Meeting Ticker

This is brilliant – a ticker that shows you how much the meeting costs.

Via Matt Raible’s post on Passionate Programmer book.

New Focus

I am excited to announce that after spending years reading and learning about how to start companies, I am finally doing something about it. I recently left Alfresco and am in the process of starting a new service that will create tools for measuring energy efficiency of buildings.

A bit of a change in focus, but as the technical part of the founding team, I hope that my experience will be useful as I am now building out a prototype version of the service.

I won’t promise that I will blog more, though I certainly intend to, including more about the service itself and what I am working on. One of the things I’ve been thinking about recently is the transition from an employee, which I have been all my professional life, to an entrepreneur and how the two are different.

StackOverflow Rocks!

StackOverflow is site created by Jeff Atwood of the excellent blog CodingHorror.com together with Joel Spolsky of Joel On Software that allows programmers to ask each other questions in an open forum. 

Very quickly, it’s become one of the best technical resources on the web, now whenever I have a generic question about programming, I go there and do a quick search (you can also map it as OpenSearch in your browser).  Of the past 10 such situations, there was already a thread there on the topic, with majority of responses very well reasoned.  A lot of great developers hang out there and there is a ton of useful information.  

In addition to frequenting the site, I also listen to the StackOverflow Podcast – the Signal to Noise ratio isn’t amazing, but it’s a good background conversation to listen to while doing something else.

NY Architecture Conference Presentation

Last week I spoke at the NY IT Architecture Conference.  My main topic was on Content-Oriented Architectures (copy of presentation here).  It addressed how the Content Repository is a new abstraction better suited for content applications, one that combines advantages of the database (i.e. transactions, rich content modeling, data integrity), and file systems (hierarchy, ability to store large files), while adding some new constructs not easily present in either, i.e. granular item-level security, workflow, content transformations, etc.    There are a few good resources I found in preparing for the talk. One that stood out was a description of what content repositories offer you at Gadgetopia here.

In addition to the main topic, I also participated in Rich Internet Applications Panel, talking about interesting technologies such as Adobe Flex, Ajax and its cousin Comet.

As to the conference overall, I have to say that since my primary interest is software architecture and technology, I didn’t always find interesting topics that were immediately relevant (a few of the ones i really wanted to attend overlapped with my talks ).  However, this did allow me to branch out and hear about topics I am not as directly involved with, such as proving value of architecture, and establishing Architecture as a profession within our industry.

Upcoming Speaking Engagement June 12th – Enterprise 2.0 Conference

By the way, I am also speaking at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference.   The topic is Programmable Web: Consequences for the Enterprise.  I am on at 9:30 am on Thursday, June 12th.   Here is the Description:

The internet is becoming programmable. Many sites are providing data access APIs as the Software As as A Service paradigm shift is taking place. Mashups have been around for years, but recently social networking sites have also joined the fray by opening up their own APIs. Facebook is one of the leaders of the movement. Having released their API in May of 2007, there are many thousands of Facebook applications in use today. Google countered with OpenSocial Project. We will discuss the internet as an application development platform in general, and look at how some of the leading social networking APIs work. We will then discuss how these concepts can be applied in the enterprise to enable better information sharing and collaboration.

Microsoft Community Ecosystem Part 2 – Community Programs

Note: this is part of the series of posts about Microsoft Community Ecosystem. Previous posts – Introduction, Part 1 – Microsoft Partner Community. I am participating in a panel discussing these programs and what Open Source companies can learn from Microsoft this week at Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco. The panel is on Tuesday, March 25^th, 2008 at 2pm and is called “What Open Source Can Learn From Microsoft and the Proprietary World”.

Microsoft makes software for so many different areas, it has many constituencies that are part of their community. There are developers – they care about development tools and new frameworks. In addition, there are database gurus, administrators of their various products, office users, enterprise users, etc. There are many demographics that apply, and obviously it is good to have them all as part of an ecosystem. I am most familiar with the developer community, but will try to cover other efforts as well. This post will introduce the community-run programs, and then examine the different programs and support structures that exist to help the community.

Community Programs

User Groups

These are pretty traditional user groups, just like other companies and technologies have. They meet about once a month and discuss topics of interest to that particular groups. There are several programs out there to reinforce them, about which I’ll talk below. To give you an idea of the different areas covered, here are the active groups in New York City:

• DotNET User Group
• Connected Systems Group
• Enterprise Windows Group
• SharePoint User Group
• SQL Server Group
• .NET Meetup (started recently by a company Lab49).

These groups are community-run in that their leaders (for the most part) are not associated with Microsoft in an official capacity. Microsoft does help out by providing space (and sometimes food). They also form a great basis for other community-run events, such as Code Camps (next section).

