Information Overlode

DropBox set to mean business with 'DropBox for Teams'

Chris Noble — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 08:18:02 +0100

I first wrote about the prospects for DropBox in the Enterprise in September 2008. Back them quite a few people were excited about the new company and even more excited by the possibilities of a version designed for business, with centralised management, roles - and perhaps a bit more security.

But it seemed that DropBox was steering well away from the enterprise market. Yes it has tweaked its Web interface and launched some nice mobile products , but there's been appreciable for the Enterprise user. But what's this? Thanks to a little Google serendipity I found dl.dropbox.com/u/5135637/teams.html: containing the details of DropBox For Teams, which has apparently been in very limited beta for 3 months or so.

The page also includes details of the product, an indication of some yet-to-be-implemented feature, and prices that suggest that DropBox is going after businesses with deep corporate pockets.

The main features of the current beta are (according to the undated document on the page):

Centralised billing and administration - The company gets a pool of license that they can assign to users as required.

Pooled storage quotas - instead of individual storage limits, every user gets to share the single quota assigned to the pool and any file that appears in multiple users' folders only count once (this is a substantial change from conventional DropBox usage where sharing a 1GB file with a colleague will eat up 1GB from both users' quotas).

Versioning - Dubbed 'DropBox Rewind', this sounds similar to the existing ' DropBox Packrat' functionality that is a chargeable extra for existing accounts. It allows users to roll files to previous versions that were stored on the system.

The same document says that a future improvements will include:

Group shared folders - which s going to be DropBox's attempt at group permissions controls. An administrator will be able to create groups, such as 'marketing' or 'administration' and assign users to one or more groups. Each group can be given their own 'home' shared folder in which assigned users' Dropboxes appear. "Over time" a permission system will be added to control who can write and read from which folders. At the moment the details sound rather hazy.

What isn't so hazy is the pricing. Currently the company is proposing an annual charge of $795 per year for 5 users and 350GB of shared storage. Additional users are $125 a pop (which I presume will get you some more storage) and you can buy additional storage in 100GB chunks for $200 a year.

My guess is that this price plan will be revised, perhaps with additional tiers. DropBox obviously has full access to their users' storage statistics and I don't, nonetheless I would be very surprised if most moderately sized businesses have teams of 5 needing to share 70GB of files each. Most that I come across are interested in using DropBox as a collaboration tool, rather than an off-site back-up system and would probably prefer a cheaper plan with less storage or perhaps the same price with 10 seats and 20GB of shared storage. Let me know if you disagree.

A couple of final notes:

The system looks to be designed for medium sized businesses only. Larger firms are likely to want administration integrated with the rest of their file-serving infrastructure, but that's fine - DropBox's sweet simplicity has always seemed to be best suited to for small and medium-sized outfits.

Security: The document makes mention of strong security, but there's no explicit mention of any additional security measures over the existing DropBox set up. So there's still no ability to choose your own encryption key.

Stop this Web 3.0 madness now!

Chris Noble — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 14:57:34 +0000

As a one-time technology journalist and analyst I'm pretty inured to industry jargon. OK the co-opting of "cloud" to mean "Internet-based" made a small vein in my forehead throb, but I recovered.

However every time I hear the phrase "Web 3.0" my inner Howard Beale comes ever-closer to the surface. I want to open a window - probably a window on an IRC client - and yell "I'm as mad as hell and I can't take it any more!" Web 2.0 was bad enough. Tim O'Reilly cleverly popularised it as a catchy title for a conference in 2004, but it took on a life of its own, encompassing a rag-tag collection of Web trends with nothing much in common other than a nice marketing catch-phase.

But Web 3.0 is much worse. It's pure snake-oil. Anyone using it is not to doing so in the service of clear communication. No, they have one or more ulterior motives.

They may want to...

induce a profitable paranoia in their audience that they, the expert holds the keys to arcane knowledge beyond the ken of the listener..
sprinkle a little marketing-pixie-dust over an otherwise hum-drum product offering
be lazy and avoid articulating which particular trend in Web technology or usage they are talking about.
avoid revealing that they are actually unsure of what they are talking about, so use the catch-all "Web 3.0" to paper over the cracks in their knowledge.

Often it will be a combination of these.

We owe it to ourselves and our children to nip this pernicious marketing drivel in the bud. It's not too late to stop it from taking hold. The next time you hear some self-important stuffed-shirt uncritically trot out the phrase I encourage you to stand up. Point. Have a good laugh Then ask him or her to explain exactly what they meant when they used the term.

If you're lucky they may offer a succinct definition that could encompass:

The Semantic Web - an effort to evolve the Web into a data source that can be unambiguously parsed by computers, thus aiding information reuse and extraction
The trend towards open, documented data interfaces that allow information to be mixed and matched into innovative new "mashup" applications
The trend towards the Web becoming a platform capable of hosting online services capable of competing with desktop software
The increasing importance of the "realtime Web" - the mass of Tweets and social status updates that let people transmit their feelings, activities, news and location.
The increasing support for mobile and location-aware Web-based applications, including augmented reality applications.

However they are most likely to opt for

"That's difficult to explain in a nutshell, but it's cutting edge stuff!"

Force them to explain themselves. It will do them good since once you and they know what they are actually talking about you can have a proper conversation. Join the campaign today!

Are you ears turning red? Habit Stream aims to make sharing plaudits simple

Chris Noble — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 11:55:47 +0000

There's nothing as nice as receiving unsolicited customer testimonials and there's nothing as nice as being able to get them on your Web site quickly. In the old days testimonials came in via e-mail, if you were lucky. These days, if you're doing your job right you are likely to be receiving plaudits unbeknownst to you on a variety of social networks. A variety of tools such as Whos Talking, Samepoint and Social Mention exist which let you easily search across multiple social networks and blogs for mentions. The latter even gives you a neat little Flash widget that you can embed on your Web site so that visitors can see those mentions fly past.

But what if that stream contains some ... ahem ... less than complimentary mentions? That's where Habit Stream comes in, it's aim - to let you search multiple sources, choose only the nice things that people are saying about you and get them displayed on your site with the minimum of fuss.

The system is simple enough to operate:

Set up a "stream" that will containing a series of search terms.
Put the the terms into your stream.
Pick the items you like from the search results.
Create a "Broadcast" to display the results embedded on your site.

