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I'm Not Actually a Geek

Observations on technology and business from someone who should know better


Would You Apply a ‘Dislike’ to Your Co-Workers’ Content?Yesterday

On Digg, you can apply the “bury” rating to stories. On Amazon.com, you can apply a single star to rate something negatively.

Would you ever do that to the work of your colleagues?

I’m not talking the annual HR exercise of 360 reviews. I’m talking Enterprise 2.0 apps, which incorporate the features we see out in Web 2.0. The ability of people to rate the content they see.

A few social media sites have taken a binary approach to ratings: (1) positive rating, or (2) abstain:

While some others are incorporating the notion of negative ratings:

Out on the Web, where you’re interacting on platforms with thousands of anonymous or unknown people, negative


Entrepreneurship as Signal: Quitting Facebook to Tackle Enterprise 2.0October 6

In a recent post, Fred Wilson had this to say about Enterprise 2.0:

This is one of the reasons we’ve struggled so hard to invest in “enterprise 2.0″ at Union Square Ventures. We have tried pretty hard to find companies that we can invest in that bring the new web technologies to the enterprise, but often we’ve found what happens is that consumers (ie employees) bring the web technologies they use every day to work and they prefer that.

I understand the sentiment, but I’m not really agreeing with Fred on this one. Corporate employees don’t use their Gmail and Yahoo Mail in lieu of their company’s Microsoft Outlook application. It’s really a matter of making an application that solves some key issues and has an appropriate experience for what it needs to accomplish.

But Fred’s opinion is interesting in the context of Friday’s news that two key Facebook executives are leaving the company “to build an extensible enterprise productivity suite”. They plan to leverage many of the conventions of Facebook for this new company.

Enterprise 2.0? Are they crazy?

Enterprise Software Is So Boring

Robert Scoble set off a firestorm last December when he wrote


Facebook Is Starting to Get My Attention AgainOctober 3

Facebook recently made its new design permanent, despite the protests of many vocal users. Where the old focus was on a slow newsfeed, ornamenting your profile and interacting through thrird party apps, the new design puts content and conversations at the center of the user experience.

I think Michael Arrington still has one of the best perspectives on it when he wrote The Friendfeedization Of Facebook back in July.  As he said there:

But it’s also clear that they like what they see at Friendfeed, which expertly combined the idea of an activity stream that was first popularized by Facebook with the microblogging trend introduced by Twitter


Tim O’Reilly Course Corrects the Definition of Web 2.0October 1

eBay was Web 2.0 before Web 2.0 was cool.

Tim O’Reilly wrote a nice piece the other day Why Dell.com (was) More Enterprise 2.0 Than Dell IdeaStorm. In the post, he re-asserted the proper definition of Web 2.0. Here’s a quote:

I define Web 2.0 as the design of systems that harness network effects to get better the more people use them, or more colloquially, as “harnessing collective intelligence.” This includes explicit network-enabled collaboration, to be sure, but it should encompass every way that people connected to a network create synergistic effects.

The impetus for Tim’s post was that people leave Google and its search engine off the list of Web 2.0 companies. As Tim writes, seeing the power of what Google’s search engine did was part of the notion of Web 2.0.

Here’s a way to represent what Tim is talking about:

I like that Tim sent out this reminder about Web 2.0. Here’s how


Don’t Be Boring, Don’t Sweat Page Views: Ten Company Blogs AnalyzedSeptember 30

Courtesy of user 'twob' on Flickr

Courtesy of user twob on Flickr

I read an amusing and insightful post by B.L. Ochman, 10 Reasons Your Company Shouldn’t Blog. Several reasons don’t argue against blogging (e.g. “A blog is not a quick fix”), but a few are worth considering. Here are a couple that I liked:

1. The blogs most companies want to create are guaranteed to join the 900,999 out of every million blogs with no readers. Why? They’re boring.

2. A blog has to have a personal voice. If you sound like a corporate drone, nobody will read your blog.

In a similar vein, Wall Street Journal blogger Ben Worthen reported on a  study by Forrester Research. Forrester reviewed 90 B2B blogs, and came away decidedly unimpressed: most corporate blogs are “dull, drab, and don’t stimulate discussion.”

I’ve just started to blog for my company Connectbeam. I’ve got a