Lawrence Lessig has decided to revise his excellent book Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace for a second edition. But here's the interesting bit — he's not revising it; we are. It's put the book up in a wiki and said, "Have at it, 'net." This is a tremendous application for a wiki, and the book that Prof. Lessig has chosen is a prefect subject for this kind of experiment.
The good professor, in his eminent wisdom, has chosen JotSpot to run his wiki. JotSpot, of course, gets some lovely publicity out of the deal. Some folks might complain that he has chosen a non-free product to host his project, but Prof. Lessig seems much more concerned with free content than with free software. And as the FAQ explains:
We chose Jotspot because it makes it easy for people to start contributing content immediately using their existing skills. JotSpot offers features such as an advanced WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) page editor and integration with Microsoft Office. In addition, JotSpot provides simple, integrated applications to support the collaboration process, including a blog for posting and syndicating side discussions on the work, and instant messaging presence indicators for easily recognizing which contributors are active/online.
I was planning a post about how I didn't actually think that JotSpot was the best choice for this particular application, not for political reasons but for functional ones. However, after looking at the Code wiki, I have to say it looks great.
Either Prof. Lessig has a much more advanced version of the software than I do on my beta site, or someone did some serious customization to the stock JotSpot wiki. The most important new feature is that each page has a "Page" and a "Discussion" tab, much like MediaWiki. This is, I think, absolutely critical for the kind of project that Prof. Lessig is undertaking. They've also added some additional user management features and done a totally custom skin for the site. As I said, It looks great. Congratulations to the guys at Jot for supporting such a worthwhile project.
JotSpot just announced free service for open source projects. Good for them. And this is somewhat more significant that just free software licenses: they're actually volunteering to pay all the secondary costs: hosting, bandwidth, admin, &c. It's much like the original SourceForge, in that respect. Of course, they don't offer a non-hosted version of their software, so this was pretty much the only way they could do it.
Atlassian also offers free open source licensing for Confluence and JIRA. I think they also offer some hosting, but it seems to be a very informal sort of thing.
XWiki is open-source, so no problems there. And SocialText doesn't seem to have a policy on the matter. Though you could always use Kwiki, I suppose.
Steven Noels, one of the developers of Daisy, a true open source CMS, is pretty hacked off about this. He argues that JotSpot's actions are blatant marketing moves and that the open source community is being taken advantage of.
Seems like everyone is off having fun but me. I really should have gone to ETech, as it's only in San Diego. But it's still awfully expensive for those of us who can't convince our employers to foot the bill.
And maybe I'm behind the curve, but I just noticed how the Technorati page for SXSW is incorporating tagged pictures from Flikr and tagged URLs from Furl and Del.icio.us? Damn, that's hot.
37Signals is a company that I've admired for a long time. I first read their manifesto in early 2000 and it changed my ideas about web-design. I was both excited and disappointed when they decided scale back client design work and instead focus on building web applications. Fortunately, their application kicks ass.
As 37Signals morphed from a design shop with clients into a app developer with users, they clearly thought long and hard about what kind of company they wanted to be. They talked a lot about this during The Building of Basecamp, which I attended in San Francisco last fall. They also post quite a lot about this on their blog. (Unfortunately, their archives are offline today, so I can't find any individual posts to link.) Many of the ideas that I've incorporated into my thinking have come from watching 37Signals.
I wanted to point out another example of something 37Signals did right. Last week, they encountered some pretty henious problems during an upgrade of their main product, Basecamp. The problems were severe and user-affecting. That wasn't good. But the way in which 37Signals handled the outage was terrific.
I didn't actually realize how apropos this post was, but according to Slashdot, today (at 1pm) marks the five year anniversary of the NASDAQ's peak (at 5048.62). I'll have to remember to pause for a moment of silence.
The funny thing about it was, my company was out trying to raise money at exactly this time. And we had no idea it was the beginning of the end. Honestly, none of us even started to worry until weeks later.
