... Moveable Type was using or working with Qumana, they would have WYSIWYG ...

Gleaned from Marc Canter's blog ...

Man oh man I sure wish MT had WYSIWYG editing. I wanted to post this a coupel of days ago - but..... it took too long to.....

It came form this post - which is exactly about the space that Qumana addresses:

Personal servers - via Adam Rifkin and Rohit Khare

Man oh man I sure wish MT had WYSIWYG editing. I wanted to post this a coupel of days ago - but..... it took too long to.....

Anyway - here's some cool shit Adam Rifkin is talking about personal servers - and what Rohit is thinking about....

Personal Servers and Information Clients, 2004

It's been about a year since I've thought about personal servers and Web Services Intermediaries and Mojito, and now that I'm spending a lot of time with Rohit I'm starting to think about them again. Mostly because he cannot stop talking about them, though this time he's calling the server TPd. (Ten years ago, he called it StarTPd or *TPd because such a server could handle ftp, http, and smtp messages in and out. The star got dropped and/or burned out sometime in the last decade, perhaps during the IMPP wars at the IETF in the late 1990s. Oh, the humanity! As for my own interest, I've been kicking around these ideas with Rohit -- Internet-Scale Event Notifications and munchkins for about a dozen years now. Wow, that's a long slog...)

I'm still inspired by Ben Hammersley's post in 2002 quoting Morten Frederiksen's description of Hep: "Software that transfers messages between different messaging systems. Eventually, it should transparently route messages between email, weblogs, and instant messaging. Currently Hep does one thing: fetches news feeds from Web sites and lets you view them in your email client."

That inspired Rohit to write,

Both Hep and ZOË are innovative new messaging engines that I categorize with the name Personal Servers. Personal Servers are a new kind of infrastructure that run on behalf of people to process the messages that come into their life through email, web, IM, news, ftp, RSS, SOAP, and Internet-scale event notifications. Mod-pubsub is peanut butter to a chocolatey Personal Server because

PubSub makes Personal Servers timely and actionable.

In the future, all decentralized applications will be developed using Personal Servers: bags of bits will routed hop-by-hop through whatever application-layer protocol is available, from source to destination. We call this insight Application Layer Internetworking, or ALIN, named by analogy to IP Layer Internetworking done by today's Layer 3 Routers (slides, notes). From an architecture standpoint, Personal Servers have just one rule of thumb:

The message is the medium.

Security, reliability, filtering/transformations, and so on all stem from this first principle. (Respectively, security is message-centric, reliability is an upper-layer concern, and filtering/transformations are rules at active proxies. More specifically, the edges are intelligent because the network is insecure, unreliable, and dumb.)

Personal Servers go hand in hand with Information Clients, for which Gary Burd did a nice roundup:

• Haystack: we aim to let users define whichever arrangements of, connections between, and views of information they find most effective.
• Chandler: users will be able to organize diverse kinds of information for their own convenience -- not the computer's convenience.
• ZOË: Think about it as a sort of librarian, tirelessly, continuously, processing, slicing, indexing, organizing, your messages. The end result is this intertwingled web of information.
• clevercactus: clevercactus is focused on information centric users who want a single solution to manage their core information needs.
• IdeaGraph: IdeaGraph is easy-dailyto-use software for creating visual maps of ideas, that can work with web pages, documents and images.
• Spring: It's a universal canvas where you interact naturally with singular, visual representations of the people, places, products, etc that define your life!
  
• Agent Frank: The goal of Agent Frank is to be a personal intelligent intermediary and companion to internet infovores during their daily hunter/gatherer excursions.
• Hep: Hep Message Server is software that transfers bits of information between different messaging sytems on the Internet. When it's done, you'll be able to use Hep to transparently route messages between e-mail, weblogs, and instant messaging.
• Dashboard: The dashboard is a piece of software which performs a continous, automatic search of your personal information space to show you things in your life that are related to whatever you happen to be doing with your computer at the time.

Note how Mojito fits into the Information Client vision, too:

• secure chat (like this, but in a browser)
• "live" RSS news aggregator (in a browser, without polling)
• "live" group blogging with multiple read and write permissions

Joyce hypothesized that these three applications all converge into one live, browser-based "super app" that allows secure, real-time collaboration and news feeds.

Not much has changed about the idea of Information Clients and Personal Servers in the last year; what has changed is that it sounds to me like Rohit is (finally) interested in working on them. (His PhD and wedding were distracting him for the better part of the last 18 months.) Let's see if we can get some momentum for this now that those distractions are off the table. Just in case, I'm keeping handy the Architect's Lament should Rohit need it...

"The first matrix I designed was quite naturally perfect; it was a work of art, flawless, sublime. A triumph equaled only by its monumental failure."

From Steve Rubel's Micro Persuasion comes this:

Feedster to Launch New Way to View Blogs

One of the the new features Feedster plans to unveil this week is the ability to view all of a blog's posts by date in a monthly calendar view and who links to each post. Check out this sweet screen grab.

From BlogOn, according to Ross Mayfield:

July 22, 2004

Discussing Social Media

This post is in lieu of Powerpoint to introduce the Defining Social Media panel at BlogOn tomorrow with Dan Gillmor, James Currier, Reid Hoffman, Michael Sikillian and Jim Spohrer.

How We Got Here

The Internet has always facilitated conversations and augmented relationships. When a critical mass of participation is gained, cooperation ensues and simple tools have complex results. The earliest innovators in this adoption lifecycle were geeks and hackers. Put enough of them together and you get a new mode of production to disrupt the software industry and enable a new phase of growth — open source.

