Oliver Marks

This week I will finally be upgrading this site: I’ve been experimenting with various WordPress customizations and have Joomla, Mambo and Drupal running locally through MAMP.

While the benefits of inflating an install of these substantial platforms are undeniable, it is surprising how obscure it can be to make a significant impact on the user interface design. A package with the ability to for example drag and drop sections to design the interface in a modular way would be great for those of us used to designing websites to single pixel parameters.

I have thought of just designing a flat website and hooking up WordPress under the blog button with an appropriately tweaked theme, but this seems pretty clumsy. It would be great to be able to build out a site and incorporate, web 2.0 style, a mashup of content management, blogs and other components in such a way that it was possible to create a seamless unified user interface without needing to be an uber coder.

Maybe I’m missing something here but that seems like a huge differentiator in the open source space - perhaps this is fundamentally a standards issue.

Whatever - expect to finally see my Oliver Marks & Associates product and services information in this space shortly, along with a renewed blogging effort here. I’m blogging away at http://blogs.zdnet.com/collaboration/ but have been too jammed to write anything for Inc magazine yet.

My blog at ZDNet on Collaboration at http://blogs.zdnet.com/collaboration/ and a new blog at Inc Magazine and http://www.incbiznet.com/ is taking up a lot of my time right now.

I’m also an organizer of the Office 2.0 Conference which is happening in San Francisco September 3-5.

The Office 2.0 Conference is a collective experiment organized every year in San Francisco, CA and aimed at discovering the future of online productivity & collaboration. It is a unique gathering of visionaries, thought leaders, and customers using innovative online services for getting things done at the office, at home, and on the go. All paying attendees get an HP 2133 Mini-Note PC.

This year’s theme is Enterprise Adoption.

I’m continuing work on this site and aim to have the new look up by the end of August. (I’m going to WordPress Camp next week to help me wrestle with the code and build out a more substantial site around this blog).

I’ll be attending the Brainstorm Technology Conference this week - looks like a great group of speakers!

This will be my first Brainstorm Conference, I’m looking forward to hearing discussion of SuperNova caliber, and starting to formulate some questions and thoughts suitable for this level of participant.

It looks as though it will be in the style of SuperNova interactive discussion - it will be great to hear exec level discussion of operational issues.

I’m very focused on people>processes>technology and this could be an ideal forum for discussion around identifying appropriate tech solutions after defining process. I keep running into projects where the cart was put before the horse, with tech solutions implemented that didn’t address the problems they were intended to solve.

Hoping the wifi will hold up - this conference is paperless so it’s doubly important to have good connectivity…I just downloaded all the materials just in case…

Current blog post at ZDNet “Conferences as conversation starters”. I’ll resume blogging regularly here once I’ve expanded this site - I’m working on redesign and code offline as time permits.

Book Publishing
Great post from Jay Cross I commented on this morning “Dawn of the un-book”.

A study by the Jenkins Group, a custom book publishing firm, found that:

• One-third of high school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives.

• 42 percent of college graduates never read another book after college.

• 80 percent of U.S. families did not buy or read a book last year.

• 70 percent of U.S. adults have not been in a bookstore in the past five years.

• 57 percent of new books are not read to completion.

Increasingly, people hunt and gather what they want to read. Today’s activist readers pluck information from the blogosphere and YouTube and their friends on Facebook and MySpace.

To prosper in times ahead, we need to re-conceptualize our relationship with books, the role of authors and how to make books better.

Jay goes on to argue the case for what used to be called multimedia, something I toiled away on in the late ’90’s, creating Classic Car CD Roms. I wound up self publishing because there was no channel model, and amazingly there still isn’t.

I commented:

- great post. It’s interesting that O’Reilly books have their Safari bookshelf (access to their entire library online) as an option for users. They also publish beta versions of books and then version updates to mirror changes after paper print.

Even this seems a creaky and archaic way of doing things to those of us used to consuming information online.

i use my local library extensively and read at least a book a week. I’m reading ‘Here comes everybody’ by Clay Shirky right now, probably written at least 18 months ago I’d estimate.

Books are great for timeless content - typography, cook books, music theory - that you can have open as you work.

For everything else the book publishing industry seems as out of touch as the music industry at this point in time. (Why does it take months to ‘publish’ a music album you can download?!)

I’ve been negotiating to write articles and books recently, but the lack of publisher urgency to get relevant products in front of potential consumers within a timeframe that’s relevant is astonishingly lacking.

My favorite Email crusader
Luis Suarez of I.B.M, who I blogged about earlier this month and then met up with at Enterprise 2.0 in Boston, has a great piece in the New York Times: “I freed myself from E-mail’s grip” this weekend.

Congratulations Luis for fighting the good fight!

I’ve been focused on blogging on ZD Net the last couple of weeks, having been on the road in Boston for Enterprise 2.0 and then straight back to San Francisco for SuperNova.

I’ll be updating this site over the next few days, and blogging thoughts about the many wonderful connections and conversations I’ve made and had over the last couple of weeks.

Luis Suarez of IBM speaking in Germany at ‘Next 08′ on his experimental progress in eradicating work email. Fortunately Luis’s job at IBM is around exploring this; most of us would be getting a performance review from our bosses if we ignored their endless missives!
Breaking out of the email straightjacket “requires trust from ALL community members…in order for it to work”.

