Jeffrey McManus

Link: Shh! In British Library Reading Rooms, Flirting and Even Giggling - New York Times

Researchers have been grousing about the boisterous atmosphere and crowded conditions at the British Library for years. But the dispute — a philosophical battle, really, over who should be allowed access to a great national library — spilled out in public last week when The Times of London published an article quoting various distinguished figures complaining about the out-of-control mood over spring break.

The article described how the author Lady Antonia Fraser had been obliged to wait for 20 minutes in freezing weather just to enter the building, and another 20 minutes to leave her coat at the mandatory check-in desk.

It described how another writer, Christopher Hawtree, had been “forced to perch on a windowsill” because he could not get a desk.

To my way of thinking this has far less to do with British schoolgirls annoying people by giggling in a hallowed institution of learning and far more to do with the way that academics seek to impose their mores on students. It is a fact today that most students have mobile phones and a lot of them have laptops. Would it be unreasonable to adapt to this? It seems natural that the “net native” generation would turn to collaboration more readily than previous generations (and why is this necessarily a bad thing?). The problem isn’t these boisterous kids, it’s that our academic institutions (once again) haven’t caught up to the way that people want to learn, communicate and collaborate. The institution of the library clearly isn’t serving these students’ needs. That doesn’t make it automatically the students’ fault; it may not even be Lady Antonia Frasier’s fault. It seems more likely that we are actually in need of a new kind of institution, one with some aspects of a library but without its monastery-esque structure and mindless bureaucracy.

I’m running into this kind of thing myself as I take a community college class this semester (which I know I haven’t mentioned here yet — I’m planning on saying a lot more about this once the semester is over). Suffice it to say that when you see a huge sign outside a campus media center that says NO COMPUTERS ALLOWED and doesn’t permit students to photocopy out-of-print texts under the principle of academic fair use, there’s something fishy at work there — it certainly isn’t the interests of students that are being served.

I’ll be speaking at VSLive San Francisco the first week of April. This time around I’ll be giving three talks:

• Creating Facebook Applications Using .NET
• Data-Driven ASP.NET Ajax (an updated version of the talk I gave in New York last year)
• Creating iPhone Applications with ASP.NET

If you’re going to be in town for the conference and want to set aside some time to get together and chat (particularly if you’re interested in getting some consulting help) please leave a comment.

How much am I loving this post in the NY Times’ "Papercuts" blog on books to read while commuting. The piece, written by Dwight Garner, a editor of the Times’ Book Review, prescribes a good book as the preferred way to endure a long urban commute.

I have to say that the steady blogification of the Times over the past year or so has been somewhat hit-and-miss. It’s terrific that they’re using the infinite canvas of the web page as a vector for putting more content online. But when Times writers started blogging, I wondered whether the contribution of a good editor would be lost, and that occasionally seems to be the case. (On the other hand, it’s not like my own blog couldn’t do without some editing now and again.) It’ll also be interesting to see whether the Times blogs represent a minor league opportunity for emerging new voices, or whether Times blogs will turn into a ghetto for junior writers who are disdained by their elder peers (such as John Markoff, who famously and embarassingly said that he doesn’t need to blog because NYTimes.com is his blog. Um, duh).

But this Garner post has it all, blog-wise: an interesting exploration of a topic that’s probably too niche for the news section (or even the Review of Books); a first-person point of view which is nevertheless reasoned and balanced; and a call to action for readers to continue the conversation.

This being the internet, it is unavoidable that someone would use the comments section to mention the iPhone, but still.

When eBay purchased a 25% stake in Craigslist in 2004, it had people scratching their heads. Because the 2004-vintage eBay still had at least a thin layer of Teflon left, the press and analysts seemed to accept eBay’s rationale for the deal, even though it had been pulled out of the filing cabinet labeled "OBFUSCATORY RATIONALES TO USE WHEN MAKING ACQUISITIONS." (Also to be found in that folder: "VOICE-OVER-IP CALLING BETWEEN BUYERS AND SELLERS WILL RE-ENERGIZE OUR AUCTION MARKETPLACE.")

So you may recall that the official eBay rationale behind buying the stake in Craigslist was "we have a lot to learn from the online classified business." Which seems weird when you think about it — I didn’t find it necessary to purchase a chunk of Oxford University to get a degree in English Lit; renting a room at UC Santa Barbara was more than sufficient.

Anyway. The more believable rationale seemed to be "A departing founder wants to cash in his stake in Craiglist and we want to make sure that Google or Yahoo! don’t get their mitts on it."

Well, now eBay has decided that it has learned quite enough, thank you, and will compete against Craigslist in the U.S. under the Kijiji brand, which until now has only existed outside the United States. Lotsa luck, guys!

After a three-year hiatus during which her blogging talents were being utilized on behalf of one corporate overlord or another, my wife Carole is reviving her Typepad blog.

I suspect she’ll cover the same weird mix of topics that I do (including an unnerving combination of work, hostile and indignant left-of-center politics, family, and dog-related stuff).

Carole is now at MarketTools after concluding her three-year tenure at Yahoo last week. These guys are building really interesting communities around products and assisting businesses with the process of engaging with customers. They also own the Zoomerang survey tool.

Link: Putting the We Back in Wii

"As of the end of April, Nintendo has sold 2.5 million Wii consoles in the United States, almost double PlayStation 3’s sales of 1.3 million and closing in on Xbox 360’s 5.4 million sales, according to the NPD Group, a market research firm.

What changed? The secretive company is coming out of its shell. It has made a concerted effort to woo other makers of game software as part of a broader change in strategy to dominate the newest generation of video game consoles."

I rolled my eyes when I saw the headline of this NY Times story on the Wii because it opened with the same tired stats on the Wii’s success we’ve been reading for the past seven months . It also asserts that reaching out to partners is a "new strategy" which of course can’t be true. But if you stick with the piece for a few paragraphs, something new pops out at you: part of the Wii’s success is because of Nintendo’s focus on getting third party developers on board.

I don’t think this is the only reason for the Wii’s success, for sure. Clearly the low price point of the Wii compared to competing consoles is a biggie, as well as its innovative controllers and simple interface. In its effort to uncover new ground, the Times story doesn’t mention these important aspects. But it’s clear that the story of the Wii is a story of disruptive innovation — using out-of-the-box thinking and cooperation with partners to defeat well-heeled incumbents.

Link: The opening of Web 2.0 service platforms

"What is at stake [for web sites that fail to open themselves to third parties as platforms] is other properties provide will provide much greater value than your property and take market share away. Rather than protecting your assets you are removing the millions in R&D that other are spending creating value-added services on your platform as well as extending reach in to markets, verticals and geographies that a single web site alone cannot reach unless it is Google.

This may be Web 2.0’s open source moment - to open up or remain closed."

I’m looking forward to reading more of John Newton’s thoughts on his new ZDNet blog. In this one he puzzles over why more big sites like LinkedIn haven’t gone the Facebook route and exposed their data to third parties — John assumes that it’s not the technology that’s standing in the way. I mostly agree with this, although there are tricky parts like rate limiting and authenticating through untrusted third-party applications that we’ve had to tackle.

That said, the barriers that I’m seeing today have more to do with ensuring that the platform is in alignment with the business and that third parties are adequately supported on the platform — it’s not enough to throw together a collection of integration points and call yourself an open platform.

Anil Dash at Six Apart pinged me this afternoon to let me know that an early beta
of Movable Type 4 will be available tomorrow. There are several pieces of big news with this release: the product has been rearchitected with an eye toward better extensibility, will add significant new feature functionality pertaining to things like community/social networking, will sport a new user interface (hopefully we’re talking Ajax goodness here — Typepad’s reliance on pop-up windows has always peeved me). But perhaps most significantly — MT4 will be made available as open source.

I use and love both MT (in its hosted incarnation as Typepad) as well as Wordpress. I know that MT users have been clamoring for an open source version of the product for some time, I’m just hoping that it doesn’t come too late on the heels of Wordpress’ success. I suspect that we’ll start seeing some interesting cross-pollination between MT and Wordpress over time, but a lot will hinge on how well Six Apart can build a community around its product.

Link: Myspace - the next Prodigy?.

"Facebook has recognized (and embraced) something that Myspace has not - that there is more value in owning a web platform then a web property."

Shri Mahesh posted about an inane op-ed in the NY Times this morning and it reminded me that I’d meant to go into angry old man mode about it here but I got sleepy and had some toast instead. Anyway, in the piece, the writer, Mark Helprin, argues that copyright protections should be extended indefinitely, because if the government can’t be permitted to determine how long you can own your house, your pants, or your dog, why should they get to place some sort of artificial time limit on how long you can own the copyright to your novel or song?

This is a completely specious argument; it’s politics of the Big Lie at its worst. Because copyright protection in the U.S. is for the life of the creator plus seventy years, no American artist actually fears that his or her copyright will expire (or that his or her heirs wouldn’t be able to benefit from the copyright, for that matter). So although he never comes right out and says it, Helprin is really defending the "right" of corporations, not people, to benefit from copyrights in perpetuity.

But Helprin is not being true to the "principles of the founding fathers" that the Claremont Institute (the think tank that pays his salary) is supposed to be about. One of those principles happens to be a time limit on patents and copyrights. The reason intellectual property is treated differently in our constitution is because the founding fathers understood that intellectual property is, in fact, very different than physical property. Putting barbed wire around it for eternity would be a disaster for culture and for industry, and the founding fathers understood that — without a commons to draw upon, all culture stagnates.

For me, the only real controversy here is that congress keeps extending the legal term of copyright — moving the goalposts back every time the copyrights on certain pieces of early 20th century intellectual property come close to expiring. I’m not sure which throngs of American voters have been clamoring for the preservation of Steamboat Willie, but it’s clearly important enough to thwart the fairly straightforward edict about time-limited IP that’s spelled out in the constitution.

Maybe we should take Helprin’s radical suggestion to its logical conclusion and draw up a constitutional amendment that asserts that copyright lasts forever. Then when that amendment fails, we’ll consider the matter closed and promise to never extend the term of copyright again.

As usual Lawrence Lessig is a voice of reason; he’s set up a wiki to dissect the Helprin piece further. (Thanks for the link, Shri.)

Update: This morning, the NY Times’ pseudo-blog "The Lede" has an oh-my-gosh-look-at-that-internet-go post on Prof. Lessig’s wiki-based rebuttal. Dear NY Times: wikis are so five years ago. It’s time to stop gushing over them. Interestingly (or perhaps uninterestingly), the Times’ blog post doesn’t even touch on the subject of the original Helprin op-ed, instead obsessing over the process involved in sending letters to the editor versus starting a wiki. This seems less than courageous to me. Do Times readers really need someone to explain to them that the Times gets 10 times more letters to the editor than it can publish?

Update: Today’s NY Times has some excellent letters to the editor on this piece.

Link: Bad Hair Days Lead Pair to Web Incubator and Venture Capital

"[NaturallyCurly.com] is a throwback to the late 1990s, in that it follows the “three C’s” of Web site development — community, commerce and content."

It’s true: you’ll recall that on December 31 1999, internet users suddenly decided en masse that community, commerce and content were no longer interesting. Today, most internet users instead flock to sites offering a lack of community, an inability to purchase anything and no content whatsoever.

Usually when I find myself with enough time to take more than one Puzzle Pirates break during the course of a weekday it means that it’s time to add another consulting client to my list. I’m talking to a few very promising young businesses at the moment about helping with platform product strategy and third-party developer outreach, but if your company needs help from the guy who started platform evangelism at eBay and co-founded the developer network at Yahoo!, now’s a great time to kick off a conversation.

It looks like astroturfers from a Virginia-based lobbying/PR outfit that calls itself "Hands Off the Internet" have been busy this week, posting the telco/cable company party line on various bloggers’ comments, including mine.

It surprised me that these people found my blog — I’m in favor of net neutrality, but I don’t blog about it much here, mainly because others do it much better than I could. I just happened to mention net neutrality in a quote from an unrelated NY Times article I quoted earlier in the week. They must have Technorati alerts set up for phrases like "net neutrality," and when they see someone post something with that phrase in it, they dump a bunch of nonsense in their comments.

You can see he (or they) are doing this on other peoples’ blogs by doing a web search for "HandsOffPlease".

The fact that the astroturfers are comment-bombing blogs is interesting not because of their dazzling rhetoric — they’re falsely trying to position anti-net-neutrality as a way to foster more internet innovation by removing the evil spectre of government regulation. The fact is that the industry is more interested in forcing government to step aside so telcos and cable companies can screw over consumers any way they want. If you want to start putting a quarter in a meter every time you download a video, I suppose that  kind of "deregulation" is what you want. But if you want to keep paying for access to the net the way you do today, with a flat rate for a specified amount of bandwidth, then you’re pro-net neutrality, it’s as simple as that.

Even more interesting to me than the sloppy, intellectually dishonest rhetoric is the fact that the telcos are now paying somebody to troll the net and tell lies in bloggers’ comments. The telcos must believe that the blogosphere is a front in the net neutrality fight.

A while back, one of British Telecom’s U.S.-based operatives met with me to talk about some of their initiatives regarding hosted applications for small/medium businesses. Yesterday he invited us to list Approver.com on their called BT Tradespace. This is a business directory site, similar to loads of others out there, with a few interesting exceptions: they provide the notion of businesses recommending or "friending" other businesses (similar to the idea that my pals at Merchant Circle are working on). They are also throwing in lots of publishing features like photo and video uploads, blogging, and so forth.

More importantly for us, the Tradespace site doesn’t relegate Internet businesses to some ghetto off to the side — on the site, online businesses are first-class citizens, listed right alongside brick-and-mortar businesses.

This is key because we’re cutting way back on our product evangelism to Silicon Valley-based technology businesses. It isn’t that we don’t love you crazy kids, but we’ve come to the conclusion that our sweet spot is small and medium businesses like PR firms, law firms and other professional services teams that are underserved by information technology. So instead of doing more pointless bake-off demos in front of yawning Silicon Valley audiences, we’re working on figuring out new ways to reach out to more traditional businesses that might not be located in Northern California and that are more likely to use the system regularly (and eventually convert into paying customers). Getting access to English-speaking users who do not happen to be located in the U.S. is icing on the cake.

Late last night I had an email conversation with a very nice woman in Manchester who runs a business furniture store there, lists her business on Tradespace, and signed up for Approver less than a day after our profile went live there. This is exactly the kind of customer we need to see more of.

Tradespace is a terrific idea. It needs some polish, but I hope it catches on.

Link: Both Sales and Earnings Rise Sharply at Amazon

One initiative that has not yet yielded measurable results is Amazon Web Services, in which the company rents out parts of its infrastructure, like its storage computers, to smaller companies that do not want to develop skills that Amazon has honed over the years. Mr. Bezos said it was still too early to judge whether Web Services could generate the same revenue as retail sales. "The market sizes are potentially very large," he said. "How large it can be over what time frame, we’ll have to wait and see. But we are going to keep inventing in that area."

Amazon killed their earnings numbers yesterday and today their stock has popped by 22%, good for them. It was great to see Jeff Bezos specifically call out their web services program on the earnings call.

I am sure that their platform initiatives will be a money-maker for them in time, but it takes a while to build up this kind of business (particularly since so many of their services are totally unique). But Amazon has shown in the past that it’s can build a new business with patience and discipline so I’m sure they’ll get there in a reasonable timeframe.

This week I’m attending the second of two developer conferences on my schedule for this month. I noticed an interesting trend that I hadn’t seen discussed anywhere else before. Nearly every presenter is using some kind of virtualization technology to give their talks.

This is a terrific idea — it’s awesome to have a more or less pristine copy of your development environment that you can put into cold storage and spin up right before your talk is slated to begin.

I’m not sure why it’s taken until 2007 for this kind of virtualization to reach a tipping point, although it might have something to do with the success of Parallels on the Mac — as well as the fact that Microsoft released Virtual PC as a free product last year. (Although I should mention that I overheard more than one conversation at VSLive two weeks ago from presenters who were slagging Virtual PC’s performance.)

I’d be willing to bet that this trend will work its way into technology sales organizations soon if it hasn’t already.

Virtualization lets you start from a known good configuration but it presents new challenges in terms of syncing your virtual machine to external monitors and projectors. Getting your laptop to talk to the projector is always the big challenge whenever you do a technical talk, and virtualization doesn’t seem to help much. Right now I’m watching a presenter struggle with getting a VMWare machine on Windows to talk to the projector at the MySQL conference; the talk was supposed to have gotten started seven minutes ago.

Link: Feld Thoughts - SharePoint - Microsoft’s Sleeper Cell.

"According to the article Microsoft has sold 85 million licenses of SharePoint across 17,000 companies. Say that again slowly: 85 million licenses across 17,000 companies. I don’t know how many are "free" (according to the WSJ Microsoft has to be careful about giving SharePoint away due to their antitrust settlement) and while I used to tease my friends at Microsoft about simply giving away SharePoint and not caring who used it, this clearly was an effective strategy."

In a session on hybrid developer/designers at Web 2.0 Expo, Chris and Jeremy got applause when they pointed out that adoption momentum for emergent widget platforms, as well as next-gen client platforms such as Apollo and Microsoft’s recently-rebranded Silverlight, will be weighed down by the fact that they don’t let users View Source as web applications do.

For a certain class of users, the death of View Source is a feature, not a bug, but it’s certainly the case that access to source code is one of the best ways to learn. On the other hand, there is more than one kind of application and there is more than one way for knowledge to be transmitted from experienced developers to less experienced developers. The question is how these emergent platforms will enable knowledge sharing for developers and designers at the speed of the web.

