The Ponderings of Woodrow

Yahoo! no longer saying yahoo! about RSS?

Steve Rubel calls into question whether Yahoo! (and presumably other media properties) are backing away from their support of RSS.  He right fully questions why Yahoo! would do such a thing (if in fact they are) rather than finding a way to embrace the emerging opportunity that RSS provides.

Has anyone noticed that Yahoo's love affair with RSS seems to be withering? In 2004 and 2005 Yahoo! was all over feeds. It was an early leader in driving adoption, as a matter of fact. But in recent months I question whether they remain committed to RSS as a platform. and 2005 Yahoo was

This is more than conjecture. In the past few weeks Yahoo has rolled out three major new web sites - Yahoo! Food, Yahoo! Advertising and Yahoo! TV. They're great sites, but none of them has feeds. There's a reason why - eyeballs...[continued]

Today, he follows up this post with a broader supposition that the page view may be on its way out, BECAUSE of RSS, AJAX and other web technologies that micro chunk the way we consume IP-based content.

...The page view does not offer a suitable way to measure the next generation of web sites. These sites will be built with Ajax, Flash and other interactive technologies that allow the user to conduct affairs all within a single web page - like Gmail or the Google Reader. This eliminates the need to click from one page to another. The widgetization of the web will only accelerate this.

This is a dirty little secret in the advertising business that no one wants to talk about. Media companies love to promote how many page views their properties get. They've used the data to build equity. They will fight it tooth and nail to protect it, perhaps by not embracing interactive technologies as quickly as they should. But that's not going to stop the revolution from coming...[continued]

If there's one thing we should know by now, it's that the advertising model is here to stay [Google anyone?]. We can also be sure that RSS adoption isn't going away (in fact, it's in the early innings) and that AJAX and other componentization concepts are continuing to proliferate.  Clearly, Rubel's point vis-a-vis the 'page view' is an interesting one, but all that means is that online properties will need better ways to quantify their reach and impact [CPA?].

Note: At the time of this writing I, and/or funds I maintain discretionary control over, maintained a long equity position in YHOO but did not maintain a position, long or short, in GOOG. We also may, at times, carry derivative options on underlying positions as a hedge.

rss rubel page view monetization componentization woodrow

 

E&Y Loses an Innovator...Best of Luck Rod

Friend and fellow Enterprise Irregular Rod Boothby is leaving his position at E&Y for a new (presumably more entrepreneurial) venture. While the details of Rod's next move have yet to be announced, those familiar with his work at E&Y or through his blog understand that Rod is passionate and extremely knowledgeable about Web 2.0 technologies and their place as a conduit for innovation.

• I am leaving Ernst & Young (Rod Boothby)

Best of luck Rod!

rod boothby new venture enterprise irregulars irregulars good luck woodrow

Forrester Research proves not all blog analysts are created equal...

Megan Burns seems like a nice enough person, and has tangible experience working on website design prior to joining Forrester Research. Yet, had I not read her bio with my own eyes, I would've questioned whether she had any idea what a blog looked like prior to penning the following report:

• Best and Worst of Blog Design, 2006 [Subscription Required]

From the executive summary:

Forrester evaluated the customer experience of 16 blogs written by executives of large US companies, corporate product and branding teams, newspaper journalists, and today's most popular professional bloggers. While product/brand teams fared best, not one blog passed our usability tests, and even the best blogs we looked at had major flaws. To encourage new users to become regular readers, blog owners should leverage existing Web design best practices that make content and functionality easy to find and consume and follow emerging blog guidelines that help users feel more comfortable participating in online conversations.

While there are a handful of interesting observations in the 17-page report, I have major issues with the bolded conclusion. Since when is a sample size of 16 in any way, shape or form statistically significant when dealing with a data set of 57 million and counting?  One would think Forrester would have the good sense to do a broader assessment and segmentation of the blogs they were reviewing; but to have done such a tiny subset really belies any of the potentially interesting observation Burns makes in her "report."

Also, how can Forrester employ a team to cover blogging that DOESN'T BLOG!?! Credit to Vinnie for making a similar observation. Before someone brings up an analogy that Forrester employs other analysts who don't actively use the products they cover; I would contend this is different. It's far harder to ask someone to cover the ERP space and also deep dive on the applications in a production environment; that's just a logistical impossibility. But when tens of millions of people are blogging, and the time commitment is de minimous, how could someone put themselves out as an expert without participating in the process? Blogs are, by definition, a social and collaborative medium.

