Octavianworld

Picked Up On MITX Exchange

Octavianworld is now a featured blog on MITX Exchange.  (Thanks to MITX for the privilege, and especially to Dean Whitney for all his hard work building that site.)  I'm honored to be there, in good company, and hope to put back even a little of the lots I've learned through MITX people and events.

Upcoming Enterprise 2.0 Panel: "What Blogging Brings To Business"

I'm joining Jessica Lipnack, Bill Ives, Patti Anklam, and Doug Cornelius on the "What Blogging Brings To Business" Panel at Enterprise 2.0 in Boston on June 10.

500 Mirrors: Channeling Light Into The Business of Virtual Worlds

I connected recently in NYC with my ex ArsDigita colleague and good friend Kevin Kelly.  Kevin is (among other roles) the CEO of 500 Mirrors, an enterprise-class virtual world platform provider, and was in town for the annual VirtualWorlds Conference at the Javits Center.

For the virtual worlds crowds, these are dark days, not unlike what things were like for the web generally in 2002.  After flying high in 2006 -- including making the cover of Business Week -- Linden Labs' Second Life, the poster child for the category, has hit rough patches on several fronts, including usability and, security, and scalability.  Electric Sheep, the leading interactive agency helping corporations build and pimp out their VW experiments, recently cut back its staff significantly.  And as most of us have seen, even mighty IBM, the corporate pied piper of the VW movement, has been advertising against its own efforts.  The remaining bright spots in the "classic" rich-client VW world these days seem to be in applications for kids:  Webkinz, Club Penguin, Habbo Hotel -- virtual babysitters for kids that parents are willing to pay for, perhaps partly as diversions to keep them away from first-person shooters,  MMORPGs, or perhaps as training for earning the big bucks playing WoW.  Though 1300 people registered for the conference, things seemed quiet even for the cavernous Javits, with few attendees from big-name companies/ brands in evidence.

My overwhelming impression remains that this is an industry whose technological reach and ambition greatly exceed its grasp of imaginative use cases for which this medium is uniquely suited.  Kevin and 500 Mirrors' CTO and founder Bob Flesch get this in spades.  Kevin tells a story of a recent conference in SL that illustrates the state of things:

• with a limited number of avatars each island (server instance) can support, the conference inevitably had an empty feeling;
• lots of power and flexibility for moving around means too much power for newbies and the less experienced;
• P-bombings have been an unfortunate reality;
• functionally, the experience's complexity exceeds its theoretical information and communication advantages -- for example, it's hard to read expressions when an avatar -- if human -- is programmed by default to look ironic and bored, if hip.

500 Mirrors' name reflects an approach to scalability it has developed that has effectively solved population limits for any practical enterprise and even consumer scenario.  (Proof comes from production instances that unfortunately Kevin can't disclose without unpleasant consequences.)  On the usability front, Kevin and Bob are focused on providing more by enabling less -- pre-scripting movement sequences to get someone into the right place in the right space, for example, or by turning off flying, or by simply making it impossible to get trapped in a corner.  Finally, since each instance they set up for a client is isolated (whether hosted by 500 Mirrors or installed behind a client's firewall), attendees can't jump out to inappropriate places, and intruders find it harder to get in.

But the biggest insight comes from conceiving of use cases that make sense, and Kevin's got a separate business going that's nailed one of these.  More about this in an upcoming post...

Upcoming Talk: Carlson on Metrics (Minneapolis, May 23)

I'll be speaking at the "Carlson on Metrics" conference in Minneapolis (May 21-23, my talk is on the morning of the 23rd).  I'll be talking about "multi-channel marketing optimization".

Here's the premise:

• as people spend more time in digital channels, marketing dollars are following them
• this is challenging for marketers, since these channels are also much more fragmented (for example, we've gone from a handful of broadcast networks, to hundreds of cable channels, to millions of websites with embedded videos)
• there's a silver lining:  these channels are much more trackable, targetable, and testable
• but, in practice, this means a typical marketer is now faced with a fire hose of information to process from each of these channels
• so, what happens is that in most cases, firms end up "locally optimizing" their marketing spend within each channel
• this might have been fine if the typical "customer experience" for any given target segment was limited to a single channel -- say, physical stores vs. online storefront
• but, with channel fragmentation, the average "customer experience" through any given buying process now crosses many different channels -- see the infomercial, go online to research the product, ask a friend, go back to the site through a search engine to buy, and then maybe pick up in the store
• so, firms can't really afford to "optimize locally" any more -- they have to make sure that all these channels are working together effectively
• this is hard; it requires integration of data and coordination/ cooperation among functional organizations with separate, often different, and sometimes conflicting metrics, budgets, and cultures
• since it's hard, many firms are tempted by silver bullets: "If we build a data warehouse, the clouds will  part and the angels will sing multi-channel insights to  us."
• but in practice, such efforts often collapse of their own weight, and unfortunately it takes time to realize that prospect, since "If you don't know where you are going any road will get you there."
• there are ways to do better, and folks who have done better...

Hope to see you there, or hear from you about your experiences before, during, or after.

Opinion Polls & Market Research

OpenACS Zeitgeist Next Stop: Brazil

Following the recent global user group meeting in Guatemala,  o resurgence de OpenACS/.LRN will next pop up in Brazil.  Here's Eduardo Santos'  summary:

I'm happy to announce the first (or the second, if you consider this) OpenACS Brazilian users group meeting. The event will take place at the 9th International Free Software Forum (FISL 9.0) in Porto Alegre, RS, Brasil, from April 17th to 19th.

The Brazilian community is growing and we already have 607 members from many different states in country. We also have a lot of translated documentation, which is an effort to make the OpenACS framework popular among Brazilian developers...

Here are some of the OpenACS/.LRN based services they will present:

1. OpenACS history in Brazil, by Rodrigo Proença
2. OpenACS projects in Embrapa by Orzenil Silva
3.  Citizens' Territories Portal, by Alessandro Landim
4. SPU Colaborative Portal, by Vitor Silva
5. Virtual Public Market, by Eduardo Santos

See his post with details here.  Please pass the word into your favorite e-learning/ online community/ web development forums/blogs/ listservs, etc. !

Surf Canyon: A Publisher-Friendly Search Reformulation Alternative

A while back, I wrote a post suggesting that Google's AdSense business was less profitable than its direct search business.  Some folks I know in the business have confirmed this.  Yesterday, the New York Times carried an article about how Google is trying to keep people on Google.com longer, and making publishers and retailers mad in the process.  But what can they do about it?

The Revolution Will Be Televised (It Just May Not Be A Revolution)

I wrote in an earlier post about the logical math that would drive ad budgets away from "traditional" TV (broadcast, cable) toward online videos.  Here's a great article by Alan Schulman in yesterday's Online Video Insider on how traditional agencies are co-opting the online video ad buy in a way that may limit the evolution of the medium, and illustrates how my earlier post missed the point. 

Compete: A One-Eyed King Gets Crowned

TNS  bought Compete today for what could turn out to be $150M in cash.  Not bad for an eight-year-old company reportedly doing $15M in revenue and burning $5M a year.  Here's a very interesting study on the SEOMoz blog that looks at the traffic estimation/ prediction accuracy of a number of services like Compete.  Technorati did well by SEOMoz's method; I've added a couple of Technorati-provided services in the left-hand sidebar of this blog for reference.

LMS Usability Review

In all the years that I've been involved in the OpenACS/ .LRN community, it's been my experience that we get high marks for the architectural sophistication and power of the toolkit, but that we get dinged when it comes to usability, especially vs. Moodle, the latest darling of the LMS world.  So, with that as a backdrop, check out this study presented by Emmanuelle Raffenne of Spain's Universidad de la Educacion a la Distancia (UNED) at the recent .LRN global user meetings in Guatemala.   Congratulations to all the members of the community who have been working very hard on this front!

More to follow on the conference...

DylanMessaging: Viral Genius

This viral messaging campaign by Ten4 for SonyBMG's release of a collection of Bob Dylan's music last fall was enormously successful.  I've always loved the original video, and harbored ideas of recording my own version of it at home to kick off various presentations I've given in the past, but hadn't pulled the trigger.  Then I saw this (via Scott Kirsner -- thanks Scott!) and was really impressed.  The mind races to all the other similar possibilities, though doubtless there are intellectual property issues that weren't a problem here.

