noirExtreme

Google announced tonight that it will up its Gmail limit to 2 GB, and that it plans to increase the limit to...the sky. Really. [...] (I did ask them about the abuse of this feature - and they told me they'd get back to me....).

Not to beat a tired horse, but why do this? Mail = pageviews. Pageviews = profits. Rinse. Repeat.

Source: Google Says: Top This

Wow, the ultimate file sharing tool. With one click send a 1.4GB movie to 20 friends. The upstream bandwidth limit of ADSL is no longer an issue as all exchanges are made between endpoint within the core of the network. Use a mailbox as a public folder to store the files you want to share (remember Yahoo! Briefcases?). Actually, there's already software for doing this...

I hope Google thought this through before making the announcement and have a good strategy to manage the predictable parasitic activity on the Gmail service.

In a short and enthusiastic post, James Enck highlights the announcement of "Yahoo! 360°, an Innovative New Service that Allows Consumers to Conveniently Communicate and Connect with the People They Know".

Based on the release only, my feeling is that they took all their existing community oriented services, slapped a blogging and a social networking engine on top and threw it at beta testers to see if it sticks. A statement like The company plans to add additional features and functionality throughout the beta period is a clear indication that the plan is only half baked at best.

With Google and Microsoft making moves to capture the business potential (if there's such a thing) of an exploding blogosphere Yahoo! could not stay on the sideline and such a move is hardly surprising.

None of them has a killer value proposition so far but all of them offer one thing I hate: a walled garden in which they try to lock up their users.

This blog I was reading is supposedly on the phenomenon of Groupthink in Blogging but it doesn't really make any point (well I guess that is why it is called "Part I"...).
The interesting bit is that the quote from James Surowiecki that it contains is probably more telling when transposed from this context to that of Open Source:

BlogThink/GroupThink (or the Ignorance of Crowds): Part I
[...][James] Surowiecki dissects a number of studies which all seem to show that groups - when organized and led correctly - almost always outhink the best individual performers. But not all distributed groups are alike, and the benefits of collective wisdom come to play only when the following conditions exist:

• independence (each group member has to believe he or she can contribute)
• diversity (different types of group members -- different types of intelligence, personality, style, etc.)
• decentralization (less emphasis on central authority, more emphasis on individual accountability)
• aggregation (a system for processing, synthesizing all the contributions).

How does this apply to the blogger community?[...]
Source: Always-On

I don't know how it applies to the blogger community but these attributes describe an emerging form of organisation that is already delivering compelling results when applied to Open Source software development and that will give birth to new forms of business organisations more flexible, more agile and more efficient than today's corporation but —more importantly— more respectful of people's personal styles.

Thought provoking facts:

75% of Americans are looking for a new job
The Society of Human Resource Management found that 75% of the nation's employees are looking for a new job. Executives are the most dissatisfied, with 82% on the job hunt.
Source: itfacts.biz

I don't know if job satisfaction has always been so low or if a new bottom has been reached but I think it is fair to say that any system that shows such a high level of dissatisfaction is completely broken.

Entrepreneurship not in Europe's blood?
Forty-five percent of Europeans would like to be their own boss, compared with 61 percent of Americans, according to the report, published Monday.
Source: News.com

So it looks like most people are unhappy with work as we know it and believe that a greater independence would suit them more. I think the Western World is mature for a deep structural change in business and work organisation driven by the need to adapt to a global competitive environment. And I would not be surprised if the philosophy that made Open Source such a striking success was the driving force shaping the future of work.

Open Source software development use information technology as a means to assemble and organise scattered micro-resources and drive them towards a common goal with incredible agility and efficiency. The traditional hierarchical control & command structures are being challenged by loosely coupled herds steered by meritocracy and those seem to be gaining ground every day. Even if you are not interested in software development, do yourself a favour and read The Cathedral and The Bazaar from Eric Raymond if you haven't done so yet.

Similar principles have been developed independently from the Open Source movement by Ricardo Semler of Semco in Brazil and have resulted in stellar business performance even measured by traditional standards (of shareholder value maximisation and continuous growth) in which he doesn't believe.

