AOL and Yahoo! for size. It's big. It has 76 million users tied to 480,000 web domains. Its clients offer Outblaze services as if they were their own. Outblaze picks up a monthly fee per user based on which particular services are picked from the company's long menu. At a broad level, it provides messaging, security, collaboration, community/social networking, digital identity, compliance and gaming facilities. Each heading contains, on average, half a dozen or so sub categories.

If you took the community/social networking stack, for example, it contains: social networking platform, online video editing and sharing, photo sharing, bookmarks sharing, blogs, wiki, chat, forums/message boards and dating/friend matching. It supports devices from mobile phones to desktop PCs and anything that can use the web.

The company is already hugely successful around the world and it is now extending its reach into the enterprise and, at the same time, it wants to increase its European presence, where it (vaguely) claims to have between five and ten million users. It thinks that Europe is more ready for its approach than the USA.

Richard Bye is the company's vp of sales and corporate development for EMEA (Europe Middle East and Africa), so he's the guy in the hot seat for this initiative. He believes, and he's probably right, that enterprises want their own social networks but they can't do it in-house and they don't really trust the public services. Nor do they want the capital expenditure or the disruption associated with such an initiative.

It's obvious where this is heading. With a solid base of experience of running enterprise-class hosted and integrated systems, Outblaze's system appears to check all the boxes. No doubt it will try and get its leverage from working through the third parties that already serve these prospects. Potentially, it's a straightforward value-add for them and huge leverage for Outblaze.

It will come into conflict with some presently outsourced services. Messagelabs springs to mind, but I'm sure there are plenty of others.

And, who knows, perhaps we can learn to relax a bit and allow a little of the Far Eastern culture to penetrate our rather stolid computer interfaces. All we need is a bit more bandwidth.

PS The above blog was written just before I left for Lotusphere on 20th Jan. On 21st January, IBM/Lotus announced  the beta of its own social/collaboration hosted service called bluehouse. If IBM can get its rollout and provisioning strategy right, it could put the company centre stage.

*Outblaze's new website should be online by the end of January. Having looked at the old one on Wayback Machine, I can't blame the company for hiding it.

Dealing with social media addiction

The internet is silting up with ego-driven dross. It's little wonder that the anti-network-neutrality brigade would like to turn it into freeways and side streets, depending on willingness to pay. And, equally, it's no wonder that the network neutrality supporters want everything to stay the same and for the pipes to be fattened ad infinitum.

With limitless capacity and fixed price access, anyone who can afford a few dollars a month is able to promulgate whatever they want out to an unsuspecting world. They could do it with blogs, podcasts, videocasts, social networking sites, Second Life or Twitter.

It doesn't matter that most of the utterances are ignored by most of the world. For most people the joy lies, I suspect, in the uttering. It's like vanity publishing. Everyone has a story and this is a way to get it out.

Most people like making connections and 'friendships'. By participating in a social site like Twitter, they can delude themselves about their connectedness. Enough of the digital glitterati hang out there to make it worth dropping by and picking up what these A-listers are up to. Even if it is as boring as 'stuck in traffic on 101', or whatever.

If we were able to really restrict our appetite for social media consumption to our genuine friends and work colleagues, for example, then we'd probably derive a lot of value from it. I wouldn't mind knowing what my four analyst colleagues at Freeform Dynamics were up to at any time although I really wouldn't welcome a continous stream of the stuff.

And this is the issue really. If you get involved in any big way with blogs, podcasts, videocasts and social sites, it can be like a drug. But this drug doesn't so much mess with your head as mess with your time. "I'll just see what [name your own guru] is up to at the moment" and that's another chunk of your life thrown away, never to be recovered. It's even worse with videos, which are becoming all the rage in Twitterati circles. A bit of puff and a tiny URL and, if you're not careful, you end up watching some nonentity on an ego trip.