The "Broadcasts" come a three varieties so far, a customisable Flash widget, a "mini-site" option that can be embedded into the main site or linked to and a full API for developers with more ambitious plans for integrating the comments into their sites.

Setting up searches and selecting items is simple, but the results need better filtering options - coming soon, apparently.

Some aspects of the service are clearly still a work-in-progress and not fully baked. 'Out of the box' it only searches a relatively small number of sources, although additional RSS and Atom feeds can be added to a search. Comments on YCombinator's Hacker News suggest that Habit is working hard to expand the selection. But the biggest problem is the sheer amount of noise that the searches currently include. The results tend to be cluttered with rubbish that cannot be adequately be filtered out since there isn't support for the full range of boolean search modifiers yet. Thus It is impossible to restrict results to only those posts that contain the words Chris Noble and the words "truly excellent" (something I've been Tweeting regularly - simply for the purposes of search testing, you understand).

Habit founder Devin Hunt says says the firm is working on a "robust filtering system" which it is hoped with solve some of these problems. But, to my mind the thing needed to make the service really useful is the provision of sentiment analysis, which which, even if not perfect could help bubble positive comments towards the top of the results. Integrating something like OpenAmplify, Calais or the like into the offering would make it more compelling. As an aside you can have fun seeing OpenAmplify sentiment analysis in action at Tweet Sentiments.

At the moment then, the service has potential, and the Broadcast module combined with the pick-and-choose Curating function certain a convenient way to get the right live comment onto a site. It's particularly well suited to PR agencies who can use it to seamlessly curate the content on their clients' sites... and can pass the cost along. Smaller, more tech-savvy operations are likely to be content to spend a few extra minutes needed to use the free search tools out there, copying and pasting the results into their sites content management system. A 30 day free trial is available, the ability to use fully customisable white-labelled embedding starts from $99 a month.

Setting up the options for an embeddable widget is similarly simple

Google Wave: Potentially powerful, but it will make normal users’ heads implode.

Chris Noble — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 13:19:39 +0000

So. Google Wave. The hype has dispersed, the hubbub has calmed down. Moreover in some quarters there’s already a backlash in progress. “Slow, over-hyped, doesn’t do much new” are opinions I’ve seen aired recently. But I think the backlash is misplaced.

Certainly Wave’s current Preview implementation is flawed and there are good technical reasons for people to dislike it. However, the more I’ve come to understand Wave, the more I believe it is potentially absolutely brilliant - a communication and collaboration … I’m going to use the phrase… game-changer. Sorry about that.

In fact, I believe that he technical problems with the Preview implementation are the least of it. The biggest challenge that Wave faces is going to be getting users to wrap their heads around it: Wave is so flexible that there is no natural metaphor that properly describes its capabilities.

When introducing an Internet-based communications medium to new users, real-world similes have always been the easiest way to go. Ten years ago it was simple: E-mail is like a letter, instant messaging is like a one-to-one chat. A blog - it’s like an online diary. Once those were sorted out you could rely on second-level metaphors that built on some knowledge of the Internet: Wikis - they’re a Web page anyone can edit - and you can see everyone’s edit history.

Wave Guide - the jargon

Some context: Google Wave was developed by its creators, Lars and Jens Rasmussen, as a modern reinvention of email. They were sick of e-mail’s shortcoming as a collaborative tool (the Re:Re:Re:Re: problem). The thing they came up with - Wave describes a platform, a product, and a federated protocol. What it provides is a system for creating a discussion-document mix that can be edited by multiple users in near real-time.

A wave is the overall container for a threaded conversation, consisting of one or more participants (which may include both human participants and robots). The wave contains state and stores historical information. A wave always contains at least one wavelet…

A wavelet is the basic container for one or more messages - known as blips - which are often organised into a threaded conversation. The wavelet is the basic unit of access control for data in the wave. All participants on a wavelet have full read/write access to all of the content within the wavelet. Many waves will only contain one wavelet, however whenever you create a new private conversation within a wave you are spawning a new wavelet. Every wavelet contains at least one ‘blip’…

A blip is the basic unit of conversation and consists of a single message in a wavelet.. Each wavelet always consists of at least one root blip. From a technical point of view the blip’s content is actually stored in an attached XML ‘document’

Not only does Google Wave need to be described with a messy simile melange: (“it’s a mash-up of e-mail, IRC, Wiki, and IM”). But more problematic is that the best metaphor to describe Wave’s use tends to morph from minute to minute. What seems like IM one minute can become akin to a Wiki the next and E-mail the minute afterwards. From what I’ve seen on the Preview this transition from one mode of use to another can cause a mental jolt. Overcoming resistance to those jolts and getting users to embrace the flexibility is going to be a hurdle when unlocking its full potential within a business.

In Use…

Starting off a wave conversation when you are the only person on line can seem like e-mail. But if there are several of you online simultaneously, the experience is more like IM or IRC. One unnerving quirk of Wave is your ability to see other people’s keystrokes, complete with pauses and back-spaces in real-time. Often this means that one person will start typing… and before they have even finished their first line, someone else will have chipped in and started replying. The first person, seeing the reply emerge will sometimes go back and start amending their original thought, leading to the second person deleting their own reply.

It makes for a fast-moving collaborative environment that feels like a meeting where everyone is talking at once. And that is even before someone starts editing the very same blip you are typing, even as you are writing it.

Potential applications

This fluid environment presents some novel applications. One example may be to transform the technical support discussion forums and FAQs that are common on technical Web sites.

The problem with discussion forums is that they are poor when it comes to finding previously answered questions. Consequently, they often contain the same question, asked multiple times in slightly different ways by different people and , answered in a variety of manners. After trawling through a discussion board for a while, the user is often left screaming ‘yes, but which is the right answer? Before deciding to post their new version of the same question. By contrast the FAQs are easy to navigate to find answers but the content can quite often be stale.

Wave offers the way to combine the two (or three, if you include real-time chat support that some companies now offer).

In the Wave-using scenario, a user would visit a company’s support area and begin typing their question into a new wave. If another user or employee was online, this might turn into a real-time chat, if not it would turn into a typical threaded discussion. But once an answer had been found a moderator could edit the discussion thread down to the essential Q and A, adding it to a FAQ list, if appropriate, or deleting it from the discussion board entirely. The result is a fluid evolution from online support t to finished support document.

Why open source matters, why federation is key.

