After some thought (admittedly not a whole lot of thought) I hit on the idea of testing one of social media’s darling children, crowdsourcing.  Crowdsourcing is really just a way of asking a large, usually unrelated, group to provide input, ideas, or solutions.  It truly is the power of the people and nowhere can that power be better or more easily applied than online.

So my first thought was why not crowdsource this whole process?  Being the social media junkie that I am I started by posting a question on my Yammer account at work.  That’s a work in progress and I’m getting some ideas from that crowd about what I should crowdsource as a way of testing social media and the power of crowdsourcing.  Are you still with me?  The idea ,or experiment as I now call it, is to crowdsource an experiment that will either prove or disprove the value of crowdsourcing. 

That brings me to, well somewhere, but my next step is to expand my crowd-cloud and seek input from this Blog, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn because these are the communities that I belong to.  So this is step 2 and I am now seeking input from you as to what I should crowdsource…so here is what I need:

• Please provide an idea for something that I can crowd-source (something like the logo on my blog, or new product ideas).  Post your ideas as comments to this post. 
• The next step in the plan is to whittle the ideas down to one really good, but easily executable, idea and then I will move on to actually execute the idea.  Its a two-step crowdsourcing experiment.  First get the idea from all of you and then do it…not that complex really but it should be interesting.

        

After almost 2 years of trying (you can’t fault me for giving up too easily) I finally gave in and sold it to a friend who has now completely converted to a Mac household! It was liberating, I finally got rid of that one thing that was niggling at me.  Ok, well it wasn’t the only thing but it was the thing most easily removed from my life, so its gone.  Almost immediately I felt lighter, happier and full of hope.  My plan was to get me one of those shiny new Netbooks everybody is talking about.  The plan was perfect, I only needed something to browse the web, do a few emails, and maybe a bit of video Skype action.  My primary machine was, and still is, a heavy duty Dell XPS 630i with lots of grunt and a slightly flawed operating system so my laptop didn’t need to be a big powerful machine…or so I thought!

After a bit of a wait I got my Dell Mini 1210 machine about 2 weeks ago.  Its the 12″ netbook variety.  I popped it out of the box, booted it up and within an hour it was loaded with what I need, connected to my network, and sharing my iTunes library, my printer, and my ADSL connection flawlessly (I’d like to see anyone do that with a windows network and a Mac! Hah!)

But that is where the joy ends.  After a couple weeks getting used to the slightly smaller than normal keyboard the thing I can’t get used to, refuse to accept, and can’t figure out how to remedy, is that it just doesn’t have the processing power to do what it is advertised to do.  I’m not running MS Office or any resource heavy applications.  I’m not playing PC games or MMP’s or even running a lot of video.  I just want to browse the web without it slowing to a halt every 2 minutes or locking up because I refreshed a page. 

In the end, I’ll probably get rid of that too and settle down with a nice comfortable mid-range laptop. Its too bad though, the netbook craze really seems to be much ado about nothing.  Without the processing power to be of real day-to-day use I don’t really see the value even if they are cheap.

        

Like any other initiative in an organisation you need to follow a tried and true process:

1. Plan a strategy with demonstrable results (hint: they don’t have to be revenue generating results and they don’t have to be earth shattering.  A positive result that is demonstrable will usually do)
2. Don’t bite off more than you can chew.  A simple plan executed well will drive success more than a larger than life plan that takes years to resolve or is too complex.  In the end it will slow you down. 
3. Be quiet.  There is no need to broadcast your activities to the whole world.  A small plan usually means a small audience.  Target your audience well and build slowly from there.
4. Be agile.  While executing a strategy is important don’t be afraid to let the market take you where it wants to go.  Remember you’re trying to drive usage and cultural change, you can’t force these things. 
5. Stick to the rules.  Internal policy and social media etiquette should guide you
6. Always, always have a backup.  Two or three is even better.  If the market says what you’re doing isn’t working you better have alternatives or you’re dead in the water. 
7. Keep at it and eventually the results can be used to generate increased awareness and, if necessary, budget in order to build on your success.

