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Video White Papers

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Via Copyblogger, I found this entry about educational marketing with so called video white papers:

A few years ago, I began taking the concepts used in developing white papers for clients and applying them to video-based presentations. Not really canned slide-shows, not really product demos, and not just sales presentations, but a mix of the three. I started calling them video white papers, because like a good white paper, they focused on the audience and their issues, not the authors and all the amazing benefits they have to offer. My goal was to provide an alternative to a typical presentation and demo.

Economic Impact of FLOSS in the European Union

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A recently published extensive study on the Economic Impact of Open Source Software on Innovation and the Competitiveness of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) Sector in the EU states:

Almost two-thirds of FLOSS software is still written by individuals; firms contribute about 15% and other institutions another 20%.

Europe is the leading region in terms of globally collaborating FLOSS software developers, and leads in terms of global project leaders […].

While the U.S. has the edge in terms of large FLOSS-related businesses, the greater individual contribution from Europe has led to an increasing number of globally successful European FLOSS small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

The existing base of quality FLOSS applications with reasonable quality control and distribution would cost firms almost Euro 12 billion to reproduce internally.

This existing base of FLOSS software represents a lower bound of about 131 000 real person-years of effort that has been devoted exclusively by programmers.

Defined broadly, FLOSS-related services could reach a 32% share of all IT services by 2010, and the FLOSS-related share of the economy could reach 4% of European GDP by 2010.

FLOSS potentially saves industry over 36% in software R&D investment that can result in increased profits or be more usefully spent in further innovation.

The notional value of Europeâ??s investment in FLOSS software today is Euro 22 billion (36 billion in the US) representing 20.5% of total software investment (20% in the US).

Just Finished Reading all of the Internet

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Today is a great day, because after 11 years, I am finally done reading the Internet.

I heard that there will be a new version coming out, called Web 2.0? Maybe they can make it a bit easier to read: Navigating through those millions of pages of all those sites was not easy at all. Actually, as long as the contents of the new Internet will also be for free, I don’t really mind all the navigation hassle.

It would be great if they offered the next version of the Internet as a printed book, that would allow for convenient offline reading and I could spend the next 11 years somewhere else, at least not in front of my computer. Then again, I fear that book might become really expensive…

Managed Intuition

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Seth Godin writes:

[…] the art of management is in understanding that all problems are different, and that your intuition and insight are the key.

On HBS Working Knowledge I read in When Not to Trust Your Guts:

[…] with the use of intuition comes the potential for significant psychological biases that lead to irrationality. By accepting this fact, you can learn to overcome bias and think more rationally during your most important negotiations.

Management is also about managing intuition.

Chain of Knowledge Production in Open Source Companies

Sandro Groganz 1 Comment

If your Open Source company plans to sell books about its products or do community marketing via Weblogs, then you need a strategy that takes into account the whole chain of knowledge production within and outside of your organization to be truly successful.

That chain leads from “raw material” such as emails to a blog entry that a staff member writes about a solution found in an email discussion. Another employee or community member might write an article based on that blog post and from several similar articles you could make a book.

In short: email -> blog -> article -> book.

A book is on the one side something like a high-end knowledge product. On the other side, it helps others to learn about your products and to innovate. That would be an ideal knowledge life cycle.

Open Source companies need to take into account the tight relationship they have with the community. The borders between those groups blur and eventually corporate knowledge management also needs to focus on the community.

In fact, the production of knowledge products by Open Source companies will work quite similar to how Open Source code is being created. That means, by listening to your community, you will understand what kind of knowledge products aka type of information they need most. This will help you to avoid wrong investments in the creation of knowledge products.

Digg is too Slow!

Sandro Groganz 9 Comments

I tried out Digg the past weeks for social bookmarking – it’s much too slow! Why should I use such a service if it feels like 100 times slower compared to saving a bookmark in Firefox? The slow performance cannot be compensated by the nice features offered by Digg. Google’s services are always simple to use and fast. If your Web 2.0 site is not as fast as Google, forget it!

Relevance-based Ranking of Search Results in eZ Publish

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Thomas Nunninger did some research in better ranking of search results within eZ Publish. He implemented a nice test implementation with some fancy AJAX drag&drop. Feel free to try out the implementation. By doing so, you also help Thomas to get some more test cases for his diploma thesis.