Google has committed itself to releasing Wave code under the permissive Apache open source license, in fact the first tranche is already released. The implications of open source and open protocols is clear enough - anyone will be able to implement their own Wave server, in the same way that anyone can implement their own e-mail server using the SMTP protocol. Moreover since Wave is an open Platform there are already a plethora of Gadgets and Robots that extend the base Wave functions,

Just as important, the Wave protocols will work in a federated manner - again like SMTP, meaning that contributors to a Wave can use their own local Wave servers to communicate.

For a time, the federation aspect puzzled me, since I was locked into the idea of using Wave as a conventional Web-based Internet or intranet-based collaboration medium. Why federation? I wondered. Surely, if I want to use Example Inc.’s Wave-based support forum, I’ll just point my browser at wave.example.com and away I’ll go. But here’s the clever thing about federation - it’s the key to the original Wave aim of replacing e-mail

In the federated Wave world, rather than sending an e-mail, you would create a message (actually the initial blip of a wave) on your local Wave server and then sent it to colleagues in the same way that you would send an e-mail. It would pop up in their Wave in-boxes. Your colleagues would then simply add their reply/edits, which would be seen by all the people who received the initial blip. No more Reply-to-all nightmares. So Wave doesn’t have to be something attached to a Web site for collaboration; federation makes it a peer-to-peer personal communication tool.

Problems Problems

So why do the people who hate Wave, currently hate it so?

The need for speed Preview’s Web interface, written in GWT (Google Web ToolKit) which frankly pushes browsers to breaking point. It works reasonably in Chrome, but in Firefox it is sluggish and Safari, which presumably uses some aggressive in-memory caching to keep things fast can see its memory usage balloon to 1.6Gigs after half an hour of intense Waving.

Currently nearly all the usable dedicated Wave clients out there are in effect site-specific browsers, accessing the Web interface. This is akin to only being able to use e-mail via Web mail. What appears to be missing is a usable client-server protocol - the POP/IMAP elements. Google itself doesn’t appear to be prioritising this (not surprisingly, it likes Web interfaces). It has open-sourced a rudimentary text-based client which uses a minimal protocol implementation, but appears happy to rely on community efforts to develop a properly rich protocol. The community efforts are stuttering along at the moment. Now, I know Web interfaces are all the rage, but personally I think that a nice snappy user experience is likely to need on a native client app.

Who gave you permission to do that? To force people into really seeing what Wave is all about, Google has left out anything resembling a permissions system. That means I can create a wave to discuss ‘Usablity Issues in Lotus Notes’ and you can come along, delete everything and change the title to ‘Elephant farming in Bromley”. And there is not a thing that I, as originator can do about it. Certainly the other wave participants can see that you have edited my blips, and even see the history of changes, using the Playback function - but that’s not enough. Expect to see roles, permissions and access controls. Locking down permission will also service to make the new medium seem less strange and unfamiliar. However locking down too far will destroy what makes it special.

Where is everybody? There’s no point using a collaboration medium, if there is no-one to collaborate with and at the moment activity on the Preview has slowed down, it can feel pretty quiet. Google needs to get the protocols finished and the open source code out of the door before companies can start using it in anger.

Bugs bugs bugs Yes, it’s full of them. From the way that search and playback often doesn’t work to the fact that once a wave gets to a certain size it will - without warning - make itself read-only.

In summary: It’s a lovely idea, its open source and federated, it will have a serious impact on any business whose business is collaboration and groupware vendors will need to sit up and take note. However it needs a lot of technical work before it becomes a practical tool, I estimate a couple of years at best before we see Wave in the wild. That will give you long enough to think about exactly how you explain the new working methods to your users and customers.

From wireframe to clickable prototypes - Balsamiq meets Napkee

Chris Noble — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 14:11:52 +0000

I’ve enthused about Balsamiq Mockups before, but there’s another tool - Napkee - that promises to make it even more useful. It takes Balsamiq’s wireframe models and exports them as fully interactive clickable HTML/Javascript or Flex mockups.

Well, nearly. The product has been around since last August, but some of the support for some Balsamiq elements has been a little idiosyncratic until recently, so I have held off blogging about it. While there are still the occasional glitches, development is continuing apace and I reckon it is ready to be used in anger. The best place to get a feel for its quirks is on the company’s GetSatisfaction page.

In use it is simplicity itself. First make sure that your Mockup layout elements are all nicely linked to each other. Make sure that drop-down elements and menus are fully populated with options. Then import the Mockup’s .bmml xml file into Napkee and export. If you have both applications open simultaneous, changes to a Mockup are reflected in Napkee’s display every time a save occurs.

Development, pricing and support model is self-consciously modelled on Balsamiq’s: It’s an Adobe Air application, pricing is low - starting at $45 for Web or Flex export, $79 for both options. Like Balsamiq, Napkee is churning out application updates at an impressive rate.

The obvious thought is that Napkee’s lunch is likely to be eaten by Balsamiq implementing a similar feature itself. The addition of an “Export to PDF’ function including support for internal links in Balsamiq last November added basic support for exportable clickable models. The company is also putting the finishing touches to the MyBalsamiq online Web app which will allow collaborative commenting of clickable wireframes - taking it into Protoshare territory.

However Balsamiq founder and CEO Giacomo 'Peldi' Guilizzoni says he is leaving the field clear for Napkee in terms of standalone clickable prototypes to Napkee, - he has other fish to fry.

Indeed the two outfits are working closely together. Back in November Balsamiq added custom control ids to mock-up elements specifically so Napkee could hide, show and toggle visibility of a page elements in response to mouse clicks (although it has to be said that this feature will undoubtedly be useful for the MyBalsamiq effort). Balsamiq seems to intuitively like the idea of being an open platform on which others can build tools.

I suspect it won’t be long until some enterprising tools manufacturer decides it would like to buy both Balsamiq and Napkee as a package and put them together. At the moment, however both owners seem to be enjoying the role of nimble rapid-development entrepreneur.

When Web 2.0 concepts collide: The tribal problem with Digg

Chris Noble — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 14:49:30 +0000

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a Web site with a large user-base must be in need of some social networking features. After-all turning a Web readership into a community, which can share knowledge and opinion, benefits the Web site and the user-base alike. And hey, social networks are hot, so if you can make your site into one of those, you’re bound to boost its value. Right?

Not always: in Digg.com, we have a site where social networking is positively toxic to its core model. Yet the company continues down the social road.