Ronen Kadushin (link via Core77) has released a series of beautiful lamps and housewares. But here's the interesting bit: you don't buy them, you download them. He's put up the plans up in DXF format, calling it Open Design.
In Open Design, the design is a two dimensional "cutout" represented as digital information. It relies on the Internet's communication resources, to publish, distribute, and copy the designs under a CreativeCommons deed. Coupled with The flexibility of CNC production methods, all technically conforming designs are continuously available for production, in any number, with no tooling investment, anywhere and by anyone.
He may be a little ahead of his time, as I don't have ready access to a computer-controller laser cutter*, but I applaud the effort. It is a sign of good things to come. I love watching Open Source ideas spreads into ever-wider application. And, of course, none of this would be possible without the Creative Commons. You're doing the Lord's work, gentlemen. Keep it up.
* On second glance, maybe I do.
My friend Alicia moved to San Francisco recently. She's looking for a job, so she doing a lot of prowling around craigslist. For the last couple of weeks she's been sending me links to interesting job postings in the area. (I think she wants company in SF.)
After looking around a little myself, it seems like the talent search is really heating up in the bay area. Searching the job listings with a keyword of "startup" returns more than 300 listings in the last month. Now, I'm sure this doesn't compare to the height of the boom, but it's way more than I remember seeing in the last couple of years — or even two months ago.
And the listing themselves seem substantive — consumer-focused web startups, stealth-mode startups, companies with change-the-world ambitions. Lots of big opportunities. And of course, Google is always hiring.
Ever since last spring, I've felt big changes coming: conversations sparking, ideas germinating, pressures building, forces aligning. After a long winter, real innovation is happening — innovation that will affect my life. People are talking about technology for its own sake again. They're building applications and services because they love the technology and what they can do with it. And they are cross-pollinating ideas like the early days of the web. We've already seen the first flowerings. I'm convinced there are even bigger things to come. Web 2.0, indeed. I'm so ready for it.
I wrote a couple of weeks ago about how wikis needs to be very careful about how much "workflow" overhead and limited access that they add to their applications, lest a growing community of shared information be killed by too much bureaucracy. I decided to do a survey of what permissions features the different wikis provide.
This weekend I switched my email from Entourage to Apple's Mail.app. I'm still not sure it's going to take, but thanks to the Mail Enhancer utility, which gave me per-account signatures, it was at least possible to try.
Anyway, while doing a little email cleanup, I stumbled across on old .mbox from '97-'98 that I had taken from one of my old jobs. It was fun to read through those old messages, though it was just a tiny fraction of the hundreds I must have sent during that time. I loved re-reading my thoughts from seven years ago: projects I was working on, opinions I was forming, friends I was partying with, girls I was in love with. (Though I admit it's really just the blogger's inherent narcissism surfacing in yet another context.)
Jeff Veen has a great post today about some real-world consequences of openness. He reminds us that being an Open Company is not just good for your current customers, but it's good business because it leads to more sales.
While the macromedia.com web site was filled with marketing content extolling the features of each product, most people just downloaded a demo version. So in the course of about 3 minutes, potential customers became users. And all the users we talked to explained that their decision to buy was made … in the support forums.
And you don't just have to believe me any longer. Jeff does actual user research. Hard numbers, people.
Jeff also mentions that Crutchfield (a company with whom I've had good experiences) provides PDF versions of the owner's manuals for the products that they sell. People download those manuals as part of making their purchasing decision because "if they could understand the manual, they'd be able to use the camera."
Contrast that with my experiences last week trying to find software documentation. You want to make potential customers comfortable enough with your product that are willing to buy. Providing demos, accessible documentation and access to support histories are great ways to get them to that point.
P.S. I saw Jeff and Doug Bowman give an excellent presentation on Redesigning Blogger in SF last fall. I don't know if they will offer it again, but it was highly worthwhile.
Jonathan Nolen 