Collaborative Publishing and Web 2.0 Summary

This is a summary of the presentations made on July 15, 2008 by Bruce Perens, CEO of Kiloboot, a company vending dual Open Source and commercial licensed software; Scott Johnston, Product Manager for JotSpot, a Google company focused on wiki technologies now known as Google Sites; and, Helen Harris, a PhD student and researcher at the Stanford University Virtual Human Interaction Lab.

Bruce Perens: Talked about three online paradigms of interest: 1) Open Source where high quality, free software is develop by loosely organized coalitions of people with no common employer or even common goals. Companies that make money from this software offer services for which they can charge fees for; 2) Online Collaboration as Wikipedia is a huge content provider with tools and audit trails to support a level of quality; and, 3) Free in which giving something away is an effective attention-getter.

He felt that the Open Source model could be best used by book publisher to ensure quality control: instead of a few reviewers, a publisher could open up testing the accuracy of material to hundreds of users thereby increasing the overall quality of books. This is the major benefit of opening up, say, an operating system or web browser to hundreds even thousands of programmers worldwide and releasing several updated versions daily.

Bruce challenged book publishers to release materials online, have many users contribute, and then take a book to market which is something he has done with his Prentice-Hall authored books. There are real marketing advantages to online releases, the ability to better forecast any forthcoming book sales, and building a loyal user base. Then, several months out, publish the book – his experience is that sales are not diminished but increased this way. If the publisher also sells electronic versions online, the publisher benefits from the lower transaction costs of ecommerce as well.

Finally, Bruce sees the next decade of book publishing being one where the front end editorial team is more valuable than the traditional hardcopy marketing and retail/bookstore distribution channel. He called the development of this new role “disintermediation” meaning that the publisher will no longer be the total intermediary between author and reader along a traditional value chain, but will best contribute at the editorial front end and market/sell and distribute via the Internet.

His advice is to build a “pull” and not “push” business model in which readers find the publishers via an up-to-date, useful and informative web site where free online books can be read, downloaded, and even purchased. He was pessimistic about email blasts pushed out to users as the best way to market books as increasingly users have multiple spam filters and blockers: He recommended giving away – free – MP3 audio files as a way to market and sell books online.

Scott Johnston: talked about how he discovered the power of online collaboration first as a better way to communicate in a virtual office environment. He saw projects fail because of lack of effective communications and communication tools. He installed a wiki to help project manage software projects and saw an immediate improvement in the development of these projects as communications improved. This made it an easy choice for him to join JotSpot, a wiki technology startup which was later acquired by Google.

He pointed out the websites are hard to update dynamically and so the ground work was laid for the "wiki" for everyone. Ward Cunningham developed the first wiki (the name comes from the Hawaiian word for "fast" or "speedy") that included: 1) An edit page/button; 2) A create page for content creation; 3) A version history file to track or audit the edit trails keeping all versions of updates with a time stamp and owners names. This was a key to the success of Wikipedia as it built trust in the creation and editing work. Most wikis are password protected which helps with the quality control, although there is a view function. The dynamic nature of wikis made them more useful than traditional ftp sites.

What Google is developing is a concept called "cloud computing" which means all applications are on a Google server and the user leases its use along with storing of data files there as well. This is not a new concept as application service providers (ASPs) were around ten years ago, but Google has enhanced the concept by offering their services free of charge, as they have with Google Apps, a more basic set of Microsoft Suite tools. The application and a person's data files are then accessible from anywhere whether in an office, at home, or internet café. Further, no installations are required on the user's desktop/notebook while all software is continually updated. This leads to rapid application development that users can use in real time without tying up their hard disks.

Google Sites, for instance, has several innovations: 1) You can easily set permissions; 2) Use the tool intra or inter company; 3) Set up your own administration specific to your domain; 4) Use hybrid graphic and presentation apps; and, 6) Set up internal team files for internal productivity and communications. Sign up for Google Sites at http://sites.google.com. It is free!

Helen Harris: provided a demonstration and gave some background to Second Life. Philip Rosedale of San Francisco set up the first Second Life site in his home on Linden Street in 1999. There are 100,000 users online worldwide at any time and an estimated 13 million total “residents”. The online users create online versions of themselves called, Avatars that allow the users to “be” anyone or any thing/animal that they would like to be in the virtual world. A lot of creativity is put into the development of landscapes, “worlds” and avatars at the present. Movement within the world is video game-like even flying or teleporting from world to world.

Helen demonstrated the virtual realities of Second Life with a bookstore, landscape, forest, and boutique shops where objects can actually be purchased with virtual money called “Linden dollars” (purchased with real money). At the moment, Second Life is more of a fun place to be online. Although everyone wants into it, they don’t know what to do with it yet. Having said that, San Jose State, among other universities, are offering library science courses via online Second Life technology. For more information, Helen recommends:

Also, she recommends for books on the subject:

Sherry Turkle’s, “Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet”, Simon & Shuster, 1997, 352pp in paperback – a sociological analysis of virtual communities and the new “culture of simulation”
Wagner James Au’s, “The Making of Second Life”, Collins, 2008, 304pp, hardback – a look at the history and growth of Second Life