Reminds me of another viral favorite, Mr. Picassohead

At Harvard KSG With Tim Berners-Lee

Jerry Mechling, who teaches at Harvard's Kennedy School, and runs the "Leadership for a Networked World" (formerly E-Government Executive Education) program there, invited me to a talk by Sir Tim Berners-Lee last Wednesday evening.  The audience included ~50 current and former senior public-sector information technology officials attending one of Jerry's sessions.

Sir Tim's comments included:

• a discussion of how the WWW came to be
• an examination of some of the risks that could have killed it early on, and how those were overcome
• an exploration of some of the possibilities of the Semantic Web
• an exhortation to members of the audience to "set their data free"

An Unevenly Distributed Future: MITX Internet Video Panel

Last night I went to a great MITX panel discussion at MIT on Internet video.  Scott Kirsner moderated a great and diverse group representing the media, CDNs, VC, and agency worlds.  Scott organized the discussion into three buckets:  how are users interactions with web video changing; how is the production side of the business evolving to enable new things; and, the "monetization" of all this.  Here are my notes, and a few ideas:

Expanded Awareness At AOL: MIHOO + eBay? And What About Amazon?

Dave Morgan is a shrewd operator.  In adding buyat to advertising.com, he expands what AOL knows about how surfing ties to buying.  As I wrote here, this expanded awareness of consumer behavior makes it possible to develop better targeting algorithms, raising the CPMs he can charge advertisers or helping him be more competitive at existing rates.

So if a smaller affiliate network like buyat makes sense for AOL, what about two well-known larger networks? 

For example, when does Microsoft add eBay to Yahoo!? Like Yahoo!, eBay's stock is down 30% from last fall.  The premium over the market price that Microsoft is paying for Yahoo! represents only about 5% of Microsoft's market capitalization, arguably leaving plenty of room for another deal of similar scale without stockholders getting nervous about excessive dilution -- and eBay's market cap today is only about a third bigger than Yahoo!'s was pre-MIHOO.  Amazon, with a market cap of $30 billion, is in essentially the same position. (And maybe since it's a neighbor of Microsoft's, it might make more sense?)

This idea isn't that radical.  Yahoo! and eBay already had a partnership.  Google gets the value too, though it hasn't made much progress with its own services, Froogle and Base.

Some will say another deal soon is practically impossible, because integrating Yahoo! will consume Microsoft.  I believe that's a red herring.  The value in the MSFT/ YHOO deal will be created by a better advertising capability: better reach, better data, better targeting.  It won't come from integrating media properties.  If you believe this, it suggests that this is where the integration focus should be.  This  simplifies the integration challenge, and allows Microsoft to turn its attention to the next move.  Also, the current economic circumstances favor further consolidation, especially in a market (digital marketing) with longer-term fundamentals (growth, returns to scale) that remain strong.

Just When I Thought I Was Getting Clever

Since publishing your email address on the web invites spam, I recently used a free external service to add an "email me" form to this blog (see link at left).  The service uses captcha, the system that asks you to prove that you're human when you register for something online by copying a set of squiggly letters and/or numbers into a form.  I was feeling very smug about this until I read my former ArsDigita colleague Carsten Clasohm's post on how some spammers now get around this.

Memo to MIHOO: A Modest Proposal for The Next Step

There are three ways an ad network can compete:  better reach, better data, better analytics.  Know more people, know more about them, know what to do with that information.  Jeffrey Rayport noted yesterday in MarketWatch that recent consolidations in the ad network business have made it a game that "only the mighty can play."  Meanwhile, Danny Sullivan wonders in Ad Age whether the Microsoft-Yahoo combination will be enough to catch Google, even if they can pull the integration off.

So here's an idea, borrowing from a time-honored software business strategy most recently exploited by Facebook when it opened up an API to its "social graph" (also inspired by recent fiddling I've done with the IBM Many Eyes project).  MIHOO should provide a way for "third-party algorithm developers" to query its combined data hoard of users and their clickstreams.  That way, they can "unleash the power of open-source algorithm development" by letting the unwashed mathematicians of the world back-test their ideas for getting consumer X to respond to offer Y in context Z.  Of course, this would come with a price: when you go to run your algorithm on the MIHOO network to "monetize" it, MIHOO takes the gross cut to the network and pays you, the algorithm developer a royalty.