Should you be interested in more information about his implementation, read his recently published article Creating a Search Engine.

Web 2.0 in 20 Years

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The Web 2.0 paradigm has reached mass media. We read about it in newspapers and hear about it on CNN. Now that the hype is really big, its death is also close. Let’s take an unagitated look at the Web 2.0 phenomena: What will be left in 20 years?

Some heroes

Tim O’Reilly coined the term Web 2.0 and hence further helped to establish himself and his company as a trend setter and a leading WWW think tank. They even do good marketing around it. Tim, you deserve it: we’ll still remember you in 20 years – just like the Google, Flickr, YouTube, etc. founders.

Big Mac 2.0

With “2.0” we got one more label for marketing in the spirit of “reloaded”, “next generation”, etc. Only history can tell, how much longer it will be used and for which products. How about “Big Mac 2.0″?

Refrigerators of knowledge

Times are moving fast and in 20 years, the Web 2.0 will be a normal part of our life, just like refrigerators. Indeed, I am saying that the Web 2.0 is here to stay. It will be an integral part of the knowledge society and the always-online generation. That’s because the companies behind the Web 2.0 understand the needs of the mass of knowledge workers.

For example, those who blog (and effectively share knowledge), would like to know about the commentators and visitors of their site (using pingback, trackback, Google Analytics, etc.) to reflect upon the interests of their audience and optimize their information offerings. Web 2.0 provides the tools for the knowledge economy.

Knowledge workers want to use the Internet to treat their goods (aka information pieces) world-wide, hence reaching all potential customers. Tim O’Reilly said it very well:

The Web 2.0 lesson: leverage customer-self service and algorithmic data management to reach out to the entire web, to the edges and not just the center, to the long tail and not just the head.

The Web 2.0 will be as normal as refrigerators in 20 years – refrigerators which keep your knowledge fresh.

Modeling our daily life

Once there was a shining term coined “New Economy” which today causes pains for those who lost a lot of money back then. In fact, the crash of the new economy was a usual and typical phase of the adoption of new disruptive technologies.

What’s that got to do with the Web 2.0? Well, I am saying that the Web 2.0 is the succeeding (and much longer) phase of economic consolidation after the hype years of the Internet boom. The Web 2.0 is characterized by mature businesses built upon a more mature new technology and mature users better understanding the benefits of that technology. In terms of socio dynamics: several Web technologies have reached a level of maturity and sum up to a critical mass to actually constitute a new quality of applications. Just think of today’s better cross-browser interoperability allowing for AJAX.

Did you know that there were 274 American car manufacturers in 1909 before the car market collapsed just like the new economy did? In 1955 there were only 7 manufacturers left and the car had revolutionized our daily lives and made the 7 manufacturers very profitable.

The basic technological concepts of cars are nothing spectacular anymore, but they had and still have a big impact on societies as a whole. The same will happen with the Web 2.0: a change from hype to seamless integration and modeling of our daily life. That change is what a (German) article calls the transition from the new economy to the next economy.

It’s about maturity

Having said that, Web 2.0 is more about a concept explaining a mature symbiosis between a rather new technology and a changing society than about software alone. Critiques saying that the Web 2.0 is nothing new, are mostly right when it comes to the base technologies behind it. XML, JavaScript, CSS, etc. are indeed nothing new. Instead, those building the Web 2.0 have simply learned how to effectively make use of these technologies to solve the daily needs of knowledge workers.

True or not?

To testify my projections, we still got 20 years to go. One thing is already sure though: There will be some revisions of Web 2.0 within the next 20 years because we are still in the early days of the next economy. As a start, get Web 2.0.1.

Update:

Testifying the hype: Web 2.0 Most Cited Wikipedia Entry of the Year.

Call for Papers: eZ Conference 2007

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BÃ¥rd published a short note on his blog that the call for papers for the 5th annual eZ Conference is now open. Deadline for submissions is February 1st.

The conference is worth attending not only for eZ Publish or eZ Components users and geeks, it is also interesting if you’re interested in content and knowledge management or PHP/LAMP in general. Last year, I enjoyed talking to guests such as Martin White and Anne Jubert, Rasmus Lerdorf and David Axmark – and some more of the 350 attendees.