We all like reading posts on blogs, news sites and media. we like to see videos and pictures. some of us like to comment on them too. but those comments are not social, they are local and isolated. who saw this in his twitter feed?

i commented on _____ blog post http://bit.ly____

This is a hack with a hint to the future.

Comments are a social thing, an interaction of the reader with the blogger. Why should it not be a part of the social fabric?
There are a few first trials to weave the social tools to website, like the cmswire.com  reactions driven by disqus, but comments are still available. No one was bald enough to take the plunge yet and remove comments all together.

The Facbook social plugin gives another platform to replace the comments while adding the facebook aspect to it.

The risk as with all cloud services is the locking of the data to a third party and with the last Amazon EC3 shutdown, as with all risks the mitigation and the value it offers should be assessed, my view is that an integration of a twitter/facebook feed to your articles is much more engaging then the current comments structure. The value and exposure in the social networks will beat the search value, yes i think that search will crumble against the mighty social network information structure, information is ranked better in a social network to my oppinion but that is a huge article i have no time to deal with at the moment.

So what do you think about the comments death? is it inevitable?

As my son will put it it is very very very very sad, seeing this great service suffering from this problem. and sadder to see all the services around it fearing their livelihood.
Hope it gets back up quick this time as it is not a welcomed crash.
The reason is unclear at the moment as to shy it is down but it seems to be a big thing as oppose to the quick drops from the past.
Time will tell what effect it will have on trust and especially of transition into buzz the main competitor.

Imagine you are a CEO of a medium company, or you might even be one, and you have chosen your Enterprise 2.0 platform, implemented it and trained every employee in the company to use it.

So you have your Wikies and Forums set up.

All of your groups have access and manage their content in the sysem.

You see usage growing in the company.

“All is good”, you think to yourself, i can tell the board we have succeeded and that benefits will be seen in the immediate future.

But nothing happens.
You start to question the reasons, but all you see is a good usage rate and lots of content.
What is wrong?

From my experiance in the last few months i have a few reasons.
First and foremost is that the initial flame is gone, your employees are not eager to play since the interest in the content has fallen and the content that was there is not as updated any more.
The second is that this is a business that has ranks not an open source project where you have respect, not everything is documented.
But these are all obvious things we all know about, whats your new pain-point Yuval?
I was just exposed to a problem in the way the content is managed, i have a client where he has 2 IT departments under different titles. they both use the same software for their Enterprise 2.0 solutions but they are separated by a security border and thus oblivious to the content of the other group.
They have no way of using the content that the other group have written even if it is most relevant.
Both of the groups use our software and use the same infrastructure, so they encounter the same problems and could use each other solutions.
But they have no exposure to that so they need to go and ask people, that have done the same 6-12 months ago, if they have seen this or that behavior.
Guess what, no one can remember so they either search the wiki for you or say they didn’t encounter it.

This is a major hidden problem especially with things that are cross deparmental.
But when is it safe to share and when is it not? i guess we are missing some sort of a rule of thumb here.
My guess is that more then 80% of the information is safe, very safe to go across departments to the whole company.
But who makes the decision? who is the person in charge?
The contributor is not capable of making the decision himself some times and needs to consult, who governs this?
I have seen a few debates going sour, and was introduced to this article onhow blogs solve the inter departmental communication gap but that is a singular solution to a problem in multiple communication channels.

Let the discussion begin!
P.S. if we get a good solution i am going to push it to the client as a pilot.

Its been a great weekend in OpenAustralia Hackfest, first let me thank the organizers who have done an amazing job, Matthew Landauer, Alan Noble, Pamela Fox, Henare Degan and Tim Ansell who organized the event. And a special thanks to our amazing sponsorers Google who gave us the space, the food and the great prizes.
A big get well out to Rob Manson, getting sick in the first day and missing out. Hope he gets better soon.
There were some great hacking done on goverment data and some nice things that have not matured to applications during the weekend.

There is one thing, that keeps blinking at the back of my mind.

Is the crowd we are serving the data ready?
Will they be able to use the interface we give them?

