(continued from previous page)
new habit takes time. I remember back in 1994 with search. Search wasn't a habit; it took five years to become a habit.
It took awhile for desktop publishing to take off. It entered the corporate market through the back door. So with wikis, you may have a long period before it becomes widely accepted. Given that, should you expect that some other obvious players will get into the business?
Kraus: Sure. I think any exciting category attracts competition--otherwise it wouldn't be exciting. When we started at Excite nobody gave a crap about search. Suddenly a lot more people started caring, and then Microsoft started caring. If some really big players think that this is important to the future of their company, that would be an indication that we're onto something interesting.
How long will wikis take to really catch on with the majority of computer users?
Kraus: Let me use the desktop publishing example. Twenty years ago, typewriters were cheap, widely available, and everybody knew how to use them. But they had crappy output. At the high end, you had professionals doing expensive work, with expensive machines and beautiful output.
When DTP (desktop publishing) came along, typesetters thought it was a joke. But it appealed to the average consumer who could use typewriters. And over 20 years, it just completely abolished typesetting and typewriters. Well, I think that's kind of a good example here.
In other words, this is part of a broader technology shift that takes place over time, rather than through a sudden embrace?
Kraus: Whenever you're trying to create a category, it takes years to really take hold. Early on, you asked why this isn't the second coming of the bubble. I think part of the reason is that, if you look at the way companies--including JotSpot--are scaling and building in this environment, they're not doing it the same way we did (during the late 1990s). Back then, it was, "OK, the market's here right now. So let's blow the company up to hundreds of people." It's just not that way now. It's much more measured and realistic.
What's the right analogy? Search?
Kraus: They didn't ask for search in 1994, either. When you put people in front of a search box in '94 and said, "Search for something," they said, "What do I search for?" and I said, "Anything you want." (They would say), "I don't really know what I want," and then eventually they would type their name and they would judge you whether or not you provided good information on them. But they at least could categorize you then and knew what to do, and it took five years for that to become a habit. I think the same is true here. Most people don't know they want to publish an application.
One of the key things about wikis is that they evolve. They don't just start. They don't begin with the end in mind. They just begin, and you can change them over time. You can change the links; you can change the structure they involve. Users are authors. The difference between a user, a reader and a writer is very small. Also, they integrate really well.
Is it easier to run a company on a limited investment than it was, say, when you started Excite?
Kraus: Oh yeah. It took $3 million to get Excite from concept to release, it took $100,000 to get JotSpot from concept to release.
Why is that?
Kraus: Three reasons. When we started Excite, we had to buy expensive Sun servers and disk arrays and all sorts of stuff. Hardware costs nothing these days. Second, you don't pay for compilers, app servers, Web servers--any of that anymore. You use Linux, you use Tomcat, you use Apache--I mean, the infrastructure software is free, essentially. And the third reason is that start-ups have access to offshore labor in a way that they didn't have in the early 1990s. IBM had access to offshore labor in the early 1990s but Excite as a start-up didn't.
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Ever have to load all of those strung out comments from a review process into a database so the decisions and the money travel together?
Nothing is more powerful than a web page with and edit button.
Ever have to load all of those strung out comments from a review process into a database so the decisions and the money travel together?
Nothing is more powerful than a web page with and edit button.
Wikis are great for getting data into a black box, they don't address the problem of getting data out of the black box. Nothing is more powerful than a good database, because this allows you to look at the relationships, tailor the queries, and ensure that all this data is reliable and available. Look around and you'll see 30 years of work improving these processes.
Don't mistake ease of writing for quality of reading.
searched -- some even have SQL extensions, for end-user
queries. Almost all have a "Search" field or page.
I've been using wikis since Ward Cunningham first invented
them. Early versions were "write-only" systems, but that has all
changed.
The latest work I've done has been with groups of fairly
unsophisticated computer users (http://www.IslandSeeds.org). It
is amazing what they can accomplish!
Another "wiki must-have" is a good editor/moderator. The
newbies need to understand that they can do no wrong, but that
others may come along later and "clean up" things a bit. Without
one or more editor/moderators, a wiki can quickly disintegrate
into a "write only" site.