This is in NYC alone – there are similar groups in New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and others. For information about their meetings, check out Peter Laudati’s blog, where he does a great job aggregating all the meetings on one page.

Code Camps

Code Camp is a free community-run, (usually) one-day event. It’s basically a mini-conference. Here is the original “Code Camp Manifesto”. The focus is on sharing knowledge and showing code. It usually happens on weekends, most often Saturdays. Here is the schedule of code camps.

Because Code Camps are held on a weekend, people are less tired, and Code Camps are usually well attended. There are usually several tracks, and each talk lasts an hour, to a maximum of an hour and fifteen minutes at some camps. They attract up to several hundred attendees. What is so nice about these is that it’s a great way to catch up on some latest technologies, and learn about things and branch out your knowledge.

The people who run these are usually user group leaders. Microsoft tries to help out, sometimes with sponsorship money for food, sometimes by donating the space, but this is mostly a community-run event. I haven’t been involved in planning these, but they looks like fairly easy to plan compared to a full conference. If you can get somebody to donate the space, you can use the local user groups as a base for speakers, as well as invite speakers from communities nearby. Because they are community run, it’s relatively easy to get a speaking slot. However, the quality of sessions is quite high. Code camp in New York a few years ago was the first time I started doing public speaking outside of internal presentations at different companies I worked at.

I really enjoy Code Camps. They are nice to learn about things, to interact, to network. You get to see five or six presentations, so even if one or two is not great, it’s still pretty good signal to noise ratio. Also, they are local (although you can always travel to go to ones outside your area), so you don’t have to spend half a day getting there and back.

For a learning-addict like me, Code Camps are a great way to feed the habit…

Resources To Foster Community

User Groups and Code Camps are great community programs. Even though they are run by community, there are a few programs and structures that exist to reinforce them.

Microsoft-Employed Developer Evangelists

I didn’t mention Microsoft employees responsible for partnership because it’s pretty obvious that they exist. What is not obvious is that Microsoft has a title called Developer Evangelist. The job of these people is to encourage and foster Microsoft community, usually in a specific geographic region. Their geographic region can be quite large, with two evangelists covering the NY Metropolitan area, for example – NY, NJ, and CT.

The goal is to evangelize Microsoft technologies and increase adoption of .NET technologies. I believe the best ones view themselves as community’s voice inside Microsoft. I don’t know all they do, but I know they are a great resource to the community groups. In addition to supporting local user groups, they try to reach out to non-Microsoft communities, conduct online seminars for people who don’t like to go to the meetings, work with companies to increase adoption of Microsoft technologies and training, and many other things. Additionally, they have great contacts within the community, and can be counted on to give talks in a pinch.

Developer Evangelists have a tough job – to make it easier for the community to work with Microsoft. Additionally, they work to attract people from outside of Microsoft community, such as people doing Java, PHP. At a minimum, Microsoft would like to make sure they are not very unhappy with Microsoft, maybe just a bit unhappy J.

INETA

Another organization that supports the Microsoft community efforts is INETA – International .NET Association. It’s an organization that serves as an umbrella and a resource for user groups. According to the website, INETA serves 255 user groups.

The INETA Speaker program has a list of speakers, and they make INETA speakers available to user groups. It’s a somewhat exclusive group – to become INETA speaker is not easy. The nice thing about it is that the INETA speakers are good. As a user group you can request an INETA speaker and know that you will get somebody of high quality.

I know that with other user groups and conferences, the quality can vary – this is one way Microsoft user groups make sure the user groups have good quality content. I am not sure if there are member dues for INETA or if it’s a Microsoft-sponsored organization, but I do know it’s a positive force that provides lots of resources to the communities.

The Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Program

The MVP (Most Valuable Professional) program is probably my favorite program, since I think it’s quite brilliant. Within each product group, a certain number of community members get recognized as MVPs. These are the guys judged to be great at helping increase the community around Microsoft technologies.

What this amounts to is many people who don’t work for Microsoft spending a big chunk of their time evangelizing Microsoft, answering questions, and in other ways promoting Microsoft technologies. In exchange, they get some support from Microsoft, but my guess is that the MVP program costs a fraction of the value it generates for Microsoft. Many MVPs are independent consultants who can use their MVP status as imprimatur for their billable work. Others work for companies. It’s a very symbiotic program – both the MVPs and Microsoft benefit from the relationship tremendously.

One thing to realize is that this is a community program first – it rewards people who are active. This means that while MVPs are usually technically strong, MVP status itself does not really mean that this person is an expert in a technology, just that they are very vocal about helping people in this technology. It’s hard to have one without the other, but it’s possible.