(...) Semler determined to balance his work and personal life more carefully, and to do the same for his employees—all while improving Semco's fortunes. To his great relief, he discovered he didn't have to reconcile these two goals: The more freedom he gave his staff to set their own schedules, the more versatile, productive and loyal they became, and the better Semco performed.
Nor did he stop with flextime. He did away with dedicated receptionists, org charts, even the central office—it now resembles an airlines' VIP lounge, with people working in different areas each day. He encouraged employees to suggest what they should be paid, to evaluate their bosses, to learn each other's jobs, and to tolerate dissent—even when divisive. He set up a profit-sharing system and insisted that the company's financials be published internally, so that everyone could see how the company was doing.
Source: CIO Insight

Enhanced by information technology these principles will allow virtual organisations to be formed and people to team up regardless geographical distance or time constrains but simply based on their skills and their motivation to contribute to a certain project.

In this context work has the potential to be extremely exciting and rewarding but also more demanding...

Blogging: Conversation or Soliloquy?
Blogging should be a conversation, not a long-winded speech with scattered applause... (...)
Bloggers all reference each other, but other than the weak comment mechanism, it's hard to create anything resembling a global conversation.
Source: Geek CEO

The real question for me is "are bloggers really interested in conversations?" I thought so in the beginning but I am not sure anymore. I think the current situation is pretty satisfactory to most.

The process is simple: one blogger emits an opinion about on a certain topic. Another one reads it, finds it stimulating, blogs about it and add his own opinion, etc. Since they post on their own respective blogs for which they want to generate traffic (an ego thing), which is their personal image in cyberspace and on which there is no competition for visibility, bloggers generate the best quality content they can.

In contrast pick any "conversation" on Slashdot. 80% is just trash. Most of the posts don't build a conversation but are isolated attempts to make an astute remark to look smart and collect karma. The rest is buried so deep that you only find it by chance. Individual contributions are not linked to the personal image of the contributor and therefore does not contribute positively or negatively to his/her reputation. Content is more "relaxed" as a result and that's not for the best.

More fundamentally I don't think bloggers are interested in getting smarter collectively and in building consensus on specific topics. Bloggers are interested in getting their own opinions across and in having these opinions enhance their personal image. If in the process bloggers and their readers can collectively get smarter, great. My take is that we are not going to see fundamentally better interaction than today until collaboration tools become a lot smarter and allow for people to shine individually through true participation in a real conversation.

I started one of my firsts posts this year Beyond Laser Tag and Telephone Tag by writing "2005 will be the year of tagging". We did not have to wait very long to see that prediction come true.

There is a huge and growing appetite in the blogosphere (read this great overview on Headshift) for tools that would help tapping the mass of information that is created every day in new meaningful ways.

In the last few days I started thinking of the semantic web as a gigantic relational database.

A relational database is a collection of data items organized as a set of formally-described tables from which data can be accessed or reassembled in many different ways without having to reorganize the database tables.(...)
In addition to being relatively easy to create and access, a relational database has the important advantage of being easy to extend. After the original database creation, a new data category can be added without requiring that all existing applications be modified.
Source: searchdatabase.com

Web sites that provide content are like tables in a relational database. A blog is a table that contains posts, a forum is a table containing conversations, del.icio.us is a table of bookmarks, Flickr one of pictures, etc.
To be able to establish links between two tables in a relational database you need a common data element in each. Unfortunately, up until now websites in the semantic web did not have this common data element to enable relationships between them. Enter tags:

• del.icio.us, Furl, Spurl, FeedMarker, etc. apply tags to web pages (strictly speaking to bookmarks)
• Flickr associates tags with pictures
• Tags can be added to blog posts that Technorati can use
• Ed Takema suggests using tags to add structure to Wiki's
• And many more to come. I bet that the tagging craze is just beginning and soon you will find tags everywhere.

And now comes the interesting bit. Since tags are getting applied to different types of contents we do now have the data element that can be used to link content from various source as in a relational database. Two new classes of applications are just emerging around that concept:

1. Information aggregators (or tentatively "taggregators") that use tags to link content from various sources in new and hopefully meaningful ways. Taggregator is a prototype of such an app. that links del.icio.us bookmarks with Flickr pictures. As I mentioned already, Technorati links Flickr, del.icio.us and blogs. Search for tag:opensource to retrieve pictures, blog posts and web pages on that specific topic.
2. Tag management tools to help manage personal tag usage (rename, regroup, link, split, etc.) but also get an understanding of how others use tags to label content in order to be able to align or differentiate one's tagging strategy. Some are already working on it.

These brand new classes of applications will be very hot in the coming months.