Most social media strategies don’t require a lot of money or resources to execute.  The beauty of social media is that its mostly free, mostly accessable, and mostly easy to start on your own.  Building a loyal, if not small, initial following is the first milestone.  Target internal and external users who are most likely to support your strategy.  They don’t even have to be part of your industry, just find people willing to participate in the conversation and then work from there.  The key is to have a following that is dedicated enough to keep coming back and contributing to the conversation.  In time the conversation will naturally progress and grow if it’s maintained.

        

While WP is a fantastic free and open source environment for creating websites it seems to have a missing piece.  As I found out immediately WP is currently geared toward 2 communities.  The first is the complete novice and for them WP is a great quick solution that offers just enough to let you produce a reasonable site.  It doesn’t offer much customisation but you can get something out there with little experience and even less complication.  The other community is geared toward the more hard-core developers out there who understand the development languages that are utilized to program a site.  PHP and CSS (or Cascading Style Sheets) are scripting languages used to define the look, feel, and action of a web page.  PHP requires at least a basic understanding of programming in order to pull from it the value that it can really deliver.  Clearly over my head! CSS is designed to be a little less daunting but still requires at least a bit of education before you can make it do anything more than change the colour of text.  So, you ask, what about those of us who want a bit more than basics but aren’t genuine code monkey’s?    The answer turns out to be very unclear.

After much searching and a whole lot of cursing the day I plunked down my credit card I found something of a bridge between the two communities.  For a fee (like everything else that solves a problem) you can buy certain WP themes that come with a complete set of settings that make the changes to the PHP and CSS files for you.  All you need to do is select the setting you’d like to change from a pre-set list, what you want to change it to and it makes the changes for you.  Unfortunately finding a theme that has both the look & feel & functionality you want, as well as, having the settings pre-defined isn’t that easy.  I got lucky and someone suggested a theme to me that turned out to have 90% of what I was looking for.  A little effort on my part, a little help from some friends and the online forum from the theme developer, and now I am about 95% there.  The theme cost me $US95 but saved me from having a custom developer create one from scratch which would run several thousand dollars so it was worth it.

In the end, a little elbow grease, a little luck, and a little money got me almost all the way home.  It’s not a perfect solution so I think there is room for the WP community to further bridge the gap and release more themes with pre-defined settings.  In time, I think that’s exactly what will happen.

        

Hosting: after much research locally and internationally, including a failed attempt to scam my way into free hosting, I settled on GoDaddy.com  primarily due to cost (about AU$7/mo), the availability of easily accessable online tools, and (this was the kicker) a local free contact phone number that actually connects back to GoDaddy in the US, pretty slick customer service really.  Next came choosing a domain.  Again after some research I settled on GoDaddy.  In this case I was interested in a .com name rather than a .com.au domain so the combination of global domain registry and price (I registered a few but you can get names from $US 1.99/year) convinced me.  If I was smart I would have gone with a package deal that gives you hosting and a couple of free domains, another lesson learned but more on this later.  

The next step was easy but boring so I won’t go into detail.  Using the GoDaddy online terminal I was able to automatically download and install the latest version of  Wordpress which meant I was, in theory, all set up and ready to go.  THIS is where the fun begins…almost immediately I started to regret the committment I had just made.  In order to justify my whopping AU$130ish expenditure I felt obliged to make something happen quickly.  Big mistake, and one I will elaborate on over the next few posts.

        

For those of you who don’t know Wordpress.com   it is a very simple, and easy to use online toolset that allows you to be up and running with a simple blog very quickly.  This site is built on wordpress.com and over the last 6 months I’ve come to enjoy the fact that I can concentrate on the editorial content of my site, still having a few stylistic choices, and not have to worry about hosting, domain registration, and web design.  However, I have increasingly been looking to add more features, more capability and more personal style to my site.  While the free capabilities of wordpress.com were great for me when I knew nothing more than that I wanted to voice an opinion online I am now feeling a bit restricted by its lack of customisation. 

That brings us to the more advanced Wordpress option found at Wordpress.org.  To be honest, I’ve already stepped up to this option and am now questioning if it was the right move.  Let me explain; In order to have more choice in styles, themes, functionality, metrics tracking, security and the option to monetise my site, I needed to secure and purchase a domain & pay for someone to host that domain.  That was relatively easy.  I chose my preferred domain (well my second choice anyway) and then did a bit of research and opted for GoDaddy.com to host my site.  In the end, and to be fair, it wasn’t long until I exported my current content to the new domain, chose a theme, and had the new site up and running.    And that is when I first started to notice that Grand Canyon sized gap between the two offerings. 