What we are witnessing is segments of early providers and early adopters form previously unrepresented networks and apply participatory technologies to disrupt industries. Earlier adoption segments include software, media, advertising, entertainment, politics, dating, recruiting, consumer electronics, sales, management, the list goes on. All these segments are information intensive and rely on relationships. And as Doc says, its a revolution in demand-based supply:

Social media are another example of the demand side supplying itself. We’re seeing this with open source software, with new standards like RSS, and with the new media we call blogs. We’re even seeing it in movies such as Outfoxed, and with Internet radio (in spite of destructive fear-based regulation). None of these things came from the Big Boys. They came from you and me and the rest of us here.

Landscape

There is little point in defining Social Software, Media, Search, Computing or Networking, except that new language parallels innovation. Here’s my way of mapping the space, feel free to modify and make your own.

Social Software, a term coined by Clay Shirky, is the design of systems that supports groups with an underlying value proposition of building social capital…

Social Software is not that new, but its currently a growing and evolving sector marked by a high level of cross-polinization. The level of innovation defys easy categorization.

Properties include people-centricity, low communication costs, low transaction costs that encourage adoption, easy group forming, triads rather than pairs, treating groups as first class objects in the system and adapting to the social network (heterarchy) rather than requiring it to adapt it it (heirarchy). Second order effects include emergence, reputation, different values at different scales, transparency, decentralization and fun parties.

Other dimensions to view this space include enterprise vs. consumer, how connections are formed, different values at different scales, what markets are cannibalized, what cultures (not markets, but don’t reach for your gun) are served and open vs. closed.

These dimension easily blur. Take for example the distinction of enterprise vs. consumer. Social Software adoption is being driven in the enterprise from the bottom up. Initially, it users as developers bringing in their own tools like personal publishing and wikis plus (shameless plug here) enlightened companies serving both users and enterprises at different scales.

Drivers

• Sales of camera phones with outpace cameras and phones within five years. The fastest growing consumer electronic device hasn’t yet been matched with robust sharing services, save Photologs and Moblogging. These are the fastest growing segments of social media and Incumbents are catching on.
• People spend time with other people. 2 Hours Per Visit on Friendster (pdf) make it ripe for ad revenue.
• We have an innate human need to mess with media and make artifacts their own (call this a plausable generalization). What you share makes us care.
• Countries and cultures like the US and UK have a latent demand for social capital
• Pull models of attention management and social networks as filters are solutions for attention scarcity and information abundance
• Relatively low costs for personal publishing, group forming and network management are expanding markets from the supply side
• Above all, ease of use. Simple tools yield complex results.

Talk of Bubblet
After initial events like the Blogger acquisition by Google, Six Apart funding, Socialtext seeding and the Social Networking bubblet — there is a recent spate of significant fundings in this area like Technorati, Newsgator, and Feedburner that bring it renewed attention.
The Consumer Internet is a ripe investment thesis where a small up front investment can yield potentially large returns and many of these companies represent a reinvention of the way the web works and viral growth.

Opportunities still remain within the enterprise. The vast majority of employees are not involved in process that software can automate, they manage exceptions to process. Today all they have is email (90% of collaboration and 75% of knowledge assets is trapped there). Enterprise Social Software seeks to serve the unmet needs of knowledge work and business practice, beginning with a proposition of making group communication efficient and effective.

Expect a byproduct of the BlogOn conference to be coverage that suggests an investment bubblet. Reason being that the early entrants who paid their dues and have success stories to tell are reaching a level of investor interest that’s attracting copycat competition. But skepticism is more than warranted.

Risk Factors

• Privacy — relationship data is extremely sensitive and conflicts between enterprise and individual incentives abound
• Growth — many models require scale for return and not all achieve viral levels
• Low Barriers to Entry — there isn’t much in the way of technology risk, the network is accessible and the LAMP stack drives down startup costs. Network effects are the natural and equitable barrier.
• DIY — if you fail to serve the network, the network will serve itself
• Intellectual Property — regimes prevent sharing and development of the commons

Value Proposition
The underlying value proposition across social software is enhancing social capital. But a couple of unique factors are worth consideration.

• Influence — when you increase the level of participation, so too increases the value of reputation. In advertising, at a time where ad space is starting to become scarice, new metrics and formats could build upon influence. Within enterprises, the trend towards decentralization requires revealing the power law and augmenting the heterarchy.
• Economies — used to be that competitive advantage was driven by economies of scale and speed. A more networked economy shifts the focus to economies of scope and span.
• Embracing Change — when vendors hand over control to users as developers (as is the case with wikis enabling users to create information architecture for their own situations, it shares risk and reward.
• Pooling Risk — Social Software vendors have cooperated early with standards like RSS, Atom, FOAF and Kwiki. This pools risks for vendors, enables new combinations and reduces lock-in for customers and users

... and are they, really ?

This is an interesting post, gleaned from George Por's Blog of Collective Intelligence.

Marc Eisenstadt, a fellow speaker at London Symposium on Social Tools for the Enterprise, wrote in the Symposium's blog:

Personal ownership of content creation is critical: in our work with school children, parents, members of the local community, University students, corporate sponsors, and research colleagues, we find over and over again that empowering users to create their own content is the key to fostering engagement, creativity, and problem solving skills. (emphasis added)

Building on that, I'd add the technological innovation of weblogs will discover its full power in the enterprise when associated with the social innovation of communities of practice. Why? When we free the creative potential of flexible constellations of communities of interest and practice, it will boost their members’ identity, mutual care and professional pride. The emerging generation of social tools can be optimized for powering up that process. When that happens, blogs graduate from personal publishing tool and become a potent enabler of collective intelligence.

Right now, in many companies blogging is looked at with the same suspicion as personal webpages were in the early days of intranets. "Yet, another tool that people can use to express themselves but doesn't it risk to get out of control?" Well, who is in control, anyway?

Via Joi Ito via Smart Mobs: