Connecting the dots ...
Return Path CEO Matt Blumberg is in violation of an NDA Google made him sign when he visited his friend for lunch at their New York office. NDA or not, he revealed the top secret super gourmet lunch menu:
“hazelnut-encrusted wild halibut, braised fennel and leeks, lavash, and seared scallop and seaweed with a ponzu vinaigrette”
The lunch menu was not always so super-secret, at some point Google even listed sample menus on their job-listings. Baileys Irish Cream Cheesecake …. ahhhhh….. 
I guess “shortly” has a a subjective definition. In this case it’s been hours half a day – so far.
There’s a crazy meme going on which has the potential of turning Technorati ranks upside-down. Now, that may sometimes be good, giving fresh views more visibility, like Seth Godin or Steve Rubel’s recent initiatives. The new 2000 Bloggers craze is nothing comparable though: it’s random, viral, and has to potential to turn links, the glue of the blogosphere completely meaningless.
If you blog, there’s a good chance you’re one of the 2000: when Tino Buntic launched his project he seeded the initial collage with photos/links of 300 or so bloggers. The initial roster included A-listers like Robert Scoble, Guy Kawasaki, Ross Mayfield, Matt Cutts, Doc Searls, celebrities like Donald Trump, Rosie O’Donnell and “regular” bloggers like yours truly. The rest of the slots got filled on a sign-up basis.
It may all have started innocently: “let’s discover our blogging neighbors”. Several bloggers I respect embraced the idea, pointing out the “social networking” effect. Most of the A-list remained silent, but France’s top Blogger, Loic Le Meur welcomed it as a “cool initiative“. I’m amazed that no one seems to recognize what this project really is: blind, unselective, dumb link-exchange.
Links are good, but they are supposed to refer to content. Not here. No-one can seriously claim that we’re really “discovering” 2000 bloggers this way …. the whole game is not about checking out new blogs, it’s just an efficient copy/paste link-generation machine. I can somewhat understand the enthusiastic response the 2000 Bloggers scheme received: who would not be happy with hundreds of new inbound links, a major improvement in their Technorati rank? But if you think *that* will make you an A-lister, think again…and again.
First, what’s the point of getting a few hundred or even 2000 new inbound links when everyone else has it? Your link-wealth will be worth less and less as the 2000 Bloggers do a good job of devaluing their currency. Word will get out and unless Technorati finds a way of ignoring these inflated link-counts, the whole value system based on links and Technorati ranks becomes a joke, and will collapse. Now, that’s my doomsday scenario, my bet is that Dave Sifry and team will find a way to disarm the monster soon. Update (2/5): They did. Even so, any service that lists inbound links has just become useless: I now have to sift through pages of crap to find the links that I care about – which is when people actually red my posts and found them interesting.
And don’t think it’s only Technorati – this is gaming Google and any other search / indexing service, too. It can backfire, too: I wouldn’t be surprised if Google’s almighty algorithm decided the entire 2000 bloggers neighborhood was a linkfarm and penalized the sites accordingly.
Earlier I said this whole project may have started “innocently”. Well, on second thought, perhaps not: Tino Buntic’s blog is all about linking, SEO, blog-advertising, he certainly knows what he is doing. But I do believe most of the 2000 community is just going along for the ride, without realizing the consequences. If you’re one of the 2000, all I ask you is think. Think and draw your own conclusion.
Update : I wrote this post late Friday and planned to release it on Monday. In the meantime I’m glad to report to have discovered the first signs of sanity: Jeremiah Owyang rejects the scheme, and I suppose so does this French-language blog, too – if I guessed the title right. Anybody else? Hello, World!!! Update (1/6): Apparently I missed crediting Amy Gahran for being first to raise the linkfarm issue.
Tags: 2000 bloggers, 2000 bloggers meme, 2000 bloggers project, seo, links, linking, blogs, blogging, technorati, technorati rank, google, link-exchange, linkbait, linkfarm, spam, blog spam, a-list
Believing is one thing – facts are another. The recent McKinsey study confirmed that contrary to popular belief SaaS is really not just a small-business toy; it is indeed becoming mainstream amongst large corporations: “61% of North American companies with sales over $1 billion plan to adopt one or more SaaS applications over the next year.”
A new study by Nucleus Research confirms these findings: 63% of companies with over 1000 employees adopted some On-Demand solution, vs. 46% of those with less then 1000 employees. The study turned up a few more “surprises”, perhaps the most striking one being the market-share of particular types of applications. Salesforce.com is the poster-boy of SaaS, in fact many would argue they created this market, yet CRM appears to have a relatively low adoption rate amongst SaaS customers, only 32%. Project Management comes close, 23% of the responding organizations deployed PM solutions.
Even more surprising (?) is future buying intention:
(Charts by Zoho Sheet)
If we compare the two sets of numbers, CRM has already peaked and Content Management, Project Management will be the new growth areas:
A word of caution: I’m not sure these numbers represent true market share. 198 companies of all sizes from under 100 employees to over 500 participated in the survey, and the results are not weighted by number of users. I tend to believe that Web-based Project Management is often used for small-team efforts, and in this setup a small startup with 5 Basecamp-users counts equal to a large company with 200 salesforce.com seats (theoretical numbers). Draw your own conclusions. Oh, and since it’s the weekend, here’s a statistician joke:
A business owner asked job applicants the same question: “how much is 2+2?”
The engineer pulled out his slide rule and shuffled it back and forth, and finally announced, “It lies between 3.98 and 4.02”.
The mathematician said, “In two hours I can demonstrate it equals 4 with the following short proof.”
