Recently in Web 2.0 Category

Barracuda Labs' annual report contains some interesting analysis of the online space, including Twitter and security issues. A few highlights:

* Only 21% of Twitter accounts are active i.e. at least 10 followers/ 10 following/ 10 tweets
* Even so, there has been an increase in activity from dormant accounts - 40% fewer accounts have zero followers compared with six months ago
* 66% of users are following more or the same as the their number of followers (i.e. you are in the "top" one third if you have more followers than following)
* The most prolific Tweeters are those with around 1,000 followers. Those with more followers tend to tweet less - see chart below.

I recently posted an excerpt from Chapter 17 of Implementing Enterprise 2.0 titled 8 Guiding Principles for Pilot Programs: A Key for Enterprise 2.0.

To follow up, here is an additional excerpt from Chapter 17 on pilots.

CHARACTERISTICS OF GREAT PILOT TEAM MEMBERS

The selection of pilot team members is a major factor not just in the success of the pilots, but also whether useful lessons are learned and the successful migration of the pilots into other parts of the business.

The reality is that there is usually limited choice in selecting pilot team members. However since it is such an important driver of success, it is important to understand the characteristics of great pilot team members, and to apply this to the degree possible in bringing the right people on board.

There are five key aspects to a great pilot team member.

1. Enthusiasm
There is no substitute for enthusiasm in a pilot. As such, in most cases the best pilot team members are those who are clamoring to try something because they think it will make them more effective in their work.

Enthusiastic team members will:
• Want to be involved in the pilot!
• Think there are better ways to do things than current approaches
• Be happy to try new things
• Put up with immature systems
• Put in extra time and energy now for the potential of worthwhile results later
• Actively suggest and try new ideas to make the pilot work better

This morning I did the opening keynote at IBM's Collective Intelligence BusinessSphere conference in Melbourne. It was designed as a brief and punchy opener to provide a big-picture context to what collective intelligence means for organizations and the key success factors.

Below are the slides. As always the slides are intended to provide visual support to my presentation, not to be useful by themselves. However there are a few visuals there that may be of interest even to those who didn't attend.

IBM's annual Lotusphere conference is held each January, bringing together customers of IBM's enterprise collaboration suite. While many associate Lotus with its long-established product Notes, since the launch of Lotus Connections in 2007 Lotus is centered on Web 2.0 tools such as social networks, mash-ups and micro-blogging. After Lotussphere local events are run in countries around the world, usually dubbed Lotusphere Comes To You.

This year IBM Australia is calling its enterprise collaboration conference Collective Intelligence, running this in 9 cities around the country. In Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra they are dividing the program into technology and business streams. I will be doing the opening keynote for the BusinessSphere stream as below in Sydney and Melbourne, though I will be in Asia at the time of the Canberra event next week.

The event is free to attend for "IBM customers and prospects" - you can register at the website. Maybe see you there!

The evolution and future of Social Networking and Web 2.0 technologies

Web and social technologies, having already had a massive social impact, are now being applied extensively in business and government. Many of the most successful organisations globally are implementing social software and web tools to increase productivity, tap expertise, improve staff engagement and streamline processes.

Crowdsourcing in the broadest sense will be one of the fundamental platforms of the emerging network economy. As such it’s pleasing to see that Australia is becoming a hub for a number of the most significant crowdsourcing platforms globally.

I caught up with Alec Lynch of DesignCrowd yesterday for an interesting conversation about the crowdsourcing space and thought it was worth giving a quick pointer to the three main platforms run out of Australia (though all are global in scope).

Freelancer.com, was founded in Sweden as getafreelancer.com in 2004. I first wrote about it in 2005 in an overview of the space. For many years it was the dominant online services exchange in Europe, and one of the top three globally. In May 2009 it was bought by Australian company Ignition Networks, which also acquired the domain Freelancer.com. The company is run by veteran tech entrepreneur Matt Barrie, who most recently founded and ran specialty processor firm Sensory Networks Inc.

In my Implementing Enterprise 2.0 report I put Iterate and Refine at the center of the Enterprise 2.0 Implementation Framework.

One of the most critical elements of this principle is the ability to establish and run effective pilot programs.