I think we ought to start accounting for our time in the same way that lawyers do. And then measure the value extracted from each social media engagement. Did it entertain? Did it educate? Did it inform? Choose your own criteria and monitor your online activity. If you're dissatisfied with the outcome, ask yourself what else you would have spent that time doing. If the answer to that is 'something better' then you have a problem. Only by recognising the consequences of the addiction can you form your strategy for beating it.

PS For social accounting purposes, that probably took you 135 seconds to read.

To Twit, to who?

Okay, I confess. I've been Twittering over the holiday period. As part of my social computing beat for Freeform Dynamics, it's up to me to try and understand what the heck's going on, even if it isn't (yet?) mainstream.

Like blogging, Second Life, instant messaging, Facebook and all the other social computing activities before it, at first glance Twitter looks a bit mad and potentially very disruptive. It is, essentially, mini-blogging. 140 characters to say what you like when you like. Your posts appear on your followers' screens or on their phones.

You can be certain that companies like IBM and Microsoft are watching with interest. And, no doubt, many of their staff will be participating enthusiastically. As with all the previous social activities, they'll mine value out of it, if there's any value to be mined. Then they'll try to either replicate it within their own collaboration suites or, if they have to, make sure that this stuff can be surfaced within their own offerings.

The early adopters of social media tools are a fickle bunch. They swarm. Because they are so connected, ideas spread rapidly and they find themselves flitting to the next new thing. And, presumably because there are only so many hours in the day, marginalise whatever social computing activity they previously indulged in.

Facebook was de rigeur among these people and now they're Twittering. I have no doubt that they will be on to the next good thing very soon. But they leave a trail. I was going to say like animal spoor, but that sounds rather negative. First of all the creators of these tools have probably worked for nothing and shared their tools freely. If they end up with a 'hit' on their hands, then they have masses of beta testers, also working for 'nothing'. (In actual fact, they disclose a lot about themselves.) They will have identified value in the offering, even if they subsequently move on.  For the Microsofts and IBMs of this world, this amounts to free research.

When blogging first caught on, it seemed to comprise mainly of people wittering on about nothing in particular to an audience that largely couldn't give a toss. Some bloggers, though, actually made sense and started to attract followers. Just like journalism, some educated, some informed and some entertained. It didn't really matter. By writing authoritatively about their interests, they started to attract those who were interested in similar things. Communities started to form, through adding comments and including links from their own blogs. This often led to other more conventional forms of contact. Beside this undeniably valuable human aggregation, a massive pool of permanently stored information is there for anyone to explore in the future.

So what about Twitter? Time-wasting nonsense was my predominant reaction to it for several months. I made the same mistake that I did with blogging, predominantly that I thought I had to keep up with everything. It's not possible. I thought the posts were largely pointless. Many of them are. Just like blogging, some are silly, some are irritating while some deliver direct value. Some Twitterers do all three, depending on their mood. The best ones are of the 'hey look at this' variety. If someone you respect enough to follow says this, then you're probably going to welcome such a tip-off.

But then you get the "I am in a sushi bar in Times Square, yum yum". Most of us couldn't care less, unless we happen to be in New York, in which case it's an opportunity to make contact. If you're thinking of calling someone and they're on Twitter, you could look at their stream and see what they're up to. Frankly, I think there are dangers in giving too much away. If I wanted to burgle someone, all I'd need to do was follow their Twitter stream to find out when they're away. Okay - a bit silly maybe, but it is a reminder of how much we give away, wittingly or not.

But, behind this, values emerge. Sign up and find some people or entities (Twitterers are all people, but some go by their company name or their interest - 'predictions08' or 'FTtechnews' for example) that you know and see who they follow. This is a useful way of finding who's out there who might be of interest to you. Watch out for the current courtesy of reciprocating 'follows'. If you look at the list of people I follow, don't assume I have the faintest idea who many of them are. I've just added them because they added me. (Unlike Facebook where I'm very fussy who I accept as a 'friend'. 'Follower' is a much more sensible term.)

