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Why do you think IBM is evil, and why didn't you blog about this???????????????

The only question is, why is IBM evil, and why haven't you pointed this out?????

i am confused. readers seem to be taking away the evil meme, but you dont seem to have written that?

Maybe I over-reacted - maybe I haven't got the IBM Kool-Aid in my system yet. (Disclosure: I used to edit a magazine for AS/400 / iSeries users & still write for it occasionally.) But it did read rather as if David had gone in there determined to be unimpressed.

Or, indeed, out of my system. Freudian slip?

The Web 2.0 meme irritates me when taken this way, but IBM is hardly the only one to do so; if they were, it wouldn't be worth mentioning. I've changed the phrasing of one of my asides to try to prevent that misimpression.

But, yes, this was too snarky. What I sometimes meant as teasing may come across as ridicule. I wrote badly and didn't leave enough time to get some critical distance on it. So, let me be clear: DogEar looks terrific. The web analytics stuff is probably useful, although it's hard to evaluate on the basis of a demo because the question is how thoroughly and accurately it works in practice. I didn't see much in the Unified Activity Management that made me think it was going succeed where others have failed, but who knows? My personal experience failing to market software in the same space may have made me overly cynical. As for the Application Wiki prototype, I worry that the market doesn't really want another tool kit of this sort, but it depends on how they package it up (if they bring it to market). It was a cool demo, though.The Jamalyzer is highly specific to IBM's Jam program; I'm sure it's useful but I have nothing to say about it's general appeal.

As for IBM's attitude and tone at this event: User-focused, embracing decentralization, and a sense of humor. Quite admirable, and unrecognizable from the IBM of ten years ago.

So, I apologize for if I left another impression and will so note in the body of the post.

Funny.. I work for IBM and use most of those tools daily. I didn't find the post overly snarky.

I guess I have a positive bias.

I really don't think its a snarky post. Anybody how takes joho feeds will understand Davids style of writing. Secondly, where the heck did the evil meme come in from ??

But I wonder why they have 20K internal blogs and yet the same bloggers don't interact on the outside ?? A blogger is a blogger either way its a like a sickness- one blogs that's all. So what and where is the blockade happening in the realm of IBM's world ??

David, I'm with you on the Web 2.0 hype, and its deliberate revision of all-too-recent history. But then again, in my history, Ajax was an abrasive cleanser, so perhaps there is indeed a fit.

What's telling, I think, is the way in which recent applications, technology mashups and rapid dissemination of capability are unanimously increasing transparency of relations and interpersonal connections amidst the flow of information and links. Your observation of "deriving a social network from a semantic one" is spot on, and probably one of the most important effects. The transparency of influence within an organization disrupts the traditional power/control hierarchy in a useful way, I think, making referent power dominant, while de-emphasizing the other modes (i.e., legitimate, reward/punishment, information, expertise) that are all artefacts of a prior era.

"KM was incredibly boring" is the understatement of the year - an information age throwback to Frederick Taylor, or the last hurrah of the industrialist mentality given a computer for Christmas. However, there are other "innovations" that are equally boring (starting with Web 2.0), including most of the focus on doing this or that task from the traditional organization better, faster, cheaper, bigger (like JH's comment about the "evolution of the portal"). The more we hold fast to our Industrial Age metaphors, the longer it will take us to realize the extent of the changes under UCaPP conditions.
(UCaPP = ubiquitously connected and pervasively proximate)

But I wonder why they have 20K internal blogs and yet the same bloggers don't interact on the outside

That's a very good question. To drill down a bit:
- IBM's internal blog system has 15k registered users (who may post comments rather than run a blog themselves)
- 4600+ of those have created a blog
- 300+ of those have a blog with more than 14 posts.

Which is approximately the same number of IBMers who have external blogs...

It is the age old problem. Make it easy to create something, and people will create them, but if you haven't made it easy to keep building on that something, you wind up with lots of abandoned efforts. Obviously, IBM has made it easy to create a blog. They just haven't figured out how to make it easy to keep writing in your blog.

I noted something similar when OpenNTF mentioned that there had been 1700 downloads of their DominiWiki template. Anybody want to hazard a guess as to how many actual domino wikis there are out there? Not 1700, that is for sure.

But I wonder why they have 20K internal blogs and yet the same bloggers don't interact on the outside

1. IBM official external blogs hosted on IBM webspace are an entirely different thing from IBMers having personal blogs.

2. IBM internal bloggers might not want to be associated with IBM on ther personal blogs elsewhere, for fear of some kind of collision of interests, or just 'cause they don't want to talk about work when they're not at work and don't want their coworkers/managers/etc reading their personal blog.

They [IBM] just haven't figured out how to make it easy to keep writing in your blog.

And to be fair that's not the job of "IBM" - that's a choice that 300k IBMers have to make. If IBM was a copywriting agency they might be worried if only 0.1% of their employees were writing regularly. But given that they are an IT company...

IBM official external blogs hosted on IBM webspace are an entirely different thing from IBMers having personal blogs.