For those few who haven’t visited it, Digg is a user-driven news aggregator. That is users submit links to interesting news stories, which get voted up (dugg up) or down (buried) by the rest of the users. The ones that are most rapidly “dugg” make it to the site’s front page (that’s a simplification - the algorithm that dictates whether a story to make it to the front of the site is more complex and obfuscated than that). Digg’s selling point is that the content that makes it to the top of the pile is dictated entirely by the crowd and the algorithm. There are no editors, moderators or overseers deciding what hot and what’s not.

So Digg is a classic embodiment of the “wisdom of crowds”. It turns out that the model works well when your crowd is amorphous and disconnected. But what happens when it starts to get clumpy? What happens when connections occur between parts of the cloud, when things get tribal? Bad things, that’s what.

Over the last couple of years the Digg team has looked to capitalise on all the information generated by the army of diggers, aiming to improve the algorithm so that each user sees what they are interested in. One strategy adopted was to add social networking into the mix. The thinking is simple enough: if Alice spots that Bob tends to submit interesting stuff, give her an easy way of following Bob’s activities and give the two of them a way to tip each other off about interesting stuff. Consequently Digg introduced a way to build lists of ‘Friends’ - making it easy to follow what particular users are doing and what content they are digging. It also added the ability to send a message, or ‘Shout’ to Friends.

The result was twofold. Some users began digging stories based on who submitted it, rather than the intrinsic value of the content. Networks of friends have emerged that work to promote the submissions of particular users. Of course, such concerted teamwork could happen anyway through e-mail and IM. However with friends and shouts Digg has specifically created the tools that are detrimental to the site’s core mission.

“But hang on a second”, you may be thinking - “that sounds like a good idea, letting me follow someone smart and interesting improves my experience”. You’re right. But the problem with the Digg model is when a group mutually up-vote each other’s stories, the results are non-local to that group. In other words if a cluster of Bobs and Alices have a deep interest in moth-wrangling and digg each other’s stories, it doesn’t only effect the group’s results: Carol and Dave will also see the story rise through the ranks despite the fact that they are much more interested in the latest earwig-racing news.

The addition of a social element also exacerbates the “power user problem”. These are users who build large networks and therefore manage to drive large numbers of stories to the front page. The bête noir of many users are power users who spot stories submitted by someone else and re-submit it as their own - usually leaving the original submission in the dust. It’s leads to this kind of pitch-fork rattling story from December - and Digg’s response which you can read here.

So Digg clearly takes the issue seriously and has spent significant time tweaking its design to get around the problem. An early response was to removing the list of ‘top posters’ to reduce competition for the title of “number one Digger”. Breaking the site up into topic sections was another move designed to give users an easy way to filter content.

It has also spent a lot time tweaking its algorithms to reduce the unwanted network effects and to make it harder for network-dugg stories to hit the front page. But as the algorithm has become more sophisticated, so the conceptually simple link between number of diggs and the likelihood of hitting the front page has been lost. Users now puzzle over why some stories with large numbers of diggs never making it to the front page. The answer of course is that the stories may have been dugg, but not by the right kind of users.

Digg has tied itself in knots because of two fundamental problem with its model:

1. The number of diggs that a story receives is global - everyone sees the same number.
2. Everyone sees the same stories hit the front page (assuming they have all the sections turned on).

Unfortunately network effects mean that while everyone sees a story as having the same number of diggs, the value of each dig varies for each user: a digg from a Friend is more valuable to me than a digg by your Friend. An unprompted digg from someone is more valuable than someone who has been prompted by a friend. So the contents of my front page should be different to yours. This is a fact recognised by Digg’s recommendation engine.

So how can Digg get around this? It can’t easily. Giving everyone their own individual front page would lead to confusion, as would displaying an ‘adjusted’ digg number for each user next to each story.

Digg could simply remove the Friends and Shouts functionality and leave stories in the Upcoming voting queue anonymous until they had passed some threshold of popularity. But it won’t do that because it wants to increase its value and social networking is by far the easiest path when you have a large user-base.

Are there any major lessons here for other sites? Only this: In the vast majority of cases giving your user-base the tools to communicate is a Good Thing. The main exceptions are: (a) when your customer service and products are so bad that letting users converse will create a lynch-mob (b) when your core model requires a user to act without being biased by other users’ activity.

Before retrofitting sociality to existing site, pause for a moment. How will is the site's mechanics be affected if a sub-set of the users start acting as a coordinated mass, rather than informed individuals?

One to watch: Content Circles - a new collaboration tool

Chris Noble — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 23:58:08 +0000

Content Circles is an intriguing little company. A nine person outfit founded by a couple of Adobe/Xerox alumni, it has so far stayed under most peoples’ radars. There appear to be few if any blog entries about it and no mainstream news coverage. But the company does have a potentially nifty little tool for small and medium sized businesses to share files and collaborate on authoring them. It's just emerged from beta.

Content Circle’s basic concept is a familiar one. It lets you create multiple closed workspaces (it dubs them circles, of course), into which you can dump any kind of document. You can then invite contacts into the circle, so that they can view, contribute or edit the content depending on the role that you as circle creator assign them. Once in they can choose to be notified when content is added or changes, can add notes to documents, and use an in-circle IM system.

Yes, its another approach to doing away with the old e-mail attachment shuffle and there is no shortage of cheap and cheerful approaches; DropBox, Google Docs… or Sharepoint, if cheap doesn’t really appeal.

However Content Circles is unusual in it takes a peer-to-peer approach to the data and is written as a desktop Java application. So there is no central repository for the files, instead each member of the circle holds copy of the files locally in the application. Drag a file or folder into a circle window and the data is copied into the application and then synced across the network to the rest of the membership. If they are offline, then the data is synced as soon as they reappear, from whichever members are online. If everyone is offline, well it is possible to set up a machine as a dedicated store-and-forward server.

The application also hosts a real-time chat pane for circle participants as well as the ability to tag and add comments to files. Here's an annotated screen-shot from the company:

There are some nice touches - you’ll notice above that I said dragging a file on to the application copies it into the circle - so the existing file sits untouched on your machine. But what happens when the version held within CC is altered? First the application makes a new revision and keeps it with previous versions. Secondly it flags up that the version inside the application now differs from the original sitting on your machine and lets you update the original with a couple of mouse clicks.

Another nice touch is the application’s ability to link to Google Docs and Sharepoint servers, so that documents can be pulled in from those sources, edited collaboratively within Content Circles and the Synced back out.

