broadstuff Comments

Nic Brisbourne: The Adoption of Enterprise 2.0 - wildfire or slow burn?

nospam@example.com (Nic Brisbourne) — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 23:08:18 -0600

Hi Alan,

Good post. The one thing you didn't mention is adoption of web based enterprise 2.0 SaaS by small numbers of users and departments without the permission of the CIO, or possibly even behind her back.

This is the exciting potential of e2.0 for me.

best,
Nic

Deirdre Molloy: The Feminisation of the Web - Part II

nospam@example.com (Deirdre Molloy) — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 22:48:19 -0600

Great post Janet, I'm very late to it as have been on holiday. In terms of Alan's prefaratory remarks that:"there are many women as customers, but far fewer people developing services that give women the UI / UE they prefer".. it's also worth bearing in mind that "developing services" also includes the advertising, marketing and creative communications and services brands offer online both in their own web offerings and in broader digital campaigns.

That side of things and the issue of women's contribution and talent therein is being addressed directly in the UK (and recently extended to New York) by SheSays who started running regular topical discussion events in London in March 2007 and are also pioneering a mentoring service for women in digital marketing (agencies and client-side).

You can see what they're up to and what they've done already here (website site currently a bit glitchy - first time i've seen it out of whack BTW):
http://www.shesays.org.uk/missing-out.aspx

I've been to a few of these and the standard of both speakers and group discussion is of a very high calibre. Whilst I harboured deep reservations about the idea of women-only events I have to say I withdrew them immediately after partaking of the convivial atmosphere and innovative talent celebrated in each event.

These events are also incredibly popular with each one booking up in a day or so - much like MoMo London does on the mobile side - so there is clearly a huge well of demand that the organisers Laura Jordan Bambach and Alessandra Lariu have tapped into.

It mightn't be so much the denizen of coders, biz dev peeps and the 'same old faces' that other London web events are dominated by - which is mightily refreshing! - but there's a good spread of skillsets represented in the audiences each time. Events like this make me very hopeful that women's contribution can be both promoted more equitable and their influx into digital production increased if we would only think more seriously, creatively and consistently about spheres of mentorship and influence and how they operate.

Given the skills shortage and associated pressures on recruitment into the digital industries, initiatives like SheSays and the Girl Geek Dinners should be welcomed and supported more widely in the digital scene.

As a footnote: an interesting point made by a speaker at the last SheSays I attended was that women need to improve (or at least establish!) their negotiating skills in the sector. In other words, the pay differential for men and women doing the same jobs is mainly down to women not going in with with a higher request, or the mindset to negotiate, and just accepting what they're offered (or thinking about the "needs of the business" rather than their worth or needs primarily). The speaker that night reminded us that men do this much less and suggested we bear this in mind when going for job interviews or annual pay reviews... the speaker was Nikki Barton, who has recently been appointed Head of Digital Design at Nokia and (disclosure) also blogs for Chinwag.

Crosbie Fitch: The Tyranny of Persistence - how new media hacks are writing themselves into sharecroppers

nospam@example.com (Crosbie Fitch) — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 13:03:12 -0600

Would you be so good as to e-mail me the text of the comment of mine you unpublished please?

Ta.

Peter Parker: How much do you value your Twitter service - will you pay for it or with it?

nospam@example.com (Peter Parker) — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 08:31:03 -0600

------------------------------------------------
Dave Winer, father of RSS says “Twitter, as it was conceived, was never meant to live.”

“It’s very possible with better engineering its architecture might have gone on for a few more years, but eventually it would have hit this wall, where there were too many people posting too many twits to too many followers. The scale of the system as conceived rises exponentially.”

So is the end of Twitter getting near? I hope not. Twitter I hope that you are listening and you better start taking things more seriously.
-----------------------------------------------

Here's my two cents.

For instance there are about 100m users of yahoo messenger and usually 2-3 of them talk at a time that means scalability of 300m conversations. On the other hand with 100m twitter users who usually send messages to 100-10,000 other users the scalability required is 10,000m to 10^6m I have never known any current architecture based on webservers to handle such a scale. So according to me Twitter was never meant to live. It is like a concept car that will never see production. Users of twitter don't understand this and they don't care.
They don't know whats happening when the website is down. The sad part is that the best analysts claim that Twitter is a billion dollar company in one year of operations. There is an old saying before the days of when people understood permutation combinations. One peasant asked a king to give him rice equal to the total amount gotten by placing double the number of rice grains on a chess square than the previous square, starting with one rice grain. There are 8x8=64 squares. We seriously need to visit grade 7 mathematics.

