We have been using wikis in our business as well as promoting the collaboration tool to our clients. The Dallas Mavericks are experimenting with a public wiki for use by fans. The Dallas Observer talked to Mark Cuban about the wiki,
But, then, that is the point. Team owner Mark Cuban tells Unfair Park that MavsWiki is intended “a way for fans to have more fun and connect closer to the Mavs” by posting their fond memories of games way past and recently present. Mavs staffers (meaning, interns) will augment the site with old game stories from the Associated Press and other media outlets. Cuban also says, “I think it’s a first of any kind”; certainly, no other pro sports team has a similar site…at the moment.
Check it out here: Mavswiki.com. The cost of deployment is very low compared with traditional fan sites, and it gives your brand a great opportunity to let your fans generate content. It will be interesting to see if dedicated wikis (versus public wikis like Wikipedia) take off. What do you think?
For more than a year Big in Japan has been building and hosting social tools for various brands. Initially we assumed that large corporate clients would want to ‘house’ our tools in their own state-of-the-art data centers, but soon we realized that the opposite was the case. 100% of our clients require that we provide our tools as managed services, instead of simply delivering them executable code. We realized that as our client base grew our data center needs would grow as well and as a result we acquired an operational data center from McLeod in late 2006.
Our managed environments include:
Don’t call us for hosting, but if you need social tools built and managed we can provide a turnkey solution ~ no need to call a third-party hosting company. That said, if your brand is the next Second Life we have great partners such as NeoSpire who can handle huge, million+ user virtual worlds.
YouTube announced that Warner Music Group will distribute and license its copyrighted songs and other materials through the companies system. The deal is fairly simple, YouTube will share ad revenue with Warner. The neat part for YouTube’s users is that Warner is going to extend the license to the users for use Warner’s songs in their homemade videos. Very smart!
This deal is very big. Warner, including labels such as Atlantic, Asylum, Elektra and Rhino, is the third largest recording company with revenues greater than $3.5 billion. It is big for Warner, big for YouTube and most of all big for all those kids making videos lacking background music…
The Big in Japan team is working with Rupert Murdoch’s FX Networks (owned by News Corporation) to build a customized version of Fancast based on the highly popular PodServe podcast system. Update: For clarification, FX Network is a client of Big in Japan. The system combines a highly scableable ruby on rails application with a VoIP based phone system capable of handling more than 30,000 telephone connections.
This summer we began working with the producers of Nip/Tuck, the Golden Globe winning drama, on their community interaction efforts. The program is cables’ top-rated series with adults 18-49 with more than 2.6 million viewers. The first program consists of two fan generated podcasts. The first is titled the Nip/Tuck Fan Question Podcast. Where viewers can interview each member of the cast or crew. Each week five of the best questions are answered by the appropriate cast or crew member and then the content is posted to the system. The second is titled the Nip/Tuck Fan Comments Podcast. Each week the IVR system will prompt viewers to comment on various topics about the show.
The system consists of a white label version of PodServe using multiple load balanced DELL Poweredge servers to consume and organize recordings generated from Podcall using one or more Dell Poweredge servers running in series to generate dialtone, outbound calls, covert .wav and compress into .mp3 ready for iTunes. The tightly integrated system is known as the Fancast system. The servers are located in our state-of-the-art data center and network operations center. During programming our technicians watch the program on one screen, server and call statistics on another and errors on a thrid. Starting this week FX will begin to promote the launch of the system using television advertising.
Will it work? According to Arbitron/Edison Media Research more than 27 million Americans have listened to a podcast, half of whom are under 35 years old. Using the Fancast system, Nip/Tuck’s producers can empower their own community of 2.6 million viewers to deliver content via iTunes to more than 30 million iPod listeners. Converting just 2% of those iTunes users might deilver 600,000 viewers to the program. Additionally, FX has the option of inserting advertising into the consumer generated content as they moderate and process it allowing for additional marketing channels for their advertisers.
The Fancast system, launched in June 2006 and presented that same month at Under the Radar, combines PodServe and Podcall into a single platform allows users to easily create recordings for inclusion within hosted podcasts. Podcall is a multiprotocol PBX on Linux that provides all of the features you would expect from a high-end PBX and more. Podcall supports voice over IP in many protocols, and interoperates with all standards-based telephone equipment. Podcall can serve as a gateway to PodServe for inbound, outbound telephone lins (POTs or IAX) as well as conference bridges. Features include: Automated Attendant, Blacklists, Call Detail Records, Call Forward on Busy, Call Forward on No Answer, Call Forward Variable, Call Monitoring, Call Recording, Call Retrieval, Conference Bridging, Fax Transmit and Receive, Interactive Voice Response, Predictive Dialer, Route by Caller ID, SMS Messaging, Spell / Say, Talk Detection, Text-to-Speech, Graphical Call Manager, Outbound Call Spooling, and TCP/IP Management Interface.