Conversations emerge on Twitter, but it's not a good way to converse, any more than blogging would be. Do you track comments on your comments on someone's blog post? So Twitter provides messaging as well. You can't assume that anyone's aware of anything you've posted. Twitter is just a stream of jumbled stuff into which you can dip to 'catch the mood' perhaps or pick up tips, links and like-minded (or not) souls. And, of course, it's always a good idea to reciprocate with links to good stuff that you've stumbled across.

The very worst thing you can do is to try and catch up on everything that's been said since the last time you were on. Accept that you'll miss stuff. Or, if there are people whose every utterance you must follow, get them sent to your mobile or log in to their page when you have a moment.

I can't predict whether Twitter will prove to be a fad or whether it will go mainstream. What I do know is that the entrails are being studied and if there's anything of value there, it will surface in some form in the offerings of major software companies.

On social computing signal:noise ratio

Earlier this week Dale Vile - boss of Freeform Dynamics - posted about his frustrations following a deep dive into social computing. He's been blogging and reading blogs for a couple of years but wondered if he might be missing out on something. By and large, he concluded he wasn't.

I responded by email rather than comment. But Dale thought I should base a post around my response. Having read it through, I think I may as well share it in its entirety. Responses, private or as comments, are more than welcome.

Dear Dale

Read your 'Signal to noise' piece yesterday.

Reread it this morning.

Sounds like you've gone round the loop I went round a few years ago, except I did allow myself to become overwhelmed for a while.

Eventually, it was the realisation that you can't keep up with everything, no matter how relevant/important, that stopped me. Along with the inability to keep up was a strong and growing sense of inadequacy which was fairly crippling.

Eventually I twigged that all this stuff is a river - continuously flowing, into which it's possible to dip and sense the mood and perhaps go after the occasional fish or interesting piece of driftwood. There's always Google blog search if you want to track down what's been said recently on any particular subject. And, as you point out, tags. Although I'm less trusting of them because they're not universally used.

When Netvibes came along, it allowed me to Watch the river without necessarily going for a swim. This is where the value of a good descriptive headline comes in. Netvibes just lists the feeds in little boxes - you can choose how items many you want to display in each, but the next/previous links mean you don't have to miss stuff.

If you want to see the full degree to which I (don't) track, see the attached picture. The bold numbers are how many unselected/unread items are outstanding in each category.

Am I bothered? Not any more. Like you, I go where I want when I need to. You'll notice the 'ego' tab has no unreads. When I go to a tab with unread entries, it takes seconds to scan each one.

I agree about Twitter - lots of lost souls clinging together for comfort and reassurance. Facebook is heading the same way and they're making some strategic mistakes at the moment. I hope it will pass because groups have good potential for business use as does the general theory of 'find someone who knows'.

The water cooler/bonding aspect of these social media is important IMHO, providing it doesn't descend into pointless natter (the social media gurus will argue that nothing's pointless, it might come in handy some time). Sometimes our own Skype IM group is good, sometimes it's noise. But there's bonding going on there. These things can be good for distributed teams or collaborators.

Part of whether social computing has value lies in the size of the participating group. And this applies to wikis as well. Too few active participants in a community means that nothing happens and value isn't extracted. Large organisations like IBM, BT or BBC get value out. Signal/noise can be improved with simple ground rules. And, of course, by the fact that people's online activities are visible to all in the community.

Finally, there's the question of why people do stuff online. Blogging in particular, but it could apply to Twitter, Facebook et al. Conventional wisdom is 'post often'. I think the reason for this is that you then go up the various rankings. And, if you get visible, you go up further because people think you must be good. I've always thought this was barmy, and still do. The scheduled or frequent posting is not for the benefit of the reader, it's for the benefit of the publisher or the individual doing the post.

You talk in your piece about how few blogs have something original to say. And I agree. It's just noise. And, I suspect a lot of this is because people feel obliged to post at a particular frequency, regardless of if there's any reason to post.

It's all jolly complicated. I know there are Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays when I think "oh shit, it's blog post day". Although, mostly, something has happened in the previous week to justify some kind of post. Then there's the time it takes up.... But that's another story.

David

Upheaval or opportunity?