Part of wiki culture is that there is no "right or wrong," only
"better or worse." That which fights entropy is better, but that
doesn't mean one must think things through completely before
posting something!
The thing wikis do best is help define unknowns. If you already
know what you need, yea -- slap a front end onto a database.
But if you don't know if you're going to build a building, a
religion, or a concept, a wiki is the way to go. Once you get past
the brainstorming stage, THEN you can freeze your structure
into fifth normal form if you find that necessary.
With an edit button.
What the backend does is not what the most important part of the system cares about: the human. A single person may not write well. Most of them don't, but in mass, they determine what to say and how best to say it. That is why folksonomies rule over formal ontologies in actual use. My point was oldThink does this stuff with spreadsheets and as formal as that can be, it is a painful interface and not cheaply distributable. It's only virtue is naming the cells and columns to direct the edits.
I was part of the teams that spent years working on integrated bibliographic systems for hypermedia only to be handed our heads by one-way http links, gray pages, and PageRank. The power is not, as the other fellow said, in the implementation. It is in the ease of editing the content for the interested.
Yes, a moderator is very important. Every evolving system needs at least one strange attractor.
Wikis are great for getting data into a black box, they don't address the problem of getting data out of the black box. Nothing is more powerful than a good database, because this allows you to look at the relationships, tailor the queries, and ensure that all this data is reliable and available. Look around and you'll see 30 years of work improving these processes.
Don't mistake ease of writing for quality of reading.
searched -- some even have SQL extensions, for end-user
queries. Almost all have a "Search" field or page.
I've been using wikis since Ward Cunningham first invented
them. Early versions were "write-only" systems, but that has all
changed.
The latest work I've done has been with groups of fairly
unsophisticated computer users (http://www.IslandSeeds.org). It
is amazing what they can accomplish!
Another "wiki must-have" is a good editor/moderator. The
newbies need to understand that they can do no wrong, but that
others may come along later and "clean up" things a bit. Without
one or more editor/moderators, a wiki can quickly disintegrate
into a "write only" site.
Part of wiki culture is that there is no "right or wrong," only
"better or worse." That which fights entropy is better, but that
doesn't mean one must think things through completely before
posting something!
The thing wikis do best is help define unknowns. If you already
know what you need, yea -- slap a front end onto a database.
But if you don't know if you're going to build a building, a
religion, or a concept, a wiki is the way to go. Once you get past
the brainstorming stage, THEN you can freeze your structure
into fifth normal form if you find that necessary.
With an edit button.
What the backend does is not what the most important part of the system cares about: the human. A single person may not write well. Most of them don't, but in mass, they determine what to say and how best to say it. That is why folksonomies rule over formal ontologies in actual use. My point was oldThink does this stuff with spreadsheets and as formal as that can be, it is a painful interface and not cheaply distributable. It's only virtue is naming the cells and columns to direct the edits.
I was part of the teams that spent years working on integrated bibliographic systems for hypermedia only to be handed our heads by one-way http links, gray pages, and PageRank. The power is not, as the other fellow said, in the implementation. It is in the ease of editing the content for the interested.
Yes, a moderator is very important. Every evolving system needs at least one strange attractor.
When I return I check for a dial tone and frequently get nothing but dead silence.
I discovered that the activity lights on both the cable modem and the Sys-Link Vonage modem is going wild; so, I simply shut the computer down, wait a minute aand re-boot it. The problem is solved again I leave the computer inactive for about an hour or more.
So far I have received mos of my calls on my cell phone because the VOIP is call forwarded to it.
- IT's About Time
- by July 31, 2005 2:07 PM PDT
- I've been praying that someone develop VOIP security that works. Several times each day my Vonage system goes silent. It is always when I am normally out ant the office is closed.
- Reply to this comment
-
(14 Comments)When I return I check for a dial tone and frequently get nothing but dead silence.
I discovered that the activity lights on both the cable modem and the Sys-Link Vonage modem is going wild; so, I simply shut the computer down, wait a minute aand re-boot it. The problem is solved again I leave the computer inactive for about an hour or more.
So far I have received mos of my calls on my cell phone because the VOIP is call forwarded to it.