I just returned from NEXPO, which I'm told is the largest newspaper conference. The exhibition floor was the largest I've ever seen. There were several huge printing presses there. The event was definitely different from the conferences I'm accustomed to attending. There may have been five geeks in total. It was entirely business and traditional media types and I've been on the road so long I haven't had a chance to get a much needed haircut. 🙂  I did have a great time. We were demoing MindTouch Nexus (see press release below). MindTouch Nexus is a wiki based community service geared to online media, publishing, newspapers and ecommerce. This provides the third component readers expect from online media and newspapers when they visit their website or online properties. Already these sites have trusted editorial content. They're also fulfilling the syndicated content requirement. With Nexus they can provide what their readers are demanding: the ability to participate in a very real way; specifically, in the creation of the most comprehensive encyclopedic directory of local resources. This is about getting the community involved in helping to create the most comprehensive hyper-local content repository.

We presented two properties at Nexpo: AmplifySD and the Orlando Sentinel Wiki. The AmplifySD site is almost certainly already the most comprehensive resource for local music, bands, and venues in San Diego and will continue to grow. The Orlando Sentinel Wiki is a generic proof of concept site we launched in just a few days prior to NEXPO, but it's been very well received and already has some great hyper-local content.

There was a ton of talk at the conference about hyper-local content and empowering communities. Most traditional media outlets are beginning to understand the need and value of this. Newspapers are realizing they have to own the local content space if they wish to be viable. Other online media, publishing, and ecommerce sites are realizing the power and benefits of enabling a community. Most of the folks I spoke with at NEXPO either have blogs and forums attached to their web properties or are just now beginning to launch these tools. Blogs and forums are a great start, but a wiki makes a lot more sense if you want to encourage participation, and if you want to own the local content space.

Blogs are great for one person or a few people to publish to many readers. This is really about providing a rapid publishing tool mostly for featured topics and enabling your audience to comment. This is great for reviewers, critics, etc. However, this enables very limited community participation (comments only) and information is only able to be presented anti-chronologically. This is to say that the most relevant information is always the newest. In reality blogs are a single thread forum engine. Forums are wonderful for question/answer kind of topics. However, forums too are limited to an anti-chronological information architecture. Both forums and blogs quickly become difficult to navigate and find what you're looking for. Neither technology is suitable to collaborative authoring or developing a reference site. Enter wikis.

Wikis are wonderful for online collaboration and are the obvious choice for developing reference sites. Take Wikipedia for example. Newspapers that deploy wikis can provide a very useful service to their readers. They can give them the opportunity to participate in creating the most comprehensive encyclopedic directory of local resources. This benefits everyone. Newspapers can't do this alone. They couldn't afford it and it wouldn't be authentic. Moreover, the community would have difficulty creating a "localpedia" without the help of the newspapers. Newspapers can provide the infrastructure, editors and journalists to assist in shaping the quality of the content, the very important initial or seed content to get the wiki started, and an incentive for local businesses and community members to participate. It's a mutually beneficial partnership.

For newspapers a "localpedia", whether topic specific or generic in nature, might be the holy grail with which they can empower, reward, and benefit from citizens' input. Local businesses benefit by having a medium to make their presence known on a contextually relevant basis to readers who are seeking their services. Readers benefit by having a useful and comprehensive encyclopedia of local events, businesses, history, places, sports, and whatever else. Wouldn't it be wonderful to be vacationing in San Diego and to have a wikipedia like resource of local events, places, and historical reference at your finger tips to guide your planning?

I mentioned previously a "localpedia" that might be either topic specific or generic. I think this is keenly important because the more narrowly you focus your "localpedia" the less seeding of content is required. For example, the AmplifySD site focuses solely on local music, bars, bands, and venues. The San Diego Union Tribune only had to seed content on these topics. It's critically important for them to do so because when readers/participants visit the site they need a framework to operate in; otherwise you run the risk of confusing them. The San Diego Union Tribune is launching many narrowly focused "localpedias" using MindTouch Nexus. Also, by focusing the topics there is a lower barrier for the users to contribute–they have to think less. Moreover, if they've arrived at a narrowly focused "localpedia" they've almost certainly done so because it's a topic that interests them and the content is focuses solely on this topic; therefore they'll be more inclined to participate.

NEXPO 2007

MindTouch Nexus is a turnkey hosted service that integrates with SignOnSanDiego’s website and publishing system. It enables SignOnSanDiego readers to easily contribute content on subjects that interest them and collaborate with other readers and editors with an intuitive WYSIWIG editing tool. They can post text, images, video and MP3 clips. MindTouch Nexus provides many tools for SignOnSanDiego editors to manage how user-generated content can be blended with editorial and syndicated content on the site. Pages can be set to edit, comment or read-only mode, and are indexed and linkable, searchable and taggable. Contributions can be submitted on their own or in context of an article or other editorial content.