Looking forward to meeting Luis in person in Boston next week….

Scroll halfway down this page to
2:45 p.m. Luis Suarez Rodriguez, Community Builder and Social Computing Evangelist at IBM
Giving up on Work E-mail and hit the video link.

I spent a week without a computer while in New York City in April, using my iphone and borrowed computers. I was interested to see how life would be without all those saved bookmarks, usernames and passwords, and how difficult it would be to use other people’s computers.

It wound up being an interesting but irritating experienceand I was relieved to be back in front of my ‘home’ computer in San Francisco.

I’m writing this while looking out over the Pacific Ocean at the tip of Baja California Mexico in Cabo San Lucas on the MacBook Pro I recently bought.

I haven’t used this much until this week and it’s been very intriguing to what extent I’ve moved online. Past computer upgrade experiences have involved laborious software installations and file transfers, but this has virtually no apps on it so far apart from Adobe CS3 (and I’m experimenting with online competitors to this…).

I’m using Evernoteextensively, and the various Google apps - Reader for RSS feeds, Gmail, docs, maps etc. No Microsoft Office, no text files saved to hard drive as an experiment.

The only problem I’ve encountered is remembering online application urls on this ‘clean’ machine, I have to dip into delic.io.us or do Google searches to remember where I have accounts. (I’ve been evaluating a lot of new apps recently, i updated my location on BrightKite, not quite clear on utility of this yet and haven’t hooked it into Friendfeed either). Apart from this it’s been a painless experience (apart from resting this laptop on my sunburned thighs!).

As long as I can sync with Evernote I have an up to date version of my text files, so if I lose connection I can continue to work offline.

Within minutes of arriving at this hotel I installed Skype and was talking to my mother in the UK and showing her the view live from the laptop.

This is such a different experience to the current enormously expensive enterprise ‘vpn and desktop apps’ model it really reinforces for me the shifts ahead as hosted saas offerings become acceptably secure and non critical information is formally shared the way consumers on holiday do it (and enterprise employees informally do…).

The critical issue is being unable to connect; a good connection is essential if all your files are in the clouds and you’re on the ground…

Massive ‘worldwide computer’ utilities like Switch and lower down in the stratosphere cloud computing resources like Joyent are clearly the future: now the ever critical ‘last mile’ becomes the ‘first meter’ - the connection to the nearest broadband that will connect you to the mothership wherever you are on the planet…

I have one full pass to the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston to give away thanks to the organizers. This promises to be one of the premier events of the year and a great opportunity to mingle with key thought leaders!

I’m looking forward to four days of discussion and debate across a number of topics, including:
* Social Networking in Business
* Social Networks as New Media
* Microblogging & Twitter
* Enterprise Mash-ups
* Enterprise RSS & Syndication
* Developing a Next Generation Workforce
* Socializing Search
* Making the Right Video Conferencing Choice
* Software as a Service
* Security for Enterprise 2.0
* Office 2.0
* Presence
* Unified Communications
* Integrated Collaboration Platforms
* Enterprise Mobility

Here’s the conference website: http://www.enterprise2conf.com to explore the sessions in more detail.

Shoot me an email with your contact details to contest at olivermarks.com (this is an address I rarely use so don’t email me with other comments here!) and I’ll perform a lucky dip at the end of May. The runner up will get a free expo hall pass worth $100.

Good luck!

CBS were so impressed Dan Farber offered me a blog spot on ZDNet they bought the company this morning!

I’ve just posted my inaugural blogs here: http://blogs.zdnet.com/collaboration/ and am now officially a two blog person.

The ZDNet Collaboration 2.0 will be my primary focus over the next few months as I attempt to stoke up discussion there, but I will continue to blog here, saying things I may not want to expose ZDNet to…

I’m pretty behind getting the consulting part of this site up so that will also be a focus over the next couple of weeks prior to a couple of conferences I’ll be attending, Enterprise 2.0 and Supernova.

Despite a split second power cut that nuked my dsl connection and ensuing resets, I had a fascinating discussion this morning with France based Sigurd Rinde about ‘Thingamy’, a “Business Model Builder with instant delivery of Business Processes, Accounts and Reports.”

Sigurd screen shared the application to walk through the UI, and we had a fascinating conversation about the paradigm shifting concepts which formed the foundations of the application.

Early days yet but I think there is real promise here. Taking a big picture view, despite all the hoopla about the web over the last ten years, the reality is that people are stuck with ancient conventions which often make little sense.

Email is an obvious example: to the lay person the postal mail paradigm is made electronic by email. The only difference in thinking is dealing with volume.

This deluge perception is particularly pertinent to email, where people literally sit in cubicles processing email in enterprises - like these cats playing on a treadmill, sooner or later you’re going to slip behind…

Sigurd makes a good case that GAAP (’Generally Accepted Accounting Principles’) is a similarly outdated financial management model: ‘Thingamy’ is able to capture team ideas in real time and ammend budget costs on the fly.

It’s early days for this futuristic app, which enables agile development of semantically linked information. This results in a very lean experience that spits out contextually valuable information without all ‘busy work’ of tagging etc. It’s tough to convey paradigm breaking apps in a blog post without backup images, video etc but my feeling is that this a true Web 2.0 application that is also a harbinger of the semantically driven future.