Web next?

I can't stop returning to the question about web 3.0, or web n+1, or web next. Everyone has the same problem today - they can contribute to many different places in web 2.0 - blogs (how many different options?), flickr, youtube, facebook, myspace, bebo, ning, twitter, linkedin, and so on...

But how to decide which ones to update, when? How to decide which ones to follow for updates from your social and professional network?

The answer is pretty simple - there is NO real answer today! Tomorrow I will be able to go to a single screen (remember the first time you used netscape browser?), and instead of looking for information I will be able to share information without having to decide where it should go - that's what clever software should do, decide based on the characteristics of what I am sharing, perhaps suggesting tags and/or destinations which I can then edit if I have changes I wish to make.

We were working on something similar to this inside Sun before I left there, and hopefully that development will some day reach the light of day in an open format which can be used by a broader audience. Until then, you might follow Peter Reiser's blog in blogs.sun.com for further developments, or provide your own suggestions of where this work is being done.

Life Options

I've been taking some time in the last couple of months to explore the future, and what I would like it to look like.

• I took a terrific trip on my motorcycle through Northern California (I kept promising people I would post photos...and here they are in flickr. Here's one sample to get you interested ).
  
• I flew to Utah and met my friends Peg and Steve for some dirt biking and hiking around Moab (yet more photos posted. Another sample).
• I took an excellent 2-day course on life options (hence the title of this entry) - it provided me with some terrific insights which I am still processing, but will share a little here (tho no photos...)

Perhaps the most important questions I have faced are what would I like to do more of, and what would I like to do less of, over the next 30-40 years. I have a few answers now, and will continue to work on more in the coming weeks/months/years:

MORE:

• Spend time with family and friends
• Do interesting things as "work" (whether paid or not) which helps people - could be co-workers, customers, management, others - just something which makes someone's life easier/better/more fun
  
• See new places, ideally with Carol, Olivia and some of our family/friends - we have never yet had a bad trip - some challenging experiences, but overall always glad we went
• Re-visit some previous places - there are few places we have been that we have used up!
• Take time to just "be" - on the 2 trips I took, I was moving too much, for some good reasons, but still...you need to sometimes just sit, without talking, music, TV, etc. and just "be". Moab was so incredibly quiet, but I didn't give that quiet time to really penetrate.
• Skiing, tennis, volleyball, bike riding, scuba, motorcycle riding - more of the same. I think I have gotten some clear indications from a supreme being that I am not meant to sky dive or heli-ski, so those are probably out. Mountain biking is probably just too tough for this tenderfoot. The jury is still out on dirt biking - lots of fun, but sooo tiring.
  

LESS:

• Time spent trying to convince people to change their minds, or priorities - that's not me. I can help you accomplish what you want done; I can't convince you that a good idea of mine is something you should consider important - you get it or you don't.
• TV - this is a tough one, as those who know me will attest, but it has to be done. Help me here, folks.
• Internet - extremely valuable and vital to lots of what I want to do, but too much time spent on information which is "interesting" but not necessary to read. This is also my excuse for limited blogging.
  
• Current events - learning about murders, or robberies, or celebrities in trouble, or even social/political issues - only when/if they are very directly related to me, or my involvement can make a difference. Perhaps another way of saying think globally, act locally, but it really means narrower focus.

That's enough for today - hopefully more enlightenment to come.

How valuable is information?

There's a lot of discussion about sharing information, and some of it focuses on how to measure the value of the information. This is a vital question, because it costs time and money to improve how we share information. If you can show a value, it can justify the expense.

There are numerous ways you can measure this value, and it actually varies depending on the information being shared and the purpose the users have for it. If the information is seen that may be considered valuable, or if it's downloaded, or if it's actually reused. Likewise the feedback from users - a rating of the value, or even an estimate of the time they saved, can be used to measure value.

My aim was to create a single value indicator, from a combination of factors, with as little extra effort as possible. Display the value to potential future users, to help them decide which information they want to look at. Let them see the details if they want, so that they can determine whether the factors which contributed to this indicator are significant to them.

The result has just been published as a research disclosure - my understanding is that rather than go to the expense of filing for a patent, by filing such a disclosure we protect the ideas that we created. Check it out, ask any question, provide me with feedback.

SUNW = JAVA; What's in a name?

When I first heard this I was shocked and disappointed.

