Some crossposts from the BMID blog

If you haven’t figured it out already, I am horrible at cross-posting.

Here’s what I’ve been writing over at my Business Model Innovation and Design blog over the last weeks that relates to innovation work and consulting:

How Innovation Works

Outsourcing von F&E

Web 2.0 Compact Definition

Web 2.0 isn’t about the Internet

Some business model innovation links

Is Microsoft Driving Innovation Or Playing Catch-Up With Rivals? Office 2.0 and more

Thriving in the New Innovation Landscape

Externe Berater …

More on enterprise wikis

Some wiki links of late …

1. Socialtext Unplugged.

Socialtext Unplugged is an application within a single HTML file, which also means it is cross-platform. It downloads as a Zip file, but synching is through Socialtext’s Wiki Web Services.

Bob Sutor with excellent analysis on what this means for Office 2.0 …

That’s the wonderful thing about the future that Office 2.0 is nudging us towards: we already have the pieces! We may need some standards so we can make the different services work together better, but we’re on the right path.

2. Wikia announces OpenServing.

Wikia is launching a service offering free tools for people who want to build community websites. Interesting business model policy, letting the community sort out the business model 😉

FREE software, FREE bandwidth, FREE storage, FREE computing power, FREE content over the Internet, and GIVING AWAY 100% of the ad inventory and revenue to bloggers and website owners who partner with Wikia

and

Social change has accelerated beyond the original Wikipedia concept of six years ago. People are rapidly adopting new conventions for working together to do great things, and Wikia is a major beneficiary of that trend. OpenServing is the next phase of this experiment. We don’t have all the business model answers, but we are confident – as we always have been – that the wisdom of our community will prevail

Update: Stuart Froman focuses on the experimental free-flowing and adaptive approach Wikia’s following:

But if it’s experiments we want, then this is a good one. […] And will a sustainable business model follow?

Well, I would add that this setting may allow for the emergence of new businessmodels, where “emergence” is used in its complex systems sense, i.e. the emergence of patterns (business models) out of the interactions of independent agents … for some related ideas see my business model innovation and design blog.

3. Manuel Simoni notes challenges for wikis in the enterprise.

No Sense of Ownership: Information I put on a page could be edited away by tomorrow, and my pages seem to float in a boundary-less space beyond my personal control.
There are technical solutions to these problems (versioning and a personal dashboard, for example) but the feeling remains.
Unidentified ContributorsIt’s not immediately obvious who contributed what, which gives capitalists little incentive to contribute.
Again, there are technical (versioning) and social (ThreadMode) fixes, but they’re just that, fixes.
Shared State: As we move to an occasionally offline model of operation (e.g. Zimbra Offline client), where multiple users may edit the same page while all of them are offline, using a wiki with its simple-minded “all mixed up like Pasta Primavera” data model is asking for trouble.

Well, yes, see also 1. above for looming sharing and editing problems, where SocialText has given no answers yet.

Manuel proposes a system of intertwined weblogs, a collage approach to social software.

Still, I think wikis will have their place. So when people want to be recognized (and rewarded) for their contributions the way to go is a combination of blogs and wikis in an integrated enterprise 2.0 approach.

Blogs and wikis as Web 2.0 platforms …

Don Dodge on whether blogs and wikis can be (application) platforms …

Well, yes, they certainly are … fitting nicely in this big trend, where the web becomes the platform, e.g. have a look here or here, and for another application wiki check out this.

For the record, some notes by Don Dodge:

Application platforms are very profitable in the software business. Platforms attract developers. Developers build all kinds of interesting applications…which attracts users. Millions of users mean your platform will generate revenues for a long, long time.

Wikis and blogs are great collaboration tools, but they are now moving beyond that to become application platforms. Socialtext and JotSpot (acquired by Google) are building out suites of office productivity applications built on top of a wiki platform. Telligent and Blogtronix are building application platforms on top of the blog model.

Web 2.0 applications are more than just “webifying” existing apps. Web 2.0 applications are inherently interactive and collaborative at every level of the application. They are simple to build, easy to manage, and cheap to maintain. Increasingly they are being built on new platforms like blogs and wikis, and using new tools like AJAX and REST.