Annoyances and questions

The 1.0.1 release has a few niggles in it: The Google Docs function won’t work for anyone in the UK or Germany simply because the application automatically appends @gmail.com to the end of username credentials. Fine, except that in the UK and Germany, Google is forced to use googlemail, not gmail. Content Circles says that this bug would be fixed in the next release.

Will it work in a corporate enterprise environment? If Content Circles reminds me of anything at all, it is of a stripped down Groove. Groove was the brainchild of Lotus Notes creator Ray Ozzie and used a peer-to-peer approach to sync files, discussions, all kinds of data between clients. Now I haven’t used Groove since both it and Ozzie were snapped up by Microsoft in, so I don’t know how Microsoft Groove has evolved 2007 . But the original free app combined a lovely idea with a somewhat flawed implementation - it was bloated and syncing often worked, but sometimes didn’t, resulting in a lot of ‘could you re-sync at your end?’ IM conversations.

I wouldn’t want to paint CC with the Groove brush, but it naturally makes me cautious. Particularly since I haven’t tested it in a proper business environment so I don’t know how it copes with traversing firewalls or how it scales or how much network traffic a large installation dumps into the corporate LAN. These are all issues that can make peer-to-peer a pig in the enterprise and can cripple an apparently good idea. On the sync'ing side at least things look hopeful. Whereas the early Groove was purely peer-to-peer, Content Circle's firewall-traversing abilities are mediated by a "rendevous service" running on the company's own servers according to CEO Sri Chilukuri.

Another thing that will add confidence is the ability to see how others are fairing in the field. Content Circles doesn’t currently have a support forum for users to swap experiences, so you can't get an intuitive feel for how deployments are going. The company says that is set to change.

Subscription based pricing

Lastly, pricing. Content Circles is using a subscription model to sell its product. Passive “circle members” - users who merely want to partake in a circle - can use a free copy, but users who want the ability to set up new circles (be a “circle owner”) and use a few of the more sophisticated abilities such as Sharepoint integration will need to pay - $24.95 per month or $249.50 per year. New users get a 30 day trial period during which they can use all the facilites including circle creation.

Personally, I don’t mind the subscription model when I’m paying for a service, but here the subscription felt artificial when I first tested the app - my personal preference would have been for a standard software license. However Sri Chilukuri argues that there is a substantial service element, with the important directory service (for authentication and security), as well as firewall traversal being dependent on Content Circle's servers.

You may be wondering what happens if you set up some circles, use them and then let the owners' subscription lapse. The answer - the circles are frozen; the content may be accessed, but no new content, tags, notes etc. may be added. Renewing the subscription, 'defrosts' the owner's circles once more. It's an interesting model and one that at least means that, should something befall this small company your content is at least retrievable.

This is definitely a company and a product worth watching.

Google Friend Connect v Facebook Connect = chalk v cheese - at the moment

Chris Noble — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 16:24:41 +0000

I’ve been helping a couple of people sort out their customer-facing sites recent and the same question has popped up: Google Friend Connect or FaceBook Connect? When Myspace weighed in with MySpaceID and promised to interoperate with Google Friend Connect, the questions multiplied. So as Christmas approaches, let me lean back against this mahogany fireplace, place my sherry carefully upon it and and expound for a moment.

Most of the initial debates that I’ve seen on suggest that this is an immediate battle and that Google/Facebook are going head-to-head with comparable systems. Not so, in my opinion. While they both broadly aim to make Web sites more social, the offerings are in many respects very, very different. That may change in the future, but here’s the summary of where we are now:

Google Friend Connect

A Quick and dirty addition of social widgets to a Web site. Doesn’t really integrate into the existing site. Currently lacks an API, but expect that to change one day.

Pros

* Good for Non-coders with smaller sites who just want to cut and paste a widget in.
* Good for creating broad, loose networks.
* Expect to see wide availability of wide selection of apps (gadgets) as existing OpenSocial authors tweak their offerings.
* Open-ish - based upon OAuth, OpenSocial and OpenID.
* Support from Myspace, but limited details on integration at the moment.

Cons

* No API, so very limited ability to integrate social information into the mainstream site.
* Log-in is not integrated into the main site at the moment. So expect dual log-ins if your site already has user accounts.
* Not all OpenSocial apps work unmodified.

Facebook Connect

A more powerful system that allows integrated log-on and integration into an existing site thanks to its API. Implementation is more complex than Google Friend Connect.

Pros

* Proper single-sign-in tying site and social aspects together.
* Activity on your site can show up in users’ Facebook feeds - a nice viral way to promote the site.
* A full API giving site designers flexibility.
* Facebook users have to use their real names on your site. (Added veracity)

Cons

* More complex to implement.
* Tightly tied to the fortunes of Facebook.
* Facebook users have to use their real names on your site. (They might not want to)

The main advantages of Google Friend Connect is that a quick cut’n paste of some code is all that’s needed to integrate an open OpenSocial application (Google calls them gadgets) into your site. At the moment only a subset of OpenSocial applications worth in the Friend Connect environment Users can interact with these widgets using their existing Google, Yahoo, AOL, or OpenID credentials.

The relative simplicity of using the Google offering is already garnering benefits for the company. Twitter’s recent announcement of support for Google Friend Connect (A user can log in to a GFC-enabled site using their Twitter credentials) was initially this was seen as rejection of Facebook. But “not so” says Twitter in its blog. It’s just that integration with Facebook Connect and MySpaceID are still works in progress that “will require some development effort on our part.”

In the future expect to see Google make its offering more powerful (I would expect an API) and Facebook to help make its more simple. Already it has added a directory of plug-ins that allow popular blog and Wiki packages to work with Connect.

And what of MySpaceID? To be honest it still appears something of a closed book to me since it really hasn’t launched properly yet. It is holding out the promise of synchronization of social activity back to a user’s Myspace page, but isn’t there yet. It's not even absolutely clear how the promised interaction between MySpaceID and Google Friend Connect will work in practice. I’d hold fire until more details emerge.

I'll be revisiting this topic in the future to look at exactly how much knowledge you lose about your userbase by implementing something like Facebook Connect.

In the meantime - have a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Collaborative blogging tool Skribit readying new 'Pro' features.