The founders of the wikipedia claim that most of the work is done by a small group of 500 contributors. This afternoon I ran across an interesting post concerning, “Who writes wikipedia.“ Aaron explains,
When you put it all together, the story become clear: an outsider makes one edit to add a chunk of information, then insiders make several edits tweaking and reformatting it. In addition, insiders rack up thousands of edits doing things like changing the name of a category across the entire site — the kind of thing only insiders deeply care about. As a result, insiders account for the vast majority of the edits. But it’s the outsiders who provide nearly all of the content.
And when you think about it, this makes perfect sense. Writing an encyclopedia is hard. To do anywhere near a decent job, you have to know a great deal of information about an incredibly wide variety of subjects. Writing so much text is difficult, but doing all the background research seems impossible.
On the other hand, everyone has a bunch of obscure things that, for one reason or another, they’ve come to know well. So they share them, clicking the edit link and adding a paragraph or two to Wikipedia. At the same time, a small number of people have become particularly involved in Wikipedia itself, learning its policies and special syntax, and spending their time tweaking the contributions of everybody else.
Other encyclopedias work similarly, just on a much smaller scale: a large group of people write articles on topics they know well, while a small staff formats them into a single work. This second group is clearly very important — it’s thanks to them encyclopedias have a consistent look and tone — but it’s a severe exaggeration to say that they wrote the encyclopedia. One imagines the people running Britannica worry more about their contributors than their formatters.
This explaination makes the most sense to me. How could 500 people know everything? It makes much more sense that tens if not hundreds of thousands of people have something to contribute and an elite group of 500 do most of the formatting. Nice work. . .
Stowe Boyd has an extensive post titled, “Efficiency v Belonging: The Real Heart of Social Tools” where he proposes that many of the critics of social tools are chasing a red herring when they claim social tools do not improve personal productivity. Stowe correctly points out that this “lynch mob” is barking up the wrong tree.
Social tools were never really designed to improve productivity or efficiency (some may in fact do so), but instead he suggests that social tools “are about social involvement, learning and enlarging perspectives through connection…”
My favorite social tools (that don’t save me time) include: Upcoming.org, Wikipedia and Flickr. Why? They help me stay connected. In the case of Yahoo’s Upcoming and Flickr, they help me connect to a small group of people who I care about. In the case of Wikipedia it helps me stay connected to the world. Just ask my wife if adding pictures to Flickr help me save time…
I wrote about Upcoming a while back in a post titled, “My Favorite Social Tools: Upcoming” and I am pleased to announce that Upcoming is getting better. Yahoo has announced they have added a number of new features including:
Our team is working more and more with companies seeking to launch wikis in their businesses (internal and external wikis). This summer we spent some time with the Socialtext guys in our effort to recommend and support the best products available to our cliens. Joshua Porter pointed out that Apple might be a direction our team needed to explore. Boy, was he dead on!
Apple is now making push into social tools such as wikis. With their new wiki server as described by Apple:
“Leopard Server includes a Wiki Server to make it easy for teams to create and distribute information through their own shared Intranet website. For the first time, all members of a workgroup can easily create or edit content right from their browser. With a few clicks, or by dragging and dropping, they can upload files and images, track changes, assign keywords, hyper-link pages, view and contribute to shared calendars and blogs, and search for content on the group Intranet.�
Of course the wiki server is only one great social tool included in Leopard. Others include iCal calendar sharing (say goodbye to Exchange?), iChat screen sharing and social iTunes. Oh, and of course Apple is going to allow “teams” to turn on these features. Apple explaines:
“Leopard Server includes a Wiki Server to make it easy for teams to create and distribute information through their own shared Intranet website. For the first time, all members of a workgroup can easily create or edit content right from their browser. With a few clicks, or by dragging and dropping, they can upload files and images, track changes, assign keywords, hyper-link pages, view and contribute to shared calendars and blogs, and search for content on the group Intranet.�
I started with Flickr, clearly “The best way to store, search, sort and share your photos” and now I am ready to show you Upcoming. Both Flickr and Upcoming were bought by Yahoo and are great examples of social tools that work for me.
What: Upcoming is a social event calendar website that uses iCalendar and XML for content syndication. You can compare it to Evite (please stop using that service). What makes Upcoming so important is the ability for users to build connections between each other. For example, one of my contacts was attending an event called STIRR 1.5. I knew this because my friends events are listed on “My Upcoming” page. I clicked to see what Kristie was up to and found out that STIRR 1.5 was, “STIRR Mixers are blend of tech-social mixer and launchpad for new startups in an innovative format (the 60 second spot).” Neat, I should go to that so I clicked “Attend this event.” I was added to the event and then receieved an email from one of my contacts confirming that I would be there so that we could meet. He doesn’t know Kristie Wells, the contact that allowed me to discover the event in the first place, but he does know me. Kristie would have never thought to invite him, but now he will be coming.
Why: You can view events through your contacts or by metros. I have four metros setup on my account: Dallas, Austin, San Francisco and Miami. I can see public events in each metro regardless of whether or not a contact of mine is going. If I see an event that I am interested in I might click “watch event” instead of attend. Often one or more of my contacts will ping me to see if I am going, more often than not I am more interested in going if there are going to be people I know at the event. See how this works?
