TechWiseTV

My so called second life....

Robb is really into this whole Web 2.0 thingy. He does it, knows it and loves it. I have resisted things like dopplr, twitter and facebook. Not really for any good reason other then, I don't wanna. I enjoy writing/blogging so that is Web 2.0-ish for me. I did however, jump into the virtual world of Second Life. I love video games, so this part of Web 2.0 I can dig man! I used to mess around with a similar program called Active Worlds and I really enjoyed it. Second Life is cool, it does required some horsepower on your end to run it. I run it on my PC and Mac. Needless to say, the Mac runs circles around the PC. I created a avatar like the Dude on Star Trek VI the undiscovered country that they keep trying to bust a cap in. He looks cool. I was going to go for more of a GTA look, but then I saw my last name and decided for the Sage/Gandalf look....

Second Life does give a enterprising kinda a person the ability to buy and sell money, land, etc. Many vendors have stores/places in Second Life like Adidas, Sears, Starwood Hotels, etc. I even saw today (07Apr08) that Congress held a session in Second Life. It had about as many people attend as do in First Life...

I have notice more Europeans on Second Life then other regions but that was also the case in Active Worlds as well. I have had fun talking geek to folks and discussing  TechWiseTV. I was talking about flexible packet matching with a Dude in Iceland today. I highly recommend to anyone to go out and get a Second Life account and just mess around. On most Corp networks, they will most likely have the ports you need to access Second Life blocked. If you get a failure to log in at the end, then there's your proof.  Best to mess around with it on your home network. Stop by the Cisco Island and say hey !

By the way, Robb and I are at RSA this week. stop by the Cisco booth and chat with us!

Jimmy Ray

Web 2.0...for geeks!!

Buzzword bingo... it's a game we all love to play. From phrases like "thinking outside of the box" to B2B the endless stream of buzzwords will certainly keep us in buzzword bingo cards for sometime to come. Robb was tasked with creating a Web 2.0 show and I immediately thought, good luck with alllllllllll that! There really is no such thing from a technical point of view.

But Robb is smart and that is why they asked him and not me. He gets the big picture on here on the parts and pieces fit. I am an engineer from steam to stern. Defining the processes is not something I have ever been good at.  When the phrase Web 2.0 was actually first used at a Web Conference by Tim O'Reilly back in 2005 I thought that was a clever way of summing up what technology has morphed into.

But then enter the analysist. Seizing on the opportunity to sale more "research" studies, Tim's idea became...(dramatic music....) a buzzword. Web 2.0 lit up the Internet fast then Anna Kornicorvia's latest beach pictures. As an engineer, I has asked how do we make our business Web 2.0 ready nearly three times a day.

So I seized on opportunity to train engineers on Web 2.0 myself. Not really about Web 2.0 per se, but how to use buzzwords in our favor. For example, the personality type drawn to engineering normally will roll with the changes and automatically look for newer, better and faster ways to accomplish our end goal, "Successfully Passing Data" I was on sight troubleshooting a network here a while back. After talking with the companies engineer to see what he had already done. As he explained his troubleshooting methodology, I said, "OK, so you used half bracketing up to what point?" He replied, "What is half bracketing" I told him that the troubleshooting method he used is called, half bracketing. His response was, "Whatever Dude, this is just how I troubleshoot, call it what you want"

To me, as an engineer, that is what Web 2.0 is. it is just a little more interactive and a little more friendly and a whole lot more graphically enhanced then the BBS' of old. As engineers, we naturally moved from news groups to Wikis. From bookmarking to del.icio.us and of course from brick and morter music stores to iTunes. But the question is how to we use this buzzword to our advantage. That is simple. Think like an analysist. Analysist have most likely never config'ed a piece networking gear in their life, but exec's listen to them. Analysist know how to seize a moment in time. Now we have an in. For example, consider this conversion between an Exec and an Engineer:
                Engineer: We need to replace our PIX firewall with a new ASA to keep up with the current                     threats.
                    <What the Exec heard:> I need spend money on something I really can not define
                Exec: It is just not in the budget this year. Please make do with what we have and keep our                 data safe.

Been there done that right? Now add a new buzzword and which what happens:

            

   Engineer: In trying to make our business ready for Web 2.0, I noticed the firewall needs                         replacement to support the newer processes we need for success
                <What the Exec heard:> We are not ready for Web 2.0!! This is worse then missing my tee                 time at the country club. Think goodness my engineer caught this problem!
             Exec: Excellent job, please go ahead to order what you need. Fine work!