Here is some more information from an article What is an MVP, Anyways:

MVP program is an “award and recognition program.” While a certain amount of technical skill is usually needed to accomplish the tenets of MVP membership, the MVP program is in no way a measuring stick of the technical merits of its members.

The key take-away here is that the MVP program is now agnostic as to the venue (online or offline) that you use to make your community contributions. The result should be a greater amount of diversification in the program’s membership, and, in some respects, it has worked.

The MVP program is designed for people who would make the same community contributions even if the program didn’t exist.

For instance, there are now over 3,100 MVPs in 75 countries worldwide, covering more than 75 technologies in nine languages.

MVPs are great people to reinforce other programs. They generate a lot of knowledge and help through their blogs, and are frequent speakers at community events and conferences. Since they are typically practitioners, they have a unique view of what customers need and how they are actually using the technologies, and some serve as advisors to product managers and Microsoft teams.

How do you become an MVP? It’s an award and recognition program for being active in the community. It started out as a way to reward people active in the online forums. It evolved to now involve speakers, prolific bloggers, writers, and others. There are many ways to become an MVP, and currently there are thousands of MVPs in topics ranging from Outlook to C# to SharePoint. As part of the reward, MVP get MSDN subscription, and are invited to a special annual conference for MVPs, where they get access to the product teams and see what is coming down the line from the company. There are people at Microsoft managing the program, and MVPs can contact them as necessary to get more support from Microsoft as needed.

Regional Director Program

To be honest, this is the program I know the least about. Each region has a person who is a Regional Director (RD), whose role is also to encourage community. There are less than 150 Regional Directors worldwide – you can find yours here. While not employed by Microsoft, I believe they do get some kind of compensation and have certain commitments to Microsoft.

Jonathan Goodyear, one of RDs, writes about the program:

“ RDs are not employed by Microsoft. In fact, we are not compensated for our role as RDs (that’s not completely true … more on that in a bit). The role of an RD is to act as an unbiased third-party evangelist of Microsoft products and services and to work with software developers to ensure successful project engagements. We act as the glue between Microsoft and the developer community”

That same article talks about the difference between Developer Evangelists (DEs) and RDs.

“An important distinction between RDs and DEs is that DEs can be influenced to ride the party line. RDs, on the other hand, can (and often do) voice strong opinions in opposition to things Microsoft is doing that the RDs feel don’t fall in line with the interests of Microsoft developers, end users, and customers. RDs have many media contacts, so their voices are heard loud and clear. In this way, RDs act as a strong advocate for the Microsoft community. “

So in a way, they are representatives of Microsoft who don’t work for Microsoft, and thus has some independence.

Other Programs

In addition to the larger programs above, here are some of the other efforts that I learned about:

• Architecture Day – half a day program for in-depth discussion of technologies.
• Microsoft’s Student Partners program – a program to reach out to Universities – finds students who serve as advocates at educational institutions.
• Installfests – I haven’t been to these, but recently there have been some gatherings around Visual Studio 2008.

Conclusion

One of the best things about the Microsoft Community is that it’s very easy to participate. I was a pretty unknown commodity when I started. Because Code Camps are community-run events, anybody can easily submit a talk topic, and get accepted. As you can see, with dozens of years of fostering it, Microsoft’s community is vibrant and strong. I believe it is one of the company’s biggest assets to remain relevant and increase its reach.

Note: I plan to continue this series by talking about online resources that Microsoft provides, and then will conclude with some suggestions for the Open Source companies on what they can learn from Microsoft’s efforts.

Tags: Microsoft, Community, MVP Program, Code Camp

New York Regional IT Architects Conference and BarCampMoney

I am helping out with organizing the NY local IT Architect Regional Conference, and will also be speaking there about content repositories emerging as equivalent of databases for content (i.e. documents). There are a bunch of great speakers in the lineup (at least a few of the ones I heard before). If you are an architect, or an aspiring architect, I definitely encourage you to attend. It’s a community-run effort, and the conference is run pretty much at cost, so I think it’s a great deal. The space is limited, so please register soon.

IASA New York IT Architect Regional Conference – May 22-23, 2008

We have a great lineup of local and global keynote and breakout session presenters lined up for the conference. You would have to pay thousands of dollars plus travel expenses to attend a Gartner or other similar architecture conference elsewhere. We are bringing this conference to New York for a very low price. However due to venue space limitations we can only accommodate 200 attendees. If you are interested in attending we encourage you to register as early as possible.

Early bird registration: (On or before March 31^st):

• $350 for IASA members; $500 for non-IASA members (join for $50 and get the lower rate)

After early bird:

• $450 for IASA members; $600 for non-IASA members (join for $50 and get the lower rate)
• 10% discount will be given for local chapter members. (You can register yourself using discount code: community436.)

The registration link is here.

The ITARC is run by the local chapter of IASA (International Association of Software Architects). IASA is the premier association focused on the IT architecture profession through education, advocacy, events, and the development of best practices. IASA New York Chapter web site here. They hold free monthly meetings focused on various architecture topics.

Unconference for Financial Services Innovators – BarCampMoneyNYC

Also, check out a one-day Unconference called BarCampMoneyNYC for innovators in the finance and financial services industries. It’s a no-cost conference with an admission “price” of presenting a project or conversation topic. You can read more at http://barcamp.org/BarCampMoneyNYC. The event is hosted on Saturday, April 12th at the law firm of Wilson Sonsini in midtown Manhattan.

How To Be a Better Blogger

Last Wednesday we held the first Dinner Salon. This is an idea that I threw out on NextNY list a month or so ago, and Eric Nehrlich said he’d be interested in helping out. The two of us, with some feedback from Tony Bacigalupo wrote up a little manifesto, and scheduled the first discussion – on the topic we were both interested in – How to become a better blogger. We promoted the event and had five people come to the inaugural Dinner Salon.

We met at Sahara – a quiet Turkish restaurant next to where I used to live. A total of five people came to dinner. We had a good cross-section of people who all blogged for different purposes, so it was very interesting to learn from each other. We had a very nice time, and I want to thank all who came for making the evening so interesting. This post will summarize the conversation and insights shared that night.

Here are the people who came, and a little bit about their blogs:

• Eric blogs for largely personal reasons, but without a very clear focus. He writes about technology, becoming a technical manager, book he read, and other topics. Since I am interested in this area, I will attend that his blog is very good.
• Damian is a wine connoisseur. He blogs at redteeth.com. He said he originally started blogging about wine, but over time it evolved about the whole experience around wine.
• Fred is from a family that owns several Italian restaurants in US and Europe. He blogs at Inabbondanza. He also has a restaurant consulting business. His blog serves to reinforce his business. Fred also has other people working with him – a chef blogger in Rome, and another person who acts as a producer. Because he covers a lot of travel destinations, restaurants, and recipes, his older content is valuable, and he is able to charge a small fee for access to his blog’s archives.
• Maria Ogneva just started a blog a few weeks ago. She is an entrepreneur who is starting a company focused on helping real estate investors find each other, and is hoping to have her blog establish her as an authority in the plan.
• I (Jean, a.k.a. NY Web Guy) blog for a combination of personal and professional reasons. It helps me think and clarify ideas. Over time, I am hoping the blog will allow me to contribute to the conversation around technology, entrepreneurship and open source. I feel I have a bit of a focus, although perhaps not strong enough.

Here are some ideas that came up during the discussion:

• Blog Focus. It’s harder to build up traffic if your blog doesn’t have a focus. Your friends may read it, but for a casual visitor there isn’t as much of a payoff to continue to visit you, unless they happen to be interested in the same several areas that you happen to blog about. Around the table, we had three people who had very focused blogs, and two who didn’t.
• Stockpiling posts. Posting regularly is important. Depending on your focus, you also want to be careful about posting too frequently – that can dilute your message. If you have 10 posts per day on a topic, then you are crossing over to a media company, not just a blog. So if an inspiration hits and you have two blogging ideas the same day, write them up, but only post one – save one for later. This is especially good to have if you travel often – you can still have consistency even when you don’t have as much time.
• Publishing Schedule.
  Inabbondanza, the blog focused on Italian culture has different focus area – food, places, culture, sports. They created a publishing schedule so that on a specific day of the week, the readers can expect posts about certain topics. For example – sports on Thursdays. Since they have readers that are really interested in Italian food, but not so much sports, this allows the readers to easily read only the content they care about.
• Color Coding.
  Inabbondanza also color codes their posts to make it easier for readers to find what they like.
• Writing Classes. We discussed whether anybody took writing classes as a way to improve their writing. Nobody at the table has, but Fred had a cautionary tale for us. A chef that he co-blogs with took some classes for writing about food. After that, his writing became worse on some level – since he was trying to apply what he learned, his writing style became way too formal, which started turning off some readers. After some time, he went back to his old, more informal, style.
• Blogging Environment. Some of us shared that they have a special environment they setup for blogging, i.e. have several Firefox tabs open, for translation, reference, etc to have everything on the tips of their fingers.
• Blogging platform. We went around the table and it turned out four of five used WordPress.
• Creating a Community. The Wine and Culture-related bloggers both talked about how they created community, and even did a few offline events with their readers. I am not sure if this is as applicable with other types of blogs, but I am sure if you get big enough, it’s possible. From Eric:
  

  We were talking about Damian’s wine blog, and he observed that it became less about the wine and more about the people and community as time went on. I mentioned Hugh MacLeod and the idea of “Social Objects“, which he summarizes in another post as “The main thesis is that it’s not the wine per se that is interesting, it’s the conversations that happen around the wine that are interesting. And that is true for all social objects. People matter. Objects don’t.” It’s all about the people, and I think Damian’s experiences bear that out.
  

   

• Sticking it to the Reader. We discussed how to make writing more gripping. Eric brought up the book “Made to Stick” (Eric’s Review), which talks about how to craft a compelling and memorable messages. One technique mentioned in the book is the inverted pyramid that journalists use. Start with your most important idea you want to convey, and then add details in the rest of the article. This way, if the reader stops reading at any point, they will still get most of what you are trying to convey. The book has a lot of other insights as well.
• Optimize for Search. Eric shared his observation that a lot of readers may come through search engines. They can also leave very fast – you need to make it easy for them to stay. Make sure your blog layout is such that they can find other posts that might be interesting to them. Include links to your most popular posts, and random posts. Trying to understand who your users are is very valuable, since you can then think of way to target people in the same demographic.
• Getting Ideas. One of the people suggested that he used free-association brainstorming and mind maps to get ideas about what to write about, and how to cover a topic more completely. This made me think of improvisation classes that I took at UCB. Improv generally can make you more creative, so classes could help improve blogging.

Post Length.

We discussed the issue of a length of posts. I referenced the post by Steve Yegge, who writes essay-like posts. He says that a longer post takes longer for people to digest, and some will be turned off. But over time, a long substantial post will have more influence than several shorter ones. However, without having a lot of traffic already, it’s hard to build up readers this way – most people just won’t bother. I know I started to break up some of my posts into series format, the way Paul Mark Andresen does. You also don’t want your posts to be too short. Eric later sent out some good links to Jakob Nielsen’s post on content strategy, where he examines the issue of content length. Here is another great post by Nielsen where he suggests that if you are a world-class expert, you should write articles.

From Eric’s email:

He suggests that different lengths are appropriate for different readers – “On the Web, you can offer both short and long treatments within a single hyperspace. Start with overviews and short, simplified pages. Then link to long, in-depth coverage on other pages.”

 

Personally, I don’t seem to write short posts – most of them are on the longer side. I think that would definitely be a good strategy if I was more famous. This is an issue I am very interested in when it comes to my blog, so I’ll be thinking and reading more about it.

How to Increase Traffic:

Great focus on a specific topic will attract people interested in that area.

• In blogosphere, linking and comments are a form of social currency. People see where their traffic comes from, so the more you link to others, the more they will link to you. Providing a link to a relevant blog post you did when you comment is also a good way to get some readers.
• Monitor the current memes in your area (i.e. Techmeme.com), and write posts on the current memes. Since a lot of people are talking about this topic, you are likely to be a beneficiary of some of the traffic.
• Find blogs related to your focus that syndicate content, and sing up. For example, I syndicate my blog on NextNY blog, and my company’s blog. When I write relevant posts, I tag them appropriately and they show up on there. This increases the reach of your ideas. Over time, if you have good and relevant content, people will want to subscribe to you directly.
• InAbondanza contacted local meetups in the related area – meetups of Italian expatriates or ones focuses on Italian Culture. Since the meetups didn’t have a voice, the blog became a good spot for the community to frequent, and many people from the groups subscribed.
• Syndicate your blog. Adding your blog to other, more popular sites, is one way to increase the reach of your ideas. Also, as time goes on, people will notice that you (hopefully) have something interesting to say, and will subscribe to your blog directly.
• Pre-writing and timing posts to be posted when a certain events occur. For example, Hank Williams wrote an post about the Chandler project since he knows that space very well. He posted it around the time that there was some news related to the project, which meant that people were looking for information about it. Another popular blogger found it, linked to it, and thus he got pretty good traffic from it.
• You need to make it easy for people to stay with your blog – i.e. introduce who you are, etc.

Somebody asked a question about if there are any good books on blogging. Nobody really knew, except for a short book on blogging etiquette called Blogging (Quamut) – it was suggested as a good short primer (online version here).