The completely free offering for beginners doesn’t offer me enough flexibility and choice and the hosted domain offering has so much flexibility and choice that you need at least a basic level of skill at CSS and/or HTML.  Oh, and I should mention that you’ll need a heckuva lot more time to build that custom blog site, we’re talking days/weeks vs. hours to get it right.   In the end, there doesn’t seem to be middle option.  I’m talking about something that provides me with modularisation and admin simplicity while still giving me more than just a few basic theme options.  I want to concentrate more on my content  and a bit less on skimming the style sheet to find out exactly where the dang image file should be placed without creating a fatal error (I did that at least 19 times!)  

So, where does this leave me? Do I continue to contribute on a casual basis using basic free tools, or do I step up a bit and make a more concerted effort to learn more about CSS and create a professional blog site?  Then there is option 3: I could always pay someone much smater than me to do it for me. I’m looking into option 3 so we’ll see how that goes. 

In the end it comes down to two questions: 1) What am I trying to do here, simply get my point of view out there or 2) am I looking to build the most professional and entertaining site possible?  For the technically literate these positions aren’t mutually exclusive.  However for me, someone who seems to bring out the worst in the machines I so heavily rely on, these questions seem be at the intersection of too much and too little.

        

The advent of social media coupled with the average teenagers lust for attention means that many things that used to be private to us old folks just aren’t private to the average Gen. Y’er.  Over the last few years MySpace, FaceBook, Bebo etc. etc. etc. have seen people (initially kids but now just about anybody) posting their most personal thoughts, images, and attributes for the world to see and judge.  While many decry this as the end of civilisation as we know it, I think its the natural progression of things.  To some extent the more people present their previously private data the less of a problem it becomes. 

We’ve all experienced data overload as our email, text message, and instant message inboxes have become increasingly full.   At some point data overload leads to a form of invisibility.  You essentially get lost in the data and it all becomes a bunch of X’s and O’s and 1’s and 2’s.  In the personal data space data overload = anonymity.  Evenutally so much information will be available about so many people that you’ll stop noticing and then stop looking and finally stop caring. 

Of course there are notable exceptions.  Once the privacy shield drops to a low enough level we could be faced with forms of discrimination based on what we’ve said about ourselves online.  For example, health insurance companies might be tempted use facebook entries detailing long histories of alchohol related stories to cancel, modify, or increase health insurance premiums or policies.  Its going to happen sooner or later and I predict legislation will eventually be enacted to protect us from ourselves. 

However the point is we’ve been down this road before and the juggernaut can’t and won’t be stopped.  If you think back 5-6 years many people were screaming about online credit card purchases being unsafe.  In truth, your local waiter was more likely to steal your credit details than an online retailer but it took a few years for people to get comfortable with the idea.  Eventually, online shopping grew to the point where the benefits outweighed the risks and now you almost never hear about it.  The same thing is going to happen with privacy.  Eventually those people who can’t get their heads around the new world (wide web) order will either fade away, stop caring, or just die off! We’ll be left with what Gen. Y grows into and they won’t even remember a day when people didn’t put every last detail of their lives online.  Society will adjust, as it always does, and the world will continue to move forward. 

You can find more about me at:

Michael Bromley on LinkedIn

Michael Bromley on FaceBook

Michael Bromley on Twitter

        

There are several models for how this might happen.  Creating a virtual IT storehouse on the web where many IT functions, hardware, and services are wholly controlled by the enterprise is deemed an Internal Cloud.  In many ways this is the “baby step” approach advocated by those who beleive IT groups will resist any change to their authority or control.  While  providing on-demand resources, pay-as-you-go pricing, and the appearance of infinite scalability, a private cloud doesn’t quite provide the economies of scale that you might see from an approach that “upsources” the whole shebang to a Public Cloud. 