The biggest conundrum I have is that Forrester has a blogger on its analyst roster who fully understands the nuances of blogging both at the consumer level and a newer focus on the enterprise. Charlene Li, who met with me and other Enterprise Irregulars last month, covers the space with a depth and perspective that frankly isn't reflected in this Forrester piece or a similar one published in October. Why wouldn't Megan and her team collaborate with Charlene? I have to imagine Charlene would've had some helpful perspective on what matters and what doesn't among blog design criteria, and could've also helped shape a more appropriately sized sample set.

megan burns charlene li blog design forrester irregulars blogs enterprise2.0 woodrow

Ramana drops some science...Technical Barriers for Office 2.0

Ramana Rao has a great post on some of the technical hurdles to getting Office 2.0 adopted.  I encourage you to read his post in its entirety, but in the interim, here are his headline points:

• Offline Usage

• Single Sign-On

• Data Ownership and Privacy

• Data Synchronization

• Ease of Migration

• Fragility of Aggregated Services

I would add two more to the list:

• Scalability -- Many of the Office 2.0 services we saw at the conference were clearly marketed toward small organizations and/or departmental uses. While that's fine and dandy, there's a difference between marketing something to small groups and architecting the solution in such a way as to prevent scale. 

• Service Entitlement & Provisioning -- Provisioning (i.e,. identity management, profiling, access) has always been a challenge, and I get the impression it remains an area with some considerable whitespace among the Office 2.0 vendors out there.

ramanarao irregulars enterprise irregulars office2.0 woodrow

Forrester gets briefed by the Irregulars...

Charlene Li has been doing interesting work at Forrester, writing about trends in social computing in consumer and (more recently) enterprise environments. Unlike many analysts at the conventional research firms, Charlene puts her money where her mouth is, and maintains an active blog that isn't simply a thumbnail of her firm's expensive industry pieces.

In keeping with her unique approach to her work, Charlene hosted many of the Irregulars for cocktails on Wednesday night while we were all in San Francisco for the Office 2.0 conference. Upon arriving, Charlene announced that Forrester is officially expanding its coverage of social software to include the enterprise. Charlene will focus on consumer trends, while G. Oliver Young will build out the enterprise coverage. Oliver was bright and eager, but isn't yet a blogger and must find out for himself whether he has a passion for social software before we know if he can carry Charlene's baton.

Charlene wanted to speak to the Irregulars to get our thoughts on the key talking points of Enterprise 2.0 trends and the emergence of social software. The conversation took many turns, but solidified around a series of Enterprise 2.0 Myths that we felt Forrester should address in their launch coverage, including:

• Myth: The incumbent enterprise technology behemoths aren't adopting Web 2.0 and social software technologies
• Myth: Business value is maximized by compartmentalized (departmental) silos of information
• Myth: Social software fails to address critical issues like security, versioning, provisioning and integration
• Myth: CIOs can stem the adoption of social software throughout their organization

One of the interesting things about the conversation (Charlene and Oliver joined us after the event for our Irregulars dinner, too) was that Forrester appears willing to build out a coverage today before many enterprise customers are inquiring, with the idea that they'll have a highly profitable practice in a few years with best-in-class domain expertise. A lot of Forrester's biggest customers (read: Global 2000 CIOs) aren't going to find a lot of our assertions popular ones, but that doesn't change their significance. Kudos to Charlene and Oliver (and Forrester for giving them the platform) to prepare CIOs for the changes ahead rather than collecting the easy $$$ by promising them that today's realities are the realities of tomorrow.

Related:

• Dennis Howlett posts his thoughts from the get together
• Dan Farber provides some photos of the chat

office2.0 charlene li enterprise irregulars social software forrester irregulars blogs wikis enterprise2.0 woodrow

The Yin & Yang of Enterprise Software

I've just returned from a week long trip to California that was profoundly stimulating, educational and productive. As I reflect back on the dozens of conversations I had with old and new faces, I've made the realization that the entire week was, in many ways, a study in contrasts.

From Sunday through Tuesday afternoon, I attended M.R. Rangaswami's Enterprise 2006 Conference. The annual conference is an invitation only event where thought leaders converge to candidly discuss the state of the enterprise software landscape. Held at the gorgeous Inn at Spanish Bay, there was a sense of tranquil exclusivity that made for a very relaxed and candid atmosphere.

This year's theme was Innovation, but ultimately I felt it should have been called Reality of Today's Enterprise. Fortune 500 CIOs presented how their companies are innovating, and to a man it wasn't about the technology, it was about the process. If there was a unifying theme of the conference's attendees, it was that innovation is born out of business value (not new bells and whistles). Large, multinational enterprises want to be able to do more with less, and are pushing their vendors for incremental reductions in TCO. With 70%-80% of their budgets dedicated to maintaining existing systems and processes, there is precious room in the budget for new technologies without a clear, quantifiable ROI. Important software trends including open source, SaaS, SOA and emergent applications (e.g., blogs, wikis) are gaining mindshare, but there remains a healthy dose of skepticism about whether any of these trends are evolutionary.