Symbiotic way for MIHOO and the little guy to take on big GOOG.  Lots of problems with this to be sure, starting with privacy (even though it already "is", can data be further anonymized to make it tough to infer my personal clickstream?).  And, as a practical matter, can MIHOO expose a data warehouse that could take mass pounding from the world without slowing to a useless crawl?  Further, would it be worth it?  There is a diminishing return to finer and finer targeting ideas, after all.  As for the competitive risk -- that people will get insights on MIHOO's data set that they can deploy on some other network (Google's or otherwise) perhaps there is a way to abstract the data being queried until a promising algorithm can be "optioned" by MIHOO.

Granted, it's a bit out there... but work with me people, or help me find the fatal flaw.

A Struggle for the Soul of Viral Marketing

I caught up with my former colleague Shiv Singh last week in new York.  Shiv is now leading Razorfish's social media practice initiative. 

We got to talking about Duncan Watts' research on how trends spread through social networks.  Watts argues that they spread randomly, and that it's the predisposition of the network to "catch" the trend that matters most.  This, of course, flies in the face of conventional thinking on the topic, starting with some of the conclusions that flow out of Stanley ("Six Degrees")  Milgram's work, and more recent books like Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point and Keller and Berry's The Influentials. These latter two argue that some people matter lots more than others in propagating ideas, and that these people can be pre-identified.

Watts' credibility stems from analysis he's done, both of large email archive data sets and through large-scale simulations in virtual world social networks.  And his conclusion, if you agree, would of course be a bummer for the budding industry of folks trying to help marketers influence social media.

A great article on the topic runs in this month's Fast Company.

My take is that as a practical matter, both sides have a point.  I do believe some people, even if just through more numerous interactions, are likelier to spread ideas (though not necessarily yours), and Watts does not completely discount the role of influencers.  And, as I wrote earlier in this post, simply spreading your message through an influencer will be futile if it doesn't "tune in" and extend in a useful way what's already going on in the "conversations" a particular network is having.

(See also Shiv's article in Boxes and Arrows, and this earlier post I wrote on Marketspace Advisor summarizing some of the research on social networks.)

Ze Frank's Experience Embracing "UGC"

Podcast of Ze Frank's very entertaining presentation at a recent Rails conference here.   The second half of his talk, in which he describes "the anxiety of acceleration" that he experiences as his audience becomes his partner in producing content, is especially interesting and highly relevant for publishers pursuing user-generated-content.  Possibly NSFW, probably not.

Thomson Buys Contact Networks

Thomson announced today they bought Contact Networks.

Sunny Days in Uppsala

Sun's bought MySQL AB for a cool $1 billion.  Why?  Maybe Amazon's recently adding SimpleDB to AWS made Sun, which is also offering utility-based computing, a bit nervous.  Some folks wonder if a billion is too much to pay for open-source software.  I say they get the full attention of the core of the MySQL project, and once they figure out how to run distributed MySQL clusters on their version of EC2, they can rent (SaaS) what they can't sell.

This open-source thing is going to be big one of these days...

Related: Tim O'Reilly's recent Radar talk offered some cautionary notes about the whole cloud-based SaaS trend that are worth considering:

http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail3364.html

Hacking The Cloud, And Its Alternatives

I'm on a Forbes panel called "Optimizing IT for the Enterprise" this Thursday evening in Chicago. 

What's the market tension that might make an event like this remotely interesting?  In one corner you find the "old way" of doing things:  running your own infrastructure -- servers, storage, packaged apps you license, install, etc.   In the other, there's the "new way":  run your business using (e.g.) AWS/ S3/EC2, hack your own apps in PHP/Python/Ruby, on APIs from Facebook and Google.  In short man, the very soul of the IT organization, nay, the very industry, is in play! 

The challenge is to suggest what balance makes sense, when and for whom.  My frame of reference for addressing the "optimization" challenge is trying to reconcile accelerating "market cycles" with increasing "differentiation demands".  The former often pushes you to push as much of your stack to the cloud as possible.  The latter sometimes requires you to mine every nook and cranny of the stack for competitive advantage (there's a reason Google builds its own servers and runs its own server farms).  In my own recent experience with the client extranet we deployed at Marketspace, we pushed in both directions, with very happy results so far.  But your circumstances likely will be different.  I look forward to learning about them Thursday evening.

Hope to see you there.