“We believe MindTouch Nexus will generate large volumes of fresh content which will in turn build traffic, increase the ability to post more targeted advertising and deepen our connection with the dynamic San Diego County community,” said Chris Jennewein Vice President, Internet Operations of Union-Tribune Publishing Co. “The need to harness user-generated content is the new reality for all online media, and MindTouch Nexus provides us with a powerful tool to fulfill that need in a controlled way.”

The agreement with SignOnSanDiego calls for a continuous rollout of sites and topics, starting with AmplifySD (www.amplifySD.com), a site dedicated to the vibrant and influential San Diego music scene. Visitors to the site can post articles, images, video and MP3 clips of their favorite bands, and i
nclude their history, music reviews, tours, discographies and more. MindTouch Nexus provides a central platform for music lovers to edit or comment on each other’s contributions and interact with the musicians and others involved in the business. Its targeted launch is in May, 2007.

“We selected MindTouch due to its extensible technology, customer-friendly business approach and business model,” said Ron James, Content Manager of SignOnSanDiego. “MindTouch Nexus does not require any capital investment or large upfront expenditure, and is immediately deployable with an attractive pay-for-performance model. All these factors made its selection easy for us.”

“We are proud to have SignOnSanDiego, a well-known innovator in the online media world, as our launch customer for MindTouch Nexus,” said Ken Liu, MindTouch’s CEO. “We are excited by how their long-term vision for community-generated content meshes with our capabilities, which we will showcase in a continuous stream of new features and launches in the coming months.”

Why would a newspaper, online publishing/media, or ecommerce site use MindTouch's technology over the countless open source wikis and few other commercial vendors out there? There are many reasons why MindTouch Nexus makes the most sense. Visit www.MindTouch.com for a complete picture or contact MindTouch directly (866) MindTouch or (866) 646-3868. I'll mention just a few reasons why Nexus is the best choice here. The first reason is that MindTouch Nexus is a platform that has been specifically designed for the needs of this space–it's completely customizable and easily integrated with existing systems. The product is vendor backed and you have multiple support options. MindTouch Nexus and other MindTouch wiki products are the most easy to use in this space and this means the barrier to participate is dramatically lower than other offerings. Try out the competitions' offerings and you'll undoubtedly agree. Also, and perhaps most importantly, MindTouch Nexus is designed to make it very easy to integrate with other systems. Not just for things like single-signon, but also to weave the community content into the editorial content and vice-versa.

The following are the three most asked questions about MindTouch Nexus at NEXPO:

Will we have to change our existing systems? Absolutely not. MindTouch Nexus is easily integrated into all of your existing systems and MindTouch can turn on a new in a few hours to a few days depending upon the level of integration and customization. None of your existing technologies or tools need to be changed.

If I launch MindTouch Nexus as a hosted service does this mean I will have new or different traffic analytics, different ads, and will I still get traffic rank increases from this new property? MindTouch Nexus will integrate with your existing analytics, advertising engines and you will receive the Nielson or Alexa ranking for the traffic. If you're new to this space and need help with analytics or advertising MindTouch can help.

How do I control the community? Without getting esoteric on controlling a community I'll just state succinctly: MindTouch gives you very fine granularity in controlling who can edit what. You also have the ability to create trusted users that don't get put into moderation. Moreover, MindTouch has been doing this community thing for a while now and can help in establishing the best strategy to creating a successful deployment.

If you have more questions about MindTouch Nexus or another MindTouch product email sales@mindtouch.com.

PC World

I downloaded MindTouch Deki, which lets you collaborate on documents wiki-style. I expanded the archive and then double-clicked on the resulting file. The appliance booted its operating system, configured itself, and was ready to use in about a minute.

Looks like PCWorld picked up the MindTouch Deki piece too.

Macworld

Virtual Appliance: VMWare’s virtual appliances are fully configured and ready-to-run software programs—such as MindTouch Deki, shown here—that you can download.

MindTouch Deki was recently used to demo the new VMWare Fusion on MacOSX. I heard from some friends they had seen this in the print magazine. If I heard correctly, I also heard it was in a presentation somewhere. Very cool.