It seems there is a gap, a big gap, between the technology world and the political realm. there is always a gap, i was not aware of how deep it is. Reading License to Drive in the Digital Economy exposed me to a troubling figure, a quater of the people in this land are social web illiterate,

“27% of those surveyed aged 14 and over were not currently participating online. These statistics give some indication that about a quarter of those surveyed would struggle to become active participants in the digital economy.”

This poses a big question about utilization of the Government 2. and the usefulness of these tools.
It seems that the information gathered from these types of applications will be biased towards the more capable social layers, thus creating a worse situation to the social segments not represented.
What shell we do?

How can you enable all the crowd to be part of this participation age?
This is a big questions that got some mentioning

My take is that we need to child proof our applications and match them to a crowd of a non technical and non social aware type.
As we develop our systems we should be able to get the information to the users in the most easy to follow and simple to understand thus making it available to all users of the web.
Keep your interfaces accessible, make them conform to WCAG 2.0, if you are not a front end developer DON’T develop the front end.

There was a cry from Tim Ansell, during free hacking sessions and later in the lightning sessions, to find any one who can prettify his interface.

Do the same, there are allot of people that are very capable and would love to do so.

May the web be with you.

When i think on Enterprise 2.0 implementation in any organization i am looking to see if the organization will embrace it and invest the time needed.
Judging people on a quick impression basis probably gives me the wrong impression over the flexibility of some of those organizations. And imagining the CEO of a company embracing a blog usually seems impossible.

Apparently i am wrong Ron Miller in Fierce Content Management has posted a commentary about how the Enterprise 2.0 is been adopted by the more mature crowd of companies as tools of communication.
It might be that the validity of the Web 2.0 as a communication platform is really here in the Enterprise Corporation and not the twitter mania over Iran.
I hope of hearing more and more news like that.

Steve looks like a very nice toy to run through and looks interesting enough to buy a ticket and get to the next burning man.

Steve is a large scale, interactive, collaborative installation

but what is the collaboration effort needed to make Steve work? and what value do we expect to get out of the experiment?
I am sorry to say that i see no value in the effort of making this funny looking exhibition. there will be probably a great fun involved in making it play good and there will be interesting pieces to be played, but beyond that fact Steve could be in a museum and not in burning man, what social value does it hold/represent?
it seems like the builders taken the wrong approach to it

these collaborations become their own persistent meta-beings, meta-beings comprised of both biological and technological parts.

Sorry guys but running naked, and probably high, through a robot that makes sound, and may be lights, based on my position is not the evolution outside of biological boundaries, but the celebration of them, with the laser sensors pointing at my physical boundaries.

May be we can make Steve create content in a content system based on peoples motions and movement generating a website out of those motions. wait that is exactly what i am doing now. using motions to put words into the machine. so we are extending our biological boundaries as we communicate over the internet. and we collaborate in many social networks that usually enhance our individuality and combines us in the social fabric of the world as nodes.

There is no novelty in Steve and he is not to my opinion extends the experience of the social creation beyond its current boundaries.

I would envisioned a much more interesting learning and implementing machine, that begins with interaction with the humans and then continues the cycle quoting humans and extending their impressions, making their interaction with the machine a part of the machines memory and make the machine create its own memories.

The most appropriate project that was done by ubergeek is the Disruption Array and it was situated in a museum which is in my opinion the place to put Steve in.

It appears that i am not going to buy a ticket to this years burning man so i will not meet Steve and get disappointed.

Last.fm thank you. you have made my choice as easy as waking up in the morning.
Since last.fm changed their business model to a subscription model i have been prompted by their client to pay or i will be waiting for music streaming.
Well enough is enough! I have just deleted the account and removed your software to stop you from abusing me.
Fist last.fm takes some bandwidth and download my songs while i am listening and now after several years (3 as a matter of fact) you ask me for subscription fee to keep using your service?
Have you lost your mind some where?
Isnt scrobbing prevents you from
I have deleted my account and uninstalled the service so you can’t Scrobb me off my files any more.
I am not paying a company that took my resources and copyrighted content 3$ a month to continue.
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish last.fm

Ominous Clouds over the free services?