A Public Cloud is a more radical and controversial approach.  By almost completely eliminating the requirements of a traditional IT department in favour of a publicly maintained environment, an organisation could limit their IT department to simple management of data via an access method as simple as a browser or similar terminal application.   This is a revolutionary approach as compared with the evolutionary approach of an Internal Cloud.  While economies of scale and overall cost reduction are chief benefits, other risks such as security do remain. 

This leads many to the inevitable conclusion that the answer is to take the public cloud and cordon off a place for the enterprise to access and control.  The idea of  “upsourcing” to the web but still maintaining control is called a Private Cloud.  A Private Cloud takes advantage of some of the economies of scale that the Public Cloud offers but retains some of the security and control of an Internal Cloud at a more reasonable cost.  Resources may be owned by the enterprise, consumed from a public cloud provider, or some combination of the two.

My view is that Private Cloud’s will evolve into what I call a Virtual Private Cloud.  Private Cloud’s still carry a higher cost than a completely public cloud and so the unending quest to reduce cost will drive data to become dispersed into the public domain but retain security and access rights.  This won’t happen overnight as a lack of security protocols and the inertia of today’s IT departments will resist it until their last dying gasps.   But eventually, as it always does, efficiency and cost reduction will win out and all of our data will be thrown into the wind to be gathered into the cloud for your consumption on demand.

        

Now that the Web has nearly reached the drinking age  (the US drinking age anyway) it makes sense to look at how she has grown up over the last 20 years.  For those of you who didn’t already know Tim Berners-Lee and the team at CERN invented the World Wide Web  in 1989 to make information easier to publish and access on the internet.  FYI, the terms Internet and World Wide Web are often used in every-day speech without much distinction. However, the Internet and the World Wide Web are not one and the same. The Internet is a global data communications system. It is a hardware and software infrastructure that provides connectivity between computers. In contrast, the Web is one of the services communicated via the Internet. It is a collection of interconnected documents and other resources, linked by hyperlinks and URLs.

Other key milestones along the way include Marc Andreesen (later of Netscape and AOL) launching the first web-browser “for the people” called Mosaic in 1993.  Mosaic introduced proprietary HTML tags and more imaging capabilities making the web a visual experience for the first time.  In 1994 “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web” is renamed Yahoo! and received 100,000 visitors.  In 1995, it began displaying ads.  In 1996  The browser wars begin. Microsoft sees the internet as a threat and integrates Internet Explorer with Windows.  Netscape and Microsoft go head-to-head, and an arms race of features begins.  Two years later, in 1998, Google arrives and creates a ranking system that uses links to assess a website’s popularity.

Then comes Y2K and chaos.  Oddly enough the catastrophe many expected to occur just after midnight December 31, 1999 never happened but a more sinister and game changing disaster does occur.  The bubble, that was the seemingly never-ending increase in dot.com stock prices, bursts amid the realisation, among other things, that many web-based businesses had no business model and could not sustain themselves.  This is a defining moment and ultimately leads to the death of what later becomes known as web 1.0.  The web as a bill-board, a place to post information and shout at your audience, has failed.  Well, not failed really, but it has reached puberty and gone through some tough growing pains along the way.  Like many early teens, the web goes through an awkward stage.  Dial-up connections make using the web as anything more than a bullhorn difficult and clumsy.  However, in time, broadband connections begin to shed light on a new vision for the world wide web.  By 2004 broadband begins to displace dial-up for active users and the web begins to reinvent itself. Tim O’reilly coins the phrase Web 2.0 and a new socially connected era begins.  As 2007  rolls around the top 20 connected countries in the world have broadband penetration over 20% and by 2008 the US eclipses the 50% mark.  As broadband becomes more popular, media companies see selling music and video online as a real business rather than a novelty.  Apple iTunes becomes the #1 music retailer in the US surpassing retail giant Walmart.

Now that most of us are nearly “always on” the next evolutionary step comes with the birth of social media which takes advantage of the now socially connected web which has been well documented.  No doubt enterprise social media will follow leaving us all connected with our friends, families, colleagues and strangers if we like.  So what’s next?  Where does the web, now in early adulthood, go from here? The answer is up in the clouds! As the era of “cloud” computing begins my next post will take a look at cloud computing and how I think it will evolve in the coming months.  Stay tuned.

Special thanks to Sean McManus who’s “Short History of the Internet” provided material for this post.