Assembling the disparate bits
by Eric Norlin on Jun.12, 2007, under conference topics
“Assembling the disparate bits” was the original “tag line” that I wrote for Defrag (I’ve since given up on constructing a tag line). I was trying to convey what the conversations Brad and I (and others) were having around Defrag were conveying — a struggle to really wrap our heads around what *exactly* we were talking about.
The closest that I’ve gotten to something satisfying is to describe Defrag by analogy:
the sweep of creating the internet is about reconstructing the plumbing of the brainstorm. we’ve solved the need for co-location (space), and we’ve solved the need for simultaneity (time) - we’re even working on solving who’s in the room (identity). What we still have left to solve are ways to *augment* the moment of insight that occurs in a brainstorm — to accelerate the “aha” moment.
That’s gotten me this far. In the meantime, Brad has begun to call it the implicit web.
This morning I’m thinking about all of the “parts” that fit into what Defrag is trying to address (some of these folks are sponsors and some aren’t — and there *is* overlap between categories):
1. Implicit web tools: companies like Me.dium, Lijit, AdaptiveBlue, and ProQuo personify this.
2. Collaboration tools: companies like BEA, Newsgator, ThinkFree, JackBe, Near-time, and HiveLive.
3. Semantic web tools (is there a difference between semantic web and implicit web?): Dapper and Siderean represent this –as well as some folks that aren’t sponsors (yet) like Mashery or Teqlo.
4. Next-level discovery tools: Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft, Search Wikia, etc.
5. New Media intelligence tools: CustomScoop, Collective Intellect, etc.
All of these “categories” address different sides of the “Aha” problem - discovery, application building, intelligence, knowledge management, collaboration. As such, we’re crossing “enterprise” and “consumer” lines — moving around in a new space; assembling the disparate bits.
I know I’m missing stuff in this problem-space, and I’m looking forward to the next 12months (ie, the time leading up to and after the first Defrag), as I know that, collectively, we’ll flesh out the universe that Defrag looks to tackle.
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June 13th, 2007 on 11:19 am
Hi Eric,
This is Austin from Yugma (www.yugma.com).
You mentioned increasing the ease of collaboration to speed up business results; I think your mission fits well with our web conferencing and collaboration service. We are completely focused on being extremely easy, inexpensive, and cross-platform compatible. In addition to having excellent service for Windows users, we’ve been getting great reviews for our ease of use and support for Mac users. (See: http://www.joonyou.com ). We also recently launched support for Linux (8 versions supported).
Feature highlights:
- Invite up to 10 people for free
- Built-in file and application sharing
- Session recording and playback
- Real-time chat
- Annotating and highlighting tools
- You can embed Yugma in your site or application
- Remote PC access
- Secure and reliable
- No Spyware, Adware or Malware
I encourage you to try our service out. We currently offer 15 days of trial Premium Service, and our basic version is FREE forever. It allows you to invite up to 10 attendees, anytime. Add in a whiteboard and free teleconferencing… the features and price are hard to beat!
I hope you like what we’ve put together and that it can help you and your readers bring together those scattered pieces. If you have any comments or suggestions, we’d love to hear from you. Just email us at info@yugma.com. Thanks!
Best regards,
Austin Sponsel
———
Marketing Intern
http://www.yugma.com
June 16th, 2007 on 8:55 pm
I like the term Implicit Web for the space in general because the more I try to articulate what’s going on the more I fall back on the idea of externalities and activity exhaust as what’s driving so many of the new business opportunities. When looking at Google’s Pagerank where a lot started, we see a smart method for determining relevancy through people’s actions that were never intended to be used the way Google took advantage of. In other words, when Google started no one was sitting around saying “hey, I’ll link to this site because one day it will help Google consider it more authoritative since me and others have linked to it”.
Behavioral targeting or collboartive filtering were never about people going to certain sites to make themselves fit into psychographic categories or activity clusters of like-minded people. But once a system was able to observe this the exhaust of users’ activities netted a way of targeting or recommending content/ads to them.
del.icio.us was novel in that my selfish needs lead to a group benefit, again somewhat of an externality to the main activity for which the user used the service initially.
Collective Intellect, BuzzLogic, Monitor110, Buzzmetrics, Umbria all fall into this group as well, since people didn’t start blogging for the purpose of influencing brands or company stock valuations. People were simply bitching about stuff, but when looked at in the aggregate some powerful information could be derived.
MyBlogLog took this concept head-on by linking people’s desire join a blogger’s community with an web site analytics service. To the people joining the communities, the analytics were not part of the proposition, but it’s where the value of the business was.
All of these services are IMHO manifestations of the effects of implicit data leading to valuable information. Even as I look at the collaboration tools out there, they first solve my individual problem of creating something, with the secondary benefit being able to facilitate the group interaction/communication.
All this to say that I’m not sure there’s a need to break out these groupings, and instead consider highlighting how whether niche or horizontal in nature, more and more services and the innovation coming out these days are taking another crack at creating a better implicit methods to view the online data. Lijit and Me.dium are good examples of this.