Below is an excerpt from Chapter 17 of Implementing Enterprise 2.0 on Pilots, which describes 8 guiding principles for pilot programs.

GUIDING PRINCIPLES FOR PILOTS
While there are no hard and fast rules for establishing successful pilots, eight guiding principles that should be kept in mind are:

“It is reasonably cheap and easy to get a pilot up and running to evaluate how successful a new Technology will be. Fail fast, fail cheap. Set things up as pilots and pick up the lessons.”
CIO, large property developer

1. Select fertile ground.
Pilots often establish the tone for how broader initiatives are received across the organization. Stories – both positive and negative – about the success of pilots often filter out very widely. A successful pilot can easily take a life of its own as others hear about the benefits and actively want to apply them in their own work. Failures can often be referred to across the organization as reasons why related initiatives will not succeed. While you can never expect all pilots to be successful, maximize chances of success by selecting the most promising projects and the best team, and make it easy for them to identify value.

I am at the Media 2010 conference in Sydney, where there is an extraordinary line-up of speakers through the day. I am here to get my head back into gear on future of media strategy, which will be a major theme for me through this year.

Below are my notes taken on-the-fly from the first few speakers. Hopefully I will get hold of some laptop power to be able to continue after this.

JACK MATTHEWS, CEO, FAIRFAX DIGITAL
We are at the point of singularity – beyond which we cannot see.

Highly recommend Yochai Benkler’s Wealth of Networks.

George Washington University and media relations software firm Cision have released a very interesting study of how journalists use social media and online tools.

The headline news is that 56% of journalists consider social media to be important to some degree. This figure pushed up to 69% of journalists writing for online outlets, while just 48% of magazine writers found social media to be important.

Journalists on the importance of social media for reporting and producing their stories
Source: Cision

Social media is used extensively by journalists to publish and promote what they have written, with just 14% saying they don’t use social media at all for spreading word on their work. Almost two-thirds say they use blogs (presumably usually not their own), and 57% use Twitter or other microblogging sites to point to their articles.

Journalists on the social media tools they use to publish, promote and distribute what they write
Source: Cision

Gartner has released five interesting predictions for social software. Here are the predictions along with a few of my thoughts.

By 2014, social networking services will replace e-mail as the primary vehicle for interpersonal communications for 20 percent of business users.

This is a transition that we’ve seen for a very long time, and looks finally ready to come to fruition. Coming from a financial markets background, I’d seen from as far back as the late 1990s that email as a primary medium was resulting in communication breakdown. I’ve long believed that shifting communication out of email was one of the main ways that social media would be valuable, as for example expressed in my 2005 white paper How Collaborative Technologies are Transforming Financial Services.

This prediction will play out very differently across organizations. Many companies will remain bound in email. Others, particularly those that are project-centric and effectively implement social software, could well see a substantially more than 20% of communication shift out of email. The development and evolution of new tools such as Google Wave will see email not quite die, but rapidly erode in the most innovative organizations.

By 2012, over 50 percent of enterprises will use activity streams that include microblogging, but stand-alone enterprise microblogging will have less than 5 percent penetration.

I am not that keen on the word "crowdsourcing", because people mean many different things when they use the term. However since it is the word most used to describe tapping the power of distributed talent, which is one of the most important emerging themes in our hyper-connected world, I will embrace it, and hopefully soon draw up my own taxonomy of what crowdsourcing means to help clarify the conversation.

I was struck by a post by Steve Kelman on The dark side of crowdsourcing?. Kelman attended a presentation by Jonathan Zittrain (esteemed scholar and author of The Future of the Internet - and How to Stop It) in which Zittrain pointed to how crowdsourcing approaches could used for bad things. However Kelman came out primarily impressed with the vast potential of the field.

One of the best-known domains for crowdsourcing is getting contributions for inventors and innovators to contribute, using innovation markets such as Innocentive (which I described in Chapter 5 of Living Network on Innovation), and prizes such as the X-Prize Foundation.

An emerging domain is using large pools of people to monitor for crime:

Zittran then noted the growth of applications (this one from the U.K.) where people, for very small amounts of money, are apparently willing, from the comfort of their couches, to monitor crime surveillance cameras to look for suspicious activity and report it. Some companies are also getting people, again for micro-payments, to report in if they recognize photos of people participating in a mass marijuana smoke-in.