From Tuesday through Thursday, I headed to downtown San Francisco to attend the Office 2.0 Conference put together by my friend and fellow Irregular Ismael Ghalimi. Whereas I was one of the youngest attendees at Enterprise, the 300+ attendees at Office skewed much younger (at least as many 20-somethings as any other age group). The setup was no less impressive, as Ismael landed the newly-refurbished St. Regis as the conference location (thanks in no small part to Julia French). The vibe at Office 2.0, by nature, was far less about today's reality as it was about the promise of tomorrow. On one hand, there was a bit of an echo chamber effect that didn't reflect the buying behaviors and needs of today's enterprises. On the other hand, I think those who dismissed the wares with a "who needs another online spreadsheet?" completely missed the mark. What I saw at Office 2.0 were hundreds of bright, energetic and driven minds leveraging technology to help re-think the way we manage personal productivity. I'm far less interested in what they had to show me today as I am in seeing what many of these companies are doing two or three years from now.

If I had just attended Enterprise, I think I would've come away with a sense that large enterprises are a long way away from embracing many of the changes that dominate today's software trends. Whereas had I just attended Office 2.0, I would've come away sensing an unstoppable wave of entrepreneurial innovation that was going to pave the way for the next software paradigm. The reality lies somewhere in between. Transformational technology trends can't be bounded by today's thinking, and the best CIOs will recognize that or risk losing the chance of being tomorrow's CIOs. That said, many of today's startups have a lot of maturing to do if they hope to provide software-based solutions that meet the needs of big enterprise.

enterprise2006 office2.0 enterprise irregulars software study in contrast woodrow

 

Longworth Ventures hosts the Irregulars...

Longworth Ventures hosted a conference this week in Boston and one of the panels featured:

• Jeff Nolan, ex-SAP...CEO of "soon to be revealed" startup
• Ismael Ghalimi, CEO of Intalio
• Rod Boothby, Manager, Ernst & Young
• Zoli Erdos, Angel Investor, Startup Adviser

Ross Mayfield (CEO, Socialtext) was also scheduled to appear on the panel but had to cancel due to other obligations.

The panel was moderated by Andrew McAfee, Harvard Professor and "father" of the term "Enterprise 2.0."

What do all these people have in common besides being thought leaders on Web 2.0 and broader technology trends? Yes, they ARE all bloggers, but that's not what I'm getting at...

Give up?

They're all members of The Enterprise Irregulars. Probably doesn't mean all that much to many of you, but I took a small measure of pride in seeing that this panel was 100% Irregulars; INCLUDING Andrew who has just recently joined our little conclave.

As to what these guys actually discussed on the panel, I'll leave that to the panelists themselves:

• Jeff's Take: Starting a New Chapter for the Software Industry
• Zoli's Take: Bright Minds in Dark Suits
• Rod's Take: Participation is the Killer App

longworth vc irregulars zoli erdos jeff nolan rod boothby ismael ghalimi andrew mcafee woodrow

Dion's 7 Things to Know about AJAX

Fellow Irregular Dion Hinchcliffe is a blogger I read feverishly but somehow rarely find myself directly referencing; which I've aimed to change. Today Dion gives me a great chance to rectify that situation with his post on AJAX:

• Seven Things Every Software Project Needs to Know About Ajax

AJAX has captivated the world at large, and I'm finding the term creep into a lot of sell-side research reports without any clear understanding of what AJAX is, and as importantly, is not. Folks like Dion help clarify emergent technologies within the "Web 2.0" umbrella and it's much appreciated.

ajax web2.0 dion hinchcliffe irregulars woodrow

Office 2.0 Update

The momentum and support for the Office 2.0 Conference continues apace.

Venue: Ismael has secured the Regis San Francisco for the conference. As an East Coast guy, I'm going to have to take my West Coast friends' word for it, but they tell me that the just opened St. Regis is a highly sought after venue and securing it for this inaugural conference was a coup. Special thanks to Julia French of Socialtext (and the only female member of the inaugural blogger's corner) for helping make this a reality.

Dates: The conference is now being held on October 11th-12th, versus 12th-13th. Please mark your calendars accordingly.

Attendees: Ismael also continues to add more speakers, participant companies, and sponsors.

This should be a great chance to help be on the ground floor of defining the Office 2.0 movement. It's also shaping up as a chance for the extended group of Irregulars to get together (as well as meet old and new friends); and finally a chance to share ideas with a passionate, intelligent group of people.

itredux office2.0 conference irregulars enterprise2.0 woodrow

Blogbeat acquired by FeedBurner

FeedBurner is on a roll. The recently tightened integration with Six Apart has turned the service into an integral component of my blogging (I now run one feed through FeedBurner versus multiple feeds previously); and now it seems they've made a move to improve their stats analytics.

In a move announced today, FeedBurner has acquired Blogbeat. As one might expect, this acquisition has gotten plenty of attention on tech.meme because it's both services are near and dear to our collective hearts. I don't know Jeff Turner or Dick Costolo personally, but I do want to extend a quick congratulations to Brad Feld and Matt McCall, who both sit on the board of FeedBurner and appear to have backed a winning horse, in my opinion.

feedburner blogbeat m&a vc blogging web2.0 woodrow