I just had the good fortune of meeting Ross Mayfield. I’m speaking on a panel with him at the Gilbane conference today. I introduced myself to him. I told him I was glad to finally meet him. He then proceeded to tell me that I am his "industrial troll". I don’t know what this means. He also told me that I am "full of shit", or maybe it was that everything I say is "bullshit". I asked him what he meant. He said everything I write on my blog is "bullshit" and "no one cares about me anyway". I asked him what he meant. He said "no one reads my blog anyway". I asked Ross what he thought was "bullshit" that I had written on my blog and Ross Mayfield said: "I’m a PR whore". I think he said "whore". He walked away from me before I could clarify. I wish I was popular like Ross, _sniffle_. Could someone clarify for me what an "Industrial troll" is?

Update

I finished the Wiki Executive Panel a moment ago. During the panel I was thinking: "what is an industrial troll"? Is this an insult? He did say: "You are my industrial troll". Maybe I misread his derisive tone and sneer. Uhh…I don’t think so. Also, someone who read the initial post thought Ross was asserting that I was a "PR whore", if in fact the word he used was whore (I’m pretty sure it was). No, he was asserting that I had called him a PR whore.

Anyway, Ross did a good presentation during the panel. He has some good things to say. He’s done a lot to move wikis into the mainstream (we’re not there just yet). I appreciate this. He’s also a strong advocate of open standards. It seems, to me anyway, that Ross and I should get along. We have similar interests. I get along quite well with every other wiki vendor I’ve met. Mike at Atlassian is super cool. Isaac Garcia at Central Desktop is witty and fun. The guys at eTouch are cool. I just spoke with a dude from iUpload, really nice guy. Customer Vision–what’s her name–is really funny and nice. I guess I’m not "cool" enough for Ross. By the way, Ross again asserted Socialtext was the first Wiki company. I’m pretty sure he’s wrong about this though. I think this title goes to either Customer Vision or Atlassian. However, I will assert MindTouch is the bestest! 😉

This is a cross-post

Steve and I have been tossing about this idea for an Open Web for some time now.

What is Open Web?

Open Web is a collection of technologies and standards that enable individuals to disclose their identity, feeds, activities, friends, and social networks, while preserving their ownership over this information and enabling them to keep their privacy.

What is NOT Open Web?

Anything that is proprietary, locked in in format or provider is NOT Open Web.  Open Web is about open, extensible, and license free standards.

In short this is a collection of technologies and open standards that enable individuals to disclose their identity, feeds, activities, friends, and social networks, while preserving their ownership over this information and enabling them to keep their privacy.

The goals are to enable you to:

1. Claim who you are without being locked into a proprietary stack (i.e. you own your identity)
2. Reveal as much or as little about your identity as you like
3. Associate feeds with your identity
4. Associate other identities with your identity
5. Claim membership of social networks, associations, groups, and other collective structures
6. Act as a repository of your activities, attention, and content

This will all be built on existing, open standards. The following lists technologies that are being considered as building blocks for Open Web.

• OpenID for identity
• Atom Publishing Protocol (APP) for activities
• FOAF for personal information and information about relations
• OPML for feeds

You can think of this as the nexus of your identity. You own it. You can take it with you in a simple XML file and anyone could write a client that will give you some very cool benefits based on this. I’ll not get into too much wand waving about what this will/can enable just yet, but just use your imagination for a moment. The social network becomes implicit to the Internet itself. No need for these walled garden social networks. Your identity isn’t being sprinkled about countless buckets in which you have no control. Content is mobile, Identity is mobile. Later we’ll talk about how behavior can be mobile too. The user is in control. Ok, enough wand waving for now.

I spoke with Elizabeth Churchill about this last month at Community 2.0. She’s brilliant. She immediately plucked from thin air an analogy about getting directions in Japan. Beware, I’ll likely get this partially wrong. In Japan it’s the case that directions are often given at different levels of granularity. So, when you get directions you get to the region, then you get regional directions, then you get local directions. etc. Applied to a person’s identity or content this is powerful stuff.

If you know of me you likely know I live in San Diego. If you have met me you know I live in downtown San Diego, maybe even that I live in Little Italy. If you came looking for me in Little Italy, because I’m pretty extroverted, you may find someone who could tell you I live on Kettner Blvd. But you’re not going to know my building our condo number unless I want you to know it or you shake down a good friend of mine. Unfortunately this is not currently the case on the Internet and we really need this.

We need to be able to own and protect our identities. Also the same is true for our content. For example, I don’t want everyone to have access to photos of my daughter. I want to be able to stipulate if you can view my content, how you can use, or reuse my content. All of this is especially prescient in light of the recent Kathy Sierra…uhhh….I don’t even know what to call it…incident. Here are the official statements, and here and here two posts from Sierra.