Shocked because, as a Sun employee, I thought we deserved a heads-up before it was public (still waiting for an update on why that did not happen)

Disappointed because I felt it was sending a message to lots of loyal Sun employees that "the hard work you have done to make Sun relevant in the marketplace has not been enough, and we need to change stock symbols so that people can find us"

Having read the earlier comments, I now feel OK - the company is still Sun.

How many people "discovered" Sun because its stock symbol was SunW = 0.

How many MIGHT discover us because of the linkage with JAVA = >0. That's enough for me. Don't get the company's name and reputation mixed up with the stock symbol - that's a mistake I was making, and now I'm over it.

CEpedia OneStop CE 2.0 - what's this all about?

There are @3200 CEpedia users, @2500 OneStop users and many of them (you?) want to know what's happening with those 2 systems and what is CE 2.0.

Right about now most non-Sun employees may have tuned out, but just bear with me for a moment here and it might be worth your while (and if it isn't, what a wonderful opportunity to flame me, or whatever the current term is!)

Basically CEpedia and OneStop are 2 different systems we use at Sun to try and improve the information sharing within our customer-facing technical community. There's alot of information in most of their heads and/or laptops, and we are constantly trying to help them share it with each other so that our customers benefit - better answers to their questions such as "how would I..." or "have you ever...?"

OneStop today is a typical website - a collection of html pages which are editable by their owners. Terrific content because of the passion and knowledge of their owners.author, but sometimes a little out of date because those authors are either busy solving customer challenges or else working on new Sun products/services/solutions.

CEpedia is a wiki we established a year ago to support our Customer Engineers (CEs) - kind of like Wikipedia (do i need a tm here?) for CEs. It has the advantage of wikis - easy to update by anyone who can access, so it can be kept very much up to date.

Now if I haven't lost the non-Sun audience, here's where I think it gets more interesting. Our plan is to:

• merge OneStop and CEpedia into a wiki with access control so that not just anyone can edit everything (after all, you wouldn't want me to be updating anything remotely approaching technical content - trust me on this), but updates are easier and therefore more frequent.
  
• We also want to host this outside of our intranet so that initially our partners can also have access, including update capability where appropriate. Over time we would like to share as much as possible of this information with everyone, but that will take more "cleansing" of what information should be public knowledge and what needs to be restricted
• Additionally, we are introducing various Web 2.0 concepts - tagging, RSS / Atom aggregation, AJAX, voting/comments to drive search results, etc. so that we obtain the benefits of this more participatory technology (aka the Wisdom of Crowds) at the same time as understanding how to leverage this technology better for our customers.

This future vision we are calling CE 2.0 - basically a Web2.0 experience for our CEs, partners, eventually customers, developers and others. Stay tuned.

deleting links in Open Office

I found this handy set of tips in this blog:

OpenOffice automatically detects Links in copied text

Deleting or removing links is not very obvious. Here are two solutions to this.

1) Click with the right mouse button, choose Character from the context menu. Select the tab Hyperlink and delete the URL.

2) Select the hyperlink text and open the menu Format then choose Default. All formats including the hyperlink are deleted.

Web 3.0 - syndication and aggregation

I have described elsewhere the problem I see with the participatory web, aka web 2.0 - there are too many different ways to put information into it, resulting in the sharing of that information being fragmented across the users of the various sites - del.icio.us, flickr, youtube, facebook, myspace, ning, digg, etc.

One possible workaround to this problem is what I am using right now to write this - scribefire. It enables me to publish this rant to as many blogs as I care to tell it about - i.e., syndication. So I can reach the readers of my blogspot and my blogs.sun.com entries with the same info.

The reverse (or corollary?) of this is aggregation - collect information from various sites and deliver them to the user - so far this still feels like too much content coming at me from these many sources to be able to assimilate in the few hours a day I have to spare.

This still leaves the problem of proliferation of content, but perhaps that gets solved in web 6.0...

What's in my other blog?

When I was blogging at http://blogs.sun.com/pdiamond

it was about topics such as motorcycles, stock options, re-organizations, web 2.0 and ...

Latest rambling

i realized today that I had not posted an entry here in 17 months! Rather than being lazy, which is at least partly true, i had been posting on my blogs.sun.com/pdiamond blog - hard to know why I would try to blog in 2 places, but putting this out there just to keep it active and to see if there are any comments out there as to why this is a good idea .

I can see the suggestion that maybe there are things I would post here that I don't want my Sun management to see - I actually am not concerned about that, they're pretty cool with anything I am likely to say.