On behalf of InitMarketing, I am currently helping a customer to provide more information about their Open Source product to their community via Weblogs.

My role is that of an external coach, who reviews blog post drafts, provides concrete and strategic advice - all of which only if the bloggers ask me for my services.

Given that bloggers are their own chief editor, it is important that they control their Weblog and that they can fully commit on what they do. Dictatorship won’t get you anywhere if you want to get your employees and partners to start blogging or to blog more or to blog more regularly. Bloggers also need to understand some of the strategic marketing communications background of blogging, because that will allow them to better attract readers.

Let me share with you some answers I provided to questions which have been asked by the customer’s bloggers during the process.

Won’t information be too scattered if we don’t blog at one place but in individual blogs on different domains?

That’s a valid concern. Here’s a marketing strategy backgrounder:

On the social software level (blogs, Wiki, etc.), the credos are:

1. Let it happen! No matter how well crafted or condensed the information provided is, any information is better than none.2) Be personal! Credit where credits are due, e.g. a blog should be personal, a Wiki should indicate contributors, etc.
2. Be personal! Credit where credits are due, e.g. a blog should be personal, a Wiki should indicate contributors, etc.

The social media marketing approach follows very closely the Open Source development mode, just like “release early, release often” it follows the idea of “communicate early, communicate often”. There are tools which help to provide an overview of various information resources, e.g. RSS aggregators help to show all latest posts from different blogs.

On the traditional marketing communications level, content can be re-use from blogs, Wikis, etc. to publish well crafted and designed collaterals which are in line with the main marketing message(s). Such collaterals would be the corporate website, newsletters, white papers, brochures, and so on. Traditional marketing communications is more centralized in that it is the sole responsibility of the marketing team.

How should a blog author react on a comment: By replying in a comment or by adding a new post answering the comment?

First: The fact that there are comments is great and indicates that your post is of high value.

Concerning the question:

It’s hard to say where to draw a line between a comment and a new blog post. I’d say it’s worth a new blog post

1. if you feel like you want to write one (in the end, you are the chief editor of your blog)
2. if the new blog post is actually about a new topic and does not merely address the topic of the comment from another perspective
3. if you do have the time to write a new blog post

Should you write a new blog post, make sure you link to the comment. Additionally, you can reply to the comment of the other blog post and there point to the new blog post, so that it becomes clear that you answered the comment in a new blog post.

How often should we blog?

There should be at least one post per week each by two persons in your team to keep and grow readership. There will be days where it will be hard to meet that requirement. Hence, if you have an idea for a new blog post, make sure you leave some time in between posts. You could already write that post (because the ideas are already spinning in your head) but not publish it yet, instead keep it as a draft. Then publish the new blog post some days later.

CMSWire asked me to be the first they interview for their brand new column Flash Quiz. If you ever wondered how much I sleep and whether I like fancy cars, check out Flash Quiz: Sandro Groganz Speaks.

I have written a little Wiki entry about how to merge the design of MediaWiki and WordPress, just as I did it on my Web site. The Wiki page explains the setup and you can also download the relevant PHP and CSS files of my design at that page. Use at your own risk.

Mark Shuttleworth says:

I�??ve long believed there�??s a general phenomenon that underlies the free software movement. It�??s �??volunteer-driven, internet-powered collaboration�?�.

I’d call it “freedom of collaboration”.

This freedom will eventually spill over from public collaborative environments such as public SVN and CVS repositories or Wikipedia to corporate collaborative workspaces, simply because it results in more efficiency and better results. Freedom of collaboration within and between businesses is at the core of what constitutes the Enterprise 2.0.

The aim of Mindquarry’s Open Source collaborative software is, to allow all sorts of knowledge workers in various types of organizations to work just like Open Source developers or Wikipedia editors in modern teams. We bring them the freedom of collaboration. Yep!

Open Source software is often being referred to as commodity products. This is particularly true for OSS databases like MySQL or PostgreSQL. Developers of such systems can heavily make use of defined standards. In this case, it’s the various SQL standards. These standards define the general functionality set your product should have. They help you define the commodity features of your software.

