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a key insight;

what's rotten at the heart of the planning and development of these systems is pretty much what cripples stand-alone software application development: before understanding the problem, organizations select a solution

Digging into the guts of how content is created is also digging into the guts of how people think. That's not a very smart place to take the crude tools of reengineering that were originally designed to smooth the processes of non-thinking that characterized most routine organizational processes.

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So what else is new?

This piece does actually have a couple of good pieces of advice on how to promote collaboration with new tools, to wit:

4. Fill the space. The online collaborative environment won't be very enticing if it starts out empty. No one wants to be the first to post a message, add an event to the group's calendar or deposit a working document. Tim Butler, SiteScape's president and founder, recommends ... planting some important information in the online environment before the team gets started and keeping it pruned as time goes on.

8. Don't be safe. Allow controversial debates to brew in collaborative areas—otherwise people will avoid having any substantial conversations there. "The stuff that gets people most engaged is the controversial stuff," says Yonkee at Siemens.

9:50:23 PM •  • comment  

Who owns the Internet? Until recently, nobody. That's because, although the Internet was "Made in the U.S.A.," its unique design transformed it into a resource for innovation that anyone in the world could use. Today, however, courts and corporations are attempting to wall off portions of cyberspace. In so doing, they are destroying the Internet's potential to foster democracy and economic growth worldwide.

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The motivation for this counterrevolution is as old as revolutions themselves. As Niccolò Machiavelli described long before the Internet, "Innovation makes enemies of all those who prospered under the old regime, and only lukewarm support is forthcoming from those who would prosper under the new." And so it is today with us. Those who prospered under the old regime are threatened by the Internet. Those who would prosper under the new regime have not risen to defend it against the old; whether they will is still a question. So far, it appears they will not.

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This history should be a lesson. Every significant innovation on the Internet has emerged outside of traditional providers. The new grows away from the old. This trend teaches the value of leaving the platform open for innovation. Unfortunately, that platform is now under siege. Every technological disruption creates winners and losers. The losers have an interest in avoiding that disruption if they can. This was the lesson Machiavelli taught, and it is the experience with every important technological change over time. It is also what we are now seeing with the Internet. The innovation commons of the Internet threatens important and powerful pre-Internet interests. During the past five years, those interests have mobilized to launch a counterrevolution that is now having a global impact.

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This control has already begun in the United States. ISPs running cable services have exercised their power to ban certain kinds of applications (specifically, those that enable peer-to-peer service). They have blocked particular content (advertising from competitors, for example) when that content was not consistent with their business model. The model for these providers is the model of cable television generally--controlling access and content to the cable providers' end.

[ ... ]

When the U.S. Congress finally got around to changing the law, it struck an importantly illustrative balance. Congress granted copyright owners the right to compensation from the use of their material on cable broadcasts, but cable companies were given the right to broadcast the copyrighted material. The reason for this balance is not hard to see. Copyright owners certainly are entitled to compensation for their work. But the right to compensation shouldn't translate into the power to control innovation. Rather than giving copyright holders the right to veto a particular new use of their work (in this case, because it would compete with over-the-air broadcasting), Congress assured copyright owners would get paid without having the power to control--compensation without control.

9:48:47 PM •  • comment  

Broadband customers and U.S. military systems are the most common victims of an online phenomenon researchers have dubbed "dark address space," which leaves some 100 million hosts completely unreachable from portions of the Internet.

For a variety of reasons ranging from contract disputes among network operators to simple router misconfiguration, over five percent of the Internet's routable address space lacks global connectivity, according to the results of a three-year study by researchers at Massachusetts-based Arbor Networks, to be released Tuesday.

"Popular belief holds that the Internet represents a completely connected graph," says Craig Labovitz, Arbor Networks' director of network architecture. "It turns out that's just not true."

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