To Do: Sign up for an Upcoming account and add me as a contact. Check out my events or check out your metro. Start “watching” or “attending” a few events. Have fun!
More of you need to start using social tools so I decided to start a little series of posts called My Favorite Social Tools. I will start off with Flickr. Wow what a great tool. I have been a paid user since July of 2005 (I only know this because I had to renew my account the other day). At first I did not understand why Flickr was so great, but as the number of people I met from around the world added me as a Flickr contact I understood the value of Flickr. Let me start with the basics:
What: Flickr is a social picture sharing site started in 2004 by Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake. The best feature of flickr is the ability to add one or more “tags” to each photograph added to the site. Why is this so powerful? Take me for example: I have more than 8,000 photos on Flickr and finding a specific picture would be impossible if it were not for the tagging function. Each time I added a photo of my son I used the tag ethanmuse, that helps me narrow my search to just photos of him. But I have more than 1,000 photos of my favorite little guy, but good news, I used other tags such as soccer to describe the photos in greater detail. So I use the advanced search feature and search for photos of ethanmuse and soccer and find his soccer photos. You get the idea. Ethan’s Grandmother can search my photos for her tag (bethmuse) and Ethan’s tag to find photos containing both her and my son. Neat huh?
For Networking: I live in Dallas, Texas, but I have met lots of people on the West coast that I want to keep in touch with. It is hard to stay in touch with people you don’t see more than once or twice a year. More often than not I don’t have anything to say, certainly not anything worthy of an email or an IM, but I want to stay connected. Each day when I log into Flickr I am presented with the most recent picture added by each of my contacts. Usually five or six of my contacts has added a new picture each time I log in, so I open each photo in a browser tab. If the photo is comment worthly I might just make a note. Why? Why do you say hi in the hall when you walk by someone? It is a good way to say, “hey I am interested in you and your life, thanks for sharing it with me.” I know I love it when someone comments on one of my photos. Earlier this year I went to India and met almost 200 programmers and business people, many of whom have Flickr accounts. I have been able to stay connected to them from across the globe with pictures.
For Business: Back in April I wrote a posted titled, “Flickr as PR Tool…EyeFi” and wrote, “Got a great new product? Want to get a lot of people to see it? Get a power user on Flickr to take a picture of it. Scott Beale, also known as Laughing Squid, is a well know photographer. In fact, he may be the second most ‘internet famous’ photographer (Thomas Hawk is perhaps the most famous). So if you are going to create a product for photographers call up Scott and get him to take a picture of it. That is exactly what the Yuval Koren, the guy behind Eye-Fi, did. What is Eye-Fi? An SD memory card that will turn your camera into a wi-fi camera - no more USB cable. This is going to be huge! And Yuval, by simply showing it to one of the best know ‘internet famous’ photographer is getting his product in front of thousands of people who WILL buy the Eye-Fi. Very smart. More on Gizmodo here.” Check out Scott’s eyefi flickr pics.
To Do: Okay get a Flickr account right away. Add me as a contact, add a photo, tag it with a couple of tags (be specific) and lets start being social. You can setup your phone to send photos directly to Flickr (lots of people do it). You can use your photos to make books, prints, calenders and so on. Have fun!
Weblogs Work is now part of Big in Japan! It took us a year to determined that weblogs do in fact work, but they are simply one social media tool a business or agency should consider. As a result we have decided to consolidate the Big in Japan and Weblogs Work brand into one with a renewed focus on helping businesses and agencies build turnkey social media programs by providing a broad spectrum of social tools including weblogs, wikis, podcasts, forums and feeds. Don’t worry, the Weblogs Work weblog won’t go away, it will continue to provide a place for the Big in Japan team to blog about social media. Can you believe it has been a year?
On April 12, 2005 I wrote the first Weblogs Work post titled, “Business Blogs the next big thing (that is already here)!” In July we began offering ‘blog consulting’ services to small companies. We also started having our programmers build various tools for our consultancy to effectively host shared and dedicated, single and multi-user blogs. Soon our clients got larger and our projects more complicated. Our programmers started building even more customized tools like elfURL, PodServe, FrankenFeed, InstantFeed and SocialMail. We even created a brand for our social tool effort called Big in Japan.
Almost ninety days ago it became obvious we had a choice to make. We could build an agency and expand our social media consulting practice or we could change our focus to exploit what we were already uniquely positioned to provide. Weblogs Work and Big in Japan are both brands owned by Spur (the holding company I manage). Spur also owns an IT support brand called Architel. Weblogs Work and Big in Japan had been stealing resources (data center space, servers, programmers and engineers) from the very start and it became clear we were very good at building, customizing, managing and supporting various social tools. Very few companies had the experience and resources to do what we were doing on a daily basis.
Just before the 4th of July we bit the bullet and decided to refocus our offering to provide agencies and brand managers enterprise class social tools complete with hosting, management and day-to-day support. Here is an example of our most popular offerings:
Want to learn more? You can reach me directly at 1+214.550.2003 or just send me an email. We look forward to hearing from you!
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