The social worker said, “I don’t know the answer, but I’m glad that we discussed this important question.
The attorney stated, “In the case of Svenson vs. the State, 2+2 was declared to be 4.”
The trader asked, “Are you buying or selling?”
The statistician looked at the business owner, then got out of his chair, went to see if anyone was listening at the door and pulled the drapes. Then he returned to the business owner, leaned across the desk and said in a low voice, “What would you like it to be?”
Tags: nucleus research, saas, on-demand, crm, project management, content management, ecm, statistics, zoho sheet
I did not want to believe my eyes when I saw the “light” version of Tropicana Orange Juice at the supermarket today. Tropicana OJ is 100% fruit, how do they make it light? Hm.. the box says “½ Less Sugar & Calories”, let’s check the ingredients:
Filtered water, not from concentrate pasteurized orange juice, modified food starch, citric acid, malic acid, natural flavors, sucralose (Splenda), and acesulfame potassium; Vitamins & Minerals: potassium citrate, ascorbic acid (vitamin C), beta-carotene, tocopherol (vitamin E), magnesium phosphate, niacinamide (vitamin B3), thamin hydrochloride (vitamin B1), riboflavin (vitamin B2), and pyridoxine hydrochloride (vitamin B6)
Wow, I only recognize one “legitim” item on this list: the orange juice. Light juice? Yeah, right. I’ve got news for everyone: half the juice will naturally have half the Calories and Sugar in it. The rest is just water, plain and simple. (well, not that plain considering all the crap added to it).
Of course I shouldn’t be surprised, this comes from the industry that sells us tap water in bottles.
Need I say the water/juice mix and the pure juice are sold for the same price? So here’s my “light juice recipe”: buy the original, mix half a glass juice with half a glass water on your own, free of extra charge, and PayPal me half of what you saved.:-)
Update (9/9/08): See Consumerist on Apple Juice.
Well, we did not have to wait long: barely two weeks after Omnidrive announced their integration with the Zoho online applications, competitor Box.net followed suite: they now support online editing via Zoho Writer. The result of the edit process will be saved back to your Box as a .doc file.
Box CEO Aaron Levie assures me this is just the start of many future integration projects, which is great. After all, it should not matter where a document starts its life: I should be able to access and work on it online or offline.
I fully expect other services to join the camp: For example, the better business-class wikis all handle document attachments, but to edit those docs you still need to download, edit, save, upload back up again – way too cumbersome, why not enable online editing? And if you read Tim Barker’s comments to my writeup on Koral, you can expect this amazingly easy content collaboration system to offer online editing soon.
P.S. Aaron, I’m still waiting for that sync
Additional posts: /Message, CenterNetworks, Web Worker Daily,
Harvard Prof’s Andrew McAfee and Karim Lakhani have just completed the first ever Harvard Business School case on Wikipedia, which largely focuses on the infamous Enterprise 2.0 debate. Enterprise 2.0 has undeniably become mainstream since the original debate – just check out the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston.
There is some irony in this situation though: The deletionist argument was that “Enterprise 2.0” is not original and there are not enough independent references. Well, what better reference and validation that a Harvard Case Study? (Of course hard-core deletionists could still argue that the Study is not about 
Enterprise 2.0 as such but the debate itself, and as such self-referential and unacceptable as an independent source…)
Why Epilogue to the Epilogue? Because I’ve already written an epilogue to the debate.
(Photo: Prof. Andy McAfee moderating a panel on Enterprise 2.0 with fellow Enterprise Irregulars Jeff Nolan, Ismael Ghalimi, Rod Boothby and yours truly).
Tags: wikipedia, enterprise 2.0, wikipedia debate, deletionists, inclusionists, harvard business school, hbs, harvard case study, enterprise irregulars
Ross Mayfield points to another interesting wiki-experiment: the authors of Wikinomics, a fast-selling new business book opened up Chapter 11 (no, this is not *that* Chapter 11) to collective editing, leaving it to the public to “finish” the book.
The Wikinomics Playbook is a Socialtext-based wiki with minimum initial content that anyone can contribute to. It will likely never be “finished” as such. Unlike the recent Wired Wiki experiment, this project is open-ended, without a firm deadline. It will be interesting to observe how the absence of any incentive to wait for last minute edits (a’la eBay auction sniping) leads to different behaviors.
For now, I sense the experiment is going somewhat sideways: page content is not growing as much as comments are. I guess it’s easier to talk about it than actually doing it (hm… that’s what I am doing, too
), but that carries the risk of the Playbook becoming just another discussion forum. Perhaps we should all heed the advice under Be Bold:
“Being bold is necessary advice in wikis: most people aren’t accustomed to editing each other’s sentences. In a wiki participants must be bold because it is only by many iterative edits that mass intelligence can occur and wisdom can triumph over verbosity. If we are bold the content will evolve.”
Tags: wiki, wikinomics, wikinomics playbook, socialtext, wired wiki, collaboration, collaborative book editing, open-ended book, online book
And if Ultimate is not enough, go for MWVULNSE: Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate Limited Numbered Signature Edition.
And if you’re still wondering what you pay for, don’t miss this Value Analysis.
Headlines from my Drudge feed:
Emergency Shutdown at Russian Nuke Plant…
GLOBAL WARNING: ‘BILLIONS TO GO WATERLESS’ IN CLIMATE SHOCK…
ALL-STAR GROUP: 10 years to save the planet…
Otherwise … have a nice day, everyone.
Publisher / Editor of CloudAve and Enterprise Irregulars.
I do most of my business blogging there, with occasional asides here. More...
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