Now i hope this is not a start of a new trend where companies who relied on advertising now slowly realize that the money is gone and they need some alternate income so they turn to the registered users and ask for subscription fees.
If that is so we are about to see a new change in our usage of once free services.
If yahoo decides to block flickr for subscription or facebook creates a pro services bundle and limits the regular users that will decrease usage and will prevent many from using their services especially in an economic environment like this.
But i think it will take a long time for a percolation through the whole industry of web applications and it might never happen to some of the big ones.
p.s. Will this be the end of the overrated hype Cloud Computing?

Reading newsweek i see that they have an article “Facebook‚Äôs Roar Becomes a Meow” by Daniel Lyons on Facebooks problematic business module of ad space.
But this model is pretty much all they had you might say.
Well… i think not. they could have add premium services or targeted businesses and organization at special services.
They could have added applications that you need to pay for and get the developer some premium on their work.
But the deal is that Googles business model is the one they chose.
Daniels point on the disturbance the ads generate in Facebook as oppose to the help they generate when attached to a searched and are relevant to the seeker is very important and might i say crucial.
The one model they might have benefited most of is letting external applications and developers connect through an API that carries a price tag on it so applications like Flock would pay a premium.
May be if you use the login API you pay nothing but only on other API’s? That could work and will open the net for a single peoples directory, a long needed resource.
This could generate  that will benefit every user in Facebook with more quality and every developer trying to make a buck.
But the war on MySpace was too important to facebook that they forgot to believe in their application strength.
My thoughts for a better Facebook

• Believe in your application.
• Remove the integral ads.
• Charge a premium for usage of applications and share it with developers.
• give the developers the ability to choose the payment and structure of charging, they know their app best.
• Develop more sophisticated ways to promote product, for instance get celebrities to become VIP fans of the products. Remember to coordinate the VIP user activities so they don’t slip
• Listen!

Looking at David Heinemeier post on ideas on 37signals you get the feeling of been there done that. but can the new age of wikinomics change the reality and make your idea come true using the momentum of others? can you be the next flickr ponderer? can your ideas come to life just because they are not unique?
Since it seems that our ideas are not unique and today places like Wikipedia succeed as collaborative effort may it be that people sharing the same idea will succeed in materializing it? can “Birds of feather flock together” work to create services?
This might be a fruitful effort if we can find a ground to group those people together.
But people think their ideas are unique, which they are but if we can extract 95% of these ideas we can probably find many people sharing the same idea.
Can harnessing other people with the same idea through a sharing site or selling it through an ideagora will change the ill fate of your idea? will your unique idea be deemed for life?
My personal belief is, No! your idea is sheared by many and the solution you might have concocted for your idea is yours and probably will stay yours since some one else might have taken the solution through another path of his own making. Gaping the solution to a unified solution is in the heart of standards that tend to take time and effort.
But if people with the same idea will be guided they can create a unified solution. there should be a process that guides people to that path, and that needs to be pondered thoroughly.
Only if a platform for solving the gaping issues and for making the process of solving ideas situations or problems will be created, may be through a community or a collaborative effort we might be able to give life to more ideas.
Just look at the fights spawn on community projects where one guy suggests an implementation of this sort and another an implementation of other sort, thus linux have distros.
The ideagora is less of a collaborative effort but a more of a solo spirited place and thus kind of single solution to a problem. you push your idea into “better hands” for a small fee hoping it will get better life at the hands of the buyer. like the start-up phenomena, i am making a solution/service to a problem/need and as soon as it shows singes of growth/hope i through it away at whom ever will give me the biggest amount of money for it.

Since it seems that our ideas are not unique and today places like Wikipedia succeed as collaborative efforts can harnessing other people with the same idea through a sharing site rather then selling it through an ideagora make more solutions available to us as services? can that also create the next step to start-ups?
Who will jump on the opportunity to ponder the system and the path to the Social Production solved problems? can we make that effort also Social Production?