Private Blogs. We talked about entrepreneurs using blogs to promote their companies, to announce their plans, and generally to make their companies more approachable. This is what Maria is trying to do at meetmojo.com. It was interesting to find out that two of the guys who are also starting companies keep internal blogs. This allows them to communicate with their employees and investors. Sort of like status report for investors.

More Resources:

• Eric wrote a post on “What I know about blogging” last summer at when a colleague was thinking about starting.
• Pro Blogger – lots of good content on becoming a better blogging -
• A list of resources (from 2006) on getting started with blogging from ProBlogger.

Guy Kawasaki’s Article on Blogging.

Meaning-Based Web and Web 3.0

Yesterday I went to NY Social Media Club meeting. (See my summary of last month’s meeting on Social Networks here). The topic of discussion was Semantic Web and Web 3.0. There were two panelists, moderated by Howard Greenstein. The first panelist was Tim McGuinness, Vice President of Search from Hakia.com. Hakia is a NY-based startup that has a great meaning-based search engine. They just launched a new beta version with some very social networking feature this week. They use Natural Language Processing techniques to produce better searches. Nate Westheimer was the other panelist. He is the founder of BricaBox.com, a site that just launched its Beta this morning. Also, Marco Neumann, the leader of the NY Semantic Web Meetup, contributed a lot to the conversation. This post is not a strict summary, but rather some thoughts related and inspired by the discussion yesterday. I purposely use the term Meaning-Based web, and stay away from using the term Semantic Web, since it refers more to a set of technologies than a wider concept.

Meaning-Based Web – Motivation

First of all, Semantic Web is really about improving the connections and the meaning that one can gleam from the internet. So that when you do searches, it only returns the searches relevant to the meaning of what you are looking for. The goal of meaning-based web technologies is to make the meaning of the pages on the World Wide Web better understood by the computers. This will drastically improve our ability to find things, and to ask intelligent questions about the world.

To illustrate the difference: today, when somebody does a search for “George Bush”, the search engines are fundamentally looking for a string of characters in the sequence you types in. It does not understand that you are talking about a person, cannot relate it directly that George Bush is the president, etc. You want your search to find all the cases when George Bush is referred to through meaning, i.e. The President, 41^rd President’s Son, “W,” Kerry’s opponent in 2004, etc. To us humans, these are obvious connections to make, to computers – not so.

There are two ways to approach this goal, through two philosophically different directions. They are the Semantic Web Techniques and Natural Language Processing, and in a way are two sides of the same coin.

Approach One – Evolve the Web (Semantic Web, Microformats)

The first approach is to evolve the web, to add more information to it. This means that the content producers will add more information to the Web, and thus enhance it to make it more understandable to machines. Semantic Web is a set of W3C standards that allow to add that data and query it. Very similar to the W3C approach, Microsoformats are another, more light-weight, way to do the same. The goal is for content to have semantic information attached to it so that computers can read it and form connections just like the humans do.

Using this approach, a page with information about a movie called “Magnolia” has hooks in the page (possibly invisible to the user) that mark it as such. A page about flower magnolia has markings that explain that it’s about flower.

Approach Two – Extract Meaning (through Natural Language Analysis)

The second approach is work harder to extract meaning from the web. To assume that enhancing the data is very cumbersome, and that while some people will do it, not everybody will. Additionally, adding more data means that there will always be holes and things that cannot be expressed easily. It would be great if computers could get closer to the real meaning of what the web pages are talking about.

This movement espouses Natural Language Processing techniques. Natural Language Processing is a set of techniques that try to extract meaning and relationships from text. Their algorithms read the texts and cull meanings from the text, coupled with an ontology of relationships they defined elsewhere. For example, their ontology will know that car is a vehicle, and that car has certain actions that it can perform, and that it’s different from an inanimate object, which means that it cannot speak. As it “reads” the web pages, it applied the ontology to the content and records not where a specific word can be found in a document, but rather where a specific concept is. Additionally, these ontologies are language independent, except for some minor exception language particularities.

To come back to our example, using this approach the technology will automatically be able to tell the page is talking about a flower because it sees words like “grows,” “soil”, etc – same clues that allow us humans disambiguate the meaning of words. It is able to figure out meaning from the context.

In reality, both approaches have their strengths and weaknesses, although I have to admit to be more partial to NLP approach over the long term.

Implications

The implications here are profound. As this technology improves, searching will become more seamless, and that things like Search Engine Optimization will be the thing of the past. The search engines will understand the true meaning value of the content, and will be able to direct people towards you. The very cumbersome task of thinking up of various words that your content can be searched will be a thing of the past.