The trouble with this business is that, almost every day, you meet honest and well-intentioned people who have a convincing story to tell. Then you get back to the real world and realise that however decent these people are, many are fundamentally deluding themselves.

I'm not going to name names, but take a company that has a technically superb product but it was designed by programmers and information scientists with the result that it can only be used by an elite with a similar background. Or, and perhaps this is deliberate, by spending a ton of dough on training - either from the vendor or by setting up their own internal programmes.

A bit of 'user first' wouldn't go amiss and it would save customers a fortune. It would also make selling easier. One suspects that it might also result in a lower price, because it would then be seen as less esoteric and easier to use.

Another organisation might think it has come up with the most cracking environment within which to work. Top to bottom integration from applications, through operating systems, down to database and hardware platform. Enterprise rollouts are the dream with shedloads of revenue pouring in each year. Such systems pay lip service to the outside world of social networking but try to trap everything within their own walled gardens. The mantra could be, "You're safe with us."

A variation on this theme is a multi-platform version which is slightly less obsessed with the operating system lock-in bit.

Either way, the sell is seductive -  a single backside to kick. The downside is that, once trapped and committed to a particular way of working and set of standards, it's hard to escape. You depend on the supplier to keep up and quickly incorporate the more desirable elements from the outside world.

This sort of all-encompassing approach comes at the same time as a general drift toward consolidation and centralisation and away from the distributed computer operations that we've become familiar with. This is driven largely by cost savings but, for public consumption, they're frequently camouflaged with greenwash.

Counterbalancing this centralising, regaining control, kind of world of individual major vendors, you have a decentralising world of hosted services, social computing and open systems. They look like a rag bag army from a distance but get close and you find some jolly effective regiments and platoons. The challenge is to wire them together as a cost-effective whole.

SalesForce.com is the poster child for enterprise SaaS. It took one aspect of a business which could be peeled off and delivered as a service, more or less bypassing IT.

Then you have the great mass of social software where people can link up with others of common interest, both inside and outside business. Many of these are platform plays which allow others to add functionality for the glory of so-doing, rather than in the expectation of making money. Some pretty major companies have given the nod to Facebook use among employees, not least because they haven't had to expand their computer operations to accommodate the functionality.

It's easy for IT and business people who are used to the first world above to sneer at people from the second world. But they know that every day, in their own lives and in those of their users, that the second world is an increasing slice of their lives. Connections between people are the life blood of knowledge work and knowledge work is an ever-increasing part of our lives.

The centralisers want to embed and control the somewhat freeform nature of informal and ad hoc communications. Apart from anything else, they'd like audit trails for possible regulatory actions. (Never mind that they can't do it with normal human interactions - in the café, down the pub, in the restaurant and on the phone.)

On the other hand, the open folk put their offerings out there and wait and see what happens. Sure, they evangelise like fury, by talking at conferences, blogging and pushing hard from their websites. But they don't have armies of sales people. They rely on the conversational networks to spread the word. They provide free downloads and let people get on with it.

Some of them and this unnerves many, rely on unpaid developers to fix bugs and add features. They argue that real-time fixes and improvements are infinitely preferable to waiting for, and forking out for, the periodic 'big releases' of traditional vendors.

At some point, if 'client' companies get serious, they come to the provider and ask for support, hosting, education or whatever. At this point, the vendor starts to make money more or less directly proportionate to the effort they are expending. But the amount of money coming in doesn't have to pay for a top-heavy, revenue-draining, sales force and channel. The vendor's primary investment is in creating a robust and responsive computing and communications system which can scale to match demand.

In so many ways it seems we are at another transition point in computing history. Huge forces are demanding that we review how we run our computer operations. The open movement is challenging conventional publishing models. Broadband and mobile communications are transforming where and how many of us work. And interpersonal communications, on which so much of (western?) business depends, is moving centre-stage.

Who knows what the outcome will be? The important thing is to keep an open mind and, even if you're presently locked in to a particular supplier, don't stop looking at what's going on elsewhere. And, although their demands might seem unreasonable at times, listen to your users. They are, after all, the ones doing the real work.