Steve and I have some ideas about how an Open Web can improve the current state of affairs, perhaps even solve some of these fundamental problems with online identity and our content. Some of the interesting side-effects will be baking a social network into the fabric of the Internet, making it possible to more easily layer Semantics, giving an infrastructure that would enable us to discover (and be discovered by) services, and as previously mentioned this will make content more mobile than ever, identity mobile for the first time, and even make behavior mobile. We’re not inventing a lot of this stuff. We’re just cobbling it together. Sound interesting? It damn sure should. Let’s start talking. It’s time for an Open Web and the technologies currently exist to make it a reality. We propose an Open Web Iniative realize this dream and we’re actively putting this together. We want help. We just launched a public wiki on the topic here. We’ll be fleshing this out as quickly as we can. It’s a busy month ahead for us, but this is too important for us to sit quietly any longer.

ETech is over. It has been since last Thursday. I’m clearly past-due for a summary of the conference. ETech is always fun. This was my second and both times I felt like I could have gotten more from the event if only I wasn’t distracted with work related tasks and fatigue from the constant go, go, go of the event. I suppose this is a testament of how much ETech has to offer. There’s so much going on it’s hard not to feel like you missed out even if you were fully engaged the entire conference.

First, let’s start with my highlights. It was cool to meet Jay Goldman and David Crow. I virtually met Jay Goldman of Radiant Core a couple years ago by way of Geoff Norton > Mike Shaver. I noticed his name in IRC early into the conference and boy it’s a small world. Turns out he and David Crow, who claims to be a power bottom, were planning an event with Dan Grisby a guy I knew from when I helped Ben Edwards to organize a Bar Camp (MinneBar) in Minneapolis. Dan was the guy who branded all the Minnebar shirts with his name. How am I suppose to wear that? This year’s Minnebar tshirts kick ass and I’m hoping someone sends me one. I’ll plug the designer Bill Ferenc who I don’t think I know, but he deserves to be plugged because those shirts are very cool. Anyhow, strange how small the world is; especially in technology. I missed all of Thursday’s sessions. And I also missed the Make event, which I wish I could have made. So, the only other two highlights I want to point out are: 1). Amazon Web Services Party. This was held at some really funky bar and pizza joint called Basic. There were lots of tatoos, oil painters, chopped bicycles, gangster looking folks, a bunch of geeks, and Jeff Bezos. It was fun. I noticed Hober reviewed the place. 2). I thought Seth Raphael, MIT Media Lab, was really great. I enjoyed him and his session. He did some fun magic tricks for me in passing earlier than his session. I really enjoyed his connecting technology with magic. I never really thought about it. It also makes perfect sense that he’s studying the emotion of wonder. It’s been my experience we tend to lose this with age as well as our willingness to believe in the supernatural.

Now for some things that ETech can improve upon. Last year ETech was upstairs and I thought this was a lot better than where it was this year, downstairs of the Hyatt. I say this because this year there wasn’t a common area for folks to congregate as much as previously. Also, having sessions way out in different buildings kind of sucked. In general, stuff was just too spread out. Also, as previously mentioned, I could never find freakin’ coffee!! WTF! Every day I resorted to buying a cup of coffee from the bar at $4 a cup! That’s crazy. It would have been better if the Wifi reached the bar. And lastly, give us some chairs. Bring in the inflatable ones like you did in 2006 and you do at OSCON. Don’t get me wrong, I still love me some ETech.

I forgot to include one other highlight. The MindTouch Wii Scavenger hunt. The photos are hilarious. I should have had the participants post these to flickr though. Oh well, next time. Anyway, we’ll be doing these scavenger hunts regularly here in San Diego. Also, SteveB came up with a great idea of doing a WikiMe event. It will go something like this. We select a location, a block, a district, whatever. People come out and go mad in documenting the location for the San Diego wiki. Photos, bars, clubs, restaurants, history, whatever. We just go mad documenting it. MindTouch supplies beer and maybe tshirts or something. It will be a really cool way of developing an excellent online resource for San Diego. Also, for folks to meet one another. I’ll announce the first of these in the next week or so here and at OpenGarden.org.

Creating Passionate Users

As I type this, I am supposed to be in San Diego, delivering a workshop at the ETech conference. But I’m not. I’m at home, with the doors locked, terrified. For the last four weeks, I’ve been getting death threat comments on this blog. But that’s not what pushed me over the edge. What finally did it was some disturbing threats of violence and sex posted on two other blogs… blogs authored and/or owned by a group that includes prominent bloggers. People you’ve probably heard of. People like respected Cluetrain Manifesto co-author Chris Locke (aka Rageboy).