The question is: where do you get your software requirements from if the OSS product you are developing cannot rely on any or only a few standards?

Let’s take a look at two other types of OSS products: Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and collaborative software. I used to work for an Open Source ECM vendor until recently and just started to work for a company offering Open Source collaborative software. Hence, I might be able to provide some useful information.

For ECM vendors, there exist a few standards in different areas of ECM. This is because ECM comprises a very broad set of functionality, e.g. content editing, workflow management, document management, accessibility, etc. Yet, these standards cover only a small fraction of what makes up a full-fledged ECM system. In fact, ECM is very much about customer-specific implementations and integration of legacy systems. It is a lot about experience, best practices.

Hence, a successful Open Source ECM project can define the set of commodity features by listening to its:

• customers
• partner companies
• developers and users community

These groups have different impact in different OSS ECM projects.

For example, eZ Publish is equally influenced by all three of them. At Alfresco, there is massive know-how of customer needs, simply because they have John Newton on board, co-founder of the very successful proprietary Documentum ECM. It will be interesting to see how eZ Publish and Alfresco will compete in the future. This will largely depend on how well the eZ Publish developers react upon market needs and on how fast Alfresco can grow its Open Source community. It’s actually not black and white, because customers can be a part of your developers community.

Before I talk about the interesting aspects of commodity features in collaborative software, one more note about highly standardized products: Of course, the MySQL developers need to also think of market needs. They first implemented the very basic features which made their RDBMS useful for simple, yet common scenarios in Web development. Standards do not free you from deciding which ones to implement first, but they help you to save time collecting all the potential features.

Now about collaborative software: Most development here is based on best practices. The interesting point is: these best practices are mostly already available in the Web. To be more precise: in the Web 2.0. At Mindquarry, we implement collaborative software which includes a Wiki, task and document manager (conversation tools for email and instant messaging coming soon).

Where do we get our basic ideas from? Well, from Wikipedia, Jabber, Bugzilla, etc. Mindquarry’s commodity features are out there in the Web and have been tested by a lot of users for several years. With Mindquarry, the trick is not about simply imitating an already existing and proven software infrastructure. It is about connecting the various bits and pieces of social software into one coherent infrastructure which you can use e.g. in your Intranet.

The point is: You can see the difference between the Web 1.0 and the Web 2.0 also in how OSS vendors define the commodity features of their products. An RDBMS is largely a Web 1.0 tool. It has at least one foot in the old days, when companies fought about software standards. Social or collaborative software is Web 2.0, you can find and influence its standards in the Web by providing efficient and rich user experience.

Of course, Web 2.0 standards rely on Web 1.0 standards, but the Web 2.0 is more about best practices and de facto standards on the user level compared to logical definitions of standards on the developers level. Again, the reality is not black and white. Take a look at MySQL’s and PostgreSQL’s ANSI92 SQL-defying LIMIT clause. It’s a best practice approach and shows that OSS developers always listened to their developers community just like Web 2.0 developers today listen to their users.

While at Badajoz, my tOSSad colleague Al Harris pointed me to a fantastic del.icio.us browser they developed at KnowNet.

You can try out the del.icio.us browser online. It’s fantastic! The top window allows you to browse for bundles and tags. It provides a slide to minimize or maximize the number of displayed tags:

Beneath the tag browser, the list of items and related tags is being displayed:

The browser is JSON-powered. Feel free to contact Mike Malloch of KnowNet if you’d like to see the code. Al did not know the license, he basically told me that they are happy to share and don’t really care about licensing - sounds like true Open Source

Hurry up, submit a paper! The LinuxTag Call for Papers ends tomorrow, February 16th.

Short info about LinuxTag from the homepage:

LinuxTag 2007 opens doors from May 30 to June 2, 2007 on Berlin Expo Center under the Funkturm. We invite users and experts to learn at Europe’s leading conference and expo more about the potential of Linux, Open Source, and Free Software.