Chris Noble — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 13:37:51 +0000

Writer's block is a perennial problem - the average corporate blogger has lots of interesting information tied up in their noggin. But how do they navigate the boundless seas of half-formed blog ideas and steer themselves towards the safe port of.... splosh... oops, my metaphor seems to have sunk. Never mind.

Anyway, Skribit is a handy, free widget that can be integrated into any blog with the minimum of fuss. It lets readers propose topics for the blogger to write about, and it lets other readers vote on these ideas.

At first glance, you might think "so what - topics are often suggested in post comments anyway?" This is true. However the typically blogging set-up reinforces an author-reader divide,. The blogger gets the big headline and large type-face text, the readers get the little comments tucked away. The use of something like Skribit helps break down the barrier and brings the blogger's desire for interaction front-and-centre. And of course the blog author can always 'fly a kite' or two - proposing their own topics and watching how the voting goes.

Currently, the widget is implemented as an IFrame, and as you can see with the sample to the right, the styling it allows is a little rough-and ready. Its Javascript is also rather on the chunky side, which can slow page loading. However some changes are in the works, first there is a new, lightweight version of the widget in development, which allows it to be styled using a blog's own CSS. Secondly there are moves afoot to try and put a business model for Skribit in place.

Skribit doesn't look like a company yet, it hasn't apparently taken any VC financing and comprises three people: Student-founder Paul Stamatiou, developer-founder Calvin Yu and Lance Weatherby who is "Venture Catalyst" at Georgia Tech. and who appears to have a mentoring role.

However, it will start beta-testing a Pro version of the tool next month, according to a posting on the Get Satisfaction support site. The team has even started canavassing opinion as to what features should appear in the paid-for version. So far, support for multiple blogs, suggestion moderation, analytics and increased customisation all appear to be likely candidates. That's good news since a decent revenue stream will increase the chances of a secure future for the the basic, free version.

Dabbleboard - online whiteboarding done right.

Chris Noble — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 13:33:53 +0100

In a previous life I was ‘the diagram guy’, the chap who chatted to someone about an idea and had to convert a concept into an architectural diagram. I prided myself on my ability to talk to someone on the phone, grasp the idea, and turn a draft diagram around in a few minutes, saying "you mean something like this?".
Network diagrams, software architectures, market life-cycle graphs, you name it, they were all grist to my mill.

I still do that kind of thing now, on occasion. If you're in a similar position, Dabbleboard may prove a lifesaver.

It’s a shared collaborative white board. There are no shortage of those out there, but one that is designed in such a way to be effortlessly powerful. Using the UI, I think to myself - why didn’t anyone else think of doing it that way.

The usual problem with mouse-based whiteboarding is that the results usually look like those of a 3 year-old. While it is possible to get that niave look, by using the freehand mode, in the alternative mode Dabbleboard will try to guess the shape you’re drawing and clean it up. Something that looks vaguely squarish, rectangular or triangular all get instantly converted into a clean vector shapes that can be resized, repositioned and transformed. It keeps drawing very fluid… and fast. I am particularly fond of the duplication function. Click on a shape and various ‘handles’ with different functions appear around it. One of these, lets you copy a figure. simply by dragging on the handle. This is a nice example of how a tiny bit of usabilty work can give a piece of software an undefinable feeling of class. Copy and Paste isn’t hard, ctrl-drag to copy is nice, but this drag-to-copy method is lovely.

Other nice features? A simple API which lets you embed a whiteboard into any page and the ability to construct (and publicly share) libraries of shapes, such as UI widgets.
Here's a demo:

At this point I would normally indulge in a bit of constructive criticism, but there’s really not much to add. It’s fast, slick and nice to use. It’s also free. Developer Zohair Hyder says that there will be a paid version with corporate-friendly features SSL, access control, etc.) in the future. But the free version will remain, with at least the same feature-set as we see today.

Protoshare - a collaborative way to produce clickable wireframes.

Chris Noble — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 23:26:41 +0100

Sometime last year I came across a little article by the Newfangled Web Factory about how they used “Grayscreen Prototypes” - clickable wireframes with some of the elements, such as menus, and text-links live. “That’s a nice idea” I thought, before deciding to leave the mock-ups to the Web developers, working from my specs and wireframes.

Well, now a tool has popped up which promises to anyone capable of creating a wireframe, to turn it into a prototype with enough functionality built in so that a client can experiment with the navigation scheme and get a real feel for how the site works.

It was a commenter to this blog - indeed the only comment in the life of this blog so far - which asked whether I had looked at Protoshare, a relatively new online tool from Site9. I hadn't. But when 100% of your active audience suggests something, it seems churlish not to take a peek.

To get a decent understanding of what Protoshare is all about, it is worth looking at the tutorial videos. It's a slick subscription-based Web tool that allows developers to:

1. Create hierarchical lists of pages (aka site maps) and then:
2. Create wire-frame clickable mock-ups with working menus etc. for each page
3. Set up a collaborative discussion, where developers and clients can discuss and annotate the wireframes.

Overall, I like it. I have some niggles with usability, the pricing model and the support structure, but hopefully these can be ironed out as the product matures. There’s a 30 day free trial - give it a go. Though beware, you have to enter your credit card details and remember to send an e-mail asking to cancel, if you don’t want to be billed.

Being a curmudgeon, I’m going to focus on my dislikes first. One problem with building any drag-and-drop wireframe tool is the constant demand from users for additional drag-and-drop widgets. Some user is always going to want to place a volume-slider, or some such into their mock-up. That user is me. Even so, s it stands, Protoshare’s selection feels a little thin - there are no horizontal or vertical rules, no support for tabbed navigation and no palette of little icons, to let you (say) drop in an RSS feed button. Of course it’s possible to insert your own graphic assets into a wireframe, but who wants to bother with that, for fairly common items.

Similarly, styling of textual elements is a mixed bag. If you create a box to hold rich-text, Protoshare gives you the works - font, size, colour, style can all be selected on a per-word basis. However, if you want to make the text of your bread-crumb trail smaller, or want to decrease the font-size of your navigation bar so that the text doesn’t wrap, you’re on your own. It's true that Protoshare lets you attach custom CSS styles to elements to control all aspects of their look and feel, but it doesn’t give you any CSS tools, just a ‘type your CSS in here’ page. As a lazy IA, I don’t want to bother with code a CSS style to make my text fit on screen.

And while entering the initial page hierarchy for a new site is a joy, why does the software have to make me mouse across to a separate Title box for every single new page? That gets irksome after the twentieth time. The box should be pre-selected as a page is created since the first thing that most people want to do is rename it.