I am shocked and disgusted. Kathy Sierra has been receiving death threats for weeks and as a result has backed out of speaking at Etech! This is sick shit! This kind of behavior is disgusting. I sincerely hope these people are revealed and their mums give them a good thrashing. I cannot imagine this is anyone other than a twisted adolescent. Nonetheless I understand her concern. I caught Kathy’s session last year. It was one of my highlights at ETech06. She is brilliant. Best wishes K I hope this is quickly resolved.

The greatest thing in the world is snuggling up with my 15 month old daughter, Ashby, in the morning and watching TV. Unfortunately the only time she doesn’t mind snuggling is when we watch the ‘stupid box’. There is a new Mickey Mouse Clubhouse television show on the Disney channel. It’s awful. Neither Tara nor I can stand it, but Ashby loves it. It’s all computer graphics. At the end of every episode there is this insipid song they sing, which sticks to your brain like starch on rice. You can’t shake it! Allow me to share:

“We’re splitting the scene, we’re full of beans.” Huh?

MindTouch’s office warming party was Friday, March 2. It was great fun meeting folks from around San Diego. We entertained at our office for about an hour and then headed out to the Princess Pub for pints. We finished the evening with dinner at Vincenzo. MaxM made some wicked White Russians at the office. I heard Damien say that he would unconscious after six of them. I think it would take considerably less than this. I want to thank everyone who came out and introduced themselves. It was great meeting members of the local tech community. I especially enjoyed meeting and chatting with Chris and Ted who both work at Eventful.

I recently blogged about the modified MPL attribution licenses, Alfresco’s excellent choice to become open source, and companies like Socialtext that have been claiming to be open source even though it took them almost four years of selling their software to release their source code under a non-OSI approved license. I’ve suggested that OSI should have a wall of shame and a formal censure process. A couple days after my previous post I spoke with Michael Tiemann, the President of OSI and I shared my opinions with him. Michael is thoughtful, intelligent, funny and just plain cool.

I hope I get this right because it’s been several days since we spoke. Michael feels OSI should be a positive force rather than a negative one. He believes the open source community, mostly, does a good job of policing itself. Also, he thinks there is a  trend among the companies using modified MPL attribution licenses toward a return to the fold of open source, as is evidenced by Alfresco and others. I understood his point and I shared with him that it’s probably a good thing he’s more reflective and not as reactive as I am. Michael blogs on these topics on the new OSI website (he calls it the OSI 3.0 website) that hasn’t yet officially launched. Allegedly the board will be blogging regularly here. I hope so. 

In our conversation Michael I concurred on several items not least of which was: 

One particularly insideous subversion of the movement is the meme that “open source is about creating a commercially successful software project, so any licensing change believed to be more commercially defensible is, ipso facto, more open source.” Commercial success is a predicted side effect of open source, but open source is not defined by the commercial intentions of a software project.

My biggest concern  is the proclivity for the many newly VC backed “open source” companies to create their own licenses. In fact, I just read the lengthy piece Berlind wrote regarding this topic way back in November. I suppose it was right after our email exchange and my first post in which I accused him (perhaps inappropriately) of being too scared to take a stand on the topic. I want to highlight:

The reason for my neutrality is not that I don’t believe I could make arguments for one side or the other. In fact, if I were in the position to use or host SugarCRM (and I am, but that’s a different story), I’d have no objection to the attribution requirements. My problem is that focusing on the attribution argument right now is a distraction from what in my estimation are the more pressing issues for ZDNet’s open source-using readers (and developers) and the open source community as a whole.

Berlind goes on to assert that if this trend continues “the total number of unblessed licenses will at some point out-number the number of blessed ones.” Thereby rendering OSI and open source meaningless. David, I’m with you 100% on this. I suppose I may have been a tad harsh with you and I should provide you with kudos on, at least, two points: 1). you’re talking about this very important issue 2). and you’re addressing the real problem. I know this is a little late, but hey, I don’t spend all my time reading/writing in the blog-o-sphere. By the way, I too don’t particularly care either way about attribution. Well, that’s partially true. I do think attribution licenses are silly. However, the more important issue here is that if the spawning of non-OSI approved licenses continues unchecked it creates confusion and demeans open source. 

Finally, I’m still more than a little confused as to why Mayfield and Socialtext is being heralded as a good and noble comprimising champion of open source as Berlind, among others, have asserted when the fact remains, and I know I’m being repetitive here, this company claimed they were open source for years of selling their software without releasing so much as a stitch of code. Has everyone overlooked this because there are perceived greater evils?