Update: In comments, Dan Fernandez from Microsoft mentioned that there is a View Source angle to Silverlight.

Link: Barnaby James: Acrobat / Reader 8.0 REST Web Service support.

"Acrobat / Reader 8.0 has improved support for JavaScript networking which makes it easy to communicate with XML web services when combined with new support for XML processing. SOAP Web Services have been supported since Acrobat / Reader 6.0 however support for HTTP networking makes it possible to develop clients for a wider array of protocols - for example WebDAV, the Atom Publishing Protocol and other types of RESTive services like the Approver.com API."

This has come up with several of the companies I’ve been advising over the past few months, so I thought I’d lay out a few of my rules and tips for how to manage a public technical support forum and build a technical community. My thoughts in this area come from twenty years of managing online communities from kitchen table hobby BBSes to tiny startups, to eBay and Yahoo! technical developer communities, to the half-dozen consulting customers I am working with today.

To my mind, the most important rule is that there should be one person in your organization who is responsible for the health of your community. We call this role the "community manager". It doesn’t have to be a full-time job, particularly if you’re a startup or an open-source project, but once your community starts numbering in the thousands of active users, it’s time to start thinking about hiring or outsourcing the management of your community.

The community manager is responsible for the health of the community. This means taking whatever steps are necessary to grow the community, making sure that the community is in alignment with the goals of the business or project, and helping to put out fires when they occur. It also entails the compilation and dissemination of metrics pertaining to the community’s health. Ideally, the community manager shares these metrics with the entire company (and, in some cases, with the community itself). The old business adage "you make what you measure" is at work here — if you are serious about building a community around your product or company and you aren’t sharing your community metrics with your entire team on a regular basis, you only have yourself to blame if the community turns out to be tepid.

The community manager’s report should contain metrics as well as anecdotal information about what’s going on in the forums. If three people post about the same bug in the forums on the same day and nobody from your engineering organization responds, it’s the community manager’s job to escalate that until the problem is resolved.

These days, the community manager is the voice of the company in the community. She’s typically used to convey announcements and news in a way that a spokesperson or public relations person might have done in the past. Here is where an English major with technical chops comes in handy.

Everybody on your team should participate in your community. (At the same time, it’s important that you have one and only one community manager — if everybody’s in charge, then nobody’s in charge.) At some companies I’ve worked at, people had to go through all kinds of hurdles to get permission to post to the forums. This is small-minded; it suggests that you mistrust or have not adequately trained your team. If you have an online forum, then everybody should be encouraged to post to it, particularly people who work for you.

There are a bunch of tactical things to making a community forum work. When we developed an XML-based message board product back in 1999, people thought it was this crazy exotic thing and we had to explain the benefits of XML for customization and syndication over and over again. Today RSSified message boards are de rigeur. They’re the only way I can keep up with the literally hundreds of things I need to read each day. No technology community should be without it. Use the standard RSS icon, make sure your forum home page and each individual topic page has RSS autodiscovery meta tags, and make sure they work in the most popular feed readers (which at the moment happen to be Bloglines, My Yahoo!, Google Reader, NewsGator Online, and Netvibes).

Search engine optimization isn’t something that should be applied only to your marketing web site, it should apply to your community too. At the very least, if the topic of a discussion doesn’t appear in the page title (and preferably in the URL too), dump your community software and get something better.

If you’re a commercial software vendor, make sure that no question in the forum goes unresponded to for more than a day or so. (Your community manager can help with this, although it’s ideal if you have an automated way of doing this.) If paid support happens to be a part of your business model, you may not want to respond that quickly in your forums, which is fine — instead, make it easy for people who post questions in your forums to get priority paid support as an alternative to waiting around for an answer in the community, and manage your community’s expectations regarding the way you expect community-based support to work.

Give recognition to your contributors — they’re helping to build your platform, in many cases free of charge. Some companies resort to special programs (like the Microsoft MVP program) to recognize prominent community contributors, which is fine, but I much prefer engaging in conversations and building relationships with members of the community as a way to incent and recognize them (just saying "thanks for posting that" goes a long way). In many ways, creating a formal recognition program for people is actually easier than having these conversations (since you only have to do the heavy lifting once), which is, I think, why companies gravitate to it. But having conversations is the real money shot here, and if you’re not making time to have these conversations you’re missing out on tons of valuable information.

Your community manager can help engage with prominent contributors, but this should also be something that everybody in your organization should feel empowered to do.