The downsides of these kinds of applications were then raised:

Well there are already plenty of opinions flying around and some excellent comments on my post yesterday Australians are #1 globally in usage of social media: Why?, which pointed to new research showing this startling result. I guess it’s time for me to offer some of my thoughts, helped along by the conversation so far. Be sure to read the insightful comments on the topic!

To my mind the question is less why Australians are such heavy users of social media, as why the uptake was so slow initially before a startling acceleration over the last couple of years. Here are a few initial thoughts.

Attitudes about the individual.
One of the most famed aspects of Australian culture is the ‘tall poppy’ syndrome (your head might get lopped off). This has tempered much over the years, but there has still been until recently a relative reticence to stand up and shout out personal opinions (with of course a number of notable exceptions). I felt this contributed to the initial slow uptake by Australians of blogging. Perhaps once enough people are expressing their views on social media, you no longer stand out by blogging and Twittering – you are in a majority and your self-expression is unleashed.

Some very interesting data just out from Nielsen on social media usage. The headline is that people in developed countries are spending 82% more time on social media than they were one year ago.

However the data point that struck my interest most is that...

Australia is #1 globally in usage of social media

This is a real news. For many years I was bemoaning the slow uptake of social networks in Australia. Research featured as late as our Future of Media Report 2007 showed that Australia was dramatically behind the US and UK in Facebook usage, though it was beginning to catch up on usage of MySpace usage and tools such as Photobucket.

Serendipity is one of the most beautiful words in the English language. It originates from the story of "the Three Princes of Serendip", which tells the tale of three princes who had the faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries (see more on the story here).

For the last decade I have been talking about the idea of "enhanced serendipity". For example I wrote about how I used social networking software to create enhanced serendipity at a Living Networks event that I ran in New York in 2003, used the term to describe what was done by mobile social networking platform Dodgeball (the first attempt in the space by the founders of today's success story in the space Foursquare), and a longer post about Creating Enhanced Serendipity in 2006.

In today's New York Times, Nick Bilton writes a post titled ‘Controlled Serendipity’ Liberates the Web. He writes:

Over the holidays Mark Fidelman launched his 2010 Enterprise 2.0 All-Star Blogger Roster. Mark says:

Now that the holiday hangover has worn off and the bills are coming due, I want to turn your attention to the individuals that are most influencing the Enterprise 2.0 space. Those of you that are early adopters or just starting to research Enterprise 2.0 can short cut the search for quality information by following and reading from these all-stars.

The list of 22 people includes Andrew McAfee, who coined the term Enterprise 2.0 and has recently launched his book by the same name, sits at the top of the tree, with five termed "Most Influential" (where Mark has kindly placed me, presumably partly due to the success of my book Implementing Enterprise 2.0), five "Highly Influential", ten "Influential", with as a special extra Dennis Howlett, who believes that Enterprise 2.0 is 'a crock', as "Enterprise 2.0 Referee".

Click on the image to see Mark's post including a larger version of the image and the data used to assess the influence of the all-stars.

Over the last couple of years the AdAge 150 has collated a dynamic list of the top blogs in advertising, media, and marketing. The list actually covers over 1,000 blogs, and ranks them daily by prominence, using a variety of sources including rankings from Alexa, PostRank, and Collective Intellect, as well as a subjective ranking by the list developer Todd Andrlik. These sources have changed throughout the history of the AdAge 150 list, in trying to provide a balanced view of blog authority

This blog was added to the list a couple of months ago, having previously not come to the attention of the list creators. While I write about other topics, including enterprise technology and the future of business, a large proportion of this blog is about media and marketing in their many guises. In fact I have often described the future of business as the media economy, in which almost all economic activity is a form of media.

The AdAge rankings are highly dynamic since they emphasize recent activity. At the time of writing this blog is ranked #97, which is pretty solid given many of the blogs on the list are professional blogs.

I’ve written before about blog rankings, notably about Wikio’s approach, and I’ve been intending to write about Technorati’s recent changes in authority ranking. I’ll try to get to a broader overview of the blog authority systems before long.