On the other hand the collaboration system looks very nicely designed. Pages can have discussions attached to them and those discussions can have draggable push-pins associated with them (as illustrated above) to make it easy to see which part of the page they refer to. Each user can opt in and out of notifications when a discussion is initiated or added to.
Alongside the push-pins, ‘specification’ markers can be added. These act as ‘callouts’ giving the developer a place to explain the functionality of a particular page element.

Since this is a Web-hosted application, pricing is per licensed user per month. In effect this makes it a good tool for two groups:

1. An in-house enterprise team, which is developing a new site and may need the system intensively for a month or six, after which the subscription can be jettisoned
2. The dedicated high-end Web development house, which has a number of projects continuously on the go.

It is not particularly attractive to consultants, for whom prototyping is a task that crops up every few months, but stop-start licensers are unlikely to be on Protoshare’s list of top customers.

One area where the company really should move to make improvements, however is support. This is a Web-based tool, built on the premise that collaboration is important, and yet there is little effort to collaborate with customers. At this stage of the product’s life-cycle, I would expect to see a buzzing discussion board with the developers asking for feedback, finding out what the users’ priorities for improvement are and telling the users what developments are coming next. At the very least these online discussions act as a place for users to self-support and share hints and tips. Instead there’s a blog with comments turned off, and a rather thin FAQ. If you have a question, the e-mail form simply promises that a Customer Service representative will get back to you.

Site9’s marcoms team is missing a trick here, with little additional effort they could be collecting data on how to continuously improve their offering, cementing the engagement of their existing user-base and impressing potential visitors with their responsiveness to customers. Perhaps they are just concentrating on super-servicing the super-big accounts, but even they will have "how do I" questions that are often best answered by fellow users.

Post Scriptum.
A couple of days after writing this entry Dave DeAngelis, Site9's Director of Product Experience got in touch to say that the company is planning to improve it's Web support in November. He also pointed out that the mouse-averse can tab across to the Title field when naming a page, but likes the suggestion of leaving the page name pre-selected on creation.

Dropbox in the enterprise? Not just yet.

Chris Noble — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 12:36:15 +0100

It's been in invite-only beta since late last year, and I've been playing with it for the last 3 months. But now Dropbox, the "let's make file-syncing and sharing really simple" company has finally announced that it is open for business. The announcement caused quite a stir on blogs and discussion boards, with generally very positive response. But should you use it for business purposes?

The idea is deceptively simple. Install the software - available for Mac, Windows and now Linux and it creates an ordinary-looking folder/directory in your home directory called, yes that's right: dropbox. Any files or folders you dump in there can be shared and synced with other drop-box users, or shared via a Web URL with non drop-box users. How does it work? Files in the dropbox are pushed over the Internet to the company's system and placed on Amazon S3-based back-end storage.

The system has a variety of uses and what sets it apart is the elegant implementation and attention to detail. At it's most basic the system you to backup some files (2GB storage is free), and to access them when travelling. Alternatively, if you have multiple machines, you can keep the contents of their respective dropboxes in sync, by associating the machines with the same drop-box account. Sharing files is similarly easy and with others comes in a variety of flavours. Any file placed within the Public sub-folder is shareable over the Web by right clicking on the file and selecting 'Copy public link'. For more control, folders can also be shared with selected friends or colleagues by right-clicking and selecting “Share”. This brings up a Web page into which you type the email addresses of who you want to share the folder with. When your colleagues add files to that shared folder, they automatically get downloaded to your machine.

There are other nice little touches, such as a 'Pictures' folder, which displays in specialised gallery-form when viewed via the Web. Simply dragging photos to a local folder, has to be one of the easiest ways of creating a public photo gallery that I know.The cost? 2Gigs of storage are free, and this can be expanded to 50GB for $9.99/month, or $99.99/year.

The software has immediate applicability to small work-groups or small business collaboration. It is copes in a robust-if-not-brilliant manner if two people try to edit the same shared file simultaneously: Only the first version to fully make it to the server is kept, the other machines get copies of the conflicted file with a suffix, indicating the conflict and the users have to manually fix the conflict before removing the extra copies of the conflicted file.

It also implements version control, allowing users to restore previous versions of amended or deleted files.

As a way of sharing information in a small group of skunk-works project, it's a very nice solution. But the software isn't really suitable for wider enterprise deployment, mainly due to security and management issues. That actually represents an opportunity for Dropbox.

Security and management, not quite there yet.

In terms of physical security, there is the obvious concern about letting your valuable data sit around in the cloud. At least, in this case your data isn't held hostage - if Dropbox were to fall under a bus, your data would still exist on your machine. But what about encryption?

As it stands, the company's FAQ explains that "All transport of file data and file metadata occurs over SSL. Files are encrypted with AES-256 before being stored on our backend.". Unfortunately (unlikely, online back-up company Mozy, for example) the company does not let you specify your own encryption key, which means that notionally they (and anyone who convinces them that they shoudl cough up your data) could have access to your data). The company says that it "eventually" plans to offer this, and points out quite reasonably that there is nothing to stop you from placing encrypted disk images in the dropbox for additional password protected security.

In terms of compliance... well, I'll leave it as an exercise for your imagination to visualise the colour of a compliance offer's face when faced with some software that "allows me to right-click and create a public Web link, though the firewall to a folder on my PC". Who would have thought a human could turn that hue and survive?

Some people have also raised issues about the company's terms of service I'm not a lawyer and a cursory glance doesn't reveal much unexpected. But knowing that by putting a file in your drop box you are granting "all other Dropbox users and the public a non-exclusive, non-commercial, worldwide, royalty-free, sublicensable, perpetual and irrevocable right and license to use and exploit Your Files" may cause some people pause for thought.

I'm in two minds as to whether Dropbox has a place in the corporate world. Much of the product's current charm is in it's simplicity and elegance, But the corporate world is going to demand more in the way of management and configurability before unleashing dropbox. Indeed any moderate size company is likely to have at least a fileserver for simple sharing, perhaps even an Exchange, Zimbra or Sharepoint system installed, which will have user roles and policies attached.

The way forward

One obvious path that Dropbox could take would be to follow the Groove Networks path. Before it was acquired by Microsoft, Groove allowed anyone to download and use its peer-to-peer file-sharing and collaboration tool for free, but then sold an management console that allowed enterprise IT to set policies, user roles etc.