I know of only one News/Messaging system that supports around 1 billion users sending messages to all 1 billion users each. Thats a scalability of 10^12m. It is not Web based but rather on a massively scalable serverless P2P architecture based. The team is soft spoken and when I last talked to them I was told that they don't care about money or hype or fame but rather for just the passion of next generation global systems that will stand the test of worldwide use. Its called Mermaid News Mermaid

They have other softwares too but this post is about Twitter and Messaging. Once everyone comprehends basic mathematics that goes behind scalable algorithms they would go past the flashy screen and hype to actually want a system they can trust. To the analysts I would say it is easy to create a business plan, create a hype and raise $20m funding it is far more difficult to create something of use.

alan p: Reboot10 - The Summary of '08

nospam@example.com (alan p) — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 17:21:19 -0600

@Steve - so long as I get commission

Steve Lawson: Reboot10 - The Summary of '08

nospam@example.com (Steve Lawson) — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 15:56:44 -0600

"...and general fluffbrains"

General Fluffbrains sounds like he shoul definitely have been a character in Blackadder Goes Forth. I think I need to adopt him as an alterego

Sx

Benjamin Ellis: ICANN drives end of Web 2.0 bad spellrs

nospam@example.com (Benjamin Ellis) — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 23:44:53 -0600

Surely that should be "you need to pay to be a playEr" . I wonder how many variations of a domain there will be now you can include mis-accents as well as misspellings? Ooo... I wonder if that means that domain names will become case sensitive? Oh... This is going to be fun.

Crosbie Fitch: Role of BBC in New Media - Part I the TechCrunch BBC Debate

nospam@example.com (Crosbie Fitch) — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 18:56:09 -0600

The only solution is to abolish the unethical privilege of copyright. The 'rights' problem then disappears

As Sherlock would put it, "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."

Uproot the tree. It will survive. So will the 'rights' holders - even though they end up holding non-exclusive rights rather than exclusive privileges.

This is of course heresy, but then so was heliocentricity.

alan p: Role of BBC in New Media - Part I the TechCrunch BBC Debate

nospam@example.com (alan p) — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 18:39:16 -0600

Crosbie - thats exactly one of the issues we have to address going forward. As you say, the structure of rights now is not going to stop the industry evolving - but sorting out the millions of small rightsholders is more likely to occur when it becomes clear to them that its change or go bust, and that situation hasn't emerged yet.

Crosbie Fitch: Role of BBC in New Media - Part I the TechCrunch BBC Debate

nospam@example.com (Crosbie Fitch) — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 18:13:50 -0600

If the BBC is a an ancient tree beloved by the nation, but due to its location threatened by cliff erosion and an imminent submersion into the salty sea below, you can write off all those who say it can only be saved by relocation as naifs who simply don't understand the impossibility of the task, because of the licensing entanglements that render it rooted to the spot.

They may still be right.

Either the tree is relocated or it is doomed.

[Other trees are available.]

alan p: Role of BBC in New Media - Part I the TechCrunch BBC Debate

nospam@example.com (alan p) — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 17:57:59 -0600

POssibly, or its not such a big issue. Must say tho' that most of the whines seem pretty trite when held up to examination.

jamescoops: Role of BBC in New Media - Part I the TechCrunch BBC Debate

nospam@example.com (jamescoops) — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 13:12:49 -0600

it looked quite sparsely attended from the pics and qiks? Football semi?

Bebo Skinner: The genesis of Bebo's management Exodus

nospam@example.com (Bebo Skinner) — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 19:40:01 -0600

Have to agree $850m is a sweet deal for Bebo in comparison to the recent deal done for Youtube, although I have to say its current 40m users will grow significantly once Aol get right behind it and back it in the US.

rdomanski: I'm so bored with Web 2.0.... aka Saving Humanity Part II

nospam@example.com (rdomanski) — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 16:42:10 -0600

This is a fantastic and long-overdue discussion. What many of these internet-specific questions really get to is what should be the larger purpose of software. What human values should software embody, and how should developers then integrate those values into code?

href="http://thenerfherder.blogspot.com/2008/06/web-debate-on-saving-world.html">http://then

erfherder.blogspot.com/2008/06/web-debate-on-saving-world.html

Ethan Bauley: Amazon + Twitter = eBay + Skype?

nospam@example.com (Ethan Bauley) — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 15:36:03 -0600

Thanks for the thoughts, guys!

Here's a new question:

What did you mean by "UC system"

("Twitter is the embryo UC system Telcos have been trying to build")