Ability to understand text on a higher level (natural language processing) means that ads will be targeted even more precisely. A lot of ambiguities will be resolved easily, just by the engine asking you a few disambiguating questions. As a user, you will be rewarded for putting more search terms since the engine will be able to find the information you are looking for faster. You will be able to have an interactive conversation with your search engine until you zero in on precisely what you are looking for.

As far as search engines are concerned, I see meaning-based searching as the future. However, that cannot happen in isolation. For example, there is a lot of bad information on the web about child vaccinations, a vocal minority of sorts, mostly driven laypeople. There is also a tremendous amount of authoritative research data that shows the benefits of vaccinations. One of the reasons that Google search has been successful is that they have been able to harness the power of authority – their original Page Rank algorithm was based on the assumption that a page that has been linked to a lot is more authoritative than others. Since then, their search algorithms evolved thousand fold, but the central concept of authoritative sources is still very important on the internet (and in real life).

On top of the natural language techniques, and authoritative-based approach, the next realm in search is personalization and social networking. The next generation of collaborative filtering technologies will be collaboration-based with personalization mixed in. You’ll receive not just the best content, but the best content targeted to your current interests. If the search engine knows that I am currently interested in dancing, and I search for salsa, it will automatically return sites related to dancing, as opposed to cooking. Additionally, if it can mark studios or events that my friends have been to, that would be even more valuable.

Web 3.0

So what is Web 3.0? Nobody knows yet, and neither do I. Right now, I think it’s emerging as a combination of several emerging technologies – meaning-based web, social networking, greater personalization, and locale-based information. I think that once you are able to create mashups based on meaning-based information, extract that information easily from existing data sources, then we will have Web 3.0. Lastly, many sites will offer not just access APIs, but a way to really integrate your application into them. Therefore, Facebook API , OpenSocial, and Ning are early precursors of Web 3.0.

New things will become possible. It will be easy to cross-reference unstructured documents with information stored in relational databases. It will be easy to create a personal profile page based on the information already out there on the internet. It will be easy to create something similar to tumble blog based on your web activities. We are not quite there yet with mashups, at least not based on what I’ve seen. We are close though. When everything becomes a data source, then we will have arrived.

Meaning-Based Enterprise

Since I work for a compano, Alfresco, that is focused on bringing Web 2.0 ideas into the enterprise, I am concerned with how this will affect the people behind the firewall. Just like on the public web, I see a great opportunity to transform existing systems and ways of collaborating.

One of the reasons why many content management solutions exist is to add semantic meaning to data. When you create a taxonomy to classify your documents, you are adding semantic meaning on top of unstructured content. Much of the reasons we are doing it is because computers can not quite do it themselves. With technology improving, a lot of traditional document management systems will be fundamentally changed. Whole areas of taxonomy analysis, information architecture will be transformed, since the semantic web techniques will allow extracting these taxonomies automatically from the documents themselves.

I also see some great short-term opportunities in Natural language Processing technologies and services. If a document can be automatically tagged with metadata instead of humans having to do it, this leads us to much better user experience and thus more useful content management systems. Some of this will require better plumbing, some of it will require newer interfaces, the kind of that Adobe Flex or Microsoft SilverLight are starting to enable. This is why we are firmly committed to Flex as the future evolution of our user interface.

Since the next generation of the web will feature much better meaning-based technologies, this will also dramatically improve collaboration and information sharing. Tools will be developed that will become agents, searching in the background for information that’s relevant to your work interests, and will automatically notify you of things you didn’t even know you were looking for. As you are working on solving a problem, an agent will also be searching for a solution to your problems, both inside the intranet and on the public web. The agents will also be able to traverse your social network, and connect you with other people in your social network or company who have expertise in the area.

Auto Tagging, Auto-Classification, new ways of collaborating – Wiki-based, Mashup-based, are all transforming the public web. And these superior ways of collaborating are moving rapidly inside the enterprise. Forrester talks about tech populism – the idea that as the web in becomes more user-friendly, enterprise users will demand the same simplicity and interactivity they are becoming used to.

This is the future I am excited to be a part of.

Some more resources on Meaning-Based Web and Web 3.0:

• Great article about Semantic Web From Scientific American by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web.
• Semantic Wave Report from Project 10X
• Ling pipe – an advanced NLP java library. New York-Based and partially open source software.
• Twine – From Radar networks – a semantic web startup that just got some funding.
• Hakia.com – NLP-based search engine

Microsoft Community Ecosystem Part 1 – Partners

Note: this is part of the series of posts about Microsoft Community Ecosystem. The Introduction can be found here.