Absolutely, and it's noticeable that blogs from the IBM "diaspora" (e.g. Ed Brill, Irving VB) are drawing more attention than the attempts at blogging on ibm.com.

People have become blog enthusiasts. Now they have gone further. They have become IBM blog enthusiasts. Only the IBM blogs have not offered a way to curb the piracy or to curb the hacking or to curb the pop ups. I've pop up blockers. Yet I get at least three blocks every three seconds. My fingers are now totally worn out trying to delete or get rid of them by having to click on the red X mark on my browser. There is Dsrch trying to install his spywhere and I've to delete it every 25 seconds.

I don't blog on IBM. I blog on Blogspot. I write about the need to end all this by redeveloping the internet infrastructure that will change the servber role of having to send the documents to every Tom, Dick and Harry. When this is done all the troubles will be solved.

2c advil manager marketing product wyeth

Re: Web 2.0 as a meme - (disclaimer: I've been building and running websites since the beginning, and for a long time now at IBM Research). I think it is pretty clear there has been a dramatic shift in social networking via the web in the past 4-5 years. In the early days, we did have social networks: the web was smaller, there were more hobbyists (who often knew each other) and usenet and irc were prevalent networking areas. But our network was small; the cost of entry was enough tech-savvy to run mIRC or nn, code in HTML, and host our pages in a filesystem.

Personally, I view "Web 2.0" as a change in that cost of entry - there have been huge improvements in the ability for everyday folks to get online, sell bowling balls, build websites, date, stand on a soapbox, find social groups, etc etc. The change is in the interface, but the focus has been on getting people involved and that's significantly changed the size of the network. Perhaps it's merely an artifact of the subscription model for these services, or perhaps consumer dollars invested in social networks legitimizes them, but it's created a culture shift. For a long time, having friends online - or even initiating a real-life friendship - made one an anathema. These days, you "get-it."

Web 2.0 and social networking may be the catch phrases for self-awareness. Sure, we've been predicting it for years, but now that everyday people recognize and can casually take part in online social networking, complete with general (google) and specialized (technorati) integration/mining tools, the concepts have reached a new level.
J Scribner
(These opinions my own and don’t necessarily represent the positions, strategies or opinions of IBM)

People point to Walmart and cry "anti-union".
Unions enable disfavored people to live satisfactorly without addressing their disfavor. This way their family's problems are never resolved. Without the union they would have to accept the heirarchy, their own inferiority.
Unions serve to empower.
Walmart is anti-union because they are good. They try to help people address and resolve their problems by creating an enviornment where there are fewer hurdles.

Media ridicule and lawsuits are creations to reinforce people's belief that Walmart is evil in a subsegment of the industry dominated by the middle and lower classes.
Low-cost disfavored Chinese labor is utilized by corporate america to maximize margins. They all do it. Only WalMart gets fingered because they are the ones who help, and those who seek to create confusion in the marketplace want to eliminate the vast middle class who have a real chance and instead stick with lower classes who may not work otherwise. So they dirty him up while allowing the others to appear clean.

The coining of the term "Uncle Sam" was a clue alluding to just this::Sam Walton's WalMart is one of few saviors of the peasant class.

People point to Walmart and cry "anti-union".
Unions enable disfavored people to live satisfactorly without addressing their disfavor. This way their family's problems are never resolved. Without the union they would have to accept the heirarchy, their own inferiority.
Unions serve to empower.
Walmart is anti-union because they are good. They try to help people address and resolve their problems by creating an enviornment where there are fewer hurdles.

Media ridicule and lawsuits are creations to reinforce people's belief that Walmart is evil in a subsegment of the industry dominated by the middle and lower classes.
Low-cost disfavored Chinese labor is utilized by corporate america to maximize margins. They all do it. Only WalMart gets fingered because they are the ones who help, and those who seek to create confusion in the marketplace want to eliminate the vast middle class who have a real chance and instead stick with lower classes who may not work otherwise. So they dirty him up while allowing the others to appear clean.

The coining of the term "Uncle Sam" was a clue alluding to this::Sam Walton's WalMart is one of few saviors of the peasant class.

I noted something similar when OpenNTF mentioned that there had been 1700 downloads of their DominiWiki template. Anybody want to hazard a guess as to how many actual domino wikis there are out there? Not 1700, that is for sure.

Have you reviewed www.informationondemandblogs.com?

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and you can fill the email body with the description.
and to see the result you can see it with bookmarkMail here,
and if you want to set up for your own server click here

some screenshot

1. send yourself an email



2. see your sent email in outlook(mail client)



3. login to bookmarkMail



4. see the bookmark

I ran into this article randomly doing some del.icio.us research. Its funny to read it in 2007 since it was written in 2005. I guess hind sight is 20/20

I think the idea is simply of moving a lot of the social networking, which has been happening all along (phone calls, emails, coffee machine/beer drinking conversations ...), to the web. To that extent, I think this would be as good or as bad as the offline counterparts.

Can someone send me Steve Sparkes current email? We worked together for a time at CSFB in the early 90's.