You see, buzzwords can be our friends. Web 2.0 is really something we do all the time as engineers. Now it has a label, a nice neat container to put all those processes in so non engineering types can understand them.

Jimmy Ray

       

The Web 2.0 Journey

I have always considered myself relatively net saavy. I say relatively...as it always depends on who you compare yourself to.  But I know I don’t embrace every new shiny thing that seems to grab at least passing interest on the web.  As I now am getting older (I will be 40 on March 1) I begin to wonder if this is a sign of my age...I do see guys (and girls) my age however that seem very well versed at living the new and ever changing web as well as report on it. So I do think there is hope.

I personally tend to evaluate new technologies based on my ability to be productive with them.   My past is littered with software and gadgets that I spend money on and never manage to integrate into the fabric of my daily life. If the learning curve does not come quickly or I can’t define the benefit - then it many times just does not stick. 

It is with this set of eyes that I am now embarking on a quest to explore and become much more effective at understanding (and enunciating) technologies and services that define the new web and make possible the benefits of peer production, lowered collaboration costs and self-organizing groups.

There is more to come...but let me tell you what I have already started with: Wikis. About 3 weeks ago I decided to use a hosted wiki platform from Wetpaint to create two wikis: one for my very dynamic neighborhood and one for work. 

The neighborhood wiki has started to grow quite quickly through my use of techniques learned from Malcolm Gladwell and The Tipping Point. I simply created the platform (using wetpaint), seeded just enough content and organization to be able to explain the concepts and then I began a small evangelism campaign by talking to the key influencers, the connectors and mavens, that jump start me quickly by bridging their groups with the new wiki.  I worked with a few of them one on one to disciple them into becoming evangalistic trainers...this seems to be working. I have also benefitted from a few hot button issues bubbling up in the neighborhood.  Our local school district is attempting some rezoning/redistricting...whatever you call it and we are all fired up as it could have dramatic effect on our property values, where our kids go to school and what friends they end up making (or giving up).  I simply had my wife forward me a few of the email storms that seemed to depend on the cliques that shared emails and I asked a few of their more vocal members to move that conversation to some pages on the wiki.  This is all still in the early stages but things are looking very promising.   “Providing the platform for collaboration” was my goal and it is already starting to self-organize and allow me to monitor and participate as actively or inactively as I need to.

The blog you are reading now is an off-shoot of the TechWiseTV wiki at www.mytechwisetv.com.   The wiki came first, also on the wetpaint platform as a way to take our Cisco TV show and expand the conversation.  This is happening much slower but I am encouraged about the ideas that are starting to come out.   We have already started moving from a model that published ‘show notes’ for each show in a downloadable .pdf (how antiquated) to one that is wiki based so at a minimum, Jimmy Ray and I can collaborate on the writing more openly as well as provide access to our guests so you get unedited show notes in their own language...  to a new model that says - lets spend less time on the past (show notes available after a show airs) to shownotes that are avaiable as they are being written (prior to air date) to now....lets write the show itself in the public eye.   Hmmm...this lead to a decision to share the taping date (shows are not live) and allow anyone with an interest to weigh in on the content and potentially influence it.  This is all very new but I am excited about it and I hope that as our audience on these new tools grows, we will get more input, ideas and creativity to play with.  Won’t you help?

A lot of this started as I research our guests and their writings for what is internally being called our Web 2.0 Special Edition (taping Feb 20 and airing April 3).  I have been reading and working to get guests like hyperactive blogging trendsetter Robert Scoble....the scobleizer blog/microsoft and now Fast Company fame....Jeremy Owyang from Forrester, Don Tapscott, author of Wikinomics and a few internal people.  I like the idea of having a teenager or two on this particular show to highlight the thinking of a younger generation but I have to dig one up...my kids are way too young.  Oh, the books I am wrapping up from these guys right now have been very enjoyable...wikinomics of course (and his blog/wiki).

I am now very inspired to try out many more things...I will comment on them as I do them.   Many things like facebook still make no business sense to me but I am slowly learning to avoid overly narrow thinking.  What can they do for you?  I would love to hear opinions on the business side of all these collaborative applications. These guys listed above provide quite a few good ones in their writing...but what does this stuff do for you?

Robb