March 1st, I will start my new job at Mindquarry as VP Marketing.

Mindquarry’s Open Source product is enterprise social software, simply called “Mindquarry”. It supports spontaneous collaboration by including a Wiki, task tracker, file management, etc. The software is MPL licensed, version 1.0 will soon be available to the public. There’s an early access program available upon request.
The company was founded in 2006, it is located in Potsdam, Germany close to Berlin. The main investor is HP Ventures of SAP co-founder Hasso Plattner.

I’ll be in charge of strategic and operational marketing and community relations.

What I like most about this new job is:

• I move from an Enterprise 1.0 Open Source company (eZ Systems and its eZ Publish ECM) to an Enterprise 2.0 Open Source company (Mindquarry).
• Having 5 years of PHP programming experience, I am now looking forward towards working for a Java company. Although programming is not part of my job, I am very interested in digging deep into the code to really understand the application’s inner workings.

I actually have known one of Mindquarry’s co-founders for a few years via internet: Lars Trieloff. We only recently met in person. His expertise always impressed me.

I created a dedicated Mindquarry RSS feed for my future postings about Mindquarry, also served by the newly created Planet Mindquarry.

At this cross road of my professional life, I would like to especially thank the following persons who always supported me:

• Zak Greant
• Georg Richter
• Aleksander Farstad

Thanks guys! And of course, thanks to my wife, my biggest supporter

There are a lot of good resources out there which tell you how to blog successfully. I have recently started to collect them on my Wiki page “Successful Blogging”, which I will update regularly. Unfortunately, they rarely tell you how to cope with the evolution of a Weblog.

At February 13th, it will be 4 years that I posted my first blog entry - I am still lovin’ it! Let me tell you about some of the changes I had to deal with in those 4 years and what you can do about them.

The most important changes were:

1. My Weblog has moved to different domains (from zzoss.com to sandrozic.de to groganz.com as of today).
2. I changed the software several times (from b2 to a self-made eZ Publish-based blog to Wordpress).
3. There were times when I blogged actively (~5 blogs per week) and less so (1 entry per month).
4. My focus on certain topics varied over time (e.g. from general LAMP-based Web development to ECM, from development to marketing).

Points 1. and 2. lead to the fact that I repeatedly lost some link love, especially on Google and Technorati, because Trackbacks and Pingbacks got lost. Just recently, I managed to import all posts I wrote in my first 2 years of blogging - it’s amazing to see that some of them made it back to be listed among the most visited pages in my site stats (mostly referrals from Google).

What’s most unfortunate is that I could not recover comments to old postings. Well, I could, manually, but that would mean a lot of work. Lost comments is like lost friends.

If you want to avoid the same mistakes, make sure

• to keep your blog at the same domain at all times to keep your permalinks valid,
• to choose a Weblog software that is well supported to avoid migration problems.

When it comes to point 3., it has a lot to do with point 4.: The level of active blogging correlated with what I did. I blogged more actively while I was self-employed, simply to raise awareness which would lead to consulting contracts. After getting employed, there were times when I was simply buried with work that did not require me to blog.

Concerning point 4., I believe that there is nothing you can do about the shifting focus of what you write about. I even think that Weblogs are there to show how individuals change over time and how their interests change.

If I narrowed down my blog to one specific topic (e.g. Open Source ECM), it would not be in sync with my personality. My general interest is in being open and combining Open Source software with the knowledge society. That’s a rather broad topic, but also a thrilling conjunction where most new things happen these days.

The only problem I see is that my tagcloud does not reflect the change of interest. Some tags (e.g. “pear”) appear much too prominent, although they are outside of my scope of interest these days. Hm, I should get a chronological slider for my tagcloud, just as they did here to display Microsoft’s evolution based on a tagcloud.

In the end, it’s all about transparency and authenticity in the blogosphere, including the ability to deal with changes. Blogging is a lot about learning to cope with evolution, reflecting upon what happened and letting others know how to avoid some of the traps. Hope that helps!