Another would be to take a leaf from Google's book and produce an enterprise appliance: A simple box containing a self-contained dropbox installation which could be attached to a nice big private RAID box would remove most security concerns at a stroke, while providing a solid revenue stream.

If the company can retain the stupidly simple ease-of-use while building in the management and perhaps providing an appliance, it could find itself on an winner with medium sized businesses. In the meantime, it is fine to use in small collaborative groups, where compliance isn't an issue and where you are not storing your trade secrets or bank account details.

Update: DropBox For Teams is on the way:

It's just a rough dammit. Balsamiq to the rescue.

Chris Noble — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 21:09:47 +0100

The problem of how to communicate rough design/layout ideas is an old one. How do you find a visual way to communicate the elements that a Web page or application, while making it clear that this is not a finished design?

It's a question that has bedevilled so many designers showing a wireframe to a client or member of their own management team, that it has become an an almost Dilbert-esque cliche. After loudly intoning: "it's a rough - take no notice of the fonts or the colours", they cautiously pop something on the screen, only to find that soon enough the debate turns to - the fonts and colours.

It's too easy to make jokes about pointy-haired bosses at this stage, but the simple truth is, that most wireframes, created in tools such as Photoshop, Visio, even Powerpoint or Omnigraffle (linked because this a personal favourite) have enough polish to override the designer's verbal warnings: The human brain is very bad at ignoring things.

And it is not just non-tech management fall prey to the problem. Designers do too. I've had conversations with Information Architects in the past who have sketched out ideas for a site or interface design, only to find the designer (who is meant to be the expert) has followed the sketch altogether too slavishly.

In 2002 veteran information architecture and user experience designer Dan Brown, came up with the idea of the Page Description Diagram, an attempt to describe, in pure text the hierarchy of elements on a Web page and how they work together. An excellent idea, but one that its rarely seen in the wild.

Which is why Balsamiq mockups, is such a breath of fresh air. This is a specialised graphical tool for mocking up user interfaces and Web pages. It gives you the pre-built wireframe elements, lets you drag, drop and resize and is smart enough to to know that (for example) radio buttons can have two states and to let you simply type in the labels for tab-bars and choose the one that should appear selected. It takes away much of the grunt-work.

Written in Adobe AIR, this is a young app, and it it wasn't the snappiest in the world to begin with. But over the the last couple of months, it's extremely responsive developer Giacomo 'Peldi' Guilizzoni has cranked out the point-revisions in response to an enthusiastic user community posting enhancement ideas and bug notifications on the company's Get Satisfaction page. A one-man-band, Guilizzoni is making himself a text-book case of how to use online tools to interact with your customers.

Mockups isn't perfect - mainly, I suspect because of the quirks in AIR. On Mac OS X OS's native keyboard shortcut don't always work, for example and performance still leaves something to be desired. Nonetheless it is the quickest way that I have found to put an interface together. Moreover, alongside its standalone, desktop version, there versions available as plug-ins for Confluence, JIRA and (in development) Twiki. In other words it slots right into your collaborative workflow system.

But one place where the software scores is the output looks truly rough. And I say that as if it is a good thing - because it is. There is no way that this can be mistaken for anything other than a mock-up. The font even defaults to comic sans, for goodness sake.

Some architects/designers might feel that have is that the results look a bit amateurish, indeed they might be a bit embarrassed to put this in-front of a client. Trust me: if you carefully explain the issues and why you are using a tool that enables fast iterations of new layout possible, while also making the rough nature of the layout explicit, they are likely to 'get it'. Indeed the first client I showed it to ended up getting a licence. It is far better to undergo a little bit of pain at the start of the process, rather than endure misunderstandings throughout the project.

Why this Blog will never be popular.

Chris Noble — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 10:16:19 +0100

This then, is the first entry in the pun-tastically named Information Overlode, blog. And you, dear reader have stumbled upon it. So what's it all about?

First, I spend my working life talking to organisations about the benefits of using appropriate technology to communicate with customers, partners and employees, so not having a blog is is almost something of a faux pas. On the other hand, having a blog just for the sake of it, with no rhyme or reason is an even worse error. So like all good blog authors should, I had to consider whether this prospective blog would serve any purpose and whether it would be sustainable.

Initially then, I'll be using this blog as primarily a place for me to talk to myself and refine my thinking. As I come across useful tools, novel developments or interesting topics, I'll use this space to note, digest or analyse them. Hopefully, along the way some of these posts will be helpful to others.

"But surely", you are saying to yourself "Chris really wants this blog to be monster success with thousands of visitors and commentors every week".

It would be nice wouldn't it? It is also entirely unrealistic. And it may be instructive to examine why: This blog will break three key rules which are necessary for business or tech blogs to thrive:

1. Keep it focused, serve a well-defined community.

The best corporate blogs serve a well defined purpose and/or a well defined community. The community might be existing customers, in the case of a product support blog. The purpose could be to shape opinion about the company and engage interest in the case of a CEO's blog, but they are well focused. Which leads us to the relate point

2. Make it best-of-breed

Best of breed? Isn't that a tall order for most people?

Not really. If you are the Acme company selling Widget X, it tremendously easy for a blog to be best-of-breed. You simply make it the place where customers and potential customers learn about developments, support issues and the vision of future development. If you are feeling daring, you can even use the comments sections to back-and-forth with customers about their feelings with regards to your fabulous widget. Of course, by definition, disgruntled punters are likely to be over-represented. But with astute and intelligent handling, it is possible to publicly re-gruntle (most of) them.

3. Blog regularly

You might think that the use of RSS, Atom etc. Had obviated the need to blog regularly. But no. Most people do not currently use feeds. If you're waiting for me to give you some nice sound figures on the absolute numbers or proportion of Web users who use feeds, you are going to be disappointed. A quick browse around suggests a lack of solid research out there. But the figures that I have seen make me more than comfortable with saying that most do not.

Ergo your committed readers will only find your blog entries by regularly browsing to your site and if you regularly disappoint them by slacking off the updates visits will slowly dwindle.

Initially this blog will assuredly break all three rules. I hope it will contain interesting and valuable items, but it won't be focussed on a particular community or be strongly themed. It won't be best-of-breed in the terms outlined above, and I certainly expect a hiatus or two (or three) in the publishing schedule.

So "Welcome" and make sure that, when setting up your corporate blog you do as I say, not as I do.