Defrag Blog

And the hits just keep on coming….

AdaptiveBlue has joined the list of Defrag sponsors - and we’re pleased as punch to have them. I’ve just begun to play with AdaptiveBlue’s offerings - more on that as I dig in.

In the meantime, welcome aboard to Alex and the gang over there. If you’re thinking about becoming a sponsor of Defrag, we only have 3 slots left, so don’t delay.

I try hard not to spend *all* of my time on this blog simply promoting Defrag (which is to say that I try to write something of substance when possible), but some days you just can’t help being happy….

With that in mind, I’m pleased to announce our two newest Silver sponsors: JackBe and Near-time. Adding these two silver sponsors means that our silver level of sponsorship is now *sold out*. (We still have a couple of golds and platinum left, so if you still want in, we still have room.)

It’s kinda funny: when I’m working the “sales side” (I’m sales, marketing, operations, content, pr, etc) I often tell vendors that I’m averaging a sale every 3 days or so. I know they think I’m just trying to give them a “force function” to buy, but actually, I’m just letting them know where they stand.

As I’ve said before, the opportunity to be involved in Defrag (through attending or sponsoring) will diminish with every passing day, while the benefit of being involved will increase with every passing day….you know what to do: register, or drop me a line (enorlin AT mac.com) about sponsorship.

I want to welcome our newest Silver sponsor to Defrag — Dapper. Read/WriteWeb has a great write-up of Dapper this morning — well worth the read.

Btw, Read/WriteWeb is a media sponsor of Defrag…heck, who *isn’t* a sponsor of Defrag?!?

[later: if you'd like to join the sponsor party -- and believe me there are only a few slots left --- drop me a line at enorlin AT mac.com.]

We begin the new Defrag week (where we’ll no doubt spend a lot of time talking about MIX) by adding ThinkFree as a Gold sponsor. Welcome guys!

For those of you keeping track at home:

Platinum Sponsor: BEA Systems

Gold Sponsors: Newsgator and ThinkFree

Silver Sponsors: HiveLive, Lijit and Me.dium

Breakfast Sponsors: Collective Intellect and Custom Scoop

If you’d like to learn more about sponsoring Defrag, email me enorlin AT mac.com.

(Disclosure: I’ve never used Twitter or Jaiku. For some reason, while I tend to explore the concepts of new technologies very early via things like Defrag, I tend to actually adopt those technologies very late.)

Ross Mayfield has an interesting post on Jaiku — a company that I first learned of (and interacted with) a couple of weeks ago. Jaiku’s getting a lot of notice lately in the wake of the Twitter wave.

Ross points us to this interview with one of Jaiku’s founders. A couple of quotes caught my eye:

“We believe that online social behavior as a whole is moving towards groups who are in a state of constant connectedness. This means shorter, more frequent, more personal updates that assume the recipients already know a lot about the sender and context of the message. The amount of communication increases but it contains less noise because we know more about the context of our peers.”

The very early thoughts (all Brad’s) around Defrag talked about how information was “swamping the boat” — and how the search was on for tools that helped provide context, relevance and aggregation to that “river” of information (this led us to the idea of turning information into “knowledge”). Jaiku’s falling right into the groove on this one — what it means when “constant connectedness” demands more “context.”

(2nd quote)

“Jyri calls this social peripheral vision: the ability to have your finger on the pulse of your friends, family, and colleagues. Once you know what the people you care about are up to, you notice opportunities for social interaction that you would probably otherwise miss.”

…which brings me to the second high-level thing we realized about Defrag very early on: the essential action is one of “discovery.” It is important to note that I treat “discovery” as quite different from “search.” Discovery can occur in persistant ways (via Wikis and collaborative space), in contextual ways (feeds, aggregators, “people search”), in peripheral ways (Jaiku and Twitter), in dynamic ways (think “semantic web”) — and in a bunch of ways that I’m sure I don’t understand yet.

“Discovery” as a high-level concept begins to bring together a bunch of companies (around those ways):

Persistance (SocialText and HiveLive)
Contextual (Newsgator, Lijit and Collective Intelligence)
Peripheral (Jaiku and Twitter)
Dynamic (Radar Networks)

and I wouldn’t call any of those companies “search” companies…

So, what’s the idea of Defrag? That these companies *think* (or are perceived as) they’re working on different problem sets, but in reality, they’re working on different pieces of the same problem. Different bits, if you will…..different bits that we should reconstitute into a common…..well, you know where I’m going with that metaphor

I wanted to quickly point out our *very early* sponsors of Defrag (folks that have been on board since I floated this idea to them):

Gold Sponsor: Newsgator
Silver Sponsors: HiveLive and Lijit
Breakfast Sponsor: Collective Intelligence

In addition, we have several spectacular media and association sponsors:

Premiere Media Sponsor: ZDNet
Exclusive Audio Sponsor: Gigavox media (IT Conversations)
Media Sponsor: Read/Write Web
Association Sponsor: CTEK

If you’d like info on becoming either of these, please email me — enorlin AT mac.com .