One thing to understand is that Microsoft fundamentally wants to be a product company. Their business is to make a product, and sell it millions of times, making a healthy profit. They don’t really focus on industry verticals, and are instead focusing on broad software that can be used by many companies. This leaves two gaps: System Integration and more targeted solutions towards specific use cases or industries. Both are addressed by different aspects of the partnership model. Additionally, Microsoft relies on training partners to do a lot of it product training.

System Integrators

By comparison to products, consulting and services is a low margin business. This means they have a lot of SI partners that do the actual integration work. This is a great relationship – there is very little channel conflict. Microsoft avoids the channel conflict by keeping their consulting force quite small. I am told that their sales people are not really commissioned on services sales.

This means their sales guys care about the job getting done, and have no problem with bringing in a partner to lead. The partners that have a good relationship with Microsoft get to be the lead implementers on the deal. They are brought in while being given Microsoft’s imprimatur, and then they take over the relationship. Often, they also get involved in Microsoft-funded proof of concepts, product launches, white papers, and other efforts. So there is some revenue coming in directly from Microsoft as well.

For small but good consulting shops, Microsoft relationship is a god-send. You get the benefit of having Microsoft’s relationships work for you. That can get you introduced into many big customers. The result is that your sales model becomes MUCH simpler – no longer are you going in trying to convince new customers that you are good. Instead, you are brought in by a Microsoft sales rep that already has a relationship with the customer, saying “these are our go-to guys for this technology”. This can allow you to have higher billable rates than otherwise, when you are competing against other companies.

One bad thing about working for a Microsoft partner, is that there is such a co-dependency, that the companies end up recommending Microsoft solutions more often than they should in order to maintain the relationship. If you are brought in to scope a SharePoint deployment by Microsoft, with licensing revenue on the line, then this is what the customer is likely to get, even if SharePoint is not the best fit for this particular problem. Being a technologist, this becomes frustrating at times, since you don’t feel the problems are being solved in the best way possible. However, this is not inherent in the Microsoft partnership itself, but rather in most companies and partnerships.

There are different competence areas in which you can be a partner. For example, a company can be a Business Intelligence partner, or a BizTalk / distributed technologies partner, etc. Since Microsoft has many product lines, this allows companies to specialize somewhat. Also, Microsoft can bring in different SIs into different deals. Several SIs within the same geographic area can thus have profitable relationships without stepping on each other’s toes too much.

To make sure that partners are good, there are some requirements they need to meet, like having a certain number of certified employees, and some other requirements I am not completely aware off. However, ultimately, it’s about delivering and building up the relationship. If you are known as a company that delivers, you will get more business, since Microsoft salespeople will be more likely to bring you in.

Additionally, there are other partner benefits, such as access to software from Microsoft, MSDN subscriptions, and other benefits. But of course the key benefit to the partnership is the business opportunities.

Training Partners

Training partners work somewhat similarly to SIs. They can also get leads from Microsoft for opportunities and also have different competency area that they can teach. One nice distinction is that Microsoft Training provides the Microsoft Official Curriculum (MOC) – courses that are completely pre-packaged to the point that almost anybody with some basic familiarity with their products can teach them. That’s the biggest value to you – Microsoft generates demand for products, which in turn generates demand for training. That, plus the curriculum that Microsoft puts out enables Training partners to make money and be part of the ecosystem. My old company did both integration work and training as well.

Independent Software Vendors (ISVs)

There are also a lot of ISVs that sell add-ons to Microsoft products. I do not have experience with these, so I won’t talk about this. Suffice to say that it allows Microsoft to fill niches it would not be able to fill otherwise, and also drive sales for its partners.

While partnership has many benefits, if you are a product company, partnering with Microsoft is a bit more dangerous, since you may find a competitor in the next version of their product. So you need to maintain a good relationship with the product teams and understand their product direction and product map.

In the next post in the series, I’ll talk about the Developer and User Community Programs.

The Microsoft Community Ecosystem – Introduction

Prior to my current job, I spent the two years working for a consulting company, Infusion Development, here in New York.   We did business both with Java and .NET, focusing on large Financial Services companies and State and Local Government.  The company is a Gold partner for Microsoft, and did a lot of services work around Microsoft technologies.  

I learned a lot of Microsoft technologies while there, and got an inside glimpse into how Microsoft ecosystem works.  Another thing I discovered and took part in was the Microsoft community – the grassroots-run organizations that foster developer education, networking, and are thus a great asset to the software giant.

What really impressed me is just how large of a community exists around Microsoft and its technologies.    This series of blog posts will describe some of the community efforts that Microsoft has, and how they fit together.  I will then try to take some lessons from Microsoft and apply it to the Open Source Community.

Note:  This series of posts is a precursor to a talk I will be giving at Open Source Business Conference in March.

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Tags: Microsoft, Community